Don't mind me just crashing out about Ahlaam
Do you think she blames herself. For all of it.
She was Kal's best friend. She and Margaret and Kal were as thick as thieves (I need an interaction of them three ASAP because we barely see them together). Kal introduced Taavi, the love of her life, to Ahlaam. Kal trusted Ahlaam so much that she was the person he called to when he wanted to showcase his fog.
Ahlaam was there; not in the eye of the storm, surrounded, but so close she can feel the crackle of the lightning on her skin. She could have stopped Kal, somehow. She should have stopped him. He turned into fog right beside her and she did absolutely nothing. She watched him start that mess which destroyed their world and her first move? She went to Margaret and Sia and said they need to inform the king. Sure, that seemed like the obvious course of action at the time, but it's not like Ahlaam didn't know how Itzal was. She was there during Nobody, she is one of the closest people to the Royal Family, she is critically aware of how Chazira's tragic death affected them all. Still, she said, let's tell the king. Why didn't she think it through? Why didn't she try to help Kal herself? Why was she so... disappointing?
She is there for these ten years. Kal gets more and more secluded, delving more and more into his fog. It's not like she didn't know he's in a bad place. All the Travelers were aware of his troubles, and still she didn't prevent it. She should have. Maybe she tried to help Kal, maybe she tried to talk to him with Taavi or whatever, maybe she wanted so badly to bring back her best friend; it didn't matter anyway. She's living her life with her husband and her friends and if she tried a little harder, if she was better maybe she could have helped him. Maybe she could have prevented it all.
1829 and her world comes crashing down. Taavi has been dead for a full day; why didn't she realize it's not him? She's his wife. She is supposed to know. She grabs the Orrery, despite knowing It's precisely what got them in this mess, despite the fact that Taavi died so that no one would use those cursed, magical abominations. In a flash of events, she is dying and the world is burning; Cyrus and Mary Katherine disappear to somewhere with the second Orrery (what will they tell Samuel and Rose?), Margaret loses her memories (and suddenly Ahlaam loses both of her best friends) and there is no more Blazing World. It's a day and she loses her best friends, her home and her husband, even though the last two are one and the same.
Finally she wakes up on Lincoln Island. The last time they were there... it's different now. She wants to strike them, she wants revenge for Taavi; it's stupid and she knows it's stupid, but the grief is stuck in her throat. Another part of her breaks when Addison tells them of the broken Orrey; "the only chance to save our world" bullshit. The only chance to save Taavi. She barely has time to mourn before they need to go to New York. Rose and Samuel are so happy and it kills her; how can anyone be happy right now? And she does the most despicable act she's ever done. She tries to remain as close to fact as she can, but she has to twist and distort the truth (just like the fog, a little voice in the back of her head says, one that sounds oddly similar to virologist she once knew). If they'll ever see her again, she knows the Stratfords won't forgive her, but that's fine. She'll never forgive herself.
Fourty five years pass. She tries to keep herself occupied. She gets to know every inch of the Island. She works on the Nautilus, getting more and more familiar with what used to be Taavi's line of work. She trains and eats and sleeps. She tries not to resent Sia, who too is mourning her wife, but her spouse is coming back; she will never see Taavi again. She says goodbye to Sia in 1835, because Sia had been her friend for the past twenty years, because Sia had been her rock for these seven years. She gets to know Addison, and she actually likes her; she's a good person, a better one than Ahlaam (though that's an incredibly low bar by this point.)
December, 1874. She sees Rose once more, this time in Lincoln Island. She smiles and helps Rose to know the island; she's visibly older, even though it's only been seven years; a blink of an eye in Ahlaam's lifespan. She cries late at night because Rose has Cyrus's eyes, Mary Katherine's laugh. She embraces Sia after so long and they ponder briefly of removing the illusion from Rose's mind; they can't, they conclude, since they can't speed Margaret in crossing her thresholds. So Ahlaam pretends. She pretends Rose and Samuel are strangers, she avoids Margaret's gaze, because she knows she won't be able to lie to her best friend.
She's with Sia and Dakkar when Kal invades the Island. The Irony. A Traveler reunion. Sia and Dakkar hand out orders; even though she's the oldest, even though she's been a Traveler the longest; she doesn't mind. She's a soldier, not a general. So she goes back to the Antikythera, the same vessel she nearly died on, the same one where she saved Rose just days ago, and searches for the Orrery. It's almost funny; last time she was on the ship is was full of water, and now it's in flames. Water and fire.
And then. And fucking then.
"Ahlaam?" Says the voice. Not just a voice. His voice. She asks who is there, as if that voice hadn't haunted her dreams for the last 45 years. She's not stupid; she's exhausted and ridden with guilt but she's not stupid. She'd already been fooled once by this trick, and she knows she'll be fooled a second time. "Please, not him..." She bges, desperate. Maybe it's to herself, as she hopes she's wrong somehow; she's not; she can recognize his voice from the far reaches of the galaxy. Maybe it's for Kal, even after he tried to kill her last time she saw him, even after he murdered Taavi, even after all this time and the fog - maybe he still feels any kind of sentiment to take pity on her. Such a silly thought. She doesn't deserve pity.
The illusion is so fake it would take an idiot not to notice. "We haven’t sailed the Antikythera together in many years." They've never been on the Antikythera together. He didn't live long enough to be on the Antikythera. She doesn't care a bit. He's here, and she can feel his touch among the flames, and she can be with him once more. History doesn't repeat, it rhymes. Kal wearing the face of Taavi in order to steal an Orrery; either a cruel twist of fate, or a pointed attempt to show Ahlaam that no matter how much time has passed, she's still stuck in that moment on the Bonaventure.
Sia uses her movement in order to bring them to the Nautilus, where the situation isn't much better. Everyone are panicking, everyone are trying to do something, anything, and she can't. Can't move, can't speak, can't help. Her magic is totally drained and when she closes her eyes she sees Taavi dissolving into Kal. She watches silently is Margaret regains her memories, as Margaret Cavendish turns back into Mags, her best friend. She doesn't move when Samuel goes into the map room, because what can she even do? She just fought Kal and lost badly. Samuel is his mother's son until the bitter end, who too wished to fight Kal without any Magic Ways. She wants to cry when she realizes that Samuel will never get to remember the truth about his parents, but her eyes are cold and her mouth is dry. She wants to scream she Addison tells them how he died; the purple button. The same one she could have pressed. Samuel didn't deserve to die. She should have been the one... she should have been in that map room.
She should have died. It's all her fault anyway.