title: a new dawn when: post the tinkerer where: audelie trigger warnings: none
Dionaeia knows she is dead moments before it happens.
There is not enough time to react, even with her usual forewarning. Not while she is battling a brother that she has slowly begun to see as a stranger, not when the same sense that warned her of her imminent death warns her that this is the end.
She is not coming back.
For a long time it’s all she had wanted. For a long time, it’s what she had craved.
The talk with Nettelia remains ever present upon her head, the offer to give her an ending if that is what she so wished after the war.
She had denied the offer, not willing to bloody her sister’s hands any further with druids blood, but she had not forgotten it.
It lived, ever present on the back of her head, a siren’s call she assumed would one day succumb to.
As she lies bleeding out on the ruins of Rome, as her brotherheroemperorstranger approaches to do the unforgivable, Dionaeia realizes she would have never succumbed.
She had always been torn between duty and desire. Always wanting but never doing because she had made an oath to humanity, and she had seen it as her highest duty, any personal desires notwithstanding.
She had waited for Oztalun’s return, waited for her father to take from her and give her her final duty.
He had never come.
Purpoless, unaware of how to be selfish after so long shackled by the bounds of duty, Dionaeia had not known what to do.
Dying had been the easier option, a tempting call telling her to lay down and rest.
But as she faces death, as she faces the end of her existence, she realizes she had never wanted to rest
What she had wanted was a choice, something she never thought she had, shackled by duty and urged to loyalty to her people, to her siblings and to humanity.
As she lies dying, and Octavian reaches to take her soul, Dionaeia realizes the truth.
She doesn’t want to die.
She dies.
Then she doesn’t.
The world disappears as her soul is taken, and she opens her eyes to the Allied Forces barracks on the first day of the war. Looking across the barracks, she meets Nettelia’s eyes, and sees the same sort of vague knowledge in her eyes.
Time travel has been used once before, and she doesn’t doubt that it will be used again.
Still, she can’t help the long cackling laugh that leaves her lips, the near hysteric realization that her brother had killed for power's sake.
The Octavian she loved is gone. She does not know the man he had left behind, but if he tries his bullshit once more, she will bind him, imprison him and throw away the keys.
There is no killing a monster like Octavian, there is no killing a Phoenix. But she can subdue him.
Never let it be said that she doesn’t hold grudges.
Never let it be said that she isn’t patient, now that she realizes she never wanted to die.
Dionaeia has all of the time in the world to deal with the man that she no longer calls a brother.
For now?
For now she wants to be a little selfish.
