finale.With regard to Ran and our Makarov/Julia ‘S Nami Bog’ verse.
Here, in the twelfth hour, there is nothing to save her.
There is no talking her way out of the clutches of her enemies, no balm for what burns inside of her. As she watches the heavily armed ants skitter across the lawn, she is more concerned for the fates of her roses trampled underfoot than herself. Julia knows there is one way out for her, and the only variation she is allowed is how she is remembered at the moment of death.
Old and grey, she weighs her options, weak as they are.
Waiting is always viable, to stay here with her husband and die at his side. She will never be offered a chance to outlive him, never taste a world free of Vladimir’s influence. As they fall together, blood running towards one another on the hardwood, she knows it will seal her fate. They will write tragedies and scandals about the Tsar and his wife. She will always be remembered as his supporter, his lover, and all the public records will support this. There will be no evidence of how deep her loathing truly ran. She will stand in his shadow long after they have both rotted in whatever shallow grave these Westerners will dispose of them in.
He keeps a gun on hand, she knows. It could be a simple thing to pull it from the waistband of his pants and point it at him. She’s had nigh 30 years to imagine such a moment, and the report of her shot would be cathartic. This will let her outlive him, if only briefly, if only for the moments before these men bust through the door and finish her off as well. Vladimir will know it for the fuck you it is, but she can see how history sours this as well. A mercy kill, they will say, the tsaritsa loved her husband dearly enough to kill him before the invaders could come for him. Julia remains the loving wife in this. It curdles in her belly.
If she is clever enough, she will find some way to go out with both middle fingers up against her husband’s failed dynasty. Thirty years he has cut a bloody swathe across Europe, from reinstating the Russian throne to conquering more than the Romanovs ever dared dreamed. If she thinks hard enough, it will come to her, a way to die letting them all know what she thinks of the man who has helped her rise.
But, like the Romanovs, their time is slipping through their hands. The empire’s clock has struck midnight. His aged eyes find her, and she knows that this will be her ruin.
As the bullets echo downstairs, the most she asks for is that they shoot him first.
