promises to keep
Veronica, or Ronnie, Adler knew witches weren’t real. She’d never believed in fairy tales or myths or anything like that, as they never fit in her mother’s perfect picture of life. And her father died before she could even form memories of him. When she was eleven, her significantly older brother up and left the family for no apparent reason. Yet oddly enough, losing her father and brother had one common thread: Magic.
All her life, she was told her father died fighting in the war. Nobody really asked, so she never wondered exactly which war it had been. Her mother never told her anything that could destroy the perfect family ideal she’d created for herself.
She never knew why her brother left them after his girlfriend had a baby. Especially since she and her mother had been so involved -- after her mother got over him having a child out of wedlock -- and she was sort of growing up with her little nephew. She’d asked her mother why they hadn’t been around for a while, and her mother said the girlfriend claimed her brother was never allowed to see them again. There was no further explanation after that.
Ronnie knew better than to question her mother, as it had never really been an option in her life, even though it didn’t really make sense to her and she questioned just about everything else. But she trusted her mother would give her all the information she needed to go on.
This existential confusion continued until Ronnie reached 18, and her mother decided it was time for her to know the truth. That her father didn’t fight in a traditional, well-known war, but a magical one. A war against the stuff of legends, the stuff that wasn’t supposed to be real because it went against nature. Abnormal, unnatural witches killed her father at a magical school where her mother said they trained for these battles. They were programmed to kill normal people like her family. Like her father. And her brother had fallen in love with one of them.
Her brother’s girlfriend -- maybe even wife at that point -- was a witch, and she’d brainwashed her brother and stolen him from her life. Ronnie couldn’t process the thought of losing the most important men in her life because of these evil, deadly creatures that were trained to kill. They were the tangible thread between these losses, and Ronnie wanted to destroy that thread. For her family. She wanted to help stop them before they could take anything else from her.
Her mother was almost too enthusiastic at her daughter’s ambition to stop these creatures, and encouraged her to join the same band of soldiers -- hunters, because witches were beasts, animals -- that her father had been part of. And so Ronnie did, and they welcomed her with open arms not only because of her father, but because she was damn good. She promised to avenge her family, to protect them, and to make sure the evil ways of magic would be stopped.
She trained with the hunters all throughout college, where she studied English, and quickly moved through the ranks. She told everyone else she was training to be an EMT, when in reality she was ending lives instead of saving them. Other people couldn’t know about magic, and she didn’t want any trace of it in her real life anyway. So she managed being a full-time student, training and then fighting as a hunter, and being part of her school’s newspaper all at once. Her life was full enough to distract her from the pain of loss that fueled her fight.
Then she met Tessa. And Ronnie’s world flipped upside down.
Ronnie was a bit of a late-bloomer when it came to love and romance, but Tessa managed to change Ronnie’s life in a matter of moments. Ronnie couldn’t sleep, eat, think, or breathe without everything coming back to Tessa. And, thank god for her, Tessa seemed to feel the same.
Falling in love with a girl would ruin her mother’s image of the perfect family -- Ronnie was the last one left, so she had to be the perfect daughter, didn’t she? Regardless, she kept Tessa a secret from her mother and planned to keep it that way for as long as possible.
It was difficult for Ronnie to keep so much of her life a secret from Tessa, but she couldn’t tell her about being a hunter. She couldn’t expose her to the battles, the death and destruction of magic that she’d now seen firsthand. These thoughts kept running through Ronnie’s mind on one house patrol, where she and a handful of other hunters scoped out homes to target suspected witches. She was getting massively distracted, and maybe she was going soft, because wow was she sad about that family looking like her brother and her nephew if they were just a few years older, and...
Ronnie froze on the spot. She took a step away from the telescope and blinked, before placing her eye back on the target home. Her nephew -- now nearly eleven years old -- was there in that house moving fire with his bare hands for her aged brother and his graying wife. Ronnie watched the joyful little boy who she’d loved so much, this beautiful family she hated and missed so desperately, and it felt like all the moisture left her throat and went straight to her eyes.
She stared at them as long as she could, with a storming debate raging inside her mind. Witches weren’t people -- they were monsters. Yet when her superior officer asked if there was any suspicious activity in that home, she said no, and turned away from the home of her family. She let them go. She had promised to protect her family, and she’d keep it. Even if it meant an earth-shattering existential crisis.
And maybe it was this sentimentality and concern that led her to want a deeper connection to her mother, to want answers from her, but it felt like all her childhood confusion came back to suffocate and haunt her. The only thing that made sense was Tessa. And suddenly she was telling her mother about Tessa, and how she didn’t know love could feel like that or how something so good could happen to her. She needed these two women -- these two constants -- to know and love each other and love her and for things to make sense.
Her mother didn’t agree. Her reaction sent Ronnie spiraling -- how could she deny the only child she had left? All because of love? Was that why her brother left -- because their mother didn’t approve of his love? Ronnie couldn’t take it anymore. She’d graduated college and wanted to be a reporter. She wanted to follow her dreams and get rid of the nightmares of herself shooting her nephew mid-battle. He was just a kid, living his life and loving his parents, and Ronnie needed him to have that. She needed a fresh start with Tessa away from the hunters, so she promised herself the next battle would be her last.
When the battle came, she turned her brain off of Ronnie-mode and went straight into hunter-mode. Anything that wasn’t them was fair game. And while they were well-protected -- masked and fully armed -- the witches never seemed to be, which was how she noticed that familiar dark hair on a familiarly beautiful woman running through the field, wielding the air in a way Ronnie had never seen. Ronnie stopped short, and so did Tessa and her wind. Because she’d just been shot.
Suddenly, Ronnie didn’t care about the hunters. She didn’t care about the battle. She threw off her helmet as she ran towards her girlfriend, who looked nearly as shocked at seeing Ronnie as she did at the blood pooling from her side. Ronnie didn’t know she was crying -- she was in too much shock at her girlfriend being a witch and being there and dying there -- and all she could do was apologize. She didn’t know, she told her. She didn’t know Tessa was a witch. And she was so, so sorry. Tessa just had to hold on. Ronnie lifted Tessa’s head and rested it on her lap, running her fingers through the girl’s hair. Tessa reached her hand up to Ronnie’s face, but never quite made it to her skin before the light faded from her eyes and her hand fell back to her side.
Ronnie stayed curled over her for a while. This was all her fault. She’d joined the hunters, supported them, and led them to this town. The town where she realized her dream wasn’t revenge, but to write and write and never stop, and to love this sweet and incredible girl who helped her find a missing piece of herself. And it was all falling apart around her as she hunched over, clutching her girlfriend’s body. The battle had dissipated around them, so Ronnie carried Tessa’s body to outskirts of the woods. She’d never have enough time to bury her or do anything but rest her body gently down on the ground and press a final kiss to Tessa’s forehead before she had to flee.
Ronnie took one last look at Tessa’s face, and promised a promise she’d never hear but that Ronnie would take with her for the rest of her life -- she would stop the hunters, or she’d die trying. She’d stop them, so the Tessas of the world would get to live and thrive. So the kids like her nephew didn’t have to fear death at every corner, and could grow up happy and fulfilled. Because they were just people. Ronnie could see that now.
She fled the scene, and somehow, unconsciously, made it to Tessa’s apartment. She went inside stiffly, washed the blood off her hands, took off all of her hunter gear, and changed into clothes she’d left there. And she just sat for a while, as everything she’d known and trained for years to achieve crumbled down around her. She lost her father, her brother, her mother, and now her girlfriend -- there was nothing left. But that nothingness lit a fire in her, and she had promises to keep to her brother, her nephew, and Tessa. She’d do whatever she could to keep them.
She put all of her hunter gear into an old backpack. She searched around, breathing in Tessa’s scent and hoping something there could help her. Tessa kept her secret as much as Ronnie had, so maybe, just maybe, she’d also have information lying around somewhere. At least a name, a place, anything that could help Ronnie find the witches that she could help.
She felt crazy, as all of these thoughts and feelings seemed to come at once. But maybe it’d been underlying for so long, and maybe she was just a scared, lonely girl that wanted her family back and for people to love her. Who could, though? She killed witches -- people. She killed people. She nearly vomited at the thought, but knew she couldn’t help anyone if she just sat in the nothingness. The other hunters would come looking for her soon, so she had to act fast.
After searching through drawers and cabinets for what felt like hours, Ronnie finally found enough scraps of paper and odd-looking gadgets that she knew couldn’t be developed by people without magic, and figured that would have to be enough for now. At the very least, she’d found a town name. So that’d be her start.
When the hunters found her, she was back at her own apartment and apologized for fleeing, blamed it on being burnt out and apologized. The best way to take the hunters down would be from the inside out, so she had to keep up the act. She offered to scope out the town she’d learned about from Tessa’s apartment -- there were apparently already hunters there, and even witches that had turned against their own kind to help the hunters. And if hunters could take witches in, then maybe there would be witches willing to accept her help.
When she moved, Ronnie became a crime reporter at the town’s local newspaper, got a small apartment now covered in lots and lots of strange tech, weaponry, and paperwork in the room she’d deemed her office, as she tried to learn more about the witches.
She’s made a significant dent in her witch investigations, but she’s nowhere near to where she needs to be to keep her promises. She’s trying to get close to Andrew, who used his magic to help the hunters now instead of his own people. She wanted to learn everything he knew, and maybe she could find and help the witches he was betraying.
She just had to keep hoping something good would come from all this waiting. That someone would trust her, and she could make sure her nephew was protected along with all the others like him, and like Tessa, out there. Maybe then she’d forgive herself. But for now, she just had to write and wait.