Tell me about Desolation/Gertrude. Mutual casual flirtation? True Love forever separated by their first duties? Something more unbalanced?
The important thing to remember is: Gertrude does not recognize it as love.
She doesn’t even recognize it as intentional at first. She doesn’t see “intention” in anything the entities do any more than she sees intention in gravity slowly pulling everything into the sun. Any purposefulness in the Desolation must be the work of humans, she thinks.
Gertrude interrupted a ritual. The cultists who organized said ritual worshipped through torture and sadism. Of course they would want her to suffer. Gertrude’s question is: How did the cultists keep finding her?
She moves apartments several times. She locks her door every which way she can. She experiments with every supernatural artifact she can get her hands on. She tries everything to keep them out.
Still, without fail, she comes back every day to find something she loved in ashes.
A houseplant she’d put hours into growing. A well-loved book. The scarf her mother had knit her. All turned to ash. Each time her locks and wards were intact, and she could find no sign of anyone entering.
The cult’s death messiah starts to show up in her dreams. Gertrude decides to ask her.
“How do your people break in and leave without a trace?”
And the woman smiles and says I am with you always. As though that is an answer.
It takes a year for Gertrude to realize that no individual has been entering her living space and setting fire to her things. Remote detonation magic is what she thinks, putting it into terms she can understand. And of course, she thinks it is out of a desire to punish, rather than a desire to love.
Still, there are a few things that cue her in.
When Diego Molina burns down her parents’ home with them inside, he leaves bouquets of roses with copies of famous love poetry folded into their leaves. Taunting, Gertrude assumes.
When Jude Perry corners her and digs burning fingers into Gertrude’s arm, she sneers and calls Gertrude love. She spits out the word, as though it’s an unfortunate thing. It has to be mocking, Gertrude assumes.
And then, when she and Agnes meet (sooner in this world, and with more meetings to come) the first thing Agnes says is “I love you.”
Gertrude blanks for a moment. “What?”
She tries to See inside of Agnes’ mind, then. But what is inside Agnes is too large for words. Too powerful to be whittled down into mere thoughts.
Agnes reaches a hand out, sadly, not touching. “There is something sad about destroying things,” she says. “You know what it is?”
The pain, Gertrude thinks, though she decides not to dignify such a question with a verbal answer.
“No,” Agnes says. “It’s that after the act of destruction is done, its object is gone forever.”
“How philosophical,” Gertrude says drily. “Now, if that’s all you have to say…”
Agnes moves in, intense sorrow in her eyes. “I love your face; your lips, your eyes, your voice,” she says, as though it’s something that naturally follows from what she’s said. “I don’t want it to ever be gone.”
Then, her burning hands grab Gertrude’s rib cage. All of Gertrude’s plotting and logic leaves her, then. There is only agony and terror that burns out all her words. There is only screaming and spitting and crying and hate, so much hate.
She’ll murder Agnes, she swears. She’ll destroy every last member of her cursed cult. She’ll make them all suffer for all they’ve done, to her and everyone else.
There is a hot breath against Gertrude’s ear in response. “And I love you too,” Agnes murmurs.
Agnes leans carefully away from Gertrude’s face, and plants lips to her shoulder instead.
