The Lorekeeper couldn’t tell how long he’d been there. Standing there. Waiting. She opens her mouth to speak and yet nothing but a few shallow breaths leave her. Zinnia swallows thickly as she wracks her brain for a suitable answer. For years, she has thought about what she would say when she encountered Steven – she remembers the hours she spent in front of a mirror in countless motel rooms, reciting her feelings aloud to an audience of none. She’d written everything down. She knows her speech by heart. But the second her eyes meet his, her thoughts fail her.
Zinnia glances back at the open expanse of water, whose posterior houses a roaring fall. She begins to wonder how quickly she can swim and if Steven would dare to follow her. She knew Meteor Falls by heart, memorized its passageways. She could lose him in the caves.
Her pride, however, glues her where she stands.
“Hey,” she drawls. She pulls her lips back into a tight smile, revealing her uncannily sharp teeth.
She could never smile properly anyway – Zinnia recalls how the men and women of her village spoke of her. She was a hardened warrior back in her youth. She was given little chance to experience her childhood, little chance to develop her emotions properly. Whenever she smiled, it was rare. It always felt forced. Rabid. She smiles like the dragons, one had chimed. We don’t ever see dragons smile.
Remembering that, Zinnia’s expression sobers. She didn’t want Steven to feel that uneasy, after all.
But what else could she say? What else could she do? This reunion was a long time coming – Zinnia had known that whatever she would say – whatever he would say – would be awkward. Painful, perhaps. She had a lot to say, and she was sure that Steven would too. Zinnia had committed crimes. Willingly, she joined both Team Aqua and Magma and guided them to their respective titans. This had been a plan in the making for years; Zinnia had spent countless years earning their trust, making herself as unassuming as possible. And when those plans had come to waste, Zinnia felt herself snap. She had cried and screamed and cursed before she crafted a hastier, sloppier plan. She had become desperate – she had stolen, something that Aster would have frowned upon. Zinnia had hurt countless people, had destroyed the very object that Devon created to dispose of the meteor crisis.
They had all looked so hurt – she recalls their faces, dipped in fresh despair. As if she had destroyed the only chance they had at salvation.
In retrospect, she had said that she had a plan. And she had said that to go through with their plans would result in the genocide of another world – oh, but they hadn’t listened…
