#like u know davenport was the captain on starblaster. so the leader. but for the past decade lucretia has been madame director

[weirdlizard26]

i think its really important to consider how lucretia’s relationship with everyone shapes up after the reunion and we do get a glimpse of it in that spinoff, but another thing i wish got explored more is how barry reconnects with everyone. idk.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

for the character ask meme: one member of the IPRE (your pick!)

*slams my fists down* L U C R E T I A.  This is just gonna be…it’s just gonna be rough.  I’ve made a few goofs about the Director here and there but I literally have not written a happy headcanon here.

Send me a character and I’ll write 10 headcanons!

Lucretia’s hair has been white all her life.  Her mother suffered a bit of a magical mishap halfway through her pregnancy and there was a lot of concern that Lucretia would die, or be born with three heads, or the gods only know what else, but instead she was a perfect, healthy baby girl with skin like black walnut wood and tightly crimped white curls and all the usual number of limbs.  She wore her hair long for all her childhood and all her time in the IPRE, usually tied back into a ponytail that poofed out into a snowy cloud like a halo behind her.  On the Starblaster, as the crew grew closer, she let the others come up with new ways for her to wear it, letting Lup cast spells to turn it straight as bone (and long enough to brush her knees), or teaching Magnus how to twist it into dreadlocks, or letting Merle braid it with flowers and oils that kept it soft and strong.  Sometimes Lup and Taako would team up with two Mage Hands each and she’d have eight hands turning her hair into a thousand tiny perfect plaits.  It reset after each cycle, after all–Lucretia was game for anything, as long as it didn’t require her to cut her hair.  

After Lucretia became Madame Director, after the Bureau had been founded and the moon base was under construction and all her journals were gone, the Director stood in front of her mirror and took a razor to her hair until it was a cap of curls less than half an inch long, and all the glorious clouds of white lay littered around her feet.

Lucretia’s resume might say ‘biographer’ but it would be more accurate to call her a ‘war correspondent’.  A universe where a significant majority of the population has powerful magic means that even a minor civil dispute can be some pretty impressive hijinks, and Lucretia was kind of like Angus, a wayward twelve-year-old wandering into the local dragon-vs-hero battle and writing furiously in the background while dodging fireballs without looking up.  By the time she got recruited by the IPRE as a young twenty-something, she’d ghostwritten about fifteen books and every journalist worth their salt knew that, if you needed someone to go somewhere horribly dangerous and write something about it with no concern for their own safety, you wanted Lucretia.  Lucretia’s class is Multitasker and she’s level 450 with a prestige class in Unflappable and she didn’t exclusively get that from her time on the Starblaster.

Lucretia and Magnus were an odd pair, as far as most people could tell, but they fell in together immediately and with a vengeance.  It was never an issue of romance or sex–Lucretia only occasionally remembers that those are things that people experience–but Magnus was big and jovial and seemed to fill a room with his booming voice, and Lucretia leaned toward him like gravity and was surprised to find that he could be quiet and soothing as easily as loud and boisterous.  Lucretia never had a brother, before, but she thought sometimes that Magnus was what brothers were like, affectionate and rough and protective.  So protective.  Magnus died in almost one in five cycles, more than anyone except Merle–and Merle’s many deaths were quick, painless things.  Magnus died trying to find the Light, bled out as they tried to save him or fell protecting their backs as they ran, and after his tenth death Lucretia hurled herself at him, at the start of the next cycle, and burst into tears.  He had to be more careful, she said as he hesitantly rubbed her back.  He had to remember that they were waiting for him to come back, he had to remember that the crew was waiting for him.  Sometimes Lucretia thinks about telling Magnus those exact words and she hates herself.

Lucretia couldn’t stand the idea of abandoning her crew, even after the voidfish took their memories at her behest.  Davenport, of course, she took on as an assistant–she didn’t know, she had never imagined that she would reduce him so far, her brilliant, competent, well-spoken captain.  She cried for an hour and a half, locked alone in a room, before she could stand to face him again.  She attended Merle’s wedding, took a private bet with herself that it wouldn’t last more than two years.  She attended Magnus’ wedding, too, and that one, oh, that one she thought would last–news of the destruction of Ravensroost came just months later, and Lucretia’s chest hurt with the need to go and hug Magnus and let him cry into her shoulder the way he had when worlds died.  Barry was…a problem to track, to say the least, and Lucretia was never quite sure if he was alive or dead or just a very competent illusionist.  Liches are such a pain.  Seeing Taako playing up to an audience without Lup at his shoulder was jarring, but he seemed…not happy, but like he was enjoying himself, at the very least, and then Glamour Springs happened and Taako dropped off the map and Lucretia’s heart stopped.  Lup was dead and if Taako died too, she would never forgive herself.

Lucretia hired Magic Brian for a lot of reasons, among them his competence, but his voice–his voice reminded her so much of the twins.  On her better days, she would listen to him talk and her wistfulness would be a small part of her, not enough to really distract her.  On her worse days, she would hear Brian laugh from across the room and there would be a lurch in her chest as her head snapped up and she looked for a flash of red and identical smirks, and the crashing revelation was like losing them all over again.

In theory, the Bureau of Balance uniform is blue and silver.  Lucretia chose it on purpose, because she couldn’t take the way her throat closed up every time Davenport wore a red coat.  She doesn’t enforce it, but generally speaking people don’t wear a lot of red because it makes them stick out like a sore thumb.  She should have known that Magnus and Merle and Taako wouldn’t give a damn one way or another.  Merle still dresses a little bit like a train crash in a tropical print shirt, and Taako’s sense of style remains Unique, but they both usually have at least one item of red clothing on at all times.  Magnus has a red bandana that he wears around his neck like it’s sewn in place.  When it’s pointed out to them, Carey making a joke about how “well, no one ever has to wonder who you are, you all dress in red!”, they laugh it off and make excuses about how it’s just what’s in their closet.  They just don’t feel right without some red.  Lucretia, overhearing this, has to excuse herself, because she can’t tell if she’s going to laugh or cry.

Lucretia is tired a lot of the time.  She can’t tell if it’s because her body is older, now, older than she’s ever been but also nowhere near the age she really is, or because she’s so lonely.  There are days where she’s just numb, where the only thing that gets her out of bed is Davenport standing there looking expectant, and other days where she breaks everything in her office, until she runs out of things to throw and is left staring at a room full of shards through a haze of tears she doesn’t remember crying.  It shocks her, a little bit, to wake up on the first day after she’s recruited the boys, and actually think I can’t wait to see what happens today.  It’s the first time in years that her reflection smiles at her.

Lucretia sits with Junior sometimes and just…talks to them.  Tells them about all the things that no one knows, that no one remembers, talks about the Starblaster and all the worlds they visited.  She talks about how Lup and Taako could cook an entire feast with a bunch of shitty phosphorescent mushrooms, and how Davenport banned the pair of them from piloting the ship except in a crisis because while Taako was learning the controls Lup shouted do a barrel roll and he almost killed them all.  She talks about Magnus and his huge stupid heart that he always wore on his sleeve, and how it broke every year that they failed to save a world.  She talks about Barry and the way he once accidentally became the messianic leader of a necromantic cult, and about how Merle had to swoop in and save him from being sacrificed by riding a treant into battle.  She talks about the year where she was alone because they had all died, they died and she escaped and she thought that this would be like that year, but this is worse.  Seeing them see her and not know her, knowing they’re literally inches away, it’s so much worse.  Junior presses their tentacles against the glass when Lucretia starts crying, and she presses her hands back.

Lucretia hasn’t slept for more than three hours straight in a decade.  She has nightmares, you see.  This is a known, but unspoken, thing at the Bureau.  The Director wanders the halls like a homeless ghost at odd hours, not really checking up on anything so much as just…drifting.  Sometimes she finds another person, wandering, and brings them back to her office for tea, but there’s never any discussion of it.  One night, after Refuge, she passes the Reclaimers’ dorm and hears the sound of clattering and murmured voices, a familiar ramble about who the fuck makes powdered chocolate why do people not love themselves Magnus do not FUCKING touch that pot, and she has her hand on the doorknob and is about to walk inside on weary autopilot before she remembers.

After the dust settles, Lucretia goes and sits on the floor in the mostly-dark voidfish room.  Not very Directorly, perhaps, to be sat on the floor in the light of the voidfish tank with her old jacket in her lap, but she’s finished her task and she’ll be unDirectorly if she wants to.  Besides, there are tearful reunions happening, and she feels horribly out of place.  This is their victory, this is what she worked for all these years, what she sacrificed everything for, and she just feels empty, because even after all this, her crew, her family, is still outside and she’s in here, in this base that has been more or less her self-made prison.  It is, she thinks, no more than she deserves, but the part of her that’s still a reserved twenty-something biographer newly thrust into the spotlight had wished for something else.  The sound of footsteps takes her off-guard, and she looks back over her shoulder, away from the voidfishes, to see Davenport.  He looks sharp and alert in a way she’s sorely missed, but he also looks…unsure.

“You, ah.  You cut your hair,” he says, and Lucretia raises a hand thoughtlessly, as if she’s not used to the short length.

“It was too much work to take care of it alone,” she says, the lie she always tells about why she keeps it so short, and Davenport huffs at her, cracks a faint smile.  She’s a very tall human, and sitting, they’re almost on eye level.  

His eyes fall to her jacket, in her lap, and he sighs.  “Come on,” he says.  “Everyone’s getting drunk.  You’d better join us or they’ll come get drunk here, instead.”

“I thought maybe–”

“We’re still going to have a talk,” he says sharply, interrupting her.  “But get up off that floor and come have a goddamn drink, Lucretia.”

“Yes, Captain,” she says softly, and after she stands, he takes her hand and leads her back into the light.