#takes place before the adriel showdown

[kaisollisto]

"Beatrice," Ava calls softly, Beatrice has trapped her in a hold, one she's felt thousands of times before. Ava can feel her underlying desperation (this time it seems to say, please, please fight back). Ava steels herself (one last time). Bea's arms are thick, corded with muscle from years of use and Ava doesn't want to linger on the truth of it. (A soldier weathered over the course of many years). The cruelty doesn't spare her, it sits with her forcing her to relive the same day over and over.

"Beatrice, I know the end." Ava tries again, It shakes Beatrice and it's gut wrenching. Ava can feel the uncertainty brewing, her grapple is no longer precise just frantic. "I have to go," Ava swallows the bitterness in her chest, (failure, failure, failure, it tells her).

"You can't," She's shaking and Ava has never seen her fight harder than now to choke back sobs. "You can't." Beatrice is grabbing her hard and Ava pivots, leading them chest to chest.

She can feel the crown of thorns bite into her hand but nothing ever hurts more than looking into Bea's eyes. They're so stupidly brown and soft and so full of hope and Ava wants to throw up. (She curses every stupid higher being above for making Beatrice watch Ava die over and over. She just hopes she's the only one who remembers.)

"It all ends the same. Please, just one last time let me have this with you." Ava forces herself to look at her, Beatrice, to take it all in one last time. She's done this a thousand times, maybe a million, but it still hurts all the same. The sight of her never grows old, (Ava doesn't want to ever get used to seeing her), she's breathtaking. It softens the goodbye in her heart.  

She can't say it but she knows Beatrice can feel it. The defeat permeating from her. It's suspended between the two and Ava is never going to see her again.

She blinks through the tears, Ava is never going to see her again. She can feel Bea's heart racing through her wrist and she's never going to see her again.

And she can't kiss her, she can't kiss her because she's never going to see her again and she couldn't stop if she did. But Ava has never been the strongest between them, she ends up on her toes gently holding her face between her hands. She can feel Bea's breath reverberate through her hands and she kisses her forehead.

A sister warrior officiated goodbye, (Shannon's last moments leak through her and Ava has never felt like herself these past thousand lives).

"I love you," She lets it slip, (the part of her that exists outside being a warrior nun,) and Ava hasn't quite learned how to stop running. She closes her eyes, unwilling to see the devastation across Beatrice's face and she falls for the last time.

-

Something's changed. Ava can feel pain a heavy thing in her chest. And it hurts, it hurts that it wasn't enough that she left the earth a heartbroken mess. She's tired and Ava doesn't want to hurt anymore.

Something crosses her vision and someone grabs her -

"I know the end, you idiot." Beatrice shakes her in disbelief, "we go back to the alps." She kisses her before Ava can say anything swallowing her bloody mouth. It's raw and needy and it makes her feel alive. She can't feel anything below her chest (but this blooms a feeling she had forgotten about, hope).

Beatrice knocks her head into Ava's, panting harshly against her face, their foreheads pressed tightly like Beatrice is sure Ava's going to disappear again.   

Ava hands weakly snake around Beatrice's and she smiles through bloody teeth and swollen lips. Her throat feels hoarse but she couldn’t be happier. 

[sisterdivinium]

[this was originally posted at femslashfete for the "beg" prompt]

All hell is breaking loose around them: the pope is a pile of cooling ash, fried to death during a global broadcast; an already weakened OCS risks losing even more of its elite warriors as it continues to fight a false angel who is always one step ahead; and even sunlight becomes a curse upon the flesh of those brave few who have not bowed down to Adriel's cult. In the midst of it all, Lilith pauses her battle against Ava and asks her to join her cause.

Why?

If momentarily, Lilith has the upper hand. Ava is skewered to the side, with a sword stuck all the way through her middle, and the battleground was one Lilith chose, her own ancestral home with which she is deeply acquainted. Up until this point, Lilith has not demonstrated a great inclination to ask — she obeys, such as when Duretti has her track Ava down regardless of costs or morals; she demands, whether by “requesting silence” of Camila or teleporting her way into Jillian’s estate without patience; and she even whimpers and cries in Mary’s arms when they are by the tomb, but how often do we see Lilith beg? Even as Adriel drives his fingers into her eyes, she does not plead for mercy.

Perhaps begging seems too strong a word to describe her last attempt at winning Ava over. Perhaps Lilith is only trying to use a language which, foreign to her, could resonate with Ava’s disposition, stubborn as she is, uninclined to obey just because someone stronger and meaner said so. Fighting costs stamina and time, precious time, and the sooner Adriel can get ahead in the “holy war”, the better, so if words can more easily and more quickly attract the halo and its bearer to his camp, well, it’s worth a shot, right?

Except Lilith had already eschewed diplomacy and opted for aggression first of all. The time to talk would have been atop Adriel’s cathedral, before Duretti is killed, when first Ava looks upon Lilith after her defection and the more radical changes in her body are visible.

Instead, they fight. Instead, Lilith makes use of the halo’s malfunctioning to get a few good blows in, whether physical or emotional, what with her little spiel on breaking free from her frustrated goals when Ava took her place as the warrior nun. Now, unlike Ava, she is free of expectations and responsibilities.

But is she? Has Lilith shed her past self as she has been shedding skin for her multiplying scales? Can she — or anyone?

If rejecting her mother, the plans that had been made by the same woman, and even the OCS, which was arguably the thing that had given Lilith’s life all its meaning, if rejecting all of this is a way to reject who she was, why return to her family home for her showdown with Ava? Why choose a place central to the past she is renouncing? Strange would be the prisoner who, shortly after a successful jailbreak, decided to rush back into that same jail, now with a friend in tow.

When Lilith crumbles in Mary’s arms, she is vulnerable. She opens up, if only a little (“you said I was heartless”). Amid the mess and the violence, Lilith chooses to open up to Ava, too. It’s not Superion or Beatrice or Camila or Mary or even Adriel himself, who has helped her “see reality”, whom she takes home, to the centre of her wounded intimacy. It’s Ava.

Ava gets to witness the trinkets of medieval times, symbols of the burden Lilith must carry as a member of her family, so profuse in warrior nuns along the centuries — a burden they share, as Ava must bear the halo and correspond to others’ ideas of her without a real say in the matter. They are equivalent, they are the same even despite all their differences, the same value but inverted. Both have fates tied to the halo, terrible and overbearing, only now Ava has that circle on her back and Lilith boasts of that strange but also “open” pattern upon her chest, as some sort of negative halo.

Back in season one, when Lilith tries to cut Ava open to retrieve the object that defines the OCS perhaps more than the cruciform sword itself, she has Ava pinned down, face on the ground. She doesn’t hesitate as she plunges the divinium blade into the reticent halobearer’s back, her inferior, unworthy even of actual direct confrontation.

But now, under the sickly glow of Adriel’s cursed light, after Lilith has opened her eyes, Ava is impaled on the sword right where Lilith wanted and they are facing one another, eye in the eye. They are, blood notwithstanding, on the same level.

This isn’t the first time Lilith hurts her. At the Cat’s Cradle, in 1x03, Lilith uses the cruciform sword to slice at Ava’s arm; later, it’s the same weapon she intends to wield against Ava at the orphanage exit; as mentioned, she stabs Ava with a divinium knife before being herself pierced by a tarask. As her body changes, Lilith uses her claws on Ava, drawing blood, and finally pushes her into that sword in her home, leaving her hanging in the air — much like Lilith hung in the air at the end of the tarask’s claw in 1x05. So there is a recurrent theme by which Lilith not only seeks to hurt Ava, but to perforate, penetrate, enter her in what is some pretty sexually aggressive symbolism.

And, as they look upon one another while Ava is traversed by a weapon just as Lilith had been, a twisted mirror image of herself, as if Lilith could recreate her own experience in Ava so as to change her mind by making her feel what she felt, the rogue nun asks her to join her. Lilith has not only shown Ava her past, but replicated it on her — she should be ready to “see reality” too, she should be ready to choose. For, if the halo chose Ava when they were both marked for it, then Ava might just as well choose her, as no one else had ever done, not even Adriel since it was Lilith who approached him.

She has been burnt and passed over enough. Lilith has been made to fight Mary, she has been stabbed by a demon, her body has started to change without her control or her consent… “No more talking” indeed. Lilith wants something new. From the look in her eyes and the intonation Lorena Andrea gives her, Lilith isn’t just playing Ava. She means it. She wants Ava on her side. Adriel is an excuse. She can see they’re on the same level and surely Ava can, too. She’s the agent of change after all, Lilith recognises this — so can’t Ava recognise her?

Hers is the name Lilith calls out when she returns from the dead before she passes out inside ArqTech. Hers are the eyes that look inside Lilith, at her decadent household and past. Hers is the flesh that experiences the pain, the demonic stockade Lilith suffered. It’s not just the halo, it’s Ava or else Lilith wouldn’t waste time asking and she’d just rip the halo out the way she threatens to do at a refusal. Ava must see her, as Adriel supposedly does.

It’s not about him in the end. She barely bats an eyelash when he is defeated. After all, when she opens her eyes, Lilith’s diagnosis is that “this is how Ava sees”. Ava is the parameter, Ava is the prize.

This enemy Lilith has been trying to slice, stab, maim, kill, who conquers her one ally in the world, is the same person she helps to save as she aids Beatrice in taking a mortally injured Ava to the ark, to the portal “to the other side”, the only way to save her. Even after Ava denies her and hurts her further, Lilith ultimately helps her.

Ava and Beatrice might be the canon couple, but this ambiguous and potent connection between Lilith and Ava, as they skirt around one another in a dance that has them alternating between foes and friends at the erratic beat of the drum, was likely to electrify coming seasons of the show, had it not been cancelled. It’s indeed surprising to realise Ava/Lilith isn’t as popular a ship as one might assume it would be given the dynamics contained within. There are certainly many elements to explore between them.

Perhaps, had their relationship been graced with a few more episodes to keep developing in its intriguing spiral pattern of attraction and repulsion, it would be one more of the myriad reasons why so many fans have not gotten over Netflix’s decision and so continue, themselves, to beg for more.