Chapter Text
day 1
The apartment is miniscule compared to the world Lilith grew up in and palatial compared to the rooms in convents she lived her adult life in. There are two bedrooms, a decently-sized kitchen, even a tiny balcony with a view across the city. Ava insists that she can see the tower of the convent over the rooftops of the nearer buildings, but Lilith can barely see them and she’s an actual full grown adult compared to a pipsqueak like Ava, so she knows Ava is lying.
“This is a terrible idea.” She folds her arms over her chest and rolls her shoulders-- Jillian had found a way to disguise the metallic scales that had crept across her skin, but the wings still ache when she keeps them compressed and hidden away for too long-- and glares at Ava and Beatrice.
“I agree,” Beatrice says, mirroring her posture. Ava, next to her, rolls her eyes and bumps her hip against Beatrice’s.
“It’s just for a little while,” she says cheerfully. She pops up on her toes and kisses Beatrice on the cheek, and Lilith regrets being so willing to help Beatrice save Ava’s life all those months ago. Sure, maybe it was the right thing to do and maybe Lilith had made enough bad violent choices that she can’t really judge, but also: Ava’s incessant joy is annoying, and patience has never been one of Lilith’s greater virtues.
“I’m not doing this,” Lilith says, snatching the duffel bag at her feet up and preparing to teleport away.
“Stop.” Beatrice has always had a way of commanding respect, soft-spoken as she may be, and sure, Lilith has superpowers now and could just decide to ignore her and do what she wants, but instead she winds up dropping the bag and propping her hands on her hips, glaring right back. “You need to lay low for a while and Mother Superion felt it prudent that you stay here until we--
“Make sure that you’re not going to kill everyone at the convent,” Ava interjects, which is stupid because if Lilith wanted either of them dead all she had to do was teleport them over an ocean and drop them in.
“--ensure that you can be trusted,” Beatrice carries on, which is also stupid because of course she can’t be trusted, even if she has every intention of helping the order, even if she won’t give them-- Beatrice and her stoicism, Superion and her calm, Ava and her fucking everything-- the satisfaction of knowing that directly. “So that is what we-- all of us-- are going to do.”
“You can’t stop me from leaving,” Lilith says, only a little petulant.
“But you’re not gonna,” Ava throws back. “Because you want to stay.”
“I do not,” Lilith says indignantly.
“Yeah, okay,” Ava says. She curls a hand around Beatrice’s elbow, props her chin on her shoulder. “Now that we’ve settled that, Bea, can we--”
“Ava,” Beatrice says, soft, exasperated, even as her hand comes up to cover Ava’s on her arm. “We need to discuss--”
“But we have reservations,” Ava says, and Beatrice softens, and Lilith considers vomiting because they are horrible lecherous little cretins and they’re so in love it makes her want to walk into the ocean.
“If you both stop being so coupley and leave me alone, I promise not to do anything violent while you’re gone.” It’s the absolute most she can promise, and more than she wants to offer-- she can already tell that she hates the next door neighbor and his loud music-- but if it’ll save her from having to witness Ava looking at Beatrice like she put the stars in the sky, she’ll take it. Sure, they were separated on pain of interdimensional death for a terribly long time just as they admitted their love to each other, but also: they’re annoying, and Lilith is tired.
“Deal,” Ava says quickly, and yanks at Beatrice’s arm so hard she stumbles. Lilith stares incredulously as the way that Ava bodily drags Beatrice-- the most lethal thing on two legs in the entirety of Europe except perhaps Lilith herself-- towards the door. “Wifi code is by the door, food’s in the fridge, bye!”
Lilith stares after them as the door nearly slams on Beatrice’s foot with how quickly Ava hustles them out of the apartment and suddenly finds herself blessedly alone. She glares at the door and swipes her duffel up, stalking to find her bedroom. The first door she tries is obviously their room, judging by the one bedside table with a sloppy stack of books and a coffee mug and a baseball cap and the other completely ascetically unadorned, and she rolls her eyes and closes the door, only to slam to halt when she opens the other door to find a neatly made bed, a bedside table with an alarm clock and a neatly bundled-up charging cable and a tablet in a plain black cover.
She looks back towards the other room, with Ava’s fingerprints all over it, and then over again to this one, so painfully Beatrice it should have a nametag on it, considers the way they’re so absurdly in love it nearly glows brighter than the stupid halo and the fact that they’ve been living together since Lilith pulled Ava back through the portal three months ago, and lets out an incredulous noise.
“Unbelievable.”
day 2
The first two days are uncomfortable at a brand new scale.
After Ava and Beatrice came home from their dinner, flushed cheeks and entwined fingers and Beatrice smelling an honest to God rose, to find Lilith sulking on the couch waiting for someone to explain where she was supposed to sleep, there had been a painfully long protracted moment where neither of them seemed to realize that this situation was only going to work if they shared a bedroom; Lilith had stared at them and the way Beatrice had flushed straight up to the tips of her ears and Ava had rubbed a hand over the back of her neck and announced that she was taking Beatrice’s room just because it was easier to move her shit than Ava’s.
The next morning, she’d woken and found Beatrice in the living room, well before sunrise, circles under her eyes and a cup of coffee cooling in her hands, and turned right back around and gone back to bed for another two hours.
Ava sleeps late, somehow, despite Beatrice being the world’s earliest riser, and shuffles out of the bedroom to the chilly silence in the living room, Beatrice engrossed in a tablet except when she casts mistrustful glances towards Lilith, who’s pretending to read one of Beatrice’s pretentious French novels and is instead considering teleporting herself to the Azores.
“Morning,” Ava mumbles, fingertips dragging along Beatrice’s shoulders, pausing to press a kiss to her hair on the way to the kitchen. Beatrice looks up from her tablet, absolutely smitten as she watches Ava pour herself coffee and stretch, and Lilith earns herself a gold medal for not throwing a book at her.
Ava curls into Beatrice’s side on the couch and Beatrice’s arm settles around her shoulders blindly, Ava leaning her head onto Beatrice’s shoulder and Beatrice adjusting her hold on the tablet until Ava can sling her legs over Beatrice’s. Lilith un-earns her medal after only thirty seconds when she throws a pen-- not a book, thank you very much, she should at least get a silver medal for that-- at them.
She avoids them for the rest of the day, taking over the entire balcony for herself and lounging in the sun with her feet propped up on the railing, eating her way through Ava’s snack stash and reading more of Beatrice’s books, ignoring them when they announce that they’re heading to the convent.
She successfully avoids having to deal with them all day and well into the evening, finishing a second book and starting on a third-- Beatrice, as obnoxiously uptight and overachieving as she is, has excellent taste in literature-- as the summer sun starts to slip down past the horizon when the front door unlocks and they tumble inside, Ava’s hands wound in the collar of Beatrice’s jacket and Beatrice’s barely managing to get the door shut before shoving Ava up against it.
Lilith cranes her head back to glare at them through the balcony door and clears her throat. Either they don’t hear her, or Ava has some serious kinks to work out, based on the way she grabs for Beatrice’s ass right after Lilith clears her throat a second time. Lilith rolls her eyes and stands up, stretches, teleports into the kitchen right next to them.
Ava shrieks like a completely normal mature adult and Beatrice, less appallingly, has a more appropriate reaction of shoving Ava towards the door and swinging a left cross at Lilith’s jaw. She lets the hit land-- it takes more than a punch for her to feel pain these days-- and raises an eyebrow, glares down at her.
“Lilith,” Beatrice huffs out, drawing herself up to her full height-- not that it doesn't her any good; Lilith’s always had that advantage-- and glaring, as if her mouth isn’t ruddy red and jacket completely askew from Ava’s hold on it. “Seriously?”
“If you’re going to make me live here,” Lilith says with a huff of her own, glaring down her nose. “Don’t do that.”
She considers staying to watch them both continue flushing red with embarrassment-- Beatrice particularly is too easy to rile up, and flushes red straight up to the tips of her ears-- but instead teleports back to the balcony because Ava is shoving her way around Beatrice with her intent to shove at Lilith written across her wide-open face.
Maybe a little awkward is worth it for the sake of annoying the hell out of the both of them.
day 10
Lilith, the note in front of the kettle reads in Beatrice’s precise hand, as neat and perfect as the rest of her. Lilith stares at it appraisingly for long seconds, glances around the empty apartment-- their bedroom door is closed but the shoes by the door are missing and both of their sets of keys hanging above them are also gone-- and considers ignoring it.
Please know that when we say it’s your turn to do the dishes after dinner--
Lilith scoffs. “Dinner” was an ambitious way to put it, as cooking was apparently the only thing that Beatrice has never managed to figure out.
--it doesn’t mean ‘throw all the dishes and silverware in the garbage.’ We would appreciate it if you would simply rinse them and put them in the dishwasher instead.
Under the neatly inked B ending the note is a less-precisely scrawled seriously we are renting this place please don’t fucking throw away the dishes from Ava.
day 11
It’s late afternoon by the time she makes it back from her run, miles clicking away methodically as fatigue builds up and fades away, bitten back by whatever it is that heals her so quickly. There’s a mild burn in her calves as she climbs the stairs, digging for keys and considering how much Beatrice would glare at her if she just used a claw to jimmy the lock open.
The door swings open and she immediately drops her keys, right as Ava yelps out “Oh, shit,” and topples back from where she’d been straddling Beatrice’s lap on the couch, only saving the glass coffee table by phasing through it. Beatrice scrambles up to standing, wiping at her mouth and clearing her throat loudly, as if Lilith didn’t just blatantly see that one of her hands had been creeping up Ava’s spine under her shirt or that there’s a hickey on the side of her neck.
“Jesus, Lilith, can’t you knock or something?” Ava phases back out from under the table and flops with a whump onto the couch. Her hair is a disaster, clearly as much Beatrice’s fault as the fall’s, and her cheeks are ruddy, and Lilith is fairly certain the halo is still glowing in her back.
“I have keys,” Lilith says, rattling them for good measure. She stops herself from slamming the door, but only barely. “I could have just teleported in, you know.”
“Do not teleport into our apartment,” Beatrice says, shrill and entirely unlike herself, and Lilith folds her arms over her chest and raises an eyebrow and considers the possibility the Beatrice’s head might actually explode if Lilith needles about the fact that she just had her hand up Ava’s shirt. It probably would, and would be worth it for the entertainment factor alone, but then Lilith would have a furious warrior nun coming after her.
“It’s not my fault you two can’t keep it in your pants in the common areas,” she says, throwing caution to the wind.
“I-- we--” Beatrice splutters.
“Lilith!” Ava yelps.
“Next time you feel the need to have sex in the living room, put a sock on the door or something,” Lilith says indignantly, sweeping past the both of them and the way Beatrice has steam coming out of her ears and Ava is babbling nonsensically. “I’m using the shower.”
She locks the door behind her and starts the hot water, fully intending to use it up. Maybe some cold showers would do the both of them good. It would certainly save the final shreds of her sanity.
day 19
The deeply familiar sound of Beatrice audibly swallowing her frustration-- she’d done it so often, before, when they were younger and things were simpler and Lilith’s life was still on track, when Mary would crash into trainings and wreak havoc or Camila’s cheer would distract her from lessons or Lilith would lose her temper with any one of the less worthy recruits-- is so deeply calming. Lilith can hear her behind her, can practically see her pinching her nose and reigning in her irritation.
“Lilith,” Beatrice says calmly. “Could you please, for the love of all that is good, not leave wet towels on the floor in the bathroom?”
Lilith, who is fully aware that she was the only person at the entire convent besides Beatrice who never once got a scolding for an improperly made bed or untidy quarters, who knows that Beatrice knows as much and is absolutely certain that Beatrice knows she left the towel there for the express purpose of annoying her, ignores her and flips another page in her book.
day 21
It’s late into the night, so late it’s almost morning, and Lilith can’t sleep.
It’s not new. Since Adriel-- since she changed-- she’s slept less and less. Her body needs it less and her mind refuses it, filled with uncomfortable thoughts and worse memories. It was easier, almost, before Jillian had found a way to mask the visuals of the change, when she could see the monster in the mirror; now, she just sees Lilith, familiar and disappointing, with nowhere to hide.
She stares at the ceiling of Beatrice’s room-- her room-- for as long as she can before giving up and stalking out to the kitchen, intent on raiding Beatrice’s tea stash, but pulls up to a halt abruptly. Ava is on the couch, one knee pulled up to her chest and chin resting on it, sitting in the dark and staring out at the window, a mug of tea on the table in front of her. The halo, dormant and dark, still stands out on the skin of her back, only half-hidden by her shirt and glinting minutely from the edges of citylight that reach into the apartment.
Lilith freezes, and Ava reacts slowly, blinking slower over to where Lilith is standing awkwardly halfway between her bedroom and the living room. It’s an improvement, objectively, to the way that she and Beatrice had been so on guard around her for so long, but the improvement itself is unsettling enough that Lilith’s skin crawls.
“Can’t sleep?” Ava says after a long moment.
“Something like that.”
Ava offers half a smile, shrugs one shoulder. “Same.”
Lilith stands uncomfortably for too long before sighing and halving the distance to the couch. “Are you alright?”
Not that she cares. She doesn’t, she’s only here because there’s a war coming and the order doesn’t trust her at the convent full time and if there’s anyone who can keep her in line, as much as she hates to admit it, it’s Beatrice and the warrior nun who’s forgiven her more times than she deserves. She doesn’t care about the fact that Ava looks troubled and is sitting alone in the dark at half three in the morning.
“Yeah, just-- insomnia, I guess,” Ava says unconvincingly.
“You’d think Beatrice would be better at wearing you out,” Lilith says, because fine, maybe she cares a little bit that Ava has looked exhausted since she came back, a weight dragging at her shoulders that has nothing to do with the halo fused to her spine and everything to do with a brewing war they don't know how to win that she so blatantly feels responsible for, even when she’s bursting with energy and besotted with Beatrice.
Ava chokes on the inhale, eyes bugging out, and she glares at Lilith when she pounds none-too-gently on her back.
“Fuck you,” Ava croaks out.
“I don’t think it’s me you want for that,” Lilith says, rolling her eyes and continuing on towards the kitchen. The kettle is still warm and she busies herself with making a cup of tea for herself while Ava is busy blushing about her lack of maidenly virtue in the living room. She brings the kettle back with her and pours more water into Ava’s tea, settles as far away as possible on the couch. It’s not that far-- the couch isn’t that big-- but the principle matters.
Ava curls her hands around her mug, plucks at the dangling label on the teabag. Lilith watches, sipping on her tea before it’s cooled because she can-- being halfway to an interdimensional gatekeeper demon has some perks; teleportation and wings are the obvious ones, being able to drink scalding tea is a less obvious one-- and waits. Patience was never one of her virtues, but she’s putting in the effort with it.
“What’s bothering you so much?” She’s putting in the effort theoretically, at least.
Ava sighs, unconcerned with Lilith as she so often is these days. It’s almost nice, almost like before, in that brief time between mistakes, after Lilith had come back the first time and before she’d lost herself in the changes and found her way to Adriel and even more bad decisions; when they’d been at Jillian’s facility and Lilith had apologized and Ava had smiled and they had felt like friends for the first time.
“Nothing’s wrong,” Ava says, and then frowns. “I mean. Minus the whole pending apocalypse, at least, I guess.”
“You’re a terrible liar,” Lilith says frankly.
“And you’re a bitch,” Ava says with precisely zero bite, and sighs again. “It’s just-- things are good, you know? We’re-- happy, even with everything. Bea is just… you know, Beatrice. She’s incredible, and I love her, and--”
“Yes, you’re both in love and living in disgusting loved-up bliss where I have to witness you about to have sex on every surface of this apartment.” Lilith rolls her eyes, and Ava flushes, shifts uncomfortably.
“That’s the thing, though,” Ava says, staring down at her tea and picking at the string on the teabag nervously. “We’re not-- we’ve never-- not yet--”
Lilith stares at her profile and the brilliant flush that’s spread down her neck-- her neck that has a hickey on it because apparently Beatrice is a biter, which honestly should not be surprising given how pent-up everything about Beatrice is-- and nearly drops her tea. Ava clears her throat, sets her tea back on the table, climbs to her feet, paces and drags her hands through her hair and scrubs her palms over her face.
“Are you telling me,” Lilith says slowly. “That you two were separated for ages after realizing you were in love with each other, and have been living together alone for two months before this, and haven’t once-- you haven’t--”
“I know!” Ava whisper-shouts. “I know! But I just--” She cuts off with a frustrated, strangled noise. “I don’t want to push, okay? She was a nun, for fuck’s sake.”
Lilith snorts into her tea. “So was I.”
“What does that have to do with--” Ava’s mouth snaps shut and she points dramatically at Lilith. “Sister Lilith,” she says, delight spreading across her face and clearly distracting her from her own emotional melodrama because Lilith overplayed her hand and gave her something else to focus on and that something is Lilith.
“No,” Lilith says sharply.
“Oh, yes,” Ava says over her, flinging herself back onto the couch. “Tell me everything.”
“I will not,” Lilith sniffs. She’s aiming for posh and disaffected and absolutely makes it work and doesn’t sound petulant in the slightest.
“How old were you?” Ava props her chin in her hands, eyes wide and ecstatic. “Was it before you took your vows? After? Who was it?”
“Ava,” Lilith says, in that voice that generally makes people shit their pants, the one she learned from her mother.
“Lilith,” Ava parrots back, because Ava has never been afraid of Lilith and it's as aggressively irritating as everything else about her. “Come on! I just told you-- it’s only fair. One personal thing for another. Even trade.”
“Oh my God,” Lilith mutters. “I hate you so much.”
“Sure, whatever, who cares.” Ava brushes her words aside physically, undeterred. “Either you tell me or I start asking a lot of questions.”
Lilith glares at her, considering teleporting away just to get out of the conversation, and scrambles for a cutting response that will shut Ava up entirely. She’s too slow, though, because Ava is back on her feet and pacing excitedly back and forth across the living room.
“I’m thinking it was before you joined the church,” Ava says, ticking off years on her hands and scrunching her face up in thought. “You’re Lilith, you were the only nun in the order half as uptight as Bea, and you always were trying to be perfect. No way you broke your vows.” She pauses, slots a glance towards Lilith. Lilith glares down into her tea and pointedly ignores her, which has the opposite of the intended effect because Ava gasps again, points at her, jumps up and down twice.
“It was after?” She slaps a hand over her mouth, eyes wide. Lilith is sure that the halo is about to light up out of pure emotional overload based on how excitable Ava suddenly is. “You badass, oh my God.”
“Yes, thank you, I love talking about all of my failures, including breaking my vows,” Lilith says peevishly. She’s going to murder Ava. She’s going to murder her and no one could blame her for it, halo-bearer or not.
“Pfft,” Ava says. “Half of the entire religion is horseshit and we have definitive proof, pretty sure that means stupid shit like vows of celibacy are useless.”
Lilith opens her mouth, ready to deliver a withering takedown, only to pause, her mouth snapping shut as she wonders why she is still embarrassed about having broken a vow that broke her first.
“Oh,” Ava says suddenly, faintly. She stands up straighter, hands falling to her hips, head tilting in that way it does when she’s putting something together. Lilith moves to put her tea down, unsure if she’s aiming to lunge at Ava to shut her up or teleport to Moscow out of desperation, but Ava’s eyes are wide and understanding and it pins Lilith in place, halfway off the couch. “Mary. It was Mary, wasn’t it?”
The handle of the mug in Lilith’s hand crunches down into porcelain powder. She barely catches the rest of the mug before it falls, sloshing a third of the tea that was left onto her shirt and the arm of the couch.
“Oh, shit,” Ava mumbles, hurrying into the kitchen and cutting the corner by phasing through the wall, presumably just to show off that she can master her powers while Lilith is over on the couch breaking mugs because she can’t control her own strength, and returns with a roll of paper towels. “Here, let me-- the couch--”
“It’s a leather couch,” Lilith says peevishly, glaring at the wad of paper towels encroaching on her personal space and the arm attached to them. She swipes them out of Ava’s hands and wipes violently at the arm of the couch and the tea spilled on it.
“Yeah, but it’s a rental and if Bea doesn’t get her security deposit back on this place she’s gonna shit a brick.” Ava stands awkwardly in front of Lilith, hands held out like she wants to help, and Lilith rolls her eyes and shoves the wad of used paper towels back to her. “Gee, thanks.”
“Take them and stop staring at me like I’m going to break,” Lilith snaps. Ava holds her hands up, pacifying, and rolls her eyes, takes the paper towels, discards them on the coffee table as she drops back onto the couch. “Go away.”
“I live here,” Ava says, waving Lilith’s glare away. “So, you and Mary?”
“Shut up.” Lilith is going to murder her. Holy war be damned. They can win without Ava, surely.
“Was this-- when was--”
Lilith glares harder at her, wishing her stupid otherworldly superpowers included being a gorgon who could kill Ava Silva, specifically, with a look. Unfortunately, the universe hates her and glaring at Ava does nothing but give Ava time to put her brain to use for once in her absurd life.
“After you came back,” Ava says slowly. “Before the Vatican. Right?”
“I despise you,” Lilith informs her, choosing to ignore the fact that she has teleportation powers and could have left this conversation at any point.
“No, you don’t,” Ava says dismissively. “You and Mary. Honestly, I should’ve known. The way you two were going at it when you were both chasing me down--”
“We weren’t going at it,” Lilith says, offended. She was a sister warrior, the rightful next halo-bearer, trained from childhood to wield power and own it; she didn’t go at it with anyone, much less--
“How long did you love her?” Ava asks, derailing Lilith’s entire existence and setting it on a spiral. “I know she and Shannon-- before--”
Ava cuts herself off, an unbearably sympathetic look on her stupid face and Lilith knows-- knows-- it’s because if she looks even half as stricken as she feels then Ava’s stupid gentle heart must be running into overdrive.
“It doesn’t matter,” Lilith says, voice thick and heavy. The words catch and ache in her throat, lodging in her chest and freezing her in place. “It doesn’t matter.”
Ava is quiet for long seconds, quieter than Lilith knew she was capable-- which is uncharitable, she knows, because Ava’s grown, just like they’ve all grown-- while Lilith drags herself back towards calm and away from the careening discomfort of the fact that Ava knows now, that she pulled Lilith’s thoughts from her head and read them as easily as Lilith had been reading Beatrice’s stupid pretentious novels.
“I’m sorry,” Ava says eventually. “That you lost her.”
“We all lost her,” Lilith says, venomous and furious, because venom is easier than grief, because fury is simpler than loss.
“It’s not the same,” Ava says, and Lilith nearly crumples in on herself. “I think about losing Bea and-- I can’t. I don’t want to imagine it. So I’m sorry.”
Lilith glares at her own knees, unable to meet Ava’s pity. “Can we please go back to talking about the fact that you two have been together for months and still haven’t had sex even though you so clearly want to?”
Ava squeaks, slapping a hand over her mouth and also punching at Lilith’s shoulder.
“Oh, I’m sorry, my sex life is fair game but yours isn’t?” It’s easier, so much easier, to put it away and lock it down and turn things back on Ava. It’s easier to focus on the minor inconveniences of the fact that Ava and Beatrice are idiots than the landslide of loss and grief and guilt-- she should have stayed, she should have teleported back, she should have grabbed Mary and taken her with them all-- that is Mary. “I have to live with you two, you know. And you have a new hickey every other day.”
Ava slaps a hand over the bruise blooming on her throat, eyes bugging out comically. “We-- I just--”
“Don’t want to push.” Lilith rolls her eyes. “Why not?”
“Why-- because I’m not a dick, Lilith, that’s why!”
“You’re in a relationship with the most buttoned-up repressed former nun in the history of the Catholic church and you think she’s going to make the first move?” Lilith raises an eyebrow and shoves her now-empty, half-broken tea mug into Ava’s hands and stands, plucks disdainfully at the damp spot on her shirt from the tea she’d spilled. “I always knew you were an idiot. Nice of you to prove me right.”
She leaves Ava spluttering in the living room and teleports back into her own room. Let Ava stew in her own emotions for a while. It’s what she deserves after stirring up Lilith’s so rudely.
day 22
“Ava--”
“I’m gonna kill her,” Ava grinds out, phasing out of Beatrice’s grip and stalking across the apartment towards the balcony where Lilith is lounging in the sun, book ignored in favor of half-drowsing in the afternoon warmth. “Hey!”
Lilith opens one eye as the balcony door slides open, too comfortable to bother sitting up.
“Lilith, I swear to God,” Ava says, seething, practically vibrating. The halo flares in her back, and Lilith’s body, filled with interdimensional magic that can’t help but react to the halo, tenses for a fight.
“Ava,” Beatrice says again, a hand between her shoulderblades, surely about to get scalded by the halo. “It’s not that--”
“It is, Bea!” Ava grabs the book out of Lilith’s hands and flings it back into the apartment; Beatrice barely ducks in time and the spine of the paperback hits the wall with an uninspiring crack. “Just because she’s-- you can’t just let her--”
“Can someone please tell me what this is about?” Lilith says, bored, even though she knows exactly what it’s about. She’s not about to tell them that, though.
“Oh, what’s it about,” Ava slings back at her. “You know exactly what I’m talking about, you shit.”
“I assure you I do not,” Lilith says, lying through her teeth.
“So, what, someone else just walked into our apartment and ate the dessert I’d specifically bought for Beatrice? Is that what happened?”
“It might even be possible that someone teleported,” Lilith drawls out, wiggling down more comfortably in the chair.
Ava shrieks, like a banshee, like a demon, like a child, and lunges at her. Lilith watches Beatrice grab her around the waist and haul her back inside and slide the glass door shut, watches until Beatrice has calmed her down enough that Ava has settled for glaring at her through the glass, and then hauls up the plate with the last few bites of tiramisu left on it and spoons one deliberately into her mouth.
The halo pulses out once with Ava’s yell and Lilith teleports to the rooftop, close enough that she can hear the crumble of plaster where the halo had surely cracked at least one of the living room walls, and settles down with her legs dangling over the side to finish the tiramisu.
She doesn’t hear Ava phasing up through the ceiling, doesn’t realize her mistake until it’s too late and Ava’s boot hits her back-- politely below the base of her wings, but only barely-- and sends her careening off the side of the building.