Chapter Text
General Sarah Alder looks out over the grounds of Fort Salem, watching the snowfall settle onto the grass and the pathways. It would likely stay undisturbed for a week or so, she muses, what with the battles over and most of the cadets sent home for the first real Yule break the army had been able to grant in years. Those who remain are primarily the operational staff, such as herself, the sweet fosterlings with whom she’d visited just that morning and, is that?
No, Sekhmet are off duty, granted leave, Sarah knows this well enough, as she’d approved their absence herself.
So why is a familiar blur of red barrelling across the path towards her?
‘Craven?’
‘Ah! Shit. Shh! Sorry general, don’t shh, you know. But shhh.’ The young witch rambles, looking anxiously over her shoulder as she skids to a stop before grimacing up at Alder. ‘And sorry for swearing.’
‘Cadet, what on earth are you so flustered about?’ replies Alder, her sharp eyes examining the serene view she had only just been admiring. Her eyebrows furrow. ‘Is there a threat to the base?’
‘Oh!’ Tally laughs darkly. ‘No. Well… no. I don’t think she— no general, there’s no threat to the base.’
Alder breathes out slowly, turning to look at the cadet who is clearly on edge about something. ‘At ease, Craven,’ she begins. ‘Shall we try again? What has got such a strong performing cadet so flustered?’
‘Strong performing?’
‘Craven.’ Sarah says fondly. ‘Focus. What were you running away from?’
‘It’s more of a who—‘
‘Use your words Craven.’
‘Ugh goddess, this is so embarrassing.’ A laugh escapes the cadet again, but this time it is a little less frantic. The general finds herself fighting back a small smile. ‘My mother’s here. On base.’
That only confuses Alder. ‘And you think your mother is a threat?’
Tally shakes her head, the length of her hair catching in her scarf. ‘Hey,’ she denies, ‘I just said she wasn’t.’
‘You didn’t say it very convincingly.’
Craven opens her mouth as though to object, but shuts it once again, biting her lip instead and looking away from the general and down the path behind her. Then her eyes grow wide. ‘I’m really really sorry for what I’m about to do.’ She looks to the sky quickly, ‘Goddess have mercy,’ and then she’s grabbing Alder’s forearm and dragging her into the doorway of the administrative building.
It is a narrow doorway, there isn’t much room, but out of sight from the grounds Tally releases her grip on Alder’s wrist and takes a half-step back.
When the general looks down at her, it's clear that there really isn’t much space between them at all. ‘And why are we hiding from you mother, Craven, if she is not a threat?’
‘I said she wasn’t a threat to base, general. And she isn’t. But she might be a threat to you.’
Alder tilts her head in curious disbelief. The snow on the gravel at the end of the path crunches under a newcomer’s footfall.
‘I promise, I will explain everything,’ says Craven, her voice now a whisper as she urges the general to just take her word for it. ‘But right now we need to stay undetected.’
Fighting back a small smile, the general traces a sigil into the door handle and quirks an eyebrow at the cadet, nodding that she should step inside. ‘I imagine we should both be capable of that.’
Tally didn’t know what she expected to happen when she realised it was The General Alder that she’d nearly bowled over, but it really wasn’t to be led all the way through the dark hallways of the out-of-hours administrator's building to the general’s own office.
Everything feels different inside. After all, this has always been a place in which Tally has demanded honesty.
‘That sigil you used, to open the door,’ Tally swallows. ‘That’s kind of why I had to hide.’
Alder hmm’s as she settles another log onto the unlit fire place, on one knee in front of the mantelpiece. Her back isn’t entirely turned but she doesn’t look up, so Tally takes in a deep breath and continues.
‘She tried to stop me from saying the words. It wasn’t pretty.’
The general stills at her task, finally sending the cadet a worried glance from across the room. 'Craven, that was years ago.’
‘I know that,’ Tally states with a small nod that does nothing to dispel her commanding officer’s worry. ‘I haven’t seen her since I left to come here.’
The here she’s spoken could easily have been the army, or maybe Fort Salem, but with how the word lands in the dark of the cold room, in the stiff set of the general’s shoulders, she might have well as said the other things anyway:
here: at your side, Sarah, in your office
or
we are connected.
When Alder returns her gaze to the fireplace, the cadet issues a seed that brings flame to the wood stack. The general doesn’t flinch at the heat, though she does lower herself down to a seated position, only then leaning back to watch the young witch carefully. With her back now to the fire, Tally can’t help thinking she looks sublime.
‘Usually I’m the one demanding answers from you right?’ Tally continues when it becomes clear Alder is willing to wait for her to explain. She laughs darkly like she had done earlier, her voice breaking slightly. ‘But I guess it’s my turn now.’
‘Craven,’ Alder warned gently.
‘I told her I couldn’t go home for Yule,’ Tally admits anyway, worrying at the ring on her forefinger. ‘Because I was needed on base for something.’
‘You were needed on base? For Yule?’ Alder questions. ‘What exactly did you tell her?’
‘There was a mission to prepare for? I don’t know,’ she says with an exhale of a breath she didn’t know she’s been holding, opening her hands in a shrug as she looks back at the general. She still hasn’t moved, and the fire casts her in a soft warm light that makes Tally want to move closer, so she does, until the heat of it rolls onto her skin. ‘I wasn’t really thinking.’
Now she is hovering by the chairs, a hand on the back of the one closest to Alder, who hasn’t looked away yet.
‘Clearly you weren’t thinking, Craven,’ Alder speaks, but the lilt of her voice is teasing and the light in her eyes is as warm as the fire. ‘Because the only mission at Fort Salem during Yule in peacetime is the organising of the officer’s ball.’
‘I wasn’t lying when I said this would be a mission.’ Sarah issues as she leads Tally through the Necro building, grunting at the heavy front door.
Tally looks around at the open room. Where previously there had been bare pipes and open floor space, there are now stacks upon stacks of boxes.
‘Sarah, thank goddess you’re here,’ says Izadora, emerging from the cardboard jungle with a groan, her lab coat lost beneath the knot of tinsel. ‘And you Tally, it’s good to see you, Happy Yule,’ she adds, all the while scrambling to break free.
‘The commercial success of civilian Yule has infiltrated the base, Craven,’ the general speaks out of the side of her mouth to Tally. ‘It’s got L’Amara by the throat.’
Tally snorts as the general unwinds the Necro Witch from the mess, Izadora jumping from it as though it stung.
‘Mushrooms I can handle, but these things are the devil’s work.’ Izadora declares, staring daggers at the tinsel. Alder and Tally share a smile, before the cadet holds her hand out to take it.
‘I’ve recruited Craven on the mission to sort through the storage with us, Izadora.’ Alder explains as Tally coils the tinsel up. ’And I already promised this is the last time I allow Anacostia access to the purchasing accounts.’
‘Where is Anacostia? Erm, General Quartermaine?’ Tally asks, finding her voice at the strange scenario before her.
Alder smiles at the slight indiscretion. ‘Anacostia is in the capital,’ she reports, slicing through the packing tape of the nearest unmarked box with the long nail of her thumb. She smirks as she sifts through the contents. ‘Visiting Sterling. They’re both invited to the mess dinner.’
‘If we ever get out of here,’ Izadora mutters. She readjusts her lab coat, nods to Sarah and Tally, and slinks away in what Tally can deduce is the direction of her office.
Sarah ignores the Necro’s departure. The tape discarded, she pulls a figure from the box; it is a wooden thing, painted in the bright uniform of some army not their own, but before she know it the sight brings Tally right back to the dollhouse exercise from her first year of war college, where she alone could see the trail of song that whisped through the room, animating soft training dummies until they were enemies that clung to her coven’s back.
When the memory releases Tally from its grip, Alder is studying her face carefully.
‘These are nutcrackers, Tally, did you have them on your compound back home?’
The cadet shakes her head.
‘These days, most would remember them from the opera, Tschaichovski,’ Alder continues, hoping to pull Tally further from the dark places her mind had gone to, do you like civilian music?. ‘But they predate it by a hundred years or so.’
Tally holds out her hand to take the figure. It is cold to the touch, but more importantly and to her relief it is totally devoid of any work that might have slipped her Knowing. And if her hand brushes Alder’s as she holds the nutcracker, well that might also be a relief, or something.
The general bristles at something different beside her. ‘Sometimes I worry we put you all through too much, too soon. That I put you through too much.’
‘No,’ Tally shakes her head, lifting the nutcracker’s arm into a little salute as she does so before dropping it with a tentative smile. ‘You did what you needed to, what the army needed you to. I see that now,’ she says firmly.
Alder is still studying the cadet as she speaks, but at Tally’s response she drops her gaze to her feet.
‘Well, thank you for saying that Craven. Now what the army needs is something to take our minds off the past few years. Something to mark the peacetime.’
‘To mark it?’ Tally gulps, her mind ran to the witch’s mark behind her ears, and Alder’s gaze does too, apparently. But where Tally is blushing, heat running urgently from her neck up to her face, Alder merely smirks at her.
‘Get your mind out of the gutter, cadet. I only meant to mark the occasion. To celebrate it.’
Tally’s voice comes out low and stronger than she thought it would. ‘I can help with that.’
‘I’m sure.’
Izadora coughs behind them. She hasn’t been gone long, presumably only to wash off the synthetic feeling of the tinsel, and now she is looking at the nutcracker in Tally’s hands cautiously. ‘The groundskeepers have asked which boxes need taking first.’
‘Craven and I can sort through them together, you should all take the day off to be with your families. And that means you as well, Iza,’ the general states, lifting her chin and her chest to the height that an order commanded. Then she catches herself and turns to Tally with a shy, uncertain smile. ‘That is, if you don’t mind, corporal?’
‘Not at all,’ Tally smiles at them both, setting the nutcracker on the box so that it sits between them all. She nods at Alder and the smile cracks beautifully across the general’s face. ‘I accept the mission.’
‘Great,’ says Izadora bluntly, her eyes elsewhere. ‘Well give me a shout, I’ll just be…’ and she jerks her head to the door that holds the mycelium as she takes cautious steps back through the cardboard box maze. ‘I’ll leave you both to it. I’m only a Farspeech away.’
‘Of course, Iza. Thank you.’
‘Happy Yule, Lieutenant L’Amara. ’
‘And you, Tally.’
‘This is weird,’ Tally confesses as soon as she knows they are alone.
‘Izadora? She’s not weird, she’s just very specialist.’
‘No, not that,’ Tally says, putting down the nutcracker, ‘but she did call me Tally’
‘That’s what’s weird about this?
‘Are you going to call me by my first name, general?’
Alder lets out a small breath, looking to Tally, then looking away again, and then looking back to her with an unreadable look in her eyes, the muscles in her jaw clenching.
Tally laughs it off lightly, ‘I thought I’d be stowing myself away amongst the obstacle course for Yule, not…'
'Not sorting through storage in the Necro building trying to find Yule decorations?’
‘Well you have to admit, it’s awfully…’
‘It’s awfully what Craven? Mundane?’
‘Well that, but I meant more beneath you, surely? A general, a commanding officer?’ Tally toes the corner of a box with her boot. A cloud of dust rises off of it.
The general purses her lips. ‘You’ve risen through the ranks at an impressive rate, corporal, but apparently no one has properly briefed you for the humdrum tasks of the holidays at peacetime. I’ll count it as my own failure’, Sarah says, her eyes gleaming. She raises her arms to set a crown of twinkling Christmas lights upon Tally’s head. ‘Will you forgive me?'
‘Yeah, I suppose so.’ Tally looks up at Sarah, grins back, watches Alder’s eyes drop down to her lips before returning to her eyes with a curious glint. Adds softly, 'but only cos it’s Yule.’