Houston
2071
Once it was all over, once she and her gangmates and her sister were far enough away from the flames, once there was no fear of being caught at the scene of the crime, Gabriella did something she usually never did.
She stopped. And she looked back.
To Gabriella, there was never much reason to do that. What’s done is done, she’d always told herself. Learn from your mistakes, carry that knowledge with you, but otherwise don’t touch the past. There is no value in looking back.
Or perhaps there was. Perhaps it was simply a matter of perspective. Gabriella wasn’t used to good things happening to her. Every success had a catch. She’d survived the night she fled Houston, but had nowhere to go and a target on her back. She’d grown accepted as an Anarch, but only after a number of mistakes and missteps that had seen her rub a number of other members of the movement the wrong way and alienate a number of potential friends and allies – sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. She’d helped see to it that the Camarilla were driven out of New Orleans, but only after weeks of a rising death toll and immense emotional trauma.
Tonight there could be no catch. Perhaps the authorities would find her. She would hardly care. Perhaps Houston would find her before the Anarchs could drive them out of the city. It was a price she’d pay. It had hit her as she’d watched her sire turn to ash that this was not for her. There was no great wave of relief. There was no sense of satisfaction. There certainly was no joy or reason for celebration. Perhaps there would be for others, and that was their right, but not for her.
She had done this for everyone else. For Beatrice, and for all the other nameless childer that Klein deemed failures, unfit to walk the night – and she was more certain than ever that there had been more whose names and faces she would never know. For the countless mortals who had died in his employ, following the orders of a madman straight to their deaths, whether they knew it or not. All the mortals who met untimely ends due to his various plans – those who became tangled up in a web of supernatural cruelty and those who didn’t know better. For Skylar. For Dr. Bloom. Even for the Andersons, corrupted as they may have been from the start. Their surviving friends and loved ones would never know that justice had been done on their behalf. Gabriella would have to carry that with her. But she could also carry the knowledge that the root cause of many of their demises was no more.
She was transfixed by the flames for a brief moment, even in spite of the anxiety that arose within her at the sight of it all. It had taken her a long time to realize how much her past haunted her. How much she allowed it to haunt her, really. So much time and energy devoted on Houston, what lurked there, what sought to come and kill her. There was some sense to it, she’d maintain. She was Klein’s blood. He was infused in her. Still was, in a sense. There was nothing she could do about that but accept it and cope with it.
Or was there? He’d sought perfection. So did she, but in a wildly different way. She sought perfection because she feared the outcome if she fell short. But why? Tonight had not gone perfectly by any means. Some of that was on her. Much of it, really. And yet it ended as she would have wanted it to. Everything he’d done, up in flames in the most literal sense. All because he’d refused to face reality.
And so did she sometimes. Her constant war with her mind was exhausting, and sometimes she was just too beaten down to do anything but let it win. That was how she grew to fear the worst of the worst. How she could be partly convinced that people who had nearly died for her were simultaneously looking to ash her. It didn’t make sense. It didn’t have to. She seized on it.
Or she had. Had it made her safer? In some ways, sure. Her determination to hide from humanity and to cling to a web of aliases and false identities had limited the fallout when the Camarilla came for her. But it had deprived her of useful alliances. Of being able to nudge the world more toward what she wanted it to be. When she finally embraced some semblance of herself, it was on Southside, where she had quickly gained more power than she’d ever held.
Because she was smart. She was clever. She could even be cunning. All the things she’d never allowed herself to admit to herself before. All of it usually drowned out by the negativity. The self-chastisement. The failure.
And yet tonight she’d looked into Klein’s eyes as he’d called her a failure and felt nothing. No pang of guilt. No sadness. Just pity. There was more to it than the fact that her definition of failure was different from his. She had stared down a Tzimisce in Horrid Form and never lost her nerve. She had fought it to a draw long enough for Beatrice to strike from behind, and she’d done that without relying on anything more than the Disciplines she’d learned and the training she’d put herself through. Fifty years ago, it would have killed her. It may have even killed her twenty years ago. Not now.
Had she learned all those skills and Disciplines to cover for perceived mistakes and weaknesses? In some cases, yes. But she had been proactive in honing her strength. She hadn’t sat and waited for Klein to come after her. She had gone to him without a second thought. She had taken a risk. She had been bold. She had seized the initiative and saw it pay off for her.
Beyond that? She had initially sought to embed herself in the Caimans for personal safety, but that had disappeared as an ambition long ago. She was too invested and she cared too much about the gang members to simply treat them as a personal militia. And hell…she had a boyfriend. A boyfriend who was intimately aware of her true nature and identity. And she did it for no other reason than she liked him. No ulterior motive. No attempt at control. Just…happiness. Comfort.
As she looked at the flames one more time, she saw something more. The part of herself that she resented. That she sought to silence. That she had been running from all these years. It was burning and dying in front of her eyes. It would still be there, and it would still nag at her, but she had defeated her strongest, oldest enemy in reality. Why would this be any different?
It wasn’t optimism that she felt. That was probably never going to happen. But she had expected to die tonight. Now she would walk another night, and Klein would not. Perhaps reality did not have to be the way she had always seen it. Perhaps there was room for growth. For change. For something other than a dark tunnel with no light at the end of it.
There would always be risks. She would always feel someone’s eyes on her plotting her downfall. But she was clearly capable of fending off anyone who tried. And moreover, there was nothing stopping Gabriella from leaving the world a better place than she had found it. Tonight, she had done something toward making that a reality.
Perhaps tomorrow night she would be able to do the same. At the very least, it was a reason to wake in the evening. And she hadn’t always had one of those.
Gabriella turned away from the flames, from Klein, from Houston. Her past had made her who she was. That would never change. Perhaps, though, it had also made her stronger, smarter, and more capable. Perhaps, in the end, that represented a pyrrhic victory.
But Gabriella was not used to victories. She would take this one. And for what felt like the first time ever, she felt enough clarity to allow herself to believe that perhaps it would not be her last.