I told her to meet me in the park the next day. I ached to drag it out, to delay the inevitable as much as possible. But that wouldn't be fair to Avaritia, and if I did successfully capture Inessa, it was probably better to do it on a Friday, so she wouldn't miss school if she converted or broke out.
She's such a terrible villain. But not the kind of terrible she's trying to be.
I hadn't bothered with an umbrella. It had felt like it would be too awkward if Inessa showed up for our big climatic battle and I was carrying around an umbrella I didn't need. Instead, she found me huddled into a damp ball on a bench, hugging myself for warmth.
If only you had a couple of big, leathery appendages you could—wait, then your wings would get cold.
Hm. Maybe you should've brought a raincoa—no, her wings would get in the way when she transformed. Huh.
"You're stalling. We didn't come here to talk, Castitas," I'd wanted the words to cut, but the comment ended up sounding affectionately chiding instead. I admired her, I loved her like family, I resented her with all my heart. And today we would grab that web of feelings between us and burn it to dust.
"Do we have to?" she asked, "Is there no other way?"
I stifled a laugh. If I'd ever been the kind of person who knew what I wanted, we wouldn't have gotten here in the first place. But Inessa wouldn't get the joke, and it wasn't like I was any better at understanding me.
"There's no other way," I said instead, rising to my feet and walking away from her.
If we imagine this as a queer fix-fic of an imaginary anime which handled Charleton rather more clumsily, I assume this scene would have played out with the same dialogue in the anime, just in a radically different tone.
Her words were punctuated with another trio of fiery arrows. These spun off in circular arcs before reorienting and, impossibly, homing at me from several directions at once.
Showoff.
"Haven't you been listening to Lupin, we're the good guys!" My response was mocking in a way she didn't deserve. Anything to blow it off, anything to keep this confrontation as purely physical as it could be.
Thunder sounded in the distance.
She shook her head. "You don't really believe that, do you?"
"...well, Avaritia means well. Ey're a good guy."
Her wings were supposed to be cute accessories, a silly part of a costume that would have been absurd if the Saints weren't so amazing. Now, they caught fire and grew with every word she said, every ounce of passion incarnating as another burning feather.
Showoff.
Castitas envied me? No, I shook my head. Her soul did not sing to me with any depth. At least it hadn't since I'd learned to listen to them. At most, she aspired to be like the person she'd thought C was. It was a strange revelation nonetheless.
It's like looking in a mirror. A show-offy, cisgender mirror. Which is also on fire.
"STOP TRYING TO CONVINCE ME AND JUST DIE ALREADY!"
Canon!Charleton sounds like a dick.
But Superbia had Avaritia trapped. And the only ways to end that were to capture Inessa here and now or to make sure he couldn't fall back on using me instead of em.
He probably doesn't have half of the sympathetic inner world that No One here has.
"Honestly," she said, "Did you think I would actually kill you?"
That had been the plan, yes.
She's almost as bad at reading Inessa as she is at introspection.
