Drusilla sat at her favorite café in Brussels, watching people walk by as she tried not to kill herself out of boredom from waiting for so long.
"This is what I get for coming to see her on a weekday," she muttered to herself as she put her chin in her gloved hands.
"I am glad you know to blame yourself," a stern voice said to her in German, and Drusilla's grey eyes lit up behind her shades as she looked up at her beloved younger sister—although she did not behave as if she were a younger sister, nor a beloved one either. "And stop sitting like that," Boudicca Nerva said, her face contorted into an austere expression. "It is unbecoming of a woman of your station, Drusilla."
Drusilla stood up and removed her shades, not allowing her sister's sternness to ruin the mood. "Boudi!" she exclaimed as she wrapped her sister up in a warm hug. Well, it was a warm hug from Drusilla's side.
Boudicca eventually gave her a firm pat on the back before forcing her way out of the embrace. "Yes, yes, hello."
The two of them looked like a lesbian couple or a business meeting being held between an agent and a wannabe movie star. Drusilla did not know which image amused her more. "You could have dressed up to come and see your older sister," she said, an exaggerated pout laid out on her pretty face. Boudicca raised a thick eyebrow as she looked Drusilla up and down. "And look as ridiculous as you do? Some of us wish to be taken seriously."
Drusilla stood back up to show off her sparkling red dress with her black heels and feathered hat, spinning around to give her sister a better look. "This is how you dress when you wish to find a husband, Boudi. I am sure that even your cat has grown bored at seeing your suit pants and blazers every day."
Boudicca's eternal frown deepened into a scowl. "I do not wear a blazer every day! I throw on a blouse on the odd occasion."
Drusilla laughed as she sat back down. "A small improvement. And I do emphasize the word 'small', dear sister."
Her sister rolled her dark and beady eyes. They shared the golden-copper complexion and dark hair, but Boudicca lacked the freckles and the Hollywood good looks that her sister had inherited from her Nepalese mother. That was not to say that Boudicca Nerva was not a beautiful woman in her own right, for she very much was. She had thick and curvy eyebrows that sat below a broad forehead, and a snub nose between high and regal cheekbones, all of which sat upon an angular face with a strong jawline that met to form a cleft chin. Boudicca was taller than even Drusilla was—a fact that annoyed her greatly—but built straighter and narrower than her curvy sister. That fact gave her more joy than she would readily admit.
"Beloved sister," Boudicca said in a manner that did not make Drusilla feel loved at all. "You arrive in my city with little notice, and drag me out here to this small…" Boudicca's eyes looked around them. "…but quaint café," she admitted.
"I know, right!" Drusilla beamed. "I stumbled upon it twenty years ago on a trip here and I had hoped that—"
"And I came because blood demands this of me," Boudicca continued, this time in French. "But blood only runs so thick and so far. Tell me why you have called me."
Drusilla sat back and smiled at the waitress as she dropped off their ordered items. "I went ahead and got you your favorite, Boudi."
Her sister looked at the chocolate croissant and rolled her eyes. "I am almost 150 years old, Drusilla. I am not some child to be placated with some schokoladencroissant."
Drusilla looked at the object in front of her sister. "Schokoladen-Croissant? My beloved sister, that there before you is pain au chocolat," Drusilla said, in a mix of English and French.
That got her the reaction she was looking for. "Drusilla—Drusilla, listen to me. I will kill you dead if you ever say any of those words back to me again."
Drusilla said nothing as she watched her sister reluctantly tear into the treat she had gotten for her.
"I've missed you," Drusilla said.
"This is good… great, even."
"Good. Because in an hour, they will bring you two more."
Boudicca glanced at her before looking away. "I have… missed you too, Silla."
She laughed and sat back into her chair as her sister finished her treat. "I will need a coffee to wash this down."
"It will be here in the next three minutes."
Boudicca huffed. "Okay, okay, you have my attention. What do you want, Drusilla?"
She laughed. "Oh, so formal, what happened to Silla? The more you age, the more you're turning into Jules."
It was the first time since her arrival that Boudicca laughed. "Him? I'd sooner kill myself—preferably overeating this croissant. If you wanted to offend me less, you should have compared me with Octavian. Neither if you did not want to offend me at all."
"He wanted me to reach out to you," she said, putting her cup down to pull out a cigarette, ignoring Boudicca's frown. "Julian?"
Drusilla made it a point to exhale as close to Boudicca as possible without directly blowing a cloud into her face. She can think whatever she wants, Drusilla thought, but I am still a lady at the end of the day.
"No, Octavian."
Boudicca raised an eyebrow. "Oh? I thought that you were Julian's helper, not his."
Drusilla blew a cloud into her face and Boudicca sneered at her. Okay fine, I am a lady to an extent…
"Churches are springing up out of nowhere, signs and graffiti bearing evil vigils and symbols, and murders across the board are up," she said. "Octavian and his council have worked damn hard to keep the peace, Boudicca. But it seems that the peace is under threat once more."
Boudicca shrugged. "His peace was a farce to begin with. Oh, I'll grant our beloved duke that his system was a hell of a lot better than what had been there before. But all it had done is make the status-quo more bearable."
Drusilla could see what was coming and dreaded it immensely; I should have ordered a shot of bourbon instead.
"Bearable or no, it is under threat," she said. "And whether you agree with his measures is irrelevant if the alternative is far worse."
Boudicca barked, and it took Drusilla a moment to remember that was how she laughed. "The alternative? Dear sister, do you forget that the alternative to Octavian is me?"
She raised a hand to draw the waiter's attention. "I had, and no doubt you will re-educate me. But do be sweet enough to allow me a shot before you drone on."
"Octavian is too set in the old way of things," Boudicca said, blatantly ignoring her request. "The humans were prepared to make drastic changes after the war, and yet we did not meet them there. It used to be for every inch of progress they made, we had made a foot. And with him, I would barely call it a centimetre."
"Because you grew up like the rest of us," Drusilla snapped. I fucking hate politics. "So stop acting as if you were disenfranchised your whole life. More colleges have been opened, there are fewer sorcerer murders, and cities no longer serve as battlegrounds for cults and the wicked. Progressive change is relative, Boudicca. What seems small for the castle might mean everything for the tannery."
Boudicca laughed with as much bitterness as seemed to be in her heart. "Drusilla, his system has become stagnant, it is fraying at the seams. Are we supposed to hold onto a system that does not work just because it is what we know?"
She almost laughed herself. "You love this, don't you, Boudicca? Where is your loyalty to family? To blood?"
She snorted and rolled her eyes. "Don't give me that shit, Drusilla. I stood with you and our family during both wars, and despite my disagreements, I served on our brother's council for decades. Time and time and time again I have set aside my nationality, my ideals, my aspirations, for this family."
It was Drusilla's turn to roll her eyes; this conversation is going terribly…."Nationality? Oh be still my bleeding heart. Look at this proud German girl from a proud noble German family—is that the way of it? I will give you the first war, for I could see just how caught up you had gotten with the idea of a powerful German state, but the second one? If there were any sacrifices made siding with us that time around, dear sister, then perhaps it is less your loyalties that need questioning, and more the state of your character."
Boudicca pulled a cigarette from out of Drusilla's packet. "Do not misconstrue our war with that of the humans, Drusilla."
"Oh?" Drusilla said with her head cocked to the side. "We fought against supremacists who believed in might making right and their blood giving them the right to rule all. I see little difference between theirs and ours."
"As opposed to now?" Boudicca snorted again, blowing a cloud back into Drusilla's face. "We allow bounty-hunters to kill off the weak and then lay an open hand to attract as many people as possible to our colleges in order to cull some more. And you sit here to tell me that the supremacists lost?"
"And your government is against the culling then?" Drusilla asked, snatching back her cigarette. "The culling is necessary, despite how distasteful it all seems, Boudicca. Better to allow them to go insane then, is it? This way, their deaths can count for something."
Boudicca laughed loud enough to draw eyes toward them. "Sister, you have always been the funniest of our siblings. Unfortunately for you, however, we all have a poor sense of humour."
That annoyed Drusilla enough to put out her cigarette to stop Boudicca from taking it from her. "No jest I tell will ever amount to the joke you and your performative actors are, beloved sister. Now hear me," she said, leaning forward with a flash in her eye. "Those zealous fools are crawling from out the woodwork; we know this to be true. We know it is true that you and your sensitive council have spies among the cults too. Do you deny this?"
Boudicca's eyebrow rose. "And what of your spies, sister? Why are you so in need of ours when I know that you have your own?"
"Because," Drusilla said with a great sigh, "ours have gone and gotten themselves killed. Or worse, become converts and true believers."
"That is unfortunate for you," Boudicca told her. "Say I were to have spies among them, what of it? Why would I tell any of you?"
"Because we are asking," Drusilla said at once. And the sincerity in her voice made Boudicca hesitate for just a moment before she nodded her head. "Yes, there is movement once more, as was expected to happen. Fuck, I'd say that it took a lot longer than I thought that it would. Octavian truly was a fool for allowing them to continue existing the way that he did."
"So should he have outlawed religion?" Drusilla almost laughed. "When a man viewed as progressive is deemed not to be progressive enough in your eyes, my sister, then it is perhaps that you are a radical."
Boudicca looked far off in the distance as Drusilla downed her shot, before her eyes returned to Drusilla's. "The zealots are far too dangerous, Drusilla. Do you know what makes them far more terrifying than the zealots of the human world?"
Drusilla almost rolled her eyes again until she saw how serious Boudicca was being. "Humour me."
"They are right," her voice was cold. "There are Gods in the Source; they do reward the faithful, and they do demand more and more worship. We should have killed them all. The extremists, the supremacists, and the zealots all."
The two of them sat in silence as Drusilla contemplated the words of her younger sister. "I… I agree," Drusilla said. "I know what a love for the Source can do—me better than any of you. I know it for a fact. But our brother is an idealist at heart. He has faith that the generations that have grown up in this new world will be different. The humans, for the most part, have become less reliant on blind faith the further time has gone on. It is his great hope that the same will be said of our own youth."
Boudicca sighed before standing up. "I fear that you are wrong in this, beloved sister. I am of a mind that the time for peace is at an end, and there is no place that religion thrives more in than a place of chaos."
Drusilla stood up as well. "What about your pain au chocolat?"
Boudicca cursed and sighed. "I fear that I will go without." She glared at Drusilla then. "And it is called Schokoladen-Croissant."
She laughed and wrapped her arms around Boudicca, who returned the hug a lot sooner, this time around. "We will disclose to you whatever we know at a time we deem appropriate," she said, and Drusilla broke the embrace this time. "Thank you, Boudi."
"Give my greetings to your brood," Boudicca said as she turned to leave.
"And what about my husband? Oh, and Julian?"
"Give the former little; the latter, even less!"
Drusilla laughed.