Post by ORELLA NATALIA DELACROIX on Feb 3, 2020 10:05:17 GMT 1
If the world had been simply black and white, life would’ve been so much easier for the fury, but she’d had to learn how to trust her gut and not just that nagging feeling that she had to do something. “To judge someone’s ability to be redeemed in the heat of the moment,” she replied chuckling slightly. “I’m sure you’re more than able to judge that for yourself through your job, figure out who can actually be helped and who is beyond help, but you usually have the luxury of having time on your side.” If she’d felt drawn towards a cause, Dutch didn’t have all the time in the world to sort it out. It was probably why she had taken to stalking from the roofs so she could jump down and scare people. Fastest way to get to the truth in her experience. At least about whether someone could be redeemed. Sure, there was more to it than that, and killing had never been her end goal when she wasn’t paid and had had the time to stalk and learn for herself for a while.
“I can’t help what I am, or what I literally was born to do, only how I apply my craft. Before I got mixed up with my sister’s friends, it was mostly just breaking fingers of grabby men or scaring degenerate gamblers straight. Thankfully neither of which I really had to use my supernatural abilities for.” But then she’d had Evan to protect. In many ways, he was like the son she’d never had, and she’d felt compelled to protect him for that reason. While she didn’t always get along with her little sister, she remembered her mother telling her that if she ever had kids of her own, it was her duty to protect them no matter the cost. Family might not always get along, but it mattered more than anything else. Right now, Lea couldn’t really be blamed for her actions too much because of the hellhound part of her. But when she’d had her niece sprung on her, she knew what she had to do. She’d also known it meant her sister had gotten the same speech about family, because protecting Cora had meant keeping her away from her biological parents for her own safety.
“Life is much simpler when the just thing to do and the right thing are one and the same. My surrogate son is a case of the opposite. In order to save his life, I had to kill him. Well, turn him, but vampirism still meant his human self was dead and the contract on his life nullified.” Sure, she’d still gotten paid because he was technically dead, it had just come with conditions that he couldn’t return to New York until the people who’d wanted him dead were dead themselves. “The just thing to do would’ve been to get the people that wanted an innocent dead to change their minds or punish them somehow, but someone else would’ve actually killed him in the meantime, so the right thing turned out to be asking him whether he wanted to have a different kind of life in peace or go into hiding and always be looking out for other supernatural assassins. He chose to live and so I went with him to teach him how to safely live among humans. Thirty years later and he’s never killed anyone, even by accident.” Dutch couldn’t help but be proud of Evan. It had been an adjustment, but he’d taken it in stride and excelled. Even found himself a new wife and last she’d heard they were fostering orphaned supernaturals until they could find a good home.
In all her years, Dutch hadn’t really felt a desire to have kids. For most of her life, she hadn’t really loved anyone or anything other than doing what she was born for and picking up useful skills for making a living on the side. Any warmth in her being was derived from watching other people interact simply because she didn’t know any better. She’d been taught to put on a mask and to use herself and everything around her as a weapon if need be, past learning how to seduce someone when she was old enough, romance hadn’t really factored into her life. Then Lea was born and she’d gone back to her mother out of a sense of obligation. You might not always get along with family, but you protected them when they were vulnerable. Part of her had distracted her sister from training out of spite for how hypocritical it was of their mom to admonish her for training with a demon and then have a kid with a hellhound, and part of it was jealousy. Because she was partly a puppy, Lea got to play with things in that form in addition to playing with knives. She had also been jealous because she knew, even back then, that if Lea ever mated with a human, the sex of the child wouldn’t matter. She’d be connected to it somehow regardless while Dutch would only have something in common with any female children of her own. Any male child she might have would die of old age in the blink of an eye of her lifespan and would be all human, aside from maybe a strong desire to do right by people.
Cora really had come into her life at the perfect time. Any time before Wes and Dutch probably would’ve forced her to train from sunup to sundown every day to make up for lost time because that was all she’d known. The golem had helped her realize she was capable of love. Evan had taught her how to look out for someone else that needed her and how to listen when they were saying what they needed. So while she probably would’ve still taken Cora in, or at the very least brought her to Evan thinking that was better for her, without having Julius around, she knew that she most likely wouldn’t have been able to truly care about the girl the way she did now without also having Julius in her life. He had helped her relax and realize that she could let her guard down completely from time to time. It was ok, she wasn’t going to die if she just let someone in and let herself care for them and love them. Sure, at first she’d really only cared for Cora because she felt like she had to, but that was also because she hadn’t known anything about her. Once she’d gotten to know the girl, she had genuinely started to care about her.
Talking things over with her vampire friend had helped when she’d been at loss about Cora. He’d reminded her to just listen more than once. “Thanks,” she said, smiling at the compliment. It really did mean a lot coming from someone like Zev. “Kids never factored into things before, mostly because I haven’t been standing still long enough for it to even be a possibility, but after helping Evan adjust from being a weak medium to being turned, I swore to myself that if it ever did become relevant, I’d give them a different upbringing than I got. Seems only fair to let Cora continue to have that too, even if she has to learn soon.” Because even if Cora chose to try to live a more human life, she would need to know how to find appropriate outlets for her instincts so she wouldn’t lose control over herself. Which would be bad enough even without the fire she’d inherited from her parents.
Dutch nodded at the question. It seemed like something more people could benefit from than just her, otherwise she probably wouldn’t have brought it up as it wouldn't have been plausible to do anything about it. So it was nice that he seemed to agree that it wasn’t the worst idea. “Ulysses made a similar suggestion after I jumped off the roof to land behind him,” she said, chuckling slightly. “I’ll keep that in mind. As for Cora that might be just what she needs to feel more comfortable with both flying and running around as a hound. So far she seems to only run around in open spaces in that form, might help her build some confidence to run through the woods too.” Especially if she was being supervised at first or had guidance for certain things. “Being raised in a normal home, she seems to have missed out on the Delacroix bravado, which probably isn’t a bad thing.” Gods, she didn’t even want to imagine how cocky Cora could’ve easily been if she’d been raised by Lea or herself. Neither of the sisters were exactly shy about what they were capable of. Even when they were new at things, both of them seemed to tend to pretend otherwise most of the time.