She's thirteen when they tell her that her father is dead.
As usual, Lucy is a little later getting home from school, because band is an after school thing instead of a class and the teacher doesn't understand the meaning of the word exhausted. You'd think being around teenagers, Mrs. Vanderbilt would get it, but apparently music directors were just built a little differently. She waves goodbye to the Metro bus driver, the nicer of the two who usually have the route, the one who always waves back, but as soon as the bus pulled away and Lucy could see the shiny black sedan in front of the house, she knew something was horribly wrong.
They didn't get visitors, not this late and certainly not in cars like that.
Two men are standing in the living room where her mom sits silently and terribly still on the sofa, looking white as a sheet. But her mother doesn't reach for her, doesn't even seem to see her as Lucy looks at the strangers instead, each imposing and professional in a way that even her young mind manages to read as 'official'. Some sort of agent, like you'd see on TV or in a movie. But it's not a movie, it's real life, and they're telling her that her father was killed in action.
Lucy had known her father was — something. Something dangerous and military and completely unknown. Something important enough that she was always told to just be vague if anyone ever asked at school, but when it was clear she didn't want to talk about it her friends never pressed. It wasn't like she was the only kid who had divorced parents, and besides, as she got older and she saw less and less of him, it wasn't like there was much to tell for sure. Whatever he did was top secret, and Lucy was a good child and never broke that trust that her mother and father had for her.
She only knew three things for sure: he worked for the government, what he did was very dangerous, and that he loved her so much.
So in that terrible moment where these two strangers are telling her that her father is dead while her mother stared at nothing and her world had turned completely upside down, the only thing Lucy could think to do was stand there, clarinet case in one hand, backpack sliding down the other arm, and hold back her tears because she knew her father would want her to be brave, brave like he was.
No one was really paying attention, but it still felt important.
They gave her a patch that had L. Greaves stitched in black thread on a black background. Nearly impossible to see unless it was up close, but Lucy ran her fingers across the raised threads anyway, like some sort of spiritual braille that would let her feel connected enough to her father to at least say goodbye. Her parents had split when she was very young, and her mother had always said that while she loved Lucy's father, she knew that his work would always come first.
But Lucy had known her mother was wrong. For all the distance, all the time apart, somehow she'd understood fundamentally that they both came first in her father's heart, and that's why he did whatever it was he did in the shadows.
Which apparently meant dying, in the long run.
Still, it didn't feel right. It didn't feel like her dad could die and she would find out from other people; Lucy had been so sure that she would know somehow, although it was only something she realized in the aftermath of the terrible news. Some childish belief in connection, her teenage brain tried to rationalize, but there was a deep core that was unshakeable.
Her mother had always called Lucy a strange, serious child. 'Wise beyond her years', 'old soul', the whole gamut assigned to her by teachers and parents who crossed paths with her. Still, she was struggling with a disconnect then as she held the last memento she had of her father's presence.
When she closed her eyes and finally let herself cry, the light from her side-table painted the inside of her lids dark red.
The world is so dark, and she is so alone.
It has to be a dream, because even in the middle of the chaos swirls around her, terrifying and impossible to see, Lucy knows that what she's facing isn't real. Not yet. Maybe not ever, but she's not sure how she knows any of this. But she can see what's coming and it's so big and so scary that for all her pretense at growing up she's a terrified child, looking into the face of a dark future she knows will destroy her.
It has to be a dream. She has to be able to wake up.
Behind her, there is something she feels before seeing, something warm and safe that calms her shaking frame, even though it doesn't have anything like a form. Just a sense that things will be all right, that she's not alone, no matter how much she thinks she is. Surrounded by a crimson light, she has a sense of peace and purpose that she doesn't understand in the least. That there's a storm just beyond her sight and it's coming, but she's not alone.
Lucy's eyes fly open, and she screams.
Her mother eventually gets her an appointment with a therapist, even though Lucy doesn't really think talking with one is going to help. It's been months since her father's death, and some part of her feels lost, which probably makes sense but no one told her that grief would be this physical.
It's a really hard road for someone who just turned 14 to navigate alone, the therapist tells her at the first appointment. That it isn't surprising that she is having nightmares, that she struggles to sleep. All of it is perfectly normal.
That's enough to make Lucy realize that this person won't get it either.
The truth is that Lucy isn't afraid of the dreams, she's curious. She's more sure than ever that they mean something, something deeper than she can understand and that it's somehow tied to — everything. Her father's death, her mother's retreat into silence, that terrible feeling in her gut that something is coming and she has to be ready.
So she hides the dreams, learns to wake up silently, to tell no one about them until her mother is satisfied that her daughter is growing up just fine and perfectly normal, all things considered. Lucy graduates in four years with honors, getting into a top college, then grad school and all the things that her mother had always hoped for her to accomplish.
But Lucy never stopped dreaming.
It's in the esoteric that Lucy starts looking for answers, her graduate studies in physics remarkably unhelpful in the decoding of dreams. In the midst of her undergrad work it had been psychedelics with a friend who swore that mushrooms unlocked the secrets of the universe, during her masters it was a trip to Peru for an ayahuasca trip. The dreams of chaos and the red light shining around her continued all through her doctorate, and it seemed like nothing that Lucy tried to unlock the meaning behind them worked. As she got older, they were less and less frequent, so she gave up on the attempts to gather meaning from the dreams and focused on her studies.
Still, she never stopped dreaming entirely.
The years passed, and Dr. Lucy Greaves' research leads her down a pathway that many have walked before her, into the shadows of Site 19 where the theoretical and impossible becomes not only very real, but her responsibility. It was only then that she discovered who her father really had worked for, although not the true details of his death but rather his life of service.
It made that connection to her father that she'd always felt, even in his long absence, that much stronger.
Still, her work at the Foundation made it more clear to Lucy every day that the edges of reality were becoming frayed, not because of entropy or inevitability but of something cosmic and terrible pulling it to pieces. That feeling that had sat in her chest that first night after being told of her father's death settled right back in, like she was looking over the edge into primordial chaos and falling headfirst into it was inevitable.
Now she was starting to learn enough about the unseen to think that maybe it truly was.
One night, asleep at her desk after spending far too long looking at modeling data, Lucy dreamed again. The chaos was clearer, sharper, closer. Once again she was a girl of 13 staring into the abyss, but this time with the full knowledge of a woman steeped in the mysteries of the anomalous that were firmly on their doorstep.
And there was no way to stop it.
But that light, that familiar red light appeared again, vaguely in the shape of a man with features that she couldn't make out yet somehow knew all the same. They stared together at the danger that was mere feet ahead of them now, close enough to reach out and touch. It was then that Lucy realized that she stood with her father, his voice clear in her mind as if he had spoken aloud.
And finally, finally she understood.
BE BRAVE, KIDDO. BE BRAVE.
With gasping gulps of air, Lucy woke up in her office with a single thought taking up every inch of space in her consciousness, leaving no room for anything except conviction.
I am the child of the Scarlet King.
And she had work to do.