[ There's a pause before she replies, one that could easily be chalked up to the heavy snowdrift they're currently struggling through, Lucretia raising her legs up high to step carefully into the footprints the other woman leaves behind.
She's been so careful about giving her name out these days, mostly in her effort to maintain a professional facade - leading the Bureau is a bigger project than she's ever taken on alone, and she lies awake some nights, convinced that the organization she'd built from scratch would crumble away to nothing, all the authority she's worked so hard to build slipping away overnight, if the people working underneath her had the slightest idea of how lost and alone she really feels sometimes. Part of it, too, had been the need to keep Merle, Magnus, and Taako in the dark. There's no reason why hearing her name should trigger any of the memories she'd erased, but just controlling her own expression had been hard, the first time Magnus had called her by name at Candlenights, and...
None of that applies now, though. There is no Bureau here, no Director, nothing to conceal. ]
Lucretia.
[ She looks up, squinting at the back of the woman's head through the snow. ]
no subject
She's been so careful about giving her name out these days, mostly in her effort to maintain a professional facade - leading the Bureau is a bigger project than she's ever taken on alone, and she lies awake some nights, convinced that the organization she'd built from scratch would crumble away to nothing, all the authority she's worked so hard to build slipping away overnight, if the people working underneath her had the slightest idea of how lost and alone she really feels sometimes. Part of it, too, had been the need to keep Merle, Magnus, and Taako in the dark. There's no reason why hearing her name should trigger any of the memories she'd erased, but just controlling her own expression had been hard, the first time Magnus had called her by name at Candlenights, and...
None of that applies now, though. There is no Bureau here, no Director, nothing to conceal. ]
Lucretia.
[ She looks up, squinting at the back of the woman's head through the snow. ]
What's yours?