Sound, like any pure wave, needs a medium in which to travel. With hundreds of thousands of miles of near-void between the Moon and its parent planet, and no suitable medium on vast majority of the satellite to begin with, there was no way that anybody on Earth could possibly have detected any sound emanating from a region in the upper-right corner of its disc. If by some miracle they could, they would have heard a woman's voice alternately sobbing and cursing like a sailor in a variety of languages, primarily Portuguese. As it was, the compression waves merely traveled through the smallish bubble of atmosphere and hit the edge, sending handfuls of stray air molecules drifting lazily off to be captured by gravity, mingle with the dust, and probably baffle future selenogists.
Lucas sat alone on the bare lunar surface, staring intensely down at aeons-old basalt and dust, awash in a mess of conflicting emotions. She stared at her hands, remembering what it had felt like to hold her sword at the ready, remembering for what purpose she had been holding it, remembering what she had almost done. From a purely civilian life, the life of a freelance translator, to this, to almost ending a man's life, in only a few short weeks...how could she? Had she had this kind of capability in her all along, waiting only for the power to put it into action? What kind of person was she, really? Was she even the kind of person she thought she was? Or was she the kind of person she thought she hated? The tyrant, the bully, the petty, vindictive little man who gets a say in things and goes mad with even just a smidgen of power?
At the same time, she was monstrously angry at Jeff Aurelius, Sr. Part of her wanted to blame him for bringing this out in her, him and his fucking lawyers...did he go around intending to be exactly as much of a monster as he could legally get away with? Did he do it just to piss her off? But she knew that was absurd, even if she was certain he had been deliberately baiting her during the confrontation. All the same...ugh. There weren't words in any language she knew that felt strong enough to express her contempt at the moment. Maybe she could get Hermes to make some, if she could stop brooding over this long enough to ask...but she couldn't. This was...was...gods! How had it come to this? How could she even think of doing something like that? And why the hell hadn't she just gone through with it and gutted the son-of-a-bitch!? She buried her head in her hands, wrapping her wings around herself.
She was interrupted by a pair of arms wrapping around her wings. She didn't have to look to know it was Neruite. She sighed. "Y-you...you shouldn't be doing this," she said. "I'm...I'm not the kind of person you want to represent you. I only thought I was."
Neruite kept hugging her. "You need this," she said. "You know what this means. As for the rest...we'll talk, when you're ready."
Lucas trembled. She knew that Neruite knew what this meant to her...that long-held dream, of a goddess reaching down to comfort a mortal...she hadn't only wanted it to be children helped with small, simple problems. And...she did need this. She broke down in a fresh round of sobbing, not even trying to hold it back or explain it, and Neruite just let her cry it out.
When her sobs had died down and she'd wiped her nose, she looked up over her shoulder at the Moon-goddess. "I...I can't thank you enough," she said. "Even just for that...but...I dunno. I don't...I don't think I can do this, Neruite. I've spent my whole life hating the bejeezus out of tyrants and militias and madmen, and not even two months after I come into power myself, I...God, Neruite, I nearly killed a guy! How can I do this, if I can't even keep myself from going mad with power? How can I be this? I don't deserve it!" She tried to keep herself from breaking down again. "Un...unless you can..can change things, can make it all never have happened...I dunno."
Selene shook her head, sadly but firmly. "I am not Chronos," she said. "And if I were...I love you dearly, Lucas, child, but I couldn't do that. I don't want you to ever forget what you learned today."
Lucas stared at her. With everything the Moon-goddess had done for her so far, to be told no to this...to something she only wanted to ease her conscience... "I-is...is this my punishment?" she asked, trying not to sound accusatory. "That...that I have to go around knowing I almost murdered for the rest of my life?"
Neruite placed a hand on her shoulder. "No," she said, gently. "This is not a punishment. But mistakes - aborted or no - are only any good if you put into practice what you learned from them, not if you simply refuse acknowledge that they ever happened. And to erase this from history would not only do that, it would make you less you."
Lucas sniffled. "Th-that's...not what Hawkins said."
"He was right," the goddess said, "that killing Aurelius would have lessened you, made you into more of what you aren't. But don't you see, Lucas? It works the other way, too. You didn't do it. You didn't have to be forced to not do it; you chose not to. In the end, no matter how close you came to doing a grave wrong, you made the right choice. That makes you more you. It's easy for a man to not do something he's never wanted to - but when he sticks to his principles in spite of wanting to give in and betray them, then he's more of a man for it."
The angel looked down at herself. "I don't know too many men with a rack like this," she muttered, half to herself.
"You know perfectly well that the point stands," Celine said. "Man or woman, you are more you, the you you were meant to be, than you were this morning, for having faced down your own worst nature and denied it. That's a battle you've been fighting all your life, in smaller ways, and it's one you will fight until the end of your days - but this was a damn good step forward."
"But I wanted to," Lucas said. "I really did. I was going to do it. I don't think there's a single one of my buttons that sonofabitch doesn't push... If...if Hawkins hadn't been there, if Jeff Junior hadn't showed up in time for me to realize..."
"Timelines branch infinitely," Selene said. "Don't burden yourself with what-ifs; they only collapse and average out to so much white noise in the mortal mind, anyway. You didn't, and however people might have worked to persuade you, in the end your decision was yours and yours alone. Accept this victory, and put what you've learned towards the next."
Lucas sighed, feeling a little better but still pretty confused and lost, scuffing the ground with one foot. "But...what did I learn?" she asked. "'Killing people is bad?' I'm pretty sure I knew that one already. I just...I dunno, I wasn't sure whether it applied to bastards like him."
"That's one, though, isn't it?" Neruite said. "One of the crucial turning points: when you came to realize that even very bad men can be loved - and mourned - by someone."
"But it's a waste!" Lucas shouted - not at Neruite, more at Jeff Sr., wherever the hell he was. "All she's doing is hurting herself. He doesn't love her back; he called her it. In front of her!"
"Don't be too sure of that," the goddess replied. "Make no mistake - he's a bad person, a terrible husband, and a horrible father. He views people as machines, instead of considering that machines could be people, and it shows in his behavior. He thinks of children as means to his own end, instead of an end to which to apply his means. But it takes a lot to really kill a heart, however twisted it becomes. You don't know that, somewhere deep within, he doesn't honestly care for his child. Maybe, through the twists and turns of his perversity, that is the source of his obsession. Perhaps even he doesn't know; if it's there, he's buried it very deeply. He may not ever realize, or only when it's far too late to even begin to make amends. That's another thing you should learn from this, Lucas: even the very bad can be more complicated than you give them credit for."
Lucas stared at her, a little slack-jawed. The idea that...that that man might...might in some sense actually care, and just go to his grave never coming to that realization, or realize too late... "D-don't...don't you know?" she asked. "Couldn't you do something?"
As she said this, Neruite took on a look of immense sadness of a kind that Lucas had never seen on a human face. It was...in a way it was crushing, almost oppressive. "Lucas," she said, "if only you knew...child, I sprang from your world when it was still molten fire. By my power I make the whole ocean dance with me; it leaps to my tune every single day. Even if we overlooked the problems with meddling in a human heart...to do so by my power would be like trying to assemble a model ship with earth-moving equipment. Even these human forms are as much a way for us to keep ourselves in check as a way to relate to you. That's the final thing you should learn from this: the hardest part of wielding power is knowing when and why not to apply it."
Lucas sighed, trying to bear up under the weight of that expression. "I...I'm sorry," she said. "Learning not to apply power...then, that thing with Hermes...?"
Selene shrugged, seeming to shake off the powerful melancholy. "Difficult to say," she said. "Your cause there is just, at least at its most basic level. But...human affairs are complicated. Aurelius employs hundreds of people, in a company that has many stockholders. Should all of them suffer for his misdeeds? Even if you restrain yourself to crippling his lawyers, they're all people, not all of them bad, and those losses will affect their careers at least as much as they will his."
Lucas sighed. "I...hadn't thought about it that way. But...he can't just get away with this. God dammit, he's done enough of that already! And Jeff and her mom...he damn well can't get off without supporting them!"
"I agree completely," Selene said. "But are you certain he will? The courts are treading fairly carefully with regards to treating the changed fairly, because nobody really wants to be the guy that sparked off a huge controversy. And there's no dispute that Jeff is his child. Moreover, his meddling potentially endangered and caused the changes of several of his employees, who could provide some seriously damaging testimony."
"He does have legal muscle, though," Lucas said. "And...I mean, why take chances? He shouldn't have gotten a lot of the things he already did, why should he be allowed to have his way more?"
"He does," Selene said, nodding. "Again: human affairs are complicated. And...I am many things, but I'm not your mother, Lucas. I'm not going to tell you how to apply or not apply the power that is yours, or interfere in your dealings with Hermes. Part of learning a lesson is putting it into practice yourself, because that's the whole point behind learning it: to get better at what you do. I leave it to you."
And then she was Neruite again; she reached out to the angel, lifted her to her feet, and embraced her. "As for my not wanting you?" she said. "When I first came to you, you had nearly destroyed the universe. I never claimed some Platonic-ideal iconoclast; I took you for who and what you are, and you are more you than you have ever been up until this point."
Lucas smiled, feeling herself start to tear up again. "Th-thanks," she said.
