And then Lauren leaned down and pulled it close to her, her brown eyes wide and concerned and her hair throwing shadows in beautiful lines across her face.

“That confused me too –,” Lauren’s voice was softer, calmer, “but, look,” and then her attention was back on the book, back on the task at hand, and her voice had that unmistakable doctor-tone that got under Bo’s skin, that had been getting under Bo’s skin since she’d first walked into the Ash’s compound and looked Bo directly in the eye the first time they’d met. “Then – I remembered. There was no memory of Rainer, right?”

Bo forced herself to remember too, and when Lauren shifted to face her a little more squarely, Bo mirrored her actions. A frown furrowed its way onto Bo’s forehead, she narrowed her focus onto the task at hand, on Rainer, waiting downstairs for her to face her destiny and fight a different battle.

“Okay…?”

“Okay. When his memory returned, history’s memory of him returned as well,” Lauren drew in a deep, shaking breath, so like and unlike the many Bo had drawn from her under happier circumstances in this very bed, “and it’s not pretty. Look.”

She swept the hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear, and when she dipped her head to read, it tumbled along the side of her neck and the shadows across her face lightened a little in the dim golden glow of Bo’s room.

“’The warrior shall escape his curse’.”

Bo leaned in, her mouth drawing into a tight line and every muscle in her body tense and taut.

“’The Valkyrie shall be reborn’.”

The pages crackled under Lauren’s fingers, fingers that had traced lines along Bo’s face and kissed her lips with their gentle, feather-light touch.

“’The blood of Zamora shall be spilled’,” Lauren’s voice rose with fear and frustration, and Bo wondered if this really was a prophecy that history had remembered or if it was just her own hope and fear that Lauren was trying take her heart and break it again, “does any of this sound familiar to you?” Lauren’s tense words broke through Bo’s distracted thoughts, and Bo couldn’t answer her. Because it did, and Bo couldn’t decide how she felt about it.