antebellum [t. riddle]

lxx

march 1945

what is betrayal?

disloyalty, deception, double-dealing; the usual treachery, of course, but what is it really?

to reveal someone to an enemy. to give information or take action that would lead to their demise. to pull a blindfold over someone's eyes and walk them to the edge of a cliff. all different actions; all types of betrayals.

could eileen betray me? that was a question sicaria had pondered over for quite some time.

on one hand, they were supposed to be on the same side, fighting for the same endgame. eileen couldn't really just allow sicaria to be tossed into grindelwald's waiting room— there was still so much use to be gotten out of her. no, there was no reason for eileen to actively discard herself of sicaria, not yet anyway.

but on the other, eileen was sworn to protect macusa, not to protect sicaria. eileen had only pretended once to care whether sicaria lived or died as a human, but she worried plenty over whether or not her tool would be functional. why give her to grindelwald when she could use her to lure him right back into a macusa jail cell?

eileen felt no personal loyalty to sicaria, and vice versa, so if she were to devise a plan in which sicaria was intentional collateral damage, would that count as betrayal? it wasn't a matter of would eileen do it— if she had the moral capacity. sicaria knew she would (she already was) if needed (or wanted). the dilemma was if she actually met the criteria of what constituted betrayal. sicaria couldn't claim to have been stabbed in the back, since she had watched eileen pick up the knife.

the question made sicaria think of other situations in her life that could theoretically count as betrayals. there were few outright moments of double-crossing, but many small moments of deception that lay in the borderlands between general underhandedness and plain old backstabbing.

in an alternate reality in which sicaria could run, would tom see that as a betrayal?

had she betrayed natasha, naoki, mrs. matsumoto, and madam teresia by even allowing them to become involved with her?

could the same be said for the knights, even though she tried quite hard to keep them at arms length?

had she betrayed dumbledore when she stopped working for him?

had dumbledore betrayed her by asking in the first place?

to imply betrayal is to imply that there was a sense of trust in the first place. did dumbledore or tom trust her? did she trust them? in different ways, yes, but she didn't trust either of them entirely. if she were a bleeding heart kind of agent who wanted nothing but the betterment of the wizarding world, by any means necessary, she'd trust dumbledore implicitly. there was no doubt in sicaria's mind that dumbledore had the ability to end the war if given the proper materials. if tom hadn't blatantly ignored her boundaries so many times in the past and at least pretended to be remorseful, she reckoned she'd trust him a hell of a lot more than she did now.

could sicaria claim to have been betrayed by him? she had always been, and still was, suspicious of his motives in everything he did, but she had always thought there was a line he wouldn't cross, and every time it did, the line shifted just a bit lower to accommodate him.

she made a lot of excuses for tom's behavior, even when she knew it was wrong, but she kept telling herself that it was because she knew it was (recently) (somewhat) in good faith. he thought he was saving her. he thought he was helping her, even if the motives weren't out of the goodness of his heart.