Work Text:
Dunban was the one who urged her. He’s more or less knowledgable in that sort of thing, and Melia has no clue about these things otherwise. What do friends do? What do sisters do? What does an Empress do with her Inquisitor, when they can be afforded a break from their tireless work? It is… different, with Tyrea, even after all this time and their painful reconciliations. The coronation changed so many things for the better, and yet Melia is keenly aware of the distance that remains between them.
It’s not nearly as simple as Dunban made it out to be, she thinks. Quality time with someone like Tyrea isn’t the same thing as spending time with everyone else. They’re not even sisters, for one thing. What she has with Tyrea is nothing like what Dunban has with Fiora.
She grips her staff, now unsure. Tyrea hasn’t slept in days. She won’t rest, even when Teelan begs her to, because she swears they’re so close to a breakthrough even though that was exactly what she said hardly a month ago.
That old, unchanged Tyrea is coming back. That frightens Melia more than anything else.
So, Melia knocks.
“What? What do you want?” is Tyrea’s immediate reply, shouted from within. “Leave me be!”
“It’s only me.”
“… Melia. Hmph.”
The door slides open on its own accord, and Melia steps inside. “I order you—“
“Be quiet. I can’t focus.”
“Tyrea!”
“Fine. What do you want? Make it quick, I have a lot of work to do.”
Melia wants to badly ask; what happened to those vows they made? That promise forged as they looked out across Gran Dell, side by side, and then again in Alcamoth? A part of her bitterly thinks that Tyrea is fading away all over again, but the truth couldn’t be further from that. Maybe Teelan would have better luck getting through to her.
“I am ordering you to rest. Take a day off. Consider it your obligatory leave.”
“Excuse me?” Tyrea’s head snaps up, palms pressed flat against papers that’d been strewn all over the table she’s hunched over. Her feathers are out of place, eyes wild, lip curled back in a snarl.
“You’re of no use to me when fatigued, Tyrea.” She tries to remember what Dunban told her. Be blunt, be honest. Don’t let her get away. Oh, that's hardly any different from his advice for hunting down monsters. “I need you at your best. We need you at your best. Look at yourself; when was the last time you slept in your own bed?”
“That is… none of your business,” Tyrea says, turning her back to stare down at all those papers. “You can tell Teelan that I’m fine as well. He’s the one who sent you, isn’t he?”
“He would have come to see you himself if that were the case.” Melia approaches a chair and picks up a stack of papers left there, more out of curiosity than anything.
“Don’t touch those! Don’t touch anything!”
“I am not—!”
“You’ll ruin everything!” Tyrea makes a sudden movement, a half-lunge. Melia gasps and reflexively raises her staff, but Tyrea never crosses the length of the room. The papers scatter across the floor, some of them sliding to a halt by her feet. Tyrea halts as well as she realizes what she’d just done. Her expression falls, momentary shame cast across her weary eyes. She straightens up, but her shoulders sag. “… Apologies. I seem to have, ah, lost my temper. For a moment.”
“Tyrea…” Melia lowers the staff. Suddenly, she feels very, very tired— even more tired than she’d been after her father’s death, and even after seeing Grael’gar plummet into the sea. She’d done her fair share of mourning and contemplation. Could she be spared the grief of losing someone she’d only just found, at the very least? Tyrea is busying herself with picking up the papers, shuffling them back into a pile and leaving them on the corner of the table. A heavy silence shrouds them both.
Be blunt, be honest. Don’t let her get away.
“… Come,” Melia says, sitting on the edge of Tyrea’s bed and patting the space beside her.
“Is that an order?” Tyrea sneers.
“No. I ask you not as your Empress, but as…” A friend? A sister? It’s on the tip of her tongue, lost, but Melia needn’t struggle with the words when Tyrea obliges anyway. One of her wings brushes against Melia’s arm.
Tyrea rests her face in her hands. “… We’re so close to a breakthrough. You don’t understand.”
“Then why have you pushed Teelan away?”
“Because he—“ she balks. “He’s getting distracted and I can’t afford myself that luxury. I’ll admit Teelan is very capable, but he’s a mere child.”
“You’re wrong. He’s not distracted, he’s happy. Don’t you see? He has found a new life amongst the people of Alcamoth and Colony 9. You were… nearly there as well, despite your own reservations.” Melia’s voice softens, and she dares to lay a hand over Tyrea’s wrist. Tyrea doesn’t react. “Fiora has spoken to me about you on numerous occasions. She’s curious.”
“Hah. I’ve no interest in those Homs you call friends.”
“Your obstinance is losing its charm, I must say.”
“Spoken like a true Empress.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Tyrea’s bark of laughter is sharp, but lacking actual edges meant to cut through. Everything has been coming along so smoothly, as far as reconstruction efforts and repopulating their home with the last of their people. And yet, when Melia looks up to the sky, she sees dozens of Telethia, cursed to forever guard what’s left of the Bionis. A constant reminder. She’d been hopeful at first, seeing a new purpose for Tyrea in helping their people and unofficially adopting Teelan as family. But, even then, as Tyrea admitted that she could find no purpose in her life, after all they’d been through…
This is her purpose now, to stand beside the throne. Melia feels the weight of Tyrea’s life upon her shoulders, a burden she’d gladly carry to the very end.
Tyrea recoils at the brush of fingertips along her feathers.
“May I… brush your hair for you, Tyrea?”
“What?”
Sharla and Fiora would brush each other’s hair whenever the group stopped to camp and they’d never fail to offer Melia the same. Back then, she’d been uncertain about allowing strange Homs to touch her, however friendly they had been. Perhaps this is how Tyrea now feels. But it brought Sharla and Fiora closer to each other. They would talk as they groomed each other, out of earshot from the boys but close enough to Melia so that she could join the conversations if she wanted to. An intrinsic sort of bonding.
Tyrea is staring at her as if she’d sprouted a second head. Melia persists.
“Please. Allow me.”
“Are you implying I have poor hygiene? I’ll have you know, as busy with my research as I may be, I always find the time to clean myself daily without fail! How dare you!”
“That is most certainly not what I mean to say! If you could refrain from putting words in my mouth—” Melia grabs her arm before she can stand up. Tyrea glares, but doesn’t pull herself away. “Sit down, Tyrea. Your obligatory leave begins now.”
“… Urgh.”
The old Tyrea would have continued to threaten her until the threats escalated into an actual fight, probably. The new Tyrea allows Melia to remove her hair binding and carefully pull her braid apart until the long strands fall freely down her back. Tyrea’s wings quiver; is she uneasy? Or is her mind completely occupied with thoughts of her research?
Melia grabs a wooden hairbrush left on the nightstand. Despite all the papers and notes and books scattered around, Tyrea’s room is neat and tidy, hardly a speck of dust to be seen. She kneels behind Tyrea, carefully watching her wings as she runs her fingers through her hair. They’re still quivering.
“Will you talk to me, Tyrea?”
“About what.”
“Anything that isn’t about your research or the state of affairs in Alcamoth.” Melia lowers her voice to a soothing level. “I’ve grown weary of work and political discussion. This is rest for me as much as it is for you, you must realize. Try. For me, at least.”
Tyrea sighs, those tensed muscles in her back finally beginning to ease as Melia slowly brushes her hair. “Well. That Homs man with the smarmy grin came to see me again the other day. I ought to gut you and Shulk for putting those thoughts in his head. Him? Court me? I’d sooner eat worms straight from the dirt.”
Melia tries to hide her giggle. “I assure you, I was not the instigator of that sequence of events. Is Thad really so unbearable to be around?”
“He’s damn annoying.”
“What about his food?”
“Irrelevant. Trying to earn my affections through food is a childish and underhanded method. Does he really believe me to be such a simpleton? The thought is making my blood boil.”
“So… you really aren’t interested.”
“As if I could make that any more obvious.”
Her words should sound angry and biting, but Melia swears she hears a smile somewhere in there, though she can’t see Tyrea’s face like this. Her wings are no longer trembling.
“Sharla would encourage you to at least hear him out.”
“Melia.” Tyrea half-turns, looking over her shoulder. She’s not smiling. “I am completely, utterly serious. My service to you and my research will always be my priorities.”
“Ah.”
“Ow—!” Oh, no, she caught a knot in her hair with the brush without meaning to. Tyrea’s feathers ruffle audibly as she jerks away before Melia can apologize. “You useless, insolent—“
Tyrea freezes, as does Melia, both of them stunned by the words. Slowly, hesitantly, Tyrea reaches for Melia’s wrist in an uncharacteristically gentle grip. Melia realizes she’s breathing very very quickly in tune with her racing heartbeat. No, why is this going so wrong? She thought they were finally getting somewhere, a semblance close to what she’d been yearning for, but…
In that instance, Tyrea sounded just like Yumea.
Something mournful aches in Tyrea’s eyes.
“… I didn’t mean it,” she quietly says.
“I know,” Melia replies. She drops the hairbrush onto the bedsheets to sit beside Tyrea and hold her arm. A wordless acknowledgment of what she’d just bared. Her wings are trembling all over again.
Something silent passes between them, something that Melia isn’t quite certain of, but she knows that Tyrea needs to talk. To talk, and not be interrupted. No one had ever listened to her like this before, not even Teelan.
“I think… I may have once mentioned how harsh my mother could be.” Or, it’s the lack of sleep finally wrenching this honesty out of her. “An Inquisitor of the Bionite Order must be immaculate, she always said. The faintest smudge of dirt was a transgression against the very law of her beliefs. If I struggled, or even twitched, as she pulled my hair into order, well. I hardly need to go into detail, do I?”
Melia says nothing, so Tyrea continues. “But other times, she could be so gentle. Yet I did not yearn for even that, because my absolute loyalty meant accepting anything and everything she inflicted upon me. Her cruelty and kindness. Those hateful words. When she praised me for a job well done. I have memories of being held by her. Do you… do you remember being held by your mother, Melia?”
“Yes, I do.”
Tyrea isn’t crying, but her eyes are wide and her hands are shaking. She needs sleep, Melia thinks. The fatigue is wearing down on her in awful ways. But now’s not the time to be be blunt or honest. She simply can’t let Tyrea slip away.
“The past is the past. You are here now, Tyrea, with me. Do not ever forget that.”
“Would you brush my hair again for me…?”
“Of course.”
The sky is bright with stars outside, visible through the one window Tyrea had left uncovered. Eventually, Tyrea allows herself to be lowered properly onto the bed, eyes fluttering shut and her breathing evening out. Melia lies beside her and tightly grips her hand until she succumbs to sleep as well.
She wakes up to the scent of coffee and rustling papers. Tyrea is seated at her table, back turned, though she acknowledges the sound of Melia rising with a slight inclination of her head. All those strewn notes had been organized into separate piles set aside.
“You overslept.” A pause. “I won’t be apologizing for my misconduct last night. You had interrupted my work, after all.”
Melia weakly smiles. “Fair enough.”
Tyrea is still hesitating, her hands poised over the papers. All that trouble over of a mere lack of sleep. Melia figures that must bother her, but.
“… Thank you, Melia. For everything.”
She’d changed, no matter how much she would otherwise insist. For all her claims of returning to her normal ways of operating from the shadows, playing nothing more than an unsavory role in support to the throne, and no matter how severe she may be, she’s changed. Because she’s so much more than that now, and Melia intends to bring that new Tyrea fully into her own radiance. As a sister? Friend? Inquisitor? Well, it isn’t as though they’re lacking for time.
“It’s no trouble at all.”