Chapter Text
It’s strange that she’s met them before.
She has these memories—recent memories, from only a few months ago—of meeting her own children, hearing their names, hearing their voices, and not knowing who they were.
It’s wrong. It doesn’t fit right in her memory.
It too is strange that she suddenly feels so acutely the loss of her sight. It had meant little to her before, since she had no memory of seeing, but now that she does, the world feels… different.
Not worse. No less than it was before. Her sight-seeing songs were never lies, and they don’t feel like lies now, either.
But it’s not just her sight. It’s impulses, trains of thought, attempts at muscle memory that don’t sit right in her body anymore. She moves a hand up to fiddle with the clasp of her cape, but it’s not there. She thinks of her husband, then remembers that he’s dead. She reaches for her ability to notice the tiny changes in facial expression that reveal hidden things to her, but she can’t do that anymore.
And, maybe most strangely of all, she finds that she doesn’t really mind. She spent nine years without any magic ability to sense emotions, and she won’t start missing it now.
.
“Thalassa?”
A once familiar voice, now familiar yet again, enters her dressing room. No one here calls her that name; it must be Valant. Valant Gramarye. He’s still going by that.
Footsteps grow closer until he’s standing beside her.
“The great singer Lamiroir. I can’t believe it was you the whole time.”
She smiles thoughtfully. “Neither can I.”
“Your voice really is as beautiful as they say.”
“Thank you.”
A pause. He clears his throat. “But you didn’t ask me to visit you so I could compliment your singing.”
She sighs. “No.”
“What is it, then? Something with your father’s will? Because he didn’t leave me anything. You’d have to talk to Zak’s… did he have an executor? His taste in lawyers was terrible, I don’t really know—“
“Valant. I just wanted to see you.”
Another pause. “…Oh. Of course.”
“How have you been? Since…”
“Alone, for the most part.”
She nods.
He sighs, frustrated, like he’s never had the chance to talk about it before.
“Seven years…” He laughs bitterly. “I spent seven years praying he would stay gone. Paranoid every day that he would show up and ruin my chances to finally be something.”
There’s something caught in his voice, buried deep beneath the resentment and the fear.
Another sigh. “But… I never really wanted him to—“ He cuts himself off.
Thalassa reaches her hand out, where she thinks his hand should be, and a few moments later, he takes it in his.
“I miss him.”
“Me too.”
The room is quiet. Outside, stagehands move equipment back into storage after the last show on this leg of her tour. Tomorrow, she will be somewhere else.
Valant doesn’t let go of her hand.
“He missed you too, you know.”
Thalassa sighs. She did know that.
“Said he would never love again.”
“That’s a shame.”
“I thought so too.”
A pause. Valant clears his throat.
“What are you going to do now? That you have your memories back?”
She shrugs. “I’ve been mourning for nine years and I’ve just learned who it is I was mourning. So maybe I can finally move on, somehow, now that I know.”
“Ah,” Valant responds, quiet, unsure.
“After that… I think I’ll find a new name. Something that’s mine.”
“Oh.”
“How about you?”
Valant gives a nervous laugh. “I think I should’ve moved on a long time ago. Maybe I should follow your lead.”
“It’s never too late. You don’t have to get amnesia to start a new life for yourself, you know.”
“You were always better at that than he and I, weren’t you?”
She grins. “I don’t know. I admired your dedication to the Troupe.”
He laughs. “I don’t know if I believe that.”
“No, really! It always seemed like you belonged. You chose to be there. I was just tagging along.”
“Well… if you’d believe it, I felt like I was tagging along too.” There’s an edge of bitterness to his voice, tempered by years of separation, but still there.
“My dad fucked all three of us up, didn’t he?”
Valant snorts; she’s unsure if he’s surprised by the language or the accusation. “I think you’re right.”
They’re both silent for a moment. Thalassa reaches up to her neck, but her diamond clasp still isn’t there.
“Well,” Valant sighs, “I should be going.”
“Okay.”
She realizes they’re still holding hands, and uses it to pull him closer.
He’s startled at first, but wraps his arms around her in a hug when he realizes what she’s doing.
They stay like that for a moment, and it almost feels like no time has passed. She’s pretty sure Valant’s still wearing the same cologne he wore nine years ago, because of course he would.
A beat. She rests her chin on his shoulder.
Then, they separate again. It feels like some kind of ending, or maybe a beginning. It’s hard to tell in times like these.
“Take care of yourself, Valant.”
“You too, Thalassa.”
Footsteps mark his exit from the room, but she imagines he leaves in a puff of smoke.
.
Maybe it wasn’t fair to wait until her tour was over to see her children again.
Maybe she should’ve canceled the rest as soon as she started gaining back memories.
Maybe she’s just as bad as a parent who takes the ladder and leaves their child up on the catwalk.
But the whole thing is such a shock. She barely believes it at first, convincing herself it must be a strange dream, a hallucination, a fiction created by her subconscious, grabbing names from random people she met recently to play the roles in some feverish fantasy or nightmare or something else.
But then that lawyer calls her.
He doesn’t call about her; it’s not about the memories she’s recovering, which are accumulating and feel more real by the day… It's about jury duty.
Which, at the very least, means she must be a citizen, somehow.
It’s not a long call, but she does agree to participate in the trial. It’s the least she can do, after his firm rescued Machi from a murder conviction.
She doesn’t ask about his daughter. She’s not ready for that yet.
So she waits until her tour is over. Let one thing end before another begins. Let herself have a proper goodbye. For once in her goddamn life.
.
“You’re my real mom, aren’t you?”
Mr. Wright has barely shut the door behind them when Trucy blurts it out. But Thalassa expected her to realize as much; she has always been a perceptive young girl.
There’s a soft gasp, which must be Apollo, and in the overwhelming pressure of everything that’s come back to her, Thalassa feels a strange sense of calm.
“Yes,” she responds.
“You didn’t know before, but you know now.” Trucy’s voice is tight. Thalassa too knows what it is like to understand and still resent.
She nods. “While you believed I was dead, the truth is I lost my memory.”
“And why is Polly here?”
Polly. Cute.
“Trucy, it’s okay, this isn’t about me,” a hushed voice says.
Something haphazardly mended in Thalassa’s heart breaks a second time. So that’s what he sounds like.
She almost laughs. “Actually… it sort of is.”
“What do you mean?” Apollo asks, cautious. She sees Jove in her mind’s eye, endlessly patient, devoted, protective.
But she can’t see him, grown-up. It hurts like hell.
But he’s still here. He’s alive. He’s with his sister, somehow. That’s what matters.
“I… I am your mother as well.”
“What.” Apollo’s voice is hollow, caught off guard. Of course he is.
“You mean Apollo’s my…?!”
“The two of you are half-siblings, yes.”
“No, hold on.” Apollo is stern, focused, masking disbelief. “What are you talking about?! I was just here to be Trucy’s moral support.”
Thalassa takes a deep breath. “Your father’s name was Jove Justice. I fell in love with him when we were seventeen.”
“The guy Daddy wouldn’t talk about!” Trucy chimes in.
“He died when you were only two years old, and I thought you’d… gone with him.”
“I… I’m sorry,” he replies, as detached as one must be to give condolences about their own death.
She nods, unsure how to respond. She can’t imagine how he feels right now. She wishes, desperately, that she had some kind of reassurance for him. But she has nothing.
Why did she come here again?
“Okay, well, uh…” Apollo begins, trying to make sense of things. “What do you want from us?”
It seems the two of them are on the same page, then.
“I don’t know,” she responds. And it’s the truth.
“She doesn’t want to take me away from Daddy,” Trucy reassures Apollo.
God. Thalassa hadn’t even thought of that. She would never. Trucy deserved to be happy. She couldn’t care for a child, not like this.
Trucy is happy with her new fathers; even if her power doesn’t work as well without sight, she knows that much. She would never take that away from her. Maybe this was all for the best, even, if it led her to them.
She shakes her head.
“Then what do you want? Why now? After all these years?”
She doesn’t answer the question, because he already knows. “I know the timing is inconvenient, but—“
“Inconvenient?! I’ve lived the last twenty three years of my life not knowing—“
“Polly.”
He sighs. “Sorry. It’s not your fault.”
An awkward silence hangs in the air.
The ticks of the clock echo in the small office room.
Thalassa can’t blame them for not knowing what to say.
Finally, Trucy’s voice breaks the silence.
“What was he like?”
“Who?” Thalassa asks.
“Apollo’s father. Jove Justice.”
Thalassa smiles.
“He was kind. He was passionate. He had a beautiful singing voice. He loved deeply.”
“He sounds amazing,” says Trucy.
Thalassa nods.
“I--I’m sorry. I have to go.”
“Polly?”
“This is too much. I--”
One set of footsteps moves towards the door.
“Wait!”
Then another.
A door opens and closes.
A moment passes, and Thalassa realizes she is alone. Again.
She takes a deep breath. It could’ve gone worse.
She’s not sure what she expected.
She’s not sure what she wanted, even.
But this is… fine. This is something. She’s let them know. It’s all she can do, in the end.
.
It’s strange.
She’s found them again. Those still around, anyway.
She’s written letters to those who aren’t.
And it helped, in a way.
She’s tried to give herself the endings she never got the chance to have before.
It’s been… something, at least.
Because she can’t go back. That’s the thing.
The last time she lost everything, she went back. Now, there’s nothing to return to, even if she wanted to.
She spent years on a stage, surrounded by gunfire. And now, it is silent. She is noticing the silence for the first time.
It’s strange.
It’s not a glorious escape, no seventeen year old fever dream full of endless possibilities. It’s not a choice she has to make. It’s not even a goodbye.
No flash of smoke, no uproar of applause, no bullet to the spinal column to end the show.
It just… is.
Oh, and that new court system she had been asked to test seems to have fizzled out. A shame for that lawyer.
Thalassa Gramarye sits alone on a bed in her hotel room, feeling the weight of the years she has lived.
Maybe now she should feel free, finally unshackled from the half-memories and unfulfilled goodbyes. She really doesn’t. Or maybe she should feel trapped by the weight of it all, unable to move. She really doesn’t.
What she is faced with now is a choice. Who will she become? Lamiroir, the singer? Thalassa Gramarye, the magician? Something new? Something yet to be discovered?
She is struck suddenly by the memory of a song about a bird in a cage. She wrote it a few different lifetimes ago, but all at once, she can remember the melody so clearly.
Her song-writing has improved much since she was a teenager, but there is something beautiful and raw about the things she wrote for no one but herself. The songs she never expected anyone to hear.
The ending of that song, in particular, she still has a fondness for.
She cannot see the sun, but she feels the warmth through the window, and she sings.
.
The lock is broken, /
The sky is open, /
Fly, fly, fly.