Work Text:
“Thank you, Mrs. Ulric,” Lunafreya says over the swirling steam of her tea. The woman's eyes fix somewhere over her left shoulder as she smiles, crooked and warm, just like her son.
“Of course, dear.”
She turns slow and shuffling, but her feet do not miss a step as she returns the the counter, fingers searching for the small porcelain bowl of sugar set next to the carefully organized jars of tea leaves. Luna watches her, blowing softly across the surface of the drink nestled between her palms. It’s something of a marvel to see her move around the kitchen graceful as a dancer when her eyes are––
(”Just, don’t mention it,” Nyx warned her before they arrived, tense in a manner far different from his soldier’s readiness. “It doesn’t bother her but she doesn’t–– it isn’t––”
“I can be polite.”
Even the barb raised no reaction. “It’s not that it’s just. Old wounds.”
She set her hand upon his hand, skin too-hot where the Lucii magic had burrowed beneath his skin. “I understand.”
His relief set her heart aching. “Thanks.”)
“It’s a little disconcerting, hmm?”
“No, Mrs. Ulric,” she replies, honest. Across the pitted wooden table, Nyx’s mother sets down the sugar with a fragile sort of certainty, as if certainty could be both sure and delicate, and––
Well, Lunafreya would know all about that.
The woman takes two sugars with her tea. Lunafreya takes none out of habit; there was not always sugar to be taken at home, no matter how gilded her cage. Even now––now, perhaps, more than ever––sugar is something of a delicacy, especially this far from the capital. She would be remiss to indulge.
“I can hear you thinking from here,” says Nyx’s mother, and for a moment Lunafreya mistakes her tone for crossness. But the woman’s face is amused when she looks up from the quiet ripples of her drink. “Take one, girl. It’ll taste better.”
She selects one with a smile the woman across from her cannot see. The cube melts in the heat, sugar unfurling into her drink. The clink of the spoon against the cup reminds her of her own mother.
Both tea and memory are bittersweet.
The woman does her the politeness of waiting until after she has set her cup down, minute vibrations rippling across the table, to fold her hands before her. Lunafreya does her best to school her face to a similar solemnity, but it is hard to do when such fondness radiates from the woman. She near shines with it.
“So. My son.”
For a moment, Lunafreya feels the wild giddiness of a child who has been caught misbehaving, or the memory of such a feeling. It’s the adrenaline-surge of laughter from a time before the Empire swept in and overshadowed the world, and it loosens her shoulders as she waits for the woman to continue, sets her at ease among the drafty space of this empty home.
But the woman does not continue.
“He is a good man,” the princess says finally. Across the table Nyx’s mother smiles, eyes electric blue and sightless. They cut through her anyways; it is the gaze of a mother, and Lunafreya cannot begrudge her that.
“Yes.”
She waits. Patience has not always come so easily to her, but it does now.
“He’s quite taken with you. Given him something to fight for, hmm?”
Lunafreya considers her answer. “It is nothing I have given him.”
“Isn’t it? No, I suppose not.” The words form the shape of a condemnation, but upon a mother’s lips they sound more akin to a blessing, thankful for a challenge not given. She sips her tea, tiny ripples dancing across the surface as her hand shakes. She cannot truly be so old as she seems, Lunafreya thinks. “He always was one to burn.”
That, now. That Lunafreya knows as truth. She has seen it often enough, the fire within him, bright and fierce and unyielding.
It is a comfort, an honor, that such flame would deign to warm her, to light her way.
She opens her mouth to reply but the old woman waves a hand, sweeping response away into the wind.
“You, highness. Tell me about you.”
The change in topic startles a laugh from Lunafreya. “I am not sure what there is to say.”
“Oh, come now.” For all her frailty, there is a strength to her. Nyx Ulric has not inherited his fire from the ether, it seems. “A woman like you? I am sure they could fill a book and be left with tales aplenty. Not that I could read them, of course,” she laughs, a rich and full thing that has little place in this fragile, cracking, worn home. It makes Nyx’s mother young again; it seeps through the scars and the pockmarks around t hem and for a moment Lunafreya sees this home as it must have been once, golden-bright and warm and––
“So?” asks the woman across the table, and she is old again, frail and fragile and blind and burning from the inside out.
Lunafreya find she loves her, just a little bit.
“I hope to make the world better,” the princess says. “I cannot stand by. Your son... understands.”
“You’re one of those types then.”
“Which types?”
“Idealists.”
She sighs it like a curse, not upon Lunafreya but upon the world, heavy and inescapable as the scourge itself, and Lunafreya bristles to argue because this is beyond her, this is more important, this is––
The old woman’s mouth quirks, smile wry and crooked like her sons, and Lunafreya shakes her head with a quiet smile, even though the woman cannot see it.
“Good,” the woman decides. “Good, then. He needs someone who knows. And you know, don’t you highness? No, you don’t have to say it. I can tell. Mother’s intuition.”
She nods to herself, and sips her tea, and Lunafreya waits until the silence grows stale to ask, “Do you not wish to know my intentions?”
“I don’t know,” replies Mrs. Ulric easily. “Should I? Are they honest?”
“As anything.”
“And do you love him?”
“Yes.”
“Well then,” says the woman, and that’s it. She nudges the sugar bowl closer to Lunafreya. “Have another one, dear.”
The bitterness of the drink fades as the cube melts, and Lunafreya appreciates the blooming sweetness upon her tongue.
Nyx joins them some time latter, brushing dirt from his hands as he enters the narrow kitchen, mindless chore his mother sent him on completed. He only hesitates a moment to see them seated silently at the table, tea gone cold.
“Everything alright?”
“Yes,” his mother replies, head tilted sightless in his direction. Something in him relaxes to see her, a tension even Lunafreya has not yet noticed, and she wonders what other secrets lie hidden in this old home, wonders what else she doesn’t know about him, about them. “Come give your languishing mother a kiss, and tell me all the trouble you’ve gotten this lovely young lady into.”
“You’re hardly languishing, and she gets into far more trouble than me,” Nyx protests, but he goes willingly. His mother blooms to hear him, that quiet warmth returning to the room as her son lays a hand upon her shoulder. It seeps through the empty spaces of their home like tea leaves in water, fire returned to the hearth, and Lunafreya breathes it in like steam, familiar and sweet.
“She been telling you stories about when I was a kid?” Nyx asks her as he joins them at the table, chair legs scraping across the floor. “They’re all lies.”
“She hasn’t,” Lunafreya replies. “I would like to hear them, though.”
“Oh, he was such a troublesome child,” Nyx’s mother says, beaming, and Nyx groans and drops his head into his arms as his mother sketches the story of a boy full of fire and foolhardy hope, and this is nothing and everything like the home Lunafreya remembers from long, long ago, before the loss and the loneliness and the lingering chill.
Theirs is a small family, and their are pieces missing, portraits upon the mantle of the fireplace where their should be people around the table, but it is a warm home, a bright home, overfull with love and hope, and Luna takes comfort in their invitation that she join them within their quiet moments of peace.