Work Text:
Hector Ostia
6:12 PM
order bitch
oh shit give me a sec
ok get me an italian sub on the garlic parmesan bread
why
you do this every time
you pretend like you’re going to get something else and then you always get that
i didn’t ask for your opinion
you should’ve taken that into account when you asked me to get sandwiches then
rude
i dont judge your taste
that’s a lie and we both know that
can u also make us some cocktails when you get back
...please
ill take back what i said about not judging your taste
i promise
well since you asked so nicely yeah sure
just try not to make fun of me for paying respect to the sky and earth
THAT WAS ONE TIME LYN AND I DIDN’T KNOW
I WONT EVER DO IT AGAIN
~ / . / . / ~
It was six years ago that Hassar Lyndis Lorca stepped onto a plane and left Mongolia for the first and final time.
That had been six months after her father had sent her away to pay respects to the nearby Kutolah clan, five months and twenty-eight days after she had returned to find the gers of her tribe burnt down and the bodies of her family members strewn across the now-bloodied plains, three months and fifteen days after she had discovered the letters from her grandfather hidden away in a safe that had miraculously been untouched amongst the carnage and chaos of the killing spree, and one week after her great uncle Lundgren was found guilty for poisoning and attempted murder of her grandfather Hausen.
And then, one year after moving in with her grandfather and meeting the neighborhood boy Eliwood Pherae who used to act as her grandfather’s caretaker at times, she met Eliwood’s friend—Hector Ostia. The person who would also quickly become one of her best friends.
“Fuck.”
Hector looked up over the whiskey sour he was sipping on. “Huh? Did you forget something?”
“No. I was just thinking, that was five years ago.” At Hector’s absolute confusion (he was furrowing his brow, which was something he only ever did when he had no clue what the hell was going on), Lyn kept speaking. “You made fun of me for paying respect to the sky and earth five years ago.”
Hector groaned, holding his head in his hands. “Please, Lyn, I’m begging you, stop reminding me. I was an ignorant boy back then. I’m much more cultured now, I promise.”
Perhaps she should. After all, he hadn’t been making fun of her for it. He’d simply given her a weird look and asked what she was doing, dipping her fingers into her water bottle like that. But suffice to say, he quickly learned not to ask questions with that tone of voice.
“Here, do you want me to prove it?”
Now that caught her attention. She tilted her head, curiosity building and building until it came spilling out of her. “How?”
“Well, I’ve seen you do it all these years and you’ve told me so much… I could probably try it myself. And, like, I’m not just saying that. I want to try it. I mean, if it’s not, like—”
“Hector. I know you. You’d know better than to do that, and you’d know never to do something like that.” And even though she hated that he felt like he had to ask like that, she knew why. He’d seen what she and Rath had gone through in the one and a half years of high school they’d had together, and had seen even more explicitly what sorts of things they’d had to speak up about in college. “You’re my best friend.”
Saying that, she stretched out her hand. Hector took it, squeezing reassuringly with a smile. “And you’re mine.”
Lyn squeezed back, then let his hand go so he could pick up his drink. “Okay. Go ahead and show me what you’ve learned over all these years so that I can stop making fun of you.”
And somehow, watching as Hector flicked his fingers up at the ceiling and uttered his respects to the sky, she wasn’t surprised that he knew how to do it all flawlessly. She wasn’t surprised that he could even replicate how she said it in Mongolian to the degree where she could actually understand what he was saying—not because he had been her friend all this time, but because he had actually cared all this time.
Hector looked up at her expectantly then, a slightly nervous look on his face. She eyed him for a moment, and then smiled with satisfaction. “Good job. But after you do that, you have to make sure you finish your drink.”
At her praise, he let out a breath of relief before frowning at her—as if he had just processed both what the second part of her sentence and the way she was looking at him implied. “What’re you looking at me like that for? I can finish my drink.”
Humming doubtfully, Lyn took a sip of her drink. “Mhm. Sure.”
Hector narrowed his eyes at her for a moment before shaking his head. “I don’t think you know who you’re talking to, Lyndis.”
“I think I do. I think I’m talking to the guy who tried to shotgun a Whiteclaw, and then passed out after only successfully chugging half of it.”
“I had three shots before that, Lyn.”
“That’s weak. You’re weak.”
“You want to go?”
“Fight me, bitch.”
“Come here, you—”
~ / . / . / ~
“What,” Hector said as soon as she walked through the door to their apartment, “the hell is that.”
Lyn set the case down with a slightly amused smile. “No need to be so dramatic. It’s just a morin khuur.”
“Just? Hello? Are you forgetting that Ninian is coming over tomorrow? We have to make a good impression on her! We can’t just have random instruments thrown around the apartment!”
There he went again. Lyn resisted the urge to roll her eyes and forced herself to just kneel down and start opening the case. “You’re so stupid. She literally just went to study abroad. It’s not like she died and came back to life, completely forgetting her boyfriend’s friends-slash-roommates and only them in the process.”
“Okay, I wasn’t thinking along those lines. I’m just saying that it’s been a while since she’s been over.” Despite his words, he knelt beside her and watched curiously as she slowly wrapped her hand around the base of the morin khuur’s neck and lifted it out of its case.
“I’ll put the morin khuur away when she does get here, then. I’ll put it in my room. It’s not a big deal, seriously.” Lyn stood then, glancing around for somewhere to sit. “Can you get me a chair from the dining room?”
“Sure.” Just like that, with no questions asked, Hector pushed himself up from the ground and disappeared into the dining room. He reemerged a few moments later, carrying the chair easily in one arm.
“Thanks.” Taking a seat with the morin khuur in her lap, all the memories and instincts of playing came back to her. Her father, sitting in the plains with his own morin khuur, playing for all of nature to hear. Her mother, sitting beside her on the log that Lyn used to use as her practice chair and singing along with each familiar tune Lyn’s small and inexperienced hands managed to string out. The cows that Lyn used to herd, the horses that Lyn and her family used to ride on for both transportation and entertainment, the sheep that Lyn used to brush, the birds calling out overhead that Lyn always reached up to grab knowing full well they were kilometers in the air above him, the smell of sharp grass overwhelming her head, the sight of Mongolia filling her mind’s eye—
“Home,” she whispered, and heard Hector’s breath hitch. Lyn opened her eyes to find him watching that expression of pain in his eyes that she was far too used to. It was pain that he felt not for himself, but for her. The kind of pain that he felt when he could see just how much she missed home, and yet could do nothing about it. And as much as she loved knowing that he cared for her, she didn’t want to see that pain.
So she turned her eyes downwards, towards her hands and the morin khuur she was holding.
“...It feels strange to have one in my hands again,” she whispered, her words meant for Hector’s ears and Hector’s ears only.
Hector, in response, moved away from where he was leaning against the wall and instead sat down on the floor beside her. His eyes followed her every action, watching as she pulled the bow back and forth and taking in the way she pressed down on the strings of the morin khuur. Somewhere within it all, his eyes drifted up to look at her face. He didn’t look away. When she dared to meet his eyes, there was a question there.
She set down the bow and began to speak slowly. “My dad’s was stolen. You know, in the… everything. I’ve been looking for one ever since, but I really didn’t expect it to be so hard to find one.” She contemplated what she’d said for a moment, and then shook her head. “No, actually, it wasn’t that hard to find one, but it was hard to find an authentic one. God, the amount of plastic morin khuurs I’ve seen… god. And the fact that they were all trying to pass it off as a real morin khuur is honestly laughable.”
And perhaps someone else just like him would’ve said something along the lines of, “shit, Lyn, I’m so sorry that happened.” But this was Hector, her best friend for five of the six years she had been in the States who had seen every part of her—her grief, her anger, her attempts at humor, her excitement at anything and everything related to positive environmental changes. This was Hector, who had poured his heart out to her after being friends with her for just one month because he understood exactly how she was feeling and he wanted her to know that she was not alone. This was Hector, who had not told her or Eliwood about his own brother’s death because he had not wanted them to worry about something like that the week before graduation.
Instead of saying anything, let alone offering sympathetic words, he just hummed in understanding and gestured for her to keep playing.
So Lyn did. Her hand found the bow again and her fingers found the positioning on the strings and she played, played, played until Eliwood unlocked the apartment door and Ninian announced that she had brought them dinner.
~ / . / . / ~
“Got any plans for summer vacation?” Hector asked her one day in early June over the lunch that he was putting on the side of her desk.
Lyn didn’t look up from her computer screen, instead continuing to type away. “Can’t.”
“What do you mean, ‘can’t’? You can’t come up with any plans for summer break?”
“No, you idiot. It means I can’t have any plans for summer vacation.”
“Why not?”
At that, Lyn turned around in her swivel chair and crossed her arms. “Hector, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m kind of broke.”
“Well, being broke never stopped anyone.”
“It’s stopped people who can’t find an internship or a job, because then you’re really broke. In other words, me.”
“What? Who’s the company that’s not hiring you? I’ll kick their ass.”
“Have fun beating up all of America, then. It’s racists here and sexists there.”
“Oh, yeah. Well, a vacation doesn’t have to be expensive, you know?”
And at that, Lyn bit her tongue, because she knew that if she didn’t, everything would come spilling out—that she didn’t want to take a vacation if it meant having to go somewhere that wasn’t back to Mongolia, that she had saved up what little money earned from her part-time jobs that hadn’t gone to college tuition in hopes that one day, when she left on a vacation trip for the first time since she had been sent to the States, it would be to go back home.
Sure, a vacation didn’t have to be expensive. But a vacation like that was bound to be expensive. And so, vacation had to be expensive.
Hector rested a hand on her shoulder, making Lyn look up at him. He smiled reassuringly at her. “Well, think about it, okay? Eliwood and I might plan a trip, and it wouldn’t be right to just leave you behind. We’ll pay too, if it comes to it. You deserve a break at the very least.”
Sighing softly, Lyn swiveled her chair around and fixed her gaze on her computer screen again. “Okay. I’ll think about it.”
Hector Ostia
3:45 PM
Quiz: Build a Sandwich, and We’ll Tell You Where to Go for Summer Vacation
send me another buzzfeed quiz and i’m blocking your number
LYN NO
~ / . / . / ~
Hector Ostia
12:49 AM
damn that song kind of slaps
shit hector you should’ve told me you could hear it from your room
dude its fine
u know im always awake at ungodly hours in the morning
plus eliwoods not even here
its fine
what song is that
it’s the only chinese song i know by heart
it’s a song my dad used to play for me
oh
there’s a lyric in the song that says us mongolian shepherds were the first owners of the mainland
he always used to tell me that
he said i was destined for everything because we were the first
that if i wanted anything i should go for it
but then later in the song the predecessors disappear and the singer wonders where they went
and i never understood why it always went that way until i lost him
because now it feels like there really is no one
like there’s no one else i can turn to
no one else i can learn from
lyn
u know id do anything for u right?
i know
like anything
i know hector
i know you’d do anything
but sometimes there’s nothing you can do
there’s nothing i can do either
there’s nothing either of us can do
The room went dark as Lyn shut her phone off with a resounding click that sounded like a wolves’ howl echoing through the plains. She didn’t read the message Hector sent her when her phone thundered again, nor did she look up when her door creaked open and when her mattress dipped. She just let herself be swaddled in Hector’s arms and sank into the small amount of comfort she found being there.
But when she checked her phone the next morning, after Hector had groggily rolled out of her bed and given her a bear hug so tight she swore her ribs had broken, she saw them.
Hector Ostia
i guess
but that doesnt mean ill stop trying to find something i can do lyn
And somehow? They made life feel all the more bearable.
(He made life feel all the more bearable.)
~ / . / . / ~
“Hey. I got you something.” The voice came from nowhere, startling Lyn so badly that she felt as though her heart had dropped straight out of her chest. She started, swearing softly as she fumbled to catch her phone.
“Christ, Hector, warn me before you do something like that.” When she met his gaze, though, her fingers went slack again and she felt herself instinctively sit up straight. “What is it? Did something happen?” There was a glint in his eyes that showed a seriousness Hector almost never took on.
“I got you something,” he repeated in the same tone, with the same serious expression.
Yet, at that, Lyn let out a sigh. He’d nearly caused her a heart attack over something that trivial? “Hector, we’ve been friends for four years. I thought you’d know when my birthday is.”
“What, I can’t get a gift for my best friend in the entire world unless it’s her birthday?”
“I mean, you can, but…” Lyn trailed off then, biting her lip. “Sorry. You know I’m not used to people getting me gifts randomly. What is it?”
In response to her question, Hector produced a paper from behind his back with a flourish and presented it to her. Lyn stood up off of the couch and took it into her hands, her eyes scanning the paper. It took less than a second to realize that it was a flight itinerary—a purchased flight, under her name. It must have been for that vacation he had mentioned Eliwood and he were planning.
But when she looked at the flight details, she frowned. Why did they have a layover in Seoul? Where in the world had they planned to take this vacation? And now that she was really looking at this, why was there only one flier?
Then, finally, the final destination captured her undivided attention—ULN. She didn’t need to see anything else. She didn’t need it explained to her. She didn’t need anything else. It was right there in front of her, and all she could do was stare at it out of pure disbelief. Those three letters. ULN. It couldn’t be, could it? Was it real?
No. It couldn’t be.
Could it?
In her turmoil, she barely realized that Hector was speaking. “You’re going home,” he said in the distance, and her body broke out into goosebumps. With trembling fingers she lowered the itinerary, then looked up at him. Then, she threw her arms around him.
“Thank you. Thank you, Hector. You—I—”
“I know.”
Perhaps, in a more extravagant telling, this would’ve been where she realized that her home was here, in his arms and in this apartment with all the friends and memories she had made. Perhaps, in a more fantastical telling, this would’ve been where she looked up and met his gaze and decided for the first and final time that she didn’t need the plane ticket because all she needed was him in her life.
But her home would always be in Mongolia, and her heart would always belong to its people—her people. And so, clutching the flight itinerary so tightly in her hands that she could feel it starting to crinkle and fold, she said the words that had been her dream ever since she had been sent to the States.
“I’m going home.”