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How do you mourn someone you didn't really know?
It's not that Tannis didn 't know her at all , it's just that- she's not sure what it is, really. That is something she doesn't like, this lingering swamp of uncertainty that she must wade through now. She could ask one of the other Raiders about it, but they've all seemed very swept up in their own grieving practices. Some of them crying (ugh), some of them fighting (more understandable), some of them simply apathetic to loss by now (does she fall into this category?).
She's not sure if she does. When it happened, watching from a screen thousands of miles away, her heart had stopped for a moment. Her breath had choked itself off and for a moment even her ever-racing mind had screeched to a halt. If everyone else hadn't acted the same way, she would have thought it an elaborate hallucination. It shouldn't have happened . But it did and now Tannis was left with an aftermath she had no idea how to navigate.
What made it worse was that the moment she returned to the medical bay, she realized she wasn't alone. Ava was sitting under one of the desks, arms wrapped around her knees and her head down. Every once in a while there was a soft sound coming from her, a sob if Tannis was willing to hazard a guess. Eventually, the girl looked up at her, face twisted into an angry sneer. Tannis didn't know what to say and so they just stared at one another for a few moments. The anger faltered and then broke apart, like an overweighted bridge.
"I knew they'd look for me in my room first." She said, like that explained everything.
"Why here?"
Ava didn't have an answer for that.
Idly, Tannis considered turning around and leaving the girl to her misery. She obviously wanted to be alone. But…being around Lilith and the Crimson Raiders had left an awful stain on her rational thought. It poked and prodded, telling her, she's just a kid who lost the most important person in her life, she shouldn't have to suffer through that by herself . Tannis knew what it was like to go through the most traumatic days of your life utterly, unfathomably alone. Would having someone else there have made things better? If she was being honest with herself, she had no clue. But she was a scientist at the end of the day and any good question could be answered with a little daring and a willingness to try in the face of the unknown, if only to see what the results were.
So, with that thought in mind, Tannis found herself wedged under the desk beside Ava. There wasn't a huge amount of space and she rather disliked the feeling of her jacket bumping against Ava's…but it was producing results already. The girl recoiled and boggled incredulously at her.
"The hell are you doing?"
Tannis considered this, before answering, "I think it's quite clear that I am sitting under a desk. As are you."
"That's not-" She grimaced and muttered something so low that Tannis couldn't quite make it out, "I meant , why are you sitting here? I thought you didn't like people."
"I don't."
"Then fucking buzz off."
"Do you really want me to leave?"
She would've, if Ava wanted that. Making an effort to get through to someone didn't negate boundaries and Tannis knew well enough what it was like to have someone push too far. Ava glared at her for a few moments, looking quite like an angry, feral kitten, before deflating completely. She curled in on herself once again, leaving Tannis only slightly glad for the lack of eye contact.
"I guess you're better than the rest. You aren't going to lecture me, are you?"
Tannis frowned, "What would I lecture you for?"
"Dunno, uh, for…for not doing this whole grief thing right. I should be happy I knew her at all and celebrate her life, or some shit. Talk about how good of a person she was."
"Is that what everyone else is doing?"
"Some of them."
"I don't think there's a right or wrong way to grieve." She said, after a moment of contemplation, "It's not quantifiable scientifically, which I despise by the way, thus there are many ways to approach it. Different people produce different results when they go through the loss of someone."
"Should've known you'd have an answer like that."
Tannis glanced over, "Was that not what you wanted to hear?"
"I don't-" Ava broke off to wipe at her face roughly, "I've got no clue what I want to hear. I've got no clue what I'm supposed to feel ."
To this, Tannis had no response. Her own emotions were a riptide beneath the water's surface. Every once in a while her heart would clench for no discernable reason. A headache had sprouted shortly after the Vault Hunters returned without Maya and it hadn't left, no matter the painkillers she took. It coalesced behind her eyes painfully, giving the distinct urge that they wanted to cry, which was ridiculous and juvenile. There was no reason for any of this- except grief.
She thought, idly in the lull of the conversation, of Maya. Her heart clenched again, but she ignored it. The way she moved with a sort of fluid grace that Tannis could never even hope to manage and, quite frankly, still kind of chalked up to Siren powers rather than a human ability. The way her blue-lipsticked smile would curve up more on one side than the other, especially when she thought something was amusing. The way people gravitated around her and listened like the words falling off her lips would mean the difference between life and death. Her heart clenched again, but it was getting hard to ignore.
After a few moments, Ava spoke up again, “I’m so fucking angry.”
“At?”
“Everything! I’m mad at the stupid Calypso Twins for hounding after us, I’m mad at the Vault Hunters for not protecting her.” The words tumbled out like a dam breaking, “Do you wanna know how angry I am at myself? I’m the reason Maya died and I don’t fucking deserve to live when she should still be here. I’d blow my brains out right now, if it would change anything, but I can’t even do that! Because she died to protect me and it would all be for nothing if I turned around and offed myself.”
Tannis flinched, so unused to social interaction, but blisteringly aware she needed to say something, anything .
Ava continued, “Most of all, I’m angry at her. I know we didn’t always get along, but…she said she wasn’t going anywhere. She knew I had no one else and she promised she’d be here as long as I needed her and she lied . It’s been two fucking hours and I can’t handle this already. How am I supposed to live with this? I want to throw up.”
“Please don’t throw up on my floor.”
“That’s all you have to say?” Ava asked incredulously.
“You know I’m not good at this.” She pointed out clinically, “If you wanted to be comforted, you should’ve hidden in your room. Now, if you want to yell at someone or rant, I’m rather good at tuning others out. You may proceed to be angry here.”
Instead of any response that Tannis expected, the girl started laughing, of all things. She kept going, until the laughs tailed into a breathless sort of sobbing. Ava sat there bawling her eyes out and she hadn’t the foggiest idea of how to react to that. After a moment, she reached out a tentative hand and patted the girl on the shoulder a few times. She had a feeling that the grief had spiraled into a manic energy, slipping from anger to anguish as easily as one slipped into a pair of well-worn shoes. If she pushed hard enough, it could probably switch back again, but Tannis wasn’t sure which of those emotions was preferable.
Eventually, her throat must have grown sore, because the sobbing reduced itself to these pathetic little sniffling sounds. Ava laid one side of her face on her arm and looked over at Tannis. She’d never been particularly good at reading other humans, but she could tell when someone wanted to ask her a question. The tears ran ugly tracks down red-rimmed eyes, watching her with an intensity that made her skin itch. It reminded her of Maya, for some ungodly reason and Tannis found that she didn’t like the comparison.
“What?”
Ava looked away before speaking, “How are you handling this so…well? You knew her as well as Lilith did, didn’t you?”
Did she? Tannis rifled through her memories with a frown; a sequence of quests and conversations and companionable silences. How do one quantify how well they knew someone? Lilith and Maya talked all the time, even many planets apart. Tannis had not been physically around Maya in years and only called her up when she had an inquiry about Sirenhood that Lilith couldn’t answer. And yet, despite all of the time and space, she had been genuinely happy to have Maya working with them again. Tannis was so rarely enamored by others' presences that she hadn’t even recognized the joy until three days after Maya boarding Sanctuary III.
“I didn’t know her very well.” She said after a beat.
“She mentioned you…a lot. Just as much as Lilith and her other Vault Hunter buddies.”
This Tannis couldn’t fathom, “Why?”
“Mostly when she was teaching me something super boring. Like, uh, hell I don’t even know. Something a scientist would think is important.” There was a slight pause and then quieter, “I should’ve listened better.”
“You’re a child. They tend not to like listening- which is why I usually don’t bother with them at all.”
“Thanks.” Ava said dryly.
“When you say that I’m handling this well, what do you mean?”
“That you haven’t cried, like, at all. You’re not mad at everyone. You’re not holing up somewhere on your own. How can you just be so calm about this?”
Tannis considered the question, “I…do not feel calm.”
“You sure look fine.”
“If I was, I’d have gone back to my work already.” She said ruefully, “I have so much to do and I can’t focus on any of it, because every few minutes I remember something about her. Things I’d wanted to ask her and things she did. It’s ridiculous, I hate it.”
Ava watched her with narrowed eyes for a moment and then said, “Like what?”
Tannis sat and wracked her brains for an example, which wasn’t as hard as she would have liked it to be. The image of Maya leaning back on a table and smiling stupidly at her popped to the forefront of her mind, crystal clear and tangible enough that she almost thought she could blink and it would be true. That the Siren would be standing right there watching her.
“Why did she always start smiling when she looked at me?” The words fell out in a tumble, just like Ava’s had before, “That infuriating little smirk- she didn’t smile like that at other people. Why didn’t I hate talking to her, of all people? Why, out of anywhere she could go, did she choose to read her books in my lab so often?”
When she glanced over, Ava was staring at her with wide eyes. She wasn’t exactly sure what it was, this clear revelation that she was having, but it left Tannis feeling sorely lost. Tapping her fingers along her boots in a haphazard rhythm, she returned to staring into the middlespace and imagining Maya smiling back at her.
“I’ve asked Lilith, but she always dodged the question. I would’ve gone straight to Maya, but back then I had little control over the nosebleeds I get talking to people. Still, why, when she boarded the ship, was my first thought her hair looks nice long ? When have I ever cared about something like that?”
Ava stared at her owlishly, “You liked Maya.”
“We were colleagues.”
“Maya liked you .”
“Yes, like I said, we were-”
“No!” Ava pointed at her chest, “I mean, back on Athenas I might have eavesdropped on Maya a bit- for starters. But I heard her talking about these ‘dates’ she missed on Pandora. How she missed being able to go sit in the same room as them and just read and exist together. The closest she’d felt to someone in a long time.”
The implication of the word ‘date’ did not escape Tannis. In fact, it made heat begin to pool childishly on her cheeks. She cycled back through those memories carefully, inspecting each one for Maya’s behavior. They’d had days like that often and back then Tannis had often been put on edge by the way those silver-blue eyes would just…watch her sometimes. Only ever from the corner of her eye and when she thought Tannis was too absorbed with her experiments to take note of them.
“Maya liked me…” She tried the words out, rolling them in her mouth like they were foreign objects.
“No wonder she brought you up, like, all the time.”
Something about the way Ava said that made her heart do a somersault. It was a painful motion and Tannis suddenly found it rather hard to breathe, trying to suck in air useless for a few moments. It was…odd to consider there might have been a mutual attraction there. Tannis had known from the moment they met that Maya was pleasing to the eye, ludicrously attractive one might say. While it might have been a rather annoying turn of events, she knew why she found it so hard to focus around the Siren, chemically speaking. It had always been there, but she’d never been inclined to do anything about it. She always had so much to do, anyways.
But…her thoughts begged to run errant with the idea of Maya thinking she was attractive in turn. She didn’t want to indulge them, not really, but it was hard to fight the picture. The way Maya’s eyes crinkled in the corners when she laughed at something Tannis took too literally. The way she’d immediately stopped by the medical bay to say hello, even after years apart. The way she’d said “Stay safe, Tannis” just moments before leaving on a mission she would never return from. Her heart started beating with a vengeance, hard kicks that brought pinpricks of tears to the corners of her eyes.
“I think I loved her.” She choked out.
Ava’s face contorted and then, ever-so-carefully, she laid her head on Tannis’ shoulder. There wasn’t anything that could be said in the wake of a confession like that. She couldn’t even begin to fight the tide it brought, the tears dripping hot trails down her cheeks and over her chin. She’d loved Maya, in her own, weird way. Maya had liked her, in her easy, quiet way. And neither of them had ever said so to the other, at least not aloud. There would never again be a chance to say so.
“I loved her.” She said again, “And I never told her.”
Ava whispered, “I never told her that she was like another mom to me. I loved her too.”
___
After Ava gets her rightful powers, but before they move on to stop Tyreen, Ava wobbles over to her. For a moment, Tannis worries that something has gone wrong with the transfer and that her body isn’t handling them well. But there is a bright, easiness to the smile on Ava’s face, something that none of them have seen even a fraction of since Maya died. Tannis holds an arm out and Ava uses it to stabilize herself. There are tears running down her face and she’s hiccuping out sobs like they're going out of style. She looks up at Tannis and the circles under her eyes disappear.
“She knows.” Ava says breathlessly.
And, for once, Tannis doesn’t have to ask what she means.
She knows.