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Snoegeim sat quietly on the couch in Aydria’s apartment in the Rising Stones, compiling notes on the differences between the epigraph on each of the Twelve they’d met recently and myriad modern and historical portrayals. The winter sun had set just over a bell prior, but the mythologist had been a tad too fixated on their work to remember that the setting sun also meant they needed to eat something. And soon.
The creak of the stairs heralded the return of the Warrior of Light before she was able to be seen. Aydria shouldered open the door, slinging her pack off haphazardly into the corner after entering. “Seven Hells,” she said, clearly exhausted, “I swear, it’s almost easier to fend off the Twelve than it is to get Jessie and Tataru off my ass about expense reports.”
Snoegeim sprang up from the couch, rushing towards the door to welcome her love back home. “You’re back! You look exhausted,” they said, empathetic.
“Been one of those days,” Aydria groaned, flopping her arms around the much taller roegadyn’s waist in a hug and burying her face in their stomach.
“Just from expense reports?” Snoe asked with their hands around the smaller woman’s head, unbelieving that something so benign could demand so much from the typically inexhaustible energy of the Warrior of Light.
“Well, no, not just those, but when they both catch me at once like that, it gets really hard to wiggle away without actually doing them,” Aydria said, breaking her hug and sliding an arm up the mythologist’s back to pressure Snoegeim down for a quick kiss in greeting. The scholar obliged, bending nearly to their waist to reach the tiny miqo’te’s lips.
“You eat anything yet?” Aydria asked after they parted, shrugging off her coat and moving to hang it up on her hook next to the door. In response, Snoe’s stomach gurgled loudly, reminding them to please eat something.
Aydria smiled. “I’ll take that as ‘I forgot to eat all day again,’” she teased.
Snoegeim flushed, a little embarrassed. “There’s just been so much new data to go over after your second bout with the Twelve! Once I got into it, time completely slipped my grasp. It’s all so interesting; especially for members of the pantheon like Halone, whose associations in our myth and their recorded charge are completely unrelated! I’ve been poring over scattered Ishgardian records most of the day, trying to see how exactly her charge over glaciers and ‘imbuing men with constancy and tranquility’ turned into her being so associated with violent conflict.”
Aydria had just finished wrenching off her boots, listening the whole while. “Given my experiences with the Ishgardian clergy, I kind of doubt it’s written down plainly - at least not anywhere official, anyway. Want me to put in a word with Aymeric about it; see if he can get you access to the non-public records?”
“I - yes, of course! That would be immensely helpful!” Snoe answered enthusiastically, astonished for the briefest of moments that Aydria could so nonchalantly suggest asking the undoubtedly very busy leader of an entire nation. “You’re sure he wouldn’t mind? There must be a thousand things more important than -”
“Oh please,” Aydria interrupted, waving them off, “knowing him, he’ll take any excuse to get out from behind his stately mountains of paperwork to help with something interesting for a change.”
Snoe’s stomach gurgled again, as if begging the scholar to please, feed it.
Aydria chuckled. “Why don’t you head downstairs; grab us some food from the Seventh Heaven, and I’ll get set up to analyze some of the aetheric data we captured.”
Snoegeim nodded. “Sounds great to me! Any requests for what to eat?”
“I’d say ‘surprise me’ but the last time I asked a Sharlayan to surprise me with food I got to test an even worse iteration on archon loaf, so, uh, I dunno, a burger?” Aydria replied, noncommittal.
“I still fail to see what’s wrong with archon loaf; it’s perfectly nutritious food! But burger it is,” Snoe noted dutifully.
Aydria walked across the apartment to a cabinet and began rifling around in it for computing equipment. “The fact it’s perfectly nutritious is exactly the problem with it,” she complained, digging out an adapter for Sharlayan transcriber cartridges for use later.
Snoe shook their head and laughed. “I guess it’s not for everyone,” they said, conceding the point while slipping on their shoes. “I’ll be right back!”
The tall woman slipped out the door and thumped down the stairs rapidly, off to pick up a meal for the evening. Aydria cleared off a small section of the table by the couch and set the transcriber adapter down in it, taking off her magitek wristlet and connecting the two together for access to the data. Finally home and able to truly get comfortable, she flopped herself down on the aging couch and promptly began to remove her tough duck cloth pants, tossing them over her head without a care towards where she’d discarded her pack earlier.
As she removed the clasp at the end of her hanging braid and began to untwirl the strands, her mind wandered back to years ago, in this same room - many nights spent doing research over the Seventh Heaven’s various greasy fares, struggling to nail down just the right frequency for the aetheric siphon, or poring over tomes trying to find more scraps of information on blades of Light. Nearly eight years had come and gone since then, and it’d been a long, sometimes strange journey to bring her to where she was now. She undid the hairtie at the back of her head, and began to work her fingers through the plaits that had been tied back. “Has your journey been good? Has it been worthwhile?” echoed Venat’s words to her in her mind.
The telltale creak of the stairs signaled the return of Snoegeim, a huge brown bag in their arms full of food hampering their ability to open the door easily. She awkwardly nudged it back shut with her foot, kicking off her shoes as it clicked closed. “I figured you’re probably pretty hungry, so I got you two burgers, and I got a little experiment they’ve got going on where they fold over a Garlean pizza for myself. Don’t know if it’ll be good, but it certainly sounded interesting!”
“Ooooh,” Aydria said, intrigued, “I’m stealing a bite of that to try.”
“Also,” Snoe said with a growing smile as they struggled to find a free surface for the bag, “I got a little special treat for you.”
“No way, they still had some?!” Aydria exclaimed, jumping up from the couch and trying to get a peek into the bag - a struggle, when it was in Snoe’s arms several ilms above her head.
“Only two slices, as luck would have it, but I got us both of them,” Snoegeim said with a grin as they reached into the bag and revealed a small tin with snurbleberry pie in it.
“Fuck, yes!” Aydria nearly cheered, the Seventh Heaven’s snurbleberry pie being a long-time favorite of hers. “Here, uh,” she fussed with a few stray papers on the top of the cabinet, stacking them a little haphazardly and making room for the bag of food, “can put it there.”
She retrieved her waxpaper-wrapped meal from the bag and plopped herself on the couch, not bothering with a proper plate when there was a perfectly functional “plate” already covering her food. As she started with the wrapper, she remembered, she hadn’t gotten anything to drink and set the food aside, putting it dangerously close to the corner of the table before standing and going back to the cabinets, opening a different drawer this time. Her wavy black white-tipped hair fell around her face as she fumbled about in the back of the dark drawer until she found the familiar shape of the glass bottle she was looking for.
She pulled out a bottle of her own distillation of wine triumphantly, made with the same grapes as the wine Moenbryda had brought along with her to Eorzea all those years ago. She popped the cork off the bottle and grabbed a clean glass from a hanger bolted to the wall. “You want a glass, Snoe?”
“Hm? Oh! Yes, please!” the mythologist answered around a mouthful of pizza from the couch where they’d ensconced themselves once again in tomes and monographs. Aydria poured two glasses of the deep red drink for the both of them before setting the bottle aside and carefully journeying back to join her girlfriend on the couch. She sat down at the much larger woman’s side, leaning over to hand them their glass in exchange for a kiss. Their lips met softly, and with it, Aydria finally began to feel relaxation set in - the drain of a long day melting away with a loving partner to rest and recharge with.
“I love you, Snoe,” she said simply as they parted, the words as ever not really capturing how she really felt.
“I love you, too!” Snoegeim replied cheerily, breaking away and taking a sip at their glass before returning to eating and studiously poring over their books.
Aydria sipped her own wine, the sweet alcohol washing over her tongue as she drank. She set her glass down, retrieving a wrapped burger from the table with her freed hand and using the other to fire up her data interface to being her own analysis of the aetheric data they’d captured from the phantom realm of the Twelve.
Yes, she thought with even more conviction as when she’d originally answered Venat in Elpis, it’s been more than worthwhile.