Work Text:
Midnight is going home.
Lena isn’t quite sure why this is being brought up to her. She knows Midnight, or at least, she knows of him—her being one of Rhodes’s top mental health therapists, an accidental occupation if ever there was one, has led to her knowing virtually everyone on the landship at least by name—but it's not like she has any real connection to the man. As far as she has heard, he’s even a fairly sane person: minimal traumas, depressions, the sort of thing virtually everyone here has that necessitate the work she does. Scummy personality, sure—Orchid rags on him regularly when she drops by every other week—but… intact. Functional. Healthy. He has nothing to do with Lena. And yet…
It's Flamebringer who raised the topic. The tall Sarkaz man is her best friend, and sometimes more than that, but he also has minimal contact with Midnight. She furrows her brow. Did they become friends on a recent combat op? It's technically possible, but Flamebringer is typically less talkative and friendly the further away he gets from her and her garden, so that seems a long shot. Most likely, he heard something from Podenco, who heard something from Popukar, who heard something from Orchid, who actually heard it from Midnight himself. The combination of unexpected info from an unexpected source and the lack of clarity she has about the communication process leading up to this annoys Lena. There’s a reason she runs ninety percent of the garden herself.
Lena eyes the tall, toned man beside her with suspicion. She knows him well enough to know that whatever he’s trying to do, he means well. She knows he cares. But why this? Flamebringer returns her gaze steadily, a hint of his usual wry grin at the edge of his lips, but curiosity and concern in his eyes. Concern? She’s beginning to get frustrated but can’t quite put her finger on why. What is any of this? What does she care about Midnight? Why should she care about someone who is hardly even an acquaintance going— Oh.
The realization dawns on her with a sudden wave of nausea. She has built so much here. A career, a life, this entire garden, built from scratch on her own suggestion, mostly by her own hands, supplying hundreds of people with the fruit, vegetables, herbs and anything else they need that she can give. Built so much and gave so much so she wouldn’t have time to think about—
“Lena!”
His voice in her ear and his hand on her back draws her back into reality. She’s doubled over, squatting, no, cowering in front of her friend’s cultivated bed of rhodanthe blooms. Her skin still crawls from the panic, and her face burns from humiliation. It has been years since her garden home has felt so claustrophobic.
“Lena, are you okay?”
She tries to face him, tries to blink away the tears and reassert control. Nothing remains of his usual demeanor. It’s all concern and genuine care for her wellbeing. She knows he cares; she really does. She also knows he cannot possibly understand how she feels, cannot possibly understand the illness and insecurity she’s been working so hard to keep hidden, cannot possibly comprehend the pure shame of having lost control of herself in front of someone for even a moment. She looks into his eyes, and for just a moment, in the confusion in his eyes, she recognizes a hint of another man entirely—a man whom she definitely cannot face. Not now. Not yet.
She is not okay, and Flamebringer doesn’t try to stop her from leaving.
---
The setting sun reflects off the deck of the landship and glares like the rippling waves back at home, and Lena regrets coming up here. She needed air, she’d thought, but as is the case far too often, the air out in the barrenlands feels less clean and refreshing than the air back in her garden. Her nausea has fully subsided now, and she is left with nothing but shame, regret, and the occasional gale of dust and gravel in her face. The wind laughs at her efforts to compose herself, just as he had at her efforts to find herself, to express and establish herself at home—not without warmth, not even without love, but without understanding.
Her gardens, her first ones, had been less well ventilated than her modern efforts—smaller rooms, densely lined with handpicked vegetation, the air thick and heavy with their scents. She’d mostly chosen flowers, but she could sniff out and work with anything with a significant enough smell to catch her interest. While not every one of her experiments was truly a success—it did not go down well when she’d been discovered cultivating cannabis in her teens—she’s learned so much. About the craft she loved, about the life around her, about herself. And yet… He never saw anything. Her hobby, as it would be referred to, was appreciated, encouraged even. It was great for a girl to know her way around perfume and the garden, he would say, but business and science were not to be a life for a young lady of Minos.
He never saw a thing beyond his expectations, seemingly no matter what she did. When she’d first tried to explain the things that weren’t working correctly in her brain when she was just a girl, he had confused her newly developed difficulty in holding onto joy and increasing emotional instability with a mere passing grief at her mother’s illness. When a classmate invited himself into her garden in a misguided attempt to hit on her and she responded by breaking his nose and getting herself suspended, he dismissed her out of hand, laughing with the boy’s family, “You know how girls are”. They might, but she did not. When she tried to explain that she didn’t think she wanted to get married and live life as a Minoan housewife, that she might not want to get married at all—and especially that she wasn’t sure she wanted to be married to a man— he wouldn’t even talk to her for a week. She growls to herself at the thought and kicks a stray chunk of gravel off the deck of the ship.
Home, huh? The warm wind kisses her cheek. She doesn’t… she doesn’t hate her family. Not truly. They’re difficult. They don’t understand her very often. Even as a teen, she spoke a different language from them, and despite being considerably better adjusted as an adult, the world she lives in would be entirely foreign to her parents. Lena wonders if her father believes in mental illness yet. With how Terran geopolitics have been trending since the fall of Kazdel, even he must have become familiar with depressed and traumatized people, right?
Something sparkles on the horizon. It must be a mobile city on the march, realistically, but it glimmers like the sea off her hometown. It has been almost 15 years since she was in Minos. Since her departure, she has made friends with other Minoans at Rhodes, brought the natural scents of Minos to people as far away as Victoria, and even made peace with the thought of loving boys. She could fit right back in if she wanted to. But… does she want to?
---
As much as she has calmed down, the journey back to her quarters is still done with her tail between her legs and her head downcast. At least a few people had witnessed either her breakdown in the garden or her flight outside, and she would prefer to avoid similar attention on her way back to her life. She slinks through the corridors; ducks past the cafeteria; narrowly avoids bumping into Pallas, who already knows the story—Lena hasn’t actually listened to the messages left for her yet, but there’s only one good reason for a gossip-bird like her to be blowing up Lena’s phone like this—and, at last, sneaks back into the convalescence garden.
Her garden.
Her space.
The scents of her plants surround her almost as soon as the door closes behind her. One polite sniff. A deep breath. She allows her tail to relax and stretch out again, and keeps moving towards her quarters at the heart of the garden with a restored spring to her step. Nothing in this room is out of her control. Even when Podenco misplaces something—the young girl tries her best, but she’s still so, so far away from taking over as head gardener—it rarely takes more than a few moments of attention to right those wrongs and get things back just the way they should be. Usually.
Besides their unusual location, far from the usual dorms and surrounded by green, Lena’s personal quarters are not that different from most. Space enough for two or three people to reside in comfortably if necessary, provided said people spend most of their time elsewhere and mostly use it for sleeping. But she lives there alone, of course. Just her, a good teapot, and the gardens around.
Ideal.
As it should be.
If she had had a less stressful day, she may have noticed the unusual fact that the lights were already on in her room sooner..
“Hey,” a familiar voice calls out from her couch. She doesn’t immediately turn to look.
“Listen, I’m sorry about earlier. It was a stupid thing to bring up, I just thought…”
Lena looks at the tall man gingerly moving towards her, trying to appear composed, but giving half the impression of a scared puppy.
“Look, it doesn’t matter what I thought. I hurt you, and that’s what matters. I’m sorry.”
In truth, she hadn’t needed to forgive him. It’s not like he actually did anything wrong. But she accepted the apology anyway, and the hug offered afterwards.
“I got you a fowlbeast kebab from the cafeteria,” he starts without breaking the embrace. “I figured you haven’t eaten… it should still be warm enough? It hasn’t been long, but I’ve been lightly heating it—”
She shuts him up with a quick kiss. Thank you, Flamebringer. The first words she has said in hours pass her lips. Her voice isn’t as strong as she would like, but it will do. She sits down next to him on the couch after grabbing her food. The kebab is less hot and more lukewarm, but it’s hers, and it will do for now.
“I also got us a movie to watch, if you like. Got it on personal recommendation from Nian. Something about a metal monster attacking Lungmen—”
She doesn’t let him finish that sentence either, shutting him up by leaning back against him. That will be fine, she says. The movie is bad, as expected of a Nian recommendation, but it doesn’t really matter. She looks up at the tall man beside her, clearly more invested in the movie than she is. Her man? Sometimes. Right now, for sure. She has him. He doesn’t always understand everything about her, but… he will try to support her in all the ways he can. She has her garden, her comfortable room, her friends and her life at Rhodes. She has a home.
One day she will face the life she left behind.
But not now.
She has everything she needs right here.