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Estellise "Estelle" Sidos Heurassein had learned to move through the world softly.
In the court, she’d learned poise. Among healers, she’d learned gentleness. With Brave Vesperia, she’d learned resolve. Her magic was deliberate, her speech careful, her smiles earned. And still, underneath the curated calm of years spent learning when to speak and when to silence herself, she always carried an ache to feel something real, something uncontainable.
She didn’t know that ache had a name.
Not until it entered the hall like a thunderclap in boots too loud for marble.
Rita Mordio didn’t wait to be introduced. She didn’t lower her voice. She didn’t dress for the meeting. She was the meeting.
“The formula isn’t unstable—it’s evolving,” Rita said, arms crossed, eyes flared.
The room blinked. Estelle didn’t.
She watched Rita like the first fire she’d ever seen. Dangerous. Necessary. Unruly. Vital.
And just like that—
She crashed.
---
After that, everything came in pieces too big to name.
She started volunteering for guild liaison duties—especially the ones involving the Archive of Echoes. She told herself it was practical. Strategic. She had healing expertise that might be useful.
But it was always the same thing.
Rita. Ink-stained fingers. Sarcastic muttering. The smell of scorched parchment and violet tea.
And Estelle, with her warmth and sweetness, quietly becoming part of Rita’s atmosphere.
“You don’t have to keep showing up,” Rita grumbled one evening, not looking up from a sprawl of spell diagrams.
“But I want to,” Estelle replied, placing a cup beside her. “Interesting, isn’t it?”
“Infuriating,” Rita muttered—but she drank the tea.
It was always like that. Sharp words. Soft silences between them that neither of them dared name.
Until the night the Archive broke.
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The formula at the heart of the chamber had been stable for months.
Then, one night, Estelle woke with her heart racing didn't know the reason why.
She dressed without thinking. Didn’t send a message. Didn’t alert Brave Vesperia. Just ran.
The Archive was lit in red. Alarm spells spiraling. Heat blooming from the ground like a heartbeat gone wrong. At the center—Rita.
On her knees. Hands pressed to the floor. Magic leaking from her like blood.
Estelle crossed the room in seconds. Dropped beside her.
“Rita! Rita! what happened?”
“It was a sequence gone wrong” she breathed. “It turned on me. Thought I could contain it.”
Estelle’s hand was already on her chest, casting a healing spell as fierce. Already worried for Rita, she said:
“You should have called me! ”
“I didn’t think you’d come,” Rita said, lips cracking in a crooked half-smile.
Estelle didn’t blink. Didn’t pause.
“Of course I'll come. I'll always do.”
“Why?”
The spell pulsed. The air shimmered.
Estelle didn’t mean to say it. But maybe she’d been meaning say it all along.
“Because I crashed into you, and I never got back up.”
And in the stillness that followed, Rita stared at her—not stunned, not alarmed. Just… seen. Like a part of her had always known this moment would come.
“Then let me crash into you too,” Rita whispered.
And she reached for Estelle’s hand.
Their fingers touched.
And the chaos around them faded.
They spent the night in the Archive. Estelle curled beside Rita as she recovered, scribbling formula corrections and yawning mid-incantation. Rita leaned against her, more quiet than usual, but she was not afraid.
Not anymore.
They didn’t call it anything. Didn’t rush into labels. Didn’t kiss.
But every spell they cast the next day glowed brighter. Every ritual hummed warmer. The Archive knew something had shifted.
Because they didn’t fall in love.
They crashed.
Unstoppable. Unforgivable. Undeniable.