Work Text:
When Mehen receives the news Arelyn vanished into thin air while visiting the Crown Prince, he has to clamp down on his expression while asking for further details. It offers him no relief to hear the literalness of that statement despite all-but-confirming the Archmage was the one to take her.
He dismisses the messenger.
Out-of-body, somehow, he brings himself back to his office. He locks the door—the normal mechanism and an additional one, to keep out anyone but. Valer who isn't here. Mehen stares blankly.
Bastard. Terrible father. Terrible lord, too. Remembering one of the last things Arel wanted before she departed being to see him feels like ripping at an already open wound.
It's not over, but he knows his eyes look vacant. There's a truly damning sense of helplessness against …all of this. Despite the hope held in his heart, it became apparent over the years from the very day Arelyn was entrusted to him that the tendency of chronic ailments was to be mitigated, endured, and accepted rather than quite attain a complete cure. His abilities to do anything more substantial for Arelyn's condition had long hit their limit. Did he fail her? She's not even in his hands, now. What can he do. What can he do.
His work, he supposes. As he's been for the past however-many years, he sardonically thinks. Better something than nothing.
..Mehen can't kick himself into gear. The sun is still streaming in from the window, and he can't bear to do much of anything at all.
There's a paranoia: what if someone else took her? He sends a missive to the Sky Tower. Mail piles at their doorstep. No response is sent back.
He sleeps like shit.
That tends to be the case when he's stressed. Really, he hasn't been sleeping well since Valer vanished. Still no sign of him reported by his eyes and ears. The Regent's network identically turned up with nothing. They'll have to stretch the search further. He wishes he could care less, but the heart wants what it wants, and his peace of mind takes a toll.
None of the actual Halbern family members are here, anymore. Not Lady Sione, not Valer, nor Arelyn.
The pigment he taps into the underside of his eyes hides away the dark circles he's begun to sport, once more. Nausea rolls over him at the increasingly recurrent notion he will, or has outlived Arel. At least he's had years to detach himself from missing Valer and objectively his liege can handle himself, of his concerns: death is usually not one of them (…..Even then, he dreads never finding him. Never having his lord appear in the remainder of his lifetime. If only to resent him for the rest of their years, with that promise he made to their daughter binding him in place.)
Mehen takes a deep breath, in… and out. Him and Lady Sione were comparatively distant, firmly somewhere within the bounds of benefactor and beneficiary, but he finds himself mourning her again while yearning for the other two.
The new grief digs up the old, he wryly thinks, tilting his head back and blinking away the start of tears so he doesn't ruin the concealer he just put on. He hasn't applied setting powder, yet. And he still needs to comb his hair.
Quietly arranged for this afternoon, he planned to meet with Empress Azeni. He can at least show her a decent face, though she won't be fooled in the slightest.
His hands feel like lead.
Disconnected from sensation, he ties off his hair ribbon.
No line of contact. He can't get over that, with his lord.
His atrophied belief in the boy who saved him is alive, just barely. 'Secretive' comes with Halbern on the label. He's privy to more than most, but nowhere near all.
It drives him mad how there's always something deeper.
His senses glaze over the thrum of conversation, leaving the sounds of violins piercing to his ears as they waltz with the other instruments.
Mehen can't help it. A side effect of grieving his little girl maybe-alive-maybe-dead as it turns out, is an inability to listen to the orchestra without the phantom feeling of small hands unrepentantly clambering into his ribcage and squeezing the bones into shrapnel. It's fit for the imperial palace. A masterclass performance (and there's nothing wrong with it, he grounds mentally over the rise and fall of his chest he's commandeering to keep in time with the pragmatic tempo).
It's different. Maybe it's the make. He doesn't know how closely Ether mimicked varnished wood or catgut. Maybe it's the method. He doesn't know how exactly Arel picked up the violin, either. It seems in line with classical training, and he doesn't doubt her genius ..but Mehen knows (knew) her hands. She lacked the characteristic toughened finger pads before suddenly revealing herself as a little maestra, adjusting her body to the instrument as if intrinsic, something that should slot into place. There was a quality to the way Arel handled her violin that tipped his intuition to insist, 'this is years and years of dedicated practice at play'—but he had no desire to interrogate her (though the childcare team were certainly questioned), and simply chalked it up to a Halbern oddity.
Who is he kidding, anyways. It's the person.
A useless trifle clarified that has nowhere to go. To stay or to depart, for somewhere familiar or to wander: it's all uncomfortable. Home is empty, and hardly a place to 'return'.
..But.. Mehen can't abandon it either.
He folds what he's longing for under his lapel.
The days amalgamate together, without the reference point of his little one. He withdraws from external appearances in entirety. Unbroken, remains the monotony of work, even with the novelty of El Sionel. It becomes difficult to feel the passage of time, their routines of little check-ins and bedtime stories upheaved.
Mehen misses her voice.
He finds himself standing outside her door—a menacing self-frustration looming with him—unable to enter, in morbid parallel to before he was declared "Mom" by Arelyn.
…
It's how Lena finds him.
She's joined Dylan in helping him handle his tasks, recently. Mehen, contrary to his usual cutthroat efficiency, held off on reassigning the childcare team. Some form of denial persisting until last week. Erne and Amber have similarly applied their specialties elsewhere in the estate. Yuni retains the responsibility of managing and safeguarding Arelyn's medicine.
Inadvertently, he's gotten significantly closer to them.
Proof: "You look terrible."
"As do you," he returns the shoddy greeting, taking no offense.
The group has grown somewhat resistant to his harsher expressions (like the heavy scowl he had on, until just now). Perhaps in part due to the direct orders he gave after the medicine-stealing-maid-suicide incident, Yuni's bravery especially surged—doubly determined to give Arelyn her medicine no matter what, his endorsement being a cherry on top. Between their time together and the emotional aptitudes he evaluated them for, they've picked up on the way his anger spills out of despair and gorges itself on worry.
It's closer to empathy than fear, as of late.
He observes Lena like a mirror: a put-together appearance and the melancholy that can't be hidden. Something unkempt noticeably makes it through both their veneers.
Tired of the sight, he lets his head gingerly thud against the wood, door handle still unturned. Antique and cold. She pats his shoulder, before resting her back on the same barrier.
With intentful lightness in her factual tone, "If we do manage to open this door and see the empty bed—we're going to sob our eyes out again, you know."
He asks the doctor for sleeping aids.
Mehen brushes his hair with a frequency desperate for normalcy. Strands begin to fray and split at the ends. He has to start keeping tally to curb himself and do something else.
His presence in the sunroom becomes erratic. Sometimes he spends the entire day there, sometimes he can't bear to exist in it—oppressively reminded of memories under the apathetic light.
A handful of days, the heartbreak paralyzes him so badly he can't get out of bed. His snuffed spirit trapped in a mass of pillows and blankets that feel like a grotesque coffin of filth, disgusting complacency, and guilt rather than a semblance of comfort.
The moment he breaks is an arbitrary one, having been brittle for months on end.
Mehen has to scramble and scrap the document his tears leaked onto. The papers underneath are blotted. He'll rewrite them when he stops crying.
—Except he doesn't. Agitation itches at the way his body won't stop weeping, his uncooperative mind already given up on damming the waterworks. There's a level of dissociation as he waits for the flow to halt.
Something different is necessary after that.
He drags himself around the estate garden after settling his mess, tracing the path Arelyn used to take. (So much for choosing a change.)
When she first acquired the habit, he directed his efforts towards the garden for a time, revamping the systems and supplies that went into its maintenance. The greenhouse was expanded to bolster their rotation of flora and foliage, local temperature conditioners and humidifiers were installed to ensure Arel had spots to comfortably rest first and to cater to the more finicky plants second, additional staff was hired to develop a better method of masking the smell of fertilizer against her too-perceptive senses, among other improvements.
It truly became a flower path for his daughter.
White lilies en masse, as far as her little eyes could see, for the crest originally but a private nod to the bouquet he got her on their first outing upon enlarging the garden's capabilities. The field he moves through trumpets its own existence, carefully enhanced and controlled to lengthen the lifetime of the flowers indefinitely.
…Successfully, at that.
Arelyn had flown past her life expectancy, predicted with however limited metrics as it had been. She might still be, if he crushes his pessimism underfoot.
It's a mystery how much her life was legitimately extended. Mehen should be glad they had that extra time at all—it even afforded them those final couple of years. Deeply warm and loaded with heavy, pure affection that makes his heart sink with its weight. Regardless of the resources expended and meticulously maintained environment—Arel's condition wasn't something where one could do everything right and overcoming it was so simply guaranteed. Few things in the world are truly like that. Every time she got a miraculous surge of energy, the back of his mind fretted about the cases he had read regarding terminal lucidity, before being swiftly pushed down to prioritize making the most of her present.
The chrysanthemums bloomed some time after Arelyn disappeared, seeing through a solemn autumn and lonely winter with him—neither of them quite making it to spring.
He spots the azaleas delicately flourishing in familiar shades of pink. The beauty of his surroundings makes the misery worse.
Alcohol, when he drinks, always falls short of what Mehen wants. He swore off of it after the last Imperial Ball he attended with Arelyn and Valer. It's a depravity he falls back on anyways, unwilling to soberly face a reality with both absent.
It starts from a single shot, one inconsolable night, a reprieve different to the medicine. Eventually, in the idle moments borne from closing Halbern's doors, he lapses into the practice of pouring back a few. And now, here he is.
..Ridiculous. He's a mess. The only thing it managed was inhibiting his body—not his mind. At least he's not crying all over his documents anymore. Small victories, he thinks with hollow cheer, drooped over his desk.
Another wave of self-loathing crashes over him when he thinks of his liege. That fool, entrusting him with managing the duchy. The hysteria of his unparalleled job security while he's drunk on the job, no matter how unpleasantly sharp his mind remains creeps up on him.
Each piece of paperwork he does handles lives. It was a personal conviction to do his best for his lord. And yet he drinks.
An indiscriminate attitude does the trick to sedate and quiet his thoughts, eventually. It becomes a blur, from then on.
The alleviation makes him forgetful, as much as the sorrow itself does. He forgets to eat, forgets to sleep. It becomes impossible to focus and his hands tremble in subdivided time with his heartbeat, weak and afraid.
...He picked up smoking from socializing, briefly. It turned into a small, daily ritual—taking a pause and letting the acrid burn numb his mind to the turbulent landscape of Halbern.
Just a little before Arelyn came into his care, Mehen kicked the routine for good.
What stays his hand from reigniting the habit is what made him stop in the first place. Even under the spell of alcohol—his discipline in shambles—he's unable to disregard Valer's plea from back then.
In the throes of something that might as well have been grief, his lord stepped onto the sunroom balcony one day, and snubbed Mehen's cigarette.
("—Ah? Hey?" Fingers crooked around an impression of the indulgence-now-missing, he remembers bristling.
"Be mad at me—" gladly: he thought in the moment— "but quit that vice, would you? Don't you usually cherish your life quite well?"
…
Valer looks antsy. Maybe in part a holdover from Mehen falling (terribly) ill (once): he becomes anxious at the mere hint of a health issue—even... coughing.. would do it. Mehen's irritation fizzles out and a feeling of revulsion at himself crawls in to replace it, quick as the embers dying on the railing. After Lady Sione was married, there followed a new layer of somber air about Valer—seemingly here to stay. It's been a while since the other has shown up, busy with… something. And this was the first thing he chose to do. Was this thought with irritation or pity?
Mehen doesn't want to be the cause of that uneasy look on his face. After a fashion, all they have is each other.
..He closes his eyes, leans his head against his knuckles, and grumbles: "I didn't like the smell anyways." Or the pain.
"Why continue with it, then?" asks the very reason he's bothering to endure just about everything else.)
(Mehen can only laugh when he gets around to discarding his tobacco a few days later and finds his cigar boxes empty. Already taken care of. How considerate.
Valer remembered his off-hand comment about liking the designs enough to collect them it seems. Not that he'll be doing much more of that hobby.)
In the consequent years, Mehen is careful to avoid reacquiring the habit.
He didn't deny a drag when prompted, but he stopped seeking it out—no matter how sorely tempting it becomes within the haze he lives, he manages to refuse resorting to it. He breathes out and takes another breath in, still pure air instead of smog.
Mehen's running on nothing but pointedly metaphorical fumes, mania, and a single promise when the first message comes, via fanatic mage. The only string he'd follow out of the labyrinth he's submerged himself in cleaves through the fog. His faculties jolt alive, under the compounded exhaustion and remnant buzz of alcohol.
They keep babbling reverently about the Archmage. Whatever. The bizzareness is nearly soothing, after all the turmoil. He'll need to rewatch the recordings from the devices set up in the office—he's not in his right mind, and it barely feels real.
...He wonders if it's a dream borne of his desperate waiting, wanting.
As long as she's saved, he can weather anything. Arelyn's alive.