#there’s this one scene where they possess your parents to try and indirectly confess their feelings | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

inquartata30 · 4 years

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WIP Whenever (Tuesday)

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This is another Safira POV scene that takes place way back in time. We’re talking almost 300 years, when Thaia was still a little kid.

Hardly had Sula closed the door behind her when Meir outright asked the question that had weighed on them all since the pool. “She’s dead, isn’t she? Dad. Or whoever the fuck she was.”

Sula let out a long breath. “Yeah. Korlus.”

“The fuck was she doing there?”

“Getting herself killed, obviously,” said Eirian, arms crossed tightly against her body.

Stopping herself from lashing out, Safira knew. Eirian’s temper had somewhat abated as she’d grown into maidenhood, but both she and Thaia possessed tempers on the side of a little too healthy. To be fair, all four of them did. It was just that Safira and Meir had had more time to tame theirs. They’d learned to recognize when they needed to step back from a situation before they lost control—and then follow through with said step. It wasn’t foolproof, however.

Meir jumped to her feet. “She had no business being there. Being a fucking merc. She didn’t even have the skills.”

“Yes, she did,” said Safira, pointedly staying seated in her chair closest to the end of the hallway. “Remember? She could sneak up on all of us.”

Sula nodded. “She was a good commando when she served. Knew her shit inside and out. Could’ve captained her own squad. What she didn’t have was the right mindset for a merc. Never did.”

“Or maybe she forgot her skills like she fucking forgot us,” said Eirian, biting down on the last word.

Safira wondered how long it would be before Eirian lost her temper, not that she could be blamed any more than Thaia could when she’d cried herself to sleep. Goddess, now Safira was gritting her own teeth. She forced herself to relax. There were enough tempers flaring as it was. Meir was practically vibrating, the subtle glow of a fomenting biotic flare a haze over her skin. Eirian’s biotic corona was even more obvious, wisps already rising.

Sula moved sluggishly into the nearest chair, dragged down by the immense weight pressed upon her over the past year. The energy of Sula’s anger had already been spent, redirected to consoling her youngest. By night’s end, reality had proven that consolation wasn’t to be had, no matter the effort. Amma—Matriarch Aysu, Sula’s mother and their grandmother—had traded with Sula to sit in the room with her. Keeping watch while Sula went to speak with her older children. Her adult children who understood the situation between their parents no better than Thaia did.

Once, Safira had even gone directly to the supposed source and come away with nothing. “Honestly,” she said, “I think she forgot who she was entirely.”

“That’s no fucking excuse to forget the existence of three of her kids.” Meir stalked around the living area of their family’s Illium flat.

“I didn’t say it was.”

Eirian was on her feet. “Are you defending her?”

“No, that isn’t—goddess, I’m just trying to understand why, like the rest of you.”

“There’s no point. It won’t change a fucking thing.” Meir punctuated it with a flare, ready to fight the ghost of their father that had haunted them since well before she’d died.

At the same time, Eirian said, “I don’t care why.”

“That’s the biggest fucking lie you’ve ever told yourself,” said Sula. While the words themselves were harsh, her tone wasn’t. Soft, with a bit of self-reflection. That Sula had tried and failed to use the same lie on herself.

Safira wondered how many times her mother had tried to understand why. How often her mother must have blamed herself for what’d happened. And if she still did, despite everything. “It wasn’t your fault, Mum.”

Faint amusement crept into Sula’s eyes as she wearily turned in Safira’s direction. “It’s still adorable when you say that.”

“Don’t dismiss what I said. Amma’s told you the same thing.”

“She’s right,” Eirian said.

“It wasn’t your fault, either, kid,” said Sula. “It’s over and done, at least.” She hadn’t looked this outwardly tired in a long time.

Meir picked up on it as well. “Mum, if you’re going to Korlus in the morning, you should get some sleep.”

“I’m not going to Korlus.”

“Then who’s going to retrieve her body?” asked Safira. Someone had to, no matter the pain of the past twenty years.

“Leave it there to rot,” said Meir.

Eirian fell down hard on the sofa, like Meir had punched her. Even Safira had suffered a glancing blow. Meir had called for denying their father the most basic respect asari from the Armalian coast gave to the dead. You didn’t just leave them where they fell. It was such a basic rite that there were numerous stories from the Armalian Peninsula conflicts about the courtesy. Huntresses had picked up the bodies of their fallen foes and seen them returned to their people after a battle had ended. While Indah had become a recent stranger, it didn’t negate that she had been a father they’d known and loved—and had loved them, Safira was sure of it—for the century and more before that. If enemies were afforded the simplest of respects, then they had a responsibility to the body of the stranger who bore their father’s face.

Chin trembling, Eirian stared at Meir. “You don’t mean that. You don’t.”

Meir’s defiance visibly drained in the sudden slump in her shoulders. “No. I don’t even know why I said it.”

“Because angry’s easier than anything else,” Amma said, emerging from Thaia’s room.

“Angry’s easier than what?” Meir asked.

Amma patted Sula’s shoulder as she walked past her to sit beside Eirian. She wrapped an arm around Eirian’s shoulders and pulled her close. “Admitting that you’ve been grieving over the loss of your father since the day she left, taking your littlest sister with her.”

And Meir’s temper was back. “I’m not admitting shit.”

“Thank you for proving my point. Your cooperation is appreciated.”

When Meir declined to reply, Sula filled in the gap before the looming silence could. “She asleep?”

“Yes. I had to guide her there, but she’ll get a couple hours of good rest out of it. However, once that cycle ends, I can’t see how there won’t be a nightmare.”

Those would surge again. There was no escape. For the first month or two Thaia had come to live with them, the nightmares had occurred almost every night, sometimes multiple times. As the year passed, they’d lessened in frequency to an average of one or two a week. Those moments when Safira had helped her return to sleep, when she’d touched her mind and experienced that pain and terror directly caused by Aulus, indirectly caused by Indah’s lack of care to protect her own daughter, Safira had been left struggling with her own temper.

Meir’s corona flared again. “Every time she wakes up screaming, I want to put that asshole in a reave and leave him there, right on the edge of dying. And then fucking keep him there.”

“As much as the idea appeals, that would hurt you more, in the end,” said Amma. “You’re the throwing type, not the torture type. That kind of act would eat away at you for the rest of your life. Take solace in the fact that the matriarchs who caught him at the park weren’t gentle.”

Meir brightened. “Throwing him around sounds good. Who’s going to tell him? I’m volunteering, in case that wasn’t clear.”

“I should go, too,” Eirian said. “Maybe I couldn’t protect her like you did for me, but this would be something.”

It left Safira torn. While she welcomed the possible opportunity to tell Aulus how she truly felt, seeing him face-to-face again was less worthy than seeing to their father’s body. She looked at Sula. “You never answered about seeing to Indah’s body.”

Sula rubbed at her forehead. “Drack’s there. He’s making the proper arrangements to send her here.”

“And then,” said Amma, “we are commissioning an autopsy.”

“Why?” asked Eirian.

“Like your sister said, Indah slowly became a stranger, ending her life nothing like the person your mother and I had known for two centuries. For the final five years of her life, she didn’t produce a single poem. Not one. No entries in her journals.”

“How? Dad was never not composing. Maybe you just didn’t find her journals,” Meir said.

“We looked everywhere. There weren’t any. Most recent was a little over five years ago. And the poems in it were all shit,” Sula said.

Eirian laughed. She covered her mouth with her hand to stem it, but it didn’t work. “Imagine...” She descended into another giggling fit. “Imagine Dad’s face if you’d ever told her that. Goddess.”

A laugh trampled its way through Meir’s fire. “She’d have done that thing where she just stared, flat out stared like she was staring into your soul and you’d wonder what wrongs you’d committed over the course of your entire life and then start confessing them just so she’d stop—”

“That was you who got that look, not the rest of us,” said Safira. “And you deserved it each time.”

Eirian managed to wrangle her giggles enough to add, “I still don’t see how the fuck Dad kept a straight face after you confessed to hooking up with the elcor ambassador’s daughter on the inlet beach and she asked—”

“‘Only the once?’” finished Safira, perfectly reproducing their father’s Cultivated Armalian accent and cadence.

Even Sula spared a few chuckles. “She laughed for ten minutes straight after she walked into our bedroom and closed the door.”

#WIP prompt #tessera #an unkind stranger #safira calfuray #eirian calfuray #meir calfuray #matriarch aysu #sula calfuray #thaia kallistrate

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