Luna concurs wholeheartedly, but to say so feels like a dangerous game. For if she is to admit that her happiest times are long past, then she must conversely admit her life is worse for all that has happened since.
How could she ever give voice to such blasphemy? Admit that there is a part of her - small and suppressed as it is - that longs to be his once more? To bring her woes to Ravus and let him take up the mantle; for in those days, her greatest struggles were usually an overwhelming lesson plan and a frog in her path. If she could only be someone’s sister, someone’s daughter, someone’s friend - someone’s anything again, instead of everyone’s everything.
But of course, of course, it is an honour to serve. And though the thought occurs only briefly, Luna makes sure to admonish herself for it. Fewer and further between are her bouts of self-pity, for that had been wrung out of her in training. She does not deserve that happy, carefree life more than everyone else.
Ravus does, she thinks to herself, and Luna doesn’t dwell on what her death will mean for him finding that life. She cannot or for his sake, she might falter. This world she is working toward is for him, too. Him especially.
❝It is strange to me,❞ she utters, giving his hand a comforting squeeze, ❝When those who knew her tell me we are alike. I am the heir to her legacy as Oracle, and I have her taste for tea, but – it is you who has her heart. Her strength. Her tenacity.❞
In her final moments, their mother had abandoned duty to save her family. A decision Luna is uncertain she is capable of making; one she knows Ravus would in a heartbeat. ❝I believe she is looking down on you, proud of all you have become. It must be hard to live under the shadow of our name, but I hope you do not think it makes you lesser. Mother never did. I do not. If anything, I cannot imagine how I might have survived these twelve years without you. You were there when she could no longer be. Everything that I am capable of is because I had you.❞
If only he could read minds. Imagine the things he might say. The assurances, the gentle words, the encouraging for her to speak her mind as freely as she wished. Alas, Ravus is no mind reader, much that he wishes he could be, and sometimes, he thinks that it is one more failing on his part.
But that is neither here nor there, and he won’t dwell on it. This moment is precious to him, walking hand-in-hand with his beloved sister, the last of his family. It is such a rare moment that they’re allowed this bit of freedom to simply be at peace, and if he closes his eyes, there is nothing else but the two of them in the world.
He returns the squeeze of her hand, but her words... He knows that she means to comfort and assure him, yet... It hurts. A knife through the heart for reasons he hasn’t the mind to properly unpack. His entire life, he has heard what they say. That his sister is their mother’s daughter, that she takes after their mother, that they are so alike. And truly, does Lunafreya think their mother would be proud of him? Of all that he has had to do to save not only his own skin but the skin of his sister, of his people?
The worst of it, he supposes, is that he had gone his whole life wishing for those words to come from someone. Foolishness, when just as he was no mind reader, no one else was a mind reader. How could anyone give him what he’d never asked for?
It makes him feel like such a child.
“...Thank you,” he whispers, and regardless of how her words make him feel, he means the thanks sincerely. He is grateful for even the smallest scraps, and this is a three course meal. “Your words...mean more than the world to me. You mean more than the world to me. You are the world to me.”