Prompt number: 16. “Listen. No, really listen.” Fandom: Destiny 2 Rating: PG Warnings/Tags: none that I can tell, ask to tag Summary: Ikora Rey and Osiris share a moment over tea. Notes: I personally see them as a parent/child or mentor/mentee sort of relationship, so this is written with that in mind.
##. we need more sensible friends
“Thank you for taking the time to join me.”
A small, ornate and finely carved table stands between them, holding a multi-leveled tray of small, bite sized portions of sweets, and a tea set beside it. Ikora adjusts in her seat, the cushion not quite soft but not hard---unused to weight compressing it, perhaps.
She reaches forward and accepts the tea.
“Of course,” she says, and takes a delicate sip.
It tastes of sweetness and a fragrance she barely remembers---one that triggers a flood of memories, when she was much, much, younger, and when the tower had held many more familiar faces now lost forever to time and tragedy.
Osiris seems to understand her recognition. “I used to make this for you.”
“I remember,” she says, and doesn’t quite know how she’s meant to feel---if this is another test, or an attempt to gauge or elicit some emotion from her.
She takes a breath, and batters down that train of thought as quickly as it rises up in her. Who he is now is not who he was, and who she is has come a long, long way from who she once was.
Ikora has nothing to prove to anyone, and she has no reason to believe this to be a test.
She sets her teacup down on the dish in front of her.
There are things she wants to say. Ways to approach this gap, this lull between them---but she’s found her patience for tact lacking, lately.
And it seems no one can find it in their hearts to blame her, though she thinks maybe they should. And in that same breadth, she wishes someone would try her. Test her patience.
Yet even here, in the shimmering eternity of the infinite forest, in a quiet place carved within its mainframe and infinite realities, she finds even her once-unforgiving, once-eternally impatient mentor holds his patience and curiosity steady and waiting.
“Why did you ask me here?” she asks.
He takes a sip of his own tea, watching her with an emotion as rare and unusual behind his eyes as everything else about the path that led them here.
“I wanted to see how you’re doing,” he says, and sets down his tea in the same way as she did. Mocking her? Or did she adopt that from him? “It appears not well.”
She closes her eyes in frustration, exhaling through her nose. “Don’t start---”
“I don’t want to fight, Ikora,” he interrupts, gently. “I’ve lost someone close to me, too.”
She eases off her anger, and presses her fingers to massage her eyes. “If you expect me to break down so you can impart a lesson…”
He sighs. “Perhaps I deserve that.”
But he won’t apologize, and she doesn’t expect him to. She can only work through her bitter frustration, and her anger, and her grief, and the storm that churns deeply inside her.
She looks at him. Takes another sip of her tea---and finds that storm soothed by the nostalgic memory associated with this very brew.
It almost feels manipulative, if only she didn’t want to let go of the desire to repair this broken relationship.
Now that her life holds one less light within it.
“I’ve made a fair number of mistakes in my day,” he says, and looks away from her. His attention takes in the rolling golden grass beneath the breeze, the distant sun shining over the horizon. “And they have, all, been very, very costly.”
He looks back to her. “I can empathize with your loss.”
There are creases around the edges of his gaze. Lines, deepened, with the skewed passage of time within this “infinite forest.” He’s aged more, and faster, than even the Lord Saladin.
Such is the repercussions of experimenting with the complex perception and passage of time within the Vex system. And yet… maybe it’s not entirely that, alone.
But Ikora doesn’t want to jump to conclusions, nor make assumptions, nor impose those very things on him. If he does not say it outright, then it isn’t said at all---no matter how much she’d like to believe that he’s some modicum of sorry over the grief he’s caused her, or the loss of life his choices inevitably brought Saint-14.
“I appreciate… that.”
She doesn’t know what else to say.
“Wow,” comments a lighter voice, as the unique shell of Sagira apparates into view. “You’re both terrible at this feelings thing, huh?”
“Sagira,” Osiris snaps.
Ikora can’t help it.
She laughs.
The laugh breaks something in her. The disbelief, maybe. Or the grief. Or some combination of both.
“She’s right,” Ikora laughs, and sets down her teacup---though she still cups the ceramic loosely with one hand. She presses her free hand to her eyes, and poorly wipes away the tears. “We are terrible at this.”
Osiris sighs, but through the blur of grief she can see he smiles, though his eyes glisten to. Or perhaps that’s just a trick of the light.
He reaches a hand across the table, but does not bridge the distance---simply waits to see if she will.
She pauses, and then she does---laying her hand in his.
He meets her eyes. “I know what it’s like to lose someone dear to you. You’re not alone.”
She closes her eyes, and stops trying to clear her cheeks.
“I know,” she breathes. “But it doesn’t make it easier.”
He squeezes her hand---a comfort, though simple, that still lightens the weight in her chest and on her shoulders.
“I know,” he says. “I know.”
