status: closed for @thechircn time & date: nearly a week after the midnight revival location: genevieve’s garden
to say that ariadne was not knowledgeable about relationships would be both true and false at once. she’d had them, she’d been successful in them (by her terms, when you look at what she and peter had), and she had learned how to end them and identify when things were not going well. it was the murky region of heartbreak, true love, and loss that she lacked any sort of experience in, and with luce coming back to the world and seeming to suffer in doing so - ari was not sure what exactly was needed, or required, from her as a friend to cleo.
the two stayed together, and ari retreated, giving them both the space they needed to do... whatever it was people who care for each other in that sort of way do when one halve of the whole comes back from the dead. in truth, she was relieved to fall back into her ways, her quietness, her stiff nature; and maybe, maybe the old ari would have reached out sooner to cleo, showing up unnoticed in such a rude way, pushing her strange, abstract display of companionship on the healer. but- she didn’t. in fact, ari was abnormally quiet in the days following the full moon ceremony, seething in anger at mason and herself, but covering it up with a perfect blanket of rigid calmness.
and so; she had not called, she had not visited, even after luce found her way to ari’s hotel room a few days later in desperate need of her magic for slumber. in fact, seeing cleo at all was a stroke of pure luck. ari sat in the expansive garden, a little unkept by now and beginning to see signs of weeds choking blossoms, at genevieve ceoi’s home. it was left now, by them all, all but abandoned and sitting silently as a reminder of her absence. but ari felt the strongest here, where she had sat with asteria in the past, trying her magic and growing it for the first time. she was surprised to look up and see the face of another one of the witches, much less cleo. when she smiled, it was forced, cool, and didn’t quite meet her eyes. “a lovely surprise. i hope you are doing well, or at least, better than you were in past weeks.”