Sciel meets that smirk with a scrunched nose, smiling.
“I told Gustave that, you know,” Sciel says. “What Verso said about the Axons, and the Nevrons that have flattened him. But I guess it’s all the same because we need the Lumina converter, too. All of it comes back to the Sword of Lumière!”
"Oh? Hope he got a chuckle out of it." But probably not. Lune herself only recalls being angry and suspicious in the aftermath of Old Lumière, ready to go toe to toe with Verso over his insistence that they were surely going to die the moment they came face to face with the Axons.
"The Sword of Lumière," she echos wistfully, humming. "What was left of it, at least."
Two women and a teenager. They'd been so optimistic, boarding that ship in the morning of departure. Solemn but optimistic, with their Lumina tech and their protocols and their full team, trained and prepared to perfection— or as close to it as possible. Not one of them could have begun to think they would get violently smashed into pieces the moment they set foot on that darkened shore.
No comfort in anything involving Verso. Sciel just turns her eyes up to the sky, thinking of the Continent, how beautiful it had been anywhere the light touched, anywhere someone saw fit to set a lantern or a candle.
But she knows that wistfulness, that reminder that many died. They did. Hundreds of thousands died so they could get where they are. There is no comfort in that, either, not really, but Sciel has done her mourning for the senseless violence of life and who gets to have it and for how long. How cruel, she thinks, that Lune was made to feel responsible for that, the machinations of other, even crueller people.
“Only a few of us made it to the end, but every single Expedition helped get us there,” she says, voice a little softer, more sober. Every body a warning, every journal or handhold a waypoint. “We made it there together.”
For all the good any of it did. Lune holds back the words just in time, pressing them into the roof of her mouth with her tongue while that familiar blend of guilt and disappointment churns within, the different shades of failure. What inroads she'd begun to make into accepting what had happened in these passing months, the fog had undone, every single whisper still echoing in her ears.
Her fingers pluck at bits of grass, devoting the task too much attention. "Yeah."
As usual, letting her thoughts venture down these paths threatens to plunge her into melancholy, silent obsession and self-flagellation. She forces a hard stop to it, boxes it all up again and shoves it into the back of her mind. Nobody needs to be subjected to her dysfunctions on such a nice day, Sciel least of all.
"We should try to set something up once we're back in Etraya," she says, in a steadier voice. "For the sparring, I mean."
The slightly morose expression that had taken over Lune's mien clears away at that, making way for attentive curiosity as she turns her head to look at Sciel.
Oh. Sciel meant a personal question. Lune still isn't thrilled about such things, after a lifetime's worth of walling away her thoughts and feelings. She's tried to do better, here, but it's hard to put into words something that's just... always been. She draws in a breath, exhales quietly.
"Both," she eventually settles on, with a small shrug of one shoulder.
She knows she’s asked something uncomfortable, but Lune, she reasons, is already uncomfortable; what good is sitting on a beautiful little hillside in an eternal spring if it comes with a side of doom? She waits patiently for the answer, her brows furrowing with sympathy.
“Seems tough to hold onto that alone,” she says. “You don’t need to.”
"I'm used to it." While true, it sounds too dismissive even to Lune as it leaves her mouth, after everything they've gone through together. Sighing, she gropes for words, the look she gives Sciel caught somewhere between grateful and apologetic.
"I know. Sometimes it's just... better to push those things aside. Easier." With a hint of a crooked smile, she adds, "Besides, it's too nice of a day to obsess over things that can't be changed."
“Easier for who?” she asks, but that one’s rhetorical. Lune is like that felled Axon sometimes, limbs heaving under the weight of everything built on her shoulders, no matter how awe-inspiring her strength or powerful her presence, Sciel has never envied it. “It seems like it’s itching to come out, regardless of the weather.”
She smiles back, and adds, just to soften it: “And it doesn’t have to, right now, if you really don’t want to. I’m just saying… I’ll listen, when you’re ready.”
Edited (Fixing a sentence lol) 2025-12-27 04:27 (UTC)
Lune stays silent. A lifetime of sacrifice, of putting everything else aside to finish her parents' work, feeling undeserving of personal distractions when more important things were on the line... the future of Lumière is more important than any individual life. She doesn't know how to unlearn any of that. And now there's nothing left to show for all the toil, anyway.
"I don't know what's left to say," she replies quietly after a moment. "My mind gets... stuck, sometimes. Too much time to think, here— without anything more immediate, urgent."
Sciel shifts over, closer, leaving just a little bit of space between them in case Lune wants it. She wraps her arms around her knees, comfortably, her head still turned to Lune, her expression calm.
“There’s never enough real distractions,” she agrees. “We’ve talked a little about what happened, whether we failed or not… but we’ve never really talked about how it felt.”
Lune doesn't move from her own spot, comfortable with Sciel's proximity in a way she isn't with anyone else's. At that conversational equivalent of a trail of breadcrumbs, Lune frowns a little, pensively. Haven't they? Perhaps the talk of failure vs. not had equaled in her mind as talking about their feelings, but she doesn't outright shut down this venue of thought like she once might have.
She's just not sure where to start. Partly out of morbid curiosity, partly to give herself a minute, she asks, "How did it feel to you?"
She trails, not for a lack of needing to remember, but simply to find the words. It's all there, though, in a place she can reach.
"It felt like when I meditate, and I get very deep into it. My internal monologue drops away entirely. All of my thoughts just become like... snow, drifting around on the air, and my sense of self becomes no different from any other thing I might experience. It's just there, no more or less important than anything else that makes me... me! But at the same time, I am aware of every part. It's so strange, every time."
It feels silly, in some small way, to explain it this way to Lune, someone who wants to flay a thing open and trap it under a steel pin for observation, to understand it. But it's true for her, and she meanders on, pleasantly:
"And then all those parts of me went away, one after the other. Of course I'm sad now that it happened that way, I didn't want that, but at the time, I accepted it."
Lune waits patiently for Sciel to gather her thoughts, and despite the depressing topic, that it's a shared trauma and not some interesting new oddity to study, her scholar's curiosity is piqued in spite of it all as she listens to Sciel's explanation. Lune tries to understand it, but a lot of the deeper meaning escapes her, simply not able to relate to the sensations described on a regular day— much less attached to what happened to them.
"That sounds... peaceful," she finally settles on, a little woodenly. And it does, in an odd sort of way that she can't comprehend.
"Weren't you..." She stalls for a beat, wets her lip. "Scared? At all?"
“Oh, definitely,” she says, with a tiny bit of humour on her voice suddenly, like it’s embarrassing for fear to be an afterthought. It’s not. It’s just one feeling amongst many. “It was the end, it’s scary no matter how ready I thought I was. But at the same time, it just felt like… a different thing, another snowflake. It wasn’t bigger or more important than anything else I was feeling.”
She laces her fingers together, wrists against her calves.
“I was also confused, and hopeful about the other side, and worried. I was even relieved, in a way. What did you feel?”
Hopeful. Relieved. Any other day, Lune might be amused by the opposite ends they stand on with this. Now, she presses her tingling lips together in a firm line, inhaling slowly through her nose as her eyes lock onto some unseen point on the horizon. She hates recalling that moment, feels the cold dread crawling up her spine all over again, tasting the creeping panic at the back of her throat. She swallows it back, thickly, exhales through her mouth.
"I felt... terror. I felt like I was choking. Maybe I was." On ashes, crawling up her throat. "Like the ground had dropped away from under my feet and I was falling. That it was the end after everything we'd gone through, after all the Expeditions since the Fracture, it was ending like that, in an instant. Like none of our struggles and losses and sacrifices ever meant a damn thing. Failure. All of it amounted to nothing. Insignificance."
She shakes her head and drops it to stare at the grass instead, dread replaced with sadness. "Just oblivion. Nothingness. It was the most horrific feeling I'd ever experienced. Sometimes I... I wake up at night and feel like I'm choking all over again."
Their perspectives couldn’t be more different, but it’s still an easy difference to understand. Sciel watches Lune’s face, expression swelling with sympathy, and she reaches over to put an arm around her friend, leaning in a little.
“Oh, Lune… I wish it didn’t have to be this way.”
It had all happened so quickly, and with no warning. Odd, how the Gommage would feel like that every year if they hadn’t made a festival out of it, but even then, there’d been some distant figure ready to wake and count them down. Could they have known what heralded this one? She’s not sure; it likely will never matter, but the feeling of it is going to linger a long, long time.
She runs her hand idly up and down Lune’s back.
“You should come to me next time it happens,” she says. “So you’re not alone. Any hour of the day or night, we can sit and breathe together.”
Lune doesn't shrug off Sciel's comfort, even if she doesn't lean back into the contact, either. A small tremor moves over her frame, like a manifestation of all the ill things inside looking for a way out. Lune hates how fragile just the memory makes her feel, how viscerally it still affects her. She's supposed to be stronger than this, isn't she? She's not supposed to be weak. She's supposed to be able to get over this on her own and put focus on the work ahead like she always does, that's her role.
Sciel's offer is kind, and hard to accept. It's pride, or perhaps that ever-nagging sense of failure that churns within. Maybe both. Maybe this is well-deserved. Maybe she should feel badly for letting down generations upon generations of Lumièrans. Part of her knows that's insane, but she can't help it. And none of this is anything she can actually put into words, for several reasons.
"Yeah," she finally gets out, exhaling a long, slow breath. "I can try."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
“I told Gustave that, you know,” Sciel says. “What Verso said about the Axons, and the Nevrons that have flattened him. But I guess it’s all the same because we need the Lumina converter, too. All of it comes back to the Sword of Lumière!”
no subject
"The Sword of Lumière," she echos wistfully, humming. "What was left of it, at least."
Two women and a teenager. They'd been so optimistic, boarding that ship in the morning of departure. Solemn but optimistic, with their Lumina tech and their protocols and their full team, trained and prepared to perfection— or as close to it as possible. Not one of them could have begun to think they would get violently smashed into pieces the moment they set foot on that darkened shore.
no subject
But she knows that wistfulness, that reminder that many died. They did. Hundreds of thousands died so they could get where they are. There is no comfort in that, either, not really, but Sciel has done her mourning for the senseless violence of life and who gets to have it and for how long. How cruel, she thinks, that Lune was made to feel responsible for that, the machinations of other, even crueller people.
“Only a few of us made it to the end, but every single Expedition helped get us there,” she says, voice a little softer, more sober. Every body a warning, every journal or handhold a waypoint. “We made it there together.”
no subject
Her fingers pluck at bits of grass, devoting the task too much attention. "Yeah."
As usual, letting her thoughts venture down these paths threatens to plunge her into melancholy, silent obsession and self-flagellation. She forces a hard stop to it, boxes it all up again and shoves it into the back of her mind. Nobody needs to be subjected to her dysfunctions on such a nice day, Sciel least of all.
"We should try to set something up once we're back in Etraya," she says, in a steadier voice. "For the sparring, I mean."
no subject
“We should,” she says, warmly, and she pushes herself up to sit again, weight leant on one hand, towards Lune. “Can I ask you a question?”
no subject
"Of course. Always."
no subject
“When you swallow your feelings down like that,” she says, “is that for me? Or for you?”
no subject
"Both," she eventually settles on, with a small shrug of one shoulder.
no subject
“Seems tough to hold onto that alone,” she says. “You don’t need to.”
no subject
"I know. Sometimes it's just... better to push those things aside. Easier." With a hint of a crooked smile, she adds, "Besides, it's too nice of a day to obsess over things that can't be changed."
no subject
She smiles back, and adds, just to soften it: “And it doesn’t have to, right now, if you really don’t want to. I’m just saying… I’ll listen, when you’re ready.”
no subject
"I don't know what's left to say," she replies quietly after a moment. "My mind gets... stuck, sometimes. Too much time to think, here— without anything more immediate, urgent."
No Paintress, no Expedition.
no subject
“There’s never enough real distractions,” she agrees. “We’ve talked a little about what happened, whether we failed or not… but we’ve never really talked about how it felt.”
no subject
She's just not sure where to start. Partly out of morbid curiosity, partly to give herself a minute, she asks, "How did it feel to you?"
no subject
She trails, not for a lack of needing to remember, but simply to find the words. It's all there, though, in a place she can reach.
"It felt like when I meditate, and I get very deep into it. My internal monologue drops away entirely. All of my thoughts just become like... snow, drifting around on the air, and my sense of self becomes no different from any other thing I might experience. It's just there, no more or less important than anything else that makes me... me! But at the same time, I am aware of every part. It's so strange, every time."
It feels silly, in some small way, to explain it this way to Lune, someone who wants to flay a thing open and trap it under a steel pin for observation, to understand it. But it's true for her, and she meanders on, pleasantly:
"And then all those parts of me went away, one after the other. Of course I'm sad now that it happened that way, I didn't want that, but at the time, I accepted it."
no subject
"That sounds... peaceful," she finally settles on, a little woodenly. And it does, in an odd sort of way that she can't comprehend.
"Weren't you..." She stalls for a beat, wets her lip. "Scared? At all?"
no subject
She laces her fingers together, wrists against her calves.
“I was also confused, and hopeful about the other side, and worried. I was even relieved, in a way. What did you feel?”
no subject
"I felt... terror. I felt like I was choking. Maybe I was." On ashes, crawling up her throat. "Like the ground had dropped away from under my feet and I was falling. That it was the end after everything we'd gone through, after all the Expeditions since the Fracture, it was ending like that, in an instant. Like none of our struggles and losses and sacrifices ever meant a damn thing. Failure. All of it amounted to nothing. Insignificance."
She shakes her head and drops it to stare at the grass instead, dread replaced with sadness. "Just oblivion. Nothingness. It was the most horrific feeling I'd ever experienced. Sometimes I... I wake up at night and feel like I'm choking all over again."
no subject
“Oh, Lune… I wish it didn’t have to be this way.”
It had all happened so quickly, and with no warning. Odd, how the Gommage would feel like that every year if they hadn’t made a festival out of it, but even then, there’d been some distant figure ready to wake and count them down. Could they have known what heralded this one? She’s not sure; it likely will never matter, but the feeling of it is going to linger a long, long time.
She runs her hand idly up and down Lune’s back.
“You should come to me next time it happens,” she says. “So you’re not alone. Any hour of the day or night, we can sit and breathe together.”
no subject
Sciel's offer is kind, and hard to accept. It's pride, or perhaps that ever-nagging sense of failure that churns within. Maybe both. Maybe this is well-deserved. Maybe she should feel badly for letting down generations upon generations of Lumièrans. Part of her knows that's insane, but she can't help it. And none of this is anything she can actually put into words, for several reasons.
"Yeah," she finally gets out, exhaling a long, slow breath. "I can try."