19 Hamis 2719
Evening - Vienda // Uptown
Indecision was the cruellest curse of the intellectual. A sharp mind, one that carved its way through to the heart of any problem, turned every complex challenge into a series of contiguous answers that led like stepping stones to a resolution, was not accustomed to the paralysing indecision of having no clue of what to do next. If it had been ten years ago, it all would have been so easy. Marzena would have known the part she was expected to play, and she would have acted in accordance. The Marzena of then would have flung herself onto the bed beside Niccolette in an instant, arms bundled around her, head pulled against her shoulder, drenching her nightgown in Niccolette's tears as she cried her heart out over a boy yet again, as she had so many times before. Niccolette's friend would have known what so say, and even if she didn't, the raging inferno of magma and emotion that lurked inside her heart as if it was the heart of a supervolcano, waiting to errupt with explosive force and endanger her entire world, would have forced out a geyser of affection, or a lava plume of comfort, and in her oblivion Niccolette would not have recognised the difference. But she was not that Marzena any longer. The supervolcano had erupted, and the ash spewed forth had choked the skies, and an apocalyptic winter had become of their once verdant friendship.
The Marzena of now was a different person, by far. Her heart was now a crater, and her friendships a winter, but that did not leave her entirely devoid of warmth. She had gathered up what fragments she could, of scattered, still-cooling volcanic stone, and piled them together in the caldera of her once-heart, not a repair for the damage, but at least an approximation thereof. Like a moa burying its egg in the hot desert sands, Marzena buried her emotions there, and the nest of ash and lava stone she had gathered kept it warm, enough that her smiles were genuine, and her caring real. She spent it on her students, on the younglings at Brunnhold that she assisted and tutored in between her bouts of focus on her research. If one of those had been on the bed before her, so devastated and so drowning in despair, she knew what she would have done: she knew she would have perched on the edge of the bed, not close beside but still close enough, as if she waited on the edge of the dock to reach out a hand and help pull themselves out of the waters that threatened to drown them. But just as she could no longer be Niccolette's friend, she could not be her mentor either; one of those she had never been, and one she could never be again.
What was she then? Why was she here? Francoise's words stung in her ears, the reluctant admission that the insufferable woman was right stinging like acid in a paper cut. It's not about what you need. Francoise was correct in her scorn and her warning with those words. Perhaps that was all of it, perhaps that was the only reason, some selfish desire to see Niccolette only for her own sake. Worse, perhaps the selfishness ran deeper, Perhaps the magma reservoir beneath the caldera of her heard still lingered, and with it the desperate, foolish hope that some vestige of their friendship might survive, that now in this darkest of times, Marzena alone might somehow be enough for Niccolette once again. She hoped it was not true, and hoped that by hoping, she was not as bad a person as that hope would have exposed her to be.
But while Francoise's words had been about derision, there had inadvertently been a deeper wisdom to her words, unintended and unnoticed by Francoise most likely, but still most assuredly there. It was not about what she needed; it was about what Nicco needed. What, then, was that? Through the murky fog of indecision, a quantifiable challenge flickered like the distant lights of the shore. Uzoji was the obvious, undeliverable answer; the man that Niccolette had decided was the only thing she would ever need again. He had become her everything, woven into her life so completely that he seemed almost essential to her survival, and expecting Niccolette to adapt to life without him was like asking a shark to adapt to life without water. There was no replacing that, just struggle, and anguish, and pain. But there had been a time when Uzoji wasn't her everything, and Niccolette had thrived without him, before him. Marzena was under no illusions that she alone was enough; but she was not alone, and nor was Niccolette. To the relief of Marzena's pride, Francoise alone clearly was not enough either; but perhaps the both of them would at least be a start.
Carefully, Marzena eased herself onto the unpleasantly soft mattress of Francoise's guestroom, not perched elegantly on the edge as she would have done with a student, but rather awkwardly beside her, in the empty gulf of mattress no doubt subconsciously left for Uzoji. She didn't care. To hell with him, for leaving Niccolette this way. Besides, the gaping emptiness that he'd left behind was vast enough that her Gioran behind impeding on a tiny fraction of it would hardly make much of a difference.
"If I was there," Marzena offered gently, picking up the thread that Niccolette had begun, carefully sliding off her heels and letting them fall to the ground beside her bed, and a little awkwardly adjusting herself and her outfit into a cross-legged posture atop the bedsheets, "I would have torn out his entrails and hung them from the street lamps like streamers."
She felt the urge to offer physical comfort again, a hand on the shoulder like she had with Francoise, but she thought the better of it, her hands fidgetting loosely in her lap as she sat quietly and politely enduring the silence that Niccolette had wrapped herself in. It felt strange to be in a room with her, without her voice filling the air, without some triviality or some hyper-opinionated assertion transforming itself into some great debate between them. That had talked so much when they were young, about so much; about anything, really, that floated across their minds. That wasn't something that had been torn away suddenly, though. That one had evolved gradually, as if Niccolette had been stood on a glacier and Marzena had not, and by the time she had realised Niccolette was already too far away for her to catch up. You noticed such things when you looked backward, things that you didn't see happening at the time. The older they had become, the further the two of them had grown apart, pursuing interests and lifestyles that ran in opposite directions. As much as Marzena would have liked to lay the blame for everything at Uzoji's feet, he had merely been the wedge driven into a log that was already beginning to crack. But while Uzoji bore less blame for that than Marzena would have liked, for this she was certain that he bore it all.
"De Huane isn't really who you're angry at though, is it?" Her voice was still gentle, but her brow was furrowed, and her voice carried with it an air of hesitant wisdom, or perhaps reluctant self-reflection. "People act as if love and hate are opposites, but they aren't. They are separate things, and it is possible to feel both at once, Being angry that he is gone - being angry at him for being gone - in fact it proves the opposite."
She faltered, swallowed, her brow furrowing deeper, her eyes focusing on the foot of the bed as if they were seeing something that was not there. Her nails began to dig into her knuckles, an idle and subconscious fidget as she tried to arrange her thoughts into some kind of practical order.
"The hard part, though," she continued, with all the unsteady and reluctant wisdom of hindsight, "Is the fear. Anger is big, and heavy, and easy to hold onto. It gets in the way of everything, and you can't see past it, and the fear? The fear is that if you let it go, everything else will have slipped away without you noticing, and you'll have nothing else," Her eyes climbed away from the bedsheets to Niccolette, though an ascent of Gior's mountains would have required lesser effort. "But love doesn't work that way. Love isn't something you feel, it is something you give, and something that - if you are lucky - you are given back, The love you gave, you will always feel that, but the love he gave back? You will always feel that too. He's in your heart, he's in your name, he's in your thoughts - and he always will be. No one and nothing can take that away. Not even anger."