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It had hurt a little, that first time she’d seen Irelin again. After, that is. When they were no longer an ‘us’. Even though it had been her own decision. Or maybe especially because it had been her decision. She remembered Irelin’s face when she had told her she was leaving. How it had shifted through anger and then confusion and then pain.
She’d hated to see that pain, especially when it was her fault.
Though really, Bellara acknowledged, she couldn’t take all of the blame. Irelin had been hard to get along with sometimes. And at the end, it had been more than just sometimes. She was a good woman, with a good heart, but also she had a way of speaking that set Bellara’s teeth on edge. As if she thought Bellara was broken and needed fixing.
It had been a good decision. Bellara didn’t regret it. But even so, it hurt a little. It was a weird kind of pain, not like a cut or a bruise, where something was pressing on you or piercing your skin. It was almost the reverse of that, really. An emptiness. A hollow place where something had been. And if you poked at the edges of it there was an ache that felt... wrong.
Kind of like the way she felt about Cyrian. Was he her fault, too? It felt like it, sometimes. She’d blamed herself for his death, because she hadn’t been faster. Hadn’t been better. His absence was a place in her heart that she avoided touching, until she couldn’t avoid it any longer.
There were places in Arlathan that had once been favorites and now were too dangerous to visit. Except sometimes she still visited them anyway. Sometimes the pull to know those places -- to remember them as they were -- was too strong to bear. And so you stepped back in, and you felt the way the magic twisted, and you saw the trees with the arms and legs coming out of them and you wondered what that had been like. About who those people were, and what they had felt, at the end.
It was hard to stay away, even though they felt... haunted. Cursed. Wrong. Cyrian was like that, for her. Even though he wasn’t dead anymore.
Was it terrible of her to think that this was worse? Because... it was. So much worse. And instead of blaming herself for not being faster, she blamed herself for not being clever enough to talk him out of... whatever it was he was planning. For not being sister enough, somehow.
He was alive, but the grief was still there. Could you grieve people even while they were still alive?
And then there was Rook. What was there to say about Rook? Bellara could see the way she looked at her, sometimes. The way she listened and smiled while Bellara rambled about stuff no one but she and Emmrich really cared about. She thought there might be something there. Hoped there would be, even though hope felt... not too different from grief, really. There was an emptiness to it. An ache. Like grief before the loss had even happened.
Could you grieve something that hadn’t yet become? She didn’t know. It was just so confusing, sometimes, trying to figure out how all of that worked. People, that is. Relationships. Especially relationships. She thought even the Fade might be simpler to understand.
It was no wonder she preferred working with the artifacts. Even with something as complex as repairing the Vi’Revas, she always felt like she knew what to do. Maybe it didn’t always work out exactly as she planned, but that was okay. Usually, if you’re still alive after that happens, you could try again a little differently.
You just tinker until it breaks, or it explodes. Or it works.
Maybe it wasn’t so different after all, with people. You could never know everything that was going on inside someone else’s head, any more than you could describe all of the inner mechanics of the Nadas Dirthalen. You just had to trust your instincts, and be ready to duck. Then, if you were both still alive, you could try again.
It was comforting, when you thought about it.