Mutual Happiness

There it was. Another audience (well, it felt like an audience, but it was really more of a conference - or just a conversation, actually!) with the Queen of Keves. They'd decided that it was easier to refer to the two worlds in titles rendered equivalent; Keves and Agnus rolled off the tongue easier than Alrest and "the land of the endless sea", no matter how much majesty Nia personally felt that term commanded.

Her oldest of royal advisors certainly agreed with her on that point. Bionis and Mechonis were wonderful names for great Titans of those respective championing natural interests, but it somehow accomplished less for unity, he said, if one continued to preserve the division between their resident lifeforms by stubbornly smerging the two together. Instead, craft a new name and call each individual equivalent under that umbrella; there were new unions to be looking to, now.

When Nia observed to Minoth that he certainly liked to talk a lot, he replied that she wasn't the first to tell him so, if not far from it. Grumbled Nia, you have an answer for everything, don't you? And the ancient poet had simply replied, yes.

It had been, what, a couple of weeks since those awkward conversations culminating in what Melia so primly referred to as a "courtship"? Nia wouldn't mind the proper termage if it didn't make her feel so out of her depth. She didn't know what she wanted Melia to call it, exactly, but since they were both already married...well, better that than cheating, wasn't it? She supposed.

"I just can't figure if this all means anything!" she griped, fingertips fiddling at one another in an autonomous (and futile) anti-stressing habit. "So I thought Melia's wife was a looker, and now we get on interdimensional communication devices that transmit audio and visual of our every twitch and flirt with each other oh so politely, hoping to pass right through each other and never meet any-bloody-way.

"What I am doin'?!" the unlikely queen wailed.

"You're just saying that," Minoth said, and Nia could swear he was bein' just so even and unflappable just to mess with her. An uncharitable judgement, to be sure; she knew she shouldn't assume that the people who loved her were only pretending so, but oh, she felt such a fool.

"Just sayin' what?"

"That you hope you pass right through her. Now, you might very well hope to..." he made a vague circling motion with his right hand, the left resting comfortably on opposite bicep, "...pass through her, but that's not what I'm talking about, here."

"You bloody well better not be." Titan's foot, she was cross.

No room even for feigned feline innocence. Minoth was right. She did want to meet Melia and Vanea on the other side of the Intersection, in her world or in theirs, and she wanted them to meet Pyra and Mythra, and Shulk and Rex to shake hands, at the very least. Nia was the kind of person who liked her people to meet her other people, so's she could see how they got on and how she'd chosen well to meet them all - she'd just never say so, because that was Pyra's lot, to get all sweetly mischievous and scheming.

But it was easier to pretend all that would never happen; to say, oh well, it's not meant to turn out to very much, so why don't we table it? Why don't we forget about tryin' too hard? I like lookin' at you, and you like lookin' at me, and now we know that, well, that's all we need to know.

Minoth gave her an arch, significant look. It wasn't the "you've been thinking out loud" look, no, she knew that one, and it wasn't the "you've been thinking silently for so long your nonverbal cues are starting to think out loud for you" look either. He also wasn't chiding her for biting back at his dirty little joke.

"What." Grumbling, still. Nia had decided a few years back that she didn't very much care for special looks if they weren't affirming or surely understood. Minoth always seemed to like to have conversations that were interesting for other people to watch, and in that way interesting for him to put on, too, and every now and then it seemed to rub her just a touch too close to the wrong way. See there, the man was a walking dirty joke!

But then, here he was shaking his mane and readying himself to actually have serious conversation. Fine. Minoth took a seat beside Nia at a spare stool, and deftly flipped the communication screen right way wrong.

"I won't say 'I know it's difficult' or anything surface-level like that. I don't know the half of what it's like to be you, Nia, exploring a new relationship with her, Melia, and her, Vanea, alongside an old relationship with other hers, and hims, and no time put past to deal with your own self. I have no idea how to advise Queen Nia about this."

"So I should fire you," Nia said flatly.

"Yes," Minoth nodded, sage as a bell, "and then you'd be responsible for one very handsome and very old pink-Cored Flesh Eater experiment 2.0 wandering the streets of Elysium getting up to all sorts of mischief."

As if! Oh, he had a lot of nerve, this one. "I would not be responsible. Aren't you old enough to look after yourself?"

Minoth shrugged. "You're the boss."

"Whatever. Where's the but?"

No idea how to advise Queen Nia about this, but the young, scared Nia that was poking through?

"You certainly remember the stories I've told you about my Driver?"

"I take it you're not talkin' about the nasty deadbeat one."

"Deadbeat..." Minoth stroked his chin. "That's a word I hadn't yet considered to describe him. Somehow, in all these years. But no, not the Praetor. Addam - the Addam I memorialized-" ("With plenty of creative liberty and licence...") "-in the first play of mine you saw."

"Sure," Nia agreed, "the one who always makes you all misty-eyed. Did you 'court' him?"

"No." Minoth shook his head. "Never did. Didn't really have to. I was a tough-nut clam, and he was determined to love me whether I liked it or not."

There was a pause.

"I liked it."

Nia rolled her eyes. "I figured. Come on, come on!"

"The point, my dear Nia: Prince Addam Origo, the Lord of Aletta, was married, when the Aegis War struck."

The kitty-cat queen's not-quite-oath-bearing brows took a jump, at that. "But not to you, I gather!"

"Permission to get misty-eyed again, my lady?"

She could see where this was going, now, and she'd known Minoth long enough - since Cole, o' course - to grant herself separate permission to jump in on his grand climaxes and conclusions.

"About his lady, who became your lady?"

That got her furry ears a flick. "And that's why they call her the queen!"

Nia was about to object to this topical platitude, but she did consider that nothing quite made one better suited to ruling, presiding over people than one's ability to pick up on patterns and communicate well. Who cared if you weren't tactically minded? That was what you had a royal military head for. Not that Yew and Zuo handled that, nor did Rex, exactly, and Niall was more on politics - a noble staple that she'd managed to momentarily forget - but Mythra, with Pyra at her counsel, was still an ace, and always would be. Didn't have the perfect people-pleasing pessimism their wife and queen was able to strike into balance, though!

So Nia took the compliment and preened. Like Melia would when Nia paid her a sneaky compliment, thick silver eyelashes fluttering and dainty, stately lips pursing in a delicate V.

Vanea, for her part, took an orange flush to the cheeks, her red eyes sparkling. Oh, Nia adored the way her hair (and some other parts beneath its tips) swayed from side to side, and her quiet, constant rapport with Melia absolutely enchanted all outside observers, Nia was sure, but the suitress of the moment for absolute certain.

There came the distinct sound of nails clicking, rapping, tapping on the desk before the communication device - or, no. Those were Minoth's fingers snapping, and an accompanying pop of his tongue.

"Tch! Hey! Alrest to Queen Nia?"

Her answering protestation was weak: "Well, see, I thought if you were gonna be gettin' misty-eyed, I could sort of just..."

But Minoth kept on tutting. "Didn't let me finish. Not very queenly of you - I might have to take my esteeming judgement there back."

"Oh, Architect forbid." Wanker. "Go on, finish your story. Queen's orders," Nia tacked on for good measure.

"Well, not much to tell." Minoth loved playing bashful when his audience was captive - even when he'd coerced them to be! Oh, he got on her nerves. Which, fortunately for him, included those nerves responsible for inducing fondness. "I was terrified. Already had been, of the idea of imposing myself into Addam's life, and with Flora there, and their children, I thought he'd never want me to stay with him. An ugly lunk like me?"

"Thank me again for the fresh scar, when you get a chance."

"And you're welcome! Flora, it turned out, wanted me just as badly as Addam did, if not more so. I thought to myself, there must be levels to all this. Must be that no self-respecting normal people with normal lives would take it upon themselves to not just accept, respect, and share a meal with a failed Flesh Eater, but actually love him. Must be that people are very strict with who they let in. Must be..."

Minoth trailed off, and Nia puzzled on his words. When she was ready, she flashed him back that all-important look.

"Think she wants you just as badly as you want her, Nia. Her, and them, and all of them. People don't just agree to things like that with their best blushing faces on for nothing."

"In other words, you think people are naturally made up for love."

"I know so! If they weren't, I'd have dropped dead centuries ago."

True enough - if Nia agreed to the fundamental proposition that Minoth had put forth, generally, about taking people at their word.

"And Nia?"

"Yeah?"

"It's worth the effort."

"I know that, you absolute twerp!"

"Just making sure..."