we, too, fall like petals

“Do you hate yourself?” Valentina asked, her voice soft and gentle in the way one soothes cattle for slaughter.

Svetlana’s tongue felt heavy in her mouth, and it wasn’t because of the cloying richness of the cake she had taken a bite of. Her gaze didn’t lift to meet Valentina’s, instead resolutely looking at the cake in front of her. A chocolate crêpe cake with whipped cream and strawberries on top. The red was garishly bright against the backdrop of white and brown. She said nothing.

“Because sometimes I think I hate myself.”

- - - - -

The weather was warm and pleasant with rays of sunlight that made Svetlana wish she could stretch herself out like Claws McPaws in front of the Tree Stump Library. She and Valentina were ahead of schedule on their journey, and Valentina insisted that they must stay a day and get afternoon tea at a delightful little shop in the city they were passing through on the border of Rahadoum and Thuvia.

“My father took me there once.” Valentina had said. If the promise of cake and tea on a sunny day weren’t enough to tempt her, then the wistfulness of her friend’s expression sealed the deal.

So, to Turning Pages Tea & Poetry they went.

Svetlana and Valentina sat now at a small table on the patio, with the most delightful lacy place settings and an umbrella overhead providing shade. Sat in the middle of the table was an ornate glass vase with bunches of lilacs. The sweet scent lingered in the air, comforting and welcoming. Valentina ordered them a pot of white tea with floral notes, smiling at Svetlana and saying it would contrast nicely with the richness of the crêpe cake she wanted.

“You once said your father was an adventurer,” Svetlana had said. An innocent inquiry asked to learn more about her friend, unknowing of the gnarled path the conversation would find itself on.

Valentina smiled. Her smiles were always small, polite, pretty things, with no wrinkling of her eyes or flash of teeth. She smiled with the practiced ease of a noble keeping their cards close to their chest. Habits die hard, Svetlana supposed.

“Yes, he is. Travels all around Golarion exploring the world and taking on quests. He’s seen a lot–in our letters, he taught me a lot through speaking on what he saw,” Valentina said.

Svetlana considered that. “I knew of the letters, but I wasn’t aware you spent time with him in person.”

“It wasn’t often. Once when I was little enough that there’s only vague shapes of the memories, but when I turned 16 he took a leave from his adventuring party and brought me to northern Garund. We traveled for a few months, just the two of us,” she explained.

“That sounds lovely. Fond memories?” Svetlana asked. She looked around at the cafe and knew the answer as she asked it. Warm weather, beautiful city scenery, tea, and a poetry shop all in one. She wondered if Valentina’s love of poetry came from her father, or if he had merely indulged her with selecting this cafe all those years ago.

“Very fond,” Valentina confirmed. “I think… I think that experience was what set me on the path to joining the Bellflower Network a few months later. Finally seeing the greater world outside Cheliax for myself. Seeing that there was no one correct way to live, and even if there was then Cheliax was the one doing it wrong.”

“You joined the Bellflower Network at 16? So young, not even a full adult yet.”

A shadow passed over her face. “I may have been young, but I would see folks younger than that as slaves. If they weren’t too young to be sold as chattel, then I wasn’t too young to do something about it.”

Svetlana’s throat constricted at that, mouth suddenly dry. Ah, the crux of the matter and perhaps why they hadn’t discussed the topic in full yet—the complete and real brutality of Cheliax and the position Valentina must have been in as a noblewoman. She took a sip from the tea, but the perfumey taste was suddenly unpleasant in her mouth.

Putting the cup down with a delicate clink as it hit the saucer, Svetlana said, “You must be proud of yourself, then, to have helped so many people over so many years.”

That, it seemed, was the wrong thing to say.

Valentina sucked in a slight gasp, grip tightening on her own teacup. Her eyes searched Svetlana’s face a moment, then darted away and towards the street beyond the patio. Svetlana did not look too, but she could imagine what Valentina saw. Nameless faces that she’d never see again passing by. Each with their own life as rich and meaningful as her own.

Her gentle voice cut through the reverie, saying, “Do you hate yourself?”

Svetlana’s tongue felt heavy in her mouth. She said nothing.

“Because sometimes I think I hate myself,” Valentina continued.

Svetlana looked to the lilacs in the middle of the table. A pale purple with tiny, soft petals. She saw, then, that one of the bunches was wilting, its stem cut too short to reach the water in the vase. Its petals drooped lifelessly, threatening to come apart at the touch. She felt compelled in that moment to reach out, to touch it and see its petals fall, yet she abstained.

Her silence did not deter Valentina. “I joined the Bellflower Network, yes, but in order to make myself of use and feed other tillers information, I had to blend into Chelaxian society. I was… a Thrune’s knight. His bodyguard. His lap dog.” The last word was said so viscerally, that Svetlana knew it was only being parroted by Valentina.

“You… you did what you had to in order to help people,” Svetlana tried to say to soothe her friend.

She shook her head. “I’d help one slave escape and hurt three more people in some manner to keep my cover. When the sum of my life is weighed at my death, I know that the ills I’ve done far outweigh any good.”

“That’s not true,” Svetlana argued.

“To me it is. It’s enough to make my insides churn and my head hurt and my heart weep.”

Svetlana swallowed heavily. The words stuck to the roof of her mouth, so she had to force them out. “So you… hate yourself?”

“I think so,” Valentina breathed out.

And what Svetlana might have said in another life was, ‘We are alike, you and I. The cosmic imbalances of our births and the sums of our lives weigh heavy on our souls. It threatens to drag us down and tear us apart. I know it. I know you. I know, I know, I know’. It was what she wanted to yell out—to finally be seen as she was by someone who was a reflection of herself in some ways and so, so different in others. She wanted so badly for her own pain to be acknowledged that her own heart ached, the hurt blossoming outwards and into her very veins.

Instead, she gave a thin smile, and said, “Another pot of tea? Something that goes good with cream this time.”

When Valentina turned away to speak with a waitress, Svetlana reached a hand out, one finger outstretched, and touched the wilting lilac petals. One petal shuddered underneath her touch and broke.

It fell softly to the table.