Of Things Unsaid - Hiveswap - Stelzias

[aroberuka]

Title: Of Things Unsaid
Fandom: Hiveswap
Challenge/Prompt: Ladiesbingo - The Elephant in the Room
AO3 Link: here

***

They don't talk about it.

 

The first time Tyzias leaves one of her books (nothing too obvious, no, certainly nothing that would get either of them culled, but controversial enough to raise eyebrows and, more importantly, questions) on Stelsa’s coffee table, it’s a genuine gesture. She’s been looking into some things lately, in between assignments, just some small, harmless, not revolutionary in the slightest things, and she wants—

She’s not sure what she wants. Help, understanding, or maybe just some company, because it’s exhausting, and terrifying, to unravel everything she’s been taught to think of as natural and right and replace it with her own thoughts, and it’s even worse to do it alone.

So she leaves Huntwits’ Confessions of an Auditerrorist in plain sight, where Stelsa can’t miss it, and waits.

But the next time she comes over the book hasn’t moved an inch and they don’t talk about it.

 

Time marches on. Tyzias leaves books on the desk or the ‘coonside table or by the load gaper and comes back to find them untouched or hidden away in drawers. One particularly inflammatory account of the lime blood cullings she just never sees again. When she tries to bring it up, Stelsa smiles and hums and offers to comb her hair, like Tyzias is a wiggler she has to humor.

Time marches on. Tyzias turns passive-aggressiveness into an art form. It’s childish and immature and a stupid, stupid thing to do—it doesn’t help anything, it’ll only make the inevitable fallout worse—but she’s too tired to pick a fight and just angry enough to be petty about it.

She thinks they’re hurtling towards the end, and it hurts, it really does—Stelsa has been her rock for so long, it never even occurred to her that she would—or rather, that she wouldn’t—it never occurred to her that Stelsa could see it all, all the horror and misery and the fucking injustice of an empire build on the mass exploitation of the most vulnerable and not care, or not enough anyway. That she would just pick herself up and keep going like it’s nothing when Tyzias can barely function most days from the wrongness of it all. 

She doesn’t know how to move past this.

 

It doesn’t do them any good, all this holding on. But breaking up with Stelsa—even the thought feels like panic, like vertigo. Like jumping down into some deep dark abyss.

So she lets the wound fester and they don’t talk about it.

 

 

 

 

These nights her hive is full of reminders.

 

Mostly it’s books, and that’s a relief. Books are easy to ignore, which make them easy to live with. They don’t complain. They don’t judge. They don’t throw you tired looks over mugs of water. 

Somenight, Zizi will make her kismesis wonderfully happy. Sometimes Stelsa wishes that was the quadrant they were in—maybe things would be easier then. There would be no need for subtlety, no reason to dance around difficult subjects; they could drag every grievance, every single ugly thought out in the open and leave it for the blackfeatherbeasts. Zizi has never been shy about voicing her thoughts, even on topics better left alone. She used to think it was charming. Now she lives with the constant fear it will get one of them culled—or worse.

 

It didn’t use to be like this. Used to be Zizi could be reasoned with—or maybe Stelsa had known how to talk to her without cutting herself on all the sharp edges. How to argue without feeling like she was navigating a minefield. But time, or the pressure of her legislacerator training, or maybe something else altogether, something Stelsa can’t see yet, something much more insidious has made Zizi biting and bitter. Intransigent. It’s like she’s determined to look at the world—their world, their future, their everything—through the worst possible lens, and no amount of common sense will make her give an inch. 

Stelsa doesn’t know how to pull her back from this.

Or if she should let go.

 

It can’t go on forever, this cold war of theirs, but she can’t find a way to bring it up without upsetting the delicate balance between them, and she’s no longer sure there would still be a them after that, and that’s—no.

She will take the silence, she thinks, over an empty hive.