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Elora thinks she listens for it even in her sleep.
Well—she does, actually. Or, she must.
She knows when she might expect it: after days when Mel doesn’t seem quite herself, leading into nights when Elora is invariably woken up by a distant scream so quiet that she could only have heard it if she was listening.
It’s Elora’s business to know Mel’s habits. Of course she knows this one, too.
She supposes it’s just as much a habit of her own at this point.
Still, she always hesitates at the door. It’s thick, solid walnut with gilded hardware like every other door in the Medarda mansion, the best that money can buy. Yet, the door lacks the sleek sconce outside, the vase of fresh flowers refreshed by the maids on a precise schedule. This door is off-limits to everyone except for the lady of the house.
And Elora. She turns the key—one of two copies, only—over in her hand one more time, nervously, before finally turning it in the lock.
It’s pitch black inside and Elora’s eyes are adjusted to the stylishly-lit hallway, so she knows this room instead of sees it. Unlike the other half-dozen bedrooms on this floor, Elora knows this one is decked out in drab concrete and black-stained wooden shutters instead of golden wallpaper and velvet drapes. It also lacks the opulent four-poster bed, the tasteful decorations, the fashionable armoire and conversation furniture of the other rooms; this dark room instead is occupied only by a broad, frameless mattress and the blood-red painting looming over it.
Elora knows, but can’t see, that this room is also currently occupied by Mel, sitting up dead in the center of the mattress with her hair loose and her head in her hands.
The two women are about the same height, both tall, but this is the only time Elora feels she towers over Mel: when she approaches the side of the mattress and hovers, waiting.
Elora hears the rustle of the bedclothes as Mel moves over.
She answers with the rustle of pulling her nightgown over her head. Her eyes aren’t adjusted well enough to see it, but she knows Mel’s own nightgown is on the floor somewhere, too, like she knows the golden adornments fused to Mel’s skin, fully on display, have something to do with all of this. The room, the painting, Mel.
And Ambessa, of course.
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Where there’s Mel in pain, there’s Ambessa.
Elora doesn’t know the whole story, but, well—she’s not stupid. And she is Noxian, too, and she’s a Medarda servant in a long line of Medarda servants. Without knowing many of the details, Elora knows more than enough about the reasons Mel was abruptly dumped in Piltover with nothing but a purse of starting capital, the clothes on her back, and an assistant plucked at random out of Kino’s detail.
Mel would never tell her the rest, the details, anyway. Or, Elora doesn’t think she ever will.
There’s no nightstand to put the room key on, so Elora carefully places it on top of her nightgown to ensure it doesn’t get lost before climbing into the space Mel made for her.
The room is cold, but the thin mattress and stiff bedding are warm from Mel’s couple of hours tossing and turning. The pillow smells like Mel’s conditioner as Elora sinks into it. Like Mel’s, Elora’s hair is also loose from its typical coif for sleep; she drags it over her shoulder so it won’t pull as she lies flat on her back.
Elora doesn’t flinch when Mel eventually lays back, too, and the coolness of the golden emblems on her shoulder presses against her own warm skin.
In this colossal bed, the closeness is a choice. Or at least, a force of habit.
For a few minutes, they’re still and silent. Elora listens as Mel’s breathing slows to a calmer tempo. Stares at the ceiling, sure to keep the vague yet unsettling painting out of her peripheral vision. Waits for Mel to reach for her hand.
One could simply never describe Mel Medarda as doing anything ‘shyly’, or ‘hesitantly’, or ‘gingerly,’ so Elora would say that Mel warily laces their fingers, her left with Elora’s right. Their dominant hands both free, as always.
Mel did her part in initiating the ritual, so Elora does hers.
The tight cotton weave of the duvet crunches softly as Elora brings her free hand up from her side and ghosts her fingers along her own sternum and collarbone. She always likes to start there, whether she’s alone, or with a partner, or with Mel. She’s not aroused yet—this has never quite been about that—so the first few strokes feel like nothing terribly special, but she focuses on the light rasp of her finger pads on her skin and the hot contact between her arm and Mel’s. When she gets going, feather-light touches like these feel like pure anticipation prickling under her skin, making a hot flush bloom over her breasts and neck. It starts to crop up after a few minutes, and Elora indulges the both of them with a small, pleased hum.
Next to her, the duvet crinkles again as Mel starts to do the same. Feel herself up, that is.
Admittedly? This was a lot less, well… weird when it started. When they were younger, when things were difficult.
They were both only about twenty years old, near-strangers yet all alone in the world but for each other when they first stepped off the Medarda airship onto Piltovian soil. At that age, it could easily be passed off as youthful exploration, or a necessary comfort and means of discharging stress during a tumultuous time. Noxian literature is rife with such stories, all sorts of young companions—soldiers on the frontline, homesick sailors on long expeditions, the like—sharing their bodies in this way as they shared their cause. Maybe that’s where they got the idea, why it seemed so natural at first.
This mansion was but a twinkle in Mel’s red-rimmed eyes at the time; they started with a middle-class two bedroom apartment. It was through those thin walls that Elora first heard Mel thrashing through nightmares, then an almost-nightly occurrence; it was through that cheap hollow door that Elora, compassionate but also desperate for uninterrupted sleep, first stepped through to offer a near-stranger a shoulder to cry on; and it was in a narrow single bed that this habit started.
The closeness wasn’t a choice, yet. The small beds were all they could afford at the time. Their days were spent scheming, schmoozing, ingratiating, selling ideas, investing and re-investing; their nights were spent like this, shoulder to shoulder, touching themselves together.
Or rather, their days and nights are spent so, sometimes even still.
Mel’s nightmares are much less frequent nowadays, and correspondingly, so are Elora’s visits to this bed, they never stopped. Not as they left behind the small apartment for a less cramped townhome, then a cozy villa on the outskirts of town, then the brand-new Medarda mansion with this—honestly—melodramatic bedroom. Not as they each took other lovers from time to time. Not as birthday after birthday passed in Piltover, even as they reached twenty-five, thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three…
Well, they say one gets even more stuck in their ways as they age.
Elora’s neck prickles with heat and so she trails her fingers up, out from under the duvet, to feel along the column of her throat. There, she finds a bead of sweat that she drags down to draw a pattern over her collarbone. The rise and fall of her chest with the accompanying sigh alerts Elora to her peaked nipples as they brush on the scratchy duvet. If she had both hands free, she’d cup both breasts and tweak both nipples, but with her right fingers firmly laced with Mel’s, their palms and pulse points sweating against each other, she just crosses her free hand across her ribs to play with her right breast and lets the pressure and brush of her forearm across her left be enough.
A quick series—one, two, three, four—of muffled taps from her side suggests to Elora that Mel is feeling around her thigh. Mel likes to drum her fingernails on the golden adornment there. A long whoosh and a shift in the duvet confirms it, as Mel drags her knuckles back up her stomach to squeeze her own breast. Elora can tell by the way Mel sighs as she does it, the way a small flash of cold air creeps over her shoulder as Mel disturbs the edge of the blanket there.
Elora does the opposite and releases her breast to slide her hand down her stomach and cup herself, briefly letting the weight of her hand alone soothe the small ache there. Soon enough, she wants more, so she slides her well-practiced middle and ring finger along either side of her clit, just barely ghosting along her way to tease around her entrance. She shivers, and squeezes Mel’s fingers as her cunt clenches wantingly around nothing.
Mel squeezes back and mirrors her, rustling the duvet again as she reaches for her own clit.
Elora feels aroused, but still not quite ready for more than fleeting touches. Her mind wanders while she builds herself up, as it always does: snippets of fantasies about good-looking people she knows, scenes she liked from dirty books, memories from past encounters. She thinks about the girl she’d been seeing back in Noxus before she was exiled along with Mel and idly wonders if she’s gotten married yet. First loves are fickle, Elora knows, so she doubts things would have worked out with them in the long-term, but she supposes she’d have liked the opportunity to find out. Or even just the opportunity to say goodbye.
It’s all the what-ifs and unknowns that keep her up at night, even when Mel doesn’t have a nightmare. She’ll likely never know the whole story of what led Ambessa to banish Mel, what transgression she, Elora, is being punished for too.
It’s those what-ifs and unknowns that keep this going too, Elora figures. That make her feel like she’s still a homesick barely-more-than-teenager, huddled up with another not for literal warmth but for the figurative kind: the warmth of family, of friends, of community, of the arid Noxian summers that she, through Mel, was cast away from without warning.
But Elora isn’t stupid, and she is Noxian, too, and a Medarda servant in a long line of Medarda servants. She doesn’t know what exactly Mel did or didn’t do, what the painting looming over them depicts, what this austere room is a bizarre shrine to, but she knows Noxus, and she knows Ambessa, and by now, she knows Mel like she knows her own body.
She knows that as much as she didn’t deserve it, neither did Mel.
And somehow, that’s enough.
The duvet crinkles again and Mel’s hair brushes Elora’s shoulder as she leans closer, just enough to make her whisper audible: “I’m sorry.”
It never makes Elora’s stomach lurch any less, even as she rubs a soothing circle on Mel’s knuckles, mirroring the circle she starts around her clit, and habitually replies, “It’s alright.”