stardust and shorelines

The more I think about Urianger and Moenbryda and the more I dig into what little we have of their history in canon the more insane I feel about them. They have been friends since childhood and I cannot get over how messy that relationship must have been over the years. She was his only childhood friend. He deeply admires her work in aetherology. He told her an axe was unbecoming of a scholar. They were both disciples of Louisoix. Their mentor left for Eorzea with one of them and not the other and never even bothered to tell Moenbryda why, leaving her to deal with the vicious rumors about her former mentor alone. Urianger hated to see her hurt, but was so devoted to Louisoix that he went along with this and agreed that sure, Moenbryda needed to "find her own path" aka intuit why her mentor abandoned her and what he wanted her to learn from that by... magic, I guess. She flirts with him openly. He calls her immature. He panics when she hugs him in public. He calls her "my dearest" but only after she's dead. He lets her sacrifice herself, says she "fulfilled her destiny" and then lets the guilt over that choice spiral him deeper and deeper into a lonely and isolated hell of his own making. I love them and they make me want to chew the curtains.

If this is what they're like in their late 20s... I can hardly imagine what they were like as teenagers. Obviously they care deeply for each other and there must have been a real connection to make it stick all these years, but they are so different I can't imagine there weren't misunderstandings and hurt feelings and arguments where one or both of them went off and sulked until they got tired of it or lonely and then made up again like it never happened. I'm sure Urianger didn't always make being his friend easy; I also bet she pushed his limits sometimes, like I bet that remark about her "youthful manner" isn't coming from nowhere. Moenbryda seems like the type of person who was good at making friends and had a lot of them; I wonder if younger Urianger ever struggled with not having her full attention even as he'd rather die than admit he wanted it. Conversely I wonder how many times she tried to drag him out of his shell in ways he was simply not comfortable with. And yet, through it all, they must have reached a fundamental acceptance of one another, even as it's often tinged with fond exasperation.