Can you pls give (1) One Doropetra headcanon?
Language.
As is true with most bilingual speakers pulled from their culture for too long, Petra finds it difficult not only to traverse the long-standing habits of speaking the mainland language that have ingrained her speech since youth (habits that she's struggled with overcoming--her learning of the language born out of pure necessity through broken pieces of speech she'd heard around her in cities and classrooms) but slowly discovers more and more difficulty touching base with her native tongue, on top of it. This leaves Petra with a growing frustration of being unable to accurately communicate with her peers--a challenge Dorothea notes Petra always tackles not with a disheartened attitude, but unrelenting persistence. Frequently.
So it's shocking when Petra confides in her dearest friend after a particularly grueling battle, both of them covered in so many scratches they might rival the remnants of a thrown-away parchment in Linhardt's study, that this inability to recall the words she had known so easily once--all words her grandfather had taught her...makes her--
'...sad is the word I am thinking you might use.'
Sad.
It's a simple word--quiet--murmured--and so unlike Petra that Dorothea's blindsided.
Dorothea had been the one to start the conversation, after all--she had asked Petra what the word for binding cloth for wounds was in her language--a war word they've both come far too familiar with this past year in the Great War of Fodlan--before that long, long pause enveloped them both, and a deep shade cast over Petra's face as she stared down at the small little piece of winding white in her palms.
Sad.
It was, wasn't it? Such a simple, painful word. How many operas had been written about a word like sadness? Probably as many as were written about a word like love.
"I've never heard you speak your language." It's a quiet realization, fingers thoughtlessly curving around the calloused pair tightening wrap around Dorothea's cut arm, Gremory far too exhausted for any more magic until either a nice, long nap or an even nicer, hotter, longer bath. It's a far more humbling realization to know that she might never have known Petra was sad, at all, had the other girl not said it so plainly.
'There is not much to be doing about it. I must be...' Brows barely knit before Petra looks up with a calm smile--resilient. 'Doing what I can to learn what I can of Fodlan, for the people of Brigid. There is not much speaking of Brigidian here.'
'I'm sorry, Petra. I didn't know. I never thought--'
'It is okay, Dorothea. Let us be going back to camp. The Professor will be worrying for us.'
In what she would likely call a fit of continuous madness the day after their return, Dorothea starts sneaking away to the library and tries desperately--her hardest, truly--to learn what she can of the Brigid language. Nights spent hiding, bent over tomes and murmuring words to herself like a madwoman. She tries to drop it into conversation with Petra and learns how the other woman must feel when she absolutely massacres it every attempt she tries.
But she does try. And, bolstered by Petra's similar determination, she doesn't give up.
Even when Petra blinks and laughs and tries to piece together what Dorothea's saying, for a change, before lighting up.
Yes, that's enough to keep the library visits consistent.
Dorothea asks words more and more frequently and tries to slip them into sentences--tries to learn syntax and structure and grammar.
And each and every time Petra beams.
The good news is, even with all the massacring (both in and out of the language, given the war) Petra no longer seems sad trying to recall words from her home, at all. In fact, it starts to come with far more ease. Before long, they spend afternoons bouncing between Brigidian and Foldan's tongue because more afternoons are spent together than not.
Two years into the war, Petra slips a book of songs on Dorothea's desk in the library one night, handwritten by Petra and Manuela--songs from Brigid that had historically been sang but had never been written along with a book of poems--
'They're not songs.' Petra hums in Fodlan before continuing in a tongue that's lost no longer, smile fitting despite the faint blush highlighting cheeks in the muted hues of a dim library. 'It was difficult to tell you any other way.'
Dorothea, however, doesn't fully understand that last meaning for years. But the poems are...
Beautiful eloquent poems, it seems, that make Dorothea cry like a true romantic. A blubbering, ugly, embarrassing mess.
Fortunately, Petra seems to take this as a cue to give them to Dorothea more often.
Six months after the war, amidst a nation rebuilding, Petra herself offers Dorothea the position of ambassador to Brigid with that same smile and blush, fingers flattening down her official garments, none of them used to wearing official dress over war clothes, these days. A curious look to Edie, who suspiciously immediately excuses herself with a smirk, does nothing to stop the abject horror of elation and fear brimming through every inch of Dorothea's body.
'I have been telling my grandfather many times of the need for a Brigidian Opera.' Petra beams, Fodlan not as stilted on her tongue, nor as embarrassed of her ingrained missteps, 'He has been asking of you in my letters, but I am not thinking he has full understanding of how beautiful you sing.' The wind brushes through long hair on the boat and this time Dorothea does not pause herself from touching it.
Fortunately, learning the language is easier when there are far more people around that speak it than it is bent over a tome and Brigid becomes Dorothea's home as quickly as Petra herself once had.
But for all of this and more, as dazzling and wonderful as Brigid comes to be in the following years, nothing is more worth learning the language than the poems Petra writes her every week.
And nothing is quite as useful as knowing how to make up excuses for why she's sneaking from Petra's quarters to the guards posted outside of it every morning.
