One luminary clock against the sky - Exist

[Giver]

It's in the eyes; I can tell, you will always be danger
We had it tonight, why do we always seek absolution?

Tears. She had been crying. He could see it in the red, swollen look in her eyes and the dark, wet trails marching the slope of her jaw. Knew that it must be true when she blinked and errant leftovers spilled past her eyelashes; heard it as her voice cracked and caught in her chest, even then.

‘Alight…’ The skin around the places where those strange, fiery wings had forged their new, connective tissue with her shoulders had been hairless and raw. But he could see, even with the naked eye as he examined the burnt, pink skin, that she was healing.

Smooth, bright gold was sprouting up like springtime to mend the angry wounds.
Clean and perfect.

‘S-see. I’m like the sun and you’re like the moon. W-we’re, perfect…’

He thought they had been tears of pain.
He understood, now.
That understanding brought him further bewilderment.

He disentangled himself as quickly as he could, but he knew he had upset her in the process. Slowly it was making sense – as uncomfortable a sensation for him as dawn picking away at night to lay things bare and bright. He had, in the quiet moments with Spark and the louder moments with Alight, managed not to see it.

Men, they say, are capable hands at this.

He could never blame her for the jealous mutterings. He felt, at the time, that misplaced though they were, they made sense. It had been the two of them for so long. Not as long, perhaps, as Alight might still think. But almost so. So close, that it might as well be, so when she cast her cold, cagy glares at Spark, he thought it was a wrinkle that would smooth itself with time. A parting ache, like growing pains, only so much worse. Worse because it was like losing a half. On lung, one ventricle, one hemisphere of the brain. It had been a more protracted thing for him and so it had been easier.

He watched as illusion slipped from her before her bright, wild eyes and for a split second he thought he saw something he could not recognize in his sister.
Something that looked like animus, and then it was gone. Clean and perfect.

He could not find Malis to tell her what he had seen. How do you tell a mother her daughter is on fire? That she is, perhaps, broken in a way that he cannot repair this time? (That she is dangerous. He thinks. He thinks for a second and then he washes it away.) Nor does he find Spark among the many, brilliant flowering weeds. Perhaps it is all for the best. So, he waits for the sky to begin to darken in the east and turns his back to it, following the sun to the western shore, where he begins to fish his thoughts out of their muddied waters. 

Tries, desperately, not to recall the dark, flat gaze through narrowed eyes, so unkind to the pretty features it had taken over like a bloodborne disease.

It's in the eyes; I can tell you will always be danger

[exist]

while collecting the stars, I connected the dots.
I don’t know who I am, but now I know who I’m not.

She draws alongside him in the dusk, and for once there is only quiet glowing in her chest. The magic is still there, hers and not hers, impatient and yearning and reaching for Giver, but when she turns those pale green eyes against the softness of his troubled face, everything else fades away. For the first time since the fairy gifted her these magics, she is in control. Perhaps it is because it is the last of the magic, one final gift and then her job will be done. But it feels different, it feels better- and she feels whole.

“Hello, Uncle.” She says at last, quiet, reaching out to touch the soft of her whiskered nose to the curve of his gleaming cheek. He is family, he has always been family – though, he does not belong to them by blood. It is something more and stronger, something that feels even more relevant in this closeness. She has known him forever, as long as she has known any of her wide and scattered family – admittedly most of them also bound together by something more than the blood in their veins. But she thinks she prefers it this way, being surrounded by a family you choose.

“What’s on your mind tonight?” She asks because she can see it in his face, because he is a book she has read a thousand times, whose pages are as memorized as her own or those of her sister, Leliana. She shifts closer,  close enough that the russet feathers of her wings press soft against the curve of his side, and lays her cheek against his shoulder to stare out across the ocean with him.

The water is quiet but for the ripples of uneven rocks below and the water-beasts that coil and twist beneath the surface. Further out, beyond that stretch of bright blue like summer skies, she can make of the silhouettes of dark and stone, of reef and the things that hide within. At the edge, where deep ocean blurs to blend with a mottled gold an orange sky, she finds her peace. Even her wings shift restlessly, yearning for the in-between, for that streak of color where the sun sinks like a dropped coin.

Instead, with a sigh, she lifts her cheek from where it lay against a palely glowing shoulder and shifts to turn her eyes on him, letting them settle uncertainly in those dark hollows she has come to know so well. “Giver,” she pauses then, hesitant for the first time to return a gift- but it doesn’t matter whether or not he wants it back, she knows she can’t keep it like this in her chest, so she continues with a furrowing brow, her eyes sad and heavy when she says, “I have something for you.”

When his magic pours out of her, a euphoric exodus for the final time, she finds that the hole it leaves behind is strange and stretched and she does not like how it feels. She is certain that in time it will heal, because it is nothing that has been taken from her, nothing that was hers to keep. But, still, there is too much empty and too much hollow, and when she breaks her gaze to stare back out across the ocean as she had done before, there is a new dark to her face, a hollowness that had not been there before. And then, without looking back at him, “We can all be whole again.”

Exist

[Giver]

It's in the eyes; I can tell, you will always be danger
We had it tonight, why do we always seek absolution?

It never really mattered to him that they were not really his sisters, brothers; nieces; father and mother. It hadn’t been an avalanche for him, but a trickle. A slow unravelling, so it had been tolerable. As years went on, he had played the knots loose himself—slowly, as he grew up and began to better understand the things he was reading from their souls.

As a baby, he could understand (or misunderstand) only a few things: he knew, vaguely, when they were sad, scared; when they were hungry and when they were hurt.

All the complicated things were beyond him, for a long, long time.
All the important things.

When he was a young man, he could understand (or misunderstand) a little more: when they were resentful, when they were distant, lonely or when they trusted him and Alight to not wander too far from the Chamber. He could feel that they were more attached to Alight. Even if they would whole-heartedly refute it. Even if, in practice, he would have never known the different had it not been so easily tasted, for all the care and love he had received was in equal measure to her.

It is a deep down, genetic thing, he supposes. It is the animal makings of parturition; it is the important silk that stitches young to parent, that makes the whole organism of their species work.

And then, he began to wonder where the stars came from…

He turns his soft, brown eyes to her as she sidles up to him, smiling. No. It matters so little that they are seeds from different trees. They had, by mischief and madness, landed in the soil side-by-side each other. Close enough for Exist to grow in the shade he, and so many others, made. As the tale tells it, he and Alight are the eldest of the children. Exist and Leliana, the first seedlings of a new generation. Their coming had been a joy, if a bit curious.

The tickle from her whiskers makes him shiver, he leans his head lightly into her touch to bump her back. “Hello.” He is not even perturbed by the ease with which she guesses he is discontent. Giver has always been the serious one (at least, when taken in the context of Alight—not difficult) but not particularly adept at erasing the lines from his face. Besides, he had come down here for the exact opposite: to untangle and stew.

He only wonders how he can explain it all away.

“Girls,” he replies, with a wry grin and a wink, giving her a jesting nudge. He shakes his head. It is only a half-truth. “Sisters,” he adds, and his voice contains a sigh, some frustration and worry. “Luckily for me, you are a good girl,” he, too, watches the water grow bright and fiery with dusk, “just what I need to restore some sanity.” He tries to keep the full extent of his concern from his voice, to avoid worrying her over-much.

That has never been his aim;
He has always sought to protect them all.
(How could be possibly do that if ever called upon?)
He likes to make them laugh—keep them diverted into the shallows of happiness.

(Where had it gone wrong with Alight?)

The soft brush of feathers against his side elicits a chain reaction of confusion in his brain. He furrows his brow and turns to her again, but before he can ask her about them, she speaks his name in such a way that brings a hush. “Mhmm?” He watches her, the anxiety resting so heavy in his bones rattling in the quiet pause before she says, ‘I have something for you.’ He waits.

That fairy magic passes without sound and with only the slightest touch, and of course, what leaves her empty fills him. That he does feel. His skin prickles; hairs stand on their end, reacting to the electrical nature of the ceremony. Above, the stars begin to unfurl, their unsettled reflections glittering away in that liquid galaxy. They reach for him—with powerful, old hands—and their contact leaves miniatures in his body’s glowing atmosphere.

‘We can all be whole again.’  

He inhales—holds it—takes a few trotting steps, until the ocean laps just below his knees with its cold tongue. He looks down and looking back at him is no longer the faded reflection of a sick moon, but himself. Tiny cosmos and all. He smiles, throwing in head back and yells across the pitch-black water in chaotic, all-encompassing glee. “RRRR-AAAH-AH-HAHAAA!” The sounds magnifies over the ocean and echoes rudely. He turns, quick and nimble, and leaps back to Exist. “How did you–? I,” he ruffles her forelock his his lips, “thank you.” His breath comes heavy, his heart pounding, “have you learned to use those, yet?” he motions to her wings, smiling.

He can only imagine what flight means to her.
If it is anything like what these stars mean to him...

It's in the eyes; I can tell you will always be danger