WHO: Badr (ft. Aditi) WHEN: The Past WHERE: Around Campus SUMMARY: He has never really been alone before. CW: Crisis of faith? 🎵
The clouds are littered with pinpricks, emitting too-sharp strains of light to fall over the frosted grass, providing no warmth for his shoulders as he settles on his knees. Dirt like stone, grass like dirt.
He’ll close his eyes, lift his throat, and Simurgh will filter over his tongue, washing the sharp Serenitan morning in shades of forest, glints of gold, clouds of blue-green shadow… Though they are very far, he will hear his people’s voices rising up around him, deep and high, perfectly pitched and terribly off-key. A quilt of sound made of many different patches.
His throat feels hard, no sound emerges. He can feel the concerned ruffle of her feathers, as though it was his own skin shivering.
“You stopped singing.”
He looks up at Aditi, bundled in layers of silk and wool. Her smile is chafed with cold, redder than usual, but dry.
This is how they became friends. When he was first frightened away by the prince, he’d sought a different space and found it near her window. He had found her many times, leaning out of it—doing as he so often did: tossing bits of dinner’s bread to the birds—and listening respectfully. Her gaze on him was soft, like the way sunlight traveled through the currents of a brook.
She sits beside him, pressing close for warmth, and he presses back. Another sister. This one, perhaps, knowing him in a way that no one else has—for some things between them are so very implicit, known only by steps taken on a parallel path. His little nature priestess.
“I’ve a fear I’ve caught cold. The winter here is less forgiving.”
She nods. “No boughs, no mountains.”
He nods. “Cliftops and wind.”
They smile at each other, though his is faded. She digs around in her cloak and pulls out a small, water-green vial. “This.”
Dutifully, he tips it back, feels the warmth—thinks if he really did have a cold, he would already feel his throat easing and sinuses relaxing. She rests her head on his shoulder and a hand on his thigh. He smiles tightly. The potion, at least, makes it easier to start over again and finish the song.
“Why do you greet the day so solemnly?” she asks, not lifting head or hand.
“I…I seem to still be a little tired.”
Her hand moves then, touching his brow. She clucks. “I feel no fever.”
“It’s sometimes hard to sleep here. There is so little…sound.”
She nods in commiseration. “I feel the same. The quiet of the night…sometimes I feel like it will swallow me, like there is nothing here but the mountain wind and the stars, and even though I am behind a heavy wall, I am frightened I will be buffeted away, from the face of the earth, in that silence.”
He laughs.
She laughs. “Was that dramatic?”
“No, I feel that way, too, at times. To stand atop a mountain is different than to shelter at its foot.”
“Let us break fast. You’ll feel better with warm food in you.” She stands and pulls on his shoulder, until he chuckles and moves to his feet. They both, he thinks, can hear the curious hollowness behind the sound—or perhaps she does not. She doesn't remark on it.
Instead, they walk away towards the banquet hall, jesting as they try to guess when spring will come.
He manages to find his voice, but the roll of salt over his cheeks has no elation or wonder, and he can hear Her voice humming sweetly around him, meant to fall over him like a blanket against the cold, but sometimes the very most unpleasant answer to pain is touch. He runs his knuckles over his brow, finishes every soaring refrain and humming chorus—does it automatically and woodenly, his divine-blessed voice ugly in his ears for the first time in his life.
He delicately draws away from the brush of Her presence, and he can feel the confusion, but She relents and slips back, over the mountains and through the trees, away from him.
Sometimes he thinks it might only be his voice that severs the long silences of Serenitas, tearing open the stillness every morning and every night. It leaves him feeling exposed and uneasy. These cold stars know him, have seen him. They are so very indifferent, watching through his window, incurious at his slumped form.
Just another foolish human, missing the bigger picture—felled by a glimpse at the true nature of his world.
If he screamed, Zuya would hear, or—on the room on his other side—Cinna.
Face brow pressed to the rug, fingernails tear into his palms, he rails at Her. Silently, furiously. If She hears, She doesn’t respond.
She keeps their secrets—as perhaps She will, one day, keep his own.
He slides beside Cinna as Zuya is off preparing her plate. “I want to search our archives—the hidden ones. About the Dark Knight, I mean. We may not have access to the secrets here, but I know how to find our own.” He says it brightly, like he’s suggesting nothing more than a child’s scavenger hunt. “Will you come with me?”