Notes: Given that most of this takes place from Shar's perspective, Rook's probably gonna be called Blonko quite a bit here.
She was never quiet like her brother, when he walked. She knew because his ears twitched sometimes when she followed, and later, he always sent her slant-eyed glares over the dinner table, while she fiddled with her fork and plotted revenge. She would sit there and fume, the sweet tang of Amber Ogia porridge bursting on her tongue as she considered smearing dirt from her fingertips onto the precious metal implements he fiddled with in his room, the ones he always slid under the bed whenever Father approached. But then her stomach clenched as she remembered how they shone and caught the glimmer of the stars, how they burnt with this strange polished gleam that their farming tools were never allowed to be decorated with. And she knew then, that she could not bear to take such beauty away.
She never stopped trying though, to close the gap between her and her brother. She watched, day after day, as he leapt and swung his scythe as though it were made for more than that all-important cut that cleaved Amber Ogia from rocks, knowing that to their Father there could be no greater sin.
'Stop this foolishness,' he muttered one afternoon, his grave tone rolling out with all the presence of thunder. And her brother, normally so brave and quick, cowered beneath the tired rumble of a sigh Rook Da left behind. 'Back to work, Young One. You too,' he added, upon seeing her scythe still hovering in mid-air. 'Do not follow your brother's example.'
She scowled and with a sharp swing, forced her scythe down into the coil of the plant stem above, pretending, for once, that it was truly a weapon.
Never, could it be said, that she did not improve. For eventually, when she followed her brother, she learnt to leave space between them, enough for her to whisper out his new name and wait until she was sure that the air and not his ears, had stolen it away. But even so, she still pushed her feet gingerly into the prints he left behind, following the scuff marks of his steps, unable to shake that fearful quiver that this show of carefulness would fail to disguise her presence.
She watched, almost surprised as Rayona stepped out into the night before her, her flower crown a mere shimmer of white against her hair. It was almost as if a ghost alit upon her brow and perhaps her brother (Blonko, she reminded herself, Blonko now) felt the same, for he ran a quick finger against a petal, a gentle frown upon his face.
But then Rayona said something, some sweet sentence that disarmed him, for he looked at her, in the eye this time, and laughed softly. It jingled out into the air, a hint of awe in the sparkle of its sound, and his sister ached to have heard this new sort of happiness to its tone.
Quietly, she left for home. And yet during the following days, she noticed that in odd moments when they set off to work, his eyes lifted away from them all, even from the rakes they raised above their heads, to stare at the sky with this almost rapturous awe in his eyes. It was an altogether different kind of joy to the one she heard Rayona prompt from him, and she couldn't help but wonder how any of them could fit in his thoughts, in those times when he fixed his mind on worlds so far away from their own.
The day she chose her name, she could not help but remember the whirl of her brother's scythe, or whatever he had to hand, and the squeal of the muroids as he sent these things plummeting into their sides. She could not help but remember him as he spat out strange sounds in the dead of night, reading to her (even if he knew it not) all those strange oral exercises in some far-flung language called 'Engleesh.' And she remembered now, how years afterwards her people had adopted these customs, finding it to be a useful language, especially when trading. But she kept it secret, that her brother was the first to dab his tongue with it, the first to thread the unfamiliar vowels through his mouth and trust they would come out, unaltered by their fixation on avoiding contractions. She herself had practised the words, had pressed them against the roof of her mouth and felt them take shape. Even Father approved.
So, at her naming ceremony, she remembered her brother, fighting and speaking, and the sharpness involved in both these actions, how both his words and limbs fell through the air and came to a stop in seconds. She wanted to be like that, had practised to be like that, repeating the words, and the moves, again and again. She would be, as they said on Earth, that quick, that fierce, that sharp-
'Shar,' she announced without a moment of hesitation. 'My name is now Rook Shar.'
Notes: Yet another 'this was only meant to be a oneshot story!' Started sometime in October last year and then it kept on having a little bit added to it, then another...and another. And unlike another chaptered story (you probably know the one), this is almost finished. Just needs some fine-tuning.