Notes: The first part - even if a bit OOC - is something that could possibly work within the canon, the second part is set in an AU version where Ivory survived. I didn't see a way of doing it any other way.
The first time they meet is at the Esar's banquet.
Their behaviour seems oddly contrasting - one of them eccentric and outgoing, the other quiet and seemingly withdrawn into himself; one on his own but a part of the crowd, the other part of a group and yet, ultimately, alone.
Their appearance is equally strange; they are both striking in their otherness. Here, the well known uniform, hair and skin the colour of bone, there, extravagant, colourful clothes that don't quite fit in with the crowd - they both seem unique in this sea of faces, different from those around them and through this alike, each in his own special way.
However, it is not this resemblance that makes them notice each other. Rather, it is at the moment their eyes accidentally meet each other over the ballroom that they notice a different similarity. It is one of two minds, strangely twisted but not quite broken, clinging to a last shred of sanity, ready to tear any time. They recognize each other as birds of a feather, an echo of some long-lost kinship resonating between them.
Then someone moves into their line of sight, breaking the connection and the moment of spiritual affinity. At the end of the evening, none of them will remember this anymore, but they will both experience a vague sense of loss without knowing why.
They meet again in a different room in the palace, late on the night of celebrations for the Esar's victory in the war, after the hours of the solemn distributions of decorations have turned into more lighthearted celebrations, as lighthearted as they can be with all the losses of the war still weighing on everyone's minds.
The room is dark, some kind of currently unused antechamber, and the sounds of a piano echo through the emptiness, filling the darkness with sound instead of light. The music sounds like clear, cold water and winter's air, and the one who is listening closes his one seeing eye and feels it wash over his damaged mind, soothing, cleansing, not quite enough to restore but strong enough to mend, strand by strand, piece by piece.
When the music stops, he decides to share his own way of mending.
The dreams come as easily to him as the music came to the other and they ease the other's mind a little further away from the breaking point, numbing the pain of loss and the loss of fire and smoke and blood and purpose. The future, like the present, is bleak, for this one, and filled with shadows, even more so than his past, and there will be blood and steel and pain and sorrow. But for now, there is a piece of the freedom of dragon's flight and a piece of the soothing the sweet song of dragon's fire brings and below it, there is a calm that mends, even though it does not quite restore.
It is not much, but for now, it is enough.