Title: Wind Sisters
Character: Wendy Marvell, Lenalee Lee
Words: ~1500
Rating: K
Summary: They cross paths by chance and share dances in the sky, sisters for a brief moment in time.
Wind Sisters
They meet in a dream, in a place without boundaries between sleep and wakefulness.
She's vaguely aware that her Innocence is activated, the Dark Boots swirling streamers of blue power from her ankles, but there don't seem to be any akuma around. Instead, there is a small girl who looks very much like her, standing at her side and looking over the peaceful night scenery with a faint smile.
At first, Lenalee thinks that this girl is her, but that can't be right, because at that age, she was chained to a bed with death and an eternity full of forced denial in her lifeless eyes, kept alive by a tube forced sticky and gagging down her throat, and also her hair wasn't that long or that blue.
Then the stranger turns to face her, and Lenalee knows that this girl isn't from her world, knew with the strange but absolute certainty that comes only in dreams.
"You aren't from around here," she asks, and the girl shakes her head shyly. She scrutinizes the slight form carefully, trying to keep her guard up, because recently her dreams have been full of akuma exploding out of the bodies of her loved ones, and she cannot fight them because they wear the faces of her friends; but there is a harmless clarity that comes from this girl, a windblown innocence nearly tangible in the thin air, and she cannot stay suspicious in the face of it.
The wind itself seems to love this girl, Lenalee thought wistfully, watching the air stroke her dark ponytails into winding rivers of raven-blue in the light of the full moon. The girl turns to her and bows quickly, holding out her hand with a grin that reveals slightly-too-sharp canines. Somehow, Lenalee isn't worried.
"My name is Wendy," she says brightly. "What's yours?"
Lenalee takes the proferred hand and shakes it, smiling at the feeling of skin under her fingers, cool and wind-kissed. This dream is very real.
"My name is Lenalee," she replies kindly, and Wendy smiles up at this strange mirror-image of herself in another world and sees kindness and love and a sorrow so deep that even her healing touch cannot break it.
"I'm a dragonslayer," she pipes up proudly, and Lenalee blinks once at the odd word.
"Dragon…slayer?"
"Yup! I'm the Sky Dragonslayer!"
Lenalee smiles. She too knows something about the sky.
"Is that so?" she asks mildly. She pushes off once, the smooth movement of her body translating into an answering blaze of power from her Innocence, and then she is airborne, floating in the wind. Wendy gapes at her in surprise before breaking out into a huge grin, and then she is wrapped in a breathy swirl of air that ushers her off the cliff, leaving her suspended next to Lenalee with nothing by the sky to catch her.
Lenalee smiles at the look of exhilaration on the dragon-child's face, and then with a great push, her boots tap on the waiting air and she is climbing, climbing into the night sky on steps cut from the air itself as her Innocence propels her higher and higher. Wendy follows, arms spread like wings, the air around her gathering at her command to launch her into the stars after Lenalee, who is by now a shadowed silhouette against the moon. She catches up to the comet trail of the Dark Boots, overshoots it and swoops back, laughing, and Lenalee finds that she's laughing too as she extends her hand to Wendy in an invitation.
And then they're dancing in the wind, with only the whisper of the stars to accompany them, and they are so far up in the diamond-studded sky that no one else can touch them.
Lenalee twirls around Wendy, hair swirling about her in the playful breeze that has suddenly gusted to life around them, and Wendy answers with a gleeful leap that has her hanging, weightless in the air, the twin tails of her dark blue hair lifting slowly as if caught in time before drifting to trail in dark streamers across her beaming face. Lenalee responds by taking off into the midnight sky in a burst of blue power. She climbs and climbs, ever higher until the air turns thin and freezing and her lungs strain in the altitude.
She will break the barrier of this world. She will touch the stars.
With one final leap, she clears the clouds, settles next to the glowing moon, and here, at the highest point of her leap, she deactivates her innocence, spreads her arms out wide and closes her eyes as her body tilts, inexorably towards the earth. She lingers for a single, weightless moment before passing the delicate balance to begin her headlong descent into free-fall. The wind howls its blustering resistance against her body, whips her hair into dark, streaming banners about her face, and she listens to the sound of her clothes flapping as she gains speed, approaching terminal velocity. Her breath catches in her throat with fear and adrenaline spikes wildly in her blood. What if her boots don't work? What if her Innocence decides to fail her now? What if, what if, what if…
She passes Wendy's awed eyes in a blur of downward speed and momentum, and she can almost feel the water on her back when she executes a sharp spin in midair and her Dark Boots materialize with a flash to bring her to a jarring stop mere inches away from the lapping water. She grins, flush with success and hurls herself back into the sky with an exhilarated shout to rejoin Wendy, who greets her with a swirl of wind that uplifts both her body and her spirit. Together, they dance an aerial ballet to an orchestra of stars and a symphony of wind, rejoicing in the shared knowledge that they are both daughters of the wind, sisters in the air.
Their midair rendezvous seems timeless, stretching endlessly into infinity as the clouds swirl overhead in dizzying time-lapse whirlwinds so that they dance as if in a frozen world where they are the only ones in motion, but gradually the wind dies down, and the dark horizon in the distance begins to brighten with the coming dawn, so they descend slowly from the moonlit sky with wind-whipped hair, flushed faces and beaming smiles.
Wendy takes a step forward, but Lenalee lunges forward and catches the younger girl's wrist. The bones are thin and sharp under her hand, and Wendy turns back in surprise.
"Will I see you again?" Lenalee asked breathlessly.
Wendy smiled at her new friend, gently slips her arm out of the tight grasp before replying.
"I'm not sure, since I think I'm dreaming, but if we don't, I'm glad to have met you tonight!"
She extends her small hand again and even as Lenalee shakes it, Wendy is disappearing. She meets the younger girl's eyes and they share one last smile, unspoken understanding passing through them like a shared current as the first fingers of dawn start to peek out over the ocean.
Friends.
Lenalee wakes up that morning feeling refreshed. She wakes early, right as the sun is rising over the peaks of the Tower, and goes downstairs for breakfast with a bounce in her step. She grabs both Allen and Kanda and crushes them into a hug, breaking up their argument, plants a kiss on both their cheeks, leaving them stunned silent and grabs a cup of coffee to take to her brother, who has most likely been working straight through the night.
She's right, and as he sobs at her feet to try and win her sympathy, she smiles winningly at him and dumps his coffee all over him, letting her mind drift back to moonlit dances in the air with a friend who shares her face, a sister in a different world, a princess of the sky.
Later, as they are besieged upon a ship in the middle of the ocean with the moon thin and mocking above them and nothing but blood and death awaiting them in the clouds, she faces the most terrible opponent she has ever met, and again, she makes that same journey into the sky. This time, there is no joy in the action, only a grim, unbreakable resolution in her beautiful eyes.
Once again, she reaches that heartbreakingly beautiful moment of absolute clarity at the top of the world, and despite the death that knowingly awaits her, despite the pain and terror she knows her friends are facing now, a nameless euphoria grips her as again, she closes her eyes and her body succumbs to the greedy pull of an unnatural gravity.
She whispers her coming death to her Innocence and thinks dimly of a different sea, a different moon and a different sky as she plummets towards the ocean like a brilliant, doomed comet, because in that bittersweet moment, she is, for the last time, a daughter of the air, her hair flowing past her face in burning streams to the tune of the wind whistling her funeral dirge.
A/N - I can't be the only one to see how similar Wendy looks to Lenalee in her new outfit, right? Lenalee is one my fave girls across ANY fandom (my shoe fetish notwithstanding), and her fight with the Level 3 has always been one of my favorite scenes in any manga/anime. EVER.
So of course, with the whole falling out of the sky thing and Wendy being the Sky Dragonslayer and them looking so gosh-darn similar, this thing wouldn't leave me alone until I wrote it out. It originated from a picture first, and this fic naturally followed. I hope you liked it as much as I did :)