A/N: It's Valentine's Day and I was feeling sappy.
Also gosh, may I just formally apologize for the lack of update on Arbutus? Life's been a bit rough on my end so not much as gotten done but have no worry friends, I have returned.
Please accept this as an apology for now.
Robin doesn't know how to read people, so he reads tomes instead.
He traces his fingers across crisp white pages and whispers words in a language long since lost. Little sparks form on the tips of his fingers, nowhere near strong enough to spark, blossom, and bloom into light; but the thrum is there, a soft constant reminder of what he can create.
Or what he could destroy.
He doesn't want destructive, tainted hands to fall on another person, so he holds books instead. If the pages burn under yellow fire from his touch, then it burns. No one is harmed.
Robin doesn't know how to speak to people, so he speaks to himself instead.
It's those whispered words of old that come off his tongue, with nary a falter or pause, and it should be alarming how a language of heretics is the one that he speaks with ease. It isn't, however, because that's what he is. A heretic. A mistake. A footnote, scrawled at the bottom of the pages and dragged into relevance, sending the world stumbling while it wonders with furrowed brows from whence did he come?
Robin doesn't know how answer that question, so he doesn't. He folds it in on himself and asks why, why, why, without the slightest hint to solve it.
But Shulk told him, on a day when rain threatened to break from the clouds and his hair was dulled without the glow the sun gave him, that this is a mysterious world and not everything needs to be solved.
Not everything needs to be known.
But Robin wants, wants so badly to read the secrets buried in blue eyes and trace the stories written into soft smooth skin and speak in a tongue that says everything and yet absolutely nothing. A quiet desperation sets in whenever they're near each other, and a wailing longing bursts out whenever they're apart - the constant tug and pull on his emotions leaves him weak, makes the runes and the paragraphs swirl into unreadable blurs. Slowly his desire to read dwindles until he can barely hold the book in his hands, for he wants to read something entirely different.
He wants a different kind of magic underneath his fingers. The day he's given the opportunity is one when the skies are gray and thunder rolls in the distance. Any moment now, the rainfall would start, as a slow ambush before it turns into a downpour.
But only stray drops are falling and Robin's thirst is for knowledge, so he takes Shulk in his hands and reads.
He trails trembling fingertips over the sharp lines and curves of his face, traces him like he's studying topography. He ghosts them over eyelids that flutter at the slightest touch, brushes against a nose that wrinkles when it's touched and Robin is fascinated, entranced by the little movements because Shulk is a story come to life.
(But there's a whole hidden epilogue buried in pale pink lips, and Robin's tempted to skip to the end.)
Robin's enraptured absorption is stopped by a drop of water, falling from nowhere, splattering against his hand and he threatens in his mind to curse the heavens. He doesn't want to stop, but he doesn't want the ink to run and this is one of those stories you read uninterrupted.
But he's stopped by a hand on his arm, and a laughing command that numbs Robin's mind - it's a plot twist, executed perfectly. He's stopped by blue eyes and a smile brighter than a burst of Elthunder from his fingers, and told that rules are a formality, meant to broken.
So Robin reads, reads like he never has before. Among the patter of rain and rolls of thunder and soft, breathy laughter, he reads a person and finds them far more beautiful than any book.
(The epilogue leaves him wanting to write a sequel.)