This is my entry for 6 Appreciation Month, which is taking place on dA if you weren't aware. I'm pretty pleased with how it came out, particularly as I haven't written anything fandom-related in a while. It's getting posted here because I'm bored and I didn't do it earlier, so here you are. XD I hope you enjoy!
I listened to a piece of music called Frost Despondent during the writing process. It's around Youtube, and I highly recommend it; it's very pretty and calming.
The sky only ever clears at night.
It's been years
since he really saw the sun, since he
stepped outside
since he
knew,
since he
was no dark, all light.
...
That doesn't mean he minds, though.
...
Things are quieter at night. 1 sleeps in his chair half the time, staff held loosely in his hands, the dim glow of the fire reflected in the glass of his eyes. 8 is never far, his movements smooth as he turns his knife over and over in his hands. In the day the power in their leaders – 1 dubbed so for his cunning, 8 for his brute strength – frightens him. They notice too much. They stretch too far, reaching him no matter how far away he is. But at night, their strength is focused, controlled, introspective. It protects, and he is not afraid to slip quietly by them on his secret errands in the faint light.
...
Sometimes, in the very middle of the night, he thinks he can feel the whole of Sanctuary spread out around him, the points of light buried deep inside it where the others sleep, tiny, slow hearts in an unconscious body. The twins will be curled up in the small Sanctuary library, of course, with pictures for pillows and blankets and words for dreams. At times 7 will be with them, cross-legged in the dark, her weapon a gleam of silver as it lies across her lap. When she is there, the candle is blown out as the twins fall asleep; no firelight reflects in her eyes. But on those nights, she keeps a silent vigil by their side, listening, and that makes him feel safe, too.
On the other end of the building are 5 and 2. They often go to sleep as the light behind the clouds fades away into night, but he imagines them as brighter than any of the others, their thoughts still humming even as they sleep. They are alight with dreams of patterns and metal and gunfire, the whirs and clicks of their inventions intrinsic and soothing and constant, threading through everything they do or say or think. They are the identical minds of the city and the foundation of Sanctuary and all the things that hold them together, and he loves them for that.
...
And then here he is, afloat in the wake of seven fixed points.
...
The watchtower is almost always abandoned at night. He quietly climbs the steps, hauls himself up the rest of the way in the bucket lift, and slowly walks out under the open sky.
Tonight it's cold out, and there is a thin, ethereal ring of ice around the white-frozen moon. Clouds huddle in grey piles on the horizon, but the moon has burned them back with its cold fire, leaving a full black patch in the middle of the sky. Stars glint in it like metal, forming trails in the night like his fingers do with ink. It is beautiful and jarring and hopeful and cold all at once, a string of implications and connections that make his hands itch to draw it.
Sometimes, though, there are more important things than what he can create. One of those things lies sleeping somewhere out there in the city.
When he thinks of 9 he stands, his back straight, at the very edge of the watchtower, and waits. In the brightest moonlight he can see, not too far away, the broken house where he was born. He cannot see through the window to the two very different bodies lying within – but then again, he doesn't need to. He knows they are there, surer than sunshine, and that is enough for him.
...
At some point – when the moon slips behind the clouds growing on the horizon – he turns and slumps and goes inside, to bed, to sleep. When he wakes up in the darker, dirtier light of day, things will be different. 8 and 7 and 1 will snap and snarl and dance around each other with pointed words and heavy fists and the weight of authority. 5 will shrink and stutter and train his single eye on the ground. The twins will hide in a book, and then another, and then another. 2…will not be enough. He will paint the world black in his corner, burned from the inside out. 9 will sleep on.
When he remembers these nights, though, none of that matters so much.
...
The city only ever sleeps with him.
It keeps
its secrets, its
places of hidden glory
its
monuments,
ghosts,
its
old loves in its deeps.