Title: The Act of Giving
Day/Theme: Oct. 7, 2009 // Morning glories make a roof
Character/Pairing: Hei, Yin
A/N: Wrote this a while ago and finally decided to post this. I didn't like this one as much as I liked my other attempt at this fandom, but I think it's still fine.
Warnings:Set after season one and before season two.
Summary: The morning glories at her feet are her sky, the real one a mixture of fantasy and words. It's the things she can touch that makes up her world and he is no different.
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It's a little bit of confusion mixed with a dash of understanding. She stands, taking in the view, the fields of burnished gold and sawing lines green. There are sprinkles of colour here and there, a splatter of paint, and she almost can touch the petals, the whispering scents and cloth-like textures. The blaring city seems dream-like from here, a small crystal jutting out of the earth and fragmenting the light.
(Just as it fragments lives.)
She can't see any of this, the morning glories at her feet her sky and the real one just a fantasy of thoughts and words, but his voice is as good as any pair of eyes, even better in fact. He talks softly, quietly, in ways that she used to speak and still does. Only now, she asks more questions. A little more each time (What colour is the sky today? What's singing in the small field? Why do mothers hold their child's hand?), some bold, others not. He answers them sparingly, concise words that remind her of the past they haven't fully left behind (Red, a small blackbird, to keep him safe).
This might be progress, she supposes, this act of giving and receiving. Except, she can't really tell. Aside from that feeling she gets sometimes, when the moon splashes the water silver and she can hear the in, out, in of his breathing, she doesn't know. All she has to work on is that she doesn't want to feel that loss again.
And she can't even say why she felt that in the first place.
Sometimes, she catches a glimmer in her mind, the tendrils of something big. She grabs it, holds it close, but like the water she sees through it slips out of her fingers. He can tell her attempts, watching with lidded eyes and a closed frown. She thinks he might be disappointed, if only mildly, a parent expecting their child to fall.
He has warms hands when he pats her back, on those rare occasions that she seems to do something right. She tells him that one day and she thinks he might be surprised, with a hitch in his breath and a pause in his movements. His face, she wonders if it looks like those china dolls that fell, except that's supposed to be her and that much hasn't changed.
There is a moment where she thinks he might have frozen in time, so still is he, but then he walks to her. Another compliment, she hopes (and this is a feeble thing, a flickering candle she struggles to keep alight, struggles to understand.)
Hei gives her handshake this time, his calloused palms on hers, the textures sticking in her mind like glue. Yin holds it tight and thinks maybe this is why she makes these stumbling attempts towards humanity.
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