A/N: For split-n-splice.
"Good morning."
They were words she couldn't remember hearing in her former life. At least, not in the parts of it she could remember.
Waking up alone in her bedroom year after year to the annoying buzzing of the alarm clock was the warmest welcome to a day she had ever had. And if it wasn't the artificial cuckoo dragging her from slumber, it was a shouted summons through the dark, the people who were supposed to treat her like family demanding her presence and attention as the world had need of her.
The world never greeted her kindly, either.
If she thought hard enough, she could take her mind back to the memory of voices long-forgotten and a gentle touch on her cheek. The words were just beyond her grasp, and stolen away with them, the loving tone with which she supposed such words to herald the day were meant to be spoken. But it was all a fog, and searching for the lost voices did nothing to assuage the resentment she felt from the years of slamming her hand against the alarm clock or shouting back to her brothers that yes, she heard them, and she would be right there after stumbling into her suit in the dark, sometimes only minutes after having drifted off to sleep.
But that was then.
"Good morning."
It was different from how he remembered his mother saying it. She had meant the words each day, but there was always a subtext to her tone that it took him years to interpret, and he was sorry when he finally could.
Would he have a good day that day? Would he make any friends? Would he get through school with minimal encounters with bullies? And would he be a good boy himself, and not retaliate against the world for treating him differently from everyone else?
These questions and too many more were ever present in her voice throughout the years, to the point that it had initially been a relief when he went away to college and didn't have to bear the concern and pity from the only person in life he dared trust.
That relief faded however when loneliness caused him to miss the pity. At least it was better than the silence of his dorm room that was followed years later by an even more deafening emptiness in the monument he had built to himself—a bedroom fit for a king in a matchless villain's lair, and just as lonely as a humble dormitory crowded with students and haunted by a melancholy salutation from a worried mother.
But that was then.
In that same lair bedroom, they awake to the first rays of sunshine streaming through the high window and falling across the blankets like liquid gold as illuminated dust floats in the air like precious flakes of the same—a sign in the atmosphere of the change that has taken place.
At the center of the bed, fingers sleepily meet before hands are clasped and held, any and all dark memories banished by the peace of the present and the joy that has been found. No more loneliness or pity, and no more living life as a mere tool.
Instead, two pairs of well-rested eyes open and shine into one another's across the pillows, and hands are clasped a little tighter. The words aren't necessary, as the love alone is greeting enough. But with the breaking of each new dawn, the words heal a little more of the past and continue to seal the promise of the future.
"Good morning."
"Good morning."