Silence
"Men speak with their actions, not with their words."
It was a phrase Ahiru heard many times during her adolescence. Her friends would giggle and share stories of how a boy would never outright proclaim his thoughts and feelings. If someone was hungry, he would share his food. If someone didn't understand their homework, he would offer help. If someone tripped, he would pick them up. That, they told her, was how one could tell when a boy liked someone.
Ahiru never needed that to be explained to her.
In fact, she could perfectly understand it all on her own.
It was ingrained in the memory of her muscles, her love bursting forth through the tips of her toes, the sway of her arms, the arch of her legs. 'I love you,' she had once said with her body as she gracefully danced over the ice of the lake. 'I love you.'
Ballet in itself was the art of communicating without words. Odette spoke of her plight to Siegfried purely through dance and motions. Berthe warned her daughter, Giselle, about the Wilis through the same method. Words were never needed in ballet. Only pure raw feelings, as well as passion.
Fakir was the same.
When they danced together, Ahiru could tell. She could see it in his green eyes, feel it in his touch, sense it in his very air. He had volumes upon volumes of things to say to her, so much that it might take years to convey it all.
And yet in that moment, all he needed to do was take a step back, raise his arms, and cup his hands gently over his heart.
It was always enough to make her own flutter in her chest, a beam spreading out over her lips. She did not need to hear explicit words and open statements from him in order to know his feelings.
And neither did Fakir. The spread of her arms and the subsequent crash of her body into his was always enough.