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Someone he'd imagined, someone he'd dreamt.
Freefall. Exhilarating.
Freefall. Terrifying.
He dreams of her. He dreams of butterflies and wind and rain falling in droplets and ribbons, framing her silhouette, wings of light and water - something she has lost, something she is missing.
Someone.
He dreams of seeing her reunited, dreams of her smile and her tears and her joy - of her sorrow, of goodbyes. Of her leaving their world in pursuit of another, endlessly searching; of him staying behind, dreaming, watching a night sky that reminds him of her eyes.
Dew frames his own when he wakes. He'd once claimed that their bond was too deep; he's long lost the will to fight against what he feels. Watching her feels like poetry.
He can't continue pretending to be unaffected.
(He can neither afford it nor does he want to any longer.)
There was a time when he'd rejected the notion harshly.
This pull has been anchored between them from the first time he'd felt her presence in the mountains, maybe before then - when he'd dreamt of a falling star, when despite blood and karma and pain, something had echoed through his veins; it had passed so quickly, swallowed as though it'd never existed, only to re-emerge a blazing star, burning through layers and layers of sky.
A star, fallen and rising - a deity, ever-lasting as its namesake - Lumine.
It goes unspoken still, between them.
There's too much happening. At first, it is physical distance; they part ways and she sails into a foreign land and returns with a scar between her shoulder blades, cruel lightning burned into skin that should have stayed untouched from it.
He remembers his words about rain, remembers his dismissiveness.
The Chasm doesn’t change things so much as merely illustrates.
She’s his anchor – despite his need to understand, his willingness to sacrifice himself in the pursuit of it, she illuminates through it all.
He hears that she’s hurt, and it is no longer a question.
It becomes a thing of desperation; to make her survive, ensure her wellbeing, protect her. Sacrificing himself is a small blot of ink in a large frame; it even feels just. Deserved. It equals his drive to find Bosacius; both paths align neatly next to one another and then one closes and the other fractures.
He makes a choice that frees him of all but one regret, one that can be opened into millions of shards upon close inspection, and it gives him peace.
She can find her brother. She survives. She travels.
He wouldn’t have to see her leave.
The look in her eyes before she vanishes almost makes him regret it.
For cruelty or hope or wisdom or mercy, the God whose favour saved him once saves him once more.
They talk. They continue to – they meet up outside the city, in the mountains, at the abode; at the docks, by the gardens.
She never forces; it is him who seeks out her company under people, who begins to join her on her strolls through Liyue City.
At first, he is quiet and reserved and cautious at all the buzzing. Still his curiosity breaks through whenever he looks at her, whenever she prompts a response; by looking at things and people and places, by sharing her joy and her sorrow and her thoughts.
She tells him of her favourite shades of colours and asks him his; they bond over their favour of the sky, over the taste of dreams and stories and later, much later, when they are in the valley and the rain pours heavy upon the tiles of the little shrine and she flinches at every stab of thunder, she confesses her fear of lightning.
That she wishes to be stronger.
He takes her hands and tells her that she –
like the sky, like the stars –
He dreams of splinters in his hands as he climbs pillars of salt. They are reaching so far into the sky that they touch the moon, so far that they impale it.
He dreams of his chest open, jewels in his palm in the colour of her eyes. He dreams of her wings, lost to the winds and without their owner; seeking skies beyond the one he calls his. He dreams of clouds red, descending.
A star, falling like a stone.