[flashback] haven. (lillis)

[Caelum]

Her words bewitched him, causing amber eyes to brim with bemusement. The galaxies in them might have gasped beneath the lowering of his lashes, the sun paling against the gold painted windowpane. She drew a vision with her words as she could draw with a stick of charcoal or a fine hair brush.

Struck by a thought, he half crawled, half shoved himself off of the bed, tripping over the heels of his own boots before muttering to himself and toeing them off. They landed in a heap as he tugged open the walnut cabinet, pulling out a handful of brushes, several little jars of paint along with a palette. No artist, he, but he could sketch a decent bone structure or outline a cosmos with all of his mad cartography of the universe.

Returning to the bed, he bent a knee down and grinned down at Lillis. "I'll ask Hadrian if he knows anyone," he told her, prying a lid off. Cerulean dripped onto the pallet and, delicately, he dipped the end of a very fine and narrow brush into it. "Veins. I like that," he muttered.

[Lillis]

"Mm," she quietly intoned, locking her eyes on him as he moved about the room. She liked to see him enthusiastic; his stumbling drew a sweet little smile to her mouth. "Yes, or..." a pause as she tossed herself over onto her stomach once more, her fingers splayed out in front of her. "The branches of winter trees against the sky." Veins, leafless trees, spilled ink. She could see these dark interruptions in his aura in her minds eye so clearly that she realized she would be shocked if she read his aura and it looked like anything else.

"That's a pretty color," she commented, canting her chin toward the jar of paint in his hand. Two images flashed in her head simultaneously: the first, she inwardly admitted, was rather ridiculous and involved him tracing the line of her veins in blue paint, visible through her translucent skin all over her body; the second involved him painting thin, blue lines into the gold, bringing them to life with veins of their own.

[Caelum]

"It's your color," he explained. It was the color he tended to associate with Lillis De'Nerys, though he could not give any logical explanation as to why. Caelum did not possess a poet's tongue, even if he did have a poet's soul. It bled into universe-shaped wishes and goals the size of the Ukalas themselves.

Settling onto the mattress, he lifted her foot into his lap. The image that had scrawled within his mind he began to draw with his hands. There was tracing of her veins involved, but that trace-work bled into an incorporation of runes. He had been studying them of late with his cartographic-healing research, his impossible, impractical dream. Cerulean and gold, silver ash and pond water green. These colors and more began to creep in delicate, swirling patterns up Lillis' right leg, using runes to speak old orisons of healing and protection in the ancient tongue.

He did not consciously think of this as magic. It very well might not have been anyway. It was just an idea, not unlike his maps of cities, maps of seas, maps of stars that he layered on top of one another and littered with painstakingly chosen notations of specific herbs, glyph works, and even surgical procedures. Healing, in his mind, was a thing that overlapped and ran together, blurring the borders of endless tools and subjects.

He was undoubtedly mad.

Yet here, with the mental health as well as future wellbeing of the woman who moored him in mind, he painted prayers all over her skin.

[Lillis]

When the brush first touched her skin, she threw her head back and laughed, inadvertently squirming. "That tickles!" She protested, but her dimples bloomed and remained as she leaned forward, watching him work.

The rhythm of his breathing and the steady, even progression of his brush lulled her, and her muscles went slack and she leaned back until she was laying flat again on the mattress, save her foot, which was cradled in his hands. He began to make his way up her leg, and she caught out of the corner of her eye a discernible shape to something intertwined in the painted veins. "What do they mean?" she asked in a hushed tone, not wanting to break the spell his work had woven.

What a pair they were, she mused contentedly. She'd painted the windows; he was painting her. Two loons chirping in their own private tongue, for certainly if he was mad than she was no better. But then, she thought, love was a certain kind of madness. It must be -- what else, besides madness, could evoke that haunting thought that she was grateful for what had happened to her, that she would run willingly into such danger a second time if it meant that he would then be near. Surely that must be a kind of madness.

"Mm, I think it's my color because of my father," she said at length, her hair a mass of tangled yellow curls all around her head. She adjusted herself slightly so that she could peer around her knee and up at him, her eyes the same cobalt of the paint. "He was an Akalak warrior; my mother used to say that his skin was the color of my eyes. Oh, and she would stare at me and my heart hurt to know what it did not then understand completely -- I understand it now, though. I think I understand it now."

[Caelum]

Golden eyes lifted, surfacing slowly from the meditative state his soul had sunk into while painting, to meet her's. The brush was held up, paint smeared upon it, and he glanced from it to her eyes before one corner of his mouth curved up in an odd smile. The paint and Lillis' eyes were the exact same color.

"Do you?" He mused, possibly teasing; but as he spoke the sun winked out beyond the window, leaving but the gold in the paint Lillis had lovingly spread over the frame behind. His eyes closed and the gold left him as well. It erased itself from his skin, leaving it a duskier hue, melted from his hair even as it twisted, shifting with the vanishing of his horns into heavy knotworks of braids the color of bitter bark tea. Cheekbones, still high, smoothed and flattened and lashes dripped from copper into ink. The clothes he wore were now somewhat roomier than they had been before, his frame a touch shorter, made of denser bones than that of the celestial side.

At length, his eyes blinked back open, their gold having shrunk into a singular ring about his pupils; but in them, he was still there. Changed, but the same shape of soul, some of those sigils, some of those prayers which he had so carefully spun upon skin now not so easily spilling into his mind. It was as if he were reaching for them from a vaster distance, from the yawn of galaxies.

"Prayers of protection, healing, warding," he tried to explain what he no longer fully understood.

[Lillis]

She watched him undergo the transformation that she'd watched him undergo so many nights before, her lips curved in a gentle smile, completely without judgment. For weeks she had been trying to find a way to tell him that she thought he was beautiful at night, just as beautiful -- though it was a different kind of beauty. She wanted to tell him that she loved to look at the designs of his tattoos and run her fingers over them, tracing their outline, when they lay awake in bed. But every time she practiced saying so, the words sounded conciliatory and hollow. Her colors were the colors of night -- even though she glittered, too, in her way, underneath the sun -- and she relaxed and blossomed in confidence under the gentle glow of the moon.

Part of that was, of course, due to the still-healing scars that ran up and down her left leg, a hideous reminder of what she'd survived. Unconsciously, she shifted the afflicted limb to further hide it in shadow, feeling suddenly uncomfortable that she'd changed into a knee-length gown upon her arrival home.

"You've healed me already," she murmured, canting her head slightly to the side. "But they're very pretty symbols."

When next he lifted the brush, she moved quickly, carefully, away and put her right foot on the floor. In her two small fists she clutched the fabric of her pink satin dressing gown and scooted on her left knee toward him on the mattress. She might not have had the words to tell him how beautiful he was, but she could try to show him. Leaning in, she pressed a kiss to his mouth, at once delicate and hungry and full of the things she did not have the words to say.

[Caelum]

Healer's hands rose, cradling her face with a happy breath. The kiss swept him up, gathered his soul in her hands and made it glow. Every word her kiss said that her mouth could not otherwise understand was translated with the aid of the heart and he sank, pulling her down with him in the moonlight that loved her so.

end