Chapter Text
Leonie cut her hair on the road from Sauin Village to Garreg Mach, in the woods, crouching over a creek. Her hands shook. It was a struggle to cut it anything approaching even, and it took so long her arms ached by the time she was done. When she peered into the stream, trying to see herself—she stopped, hardly breathing.
It was not that Leonie was frozen, it was that Leonie had been in the cold for her whole life and just now the sun had condescended to rise above the ridgeline of the uncompromising Oghmas and let fall a single, warming beam. Leonie’s cheeks grew wet, not with tears but with meltwater. The person peering out from water’s surface was not the oldest daughter of Margie and Oswin Pinelli, but—someone else, someone Leonie had never gotten to meet but had always missed. Maybe a boy, maybe not, but—not a girl. Leonie stayed by the stream for a long time, just looking.