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Restorative sleep means that there are no dreams in the rest cycle; all energy goes into recovery. For the years he spent under, Eagle Vision hasn’t had a single dream.
The world, after the war, is different.
He woke up in a garden, or what he thought was one. He could hear birds chirruping overhead, and feel sunbeams dancing on his face. It was a sea of green: long grasses and the tall, graceful arches of verdant trees, almost a dream-world.
> Where—
His voice was, upon waking, a quiet noise from a raspy throat. It’s still a bad habit he’s trying to break, the immediate instinct to think commands, rather than say them. He’s nowhere near as structurally sound as Lantis, his legs still thin and his mouth unused to speaking.
But his eyes—they can see this miracle of a planet, this glittering jewel of a world that looks like the Cephiro that used to put a strange light in Lantis’s eyes. His reports used to give him the image of a broken place, crumbling ruins and dying towns, but here, there’s magic in the air so tangible it even makes breathing seem sweet.
It does something strange to the people who breathe it, too: Cephiro’s magic gives life to belief itself, in horrible and wonderful ways. It makes trees twist up toward the sky like sculptures. That much, at least, has not changed; peace is a long time coming, and at times, Cephiro’s forests look like a thicket of spears rather than mere branches.
From the sky, looking down, Eagle rests his body among large, white clouds and watches a flame-red braid bob enthusiastically, Hikaru’s face tilted up toward Lantis with a wide, beautiful smile.
“You’re awake!!” Her voice tips her words into his ear, the curious act of hearing someone rather than reading their words in his head so sudden, so surprising. He knows that voice, her loud rhythm and cadence, like drums, the heartbeat of a strong soul that had pulled him from destruction. “Eagle, you’re awake!”
His voice isn’t quite ready to form words.
“Come down!” she shouts, cupping her hands around her mouth. “It’s a great day!!”
> I wish I could. You should come up here, maybe, and bring some sunshine with you.
Sometimes it feels like he’s woken up in a dream. The good kind, almost the type where the entire experience is pleasant—ephemeral, dissipating upon waking—and nameless in its vague details. But Eagle can name every little thing that he could not have imagined in sleep: how Hikaru’s face brightens at the sight of Eagle walking upright and in their direction, the breeze kissing her face as she waves.
He offers her a half-bow, a touch of his public life that he’d never quite left behind, the polish of his mannered touch bringing a soft pink to Hikaru’s cheeks. “Did you sleep well?” she asks, clearly hoping he wouldn’t remark on her expression.
> Yes.
Eagle does her the courtesy of ignoring it. “I did.” He grins when Hikaru nods, as if satisfied at the quality of his rest, and adds, “I could have slept better if I had company.”
Lantis and Hikaru are, in so many fashions, similar. They both react the same way to him, Hikaru’s face blushing further as Lantis would duck down his head, refusing to meet anyone’s eyes. They’re both so serious about matters of the heart—and that’s Cephirean to the core—Lantis and Hikaru bound up, in name and soul, to the deep emotion so simply summed up as ‘love’.
> I love you
— is so rarely heard aloud; it’s almost as if it’s superfluous to say. If put to action, it’s how Lantis fits himself against Eagle when they are both barely awake; it’s how Hikaru presses shy kisses to his mouth, fluttering pulse, and they both can taste the word shared in their mouths. The Cephireans might have been onto something about it. There’s a strange gravity that makes Hikaru’s heartbeat faster, makes his body seem lighter and heavier all at once, Lantis grounding them both, anchoring their masses to earth.
Hikaru had said he’d had sad eyes; he wonders if she’d say the same thing about him now.
The weight behind Eagle’s eyes, in his head, doesn’t always go away when he looks at the two of them. He doesn’t mean to keep that weight there, but Lantis owns more of his heart than he’d cede. And with Hikaru it’s different and the same; Eagle hadn’t even known he had more to give until Hikaru had taken it.
Brevity was a prized gift in his world. The less energy used to make words, the more powerful they were—and the more energy he could use on other commands. Names are like metals, malleable in the mouth and forged in a layered process, but Eagle has yet to find words pithy enough to describe how it feels to rest easy with Hikaru pressed against his side, Lantis’s thumb rubbing gentle circles across his knuckles.
They’re a good thing together—whatever they are—and Lantis seems perfectly content to let them be, Hikaru perpetually in awe at the depth of love and affection she finds. It’s an excavation, a journey.
They could have an easier time of it.
Eagle can run the debate in his head: as heads of state, they should know better. They don’t even have a name for it, this thing that’s given strength to his limbs and fed his fledgling will to recover.
(But the truth is that Eagle has, despite the mental strength that Autozam loves most, always appreciated most what he can touch with his own hands. He needs to know the durability, the density of metals by feeling its strain; he learns the little things that way. How to fight, how to reconstruct precisely the memory of something he’ll need again. How to observe best the light in Hikaru’s eyes when she summons her sword, clashes its blade against Lantis’s and exclaims, is that the best you’ve got?!)
She’s forthright, and honest all the time, to the point of tears when her emotions overwhelm her. But she combines that with an eerie solemnity when she prays; she’s always praying somehow, for something better. A prayer of hope doesn’t have to be conscious when it informs her every move.
At times, Lantis wakes in the middle of the night with a defensive spell on his lips. It trails off into a silent cry, his expression panicked and lost before Lantis forcibly drowns the look under his usual stoicism. He never cries.
> Let us in—
Hikaru climbs up on his lap and Lantis freezes, breaths coming short while she studies him, that strange light in her eyes putting her spirit ablaze against his. Her hands are so slender, hands and wrists that together had pulled an entire world from the brink of death; sometimes it’s just not fair, how Hikaru and Eagle and Lantis all knew the heft and weight of worlds, how they’d all carried them as far as they could, without being asked.
There are no words to bring back what they’d lost.
Hikaru, at times, tears herself away from the sight of long blonde hair in a crowd; she murmurs a name under her breath, half-worshipful, half-mournful, and Lantis locks himself down behind his eyes until he no longer needs to shield himself from that particular memory. Lantis had, Eagle knows, known her too, Emeraude a sad exhale dragged from Hikaru’s mouth and shaped into a sigh.
The problem with belief is that, even if what one believes in does not exist, the idea itself still remains. There’s no room in their lives for ghosts, and the dead don’t roam Cephiro any more than they do Autozam, but the fear of phantom legacies—that, too, is a weight unasked for—makes Lantis screw shut his eyes and kiss Eagle, desperate to fill the voided memory that had woken him in the night. He hadn’t had the time to grieve for his brother, with the war.
With a rare hesitance, Hikaru’s hands inch doward to clasp one of theirs in each, fingers lacing together like a chain; connective tissue rather than shackles, and the heat from her skin must help to heal Lantis, seconds passing by as he comes back to himself.
It is, as always, about trust. Hikaru had said once that her name is ‘light’, light of the lion shrine, that her brothers had similar names. When Eagle watches her bring back the life in Lantis’s eyes, he believes it: she’s their lionhearted queen, in equal measures compassionate and powerful, the only command she makes a message of peace.
Contentment, like every other habit, grows on him. In the background, in silence, between shared jokes, Lantis and Eagle recreate what they used to have, the present day colored radiant and soft with a newfound courage. Hikaru makes their days brighter, lightens the air where it used to lay heavy on Eagle’s shoulders and seal Lantis’s mouth shut. She refines the places where Lantis’s strength was brittle, filters how Eagle pushes at their limits, curious to see where and when the stop command would come.
Hikaru never fights him. She’d never been the type, equipped with her swords and her fire spells and her machines, to wage war on anyone. She soothes strife rather than makes it, and where Eagle expects conflict she merely gives in, as if it were nothing.
He takes his first complete walk, in a neat squarish circuit around the grounds, and the sky is a clear, endless blue overhead.
“You’re up.”
Lantis slits open his eyes, sunbathing in the branches of a high tree; he sits up and watches Eagle, the distance between them so strange when Eagle has to tilt his chin up to really see him.
It’s been a long while since Eagle’s seen him so relaxed. When he’d met him, in Autozam, through a friend of his father’s, he’d been a different person: brittle, with a seething anger that burnt hot under his skin. It was the kind that got people to listen to him, pay attention to him, magnetic and terrible in its corrosion.
“It’s good to see you.” Lantis had doled out his words carefully, rationing them out as if he could have run out; he was popular in Autozam, respected for his capacities and his work. “It’s been a while.”
Underneath his fierce intelligence, Lantis was always someone who chafed under the weight of his inheritance. Eagle could understand that—there was no one who knew better than he did the way blood dug into the body.
But in its moments, Lantis sometimes avails himself of that curious, dry humor that weaves itself against his words. It crowns his face with a tiny smile, and everything Eagle had ever catalogued about the world—all the small details, all the little things he prides himself on remembering—doesn’t compare in the least to the sight of the shadow breaking behind Lantis’s eyes.
“I was sleeping,” Eagle explains, and when Lantis nearly laughs himself out of his tree, Eagle grins.
Breathless, head knocked back in an attempt to rein himself in, Lantis is an angular type of beautiful. His laughter is so seldom heard, and Eagle hasn’t heard its raw sound in years; he luxuriates in it, cherishes it, as if the world was meant to come together and make this kind of music, in that moment. It dissipates, as quickly as it’d come, the only trace of it in the brightness of Lantis’s face and in Eagle’s ears.
And he, like Eagle, trusts best what he learns through touch.
Halfway home, under the shade of green trees, Lantis inches his hand closer to Eagle’s; linking them is simple, mechanical by nature and driven by instinct. He looks resolute, as if he were about to fight something—and win—so Eagle takes the initiative and reignites his mirth, soft huffs of laughter blowing hot against Lantis’s mouth.
It’s almost as if he were falling into a lifelong memory, their habits so well ingrained in him that it’s easy to predict what Lantis would like. Eagle trades the word ‘love’ between their tongues and yields where he wants, chases when he can. This, too, has no name; to put one on seems to damage it somehow, distillation made impure by collapsing their dimensions into two, instead of three. In its newness, this doesn’t need a name, and Eagle drags Lantis home to find Hikaru and tell her, precisely, how their cail had fallen out of a tree at his humble joke.
“Do you think,” Hikaru says, a rare shadow of doubt crossing her face, “We were meant to be this way?”
Her head pillowed on Lantis’s lap, she watches pale grey clouds scuttle across the sky. Clef said it would rain, perhaps, a tempest brought on from the north sweeping downwards; Hikaru insisted they go out nonetheless. We’ll come back when it rains, she’d laughed, and Eagle watched her drag Lantis out, then followed them outside with a fond smile stretching his lips.
It hadn’t occurred to Eagle that the lack of a name would be strange for anyone else. That the lack of overt command, I love you left unspoken despite the space between their conversations, and the small measures of breath taken between gestures, would disturb someone. That Hikaru would be the one to ask, to clarify the nature of what they exactly are.
He’s expended enough energy to chase that particular name himself.
"Maybe," Eagle replies, and tugs at her braid softly, grinning when she yelps indignant and loud. "But does it matter?"
It doesn’t, not really, not when in Cephiro it’s about belief. And in a world like this, with belief in them—whatever they are—so strong, Hikaru throws her head back and gifts him with the sound of her laughter. "I guess not.”