Work Text:
Romeo sometimes feels like he's addicted to this warmth.
He lays spread out in front of the fireplace some nights just to drink it in. To one side the hearth crackles merrily bathing his skin in steady even burn and the other Carlo, curled against his side, face pressed into the divet of his clavicle, churns with the uneven animal heat of a creature that must inhale and exhale.
Romeo doesn't like to think about his time before the charity house. Carlo, he knows, will never be entirely free of resenting it because it is the place his father dumped him. The doll house he was set down inside and left so as not to be a bother to anyone. But to Romeo (whose earliest memories are of the biting cold of Krat winters) it is paradise. Before coming here, Romeo would dream of heaven as a place of enteral spring time with roads soft enough that they didn't hurt bare feet and vendors that gave away sweets with laughs instead of chasing him away with iron rods. Now when Romeo dreams of heaven he dreams of this house, of being enfolded in it's warmth even as winter rages outside, of never having to be parted from Carlo or Lea or Sophia. He dreams of endless sparring matches in the stalker's training room and Christmas feasts in the dinning hall, and never any specters darkening their doors. The only real difference is that he and Carlo would have a room to themselves with a locking door, instead of their shared dorm with twenty-two other boys, where they must bite their tongues and muffle their whispers even in the dead of night.
Lea sits on the chaise sometimes, sharpening her sword as Romeo reads and Carlo dozes against his neck. She dose not cross the short half yard to join them in front of the fire, does not card a hand through Romeo's hair or lay her apprentice's heads in her lap. That is not the kind of person she is. Romeo has not wanted a mother since his own decided she didn't want him and he has no desire to compel her to fulfill sometime pantomime for him, the way Carlo sometimes seems to want compel Simon or Lorenzini to pantomime Geppetto for him.
Lea's warmth comes in other ways: in corrected forms and steady hands showing proper grips and counters. In joint patrols stalking the Krat streets. And in the music room, with the three of them playing together. Lea is not one for many words. Her warmth comes in action: with the Rose Saber or her violin's bow it makes no difference. Her warmth comes in teaching them. In protecting them. In spitting on Geppetto's boots when she sees him, though Romeo alone knows about that. It is one of the only secrets between him and Carlo.
Romeo can no longer imagine a world without this feeling. It's like molten honey rolling through his veins. It's like ergo filling his lungs. It's like what he felt the one time a doctor prescribed him quinine. It's a rush that swells so bright in his brain that it almost turns to agony.
For this warmth...Romeo would do anything. And to protect it he would gladly let himself burn.
(It is something that a man as cold-blooded as Geppetto could never understand. But he doesn't need to understand it, in order to use it.)