I heard the trailing garments of the Night - Moment/any

[Giver]

The pressure is familiar. So is the way his intercostals seem to tauten and quiet – automatic; responsive to the press of a cheek or chin – with the responsibility of not disturbing her. Alight had rested her head there before. Alight has rested her head there before. Does, sometimes, and falls asleep to that familiar, measured rhythm. 

He has never resented responsibility, or Alight. He loves her and even the realization that they were not as similarly fashioned as he grew up believing hadn’t hampered it like one might think it would. It certainly hadn’t dimmed what was still a lifetime of togetherness. That dawning had been a harsh one, to be sure – too bright and too hot; slow-burning – but he had mellowed it by closing his eyes and turning his head from it.

It shone over his shoulder like a tempered fire, licking out for disorder.

He is not one to chase chaos and emotion – beautiful and ugly – with abandon. That is Alight. It cannot be both, otherwise how would she survive? Giver soothes her entropy. It may not have been his natural role if things had played out in the intended timeline; had the witchy mare not intervened. He may have been meant to be like star births and deaths; he may have been meant to taste disorder more often than not, but that is nature and nurture. Now he bends to intrepidness like a caring pair of hands cupped around a flame. ‘Careful,’ he has whined more than once to her, golden-skinned and indigo-haired and free. One day it may occur to him that it is her freedom he is shackled to, but tonight he turns his head and she is there, instead. And there are no chains.

He can tell she is spirited. He needn’t feel it from her, though he can – as if something beyond her body talks to him, reads itself like a book, though not always very clearly – he can tell by her boldness and by her aloneness. Black-capped and chested, too small and far too without accompaniment, he feels the need to draw around her. (‘Don’t you know there is a monster out here?’ 
‘I’m safe with you, though, right, Giver? You’re not a monster. And besides, mummy says the monster wants me, so don’t worry. You worry too much.’)
Once she had been as little as this, but so had he. And she had been wrong. He couldn’t have protected her then. In truth, he couldn’t protect her now. 

He doesn’t know what to do. He grew up much like she had – in the company of another, who he knows like the ridges of his own chest and the hollows of his knees. So he lets silence stay and feels a strange comfort in that fact that the little one is here, at least and with him, instead of in the hunting grounds. “Do you want to see something?” he whispers, gently stepping away from her. For her own protection. He does what he knows. Around his skin he gathers the ancient light and energy that lives above their heads, it blooms to a delicate glow. Inside the soft, light teal aura, little points, like the mimics of stars, twinkle and line up in constellations. It is mild and warm, but he knows it is best not to let her try to touch it so he watches her closely. “My sister used to love this.”

Giver keeps it around him like a bright blanket. “What is your name?” He doesn’t think to ask where her mother is. Sometimes, his folly is thinking he can be enough for them. “Mine’s Giver.”