let your fists come undone; leliana

[leliana]

leliana

oh, the desert dreams of a river that will run down to the sea
like my heart longs for an ocean to wash down over me

Leliana understands her sister but does not always comprehend her. She is magnificent in ways she will never be—in ways she could never aspire to be. Leliana is quiet and serene, a counterweight to the wildness that brews in Exist’s chest. Where Exist is a flame, she is undisturbed lakes. As deep as oceans, as unrelenting as the rains upon Winter’s edge. She simply is, and she moves forward with the persistence and endurance of a stone, heavy and calm compared to the flightiness of her beautiful, wild sister.

Her smile is slow and soft, hazy along the edges as if hovering along her crimson lips. “Together,” she whispers quietly, breathing in her sister’s familiar scent. “We restored each other together.” It is poetic, in a way, but more than that, it is expected—it is right. It is the only thing that could have happened.

She curls into her sister as much as the other curls into her, and she finds that she is deeply appreciative of their closeness, their intimacy. She misses her mother, of course she does, but the ache dulls when she is near Exist. Her sister helps to chase away the shadows the press inward when she thinks of their mother, of how lost she is, of how she had succumbed to the darkness. If only she could heal the heart too.

“I love you more,” she says with a smile, repeating the words automatically but with feeling. There would never come a time when she did not say them, when she did not mean them. She loves her sister as much as she loves herself, more so. “What next?” she questions, although she does not mind if they stay here, trapped and suspended in time, forever. She would gladly live forever pressed into her sister’s side.