Mom is a whirlwind, and Linnea cannot help but to be forever so endlessly impressed by her. She does not even have enough time to question who belongs to the name on her daughter's lips before her magic is filling in the blanks - or at least Linnea thinks it must be because for a moment mom is a statue in her focus. She stirs, speaks, and suddenly the boy from her memories is woven before her in pieces of starlight and shadow. Even in illusion he is beautiful enough to remind her of how it feels to blush. But these cheeks are bloodless, and the only color that stirs there is the flat, dirty grey of bark.
“Yes.” She says, oblivious to the changes that might break her heart until she can understand them, until she can learn to accept that being changed is not bad. That the fear comes only from the bottomless dark of not knowing. “Yes, that’s Nikolaus.” My Nikolaus, she had almost said, but shyness keeps her quiet. She reaches her nose out to him and the illusion wavers like the ripples of water across a puddle, distorting as though she had breathed across it.
She did not, of course.
But there is no time to linger because Leliana is not yet finished, and with a flourish of magic that will never not seem grand to Linnea, a portal opens before them. Out pours cold and snow and air with teeth that hurt her more than she remembers it doing before. She is so busy flinching away from it, blinking those pink tourmaline eyes, that it takes one, two, three whole seconds for her to recognize the dark shape coalescing out of the swirling flurries. But his shape and those silver eyes and that particular shade of blue are as familiar to her heart as anything she has ever loved.
“Nikolaus,” she breathes, an impossibly soft smile over wooden lips, “you look like a bruise.” It is a thing she has said a million times, a thing she has only ever said in jest, and she reaches for it now for the familiarity it brings her. Black and blue. But as those pale eyes take in his battered body, she wonders if maybe it will never again be a joke that makes them laugh, wishes she could take it back. She watches him, suddenly somber and bashful and with pink eyes that do not quite meet his anymore, so unsure. But he is broken, she can see it in his stride, and she can fix him, so she musters up another effort to stand.
Roots unearth and vines fall away from her, but she manages to stay on her feet, though it is not unlike the splayed stance of a newborn. Her body is like her face, like her legs, like the small ears that stick out of the mess of mane that is now twigs and leaves and enormous pink and white flowers shaped like heavy, upturned bells. She is flat gray everywhere, a shade made murky by a hint of brown and by the lighter notches that cover her skin at random. She is too strange now to be beautiful to anyone but her parents, but at no point does it occur to her to look down, so it is with no more bashfulness than usual that she reaches out to touch noses with her best friend.
linnea
these wildfires grow and grow until a brand new world takes shape
