"Festis bei umo canavorum," he'd said, that first morning they woke up together. His face had been golden as he'd looked down on her, his eyes bright as the sun as Neve squinted up at him.
"Wake me up this early again," she told him, "and I might be." To which Brom had laughed, and kissed her brow, and pulled the blankets higher up around her.
"Sorry. Go back to sleep."
-
Strange. She hasn't thought about that morning in so long. It's been hard to imagine any part of Brom that wasn't the last. Every drop of blood that escaped him had bled a little more of that vibrancy out with it, until he was left pale and waxy and cold.
That's the face that's haunted her these last few years. The one whose brow she kissed just before the rest of the Templars arrived, far past the point where there was anyone left to save.
-
And now the memory again. The way the sunlight slanted through the window grate. Brom never left the blinds closed when he slept - said he liked to rise with the morning sun. Neve had grumbled and turned her face into the pillow, and secretly thought it suited him.
There's no sunlight in the meditation room. The strange blue of the aquarium is a constant. It washes over her skin and turns it to something cooler, almost stonelike. Somehow, though, it seems to suit Alec. She can almost picture him in the Nocen Sea, the clear waters off Ventus. The way they'd hold him for a moment, the way the light might play off his face.
"Mph," he says, in a low, sleep-roughened voice. "Neve?"
He looks at her the way Brom had. Like she's the one who took the sun and set it in the sky, just for him. Neve opens her mouth to say something, but it feels like she used up all her words last night.
So instead, with grief and guilt and pure relief singing through her veins, she presses a kiss to his forehead, and hopes it speaks for her.
