birdwithoutasong | Looking up I saw nothing

Who: Valen Arrol (

competitionsmile) and Vasilica Alin
Universe: Original
What: True love
Warning: to be added

Maybe Valen's old enough to know better than to listen to rumors, but it's more the case that he's old enough that he knows that even if most rumors aren't what they seem, they still often make for a good story later, and sometimes what the reality is turns out to be better than the rumor. Which is why when he hears the story of a beautiful ghost in a tower he assures the servant that exorcism is definitely one of his top ten skills and sets off towards the tower that had been described to him. He'd sprained his ankle in his last fight and he's going stir-crazy trying not to head out of town yet, so he agrees because it sounds interesting

He has his bow strapped to his back when he knocks on the door, the rest of his worldly possession in his bag because it's not like he has anywhere to leave them behind. The women who'd hired him greets him at the door, and he pins her with a charming smile. "If I'm free to look around, that's what I'm going to be doing," he says, because if he's going to find out anything, it's not going to be while he's being herded around. He needs to poke his nose where it doesn't belong, because he's sure the ghost isn't going to come out to say hi, if it's even real.

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"Thank you." his smile widens, slightly, still shy, but it's more than Valen has seen from him before. "I didn't write it originally, but I rearranged it. I've written some other pieces, but I wanted to see how well that arrangement worked."

Valen nods enthusiastically, following along with what Mira said. "I would love to hear them, if you ever felt like sharing more." It could only be good for Mira to get consistent praise, right?

"Maybe," Mira says, noncommittally, though he glows a bit under the praise, even prettier than he usually is when he smiles, fingers plucking an idle melody under his fingers. "I'm still revising most of them. It's slower than I like, but I don't have as much time as I'd like to work on them."

It's not a no, though, and he's still playing whatever this song was, idle driftings, idle musings.

Valen's grinning himself, pleased by the song and by Mira's own happiness. He thinks that he could stay here for days, could forget about food and drink in the face of this kind of mood.

"You have time this evening, right?"

"I do," Mira says, looking up from the harp for a moment. Something about Valen's smile makes him warm and almost dizzy, and he has to look away briefly, blushing a bit. "But I don't want to bore you with something tedious to watch. Is there something that you would rather do?"

It's not a dismissal, but an invitation.

Valen's smile softens a little at the blush, trying to make it easier for Mira to respond or do whatever he wants.

"You couldn't bore me, of course. But maybe we could talk, get to know each other a little better?"

"That would be nice," Mira says, carefully reaching for the harp case to put his instrument away. He doesn't need to look to do the necessary maintenance, and regards Valen thoughtfully. "I don't really get the opportunity to really get to know people much, except my siblings."

He pauses, awkwardly. "The ones from this new life, who are...like me. Not the siblings I was born with."

It's so tempting to beam again at him. This is so different from the first time they'd talked, but it feels like it's building on that foundation. In all of Valen's recollection of that encounter, he hadn't been able to think of it as a foundation before.

"No, I'd imagine you wouldn't be that close to them. Still, you've had the chance to see more places now, right?"

Mira carefully closes the instrument case and nods. "A lot more than I ever thought I would see." he says, and smiles. "I once thought that I would never leave that tower."

He pauses, for a moment. "In a way, you were the first realization I had that a door out existed."

At that Valen grew a little more serious. He didn't want to have to take credit for that, hated that it had been necessary.

"You should have never been cooped up there."

"I shouldn't have been, no." Mira says - and it shows how far he's come, because once he believed that he should have been, that he'd belonged in that tower. "But I was, because I couldn't function the way my birth parents demanded of me, of my blood siblings. And what you did was...so important, even though I didn't understand until later."

Even without having known him in any of these intervening years, Valen had a sense of how far he'd come and he was delighted of it.

"What I did was very little, compared to everything you've done." He reached out, making contact without thinking better of it.

Looking up I saw nothing

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