Tu Es Ma Lumière

110 - Rainbow *Modern*

The two of them grow up together. They're separated by the sea, but they are as close as he and his half brother are. They don't remember the first time they meet, they were babies and all. She's older than him by a month, meeting him for the first time as she's held in the arms of her exhausted mother, leaned over towards him as he is held in his own sweaty mothers' arms. Fresh and tiny and new, both ready and unready for this twisting world they've found themselves within.

Their first real memory of each other is when they meet each other at five years old. The blueness of his eyes and the golden spun of his hair combines with the large, perfect circles of her green eyes, the impressive length of blackened curls. Everything is natural between them, from the way they run together to the way they plot mischief together. An unspoken bond so deep that nobody -least of all them- understands. But, they do not really care to.

At age nine, he is heartbroken as they receive news of a horrid car crash in eastern Denmark that injured each member of the Stuart-de Guises' horribly. She cannot run in her crutches and her casts, or her neck brace and her bandages. They settle on a simpler companionship that needs not words to portray themselves. They read together and play simple games, speaking of everything and nothing at the same time. They are separated by an ocean but bonded by twines that they do not care to understand. What matters is that they are together and nothing else.

At age twelve, she is the one who he turns to when his father gets the news that took his father has reared its head within his own body. He cannot handle having to console his little siblings who don't understand why their heavily pregnant mother cries more than usual. It's the worst time, as if there is a good time to get the news that a man has a potentially deadly disease. Catherine is pregnant with twin girls, almost eight months gone. Little Hercules has barely reached his first birthday.

The two brothers in arms, Henry and James, come together in the biggest embrace when the finest doctors in France give the word that Henry Valois will live, two years later. Two years of living in France together -James wanted to support his brother in arms-, the two of them have never been closer. She is the one he turns to after hearing his father get sick in the bathrooms all throughout the day. She is the one he turns to after helping his eldest sisters understand that they cannot tell Charles or Henry jnr. or Margot. They're too little. She holds him as he cries. She is not his sister, he does not have to pretend in front of her. She's more than that.

At fifteen, things begin to change with them. The looks she shares with him are different to the ones she shares with her own brothers and sisters, or even his. The touches are longer, they linger and the two of them don't really understand why. Conversations are longer, the intimacy and the naturalness of it all warm each others' hearts whenever they have a roughened day within home school or an argument with one of their friends. They don't understand, and they don't particularly want to.

At seventeen, they understand what these changes had been. She was certain, so, so certain that she was in love with him. What was there not to love? Wavy blonde hair, beautiful blue eyes, goofy conversations in the middle of the night about nothing and everything, protectiveness and gentleness, his warm hands- She had it bad. They lay together at night, for a different reason than they did as children. They are bare and they are uncovered. It takes her one of those nights when he sleeps before her to realise, as his heart quickens with her proximity, that he feels the same.

With each other, they had comfort, safety, stability, home. Not that there was anything wrong with their childhoods, it was normal, all things considered. But with each other, a whirlwind romance that never seemed to slow down even at its most heated points, the security was deeper and stronger than ever  before. Everything was easier together. Everything tasted better. Everything was lighter together.