Well I don't know how, and I don't know why

When something's living, you can't say die

It's hard to breathe when her mind fills the blind spot between his face and the back of her neck but she does anyway, inhaling a smell that was wild grass and dew and vapour drops. It lasted a moment barely brushing too long and too short at the same time and she had her face warmed up by the fire which he had struck. He moved into her field of vision, opposite the glow and their hands met over the kindling flame to exchange a log. The cold manifested in chills stroking her spine as she tried not to shiver. Once in a while, his bare stomach would clench and a ripple of spasm catch his biceps tensed. But despite the torrential downpour and plain fact that they were trapped perhaps until morning, as their presence gradually came to occupy the cave, there was a retrospective feeling of acceptance and she knew that night they'd be safe. They let both their coats dry on warming stone.

Firelight slowly glowed to gently light the shelter which they sought salvation in, and in a strange synchronization of purpose they laid out the food and worked. The muffled patter of torrential rain echoed in their wake. She tried not to think of how she wouldn't let herself feel, and she was alone, with him, for the first time since she felt like she understood something tranquil about not making war and so she let herself simply be. Her chilled fingertips slowly relinquished needles of numb frost in the orange glow of the fire, and got to work naturally. He sat down beside her. Shoulder to shoulder, knees touched. He had a stubble growing featherlight on his chin, like the way healed scrapes must tingle when kissed and at that moment she imagined they had skinned knees. Fingers deftly picked up herbs dried and fruit preserved; the metal tool in her hand glinted gold as they peeled and sliced curls of fibre that fell into a pile with his chunkier misshapen work. While they ate she thought of blissful nothing, uncharacteristically letting her mind past without consequence. Against an ambiance of distanced waterfalls crashing onto loosened soil, firelight cocooned her into reflecting its translucent glow, and the slow of her revelations on the contours of his hands shaped the beginnings of invisible creases around her eyes.

The storm started right in the middle of their scout for food, when they were too far from camp to make a break for it like mad wild creatures riding upon the waves of wind and wilderness. Or rather, he suggested it, while she stared, incredulous, and left him to save her own skin. Naturally, insanity chuckled and followed. Secretly, she was grateful for the deterrence that was the uncontrollable force of nature. There was a newfound sense of uncharacteristic non-violence about her, a week into their uncertain unofficial unspoken understanding of truce; and it unnerved her enough when her own eyes caught his, on more than one occasion silently smiling at her and her cheeks flamed in retaliation.

('You're an idiot.'

He grinned. 'Well you're smiling at one, so are you.')

She deemed it prudent not to trust herself to speak any further.

Hands worked deftly, picking and choosing, foraging like an old soldier pro used to feeding herself and the extra company of lonely. Compared to that, he made a crowd. Yet, he remained quiet too and slowly, she gradually grew accustomed to entertaining the idea of this change in company. A harmony. And she lapsed into a forgotten state of mind borne from history and past tenses and things innocent like joy, from a time when she knew it so well like the edge of her blade. A person whom she had forgotten from a lifetime ago. The armada that were her doubts and cynicism and their liege commander, duty, oddly felt content being absent from the battlefield, on a rarity holiday into oblivion along with family. They took hers with them. And she was left by herself. As herself. Just herself. Solidarity surged. And she filled her lungs with air, with the scent of tangy rainclouds. Feeling like something of a thunderbird. Eclaire.

'Lightning.'

Stormclouds flashed white. And for a moment, she was living both and they were one in the same.

He lay with his back against the wall and torso toward the flames, with closed lids his being rose and fell gently with each inhale of their silence. She turned to face the mouth of the cave. Tendrils of ivy hung from its lip, curling so slightly out of the wet. A cascade of water down the entrance fell sheer like a cloak of misty day curtains, two inches from her face refreshed by the scent of wet earth and freckled with stray spraying droplets. Her own eyes stormed grey. Her hand tentatively reached out, straight and flat. She inched towards the water. Closer, closer, then like a shield she broke through the curtain - to see sheets of pouring, dripping rain. A million liquid crystals that fell from the sky it made her think of a lone, solid tear that was somewhere far but not distant enough, within the recesses of his grey pockets lying across the floor. Yet her own eyes remained moist if only from the pouring mist and she found she liked the rain. It dripped off the leaves of the overarching oak. It trickled down in streams of the gentle slopes its grand roots made and the sound, the thunder of an army of water droplets crashing onto the bold bare earth was like a tuneless symphony that sparked off her wild soul. The side that wasn't stained by guilt and loss and regret, the piece of her that had fragmented nicely into a cohesive whole. And on its own, it told her strange alien things like she was free. She could love. She was painfully balancing the barrier between believing and disbelief; for on either side she'd fall into the same, sinful truth. Nothing went out in the rain. Nothing liked the rain. At that moment she recognized it as the storming reflected within her conscience and she took it, and made it her own. And by then she was already truthfully drowned in the thought of conceiving an idea of peace, when she was wishing a flood could take the world and they'd get lost running from the Noah's ark that never gave either of them any salvation. She closed her eyes , to drink in the rain.

She felt his eyes before she heard his voice and turned to him as he said: 'What are you doing there?' His own eyes seemed to swirl like a maelstrom. A whirlpool of familiar mystery and unabashed curiosity. To which she simply replied: 'It's raining.'

His mouth quirked asymmetrically but blue orbs glittered in sync when they said: well, duh. Nevertheless, they laid sights on her hand parting the curtain, and betrayed him a look that felt like he was truly seeing the rain, for the first time. By now her outstretched hand turned its palm, and a vein of cold water flowed down her forearm. He shuffled his bulk across the granite floor, laying his silver-blonde head beside her resting hand. And between the cold cleansing of the rainstorm and the flickering warmth of his breath on her knuckles, she found an unspeakable freedom in the way his cheek touched her grazing fingertips; and within the light of his skin and the glow of her own peace, he inevitably found his way into the small crook of her heart, and all at once she found who she was.

Reservations about unfaithful gods and legends were dispelled when his fingers took her wrist, which was all it took for her to leave the rain to wash away their sins; the pulsing of his heart against her own enough to convince eternity that they were only, ever human. And they were only reality. Somewhere along those lines of promise and safety, her vestigial resolve finally broke. Guilty burdens were slowly shed from the weight upon her shoulders, when they slid down as salt upon her cheeks.

Lightning.

'Eclaire.' Her lips whispered.

And somehow, as her forehead witnessed his mouth gently tracing the curvature of her, she felt he always had known.

A/N: Unexpectedly, I had written something out of the blue and since similar themes were present I thought it made a compatible companion piece to the first chapter. Do provide any constructive feedback, honest critiques are always welcome. I took a different angle to Light and Snow here, more toned down instead of the full on angst and explosiveness which I usually associate with them.