Legends

He watched her as she slept.

There was nothing especially remarkable about her sleeping form. She was not unearthly beautiful, like the legends of the enchanted maidens that his brother used to recite to him as he lay in whatever makeshift bed they had decided upon that night. She was not the vision of peacefulness, though he wondered if that had to do more with the weather than anything else. He had given her extra blankets tonight, but even in sleep she looked cold.

"Yui-sama," he said a little experimentally. The name brushed against his lips almost like a kiss, and he hopped up and down on one leg, feeling embarrassed at his own audacity to speak her name while she lay sleeping there.

The thought of his brother was only a dull heartache now. The wind shivered the front flap of the tent and he caught a glimpse of the star-speckled sky. There was another legend about lost lovers that his brother used to recite after the one of the beautiful maidens, because the maiden story was only a prologue to this one, and he grew bored with the retelling. He could not quite remember how the legend began and ended, though he could still hear his brother's voice in his head and hear the lilting tones of it as it rose and fell in the telling of the tale.

Something about lost lovers, he thought, and stars. Yui's sleeping form swathed in the blankets was hardly distinguishable from the gray and white dappled shadows bending over the tent, and he crept over to her, tried as hard as he could to make himself one of those shadows. It was almost like in his brother's legend of the moon as she bent over her children's cradle and sang them to sleep.

Except he was no moon, and he had never been a singer. His brother had been the musical one, he thought quietly to himself as he mouthed her name. "Yui-sama." Gently, slowly, coming to his knees beside her. His breath ruffled the strands of hair next to her ear, and his heart beat loudly in his ears.

But no, he couldn't, after all. What would his brother say? he wondered almost desperately as he stumbled backwards a bit, catching himself just as he was about to tip over and go sprawling in the dirt. There was no legend for this, he thought in despair, and he did not know what to do.

The wind rustled the tent flap again, and he saw that the stars were still there after all. The thought of that comforted him a little, and he looked back at her as she lay there, chest rising and falling under the blankets, before he ducked out the door. There had to be some sort of legend for this sort of thing, he decided. His brother just hadn't had the chance to tell him. It was up to him now to find it out and bring it back with him, so that the next time she lay sleeping in the dark and the cold, she would not be alone.