#insp: the books of bayern

[idontstorm-isunshower]

cold cold grief, and hope like a warm wind

It is cold, when Leander first realizes his power.

He is ten and John is eight, and it is snowing hard outside, and they are crouched under the hollow porch of the teahouse - where they spend most of the blizzard-days. John is resting, sleeping, his face crunched up in pain, and Leander holds his hand, and worries.

It is cold, and his brother is sick, and there is still more cold to come.

The porch they crouch under has a concrete floor-ceiling, and there’s dirt beneath their bodies. Their “walls” are wooden lattice, meant perhaps to keep animals (and ragamuffin children) out - or maybe just to pretty up the place, because a concrete slab held up in four corners with empty space between is nothing nice to look at. The wind blows in, and the snow and the rain, and Leander had tried at first to tuck blankets into places to try and keep the weather out but the blankets had simply fallen. They didn’t have anything to tack them there with, and the blankets were thin anyway, and just got wet there, and John needed them close to him anyway, to keep him warm and comfortable.

It is their first winter without their parents. It is cold and it is lonely, and Leander has had to become a father at the age of ten to his brother, so frail and so fragile and so vulnerable to the winter, and how he misses his mother, and his father, and their house - rickety and wooden as it was, there were no holes in the walls and no rain leaking in, no dirt on the ground but a floor, not just ragged blankets but beds, thin though they were, and most of all they weren’t alone. It wasn’t Leander and John against the world back then, it was Leander and John and Mama and Papa.

Back before Mama died, and the men in the night-dark suits and round hats came to take Papa away.

Leander grieves every night like this, for in the morning he has to push it away. There is another mouth to feed, and bigger older stronger street rats to be fought, and scheming prying adults from whom to hide.

Home, five full-moons ago, was warm, not with fire but with family. Home now is cold concrete and frozen ground and his brother’s weak coughing fits and trembling hands.

Leander reaches out for warmth, and something reaches back.

He wants to be warm, he thinks. Maybe not the way warm was then, but the kind of warm that will keep them two from freezing to death. He aches for it, so much it pains him, so much that he furrows his eyebrows and presses his lips hard together and wishes more than he’s wished for something ever before.

It takes a moment after he thinks it, though. There’s a pause, a moment of heavy anticipation like a seesaw once someone’s hopped off the middle trying to decide which way it’ll fall. Leander feels it himself - something slows down deep inside the way something slowed down the day the men with the loud grey boots knocked on their door. He feels it. He feels like something is about to change forever, and he is terrified to know what.

And then - he is warm.

He’s never felt a warm wind before. Wind, for him, has always been cold - sometimes cooling, sometimes biting. And this isn’t wind, not really, it doesn’t feel like it because it doesn’t rush - it feels more like it’s been tugged, like someone pulled down a ring of blankets and wrapped them in a messy sphere around him and John. But he doesn’t know what else to call it.

There’s a strange new feeling at the bottom-center of where his chest meets his stomach. Sort of a tug, maybe, or like there’s something new or awake there that wasn’t before.

He pulls at it. He doesn’t pull at it with his hands, but with something inside, like how your body knows the difference between a shoulder-breath and a belly-breath when you tell it to but you don’t reach down with your hands and press down on what’s supposed to move and when.

Leander pulls, and again, the warmness comes.

It’s faster this time, and the odd little space above his bellybutton seems to widen or excite a little more. He tentatively pulls once more, and this time the warmth that he draws down is almost instantaneous, and the air around him is humid and comforting.

Leander remembers stories that Mama told him and John, when they were much littler, about men and women and folks in between who could coax plants to grow to their will, or send heat into the air and spark fires, or push the rain in the sky out of their path. He remembers stories about how when she herself was small, another kingdom called theirs to war, and those sorts of people were called to defend the city.

He recognizes that he’s one of them. But none of that matters now. There is only one thing that’s important, and Leander knows it with more and more clarity each passing second.

He can keep them alive.