"Miss Winter! Miss Lucy! It's much too late for you to be wandering around the grounds by yourselves! Please come inside!"

The patrol of bone-weary maids trudged past us without a backwards glance. That made... six servants who'd come looking for us, I thought. Lucy had counted seven earlier but I figured that was the paranoia getting to her.

"Winter!" Lucy whined. "Why don't we just go back in? It's... It's not worth being out here so late!" She looked awfully pale in the moonlight, bright blue veins, throbbing now with panic just beneath her skin, picked out in silver brilliance. Still, I only cracked a smile, and her cheeks puffed out in indignation. She never did like my schemes, which made me wonder why the hell she stuck with me in the first place.

You know why she forces herself to come with you, selfish idiot, chided that annoying little voice that dwelt in that contemptuously logical part of my brain. I mumbled something under my breath, waving away Lucy's anxious expression; she'd seen how my stout little fingers curled into trembling fists at my sides. She's worried about you, and all you do are things that make her worry more. How do you think your mother would feel about that, hm? 

'Course I knew what Mom'd say about my exploits as these ungodly hours: She'd smile, pat my head, then tell me she wasn't overly pleased with how I'd acted, and send me off to bed without our nightly story. And that'd kill me enough that I wouldn't put a toe out of line for a week.

But Mom's not here, I reminded myself stubbornly, derailing the train of thoughts that had started to fog up my brain like a steam house. The chirrupy voice that mocked me from those unreachable corners quieted as I hauled Luce to her feet and ushered her ahead of me, out of the brush and onto the cobblestone path that twined around our house and cut into the gardens. Luce stumbled a bit, unable to transition well from a stand-still to an abrupt run, but she didn't complain much as she followed at my heels, her hand firmly wrapped in mine.

Made me smile a bit, to be honest. It was nice knowing she'd always be by my side, no matter how often we argued and bickered and turned away from one another. We were sisters, and more specifically, twins. And that was an unbreakable bond if I'd ever seen one, even if that telepathy thing was total bull.

I found the "hidden entrance" to our secret space easy enough after shoving aside a few stray branches we'd packed against the fence, revealing the jagged hole carved out from the bottom. We'd had to dig another foot from the ground around the hole to squeeze through to the other side, and the memory of Mom's airy laugh at our decidedly unclean appearances stung like a knife as I watched Lucy crawl under, the tail end of her dress barely missing a run-in with an off-shooting splinter. I made sure to pry it off before I went through myself, though I was fairly certain I hadn't escaped another wood chip that buried itself in my hair despite the vigorous shaking I did upon kicking free of the fence.

Lucy seemed to have lost her apprehension for the moment, which I was supremely grateful for. A prickly Luce did not a lovely evening make. She beckoned me over with a spasmodically waving hand, flopping onto her back as I jogged over to meet her. Her eyes stretched wide, perfectly reflecting the sea of stars drifting above us, and I caught the breathless smile that transformed her features. 

She looked more like the girl I'd known when we'd been one of those happy poster families, oblivious to the despair of reality and the inevitability of loss.

Mentally berating myself for my uselessly pessimistic thoughts, I sunk down beside my sister, craning my neck to scan the heavens. I was dazzled. "So many," I breathed in uncharacteristic wonderment, to which Lucy mumbled her agreement, fitting our fingers together in the dewy midnight grass. 

The night sky was alive with stars. Beautiful, breathtaking stars that occasionally coalesced into vague pictures. But as my mind slipped out of focus, gradually falling deeper into this imaginitive trance I'd discovered weeks ago, the images seeming to break free of their minimalistic holds and erupt into vibrant color and shape.

"There's Cancer!" Lucy squeaked, jabbing a finger upwards, tracing out the fine lines that made up the crab's shell and spindly legs. 

I frowned, recalling the last time I'd seen Cancer. Before Mom's death, when she'd told us we'd have to say our goodbyes to those Spirits we'd called family all our lives, he'd convinced Lucy and me to have our hair done up specially for the occasion.

I fingered the the tattered edges of the hair curled against my neck; I hadn't put much (really any) effort into maintaining the style Cancer had created for me, and I regretted allowing it to fall into such disarray when I wasn't even sure when - or if - I'd have Cancer there again to fix all my inelegent mistakes.

Lucy's, of course, was as prim and proper as ever, bound now in a knot at the top of head to avoid sullying the silky blonde strands. 

Dammit. Stupid pride, can't even let me look like a girl for once... 

I dismissed the stray thought with another toss of my head and returned to stargazing with Lucy, following the graceful movements of the young virgin who pranced across the sky. "Virgo!" I beamed, and Lucy was quick to spot another constellation that danced around Virgo.

We made it a sort of game, one we played every time we'd managed to break free of our curfews and sneak out here to the plains (which were downright perfect for viewing the stars, by the way) for a few stolen hours of peace. Lucy and I would imagine all the constellations in a world not unlike our own, human instead of stardust and stories.

And I knew we were just missing Mom and her Spirits. Lonely little girls seeking comfort from distant spectors who didn't give a damn about our lives or our fates. But we pretended they did, we pretended there were ears and eyes to follow our conversations, because Dad sure as hell didn't fill that role anymore.

"Oh! There's your favorite, Winter!"

Ah. I see 'em. Hey, Leo... 

Leo was probably our most debated character. Lucy claimed he was some vicious-looking, grizzled old warrior, bearing the scars of many a battle and a stony heart to match from his perilous adventures in the name of true love. But me? His appearance was strangely always the most vivid in my view. Tall, young, like a dashing prince off to secure the perpetual safety of his princess. Or maybe a knight, seeing as how I at least agreed with Luce about his warrior-like abilities. 

"I wonder what he's really like... Think he's cool?" 

Lucy looked at me, as if questioning my sanity, and I realized she thought I meant the manifestation of Leo that we'd conjured up. Grinning sheepishly, I explained. "I mean Leo the Celestial Spirit. I wanna meet him." Then, my tone souring, I added, "But if he's anything like Aquarius, then I'm kicking his ass the first time I see him, knight or not!"

And I got to feel accomplished when Lucy laughed through the sudden onset of trembling that invaded her limbs, her eyes brightening with the soft luminescence of starlight...

...before I woke up.

_________________________________

God, why can't I ever decide if these stupid dreams of mine are enjoyable or not? 

I hated dreaming of my days trapped in that mansion, even more so when they involved my fonder memories, because they felt tainted when I was reminded of the hell Daddy Dearest would put me through what was probably only a few days later. The fighting, the yelling - Lucy trying to yank me back to the brink of sanity because she was afraid I'd be exiled.

But this one... I hadn't thought about our stargazing trips in years.

Groaning, I rolled over onto my side, propped up on one elbow, straining to see through the veil of black that had descended over the room while I slept. As my eyes adjusted, something about the dream came back to me in sharp relief, something that only struck me as odd now that I'd woken up.

I had a scarily accurate image of Leo when I was seven years old... 

Like, damn, though. I'd even gone as far as calling him a knight. At seven years old. Ten years before I'd met Loke, learned his secret, saved his ass from the grips of death itself - and I'd already been thinking of Leo the Lion as someone who I'd trust my life with (minus the bit about Aquarius; I was honestly terrified that all the Zodiac Keys would be as pissy as her, apart from Cancer, anyway).

For some reason, as I lay there questioning whether or not there was such a thing as telepathy, twin or no, it was Candor who came to mind, that offensive brat who'd nearly killed me to spice up his damned playtime, the one I'd coaxed into joining Fairy Tail for the sake of his polluted soul: "When I... was inside your head I noticed something I thought seemed... off..."

Ugh. And this was why waking up in the middle of night made me irritable. Not only did I find it impossible to fall back to sleep without reading for an hour (at least), I had to deal with incomprehensible shit that bordered on notes of philosophy I cared next to nothing for at three in the freaking morning. 

Still... Candor's words bounced around in my skull, spinning unwanted theories that wouldn't do anything but keep me up till dawn - or until I became so incredibly exhausted that I collapsed in the middle of the street and possibly cracked my head open.

What was off with my head, exactly? I'd asked him a little after the mess with Phantom Lord settled down, but he claimed he didn't even remember telling me anything even remotely similar to that. I'd decided not to push him, partly because he was still on bed-rest and looked like some forlorn orphan thrown into a ditch, and partly because I actually believed him. Shocking, I know, considering how much of a manipulative bastard he was, but it was instinct and I was proud to trust my gut.

Most of the time, anyway.

With a sigh, I dropped back down onto the bed, my head sinking into the soft pillow. I needed to stop thinking; that was the only way I'd be getting any sleep tonight - or this morning, or whatever the hell you called this in-between time before the sun decided it wanted to be a nice guy and chase away the shadows. And fortunately, I had the perfect method to rid my head of any relevant thoughts.

I shifted over on the bed, ducking under the crooked arm lying beside me. The moment I felt the warmth of Loke's chest, his steady heartbeat against my own, my mind went blank, and my eyes fluttered closed with a inaudible sigh. Even half-asleep, his chuckle reverberated through my chest, causes my heart to give quite the undignified stutter, and then I was falling into the still waters of unconsciousness, already forgetting whatever had woken me up in the first place.