Daisy II | Levi Ackerman

Chapter 53 - Spaces in Your Heart

860

[Naomi]

Spring crept in gracefully, like a ballerina fluttering into a stage in the dark. She does her best to be modest, but you know she will mesmerize you in every way.

The first melt of winter snow came on the day Levi and I woke up from our ninth year anniversary. I was laying under his arm, wrapped in his rum-scented coat and a tablecloth we had used as a blanket.

As always, I met his silver gaze, already awake and watching me. By the dim rose light casting into the room, it seemed that it had only been a couple of hours of sleep- and some parts of me felt sore from the cold and being folded like this, together, in the twilight zone of neither winter nor spring.

"You smell like snowflakes," I whispered to him mindlessly. I meant to say that he smelled like hot chocolate and firewood, things that reminded me of winter; but the drowsiness of post-sleep gave me away.

"You smell like sunshine." He silently answered, to my surprise. I wondered what he meant by it.

We rose and dressed, cleaned up, put away the tablecloth and replaced it with another sheet. We laughed at it, the symbol of an unplanned circumstance we both didn't want to admit we wanted to happen. We had a warm breakfast together and locked up shop, then went home to Limestone District, where Lily and Cole asked why we hadn't come home last night. Levi and I exchanged glances, and I fizzled into a giggle as he told the kids we fell asleep cleaning the tea shop and it was too cold to go outside.

"It wasn't that cold at all last night, though." Lily slid in, before the two of them scurried away to the couch. Gabi was helping her carry her large wooden dollhouse to the living room.

Smiling, I put the phonograph on the commode, next to the framed photograph of me, Levi, the twins, and Kurt. On its left, I had also framed the picture of Hanji with the babies at the nursery in Austerlitz Mansion. Then there was the one with Lily perched on Levi's shoulders as she showed off her track and field silver medal, then the one taken from the back of me and Cole sitting in front of our easels, myself teaching him how to paint summer skies- his favorite subject.

At the back, the largest one as it was from an old sketchbook paper, was the self-portrait my mom drew with toddler me sitting on her lap. It was one of the only two relics I had left of her that I could take to Scout Harbor, with the other one being our family portrait hanging in the hall. The portrait of her that my father had commissioned was left at her College, where students who study there could easily see the brilliant person who was the namesake of their school.

Looking at these photographs, I wished so badly that I had one of Uncle Erwin. I wished I had a picture of him that could show him as accurately as photographs did. My only pathways to his face were the painted portraits that could not entirely capture his charismatic visage, the countenance that had commanded soldiers for countless years. And then there was my memory, so vivid now that I am still young- but what then, when I get older, and time mercilessly takes the remnants of him away from me?

I wasn't terrified now of losing him into the crevices of my mind. I was almost convinced that Uncle Erwin's influence in me was too strong to capitulate to the tarnishing of time. But I suppose most of me wished I had a photograph of him because that would mean Uncle Erwin beheld a camera before him, knew it could take his likeness in a flash. That would mean Uncle Erwin, even for just one moment, found out about what great new things humanity had achieved ahead of us. That would mean Uncle Erwin, even for a stolen second, saw what kind of world waited beyond the walls.