The bed nestles under the window, heaped high with thin Kilikan blankets, all bright colors and busy patterns; lost somewhere in the jumble is a silken quilt stitched together from worn and faded robes, once much like the newer ones that lie in the chest at the bed's foot and are worn every day.

Rendered into mosaic by the molding that divides the panes of glass they sleep late every day, only rising when they can't ignore the brilliant midmorning sun any longer. They sleep nestled deep in a cradling wash of blankets like baby birds in a nest, tangled together like hemp rope and silk, and if the smaller one holds the larger they must have their reasons.

Like this, asleep and undressed, they don't make any sense. The smaller one with his tan skin stretched tight over wiry muscle is obviously Kilikan and hard done by to boot; the taller one is pale and traced with bluish veins like only a Bevellite could be, slender and unmuscular, if not quite soft. Luca is full of ragtag new families like this one, formed in Sin's wake, mismatched--

--but this family is not mismatched when awake and dressed, when they put on the clothes that make them make sense, when they become, obviously, a summoner and his guardian. Then they make sense, and Luca can look at them, and understand them, and know which pigeonhole they fit into, and overlook the other part of their relationship out of gratitude towards a summoner, even a failed one.

Only in Luca. The 'Al Bhed sin', they call it elsewhere. They call it that here too, but they pretend not to see, as long as they are not forced to look. Good enough.

The summoner and his guardian rented this place on first sight a year ago, in the heady first days of the Calm. In another year they'll buy it. But for now there's only a caramel-colored hand splayed out over an ivory back, framed perfectly by a spreading square of sunlight. 

The sunlight doesn't care who they are or what they've done or what they've failed to do. It only cares about making them glow.