The First Thing They Noticed
Awareness came slowly.
Very slowly.
It was a creeping thing. It crept first into her muscles, then into her skin. The awareness of the warmth that surrounded her came next, followed by a faint sense of something else.
The last of the things she became aware of was herself. The vague, indistinct sense of who she were, and that she, in fact, was. Self awareness was a strange feeling, when she did eventually notice it.
She didn't notice it until much later though. The vague, unconscious awareness of these things could hardly be considered as having 'noticed' them, after all.
The very first thing she noticed was that something around her that she could feel through the sense of something that she could not quite name. She noticed it because it changed. It would dim or flicker suddenly, only to brighten again slowly, and it would swirl around her and brush against her skin.
The second thing she noticed was that there was a piece of that strange glow that surrounded her gleaming in her chest, only that it didn't quite seem like a part of the glow. It was different. Exactly how it differed she wasn't quite sure, but it seemed- more her than the glow.
Not knowing language at that point in her life, what she dubbed her tiny glow wasn't quite a word, much like she didn't have a word for the glow. If it was a word, however, it would be akin to the word spark.
It wasn't until after she had noticed the sounds, (the most notable of which was a steady, thumping beat she couldn't place) and the lights, (the red glow that would brighten the darkness, sometimes in brief flashes but most often in more gradual changes), that she realized she could move and change her spark, and that she could use it to change the glow. At first all she did was make patterns in the glow, shape it into swirls and lines, and watch those patterns slowly dissolve. Using her glow would make it dim for a bit, but it would eventually brighten back up if she waited. Eventually, recognizing that whatever the glow was it was made of the same material of sorts as her spark, she tried pulling a piece of the glow into her.
It was a bit uncomfortable, feeling how much bigger her spark got. When she had pulled in the glow, it had joined the spark in her chest and overflowed into her limbs, making her feel strange and tingly.
Eventually the glow had bled back out, leaving her spark the same size as it had been before, but in its wake her spark began to grow rapidly. It had always been growing, slowly enough she had barely noticed, but this was different, it was almost like it was exploding. The rapid growth only stopped when her spark had reached the size it had been when combined with the piece of the glow.
Out of curiosity, she did the same thing again, pulling in a piece of the glow and letting it bleed back out slowly, to the same effect. She did it a couple more times beyond that, just to confirm that the pattern really didn't change. It didn’t.
In addition to the increase in her spark, she also noticed that when her spark grew on its own, even when it was growing very quickly, it didn’t give her the same tingly feeling in her limbs.
As her spark grew, she began to perceive more and more of the glow around her. Eventually, she came to realize that there was another spark, much smaller than her own, but close to the size she thought hers would be if she hadn’t been messing with it.
She reached out to it with a tendril of her own spark to brush against the other, and when she did she could feel everything attached to it. Attached to the other spark was another body, another mind, and another self. She wasn't alone in the darkness, not anymore.
The other’s spark was too small for them to see her, so she thought of ways to fix that. Eventually she landed on the idea of giving a piece of her spark to the other, in the hopes that it would grow the other’s spark the same way pulling from the glow had grown hers.
It worked, and it wasn’t long before the other spark was the same size as her own.
Giving the piece of her spark to the other also seemed to have drawn their attention to their spark, and the other had started to play around with it, though not in the same way she had. Where she had enjoyed watching the changes in the glow, the other seemed to be stretching more than anything, as if their spark was merely a new muscle they could flex, rather than something they could feel affecting the glow around them. Eventually, when she reached out to tangle her spark with the other’s, the other responded, spark reaching out in turn.
As the two grew in the strength of their sparks, they twined their lights together often, learning every aspect of each other’s spark and how their own differed from it. Due to the growth of their bodies however, they eventually came to brush against each other physically as well. They didn’t brush each other directly, there was still something separating them, but they had each grown big enough to feel when the other kicked at them. They reached out to brush each other often, and soon came to feel comforted when they touched, the same way they felt comforted by the other’s spark, reassured that they weren’t alone.
After a while, she felt a fluttering pressure on her consciousness. Reaching out to it curiously, she brushed up against something unexpected. The other’s mind and self. As her mind twined with the other's, her curiosity was answered with knowledge poured straight into her mind. The other had found a way to reach out to her with his mind, and how to share his knowledge and the nature of his self with her directly.
It took a bit of adjusting, to learn to make sense of the thoughts, feelings, and memories being dumped unfiltered into her mind, and he experienced the learning curve with her. They shared all their progress and strategies with each other, and eventually learned how to partition their minds in a way that let them hold back things that weren’t relevant, while also concentrating on what they were being shown by or wanted to show to the other.
It was only once they had learned to sort through all the information that she realized one of the biggest differences between the two of them. The other couldn’t see the glow. The revelation explained why he hadn’t originally investigated it, and why he’d only noticed his spark after she had boosted it. As soon as she had taught him how to sense the glow himself, using their mind link to dump the feeling of it straight into his mind, he set about playing with it himself.
Whereas she had been curious as to the way the light flowed and interacted with itself, he was more intrigued about ways to make the patterns stick in a way that wouldn’t fade over time. The two of them spent their time for a good long while playing around with and exploring their light and what they could do with it, sharing every little thought and feeling, and all of their theories, with each other.
All in all, the two were taking full advantage of each other’s presence.