i'm two quarters and a heart down

[Celina]

“Good to know,” she tells him with a brief nod. “But if you ever do and don’t tell me, then I’ll probably have to kill you. That would make me sad, I think.” The last is said almost pensively as she looks down at the copper colored colt. When he leans into her embrace, she shifts her wings forward, enclosing him in a hug. He reminds her of Elio, back when Elio had been small and less annoying. Dad says that Mom is the reason that Elio ended up the way he is, so Celina determines that she will keep this little one away from her mother as well. Should she keep him from his own mother? No, she decides, he still needs his mother to teach him how not to glow. That’s not something Celina can do. Once she does though, once Nashua can play a better game of hide-and-sneak in the darkness, then Celina can take him away. She’ll take him to one of the caves in Nerine, or maybe in the Hyaline mountains. She’ll train him to be the very best (except for her, of course), and Dad will love her the very best because of it. The reminder of Elio makes her grit her teeth. He is her biggest – only? – rival, and it seems he is already encroaching on her brother.  “You shouldn’t trust him.” Celina tells Nashua. “He abandoned Dad and me. He left us to go to Loess.” The rest of the reasoning is forgotten in the flash of feeth. Afterward, as she watches the glow and the slowly knitting flesh, she nods in satisfaction. With little ado, she plucks a pair of feathers from her own wing – one pearly white, the other as dark as her navy hair – and tucks them into the boy’s blonde mane. At the edge of her vision, the bits of seaglass catch the light of her fireflies. Dad had woven them into her mane with a many-fingered hand, and it feels fitting to give Nashua his own décor. “Yeah, Lil Buddy,” she says, nudging the shoulder of his healing leg affectionately, “You’re definitely the good kind of different.” celina i'm that bad type, make-your-mama-sad type make-your-girlfriend-mad type, might-seduce-your-dad type

@[Nashua]