The denial was thick within his eyes. She saw it as it shifted and changed into a million different forms before it faded from his face. Perhaps he was not as ignorant as she'd originally assumed him to be. Reality often was a cruel mistress - and love was even crueler. She could never truly understand the depths in which one loved another. The selfless giving of time and devotion - it reached beyond her levels of comprehension. She, herself, had never once felt the burning desire that others often exhibited. Even the simple affection her siblings held for their shared father could not be mirrored within the emerald of her gaze. And, after seeing the aftershocks of a love as blinding as the one Cagney had experienced, she wasn't sure she ever wished to know it.
For all his strength, he was weakened by the mare who'd spat on his devotion. Disgustingly she could see the remainder of his affection just beyond the confusion that boiled within his soft gaze.
His words rake against her skin like burning prongs. Unwanted sympathy reached itself towards her and she flinched away from it. She did not need to be comforted like some sniveling child. Unlike the soft stallion before her, she hadn't willingly accepted her identity as a castaway. She let her disdain for the events of her past grow within her until it'd shaped her into the being she'd become.
"This is not my home," she corrected him. Her eyes grew cold as she edged herself around him. "My home lies somewhere else beyond this godforsaken island and I intend to find it."
She didn't care how her words might have sounded. Cagney was nothing but a meddling stranger to her. His misguided attempts to comfort her slid off her hide like the whisking of moisture after a rain. Young though she may have seemed, she'd been forced to grow beyond her age. Without a mother licking away her tears, she'd grown stronger and smarter. Perhaps that was the one thing Astarael could credit her mother.
It was because of her carelessness that she'd grown into the mare she'd became. That was not a gift she was likely to toss aside.
Astarael
I want to exorcise
the demons from your past
@[Cagney]