[private] Desolation comes upon the sky // Brennen

[Scorch]

He hesitated, stuck on the brink of wanting and needing and not knowing the right answer; in the depths of his honeyed eyes, Scorch watched the shattering and remaking of Brennen's heart as if that precious organ laid in the dirt at their hooves, a spectacle of grief and love that could rival even Scorch's emotional outbursts in its animatedness. The atoms of her life-long friend's bones could practically be heard breaking, the fracture of his skeleton a musical orchestra that left its audience sick and crying; there's beauty in pain and there's grace in death, but though they spoke now of ghosts and of an afterwards, the mare still found herself breaking alongside him.

They're asking for you.

In a single moment, everything changed; the hesitation in the failing of his heart and bones disappeared, giving way completely to brokenness as his voice came forth to claim its rightful goodbye to his departed children. Please, he croaked, the word a prayer as much it was a request. Above her watery eyes, the ugly mare's hairless brow furrowed in an attempt to keep herself together, for his sake; she couldn't break down too. The least her life long companion deserved was a rock to stand on as everything around him fell to pieces. He had a kingdom, he had a following, he had magic; but in this moment, all he needed could be found in the deep recesses of Scorch's mind. His children.

He says that he loves you. He didn't mean to fail you. He was trying to protect you.
We know, and we forgive him, though there's nothing to be forgiven. He did right by us at every step. And we have each other now... Tell him that we will be okay.
The mare swallowed, barely certain she could find her corporeal form's voice if given days to do so.
...I love you, daddy. Khaeli's voice, warbling in its failing attempt to be positive. Tell him we love him too. Alonwy's calmer drawl, resigned. It's the strength in her voice that pushed Scorch from this reality to the one she knew better; as if seeing color seep back into a grayscale world, the mare found Brennen's eyes.

Stepping closer, Scorch barely noticed as their bodies pressed closer than yet before; her mutilated lips found the sensitive hairs of Brennen's inner ear, the words his daughters had said passing from mare to stallion in an almost otherworldly fashion. As she delivered the message, her eyes closed and she leaned her soul onto his, finding comfort in the familiar pain she found there, finding a spark of passion for her friend that had never been there before. As her existence seemed to spiral around in a hazy dissociation fashion, Scorch came to realize the breadth and depth of her profound love for Brennen; she relived their every interaction, reevaluating their jokes and their secretive glances and the unfailing support they'd had for each other, especially of late. With the last whisper of the children's I love you's fading between them, Scorch paused, her gut twisting in a way that begged to be untwisted. A spark that hadn't been there before.

And Brennen, she murmured, too quiet for any but him to hear. I love you, too.
She wore her heart on her sleeve, and he wore his under wraps; some might observe that the two were incompatible, but in the moment of grief and love and intensity and passion, all the reasons why not where replaced with reasons why. In the moment of haze and hormones and nearly unmatched trust, her mouth slid down his ear, over his bare neck, down to his shoulder; her teeth grazing against him, pronouncing a need that neither of them could ever have imagined possible... And yet, in the heat of the moment, neither could deny that that need was perfectly legitimate. That they had earned this. That, in so many ways, this made sense.

She didn't need to say more; in the ways of old, their bodies now spoke for them.