He smiles when she accepts and it is a rare and fleeting thing—changing the harsh angles of his face and revealing a kinder mask beneath. It morphs his features into something more similar to what he would have looked like as a boy: wild and free and constantly yearning for the sky. His teeth are white and straight and flash beneath his dark red lips and even though it doesn’t stay for long, the effects of it do.
He lifts a wing, stained as red as the rest of him, and cradles it over her back as a shield to the wind that runs so recklessly throughout Loess as he moves them forward. She opens up quickly, telling him that he could ask her anything, and he wants to—wants to know so much of the woman beneath the gold and the beauty—but he has no words for the questions just yet. So he just makes a note of consent in his throat, a low rumbling growl, as they continue to move forward and he begins to form his thoughts more.
But before he can think to turn the question on her, she is putting one at him.
“I was,” he answers, cautious with the question even though it is innocent enough. It is difficult for him to force himself to be so vulnerable—to open up—but he swallows his instinctual need to remain guarded and instead angles his head so he can study her with light grey eyes. “I don’t know where they came from because neither of my parents have wings and my twin sister Wonder,” his voice catches on her name and he swallows hard but continues, “Wonder doesn’t have wings either.” He frowns for a second, thinking.
“Actually, I don’t think May and Phesque have wings either.”
It’s the first time he’s really thought of this—how he is the lone pegasus in his family—and it stirs something in him: a feeling of otherness that he has always harbors and need only a spark to take flame. He chews on it for a second as they reach their destination—a rocky part of Loess where magnificent stones stand sentinel, guarding the haven from the wind and prying eyes—and he ushers her further in.
“The antlers come from my mother though,” he says. “Wonder has them, too.”
It is a little easier to talk to her here where he feels like other people are not listening and when he feels like he has some momentum but he pauses to study her again, the twilight setting her aglow and twisting his heart in his chest. He reaches over to press a kiss to her cheek and push her forelock from her eyes, looking at her intently for a moment before his lip quirks. “You could never be plain, Kensa.”
He loves the ornate beauty of her, but he knows that he would love her stripped clean of it too.
“Where do you come from? What was your childhood like?”
BRIGADE
when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache
but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake
@[Kensa]