He doesn’t move his head until Leilan says something about not calling himself a brother, and then he turns to look, expression somber. He lets him finish his thought, waits for him to fall quiet, and can’t help but cast a very careful, assessing, just-this-side-of-truly-worried glance over Leilan from head to toe, looking for signs that he’d come back injured from his encounter with the fae-folk. Not that he could take them on, even with his new powers, but he might have been tempted. “You seem to have come back mostly unscathed,” he drawls quietly, “So I suspect the fairies thought the same thing I do. You’re young. Young people make mistakes. Everyone does. You can’t hold yourself in contempt forever for mistakes you’ve made, you just have to learn from them.”
Brennen is no exception, he’s certainly made mistakes. And not exclusively when he was young, though he likes to think they have been fewer and father between as he’s grown older. The other stallion’s gaze goes to the shore where the fillies has been and his next question brings a little half-smile to Brennen’s face, and warms his honey brown eyes into a true smile. “I just love them,” he offers, plainly, but he knows that it’s not that simple, not really. “It depends on the child, and the mother. I raise some of them, as you’ve seen, because their mothers are willing to stick around and co-parent or aren’t interested in the child at all. Some of them the mothers don’t want me near, or they disappear, and I don’t get to be involved. That’s harder,” he admits the last though it’s difficult, and his voice is sad. “But in the end it comes down to love. I love all of them, and I’ll give them anything I can, anything they want from me, but I can’t force a relationship with ones who don’t want one.”
Harder still, to see a child he did raise go against everything he has ever believed in – he’s ashamed that part of him is relieved Astarael has disappeared before he truly had to face a child of his own who had committed such atrocities. But he says nothing about Ast, because it doesn’t feel relevant to the question. The second question draws his attention back to Leilan’s face, and he turns over the words in his head for a long minute before responding, because for a moment that warm glow as he talks about his kids becomes ash, nightmares and sadness overcoming everything else. “There is pain, in living an unnatural long time. You lose people who are close to you, but so do those who will die.” Brennen shakes his head, reaches into the rhythmic calm of the waves again and forces the sadness to begin to recede. “But you get to experience joys other don’t get, as well. Many parents die before seeing their children grow up and succeed – I don’t. And I’ve loved, several women, to match my several lifetimes. The joy and sadness is a balance, just like those with a regular lifespan.”