it's a guarantee that he won't forget me.
my body little, my soul heavy.
As Ivar and Mary take their leave, Naia almost regrets dismissing them. Not so much that she forgets her embarrassment, but enough to make her consider calling out for Ivar when he looks back. Her brown eyes allow one tiny glimmer of desperation before his similar gaze turns away (an offer she will not soon forget).
When the roan turns back to her newfound father, he is pacing back and forth, obviously worked into some kind of a tizzy. She frowns at him, eyes darkening with a irateness to match his. A huff pushes hot and pissed from clenched teeth and pursed lips. Of course, he will have just as interesting as a reaction as her - they are family, aren’t they? But Naia cannot think of that now; instead, she stares at him with eyes brimming with fire and a chest growing tighter by the second.
All of her faux fights and bottled up emotion could not prepare her for this. Hot tears spill out of her eyes, frustrated and frightened and like nothing she has felt before.
Leilan finally stops pacing, asks her name, and for a long while she just stares at him. It is not that she does not want to offer it up, or even that she is supremely pissed - just that she thinks she cannot handle this, her father’s realness - so horribly jarring. Naia existed in a bubble her whole life up until this moment: Thalassa and the nomad lands, even strangers were few and far between.
A gulp and a sniffle, too loud in the silence between the two, then: “Naia.”
Her voice is near-cruel, a poor attempt at masking how she wishes she had grown up knowing her father’s embrace. They are strangers, and Naia simply cannot take that: the time and space that spans between them, the memories that could have been. And all for what? Thalassa never told. Leilan was always just Leilan, nice enough but apparently not important enough to for Naia to know. She stamps one furious, dark, depressed hoof into the ground.
“Thalas- Mom. She never told me why, but she never spoke ill of you . . . if that is what you are so worked up over.”
Her eyes drift slowly to the earth, resting on Leilan’s much larger hooves. She sighs, eyes half-glazed, preparing to dissociate.
@[Leilan]