[private] you'll wish for time to turn back around

[Nashua]

stars when you shine, you know how i feel
oh freedom is mine

He wonders if there is something wrong with him. Nashua knows that Elio wasn't in Taiga when it burnt. He knows that his gold-and-red brother was nowhere near the North when it met with dragonfire. His elder brother was somewhere else and all Nashua can feel at that moment - when Elio says I wasn't - is a relief as sweet as rainwater after a drought.

It's selfish, he realizes. This relief that Elio had been somewhere else, had been safe while their shared birthland blazed. While childhood memories turned to ash and sacred places became made all the more hallowed because they could only be visited in memories. There was no more bringing back the copse of trees that he and Yanhua used to rest under or recreating the fort that Little Feather had led Fire Wing to.

Nashua is selfishly-relieved because he doesn't know if he can take it again; they have lost one sibling. Elio, he realizes, has lost so much more than he. I should have protected you from him, his elder brother says and it makes Nashua think about all the times that Yanhua had said they were better off without their manipulative sire. The younger pegasus hadn't even known that they had needed protection until the Nerinian queen had gone missing. Until someone had given the monster a name. Wolfbane.

"He was dangerous," Nashua echoes what he had been told. His words are quiet and there is an edge to them; an attempt at trying to defend @[elio] from his own accusations. That there was nothing to forgive because Elio had done nothing wrong. "It took a Magician to keep him out of the North," the pegasus says quietly. There had been no reports that Nashua had heard about the shifter trying to break through Brennen's barrier. For all that he knew, Wolfbane had never come North again. He had taken one shape and then another, moving from place to place. Gale had told him that he had gone to Pangea for a time.

After that?

They both knew (or so Nash assumed) how that story ended. 

(The gold-stripped stallion is still grappling with his own guilt that he was not there in the Taiga. That he was not in Nerine. That there was no bringing Celina back.)

He doesn't miss the hardset line of his brother's mouth. He doesn't miss the way his grey-blue eyes hold a thousand storms in them, even when he looks away. In that moment, Nash would have done anything to have banished them. "I'm glad that you weren't there," is what he tells his brother instead. His green-eyed gaze follows out to the Forest and Nashua searches the spaces between the trees for his next words.

They aren't hard to find.

"It's good to see you, Fire Wing."

NASHUA

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