[mature] it is always you I find at the end of this tunnel; Nashua

[Nashua]

(and it's harder than you think)
telling dreams from one another

Nashua has imagined many things but he never imagined this.

He imagined unfurling those wide wings of his and taking to the sky, soaring to heights that others wouldn't dare, finding horizons that were waiting to be found. Nash had wanted adventure and thrill and adrenaline; he wanted the wind tangling his flaxen mane and he wanted the world below him. It's another existence (as Noel knows) in the sky.

And as a youth, that was all Nash had wanted.

But the pegasus outgrew those dreams. They changed into something broader and yet focused at the same time (and Nash always thinks of something his Aunt Elena once told him, that a horse can hold a duty to a kingdom and their family but only one ever helps shoulder the burdens of the other). The wanderer developed an ambition underneath the tutelage of the Northern king and after the destruction his father wrought (so many wrongs that Nashua wishes he could right), the striped stallion imagined helping the Isle rebuild, and then why should it stop there? Why shouldn't it expand to Nerine, to Taiga? He had thought if a kingdom was family, why couldn't a kingdom help shoulder the burdens of blood and kin?

What Nash has never dreamt of was that part of the family would be his - a lover of his own and their children; what he had never imagined was Noel.

"Do you know what I thought the first time I saw you?" he murmurs against the warmth of her pale pelt. His lips trace lightly over the top of her slender neck. He laughs briefly, remembering the day that he had encountered her on the ground against all the gray and drab granite of Nerine. "I thought you looked all wrong," he says, that voice deepening as his mouth works down her spine and moves past her withers. The look she had given him - an expression that lingered somewhere between audacity and perplexed - had made him almost laugh then and it makes him do so now as he stops moving ever so slowly down her spine.

"I thought you looked like a piece of the sky," he tells her, not revealing the part of his soul thought she looked like heaven. Those white wings catching the light, the way that it had illuminated all around her like she was some other-worldly creature. "And that it was a shame you were stuck on the ground with me." There had been nothing quite as bright as @[Noel] that day, and even now. Nobody that could light him up quite like she did.

Someday, Nashua might be a braver soul. He might be able to tell her how he feels. He might be able to put into words the way that she simultaneously grounds his soul and yet makes him feel like he is soaring towards the sun. For now, his words yield to actions. The chestnut succumbs to nature and the season, hoping that this way he reveres her is heard. 

NASHUA