be mine, be mine, be mine

[Nashua]

The newly-crowned King of the North watches the boy with a kind of mute wonder; there is something familiar about him. Something that keeps persisting on the edges of his memory, that keeps demanding he remembers why the youth is so recognizable. Some faces are just that way, the angles and planes come together in common places for some. Nashua considers that logic until the boy he announces that he knew it and the striped stallion lifts his head a little, as if taking a step back might change the confirmation he sees on Benjamen's young face.

Nashua glances at the mention of his family and the pegasus looks towards the treeline for shapes or shadows there. Noel always encouraged space with their children, letting them roam and wander and for an instant, but he always had hovered. So he expects a mother or a father to emerge. Perhaps an older sibling to come round up the wayward colt, much like he had been as a boy.

"Well," Nash says, "it's nice to meet you, James." A smile touches the edges of his lips and lifts, hoping to make the youth more comfortable until his family arrives.

Those wide blue eyes keep intoning something to Nash as he peers down at the boy. There is that feeling again, like the churning of a tide or that first bite of frost after a summer's warmth. Something is about to change. And it does when Ben looks up at him again, the wind sweeping his forelock to the side and revealing a truth that Nashua would have believed for that marking alone. The colt explains, though, what the Northern stallion had already suspected. He looks to the treeline again, searching for the palomino mare. "Is your mother here?" Nashua suddenly asks; Elena had come once before.

Why not a second time?

It never occurs to Nash that a boy so young would travel so far alone. It never occurs to Nash that the boy might have appeared as his mother once did, only this time, it wasn't Nashua or his brother in trouble. It never occurs to him that in a place far away, the place where James had been born and subsequently died, that something went wrong.

NASHUA

@[Benjamen]