When he feels her stirring, the pegasus can't help it; he gently reaches for her. If she had been planning to rest for a few more hours, he wouldn't have waked her. Tarian had planned to stay nearby, and perhaps take a rest himself. They often lose rest in other activities, and it wouldn't be hard for the gray stallion to doze off with the sun warming his hide and the warmth of Altissima so close. '
But she stirs so he smiles.
He catches the first color of her eyes - a shade not far from his piercing blue - and then it fades to violet. Her mouth moves against his skin and it dances in reply, lightning still striking where she touches. He presses his winged shoulder into her side and lifts a white wing, wishing to draw her close. But something is wrong, he thinks. Tarian turns his head to look at her, because they have come together often enough now that is second nature to him.
The shaking in her voice is new, and it immediately worries him.
Tarian studies her as she pulls away, though he is careful not to give away his concern. Her wings have appeared, and wrapped around her sides. He looks down at the way she holds herself, before glancing up as she began to speak. It takes him a moment to realize what she is asking; that she is asking him about children, about a family. (He wants to say that he could barely comprehend that there would ever be more to him than just his solitary existence. He wants to think that sometimes he still thinks is dreaming, that he had never dared to imagine her. How could imagine more?)
"No," he tells her honestly, "Before this...," he says, (before us, he means), "I was a soldier." After Paraiso, Tarian had planned on being a warrior until the day he died, until the day that a battlefield claimed him. He wanted no widow, no children. He's always stayed away from any lasting relationships because they would have to end with him, and Tarian never wanted to impart that pain on another. "And then came Loess."
Not a battlefield, but another ending just the same.
"Did you -," Tarian tries to continue their conversation, knowing that she already had a daughter. Did she want more? "I mean, do you want -"
TARIAN