03-01-2022, 05:34 PM
I'll settle for the ghost of you.
That rush of heat in his chest begins to stir new flames but they are unlike the ones that flicker along his spine. There is brimstone in his belly, there is ash on his tongue. Fyr had never been truly angry before and the emotion is one of the strongest he has ever felt. There had been small glimpses of it when he had been abandoned, when he had been shunned in the den, when BoneBone had tried to trick him. But not like this. It seems to ride on the smoky coattails of his fire and stirs something along the barred door where the souls howl to come in with a force that quiets them instantly. He is still and stoic as Sickle explains the backstory of her life, a flicker of recognition in his yellow gaze at the mention of the name Mazikeen.He’s heard that name before, overheard it actually, in a conversation that his mother had with Obscene.
Gale and Mazikeen. While he had never seen either horse in person, he knew that Gale had been the one to hurt the Fae Prince and had killed the jaguar mare whose corpse he had turned to cinders. He knew that Gale and Mazikeen were spoken about as if connected, as if a couple. It isn’t hard to connect the dots and there is both fury and empathy that cause a frightening storm sparking in his body, that set the split ends of his reddish-brown mane on fire.
”She scared me.”
His jaw clenches in response as the same time his sympathy and anger try to fight each other for a dominant position. Color plays across her coat and he follows it, noticing scars he didn't remember her having before and noting that anger had indeed won out. Her story helps put his own in perspective. His birth mother, whose name he didn’t even know, had left him and had planted an awful thing in his head with a single word. It had been cruel but it didn’t compare to what Sickle had gone through.
He is silent as she looks up to the sky and then once more his feelings struggle to find hierarchy when she heartbreakingly says that last phrase. Aela had at least wanted to keep him. Sickle had nobody.
“You can stay with me.” He looks at her after a long beat of silence, swallowing hard as he tries to find the right thing to say. “With us, I mean. In Pangea. That’s where I live now with another displaced Southerner.” An uncertain pause. “I wanted you to stay. Back then… In the Pampas.” We would have kept you, he thinks but doesn’t add. He lets his offer hang in the air for a moment, not expecting her to respond to it right away. Besides, there are more important things to get off his chest.
“I think your dad killed Obscene’s mom.” He says quietly, shuffling his hooves beneath him as his flames begin their uncertain twists and turns along his shoulders. "It happened right after you left." He adds with a hint of a shrug, glancing at her with a small frown. “It’s not your fault, you know?” He finally says after looking at the ground, chewing over everything she had told him. “You were just a kid. Nobody deserves that, Sickle.”
He feels as if he should comfort her somehow but he is uncertain on what to do. Touch with another outside of the way he had curled into Aela’s chest as a small colt was still foreign to him. Even the small touch to Sickle’s cheek earlier had been a tentative one, always worried that the fire within him might take a life of its own despite the steady control he had on it. More worrisome was that the shadow voice might stir it all up in encouragement. Part of him wants to hug her, the other part is nervous just to look at her in case she fully bursts into tears. It’s the ugly upset feeling that finally spurs him to come closer to her, forcing all his flames as far down as they will go and leaving only wisps of smoke in their wake. He doesn’t reach for her but he is there, if she needs him to be.
“I could go with you if you want. To Hyaline.” He finally says, his voice rough despite the low way the words are whispered. “If she tries to harm you…” He gives a short thrust of his muzzle instead of finishing the sentence, certain she knows what he implies. “You deserve answers.” For once he agrees with the shadowy voice that says that he could make her answer them if Sickle wanted. Hell, she didn’t even need to ask.
FYR
@Sickle