I should have loved a thunderbird instead
at least when spring comes they roar back again
There is something wrong.
Aegean is not quite able to pick apart what it might be—unable to find the reason why everything feels so broken. Perhaps it is the way that Pteron’s voice does not sound bright and carefree but instead exhausted and worn. Perhaps it is the fact that he stops so far away, the distance between them painfully large. Perhaps it is, instead, the look in his eyes, the bruises underneath the surface that still shine through.
Whatever it is, or perhaps the culmination of it all, it strikes a strange blow to Aegean. Enough to break through the dreamy distance he usually keeps himself at so that he focuses his gaze on the two-toned stallion before him, his deep purple eyes a touch sharper than usual—a strange clarity settling on him.
“Pteron,” he greets, his voice as soft as ever, wrapping the name with the same adoration that he always has—cherishing each and every syllable. The question does not hurt him, although perhaps it should. Perhaps he should feel the ragged edge of a knife at the idea that he would need a reason to be here, but such things have always rolled off of him, leaving him as unaffected as the beach by the tide.
Instead he just ponders the question, glancing up toward the darkening sky and the steaks of color across it. “I wander,” he says simply, rolling an impossibly white shoulder. “I do not always know where I will go, but I am not surprised that I ended up here.” Then, a softer smile, his eyes still studying the other boy’s face, as if trying to find the reasoning beneath it. “I have dreamed of you.”
A sentence he has uttered before, but this time, it feels strangely weighty on his tongue.
A finality, a looming sense of dread—things he has never encountered and feel alien within him.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead
(I think I made you up inside my head.)