We just selling dope, talking matching lambos; brennen

hold me in this wild, wild world
'cause in your warmth I forget how cold it can be

“I’ve never met another Holiday, he responds to the first of her words, rather solemnly, “So it must be original enough.” He doesn’t know why his own mother had chosen ‘Brennen’; but it had been one of the few things she bothered to teach the little winged colt before leaving him alone on the beach. Either she had some reason for giving him a name when she wasn’t going to give him anything else, or leaving a nameless colt behind to go live her life had been a line she wouldn’t cross, even if abandoning a child on the beach with the dead was not.

But he rarely thinks of his nameless mother; preferring, when he thinks of parents, to think of Texas and the Tundra, and so he pushes all thoughts of the gray mare and his name from his mind, and tunes instead into her poetic praise of winter, and the playful smile she flashes him. It draws an answering smile from him, though it is another of his half-smiles, as if he can’t quite commit even to the act of smiling. He has, over decades, perfected the art of walking a perfect balance on the line between being friendly and reserved, between openly communicating with the rest of the world and holding himself at a distance, and he rarely falls. He is too loyal to the things he loves, and it costs too much to award that loyalty too easily; but he has never seen a reason to be anything other than engaging, polite, friendly, even if he keeps a tight leash on any deeper feelings.

Holiday is relief, because he owes her nothing, and she expects nothing. She is not one of the Amazon women who expect him to so easily turn from his lifelong service of the Tundra to fealty to their new salty shores. She is not one of his many children or grandchildren or greatgrandchildren, whom he loves and protects even when he has no energy left to do so. She is a blank page, an open opportunity to make a friend or to leave whenever he wants, and that freedom buoys him up, makes him playful in return, and so he cannot help but reach for the ice deep within the earth and drawing it out, building a ring of spiraling ice columns that rise around them, quickly enough to suit him but slowly enough to endeavor not to startle her, and curve to meet above them, forming an icy lattice that sparkles where it catches the sun.

A heartbeat, then several in pause as he looks up to admire his own handiwork, before lowering his honey-brown gaze to hers again, and quirking that little half-grin again. “I am a fan of winter, as well,” he says slowly, the faintest hint of a drawl on the words, “I might go as far as to call it my favorite season. In the world before the changes, I lived in the Tundra, and its long winters and beautiful icy landscapes grew on me.” Brennen is proud that he can almost speak of the Tundra without pain, nowadays, and without a regretful quaver in his voice. “And where do you hail from, Holiday?”

hold me in this wild, wild world
and in your heat I feel how cold it can get

BRENNEN