"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
Vastra even has some of her memories, though there are still holes. She knows she was raised by her mother, knows that her father had died. But there is no memory of that day on the beach. She does not know she was born there, both physically and figuratively. Her mother told her the story about how she had shifted into a great lion that day to attack the monster that her father had died fighting.
She does not believe it. Foals, she knows now, are weak. Even she must have been, once.
Vastra does not like thinking about when she was weak - whether as a foal or when the teal pegasus had helped her limp across Beqanna in order to find a healer, all while she bled all over him. Had it stained, she wondered? Had there been a reddish hue to him, a reminder of the strange nameless mare?
Although she briefly considers how it would be better to just never, ever, see him again - there is a part of her that wants to. It’s inexplicable, she’s still attempting to learn how this whole socializing thing works.
Besides, there’s the matter of a weight of a debt on her heart.
So on a wintery morning, Vastra lands near the borders of Taiga and lands. Now growing more accustomed to her pegasus form over that of the mountain lion, she eyes the large trees a little warily. This is not exactly wing-friendly.
Her stormy, blue-grey eyes watch the trees as though they are a new foe but she calls out a greeting all the same - wondering briefly if this is the right place, or if he'll even be home.
finger trips across my cheek---------------- ----------------kiss me until i can't speak
Just like the morning before, Pteron makes it all the way to the Loessian border before he comes to his senses. His half-baked plan will never work; he can’t just ask Castile to take Reia back.
He’d been so sure when he woke up that today would be the day. But he’d thought that yesterday too, and the day before that as well. He’d extricated himself from his wife’s embrace (she is a light sleeper who likes to hold him close and whisper threats if it seems he might be attempting to leave in the night) in the earliest light of dawn and gone south before the sleep had really left his olive eyes.
Now he blinks them against the brightness of the snowy Loessian hills, illuminated by the morning sun. Somewhere out there is a cave, he is sure, a cave where he might put Reia and she’d never trouble him again. Perhaps he could find that bay stallion from the Icicle Isle and have him seal it shut. Guilt roils in his belly at the idea though, and Pteron shakes his blue-maned head as thought to physically rid himself of the idea. No, no he couldn’t do that. Burns and bites and being denied happiness are not the equivalent of being buried alive.
The piebald stallion turns back toward Taiga but does so rather slowly. Slowly enough that he sees the dun mare in the distance and can pause his half-completed circle and head toward her as though its been his intention all along. Pteron can’t be sure that she’s seen him – she’s looking toward the heart of the forest.
“I’ve never actually seen a ghost in there, if that’s what you’re worried about.” says the winged stallion as he steps around a tree to come closer. “But if…”
Pteron trails off, whatever he had been about to say lost in the fog.
“It’s you.” He finally says, recognizing the cream dun mare. She looks far better than when he had left her with the healer; her wings look whole and healthy tucked up against her sides. Pteron had not ever expected to see her again, and yet here she is on his very doorstep. “I guess you’re better then? I’m glad.”
Things might have been easier if he had not remembered her, but she supposes it would have also bruised her ego if he hadn’t, so there is no winning. She turns her attention from the trees, although part of her is wondering about the ghosts and another is wondering if she would be able to climb those trees.
“Hello.”
Apologies are foreign for her - she’s not sure she’s ever said she was sorry to someone before nor even considered the possibility of saying those words. She is thinking about it now, though, but due to her lack of practice she’s not even sure this situation warrants one. Certainly she is not about to apologize for not having any memory, not even of her own name, nor the bite in her voice when stupid questions were asked. Perhaps she could apologize for her weakness but, well, she would just rather pretend that they had not crossed Beqanna together with her wing draped over him.
That situation was the most intimate thing she had ever done with someone else - and now she knows she has mated with others at least a dozen times in one form or another. Procreation, to her, is not an intimate affair. It barely requires communication at all.
Allowing someone to see her at her weakest point? Unbearably intimate.
She shifts her stance and wings a little bit before speaking. Not quite a response to his words, but close enough. “I’m Vastra.” She offers, a small ghost of a smile appearing in those blue-grey eyes as she says it. “I… I don’t remember if I thanked you so I came here so I could.”
finger trips across my cheek---------------- ----------------kiss me until i can't speak
Pteron has been taught how to be polite since birth. At least, he was taught manners when his mother could find him, and that was only a few of the daylight hours of his youth. The rest of the time he was wherever he wanted to be, often invisible or in the air to avoid detection by his parents. Lepis was the one who scolded him for his unsanctioned forays; Wolfbane was always holding back a smile as he stood just out of her sight. That had made the corrections by his father all the more memorable when they came, but fortunately they were infrequent, for Pteron was not at heart a truly disobedient child.
He's not a disobedient adult either, which has made the experience of being flung unexpectedly into leadership all the more overwhelming. Pteron has always been told what to do, and the idea of being the one to give the orders to anyone other than the soldiers under his command is a nearly foreign concept. He has managed to make it through the last few months without ever cracking, and most of the time he is amazed by that. Some combination of riding his mother’s coattails, being propped up by his wife - the Dragon’s Daughter -, and his own self-use of his happiness projection and trips to Ischia when that ran dry. It won’t last forever, some part of him knows, and his aborted trip this morning was yet another failed attempt to free himself of his burden.
The mare has blue-grey eyes like his mother, Pteron notices. Had he forgotten them, he wonders, or had he just not noticed? There were other things to pay attention to: like not jostling her wing. Physical pain is certainly not an unfamiliar sensation to the tobiano pegasus, but he still shudders unconsciously at the memory of their trip to the Brilliant Pampas. The odd angle of her wing, and the way it just stayed broken like that and did not knit and tug itself back together. He summons a bit of happiness to cover that discomfort, and smiles at the offering of her name.
“Vastra,” he repeats with. “That’s a pretty name. I’m glad it wasn’t lost forever.” She thanks him, and Pteron grins. “Consider yourself in my debt, then.” he follows with a roguish grin that he has inherited from his father. “We can call it even if you tell me what you’ve been up to since I left you in the Pampas. Did you find your family? Where you live?” That she has a family Pteron never doubts, and surely she has a home as well. Pteron, loathe the forest more each day though he may, knows that it is his home.
His roguish grin brings out a smile of her own. Her prolonged embarrassment throws a shade over how much she could like Pteron, but it makes her feel better that he is - so far - apparently genuinely nice. The matter of her debt to him is a feeling that is very real to her, and she shakes her head at his idea of how to call it even. “That is not enough, but it is a start.” It was a short story, after all, and it had been far from a short trip.
“I.. rebooted my brain with the help of a fellow shifter and unlocked many memories.” Her words are still a little awkward and she fumbles over most of them but it’s becoming easier and easier to string together longer sentences. “But there is no family to be found, and no home. My father died the day I was born. I have a mother, but it’s been years since I’ve seen her… and two foals as well, in addition to the cubs I raised.” The longer she spends in horse-form, the more remote and bizarre her life as a mountain lion feels. She doesn’t think about how this is probably a strange thing to say. “I hope they are well, and that they are living peacefully somewhere.”
“No home.” She repeats, but casually and without a hint of sadness. It is a fact. It’s difficult to feel remorse over something she never felt. Even before, when she was a filly and then a young mare, she ever truly had a home. She was a wanderer at heart. “I was born before the world changed, now it’s all different.” No wonder she had not recognized anything.
Her gaze shifts momentarily to the forest that composes this land and wonders aloud. “Do you like your home?”
Not that she is looking to move in, of course, but she is curious about what that means to others. Home.
finger trips across my cheek---------------- ----------------kiss me until i can't speak
He’s shaking his head as soon as she says it is not enough; as the holder of the debt he considers it his choice as to what constitutes adequate repayment. Her experience is a foreign one, and the tale is novel enough that he considers them even with the retelling. More than even, truly, as she continues to tell a tale of missing family and lost children. The charming smile he’d worn softens as she speaks, and fades away at the idea of not knowing where he children are. Pteron cannot even imagine misplacing Adarra. Her children are older, he realizes; he’s made the mistake of assuming her smooth features are indicative of youth. How much older, he finds himself wondering? His age, older? He nearly asks her – or at least makes a comment about well she looks for a mother many times over – but Vastra’s story is not over and so he holds his tongue.
No home, she says, and her elaboration answers his unspoken question. Before the world changed? She is ancient then, thinks the stallion whose family has spent three generations here since the Reckoning. Pteron is quiet again, imagining life in a world he did not know. How strange it must be to live in a place that is the same and yet entirely different. What would Beqanna be like without the Hyaline mountains or the red hills of Loess? Strange, he decides, and Vastra’s lack of a home feels somehow the worse for it.
Her gaze has turned to the forest, and Pteron follows it, his olive gaze flicking across the broad trunks and shaded canopy that he has called his home for the past five years. Five years; how has time passed so quickly and so slowly?
“Taiga?” he asks, not thinking how that might sound. Of course she means Taiga. “Taiga is where my family lives.” He adds, and that he knows is not an answer. “When my daughter is old enough to leave her mother, I plan to find a new home for us.” He’s not admitted this aloud before, but it is true. It feels freeing to say it, and yet it is a struggle to not look around to ensure that his wife is not near enough to hear. Why he admits this to Vastra he is not certain. Perhaps because she happens to be here, on yet another morning he has failed to leave his wife, perhaps because he remembers her vulnerability at their last meeting and attempts to balance it with this one.
Vastra doesn’t ask after the girl’s mother, barely even thinks about why Pteron would want to take the child from her. It’s not that she’s being polite, really, but her curiosity is not strong enough to encourage her to say or ask anything about it. She assumes that the blue stallion has his reasoning and they are strong enough to encourage him to find a new home. That is enough for her.
It is also enough to spark an idea. “When you find new home, I will come too. Keep you and your daughter safe.” She nods with a sense of finality. They aren’t even technically friends, but story or no story there is a sense of duty that Vastra feels (not to mention - he’s tolerable to spend time with and that’s typically as close to friendship as she gets).
“That will settle our debt. Okay?” There’s a stubborn strength to her voice (even when she didn’t know who she was, Vastra knew she was stubborn - that trait was her constant) but a fragility to it as well.
What she doesn’t say out loud is that she needs him to agree to this. She needs a purpose, even if it’s just occasionally keeping an eye on two horses. She’s a guardian deep within her soul, something rooted there throughout the ancient generations of her blood. Keeping safe the stallion that kept her safe seems as good of a way to spend her time as anything else, and perhaps she will discover a further purpose while she is doing so.
finger trips across my cheek---------------- ----------------kiss me until i can't speak
What she says is less of an offer than a statement of fact, yet it brings a smile to his face that he had not expected to find. She will keep them safe, Vastra tells the soldier, and Pteron does not have the heart to break her fragile certainty. They are little more than strangers, the piebald stallion and the smoky dun, and yet the idea of Vastra being wherever he and Adarra end up is a pleasant one. “Even if we choose Pangea?” he teases, having heard the rumors but feeling safe behind the gift that Craft and Anatomy had granted to the redwood forest.
Though his heart is far lighter than it might have been without Vastra’s unexpected arrival, Pteron recognizes the sincerity in her tone. He does give her an answer, an agreeable nod and an “I would like that.” The emotion he had projected earlier lingers though, the happiness making it far easier to bush away the potential sobriety of the generous offer she’s made to repay her debt.
“Did you come here to find me?” He asks, “Or were you here for Aten?” Their first meeting had included the champagne leader of the Taiga, who had offered these same woods as sanctuary. Unfortunately, these woods did not hold a healer at the time, and Pteron thinks the choice of the Brilliant Pampas instead had been a good one. Vastra’s healed wing here proves that, surely. “He’s here somewhere, I assume, though he has been scarce of late.” That is being especially kind, Pteron thinks, having not seen the man since early summer.
@[Vastra]
-- pteron --
i kinda made it current time but also i am gucci if they meet up again later and we wrap up this thread!
