[private] when you are younger, you will wish you were older.

[Nashua]

stars when you shine, you know how i feel
oh freedom is mine

He doesn't know what she has struggled with but Nashua has traveled enough to know when someone has taken a journey; the girl has all the shine of adventure radiating from her when she peers up at him. He can't help but smile back at her, tempered as it is. Nashua is harboring storms inside his chest but sometimes feeling the winds cut through a soul is the best way to lighten it.

Nashua won't share all of his travails - he'll keep the worst of it to himself (a trait that he shares with his mother and grandmother) - but when he smiles at Olena, secrets are lingering in the corners of his upturned mouth. "A thing or two," he murmurs back to the winged girl. He tries not to think of the way he found Celina. He tries not to remember the way life looks when it has flown from the eyes of a pegasus; he glances into the stormy blue of Olena instead and focuses on the way that a life can fill them. Her eyes are deep and blue and Nash thinks they are full of things yet to come.

"I was told that I'm the grandson of a great storyteller," Nashua tells his companion rather gallantly. He looks at Olena instead of the sweeping sea and smiles charmingly, hoping that he looks the part. It's a bright emergence of the Nashua who had earned smiles from strangers and he hopes to put @[Olena] more at ease with it. There is the start of a smile on the buckskin's face and the pegasus takes a moment to appreciate it. There are glimmers here, he thinks. It's a shimmer of who this not stranger might become. It's easy to see a bolder mare glancing up at him. Give her time and a few experiences of her own and he thinks that Olena could be a fearless flyer. The dark wings that she holds against her sides deserve the skies and for a moment, Nash finds himself wondering about how to coax her to the clouds.

Another day, he tells himself. Another time when the wind is more favorable and he isn't such a thundercloud.

The chestnut cast his green eyes to the sea again, not sweeping them up to where he imagined them both moments earlier. "I was in Loess," he admits. "It...," and the admission struggles within him, chokes his throat as the soot and smoke had. "It was burning," he explains and Nash can't bring himself to look at Olena. He keeps looking away because he realizes that he can't bring himself to tell her that there are far worse things than places burning. He can't bare to share that with anyone (except perhaps Yanhua, the better half of him. But even then, what would he say? 'Our half-sister is dead.' And they never speak of their father. What good would it do?)

There are squalls building behind Nashua's green eyes and he shuts them, breathing deeply and denying them a chance to gain momentum. Olena wanted a story, not a confession. He finally turns to look at her and his gaze is rueful with an unspoken apology, "I can tell you a better story than that. Do you know why the trees of Taiga are so tall? Or why the thunder bellows so loud when storms are overhead?"

There is a thoughtful glint in his eyes as they take in the feathered appendages pressed against her. Nashua lifts his wings, "do you know the story of why we have these?"

NASHUA

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i am so sorry this took forever and that it's a bit... everywhere