I'll be almost to the ocean when you open your eyes
The darkness had left them all changed, to some extent or another. Haunted, if one was inclined to dramatics. Traumatized, if one wasn't. Whatever you called it, the darkness wouldn't leave them completely. It was easier to ignore when the sun was hot and brilliant on her scales. Less so when the moon faded in the night sky, when the wind whistled in the desiccated palms and the knotted scars on her thigh ached.
She wanted to bury herself in the sun. To burn away every memory of darkness and cold until she could breath again without her chest feeling the strain of it. The moon-white mare blinked at the taller horse, smiling softly. Ischia's loyal daughter? She was, wasn't she. And very little else, anymore.
Those blue-violet eyes began burning, dry and sore. Better than crying, she supposed, but it didn't help that she caught the flicker of something grim in his face. One she could see so much clearer today. "And here I was thinking I blended into the landscape," she replied with somewhat forced lightness. Lightness that crumbled at his next query.
Wonderful, how are you? She should say. Or, Fine! At the the very least. That was the kind, genteel thing to say. And when it was to a practical stranger, a horse she'd met only once before, that should go doubly. That kind of innocuous phrase refused to leave her mouth, though.
"Generally a mess, yourself?"
Her tongue stumbled on the words, but she felt better for saying them. It was true, wasn't it? Her leg was likely never to be quite as it had been. Not when she'd been so slow in healing it. She'd been delayed in returning home only to find that her twin eggs had birthed twin girls, and they'd been alone their first days in the world.
And even though he'd promised to be careful, that he'd come back. Pteron was still missing. Not here to watch his daughter's emerge with her, not here to intercept her patrols with his own, flirting in his carefree way. Not even emerging from the jungle with his real family, with Aegean and their ethereal brood.
She'd returned home. To a mostly empty island and another broken promise. All of that felt too much to share in one breath, especially when it was the brother she was speaking too. Wasn't it enough to say she was a mess? And lost, and barely holding together inside her own skin? The smile she'd placed so bravely on her lips had washed away, leaving only wide-eyed anxiety in its place.
Aquaria
@[Tiercel]