DAWN
it must be about as hard as forgetting your best friend
Dawn doesn’t know everything about how her parents met, but she knows that it involved being stolen away to Carnage’s lair and being kept there and tortured for an indeterminate amount of time. Her mother had chosen the path of fire, and her father had chosen ice. They were tortured simultaneously yet separated, the dark god pushing a number of horses to their very limits and even further - just for fun. Some of them had made it out fine, but others, like her parents, had been permanently traumatized.
Cress had told her that Ledger had been locked in a cell near hers, and it was the pain in his screams that had emboldened her to seek him out years later. Years later. Not days, or weeks, or months, but years. Cress had wanted to speak to another who had gone through the things she experienced, but it took her years to gather the strength to find him. And to think, in Dawn’s eyes, Cress was the mightiest of warriors - the most fearless golden woman. Cress was a dragoness lacking only in physical armor.
Back in the present, she sees the flicker of recognition in the stranger’s eyes as he turns towards her and her words fail as her mother’s name crosses his lips.
Does she look so much like her mother?
His confusion is quickly replaced by kindness, but Dawn still finds herself unable to speak. Ledger. This is her father - the man that Cress had told warm stories about. She had spoken highly of his kindness and his old soul, and though the pair had not spent a long time together - he had never even known she had been pregnant - Cress had never forgotten her one-time lover. Maybe, in a different universe, they would have been happy together. Maybe.
She wonders if he feels the same way about his shifting that she does - that she is different in that form, and that the bear seems to take over pieces of her that she has a hard time regaining control of. A part of her misses that loss of control, and the feeling of digging sharp claws into the beaches of the Cove, but yet another part of her knows that she gave it up for good reason - to learn to be strong without it. But she never learned to be strong again after Cress’s death; no, she had taken the stripping of her magicks and returned home to Tephra and didn’t look back.
Will he be able to give her insight?
Finally she speaks, tears in her eyes as she thinks of her mother. “My mother’s name was Cress,” she offers in return to his awkward greeting, her smile beginning to fade. “My name is Dawn.” Knowing that the best thing to do is just get on with it, she surges forward, praying to not trip over the words: “I think you’re my father.”
@[Ledger] actively in my feelings rn