Despite everything - the turbulent history they share, the memories of sharp teeth tearing his own flesh apart - Cassian finds himself curious. Not only curious but almost sympathetic, in a way. No, not sympathetic, really. But he finds that he rather likes her. Without her accordion mouth and alien skin, she is almost familiar. Like they might have found their way to being friends if their past lives had not entwined as they had.
He listens to her story though, fueled by that curiosity. Nods his understanding. The darkness had been a terrible thing, the shadowy beasts that lurked within even more so. Somehow, miraculously, Cassian had avoided the worst of them. But at the end, he too had come out changed, if only slightly. Before the darkness, he had been almost as normal a horse as a horse could be. After the darkness however, he had emerged sporting the slightly crooked halo that even now crowns his dark ears.
Not a change like hers, but certainly enough.
A smile flickers at the corners of his lips as he quips, “Would it be awful of me to say I’m glad you changed?” He’s not sure if she is ready for his teasing yet, but he can’t seem to help himself.
He nods again when she describes herself, remembering almost too vividly. He has no easy or ready response this time. He’s not even sure why he’d asked. Knowing which one she’d been would change nothing. But when she frowns at him, question hovering in the air between them, Cassian tips his head, his smile widening until a laugh manages to escape his throat. She had just managed to find the one thing that had made him only slightly different from other perfectly normal, perfectly mortal horses.
“I can’t really die,” he replies with a faint shrug, as though it were the most normal thing in the world. As though the one thing he’d inherited from the father he’d never met were seen every day, rather than in only him and his siblings. And perhaps some other siblings out there he’d never met. Who knows what his father got up to in his spare time. “If I do, I come back,” he continues with another laugh. “At least, I always have so far.”
@Nostromo