would you spend your whole life with me,
When he laughs, Nairne finds something sad in the sound. A good laugh, she thinks, should be a joyful sound. Humor and fun and lightness – but his is not. It’s like laughing doesn’t mean the same thing to him as it does to her. The buckskin girl thinks of her mother, and the way she had laughed the most around Mikhael and her children, and the way her laugh reminded Nairne of the bubble of water over rocks. It makes her smile, briefly, a flash of light in her eyes, but it fades as she considers him again.
He says he has never let anything hold enough power over him to mourn its loss, and she tilts her head and continues to study him, serious and wondering if she should be sad for him. Wonders what it would be like to trade not experiencing the emotional lows for also not experiencing the emotional highs – would it be worth it? He continues, asking her what the worth of the emotions she remembers so clearly is, and Nairne has to consider her answer carefully. Why let herself be ruled by emotions? – she is not so sure she has a choice!
Before she decides on words to explain it, he steps away and then she is enveloped in the most beautiful fantasy. A thing she knows cannot be (the Falls are gone, so gone – she has looked herself, in every land). The water pools around her fetlocks, cool and as welcoming as she remembers, and the familiar roar of water fills her ears. Nairne takes a deep breath, touches her muzzle reverently to the surface of the water that isn’t real (though it feels real) – and then she smiles at him.
A true smile, filled with breathtaking joy. “Thank you,” she knows it will be temporary, that at some point he will let the illusion go, or Nairne will have to step out of it, but she wades deeper into the illusion for a moment, letting the water darken her gold coat as she goes almost belly-deep, and turns back to him. The words come easy now. “Because you cannot have the joy, the love, without the risk of loss.” Nairne says. “Because to lose everything means I must have had everything. Because eventually, when I find something else to love and I don’t miss it as much, the good memories will still bring me this same kind of joy.”
would you be there to always hold me down?
Nairne
mikhael x natilyn