would you spend your whole life with me,
Nairne smiles at him, because her waterfall is there. Because it is easy enough to pretend it’s real, to immerse herself in the feeling and sounds of the waterfall. But while her own words are memories of long-held joys, his questions are so serious. Nairne can’t quite believe that he has never felt the highs and lows of life, but the very way he phrases the questions convinces her it’s the truth. She turns to look at him, letting the smile fade as she seriously considers his question. “If not for the joy, however temporary it might end up, what would I live for?” she asks a question in return for his question, voice just loud enough to be heard over the reassuring sound of the Falls. For a long moment, they simply look at each other, each convinced that the other is crazy.
His next words startle her out of her own head, and she smiles again, very reluctantly. “No, thank you. You’ve already done more than I could ever expect, or repay.” The buckskin mare, accepting with a very heavy heart that no dream can last forever, and knowing that all magics come with a cost, walks back out of her memory-mirage to stand before him once more. Despite everything, despite that she can see he thinks she is crazy for her deep love of the Falls, she is intrigued by him.
“The Falls was my family home. That is part of why it means so much to me. It was the one place where we could always find one another again. If I stayed there long enough, someone else would have come back. My parents, or my cousins, or my siblings. Now…” Nairne looks past him, something resigned deep in her gaze. “Now, I don’t know if I will ever find them again. It was my choice to leave, certainly, but I did so assuming that someone, someday, would return to the Falls. They always had before, and as long as the Kingdom stood, the children of Nikkai would have found their way back to it.”
Quiet, again, for a moment. Perhaps he can ‘see’ her family connected to her, or perhaps he can only see his own, but she is quite sure they are out of his reach anyway. Most of them are no longer in Beqanna, if they live at all. But her family is at the heart of these emotions he doesn’t understand in her. “Do you have a family…” she trails off, and is startled into a short laugh. “I don’t even know your name.”
would you be there to always hold me down?
Nairne
mikhael x natilyn