The boy does not move as she goes to draw herself closer. It had been what he had hoped she would do, though did not wish to ask it of her. His nose twitches - white as the world around them - and everything else about him remains still and quiet. He did not want to disrupt her, to startle her, to do anything that would end with him standing alone in a frozen world, with nothing but the fierce and icy wind biting into his skin. I don’t need to be alone from you, though. Suddenly he finds himself hoping that she truly likes him, and did not linger with him out of pity or his youthfulness. He could take care of himself, he wants to remind her, but he remains silent because he knows it is a lie.
Warden is smaller than her by his sheer age, but not by much, as she drapes her golden neck across the smallness of his back. Finding the gesture extremely intimate yet at the same time necessary, he quietly scoots himself in closer. It’s a familiar position, to be held like this, by either his father or mother, or even his older sisters. It soothes the storm and his nerves almost instantly, though there is a tenseness in his muscles that reminds him he should still remain wary, always wary.
Do you have a home?
There is a pause that swells between them, echoed by the sheer silence of white snow and ice. He does not try to avoid answering this time, but keeps his cobalt gaze downward to stare absentmindedly at her hooves despite being covered with the wintry white of snow. He sniffs, then presses the slender of his ivory cheek against her shoulder. “I do,” he tells her, wondering if his absence has worried his sisters enough to send them into a frenzy, or if perhaps in his absence his father has passed. He wants neither to be true, but finds an inner voice scolding him for hoping for such things not to pass. Silly, childish boy.
“It’s far from here,” he adds thoughtlessly, leaning his head against her now. He's suddenly so tired.
He misses his family with a sudden ferocity that causes a wavering look of confusion to fall across his face. But it is broken and bloody, inked into darkness by a curse and a disease that no one could cure.
He's still too afraid to return.
The obsidian of his mane is deep and dark and bold against the paleness of the stranger’s golden neck and shoulder, somehow comforting despite the foreignness. His brow furrows, his navy blue eyes lifting slightly to peek at her from his peripherals, a soft sigh in his throat. “Do you want me to tell you about it?”
He has a feeling she would like to know, and that him asking her the same question she posed to him would unsettle her.
-- warden
@[Glassheart] <3
