you could break my heart in two, but when it heals, it beats for you
Kensa settles as Litotes embraces her, though she does not entirely still. She straightens the fall of his mane against his neck, contentedly admiring her handsome love, his corded neck, the muscles in his back and shoulders shifting as he stretches his head out onto her own back. The water quiets around her legs and Kensa knows he needs this, a moment of closeness to say things that they both already know but haven't taken the time to voice. Litotes struggles more than she with his burdens because he has suffered more, so much more than she even knows, she realizes.
How many years have they been together without her ever asking? For a while she had just tried to pretend he was just out for a swim in the deep water, enjoying the refreshing chill on that first hot summer. Now she knows better, life experience opening her eyes to things a girl who had never known despair saw but did not understand. They don't know a lot about one another from before they were Kensa and Litotes of Hyaline, then of the East, and now just themselves--known to many for their individual peculiarities.
Her thoughts thus drifted, her gold tipped ears twist slowly to pull his words from the air, turned back to catch the rest of what he might say. "I know, my love.” This is all she can say, her lips pressing to the point of his shoulder after she speaks. He cannot come home any more than she can leave. This isn’t home for him anymore, that Hyaline does not exist and they are not the children who believed in it.
“Litotes, where did you live before you came to Hyaline?” Kensa pulls back, smoothes his forelock off his face and then drops a kiss onto the highest snowflake, the lightest of them just a ghost of silver on his creamy hide. “Why were you out there under the water?” She whispers, so many years later a secret between them still.
Kensa
