He has changed.
Like the earth after a massive quake or a valley after a millennia of river running through and carving out its sides. He has changed—evolved, devolved, perhaps—and he is not the same boy that once looked at her with wilderness in his eyes and a cautious hold on his tongue. But the walls of him are the same. The cliffside of his heart remains steady, despite the battered and bruised nature of it under it all.
She has the same sheen he remembered looking at when he was a young boy and his wings shift at his sides in almost memory, taking on the white and oil spill of her against the rich red of his coat.
“Here we are,” he echoes, and he feels a strange desire to tell her about the ways he has broken his world and how it still had the strength to break him back. How it is a disconcerting feeling to hear your own spine crack beneath the weight of your own foot. How you can know something is dangerous and still be surprised when its teeth sink into your jugular. How you’re never as smart as you think that you are.
Instead he just gives her a sad half-smile, exhaustion anchoring the edges of it so that it never completes and he’s left with just the broken pieces of it in his hand.,
“I have been…” his voice breaks and he furrows his brow, swallows, looks past her.
To where he had left Kensa and her love and his heart, he thinks. To Sylva, where he lives and yet struggles to imagine returning. Would Starsin look at him and know instantly all of the foolishness that lives in him? Would she look straight through him and laugh when she saw how foolish he had been?
He shakes his head, antlers swinging.
“How have you been?”
BRIGADE
when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache
but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake