leave me at the altar, knowing all the things you just escaped
The anger has gone from the winged stallion, but the boy does not trust it not to come back. It had thrashed out of him unprompted the first time, there is nothing to stop it from doing so again. He does not relax, the boy, but the pulse begins to settle in the chamber of his chest and his expression begins to soften around some kind of wide-eyed wonder as Tarian speaks.
Isakov admittedly does not know as much as he’d like about the stars. Although he and his mother are drenched in them, he does not know if they truly belong to them. They have always felt just out of reach, even splashed across his skin. He is not a star in the way that he sometimes wishes he were. He does not belong to the stars the same way he belongs to the water.
He does not know much about love either. He does not know all the ways it can destroy, whittle away the marrow of the bones, eat steadily away at the meat of the heart. He will likely never know love, Isakov. Even if he is precious little more than an empty vessel built around it.
He does not know much about the stars but he understands that they are not like them. How could they be? But he does not say this out loud. He lets Tarian speak, explain himself. It seems almost cathartic for the older stallion and the boy does not question it. He will be whatever the older stallion needs him to be, the same way he had been the quiet for Sleaze.
He is just a boy who knows nothing of gravity. He does not the way it, too, can destroy. But Tarian hardens again and the boy does not cower. He does not shrink, he just goes on watching.
His expression does not change until Tarian admits why he’s come. You looked like her.
“What do you mean I looked like her?” he asks, tilting his fine, star-strewn head. He had said looked instead of look and the boy knows enough to know that this revelation is troubling.
@[Tarian]