[private] you'll wish for time to turn back around

[Nashua]

stars when you shine, you know how i feel
oh freedom is mine

Nashua has very few memories of the man who sired him.

The only thing he has left of Wolfbane is a single white feather that he had stored away in one of Taiga's caverns near the Nerinian coast. (He had tried wearing them, once. His Aunt Elaina had braided them into his mane and he wore them proudly. The blue, the red, and the white feathers of his family woven in his flaxen hair when he first took the sky. It wasn't until he lost the pale blue one - a gift from Celina - and Nashua spent several hours looking for it, walking the Taigan trails on hoof until he found it muddied on the ground that he decided to find someplace safer for them, a place where they wouldn't get lost or dirty. He learned they were far too precious for that, far too precious for him to just lose.)

What Nashua remembers is that he hadn't mattered enough for his father to stay.

What he had come to learn was that his father was a Monster and Nash has yet to make to peace with that. The Northerners whispered about the death of the former Commandant with relief. Nashua carried those whispers with him. He carried the knife-twist of guilt in his gut around that he still had a single white feather hidden in Taiga. He walked around in silence with the thought and the weight that, I am that man's son.

It's not his fault, he's been told. It is not his or Yanhua's fault and yet sometimes Nashua thinks he feels the weight of those sins on his broad shoulders.

This flight away from the Isle is his first attempt at not letting the burden stifle his wanderlust. He had spent much of his winter alone, training for the upcoming Alliance with infrequent visits with Leilan and his family in Taiga. It was just that this world felt suddenly so much heavier to Nashua and he didn't know how to carry it yet. He was still learning how.

And yet he's not prepared for this moment of vulnerability when his older brother looks up at him. Elio's head hangs low to the ground and his vibrant mane is tangled. It's like the weight that Nashua has carried around with him but instead of grounding the striped pegasus, it has starved and beaten and left him laden with this shell. (Because he still remembers Fire Wing, he still recalls the brother that taught him all the ways to be brave before he had ever left home so he is braver than he feels now.)

He has never seen someone laid low before.

Nash says nothing at first, only drops his head the loamy ground as he approaches. But then @[elio] raises his head and the younger pegasus feels a twinge of hope lifting with it.

"What is there to be sorry for?" Nashua asks softly, quiet despite how loudly his heart hammers. Reaching his slender head out to greet the other, he says, "you're here."

NASHUA

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