i'm two quarters and a heart down

[Nashua]

NASHUA

Can she feel his eagerness burning through the darkness?

He listens and he stores this away - that there are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ types of different. His face falls a little because he doesn’t have her teeth - he doesn’t have those fearsome things haloed from her fireflies. He certainly doesn’t fire either. He just… glows. A voice in the back of mind reminds him that he has his wings. That one day he’ll fly. Celina has wings too and so Nashua tacks that on to her list of ‘good’ different.

The bad different?

It only makes him narrow his eyes. He gazes up at before shaking his head, "Nope.” The flaxen boy says, "I don’t think I can read your mind.” There had been nothing in his head except himself (and he thinks that’s probably enough).

He’s the good different though and Nashua throws her an earnest, lopsided grin.

She reaches out to touch him with her chin and he likes the feeling her touch gives - a closeness he doesn’t often experience outside his own family. Of course he feels this way - she is family. Celina is his older sister and he pulls his wings tighter against himself as he folds his smaller chestnut body into her. She’s warm and smells like running water.

When she pulls back, Nashua frowns slightly. Has he done something wrong?

"Fire Wing was here,” he tells her. "He likes Taiga,” remembering what the dunalino had told him. He had lived here too, once. Just like Nash.

The young pegasus is still a little uncertain but the boy adds, "He gave me a feather.”

When she bites down on his leg, he isn’t ready for it. Nashua had been looking up at her, studying her green eyes.

The pain sears. "Aughhhh,” and then he bites it back. He forces down all the other things he wants to say and closes his eyes. He refuses to cry. Celina had not cried and neither will he.

He can smell the blood and it makes his nostrils flare and when he finally does look down, the damage inflicted is not as bad as he feared. His wounds don’t weave together with the ease of his elder sister’s but something happens - the glow around his gold stripes and white socks brighten and while it is not a matter of breaths (it feels like hours to Nashua), the wound starts to tentatively heal.

Beaming (and glowing a little brighter himself), the boy grins up to her. "I did okay, @[Celina]?” He asks, "I’m still a good different, like you?”

and for every king that died
they would crown another

html © castlegraphics