"Too many,” the chestnut mare retorts with a quick jest of her own. Lilliana is still looking out, past the breaking outlines of waves as they materialize into their hazy (midnight) view. She’s thinking of them, though. Her boys. Thinking of a bright sunny day as Nashua and Yanhua had flickered in and out of Taigan sunshine as they raced beneath the titan Redwoods and how badly she had wished for Malachi - how she wanted to throw that (reckless) wildfire grin over her shoulder to tease him about how she might just be an overachiever, too.
How she had forgotten for just a moment that he wasn’t there for her to look back to.
Elaina is, though. Lilli turns her head towards her cousin and as they press their foreheads against the other, she drowns herself in relishing the way her palomino playmate feels against her skin. It’s nice to find the fragments of the girl again - the edges of her beginning - and even consider that there might be a chance of putting them back together. Lilliana’s future had always been a hazy thing but the bond between the pair had been her certainty; Elaina had been and would always be enough.
(Why hadn’t she known that? Why had she doubted it?)
When they pull away and Elaina keeps talking about blood and bonds, Lilli returns to the strongest one she knows. "Nashua is a tornado,” she says with a rueful smile. "Like Liam. Except I turn my back for a moment…,” the copper mare gives a playful sigh. ”I blame the wings. That one is bound to test the skies.” Thoughtfully, she adds, "Yan though,” a contemplative shake of her head reveals how deeply she worries for him, "seems to take after his mother.” Elaina would know what that meant - who had known the chestnut mare from an age similar to her youngest child - and would remember another copper foal who had been timid and shy. Who had been happiest amongst her family and felt her emotions strongly (how many times had she cried when her beloved flowers wilted?)
"I promise you,” the Taigan mare corrects her, "I am not.” Exhaling gently, her features soften and Lilliana shakes her head firmly. Wonderful would not be a word she would use to describe herself these days; maybe back then, maybe back in Beyond she might have accepted such a statement. Now? She is reckless and impulsive and trying so hard not to allow herself to fall one way or another.
Wallow or rage, dim or blaze. There is nothing of the flower child ghost the pair might remember between them. Nothing of the girl who had cried over wilted flowers and had thought of ways they might survive a frost (hadn’t she dreamt of that on the Mountain once?). Nothing of the girl who had been fleet and swift and sure of her stride.
"I’ve always compared you to fire,” the chestnut murmurs as another crisp, briny breeze makes her cast those blue eyes out to sea. "I’ve always thought it was so easy to borrow your courage when you shone so brightly.” That had been one of her very first thoughts in Beqanna, that Elaina light her way. "Remember that.” Lilliana says because she isn’t so foolish to believe that she might get another chance to tell her and she wants her cousin to remember this for the darker days that might come.
Maybe this has all been a dream and she will wake up again - damp with sweat with nothing but the fog slipping past her. Maybe she has reached some kind of breaking point and this whole encounter is nothing but a mirage. Maybe her gold cousin is nothing but a hallucination because there is nothing at the edge of the world.
But even in her wildest dreams, Elaina never cries.
There is no memory that Lilli can recall where she weeps as she does now.
The blonde mare looks away but the copper one comes closer, determined that the pain shining in her eyes and spilling down her lovely face isn’t cast out into the dark. "Hey,” Lilliana says as she reaches out for her. Speaking in a way that she does when Nash is frustrated that his scrapes don’t heal as quickly as he’d like or when Yanhua wakes in the middle of the night from a haunting memory.
Lilli pauses, though, because what can she say? (She remembers the Deserts and their Queens: ‘I can’t promise you that everything will be alright on the other side.’) Tenderly tracing her dark mouth over Elaina's pale mane, she thinks about all the things she could say and how lost she feels that she finds nothing. It’s Lilliana - not Lilli - who gives her a fact, instead. "You’re here now.” It doesn’t change the fact that nothing feels right or how things should have been different. "That’s all that matters and we’ll figure it out. We’ll figure the rest out.”
Elaina finally pushes her head into Lilli’s shoulders and crashes, wave after wave of sobs that ebb on her soul. The copper mare murmurs many words into the delicate ears of her cousin - lovely things about the winds, the stars, love and her boys, about how they are together and that is enough - but never does she say that things will be okay.
LILLIANA
if i ever get to heaven
i've got a long list of questions