"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
His enthusiasm expands in her chest and she wonders what it’s like to feel things so big all on your own. Wonders, too, if perhaps her own emotions are just dwarfed by the things she feels that belong to everyone else. If there’s seem bigger because they have a tendency to overshadow her own.
It is not a magic she understands yet. She does not know how to control it, wouldn’t know where to start trying to learn. But she smiles all the same. If he thinks it’s cool then it must be cool, even if it’s typically more painful than anything. Leaves her chest heaving, her lungs aching.
She thinks she can feel his happiness, too, but it is a strange thing to feel without any obvious source. She doesn’t understand what his happiness is born from but she doesn’t have the heart to ask. Just swallows a breath and nods.
He offers no warning about what kind of magic he possesses, nothing to indicate whether or not it’s safe. Her heart clenches with fear and she sucks in a sharp breath, closing her eyes shut in anticipation. But she does not move and he does not touch her and when she opens her eyes they go impossibly wide as she turns to watch the bodies move past them at accelerated speeds. Her mouth half-parts and she blinks rapidly, as if doing so might return them to their normal speed.
But they do not slow until he commands them to and the sun has sunk closer to the horizon. She inhales a breathy little gasp and shifts her focus back to his face. “What kind of magic is that?”
Ridiculous watches Astra carefully as he shifts time around them. At first, she squeezes her eyes shut. Now, that won’t do, because she can’t see what is happening! He is about to say something, but then she opens her eyes again. He grins his goofy grin in her direction and concentrates harder on the task at hand. Don’t screw it up, don’t screw it up, he thinks to himself.
She seems awed by his magic, by his ability to manipulate time. His grin spreads wider across his face–if that was even possible, and he wonders if she can feel the joy that seeps off of him. And then, just like that, he feels the time manipulation fading. He could feel his energy waning. Before he took it too far, he allowed it to slip away, and time slowed back to its normal pace. Horses that were speeding across the meadow suddenly slowed to a crawl in comparison.
When she asks what kind of magic that is, a thrill runs through him. “It’s time manipulation!” he exclaims, well, practically shouts. He dances around in a circle like an excited puppy. “Both mum and dad have magic, so I got this really cool ability, thanks to them!”
She wonders if everyone feels things so intensely or if this is something unique to him. She wonders if he has a stronger heart or if he’s simply more prone to letting his emotions consume him. She had tasted her mother’s grief in the hours following her birth, her panic. The first hours of her life had been tinged red with the clamor of chaos.
He is such a stark contrast to that. And she prefers him happy, she thinks, prefers his joy to his embarrassment. She can feel the joy that rolls off him in waves and, if she had known that he’d wondered it, she would have told him as much.
But time slows down and she asks her question and she listens intently to his answer. She wonders about his parents. About the mother that had named him Ridiculous but had not done so to be cruel. She tilts her star-stricken head and peers up at him a moment. “Who are your parents?” she asks, though there is no reason for it. She will not know the names even if he tells her. The only names she knows are her mother’s, Leonora; her father’s, Pentecost; and the magician who had fed her in the early days of her life, Isilya. And now his, too, Ridiculous.
The intense emotions were probably something unique to Ridiculous. After all, he had yet to meet someone with as much exuberance and excitement as himself, and he had met a lot of other horses. Okay, not really, but he liked to think that he had. And it was probably a mixture of both a stronger heart as well as allowing his emotions to consume him. He certainly has a big heart and a lot of love for everyone, that’s for sure, but his emotions definitely run away from him at times. For instance, right now, he is insanely happy, because he’d met someone who he could have good conversation with–at least in his opinion. When she asks about his parents, Ridiculous feels a burst of pride and excitement, especially since it seemed like she was interesting in him. He puffs out his chest and lifts his head in what he thought would be a dignified pose, but which actually makes him look pretty, well…ridiculous. “My father is Carnage. I don’t know much about him, but I know that he is a big dill–” He pauses for a second then says while laughing at himself, “Deal! “My mother is Blasphemare. She used to be a big deal in the Amazons, back when they were still around, but she is more in the background now, but I still think she’s fantastic.” Indeed, by the way he spoke of her, you’d think she was the crème de la crème. He gets this big, goofy grin and looks off into space with a fondness in his features. Then he grins back at her. “How about your parents?” Ridiculous finds himself wondering about Astra. What are her parents like? What kinds of things did she like? What kind of things had she done? “So, what do you like?”
A falling star fell from your heart and landed in my eyes
I screamed aloud, as it tore through them, and now it's left me blind
She doesn’t know the names he shares, Carnage and Blasphemare. Too young to know them, perhaps, too ignorant in regards to politics. She doesn’t know anything about the Amazons, the band of women who’d lived there in the old land. She doesn’t know, even, that the world had looked much different once.
But she does not want to embarrass herself with her lack of knowledge, so she summons up a slanted smile and nods. Even if the names don’t mean anything to her now, perhaps they will someday. Even if only as her new friend’s parents.
(She does not know that Carnage is her father’s father, does not know the things Carnage has asked of her father).
“They sound nice,” she says, nodding, wearing that silly, uncertain grin. His pride thumps in her chest and she considers its shape and its weight, the way it expands to fill up her whole ribcage.
“My mom’s name is Leonora,” she tells him, “and my dad’s name is Pentecost.” She rolls her shoulders. She loves her parents, but she does not know how to take pride in them the way he takes pride in his. “My mom is like a star. She glows like one but when she touches me it burns.” She frowns then, glancing down at the soft earth underfoot. She doesn’t have much to say about her father and he saves her the trouble by asking her something else instead.
“Oh,” she murmurs, surprised by it, “I don’t know. Lots of things, I guess. What about you?”
Truth be told, Ridiculous didn’t know really anything about Carnage, which is the only reason that he might make it sound like the stallion is “nice” as she puts it. Carnage is really anything but nice in reality.
“They are nice,” he says with a faraway look in his eyes. “I’ve never actually met dear ol’ dad, so I guess I don’t know about him, but mum is nice. She can be not so nice, but overall, she’s just old and chill.” Had he known what Blasphemare had just gone through and lost, perhaps he wouldn’t have thought so highly of “dear ol’ dad”–that she no longer has emotions, is covered in scars, and took months to recover. No, he found himself pretty protective of his mother. Though, truth be told, she had left him to his own most of the time in the Playground, so she hadn’t been a stellar mother.
It’s not just that he takes pride in his parents, but he takes pride in a lot of things, his parents being one of those things. He takes pride mostly in himself, though, holding an overinflated ego. He was like the class clown, always joking and carrying on exuberantly, confident of himself. Unlike the class clown, he was truly happy, though. Perhaps he wasn’t the most intelligent horse around, but he was kind and passionate.
“Your parents sound nice. That’s a shame that your mum can’t touch you. I would be sad if I were her. Is she sad?” The question is…perhaps not the smartest or most sensitive question in the world. Yeah, maybe he was trying to reserve his negative emotions so as not to overwhelm her with them, but that doesn’t mean he’s the most thoughtful horse.
“Lots of things, you guess?” He laughs at this. “Well, I like a lot of things, too. I like to dance.” With this, he starts to prance in place, kicking his hooves out like an idiot. “I like my temporal manipulation.” He doesn’t, however, manipulate time, probably thankfully for her. “I like to talk!” As if she hadn’t already noticed that. “I like a lot of things!”
A falling star fell from your heart and landed in my eyes
I screamed aloud, as it tore through them, and now it's left me blind
She wonders what it’s like to have a mother who’s ‘old and chill’. As far as she knows, her mother is neither of those things. Astra had spent most of her earliest days choking on her mother’s grief and panic and guilt. Her mother who could not even touch her, who had to employ the help of a magician to see that Astra was fed. But she still smiles something toothy and hopeful, nodding like she understands.
She considers Ridiculous’s question, pressing her mouth into a thin line as she nods. “Yes, she’s sad,” she admits. But she does not allow herself to dwell on the sadness lest it begin to swell up in her chest. “She left me in Tephra with Isilya so that I wouldn’t have to feel her sadness and because Isilya could make sure I got to eat when I was small.” She rolls her shoulders and it occurs to her then that Isilya is like a mother to her, too.
He laughs at her answer and then begins to recite his list of things he likes and she watches with a bemused expression. There is a certain light in her eyes as he takes to dancing and she stifles a laugh, not wanting him to think that she’s laughing at him. “You’re a good dancer,” she tells him, allowing herself to grin.
Ridiculous was genuinely saddened to learn of Astra’s mother and her inability to touch her own child, but he does his best not to dwell on that, lest poor Astra be forced to choke on his sadness as well. He puts a smile on his face instead. “Well, at least you had Isilya, and at least your mother cared for you enough to not put you through that. Isilya sounds nice. Was she like a mother to you, too? That’s pretty cool that you had two mothers in a way!”
If she had laughed at him, Ridiculous would not have been offended. In fact, the idea that she thinks he is a good dancer is quite laughable, because he really is not. He is big and clumsy and a giant oaf. Just after she says that he is a good dancer, he indeed manages to trip over his own hooves and falls with quite a large crash to the ground. Embarrassed, he scrambles back to his hooves, and if he hadn’t been chestnut in color already, his cheeks might have betrayed his embarrassment. Granted, a flush in his face wasn’t what would give it away to this little filly.
He laughs off the fall and quickly stifles the embarrassment. “Well, Astra, that is quite nice of you to say, but truth be told, I even know that I am not a good dancer.” His laughter rings out into the cool, crisp evening air. Thankfully, he has stopped dancing. “I taught myself everything I know, actually. You can probably tell!” Despite how bad he is at dancing, he is quite proud of himself for his skills. He had to be, because he wasn’t technically good at anything, even his own gift of temporal manipulation–it’s a wonder he didn’t shoot them clear into next week when he showed her his gift! If he didn’t take pride in what he could do, then he would be a very unhappy stallion, but despite his ineptitudes, he manages to be one of the happiest horses he had met.
As he stands there, he looks Astra over curiously. “You are quite interesting, Astra,” he says with a grin. “From your unusual coloring to your wonderful personality. How did you get your unusual coloring?” Ridiculous had come from a completely different Beqanna than Astra had. He was born a regular old chestnut coloring, his mother was black, and his father was grey. In the Beqanna he came from, that wasn’t unusual. But now, looking around, he realizes that unusual coloring had become the norm. It made him curious. Where did all the colors come from?
A falling star fell from your heart and landed in my eyes
I screamed aloud, as it tore through them, and now it's left me blind
She likes his company, despite their rocky start. She likes that his emotions are so big that she cannot help but feel them. Because he’s kind and pleasant and he can laugh at himself when his feet get all tangled up as he dances. She’s still thinking about Isilya when he scrambles back to his feet and she stifles a soft, muted laugh. Something shy, like she’s worried about drawing too much attention to herself. She had never thought of it that way, the idea that she’d had two mothers, but she thinks it’s pretty cool, too.
She shakes her head at his gentle rebuttal, his insistence that he’s not a good dancer. She tilts her head and smiles up at him. “You don’t have to have skill to be good,” she says, though she doesn’t really know how true that is. “You love it and it makes you happy and it’s fun to watch, so I think you’re good.”
She feels flush with heat underneath his gaze, the way he studies her something altogether foreign. But she finds that it is not altogether unpleasant, even as she shifts her weight and averts her gaze so that she will not have to watch him watch her.
She doesn’t slide her gaze back to his face until he speaks again and heat pools in her cheeks at his appraisal. She has never considered herself interesting and she doesn’t know what it means that he does. She knows that her personality leaves a lot to be desired and falls well short of wonderful but she doesn’t open her mouth to argue. Instead, her expression lightens with delight when he asks about her color.
“It’s magic,” she confesses. It is a skill she uses considerably less often than the one she doesn’t particularly want, but Isilya had taught her how to harness it all the same. She stares at a spot on his shoulder and drags in a long breath, willing her own color to change. And it does, easier now that she’s had practice. She stands there and beams, the same shade of chestnut as he is.
He was genuinely enjoying the wild roller coaster of a ride that this conversation and overall interaction had taken him on. Astra seemed so nice and kind and approving that it was hard to find any reason to dislike the little filly. When she compliments him on his dancing, he can’t help but dance even more, lifting his legs as rhythmically as he could, though this is Ridiculous, so it isn’t very rhythmic. He almost trips again, several times, in fact, especially as he responds to her. “That is very true! I do love to dance, it makes me happy, and I can imagine it’s fun to watch. I’ll believe you, since you say so!” It makes him happy to know that she enjoyed watching him dance.
The way she reacted to him carefully watching her was sweet. It made him think that she was still somewhat shy, though she needn’t be, not with how ridiculous Ridiculous is. After all, he’d made a fool of himself already three or four times. He can’t even remember how many times it had been, he’d done it so often!
If he had known the reservations she had about her personality, he might have told her otherwise. He didn’t think there was anything wrong with her personality. She was sweet and kind and generous and positively awesome, at least in Ridiculous’s eyes. She was about to prove that point, though, as her expression brightens at his question.
It was not the answer the colt had been expecting, but it’s magic! The thought reminded him of his mother, and he wondered if she, too, was colored by magic. But then Astra did a nifty little trick. She looked down to his chest and suddenly, her coat was shifting, changing. His jaw fell slack as her coat changed from that starry night sky to the same color as himself. Shocked, he looks down at himself, then back up at her, then back to himself, then back to her once more. “Cool?!?” he exclaims vibrantly, “No, that’s freaking amazing! Wow! Now that’s a nifty trick! How did you do that? Can anyone with magic do that? Is that why so many horses here are so brilliantly colored? I wonder if I could do that?”
As if in response to his own questions, he looks down at her and concentrates on the color. When he looks up, he grins broadly! “I can do it, too! I changed my color to match yours!” He laughs heartily, expressing that the sentiment was just a joke.
