She cried for the heartbreaking look of him; that kind of loneliness like something was missing that she inherently recognized and the sheer fact that he was beautiful to behold. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know about the missing sister or that he couldn’t know about how painful her ordinariness was to her, worn like a cheap disguise but oh so obvious. Then she cried for silly things like wanting to have that love of a lifetime and just wanting to be back at her mother’s side, milk smeared across her lips, eyes bright and the little fluff of a tail flicking with not a care in the world.
Her weeping might have begun as a compulsory reaction to his song but it had become something more. The song died off but her tears hadn’t ceased, or even slowed. Whatever part of her that she had held back from letting so much like this go, had opened like a door she couldn’t shut. She had never wept like this, only shed a tear or two when scraping a knee during a fall or something ridiculous like that was more gut reaction than emotional compromise.
But she knew she had been compromised in a matter of moments, didn’t know the why or the how or if he even cared, but his song and the look of him had made her come undone - stripped raw and laid bare in a way that Moonlet didn’t like but took in stride, as she does with all things.
Then like that - in an eye blink - her tears slow to a trickle as she looks at him, really looks at him. It seems the dregs of song still resonate inside her but not enough to keep her under his allure and she sees him as he is: bluish-black like a bruise, pale splotches like snow, small blue spots on his nose and mismatched eyes that she finally looks into. She wants to say I see you, and you’re still breathtaking. But it goes unsaid so she puts the full weight of her appreciation into her own gaze.
It goes beyond just being nice to look at, or enchanting because he’s magical in a manner that she’ll never be. She also pours a little of her own loneliness into her eyes; let’s it peek out to show him that he’s not the only one though why each of them is like that is for quite different reasons. Just as easily, she is pulled back into the throes of song-spell by the catch in his voice. “It must be, I’m sure. Why not at least be beautiful if you cannot be powerful or kind, or even cruel. Make of it what you will if that is all you’ve got,” she answers back, subsiding back into the stupor of siren-call even though the tears don’t start back up.
She doesn’t know how to take him, when his beauty is so painfully apparent but also not important because it feels like he is asking to be seen as more than that or not so much as that. Whatever she thinks it is that he wants, it is what she’ll try to give him. Spell or not, Moonlet has been blessed enough to meet him and now, she wants so badly to see if her mouth can touch on the starlight drifting up from where he ought to have feathery wings. It is enough to make her move into him until their bodies are touching but no more than hips and shoulders, as her mouth toys with the flesh just before his withers.
His request goes unanswered as she steps into him again, not wanting the space that he has given her. The door was opened by song and tears, and now other things come tumbling out of it that she hadn’t thought about before. Like how good it feels to be next to someone taller and thicker than she is, more fleshy and real as if she was the figment - the thing made of starlight. Her lips are so much closer to the starlight now, but she presses a sigh into his neck like a kiss. It might have been chaste and it might not have been, she didn’t know the difference, too new to all of this and what was stirred up inside her.
Another sigh and she pulls away from him entirely to pace the breadth of the clearing as she provides him with what he wants, an answer. “I cried for you and me, for this night and everything about it, for what’s to come still and what’s gone before. I cried for my mother and for the way that I am not like either parent, and so very ordinary compared to everyone else I’ve ever met. Even you. I don’t glow, or fly, or shift my shape. I can’t read minds or look into someone else’s.”
A breath, a pause.
“I probably never will either and I cried for that too. I cried for always being alone and choosing that, because I know I do. I cried too, for realizing that I want what’s in the fairytales but there’s a reason they’re not real and just stories told to sleepy foals.” and finally, she trails off as her head hangs away from him and her eyes go far away, looking somewhere inside because she held back other things that clamored to be said but she won’t say them. His song still worked but she just went away inside herself where he couldn’t follow as the tears renewed their slow trickle down her cheeks.
@[Indius] I’m sorry, did you say you wanted a novel? ❤️❤️❤️