[private] consider how to find a place to stand | nashua

[Nashua]

(and it's harder than you think)
telling dreams from one another

He's immensely glad for the moment that @[Gale] finally smiles.

It's what he had hoped to do. More worries are reflecting out of his brother's bright blue eyes and Nash finds himself wondering about them, if it is something more than the admission of his upcoming fatherhood. Nashua uses humor to attempt to chase some of them away. The morning is fair and the day looks to be promising, warmer than it usually is in Taiga for this time of year.

Perhaps it will make the coming winter that much colder.

There is a silence that follows them for some time afterward. Roselin will be happiest undisturbed, spending what little time she has with her flowerbeds before the first frost comes. The chill in the air had said it would be soon and the plumes of silver smoke that emerged from his flaring nostrils had confirmed it. Nashua continues to walk alongside Gale - close enough that his brother's quiet voice is heard clearly over the faint noise of the nearby River - and his smile broadens a little when the brindled stallion mentions that twins must run in the family.

That had been a joke that he had shared with Yanhua and it warms something in him to be able to share it with Gale, too. It even allows the striped pegasus a moment to imagine what it might be like to have Gale and Mazikeen visit together with their twins so that they might meet the cousins within the Taiga. A few years ago, such a hope seemed like an impossibility. His half-siblings have never been unkind to Nashua but he always imagined that he was the physical representation of what they had lost. And with Yan, his twin always seemed to prefer to distance himself from anything related to Wolfbane.

But the more that Gale visits and as more time passes, Nashua can't help but hope things might change. (To have spent a day on the Isle with him and Tiercel, to see Yanhua meet them had filled him with such joy. He hadn't known that kind of happiness outside of his own children being together.)

Gale mentions that he knows about his twins from a Magician. And while he glances across the Hyalean border, that is not the thing that strikes him as odd. Both his brother and his mate are shifters; that their offspring would be should be no surprise. And yet Nash wonders, "Does that..." and then he pauses because he had never asked Gale about his own feelings about his ability to shift. He'd never felt that kind of reluctance from Gale. Was he worried about his children being shapeshifters? (The ability had bothered Nash when he had been a youngster but growing up under the tutelage of Leilan - a dragon shifter and one that Nashua has witnessed change one form for the other many times - it didn't take long for the Hersir to learn that it wasn't the shape that mattered.) Nash leaves the question open to Gale when he asks, "Does that bother you?"

Why else would they have visited with a Magician?

NASHUA