Let's be better strangers
'Have you seen your mother?'Lilliana's voice had been full of unwarranted hope when she asked him, standing by the river with her red hair tumbling in the wind that boiled up from it. Recent autumn storms had filled the banks to bursting and the cool ground underfoot was soft and squelching, giving away every uneasy shift of his body weight as she detains him.
She had always been kind to him.
There's a part of him, in the face of the former Guardian of Taiga, that wanted to be better than he is, than he possibly ever could be, and it was this alone that kept him there, entertaining her questions with something less than bare civility, but Lilliana was too used to his mother to be much bothered by his short replies and clipped tones.
She had been looking for Neverwhere all summer. There had been sightings, at first, enough to imply that she was in the area, but she was changed. A child? The thought had made him laugh out loud, a sneering, unkind laugh that he made no effort to hide from Lilliana, but he was forced to admit that he had not run into her in his wanderings.
'Have you looked anywhere else?' He had asked, and it was a perfectly reasonable question. Had she spent the whole summer mooning for her dear friend here at the river and never thought to check anywhere else? His mother had always been a wanderer, why would she stay here? But he agreed with Lilliana's assumption that Neverwhere would not remain or return to the North very willingly (one's first death likely lingers, especially when it's at a Nuckelavee's hands,) and so he had suggested that perhaps she look West. Tephra and the Islands would surely be the safest place to go? And then he had rather bluntly taken his leave of her, becoming invisible as soon as the summer overgrowth hid him from her sightline, and turned into the Forest instead of away.
Lilliana is kind, but she is foolish, filled with too much optimism. The gold-dappled stallion stalked through the wooded trails, his usual level of frustration heightened dramatically. He hates the tight tangle of trees, the way they grab at the feathers of his wings, the ways the saplings and the vines wedge between his body and his wings like rope. There's a vague panic in his throat that sets that irritation aflame, but he stomps forward bullishly.
He has no plan, he never has a plan, but a vague goal of finding his mother fills him with unmeditated single-mindedness. He splits apart, breaking to pieces of himself, careless of the way the duplicates come together. None have wings, they slide through the trees more easily without them so he removes those on purpose, but each is missing other bits; an ear, a tail, a mouth. One is not dappled at all and another shines in the darkness like the sun. It is not important.
Ultimately, it is chance that flushes out the bald-faced girl, gangly-legged and scowling, surrounded by stars that give her away in the gloaming. It is the mouthless one that finds her and they stare at each other in silence until Wherewolf can reach them.
A memory stirs, unwilling to waken from its slumber. Six duplicates circling a foal. Threatening. He is not ready to remember this yet.
Neverwhere glares at her grown son, her child-body unable to contain itself and affect that bored nonchalance she had perfected as an adult.
"What do you want?" She asks him at last and he snorts sharply, returning the self-same scowl that so marks him as part of her.
"Lilliana has been looking for you by the River all summer so I sent her off to Tephra" his pewter tail lashes at his flanks, eyes turned a steely green, "I want to make sure she doesn't find you."
@lilliana for the backstory
