The Silvertongue’s reaction would have been amusing to Acton, if only he wasn’t going through a similar sort of crisis.
It wasn’t his tendency to doubt his senses – he’d made his living off of them for a long time, and trusted them better than he trusted anyone else. Almost anyone else, that was, because unless they were betraying him now, here was one of the few that counted as an exception.
He did not blink, but he did stare: swallowed up the sight of the boy (boy no longer, but something in between the gangly youth he’d known and a grown man), the red shock of his coat and horns he’d never seen the like of on another.
There was no confusing Raglan for anybody else, even after not seeing him for…a year now?
But his brother’s gaze was still fastened to the tree, and Acton took another step forward, no trace of a swagger in it. He was about to speak again when at last, at last, Raglan turned toward him, and the buckskin was so desperately relieved to hear his name in that voice that his knees felt weak with it. (Then again, one knee at least always felt weak nowadays.)
“The one and only,” he said, and grinned stupidly. They must have made quite a pair, then, matched expression of wary, crooked joy in front of a copse of –
“Tree-guy?” he repeated, and at last cast his gaze more closely on what Raglan had been standing beside. He examined the trunk, the leaves, the reaching limbs as he closed the space between them, bumping shoulders with his companion in a way that felt achingly familiar.
He supposed there was a face there, vaguely, with whorled bark like wrinkled skin and smooth indents where eyes might go, if you were feeling particularly imaginative. And the branch that extended toward them with splayed and leafy twigs at the end did resemble fingers, if you were in a fanciful mood.
Acton snorted and stepped back with a shake of his head, then turned his attention back to his long-missing friend. “And what is it you started? Or, if you prefer, where is it you’ve been? I’m feeling a little overwhelmed. Also, I’ve missed you like hell.”
@
whatever you feed me I'll feed you right back
