Shadows play across the back of the two stallions as they weave their way across the island.
They walk like brothers indeed, as though they’ve always known each other. Each accommodates the other without thinking about it, without even realizing it; sidestepping to allow more space, reaching out with telekinesis to hold aside the branches and bushes ahead. Bumping shoulders every so often without a second thought, each touch a silent message. Banded in the canopy’s dancing shadows they almost even look like distant brothers reunited, Eik’s skin storybooked in scars and Asterion’s in stars.
And who’s to say they aren’t brothers? Just because they had not met until a few years prior, does that have to mean they haven’t always known each other? Look very closely to the shadows that dance across the forest floor. If sometimes they blur with magic, or splay oddly as though the sun itself was moving and not the leaves of the trees, is that not an impossibility made real?
They speak of dreams and the future, of course they do. If they do not speak of that, they speak of the past. They are deep sea creatures, and even so soon after reuniting they cannot help but take a deep breath and dive.
Eik appreciates his friend’s words, although he responds only with a grim smile and a bump of the shoulder in understanding and gratitude. “I hope it does too.” He thinks foremost of his country, although technically, it was soon to be not-his-country. (It would always have a bit of his wandering heart, although not as much as Isra.) There was food here, and water. Shelter and an uncertain kind of peace. “But doesn’t something about it feel… off to you?” Maybe it was just the shadows he saw twisting at the edge of his vision, or the unfamiliar humid heat of the air. Eik wanted the island to stay, but he also wanted it to be right. And something… something about it was not right.
The grey stops suddenly, hit by a thought. “I’m going to be a father.”
(That faraway look on his face: two girls, little stars, with oceans in their eyes– I can see it already. I can hear their voices, little gods. I will give them the world.) He does not know why he did not share the news sooner. Perhaps the thought was so brightly emblazoned on his mind that he forgot it was not written above his head in letters for all the world to plainly see.
“Where I was born, there is a word- önke. It is like… a family member, but also the guardian of a child if something should happen to the parents.” He had not come across a translation in the common tongue, not that he was actively searching for one. “Would you be the önke to my daughters?” Eik appears as though he is completely uncertain how Asterion will react. He knows he needn’t be so serious among bothers, but it would be easier to wash the scars from his skin than to not be fully earnest about everything, always and forever.
@Asterion eee they make me so happy <3 we can end this any time! just... fade out as they explore together
Time makes fools of us all
