There was wind coming off of the ocean, wind that tugged at the young girl’s hair and laughed as it twisted it into ropes. She wants to ask of it, why are you laughing? and why won’t you make me a French braid instead of these dreadlocks? She had never been very good at braiding her own hair. She always left the plaits half-finished, or rushed them so that they were too-loose, or left odd bumps and snags and other irregularities that had her ripping out the cords nearly the moment she finished them. So now she lets the wind do as it pleases with her mane and her tail, and wonders what it might feeling like dancing across her crest if she were to clip every last lock off. She never would, of course - she could already imagine the looks of horror her fathers would give her, if she came home with her mane short and jagged and uneven - but the thought was nice nevertheless.
Oftentimes, it was in her thoughts that she rebelled the most. It was much easier to think those terrible, unpleasant things than to say them out loud. Oh, her heart was far too weak, far too cowardly to commit to such defiance. Even now it was stuttering, leaping, gasping like the waves that broke unevenly against the shoreline, like it thought she was racing the wind instead of jogging along behind it. She wants to roll her eyes at it, to laugh with the wind and tell it to stop acting like such a girl - maybe she would have, if she wasn’t struggling to stay on her course.
Her legs tremble with every step as her hooves sink deep into the sand, and there’s a burning feeling creeping up her thighs, but she does her best to ignore it. Does her best to tell herself that all the other girls and boys could jog twice as far as she could, and so just a little bit farther, just to the top of this dune -
It’s a relief, really, when she sees the other girl on the beach. She turns to her immediately, if only for an excuse to stop, to catch her breath before she had to push herself “just a little bit farther” again. She slows to a walk, and then finally, a stop, and if her legs could sing with joy she swore they might have.
She tries to hold her breath steady, tries to pretend her jog through the sand had been as effortless as the other girls her age (she fails, of course; her lungs heave and tremble like a ship caught in a storm at sea, aching, burning, ready to burst -) Her lungs feel ready to burst, beneath all the weight of the ocean-heavy air.
“Maret,” she answers, and her lungs scream in protest. She sucks in a quick, deep breath, and prays the unicorn doesn’t wonder why. It’s almost easy to miss the sharp way the other girl stares at her, the flat tone of her voice, when she’s trying so hard (too hard) to pretend she is not weak. And yet every hard edge, the line along her lips that stubbornly refuses to lift into a smile, the feral sounding of her voice against the seagulls squawks, makes Maret’s heart leap higher, higher, higher into her throat.
For a moment, a heart-wrenching, beach-shattering moment, only the sound of the waves settle in the space separating them. Maret shifts uneasily, wondering why there was always so much silence when she met someone new, why she was never as adept as the other girls at filling that silence. And then, feeling like she had to say something, but with no idea what -
“I like your wolf."
She smiles down at him, hoping his teeth were not quite as sharp as the girl’s not-smile.
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