Falls

Çiçek melts into the red apparition, pressing so near that she loses the point where she ends and the other begins. All of the emotion she’s held inside, away from Solomon, from Sevket, from everyone over the last few months comes flowing out of her, in streaking tracks of salty tears down her cheeks and half-choked sniffles. She buries her face in the flesh of her sweet pea’s shoulder, dampening the coarse fur there and failing to notice the absence of her characteristic white streak. All she can think of is her own wrongdoing, her worry over Rivaini’s potential rejection (However justified), and the chance that she might have broken things between them in ways that could never be fixed. Çiçek keeps her eyes shut tight, her fluted ears sliding back into her mane, and refuses to budge. If Rivaini wants her to leave, she’ll have to push her away herself, find a match, set the moldering scraps of their bond aflame, and bury the ashes.

The golden girl doesn’t have to wait long, however, before she feels the reassuring pressure of reciprocal touch. She all but purrs as she’s pulled in close, the anxiety that had been freezing her body in place thawing under the warm breath dancing across her skin. Çiçek shudders at the feather-light sensation of it. She’s moving her muzzle up, tracing the line of muscled withers with her eyes closed, when a voice rumbles through their shared embrace and towards her forward-tipped ears. The tenor of it - deeper than what she remembers, velvety soft - and the words formed within it are what break her out of her own mind, bringing her eyes to snap open and her head to pull sharply back.

“What?” she blurts out, unable to keep the hurt from her every syllable. A frown tugs at her lips, her eyes narrowed as she both tries to see her beloved more clearly and glares in petulant reproach. “Benimle oyun oynama, Rivaini,”“Don’t play games with me, Rivaini,” she scolds after a moment, moving boldly back to her place against her skin. “Kalbim dayanamaz.”“My heart can’t take it.”

Çiçek reaches up - higher than she remembers; has she truly been so careless as to forget so many little details about her Guardian? - and brushes the thick strands of Rivaini’s creamy forelock away from her broad face, warm gaze half-lidded and sultry under long, pale lashes. “Özellikle oyunlarının,”“You especially,” she murmurs huskily, “beni nasıl etkilediğini bilmelisin.”“should know how your games affect me.”

Her heart pounds like a rabbit in her chest, stealing her breath away, and Çiçek shifts her weight to angle it more firmly against her companion for support. Her tail snaps against her spotted hide, attempting to work out some of the restless energy lurking beneath and unknowingly fanning her own flowery scent around them like low-hanging fog. The effort rocks her a bit, and her legs tremble; she pulls back a bit, unsteady, then leans in harder to compensate, as if she just can’t get enough of the friction between them. She runs her soft muzzle down Rivaini’s thick-muscled crest, searching the blurred sun-bleached threads of her mane for a flash of gold and frowning anew when she can’t find it. Just as her own adornments had fallen away, so did her sweet pea’s, lost like her own richly-detailed memory seemed to be, sacrificed to the sands of time and circumstance.

She opens her mouth to comment on it, to try and make some sort of light-hearted joke in the midst of the mess she’s made, but the words won’t come. Her breath grows shallow in her chest, hot in her lungs. “Sevgili,”“Beloved,” Çiçek mumbles weakly, “I don’t feel very well…”

The slender mare trails her lips down her partner’s neck, leaving a trail of soft, beseeching kisses. “Please don’t leave me here.” Take me with you, she begs with everything but her words, her eyes round as saucers and pleading for mercy. Take me wherever it is you wish to go, and I will follow, if it means I get to keep you. She can’t lose her bezelyesweet pea a second time. She won’t survive it, not like this, her body infirm and her mind lost to the ether. Not, at least, until she touches back down to earth, comes to her senses... and learns of her many, many mistakes.