She feels like such a leech.

For so long, Çiçek was able to keep herself in check. She’d buried her emotions deep in the forgotten parts of her mind, refusing to give them more than the occasional light, and when they popped up like weeds out of her subconscious she tore them out at the roots and destroyed them. It had served her well during her pregnancy with Şevket, even moreso by the time she’d reached the Cove: her new life kept her plenty busy, sparkling joyful memories draping her wounded heart in layers of thin gauze, over and over until she couldn’t see the cuts and bruises that disfigured it. Until the bleeding stopped, and the pain lessened to a dull ache, and she could almost pretend they’d never been there at all.

But the months since her departure from the snowcapped island had worn down her resolve. The dressing grew filthy, tattered at the edges, and it yellowed with age and neglect. Her tears kept it constantly damp, the salt stinging and puckering her tender flesh. Çiçek didn’t have the energy to take care of it like she’d once had, and without new material to replace the old the fabric weakened further and further. By the time the golden girl had reached the Ridge (And by extension, Rivaini’s long-sought-after attention), her heart was so rotten, so full of poison and so far gone, even the slightest handling would have made it burst apart.

And so, when her bezelyesweet pea comes rushing to her side and embraces her, sharing freely the warmth and affection she’d missed from the moment she’d lost it, Çiçek flinches. A gasp comes strangled from her throat; for the span of a heartbeat, her whole body tenses, rigid and bracing for an incomprehensible something that would come to take her away forever.

Then - just like that, with the barest amount of pressure on her skin - the dam breaks. Çiçek sags against the pale-maned Guardian. Like a rocky outcrop in the middle of a stormy sea, she clings to her, pounded by tempestuous swells of all the feelings she’d tried in vain to ignore into nothingness. Rivaini’s solid frame burns like a furnace, mirroring the stifling tropical air itself, but still the dunalino trembles like it’s deep winter on Tinuvel, her wordless, keening sobs quieted only by the rumble of the other’s voice reverberating through her own hollow rib cage. I’m here, Çiçek, her sweet pea says, in the place where I should have been seasons ago, and she hates the bitter seed within her that cuts through the comfort and reminds her this is temporary. Once Rivaini knows what she did - knows the truth of it, every damning piece - she’ll cut her losses and go, as she should.

“Seni hak etmiyorum,”“I don’t deserve you,” she breathes in the space between the red mare’s words, shutting her eyes tight against the tears forming guiltily behind them.

Çi, Rivaini calls in dulcet tones. The waves inside her calm, some, loosening their hold, and she can feel herself floating towards the surface… and then the question comes, inevitable and immediate. What happened? her Guardian asks, and like a tsunami the trauma she’d suffered tumbles down and crushes her from where it had pulled briefly back. Çiçek hears the rest of it from her place below the water, faint and echoey; her gaze follows the path laid by the blue-eyed woman, settling on Kudzu as he stood, unsteady but determined, on four hooves for the first time, and though her body might remain her spirit has gone somewhere else entirely. When she hears a voice, it sounds like her - but is it? Part of her isn’t sure, unable to truly verify from such a great distance. Another part recognizes the disgrace dripping from every low-spoken syllable, every hard-prized admission, and knows the sour taste of remorse on her tongue remains proof positive.

“Last Fall,” she says, autumn’s rich hues swirling kaleidoscopic in her mind’s eye. “In the Cove…

I got sick.” The words fall like flat stones from her lips, plain and simple. “I went to the Crossing…”

The details had never been clear for Çiçek, but now - having been left for so long in complete darkness, hoping to be forgotten - she struggled to pick them out. Everything blurred together: scenes, feelings, sensations. The weightless caress of the sea as it carried her to and fro; the scents of plumeria and decay, intermingled so thoroughly she couldn’t tell where one stopped and the other began; a million shades of green, flashing in cascading gradients from succulent moss to intense emerald to striking mint.

So many parts of that day were lost to the wayward mare, and the parts that came the most clearly had been given to her by way of the one she trusted the least to tell her the truth.

“He found me.” Her speech comes as detached as ever, as if describing something that had happened to someone else, some other poor soul - but the silence that followed, and the tears that pooled fresh and clung to her pale lashes, unspilled, told a different story entirely. “I… I don’t remember how - how I -”

Çiçek chokes on her own words. “I -”

She draws a shuddering breath, her cheeks flushing hot. When she finally manages to speak, the voice that prizes itself from between her barely-parted lips, once high and bold with sunshine, has gone impossibly small.

“I thought I was with you.”

The older colt steps up from the shadows. Çiçek turns abruptly towards him, so lost in herself that she’d forgotten his presence entirely, and tips her ears forward to catch his timid offer. Solomon - Solomon, she remembers with a jolt, inhaling sharply at the image of the painted stallion appearing like a specter before her. Her eyes widen, fear evident in the white sclera rimming her warm brown irises. “NO!” she blurts; Kudzu, startled by the loud noise and the renewed quivering of his dam’s skin beneath his tiny nose, pauses in his cautious search along her barrel for nourishment.

Çiçek shifts, uneasy after her outburst, and tries to regain her composure. “Not yet. If he comes, I’ll -” You’ll what? the sullen voice inside her asks. Run and hide?

“I’ll talk to him then,” she answers, though the idea of it fills her with dread. Çiçek turns back towards Rivaini, every inch of her begging the lightning-struck mare to agree. To let her have this one thing, this one last favor, and she’d never ask for anything ever again. “Just not now. I can’t. Please, not now.”

She buries herself in the tangle of her bezelye’ssweet pea’s mane, squeezing her eyes closed in a failed attempt to stop the rivers of sorrow that flood the banks and come, flowing beyond her control, down her tawny face.

“Ben hatalıydım, Rivaini,”“I was wrong, Rivaini,” she sobs, losing her tenuous grip on her emotions. "I was wrong, and I’m so sorry.”