if you tell me you're leaving, i'll make it easy

“S-Svenja?” he rasps, throat raw from the salt water he's swallowed (and the wretched, ragged cries that had torn up his throat not long ago at all, when he's lost innocence in the sea, and come face to face with the consequences of his actions on a beach not so unlike this one).

He takes a step towards her, reaching as if to touch her. But his bad leg twinges and he winces at the pain of it, and he is reminded anew of how broken he is. As if he could ever forget. It cuts through him anyway, leaving him untethered and he stops just short of her, with the scent of her on the stirring breeze enough to convince him that she’s really here. How many times has he dreamed of her, and the others, lost to him and left behind?

Too many to count.

“Ah’m lost, Svenja,” he murmurs at length, and it is the truth in every sense. He had never meant to come here, even though he’s long suspected that this Island was Tabaxi’s home. Long ago, he’d pushed the issue, so convinced in his belief that Tabaxi would be better off with her kin than with him. He’d woken up one day and she’d vanished as quickly as the winter snows at spring’s thaw. And he’d been left to wonder all this time…

He cannot even entertain the notion of claiming he’d been looking for Svenja (even though his heart had yearned for her ever since he’d betrayed them both by leaving her on that cold, northern beach). It would be false of him to claim he was standing before her because of any decision on his part. He’d had no idea she was here, no knowledge of this island except for its verdant growth and towering range.

It reminds him of everything he is not - healthy and whole, mighty, dangerous and capable of sheltering those who look to it from even the fiercest of storms.

“Ah never meant ‘a –” Hurt you. Leave you. The words lodge in his throat, and stay there, making his breath come short and quick. In his chest, his wounded heart throbs feebly, not daring to hope, because how could it possibly survive breaking even more? It's why Nuka runs, because when he’s exhausted, he doesn’t have the energy to think, and the aching of his injured leg is by far an easier pain to suffer than his equally as crippled heart.

The brown stallion truly hadn’t meant to… To do to Svenja what his mother had done to him. The realisation washes over him with such force that he bows his head beneath the onslaught of if. All the excuses he could make wither the instant he thinks of them, like flower petals cast onto the blazing sands.It is not that he considers the silent black stallion of the Bay anywhere near as monstrous as his father (in fact, Nuka cannot think of him this way, because to do so, knowing that he’d abandoned Svenja and left her under the dark stallion’s rule, it would break him as fiercely as the loss of his little Lionheart had, and Cerosi’s heartrending revelation).

But he knows what it is like, to be left somewhere you don’t want to be. Nevermind the fact that Nuka had been little more than a weanling, defenceless against his father’s wrath, the black stallion might have been angry, and Svenja was as mortal as he was, no matter how celestial and otherworldly she appeared in his dreams.

Unbidden, the sight of his mother tucked so tenderly alongside a young stallion who Nuka had guessed was his half-brother - because the affection with which Sabor had interacted with the red and white stranger was how Nuka had always imagined she’d show to him, if he had been wanted - surfaced, and the scarred stallion found himself blinded by a sudden sheen of tears. In some ways, Svenja was like his mother too, having been kept against her will, denied her own autonomy.

Forsaken by someone who’d mattered to her.

“Ever since ah left, ah - ah’ve regretted…” Nuka forced the words out, husky and raw, and he blinks the tears away so that he can see her, so that he could seek to hold her gaze (even if, in all his shame and anguish, all he can manage is a moment) and hope that she can see how much he means every single word. “Ah’ve wanted t’tell ya, ever since ‘a moment we met,” when they’d been younger, and largely untouched by loss, both struggling against a current pulling them out to sea…

Nuka pauses then,face creasing in frustration because he’s done so much wrong, but he doesn’t want to get this wrong, because this moment with Svenja might be all he has. And so, drawing in a guttering breath, he says something else first, because to him, it’s just as important that Svenja knows this. “Ah’m so sorry for leavin’ ya, Svenja.” And a moment later, with a quaver in his voice that steadily became more pronounced. “Maybe ah got lucky for once, the way the ocean brought me back t’you. 'Cause more’n almost anything ah jus’ wanted t’see you again, so ah could say… Ah love ya Svenja.”

And the words taste so bittersweet in his mouth, because part of him knows it’s unfair of him, to show up out of the blue and make such a declaration. But part of him feels relief, too, because he’s finally said it, and hopes in a small way that it’ll reassure the white-laced mare in front of him. That it’ll soothe the wounds he caused in her, instead of cut ever deeper.

But part of him also trembles with such fear that he is torn in two, for as much as he wants to stay with her now, his instincts demand he turn and throw himself back into the sea, so that he can wallow in the numbness of ignorance, rather than feel the sting of rejection and ragged sense loss that he has suffered from for as long he can remember. But none of that’s on Svenja.

And by whatever gods there may be, he doesn’t want to hurt her any more.

So he stays right where he is, stiff and silent, feeling foolish and scared. The heat that rises to burn his cheeks stirs enough sense into him to stumble over a few final, hasty words. “Jus’ wanted y’ta know, ya don’t gotta say anythin’, and y’don’t need ta stay if…”

If she’s done waiting on him. More than she knows, Nuka understands how she might want to protect her heart, so whether she stays, or whether she is the one to leave this time...

He will never hold it against her.

& i'll love you either way