He wished she’d run. He wished she’d lace her ears back, bite him or kick him for so rudely dismissing her, and turn back to the islands to forget about the dying man she’d saw today. He wished it because Nephilim knew Vita Nova was his greatest weakness beside his children, and Oswin knew this too. No matter how miserly he was, Nephilim could never harm Vita Nova without being goaded. Even then, he had to wonder if he’d can hurt her even if she kicked him into the ground and left him for dead. He’d done enough to her in the past, he felt, and his heart still ached with the love he had for her.
Vita Nova was owed a lifetime of whatever hell she wished him to pay and Nephilim knew better than to utter a noise of complaint against it.
The touch was unexpected and so foreign, it inspired a myriad of emotions in Nephilim all at once and too fast for him to react immediately. He froze, muscles rigid, Vita Nova’s velvet soft nose against his shoulder. Her soft, warm breath soaked into his skin (which initially twitched as if a fly landed there) and all at once he felt it sink deep, deep down inside as if clawing for his very core. Nephilim’s eyelid clamped shut as warm, hot tears pricked suddenly and a new ache swelled in his chest.
Longing.
Because he wanted to lean into her, Nephilim turned his head away in shame and did not reward himself. His eye remained closed, even if it heightened his other senses to every bit of her presence. Her smell. Her touch. The sounds of her breath. The taste of need on his tongue to touch her again and soak into this feeling she’d reawaken in him just then.
Forgiveness.
Nephilim’s ear twitched and his eye cracked open, though tears had already run their familiar river down the slope of his cheek and his vision was blurry. His body trembled with the cries he held back, trying to remain stone-like, though it was quickly becoming an impossibility the more she talked.
“No,” he whispered, voice cracked with emotion lodged heavy in his throat. He shook his head back and forth, eye closed, and drew a breath to steady himself. His eye opened, and he dropped his head, rubbing it against his knee before taking in and releasing a large, heavy sigh of air. “You shouldn’t forgive me. After every-ever-” In spite himself, Nephilim broke off – forced by the words cut from him as a sob strangled itself inside his throat. He took a pause, trembled with the weight of his sorrow, and shook his head again as if physically trying to clear his head. “After everything…”
But he trailed off. He could not wrap his head around how Vita Nova could forgive him, but he was nowhere near able to forgive himself for anything he’d done or anything that’d been done to him.
Silence. Nephilim let it settle as Vita Nova settled in comfortably. As much as he didn’t want to watch her, his gold-eye seemed to train itself on her and only her. She was so much more beautiful now than she’d ever been, he thought, studying the way age had matured her figure. Next to him she was a goddess; she always had been, even when he was just a colt and she was just a filly, madly in love and exploring the expanse of the Bay.
“Nova,” his voice was more level than it had been (the lull in conversation allowed him to grasp some of his rather shaky emotions), “I can’t go back to Tinuvel. I can’t survive Tinuvel’s cold. I won’t live on Crossing again and I won’t live in the Lagoon. I’m a liability to any herd that’d allow me to live with them. I’d be… I’d be someone’s pity case.” Her genial tone pulled Nephilim slowly back toward his old self (ever so slowly) and though her name-calling didn’t elicit a smile or a name thrown back playfully as it might have one day, it made his tone far less pointed than it might have been.
Now he just sounded tired.
Frustrated, he sighed, his ear twitching. “I just… I’ve gone over it again and again, and it won’t do my children any good to return now. What they know, what they believe, is protecting them against a far worse truth. I’m useless to them now. Their stronger without me.” He drew a sharp breath. “And maybe that’s good. Maybe that’s just a sign I raised them right, without any knowledge of what a decent parent is… maybe it’s right that I let them move on and I…”
His voice trailed off.
Maybe it was right that everyone on the islands truly moved on and Nephilim did too, but in a much more permanent sense of the word.
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