Though the humidity is rapidly dissipating in the face of the storm, Impa still feels flush with heat. There is an edge to her laughter as she cranes her head toward the sky, one that threatens to crack into tears if she gives way to any emotion too much. In the days following her introduction to Wasp and all the wonderful changes come to the Islands in her absence from them, Impa has grown no less irate at the loss she has suffered simply by being born in the wrong timeline. It isn't fair. Water trickles in her ears and slips over her nose; she snorts but does not lower her face from the sky. Better to stare up and decry the stars above than have to face forward in this reality she unluckily missed the boat on.
If she were less selfish perhaps her fury would be outweighed with joy for all the prospects afforded to mares born into and growing up in this time, but Impa is only a horse, and as fallible as her father and her brother and everyone else who has inadvertently fucked up in their extensive family. She is filled with loathing. Much of it is directed, still, at her long-deceased sire, a wound she thought long-healed torn suddenly afresh in the face of this news that mares now lead territories. "You could've taught me that, you bastard. Could have set me on the path for everything I so clearly wanted but you didn't," she spits the words skyward around a mouthful of painful mirth as lightning flares again and thunder rolls to drown her out— so like a fucking man, she seethes.
A voice out of the dark chokes her into silence and Impa's head drops, ears flicking to pinpoint the speaker. For a moment she thought herself confronted by her grandsire and that, more than anything, springs tears to her eyes to mingle with the rain sluicing down her face. He would have supported me, she thinks The voice comes again, and though deep and rich it is also distinctly feminine. Impa wonders for a moment if she sounds at all like that— like a mare, for all her too-heavy, too-tall self and how utterly un-feminine she has felt all her life.
"Yes," she says as gruffly, and there's perhaps too long a pause as she tries to make out the figure before her despite her failing gaze, as if it isn't a completely foolish endeavor for someone whose single good eye is now half-blind to try and sight a dark horse on a dark day in the middle of a goddamn thunderstorm. Impa flicks rain off her ear in another futile gesture of defiance against the elements, then coughs to clear her throat rather than betray the emotion this mare has startled out of her, amending her first response with, "I am alone."
She's about to bite off a snappy 'What of it?' when another crush of thunder booms overhead and, tempered by this natural advice to watch her tongue, Impa presses her lips together as she searches for something less caustic to offer this individual who is, for reasons unknown, also apparently content to stand idle in a downpour. "Maybe a little lost, though it galls me to admit it. What are you doing out in this shit, anyway?" She leans a little too hard on the expletive: always, it has been important to Impa that no one mistake her for a lady when she is clearly lacking in all the feminine graces so naturally bestowed upon her sisters. Logically, it is a lousy defense, but one she clings to all the same. Heaven forbid she be mistaken for someone beautiful or worthy of love, a lesson heavily reinforced by that awful slender Lagoon Boss with the buggy eyes. A terrible specter to call up in a storm such as this, and Impa shudders under the cover of rain. |
IMPAZIENZA