Meadow

Missing you comes in waves. Today I am drowning in it - figuratively, but almost literally, too.

The swim is much longer than I had remembered, and by the time my brother and I emerge onto the sandy shore, the summer heat already oppressive on our backs, I wonder how I had managed it all those years before, when I was a mere two-year-old. Coughing seawater from my lungs, and with salt prickling along my skin like a million crawling ants, my mood is already well below baseline when Snow turns to me with a look on his face that pisses me off even before he opens his mouth.

"Tell me, Brother," he says, as we stroll up the beach and onto the sun-scorched grass of a wide, sprawling meadow. Before he can get his next sentence out, I find a patch of bare earth and drop to the ground with a deep, resigned grunt to roll away the damned sea water from my coat. I don't answer Snow's question until I'm back on my feet and have shaken the excess from my coat, though I still feel dirt which has now congealed into mud and clung to my wet coat in cakey patches. No matter - it's infinitely more tolerable than the itchiness of salt.

I look at Snow for a moment, taking care to make my expression as apathetic and unmoved as possible, as though irritation is not flickering like a disturbed flame within my chest. Sometimes, when I really look at him, I wonder what you ever saw in him. Occasionally, in the soft light of twilight when he's soft-eyed with sleep, or when he's in a good humor and flashes that grin of his, I see it: I see the stallion you almost fell for, before you came to your senses. Other times, like now, I see nothing but an annoying little brother: a nuisance who seems to take special joy in pissing me off. Ever since you left us, I've tried to be more patient with him - he is all I have left now, afterall - but it's difficult in moments like this, when I'm tired and not in the mood to be harrassed.

He's looking away now, his dark eyes roving across the land, searching for its potential. I take the opportunity to open my mouth, a sarcastic remark formulating in my brain, but before the words can leave my lips he's turned back to me, a softer expression on his face. "Mother would have loved to come back," he says, and I close my mouth, exhaling slowly and heavily through my nostrils. Though it's been years, Mother is still a sore subject and I'm forced to fling up defensive walls around my heart to keep the threatening stab of grief at bay.

"Yes, she would have," I finally say with a swish of my russet tail, and cast my eyes out across the great meadow rolling before us like a green sea. It's fringed on three sides by a thick forest that's every shade of green this time of year, and beyond - cutting a jagged silhouette against the blue sky - is a mountain, gray and morose, that reminds me vaguely of our first home on Tinuvel.

Snow moves towards me in my peripheral vision, stopping short before he can touch me. I flick one ear in his direction, but otherwise ignore him. Affection is not something easily exchanged between us, but it's enough to know he cares, no matter how much of a stone in my hoof he can be.

Naturally, he spoils the moment with his next comment. Even though he doesn't say your name, mention of you is enough to make my hastily-built defenses crumble. I had forgotten, just for a moment, that I live in a world in which you no longer exist. I don't know if Snow thought he was doing me a kindness by speaking of you, but either way, my immediate impulse is to think he's a thoughtless fool. You are still too fresh and sore a subject to be spoken of so lightly. Maybe it's easier for him - you did not pick him, after all. Your belly did not swell with his child. He is not the one who wakes up in a cold sweat every night, wondering what he could have done differently.

"Don't speak of her," I snap, heating rising into my cheeks. "You're just determined to ruin this, aren't you?"

I stare at him with a hard expression, my light brown eyes locked on his dark gaze. Letting those words leave my lips is like adding kindling to the flame of anger inside me, and I can feel it burning bigger and brighter, enabled by my lapse in self-control. For a moment my attention locks on the crisp white star on my brother's brow, and though I know it's a symbol of the link between us - for I carry the same mark between my own eyes - and to our mother, who had passed it down to us, in that moment I hate it so much I want to push him down and rub his face in the dirt until I can see it no more.

I close my eyes, thinking of you instead, and exhale slowly, releasing the hot, acrid air inside me. All at once my anger is gone, replaced instead by the bone-deep weariness of grief, and when I open my eyes, I can feel the sag of exhaustion on my face. It's only the mid-afternoon, but we had set out early that morning, and I am both physically and emotionally spent. I don't have the energy to argue with Snow right now.

"I don't know what we're going to find. Peace, I hope," I say more gently, and turn to look out at the sea of yellowed grass again. Strangers mill about here and there, mostly in the shelter of the trees where they’re safe from the heat of the sun, but they don't pay us any attention. "Why don't we find some shade, eat, and then we can talk about where to go from here," I say, though it’s less of a suggestion and more of an imposition. We will both think more clearly and calmly after a bit of rest.