take what you can Posted on August 9, 2021 at 07:58:28 AM by Rade
rade
Rade.
The scarred roan had spoken to his share of shades, but few of them ever spoke back. And though the sound of her voice wasn’t enough to convince him that the black mare was real, it helped. It helped to orient him, to tug his wandering mind back to the present. Because it wasn’t the childish treble he remembered, but an aria deepened my maturity and harshened by heartache. And the creature before him— Jaws— she wasn’t the same either. She was taller now, stronger, vital compared to the ruin that the stallion resembled both inside and out. But she moved toward him with the same confident certainty that had always been hers. Dipped the curve of her neck to press her forehead to his shoulder like she was still every bit the child he’d tried to raise.
And Rade, deprived too long of touch that wasn’t violent, flinched nervously away.
It was a few seconds before he recognized that the gentle contact hadn’t hurt. A few seconds filled by the raspy sound of his breathing and the growing quiver of his faded-gold coat. After that moment had passed, he realized that Jaws was trembling too. That she was watching him— not out of wariness or ill intent, but with something flickering in the depths of her dark eyes. Something that he couldn’t name but could vaguely remember, like the face of a long-distant friend. Family, she was family. She was his and he was hers and, and— And suddenly he was edging forward again, wary as any wild animal but desperate for the warmth he could feel emanating from her inky skin. Lowering his head, he buried his grey-flecked muzzle in the tangles of her mane and let the breath be crushed from his lungs in a ragged sigh.
You’re still here. Was he? There were days Rade had been here-but-not, his mind galloping off to the Elsewhere that was full of regrets and what-ifs. But right now, he was more here than he’d been since finding Fearghas for the first time. More here than when he’d wept over his sister’s broken body, or when he’d stood before the bachelors as their newly-appointed Boss. Those moments had been significant, but they paled in comparison to the soft murmur of his daughter’s voice and the pressure of her body against his. “I’m here,” the palomino confirmed, wincing at the husky gravel of his voice and wishing, wishing that he could turn back time and be the whole creature Jaws needed and deserved.
But he couldn’t knit the broken pieces of himself back together. He could only shift the weight of his body off his damaged shoulder, clenching his teeth at the grind of bone on bone. He could only chuckle with the wry humor of his younger days, rolling one golden eye down to look into hers with a long-suffering expression. “Where else would I be, little idiot? My adventuring days are long over, and besides—” he tugged affectionately on a strand of her forelock, doing his best to disguise the bitterness that lurked beneath his next words. “There’s nowhere else that would have me. Nowhere I belong.”
But he still wished— desperately and brokenly— that that could change.