Falls

true love is for quitters

She watched in dumbfounded shock as the colt - who she'd guessed was roughly her age - stood. He just kept rising, his shoulder stretching higher and higher into the sky until it nearly rivaled a grown adults. Laying on the ground he'd just looked like a normal boy, not a giant in a foal's skin. Thankfully, her staring was likely unnoticed given his rather graceless tumble into the water and she couldn't hold back the chuckle no matter how hard she tried. It started in her belly, jiggling like a bowl of jello that just kept gaining momentum until it burst out of her mouth quite unladylike.

Her pale cerulean eyes crinkled as she guffawed in laughter, her earlier mask wiped away for the sheer joy of being able to laugh. Laughter was a rare, fragile thing in her experience, and highly worthy of being savored when it finally came to her. She watched him paddle back to shore while still snickering slightly under her breath, but said nothing else as he clambered out of the chilly water and made his way back to her.

Vex considered scolding him again - a dunk was hardly a bath - but whatever criticism she was about to offer was lost beneath an indignant exclamation as he began to shake dirty pond water onto her. "Hey!" The water reeked of the sediment at the bottom of the pond and she gagged in disgust as she cringed away from him, her tail tucked and ears pinned against the nape of her neck.

"Don't you have any manners at all?" She shrieked as she turned away from him, hastening toward a tree a few feet away so that she could rub her water-splattered coat against the rough treebark until it was downy again. In a perfect world, she'd go wash herself beneath the falls as her mother had, and then comb her coat with the tree, but she knew from experience that submerging herself when it was windy like this would make for a miserable, shivery afternoon. In hindsight... that was probably why he hadn't been cleaning himself off, but she was in no mood to be forgiving.

When the worst of the water was off of her coat, she turned back to him and marched haughtily back into his space. "Well, Kratos," she addressed him with her head lifted up to almost meet him eye to eye. She was about to try scolding him again the way her mother would have done to her, but the prospect of a real conversation and the indulgence of her growing curiosity won out in the end and her voice abruptly softened. "How'd you get so muddy anyway? Did you fall down somewhere else?"