Halcyon
He seemed as lost in thought as she was, and while such inattentiveness might have perturbed her once, it felt like a relief now. A respite from the weight of someone's attention and notice, a break from having to pretend that she was fine when she felt like she was only a ghost of herself.
"Anything you wish me to know," she murmured quietly as he focused on the question she'd posed, feeling very off-kilter. She had never shared these awkward first moments with Fritjof, had never had a need to play the back-and-forth game of getting to know one another. They'd been little more than children when they'd first met, and the connection that tied them together had been instant and unyielding. Perhaps that was why it had nearly broken her to lose him, and why she felt so little like herself now.
"What made you wish to stop traveling?" It seemed like a safe question, and she found herself drifting restlessly forward. As he requested that they walk and talk, she nodded and moved at whatever pace he set, her gaze bobbing between the forest and the stallion in turn. The Forest was so different from Atlantis that it almost felt alien, despite the time she'd spent on the Crossing. Where were the vines? The birds? The flowers? Soft, verdant green met her eyes everywhere she looked here, broken only by the deep umber of tree trunks.
"Cromer?" She questioned the name as he spoke it, her stomach giving an uneasy lurch as multiple conflicting feelings swarmed her at once. She had no claim over Voyager, and yet jealousy flickered, a leftover from a time long ago. The memory refused to come to the surface but it played behind a foggy lens in her mind anyway - a lithe black figure and one of glittering silver dancing along a ribbon of blue - and the recollection of it made her gasp. Tears prickled at her eyes but she blinked them hastily away, and tried to focus on the curiosity that had also flickered to life at the name. She'd been a stranger amongst strangers for so long that the thought of possibly knowing another soul, of maybe someday having a friend, was heartening.
Still, she was the newcomer here. From the kindness that Voyager had so far displayed, it did not seem farfetched to believe that Cromer likely had feelings for him as his first. Halcyon was the interloper. The newcomer. And beyond that, she was too broken to expect to be more than a friendly face, if she even managed that.
And yet still, the words that rolled from her tongue left a bitter aftertaste she could not deny. "Is that your mate?"