All his intricately woven words of romance drift towards her, his hope suspending his heart high in the air above them as she listens and he waits for her response; if he had known the sort of mind he was working with, he would of course been more obvious about his feelings towards her, but there was also the question if he would have felt them as deeply had he known she was not the sort to hear love stitched into poetic words on his past and present, the broad expansion of the future rising before him. He clings to her face, his eyes searching her for reactions that he cannot read, as if a foreigner trying to decipher directions from his native speaking host.

It’s the Lady Moon… she says, and his smile slips, his hopes crumble and fray, his heart descends fifty feet and nearly strikes him dumb. She doesn’t understand what he means, she cannot hear the song of his heart, and while he knows very little of how to admit love or how to share it openly with others, he does know that if she cannot hear it now she never will. She continues, but he barely hears her, his face turned to stare out over the waters below.

The wind runs his tears across his chocolate face, his mind fights with his chest to still the collapse of his dream for long enough to conclude this conversation, to get somewhere quiet were he might drain the rest of this sorrow from himself and she will not be able to see him.

It’s not her fault.

He’s not worthy of her. He’s known this ever since they first met.

As soon as he’s sure they’re mostly gone and only a few damp lines might remain on his face, he tries to do as she asks of him. But the motion hurts, his muscles protest as if he’s never allowed to smile again, and while it looks as if he is okay with all that has come to pass, perhaps even happy as she wants him to be, his soul is flat-lining.

He is glad, at least, that she likes the halter.

He can stay with her that way, a shining memory writ across her skin. Maybe then she will not forget him, possibly even love him in her own fanciful ways.

Happiness.

It is a myth, a thing they invented to call the days one didn’t drown in figurative oceans.

It’s why she was so special; she still believed in it, so deeply that it had become everything that she was, a butterfly spreading light with each beat of her wings that denied the currents her vivacity. Even he knows that she cannot always be happy, that life is not always sunshine and that it is, in fact, most often rain… but she looks for the rainbow while he wallows in puddles.

"No one is ever truly happy, Kahlua," he says, looking at her and wrestling with his emotions all the while, trying to decide if he should go now or try and linger in her aura for a while longer, "at least no one like me."

Smile, my friend.

"I… I’m sorry," he manages, looking to his front limbs, "I have to go."

And he is leaving, though he doesn’t remember asking his hooves to go, those blue eyes shorn from the Queen he loved and the hope he’d once had that she might love him, too, large hooves digging into the earth with each slow step. He doesn’t cry, not yet, the dam building pressure the further away he gets from the edge of the sea, and he hopes that they won’t ever come; it’s not a man’s way to let others see him so weak and broken, sniveling like a foal with a bruised hock over a heart he’d never even owned to begin with.