Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.
Blessedly, she doesn’t blow up.  She just looks at me like I’ve asked something weird, something that people like us, people who’ve known each other their whole lives, should just ask when they see someone struggling.  While I’m not the nicest fellow around, I do have a heart; seeing someone as horribly off as Glacia made it twinge, especially when I hadn’t been particularly kind to her in our last encounter.

When she laughs, my ears lift swiftly, glancing over at her with a wonder as to whether or not her mind has broken.  She quickly negates that possibility, brushing off my concern, and elaborating on the laughter, by stating she had thought she looked “better.”

I frown.  How bad had she looked last week?

Silence keeps my tongue, because I don’t know what to tell her.  I don’t know what she looked like last week.  Compared to the broad no-longer-maiden daughter of the Frostheart I’d last met with, she looks a mere ghost of herself.  Her sigh is full of those ghosts, the tossing, tangled sound of innocence fled, and while I don’t know her pain, in particular, I do know that sigh.

Regret.

Every person felt it at least once or twice.  It was sad that her regret was an entire life, however; her story starts slow, and it starts with a dead kid.  Two, she says, two which became one.  She had named them both.  It seems weird to me to have named something which had been born lifeless.  It seems even weirder to know that loss and to give the other away, but one look at her says it was probably best.  A foal couldn’t get a lot of nourishment from a mother who looked like a walking skeleton, draped in midnight.

She says she’s miserable, and that she’s perhaps crazy.  It probably doesn’t help that I think by gender alone she is cursed to madness, so I keep my mouth shut.  I meet her eyes when they rise to mine with a golden light that still ponders just what to make of something so terribly tragic.  This whole topic is something which has nothing to do with me, and which I have no experience in dealing with.  I fumble about in my brain for something to say that might make it less horrible than it is.

I am still a virgin, by Time’s Beard.  What do I know about kids, about giving them away, or keeping them, of burying their small bones in soft earth?

"Everyone is shit at parenting," is where I start, because as I’ve seen, they are; example A: "even the Sun.  Didn’t lift a wing to spare his daughter from abandonment or death when her mother left her to starve in a meadow."

My brows drop down into golden orbs of anger, of misunderstanding, the memories of that day flooding to me like they always do.  They are clear, like most of my memories, easily viewed in the cinema of my thought.  I see her small, shriveled, barely able to stand as she stumbles eagerly towards mother’s side.  Her parents had left her to die, and she had gone back to him.  She even called him father, stood beside him with love in her eyes.

Girls are stupid.  They lead their lives with love.  It’s why Glacia is in this situation she is in now.  If anyone ever abandons me and takes my heart with them, I’d just beat them into a senseless pulp and carry on with a winner’s smile.  I certainly wouldn’t be ghosting around like Glacia, and I definitely won’t forgive them for stabbing me in the back, like the sister who will not be named.

You’re supposed to be being supportive, I reprimand myself.

A smile is forced over the emotional upheaval at the thought of Aithniel and her asshole dad.  I continue with my previous train of thought as if a few really awkward seconds hadn’t just stretched between what I said first, and what I say now.

"If a God can’t do it, I don’t know why you think they’re all so disappointed in you," I finish with a shrug, my face blooming into a true smile as my humor overrides the dark thoughts that had captured me only moments before.  I finish it all with a chuckle, one which I hope helps cheer her up. "Besides, if you carry on like this, you’ll never get to make it up to them.  Dying makes it hard to do that, you know."

[ OOC: Hey, you've got an extra div close in that table that was mussing up the bottom of the signature/edit format!  I fixed it in the one above so you should be able to just copy/paste that code into your table trackers and it'll be okay now. <3 ]