For a moment he too thought that she might turn and go.

As he stood looking at her, drinking in the long moments that rushed by her mind all too quickly, a fog lifted and for one crystalline and impossibly lucid moment, Gaucho realized what had happened to him. Or rather, he realized what hadn’t been happening. The gaps in his memory suddenly bore heavily on his shoulders and mind, conversations with ghosts and moments that couldn’t have happened played just behind his eyes, running on fastforward until the glassy and often hallucinated events of the past few weeks were being played on fast forward.

Gaucho going crazy- was his first thought, and then, as if that wasn’t important enough, it was quickly cast aside by a thought that seemed to overshadow it, making his sanity seem so insignificant in contrast: Ampere not real.

She thought she might run, and he thought she might fade. With bated breath he waited to see which it would be, in that moment thinking that it would be harder to endure this hallucination, that this would be what finally broke his mind into a thousand unmendable pieces. It didn’t matter that for this one long moment he knew that something was very, very wrong with him. All that mattered was that she might disappear again, that there might not even be anything before him to disappear.

”N-” He might have said something, but then she was rushing towards him again. Even as she neared close enough to hear the air being thrust from her lips, he thought that she still might disappear - might rush right through him like a phantom, taking his heart and the last remnants of his sanity with her.

But she didn’t.

She didn’t.

And that was all that mattered.

Gaucho’s wings spread open, but not to lovingly embrace her. Instead, his posture suggested that he was preparing to catch her, as if still unable to shake the thought that if he let her go now, she would disappear - quite literally - forever. Fiery wings rocketed forward, meaning to pin themselves around the muscled slopes of her shoulders, while his muzzle streaked to the side, smearing what might have been tears against the side of her neck. He embraced her with something holy distinct, yet not divorced from tenderness, but certainly there was nothing tentative in his movements. Though they weren’t desperate or needy either. As in most things, Gaucho exuded confidence, though this confidence was a lie told loudly from his own mind: if he let himself think, even for one moment, that this wasn’t real (now that he was starting to understand just how unreal his past few weeks had been), he was sure he would lose his grip on everything. On Ampere, on reality, on life.

And so his mind and his actions splintered - he held her knowing that she was real, even if most things he saw and knew lately weren’t, and he embraced her greedily, making up for the lost moments, but also as if nothing was wrong.

”Ampere.” A whisper.

A prayer.

A liferaft to reality.