In some ways, the complete non-reaction that her touch earned was worse than how he had jumped away from her last time. Alysanne wanted him to move into the touch, to accept it instead of tolerate it, but he didn’t. He watched her as she moved - while she was watching him for any signs of refusal - and then he simply looked away. That was it. She thought about testing it, about letting her dark muzzle trail from one spot to the next to see if it would provoke some sort of reaction, but of course she would never actually act on those thoughts no matter how lonely she might be.

Alysanne withdrew immediately, considered apologizing but couldn’t find enough of a voice to put together the syllables. So she looked away again, falling back into what seemed to be their natural state today - looking somewhere other than each other. She might have even left then, but he was the one who had approached her - if he was uncomfortable with her actual presence, surely he could force his legs to move and leave.

She wasn’t entirely sure her own would work right then. They needed more time.

For a while, she stood there in the silence - finding it both comfortable and uncomfortable all at once. Her green eyes tried to follow the path of various snowflakes as they fell from the sky but she always lost them in the flurry. She remembered hearing from someone that each snowflake was different, billions of unique patterns falling from the sky, but from here they all looked the same to her.

On any other morning, she wouldn’t have really minded just standing there in silence, together but very much not. She would have actually enjoyed the peace, the near-silent sound of his breathing nearby reminding her that she wasn’t alone while her eyes looked anywhere but to him. But not this morning. It quickly became too uncomfortable - the silence gave too much room for her thoughts to roam and she did not want to get lost in them today. She wanted to stay present and whole, not just pretend that she was those things.

So she spoke again, breaking it with the softest of whispers and the first thing that came into her head while continuing to watch the snow, while it continued to gather on her - turning her slowly to one solid colour instead of a patchwork. “I met your daughter.”  Alysanne forced herself to not look at him, curious as she was about what his reaction to this subject would be. It was a completely new direction from where they had been a few moments ago, but was the conversation that had sparked this strange companionship today not buried beneath the snow by now?

“Glacia.” She clarified after a moment because she didn’t know how many daughters Mauja had. What knowledge she did have of his family felt stolen - gathered bits from Naerys (who told her one of his daughters had died) and Glacia (who had been the one to state their relation). Nothing from him expressly.

If you could only understand—through my heart and through my veins

I gave it all,

I'll give again.