Maybe it would've been easier if d'Artagnan hadn't heard him. Clearly, the Doctor hadn't been aware, and Mauja ducked his head for a moment, wondering if he'd get chewed out for not killing the filly — but he'd been weak even then, rebelling against the notion of killing something innocent.. something that wasn't to blame for her parent's errors. The half-blood had had both wings and a horn, the blood of someone who was weak and someone who was terrible. So why had he let it live? But the Time Mender went on, savagely condemning his sister, and Mauja was content to listen in silence, grunting his agreement in the appropriate places or otherwise looking grim. Was Seiren a threat to them? Would her vendetta against d'Artagnan make her align herself with the enemy? Had she forsaken the racist teachings clearly present in her brother's upbringing? Had it been a mistake, a year ago, to let mother and child live? The questions gnawed at him, but he said nothing, not that he'd come upon them in a moment of weakness right after birth — that he'd had their lives in his hooves and spared them both.

He hadn't slipped as often back then.
But he had that day.

Fortunately, his red friend seemed eager to let the subject drop, and Mauja contended himself with simply having alerted d'Artagnan to his unfortunate niece's existence. They would deal with Seiren and her Ghost some other day. Once within the cave, the sister seemed forgotten, just another drop in their sea of woe. Just another thing to forget, to purge from their minds, and a bark of laughter was heard from Mauja; a rather uncharacteristic sound coming from him, given that he usually smiled, snow-soft, instead of laughed. "The children, d'Artagnan? I thought we'd stopped caring about them when we went into this cave!" And for a split second, he thought of himself not as the glacial, frigid stallion of the past, not the regal, calm Mauja, but rather as the man that lurked beneath that perfect composure.. someone more alive, raw, vivid, feral, bold and daring where the other was cautious and liked to play it safe.

Maybe he should do this more often.

He wasn't sure when it began. It was probably just placebo, the reckless knowledge of what he was doing, but he found himself grinning as d'Artagnan confessed to his nefarious experiments — and scowling, sternly, at the comment of dying. "If you die," he promised soberly, "I'll come to hell and kill you again.". Because, in another split moment of strange clarity, he knew that he did not want to be without d'Artagnan in this life.
And not just for the drugs.

"Put a flower on my grave, will you?" was the last coherent thing he said. A sense of relief flooded him, a weightlessness, and from that point, he had no real idea of what had happened. While he would recall more of their actual conversation than d'Artagnan, he did not recall particularly much of the night itself. And when d'Artagnan started walking through walls... well, Mauja did not believe it. Mauja refused to believe it, but no matter how many times he told the Doctor he was wrong, he just kept doing it, and in the end, Mauja realized what a fool he'd been.

And walked with his friend through the walls, lost in some other world where nothing mattered except the sensation of his body slipping through rock and emerging somewhere else, the painful bruising of atoms splitting, and the curious notion that he was actually in some other place as well. Unable to make sense of it, he'd simply laughed it off, wondering when the Red's eyesight had gone so bad, because Mauja was not short and probably let his friend know that a bit too roughly. And when he grew bored of dodging his friend's rather vicious and unbalanced outbursts, he simply melded with the mountain wall and watched. It did not come across as odd at all to him to become part of an inanimate object, and in fact he rather liked being the mountain, though it was probably at that part during the night that he sustained the most bruises, because he did not have enough sense to move his body out of the way of d'Artagnan's wild flailing.

When he woke, it was with a bitter headache, and a great deal many cuts and bruises across his white body; at some point in the early hours of morning they'd both fallen to the floor, legs sprawled every which-way and Mauja's head slung across d'Artagnan's red back. No matter what had happened in the night, the waking up was worth it in some way he had no real desire to explore; there were no regrets, though he certainly wished to remain on the cold floor for another half century before getting up again.

[ the end. <3 ]