The cloud wasn’t as awesome the second time. Or maybe it was, but my legs were still shaking like jelly and my ears were still ringing and my balance was still off and my mind was still reeling like What even the hell happened? Jeez. and there was no room in my head for the little pocket of happiness and wonder that the island had brought me before. It was gone like the shadow that had killed that poor woman—a thing of the past, the past that I could apparently see, but only through horrible, vertigo inducing sequences. Jeez, ugh. My spin still crawled whenever I thought about it.

Anyway, the cloud carried me down, and there I was again, amidst blue fire and half-imagined shadows, and I took a deep breath to try and steady my trembling limbs. Okay, enough bullshitting. This stuff’s real and it’s goin’ down whether or not we’re ready for it, so I guess I better pucker up and get on with it. Which, I guess, meant finally confronting Bro about some stuff.

“….Mesec?” I called, turning, hoping he hadn’t chosen a different path off of the island. And amazingly, somehow it was that moment in my life, my entire life of fuck-ups and consequences, that I realized I don’t know how to talk to people. I opened my mouth and kind of stopped—and something in the back of my head noticed the running theme. Shit, I thought. How do you even investigate motherfuckers? I can’t just say, “’Ey man, you’re Ma’s up to some bad juju and my Pa needs me to snoop around so I need you to spill some.” And I was thinking about that and some more stuff kind of bubbled up in my head, thoughts like this…poisonous kind of jealousy etching in the back of my eyes that I hated to have, but I had nonetheless. Bro had a Ma that wasn’t my Ma, a Ma he had known since the day he was born. A Ma that was dark and beautiful, a goddess of midnight and starlight, who that I was kinda forced to mistrust but I probably would’ve mistrusted anyway.

But I still didn’t know what to say (can’t just out-and-out admit that I hated the fact he had another family than ours) and, come to think of it, I wasn’t even sure what I was supposed to be asking about. “So…um…” I said, smooth as all get-out and obviously not awkward in the slightest. “How….how are you?” Because there was a plague and some darkness and some disappearances poppin’ around since the last time I saw him, so I guessed that was the most appropriate thing to start with.

@[Mesec]
speaking

”Totally calm about the fact that we were all summoned to a floating island in the sky and end up in some sort of weird family meeting right beside a dead body.”

“Right?” I said under my breath. Nice try, Bro, but we can’t really play off something like that like it ain’t shit. Gotta give him credit, though. There’s not much of a standard for those kinds of reactions.

I laughed along with him, really awkward and breathy, and my gaze shifted away from his own somewhere off to the right, where there was more blue stuff floating around. It…well, I guess it was petty of me, and pretty childish, but hearing him speak now, one on one, actually listening to his words was a little harder than I expected. His voice was deeper—too deep for me to comprehend and accept. And he was larger, too, pretty much an adult now, nothing awkward or gangly about him anymore. The most fucked up part about it though was the fact that he had been gone for so long, and that I was able to notice all of this so easily. Hell, I had been the bitch that went AWOL, what am I talking about? And I missed him so much but this was a different Bro now—only slightly different, it was true, and only by looks and age. But I still wish that I had grown up with him, and not away.

There was no ignoring that huge, dark, beautiful bitchy elephant in the room now; I couldn’t run around with wads of stuff stuck in my ears, avoiding the topic of our shared blood (or lack thereof) and running around with the whole “HE’LL BE MY BRO FOREVER” spiel. It was depressing seeing so much of the moon in him and a shadow that I never really perceived on him before; he used to be this open book, all easily flustered ‘n stuff, but he….well, I can’t really explain it. No, scratch that, I can: I didn’t feel like I knew him anymore. Maybe I did, I dunno, and I was just being too suspicious and butt-hurt about his Ma—but at this point, Mesec was suspect and I hated it but that’s how it was.

“I…I tried looking for you,” I said (still awkward), my eyes still averted off to the side. Jeez it wasn’t getting any easier talking to people. Who even invented words? Words did nothing but make up lies and shitty policies. If everyone did nothing but grunt and shit and sleep we’d be a whole lot less screwed than we are now. Gugh. “Where…where did you go?” I chanced a glance up at him, wondering if I was still looking for a clue or maybe still looking for my Bro. Something I can hold onto and say, “Yeah, that’s him, I was dumb for ever having any doubt.”



@[Mesec]
speaking

*“I’m sorry Ros, I didn’t mean to just disappear.”*

I scuffed my hoof on the ground a little, shrugging my shoulders, my eyes shifting away from him again, forgiving him on the spot. “S’kay,” I muttered. I mean, I had actually tried to go ghost in the past, to run away from whatever huge thing that Pa and the rest of the world was trying to shackle me to. When I still believed in that shackle.

There wasn’t a chance of me keeping my composure and keeping a poker face when he mentioned his Ma. So I didn’t try; my jaw went hard and my body tensed up a little, hearing how he spent “time” with her, which wasn’t doing any good for my frayed nerves. What with the whole “suspect” thing, her being a flamboyant bitch (I should really stop knocking on her like that. But—I mean—she was guilty of being his Ma and I wasn’t completely over it yet). I took a breath; let it out; took another one, trying to find something to say that wasn’t totally incriminating, or stupid, or too harsh for this reunion. I was still happy to see him. It was the situation that was the shitty part of this equation, and come to think of it, I wasn’t even sure if he knew about any of that shit anyway.
Pfft, what am I talking about? He “spent time” with her, didn’t he? Eugh.

He said something about my Pa—asking me about him, what kind of person he was, what he was like—and I snorted and found something to latch my explosive unease on. “An asshole,” I snarled sarcastically, tossing my head a little, because it was the truth and it felt good to rant out a little about Pa. I mean, he was my Pa, but. Y’know. “He’s a smart-ass and a know-it-all and likes giving me shit to do.” Which was true, and you could say that I stomped away from Mesec out of irritation for my Pa without too much of an investigation. I wasn’t about to start spilling all the other stuff that I had started thinking about Pa, and Ma; all those nasty little suspicions that were probably gonna make it hard to sleep at night. I wasn’t here to complain to Mesec.

I took a short, deep breath, bracing myself, deciding it was time to face the thing that I needed to face. I turned back to Mesec, giving that tiny little shrug again, stammering out, “I don’t know, man…you know how it is.” I paused, jumping into cold water, “How…how was your Ma?” I gulped; then pressed on doggedly, beating down the thick, awkward atmosphere that I could almost chew, “Did she…did she say anything to you? About the…world or anything? Or the gods, or….” When it became apparent that all my words were gone, I clamped my mouth shut—and waited for the sky to fall.


@[Mesec]
speaking

Make him more like her, huh? Instantly the image of a smug, gorgeous purple mare entered my vision, preening her perfect, awful feathers in my mind’s eye with a sense of haughty satisfaction. I blinked it away because damn that’s weird and also sort of unfair—I mean, I’d only glimpsed the bitch once before in my life. How did I know that she was the stuck up, prissy, intolerable, over-confident asshole that I was portraying her to be? I wasn’t even giving her a chance, and maybe that’s because she was taking my Bro places, telling him things, teaching him stuff, trying to make him more like her.

That…was…one thing I appreciated about my Pa. He seemed prepared for both possibilities of me being useful or a complete catastrophe and he went ahead and claimed me as his daughter anyway. So I guess that’s something.

I watched the shadows swirl around Mesec, eyes wide and impressed. Guess his Ma was at least successful in making him a little more brawny. That was always a concern for me, about Mesec; he was older and too sweet and always a little on the scrawny side, like he was damp cotton or something. He had always been easy to wrestle into the mud before…

…oh shit. He asked about my asking, why I was so curious about shit I normally wouldn’t have cared for. AND he guessed it was my Pa behind my asking. I opened my mouth, closed it, opened it again…deciding on the truth because that’s all I could give my Bro. I was gonna spit shit at him. “Well…he asked me to ask…” I said hesitantly, which was true, “I mean, I’m not sure what he wants exactly…” which was also true but was pushing it a little, because there was shit going down and it was obvious that someone was behind it. But he never really said if Mesec had anything to do with it, specifically…

“My Pa…can’t see your Ma,” I confessed suddenly, in a rush, “and it’s making him nervous.”



@[Mesec]
speaking