The dark shape that had attracted Alice's attention turned to regard them, bloodied and predatory with intelligence only a bonded could possess, before turning and streaking off into the sky to leave them to their reunion. Hotaru only notes it in the back of her mind, Alice's thoughts and observations intruding on her own. Though it's amazing it happens at all, because all she can see is the ghost of the boy she'd once known - once loved, like family, with her tender heart and quiet soul - flickering in and out of the matured features in sharp relief before her. As dark as an inkstain against the pale world she belongs in, though she too is a splash of muted red in the colorless realm. But he lingers there, shocked and awkward, and she feels herself falling backwards into her skin and echoing him. Her grace leaves her, and she can feel her skin heating where he can't see but she can feel and Gods, how is she supposed to act? 

But then he recognizes her too, and the snow is still a flurry around them from her half-crazed dash towards him, and her name on his lips reminds her of evergreens and home and ancient, archaic things she'd never let herself remember. His smile is bright and sudden, and she can't help but follow, struck so off balance she's left flailing where nobody can see and nobody can know but Alice, who looks at her in equal measures of bafflement and smugness. Finally, someone to kick Hotaru off her pedestal. Who would have known it would be the shy little boy from her past? But she's smiling like she hasn't in years, bright and infectious and she almost wants to laugh because he's alive. He's here, and maybe she left and lost everyone else from those old years in the Foothills, but she has him, and maybe she can fix things this way. Settle the ghosts that claw at her hide like screeching banshees in her ears. Because already they are quiet, watching as the pair greet one another, fumbling around boundaries they don't know how to redraw. 

Until he chokes on a word she knows, one she'd toted vainly but hollowly for all that she believed it, and it's she who ducks her head against the sound of it - broken and incomplete as it was. "Thank you," she breathed, mist clouding around her pale muzzle in demure whisper. Eyes flickered up to him, smiling shyly in a way she hasn't since her foalhood. She though she'd escaped all her ghosts and the power they held over her, but...well, it seemed he would be her inevitable Achille's heel simply because he'd lived through everything that had taken the rest of her family from her. "You grew so much!" she laughs instead, because her chest doesn't feel like iron bands constrict it any longer. Nobody can judge her out here. He may not know of her bloodied and underhanded achievements, and she's free to tentatively touch and coax out the true personality hiding in shadows and chains inside her. Even she doesn't know who that person is anymore. 

It's true though, he towers over her, and though he still has boyish charm about him he's far more graceful and gracious than she remembers him being as a foal. He asks after her, and though her smile falters it does not fail. How could it? "I've been...busy," she admits with a laugh that belies how weak a word it is in comparison to everything else. "Ophelia made me Lady in her stead, when she left. It's been...an experience," she finishes lamely, and she feels so free to admit to her own weakness, to this boy that had befriended her long before she ever killed and burned the shreds of her personality and innocence and claimed the complex persona she'd become. "How have you been?" she shoots back at him, and Hotaru can't help the smile that widens back onto her face, eyes eager and bright. Had he ever even seen them? All her childhood she'd kept her forelock firmly across the pale ivory of her right eye, ashamed of the abnormality she now freely embraced. It was strange to stand proud and whole before him, no matter the shell she had stepped out of the moment their eyes had met. Mesec didn't need to know that part of her. He could have the shreds of what remained, if only because he was the last one capable of appreciating it. What little it was worth, in her eyes.