It feels like limbo, standing before her but feeling miles and miles away from her. I don't deserve her, he states simply, and Ilaria merely sighs and unravels his braid to start anew upon it as the two pale children of the sand stare at one another in silence. There's nothing she can say to make him feel any differently, not when he'd grown strong enough to shoulder the weight of his own mistakes. He owned his depression, owned the fact that he'd disappeared into a hole, a machine that accepted tasks and reacted with no spirit. It was her job to always find him worthy, in a way. They were made as complimentary souls after all, and so she loved him eternally where he could not love himself. Such was the life of a companion. 

"Hey, Cera." They're such simple words, lacking any and all formality, and they echo his own. But he still feels wrong. She had been his friend, he had been prepared to die for her, still would regardless of how she felt for him anymore. He still had the faded scars across each of his shoulders to remember the evening, grappling with a veritable cougar to save Sikeax from its claws. But he hadn't proved that to her, with how he'd disappeared. He hadn't taken the time to tell her that she meant something to him, that she was one of the only individuals alive he could truly call his friend. Who had been from the start. She deserved a better kind of friendship than he could offer. But at least he could offer something, right?

She staggers to her hooves, and he makes an aborted move toward her, shoulder very apparently bared and wing tucking. The look in his eyes is purposeful, and though he believes she won't take the offer, he does it nonetheless. Inches forward as she talks, a bit of a hangdog look about him - Ilaria sighs softly, as if it doesn't win her over, too - and wonders if she will deny him if he tries to touch her. He deserved the sting of her rejection, at least. Especially for how her words form and grace his ears, wondering how he is, how he'd been, when all he'd given her was desertion. At least it's followed by something a bit more bitter and truthful, and his eyes flicker down towards their hooves for a moment to spare her the guilt that twists his features and locks his jaw for a brief moment. 

He can't answer the former without first answering the latter, and so he bravely lifts his head - still a child, with boyish grin and green doe eyes, but a man for how he confronts his own mistakes in the planes of her tired face - and tries to do right by her. "I lost everything for a while there," he explains softly, eyes soft like liquid evergreens. "I couldn't see everyone that was there for me, waiting for me to pick myself back up, and I'm sorry." His head shakes in disbelief at his own inadequate words, face contorting in a brief moment of self-hatred. "No...I can't really explain how badly I regret what I did. I was so far down, so deep, I couldn't see light any longer. I never should have ignored you, no matter how bad it got." His voice never trembles, and Cera accepts the weight of his own foolish mistakes without pause. Ilaria coos softly at him even as her big umber eyes turn to Sikeax, whom she'd adored since their very first meeting. They are a pair, and while Ilaria could not hold conversation with Sikeax to plead forgiveness, she still sought it in her own way even with her bridled independence. 

"You don't have to forgive me," he breathes quietly, though it hurts to imagine the possibility. "But...I'd like to try and be friends again. Properly. Even if I don't really deserve it." The rest they could figure out.