Kindness and compassion had the ability to be materialized simply out of nothing, nothing at all but the whisper of wind and the ongoing sorrow of yesteryear. Lena should’ve known it, should’ve understood it, because she administered the same tenderness, the same gentleness, the same, affectionate regard each and every day, but when it was gilded, proffered, and bestowed back to her, she was often without words. Her heart clenched and coiled, distorted and contorted, in utter shambles and slivers while Raeden talked, and proposed she take it back.
 
Maybe he just lost it and he could be looking for it? It’d been a wonderful thought, and at first all Lena wanted to do was shake her head in dismay, in disagreement, for he’d been gone for almost a year, maybe more – traversing, ghosting, coasting along somewhere she couldn’t see, where she didn’t belong, and it’d taken her this long to finally understand that. His silence, his disappearance, had been deafening, a constant ringing in her ears, a din of mockery and defiance for all the things she’d thought and felt. Yet, as soon as the considerate femme extended the invitation to take it back, she was struck with confusion. What would she do with it? Would she wear it like a fallen emblem, a symbol of her lost love? Would she throw it into the unfreezing lake, where she’d first given it to him, and watch it sink to the bottom (on fields of anger, on yielding croons of defiance)? Would she simply toss it aside somewhere, let it collect dust and ash as the seasons churned, lose its sheen, its glimmer, its gloss? Her jaw clenched and uncertainty quelled, brimming and overflowing her mind with its capricious, mercurial tendencies; a part of her refused, because it’d be of better use with someone else, beautiful and incandescent, hitting the sun with its charismatic flecks and ruby stone. Then another portion of her caved, still incapable of letting go. “Would you -,” she stopped there, glancing back at the mare with ambivalence and unease; she surely didn’t deserve this warmth and concern. “Only if you wouldn’t mind.” Her smile quivered back into place, confused, perplexed, befuddled by generosity and what to do with it. A final lie clutched and clawed its way past her jaw, full of forced, forged merriment, hope, and delight. “Perhaps you’re right - I’ll find him one day and he may have it back.”