Hiding sentiments, notions, and subterfuge had always been her specialty. It wasn’t done out of malice, spite, condemnation, or any other wretched thing, but protection and safeguarding for herself. There were too many weaknesses, too many open wounds, too many pitfalls and stumbling, faltering motions made by her essence, and she’d always presumed the world didn’t need to know. Her smiles would stretch into gallant, intrepid veneers, and her features would render her complete and whole, and her heart would crack and split between each lie, each refrain; she was certain, eventually, there wouldn’t be anything left of her but sonnets, fairy tales, and all the locked up secrets she’d left behind. One day she’d be just a pile of notes and string, lace and Chantilly, songs and sorrows, remembered for her hymns and hallelujahs, and the broken, idle laments she’d forgotten to tell anyone. It wasn’t a fine life to lead, but it had served her decently in the seasons past, when curious eyes peeked into hers and she could see the wonder, the studying, the speculation over who she was and how she’d come to be – and she’d show them, waltz beneath the sun, be kissed by the rain, spin dirges and requiems into mellifluous whims and assuaging balms, and then they’d soon be diverted, away, away, and away from what concocted and carved the careful, composed Songbird, full of love even when it was never given back to her. Necessity kept her closed and veiled, shrouded in enigmas and mysteries, painted in simplicity, coated in barbarity, drifting on the wind, along shells and shores, across tempests and forests.
 
But her heart ached again, to watch, to listen, to Alysanne do the same exact thing.
 
It was a measure of hypocrisy, she knew, to shake her head at the Pegasus femme for concealing truths and concocting deflections, deviations, and divergences. But because she recited the same lines, orchestrated the same characters, the Mender understood, comprehended, the situation, the surrounding circumstances far better than most. So while they danced around the issue, as they both pretended her leg wasn’t infected, that it hadn’t been properly attended, that a healer should have known better and done something about the gaping laceration, it was Hemlock who finally had enough.
 
He hooted at her, flew at the mangled tissue, the noxious sinew, and Lena couldn’t keep it in any longer. She bowed her head towards the owl first, an apology for allowing the production to continue, then Alysanne, who was a friend, who was a companion, who shouldn’t have been left to fester, wither, and decay. The boldness, the bravery, the stalwart portion of her took over, brows furrowed, smile drawn into a thin line. “Aly,” she uttered, a careful whisper as she drove further into the waves, dipped her crown beneath feathers and plumes, and examined the feral slash (by a horn, no doubt, she’d seen enough of the same sort after her brethren sparred). “What happened?” The fey who rarely pried, because she’d always been afraid someone else would do the same to her, lifted her honeyed, beatific gaze towards her kindred spirit, and sighed, soft and dulcet, calm and reflective. “Why haven’t you healed it?” Maybe she’d been too tired, too fatigued, to do it herself? Perhaps she’d seen to assist others in her herd first, and hadn’t had enough energy to stitch her own. “Would you like me to?”