Two syllables dance through the air, and his head follows the tilt of his ears, a smile already there on his lips, because no one calls him that name, unless he calls them friend. The wind pulls through her pale hair and carries her perfume towards his dark muzzle as he turns to greet her; her pretty face is framed within his sight a fluttering heart beat later, his own dark mane ruffled aside in a stray gesture of the wind’s fingers, and, for a while, he simply looks at her.

The reasons are twofold: for one, his heart is currently too wedged against his soft pallet to make words possible, an anxious fear stammering through his veins that this is the beginning of the end of any sort of friendship with Ranjiri at all. The other is a gentler reason; the interconnected sensation of being a part of something much larger than yourself fills him, as if he’d always been meant to walk by this spot, to find her again, and the subsequent worry of what to do next. Even the bewilderment at seeing him again and the weary grief of loss is beautiful on her gold marked face, her gold kissed forelock pale against her dark skin, tangled and perfect.

Then, he notices more than just her presence, and his heart deflates, and sinks hard and cold like a swallowed chunk of ice into his gut.

He tries to keep his glass smile in place, though it’s fractured, and shudders in the wind. His heart feels more and more like a stone the longer he looks at her, images of Kahlua and Kaj trickling through his head. This time though, he wasn’t sure he could bare the ache that would surely rise at the sight of Ranjiri, and whoever she’d chosen to be her golden knight.

So, in an attempt to escape the horribly painful, downward spiral of emotions he found himself currently enveloped in, he says something, his pale eyes clinging to her ruby gaze, instead of the wide curvature of her body.

"Ranjiri," remarks Dragomir, trying to clear his throat of the emotional warble from its usually steady depths before continuing (as poorly as it works), "I…" He looks away to blink rapidly at the distance, before looking back to her, a sigh falling from him despite his best efforts to seem unaffected. "I’m sorry."

His smile falls away, piece by piece, the resonance of his apology striking away all his facades of having not hoped she’d be there, waiting by the sea, full of annoyance with his hermitic nature, and concern, as she had always been before.

I’m a fool.

"I shouldn’t have just left again, I know," he tells his hooves, hot pinpricks biting into the corners of his eyes, and refusing to let her see, "but I… I did what I always do. I let my nerves get the best of me and I didn’t think…"

That you’d not wait for me, or that I wanted you for as long as I could have you. I never think the things that matter until it’s too late, until it’s too far, too much…

"I missed you, though," stoically manages the stallion, though the tears that press like knives against his composure, trying to disguise the breaking of his heart with a soft, weary smile. He wants to tell her how he’d thought of her every day, or how very pretty she looked with the sunlight shining on her dark coat, but to think of it now hurts, the day-glow light of a reverie reunion now shadowed by the truth of what had truly come to be.

memorablemoose & larfsalot @deviantart
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