Unbeknownst to him, Loras was not the only Tyrell brother ghosting through his old haunts at Highgarden, though considreing the mood he was in, it wasn't hard to imagine that he wouldn't have noticed anyone else, at any rate. He'd started with the stables, poking around, knowing that none of the horses there were ones he'd been trained on but breathing in the familiar scent of roses mixed with straw anyway. He'd looked at the second story of the stable, where Garlan had stood years ago, bet Willas that he could swing on a long rope from one ledge to another, and promptly broken his arm. He saw where he and Margaery had carved their initials into the soft, sweet-smelling wood of the walls; he saw an early prototype of the saddle Mace had had commissioned for Willas to better support his bum knee.
When that had been too much, but not enough - a faint memory of an intense dream he had once, perhaps - he'd gone to the residential quarters of the castle. He felt bile rising in the back of his throat when he wondered where, exactly, Mormont had been staying all this time. As he got to the hall that had all the rooms he and his siblings had been raised in, he matched his boots with the tiny scuffs on the floor, caused by over-exuberant races and chases and games of tag up and down the stone.
He counted the doors on the left - one golden rose painted on the first, two on the second, and finally three - and pushed. To his surprise, though the door stuck for a moment, it swung open to allow him access to his slightly-dusty room. The room was sparsely decorated enough to remind him that he hadn't lived in this room properly since he was one-and-ten, that after that he had lived at Storm's End and then in King's Landing. Wooden practice swords leaned up against the wall, looking as if someone had just left them there and would be back to collect them for a spar in a moment.
Gauze swung in the breeze from trappings at the ceiling over his bed, and he sighed, pushing them to the side. He and Margaery had got both got those when they were younger, telling the seamstress that it was like sleeping inside a cloud. His fist tightened in the thin material, and he turned, suddenly angry at all that had been lost to him.
As he looked toward the desk, he saw a half-completed letter, his own messy handwriting's familiar slant across the page. He barely saw who the letter was to - of course him, who else would he have bothered writing to - before he was sliding the paper off the desk with reverent, shaking fingers. He couldn't bear to read more than the first line before he was folding the letter, putting it into a breast pocket to look at later. No use thinking about it now.
Only, he couldn't stop thinking about it, not even when he'd slammed the door behind him and run down the hall, adding new scuff marks to the matte floor. He let instinctual memory take over as he went down winding staircases, pushed past servants in the halls, and finally ended up outside, breathing hard and feeling as if the letter was burning a hole in his shirt. Turning a corner into a garden he remembered liking particularly well, he nearly walked into someone, a man taller than him but leaning heavily on - oh. Only one person leant heavily on a cane in their few stationary moments. "Willas," he said, sounding choked-off all of a sudden.
