MANY WAYS TO HURT. ( not accepting! )
@stoiicist said: ‘ have i endured loneliness with grace ? ’ idk i want these two to be friends. maybe they can be riding horses :-)
HE’D MAKE THE obvious joke, but he doesn’t think reyna would appreciate it — she did not strike jesper as the sort of woman to ask such a charged question often, or to even let others see beneath her stoic little mask. he is not going to sully this moment with an ill timed joke, even though every instinct in him that knows he is no good at handling emotions is screaming at him to make a joke and let the fear of messing up pass onwards.
thankfully, he keeps his mouth shut against that urge, and instead lets the conversation fall to a pensive silence; he drinks in the sound of the woods, the clatter of the horses’ hooves on the ground, the feeling of the breeze amid the late summer heat. reyna is an equestrian’s dream, he thinks. she had a way with all animals, but that horse — unicorn? gods, the mist got him for a second — the horse she’s on clearly adored her, and something about that made jesper feel inexplicably soft towards the otherwise stalwart praetor.
“ you do a lot of that, do you? just endure things? ” he knows loneliness, he knows it intimately. it looked like half an empty bed, and a father who hid his sobs out on the porch, late at night so the sound couldn’t be heard. it aged a body in ways time could never hope to replicate. he sees it in her, too. “ i’ll tell you what. you can’t do anything with grace if you have to endure it. fuck what anyone else says about strength coming from the things that test your tolerance for getting hurt. i think you just . . . survived loneliness, really. ”
