sideways | there's something waiting for you

Title: There's Something Waiting For You
AO3: Link
Rating: G
Series: The Riders Series (Carlo Goss, Randy Goss)
Wordcount: 781
Summary: Randy introduces Carlo to his horse.
Tags: No Archive Warnings Apply, Post-Canon, Brotherly Fluff
Remarks: With this, I am officially half the archive fics for this fandom, haha. Rather proves the 'I am most likely to write when what I want isn't there' point! In this instance, I wanted future brotherly bonding and some musing about how one pulls a name out of a horse's self-image.

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The image soaks the ambient so deeply that for a moment Carlo is transported: a snow-laden mountain peak stretching towards a pale morning sky, marred only by the thin darkness of a winding trail up the ridgeline; a bright and frosty scene washed out by the sunlight cresting directly behind, sharp and blinding.

Carlo fights the urge to raise a shading hand over his eyes; settles for blinking and squinting through it until the sending fades enough for him to see the lake that truly lies in front. He rubs a thumb under his jaw and says, doubtfully, "You're calling her Mountain?"

"No," Randy says, and Randy's elbow comes swinging in, clips Carlo's hat forward over his eyes and blots the view out a second time. "Knucklehead. You fallen off your horse one time too many, wild rider?"

The scuffle is energetic, but brief. At eighteen, Randy's come into his man's frame but is a ways yet off filling it, and if someone's teaching him the kind of dirty tricks that'll leave a bruise on Carlo's inner thigh for days, well, Carlo's got a well of experience to draw on runs deeper than anyone else has earned. Randy's dramatic squawking takes a more genuine note once Carlo turns his thoughts to <cold lake, dark sticky mud> - never was one for swimming, young Randell - and pinching fingers abruptly find a reluctance to continue in the same vein.

In gracious good example to the wayward youth of today, Carlo accepts the surrender. And the seat.

"Yeah," Randy says, cheek pressed into soft earth. "I'd throw you off too if I was Spook. Toiling under this <hay baled high in a sagging wheelbarrow> chump ass."

"Who lets you talk like this?" Carlo says wonderingly, and adds, <Gangly colt.>

<Anvil in suspenders.>

<Cattle dung on forehead.>

"Who lets you!" Randy laughs.

The audience to their tomfoolery regards them with alien bemusement. Spook's keeping an eye, but Spook's a lot better these days at telling the difference between <threat> and <play>, and it's just habit that has him paying close attention. The mare has her head up in steadier regard. She flicks her ears back when Carlo meets her gaze in the direct way horses don't usually care for, but doesn't shy off or bare teeth.

Time was Carlo would have said all nighthorses looked the same: black as sin, yellow-fanged, eyes gleaming like round moons in the dark (or fierce red if the only sighting you ever got was a mural on some church wall).

Now he can pick the stockier stature, the lighter flecking on the undercoat giving her a grey sheen in the right lighting. Alpine horse all the way, meant for thin air and uneasy ground, but not typical to the herds most often seen around Tarmin Height. A traveller.

"Show it to me again, kid," he says. "But go easy, okay? Don't need them down in Carlisle dreaming of mountains."

"It'd just make 'em jealous," Randy agrees and, bless him, he does try. Carlo can feel the trying, deliberate and with no small skill; he's been learning more than dirty tricks these last few years, benefiting from the tutelage of the village riders, Ridley's calm and Callie's no-nonsense-taken, senior wisdom and junior camaraderie. Not so far off a man, really.

Carlo respects the effort by extending his own, making himself as clear and open as he can, the water in the lake and not the rocks surrounding it. The peak is still there, and the trail and the sunlight - going <up> he gets this time, though, the trail and the sun and all of it; a sense of <elevation> that swoops giddily through the stomach.

Damn complicated self-image for a horse, and speaking to a complicated mind behind it. Look at the surface and maybe you get Snowtip, or Dawn. Or Mountain, sure, if you've just never been the romantic sort. Touch it deeper, though, and-

Randy wriggles around in the dirt just far enough to shoot a grin up at Carlo, and it's breathtaking; the cheek and cheer that had been so scant for a time, quashed under soot and fist and lonely uncertainty, now beaming unabashed through the thin fluff of a moustache catching all the sweat on his upper lip, the mud on his chin. Little brother the dreamer, four years into wanting and waiting, at last coming to the notice of someone willing to take the long and patient road to the high place, clever and deliberate, seeking a gaze that refuses to stay trained meekly downward.

"Rise," Randy says. The words are muffled; the <joy> is not. "I'm callin' her Rise."