gooseberryhigh | HORSE CATCHING

Who: Ravinder Dhaliwal & Diego Morales
When: Tuesday, October 18. BACKDATED.
Where: The woods, during Equestrian Club.
What: Diego and Ravi are tasked with finding a runaway horse, and Diego takes the opportunity to compare and contrast stories about being lost in the woods.
Warnings: Diego's awkward.

Her name was Freyja, which Ravi had always thought was romantic. She was a sleek Granian, with a grey coat so dark it appeared black, and an impressive wingspan for her size. She was younger than most of the horses in the Gooseberry stables—younger and more prone to getting testy when handled by a careless new rider. Although, as Mr. Covington had explained it, the freshman student hadn’t been careless so much as arrogant and afraid, thinking Freyja wouldn’t understand when they’d muttered something under their breath about how she’d better not throw them. Freyja got offended very easily.

While Mr. Covington dealt with the (shaken but uninjured) freshman, he’d asked Ravi and Diego to find where Freyja had run off to after throwing her rider. Ravi had ridden and groomed Freyja a few times, but his favourite was a broad Aethonan horse named Lionheart, who by now was familiar enough to be put out when Ravi didn’t choose him. True to his name, Lionheart was brave and steady, and hadn’t even made a whinny of complaint when Diego had climbed on too. He stuck to an ambling gait as Ravi steered them into the forest, on the lookout for black wings.

“That poor freshman,” Ravi said, to make conversation. “It’s not really his fault, but he’s going to be on Mr. Covington’s stable cleaning list for awhile.”

“I guess he’ll learn his lesson,” Diego sighed. He was politely holding onto the saddle and not Ravi, because this was weird enough without him pawing anyone’s hips. He’d ridden double with family, but this was a little different, especially in light of how much thinking he’d been forced to do recently.

Ravi and Cecil really needed to start dating someone if they weren’t going to date one another.

Diego stared out into the forest instead of at the nape of Ravi’s neck, as the first few minutes of analyzing that had not returned a sufficient answer to ‘Is this a gay feeling or am I just uncomfortable being this close to a guy?’ Luckily, there was something else to focus on. Something else uncomfortable, embarrassing, and potentially a figment of his anxious imagination.

“So I remember hearing you sometimes get lost in the forest,” he blurted out, completely without context.

Ravi’s hands stilled on the reins. “What?”

Non sequitur or not, it didn’t take Ravi much time to figure out what Diego was talking about, thanks to Rosy Stoker bringing up his orientation day flub once again. It wasn’t a big deal, he knew—everyone seemed amused over the mistake now, even the freshmen, but Ravi couldn’t help but still feel embarrassed. Getting all the new Ribbonfin students lost in the forest on the first day was just going to be his legacy this year, in addition to breaking curfew, attending drunken parties and kissing his friends’ ex in front of everyone.

Why was he thinking about that? Well, fine, the why was obvious. Ravi and Diego had acted completely casual about it in the month since (as Ravi understood, Diego kissed many people during Grotto parties), and Ravi no longer felt awkward around him. But it was a chilly October day, and while they weren’t really touching right now, Ravi could still feel Diego’s warmth radiating against his back.

All besides the point. “Ah yes,” Ravi said after a moment, sounding rueful. “I get lost once and, thanks to the school rumour mill, it becomes a full-blown habit.” He checked over his shoulder, making sure Diego could see his smile and know he wasn’t annoyed. “Are you worried, Diego? I promise Lionheart has a much better sense of direction.”

“No, no,” Diego dismissed quickly. His eyes dodged meeting Ravi’s. He barely looked at the reassuring smile.

“I was just wondering what happened,” he continued, faux-casual. “Was it—”

Diego paused, suddenly self-conscious. He’d said he would gather information, but what would the point be if it just made Ravi think he was incompetent in the woods? Diego was good at about three things, and he didn’t want to let go of his reputation in any of them.

But he had promised to ask. Levi and Cecil wanted to start an investigation, and the least Diego could do was be a moderately useful third wheel. ‘You’re not a third wheel,’ Diego heard an imaginary version of Levi insist. Whether or not that was true, Diego couldn’t come back to them empty-handed, or with lies about how he’d asked and learned nothing. Diego pretty literally couldn’t lie to them, if for no other reason than he was terrible at it.

“Weird,” he finished awkwardly. “Did it feel weird?”

For a moment, the only sound was their horse’s hooves clopping on the forest loam. Diego was normally so bright and effusive, and there was something strange about his tone, enough to make Ravi tilt his head and give it serious consideration. “Weird,” he repeated softly. The incident had been easy for everyone to laugh off, but ‘did it feel weird?’ was a question which took on different significance at Gooseberry High.

“You know, I did the exact same tour last year. No one wants to do all the freshman outdoor orientation, not even Ribbonfin prefects. A big circle around the Oak, with the shortcut from the Sorting Cave to Rattlesnake Trail. You know it.” Ravi pulled lightly on Lionheart’s reins, guiding them around a fallen log. “I was explaining to them all the differences between the houses and the history of sortings and the area the cave is in, and I kept turning back to face them as I talked. I wasn’t concerned. I’d taken that shortcut dozens of times.

“Except… it wasn’t the shortcut.” Ravi frowned. “We were just going in a straight line. But suddenly, I looked back ahead of us, and I didn’t recognize the woods anymore.”

Diego tightened his grip on the saddle as the horse turned. He wasn’t liking where this conversation was going.

There were rare, strange moments where he acutely hated attention, and when Cecil and Levi had found him, that’d been one of them. That gross part of himself had loved it when Cecil hugged him hard enough to nearly lift him off the ground, even as Diego had whined and insisted he’d just gotten confused. He hadn’t wanted to make a big deal about it, because the sooner they let it go, the sooner he could dismiss the whole thing. There was no need to linger on how weird it had felt, or how weird he had been acting for the last month.

“That happened to me once.” Diego didn’t sound happy to admit it. “It was at night, though, so maybe I just couldn’t see anything.”

“Had you been drinking?” Ravi’s tone was honestly curious rather than judgmental, but he shook his head anyway as he realized how that sounded. “I’m sorry. I mean, I suppose that’s possible? But… you know the concept of a ‘gut feeling,’ right? Scientists obsess over trying to study the mechanics and accuracy of intuition, to varying success, but they do agree it’s often better to ‘go with your gut’ than not at all. As we grow older, we’re taught to rely on logic and doubt our impulses, but if you think about it, there’s really no such thing as a purely rational—”

Ravi broke off as Lionheart suddenly spread his wings to jump down a small incline, and laughed when they landed again.

“Listen to me go on. Sorry, sorry! I simply meant to say: you’re not exactly inexperienced at navigating the forest in the dark, right? So what does your gut tell you now: that you simply got lost, or that something weird really did happen to you?”

The jump made Diego sway precariously, his chest rocking into Ravi’s back where he stayed for a moment as he regained his balance. He’d been too distracted by Ravi launching into another explanation to brace himself. That voice so measured but excited, pulling Diego along with it. Diego tried to listen carefully, eager to understand and impress, only to have the rug pulled out from under him. It left him without a chance to prove himself, and instead the faintest ghost of worry. Every single time, Ravi would stop and apologize, like he was anticipating boredom. Or maybe he just thought Diego wouldn’t get it. To be fair, he usually didn’t.

What he did get, though, was that very specific fear. That fear that with every word coming out of your mouth the other person was less and less interested in what you were saying.

“You’ve got to stop that,” Diego pressed, unable to resist going back to this thought. “Every time you start explaining something, you tell me how sorry you are, and you don’t finish your thought. You don’t have to, you can keep going. I’m listening, I swear.”

Ravi checked over his shoulder at Diego, and gave a slight, forced laugh. “Oh, you know,” he said, trying for lightness. “No one likes to be lectured to.” He leaned forward to lay a reassuring hand against his horse’s neck, and had to bite his tongue against the impulse to say sorry again. It was awkward to have this conversation with Diego behind him. Usually, he could just smooth over these moments by smiling brightly and making a joke, and people would see it was fine and not a big deal at all.

But usually, people didn’t point out Ravi’s faults so baldly. Maybe Sun-mi or Rafael might, but that was different; he expected them to be blunt with him, in their own affectionate ways. Diego was nothing like them. There was nothing pointed or challenging in his words, only open honesty. Ravi’s reassuring pats became fussy, enough that Lionheart tossed his head in irritation and insisted they continue on. Ravi gave him the rein.

“Sorry.” He almost laughed again, embarrassed at how deep the need to always apologize went, but resisted. “I was actually thought something like that when the shortcut changed. Something like… ‘That’s what you get for trying to be a know-it-all, Ravi.’ Like it was the forest’s way of telling me to not speculate so much on things I only knew from books.” Ravi didn’t want to talk about this. “I tried to stay calm. It was my first time seeing it, but I’d heard about things like this happening when you leave the trail. No one ever gets lost forever. I tried to act like we were still going the right direction, but then five minutes became ten minutes, then fifteen, and… ah, if Nate hadn’t found us, I don’t know how long we would’ve stayed lost.”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Diego murmured, and leaned an elbow on Ravi’s back jokingly, propping his chin on his hand as though in deep thought.

“It does sometimes feel like the forest has an opinion, doesn’t it?” he asked, surprised to find he was actually thinking hard about this. He remembered how disconnected he’d felt, watching Levi and Cecil’s backs. Their hands intertwined. Their happy voices, the way Cecil’s shyness was warming to what might have been interest. Diego saw what he was giving up, and what his friends were gaining. Just like Ravi worrying the forest wanted to shush him, Diego wondered if the forest wanted to finish the job and pull him away completely. Like it heard, somehow, that he didn’t want to be there. It sounded ridiculous, though. It was just the way the woods made you feel sometimes.

“The desert feels so impassive compared to here,” Diego continued, lost in thought. “It doesn’t care if I’m lonely.” Awkward pause. Shit. “Or happy, or if I need to think, or want to show off by pretending I’m an expert.”

“Do you prefer that?” Ravi knew Diego was teasing him with the elbow, and he stayed perfectly straight-backed, not trying to push him off. It was too easy to lose himself in Diego’s meandering thoughts, especially when this Diego was so different from the boy Ravi usually met at parties and in class. He sounded so… serious. “I don’t know anything about the desert. For me, it’s either home, or big cities like New York or London, or here.”

He gestured around them, smiling as he turned his face up to look at the sunlight filtering through the leaves—still green, although not for much longer.

“I love it here,” Ravi sighed. “I know sometimes it can be… unsettling, but I love that the forest isn’t impassive. Even when you think it’s quiet, it’s not. It never is. So many things alive, seen and unseen, and everything has a voice. I went to Ilvermorny, which is an actual wizard castle hidden in a cloud, but here… I swear it’s even more magical here.”

Diego laughed nervously, and not because of any fear of the woods. Ravi was a nerd, he thought affectionately. Diego was also prone to waxing poetic, but he kept it in songs and out of his speech. At some point he always made it sound pretentious rather than deep. Ravi, on the other hand, made it sound passionate. Diego thought he saw a brief glimpse of the Ravi with whom he’d had that strange fake conversation at the Grotto.

“Yeah,” Diego agreed, clearing his throat and moving his arm off of Ravi’s back. “Although I kind of prefer it when it’s just being a little strange. The quirky things, you know? Sometimes it gets…” Diego gestured vaguely, even though Ravi couldn’t see him. “So last week I was out with some friends. We were being good and staying on the trail. We didn’t litter, we weren’t being assholes. We were doing everything right.”

“I’m sensing a ‘but,’” Ravi said teasingly, but his face sobered again when he glanced back over his shoulder. Lionheart never liked when his rider got distracted, but Ravi couldn’t help but keep wanting to look at Diego—the way his hands fluttered when he talked, how he smiled crookedly whenever he stopped after a sentence.

He forced his eyes to focus ahead. Covington had sent them out here with a job, and Ravi could multitask. “This is when you got lost?”

Diego confirmed both of the things Ravi said with a quick “Yeah.” He’d tried admirably hard to not be too melodramatic at the time, but that was always a difficult note to hit, and Diego was not someone who could suffer in silence for very long.

“I fell behind for a second and it was like,” Diego paused, forcing himself to think about something other than Cecil and Levi’s blossoming romance. “I lost sight of them. I thought they’d gone around a corner, so I hurried to catch up but no one was there. I thought I’d started walking in the wrong direction. I had no idea where I was.”

Ravi wondered who it was that had been walking with Diego. He could guess, but “some friends” for Diego counted almost the entirety of senior class, and a large number of juniors. “That sounds familiar. Not that I was alone, but that same sense of… disorientation.” Ravi leaned forward, looking for any movement ahead. “How did it feel? I mean, did anything feel strange when it happened?”

“Not that strange. It was remarkably mundane, aside from not making any sense. I guess,” a pause, “the timing was a little on the nose. I was feeling left out of the conversation.” Diego’s voice was careful as he edged closer to the truth. He didn’t know Ravi well enough for this. Really, he only knew two people well enough for this, and they had both sunken to the bottom of the ‘heart2heart’ list with alarming speed.

“At first I thought they’d forgotten about me,” he elaborated, still in a measured tone, “and hadn’t realized I wasn’t there anymore. I didn’t even hear them calling for me.”

“Diego…” If they were standing face to face, Ravi might’ve touched him on the shoulder or arm now in an attempt to be reassuring. Instead, he put a hand on Diego’s knee—a quick touch, but with the slightest squeeze before letting go. “Did it feel deliberate? I’m sorry, that’s a strange question. Not your friends, of course. I’m sure they didn’t mean to leave you out. I only mean…” Ravi didn’t want to name the forest specifically. It was oddly like bad-mouthing an old friend. “Did it… feel like something that was supposed to happen?”

Diego tensed when Ravi put a hand on his knee. The moment ended quickly, but Diego was already not enjoying this new development where casual touches from some boys had become heavy with implications. He really needed a second opinion, but options were limited, and he’d learned his lesson about looking for help from his classmates while anonymous. Had he actually followed anyone’s advice? Diego quickly reviewed his success rate.

Accept yourself, and be okay with your new sexuality: Nope.
Be honest with the person you love and stop matchmaking him to escape your own feelings: Messed that up too.
You’re good enough for him, and should go for it: Definitely not.

Luckily, Ravi was there to distract him with an amazingly bizarre question. Ravi couldn’t see his face, but Diego knew his surprise and confusion was evident.

“You’re right, that is a strange question,” he agreed, growing more curious than outright confused, finally ending on a teasing note. “Do you think the forest should have kept me? Maybe it did and I’m a changeling.”

Ravi laughed. “Frightening thought, but I suspect you’re too old for most child-snatching supernatural beings. Or at least… you would be in the Muggle world? I read something once about how the changeling tale might’ve taken hold because impoverished peasant families needed a justification for infanticide. One of the tell-tale signs of a changeling baby was this endlessly ravenous appetite, and when a family had scarce—”

He broke off, but not because he’d realized he was rambling again. Lionheart had slowed down, his head now following a sudden movement up ahead: a lean dark horse with beautiful wings now spreading wide as she launched herself into the air to escape her pursuers. Ravi pulled on the reins automatically, turning their horse in Freyja’s direction, and reached back again, this time to grab Diego’s hand and tug Diego’s arm around his waist.

“Hold on tight!” Ravi ordered. He leaned forward, and Lionheart leaped off the ground, flying fast after the other winged horse.

Diego was always astounded seeing one of the horses take flight. His mind always wanted to time the confident spread of those wings with some sweeping crescendo, but nothing he wrote ever quite captured it. This was why he was so shocked when Ravi grabbed his arm, and Lionheart lifted onto his back legs.

And then they were airborne, and Diego had no room to worry about any discomfort besides how unbalanced and vulnerable he was. The ground was falling away from him, and he didn’t even have the comfort of a saddle. There was just Ravi, who he clung to with both arms, as alarmed laughter shook his chest. One lucid thought crossed his mind: Ravi was a ridiculously risk-taking rider.

Ravi trusted Lionheart with his own life. He’d never had a taste for broom sports—the brutality of Quodpot in Ilvermorny had quickly cured him any fascination with flying broomsticks—but he still remembered the first time he saw Gooseberry’s stable of winged horses. He’d always loved horses, the whole romantic image of a knight atop his noble steed, the hero and his most faithful companion rushing into battle as a team. Lionheart was only the second horse Ravi had ever ridden in his life, and it had been love at first sight. There was nothing he would ever do to hurt Lionheart, and he knew the reverse was true.

He held onto Diego’s arm until he was sure that Diego was holding onto him, and Lionheart flew smoothly, not letting either of them be jostled from his back. Freyja’s wings flapped again once she cleared the tall trees of the school’s surrounding forest, but she was playing, enjoying being chased. Ravi laughed, but his was less alarm and more exhilaration. He could feel his horse under him, also wanting to break loose.

Ravi let him. Lionheart cut through the air as though he had no riders at all, much less two nearly full-grown teenage boys holding onto his back for dear life. In a minute, he’d caught up with the other horse, and their wings buffeted each other, fighting for space. “It’ll be okay!” Ravi called back to Diego, and then it was, as Lionheart finally moved ahead of Freyja and urged her to return. The Granian tossed her mane, and assented. The boys followed her down to a little clearing in the woods, and there was a hard thud underneath them as Lionheart’s hooves hit the ground, all power and rock-steady confidence.

Diego let out a loud sigh of relief, which turned into a wheezing cough as he quickly let go of Ravi. His heart was beating loudly in his ears, and though he hadn’t been the one doing the work, he felt out of breath.

“Give a guy a little more warning next time,” he said shakily, but there was still the ghost of laughter in his voice. “I think I saw my life flash before my eyes, and it was embarrassing.”

Ravi patted his horse’s neck to let him know he was dismounting, and smoothly dropped off the side, landing in high grass. He handed the reins over to Diego. “Next time, I promise. I’m sorry,” Ravi said sincerely, but he was grinning when he looked up, his hair wind-blown and his face just as flushed. “But I knew I wouldn’t drop you.”

Ravi stepped away to catch Freyja, who was idling nearby, apparently satisfied about the amount of trouble she’d caused this afternoon.

Diego gratefully moved forward on Lionheart and into the saddle, finally feeling secure and less pressured by Ravi’s nearness. Lionheart was not his horse, but the two of them had an affectionate understanding. Diego leaned down and briefly touched his forehead to Lionheart’s mane, a silent sort of thank you. It was a good cover for not having anything clever to say in response to Ravi.

HORSE CATCHING

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