[ BONUS PROMPT #3 ] The Years Have Treated You Kindly

Reilly's kind of awful with faces, especially unfamiliar faces.

But they'd recognise that broad, blanket appaloosa rump anywhere.

"Ceara?" they venture.

The perfectly manicured anonymity of standard in-hand attire shatters as the person attached to that Loshenka turns around, and when a broad smile splits across her features, it registers as correct somewhere in Reilly's brain. Definitely Ceara. Who the hell manages to smile that candidly for pictures on social media, though? They're almost distracted by how impressively genuine the familiar crinkling of her nose and the corners of her eyes is.

"Reilly! Oh my gosh, hi!"

Ceara bounces on the balls of her feet like she wants to rush over, but the both of them are holding several hundred kilograms of horse and that's not a good idea, so she settles for shaking her fists a little bit and bursting out in surprised, exciteable laughter. She turns the mare she's holding to walk closer, pausing briefly to allow a harried mother towing her child on a spectacularly rotund pony to pass on the track separating them, and it gives Reilly a moment to really look at Yara.

A decade has done the mare exceedingly well, it seems. She's settled on the heavier side, as far as the Loshenka type goes. A classic hack mount, their father would've called her. Her legs are clean and straight as ever, she's been brushed to a sheen that doesn't just come from a cloth, and her eyes are clear and bright, set just as prettily as they'd remembered in the head she carries proudly with well-defined muscles.

"Hi," they breathe, and they must be grinning like a moron because when Ceara stops the mare a polite distance from Reilly and their babysitting charge, the woman stops to glance over her own horse, as if assessing the validity of Reilly's reaction.

"She cuts a pretty spectacular figure, huh?"

Held delicately in the mare's mouth is a battered, blue and orange octopus. Her top lip wiggles as she fiddles with the toy, but otherwise she stands still and quiet. She's in no rush to acquaint herself with every unfamiliar horse she could possibly cling to, and she's not searching for anything particularly familiar in the crowd of strange scents and sounds and people and horses. She's perfectly content, dropping her head to push at her handler's elbow.

Reilly can't help the chuckle that bubbles up in their throat, starry-eyed as they drag their gaze back to Ceara.

"You have no idea how chuffed I am right now."