until the lion learns how to write

Even the blind would be able to see your strength, Lakota. His words tease a bitter chuckle from the gray mare, but she does not resist or pull away as she might have at some other time. She didn't feel strong, or brave, or capable. She felt exhausted and sad, her heart empty and her future bleak. She didn't know how to envision a future she had never experienced for herself, or how to work towards something other than the emptiness she'd lived in for so long.

Even this, snuggling against Bacardi, felt alien to her, despite how much she enjoyed it. She kept expecting him to pull away or chide her for being clingy, and yet she could not force herself to insert distance between them. The steady rocking of his his heart beneath his painted coat was doing more for her fears than anything else she had tried, and she found herself terrified to leave him lest he, too, disappear.

He spoke of grief and she nodded minutely, the gesture tiny and silent, having sobered again. She had lost others before - her grandsire, her mother, the rest of the herd even - but this was different. Ironclad had been her whole world. He was her everything, and now he was not.

Silence followed his final words and she kept her gaze downcast for a long time, knowing the words that were trying to escape her mouth despite her frantic efforts to cage them in. The thought of being vulnerable in front of him, of admitting the truth she'd known ever since she'd left the Forest, was far more terrifying than anything else she'd ever done.

"I don't want to be alone anymore," she finally said, her words a barely audible whisper.

She didn't know what love was, or rather, what love was supposed to look like. Most of what she'd witnessed had been foolhardy adoration on the part of mares, and possessive tolerance from her father. She didn't know what it was to feel like an equal, or to have a choice in the matter. And yet, if anything, Bacardi had insisted that she always had a choice. In everything. In whether she stayed or went, in whether she spoke or not. He had always made room for her, even when all there was to her was a shell of what could have been.

"I want to be here." She said again, her voice marginally stronger, the words accompanied by a quick peek upward from beneath her tear-damp lashes. With you, she thought, but did not say. She had no idea what she was doing, but it was clear that she couldn't keep doing what she had been doing. In the absence of literally any other choice, Lakota had finally realized she needed to try something different. "If you're not too upset, that is."

young mare // Mutt // gray // 15 hh