My whole body tensed as the silver horse joined me on the sand, shifting and scooting their body until it was all but under my own, touching mine in a way I had not prepared for. I flinched away at the contact, and untucked one pale limb as if to rise, but abandoned the thought before it finished. I didn't think I had enough energy to get back up and reposition myself. Eventually, the leftover tension from the flinch that I had held - my muscles quivering like jello against their quicksilver body - gave way, and I melted back into the sand and consequently into them. I tried to let myself be grateful for the warmth and support of their body after the frigid swim, but it was hard to relax when every one of their breaths set my skin twitching.

It wasn't that I didn't want to make friends. I had always wanted to belong somewhere, but wanting was as far as I had ever gotten. On the rare chances the stablehands had tried to introduce me to the big herd, they always had to quickly rescue me from one thing or another. The first time, the herd's boss mare had attempted to prove her dominance, and the second time, I had stepped (unknowingly) between a gelding and his best friend. Both excursions had left me sheltered in a corner awaiting rescue.

They had even tried to give me a round pen of safety in the midst of the herd's pasture... but that really just became an exercise in staying as far away from the edges as I could get. All in all, I'd given up. I didn't know what I was doing wrong, or how I was supposed to communicate and had simply come to accept that most other horses either hated me or intended to harm me. And those few, rare exceptions I had found were very rarely ever dominant enough to protect me when bad things began to happen. I was slowly starting to accept that the spotted stallion and his silver companion were not out to harm me, but it still felt like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. For them to grow tired of my inability to understand or communicate and retaliate in some way.

Huts your num? My ears hooked back at the sound of their voice and I craned my neck so that I could look back at their face. It wasn't so much the words themselves but the intonation that alerted me to some form of a question, and I frowned beneath the expectant silence that followed.

The harsh sound of the spotted stallion's rebuke came almost immediately, and I jumped at the abrupt sound. I oriented my head in his direction, afraid that I had somehow done something to earn his ire and lowered my head submissively, but his gaze was not on me. I followed it back to my quicksilver pillow, expecting to find a similarly angry emotion on their face. Instead, I found their gaze locked on me, and my skin twitched beneath the weight of that look.

Eyem Anathema. The words were still gibberish to me, but given the expectant pause that followed and the careful, pointed pronunciation, I began to wonder if this wasn't some sort of introduction, albeit without the pinned ears that I was accustomed to. I stared at their mouth as their stalemate unfolded, my own eyes still fixated on the charcoal smudge of their lips as if by osmosis alone I would be able to learn the shape of that name in my mouth.

Hartbrayk. I turned at the sound of his voice again, my ears oscillating between the two of them. This time, the spotted stallion's voice was not bitter with censure, but still stiff somehow, and I peeked up at him, aware of the weight of his expectant expression on me. I watched wide-eyed and silent as he lowered himself to the ground in front of me, and found the tension along my shoulders and back - muscles held tight in case I needed to lunge to my feet to escape - finally loosen. I stopped holding myself so stiffly away from the silver creature behind me, and tucked my hind legs in a little more closely to my body.

Eyem Heartbreak. Again, it sounded like an introduction, and now with the same given context as the one the silver horse - Anathema - had used. Surely, they had to be introductions. Again, my gaze fixated on his mottled lips, trying to memorize the way that they had moved to form the sounds that he had used.

Yu got won? Like Anathema's had earlier, Heartbreak's voice rose into a question and while I could not understand the words themselves, I was catching on to the implication. The trouble was whether or not I'd be able to actually give them what they were asking for. I could feel the shyness heating my cheeks and trying to paralyze my tongue, but I fixated my gaze at a particular spot on Heartbreak's chest instead of his face and tried give them what they wanted for the sake of the kindness they'd offered me so far.

"Eyum," I began, surprised to even hear the faint, squeaky whisper made into real sound. It was no louder than the creaking of a tree branch; likely inaudible in the light of day when all other stimuli rendered it invisible, but important here, now, as if they were all laying in bed, listening to a tree outside their window shifting in the wind. I winced at the pull on my throat, the feeling tight right up behind my jawbone, and while I considered trying the first sound again to make it clearer, I was not confident in my own abilities. My tongue darted out to lick my lips in preparation of my actual name. I had never spoken it aloud in my life, but I had heard it - and a thousand variations of it - from every manner of human that walked past my stall door.

"Bunnnn," the sound caught in my mouth, and my brow clouded as I fought my own body to push the rest of the word out. "Nnnnny," I finally managed, swallowing reflexively the moment my lips touched again. My gaze lurched upward to Heartbreak's face again, entirely unsure of what to expect despite the flighty triumph racing through my small body.

homeless . loveinspired