Vadim
stallion | draft x | dunalino pintaloosa | 18hhs
Almost immediately she appears and the worried look still lingers on her face. He can see how her eyes stray from his face, no doubt looking at the sorry state the rest of him is in. She openly voices her worry, and Vadim finds it valid. He probably shouldn’t have woken up, but somehow he did. Following her gaze, he looks down at the length of his exposed side, his stomach twisting with a new fear. Just because he had woken up this time, it didn’t mean he would the next time his eyes closed.
When Arisnoe explains that she had to leave him soon, Vadim gave a quiet sound of acceptance, before laying his head down again. Daughter: that word lingered with him, even in his foggy state. It would not be their own. She was old enough to have a family of her own by now. Arsinoe had made a new family, as she should, but it still made some part of him ache at the realization of how much time had passed since he had left the Badlands.
Return?
Vadim had barely caught the last of what she had said. After accepting she would be leaving, he held little hope that he would last here much longer. The tide would rise at some point, and he wouldn’t be able to hold his head up long enough for the tides to recede. But slow to realization, Vadim raised his head again. If she planned to return, then she did not plan for him to continue lying here as he was. The pale stallion wasn’t sure if he had the strength to get up like she wanted. To even make a few steps from the lapping water, much less into the soft grass. Doubt clouded his green eyes, but he knew he had to at least try. He had always been stubborn, and perhaps that could carry him when his strength failed.
Vadim took a deep rattling breath first, as if to steady himself as well as prepare himself, he forced himself to roll upright without moving his hind leg. It shifted it from the position change, and the sharp pain was instant, but nothing like when he had tried to move it. Vadim couldn’t help the hard pull on his face that expressed the pain he felt in more than just the leg, but the rest of his body as well. It took him several more (much faster) breaths, before he slowly moved one stiff foreleg out and then the other. His left knee ached but was not cut open. A bruise that he could easily ignore with everything else he had.
He could do this, right? Yes, he could. Vadim gritted his teeth, stubborn determination across his face now, before he used both front legs to pull and his right hind to push. His battered body rose from the water and sand, but once he was standing, it was not graceful. He rocked forward and back like a freshly born foal standing for the first time. He wanted to put his right hind hoof down to steady himself, but let it dangle instead, not looking back at the odd way it rested with this new position.
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