WHEN THERE'S NO ONE LEFT TO FIGHT / BOYS LIKE HIM DON'T SHINE SO BRIGHT
Toro’s dignity had been successfully stripped for the moment; he’d been reduced to a half-dead pile of meat in some unfamiliar hellscape, bleeding all over the place and continuing on out of an intense desire to not die first. Now, he slept, his mind full of wavering colors, swirling, dipping in and out, red eyelids, blue sky, flesh, scarlet, sand, vermillion, aurora borealis and off-black. There was no pain in sleep.
He dreamt of a gentle breeze; when he awoke he thought he must have imagined it but there was darkness over his seeing eye, the other encrusted with rusting blood, and a twinge of fear pulled at his chest, but he smelled mare. And she was saying, “Wake up.” The white stallion tried to sigh but whatever came out of him was hardly an exhale at all. There was a sharp pain across his flank with each weak breath, but he tried very hard to raise his head just to look her in the eye. Toro opened his mouth and closed it again, hurting, crumpled paper in the wind. He pushed himself up, determined not to be flopped against the rocks like a death-pale corpse (even if he’d always be death-pale). Something split and blood trickled from his side as he moved, gingerly, but not gingerly enough. He was too tired to groan. After a bit of shifting about Toro gave up on moving and went almost still, but he focused his good idea on the brown mare and said, ”Hi.”
On any other day he would’ve flirted and made a show of himself, flouncing around and making grand gestures and elaborately wrought innuendos. Tonight...it was not one such night.
@Isra beats
"What I say,"
What I think,
