THAT HE COULD BELIEVE
Dune was off for the rest of the night. It couldn’t come soon enough-his mind was tired from balancing trays of drinks for hours, and for some reason his stomach was feeling worse and worse by the minute. The golden paint that had been so carefully and deliberately applied before the start of the party was now a smeared mess across his left side. There were too many horses in too close quarters- he had to politely brush past so many strangers that the paint was blurred beyond all recognition. Some of it had gotten on the tip of his nose, and it glimmered foolishly in the “ambient” lighting. (lighting which, he knew from firsthand experience, was a bitch and a half to light).
Waves of nausea came and went, as did the clenching of his stomach, as he wove his way toward the exit. All he wanted was to lie down and go to sleep. The tips of his limbs felt tingling, which he attributed to some kind of jonesing for a good Dream. Later he would admit this was probably another effect of food poisoning. Or in this case poisoning-poisoning. What a god’s awful bartender- it was baffling, when they had the money to hire a professional. Scratch that, even a complete novice like Dune could probably run the bar without poisoning anyone.
He was feeling terrible. But the boy was an opportunist, and he intended to metaphorically pocket some of the fancy canapés to share with the street urchins on his walk home. A small rough-hewn bag is somewhat discretely slung over his shoulder, and into it he slips the silly, decadent foods that took far longer to make than it would to eat. Some of his favorites were the apples sliced into the shape of roses, and caramels swirled with paprika and salt and pressed in the shape of little suns- he took extra of those. And for his cats (not technically his cats, strays) he carefully swiped the few things they might be interested in.
Dune was not planning to stay for very much longer, as it would obviously look very very bad for him to be caught with a bag of stolen goods-- although was it stolen if they were free? So it was not want of conversation that made him stop by one of the guards as he grabbed a bundle of grapes and placed it into his swelling bag.
He clears his throat to catch the guard’s attention. “You’re scowling.” He comments quietly, barely audible above the din of “good music” that streams through the warm night. “You know they don’t like that.” The guards were of course not allowed to partake in merriment, so expressions of enjoyment were also unwanted. Neutrality was the name of the game, for mares and stallions of his position. Didn’t the man go to his orientation? Dune had walked past it on his way to be painted, and he had overheard a stern old mare, wizened as a grape left in the sun, rattling off a list of expectations that effectively summed up to: make like a statue.
Not that Dune was bothered by the stallion’s transgressions. He was just giving some advice, one questionable worker to another.
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That's also the thread in which he drinks poison D:)
