A smile breaks across his lips, curling. The child’s frown calls him unfair, cruel, and he is pleased with her, not with her but with his acquisition and the spirit with which she judges him and yet still submits. He’d come so close to killing her, once his teeth sunk against her flesh. How much smaller she had seemed once in his grasp, tender fruit he wanted to rend. The warmth of her had stayed him, the softness, the sweetness of her scent. And she had not squirmed or fought him, no tears or bleats of pain. The absence of these kept the stallion rational. His mind had raced through the possibilities and he had released her. An investment.
The defiance in her words. The voice so cold that it could be mistaken for a spector speaking through the child. He does not punish the babe, the pain he’d inflicted would still be throbbing through her tissues. No need to bruise his little one any further. She understood then, that she had wandered once and should not do so again. He does have a fleeting thought to bring teeth down on that scrunched little face and drag her to the ground but decides this too is unnecessary.
Tunnel bullies her once more with his heavy muzzle, hot breath falling against the delicate skin behind her ear. When he breathes her in once more his lip twitches to bare teeth but he only speaks, voice a deep murmur. ”Come. It’s cold.” The blue stallion does not suffer from any chill and his coat has dried, but she is too small to pass a night so exposed. He tosses his snout against the side of her small neck to push her roughly toward the shelter of a broad conifer and placing her between his bulk and the windbreak of the tree.
Once she is sufficiently sheltered, Tunnel drags his teeth over her withers, doesn’t bite, only directs and then reaches to pull her against his side with a tug on the whisps of her young mane so that she may prey on his own body heat. His touch never leaves the dark girl for long. Possessive. Dark lips pass over the place where he’d bitten her, touch just soft enough to be considered gentle. ”You will call me Tunnel.” He is no replacement parent--as if it needs to be said. ”Tell me your name.” He would not go on calling her ‘girl’, the detachment of that was rather like him but names strung webs between strangers and he would tangle her to him.
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves
as though we were drowning inside our hearts
@[shroud]
