You, see, my dears. I can act normal. I can pretend nothing has happened to me. I can hold normal conversations, trust stallions and be around them. But, it isn't until I reach the idea of love that one can realize my head has been twisted and broken too many times.

For, the soft comfort of a touch, the hushed whispers, and the cradling of protection - to me - is what a friend can do, possibly, if they aren't that close to you. It's the people who don't care too much, or understand what's wrong with you that think they can do something to help. It the screaming, the kicking, the tearing of flesh, the demeaning words, even the refusal to accept that you exists that proves that they love you. After all, who can really accept all that has broken you and act as if you are whole? No one. And I've accepted that. If I wanted to be loved, they would have to complain about me, to beat me, to remind me that this wasn't some fairy tale - that while they loved me I was still blind, that I had still been used.

I didn't think Alleo would ever realize that. But, he wasn't broken, so even if I cared there was nothing to beat on him about - to try and fix, to try and make seem normal. He just... he couldn't understand. I was the one too strange to be anything but a toy, one used for stag's lust as they couldn't stand to actually be with something that couldn't see them. I had accepted that, many a year ago. I'd accepted that when the one who had originally treated me right physically had wronged me emotionally. Cheating on me, using me for the power that came with my position, and then playing with the nurses on the battlefields.

It had shattered me, and he had yelled at me, beaten me. Told me it was my fault. Told me that if I could see and compliment him on the beautiful sheen he kept on his coat, the muscles that flexed and his strength that he wouldn't have to go to them. That it was most definitely my fault.

He was killed in battle not long after, but alas, he was still killed.

There was a deep frown on his face as he counted each stamp of my hoof against the ground. But it hadn't been the stallions who were the reason why I'd tried to drown him. It was the situation I was in, near the waterfall - next time it would be near a raging river. It was one stag who had kicked a tree onto me. It was that one stag who had pushed my body into a flooding river and allowed me to be partially carried downstream while I was pregnant. It was that one stallion who had left me with a miscarriage at my feet, too weak to stand. And he had been huge, strong in build. And the images had morphed Alleo into him. I had to take the only chance I'd been given to kill him! I had to! He'd done too much. He'd broken my soul, leaving me after telling me that he loved me!

He asked if three were still alive, after I had stamped my hoof three times more and I nodded my head. Yes. But only one had really tortured me, tortured me to near death. The other had just waged war on my lands, tried to kill my family and the one stag who had really cared, who hadn't ever laid a finger on me, and told me that he loved me. And the last one had held me as a prisoner of war, pretending to be my lover only to hit me, to be sarcastic, to brutalize me in front of the only child I'd ever had live come birth after 15 different miscarriages in my life. Those three were alive, and those three had been the ones who were willing to carve my heart out and serve it on a platter after watching me writhe in pain, waiting for life.

Alleo said he wouldn't let them hurt me again, his muzzle resting against my forehead as he said it in a hushed voice. I nodded my head, just a little - not wanting to move from the place I was standing, trying to be comfortable, trying to keep the memories away from both of us...