Well, I mean. I dared the bastard to hit me again. And here he was, turning to face me, bolting straight for me like he didn’t even give a fuck anymore. There’s irony in this somewhere but it flew over my head because of…well. Battle rage. Ain’t thinkin’ straight.

So he was running for me (sort of) and I was ready for it, things thumping along inside my head and my chest and everywhere, things that hurt and burned in more ways than one. He was still screaming at me and tears were gushing and there was some snot and that was kinda gross I guess but none of it affected me. Sure, a few seconds ago I probably would have felt a little squirm of guilt—I may have even stopped attacking him at this point, because you can only wax that ass for so long with no contest before it gets dull. But my jaw was throbbing too hard to let me see forgiveness, and you were in the back of my head, the laughter having long-since dried up and gone, and there was tiny rooting chiming in my skull, urging me to wreck it. You wanted to see this bro eat dirt and I was all too happy to oblige you— my cute little asshole, you.

It made it all the better that he was stepping up to the plate I was laying for him. Good. Stop running from me and get some. Something electric ran down my spine, a reverb in my bones, and it was finally starting to feel like a fight all of a sudden instead of some chumpish smackdown. He was coming for me and I felt myself gear up and lock down and I dug into the ground with my hooves and I launched myself at him and we were gonna do glorious battle—

--but I went, like, maybe three steps before a pounding in my body threw me off. I say body because it was everywhere—on my left side, where he had crashed into my chest a lot harder than I expected and there was still this sore spot that was most definitely gonna bruise later—and on my right side, a new, even more brutal pain radiating from just below my ear, right against my cheek, where it jarred my teeth and pulled tears from my right eye before I could even contemplate crying—

--and all this sort of crashed on me as I tried to get some, and the tears poured from my eye in a thick, steady stream of ow and the battle-focus that was honed on this bro suddenly shattered into a million pieces. So what really ended up happening was we were both (sort of) running at each other, him limping, me flinching with every step I took, and it ended up that he was a lot more put together than I was: he was aiming to hit me, and I was just a mess of scrambled brains and a hurting bod running right into it.

WHAM!! Again. Except now it was the right side of my chest this time, so now my whole chest was throbbing with varying degrees of ow. And since the rest of my body was going ow and I wasn’t prepped for his big ass to come crashing against me again (No, seriously, what does this kid even eat?), I was…kinda… thrown. Like, my forehooves left the ground for a second, such was the force of my weight being slammed away from him. It was all I could do to not bust my ass wholly and completely all over the ground; my legs sorta scrambled beneath me and I side-stepped away from him as fast as my body traveled, keeping up with the momentum before I lost balance. Which was harder than it sounded, because ow, ow, fucking ow everywhere it hurt to move everything but my ass at that moment.

It was like he knocked the brains out my ear, too. Because all that fire and fury I was feeling bubbling along inside my body—yeah. All that vanished. “Okay, okay, shit,” I shouted at him, and even my words sounded rattled as I spewed them. “Okay, you hit me, I’ll lay off,” I said, still side-stepping away from him, trying to get far enough away from him to get my point across. I learned that lesson a long time ago. You gotta know when to stop—you had to know how to smother the flames of battle rage— and at that point, enough was enough.





[W/C: 767
P/C: 3/3 1/1

GOOD FIGHT BRUH]



talk