and let me kick you off a bungee

The boy startles, his form flourishing with warm colours around his head at the surprise from my harsh words. I let a satisfied smirk slide across my lips, standing a little taller.

He's tripping and stumbling over his words, an unsteady sentence spilling out in a single breath, huffing and stomping his hoof out of failed defiance. I would have laughed had I had the energy, had the need, but instead I just watch his figure madly stomp a lone foot as if to prove something to me (the point doesn't exactly get across). "Okay, chill. Don't go crying, I'm not in the mood to deal with crybabies." I'm never in the mood to deal with them (despite being one of them)— I'll keep quiet about my own unstable emotions and the raging storm of feeling brewing beneath my skin.

"How do you know that?" I lean in at his distanced figure, getting flashes of the shifting temperatures blossoming over his face. "Because, if he really cared, I wouldn't be looking like this." I lean back, thinking I should be doing something unsettling to spook him, but I can't think of much (perhaps, "take a look! Take in a whiff of the horrors of heat and infection!"). "If he cared so much, he wouldn't have let the innocent suffer, he wouldn't let monsters in." My voice hushes, hollow and haunting as I try to focus my gaping sockets on the boy (maybe this will scare him?).

I can see the visible fear, the change in colours across his canvas as he denies his youth. Perhaps I'm wrong, but from the fragile appearance of his body, it's easy to see he is still developing. "You look young." And maybe I wasn't that much older, but I still felt— powerful? In his presence, I was his superior, I was the one with the experience, with the ability to weave lies and make his impressionable mind believe anything. The excitement tickles my gut, mischief forming a twisted feeling beneath my skin.

I don't think I feel bad about him telling me his mom has left, that she's gone, whisked away by some unknown force that seems to tear apart families. It compelled my mother to wander from me, to forget that her womb ever bore such a burden, that it ever produced something so disastrous from forgotten sin. I do not feel bad for the colt, do not pity him or empathize with him— he is not special.

He deflects the question back onto me, my brows twitching at the question he spits out at me. What do I tell him? That I lost my mother to a darkness that takes only the weak minded, the broken hearted— that she did not want me, that motherhood was not a burden she could bear. I will not tell him about her insanity, about the interchangeable thoughts that control her, that turn her into a tyrant or an uncharacteristically loving mother. "She is lost within herself." I answer calmly, refusing to let any sort of worry spread through my veins. I can suck it the fuck up and deal with her abandonment, I don't need her (Apa takes care of me, that's good enough).

His head has not moved, frozen in the same position, staring, wondering— he is gazing at my eyes (or lack thereof). I can feel the weight of his gaze, can taste the question on the tip of his tongue. It is always there, no matter who I speak to, it is somewhere in the back of their mind or on their lips, it is a tense feeling lingering in the air between us as they meet empty sockets. They always want to know. "Don't look too long, you might see something truly awful."

-- @Saoirse
& a note: this was made before she was outcasted officially so im just gonna keep posting her here while she goes through the process of rejoining