His alarm at my words made everything worse. The sharpness in his words and the alarm in his actions—that snap to his head, that tightness in his face—well. It made the danger of this thing a little bit more real, like I wasn’t being some paranoid freak by being so afraid of it. Here was a dude, real bro, a huge, broad-chested motherfucker getting chills about this huge cloud of doom. He didn’t even bat an eye at Funkmeister on the beach, who was even larger with half the brain cells—yet this was something that was rocking him. Well, it was rocking me well and truly anyway, and his added anxiety didn’t help that. Because this was something I was supposed to be fixing, wasn’t it? Wasn’t that…wasn’t that a thing I was supposed to do? I’m not even sure anymore; the punch line’s getting lost in translation. All I knew was that there was a terrified bastard looking me in the eye and I didn’t know how to fix it, I didn’t know how to fix the world, I never knew, and now it probably wasn’t going to even matter anymore because we’re all gonna die really horrible deaths. Because I didn’t know.

My breathing became shallow; he stared me down right to my iris but I looked away, my cheeks stinging and my eyelids drooping in that heavy way I hated and my throat catching as my breathing stopped existing. Then he said Hush and did that thing, you know, that thing adults do when kids fall down and fuck their shit up and they’re holding back hiccups and trying not to embarrass themselves any more but Ma understands, she knows you too well NOT to understand, and she just comes up to you and draws you close and soothes that jitter in your breast and goddamn it Snowball was doing it now and I swear I was gonna lose it at that moment. I couldn’t even look his way because if I moved my eyeball something would fall out. And that would be terrible.

*"We'll figure something out."*

“Hmph,” I said through my lips, not letting the hiccup out; I dipped down away from his muzzle where it touched my cheek, letting that clinging tear fall on my leg and wiping the dampness off of my face on my knee. Then I took a deep, shuddering breath, trying to blow away that thing that was still catching in my throat. I was mostly successful; when I finally looked back at Teeny, my voice was steady and my eyes were decent, even if they were a little bloodshot. “That’s easy to say,” I said; my voice was still kinda thick but I’d just have to deal with it, “I dunno, maybe you have some great idea up in your noodle or something, but I…” I shook my head; I snorted in my frustration and stomped a hoof, because I hate being lost. It sucks big ones. “I’m not a genius, I can’t fix anything for shit,” I said, trying to force some humor in my tone to hide the husky quality to it, “I’ve been like that as far as I can remember. I’ve gotten my dumb ass stuck to a tree once and if I wasn’t for my cou—“

FUCK.

FUCK.

FUCK.

FUCK.

Breathing wasn’t a thing anymore. The grove didn’t matter. The gentle lapping of the waves kinda died and Teeny shriveled up in some black hole and was never heard from again. He didn’t exist. Nothing existed. Nothing but the realization crushing everything inside me, putting me in a strangle hold, squeezing the life out of me drop by drop. I was dying. I was being suffocated.

I turned and ran back where I came. Whatever fear I had for the black cloud—that clinging, desperate fear that ashamed me, that humiliated me and threatened to reduce me to tears—was gone. Vanished. Vamoose. There was a new terror in my breast now, and I shot from Teeny back into the trees.

Back where I left Jiji.

Because FUCK.

FUCK.

FUCK.

FUCK.

FUCK.


@[Mauja]
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