That was the second desert I had ever seen in my life, the scene of a violent storm that welled inside me, a brutal battle that waged in my mind, determining once and for all what was the shittiest place to be. On one hand, this desert didn’t have sand, and that was always a plus to be considered. On the other hand, it was still cold and still shitty, except now there was wind too and I used to think the wind and I were bros but fuck that mess if it means cold gets to toddle around with us third-wheelin’ n’ shit. I did not sign up for that.

So anyway, yeah. Pa’s herd wasn’t up here, which probably meant I missed it. Figures. He would put his herd at the most a) awful place on earth that’s b)the most incredibly difficult to access. The snow swirled around me and I swear the wind was chuckling at me, or maybe it was Pa again, whatever insubstantial ghost-Pa that happened to haunt me at that particular moment. That happened sometimes. Ghost-Pa would just chill somewhere above and behind me, laughing at me and whatever fucked up situation I found myself in—and no it wasn’t all in my head, you can just shut up, gosh. Shit man. I was struggling.

I needed to fight something.

But there was literally nothing, not even a tree to break the wind or a body to try and pummel. Just me and this empty wilderness pretty much made up of nothing but shrubs and freezing. I sort of trudged my way onward, keeping north, knowing it was stupid of me to try and penetrate a place where I didn’t know where I was going. Five-hundred paces, I told myself, gritting my teeth against the bitter wind whipping at the tender still-healing skin of my face (shit man, isn’t it spring?!). Five-hundred paces. I’d go five-hundred paces and if I hadn’t found anything by then, I’d let myself turn around.

One….
Two….
Three….
This is really shit-ty

….

One-hundred-fifty-six…
One-hundred fifty-seven…
One-hudred-fifty…..what?

I stopped in my tracks, my eyes watering as the wind slapped them—but I was sure I saw something up ahead of me. No--someone, it was a person and not a snow-horse, like I thought originally. Wait…was it a person? Because it was freezing and the wind was merciless and they were just…

…standing there?

“Hey!” I said, springing into a spry trot to catch up with them. “HEY!” I called louder, trying to get their attention, see if they were alive, anything. I wouldn’t have normally cared, but it was alarming, y’know? I mean, with the wind and the cold and everything, I didn’t really have any clue what I was walking into—what sort of frozen hell I was wandering towards.





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I hadn’t given it any thought before, but my eyes were really starting to bug me then, more than ever. Maybe it was something about the burning or the FIYAH or whatever but my vision was all sorts of constantly fucked up. I didn’t used to have to blink several times for an image to clearly hit my retinas; there was a fuzzy halo over everything that smudged it into everything else, making it blend into a void of colors that made no sense until I fluttered my lids.

The point was that this white bastard was a person I had had trouble seeing before, mistaking him as my Ma at one point, seeing him in the shadows and still letting his image elude my grasp. And now that we were standing in a word of literal whiteness it made everything hella harder, almost ridiculously so. I kept walking towards him, knowing that that wasn’t simply just some outcropping of ice and snow that was piled awkwardly in the clearing to resemble life (there’s irony somewhere around here and I ain’t equipped to catch it).

But then it was screaming at me tortured things, icy things, and I didn’t even catch it coming, and I stopped so hard my feet sorta slid in the ice a little bit, but goddamn it what was that? My heart leapt into my throat and some newfound instinct jumped to action, demanding a fight. In fact, the only reason I wasn’t jumping in to beat whole-sale ass was because he stopped short, seeing me I guess, amending himself. Whatever man, I still looked at him with a raised brow, a wide eye, and a hammering heart. I leaned away a little from him, standing in the snow and the whipping wind, wondering what the hell I had walked into.

Then he called me Loudmouth.

“The hell I am!” I sorta screeched in a cracked, weak voice, floundering a little to try and make sense of the situation. Could you blame me? I wasn't the one screaming at people sneaking up on me, shouting things that don't make any kind of sense (in this situation at least). The name was familiar—no, scratch that, it was more than just a memory. In my mind, an image of a moon-soaked night flashed before my eyes, where there was a bunch of shitty sand piled all over the place and something huge dark and scary that lingered somewhere in there ( I wasn’t about to think about the Abominable Shitman that still stalked my nightmares sometimes with his funky-ass spit dripping everywhere). And there was even more darkness, something even worse than that guy we’re not talking about, a darkness I had fled from so many stupid, shameful times and that I had let my poor Jiji be devoured by.

I remembered the fear I had felt—how so very afraid I was, how it had eaten me from the inside, munched all over and left all kinds of painful sores in its wake. And I remembered this guy--this guy--and how he followed me even though he didn’t need to; how he offered some sort of bumbling comfort that went miles and miles further than he probably suspected it did.

“Teeny,” I said, softer now that my heart was starting to calm down and it appeared he wasn’t going to actually try to rip off all of my face. I lifted my head a little, blinked my eyes some so that I could see his face see those really really blue eyes I remembered he had. They were bright; it was pretty easy to see them, bright as they were, too bright but I didn’t actually catch that part at the time. Honestly I was feeling a hot prickle of embarrassment and shame, because I didn’t know the bastard’s name, and I wasn’t entirely sure if it was considered polite at this point to ask for it now.

“…what are you doing?” I suddenly asked, stronger this time, because now that my discoveries were catching up to real time I remembered this guy had just been standing here doing nothing in the freezing cold. From what I had seen of him, he was a sensible sort, or at least he faked the funk pretty well—so what caused this complete 180? “Who—who died?” He has said something about the king being fucking dea—or something. And if his screaming were any sort of indication, then he was hurting over it—or panicked, or angry, or something super emotional that I didn’t know how to handle. So I…I dunno.

I looked at him funny, I guess.

“What’s going on, Teeny?” Softer.






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Of course not he says, kinda dry and snooty, his face saying different things and his point getting across as clearly as you please. Smart ass.

I coulda shot back to him that at least I wasn’t the one standing around doing nothing of my own volition, that I was sent here by some divine bullshit and yeah, maybe I did take a wrong turn somewhere, but I was still trying to get something done whereas he was….he…

…was crying?

It was so smooth that I didn’t even notice it—I mean, for all I knew, his eyes were just glittering like they usually did, like ice shards set against his face, or whatever. But no, those were honest to god tears welling up in his eyes, sliding down his face quiet like shade, because he wasn’t sobbing or sniffling or doing any of that nonsense. He was just looking down at me like he was just as glad to see me as I was to see him—but he was crying, just letting the tears fall, like he didn’t care, or he couldn’t help them and there they just were.

I opened my mouth—and it kinda stayed open, gaping stupidly as I took in the blurry sight, understanding finally exactly what I was seeing. The guy was wrecked. And I’m not talking like he had come off worse in a fight. It was more like he was…worn down than anything, what with the roughness in the lines in his face and the shadows underneath that sad, sparkling eyes, like there was something sitting on his shoulders that was too goddamn heavy but it was bound to him with chains and there was no way he could put it down somewhere and sit his ass down for a minute, jeez.

I didn’t know what to do (well, that’s new). No, really, I didn’t know what to do. Because this guy—I remember how this guy was just there once, at this shitty place with a whole bunch of shitty sand and a shittier individual and this guy had been the sense in that jumble of a mess. He had been whatever could pass as an anchor in that turmoil of idiocy—and if it wasn’t apparent then, than it sure was right after that, when the darkness came and I fled like the chicken-shit I am sometimes and he was there running right along with me, not really pissing himself like I was but there to offer something to me, like a shoulder to cry the nervous-tears that I was doing my damnest to keep from him.

I know how it feels to suck up tears, man. I know how it feels to have the world crashing down around you and you feel like shit-- no, like filth, that you’ll never get anywhere and you were pointless and everyone who had high hopes for you is just gonna walk off feeling disappointed, like the movie they had paid to see got 2 stars out of 5 and it was full of lots and lots of explosions but there was barely any sense to the plot and it wasn’t worth the cost of admission. When someone looks at you and you notice a shadow flitting across their eyes, like you’re reminding them of something they’d rather not remember, an embarrassing night that was supposed to stay in Vegas but now it’s following them around, sucking their teat and cussing all over the place and causing more trouble than she’s worth and calling them Ma—

Um…uh. Hmm. Well.

The point is, I know what it feels to feel like shit. But I’ve never been so tired before, because I’m young, only like 2 3 years, and I haven’t been around enough to be so tired of whatever failure was creeping up on me that day. And it was that moment I realized how much of an enigma Teeny actually was to me; I didn’t know his name, I didn’t even know how old he was, and he was telling me that the King he used to be was dead (I was still gaping, like that helped any). The King he used to be.

This motherfucker used to be a King!

Used to was the key phrase. Used to. He was old enough to have had a kingdom and lost it; he was old enough to have lived with that particular failure long enough to weigh him down, cause his face to become rough and for shadows to form under his eyes; he was old enough to let his tears fall, because he was weary and he was ”falling apart” and I didn’t know what to do but here was a man who was catastrophe walking and his broken voice and the tears dripping down were the least of his problems and I was the only warm body in so many square miles of frozen nothing that gave a damn that the tears he cried were gonna start freezing on his face if he let ‘em.

I’d…never felt so small before.

“Hey…” I said softly, clearly at a loss, thinking I had to say something or one of us were gonna explode, “Hey…guy….” It was my failed attempt at being comforting and I quickly shut up because I still didn’t know the bastard’s name and this was not, this was not, the time to be asking. But all my words were used up and I still didn’t know what to do because I’ve only ever huddled in this particular pit of darkness by myself; I had never had any reason to try and draw someone out of it.

I reached out to him, with my muzzle. Which was really saying something, by the way, because I love to fight but somehow I hate being touched—but I needed to touch him somewhere, maybe on the point of his shoulder briefly, just enough to make contact and press a piece of his body back together, if he really was falling apart. I needed to let him know somehow that this warm body still gave two-shits about him, and that it would be okay (how the hell would I know that?) and that I didn’t care that there were tears on his face, but it mattered to me that he cried.

“…Come on,” I said, barely a whisper as I drew back from, “It’s cold as hell.”

I didn’t know where I wanted to take him—but it was cold here.




[100 POSTS FUCK YEAH]



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Honestly, though, this huge white snowy bastard was the hugest riddle that I had ever been faced with. It wasn’t like he was his own story—it felt like this jerk had his own saga, man, like his own series or some shit piled in the back of the library, a classic that them there young’uns forgot about and was left to sit there, gathering dust, being something epic all by itself. A story worth reading, if the librarian was kind enough to recommend it (or at least not that much of a bitch to hide it).

He cried some more when I touched him, which skewed something within me, scaring me, thinking I had done something even worse (which wouldn’t have surprised me). But then he…he smiled at me. I mean, sure it was ice-covered and frozen like the rest of him, stiff in a way that only despair could cause—but still. It was a smile. Like maybe he could tell what I was trying (and failing) to do, and he was cool with it, or at least humoring the idea behind it.

And…well, maybe the tears he was crying now were an improvement? (WOW that sounds awful.) No, wait, listen. His other tears had just been there, falling from what seemed like nowhere, and he had just let them because fuck it what else could he do? But THESE tears weren’t just falling; they were bubbling and fresh, an active thing, like they emanated from something internal, a gut-wrenching pain that you couldn’t stitch up so you just had to bear through it until it passed. This…still sounds awful, actually, but shut up I’m getting to the point! The point is that he was probably still in pain—but at least, now he was feeling. Some numbness had broken when I touched him, and I guess there had been a spark between my muzzle and his shoulder, but the fact was that you’re in trouble when you can’t feel anything but Teeny was feeling.

Did…was that me? Did I do that?

He followed behind me, letting me guide him who-knows-where, somewhere warmer, south, trusting me to take him somewhere safe. An awful choice, really, to trust me to do anything right—but I had done something for him, I guess, with the concern I felt for him that I didn’t truly understand myself. I was painfully aware of him behind me; his height and size, the thrum of the air that broke when his big white ass traveled through it, his wet, ice-laden scent and the ragged breathing that misted around his muzzle as he breathed. He whispered something—to me, to himself, I’m not sure which—and I stewed on what he said as we walked, keeping silent and to myself but trying to figure out:

Lee-os? Ley-os? Lih-os?

What the fuck?

Was that…his name?

I mean, it was still far from the time to be asking confirmation on his name—the bro just got reintroduced to his pain, and I wasn’t gonna break the precarious thing I that I had kinda-sorta-maybe helped him accomplished. But Leos (Liy-os? Leyh-ohs? Fuck me.) seemed like something a walking saga would be named, something that rolled off the tongue in a unique, majestic way (that I couldn’t replicate to save my life, goddamn). So I led this dude to warmer places that maybe could thaw out the rest of him—and in my head, I had found a better name for him than Teeny.

Leos.








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