He expects a retort, some last parting shot from the accused. He’d be a little disappointed if the boy didn’t bite back, actually, but what he doesn’t expect is for the final blow to glance so close to center. His shoulders hunch together as if absorbing a physical force and then he stops, struggling momentarily with his wildly combustible temper, unused to containing its fire since entering Helovia. Heat rises beneath his skin, his ears pin, and despite his companions valiant efforts to distract him, he turns. “I don’t want it back you moron.” His voice rises with every syllable, eventually reaching a roar of indignity, outrage, an inarticulable hysteria. "That’s the whole goddamned point."

He stares at the younger stallion, glares down at the strength in his shoulders, the muscle filling his sides and haunches with life, the pride that holds his gold marked face so high, just so. What right does this child have to mock him? He seethes. This ignorant boy with skinned knees and a singed nose, come gawping and pointing and criticizing the crippled, the disfigured. His very mention of striving to get everything back is an affront. Of course he would think of starting again - still young, still strong, still whole - but what good would starting again do for a remnant like Albrecht? A new lie to live under, a new illusion to have ripped from his grasp the very moment he starts to believe it again? Just one more evisceration before he goes, the world begs - No.

"Do you think I couldn't pull this shit together if I wanted? Do you think I haven't done it before?" He asks, demands, hurling the words at his audience with no care for how much or how little they hear or even choose to acknowledge, the shouting more a cathartic release now than an argument, a bloodied heart hemorrhaging in the hopes of drowning an adversary, bitter to the very last drop, regardless of cost. "Old Albrecht, he's just an asshole, he's never tried." He mocks in a nasally tone, struggling to stop himself now that he's started. "You’d know, wouldn’t you?” And finally, because he's run out of coherent thoughts to snarl at the outcast, “Fuck you."

He’s too busy having a shit fit to think about anything else, but the python at his brow squirms in discomfort, vividly imagining the younger stallion launching himself in their direction at any moment, the sword on his head aimed to kill. He wishes he was big, like the deer, with legs and horns so that he might shove the old stallion away, poke and prod him into escaping instead of digging himself further into a hole of self destruction.



"Alby talks" 'Strom talks'
OOC // @Rikyn