All For My Own Protection
Seasonal Prompt Summer Year 16
Bloodletter
05-12-2021, 08:24 PM
How Do You Stay So Strong? Many things had happened in the last couple months that Balthier may have expected, but they still fell onto him with some kind of surprise. Allegro and Aranea had made them believe she was coming back to stay with them, be a whole family. Balthier, while doubtful, was still excited to the thought. He had never experienced love from his own mother, or at least none that he remembered. He barely remembered when he was young and Aranea spent the first month or so with them as a family. If he tried really hard to look back, he couldn't see it. And he had to be reminded that it had even happened. He had never lived in a home where his mother and father loved each other. Allegro may have made this illusion where Aranea was the good guy, and wanted nothing more than their family to be whole, but he lied. They both lied. He was nearly on the same level of fury with both of them. But when he sat back to think, he knew this was coming. It wasn't his father's fault and he knew that. He couldn't blame Allegro for wanting to protect them, to make them feel like they were loved. Allegro loved all of them with his entire heart, he showed that every chance he got. Balthier wanted nothing more than to make him proud. He was born with his markings, and he was meant to be just like him. But when he thought about that, he thought about the life Allegro made for himself. It made him angry to think that his mother could do this to his father. As Allegro may have had concern for his children, Balthier had turned his concern around towards his father. Balthier already stepped up to take care of his siblings, and he wanted to step up to take care of his father now too. Allegro was his idol, and he didn't want to see him in the hidden pain he was in. He knew it wasn't right, and he almost wanted his mother to suffer for it. His paws took him to firefly lake, late in the evening when the sun was gone and the fireflies danced around the lake. He wasn't paying attention to the pretty fireflies though. He had a seat at the bank's edge, looking down at his dark and bright reflection. Only the thoughts of everything Allegro came home with this morning racing through his mind. He didn't know what to feel, but anger was by far the most prominent. He was coming up to a year old and with that freedom came responsibility. He had already accepted becoming the man in the family, but he never wanted his premonitions to come true. He wanted his mother there for Allegro and his siblings, and himself. And she didn't want that. While he was lost in the faint ripples of the water he stared down in, he hadn't noticed the creature stalking him. He was an easy target, not moving, too worried about everything else on his mind. He had run into some predators, but none like he was about to discover. He sometimes forgot there were things that could be out to hurt him. While he was sat at the bank, the saber cat leapt forward from the grasses behind him. It's claws dug into his rib cage behind his shoulders and it's long teeth latched at a horizontal angle on his scruff. Immediately he thrashed, trying to get the creature off of him. He had never experienced any kind of pain like this. It turned into a rodeo real quick as he struggled to throw the heavy cat off of him, and he finally had the idea of rolling backwards onto his back and onto the creature. When he did so, the cat yelped under his smaller but still heavy body. It let go of most of it's grip on him, and he wasted no time in spinning around to get on top of the beast. The cat's claws that were still embedded in him gaped across his back, but he suffered through just a few more moments before quickly reaching for the predator's throat and taking it's life. His father had always taught him that life was sacred of all the animals they had to take. Whether that was a tiny rabbit, or a might bear. But in this moment, Balthier was not apologizing to the cat he had to defend himself from. He took it's life out of pure anger and hatred. The feeling he felt towards his mother. He wasn't scared, but he never wanted to feel like this again. He never wanted to be so angry, that he went against the morals his father taught him. When the cat was done twitching and dying, he just looked down at it for a long time disappointed in himself. He couldn't just leave it behind, he had to take it back to the pack to put use to it. He never wanted to leave a wounded failed kill, and he never wanted to waste the body of something he killed. It took him many minutes before he leaned down to figure out some kind of way to lug it on his back, and that's when he felt the searing pain of what the beast did to him. He had felt it earlier, but now that the adrenaline wore off he was in almost unbearable pain. Still, he made himself manage to drape the bleeding creature over his back, over his wounds, and head back to Abaven. He was probably a huge, disgusting mess, he cared less about that and more about the wounds he couldn't see. What would his father think? He didn't need another thing to worry about. But it wasn't like he could run and hide until it was healed. He knew nothing about healing and his father certainly wouldn't let him go missing for days or weeks. He knew he was in for a lot when he made it back home. |
Current time: 09-19-2024, 10:22 AM
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