[open] am i dying..? [any]

[Scalped]

She’s had nothing but time.
Years of it.
Years enough to know that the severity of pain has lessened over time.

She chewed on her pain, fed off of it and grew fat with life (in more ways than one). Pain had become a familiar fare, as much so as grass was to her, that she could not imagine taking it and making herself stronger for having tasted it. She wore her pain and her memories proudly upon her red-shielded breast in the form of that long jagged scar and it’s pink puckered flesh.

Scalped had other scars, but none so memorable as this; scars from arrows, even a bullet once, that burned along her hip. She had scars from the mating dance with stallions, and scars from mares challenging her authority in the herd. None stood out as noticeably as the one on her breast (or the bullet that grazed her hip) and it held the most power, as only memories can, and the most pain too.

Pain could become a demon though, and she suspected that his pain had become such a demon to him as to terrorize his very self.

He was so very still beneath her touch that she thought he almost stopped breathing; wondered, if his heart had ceased to beat for the moment it took for her to breath in his musky stallion scent and pull her head back almost reluctantly. She had not meant to be so motherly, so intimate and not with him! He was, after all, a veritable stranger to her and here she was, sticking her nose in the nest of mane about his poll and inhaling the scent of him like her lungs were starved for air. Worse, she had shed a single tear! Scalped could not remember the last time she had cried, either in happiness or sorrow.

Shocked, by the tear she’d shed and the fact that he suddenly rolled to his belly, she took a hasty step back to give him more room to maneuver. She thought he might climb to his feet but he only kept his gaze averted from hers, seemingly lost to the demons of his own pain that ate at him. Scalped understood, but she chose to master her pain and eat it. She was far too unbridled to let anything ever master her again, except the pure inexplicable love she had for her babies and grandbabies and so forth. There was something about the innocence and adoration in a foal’s face that held her captive.

It is only his sharp hawkish gaze that catches her attention; she can feel it slide along her skin, the soft unprotected areas that beg a bite or a kick and she carefully angled her head just so, to protect her throat as his head moved towards hers in a painfully slow motion. He surprised her with the touch of his nose against her cheek, so light as if she imagined it there until he pressed harder into the soft spot beside her jaw. She could not help the way her ears went back against her head, even as he breathed her scent in and she gradually released the tension that tightened her flesh in preparation of an attack.

He kept touching, kept claiming inch after inch of her flesh and she let him.
That surprised her more than anything else -
She let him touch, and in return, she touched him back. Just as bold. Just as daring. Touch for touch, but her black eyes never closed like his did. Scalped drank in the light and shadow of him, the way his muscles bunched and gathered beneath the rich brown of his skin.

(He reminded her of her boy, only as a horse.)
She sighed, drinking him in.
A different sort of pain to conquer.