i'll start walkin' your way

Dawn is a rumour on the horizon, pale and bruised, dragging gold across the edges of the world like a secret it can’t wait to spill. Vesper moves through the Boneyard with hooves hushed and deliberate, the rhythm of his stride steady but far from careless. The land is a gallery of ruin—ribs like arches, skulls like monuments, bones of monsters and mice tangled together in death’s sprawl. The sand clings to them like memory, preserving curve and fang and claw as if time itself can’t quite let them go.

He has to slow in places where there are too many tusks and too many spines rising jagged from the earth like forgotten warnings. But then there are stretches of relative freedom—of clean gaps between ribcages and collapsed vertebrae—and here he lets his body stretch, tests the lean strength of this new form. A flick of his tail, a twitch of his shoulders, and he surges forward into a leap, clearing a split-open sternum with room to spare.

It should feel like freedom out here amongst all the white. Instead, it’s...complicated.

Colt melts against him like heat into skin, like a second breath. Her legs shift easily with each change in his pace, her weight balancing without conscious effort. He doesn’t feel burdened by her, instead, it’s a seamlessness he finds unnerving—not just because it’s new, but because it’s familiar in a way that sets off every internal alarm he has. And yet here he is with this woman on his back, tangled into him in a way that doesn’t require words to feel whole and satisfies just about every urge that this latest shift might ever want for.

You know it's all just a game that I'm playin'

Code 100% taken from the queeeeeeen herself, Sky <3

Colt

It's boots and chaps
It's cowboy hats
It's spurs and latigo

The desert is endless, it seems. A sea of sand and death, ribcages cresting dunes like waves of demise stilled into stationary rise. It changes around them in some form or another, but it's all the same at its core—bleak.

Vesper's energy seems renewed as he rolls beneath her, his power relentless as it unfurls with every stride and step across the dead plains. She can't say the same for herself. Whatever rest feels undone as soon as she asks her muscles to resume the same position. The curl of her fingers in his mane has long gone numb, and the burn of her thighs is near constant now. She's in the saddle daily, but aside from a long cattle drive once in a while it's not so constant, and the leather of the tack makes it easier—this requires effort. There's also something to be said about the utter lack of control, a bit of a foreign practice for her hands and seat. Normally she has some idea of where they're headed, what they're doing, but here she's trying to stay out of his way as best she can.

So when he jumps, she's surprised. She sucks in a breath as she feels him coil for it, a soft shit slipping free as she wraps her other hand higher up on his mane and leans forward to go with him, balance shifting ahead and legs pressing against his sides tighter to try and get her weight up off his back and more over the withers. As he lands, she slips back a bit, her threaded fingers holding her center. She shimmies back up, but hangs heavier on the slope of his neck. "You're getting fancy," she accuses, shoving off his mane and settling back proper. Jumping is not high on her list of horse skills, if she's being honest, least of all bareback. Good enough not to have him dump her ass in the dirt, which she guesses is all that matters in the end.

It's the ropes and the reins
And the joy and the pain
And they call the thing rodeo

Vesper snorts, the sound short and smug, like he’s laughing through his nostrils. His ears flick back at her voice—at the accusation, the breathless bite of it—but he doesn’t slow, just tosses his head once, mane rippling like silk against the heat.

Fancy? Maybe. But he’s earned it. Still, message received. He doesn’t jump again.

The land begins to flatten between the scattered bones, and Vesper lets his canter stretch out, long and even. A ground-eating rhythm. Not punishing or jarring, at least insofar as he can help it. He navigates the curve of a spine like a fence post, skirts around a skull the size of a wagon. The sun has not yet broken the horizon, but the world is tinged with pre-dawn pink, and the silence between them is broken only by the thrum of hooves on hard-packed earth and the soft shift of Colt's breath as she adjusts against him.

You know it's all just a game that I'm playin'

Code 100% taken from the queeeeeeen herself, Sky <3

Colt

It's boots and chaps
It's cowboy hats
It's spurs and latigo

Her lips tilt into a smile on one side, catching all the attitude in that head toss. "See, this is why horse you is better," she laughs, resisting the urge to give him a pat like he warned her against, though he kinda deserved it for all the wrong reasons. "Can't fire back something smart." Might fire his hooves, but just doesn't land the same.

That and, like this, she doesn't feel that slide of warning pressing in on her. Doesn't have to wonder about those blue eyes and all the risk of looking at them too long. Like this, she feels safe, and it lets her relax in a way she wouldn't normally. This feels like home.

As he lengthens she sits deeper, hips matching his cadence with the ease of something that's second nature, sore or not. Steadily her fingers release the security of his mane, a new layer of trust for him as much as herself, but she feels like she's got the pattern of him committed to memory now. Her hands flex against her thighs and stretch out to capture the wind as they run. She could do this forever, she thinks—chase the night into day with him.

It's the ropes and the reins
And the joy and the pain
And they call the thing rodeo

Vesper flattens his ears at her jab, but it’s all posture, no heat. Just the equine equivalent of a rolled eye. His hooves strike the ground in time with her laughter, and though he can’t fire back a quip, his next few strides come with a teasing flick of tail that might’ve been the ghost of a comeback, if horses had the breath to spare for sarcasm.

But then her fingers let go.

Not all at once—more like a slow breath, easing out of his mane, leaving only her balance and her body as anchor. He feels it. Not just the shift of weight, but the weight of it. The trust. Like a held breath that gets released into him, and gods, does it echo.

It would be so easy to ruin, and gods damn if Vesper doesn't come from a familial line that it isn't a good idea to place that kind of trust in.

He picks his footing with the precision of someone who knows exactly what she’s given him, and as the first gold glimmers across the horizon and touches the dunes like firelight through glass, he runs—not to flee the night, but to carry her into morning and hopefully towards her stupid belt buckle.

You know it's all just a game that I'm playin'

Code 100% taken from the queeeeeeen herself, Sky <3

Colt

It's boots and chaps
It's cowboy hats
It's spurs and latigo

The moment feels longer than it is, the risk of it making seconds echo into minutes. It'd take nothing to kiss dirt now, even without the temptation flirting inside Vesper. She could just as easily unbalance herself, overcorrect or be jostle by the uneven terrain at the wrong time. That's the thrill of it though, an edge worth skirting just to taste the possibilities like spindrift. She grins against it, her heart buoyed in her chest, light as a sail.

She comes back down from that high as she leans into his neck, hands tangling amid his mane for that tether of security once more. She leans in, a residual glow of the rush still thick in her voice. "C'mon Ves," she urges, "I know you got more gas in the tank." A challenge for him to run full out, worries of weariness torn away by his breeze, replaced with a dangerous hum of what if. What if he just let go too?

What if they outran the whole desert?

[FIN]

It's the ropes and the reins
And the joy and the pain
And they call the thing rodeo