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Changing Relations

Part one of three

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Written by Arian Mabe (Amethyst Mare)

Commissioned by Adagiodajiang

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Alyssa breathed in slowly and evenly, though her eyes were wide, the very young doe-taur clutching her arms to her chest, though her grip loosened, bit by bit. The room around her was much larger than anything that she had ever been used to as a deer-taur, to be fair, but it was hard to be too intimidated by it when the quivering white fox on the bed, dwarfed by its enormity, shook with fear.

Three days. That was all that she had been there, her brown fur still a little ruffled from her travels, though it was not as if anyone there cared all that much for her physical condition beyond the bare minimum. She had been brought there, to the home of the little white fox, to be a playmate for him, left there by her mother, though she wondered at the fact that the fox that she was supposed to play with and spend time with was white when his family was a traditional red fox. At first, she had wondered whether he was an Arctic fox, from a colder place like what her mother had told her about, but had not dared ask.

Commoners, especially those like her, did not ask those higher than her in the status of the world questions like that. Especially not when the lady of the house had such cold, hard eyes.

"Why are you scared?" She asked, though her voice sounded unfamiliar to her as it echoed in the room that, really, was too large for just the two of them, even hanging out there pretty informally, late at night. "This is...your home."

She didn't want to say it aloud, after all, but the fact of the matter was that she was the one that had been left there, taken away from everything she knew. Even Alyssa knew that the fox should have been in his element.

Her head twitched, cocking lightly to the side. Was the fox afraid...of her? That would have been strange, very strange.

Sandor, the fox, however, shuddered and curled into himself, dark eyes peeking out over the thick, white fluff of his tail.

"My friends said that the house is haunted," he hissed out through his teeth, jaws rattling as he tried to huddle back down. "They said there was a g-g-ghost around the stables..."

"What? You don't have stables."

Sandor shook his head, shivering as he clung to his tail.

"Mom and dad say there's a new house, a bigger house," he said, eyes shining, though not with delight. "It's going to be all different and strange and my friends said it's been empty for so long! That all the ghosts will have moved in!"

Sandor quivered, though, in a way, Alyssa understood him. The room there and the house was already big enough to make her feel out of place; she couldn't imagine what another was going to be like, even bigger than that one. Something must have been going right for his family. But his family were not home that night either, which was why she had been left with him, his business-focused mother buying and selling while his father was a carriage driver for aristocrats. Both clearly paid well, though Alyssa didn't know any more about that other than that there were good jobs and bad jobs.

"I don't want a skeleton coming in," the fox continued, eyes darting between the doe-taur and the door. "If it's left open...then there'll be nothing to stop it!"

Alyssa shook her head, heart pulling with sympathy for him. He hadn't had to live as she had. Maybe she would be just like him if she had been born like Sandor.

"Do you want to try wrapping yourself all up in the blanket?" She said, demonstrating by turning around on the spot and miming rolling up in a blanket. "Like this?"

"No!" He all but shrieked, pulling back from her, an edge of hysteria colouring his tone. "What if there's a skeleton under the blanket?"

Alyssa stepped back, opening and closing her mouth soundlessly. She didn't know what to do, she was just a fawn, really, she wasn't old enough for the task that she had been put up to. She brushed her hair back from her shoulders, her red earring dangling in a gold casing, though...maybe she did understand him too.

It was different. Of course, it was. It could never be the same for her, having lived in the taur stables with her mother, travelling from town to town, clinging to her hand and tucking herself in close to her side. She remembered those leering looks, the eyes shining like the points of daggers out of the darkness of alleys that her mother told her never to go down, though Alyssa would never truly know what lengths her mother went to, all to keep her safe and healthy. Those memories would fade, for she was only young.

But she remembered, at that time, the taunts and leers, how the anthros and other taurs standing over her saw her as something else, something that could be hurt, how they made her feel so small and insignificant that fear sank with an icy chill into the pit of her belly.

That fear was the same for him. But maybe it could be put differently...

"I'm a monster too," Alyssa said, pulling the words that had been said to her, so many times, from her memory as fi they meant nothing at all. "But you're not afraid of me. So, I will talk with the monsters that scare you - and they won't be here anymore!"

The fox sat up straight, his lower jaw slightly slack.

"What? But Alyssa is not a monster!"

Alyssa sighed softly, tail flicking, stepping closer again. The little fox was so scared, still a bit annoying... With so many other things to fear in the world, what harm could ghosts ever do to him? But he had never seen anything out there that was real to be scared of. Her stomach twisted at him saying that she was not a monster, a sense of "wrongness" in it, but the doe-taur brushed it aside. Perhaps it was not all that important.

He did not settle that night, even when she crawled into bed with him, at his insistence, wrapping her arms around him to hold the fox as her mother had held her. Only later, much later, when his father returned, tired but well-worked from his late shift carriage driving, could Sandor finally settle. Alyssa, of course, was not permitted to stay in the bed and, frankly, preferred the solitude of her little room that was no more than a broom cupboard. But she didn't know that it was only a broom cupboard. To her, it was privacy, something that she had not had before, always having others around her, though the bulk of her mother's body had always blocked prying eyes from her.

But she learned something about Sandor that night. Whereas his father brushed her aside as the lower-class taur that she was, which Alyssa knew and understood even at a tender age, Sandor saw her as an equal. Despite their different lives, he was as wide-eyed and as scared as she was - only of different things. Sandor was not like the other rich people, those that thought taurs were lower-level creatures in life, always looking up to, well, everyone else above them. Maybe he had not yet been taught to do that or perhaps he was different...but she liked to believe that he was different.

Even then, the little doe-taur was wise beyond her years. If Sandor believed that they were equals, that there was not so much distance between them, she was more than willing to go along with it.

It would be good for her to have company, after all, in the new house.

Continued in part two of three...