[A bit of backstory for the Filling the Space series, about the character Arch and where he got his somewhat unusual name.]
You’re a newborn foal, and the world is a happy place. Every day you get the best milk, and you were born in summer so you’re never cold. Your mother takes good care of you, and her mate finds her good food to eat so you never have to hungry. It’s a wonderful life, one you wish could have gone on forever.
But soon, far too soon, while you and your family where asleep, a rough hand grabs you and pulls you away, the sudden sharp squeeze forcing your breath out in a gasp so you can’t even chirp for help. Not that you know it’s a hand; you’re too little to have opened your eyes yet. All you know is there’s a sudden terrible pressure, and you’re being taken somewhere far away from your family.
Soon, the hand sets you down on a rough wooden surface, and an off-key humming begins from high above you. Eventually, the humming gives way to singing, equally off-key but still soothing to your little foal ears.
“Daddeh loves babbeh
Babbeh loves daddeh”
Repeating over and over. The song keeps you calm, keeps you from cheeping in fear in this unfamiliar place, so alone without your brothers and sisters and mother in the fluffpile. You start to smell an acrid, metallic smell, but you keep still and quiet, relishing the greatly needed soothing to your frayed nerves.
The song repeats again, but this time there’s an added verse, one which you’d never heard in any daddeh or mummah song before.
“Daddeh loves babbeh
Babbeh loves daddeh
Babbeh get hurties
So daddeh get happies.”
You’re blood runs cold, and you feel sick from the terror this new verse instills in you. You’d have made a mess from the fear, but the squeezing earlier had force everything out of you. So you just flailed around, still unable to see, and chirped desperately for help.
A sudden horrible, burning pain starts just above your eye, and slowly spreads in a ring around you eye as your cheeping becomes more and more frantic. Just as the ring around your eye is completed, a voice, this time a woman (“Nice lady,” your programming tells you").
“Bryce! What’s that noise, Bryce?”
“Just a foal I found, mom! I’ll let it go after I’m done playing with it.”
“Let me take a look at it, it sounds like it’s in pain.”
The voice above you, the one who’d been singing the dreadful song, muttered a quick “Oh FUCK.” You flinched at the bad words, and continued to struggle and chirp, but while the pain still persisted, it wasn’t spreading any further. It still was the worst burning pain, though.
A softer, kinder hand took you, and lifted you into the air once more. There was a gasp, and the woman’s voice suddenly snapped sharply.
“BRYCE! GET YOUR ASS IN YOUR ROOM! WE DO NOT TORTURE ANIMALS IN THIS HOUSE! YOU’RE GROUNDED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE!”
“I was just going to draw glasses on it, mom!” huffed the mean daddy voice.
“With a soldering iron?”
There was loud stomping high above you, and incoherent yells of anger from the mean daddy voice. The the woman’s voice spoke, much more softly,
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know Bryce was capable of doing things like that. I’m going to take you to the shelter to make sure you get feeling better.”
With that, the woman (“nice lady,” your programming insisted") carried you into a scary, loud place, and you stayed there for a while, before she carried you out again and brought you into a new place, a place that smelled of fluffies and chemicals.
“Hello, I’d like to drop a feral fluffy off. His left eye is injured, but other than that he seems fine.”
“What’s that silver stuff around his eye?”
“It’s solder. My son, he…”
“I get the picture. Alright, leave him here, we’ll have the vet take a look at him and then we’ll see about getting him situated. Thanks for bringing him in, a lot of folks’d’ve just stomped on him.”
Some time later…
You liked the shelter. It was warm, and there were lots of friends to play with. At first they’d called you a monster, because of the silver stuff around your eye, but now they let you play, even if they were sometimes a bit shy towards you.
You even got a name! Something you’d never realized you wanted more than anything in the whole world! One of the shelter workers said that you looked like you had a thing called a monocle, and said it made you look “sophisticated,” and that a sophisticated fluffy needed a sophisticated name. So she named you Archibald, or Arch for short. You loved your new name; it was the best name ever.
But nothing lasts forever, and eventually a nice lady came along and adopted you. You didn’t really like her at first; you were still a bit scared of new people ever since the thing with your eye, but she gave you nice milk from a bottle and a new ball and some blocks to play with! And you got a new fluffy-mother, who loved you very much.
Before you left the shelter, you started to get aching in your mouth. The shelter workers said this was because of “teething” and that it meant you were almost ready to eat solid food like a big fluffy. You were excited about that; milk was the most delicious thing you could imagine, but it somehow just wasn’t satisfying anymore. Eventually, the mouth aches went away, and when you told your owner this she was very excited, and said that now you could eat big-fluffy food.
Later that day, your owner said she was going to the store to get extra special food to celebrate your new teeth. You were so happy that you didn’t even take your afternoon nap, and instead played with your blocks. You stacked three blocks, which was only one less than many! You were so proud of yourself.
When your owner came home, she told you that since you were a good fluffy and could eat solid food now, she was going to give you sketties! When she brought over the sketties to you and mummah, it was the best thing you’d smelled, ever! She said that if you were always a good fluffy, you could have sketties once every few bright times, but that this time the sketties were extra-special Skettiland sketties.
As she set the bowl down in front of you, and your lungs filled with the amazing aroma of the sketties, you thought to yourself that this was the best day of your life.