Victoria kept up the responsibility act through the rest of Apricot’s pregnancy, every time the frantic mare had something on her mind, Victoria would remind her that it was on her to provide for her young.
Tummy babies hungry? Use your immobile limbs to find more food.
Tummy babies cold? Grab the blanket that’s just out of reach.
Tummy babies make Apricot go bad poopies? Well then Apricot can just clean it herself when she learns how to turn around.
Apricot hated the whole thing, she thought babies would be so nice and perfect and pretty, but they weren’t even here yet and she was started to wonder if she’d made the wrong choice. No, no she would be a good mummah, she would provide for her babbehs in everyway she could, with or without her mummah’s help.
Still, it was an achingly long time for her as she waited for the inevitable moment.
“BIGGESH POOPIES!”
Hearing Apricot screech from the safe room, Victoria casually finished making her cup of tea before sauntering through to the helpless mare as she strained against the pain in her special place.
“HNNNGHH! Mummah hewp, Apwicot hab wowstesh huwties in speciaw-pwace, nu wan tummeh-babbehs hab huwties tuu.”
“They’re not gonna get hurt Apricot.” Victoria smirked with a sip of her tea. “They’re just coming out of you now.”
“BABBEHS! MUMMAH HEWP!”
“Oh no, your babies, your responsibility, remember.”
Apricot sobbed as another contraction pounded through her nervous system as a solid mass was pushed against her most sensitive area. For ages she sat there, sweating, snivelling, and sobbing as Victoria calmly observed the mare’s plight, ignoring all howls for help. Briefly she wondered how feral mares could go through this so many times and still survive long enough to breed again, but then she remember how sheltered Apricot was within the confines of her home.
It was only dumb fucking luck that the first stallion she came across outside was a nice guy, and not some rapist Smarty prick.
Finally, after nearly half an hour of endurance, the first foal came out, Victoria craned her neck to get a better look at it but didn’t move to help.
Apricot panted out, foolishly believing it was over. “Mummah, pwease bwing babbeh tu Apwicot, babbeh need miwkies bu Apwicot tuu big tu gib dem.”
Victoria said nothing and took another sip of tea. Apricot started crying again.
“Wai mummah nu hewp babbeh, am onwy wittew babbeh, neba huwt…AAAAHHH!”
Caught off-guard by another contraction, Apricot went right back to straining with her birth. Thankfully following the first one, the rest weren’t too much trouble, although Apricot did plead each time one came out for Victoria to let her feed the new foal.
Eventually the last foal slid out of her, along with the amniotic fluids – thankfully mostly onto the litterbox Victoria had set up – and Apricot could relax, for about three seconds before she remembered her foals.
“Babbehs!” She croaked out before turning and seeing her litter, there were five in total, all tiny, wriggling, soaked in fluids and blind as all hell, but immediately she loved them.
“Babbehs am su pwetty, hewwo babbehs, am mummah. Mummah gib wickie-cweans tu gud babbehs.”
As Apricot instinctively started cleaning her newborn foals, stopping only to complain about ‘nu taste pwetty’, Victoria took the moment to examine the foals. Out of the five of them they were split between three fillies and two colts, almost all of them were earthies but there were two unicorns, one filly and one colt respectively.
Colour wise they were decent. One earthie filly was green with a purple mane, the other was orange with a silver mane, whilst the unicorn filly was silver with a green mane. The earthie colt was purple with a green man, and the unicorn was a direct match to his father, green with a silver mane.
But then, just as Apricot was cleaning off her third foal and wondering how to manoeuvre the two clean one already feeding, Victoria noticed a small movement in the litterbox. She peered in, wondering what it could be, then she saw it.
A sixth foal, a monochrome purple earthie colt, his colours helping mask him within the waste fluids. Even just by looking at him, Victoria could tell he was the runt, he was painfully thin with barely, if any muscle mass on him, and even by runt standards his laboured breathing was heavy and choking.
Victoria wondered if his condition was due to her deliberately underfeeding Apricot, or if six foals was just too big of a litter for a first time mummah to handle. Either way, he would not last long, but just long enough for Victoria to use him for her own means.
“Oh look Apricot, there’s another baby right here.”
“Nudda babbeh? Yay, mowe babbehs fow huggies an wub.”
Victoria carefully picked the foal up and handed him to Apricot, the mare blinding singing her off-key song.
“Mummah wubs babbehs, babbehs wub mummah, mummah gib wickie-cweans, babbehs be…”
She froze. The instant her tongue touched the colt, the runt scent – and it must’ve have been fucking powerful given how fragile the poor guy was – frazzled her senses and she held the colt out at arms length, spitting out the bitter taste of bad babbeh.
“Uck, nu wike, taste wike bad babbeh.”
“Apricot!” Victoria chastised the mare. “How dare you, that is YOUR baby, you look after him.”
“Bu mummah, he bad babbeh, nu taste pwetty.”
“I don’t care, you said you would look after ALL of your babies. Or are you a bad mummy?”
Apricot yelped, being a bad mummah was the WORST thing for a Fluffy to be – at least in her limited mind-set. She pulled the colt back and resumed her licking clean, forcibly holding back from vomiting with every lick. Victoria had to hide her smirk as she watched the colt, already so poorly and weak, be subjected to a rough and painful cleaning.
It didn’t take long, but Apricot had finished cleaning the runt and placed him onto one of her teats, pushing away her unicorn daughter to make room for the little guy. Victoria said nothing at the mistreatment of one child over another, there would be time for that later, and instead kept watch over the feeding, having a good idea what was about to happen.
Sure enough, the purple colt took one large gulp of milk and instantly started hacking up, the raspy breathing had told Victoria there was significant damage to his oesophagus, likely not being developed fully in the womb. That first drink wasn’t bound for his stomach, it was heading straight for his lungs.
“Ba… babbeh? Wha wong?”
The purple colt coughed and spluttered and wheezed, his tiny nub limbs trying to simultaneously push him away from the pain trying to tear open his lung and push himself closer to his mother for comfort. Apricot watched helplessly as her son made such awful, horrendous noises, utterly terrifying her other foals as the first noise many of them were hearing was their brother dying.
“Huu, nu cwy babbehs, bwudda jus hab bweathie huwtie, he be awwight wiv huggies.”
But every time she franticly tried to reach over to her dying son, she would inadvertently knock or push over another foal, resulting in Apricot trying to calm that foal down before trying again to reach the purple colt and having to calm another foal down instead.
Eventually Victoria saw specks of red in the white phlegm being hacked out by the colt, and she knew there only moments to go. The colt’s violent cough suddenly got muffled and choked, his body convulsed for several seconds before his eyes rolled back and his tongue fell out.
He died, without ever knowing milk or huggies or love.
The silence embedded itself in Apricot’s heart as she turned and saw her purple son laying dead on the floor.
“NUUUHUUUHUUU!!! BABBEH! PWEASE NU GU FOWBEA SWEEPIES!”
Helplessly she reached out to him, hoping her huggies would bring him back, but she couldn’t move for her other panicking foals surrounding her. Victoria shook her head and picked up the colt’s body.
“I’m so disappointing in you Apricot. I thought you said you were a good mother, you called your own child a bad baby and now look, he went forever sleepies without ever knowing his mother’s love, his mother’s hugs. Your milk was BAD mummah milk, it killed him because he knew you didn’t love him.”
“NU! NU AM TWUE MUMMAH, APWICOT WUB AWW BABBEHS!”
“Really? Then why is he dead?”
Victoria shook her head in disapproval and walked out of the safe-room with the body, smiling as she heard Apricot’s wails of anguish behind her. She checked the body closer as she left, wondering if she should give it to Vincent or his business partner Gus for examination.
But that was too much effort, so she took it outside, lobby it into the bio-waste bin without a second thought.
At the bottom of the bin, trapped by weeks of rotten corpses and voided bowels, a barely alive Evergreen got whiff of a new scent, something new yet familiar. He had just enough time to recognise the stench of his own dead son before darkness enveloped him once more.
While Victoria was outside dealing with the body, Apricot was brought out of her depressive stupor by the peeping of her young, slowly she realised she hadn’t fed them all yet.
“Sowwy babbehs, mummah jus hab heawt huwties fwom foweba sweepie babbeh. Mummah DU wub him, bu nu enuff. Hewe, wet mummah gib miwkies tu aww of yu.”
With both earthie daughters already fed, and her unicorn daughter partially fed, Apricot returned the unicorn filly to one teat and placed the unicorn colt to the other. Feeling her heart warming up again, she smiled and started to sing.
“Mummah wub babbehs, babbehs wub mummah, dwink da miwkies, gwow big an…”
Peep peep, chirp peep
Hearing the dismayed peeping and feeling soft thumps against her teats, Apricot looked down to see her two feeding foals knocking and pressing down on her, trying to push more milk out of her body.
“Dwink babbehs mummah hab wots of miwkies fow…”
Wait. No she didn’t. She could feel it now, her body was out of milk, she needed more nummies, and she needed them now.
“MUMMAH! MUMMAH HEWP, NEED…”
She stopped, she knew mummah wouldn’t help her, she’d been saying that the entire time her babbehs were tummeh-babbehs. It was up to Apricot to keep them all fed and safe, mummah wasn’t going to do anything.
Slowly and carefully, Apricot lifted herself out and away from her foals to nibble on the little food left in the kibble bowl. She didn’t know what hurt her more, hearing the pained chirping of her hungry children, or knowing that even finishing the bowl wouldn’t be enough to feed them all.
barely im sure would go wan die seeing his dead runt son.