Fight
"No! No way! I'm not watching him kill that cub! That baby!" You throw yourself forward towards the male. Your paws lift, claws extending out down towards the male's face. You throw him off. You can see the confusion, as you land with a loud thud on the dust beside him, he's baffled by this attack.
Confusion, however, does not slow his response. He lashes out. Claws swipe across your face, catching and tearing over the soft give of one eyeball. You see blood spurt across the ground with your opposite eye.
In a spinning tornado of pain, blinding pain you grab for the cub in your jaws, catching its scruff just as another blow clipps your tail, ripping off chunks of fur before your flee into the distant dusty edges of the horizon.
There, at the fringe of sight, you collapse over the child and wait, painfully, as your eye heals.
Though you survive the bleeding, your vision is skewed by the darkness on one side, forcing you to helplessly trail behind your pride, picking at their scraps and nursing the cub anxiously. Each night, you sleep with a wishful prayer that you'll both wake the next morning.
Day after day, the small child rises slower and slower until, finally, his eyes do not flicker back open.
Never again will you see the cloudy yellow of his eyes. You're collapsed beside him, eyeing the little lump of meat that was once your offspring. You sniff at the air, smelling the death around.
"Is that the smell of him... or the warning of my own?" you wonder, stomach demanding your attention.
You look again to the small body.
Your stomach growls.
"It... is... food?" You offer the idea to yourself, as though half joking. You try to swallow the idea, but it catches you each time, forcing you to grimace, yet your stomach is unwavering in its complaints.
You have to choose to eat his dead body in hopes of surviving a few more days, being able to find more food and recover or not and continue the search from your current state.
Written by Picklessauce69 on 27 February 2016
