Plotted Starter ;; Latty.
@amarvelousmencgerie
The former marine had grown used to thinking of his inheritance as something ABSTRACT ;; numbers on screens, papers locked in drawers, properties he owned in theory but never bothered to see. The Lawton name was stamped across businesses, ranches && tracts of land, but he let managers and lawyers SHUFFLE the details while he kept his distance.
Wealth insulated him well enough from questions. Except the stables. Something about them tugged at the edge of his attention: a quiet RUMOR that there had been no investors circling, no board meetings, no plans for expansion as there always were with every other piece of the Lawton empire. Strange, in a world where everything about the family fortune usually smelled of PROFIT.
Strange enough that today, for the first time, he came down to see the place for himself.
The sight surprised him. These weren’t the polished, showcase barns of glossy brochures ----- no marble entryways, no fuss. Instead, the stables seemed to BREATHE. Weathered siding, sun-bleached && sturdy, held rows of stalls where horses shifted restlessly within ;; their ears flicking at his footsteps. The air pulsed with living scents ;; musky hay STACKED in shadowed bales, the damp dark tang of earth trampled by hooves && the sweet burn of oiled leather. Light speared through gaps in the walls and rafters, falling across the animals’ coats in bronze patches that glowed && disappeared as they moved.
Saddles hung carefully; tools were kept ready; there was DISCIPLINE here, but not the sterile kind enforced by investors. It was the kind built by hands that worked until the job was done.
As Floyd drifted farther, CURIOUS but unrecognized, the silence carried the kind of honesty he rarely found in his world. He didn’t look like an owner now ------ just a man in a dark shirt && hard boots, pausing to study the line of a restless gelding’s shoulders, listening to the way chains rattled as the horse stamped. He traced the EDGE of the stall gate as though reading the grooves of lives spent here.
It wasn’t until a voice broke the quiet ;; light but edged with AUTHORITY called out behind him that he turned && found himself face-to-face with a woman who clearly thought she had another hand to put to work.
