Trustfall || Sanders Sides Equestrian AU

Chapter 21 - On Herds and Drama

quick author's note! THANK YOU. thank you so much for all of the support on this story recently. reading your comments makes my day and keeps me going on rough days. you know who you are :) I hope you have a wonderful week. <3

Up until the heaviest rock that had ever pressured on Patton's chest rolled away and disappeared, he had no clue how much he needed that to happen. Turned out, every other rock that had ever sat in his heart in the past was nothing heavier than a pebble.

But now that he'd gotten to ride Puzzle again, Patton was, simply put, himself.

And there was nothing he'd ever wanted to be more.

The morning after their first lesson back, Patton waltzed into school on a pair of light, cheerful feet. He smiled at every student, teacher, and staff member that passed by him – and just as he'd always been told growing up – his smile seemed to have been contagious. Oh, how fun it was to be yourself! Patton's 'self' was, broken down as simply as possible, happy. And Patton was happy. He'd forgotten how much he loved being happy. Almost as much as he loved Puzzle.

The first and second period swept by easily, leaving Patton in the same wonderful mood as he made his way to the library at lunch. He waved at the librarian after closing the door behind him, and their face lit up. They waved back with the same amount of energy.

The library was a spacious room, naturally lit by the sunlight that infiltrated through the tall windows and striped the floor and the wooden shelves. It was home to Patton's favourite books, and the place he liked spending lunch at the most.

Except, for the first time this year, somebody already sat there when he approached.

"Oh- hey, Logan!"

Logan jerked up, and his glasses tumbled down his nose. He pushed them back up.

"Sorry. Didn't mean to startle you."

His teammate stood up at once and shut the book he'd been reading closed. "It's quite all right, Patton. I was about to head off, either way."

"Oh-... okay...?"

He barely got to finish his sentence before Logan lifted his bag to his shoulder, nodded at him in farewell and set off.

"Wait, Logan, you forgot your-" The door of the library shut with a click, and Patton was left with nothing but the dust hovering in the air and the librarian on the other side of the room. "-... book."

Odd, but nothing he hadn't seen before. Logan was a strange fella. In fact, all of Patton's teammates were strange fellas, he realised as he dug into the thought. But enough of that.

The book now sat lonely on the table, flipped over its face. Patton sent it a sad smile.

"Aw, don't take it personally, book. I'm sure Logan enjoyed reading you. He's just bad at saying thank you."

He reached a hand and flipped it the other way to look at the cover. The picture of a bay horse in a bridle returned him a look, under the title Thinking Like a Horse: The Art of Understanding the Horse's Mind.

"That's... the most like-him and unlike-him book I've ever seen him read. Simultaneously."

Patton couldn't help but settle down in the chair that still stood by the table and flip through the book. The pages segued from long paragraphs typed out by black-and-white illustrations of horses, to colourful charts and pictures of different types of tack and grooming tools. There was a whole chapter filled with horse anatomy, and Patton hung back to test his memory on saddle fitting, counting the ribs from T8 all the way to T18. The pictures and examples took him back to elementary school, when his riding instructors would give him and his friends theory lessons on days when it was too rainy to ride. It was before they had the indoor arena, which was now impossible to imagine the barn without it. Things change so quickly.