Cerulean Cape if someone is talking about you behind your back, just fart

@Wylla

The next best thing to food was a good chew. Raptor would eat anything and he would also chew on just about anything, but he did have a bit of a preference for old but not too old bones that had been tossed around the sea and then spit onto shore with some of the rotten marrow still inside. Or bones that were a bit soft and turned to crumbs as he gnawed on them. Or a shark fin. Or a nice smooth hunk of driftwood. Ok, so Raptor did not have much of a preference for chews either, but he was pretty enamored at the prospect of the one he had just found.

Beneath his paws as he furiously scraped and clawed and dug at the sand was a whale's rib that had been buried over. It would take some effort to dig it out — something Raptor was not keen on at all — but the reward would be worth it. He could chew on this rib forever if he could get it back to the safety of the ship. He had been working at it for a good hour, and had uncovered most of it. There was just one end still buried deep into the cape. He licked his lips as he dug, excited more by the minute.

The sun was starting to set on the cool, overcast day. If he hurried, he might have his treasure before dark.

Leaving home for the first time in what felt like years (okay, like, three weeks) was mildly frightening, but mostly liberating. Wylla had grown so accustomed to being constantly surrounded by comrades, safe by definition, that she sauntered up the coast with nary a care in the world. The wolves that had been turned away from their borders, often with verbal jabs to hasten them along, could very well be planning an assassination, but Wylla would never see it coming, so great had her confidence grown.

Confidence. Yeah. That's what it was.

It was also confidence that led her to rapidly approach a seeming stranger. The other wolf's dark rump was in the air, and if she cared to examine it for any length of time, Wylla would have recognized it. Instead her eyes were on the tantalizing tip of rib dug out of the ground, no doubt from this wolf's effort. Well, his effort was his loss. Poor fools didn't expend energy on pursuits that might end in failure, and if the dainty little Alpha had her way, this loner would fail. It wasn't so long ago she was challenging pack wolves to look at loners with a little more dignity and respect, but "confidence" had a funny way of changing a person.

She crept up alongside him, and while Raptor dug, she fitted her jaws over the rib bone and applied a little tugging pressure, preparing to haul it away from him the second it came loose.

Raptor was wary when Raptor was wary. But when he wasn't he wasn't and in this case he wasn't. The sable corsair was not the least bit aware of the approach of the soot and silver female he had previously mistaken for a Smoke and Sandpiper sibling. He had set his paws and his focus to scratching and digging and scrabbling at the sand and between that, the roll of the waves and the wind that swooped over the shore, he never even heard the sound of her paws on the beach.

He had almost completed his task by the time she arrived, setting her teeth into the first end that he had already freed from the cape. It was not until he loosened the opposite end saw it jerk seemingly of its own accord did Raptor realize he had company. The pirate spun with a snarl to face the would-be thief, stamping a paw down possessively on his rib bone.

"YOU!" He blurted out. His slack-jawed and muzzle-wrinkled expression was contorted in some strained and confused look of shock. It was also not unlike the like the look of a young lad that had just slammed into his crush walking around the corner and had no idea how to recover from the folly. It was also partly the look of guilt. It was all of these things because in a flash he cycled through a slew of emotions before he settled on (and hid behind) bristling, defensive anger.

"Get the hell away from my bone!"

Her jaws didn't slacken on the bone when the digger, having unearthed it and given Wylla the chance to yank it away, slammed a paw into it and shrieked at her. Her ears pinned back and her eyes rolled up to meet him, and if anything, the look of his dark-masked face only compelled her to grip tighter. She eyed the tips of his yellow teeth as he scrunched his face up at her, equal parts offended and angry (but what the fuck did this bastard have to be offended about, she wondered; he had lied to her) and made the single stupidest remark any dude could ever make.

Well, besides calling her a skunk, anyway.

The bridge of her muzzle rippled and around the bone in her jaws, which she gave a sharp wrench with a backward step and twitch of her shoulders, she told him, "don't worry, no one wants your crusty, diseased bone." Her tail lashed violently and a snarl tore from her throat as she gave the rib bone another good tug, but Wylla was a lot tinier than Raptor, and he weighed a lot more than her. His paw was enough to secure it in place with only minimal movement. But she didn't stop, because if anything, this lying, no good piece of shit owed it to her for humiliating her.

His toes were still tender from when she had chomped down on them. He flexed them across the rib bone as he leaned on the foreleg that stayed her attempted thievery, letting the ache give him a reason to be mad. Come hell or high water, the stubborn ol' seadog was not about to bare weakness to her. He told himself she was inconsequential and worth neither his remorse nor his compassion. He told himself that if the roles were reversed she would do the same to him — and he dearly believed that too.

She wrenched on the bone but it held fast beneath his weight. His anger morphed into a grating smirk as he realized that he had the advantage against her. "Sure as hell looks like ye want it," he sneered, hauling himself up so that he could stare down on her like a fat lord over a begging peasant. Despite the outward savage arrogance, there was an irregular and near sickening beat to his heart. He worried she could hear it, smell it, see it, but the distinguishing bandit's mask on his face was not the only one he wore. Raptor steeled himself behind this most credible disguise of contempt and never wavered.

Ugh, insufferable being. Raptor played the part of slovenly, obese royalty rather well, quadruple chins and all, a fact that only incensed Wylla further despite how poorly it made him look. What a cretin, lying to her and then acting like some holier-than-thou king of the world. She gave the bone another sharp tug, growling all the while, and refused to meet his eye for a long time. There was no sense justifying such an immaturely stupid creature with a response, she thought. It only bothered her more that she was the queen and he was the peasant licking someone else's shoes, yet here he was, lording over her. At length, she reasoned that aristocrats need not concern themselves with the thoughts of worms, so for the time being, she took the high road and shut her mouth.

But as we all know, in the end, Wylla's burgeoning ego won out over her better senses. How could it not? She was the equivalent of a twenty year old train wreck, fifteen years in the making, with over a hundred fatalities. Her brain ticked along in slow motion until finally it stopped, and a wicked smirk curled the corners of her lips up into a Cheshire grin. "Nice comeback," she snarled around the rib bone, "did you scrape it off the back of your throat?"

Raptor had his moments where he had a seemingly endless supply of wit. This was not one of those moments. His immediate response was not to fling some cagey remark back at her, but twitch his lips and crinkle his nose as he quarelled with himself and his inability to come up with a proper riposte. He couldn't — not when he was concentrating on putting up an aggressive front in lieu of betraying his guilt.

"No!" He finally blurted back. "But I can scrape the back of your throat with this bone!"

Oh, that was terrible.

He never meant it in a lewd way, but Raptor's mind took him there rather quickly, and now his expression shifted and flickered more as he stifled a laugh. The sable wolf set his jaw and ground his teeth, channeling his anger, trying to hold on to it. It was the only way he could spare himself. He flicked his ears forward, conjured up a threatening snarl and lowered his head, fangs bared and gleaming. The burnt umber of his eyes came alive like fire and his hackles rose like quills. He pressed down onto the rib as hard as he could.

"Let. Go."

He didn't have his wit to fight with but he still had his teeth.

What a gracious offer. Wylla's eyes narrowed and her own hackles puffed along her back. Did he really think she wanted to...? Ugh, gross. That was probably even saltier than he was about her chewing on his rib bone, and he was proving to be saltier than the sea itself. Granted, what he clearly wanted would bring her teeth in pretty...

No. Too much.

"How'd you know what your dad said to me last night?" she questioned innocently, facing his threat display with all the impudent brazenness of the devil itself. Their quarrel was very rapidly deteriorating from any semblance of civility into ass-kicking territory, and she had to wonder what the fuck she'd ever done to this guy to deserve such a thing. It would prove too large a vulnerability to do the sensible thing and ask, so Wylla pressed a paw down on the bone and gave it another tug.

As it turned out, ocean-soaked bones left to dry were awfully brittle, and the rib bone snapped unevenly as she wrenched her head back. She staggered under her own momentum, nearly flipping ass-over-teakettle into the sand, but managing to merely land on her side instead. Thusly stunned, she was momentarily unable to respond to anything Raptor said or did; but after a few seconds she recovered, brandished the sharp broken edge of the bone like a recently shattered beer bottle, and snarled, "now look what you did, you fat, ugly bastard!"

Did she seriously just break out the Dad jokes?

Raptor blinked owlishly at her. Once again he had nothing to say back to that. Mostly because the thought of his father opened a whole new kettle of worms worth of emotions that he was incapable of dealing with at the best of times — let alone right now.

She gave another wrench on the bone and for her efforts was sent tumbling backwards. Raptor snorted, allowing his snarl to briefly shift to a mocking grin. He made no attempt to rush her while she was open to attack, but when the female stood back up and threatened him with the jagged edge of his broken treasure, insulting him three ways, he considered that he should have. He really had no reason to fight her. He had been the one to fuck up in the first place. But she was provoking him and he was stewing in his own fabricated rage.

"I might be a bastard," he seethed lowly. "But yer gonna be the ugly one if you try to take me on."

He wouldn't make the first move. But he'd make the last one.

Up until then, Raptor had the physical edge while Wylla had the vocal one; his ability to halt her with his fat ass enraged her, while her jabs incensed him. But now the bone was broken in half, so his physical edge was gone. It seemed she had the upper hand now, with sharp bone aimed toward his gullet and comebacks loaded on the tip of her tongue, but he had to go and call her ugly, didn't he? She'd done it to him, and it was only fair, but everyone knew all men were ugly, and calling a thin wraith of a woman ugly was like calling a bear lazy.

Aghast, she briefly dropped the bone, and had the good sense to pin it beneath a narrow paw as she openly gaped at him. "Excuse me?" she asked, flattening her ears and baring her teeth in an abrupt threat display. Woah, Wylla, it's not like he killed your pet cat. On several occasions, this good-for-nothing pirate wannabe had insulted her and humiliated her, and for that he deserved every inch of his scruffy face maimed.

Instead, she let her rage consume her, followed closely by the snapping jaws of self-loathing, and told him in a dangerously low tone, "I catch your sorry ass 'round here again, you're dead," and then picked up her half of the rib bone—it was a hard won prize, after all—and turned away from him with a lash of her tail. It told quite clearly her true feelings on the matter, though she wasn't kidding with the death threat. She didn't know they were actually equidistant between her home and his; she would marshal her troops and bury him alive, of that she was convinced. For now, she marched away to lick her wounds and plan her revenge.

Snarling and bristling, Raptor hurled one last immature "UGLY!" insult down the shore at the back of the retreating female's head, and then whirled around to stomp off in the opposite direction. He decided for all of five minutes that he no longer wanted the bone and only wanted to go and ferment somewhere. But then he doubled back, grabbed what was left of the rib with a snort and sneer, and hauled it away back to Ironsea.