There seemed to be no destination of the tarnished white wolf that traipsed along the beach that quiet, late afternoon, and yet she carried herself with a purpose that was distinguishable at a distance. Furiosa was not a creature fine-tuned to loneliness, though used the singular advantage of fewer distractions to explore where there was little daylight left to do so. The sun would be swallowed by the sea in another hour or so, leaving the black-eyed wraith with a riling hunger to see as much as she could.
She remembered colder beaches; a fact that compelled her to scoff at the golden warmth that was the peninsula of Cerulean Cape. The ground was soft and inviting, something she found wildly unpleasant after years of almost nothing but cold and ice. She would get more used to it, she supposed, perhaps even come to be more fond of it than she was of the harshness she had been raised in. These lands felt inherently gentler, less competitive, than where she was from, and though Furiosa didn't often wonder, she wondered now if staying too long in this place would turn her gentle too.
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The sea. He'd been so accustomed to sparring through the foam, tiny bodies slammed into grey slate and sand with necks wrapped in needlepoint teeth. Why they'd always chosen the coldest days, he'd never known, but he liked to think it had hardened his body against what others might shiver and shudder at. It's what he let himself believe, anyway.
It had been a big, ugly, churning thing when he was young. This one, with its blue water and almost inviting face, was completely alien to him, moreso than the scent markers and the abundance of wolves and the lack of barracks dug into mountainsides and mudbanks. How he'd ended up here, the chill wind biting his heels and chasing him from end of territory to end, was beyond even him. The fading sunlight burned off the sand that dipped below his paws, an orange and blue and red mix of light that burned what remaining eye he had. For all his issues with depth, he could still see the way the light reflected off the crystal tide, the way it kicked up in white rollers around his paws, the figure that stood on the — what.
He reeled his head backward with an irritated chuff, the only indication of his ever being there before he almost violently strafed to the right, keeping his remaining eye on the figure he recognized all too clearly. Not this again. He already had a nice mangling of scrapes from their last encounter, and woman or not, he wasn't about to turn his back on a former scuffle. That being said, he still chose to escape to the dunes, if he could; at the very least, he wasn't tired enough for some banter, but a fight? Come back to him in a week.
Too uninterested to turn her head for any small degree, the stark wretch spied a shadow in her peripheral. She ignored it at first, until the figure had become too large to be a non-threat, and she was forced to finally afford herself a glance towards the amorphous black blot. Reflexively freezing, Furiosa committed the very rare act of a double-take— and sure enough, she recognized him.
It had been some time ago, but she remembered the hellhound quite clearly. She had received one of her "better" scars from those teeth, and she didn't easily forget a set of jaws that had ever touched her skin in violence. He had disrespected her before, perhaps because she was not traditionally beautiful, or more likely because (in her opinion) he was a homosexual. But he did not make that mistake now.
His militant, straight-backed trot had angled away from her, though even at this distance she could tell his eyes were intently trained on her. Furiosa was amused, to say the least, and because she further craved company to belittle, the wicked she-wolf picked a high trot through the sand with obvious intent to intercept him.
Spotted. The poverbial !! of alert sparks through fluttering, torn ears, and the seneschal gives a low, guttural noise of irritation. A grungy fly buzzes in his periphery, and while that one golden eye remains on the mangy face, it's dead of all recognition. A few scrapes still blistered, maybe, but nothing hurt more than an uppity woman's presence. Already he could feel his jaw tightening. The first and utmost irritation of any new culture was the idea - the very wrong one, if you asked him - that women had any sense in being heard, or being seen.
How tiring.
Her angle made all too clear - did she mean to herd him like cattle? - with the cut of that wiry body, he turns himself, trying to angle a wide swoop around the straight cut of her high-step path, a low, half-grunt summoning up from his throat. Couldn't the infernal woman just leave him in peace? He had no time to teach her discipline as he so politely had on their first meeting.
Though interested in goading him, Furiosa was in no condition at present to receive any new wounds on his behalf; it explained why she hung back, just outside of his lunging range, after dauntlessly coming forward. Her damaged tail lifted, proud as if it were a peacock's full plumage, and it swung slowly back and forth as her hungry black eyes took him in. "I thought surely you'd have turned to dust by now," she "complimented" him. "Or at least fossilized." Her opinion of him vastly differed from his opinion of her, mainly because her primary wants included eating, fighting, and reproducing. Not only could he care for himself— which spoke volumes to the prowess of a single wolf— but he had also bested her in battle, which was an immeasurably attractive aspect for the feral rogue. Had not the militant, dark zeus been so utterly disinterested in her, she would have snobbishly bore him a few goblins offspring already.
"Maybe it's a good thing you haven't," the wretch added ominously behind an equally sharkish smile.
As women do, she talks, throwing words at a brick wall. Thick muscles ripple to irritated attention, his gait slowing with the thunder of his paws. Fine, he'll bite. The golden glare of his one eye, dead of all emotion except for maybe a thread of annoyance, lifted with the straight of his neck. An army man standing to attention, ruined only by the dirty mangle of his coat. (He'd once been quite the meticulous groomer, if you could believe it. He hadn't any reason to keep it clean of late, though.) He stops, and whether she did or not, he would stand stalwart.
The black cut of his mouth drew backward in a sardonic smile that lasted only a second. "It's a wonder nobody's managed to snap that weasel neck of yours." Or separate her and that tongue, at the very least. Where Karma had only a few ounces of whatever respect he could muster for a fellow man, women rarely even recieved his attention, and it was a wonder he didn't consider them entirely invisible. Anytime they spoke, whether it be with eyes cast down in submission or yowling shrill with nagging, he considered them irritating, and best left in the shadows of their husbands. These were old beliefs, one's he hadn't cultivated since his time in uniform, but something about this one surfaced all that old prejudice to a boiling point.
"No man favors a stalker," he rumbles, lifting his chin with a haughty jerk and somehow bolstering his shoulders forward at the same time, defensive and aggressive and all-around looking like a tool — which was, unbeknownst to him, his specialty.
Still maintaining her distance, Furiosa paced in tight circles before him, swinging her head methodically over her shoulder so as to keep an eye on the spot where he had come to halt at all times. The vile woman delighted in the shadowy cyclops' trained posture, his back rigid with unshakeable authority, and her pitch eyes flashed excitedly at his caustic remark. "Ha!" the hyena crowed derisively; another retort gleaming silently from the froth waxing her over-used teeth as she grinned— you couldn't. But it was not on her to speak this, too busy watching carefully as his body rolled like distant thunder. And she listened to his dull roar of him in the back of her mind, keeping herself aware of it at all times.
He spoke again, which she found a more surprising occurrence than the first, and finally she ceased her tiger-in-a-cage pacing, one forepaw lifted as if she presumed to continue. "Well you don't seem to favor much of anything, so any approach on my behalf would've had your disapproval," she sneered. "But no need to be that way with me, Lucifer. I am your special friend, after all."