The cast of the sun bore into her face, lancing her gaze. Lusca shrouded her profile from its white streaks, recanting her glow-edged muzzle to face away from the glare. Ducking into the shade, she scrubbed her hackles against a crowd of pine tree branches, then carried on with a flick of her tail and the trek of mincing steps, hips bobbing as she picked her way shoulder-to-shoulder with the tree-line. 

This was the furthest she had strayed from the bounds of Ankyra Sound in the weeks since her capture, and Lusca was glad for the independence. Vlad had made himself irrelevant as of late and no other soul that haunted Caiaphas' habitation cared enough to keep her scrappy little gudgeon from abandoning her post––an opportunity for freedom that she was unwilling to let pass her by. 

In the early hours of morning when Caiaphas hid away in the intricate, water-slick passages of her beloved grotto, Lusca slipped away, traveling long into noon until she came onto the stillness of the grasslands. Here was a place that stirred nebulous feelings––almost evocative in nature. The better part of her early days in the Teekon Wilds had been spent in this hub, and she couldn't help but hold close a fondness for its windfirm silence. 

Withdrawing to a lonesome and unfrequented space in the brush, Lusca sank to her elbows and supped from a rainfed puddle. 

The whooping clamor that came from the east-end of the sward caused Lusca to startle. Her heart scuppered and she flailed to the right side in one unthrifty sweep, plashing through the puddle. In her urgency her foundered paw sucked into the clay-like substrate and twisted wrong––a shrill yelp pealed from her throat. Her immediate thought was that the wailing specter was Caiaphas come to collect her mislaid soul, and she was loath to go back into the custody of the briny litch. She began to run, throwing a panicked look over her shoulder.

As the figure jounced up and down through the tallgrass, it became abundantly clearer to Lusca that the gunmetal frons did not belong to the wicked woman, but another contact entirely. She pumped the brakes and her ears flew backwards. "You!" She roared, haunches screaming to a halt into the ground. 

His inbound form did not show any intention of halting, and if she knew this guy as well as she thought she did, she was sure that the pilot helming that plane was poor at navigation and even poorer at sticking the landing. As soon as he inevitably crashed into her, she had half the mind to wrestle him to the ground and sink her teeth into his gizzard. 

She drew aside her ears with lukewarm interest as he described his living arrangements, and felt the cusp of a deceiver's anlace dig between her shoulder-blades. The deception she felt was felt unjustly so––his exposure to the nature of his Alpha's comrade was not a heuristic process; Tachyon clearly hadn't felt imposed upon by her in any shape, shadow, or form, and even more clearly, Caiaphas herself hadn't laid bare the unsavoriness of her character to Donnelaith. 

Otherwise, his packfellows landed on the unscrupulous side of the coin, and weren't opposed to her practices. Bile gathered in her throat at the thought.

Like a disobedient dog resisting the insistent yanking of his tether, Lusca pulled back at his suggestion. She was openly soured to the idea of seeking refuge under boon companions of the termagant––the root of all evil in her scarcely traveled world. "Security. That's home." She snipped, low-set head swinging skyward in a gesture of decisiveness. "I won't fain to live amongst her friends." 

Too weary to snub his advance, Luc relented to Tachyon's trillion-count rosette of kisses. His public displays of affection were to be expected and routinely disciplined, but after enduring weeks of harsh rebukes as the dross and dregs of Saltwinter's hierarchy, gentle physical contact was a favored change. 

Slinking unbidden to his side, she brushed her muzzle under his grizzled chin, permissive of his doting.

Biological imperative was undiscriminating, rarely a thing that stood to be ignored, and not even the black gutterpup could long abstain from its dissipated draw. Her body responded to his touch with an instinctive flex of her waist, an untaught impulse against the breadth of his roving muzzle. She froze upon his intrepid approach, but came at him with no intention of hurling him to the ends of the Earth, nor with the corrective fret of teeth, but tolerance; a simple, rare mercifulness. She draped her paw across his nose, mouthed at his snout and rumbled friskily, rolling onto her back and batting his chest before leaping to her feet and romping away.

Perhaps the Sirens had more influence over her than she thought, as she led her jolly sailor boy away into the pall of shadows with her features a stretch of finger's wooing.