Cerulean Cape High maintenance means you're a gluttonous queen, narcissistic and mean

She'd kept the broken half of rib bone she'd managed to steal from Raptor as a reminder of her victory over him. In the end he'd spluttered and resorted to calling her ugly, losing in a spectacular flash of immaturity. Upon returning to the strand with the bone, angry and flustered, Wylla had stashed it away in her corner of the grotto and put him from her mind. By the time she ventured out again, she had nearly erased the exchange from significant memory.

She was drawn far from Grimnismal's borders for two reasons, but the more relevant one was the scent of rotting flesh on the easterly wind. An obscenely fat seal had expired at sea in the jaws of an even more obscenely fat shark, judging by the size of the chunk taken out of it, and had washed up on shore. Having sat there for several days, the carcass was ripe and sent out a loving siren song on the wind to searching predators. Wylla, who had subsisted on fare such as this for most of her life, heeded its call helplessly, and her tail wagged as she spotted the mound of half-rotten flesh on the beach.

She might have forgotten their squabble but he hadn't.

Raptor had returned home and worked his teeth across his half of the bone until his gums were sore and bleeding. In the following days he had busied himself around the crew's claim as a means of coping with the crippling guilt that had lodged in his breast like the splintered end of the rib Wylla had brandished at him. But, distracted and forlorn, the sable corsair had made several dispiriting blunders in his endeavors; a spry coyote had even managed to pilfer a plump gull straight from his jaws. It had been enough to wholly sour him and send him spoiling for a win down the cape — and headlong into what promised to be another wreckful encounter.

The lure of carrion brought him down the shore.

Then the sight of her stopped him in his tracks.

"Why can't you just disappear!"

It felt liberating to be in a good mood for once. Free food on the shore, a nice breeze off the sea, relatively warm weather for the season, and Wylla, alone with her solitude. There were no snarky brothers to make verbal jabs at her, no sea witches watching creepily from the dark, and best of all, no—

—oh, fuck.

Her head snapped up at the sound of his voice, and just like that, her good mood spoiled and fermented into sour soup in her belly. She turned a vicious scowl upon Raptor as he came roaring up the coast, the attention seeking little baby, and her hackles flared to life along her back. "I warned you," she snarled across the way, then tossed back her head to howl long and loud for her pack members to come and kill the pirate bastard. Sadly, her pack was a lot farther away than she thought it was, and no one would be coming to answer her call.

Raptor seethed. His eyes turned to fire and he bared the fullness of his fangs. He let his tumultuous and derisory emotions thrust him forward in a stiff and vengeful stalk, but his advance halted when she howled for her crew. The sable wolf looked sidelong for the reinforcements she summoned to materialize out of the grasses and sand.

This was his usual cue to leave. He did not have the support of his own crew and he was not above cowardice in the name of keeping his own hide intact. But Raptor was foolishly barrelling down a path of self-destruction and darkly thought that he should let her and her pack tear him to scrap. Only, her pack did not come right away (would they come at all?), and he turned brazenly to mockery.

"Too weak to do it by yerself?" He jeered with an expression that was caught between a smirk and a snarl.

"You're not worth me lifting a single paw myself," Wylla rejoined, bristling from nose to tail as she stood guard along the bloated flank of the dead seal. Raptor was larger than her, which gave him a power advantage, but she was skilled enough at fighting that she hadn't been killed yet despite her barbed lips. They were probably somewhat evenly matched, but she believed what she said: swine like him wasn't worth the time of day.

Unfortunately, Wylla wasn't mature enough to truly act the way she thought she should, so although the right thing would have been to put her money where her mouth was and walk away entirely, she didn't. She remained, intent on keeping him from the seal although it was too large for her to properly guard, but when her pack didn't arrive or howl back, she muttered, "fuckers," under her breath and steeled herself to have to take him on solo.

"Mm-hmm that sounds like somethin' a weak wolf would say," he riposted. He was reminded of Sandpiper in that instant. Her and him had often exchanged barbs like this but theirs were never laced with such poison. Theirs had been an entertaining affair and this... all this did was rankle him more.

Raptor stalked forward, circling toward the far end of the seal. His eyes never left her. He too recognized that the carrion was too large for her to guard with ease and he doubted the lengths she would take to protect it from him. But only so much. That she had snapped her teeth down on his toes before cautioned him enough to try to be wily about stealing a bite. Meanwhile his destructive mood gave him the balls to tempt fate as he parted his jaws and made a lunge for a chunk of blubber that looked like it might come free with a solid jerk.

She couldn't muster a single word in response; she'd grown weary of his constant insults when he was the only one of them who had ever done anything wrong. If Wylla had the powers of the cosmos on her side, she would have willed him away to a distant star, never to be seen again. There wasn't a single redeeming quality in the bastard, and her eyes remained wicked on him as he began to move, eliciting a hackle response from the tiniest Luschyon.

Her reaction was instantaneous when he lunged. She'd been in so many scraps in her life, it was a wonder she wasn't dead. Beneath her coarse fur was a map of scars from the fights she'd picked with larger and more experienced wolves, and she had often lost—but she also hadn't lived as she had for so long out of sheer luck. In a flurry of rough sand, the silver-and-charcoal wolf swung around and threw herself at his arm, teeth parted to seek dangerous purchase on his leg and ward him away from the seal.

She couldn't possibly eat or carry all that meat, but now it was a matter of pride rather than survival.

Raptor's brazen efforts only awarded him with a paltry chunk of flesh no larger than his own paw and it came at a great expense. The blubber did not give way like he thought it would. Instead of him tearing it off smoothly and bounding out of harm's way in one fluid motion, his momentum was broken by unexpected resistance and he was unable to recover and act quick enough to dodge the viper-like strike Wylla made.

Her teeth clamped down onto his foreleg like a steel trap, drawing a loud squall from the corsair as the measly blubber dropped into the sand. He fought to free himself, shaking and jerking his leg at the risk of cutting his own flesh on her teeth if she did not do it for him first. Desperate and furious, and absolutely smarting with a feeling of worthlessness, Raptor made a lunge for the bridge of her muzzle, hoping to drive her off and away.

Sand flew underfoot when, in two quick motions, they held one another in check. Wylla's teeth cut into the muscle of Raptor's arm and she made an effort to lock her jaw, but wasn't successful before his own teeth scored her muzzle. A pained snarl erupted from her throat and she threw back her weight and tore at his flesh, hoping to come away with a piece of it and only a deep scrape on her snout to match it, though she knew better than to think he was fully disadvantaged. Raptor was larger than she, and larger wolves tended to have a stronger grip. So she gave only a few sharp wrenches of her head before yanking herself away, with or without a piece of him in her jaws, and she pulled back several paces to lick blood from her lips, whether his or hers or both.

The flesh across Raptor's leg ripped and tore under Wylla's ferocity and his own bullheaded efforts to escape it, but his teeth had left their own score across her snout and drove her back. He was stiff and smug for all but a moment as his burnt umber eyes beheld his work... but his injured leg was quivering from adrenaline, and when he spared it a glance he was drained of all the will to keep up his aggression. Raptor's limb bore several hideous gashes, and blood had soaked his dark fur and was seeping into the sand beneath his paw. Had he not been so reckless he would have spared himself a lot of injury, but there he stood with awful and sinister wounds; the same sort he had seen on another's limb; the same sort he had seen become infected and rot the entire leg off.

He felt sick and ashamed and embarrassed — and a cocktail of other wild emotions half of which he could not even name — and his opinion of himself plummeted even further as unbidden thoughts of his past stormed his mind. Raptor had brought all the recent follies on himself (and arguably, most of his past ones), but he levelled his narrowed and malignant stare on her and blamed her for everything that had ever been wrong with him and his life. In that moment he convinced himself wholly and vehemently that she was the embodiment of what had been standing in his way since he was a whelp; that she was the very thing he needed to overcome if he was ever going to survive in this world. He made himself hate her so that he could both arm and shield himself with that hate.

"Watch your back," he threatened lowly. There was no mistaking the malevolence on his face or the vindictive promise in his eyes. Raptor backed away defensively as purpose and sense finally pulled taut the reins, and then retreated to bay to lick his wounds and seethe.

He retreated, but not before spitting vitriol over the space between them. Wylla pressed back her ears and bared her fangs, declaring that he, "best watch yours first," before returning diligently to the seal's side. Ignorant braggart. She'd done more damage to him, who was he to throw threats? He was just a loser. She lapped blood from her lips as he presumably headed back to the shithole he'd crawled out of. This time it was her own blood; the wounds on her snout were deeper than she first realized and as adrenaline slowly faded, pain soon took root. She remained by the seal for only a few minutes longer before the sting in her face spoiled her mood entirely and sent her packing for Grimnismal with a chunk of seal blubber in her jaws and a seething expression.