Sweet dreams are made of this,
Who am I, to disagree?

Red felt herself sway as she sat down on a tree stump, overlooking the brackish waters that lined the coast. A casket of strong liquor sat below her, and she clasped her paws around one to ease the shaking. The serval fiddled with her bandages, then pressed the bottle to her maw to drink. Her vision flashed, and the pain in her wounded eye was like hot, hateful fire.

"Alec?" she hushed, looking at the dark canid figure over the water. It wavered, then walked away. "Alec!?"

She stood, then swayed, then fell into the casket of liquor with a crash. With a pained grunt she hauled herself up. "Come back..!" her voice came as a sob, and a paw pressed against her bandaged eye as the pain became worse. "Come back, please..." came her drunken sobs.

Sweet dreams are made of this,
Who am I, to disagree?

"I saw him... I saw him, I saw him!" she cried, unaware of Lucinder up until he threw the bottle. Looking with her good eye and cradling the bad with a paw, she glared at him.

"What I do..." she looked up at Lucinder, lost in drunken thought for a moment. "Is no one's business." She tried to reach for the bottle, then groaned again as her eye kept getting worse.

"Fuck-" she felt along her face, peeling away bandages and letting them fall to the ground, her paws shaking. Her vision blurred, and she shook her head, only making the pain worse.

Sweet dreams are made of this,
Who am I, to disagree?

Her lips pulled back in a snarl as he spoke, pressing a paw against her cheek. For a second, her expression softened, haunted by the memory. Then, just as quickly as it came, it was gone. "Get your paw off me." she snapped, lashing out at his foreleg.

Staggering back, she felt blood trickle from the wound, but she looked at Lucinder. "And what... why do you care? Why the fuck do you even care!?" she raised her voice slightly, not enough to be a yell. Her skin itched so, so much. The scarring on her legs itches even more, and she fought the urge to scratch at it.

Sweet dreams are made of this,
Who am I, to disagree?

Red backed up into the tree, anguish in her eye as she stared up at Lucinder. He... cared. About her. It was a wicked idea, something she hadn't expected. She was uncomfortably silent, staring up at him, eye a myriad of emotions. Grief, anger, fear, maybe something more. But she shut her eye to the world and tried to steady her breathing. She couldn't tell if the alcohol was already fading off (if it was, it was all thanks to the blood within her, the divine curse), but her thoughts had cleared slightly.

Opening her eye, meeting his with an equal amount of fury, she spoke. "You don't know enough about me to care; you don't know what I am, what I've done, where I've been." She could feel the anger in her chest, and it fueled whatever memories of him she had. Too vivid were the thoughts of the black canid, the one who had stolen her heart once before, and she didn't know if he'd given it back.

Sweet dreams are made of this,
Who am I, to disagree?

Red flattened her ears against her skull, listening to each and every word as the thoughts got louder. Where was this leading? Would it end? And he fell silent, and she spoke up. "Selfish!? Selfish!? You really don't know a DAMN thing about me-" His confession damn near broke her. She fell silent, letting the words sink in as a paw reached to the tooth that hung around her neck. It was a sudden realization of two things; one - Alec was gone, dead most likely, and two - in the short time she'd known Lucinder, she had started to feel some semblance of affection toward him.

But her past was dark, interlayed with things she had nightmares and terrors about. Would he really want to deal with her, with all that? Her voice was small, incredibly tiny compared to before. "If you knew everything, maybe you wouldn't.." she lowered her head, hiding her wounded eye. "But... I like you too."