Though Rosemary had yet to properly get acquainted with Luca, she saw him around the group often enough to notice his various scratches across his body - as well as a potentially interesting light in his aura, similar enough to Caesar's own demonic trace. Given that the hellhound, obviously, was a hellhound she pieced together that Luca probably was demonic; if she kept to herself as a good witch should, then she knew she needed to put a bit of distance between them. After all, meddling with demons seldom turned out well.

But the ocelot, filled with more curiosity and far more evil compulsions than the average witch, dismissed that guideline. Instead, she wanted to investigate; she needed to see if Luca's demonic nature made him as intolerable as Caesar, and whether the hellhound would need regular checkups on these odd scratches he seemed to collect.

"Luca?" the pale wildcat called out, using her magic to cause her soft voice to carry on the wind. She had a feeling that the canine was currently here, in the darkness of the jungle, but she couldn't quite pinpoint where his scent trail led to. Rolling her tongue around her teeth, she adjusted the satchel around her as she waited to hear for his returning callback.

[member=1517]Luca[/member]

Likewise, Luca had noticed Rosemary around. Most notably at that kid's capture, where she had tried to stop that yellow guy from torturing her. Luca was internally grateful for that, despite complaining about the infighting at the time. He disliked seeing the weak get picked on. Perhaps it was strange for him to care about things like that. After all, Rosemary was correct in the assumption that he was a demon, and he had definitely done worse in the past. He couldn't help but be reminded of himself though, back when he was young and vulnerable and unable to defend himself from the cruel hands of others.

The sound of his name on the wind prompted him to flick a pierced ear, lifting his head and turning it in the direction that the noise had come from. He was taking some much needed shelter from the sun and the rest of the clan, curled up in the shade with his head rested on his paws. He was needed for something. How odd. He blinked sleepily and stood, slinking from his shelter and through the foliage towards the wildcat. Those luminous eyes of his were no doubt the first things to appear from the darkness, curiosity evident in their depths as he stopped before the one that had summoned him. "Evening ma'am," he responded, hesitance lacing his voice somewhat. "Do you need something?" It was definitely odd for someone to seek him out with nonviolent intentions, so he couldn't help but wonder what she was after.

Her right ear twitched as she heard the crunching foliage, her slitted pupils jerkily moving to look at the shaded shelter. The hellhound's glowing eyes, unmistakably Luca's, popped against the relative darkness - before the rest of him popped out, too. She nodded in greeting to him, her main eyes analyzing him and his various scratches. But her smaller eyes, almost blended into the top of her head with her dark splotches, moved almost erratically as she read the words that formed momentarily in the air around the demon.

She could see the hesitance in his voice, more than she could decipher it from his tone. She frowned for a half-second, confused as to why the male seemed uncertain. And why he called her ma'am. Rosemary understood that one, least of all, especially given he wasn't even the first or second to address her like that since coming to the Typhoon. As the youngest of her previous coven, nobody approached her with respectful hesitance, and she wasn't adapting to it well.

"Rosemary is fine," she mumbled back in response, seemingly catching the hesitance bug from Luca. But the wavering in her tone came from her distracted mind. Did she come across as more intimidating than she realized? Was she considered mean to the rest of the members? Questions rolled around in her head, but she pushed past them to resume her little quest. Clearing her throat, she pulled her satchel off her shoulder and placed it in front of her; the movement caused the clasp to shuffle slightly, and a perfume-like smell of mint and other herbs wafted from its opening. "I couldn't help but notice your scratches. I'd like to bandage them up for you, if that's alright," she explained, her voice cracked and dry - like the snap dead sticks, which contrasted so strangely against the jungle.

Boop

Luca noticed her extra set of eyes about half way through his sentence. He followed their movement with his own pupils, watching as they appeared to read something that he couldn't quite perceive. It was a little odd, but Luca had seen much stranger in terms of mutations, even on his own body. It did make him a little jealous though, seeing that she had two pairs of eyes while he quite often didn't have any. He returned the nod and waited for her to speak, a hint of hesitance still clinging to his aura. The reason for his meeker attitude was pretty simple, really. He was good at approaching others, but much worse at being approached. When he wasn't the one in control of the situation, it was fairly common for his true self to come to light. He was shy, bashful, and he hated himself for it. He would sell what little remained of his soul if he could appear aloof and levelheaded in all situations all the time. It was one of the many things that he had always envied his brother for.

His reasoning for calling her by the title of ma'am was a little more complicated. Luca was rude, even when he was caught off guard and his true self came to light. Unlike the other parts of his facade, his abrasiveness was one hundred percent real. However, all of this seemed to disappear in the face of more women who's aura he respected. Rosemary was his type, although perhaps 'type' was too broad a term. Technically everyone was Luca's type, she just happened to be the type that he respected, the type that reminded him of his childhood friend. If he couldn't have her around him, he would just gravitate towards any female who had a hint of her domineering aura.

He sat down and watched the movement of her satchel as she placed it on the ground, curiosity bubbling beneath his skin before she answered him. It appeared she just wanted to take a look at his wounds. He glanced and his cut legs and immediately a small wave of guilt washed over him. He didn't like that fact that clan supplies were being wasted on wounds that he got in the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure. A subtle heat bloomed beneath his fur and he shifted in his seat, trying to hide both the embarrassment and his guilt. "Ah, you can take a look at them if you want, but they really don't bother me that much," he attempted, suddenly avoiding eye contact. "Besides, I'll probably just get more anyway." He added that last part in a mumble, knowing that it was more likely to let Rosemary catch on, but also more likely to get her to leave his wounds alone.

She watched his movements, her main pair of eyes watching him carefully as he sat down. However, his aura flashes several times with various colors - the red overlay of his aura lights up first with light pink, followed shortly by dull cornsilk. Her eyelids blink rapidly, all four of them, as she tries to puzzle through what those indicate. But, before she solidly fixed on an answer, he spoke; his words, illuminated with the same flashing colors she noticed in his aura, lazily drifted in the air around his head like trembling leaves in the wind, before fading out of existence.

Rosemary considered her synesthesia little more than a hallucination; with how many of her family members suffered from mental disorders with psychosis and hallucinations as side-effects, she easily mistook her benign ability as belonging to a more sinister neurological anomaly. Even with this belief, however, she knowingly broke the first rule about hallucinations - she trusted their insights. They've never failed her before; how could they, when her synesthesia simply projected emotional clues from tone and diction into a visual format? So she trusted them, along with her magical ability to sense aura, and knew he felt something akin to... embarrassment? No, something deeper, she felt that in her bones.

"Well, it doesn't bother me to look them over," she replied, matching his words to try and convince him. Rosemary's dealt with plenty of wounded pirates that wanted to do anything to their wounds besides allow Rosemary to heal them, so the stubborn edge to her voice was resolute from all her practice. The soothsayer, covertly sadistic, never got the chance to properly explore that side of her; regardless, she felt natural in leadership roles. She took to handling the necro mambas easily enough, regardless of her personally chaotic nature. Confident in herself (when she isn't flushed with social anxiety or worrying about potential warning signs of her crumbling sanity), she didn't think for a moment that Luca would skitter away back into the jungle. After all, he willingly sat down in front of her and protested weakly  against her bothering to heal him.

Still, she frowned slightly at his last remark and lack of eye contact, thinking that his reaction to her efforts contrast sharply with doctor-hating patients from the past. "What makes you think you'll get more?" she asked, her dry voice painfully neutral to her ears; she tried to display a warm bedside manner, but her expression fell flat, as usual. Looking down into her satchel, she paws around in it, though it only takes a second or two for her to produce a swath of clean bandages and one of her trademark tins. "How did you get them?" she asked, looking up from her assembled tools back to his face, her forked tail flicking behind her. Her curiosity didn't wait for his answer to start coming up with possible answers - perhaps someone in the Typhoon hurt him regularly or he liked to recklessly spar with the grim rays too much.

In her naivety, she doesn't even begin to wonder if he's a masochist; she doubts people like that really exist at all, anyway, as she can't possibly imagine how anyone would derive pleasure from pain. Rosemary is a sadist, a monster that likes to defy her nature by healing instead of harming. She guards her secret carefully, and never allows herself to think that anyone would want a sadist.

© MADI

Unlike Rosemary with her sadism, Luca had received many opportunities over the course of his life to explore his masochism. It had only developed in the first place as a coping mechanism, but now it was so much more than that. He no longer needed it to defend himself from the horrors that were happening to him, to trick him into thinking that he enjoyed the torture. It had become detrimental to his health now, but still it remained. There were times at night that he couldn't think about anything other than the wounds coating his body. He would lie awake for hours, digging his claws into his limbs and glancing with shame out the window to make sure that he wasn't being seen. The darkness would move in on him and call him all sorts of names, although he didn't consider them hallucinations. They were much too real to be figments of his imagination, he had decided, so he broke the rather well-known rule and acknowledged them.

As Rosemary insisted that she didn't mind looking him over, his resistance started to fade. He exhaled, a plume of white smoke drawing itself from his lungs and swirling around them. "Okay," he finally agreed, although his voice was softer than his usual tone. At least it meant that none of his cuts would get infected. As much as he hated wasting the clan's resources, he almost hated getting infections more. They were gross and oozy and made him feel all sick, so he was silently a bit thankful for the medic's insistence. The canine shifted into a more comfortable position, his straight back relaxing slightly and his head falling. If she was going to do a check of all the cuts on his body, he knew that they'd be there for a while.

Her next question was one that he had been dreading. Heat continued to creep up his body, embarrassment becoming evident in the quick reddening of his skin. It was easy to mention his masochism offhandedly in the middle of a conversation, especially if he was saying it as a joke, but it was infinitely more difficult for him in intimate situations like this. He had nothing to hide behind here, when there was just the two of them. There was no way he could pass it off as a joke if she reacted badly. His reputation in the Typhoon was pretty much in shambles already though, so he eventually came to the decision that he had nothing to lose. He watched her paws as she dug around in her satchel, his eyes easily being drawn to the white of the bandages as she pulled them from its depths. "Um," he began, unsure of where exactly to start. He wanted to make it clear that he wasn't being picked on, as people often assumed, or that he was doing this out of some hidden self loathing (although it would be a lie to say that there was no self hate involved).

"Most of them... I did to myself," the hellhound admitted quietly, his eyes darting off to the side as if to check that no one was listening in. "I'm a, uh, bit of a masochist. I like the pain, so sometimes I just can't help it." He trailed off, glancing at the ground. He felt like his face was burning from the confession, and he shifted again in the cool dirt of the jungle. People usually looked down on him for that sort of thing. He had never thought there was anything weird about it until he started trying to integrate himself back into society. People often looked at him funny when he requested certain violent actions, recoiled when he admitted why he started so many fights. He was very obviously expecting the same response from Rosemary.

She breathed out a small sigh as he complied; she never liked fighting people when it came to their health, especially when that meant they only prolonged the inevitable and made her job harder if the wounds festered. As he settled into a comfortable position and started answering her, she nodded though she doubted he saw the body language - he seemed content to look at her paws, and she quickly noticed the strong embarrassment in his aura continued to spread. Her smaller pair of eyes narrowed skeptically as she anticipated some odd, stupid story about how he got his injuries; as a healer, she saw plenty of people who injured themselves in the dumbest possible ways, so she doubted he actually needed to bother feeling embarrassed over his predicament.

Taking out a flask of water, she uncorked it and propped the item up against her satchel. With a flick of her paw, the contents came out in one great stream to form two bubbles around each of her forepaws, their surfaces shimmering with reflected light and their wavering surface tension. As he continued, she settled her paws to hover above his back, breathing slowly and steadily to control her magic with the precise control. The cool water permeated his wounds, gently clearing gaping flesh of dirt and other particle debris. But, in an instant, she lost control of her magic as shock rippled through her mind - causing the water to turn to ice, and the effect caused an accidental attempt to freeze his wounds and force the weeping pink blood from the wounds to clot with the decreased temperature.

Her mind felt as though someone yanked the power cord out before shoving it back in for a manual reset. She never encountered a masochist before - well, nobody ever admitted themselves to hold masochistic tendencies around her - and to know Luca... by his own admission...! She took a deep breath, forcing her magic to cooperate and turn the ice back into useful floating blobs of water. "I'm sorry, but... did you just say you were... a masochist?" she breathed, her voice shaky and unsteady; for once, her apathetic tone and cold demeanor broke from the flood of unexpected surprise in her mind.

But the surprise quickly turned to excitement, her toes of her forepaws twitching and curling with the energy as new and forbidden thoughts flashed across her mind. "I've never - I thought - I am," she spoke, her voice thrumming with sudden bursts of intensity, though even her voice couldn't keep up with the frantic pulse of her mind. As evident to how she started three different sentences, but couldn't manage to finish any of them as she kept cutting herself off. Her heartrate continued to accelerate as the door she locked her sadism within shattered, and she fought the urge to laugh with hysteria - she didn't need the demon to think she was a crazy witch, though in all honesty... she knew she was. And what insane witch turned down the opportunity to leash a demon?

"I'm a sadist," she breathed out, finally capable of forming a coherent sentence. She tried to ignore her rising darkness and the steady drum-drum of her heart to keep a rational head while she made her offer. "Any wound I give you, I can heal. You wouldn't need to wander around the jungle with half-festered wounds until a medic takes notice," she spoke, her question unspoken and concealed behind the safety of syntax. She didn't feel confident enough in her sadism, in her darkness, to know how to deal with this kind of situation. But she knew how to talk about wounds, so she stuck with what she knew.

[ lol what are his actual scratches / wounds and are any deep enough to need stitches or more intensive treatment? ]

© MADI