｢ become fierce or savage / joining ｣

[TYDEUS]

[align=center][div style="max-width: 500px; text-align: justify; font-family: arial; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 1.4;letter-spacing:.1px"]Life experience — now that was something Tydeus sorely lacked. Or perhaps he simply didn't have the correct experiences. Violence was common, and he had learned not to be afraid of it. Of death, maybe, but not of anything that came before it. Teeth buried in his skin became an intimate thing, and pressure on bruises made his heart race. It wasn't that he enjoyed it, life just... had a way of crossing his wires, he supposed. If that was how his life would be, he would learn to enjoy it. So with time, in a way, he became as bad as anyone else that had fucked him over. Blood and gore didn't scare him off. Every other slave that ended up dead gave him a sense of sick relief: it's not me. Bones choosing to kill all of his friends instead of him: it's not me. He had never been a leader, he'd barely even been a friend, but he'd survived, and since survival and blood were so intricately knotted together with him, he wasn't afraid.

The only thing he knows about this particular pain is that it's confusing. He can see the strangers approaching perfectly well, though his mind seems reluctant to acknowledge it. There's no sound. The lion's head tilts until it's uncomfortable and he swallows thickly, missing everything that Pierce says. Peach eyes flicker between him and the next person, who blessedly does not move their mouth. Still, his ears flatten despite the pain at her expression. Disgust. Some irrational part of him puts the blame on his own shoulders, his appearance, just — something, anything. He's afraid of what she could possibly be thinking. Nothing seemed positive, to say the least. He found himself craving apathy the way he had once craved affection. All he needed was for people to ignore him, to look away. They so rarely did these days.

"What?" Even his own voice can only be heard in the vibrations of his throat and that scares him too. One paw lifts first to his collar and then to his ear, brushing across the area. It throbs and aches; he drops his paw back down. He'll spend days washing blood out from the pale fur, but that thought doesn't reach him now. "I can't — hear you."