Family

The drunkards considered it a pastime, but she saw it as an affront to her Pride. Such men were swiftly put in their place, but a few beers always seemed to make them forget the last time they tried their ill-advised advances.

Then you had the wimpy noble children here, who couldn't even raise a pickaxe, much less beat her in a fight. And they still cast lustful or longing glances at her from across the room, expecting their so-called "status" to keep them safe.

Needless to say, having two men that weren't total horndogs around was a blessing, especially when they were the only two parental figures she had.

But now another man has shown up, with not an ounce of lust in their eyes and not a hint of desire in their mind?

She could only call such a thing suspicious.

In her eighteen long years alive, not once was there ever a man she had met without lust for her, hidden or not, except for her uncle and father.

She had said before that she had met men that thought themselves smart, and hid their desires from her senses with special enchantments. Some weren't smart enough and let their eyes reveal their intentions, while others managed to keep their true goals a secret almost until it was too late for her.

One particular fool had bought a teddy bear for her, demanding that she give herself to him for that trivial, inconsequential, empty gesture. He received a face full of rock and dirt for his troubles.

With all this in mind, it was only natural for her to be suspicious of another man without such lewd thoughts. In her experience, they were the ones most willing to take what they wanted by force.

In the back of her mind, she knew it was irrational. They had never met or even seen one another before the Familiar ceremony. How could he not only know about her desire sense, but also school his gaze?

Uncle Travis himself had said that Fate's eyes were enough to see through the man's thoughts, which only piled onto the absurdity.

But if that wasn't enough to make her feel like something was afoot, there was their shared knowledge of a language no one but her should even know existed. One impossibility stacked upon another, leaving her confused and frustrated.

Her suspicion soon turned to anger, and her anger became what she was doing now, tearing holograms apart with her bare hands to calm her mind.

Every bone in her body screamed at her, every drop of blood boiling. She wanted to beat him into the ground. How dare he make her own uncle yell at her?

Who was this man? How did he deserve the love of her uncle?

The dilemma she was facing now was something many Fox kitsubi went through, and was known as a Pride loop.

A slight blow to her Pride, normally something she could shrug off, combined with her helplessness and inability to do anything whatsoever to solve her situation led to a feedback loop.

Her Pride was rallied, prickling at this slight, pumping her Lust with energy and filling her with anger and violent thoughts that left her restless and itching for a fight.

But since she couldn't take this out on the source of the attack on her Pride – in this case, her lack of information – that restlessness kept ramping up, until she was left in a state where she could only go through fight after fight.

Her bloodline demanded she tear the offender limb from limb to appease her Lust for blood, beat them into submission, and establish dominance, assuring she was never slighted by them again to satisfy her Pride.

But when the cause of concern was simultaneously a concept and a person she couldn't harm without upsetting her uncle, what could she do?

The answer was to drown oneself in violence.

Within another hour, Cait had stopped taking breaks to catch her breath, fighting holograms back to back without respite. She had long since stopped caring about her form or stances, only wanting this feeling to fade.

Pospo watched this all happen in silence. She knew from Cait's own memories that this was the most effective way she had of dealing with such an issue.

Cait knew the kitsubi had other ways, but they had always deemed their time too important to speak with a half-breed, motherless kitsubus raised by humans.

"She didn't know her roots," they would say, the irony that they were refusing to teach her entirely lost on them.

And that knowledge only added fuel to the raging fire within her.

Cait sunk her fingers into the solid "flesh" of the light construct's arms, yelling furiously as she tore the arms out of their sockets and beat the construct to digital death with its own limbs.

She dropped the fading arms and panted heavily, mouth wide open and canines dripping with saliva as the red slowly faded from her vision.

Her tail vanished in a cloud of swirling brown light that sunk into her back, and she plopped down roughly on her bed and laid back, chest heaving as she stared at the ceiling above.

The method she had always left her drained of energy and breathless for the rest of the day. It was an extremely unpleasant experience and always left her feeling like shit afterward.

Her eyes fell from the ceiling to her stomach, where Pospo was currently making herself comfortable.

'Perhaps if you had talked it out, you wouldn't have had to resort to such drastic measures,' Pospo said.

'Talk about what, exactly? That even though my uncle vouched for him, I don't trust him? That I think he's some kind of Mental Mage that snuck into my bedroom when I was sleeping and broke into my mind? I wouldn't get more than five sentences in without starting a fight.

'But now that I've had time to think about it… I couldn't care less. If he is just like all the other men, he'll show his true colors soon enough. And if not… then maybe I can finally have a friend.

'Until then, he deserves the benefit of the doubt, if only for uncle Travis' sake.'

Pospo didn't object to these words. Each of Cait's thoughts was her own. All she did was purr in satisfaction as she gleaned from her master's thoughts that Cait thought of her not as a friend, but as family.