Animal had been around much too long and learned far too quickly to know how this world worked and what he wanted to take from it. He had spent years discovering the pawns and the players, the winners and the losers â€" and had swiftly decided that it was a game unfit for his precious time. This world swarmed with humans like a bothersome hive of bees, humming dully in their day to day lives as they slowly made their way from flower to flower before perishing; meaningless in culture and desire as they seemed to thrive, yet only just. It was entirely loathsome before he found that this race, mixed with the blended blood of those who possessed magic, could be swayed all too easily from their path.

If you were to give them a greater meaning or brighter, more succulent flower, they would come. To expose oneself as a greater entity in this mortal world was to open up endless possibilities, and now, hundreds of years later Animal remained a myth. A scary bedtime story. A hope, a dream, for those lowly humans desperate enough to believe in anything that appeared to be more than what their world could offer. He was an escape. A solution. Animal had risen the desperate and crumbled the rising, taking and giving with his twisted silver tongue and his Fairy magic. It was a game where he cheated and loved it dearly, despising the Courts from afar and wreaking havoc on the inhabitants of the city that resided there. It was a Fae's nature to be devious and elusive, cunning and tricky. Animal seemed to take pride in being so much more than that. He had not seen it all but he had seen most, and it would take more than a simple pale, fleshy distraction to draw his attention away from the hidden motives he knew lingered behind every mind â€" Fae's especially.

He did not trust Eleanor but he was not foolish enough to show it. He was an admirer of their species, envious and jealous of the grace and utter power their kind seemed to harness. She carried a particular draw to him that made him uneasy and that greed inside of him seemed to clash with his natural desire to destroy. Animal was too proud a Fae to let her wrap him around her fingers the way he wished to do to her, too vicious with time and experience to play nicely for long. It seemed that the two would meet at a stalemate every time, keeping one another an arm's length away and perhaps more, lest someone decide to rip a limb off in the mutual area of space they'd given each other. Animal was almost at that point. His eyes were stormy, furious with how easily he felt his emotions rise and fall like an angry ocean whenever this particular Fae came into his presence.

Eleanor... what is it that you want?

Animal's gaze remained steady, appraising her from afar. The anger did not cease but the frustration seemed momentarily re-directed at her statement and a harsh silence fell over the circular clearing. He let his voice ring out once more, the harshness that had once occupied it no longer lashing out in a booming anger. Instead it came out in a collected hiss, as if Animal was now convinced of a home field advantage. "And yet it does not feel as if you entirely belong." His slate eyes glinted, that sneer on his lips curling ever so slightly into a faint smirk. "Does it, Darling?"

He motioned openly to the trees that formed the ring of the clearing. It was she who stepped so hesitantly on these grounds. Not he.

have you no idea that you're in this deep?
I've dreamt about you nearly every night this week