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It was so stupid. Zweite knew it was stupid. The b***h hadn't meant it seriously. It was just something said in passing. Even so, it had been bothering Zweite all day until at last she had found herself a private place where she could pull at her fur until the anxieties went away.

Just a little bit. One pull. Well, maybe one pull and a few short tugs. And one good yank. Two good yanks, but no blood. She wouldn't pull until there was blood.

"Owowow," she whimpered as she broke that last promise to herself. Immediately she made another one that she was destined to break, swearing that this was the last time.

Drvena was on his way to pick up his new friend and follower Muko. The little brown pup wasn't all that clever, but he was loyal and he did whatever Drvena told him to do without asking questions or arguing. Drvena liked that in a friend.

He was laying plans as he walked for how he would like to spend the day and what awesome things they could do together when he heard a whimpering. It wasn't a sound he heard often around his own den except when someone was careless and stepped on something sharp, but he knew it for what it was. It was a horribly sad sound.

He hadn't said a specific time when he would be picking Muko up, so it would be okay for him to investigate, right?

Was that a sound? Was that a sound caused by a person, that is? Zweite shifted guiltily and began digging a hole as if she was preparing to fill it with excrement. That was an acceptable activity. Her pulling, well, she knew that wasn't acceptable.

"Who's there?" she demanded, trying to put as much confidence and authority into her tone as she could muster. After a lifetime of submission, it did not come easily to her, but this was a proper pack. There were males to dominate, so it wasn't necessary for females to fight amongst themselves most of the time.

"It's very rude to spy on people, you know. I'll have your tail," she warned.

Affronted, Drvena popped out of the foliage and said very soberly, "I wasn't spying. I was coming to make sure you were okay. I heard...noises."

It offended Drvena that his attempts at heroism had been mistaken for something as horrible and sneaky as spying. Of course, Drvena was very brave and would totally be a spy for the pack, but he would spy on lions not other hyenas. That was not cool.

"So...are you okay?" he asked. He might bet smacked for being impertinent and asking questions because she was a girl and girl hyenas were mean, but he had to ask. It wouldn't have felt right not to ask.

Zweite's guilty expression didn't vanish as quickly as she might have liked, but the hyena had more experience in feeling guilty and projecting an apologetic air than she had in feeling or looking confident and in charge. Fortunately, she was older than the youth who had surprised her, and that lent her some courage she would not have been able to dredge up otherwise.

"I'm fine," she told the pup firmly. "You should mind your own business."

She wondered if he could see the area at the base of her tail where she had been pulling fur. If he could, he would probably be able to see the bald and patchy spot, crusted over with scabs and weeping sores. Zweite knew she wasn't pretty and never would be, so what did this one self-inflicted disfigurement matter?

Drvena was a pretty sharp pup, for a boy, and he picked up on the fact that the older female was hiding something from him, and also that she was more uncomfortable than he was. He didn't think she was afraid of him or anything stupid like that, but he remained convinced something was wrong.

"You're bleeding," he exclaimed when his nose filled him in on what it was about the scene that was subliminally upsetting him. "Did somebody hurt you?"

The idea of anyone attacking a member of his pack was both horrifying and outrageous. This wasn't a violent pack, in his experience, and no one attacked females. They were the bosses.

"Was it a lion? If it was, I'll kill it for you."

Zweite stared at the pup. She knew she shouldn't have been surprised that he could smell the blood from her plucked and nipped rump, but there wasn't very much of it. She told herself that he just had exceptionally keen senses, and that no one else would notice it.

"No one hurt me," she told the pup. It was a lie, of course, because injuries don't just spontaneously appear. "I actually pulled out my own fur."

She realized as soon as she said that it had been a mistake, but she could hardly unsay something like that. Perhaps she could distract the pup somehow, though why she cared at all was something of a mystery.

"It's pretty brave of you to be willing to fight a lion."

"Yeah, well. I'm pretty brave," Drvena said without much modesty. He wasn't a modest pup and had not yet learned to feign modesty when dealing with females.

Her admission that she had done that damage to herself was completely unexpected. He didn't know how to react to that, and so he was stalling with bravado.

"I don't understand. Why would you do that? You're so pretty." It probably wasn't the best thought out argument he could have made, but it was the first thing that came to mind. He still couldn't imagine deliberately hurting himself for any reason. He also didn't understand that just being pretty didn't mean a person was necessarily happy.

Zweite had nothing to say to the pup on the subject of her beauty. She had spent her life being told she was stupid and ugly and useless. It was hard to believe anything else, even unsolicited compliments from pups who had no reason to give them if they weren't true.

"Go away, pup," she said wearily. "I am tired of talking to you now."

She was just tired in general. No one in this pack had been unkind to her, but she was not accustomed to being surrounded by so many females and it made her uncomfortable and nervous all the time. She didn't feel like explaining that to the pup, to whom she had already said too much about subjects he had no business hearing about.

"Leave."

"Um...Okay," Drvena said hesitantly, retreating a few steps.

She looked like she could use some help and some cheering up, but she had also told him to go away and he was learning that it was best to obey females, even when they didn't look like they were the sort who were going to hurt him for being uppity. He took another few steps in the direction of Muko's home before stopping to tell her, "But you really are pretty. You shouldn't hurt yourself. Or be unhappy."

And then, before she could get mad at him for being impertinent he scampered off. He would think about this encounter later, but for the time being he had adventures to get to with Muko.