Of all the things Vitani expected to get in response to her biting retorts, silence isn't one of them. Truth be told, she doesn't have much experience socializing with other horses outside of her own family - and their quick tempers, collectively, never allowed for remarks like hers to go unanswered - but the little she does have brings her to expect at least something. She bristles internally at the perceived snub, though she can't complain. Solitude is what she wants. She closes her eyes again, letting the sound of the waves in her ears drown out the chattering of her teeth, and waits for fate and the cold hands of winter to take her -

And instead feels something rough, and warm, and alive, shove rudely up against her barrel, pushing her onto her other side.

Spoken or otherwise, with her siblings, those would be fighting words. Vitani squeals, reaching up to grab a hunk of his salt-damp mane in her mouth, and pulls, both to chastise him for his insolence and to get some leverage for herself. "HEY!" she yells, managing to sit halfway up, her front legs locked together. She glares at him for a second, staring at his blackened form fully, and huffs, her breath rocketed from her nares in two long plumes of smog.

"D-d-didn't your mama t-teach you any m-m-manners?" Clearly not, she thinks to herself, and gathers her back end under her, attempting to push herself up on all fours. For a moment, it works - but in the next instant, her hind legs have failed again, quivering from fatigue and wobbly without any support. Vitani's rump hits the ground a second time, smacking right back into wet sand and water. She presses her lips together, swallowing down the scream trying to climb its way out of her throat, and takes a deep breath, feeling the anger as it roils within her tired body, unable to escape.

If only she could just get up. If she could stand - better yet, walk - she could rest, and then she could make this stallion, and Kovu, pay for what they'd done to her. Until then, she needed someone to help her get there, and unfortunately for Vitani, the only horse around was the one whose ass she desperately wanted to beat, whether he truly deserved it or not.

"My p-parents raised me better," she says, her words, though still shivery, back to their favored taunting pitch. "And my parents t-taught me that th-that's not how you treat a d-d-damsel in d-d-distress." Several things are untrue about that statement: Vitani is no damsel, and in this particular moment she may be weak, but she will never admit to anyone that she's ever in distress, much less in need of saving. And though her sire had visited her, and taken her once or twice on daddy-daughter excursions, it was Sabor alone who had done most of the raising, no matter how much Vitani wanted to claim otherwise. Khajiit was a god to her, a king on a pedestal, shining and perfect and almost always out of reach, and she wanted him to be there for her so desperately that the memory of his role in her life had ballooned far beyond what it actually was. Kovu was less... idealistic about the whole thing, less inclined to believe in the mythical "someday soon" upon which their sire would return to the Crossing and swan them away to their newest island home, and as of late, had come under the extremely erroneous assumption that Khajiit was never coming back. He comes every autumn, she can remember her brother saying some days ago, his hushed tones no less accusatory for their volume. Does he not? And he didn't come this year, did he, Vitani?

But Kovu was wrong. He didn't know their father like she did, and he didn't listen to Sabor when she promised the blue-eyed rogue would come back to them, just as he always had. That was the problem: Kovu didn't listen, to Sabor or to Vitani or to anyone, and all of his not-listening was what had gotten them into this mess in the first place. Unlike him, Vitani did pay attention to her mother's teachings, more than Kovu ever did, and when she turns her head to peer up at the ill-tempered stallion, applying the education she'd been so blessed to receive, her expression has changed from one of fire and brimstone to something a bit more... sultry.

"Come back here," she bids, forcing the tremble from her voice, "and help me," the glitter in her honeyed gaze as dangerous as it is enticing. Come back, you handsome prick, she wills him silently, or else, and waits for instinct and the allure of her feminine curves to draw him like prey into her open, waiting jaws.