The man that had accepted him was...interesting.

The threat had left only warm humor settled in the chest of Achille. Fuck around could mean a great many things. Yet this would not be his first spring. He imagined that the implication was clear. Two men could feel the warmth in their bones just as any woman might.

So Achille was not welcomed to...mingle among their soon-to-be perfumed women. Not that he felt so inclined with his own preferences, but clearly no one could have known that. It was for the best that they had offered their warning to him and had assumed nothing of his own tastes.

For now he wished only to make himself useful, as promise.

"I know you must be a busy man," His features crinkled with warmth. "Yet I have come to see if you might spare time for me. A hunt, perhaps?"

He sought to bond them as packmates, as trusted figures.

"I will settle for a patrol if the land is not so giving today."

The man seemed more laxed now.

Perhaps with those pesky rules out of the way, they could shine a bit more genuinely.

"A land far south of your own. The winters are not so hard there. The land was rolling hills and a river winding through a valley." For a moment his gaze drifted to Eros, admired the man for what he could see. "You would have fit in there, I think." His features wrinkled gently with a smile.

It was the warm colors and the strong build. Achille had seen such features come about for years in his home.

"I am glad to have traveled and come to see your lands, though."

It sounded like an invitation in a way. To see the seasons as they changed here. To see the spring roll into summer. To watch as the world would eventually fall back into winter.

He wondered how long this pack had stood, how many times they had watched the seasons roll.

"Sometimes, but not as much as I thought I might." His smile then was a bit more boyish, warm and teasing. Although he mainly teased himself by saying this.

"I think they will still flourish with one less Pascal around. My siblings are many there. Not so much here. Not to my knowledge, anyway."

Eros had opened his home to Achille, it was only kind of Achille to open his history to the leader.

"That we do and I am grateful for it."

Otherwise their paths might not have crossed. A million things could have turned into what ifs had journeys been different. He could have taken himself down a long and exhaustive path of thought with it but he refrained.

"So far? Do you await disappointment? Perhaps a certain...bias is in the air already?" Yet his voice was light and laughter crept into the edge of his words. That sound spilled freely by the time he finished asking his own teased questions. His tail waved behind him in wide, joyous sweeps as he padded along after the leader.

The Backwater proved to be good company so far.