Annooka: Off the Leash

[Phantom]

The long awaited Annooka thread! ^^; Anyway, just a little Annooka thread taking place in Partner's AU.

Me - Pooka
Partner - Annette

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Pooka would have been lying to some degree if he said he was quite used to New England. For all the traveling he, Anya, and Dmitri had done, he still hadn't quite settled in the new place they had decided to settle. That might have been in part related to the fact that Pooka still hadn't met any dogs he could consider friends. There had been some he had seen on walks Anya took him on, but they had been little more than the initial 'sniff, sniff, move on' meetings than the actual sort of meeting Pooka had hoped for. So, the scruffy male was a bit on the lonely side in spite of having two humans to call his own.

Today felt as though it would be different. The scruffy dog couldn't put his paw on why that was, but for some reason Pooka felt like it would be worth his while. It hadn't been terribly out of the ordinary yet, what with Anya treating him to a nice belly rub not long after waking up and Dmitri sneaking him scraps from breakfast, but there had to be something. Presently Anya was taking him for his walk, and the blue-eyed pooch was determined to figure out what felt so different. He glanced at every little thing as they walked, only to come up with nothing. Finally, when the pair arrived in the park, he resigned himself to giving up. So he let himself lay under the bench Anya had decided to rest on and began to wonder if maybe his intuition about the day had been wrong.

Then, he noticed something. Not much at first, as what he thought he saw was just something out of the corner of his eye, but Pooka believed he had noticed something. He lifted his head from his paws and looked around once more. What was it? What was different?

[Angel]

What was different might have been that where, until a moment ago, Pooka had been the only dog present, now a cocker-spaniel cross had entered the park. The usually neat and collected Annette looked particularly flustered at the current point in time, although she carried herself somewhat hautily, nose in the air, in an attempt to disguise this. In fact, Annette was getting more and more frustrated with her home life. If having three doberman-spawn about wasn't bad enough (made even worse by the fact that one of them was her own daughter), Scamp was - whether intentionally or not - getting on her nerves worse than ever now that Collette and Danielle had moved out, constantly criticising her parenting techniques (as though the way he spoilt his newborn daughter rotten was any better)... and that wasn't even starting on the nightmare having a three-month-old, quite frankly unwanted, half-doberman pup underfoot who had no the slightest bit of respect for her.

Right now, Annette just needed some time to cool off, so she'd left little Estelle in her own father's care while she left the home behind for a while. 'Cool off', as it turned out, was certainly the right term; the mid-February air was still bitterly cold; but as anything was better than enduring Estelle's troublemaking nature and Scamp's taunts for the immediate moment, Annette kept walking, despite shivering beneath her fur, until she reached the familiar locale of Veterans' Park.

Not sparing a glance for the scruffy mutt currently, Annette padded to the riverbank, where she finally stopped. frowning down at her somewhat dishevelled reflection. Becoming an unwilling parent at such a relatively young age clearly had not been kind to Annette, she could tell as much just from looking at her own visage. Where she'd once felt in control, if not of everything then at least of her own life, the cocker now felt as though nothing was within her influence anymore - and since it had all started when Scamp had brought Angel home, Annette blamed both of them in equal measure. An audible sigh escaped her muzzle, one that could almost be described as despairing, as she stared down into the water, just starting to believe that life hated her now.