The copper tang hit him like a punch to the gut.

Dorian froze mid-drift, nostrils flaring. Blood. Fresh. A lot of it. The scent slid down into his chest, setting off instincts honed over years of patrol. Someone was hurt... Badly enough that it was seeping into the current.

He broke from the shadows of the reef with powerful strokes, cutting through the water in clean lines. The deeper he pushed toward shore, the stronger the scent grew, swirling thick and warm in the waves. His pulse quickened. Whoever it was didn’t have long.

Images flickered in his mind; bodies dragged under, throats torn open, the churn of red into foam. He hated those memories, but they sharpened his focus now. He moved faster.

A swell lifted him, and then the water grew brighter. The shore was close, pale sand and rolling surf. The scent had grown almost oppressive here, a copper weight pressing against the back of his tongue. His muscles tensed in anticipation of carnage.

But there was no flailing body, no slick trail of injury.

There was just... them.

A single figure stood in the shallows, half-turned to the waves. The tide curled gently around her waist. She was unarmed. Uninjured. Entirely unaware of how violently she had set off every alarm in his body.

For a moment, Dorian just stared. His heartbeat hadn’t caught up with what his eyes were seeing. The smell was undeniable; thick, metallic, insistent, yet there was no wound to match it. His instincts roared danger, but reality whispered no threat at all.

He rose halfway out of the water, eyes narrowing, his entire body coiled with a kind of hunter’s confusion. Adrenaline still burned in his veins, searching for an enemy that didn’t exist.

They turned then, just slightly, and the sunlight caught her face. Nervous, uncomfortable. Not the expression of someone bleeding out into the sea. But not a good one either.

A flicker of irritation threaded through him; at himself, at the sea, at this inexplicable situation. He’d imagined torn flesh and screaming. What he found was... a mystery wrapped in stillness.

His senses strained to make sense of it. The blood-scent was strong, steady, and still coming from them. No predators drawn near. No danger. Just they standing there, as if nothing were wrong at all.

Finally, he decided to approach. The closer he got, the strongest was the smell. The water there was moving enough and was deep enough for the blood color not to show, but his nose was not being fooled. As he tried following exactly where the blood was coming from, he didn't realize how close he got from them, his face hitting their crotch, the source of the blood.

He immediately realized how dumb he was. Sometimes people did get their periods in the beach, but not that much...

The damage was done, now that he knew this was no emergency, the blood on his nose was causing other things to surface... He raised from the water before it became too awkward.

"Hello... Uh... Do you come here often?" He asked like nothing weird was going on, praying for his charm to work on them.