The way she sprang to some semblance of life, seemingly only for him. Had it always been like that, or did he just imagine it? She had always been a very deliberate and consistent construct, and yet Hawthorn had always believed he knew the flesh and blood beneath it all, and she never seemed to mind that he at least thought as much.

His own tail went from its gentle wafting to a more zealous whishing back and forth when she bounded for him and her words assured him, in their own short and concise way, that she wasn't truly injured. Just very, very messy. He couldn't help the warm bout of laughter that escaped his throat, and it felt like that first breath of heady, unfettered air after being kept in for too long.

"You, ah, look as though you bathed in it," he said gently and with some amusement, even as he took note of her someone precarious state of being. Not that there was anything truly precarious about Alice. She was sturdy and always as she was meant to be, but she was still human somewhere beneath that.

"Of course," he said to her statement on his return. "I think... I think this is where my bones intend to rest. One day when I no longer have need of them."

The smile he then offered her was tender and a poor attempt at being reticintly indulgent. He never had been the sort to duck behind veneers. "You'll be stained that color, you know," he said as he stepped forward and ran his tongue up the bridge of her nose and between her eyes. The thick and pungent taste of drying blood coated his tongue, but it didn't do much to remove the red from her fur. He frowned, but in a light and comical way rather than in disappointment or irritation.