there is no greater pain
or punishment than memory

He waits it out as if the answer she would give would open wide some big secret he doesn't understand. If she were to answer it at all, and not throw the conversation into another direction. That was possible, if it wasn't a place she wanted to go right now. Maybe it wouldn't tell him anything at all that he didn't already know. He could understand if he was a hell to her, because there must be enough others who would say the same thing. He wasn't a good creature by any means, though it was true that he had never expected things to go downhill as much as they had when it came to Echidna. He'd been rash with words and actions, but he lashed out when he was in pain, or angry, and he hadn't been in a good place.

It had taken a toll on him, feeling left alone and pushed aside. He wanted to understand the reasons why, but it had gotten to a point where he simply hadn't. He did his best to grasp them, settle with them, and it had never worked the way that he had wished it could. The reasons hadn't made the pain go away. Walking away hadn't made the pain stop, either. He could freeze what he felt only so much, but eventually it all got dragged back up anyway. Quinn just waits it out, and when he hears that one 'no', he gives Echidna a careful glance, noticing the way she's looking elsewhere right now; at her mare. He expected nothing less then the defensive way she was behaving, though. He saw it coming.

What he says gets a reaction from her, though, and it wasn't one that he thought would come with the words. Bewildered, maybe even somewhere in the general family of defeated. She didn't see herself that way. Pretending, like being on the outside and watching. Quinn nods at this, watching the way she plucked at the grass, brought up a little earth cat from the dirt. Quinn is pondering what Echidna had said, trying to make sense of it all, but it felt like some type of roller coaster that was making him dizzy. "Was any of it real? Any of what you said back there?" He needs to ask it, because it's important in so many ways that she probably wouldn't understand. He's conflicted about so many things here.

Knowing more about that time would help him to make sense of it all. Quinn isn't sure what to say about her thinking that she wouldn't see him again, because that wasn't how he'd seen it. "So you didn't believe you had to hold to being my friend? Or maybe you didn't want to." His gaze was thoughtful and upturned in the next moment, debating the information he was getting. He does sigh when Echidna is bringing up when he had lashed out in pain and anger, and there feels like a lump in his throat that he cannot swallow down. "There's fault for both of us on how everything went down. I can admit I didn't react the right way to a number of things in all that." It wasn't always easy, but he could admit to it now.

WORDCOUNT: 546