She wasn’t good at words. Usually they got her into trouble because she said the wrong thing or assumed things. Her idea of a conversation was more along the lines of a subtle grunt but that didn’t fly with a lot of people. They expected her to know how to express herself, articulate, pay attention to cues that were given. But she was terrible at all of it. Whenever she tried to explain how she thought or felt, it always ended up in some weird conglomerate no one could even attempt to understand. Or she didn’t want to talk about it, which was more common, since emotions were never really her thing and the more human she becomes the less they made sense to her. Sometimes she wished she’d never been human at all, stayed in that little mare body. Most of all she wishes she’d just stayed in the ocean, drifted so far out to sea no one would have ever been able to find her again. Sleep away the sorrow, the guilt, and the anger she made for herself on the shore.

If she let herself think about it, her past, she’d be lost to the emotions. Experience had shown her what it was to be human, took her from mechanical to flesh and blood so easily punctured it made her wily. Made her aware of easy she was to break these days. Little pieces of her chipped away, whittled down, the finished sculpture was still to be determined but it was turning into an ugly thing. Not like she’d ever been good looking anyway, right? Echidna was used to it. Her world was small and it was scarred with all the things she’d managed to endure.

What was one more thing?

One more giant scar on her chest. It didn’t mean much, she thinks, and she wants to tell him but why poke the bear? She has a feeling he won’t admit to how he feels about flat out, good of bad because it would just make everything more difficult. He’s defending his new ability to her, how it’s new and he’s not used to it and she shrugs it off. There’s not much there to say, it’s done and it didn’t surprise her that he’d go looking for a reason to argue. She can see he’s smiling at the idea of what happened and she isn’t sure how she feels about it right now. So, she says whatever it is she wants to say to him, he’s quiet and it makes her nervous. Echidna flicks her eyes from his face to the dirt, back and forth, not sure where to look. There’s a slight pain behind her eyes, along the bridge of her nose, this irritating pressure.

What he says next doesn’t get a physical response from her. Echidna sits in the silence for a moment, unsure of what he meant. Quinn was hard to figure out sometimes. At least he’s sorry.

Well, she starts and chuckles humorlessly, I didn’t expect anything else. Echidna rubs her arms gently; her skin is beginning to chill from the late evening. Soon, she’ll have to shift into her other form and find somewhere to hunker down for the night. Caia would eat in the forest until daylight, then Echidna would go find her, try and get some of the blood off before they wandered into town for some supplies.

Then again, she could build herself a hut, if she wanted but the effort felt like too much. She much preferred finding a nice, leafy spot under a tree. So are we like, going to keep this casual friends with benefits thing going or is it more of a ‘see you when I see you’ kind of thing where we never really see each other.

She can’t help being curious, wondering what he means, what he wants. If it was the more ‘pretend to be friends but avoid each other’ then she could find things to do but she just wanted to see what was on his mind.