Common

It was difficult to tell exactly what colour he was, the wet of the sea darkening him and the champagne diamonds of sand granules glittering over him further confusing what seemed to be a deep bronze- watery pink rivulets of thinned blood had stained what had once been white. His stiff porcelain mask face didn't help, his eyes burning past the reaches of that cold, callous white. Of all things, though, it was his voice that caught Herald off guard, though it was difficult to pinpoint why. It was as harsh as he might've expected from that still, unnerving face and that tense, fierce body, but something about the hoarseness- the catching, snagging texture of it that grated against his cheek like coarse sandpaper- seemed so... Affected? So heated with suffering, and angry for it? It was a sort of passion or feeling that felt raw beneath Herald's gently probing fingertips, as if he were lightly touching his opened flesh and the bare, quivering, angry nerves and throbbing capillaries underneath. It prickled something equally raw in Herald, and without thinking he reached for him- then jolted himself out of the daydream before his straining muzzle could touch the rigid planes of his new 'friend's' face where his sodden, slithering platinum hair parted across the bridge of his nose. Hurriedly leaning back on his heels with a low, stuttered laugh, he averted his gaze to the... Meat hanging from his friend's sleek, scarred back, and swallowed, still smiling with an instinctive, nervous sort of thoughtlessness.

"Um..." Maybe he just shouldn't answer? It didn't seem like the kind of question that begged an honest answer, but Herald was not a good liar, and despite that not answering was easier, he also cared just a little too much to do that, either. His face worked visibly through a few lines of thought as he had them, from worry to pity to unease to something a little too soft to be as smart as any of the prior ones, before it stubbornly settled into a look of determined sympathy, and he answered in his wistful war-horn voice, "Very. It looks like it hurts a lot."

The last came out almost like an admission, though it was his dark, bedraggled friend who was in pain, and he was still uncertainly chewing his lip over it when the bronze sea-beast growled on. His expression was unchanged, his voice as much ground glass as it had been before, but the quiet tilt of his head again felt revealing in a strangely vulnerable way. Not soft. Far from it, everything he revealed was sharp and raw and bitter and so hard and unyielding that it was riddled with cracks and hairline fractures, but somehow that was exactly why it affected Herald so.

He wasn't quite sure whether the question was meant to be offensive or not, but he felt himself stiffen petulantly all the same, even as his pale eyes made a swift, confused pass across his friend's cold face, his ego stinging but his tender heart trying to see whether he needed comforting in spite of the slight.

"I-" his tongue stumbled a little and he cussed under his breath, puffing up to his full height as he sternly continued- "I'm more than capable of protecting one badly hurt person while they heal. -I bet you can barely walk," he added snarkily, even as his face twitched tellingly, already regretting his pettiness toward his wounded would-be ward. Running his tongue over his teeth and turning his eyes to the surf, he finished in a stubborn mumble, "I'm plenty capable of helping with that, too."