In the red sand and clods of soggy earth, Arkash stood with naught but his ragged arm to hide his shame, to bury his weakness. He stood there a while longer, sniffling and trembling while he tried to sort through his grief-stricken mind, to make sense of whatever brought on that uncomfortable burn his throat, or what made his heart flutter. Try as he might, no such resolution came. Answers to why he was the way he was often came down to his own shallow, cold dismissal, only a word or two in summary. Stupid, weak, broken... Despicable.
His self-affirmed crocodile tears had ensnared another empathetic soul, but it wouldn't be like the last.
Reiss went on to show a little of her own heart to him in turn and compared him to her own flesh and blood after taking his messy claws with her own. Arkash stopped his sniffling for a moment, then looked up from the cover of his raggedy arm, which burned more and more as the adrenaline in his veins receded. Pale yellow eyes peered at the wolf from the uncertain squint of his dark eyelids.
Still dripping gore, Arkash stayed still while she spoke. His silence was only broken by the occasional shaky breath while he composed himself. Her son was a Rathor, obviously, but a Rathor who took on the traits of a zebra. A clumsy rathor, as well. He was compared to this clumsy Zebra, who lied, too smart for his own good.
Arkash took a moment to reflect. Was he really so transparent? He supposed he was a liar, but too smart for his own good? In some ways, he thought. His awareness of how the turning wheel of Society only perpetuated the suffering of mortals and the power of the blue-bloods did bring him nothing but harm in the end. Clumsy though? Never... Well, at least not physically.
He was quiet through her whole recollection, and as she apologized, he shook his head to dismiss it. "...Where is he now?" He asked, uncertain of whether or not he wanted to know the answer. "You don't have to tell me, I'm just... Nosey," he assured with a bow of his head, a bow that put his eyes on the claws that remained in her hand.
A slight grin pulled at his lips while he thought for a long moment. He was good at that last thing, getting out alive. Oftentimes, it felt as though he was too good. One day, he would bite off more than he could chew, but that day wasn't to come for some time.
Without thought, he lifted his claws from her hand, then brushed some of the gunk from his face. "...Did I get any of it on you?" He asked briefly before he cast leeched from the puddles around him, then pulled all the blood from his broken burlap rags and Reiss's tent, like the sudden evaporation of red into a fine mist that pulled and concentrated on his claws. As it began to build in mass, Arkash hardened it through sway and shaped it freely with a small amount of ether.
A furrow of his brow saw him bend down to slip it under his burlap trouser's leg, then molded it to splint and squeeze the leg that had been bitten by the Hyena. The pain there only got worse as Arkash came down from his blood rage; something was certainly wrong. He had to eat if he wanted to heal it, and though he was surrounded by food, he didn't really want to start chowing down in front of Reiss when she'd just told him all about her possibly dead son.
When he straightened up, he looked her over and exhaled deeply. "Well, we got all the material we need... If you want to move maybe two of these guys back to the cave, I'll meet you back there and we can get started... Sound good?" He offered with a turn of his arm, then took a testing step on his braced leg. Pain lit up his eyes in a burst, and he pulled pressure off it at once. "Ah... Why don't you go ahead? I'll stay behind and make some crutches or something," he offered with no intent to make crutches whatsoever.
"Oh, and Reiss..." He began after limping a short stretch to some of the meatier chunks of Hyena. "...Thank you, you know, for not hating me." It could have gone either way while he was composed. Anywhere between threatening her and thanking her for treating him with kindness.
In the end, he didn't know what her end game was, but he'd realized he had to be careful around her. She got under his scales much too easily, she made him weak. He couldn't slip up as he had again.
