"It's strange to hear you talk about me like that," he said after a moment, turning his face up towards the sky.

"Oh?" I asked, hoping for an elaboration.

Dain obliged. "As if I look... normal," he said, and sighed. "I know it has to be true, because I think I, too, would be uncomfortable if anything about your body was glamored to be different." He sighed through his nose. "It's... difficult."

"Difficult good or difficult bad?"

A smile touched the corners of his mouth, and his ear turned to face me. "Why do you care?"

"I'll answer that if this is a trade," I said, and saw him smile a little more.

"I'm not sure yet," Dain said. "It will make people look at us like a unit when I behave differently around you, and they will start to realize that I could be even more monstrous than I am." He dragged the long fingers of his far wing-hand through the tall grass. "Perhaps they will appreciate the restraint, but perhaps I will come to loathe their dread more than I already do."

"For better or for worse, I hate to see suffering of any kind," I said in reply. "Maybe we'll end up nemeses, but even if I hated you with every particle of my being I wouldn't want you to suffer. And I'm something of a caretaker, I guess. I like to help people."

"So you're trying to fix me," he said, sounding disgusted.

I rolled my eyes and flicked him on the ear. Dain snarled and jerked sideways; I pinned him with a glare.

"You could consider giving me the benefit of the doubt, your royal growliness," I snapped. "What I'm trying to do is give you some fucking space to experience what it's like to exist around someone who isn't freaked out by your physical form." I jerked my head up to look at the sky again. "If you can't bear the fact that I'd rather you be comfortable and fully-realized or whatever, you can fuck all the way off. I'm not going to pretend not to give a shit about people because you can't pull your head out of your ass long enough to realize that the worst possible interpretation isn't always, in fact, the correct interpretation."

Dain didn't say anything, and he didn't get up. I refused to look back over at him, even when I saw him shifting in my peripheral vision, fuming about him. So much for being fucking nice to him. So much for thinking he was being fucking nice to me! Dain could go suck a toad—

"'Growliness'?" he said, sounding pained.