“If you’re not inclined to chase me off, now that you know the truth.” He jokes, thready in the way that anything that isn’t really a joke sounds when bared to the naked air: paper thin, fragile— maybe a little scared.

But he wears it with a smile. An easy one, his own chin tipped low in something akin to animalistic deference.

Something that’d been absent when he’d been battling for control, or fucking Fenris ever so feverishly into the warm, dew-slicked earth. A clear difference in demeanor.

In expectation, too.

“...you won’t, will you?”