“Tell me your name.”

He requested it from all of them. He learned the name of every faceless someone he fell into bed with, and his memory promised to keep them for years to come. The sweat, the sex; everything else would fade. But he would know the name of every person he slept with while Daliquinn was gone.

He made no attempts to convince himself that they meant anything. He stroked with heavy hands and drove himself deep with abandon, but never lost himself the way he would for—the one name he didn't hear. He felt no guilt.

“Tell me your name, please.”

They didn't feel right. He'd never known a difference before, when connection had always simply been connection, but now, now it was nearly painful with lacking. It was sex, and it was contact with people who found him disgusting, and it was wrong. It wasn't, he realised, what he was looking for.

He answered the urges but, for the first time in his life, he did so half-heartedly.

“Tell me your name, now.”

Growling, huffing, snarling, and all the while aware that none of it sounded right. He listened to himself and to his partner in the moment, and moaned with helpless dissatisfaction. He hardly cared if he was misunderstood; far better, to end on the best note possible, his companions unaware of how utterly they'd failed. He rarely slept indoors, afterwards. (He always slept alone.) He walked outside barefoot and proceeded down the road until he found a place to sit. It was never far.

He settled his mind and lost his hands in movements long-since memorised. Sometimes, he imagined what the tribe might say, to see him reduced to clay feet and idle gazing. Their Sometimes-Traveller, trapped of his own volition, waiting. Waiting.

He grinned and laughed aloud. Oh, of course he would wait. Day in, and day out, all he did was wait. He kept himself busy, tasked himself with mending and mining and whatever else he could find to pass the time, but beneath it all, he was simply waiting.

Quinn would come back. He didn't know when, but he knew Quinn would come back. His bones would prove his word, if it came to it. He accepted this. He was always a patient creature.

If it meant that Quinn could believe him, he would die here.