He chews on his lower lip for a bit. "I am not... trying to manipulate you. I've just—fought many salmon. Many, many salmon. It is always fun, but it is the most fun with someone else. They can do new things, unexpected things! It's the whole reason I like bringing people with me, to watch them—shine."

“I do not need your help, nor your coddling to shine, I shine plenty on my own. You do not need to set me up in a, a small safe little playpen that you’re familiar with and bored of. That you can shake as much as you want to see what interesting thing I do.”

"I was not coddling you! But admittedly all we had to lose there was our lives," he says, shrugging a bit. "If you want to see real danger, I can show you real danger." He stands up, dusting himself up—oh, dust is now the right size, they're not tiny anymore. "The stakes can get much higher, dear marigold."

“Nope,” she sniffs. “Absolutely not. I am mad at you, and feeling obstinate and stubborn, and that sounds like precisely what you would like to do, and so out of sheer spite I refuse.”

"...well, I wasn't actually planning on anything that dangerous, before. It's just an idea I had, you know, since you didn't want to stick to something that can only kill you. But if that's what you prefer, we can play it safe. Maybe go poke at a beehive."

“Now you’re taunting me. I don’t appreciate that, either.”

"I'm not! That's not the kind of fae I am, you don't need to read into everything I say like that, I'm not trying to trap you." He falls onto his butt, again, then leans back to look at the stars. "I just want to have fun with you."

“It’s not the level of danger,” she eventually clarifies, still sounding surly. “It’s, it’s. You not doing your very best to see whatever insane, absurd goal we’ve set through. It’s you showboating when I was trusting you to stab the damn fish and let me steer.”

"...you were? I did not know that. I wanted to kill the fish before we hit the rocks and hope we didn't drown!"

“And you were playing with it! You were taking forever and purposefully holding back at the thing you apparently have so much practice at! So I went and did it for you because it was infuriating.”

"I was not holding back!" he says, now his turn at sounding affronted as he gets back to his feet. He looks around—there's the river, when they're human-sized those rapids are not that rapid at all—and the carcass of the dead fish is floating a few feet away, so he walks over to it and brings it back. Calendula's pointy stick is sticking out of its eye, probably having gone through into its brain, but it's also stained red along its length on the handful of cuts Reverie managed to land. They're thin enough that if it weren't for the bleeding they might be invisible, but Reverie shows her the fish and pulls one of the gashes open and—there is absolutely no way a tiny pointy branch should have been able to cut that deep but those are absolutely some fish innards right there.

“Oh,” she says. Then she huffs and looks away. “… then I’m sorry for not trusting you to be taking it seriously.”

He beams and tosses the fish over the shoulder. "It's fine! Sorry for, you know, the thing." Back onto his butt, his soles held against each other while he hooks his index fingers around his big toes and sways back and forth. "So! What next?"