"Being injured and in some sort of predicament and vulnerable does not actually tell you anything about how good a master I am!"

He shrugs.

"You are so lucky you got me and if my most recent master before you shows up you might want to immediately commit suicide rather than let him get his hands on you but fortunately I think he isn't going to do that." She twitches her torn wing, and winces. "...he had me in condition to fly before but falling through the trees didn't improve me. I will take you up on carrying me somewhere if there's a suitable place to go."

"What would I want to commit suicide about!"

"He goes in for torture."

"Well, I can carry you.  To my house?  If that sounds like a place you'd like to go."

"I don't exactly have a better idea of what there is around here. And I haven't eaten anything but that Clif bar in a long time and if I'm going to eat safely in the mortal world I need you to be the one to feed me."

"I can do that."  He says it very quickly.  "What do you think of the jacket dragging idea, does that sound reasonable?"

"I can probably get myself onto the jacket now, and then yes."

He lays it out for her, trying to balance doing a careful job against not looking like he's being freakily reverent.

She scoots herself on, favoring the ankle and hissing softly a couple times, and then is fully curled up on the coat.

He attempts to drag her, and can - mostly do that, but something keeps preventing him from specific implementations, which is confusing because that's not ordering her even a little bit -  "Can you hold onto the sleeves?  I'm worried you're going to fall off."

She grabs the sleeves.

"Thank you."

He drags her a ways and develops the guess that he's being prevented from hurting her.  He tries to appear neutral about this, which is harder than it would be if he were facing forwards instead of pulling her backwards.  Where does he look.  At her face?  - No, vaguely behind them and sometimes over his shoulder.

"Do you live alone, in your house?"

"I live with my parents.  It might be smart to hide you from them but I think that will be possible."

"Do - no, mortals don't work that way - why would it be smart to hide me from them?"

"My parents are... fine, but not really more than fine."

"I don't know what that means. I have never met a parent in my life."

"...For example they probably wouldn't want to let you stay in our house for very long and would probably try to send you somewhere which might be somewhat worse but could for all I know be a lot worse."

"Why wouldn't they let you have me in the house?"

"...There are kind of a few angles I could come at this from, I feel like.  One is that most people probably don't want a fairy to stay in their house, especially but maybe not only because you're apparently scary, and then there's a thing where they mostly don't want to let me have big things that I want that aren't normal, and then there's also something where maybe they want to give you over to the government because the existence of fairies is an important thing they don't feel equipped to handle, whereas I feel that the existence of fairies is an important thing that I don't trust the government to handle well, or something."

"The... government?"

"...Do you not know what one is or do you wonder what human ones are like?"

"I understand the word but it's not a thing fairies have in any but the most trivial sense so I have very little idea of what one looks like in practice."