for bigblue: A whale of a tale

[kingtide]

He feels a little bad.

Usually, when he asks one of his friends to go and do a favor for him, he makes a point of giving the creature a pat and taking a swim with them. Today, that pat took the form of a pound of krill tossed her way as he picked his way down the rocky beach to pick up his new 'friend'. It'd been a bitch and a half getting back to shore before she did, after all; doable but unpleasant with the currents as they were and he wasn't about to undo the work of drying off and getting dressed when he knew that the whale would be just as happy to swim with him tomorrow.

Which left him with the halfnaked man who had held up a burning building by himself.

"I know you're not dead," he says, because that's mostly the point he wants to get across. He knows the man isn't dead and he's holding a change of clothes and a towel. The rest should be self-explanatory.