Blue Is A Beautiful Color

And then she looked up at him. Crux shuffled to a stop. He felt his face flush as the woman commented on his expression but it helped to jostle him into a less stressed expression. Expression. Because through no fault of her own her words did summon the face of the dead. Those two wolves he hadn't even known, their bodies bloated with flood water and faces already growing stiff. Cool, cool, cool. Good to know his mind was just gonna do that! His expression flickered for a moment as he tried to banish the images from his mind but he did manage to settle into a nervous sort of smile.

"Y-yeah." Crux sounded more sure than he felt. "I just uh, kinda struggle to move on the sand and thought I was gonna fall." A half lie, it was true he struggled to keep his paws under him on less than solid ground but he was also frankly just a socially anxious mess. Crux gestured over his shoulder to his right hind leg which was jutting out slightly, not in line with his hips the way it ought to have been.  He didn't love introducing himself as his leg first but sometimes it was easier than explaining the more complex parts of himself. He hated that it was so easy to boil his own disability down for simplicity when it felt like so much more. It was his own struggles, it was his own need to always be twice as good, it was everyone else's assumptions about himself, it was others assuming he was less than twice of everyone else. "I'm Crux Fatalis." Crux tried to move focus on as quickly as he could. "You're newer around here right?"

"Speech"