Whatever else she said, Ford was entirely distracted by her use of profanity. Not the word itself; he used it often enough that it was hardly going to shock him to hear it from someone else's lips. Ford mostly used profanity internally, though, and when he did swear aloud it was almost never around women. He could probably count on his fingers the number of times he'd used foul language around someone of the opposite sex, and one of them might have been while he was trying to escape a fire in the midst of a hurricane. He did not drop those sorts of words casually into conversation at parties, and had never known a lady to do so either. The time and place seemed particularly significant. This was society, and while not everyone was keeping the same sort of mental tally that he had been preoccupied with tonight, everyone was playing a part at least to some extent; everyone chose their words as carefully as a gambler selected which card to play when the stakes were high. That seemed especially true now, because they were flirting (flirting had ceased to be an active verb and had become a state of being; she had gotten him his second drink and he had asked her to dance, and now they had passed a point of no return and were flirting no matter what they said or did). She could just as easily have said she was bad at healing, so had she chosen shit specifically to elicit some sort of reaction? If so — what reaction? Because Ford desperately wanted to have the right reaction, whatever it was. It wasn't so much about her or what she thought of him, at least not entirely. It was the point of the conversation they were at — past pleasantries, having shared some stories and interests, feeling slightly more comfortable around each other, flirting — the stakes were higher, and a misstep now might have bigger consequences, be more revealing of all the things he was trying to keep hidden.
And he had no idea what the right reaction was.
"I know just enough about healing to know that I shouldn't," Ford said, having determined that gliding past it with no reaction at all was at least safer than gawking at her with a panicked look in his eye. "Like — oh, you'll find this interesting, I imagine — back in February when all those people were transfigured into animals, I was part of the — er, search efforts, I suppose. Only because it was originally a capture effort, of course, because at the time we all thought this was the Beast Division's incident to handle, and they were too short-staffed to handle it," he explained. "And I actually — well, I un-transfigured one of them by accident, and that's how we figured it out. But then people thought I could help with un-transfiguring the rest and I backed right out of that. It was blind luck that I didn't leave the first girl with feathers and talons, you know. Certainly wasn't going to push it."
And he had no idea what the right reaction was.
"I know just enough about healing to know that I shouldn't," Ford said, having determined that gliding past it with no reaction at all was at least safer than gawking at her with a panicked look in his eye. "Like — oh, you'll find this interesting, I imagine — back in February when all those people were transfigured into animals, I was part of the — er, search efforts, I suppose. Only because it was originally a capture effort, of course, because at the time we all thought this was the Beast Division's incident to handle, and they were too short-staffed to handle it," he explained. "And I actually — well, I un-transfigured one of them by accident, and that's how we figured it out. But then people thought I could help with un-transfiguring the rest and I backed right out of that. It was blind luck that I didn't leave the first girl with feathers and talons, you know. Certainly wasn't going to push it."
Set by Lady!