"I know! It's a skill, very impressive! I've had it all my life!"

Had cultivated it a good portion of his life, as a skill for settling, soothing, and irritating people in turns, keeping them from the worse kinds of angers or brooding or whatever negativity when he could. He couldn't always.

He held still, waiting for Jin Ling to find him, and continued speaking.

"You should see me when I was really trying when I was your age, ah? The only time where you really could get away with punching someone for being a complete donkey, which, admittedly, I did try doing with your father before he pulled his head out of his peacock feathered a...wings and saw the world around him, and I don't apologise for that part, he'd have driven you mad too, with how he treated your mother back then."

Now he was rambling, but the memory had come back to him as a strike in the night, unexpected and visceral, all at once. That confrontation would have had him kicked out of Gusu Lan if it wasn't at the time they were all graduating from their half year of finishing, anyway.