"Well I don’t." Ira replied protesting Jinx’s further comparison. He was not like her butt, and that was that. Likely, she would keep thinking that he was, and he would keep thinking he wasn’t and it would be a tiresome verbal game of cat and mouse. If this warrior woman did, indeed, decide to take him in - something in which he wouldn’t protest, Ira was not ignorant and understood without an adult he would not survive very long - he wondered, as briefly as the thought had fluttered into his mind, if it would always be like this. While Ira did not enjoy being insulted, it didn’t really dig further than scratch as his skin until he was mildly irritated. He did not know her - didn’t even know her name - how was he supposed to feel mortally wounded by her insults? Ira had found in the case of Tark, it was easy to not feel anything when you never let anyone in. He had felt detrimentally hurt when his parents had abandoned him (though he now knew they had been killed). Overtop that pain he had felt anger; and after he had cried in isolation in some abandoned den far away from the den he had once shared with his parents, he had vowed no creature would ever hurt him like that again.
Youth or not, it had been enough for Ira to understand he never wanted to feel that again.
He did not cry as he studied Tark’s cold and lifeless body because he had not let the elder in, slamming the proverbial doors in his face when he had tried to breach in. There had been no love for the elder, no affection. The man had helped him flee, kept him alive so he could reach this point. While Ira had felt grateful there had been little else. Loss, Ira had discovered, was easier to deal with when there was nothing truly binding between wolves. "I didn’ know him," Ira spoke, unable to help but wander, fleeting though it was, if the fact that he successfully felt nothing meant there was something wrong with him, at Jinx’s question. "He was lil’ more than a stranger," Breath was taken and left out in a plume of white steam. "why pretend to feel something I don’?" Ira answered with a question of his own, before he fell silent, sort of feeling awkward knowing their was a wolf carcass behind him.