After the squad dismissed, Adrian immediately retreated to his room, and stripped, before he took a grooming brush to himself and slowly, but surely weeded the loose hairs out of his coat. The time he spent turning from white to brown left him to think back on the mission so far, and the fluidity of the Roughriders’ numbers. There were definitely those that had managed to stick around, but between the death and the surprise transfers, the revolving door effect made it incredibly hard to gauge who would stick around and who wouldn’t. “I was almost a part of the problem, too.” He rubbed his face and put his clothes back on and reentered the common room to find that most everybody had gone to do other things, while he was busy fussing over his looks.
It took him some time to find Silver’s office—whole months into his station on the Claw as he was—and he was just in time to catch Aidan passing through the doorway. Curious, Adrian pressed an ear up against the door and eavesdropped on the conversation between Aidan and Silver—one-sided as it may have felt. Everybody’s beating themselves up over it… And here I am, complaining about my shedding fur. He sighed. At least they can still feel bad about it, he thought as he stepped away from the door and watched Aidan head off to another part of the cruiser. He stood outside Silver’s office for a few minutes, before he finally entered.
“Hey, Captain,” he tossed out a greeting in his quiet voice, developed from years of comrades with sensitive ears. “I, uh, wanted to make sure I thanked you. You know, looking out for me like you did in the mines…” The tall hare reached up and ran a hand along his ear, pulling off a number of white hairs in the process. “Would’ve been a little disappointing, that I let it end right after I got to a new unit.” He crossed his arms. “So, yeah.” He gestured to the door behind himself. “You want me to leave you alone, or…?”