A white-hot rage rips through Walter's chest when his hand is knocked away, and immediately burns itself out. The fire in his belly can't sustain amid the hardening fear of this stranger's violence, but it comes upon him at first like instinct. "You think I'm going to let you walk at my back, where I can't see you and have no idea what you're planning?" Walter knows by now the words are a useless matter of habit, but it satisfies something in him to growl them across the rough landscape of his own throat. To eject them from his lungs and hurl them in the air to someone he considers the source of the problem. The man who speaks so many languages, but none accessible to the one he's painstakingly studied for all his life. The one he's faced so much just to shape into something useful.

Walter makes a sweeping gesture at the man's back when he turns, as if insisting him on his way. Hidden, unseen. The thought occurs to him of what he could do from back here, if he were a different sort of man. But that too fades when his uneasy companion begins to strip layers of his clothes away, and his thoughts immediately turn curious. Walter watches like he knows he's going unseen, eyes taking in the slope of the shoulders and the strength of the forearms before focusing on the map of ink. The dark and colorful lines set to his skin in pictures both discernible and impossible to understand the full weight of. His breath catches in his throat and Walter holds his head higher as they reach the café and he breezes forward, knowing that they are only here on his good fortune. That without him this man would not be invited.