The first day after their confrontation with Asteroth, Winterwing woke up to the sound of an alarm he forgot he had set. He found his right arm was unresponsive, and fumbled around with the left in the dark, until he finally found the little clock and slapped it quiet. He lay in the red antique glow of its display, awareness creeping slowly back to him. His shoulders were stiff and cramped, and trying to loosen them finally brought back the rest of his memory.

“Oh,” he said, thoughtlessly.

He could barely make out the outline of Emily’s face. She stared up at him and said nothing. She was tucked in the crook of his arm, head resting on his shoulder.

Winterwing had insisted that she sleep on the side against the wall. He had been possessed of the notion that, in the middle of the night, Wildwing would change his mind. He would change his mind and convince the rest of them to come for her. So, Winterwing placed himself between her and the door. He did not believe that he could have fought off six determined people, but also it seemed it would reflect better on him if he tried.

The paranoia appeared to have been misplaced. It was morning, and no one had disturbed them.

He rolled to his side to face her, and tried to give an assuring embrace.

“I am sore everywhere,” he observed aloud. “Everything hurts.” There was no doubt this was from being punched, pounced upon, chased, and slashed open the day before. Every movement ached, but the stinging skin on his chest was especially vocal in its dissent. The medicom had not done a bad job in the repair, but the muscle underneath remembered the wound just the same.

“Shame,” Emily responded simply. Her free hand drifted up the inside of his thigh, and miraculously he found that he was not as fatigued as he thought he was.

It was some time long after that he looked over his shoulder, to the clock again, and blinked, thinking that he had read it wrong.

Nearly every waking moment since he had been deposited on this planet, he had been under the watchful eye of someone else. Scrutiny permeated everything he did, every sentence he uttered. Someone should have knocked on his door to check in on him and demand to know what he was doing hours ago.

No one had. Winterwing had wasted the morning in bed, the way that he would have hoped in better circumstances. He was happy, he realized, but he was growing more and more sure that the hours that he and Emily had spent, legs entwined, the feathers of his shoulders gripped in her fists, were stolen time.

The team had been so adamant about schedule and protocol before, and it appeared that the mourning that followed the loss of their friend had sent all that into chaos. It made him uneasy. Winterwing and Emily shouldn’t have been forgotten. If anything, Wildwing’s suspicion that the tragedy had been their orchestration should have made him more insufferably vigilant, not less.

Eventually, Winterwing had to extract himself from the sheets.

“I’m hungry,” he explained, as he tried his best to reassemble himself. “Want anything?”

Emily grimaced at the mention of food, but he could not help it. He had not eaten anything since their afternoon stop at the comic store. He resolved to retrieve something from the kitchen, and return with as little incident as he could manage. It seemed like a reasonable plan—after all, the base was huge. Perhaps he could make the entire journey without seeing another person.

Emily refused to go with him. He did not blame her. He may have physically put himself in the crossfire, but he was a tangential concern to everyone involved. The animosity and suspicion and fear revolved around her, and anything he caught, as annoying as it was, was just splash. He promised to bring back something for her, and left once he was satisfied he looked somewhat presentable.

The only person in the kitchen was Tanya. She looked up at him as she noticed him enter, and seemed on the cusp of asking him a question, perhaps to inquire who was supposed to be minding him, before dismissing it and settling on a nod for greeting. He returned it and tried his best at a friendly smile, but it faltered. A smile didn’t feel appropriate for the mood of the day, and it did not seem a social cue Tanya much cared about anyway. She looked back down to the blue pad before her, a collection of notes, and continued to pick at what appeared to be a bowl of fruit as she did so.

Winterwing wasn't sure what their relationship was, but of the bunch, Tanya seemed the most willing to call him a friend, or perhaps, falling short of that, an inoffensive acquaintance.

“You-you stopped working on the translation?” she asked at last. Referring to the book of Saurian poetry, that he had disassembled and rearranged and torn apart again, for weeks, for no good reason.

“If you’re not willing to ask the lizards for an answer key, I don’t know what to do about it.”

She gave this some thought, putting her pad down and turning in her chair, as though by thinking about her lab she had to face it. “I mi-might have some samples that we’ve collected over the last year, if you think it would help b-bridge the gap.”

“Do you really need a book of saurian poetry that badly?”

“No,” she conceded. “Just the four pages that were hidden in it, for now.”

The four that looked to be instructions, for the parasitic infection that Emily had brought with her. With the problem of monsters in the walls handled, Tanya would be able to turn her attention back to the infection, figuring out what it was for, and how to remove it.

“It’s beyond my ability,” Winterwing said.

She nodded again, and seemed to lose interest in him entirely, turning back to her notes without another word.

He rummaged through the refrigerator before settling on assembling a sandwich, and then deciding he might as well make it two.

They worked in silence, and Winterwing noticed that, for every time he paused to take a glance at her, Tanya did not appear to do the same. She did not throw him suspicious looks, or attempt another conversation, casual or adversarial. She did not seem to care he was there at all, and continued just as she would have if he had never walked in.

Inoffensive acquaintance, he reminded himself.

Winterwing finished his assembly, returned ingredients to the their places, and found some appropriately sized serving savers to pack them in, grabbed two cylinders of what he assumed was the same sugar water from the day before, and made his way to the exit with his prizes, determined not to see anyone else.

He stopped at the door, clearing his throat to get Tanya’s attention. One of her brows twitched, just the slightest bit of annoyance at the interruption, but she looked up from her notes just the same, waiting for him to speak.

“I’m going to need something like the armor you all have,” he said.

She blinked. “I’m, I don’t, I can’t really just give you that.”

“Well, we need to figure something out, because I’m not fighting the next monster like this.”

Tanya put down her notes, now fully scratching at the twitching brow, though it seemed likely she didn’t even know she was doing it. “I mean, you, you weren’t supposed to be fighting a monster at all.”

“No,” he agreed, and this time the smile was insincere. “But I sure had to, didn’t I?”

She looked back down at the table, either embarrassed or ashamed, and said, “I-I-I think we’re supposed to… vote on it? Like we did with Emily.”

“Do you think the monsters are going to honor the results?”

Tanya picked at her food, and when no easy rebuttal came to her, finally said “I’ll... see what I can do.”

He returned to his room without further incident or interaction. Walking through the hallways of the Pond still came with a hint of apprehension. He was familiar enough with the route back to the residential block, that it wasn’t quite as daunting and confusing as before, but the instinct of anticipating a sprinting monster of black bile around every corner had not vanished yet. There was the assumption that they had solved the problem of the building shifting, with Asteroth defeated, but the only way to be sure was to wait and see. It had not been long enough, yet, to truly relax.

When he made it back his room was empty. The bed was unmade, but Emily and her clothing were gone. Her communicator was still sitting on his desk, and he stared at it, uncomprehending. She returned through the same door that he had. She was shaking the last of the water out of her hair with a towel, and wearing fresh clothes, leaving the uniform she had been assigned behind.

“You scared me, I thought-” Winterwing started.

She gave an apologetic smile. “Sorry. Felt gross.”

He held out her share of food wordlessly, unable to think of anything else to say. She looked at it with a scowl and took it reluctantly. They sat on his bed to eat, backs against the cold steel wall. He found that he had underestimated how hungry he was, and for a few minutes all he focused on was the food, but eventually his attention turned to Emily again.

She had picked the piece of bread off the top of her sandwich, scraped most everything off of it, and had taken to nibbling it plain.

“Something wrong with it?” he asked.

She shook her head and tore a piece to nibble. “It’s not the food. It’s everything.”

“Everything?”

“I dunno. Touching things freaks it out, I think.”

Referring to the parasite.

She held up her slice of bread. “Tastes like a dry field,” then pinched at the hem of her shirt. “A mouth full of grass,” tapped the wall they were learning against. “Cold blood. The water down here is filtered I think, that’s not too bad.”

This sounded like nothing he had ever heard of before. Taste was a fickle thing, that could change or disappear with illness, but that what she was describing sounded far more complicated. They had all seen the scans, that had shown a primary mass in her chest, and a full secondary mass of alien matter wrapped around her brainstem. It was not too far a leap in logic that something burrowing into neurons would effect the senses.

Winterwing put the last of his food down, finding it suddenly unappetizing. “Everything you touch?”

“I mean, I think, I think taste isn’t quite right. It’s close. Maybe that’s just how it understands things. It doesn’t have eyes to actually look at them, right?”

He leaned back against the wall. All it felt to him was cold. He tried to imagine the purpose of the parasite, and yet again come up short. “What in the world does anyone gain from that?”

She shrugged, and took another careful bite. “I think it’s getting better,” she said around a cough. “It’s not as bad as it was a few weeks ago.”

“Maybe I should have asked before I grabbed your arm,” he mused.

“It’s fine,” she said, and then added, “it knows you.”

“It does?”

“Sure. Everyone else is afraid to touch me.”

He lolled his head to the side, casually. “So, what do I taste like?”

She swallowed and narrowed her eyes. “Behave.”

He shrugged. “Can’t blame a guy for asking.”

She put the remains of her bread down on the rest of the abandoned sandwich, pushing it away, and leaned back as well. Her forehead touched his shoulder, and they sat in silence for a moment.

“Feather dust mostly. Maybe in the sun,” she said, thoughtful.

“Well, that doesn’t sound so bad.”

She made the quick, quiet exhale of a single laugh, and her weight rested more easily on his side. “No, I suppose not.”