Having been dismissed, or maybe just forgotten, Winterwing ushered Emily back into the elevator. They stood in silence, several feet apart, as it moved downward again.

They turned the corner in the residential block that separated their rooms from the rest, and Emily took the opportunity to abruptly stop once they were out of view of the main hallway. He walked a few more paces before he noticed that the twinning of his footsteps had become singular. As he turned she doubled over, with her wrong face contorted in a combination of pain and concentration. This time he knew what was coming, and he still hated every second of it.

Flesh broke into stripes that resembled roots and slithered, that blue glow accompanying the movement. He wasn’t even fully sure if he actually heard, or just imagined, underneath the smooth slick sound of flesh moving and the more subtle cracks and pops of bone, freeing itself and reattaching.

She didn’t scream this time, which was a small mercy. Maybe, having done it once already, she had been able to anticipate the experience. Or perhaps it was easier.

Eventually the symphony stopped, and she stood up straight, though Winterwing was dismayed to realize that she still was not right. The shape of Tanya completely gone, and Emily was still recognizably herself, in her own armor, but there was something off. It reminded him less of her returning back to normal, and more of the sensation of seeing someone after many years apart. Still recognizable as themselves, but with all the minute changes that life inflicts upon a person.

She seemed to understand this, as well, because she inspected the backs of her hands, her face scrunched in thought, before shrugging and declaring aloud, “Close enough.”

“It hurts,” Winterwing said.

She looked at him as if just remembering he were there. “Of course it hurts.”

“Maybe,” he said, “maybe that means you shouldn’t be doing it.”

“Did you have a better idea?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t another option.”

“He said I did good, you heard him say it.”

“I just think that maybe you shouldn’t be encouraging a parasite to rearrange your bones.”

“Winterwing,” Emily said sharply, “there is no parasite.”

He felt the pit in his stomach growing. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s like Grin said, right? A body is neutral. Calling it a parasite before even knowing what it does makes it bad.”

“Then what is it?” he demanded.

“I don’t know. I don’t think it knows either. I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to be in a person. But it’s not supposed to be outside a person either. I don’t know.”

“It doesn’t know,” he repeated. “You asked it?”

“Not… I wouldn’t really call it asking.”

“Then what would you call it?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like asking anything it just feels like talking to myself.”

He had no reference to evaluate this from. The creature, whatever it was, existed outside any natural thing Winterwing had ever encountered, that any of them had.

“Do you even know if you’re still the one making the decisions?” he said, quietly.

“It's not like that,” she said. “It was just like having an idea. You don’t have to act on every idea you have.”

“I don’t think you should be listening to its ideas at all.”

“Everyone who didn’t listen to it died,” Emily made a noise of frustration. When she looked at him again and he still did not follow her reasoning, she made an exasperated turn on her heels, pacing away. She faced him again and this time tried her best to speak carefully.

“It knows that. It doesn’t mean to. It doesn’t want to die, either. You can’t take it out without killing me and it can’t live in air. So it offered to work together instead.”

Winterwing found himself at a loss for words. She seemed so sure, and all he could think of was that it hurt, that the one universal indicator that you should not be doing a thing was hurt, and she was choosing to ignore it.

“You know that feeling when you’re falling asleep?” Emily asked. “The one that makes you jerk back awake.”

“Sure.”

“It lives there. That’s what they all saw, before they died, I think. The space where it exists, right when you fall asleep.”

“Tanya thinks she has a way to kill it,” he blurted. Tanya had, to the best of his knowledge, not moved forward into her plan to starve the creature, but he suspected she would be urged to try, as soon as attention refocused from recovering their destroyed equipment.

“She can’t,” Emily said.

“They are going to try.”

“No, listen, it doesn’t matter,” Emily insisted, “They can’t. Whatever she thinks she can do, it won’t work.”

He could not recall the last time she had said something so confidently.

She looked up at him, searching his face for something. It was not his imagination, she had not recomposed back into the same shape.

“This is you now?” he asked, gesturing to her.

“I don’t know. It felt right.”

He nodded, still unsure.

“Winterwing,” she said, by way of prompting, the severity in her gaze smoothing out, as she became concerned with his prolonged silence. His brows knitted together in a worried knot as he looked back at her, into the face that wasn’t quite right, but was still undeniably her. It didn’t matter if maybe the cheekbones were a little sharper, or that the brow was more defined. It was still those same eyes that he had known the entire time.

“You scared the hell out of me,” he said at last. “You just started screaming. I thought you were about to come apart right there and I couldn’t do anything about it.”

Emily blinked, and finally averted her gaze. “I’m sorry.”

He stood frozen in place, and his indecision caused something in her confidence to break. Nearly in real time, he could see her withdraw back into herself, and the months of progress, of trying to get her to just be herself around him, being walled over. However frightened to observe this revelation from the outside Winterwing found himself, it was a tiny ripple compared to living within it.

He was fucking this up. He had said he was going to accept what she was. He had insisted that he was going to fix himself this time and he was fucking it up again.

He offered an outstretched hand, and she balked at it.

“Show me,” he said.

She hesitated, before clasping it in one of her own. It stung, like before, and underneath a roiling reminder of something else embedded in the sinew and skin, that calmed as the sting subsided. It knew him, she had told him.

Winterwing tried his best to swallow the knot of fear in his throat, and pulled her towards him, embracing her in silence. She rested her weight against him, and let out a sharp sound that may have been a sigh of relief, or a single held in sob.

That ache under his breastplate came back. They were both still clad in the ridiculous armor, but in those spots that they weren’t, she felt the same. Maybe his eyes found something wrong, but under his fingers, she felt the same. The warmth of her forehead on his neck was the same. Her hair smelled the same. However deeply integrated the creature was, parasite or otherwise, it changed nothing for him.

He was in love with her.

He was in love with her and it was probably going to kill him.