“Well then stop shooting it! That thing is fuckin’ huge and solid you could bash someone to absolute paste with it! Just sweep’em in the leg and—” she mimed smashing something, and even with her reduced self, her enthusiasm still made the bed shake. The girl was absolutely wired. “Oh wait! This part though!”

Snatching a tiny remote off the sheets, Roaki fast-forwarded through the footage. She paused briefly when the meteor that was Firebrand slammed into the ground, scoffed, then clicked through again until it came to the desk of some new station. It was hard to tell which—though the lack of flashing bars and scrolling texts decrying Quinnlash as the living end meant it likely wasn’t Euseran. One of the casters was midsentence, saying something about communications between Savior Corps, but Roaki pushed forward with an impatient groan.

“Ugh, all the channels, talk talk talk, like anyone gives a fuck what they think. No one’s got just the footage. Where—there!”

It stopped right as Ablaze confronted the last Modir, slamming her cannon into its chest before blasting it apart. Roaki threw her arm up, remote flying to the carpet, and gave what might have been her approximation of the sound it would have made. Surprisingly, not that far off. Inside Quinn that alien satisfaction and pride lingered.

“That! That’s fine” she said, rewinding to show it again. “Where you hit it and then blew it up, that’s good! Close! I know they don’t talk, but I bet they scream real good. Monster fucks.”

The footage went on to go over the Casobani pilots. Two familiar Saviors popped up, and Roaki grinned. She’d done a number on them back at the duel, and was a little disappointed they’d regenerated already. The last of the survivors, Foudre and its pilot, a woman named Camille, flashed by.

“Was supposed to fight her, y’know. Best duelist in Casoban I guess. CSC didn’t think I was worth it, decided to throw the other two at me.” Roaki giggled, soft and menacing. “Bet they regret that. And now the whole stupid country owes their asses to you.”

Roaki's enthusiasm really was infectious, wasn't it?

From her position lying limp on the mattress, she got an excellent firsthand view of the girl being unbelievably animated. Or, unbelievable a few days ago. And even though it had barely been any time at all, it was hard to even remember the half-dead girl that had only stared into the false half-light of a faux window, looking at how she was now. Quinn sat up against the wall, watching her go on and taking a certain amount of pride in it. The world had fought her, and she'd won. They both had.

After some time, though, Quinn felt her tiredness creeping up on her, and relaxed against the wall, she cut her mind loose to wander, letting herself think about what had happened just after she'd gotten out of her savior, and what had happened just after that. She hadn't been able to unpack it at all, really. The cheering, the clapping, the Dahlia hug--she smiled unconsciously--and then...

Then...

Quinn frowned.

Right. Doctor Follen. That weird sound the metal tapper thing had made. She'd been so caught up in the mess that was press release--awful, don't think about it, remember? Don't think about it--that she hadn't considered it at all. The metal sound, scraping where her eye used to be. A deep distress was steadily building in her gut. Almost unwillingly, she lifted her hand. It shook, but held, as for the first time in her entire life, or...since she was...eleven? She thought? For the first time since then, she reached under her eyepatch, and allowed herself to feel around the eye socket.

It was all tough scar tissue. Tough, hard, almost numb to the touch, rippling out from the center. Her fingers crept over the edge of her ocular bone, and almost fighting against herself, she forced them onwards, despite a deep and elemental fear that pushed her backwards.

Ridged skin. Wrinkled scars. And--

Something solid. Pointy.

Metal.

She cannoned up, all relaxation forgotten and her heart in her throat. Her fingers lay on the object, almost petrified. A bone-deep dread began to build in her.

"Roaki," she choked out through a trembling, half-strangled throat, hesitantly lifting her fingers and the eyepatch out of the way, "what's...what's in my eye?"

“What the fuck do you mean ‘what’s in my eye’? Your eye, dipshit. Unless you mean—” She turned from the screen, noticing that Quinn did in fact mean the other one. Frankly, that made even less sense. “Nothing,” she said, exasperated. “A hole.”

But Quinn didn’t relent. She had that same stupid, desperate, worried look on her face that seemed bolted on six days out of the week. It baffled her, honestly. How could someone go from mulching a handful of Modir to sniveling in bed in the span of, what, an hour? Maybe? Roaki wasn’t entirely sure what day it was, to be fair. Either way, unless she wanted Quinn to spray snot and anxiety all over her sheets, there wasn’t much choice but to play along.

“Fine,” she said, hopping over to where Quinn sat up. She leaned close, balancing herself so she could stay upright, but she still wasn’t tall enough. So she bent Quinn forward, not gentle but not like an enemy. “Don’t move. And don’t sneeze. That’s different from moving.”

Threat satisfactorily conveyed, Roaki hunched and guided an exploratory finger into Quinn’s eye socket. She wasn’t as slow or careful as Quinn had been, but this also wasn’t her first foray into wound-probing. Several of her own modium scars had begun as craters in the flesh, some quite shallow, others bone-deep. It had sated some grim curiosity in her to poke at them, but they were always fresh and the pain was prohibitory to her fun. Quinn’s eye-wound was old, and likely healed beyond sensation.

She tapped lightly around at the scarred flesh, and when Quinn didn’t immediately shriek in agony, she took that as the green light to continue. It ought to have been more exciting, like digging her fingers into the flesh of another Savior. She could feel that in her memory, in the phantom sensations that often lingered when she disconnected. Wet pulp in her hands, screams for mercy in her ears. This was…not that. It was dry, silent, clinical. Boring.

Then it wasn’t.

“Wie bitte…?” she mumbled. She didn’t know much Helburkan, not compared to a scholar, but she’d heard a few phases from the doctors who had operated on her. They stuck.

Her finger had hit something hard, sharp, like bone only there ought not to have been any bone there. It was cold, too, just barely. Like…metal.

“Did you get shot in the face? Did I miss you getting shot in the face? You’d have told me if that was happening, right? Don’t move—uh, keep not moving.” Roaki snatched a small handheld light from her bedstand and, leveling herself again, shined it inside.

Sure enough, she saw metal. A tiny bit, smaller than a fingernail, and buried in the tissue. She tapped it, and as she did, Quinn would feel that same, distinct sensation. No pain, but for a moment, until it faded, she would be entirely aware of something there.

“That…” she mumbled. “That’s weird. That…it looks like modium. But…but you’d be dead if that was modium. Your brain’d be a metal flower right now, even if you just got it. Oi, deadgirl, when’d you lose this?”

Quinn held her breath, holding still as she could, as Roaki poked her finger into her mangled eye socket. It wasn't exactly the most comfortable experience, but it was an old, old wound now; it was mostly just scar and skin, not much pain to be found there. Then Roaki muttered something in Helburkan. Quinn jerked slightly. "Did you get shot in the face? Did I miss you getting shot in the face?" She opened her mouth to say that no, she had not actually been shot in the face, that was not what had happened, when Roaki leaned over to grab a penlight. She shone it into the eye socket. Then she spoke. "That…it looks like modium."

Modium.

Modium.

Of course it had been modium.

A part of Quinn wanted to scream, and another part of her wanted to laugh. Instead she clenched her hands into tight fists, once, twist, three times, four, focusing on the feeling of her fingernails digging hard into her palms as she tried to clamp down on her rising hysteria. A mocking voice hissed inside of her, cast through time, telling her that it was because she'd looked outside. But no, it had been modium all along, that goddamn modium collecting in her and finding a way out in her fucking eye.

She thought back to when she'd taken her eyepatch off for Dahlia, right after the duel, and the pale-faced fervent fury that she'd displayed. She hadn't thought much of it at the time, but looking back, well, it all made sense now, didn't it? She'd seen it. She must've. She'd seen it and she'd been enraged on Quinn's behalf. Everything fell into place there now.

"Oi, deadgirl, when'd you lose this?"

"I dunno," she muttered, voice shaking, as she tried as hard as she could to keep herself calm and not lose her mind, "four or five years ago?"

“Bullshit, no way. You should be, like, soup by now.”

But she didn’t offer much resistance otherwise. I mean, what was there to argue over? Roaki thought of herself as a realist, and the reality was staring her in the face, out of Quinnlash’s face. If she wasn’t shot—and yeah, sure, she’d probably have remembered if she was—then that meant it had to be modium. Or something that looked like modium. After all, if it was real, Roaki had just touched it. Shouldn’t her finger have been bursting with steel tumors?

So, she reached in and touched it again. Still nothing happened. She was almost disappointed.

“Weird…” she muttered, inspecting her own finger, squeezing and poking down her hand in search of anything amiss. “Should be super dead. And my hand should be gone. Maybe it’s not really modium? Has that freak doctor seen it yet?”

It didn’t make sense. Roaki knew modium, what it looked like, felt like, and most importantly, what it did. The little nugget ticked two out of three boxes, but she’d never encountered anything that didn’t just fill out all of them. Why wasn’t it killing her? She still didn’t believe Quinnlash’s story about growing up drinking the stuff, but how else did you end up with modium in your head if it wasn’t put there?

Quinn flinched as Roaki reached once again into her face, tapping against the fragment of metal once again. She resisted the urge to twitch at the odd sensation, but she was busy thinking anyway. Thinking about how she ended up with modium in her head. And, more importantly, Roaki was right. It was...weird. She'd never experienced the disastrous effects of modium herself, but she'd seen Dahlia in pain from growths; she'd learned that she'd needed to get her eyes replaced because of them. Even just looking at Roaki was proof that it was dangerous and aggressive.

So if so, then...how was it just...sitting there? If it really had been responsible for the loss of her eye, then it would have been there for years. And that didn't happen. Modium didn't just sit there. So now not only was she very upset, she was upset and confused.

"Maybe it’s not really modium? Has that freak doctor seen it yet?"

Quinn opened her mouth to reply, then...closed it again. Stilled.

"I guess...I guess he would've had to, since he's the one who..." He's the one that did the modioscory on me. Doctor Follen would've had to see it, wouldn't he? It was the only thing that made sense. Which...made even less sense, because if Quinn had really carried a piece of modium in her head since she was a kid, then that made being a pilot absurdly dangerous, right? Horrifically so, the second she got into the Savior she could've exploded into a pile of metal tumors. So...

She sighed heavily and dropped her head, tightening her teeth as she locked her emotions down so they didn't carry her away with them. Besca. She could ask Besca about it. About him.

Roaki sat back, looking Quinnlash up and down. She was still mopey as shit, and she was clearly trying to keep herself in check, but Roaki knew the signs. Anger, confusion, grief, she could tell when someone was about to crack, and doing absolutely everything they could to hold themselves together. In her experience, that never lasted long, even in people who were emotionally stable. Quinnlash was not. Quinnlash was emotionally two seconds away from combusting, always.

Normally, Roaki would have found this annoying as fuck, but this time not so much. It was still pathetic, but she’d come to expect that from her, and anyway, it wasn’t like she wasn’t right there herself too. But it seemed obvious Quinnlash trusted this doctor, for some reason. She knew what it was like realizing for the first time what a mistake that was.

“Yeah,” she sighed. “I remember the first time someone tried to kill me. One of my older brothers snuck rat poison into my dinner. Made me spill my guts out, but I lived. Then he tried to knife me. Gets easier, you’ll get used to it.”

Ideas came to her, old and exciting. She snapped her fingers, a devious grin spreading across her face. “Y’know I bet you got all sorts of nasty shit onboard here. We could get real creative with the revenge.”

At Roaki's suggestion, Quinn jerked her head up and a funny kind of queasy nauseated look emerged on her face as everything inside her tried to reconcile what was going on, and the emotions that she was struggling to suppress fought her control harder. A sudden alien feeling from within her didn't help matters any; a bristling distrust, a girl on edge. It hardly did anything to clarify to Quinn what she should do. Though, she certainly knew what she wasn't going to do; carry out horrible violence on Doctor Follen for something that she had very little knowledge of. As suspicious as she was, there was a part of her that knew, deep down, that he was a good person.

...Right?

A moment later she realized that she'd thought that with a question mark. And it was that thought that finally did it, that pushed her over the edge; that brief moment, that split second of doubt. Doctor Follen had been one of her few fixed points on the Aerie, one of the few people that she'd known implicitly that she could trust with absolutely anything. That she had trusted with just about anything. All of the sadness, all of the uncertainty, that had come with her position; all of the deeply personal things that she sometimes even felt scared to tell Dahlia.

So how could she doubt him?

That control that she'd given her level best to exert over her feelings, so tenuous now, finally cracked and broke, and she felt hot tears of confusion and grief welling up in her eye. She curled in the corner where the mattress met the walls and pulled her knees up to her chest, then rested her face against them as tears and muffled sobs seeped out of her. And suddenly, shame joined the rest of the awful things going on in her head:

She didn't want Roaki to see her cry.

Oh, great. She was crying. Always with the crying—honestly, how did Quinnlash get anything done? She was important, right? Important people had tight schedules to keep, and Roaki was certain that if she could see Quinnlash’s, there would be slots dedicated to breakdowns at the top of every hour.

This was why people got betrayed. Quinnlash was bleeding and thrashing around in an ocean full of sharks, eventually someone was bound to come along hungry. God, but it had to be an act—especially after today, after what she’d done, killing all those Modir. You couldn’t be that strong and this weak.

“Well you can’t just do nothing!” Roaki said, exasperated. She stayed where she was, away from Quinnlash, just in case whatever cry-virus she had was contagious. “If he thinks he can get away with it he’ll keep doing it! It doesn’t matter if you’re strong or not, if people think you’re weak, they’ll treat you like it. So if you’re too much of a weichei to kill him then you should at least march down there and fuckin’ clock him in the jaw or something! He’s nothing—you’re a pilot.”

Deep within Quinn, there was the rare rumbling of agreement with the Helburkan girl. It seemed someone was still riding their bloody high from the battlefield. It didn’t get the chance to settle though, as outside there was the shuttering of the dormitory door, followed by a familiar voice.

“Quinn? You here?”

Footsteps towards Quinn’s room, then faster footsteps until Dahlia appeared in the doorway of Roaki’s. She seemed panicked, eyes settling first on the curled up, weeping form of her sister, then turning sharply to Roaki.

“What did you do?”

“Oh, yeah, cause normally she’s such a rock.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t fuckin’ know. She’s mad about that snake doctor—I told her she should just kill the prick but I guess she doesn’t wanna.”

Dahlia stared at her a moment, took a deep breath, and marched in. “Okay, I need to talk to her. Alone.”

“Yeah good fuckin’ luck with that. I don’t think she’s gonna—” Roaki lapsed into stunned silence as Dahlia lifted up by the armpits and carried her out of the room. Momentary silence. “PutmethefuckdownyoufuckingassholeIllripyourheartoutofyourfuckingchestwithmyteethdoyouhearmeIlleviscerateyouIwillbreakeveryfingeronyourhandsnoonepicksmethefuckupareyouseriousyouwillbegmeformercyIfuckingswear—”

She thrashed but Dahlia was stronger than she looked, and held her out far enough that even with half her leg she couldn’t kick back far enough to reach her. She was eventually dumped unceremoniously onto the couch with a surprised yelp, and could only watch as Dahlia strode back to the room and shut the door.

Inside, Roaki’s threats continued, muffled, before they faded into blissful yet also troubling silence. Dahlia didn’t seem to care, she just came over to the bed and sat down beside Quinn. Arms found their way around her, pulling her in close. Deep breaths, warmth, silent, lingering joy that they were both still alive.

“What’s wrong, Quinn?” came the quiet question, accompanied by a squeeze around her. “Talk to me.”

It took more than a few moments for Quinn to collect herself enough to lift her face from her knees. The eyepatch was still settled on her face, but it was noticeably out of position, had clearly been shifted around a bit. It took some more time to collect herself even after lifting her face enough to reply; and when she did, her voice was thin and reedy and filled with a deep, cold, miserable confusion as she battled to force the words out of her throat.

"I--"

"Deelie, I--I looked...felt, I...I..." She swallowed hard, like she could gulp the lump back down her throat as tears still leaked from her eye. "...I, under my eyepatch, I, I felt it, I--." The words decayed into rambling static, then lapsed into silence, as she tried and failed to keep a hold on herself, to stabilize all the emotions rampaging through her. She took a deep breath, then: one, two, three. Just focus on that. Focus on the breathing. Don't focus on anything else, just the breathing. It took her well over a minute of just shuddering against the wall to finally resume what she'd been saying.

"I...felt under my eyepatch for, for the first time ever" She was slowly beginning to uncurl as she grew slightly--slightly--calmer."Roaki looked at it. It's...It's--"

A part of her didn't want to say it. Like saying it would make it real. But that was stupid kid thinking. It was real, and nothing she could do would make it any less so. But even so, her voice dropped to a pained whisper, still cut with tears.

"Why? Why?" She reached up to her hair, yanking at her bangs as her voice grew once again heavily agitated. "Why didn't he tell me, Deelie?"

By the time she finished, she was almost yelling:

"Does he hate me?"

While she wasn’t comfortable using a word like ‘accustomed’, Dahlia had been learning how to handle Quinn’s lower moments as they came. She couldn’t always pull her out of them, but she had at least built up a better understanding of their severity. Frankly, it didn’t take much to wring the tears out of Quinn, so being able to differentiate between a mild upset and a breakdown was important.

This, for instance, seemed rather serious. The key tells were in her voice, her posture—she checked her arms for nail-marks and was relieved to see them unmarred—and most of all: the fact that Dahlia had no idea what she was talking about. Cohesion was not one of Quinn’s strong suits at times like this. She spoke in a thin babble and it was hard to understand her. Something about her eyepatch, something about someone hating her, not telling her something.

That was all fine. For the moment it didn’t matter what she was talking about, and wouldn’t until she could collect herself enough to say it clearly. What did matter was being there, giving her an anchor to pull herself up with.

“No,” she said, meeting Quinn’s rising aggravation serenely. “Of course not. Shh. No one hates you, Quinn. Just breathe for me, okay? Just try to settle, we can work through this.”

As usual, Dahlia's voice interrupted the static.

"Just breathe for me, okay?"

The frantic thoughts jerked, and Quinn breathed.

In, out. One, two, three.

She dropped her hands from her forehead and found a few strands of hair coming along with them where she'd pulled them out at the roots. They trembled as she held them out in front of her, staring sightlessly at them with an eye at once vague, faraway, and horrified. Not just her hands; her whole body was shivering along with them. Her jaw clenched and unclenched unconsciously, creaking out a rhythm on her bones. The same refrain seethed through her head: why? Why? Why? Why?

In, out. One, two, three.

The frantic hammering of her heart, so deafening in her ears, began to slow, to abate. She pulled her hands into fists, squeezing them rock hard in an effort to stop them from shaking. It worked. Up to a point. It was no longer so visible or extreme, but she still felt it, even if it couldn't be seen as well. She squeezed harder, closing her eye tight and trying to blot everything out so she could think straight.

In, out. One, two, three.

Now she finally began to calm down. The full-body shivering was almost gone now, and the hands weren't too far behind. She let the tight fists go, and her eye opened as well. It was still a little distant, but at least it seemed to be focused this time, as she pulled herself out of her head.

Her voice was still weak and reedy, but it wasn't as bad, and it wasn't frantic. She was almost sadly proud at how it almost didn't shake like a leaf, even if you could steal hear the tears in it.

"I..."

"I felt under my eyepatch." She let her fingers skate lightly over the fabric in question, swallowing down another spike of fear and confusion.

"Why didn't anyone ever tell me?"

Progress came slow, but it came. Dahlia let go of Quinn and leaned back to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with her. She was intelligible now, which was good, but it didn’t make what she was saying any easier to understand—not a particularly uncommon thing either. Looked under her eyepatch? What could there possibly be to see or feel that wasn’t just…emptiness?

She saw the strands of hair in Quinn’s hands and a worried sound escaped her. She rubbed Quinn’s head gently, relieved that there wasn’t any blood to feel. For Quinn, there hadn’t been any pain to feel, either. Her silent passenger must have reached up to numb the roots. There was nothing else though, no other sensations or alien thoughts. She was often quiet whenever Dahlia was near. Listening, content, basking.

“Tell you what?”

The hand massaging her head snaked down to her cheek to thumb the tears away. In the dark, Dahlia’s synthetic eyes glowed with pale blue concern.

“What didn’t they tell you, Quinn?”

Quinn's thoughts stuttered to a stop.

"W--what?"

How? How could that...? That didn't make any sense. She'd been so angry, Quinn had seen it in her eyes, she had been furious. Didn't that mean--how could it not--

"But, but, you saw it after the duel, right?" She reached a hand up to take Dahlia's, pulling it from her face and squeezing it tightly, face writ with confusion as she began once again to fumble over her words. It didn't make sense. It didn't make any sense. None of this made any sense at all.

"That's--isn't that why you--you got so angry I thought you--" She swallowed hard, cutting off her babbling, and her eye flicked over to the penlight that Roaki had left on the nightstand. She grabbed at it, pulling it towards them, but dropped it before it could reach her, tumbling down and rolling under the bed. She reached down to get it, but only barely managed to pull herself back to stop from falling herself. She swallowed heavily, feeling the hysterical tears starting to bubble towards the surface again, and closed her eye to keep them locked down.

Oh. That was right, Dahlia could see in the dark anyway.

At that thought, Quinn turned to her, yanking the eyepatch off her head to reveal the twisted expanse of gray scarring that dominated the right side of her face before leaning in towards her.

"Look," she begged, eye still shut tight as she hoarsely whispered. "Just--look--please."

Confused, and increasingly concerned, Dahlia nonetheless obliged and leaned close to Quinn’s face. A synthetic whirring echoed briefly in her ears before vanishing in her aural blind spot, and with a blink her eyes brought faux clarity to the dark. A seamless combination of night vision and rapidly-refreshing AI-generation took in and deciphered everything just as fast as the eyes she’d been born with. It mapped out Quinn’s face, twisted in pain and grief and anxiety, and then further, it lit up the empty eye socket.

It seemed normal for modium scarring. Discolored, gray flesh like water splashed on dry concrete. She knew from experience how uncomfortable it could be at first, but this was old and healed and as much a part of her as the rest of her skin. Then, further in, it highlighted something…else. Something small, hardly the size of a fingernail, lodged into the flesh at the very back of the socket.

Dahlia had never had reason to doubt her implants before, but when a preemptive scan warned her that she was looking at raw modium, she figured there must be a glitch. She blinked, the overlay reset, scanned again. Again it returned modium, warned her to back away. Dahlia gasped hard.

Her first thought was simple and animalistic—run. Quickly her human mind caught up and told her she needed to drag Quinn to Follen’s now because she was about to die. Then the logical mind followed, and reminded her that she should already be dead. Long dead, burst into a statue of volatile steel.

But here she sat, with her, both of them alive.

“What…” she mumbled dumbly. “That’s…but…is that from when you were little? But…but you should be…”

She recalled Quinn’s babbling, and a pit formed in her stomach. “He…? Do you mean…do you think…Follen knew?”

He’d have to, wouldn’t he? They’d have scanned Quinn before the modioscory, to say nothing of the numerous scans afterwards. There was no way Follen hadn’t known about it. So…so why hadn’t he said anything?

“What…what do we do?”

As Dahlia, clearly as shocked as she herself was, stumbled out questions, Quinn could only nod dumbly along, eye wide.

Yes, she should be dead. By all rights, from everything she knew of modium--which was more than a lot of people--she should've died a long time ago. Years. Modium did not pull its punches, and the idea of a growth sitting benign in her head for that long was--as far as she was aware--unprecedented. That she was alive at all was a miracle, and not a small one; and the fact that even her existing growth had never swelled after sessions in the cockpit just added another layer of unreality to the entire surreal thing.

And...yes. Yes, Follen had to know. He was the one that had come up with the idea for the surgery; and the one who'd prepared her for the surgery, cleared her for operating; and the one who'd performed the surgery, without ever telling Besca until it was already done. The idea that he didn't know was, frankly, impossible, especially since he'd tapped her on the growth just earlier that day. Why? Why did he--he had never done that before, why did he? And why didn't he ever tell her?

"I--"

Quinn's thoughts--dropped from their earlier racing babble--slowed in her head like molasses. The eyepatch in her lap felt suddenly like it weighed a hundred pounds, all pressing down on her. She wanted to run and hide but there was no way to run or hide from your own head, so she instead curled up against the wall again, staring down at her knees as she pulled them up to her chest. Her voice shook as she spoke:

"I don't know."

She didn’t know? Dahlia could have slapped herself; of course Quinn didn’t know what to do—how could anyone be expected to know what to do in a situation like this? Putting Follen’s apparent deception aside, there was modium in Quinn’s head and, apparently, it had been there a long time, perhaps since she was little. A nugget of the what was perhaps the deadliest material known to man, lodged inches from her brain and she was still breathing.

Dahlia disabled the scan, the constant warnings were making her anxious. She sat back on the bed, staring blankly as the dark returned.

What should they do? Follen was still held up in the hangar, and would likely be bogged down with paperwork and meetings for the rest of the day. Besca would be lucky if she saw the dorm before the weekend, but would most likely be spending her nights catching powernaps on the bridge until whatever new international storm was brewing passed on.

That left the two of them—well, technically the three of them, but damned if she was gonna count the creature. They’d have to weather this on their own for now, which was, well, unideal, but that was practically the definition of their job.

‘Well, you can’t just sit here.’ She thought. ‘You’re the big sister, act like it.’

Dahlia pushed herself up off the bed. Whatever the plan was, they couldn’t just coop up and cry in the dark until Besca came home.

“C’mon,” she said, taking Quinn gently by the wrists to get her to follow. “Lets have something to eat, give ourselves some energy to think with.”

She pushed the door open, letting the light back in. It did make things a little better, a little more open, and—

Her foot caught on something and she stumbled to the floor, managing to catch herself with her good arm. Kicking back, she saw it was…her…shirt? A little graphic T-shirt with the faded name of a band she listened to when she was little. But this had been in her closet, hadn’t it?

Crumpled up before her were a pair of shorts, which she was certain had also been in her closet.

So had the long-sleeve shirt on the table, and the four or five pairs of pants tossed over and around the couch. The dozens of socks. The undershirts. The sweaters, the coats, all twisted inside out or crumpled and strewn over the common area, the TV, even the kitchen—where the microwave was on and through the light she could clearly see at least two pairs of underwear rotating on the popcorn setting.

Across the dorm, another shirt came flying out of the open door to her room. Dahlia stared slack jawed as Roaki hopped out, holding a bundle of socks in her hand, and an expensive dress in her teeth.

“Oh my GOD!” Dahlia shrieked. “Roaki! what the hell?!”

Roaki spat the dress onto the floor and tossed the socks up to scatter across the room like rain. She held herself upright, and met Dahlia’s eyes with a fearsome glower.

“No one picks up Roaki Tormont without consequence!” she declared. “Mark my words lizard, your suffering will be long and brutal!”

Quinn...stared. At the clothing scattered around, the brutal fabric massacre covering essentially the entire common room of the dorms. Dahlia screaming at Roaki. Justifiably.

Stared some more, at the entire bizarre tableau.

Stared at Roaki, as she let fly a bunch more of Dahlia's clothes.

The spell was broken as a pair of balled-up socks bonked her in the nose, prompting a sneeze of alarm. Her eyebrow twitched, and the loud, jagged grinding in her head was nearly audible as her brain abruptly shifted gears that were not, at that moment, prepared to shift. Dahlia's stuff being thrown about--Dahlia yelling--Roaki doing it--Quinn's affection for Roaki--

The socks that had bounced off her face rolled to a stop a few feet away from her, and for a moment that felt frozen in time she just...stood there. And blinked. And stared at the socks, completely unsure what she should do in this situation.

Then the gears in her brain caught and started to move again, and something like a strangled growl crossed with a tired groan seeped from her throat. She marched up to Roaki, face caught in some bizarre triangulation between sadness, confusion, and stormy frustration. Taking care not to step on Dahlia's dress, she stood in front of the smaller--and legless--girl, took a deep breath, bent down, lifted her hand, and...

Flicked her once, gently. Right in the middle of the forehead. "Roaki, you..." she chided--then paused, and the chiding tone left her voice, to be replaced by restrained frustration. Still gentle, as Quinn always was with Roaki, but present nonetheless as Quinnlash's anger reared its head as well. "Apologize to Dahlia. Right now." She took another deep breath as she straightened, trying to quell the irritation and annoyance that were bubbling up in her. She'd had a long day. "You're acting like a child. You're better than this."

Roaki snarled, flinching back and swatting at Quinn’s hand. Humiliation was familiar to her now, and while she couldn’t let it slide from the lizard, she had no choice but to take it from the girl who’d bested her. Their spars in sims were one thing, but to actively fight back? The lion’s share of her knew she was unworthy of something like that.

Still, just because she was done trying to kill Quinnlash for the moment, didn’t mean she would blindly follow her commands, especially something so ridiculous as apologizing.

“I’ve torn out hearts for lesser slights,” she spat back. “Consider it a favor that she still breathes”

Across the room, Dahlia opened the fridge, where three pairs of shoes came tumbling out onto the floor. She muffled a furious shriek behind her teeth.

“Seriously?!”

Roaki bit her bottom lip, thinking hard. “I had an insult about cold feet, but you two took too long and I forgot it. Just—hey! Just pretend I said something biting! Maybe cry—you’re good at that!”

Dahlia held a shoe over the sink, shaking out handfuls of ice cubes. “What is the matter with you? Who does this?!”

“Next time maybe you’ll think twice about throwing me out of my own room!”

“Next time I’ll just throw you into the washer!”

“Then you can grab all your clothes from space after I airlock your whole closet!” Roaki snapped. “You don’t want to play vengeance with me, lizard. I'll win.”

Scooping more clothes off the floor, Dahlia went about replacing her things with a grimace and a flurry of grumbles. Roaki sneered victoriously and hobbled back to the couch.

“Well, did you figure your shit out?” she asked Quinn, entire debacle already forgotten. “All that blubbering better have been worth something.”

Quinn didn't answer right away, opting instead to help Dahlia pick up her clothes, shake the ice cubes out of the shoes, find the sweatpants in the freezer, and so on and so forth. It was almost impressive just how much Roaki had managed to accomplish with no legs and one arm in such a short time. After bringing it all back into Dahlia's room, she returned to the common area, sinking down into her beloved blue chair and staring up the ceiling before she finally responded, a look on her face that could only be described as brittle.

"...No. I didn't figure anything out. I think I'm even more confused." She paused, took a breath, thought. At least her entire brain wasn't trying to combust in on itself anymore. Talking to her sister and deep breathing, probably. Both of those were things that calmed her down, so combining them--and the distraction of Roaki's textile slaughter--had her thinking pretty straight again. "Buuuut I did figure out that I can't figure it out right now, and that I shouldn't worry about it until I can."

That was, of course, underselling the turmoil that was still boiling inside of her, threatening to burst out at any moment; Quinn was emotionally fragile at the best of times, and this was not exactly that. But she found that when she was with Roaki, it was a bit easier to keep it all down, to hide it and deal with it later. Perhaps it was an artifact of the way that they'd talked when Roaki was still in that room in medical, or perhaps it was just the ways that their personalities played. But even though she really did want to curl up in a ball again and keep crying some more, she...wasn't. A faint ghost of what might one day be a smile came to her face as she considered that Roaki could therefore be perhaps classified as a good influence. "So...thanks--"

She realized only after she said it that she didn't exactly know what she wanted to thank Roaki for. Just that she did. So she paused for a second, only to shake her head a moment later.

"Just...thanks."