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You're putting makeup on before the show; eyeliner with shaky hands is never going to be easy, but you've done it before and you're going to do it now. Fuck your tremors. It's not bad enough to keep you from playing, but you'll need a hefty dose of self-medication afterwards, maybe in the form of more booze.
Birdperson is sitting on a small bench next to you, scooted far enough away that when he extends one wing, it doesn't infringe on your personal space in any big way. Unnecessarily thoughtful of him, since you've been in each other's personal space in a shitton of other, more serious situations, like when he'd been pressed up against you, back-to-back, taking out fifteen platoons of Gromflomites, making them eat dirt in a dozen different ways.
Your personal favorite was when he'd fashioned a spear out of a dead Gromflomite's leg and impaled four more of them on it with the careful ease of a hunter. You'd given an impressed whistle, and he'd said, “Gromflomites or nightcrawlers, insects are insects.” You, covered in blood and half hysterical with exhaustion, had howled.
He's smoothing his feathers with an amber powder; when the light hits it at just the right angle, it reflects it and sends out golden speckles that scatter all over you and the mirror and the floor.
“What's this shiny shit, Pers?”
He turns to look at you, the full weight of his attention pressing down on you through his eyes. You almost have to look away. “It is Agortuka. From the crushed pods of the Agor plant. It is culturally and religiously significant for my people. It brings good luck and good health.”
Normally you'd lose interest right there. As far as you're concerned, everyone can keep their own religious beliefs and shit to themselves, because you don't care. Despite this, you presently care very much about what Birdperson has to say.
You're about to say something else when Squanchy interrupts you, shuffling into the room to let you know that everything's ready. You leave most of the set up to him, because even though you have fans who'd do that shit for you, you never know if someone could be a Federation lackey who's just there to get into your good graces and then fuck everything up. Squanchy doesn't have to deal with things like clothes or “looking presentable” the way you and Birdperson do, so you've all agreed that he takes care of it.
The show starts in ten. You still have to tune your bass. You head to the stage, leaving Birdperson to finish bedazzling his wings for whatever weird bird reasons he has.
The music you play is pretty typical run of the mill Earth punk rock: “fuck the government” and “life is hard and no one understands so you might as well drink it away,” and the Federation hates it, especially the whole “fuck the government” bit. The Federation can suck your hairy, wrinkly, old-man balls.
You write all the lyrics, and Birdperson sings, because your singing voice is functional, but his lungs can hold a lot more air and he can blast the audience with sound. Your voice is better suited for small gatherings, where it doesn't have to reach, and while you're on stage with him you mostly just sing the backing vocals. It suits you fine.
The stage is decked out in your usual concert banners, the spotlights focused on three equidistant points so you each have enough space do to your thing. Birdperson has a tendency to open his wings when he sings. You'd made a joke about it once and he'd said, dryly, “It is a reflex, Rick,” and you almost felt a little bit bad. Almost.
There are fog machines placed haphazardly at the edge of the stage, pointing towards you partly for camouflage purposes if things go to shit and partly because standing in a cloud of fog makes you look, you think, fucking awesome.
There's already a crowd, at least a thousand in there, but you're shit at guesstimating crowd sizes. A throng is a throng. You see some familiar faces near the front, fans from previous concerts that you know of only because they're unique enough to catch your eye.
Your promotions are mostly underground on account of the anti-Federation message, but each show draws a bigger and bigger crowd, news passed around by word of mouth and coded messages on resistance radio waves. All of your shows are on planets that either haven't submitted to the Federation yet or are actively fighting back.
This one, Korterion, is small and mostly uninhabitable: 95% of the atmosphere contains chemicals toxic to any oxygen-breathing organism, and the other 5% covers mostly ocean. The one safe place on the planet is an island that survives by mining and trading incredibly rare minerals that the Federation would love to get their grimy little pincers on.
Anyone who wants to come to your concert on Korterion has to be incredibly determined, has to have the precise coordinates, and has to have been allowed in by the fiercely protective Korterian customs. You can't think of a better place to hold an anti-Federation concert.
You drain half your flask and head onto the stage. Your bass is out of tune, as you predicted. The pressure changes during takeoff and landing always fuck up your tuning even though you've built a special pressurized case for it. You step on stage to plug it into an amp, and the crowd's attention is all on you.
“Yeaaaaah, Riiiiiiick!” someone yells, and you flip them off and go back to tuning your bass. This, predictably, drives them even wilder, and as you strum a few experimental chords, they get louder and louder. You turn as you hear the crash of cymbals, and you see Birdperson and Squanchy taking their places beside and behind you.
You turn to the mic in front of you and yell, “Who's here to have a good fuckin' time!”
The audience makes a hundred different noises, yells and clicks and whistles and whoops, and you yell, even louder, “Who's here to have a GOOD. FUCKING. TIME! We're The Flesh Curtains, and we're here to fuck your shit up.”
There's the reaction you wanted, all of their cries meshing together into one deafening roar.
You look to Birdperson and Squanchy, and they nod at you.
“This is Blood, Brains, and Booze, motherfuckers!” you say. Birdperson counts out into the mic, one, two, three, and you launch into the first number.
Birdperson's voice is resonant, all the air in his lungs forced out in a gale that threatens to knock you off your feet every time you hear it. He loses his clearer enunciation in favor of getting your sloppy, stream-of-consciousness lyrics out all in one breath, and he adds his own flourishes to the song, caws and trills and chirps and whistles and a dozen other sounds you couldn't even begin to mimic. You hate to admit it because you think you're a pretty good songwriter, but he has an incredible ear for when to add things and when to let the lyrics speak for themselves.
His wings are incandescent under the stage lights, and halfway through the third song, you flub your notes, because you're wasting all your time watching him. What the actual fuck, Sanchez? He gives you a concerned look, and the flush that works its way from somewhere in the center of your chest up to your face is even more embarrassing than your musical fuck up.
And then the realization hits you like a bass line, thrumming underneath your skin and making you jump: you want him right now. You want to be close to him, to smell his dusty feather-smell, the pine-sweet stink of his sweat, to hear his feathers brushing against each other as he folds his wings against his back, because he's the closest thing to a friend you've had in years. Decades, if you're honest. The feeling makes you a little euphoric and a little sick.
If you believed in angels, you might even say he'd looked like one then, illuminated and glorious, bringing a message down to mere mortals, but that's fucking stupid, Sanchez. God isn't even real.
What is real is the crowd in front of you, a thousand faces and limbs and you think all of them might be just as fascinated by him as you are.
On closer inspection, some of those limbs and faces belong to a dozen or so Gromflomites. You're willing to give them the benefit of the doubt at first, because not every one of them is a Federation lackey, but then Birdperson does a quick double-caw followed by a whistle, which sounds innocuous with the music, but it's also his signal for “danger.”
When you look at him, he tilts his head ever so slightly towards them. You look closer, and though the fog makes it hard to see much, you're pretty sure that guitar case next to them isn't for instruments. Who the fuck brings their own guitar to someone else's concert? That's just weird.
But nothing out of the ordinary happens, and you tear through the other half dozen songs in your set and then you're in the middle of your last song, breathing hard and muscles aching. He looks at you, eyes intense and feathers so mussed he looks positively feral. You feel that zing in the small of your back, all your nerves buzzing like you've been plugged in.
You swallow down the bezoar lump in your throat and nod at him, and he turns and exchanges a nod with Squanchy too. You stop playing and Birdperson stops singing, and Squanchy launches into a drum solo that makes your arms tired just from watching him.
The anti-Federation banner you've hidden behind his drumkit unfurls: “FUCK THE FEDERATION.” Concise and to the point. Catchy slogans are for people who don't know what their message is. It also says “FUCK THE FEDERATION” in Standard Federation Gromflomitian, though you think maybe you botched the grammar and turned it into “THE FEDERATION FUCKS,” because none of you really speak it on account of your planets all being mercifully free of the Federation's rule. The crowd fucking loses it.
Of course, after that everything goes to shit, because of course the Federation's watching. Of course those Gromflomites are Federation goons. You're too much of a threat for them to not be keeping an eye on you. The thought of being a big, sharp thorn in the Federation's ass makes you feel the closest thing to warm and fuzzy as you think you're capable of feeling.
The Gromflomites are opening the guitar cases, pulling out guns and heading towards the stage. There's more of them than you'd originally thought, scattered in clusters throughout the audience at strategic points.
The crowd, predictably, panics, because the Federation isn't known for treating rebels kindly. You've heard of interrogations using tactics that are technically illegal even by the Federation's own laws, declared barbaric by treaties and motions spearheaded by Shrimply Pibbles and his ilk, and the Federation still uses them. You've heard of rebel leaders released back to their home planets to find everything exactly as they left it, except for a crater in the ground where their homes used to be, no one meeting their gaze and everyone continuing as if they simply don't exist. You've heard of prison cells, isolated and dark and deathly quiet, quiet enough that you start to see and hear and feel things, because your brain has to compensate for lack of stimulation somehow.
You whip around to find the stage exit blocked by one of your Korterian hosts, and he's got a Federation rifle pointed directly at your chest. The fuckers sold you out.
But you're nothing if not prepared, and with the quick press of a button, the back panel of your amp falls open. Tucked inside is a powerful rifle of your own design. Squanchy has his own hidden in his drumkit, and Birdperson has a smaller version tucked inside his boot.
You duck and grab one of the fog machines, sliding it across the stage as the Korterian shoots at you, and it hits him, hard, in what you think are his shins. He goes down, clutching at a gash in one of his reptilian legs, and then you've got your rifle in your hands. You aim for the head.
Squanchy and Birdperson have already armed themselves and are firing back at your assailants. They're both holding their ground, and you turn your attention away from them to take aim at the biggest group of them. A small band of Korterians have joined the Gromflomites, and they've got their own, simpler rifles, which means this isn't something that had been planned in advance. The Federation just got lucky and found a few Korterians willing to rat you out. Lovely.
You think the Federation must just be there for you and Birdperson and Squanchy, because none of them are making any effort to block the exits, and the audience is flooding out, escaping to aircrafts, to ships, to portals. Some rebels they are, you think, if they don't want to stick around and fuck up some real-life Federation goons.
And then you hear something that makes your heart almost stop: a squawk of distress from Birdperson. His gun's been shot out of his hand and is lying in pieces on the floor. There's four of them coming at him with rifles firing and he ducks behind the drumkit, the lasers bouncing off the plastic and metal. You take one last shot at a Gromflomite in front of you, and then you're legging it across the stage to cover him, because like hell you're going to let them take any one of you down.
Squanchy apparently has the same idea, because now the two of you are backed up to the drumkit, and you're asking Birdperson if he's okay, and he's not answering you and fuck, fuck you can't even see him back there what if he's hurt what if he's dead you're going to murder every last one of those fuckers this isn't happening he's not dead—
And then, with a resonant caw that you feel in your bones and that vibrates in your ribcage, he launches himself into the air. He's soaring over them, holding one of Squanchy's cymbals in front of his chest as a makeshift shield, and every flap of his wings creates a gust of air that sprays them with that golden powder. You only maybe try to look up his kilt-skirt-thing a little bit, and only for a second, because thinking with your dick is what'll really get you killed.
There's something about that powder that stops the Gromflomites dead in their tracks, and then they're clawing at themselves, trying desperately to get it off. You can tell it's thrown them into a confusion: any of them that've been hit by it are dropping their guns, and there's hardly any shots being fired at any of you now. The Korterians, suddenly directionless and unprotected, are breaking rank and turning into a disorganized mess, most of them retreating, and you have no trouble picking the last of them off.
You take out six more Gromflomites while they're distracted by this powder, and then they start to crumple. Birdperson glides to a landing next to you, gives his wings one last good shake, and then throws himself, empty-handed, back into the fray.
“What the fuck was that on your wings, Pers?” you yell, because you're watching any and all beings with an exoskeleton writhing on the ground, seeming to wither and dry up right before your eyes.
He's got two of them, one head in each hand, and he messily crushes them together before he turns and answers you, shaking the blood off his hands.
“Agortuka, Rick. It is used as an insect repellent and a feather conditioner. It is primarily effective against creatures with exoskeletons, and virtually harmless to anything without. A precaution, and a surprisingly effective weapon against them. I simply used it in much greater concentrations than—”
Squanchy interrupts before he can finish, but you've got the idea. “Birdperson, behind you!”
You fire your gun at the two Gromflomites behind him. It's close, and you graze the tuft of feathers on the top of his head. You think it must have briefly stunned him, but then he shakes it off and ducks so you can fire the second shot.
And then another one of the fuckers gets you in the side. You stagger, but manage to regain your balance, and then you're pressing the heel of your foot into his chest. He's weaponless, and you can see the fine bronze powder is mostly concentrated on his arms and hands. He can't hold his fucking rifle and he's still trying to take you down. Incredible. You look right into his ugly bug-bastard eyes as you bring the butt of your gun down on his head.
The Federation must have ships on the way, because you can hear the shrill swell of the sirens and see the red lights breaking up the foggy dim of the concert hall.
“Backup!” Squanchy yelps. “You guys as ready to squanch outta here as I am?”
The Gromflomite crumpled at your feet gets one last good thwack from your gun, and you shoot two more before you're really ready to go.
“Rick!” Birdperson says warningly. He's already in the air, Squanchy on his left shoulder, and he's holding out his hand to you. You have to jump just a bit to catch hold. He hoists you up, and you're pressed against his side with his arm around your chest. Your right arm goes around his shoulder and you hook one of your legs around his waist. He moves his hand to your hip to better support your weight, and you try not to think about how it would feel on your ass.
“We're The Flesh Curtains, motherfuckerrrrrrrrs!” you yell, and then Birdperson's swooping through a broken window and you're whooping and giddy with it all: the hot, gasoline-stink air in your face as Birdperson ducks and swerves around the Federation's aircraft; the small cyclones that whip through your hair with every flap of his wings; the feeling of his feathers under your hands, of his body pressed against yours.
Your ship is hidden in a small cove at the edge of the island because you're not stupid enough to park it where the Federation could have surrounded it. You get there faster than you'd estimated in your escape preparations, and then the three of you are piling into your ship, kicking aside empty liquor bottles and firing up the engine, lost in the buzz of your own incredible escape.
Squanchy is in the backseat rasping out, “Holy squanch can you believe—can you believe—can you believe—” like he's got a fucking hairball, but you can't blame him, because the adrenaline rush would have you babbling incoherently too if you weren't busy twisting the cap off your flask and taking another long pull from it.
You're in no state to drive, but that's never really stopped you, and neither of them know how to operate your ship, so it's entirely in your hands. You loop your way up and into the air, and you hope the noise from you crashing through about twenty tree branches doesn't give you away.
It does.
A laser goes right through the passenger side window and settles firmly in your dashboard, leaving a quarter-sized hole that smokes around the edges. Several more lasers follow after it, one-two-three, but you swerve just in time to hear them ping off the refraction shields you've installed on the underside of your ship.
“Fuck. Did they get you, Pers?” You give the steering wheel a sharp twist as you look over at him and he has to put a hand out to steady himself against the side door. He shakes his head, and then your focus is back on getting out of this massive clusterfuck.
“Squanchy?”
“I'm fine, Rick!”
The thing about lasers is they don't just cut and run. The thing about lasers is they keep burning through the flesh for a good minute after they hit and seem to disappear. The thing about lasers is that the wounds from them can end up being more like lacerations and burns than bullet wounds. The thing about lasers is that one of them comes at you through the front windshield and starts searing its way through the top of your right shoulder, and it fucking hurts.
It's a messy tear—they've apparently upgraded the diameter of their lenses and reflectors, which makes for a bigger entry wound. Blood is running down your arm and soaking into your upholstery and your shirt and your pants leg and you still have to drive this fucking thing, Jesus Christ.
“Where the fuck is one of those fucking health injector things I got from T-413?” you yell. There are lasers coming at you from every direction and you can't exactly stop to treat yourself.
Squanchy is digging through the bottles and he keeps digging, and digging, and digging, until finally, a little out of breath, he says, “There aren't any, Rick! We left everything at the concert hall!”
You look at him in the rearview mirror and see him baring his fangs in a snaggletoothed grin. “But look what cool squanch I did find.”
He's holding up something round and red and fissured like a hatching egg and you recognize them instantly. It's not what you wanted, but it'll work as a distraction for now.
“Fine. Fuck. Squanchy, use the fucking—the fucking—” He's one step ahead of you. You hear the faint buzz of a window rolling down and then, a few seconds later, the satisfying electric sizzle and bang of one of your airborne grenades absolutely demolishing a Federation ship.
The reek of burning rubber and metal hits your nose as hunks of metal and glass are flung backwards into the other ships tailing you. The microgrenades lodged in the shrapnel of the original grenade do quick work on the other two ships. They won't obliterate them, but they'll cause enough damage to whatever they hit to render the ships at least partially unusable. There are a few more smaller explosions behind you, and you see the other two Federation ships spiraling down and away, into the caustic Korterian atmosphere.
“That's all of them, Rick. We need to find somewhere to land so that we can treat your wound,” Birdperson says.
You're halfway between Korterion and the next planet, and it doesn't take long for you to ascertain that the Federation hasn't gotten there yet. There's no bright flashing lights and no ships buzzing back and forth in the sky. They still haven't figured out that they'd probably be a lot better at catching you if they didn't announce their presence everywhere they went.
Your right side is messy and sticky with blood. You try not to think about it, but everything throbs and aches and you can feel the weakness settling into your injured arm.
You manage to steer clumsily into a clearing—flat plains bracketed by two sheer cliffs—that Birdperson points out, scoring a messy landing and running right over a fucking rock. The edge of it guts the underside of your ship, sending a half dozen tubes and wires sparking and whipping against the metal. The ship stutters to a stop at the bottom of a cliff, the friction and drag from the dirt slowing it down just enough to keep it from ramming headfirst into the rocky incline.
The engine cuts out. You say, crisply, “Fuck.”
The three of you exit the ship to inspect the damage. The air on this planet is sharp and cold and as you open the door, it hits you like an ocean wave. You can see Birdperson's feathers puff up slightly, trapping more heat, and he wraps his wings tightly around himself. Squanchy's got his fur, at least, but you're fucking miserable, because all you have is that loose sleeveless shirt and some too-tight leather pants that don't do anything to keep in warmth.
Before you can get all the way out the door (a slow, ginger process on account of you being dizzier than you thought), Birdperson is right in your face, in your space, pressing you back into your seat. And then he's manhandling your arm, wrapping his—good Christ that's his belt there can't be much of anything keeping his stupid bird-kilt up—his belt around your shoulder and pulling it tight.
“Pers—Pers cut that shit out. That's not gonna work. Tourniquets're only useful for extremities. Nice try getting your pants off, but all you're gonna get is a bloody belt.”
“I am not wearing pants, Rick,” he points out unhelpfully, but he stops fucking around with your arm.
You wish you hadn't been stupid enough to leave your medical supplies in the concert hall. There was a health injector in there, and you really, really could fucking use it. You don't have anything except your ship (broken), your portal gun (low on charge), your clothes (skimpy, ineffectual), and a bunch of mostly-empty liquor bottles (nice when they were full, but not presently helpful).
“Do you need that for the ship to function properly?” he asks, pointing to the sail that you've attached to the rear of the ship. It's mostly for show, and it makes you feel a bit jaunty and nautical when you see it in the rearview mirror, so no, it's not necessary, but it's nice.
As soon as he hears you don't need it, he's climbing up the back of the ship and undoing the ropes that hold it in place. He pulls a small dagger from his boot and cuts off three neat strips, and then carries it all back to you. He makes quick work of tying the strips of fabric around your shoulder, and the rest of the sail he drapes carefully around you as a makeshift blanket. It's too thin to really be much use, but the gesture is...something.
“Now you can examine the ship,” he says, and then he's wrapping an arm around your waist and half-dragging, half-walking you the other side. You try to tell him you're fine, that you can still walk without help, but he ignores you. You scowl at him, but it's not worth the fight. If it makes him feel better to lug you around like so much meat, he can have himself a fuckin' ball. And anyways, he's warm, and you can use all the warmth you can get.
The sparks have died down, but there's still an intermittent crackling that makes you nervous. If any of them bounce off the rock just so, the entire clearing could be lit up and you'd basically be sending out signal flares for the Federation: “Come and fucking get us—if we haven't already burned to death.”
You shrug Birdperson off you and flip open the engine compartment of the ship to make quick work of disconnecting everything (as quick as you can with your right arm hanging uselessly at your side, which means it takes a lot longer than it should). It won't completely remove the risk, but at least it'll eliminate most of the sparking. Still, given the amount of half-full liquor bottles in the ship and the engine fluid oozing from one of the tubes, it's safer to stay away just in case something does catch.
Unfortunately, disconnecting everything also cuts off all the power to all of the ship's lights and the three of you are left blinking and trying to adjust your eyes to the darkness.
There are two moons on this planet, but they reflect so little light from this galaxy's sun so as to be nearly useless. Scrabbling with your left hand, you pull a small orb from the ship's glove compartment. With the flick of a switch, a faint circle of light expands around your palm. It's weak, but it'll give you enough to work with.
You dig your portal gun out of the glove compartment too and tuck it under your left arm before moving away a safe distance. The lightheadedness is fucking with you. Your balance is iffy on a good day, but this time when you stumble, Birdperson catches you.
“You have lost a lot of blood, Rick,” he says. You fucking hate that you have to slump against him to make it the rest of the way across the clearing. You settle against the opposite cliff face and start up the portal gun, punching in coordinates and fine-tuning settings. Birdperson is still hovering over you and you almost want to tell him to stop being such a big baby. You'll be fine. You've got this all under control.
“Squanchy,” you say as you fiddle with some dials.
His ears prick up and he looks at you with furrowed brows. His tail is twitching. If Squanchy is concerned, you think, you must really be fucked, and you're just too far gone to realize it.
“I n-n-need you to go through this portal. I need you to t-t-take this with you. You gotta—you gotta get me an injector and at least two health vials from T-413. The guy who owns this shop, just—just tell him it's for Rick Sanchez. He—he owes me. Tell him to get you some—”
The shudder that ripples through you shuts you up fast. You shove your flask at Birdperson and he carefully unscrews the cap and holds it to your mouth. You snatch it back from him. You're not so weak that you can't fucking drink by yourself. You take two long swallows and wait for the burn in your chest to subside.
“Get some copper and dramilion wires. Make sure they're coated with exactly thirty percent megatree plaster. And some plain rubber tubing. Three-quarters inch diameter. And then put these coordinates into the gun and come right fucking back.”
You hand him the portal gun and write the coordinates on a scrap of paper with a stubby golf pencil you pulled from the glove compartment. You're right handed, and your handwriting with your left hand is atrocious, but he says he can read it, so that's good enough for you.
He takes the portal gun from you, presses a claw to the button, and then he's gone. It's just you and Birdperson, and the concern on his face makes you want to hit him.
The cold is sinking into you, working its way past your flimsy sail-blanket and deep into your bones. Your teeth are starting to chatter. You give your flask an experimental shake. It's disappointingly close to empty.
You hate your useless arm. Replacing everything with cyborg limbs is starting to sound more and more appealing. As soon as you get home, you're gonna blueprint some out. You shove your flask at Birdperson again. “Open it, Pers. I'm fucking freezing.”
He does. You take it back, drain the last of it, and let out a thundering burp. The cliffsides create a weak echoing and you listen to your burp faintly repeat itself a half dozen times. Birdperson, crouched next to you and leaning in close enough to your face that he can probably smell it, has the gall to look unimpressed.
“Alcohol is only temporarily warming, Rick,” he says. “We should find some cover. Under a tree, perhaps, or a cave. Somewhere protected from the wind, where we can start a fire.”
You don't want to leave your ship behind. And the coordinates you gave Squanchy will bring him right back to this clearing. If you look for somewhere else to rest, it'll take him that much longer to find you, and that much longer to heal your shoulder. You're going to stay here, you tell him, and he nods once, solemnly, and opens his wings.
You think he's going to take off, go do whatever it is he thinks he has to do, and while you're not sure being separated is the smartest thing for you to do, you trust his judgment. But then he's drawing even closer, close enough that you can feel his breath on your face, and his wings are closing in over your head and pressing you against him. He's so, so warm.
“Pers, what the fuck,” you say.
“You are cold. And that cloth is too thin to be of much use. My feathers are much more effective.”
You want to point out that he's more exposed than you, bare-chested and bare-legged, but when you mumble something about him being more naked than you, he simply says, “My feathers are insulating.”
“Look, Pers, I'm fine. Get off me.”
“We have been this close before. I do not understand why you are so opposed to it now.”
He's not going to budge on this, you realize. You give one last sad, pathetic attempt at pushing him off you with your left hand, but all you succeed in doing is getting him to wrap his wing closer around you.
At least he's not trying to wrap his arm around you. That, you think, would be too much. Too much closeness, too much contact, too much intimacy. You're already far too familiar with all his small details, the crease where his belly folds into itself when he sits, the way he shakes out his wings in the rain, the way he looks at you when you talk, the—fuck. Fuck.
Sanchez, party of one, for “I've just realized I'm disgustingly attracted to my best bird friend.”
“Rick?”
You shake your head. “I'm fine, Pers.” You're not going to let any of this get to you. You're not.
He looks at your shoulder and then back up at you. “Fine enough, Pers. Leave me alone.” He sighs and settles, cross-legged, next to you. He is very careful not to jostle your injured arm. He is not leaving you alone.
You try to focus on scribbling diagrams onto the scraps of paper, try to figure out what steps you'll need to take to repair your engine. You know what needs replaced and repaired, but for some reason you're having trouble keeping the steps all organized in your head. Birdperson watches you work, but he doesn't interrupt you with any more questions or offer suggestions and you appreciate, not for the first time, that he tends towards stoicism.
And then there's a rustling that startles you both, something moving in the underbrush across from you. You move to cup your hand over your light. He turns his head to look towards the source of the sound, lowering a wing so it's not blocking his line of sight, and then you see it, slick and fading into rust-red: the feathers on the back of his head are matted with blood. You guess you weren't as good a shot as you'd thought.
You lean forward to get a better look, jostling your arm in the process. “Shit,” you hiss, and then, “Jesus, Pers, your head—”
“Quiet,” he says, but it's gentle, more a reminder than a command. He's peering into the night, eyes darting from side to side, trying to make out whatever is rustling in the trees. Some sort of small mammalian creature, squirrel-like and twitchy, pops its head out of the underbrush and then darts away, and you both sigh. He turns his attention back to you.
“It is fine, Rick. A graze.”
You roll your eyes and try to get comfortable again. “That'll teach you to fucking info-dump in the middle of a fight.”
“You were the one who asked about it, Rick.”
You can't believe he's sassing you.
You try to reach for your flask before you remember it's empty, and the pain jets up your shoulder and lights up every nerve. “Christ, what's taking Squanchy so long?”
“You really should rest,” he says, placing a careful hand on your arm and taking the flask from you. His words are all wobbly and fucked up, because even as he's talking there's some soft, rounded sound building in his throat. You think maybe he's going to pull a Squanchy and cough up a featherball or something, but his eyes are closing and he looks calm and you realize, as your heart spasms painfully in your chest, that he's cooing at you. Like a fucking overgrown pigeon.
You have to take a minute to process this information, and then you rasp out, “Are you birding at me?”
He opens his eyes and peers at you, and then shrugs and closes them again. That's not a fucking answer, but he's still making that sound. You can feel his wings shift around the two of you. He is unbearably calm, and you're still buzzing with adrenaline and it's not fair how easily he can go from zero to a hundred and then back down to zero. You're pretty much always hovering somewhere around one-seventy-five.
But there's something about the soft warble that's comforting, that makes you feel safe, and you can almost feel your breathing get easier. You're not used to being calm. It must be the blood loss.
The press of his wings suddenly feels far too enclosed, like you're a couple of dumb kids about to start a round of seven minutes in heaven. There's still Gromflomite blood on his hands, on his feathers, on his chest, and there's your blood there too, mixing and creating a strange purple sheen. You can see the tremors of muscles underneath his skin, and you realize that it must be uncomfortable holding his wings so tightly around you, all so you can have a stupid little ball of light and warmth.
“Pers,” you say, and you reach out your good arm to touch his wing. His feathers are gritty under your fingers. He quiets and opens his eyes again, and you let your hand settle back at your side.
You rub the powder between your fingers and watch it shimmer in the faint light. You're so fucking tired, and this is going to seem like a mistake in about ten seconds, but if anyone asks later, you can just say it was the whole 'bleeding out' thing.
“Pers, I'm gonna turn this off. It's, uh, it's running out of charge, and we need some light left to fix the ship. Squanchy has our coordinates. He knows where to find us. And you—you can put your wings down. I'm warm enough.”
You find the switch with the edge of your fingernail, and right as you flick it off, you lean forward and clumsily, stupidly, press a kiss to his mouth.
You feel him exhale through his nose, a soft puff against your cheek, and his wings are relaxing around you, feathers brushing against your arm and sending a little shiver up the back of your neck.
“Gonna show me a good time before I kick it, Pers?” you say as you pull away, as if this had been his idea, and leer up at him.
“You will not die, Rick,” he says, and the warmth of his wings is starting to make you feel a different sort of woozy. He's smiling at you, and you want to pick apart every piece of it: the crinkle at the corner of his eyes, the creases around his mouth, the way his feathery brows lift ever so slightly. He doesn't ever fucking smile. It's like seeing a supernova. Incredible.
And then you hear the soft “wub” of a portal popping into existence, and you pull yourself away from him. His wing goes slack around you and then he's tucking it back against himself and Squanchy is padding towards you dragging a sack of supplies that must weigh more than he does.
He dumps the whole thing in front of you. The thing you thought was a sack turns out to be a heavy, woolly blanket, thicker and warmer than the sail currently tucked around you, and everything you need is wrapped up carefully in it. There are three health vials and one injector and Squanchy's already loaded the first vial into it.
You scoop it up before Birdperson gets it into his head to try and baby you anymore, and press the needle firmly into your shoulder. Your whole body goes slack with relief. Squanchy's gotten you the kind with the bonus painkillers. Smart fucking cat.
You empty the rest of the supplies onto the ground, shrug off the sail, and pull the blanket around yourself. It must be self-heating, because the warmth jolts you right back out of your painkiller haze and then settles you back into it like a bath. It's so, so good.
With your arm functional again, it's quick work to repair the engine. A snip here, a twist there, and the tubes and wires are good as new. You reconnect everything and toss the broken bits into the back of the ship. It's no good to leave too many traces for the Federation.
Your arm is working but it's still healing, and all the moving and twisting makes it ache. You look over at the health vials and think it's probably worth it to treat yourself to a second. You load the second vial into the injector, stick the point into your shoulder, and depress the lever.
Before the contents of the second vial can fully empty into your bloodstream, you pull it from your shoulder. In one quick motion, you shove Birdperson's head down, part the feathers with your fingers, and press the rest into the oozing wound. He gives a squawk of protest as the medicine hits, and then you're letting him up and stuffing the injector and remaining vial into your pocket.
You mutter “fucking stoic” loud enough for him to hear you, and you feel a strange sort of satisfaction, but then he fluffs up his neck feathers and, low and under his breath as you walk past him, coos again.
You stop and turn to stare at him, and he has the nerve to smile at you, that sentimental, feathery asshole.
Squanchy is looking back and forth between you two. If he knows something went down, he's smart enough to keep his mouth shut.
You shake your head and turn away from them. Rolling your shoulder and cracking your back one last time, you open the door to your ship.
“Where next, assholes?”
***