I whistle low and long as I reach the last line of the chat log. Then I read it again quickly and whistle even longer.

"Yeah," he agrees.

"Damn," I say, propping myself up slightly on the loungeplank. "And I thought the way you left us was cold. This is like the double slam breakfast of vague breakups."

From the corner where he's only half paying attention to me, I can see his profile flinch. It's not as visceral of a reaction as it used to be, which I feel I can pat myself on the back for. I've always belonged to the school of thought that any significantly painful point can be numbed by prodding it enough, which I apply as equally to other people's buttons as embarrassing things I did when I was six.

"What goes around comes around, I guess," he says, and turns until all I can see is his back. He's been trying to fix the leak in his quarter all morning, but if there's something the Talon is known for, it isn't prompt maintenance request responses. For now, he's tied a handkerchief around the leaking pipe and shoved a bucket into the middle of the slowly expanding pool. I've already exhausted all the jokes I could make about that, and when he saw I was getting restless, he shoved his palmhusk into my hands so that I would leave him alone.

"I still can't believe you were triangulating off with a pair of bluebloods!" I say, scrolling up to try and glean more about the other members of Reaper's failed relationship. "And old-ass ones too. Who still says 'agglutinate respiteblocks'?"

"I'm not exactly your either, anymore." A wrench appears from his fetch modus and he tightens a coupling.

"So that's the end of the story?" I wave the palmhusk around. "The Incident occurs, and you never see 'em again?"

"No. It ends before I even got court marshaled." The mood in the room drops until it's on par with the physical dampness. He's not even turning the wrench now, just making a show, pretending like his hands are busy. "They were assigned to a mission less then a wipe later, first one without me. It went south. Some fight with a bunch of rogue gamblignants. No one made it back."

"Oh."

The bucket is almost full now. Every now and then cold condensation drips from soaked fabric into the waiting maw below it, filling the room with the steady drip drip drip of a ticking clock.

"So, I am saying if they hadn't ditched you, you'd probably be dead too?"

Reaper says nothing.

I get up off the loungeplank, and make my way over to him. I pap him on the side of the face and tell him, "aw, it's alright buddy. Not your fault or nothing."

It's not even a pap really, just a blasé pat against his cheek as I stand on my toes to reach him. He stiffens, but other than that, doesn't react, so I give up and peel away. I've always been told my shoosh-pap game is garbage (mostly by him) but that's still remarkably unresponsive even for him, I so I decide to saunter back from whence I came.

"Besides," I say, sashaying my hips as I do so, "they seemed like a couple of bulge scrubs. Got what was coming to 'em."

Suddenly, there's a constriction on my arm, and I barely have time to register it before Reaper spins me around to face him. "They did not get what was coming to them," he tells me in no uncertain terms.

Damn he closed in quickly. He's hauling me upward, his face mere inches from mine, hostility flickering in the deep maroon of his eyes. The short spikes of his horns are so far forward on his scalp they nearly sprout from his forehead, and if he leaned down further, he would be butting them right into me.

I suppress a gulp and instead offer a grin. "You still holding a candle for them after all these sweeps, Gabe? C'mon Boss, you deserve way better than those bozos."

His hands are cold and wet. When he shoves me away, he leaves a print on my arm. "They are not bozos and they are not bulge scrubs, or anything else your ignorance tunnel can come up with."

I can't tear my glance nuggets away from him. I want him to keep looking at I like that, want him never to stop. That means what I think it means, right? That I want to infuriate him, want to be the object of his contempt.

When I say nothing, he turns, and I do the only thing that makes sense: I reach forward and hold his arm in place.

"I'm series Boss. You deserve waaayyy better," I tell him, chipper as I can be while I sink my claws into the black mesh.

He tries to jerk away, and he may be strong but I've got laughsassin blood in my veins. I hold steady and he demands, "oh yeah? Better how?"

"People who won't die on you," I say through sharpened teeth.

Without warning, the tension between us reverses, and Reaper comes flying with murder in his eyes. I manage to pull him off balance, send his weight past me instead of through me, but our arms are still intertwined and he brings me down with him. I clatter on the loungeplank, his fangs bared and my hand around his collar. My knee has landed between his legs and the two of I am locked in and inescapable standoff as he looks at I with pure hatred. When will he learn? When has he ever opened himself up to me and been better for it?

I want to make him regret it. I am leaning forward, breathing heavy, watching the way his lookstubs flick to my lips, suppressing every part of I that knows this is a mistake-

Sombra storms into my quarters her heels hot and her fists clenched. Her slipstream could burn me, and I get to bare witness to one of these rare celestial events the only come once each thousand years: she is too angry to speak.

The fact that she still needs to yell at me is the diametrically opposed force that leads to me following her to my block, and produces intermittent growls of frustration as she tries to form words but can't. Somehow, I am back here again, trailing behind, reverted to an adolescent once more. The sullenness from my friend clown might as well be the admonishing honks of my lusus for all the sense of indifference they invoke in me.

Because, at the moment, I am unrepentant. I am the stone that the river parts around, at least outwardly, and I can only hope that if I exude an aura of disimpassioned self-control, I and the mask will eventually become one, and the confusion fluttering in my chest will subside until there is no reason at all to fear that Sombra might see it. If I wish to soar with the eagles, I must pretend to be one. A wise troll said that once.

She's still too pissed to glance at me for more than a few seconds. Instead she groans, spreads her arms, and falls backwards into my recuperacoon.

The slime is far too viscous to splash over the edge, but it does jiggle when the clown deposits her meager body into its contents, sopor quivering over its shallow bottom as it allows her to sink the remaining few inches. This and Widow's Kiss are the two luxuries I've allowed myself in my life as an imperial exile. My first day as a pirate, liberated under the glorious leadership of Doomfist the Successor, I shivered through daymares in the spare cocoon I'd claimed, huddled as I was among dozens of sleeping trolls. There is no hemospectrum among Talon, at least outwardly—rank is garnered by killcount and living long enough to survive to the next night. So new recruits, runaways not long from Alternia, would cluster together in the hull until the most dangerous profession in the universe took the few wipes it needed to whittle them down. That first day I longed for my old hive, for the indent of sopor in the floor I could sink into and breath in comfortably—instead, I had the rattling snore of Sombra beside me as she blew snot bubbles in her slime.

Now, she throws her arms over her eyes. She can't be that mad at me—otherwise she'd be back in her own block instead of mine—so I wait, facing as much of the wall as I can while still keeping her in my sights. She has always been my anchor to this place and, for a very long time, my only one. I do not know how to manage her animosity, nor the confliction inside I: the regret that seems to be overpowered by the satisfaction. She throws her arms in the air, unrest causing her to thrash upwards, glaring at I as she says-

"I can't believe I-! I-!" She slams her fists down in the slime. It slowly creeps back over her hands, cautiously returning to its natural shape. "What even was the point of that? There's like, literally nothing to be jealous of!"

I stare at her, uncomprehending. But then the line is made in my thinkpan, one dot to the other, and exasperation to the point of disgust wells in up inside me. She still thinks I am flushed for her. Still. I have known each other since I was six and she still thinks-

If not for the lingering thrill and my undecided qualms, I might be able to muster up the strength to be disappointed in her.

"Sombra," I tell her, for not the first nor the last time, "You are an idiot."

"I'm an idiot?" she scoffs. "I'm not the one who can't tell the difference between horny and hatesex. And even if we were going pushers with each other it wouldn't matter because you and I aren't even-! I never-!" She throws a glob of slime at me. It doesn't take much effort to dodge it. "Uhg! Why do you do this now when things are going so well?"

"You are not pitched for him Sombra," I say, and I am surprised at how calmly I say it. I can feel the precipice of change, that I am approaching something and I have to hold back to not get too excited.

"What do you know about that?" A snarl twitches at the corner of her nose. "Okay so we're morails, big deal. Quadrants change. It's not like I'm moving in on someone else's turf, Boss is as cloistered as an adult jade."

"You are not pitched for him," I go on. "You've never been pitched for anyone."

It only takes a moment for the hurt on Sombra's to morph into fury. She rises, hair still dripping, water running from her scalp and tearing through her paint where she's forgotten to seal it. She jabs a finger at me. "And what the fuckwould you know about that, Amélie?"

It's a question she asked me a mere minute ago, but now with so much more venom to it. For some reason my ignorance tunnels sees fit to keep opening itself, and the premade words are reveal themselves, fresh and ready to be served.

"We have known each other nearly our whole lives," I say, because the truth has never hurt anyone, right? "You are always aiming for the spade, Sombra. It's like you have an addiction. I know you cannot see it from where you are, but I have been arbitrating these one-sided relationships since I found you on that beach. You may think you want to hate people Sombra, but you don't."

There. That's as clear as I could ever make it. How long have I wanted to say it, how long have I been drudging behind the scenes, trying to make her happy?

I am not sure it matters, since she's certainly not happy now. She walks forward, tripping on the pool's raised lip. The first thing I did when I earned my own block was drag up that little kiddie pool, dumping in as much sopor as possible and not caring about volume-displacement as I finally sunk in. The warm embrace felt like coming home. That's what I'd always liked about my pool, the ability to pretend I was underwater, the privilege to sit back and just breathe. It was an old comfort, like my gun, like Sombra. But the Sombra I have now isn't mine anymore, not really.

She jabs a prong in my sternum. "I think because you admit to stepping on my life that makes you some kind of expert? It makes you a quadrangular glass nose-pressing creep!"

I flinch. It surprises me, and my back is suddenly against the wall. "I am trying to help Sombra. For once, listen to me: you have an inability to maintain or even properly begin pitched feelings-"

"you think I don't already know that?" It's nearly daylight by the according to the ship's suncycles and she must be waking my neighbors by now but for some reason I am suddenly more frightened than concerned. Not of her but- "I think I don't fucking notice? I'm inside my own gogdamn head Widow, I know I'm fucked up, I know I can't make anything work and I don't need you telling me how I'm so broken I can't even have feelings."

She slams her fists against my vascular cage. It might hurt if I bones were not made tide and trench. I am close enough to her now to see it's not just the afterimage of pipe water making her face wet.

"That's why this had to work!" she says, punctuating each word with a forceful punch to my chest, turning the ineffective strikes into a steady tattoo. "Because if it was going to work with anyone it was going to be with him. Don't you see? He's the closest I've ever come to it and I just went along and-"

She cuts herself off with a sob. Slowly, her pounding turns feeble until it comes to a stop entirely, and she presses her forehead against my chest. I think I am starting to see now. It may be me she's hitting, but I am not the one she's fighting.

Stiffly, I try to close my arms around her. Despite my long friendship and apparent closeness, I don't think I've ever hugged her before. She's gone silent again, shoulders jerking in a rhythmic and identifiable motion.

"I don't…" she says, barely intelligible with her face shushed against me. "You don't think I'm busted, right?"

Even I—famous serial killer of the Outglut who just spent the past few minutes dumping on my friend for how rough her loathelife has been for me—isn't cruel enough to push on now.

"Of course not," I say, awkwardly smoothing down her sopping hair. "Of course not Sombra."

I have never hugged anyone, actually. Never had to comfort a morail, never even held a matesprit after a long night. It makes me wonder what authority I have being anyone's auspistice; if relationships require job experience, I might as well hang my hat now.

She kisses me. And I wish feeling were hats because then I could just toss mine out the airlock and not think about them until it's all over. But they are not hats, and I spend every minute of the messy kiss hating myself and the mistakes I've made. But I let her. She presses up on her toes and I am trapped between her and the wall while she draws her arms around my neck. I am petrified and I keep on letting her until she presses against me so vehemently my thinkpan snaps back to reality.

I push her back. Too forcefully, and I immediately regret it even though my body is already compounding in relief. Because it takes a second for the surprise on her face to twist into rejection, and in that second I think I may be the worst person in the universe.

"Sombra," I say, to parlay, to mediate between her and my inability to find something to follow it as she heads toward the door. "Sombra you can't just replace him with me."

"Yeah," she says, scrubbing tears from her cheeks. "That's pretty obvious."

And then she's gone.