Do not trust your eyes-
they have lost my lines to the lidded dark,
to your latticework of veins.
Fish for me. Cast out your hands.
You will know me, for my shell is wet
with the fine fret of dreams.
Kalypso woke to darkness. Utter darkness-the hologram blue was gone. So, too, was the hot press of Yang on her senses.
Clumsy with sleep and with the sort of cotton-ball fog that followed a Dominion-induced migraine, she wormed her way out of her scrunch under the table, feeling around in the darkness until she got that table back on, for light.
It glowed a sort of empty gray, casting no recording. Redford had said it got wiped daily-apparently that had happened while she slept. The tray of breakfast debris was gone. Yang was nowhere to be seen.
She was torn between feeling grateful and irritated by that. He'd said he'd let her back into her room in two hours. Instead, he'd left her on the floor. Then again, the thought of him waking her was miserable to contemplate. Even if he wasn't a monster about it, her chemistry might take advantage of her before she could get it under control-and that would set a terrible precedent.
There was really nothing for it but to go find out what time it was. Kalypso gathered her bedding up, squared her shoulders, and walked toward the door.
Outside was barely any brighter, but when she stepped into the room, the lights did hum on, dimmed to a sort of afterhours glow that told her it wasn't yet an hour when most people would be up. She'd left her room at nearly midnight, and-yes, there was a wall clock here, on the wall behind her-it was 5:30 am now.
This was as good a time as any to go see what was in the other rooms. Kalypso dropped her bedding pile on the most out-of-the-way couch, and went scouting.
A conditioning room, divided between weights, mats, and cardio. A bath-separate from the bathrooms, though the same door did branch into both. A…chapel? Or a meditation room? A medical wing-Kalypso took one step inside this one and backed out again immediately. If she never went into such a place again it would be too soon, and nevermind that it appeared at the moment to be autonomous. Doubtless Nike Drive staff would flood it the minute something about their resident Object Zero deviated from the norm.
The conditioning room had its own locker room, set up the same way that the training room's was-with a blood test lock on the 'O' locker. Just as clothes had been waiting for her in that other locker yesterday, so were some already awaiting her in this one today.
And this time, they were long-sleeved and with full pant-legs. Somebody was paying attention.
After half an hour on a treadmill, she was interrupted by a flat, robotic voice from some speaker overhead.
Good morning. Training begins in one hour. Alternate conditioning facilities will be shut down in thirty minutes.
Kalypso exhaled, hard, and turned up the resistance on the rowing machine.
Cu Chulainn kicked out a chair from the table and straddled it, his forearms braced on its top. Sipping his coffee, he regarded that pile of bedding with narrowed, thoughtful eyes.
That's how he was sitting when Renji came out of the door to the bedrooms, bed-tousled and rolling his shoulders. The Dominion stopped in the doorway like he'd been hit by a bus, stared, and then looked slowly at Cu Chulainn, eyes wide.
"Couldn't tell ya," said Cu Chulainn over the top of his coffee mug.
"She's…not…in there?" Renji's voice was a slightly choked whisper.
"Nah. Kicks you right in the face, don't it?"
"...Sure does. You sure she's not-?"
"Go on, sit on it and find out."
"Shut up." Renji shook himself, went to the kitchen for his breakfast with half an eye over his shoulder at the couch as he did so.
The door to the bedroom hallway opened again-but where Renji had gone still, Jaegerjaquez charged through. Instinct got him halfway to the couch before his brain switched back on and he came to with a grunt and a lurch, bashing a bit into a corner of the table.
"Morning," said Cu Chulainn, eyeing him.
Completely ignoring the libero, Grimmjow stood there, rigid and staring at the crumpled duvet for several more seconds before exhaling hard, turning on his heel, and stalking toward the kitchen.
The rest trickled in slowly over the next half hour. Not one of them made it into the room without a hearty Dominion response to the rumpled pile of bedding on the couch. Diarmuid, clearly uncomfortable sharing the room with either it or the rest of them in various statements of rile, went straight from the kitchen to the training locker room with a set face and braced shoulders. "Guess we'll know if she's in there if he comes flying straight back out," Abarai muttered. Diarmuid did not reemerge, so wherever she was, it wasn't that locker room.
Gilbert settled himself on Cu Chulainn's right, his chair half-turned so he could keep both the libero and the couch in range of his eye. "You didn't go looking?"
"Felt more like a watchdog than a hunting hound this morning."
"I'd have thought you'd be curious."
"Oh, I am," said Cu Chulainn, his crooked grin curling up off his teeth.
Grimmjow had taken up a pointed position against the wall beside the couch, his eyes roving dangerously over all the present men in turn. It was very similar to the way in which, after her departure from the meeting room last night, he'd gone to stand right next to the place she'd been sitting.
"Like we needed another fire started," muttered Renji, who at this point was the only one sitting at the table normally, his back to the couch while he ate. Pointed body language-dismissing Grimmjow's nonverbal message while also making it clear he wasn't a threat.
"She dug him outta his mess yesterday," Cu Chulainn replied, his voice pitched low so it wouldn't carry.
"Not sure how I feel about that." Gilbert rubbed the back of his neck.
"Aw, c'mon. Would a Claim be so bad?"
Before Gilbert could answer, the door to the dormitory wing opened again, and the final two Dominions entered. "Rise and shine, sleepyheads," call Cu Chulainn cheerfully, his smirk expectant. "Somebody spiked the morning for us, eh?"
Axel's emerald gaze lit on the Lamb bedding first thing, predictably, Flaring with startled intensity-but Yang's eyes slid past it with little more than a cursory glance. His stride never paused in its trajectory toward the kitchen.
Jaegerjaquez and Gilbert both tensed.
"Oho," murmured Cu Chulainn under his breath.
"Something the room should know?" Gilbert asked, in a flat voice that was absolutely not asking politely.
As if he did not hear the question, Yang vanished through the saloon doors.
Axel, on the other hand, walked to the door leading to Kalypso's room. The muscles in Grimmjow's jaws worked more visibly with every step the redhead took, until finally he snarled "Fuck you doing?"
"Down, killer." Axel was inspecting the Dominion blood test unit-not the palm pad that would trigger the needle, but the sides. He pressed something. The LOCKED message on the door flickered out.
DAILY ACCESS HISTORY:
N/A
"She came out before midnight, then," said Axel. "Huh."
"And what, slept out here? Why the hell-"
Yang exited the kitchen, his expression no different from its usual sleek, sinister disinterest, but with an undeniable extra bit of Flare rippling out of his wake. He prowled to the meeting room door, looked inside, and then turned on his heel and returned to the kitchen again, all without a word.
"Tch."
"Don't you start," Gilbert growled at Grimmjow.
With a little spit of static, the wall opposite Kalypso's door came to electronic life, just as two doors opened: one from the training room, revealing Diarmuid dressed for practice, and one from the conditioning room, from which stepped their missing teammate.
"Impeccable timing," drawled Xigbar from the screen. "Try not to make us cut power to your machine next time, Ixora-it'd be an embarrassment to all involved, losing you that way."
Deliberately avoiding eye contact with everyone else in the room, Kalypso loitered by the door she'd just entered through, rather than approach the cluster of Dominions at the table. The exertion high from that cardio was girding her against the nastier effects of their chemistry, but that wouldn't last long.
"Morning instructions are as follows." The sarcastic drawl left Xigbar's voice. He sounded clipped and efficient now. "Three of you will be on the court, running half-court pepper. Setter shuttles between sides. Two of you will join off-court, tossing and shagging. The rest of you, conditioning regimens. Half an hour rotations-I'll call the next three up when it's time. First three, Cu Chulainn, Abarai, Duibhne. Ixora, you've logged warm-ups so let's get you off-court. Somebody follow her there."
"Calling it," said Redford, waving a few fingers.
"Right then. Snap to it. Thirty minutes until go time, kids." The screen went dead.
"Ixora," Abarai said instantly-Kalypso sighed internally, bracing herself for whatever was coming. "You good?"
A silly question, but what did he even mean by it? "In what context?" she asked, feeling the slow build of Lamb chemistry already starting in her veins.
He looked at her with a bit of disbelief, like he couldn't believe she'd ask, and jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the couch behind him.
Kalypso followed that gesture in the direction indicated-accidentally caught Jaegerjaquez's eye, who offered a startling assist in the form of a sharply tilted chin-and looked at the pile of bedding there. After a moment, she said, "Yes, I am good in, uh, that context."
"He phrased it like an idiot," said Axel. "Let me try. Why did you come out here to sleep?"
"I didn't come out here to sleep." She hadn't at all wanted to explain this to an audience, but she supposed it was inevitable. "I wanted to use that table again."
"Eh-in the middle of the night?"
"I'm a nightowl," said Kalypso, sarcastically.
Axel, slightly to her surprise, shut up at that.
Belatedly, she recalled him seizing hold of the attention last night to bail her out of it, and felt a bit guilty for that snap. But come on. Could any of them blame her for wanting some time to think without the smothering weight of Dominions?
"So you planned to sleep out here, though?" Cu Chulainn's eyebrows were quirked. He was leaning forward over the arms he'd folded overtop the back of his straddled chair, looking at her keenly.
"You might have noticed I'm not allowed back in my bedroom unless I've been a very good girl," she drawled.
And immediately mentally kicked herself. That had spiked the Dominion temperature of the room, which in answer had caused the little knot of tension at the base of her skull to bloom painfully.
"Pardon," she added, irritably. "Phrasing."
"Shut up. Get me."
After the Flare that accompanied those words finished bashing her in the face, Kalypso tried to process them. Fumbled it, apparently, because they were completely absurd, at least the way she was currently understanding them. "Eh?"
"Come get me next time."
Kalypso stared at the Dominion whose face she'd half-muzzled with the jawbone of a predator. She still saw those awful oversharp teeth grinding against each other, lined sharper than ever with shadow. Her defensive mechanism was in overdrive because for some fucking reason, this was a much stronger chemical response than the situation merited at all, from all of them. Flares were beginning to uncoil in every direction, Jaegerjaquez's with insistent, intensifying heat. Why were they so wound up? What had she done?
"Be more self-aware, Ixora." Yang's voice was, superficially, calm. As he had last night, he was keeping his Flare close, rather than letting it swell out at his target. Still, she saw malicious glitter in his eyes. "A sleeping Lamb is a goad that…lingers. Did you not know this?"
Epiphany hit her like a suckerpunch.
Oh. Fuck. It was the duvet.
Kalypso slapped a furious hand hard to her forehead. "Son of a bitch bastard idiot. Christ. Jackass. Goon."
"Uh-"
Kalypso strode across the room to the couch, giving herself a second blow with the heel of her hand for her brainlessness. Scooping her bedding into her arms, she growled, "Can somebody-"
She didn't stop to examine the dynamics of the moment when Axel lifted his hand toward the Dominion blood test pad and Grimmjow dropped a shoulder to muscle him out of position so he could open the door for her instead. She was too busy trying not to speculate exactly how wretched it must feel to be one of these Dominions right now, ambushed in their early morning by a whole beddingful of sleeping Lamb pheromones when they were just trying to have breakfast, and also, consequently, too busy perishing from embarrassment.
It was not until she was back in the safety of her own room that she realized she'd subjected Yang to the full force of said Lamb-sleep chemistry last night.
Kalypso slowly tightened her shaking fingers into fists.
Be more self-aware.
Come get me next time.
You good?
Think about each other, in the context of each other, and figure out how you can use your accursed chemistry for something beyond bickering and heart attacks.
We all have our pride, Ixora.
She really, really needed to play volleyball. She wasn't doing any other part of this right-and it was incredible how certain she was about that, when she wasn't even sure what right was in the first place.