Except for the activity over at the Cloud Runner's warehouse, Red Bay was mellow and content the following day.

It was a befitting atmosphere, for I was taking it very easy that day. I spent much of the day resting to allow my wounds the precious time to heal quicker. As pleasant as this was for me, I regrettably missed a great deal of groundbreaking developments concerning my downed Arwing having voluntarily removed myself from community activities. As much as I wished I had been present when the parties experimenting with the Cloud Runner successfully managed to get the plasma engine to accept the alternate Combine power source, I still believe the choice to nap all day was the best one for me, for I woke up late in the afternoon feeling like a brand-new vixen.

I wasn't the only one who was feeling relaxed; Adrian had been taking it easy for the majority of the day as well. While not bedridden like me, Adrian took frequent walks around town, mainly by the shore, decompressing in his own way. I was passively aware of his activities by my telepathy as he dwelt on the floor above mine.

Neither of us interacted with each other until the end of the day when supper was served at the mess hall. Our provisions predicably consisted mostly of fried fish and russet chips, but it was a comforting assortment that I had quickly grown affection for. Shephard developed the same taste as well, so it did not take long for us to run into each other when the hour came for supper to be served.

Rather than find a table like we always did, Shephard clearly had a hankering for the outdoors today and sought solitude out there again. I found that a lovely idea and asked if I could join him, and he accepted without hesitation. I had a feeling he was ready to get some more things off of his chest, and we did make a little promise to each other that we would discuss it after that outburst Shephard had in the crawlspace. The Combine gave us no time to do so while we were still in Aldana, so I was happy to see Shephard take the opportunity now.

We actually ended up going a little way away from the denizens, just outside the west gate. We situated ourselves right at the lip of the calm shoreline as we ate, sticking our bare feet in the water as tiny waves gently lapped over them. We had some pleasant small talk at first, more focused on eating and reflecting on some of the more radical highlights of the prior night. The evening sun was setting, though it was covered by a far distant blanket of grey stratocumulus clouds that spanned the horizon in an otherwise clear sky. Such a sight was indicative of a possible incoming shift in the seasons.

I had a feeling this was going to be a heavy conversation for Shephard because he carried an entire case of this luger brew that nobody in Red Bay cared for but that he unironically had a taste for. I cared very little for beer myself, but I had one as a gesture of camaraderie. It took a little time for Shephard to start opening up about his former relationship, but he soon worked up the courage to begin reembracing the memory of his fiancé again―after finishing a bottle or two of beer of course.

"Where did you first meet each other?" I asked, hugging my knees. Shephard stared out into the endless-seaming ocean, though he wore a reminiscing smile before sipping some more beer from his second bottle.

"The VA's department in Phoenix; state capitol," he said, adjusting himself in the sand slightly. "I was twenty and Sam was nineteen. She was fresh out of high school and she got a job as one of the receptionists at the front desk, and I was a jobless firebrand still living with his dad."

He paused for a moment to look at me listening intently, and a little guilt seemed to flicker in his eyes. "My mom left my dad a few years prior. Wasn't a great exit," he informed, seemingly nudged by a pressure that wasn't really there―at least none that I could sense.

"I'm sorry about that," I said sympathetically. "That couldn't have been a pleasant experience for anyone in your family."

"What little family we had left, anyway," Shephard said, returning to gaze at the bay and the ocean beyond it―the Atlantic Ocean as I had recently learned. "With what family we did have left, my dad wanted to spend as much time with them as he could. Old Granddaddy Brian was waning in years, so my dad wanted to take me to see him in Phoenix at the veterans' home he was living in."

"Your grandfather was military like you?" I wondered.

"Yeah; Naval Chief Petty Officer during the Korean War," Shephard explained. "My dad was Navy too, and my mom's dad was Army. We've got a little lineage of jarheads in the family you could say."

I chuckled a little bit from that, which spurred a modest smirk from Shephard as he took another sip of his beer. "Anyway, Sam was the receptionist that day when we went to see Grandaddy," he continued. "She buzzed me and my dad in and, well… I just couldn't take my eyes off of her after that."

From what little I could recall of Sam when I unwittingly glimpsed a memory of her through the Vortessence, I remembered a young human woman with brown hair, though her facial features were askew due to the fluidity of the images. "Did you find her pretty?" I asked.

Shephard closed his eyes and smiled softly. "I sure thought she was," he said, his voice low and ripe with fondness. "At the end of the day, I finally found a reason to go visit Granddaddy more often. I went through a lot of trouble to find Sam's work schedule just so I could happen to roll up on the days when she was working. I guess seeing me brightened her day a little too because we began going out a few weeks after she found out about my little scheme."

That warmed my heart to hear. I could, quite literally, feel his love, which was an unprecedented sensation for me. Being able to resonate with the heart as I did the mind was incredible. But as amazing as it was, I was discovering that I could just as easily reflect the negative emotions of others, something I feared I would confront soon enough knowing this story's inevitable ending.

"Long story short, Sam and I hit it off for a while, and dated for more than a year straight." It was then that Shephard's nostalgic remembrance began to turn sorrowful, and I received an early taste of it through my empathy. "There was a reason why it took as long as it did before I thought I earned the right to pop the question in our car."

"What happened?" I asked, wedging my bottle of beer into the sand next to me.

"It's…a little complicated," Shephard sighed through his nostrils, nearly halfway through his second bottle. "I wasn't in a terrific place ever since graduating high school―and it was hardly better while I was in it for that matter. I was always getting in fights in school, or in my neighbourhood, and I cussed out my parents a lot. Might have been one of the reasons Mom left for all I know. I guess you could say I was finding it hard to envision a future for myself, so I acted out a lot. I managed to graduate high school with a decent GPA, but I wasn't sure what I was gonna do with myself. Dad hardly knew what to do with me, but I don't blame him for that. He had his own issues he was trying to work out on top of the divorce. Mom had problems too. We all had problems of some kind."

I slowly curled my tail underneath my legs, briefly glancing at his gauzed hand. "Did these problems manifest in front of Sam?"

Shephard's distant face grew dismally forlorn as he sloshed his bottle's remaining contents around. "They did," he said softly, looking at his feet in the water. "As much as I like to believe she loved me as much as I loved her, I knew my inability to, well…get a grip of myself…upset her a lot. I still lashed out at people―even at the fricking drive-thru window. I remember Sam practically holding me back from clobbering a guy's jaw out for whistling at her. She tolerated too much of this, and it came to a breaking point one day after we got in a car wreck at an intersection together."

My whiskers twitched with suspense. "Were you both okay?"

"We were," he said. "A guy with insomnia nodded off at his wheel. Total accident―don't blame the guy―and the damage done to our car wasn't as bad as it could have been, but it had been totalled nonetheless. The cost of repairs was insane and we had no auto insurance, and Sam didn't have a high enough pay grade to get any from her job."

"What did you do?"

"Took out a loan, but Sam was pissed," Shephard recalled glumly. "On top of being angry over how I lashed out at a poor guy who could barely keep his eyes open, finances were straining us. I still didn't find work, and Dad had since cut me off, pressuring me to join the military and get myself in shape. I couldn't give a shit. Sam let me live in her apartment while I would find a job, but I didn't put the effort in and hadn't for months. For what little money I did have, I never invested in anything that would help us."

Shephard paused for a moment before he grabbed another bottle from his case cracking the cap off on the side of the case. "I was a deadweight, and I was costing her a lot of money from housing alone. Her income was fixed with her job. She began taking my Dad's side and pushed me to do something with myself. I don't know why I didn't sooner. I just don't. Maybe if…"

Shephard's breaths got a little shaky before he took a long swig of his third beer. He parted his lips with the bottle before resuming, approaching a quivering state that mirrored what I saw in him last night. "We got in a bad fight that evening," Shephard said with remorse. "It wasn't even about the loan anymore; I don't think it ever was. I was a bum and I hated that Sam was reminding me of it. I yelled and she yelled back. I couldn't take being told I was a nobody anymore and…"

Shephard, quivering his lower lip slightly, brought his head down and covered his eyes, taking a couple of distressed breaths. I waited silently for him to recuperate, and he did so shortly thereafter. "Well…you saw what happened," he sighed miserably. "I punched a hole in her damn wall. She kicked me out of her apartment. I'll never forget how loud she screamed…"

Amidst his grief, Shephard glanced at me with pinkening eyes, only to see me still silently listening as the tranquil laps of water continuously slinked up the shoreline and receded. Shephard's frown stretched to the ends of his face as he set his beer aside before looking out into the bay again. "That was a goddam wakeup call if I ever felt one," Shephard resumed, his voice sounding heavy and low.

"I didn't get any sleep that night, and it wasn't just because I had nowhere to sleep. I spent the whole night at the Marine Corps recruitment office in Phoenix filling out my ASVAB. I had enough money to rent a motel room after submitting it, not having the courage to see Sam again until I got a call back from them. I eventually did after a day."

Taking another shaky breath, Shephard took another swig of his beer, tapping the bottle's neck with his fingernail. "I went back to her with the news that I was going to boot camp within the week. I was going to make something of myself for her. She deserved better than what I was. I wanted to be the man she said she saw in me."

"How did she receive the news?" I asked after I gave him another moment to recollect. Shephard sniffled a little bit as he struggled to decide whether to smile or grin with despair.

"God…I wish I had a picture of her the moment after I told her," he said. "I've never seen her so… So proud of me. No one ever was; especially me."

It was hard on my end to remain poised because I was feeling emotional myself in no small part due to my empathetic sensitivities. I kept them in line as Shephard continued to speak. "I left on a bus several days later for Santago with other recruits, and Sam came with me to send me off. She told me that she couldn't wait for the next thirteen weeks to be over so she could see me in uniform. She considered me wear it during our wedding. She was so damn happy…"

Shephard blinked a few tears from his eyes as the memory resurfaced in his mind, forcing him to rub them out. "She told me…that I was already her hero despite being a freshly made rookie. Me… The lowlife freeloader with a short fuse… I wanted to make that come true for her."

He took another swig of beer after getting over that emotional bump in the story. "The first few weeks at camp were hard as shit; really put my lousy temper to the test. Training was brutal and our instructors were insufferable, but we all pulled through in the end. I made corporal and found myself getting shuffled into the HECU. I was feeling pretty good about my prospects by the end of the course, all things considered."

Shephard began to frown again, and I had a feeling it would be a permanent one going forward. "I wouldn't have felt this way at all had I known that the last few permitted phone calls I had with Sam would have been the last time I would ever hear her voice…" he stated in the grimmest tone I had heard from him yet. "Being that I was shoehorned into the HECU, effectively an emergency response division of the Marines, I got called away with my squad before 'technically' graduating. Our training was advanced enough to grant us some leniency, particularly during one crisis I was sent out to help contain in just the next state over. And, well…when you go Black Mesa, you never go back…"

I pondered the recounts that Adrian had described to me, feeling his sorrows in more ways than one. I struggled a little to formulate an appropriate reply before Shephard began resuming himself again with crushing vulnerability in his voice. "I was going to propose to her when I was out of camp. I will never know what happened to her," he heaved sadly. "I was missing in action when the whole fucking world ended."

His swelling grief urged me to shuffle over and comfort him, but a potently hateful aura suddenly emitting from his heart kept me at bay. Shephard lifted his head and began glancing around, arching a vengeful scowl. "The lingering matter of witnesses…" he uttered darkly. "That's what the spook in the suit told me when he stuffed me in the dark. Guess I was meant to die along with my squad in our osprey. I agree; it'd be a hell of a lot better than coming back to this bumfucked world."

I sensed billowing tension rising in him when it wasn't obvious on his face. I wanted to help quell it, but the fear of potentially making this worse held me back. I knew the monologue was drifting to a darker place when Shephard began to laugh with bleeding irony.

"That's all this is, ain't it? A big game of checkers for Flattop. Well, I guess you got me to king you, Flattop. What else you got in store for me, huh?" Shephard asked out into the open air as he looked around, clearly trying to invoke the G-Man to appear, which I knew was a severely dangerous move.

"Shephard―" I tried to intervene, but Shephard cut me off as he stood up with his bottle in his hand.

"Where'ya hiding now, jerkoff? In that damn porta-potty over there?" he shouted to the world, singling out the old portable defecation unit that was tipped over close to the west gate. "You don't fucking scare me. A time-lording brownnoser is still a fucking brownnoser! Let me come over there so I can ram this thing right up your pasty―!"

I grabbed Shephard's arm and covered his mouth quickly, catching him by surprise, and making him freeze for a few seconds. "Adrian, stop…" I begged urgently, pleading that he not do something he would severely regret.

Adrian looked at me scornfully at first given how pent-up he was, but his arms began relaxing as he adhered to my command. I took a step back from him, sensing that he was returning to his senses. Even still, he was already far too riled up to just let it fizzle out. He was still severely distraught with all that had happened and needed another release, and he looked to his bottle with a clenching fury.

"God DAMMIT!" he screamed ferociously as he threw the bottle out into the bay, stumbling a bit from his own force as the bottle splashed down fifteen metres away. He collapsed to his knees as he tried holding back his tears again, so I knelt down next to him and held him close. He was severely tense and showed reluctance, but he allowed me to nuzzle him on the cheek. He was hardly ready to handle this level of affection.

"I was supposed to be her hero…" he moaned pathetically, covering his eyes with his hand. "I promised that I would be. I never got the chance to show her what I could be…"

I pulled off from Shephard and turned his head to look at me. His sorrowful face looked so lost and bereaved, coinciding with his aching heart. I was not a stranger to anything he was enduring.

"I know your pain, Adrian," I told him, voicing my deduction. "I was only a small child when my whole world was ripped from me and my family along with it. I would be lying if I said I don't see a little bit of myself in you right now. The only major difference is that you were building a life for yourself and Sam, only to have the rug pulled out from you along with the whole of Earth."

Shephard had grown rather docile since I put my arms around him, which was the reason why he allowed me to wipe a few tears from his face. "However, regardless of circumstances, the fundamentality of your ongoing existence remains truer still for you. It's not just you that survived, Sam has as well. Her memory persists in you. The love you shared will never die. You must carry it, carry her, with you, into this new world. Your old world as well; it too lives in you―quite stronger than most alive today."

Shephard dwelled on my words. I could tell he wanted to be comforted by them, and he was to a degree, but it was hardly enough to subdue the pain of losing everything over the span of a week. He shook his head with crushing remorse.

"I just… I wish I could've said goodbye. To tell her that I loved her more than anything…" Shephard cracked, unable to contain the few sobs that escaped him.

"She already knows, Adrian. Do not mistake that. She's right here," I nudged, moving my hand over his chest. "Even though you can't see her, Sam will never leave you."

Shephard initially found my approach sappy, but he began to smile. Plenty melancholically, but markedly more hopeful. "I, uh…guess you'd know a thing or two about this, wouldn't you?"

I shrugged slightly. "I had plenty of time to work it out through means your world is not accustomed to," I said.

Shephard only nodded complacently. "Looks like my world was forced to confront a lot of things it was never accustomed to," he sighed, turning towards the ocean again, though he held my hand for a little while before I withdrew it when I sensed he wished to be released from my hold, giving him the space he needed.

Shephard resumed his ceaseless gaze out to the horizon, and our conversation seemed to suspend itself without declaration. He sat in mournful silence as he grabbed another unopened bottle from the case without looking at it, though he did not crack it open. He had his eyes closed, keen on just listening to the tranquil sounds of the calm shore.

I was content to let him tune everything out as he processed more of his grief. In fact, I found this to be a lovely spot to meditate for a little bit, but it would have to be a moderate one. It would have been rude if I were to remove myself from myself entirely while I was still in his company. I ultimately was unable to seize the chance to do so after the several minutes we spent in silence eventually ended when Shephard blurted something peculiar.

"It went both ways, you know…"

I was about to nod off into a semi-trance, so I opened my eyes abruptly after I heard this. "What did?" I wondered, looking at him curiously.

Shephard sighed quietly as he rolled his unopened bottle aside before turning his head towards me. "That freaky mind link that happened in your room yesterday morning. When you saw my recent memories?" Shephard clarified. "Well…I had a little glimpse of your life flashing in my eyes like mine did for you."

I leaned forward a bit with great intrigue from my lounged stance, knitting my brows. "You did?"

"Yeah. I did," Shephard confessed, now fully turning around in the sand to face me directly. "I…guess I should've said something about it earlier, but…I was more fixated on my privacy getting breached."

I was surprised I hadn't realised this until Shephard confessed; perhaps Shephard's more recent memories were far more emotionally charged they eclipsed any awareness on my end of him seeing my life. "Fascinating. This makes sense," I deduced. "It was an unprompted faze within the Vortessence, where all participants meld their minds into one. What did you see?"

Shephard shrugged. "Well, a lot of what you did around here before I showed up," he said. "And, well, I saw that big wormhole in space you got sucked through, your mercenary friends―a whole shit-load of stuff honestly."

Unlike Shephard when he realised I saw his life before my eyes, I was enthralled by his viewing experience―so much so my tail began whipping around in the sand excitedly. "You saw my friends," I smiled jubilantly. "You wouldn't have happened to have seen any of the missions we went on together, would you?"

Shephard was a little taken aback by my enthusiasm because this was such a stark contrast to his reaction to me witnessing key moments in his life. "It still kind of blends together," he said, scratching his head. "But I saw the…Aparoid Queen, was it? You guys infected it with some sort of self-destruct program and blew it up."

"Yes. Yes, that's exactly how it happened," I confirmed, grinning from ear to ear in wonder. "What else do you remember?"

"I saw you flying around in that spaceship of yours, kicking ass," he added. "I also saw a real old castle-looking place, and it was pouring like crazy outside. You were dangling over a ledge, but someone was there to help you out."

My smile began to fade, but I was not distraught―at least not in the practical sense. When I saw Shephard's memories, his fight with Sam stuck out to me because of its raw emotional potency―nearly overshadowing all the memories during the Black Mesa Incident. Something told me that the same applied to the specific moment in my life Shephard saw, and I had a wary suspicion he now knew about an important secret of mine, which seemed indicative by that fond look Shephard was suddenly growing on his face.

"That was the first time you met your team leader, right? Fox?" he asked.

"Yes. That was him you saw," I confirmed, lowering my gaze to the sand as a reminiscing smile crept across my muzzle. "He saved my life that night. I would have been killed had he not been there to catch me when I fell."

"You like him?"

A cornered feeling suddenly spiked across my nervous system. "What do you mean by that?"

Shephard raised an eyebrow with an incredulous smirk. "Come on, girlie, I was in your head for a second. That lean orange hotshot pushes a lot of the right buttons for you."

I closed my left hand around my right elbow. "I hope you're not implying what I think you are."

"What else could I be meaning?" Shephard asked, amused watching me squirm a little from his accusations. "I mean, flipping your hair whenever he walks into the room? Always got one heel up on the counter? Oh, and that little flutter you send his way. Never knew you could be so flirty like that."

"Adrian, I will not be misjudged like this!" I demanded, but I sounded much more desperate than firm.

"You kidding me?" Shephard grinned with a cocked eyebrow. "What do you have to say about that little stunt in the doorway?"

I felt like my heart wanted to climb out of my throat after he uttered this. "What stunt…?"

"My unearned memory might be hazy, correct me honestly if I'm wrong, but I'm recalling one time when you were practising some pull-ups on some bars above some door. One you knew Fox would be walking through soon with his eyes glued to a screen in his hands?"

"Don't you dare…"

"You weren't wearing a shirt either; just a top," Shephard continued with a heinously sly expression. "Your excuse to him was that the AC wasn't working."

"Corporal!"

"You knew he wouldn't look up from the screen, so what a chuckle it was when he walked right through the door and ran his poor oblivious snout straight into your―"

"All right! Enough!" I pleaded, waving my hands out at him, wanting so desperately to be an Aquarian tortoise. The idea of having my head hide away inside my chest cavity felt appealing at that moment. I turned my head away and covered my eyes in embarrassment; I truly was not ready for anybody to bear witness to such a promiscuous moment in my recent past. The worst part of it was, that I did get a kick out of the total bewilderment I bestowed on Fox when he bumped into me in the manner I orchestrated, and Adrian knew that.

"Oh, Krazoa, holao m0 tawdak0…" I whimpered in embarrassment, shaking my lowered head in surrender. Shephard felt a surge of vindication initially, but I sensed that he quickly began to feel bad as he attempted to amend the situation.

"Oh jeez; that was a total ass move for digging that up. Shit…" he admitted, struggling to figure out how to fix things over a fear that he sullied our picnic, but that wasn't really true.

"No; you know I'm guilty all the same," I reassured, bringing my head up after rubbing my eyes to relieve tension. I crossed my legs and began hugging my arms, leering my gaze at the water. "Yes. I admit it. I'm somewhat smitten for Fox McCloud," I said, curling my tail around my ankles.

"Only somewhat?" Shephard wondered with a raised eyebrow, feeling I were downplaying my feelings given the things he unwittingly witnessed.

"Okay. Quite smitten," I corrected, a little bashfully. "I'm…so sorry you witnessed such foolery from me. Perhaps I get a little cheeky when I want certain kinds of attention."

"Hey, nothing wrong with that," Shephard reassured. "It was pretty hella funny more than anything. Kinda strange seeing you with a frisky side."

I smiled a little, remembering how Fox completely turned into a flustering and stuttering mess after getting a generous face full of my mammae. "It was just a bit of fun," I bargained, though it only took seconds before I began to remember what often pushed me to behave that way around Fox sometimes. "Fox is a good man, but he is always preoccupied with something," I said. "I guess that was a bold way of trying to get him to notice me."

My slight shift in tone garnered a curious look from Adrian. "How do you mean?"

"Nothing major. Disregard what I said."

"Kinda can't," Shephard refuted, "and I got the sense that it's bugging you. I was in your head, after all."

I began to frown as the semi-forgotten dilemma involving my unstable standing in Star Fox resurfaced. Fox's seeming disinterest in engaging with me despite his obvious attraction for me and the damning termination draft started to haunt my mind again, making me sigh sadly through my nostrils. "There's…quite a lot that's been bugging me, Shephard. About Fox, and where I am meant to stand on his team and in his life. Admittedly not as much lately given my plight here, but it's never really left…"

Shephard looked at me for a mindful moment, pursing his lips, before reaching over behind him. He grabbed another bottle of beer from the case and chucked it my way, where I grabbed it in midair, grazing the glass slightly with my clawed nails upon snagging. I looked at it for a second before looking to Adrian again, where he then cracked open his next bottle before giving me an understanding look.

"You help me, I help you," he said, lifting his open bottle slightly as carbonation mist rose from the top. "Why don't you share a little bit about your own rotten luck with love?"