“But she’s hurting now and I can help and and and yes fine I even put out all of the flaming emergencies burning up her life on stupid shit hours ago and, nothing new will have any room to get into her queue for another 19 hours, and.” Sniffle. “Okay, I guess.”

He reaches his (non-mechanical) thumb up to wipe a tear off her face. "Let it out, then wash your face, make yourself presentable, become the bitchy ice queen of your dreams, and let's get some food in you and then put you to bed."

“Honestly I could probably work with being the crazy and bitchy ice queen, but yeah okay we can save that card for later if we think it’ll be tactically significant,” she sniffles, then: she can get waterworks under control. She is a real grownup who doesn’t ever need to cry because she has her whole entire life sorted out already and is never ever overwhelmed or overly emotional, ever. Yes.

She is good enough for escorting out of here soon enough.

And then Zash can once again become The Help and trail after her looking cool and stoic and background menacing and very competent.

She thus retreats to her suite without incident, and, uh, food. She should food. She should food from a source other than room service, because that is a rip off and she’d rather use her money more responsibly. But then she would need to find the cafeteria and handle interpersonal interaction which sounds impossible and awful and she’s not doing it you can’t make her.

No, but Zash can do that. Zash is perfectly up for social interaction, right now; it would even play up the "spoiled queen can't do anything but plant engineering on her own" image.

Oh. Okay. Yes, sure, please get her something to eat. And she’ll, um. Drink some water out of the faucet, probably. Or something. Like a clever human being who can take care of her physical needs.

Their suite is very nice and has tables and chairs so they can sit at the table to eat. Zash got food for three but he doesn't need any so Yvette and Morgan can share his.

Morgan stirs from her slumber at the smell of food. One would think she would have stirred earlier, being a human experiment who was once a member of an assassin cult, but no. (She would have if anyone got too close to her, but general people sounds of people doing things nearby? Super normal.)

OM NOM NOM NOM Zash’s portion is really her portion no she is not negotiating on this she has bullshit superpowers to fuel!!!

Yvette is fine with this. She will get all food of her portion into her face, mechanically and efficiently, and then: yeah okay her turn to sleep.

…..

Can Zash cuddle her even though the temperature regulation is fine in here??

Yeah. Yeah, he can.

Then the bitchy ice queen will nestle happily in his arms and be lulled to sleep.

He, too, will sleep eventually. And wake up before her, again, because he still doesn't trust his own emotional output while he's asleep and he doesn't want her to get any while she's conscious enough to be able to process it.

Her new job proceeds.

The first week is approximately nothing but annoying scut work cleaning up the massive messes that have been left before her. She vaguely feels like they should change her title to plant janitorial staff. Just this done has her contractually obligated profit margins secured, though she would have trouble finding work in anything but horrible dead-end jobs like this one if she left it at that. Gigs like this are where plant engineers go to die. Or maybe where they go to want to die, because she's having just a smidgen of that on the side. All of the nice amenities in the world don't dull the pain of feeling like you're assisting in the systematic murder of something beautiful and pure and precious.

After that, she does actually get onto some problems that are more interesting, though not necessarily less soul crushing. Essentially, it's sorted into two categories of problem.

The first is the one she's most accustomed to and best at, even though in theory it's significantly harder. Essentially, it's what she was doing at Jeneora, supporting and mending the plant herself by having a mapped and graphed understanding of what's going on across the divide. This job is both much easier than Jeneora, and also much harder. It's easier because, well, the damage to this plant is all pretty recent, this isn't a long term chronic problem that has worn away at her for years. It's a bunch of recent trauma inflicted upon her, and while that's not necessarily simple, it is simpler to diagnose and respond to.

The second is the one she actually finds most difficult. The people in charge do not particularly want to listen to her, do not care about the long term health of the plant, and will in fact countermand her and force through something even worse than their dumb, dumb ideas if she gainsays them too much on their damn profit margins. So, really, part of her job is convincing them to please knock their shit off and stop causing trauma to her patient. She... is less good at this part of the job. She's not terrible at it, exactly, and the hypercompetent ice queen persona who has singlehandedly tripled (at least) the time their plant will stay blue state is helping, but. ... There's only so much she can do.

Her life becomes one of a doctor or nurse who tends to the injuries continually inflicted upon her patient. Soften the blow, no don't aim there just yet, it's still healing, wait a couple of days and then you can without disturbing her too much. Her percentages are amazing, and she's probably doing a better job at this than literally anyone else in her field could manage, from a mix of specializing in this kind of healing and sheer personal investment. It's not enough. She can see the trend in this data, and the trend is that this poor plant is dying and will continue to die despite all of Yvette's cleverness and best efforts. All of the graphs and yelling at the people who pay her will not change any of that, at all. Only make their profit margins prettier.

She hates it all and she kind of wants to burn it all to the ground.

Zash turns out to revert to his normal appearance overnight whenever he goes to sleep, so he has to spend a while in the morning reapplying the changes. Which isn't so bad except for how he has to remember to look the same every time and he didn't really keep notes or pictures of the first day so he has to improvise on day two.

He continues to be able to provide help from the other side of things, rapid feedback as well as the plant's memory of what everything felt like. It continues to be heartbreaking how the one thing she focuses on the most is how much more she'll be able to help these people if she lasts longer.

This time he can be more helpful than in Jeneora, though. He's doing zero pretending to be human, he can give Yvette direct feedback, but most importantly, he can do a... thing. It's hard to describe the thing. He can't even really explain the thing. The first time the thing happens is probably rather shocking to her, because it goes like this.

He walks up to the glass tank, staring at the plant. He makes sure there's no one outside or nearby, because it'll be rather hard to explain it, and then he touches the glass with both hands and with his forehead. His skin adopts a faint glow, and the same blue markings Nai's skin has go up his neck to his face. His appearance subconsciously reverts to default, then, except for the skin, and he goes unresponsive.

The measurements go kind of crazy. No alarms actually go off because this is actually built into the systems as a thing that can happen, because Zash himself made sure every single fucking pod on this dustbin planet would allow him to do this, a hundred and fifty years ago. The measurements go crazy, but the system recognises what's happening, and it doesn't raise any alarms.

And the plant... unfurls.

There's a body, there. The big bulb that makes up its upper half untwists like petals, and the humanoid inside is revealed. The petals are like a skirt, or wings, and her skin has the same white and blue colour and markings. Her arms are long and thin, her fingers ending in round nubs. Her eyes are enormous, not proportional to her face, and a pure glowing clear blue. There's no way someone seeing this could confuse her for a machine without some very motivated reasoning.

She slowly floats down to be eye level with Zash, and places her own hands and forehead against the glass, matching his. They glow where they touch, and Zash's do, too.

Zash's best guess is that he's sharing his gate, helping her stabilise hers. He can't open his gate on his own, but he learned how to do this long before Nai cut his arm off, and it's a much more primitive action, to him. And she... heals. He heals her. Yvette will see, in real time, some of the strange but positive behaviour she'd seen on her graphs and which had been unexplained, until now. A miracle occurs, and the plant feels better.

It's not a perfect fix, it doesn't restore her to perfect health, it doesn't even do a lot of long-term helping on its own. But it buys peace, and time, and stability, and for a short time everything works better. Anything that requires her to be a bit stronger, a bit healthier, can happen while he does this.

He's not an academic, not a proper plant engineer, but this... explains all of the remaining unexplained bits about how he's succeeded over the decades despite that.

Yvette doesn't, really, believe in miracles. But for a little while, she forgets. It's one of the most beautiful things she's ever seen. She doesn't even quite want to peer too closely at how it all works, because it'd be like ruining the magic.

Zash can't do this for very long, though, or very often. It's exhausting, both in terms of energy and emotionally, it leaves him extremely distracted and vulnerable, and he can't come off it very quickly so if anyone walks in on them it'll be game over.

So he pulls away and so does the plant, and the glow on his face slowly retreats down and the plant curls back up, and then he has to spend a while fixing his face once more.

Okay, yes, but first she's going to hug him, because. ... Because.

"Is, is being unfurled uncomfortable for her, because if not why don't they just do that more often so the humans will be less... less."

"It's not uncomfortable, but... it's like the difference between lying down and standing up. Not much of one, but if you're constantly doing the equivalent of racing around at top speed you want to do the best you can to conserve your energy otherwise."

"But if she showed herself to humans she wouldn't have to race around at top speed!" The realization then hits; she's been listening to enough of how plants think to guess what the answer is.

"... But that's not what she wants, is it. She wants to be as efficiently helpful as possible."

"Yeah." She's a smart girl, he knew she was going to get it.

"Fuck," she mutters, and then leans into him. "Fuck. God damn it. Okay. And I suppose you've already tried talking them around and persuading them to be briefly inefficient for a greater efficiency later and this. Hasn't worked out. Because they don't do serial thinking."