Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Phil collapsed in the nest, exhausted.

It had only been a day since they’d been attacked, and it had been a long process to get everything up and running again.

Tommy and Tubbo had been working harder than any of them, staying up late into the night to fight the virus that the pirates had infected them with for control of the ship’s systems, then meticulously combing through the ship’s AI to root out any lingering traces of it.

Once the worst of it was done, Tubbo had moved on to repairing any physical damage left by their ship docking – borrowing the human when he went onto the pirate’s ship to make sure he wasn’t surprised by any remaining members of the pirate’s crew, which had upset Ranboo because the human was still injured – and then fixing up a tow line so that they could bring the ship with them. (Phil had been all for leaving it in the nearest asteroid belt, but Tubbo had insisted that it would be better to search it for valuables and sell it on Kinoko or Las Nevadas.)

Tommy had been equally busy trying to fix the hole in their security. He had asked Phil about where he got the ship’s software from, and Phil had left that conversation shortly after Tommy had started sobbing.

Wilbur and Phil had been left with the chore of tidying up after the attack: putting furniture back, dragging the bodies to the waste chute and trying to scrub the blood off the walls. Once Tommy and Tubbo had regained control of the ship’s AI, they were able to leave the rest of the clean-up to the cleaning bots (thankfully) and their focus quickly shifted to working out where they were. Even with the navigations systems back online, it took half a day for them to plot a route from their current location to Kinoko.

That had left them to work through their cargo list to make sure none of it had been taken or damaged by the pirates, something Wilbur, Tommy and Tubbo were still working through downstairs. The whole time Phil had been running around trying to make sure that everyone was eating and drinking enough, and that the human wasn’t doing something stupid or dangerous. (It was in the medbay with Ranboo – he’d checked on them both just an hour ago.)

Hence the exhaustion.

So he stumbled across the common room to the nest, basking in the open space and vast expanse of cushions and pillows, and let his instincts take over.

It was long overdue; he could tell by how he’d forgotten how relaxing it was to just adjust parts of his nest and have nothing else in his brain. It was nice to switch off after the stress of the last two days.

He pulled back one of the blankets… and blinked at the two legs he found under it. Human legs. Slowly, he looked up, following the legs to the rest of its body, to its head. Its eyes staring right at him.

How he hadn’t noticed it, he had no idea. Tiredness was probably the main factor, though the human also seemed to have purposefully buried itself in the nest.

Cold fear cut through some of the fog of his instincts. He became very aware very suddenly that he had just abruptly snatched the blanket it was using away from it.

It probably didn’t like that.

He tried to drop the blanket, but his limbs weren’t responding.

Was taking a blanket from a human enough reason for it to attack him? (As much as he hoped that they were at a point where it wouldn’t, he knew the answer was probably yes.)

Techno had just been looking for somewhere to nap for a bit. The medbay was too bright, and it had been too easy to sneak away from Oreo. He’d have gone to his room downstairs, but he wasn’t all that keen to get locked in there alone all day again, so he’d climbed into the giant nest in one corner of the living-dining-cooking room.

Half-asleep, he hadn’t thought anything of it when he felt someone else climb in. Until they yanked his blanket away.

Rude, he’d thought, pushing himself up on his elbows to look at the offender. Then he saw who it was: Bird.

This fact didn’t calm the voices down at all – only a few of them were actually upset about the blanket, but most of them seemed to be happy with any excuse for violence and were taking this opportunity to be chaotic. Techno, on the other hand, froze.

This was a giant bird nest; Bird was a giant bird. They were probably upset that he was in it. They hadn’t invited him in, after all, and this space was most likely quite personal.

Internally, he cursed his luck. Of course, the moment he did something stupid and impulsive, the worst person on the crew to find him would do so. And, naturally, he had no way of knowing how badly he’d messed up, nor any way of apologising.

He glanced at the blanket still in their hand, considering his options. They weren’t actively shooing him out of the nest, which was a positive, but the cold stare they were giving him told him he might not have long before they started. Better to leave on his own terms.

Experimentally, he pushed himself up with his arms, pulling his legs in. Bird fluffed their feathers, but otherwise didn’t move. So far so good?

He turned slowly, reaching towards the edge of the nest.

Phil reacted before he could think, scooping up the human before they could leave the nest.

The idea that they might leave was oddly upsetting, as was the pained noise they made before he had them safely wrapped in his wings. This was a nest! Chicks shouldn’t be hurt or scared in a nest, shouldn’t want to leave-

He caught up to himself. Chick? When had the human started being his chick? Sure, he had joked with Wilbur about adopting them, but that had been a joke! His instincts took months to warm up to new things; they couldn’t have accepted the human into his flock that quickly.

And yet, he had said human wrapped up in his arms. They weren’t moving.

Quickly, he let go of them, hopping back and chittering apologetically. Hopefully they wouldn’t be too upset at him.

Techno sensed Bird move before he felt it, but didn’t have time to do anything before they were on him.

They collided with his back, pushing him down – the pressure made his ribs burn, and he cried out in pain – before dragging him upright. Arms wrapped around him, thankfully missing his broken bones but still digging into his tender bruises, and wings quickly followed, blocking out his view of the rest of the room.

Despite the voices screaming at him to do otherwise, he forced himself not to try to escape. The only way to get out now would be to force Bird’s arms open, and their wings, and then try to keep them away as he put some distance between them, and there was far too much potential for them to get hurt. The memory of the broken corpses from the last time he’d given in to the voices’ bloodlust was too fresh.

Besides, he tried to convince himself, he wasn’t sure that Bird was upset at him.

It wasn’t very convincing. Their reaction to finding him here, and how rough they’d been with him already, did not bode well. He couldn’t stop himself from tensing as they shifted him in their arms. He just hoped that they wouldn’t hurt him too badly, and that he wouldn’t lash out accidentally.

Then, suddenly, they released him.

He twisted as he fell to land on his back, sparing his ribs, and sat there for a moment as he caught his breath.

Bird was sat in the centre of the nest – an arm’s length away, but not nearly far enough for him to feel safe – with their wings slightly spread. They were perfectly still, head cocked to one side, eyes drilling into his chest.

There was something cold in the way their eyes were narrowed, something that told of barely-contained rage simmering beneath the surface. He shivered.

Why they had let him go felt obvious. The pain radiating from his side was warning enough; he didn’t feel like sticking around to see what they’d do next. (Even if a small part of him whispered that he deserved it.)

He didn’t stop running until he was under his own blankets in his bed downstairs.

Phil let out a broken chirp as he watched his ch- the human run out of the room.

They ran with an urgency he hadn’t seen from them before and were out of the room before he could even get to his feet. He made it to the top of the stairs just in time to see them disappear down the corridor that led to their room.

He made his way back to the nest. The look in their eyes when he’d let go of them echoed in his mind. They’d looked scared, which was ridiculous! They were more than capable of killing him if they tried – they had no reason to fear him.

The nest felt emptier than it had any right to be, further dampening his mood. He sat there dejectedly for several minutes before Ranboo found him.

“Hey, Phil?”

“Yeah, mate?”

“…Are you okay?” Ranboo must’ve picked up on his mood – his voice was quiet, and shakier than normal, and his tail was wrapped tightly around one leg. “The last few days have been tough. For everyone. Do you-” He hesitated, then seemed to rethink whatever he had been about to say. “I’ll give you some space.”

Phil appreciated the gesture. Enderians were naturally fairly solitary as adults and preferred to be alone when working out their emotions. Ranboo, being a podling, was much more comfortable in the presence of his pod, but still felt obliged to give the rest of the crew space if they were upset. It was his way of trying to be supportive.

Phil, on the other hand, was not solitary, and much preferred the company of his flock when he was feeling down. Particularly now, when his nest felt so cold and his wings were so empty.

“Stay?”

Ranboo stopped, turning away from the corridor he’d been about to disappear down. “Sure,” he replied softly.

He settled beside Phil in the nest and he wrapped his wing around him, chirping happily when he felt Ranboo’s tail curl itself around his wrist. The presence of one of his chicks was soothing for his instincts, and Phil was able to shake the horrible feeling from earlier.

“Oh!” Ranboo exclaimed out of nowhere. “I forgot! I meant to ask you about the human.” He looked sheepish. “I might have lost them…”

The reminder was not a pleasant one, but Phil did his best to keep his expression light. “I saw it earlier – it went downstairs, back to its room.”

“That’s good. At least they’re not stuck somewhere they shouldn’t be.”

“Mmm.”

It took a long time for Techno to calm down.

It was difficult to judge time – the lights in his room were still off, so he only had the dim light coming in from the storage room to tell him that it wasn’t night already – but it felt like hours before his breathing evened out and the voices stopped shouting.

(Now they were just sulking. You could’ve punched him. Just a little bit.

No, he responded firmly.)

After spending the last few days constantly surrounded by at least one alien, the familiar loneliness of his room was uncomfortable. He could hear distant footsteps, voices chattering, but nothing came close to his room.

(That almost hurt more than the lingering ache of his ribs.)

Logically, he knew that he shouldn’t be upset. Bird hadn’t followed him. He wasn’t being supervised by one of the crew, alone for the first time in days. His bed was nicer than the one in the medical room.

Still.

After what felt like hours, he realised that Oreo hadn’t come looking for him. Had they not realised he was gone?

Or maybe they had realised, but Bird had told them what happened? He curled in on himself at the thought that they might look at him the way Bird did. Not that he didn’t deserve their anger.

He could still feel the blood on his hands.

Much later, he forced himself to get up.

His skin felt… wrong somehow, and he struggled to get his eyes to focus on anything. There was a churring in his gut and a buzzing in his ears. He didn’t remember how he got down from his bed.

Every step back down the corridor towards the rest of the ship brought him further back. By the time he reached the storage room, he felt in control of his limbs again and the voices had changed back from indistinct whispers to actual words.

He made his way up the stairs to the living room, but paused just before he could enter. The sight awaiting him made him glad he did. 

Bird was still in the nest, but Oreo had joined them. They had one of Bird’s black wings wrapped around their shoulders.

It felt like a gut punch, though he wasn’t sure why. Bird and Oreo were friends – it made sense that Bird would let them into their nest. Why would they let him in? He was dangerous. He was the monster. The one who’d massacred the other aliens (and he hated that he still didn’t know if they had been their friends) and yet wandered around the ship as though he had any right to the crew’s kindness.

Quietly, he returned to his room. He laid for hours in his makeshift bed, trying to pretend that the sharp pain in his chest was from his broken ribs.

Chapter Text

Phil didn’t know how to apologise to the human.

Remembering how they had given Wilbur some fruit, back when they were trying to train them and the human had scared him, he had tried bringing them a whole chorus fruit (in the middle of the day, so that it was clear that it wasn’t just part of their normal meals). They had accepted the offering, albeit hesitantly, but it didn’t change their attitude towards the nest.

Next, he tried beckoning them in, fluffing his feathers and brushing the blankets next to him invitingly. Then he tried leaving the room entirely, watching them through the security cameras to see if they’d go in when he wasn’t there. Neither method worked.

He felt guilty, both for scaring the human away in the first place and for not telling the rest of the crew about it. He knew that they had noticed the human’s odd behaviour – Tommy complained about it incessantly – but still he held back.

Techno was not going near the nest.

Fluffy and Bee were trying to tempt him over with some berries, but Bird had been very clear that he wasn’t welcome in it. The last time they’d been in the central room together, they had fluffed up all of their feathers and made shooing motions, and their initial threat was more than enough to make him wary of crossing them.

Sighing, he settled on a chair at the dining table a few metres away instead. He was careful to choose one of the generic ones, even though one of the higher-backed chairs would have been more comfortable. He hadn’t been expressly forbidden from the table yet, though he was yet to sit with everyone around it. In fact, he had never seen any of the aliens so much as prepare a meal in front of him, let alone eat with him.

(He tried not to imagine them all sat around the table, eating and laughing together while he was sat alone downstairs, but he only had so much to think about.)

Regardless, it was clear that the aliens didn’t see him as one of them. They all had bedrooms on the same corridor; his was tucked away on another floor, on the other side of the ship. He wasn’t allowed to leave his room without supervision, and they locked him away every night. Most dishearteningly, they were making no real attempts to teach him any of their language.

Still, their company was better than solitude, and it kept the voices quiet for a few hours, so he did whatever they asked of him, be it trailing around the second ship after them or just sitting still and watching them go about their business.

Quietly, he tried to push down the parts of him that yearned for more. He didn’t deserve it, and he wouldn’t get it.

Ranboo was peacefully synthesising some vitamin tablets when Tommy burst in.

“What do you- What is the human doing here?!”

Tommy breezed past, ignoring Ranboo’s shrieking. “Phil said they need to be watched at all times,” he said calmly, as though that explained everything.

“That doesn’t mean bringing them into the lab! There are dangerous chemicals in here!”

“You worry too much, Ran-boob.”

Ranboo knew he wouldn’t win this argument, but he could speed this up. “What do you want?”

Tommy sighed. “Something explosive. Not very,” he tacked on, seeing Ranboo’s incredulous expression, “just enough to create some pressure. Here.” He pulled up some schematics on his comm, holding it up to show Ranboo.

He took the comm, quickly reading the specifications and considering which combination of chemicals would be best. “Shouldn’t you have something better suited to this in your own lab?”

The mechanical and technological lab downstairs was Tubbo and Tommy’s designated workspace, theoretically equipped with all of the tools and materials they might need in their roles as the ship’s mechanic and software engineer. However, without any of the others to keep an eye on what they were doing in there (Wilbur and Ranboo being too busy with their own lab, and Phil being stuck in his office with paperwork), they had systematically stripped out any semblance of scientific tidiness.

Where the workbenches in the biochemical lab were always sparkling, chemicals all in their designated spaces on the shelves, experiments carefully recorded and stored in their respective cupboards, the ‘workshop’ had tools strewn across the tables, materials scattered across the room instead of in their labelled bins, and soot marks on every bench. 

“Nah, the stuff we have is all too strong.”

They bounced different chemical reactions off each other – Tommy didn’t have a very good grasp of general chemistry, but knew a disturbing amount about explosions – until they found one that satisfied Tommy’s needs, running it through some simulator software to check. Ranboo turned to grab the chemicals from their cupboard, and looked up to see the human stood next to it.

In fact, they were standing right in front of the small glass-fronted cabinet that held the lab’s supply of poisons. Of course the human finds the deadliest thing in the room, he thought, stepping forwards. Then, he noticed that the door to the cabinet was swung open, and the human was holding something in their hand: a rectangle of something solid and foil-wrapped, almost completely obscured by the human’s hand. As the human turned, he saw that a corner of the foil had been peeled back to reveal a sheet of dark brown, some of which had clearly been bitten off-

Chocolate.

He nearly shrieked when he realised what it was, and that the human had eaten some of it.

Chocolate was a common pesticide despite its relatively recent discovery. A mix of poisons ensured that it worked on basically any pest, and the addition of sugar and other palatable ingredients curbed the harsh taste to make sure that the victims ate enough of it to die. It wasn’t necessarily a humane way to deal with pests, but its effectiveness had led to its widespread use.

Ranboo had been experimenting with the formula, replacing some of the theobromine (the usual main active ingredient in chocolate, which primarily attacked the circulatory system. Its symptoms ranged from damage to the blood vessels and muscles in the heart, to internal bleeding and cardiac arrest) with caffeine, an even more effective stimulant that affected the central nervous system. The two-pronged approach made it more versatile and increased its already impressive toxicity.

The human was screwed.

He scrambled to bat the chocolate out of their hands, but they just held it away from him, using their long limbs to keep it out of his reach. Tommy rushed over to help, likely now realising the danger he’d put them all in by bringing the human here.

“Oh, come on! Just- argh!” Every swipe he made at the chocolate, the human countered easily, even as he dodged Tommy from the other side. He didn’t have time to worry about the human getting properly upset that they were trying to take the chocolate back, though. While the effects of the theobromine would take several hours to fully set in, the caffeine was much more fast-acting and they were running out of time quickly.

“What is that?” Tommy asked as he grabbed the cloth on the human’s torso, trying to use it as leverage to yank their arm closer.

Ranboo hissed as the human dodged another swing. “Poison.”

“Oh.”

Tommy stepped back, clearly exhausted (with the added weight of his cast, Ranboo was impressed he’d lasted that long), and Ranboo took the opportunity to pause too, trying to think of any way they could fix this while his lungs did their best to make up for the oxygen he’d been using.

The human skipped to the other side of the lab, taking another bite. They weren’t even out of breath.

“Do we have an antidote?” Tommy asked, voice hopeful.

“No.”

“Right.”

Ranboo sighed. “We need to get them to the medbay. Even if we can’t reverse the effects, they stand a better chance there than anywhere else.”

So he and Tommy started herding them out of the door and towards the medbay. Ranboo winced every time the human nibbled at the chocolate, which they seemed to be enjoying more than the chorus fruit or berries (not a good sign). Luckily, though they continued to evade any attempts to retrieve the chocolate, they seemed perfectly happy to be herded, and they reached the medbay without too much trouble.

Techno laughed as savoured yet another bite of chocolate.

Chocolate – one of the last things he’d expected to find out here. It was dark, which wasn’t normally his preference, but now the bitter tones only emphasised its earthy richness. It tasted a little off – more watery than creamy, with notes of something unfamiliar – but it had been a long time since he’d had chocolate. As the flavour coated his mouth, he couldn’t keep the smile off his face.

Fluffy and Oreo had given up on trying to get it off him, and he happily followed them down the corridor to the medical room. Where had they got the chocolate from? Why was it in a science lab instead of the kitchen? Was it a personal stash?

He was hit with a small wave of guilt, then, because this wasn’t his chocolate and he wasn’t doing a very good job of sharing it. As Fluffy guided him to one of the beds, he broke off a piece and offered it to them.

They recoiled as though he’d brandished a red-hot poker at them.

He tried not to let it sting. It was justified. The blood was still fresh on his hands (and the inside of his eyelids).

The chocolate soured in his mouth, and, realising that he wouldn’t be able to savour it as it deserved, he wrapped the rest of it back up in the foil. When Fluffy reached for it, he didn’t stop them.

Ranboo was frantically gathering supplies to get a blood sample when Tommy called over.

“Ranboo?” There was a note of fear in his voice that made Ranboo’s core start buzzing.

“What?” He grabbed some numbing potion, the last of what he needed, and turned to Tommy and the human.

Tommy was holding the chocolate. How he got it became apparent when he saw the human. They were slumped where they sat, head hanging, having lost all of the energy they’d had earlier.

He struggled to keep crackling out of his voice as he rushed over. “What happened?” The human looked up when he got closer, which alleviated some of his worry, but they were still too lethargic.

Tommy stuttered something in response, but Ranboo only heard enough of it to know that it wasn’t helpful. He quickly took a blood sample, trying not to wince at how pliant they were, and fed it into the haematology analyser with shaking hands. Knowing which compounds he had to look for made the tests faster, but it still took agonisingly long for the machine to get back with the results.

Staring at the screen, Rannboo couldn’t help but curse himself. The human never should have been in the lab in the first place – he’d known that, and still hadn’t pushed hard enough against Tommy’s misplaced optimism. And now it was too late. Even with the test results, human physiology was such an unknown that he had no way of knowing how to alleviate their symptoms, much less cure them.

In fact, he didn’t even know what symptoms to expect – theobromine and caffeine, the main concerns, were both stimulants to most species, and yet the human had reacted as though the chocolate was a depressant, much closer to what he might expect from alcohol poisoning. He felt like he was drowning, void pressing into his lungs and choking him. He didn’t know which of the compounds might kill them first, and he had no idea how to help.

He was the ship’s medical officer: it was his job to help the crew – his pod – when they were sick, but now that one of them needed him he could only watch-

A large, warm hand engulfing his shoulder pulled Ranboo out of his thoughts.

He looked up to see the human standing much closer than he’d expected. He couldn’t hold back a shriek at the almost-eye contact – a testament to his already frayed nerves – which made them take several steps back.

Slowly, (still looking him in the eyes, though he was able to contain his discomfort) they inched closer, setting one hand then the other on his shoulders. (Their stability made him realise just how much he was shaking.) Ranboo could only look on in confusion. Why would they waste their dwindling energy?

They reached out with one hand (still moving too slowly, evidence of the poison that he couldn’t do anything about spreading through their veins) and grasped his hand, pulling it up to press it against their chest.

Then he noticed their breathing. Their chest was moving much more than normal, their ribs straining to expand under their skin, and when he started listening each breath sounded laboured.

Suffocation. His panic grew, and guilt joined it. The human had come to him for help, and he had no way of saving them. He could only look on in horror.

Techno pressed Oreo’s hand to his chest, ignoring the small pinpricks of pain as their claws flexed.

He breathed in and out deliberately, hoping that it might help Oreo stop hyperventilating. He didn’t think it could do any harm – at the very least, his steady heartbeat might calm them (that was a thing, right?) and the breathing exercise was also helping him not succumb to his own anxiety at the situation and the aliens’ strange behaviour.

It wasn’t working.

Oreo stared back at him with wide eyes, their shaking only getting worse.

He stepped back, staggering slightly as is head spun from too much oxygen. Luckily, it passed quickly, but Oreo seemed to have become all the more panicked in the seconds his attention was off them.

He had no idea how to calm an alien down. Fluffy was still being resolutely unhelpful, standing off to one side and staring at him instead of trying to help Oreo.

Get the big one, one of the voices suggested.

A chorus of others agreed. Yes, get Bird! They’ll know what to do!

Without any better ideas, he turned to the door.

Tommy looked on in stunned silence as the human ran out of the room.

Ranboo was still very much panicking, which left Tommy to wrangle the sick human. With a huff, he followed them into the corridor.

They were running faster than he’d expected with them being so listless earlier, not to mention the poison that should have been slowing them down: they were already halfway to the common room.

The human looked back – somehow spinning to run backwards – and shouted something, waving one hand, before turning to continue. They managed not to slow for even a second.

“Humans,” he cursed under his breath.

Ranboo came to his senses as Tommy disappeared into the corridor. He was following before he’d really thought about it.

The human was already nearly to the common room, while Tommy – normally one of the fastest crewmembers – was lagging behind. Avians usually used their small flightless wings to help them run, but with his broken wing and a heavy cast, Tommy was struggling to make any pace at all.

Ranboo wasn’t one for running. Podlings didn’t have much need of it; running was done by hunting adults, not those who were still learning themselves. Still, he didn’t have much choice.

Dodging around Tommy (and ignoring whatever he had yelled after him), he managed to catch up to the human as they came to a stop in the common room, quickly circling them to block off their route forwards.

They stopped, evidently surprised to see him, but it was short-lived. They crouched suddenly, defensive, and Ranboo matched it instinctively. Before he could question it, they were dashing towards the door to the storage room.

They were faster than him down the stairs and disappeared behind one of the rows of crates before he could reach the floor.

Ranboo paused at the bottom of the stairs, ears standing straight up. His eyes scanned along the long rows of crates, looking for a glimpse of their bright pink hair, but – between his worse-than-average colour vision, the busyness of the various shapes in the room, and the fact that he was already slightly off kilter – he couldn’t spot them.

It didn’t matter that he couldn’t see them, though. His ears pricked at every sound in the room: he could hear the constant hum of the engine down the corridor, Tommy’s footsteps upstairs, and – most importantly – the human’s breathing. It was irregular, like they were trying to disguise it, but loud enough to stand out anyway.

His tail twitched with excess energy, but it didn’t swish in the way it usually did as he quietly stalked closer to the human’s hiding place on his padded feet.

Their head peeked over the top of a crate. Ranboo lunged.

He overshot.

He managed to grab the human by the shoulder as he went over, dragging them down with him as he hit the ground awkwardly. He was quick to scramble upright, jumping up at the human again. He hissed (in victory? In excitement? He wasn’t sure) and, as the human brought their arms up to fend him off, it was only natural to sink his bared teeth into their hand.

He bit the human.

The realisation hit him hard. Fear shot through his core, sending him teleporting just out of arm’s reach. He sat there, the instinct to stay frozen keeping him in place.

He could only watch as the human groaned, injured arm tucked in close to their torso.

Techno cradled his ribs, breathing through the pain.

In hindsight, baiting Oreo into chasing him like that while he was so injured had not been among his best ideas.

He hadn’t been expecting them to leap at him like that and his arms had come up automatically to shield his face, leaving his still-broken ribs unprotected. Now he could barely think through the fire engulfing his side.

After a minute or so of careful, shallow breaths, the pain had subsided enough for him to try to assess the situation. The impact had probably set his ribs back at least a week in their recovery (had it even been a week since he’d been injured?). His hip, which had taken the brunt of the impact, was tender, likely bruised, and there was blood in his mouth from where he’d bitten down on his tongue. Oreo had nipped his hand, but it had only left indents in the skin – he was lucky they were only playing.

The voices, now audible above the pain, were clamouring for him to get revenge. Most of the suggestions were harmless – things like putting them in a headlock or chasing them around the room – but enough of them were just a little too dark for him to feel entirely comfortable.

Oreo had backed off a little to give him some space, likely having realised that he had gotten hurt. As he carefully pushed himself up to sit leaning back against the crate he’d been crouched behind, he noticed them looking at him with concern.

“’m fine,” he mumbled in an attempt to alleviate some of the guilt on their face. Their ears twitched at the noise but otherwise remained pinned back against their head. “Really, I am. It’s not your fault. I started it.”

Ranboo’s anxiety was not helped by the fact that the human was moving so carefully. He seemed to have really hurt them.

Tommy appeared at the end of the row, chirping in concern when he saw the two of them. “What happened?!”

Ranboo vwooped nervously. “I jumped at them and knocked us both over, and I think the fall hurt their ribs.” His ears, already flattened against his head, tried to go flatter. “They’re hurt and it’s my fault.”

Tommy was looking at Ranboo with an unreadable expression. “…Are you getting your hunting instincts?”

“What?”

Enderians usually developed the instincts needed to hunt and fend for themselves as they became fully-grown. Ranboo was far older than the stage where those instincts should have shown themselves; it was part of the reason he’d been abandoned by his pod in the first place. Since then, he had resigned himself to his broken baby instincts.

“There’s no way,” Ranboo argued. “It would’ve happened by now if it was possible.”

“Just saying – that looked a lot like hunting to me. I’ve never seen you run like that before.”

“There has to be some other explanation.”

Ranboo could tell that he didn’t agree, but Tommy didn’t push it.

The human stood up, using the crate next to them to pull themselves up. Ranboo stayed crouched. They started walking towards him.

This is the part where they take their revenge. Ranboo braced himself to be disciplined.

A moment passed.

There was a huff from somewhere above him. When he opened his eyes, the human was sat on their knees in front of him, hands in their lap. They leant down and tilted their head, and Ranboo was briefly transfixed by the strange movement (particularly how it made their hair fall over their shoulder like a curtain) before he realised that they were trying to catch his eye. Ranboo only lowered his gaze. He knew better than to make eye contact.

The human shifted again and it took everything in Ranboo not to flinch. They leaned closer – he could feel the heat radiating from them – and then their arms were around his back and he couldn’t hold back his terrified warbles (and didn’t that just prove that he wasn’t good enough?).

Their arms tightened, one around his waist and the other by his shoulders, pulling him against the human. It wasn’t unpleasant. Between the solid pressure on all sides and the little semicircles their thumbs stroked into his fur, Ranboo was quick to slump into their hold. A low purr built up in his throat.

He made a questioning noise – this was an odd punishment, and part of him was confused that the human wasn’t hurting him – and he felt the human’s responding hum reverberate through their chest.

“Umm… Ranboo?”

Slowly, Ranboo lifted his head to look over the human’s shoulder. Tommy was stood a couple of steps behind them.

“Are you alright?”

Ranboo thought about it for a moment. The human, surprisingly, didn’t seem to want to hurt him. Whatever they were doing filled his head with chorus-stalks, leaving no space for panic. The only thing he was feeling was tired. “I think so.”

Tommy edged closer. “What are they doing?”

Unthinkingly, Ranboo buried his face into the human’s shoulder. “Don’t know,” he mumbled, voice muffled. “Feels nice though.”

“So… about the chocolate…”

Ranboo’s head shot up. He’d forgotten about that.

Careful to avoid their injuries, he pushed himself away from the human. They let him go easily. He tried to find any sign that they weren’t well, but nothing seemed particularly out of the ordinary; their breathing and heart rate seemed normal.

“What if they’re immune?” Tommy suggested.

“You mean – they’re resistant to the toxins in the chocolate? All of them?”

“They are a human.”

Ranboo considered the idea. It was certainly within the realm of possibility; humans were supposed to be unkillable. The fact that they weren’t showing any symptoms was promising.

“What about earlier? When they seemed so tired?”

Tommy thought about it. “Maybe they aren’t completely immune, and they just needed a minute to deal with the poisons?”

The theory made some sense. Maybe that was why the human became lethargic in response to stimulants – their energy was focused on getting the poisons out of their system. “Maybe. I think we should still keep an eye on them.”

“Of course!” Tommy jumped to the human’s side as they slowly stood up, helping Ranboo stand as well.

Chapter Text

Phil watched the camera feed with despair.

Not only had the human still not gone near the nest, they were now constructing their own right next to it!

They were carrying armfuls of materials up from their nest downstairs (Phil dreaded to think what a mess it looked like, and refused to check the cameras to find out) and was depositing  them in the corner opposite the large table, mere metres from the existing big, comfy nest. They had even recruited Tommy and Tubbo to help, though neither of them were able to carry as much as the human.

They started by lining their chosen corner – next to the corridor to the bedrooms, on the opposite side of the room to the dining table – with cushions (not the hardest ones, like Phil would have done, nor the softest ones that might be comfier, but a seemingly random selection of the ones in the middle of the spectrum), then started constructing a wall around it. They took two chairs from the table to strengthen it, though they were having quite a lot of success just propping cushions against each other.

With some prompting from the human, Tommy and Tubbo, both with some experience of nest-building, started lining the inside of the nest with the softer pillows. Once the outer walls had been established, the human used the blankets, hung between the chairs and tucked into the cushions against the wall, to create a roof.

This delighted Tubbo and Tommy, whose species often had more enclosed nest spaces, but Phil was horrified by how little space there was for all three of them in there. None of them would be able to stand, and the human couldn’t have the space to sit upright.

Clearly, none of them found it comfortable either, as they sat in it for only a few minutes before they started deconstructing it.

At last they’ve seen sense, Phil thought, hopeful that this might make the human finally decide to give the proper nest a go.

However, instead of sensibly putting everything back to where it should be and settling in the nice, spacious, comfortable nest sat right next to them, they started reconstructing the cushion-den. Phil nearly screeched his disapproval.

“Phil?”

Phil spun around to see Wilbur walk in. The door shut behind him.

“What’s wrong?” His tone was humorous, and only got more so when Phil showed him the camera feed on his comm. “You upset that your chicks aren’t in the nest?”

“It’s not that,” Phil grumbled. “Look at that nest! There’s no space, and they haven’t lined it properly-”

“The human’s building a nest?” Wilbur interrupted, intrigued.

“If you can call it that.”

“Interesting that they’d let the others help,” Wilbur noted as he pulled out his own comm, opening the notes he’d been taking on the human’s behaviour. “The corner…” he muttered as he wrote, “probably for the extra security of two solid walls. Or because it’s free? I wonder if they’d prefer three.”

Phil dithered for a moment before accepting the opportunity to distract himself. The human’s behaviour was quite interesting, when considered impersonally. “Three might be too many,” he suggested. “Fewer opportunities to get away if things go wrong.”

“But we only think that because we have a strong flight instinct,” Wilbur countered, pulling up a chair to sit next to Phil at his desk. “Humans might prefer to face their problems head-on, more like a piglin.” Phil didn’t have a response, but Wilbur didn’t seem to need one. He continued studying the video, where the human was helping Tubbo set up some interior walls. “The cooperation is unexpected,” Wilbur pointed out. “Do you know why they’re making a new nest upstairs?”

“No. They must have completely dismantled their nest downstairs, though.”

Wilbur turned, expression serious. “Dismantled? Do you think this new nest is a permanent fixture?”

Neither of them spoke for a moment, both considering what the human having a permanent nest upstairs might entail. “Do you think they’ll let us move them back downstairs?” Phil asked weakly.

Techno looked at the second version of their pillow fort.

Fluffy and Bee seemed to understand the concept better now that he’d demonstrated it, though they both seemed to prefer making the inside all fancy to doing any sort of structural work.

He’d got the idea when he was moving his bedding from the highest platform back to the one he’d woken up on when he’d first arrived, which was much closer to the ground, since climbing up the huge climbing wall had gotten too difficult with his broken ribs. He thought he might as well enjoy a good pillow fort with Fluffy and Bee while he was moving everything around.

This second iteration was much bigger, with some interior walls to section off different rooms as well as more chairs to hold the roof up. Unfortunately, this meant sacrificing some of the cushions they’d been using as the floor, which upset Fluffy and Bee greatly.

When Bee had gone to get cushions from Bird’s nest, Techno had wanted to stop them. He really didn’t want Bird to be upset that they’d taken some of it to build their own, particularly after they’d been so insistent that he stay away from it. But Fluffy had been tenacious, and he was eventually persuaded to let them both grab some extra supplies. (He noted each and every cushion and blanket they took, so that he could make sure to return them later.)

He could identify several structurally weak points, but it was holding together well enough to serve its purpose: to give the three of them somewhere to hang out that wasn’t the nest.

He was tired of sitting on the other side of the room to the aliens he was spending time with.

He crawled inside, carefully manoeuvring in the small space so that he could sit up in the tallest part of the fort without aggravating his broken ribs. Unfortunately, the tallest space was also the area furthest from anything to lean on, so he gathered some pillows to form a makeshift seat while Fluffy and Bee started exploring the space inside.

Eventually, they settled – Bee in one of the smaller spaces he’d partitioned off (not very well – the walls didn’t reach the ceiling, so he could easily see over them), Fluffy in the larger ‘room’ that Techno was sat in. He smiled at the way Fluffy was trying to subtly edge closer without him noticing, coming to lean against his side, and the voices exploded with ‘aww’s when they brought one wing to tentatively wrap around him.

Absentmindedly, he reached over their head (it wasn’t hard) to stroke the feathers on their head and wing. They responded positively, so he continued, focusing on carefully brushing through all of them to block out the ever-present ache from being unable to understand  whatever conversation Bee and Fluffy were having.

Tommy nearly melted as the human brushed over a particularly sensitive spot on his wing.

He could hear Tubbo laughing at him, and realised that he’d broken off mid-sentence. He levelled a glare at him, but his intimidation was undercut as the human brushed the spot again and he let out a noise of delight.

That sent Tubbo into hysterics. “Shut up,” Tommy grumbled once he’d regained control of his voice.

“Aww, you sound so happy!” Tubbo crowed.

“It’s not my fault the human’s so good at this!”

It was unfair, really, how they seemed to know all of the best places to brush through his feathers. Phil must’ve shown them how to preen – there was no way they could be that good at it otherwise. Even if they’d been taught, it was still impressive how easily they were able to turn Tommy into goo.

Tubbo crawled closer. “They’re surprisingly good at preening, considering they don’t have feathers.”

Tommy leant heavily against the human’s side (he doubted they even noticed the extra weight) and slowly stretched one of his wings – the one that wasn’t currently trapped in a cast – across their lap to give them access to all of it. His instincts were crowding on the edges of his consciousness, making it difficult to focus on anything other than the human’s warm fingers in his feathers. “Phil prob’ly showed ‘em.”

“Phil showed me too,” Tubbo pointed out, “but I can’t get you like this that quickly.” Tommy only clicked a vague agreement. The human was getting more confident and it was getting harder to keep his instincts at bay.

Fortunately, Tubbo seemed to understand. “You can relax, bossman, nothing’s going to happen.”

He trusted the human not to hurt him, but it was reassuring nonetheless to know that Tubbo wouldn’t let anything happen. Slowly, he stopped resisting the comforting lull.

Tubbo watched the human carefully.

Despite what Tommy seemed to think, he sincerely doubted that the human had learnt to preen from Phil. They hadn’t actually spent that much time with him since they’d been allowed upstairs regularly – Phil had been busy with extra paperwork, leaving Ranboo to supervise the human most of the time. (Tommy and Tubbo had been trying to take over where they could, and Wilbur joined them occasionally, though he mostly worked in one corner while he and Tommy actually entertained the human.)

The human’s technique was also different to Phil’s – not by much, but Tubbo had seen Phil preen Tommy enough to notice the differences. Where Phil’s delicate talons allowed him to clean each feather individually, the human’s thick, blunt fingers made it difficult for them to reach around each one properly, leaving them to skirt over the feathers for the most part, though they would occasionally hook their fingers to part the top layers and reach the skin underneath.

Phil moved slowly through each section of plumage, rarely revisiting a section he’d already done; the human moved their hand straight down in the direction of the feathers, preferring to return to the top repeatedly and revisit sections. They weren’t methodical at all – if anything, they seemed to be deliberately random in how they alternated between Tommy’s head, wing and back, and how much time and pressure they put into each spot.

And yet, it was working. Tommy wasn’t ever this relaxed when Phil was cleaning his wings.

It was hard to believe that the human had never done this before, but where could they have learnt to preen? He couldn’t imagine where they’d been taught – humans don’t have feathers of their own, no sane person would let a human near their wings, and what use would teaching a human to clean wings be?

Even with all of his reservations, Tubbo had to admit that it was difficult to remember that the human was an apex predator when they were being so gentle. It helped that their piercing binocular vision was entirely focused on Tommy, who was stretching across their lap and chirping happily.

He pulled together some of the spare blankets and cushions, mindful of the human and keeping an eye out in case they decided to take advantage of Tommy’s current state, and formed a small nest to settle in.

He couldn’t help the anxious flick of his wings. He’d promised Tommy that he wouldn’t let anything happen, but what could he do against a human? In such a small space, he wouldn’t even be able to fly to safety and call for help.

The scene was not dissimilar to the one Tommy described after the human had saved them from the pirate attack: both of them in the human’s nest (did this count, if they’d built it together?), Tommy deep in his instincts and Tubbo completely helpless.

An hour was spent trying to convince himself that it was fine, and eventually he decided that if the human planned to try something, they would have done it by then. Neither the human nor Tommy had moved in that time except to readjust.

Then came the problem of trying to separate the two.

If Tommy spent too much more time in this state, he wouldn’t be able to function at all for the rest of the day. However, his instincts wouldn’t like being separated from whoever was preening him, or being forcibly removed from a nest. And, if the human put up any significant resistance, Tubbo had no hope of getting Tommy out of their grasp.

Slowly, he approached the pair. The human’s eyes snapped up at the movement, but their posture remained relaxed. They continued their stroking. Tubbo’s wings flicked even as he did his best to keep them pinned against his back, and he had to take a second to steady himself before he could continue.

Once he was close enough, he knelt and reached forwards towards the hand on Tommy’s wing. It stilled, but the human didn’t react as he placed his own (alarmingly smaller) hand over it.

“Let go?” he buzzed nervously, applying a small amount of pressure to push the human’s hand off. To his surprise, they did. There was no resistance as he moved it out of the way, and it remained hovering in the air for a moment once he let go.

Some of his nervousness relaxed when, instead of moving back to keep petting Tommy, they put both of their hands behind them and leant back on them. So far, so good.

Tommy stirred and, realising that he was no longer being preened, whistled a protest. He put up much more a fight than the human had, squirming away from him when Tubbo tried to pull him off their lap.

Haste bled into his actions – he wasn’t sure how long he had before the human’s patience ran out. “Come on,” he muttered, but Tommy was too far gone to understand; he only tweeted angrily and burrowed back against the human.

Movement at the edge of his vision made him startle. The human was leaning forwards, their hands coming up.

Tubbo jumped back, out of the way, but they didn’t seem interested in him. Murmuring quietly, they gently nudged Tommy away. He didn’t go easily, but the human persisted, lifting and pushing carefully until Tommy was sprawled across the floor of the nest. With one last pet to Tommy’s head, they shifted, unfolding and re-folding their legs to reduce the size of their lap, making it much harder for Tommy to return.

He watched, frozen in surprise.

Tommy’s upset chirps pulled him out of it, and he quickly pulled Tommy to his feet and started guiding him to the door. His resistance had decreased since the human let go, but it wasn’t easy to push him out of the den’s door.

Eventually, he got them both outside, one arm around Tommy’s waist to guide him towards the bedrooms. It would be best if Tommy could nap the rest of this instinct haze off. When he had managed to get them both to the start of the corridor, he looked back.

And nearly screamed.

The human was there, their huge figure looming behind them. Tubbo hadn’t realised that they’d even followed them out of the den. How could something so big move so quietly?

They leaned down, sending Tubbo skittering backwards. He realised his mistake when the human wrapped their arms around Tommy – he’d left them at the human’s mercy in his haste to get away from them – and lifted him up. They were careful about it at least, using one arm as a seat and the other to hold Tommy upright against their side – but Tubbo was too busy panicking about how he was going to get Tommy back to his room to stop and appreciate the human’s care.

The human stared at him. He was careful not to meet their eye, keeping his own gaze respectfully lowered (it wasn’t difficult, when the human’s eye level was several times his own height), but he could almost feel their eyes watching him.

He didn’t understand why they didn’t just take Tommy back to their nest now. They had to know he wouldn’t stop them, right? (He hoped they did. He didn’t want to consider what they might do to him if they considered him a threat.) Were they waiting for something?

Experimentally, he stepped to the side. There, now he wasn’t blocking the corridor – the human was free to go wherever they wanted. They didn’t move.

There was a huff from above him, and he carefully looked up. The human was moving their head around, but Tubbo couldn’t understand what they could mean. Hesitantly, he made eye contact.

The human looked at him, then inclined their head to the side, eyes flicking away.

Breaking eye contact, exposing a point of weakness… He tried to remember what he’d been told about human body language.

Oh! They were trying to indicate subordination! They were saying they would follow his instructions!

It seemed an odd message to come from a human, but they followed him when Tubbo walked to Tommy’s door, so he assumed that he’d been correct.

The idea that a human wanted to follow his lead was a surprise, but not an unwelcome one. He was small for an apistian and used to people assuming that he was only able to follow instructions, not give them. To have a human (a human!) accept his direction set his wings buzzing happily.

Techno sighed as Bee finally realised what he had been trying to convey and started leading him down the corridor.

They pressed their hand to a control panel to open one of the doors, stepping inside. Techno followed, ducking slightly to get through the doorway.

The room inside was clearly one of the bedrooms. There was a desk to one side, which held one of those hologram projector screens that Oreo had in the medical room, but was otherwise clear of mess. (He was reminded how messy his desk back on Earth had been, and was hit with a pang of homesickness.)

The floor was nowhere near as organised: in the middle of the room, there was a semi-circle of notebooks and papers and pencils, all covered in scrawling handwriting and diagrams (he itched to take a few pieces and a pencil for himself – it had been so long since he’d last been able to write or draw); a small heap of clothes, possibly clean, possibly dirty, laid in one corner; a stack of books was piled haphazardly next to the desk. The mismatched rugs felt nice under his socked feet, a contrast to the cool metallic floors everywhere else.

The wall behind the desk had a large blank space that seemed to function like a whiteboard – there was what looked like a pen and a rubber stuck to it, and it held a short list in the same writing that covered the notebooks below it. A rod jutted abruptly out of the wall next to it at waist-height. He couldn’t fathom its purpose, but there were two more at intervals along the wall. Between them, indents in the wall formed shelves, the highest of which was a full head above him.

A very small proportion of the space was filled with books. Most of it held trinkets and small objects: a shiny rock, a gold necklace, a carved animal, and several other odd things, as well as a few more mechanical-looking ones. Bright red drawers filled the bottom shelves, a stark contrast to the muted grey walls.

Against the back wall, a hammock, a small cylindrical beanbag, and a curved sofa-like article of furniture were arranged under a large platform that jutted out halfway up the wall. Leading from the platform to the floor was a set of wide, shallow steps and the rest of the third wall held an indented space that could be a door, though it was much shorter than the one they’d just come through.

Bee was hovering in the middle of the room, just off the edge of the platform, which Techno took as an invitation. At the top was another nest. (He shouldn’t have been surprised, at this point.) It was smaller than Bird’s big one, and there were curtains that could be drawn around it to make it feel even cozier. He had to stoop to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling.

Carefully, he lowered Fluffy into the nest. They clung to him briefly, but it didn’t take much encouragement to get them to let go. He pulled one of the blankets around them and quietly left the room, feeling oddly satisfied.

Chapter Text

Tommy watched the human.

They were stubbornly sitting on the floor, legs folded uncomfortably in front of them, instead of up in the nest with him and Tubbo. He didn’t understand what their problem with the nest was. They had been perfectly happy to sit in the half-nest half-den they’d made together!

He had been disappointed to wake up from his instinct haze to find it gone and the human locked in their room for the night. The next day, it was as if it had never happened: they refused to make another one, and even started dismantling the one Tommy tried to make himself.

Phil had pulled him aside to gently explain that humans weren’t as flock-orientated as most species, so might not enjoy sharing spaces in the same way the rest of the crew did. Tommy had argued; clearly, they did enjoy spending time with the crew, and they had taken the time to sit with him and Tubbo in the nest-den they had constructed together, and they never got upset when Tommy was a little too rough with their injuries, and they had happily shared their bed in the medbay when they were injured, and, and, and.

At least, he’d tried to argue. Phil hadn’t listened. He’d ignored or dismissed or downplayed every example Tommy gave and spouted some nonsense about his instincts being messed up. (He used other words – like ‘affected’ or ‘disrupted’ – but Tommy knew what he meant.)

Tommy tried not to take it personally.

Tubbo glanced up from the schematics on his comm.

Tommy was in the process of trying (unsuccessfully) to drag the human into the nest by their arm. They seemed completely unbothered by it, and the contrast between Tommy – leant over at an alarming angle, claws digging into the material of the nest, good wing flapping in an effort to help – and the human – arm slack, sitting upright, barely affected by Tommy’s efforts, watching him languidly – was almost comedic.

(It was also a reminder that they could do very little to stop the human if they decided to do something. Tubbo was trying very hard not to imagine how easy it would be for the human to use that strength to hurt one of the crew.)

After a minute, Tommy flopped back to the nest, exhausted and defeated. “I don’t get it. Why won’t they just sit up here with us?”

“If they’re more comfortable down there, leave them be.” Tubbo tried to keep his tone neutral. Although he would probably enjoy having the human in the nest, he could also see that there were benefits to the current arrangement: the human, for all their endearing qualities, was still a powerful predator.

“That-“ Tommy gestured to the human’s legs, folded on the hard floor without even a cushion. “-can’t be more comfortable.”

Tubbo understood why Tommy wanted the human in the nest; it was the avian’s way of accepting them as flock. The instinct-driven part of his brain probably saw the human’s refusal as a profound rejection.

“Look, Tommy. You offered them berries-” The container was still sat open in the middle of the nest. “-and they still didn’t want to. If they won’t do it for their favourite food, they-”

He didn’t get to finish the thought. Tommy turned to him abruptly, cutting him off. “Of course!” Then, without elaborating, he jumped up and ran out of the room, past the kitchen and down the corridor to the medbay. The human turned their head to watch him leave, looking back at Tubbo once he was out of sight.

“I don’t know,” he grumbled, even if the human wouldn’t understand.

It wasn’t long before Tommy returned, holding a small silvery thing victoriously. He sat back in his original spot, nearly buzzing with energy, and held it out for Tubbo to look at.

It was a sheet as thick as his hand of something covered in foil. Its perfect rectangular shape was disrupted in one corner, where it looked like some of it had been taken out. It was hard to tell the fracture pattern, as the foil from that corner had clearly been peeled back to remove the material and then wrapped around to cover where it had been taken, but from the shape of the

“What is it?” He couldn’t help but notice that it had captured the human’s attention – they didn’t take their eyes off it.

“Chocolate!” Tubbo vaguely recognised the name but couldn’t place it. Tommy either noticed or anticipated his confusion, and continued explaining. “It’s a mix of a bunch of poisons, but humans are basically immune to all of them.” The hand holding the chocolate waved slightly as he spoke; the human’s gaze could only be described as predatory. “Ranboo and I found out after they got hold of some in the lab. They love it! It took us ages to get it back off them.”

Tommy turned back to the human, who looked up at him. “Come on,” he coaxed, holding the chocolate out while backing up slowly. “I know you want it. You just have to climb in.”

“Tommy,” Tubbo warned. The look on the human’s face told him this could only end badly.

Though, clearly, Tommy didn’t share his concern. He waved the chocolate in front of himself, cooing encouragements. Slowly, the human shifted closer.

As the human moved, Tubbo was struck again by the fact that humans were apex predators: slowly but smoothly they shifted their weight to free their legs – first leaning backwards to unfold them, then swinging them to one side, before leaning forwards and tucking them under their body as they lifted themselves up to kneel – all without turning even a fraction of their attention away from Tommy. In one fluid motion, the human had gone from an awkward but relaxed position to being obviously on the hunt.

He had thought that having their legs tangled was impractical; now, having seen how quickly they were able get to their knees, he understood how mistaken he’d been.

They didn’t stop until they were as upright as they could get without standing: only then did their trance seem to break. They made a humming sound (it sounded a lot like the apistian word for ‘wall’, but he doubted that was its intended meaning) and started looking around, scanning the rest of the room.

“No, no – this way,” Tommy tried, wiggling the chocolate hopefully.

Slowly, the human stood, still glancing around. Then, carefully, they lowered themselves sideways to perch on the edge of the nest, barely glancing at the two of them. After a moment, they pulled one foot up to rest on the other knee, removing their hard foot-covering and dropping it to the floor before doing the same to the other, leaving them in just their inner cloth foot-coverings. (The twisting of their legs looked like it had to be painful, but the ease of their movement suggested otherwise. He wondered what their joints looked like.)

Once they were finished, they glanced around the room again – what were they looking for? – and twisted to face him and Tommy, pulling their legs up to cross them the way they had on the floor.

“Yes!” Tommy broke off a piece of chocolate and handed it to the human, who accepted it surprisingly politely, without any of the aggression or haste that Tubbo had expected them to show for their ‘favourite food’. “Finally!”

Tubbo was impressed, and slightly concerned, that poison was enough to convince the human; they had been stubbornly avoiding the nest since they’d been allowed near it. Still, his instincts had warmed up to the human considerably after sharing their cushion-den, and he enjoyed seeing them sharing the proper nest, even if he still worried about how they might react.

Luckily, the human was no more interested in being aggressive than they had been in the nest they’d all built together two days before. Tommy moved to sit next to them, tucking himself firmly against their side, while Tubbo stayed where he was.

They sat in companionable silence, the human gradually relaxing the longer they sat there.

Tommy chirped happily.

The human was finally in the nest, and he could feel them starting to slump as they got more comfortable.

“Hey, guys,” Phil said, walking in. “I was-”

The human shot up before he could finish, knocking him away in their haste. They were out of the nest and rounding it before Tommy could process what had happened.

Tommy took in the way they had positioned themselves on the opposite side of the nest to Phil and noted the fact that they weren’t taking their eyes off him. His entrance must have really startled them.

“Hey,” Tommy said soothingly. “It’s alright – it’s just Phil.” They human was still breathing heavily and didn’t appear to be relaxing even though they must have recognised Phil by now. After a moment, he turned to Phil. “Um, Phil?”

“Yeah, mate?” Phil wasn’t looking away from the human, though he seemed more surprised than defensive. Tommy paused.

“Why is the human scared of you?”

It was an abrupt question, but one he needed answers to. He couldn’t think of why the human might have reason to be scared of Phil, but he also couldn’t think of any other way to interpret the human’s behaviour.

The question startled Phil out of his almost-staring contest. “I-” He hesitated, then sighed. “I found the human in the nest a couple of days after the pirate attack. My instincts- I-” He cut himself off, seemingly unable to finish the thought.

Something cold threaded through his feathers. Elytrians were fiercely protective of their nests and didn’t take kindly to intruders. With the human already injured, a lucky hit could easily have allowed Phil to overpower them, particularly if he caught them off-guard. Suddenly he understood why the human had been so hesitant to get into the nest.

Tubbo voiced the thought while Tommy was still processing the rising dread making his feathers puff up. “Your instincts kicked them out?”

“Not exactly,” Phil corrected, guilt evident in his wings. Tommy wasn’t comforted. “They tried to leave after I’d uncovered them, and my instincts didn’t like that. I- Humans are solitary-” Tommy went to protest, but Phil paid him no heed. “-so when I went to pull them back, they probably saw it as an attack. They ran away as soon as they could. Why they didn’t try to fight back is beyond me, but that’s probably why they don’t want to get in the nest again.”

That didn’t make any sense. Their human hadn’t resisted any of Tommy’s expressions of (manly) affection, even when they’d just woken up after the pirate attack, when they had been at their most vulnerable. “I don’t understand. They were happy to share the nest the three of us made together, and it wasn’t like I was trying to keep my distance then. And they shared their bed with me in the medbay!”

Phil looked conflicted. Tubbo spoke up first. “Maybe it was how you pulled them back? I can’t believe that humans are completely solitary, not after the way they’ve interacted with us.”

“I did use my wings,” Phil considered. “They might have seen it as a dominance thing?”

Tommy huffed. “I don’t get the whole hierarchy theory you guys have. Why is the human so comfortable with us if everything is about competition?”

‘Comfortable’ might even have been an understatement. They seemed to enjoy spending time with the crew, and the only time they’d leaned away from one of his hugs was when-

When he’d forgotten about their injured ribs.

Phil was talking – something about his stupid hierarchy theory – but Tommy wasn’t paying attention. “Did you- Are you sure you didn’t grab them by their broken bones?”

Phil verbally stumbled and broke off, a look of dawning horror on his face. “I- Their ribs. I had forgotten.” He swore, looking back at the human. “They- I was hurting them. No wonder they froze.” His feathers were quickly fluffing up and he looked suddenly unsteady.

Tommy pushed himself to his feet, stepping across the nest to Phil and using his good wing to usher him into the nest before he collapsed. The human took a step back, towards the corridor that led to the bedrooms, and watched them warily. Tommy looked back at Phil: one problem at a time.

“So… not to say I told you so, but…” He added a ‘joke/amusement’ chirp (a tonal modifier that, if he was remembering correctly, mostly translated to elytrian) in the hopes of lightening the mood. “I think this explains everything easily without any of your competition arguments.”

Tubbo nodded, though Phil only continued to look morose. “The human probably saw it as an attack,” Tubbo pieced together, “but they didn’t fight back because they were too injured.”

“Or because they’re flock and they know it,” Tommy argued. “They’ve been stubbornly non-threatening since the pirate attack. Even you can’t explain that without some sort of recognition of allyship or something.”

“Humans aren’t pack-orientated,” Phil argued, though he sounded less sure of himself now than he had been before. Good – it meant that he was finally considering Tommy’s argument.

Before Tommy could continue that train of thought, Tubbo redirected the conversation. “Regardless, the most likely interpretation of an attack like that-” Phil looked guiltily back at the human, who was still tense. “-is a territorial dispute.” At Tommy’s loud protest, Tubbo clarified, “Even if humans aren’t territorial, they probably recognise other species claiming territories. The human home planet is a deathworld for a reason; there has to be at least one territorial species that humans would be familiar with.”

“So they think I was kicking them out of the nest,” Phil summarised. “How do I fix it?”

“Easy!” Tubbo said. “We invite them into the nest!”

“I tried that-”

“It’s a matter of communication. We know they want to be in the nest, and we know why they think they can’t. Now it’s just a matter of telling them that it’s alright.”

Techno watched the aliens carefully.

He was torn.

On one hand, the probability of him actually getting to join them in the oversized nest was next to nothing, particularly compared to his chances of getting hit (again) for daring to overstep their boundaries.

On the other hand, even the thought of getting to- to be there with them, sat next to them instead of on the other side of the room (the few metres between the nest and the table felt so far, sometimes), getting to indulge in Fluffy’s affection (it was getting harder to pretend he didn’t enjoy it) and listen to their conversation (even if he still couldn’t understand a word of it) and-

The lingering hope was enough to keep him from running away, even as he watched Fluffy invite Bird into the heaps of blankets with a wing across their back.

They aren’t interested, a small voice niggled in the back of his mind. Surprisingly, it didn’t sound anything like the usual voices, who were squabbling about whether to stay or go (though, naturally, they didn’t limit themselves to such a strict binary decision – they were actually arguing over half a dozen different options, of which the current favourite was just forcing himself into the nest with violence). It was quieter, yet stood out even against the background of half-shouts.

He took another step back.

Fluffy, Bird and Bee were having some sort of conversation. Dejectedly, he noted that he couldn’t even tell the tone of what they were discussing – were they having a heated debate? A calm discussion? – though he could guess from context that it was probably about him.

The mood, whatever it had been, shifted slightly. Bird said something and Bee cut them off, and then Bee and Fluffy spoke back and forth for a minute with the occasional addition from Bird. Then all three of them turned to him.

He took another step back.

Fluffy stood up and walked across the mound of pillows (their wider feet allowed them to balance impressively, he noted distantly), while Bird and Bee stayed in the nest, watching. Techno stood stock-still as Fluffy walked up to him.

They came to stand next to him, wrapping their good wing around his back (or trying to – they were so short that they only really succeeded in wrapping it around his thighs) and pushing him towards the nest. He glanced back at Bird.

Bird’s feathers were fluffed up, though they seemed to be making an effort to smooth them back down. They shuffled backwards a little in the nest, and then brushed the space they’d made with the feathers of one wing. The motion was brief, but reminded him of how they’d shooed him away when he’d gotten too close to the nest a few days ago (or was it a week? He couldn’t remember).

Fluffy kept pushing – they were leaning against his leg now, but even their full bodyweight wasn’t particularly significant – and Techno took a half-step forwards almost unconsciously.

Phil chirped his own encouragements as the human took a hesitant step towards the nest.

He tried brushing the spot next to him invitingly, but the human visibly recoiled at the action, hunching their shoulders and leaning away.

“It’s okay,” Tommy reassured from behind them. “See? We all want you in the nest.”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to leave?” Phil asked. It seemed the obvious solution to him: he was the reason the human was refusing to join them, so him leaving would make it easier to encourage the human.

“You leaving won’t help in the long-term,” Tubbo pointed out. “We need to establish that you don’t mind having them in the nest, otherwise they won’t relax properly.”

“Then why is Tommy the one-”

“Because you don’t get to decide who is and isn’t allowed in the shared nest!” Tommy responded, still pushing hard against the human.

Tubbo flicked his antenna in agreement. “We need to them to be able to trust us. If every time we try to get them to do something they have to go running to you to check if it’s okay…”

Phil understood where they were coming from. It was probably his guilt as much as anything else that made him want to retreat back to his office. He shuffled further to the side, brushing the growing space next to him again. The human didn’t pull away, which he counted as a win, but they were also making no move to climb into the nest.

Tommy made an irritated clicking noise before giving up on pushing the human into the nest. He rounded their legs and grabbed a handful of the cloth on the human’s leg, tugging gently at it as he moved past them to climb back onto the nest. He flopped down next to Phil, reaching across the nest to grab something slivery and wave it at the human.

The human’s eyes, which had been darting between the three of them, suddenly locked onto whatever Tommy was holding. Their fingers twitched and they swayed slightly, as if about to take a step forwards.

After a moment, and a glance his way, the human hesitantly stepped closer. Tommy chirped some more encouragement and broke some of whatever it was wrapped in the foil off the slab and held it out for the human to take. Slowly, they came up to the edge of the nest, though they still seemed nervous about climbing in.

Eventually, they stepped forwards, bending their legs at the edge of the nest so that they were standing on their knees. They shuffled slightly further in, then lowered themselves to sit with their legs folded underneath them.

Tommy moved to sit next to them, tucking himself into their side and handing them the piece of whatever was in the foil wrapping. The human accepted it but, instead of just eating it, they started nibbling at one of the edges, taking very small bites and pausing often.

Phil was slightly confused. Was the whatever-it-was just so hard that they couldn’t bite into it directly? But then how had Tommy managed to snap it so easily? It couldn’t have an unpleasant flavour, else they wouldn’t be eating it at all, but if it tasted nice why were they eating it so slowly?

“What is that?” he asked as Tommy broke off another piece. The human shifted, pushing their legs out at an angle to lean more towards the avian.

“Poison,” Tubbo responded casually. Phil did a double take – had he misheard? “Of course a human’s favourite food would be poison.”

“That’s poison!?”

The human flinched at his loud voice and raised wings, and Tommy glared at Phil. “It’s not poison to them,” he pointed out. “And we didn’t give it to them on purpose, at first. They found some in the lab and managed to dodge any attempts at getting it back.”

He folded his wings back down but was struggling to get the feathers to lay flat. Absentmindedly, he pulled one of the wings into his lap and started preening. “You’re sure?”

Tommy made a so-so gesture. “I mean, they got really tired when they started to metabolise it, but that didn’t last long, even though they still had the toxins in their system hours later. Besides, they really like it.”

“What’s in it?”

“It’s chocolate, so it’s mostly the-mo-bro-hi-min, but Ranboob added some caf-neen too.” Phil didn’t recognise either of the chemicals. “They’re stimulators normally, but the human was even more calm than usual after eating some.”

“Some sort of human sedative?” He was a little surprised that there existed such a thing – humans were known to be very difficult to calm down chemically – but it wasn’t implausible. (At least, no more implausible than any of the rumours about humans, like the stories of humans surviving losing an arm but dying to airborne pollen.)

“I guess.” Tommy turned back to the human. They had finished their piece of chocolate, and held out a hand palm-up towards the rest of the bar. Tommy broke another piece off and handed it to them.

Phil watched the human slowly relax as Tommy and Tubbo kept up a conversation. He chimed in occasionally, but his focus was on how effective the chocolate seemed to be. It wasn’t long before the human was completely relaxed, propping themselves up on one arm as though even the act of holding themselves upright was too much.

Tommy tried very hard to keep his excitement to himself as he and Tubbo discussed a multi-disciplinary cooperative codebreaking initiative Tubbo had been reading about.

It was a fascinating topic, and normally one that would have captured his attention entirely, but having the human sitting next to him was enough to make it difficult to concentrate. Even though he could feel their squishy-but-not limbs against his feathers, it almost didn’t feel real.

Something settled in his wings, and Tommy sunk further into the human’s warmth.

Techno sat in the nest, listening to Fluffy and Bee talk and trying very hard not to make eye contact with Bird.

They weren’t staring, but they were clearly keeping their eye on him, and Techno was not keen to break whatever truce was currently in place, so he kept his focus on the other two and only watched Bird from his peripheral vision. His stomach was in knots, but he kept accepting the pieces of chocolate Fluffy handed him and nibbled on them as a way of trying to distract himself.

After a while, sitting so tensely got the better of him and he slouched, first relaxing his spine and then leaning back on one arm. Bird didn’t react to the change in position, but they also didn’t stop watching him.

Techno never stopped bracing, first physically and then just mentally, for Bird to change their mind. He didn’t necessarily expect them to hurt him (at least, not properly – they were reasonably friendly, but his ribs were still healing and it wouldn’t take much to make his side light up in pain), but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t kick him out of the nest.

The feeling didn’t leave him until long after Fluffy had led him back to his room for the night. He lay awake plagued by questions. Did Bird actually dislike him? Were the looks they gave him friendly or hostile? Did it even matter, when he had no way to know until it was too late?

He fell asleep with a familiar aching, hollow feeling in his chest.

Chapter Text

Techno had decided to help Oreo.

They clearly had a lot of excess energy to burn. They liked to pace when the other aliens weren’t in the room, and their tail was constantly restless. They had clearly enjoyed the impromptu game of hide-and-seek, but, unfortunately, with his ribs still broken, Techno wasn’t in any condition to play with them like that. He had to find another way to help them let off steam.

Fortunately, he’d had an idea: if he could make a toy – like a cat teaser wand – he could help Oreo work out some of their energy without setting his recovery back any further.

The only problem was making one.

He figured that he could get some feathers from Bird or Fluffy – he wouldn’t dream of plucking their feathers, but he’d seen some fall out when they were cleaning themselves – but finding some string (and, ideally, glue) was proving more difficult than he’d expected. He was hesitant to go digging through the medical room for something suitable, just in case he ended up taking something essential, but he was running out of options and patience.

He had tried in the kitchen part of the common room, in the hopes that there would be some twine or something in one of the drawers, but was dragged away by Oreo and Bird before he could open more than a single cupboard. (Why they didn’t want him in the kitchen was a mystery, but it wasn’t as if he could ask them, so he reluctantly accepted that he would just have to look elsewhere.)

Next, he had scoured the corners of the storage room. The crates were held in place with thick ribbons of a smooth plastic-like material, but they were all secured too well for him to slip one out and he couldn’t find any spares.

He kept an eye out for anything that could work whenever he was in the common room, just in case someone had dropped some, but the floor was always clear of any useful detritus. It was almost impressive.

Phil watched the human check underneath the nest again.

“Do you think we should be worried?” he asked as they huffed, defeated.

Wilbur looked up at the human and considered them for a moment. “They do seem to be more restless than usual. Maybe it’s a hunting instinct? We don’t really make them work for their food.”

“We can’t make them work for their food while they’re still injured,” Ranboo pointed out. “They probably just have some excess energy from being unable to move around as much as would usually.”

“They’re not the only one with excess energy,” Wilbur teased. Ranboo’s ears flicked back as he looked away.

It was completely by accident that Techno eventually stumbled into the right room.

Fluffy and Bee were chasing each other around the storage room, but his busted ribs kept him from joining in, leaving him to entertain himself.

There were a couple of fairly nondescript doors leading off the storage room, and, in his boredom, he decided to explore a little. It helped that most of them had the same control panel as all of the other doors on the ship, with the same label for ‘open’ and no password required.

He slipped inside, quickly hitting ‘close’ on the inside panel so he wouldn’t be interrupted.

The room was bigger than he’d expected, about the same size as his own room. The ceiling was as high as it had been in the storage room, but here the space was split vertically with another floor, which wrapped around three walls in a large U-shape. The whole thing looked like a strange mixture of messy auto repair workshop and sleek computer lab.

On the lower level, workbenches stood at intervals in the middle of the room. They varied wildly in height, some level with Techno’s stomach and others at knee-height, and most were covered with materials, tools and a couple of holographic displays. In some cases it was clear that there was a project being worked on, but most of the mess looked completely random.

Around the walls, racks of tools, seemingly unorganised, filled the spaces between or above large machines, boxes of scrap metal and drawers overflowing with smaller parts. In some cases, the racks had been installed half-covering what looked like important posters about workshop safety.

However interesting the space was, he wasn’t keen to linger, so he quickly started looking for the string.

The drawers were unsurprisingly disorganised, and he struggled to find very much in the mess. There were a lot of screws (of all shapes and sizes, including several with a spiral-shaped shaft), nails, small electrical components and plenty of wire, but no string.

It was just as he opened a promising drawer that the door opened and Fluffy and Bee came running in.

Tubbo shrieked when he saw the human going through their workshop.

“What do we do?!”

Tommy was a little calmer. “I don’t know, but whatever they find we won’t be able to take off them,” he warned him.

“There’s nothing we can do to get them out?”

“We could try treats?” Tommy suggested. Tubbo tapped his irritation out on the doorframe. “You and I both know how stubborn they can be – if they don’t want to leave, they won’t.”

The human, who had looked up when they first came in, went back to searching through the materials drawers. They were being considerate, at least, by leaving everything where they found it, but he dreaded how that might change once they’d found something that caught their interest.

Suddenly, they make an odd sound. Their whole posture seemed to change, though Tubbo didn’t have enough experience reading the human to understand what it could mean, and they straightened, pulling out… a piece of string.

From the noise Tommy made, he was just as bewildered as Tubbo. The string was the least valuable item there – an off-cut from a rough natural fibre blend – and it served no discernible purpose for the human. It was much thicker than whatever threads were used to make their clothes (though, of course, he couldn’t be sure that the human knew that) and it was too short to be very useful; it barely brushed the floor as the human held it up to their eye level.

“String?” Tommy said incredulously. “What’s so great about string? It’s not even a whole roll of it!”

Tubbo laughed at his expression. “We have so many explosives in here, and they go for the most mundane thing ever.” Not that he was complaining; this was probably the best outcome for everyone.

Tommy strode to one of the workbenches, leaving Tubbo lingering in the doorway. He grabbed a scrap of a copper alloy sheet and held it up for the human to see. “Here. See? We have more interesting stuff than rope.”

The human picked up the small square of metal, examined it, and then set the rope down on the nearest counter (they fit right in) in favour of fiddling with the metal.

“Tommy!” Tubbo buzzed as quietly as he could manage. “We are trying to get the human out of the workshop!” Tommy didn’t acknowledge the reminder, not turning away from the human. He was lucky the human was close enough that Tubbo couldn’t get near him.

The human moved – without looking up from the piece of metal they were turning over in their hands – to sit on one of the stools scattered around the room. (How they located it without looking was as impressive as it was baffling. As far as he was aware, human eyes weren’t designed to see in more than one direction.)

After a moment, their hands stilled. Tubbo surreptitiously edged further around the doorframe, unsure what to expect, but the human didn’t move. Slowly, their hands twisted.

The metal twisted with them.

The reminder of how absurdly strong humans were shouldn’t have shocked him as much as it did. Still, he couldn’t help but tremble as such a casual show of strength.  

Luckily, they only seemed interested in twisting the corners and edges of the metal square inwards, slowly shaping it into a bowl. Tubbo soon found himself distracted with how well their blunt, thick fingers worked the metal, managing to be surprisingly delicate. He moved into the room, hovering behind a different workbench that offered a better view.

“They’re sticking their tongue out,” Tommy noted quietly.

“Do you think it helps?”

The human, ignoring their whispers, started scanning the worktop where Tommy had gotten the copper alloy from. Tubbo worried for a minute that they would go for the hand-held drill right next to the rest of the metal scraps, but the human barely looked at it, instead grabbing an even smaller piece.

They put the almost-finished hollow ball down to focus on this new piece. (Tubbo found it surprising that they would abandon a project they had been so focused on just a minute ago.) They worked it between their fingers, folding and pressing it until it was vaguely spherical too, though due to the smaller size it ended up as more of a ball than a bowl. Then, they dropped it into the previous piece before continuing to fold the metal until the smaller piece was completely surrounded.

It was at this point that their laser focus finally dropped, and they looked up at him and Tommy with their teeth bared, holding up the strange round contraption. They both froze, obviously, but the human only held up the small object and shook it gently, exposing more teeth and huffing at the tinny rattle.

Tommy was the first to unfreeze. He stepped forwards and chirped a vague avian noise of request, reaching towards the ball before the human could respond or Tubbo could stop him.

Techno was unable to keep the grin off his face as he let Fluffy inspect the bell.

It wasn’t the best workmanship – hardly his fault, he’d had a matter of minutes and no tools – but there was something about just making something that felt very satisfying. He’d never really been into arts and crafts, but he could see the appeal now.

Carefully reaching over Fluffy’s head, he grabbed the string from where he’d left it on the workbench. Now he just had to attach the bell to the string, and he’d be most of the way to a functional toy for Oreo.

He took the bell back and set it down, but paused as he held the string up. Tying the string around the bell seemed a bad idea – he didn’t know enough about how to manipulate string to be able to tie anything that would last. He held the string against the back of the bell, using his thumb to keep it in place. Ideally, he could attach some sort of loop there to tie the string to, or stick it together with some sort of glue.

Bee flew closer, hovering at about head-height, and Techno tilted his hand to let them see while he glanced around the workshop. Where would they keep glue?

Small claws wrapped around his wrist, pulling the bell closer to Fluffy’s eye-level. They chittered something at Bee, gesturing at the bell until Bee flew off to the other side of the workshop.

Techno didn’t get to see what they were doing, too busy watching an enthralled Fluffy inspect the brass sphere. He demonstrated it by jingling it to the side of Fluffy’s head, and then listened to it himself. It wasn’t a very loud sound, unfortunately, but it would at least add a bit of weight to the toy to make it easier to drag around. (That was how it worked, right?)

Bee returned carrying two small pots. They set both down on the table and took off the lid of the larger one (naturally, instead of coming off normally, it took a strange folding motion to get it off). Techno couldn’t see what was inside, but they pulled out a thin spoon and scooped out some pale green paste.

Tommy wasn’t entirely sure what the human wanted, but, from the way they were holding the string against the metal ball,

 it didn’t feel like too far a leap to guess that they wanted to stick the string to the metal ball from the way they were holding it there.

“Hey, Tubbo, can you grab some adhesive?”

“What for?”

“To attach the string to the metal. Preferably something reversible.” It would be useful to be able to remove the adhesive in case the human didn’t like the addition.

Tubbo buzzed thoughtfully. He was still looking at the creation in the human’s hands, but Tommy could see his expression shift to something more calculating. “I think we’ve got something that would work.” He flew across the room to rummage in a cupboard.

Tommy turned back to study the metal sphere in the human’s hand. The craftsmanship was nothing to sing from the trees over, but it was much more delicate than he would have expected from their large hands.

Tubbo returned with the components for a two-part glue. He set both containers down on the workbench and started getting out the paste before he hesitated, glancing at the human and then turning to Tommy. “Could you…?”

Tommy clicked in mock-annoyance as he reached out for the ball and string from the human. “It’s not like they bite.” The human handed them over, and Tommy set the parts on the workbench next to the glue. “See? Easy.”

“They are a deathworlder, even if you don’t treat them like it,” Tubbo shot back as he scooped some paste onto the smoothest side of the metal ball, where the human had been holding the string. He used a stick to shape the paste and press the string into it before applying a spray of the second part of the glue. Tommy reached up to grab the string and ball, but Tubbo batted his hands away. “It needs a moment to set.”

Tommy grumbled (of course he knew that) and shifted impatiently as they waited for the adhesive to set.

Luckily the human seemed to have more patience than him, as they sat without fuss for the whole time it took for the paste to turn from pale green to transparent. Tubbo fussed over it for another minute – something about fault lines and imperfect crystallisation – before he handed it back to the human.

The first thing they did was try to pull the string off the ball.

Tommy tensed, wings flaring slightly, as they tugged on it, while Tubbo ducked behind another workbench. They weren’t pulling hard enough to dent the metal, but they clearly didn’t like the new addition.

Tommy winced. Had he misjudged?

Techno tested the glue, tugging at the string gently to make sure it was properly attached.

The glue had turned from green to perfectly clear, so he guessed that it had set (did alien glue need to dry?). It held when he pulled gently, and when he let the bell drop to dangle from the string.

Still, he didn’t want it falling off as soon as Oreo got their claws on it, so he kept testing it, pulling harder and then swinging it around. The glue held.

As soon as Techno stopped, Fluffy tried to grab it out of his hands. Techno snorted, then held up enough that they couldn’t get it, smiling at Fluffy’s grumpy expression.

Fortunately, the next step – the feathers – would be much easier.

Fluffy and Bird shed them occasionally, and, given the amount of time they both spend there, the big nest in the common room was full of stray feathers. Finishing his new toy would be a matter of digging around until he found a few, and then tying them together with the bell on the string.

In the meantime, he stashed the rest of the toy in his room, burying it under a cushion in the far corner of his bed. He didn’t get an opportunity to look for any feathers that afternoon, since Fluffy and Bee insisted on dragging him to the medical room, where they proceeded to talk with Oreo – and then Blue, when they showed up – for the rest of the day.

Thankfully, the next day, the opportunity presented itself at about mid-morning. It was a rare moment that he’d been left unsupervised, but he couldn’t be sure how long it would last, so he started working as quickly and efficiently as possible.

He was halfway through digging when Fluffy, Bee and Oreo walked in.

Ranboo looked between the feather in the human’s hand and Tommy’s unwavering stare.

Feathers were about as sacred as nests to avians. While Tommy clearly already considered the human flock, letting them tear up a nest (though ‘tear up’ might be an overstatement, with how carefully the human was replacing everything they moved) and steal some of his feathers from it might be a step too far.

The human made a noise at them before turning their attention back to the nest. It was probably a greeting; Ranboo recognised the noise, and they only seemed to make it when they saw someone after a period of not seeing them. (It was one of the human’s most distinct sounds, and the only one so far that Ranboo had managed to link to any sort of pattern, though, frustratingly, he still couldn’t always predict if the human would make the noise.)

Tommy chirped – a happy noise, from what Ranboo knew of avian calls, but not close enough to a word or sentence to be picked up by their translators – and hopped over to the nest, landing just beside the human.

Tommy pulled the feathers from the human’s hands with a dissatisfied click.

It wasn’t that he didn’t think the human deserved one – far from it – but the two feathers they’d gathered were hardly good enough for a flock gift. They had both been nest markers for some time and were both bent, missing vanes, and covered in dust. Hardly a shining example of his good health, so taking one as a flock gift would only imply that his protector was bad at their job.

He tried to pull his brain out of the fog of his instincts. He wished that he’d had more time to prepare a proper flock-gift for the human. He’d just have to get a better one later – he could settle for finding an adequate substitute for the meantime.

He took a second to glance up at the human’s bright hair. Did humans give flock gifts? Individually, their hairs were much thinner than a feather, but they seemed to shed hairs in the same way he shed feathers (he’d been ecstatic when he found the first pink strand in the main nest) and he’d seen the way they could twist sections of their hair together to make a bigger strand – there was no reason why they couldn’t do something similar to the strands they shed.

Still, he should try not to get his hopes up.

He was distantly aware of Tubbo and Ranboo whispering to each other, but he didn’t worry about it. He had other things to focus on.

It took him and the human a while to find a passable feather. The human seemed to have much lower standards than he did, and looked happy to end the search with only a selection of three bedraggled feathers.

After a few more minutes of searching producing only one marginally better feather, Tommy had to concede defeat. He tried to comfort himself with the thought that, now that he knew the human would appreciate the gesture, he could save some good feathers from his next preening session.

The human held the feathers out to him and he carefully reached out to take them, trying to ignore the flash of pain at the idea that the human might be rejecting the present. Maybe they had higher standards than Tommy had given them credit for?

He watched, mood sinking, as they turned and left the room.

Techno rushed down to his room, quickly grabbing the nearly-finished toy from his bed before returning as fast as he could to the common room.

Admittedly, it wasn’t nearly as fast as he’d liked, since breathing too hard made his ribs ache, but it was as fast as he could manage.

Fluffy was still sat in the giant nest, holding the feathers he’d found, when he got back, though Bee and Oreo had moved to sit either side of them. The three of them were discussing something, but Techno had no hope of understanding, so he tried not to worry about it.

Tommy looked up as the human sat back down.

He chirped happily as the human reached to take the feathers back. Were they reconsidering? They gathered them up and started, bafflingly, tying them to the piece of string they’d taken from the workshop the day before.

He wondered if this is how humans did flock-gifts. It was common enough in avian culture – and the norm in elytrian culture – to incorporate a flock-gifted feather into a necklace or some other accessory. But what did that make the odd metal sphere that was also on the string? Was it a symbol for something?

He managed to pull himself enough out of his instincts to pose the question to Ranboo and Tubbo.

Ranboo seemed very distracted by the string as the human dragged it over their hand (an enderian instinct he wasn’t aware of?), but Tubbo was happy enough to postulate.

“Maybe it’s a craftmanship thing? Like, they have to make something to show off their skills. Apistians are similar – everyone choses a craft to learn, but the quality of what you can make is representative of…” Tubbo paused. “I don’t know how to explain it. Usefulness? Worth as a member of the hive?”

Tommy clicked a vague ‘agreement-understanding’. (He didn’t really get it – apistian societies had always confused him – but he understood what Tubbo was getting at.) “You think they’re showing off? Why would they need my feathers for that?”

The human was still messing around with the string. Every time they moved it particularly hard, there was a faint jiggling noise as the smaller piece of metal moved inside the ball. For whatever reason, Ranboo seemed enthralled by it.

Tommy gestured to the two of them. “Do you think we need to be worried about that?”

Tubbo looked over too. “’boo’s been acting a little odd lately.” He spoke quietly, but Tommy doubted Ranboo would have noticed either way.

“He chased the human the other day,” Tommy recalled offhandedly, still watching as the human, looking at Ranboo, made the string move jerkily across the nest.

“What!?”

“Yeah, the human had eaten some poison – the chocolate – and then ran out of the room, and Ranboo sprinted after them. I think he bit them too.”

Tubbo looked shocked. “It could be… Enderians are hunters by nature…”

“You think he’s getting hunting instincts?”

“I think so.”

Tommy looked back at the way Ranboo was zeroing in on the human’s creation. He hoped it wasn’t too important to them.

There was nothing outside of this little noisy feathery thing.

Ranboo watched it skitter across the soft floor (distantly, he remembered that he was in the nest, but the thought was quickly buried under his intense focus). He didn’t recognise it, but he could tell it was sniffing for something from the way it paused occasionally on its meandering journey.

His ears were straining, zeroing in on the odd jingling sound of its footsteps. To anyone else, the sound was probably inaudible, but to him it was the loudest thing in the room.

His feet felt clumsy as he shifted them, but it didn’t matter. The odd little thing – prey, his mind whispered, the taste of the word unfamiliar and yet tantalising – was easily within arm’s reach. He bunched himself up, preparing to strike…

He lunged.

He miscalculated, launching himself further and higher than he’d wanted to, but he reached out with his claws and snagged the small feathery jingly prey and pulled it with him, not waiting to land before he was scooping it up to his mouth and-

Suddenly he was back in the nest, soft blankets and cushions holding him in their gentle embrace, and he was holding the human’s precious string-thing in his teeth-

He dropped it as though it were water, skittering back and warbling an apology. Fear kept his head down, eyes lowered, and familiar instincts make him curl his tail in and hold completely still.

He could only imagine how angry the human would be. They had worked hard to make their little metal ball on a string – Tommy had told him how proud they’d looked when they made it – and then they’d accepted feathers from Tommy – and even if humans weren’t pack-based that had to mean something to them – and Ranboo had attacked it.

The heat off the human’s hand hovered near his head. Ranboo barely breathed. They reached in, dull claws running across the top of his head (he hated how nice it felt), and he waited for them to dig their fingers in, grab his fur or an ear or even his whole head and wrench.

They didn’t. Slowly, they inched closer, flattening their hand until their palm was brushing the top of his head and making quiet murmuring noises. It was comforting. He did his best to hold still, but then their hand ran further, coming to cup the back of his neck and he folded.

He fell forwards, the human’s arms coming up to guide him into them. He still didn’t dare lift his head, but he found it difficult not to relax as the human’s hand rubbed his back and head.

Techno was panicking.

He’d finally finished the toy to help Oreo let off some steam and it had worked. He barely had to do anything before they were locked onto it, eyes wide and ears standing straight up.

It had been a struggle not to start laughing as they shifted – they looked so much like an overgrown kitten – and then they’d actually leapt at it, falling over as they overshot and making the most adorable excited noise as they caught it.

But now they looked nothing short of terrified. He had no idea where the sudden change had come from.

He had approached slowly, not wanting to make things worse, and now he was hugging them (and doing his best to ignore the warm feeling in his chest amongst the anxiety) and trying not to panic. (It wasn’t working.)

Fluffy and Bee were being less than helpful: they were both just staring at him. Bee flinched when he made eye contact, but Fluffy didn’t react at all.

So, without anything else to do, he just kept holding Oreo.

Gradually, their heartrate slowed down and they uncurled enough that their head was resting on his shoulder. Their arms were relaxed, one pressed against him and the other hanging off to one side. Techno couldn’t stop thinking about what they would feel like holding him back.

As the human pulled away, Ranboo had to stifle a sad warble.

They didn’t go far – just enough that they weren’t touching him – and then leaned over to grab something. He barely had time to lift his head before they grabbed his hands with theirs and deposited the item there.

It took him a moment to realise that it was the string.

Was it a test? He struggled to think of any other explanation, though it didn’t explain why they hadn’t hurt him for attacking their property yet. He reached to give it back, but they dodged his attempts, instead bringing their hands to wrap his around the string.

Were they… giving it to him? Why? Was it because he’d taken it? (That would be the worst option – he would hate for the human to give up something important to them because they thought he’d ‘won’ it or something. Unfortunately, it was looking like the most likely explanation.)

He stared at the thing in his hands, still reeling from the idea that the human had just given it to him. Before he could fully process the idea, the human plucked it from his hands, turning to climb out of the nest. (Taking it back? He was so confused.)

They stood up, arranging the string so that the feathers and metal sphere sat on the nest and the long end ran over the edge. “What-”

The feathers twitched. All thoughts fled Ranboo’s brain.

Philza listened carefully as Wilbur discussed plans for their arrival on Kinoko.

“Obviously, we need to go to the main planet to get supplies,” he spoke as they both walked down the corridor. “I just think the human would benefit from a practice-”

Phil looked up, confused about why Wilbur had stopped talking. They’d just reached the end of the corridor and the entrance to the common room. To their left was the cooking and eating areas, and to their right was the giant nest.

Tubbo and Tommy were both sat in the nest, but Ranboo was crouched beside it on all fours, focus on something just around the nest, out of Phil’s line of sight. It was an odd position to find the usually self-conscious enderian, made all the more bizarre by the intensity of his focus: his ears were stood straight up and both pointed to a spot just around the corner. He shifted restlessly, tail swishing energetically across the floor behind him. Phil had never seen him so plainly energetic.

“Um,” Wilbur said, looking at the two on the nest questioningly. “What’s going on?” One of Ranboo’s ears flicked towards them for a moment, but that was the only acknowledgement the pair got from him.

Tubbo responded with more excitement than he’d been expecting. (It certainly didn’t match the mix of curiosity and anxiety skittering across Phil’s wings.) “Ranboo’s hunting!”

“Hunting what?” Phil asked, confused. There shouldn’t be anything to hunt on the ship – they didn’t have any live animals in cargo at the moment, and they had checked the ship for small stowaways before they left their last stop. Then the rest of the sentence caught up to him. “Wait- Ranboo’s hunting? Since when?”

They had long since given up on Ranboo developing the normal instincts for enderian adults. The condition that’d left him with his unusual colouration, combined with the neglect he’d faced from his pod (previous pod, Phil corrected himself, with no small amount of satisfaction) had done some serious damage.

“Since just now!” Tommy chirped happily, and Phil couldn’t help but echo the noise.

“Yeah,” Tubbo agreed. “The human’s been helping him practice!”

For the second time, Phil did a mental double-take.

After a moment, during which neither Tubbo nor Tommy volunteered any clarification, Phil asked weakly, “The human?”

With impeccable timing, the human climbed onto the nest from where they had apparently been crouched on the other side. They didn’t look up from whatever was on the floor except to glance to the side at Ranboo every few seconds.

Ranboo pounced, jerking forwards unsteadily and reaching for something, at the same time as the human sat up quickly, pulling their arm up and away from Ranboo. Phil caught a brief glance of something – the human was clutching a string in the hand they’d just lifted, and it seemed to be trailing something small and fluffy – before Ranboo reached it and batted it to the ground.

Tubbo looked away first, seemingly nonplussed. “They’ve been doing this on and off for nearly half an hour now.”

After taking a moment to make sure no one was actually at risk of being mauled, Phil followed Wilbur in approaching the nest for a closer look. “What are they doing?”

“The human attached some of my feathers and a bit of metal to a piece of string,” Tommy explained, “and now they’re dragging it around to get Ranboo to chase it.”

“Fascinating.” Wilbur pulled out his comm. “Did they make it for this purpose deliberately or was it originally intended for something else?”

“I think that they always meant for it to be used like this. They made the metal ball so that it would make a noise when it’s moved, and they have only encouraged this behaviour.” Tubbo gestured at Ranboo, who had released the bundle of feathers only to reengage as the human moved it away and started making it scurry across the floor.

(The movement was enough to stir his own hunting instincts, which surprised him. Such a crude toy shouldn’t have been enough to tempt him, but something about the way the human made it move made the small bundle come to life. He had enough practise that supressing the instinct to chase it was easy enough, but he could understand how Ranboo, with his much newer instincts, couldn’t focus on anything else.)

Phil considered the human, who was glancing between the toy and Ranboo with the same focus as Ranboo was giving the toy.

It was possible that this was a method humans used to hunt: creating a fake animal to lure in low-level predators that could then be ambushed was a tactic used by a variety of species in different ecosystems and environments. Still, the way the human was interacting with Ranboo didn’t feel like a hunter stalking its prey; it felt more like the human was trying to teach Ranboo how to hunt.

Of all of the crew’s various species, a human’s method of hunting was probably the closest to an enderian’s. Avians and apistians didn’t hunt, and phantoms like Wilbur only hunted underwater (not an option for enderians, given that water burnt them). Elytrains might hunt similar land-based prey, but they preferred to swoop down on their prey, to use their weight and the larger talons on their feet. He could only guess at the human’s method of hunting, but both humans and enderians would have to approach their prey on land.

He had considered that the human could recognise the chicks as children. There were slight differences in how they interacted with Tubbo, Tommy and Ranboo compared to himself and Wilbur. Wilbur disagreed, arguing that they didn’t have enough evidence to suggest they treated Tubbo, Tommy and Ranboo any differently and pointing out that the human would have no way to know whether the three of them were young or not. (Phil felt that there was a way to tell, even when height or colouring didn’t give it away, but he wasn’t sure how to explain that to Wilbur.)

It was possible, if unlikely, that the human had recognised that Ranboo was at the right age to learn how to hunt, and had decided to do it themselves. It was difficult to think of any other explanation for the human’s behaviour.

“It seems odd that a human would go to the trouble of making something like this,” Wilbur was saying as Phil tuned back in. “Why waste the resources?”

“Teaching children to hunt is never a waste of resources,” Phil countered.

“It is if you’re on a deathworld and they’re not your children.”

Tommy cut in before Phil could respond. “This proves that humans are social!”

“Not necessarily...”

“Mate, tell me that doesn’t look like they’re teaching Ranboo to hunt. Raising young communally is a common behaviour, and I certainly can’t think of any other reason they’d go to all this trouble.” Even adding a noise-based element, he noted fondly, tailoring it to an enderian’s keen hearing.

Wilbur didn’t respond, and the intense focus evident in his tail and fins suggested he wouldn’t be answering quickly.

“What are you talking about?”

The familiar voice startled Phil, who hadn’t been expecting it.

“We were just talking about how humans are actually pack-based,” Tubbo responded cheerily as Ranboo climbed back into the nest. “Were you having fun?”

Ranboo ducked his head, tail coming to curl around one of Tubbo’s arms. “Yeah,” he admitted quietly.

Tommy climbed across the pillows to sit on his other side. “Don’t be like that, ‘boob. We’ve all been there. You remember when I was jumping off everything.” (Phil did. It had been a long month.)

He watched the human hesitantly come to join them, perching near the edge as they stayed an arm’s length away from the trio. Phil chuckled and climbed in next to them, slowly bringing one of his wings up to nudge them closer to the middle and beaming when they followed him willingly. (Having spent most of the previous day sitting with the human to acclimatise them to the nest, he was glad to see his efforts paying off.) He held back from wrapping his wing around them properly, not wanting to push them too far.  

He listened to Tubbo and Tommy reassuring Ranboo and theorising about whether he’d get to be deathworld-level good at hunting if the human kept teaching him. Wilbur sat down too and interjected in the conversation every now and then, though his focus was mostly on his comm (Phil suspected that he was busy researching everything there was to know about helping young enderians develop their hunting instincts, and smiled at the thought of all the ‘helpful’ activities he’d undoubtedly propose tomorrow).

The human sat silently, watching them talking, and Phil liked to imagine that the glint in their blue eyes was their own kind of smile.