Saedah was thoroughly panicked. He repeatedly hit the console, swiped at commands and pushed the throttle. All to no avail.

The ship was going nowhere.

It was trapped.

They were trapped.

Nothing Saedah did could break them free. The sounds coming from him were feral and more than a little alarming, considering Nyx was sharing the cockpit with him.

Curses and jumbled, near-incomprehensible words crashed through the com.

"Nyx?" A single voice, female, broke the cacophony of various curses, the other voices dying out and fading into silence.

"Pen?" Nyx asked, daring to hope.

"Thank the Gods she's alive." Vector half grumbled, half sighed. Then in an exasperated tone, continued, "Dirge, you are such an ASSHOLE."

Nyx hooked up the HUD and got a good look at Mac in his Drakkar blasting the two intruders out of the sky. Three other ships hovered around the Pegasus with the magnetic anchors trapping it. The Valkyrie, Leviathan, and a fomentor fighter bearing the Phoenix mark. Citram's Kitsune hovered further back, ready to dart in to support either Mac or to keep Saedah pinned if necessary. The HUD showed a hostile mark on the Kitsune, showing that she had the Pegasus targeted.

That was certainly never a position she had ever wanted to be in.

"Lay off." Vorn and Saedah said in unison. Vorn scoffed but sounded tired. Saedah's voice was pure poison. Nyx looked sidelong at her companion in the resulting silence.

Silence that stretched on as Saedah glared at what he was looking in the HUD. She couldn't tell if they were talking directly to him, or if he was trying to disable the anchor with sheer force of will.

"Can you put my ship down?" Saedah asked with barely-concealed fury. Moments later the ship lurched as it was dropped onto the landing pad. Saedah took the controls and navigated it back to the hatch.

"Saedah," Nyx started as they left to debark.

"Don't!" He hissed, shrugging off her touch.

Kitty flickered into an unsteady projection, trying to speak with her creator. Saedah glared and walked through her. If someone could walk through a projection violently, Saedah did it.

The two entered the house once again, though with markedly more tension between them. The hatch sealed and detached from the ship behind them. Saedah descended the stairs, still in a foul mood. Nyx was left at the top of the stairs, looking between the door and Saedah's back. Nerves had her stomach feeling like a host of live eels, writing in a frenzy, and threatening to turn to nausea if it didn't wind down.

The door opened to reveal Penance, Flux, Raze, Ker, and Phoenix in their Apollo Skins. Ker was the only one to swivel her head to take in the interior. As they stepped through the threshold, they removed their helmets. As a whole, they looked like a mixture between concern and anger.

"We weren't sure if he'd killed you, to be honest." Vector whispered with a wink of his peculiar three-pupiled eye, coming to her side with Mac as the others approached the stairs to chase Saedah. "Where'd he go?" The scales of his face and neck reflected blue in the light. His blue, marbled eyes adjusted to the low light. The vertical 'string of pearls' pupils grew, consuming the large iris. When he winked, it was with the opaque second set of lids that closed from the outside edge toward his nose. She felt that he did it to throw people off. It worked.

Nyx could only point down toward the North wing. The notion that that they thought Saedah had killed her sent ice through her veins.

Mac looked her over as he circled her.

"What?" She asked, having only felt uncomfortable under his gaze during their first meeting.

"Where are your injuries?" He asked, concerned. He prodded her bloody nose with his thumbs and ran a finger along the bruise forming across the left half of her face.

"I have none, other than bumps and bruises." She scrunched her eyebrows in confusion. "Why?"

"There was dried blood out there." He pointed over his shoulder to the hatch and she remembered the incident with the cats.

"That," She sighed, "was a kitten." She said 'kitten' as though it were a curse.

"He didn't try to kill you?" Vector asked. "'Cause his eyes in the arena…" Vector let the sentence hang and Nyx only shrugged.

"He did, sort of. He was more interested in leaving that rock first, thank the suns. By the time he could kill me, I'd talked myself out of a painful death, I think." she looked between Mac and Vector, seeing the doubt on their faces.

"I wouldn't put too much trust in that." Mac said slowly, looking around. "He brought you here. This isn't a place he would bring an outsider." He winced at the look on Nyx's face. "I may be wrong, though."

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"Even Vidian's never been here. Though she's had a couple opportunities. Invitations. Things just never worked out." Vector mumbled.

Nyx knew she was still an outsider. She hadn't gained the status of Ghost, nor the status of friend with all of them. Vidian, for one, remained wary and distrustful of her most of the time. The woman was kind enough when there was a good time to be had, but when it came to their lives, she consistently second-guessed everything Nyx provided. Nyx had only months to her resume with the crew, where they had years with one another.

"I'm not so easily killed." She waved away further concerns. "He needs some serious treatment, Mac. Mentally and physically." She grimaced at the memories of what he had put himself through, "He skinned himself earlier." She raised a hand to forestall questions, "Just to look at his hardware. The damn cat took a chunk out of the other arm and scratched him up pretty good. That's not counting everything else that happened to him. He is literally covered with stitches and blood, and I really do not know how he is even conscious." She took a deep breath and set Mac with a hard stare. "AND he went through whatever it takes to insert nodes."

Vector and Mac looked at one another.

"Yeah," She continued. "And the fact that the nerves in his left arm are non-organic has made him want to lop the whole thing off, just so he can wear the suit again." She rapped the Drakkar Skin with a knuckle for emphasis.

"You saw that?" Vector asked, brow raised. "The procedure?"

"Yes, and the stubborn mule still hasn't had the tea that Kitty told me to give him." At this point, Mac was turning a deep shade of red. Vector glanced at him and winced.

"He's gonna get it." Vector mumbled and shook his head as Mac stalked off mumbling under his breath about idiots. The young Agamid looked back to Nyx and smiled, saying, "We'll keep you around. Don't worry. What do you say about us getting some grub fixed up?"

Nyx smiled. During the months she had spent with the Ghosts, Vector and she had become friends in the kitchen. Not that she could really cook back then, but she gave an honest attempt to learn. And she wasn't afraid to laugh at her utter failure. Neither was Vector, but now she could be more help in the kitchen than hindrance. Provided that she was given instructions. Without instruction, there were no guarantees that she wouldn't burn or otherwise ruin everything she touched.

As the two gathered ingredients, Nyx told Vector about what had occurred throughout the day. Gods, had it only been a day? She went into detail about everything.

Midway into her telling, Citram stormed into the kitchen, grabbed Nyx's arm similar to how Saedah had just minutes prior, and dragged her back to the Solarium. Saedah glared at the others from where he leaned against the glass wall. His flesh was criss-crossed with puckered scars and wrapped in bandages. The contrast between his appearance and that of the two sitting on the bench before him was stark. The Apollo skins seemed to draw a divide between them wider than the galaxy itself.

"You let him do this?" Citram demanded, indicating all of Saedah.

"I'm not sure what you mean by that." Nyx responded indignantly. "He did some himself, yes. I'm also not sure what you mean about me letting him do it. He's a fully grown male warrior. I wasn't aware any of your species' required a female's approval for anything." She looked between the Ghosts without looking at Saedah. Vidian smothered a smile before it could fully form. Vorn just looked cross with everyone as he pinched the bridge of his nose. Citram threw up her hands like everyone had lost their minds.

"What did you want me to do?" Nyx demanded, but continued without waiting for answers. "We rescued him. Or rather, we provided one hell of a distraction while he saved himself. Granted, he got in the way of that…" She looked at him then. Saedah only shrugged nonchalantly. "So for what, exactly, am I in trouble here?" She looked Citram in the eye, head held high, and waited.

"You helped him into the pod. You know what he did." Citram pointed at Nyx accusingly. The fox's pale cheeks were splotched red with anger bleeding to the surface.

"Not like I knew that when I put him in there!" Nyx exclaimed indignantly, "And honestly, I probably wouldn't have stopped him, either. He could have had some patience and actually let himself heal first, though." She kept her eyes on Citram.

"You support his decision to remove his arm?" While it was a question, Vorn said it as a statement. Nyx took it as a question, in any case.

"I can't say that I fully support it. But I don't believe there is enough reason to hold him back. There is plenty of reason to let him do what will let him heal." She crossed her arms and went on, "And is it not his decision, in the end, to do what he wants to do to his body? He isn't talking about killing himself, so why is this an issue of allowance?"

Vorn was looking at her strangely. They all were, for that matter.

Vector walked up behind her and wrapped his arms around Citram and Nyx.

"I couldn't have said it better, little sister." He grinned and winked at Saedah. "While Saedah is, was, and always will be a pain in the ass, we can't force him to take a desk job. How would you like it if you were forced out of commission when an alternative was plausible?" The question was aimed at Citram, who ignored it. Vector turned his eyes on the others, before turning back to his woman.

"The alternative will result in him losing an arm, Vector." Citram ground out.

"He wouldn't necessarily be losing an arm, Citram." Mac said in his serious monotone. "But swapping it for another." He was swiping at a slate and not looking at anyone as he walked down the path. "I gathered the data he recorded, and I think it's probably a good idea to go ahead with his wish."

"Wha- why?" Citram stammered. Vector whispered in her ear and her cheeks bled red. "No, I will not give off. I want to know why this idiot won't…" Her whisper was louder than she intended until Vector released Nyx and clamped a hand over Citram's mouth. Pure outrage consumed Citram but she held it.

"Because this isn't 500 years ago and prosthetics aren't much of a hindrance any more. It may also complement his fighting style, given time." Mac glared at the woman as he explained what he obviously thought he did not need to explain. He turned - irritably - to Saedah before forcing himself to relax, "I need to go through our inventory to see if we have the materials we would need, but once everything is available, we can do the operation." Mac continued speaking directly with Saedah, but Nyx missed everything else. With less room than Nyx would have liked, Citram flipped Vector over her shoulder and stormed out of the Solarium.

Vector coughed from the gravel at Nyx's feet, but no one paid any attention to them. This activity between Citram and Vector was fairly routine when there was no risk of outside eyes or ears. It was a comforting thought that not everything had changed. They were still the people she had grown to love. They were still the people who would drive her crazy with their antics.

Nyx had been shocked the first time she had gotten a glimpse of their real selves. The first time they showed their humanity. The side of them that no one else had seen.