She had tea and a large plate of curry waiting for him in the kitchen when he got out. He had followed the scent of food (something that he seemed to always want nowadays), and found her munching away at her own plate with another right next to her. She gestured to it with her chin, as her mouth was full, to show it was for him, so he sat down with a quiet thank you. Tyson would have had seizures hearing so much gratitude from him.

They ate in quiet. He couldn't help himself from stealing a few glances of her. He dared any man not to. About the third time, however, he caught her glancing up at him as well. She flushed and turned back to her curry before she could have spot the heat crawling up to his face as well.

"Sorry! I never got the chance to see your feathers, the gray at the tips—I mean, I was kind of..." She turned her face even further to hide her face behind her hair, even trailing a bit in her curry. "You're beautiful."

A hot chill ran up his spine and his stomach did a giddy twist behind his ribs. Had she just...did that mean he should say he found her beautiful too? Wait, was beautiful even the right thing to say to a freak guy like him? But then, he wouldn't be a freak to her...

Damn it...it still didn't matter.

Sighing to himself, he reached out and pulled the lock of white hair that had fallen into her curry. She jerked around to see what he was doing and her face turned even more red, if possible.

"Stupid hair," she grabbed a cloth from the stove to rub it. "Would you believe me if I said Tyson and Grandpa don't have a single hair band? They tie back their mop heads with whatever torn piece of fabric they can get their hands on. Like they'd ever had to deal with this much..."

Kai reached into his pocket for a hair band. He had found them useful in keeping his ever lengthening tail feathers in a bundle easy enough to stuff down his pants. Without a word he stood and walked behind her, where he cautiously scooped back her hair. He didn't know what pushed him to take the initiative to be in close contact with another being. Perhaps it had been because he had seen her naked, even helped bathe her, so such boundaries were hard to replace. But she didn't seem to mind, so he gingerly pulled back her soft, satin smooth waves into a loose (maybe even too loose because he feared pulling at her hair) ponytail.

"Thank you," she said, giving him a smile over her shoulder.

He shrugged. "Tail feathers." He meant to explain more than that, but his voice was even harder to find than usual.

"Really? Are they that long?"

Her eyes went down and, since he knew for sure he was so not going to unzip his pants and pull out his tail, he robot-marched to his seat and started scarfing down food as though nothing had happened. He should have taken a longer shower; used up all of Tyson's hot water, anything.

"Ray told me he saw you breathe fire," she said, rather lamely, as though she herself was having a problem coming up with conversation topics.

He shrugged, lucky to have his mouth full. He planned on pretending to take a nap somewhere or puppy-guarding the laundry after this.

Ayah fiddled with a piece of potato in her curry. "Kai, why are you so afraid of me? I can think of reasons but my father always told me not to assume and...if it's because of what happened back in that room of Cain's, I promise I won't do it again."

"I'm not afraid of you," he said most stoutly, which was true...right? "Just how much can you hear? What makes you think I'm afraid?"

"Your heartbeat," she said. "And your breathing. And...well, there are certain kinds of 'alarms' I guess you can say that I can hear from the human body, beneath the sound of the heartbeat and breathing. One is when the body is injured, and if said person's heart rate happens to be up, it increases the blood flow and makes the alarm easier for me to hear. The other alarm also happens when the blood flow is sped up, but it's usually something like...potential. Like the whole body starts to hum with pent up energy in case they need to run or fight or use it for something, which is what happens when someone is stressed or afraid, right?" Her brow wrinkled and her eyes widened with earnestness. "Right now it's that second kind of alarm with you. You're all pent up for something. Though...you're usually pent up like that, so I guess I was just getting jumpy when I heard it pick up around me..."

He snorted. "So, essentially it's not too accurate. You don't just hear when someone is afraid, you hear it when their body is under stress."

"Unless they speak on it," she said. "I mean, you don't have to have hearing like mine to hear things in people's voices. That's what voices are for, after all: communicating. Expression." She cocked her head to the side, giving a gentler edge to the way she looked at him. "It was the fear in your voice on the ship that woke me up. I don't want you to be afraid, Kai. I've heard the alarms going off in your body since I met you, and no body, human or otherwise, can live that twisted up and loud for too long. It'll make you sick."

He shrugged. "Not much I can do about that. It's the way they made me."

"You're the one who makes you."

"Then maybe they gave me really good reason to be this way." He swallowed the last bite and stood to take his plate to the sink. "Either way, it's none of your business, so stop worrying. There's nothing for you to do."

"I can't always control what I feel."

"But you can choose what you do with it." He turned about, drying his hands on a rag. "Back to your original question, though: I use to be afraid of you. I didn't trust you, and I think you already know why. But I'm not afraid of you anymore." He hesitated. "What you're hearing is probably discomfort. I don't much care for being around people."

He hoped she left it at that, but her eyes locked him in place long enough for her to ask why. For someone who said they wanted him to not feel nervous or stressed anymore, she was doing a smashing good job of doing just that by putting him on the spot like this. God, he hated questions about himself. There was this huge gray nebulous of answers that could be wrong, right, neither, or partially one or the other, and he preferred his world to be black and white. Not to mention he didn't want anyone's opinion on himself, which would just blur the lines even more.

"I just am," he said. "People aren't exactly comforting."

She stilled and turned her blue gaze away. "I suppose you're right...is there any way I could be comforting? So you're not nervous around me."

"Look, I'd rather not talk about my feelings, and either way I don't think there's anything you can do. It's just who I am."

He put down the towel and left to check the laundry for how much time was left, then headed for the backyard to get some air. It was good to feel the late September sun on his feathers. That trench coat could suffocate the life out of anyone if worn for so long.

He stayed out in the sun, occasionally stretching out his wings for a lazy flap, letting his mind wander and listening to the sounds of the slow suburb traffic outside the dojo walls. He kept his senses peeled for intruders in the case he needed to hide himself, but mostly he just daydreamed of a place where he could wander free, or even of the life he could have had if he hadn't have gone weird. But then that led to what if he had never met Ayah. Ayah had started all of this. Ayah was the reason he was what he was.

And she knew it. He didn't need special hearing to see her unease about him as well, and she had many reasons to be uneasy.

This thought made him sigh. He had been so preoccupied with his own discomfort that he hadn't even stopped to think about hers. Just added another nail into the coffin of why he must never become intimate with her. Tyson could handle him half the time, but even Tyson had never gotten too close. No one had.

He put a hand to his brow, a forefinger and thumb to his temples. "I really am afraid of everything."

Pathetic.

Eventually, he heard the timer beep and went inside to throw his clothes into the dryer. Ayah almost beat him to it, but they caught each other in the hallways instead, where they looked at each other awkwardly until her face turned pink and she put her hands up to hide it. He frowned as he opened the washer machine lid.

"I guess I don't have to ask why you're so nervous around me, then." He chucked in the first armful of damp cloth. "Will you actually listen to me if I say the whole...hatching, slime, naked episode really doesn't matter?"

She groaned and replaced her hands on her face with her arms. "Why'd you have to mention that?"

"What? You have other reasons?" He closed the washer machine with a clang. "I'm not threatening you anymore, and even when I did you didn't seem too fazed by that."

"Do you even have to ask?"

"You said something about not assuming." In with the fabric softener. Smelled of lavender, the same scent as El 'la Tyson's oddly clean bed.

"I...I tried to get you to sleep with me..."

He snorted. "Yeah, your mind was about as clear as it was when you were unconscious and covered in ooze—"

"I was thinking plenty clearly!"

Her sharpness caught him off guard. She had even dropped her arms to reveal her face, despite the pink flush to her cheeks. It only lasted a few moments though before she wavered beneath his gaze and looked away.

"Think whatever you want of me for doing that, but don't take it lightly. I knew exactly what I was doing. I honestly thought you would die if you faced him, along with everyone else, because I had given it all I could to use my powers to fight him when he---but--"

"Stop." He didn't want to hear anymore. He started the dryer. He hadn't meant to hurt her, but he supposed it was inevitable.

"I'm sorry, you didn't want to hear that—oh, why did I even mention that?" She covered her face with her hands again and even sank down to the floor, her tail feathers broadening as though to stop a decent in flight.

"Stop that too," he mumbled. When she didn't stand up, he sighed and dropped down in front of her as well. When she didn't drop her hands, even after he asked her too, he figured it wouldn't affect her hearing anyways. "Look, we survived. It's over. We did what we had to. If I make you nervous, fine. I don't need you to be comfortable around me anyways. I just came here to do my laundry, not to clear any air."

"I know. But I want to know you." She looked up, and he could see through her fingers that she had steeled herself to look into his eyes. "I want to be close to you, whether you want it or not. Or, no, what I mean is—well, if you don't want to be friends or—I mean, I wasn't trying to get close because of what you were acting or saying, crap, but I guess I was, or—"

His chuckle caught them both off guard. Somewhere among all the heat flooding to his skin and stoking the flames in his gut, something ridiculously happy bubbled up to his mouth. It made no sense. He knew he shouldn't feel like this. But she made him feel all sorts of stuff that defied logic.

"I get what you're saying," he pushed out. "But I'm afraid you're under some misunderstanding. I have nothing to offer you. I don't know if you've noticed, but I don't make the most happy of friend. If you need beyblade training or some fire, I suppose so, but I think what you're looking for is a bit different from that."

"Are you saying there's nothing likable about you? Why can't I just like you for the sake of it?"

The heat in his face was increasing, and his stupid insides wouldn't stop dancing. "I-I, ugh, look, don't make me spell it out—"

"You have to get something out of relationships and you're saying you don't have anything to give," she said. "I can hear you, Kai, and all we've had up to this point is you growling at me and me screwing things up for you, but you don't know what I see, so don't try to decide it for me. I think you have plenty to offer."

He gave her his most blank stare, which, for some reason, amused her. She hopped closer to him and bent her head in, almost conspiratorially. Thoughts of kissing her threw his thoughts into a mess.

"You're the only other winged person in the world. Let's practice flying."

He somehow managed to tug out something from the toppled remains of his coherent thought. "What about Max?"

"He doesn't have wings. He's managed to Skype with us a few times. He's all, like...armored, sort of, you'll have to see for yourself. His mom's been running tests to try and understand what's happened. It's just you and me." Her smile grew so wide he thought he might be able to see all her white teeth, and happy creases narrowed her eyes. "Besides, I could still technically be a threat to the others, right? You got to keep an eye on me if nothing else. I bet you even know some good spots we could practice."