Chapter 2

Green Tea

What comes out of the tap the next morning smells both vaguely foul and antiseptic at once. That'll be the broadband, then. They're forced to fetch their water reserves from the car to drink Four more nights of this—Nat is going to be carefully washing up in the sink again until they're out of here. A short lived luxury, that shower was. At least their hair feels better now.

While Ron fetches breakfast, Nat figures they should do something about their freedom of movement.

The other sleeping quarters surrounding the room that they've been put up in are all behind locked doors, naturally. Which will not stop Nat, naturally. They’ve done this a hundred times by now. These doors are old and neglected, and the last time any of the locks were adjusted was probably fifty years ago. Nat stands there with their ear to the door for a long moment, then, certain that nobody is inside, digs their multi tool out of a pocket of their cargo pants. The traveler hook glides right in, and Nat feels for the latch, wiggles it, and just like that, the door is open.

Setup-wise, this room looks just like theirs. There's a single bed to the left and a closet towards the back. But instead of being empty, there are personal artifacts all but piled up—books, shoes, jackets, a computer. Nat goes through it all quickly, running through the drawers, patting down the clothes. They retrieve a key card from the inner pocket of a uniform jacket, and admire the shine of the scratched up, bright yellow plastic between their fingers. How good it is to be a thief. The world is their oyster now—that is to say, a shut off, secluded space full of grime. But at least they can use the elevator with this thing. And, this early in the morning, they figure they’ll give it a go immediately. Ron probably isn’t back yet anyways.

It leads them onto different floors. On each, Nat just briefly pokes their nose through the doors, not planning to stay very long. Floor -1 is the parking lot. Then there's the one they're sleeping on, the living floor, complete with sleeping quarters, canteens, and the admin office. That's -2. Going further down, there's a floor with a kitchen and a wash room, something that looks like storage, then there's the machinery, the water vats, and a floor fully for food production, where the smell of death makes Nat frantically smack their hand against the door closer.

But just as the doors shut, the spot it, all the way across the hallway. "Huh," they say under their breath. "That's interesting," and, the fabric of their turtleneck pulled over their mouth, open the door again. Where they'd expect just one door, there are two, kitty corner from each other. Gripped with curiosity, Nat opens the second, and is faced with a stairwell that exclusively goes down. This is the lowest floor that the elevator should be going to, there’s nothing else after -7. What's going on?

For a moment, their hand hesitates on the door handle. Is this a good idea? What are they sticking their nose into here? Most likely, this is just an older part of the building that's fallen out of use, right?

Ron would want to get in on this. And they're hungry. So Nat turns around and tucks this away for later.

“The hell took you so long?” Ron asks, draped back against the head of the bed, a half eaten steaming fresh bread roll in his hand, and three more on a napkin. He wrinkles his nose. “And what’s that smell?”

“Ugh, don’t tell me I smell now,” Nat complains, and sniffs the fabric of their thin sweater.

“Where were you?” he asks, through a mouthful of food.

“Oh, I got us some freedom of movement.” They hold up the key card.

“Oh dude, nice!”

“Isn’t it just? Give me one of those,” Nat demands, hand outstretched. “Are these baked in house?”

“They have this machine in the canteen that does it for you. You can even pick the filling.”

“Wow. Something that us proles can only dream about.” Nat flops onto the foot end of the bed and pulls the fluffy bread apart between their fingers, discovering a swirl of red and green inside. “Beans?”

“And spinach. So spit it out, what’d you find?”

Nat grins. “Want me to show you later?”

“Sounds like a date!”

Stomachs full, they pick their way through the empty corridors of the facility to find out what kind of free labor they’ll be doing today. It’s early in the morning, early enough that the sun is still rising outside the concrete walls, though all they have in here is the flicker of the overhead lights. The rubber floors squeak underneath their shoes, and door by door goes by as they round corner after corner. After about the second turn, everything starts to look the same. And worst of all, they don't see a single soul.

"Ugh. Creepy," Ron whispers.

"Not great, no," Nat agrees. "Do you think—"

"That they're hiding something from us? Dunno. Maybe."

"Well, perhaps not hiding. But... Sugarcoating?"

Ron snorts. "Fuck, man. What that Leeway guy told us already wasn’t great. If it’s worse, then I don't know if I really want to think about it. I mean, is this our problem?"

"It is so not."

Leeway's office is on the -2nd floor, same as the sleeping quarters, so they don't need to use the elevator again. Unfortunately, every single door on this floor looks exactly the same. It's only when they start reading every single door sign individually that Nat spots his name, stuck over a different door sign with what could not be more clearly a label maker sticker, next to a door they must’ve walked past thrice. Nat thunks the side of their head against it, wide eyed with a silent, disbelieving exasperation. No words needed. Ron laughs so hard he wheezes.

"Oh," Leeway opens the door to the sound, and Nat and Ron once again straighten their backs, quickly collecting themselves. "Hello and good morning. I hope you found my office without too many issues?"

"Define too many!" Nat jokes, and lets him beckon them in.

Ron shuts the door behind them as Nat lets their eyes wander around his office. He keeps it dark, the only lights coming from the glow of three large screens. There are surprisingly few personal artifacts, and the ones that are here are dusty and untouched. There’s a framed photo of a family, tucked away behind one of the monitors, but Nat recognizes none of the people in it.

"Did you have your breakfast yet?" Leeway asks by way of conversation as he opens a 3-dimensional view of the facility on a screen with a wipe of his hand.

"Yep," Ron confirms, casting glances of his own around the office.

"Good, good. Let's get to it, then.” That’s all the small talk they’re gonna get, huh? “I can't leave you running around this facility on your own," Leeway says, "As I’m sure you've noticed, you can't access any of the other floors without a key card, and I can't give you one of your own."

"You can't or you won't?" Ron asks.

Leeway shoots him a displeased look, rubbing his back like it aches.

"Joke!" Ron raises his hands.

"Right," Leeway says, humorless. "In any case, I'm busy and can't mind you the entire time, so I'll be asking an employee to guide you through this building instead."

"Right," Nat says, "that sounds reasonable." They're getting a babysitter, probably the combination door guard and nurse again. Awesome. What doesn’t she do?

"I'm glad you think so," Leeway nods, and brings up a list of contacts titled ‘Internal’ to call a number labeled 'New Admin'. Briefly, Nat’s eyes skim over the rest of them. There’s maybe twenty people on here. "Miss Ginny," Leeway leans into the screen, "Will you come pick up the filter technicians at my office, please? As discussed."

"Right away!" a woman's voice sounds out, a voice that definitely doesn’t belong to the only other person they’ve seen here. But before Nat can form any deeper opinions, Leeway already hangs up.

"Now," he says, "we have about three or four days left of this storm. I already showed you two our main issue with the filters yesterday, but additionally, I'd also like you to check all the water siphons at the pools. Since you're already here."

Nat has to physically keep themself from grinding their teeth. “Naturally,” they drawl. “That’s what we’re here for, after all.” They pointedly don’t ask him what he will be doing those four nights, and whether it will involve a lot of sitting on his ass. Nor do they ask whether they’ll be paid for this extra work. However big the paycheck he’s wiring, it won’t be going to them either way.

On the way out, Nat pockets an expensive looking paperweight. Since they're already here.

"Babysitter, eh?" Ron grins as they loiter around in front of Leeway's office. They let him do whatever important job it is that he has to do with the door shut.

"You think she's going to let us eat ice cream before bed?" Nat grins right back as they move to stand on his good side. “I don’t believe this is going to be the blond one again, though. Have you caught her name yet?”

“Not a damn clue.”

"Hi!" somebody calls down the hallway.

Ron and Nat both turn, to the sight of a woman waving.

Ron raises a hand to wave back, but all Nat can look at is her long black hair. "Oh, she stole my shtick," they grumble under their breath.

"Hi," the woman—girl? Says again, breathlessly, when she's close enough to stick her hand out towards them both for a handshake. "You two are the filtration techs? I totally expected someone older! Call me Matcha." She’s in a straight cut grey sweater and tight black pants, both of which are wrinkled.

"Sup Matcha," Ron grins, but doesn't take her hand. Neither does Nat. "I'm Gabriel, this is—"

"Alexis."

"Nice to meet you both," Matcha smiles as she awkwardly takes back her unshaken hand.

"And you're not the first one to note how young we are," Nat drawls. "Though I wouldn't have expected that from someone our age." They size her up. Nat can’t quite tell, but they figure she has to be somewhere around twenty.

"Oh, yeah, I guess that's kind of a weird thing to say of me," Matcha laughs, and nervously tucks her hair behind one ear. On the other side of her face, a thick curtain of her hair is falling into her brown cat-like face. It’s thick, pin straight, and dull looking, and where it hits her waist, split ends are starting to form. Nat eyes her thin wrists. She looks straight up malnourished, or perhaps like she hasn’t done physical labor a day in her life. While they dwell on that, however, Ron is already chatting her up.

"Nah, you're fine," Ron waves it off. "Don't sweat it. Techies are usually older. But, y’know, someone’s got to take up the mantle!”

“That’s true,” she smiles, visibly relieved.

“Got a question, though!” he says. “Not many people here. Are you, the head of guy, and the combination guard and nurse literally the only ones here?"

She laughs, and it sounds immediately fake. Practiced. "What? No way. You haven't met anyone else?"

"Nope," Ron says. "That's the whole list, dude." Nat gives him side eye, which he ignores. What happened to this being none of their business?

"Wellllllll." She drags the word out far past its welcome, then sighs. "Look, I have no idea how much I'm supposed or even allowed to tell you. Sorry, it’s not you, I promise."

That makes Nat perk up despite themself. "Oh, what? Come on. We all know what happened here. Somebody messed up their duties, you had an enormous zombie problem, everybody jumped ship, and now your word of mouth reviews are at rock bottom and you're sweating to rehire."

Matcha wraps a strand of her hair around her finger, nervous.

"What?" Ron blinks. "No, c'mon. That’s totally what happened. Just nod your head yes, dude."

Matcha hisses air between her teeth. "It's just suuuch a PR disaster. The entire thing. We should totally make you sign an NDA just for even being here. Sooo, Mister Leeway told you about the zombie that got into our facility, right? Hey—let's walk while we talk, how about that?" She drawls a lot as she talks, dragging her words, her voice going up and down in cadence, almost a sing song. Nat decides that it's incredibly annoying.

"So, like..." Matcha starts as she leads them through the corridors. "The thing here is that it wasn't just a zombie breaking in and falling briefly into one of the vats. Right? It fell in there and nobody noticed for hours.”

“It contaminated the entire water supply,” Nat says. “We’ve been told.”

“Well, but that kind of undersells it? The person who was supposed to check that area was off doing—well, honestly, who even knows. But yeah, by the time the alarm went off, it had contaminated more than two hundred liters of water. And, you know, it's water. It's flowing and you can't really, like, draw a clear line of where it's polluted and what's where?"

"...Right," Nat says, stunned at the mental image. It’s still fucking with their head just how much water there is in one place here. How much are two hundred liters, even?

"And then they tried to clean that water, and they thought it was safe." Haunted, Matcha pauses. "So they gave the go ahead to send it through the facility again, let it run from the tabs here before we would supply the surrounding cities again. But it wasn't clean."

"Damn," Ron says, wincing with sympathy. "Man, that's fucking creepy."

Matcha smiles, wavering. "People died. And, well, you know what happens when someone feels sick because they drank infected water, go to their room to lay down and die, and nobody thinks to check on them because nobody knows yet that that’s what’s going on."

"More people die," Ron says.

"Yeeeaaah," Matcha drags out, then adds in a jarringly chipper tone, "So it's, like, really good that you two are here to take a look at the filter and all the machinery!"

"No kidding," Nat says. The tips of their fingers feel numb with anxiety.

"So, uh." Ron clears his throat. "You saw all this happen? Or..."

"Oh, no! Nooo," she shakes her head. "No, I got here after they were already... I helped clean up."

"Eesh."

"I'm an auditor with the county," she explains. "I got sent here to like, look at the damage, do some math about what went wrong and how likely this is to happen again, and report all the names of everyone who died so they can be written out of the census."

"Grim," Nat smiles.

Matcha laughs, embarrassed. "It's not that bad of a jobbbb," she drags out. "I'm also doing admin stuff while I'm here, though. Just to help out."

“Because it actually is only you three,” Ron concludes.

"And they're having you watch us on top of that?" Nat snorts.

"I know, right?" Matcha smiles. "But it's all hands on deck. I can just do my other two jobs when you’re done."

She stays with them the entire time they're working on the filters. Here and there, she even lends a hand, but her wrists are small and her nails are long and painted, and getting her to hold on tight to a component turns out to be an ordeal and a half.

To top it all off, and it bears repeating, Nat and Ron aren't even filtration techs. They’ve seen this machinery before, sure, appraised it on scrap metal markets and stolen it off the backs of trucks to sell. But selling something, stripping it for parts, isn’t the same as understanding whether it’s broken, or even repairing it when it is, it turns out.

More than once, Ron has to distract Matcha from breathing down their necks, so Nat can get out their phone and hastily reads through the manuals while she isn’t looking. They'd suggested cheating their way through this and dragging it out until they can fuck off, but for some reason, Ron is absolutely insisting that they at least try to help. The fucking goody two-shoes.

Matcha hangs around them far too much, but they make good progress on the rest of the siphons and the tubes and what not, and Nat can tell that she's warming up to them. She even grabs lunch with them, which is a little much, in their esteemed opinion. It leaves them drumming their fingers against the canteen table, head in their hand as Ron and Matcha take turns prattling on and laughing, with only a few words here and there from Nat. He even shows her a magic trick with the napkins. Ugh.

When the work is done for the day and they're too tired to go on, they're about two thirds through the pools, and have managed to fix almost all of the respective siphons. By the second one, it started feeling a little more manageable, and by the fifth, Nat felt confident enough in their skills that they stopped looking things up.

All said and done, Ron sits back on his heels and heaves a big breath. "Woof. You know what I could go for right now? Some ice cold chimarrão."

Matcha perks up. "Wait, that's that South American drink, right? Served in those round brown things?"

Ron shoots her a finger gun. "Sure is! Damn, you recognized that?"

"I have an internet friend from Argentina, and she loves that drink!" she beams, and just like that, the two of them are off on a wild tangent about culture and language and religion. Which, mind, are just about Nat's favorite topics, and they try to join in a couple times, but after the fifth jump in topic and the sixth time they get cut off, Nat finally snaps their mouth shut and keeps it that way.

When they start to head for the canteen to get something to eat, Nat excuses themself towards bed with a headache. Neither of the other two seems to mind, or really even extend the proper amount of pity. Scorned, Nat stalks off towards their room and lays down.

When Ron doesn’t make it back to the room two hours past dinner time, they weave their way back to the canteen to grab for a midnight snack for later. Gods know what he's up to, with how little one can do on this floor. They only have one key card right now, and Nat is carrying that. Hell, given that they left him deep in conversation with Matcha, he’s probably still talking to—well, what do you know.

Matcha closes the door to the maintenance and admin office behind her. She looks over her shoulder, head ducked, then startles when she turns and sees Nat, in a way she hasn’t startled all day. And Ron is nowhere in sight. Nat smells blood in the water.

"Heyyy," they drawl out, grinning like a shark as they sidle up to her.

"Hi!" she smiles, unsure. "Still, like, um. Up so late?"

"It's not that late," Nat blows her off, and leans their arm against the wall of the office, standing a little closer than absolutely necessary. "What about you? Sneaking around, huh?"

Matcha swallows, the warmth visibly leaving her brown cheeks. "Whaaaaat," she laughs, "Sneaking around?"

"Oh, come on, I'm kidding," Nat bumps their elbow into her arm. "I mean, you work here, right? That would be silly." They watch her, squinting.

"Like, so silly," Matcha agrees, rubbing her arm. "What about you? Where have you, uh… Been?"

"I was laying down," Nat huffs. "Not like either of you checked on me."

“Aw, I’m sorry,” she frowns. “How is your head? Are you feeling any better?”

“I mean—I’m fine,” they shrink, taken aback.

“Would you like me to take a look at it?”

Matcha twirls a strand of her hair around her finger. She's leaning in now, all attentive and smiley, flirting, when she hasn't been disinterested in Nat for the entirety of the time they've known each other.

“What, you want me to let you look at my head? It’s just a headache.”

“But maybe something could be done about it! I’ve had to take quite a bit of medical training for this job, you know?”

And, hang on a moment. Didn’t she explicitly say that she doesn’t have medical training just this morning? That she only does accident reports and workplace safety? And all those little pieces of info that don’t seem to match up, all those hesitations and pauses as she’s asked about herself. Things she said were true and then forgot. Things she said she knew nothing about, then later had a whole rant about. Suddenly, with a shock of clarity, Nat recognizes what she's doing.

She's a liar. Nat nearly laughs out loud—oh no, no, she's not some stuffy babysitter who's just overly friendly. This girl is not an airhead. She's like Nat and Ron. She's an artist. A con artist, that is.

"Oh, that’s so nice of you, I’d love to take you up on that," they grin. "But I totally forgot something in Leeway's office earlier, so let me just—" They move to open the door to maintenance and admin and Matcha twinges like she wants to lunge. Nat watches her, but she just smiles nervously, too cowardly to actually stop them, so they step inside.

It's empty. As they suspected. Leeway is out, probably for the day. Who knows when his actual working hours are, but there isn’t a way in hell that he works this late. Nat lets their eyes glide over the room in a quick once over, but nothing looks out of place. The paperweight they stole left behind an imprint in the dust that hasn’t even been wiped away. So what exactly was Matcha doing in here?

She closes the door behind her, looking for all intents and purposes like a lamb going to slaughter. Nat mentally corrects themself. No, she's not at all like Ron and them. She is bad at this.

She leans in then, and, oh, she's put a hand on Nat's arm. Nat raises a single eyebrow at her, and she tilts her head, biting her lip in a smile.

"Sooo," she drags out. "Did you just want to get me alone?"

"Oh," Nat laughs. "I wanted to get you alone, alright. Look—"

Matcha puts a gentle hand onto their shoulder. She casts a glance at them as if asking for permission before she slides her arm behind their neck, leaning her hip against theirs, and Nat is too stunned and fascinated by the audacity to protest.

They were trying to do something here, but they've been driving through the desert for two weeks now with barely a break except to refill their car, and it's been too goddamn long that anyone has come onto them like this.

"You're such a fascinating person, you know that," Matcha murmurs, low. From this close, Nat can count her lashes—thick and blackened—but also the blemishes on her skin that she's tried to hide underneath thick makeup, texturing her cheeks.

"I mean," Nat falters. "Am I? I mean, I am. Of course I am."

Matcha gently pushes them back against Leeway’s desk. They're speechless—but they bump a notebook, and it hits the ground.

"Wait, I'll get it," Matcha gasps as Nat uses the opportunity and ducks out of her grasp, but it's too late. Nat is face to face with the main frame of the admin computer. And along with it, a small gray cable which dangles from the back of it, plugged into one of the ports, inconspicuous if it wasn't for the attached small black box tucked away against the wall.

The notebook in hand, Nat reaches for it, then thinks better of it and puts their sleeve over their hand before they unplug it. Standing, they hold it in Matcha's face, and she looks like she's about to throw up with panic.

"What did you say you're here for again?" Nat goads her.

"Audit and admin," she breathes.

"And is this part of audit, or of admin?"

"That isn’t mine."

"Girlie, of course it's yours. You don't sneak around like this for nothing. You could not have acted more suspiciously if you'd folded your hands behind your back and started to whistle." Matcha is speechless. Nat grins. "Now look, I'm not a tattletale. Okay? We can plug this back in and both pretend this never happened."

"What?" Matcha squeaks.

Nat shrugs, languid, letting the notebook drop back onto the desk. "I'm not that invested in the data security of some random water facility. Look, I'm a filtration tech. They're underpaying me so hard it's offensive. However," and they watch Matcha tense, "I have a request."

"In, um, like. In exchange for not being a…”

"A tattletale," they finish the sentence for her, benevolent. "Exactly. See, you're catching on."

Matcha wets her lips, pale as clay. "So."

"Look, you're just getting on my fucking nerves. Stop hogging my coworker, fuck off into a corner somewhere while we're working, and you and me are gonna get along just great."

"Oh," she breathes. "Oh, you probably think I'm coming on to him. I didn't know you cared this much about—well, he's just your coworker, it's not like you two are—" The look Nat gives her makes her go two shades paler. "I am so sorry. I will back off immediately, I'll—" she stops herself, because Nat has stepped in, close into her personal space.

"Gods, shut up," they growl. "Do you ever just do that? Do you ever shut up?" Matcha quickly nods her head. "Good," Nat grits their teeth, all the angrier because she’s right. "Keep doing that. I have absolutely zero interest in ratting you out to anyone, because see above, I don't give a shit. But what I do give a shit about is someone in my territory, pissing on my tree. Got it?"

"Got it," Matcha whispers.

Nat grins and holds the little device out to her. Matcha scrambles to bring the fabric of her sleeves over her hands first to avoid leaving prints, clever girl, before Nat drops it into her palms.

They pat her arm condescendingly and leave without another word.

Ron still isn’t back in their goddamn room. Fine, they think, then he will simply have to miss out on exploring.

It's unclear what they're looking for. Excitement? A distraction? Signs of how the zombie got in? The whole story doesn't actually interest them all that much, and still, Nat finds themself poking around. It could be blamed on their raised hackles, or perhaps on their slowly encroaching cabin fever, or simply on the feeling of wanting to get one up on Ron for disappearing on them when they could have used some goddamn attention.

The corridors stretch. It’s all just vinyl and more vinyl. With the knowledge that this facility is down to the absolute bones with just three people, it becomes very easy to tell which rooms are occupied and which aren’t, simply by how much dust has gathered on the door handles.

Though it turns out that, after pocketing the key card earlier, there isn’t much else to get in these rooms. Some personal artifacts, discarded shoes, half a story of a life lived. As they filch the rooms, Nat feels no particular pity or remorse. These people are dead, and Nat is not. Tough luck, but the living have to keep on going.

Nat walks further down the corridor, running their hand along the slick rubberized walls. They want to see something further away. It feels like they're rubbing free a lottery ticket. Which room is it going to be? This one, this one, this one or… They pick one that's all by itself, located just around the corner of the very end of a corridor, a dead end. It's perfect. They feel the cold metal of the door beneath their hand, push their traveler’s hook into the crevice, and feel for the satisfying click. Nat gently shuts the door behind themself and turns to admire their lottery numbers.

"Oh," they gasp out as the smell hits them. They clamp their nose shut immediately and grab for the top of their turtleneck to pull it over their mouth. What the fuck is that? Did someone leave food in here to rot? Immediately, they turn on their heel again to leave, but that’s when they see it. Squeezed right where the door would open to, the beige carpet is stained a deep brownish red, in an area so large that it makes Nat shiver. And sprouting out of it, small and delicate, stands a single zombie flower. Nat's back hits the wall as they startle away from it on sheer instinct.

They should leave immediately, but there’s just one issue, and that’s that the flower is beautiful. Their mouth covered as well as possible, Nat crouches down and retrieves their field notebook to start sketching. Light purple blossoms stand like starbursts of firework in a bed of soft, feathery foliage that looks like it has been clamped closed. The plant is young, with just a few thin, erect stems, each one slightly prickly. The species is on the tip of their tongue, but the thought leaves them entirely as the flower gently begins to open its green leaves, unfurling them feather by feather, and tilts its blossoms towards Nat.

It's a piece of nature that they see so rarely, a tiny speck of color in the vast ocean of sand and concrete and steel, so incomparable even to the symmetry of the succulents and the thorn-nestled blossoms of the cacti. They’re gripped with the knowledge that have to protect this, nobody can know that this flower has found its way through the cracks. As they only just begin to consider touching it, they realize that their hand is already outstretched—and that's when it strikes them that this fuzzy feeling in their head isn't their own.

Nat startles back like it's burned them. They stumble up and run for the door so fast that they nearly lose their notebook, and it’s not until they've slammed the door of their room shut behind them that they dare to breathe again.

It's that same awful intensity now that sometimes grips them, out there in the desert, the same one that Ron never feels, the one that they can never fully put their finger on.

They must've breathed in its scent. That must be it. They wish they could tell for sure—even just a few seconds afterwards, the memory is already starting to fuzz up. They fumble with the lock code on their phone, hurrying to look it up, but to their horror, the harder they try to grasp for the memory, the more it escapes them. Nat pages for the sketch they made again and is faced with nothing but a few disjointed lines.

This is dangerous. They weren’t in there for much longer than five minutes, were they?

…They cannot report this, though. They should never even have been in that room in the first place.

Horribly, strangely, Nat is happy for the obstacle, happy that nobody will be coming to burn this last little piece of life within these dead walls.

They need to lay down.

It's past midnight when they wake up again. They pick themself out of bed, and just as they're reaching for their pajamas, Ron barges into the room.

“Can you be fucking normal?" he barks, slamming the door shut behind him so hard that it has Nat startling up.

"What?!"

"I fucking know this was you!" he throws his hands up. "Don't play dumb!"

"Ron, I have no earthly idea what you're—"

"Matcha."

Oh. Well, yeah, that one was them.

"I fucking knew it!" he all but shrieks. "What the fuck did you do? She literally ran away when I tried to talk to her! I had to chase her down! Nat, what the actual—"

"Oh, so you don't actually know what's going on," Nat growls. "But you think just because I'm here, that it's my fault somehow."

Ron throws his hands onto his head, and he'd tear at his hair if it wasn’t cut down to a millimeter right now. "It's always you. It fucking always is! And I know you don't like her! Fucking shit Nat, at least don't act like I'm stupid and don't see the way you're glaring at her when we talk."

Nat gasps. "You knew I hate her! You knew and you were still doing it!"

"Doing what!" he laughs, hysterical. "Making friends? Making small talk?!"

"Ignoring me!" they bite. "Going on and on about some shit I don't care about, cutting me off, hell, flirting with her. I know you're socially stunted, but I'm in the room too!" Ron is staring at them, so they bark, "what?"

"Flirting," he repeats, aghast. "You dumb asshole. You absolute fucking idiot. You jealous fucking prick. Flirting?!"

"Obviously!!"

Ron grabs a pillow off the beds and screams into it. Nat shoots up to yank it away from him, and he backs away from them as he loses his grip, teeth bared, and his back hits the door.

"Of fucking course you were flirting," Nat hisses, "and don't pretend that you weren't. And even without that, she gets on my fucking nerves. There is only so much chipper air headed prattling that I can fucking take. I'm a fucking intellectual, Ron, she is killing my brain cells."

"And what are you even using those for anymore, huh?" he juts his chin down at them. "Getting into academia? Climbing the ladder? Doing important science, eh? You think you're so much better than me, but you're a common fucking thief too. You're in this with me, so use your fucking brain to realize you're my friend, not my owner, and to be nice to someone for once in your fucking life."

It's not so much a slap to the face as it is like being run over by a freight train. Nat takes a ragged breath, wanting to scream something back, wanting to hurt him, to grab him by his stupid neck, but not a single sound comes out of their mouth, and they realize that they're crying.

Ron looks at them like he's caught between shock and guilt, like they're fragile instead of fierce, and Nat absolutely cannot take that.

They shove him aside and storm out of the room without looking back. They hear Ron calling out for them to wait, but he doesn't chase them.