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When Vehuel awoke, she remembered being swept off the ship by a massive wave, but everything between then and now was a hazy blur. There was exhaustion and saltwater, and a vague recollection of riding... some kind of animal? And then she had slept, curled into the warmth of something else. But whatever that something else was, it wasn't here now.
She wiped salt and sleep from her eyes and sat up. Everything hurt -- not just her muscles, but her head, and her stomach, and her mouth was dry and tasted unpleasantly like the ocean. She was in a forest, it seemed, and the foliage was too dense for her to see the shore. Next to her were the charred remains of a campfire. Somebody had left a few roasted fish on a spit, and the smell of them made Vehuel's stomach make a startling noise.
Was she... hungry? It was very inconvenient to be hungry right now, and she didn't want to go and eat someone else's fish without asking, so she ignored it.
She got to her feet, with some difficulty, and that made her head hurt even worse. She was dizzy too, which was stupid and annoying, and she told her inner ear to behave, but it did not.
Looking at where she'd been sleeping, there was the indent of some very large beast right next to her, and a few lines in the sandy ground on her other side, which suggested... draping wings? There was a trail of mixed pawprints and web-toed footprints leading around and away from the campfire, as if an enormous cat and an equally enormous waterbird had been following each other very closely, and Vehuel began to suspect what had happened, although she'd never seen Nisroc's griffin form with webbed feet before.
No longer feeling guilty about stealing the fish -- it wasn't stealing food if it was Nisroc's food, she was liberating these fish -- Vehuel slid one fish off the spit and ate it with her bare hands, picking the nasty little bones out of her teeth before scarfing down the other one. Then she spread her wings, hoping to avoid having any kind of conversation with Nisroc. Besides, her crew needed her if they weren't all dead, and if only some of them were dead they definitely needed her.
Well, she tried to spread her wings. Nothing happened. "Fuck," she said. Had her miracles been turned off? And if so, why? Grumbling to herself about what she was gonna say to Phanuel next time she saw him, she started off in the direction of what she thought were the freshest footprints.
She found Nisroc a few minutes later, or rather, she found an immense tan creature with -- were those pink wings? "Hey," said Vehuel, and the creature dove into the underbrush, trying to hide itself. Vehuel could still see bits of tan and pink, but she couldn't make out the details. For a moment, Vehuel doubted herself -- was it Nisroc? She didn't have a set of pink wings.
"You're awake," said the creature -- definitely Nisroc -- from within the trees. She didn't sound super enthused about that, which made sense. Vehuel wasn't happy either. "Did you eat?"
"Yeah," said Vehuel. "Had your fish." She was ready to have an argument about anything, even fish, so long as it wasn't an argument about what had happened between them.
"Good," said Nisroc, and Vehuel bristled, because goddamnit, she was here to have that argument.
"You know, I didn't ask you to take care of me," she said. "I don't know what the fuck you're trying to do here."
"I am trying," said Nisroc, sounding very annoyed, "to keep you alive, you asshole."
"Oh okay, so we're just gonna ignore the several centuries you spent disemboweling me because I was slightly insensitive when you came to me with news that you let humans kill your son --"
"My son? My son?" demanded Nisroc, still hiding in the underbrush.
"Well. Well, yeah," said Vehuel, surprised that this was somehow what had annoyed her. "Well, I mean. I. I didn't want to overstep --"
A vast shape sprang out of the underbrush and Vehuel found herself pinned down by a nightmare creature, a thing with a head the shape of a cane handle, its curved beak full of vicious fangs. "He was our son, you shithead," Nisroc snarled into her face. Her breath smelled fishy, and, most disconcerting of all, her tongue was also toothed. Vehuel tried to focus on this rather than the actual conversation, because as upsetting as it looked, it was much less distressing than thinking about Grendel. "Did you even fucking cry when you found out he was dead?" Nisroc asked, trying and failing to wrap one webbed front foot around her throat; she had made herself an opposable thumb, but the webbing kept getting in the way of strangulation, and she was strangely weak.
Nothing she could have done to Vehuel physically was comparable to the blow she had just dealt, though. "No," said Vehuel, only just realizing this; she had cried over what her feud with Nisroc had done to Cahokia and what War had done to Vijayangara, but she had never had a chance to cry for Grendel; she couldn't cry in Heaven, and when she'd been on Earth she'd thrown herself into her work and tried not to think about it. But now her face went hot, and her eyes began to fill with tears, and she tried desperately not to let any of them fall.
Nisroc loosened her grip on Vehuel, and she pulled her face away from Vehuel's, her neck becoming a question mark. "Do you... do you need to?" she asked.
"N-no?" said Vehuel, unconvincingly, Nisroc dragged her to her feet and wrapped her in an awkward, feathery hug, and then she couldn't hold back anymore; she wept, messily and painfully into Nisroc's shoulder, arms around her weird skinny neck, in the safe embrace of her inexplicably garish pink wings. She thought of Grendel with his cheerful smile; how much he'd wanted a pet, and how much he'd loved flying, even though he was awful at it. She thought about how lonely he was, and all the lies Nisroc had told him to keep him safe. She remembered what a bad idea she'd thought that was, and how she told herself to keep that to herself, because, after all, Grendel wasn't her child.
And she thought about how little that emotional distance had mattered in the end, when Vehuel had watched him hatch, and sang him to sleep, and helped him learn to walk and talk and fly and do miracles, and how much it hurt that he would never do those things again. He would never have the dog he wanted; he would never learn to fly well. He was forever safe from the trauma of learning the truth about humans, because he had not, in the end, been safe from humans. She sobbed until she was out of tears and it hurt to breathe, and Nisroc was crying too, she thought, although Vehuel wasn't sure if birds actually did that.
"I thought you didn't love him," said Nisroc, quietly. She sounded regretful.
That made Vehuel angry again. "How could I -- why would -- how could anyone not love him?" she demanded. "I just..." It hurt so much to think about any of this. "I didn't want -- he was your kid, I didn't want to tell you what to do with him, and -- and the only thing I ever told you to do you didn't do, and --"
"I didn't have time," said Nisroc, withdrawing so quickly from the hug that it almost knocked Vehuel off balance. "There weren't churches around for me to steal communion bread from so I had to switch back to feeding him humans and --"
"Bullshit, I told you to move. You couldn't do anything?" Vehuel demanded.
"I was in Hell asking for an update on my transfer request when it happened," Nisroc snarled. "I didn't want to take Grendel with me because Dagon was making him feel bad about liking things, and I --" Her breath hitched. "When I came back, it was... he was..." She trailed off, and looked away.
All the fight went out of Vehuel again. "Oh," she said, feeling wrung-out and miserable on every conceivable level.
"Oh," said Nisroc, mockingly. "No apology for all the shit you said to me."
"You've been disemboweling me seconds after finding me!" said Vehuel. She sighed. "Fine. Whatever. I'm sorry I reacted badly."
"That's not even a real apology, fuck you," said Nisroc.
"No thank you," said Vehuel. "The toothed tongue thing is way too much even for me."
"What are you --" Nisroc seemed to realize Vehuel could see her again, recoiled, and hid her head under one wing. "Fuck you," she repeated, slightly muffled. "Don't look at me."
"Hard not to when you're bright fucking pink," said Vehuel. "Did you get another set of wings? I thought you only had the three pairs."
"These are the gray ones," said Nisroc, from under her wing.
"But they're not... do they turn pink? Is that why you never wore them?" Vehuel asked.
"I just didn't want anyone to see me with webbed fingers," said Nisroc, miserably. Vehuel looked down at her front feet and realized she'd been trying to bury them in the sandy soil. "I didn't know -- I didn't know they'd make me look like this," she said. "I don't even know why they turned pink. They were gray when I got stuck here. I looked stupid but at least I didn't clash."
"Stuck here?" Vehuel asked. "You mean you didn't cause that big storm?"
Nisroc said something, but it was too muffled to hear.
"I didn't hear you over the feathers and uncharacteristic shame," said Vehuel.
Nisroc heaved a great sigh, and withdrew her head from under her wing, looking miserable. "I didn't mean to," she said. "I don't even know at this point. My miracles haven't been working for at least a month. When I first washed up here, I gave myself thumbs," she said, wriggling said digits, "but it took all my energy and somehow summoned like six fucking alligators, which I then had to fight, on my own, exhausted, and in what is maybe the shittiest version of my griffin form. So I've been trying to avoid miracles but it's force of habit, you know? So, I dunno, maybe. But I don't think so? It's mostly been a lot of alligators. And snakes. And giant fucking bugs."
"Oh. Is that why I couldn't get my wings to come out?" Vehuel asked.
"They probably wouldn't have worked anyway. I can't fly," said Nisroc. She flapped her wings slightly. "These are absolutely fucking useless."
Vehuel thought of her vague memories of sleeping after the storm. She had been warm; she had felt safe. She thought of the little wing tracks beside her when she'd awoken, opposite the indentation of Nisroc's sleeping form, and pictured Nisroc settling in beside her, one wing over her. She decided not to bring that up. It would get weird fast. "Yeah. Okay. Well that's good to know. Shitty, but good to know. Is that why I have this pounding headache?"
"Uh. No," said Nisroc. "That'll be the dehydration. Shit, we need to find you some water you can drink."
"What have you been drinking?" Vehuel asked.
"Saltwater filled with brine shrimp. It's as delicious as it sounds. I know where there's a stream, though, come on," she said, turning and taking a few steps, before pausing. "Do you... I can carry you," she offered.
"No, I'm good," said Vehuel. Nisroc cocked her head skeptically, and Vehuel sighed. "Fine," she said. "Fine, I'll let you carry me if it makes you feel better."
"Yup, that's why I'm offering, me and my notoriously guilty conscience," said Nisroc, kneeling so that Vehuel could climb onto her back.
Vehuel was too tired and headachey and cried out to come up with a sarcastic response, but even she had to admit, in the privacy of her own head, that it was almost nice.