She wakes, and all the world's wrongness shrills at her through a shattered glass kaleidoscope of senses for which no human words exist.

It's been a long time.

She screams. Not in fear or pain, but anger. The wrongness is vulgar and repulsive and, at some primal level beyond any ounce of conscious control, it offends her.

It must be fixed.

Her own cry hitches along in corrupted wavelengths, a garbled sound that is acid bubbling in her ears. The wrong spectrum of light drives hot pokers into the back of her skull. Broken air rasps across her skin, down the channel of her nose and throat in a lattice of rusty knives. Those organs beyond human inhale the garish texture and the composition of her surroundings and without a single scientific or conscious thought, deem them unworthy.

She writhes to life, wildly thrashing every limb and serpentine appendage. They hit walls, there are walls, great grey metal barriers between her and the broken world that close in and threaten to contain her. She knows what comes after that. Not again. Not again. Everything trembles as she gathers her mind's strength and prepares to blow them apart -

- and there is a hole, a square of dull light above, and instead of destroying her cage she diverts that growing crescendo of energy into a gravity-defying launch up into freedom.

Far beneath the suffocating layers of instinct and fury, something claws for release. For restraint. But the something is tiny, diminished, and she will not hear it. It is beneath her now, old, withered and irrelevant. She has eyes only for the aberration of a landscape that stretches out beyond the roof of her new prison.

A guttering sun hangs swollen and toxic in a fragmented sky stained with the arc of its crawling ascent. Its tainted rays spear a world reduced to rock and ruin, a dull smear of heat haze-obscured tan desert from which the mineral bones of the earth jut in ugly defiance.

Wrong. It's wrong, and the wrongness is a thousand splinters in her skin, grit in her eyes, a thundercloud of an ache building infinitely at the base of her skull where her tentacles bristle. Sun-scorched metal stings her bare feet as she ranges along the roof with predatory menace, casting left and right for that small glimmer of purity she can taste -

- and there, on the horizon. A jagged splash of familiar crystal, bleeding an aura of air that feels right, that is the closest thing to prismatic perfection for many, many miles -

(she knows, she can sense it)

- and it is hers. She made it. It is How The World Should Be.

She should go there.

And then that shrivelled something inside of her recoils at the idea, hard enough to make her stagger. She has been there already; she has been there alone for eternity with no end in sight. Why go back, now that there is something better?

Something better . . .

Something better?

Her fists clench. Her confidence falters, and the uncertain panic of unidentified loss takes root. She can't find it. Where was it? What was it? She remembers the feelings - the relief, the joy, the grief, the shame . . . but her grasping thoughts cannot picture the catalyst. If the memory exists, it can't break through the decades of isolation and the all-consuming swarm of the deviant world bearing down on her.

A lie, then, surely. She will trust her senses. There was never anything better. Only a new prison here, with its one organic captor lurking below.

A prison and a world that is the wrong shape.

She can fix that.

Her alien senses touch the tapestry of everything around her, invisible fingertips brushing across the interwoven pattern of materials and textures. They read the mistakes, the errors, the abnormalities that bite endlessly at her patience, and instinct alone tells her what needs to shift to transform them into something acceptable. Something perfect. Beneath her feet, the roof begins to judder; beneath the prison itself, the faulty rocks and grit begin to bounce as though on the skin of a drum, beaten to the tune of her amassing psionic energy.

But it's harder here. Painful. When she draws power she must drag and wrench it through the sensory bombardment of imperfections. She's limited, and that angers her, but at least it is a temporary hindrance. Once the air is clean and the landscape glitters with crystal, nothing will hold her back -

Movement behind her, the heavy clatter of metal on metal. But the organic is still milling below, emanating confusion and alarm, so she whirls to face the unknown threat and finds herself frozen at the sight of it. Just an empty construct of metals and springs and tiny whirring mechanisms, but it moves like a living thing and is branded with the heart and violent magenta lights of the enemy masters enemy.

She roars. It cringes, strange mobile ears flung behind it, three-fingered hands upraised toward her - but in desperate plea, not self-defence.

And it speaks, and even though it is empty and nothing its voice sears right into her very depths. It throws a word at her, and like a magma-hot coal it drops and burns through the viscous web of her alien senses.

"April."

The name of the buried thing inside her. The thing that screams recognition and disarms her with the force of its eruption to the surface.

The world stops quaking. She is sinking, sinking until the steel of the roof prison home is hot against her knees, her fingertips, the heels of her palms. Tainted air rasps in and out of her altered lungs. A soft klunk, klunk, klunk sounds in front of her and she doesn't need to look up to know the source.

Stay away, she says. Or would say, but she can't yet reach her human words; they are submerged too many years and layers deep, obscured by the noise that clings to her skull.

"April, it's okay."

Her slitted pupils rise to a face that can't possibly look so earnest when it's immobile - and then to the dented shoulder. The long, horizontal scar across the battered chestplate, just an inch shy of breaching that meticulously-painted blue, red and yellow star.

No, it isn't.

Her gaze lowers to his heavy hands, resting patiently on his thighs, and the small pink centres of his upturned palms - because her hands are there, too, encapsulated carefully by the articulated fingers.

She doesn't remember him taking them. She doesn't remember putting them there. With a long, slow blink, she debates whether either situation is acceptable, but in those dragging seconds the weight of his grip asserts itself as . . . pleasant. A solid anchor that fastens her down, keeps her grounded until the barrage of the impure world shrinks from an intolerable cacophony to an irritating, perpetual buzz.

Only then does she privately concede that it might, in fact, be okay.

Beyond his steel silhouette, a red-clad head with a grim countenance looms out of the open roof hatch. "So," the owner huffs, flatly meeting her gaze. "You done?"

"Raph . . ." her anchor growls.

"I'm just sayin', we got roach jerky, scorp jerky, and some leftover Merchant Town gruel. If you were that hungry, all you had to do was ask."

She smiles. Aberrations everywhere, all of them.

But these two . . . these two can stay.