.

The dream was of home. Not the sterile, functional barracks that had been her on and off official address for a decade, but the true home she had found in Eva. They were in their small, sun-drenched apartment on Meridian, the air thick with the scent of roasted peppers and Eva’s ridiculously expensive hydroponic coffee beans. Eva was laughing, a sound like wind chimes, as she tried to teach Kaelen a clumsy dance step in the middle of their tiny kitchen, her dark curls bouncing, her eyes sparkling with a light that Kaelen had sworn to protect with her life. It was a perfect memory, a flawless diamond of happiness she kept polished in the vault of her mind.

But the scent didn't match that.

The scent that made her think of "home" carried a touch of ozone and musk, and it didn't match the dream.

The dissonance grew the more she tried to process it. The more she did, the more the memory of that perfect warm morning felt slightly out of place, twisting it into something alien. The dream-Eva’s smile began to look strained, the light in her eyes a little too bright, a little too manic. The kitchen walls seemed to press inwards, the sunlight cold and grey. The bedsheets were a little bit scratchy, the hallways to the bedroom a bit too long. The perfect note of warmth twinged with the smell of something that clawed at her nerves, like a cheap perfume you could tolerate for a few hours but that would drive you insane if it went any longer than that.

That sense, that "otherness" that permeated the image of her wife, was a lightning-bolt of alarms through her mind.

Kaelen’s eyes snapped open, tearing her away from the decaying memory and throwing her back into the waking nightmare. The first thing she registered was the physical reality of the dream’s source, one that brought with it a fresh wave of dread: Eva was in the cell with her, holding her, hugging her, a gentle, protective embrace, her body a familiar shield against the space of the enclosure. The gesture was a language Kaelen knew better than her own name; it was the dialect of their shared souls, a promise of safety and belonging.

They'd captured her, she hadn't made it.

It was like a stab through her heart. "Fuck," she whispered, holding back a sob and taking a shuddering breath to calm herself before Eva woke and noticed.

That was when the scent hit her.

It was the same wrongness from the dream, that odd 'perfume' that tickled the back of her throat and made her clothes feel itchy, and it was coming from Eva. Kaelen tried to discern what was going on, on instinct, she leaned closer to get a better whiff, to determine what, exactly, was that scent. Her mind supplied her with a sudden surge of information that clicked into place like some barely remembered memory. She could smell the fear, the adrenaline, the sweat, the slightly less stale air from outside their cell, the panic, the anger, and the lingering traces of something chemical. It was like watching a timeline of events unfold within her nose. Eva had run, she'd made it far enough that the faintest traces of something oily had clung to her clothes, and then she'd been caught by something metallic... a droid. It had injected her with a drug, a soporific, then dragged her to the cell.

Kaelen didn't know how she knew these things, but the knowledge felt solid, like a piece of well-documented trivia she'd found in an encyclopedia.

But none of those scents were what was sounding the quiet but insistent alarm.

It was the scent underneath the layers, the signature of her presence, the smell of Eva herself. She could recognize that ever-present touch of ink and nutmeg, and the hint of something floral, the scent she knew belonged to her wife, the scent that would wake her up to comfort. But it had a layer of dissonant static to it. It wasn't a bad smell, not like something rotten or foul. It was the scent of a stranger, of a lie. As if the universe had replaced the Eva she knew with a stranger, an alien, something that looked like her down to the little scar on the left side of her jaw, but that was, in truth, an impostor, a fake, a threat that only Kaelen's nose could recognize.

A splitting headache began to throb behind her eyes, a physical manifestation of the war being waged in her brain. The cognitive dissonance was a physical force, a grinding of gears between what she knew and what her body was now telling her was true. 

Eva began to stir at the movement, opening her eyes and staring at Kaelen with a strained smile, the air around her practically glowing with guilt. "Hey," she said with a soft whisper, seeking out Kaelen's hand.

Kaelen forced herself to remain still, to fight the new, horrifying instinct that told her to recoil from the touch of the contaminating presence of this… other. "Hey," she replied, squeezing tightly. "Are you ok?"

The look in her wife's face hid the cloud of guilt that floated her like an aurora, the guilt of not making it out, of wasting Kaelen's sacrifice. "We're either in an asteroid or a planet," she said, deflecting the question. "Outside the cell, there's only a corridor. I took to the left, made it to an area that had been damaged, there's rock behind the walls. One of the construction bots-"

"Asteroid," Kaelen blurted.

"What?"

"It's an asteroid," she repeated, now feeling surer of her words but avoiding her gaze. "There's no moisture in the scent on your clothes, no earthiness, it's too metallic, too simple. We're in an asteroid, a perfect hidden base of operations, we could be anywhere. We could even be in deep space, no one would know where to look... if there's anyone looking at all."

The guilt in the air turned to concern like the flick of a light. "Tell me what happened, what did he do to you?"

It was a question that ignored the truth that hung in the air like a thunderstorm. Kaelen found it hard to imagine Eva couldn't pick up on it, on that tangi ozone and musk, on the sweat, on the sex that occupied a singular spot at the center of their cell, the place he'd pinned her down, the place that-

The slight tingling of warmth and rightness of that scent jolted her to her feet with a wave of horror.

“I need to move,” she said, the words clipped. “Stretch.”

Eva’s eyes, full of a deep, wounded understanding, followed her. She didn’t protest. She simply nodded, pulling the thin blanket tighter around her shoulders as Kaelen rose from the nest and moved into the center of the enclosure in what felt like a desperate attempt to deny a dawning revelation before it took root. The area of the floor where he had taken her the night before was a nexus of olfactory information. 

Her new senses, a gift from hell, dissected it with a horrifying precision. There was that base touch of ozone and musk, wrapped in something that her brain could only label as "dominance", something dark and metallic that spoke of power. It was accompanied by "enjoyment" from that very same ozone, a minty flavor. And underneath that cloud, tucked almost as an afterthought, was the empty scent that her nose immediately labelled as "Kaelen". She had expected to smell her own fear, the sharp, acrid tang of terror and pain. She had expected to find evidence of her struggle, the scent of a soldier fighting a losing battle. She closed her eyes and took a deeper breath, trying to analyze, to find the proof that she had willingly sacrificed herself to give Eva even an iota of a chance to escape.

But it wasn’t there.

Beneath the warden’s overwhelming musk, her own scent was not one of terror. It was the scent of pure, high-octane arousal. A sweet, heady, tangy smell, thick with the chemical evidence of a body not just yielding, but actively enjoying its domination. There were no nuances to her scent, no undertones nor hesitation. It was a singular ringing bell of pure bliss. Of a mindless creature that was basking in the moment, in the pleasure, in a series of orgasms she could almost count with every twitch of her nose. Her mind screamed in protest. No. I fought him. I fought him. But her nose, the new arbiter of truth, was telling her a different story. It was presenting her with the undeniable, biological proof that, whatever she'd been thinking did not matter, because her body had been singing in ecstasy.

That maybe, just maybe, she hadn't told Eva to run to save herself, but because she wanted to enjoy it.

The shame, guilt, and pain was so profound, so absolute, it felt like a physical weight trying to crush her from the inside out.

Without thought and moving more out of desperation than anything else, Kaelen rushed to the pallet, yanking out her blanket and dragging it to the water dispenser. "Kae?" Eva's concern was ignored in favor of drenching the blanket, then whipping it over the air, against the walls, like a cocked-up maniac in a cleaning spree before slamming it down on The Spot. Then, and only then, when the scent of her betrayal had diminished from the air enough that it was only a painfully vivid memory did she stop, heaving from the rushed exertion.

"Kae!" Eva spoke again, rushing to her wife's side, gripping her arm. "Breathe, breathe, I'm here, just... close your eyes, focus. Tell me what's wrong."

"It's the smell," Kaelen replied, trying to hide how shaken up she was, but it was plain as day Eva saw through her. "It smells of... me, and him, and... there’s no fear in it. In my scent. There’s no… fight. It’s just…” She couldn’t say the word.

It started slowly, then all at once, the dawning realization of what had gone unsaid, followed by an rage, concern, and love that washed away everything else from Eva's scent. Her expression hardened. "Don't you dare," she said, her voice low and intense. She crossed the distance between them, stopping just short of touching her. “Don’t you dare blame yourself for a biological reaction forced on you by a monster. He hot-wired your body. That’s not you, Kaelen. That is a symptom. That is evidence of the crime, not of your consent. Do you understand me?”

That fierce protective love that poured out of Eva like a wildfire was intense enough it almost washed away the wrongness lying underneath. Kaelen clutched at it all the same, giving a shaky, grateful nod, even as the back of her mind kept pointing at the memory: There's no proof of resistance. There wasn't even the smell of her own injuries, of the foot she broke and was now perfect again, of the fight, only the scent of Eva's bruises. But he used that scent of protectiveness and concern like a shield, a fortification against the poison of self-loathing. It gave her the strength to admit the second part, the part that hurt more deeply. “It’s not just that,” Kaelen said, her voice barely a whisper. “Eva… your scent.” She saw the flash of pain in Eva’s eyes, a wound she hated herself for inflicting. “It’s wrong. It’s… I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like… static. It feels like a lie. Like the you I'm looking at right now is not the Eva I know. And it hurts. It gives me a headache just being near you.” The confession was out, a bald, ugly thing hanging in the air between them.

Instead of hurt, or pain, or betrayal, Eva's determination seemed to redouble. Her expression shifted, the doctor’s analytical focus taking over. “Okay,” she said, her voice crisp. “Okay, that’s… that’s data. That’s something we can work with.” She moved to her scanner, her movements economical and precise. “Let’s see what he did.”

The now-familiar ritual of the scan began. Kaelen stood perfectly still as the device's light blinked over her, the hum of the little tool was a strangely comforting sound in the oppressive silence. On the holographic display, Eva pulled up the schematic of Kaelen’s skull. “There,” Eva breathed, her finger tracing a glowing, web-like structure on the hologram. “The filaments… they’ve wrapped themselves around your entire olfactory bulb.” She zoomed in, the image resolving into a complex, crystalline matrix that seemed to be growing over the neural tissue like a net. “It’s a lattice, it’s acting like neurons, but faster, it’s emitting its own signals based on the input from your nose. I don’t know-”

“It’s marking you as alien,” Kaelen said.

Eva nodded grimly. “The lattice is built to force an interpretation, a library of pre-programmed responses to specific stimulus. Signals move faster through the lattice, it's injecting the result before the neuron signal can reach the same destination." The words came with a deep note of concern, one that she caught.

"What does that mean?" She asked slowly.

Her wife, the doctor, flinched, guilt followed as she lowered her face. "Neural plasticity. The brain isn't a static thing, it's always trying to optimize itself, to remove errors and to reinforce pathways that see constant use." Her jaw was tight. "Do you remember that I hated black licorice? I didn't just start enjoying it overnight, it took weeks before I started enjoying it. This is the same principle, but... deeper, more invasive."

The bio-lock wasn't just trying to change her body, it was working to set-up structures to reprogram her mind. Kaelen's legs gave out, her body automatically turning the drop into a languishing thing that would've looked choreographed if she hadn't been practically hyperventilating. Every breath brought with a glowing neon sign hovering over Eva's head, a conclusion that hung at the end of the road: "Stranger, Other, Alien".

The surge of anger was a lifeline, something she clutched because to do otherwise would've had her spiraling into an abyss. For some God forsaken reason, they were trying to drive her away from her wife. "I-We need to stop this," she choked, fighting through the act of taking deep breaths until the shaking in her hands had stopped.

"Yes." The surety in Eva's voice, the growl that accompanied it, and the glimmer in her eye, they showed a woman who wasn't merely determined, but just as desperate as she was. Scent and memory confirmed that Eva would sooner burn the known universe than allow anyone to take her wife away. It was such an absurdly profound relief that it nearly made Kaelen laugh. But Eva had no time for that. "This is no different from the flexibility. It's a tool. They put a library of codes into your head, we can find a way to fake it, control it to our advantage. Like putting on a construction uniform and marching into a building without anyone asking questions."

That... that gave Kaelen pause as she blinked, realizing the genius of Eva's proposal. She swallowed the panic. "What do you need?"

"We need to find out what the keys are, what causes what responses," the doctor said. "Catalogue each, and figure out what could be used to our advantage." She hummed for a moment, then pointed at the pallets. "Smell the blankets, see if any of them has a strong smell of you." At her command, Kaelen moved, and began pulling up the blankets one by one, carefully sniffing them over. She quickly categorized them between those that reeked of Eva, and those that barely even had a trace. Without missing a beat, Eva took one of the ones that smelled of Kaelen, tore off a strip, and drenched it in some water. "Wrap this around your face, cover your nose."

It should've been a simple thing, effortless, just a mouth cover. Yet the moment she'd set it in place her whole body went rigid, eyes widening. "It's... it feels like I'm wearing a blindfold," she declared, looking around the room and a heavy sense of unease falling on her, as if she were currently in a very dark room. Worse, there wasn't even a dissonance, her brain acknowledged she could see, but it kept complaining at the sudden absence of the rich tapestry of critical data in the air.

"We don't want to keep it there forever. The goal is to stall the reinforcement, and to do that, we need to get rid of as much of my scent as possible. You're going to make Kae-scented ghillie suits." Eva took the blankets that smelt of her, and draped one Kaelen's shoulders. "Your job right now is to sweat, I want these to reek."

"Uh..." She hesitated. "If I move around a lot, the bio-lock will charge faster, won't it?"

"Scan says we have at least twelve hours before it reaches full charge even with heightened activity. Get to it, soldier."

"Yes ma'am!"

.

"Why are you moving like that?" Eva interrupted the sound of wet footsteps.

Kaelen was in the middle of fighting against the imaginary phantom of the warden. It had not been a winning spar, but it was useful all the same. "When I fought yesterday, my punches didn't do shit, but that kick at the end did, a lot. It was so hard it broke my foot." She declared. "But even then, he seemed to think my attacks would come from different angles, as if he knew something I didn't. It got me thinking about what you said, that my muscles are harder to hurt when they're stretched. I think he knows what this thing is turning me into, and was anticipating a different fighting style."

The foundational idea went against everything she'd learned about combat in the military, straight jabs and punches and kicks just were not things that her new more flexible body agreed with. Her normal human body and training treated attacks like she was pushing into the enemy. It was all the energy gathering in the soles of her feet, pushing up her legs, pushing into the twist of her hips, then pushing up her torso, down her arm, and into her fist. And it was the wrong way to move now. Now she had to think of herself not as a series of pistons actioning in a perfect sequence, but as a piece of elastic. Her whole body was meant to be stretched, to twist, to gather potential energy as she contorted, and then unleash it like letting go of a rubber band that had been pulled taut. It was a twisting flowing motion that would turn her arm or leg into a whip, cracking as all the inertia from her larger body ran down to her thin arm, and then right to her hands.

It felt correct, like she was getting closer to the answer.

There was something missing though, and she couldn't tell what. Every time she hit the air from a big enough build-up, her hands and feet would feel like they would've shattered had she hit anything other than empty air. There was something about the angle and position of her extremities that wasn't quite clicking. Like throwing a punch with a crooked wrist, an open invitation for self-injury.

"I think you've reeked up enough for a smell test." Eva proclaimed, standing up from the spot where she'd been fiddling with the scanner and marching up to her.

Her Eva, her squeaky clean "ew don't kiss me while sweaty" Eva took sweat-drenched blanket and, with only a minor grimace, threw it over her shoulders and wrapped it tightly, rubbing her face, hair, and body into the sweaty thing. It made Kaelen want to rush and hug her, but she held back, waiting for the signal before she took off the cloth from her nose. The first breath was a blinding ringing surge of scents where there'd been only herself before, like walking into a room with floodlights. She winced, then breathed again, then again. Slowly she could pick out the nuance again, the details, the layers that hadn't existed before.

Closing her eyes, she focused, she tried to find "Eva" through scent alone. She sniffed, wavered, and turned slightly into a specific direction. She opened her eyes again, she was looking at the corner of the cell Eva had been sitting in until a moment ago. "I can't detect you," she declared with trepidation. Then, slowly, she moved closer and took a cautious breath, steeling herself for the familiar, painful dissonance that should've been coming out of Eva's body. But it was different. The static was still there, a low hum in the background like an image that hadn't quite come into focus, but it was no longer annoying. It was muffled, confused. Eva’s true, beloved scent was still present, but now it was suffused under the familiar, accepted scent of Kaelen’s own body. Her brain kept tickling at that notion, there was a thought, a concept, lingering right at the tip of her tongue, but every time she tried to reach it, there was an empty space.

As if the catalogue of scents was incomplete.

"It's better, it's practically gone," she said, ignoring the abnormal 'silence' of that spot in her mind, focusing instead in the profound relief of the confirmation. She leaned closer, wrapping herself around the blanket-covered Eva and hugging her tightly, burying her nose into the cloth to drown out even the tiniest flicker of wrongness, focusing instead on the sound of her happy sigh, the squeeze of her hug, the sensation of almost being normal again. "Do we start making the catalogue, or..."

"I was thinking about the bio-lock," Eva said, her voice marginally strained, but determined. "I think we can figure out some way to keep it drained."

Kaelen hesitated. "How? Wouldn't that just make the changes..."

"Not necessarily, didn't you notice how, when triggering the bio-lock, your body went kind of limp? Yet the alterations didn't begin until after he growled into your neck," she explained. "I think that every time the bio-lock is activated, it expends energy to prime itself, awaits command, and then executes. If we can just trigger the priming, disengage, and repeat... that might be a reliable way to empty its batteries."

The memory of the previous day came to her with perfect clarity, the truth that she could still very dimly smell in the air: the way his paw gripped her neck, the click, the world turning into nothing but cloudy thoughts, sex, and limp mindless pleasure. It was so easy to recall she could practically feel the phantom of his touch, the way he stretched her in a delicious-

SLAP

She slapped her own cheek to break from the memory. "It's the grip," she declared to a confused Eva before she could ask what was going on. "When he held me by the neck it didn't activate right away, it took a moment until he put his paw into a precise position. Then it clicked, and I just couldn't move anymore, could barely even think."

They moved closer, the air between them charged with a mixture of hope and trepidation. Kaelen reached up, her own fingers tracing against her throat. Her fingers traced over soft skin, pausing at the sensation, was the bio-lock... larger? She pushed the thought away, finding the intruder near the back of her throat, reaching up around her jaw. It was a lump that brought a sense of dread through her body, but she pushed that aside too and focused on trying to replicate the warden’s grip. She placed her thumb and forefinger where she thought his had been. She pressed, feeling the material yield and bend in the same way her own muscle and skin did, but nothing happened. She tried again, and again, shifting the pressure into different positions. Still nothing.

“Let me try,” Eva said, her voice low.

She nodded, her heart hammering against her ribs. This was a different kind of intimacy, a different kind of trust. Eva’s hands, the hands that had healed her, that had held her, that knew every inch of her body, now approached the alien device embedded in her throat with the intent of awakening it. Her touch was feather-light at first, a doctor’s exploratory palpation that mapped out the invader. "Is it larger or is it just me?" Kaelen asked.

The moment of tension in Eva's shoulders was the answer. "It is," she replied after a second. "The amount of charge it can hold is larger, but fortunately the charge rate is no different. I didn't want to say anything until we confirmed the scent thing, sorry." Her brows furrowed slightly. “It feels… warmer than it did yesterday,” Eva murmured. Her fingers traced the circumference, searching for the indentations Kaelen had described. “I think… I think I feel it. There are four very slight depressions, almost imperceptible. Two on your throat, two on the nape of the neck.”

“That’s it,” Kaelen urged, her breath catching in her throat.

“Okay,” Eva said, her voice a tense whisper. “I’m going to try to match the pressure. Tell me if you feel anything.”

She positioned her thumb and forefinger, her grip mimicking the one they had both seen him use. She began to apply a slow, steady force.

For a moment, there was nothing. Then, Kaelen’s breath hitched. “Wait,” she gasped. A faint, ghostly echo of the lethargy she had felt before began to creep into her limbs. A ghost of a warmth stirred deep in her groin. It was a pale, washed-out version of the real thing, but it was there. “It’s… it’s... I can feel it.”

Eva’s eyes widened, a flicker of triumphant hope in their depths. “Okay,” she said, her voice tight with focus. “A little more…”

She shifted her grip, a tiny, infinitesimal adjustment, trying to find the perfect angle, the sweet spot.

And then something clicked, something wrong.

The world exploded in a flash of white-hot agony. A raw unfiltered jolt of pure, bio-electric pain that shot straight from the lock into her brainstem and lit up her whole body with electric fire. A scream tore from Kaelen’s throat, high and thin, and she recoiled like a loaded spring, a violent, convulsive spasm that sent her sprawling against the floor and nearly across the room. The air had been torn out of her, and in her attempt to refill her lungs, she made the mistake of breathing. The empty blank in the back of her brain suddenly was not empty anymore, it took the pain and locked on to the scent of the creature it had catalogued as "Eva".

It became a scream.

ENEMY THREAT KILL!

Kaelen convulsed again, her body's attempt to spring into action conflicting with her single-minded fear against Eva's safety, trying to shove herself further away. It was a tangle of mismatched movements that sent her rolling face-first to the floor. She needed to calm down, she needed to stop herself. She didn't think, she grasped the blanket at the center of the room and yanked it against her face. Her bloodied nostrils suddenly swam with a hit of concentrated ozone and musk so intense it sent her spinning straight back to yesterday. Her brain refused to let go of the image, the blank mindless content, the arousal, the way the warden's massive cock stretched her in a way that was painfully delicious followed by just delight. It was a movie she couldn't escape, every breath imposing the memory into reality, coaxing her muscles to relax, her thoughts to melt, her pussy to gush and squeeze on empty air.

It took her a minute to even realize Eva had been trying to talk to her, hovering over her with the scanner as if it could tell what was currently playing across Kaelen's mind, as if it could somehow show her the half-empty placid thoughts that pushed her to breathe more of that concentrated musk mingled with her pleasure.

"Kae, kae, please," Eva kept saying, the words slowly filtering in, the terror high in her voice. To the half-dazed Kaelen, her wife felt washed out, as if part of the background, the lack of any scent to confirm her presence a half-formed mantle of invisibility.

"My... cloth..." she managed with a breathy sigh, only marginally able to keep the smile from pushing her lips up.

Eva bolted to get her the wet cloth, and once it was atop Kaelen's nose, it took several more breaths before the warden's musk was no longer forcing her to relieve the memory.

“Kae, I’m so sorry. I didn’t… I thought…”

“Don’t,” Kaelen said through gritted teeth as reality came crashing back. There was a barely-there trace of Eva's scent, and it made the back of her mind stir as if ready to sound the alarm again. “Don’t do that again.”

“B-”

“DON’T!” She muffled her scream into her hand. “It wanted to hurt you,” she added with a whimper. “It said enemy. It was pain and instinct so loud I nearly acted on it.” Even as she spoke, she could feel her brain struggling to recognize the true source of the pain. Rationally, she wanted to blame the warden, the monster and its experiment. But her nose kept pointing at Eva, a threat that had made Kaele’s scent flood with agony and fear. She knew that this truth was lingering in the air now, that the idea would cement itself the more she breathed it. "We need to get rid of the scent of the attack."

"I didn't att-"

"I know," She slowly crawled towards the pallets. "I know," she repeated, ignoring the mirror on the far wall, facing instead the cold gray thing in front of her. "Just... I need to clear my head right now."

Her nose was covered, she was blind, her brain kept demanding proof of what had happened, details, a forensic investigation of the compounds in the air. It was like being in a room with a monster and not being able to see it, the desperate urge to use the flashlight and point at every corner. Kaelen refused to remove the cloth with every fiber of her being, hands curled into fists at her sides as Eva worked. Before she realized it, she felt the familiar comfort of the weight of Eva sitting nearby, her hand gently touching her foot. The contact nearly made her recoil, like algae touching her foot when on a swim, but she clenched her jaw shut and forced herself to remain still. It became easier as the minutes bled onward, the alarms in her head growing exhausted from something that remained patiently at her side.

"Don't stop," Kaelen croaked as she took her wife's hand and placed it on her knee, a fresh wave of panic threatening to blossom in her chest, a panic she shoved down again.

They had found another wall, another boundary they couldn't cross. The lock wasn't just a keyhole, it was booby-trapped.

But worst of all was the truth that lingered in her memories, vivid like red hot coals. Eva had brought pain, the warden brought pleasure. And Kaelen screamed at those thoughts, refusing to acknowledge them, moving to hug Eva and bury her face into the sweaty blanket, focusing on the memory of their marriage, the white tacky dress she hated, the ugly plastic flowers, the way Eva teared up when she made her vows… It grounded her, it helped her fight the new panicked instincts until they'd turned from blaring alarms into quiet cries, and then, blessedly, into nothing. Even then, she did not dare remove the cloth from her face, squeezing her body against Eva's as her wife hugged her back, stroking her hair in that way that should have been perfect, but felt like a consolation prize of what it had once been.

The emotional exhaustion, the constant alarm, the mountain of adrenaline, it all washed over her as she came crashing down, surrendering to the hug and the void.