Finally accepting he’ll have to show his back to Phineas at some point in this relationship, Ulrich passes through a dirty kitchenette and disappears through the door on the far side of the shack. There’s a sepia-colored “On Air” sign hanging next to it. Phineas is pretty sure those are usually red, they show up in cartoons all the time.

He comes back with a little wooden box like what Jo’s tobacco would come in, but it’s labeled for chocolates. Phineas brightens.

“Candy?” she asks.

“No, er.” He’s looking at his wound on her shoulder, wincing. “Here, don’t…”

Phineas The Commander had stopped the worst of the bleeding, but halfway here she’d gotten lazy and now the entire left side of her shirt is a congealing mess. She paws at it without thinking and Ulrich makes a strangled sound that reminds her of the brooding hens the neighbors had kept. Phineas grins at him as she grits dried blood between her fingertips.

“Stop that!” He says, nudging one of the crates with his boot. “Sit here, don’t get it on the couch.” She does what he asks while Ulrich breathes deeply through his nose to bolster his patience, something Phineas is starting to find familiar already.

He settles down on the other crate and opens the chocolate box. Phineas hears distinctly not chocolate noises while Ulrich digs inside, retrieving a glass jar and a roll of bandages. He’s going to bandage the gunshot wound. Her heart soars, she wants his hands on her immediately, but Jo’s efforts to make Phineas into a decent member of society almost prompt her to politely decline. Ulrich’s grimace as he appraises the mess in front of him gets her the rest of the way.

“You don’t have to do all this, I’ll heal up fine on my own,” Phineas says. “Commanders are sturdy.” Ulrich shakes his head, busying himself with the supplies.

“This place is filthy, you are going to get an infection.”

Phineas hasn’t had an infection in almost a decade, but she wants this too bad to try and put him off again.

“I didn’t take you for the compassionate type,” she says instead.

“I am not.”

That’s…Phineas forgets to answer, staring at him while he blots some disinfectant onto a cotton swab. There’s a thing that lights up in the air around Ulrich when he talks sometimes, a silver spark that flies from his mouth and looks like it wants to grow into something: she can see spindly sprouts curling out of it into space, but they’re weak. The tiny spark cracks apart and dies away before it can form into anything real.

Phineas doesn’t know what to do with that, or, it’s going to take a while to solve that particular puzzle and she’s busy right now. She wants to get these gross clothes off so Ulrich doesn’t have to fool with them. Peeling out of her ruined shirt cracks dried gunk all over the floor, some on Ulrich’s pants, and she appreciates the effort he puts into appearing unaffected. He would have an excellent poker face for anyone else. While he’s distracted, she takes the soaked cotton from him and drags it through the fresh blood welling around the fussy wound.

“Lemme get the worst of it for you at least.”

Tangibly relieved, Ulrich sits back without arguing and gets more disinfectant ready. Phineas is still wearing a ratty black jogging bra, there isn’t enough on her chest to warrant it but it’s useful for situations like this. She ruins her clothes a lot and other people get weird about too much bare skin; it’s goofy and, frankly, irritating the same way it is when she has to explain feelings with words, but it’s bound to happen with people who spend all their time only seeing things they can touch. Ulrich hands her another wet slab of cotton when the first one is more grime than gauze and she watches him carefully. He doesn’t ruffle at all when she slides the bra strap from her shoulder to get under it, she likes him so much.

“That is enough, let me,” he says eventually, sitting up and motioning with a pair of forceps for her to do the same. She sits up tall, the air cold on the alcohol smeared across her skin.

Ulrich leans in slow enough it’s clear he thinks she’s anxious about all this, which is so wrong it makes her laugh, close enough she knows it hits him like static electricity. His face stays carefully neutral, but annoyance flashes across his halo. It’s pretty, like a comet in the mist.

“Please hold still,” he says flatly.

She tries to do that.

“This will sting.”

“That’s okay,” Phineas says. It does sting. She lets it pull her down into her body, and the shack snaps into stark contrast without any ambient energy blurring in her vision. Here in physical space can see a tiny line between Ulrich’s furrowed eyebrows while he’s concentrating, emphasized by the fine layer of dusty sweat across his face. He’s not looking at her expression, focused in entirely on the work. It’s very hard not to kiss him.

“You do this a lot?” Phineas asks, cool and normal.

“Hm.” Ulrich’s voice is distant.

“Shoot people just to patch ’em up?”

Ulrich leans away to add the swab to the growing pile of bloody cotton, then reaches for what looks like an inkwell. He unscrews the cap and the smell that assaults Phineas’ nose puts her immediately back in Jo’s kitchen, knees and elbows freshly scraped.

“Not often,” Ulrich says, still focused on his task. “But we find ourselves in extenuating circumstances.”

He finishes layering the salve over the wound that didn’t really need it in the first place, then dresses it with a fresh pad of gauze and some tape, deft and meticulous. Phineas smiles big, so loud she sees the ghost of it flicker across Ulrich’s face before he darts his eyes away, uncomfortable.

“Thanks!” she says, standing up to stretch her arms over her head. Ulrich tsks.

“Be careful, I am not doing this a second time.”

Phineas giggles at him and turns to look around again, she thought she’d seen-

“I believe those boxes are full of shirts,” Ulrich offers while he packs away the medicine. Phineas wanders to a darker corner of the room piled high with shipping boxes and finds one is already torn open. It’s mostly baseball caps with station branding on, but some grey shirts are lying in the bottom, scratchy and cheap and a lot less bloody than what she’s got. She remembers at the last second it’s rude to undress in front of people without asking.

“Can I change in here? D’you mind?”

Ulrich hardly looks up, taken with trying to get everything to fit back inside the box the way he’d had it.

“I don’t care if you don’t.”

Phineas tosses her ruined bra-thing into the corner, it lands with a sad wet noise that gets a disapproving “ach” from Ulrich. When she goes back for the new shirt, there’s a pair of eyes looking back at her from the darkness.

“…is the turtle yours?”

Ulrich stops. “What?”

“There’s a turtle in this box.”

She has a shiny black shell trimmed in gold, and a succulent is cheerfully sprawling across her back in spite of the dry air. The stumpy legs and little face are a pale green that makes Phineas think of aloe. She (The Turtle) looks up at Phineas with glistening black eyes for a moment before scrabbling up the side of the box, her feet sticking like an insect’s. Phineas reaches in to help her out.

“Where’d you come from, little thing?” Phineas coos, letting her crawl over her hand. She (The Turtle) doesn’t respond, and wriggles to be set down on the floor. Phineas watches her crawl towards the table, straight for Ulrich, who is still absorbed in cleaning up the mess. He nearly drops the box when he catches the animal in his periphery.

“WHAT is that,” he barks, “put it outside!”

“Aw she ain’t hurtin’ nothin’,” Phineas grins, creaking across the warped floorboards to settle on the couch. When she does, a cloud of dust poofs out from the cushions. “That’s a good one too, for medicine I think.”

Ulrich’s face is pinched. He hasn’t looked away from She, who hasn’t turned from him either.

“It is…looking at me,” he manages. A faint blush colors his cheeks as he says it. Phineas tries to hide her giggle behind her hand so she doesn’t make him feel bad.

“Don’t let her bully you, Ulrich.”

He rolls his eyes and flounces to his feet, crossing back to the kitchen to dig in the cupboards instead of dealing with this nonsense. His shoes click oddly against the floor for as bulky and rubbery as they look: he might have stones trapped in the treads after their walk out here. Phineas notices a cloud of dirt accentuates his movement too, like the couch cushions, and she’s struck again by how displaced Ulrich seems.

The light humming over the stove is flickery, like a flame, and Phineas gets to watch his tight expression while he’s searching for something with increasing disdain. Yeah that’s a good word for him, he’s disdainful of these cupboards, of this place. His clothes say the same thing: dress clothes diligently maintained in another life, now loose and grimy from going too long between washes, his suspenders hanging around his hips and threatening to catch on every shard of exposed metal or splintery wooden surface. He is out of place in Last Chance like an antique clock stubbornly ticking away in a ditch by the road, his frustration is constant and loud, and Phineas is somehow sure the town hates him back.

“You don’t live here, do you?” When she asks, disgust ripples in his halo strongly enough to reach her from across the room.

“Ach, absolutely not. I think some rabbits were holed up here before me.” Ulrich mutters something else she doesn’t catch and reaches as far back into the cupboard as he can, up on his toes.

“I meant in Last Chance, in this town,” Phineas says.

“Do I look like a local?”

“Maybe? I dunno from locals.”

Ulrich shakes his head, which doesn’t do much because his cheek is pressed against the cupboard frame. He finally fishes out a chipped plastic cup.

“Only passing through. I got held up.”

He returns from the kitchen with a bottle of water and the cup, which looks suspiciously clean this close. The couch cushion Phineas is sitting on is also suspiciously clean despite the internal dust, and the top of the wooden spindle being used as a table is a completely different shade of brown than the rest of it. The space Ulrich has carved out for himself almost sparkles next to the dirt on everything else.

She (The Turtle) had climbed on top of the spindle-table while he was away, and now watches Ulrich closely, craning her neck to keep a direct line of sight. He ignores her until he is setting his things next to her, and then he stops to glare back. Phineas feels something undefinable pass between them. Whatever it is makes Ulrich seem even more irritated than before.

“Don’t like critters?” Phineas asks lightly, after several extremely weird seconds pass.

“Wild animals?” he asks with false enthusiasm. “In my living space, on the furniture? Almost as much as I like used bandages on the table.” He looks like he wants to remove the creature (She, not Phineas,) but can’t make himself touch it. Phineas takes pity and gently picks up the turtle to set her on the floor, where she retreats into her shell. The leaves on her back glow an idle blue.

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