“Exceed my every expectation?” Director Williams' voice comes muffled from behind the glass of the medical ward. A cocktail of highly potent medical fluids flow through Crow’s body as he lays on one of the beds. Doctors mull around him, drawing blood, sampling tissue, echoing readouts.

  “Their performance against an anomaly not even the other Vanguard branches could survive against was exceptional, really. Their resistance to mind-altering effects even more so given how dangerously expedited the process was…” Doctor MacArthur tries to sound enthusiastic with his silver lining, but it doesn’t work.

  Crow watches shapes move absently across the back of his closed eyelids, trying to swim through the drowsiness that threatens to take him back under at any moment. For a brief moment, the doctor's voices become lost, but Crow forces himself to remain conscious and continues to listen to their words.

  Director Williams sighs, Crow hears him shift and nod and tap away into his floating tablet. “Their fragmentation rate is going to prove problematic if it's not dealt with soon. I want a unit of soldiers, Doctor, not a group of bickering children. The Vanguard are scalpels, and I dare say their insistence on bickering is blunting them.”

  There is a pause then, as Doctor MacArthur hangs on the Director's words, and Crow finds himself hanging on them too. Every sentence they speak is like a drug, and in the absence of conversation he finds himself wanting. It's an odd, deeply unsettling feeling, especially half drugged up in a hospital bed.

  Crow knows why he hangs on their words—understands that this is a product of his conditioning and yet he can’t stop himself from feeling the emotions that well up inside of him with their praise or disapproval.

  Director Williams takes a breath, and with that breath comes a rush of anxiety. Crow’s entire sense of self hinges on what this man says. Director Williams, Doctor MacArthur, they are his reason for existing. He needs to know what the Director has to say.

  “I will leave the details in James’s capable hands, though please make sure that he knows I expect better. This mission was no easy task but the Vanguard is meant to be the best. Let's ensure we are doing everything to achieve that end.”

  It's as though Director Williams plunged his hand into Crow's chest and tore out his still beating heart, creating a void, and he feels his throat wet with bile.

  A disappointment. That's what he was. He failed, failed the 0-6, Doctor MacArthur, James, and his team. A whimper almost escapes him but he bites it back as he realizes just how pathetic it feels.

  A whimper? A hole in his chest? His mind stretches itself to the very edge of what he can handle in his current state. Self loathing does not help site-51. Crying and complaining about poor performance does not help him improve.

  Fire takes in the pit of his guts, burning away at the crush of anxiety that tempts the edges of his emotions. He feels his breathing return to normal, as the calculations settle deep within his soul. Analyze, correct, improve. Dissect the reason for failure and ensure it never happens again.

  While there is little he can do from his hospital bed, it serves as a stage to observe his situation more objectively. As the night closes in and the doctors leave him in silence, he focuses on his breathing, and the steps he’s able to take.

  The image of the Witch’s writhing, screaming body burns into his mind. He can still smell her blood in his sinuses, feel his blade carve into her. She was their first target, but she is also a fragment. The memory of her stings him, the cold realization of what he’s done, burned into his bones.

  He needs to kill her from his mind, crash the fragment down, bury her as deep as possible. That's the first step.

  Her voice echoes in his ears, her screams, and with each exhale he tries to force his blood to run cold, to take the fragment and cast it away. It works for a second, he can feel the emotion slip away, feel the pain of what he’s done ebb and flow from his body—

  No

  A tap on his chest, imaginary, a phantom, another fragment, but one that won't let him forget.

  Crow grinds his teeth, tries to ignore it but despite his conscious effort to quell the pain the memory of the Witch causes he can’t bring himself to fully let go. The fragment lingers at his fingertips, and he can feel tears begin to well in the corners of his eyes.

  “Come on.” He mutters, practically begs, tries to let the fragment go, tries to forget the tapping on his chest. How easy it would be, how much easier all of it would be if he could just let it go.

  It sticks to him, that primal, animalistic part of his brain grasps at the fragments against his conscious will and carves it into his skin.

  “Fuck!” Crow lets out a breath, allowing the tension to ease in his body as the fragment refuses to leave. He brings his one good hand up to his forehead, and taps it there, thinking that maybe he can force the fragments out through force.

  It doesn’t work, and just leaves his muscles aching.

  Opening his eyes for the first time in what feels like a day, he turns his gaze to his other arm.

  Fluids pump into his veins, making them glow at the edge of the fresh amputation location that connects to the artificial arm they grew for him. It looks almost exactly like his old arm, though with Crows enhanced perception he can tell its off.

  It’s uncanny, watching as he is being made to fuse with it, as the power of the Harbinger tries to latch onto the lab grown muscle to distribute its power across the limb.

  It itches like hell, but there is nothing he can do about it for now.

  Crow closes his eyes again, and gives up on trying to leave the fragments behind. Instead, he finds himself thinking about how he can improve, and what more he can do to ensure he is an asset to site-51. He needs to be stronger, faster, a better fighter, a better tactician and strategist. At the very least, he needs to become the best of Vanguard to ensure that Vulture doesn’t.

  The memory of Vulture using his fear aura against Crow infuriates him. He can get away with it because he’s the strongest, because he knows he can fight the noise just enough to prove a point to the rest of Vanguard. If Director Williams wants a unit, then that unit needs a leader, and that leader can not under any circumstances be Vulture.

  Days pass in the hospital as his body works to lend its full Harbinger enhanced strength to Crow's new limb. More than once the acid is pumped into his veins to compensate for the days of bedrest, but the acid is nothing compared to the noise. So long as they don’t bring in the noise, he can stomach their methods.

  During this time, he studies. Hours upon hours of instruction time, mostly regarding the anomalies site-51 captured previously when the government outsourced that particular duty to contractors. It's a flood of information he desperately tries to digest, any and every advantage over their targets is one worth having, and any piece of information that may give him the edge over Vulture in the coming missions, even more useful.

  By the time Crow is finally released from bedrest and allowed to train again, he pushes himself to the absolute brink of what his body will allow, despite his new arm struggle to keep up. He tries to stretch it, to work it harder than the rest of his body but the strength refuses to return in full.

  While in the showers, Crow scrubs at it, desperate to get more feeling returned to the nerve endings. It still lacks a full range of motion, and the pink scar around the place the new arm meets the old itches unlike anything.

  Reaching back, he dangles the loofa with his fingers and tries to swipe at the space just under his right shoulder blades. He can reach it with his new arm, but he can’t apply any significant amount of pressure to feel adequately clean.

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  Sighing, he lets his head rest against the wall, letting the sounds of the multiple running showers drown him out. He’s exhausted, maybe with either both arms or strength he could manage, but the combination of neither has him defeated.

  The sound of wet footsteps behind him has him shifting his eyes to watch Starling approach him. She stops a few inches shy of his back, and wordlessly she grabs the soapy loofa from between his hands and presses it to his back.

  Crow keeps his head against the wall, bringing his one hand up to press against it as well, letting Starling scrub at him.

  She saved him from that explosion... just as he saved her from the hairs that nearly turned her leg into ribbons. They were even all things considered, so why is she doing this?

  Starling never looks as though she feels anything, clinically apathetic. Her voice is a near persistent monotone at all times, her eyes rarely shifting beyond their resting, almost tired look. Her mouth has a natural curve up at the corner, giving the illusion of a smile in just the right light, which he had convinced himself was a smile sometimes, just to feel a little better.

  “Why are you doing this?” He asks, the words escaping him before he can stop it. He doesn’t know why he asks, It isn’t like it matters much.

  “I am responsible for your inability to do it yourself,” she responds plainly.

  He should have expected that answer. He doesn’t know why his mind suddenly jumps to something embarrassing. She is his team mate, she is Vanguard, of course that would be the reason—what other possible reason could there be?

  But what reason could there be for his mind's moment of drifting?

  “We are even, I saved you, you saved me,” Crow deflects.

  “Your saving me cost you more, and you have new scars because of me.” She continues, bringing the loofa away from his face.

  Crow lets the water wash the soap away, watching as it circles the drain just behind his feet.

  She doesn’t give the loofa back, so Crow turns to face her.

  Starling holds the Loofa next to her face, eyes as cold as ever as she stares at Crow.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “You look like me.”

  “W—what?” Crow looks down at himself, then looks her over, returning his now very confused gaze to her face. “We are very different on several fronts.”

  She shakes her head and pulls the Loofah away as Crow tries to take it back.

  “You look like me, that isn’t normal.”

  “Starling, I have no idea what you are talking about.”

  She brings both of her index fingers up, and presses them into the corner of her lips, and pulls them up to force her face into a strange approximation of a smile.

  “You usually look like this.” She says, the sound coming out all wrong because of her fingers and mouth position.

  Crow stifles a laugh. “I usually look like that?”

  “Not quite. It is more...” She brings her fingers to his lips, and does the same, forcing him into a smile.

  Crow can’t help it any more, he pulls away and laughs to himself. The feeling is strange, awkward almost, his cheeks hurt, and Starling lets her fingers down back to her sides.

  “Like that.”

  “What are you talking about?” He says through the remnants of his chuckle. “It’s not as though we need to smile. I think it's more accurate to say I normally look like you.”

  “Incorrect.”

  “Ah, I see. How foolish of me to assume I know myself.”

  “At least you are aware of your own foolishness.”

  Crow narrows his eyes and raises an eyebrow.

  “That was a joke.”

  “I can never tell.”

  “I know.”

  Crow finds himself chuckling again, grabbing the loofa without issue this time, and setting it on the rack next to the shower head to dry.

  “But you are wrong. You normally do not look like me,” Starling continues.

  “I’m not sure what qualifies as normal here.”

  “Statistical averages. My memory is perfect. I remember the number of days you look like you and the number of days you look like me. Today marks the beginning of a significant shift. Today you look like me exactly as many times as you look normal.”

  “You count the number of times I smile?”

  “In a sense, I count most everything.”

  Crow understands that. It’s a habit of his too, but still. He counts things in the world around him, not necessarily the things that happen to other people.

  “Well, perhaps that means this is my new average.” Crow turns off the water and grabs his towel, handing one to Starling as they approach their lockers.

  It certainly feels like the new normal. Now that he is forced to think about it, he can’t remember a time he smiled after he was given the order to bring his friend's head to James’s feet.

  “I only count my observations. I would assume before our time here the number favored your normal habits much higher.”

  The noise fills his ears for only a moment, but a moment long enough to give him pause. His knuckles turn white against the locker as it spreads through his head, making him clench his teeth, forcing his breath into shallow raspy things.

  “We shouldn’t talk about that...” he taps his ears.

  “I simply ignore it.”

  “I guess you are just better.”

  “I suppose I likely am.” Starling finishes drying off, and changes into her pure white lounge clothes.

  Crow smiles and shakes his head. “Another joke?”

  “No.”

  Crow pauses, and brings a hand to his chest. “Ouch.”

  “That ‘no’ was a joke.”

  Crow sighs, finishes dressing, and looks down to Starling who matches his gaze.

  “Why are we talking about this?”

  “Because I feel compelled to.”

  “Why do you feel compelled to?”

  “Why do you feel compelled to count seconds?” Starling cocks her head.

  “Because... I don’t know actually.”

  “Then there is your answer.”

  “That is not an answer.”

  “When you come up with an answer for why you count the seconds I will come up with an answer for why we talked about this.”

  Starling walks to the exit, and Crow finds himself wanting to shout back a retort, but he stops himself as he spies Vulture’s gaze on him.

  His attention shifts, his expression dropping instantly as Vulture seems to steal the smile from Crow's face.

  He doesn’t like the look in Vulture's eyes, not as they flick to the exit where Starling just left from, before returning to him.

  A pat on the back pulls him away, looking to Falcon now who examines the arm. “How much longer until its back to normal?”

  “The doctors told me two weeks.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “It itches a lot.”

  Falcon nods his head. “Myself and Sparrow were given reward requests for the mission. I can spend mine on an anti-itching cream if you want?”

  Crow shakes his head, walking with Falcon out of the showers, though he spares a quick look to Vulture who follows their exit.

  “No no, you don’t have to do that. Get yourself something.”

  “I’m not sure what I would request for myself, Besides, you were the one who planned damn near everything and got us through that. You’re the only reason Sparrow is still with us, you deserve it more than I do for following orders and playing mediator a couple times.”

  Falcon's hand on his shoulder squeezed slightly, and it’s obvious that this is eating at him.

  “My reward is a new arm… I'm happy enough with that.” Crow watches Falcon frown, evidently intent on insisting regardless. “You are too hard on yourself.” Crow offers a soft smile, realizing now he’s beginning to mentally keep count. Damnit Starling...

  “I am not hard enough on myself. Will you let me get you something for the itch?”

  Crow sighs, and nods his head. “Thank you.”

  “Of course.” Falcon pats him on the shoulder before breaking off to his room.

  Crow is exhausted, but he doesn’t intend to sleep just yet.

  Walking out into the rebuilt courtyard of their compound, Crow sits in the fields center, looking up at the night sky, letting his teleportation teeter to the edge, feeling it reroute him back to the newly rebuilt and heavily reinforced containment units.

  All of the blind spots have been patched, all of the possible escape methods now fully removed. There is now absolutely zero chance of even making an attempt. Not that there ever was before, but now he knows with absolute certainty that it’s impossible.

  Crow taps his finger into the ground, three times. It isn’t Morse, just three simple taps, the sound his namesake made—the sound they still make outside his window most nights, the sound they made before Jessica died, before he killed Chris, before a family he can barely remember the voices of were burned in their home.

  He can hear them just beyond the walls of the compound—a beak striking the earth

  tap tap tap