...it's probably not useful for Zash to try to people person about a dead guy but they're in each other's heads so Yvette will certainly be able to see the impulse. Or, if nothing else, the bare fact that Zash does not feel at all surprised by this.

He's very cute, and she will probably take him up on that later, but there is no time for feelings right now, Zash! None!! Who are you to think feelings are allowed, she's working so she (and Nai) can avoid them!

Nodnodnodnod.

Man if he's not allowed to work and not allowed to feelings what else is he meant to do here.

(Human reproduction-related thoughts flit to mind and now he's seeing an advantage or two to having shut his libido down decades ago actually. Especially given that the people he might want to take human reproduction-related actions with are unavailable.)

...people, plural???? Zash, Nai isn't human, he thought that was clear.

(Not being human and having a fluid body plan just means he has more options available to him, really, clearly hybrids can have sex drives if they want them and it has legitimate recreational appeal NO BAD YVETTE.)

Nope, nope, not engaging with any of that. She is not. Zash is here for SNUGGLES and BASKING IN THE PRESENCE OF THOSE HE LOVES.

She!! Is going!!! To work!!!!!

...speaking of work, uh, Nai loves likes enjoys appreciates has positive feelings about the snuggles but he actually wants to go back to directly healing plants now. Even if the red ones aren't in pain, here, because of the entire support network he's built for them, they're still not alright.

Yeah, absolutely. She supports this wholeheartedly. Uh. ... Probably she can mind snuggle him because she's using his gate now? So he can sort of have that if he wants, while still healing plants. If he would not feel like she's overstepping into his personal space about it, anyway, she'd kind of been expecting that.

Of course they're going to—what does she—

[Nai, she has no idea what it feels like to heal plants from the inside]

Oh.

He supposes that makes sense.

Well, they'll be mind snuggling.

[...I can't fly but... could you bring me with you? to heal the plant] He turns his mental attention if not his eyes towards Yvette. [if it's alright for me to unsnuggle?]

[Yes, Zash, it’s all right for you to unsnuggle. The rule about always touching for the next month is mostly for your benefit, you know, I was never worried about your survival.]

Just him. Which is much less scary, really.

[lovelovelovelove]

[you'll like this]

But then yes he'll get up.

...Nai will hold one of Zash's hands. A bit shyly. And then he'll strangle the shyness to death and start to fly them towards one of the red plants.

The plant starts to unfold before they even get there, and her thoughts are more jumbled than plants' thoughts usually are. It's in a very recognisable way, though: she feels nervous, and excited, and anxious, and anticipatory. She knows what they're going to do and while she isn't in pain she isn't alright, as Nai himself thought, and they'll help her feel alright.

She loves them so much.

Awwwwwwwwww what a cutie, she loves her right back.

Yvette will bravely attempt to continue doing her own work, but she's starting to get the sneaking suspicion that this is an immensely emotional and compassionate sort of event that one might find distracting.

They get to the tank and place their hands and foreheads on the glass, Nai's right hand resting on top of Zash's left hand, and they open up.

The feeling... is pretty much the psychic equivalent of snuggling.

You're not alone.

We're here for you.

You don't have to be afraid.

You don't have to fight so much.

We love you.

We can help you.

You don't need to worry.

Trust us.

The feeling, in itself, isn't directed, and Yvette might get the sense it can't be. It's love, pure and simple. It's the kind of thing that doesn't have room for doubt, for selfishness, for fear, for mistrust. They make themselves vulnerable, make themselves wide open in full trust that they're not going to be hurt, that they're not going to be taken advantage of when everything they have is laid bare.

It's not, actually, very distracting, because it really just feels comfortable. Cosy. Like home. It's a passive, background feeling, a feeling that isn't strongly and intensely felt, the kind of love that permeates your heart and your thoughts when you're next to someone you love and you're allowed to simply be, with your guard lowered and your heart still.

Once they establish that connection, once their souls are in synchrony, their minds can interface with even higher bandwidth. Yvette natively has that much bandwidth with Nai because they're sharing a gate, and that's how she can feel this love no matter what, that's why Nai thought that of course she was going to be feel snuggled. She's sharing in this bond with them.

But it's not just the feeling. There is a purpose to what they're doing. With their gates connected to each other like this, the twins can get to work. They look, and reach towards their sister, and go all the way into her heart and mind and body, all the way to the other dimension.

And they assess.

Where's the damage? What's going wrong? What's missing, what's hurting, what's leaking? Where are you in pain? How can they help? It's like surgery, they have to use their minds as their scalpel and to carefully and intimately know all of the ways in which the humans have hurt her. Pay close attention to their patient, comfort her, and heal her.

So it's no wonder Zash gets so exhausted, so physically and emotionally wrung out. He's not angry, never angry, but he's so, so sad and hurting for his sister, for all the pain and damage she's had to gone through. He knows exactly how much she's clamped down on her hurt and discomfort so that she could keep helping the humans, how much she's had to ignore her needs and her wishes because there was something more important on the line.

And it's likewise no wonder that Nai gets less exhausted than Zash does, because Nai is always angry. He spends hours being reminded of how much humans have used his sister, how callously, how they have ignored her cries and the diagnostic data saying that everything wasn't okay. That brings the anger into focus, and it makes his purpose even clearer. He doesn't have the luxury of feeling pain when his sisters are in so much worse condition; he needs to help them, all of them, rescue them and free them from the clutches of this species that has eyes for nothing and no one but themselves.

Every time he does this, every time he heals one of his sisters, he sharpens himself more, files his blades to a finer and finer edge.

Oh.

Yeah, hoping she could get work done, while also witnessing this for the first time from the inside, was perhaps a bit overly ambitious of her, wasn't it. She can, at long last, see what's on the other side of the divide. She's even getting snuggled while she looks.

For a second she's briefly overwhelmed by the sheer beauty, and the delicious feeling of ha I'm right. Connecting what she's seeing with what she already knows. It's not, quite, all accurate, but a lot of the broad strokes are correct enough that she has enough of an idea of what's happening that her next immediate impulse is to backseat diagnose. Except... well, of course it's obvious what's wrong from her viewpoint, because they're the ones showing her and then fixing it. They know it from this side much, much better than she does. This is a time where, actually? What she should be doing is sitting down and shutting up and taking notes. Translating this all to math that can be used to show other humans what's going on. Being the proverbial surgeon is important and fulfilling, but... sometimes the way to do the most doesn't involve being the one in charge. Sometimes it's taking notes so other people can do this, too.

... Not quite the work she was expecting to be doing, but it probably counts. Even if she's absolutely failing to have any kind of control over her short attention span and high likelihood of getting distracted by new and shiny problems. So, yes she manages to work! Workaholic to the very end, that's her.

The twins send her nearly-identical waves of love. The intensity of the feeling, the direction, it's almost the same, almost echoing.

But the context and the content aren't, quite, identical.

For Nai, it's the way Yvette is leveraging it, got her hands on a new resource and immediately jumped to figuring out how to best use it to help his sisters. How to best do good.

For Zash, it's the understanding that she gets it. That she understands, that she knows what love can do. Her motivations, her agape, the love for all people.

He's so in love with her it's surreal.

That's very sweet, and working while getting psychically snuggled and viscerally feeling she's loved is approximately the best working conditions ever. In all of time. Well, except for how it's a bit distracting, but she's declining to get distracted any further. She sends affection right back to both, but not now boys she's working!