Tainui shrugged and walked over to the pool, where he quickly undressed and jumped into the hot water with the two Vanguard, watching while they cleaned and groomed each other, wincing occasionally from their injuries.

"You're like a couple of baboons," he smirked at the two of them.

"What are 'baboons'?"

"Baboons. Monkeys. Y'know, eat bananas and fling shit at each other? Masturbate in front of school-kids at the zoo? Ring any bells?" The two Vanguard just stared at him silently and he shrugged after a moment. "Maybe not, then."

Turning around, he rested his chin on his crossed arms while staring vacantly out the window into the deep purple colored sky, wondering what was to become of him. A minute or so later, he jerked with surprise when he felt something brush lightly against his back. He tried to swivel around, but was prevented from doing so by a firm, but gentle grip by a pair of hands that brooked no argument.

"Hey! Wait a minute, what -"

"Silence, human. Base medics overlook your injuries. This one heals. Cease and desist with struggle," Two-Talon instructed, snapping his jaw softly at the warrior who shifted his hands slightly to stop him from wriggling quite so much.

"That'll teach me to make smart-ass comments," he lamented while Hunts-In-Grass forcibly detained him, purring loudly. "This isn't going to hurt, is it?" he whined, biting his bottom lip nervously.

He felt Two-Talon's lethally sharp talons tracing lightly over the wet skin on his back, a sensation that raised involuntarily goose-bumps despite the warmth of the water. When the movement stopped and a peculiar, tingling pressure began, he tried to slip forward, up and over the lip of the pool. But the warrior holding him down would have none of it and just tightened his grip slightly. The tingling pressure increased until it felt like there were lots of hot, sharp little legs crawling over him. It wasn't a painful or even all that unpleasant feeling, just very, very alien.

Hunts-In-Grass looked on with interest while Two-Talon worked his healing ability. He had never watched a medic in action this closely before and found the process rather fascinating. Although it was probably just as well the human couldn't see what was happening; he suspected Tainui would become somewhat...unmanageable if he could see exactly what the medic was doing to him.

After a minute or so, the medic opened his eyes and gave Hunts-In-Grass a small grin while he waited for the nerve tendrils to withdraw fully from the human's body back into his uninjured hand. He then moved the hand to a large bruise over the spine and set to work again. It took a few moments, but eventually the thousands of ultra-fine nerve tendrils slowly emerged from the palm and his fingers, slithering over the skin before burrowing in.

Tainui, for his part, actually began to enjoy the sensation. Although Two-Talon had moved on to another sore-spot, a pleasant warmth remained behind. He closed his eyes and sighed, lowering his chin onto his crossed arms again while the medic continued to minister to him. Abruptly and without any warning, his right leg spasmed violently and began cramping as the muscles writhed around with a mind of their own.

"Ow! What the fuck, OW...oh..." Just as quickly as it started, his leg returned to his control and the pain disappeared as if it had never been. He turned his head as much as he was able and glared at Two-Talon. "Bro! What the hell?"

"Hrrr, apologies, little one. Unfamiliar nerves," Two-Talon rumbled softly, not opening his eyes.

He had let his tendrils infiltrate a little too far into the concentrated mass of nerves running through the human's spine. However, he was almost done and after the tendrils had withdrawn he nodded to the warrior to release him.

Hunts-In-Grass watched the livid bruise start fading as if by magic and gave Two-Talon a questioning look.

"Human physiology appears to react much more swiftly to my healing ability than our own." When the warrior's face suddenly went blank and his eyes took on a haunted, hollow look, Two-Talon knew exactly what he was thinking, and he quickly disabled his translation disk. "Hrrr, it would have not altered the outcome, lover. Andrej would still have succumbed to his injuries, for they were extensive and had been left untreated for too long by the time you reached him. There was nothing that we could have done differently, even if I had of been able to assist. All I could have done was to ease his pain in the last few minutes."

He saw the warrior struggling to hold himself together and Tainui had turned around to stare at them suspiciously. Time to wrap this up. "Just being with him at the end was the single most important thing you did, alright?" He ran the fingers of his good arm along the bottom of the warrior's jaw in a tender movement. "Hrrr, let us finish here. Your base commander wanted to communicate with us this morning, correct?"

Hunts-In-Grass grunted, not trusting himself to say anything and hunkered down into the water beside the human and stared at him sorrowfully for several moments.

Tainui raised an eyebrow and stared back at him, unable to read the expression on his craggy face. Just the lizard being all weird and moody again, he figured. Surging to his feet again, the warrior reached out with his forward arms and lifted him from the pool and placed him on the edge with little effort.
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This is NOT what it might look like, and anyone who immediately thought "RAEP!" should be ashamed of yourselves

Huge thanks to the ever wonderful  charha for this. She is such a wonderful artist to work with, much