“I know you’re in there, Morgan,” Alex said. He had his hands on his hips and looked disapprovingly at the cupboard. He’d probably searched everywhere else and had concluded where Morgan was. Not that Morgan was going to give him the satisfaction of responding. Not verbally, anyway. He needed to be alone, Alex had to understand that, and yet here he was, haughtily demanding his attention. 

 

Alex sighed and opened the cupboard. In it were all the things one might expect to reasonably find in a cupboard, although a small station as barebones as this did have some very expensive ceramic. Courtesy of Transtar going under, there were dozens of everything. There were exactly thirteen cups on the shelf. Alex had counted. 

 

“I will use all of these for coffee,” Alex said, “until you talk to me.” He was speaking vaguely in the direction of the cups. Morgan assumed it was because he didn’t want to run the risk of addressing one when he’d been disguised as another. He felt a little bit of malicious glee about that. Still, he wasn’t going to risk Alex’s coffee. For the first time in his life, Alex had been forced to make it himself, and it was about as good as you’d expect. His coffee was chunky.

 

Slowly, the Transtar logo began to fade on the leftmost cup. Alex looked at it with his usual glare and raised an eyebrow. “Well? Are you going to sit in here all day and sulk?” He probably expected Morgan to turn back any second. Not that Morgan was going to give him the satisfaction. Slowly, the gold lettering began to reappear. In the beautiful Art Deco font that was the hallmark of the Transtar corporation, new words wrote themselves on its surface. 

 

“FUCK OFF,” the cup said. 

 

“Why are you doing this, Morgan?” Alex said. He leaned against the small countertop. Morgan hoped he felt really dumb, talking to a cup as if it was a person. Morgan wasn’t here! It was just cups! The lettering faded again. It took a minute for new ones to appear. 

 

“KINDLY FUCK OFF,” the lettering now said, slightly smaller.

 

“I will ask Mikhaila to come here and talk to you if you won’t act like an adult. You know I will.”

 

If a cup could sigh, this one would. It didn’t move in any perceptible way, but it suddenly had an air of sullen frustration. The letters faded again. Alex raised his eyebrows and crossed his arms, waiting for his brother to change back, or at least give a coherent response. Instead, the Transtar logo appeared again. Alex rolled his eyes, closed the cupboard and left the room, muttering “Be that way,” just before closing the door. 

 

Sweet silence. Gentle darkness. Morgan didn’t have eyes right now. Cups, except some of those novelty ones, didn’t have eyes either, but Morgan was aware of his environment. Being a cup made the world a lot flatter. After the Talos I incident, he had found refuge in, well, the cupboard. Mimicking a cup allowed him to tune out the world, turn off his brain and not feel everything so keenly. As a cup, his body wasn’t his body. It was a cup. 

 

No cup lasts forever, though, and when Mikhaila walked in, Morgan was once again Morgan-shaped, his arms crossed as he looked at Earth through the porthole. He’d been a cup long enough. He’d had his time to not-think. And while it was always pleasant to mess with his brother, he couldn’t really avoid Mikhaila. They’d been too close. And he respected her, which was more than he could say for his brother. Sure, he knew he was a good scientist. But Alex had a lot to make up for. Mikhaila didn’t. She was a fundamentally good person. She deserved better than to have a conversation with a cup. 

 

As much as he wanted to tell her to go away, he needed to be honest with her. Even if that carried the risk of being honest with himself. Right now, the outcome of that would be less than pleasant. He didn’t want to face the thing that had been screaming inside his head. It couldn’t scream inside a cup, but he couldn’t stay cup forever. 

 

“Morgan,” Mikhaila said. It wasn’t a question. There was no hesitation in her voice. Morgan didn’t turn around. He didn’t have the energy to face her, even if she was broadcasting through an operator. He was going to have to, eventually, but he was stalling. He imagined they both knew it, deep down. He imagined she could tell. But there wasn’t much she could do about it, constrained as she was by the --

 

“Morgan,” she repeated, and touched him on the arm. He spun around. Mikhaila stood in front of him. He always managed to forget just how imposing a figure she struck when she was in the same room as him. Her cheekbones looked sharp enough to cut glass. There weren’t many who had the same intense look in their eyes the way she did. If he hadn’t looked into the Typhon’s that very day, he wouldn’t have been able to remember the last time he’d been looked at like that. Like someone could peer into him. He hated it, but it’s what he loved about her. It’s why, after the Talos I event, they’d stayed close. She could see him for who he really was, and he felt more genuine around her. 

 

They’d agreed to stay just that though. Close, but not too close. Morgan felt too… he couldn’t imagine the thought of being in a relationship the way he was right now. He’d given it thought, at first, but his rough hands on her skin felt wrong. Like he’d be defiling something good and beautiful. He knew he’d be apologizing for not being good enough every step of the relationship. He hoped that she understood that. That she knew the problem wasn’t her, that it was him, in the most sincere possible way. The way she looked at him, he could tell she did. Her usually hard gaze softly caressed his face. He felt hideous, the way she looked at him with caring. He felt repulsive.

 

“Morgan,” she said a third time. He was doing what he could to keep it together, and having a hard time of it. She was too kind to him, and probably always had been. 

 

“How…” he began. “When did you even get here? I don’t --” He lightly shook his head as if to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. 

 

“I docked earlier,” she said. “I’m surprised you didn’t hear. I’m afraid I’m better at fixing these damn guidance systems than I am at guiding them.” She flashed him an apologetic smile. 

 

“Oh,” he said. “What are you doing here?” He hadn’t meant for that to sound as dismissive as it did, but he felt he had little control over his voice. It always sounded too rough to him. He often felt he had to constantly oversteer or be seen as that Morgan Yu. The old one. The one he hated so much. 

 

“Alex asked me to come here,” she said. 

 

“Of course he did,” Morgan said with a sigh. “What did he tell you?”

 

She bit her lip and stood next to him to look out the window at Earth. 

 

“It looks so peaceful from up here, doesn’t it?” Changing the subject as if it was the most normal business in the world, she crossed her arms. Her eyes flitted across the blue-and-yellow planet’s surface. 

 

“Yeah,” Morgan said. If she was going to play games, he could play along. Better this than what he feared she might start saying. “The Coral doesn’t look so bad from up here.”

 

They stood next to each other for what felt like a lifetime. Somewhere on the ship, a digital clock counted the minutes as they passed. Talos IV continued its gentle orbit. Morgan and Mikhaila stood next to each other and looked out into space. It was pleasant. He hadn’t been in Mikhaila’s presence for some time, and having her there with him was soothing, to a certain extent. It was pleasant for as long as he could ignore the urge to reach out to her, to hold her. That urge was disturbing to him and it made him feel vile. Not because of her. She was perfectly wonderful. Because of him. 

 

“I love you, you know,” Mikhaila said. It was the worst possible thing she could have said, and the best. He felt much the same, of course. But they’d talked about this before. Bringing it out into the open again now was simply painful.

 

“I -- I know, but --” he began. He’d planned on reminding her of the agreement they’d made, that them being together was not something he felt he could do. But she wasn’t going to let him. She turned to him with those two steely eyes of hers fixed on his. His voice caught in his throat. He, those eyes said clearly, had misunderstood what she meant.

 

“I love you, Morgan. Even if you don’t look like you used to.”

 

“What do you mean?” he asked. He knew what he thought she meant. But he needed to hear it from her.

 

“If you want to look different, you won’t be a different person to me,” she said, her eyes hard but her voice soft. “You’ll be the good person who woke up on Talos I and saved my life.” She put a hand on his arm. He almost winced, as if he was about to be touched with a hot poker. She wasn’t going to let him retreat into himself like that, though, and kept her arm in place.

 

“You’re a good person, Morgan. That person is the one I love. And from what I heard, that person doesn’t...” she paused. He could see it in her eyes. She was about to say the thing. The thing that made him want to throw himself out the porthole. “It doesn’t sound like that person looks like this.” She forced out her words towards the end of her sentence. It was clearly hard for her to say this. He wondered if that was because she was forcing herself to accept something about him she was struggling with, or because she felt she was hurting him. 

 

Morgan frowned. “Alex didn’t tell you that,” he said. 

 

She shook her head. “I talked to her,” she said, confirming his fears. He couldn’t have forbidden her from talking to the Typhon, of course, and he couldn’t hold it against her. He’d felt morbid curiosity himself when he went to see the damn thing. But he feared what it -- what she’d told Mikhaila. Anything but the truth, a little voice in the back of his head said. He told it to shut the fuck up. 

 

“Do you think,” Mikhaila asked, “that she looks like what you were supposed to look like?”

 

He shook his head. “I don’t --” he began, and rubbed his face. “I couldn’t even… I’m not…”

 

“You couldn’t what?” she asked. She seemed to want to help him, but a part of her seemed annoyed, even frustrated. 

 

“I could never look like…” he began and let the sentence peter out vaguely. The whole question was moot, the way he saw it. Why ask it if the answer was impossible? What was the point? He could never, so he should never. The question itself was cursed, and he couldn’t answer it properly. That was if he even deserved to. He looked at his hands, and couldn’t imagine them being anything but repulsive to him.

 

“Morgan,” she said, and she seemed genuinely annoyed now. Her frown deepened and she gently raised her hand and slapped him. It wasn’t very hard, but it shook him out of his self-flagellation. 

 

“What?!” he said/asked incredulously. “What was that for?”

 

“You,” she said, waving a finger in his face, “are the dumbest smart person I know.” Something about the way she said that made it almost feel like a term of endearment. Morgan shook his head. He didn’t understand what she meant. She rolled her eyes and took his face in her hands. 

“You can turn into a cup, Morgan. You can look like whatever the hell you want."