“That’s just great,” Collins said, and Jared tried to focus on him as he approached the side of the bed. “What’s this goo you’re making?”

“Softens my skin,” Jared said raggedly. “Skin becomes the cocoon.”

I had a really hard time getting rolling on this story, so I wrote a lot of it in a hurry at the last minute, and still turned it in late, like an asshole. A lot of it was just waffling about the ridiculousness of the concept and whether I could execute it, I think. Anyway, because of the time constraint I basically created for myself out of nothing, some corners got cut, sometimes for the better.

My original idea for the cocoon thing had Jared constructing one for himself like a caterpillar. I decided that was too self-directed, and for a while was going to go with a second-instar person's parents and relatives building a cocoon around them after they entered the goo stage, which opened up possibilities like embedding charms in the cocoons a la the charms in Egyptian grave wrappings, families making cocoons ahead of time to send away with their kids, Jared sadly climbing into a cocoon he bought at a drugstore before he set out, etc. What I did is more compact than that would have been, and maybe served the body horror and h/c angles of this story better, but I am sorry I didn't get to explore some of that stuff.

“Wow. Okay. I’m sure this is a natural, beautiful thing for you—”

Jared almost smiled. “No, it’s gross.”

Affably reads most of my writing as I write it and more or less liveblogs it back at me, which is helpful in a whole lot of ways, and I think this line got a bigger laugh out of her than anything else in this story. It's one of my favorite lines too, and one of the better examples of the thing that happens throughout the story where Misha and Jared are either suddenly and unexpectedly simpatico, or suddenly and unexpectedly foreign to each other.

You didn't excerpt the bit later when Misha says the goo smells kind of good and Jared tells him it's nutritious (my single favorite exchange in the story), but the reason for that is that it's meant to calorically pay back the people watching over a sub-adult in the cocoon if food supplies get tight, partly inspired by the way discus fish "nurse" their offspring with their own skin mucus. I should have had Jared eating a lot more and putting on some extra weight during the trip toward Earth.

“I’m so glad you said that,” Collins said. He paused, and Jared didn’t have the energy to fill the silence. “What do I do?”

“Huh?” said Jared, drifting.

I wrote this either when I had a cold, or just after I'd recovered from one, so it's appropriate that I'm commentating it now, when I've got another cold. A lot of the body horror Jared experiences is just cold symptoms turned up to eleven, with glycerine poured on them.

“I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to just leave you here to ruin a set of my sheets. What do I do?”

Thinking was so much work. “I won’t stick to a smooth surface,” Jared said eventually. “You could move me to the bathroom.”

“Oh, that’s going to be awesome.” Collins lifted Jared’s wrist gingerly off the bed and tugged experimentally at the sheet, which came away from Jared’s skin much more easily for him than it had for Jared. A couple of days ago Collins touching him like this would’ve been thrilling and confusing but basically good; right now, oversensitized and sick, Jared would have yanked his hand away if he could have, and the vile sensation of the sheet pulling away made him want to scream. “Oh wow, you’re naked. This is not how I imagined this happening. Okay, put you in a shower stall, then what?”

This, for example. A few years ago I had a flu bad enough that I went to the doctor with it (they told me to drink lots of clear fluids and gave me prescription-strength tablets of an over-the-counter painkiller). I told them that my skin hurt and they looked at me like I was a weirdo, but this is something I get every time I have a cold: my skin becomes unpleasantly sensitized and touching any surface is both painful and loathsome. It's like nails on a chalkboard. For skin. I don't think I conveyed the true nastiness of it, frankly.

Anyway, here we also have an example of how openly Misha has been hitting on Jared without Jared noticing. Jared, you dweeb. He's been escalating for a week and a half or whatever, seeing how blatant he has to get before Jared notices.

“Um. Throw — throw me out the airlock.”

Collins dropped Jared’s wrist. Jared found the wherewithal to yelp. “What?”

“Not yet,” Jared said, still wincing. “In a few days. It breaks the cocoon.”

“You are fucking joking.”

“It’s the only way.”

Misha reluctantly airlocking Jared is one of the first things I knew was going to happen in this story, and a lot of Jared's biology, and therefore his culture, were constructed to justify it. So of course, when it happens, Jared is insensate and all the audience sees is the results.

“Also seems like a fine way to kill you if I time it wrong. Which I will, because I don’t know a damn thing about this, and the local expert is going to be in a cocoon.”

I've made a token effort to restore the italics that got lost in copy-pasting, but I'm sure I missed some. Anyway, one of the things I enjoyed about writing Misha in this story was what a worrywart he turned into at this point. I always write Misha as very deflective and emotionally evasive (and when he does talk about his feelings, unless you catch him off guard, it's all very organized: it's stuff he's thought about a thousand times, dealt with, arranged neatly, probably put into words ahead of time, because he's terrified of vulnerability), but also absolutely determined to take care of the people around him as best he can. Which in this case just means waiting, which he hates.

“It starts to—” Jared sighed, and considered just going back to sleep instead of exerting himself to explain. “It starts to crumble off when it’s ready to go. You’ll be able to see it. But I need hard vacuum to get the inner layers off. Harder than you can make by just cycling an airlock. You have to open the outer gate.”

“Damn it.”

“I could hear you thinking it.”

“Don’t get smart while you’re at my mercy.” Collins seemed to stand back and survey him, though given that Jared could see him only blurrily, he could really have been doing anything. It was probably for the best that he didn’t know that. “Okay, this isn’t going to work.”

“Nuh,” Jared said helpfully.

Oh yeah, I really evoked the feeling of the second or third day of a cold. Specifically the cold I have right now. I call what Jared is experiencing here "Wednesday". Y'all are just going to have to take my word for it.

“Not in the Face remote command authorization Collins six eight three,” Collins said into his lapel. “Gravity to point one gee, thirty second onset. Execute.”

I know I've mentioned this elsewhere, but the name of the ship is from The Tick via the hilarious tuisinthekowhai. I solicited people for a name pretty late in the writing of this story, but the reason nobody acknowledges the name in the text is just that the joke is that no one questions it anymore, not that I didn't have time to work it in.

Anyway, science fiction is awesome because when you're looking down the barrel of having to write one of your characters wrangling the sodden, sticky body of the other one down a ladder and along several corridors, you can instead just have the first character turn down the gravity.

Misha loves his ship and they get along very well, but the first time after the retro-fit that he flew her from port to port he spent the entire time terrified that she was going to explode. This did not happen.

Jared was drowsily unable to extract any meaning from this, and had decided to just ignore it when he felt the ship’s artificial gravity well flex and the weight lift slowly from his limbs. He could feel the forward-and-back slewing of the Not in the Face’s center of mass more clearly now, and it made him glad there was nothing in his stomach.

It doesn't come up in this paragraph, but to Jared ships are "it", not "she", even when they're female-shaped. What I don't know is if this "it" (presumably being translated from whatever language Jared speaks) refers to inanimate objects or to a gender Jared's species has and humans don't. They definitely have at least three sexes and all of them are involved in reproduction. Also, communal child-rearing is common. They're a gregarious species, because they evolved in an environment of constant extreme peril, though before they encountered humans I don't think they tended to settle in groups of more than a couple of hundred.

“That’s more like it,” Collins said, and got an arm under Jared. Jared came unstuck in a dozen places at once when Collins lifted him; he managed a horrified whimper, and Collins froze. “Am I hurting you?”

“Feels gross,” Jared said. “Everything’s — my nerves — ugh.”

Aw, Misha, you're a not altogether terrible space boyfriend. So, oxygen!

I refer to breath mosses and their mechanical equivalent, oxygen stations, in the story, and also mention that one of the functions of Jared's wing membranes is to hold the air in over his hypothetical family. Obviously this would never work; if you dump some gasses into vacuum they just dissipate too quickly for you to get any use out of them. Breath mosses, which are the foundation of the ecosystem in which Jared's people evolved, must produce air that is somehow sticky and clingy, or polymerized or something, to keep it from just flying off into the void and never being heard from again.