#Workspace Container

[msakintechnicalservices]

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[spanocontainer]

Custom Mobile Offices Available for Rent or Sale – Spano Container

When your company requires flexibility, Spano Container has the ideal solution: custom mobile offices. Whether you are growing your operations, establishing a temporary work site, or require extra office space, we have mobile offices that suit your requirements. With configurations from small units to large setups, you can discover the perfect office space for your employees.

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[portablecontainers]

Custom shipping container showroom PT 1 The build 0756463729

[miyadollie]

R/CRUSHES : HOW DO I TALK TO MY OFFICE CRUSH ? sillyguy0813 says : dude just borrow a stapler

★ STARRING office worker lee jeno x fem reader ( ft. best friend jaemin ) ★ WORD COUNT 2.6k + 3OO bonus ★ CONTAINS co-workers to dating, fluff !! lee jeno being a cutie, jaemin is a menace to society, workplace romance, ★ MIYA SAYS 💗 this is my first time TRYING to write a long fic :3 pls give me any constructive criticism and feedback thank uu 🧘🏼‍♀️ . update : wow i absolutely dislike my writing here but its been rotting in drafts too long and i gave up on fixing this TT

it starts with a stapler.

one you’re not even sure belongs to you. maybe you bought it once during a sale, or someone left it at your desk during a particularly chaotic week, and it stayed. quietly claimed as yours.

the moment wasn't love at first sight, no grand declaration of love with bouquets or fireworks. just a quiet tuesday morning, your inbox overflowing, the boss increasing your headache by preponing your deadlines, the coffee machine on its last breath and the fluorescent lights above flickering slightly like they, too, were tired of this job. and then there’s him.

lee jeno. clean-cut. soft-spoken. the kind of guy who always says “excuse me” when passing behind you, even when there’s plenty of space. always dressed a little too well for your casual office. not flashy—never that—but tidy, crisp. thoughtful. one cubicle down, diagonal from yours. he’s been here a while. a familiar face in the sea of semi-familiar ones. you’ve never really talked but only ever exchanged the kind of polite nods reserved for coworkers who share nothing but recycled air and a breakroom.

until today. “could you pass the stapler?” you look up, startled slightly by the voice.

he’s leaning just slightly over the low partition separating your desks, eyes trained on the corner of your workspace where your lonely black stapler sits. he gives you a smile. not flashy. not flirtatious. just—nice. warm. gentle. you blink once. then reach for it. “thanks,” he says. you nod. he returns to his screen. that’s it. except… it isn’t. because the next day, he borrows a pen. the day after that, post-its. then tape. then scissors. always returning everything. always smiling. always saying thank you like he means it. and now you’re wondering. is this flirting? some kind of extremely office-safe, hr-friendly version of it? or are you just painfully, embarrassingly overthinking it? or maybe did you have an unspoken crush on him? not that you can be blamed. - lee jeno is attractive. undeniably so. you’ve seen him once—just once—rolling up the sleeves of his white button-down in the middle of summer, and you swear you forgot how to form a coherent sentence for ten straight minutes. defined forearms. slim but strong hands. that razor-sharp jawline, often tilted thoughtfully while reading something on his screen. dark lashes. deep voice. a gym guy, apparently—you overheard it once when he mentioned it to jaemin (you weren’t eavesdropping, you just… have really good ears). you haven’t initiated anything. neither has he. but those tiny moments? the ones that make your heart skip? they’re adding up

────

FRIDAY | 4:30 PM

“soo… still down to try that new restaurant?” jaemin asks one afternoon, casually leaning on your desk during lunch with a fresh iced americano in hand—probably his fifth for the day. “obviously,” you reply, eyes lighting up. “people have been absolutely glazing it online. thanks for getting us a table!” he grins. “see you at 9 then.” just as he turns, he spins back around like a cartoon character. “oh, also—jeno’s coming. hope that’s cool?” you freeze. your face says i’m fine, but your body language screams mayday. “y-yeah. sure. totally chill,” you manage. “coolcoolcoolcool,” you say, immediately turning your head towards your computer, and then you see your reflection on the blank empty screen. you were blushing. hard. jaemin smirks knowingly as he walks off. of course he knows. he always knows. after all, he’s the mastermind who told jeno to borrow your stapler in the first place. ────

8:55 PM

the restaurant is low-lit and warm, the kind of place where the wood-paneled walls muffle outside noise, and everything feels just a little more intimate than it should. you arrive five minutes early. out of habit, mostly. or nerves. you’re not sure which. jaemin’s already there, somehow sipping an iced americano even here, scrolling through his phone while pretending not to notice your presence with a dramatic sigh. “i told you 9:00,” he says, without looking up. “it’s 8:55.” “still early.” he glances at you now, then raises an eyebrow. “cute top.” you ignore his antics, he’s just trying to get a reaction out of you. typical jaemin. your heart is already thudding too loudly, because jeno walks in right after. black shirt, sleeves rolled up. clean slacks. a bit of cologne, subtle but warm. his hair’s tousled slightly, and his eyes light up just a little when they land on you. “hey,” he says, with that soft smile. you don’t trust yourself to speak, so you just smile back, scooting over so he can sit across from you. the conversation is light, easy. mostly thanks to jaemin, who fills every awkward silence with a joke, a story, an embarrassing anecdote about your office. jaemin and jeno were friends in school, you get to know that night, they were benchmates. jaemin always chose jeno as his partner for every game, every lab, and jeno just liked his company, so he stood with him always. jaemin talks about you to jeno too—how you both were first day interns and hit it off over a conversation about which seventeen album is truly the best. but every now and then, you catch jeno looking at you. not staring. not even for long. just—looking. like he’s seeing something he's trying very hard not to see too obviously. “so,” jaemin says mid-way through dessert, smirking at you over his spoon, “funny how you two never end up talking at work.” you nearly choke. jeno shifts in his seat. “like, what’s with all the stapler borrowing, huh? no small talk?” you glare at him. he grins. “i’m just saying. feels like there’s some unspoken office tension.” jeno lets out a quiet laugh. and then, after a beat—he looks at you. “i guess i just… wanted a reason to talk,” he says, voice soft. and your breath catches. your heart is thudding again. you manage a smile, small and shy. trying not to mess up words or blabber out something nonsensical. “i noticed,” you reply. the space between you feels full, suddenly. full of every little interaction. every thank-you. every passing smile. jaemin stretches obnoxiously. “well, look at the time! i’ve got a meeting with my bed in ten.” you roll your eyes. “you’re so obvious.” he shrugs. “you’re welcome.” and just like that, he’s gone with the wind. leaving you and jeno, two half-finished desserts, and a quiet restaurant glowing gold in the late-night hush. “i can walk you home,” he says, gently. not pushing. just offering. and something in you says yes. to the walk. to this night. to the maybe that’s been building between you both. ────

10:45 PM

the night is cool, with a breeze just strong enough to lift the corners of your coat and make you tuck your hands into your sleeves. the restaurant’s warm glow fades behind you, replaced by the hush of quiet streets and dimly lit sidewalks. jeno walks beside you, hands in his pockets, his steps matching yours. neither of you says anything at first. the silence isn’t awkward. it’s... full. full of unspoken things. of nerves and glances and the way your arms brush every few seconds and both of you pretend not to notice. “jaemin talks too much,” jeno says eventually, voice low. you laugh softly. “it’s his specialty.” he hums in agreement, then adds, “he wasn’t wrong, though.” you glance at him, catching the way his eyes flicker to yours and then away again, like he’s testing the water, like he’s afraid of saying too much too fast. “i... didn’t really need the stapler that day.” your breath catches. “oh,” you manage, and you’re smiling now. you can’t help it. “i just... i guess i liked the idea of you looking at me. talking to me.” he pauses. “even if it was just a stapler.” you stop walking, just for a moment. jeno turns, realizing you’re no longer beside him. there’s a streetlight above him, casting shadows across his face and soft highlights in his hair. “you could’ve just said hi,” you whisper. he steps closer. barely. but enough to make the air between you buzz. “i know,” he murmurs. “i wanted to. every day. but you always looked so focused. and i didn’t want to ruin that.” your heart is a mess of drumbeats and warmth. “you wouldn’t have.” silence again. then he says, barely audible, “could i maybe get your number... just for office related stuff, of course.” you nod, because your voice has already betrayed you too many times tonight. a soft smile tugs at his lips. the quiet kind. the kind you know he saves for only a few people. he walks you all the way to your apartment. and when he says goodbye, it’s not a hug. not a kiss. just a quiet “goodnight” and a look that lingers longer than it should. but your heart knows. it knows everything. ────

SATURDAY | 9:00 AM

the next day, the office is just waking up. it always feels colder in the morning—half because of the ac blasting too early, half because everyone’s too busy chasing caffeine to talk. desks are still half-empty. monitors glow. the printer sputters. someone sneezes. a mug clinks. you step in, trying to hide the stupid smile that’s been stuck to your face since last night. your coat is too warm for indoors but your hands are cold, so you hold your coffee tighter. and then you see it. your desk. something’s different. sitting neatly on top of your keyboard is a brand-new stapler. blue, shiny, absolutely unnecessary. you freeze. right beside it, a yellow post-it. his handwriting. neat. almost too neat. “thought you could use one that wasn’t cursed.     —jeno :)” you almost laugh. it’s such a him thing to do—dry humor disguised as helpfulness. but your heart? it’s fluttering like it’s stuck in a romcom scene, an angelic choir singing along in tandem. you reach out and pick up the stapler.you didn’t even need one nor were you going to use one. but you want to keep this one forever. cherish it. maybe even pass it on as an heirloom.

just then, you hear someone clear their throat. “new office romance i should know about?” you don’t even need to turn around. jaemin. of course. loud, nosy, iced-americano jaemin. “shut up,” you say instantly, trying to sound bored. your cheeks are already heating up. but he walks past you, grinning like the devil, a bounce in his step like he’s in on the joke you’re still figuring out. and then—your gaze drifts. to the cubicle across. there he is. jeno. typing. or pretending to. his posture is the same—back straight, eyes on the screen—but his fingers are still on the home row keys, just gliding about. and when he feels your eyes, he glances up. It's brief, barely a second. but he smiles. like last night wasn’t just dinner. like it meant something.

a few hours later, a message pops up.

jeno lee “did the new one pass inspection?”

you “it’s still under review by the council. but i think they approve ;)”

jeno lee “let me know if it jams. i’ll personally fix it.”

you smile. a full smile this time. the kind that makes you reach for your coffee, lean back in your chair, and breathe in like something in your world has shifted.

jeno 💗 “what’s your go-to coffee order?”

you “anything except that poison jaemin drinks every day. ‘i like my coffee as dark as my soul’ ahh guy.”

jeno 💗 “haha.” “noted.”

the next morning there’s a cup of coffee on your desk, with yet another post-it note. “it’s the new specialty at a cafe near my place. i thought you’d like it :)”

that was truly the best coffee you had ever tasted. and maybe he started getting it for you every day. ────

WEDNESDAY | 9:00 PM

it's another day at the office. rain taps gently on the windows, a soft drumbeat to the silence of overworked employees and abandoned coffee mugs. you’re still at your desk & so is he. the fluorescent lights overhead are dimmer than usual, humming low like they’re tired too. you stretch your back, glancing at the clock. 9:04 pm. “still here?” comes his voice. you look up to see jeno leaning on the edge of his cubicle wall, sleeves rolled up, tie a little loosened. “so are you,” you shoot back. he smiles. “want company for the walk back?” you nod before your brain catches up.

the streetlights blur against the wet pavement, reflecting like oil paint smudged across the road. jeno’s shoulder brushes yours every few seconds—neither of you move away. he talks about the weird way jaemin eats ramen. you laugh. you tell him about your favorite childhood cartoon. he says he watched it too, and suddenly it’s three blocks later and you’re still talking. at a red light, you both stop. he glances down at you. you glance up. it’s a pause so charged you swear the rain quiets. “...you looked really pretty today,” he says suddenly. his voice isn’t confident or smooth—he says it like a secret. you don’t respond right away. just tuck your hair behind your ear, your face heating. he notices. the light turns green and you simply walk on. on reaching your apartment building you stop at the steps. he’s still holding the umbrella. you don’t say anything. he doesn’t either. there’s that moment again—that pause like the world might tilt if either of you moves. “i’m really glad you came to dinner that night,” he finally says, voice quieter than before. “been wanting to talk to you properly for months.” you blink. “...really?” jeno chuckles. “you had the office’s only decent stapler. of course i had to make a move.” you laugh—nervous and shy and full of everything you’ve been holding back. he takes a step closer. just one. not too much. “but also,” he adds, and this time his voice is a little more sure, “i like you. not just the lunch break, passing-notes kind. the kind where i want to sit and mindlessly watch silly romcoms with you, the kind where i want to walk you home every day and make sure you had dinner. the kind where - " he goes on. but words fall on deaf ears. you feel your heart clench, sweet and sharp. you’re about to respond when— “...so, if you’re okay with it,” he continues, scratching the back of his neck, “can i officially take you out sometime? like, not just coffee machine and post-it flirting. a real date.” you blink. once. twice. your face is warm. your chest feels like it’s glowing. “...yes.” you don’t even hesitate. his smile is soft. wide. genuine. and when he hands you the umbrella and waves goodnight, walking back with his hands in his pockets and a quiet bounce in his step. you think, maybe this started with a stapler. but it’s gonna end with something a lot more permanent. ──── BONUS : FEW WEEKS LATER | 2:00 PM

you, jeno, and jaemin were perched on the edge of the rooftop, paper lunchboxes balanced on your laps, chinese takeout - courtesy of jeno. the breeze is nice, the sky a little overcast, and jaemin's halfway through an enthusiastic rant about the company’s new vending machine layout.

“and like .. why did they move the green tea to the bottom row? what kind of criminal.. oh, thanks man.” he says as jeno hands him a napkin mid-rant, like muscle memory.

you say while giggling, “you guys are like an old married couple.”

jeno chokes on his rice. you pat his back helpfullly , still giggling.

jaemin just shrugs. “what can i say? i raised him well.”

jeno glares at him. mouthing ' stop. talking.' he knew jaemin could slip up any moment. for he always did.

jaemin does not stop talking.

“i mean, not to brag, but if it weren’t for me, he’d still be hovering awkwardly near your desk pretending he needed your stapler.”

you blink. “wait. what?”

jeno drops his chopsticks.

jaemin freezes. realizes.

“oh..." he mutters.

your jaw drops. “waitwaitwait. you told him to borrow my stapler?”

“in my defense,” jaemin says, holding up both hands, “i was just trying to save him from dying of heart failure every time you walked past. it was either that or fake a paper jam crisis.”

jeno is silent. fully hiding behind his lunchbox now.

you slowly turn to him. “is this true?”

“…maybe,” he mumbles.

you snort, trying to hold in your laughter. “oh my god. so all this time..”

“don’t act like it wasn’t genius!” jaemin interrupts. “you’re welcome, by the way. this whole slow-burn coffee shop romcom office love story? all me.”

jeno groans. “can i push him off the roof.”

you lean into jeno’s shoulder, grinning. “you should’ve just said hi.”

he sighs. “i wanted to. but every time i tried, you were always typing so fast. and glaring at your screen like it personally insulted your ancestors.”

you snort. “fair.”

jaemin raises his water bottle. “to true love, born from borrowing office supplies.”

jeno snatches it from him and takes a sip without asking. you think that’s revenge enough. read more ❤︎ please like, reblog and let me know your reviews (๑>◡<๑) this work is a piece of fiction and is not intended to reflect the real personalities, actions, or beliefs of the individuals portrayed. the idols mentioned are used purely as fictional characters for storytelling purposes. no harm, disrespect, or objectification is intended. everything written here is entirely imaginative and not based on real-life events or relationships.

[plushpixelssims]

Creative Mind

For this setI had a very creative Sim in mind and wondered what they might enjoy doing the most. This set comes with lots of hobby clutter and also a very cozy chair to also enjoy some quiet time. The shelf is perfect for any workspace to store all your goodies. Everthing is base game compatible. The set contains of 15 new meshes.Hopefully you will enjoy the set<3

You can get the set on early access now at my Patreon here

[eggrollforyou]

Research

Law x F!reader

CW: NSFW, MDNI, unprotected sex, sex pollen trope, p in v, pwp, that's all I remember idk 😅

“Y/N-ya,” Law calls out to you, tapping his knuckles as he pushes the door open to your workspace. He crosses his arms in the doorway as he leans against the frame, a small smirk as he admires you. “It's late, let's get to bed.”

You're so immersed in cataloguing the latest round of flora the crew brought you on the last island stop, you don't respond as you work. As the crew's botanist, it was your job to catalogue all the amazing new plants you came across on the Grand Line.

You haven't even registered Law’s calls to you, this batch being particularly difficult to process, as you work on trying to identify the bundle of blood red flowers in your hand. They resemble magnolias, with large red petals, pale yellow stamens and a bright orange pistil.

You jump, startled from your concentration when Law gently places his hand on your shoulder. “SHIT!” you cry out, hand reaching to your beating heart, “Oh my god, Law, you scared me!” Coughing as the pollen on the stamens shake loose, thinking nothing of it, reeling still from being startled.

“It's late, you can finish this tomorrow, let's go to bed,” Law continues as he gently rubs his hands along your arms and shoulders. ‘It must be really late if Law is telling me to go to bed,’ you think to yourself. Clearing your throat again, you finally yawn, leaning back into his chest, “Alright, let's go,” you resign as you put your work into their respective containers.

As you both walk back to Law’s room, now your shared quarters, Law listens to you intently as you gab about your research for the day. He doesn't understand all of it, which amazes you considering his wealth of physiological knowledge, but he listens nonetheless. As you approach your room you begin to feel warmth spread across your chest, your fingertips tingling, and a familiar ache building deep in your lower belly.

Law notices that you've stopped talking suddenly and guides you into the room, his warm hand pressing on your lower back. It almost burns. As you rub your hands on your upper arms, you feel the burning sensation increase and suddenly feel flushed and overheated.

You don't know what's coming over you. It couldn't be exhaustion, it's never felt like this before. Before you can say anything, Law looks at you worriedly. Your face, neck, and chest are flushed red and you have a sheen of sweat growing across your brow. “Y/N-ya,” the back of his hand touches your forehead, “are you ok?” You wince at the touch as it burns and makes your skin crawl. “I-I don’t know. I feel SO hot. My skin burns…a-and I-I feel this ache,” you trail off as the ache you feel in your chest settles in your lower abdomen. No way…there’s no way this is happening.

Suddenly, you feel pulses of desire coursing through you. Your mind is hazy, all you can focus on is Law’s hand as he reaches for your face. You see his fingers, and that ache grows stronger. Your gaze trails up his arms, as you fixate on every vein and muscle on it, moving further up to his chest. Suddenly, you’re wracked with intense pain causing you to double over and all you can think about is where you want those fingers. What the fuck?! Your knees buckle but catching yourself causes you to rub your thighs together. You have to restrain a lewd moan at the feeling.

Law catches you as you fall forward, his touch again, burning your skin as you try to come to terms with what’s happening. “L-Law, I think I know what’s going on…” you say through gritted teeth. Your hand reaches for his pants. He pulls back slightly, confused, trying to figure out what you’re trying to say, “This isn’t the time for that Y/N-ya, we have to get to the med bay so I can figure out what’s going on, properly,” he tells you sternly. As he puts his hand out to Room you both, you grab his wrist first. “It’s the f-flowers I think,” you stammer, as you wriggle in his hold, rubbing your thighs together to get any relief you possibly could.

“The flowers?! What the fuck do the flowers have anything to do with this?” His eyes scanning you for any kind of hint to make sense of what is happening. “T-there are flowers out here…t-that have pollen that acts as an aphrodisiac…I-I think when you startled me, I inhaled that p-pollen.” His eyes widen, “W-what do you need me to do?” he desperately asks. “P-please, just make it stop, m-make me feel good,” you mutter as you pull him to you and kiss him.

Your teeth click against each other as you moan into Law’s mouth. It takes him a moment to process that this may indeed be what you need and he begins to kiss you back, barely able to match your urgency. “Mmmph…..p-please,” you whisper between your pants, “p-please Law,” you plead as you grasp at anything to give yourself relief.

His hand finds you as he presses the heel of his palm on your clothed clit. You gasp and as if a switch flipped and you can no longer contain yourself. You grind helplessly on his palm, whispering praises between labored breaths and you feel your orgasm building up quickly. Your skin still burns and you feel overheated but every press on your clit and every nip on your neck, you feel electric. Suddenly, you shatter, your orgasm washing over you in waves as it radiates out from your core.

Soon, the aching pain returns in another wave. “F-fuck, Law, it hurts, please…I need y-you,” you babble. Surprised you're able to string a sentence together. You push Law to the bed, his eyes widen in surprise at your current state, but he doesn't stop you when you rip open his shirt, buttons flying everywhere. You both undress quickly and without any further prep, you climb onto Law's lap, lining yourself up with him.

Desperately seeking relief from your pain, you lower yourself, taking his length completely in one swift motion as you both moan. You immediately pick up a swift pace, trying to chase whatever feeling was telling you to take what you needed from him. Your mind is hazy, only registering how full you feel. Feeling every vein against your clenching walls as you bounce up on and down on his cock. You feel another orgasm, building up quickly.

He hisses as you begin to roll your hips on him, grabbing your hips so tightly his knuckles are white. “Mmmmm, f-fuck. You feel so fucking good,” you moan, your head thrown back as you chase your high. “Ah! Shit, Y/N-ya,” he growls. With one last roll of your hips, you cum again, just as intensely as the first.

Suddenly, your concentration is broken as Law pulls you toward him so your chest is on his. He reaches around you, wrapping his arms around you so tightly, it starts to restrict your breath. He bends his knees, plants his feet and begins fucking up into you at a relentless pace.

“Fuuuhhhck, Law! Right there, just like that, right there!” You scream as he fucks into you like he'd never get the opportunity again. The sinful sound of skin meeting skin filling the room almost as loud as your cries of praise. You feel the familiar pull deep in your gut as he keeps up his pace. The drag of his cock in your tensing walls. He doesn't relent and with one of his moans in your ear, you snap and cum again.

Pulsing and clenching, forcing a growl out of Law as you are barely able to whisper your praises and thank yous, completely lost in this feeling of utter bliss. Law flips you over without ever leaving your warmth. He pushes up and swirls his tongue around your nipple, biting it as you arch your back into it.

He continues rutting into you, grip tight on your waist as you take everything he gives you, his pupils blown wide. One might think he inhaled some of the pollen too. He's less worried now that he's seen how each of your climaxes have reduced the uncomfortable effects of the pollen.

“Fuck, Y/N-ya, I'm gonna cum,” he grits his teeth, “w-where do you want me?”

“I-inside, p-please, Law!”

“Fuuuhhhhck,” he cries out as he finishes, pulsing inside of you, watching where you are connected. As you both pant, desperately trying to catch your breath.

He stills and rests his forehead on yours. Both of you spent, dripping sweat, and utterly exhausted. You let out a breath of content, finally feeling back to normal. He pulls out of you with a wince and you pull him forward to press a soft kiss to his cheek, “Thank you….for helping me….even though you caused it in the first place!” you tease. He smirks, “I'll be more careful, next time.”

Tags: @shy-writer-999 @dreamcastgirl99

Dividers by: @cafekitsune

Did you like this? I'm flattered! Wanna read more? Here's my Masterlist!

[breelandwalker]

Magical Oil Recipes - Protection and Warding Edition

For anyone looking to brew up some magical protections or enhance their current warding measures, here are some recipes I’ve created that you might find useful.

To prepare them, blend the ingredients in such proportions as feels correct for your purposes (or as supplies allow). Use dried material except where indicated. Place a few spoonfuls in a mason jar with a screwtop lid and fill the jar with a bland oil of your choice. (Vegetable oil of the sort you would buy for cooking works fine.) Screw the lid on tightly and shake well to combine, then leave the jar in a dark dry place for 2-4 weeks to steep.

Once steeped, prepare a clean storage bottle (also with a secure lid) and label with the type of oil and the bottling date. Strain the oil through paper towels or cheesecloth to remove the plant material, then bottle immediately. Store away from sunlight and heat for up to one year. Use for spellwork as you see fit.

(Please note that NONE of these potions are meant to be taken internally by any means. Observe all proper safety measures related to glass, fire, and potentially harmful plants as necessary during preparation.)

*- Ingredient is potentially harmful if inhaled or ingested. **- Ingredient should not be used or handled if you are pregnant or nursing.

All-Purpose Blessing Oil For blessing, purification, and consecration.

Lavender

Sweet Basil

Bay Leaf

Patchouli Note: Use Olive Oil for the base.

All-Purpose Hexbreaking Oil For general negation of baneful spells cast by oneself or others.

Agrimony**

Cinquefoil

Fennel

Vervain

Solomon's Seal Root in master bottle

And Stay Out Ward Refresher Oil For strengthening household protections between castings.

Sarsaparilla

Oakmoss

Horehound

Sweet Basil

Banned From The Premises Banishing Oil For anointing doorways and banishing unwanted persons.

Oregano

Rosemary

Lemon Peel

Thyme

Blue Moon Curse Reversal Oil For turning and countering baneful magic.

Angelica Root

Lemon Verbena

Motherwort**

Elderberries*

Change the Locks Protection Oil For protection of the home from banished persons.

Cumin

Oregano

Rosemary

Thistle

Cradlekeeper Child Protection Oil For protection of infants and young children.

Daisies (any color)

Flax Seeds

Caraway Seeds

Lamb's Ear Leaf Note: Use to anoint the lintel of the door to the child's room.

No Soliciting Front Door Oil To keep unwanted visitors away from your home.

Ivy Leaves

Sweet Basil

Blueberry Leaf

Juniper Berries Note: Apply to your front door or threshold.

Safe Space Protection Oil To help one find sanctuary when it is most needed.

Blackberry Leaf (or Tea)

Allspice Berries

Fennel Tops

Clover Leaves and Blossoms

The Shielding Light Protection Oil For passive protective magics.

Caraway Seeds

Eucalyptus Leaf**

Lavender

Vervain Note: Passive protection magic functions as a shield, rebuffing or neutralizing harm. It is good for long-term spells that don't require much energy or maintenance.

The Shining Dark Protection Oil For active protective magics.

Coconut Husk

Thistle Leaf

Witch Hazel**

Angelica Root Note: Active protection magic functions as a sword, strongly deflecting or fending off harm. This is best for short-term or immediate-use spells that are not meant to last, but must kick in very strongly and very quickly. Excellent for emergency personal protections.

The Sorcerer's Tower Protection Oil To protect your witchy supplies and workspace from interlopers.

Juniper Sprigs or Berries

Blueberry Leaf

Thistle

Astragalus Root Note: Works best alongside mundane secrecy and privacy measures. To avoid damage, anoint containers, furniture, and doors rather than items. Do not use directly on books as it may damage delicate paper or covers. Use with caution on unfinished wood.

Thorn in the Door Warding Oil To discourage unfriendly witches from entering your home.

Rosemary

Bay Leaf

Sage (any color)

Solomon's Seal Root

Rose Stem (with thorns) in master bottle

Walking Ward Protection Oil For personal warding spells of all kinds.

Sweet Basil

Witch Hazel**

Fennel Sprigs Note: This works for both active and passive protection magics and may be used in conjunction other protective oils.

Wanderlust Traveling Oil For all-purpose protection and luck while traveling.

Feverfew

Cinquefoil

Witch Hazel**

Spearmint

Should the reader require supplies, I recommend the following:

Penn Herb Company

Starwest Botanicals

Bulk Apothecary

Mountain Rose Herbs

Specialty Bottle

Photo Credit - Shaiith

All recipes are © 2017 Bree NicGarran, published in Pestlework: A Book of Magical Powders & Oils. Please check out the book if you would like more recipes.

If you’re enjoying my content, please feel free to drop a little something in the tip jar, tune in to my podcast Hex Positive, or check out my published works on Amazon or in the Willow Wings Witch Shop.

[stairain]

Good Decoration 

After misplacing a folder full of explicit images, the last thing you’d expect was Spencer to take it. 

Warnings: Perv Spencer, male masturbation, nudes.

WC: 1.1K

“I have no idea what happened to it.”

Is what Spencer wanted you to believe.

You had misplaced a folder that unfortunately didn’t contain any case files, but instead various explicit photos of yourself. And you recall the last place you had left it was on his desk

Looking at him with an anxious frustration, you start to go through the folders and files he had splayed on his desk.

“Are you sure? I swear I left it here yesterday before I went home.”  

Even as you begin to disorganize his workspace, Spencer looks unbothered. With a purse of his lips, he simply looks at you as if as clueless as you are to what had happened. 

“I haven’t seen it. Maybe you left it somewhere else.” Or maybe someone took it. 

He lied through his teeth, and if you weren’t so naive, you would’ve seen right through it. But instead, you anxiously bite your lip and nod.

Unfortunately for you, Spencer having been the one to take the folder would’ve been the best case scenario. Albeit embarrassing, you knew he’d be the one to not make a scene over it.

“Alright, thank you anyways.”

You say dejectedly before you leave his desk and return to yours, trying your best to stay composed and not tear apart the entire building.

Little did you know, Spencer was the one who had taken the folder. He wasn’t worried in the slightest when you started going through his desk, because the folder was comfortably sat on his bedside table at home.

It was your fault really, you should've been more careful. You'd ordered and printed them at a store and didn’t have time to stop by your place before you had to get to work. So you mindlessly placed them in a folder and in your bag, along with all the other case files you had as well. 

Spencer was just sitting at his desk, packing his belongings up to finally go home. But as he was sorting through the pile on his desk, he noticed a dark blue folder slotted in the middle of every other cream colored one. 

What started as an innocent curiosity quickly devolved into a perverted fascination as soon as he opened the folder. His eyes were met with the image of your bare chest, pushed up into the view of the lens as your face was left as an afterthought in the background. 

He should’ve closed it immediately, slipped it into your desk before anyone else saw it. But with interested fingers that seemed to have a mind of their own, he found himself carding through the images.

They were all of you. Clothed, unclothed, exposed, private.

The office was otherwise empty, only him and a few other people who were packing up to leave anyways. He looked around to make sure no one was near him as he quickly shoved the folder into his bag. 

The whole ride home, he contemplated his decision. Whether or not to drive back and put them where they belong. 

You were his coworker, this was wrong. 

Even as he stepped through the door of his apartment and took the folder with him to his bedroom, he knew it was wrong. 

You were the only one who was supposed to have these photos, not him, he told himself as he pulled out the stack of photos. 

With trembling hands, he splayed them out against the soft fabric of his bed. There had to have been at least thirty, all lined up as his dilated pupils scanned over each and every one of them. 

As one hand held himself up as he leaned over the spread of pictures, the other slotted between the dampened fabric of his underwear and his embarrassingly hard cock. 

Spencer didn’t know where to look, as his frantic eyes darted from the stiff peaks of your nipples under your tank top, all the way to where your perfectly manicured fingers were spreading open your slick pussy. 

Letting out a low moan, his slim fingers wrapped around his heavy cock, and he couldn’t stop the way he began to hump his hand like some sort of animal. 

The man felt disgusting, fucking into his hand as stared down at the collage of you he had created underneath his shaking body. 

He had to face you tomorrow, look you right in the eyes as you talked about anything other than how he knows exactly what you look like under all your fancy blazers and fitted dress pants. 

It was so wrong, you trusted him so much, and here he was, stroking himself slowly to your nudes like they were in a cheap porn magazine. 

You’d be mortified if you knew anyone saw them, and you’d be horrified to know how tightly Spencer was squeezing his cock, desperately trying to replicate what it’d be like to fit into that drenched cunt of yours, the one you so proudly displayed for the camera. 

Guttural groans and borderline pathetic whimpers escaped his quivering lips. The tip of his thumb rubbed at the soaked head of his length, and his knees almost buckled at how fucking good it felt. 

His mouth hung open and a shaky stream of moans echoed throughout his empty room. 

“F-Fuck—“

He was dangerously close, eyes rolling back into his skull, hair falling into his line of sight, spine shuddering in pleasure, he was long gone. 

The fast pace of his hand around himself sped up frantically, and his body folded into itself as he imagined how upset and embarrassed you’d look after finding out what he’d done. 

A loud whine ripped from his throat and his entire body froze as he thrusted into his hand, shamelessly exploding all over your face and body. 

White ribbons of hot cum drip down his hand and pool against the inked surfaces, and he was far too busy moaning to himself to realize how much of a mess he made of you. 

But the morning after your suspicion, he made sure he got to the office before you did, inconspicuously hiding it under a pile of papers in your drawer. 

He knew you’d chalk it up to your nerves for not looking thoroughly enough the first time, you wouldn’t suspect a thing.

You made a quick stop at his desk to let him know that you found it, and he smiled at you like he had nothing to do with it, even though his pants had gotten tighter at the mere sight of the dark blue folder in those perfectly manifested fingers of yours. 

You were so relieved that you had found them before anyone else, that you didn’t even notice that a few were missing. 

[ririleil]

witch and vampire // r. suna

tags: best friends to lovers, fantasy mythological au but in modern era, vamp!suna x witch fem!reader, suna has tattoos and is a simp, fem!reader finds him strangely endearing, both of them are kinda FREAKS, wc: 3k

cw: contains blood, swearing, and mild/suggestive themes of sexual content (they haven't gone all the way dw) so please proceed with caution

more a/n are found at the end. most of all, hope you guys enjoy!

sigils with infused mana hovered around your workspace— its dark ominous glow casted all around the walls of your little witch hut. the glow reflected on the glass vial that was neatly arranged on a stand on your work table. 

the herbs you bought from a collector were dried, crushed, and left alone in a mortar and pestle, and the burnt candle wax dripped over its hold onto the floor, the waxy bits of it splatting on the old books you left open on the messy ground.

your fingers trailed over the pages of an ancient tome, one that you recently traded over with the artifact you had picked up on a cave during one of your travels. you muttered incantations under your breath as you carefully and telepathically stirred the contents of your little bubbling cauldron on top of the table.

you were locked in, that’s literally the simplest way to put it. you were creating a potion for a client and you were so deep in the process of thaumaturgy.

too deep to even notice the persistent knocking that's been going at it on your door.

it was just a light knock, knock, knock at first

then a few more, heavier and louder this time. like a thump, thump, thump.

then, a resounding BAM! BAM! BAM! so thunderous it rattled the doorframe.

but you heard none of it because you were too focused on what's going on in front of you. 

then suddenly, a gust of cold wind rushed in, carrying a scent of something metallic. it left a chill down your–

“why the hell weren't you picking up your phone?” 

you shrieked. the sudden, slithering voice in your ear gave you a fright and made you jump from your seat, knocking over the glass vial on your table.

the vial flew off but a hand shot out to catch it midair before it could shatter on the floor. long and rough but precise fingers brought it back to its rightful place. you whipped your head around, heart still hammering on your chest, to see yourself face to face with suna.

he stood there behind you, clad in his ejp varsity jacket and loose pants, his tall frame caging you in. 

his face— your faces, to be exact, were too close to each other. close enough that you could see the sharp glint of his golden eyes, an indication of a vampire. his eyes were slightly dilated and the grip on your wrist was firm– too firm. 

“shit, suna! you disrupted my potion-making! do you realize how dangerous that was?! the whole thing could’ve exploded!”

suna said nothing nor did he move. his broad frame slightly hunched as if too exhausted to stand up properly. 

“i knocked a thousand times. but you didn't notice. so i broke the door and got in.” suna muttered, voice slightly rougher than usual and breath labored and shallow. you could even feel the subtle trembling on his fingers when he held a tight grip on your wrist. 

“you broke the door?” you said with surprise and disbelief at the same time, looking out behind him to the door to see the knob broken and on the verge of falling off. 

“suna, what's wrong with you–” 

your voice got caught in your throat as it finally sinked in. the vampire's eyes burned with something more primal. something starved. his fingers, normally lazy and gentle on your skin, were harshly digging into it leaving marks and just shy of breaking it. his jaw was clenched, fangs slightly bare, and his entire, sturdy body tense with restraint. 

you had seen this before. and it almost didn't end well.

you met his distressed gaze head on.

“you haven't eaten anything in days, have you?”

.

.

.

“so you're telling me, you ran out of blood bags and back-ups. your provider is out of town. you're somehow and surprisingly broke as hell right now despite being one of the most high paying athletes in the country and you're incredibly thirsty– hungry. whatever. to the point you're losing control? why the hell haven't you acted as soon as possible?” 

suna exhaled sharply, leaning against the table. “...thought i could hold on much longer.”

you sighed, rubbing your temples. “yeah, and look where it got you. you should've said something sooner.” 

“yeah, well you weren't answering your damn phone.” 

“excuse you, i was busy doing potion making. my work. i didn't have time to answer my damn phone.” you hissed with irritation dripping in your tone, making suna look away to avoid your gaze. 

suna’s sudden disruption had completely thrown off the potion making and now, the potion is completely unstable. the cauldron turned into a horrible shade of brown, puffing out black smoke, and leaving an acrid smell that filled the room. 

what a waste of materials, you thought as you raised a hand. lifting your fingers with a swish, you willed magic into levitating your cauldron and dumping it into the waste basin nearby. you gruntingly and absentmindedly massaged your wrist afterwards, applying a bit of pressure on it to soothe off the lingering pain from suna's grip. 

the vampire studied your actions and without a word, went closer to you. 

he took your hand and rubbed circles over the sore spot, touch gentler this time compared to his strength moments ago. this small gesture was nothing short of an apology you could tell. 

then you reflected. despite everything, this level of familiarity—lingering touches and close proximities—between you two wasn't unusual. you both had been friends for years— grown close to the point of comfort (that's beyond just friends) in ways neither of you cared to acknowledge.

“figured. you were always one to get so immersed in your work.” he commented as he massaged your wrist. 

you watched him carefully, noticing the slight raggedness of his breath, his furrowed brows, and his fangs as he parted his lips to speak. 

suna was holding himself back. he always did. he was never one to fully embrace his vampiric nature and let his hunger consume and take control of him. 

magic could've helped him. just a little. but not even it could fully satiate a vampire's natural instinct to be fed. to drink. to ingest blood. not when a hunger that has been gnawing at his skin, itching him to finally devour after holding back for too long. 

it fascinated you. quite weirdly.

though, you felt quite bad for him so you ran your free hand through his hair, petting him and feeling the soft dark brown locks on your palm. hoping it would soothe him a little.

“how bad is it? your hunger, i mean.”

he didn't answer right away. 

“you wouldn't want to know the answer to that, so don't ask.” he huffed, releasing your hand. 

that bad, huh. you thought. 

“i think i have vials of synthetic blood in my storage. let me go check––”

before you could even move, suna held you by the arm. 

“none of that. no. i don't want something fake. the real deal is what i want. the last time you made me drink synthetic blood, i puked that shit out. did you forget?” 

his voice dropped lower now, almost a growl. the tension in the air was thickening and becoming even more serious, borderline dangerous. and what he said was true; in comparison to true blood, synthetic substitutes tasted like awful, dirty plastic and it could barely satisfy a vampire’s hunger.

“i didn't forget, suna. i just thought it would suffice for the meantime.” 

suna exhaled slowly through his nose, eyes gleamed with restraint as his jaw clenched so tight you could see a muscle jump in his cheek.

“you don’t get it, y/n” he muttered, voice rough, almost cracking with the weight of his need. 

“nothing else works. nothing even comes close.”

the space between you both buzzed with something volatile, something intimate in its intensity. 

if nothing else—and no one else—could satisfy suna, 

then who else but you?

“i want the real deal.” suna stated his desires once more.

“so you're asking me. my blood, specifically” 

“yeah.” his voice cracked. 

“you are so weird.” you laughed. 

“it's not funny, y/n. help your friend out, will you?”

you let out an exasperated sigh. “you're being aggressive and moody, suna.”

“then help me right away.”

“you do realize that there are people out there whose blood is more accessible, right?”

his golden eyes then locked onto yours, unwavering. 

“but i want you.”

“and why me?” 

silence.

for the many years you've known suna, you had always wondered how long it would take for him to ask this of you. how long he would last before his instincts won. how long he would finally have the chance to devour a witch such as you. 

freaky thought yes, but a thought nonetheless. 

suna's sigh broke the silence.

“honestly, i…” he ran a hand through his hair. 

“you're… actually the last person i wanted to go to for this because i don't want to fuck things up— our relationship and all the other good things we have. but i couldn't think of anything else.. i couldn't think of anyone but you. i'm so starved, y/n. please. i don't know if i could hold on for much longer.”

you sighed, rubbing your temple. 

guess you can't really help it. 

“alright. i'll give you my blood. ”

“fuck, okay. great. give me your hand"

.

.

. 

you let suna guide you to your sofa. he sat beside you, his fingers tracing along your wrist.

"we're really starting this now?"

"yeah. what better time than the present?” 

he lifted your arm, he puts his face close to it, nose brushing against the vein on your antebrachial

"i can feel your pulse here.” he whispered softly against the supple flesh. “fresh blood. so warm.”

a shiver ran down your spine when he licked the skin there— moist, slow, deliberate. he then pressed a kiss to the spot, and your breath hitched.

he didn't need to do that. 

"don't worry. it'll sting a bit but then the runes would take effect."

“what?” 

then he immediately took a bite, fangs sinking deep into your skin. 

you winced, a stinging sensation came first. then a burn. you could feel the searing pain of his fangs breaking into the surface of your arm, blood seeping out from your skin. 

but then something else entirely. something tingling. some kind of warmth spreading throughout your entire body. 

this wasn't pain.

this was…

pleasure. 

“s-suna—w-what did—” you stammered, your hands flying up to clutch his arm, fingers trembling against the firm muscles beneath his jacket.

he didn’t answer. just held you closer, sucking deep, drinking in slow leisure. blood trickled down your arm as your body grew light and heat pooled beneath you. your vision blurred and cheeks flushed.

“stop—” you tried to pull away but suna’s hand shot out, snaking his arm around your waist in a firm and unrelenting hold. his touch wasn’t cruel, but it was heavy with a warning.

stay still.

it felt raw, immediate, and strange… like everything happening all at once. but there was tenderness in the way he held you against him. something starved but in an entirely different way that transcended just hunger. 

it was different. 

it was intimate. 

although if he doesn't stop, you might have to knock him out with magic. 

suna finally released you, mouth letting out a soft pop as his eyes finally met your gaze head on. he licked your blood that was smeared on his lips, eyes hazy and heavy-lidded. golden irises nearly swallowed by his pupils.

“fuck.” he heaved, voice hoarse yet delightful as if he tasted the sweetest fucking thing on earth that not even the ambrosia of the gods could be compared to the taste of your delicious blood. 

“oh fuck, you tasted so fucking good.”

your breathing was uneven and you couldn't think nor speak straight. you felt faint under his gaze, causing your legs to tremble. the moment your strength faltered, suna caught you without hesitation.

“woah hey, you good?”

“suna… those– they were… those are runes.. are—”

his lips quirked into a lazy, satisfied smile. 

“yeah,” 

before you could say anything, suna shrugged off his yellow jacket, revealing the black compression shirt underneath that tightly hugged his frame. your eyes immediately caught onto the rising dark markings crawling up from his neck—a thin black slit embedded into his skin that pulsed faintly. 

something in your head clicked, your energy rejuvenated as you saw the familiar ink embedded on the vampire's skin. 

without thinking, you immediately shot forward, ignoring the dull throb and the dripping blood on your arm and the way suna arched a brow at your sudden, reckless approach. you tugged at the hem of his shirt, pushing it up to reveal more of the markings etched into his skin.

“hey, don't just take my shirt off out of nowhere. buy me dinner first.” he chuckled, amused like he expected nothing less from you.

“it's not like I haven't seen you shirtless before.”

“yeah, well, there's a difference between looking and stripping me, you menace.”

“it's just a shirt, suna,” you murmured, leaning in even closer. at this point, you were practically straddling his lap and your fingers were tracing the dark rune along his neck. “what's under here is way more important. now take your shirt off and let me see it!” you demanded. 

“wow, more important than me? okay. so much for being your bestie. amazing. okay wow, she's ignoring me. she's in her own world now and i'm just a mere toy for her to play with. hold me, i feel so used.” suna dramatically deadpanned as you tried to take his shirt off even more. 

you rolled your eyes, not even bothering in dignifying him with a response. 

smirking to himself, suna gently pushed you to adjust his position under you. he finally took and tossed his shirt to the side. 

the tattoo revealed itself in full—a long, intricate trail of black runes and sharp lines that wove down the side of his torso, snaking over the ridges of his ribs. it looked like it was written directly onto his being. it pulsed faintly too, each rune almost seeming to breathe with him, alive and humming quietly under your fingertips.

“suna, this is amazing. these aren’t just any runes— they’re ancient glyphs. they’re supposed to be impossible to replicate. where did you get this?” 

he hesitated to open his mouth for just a second. “i watched you read them many times. kept seeing how your eyes lit up whenever you found a piece no one else could decipher. so i offered myself up. got inked by one of those rogue archivists. i requested him to make something that could make a partner feel good if i feed on them. it costed a lot of money but he said he could try and make it work.”

you stared at him, stunned. “you… basically let someone use you as an experimental subject… for this?”

“for you, actually.” he said simply like it wasn’t the craziest and stupidest thing you’d ever heard.

you shook your head, half-laughing, half-exasperated by his statement. “suna you are fucking insane.”

he gave a lazy smirk and his occasional shrug, but his voice was steady. “maybe. but you noticed, didn’t you?”

and you had. more than just noticed even. the runes resonated with your touch, drawing you closer, syncing with your breath, your pulse, your everything.

as if it was calling out for you. 

“you really didn’t have to go this far just to get my attention.”

“well, you weren’t exactly easy to distract.”

silence settled between you for a moment—comfortable, electric. you traced another line down his side, slower this time.

“do you even know what they say?” you murmured.

“not exactly. asides from its aphrodisiac effect. figured you’d be the one to tell me.” he admitted. 

your fingertips lingered over one of the curved symbols just beneath his ribs, feeling the soft warmth beneath it. the ink was cool, but his skin wasn’t despite being a coldblooded vampire. you could feel him watching you closely—his breath shallow now, like he was holding it back for your sake.

“you let someone rewrite your body in a language you didn’t even understand…” you said quietly, your voice softer now, reverent. 

“...just so I’d look at you?” you confirmed once more. 

his eyes didn’t waver. “and it worked, didn’t it?” 

you wanted to laugh again but it got caught in your throat, tangled in something heavier. something warmer. you’d never thought of him—suna rintarou—as reckless. quiet, yes. brooding, sometimes when something's on his mind. but this kind of gesture? it was devotion disguised as recklessness. 

and it was absurdly, heartbreakingly sincere.

“i should be mad at you,” you murmured, still tracing the runes like they might vanish if you stopped. “i really should. this is dangerous magic. what you did was stupid. you could’ve—”

“i know,” he cut in gently. “but i also knew you’d figure it out if something happened to me. that you'd understand what it meant.”

“you have that immense trust in me?”

“of course.” 

you looked up, and he was already close—closer than before, the faintest edge of hope tugging at his expression. not cocky. not teasing. just there. real and vulnerable.

“you didn’t need to do this to get my attention, you know?” you said, heart beating far too fast now. “you already had it since the beginning.”

the words settled between you like an exhale and for the first time since long, he looked a little unsteady.

“yeah?”

you leaned in then, slowly, deliberately—your hand still resting on his side, over the script he’d carved himself into for you. 

“yeah,” you breathed, just before closing the space between you.

his lips met yours with a kind of intensity that didn’t match his usual nonchalance—like he’d been waiting for this, for you, for far too long. and in a way, maybe he had.

the runes pulsed under your palm as if echoing the feeling blooming between you. 

and then ancient magic finally awakened.

love. 

a/n: hope you guys enjoyed this. this was totally self-indulgent and im sorry if this is in anyway ooc for suna T_T. this fic was inspired by that one certain nsfw va that i won't mention LMAO iykyk and the tattoo from loony's fanart of suna. it's so fcking hot u guys. also this au is set in the timeskip modern setting but with magic and mythical creatures roaming as normal citizens. this fic was in my drafts since last year and probably one of the most challenging that i've ever written.

photo credits: Freaka_LoonyZ, Pinterest

temp. m.list

© ririleil 2025 | do not copy, modify, repost, or translate without my permission

[tracklessreason]

Hi. It's me again.

WHERE THE FRICK IS BUMBLEBEE?! Sorry, let me calm down and retry.

Thank you for answering my last ask, I can't help but notice how no one knows where Bee's ghost is. And Megatron is the one looking into the Matrix... Is he haunting Megatron? Trying to stop him from doing it? Helping him?

Is Optimus's ghost following Ratchet around like a sad puppy?

Also just the pairings- Jazz with Megatronus? THat sounds... like fun.

Do the primes miss the other Primes and ask their host if they can check on the other bots that got shrapeneled? Maybe one of them asks if they can find a way to talk with the others... or maybe they can talk trough the hosts... maybe... (ah ah possessed arc)

(PS I really vibe with Hive's whole deal, he is very cool :D and I'm devastated that I'm the one that discovered how he explodes)

Hug hug!

Hi again!!! Don't worry, Bee is still here!

His spirit is just...struggling. He's weak at first, flickering like a dying light bulb. He hasn't left the fractured core of the Matrix still in his corpse, but his soul signature is so weak no one can find him. He's just sort of trapped there for a while, in the burnt out room he died in. Until Megatron of course.

Megatron breaks into the autobot base, walks past every sleeping mech he could easily have snuffed, and steals the Matrix core, and by unintentional extension, steals Bumblebee. Now at first, Bee is rightfully upset. He hates being at the gloomy decepticon base, he hates Megatron for taking his voice, he's just mad. Time passes as Megatron tinkers with the core, and Bee regains strength enough to....throw things???

It shouldn't be possible. Somehow this unstable remnant of the Matrix doesn't contain him, but merely houses him, and as he grows stronger, he can appear as an apparition to Megatron. He uses it almost solely to hinder him. With no voice (even ghost Bee gets no respite) all he can really do is mess up Megatron's workspace and insult him through pantomime. Really he doesn't understand why Megatron puts up with it, but aside from the occasional fit of rage at his antics, the decepticon leader ignores him as much as possible and puts his all into trying to restore the Matrix.

Before long he starts having one sided conversations with Bumblebee. Its mostly complaints at first, and insults towards him and the autobots and whatever else goes wrong in his life outside of this little workshop Bee cant leave. It soon gives way to more private matters; intentionally or not, Megatron is revealing his very convoluted, very mixed feelings about Optimus Prime.

The war has gone on too long, why couldn't that idiot just see things from his perspective, he deserved to die, he will be brought back, how could his oldest friend just leave him like this...

To Bee it sounds...exactly like how Optimus felt about Megatron, just drowned in molten anger issues. Against his self preservation instinct, Bee decides to work towards putting this whole mess to bed. Nothing better to do.

With what limited knowledge and communication he has, he does his best to try and help Megatron fix the Matrix. They have spats still, and plenty of set backs, but things smooth over when Megatron (begrudgingly) admits to feelings of regret over taking Bee's voice. As an olive branch, Bee explains something to Megatron that he's been dying to know: how Optimus died.

Things sour fast. Megatron is determined to murder Starscream, Bee is frustratedly trying to explain that if he does so, this little partnership of convenience is over, and he will ensure that the Matrix is never restored. The end of the war relies almost solely on Megatron reeling in his damn anger, and Bee doesnt intend to allow any slip ups. He has no idea how this will end when Megatron leaves the workshop that night.

On the other side of things, the Primes are having a real...weird time?? The ones without hosts can communicate with each other, but the other four are basically cut off from all but their hosts. They don't have the ability to take control anymore, and even if they did, their hosts are nowhere near as easy to possess, nor as willing, as Hive Prime was. Ratchet especially has threatened to tear the Matrix metal from his frame and grind it to dust if Prima so much as thinks about trying it. The other three hosts are similarly put off.

Once again the Primes are relegated to giving advice, but it's not advice anyone seems to want, and yeah, it's mostly because of the wild pairings. Megatronus is constantly clutching his pearls over Jazz's laid-back attitude and deliberate ignorance of his wishes. Prima's calm rationality does little to temper Ratchet's snappy demeanor and only really gets on his nerves (how can you be so calm after what you all did?). Ironhide straight up refuses to acknowledge Quintus. Drift is probably the only one feeling alright with all this. Alpha Trion is generally reasonable, and isn't interested in having control over Drift's form, nor was he interested in it with Hive, so they just vibe like college roommates.

It's uncomfortable, but the Primes are used to sharing space. The worst part is actually sharing it with fewer mechs than usual. The Primes all miss each other to varying degrees, but for the most part are either too egotistical to admit it, or think it improper to mention.

Of course, grand prize for worst ghost time currently goes to Optimus. Dying, watching Bee suffer, feeling his friend's life force extinguish...

He might as well be a husk right now, full on silent treatment is all he's capable of at the moment. The other Primes know better than to try and speak with him. This is their doing to begin with, the channeling of their energy that strained Bee so heavily. Optimus follows the elected council around during the days, but at night he sits outside the room where Hive's body rests. He was there the night that Megatron broke in.

It takes immense effort to travel far enough out from the base to go see Megatron, and he needs several cycles to recover after every attempt, but he keeps doing it, knowing he could fade away permanently. When he gets there, he's too weak for Bee or Megatron to detect him. But he can hear their talks. He misses them both more than words can say.

(Sorry the response is so long, lol. This ask really got the gears turning in my head. I hope at least that makes up for being the one to find out that Ending 3 Hive dies bloody. I'm really flattered to hear you like him! For me that's quite high praise coming from you. Hug hug!)

[cryptic-forge]

here's some miscellaneous things i've recently made/customized for our home, just because i felt like posting.

a wall clock for my room, because i wanted to be able to tell the time at a glance from my desk. customized from an old clock, so i was able to keep the numbers on the face & the genereral shape of it. should hang it with something that's not just a screw.

a little side table for the living room, because the armchair/end of the couch sorely lacked a place to set down a cup/plate. the leg is spliced together from multiple pine branches, while the table is a thrifted wooden tray. would love to say i carved the pattern, but it in fact came that way.

a chessboard, just for fun. i'm probably not going to make any pieces to go with it, and just use it as a decorative tray. features glass mosaic tiles, 3d modeled mosaic tiles, and edge swirls made of hot glue in silicone molds, combined together with hand-sculpted air-dry clay.

another table for the living room corner. this was also thrifted, but needed some fixing. it had a thick layer of varnish that had gone bright yellow, and as a first-aid move, i painted this fake dark wood texture on top. eventually i would love to sand the varnish off and use wood stain to get the dark color, but i do not currently have the sanding equipment or the workspace for that.

living room lamp. i thrifted the lamp and was inspired by its gourd-like shape to paint it vaguely like a lantern fruit.

i bought a roll of this art deco wallpaper & have been using it to decorate several items of furniture. this drawer under my desk used to be white, but now it fits my room much better. should get some kind of a container for the craft things on top of it though. i've also been doing a lot of other small-scale interior decoration projects. there are still objects i want to repaint & some small furniture and decoration items i need to make, and i'm gonna have a lot of fun with them too.

[whenanafallsinlove]

KATSUKI BAKUGO; - you take a cat home... or not? crack﹗ ✧ Word count: 1.9 k

﹗warnings: swearing :D

a/n: Okay, so this ended up longer than intended, just enjoy! I hope I get you to laugh a little ;) . Comment your thoughts and remember my asks and dm's are open!

You were in your home, chopping vegetables for your lunch. The day was sunny, and you were in a good mood. Your favourite music was playing in the background, while your rice was cooking. Suddenly, your phone rang, it was Izuku. You knew Katsuki was currently working on a case with him and Todoroki, so you instantly picked up to learn the news. Maybe they already captured the villain, and they could come over for lunch!

"Hello, Izuku! Is everything alright?" you asked cheerily.

"Oh, hi (Y/n)! Well, uhm-" he was interrupted by something that sounded like a hiss, "Ouch! Kacchan, stop it! Todoroki-kun, could you help?"

"Izuku?" you asked, starting to get concerned.

"Sorry, (Y/n)! It's just, well... Wekindofhaveasituationhere, beacusewe werefightingavillain, but, uh- shehadaveryunusualquirk, and, well uhm-"

Okay, when that man starts to mumble, something is definitely wrong. If something happened, he better talk now.

"Izuku Midoriya, you have three seconds to spill it, before I pull a Katsuki on you" you practically ordered, your bubbly mood from before, long gone.

"Kaachan was turned into a cat!"

"What?!"

"Yeah, but don't worry, he's fine. Please come to the Agency! I swear we'll tell you more about it once you're here!"

"Oh, okay, alright. But is he fine?"

"He- he is! Just, please hurry? He's already scratched me like ten times..."

"I'm on my way" you hanged up and turned off the stove. Grabbed your keys, your phone and instantly headed out.

You made it to the Agency in record time and got as swiftly as you could out of the car and into the building.

"Ms (Y/L/N)!", Sasaki, the receptionist called right after you entered, "they're waiting for you in Dynamight's office!"

"Thanks, Sasaki!" you nodded, and headed straight into the elevator. You pressed the button for Katsuki's office and waited.

While the elevator went up, the news finally dawned on you. Your boyfriend was turned into a cat! By a villain! God knows for how long!

The doors of the elevator finally opened, and you sprinted to your boyfriend's workspace. When you got there, you slammed the door open and were met by Izuku's and Todoroki's eyes.

"Where is he?" you said, without greeting them

"He is seated in his chair" Todoroki responded, nodding to the corresponding direction.

You walked slowly into the room, to take a look at your boyfriend. Then, you spotted a fluffy yellowish cat, with the grumpiest face, seated on an office chair.

And you barked a laugh.

Then, you turned around to meet, Izuku's and Todoroki's confused stares, which only made you laugh louder.

"Uhm, (Y/n), are you okay? Izuku asked, with a concerned tone

"Yeah, I'm fine! It's just-" you chuckled, wiping the tears that your laughter provoked, "I just can't believe Pro hero Dynamight got quirked into a cat! How the hell did it happen anyway?" you questioned between laughter, earning a hiss from the cat.

"Well, this villain is called ‘Animaniac’. At first, we thought it was just a villain who could talk with animals, and we thought she had let out the animals from the Zoo. But while fighting, we discovered she actually turns people into animals, and the ones that were roaming around the city, are people who got hit by the quirk." Todoroki explained.

"Yeah, and when we were fighting her, she was going to hit a little girl with her quirk, but Kaachan acted faster, and got hit with the quirk instead..." Izuku continued.

"Aw, Kats... You're so sweet for protecting the girl!" and then started chuckling, "You're such a nice Kat!" and roared a laughter once again; this time earning contained chuckles from the other two heroes.

"He is Cat-suki!" exclaimed a laughing Izuku, and in a swift movement, the cat jumped from where he was seated and started attacking Izuku with his claws.

You gasped and instantly went to help Izuku, while Todoroki just stood there watching the scene unroll. The chaos went on for a few moments until an accidental scratch made your skin sting.

"Ouch! Okay, that's enough" you grabbed Katsuki from the neck, how a mother cat would take her kitten, and embraced him.

Finally, Izuku shook off the fur that got stuck in his clothes, breathing from relief. You sighed.

“So, tell me… Did you take him to the police or the doctors yet?”

“We went to the hospital, where the police met us. They told us the quirk was not going to last, long, but they took Bakugo’s hero costume to follow up the investigation.” Todoroki explained and you nodded in understanding.

“Good. So, I’ll take Katsuki home, and I’ll see you guys around?”

“Yes, (Y/N)! Take care! And please keep us updated if anything happens!” Izuku said, waving goodbye.

“Sure! See you!”

“Bye, (Y/N). Take care.” Todoroki said with a smile as you closed the office door behind you.

You made your way into the elevator, once you were alone with Katsuki, you spoke.

“Sorry for teasing you, it’s just such a funny situation.” The cat looked up as you continued, “Do you want to get in my purse? Or do you want me to keep carrying you?” the cat blinked.

“I’ll just carry you, then. I don’t want you getting stomped on, or kidnapped, or anything”. Just then, the elevator opened, and you walked to the exit.

“Bye, Sasaki!” you addressed the receptionist as you quickly passed by her place. You didn’t wait for an answer, since you were sure Katsuki would like to avoid any type of attention towards his cat form.

Once you were out of the building and inside your car, you spoke to Katsuki again,

“Kats, stay in my lap. I’ll just put the sit belt for both of us”, Katsuki blinked at you and did as you said, while you clicked the belt, covering both of you.

You started driving home, and the stillness of Katsuki made you slightly concerned.

“I know you can’t speak right now, but I feel like you’re acting a little weird. Do you feel okay? If you’re getting motion sickness, meow two times” he stayed silent.

A few more minutes passed until you pulled over in your driveway. You took off your sit belt and carried Katsuki inside your home.

His silence was making you believe he was mad that you made fun of him in front of his friends, so you put him in the kitchen aisle and said,

“Hey, Kats. I’m really sorry for teasing you. I know you must be feeling so unlike yourself right now, and you must not be in the mood to be make fun of. I’ll make it up to you, ‘kay? I’ll cook lunch” you offered him a smile.

Then, you put your apron on and continued the cooking you had started before all the chaos. When you poured the ingredients in the pan, the smell of the food seemed to content Katsuki, so he got off the counter and started to rub his head around your feet.

“I’m almost finished, babe. Just know that I didn’t cook it with spice this time, we don’t know if you’ll be as resistant in this form”.

“What form?” the voice made you jolt, you looked to the cat to see if he could talk, but then you spotted him.

Katsuki was standing near the entrance.

“What? Babe get behind me” you picked up the cat and put it behind your figure, as you took the knife you used to chop the vegetables and pointed it to the human Katsuki.

“Babe? What’s wrong?” he eyed the cat “Why is there a cat?” the confusion in his eyes was evident.

“Do not get closer or I’ll call the police!” you threatened when he tried to get closer.

“What the fuck, (Y/N)? Why are you acting so weird? Did you get hit it he head? Let me check if you have a concussion-” he took a couple steps towards you before you interrupted,

“I do not have a concussion! I just, how are you there? I don’t understand!” your voice sounded more exasperated than you wished.

Katsuki recognized you were starting to panic at the situation, so he had to make you calm down before anything escalated.

“Okay, I’ll prove to you that it is me.” He hummed, as he thought about a memory only the two of you knew, “Remember when we had our first date and you were laughing very hard, and then I hugged you and-”

“Stop! Okay, I get it, it’s you!” you tossed the knife to the counter and sighed.

“Now that it’s settled… Care to explain why you’re acting like a maniac?”

“I still don’t get why there’s two of you, is the effect of the quirk gone?” Katsuki’s eyes grew even wider.

“What quirk? There is no other me, are you sure you didn’t hit your head, freak?” he then went and took your head in his hands, hunching slightly to analyse your face.

“The quirk that hit you! The one that turned you into a cat? Do you not remember? We can call Izuku and Todoroki…”

“What? Okay, explain everything to me.” You narrated everything that happened since you received the call, the story that the two heroes told you and how you ended up with a cat.

“Those bastards pranked you. I’m gonna fucking Howitzer them into their next lifetime; see if they reincarnate in a cat, tch" he said as he hugged you. He rested his head in yours.

“I can’t believe I got pranked on by Izuku and freaking Shoto! How could I fall for that?!”

“You’re a dumbass” he chuckled “Even the name they made up for the villain sounded fake as fuck, and I wasn't even working with them today!”

“They were really convincing, I swear! Even the cat attacked Izuku, I really thought it was you!”

“He attacked him? We should keep it!”

“By the way, where is he?” you broke the embrace to search for the cat and caught him eating the food directly from the pan. You sighed.

“What should he call him?” Katsuki asked.

“We’re keeping him for real?” you asked surprised.

“Yes, whatever. He seems to like your food, and if he doesn’t like Deku, then it’s a plus.” You smiled while rolling your eyes.

“Then we should call him ‘Lord explosion!” Katsuki scoffed.

“Shut up. At least I didn’t confuse that cat with you and then proceeded to act like a nut case once I saw you.”

“Stop! We are so gonna get back at them for this. But I think we need to take care of Lord explosion first…” the cat was digging in one of your plant pots, which he then used as a litter box…

“Oh shit! Literal shit!”

Bonus: Sometime later that day...

“Do you think they’ll adopt the cat?” Izuku asked Todoroki. They were patrolling together. “Yes. But I’m sure once (Y/N) discovers that we lied, she will personally come to scold us”. “But we did it for a good cause! How else would they have taken the cat?” “I’m just surprised she fell for it, and found it amusing even…” Todoroki said in a thoughtful voice. Then, Izuku’s phone rang. It was your number. “What do we do?” Izuku’s nervousness evident in his voice. “I’ll answer” Shoto took the phone from Izuku’s hand and tapped the screen to speak with you, “Yes?” “Count your seconds, because we're coming for you two, including Lord explosion” then you hung up. “They’re adopted him” Todoroki shrugged and gave the phone to Izuku. Then, they continued their patrol, watching out for any other civilian or pet in need.

[celestiaras]

‧₊˚✧ ❛[ a shot of lust ]❜

ft. claude clawmark x f! reader — ttt, nijisanji en

╰₊✧ while testing out potions, you take an experimental sip gone wrong & your friend isn’t half as innocent as he seems┊2.2k words

contains: smut!! dom reader & sub claude┊slight dubcon, reader is mean but claude is into that, unintentional (high-key nonconsensual) drugging with an aphrodisiac, kinda unrequited feelings but requited lust, making out, marking & biting, slight masochist claude, spit as lube, degradation, unprotected piv on a chair (because you guys are nasty like that), implied multiple rounds

➤ author's note: oh my god, i’ve been starving you guys again, i’m so sorry, i’ve been hit full force with squid game brainrot. this isn’t my best work, but i’m slowly getting back into niji because it’s my first vtuber family and i miss them :( 

potion-making is a refined art that is desirable to all with its effectiveness in battle or healing properties yet mastered by few with how dangerous or explosive results could be with something simple as an extra drop of dragon’s blood becoming fatal. personally, you’re willing to take the risk of the deadly consequences when it comes to elixirs of speed to slay your opponents before they could even blink.

for these very reasons, you study the craft under your fellow adventurer and close confidant claude clawmark. admittedly, he wasn’t your first choice regarding mentors with his messy workspace and questionable habits, but he was willing to teach you for free so you agreed. even victoria and kunai were unsure of your decision but figured that if anyone could handle the eccentric cleric, it would be you. even though this was something you took upon yourself to learn, you really didn’t like being cooped up in his shop all day while taking orders from customers and spending all day mixing strange components. you miss going out and looting dungeons with your guildmates, but learning through experience would certainly be worth it in the amount of gold you could save by making your own potions (people really pay for the expertise of a professional rather than the collected common loot dropped to make them).

the wooden table in the center of the room had a batch of roughly fifteen glass vials filled with strength potions for a customer, a finished half of the order while working on producing the other half of invisibility. you placed a sealed jar of fermented spider eyes on the table for your partner to brew and went to go grab some night vision potions for the base, but you noticed an odd bottle filled with a shimmering pink liquid that stood out among the batch of dully-colored royal blue potions on the self. it clearly wasn’t organized on the right shelf, but it didn’t have a label nor did its appearance match any of the others. “hey claude, do you remember what this is supposed to be?”

he turned his head to examine it for a second before continuing his work, “eh, i’m not actually sure. maybe you should test it out.”

oh yeah, another thing about potions is that if you aren’t sure what it is, you have to try it out yourself. there are tons of healing medicines all over the place in case someone got poisoned, so you drank it without hesitation like you’ve done plenty of times before. it tasted artificially of strawberries and cream, not an uncommon flavor to mask the usual strange medley of ingredients, but it left a weird aftertaste of bittersweetness on your tongue. you didn’t feel any different nor see any change looking in the mirror so perhaps it was simply a base potion that didn’t have any magic added yet, leaving you to go on with your day after placing the empty glass into the sink.

it didn’t hit you full-force as soon as you swallowed it, but the effects were slowly but surely taking hold of you. it started with you feeling warm, taking off your jacket and touching your face, wondering if there was a sudden change in room temperature for some reason. your breathing steadily became more labored even though you weren’t moving around much, trying to take deep breaths through your mouth in a futile attempt to clear your fogged mind and soaking a towel in water to pat away the perspiration beginning to form on your forehead.

were you ill and coming down with a fever? it didn’t feel like any virus you’ve ever had, felt more like… it was definitely from that unlabeled potion you drank earlier, but why would he leave such a thing lying around if it was really what you thought? this was really why you were warned to get a proper tutor instead of a cleric known for fumbling his belongings. the sun had begun to set and the shop would close in about fifteen minutes anyway, so you decided to wait it out even though it felt borderline unbearable. leaning back on the table, you think there must be an antidote or something somewhere to counter it, but you were interrupted before you could get up and look for it.

“are you okay? you look sick,” claude mentioned, taking off his tool belt equipped with various gadgets and moving away from his station to check in on you. “do you… need help with anything?” he took off his glove to gently press his hand against your forehead followed by your cheek to test your temperature, suddenly feeling conscious of his presence with the proximity and feeling his breath on your skin as he stared intently at your face.

you never paid too much attention to his looks, but you suddenly found yourself studying his appearance now that he was so much closer to you: his long opalescent locks that were neatly tied in a ponytail tossed over his shoulder, his sleepy eyes that shifted from magenta to aquamarine, how built he actually was with his broad shoulders that well defined his frame— was he always so handsome?

“hey… claude…” you felt like a living furnace with lit coals that were bursting at the seams, fire burning into desire at your core and could only be quenched by the man standing in front of you. vivi and kunai aren’t the best at keeping secrets (especially when it’s past midnight at a sleepover), you knew he had a crush on you or at the very least found you attractive. either way, he wouldn’t reject you at the moment unless he considers the friendship on the line, and you were willing to bet everything on that.

his eyes met yours, staring deeply into them while waiting for you to finish your sentence. the tension was so palpable that it could be cut with a knife and you sighed, closing your eyes and leaning forward to break it with a kiss. you couldn’t see his reaction, but he didn’t flinch nor did he pull back, instead reciprocating it once he seemed to process it.

it took some of the edge off, but you still felt insatiable and starved for more of him. slipping your hand to the back of his head and intertwining it with his hair, you deepened the kiss and began to dart your tongue out to ask him to part his lips. you had no way to know what he was really thinking, but he seemed to be understandably confused about the whole thing and yet he didn’t deny you or offer an ounce of resistance. he obediently followed your motions and let you take the lead, just how you liked it, even whimpering slightly when your tongue gently brushed against his and felt the cool titanium pierced through it.

oh, when you heard that sound escape his lips, something feral awakened within you. “fuck…” you placed your hands on her shoulder and swung him around, roughly shoving him down onto a nearby chair and splitting his legs apart with a knee in the middle while continuing to kiss him roughly. fiddling with the hem of his clothing, “is this okay?”

he blushed a deep red as if the gravity of the situation was only hitting him now that you were requesting for content, “y-yes! of course! totally!” he mentally cringed, his ass did not just say ‘totally’ when his crush of over a year was asking if it was okay to fuck him.

thankfully for him, you didn’t seem to mind in the least bit and fervently began to strip him of his clothing, pulling his black top over his arms and tossing it haphazardly on the floor. his strapping frame was even more evident with his bare chest exposed to you, pretty unblemished ivory skin that was just begging to get marked up and bruised. you were quick to leave one last kiss on his lips before lowering your head to suck on his neck, watching a dark purple-red hickey bloom on the spot. you repeated this process a few times before outright sinking your teeth into his tender flesh, finding yourself unable to refrain from behaving like a wild animal even though you were trying your hardest to hold yourself back. 

meanwhile, claude felt like he was dreaming and was almost light-headed by your touch. he allowed you to use his body as you pleased, like a doll for you to play with and abuse. the pain didn’t even register as such to him, feeling more like ecstasy shooting through his veins wherever your mouth found itself as his eyes rolled back like the pathetic fool he was.

“fuck, i feel like i’m going crazy,” you groaned, adjusting your position to sit on his lap and pulling back his pristine white pants to reveal his leaking cock before holding out your palm. “spit.” he complied, taking a moment to gather saliva in his mouth before spitting a clear glob into your open hand which you smeared all over his dick to act as makeshift lube.

the heat was really beginning to get to you like the wrath of a thousand suns, prickling at your skin and causing you to pause your actions to remove your own clothing. you didn’t notice until you were fully nude the way he was staring at you like he had just witnessed the unfiltered beauty of a goddess for the first time. maybe if it was another day under different circumstances, you would have felt soft at his obvious affection and admiration towards you, but unfortunately, you were feeling nothing but irritation due to the effects of the drug.

you extended an arm to push him back so he was sitting properly against the chair instead of slouching, moving to straddle him and finally, finally, lined up his angry red tip with your entrance before sinking into it. claude gasped as he buried his face into your chest, unable to rut into you as he so desired with your purposefully straining your weight on him. 

despite not being able to think straight, your dominance over him was made clear as you set your own pace, ignoring the strain beginning to form in your thighs as you worked your way up and down his length. his size was perfect, not too difficult to take, and also able to hit all of the right spots.

despite not being allowed to put in any work, claude’s heart was hammering in his chest like he was running a marathon with strands of hair sticking to his face thanks to the beads of sweat that formed on his forehead. he struggled to find a place to put his hands with your hips moving too fast for him to grip and the little groan you would let out in the precipice of pleasure and disdain each time he tried to touch you elsewhere led to him simply gripping the sides of the wooden chair he was seated on, basically hold on for dear life while chasing an orgasm to snap you out it. 

“you did this on purpose, didn’t you, you little freak?”

“h-huh?”

“you wanted me to drink that potion, didn’t you? so that you would get fucked like a whore, just how desperate are you?”

he opened his mouth to deny the accusation but found himself unable to and let out a pathetic whimper instead. how could he deny it when it was completely true? he didn’t think you would actually drink it, only planted it on the table and allowed for chance to take the reins, but he didn’t think anything was actually going to happen.

still, there wasn’t a single ounce of regret in his body, even if you were being a little mean to him. he didn’t mind how your sharp words cut into him, it made him dizzy if anything. 

you began to slow down as the ache of constant bouncing was catching up to you, moving your hand to circle your clit and crying out when you felt yourself unravel at the contact. feeling your velvety walls pulse around him had him following shortly after when you lifted yourself off of him, causing him to finish on your lower stomach in pretty white splatters.

both of you were exhausted at the exhibition of energy on top of the long day before this situation occurred, breathing heavily as you got off the chair in favor of leaning against the table with your shaky legs. 

he couldn’t read your reaction, if the gravity of what just happened had sunk in yet or if you were still basking in the satisfaction of your climax. it made you glow in a way, making him dumbfounded and unable to meet your eyes. “i-i should go…” in a matter of minutes thanks to his stupidity, he just went from a good friend to a lowly slut in your eyes all because you were able to see right through him like glass.

however, you grabbed his wrist and pulled him back towards you, nude bodies pressed flushed against each other, kissing him fervently again with a slightly crazy edge to your actions. “yeah, no, you aren’t going anywhere. you started this mess, you’re going to help me out until the potion wears off or until we both pass out.”

[marauderswithpalestineproject]

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[chimcess]

⮞ Chapter Six: Bureaucratic Felchers Pairing: Jungkook x Reader Other Tags: Convict!Jungkook, Escaped Prisoner!Jungkook, Piolet!Reader, Captain!Reader, Holyman!Namjoon, Boss!Yoongi, Commander!Jimin, Astronaut!Jimin, Doctor!Hoseok, Astronaut!Hoseok Genre: Sci-Fi, Action, Adventure, Thriller, Suspense, Strangers to Enemies to ???, Slow Burn, LOTS of Angst, Light Fluff, Eventual Smut, Third Person POV, 18+ Only Word Count: 19.7k+ Summary: When a deep space transporter crash-lands on a barren planet illuminated by three relentless suns, survival becomes the only priority for the stranded passengers, including resourceful pilot Y/N Y/L/N, mystic Namjoon Kim, lawman Taemin Lee, and enigmatic convict Jungkook Jeon. As they scour the hostile terrain for supplies and a way to escape, Y/N uncovers a terrifying truth: every 22 years, the planet is plunged into total darkness during an eclipse, awakening swarms of ravenous, flesh-eating creatures. Forced into a fragile alliance, the survivors must face not only the deadly predators but also their own mistrust and secrets. For Y/N, the growing tension with Jungkook—both a threat and a reluctant ally—raises the stakes even higher, as the battle to escape becomes one for survival against the darkness both around them and within themselves. Warnings: Strong Language, Blood, Trauma, Smart Character Choices, This is all angst and action and that's pretty much it, Reader is a bad ass, Survivor Woman is back baby, terraforming, some mental health issues, survivor's guilt, lots of talking to herself, and recording it, because she'll lose her mind otherwise, fixing things, intergalatical politics, new characters, body image issues, scars, strong female characters are everywhere, cynical humor, bad science language, honestly all of this has probably had the worst science and basis ever, I researched a lot I promise, let me know if I missed anything... A/N: This is longer than I thought it would be so I again have had to split this up differently than I would have liked.

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The days stopped having names.

There was just light and dark. Heat and cold. Movement and collapse.

She couldn’t say how long she’d been at it anymore. Time had collapsed into a series of repeated motions: unbolt, strip, replace, curse, repeat. Her internal clock was a blur of ration schedules and brief rest cycles that ended the moment she couldn’t pretend she was resting anymore.

The lander sat under the stretched-out canopy of solar blankets just outside the Hab’s eastern workspace, its scarred hull looming like a carcass she refused to bury. She’d stripped most of the exterior shell by now—sections so brittle they crumbled under the pressure of her gloves. Panels that looked intact from a distance splintered at the hinges or peeled away in sheets when she applied force.

Half the external structure was junk.

But the core housing—the pressure-stabilized assembly at the heart of the machine—was still sealed. Scratched. Warped. But sealed. The insulation foam was cooked, the seals half-melted, but the containment structure had held.

The battery, predictably, was dead, but it hadn’t ruptured. That alone felt like a gift from a higher power she didn’t believe in anymore.

She tried to pace herself in the beginning—take breaks, drink, sleep—but it didn’t last. The work demanded more. More time. More energy. More than she had.

Soon, she was working fifteen, sixteen hours at a stretch, broken only by the occasional alarm from her hydration monitor or the sharp stab of a leg cramp that forced her to stretch out flat on the floor, panting, until the pain passed.

Her hands were a mess. Even with gloves, the skin along the inside of her fingers had blistered, popped, and blistered again. She wore gauze wraps now, layered under the gloves, but they slipped, soaked through, left raw pink skin that smarted with every movement. Her forearms screamed at her with every turn of the wrench. Her shoulders throbbed deep into the joints from crouching over a bench not meant for this kind of work.

But she didn’t stop.

The Hab’s main workbench—once a place for routine diagnostics and simple component testing—was now a battlefield of salvaged parts and half-functioning assemblies. Old comms tubing lay in spirals on the floor, cut and re-routed to serve as makeshift wiring conduits. She’d gutted two of the rover’s secondary sensor pods to cannibalize their processors, then re-soldered their cores into the lander’s stripped data line.

One night—she thought it was night, though who could tell anymore—she stood in silence for ten full minutes before connecting a final junction. Not for drama. Just because her hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

She was building life from rot. Trying to breathe warmth back into metal that had been dead for longer than some missions lasted.

She rigged an environmental heater into a low-output power conversion unit—something designed to condense drinking water, now barely stable enough to funnel current into the backup loop. It buzzed when she powered it up. Not reassuringly.

But it worked. Sort of.

Everything she touched was either overheating or underperforming. The voltage swings made her flinch every time she touched a wire. The diagnostics gave inconsistent reads—some sensors simply refused to admit the last two decades had happened. One system thought it was still docked in low orbit. Another insisted it was 2089.

One night, while rerouting the primary regulator through a bent coupling she’d hammered back into shape with a rock—because her mallet had cracked two days earlier—she felt her entire upper back seize. Just locked. The kind of pain that makes you stop breathing for a second. She sat on the floor for nearly an hour after that, her head resting against the hull, every part of her damp with sweat. She watched the condensation from her breath disappear into the dust as she muttered curses no one could hear.

But then she got up. Because that was what there was to do.

And finally, one night—if it was night—she reached for the last module. The connector clicked. A sharp, metallic snap. The system locked.

She sat back slowly, the stool wobbling under her weight. Her arms were trembling from the strain. Her fingers refused to uncurl. She looked down at her hands like they belonged to someone else. Her body felt hollowed out—like someone had rung her out and left her in the sun.

Her eyes drifted up to the camera perched near the edge of the bench. A little red light blinked, patient and steady. She’d forgotten it was still on. She hadn’t shut it off in days.

She cleared her throat, the sound raw and dusty.

“Okay,” she said. Her voice barely registered. “Step one’s done.”

She reached forward and wiped the dust off the control panel with the sleeve of her undershirt. The motion left a streak across the display. Her fingers hesitated, hovering over the first set of toggles.

She knew them. She’d studied them before any of this had gone wrong. Before this place had become a graveyard with no headstones. They felt familiar. Like muscle memory.

She sat there for a long time with her fingers hovering over the switch, her hands trembling too much to move.

There were a dozen things that could go wrong. A surge, a short, a silent software fault buried so deep in the system it wouldn’t even show until after she burned the last of her power trying to coax a response. The casing had hairline fractures she’d sealed with melted patch resin. One of the relay boards still gave off a faint electrical smell when it ran for too long. And the capacitor network? Frankenstein’d from three incompatible systems and sheer spite.

But it was the only shot she had.

She wiped a shaking hand across her mouth, glanced at the camera she’d left running in the corner—more habit than hope—and leaned forward. Her breath fogged the scratched polyglass screen as she whispered, almost like she was afraid saying it too loud might scare the whole thing off:

“Let’s see if this thing still remembers how to breathe.”

She flipped the first switch. Nothing. Silence.

It wasn’t just absence—it was active. Thick. Like the air had turned solid and her lungs forgot how to work. A moment passed. Another.

One diode blinked red, then green. Then came the low, uneven hum of power crawling its way through dry circuits. Something deep inside the lander gave a metallic clunk, like a lung trying to remember how to inhale after drowning.

Her eyes snapped to the screen. A strip of green. Then amber. Then more green.

The diagnostic panel lit up, stuttering to life like a drunk trying to stand. The screen flared—too bright, too sudden—then stabilized. Sections of the UI began to populate. Slowly. Glitchy. But real. She watched it happen in stunned silence, afraid to move. Afraid it might blink out and take her with it.

The environmental system chirped once. A faint, bird-like blip. Then it quieted.

The internal clock blinked 12:00:00.00 and began counting.

Wrong, of course. Meaningless. It was counting again. The status light went solid green.

She sat back, just a few inches at first. Her hands still hovered in the air. Like she’d been holding her breath for the entire time she’d been on this godforsaken planet and had only now remembered how to exhale.

A sound escaped her lips—small, unshaped. A hitch. Then another. She covered her mouth, but it didn’t stop.

The sob tore out of her like it had been waiting at the base of her spine for months.

She stumbled back from the bench, tripping over a coil of tubing, and hit the floor hard. The impact knocked the breath out of her, but it didn’t matter. She was laughing now, too, in jagged bursts between sobs. Both sounds came out at once—raw, involuntary, almost animal.

She curled forward, arms around her knees, forehead pressed to the cold floor of the Hab.

It was too much. Too much relief. Too much hope all at once. It hit like a fist to the chest.

For weeks—maybe longer—she’d existed in a kind of suspended animation. Endless work. Endless day. The suns never set here, not really. Time had stopped meaning anything. She slept when her body shut down. Ate when her hands couldn’t hold a tool anymore. The number in the corner of the camera feed was her only guess at how many days had passed, but even that was unreliable. Glitchy. Maybe corrupted.

And through it all, nothing. No voices. No signals. No contact. Until now.

She forced herself to look up. Her vision swam. She blinked fast, dragging herself upright.

On the screen, the lander’s systems were still initializing. The comms package wasn’t fully online, but the routing table was back. She could see the interface. The channel protocols. The handshake logic waiting for input.

If she could get power stabilized and reroute signal through the rover’s external antenna…

She swallowed, chest tight.

She might be able to send a message. A real one. With data. With coordinates. With proof of life.

She stood too fast. Her knees buckled and she caught herself on the workbench. Her head was pounding. She hadn’t had water in too long. Her body was still locked in the ache of survival mode.

But none of it mattered.

She stared at the word PROMETHEUS etched into the side panel, half-obscured by grime, and grinned through a throat gone raw.

“I knew you weren’t done,” she whispered, touching the metal with shaking fingers.

Then, louder—laughing now, breathless and cracked:

“You stubborn son of a bitch.”

She hit the internal comms switch. A familiar interface blinked to life. Crude. Prehistoric by Earth standards. But she could see the relay bounce path. If she timed it right, caught the orbiting NOSA satellite within window…

She could go home.

It would still take time. There were diagnostics to run. System calibrations. She’d need to stabilize the internal temperature and clean out every speck of contamination from the RTG lines.

But for the first time in—God, how long had it been?

She had proof she wasn’t dead. That she wasn’t forgotten. That she could be found.

The Hab was still dim, the world outside still blasted red, and her body still ached in a hundred places.

But now, sitting beside a resurrected lander and a flickering comms panel that was almost awake again, she felt something she hadn’t felt in what might have been months.

Hope didn’t come in a flood. It came like the first breath after almost drowning.

And she was breathing again.

The garage at JPL was quiet in that loaded, unnatural way only rooms full of engineers can be—filled with the subtle clatter of keyboards, the hum of cooling fans, and the sound of too many people trying not to hold their breath too loudly.

It was nearly 3 a.m. in Pasadena, but no one had left. Not really. Some had wandered down the hall for coffee or stared blankly at the vending machine long enough to forget what they were doing, but they always returned. They always found themselves pulled back into this echoing concrete-walled space, drawn to the bank of monitors like moths circling a stubborn lightbulb.

Then the console screen on Station 4 flickered.

A few lines of garbled static, then clarity. Simple, unmistakable.

PROMETHEUS LOG: SOL 0 — BOOT SEQUENCE INITIATED

TIME: 00:00:00

LOADING OS…

PERFORMING HARDWARE CHECK...

No one spoke. Chairs creaked quietly as people leaned forward. Someone dropped a pen, but no one looked.

The glow from the monitor bathed the surrounding metal worktables and diagnostic gear in pale light. The tension in the room thickened with each new line.

INT TEMPERATURE: -34C 

EXT TEMPERATURE: NONFUNCTIONAL

BATTERY: FULL

HIGAIN: OKAY

LOGAIN: OKAY

METEOROLOGY: NONFUNCTIONAL

SOLAR A: NONFUNCTIONAL

SOLAR B: NONFUNCTIONAL SOLAR C: NONFUNCTIONAL

HARDWARE CHECK COMPLETE.

A few people exchanged glances. Those weren’t great numbers. But they were numbers.

Then came the line everyone had been waiting for:

BROADCASTING STATUS. LISTENING FOR TELEMETRY SIGNAL...

And then—

LISTENING FOR TELEMETRY SIGNAL…

LISTENING FOR TELEMETRY SIGNAL...

Each repetition landed heavier than the last. The silence that followed was mechanical, deliberate. Just long enough to doubt. Just long enough to feel the air leave the room.

Marco crossed his arms tighter across his chest. He hadn’t blinked since the first line. Next to him, Mateo leaned forward, elbows on the console, lips parted like he might whisper something to the machine, like it would help.

Then the screen updated:

SIGNAL ACQUIRED.

No one moved. It took a second to register. Maybe two. As if their brains had to run a boot sequence of their own to process it.

Then the room erupted.

It wasn’t cinematic. It wasn’t choreographed. It was messy and real and loud. People laughed, clapped, slapped backs, some shouting half-formed thoughts, some just standing there in stunned relief. One of the interns let out a string of expletives so enthusiastic that the older woman next to him laughed until she nearly fell over.

Mateo didn’t cheer.

Not at first.

He stared at the blinking cursor on the screen. The simple phrase just sitting there, plain and quiet in its plain white font: SIGNAL ACQUIRED.

Someone was alive out there.

He ran a hand down his face, the disbelief finally cracking into something softer. He exhaled and turned to Marco, who looked as if he hadn’t breathed at all until that moment.

“She did it,” Mateo said, voice low, dazed.

Marco just nodded, eyes still locked on the screen. His throat worked like he was trying to speak, but nothing came out. He was smiling. Barely. The kind of smile you get when something too impossible to hope for actually happens.

Across the room, the operations lead was already on comms, yelling over the cheers, coordinating signal lock. People were moving now—rushing to bring other systems online, pulling up bandwidth allocations, cross-checking satellite relays. The energy in the room had flipped. The air had a pulse now.

This wasn’t just a blip. This wasn’t telemetry from some dead rover buried in sand. This was a lander that hadn’t spoken in years.

This was Prometheus.

And it was talking.

Mateo sat down slowly, hands resting on the console, staring at the screen like it might vanish if he blinked. His voice, when he spoke again, was quieter than before—almost reverent.

“Holy shit.”

The sky above M6-117 never changed much—just an endless dome of pale, bleached orange that never gave way to stars. The suns didn’t set. They just circled and layered over each other, always hanging there, always burning.

Y/N stood outside the Hab, boots planted in powdery, red soil. Her hands were smeared with grease, fingertips raw under torn gloves. She tilted her head back, squinting up at the Prometheus lander, half-buried in its thermal shroud. Its high-gain antenna, silent for years, was moving.

Slowly. Stiffly. But moving.

The dish creaked on its axis as it shifted, metal joints grumbling under the strain of age and heat. The movement was uneven at first—hesitant, mechanical—but it found its target, angling toward the far western edge of the horizon.

Toward Aguerra.

Or a satellite. Or a station. Someone. Something that could answer.

She didn’t breathe. Didn’t blink.

Then the motor gave a final click, and the dish held steady. Pointed. Alive.

Her heart stuttered once—an involuntary jolt, as if her body had only just gotten the message.

“Oh my god,” she whispered, the words breaking out of her without permission.

She blinked, staggered back a step, her hands hovering in the air like she couldn’t decide whether to cover her mouth or punch the sky.

“Oh my god!” she said again, louder this time, her voice cracking under the strain of adrenaline and disbelief. It came out half a laugh, half a sob.

Then something inside her just—broke loose.

She laughed. Loud and sharp, the sound echoing across the empty flats like it didn’t know how to stop. And before she could think about how absurd it might look, she started to move—spinning in place, arms out wide like a child in a summer storm.

She danced.

Not gracefully. Not even rhythmically. Just a wild, joyful release of motion—half stumbling, half hopping in circles as she kicked up clouds of red dust. Her boots slipped in the soft grit, sending her lurching sideways, but she didn’t care. She threw her arms in the air, let her head fall back, and howled something wordless at the bright sky.

She was grinning so hard it hurt.

The antenna was tracking. The diagnostics were holding steady. The telemetry stack had confirmed the signal pathway was stable. For the first time in—God, weeks, maybe months—she wasn’t guessing.

Someone was listening.

She didn’t know who yet. Didn’t know if it was NOSA, or a deep-space array, or some flyby relay picking up the call. But it didn’t matter.

She wasn’t just broadcasting into silence anymore.

There was a path.

A voice could travel it.

Her voice.

She staggered to a stop, out of breath, chest heaving with the effort of movement and the sheer weight of emotion she hadn’t let herself feel in so long. Her face was damp, though she couldn’t tell if it was sweat or tears. Probably both. Her legs were shaking. She didn’t care.

She wiped her sleeve across her face, dragging grit across her cheekbone, and looked up again.

The dish hadn’t moved.

Back at JPL, the mood in the control room had shifted from stunned disbelief to a kind of focused, collective obsession. Engineers were packed shoulder to shoulder, eyes fixed on the wall of displays like spectators watching a patient’s vitals stabilize for the first time after a coma. The tension wasn’t gone—it had simply refined into something sharp and surgical.

And at the center of it all was Doug Russell’s station.

Monitors cast a sterile glow across his desk and the two chairs flanking it—though no one was sitting. Tim, JPL’s most tenacious and sarcastic comms tech, hunched forward as he typed, the clack of keys rapid and precise. His wiry frame leaned into the console like the machine might move faster if he willed it to. He looked like he hadn’t shaved in a week and had no intention of fixing that tonight.

Mateo and Marco stood just behind him, hovering like nervous family members outside an operating room—familiar enough with the system to understand what was happening, just far enough removed to feel useless.

“As soon as we got the high-gain response,” Tim said, voice calm despite the low buzz of urgency humming through the room, “I queued Prometheus for a full panoramic sweep.”

“You’ve received it?” Mateo asked, leaning in, voice clipped.

Tim didn’t look up. “Sure,” he said dryly. “But I figured we’d all rather watch a blank screen and slowly lose our minds than see what the first human message from M6-117 in five months might look like.”

Marco shot him a warning glance.

“Tim is,” he said through clenched teeth, “our finest comms technician. And we all deeply, deeply appreciate his wit.”

Tim didn’t miss a beat. “You can’t fire me, I’m already dead inside.”

“Tim,” Marco mouthed. Sharp. But not unkind.

Tim smirked and tapped the return key. “Incoming,” he said, almost offhandedly.

The screen blinked. Then—line by vertical line—a panoramic image began to assemble. Slowly. Agonizingly slowly.

The room fell still.

Engineers leaned in, mouths slightly open, trying not to hope too hard. A few people unconsciously held their breath. Somewhere in the back, someone whispered a countdown with each line of image loaded.

The first few strips were barren. Red dirt. Wind-raked ridges. The soft haze of dust in the triple-sunlight. Then the edge of a familiar structure began to resolve—a weather-scored dome, metal-stiff support ribs, just barely visible above the rise.

“There’s the Hab,” Marco said, his voice soft but rising, pointing to the curved outline.

Mateo was already scanning ahead. “Wait—what’s that?” he said, tapping the screen near a shadow that didn't look like a rock or any kind of equipment.

As the next lines loaded, the answer came into view.

A metal rod had been planted in the soil like a flagpole. Taped to it, fluttering just slightly in the wind, was a piece of plastic—something stiff, maybe from a packing crate or a suit panel—and on it, in unmistakably large handwriting, was a message scrawled in black marker:

I’LL WRITE MESSAGES HERE. ARE YOU RECEIVING?

The room collectively exhaled, a sharp sound like a crowd reacting to a sports goal—but no one cheered. It was quieter than that. More reverent. The kind of stillness that forms when everyone realizes they’re witnessing something that will be replayed for the rest of their lives.

More of the image loaded.

Two more signs had been propped beside the first:

POINT HERE FOR YES. POINT HERE FOR NO.

Mateo blinked hard. “She doesn’t even know if anyone’s actually watching.”

“She’s guessing,” Marco said, swallowing hard.

Tim leaned back in his chair, arms crossed. “We’ve got a two-hour round trip on comms. She’s asking yes-or-no questions with nothing but a fixed camera and hope.” He gestured toward the screen with a dry little shrug. “This is going to be the slowest conversation in the history of intelligent life.”

Marco shot him a look, but his expression had softened. He wasn't in the mood to argue. He just said, “Point the damn camera, Tim.”

Tim nodded once, then turned back to the keyboard. “Pointing the damn camera.”

She stood barefoot on the edge of the rover’s entry step, the arch of one foot pressed against sun-warmed metal, the other dug slightly into the soft red grit below. Her boots lay discarded a few meters away, kicked off in a moment of impulsive hope.

Her hands—still stained with marker ink, dirt, and grease—hung loosely at her sides, fingers twitching unconsciously as she stared across the makeshift clearing. Her jaw ached from how tightly she was clenching it. Her whole body was wound up like a spring.

The sun—one of the three—hung high behind her, stretching long triple shadows across the uneven ground. It was always day here. Always bright. She’d long since stopped pretending to track it properly.

But now, standing under that endless orange sky, she needed the seconds to slow. Just long enough for her to believe what she thought she’d just seen.

Because the camera turret on the Prometheus lander—dormant for longer than she’d been alive—had moved.

She didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe.

It had been still when she finished setting up the message signs—just three stiff cards secured to scavenged rods and spare tie-wire, letters handwritten in black marker until the ink gave out halfway through the second sign. She’d traced the rest using a piece of carbon foil, pressing hard and hoping the message was still legible.

That was all she could do.

No uplink. No antenna feed. No voice. Just cardboard signs and an idea.

The turret shifted again. Slow. Careful. Mechanical.

It wasn’t sweeping the horizon. It wasn’t running a diagnostic pattern. It was deliberate.

Her breath hitched.

She stepped off the rover, boots forgotten, soles pressing into the hot dust. She could feel the sting of grit working into the cracks in her skin, but she barely registered it. Her eyes were fixed on the turret as it paused—held—and then tilted, degrees at a time, until it stopped.

Pointing directly at the “YES” sign.

She gasped—sharp, involuntary, like something had been pulled from her lungs.

Her legs gave out.

She dropped to her knees in the dust, the impact jarring but not painful. Her hands came up to her mouth, clamping down instinctively like they could hold back the emotion breaking loose inside her chest.

Her eyes blurred instantly with tears she hadn’t realized she was still capable of producing.

And then, without meaning to, she laughed.

It wasn’t elegant. It cracked halfway out of her throat and folded over into a broken, sobbing kind of sound—deep, guttural, and helpless. Her shoulders shook. Her body curled forward as the laughter tangled into crying and the crying gave way to silence again.

Not emptiness, though. Not this time.

Relief. Sheer, unimaginable relief. And something else. Something heavier.

Someone was out there. They’d seen her message. They’d understood. She wasn’t just screaming into the void anymore.

“I’m not alone,” she said, barely above a whisper. Her voice cracked, but the words came again. “I’m not alone.”

She stayed on her knees for a while, not moving, afraid that if she stood too soon the spell would break and the turret would turn away. She watched the camera, its stillness now more meaningful than any motion. It was listening. Watching.

The dust settled slowly around her. The heat beat down. The suns moved across the sky, layered and strange.

But nothing else mattered.

For the first time in what felt like forever, she was real to someone again. Not just a blip in a black box. Not just telemetry noise on a server somewhere.

Someone had seen her.

By the time she made it back inside the Hab, her limbs felt like they were filled with sand. Heavy, sluggish, every motion slightly delayed, like her body hadn’t caught up with what her heart already knew.

They saw her.

She hadn’t even realized how much she'd needed that until it happened.

Inside, she peeled off her gloves and wiped the dust from her face with the inside of her elbow. It smeared. Whatever. She’d stopped caring about the state of her face somewhere around sol-whatever-the-hell. She squatted beside the food drawer, muttered a half-hearted apology to the ration packs she’d been ignoring, and pulled out a pouch of rehydrated potato stew.

“Dinner of champions,” she muttered.

She sat cross-legged on the floor, back against the wall, the still-warm packet in her lap. Steam rose gently from the top as she peeled it open.

She raised it toward the overhead light like a toast. “To Prometheus. To whoever’s out there. And to me. For not dying in a crater.”

She took a bite. It tasted like cardboard and regret, but she smiled through it. She was so hungry, and she hadn’t noticed until now. The emotional crash after the high of connection hit like a body blow. Her hands were shaking from fatigue, from adrenaline, from months of pent-up everything.

As she chewed, her eyes wandered to the far wall, where she’d arranged her makeshift “crew.”

There was Captain Stanley, the helmet from her EVA suit, perched on an upturned crate. The dark visor reflected a ghost of her own face. She lifted her stew pouch.

“To you, Cap. For keeping me grounded.”

Propped beside him was Pam the Vent, the cracked exhaust duct that had been making a haunting whine during night cycles until she taped a fork into it. Now it made a different, more tolerable whine.

“Pam, you were right. I should’ve believed the signal would go through.” She winked at the vent. “You’re always right. Moody, but right.”

A beat.

“You still sound like a dying cat when the fans kick in, though.”

Near the airlock, Susan—her ruined boot from the first week, long since deemed unsalvageable—sat filled with loose bolts. She saluted it solemnly. “Susan, your sacrifice shall not be forgotten.”

She exhaled a laugh, small but real. The sound startled her. She hadn’t heard herself laugh for no reason in a long, long time.

Only the rover, Speculor-2, remained unnamed. She referred to it only by its designation. A sign of respect. Or maybe distance. She wasn’t sure anymore.

“You don’t get a name,” she said aloud between bites. “You’re the only one still doing your damn job.”

The rover sat just outside the Hab, its silhouette barely visible through the dusty porthole—motionless, but unmistakably there. Same position she’d left it in after dragging Prometheus into place. Just behind it, the lander’s antenna still pointed skyward, unmoving now, but resolute. Silent, but not alone.

Y/N leaned her forehead against the window, her breath fogging a patch of glass. The heat from the rehydrated food she’d finally forced herself to eat was slowly working its way back into her core, settling in her chest, behind her ribs.

Her voice, when she spoke, was soft—half to herself, half to the rover outside. “I mean, I could name you,” she murmured. “But let’s be honest, that’s just asking for it. The last three things I named either exploded, got moldy, or betrayed me by freezing solid in the middle of a repair.”

She watched the still form of Speculor-2 through the haze of dust and reflected light. “Besides,” she added, almost apologetically, “you’re the only one that hasn’t let me down. I think that earns you your full title.”

The silence on the other side of the glass didn’t answer. But it didn’t feel empty, either. Not anymore.

She finished the meal in slow, methodical bites—every muscle still recovering from adrenaline. When the pouch was empty, she tossed it toward the waste bin. It hit the rim and bounced onto the floor. She stared at it. Didn’t move. Just let it be.

Instead, she crawled toward the center of the Hab, dragging her tired limbs like dead weight, and pulled a flattened ration box from beneath her bunk. It had been waiting there for days—saved for a moment when she had something worth putting on it.

She grabbed her old utility marker, shaking it a few times until the ink grudgingly agreed to cooperate, and began sketching out a rough circle. Segmented. Crude. But functional.

“Okay,” she muttered, drawing in more detail as she worked. “Here’s the plan. You,” she said, tapping the rough shape of the lander on her makeshift diagram, “are now my communications officer. Congratulations. No training, no pay, but full responsibility for the emotional well-being of a stranded astronaut.”

She paused and looked toward the lander through the port again.

“Don’t screw it up.”

She kept drawing. Lines, angles, numbers. She spoke as she worked, narrating like she was teaching a class no one had signed up for.

“We’ve got a two-hour delay round-trip. So no witty banter, no debates, and definitely no sarcasm unless it’s really, really well-timed.” She sniffed, wiped her nose on her sleeve, and kept going. “The camera can rotate a full 360. I’m dividing it into sixteen equal sectors—hexadecimals. Each one corresponds to a character. You rotate to a segment, that’s your letter. Point, pause, reset. Repeat.”

She sat back, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her palms. “It’s going to be slow. Like, glacial. But it’s language. It’s mine. It’s… contact.”

Her gaze drifted toward the far corner of the Hab. The broken vent—Valerie—let out its usual high-pitched whine. She smiled.

“You hear that, Val?” she said. “We might actually get a conversation going in here that doesn’t involve me assigning personalities to heating components.”

She looked over to the EVA helmet she’d propped up on a supply crate weeks ago. Its black visor faced her like a mirror.

“Stanley, don’t look at me like that. I know it’s weird. It’s been weird for a while.”

A pause. A breath.

“But it’s working. Something’s working.”

She turned on her personal log, the soft red light blinking awake on the little camera perched above the console. It had been dark for a while. No point in recording when you’re not sure anyone’s out there to listen.

But now?

She leaned in close, brushing dust off her face with the back of her hand. Her hair stuck to her temples, damp with sweat. Her eyes were still rimmed with exhaustion, but they were clear. Focused.

“Day… unknown,” she said, voice hoarse but steady. “The suns never set here, so time’s been more of a suggestion than a measurement. My sleep cycle’s shot, I think I hallucinated a second Valerie the other night, and I’ve been arguing with a space boot I named Susan.”

She smiled—wry, tired, but real.

“But today, the Prometheus camera responded. It moved. It pointed to YES.”

She let the words sit there, hang in the air like they deserved to.

“That means someone saw my signs. It means someone’s listening. I don’t know who it is yet. Could be NOSA. Could be a university relay team. Could be a maintenance AI that accidentally found me while looking for a comet.”

She chuckled quietly, then tapped a finger against her temple.

“Doesn’t matter. Someone’s there. I’m not just shouting into dust anymore.”

She reached over and picked up the sheet of cardboard with her communication circle. The lines were uneven, hand-drawn, but precise enough to work.

“I’m going to teach Prometheus how to talk again. One letter at a time. Using hexadecimals. Because 26 letters don’t fit evenly into 360 degrees, and I’m not about to eyeball that math. Base sixteen is cleaner. And besides…” She shrugged. “Old code habits.”

Her tone softened, eyes trailing back to the camera feed from outside.

“Thank you,” she said, quietly.

She didn’t say more. She didn’t need to.

She turned off the recording and sat there on the floor, cross-legged, arms folded over her chest, head tipped back against the wall.

Outside, through the porthole, the rover stayed still. The lander didn’t move.

The red sands of M6-117 stretched outward in every direction, as if the world had been poured out in one long, unbroken breath and then left to harden under the brutal glare of three unrelenting suns. There was no horizon here—at least not one that felt real. The light smeared everything flat. There were no true shadows, just overlapping ghosts in odd directions, triple-cast silhouettes that shifted slightly as the suns moved in their slow, endless circuits across the sky.

The planet wasn’t quiet, exactly. The wind was a constant whisper—soft, dry, hissing over the sand like it was trying to wear everything down to bone. Even the stillness had teeth.

Out past the main hatch, near the base of the Prometheus lander, Y/N crouched in the dust. Her knees ached in the suit’s rigid frame. Her fingers cramped every time she tried to flex them, the gloves thick and uncooperative. But the cards had to be exact.

Sixteen of them in total, each one an off-white square marked with thick, blocky characters in permanent ink: A through F, 0 through 9. A hexadecimal ring. Not elegant, but math rarely cared about elegance.

She placed the final card—“F”—into position, carefully tucking the corner under a flat, palm-sized rock. Each square had its own weight, each stone tested and re-tested. The Hexundecian wind wasn’t fierce, just persistent and erratic. It could sit calm for hours, then flick sideways out of nowhere and scatter your careful intentions like confetti. Earlier that week, she’d watched the “E” card lift off like a leaf and skip across the plain, fluttering just out of reach as she’d chased it, cursing until she was breathless.

Lesson learned.

She stood slowly, knees groaning with effort, and took a few cautious steps back. The circle wasn’t perfect—she wasn’t a machine—but it was close. From the camera’s perspective, perched atop the Prometheus turret, the spread would be clear, each card aligned just enough to be distinguishable in a 360-degree sweep.

Her gaze drifted up to the turret, still and silent for now.

But it had moved yesterday.

It had seen.

“I figured one of you had an ASCII table lying around,” she said, her voice muffled by the suit but still laced with something dry, almost playful. “Or a sixth-grade understanding of encoding, at least.”

She allowed herself a tired, wry smile. Then turned, giving the cards one last look—checking for shifting rocks, bent corners, anything out of place—before making her way back toward the Hab.

Inside, the suit came off in stages. Exhausted, breathless stages. Every joint creaked. Every zipper fought her. The synthetic inner lining peeled away from her skin like duct tape from fabric. When she finally stepped free, her undershirt clung to her back, damp with sweat, dust pressed into the creases of her elbows and neck.

She didn’t bother with a full decontamination cycle—just a rinse of water over her face and a few swipes with a towel. There wasn’t enough energy left in her limbs for a full scrub. The dust wasn’t the priority tonight.

She dressed slowly, pulling on a clean pair of NOSA-issue pants—gray, thinning at the knees—and a soft, over-washed t-shirt with the faded logo of a launch site she hadn’t seen in years. The neckline had stretched out. One shoulder slipped as she moved. She didn’t fix it.

Then she crawled onto Gregory Shields’s old bunk. It was narrower than hers, tucked beneath a low storage shelf, but it felt safer somehow. Quieter. The kind of place where someone had lived with intention.

It still smelled faintly of antiseptic wipes and the faint tang of synthetic polymer—a smell she’d come to associate with him. She wasn’t sure whether it clung to the bed, or whether the Hab itself had chosen to remember.

The laptop sat just where she’d left it, perched precariously on top of a stack of filtered water cartridges. It flickered to life with the usual delay, the fan sputtering once before giving in to the boot cycle.

She leaned forward and watched the screen resolve, file folders loading one by one.

HabMaint_Logs_2_FINALREAL

Speculor_Backup_NewestActual 

DoNotDelete_GS

And then, tucked inside a dusty log archive, buried three directories deep: a folder labeled simply, “Extras.”

Curiosity tugged at her hand.

She opened it.

The contents loaded slowly, line by line: a list of .exe files and text documents. The file names were unmistakable.

Zork II. Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Planetfall. A Mind Forever Voyaging.

She blinked. Then laughed—quiet at first, then fuller, warmer than she’d expected.

She turned her head toward the small camera she’d propped on the crate beside the bunk, just far enough back to catch her expression.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, holding the laptop up slightly like a game show host revealing a prize, “I give you the hidden emotional archive of Commander Gregory Shields.”

She gave the screen a reverent shake of her head. “Turns out our fearless leader was also a closet nerd. This is like the Smithsonian of digital loneliness.”

She let the laptop fall back into her lap and smiled, eyes scanning the list again.

“I mean, I get it,” she said, more quietly now. “You run diagnostics six times a day. Inventory every bolt and meal pouch. But eventually, you just… want a story. Even if it’s one where you’re alone in a white house with a boarded-up door.”

Her hand hovered over the mousepad.

Then she clicked.

The screen blinked and shifted to a black window with stark white text.

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.

Y/N stared for a long moment.

The words felt like a heartbeat. Familiar. Steady. Someone had been here before her. Someone had typed into this same blinking cursor and waited for a reply that wasn’t human but was, in its own way, comforting.

She grinned. Not mockingly. Just with recognition.

“Well,” she murmured, “I guess I’m not the only one trying to talk to something that doesn’t talk back.”

She typed:

LOOK AROUND

The response appeared instantly.

You are in an open field...

She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, then leaned back against the wall, chin resting in one palm. The faint whine of the broken vent in the corner—Valerie, as she’d named her—filled the silence between lines.

The stack of cardboard hexadecimals sat nearby, their marker ink still drying in spots. Tomorrow, she’d send another message. One letter at a time. One slow, careful spin of a camera. She had a system now.

For now, though, she played. Just for a little while. A game meant for solitary people. Text and choices. Words typed into voids.

She was still alone, but for the first time in a long while, it didn’t feel so endless.

Back at JPL, the room was taut with anticipation. The kind that made people forget to blink, forget to sip the coffee cooling in their hands. Consoles hummed, monitors flickered, and somewhere across the room, someone whispered a half-joke and then immediately regretted it.

At Doug Russell’s station, the tension crystallized. He leaned in close to his screen, an ASCII chart dog-eared beside him, one hand flying across the keyboard, the other adjusting Prometheus’s command queue.

“Incoming,” he muttered, not turning around. His voice was low but firm, the verbal equivalent of threading a needle at 2 a.m. with caffeine instead of sleep.

Behind him, Marco and Mateo stood shoulder to shoulder, silent and tense. Watching. Waiting.

On the main monitor, the live camera feed from Prometheus began to move. Slowly, methodically, the turret scanned across the circle of hand-lettered cards that Y/N had arranged in the dust of M6-117. Each card—labeled with a number or letter from the hex set—was captured in a frame. Pause. Capture. Move. Pause. Capture again.

It was absurd. And beautiful.

Inside the Hab, Y/N crouched at the window, watching the turret turn. The movement was stiff, but deliberate—like an old man raising a hand to wave. It was working.

She pulled her knees up to her chest, dust still clinging to her suit, and smiled.

“Not complaining,” she muttered, watching the turret complete another slow sweep. “I’ll take interpretive dance over silence.”

Later, back inside, she stripped off the outer layer of her suit and settled at her workstation, cross-legged in front of her notepad, the laminated ASCII reference guide spread out beside her like a sacred text. Each number pointed to a character. She traced the values with a fingertip, checking twice before she committed to anything in ink.

The message formed one word at a time.

H

O

W

She paused.

A

L

I

V 

E

She stared at the page.

Her breath caught, a soft, involuntary sound that surprised even her. “How alive,” she repeated, barely a whisper.

It was such a simple question. But it undid her.

She sat still for a long time, pen hovering just above the paper. Then, slowly, she began to write.

Impaled by big monster bone. Dragged away into dark. Hid in cave. Civilians had reason to think me dead. Not their fault.

She scratched the last word three times before she was satisfied it looked like she meant it.

Later that night, she climbed into the Speculor rover and hooked into the command system. The console flickered to life. Her fingers, still sore, flew over the keys, typing out each carefully chosen instruction.

The screen glowed blue in the dark.

She turned the dashboard camera toward her. It was propped with a zip tie and a strip of old sensor tape. Shaky but serviceable.

“Now that we can have more complicated conversations,” she said, breath fogging the inside of her faceplate just a little, “the smart people at NOSA sent me instructions on how to link the rover with Prometheus’s systems. Just a tiny little tweak—twenty lines of ancient operating system code—and boom.”

She gestured toward the screen. “We’re in business.”

As if on cue, a new message rolled onto her terminal.

Dr.Y/L/N, this is Mateo Gomez.

She froze.

For a moment, it felt like the rover stopped breathing. Like the world went still. Her hands hovered over the keyboard. Her pulse pounded in her neck.

The next line arrived seconds later.

We’ve been watching you since Sol 63. The whole world is rooting for you. Amazing job getting Prometheus. We’re working on rescue plans. Meantime...

She read each line like it might vanish if she blinked. The words were surreal. Gentle. Real.

We’re putting together a supply mission to keep you fed until Helion Nexus arrives.

She let out a ragged breath, something between a laugh and a sigh of disbelief. Then typed back, quickly:

Glad to hear it. Really looking forward to not dying.

Back at JPL, Doug let out a laugh as he read the response aloud, and the garage erupted in scattered chuckles. A few of the techs even clapped, unprompted.

But the moment sobered as a new line appeared on-screen from Y/N:

How’s the survivors? What did they say when they found out I was alive?

Mateo’s smile faded.

He looked at Marco, whose face was unreadable. The older man rubbed his temple with two fingers and exhaled slowly.

“Tell her,” he said. “But carefully.”

Mateo hesitated, then typed.

They are safe on New Mecca. We haven’t told them you’re alive yet. We didn’t think it was their business. Your cousin doesn’t know either. He needs to stay focused on his mission.

Y/N stared at the reply.

The words didn’t register all at once. They landed in pieces.

Her hands trembled. She blinked. Then, without thinking, her fingers slammed the keyboard.

WHAT THE F—

She caught herself. Backspaced. Hard. But the anger wasn’t gone. It sat in her chest like a fist. She leaned forward, jaw clenched, and typed again.

What the fuck is wrong with you fuckers.

Back at JPL, Doug winced as the message came through. Several people turned to look at Mateo, who rubbed his forehead with a groan. He typed, carefully:

Doc, please watch your language. Everything you send is being broadcast live to the public. Global feed.

Y/N narrowed her eyes at the screen. The rage hadn’t gone anywhere, but she forced herself to breathe. Once. Twice. Then she typed:

Tell the world I’m deeply, sincerely sorry for my colorful language. You bureaucratic fletchers. Also, go fuck yourselves. Politely.

She hit send.

And then she leaned back in her seat, hands shaking, chest burning, and laughed. Bitter. Exhausted. Free.

It wasn’t eloquent. It wasn’t composed.

But it was honest.

And for the first time in a long time, somebody heard her.

At NOSA headquarters, the hum of fluorescent lighting pressed down on everything like a second atmosphere. The office felt smaller than usual—walls lined with outdated charts, satellite composite maps curling at the edges, and one stubborn water stain above the far vent that Yoongi had started to take personally.

He rubbed his temples hard with the heels of both hands, then slammed the receiver back into its cradle. The sound cracked through the room, sharp and final.

He leaned back in his chair and exhaled through his nose, long and slow, like he was trying to bleed tension out of his ribs.

The door opened without a knock. Creed stepped inside, a tablet tucked under one arm, brow already furrowed. He paused when he saw the look on Yoongi’s face.

“Bad call?”

Yoongi didn’t answer right away. He turned his head slightly, eyes still on the phone, as if it might ring again just to spite him.

“I just had to explain to the President of the United States what a ‘bureaucratic felcher’ is,” he said flatly.

Creed’s expression flickered—half horror, half sympathy.

“I made the mistake of Googling it,” he admitted after a beat. “Regret was immediate.”

Yoongi didn’t laugh. He just scrubbed a hand over his face and sat forward, elbows on the desk, tension still coiled tight in his neck. His eyes were bloodshot. The long days—and longer nights—of political firefighting were starting to show.

Creed stepped further into the room and shut the door behind him.

“She’s not wrong,” he said, his voice quieter now. “We’ve waited long enough. We need to tell the survivors. And her cousin.”

Yoongi didn’t respond right away. He stared down at the scuffed surface of his desk, where his notepad sat open beside a half-eaten protein bar. The pad was filled with names, coordinates, scribbled notes, and one line circled three times: DON’T TELL YET.

He tapped a pen absently against the corner of the desk.

“She’s stable,” Creed said, pressing. “She’s coherent. More than that, she’s functional. She’s asking hard questions. And if we don’t start giving her straight answers—”

“She’s going to stop trusting us,” Yoongi finished.

Creed nodded.

Yoongi sighed and leaned back again. The chair creaked.

“You’re only pushing this now because Mateo’s in D.C. and can’t push back.”

Creed didn’t flinch. “He’s too close to her. You know that. He’s been since the beginning.”

“He’s also the only one who’s managed to keep her talking without her telling the world to go fuck itself in five languages.”

Creed dropped the tablet onto the desk. “Then let her. If she has to scream at someone, let it be us. What matters is that she knows she’s not being kept in the dark. That she’s not being lied to.”

There was a long silence.

Outside, the hum of activity from the floor buzzed on—keyboard clicks, muffled voices, the occasional printer groaning to life. But in Yoongi’s office, the air had gone still.

He looked up finally, met Creed’s eyes, and gave a small, tired nod.

“Okay,” he said.

Creed’s shoulders relaxed just slightly.

Yoongi pushed the notepad aside and grabbed a clean sheet.

“Draft a statement. We’ll have to vet it through the comms team, but let’s get it moving.”

Creed turned to go, then paused at the door.

“She asked us for the truth,” he said. “Let’s give her at least that much.”

Yoongi didn’t respond, but as the door closed behind Creed, he exhaled again—this time quieter.

The Starfire drifted in perfect silence, its silver hull gliding along a stable arc through the deep, indifferent black of space. Stars burned cold and distant beyond the reinforced windows, too far to feel real. The ship didn’t so much cut through space as inhabit it — a man-made ember, tiny and determined, carrying seventeen people and every hope pinned to them.

Inside, though, serenity was in short supply.

Commander Jimin Park stood near the forward observation deck, one hand braced lightly on the edge of a console, the other curled against his jaw, thumb pressing absently into the line of his cheek. His face was still, unreadable, but the tension in his stance said enough. He wasn’t really looking at the stars. He was staring through them.

The voice crackled in from the comms, tinny and practical.

“Commander Park, come in,” said Valencia Cruz, comms officer, from elsewhere on the ship. Her tone was clipped, businesslike — but even over the static, there was an edge of anticipation.

Jimin blinked, then leaned forward and keyed the panel. “Go ahead.”

“Data dump’s almost finished,” she said. “Personal packets are coming through now.”

“Copy that. On my way.”

He pushed off with a practiced ease, shoulders brushing past the low lighting strips overhead. As he floated toward the Semicone-A ladder, he caught a glimpse of Khoa Nguyen ahead of him, already heading the same direction.

“You’re in a hurry,” Jimin noted as he caught up.

Nguyen glanced over his shoulder and flashed a crooked grin. “My kid turned three yesterday. I’m hoping there’s video. Maybe cake. Hopefully something not entirely destroyed by compression.”

Jimin gave a short nod, then turned his focus to the transition zone. As they reached the midpoint of the ladder, the artificial gravity gently reasserted itself — not full weight, but enough to give everything a sense of down. They moved more cautiously, boots finding purchase, hands steadying themselves on the rails.

The rec room was already filling by the time they arrived — not with noise, exactly, but with a kind of restless energy. Voices were lower than usual, movements quicker. People took their usual seats, leaning in toward their terminals, waiting for whatever fragments of Earth they could still call their own.

Val was already at the main console, typing fast, a mug of tea steaming beside her, mostly forgotten.

“Okay,” she announced, glancing up at the gathered crew. “Personals are in. Dispatching to your inboxes now. If anyone gets a corrupted file, don’t panic. Just flag it and I’ll resend.”

“Make sure to skip Zimmermann’s disturbing German niche fetishes,” someone muttered near the back.

Val didn’t even look up. “They’re telemetry logs, and they’re beautiful,” she said in a flat, mocking monotone.

Armin Zimmermann, who had just opened his tablet, let out a sigh without even raising his head. “They are spacecraft health reports,” he muttered under his breath.

Val shot a quick smirk in his direction, then paused, fingers hovering over the keyboard.

“Wait,” she said. “This one’s different.”

The room shifted. Small sounds stopped — the clink of a spoon in a mug, the rustle of someone adjusting their shirt.

Val’s eyes narrowed. “It’s a voice memo. Not tagged to anyone individually. Says it’s for the whole crew.”

Jimin stepped closer to the console, a frown tugging at the corners of his mouth. His fingers rested lightly on the back of Val’s chair, but his eyes were locked on the screen.

“Play it,” he said, low.

Val hesitated—just a second too long—then tapped the key.

The speakers crackled, then cleared.

The voice that filled the room was familiar. Calm, professional. Creed Summers—NOSA’s mission coordinator. A voice they were used to hearing twice a week with updates, mission briefings, and dry observations that occasionally bordered on wry. But this time, it was different. The tone was flatter. Strained. Like someone trying to walk across thin ice without making a sound.

“Starfire,” Creed said, “this is Creed Summers. I’ve got an update. No way to ease into it, so I won’t.”

There was a pause. Just a breath.

“Y/N Y/L/N is alive.”

It didn’t crash over them so much as snap the air taut. Like a fault line giving way.

Khoa Nguyen froze, tablet still in hand, thumb resting against the screen like he’d forgotten what it was for. Across the room, Hoseok Jung slowly sank back into his chair, blinking like he hadn’t heard it right. Val’s hands hovered over the keyboard, suspended in midair.

No one moved. No one spoke.

“She’s alive,” Creed repeated, quieter this time. “Stable. Lucid. Communicating.”

Jimin didn’t flinch, but his grip on the back of the chair tightened. His knuckles paled. His face, usually so composed it bordered on unreadable, had gone still. Hollow.

“We’ve known for just over two months,” Creed continued. “That decision—keeping it quiet—came from the top. I want to be clear: I disagreed then, and I disagree now. I’m telling you because we finally have a stable comm link and a confirmed path for recovery. A rescue is viable. The plan’s already in motion.”

Another pause. Creed’s voice dipped lower.

“You’ll get a full write-up in the morning—timelines, diagnostics, cause analysis. But for now, the important thing is this: she’s okay. She keeps saying none of the survivors are to blame. That it wasn’t anyone’s fault. She was critically injured. She was dragged off the launch path. She doesn’t want guilt. Just wants you to know she made it. Somehow.”

The silence on the ship grew dense, airless.

“You’re cleared of science ops for the next 24 hours,” Creed said. “Use the time. Ask questions if you need to. Summers out.”

The line went dead.

The only sound for a long moment was the low hum of the ship itself—ventilation cycling, a screen blinking somewhere, the dull tap of someone’s fingers nervously shifting on plastic.

Then Khoa spoke. His voice was thin. “She… she’s alive?”

Armin let out a long breath. Not a laugh, not quite. Something quieter. “Frenchie lives,” he murmured.

Across the room, Hoseok let out a sharp, stunned exhale. “Holy shit,” he said, half-laughing as he scrubbed both hands over his face. “Holy shit. Commander. Did you hear—?”

“She’s alive,” Jimin said. But it wasn’t joy in his voice. It was something else. Something low and furious.

He was still staring at the screen.

“They left her behind.”

His voice was barely a whisper.

Val turned toward him slowly. “Commander…”

“They left my sister behind,” he said, louder now, jaw clenched. He wasn’t looking at anyone. “She was injured. Alone. And they wrote her off.”

“Jimin,” Hoseok said gently, “you heard the report. Everyone thought she was dead. No one expected even two of us to make it out of that launch zone alive. You remember what it was like down there.”

“She’s been surviving in that hellhole for months. By herself.” His voice rose again, brittle and sharp. “While we’ve been running scans and juggling experiments and writing status reports. If we had known, we could’ve turned back. We could’ve—”

“No one would have approved a course change,” Hoseok cut in, regret in his voice. “We were already past max drift. And your wife—Jimin, she would’ve never agreed to let you stay out any longer with the baby coming—”

“For French Fry,” Jimin said, cutting him off. “She would’ve understood.”

The words landed like iron. The room went still again.

No one answered. There wasn’t a way to. Because he wasn’t wrong.

Val looked down at her hands, still poised above the console. She dropped them into her lap. Khoa sat quietly, his tablet untouched. Even Armin, ever the rational one, had nothing to say.

Jimin straightened slowly, his shoulders squared like armor tightening. Without another word, he turned and left the room. His footsteps echoed down the hall—deliberate, heavy against the low hum of artificial gravity.

No one followed.

There was nothing to say.

The heat was relentless.

Outside, under the glare of M6-117’s three suns, the red dust shimmered like liquid metal. Inside the Hab, it wasn’t much better. The air recyclers coughed along at half-capacity, the cooling system barely holding a line between unbearable and fatal. Everything smelled faintly of plastic and sweat—human persistence baked into the walls.

Y/N moved carefully, deliberately, her body too tired for wasted motion. A layer of sweat clung to the inside of her collar, sticky and constant. She crouched beside her potato rows, fingers brushing gently across a cluster of dark green leaves. The plants were thriving—miraculously, stubbornly. Small jungle bursts of color and life tucked between racks of salvage gear and oxygen scrubbers.

She lifted a reclaimed plastic jug from under the table, the water inside cool from the overnight cycle. It had been drawn from her own sweat, breath, condensation, and filtered half a dozen times through systems that had no right still working.

She poured it carefully at the base of each plant.

"You have no idea how much you're worth," she muttered to the leaves. “That’s a day of me smelling like gym socks so you can have a drink.”

She looked up toward the mounted camera, wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist, leaving a streak of dust behind. Her tone was light, but fatigue etched her voice like a dull blade.

“Now that NOSA can actually talk to me, they won’t shut up,” she said. “It’s like I won a sweepstakes I didn’t enter. Constant pings, questions, feedback... one guy sent me seventeen different configurations for optimizing light angles in here. I’m sure he means well.”

She adjusted the camera slightly, panning it over the rows of potatoes. They filled almost every horizontal surface now—shelving, crate tops, even a jury-rigged hanging tray suspended from the ceiling with bungee cords.

“I don’t mean to brag,” she said, “but I’m currently the most successful botanist on this planet. Also the only one. But that’s a technicality.”

She gave a small, dry smile and leaned on the edge of the workstation, looking down at her plants like they might talk back.

“They want me to pose for a picture for the next transmission,” she said after a moment. “Apparently, PR back home thinks a visual helps morale. You know—proof of life, survivor smiles, that kind of thing.”

She straightened and lifted an imaginary curtain with one hand. “So, here’s option one: high school senior portrait.” She struck a painfully awkward pose, elbow on the corner of the hydroponic shelf, head tilted at a strange angle. “Or option two: helpless ingénue stuck in a sci-fi melodrama.” She turned away from the camera, glancing over her shoulder with a dramatic pout and raised eyebrows. “Might not land well with a wrinkled jumpsuit and orbital grime under my eyes, but hey—commitment.”

She laughed, a short but real sound, and let the expression fall away.

“Still,” she said, grabbing a nearby notepad and scribbling a few numbers into her log. “This whole ‘talking to Earth again’ thing… it helps. I get regular data dumps now—emails from family, people from Starfire, old professors. Even some from strangers. Rock stars. One message was from the President of Nigeria. She said, ‘If you can grow food in hell, you can write your own flag.’”

She paused and smiled softly. “My favorite’s from Helion Prime Tech. My alma mater. They quoted this old saying: once you grow crops somewhere, you’ve officially colonized it.”

Y/N glanced toward the plants again, then the camera. Her voice took on a sharper edge—still dry, but aimed.

“So technically? This is a colony. My colony. And no offense to the dearly departed of Colony 212, but—” she lifted her chin, lips curled into a smirk—“in your fucking face. This rock is mine.”

It took her longer than she wanted to suit up.

The EVA gear was stiff with heat, the inner lining clammy with the kind of sweat that never really dried. She moved with slow precision, strapping each piece into place, checking seals twice—not out of fear, but out of habit. On M6-117, nothing forgiven mistakes.

The outer airlock hissed open, and the full weight of the suns hit her the moment she stepped outside. No breeze, no break, just three brutal discs crawling across a pale yellow sky, casting triple shadows that splayed outward from her feet like ghostly limbs.

She exhaled, already feeling the sweat bead along her hairline beneath the helmet. The ground crunched under her boots as she walked to the signpost she’d stuck into the soil the night before—a piece of scrap aluminum from a broken equipment crate, bent and planted like a flag.

The helmet cam was already recording, but she reached up with gloved fingers and adjusted its angle anyway, making sure the shot would frame the suns just behind her, the horizon wide and clear. She checked her posture, squared her shoulders.

Then she pulled the card from a side pocket. Standard Hab notepad stock. On it, written in thick, black marker with a slight smudge in the corner, was a single word:

“Ayyyyyyy.”

She held it up next to her helmet with one hand. The other gave a big, exaggerated thumbs-up.

The camera clicked.

That single frame—cropped, corrected for color and saturation, encoded and transmitted through four satellites, then downlinked to NOSA’s secure server on Aguerra Prime—arrived twenty-three minutes later in the middle of a tense meeting.

It projected onto the conference table like a headline. Y/N Y/L/N, alive, dusty, and grinning under her helmet, standing against the scorched landscape of a planet no one thought she’d survived.

Her suit was patched in at least two places—tape visible at the elbow and right knee. The jumpsuit underneath was stained with hydraulic fluid and long weeks of recycled air. But her posture was straight. Her stance confident. Her body language said what no press release could.

She was alive.

She was winning.

Y/N stood in the dust for a moment longer after the picture was taken. She didn’t move. She didn’t lower the card right away. The silence out here was total—no atmosphere to carry sound, no birds or engines or voices. Just the faint static hum inside her helmet and her own breathing.

She stared out at the land beyond the camera’s frame—flat, blistering red-orange, littered with sharp rocks and faint, wind-scarred ridges.

Then she smiled, a little to herself.

She tucked the card back into her suit and turned toward the Hab, footsteps crunching across the cracked surface. Her shadow followed in triplicate.

Around the table at NOSA HQ, no one said anything at first.

Then Alice folded her arms tightly and let out a long breath. “I ask for a hopeful, inspirational survivor photo,” she said, “and I get the goddamn Fonz.”

There were a few muffled laughs, but the mood stayed taut, the kind of tension that never really left these briefings.

Mateo’s voice crackled over the audio line from JPL. “Be grateful she held still long enough to take one. You should’ve seen the first batch—she was trying to photobomb herself.”

Alice shot a glare toward the monitor that could’ve etched cracks in the screen. “I need something with less Happy Days and more… her face. This is going global, not going viral.”

“She’d need to take off her helmet for that,” Mateo said, dry. “Which, you know… would kind of ruin the survivor narrative.”

The room chuckled. Even the interns in the back cracked a smile. The tension thinned for a moment—long enough to feel it.

But Yoongi, seated at the head of the table, didn’t laugh. He leaned forward slightly, elbows on the table, eyes fixed on the image.

“We’ll release the photo as part of the official rescue announcement,” he said, voice calm but clipped. “Tie it to the supply mission schedule. I want public rollout before the next Hohmann Transfer window.”

Mateo’s tone shifted instantly. “Understood. I’m flying out this afternoon to confirm timeline and media assets.”

“Good,” Yoongi said. Then, turning slightly, he added without looking up, “Alice will handle all media appearances.”

There was a beat of silence.

Then Mateo’s voice again, mock-hurt: “Et tu, Yoongi?”

That earned a few more laughs around the room.

Alice didn’t even blink. “You gave us the Fonz,” she said. “Now smile pretty for the cameras.”

The suit was getting harder to pull on each time—stiff from dust, from wear, from the countless hours it had spent exposed to heat, strain, and her own sweat. Y/N wriggled her arms into the sleeves, then sealed the chest plate with a firm press until the internal display blinked to life.

O₂ levels: nominal

Suit integrity: 97%

Environmental risk: high

She muttered under her breath, “No shit,” and reached for the toolkit. It rattled slightly as she lifted it, the latches barely holding after last week’s impact when she’d dropped it down the south ravine.

She moved to the airlock out of habit more than thought. It was just another check, another routine repair on the never-ending list. Seal realignment. External circuit relay.

Same thing as yesterday. And the day before that.

The door closed behind her with a metallic shunk, the seals engaging one by one with a soft, pressurized click. The hum of depressurization followed—steady, familiar. She braced herself with one hand against the wall, the other gripping the handle of her case.

Then, something shifted.

A sound—not quite right. A low groan. Material under stress. Then another. Louder.

She frowned, turning toward the seam above her.

The canvas lining rippled like something alive.

And then the airlock detonated.

KRAAK-BOOM.

The sound was deafening. She didn’t even register the pain until she was airborne.

The force hit her like a truck. She felt her body lift, weightless for a terrifying second, then plummet. The sky twisted. Dust. Light. The ground.

She hit.

Hard.

Her body slammed into the crusted surface of M6-117, the impact ripping the breath from her lungs. Her limbs flailed uselessly as she skidded, tumbled, rolled. The world spun in a blur of color and dust and noise. Something cracked—her faceplate. She heard it before she saw it.

By the time she stopped moving, she was flat on her back, staring at the burning sky through a spiderweb of shattered glass.

Inside the helmet, the heads-up display flickered, then died.

For a few long seconds, she didn’t move. Couldn’t.

Then she coughed—a wet, shuddering sound. Blood smeared across her visor. Her head pounded with the deep, pulsing throb of a concussion. Her left shoulder felt wrong—off-kilter. Dislocated? Maybe worse.

But she was alive.

She tried to sit. Couldn’t.

Tried again. This time she made it to her elbows.

From where she lay, she could see what was left of the Hab. Or rather, what wasn’t.

The far wall had collapsed. Twisted metal framed the crater where the airlock used to be. Bits of insulation floated in the thin air like confetti. The antenna was gone. Smoke curled from the side panel like steam off a boiling pot.

And then she heard it—sharp, close. The hiss.

A sound every spacer knows in their bones.

A breach.

Her breath hitched. She looked down. The hiss wasn’t coming from the destroyed Hab. It was closer.

Her suit.

No.

Panic hit her like a second explosion. She twisted, dragging her limbs over herself, hands scrabbling at the seams of her arms, her side, her legs. Fingers trembling, blood-slicked. The hiss was steady now, mocking her, just beneath her ear.

Too quiet to locate. Too loud to ignore.

“No. No no no—” she muttered, her voice cracking.

She fumbled with the toolkit, nearly dropped it. Yanked out a thermal knife and held it in shaking fingers. Her breath was coming too fast. Not enough oxygen left to waste.

She paused. Tried to think.

Then it came to her.

Hair.

She pulled off one glove with her teeth, then reached up and yanked a fistful of her hair from the base of her scalp. It came loose in a painful clump.

She struck the knife’s igniter. The tiny blade sparked to life.

She held the hair to the flame.

It caught instantly, curling into gray smoke.

She held her breath and watched.

The smoke drifted sideways. Curled. Then it flowed with purpose—drawn toward a tear no wider than a pencil lead, just under her right arm.

“There you are,” she whispered.

She grabbed a strip of emergency patch tape—bless whoever had packed it—and slapped it across the breach. Pressed hard. Waited.

The hiss stopped.

She sat there for a moment, hands shaking, heart pounding in her ears, her body slumped like a puppet with its strings cut.

But she was still breathing.

She forced herself to sit up straighter. Blood from her nose trickled down the inside of her collar. Her shoulder screamed with every movement, but she ignored it. Pain was good. Pain meant her nerves still worked.

She reached back into the kit. More tape. A patch for the faceplate. It wouldn’t hold under pressure, but it would get her to the rover if she didn’t waste time.

Each move was deliberate. Measured. She didn’t speak. Not now.

She worked on instinct—training, repetition, desperation. By the time she’d stabilized the suit enough to move, her fingers were scraped raw inside the gloves and her muscles ached with the dull tremor of shock.

By the time she reached what was left of the Hab, the sky had already shifted shades—three suns high and pale, casting long, warped shadows behind her. Every step felt like dragging a deadweight behind her. The suit was torn in three places, patched with thermal tape and a prayer, and every motion sent a warning ping through her helmet’s display.

She ignored them.

Her knees buckled when she stepped over the threshold of the airlock—what used to be the airlock. Now it was just jagged framework, wires frayed and sparking faintly in the filtered sunlight, insulation stripped away like peeling skin.

Inside, the smell hit her first.

Scorched plastic. Char. Burned electronics. And under that—soil. Rich, damp earth, once full of life. Now cold and still.

Y/N stopped in the center of the room and stared.

Her greenhouse trays had flipped during the blast. Rows of hand-raised potato plants were overturned, their roots tangled and limp, snapped stems buried under frozen soil. The water lines had ruptured. Moisture beaded on the shattered remnants of the clear ceiling panels, already beginning to frost.

The small oasis she’d fought for—day after day, breath by recycled breath—had been wiped out in an instant.

She stood there, barely swaying, not even bothering to remove her helmet. Her breath fogged the inside of the visor. Her limbs screamed for rest. Her shoulder throbbed. Her lips were cracked, and her face stung from where the suit lining had rubbed raw.

But the worst pain was in her chest.

It didn’t explode. It didn’t scream. It just ached. A deep, hollowed-out ache. A silence where hope had been.

She lowered herself to one knee. Not gracefully—more like her legs gave out. She caught herself with a hand against the floor, grimacing at the sharp jab of pain in her side.

She stared at one of the ruined plants. Half buried in overturned soil, its leaves wilted and torn, roots still clinging to a chunk of earth like it didn’t understand it had already lost.

Her vision swam.

Tears welled up fast—too fast for her to blink them away. They slipped down her face silently, tracking along the curve of her cheeks, catching in the grime at her jawline.

“No,” she whispered, shaking her head hard. “No, no, not now.”

She sniffed, wiped at her face clumsily with the back of her glove. Her hands were shaking, but she pressed them into the floor to ground herself. She didn’t have time for this. She couldn’t afford it.

She wouldn’t cry here.

Not in front of the ruins of her work. Not in the place she’d survived. Not after everything.

She took one breath. Then another. Jaw clenched. Shoulders trembling. But still upright.

Then she reached forward.

Her fingers curled gently around the base of a broken stalk, brushing away bits of soil and tangled tubing. The leaves crumbled as she lifted it, the root ball dangling uselessly beneath.

She turned it over once in her hand.

And then, quietly, she began to clean.

No words. No declarations. Just movement. One wrecked plant at a time. Setting aside what could be salvaged, scraping frost from trays, resetting any equipment that still responded to power.

Her hands were red and raw. Her shoulder screamed every time she lifted something more than a kilogram. She worked through it.

Inside the Speculor, the silence felt deeper than usual.

Not the quiet of rest, or even the soft mechanical hum of a well-running system. This was different—hollow, like something had been taken out of the air itself. Like the space around her had grown too big and too small at the same time.

Y/N sat in the pilot’s chair, hands resting on the keypad, the screen in front of her still dark. The comm relay had synced with Earth five minutes ago. The signal was stable. Everything was ready.

But she wasn’t.

Her fingers hovered, curled and motionless, like she’d forgotten how to type. Like the words, all of them, were caught somewhere between her brain and her hands. Her jaw ached from clenching.

How do you even start a message like this?

She’d practiced it in her head a dozen times. Tried to boil it down into numbers, mission code, survivable facts. But none of it fit.

She closed her eyes, just for a second. Then she exhaled slowly, leaned forward, and began to type.

Thousands of kilometers away, on Aguerra Prime, in a windowless NOSA conference room tucked beneath the main operations floor, the mood was brittle.

Papers rustled. Fans turned overhead, moving stale air that no one was breathing deeply.

Mateo stood at the front of the table, the latest transmission report clutched in one hand, his other braced against the polished steel edge. Across from him, Alice Sung sat straight-backed and silent, her arms folded. Yoongi leaned forward with his elbows on the table, staring at the projection with a tightness around his eyes that hadn’t left in weeks.

Mateo cleared his throat, not because he needed to, but because the silence was pressing in. “The crops are gone,” he said.

No inflection. Just the truth.

“A full pressure breach,” he continued, flipping to the next page though he didn’t need to look. “Vaporized most of the water in minutes. The remaining biomass was exposed to sub-zero atmosphere. Temperatures dropped hard. Anything microbial was flash-frozen and denatured.”

Alice didn’t blink. “How much did she lose?”

“All of it,” Mateo said. “Zero viable regrowth. She’s down to stored reserves.”

A beat passed.

Alice’s eyes narrowed slightly. “How long can she stretch that?”

Mateo’s voice softened, but only slightly. “She still has a full reserve of harvested potatoes in cold storage. Rough estimate: 200 sols. If she rations to the edge of starvation, maybe 230.”

Yoongi tapped the pad in front of him, pulling up the raw numbers. “And combined with current rations?”

“Best-case projection gets her to Sol 609,” Mateo said, meeting his eyes. “That’s a hard ceiling. After that… she runs out.”

Alice’s tone didn’t change. “And the current Sol is?”

“135.”

The math wasn’t hard. The implications were.

Yoongi leaned back slightly, rubbing at his temple. “By Sol 868, she’s dead,” he said flatly.

No one answered.

The weight of it wasn’t in the words—it was in everything left unsaid. The understanding that survival had a clock now. That every tick, every delay, had a cost.

Finally, Yoongi spoke again. “That means we move. No more waiting. What happens if we accelerate the launch window?”

Across the room, Creed Summers looked up from his notes. He’d been quiet until now, mostly watching. Listening. He tapped his pen against his notebook—softly, rhythmically, the sound oddly loud in the tension-heavy room.

“If we move the launch up,” Creed said, “we hit a more aggressive arc. Less efficiency. It’ll cost fuel, and we’ll need to retrofit the shell. But it cuts time.” He flipped a page. “Best estimate: 414-day trip. That’s with minimal margin for slingshot.”

Yoongi didn’t look away. “How fast can we mount and inspect the boosters?”

“Thirteen days,” Creed said.

Yoongi nodded slowly, doing the math aloud. “Sol 135. If we launch in thirteen, we’re at Sol 148. That gives…” He glanced at Mateo.

“Forty-seven days,” Mateo confirmed. “That’s all Marco and his team get.”

Alice raised an eyebrow. “How long does a long-range delivery probe usually take to build?”

“Six months,” Mateo said, deadpan.

Yoongi didn’t hesitate. “Then we’re doing it in forty-seven days.”

He pushed his chair back and stood, pressing his palms flat on the table. “I want the schedule on my desk in two hours. Engineering, fabrication, mission redundancy. I want a failure tree mapped before nightfall.”

He turned toward Mateo. “You’re going to call Marco and tell him.”

Mateo didn’t argue. He just gave a tired, resigned nod. “Sure. He loves a challenge.”

Yoongi paused in the doorway. “Tell him if he pulls it off, I’ll name the booster after him.”

Alice’s eyes flicked up. “And if he doesn’t?”

Yoongi didn’t look back. “Then I’ll name the crater after him instead.”

At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Aguerra Prime, the mission floor had fallen into a kind of unnatural stillness—the quiet you only get after a seismic shift. Moments earlier, the room had been its usual low-grade storm of movement: soft conversations, data pings, the tapping of keys, the muted buzz of a dozen different systems chattering across their networks.

Now, the air was still.

Screens still glowed. Diagnostics still ran. But no one was reading them. No one was speaking.

The speakerphone in the middle of the room hummed quietly, its last transmission long since finished, as if it hadn’t caught on that the call had ended. Or maybe it had. Maybe it was the only thing in the room that understood what had just landed.

Marco del Castillo sat back slowly in his chair, one hand braced against the edge of the desk. His face was drawn tight, his forehead damp. The sweat wasn't from heat—climate control kept the labs cool. It was the kind that came when the reality of something hit harder than expected. His jaw was clenched, not in anger, but in pressure, as if the weight of what he’d just heard was still settling in.

Across the room, his team watched him. Not waiting for a speech—just waiting for movement.

Marco’s eyes stayed on the speaker for another few seconds, like it might offer him some clarification. A loophole. A way out. But it didn’t. Just that low hum.

He swallowed. “Okay.”

Barely above a whisper.

He blinked. Licked his lips.

“Okay.”

It wasn’t agreement. It wasn’t reassurance. It was just... the first brick laid on a path he didn’t yet know how to walk.

No one else spoke. Even the coffee machine, notorious for burbling at the worst possible times, stayed quiet.

He looked down at his shirt. The collar was damp where it touched his neck. He tugged it loose, tried to swipe the sweat off his palms but only managed to smear it into the fabric of his pants.

“I’m gonna need a change of clothes,” he muttered.

Then, finally, he stood. Slow. Shoulders rolling to life after too long spent frozen. His knees cracked audibly as he straightened. He didn’t bother to hide it.

He looked around—really looked this time. His team wasn’t huge, but it was formidable. Engineers, data analysts, systems designers, materials people. A few interns, all wide-eyed and stock-still. None of them moved. But they were waiting.

He cleared his throat and nodded to himself, as if deciding to take the next step before his body caught up.

“We’re all gonna need a change of clothes,” he said, louder now. “Probably more than one.”

There was no laughter. No eye-rolling or smirks. But the silence changed shape.

Because it wasn’t a joke. It was the truth.

They’d just been handed a forty-seven-day timeline to do what normally took half a year. Design, build, and launch a custom long-range, solar-boosted supply probe—fully loaded, tested, and space-certified. Not for a demonstration. Not for a publication. For a person.

A woman—alone, somewhere on a planet that was trying to kill her by inches.

This was not the job they’d expected when they came in this morning.

It was quiet for a few more seconds.

Then a chair squeaked back. A keyboard tapped once. A screen changed. Someone moved. And then another.

Marco turned to the closest terminal, watching it come alive again. He drew a long breath, the weight in his chest still there, but finally shifting into something useful.

“Okay,” he said, not to himself this time. “We’re splitting into two teams. Twenty-four-hour rotations from here on out. Team One’s on design and integration, Team Two’s on fabrication and logistics. Habitat Systems is priority. I don’t care if it’s ugly—I care if it works. This isn’t about how it looks in a journal.”

He started walking, pointing as he spoke.

“Avionics, you’re with propulsion—make a list of what we’ve already got on-site. If it flies and isn’t nailed down, I want it catalogued. Flight software—start building a stripped-down nav shell. We don’t need elegance. We need function. Communications, link with SatCon and figure out how to thread a signal path between three satellites we don’t even control. Make it work.”

He looked at Materials next.

“If we’re short anything, I want a full manifest on my desk by midnight. Don’t wait for procurement. Raid our backups. Hell, raid the museum if you have to. This thing launches in forty-seven days, or she dies.”

A silence settled again—not the stillness from before, but something more focused. Sharper.

People began to move in earnest. Terminal screens flicked open. Hands reached for headsets. Murmurs returned to the room—not casual, but concentrated. No one needed to be told what this was. They could feel it in their chests.

This wasn’t a project. It was a lifeline.

Marco turned back toward his own workstation, dragging in a shaky breath, already making calculations in his head. Trajectories. Mass ratios. Heat loads. Battery yields under degraded conditions.

He was exhausted. Sweating. His shirt clung to his back. But he didn’t sit down.

There was too much to do.

The Starfire drifted through the velvet dark, a slow glide along its return arc to Augerra Prime. From a distance, it was just a speck—cold metal and old fire reflecting starlight, swallowed by the vast, endless black.

Inside, tucked away from the quiet hum of fusion drives and navigation updates, the rec room felt like another planet entirely. Low lighting, soft music looping somewhere in the background, and a faint hum of life-support systems pulsing through the walls like a heartbeat.

Bách Koah Nguyen slouched at one of the auxiliary terminals in the Starfire’s rec alcove, the ship's artificial night cycle dimming the overhead lights to a sleepy amber. The room was half-empty—just the quiet hum of the ventilation system and the occasional murmur from the corridor beyond.

A glass of electrolyte tea sweated next to his elbow, untouched. His legs were kicked out beneath the desk, one boot tapping softly against the metal base, steady and aimless.

He stared at the blinking cursor in the message field. Just him, a static-filled channel, and a blank screen demanding a letter to a woman stranded on a dead planet.

“Goddammit, Frenchie,” he muttered.

He cracked his knuckles and started typing.

Frenchie,

Apparently, NOSA’s decided we’re allowed to talk to you again. And lucky me—I drew the short straw. So… hi. I guess.

He scowled, reread the line, then deleted the last sentence.

Frenchie,

Apparently, NOSA’s letting us talk to you now. And lucky me—I get the honors. Just me and this stupid interface.

A small grin tugged at his mouth.

He kept going.

Sorry everyone left you behind. I’d say it was personal, but let’s be honest—you’re not that interesting.

He leaned back, reading it out loud under his breath with mock solemnity.

It’s roomier without you here, though. We’ve been splitting your workload—still no replacement. NOSA moves at the speed of moss. But hey, it’s only botany. Not real science, right?

He paused, hesitating for half a breath, then added:

How’s the planet? Healing okay? Quỳnh made me ask. She says hi. Swears she likes you more than me. Unclear if that was a joke.

He smirked, hit send, and spun the chair halfway around to stretch his legs. Quỳnh would kill him if she saw what he’d written. Or at least make a pointed comment over dinner and then beat him at cards in front of their kids.

The inside of Y/N’s speculor was a cramped oven by mid-sol, the temperature gauge flickering just below caution-red. The screen glowed pale blue in the darkened cabin, casting a cool light across her face, which was smudged with dust and exhaustion. Her hair had been cut short weeks ago—poorly, out of necessity—with thick sections buzzed unevenly to keep from snagging in her helmet.

When the ping came through, she sat up straighter, already half-smiling. Her eyes scanned the message. She barked a short laugh. It echoed oddly in the enclosed space.

“He’s such a dickhead,” she said, amused more than annoyed.

She cracked her knuckles and leaned in.

Koah, M6 is lovely this time of year. No bioraptors since sunrise, which is honestly a personal best. The injury healing fine. Sand in everything, winds like a brick wall, zero humidity. You’d hate it.

Her fingers moved faster now.

Tell Quỳnh I love her for checking in and that she’s objectively correct—I am more likable than you. But she loves you the most, don’t be a baby. How are the kids? Tell my Báo Bun I said happy birthday. Please. I think I missed it. Days blur here.

She hesitated, then added quietly:

Time’s getting slippery. I talk to a vent. I named my EVA helmet. I narrate things to a camera like it’s a friend and not just a blinking red dot. It's getting weird. I miss people.

Her jaw tensed. She exhaled and kept going.

Also, I did blow up the Hab. Long story. Mostly oxygen. Partially my fault. On the bright side, all of Captain Marshall’s disco collection survived the fire. Divine punishment, I guess. Tell Zimmermann. He’d appreciate that.

She glanced at the fuel gauge on her aux battery and typed faster.

How’s the Starfire? Still smell like a rusted can and depression? I walked today—just me, long horizons, and high ceilings. You’d hate it. No chairs. No coffee. Tell the crew I said hi. And tell Jung he still owes me fifty credits from poker. I may be marooned, but I’m not letting that go.

She read it over, didn’t bother to edit, and hit send.

Y/N leaned back in the worn pilot’s chair, the padding long since flattened beneath her weight. Her shoulders sank into the frame, her neck rolling slowly against the edge of the headrest with a dull crack. The gesture wasn’t one of comfort—just survival. The closest she could get.

She closed her eyes.

Her whole body ached—not sharp pain, just the kind that lingered, like soreness that had taken up permanent residence in her joints. Her knees were stiff. Her lower back pulled with every breath. The skin on her hands felt raw under the gloves, the kind of tired that wasn’t from one bad night but from all of them.

Still, there was a quiet inside her chest now—a loosening of something she'd been carrying around for weeks without realizing. Just a little slack in the knot. No miracles. Just a few words on a screen from someone who remembered who she was.

Back on the Starfire, Koah barely shifted in his seat when the response pinged in. He opened it and scanned the message in silence, his mouth twitching as he read.

Helmet names. Talking to vents. The fire. The disco.

He let out a sharp breath of laughter when he hit the part about the Hab explosion, loud enough to make Val, seated at the next terminal, lift her head.

“What?”

“Y/N blew something up,” Koah said, grinning.

Val raised an eyebrow. “That is the least surprising thing I’ve heard today.”

He nodded, still smiling as he typed out a reply:

Copy that. Will relay to Jung. Still not paying.

He sent it. Then sat back, drink in hand, and stared at the terminal’s blank screen. He thought about saying something else. Asking something real. But the words didn’t come.

On M6-117, the glow from the message faded from Y/N’s screen as the terminal timed out.

She didn’t linger. There wasn’t time for it, not here.

The lightness that had crept in during the exchange was already being swallowed by the reality around her. The inside of the Hab still smelled faintly like burnt polymer and battery acid—residue from the fire that had nearly taken the whole station out. That smell had a way of clinging to everything. Her suit. Her tools. Her skin.

The inner wall was holding, more or less. The last repair—a patchwork quilt of insulation fabric, scavenged hull plating, and stubborn optimism—still looked solid. But the airlock was a different story. The blast had peeled open the lower quadrant like a can lid. The edges curled inward, jagged and blackened, the whole structure groaning with every change in temperature.

Y/N dragged a roll of synthetic canvas across the floor, one end slung over her shoulder, her feet crunching over scattered debris. She didn’t talk. She didn’t think. She just moved. Her breath was shallow, labored more from rationed air than from exertion. The silence around her felt thicker than usual—too still, too watchful.

She knelt at the base of the breach and began layering the canvas, her hands stiff inside the gloves. She worked fast but methodically, following the emergency repair schematic by memory: cross-seal pattern, spiral tension reinforcement. The duct tape unspooled with a series of harsh, ragged rips that echoed through the Hab like tiny gunshots.

Her hands trembled by the time she pressed the last strip flat.

She stepped back slowly, breath catching in her throat. The patch was ugly. Lopsided. But sealed.

“Not pretty,” she murmured, voice barely audible over her own heartbeat. “But let’s see what you’ve got.”

She crossed the room to the repressurization panel and keyed in the sequence. For a moment, nothing happened.

Then the hiss began—low and deliberate as air filtered into the chamber, volume climbing slowly. The canvas at the airlock flexed. Bulged. Tensed.

Y/N didn’t breathe.

The panel beeped.

Pressure: Stable.

She slumped against the nearest wall, her legs folding beneath her as she slid to the floor, forehead pressed to the cool metal. Her heart was thundering in her chest, her lungs trying to decide whether they trusted the air again.

She let herself sit there for a minute. Maybe two.

Then she pushed up. Staggered a little, caught herself, and kept going.

There was always more to do.

Outside, the light had shifted. One sun was sinking low, casting long amber streaks across the sand. Another was just beginning to rise, painting the sky with a sickly kind of lavender haze. The third hung high overhead, thin and distant.

Inside the Hab, Y/N crouched beside one of her supply crates. She opened the lid slowly, as if hoping something new might be inside this time.

There wasn’t.

Potatoes. Shriveling, sprouting, some soft to the touch. She sorted through them one by one, inspecting for mold, for rot, for anything salvageable. She didn’t count them anymore. She knew what she had. Knew how long it would last. But the ritual mattered.

Each one passed through her hands like a silent marker of time.

She wasn’t counting calories. She was counting days.

A gust of wind rattled the outer shell. The canvas seal whispered as it flexed, tugged by the pressure difference.

Y/N’s head snapped up. She stared at the airlock.

Her chest tightened.

The fear was never gone. It just sank down for a while—waited. She clenched her jaw, turned back to the crate. Kept working.

Her fingers landed on the last potato.

She paused, thumb brushing its uneven skin.

Then, very softly, she lowered the lid and leaned forward until her forehead rested against it.

“Keep going,” she whispered to no one. “Just keep working.”

And she did.

Dean Marblemaw was half-hanging off his tiny faux-leather loveseat, one leg dangling off the side, the other curled awkwardly beneath him. His head was tilted at a painful angle that would all but guarantee a neck cramp by morning. He snored softly, the sound rhythmic and oddly reassuring, like an idling machine in sleep mode.

The only light in the room came from his computer monitor, which bathed the walls in a cold, blue glow. Orbital data crawled across the screen in endless loops—trajectory estimates, fuel deltas, burn timings, and window alignments. The cursor blinked patiently in a corner, waiting for someone to care.

A knock broke the stillness.

It was hesitant. Like whoever was on the other side wasn’t entirely sure they wanted to be there.

“Dean?” came a voice, low and tired.

Rory Bozzelli poked his head into the office, his face framed by the soft backlight of the corridor. His tie was loose. His eyes were glassy with the particular kind of fatigue you only got from too many consecutive 2 a.m. meetings and caffeine crashes.

Dean stirred with a grunt, brow furrowing as his eyelids fluttered open. He looked around like he wasn’t entirely sure where he was.

“Dean,” Rory said again, stepping inside. “Wake up. Sorry. They’re asking for the probe courses.”

Dean blinked slowly, then groaned and hauled himself upright with a kind of grim determination. He rubbed at his eyes with both hands, blinking away the fog.

“What time is it?” he rasped, voice thick with sleep.

“Three-forty-two,” Rory said, glancing at his watch like it was mocking him. “A.M., not that it matters anymore.”

Dean reached blindly for the mug on the small table beside the couch—his go-to cup, beige with the faded NOSA logo almost rubbed off. He took a generous swig without thinking.

He didn’t even swallow. The look of betrayal on his face was immediate. He leaned over and spat the cold, curdled sludge directly onto the carpet with no ceremony at all.

Rory grimaced. “Bold move.”

Dean wiped his mouth on his sleeve, waving the offense away like it was a minor inconvenience.

“I keep hoping one of these times it'll have magically turned back into coffee.”

“No such luck. Time travel’s not in the budget,” Rory said, then crossed the room to stand behind the desk. “Anyway, we need something they can lock onto. Doesn’t have to be pretty. Just has to be technically possible.”

Dean nodded, eyes still adjusting to the light, brain lagging a few seconds behind his hands as he fumbled through the disorganized pile of notes spread across his desk like fallen leaves. Pages were covered in sketches, scribbles, and equations scrawled in every direction.

“I know we’re working backwards,” Rory continued, dropping into the chair opposite him. “But no one's going to greenlight a hard launch date with this many unknowns. We need ballpark figures. Even soft projections would help.”

Dean finally found the page he was looking for and tapped it with a pencil, the graphite worn down to a nub.

“All twenty-five models converge at seven hundred thirty days to intercept,” he said, voice still hoarse. “There’s some variation in thrust profiles—different durations, minor fuel deviations—but it all averages out. Worst-case, we're talking maybe three percent delta-v difference. Not enough to change the math.”

Rory leaned over to get a better look at the figures. “Seven thirty’s... not ideal. It’s a long haul.”

“Tell me about it,” Dean muttered. He was already flipping through a second notebook. “Aguerra and M6-117 are completely misaligned this cycle. Honestly, it’s borderline punitive.”

He stared down at the trajectory model on the screen for a long beat, blinking in slow motion as something clicked behind his eyes. His fingers stilled.

“Almost easier to what?” Rory asked.

Dean didn’t answer right away. His gaze had gone distant, eyes unfocused—not distracted, just deep in the zone where his mind did its best work. The gears were turning.

“Dean?” Rory said again.

Dean stood up abruptly, stretching his arms above his head with a groan, then wandered toward the door like he’d forgotten Rory was in the room.

“Coffee,” he muttered.

“Almost easier to what?” Rory pressed, trailing after him now. “You said it’s almost easier—what’s the rest of that thought?”

But Dean was already halfway down the hallway, muttering under his breath about eccentric orbits and slingshot vectors. One hand ran through his hair, the other gesturing vaguely at the air, like he could see the math floating there in front of him.

Rory stopped in the doorway and sighed, watching him go.

“You understand I’m technically your boss, right?” he called after him, no real heat behind it.

Dean didn’t answer. He rarely did when he was thinking like this.

Rory shook his head, lips curving into a tired, reluctant smile. He didn’t know where Dean’s thoughts were heading—but if past experience was anything to go by, it would either be a breakthrough or a fire hazard.

Either way, it was probably worth hearing.

Mateo stood in the center of NOSA’s mission control floor, one hand resting lightly on the edge of April’s console. The room buzzed softly with quiet activity—keyboards clacking, soft beeps from telemetry feeds, the occasional low voice trading numbers—but beneath it all, there was a tension that didn’t show on anyone’s face, but could be felt in the air. The kind that came when the margin for error had evaporated days ago.

He watched the satellite path update on the central display before beginning his dictation. April’s fingers were already poised above the keyboard, her eyes flicking between the screen and Mateo’s face.

“The probe will take four hundred fourteen days to reach you,” Mateo began, voice steady, deliberate. “It’ll carry enough food to get you through to the Helion Nexus rendezvous. We got lucky—one of the colony preloads was already scheduled to pass through that sector.”

April paused just long enough to glance up at him, a small curve forming at the corner of her mouth. “Tell her about the name,” she said quietly.

Mateo’s tone softened, just slightly. “We’re calling the probe Iris,” he said, watching the words appear on the screen as April typed. “After the Greek goddess who moved between worlds at the speed of wind. She’s also the goddess of rainbows. You’d like her.”

Inside the speculor, Y/N sat hunched over the terminal, legs drawn up to her chest. The message blinked onto the screen, and she read it in silence, the corner of her dry, cracked lips twitching into something just shy of a smile.

Mateo’s voice lived in her head now. Not in a dramatic way—just a familiarity, a rhythm. Even reading, she could hear his inflection. She stared at the words for a moment longer before typing back.

Gay probe coming to save me. Got it.

She hit send.

Back at NOSA, the message popped onto April’s screen. She read it, blinked, then laughed—actually laughed—and turned in her chair to read it aloud.

Mateo groaned softly, dragging a hand down his face. “Jesus, Y/N.”

A few people nearby cracked up, grateful for the tension break. Someone at the back muttered, “Can we print that on the mission patch?”

April was still smiling as she cleared the message. For a moment, the pressure lifted. Just a moment.

Down the hall from the light of mission control, the NOSA briefing room was silent. No alerts. No monitors blinking with incoming messages. Just a single long table, half-drunk coffee cooling beside notepads, and a whiteboard filled with timelines that had already become obsolete.

This was the part of the building where optimism went to get audited.

Yoongi stood at the head of the table, sleeves rolled up, tie undone, the weight of the moment visible in the way he gripped the back of a chair. His knuckles were pale, the veins on his forearms raised like cables. He didn’t need to raise his voice—he never did—but the silence that surrounded him wasn’t respect so much as inevitability. Everyone here knew what was at stake.

He stared at the latest report in his hands for a long beat, then tilted it toward the overhead light.

“The two hundred million dollar question,” he said dryly.

Then he squinted, leaned closer.

“Correction—five hundred.”

No one laughed.

Yoongi didn’t expect them to. His eyes moved from person to person, reading the faces in the room like mission telemetry. No one looked surprised. Everyone looked exhausted.

He cleared his throat. “So. Let’s get to it. Is this probe going to be ready in time?”

Across the table, Marco Moneaux looked like he was held together by sheer caffeine and irritation. His shirt was rumpled. His glasses were crooked. He hadn’t touched the cup of coffee in front of him. His fingers drummed once on the tabletop, then stopped.

“We’re not there,” Marco said, no sugarcoating. Just fact. “We’re behind.”

“How far behind?” Yoongi asked. No frustration. Just calculation.

Marco leaned back in his chair and rubbed at his face like he was trying to wipe off the last forty-eight hours. “Fifteen days. Minimum. If I had fifteen more, we could finish integration, validate all systems, run two full test loops, and sign off without crossing our fingers.”

Yoongi didn’t flinch. He turned slightly toward Mateo, who stood against the far wall with his arms folded, watching quietly.

“Mounting takes thirteen,” Yoongi said. “Can we buy time there?”

Mateo unfolded his arms. “Technically, the hardware mount takes three. We added ten days for failure scenarios, interlock sequences, and redundancy checks. I could compress that. Maybe down to two.”

“That gives us one day,” Yoongi said. “We still need fourteen more.”

The room quieted again.

Yoongi turned back to the table. “What about testing and inspections?”

No one spoke.

Because they all knew what he was asking.

Creed, seated near the end, finally leaned back in his chair. “You’re not seriously considering skipping the final inspections.”

Yoongi’s voice stayed even. “I’m asking how often they catch something that would actually stop the launch.”

Still, no answer.

Mateo exhaled slowly through his nose, then said, “One in twenty. That’s about the failure flag rate on final inspection. Most are minor. Some aren’t.”

Yoongi locked eyes with him. “So there’s a 95% chance nothing critical shows up.”

Mateo didn’t nod. “There’s a 5% chance we kill her before the probe even reaches orbit.”

The room went still.

Someone shifted in their chair. Paper rustled faintly. The HVAC kicked on overhead with a low, steady hum, like the building itself was holding its breath.

Yoongi didn’t say anything for a moment. He looked down at the report again, not because he needed to, but because it gave him something to do with his hands.

Then he looked over at April, who had been standing quietly near the doorway, her tablet pressed against her chest like a shield.

“Tell Dr. Keller to cut Y/N’s food rations by four more days.”

April frowned. “She’s already running tight.”

“She won’t like it,” Yoongi agreed. “Tell her anyway.”

April hesitated, then nodded and made a note.

Yoongi looked back to Marco. “No final inspection. You’ve got your fifteen days.”

Marco blinked at him, caught between disbelief and relief. “You’re serious?”

Yoongi nodded once. “Dead serious. Get it done.”

There was a pause. A long one.

Then Marco sat forward, a little straighter than before. The fatigue didn’t leave his face, but something steadier moved in behind his eyes.

“We’ll make it happen,” he said.

Mateo shifted, uneasy. His jaw clenched. He wanted to argue. You could see it building in the way his fingers tapped once against the table’s edge.

“Yoongi…” he started.

Yoongi didn’t look at him.

“If this fails, if it doesn’t make orbit—”

“It’s on me,” Yoongi said, quiet but final. “The risk. The consequences. The headlines. All of it. Put my name on it.”

And then he stepped away from the table, his hand brushing the doorframe as he paused to add, “The only number I care about now is launch day. Make it count.”

Then he left.

The door clicked shut behind him.

For a few seconds, no one moved. The weight of the choice he’d just made settled over the room like dust. Unspoken. Heavy. Real.

Then Marco stood.

Mateo followed.

One by one, the room came back to life—not with noise or panic, but with quiet resolve. No more questions. No more hesitation.

They didn’t have time for it.

They had fifteen days.

Y/N sat at the narrow foldout table in the Hab, elbows braced against the edges, hands limp in her lap. Her eyes were fixed on the items in front of her: one vacuum-sealed ration pack, two undersized potatoes, and silence.

The red light on the camera glowed steadily in the corner—unblinking, unjudging, and always watching. It had become a kind of ghost in her periphery. A reminder that someone, somewhere, might eventually see this. Or maybe not. At this point, the possibility barely registered.

She exhaled through her nose. Not quite a sigh. Just the breath left over after a thought you didn’t finish saying out loud.

“So,” she began, not looking at the camera yet. Her voice was low, dry. “Update. I’ve been advised to stretch rations another four days. That’s on top of the cuts I already made.”

She reached for the ration pack and held it up between two fingers like it offended her. The plastic crinkled faintly as she gave it a shake.

“This,” she said, “is what a ‘minimal calorie survival pack’ looks like when central command gets nervous.”

Her thumb slid along the seam and peeled it open with a practiced, joyless motion. A faint whiff of synthetic gravy filled the air.

She stared into the pouch for a second, then snorted.

“Oh good,” she muttered. “Meatloaf.”

She said it like the word had betrayed her.

Using a small, dented spoon, she carefully portioned the contents into thirds. One third onto a stained square of thermal wrap she used as a plate. The rest, she scraped into an airtight container she slid toward the back of the table. Tomorrow. And the day after. If she was lucky.

What was left in front of her was barely enough to coat the center of her palm. She studied it for a long moment, then reached for one of the potatoes.

It was warm from the growing bed, spotted with dirt. She sliced it in half, then quarters, trimming each piece down to something she could pretend was deliberate. Not desperation. Just… meal prep.

“This,” she said, her voice now aimed squarely at the camera, “is today’s menu. Potato number... I don’t know. Two hundred something. Maybe more. I stopped counting.”

She held up the grim little pile of food, eyebrows raised.

“Bon appétit.”

She set the knife down with more force than necessary and leaned back in her chair. It creaked slightly beneath her. Her shoulders rolled forward, heavy with the fatigue that came from more than just hunger.

“I used to like potatoes,” she said after a moment. “Grew up eating them. Roasted. Mashed. Fried. Once had this loaded baked thing at a truck stop in Oregon that could’ve solved world peace. But now?”

She looked down at the slices on the table.

“I hate them. With the fire of a thousand nuclear suns.”

She picked up the knife again, chopped off a section of the meatloaf and an edge of the potato, and pushed them into the reserve pile—her little future. The container already looked too small.

“The point is,” she said, eyes still on the food but no longer seeing it, “stretching rations four extra days is a real dick-punch.”

Her voice cracked slightly on the last word, not with emotion but something worse: hollow laughter that didn’t quite make it out of her chest.

Beside the plate, two pills waited. Pale blue. Pain management, according to the label she no longer bothered reading.

She picked them up, held them for a second between thumb and forefinger, then dropped them onto the table. With practiced efficiency, she flattened them with the blade of her knife, the powder scattering like dust. She used the flat of her palm to sweep it onto a potato slice and tapped the edges down so it wouldn’t fall off.

“I’m dipping my potato in Vicodin,” she said quietly. “And there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

She wasn’t smiling when she said it. There was no triumph in the words. No rebellion. Just fatigue, scraped raw at the edges and smeared with the thinnest veneer of humor.

She popped the medicated piece into her mouth and chewed slowly, eyes fixed on the far wall. The silence returned, stretching between the seconds like taffy.

She didn’t bother saying anything else.

At Cape Canaveral, the Iris probe stood tall against the pale morning sky, its sleek silver frame already glistening with condensation. Vapor hissed and curled around the base of the launchpad, coiling through the support scaffolding like breath in cold air. Engineers moved around it with surgical focus, checking clamps, seals, telemetry channels—everything twice, some things three times.

There was no room for error. Not this time.

Inside NOSA’s mission control, every seat was filled. The room had that charged stillness of a place on the verge of something irreversible. The kind of quiet that wasn’t really quiet—just full of people holding their breath in unison.

Creed stood in the center of it all, headset on, eyes flicking between monitors. His voice was calm but clipped, the way it always got when the adrenaline started to hit.

He glanced toward the back of the room where Mateo leaned against the wall, arms folded. His posture was relaxed, but the tightness around his mouth said otherwise.

“Do you believe in God, Mateo?” Creed asked, adjusting his mic without taking his eyes off the main feed.

Mateo didn’t hesitate. “Several. My mother’s Catholic. My father’s Hindu.”

Creed gave a single nod, as if that somehow covered the bases. “Good. We’ll take all the help we can get.”

He turned back to his console, voice sharpening. “Flight Director to all stations—begin Launch Status Check.”

A quiet chorus of acknowledgments echoed through the room, each one crisp, practiced, stripped of emotion.

“Prop.”

“Go.”

“Avionics.”

“Go.”

“Guidance.”

“Go.”

“Ground.”

“Go flight.”

Outside, Iris waited.

The countdown clock began to tick—T-minus two minutes—and the room settled into a silence so focused it hummed in the air. At JPL, Marco Moneaux stood with his team in a darkened room, eyes locked on their displays. Alice was pacing in her glass-walled office back in Oslo, arms crossed, phone forgotten in one hand.

Mateo stayed by the wall, unmoving, watching the second hand sweep past each hash mark like a blade.

T-minus zero.

The clamps released.

The booster roared to life, a deep, visceral thunder that shook the ground from thousands of miles away. Onscreen, the rocket surged upward in a column of white fire. The room erupted—claps, cheers, people standing out of their seats, a dozen fists in the air. After everything—the engineering, the recalculations, the fifteen borrowed days—it was happening.

A launch. A real one. And it looked good. For a second.

“Getting a little shimmy, Flight,” came a voice over comms. Calm, but edged with concern.

Creed straightened. “Say again.”

“Guidance reports rotational anomaly—long-axis spin. Seventeen degrees and climbing.”

The cheers stopped mid-breath. On the main screen, the probe jerked slightly, then again—too sharply. Too fast. Red warning lights blinked to life across the room.

“Payload rotation increasing,” another voice called. “We’re seeing lateral instability—probable dismount in the housing ring.”

“Shit,” Creed said under his breath.

On the video feed, Iris vibrated hard, the booster shaking beneath it like it was trying to buck the probe free. Telemetry feeds went scrambled. Numbers flickered. Then: static.

And then—nothing.

The main screen blinked. Froze.

Black.

A single word appeared in the corner in block white font:

L.O.S. — Loss of Signal.

No one spoke.

Creed stood completely still, jaw locked, his hand resting lightly on the edge of his console. A vein ticked in his temple. The whole room seemed to hold itself in suspension, waiting for something else. Anything.

But there was no update. No recovery.

The probe was gone.

He reached for the mic. His voice, when it came, was quiet. Controlled.

“GC, Flight. Lock the doors.”

The command was standard. No one left. No one talked to press. No one speculated outside this room until they understood what had happened.

But the weight behind the words was anything but procedural.

Across the room, Mateo had closed his eyes. His fingers dug into his arms where they crossed.

JPL went silent. Alice stared at her screen like she was seeing ghosts.

Mateo sat alone in his office, still in his shirt and tie from earlier, though the knot was loose now and the sleeves pushed halfway up his forearms. The building was quiet—too quiet. The buzz that usually pulsed through NOSA’s command wing had faded hours ago, leaving behind the hum of distant servers and the occasional click of an HVAC vent adjusting to no one’s preferences.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been sitting there. His elbows rested on his thighs, hands hanging loose between his knees, head bowed like he was trying to remember how to breathe through a concrete chest. The overhead lights had timed out a while ago. Motion sensors gave up when you stopped moving.

The darkness didn’t startle him. It didn’t even register at first.

It was the cold that finally reached him—the slight drop in temperature that crept in around the silence, crawling under his collar, along his spine. It made him shift, just slightly. Enough for the system to recognize life again.

The lights snapped back on. Cold, sterile fluorescence bathed the room, harsh against the stale air and the untouched coffee on his desk.

He squinted as his computer chimed.

A soft, familiar notification tone.

He turned his head slowly, expecting a routine update. More debris analysis. Another round of impact telemetry. Instead, he saw the sender field.

Relay Message Received—Prometheus (M6-117)

There was a pause in his brain. A kind of quiet click, like a dropped pin landing on tile. His heart didn’t race. It just… stopped for a beat. Then started again.

He opened the message.

One line.

How’d the launch go?

Mateo stared at the screen.

He didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Just sat there, one hand hovering near the keyboard but not touching it. The cursor blinked beneath her words, quiet and steady, as if it wasn’t sitting inside a vacuum of awful truth.

He leaned back slowly in his chair. Closed his eyes for a second.

Then opened them again, because she was waiting. And she didn’t know.

He rubbed his face with both hands, exhaling through his fingers. His eyes burned, not with tears but with exhaustion he didn’t have room for anymore.

He turned back to the keyboard. His hands hovered over the keys.

Then stopped.

Because how the hell do you explain this? How do you tell someone who’s a planet away that the thing meant to save her just fell out of the sky?

He sat there, surrounded by light he didn’t want, silence he couldn’t stand, and a message from someone who still believed there was hope.

And for the first time all day, he didn’t know what to say.

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