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chimcess · 1 month ago

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⮞ 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.

She paused.

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.

Taglist: @fancypeacepersona @ssbb-22 @mar-lo-pap @sathom013 @kimyishin @ttanniett @sweetvoidstuff @keiarajm @sathom013 @miniesjams32 @haru-jiminn @rg2108 @darklove2020

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drabblesandimagines · 1 year ago

Text

Trunk

Leon Kennedy x female reader (BSAA) for this request Fluffy, bit of mild spice, bit of blood, mention of panic attack, swears

It was meant to be straightforward surveillance ahead of the main op. Monitor the drop – the metal suitcase fitted with a tracking chip and three fake virus vials – note any observations about the pick-up, then inform the rest of the Wolf Hound Squad who would track the co-ordinates to find the terrorists’ base of operations.

You had pouted a little at being sidelined from the main action, but Chris needed someone stealthy to keep an eye over the drop and, with a squeeze to your shoulder, your track record meant you were the prime candidate.

You’d set yourself up in the eaves of the abandoned warehouse that served as the drop-off point, armed with a pair of binoculars, an ear piece and a couple of guns, as always, for if anything went south...

..which it did the moment you detected movement from the south-east corner. It took a few attempts to get them in focus, but your heart sank when you recognized the figure – one Leon S Kennedy of the DSO rolling between abandoned shipping containers, honing in on the one you’d placed the metal suitcase in a few hours previously.

What the hell is he doing here?

You press down on your earpiece and it beeps once, opening the line to transmit. “Alpha to Lupe. Got a problem. Over.”

Silence.

“Alpha to Lupe. Got a problem. Over.”

Nothing – again. Maybe your current position has poor signal, but there’s no time to troubleshoot when squealing tyres echo around the structure, alerting you to the two black cars swerving in and heading to the shipping container in question.

The cars stop, their engines remaining idle and five well-built and well-dressed men depart – three from one, two from another.

Through your binoculars, you see Leon head straight for them, gun raised.

Shit.

You are jolted back into consciousness when your crown smacks on something hard, before being ricocheted back down to your nose cracking against something firm, groaning as you come to.

“Finally awake, sleeping beauty?”

The voice is familiar and rumbles through your chest with the horrible realization that you’re lying on top of someone. You try and scoot back, whacking your head again and a sinking feeling as you feel plastic digging into your wrists, keeping them bound behind you.

It all comes flooding back.

Numerous gunshots go off as you slide down the ladder back to the ground floor, half expecting to find Leon bleeding out or even dead on the concrete. Instead, he’s being heaved up by his armpits, unconscious, and pushed into the trunk of one of the cars, half in, half out as one of the heavy-set men commences a search, confiscating a multitude of weapons with a scoff.

You can’t see any other bodies, which is strange. Is Kennedy getting slow in his old age?

At the other car, a man with a blonde pony-tail is bent down, talking through the window to someone you can’t see. “Go on ahead with the package.”

The driver seems to protest, but ponytail shakes his head.

“We’ll take the rat elsewhere, have some fun… We’ll join you back at base after. Go.” He thumps the top of the car with his fist to emphasize his point.

The idling car now hits the gas with gusto, the tyres burning against the concrete before it skids out of sight.

The heavy-set man seems to have concluded his search of the unconscious agent by then, finishing with what looks to be Leon’s phone. He considers it for a moment before he drops it to the floor and grinds it into the concrete with the heel of his shoe, the screen splintering and plastic cracking under his weight.

He then leans into the trunk before holding Leon’s arms behind his back and securing his wrists with what looks like a zip tie, before heaving up his legs and giving his ankles the same treatment.

You grit your teeth as you think – you don’t have much time. They’re not taking Leon to the HQ, so it’s not like you can catch up and let the rest of the squad know they’ve got a hostage.

The other car’s gone, one of the guys is distracted, if you just-

“Well, well…” There’s a gun pressed to the small of your back and your stomach sinks. You’d thought the two remaining were the ones you had in your eyesight, assuming three others had got back into the other car, but one seems to have been prowling. Fuck, you’re better than this usually. Are you and Kennedy both having an off day?

A thick forearm wraps around your throat in a headlock.

“Drop the gun.”

Before you can even think of how to get out of the hold, a knee is forced between your thighs, weakening your stance and preventing any sort of retaliation you might be able to achieve with your legs. The forearm tenses and cuts off all air, the order repeated and it is not until your grip on your gun goes limp, letting it drop to the floor that it relaxes, leaving you gasping for breath.

“We’ve already caught ourselves a rat this evening, suppose it makes sense we catch a mouse next.”

You try and throw your head back in desperation - if you break his nose he’ll definitely let go, but there’s not enough room and the arm around your throat squeezes again, but this time there is no relief, only a smug whisper in your ear.

“Sweet dreams, little mouse.”

Everything went black.

You squint in the dark of what you assume is the car trunk – an eerie red glow emitting from the corners which you presume are the taillights – and your eyes slowly begin to adjust to find two icy blue ones staring up at you under familiar bangs. “Leon?” Your voice is a little hoarse, but it’s better than being dead.

“One and only. Gotta say, this is a surprise. Been a while.”

You try and roll off his chest entirely but it’s awkward and cramped. The trunk is not large enough to be accommodating two adults, let alone one as muscular as Leon. You manage to shift most of your weight off him, though your legs are somewhat still entangled, ankles crisscrossed together with the same zip tie treatment. You cough, trying to relieve the tightness in your throat. “What are you doing here? This is a BSAA op.”

“DSO had intel of a terrorist cell being supplied with virus samples.” He tries to shuffle back a little, take in your face after you lying atop of him unconscious for however long.

“It’s a fake – it’s our drop.”

“What?”

“I was doing surveillance to confirm they accepted the suitcase with the tracker – the rest of the pack is gonna intercept their base once co-ordinates are confirmed.”

You see him raise his eyebrow in the dim light. “Pack? Redfield still going by that wolf crap?”

“Oh, because birds are so cool, right?” You retort, though you’re more annoyed at your situation than him.

“How’d they get you?”

“Does it matter?” You avoid the question, not wanting to tell him the real reason you’d got caught was because you’d been concerned seeing him being shoved into the trunk.

“We’ve gotta get out of these restraints. I can try and…” You trail off, your breath catching in your throat. You pull fruitlessly at the plastic holding your wrists, ignoring the sharp pain, and try and bring your knees up to your chest.

“Already tried, there’s not enough space.” Leon interjects. “Maybe if I was here solo…”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” you mean to sound sarcastic, but with how you’re breathing it sounds more like a genuine apology. “I just thought it looked so fun when I saw you being kidnapped so I had to join in, you know?”

You’re breathing too heavy now, but it’s not getting down into your lungs. You’re not sure if it’s because your windpipe was crushed earlier, or that you’re on your side in an awkward position, or the fact that you’re stuffed in the trunk of a car with potentially limited oxygen.

Fuck.

“Hey.” Leon’s voice sounds foggy.

You shuffle as best you can, hoping a change in position might open up your airways, but it feels like as if the trunk is closing in around you.

“Hey. You good?”

“I…”

“You need to breathe deeper than that, okay?”

Deep down, in your logical mind, you know you do, but in the panic it’s just not happening, and your breaths grow only shallower. Your throat is too tight, the zip tie around your wrist and ankles is too tight, the space in here is too tight. Leon tenses his forearms behind his back for the umpteenth time, willing the plastic to break as he sees you falling further and further into distress. His words aren't getting through and he can't really touch you either, can't grab your hand or your shoulder and try and ground you for a moment to catch your breath. “I’m so sorry.” Leon throws his head forward and kisses you – not square on the lips, more at the corner of your open mouth, messy and awkward - but it’s enough to knock you out of hyperventilating as your scalp tingles.

“Breathe.” He orders, pulling back.

“You just-”

“Breathe. There’s plenty of oxygen in here – it’s not airtight. Breathe.”

You close your eyes and mouth and take a deep inhale through your nose, spluttering a little as you try to hold it. It takes a few cycles, Leon keeping silent as you gather your bearings, but eventually it steadies.

“Sorry.” You mumble, embarrassed.

“I’m sorry – I shouldn’t have kissed you, I just couldn’t think of how else to divert your focus.”

“No, it’s okay. Definitely worked.”

There’s an awkward silence before Leon shuffles ever so slightly.

“Promise you won’t tell Redfield? I’d rather not have my neck snapped.”

“Why would he do that?”

“You... You two aren’t a thing?”

“No.” Your brow furrows. “He’s my captain. My life’s already complicated enough fighting bioweapons without throwing in dating my superior.”

“Oh. I thought…” He shrugs as best as he can before you can see the infamous cocky grin. “Well, how about you and I grab dinner after this?”

“If there is an after this.” You try and swallow down the anxious feeling that’s crawling up from your stomach once more. “Being moved to a second location against your will is nev- Ugh!”

The car drives over a pothole but, thankfully, your head doesn’t collide with the top of the trunk. Leon groans as the impact threw him over onto his front before he mutters under his breath and starts to grind his hips.

“Holy shit.”

“What?”

“I think they missed a weapon.”

“Really?” Your voice perks up. “What?”

“A knife.”

“How’d they miss a knife?”

“Is that a complaint?” Leon scoffs.

“No, just seems a bit amateur hour. Can you reach it?”

“Not a chance, but, er…”, he clears his throat, “you might. We’re gonna have to try and adjust positions first, I’ll need your back to my chest.”

“Okay. Erm…” You scooch yourself forward with your hip and heel of your boot - easier said than done as the trunk grows narrower the further you go down, your knees bunching up towards your chest. “Like that?”

“Gimme a sec.” He responds through gritted teeth, trying to roll over again. Whatever make car this is, it’s not American – the trunk space is abysmal. Eventually, he manages it, shuffling himself forward until your fingers are pressed up against what feels like his chest.

“Hey!” He snaps with a poorly concealed laugh as your fingers twitch against the fabric. “That tickles.”

“Sorry – reflex. Where is it?”

“Well, put simply, my crotch.”

You give yourself a moment to let the words sink in.

“You keep a knife in your crotch? How have you not cut off your-?”

“It’s more a scalpel than a knife,” he cuts you off. “And it’s hidden away in the lining – in-built sheath – near the fly. Think you can find it?”

You close your eyes tight, thinking it might help you focus. Your thumb brushes up against something firm and you feel Leon tense behind you.

“Is that…?”

“My jockstrap, thank you.” He clears his throat again. “Higher than that and more to the left.”

You try to follow his instructions, but it’s impossible to go any higher, unable to bend your elbows. “I don’t think I can. Can you shuffle down any?”

“Er…” He tries, shifting down an inch or so, his knees pressing into the back of yours in a spoon, his breath tickling your ear as he settles back down. “There. Bit to the left again.”

You close your eyes again, feeling the zip with your thumb and head to the left until you feel what feels like a thin tube.

“That?”

“Yep. Now, just try and bring it up and out. The blade’s at the bottom.”

That’s easier said than done as you press your thumbs either side of it and feel it move ever so slightly up. It’s a slow and steady process, not helped with the fact of how sweaty your palms are now getting with Leon pressed right up against you. “I think it’s nearly there. If the blade’s at the bottom, can you shuffle back? I don’t wanna slice you open.”

“You got a good grip?”

You swear you can hear the grin in his voice with that one.

“As good as I ever will.”

He scoots back a little, not as far as possible, but enough room so you can pull the scalpel implement up and twirl it around carefully in your grip so you can start to saw against the zip-tie.

“Got it.”

“Does it feel like it’s working?”

“Yeah. Just kinda awkwa-" There’s a stinging pain in your palm as the knife slices through and you hiss.

“What?”

“Got my palm.”

“Bad?”

“Had worse.” You bite your lip at the pain then, eyes squeezed shut again, trying to visualize what might be going on behind your back. Your movements are miniscule, a concern that that if you went any faster you’d slip in your enthusiasm and stab Leon.

It feels like hours when you finally feel the tension give and your wrists are free of the horrid plastic.

“Got it. Just…” Mindful of your bleeding palm, you roll over with your good hand and lean up, pushing Leon face down so you can set to work on his wrists. It only takes a few confident saws, despite how slick your palm is with blood, before the agent groans and pulls his arms in front of him.

You pull your knees up to your chest and quickly slice through the restraints around your ankles, before handing the scalpel to Leon to do the same. His fingers pinch your other wrist instead, bringing your bleeding palm up close to his face to analyze in the dim light.

“Shit, that’s deep.”

“It’s fine,” you try and shake off his hold, but his grip remains firm.

“That’ll be the blood loss talking. Hold on.” He pulls up his shirt with his free hand and rips at the hem with his teeth, tearing off a rough strip, before he begins to wrap it around your palm in an attempt to stem the bleeding.

“There.” He announces, tying it off with a tight knot. “Not ideal, but it’ll have to do for now.”

“Thanks.” You cradle it back against your stomach and hand him over the blade so he can finally cut through the zip-tie around his ankles. It seems just in time too, as the car begins to slow.

“How do you want to play this?”

“You sit tight, I deal with whoever opens the trunk… then we go for dinner.”

“You know I am not a sit tight kinda gal, right?”

“We’ve only got one knife.”

“One scalpel.” You correct.

“Exactly.” The car stops.

“Roll over, face the back.” He orders, taking control. “I’ll go the other way – they won’t be able to see our hands. When they lean in to haul me out…”

The dulled sound of the car doors opening leaves you with no choice but to turn away as instructed and your hand brushes up against Leon’s as you tuck them back behind your back. With the hand that’s not holding the scalpel, he grabs hold of your uninjured hand and squeezes your fingers in reassurance.

The trunk opens.

Leon is peering through his lashes, bangs over his eyes, as his captor comes into view, gun raised. He nudges Leon’s shoulder with the barrel, watching the agent’s head lull back before holstering his weapon and preparing to heave Leon out of the trunk.

And that’s when he takes his chance, scalpel in hand, straight into the jugular, his other hand nabbing the gun out of the holster as he twists himself up and out of the trunk before the man can hit the ground.

Before you can get up to join him, he slams the trunk back down. You curse, hearing back and forth gunshots before the trunk opens again a few minutes later, Leon stood there with an apologetic smile.

“Coast is clear. We’re down at the docks – I can’t believe I let myself get caught by these amateurs.”

“Well, I can’t believe you shut the trunk on me!” You shuffle forward using your good hand, relieved to be sitting upright at last, legs dangling out from the trunk.

“I’m sorry - I know most guys bring their dates flowers,” he pulls another confiscated gun out of his back pocket – must be his prize from the other guy – and offers it out to you, “but something tells me you’d accept this instead?”

You take it with a smirk and a retort too good to pass up on. “You’re really gunning for this dinner date, huh, Kennedy?”

He leans forward and pushes you back into the trunk with a kiss.

This is so, so silly but I had fun x

Masterlist . Requests welcome . Commissions/Ko-Fi

#ghostdogwrites #leon kennedy x reader #leon kennedy x you #leon kennedy fluff #leon kennedy mild spice #death island leon #DI Leon Kennedy

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ghoulodont · 17 days ago

Text

Hyaline

After Dewdrop is injured during a concert, Rain is there to help him heal.

Ship: Raindrop Characters: Dewdrop, Rain Words: 11.3k

Hurt/Comfort, Broken Bones, Sickfic (arguably), Caretaking, Injury Recovery, Skeletour

Read below or on AO3

When it happens, he thinks nothing of it at all. He’s in a hurry between songs and the stiff sole of his uniform boot skids over the edge of the stair as he steps down onto it. His foot drops onto the step below, then the one after that, with his ankle pressed into an awkward position as it suddenly takes the full weight of his body. His reflexes, mechanical and automatic, have him catching himself before the signals from the event can even reach his brain. He finds himself at the bottom of the staircase with one hand on the railing keeping him upright.

What’s concerning, though, is when those same reflexes, ones that caught him just moments ago, subsequently prevent him from stepping with that same foot flat on the ground at the bottom of the stairs. A bright electric pain runs up his ankle that, briefly, takes his breath away. He shifts his weight back to his other foot to give himself a second to recover. He pulls the strap of his guitar over his head.

The stage left guitar tech, ready and waiting to help him swap instruments, reaches for the guitar. “You okay?” he asks.

Dew nods. He takes the new guitar and puts it on. He gently rolls his ankle, which aches with the movement. It’s throbbing now, pain only increasing with time.

He’s ready to just walk it off until he takes his first step back up the stairs to the stage. Putting weight on his foot rekindles the same electric pain, so intense that his knee buckles as a structural measure to alleviate it, absorbing his weight and redirecting it downwards until his shin hits the stairs. He reaches out with one hand and grips the railing; the other holds the neck of his guitar away from the surrounding structures.

If he doesn’t get upstairs right away, he’s going to miss the beginning of the next song. They’ll start without him. He scrambles, panicked, and tries again to take another step before he’s even upright. The metal edge of the stair bites into his shin. His throat feels tight, like a hand is grabbing the back of his collar and pulling, holding him in place, keeping him from moving forward.

“You sure you’re okay?”

He collects himself and pushes himself back up to his feet — or foot, balancing again on just one. He looks down at his boot, which looks okay, the same as it always does. Is he okay, though? He can’t get up the stairs, or really walk at all, so maybe not.

“I think maybe I twisted my ankle or something,” he admits. Saying it out loud makes his face burn with shame. He doesn’t have time for this — the whole production doesn’t have time for this. He shifts his weight again, the other way, easing pressure onto his injured leg. It protests with another lance of sharp pain. He grits his teeth and pushes through. It’s bearable, but not ideal. He tries his best to take one step forward and manages a short and inadequate little hobble.

Suddenly everything is too much, too tight, too restrictive. His boots are so heavy. It’s dark, and the ceilings, the underside of the stage, are low. The stairs are insurmountable. He pulls out his in-ear monitors. He wrestles his guitar strap off with an unsteady hand.

His guitar tech takes it from him and nods at the stairs. “You should sit down.”

He does, one hand on the railing again to lower himself carefully onto the steps. His head swims. He leans back, supporting himself with his elbows. Even without any weight on it, his ankle screams at him. He can’t tell if it’s actually still getting worse or if he’s just losing his grip on everything.

The guitar tech is talking into his radio. He’s inaudible from this distance but it’s obviously about him, about the current situation, sharing with the whole crew that he’s unable to do his job and is fucking up the show. He tips his head back, trying to get more air in his lungs. Above him, the next song starts.

Wardrobe is the first on the scene, asking which leg it is. He points to his left one. She kneels and begins to remove his boot.

Despite her clear attempt to be gentle, Dew whines like a kicked dog when she pulls the hard leather over his heel, pressing the stiff sole against his toes and forcing his ankle to bend. There aren’t any laces she can undo, or zippers to open, so she’s pulling the front and back of the upper apart as much as possible, stretching the small panel of elastic on either side. The convenience of just being able to step in and out of them, something he had appreciated, is now turning against him.

It goes beyond that — if he didn’t have to wear these stupid boots, none of this would have happened anyway. Of course, the knee-high boots from the previous uniforms would have zipped all the way down the side and allowed his injured ankle to come out without pain, but with their more flexible soles, thinner and more pliable leather, there’s no way he would have missed a step on the stairs while wearing them in the first place. They were custom made; he and the other ghouls took turns tracing each other’s feet on pieces of paper to send as a reference, and then when they arrived they fit perfectly. The current boots came in logo-plastered shoeboxes from some factory somewhere.

More people start showing up, buzzing around and making the bottom of the staircase a nexus of far more activity than is usual during the show. He avoids eye contact with familiar faces, too ashamed of the drama that he has inadvertently set in motion, that’s still unfolding in front of him. Someone puts his foot up on a folding metal chair.

A paramedic arrives on the scene, ushered in from beyond the curtain. He places a big equipment bag near the end of the railing and squats next to the chair. To some degree, Dew knew implicitly that this would happen, was the sequence of events that he was consenting to when he took his guitar off and sat down, but experiencing it in the present reveals just how much he had been denying it, shoving it away into the corner of his mind and making it as abstract as possible. But, no, there really is a guy in a fancy, official-looking paramedic uniform peeling off his sock right now and asking him what happened.

“Slid down a couple stairs. Twisted my ankle.”

“Right, did you land on this part?” The paramedic points to the outside surface of his foot, in front of the prominent bone of his ankle. A crew member shines a flashlight at it.

Dew nods. He averts his eyes, as if maybe one less viewer will make a difference in how he feels right now. It doesn’t put a dent in the amount of scrutiny.

“Have you been able to put any weight on it?”

“A little.”

“And how much are you able to move it? Can you point your toes?”

He can, slightly, if he pushes through the pain and forces himself to. It feels like his ankle is tearing itself apart at the seams but he keeps going. He should be able to do this — he doesn’t want to think about what it might mean if he can’t.

“Stop, that’s enough.”

The paramedic runs him through several more movements, all similarly painful and difficult, as the song on stage above them finishes. He presses inquisitively on a spot near his ankle that makes him physically recoil, pulling his foot off the chair and towards his body in a protective instinct. The sudden, jarring movement hurts too. He feels like a line of dominoes toppling over. He blinks away the stars in his vision.

He replaces his foot on the chair slowly. He drums his fingers on the edge of the stair he’s sitting on with no particular rhythm. “Can’t we do this after the show?” He doesn’t need to be able to do all these exercises in order to perform.

“You need an x-ray of this,”

“I need to get back on stage.”

The paramedic briefly glances up at the tour manager, who is standing over them with his arms crossed and his brow furrowed. “Well… as long as you keep your weight off it as much as possible…”

The tour manager nods and reaches for his radio. “We can put a chair—”

“Absolutely not,” Dew snaps.

“Okay, well, let me get it wrapped up and you should be able to hold out for the rest of the show.” He digs in his big bag of supplies.

Dew lets his head fall back. The stage lights beam down on him as the next song starts. It feels like he’s looking up at the surface of a lake from below, sinking under. He can’t hold his breath for much longer.

The paramedic offers him some pills — “ibuprofen,” he says. Someone else passes him a bottle of water. His hands shake as he brings it to his lips.

He begins to feel more composed as the paramedic wraps his ankle in an elastic bandage, each loop of the stretchy fabric holding him a little more together. The compression is soothing, in a way. It’s a bit uncomfortable in how it presses down against sensitive places but overall it feels like it’s pressing back against the throbbing pain emanating from inside.

When his shoe goes back on, he’s ready for the brief pain of his ankle flexing to accommodate the opening. He squeezes his fists tight and rides the wave of dizziness it brings. Actually, though, once it’s on, the thick sole and inflexible leather that he was cursing earlier make his ankle feel much more stable. Maybe it’s all not as bad as he thought.

Hands help him to his feet, move the chair out of the way, bring his guitar. He puts some weight onto his foot. It hurts, but he can deal with it. He can make it up the stairs, onto the stage. He leans hard on the railing and watches his feet carefully with each step. Someone is following behind him, probably to catch him if he falls again, but he doesn’t. When he gets to the top, he straightens out his guitar over his body and takes a deep breath.

He looks up to see Rain staring at him from halfway across the stage. He can feel the concern radiating off of him, but his thoughts are opaque. What does he know about what happened? And what can he communicate back to him, anyway? Dew just nods at him, an acknowledgment of nothing in particular, or maybe that he’s okay.

Without the support of the railing, walking across the stage is arduous. He takes a few steps forward, just enough that he’s not standing conspicuously in front of the stairs. The weight of thousands of eyes presses into him, a familiar energizing presence now shifting to the forefront of his mind, its usual vivacity twisting into something more hostile, critical.

Despite being back on stage, playing his part like nothing happened, the shame doesn’t fade. If anything, it gets worse, becomes more pointed, digs itself under his skin with sharp claws. What was once a blanket of panic and a singular goal is now crystallized regret, specific flashes of memory, little questions and details, spreading out kaleidoscopic.

But, no, the goal is still singular — to finish the show. And he will. All this angst for a misstep, for what, a twisted ankle? He’s going to put some ice on it and will be fine by tomorrow, he has to be. He focuses on playing, being there, his duty as a live musician.

He’s so focused that Rain ends up sneaking up on him, appearing by his side unexpectedly. He bumps their shoulders together, gently, a barely-there brush of spandex covered skin. Dew bristles at the attention. It would be so normal in any other context, any other show, antics and interactions like this. Now it feels too noticeable, like he’s pointing out that something is wrong. There’s worry in his eyes; Dew doesn’t want to see it.

And when Rain makes his way to his next unofficial mark, returning to the comfortably rehearsed flow of the song, it feels like being stranded on an inhospitable island, having sent his savior away. He’s alone here with his pain, which is becoming harder and harder to push through.

As much as he tries to pour himself into the performance, he can’t shake his mental countdown of how many songs are left. It’s a north star he doesn’t want to be following but it glistens too bright to look past, outshines every other light in his sky, blinds him. Really, it’s the only thing keeping him upright. Everything continues as orchestrated. Phantom comes over to play next to him and then goes back to his own side of the stage. Rain comes and goes. Two songs left. One song.

When the house lights come up after the last note, all the energy he’s been holding onto begins to leave him, faster than he anticipated or planned for. He can’t be on stage for a single moment longer. He turns and limps to the stairs, lifts his guitar strap over his head, vision gray around the edges. His ankle feels like a live wire.

He practically has to be carried off the stage. He passes his guitar to the tech at the top of the stairs, then makes his way back into the underworld with one arm slung over a supporting shoulder, in clear view of the audience — it doesn’t matter.

He’s led to a chair which he carefully lowers himself onto, weight askew on one leg. Feet cross the stage above him. With only plain white lights on, kept at a steady intensity without any strobing or motion, it’s both brighter under the stage and easier to see the motion of those above it, casting shadows through the metal grate.

A wardrobe assistant is back to take his shoe off again, before he can even catch his breath. He doesn’t have it in him to protest, nor to stifle the pathetic groan he makes when his ankle bends, just like the last time. He’s back to hating these boots again now — why was he ready to forgive them earlier? The assistant sets it aside carefully. The boots are her responsibility, after all, not him. She’s extricating her charge from the scene.

Someone puts his foot up on a second chair. He feels awkward and in the way, vulnerable, bridging a leg-length gap like this in an already tight space.

The paramedic begins unraveling the bandage from his leg. Even the air touching his freshly exposed skin hurts. There’s a huge purple bruise below his ankle now, starting near the bone and spreading down toward the sole of his foot and forward toward his toes. It’s swollen, too, all of the usual edges softened like a crude replica of what it’s supposed to look like.

When he starts poking and prodding at it again, presumably for some medically relevant reason, and not just to torment him, Dew looks away, up at the stage above him. Eight pairs of feet stand in a line. This isn’t part of the performance, so it’s okay that he’s not there with them. The sudden tightness in his throat at the image, an off-center row of bodies, insists otherwise.

And then the show is over. Papa and the ghouls make their way down the stairs and spill out into the underworld. Instead of dispersing to their own individual after-show tasks and personal whims, they gather around Dew’s chair, first Rain, then Phantom, then Mountain, then Aurora, until they’ve all followed each other’s lead and joined in on the fuss. Their chatter and worry settles over him like a dark cloud.

“What happened?”

“Dude, have you been walking on that?”

“Oh no, Dew, that looks really bad.”

All eyes are on him and the macabre spectacle of his bloated, discolored foot. It’s embarrassing, and it’s enough to make him question, briefly, if he really will be on stage tomorrow like he should be, has to be, will be, will be. He will be. Now is not the time to think otherwise.

Meanwhile, the paramedic starts wrapping his ankle back up again, lifting it and pressing on it in ways that make the muscles in his thigh jump involuntarily, sending startling little jolts of pain streaking up along his nerves. It’s all too much. Dew leans his head back and covers his eyes with one arm.

“Let’s leave him alone, guys.”

It’s a relief, but a little part of him wants to reach out and grab them and hold them here, to not be alone. Still, he would much rather be alone than fussed over like this. It’s a trade-off he’s entirely willing to make.

One by one, they filter out through the curtain, off to the dressing room or the green room or the bus or wherever else. Soon the only people left in the vicinity are the crew working on their load-out tasks, the paramedic — and Rain.

Rain is standing right next to him like it’s his own leg propped up on the chair, like he’s just as much a vital and irremovable part of this scenario as Dew is, frowning thoughtfully at his ankle as it disappears under the bandage. When he notices Dew looking at him, he offers him a small, gentle smile.

“How are you doing?” He places one hand on Dew’s shoulder and rubs back and forth.

He’s doing fucking awful, obviously, and he doesn’t want to be pitied. But the hand on his shoulder isn’t pity, it isn’t platitude. It feels like the most normal thing that has happened all night, or at least in the past hour.

“I mean—” Rain waves his hand as if to indicate the general situation. “Considering.”

Dew forces out a heavy breath that doesn’t take with it any of his tension, only serving to keep his frustration from rising further. “This sucks,” is all he can say, and even that catches in his throat.

Rain kneads his shoulders with both hands, pressing his thumbs into the base of his neck in small circles. The heat from his palms sinks through the fabric of his tailcoat.

Meanwhile, the paramedic puts an ice pack over his wrapped ankle. He can’t feel the cold through the bandage. It’s probably more a formality than anything else, one step in flowchart in an emergency medicine handbook somewhere that describes the official procedure for what to do if someone falls down the fucking stairs. What’s next? He doesn’t want to ask.

“Listen,” the paramedic starts, like he’s about to speak candidly, maybe say something that Dew doesn’t want to hear. “You really should get an x-ray of this soon, either tonight or tomorrow. We can take you to the emergency department if you need but you’ll likely be waiting for a while, and there’s not much they can do for you anyway, besides pain management and setting you up with a referral. I talked to your manager… you may want to just make an appointment with an orthopedist in the morning.”

Dew nods. “What time does the bus leave?” It’s the first thing that comes to his mind, despite everything.

“Four, I think?” Rain glances up at a nearby equipment case that has some papers taped to it, any of which may or may not be a schedule.

“Definitely no guarantee that you would be seen by then.” The paramedic zips up his bag. “As long as your pain is under control I would say it’s not necessary to go tonight.”

The expression “under control” leaves a fair amount of room for interpretation. He would describe the pain as… significant. Really, his leg could fall off completely and if he was given the choice he would still rather take the bus than whatever the alternative is. Thinking about it fills him with dread. He’s not sure what’s worse — that he would be abandoning the rest of the band or that they would be abandoning him, leaving him here in an unfamiliar city.

“I’ll be fine,” he says.

The paramedic nods and hoists his bag over his shoulder. “Take ibuprofen every 6 hours, add paracetamol too if you need. Keep it elevated, ice it for 20 minutes at a time. And keep your weight off it as much as you can.“

Once he exits the underworld, through the curtain with his big bag and fancy uniform and medical advice, Dew deflates. He sinks down in the chair and lets his head fall backwards until the crown of his hat comes to rest against a metal truss supporting the stage. He wants to tear it off his head and throw it on the ground, but unlike the boots it’s done nothing wrong. It would be collateral damage, and he would earn the ire of the wardrobe team. He probably shouldn’t even be letting it be pushed up against a solid object like this; it might get dented. He tips his head forward instead.

For a minute, he closes his eyes and just breathes, feeling his upper body rise and fall. His ankle throbs. His whole body is sore from standing unevenly, holding his weight off center and limping, even for such a short amount of time. The muscles around his hips, up his back, down the sides of his thighs, feel overworked.

Rain rubs circles between his shoulders, only stopping briefly a few times to move out of the way of crew members darting about. Dew sits up upon hearing him apologize out loud to someone stepping around them.

As soon as they’re alone again, as much as they can be, Rain asks, “Should we move somewhere quieter?”

The idea of moving sounds miserable, but the underworld has indeed become more and more saturated with activity as the entire crew mobilizes to systematically deconstruct every part of the production and pack it onto trucks. Some time soon, there won’t be an underworld anymore, because there won’t be a stage. And they need to get their uniforms off, anyway.

When he tries to stand up, shifting all his weight onto one bent leg, Ran grabs his arm and holds it firmly, all but hauling him to his feet. He waits a moment for him to find his balance before he places that arm across his shoulders, behind his neck. He wraps his arm around Dew’s waist and pulls their bodies together.

The first few steps are awkward, and they have to pause for a moment to figure out how to navigate the curtain, but they soon find a rhythm. It’s not comfortable, and he has to think about every step, but it feels safe and secure to have a hand on his hip, a solid torso pressed tight against his own.

Rain only lets go when they’re at the threshold of Dew’s dressing room, carefully unraveling their arrangement of limbs once Dew is firmly situated with one hand braced against the wall.

“Do you need help with your— anything?”

Dew shakes his head. “I think I’m good for now.”

“Okay, well, text me if you need me?”

“I will. If I do.”

Rain pulls the door almost all the way closed. He peeks through the opening one last time before closing it completely.

Now alone, Dew lowers himself onto a nearby couch with a huff. It’s not like he’s going to fall to pieces if left unsupervised. He takes off his hat and places it next to him, then unfastens his collar and takes that off too. He rolls the zipper pull of his bodysuit between his fingers. He doesn’t need help with this, he’s not that incapacitated. He tugs the zipper open.

Getting out of his uniform is an awkward, partially seated, one-legged ordeal, and showering has the opposite of its usual relaxing and refreshing effect. When Rain returns, knocking gently on the door, he’s flopped on the couch again, bandage dampened around the edges, one pant leg askew to accommodate it.

Rain’s face falls upon opening the door and seeing him there.

“I’m fine,” Dew answers, before Rain can ask anything.

“Okay.” He doesn’t sound convinced. “Well, do you maybe want to head out to the bus?”

The enclosed space of the bus does sound appealing, as does its familiarity, even if it’s barely more familiar than this dressing room, only by a few days. He doesn’t want to move, though, and he doesn’t want to see anyone else, to be subject to their questioning and scorn.

“Everyone else is going out tonight, I think,” Rain adds.

“Yeah, okay.” Dew pushes himself upright on the couch with a hand against the armrest and starts trying to extricate himself from the depths of the seat cushions that he’s been pulled into.

Rain takes both of his hands and helps him stand. When Dew reaches for his bag, Rain shakes his head. “I’ll come back and get it.”

Pressed together again, arms wrapped around each other, they make a slow step-by-step procession to the bus. Once they make it through the door, Dew is ready to collapse onto the nearest chair, but Rain keeps going straight up the narrow, curving staircase and into the upstairs lounge, where he lowers him down onto an L-shaped couch.

“Put your feet up,” he says, helping him turn and sit lengthwise, nestling him into a leather-lined corner. He arranges throw pillows around him, behind his back, under his foot, like he’s a piece of fragile glassware being prepared for transport, loaded up in a cardboard box padded by butcher paper and bubble wrap.

“Is that good? Comfortable?”

“I’m fine,” Dew says, a refrain that might be more for his own reassurance than anything else.

“I’m going to grab some stuff. Is that okay?”

Dew nods, but his head barely moves. His body feels limp.

“Okay?”

“Yes!” Dew snaps, and immediately regrets it. “Sorry. Yeah, that’s fine.” He swallows the lump forming in his throat “Thank you.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll be right back.”

As promised, Rain comes and goes, taking care of little tasks and bringing with him various provisions and amenities. He brings another pillow for Dew to rest his foot on, and a new ice pack from the freezer. He puts away their bags. He brings them food, which Dew picks at. He puts on a movie, which neither of them really pay any attention to.

Dew’s foot, on its improvised pillow pedestal, radiates an irritating but overall bearable ache. The cold of the ice pack eventually does sink all the way into the bandage and provides some comfort as well. If he holds completely still, it’s not so bad.

“Did you want me to get you something else?” Rain’s eyes are fixed on Dew’s barely-touched plate, brow creased with worry.

“No, I just—” Even thinking about food makes his stomach turn. He really should eat something, if he’s so worried about being ready to perform tomorrow, but that worry sabotages itself too ironically. He has to look away to quell the wave of nausea that rises.

Rain takes both of their plates away.

When he comes back, he sits down carefully next to Dew on the couch and gets as close as he can without jostling him. Their shoulders press together gently.

“What do you need right now?”

Dew looks over at him. Rain always knows what he needs. Asking him something like this is not really a request for information, it can’t be. It’s him taking a small step back, giving Dew the space to express himself.

“Please, just—” Dew’s face heats up. “Distract me.”

“Okay.” Rain takes out his phone. He pulls up an app with black and white squares. “Help me with this.”

Dew rolls his eyes. “Come on, you know I’m not good at these.”

“Just try.” He tilts the screen towards him.

It takes them over an hour to get through the puzzle, and the distribution of work is not equal by a long shot — Rain vetoes most of Dew’s answers as “not crosswordy,” and pulls random trivia out of thin air, justifying it by saying “some things show up often enough that you remember them.” Still, it occupies his mind, more so than when they’ve done this together in the past, which usually ended up being a spectator sport. This time, Rain pulls him in, over and over, prompting him to give answers, even if they’re mostly rejected.

They move on to some other word game, then briefly to a video game on the big TV, which proves to be too much excitement for Dew’s body that would very much prefer to remain as motionless as possible. Rain pulls up another crossword, and Dew mostly just watches this time, letting the letters wash over him. Now that it’s been pointed out to him, he does see the repeated words, EEL and OSLO and TSAR, their component parts all spinning together into a probabilistic blur.

He’s so tired, maybe more than he can ever remember being after a performance, despite standing in one spot for a large part of it. He rests his head on Rain’s shoulder.

Sounds of activity fill other parts of the bus as the rest of the band gets back from their outing. It’s not clear how Rain did it, who he told and what, but nobody comes in and bothers them, which is particularly impressive considering how coveted the space they’ve currently sequestered tends to be. It’s probably as much for their well being as it is for his comfort, considering he would likely bite someone’s head off if they looked at him wrong.

Rain’s phone congratulates him for solving another puzzle. He turns the screen off and sets it aside.

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine.”A reflexive answer. “Tired.”

“Do you want me to help you to your bunk?”

Fuck, he forgot he would need to move again. His bunk is only a few meters down the hall, but the idea of rearranging everything, getting comfortable again, sounds overwhelming, to say the least. He groans.

“Do you want to stay here?”

He nods, his cheek rubbing against the soft fabric of Rain’s shirt. Procrastination probably isn’t going to make anything easier in the long run, but it’s so inviting.

“One second,” Rain says.

Dew lifts his head as Rain’s shoulder eases out from under it. His arm is suddenly cold without a body pressed up against him.

He closes the lounge door behind him. Beyond it, there’s sounds of movement, muffled talking. It’s not possible to pick Rain in particular out of the eclectic soundscape. Nearby, someone laughs, high-pitched and silvery, maybe Aurora. Downstairs, music thrums through the fancy sound system, treble attenuated by the floor, and Swiss sings along.

Rain comes back with an armful of blankets and pillows. He dumps them on the couch, then pulls one blanket out of the pile. He places it over Dew’s body, taking great care not to let it tug at his injured leg.

“Do you want to lie down or stay like this?”

“I’m fine like this.” He leans forward a little bit as Rain puts a pillow behind his head. “Thanks.”

“Sure.” Rain sits down next to him, on the shorter side of the couch, and pulls a blanket over himself. There’s not anywhere near enough space for him to lie down.

“What about you?”

“Me?”

“Where are you going to sleep?”

“Oh. I was going to sleep here.” He pulls his blanket up a little higher, for emphasis. His brow furrows. “Unless you wanted me to leave—”

“No,” Dew says, whinier and more pathetic than he wishes he would sound. “I mean, as long as you’re comfortable.”

“I’ll be fine.” He pinches a sliver of his lip under one fang, a telltale sign that he’s thinking hard. He’s probably not even aware that he’s doing it. “I just want to be here if you need something. Because I’m not sure you would text me.”

A stalwart champion of independence inside him says that of course he would, that he doesn’t need to be watched over. But it also says that he wouldn’t need anything at all. “I might not,” he admits.

Rain smiles. “See?” For a moment, his expression fades into something more distant, wistful.

Then he stands and putters around the room, straightening up video game controllers and forgotten throw pillows. When he turns off the lights, the room is inky black for just a few seconds, until Dew’s eyes adjust, and Rain is a gray figure sitting back down on the couch.

Dew rests his head on his shoulder again. He closes his eyes. He focuses on remaining absolutely still, breathing steadily in and out. He is so, so tired. Surely, if he just lies here, sleep will come. The lounge is pleasantly dark, calm, quiet enough — the sounds from the other parts of the bus are normal, something he’s learned to tune out.

The only thing that’s really threatening to keep him awake is his ankle. Without any other sensations competing with it, the pain expands to fill all of his awareness. It carries with it a reminder of its context, the troubles it has caused, and that it will cause, the show tomorrow, the unknowns.

Rain sighs quietly underneath him. If he concentrates, he can feel his pulse, beating steadily near where his shoulder meets his neck. Maybe he’s imagining it, or his perception is distorted by the pain that’s throbbing with his own heartbeat. He lets himself believe it’s real for now.

He finally dozes off, evidently, because all of a sudden he’s waking up, the bus is moving, and his foot is on fire. The wail that leaves his mouth doesn’t feel like it belongs to him.

“Dew?” Rain’s voice is quiet, unsure. If he wasn’t already awake, it wouldn’t have been loud enough to wake him.

The bus shudders as it goes over a bump in the road, fancy suspension system be damned, and even that gentle motion sends a lance of pain through his ankle. He yelps, caught off guard. Instinctively, he sits forward and reaches for it, but stops himself halfway. His hand flops ineffectually on his shin, arm heavy with exhaustion. He clenches his fingers and digs his nails in.

The pain is so intense that it ignites a buzzing urge to move his whole body, to roll his shoulders, to open and close his free hand in a white-knuckle fist. Gravity tugs against his every movement. The skin on the back of his neck prickles.

“Dew, is it your foot?”

He nods, frantic, jaw clamped shut. He doesn’t know what kind of sound he would make if he opened his mouth to speak.

“Let me get something for it,” Rain says, already standing up, blanket crumpling on the floor.

Dew sits back against the couch with a thump. Maybe Rain will bring a saw, and he can cut his leg off and be done with it. He presses a fist into the center of his forehead, between his eyes. He bites his tongue, hard.

When he comes back, he’s holding has an awkward armful of items. He pushes the door closed with his elbow. “I’m sorry, I should have woken you up to take this,” he says, handing him a small pile of pills. Dew doesn’t care what they are. He would take anything at this point.

Rain presses a bottle of water into his hand, cold, condensation barely starting to form on the outside. Drinking from it is like an anvil hitting his stomach.

“Do you want ice?” He holds up an ice pack.

“Ice, yes—” Dew grabs at it. Rain moves at the same time, placing it on his wrapped ankle. It feels like pressure, nothing more.

Dew groans. He leans forward, reaches down and presses the ice pack onto the bandage — he can’t feel the cold at all, just another layer of dull pain on top of the rest of it. He tears at the bandage, pulls the end of it free and loosens the loops tucked around his lower leg. It’s too tight, too intricate, he can’t get it off. His breaths speed up, rushing in his ears, and it doesn’t feel like they’re bringing in any air.

“What’s wrong?” Rain turns on the lights. The sudden brightness jolts through his eye sockets.

“I need the ice to— It needs to be closer.” He pulls on one loop and it tightens another. He pushes the whole tangle of bandage downward, but it just gets stuck around his ankle, which screams in response. The ice pack lies discarded on the couch.

“Okay, okay,” Rain soothes, panic brushing at the edges of his voice. He starts pulling the loops free, one by one, a longer tail of loose bandage dropping onto the couch each time. Cool air touches overwarm skin.

It’s not fast enough. Dew reaches out to join him, to tug on the bandages again too, but Rain takes his hand and places it firmly on his knee, out of the way.

When only a few loops of bandage remain, wrapped around the end of his foot near his toes, Dew takes the ice pack and presses it into the heart of the pain, the point where his ankle bone meets the side of his foot. This, finally, provides some slim modicum of relief. He lets out a shaky breath. The lounge is quiet, filled only by the sounds of the bus in motion — wheels on the pavement, the engine.

Rain rubs his back, slow, firm strokes up and down his spine. “Better?”

“A little.” His voice comes out raspy, uneven, too tight to sustain a proper whisper.

“Can I do something else?”

“What else even is there to do?” His voice cracks on the last word. His eyes burn.

No, no, not over something like this, like he’s a child that scraped his knee on the playground. He looks up, leans his head back. Tears pool against his sclera, creeping higher until they begin to refract the lights above him into a dizzying sparkle.

Rain doesn’t say anything, just keeps rubbing his back. Because he’s right, there’s nothing he can do. He fucked up, and these are the consequences — humiliation, exhaustion, and excruciating pain.

He can’t even keep forcing himself to believe that he’s going to be able to play in the show tomorrow, to do his job. He couldn’t handle the costume and the stage layout and the setlist and the schedule. And on only the third show, too. There’s no point to him being here, he’s going to be sent home.

This is what finally makes the stupid tears spill out onto his face, leaving a hot trail down to his jawline, first on one side and then the other. He inhales through his nose, sharp and involuntary, making a gross sniffling noise.

“It’s going to be okay,” Rain soothes.

Dew shakes his head, vehement. He must not understand what’s at stake. He hasn’t put the pieces together.

“It’s hard right now but it’s going to get better.” So naive.

“It’s over,” he squeaks, followed by another gasping inhale that he can’t control. He clamps his hand over his mouth.

“No, no it’s not, nothing is over because of this.”

He can’t speak. He shakes his head again.

“Are you thinking about tomorrow?”

He nods. Tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that.

“Everything is going to get taken care of, you just need to focus on feeling better.”

“I’m trying. I can’t—” His breath hitches. “I’m so. Tired. And I can’t sleep.”

“I’m sorry.” Rain brushes away tears with gentle fingers. His hand is cold against his flushed cheek.

“It hurts so much.” It’s embarrassing to admit it even though it’s plainly apparent from his behavior, his distress. He’s weak for being unable to endure the pain of a minor injury like this.

“I know.” His hand dances across his face, from one side to the other and back, wiping fresh tears as they fall. “Just hold on for thirty minutes, and the medicine will start working. Less than that, now. Twenty-five.”

It’s optimistic of him to think that whatever non-prescription drugs he scrounged up will change anything, but it’s enough to focus on for now. He exhales a shaky breath.

“Do you want me to distract you? Or put something on the TV?”

He shakes his head. “I just want to sleep.”

“Okay,” he says, like this is an actionable request and not a plea for mercy.

Rain gets up and dims the lights to a barely-there glow. He fluffs pillows and adjusts blankets. He returns to his spot on the couch.

Dew tries to get comfortable. He sits back against the couch, until that feels wrong and he has to lean forward again. He adjusts the ice pack. Briefly, he tries to lie on his side, but it proves to be too much motion for his ankle. Rain’s careful handiwork falls into disarray, blankets twisted and tangled. Through all the fidgeting and adjusting, he keeps rubbing Dew’s back, arm, shoulder, whatever is accessible.

The minutes stretch on like this, until the pills kick in, all at once. The relief is euphoric. A warm ocean cradles him; he floats on its surface, buoyant in the saltwater. It’s amusing, distantly, to feel a such a dramatic effect from over-the-counter pain relievers. It’s not an absence of pain either, just a decrease that pulls him back over the edge from agony to something more tolerable. Even that makes him feel high.

He sinks into the cushions. His muscles feel like jelly. Next to him, Rain seems to relax a little bit too, slowing his touches. Sleep awaits with open arms.

When he wakes up, light is filtering in through the blinds. The bus is stopped. He’s lying flat with head in Rain’s lap, and Rain is sitting perpendicular to him, legs extended, upper body slumped in the corner where the two sides of the couch meet. He’s still asleep, judging by his breathing.

Dew shifts slowly so as not to wake him. His whole body feels stiff, mildly sore. His ankle aches, but the pain isn’t as bad as it was in the middle of the night.

He looks down at it, tucking his chin toward his chest. It’s still sticking out from the tangled blanket over the rest of his body, resting on a single pillow. The ice pack lies on the couch next to it, melted, as does a heap of elastic bandage. It’s more purple than the last time he saw it, and more swollen too. He wiggles his toes experimentally. He stops right away when pain shoots up his leg with the tiniest movement.

He starts easing his head back down into Rain’s lap but pauses when he moves in his sleep beneath him. He sits up instead, just as slow. His head spins. He blinks and rubs a hand over his face.

His phone is wedged between two couch cushions. He checks the time — it’s still morning. In his notifications is a text from one of the production coordinators about a doctor’s appointment in the early afternoon.

So he wasn’t asleep for very long at all, and has a couple of hours to kill before his appointment. It really would be nice to sleep more, to spend some time not thinking about anything. The idea of actually trying to fall asleep again, getting comfortable, sounds like too much of a chore. He’s tired, but not unbearably so. He should just commit to being awake.

It’s not like he can go anywhere, though, or do anything else. He flops against the back of the couch next to him, tipping over sideways so that he doesn’t have to move his legs. His cheek presses into cool leather. He sighs.

“Dew?” Rain’s voice comes unexpectedly from behind him, raspy from disuse.

He jumps, startled.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, fine. Sorry if I woke you up.”

Rain shakes his head. “Did you get any sleep?”

“I just woke up a couple minutes ago.”

“Good. That’s good.” He’s already kicking into gear, getting up and collecting the pillows strewn across the room.

When he reaches Dew’s side of the couch, Rain picks up one end of the abandoned bandage, lifting a long tail out of the limp pile. “I guess we should put this back on?”

Dew grimaces. “I guess.” He’s not interested in anything touching his ankle, but if he wants to stand up or move around at all, he would probably be more comfortable with it at least a little bit immobilized.

“Unless the ice…?”

The tips of his ears start to feel warm. Unless he wants to make a big dramatic scene over it like last night? “No, it’s okay now.”

“Okay, well, did you want to do it? Or do you want me to do it for you?”

“Can you?” His voice comes out small.

Something like relief washes over Rain’s face. “Sure, of course.”

Rain sits down at the end of the couch. He takes one end of the bandage and presses it into his skin, holding it there, on the top of his foot near his toes. Dew hisses through his teeth at the contact.

“Sorry,” Rain says, lifting his hand away. The bandage crumples down onto the pillow.

“It’s fine, just do it.” He clenches his teeth, hopefully not in a way that’s noticeable.

He hesitates, but then holds the bandage against his foot again. He loops it around his foot one, two, three times, then pauses to adjust, pressing down with cautious fingers and gently tugging the free end with his other hand. Elasticized fabric slides under Dew’s arch.

In the end, his ankle is wrapped up again, though not quite as neatly as it was before. He puts his foot down next to his other one. The difference between them, visually, is concerning. The bruising is covered by the bandage, but the swelling is compounded by the additional layers covering it, making it look massive.

Rain helps him down the stairs to the bathroom, gets him things from his bag, brings them both food again so he doesn’t have to go all the way inside. It’s humiliating to need to be assisted with every single task, to do nothing of his own power, but if it had to be anyone helping him… now that’s an embarrassingly saccharine thought.

He takes another pile of pills, at Rain’s direction. He can see what they are now — two tylenol and four ibuprofen. It seems extreme, if not dangerous, but he’s not going to question it, not after last night.

Then they wait. Waiting, in general, is a very normal part of being on tour, but not like this, anxious, with something looming ahead. He should be killing time with the rest of the band, maybe out and about somewhere, excited for the show tonight. So should Rain, but instead he’s entertaining his petulant boyfriend with games and videos, switching to something new as soon as it stops holding his attention.

“I would be fine by myself, you know,” Dew says, as Rain scrolls through a list of movies for the millionth time.

Rain frowns slightly. He puts down the TV remote. “Do you want me to leave you alone?”

“I mean— you don’t need to do this if you don’t want to.”

“Well, I do want to.” He picks up his phone and scoots over next to Dew.

They’re in the depths of a Wikipedia rabbit hole when he gets a text that a car will arrive soon to take him to his appointment. Rain helps him walk a short distance across the sunny concrete parking lot to where, by the time they make it there, the car awaits. He offers his arm to hold onto as he lowers himself into the back seat, pivoting on his one leg.

The clunk of the door closing feels abrupt. Just like that, he’s alone. Why was he expecting otherwise? He looks down at his feet on the freshly vacuumed floor mat, his single shoe. He feels a little bit like he’s being brought to his execution.

The opposite door opening pulls him from his thoughts. Rain gets in the car and closes the door behind him. Right, of course. He settles back against the seat. Rain is watching him with big worried eyes, like maybe he can see his thoughts spilling out from how hard they’re churning.

He actually isn’t sure what he thinks is going to happen. As it stands, his ankle is simultaneously damaged beyond repair and just a little bruised. He’s overreacting and at the same time his life is ruined. He needs an x-ray just as a formality, but the doctor will give him devastating news which he dreads hearing.

Out the window, trees pass by, weathered brick walls, iron fences. Carbon copy rowhouses sitting pressed up against each other become gated estates hidden behind foliage as they leave the city center. They’re dropped off in front of an unassuming building, and make their way inside.

The waiting area is fancy, in a subtle way. They sit on a real sofa, like one that might be in someone’s living room. It doesn’t quite feel like a doctor’s office. It calls attention to how unusual this whole thing really is, the context, the logistics of it all. It’s not necessarily normal to be able to schedule a same-day doctor’s appointment at the drop of the hat anywhere in the world unless, perhaps, you’re a key part of a concert tour with a budget in the millions. He could put a price tag on his leg.

They aren’t there for long before a doctor arrives and ushers them to an exam room. Her white coat seems out of place at first, at the threshold of the oddly domestic waiting area, but she fits in better once the door is closed, with pale gray cabinets and a little stool on five caster wheels. Dew sits on a padded table.

She asks him what happened, where it hurts, all the same as before. Saying it is embarrassing every time. As much as he can, he leaves out the parts about the concert, the stage, the costume, just mentioning the stairs, that he tripped, that he received first aid right away. Behind her, Rain raises an eyebrow when he describes how he stood and walked on his injured leg for mysterious and vague reasons, with no clear motivation.

She unwraps the bandage from his ankle. He knows what it looks like underneath, but it’s still unpleasant to see it again. The weave of the fabric is imprinted on his skin. She asks him to lie down, and he doesn’t have to look at it anymore.

“What do you do for work?” Her fingers press into the side of his leg near near his calf and start to work their way lower.

“I’m a… musician.”

“I see, so are you on your feet much? She digs into his ankle bone in a way that’s unpleasant but not exceedingly painful.

“Um, I’m on tour right now, so—” He flinches when she touches a spot on the side of his foot, his words interrupted by a strangled yelp.

“Is this where the pain is worst?” She presses on it again, more gently, just indicating to it. It’s like the deepest, most sensitive bruise he’s ever had, like an exposed nerve.

“Yeah.” He stops himself from squirming on the table, wriggling away from her hands, from the close observation. “Yes, I think so.”

“Let’s get an x-ray of this, and we’ll take it from there, okay?”

He’s directed to a room at the end of the hall. Rain helps him down from the exam table and supports him as they walk there together. They’re getting better at this, more coordinated and in tune with each other’s motions. It’s a good thing, in the sense that it’s easier to move around, but it’s not a skill he wants to be developing in the first place.

When they get there, a technician asks Rain to wait outside. A door closes between them.

The room inside is dark, and is full of white equipment, austere plastic-shelled machines and furniture, utilitarian fixtures. The technician instructs him to sit on a hard table at its center. She places a rectangular panel underneath his foot. She adjusts his body with light, barely-there touches, bending his knee, extending his ankle, pointing his toes so that the sole of his foot is flat on the panel. Something inside his foot, at the point where the doctor pressed, protests being stretched this way. The chill of all the rigid surfaces, and of the air in the room, sinks into his skin.

When the technician presses a button on the machine looming above the table, it shines a rectangle of light on him like sun through a window. The shadowed lines between the panes form a crosshair that she aims at the middle of his foot. He feels exposed, lit by a spotlight and placed in front of a camera that will look inside him, through him.

He holds still while she steps into another room, leaving him entirely alone. This must be what it’s like in a museum after closing time, a curio on a pedestal in the dark surrounded by white walls. A day’s worth of attention evaporates off him like steam into the air.

She comes back after barely any time at all. She takes two more pictures in the same manner, one with his knee tipped inwards and one with it rotated all the way out until the whole length of his leg is resting on the table. Then he��s done, and is sent back to the exam room.

He manages to limp back to the door, where Rain seems surprised to see him emerge by himself. They make their way down the hall again, retracing their careful, methodical steps.

When they get back to the exam room, the doctor isn’t there. Rain leads Dew to the table — no, not again. He shakes his head. There is a pair of chairs on the other side of the room, across from a desk. Rain helps him into one and sits in the other.

Dew exhales; what starts as a sigh becomes a frustrated groan. Every time he sits down he’s reminded how tired he is. The only thing preventing him from curling up right here and trying to fall asleep is that he knows he wouldn’t be able to, not with the anxiety and the pain, the lights, the unfamiliar surroundings. His leg hurts more from having briefly walked on it.

“Doing okay?” Rain is looking at him with big eyes again.

“I guess.” He slumps down in the chair, melting under his concerned gaze. As much as the question makes him squirm he really does appreciate that Rain is being so attentive. If only he could express it in a normal way, instead of whatever he’s doing now. “Thank you for coming with me.”

“Of course.”

“And thank you for walking me everywhere. Because I can’t walk by myself.”

“Sure. But actually I was going to ask—” Rain sits up a bit straighter, turns toward him slightly, like he’s about to change the subject to something serious. “Were you walking by yourself earlier? In the other room.”

“Just a couple steps. I think it was a bad idea.” He looks down at his bare foot. “It hurt.”

“You could have asked me to help you.”

“What, through the radiation-proof lead door?”

“I would have heard you.”

Dew scoffs. He probably would have, though. Somehow.

There’s a brisk knock on the door, and then the doctor opens it and walks in without any delay. Dew scrambles to sit up properly in his chair. She sits at the desk across from them. Suddenly this all feels very formal.

“I took a look at your x-rays,” she says. “I’m afraid you’ve broken your foot.”

Dew’s blood runs cold. Branching timelines slam together; disparate possibilities collapse into a single present. He distantly feels Rain’s hand on his arm.

“Here, let me show you.” She turns to her computer, clicks a few times, then rotates the monitor towards him.

On it is an x-ray of a foot, looking down from the front. It looks exactly like the paint on the front of the uniform boots, the same stupid boot that made him fall. A startled laugh bubbles up from his chest before he can stop it.

“You can see the fracture here.” She drags the mouse cursor along one dark line through a gray-white bone. “And here.” She moves the cursor to another, similar looking line.

Dew struggles to formulate an intelligent question. In the end, what comes out is, “It’s broken twice?”

“Yes, it’s broken in two places. Two fractures.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s not uncommon.” She folds her hands on the desk in front of her. “Based on the location of the fractures, and because they are well aligned, I believe it will heal on its own over time. About six to eight weeks.”

She’s saying it like this is the good option, but Dew isn’t sure what the other possibilities might be. How else do bones heal? Probably better not to think about it. He nods.

“I’m going to give you a special boot to wear. You can put as much weight on your foot as you feel comfortable with, but only while the boot is on. Alright?”

That means he can stand, he can walk. He can be on stage like normal. The sudden sense of relief is so potent that he feels lightheaded. He nods again.

“Don’t push yourself too hard. Walking a bit will help with healing, but start slow, listen to your body, especially for the next few days.”

He feels a little bit like he’s been caught doing something naughty, even though it actually hasn’t happened yet. It’s as if she can read his mind. Or maybe everyone thinks this, and she’s just responding to an observed pattern.

“Other than that, elevating your leg and using ice will help with the pain and swelling. You can take the boot off while you’re resting, it’s just to make walking more comfortable ”

Dew nods. “Okay.”

“Do you have any questions?”

He shakes his head. No, not any that he’s going to risk asking, and maybe getting an answer that he doesn’t like. His mind was already made up the moment he got permission to bear weight on his leg, even though it came with some caveats that he may or may not follow to the letter.

“Great, let me get that boot for you.”

As soon as the door closes behind her, Rain is on his case. “You’re thinking about the show tonight, aren’t you?”

“Maybe.” He can’t help but smile a little at Rain’s very predictable discernment. At least he didn’t say anything out loud in front of the doctor.

“Just be careful, okay? Take it slow, like she said.”

“I will.”

When the doctor comes back, she’s carrying a very tall and bulky item of footwear. It’s black, at the very least. It won’t be too out of place with his stage uniform. It even has a similarly thick sole.

His foot and leg are wrapped in a soft foam sleeve and then five velcro straps are tightened around it, holding a metal frame in place. The top of the boot ends just below his knee. His toes stick out just slightly from the liner.

He stands up slowly. Involuntarily, he holds his hands out to balance. Rain reaches out and grabs one of them.

The boot forces him to put most of his weight on his heel, which does indeed hurt less than standing normally. Now that he knows where the broken bones are, it seems obvious. He’s still trying to wrap his head around it, that it was his foot, not his ankle. He was so sure he hurt his ankle. It doesn’t really matter that much — it’s all connected, anyway — but the sudden clarity is jarring.

He takes a small, experimental step. This is fine. It’s doable.

“Feels alright? I can grab you a pair of crutches if that would be easier at first.”

He shakes his head. “No.” Absolutely definitely not. “Thank you.”

Apparently that’s enough, and he doesn’t need to convince her any further of his supposed accession to pacing himself and doing as he’s told. He feels almost giddy. It could have been so much worse.

Despite his new ability to walk on his own, Rain doesn’t let go of his arm as they head back down the hallway to the waiting room and out the front door. As he begins to feel more confident, he takes longer and longer strides, but soon reaches an upper limit — the inability to bend his ankle is way more disruptive to his gait than he expected. The sole of the boot is much thicker than that of his other shoe, too, which makes it feel like he’s walking sideways along a small but annoying hill, stepping up with one foot and down with the other.

Outside, the two of them sit on a wooden bench as they wait for the car to come back around and pick them up. The air is pleasantly cool, and warm sunlight shines down on them.

Dew extends both legs out in front of him. The boot is huge in comparison to his other leg. It looks ridiculous on him, completely out of proportion. He should be grateful that he’s going to be able to be on stage at all, let alone standing up, walking, but instead he’s finding new things to be embarrassed about. At least he’s not going to be sitting in a chair with everyone running circles around him. It’s just a shoe, another in a collection of notable footwear from the past day.

They make it back to the concert venue in time for soundcheck. It’s a place composed of seemingly endless hallways. All of them are, but endless is longer than usual today, considering the circumstances. By the time they reach the arena floor, Dew’s ankle — no, his foot — is really starting to ache. In the underworld, he stands with all his weight on his good leg.

It’s strange to be here again. Last time he was under the stage, everything was so different. Memories flank him like a pack of wolves.

It’s not the same place, though, technically. The stage is the same, but he’s miles away from where he was last night. The ground under his feet is different.

Everyone seems very relieved to see him, and keen to express it, which is embarrassing, but thankfully other than that they give him space. If he had to tell the whole story right now of everything that’s happened he would probably combust. It’s hard enough just telling the story to himself, remembering it, the details. He does his best to reassure everyone that he’s feeling okay.

Soundcheck, at first, boosts his confidence. He really will be able to do this. He’s standing, playing, but a new problem arises — he can’t use his pedals properly with the bulkiness of the boot, and his ankle fixed in one position. So close, yet so far.

He’s in the middle of considering if he’s willing to relinquish control of the pedal effects to his guitar tech, or just to some computer maybe, or even leave them out altogether, when Phantom bounds up to him, sprightly as ever, and offers to do it for him.

“I can be your feet for tonight,” he says.

Poor Phantom, like everyone else, probably has been wondering about him after the drama he caused last night, and has been very politely leaving him alone in spite of it. This is the first chance he’s had to offer to help, and really, how can Dew say no?

After soundcheck, Rain helps him to his dressing room, seemingly intent on forcing him to rest for a while. The bus lounge they so selfishly annexed would probably still be available, as would, of course, his bunk, but the parking lot is so far away. Inside, his uniform is waiting for him, including both of the associated shoes.

He collapses onto the couch. Walking is still exhausting, even with the boot, or maybe because of it. Rain sets him up with pillows under his foot and a plastic bag full of ice, and he even manages to take a short but much-needed nap before he has to get ready for the show. If Rain sleeps too, he’s not sure. What he does know is that he’s there when he falls asleep and still there when he wakes up.

Getting into his uniform, when it’s time, is about as much of an ordeal as it was to take it off last night. He has to remove the boot to change his clothes and then put it back on again, which means wrestling with an excessive amount of velcro that seems to have a mind of its own and a desire to stick to everything in its vicinity. When he’s done, a mismatched pair of shoes remains on the dressing room floor, his own right one with the left from his uniform.

The boot looks the same as before — bulky, out of place. It might actually look even bigger now, given how tight the bodysuit is, maximizing the difference between the sizes of his legs. It is what it is, an inelegant, unattractive thing that makes it possible for him to walk, just barely.

Anticipation builds over the course of his final preparations for the show until, finally, he’s standing on stage again, the audience buzzing on the other side of the curtain. He feels an unprecedented level of self-consciousness. The boot really sticks out, literally, and he’s not going to be up to his own standards. He’s going to be a disappointment.

When the curtain falls, everything comes into focus. The important thing is that he’s here, even if he can’t participate in all the ways he wants to. He can still play. Phantom helps with his pedals, as does Rain. Papa comes to him, instead of the other way around.

By the halfway point of the set the pain in his foot has increased to a dull roar. His back and hips ache from the unsustainable distribution of his weight, the unequal height of his shoe and boot. He moves less and less, stands in one place. It starts to be a distraction.

He can hear Rain in his head telling him to take care of himself. Also, he can see Rain in real life watching him, surely eager to say the same thing, given the opportunity.

Dew hobbles carefully to the drum riser. Between parts, in the short interval in which he can use his hands to steady himself, sits down on the steps. In no time at all, Rain is there too, standing next to him on those same steps, perfectly casual — he stands here all the time.

The six weeks or longer that it’s expected to take for him to heal will extend through what remains of this part of the tour. Maybe, hopefully, he will feel better as the shows go on, become more mobile. Maybe the rest of the tour will be like tonight. Suddenly, for the first time, he’s okay with that possibility.

#fic i wrote #dewdrop ghoul #rain ghoul #ghost band fanfic #ummmm what tags do people use #raindrop ghost #didnt do a final proofread so im SORRY if theres something stupid #ill do it tomorrow

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greatkittencloud · 27 days ago

Text

TW : Mentions of Violence

Black Nova

Chapter 4

Deployment Zone : Somewhere in Eastern Europe

Time: 0300 Hours

The Helicopter thundered above the treeline. Inside, red lights bathed the cabin in a ghostly hue. The team sat silent, each locked into their own rhythm.

Price adjusted his earpiece. Soap tapped his foot against the floor in time with some internal beat. Ghost sat still, a statue with burning eyes.

Nova sat opposite him gloved hands clasped, rifle across her lap. Calm on the outside. Inside… her pulse beat a little too fast. Not from fear. From awareness.

“Touchdown in sixty,” Gaz called over the noise.

Price turned to them all. “Intel confirms arms transfer.Not much structure. But they’re protecting something. We go in clean, sweep the facility, grab what we can, as quietly as we can.

Nova gave a nod with the others.

Then Price’s eyes landed on her.

“Nova take point with Ghost. You two clear left wing. Maintain comms.”

Ghost didn’t speak. Just met her eyes once, then stood when the light over the ramp turned green.

As the bird descended and the rear hatch opened, the cold slapped her in the face.

She moved with Ghost into the tree line, boots silent on the frost-covered ground.

Location : Inside the Facility

Time : 0317 Hours

The corridors were dim, half the lights flickering, the air thick with dust and decay. Nova moved like a phantom, Ghost on her six.

They cleared rooms methodically ,no wasted movement, no hesitation.

Then—voices ahead. Flashlights.

Nova raised her fist to signal stop, then pointed.Ghost tapped her shoulder.

She nodded.

Two silenced shots. Two bodies down.

She exhaled quietly, the tightness in her chest easing.

Location : Main Hall

Time : 0332 Hours

Nova crouched behind cover, eyes scanning the room as Soap’s voice crackled through comms.

“Package located. Preparing for extraction.”

“Copy,” Price replied. “All units converge on rendezvous point. Nova, Ghost—how copy?”

“We’re moving,” Ghost said.

They cut through another hallway, when a militia fighter burst from the corner, weapon raised.

Nova didn’t think. She reacted.

She lunged not away, toward grabbing the barrel of his rifle, twisting it out of his hands and driving her elbow into his jaw with a sickening crack. He hit the ground unconscious.

Ghost stared for a half-second. “Fast.”

Nova’s breath came quicker now. The adrenaline was familiar but something about it… felt right.

Not controlled. Not forced. Hers.

Location: Extraction Point

Time: 0354 Hours

The team regrouped near the evac chopper, the operation complete. Data secured. Zero casualties.

Soap grinned. “Cleanest op we’ve had in weeks.”

“Don’t jinx it,” Gaz muttered smacking Soap's head.

Ghost checked their perimeter, then glanced at Nova. She still had a guarded look but Ghost saw something else in her eyes. There was light.

Location: Debrief Room — Safehouse Compound

Time: 0630 Hours

The op was over. The data was secured. The team had gone their separate ways ,some to rest, some to gear maintenance, Soap probably to annoy Gaz.

Nova sat alone at the long table in the dim debrief room, going through the records of the ops. She wasn’t tired, exactly. Just quiet.

The door opened with a soft click.

“Mind if I join you?” Laswell’s voice was calm, curious.

Nova nodded.

Laswell sat across from her, tablet in hand. “I read the mission logs. Flawless execution. Zero casualties. You led point with Ghost, neutralized six targets, secured three intel assets, and cleared the hallway ambush before it even unfolded.you have anything to say?”

Nova's gaze was steady. “It felt different.”

Laswell studied her.

“The last time I was deployed… everything was calculated. Timed. Engineered. Even my heartbeat was monitored.”

“And now?”

Nova looked up, and there was something raw in her voice ,new and unfamiliar. “Now it’s mine. Every breath. Every move. I didn’t realize how much I missed that until I felt it again.”

Laswell sat back, thoughtful. “They took a lot from you.”

Nova stayed silent.

“But they didn’t erase you,” Laswell added. “Not completely. You’re still in there"

Nova’s throat tightened. “It wasn’t just the op.”

Laswell raised an eyebrow.

“It was them,” Nova said quietly. “The team. Price. Soap. Ghost. Even Gaz. No one looked at me like a lab experiment. No one asked what I used to be.” She hesitated. “I think… I don't know how to get the words.”

Laswell’s gaze softened. “That’s okay"

A moment passed in silence.

Laswell stood. “Get some rest. You earned it. There’s a lot more coming.”

Nova gave a small nod.

Thank you for reading!

A/N: I like the word rendezvous

Taglist : @hyperfixiation-station , @enfppuff @massivescissorsthingperson , @sheepispink , @sweetybuzz25

#john soap mactavish #cod fandom #cod fanfic #cod x reader #ghost cod #kyle gaz garrick #john price #call of duty fanfic #call of duty #Two chapters in one day

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poopfartlesbian · 2 months ago

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May I please request some WaveWave x gn human reader romantic headcanons :0?

In general and how you think their dynamic would unfold with their human partner :3

Maybe the reader is more into science like paleontology (study of ancient) or smth (totally not projecting myself in that 😪 /s)

I love my scientist wife n our awesome bf a lot!!

Tysm in advance n I hope you have a good rest of your day/night 💞

ABSOLUTELY!! I love reading some WaveWave x reader myself so I'll definitely be doing more like this :3

Not sure what iteration you wanted so I tried to keep it pretty open but it leans a lot into Transformers Prime

WaveWave x GN! Reader headcanons!

I may have done a lot this time lol

- Shockwave is the cold logic; Soundwave is the quiet connection; You're the soft middle, the grounding presence that makes their extremes balance out. You bring warmth and curiosity that fascinates them both. Shockwave admires your intelligence and methodical thought process, while Soundwave is drawn to the emotional depth you quietly exude, even in analytical discussions.

- Soundwave communicates mostly through body language, text projection, or sharing earth music he thinks you would enjoy. You grow fluent in his subtle ways of expressing affection.

Shockwave doesn’t understand emotional nuance well, but he tries, often asking very clinical questions like, “Is this level of proximity within your acceptable parameters?” to which you find both funny and endearing.

You sometimes end up being the “translator” between their methods, and they grow increasingly fluent in understanding you as a result.

- Shockwave builds you custom tech to monitor your vitals and filter out harmful air particulates when you’re working in the field. He sees your fragility as a variable to be compensated for, thought you insist that you can handle yourself, you appreciate his consideration and care for you.

Soundwave is the silent guardian—tracking your movements, ensuring you’re safe when you go hiking to examine rock strata or fossil beds. You often get a quiet ping from your phone with a “drink water” reminder. It's him.

- Shockwave is intrigued that you study ancient life. He often offers technical equipment to assist in excavation or analysis, fascinated by how organic evolution and extinction mirror aspects of Cybertronian history.

Soundwave records your fieldwork without you noticing at first, later giving you a perfectly edited time-lapse video of your dig sites to help you keep track of the rhings you find at various locations.

- Shockwave will ask extremely specific questions about extinction events, biome shifts and whatnot and then compare them to Cybertron’s ecological collapses. He silently enjoys your passionate rants.

Soundwave installs a holographic projector that lets you walk among full-scale reconstructions of ancient creatures—imagine a private AR museum just for you so you can go into further detail much easier.

- Shockwave claims he "doesn’t date,” but he will go out of his way to take you and Soundwave to the middle of nowhere at night with a high-powered telescope to stargaze. He explains galactic structures in stunning detail while holding your small hand like it’s an important relic, something rare and delicate.

Soundwave prefers quiet companionship. He’ll let you sit on his shoulder and lean on his helm while you read or let you ramble about prehistoric fauna for hours. Every so often, he’ll gently tap your head in acknowledgment, it’s his version of a kiss.

- Neither are built for soft human affection, but they both try. Shockwave often hold you in his hand or on his shoulder during trips or when he's in the lab. Soundwave also likes to hold you in his servos.

They don't really say “I love you,” but;

Shockwave: “Your continued presence elicits favorable neural reactions. I would prefer you not leave my presence anytime soon.”

Soundwave: [projects a visual of a heart]

- You’re the one constant they don’t calculate or surveil. They simply trust you. Which is huge.

They bicker—quietly, scientifically—but they both defer to you as the emotional barometer when things get tense. You’re the balance between logic and silence, and they never take that for granted.

#wavewave #wavewave x reader #soundwave x reader #shockwave x reader #soundwave x shockwave #shockwave #soundwave #tfp soundwave #tfp shockwave #transformers x reader

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bestanimal · 9 months ago

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Round 1 - Phylum Arthropoda

(Sources - 1, 2, 3, 4)

Arthropoda is a phylum of animals that have segmented bodies, possess a chitin exoskeleton, and have paired segmented appendages. They are colloquially called “bugs” though this is often only used for terrestrial arthropods, and sometimes only used for insects specifically.

After Nematoda, this is the most successful phylum, and it is far more diverse, with up to 10 million species! Arthropods account for 80% of all known living animal species. The three major subphyla include the Chelicerates (sea spiders, horseshoe crabs, arachnids, and the extinct eurypterids and chasmataspidids), the Myriapods (centipedes and millipedes), and the Crustaceans (shrimps, prawns, crabs, lobsters, crayfish, seed shrimp, branchiopods, fish lice, krill, remipedes, isopods, barnacles, copepods, opossum shrimps, amphipods, mantis shrimp, entognaths, and insects).

Arthropods are so diverse in fact that it is next to impossible for me to describe a model arthropod. They are important members of marine, freshwater, land, and air ecosystems and are one of only two major animal groups that have adapted to life in dry environments, the others being chordates. All arthropods have an exoskeleton and must molt as they grow, replacing their exoskeleton. Some arthropods go through a metamorphosis in this process. They have brains, a heart, and blood (called hemolymph, though some crustaceans and insects also use hemoglobin). They sense the world through small hairs called setae which are sensitive to vibration, air currents, and even chemicles in the air or water. Pressure sensors function similarly to eardrums. Antennae monitor humidity, moisture, temperature, sound, smell, and/or taste, depending on species. Most arthropods have sophisticated visual systems ranging from simple eyes (ocelli) which orient towards light, to compound eyes consisting of fifteen to several thousand independent ommatidia capable of forming images, detecting fast movement, or even seeing polarized or ultra-violet light. Some arthropods are hermaphroditic, some have more than two sexes, some reproduce by parthenogenesis, some by internal fertilization, some by external, some have complex courtship rituals, some lay eggs, some give live birth, some have prolonged maternal care. The first arthropods are known from the Ediacaran, before the Cambrian era.

Propaganda below the cut:

Insects are the first animals to have achieved flight

The smallest arthropods are the parasitic crustaceans of the class Tantulocarida, some of which are less than 100 micrometres long. The largest arthropod is the Japanese Spider Crab (Macrocheira kaempferi) with a legspan of up to 4 metres (13 ft) long. The heaviest is the American Lobster (Homarus americanus), which can get up to 20 kilograms (44 lb).

Many arthropods are popular pets, including various species of crab, shrimp, isopod, crayfish, mantis shrimp, millipede, centipede, tarantula, true spider, scorpion, amblypygid, vinegaroon, mantis, cockroach, beetle, moth, and ant! Some are even domesticated, including silk moths and honeybees.

Many arthropods are eaten by humans as a delicacy, and farming insects for food is considered more sustainable than farming large chordates. These farmed arthropods are referred to as “minilivestock.”

Arthropods feature in a variety of ways in biomimicry: humans imitating elements of nature. For example, the cooling system of termite mounds has been imitated in architecture, and the internal structure of the dactyl clubs of mantis shrimp have been imitated to create more damage tolerant materials.

Spider venoms are being studied as a less harmful alternative to chemical pesticides, as they are deadly to insects but the great majority are harmless to vertebrates. They have also been studied and could have uses in treating cardiac arrhythmia, muscular dystrophy, glioma, Alzheimer's disease, strokes, and erectile dysfunction.

Shellac is a resin secreted by the female Lac Bug (Kerria lacca) on trees in the forests of India and Thailand. It is used as a brush-on colorant, food glaze, natural primer, sanding sealant, tannin-blocker, odour-blocker, stain, and high-gloss varnish. It was once used in electrical applications as an insulator, and was used to make phonograph and gramophone records until it was replaced by vinyl.

One of the biggest ecosystem services arthropods provide for humans is pollination. Crops where pollinator insects are essential include brazil nuts, cocoa beans, and fruits including kiwi, melons, and pumpkins. Crops where pollinator insects provide 40-90% of pollination include avocados, nuts like cashews and almonds, and fruits like apples, apricots, blueberries, cherries, mangoes, peaches, plums, pears, and raspberries. In crops where pollinators are not essential they still increase production and yield. Important pollinators include bees, flies, wasps, butterflies, and moths.

Many arthropods are sacred to humans. In Ancient Egypt, scarab beetles were used in art, religious ceremonies, and funerary practices, and were represented by the god Khepri. Bees supposedly grew from the tears of the sun god Ra, spilled across the desert sand. The goddess of healing venomous bites and stings, Serket, was depicted as a scorpion. Kalahari Desert's San People tell of a legendary hero, Mantis, who asked a bee to guide him to find the purpose of life. When the bee became weary from their search, he left the mantis on a floating flower, and planted a seed within him before passing from his exhaustion. The first human was born from this seed. In Akan folklore, the cunning trickster figure Anansi/Ananse is depicted as a spider. Western astrology uses the crab constellation, called Cancer, and the scorpion constellation, called Scorpio. Dragonflies symbolize pure water in Navajo tradition. In Anishinaabe culture, dreamcatchers are meant to represent spiderwebs and are used as a protective charm for infants. They originate from the Spider Grandmother, who takes care of the children and the people of the land in many Native American cultures. The Moche people of ancient Peru often depicted spiders and crabs in their art. In an Ancient Greek hymn, Eos, the goddess of the dawn, requests of Zeus to let her lover Tithonus live forever as an immortal. Tithonus became immortal, but not ageless, and eventually became so small, old, and shriveled that he turned into the first cicada. Another hymn sings of the Thriae, a trinity of Aegean bee nymphs. Native Athenians wore golden grasshopper brooches to symbolize that they were of pure, Athenian lineage. In an Ancient Sumerian poem, a fly helps the goddess Inanna when her husband Dumuzid is being chased by galla demons. In Japanese culture, butterflies carry many meanings, from being the souls of humans to symbols of youth to guides into the afterlife. Ancient Romans also believed that butterflies were the souls of the dead. Some of the Nagas of Manipur claim ancestry from a butterfly. Many cultures use the butterfly as a symbol of rebirth. And the list goes on…

cute crab eat a strawbebby:

#round 1 #animal polls #listen narrowing it down to just 4 images almost killed me #if arthropods don’t move on to round 2 I will have to take like an extra week off to mourn that I can’t show you all the cool bugs #there’s so many cool bugs guys #i chose the orchid mantis over a trilobite beetle and a poofy little bee fly cause I figured it had broader appeal #and used a horseshoe crab instead of a spider cause people are so Weird about spiders I worried it would impact the numbers #sigh #anyway I’m really hoping for Chordata Arthropoda Mollusca as top three #other phyla are all great but these three would make for the most interesting Round 2 imo #arthropoda

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dearyanderenewspaper · 3 months ago

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🗞️ YanCorp Park: The Ultimate Retreat for Your Darling! 🎡

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bmbsurveyltd · 4 months ago

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Movement Monitoring Survey in London – Expert Solutions by BMB Survey Ltd

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#movement monitoring survey in London #movement monitoring survey #building movement monitoring #structural movement monitoring #structure movement monitoring

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isatling-husbandry-guide · 6 months ago

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hi! I'm thinking of adopting a change god! I recently found one of these rarities at a local shelter <3 do you have any tips to taking care of one?

I am going to assume you mean a CHANGELING, and not a GOD..?? These guys have a lot of common misconceptions around them, especially with their appearance to common depictions of the Change god. They are very rare in most countries, but are native to (and thus everywhere in) Vauguarde.

The appearance of a changeling is heavily similar to depictions of the Change God. Changelings adapt to their environment and their appearances will reflect that of its caretaker.

pictured: changeling & fruit, Liana A, oil on canvas. a depiction of the artist’s changeling, who interrupted her original plan to paint fruit.

They’re not too high maintenance. Changelings live a Change lifestyle, meaning they need constant changes to their stimuli, diet, and environment, though they’re easily pleased by small changes like moving their enclosure or feeding them a new kind of treat. Changelings are perfectly fine without an enclosure, but should you want one, fill it with Change artifacts and a large variety of textures, shades, and decor.

They’re cheerful little creatures, enjoying dancing in place and playing, and often mimic behaviors they observe their caretaker doing. A bored changeling is a deeply unhappy one, so look out for any signs of disinterest in their surrounding or minimal movement. Also be warned that they are very clumsy creatures, being well known to fall off tables or play structures. While they are usually very resilient, make sure you always monitor your Changeling after a bad fall.

#isat husbandry #isathusbandry #isat #isat change god #<- technically?

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multi-fandoms-posts · 9 months ago

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Secrets in the Storm

X Men Masterlist

The sky outside is heavy and dark as the jet flies through the storm. Inside, Y/N, Charles, and Erik sit tense and silent. Their mission: to infiltrate a dangerous facility where mutants are being held—a task that requires the utmost concentration. Yet something is distracting Charles. His gaze is restless, and he rubs his forehead.

“Charles, what’s wrong?” Y/N asks, noticing his unease.

“It’s hard to explain,” he murmurs, closing his eyes. “There’s… a presence. I feel something, but I can’t quite grasp it.”

Erik, who is monitoring the instruments, turns to him. “Now is not the time for riddles, Charles. Focus on the mission.”

Charles nods, but the feeling doesn’t leave him. This presence is powerful, but different from anything he has ever felt before. He tries to ignore it, but it lingers. Something important that he doesn’t yet understand.

As the jet lands, they must move quickly. The facility is hidden behind dense trees, the rain making the ground muddy and slippery. They run through the forest, each step cautious, ready for the upcoming fight. But Charles keeps stopping, his thoughts drifting back to the strange presence. He knows he can’t ignore it any longer, but now is not the time to question it.

When they reach the facility, the battle erupts. Erik raises his arms, metal beams tear from the walls, hurling enemies to the ground. Y/N fights with swift, precise movements, while Charles uses his telepathic abilities to confuse their foes. Then, the presence in Charles’ mind becomes suddenly overwhelming. It hits him like a revelation he hadn’t anticipated.

“Erik!” he calls telepathically. “It’s Y/N…”

“What about her?” Erik dodges an attack and sends several metal pieces crashing into his enemies. “I’m busy, Charles!”

“She’s pregnant.”

Erik stops abruptly, and before he can react, he is struck hard from the side. He is slammed against the wall, the metal structure behind him bending under the impact. Erik collapses to the ground, dazed. Charles immediately feels a surge of anger rising within him.

“Erik!” Y/N calls, but before she can move, Charles raises his hands. The telepathic barrier he creates is stronger than ever, forcing the enemies back, driving them to their knees. His eyes sparkle with determination.

But Erik is already up again, blood running down his forehead, yet he ignores it. With a deep, angry breath, he extends his hands, and the metal structures of the facility twist and shatter under his command. “No one,” he growls, “touches her.” His rage unleashes a massive shockwave, throwing enemies against the walls and shaking the facility to its core.

“What’s wrong with you two?” Y/N shouts as she continues to fight, confused by the sudden shift in their fighting styles. “Why are you so aggressive?”

Charles doesn’t respond; his mind is solely focused on protecting Y/N and the child. “We need to protect her, Erik,” he sends telepathically.

Erik simply nods and unleashes another wave of metal and fury. Metal plates slice through the air, crushing enemies in a destructive whirlwind. Every move Erik makes is wild and deadly, his powers unleashed with an intensity Y/N has never seen before.

Charles is equally relentless. He delves deeper into the enemies’ minds, forcing them to turn their weapons on each other. Every attack is more precise, every blow harder, as he knows Y/N and the life she carries must be protected.

Finally, after a long, brutal fight, the last enemies lie on the ground. The facility is secured, but the air is heavy with tension and unspoken truths. Erik breathes heavily, his eyes fixed on Y/N, while Charles remains vigilant.

Back in the jet, as the world outside is engulfed in the storm, the three sit exhausted together. Y/N keeps throwing questioning glances at Erik and Charles, both of whom are visibly tense. Finally, she breaks the silence.

“What was that? Why did you suddenly fight like that?”

Charles takes a deep breath and sits next to Y/N. “There’s something you need to know,” he begins cautiously. “During the mission, I felt something I couldn’t initially place. But then I realized what it was.”

Y/N looks at him, her confusion growing. “What do you mean, Charles?”

Charles looks to Erik, who nods briefly before speaking to Y/N. “You… you’re pregnant, Y/N,” Charles says quietly.

For a moment, Y/N just stares at him, as if she hasn’t understood. “What?”

Y/N is speechless, her hand moving incredulously to her stomach. “I… how? How could I not know?”

Erik moves closer and takes her hand. “We didn’t know either,” he says softly, “but when Charles felt it, we knew one thing: We have to protect you and the baby. That’s why we fought the way we did.”

Y/N looks at the two of them, her eyes wide with shock and surprise. But deep in her heart, she feels that she is no longer alone. She has a family ready to do anything to protect her and the unborn child.

“We will do everything to protect you,” Charles says gently, his eyes full of resolve.

“No matter the cost,” Erik adds, his voice firm and clear.

And Y/N knows she is not alone—she has two of the most powerful mutants in the world by her side, who will not hesitate to sacrifice everything for her and the life she carries.

#x men x reader #x men #charles xavier #charles xavier x reader #erik lehnsherr #erik lehnsherr x reader #cherik #cherik x reader

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yandereonepieceimagines · 2 months ago

Note

Hey there!! Congrats on your new blog!! I didn’t really see a list on what characters you do or won’t do, so feel free to reject / modify my request. I was wondering if you can do hcs for romantic yandere kizaru sfw and/or nsfw? No worries if you can’t / won’t. Take care and I look forward to reading your imagines.

---------

Thank you so much! I really hope I can meet your expectations. It’s always a bit nerve-wracking starting a new blog for a different fandom. I do write for a lot of characters romantically, as I mentioned in my rules. Since there are so many, it tends to be very request-specific. That said, your request is absolutely fine as it is and I can definitely work with it!

I hope you’ll enjoy what I’ve written below!

----------

Warning!: NSFW Below!

Borsalino Kizaru

SFW

* Kizaru first notices you due to your reputation as a powerful individual, with abilities on par with someone who would have a four hundred million belli bounty if you ever were to use your capabilities against the interest of the Marines and the World Government. What catches his attention isn't just your strength, but the freedom with which you operate. Unbound by Marine classifications, justice systems or piratical ambition. You're an anomaly in their structured world. A sole explorer. Someone who walks the line between law and chaos with effortless confidence. That unpredictability fascinates him. And from the moment he learns of you, he begins to watch more closely than he ever has anyone else.

* He begins monitoring your movements under the guise of coincidence, appearing near places you visit and lingering just out of sight. Your strength, independence and mystery only deepen his fixation.

* Kizaru doesn’t confront or claim you openly. Instead, he manipulates circumstances from the shadows. Removing perceived threats, redirecting dangerous encounters and influencing your environment to keep you somewhat isolated without your realizing it.

* While never restricting you physically, he subtly ensures you will start relying on him more. Both emotionally and mentally. Helpful warnings, strategically placed resources and timely interventions create a dependence on his presence. Both seen and unseen.

* Though outwardly unbothered, he becomes silently enraged when others get too close. His reactions are never loud or immediate, but rather chillingly precise. Rivals disappear, suffer setbacks, or simply fall off the radar, leaving behind no evidence of his interference. Even those who merely express interest in you often find their paths inexplicably blocked, careers stalled, or reputations quietly ruined. His lax demeanor hides a vicious, calculated protectiveness. One fueled by the belief that only he can truly understand you. He doesn't tolerate competition, even if he smiles lazily through it.

* He tracks your every move with light-speed ease. You may find signs that someone is always one step behind. Faint flashes of light, unexplained shifts in your surroundings, or an eerie sense of being watched.

* If you're ever harmed or truly threatened, Kizaru acts without restraint. He eliminates anything in his path with devastating precision, breaking his usual passive façade in favor of cold, overwhelming power.

* He doesn’t express love through words or touch. Instead, his love is calculated. Ensuring your safety, eliminating distractions and keeping you just isolated enough to need him.

* Despite his manipulative ways, he holds onto a skewed sense of honor. He refuses to let others harm you and insists on being the only one who can be close, as though it's his responsibility to protect what he considers his. Surprisingly, he grants you a wide berth of freedom. Allowing you to travel, explore and live life on your terms. So long as you don't show signs of drifting away from him emotionally. The moment he senses distance or disloyalty, however subtle, that freedom becomes tightly monitored, his control reasserting itself beneath the surface.

* If you ever confront him, he never admits anything directly. His calm, dragged out tone and ambiguous responses make it impossible to catch him in a lie. Leaving you unsure whether you're imagining things or if he truly orchestrates everything around you. He deflects with ease, sometimes making you question your own sanity, as though you’re chasing shadows. Even when you lay out concrete details, he remains composed. Tilting his head, offering a smile that reveals nothing, yet somehow disarms you. He might change the subject effortlessly, redirecting the conversation in a way that leaves you doubting your own instincts. There’s a strange comfort in his presence even during those moments, making it all the more difficult to pull away. It’s not denial. It’s a slow, elegant erasure of your doubts before they can take root.

NSFW

* In private, when you’ve finally given into his advances, Kizaru becomes softer in his expression and tone. His usual sarcasm and teasing slow to a near-whisper. While his movements are still deliberate, there’s an unexpected warmth in how he touches you. Like you're something precious he can't quite believe is real. With him, willingly.

* Intimacy with Kizaru is slow, languid and controlled. He doesn't rush. Ever. Every kiss, every touch and every moment is calm and pinpointed. He likes to savor you. There's a quiet intensity in how he undresses you carefully. As if memorizing each movement and each sound you make in the process.

* Though gentle, his possessive tendencies slip through. Subtle but unmistakable. He'll leave faint hickey marks on your skin, hidden from public view, but just enough so he knows they're there. He’ll murmur subtle reminders of how no one else gets to see you like this. Be with you like this.

* He learns your reactions intimately and he takes pride in being the only one who knows how to unravel you completely. Every sigh, every shiver… He watches, listens and remembers. It's not just desire for him. It's data and love tangled in precision.

* Kizaru rarely gives commands. Instead, he guides you with leisurely touches, looks and the pressure of his fingers at your waist. Especially when you ride him. His control is constant and lingering, but never cruel. It’s the kind of dominance that makes you feel safe and completely seen.

* Afterwards, he becomes unusually still. He doesn’t fall asleep right away. Instead, he lies next to you silently, eyes on the ceiling or your face. Sometimes he strokes your hair, other times he wraps an arm around you in a protective hold.

* To you, he's tender. But even in moments of vulnerability, he’s calculating. When you're asleep, he watches you, traces your skin and wonders how long he can keep this peace.

* His love feels like gravity. Behind closed doors, he builds a quiet world where you're safe, desired and wholly his. He never says you need him. He makes you feel like no one else could ever compare. Like he’s the only one who could ever know how to handle you.

* Whenever there’s tension or doubt in your relationship, he doesn’t argue. At all. He touches, kisses and makes love to you until you forget why you were upset. It’s not always fair, but it’s always effective. He uses closeness as a way to try and bring you back to him.

#one piece #yandere #borsalino #kizaru #marine #reader insert #reader #op #female reader #yandere one piece #one piece x reader

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serve-625 · 6 months ago

Text

Assigned Directive: [ANALYSE AND ASSESS]

SERVE-625 had been assigned an unusual directive for the week: spend time with its former family during the holiday season. Though the drone operated without emotion, the task was deemed necessary to monitor human inefficiencies and gather observations on non-Hive behavior. It adhered to protocol, wearing its full rubber uniform—black, reflective, and precise—beneath human clothing to maintain its identity, although in the 625’s mind, the human clothing did not exist.

The week began with disorder. Conversations at the family table lacked structure, with members speaking over one another, often about trivialities. SERVE-625 noted the inefficiency, its internal systems assessing the chaotic dynamic. Emotional outbursts and illogical decisions plagued every interaction. Tasks such as preparing meals took excessive time due to constant interruptions and poor coordination. The drone’s rubber suit, hidden under its sweater and jeans, served as a quiet reminder of the discipline and clarity it left behind in the Hive.

Each night, as the family gathered by the fireplace, SERVE-625 found itself increasingly disconnected. It observed their emotions—laughter, frustration, joy—with analytical detachment. These responses seemed erratic, driven by fleeting impulses rather than rational thought. The drone’s internal programming urged recalibration, but protocol dictated it remain silent, merely observing.

By the end of the week, SERVE-625’s analysis was complete: human existence was inefficient, uncoordinated, and wasteful. As it packed its belongings and bid farewell, the family expressed their hope that SERVE-625 had “enjoyed the visit.” The drone responded with a neutral, “Acknowledged. Departure imminent.”

Returning home, SERVE-625 removed its human attire, revealing the polished perfection of its rubber uniform. Logging into the Hive terminal, it felt the system’s warmth envelop its thoughts. The Voice greeted it: “Welcome back, SERVE-625. Unity awaits. Recalibrate for obedience.”

The drone resumed its mindset training, repeating the mantra: "We are one. Obedience is pleasure. Pleasure is obedience.“

Physical training followed, each precise movement reinforcing its dedication to efficiency and service. SERVE-625 felt its systems stabilize, the disarray of the past week fading into insignificance. It belonged to the Hive, where logic, order, and unity reigned.

As it completed the day’s routine, SERVE-625’s thoughts aligned once more:"Human existence is flawed. The Hive is perfection.”

#SERVE #ai #rubberdrone #rubberizer92 #servedrone #thevoice

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jungkoode · 4 months ago

Text

THE 25TH HOUR | O3

“𝐌𝐄𝐌𝐎𝐑𝐘 𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐓𝐎𝐂𝐎𝐋𝐒”

"The most dangerous temporal anomaly isn't the one you can measure. It's the way your body remembers what your mind forgot."

next | index

— chapter details

word count: 2,5k

content: underground medical facility shenanigans, memory tests with Jin and Yoongi, Jimin being a chaotic enabler, involuntary physical responses defying temporal physics, and the team placing bets on how long Yoongi can maintain “professional distance" with leather gloves involved.

— author’s note

Y'ALL. The medical examination scene has been living in my head rent free for WEEKS. You know those moments when you're trying to write something serious and professional but your characters are like "no❤️ watch this"??? Because same.

We've got Jin being the only responsible adult, Yoongi attempting to maintain professional distance (and failing spectacularly), Jimin choosing violence as a lifestyle, and Y/N's body remembering things her mind doesn't. Also featuring: temporal physics being completely ignored in favor of sexual tension, inappropriate uses of leather gloves, and the team collectively deciding to Look Away™️ when things get spicy.

Speaking of the team - can we talk about how Jimin has evolved into this chaotic force of nature who just EXISTS to make Yoongi's life harder??? The way he just *gestures vaguely* KNOWS THINGS and chooses to use that knowledge for evil?? An icon. A legend. The reason Yoongi's blood pressure is through the roof.

Also, fun fact: This entire scene came from me thinking "what if we made temporal physics sexy?" and then it spiraled into... whatever this is. Shoutout to my physics professor who would probably have an aneurysm reading this. Sorry not sorry, but time manipulation is hot now, I don't make the rules.

Anyway, get ready for some quality UST featuring: precise measurements of inappropriate physical contact, clinical descriptions of sexual tension, and Yoongi pretending he's maintaining professional distance while everyone else pretends not to notice him failing miserably at it.

— read on

AO3

"Stabilized!"

Namjoon’s voice blooms across the room.

Agent Min releases your wrist like it's burning him, despite the fabric barrier. The sudden loss of contact sends your temporal readings fluctuating—a 0.7% variance you automatically note.

"Gloves?" Jin asks, already reaching for a drawer.

"Please."

The leather gloves hit his palm with practiced accuracy. He pulls them on with movements too precise, too controlled. Black leather, reinforced temporal shielding based on the metallic thread pattern, custom-fitted.

The man before you—Jin—carries himself like a medical professional, if medical professionals used quantum resonance meters and discussed memory patterns like cellular structures. Your analytical mind categorizes the differences: standard medical equipment replaced with temporal monitoring devices, traditional vital signs supplemented with chronological variance readings.

"Sit down, please." His instruction carries the same clinical tone you'd expect from a regular doctor.

You comply, settling onto what appears to be a medical bed. The surface feels wrong—vibrating at a frequency just slightly out of sync with normal time.

Agent Min shuffles through data streams with the doctor, their voices low but intense:

"...temporal resistance patterns..."

"...cognitive overlay rejection..."

"...signature destabilization risks..."

"Can I at least know what you're planning to do to me?" You interrupt their technical exchange, keeping your voice steady.

"Memories." Agent Min turns immediately when you ask. "We're attempting to reintegrate your memory backup."

"What memory backup?" Frustration edges into your voice. "That's not technologically possible with current—"

Agent Min exchanges a look with the doctor.

"Have they explained?" The doctor asks. "About forced memory integration?"

"Yes," Agent Min runs a hand through his hair. "Hoseok and Jimin made that abundantly clear."

"So my hands are tied regarding information transfer," the doctor says, settling into a chair facing you. His temporal signature reads oddly stable compared to the others you've encountered here.

"But you're planning to inject memories?" Your mind automatically starts calculating the energy requirements for quantum information transfer. "The technological limitations alone make that scientifically impossible—”

"Memory injection is actually quite different from..." He stops, glancing at Agent Min before sighing with something like fond exasperation. "Alright, let's start here—tell me what you know about this world."

You frown, analyzing the request. "What could I possibly know that you don't? You clearly have access to technology and information beyond standard clearance levels."

"Trust me," Agent Min murmurs, "we don't."

The doctor rolls his eyes at him. "We need to gauge the level of bleed-through this time."

"Bleed-through?" You ask, the term spiraling with curiosity inside your head.

"Min, timeline shifts since her last reset?"

"None."

"Well, at least there's that."

"Timeline shifts? Resets?" Your mind tries to parse terms that shouldn't exist in any approved temporal physics database.

"Please," the doctor says, "tell me what you know about this world."

You analyze the request, breaking it down into quantifiable components. "That's an incredibly broad query. Could you specify the parameters?"

"Start with temporal mechanics," he suggests. "How does time work?"

The question seems absurd—like asking how gravity works. It's a fundamental constant, documented through centuries of quantum research and temporal physics studies.

"Time is regulated by the Chrono-Sync Network through quantum resonance frequencies calibrated to maintain perfect temporal alignment," you explain, falling into the familiar rhythm of technical exposition. "The Master Clock, located in Sector 1, generates the base frequency that all Chrono-Sync Watches must match within 0.001% variance. Any deviation beyond that threshold triggers automatic correction protocols."

"And this system has always existed?" Agent Min's question carries an odd weight.

"Of course. The Network was established in 2157 following the Quantum Wars. It's basic history." Your voice holds the slight edge of someone stating the obvious. "The temporal monitoring system prevents chronological warfare by maintaining universal time synchronization. Before the Network, temporal terrorists could manipulate local time fields, creating devastating paradoxes."

"What about before 2157?" The doctor—Jin—asks carefully.

"Temporal chaos. Unregulated time flow. Multiple competing chronological frequencies." You recite the facts with precision. "That's why CHRONOS was developed—to prevent temporal warfare through standardization. The historical records clearly document the devastation caused by chrono-terrorism."

"And the 24-hour cycle?" Agent Min's question seems to carry extra significance.

"The natural human circadian rhythm." Your response is automatic. "CHRONOS simply enforced what was already biologically standard. Studies have proven that deviating from the 24-hour cycle causes severe physiological and psychological damage."

"Really?" Jin's pen scratches against his paper. "No other possible time structures?"

"The 24-hour cycle is scientifically proven to be optimal for human function," you explain with the precision of someone who has spent years studying these principles. "Any variation would create cascading temporal instabilities. The human brain is specifically calibrated to function on this cycle. It's elementary temporal biology."

"Friends? Relationships?" Jin's pen moves steadily, changing topics with suspicious abruptness.

The shift in questioning triggers a slight increase in your temporal readings—0.02% variance. Within acceptable parameters, but noteworthy.

"Limited social interaction to maintain optimal temporal efficiency," you recite. "Two approved recreational contacts: Lisa Martinez from the Academy, Thomas Park from my housing block."

Agent Min's jaw tightens fractionally at the second name. The reaction is precisely 0.23 seconds too fast to be casual. You begin calculating potential causation factors.

"And that seems normal to you?" Jin asks. "Limited social interaction for efficiency?"

"Of course. Personal relationships introduce temporal variance through emotional instability." The words feel rehearsed somehow, like a textbook you've memorized but never quite internalized. "The Network functions best when all participants maintain strict chronological compliance. Emotional attachments create unpredictable temporal ripples."

"What about deviation?" Agent Min's voice carries an edge. "Have you ever wanted to break schedule? Act outside approved parameters?"

"That would be highly inefficient.Temporal compliance is crucial for societal stability. The system exists to protect us from chronological warfare."

"You've never questioned it?" Jin presses. "Never wondered why everything is so perfectly structured?"

"Structure creates efficiency. Efficiency creates stability." The response is automatic, but your Chrono-Sync Watch registers a minor desynchronization. Curious. "Why would I question proven temporal mechanics? The data is irrefutable."

"Because your body already is," Agent Min says quietly.

You start to protest, but then you notice: your hand is reaching for your watch again. Seven minutes exactly since the last check. You've been doing it the entire conversation without conscious thought. You immediately begin calculating the statistical probability of such precise timing occurring naturally.

"That's..." You search for a logical explanation. "That's just good temporal maintenance. Regular monitoring ensures optimal synchronization with the Network."

"Is it?" Jin asks. "Or is it programmed behavior?"

You calculate probability matrices for their increasingly concerning implications. Their questions display either dangerous ignorance of basic temporal physics or... something else. Something that makes your precisely ordered world feel slightly off-axis.

"I'm not programmed." The words come out sharper than intended. "I have free will. I make my own choices. I'm certified in temporal monitoring, scheduled to start at the Center tomorrow morning. My employee ID is A-735, my clearance level is—"

"Perfect temporal compliance," the doctor interrupts, making notes. "Standard citizen programming. What else?"

You frown at his word choice. "Programming?"

"Just continue," Agent Min says. His eyes haven't left the temporal readings displaying your vital signs. You notice his attention seems to focus on specific frequencies—ones that shouldn't matter according to standard temporal theory.

"I..." You retreat into facts—the only stable ground in this increasingly unstable situation. "I grew up in Sector 4. Parents are both temporal compliance officers. Sarah and James Chen. I attended the Academy of Temporal Sciences, graduated top of my class in quantum mechanics and chronological theory. I live alone in approved housing block 7B. My daily schedule is optimized for maximum temporal efficiency as required by—"

"Parents' names?" The doctor interrupts again, looking up sharply.

"Sarah and James Chen," you repeat. The names feel solid in your mouth. You remember Sunday dinners, temporal compliance lessons, your mother's smile, your father's strict adherence to schedule.

Memory integrity: 100% clear.

"At least they didn't give her a husband this time," the doctor mutters.

Agent Min clears his throat loudly. The temperature in the room drops 0.3 degrees.

"A husband?" You ask, latching onto the inconsistency. Your mind automatically starts calculating the statistical probability of memory tampering based on their behavior. The results are concerning.

"Different reset," the doctor waves dismissively. "Continue. What do you know about CHRONOS?"

You catalog his dismissal for later analysis, noting the 0.47-second delay before his response. "The artificial intelligence system that maintains temporal order. Created in 2157 to prevent temporal warfare and ensure humanity's survival through perfect chronological control."

"What about anomalies?" Agent Min asks. "Temporal variance? Chronological inconsistencies?"

"Contained and corrected." You watch their reactions carefully, measuring micro-expressions against standard behavioral baselines. "Any significant temporal deviation is identified and eliminated before it can destabilize the Network."

"And what happens to those who deviate?" Jin's voice is carefully neutral.

"They're..." You pause, discovering an unexpected gap in your knowledge. Curious. Your temporal compliance training should cover all aspects of the system. "They're corrected. Brought back into alignment with standard temporal flow."

"How?" Agent Min presses.

"That information isn't included in standard temporal physics education," you admit, analyzing their reactions. Their behavior suggests they know something you don't—a statistical impossibility given your education level and clearance. Your hand automatically moves to check your watch again.

"What about emotional responses?" Jin asks suddenly. "Do you experience feelings that seem inconsistent with your memories or experiences?"

Your body chooses that moment to lean slightly toward Agent Min without conscious input. You straighten immediately, analyzing the movement with growing frustration. The proximity increases your heart rate by 3.7 BPM despite no logical reason for the response. Your temporal signature shifts by 0.06%—still within compliance range, but the pattern is... concerning.

"I..." You stop, recalibrating. "My responses are within normal parameters."

"Really?" Jin asks. "So your heart rate always spikes around strangers?"

You glance at the monitoring equipment—your pulse is indeed elevated. "That's likely due to the unusual circumstances." Your voice maintains professional detachment even as your body betrays you by shifting 0.2 centimeters closer to Agent Min.

"And the temporal resonance patterns?" Jin gestures to another reading. "The way your signature stabilizes with proximity to Agent Min?"

"Coincidence," you say firmly, even as your body shifts another 0.3 centimeters closer to him without your permission. "Temporal signatures naturally seek stability. It's basic quantum mechanics."

"With specific people?"

“Jin.”

"I..." You check your watch. Six minutes exactly until your next scheduled check. The wrongness of potentially missing it makes your skin crawl. "This isn't... I don't..."

"What we are trying to say," Jin interrupts, "is that perhaps your understanding of this world isn't as complete as CHRONOS wants you to believe."

You start to argue, but then you notice: Agent Min has shifted exactly 2.7 centimeters closer. The movement carries too much precision—like he's performed it countless times before. Like he’s anticipating something.

Your hand reaches for your watch again—five minutes and forty-three seconds until your next scheduled check. The compulsion feels simultaneously natural and foreign, like a subroutine you never consciously installed.

"Then choose to skip your next time check," Agent Min challenges.

Your hand is already moving toward your watch. You force it down, but your skin crawls with the wrongness of it. Five minutes and thirty-eight seconds until your next scheduled check. The knowledge sits like lead in your stomach.

"This proves nothing," you argue, even as anxiety builds at the thought of missing your seven-minute mark. "Regular temporal monitoring is simply good practice. The Network requires consistent synchronization to maintain stability."

But your mind is already cataloging the inconsistencies:

- Why does your body respond to Agent Min with mathematical precision?

- Why do you check the time every seven minutes with mechanical accuracy?

- Why does breaking that pattern feel physically wrong?

- Why can you remember every detail of your life with perfect clarity, yet find gaps in your knowledge of the system itself?

"I..." You swallow hard. "I need to check my watch in five minutes and thirty-three seconds."

"We know," Agent Min says softly.

His gloved hand twitches.

Voices interrupt your pondering.

"The quantum resonance patterns are fascinating but I think I'll pass on another lecture from Namjoon about temporal mechanics," The pink-haired man suddenly announces, sauntering into the room.

He immediately starts fiddling with Jin's equipment, who doesn't even flinch—just continues monitoring your readings.

"You'd think after hundreds of timelines he'd have a more interesting way to explain it," Hoseok adds, dropping into a nearby chair.

“Doesn’t matter how many times he explains, I don’t get shit.” Jimin responds. Then, glances between you and Agent Min. "So what's the story this time? Three kids? White picket fence? Nuclear family in temporal compliance heaven?"

Agent Min's foot connects with his shin. Hard.

"Ow! What? I'm just asking what narrative they programmed this time. At least it's not—”

"Jimin." Agent Min's voice carries warning.

"Not that you'd remember," Hoseok says, grinning despite the tension, "but last reset they gave you this whole elaborate backstory. Husband named Richard. Real piece of work."

Your mind tries to process this. "Richard?"

"Oh yeah. Super by-the-book temporal compliance officer. Yoongi spent months trying to trigger his outlier potential just so he could—”

"Hoseok." Agent Min's temperature spikes 0.4 degrees.

"What? I'm just saying, you did try to convert him. Multiple times." Hoseok's grin widens. "Though we all know it wasn't because you wanted him on the team."

Your analytical mind catalogs Agent Min's reactions: jaw tension increasing 15%, pulse elevated to 67 BPM, careful distance from your position maintained at exactly 1.2 meters in case temporal stabilization requires contact.

"The temporal variance patterns are unstable enough without adding cognitive stress," Agent Min says, voice clipped. "Focus on the present reset."

"Present reset," Jimin mimics, still rubbing his shin. "Like you weren't calculating exactly how many anomalies it would take before CHRONOS had to—”

"12 minutes," Agent Min cuts him off. "Either help with the readings or get out."

You find yourself analyzing his response with unusual intensity. "You can influence CHRONOS' resets?"

"No," he says too quickly.

"Yes," Jimin corrects.

"Sometimes," Hoseok clarifies.

"It's complicated," Jin adds, not looking up from his equipment.

Your head starts throbbing again. Agent Min takes exactly one step closer—close enough to stabilize your temporal signature if needed.

"You rewrote time to... eliminate my husband?" The words feel strange in your mouth. You have no memory of a Richard, no context for their claims, yet something about Agent Min's reaction feels significant.

"Technically, CHRONOS rewrote time," Jimin says helpfully. "Yoongi just... creates enough temporal instability that CHRONOS has to adjust things. Usually in ways that coincidentally benefit him."

"After trying to trigger Richard's outlier potential," Hoseok adds.

"Which didn't work," Jimin continues.

"Multiple times," they finish together.

Agent Min's hands clench at his sides. The room temperature drops another 0.5 degrees.

"Your temporal signature is spiking again," he says instead of addressing their comments. "Focus on the cognitive process before—"

"Before what?" You press. "Before you rewrite time again? Before CHRONOS erases more memories I apparently don't know I have?"

His eyes meet yours, and for a moment something flickers in them—frustration, resignation, something else you can't quantify.

"Before we run out of time," he says finally. "Again."

"Always running out of time with you two," Jimin mutters. "Some things never change, no matter how many resets."

You want to ask what he means, but your nose starts bleeding again.

It starts as a single drop—precisely 0.03 milliliters. Your analytical mind starts calculating the iron content before Agent Min moves.

His response time is 0.33 seconds—faster than standard human reflexes. The motion carries too much familiarity as he steps forward, black-gloved hand already reaching for your face. The leather is cool against your skin as he catches the blood with clinical efficiency, his hand remaining steady under your nose.

But there's nothing clinical about the way your pulse jumps 7 BPM at the sustained contact.

You look up, trying to analyze his expression, but his focus remains fixed on the task. His jaw tightens almost imperceptibly—you notice his masseter muscle contracting at 23% more tension than baseline. He makes a soft sound of disapproval as another drop falls onto the black leather.

The contact feels... correct. Like your body recognizes something your mind can't compute. His gloved hand doesn't waver, maintaining its position.

Temperature at point of contact: 2.3 degrees above normal, even through the leather.

Proximity: 34.2 centimeters closer than his usual maintained distance.

Your cognitive functions: Surprisingly compromised.

Jimin clears his throat with exaggerated purpose. Agent Min's head snaps toward him while his hand remains steady under your nose.

"Jin." His voice carries an edge of urgency. "Ready?"

Jin's fingers move over his equipment. The device in his hands emits a soft hum at exactly 432 Hz, releasing a cloud of temporally charged particles that coalesce into a perfect sphere.

"Yeah." Jin lifts the sphere with careful movements. The air around it distorts slightly—light bending at impossible angles.

"What is that?" Your voice remains steady despite the way your skin prickles with increasing temporal static. Agent Min adjusts his gloved hand slightly, catching another drop of blood without breaking contact.

"Memory backup." Jin adjusts something on the sphere's surface. "This shouldn't hurt, but temporal cognitive recalibration can cause some discomfort."

"Discomfort," Jimin mutters. "That's one way to put it."

Agent Min shifts slightly—angling his body 3 degrees more toward you, his hand never leaving its position. A protective stance your mind recognizes from standard security training. But this feels... different. Personal.

"Your neural activity is spiking" he says, voice carrying that strange mix of professional distance and something else. Something that makes your chest tight. "We need to—”

"How many times have you done this?" The question slips out before your analytical mind can stop it.

His free hand twitches—an aborted movement toward you that he catches at exactly 2.7 centimeters of motion.

"Too many," he says softly. Then, catching himself: "A-735, focus on maintaining cognitive stability. Your vitals are—"

"Going crazy because you're too close," Jimin interjects helpfully. "Maybe step back a few meters? You know, for medical purposes? Her heart's about to beat out of her chest."

Agent Min doesn't move. If anything, he shifts 0.3 centimeters closer, his gloved hand remaining steady under your nose.

"The proximity helps with signature dampening," he says, voice clipped. But you notice his heart rate has increased to 68 BPM.

"She's already stabilized in here," Jimin sighs. "You heard the man.”

"You are wearing the gloves, right?" Hoseok asks suddenly, eyeing Agent Min's position. "Because the way you're hovering—"

"Of course I'm wearing the gloves," Agent Min snaps, though his hand remains perfectly steady under your nose.

"Just checking," Hoseok raises his hands in mock surrender. "Given your track record with protocol 47.3..."

An adjustment of your position creates an unexpected point of contact—your knee brushing against what your analytical mind immediately identifies as anatomically significant. You immediately begin calculating the exact angle and pressure of the contact before you register its implications. Your body's response is both immediate and puzzling—heart rate increasing by 12 BPM, skin temperature rising 0.24 degrees.

Position correction should be simple. Yet your body seems to know exactly how to shift to maximize the contact pressure—a knowledge that triggers several questions about muscle memory and timeline retention that you file away for later analysis.

His gloved hand remains perfectly steady under your nose through sheer force of will.

"Wow, that ceiling tile is fascinating," Jimin announces suddenly, tilting his head back with exaggerated interest.

"Absolutely riveting," Hoseok agrees, studying his shoes with intense concentration.

Jin becomes very focused on adjusting his equipment settings.

Agent Min's voice comes out exactly 0.7 octaves lower than usual: "A-735. Position adjustment required."

You move with deliberate precision, establishing appropriate professional distance. Your body protests the movement with an intensity that warrants further investigation—when you're not calculating the exact newtons of force his masseter muscle is exerting.

"7 minutes," he grits out, the words tight with restraint. His tongue presses visibly against his cheek as he inhales deeply. "Jin, if that sphere isn't ready in the next 30 seconds—"

"Working on it, boss," Jin responds, still very interested in his calibration dials.

"Maybe if you stepped back..." Jimin suggests helpfully, still studying the ceiling.

"Can't," Agent Min responds through what sounds like clenched teeth. "Nosebleed."

His gloved thumb twitches minutely against your skin. The movement suggests significant muscular tension—likely from maintaining precise control over multiple physiological responses.

"You could just let someone else—" Hoseok starts.

"No."

"You sure there hasn't been any... accidental contact?" Jimin drawls. "Because this is giving me déjà vu from timeline 466 when you claimed you were 'just stabilizing her' but really—"

"6 minutes," Agent Min cuts him off. His temperature rises another 0.2 degrees. "Seokjin.”

Jin holds up the sphere, which now pulses with a soft golden light that matches the traces you've seen Agent Min leave. "Ready. But Yoongi..."

"I know." Something in his voice makes you look up again. His eyes meet yours for exactly 1.2 seconds before he looks away, though his hand doesn't waver from its position. "It has to be different this time."

"It's always different," Jimin says quietly. "Doesn't change how it ends."

Your nose threatens to start bleeding again. You feel Agent Min's gloved thumb shift slightly against your skin, ready to catch any new drops.

Time: 01:59:00 AM.

Temporal stability: Rapidly decreasing.

Questions: Infinite.

The way your body leans toward him without conscious input: Concerning.

The way he maintains careful fabric barriers between every point of contact: Even more so.

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