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@sweetpainterdreamer
I LOVE READING “X READER” SO MUCH.
Definitely not (totally is) a cat person
begged
alysa liu x gf reader !
it had been non stop for alysa. a month away in milan, which you two handled pretty well. she texted you everyday and called as much as she could. you didn’t pressure her either because you knew she was extremely busy. then came the short press after which you thought you could handle. she was the most deserving person in this world of her new found fame. you pushed your feelings to the side, because it felt selfish.
the feeling started slowly, she stopped texting as much. which you excepted, she was making constant back to back appearances. then calls went from everyday to once a week, if you were lucky. when you called it felt like you were bothering her. she was always distracted with something else.
“do you like the blue or red top more?” you asked over facetime. alysa was half paying attention, scrolling through her phone.
“whichever babe they both look good on you” she said not even batting an eye towards the camera.
“that’s the issue”
“well figure it out. i’ve gotta go, im so tired from today” she turned over in the hotel bed and turned off the light.
you were a bit taken back over her reaction, but you tried to reason with it. she was probably just tired and overwhelmed. so you nodded reaching for your phone, “okay i love you bye”
“ditto”
ditto? never in the past two years has alysa ever said that. who even says that now in days, whatever. don’t overreact.
after awhile the calls stopped coming all together. it’s not like she was fully ghosting you either, she would send you stuff from time to time. a dumb tiktok or instagram reel but other than that you didn’t hear from her. she never invited you to events which you understood. she wanted to keep you away from the public, which you thought you wanted too. she never acknowledged you in interviews and when she would bring you up, she would refer to you as just a friend. it hurt more than you wanted to admit but you never told her.
finally press was over and alysa came back home. expect she didn’t, she was always somewhere else with her friends or with her family, you didnt mind. you knew how much eveyone in her life meant to her so you were cool with it. it just felt like you came second and that never used to happen. it made you think maybe you did something, but there was nothing. the only thing you were guilty of was begging for her attention. so you stopped being so “needy” in hopes she’d come back around. she still didn’t. you were almost completely checked out of the relationship by the time she was about to leave for tour. you knew yourself and you couldn’t continue like this so you invited her to dinner to celebrate all her accomplishments. in reality you were ready to soft launch a breakup, maybe just suggest a break. you made reservations at her favorite restaurant downtown, you got ready for the first time in months. you looked at yourself in the mirror and felt like the old version of yourself. the one who wasn’t slowly loosing her in a relationship. when you first met alysa you had sworn off being in any kind of relationship, but she snuck in. she was so sweet and attentive to you. you encouraged her to go back to skating two years ago because you knew how important it was to her. you were at every competition, reassuring her after every bad practice, and when the peak of it came she pushed you to the side. something switched within her, maybe it was the sudden raise to fame. you didn’t know and you were too tired to keep trying to figure it out. you sat on the couch putting on some documentary while you waited for her. you waited all night for her to step through the door and she never did. you called to cancel the reservation and tears began to escape your eyes. it was really over for you, she never stood you up like this. what could she be doing that so important?
alysa didn’t fully realize how shitty she was treating you. she knew she wasn’t putting in the same energy as she once did but she thought you understood. her new found fame was overwhelming and she didn’t need to fake with you, she was exhausted. when she got home she just needed to be on her own but her family and friends never let her have it. she loved them dearly but all she wanted was to be alone with her own thoughts. you did that for her, you understood she needed her time and you gave it. she didn’t think you were beating yourself about it all the entire time. she didn’t notice the mess she had created. so when you called for dinner she really didn’t want to go, but she missed you. more than she wanted to admit. her friends had organized a bonfire the same day and alysa was sure she would be able to squeeze in both things. but then she had a couple drinks, more people showed up, and she lost track of time.
“dude weren’t you supposed to leave early for dinner with your girl?” one of her friends questioned.
alysa felt her stomach drop, she reached for her phone in her pocket. it was one in the morning, she cursed under her breath. she said her goodbyes and ordered an uber to your apartment.
“do you know anywhere i can get some flowers right now?” she asked the uber driver. he gave her a puzzled look and he shook his head. alysa snuck further into the seat.
once she got to your apartment she thanked the uber driver and tried her best to compose herself. she kept mumbling her apology to herself. i love you im sorry i can make it up to you. she stopped when she saw the planters by the leasing office, they were full of small flowers. she picked a few making a small makeshift bouquet.
all the lights were all in your apartment were off, except the tv that was playing. alysa closed the door quietly, she saw you had flowers and a card for her on the counter. she smiled to herself as she read it, guilt flooding over her. she looked over to the couch where you laying. you were still in your dress, phone in hand, and you had been crying. your mascara was almost completely gone and there were tears stains all over your face. alysa felt terrible seeing you like this, knowing she was the reason. she quietly went into your bathroom and grabbed your makeup wipes. she tried to wipe off your makeup carefully without waking you, but you flinched the moment she started. you turned over mumbling something.
“hey baby it’s me, i’m so so sorry. i can make it up you i promise” alysa whispered to you rubbing your back.
you pushed her her hand off, “don’t touch me” you said harshly.
“what?”
“you heard me” you were awake the entire time. you waited all night for alysa and pretended to be asleep the moment you heard her come in.
“over some dinner? we can go tomorrow”
“are you kidding me right now? are you drunk?” you could smell the alcohol on her.
“what? no”
“you’re fucking lying to me! get out!” you got up pointing to the door.
“dude relax i-”
“don’t tell me to fucking relax right now! do you understand how shitty you’ve made me feel these past weeks? no, you don’t because you’re off living your best life” you walked into your room in hopes she wouldn’t follow.
“are you seriously mad at me right now? i’m exhausted i can’t be the world’s best girlfriend right now!”
“oh my god you’re pathetic! i’m not asking you to put me first, i’m begging you to consider me! you’ve been home three weeks and i haven’t seen you once”
“well i wanted to be with my friends and family-”
“i am your friend alysa! im your girlfriend remember? or did you play too much into the just friends narrative?”
“what are you talking about?”
“i’m talking about how you’re ashamed of me! you don’t acknowledge our relationship at all and i thought i was okay with it, but it hurts. you keep me hidden from everything.”
“i’m trying to protect you! the fucking internet is ruthless they’d rip you to shreds”
“excuse me? what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“shit i didn’t mean it like that. i mean that you’re so special to me i don’t want people trying to ruin what we have”
all you could do is roll your eyes and walked into your bathroom. you slammed the door shut. alysa didn’t know what to do with herself, you two have never fought like this. she sighed and sat on the other side of the door in hopes you’d come out soon.
“come on baby i’m sorry. let’s just talk about this please” her voice cracked at the end.
on the other side of the door you felt awful. however all the pain alysa was experiencing in the last five minutes was what you had felt the past month. she didn’t deserve to be forgive now or even at all.
alysa woke up in your bed, her head already starting to pound. she was in one of her old tshirts, aspirin and water on the bedside table. she smiled to herself before getting up to follow the scent coming from the kitchen. you had your back turned as you finished up making breakfast. out of instinct alysa didn’t announce herself, all she did was wrap her arms around your waist. you had your airpods in and weren’t expecting her to be up, so you dropped the pan on your foot.
“fuck!” you yelled immediately clutching your foot.
“holy shit! i’m so sorry i didn’t mean to” alysa immediately went to grab ice from the freezer.
“don’t bother ive got it” you pushed pass her grabbing a cloth and running it under cold water.
“i’m really sorry i didnt-”
“you didn’t mean it, i know just sit down” your tone was harsh.
alysa didn’t push back, she took a seat at your dinner table and waited for you. she watched as you put the cloth on your foot and winced in pain.
“are you sure you don’t want me-”
“no! i don’t need your help alysa!” you didn’t mean to yell. you were frustrated with her, you couldn’t look at her without feeling some type of way. mostly anger and hurt. you sighed as you walked over to sit across from her at table, “look i’ve been meaning to talk you about this. i’m so happy for you all that you’ve done this past month but-”
“are you breaking up with me?” alysa cut in quickly.
you didn’t even dodge the question, “yes” was all you said as you looked down at your foot.
alysa didn’t know how to react, all she could do was scoff and get up to grab her things. you didnt fight her on it, you sat at the table and watched her leave.
“i’m sorry it had to come to this” she said reaching for the door.
“me too”
she didn’t even look back at you before slamming the door. you sat in your chair and started to sob. not only was your foot burning but you just watched the most important person in your life walk out on you. she didn’t even fight for you, and that’s what hurt most.
alysa could hear your sobs from the other side of the door. she wanted to go back inside and tell you it was all okay. she understood how much she hurt you and wanted to work on it, but the damage was done. she knew wasn’t in the place to be there for you like she once was.
things went back to normal pretty quickly for you. you slowly started coming out of your shell again. your friends noticed it first, you started accepting their invitations. frequent parties, bar hopping, and day drinking. it wasn’t really you, they knew you were hurting after everything with alysa.
“are you going to mel’s party tonight?” one of your friends asked as you two sat on your couch.
“will there be alcohol?”
“yeah”
“then count me in”
your friend paused a second, “alysa will be there”
“okay” you shrugged your shoulders.
“it doesn’t bother you?”
“why would it?”
“because she broke your heart and you haven’t seen her since she walked out on you like two months ago”
“knowing her she’ll probably flake” you said getting up to get ready for the party.
alysa didn’t want to be there. she had been a wreck since the breakup. her friends hadn’t seen her since she got back from tour a week ago. she insisted she was just burnt out. everyone figured it about the breakup pretty quickly though and were shocked. you two were the couple that was supposed to make it all the way. when mel reached out to alysa about tonight she had her excuse ready.
“i just haven’t seen you since you got from tour. i doubt she’ll be there anyway” mel pleaded over the phone.
“why would i care if she’s there or not?”
“because it’s clear you’re avoiding the whole situation. just come get drunk and have fun!”
“yeah maybe” alysa hung up the phone. she threw her phone and looked out the window. she hadn’t been in this kind of rut in awhile. it was slowly ruining her that she let herself mess up one of the most important things in her life. she got up slowly taking her time to get ready just in case she wanted to back out last minute. at the end of the night she was on the couch red solo cup filled with random liquids. her friends couldn’t stop laughing, while all she could think about was you. you should be sitting right next to her. her arm around your shoulder as you bump her to make she was okay. she would smile at you and kiss your temple before going back to the conversation. that was no longer, she was now on the edge of the couch, alone. being left out of whatever story was being told. the door bell rang and mel stumbled to get it.
“you made it!” she shrieked.
“these girls take too long to get ready” your friend cole answered. you playfully smacked his shoulder.
“that’s not true he was late to pick us up mel. happy birthday!” you hugged her.
“don’t be mad at me, but alysa is here” she whispered into your hair.
“it’s all good” you pulled away for the hug smiling at her. she grabbed your hand and dragged you to the living room where eveyone was.
“party is here!” mel announced and the small group who all cheered. you didn’t dare to look around in fear you’d lock eyes with alysa. “let’s take shots come on guys!” mel dragged you into the kitchen and you grabbed cole’s hand. you and cole had been friends for years, since you were teenagers. he always had a thing for you but you were too blind to see it. alysa always knew, she hated him for it. his lingering looks when you two were together, but now? the way he got all red when you grabbed his hand, he had his chance with you. she watched carefully as you all took shots with mel. your back turned to her, cole saw her looking and went to whisper something in your ear. you pushed him playful before grabbing another shot.
“she doesn’t like him” your other friend said taking a seat next to her. alysa looked at her puzzled before she continued, “don’t tell her i told you, but she’s a wreck. she keeps saying she’s fine but she misses you a lot.“
“i miss her too”
“you need to talk to her soon, because cole is going to make a move. i can’t stand him he’ll literally suck all the fun out of her”
“what do i even say?”
“that you miss her and you’re sorry?”
“i-”
“look you have 20 minutes. i’ll trap her in the bathroom and come get you” she tapped alysa’s thigh then went into the kitchen to get you. she didn’t have to go very far because you were standing right in front of the doorway. you saw the way she touched alysa.
“that’s new” cole said pointing between the two of them.
“shut up cole” then you took the drink from his hand and chugged the rest.
-
alysa was pacing in the hallway while she waited. she only had one shot at this.
“you know how that looked right?” you yelled at her.
“i don’t want your ex girlfriend dude chill”
“you’re telling me to chill? i’ve confined in you and you’re gonna-” you stopped when you saw alysa. you cleared your throat pushing yourself past her to get to the bathroom. you left the door opened hoping your friend was the one following you in, but it was alysa instead.
“look i’m not mad or anything but why her? there’s so many people in this world” you continued on your little rant not even noticing who was in the bathroom with you.
“i’m really sorry babe. i know i hurt you and-”
you stopped in your tracks and turned to see alysa in front of the door. her hand on the knob because she was scared you’d try to walk away.
“don’t this to me please” a soft sob started to come from you, “i’m really drunk i can’t even-” you felt a wave of nausea hit. you started throwing up into the toilet. alysa wasted no time running to you side pulling your hair back and rubbing your back. she whispered sweet nothings into you ear as you threw up.
“i’m here for you”
“i’ve got you”
“you’re doing to so great”
“you look so pretty when not even trying”
“why are you doing this to me?” you cried into the toilet.
“what am i doing to you other than being here for you right now?”
“how do i know you’re not going to hurt me like you did before?”
“because i’m done with it. im done with skating for good”
“yeah okay i’ve heard before” you threw up again crying a bit more. you felt disgusting.
“i know im so sorry. you’re the most important thing to me in my life right now. i am so sorry i didn’t make you feel that way” she pressed a gentle kiss to top of forehead, “but i promise if you let me in again, ill prove to you how important you are to me”
“you swear?”
“swear”
“i swear to everything if you make me look like a idiot i’ll murder you”
alsya laughed at you shaking her head. you wiped your mouth with a towel you had found. then tried to get up but stumbled back immediately, she caught you without hesitation. she helped you wash your hands, smooth out your hair, and rinse out your mouth.
“does mouth wash expire?” you asked grabbing the bottle alysa had found in the cabinet.
“i don’t see one on here so-”
you took a quick shot of it gurgling it in your mouth.
“i look like shit, i wanna go home” you said looking at yourself in the mirror after spitting out the mouth wash.
“yeah of course, my place or yours?”
“whichever is closest. i just wanna shower and sleep” you could already feel a headache coming.
alysa nodded grabbing her car keys out of her pocket. she helped you walk down the stairs and yelled a quick bye at everyone.
she placed you gently into the passenger seat and put your seat belt on. she rushed to get into the drivers seat and you were already fast alseep. she drove especially carefully back to her place making sure not to wake you. she would look over at you constantly to make you were okay. alysa helped you out the car and up to her room. she laid you on the bed while she started up the shower.
“can you come with me? i need help washing my hair” you startled her as she came back into the room. she wasn’t expecting you to be awake.
“yeah of course come on” she reached out her arms and pulled you up.
-
“i really missed you” you said as alysa massaged you hair.
“i missed you more” she said.
you smiled to yourself and she started to rinse your hair.
-
after the shower she did your skincare and helped brush your teeth. you were mostly sober by this point but alysa wanted to help you with everything. she was trying to prove herself to you.
she gave you one of her old shirts to wear to bed. she left to grab some water and moved her trashcan to your side of the bed in case of anything. you were already in bed by the time she got back.
“thank you” you said half asleep.
“of course anytime” alysa moved some hair that had fallen in front of your face.
“i love you” you said wrapping your arm around her waist.
“i love you too” she kissed the top of your head, wrapping her arm around your shoulder.
a/n: ik the tag is lowk dying but i wanna put out all my drafts before it goes extinct lol
tags <3 @bellecanelle @tomasaya03 @kozukenapplepi @sani-sunny @katzzeye @aespicysstuff @lyzsaphrodite @certifiedliunatic @certifiedsushillover @prettyshittywriting @jemilysamour @eunchacha @petrolprettyplease @lovergirl1989 @sambiuxstuff @urwavvy @lizzygrantwrld @nanabongos @yournextdooralien @lexiidkwhattoput @kerbedumb
drop dead
&. DROP DEAD 【 it’s feminine intuition 】
sypnosis: you've been alysa's celebrity crush since your debut, and you two "happen" to cross paths at the AMAs
pairing: olympian!older!alysa x katseye’s 7th member!reader
w.c: 3.1k
contains: tooth rotting flufffff | use of y/n (SORRYYUUUHH)
kk here: chromed out alysa can ruin my life and id thank her massive writer’s block while writing this 😬 not proofread
this is SOOOOOOOO GUD
What sapphic thing my girls, Ariana and Sabrina, have to do for you guys make gay fanfictions about them hum?
i’m actually so obsessed with her
EXCUSE MEEEEEEE
In a world of AO3 warriors, I'm forever a Tumblr Trooper...
i leave quite an impression
synopsis ; you're convinced sabrina carpenter is jealous of your relationship with your boyfriend, joe. i mean, who wouldn't be? you've got just about anything a girl could want. but it turns out joe wasn't the one that left an impression on miss sabrina.
contents & warnings ; fem!reader, famous!reader, however it isn't explicitly stated what reader's job is so it's up for interpretation, timeline is messy, jealousy, love triangle?, suggestive joke, sabrina likes GIRLS, joe likes YOU, and you like...?
lana's notes ; first ever fic, kinda nervous...lemme know if i should do a pt2!
THE CROWD WAS AN ERUPTION OF CHEERS AND RECONGNIZTION. sabrina carpenter has just arrested your boyfriend, joe, at austin city limits for being "too hot".
"joe, where you from?" she asked, tilting her sparkling microphone towards him.
"BOSTON!" joe shouts over the crowd.
"boston? damn...IT RHYMES WITH AUSTIN THOUGH!" the crowd goes wild once more.
"it's close enough! you know, joe, it's um...it's actually cuffing season, i don't know if you know that...it's like, we're getting-"
sabrina couldn't even finish her sentence before his arms were raised, ready to be arrested. the audience looks it's about to pass out from excitement. joe takes in the crowds reaction proudly, soaking in the screams and applause. he always was so good with crowd work.
"i was wondering if you-you seem very eager, actually! it's so rare..."
she bends down and hands the fuzzy, pink handcuffs to the security guard who then passes them to a smiling joe. "alright, we did it, joe. you're the one."
joe spins them in his hands, beaming.
"i'm gonna sing this next song, this is dedicated to joe everybody!" sabrina says smugly, looks right at the camera, as if she knows your watching. knows you can see your boyfriend looking up at her in that dazzling purple dress and bouncy blonde curls like she's a goddess. because she is. and she knows it.
you want to smack that stupid perfect grin right off her face. grab her gorgeous hair and fling her to the next planet over. grab her shoulders, shake her crazy-
"so? what'd you think?" joe asks, trying to read your face. he was so excited to see your reaction the arrest. he knew you'd been a fan of sabrina, and thought you'd be delighted about the interaction.
you were anything but.
for the sake of your boyfriend, however, you force a smile and like the video despite wanting to report it for violence. because she gives you violent thoughts. thoughts about her, her small little costumes, sparkling blue eyes, rosy red cheeks, porcelain glowing skin-
"it's great. i'm really glad you guys got to do that," you say. "the crowd ate it up."
joe chuckled. "so am i. it was fun. and i was thinking..." he leaned a little closer to you, voice dropping. "we could, y'know, make good use of those handcuffs tonight..."
that you didn't hate the idea of.
THE GRAMMY'S AFTER PARTY WAS LOUD. drunk people stumble around, music blasts from above. paparazzi wait outside to ambush the leaving celebrities with camera flashes and a million questions.
you were with joe, per usual, nursing a glass of champagne. everything was going well so far.
until she walked in.
sabrina carpenter waltzed in through the entrance, curls bouncing with every step. clearly giddy after her grammy wins. you wouldn't even be able to see her through the crowd if it weren't for her tall high heels she was always sporting. her eyes scanned the crowd for a moment, then landed on you and joe.
then stayed there.
you clenched your drink a little tighter as you watched her accept the "congratulations!" and praise from everyone, making her way over to where you and joe were standing. your hand tightened on his, and if he noticed he didn't say anything.
he was busy chatting teddy swims up when sabrina slipped next to you flawlessly. maybe a little close to be casual, but the room was already pretty crowded anyways, right?
"hey, girlie! i'm so glad to see you!" she smiled at you. you couldn't decipher if it was real or overly kind.
"sabrina! congrats on the wins! espresso is a great song," you reply, forcing your voice to sound sweet.
"aww, thanks the most! i, like, still can't even process that it's real. i guess i'm just...in shock or something!" you nod. "that makes sense. can't say anyone's surprised, though. you pretty much had it in the bag since the song dropped." sabrina looked at you for a moment, and you swear you saw her eyes drop to your mouth. you would've brushed it off if they didn't linger there, watching as you took a sip from your glass...
"oh, hey sabrina! congratulations. totally deserved it," joe said, finally turning and noticing her presence. her eyes flew to his, and you tense at their sustained eye contact. you trusted joe, of course you did, it was this little blondie that probably coughs up glitter you didn't trust.
"thanks, joe! it's honestly sooo crazy. so, um...you got any new projects going on?"
"yeah, actually. working on some stuff with the boys, think we're gonna call this one the crux..." he drones on, and you suddenly feel invisible. you stare down at the ground, twirling the champagne around in your glass, willing her to just walk away already, stop distracting you-
she brushes her hand against his arm while reaching for a drink from a waiter's tray, hand lingering for a moment too long for your liking. your eyebrows furrow as you watch joe's gaze fall to her hand.
"sorry, sorry! do you mind if i borrow the stunning lady to your left real quick?" sabrina says suddenly, snapping you out of your jealous daze. was she talking about you?
"oh, by all means-"
"great! be right back."
oh, so she wants to do this now?
joe barely finishes his sentence before you're being practically dragged off towards some random empty hallway. the chatter and laughter fades into the background with every step, before she stops randomly and drops your arm, hesitantly. like she didn't really want to. she opens her mouth to say something, but you beat her to it.
"i've had it with this, sabrina! you can't keep flirting with my boyfriend. i get it's part of your whole brand or whatever, but just please...stop. you're hot and talented, you could probably have anyone you want-" "you think i'm...hot?" sabrina says, blinking at you.
"who doesn't?! but that's not the point! the point is, you need to-"
"woah, woah, woah! i do not want joe!" sabrina says, frantically shaking her head like a bobble head.
"then why do you keep flirting with him in front of me, in front of the whole world?!"
"BECAUSE IT GETS YOU TO LOOK AT ME!"
you freeze, the rest of your tangent dying on your tongue.
"wh...what?"
sabrina sighs. "god, if you weren't so oblivious maybe i wouldn't have to do all this shit, but i want you. not him."
"but i thought-"
she shakes her head in frustration. "no, no no. i know i arrested him for juno and all that but i just wanted to get your attention. you're too busy ogling him all the time, i didn't know how else to break through to you."
the air feels heavier, the chaos of the party background static because suddenly it all makes sense. the way she stands a little too close, likes all your instagram posts, seeks you out in crowds full of people chanting her name, hell even going as far to use your own boyfriend to get to you.
"you don't have to say anything, just...let me have this."
before you can reply, she leans in and kisses you on the lips, causing you to gasp in shock. she pulls away before you can react, licking her lips and looking up at you through her lashes. then she winks at you and struts elsewhere, leaving you standing there in a daze.
"baby...? what just happened?" joe rushes over to you, meaning he definitely saw the kiss. he was almost as surprised as you were.
"i don't...i don't know. did you see that?" you had to ask, to make sure you didn't just hallucinate the whole thing.
you both stare at where she just stood seconds ago before disappearing. joe nods slowly.
he cups your face in his hands to get you to meet his gaze.
"yeah, yeah. i did. are you okay? talk to me, baby."
you blink at him a few times, urging your brain to work with you.
"um, i think i need some space..."
likes, reblogs and comments are greatly appreciated .ᐟ
how I feel when I consume content specifically for a hot character
Damn she's really never beating the lesbian allegations...
Say Something - Alysa Liu x Female Reader ❤️💙
For someone who hated drama, Alysa Liu somehow ended up at the center of it constantly.
Maybe that came with being famous young.
Olympic medalist.
World champion.
The girl who retired unexpectedly, disappeared from skating for a while, then shocked everyone by returning and somehow skating even better than before.
People always wanted something from her.
A headline.
A story.
A rumor.
Unfortunately for you, this time the rumor involved another figure skater.
It started harmlessly enough.
One blurry backstage photo during Stars on Ice.
Then another clip of Alysa laughing with the skater during rehearsal.
Then suddenly social media decided they were "obviously dating."
You tried not to care.
Really.
Because you trusted Alysa completely.
You knew she'd never cheat on you.
That wasn't the problem.
𝒲𝑒𝒷 𝑜𝒻 𝓈𝑜𝓂𝑒𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓃𝑔 ⋆♡︎.ೃ࿔:・
↪ Synopsis : A spider bite gives Alysa Liu extraordinary powers, but her greatest challenge may be falling in love.
↪ 𝓦arnings: Pure fluff
A/n: little stressed hope u will like it guys ( Share your opinion in the comments or in my inbox :P) best fic I'v ever write btw
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There is a specific kind of invisibility that has nothing to do with being unseen.
Alysa Liu is seen every day. She walks through the hallways of Westbridge High School the same way she has walked through them for three years — head down, backpack slightly too heavy on her left shoulder because she refuses to use her locker because getting to her locker between second and third period adds four minutes to her route and four minutes is four minutes — and people see her. They step around her. They occasionally say her name if they need something, usually help with an assignment, usually at the last possible minute before it's due, usually with that particular tone people use when they need a favor from someone they have not previously thought about. She helps them. She always helps them. This is not because she is a pushover, though some people mistake it for that. It is because she is constitutionally incapable of watching someone struggle with something she could fix in six minutes.
She is, by every measurable standard, invisible in the way that matters at seventeen in a school like Westbridge. She is not invited to parties. She is not part of any social circle that has a name. She is not on anyone's radar in the particular way that radar operates in high school, which is to say: she is not someone people think about when she is not in the room.
She thinks about this sometimes, in the abstract, in the way she thinks about most things — methodically, without excessive emotion, as a problem with a set of variables that she could theoretically solve if she wanted to. She has decided she doesn't want to. The social architecture of Westbridge High feels, to her, like a system built on rules she didn't help write and doesn't particularly respect, and participating in it fully would require a kind of performance she doesn't have the energy for.
What she has energy for: her classes, which are genuinely interesting, all of them, even the ones people complain about. Her lab, which is technically the science prep room on the third floor that Mr. Okafor lets her use after school because she asked and he said yes and nobody else has ever asked. Her projects, which are numerous and complicated and which she works on with the specific, consuming focus of someone who has found the thing that makes the world make sense.
And, if she is being honest with herself, which she usually is: you.
You are, by every measurable standard, the opposite of invisible. You are Y/N Y/L/N, which at Westbridge means something specific and immediate and understood by everyone in the building. You are a junior, same as Alysa, same year, different universe. You are the kind of person who walks into a room and the room reorganizes itself slightly around your presence, not because you're trying, not because you're performing, but because you have some quality of aliveness that draws attention the way light draws attention — not because light is asking to be looked at, but because that's simply what light does.
You sit three rows ahead of Alysa in AP Biology. You tap your pen against your notebook when you're thinking, a quick irregular rhythm that Alysa has memorized without deciding to. You laugh with your whole face, which is an expression she has catalogued from the side-profile angle available from her seat, which tells her more than a straight-on view would, because the side profile shows the way the laugh starts in your eyes slightly before it gets to your mouth, and that sequence is — she has not found a word for what that sequence is. She has stopped trying to find one.
You have never spoken directly to Alysa Liu.
This is not a cruelty. It is simply the natural order of Westbridge, which Alysa has accepted the way she accepts other fixed conditions — the speed of light, the atomic weight of carbon, the fact that the elevator in the science wing has been broken since October and will presumably remain broken until the heat death of the universe. These are things that are. They do not require her feelings about them.
She has feelings about this one anyway. She keeps them in the category of noted but non-actionable, which is where she puts most things that she cannot solve in six minutes.
The day everything changes starts ordinarily.
Alysa is in the lab after school — which is to say, she is in Mr. Okafor's prep room on the third floor, which she has quietly transformed over the course of a year into something that functions like an actual research space, with three whiteboards covered in diagrams and a shelf of equipment that is technically the school's but which no one else touches and which she treats with the specific care of things that are practically hers. She is working on a project that she has been working on for six weeks, which she describes to Mr. Okafor as "an applied research project on enhanced adhesion polymers" and which she describes to herself, more honestly, as trying to figure out if the thing in my head can actually exist.
The thing in her head: a web-like structural polymer with tensile strength exceeding any currently existing synthetic material, deployable in a controlled filament, strong enough to support significant weight, degrading within approximately two hours. She has notebooks full of the theoretical basis for this. She has a shelf full of prototypes that have not worked. She is on prototype seventeen.
She is deep enough in the math that she doesn't hear the door open.
"Hey," says a voice. "Is this — sorry, is Mr. Okafor here?"
Alysa looks up.
You are standing in the doorway of the prep room.
This is the first time you have been in close proximity to her outside of AP Biology, which means this is the first time she has seen you at anything other than three-rows-ahead distance, which means she is now confronted with the fact that you are even more specifically real up close than you are from a distance, which should not be surprising and yet somehow is. You are wearing your varsity jacket — you are on the swim team, she knows this, she knows more things about you than she has ever examined too closely — and you have a textbook under your arm and you are looking at her with an expression that is open and slightly apologetic and entirely without the particular quality some people have when they look at her, which is the quality of someone looking at a prop rather than a person.
You are looking at her like she is a person.
"He left at four," Alysa says. Her voice comes out at its normal register, which surprises her slightly. "I can leave a message if you need something."
"Oh, no, it's—" You look at the textbook under your arm, then back at her. "It's about the bio midterm. He said I could come by but I must have gotten the time wrong." You look around the room, and Alysa watches your expression shift from apologetic to curious, taking in the whiteboards, the equipment, the general evidence of someone who lives here in some meaningful sense. "Is this your—do you use this room?"
"After hours," she says. "For personal projects."
"Personal projects," you repeat, and there is something in it — not mockery, the very specific opposite of mockery, actually, something that sounds like genuine interest. "What kind?"
A pause. She looks at you. You are looking at her whiteboards, at the diagrams, at the shelf of prototypes. You are not doing the thing people usually do, which is to glance around politely and then redirect toward whatever they actually came here for. You are actually looking.
"Polymer research," she says.
"Like — plastics?"
"Like adhesion structures. Tensile polymer filaments." She hesitates. "Spider silk, basically. I'm trying to synthesize something with comparable properties."
You look at her. A beat.
"That's the coolest thing I've heard all week," you say.
Alysa blinks.
You say it with the same quality that you do most things, which is to say completely and without reservation, without the social hedging that most people apply to statements about what they find interesting when talking to someone they don't know. You just say it, like it's true, like it's obvious that it's true, and then you come further into the room with the easy confidence of someone who moves through spaces without worrying about whether they're welcome in them.
"Can I see?" you say.
She should say she's busy. She is busy. She has seventeen prototypes on a shelf and a whiteboard full of math and a problem she has been trying to solve for six weeks and she does not have time to give a tour to the most distracting person in her AP Biology class.
"Sure," she says.
You stay for forty minutes.
You ask questions. Real ones, not the performative questions people ask to seem interested, but the kind that follow from something you said before, that build on each other, that indicate that you are actually tracking what she's saying and thinking about it. You ask about the tensile strength targets and whether the two-hour degradation is a feature or a limitation and whether spider silk itself has been tried as a base material or if the synthesis has to be entirely artificial. You ask in the tone of someone who is genuinely curious and also genuinely aware that she is the one who knows things here, which is a tone that most people do not find naturally, which requires a particular kind of unself-consciousness.
You sit on the lab stool across from her workbench, your textbook long forgotten on the counter, and you learn about polymer chains with the focused attention of someone who has decided that this is the thing they are doing right now and they are doing it completely.
Alysa answers your questions. She finds herself explaining things in more depth than she usually bothers to with people who haven't already demonstrated they can follow along, because you can follow along, and there is something unexpectedly satisfying about that. She pulls out her notebook at one point to show you a diagram that explains the tensile property problem more clearly than her words are doing, and you lean in to look at it and you are close enough that she is briefly, acutely aware of how close you are, before she redirects her attention to the notebook.
When you leave — you have practice, you say, apologetically, you lost track of time, which she also did, which she is now noticing — you pause at the door.
"I'll come back," you say. "If that's okay. I want to hear how the next prototype goes."
She looks at you.
"It's okay," she says.
You smile, the full-face version, the one she knows from three rows back, and you're gone.
Alysa sits in the lab for a moment after the door closes. Then she looks at prototype seventeen on the shelf. Then she looks at the door.
Then she picks up her notebook and goes back to work, and she does not think about how you said I'll come back and how that sentence has lodged itself somewhere in her chest with a particular and unreasonable warmth.
She does not think about this at all.
Chapter Two : Seventeen Prototypes
You come back on a Tuesday.
Alysa is mid-experiment when the door opens — she has her safety goggles on and her hands in the middle of something delicate and she cannot look up immediately, so she says "one second" to the room and finishes the measurement before she turns around.
You are sitting on your stool. You brought coffee — two cups, from the place on the corner, and you set one near her workbench with the ease of someone who has decided this is a thing that happens now.
"I looked up spider silk," you say, by way of greeting. "I went down a rabbit hole. Did you know the Darwin's bark spider produces silk that's ten times stronger than Kevlar?"
"Yes," she says, pulling her goggles up.
"It's insane."
"It is."
"How far off is yours from that?"
She looks at the shelf. "Prototype seventeen is closer than sixteen. The tensile strength is up. The deployment mechanism is still the problem."
"What's the problem with it?"
She sits down and explains. You listen with the same quality as before — complete, specific, following along. The coffee is the right order, she notices. She has never told you her coffee order. You must have seen it somewhere, or guessed, or —
She doesn't examine this.
This is how the next three weeks go.
You come by the lab two or three times a week. Sometimes you have questions about bio, which she answers, and then you stay for the project conversation anyway. Sometimes you come purely for the project, sitting on your stool with your coffee and your questions, and she works while you talk, and the lab which has always been comfortable and solitary becomes comfortable and inhabited, and the difference between those two things is something she is carefully not analyzing.
You learn her shorthand. Not the technical vocabulary — though you pick that up too, faster than she'd have predicted — but the personal shorthand, the way she uses specific phrases when something is working versus when it isn't, the particular silence that means she's in the middle of something that requires all her concentration, the difference between hm when she means I'm thinking and hm when she means that doesn't work and I know why. You learn to read these things the way you learn to read things about people you are paying close attention to.
Alysa notices this. She notices the precision of your attention, the way you have quietly become someone who knows how to exist in her space without disrupting it, which is something most people don't manage even when they're trying. You don't try, exactly. You just — adapt. You observe and adjust and after a while you simply know.
She keeps this observation in the noted but non-actionable category, along with everything else.
On a Thursday in October, prototype eighteen works.
Not completely — the tensile strength is still not where she needs it and the degradation timer needs calibration — but the deployment mechanism functions, for the first time, in the way she has been designing it for six weeks. The filament deploys in a clean arc, attaches cleanly to the test surface, holds.
She stares at it.
"Oh my god," you say, from the stool, where you have been watching. "Oh my god, that held."
"It held," she says. There is something in her voice that she doesn't bother controlling because she is too busy looking at the filament and the test surface and the first prototype that has done the thing she designed it to do.
"Alysa." You are off the stool. You are beside her. "That worked. That actually worked."
She turns to look at you. You are grinning — the full version, bigger than the one she knows from three rows back, close enough that she can see every dimension of it — and your hand is on her arm, which you have placed there without thinking, the way people place hands on the arms of people they have been paying close attention to for three weeks.
"It's prototype eighteen," she says. "There are still — the strength isn't—"
"It deployed," you say. "The deployment works. You figured out the deployment."
She looks at the filament. Then at you. You are still grinning, still with your hand on her arm, still with the full force of your attention directed at her, and something in the noted but non-actionable category has shifted, very slightly, in a direction she is not going to examine right now.
"Yes," she says. "The deployment works."
"I'm coming back Friday," you say. "We should celebrate."
"It's one prototype," she says.
"It's the best prototype," you say. "It deployed."
She looks at you for one more second. Then she looks back at the filament.
"Friday," she says.
Chapter Three : The Field Trip
The Westbridge annual science field trip to the Harrington Institute of Biological Research is, by the universal consensus of every student who has ever attended it, not a highlight of the academic calendar.
It involves a two-hour bus ride, a tour that is pitched at a level approximately four years below AP Biology, and a free period at the end that everyone uses to sit in the Institute's atrium and wait to go home. The exhibits are fine. The explanations are basic. The only people who get anything real out of it are the ones who ignore the tour and read the supplementary materials on the displays, which is exactly what Alysa does every year.
This year is different because you are in her AP Bio class, and the field trip seating is first-come-first-served on the bus, and you sat down next to her before she could put her bag on the seat in the way that discourages conversation. Not aggressively, not deliberately, just — you sat down and said "hi" and opened your phone and that was that.
She spent the two hours explaining the interesting parts of the Institute to you, quietly, because the tour guide was in the middle of something oversimplified about protein folding, and you were leaning slightly toward her to hear, and the bus was loud enough that this proximity was reasonable and unremarkable.
That is what she tells herself.
The Institute has a research wing that is closed to general tour groups, which Alysa has known about for years and has never been able to access. This year there is a small exhibit on advanced arachnid biology that is technically open, technically on the edge of the tour route, technically something the guide gestures at briefly before moving on.
Alysa does not move on.
"I'll catch up," she tells the group, which no one in the group cares about except you, who falls back with her without being asked.
The exhibit is small but the content is real — genuine research-level information on spider silk production, structural biology, the specific proteins involved in dragline silk synthesis. She reads every panel. You read alongside her, which she is no longer surprised by. You have been reading alongside her for three weeks.
"This is what you're trying to replicate," you say, at the panel on dragline silk tensile properties.
"Trying to," she says.
"You're closer than this paper is," you say, pointing at the cited research date. "This is from four years ago."
She looks at the panel. You're right. The tensile strength numbers in her last prototype, while still below target, exceed what this paper was working with four years ago. She had not framed it that way before. There is something in the reframe that settles in her chest with a particular quality, the quality of being seen accurately rather than politely.
"I'm still not there," she says.
"You'll get there," you say, with the same uncomplicated certainty you say most things with, and she believes you the way she believes things that don't require proof.
The research wing is accessible through a door at the back of the exhibit that is marked authorized personnel only but which is, when she tries it on instinct, unlocked. She looks at it for a moment.
"We shouldn't," you say.
"No," she agrees.
A beat.
"The tour group is probably already in the atrium," you say.
"Probably," she says.
Another beat. She looks at the door. You look at the door.
"Five minutes," you say.
They go in.
The research wing is quieter than the exhibit space, the low hum of equipment the only sound, rows of tanks and terrariums and lab benches with work in progress. She moves through it slowly, reading labels, taking in the scale of the research, the evidence of years of work. You follow her, close enough that she can hear you breathing, looking at the same things she looks at.
They are at the far end of the wing, near a row of terrariums containing various arachnid species, when the spider drops.
She doesn't see it happen. One moment she is reading the label on a terrarium, and the next there is a sharp, specific sting on the back of her hand, and she pulls it back and looks at it and there is a small welt rising.
"Alysa." Your voice is sharp with alarm, your hand closing over her wrist. "What happened?"
"Something bit me," she says.
She looks at the terrarium. On the glass, on the outside — it must have gotten out through a gap, must have been on the edge of the label she was reading — is a spider. Small, deep amber-colored, with a marking on its back she does not immediately recognize.
You look at it. Then at her hand. "Does it hurt?"
"A little," she says. "It's just a bite."
"We need to find someone," you say. "We need to tell a staff member."
"It's just a bite," she says again, but you are already steering her back toward the door, your hand still around her wrist, and she lets you because the alternative is arguing with you and she is currently distracted by the sensation in her hand, which is not exactly pain, more like warmth spreading outward, which is probably fine, which is almost certainly just a normal localized reaction.
They find the tour group. They do not tell anyone, because Alysa says she is fine, because she is probably fine, because the ride home is starting and the welt is already reducing in size by the time they are back on the bus and you are sitting next to her again and checking her hand every twenty minutes.
"It's fine," she says.
"I'm watching it," you say.
She looks at you from the side. There is a particular quality to the way you are watching her hand — not performing concern, just actually concerned, in the direct and uncomplicated way you do things.
"I'm fine," she says, softer.
You look at her. "I know," you say. "I'm still watching."
She looks out the window. The welt is gone by the time they pull into the Westbridge parking lot. She tells herself, and tells you, that it was nothing.
She sleeps for eleven hours that night and wakes up with her hands tingling.
Chapter Four : What Happens Next
The tingling goes away by morning. So does the tiredness. What doesn't go away — what presents itself over the course of the following week with the quiet inevitability of something that has already been decided — is everything else.
She notices the first thing on Monday, in the hallway, when she catches a water bottle that Marcus Kim drops from three feet above her head, in mid-air, without looking, without the reaction time that catching something requires. She holds the bottle and looks at it and thinks: hm.
She notices the second thing on Tuesday, when she climbs the stairs to the third floor and realizes she isn't breathing harder at the top, which she always does, which everyone does, because it's four flights and it's fast. She is not breathing harder. She could have gone faster. She is not sure how much faster.
The third thing is Wednesday, in the lab, when she is reaching for a beaker on the top shelf — the one that is technically too high for her without a step stool, which she has been using for a year — and her hand simply sticks. Not slips, not grabs. Sticks. Palm flat against the surface of the shelf, with a grip that doesn't require any effort from her, with a quality that is immediately, entirely recognizable to someone who has spent six months thinking about adhesion polymers.
She stands there with her hand stuck to the shelf for approximately fifteen seconds, processing this.
Then she unsticks her hand, which is also something she can simply do, intentionally, by — she does not fully understand how, it is like deciding to let go but more specific than that — and she stands in the middle of the lab and looks at her palm.
"Hm," she says, out loud, to the empty room.
She spends the next two hours testing this instead of working on prototype eighteen. She sticks her hand to the shelf, the wall, the window, the workbench. She peels it away cleanly. She tries with different pressures, different surfaces, different intentions. She falls off the lab stool at one point when she overbalances attempting to test the ceiling and grabs the wall instinctively on the way down, which results in her hanging sideways from the wall for a moment before she figures out how to let go and lands on her feet with a grace that is also new and also requires examination.
She lands on her feet from a sideways wall-hang with no impact and no stumbling.
She stands in the middle of the lab.
Her phone buzzes.
Y/N: how's 18 going, still at the lab?
She looks at the text. Then at the wall. Then at her hands.
ALYSA: can you come by
You come by. You always come by when she asks, which is something she has not thought about too directly because thinking about it too directly takes her somewhere she has categorized as non-actionable.
You come in and you look at her standing in the middle of the lab, which she has been doing for twenty minutes, and you say "what happened" before she says anything.
"I need to show you something," she says. "And I need you to — I need you to be the kind of person you are, about this."
You look at her. "What kind of person am I?"
"The kind that doesn't panic," she says. "And doesn't ask questions I can't answer yet. Just watches."
A beat. "Okay," you say.
She turns to the wall. She puts her hand flat against it. She walks up it.
Not metaphorically. Not symbolically. She puts her hand on the wall and then her foot and she walks, vertically, up the prep room wall to the ceiling, where she stays for a moment because she can, because gravity appears to have become optional, because the spider from the research wing has done something to her that she is not yet able to fully articulate but which she is currently demonstrating by being on the ceiling.
She looks down at you from the ceiling of Mr. Okafor's prep room.
You are looking up at her. Your expression is — she cannot fully read it from up here, but it does not look like panic, which is what she asked for. It looks like the expression you have in the lab when something works, when a prototype does something it wasn't doing before. It looks like the expression of someone watching something new become real.
"Okay," you say, from the floor. Your voice is steady. "Okay. Tell me everything."
She climbs back down and tells you everything.
Chapter Five : The Research Wing Spider
They spend six hours in the lab on Wednesday.
She tells you about the bite, the symptoms, the sequence of observations. She shows you the wall demonstration three more times, the ceiling grip, the strength test where she lifts the lab table with one hand and puts it down and it makes a clean impression in the floor and she will have to deal with that later. She shows you her palm, which looks completely normal, which you examine with the focused attention you bring to everything you examine.
You do not panic. You ask exactly the questions she cannot answer yet, which is what she asked you not to do, but you ask them in the tone of someone who is helping figure out what the answers might be rather than demanding she have them already. You bring your notebook. You are taking notes. She is too.
"The spider," you say, at some point. "Did you get a look at it?"
"Small. Amber-colored. Dorsal marking I didn't recognize."
"We need to figure out what species."
"I know."
"The Institute would have records."
"I know." She looks at her notebook. "I also think — the silk."
You look at her.
"The bite. The adhesion. The filament I've been developing." She turns to the whiteboard, where she has started a new diagram, the one she has been drawing for the past three hours that connects prototype eighteen to what her hands are currently doing. "I don't think this is unrelated. The spider's silk production. I think the bite — I think I have something in my biology now that's analogous to what I was trying to synthesize."
You look at the diagram. Then at her hands. Then at the diagram again.
"You have the deployment mechanism," you say.
"Potentially."
"You've been building the external version for months and the spider just—"
"Potentially."
"Alysa." Your voice has something in it. "You have the deployment mechanism."
She looks at her hands. Then at the diagram. "I need to test it."
"Yes," you say. "Obviously yes. How?"
She looks at the prototype eighteen housing on the shelf — the wrist mechanism she's been developing for deployment. She has been testing it with the synthesized polymer, with decreasing success because the polymer still isn't strong enough. But if what she thinks is happening is actually happening — if her body is now producing something analogous, something that comes from the same biology she's been trying to replicate—
"I need to rebuild the housing," she says. "Smaller. More precise. If I can direct the deployment biologically, through the mechanism, without the synthesized polymer—"
"You'd have what you've been trying to build for eight months," you say.
She looks at you. You are watching her with the particular quality of your attention, the full version, and there is something in your expression that is not just scientific interest, something warmer and less categorizable, something she puts in the non-actionable file without looking at it.
"I need to go home and work on the housing," she says.
"I'll help," you say.
"You don't know how to build—"
"I know how to hand you things and not touch things I shouldn't touch and ask questions that make you explain your thinking more clearly," you say. "You've told me that's useful."
She has told you that. She has told you that the questions you ask make her articulate things she was processing silently, which often helps. She has told you this as a fact, neutrally, and you are now deploying it as a reason to stay and she doesn't have a counterargument.
"Fine," she says. "Come on."
They go to her apartment. Her parents are out. You sit at the kitchen table and watch her rebuild the housing, and you hand her things when she asks, and you ask the questions that make her explain her thinking, and by midnight she has something that might work and you are asleep on the couch with your jacket as a blanket, which is something she observes and puts in the non-actionable file along with everything else.
She covers you with the blanket from the back of the couch, which is something she does without examining whether she is doing it.
Then she goes to her room and sits on her bed and looks at the modified housing on her desk.
The next morning she tests it.
It works.
Chapter Six : The Part Where She Becomes Someone Else
Here is the thing that Alysa understands about herself, which she has understood for a long time and which has shaped the specific architecture of her life at Westbridge: she is not a person who does things halfway.
This is not a personality trait she selected. It is simply how she is built. When she is interested in something, she is completely interested, and the interest does not modulate itself to fit the available time. When she commits to a problem, she commits with the entire force of herself, and she does not stop until the problem is solved or until she has run out of approaches to try, which has not yet happened.
This quality, applied to schoolwork, produces the best grades in the junior class. Applied to the lab, it produced prototype eighteen and the modified housing. Applied to the post-bite situation, which she is tentatively calling the development because she does not yet have a better name for it, it produces the following, over the course of three weeks:
A complete suite of modified housings, one for each wrist, built to her exact specifications, black metal with a tensioned filament mechanism that deploys with a specific motion of her wrist and retracts cleanly. A costume that she is somewhat embarrassed about but which is functionally necessary — coverage, movement, anonymity — built from materials she sourced with care and assembled with the same precision she brings to lab work. A testing protocol that starts in her apartment, moves to the roof of her building, moves to the alley behind her building, moves progressively outward as she understands more about what she can do and how to do it.
The strength: she can lift approximately eight times her body weight. She can fall from the third floor of her building without injury, which she tests with some caution and some scientific excitement and some genuine terror. She can run at a speed that makes the city feel smaller.
The webs: the housing works. The filament deploys cleanly, attaches to surfaces with the adhesion she has been trying to synthesize for eight months, holds her weight and more. She swings between her building and the next on a Thursday evening and lands on the opposite roof and stands there breathing hard from the adrenaline of it and looking back at the space she just covered, which is not a large space, which is not a record-breaking distance, but which was air and is now traversed.
She stands on a rooftop in the October dark and understands that something has changed in a way that is not reversible.
The other things are tests she runs and data she collects. This is a realization she arrives at, not a test. This is standing still and understanding, with the particular quality of certainty she has about things that are true, that the development is not something that happened to her and is going to stop. It is something she is now. It has joined the architecture.
She goes home and sits at her desk and thinks.
You text at eleven.
Y/N: how's testing going
ALYSA: the housing works
Y/N: ALYSA
Y/N: the housing WORKS?
ALYSA: the housing works
Y/N: I'm coming over
ALYSA: it's eleven
Y/N: and?
She looks at her phone. Then at the housings on her desk.
ALYSA: fine
You come over. She shows you the housings, the deployment, the controlled filament. She does not take you to the roof yet because it is eleven PM and she has not thought through the logistics of the roof with an audience. You sit on her bedroom floor across from her and you watch the filament deploy from the housing and attach to the far wall and hold, and your expression is the expression from prototype eighteen, the full-face grin, the close-enough version.
"You built the real thing," you say.
"The development built it," she says. "I just made the housing."
"You built the housing for six months first," you say. "You were already there. The spider just — completed the circuit."
She looks at the filament attached to her wall. Then at you.
"What do I do with it," she says. This is not rhetorical. She is asking you the way she asks you things in the lab — genuinely, because you are someone whose thinking she finds useful, because you have this quality of seeing the angle she hasn't tried.
You think about it. Not the quick-answer version of thinking, but the real version, the one where you actually sit with something before responding.
"I think," you say, slowly, "that you already know what you do with it. And I think you're asking me because you want someone to say it out loud so you don't have to be the one who decided."
She looks at you for a long moment.
"The city is right there," you say. Quietly. Not dramatic. Just factual. "You can do things most people can't do. People need things."
"I'm not—" She stops. "That's not—"
"You help people you can help," you say. "That's just what you do. You always have. This is bigger."
She looks at the housing on her wrist. The filament still attached to her wall.
"I'd need a better costume," she says.
"Absolutely," you say.
"And a name is probably—"
"A name would help, yes."
She looks at you. You are looking back with that particular quality, and something in the non-actionable file is straining at its category, has been straining for weeks, is becoming harder to keep contained.
"I don't know how to do this," she says.
"You know how to do this," you say. "You know how to learn things, which is the same as knowing how to do them eventually. Start small."
She nods. She looks at the wall where the filament is attached. She thinks about the roof, about the alley, about the distance between her building and the next one that she crossed on Thursday.
"Okay," she says.
"Okay," you say.
Part Two — After
Chapter Seven : The Natural Order of Things (Revised)
November. Three weeks after the roof.
The thing about becoming someone who swings between buildings at night is that it changes your relationship with insomnia. Alysa has always been a light sleeper, has always had nights where the math in her head won't quiet down, where the next step of a problem presents itself at two AM with the urgency of something that will not wait. Those nights used to mean hours at her desk and too much coffee and tiredness the next morning. Now they mean putting on the suit and going out, which is both a worse idea than staying at her desk and a better one, because at least when she is out she is doing something with the restlessness.
She has, in three weeks, stopped a mugging in the East Village (her first real one, not a practice scenario, not a test — an actual person with an actual knife, which she handled with less grace than she wanted to and more effectiveness than she expected), helped extract two people from a car accident on 7th Avenue, and caught a man who jumped from a fire escape on the third floor and would have hit the pavement badly if she hadn't been passing below at exactly that moment. She is not yet fast enough, or practiced enough, to be doing this comprehensively, with the coverage of someone who knows the city from above. She is learning the geometry of it — the swing radius, the web attachment points, the way certain building facades work and certain ones don't, the weight distribution of different moves.
She is, in short, a work in progress.
You know all of this because she tells you. This has become the architecture: she goes out, she comes back, she texts you, and you parse it together. Not surveillance — you are not her handler, she does not check in because you require it. She checks in because you are the only person who knows, which means you are the only person she can be honest with about this specific dimension of her existence, which means the texts have taken on a particular quality of relief. Saying it to you makes it real in a way that the suit and the city cannot do alone.
ALYSA: mugging on 9th, handled it, scraped my knee on the landing
Y/N: the landing or the takeoff
ALYSA: the landing. I overrotated
Y/N: again?
ALYSA: yes, again, I'm working on it
Y/N: want me to come over
She looks at this text every time. She looks at it and she says no, she's fine, it's late, she has school tomorrow. She says this every time.
Y/N: ok. ice for the knee
ALYSA: I know
Y/N: get some sleep
She doesn't sleep. But she tries, which she counts.
The other thing that happens in November is that the city starts to notice.
Not her, specifically — no one knows who she is, the mask and the costume have done the job she designed them to do. But someone is swinging between buildings on the east side and stopping things that used to not get stopped, and the city notices this the way the city notices everything, which is loudly and with strong opinions.
The first Daily News piece is brief, buried in the Metro section, and calls her "a masked vigilante of unclear motivation." The second one is bigger and calls her "the city's newest costumed figure." The third one is a week later and has the word Spiderwoman in the headline, which is not a name she chose, which is a name derived from someone's description of the web she left at a scene because she ran out of time to clear it, but which is now apparently what she is.
She reads this piece in the lab, on her phone, while you read it on yours sitting on your stool.
"Spiderwoman," you say.
"I didn't name it," she says.
"I know. Do you hate it?"
She considers. "No," she says. "It's fine."
"It's actually pretty good," you say. "Descriptive. Clear."
"It's derivative."
"Everything is derivative," you say. "Does it fit?"
She looks at the article. At the description of the figure someone saw swinging through the East Village at two AM. At the word Spiderwoman in the headline.
"Yes," she says. "It fits."
You nod. You look back at your phone for a moment, and then you look up and you have an expression she hasn't seen before, something that is complicated in a way you're not trying to hide but also not naming.
"You're going to keep doing this," you say.
"Yes," she says.
"I know," you say. "I just — I want to make sure you know I know. That this is the thing now."
She looks at you. "It's the thing now."
You nod again. Something in your expression settles, resolves into something simpler, the something that you usually have when you've processed a complicated thing and come out the other side.
"Then I'm in," you say. "Whatever that means. However you need it."
She looks at you for a long moment, long enough that you look back with curiosity, long enough that whatever is in the non-actionable file presses against its category with specific and unhelpful intensity.
"Okay," she says.
"Okay," you say.
Chapter Eight : The Space Between Desks
December.
AP Biology has a lab practical this week, which means the seating arrangement changes, which means Alysa is no longer three rows behind you but beside you at a shared lab bench, which is an arrangement that happens every few months and which she has always handled fine.
She handles it fine now. She is handling it fine.
You are pipetting a solution with the focus you bring to things you are genuinely trying to do correctly, which is all things, which is one of the things about you that she has stopped trying to categorize and simply accepts as a quality you have. You are wearing your swim team hoodie. You have your hair back in the specific way you do it when you are working on something that requires concentration.
"You're doing the contamination check wrong," she says.
You look up. "I'm not."
"You are. The order matters."
"The order — does the order matter for this?"
"For sterility, yes. Always rinse the outside of the pipette before the inside."
You look at the pipette. Then at her. "Why does no one teach that."
"It's in the supplementary materials."
"Of course it is." You correct your technique. You do it correctly. "Thank you."
She goes back to her own bench section. Two minutes later:
"Why does it have to be outside first?"
She explains it. You listen. The lab practical continues. At some point you are leaning toward her to look at her diagram and you are close enough that she is acutely aware, in the specific and unhelpful way she has been for two months, of exactly how close you are.
"Your contamination ring is smaller than mine," you say. "Mine looks like a crime scene."
"Practice," she says.
"You've done this before."
"I've done this a lot."
"Show me the motion again?"
She shows you the motion. She does it with her hands over yours, very briefly, correcting the angle of the pipette, and then removes them and steps back and goes back to her section with the calm of someone who is not thinking about anything specific.
You get it right on the next attempt.
"There it is," you say, quietly, to yourself, with the tone of someone who gets a small private satisfaction from getting something right. She is not supposed to hear this. She hears it anyway. She files it in the non-actionable category, which is becoming alarmingly full.
After class, in the hallway:
"The Christmas showcase thing," you say, falling into step beside her. "For bio club. Are you presenting?"
"The polymer project. Yes."
"Can I come?"
She looks at you. "It's open to the school."
"I know. I'm asking if you want me there specifically."
A beat.
"Yes," she says.
You nod. "Then I'll be there."
You split off toward the gym. She continues toward the third floor. She walks up all four flights without any change in her breathing, as has been the case since November, and she arrives at the lab and puts her bag down and stands in the middle of the room for a moment.
She opens her notebook to a clean page.
She writes: non-actionable.
She underlines it.
She closes the notebook and gets to work.
Chapter Nine : What Everyone Else Sees
The thing about Y/N Y/L/N is that she is not oblivious.
She is, by some measures, one of the more perceptive people at Westbridge, which is not something people would necessarily list first when describing her because what they list first is usually something about her presence, her energy, the way a room responds to her. But underneath that, she notices things. She notices the way people's expressions change when they're uncomfortable versus when they're performing discomfort. She notices when someone is struggling with something they haven't said yet. She notices the specific quality of silence in different people, what it means when Marcus Kim goes quiet versus what it means when Jenny Park goes quiet, and she has learned to respond to the difference without being obvious about the fact that she's noticed.
She has been noticing things about Alysa Liu since October.
Not the technical things — those she was already noticing before October, before the prep room, before the lab visits became a fixture. She noticed Alysa before she ever spoke to her, in the particular way you notice people who are doing something completely independently of whether you are looking at them, which is a quality very few people at Westbridge have. Most people at Westbridge are performing their existence to some degree, for some audience. Alysa is not performing anything. She is simply doing what she is doing, with her whole self, with no apparent awareness of or interest in whether anyone is watching.
She found this interesting before she found it anything else. She finds it something else now.
She finds, specifically, that she is thinking about Alysa with a frequency and specificity that has been increasing steadily since October and which she has not interrogated too closely because she is not sure she wants to know what the interrogation produces. She finds that the time in the lab has become the part of her day she looks forward to with a particularity that she is careful not to examine. She finds that when Alysa explains things to her — the polymer, the housings, the bio lab techniques, the city from above, the specific geometry of swinging between two particular buildings — she is listening with more attention than she gives to most things, and that this attention has a quality that is not entirely academic.
She also finds that Alysa is — and she has been slow to land on this word, not because she isn't sure of it but because once she lands on it she will have to decide what to do with it — beautiful. Not in the obvious way, not in the way Westbridge would vote on it, not in the way that gets noticed. In the specific, close-range way of someone who has been paying attention to all the details of a face for two months and has arrived at a conclusion that is more comprehensive than the one you'd reach from a distance.
She sits in AP Biology and looks at Alysa from three rows back, and she thinks: I am in significant trouble.
She does not tell Alysa this. She is fairly confident Alysa does not know. Alysa moves through the world with the focused specificity of someone who is thinking about the next problem, and when she looks at you she looks with interest and attention and warmth and also — sometimes, in the specific way of something being managed — with a quality that suggests there is something she has decided not to look at directly.
You recognize this quality because you are also deploying it.
The difference, which you have not fully worked out yet, is what to do about it.
Chapter Ten : 2 AM
It is a Tuesday in December and your phone buzzes at two in the morning.
You are awake. You are usually awake at two, not because you have insomnia but because you have a long-standing inability to go to sleep at a reasonable hour, which your mother has been commenting on since you were twelve. You are on your phone, reading something you found in the rabbit hole that started with Alysa's polymer research and ended, six links later, at a paper on arachnid silk gland evolution, which is not something you ever expected to be reading at two in the morning and which you find genuinely interesting.
The buzz is Alysa.
ALYSA: bad night
You sit up.
YOU: what happened
ALYSA: nothing I couldn't handle. just — bad.
YOU: define bad
A pause. Then:
ALYSA: there was a fire. apartment building, East 14th. I got the people out but I was — I wasn't fast enough for one of them. she's okay. the paramedics got to her. but I wasn't fast enough.
You read this twice.
YOU: she's okay
ALYSA: she was unresponsive when I found her. she's okay now. she is. but
YOU: but you keep thinking about the before
ALYSA: yes
YOU: where are you
ALYSA: rooftop. 20th st
YOU: can you come here
A long pause.
ALYSA: it's two AM
YOU: I know
ALYSA: you have practice at six
YOU: I know. come here.
The longest pause yet.
ALYSA: give me fifteen minutes
She comes in through your window, because this is something she can do now, something that you have both adapted to with a practicality that still occasionally strikes you as surreal. She comes in through the second-floor window and drops down onto your floor and she is already out of the suit top, just the undershirt, and she looks — she looks tired in a way that the suit and the movement usually mask and that is more visible now, in your room at two AM, in the specific light of your desk lamp that is the only light on.
She sits on the floor. You sit on the floor next to her, because the floor is where she chose to sit and you are not going to make this into something it doesn't have to be.
"Tell me what happened," you say.
She tells you. The building, the fire on the third floor, the people on the upper floors who couldn't get down. The woman on the fourth floor who was unconscious when she got there, who she carried down, who the paramedics took before Alysa could know for certain. The waiting on the rooftop across the street while they worked on her, watching, not being able to know.
"She was okay," you say. "You said she was okay."
"She was okay by the time I left," she says. "Responsive. They had her."
"Then—"
"I know she was okay," Alysa says. "I know. I keep—" She stops. She is looking at her hands, which are fine, which are not injured, which have the specific non-state of hands that did not get to do the thing they needed to do fast enough. "I know she was okay."
"Yes," you say.
"I keep thinking about the window," she says. "There was a window of time where if I had been thirty seconds faster she would never have been unconscious at all. If I had been thirty seconds faster."
"You don't know that," you say.
"I know the timing," she says, and this is Alysa, this is the specific way her mind works, precise and relentless, running the numbers even when the numbers are hurting her. "I know what I could have done differently."
"And in six months," you say, "when you know more, when you're faster, you will do it differently. You will have been doing it differently for six months." You look at her. "You started three weeks ago."
She is quiet for a moment.
"Three weeks," she says.
"You are three weeks into this," you say. "You saved everyone else in the building. You have stopped four other things this month. You are learning and you are doing it while you're learning and that woman is alive because you were there." A beat. "Three weeks ago you were only doing it from the roof of your building."
She looks at her hands again. The lines of them, the adhesion capability, the thing she has spent months thinking about in a purely technical register and is now thinking about in a completely different one.
"Yeah," she says, quietly.
"Yeah," you say.
You sit there for a while. The desk lamp makes a small warm circle. Outside, the city does its 2 AM thing — quieter than it is at any other hour, but not silent, because the city is never silent, because the city is exactly what she said it is, the thing that holds together.
At some point you get off the floor onto the bed because the floor is uncomfortable and you are both seventeen and you have practice at six, and she is on the far side with her arms around her knees and you are on your side facing her and neither of you says anything for a while and it is not uncomfortable, it is the specific comfortable silence that has been building in the lab for two months, the one that exists between people who have been in enough silences together that they know what the other person's silence means.
"Thank you," she says. Eventually.
"You would have figured it out by morning," you say. "I just made it faster."
"That's not—" She stops. She looks at you, and in the lamp light her expression has shed some of the layer she usually keeps in place, the managing-quality, and what's underneath it is something warmer and more direct and completely, thoroughly non-actionable.
"I know," you say. Because you do know. Because you have known for a while.
You fall asleep before she does. She lies awake for another hour in the specific comfortable quiet of your room, which smells like chlorine and the vanilla candle you keep on your desk and something else she doesn't have a name for that is simply the smell of your space, and she looks at the ceiling, and she thinks.
In the morning she is gone before your alarm, which is what she usually does when she ends up here. There is a text on your phone from 5:47 AM.
ALYSA: thank you
ALYSA: go get in the water
You smile at your phone before you're fully awake. Then you get up and go to practice.
Chapter Eleven : January
After the holidays — after two weeks apart, which Alysa spends at her grandmother's in a way that is too long and too quiet and that has a shape she doesn't examine too directly — January arrives with the specific quality of a month that is cold all the way through and asks nothing cheerful of you.
She is back at the lab. The project has evolved past the housing, past the suit, into something she is now thinking about in operational terms rather than engineering ones — the improvement of her technique, the expansion of her coverage area, the nights when she goes out earlier and comes in later and the data she is collecting about the city's patterns and her own response times. She is getting faster. The overrotation on landings has mostly resolved. The swing radius is larger.
You are back on your stool.
The weeks in between have produced something — she is not sure what to call it, it is something she notices in the way she notices changes in her prototypes, by comparing what is in front of her to what she remembers. You are the same as before and also there is something different, something that is not dramatic and has no announcement, something that exists in the specific quality of how long you hold eye contact before looking away and in the way you lean against the door frame sometimes when you are leaving, like leaving requires a moment of decision.
She puts this in the non-actionable file. The file is at capacity. She is aware of this.
"The Post did a thing on Spiderwoman," you say, on a Tuesday, looking at your phone.
"I saw."
"They called you a menace."
"I saw."
"Two days before that they called you a hero."
"Journalists are not consistent." She does not look up from the workbench.
"They want to know who you are," you say.
"Everyone wants to know who I am."
"What would you say? If someone asked."
She looks up. You are looking at her with a question in your expression that is both the question you asked and something other than the question you asked, something larger and less specific.
"I'd say it doesn't matter," she says.
"Does it matter to you?"
She considers this with the honesty she brings to most things. "Yes," she says. "But the part that matters is the one that exists here, not out there." She gestures vaguely at the window, at the city outside, at the press coverage and the rumors and the growing accumulation of public opinion about a woman in a red and black suit. "Out there, the identity is a problem. It makes the people I care about into targets."
A pause.
"People you care about," you say.
"Specifically, one person," she says, and then she realizes she has said this out loud and she looks back at the workbench with the specific focus of someone redirecting very quickly.
The silence in the lab has a different quality for a moment.
"Okay," you say, quietly.
She does not respond. She is pipetting something she does not need to pipette. She is giving this pipetting her complete attention.
"I'm not a target," you say. "For the record."
"You don't know that," she says.
"Alysa—"
"I don't know what this becomes," she says, to the workbench. "I don't know how visible it gets, or what the visibility means for the people connected to me. I don't—" She stops. She puts the pipette down. "I need to know that what I'm building stays separate. That you stay—"
"Safe," you say.
"Yes," she says.
You are quiet for a moment.
"I understand that," you say. "I do. But I'm already in it. I've been in it since the prep room." You say this carefully, not dramatically, in the tone of someone stating a position they have thought about. "I know what that means. I'm making an informed choice."
She looks at you. "You're seventeen."
"So are you," you say.
She doesn't have a response to this. She looks at you, and you look back, and the non-actionable file in her chest is making itself very loudly known, and she is about to say something, she is in the process of deciding what to say, when your phone buzzes.
You look at it. "I have to go," you say. "Practice ran over, I forgot to tell my mom." You slide off the stool, pick up your bag, and then you pause at the door in the way you have been pausing at the door more lately, the pause that takes a moment to resolve.
"I'm not going anywhere," you say. "For the record."
She looks at you.
"Okay," she says.
You go. The door closes. She stands in the lab for a moment and then she goes back to the workbench and she pipettes the thing she was pretending to pipette earlier, this time because she actually needs to.
Chapter Twelve : The Part Before Everything Changes Again
February.
Alysa's name is in the school paper.
Not for Spiderwoman. For the polymer project, which she presented at the bio club showcase in December and which one of the students on the paper wrote a brief item on, which ran in January, and which resulted in three things: an email from a professor at Columbia who wants to hear more about the project, an email from a bio competition coordinator about a citywide showcase in March, and the specific kind of visibility she has been trying to manage since November.
She is, briefly, something at Westbridge. Not the kind of something you are — she does not walk into rooms and have them reorganize — but the kind of something that produces recognition, people saying her name in the hallway with the specific quality of people who have recently learned it, the bio teachers mentioning the item in class, Harmon (the AP Bio Harmon, not related to the fictional editor in the previous story) asking her to present the project to the junior seminar.
She handles this fine. She is used to the work being visible even when she isn't. This is different from social visibility, which requires performance. The work standing on its own is something she has always been comfortable with.
What she is less comfortable with is the shift in your presence at school.
You have always been, by the natural order of Westbridge, someone who moves in circles that don't include her. Your circle is large and warm and inclusive in the specific way of someone who doesn't build walls, but it is still a circle, and she has been adjacent to it rather than inside it for three years. The lab visits are their thing — separate, specific, not something that has migrated into the hallways or the cafeteria or the rest of the school day.
Until February.
You stop by her locker on a Tuesday, which you have never done before. You do it in the way you do things — naturally, without ceremony, like it is simply a thing that happens and you are doing it. You are talking to someone from the swim team and you see her and you say her name and include her in the conversation with an ease that leaves no room for awkwardness, and then you say see you later when you have to go and the swim team person says nice to meet you and she stands at her locker processing the fact that you stopped by her locker.
On Thursday you sit next to her at lunch.
You eat with your usual people, most days. Your social gravity pulls you there, and it is not a cruel gravity — you are not one of the people who categorizes, who excludes deliberately, who builds walls. But you eat with your people, and your people are not her people, and this has simply been how it is for three years.
You sit next to her on Thursday with your tray and you say hey and you eat and you talk to her and to the two people from the bio club who are also at this table, and when the swim team people come by looking for you, you introduce everyone without making it a production and they sit down and the lunch is — it is fine. She handles it fine. The swim team people are not awful, they are ordinary, and she can navigate ordinary.
But she notices, and she files it, and the non-actionable file has been over capacity since January and she is not sure what to do about that except continue to manage it.
On Friday, after school, in the lab:
"You keep doing things," she says.
You look up from your stool. "What things."
"The locker. Lunch. The — including."
"The including," you repeat.
"You keep including me," she says, not accusatorially, just — stating it, the way she states things she is trying to understand the logic of. "Deliberately. In places you haven't before."
You look at her for a moment. "Yes," you say.
"Why."
"Because I want to," you say. And then, more carefully: "Because I've been thinking about the categories."
"What categories."
"The one where the lab is ours and the rest of school is something else," you say. "I've been thinking about whether that needs to be true."
She looks at you. This is a direct conversation, more direct than either of them usually does in this particular direction, and she can feel the edge of it, the place where this conversation could become the conversation that she has been managing around for months.
"The lab being ours doesn't stop being true if the other things are also true," you say. "They're not mutually exclusive."
She is quiet for a moment.
"What happens to the categories," she says, slowly, "if the other things are also true."
You look at her steadily. "I think you know what happens."
She looks back. The non-actionable file is open. She is looking directly at it, and it is looking back at her, and every argument she has assembled — the complication, the risk, the specificity of what she is now and what that means for anyone close to her — is present and real and none of it is sufficient to change the fact of what she is feeling.
"Alysa," you say. Quietly.
She picks up her notebook. She opens it to the page that says non-actionable, which she underlined in December.
She crosses out the word.
You watch her do this. Something in your expression opens — not surprise, she doesn't think it's surprise, more like relief, like something that has been held at a particular tension finally being able to release.
"I still don't know what it means," she says. "For the rest of it. For — what I am."
"I know," you say.
"It's complicated in ways—"
"I know," you say again. "I've been next to the complicated for four months. I'm not leaving because it's complicated."
She looks at you for a long moment. Then she looks at the notebook in her hands, at the crossed-out word.
"Okay," she says.
"Okay," you say.
Neither of you moves for a moment. The lab is the same as it always is, the equipment and the whiteboards and the light at this hour going golden, and she is sitting on her lab stool and you are sitting on yours and the distance between the two of them is approximately four feet, which is a workbench width, which is nothing.
"Come here," you say.
She comes. She stands in front of you and you are looking at her with the full version, the one she knows from prototype eighteen, the close-range version, and she looks back.
"Hi," you say.
"Hi," she says.
You reach up and tuck a piece of her hair back, very gently, with the specific care of someone doing something for the first time that they have been thinking about for a long time. She stays still for it. Your hand comes to rest at the side of her face, and she turns into it slightly, not dramatically, just a small lean, and something in her chest that has been noted but non-actionable for four months resolves into something simple and certain and completely present.
"I've been thinking about doing this for a while," you say.
"I know," she says.
"You knew?"
"I observe things," she says. "You know this about me."
You laugh — the full version, the close version, the one she has now seen many times but which she does not think she will ever fully adapt to, because it is the specific quality of a thing that is complete rather than a thing that performs being complete.
"Fair," you say.
She kisses you. It is the first time she has kissed anyone and she is aware of this and also aware that it doesn't feel like a first time in the way people describe first times, doesn't feel fumbled or uncertain, feels like the logical conclusion of four months of everything else, like something that was going to happen at the exact moment when they both had the right information and decided to use it.
You kiss her back with the same completeness you bring to everything.
The lab is the same as it always is. The equipment hums. The late afternoon light comes through the windows at the angle it comes through at this hour. Prototype eighteen is on the shelf where it has been since October, the first thing that worked.
She is, she thinks, the second.
Chapter Thirteen : What February Becomes
February becomes something new, in the way months become something new when the architecture of your life changes in the middle of them.
It is not dramatic. It does not remake every surface. It is subtler than that — a shift in the quality of specific things, the lab and the hallways and the two-AM texts, all of them the same and also different, the difference being that she now gets to kiss you when you stop by her locker, that you reach for her hand sometimes in the hallway without looking around first to see if anyone is watching, that the 2 AM texts have a different register when she's been out and comes back to them, something warmer and more specific, something that says you specifically in a way that the texts already said and now say louder.
You are careful with her. She notices this and she does not put it in any file at all, she simply holds it, the way you hold things that you don't want to categorize because categorizing them risks diminishing them. You are careful with the suit, with what it means, with the specific complications of being the person who knows. You have been careful since October. Now the care has a different quality, the quality of someone who has a personal stake rather than an intellectual one, and she feels the difference.
She is also careful with you. She is careful with the identity, which she has been careful with since November, but now the carefulness has a specific shape, a specific fear that has settled into the architecture alongside everything else: the fear of the day when someone figures out that Spiderwoman is a specific person rather than a symbol, and traces that person to the people she is near. She carries this fear with the same precision she brings to everything — cleanly, specifically, managed rather than avoided.
March arrives. The citywide bio showcase. She presents the polymer project, the official version, the one that does not include the development, the one that is purely the synthetic research. It wins its category. The Columbia professor shakes her hand. The competition coordinator mentions graduate programs that she is, technically, seven years away from, but which she files as something to examine later.
You are there. You are in the audience, which is not a small thing, it is a Tuesday afternoon in March and you rearranged your practice schedule to be there, which your coach was not happy about and which you did anyway. She sees you when she walks to the podium and you are in the third row with the full version of your expression, the close-range one, and she looks at you for exactly one second before she begins speaking.
It is the best presentation she has ever given.
After, in the lobby, you say: "Outside first, then inside."
She looks at you.
"The contamination check," you say. "I've been thinking about how to apply that principle to the suit's grip release mechanism. Outside force first, then internal adjustment. Would that give you more precision?"
She stares at you. "You've been thinking about my grip release mechanism."
"I think about your grip release mechanism a lot," you say, and there is something in it, a deliberate note of the other meaning, and she starts laughing, which she doesn't do often enough, and you are grinning, and the lobby of the competition venue is not the lab and it is not the 2 AM rooftop and it is not the school hallway, it is something else, something new, something that is a part of the architecture that didn't exist in September.
She is, she thinks, doing all right.
Epilogue
April.
There is a building on the corner of 23rd and 8th that Alysa has started thinking of as hers, not because she owns it, not because it is special, but because the water tower on the roof has a particular vantage point on the west side grid that she finds useful for situation assessment, and because she has been up there enough times that it feels familiar in the way things feel familiar when you have been in them enough times, settled-in, known.
She is up there on a Tuesday in April, the suit on, the city below her in its April state — colder than it should be still, the specific stubborn cold of a New York April that refuses to concede spring until it's absolutely forced to — and she is doing what she does up here, which is watching.
Not for anything specific. For the pattern. For the system. For the way the city moves at eleven PM on a Tuesday, the specific rhythm of it, the particular way the lights organize themselves and the streets move and the whole thing works.
Her phone buzzes.
Y/N: I can see the water tower from my window
She looks south. The window of your apartment building is visible from here, lit up, your silhouette behind the glass.
She raises one hand. A wave.
A beat. Then, from your window, a wave back.
ALYSA: go to sleep
Y/N: you first
ALYSA: I have work
Y/N: I know. be careful.
She looks at the lit window for a moment. The city goes on below her, and the cold is still the specific April cold that hasn't given up, and she is on a water tower in the suit she built out of a housing she built out of a development that started with a spider in a research wing in October, and twelve floors down and three blocks south you are at your window watching for her.
She looks at the city. She looks at your window.
ALYSA: always
She goes back to watching.
The city holds together.
🕷️
How I feel asking for a Pt 2 😔
𝐼 𝒸𝒶𝓃 𝒷𝑒 𝓃𝑒𝑒𝒹𝓎 ✄
↪ Synopsis : She’s unstoppable in every part of life—except when it comes to you. With you, Alysa lets her guard down and just wants to stay close.
↪ 𝓦arnings: smut but fluff at the ends
A/n: litte stressed first time doing smut hehe...
I made a short fic to see if you like it. Let me know what you think in a message or even a comment :P
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𝒩𝑒𝑒𝒹𝓎 𝒶𝓁𝓎𝓈𝒶 who puts her leg hook over your hips before you even realize she's awake, her fingers threading through your hair as she pulls you down into the pillows with her. The thing about Alysa—she's always thinking, always calculating, running three steps ahead in her head. But when she's with you, she turns off that part of her brain. She gets needy. Her mouth finds yours before words can form, and she's already arching her back, pressing her chest into yours, making these soft little noises against your lips.
She likes it when you take your time. When your fingers trace down her stomach slow enough to make her breath hitch. When you duck your head and press open-mouthed kisses along her collarbone while your hand slides between her thighs. She'll whisper please into your ear, and it's the only time she ever really begs for anything.
There's something about the way sunlight hits her skin in the mornings. She's still half-asleep, hair a mess, lips slightly parted—and she looks so soft. You can't help yourself. You press kisses along her shoulder blade, down her spine, until she stirs and makes that sleepy sound that means she's waking up but doesn't want to.
𝒩𝑒𝑒𝒹𝓎 𝒶𝓁𝓎𝓈𝒶 rolls over and pulls you on top of her, legs already spreading to fit you between them. She's warm and pliant and she smells like sleep and her shampoo. You kiss her neck and she hums, fingers tracing lazy patterns on your back while your hand slides down her stomach, lower, until she gasps and digs her nails in just a little.
𝒩𝑒𝑒𝒹𝓎 𝒶𝓁𝓎𝓈𝒶 who is getting wet before you even touch her properly. That's what morning does to her—makes her sensitive, makes her want. She bucks her hips into your hand and mumbles right there against your mouth, and when you finally slide into her, she arches and pulls you closer, legs locking around your waist.
Alysa gets sensitive after she comes—but she doesn't want you to stop. Not yet. She'll grab your wrist when you try to pull away, shake her head, breathe out a shaky no, keep going. So you do. You keep touching her, slower now, gentler, and she shudders through it. Her thighs tremble. She makes these broken little sounds that are half-sob, half-laugh, and she hides her face in your neck while you rub her through the oversensitivity.
She trusts you. That's the thing. She trusts you enough to let herself fall apart completely, to be vulnerable, to let you see her like this—messy and undone and raw.
𝒩𝑒𝑒𝒹𝓎 𝒶𝓁𝓎𝓈𝒶 who , Afterwards, doesn't want to let go. She curls into your side, face pressed into your chest, and she's silent for a while. You run your fingers through her hair, trace patterns on her back, kiss the top of her head. Eventually she'll mumble something—I love you or stay or don't move—and you hold her tighter.
She falls asleep tangled up in you, limbs heavy and warm, and you watch her breathe until you drift off too.
She says it differently when she's close. Breathy. Desperate. Like a prayer. She'll grip your shoulders or tangle her fingers in your hair and whisper it over and over, y/n, y/n, please, don't stop, and the way her voice breaks on the last syllable is enough to make you want to spend the rest of your life making her feel exactly like this.
don't forget to give me your opinion in a message or comments :)
𝒩𝑜𝓉 𝓎𝑜𝓊𝓇𝓈
↪ 𝓢ynopsis : After years of being close but undefined, they finally face the truth and choose each other again. Everyone else already knew. it was love
↪ 𝓦arnings: Nothinnnnnnnng A/n: One of the longest fanfics I've ever written, at least 20k words :p
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The thing about Alysa's rink is that it has its own atmosphere. Its own particular cold, different from outside cold, the kind that sinks in past the first layer of skin and just stays there, settled into your bones like it's been invited. The smell of ice shavings and machine oil and the faint ghost of whatever someone's been eating in the lobby. The sound of blades catching edges in the early morning quiet, and the way every little noise echoes back from the ceiling before disappearing. You've been here enough times that you stopped noticing the particulars of it a long time ago.
What you do notice, every single time without fail, is the way you can spot Alysa from across the entire length of the rink.
It's not like she's hard to find. She's usually the one who's moving when everyone else is standing still, or standing still when everyone else is moving, or making some kind of noise that draws the eye before you've consciously looked for her. Today she's in the middle of a run-through, her music bleeding through the speakers at the edge of the ice—something sweeping and dramatic that she's been obsessing over for the past three months—and even from where you're standing by the boards with your coffee going cold in your hands, you can tell she's in one of her good days. The kind where everything she does has a little more lift to it, a little more ease, like the ice is cooperating instead of fighting her.
You watch her come out of a spin and transition into footwork, and even though you are categorically not a figure skating person and never have been—you cannot do a single thing on skates, you have tried, it went badly, Alysa still brings it up—something in your chest does that stupid thing it always does when you watch her skate. That quiet, helpless thing that you have decided, over years of practice, is simply a feature of loving Alysa Liu. You can't watch her skate without it happening. You've stopped trying not to let it.
You've learned to just let it happen. You've had a lot of practice.
It's Isabeau who notices you first, which is how you know you've been standing there long enough to look obvious. She's sitting at the boards a few feet away, laces in her hands, gloves off, working through the particular concentration of someone who has a very specific way they need the tension to sit and is not going to compromise on it. She glances over at you with an expression that's more curious than anything else. You know who she is because Alysa talks about her teammates with the particular fluency of someone who loves the people she spends twelve hours a day with, even when she's exasperated by them, which is often. Isabeau is one of the ones she's less exasperated by and more genuinely fond of.
"You her friend?" she asks, not unfriendly. Assessing.
"Something like that," you say, which is the most honest you've been about it in months and also the least complete answer available to you.
Isabeau looks at you for another half second, then back out at the ice where Alysa is doing something technically impressive that you don't have the vocabulary to name.
"She skates different when someone she knows is watching," she says, and it sounds less like a casual observation and more like something she's been sitting with for a while.
You look out at Alysa, at the particular ease in her shoulders that you've been reading for years without realizing you were cataloguing it. The looseness that means she's comfortable. The way her chin lifts just slightly when she's in a moment that feels right rather than just correct.
"I know," you say, and mean it.
The run-through ends with a held position that bleeds into stillness, and then Alysa is gliding toward the boards in that effortless way she has, like the ice is just something she thinks across rather than moves through, and she hasn't clocked you yet, her attention on her coach, nodding along to something being said, her face in that particular concentrated shape that means she's filing the notes even as she lets the expression of the program come off her like a coat.
Then her coach gestures toward something at the far end of the rink, and Alysa turns to look, and in turning she sweeps her gaze across the boards—
And finds you.
The smile that happens is not the polished one.
It's not the competition smile or the interview smile or even the general-public smile that she has ready all the time, that particular warmth she turns on easily because it is real warmth but it's also managed.
The smile that happens is the one underneath all of those ones.
It's the one that's been yours for long enough that you stopped feeling proprietary about it and started feeling something much harder to name—something that lives in the vicinity of gratitude, and the specific ache that comes from wanting something you already have but can't quite hold.
"You're early," she says when she reaches the boards, already leaning against them toward you, her skates adding a few inches she doesn't need.
She's flushed from the run-through, her hair doing that thing.
"You said nine-thirty."
"I said maybe nine-thirty."
"You said nine-thirty and put a question mark and then sent three follow-up messages in the next two minutes specifying the rink entrance and the parking and whether I'd had coffee already, so."
She opens her mouth. Closes it.
"That's fair," she says. "Thank you."
"I was being thorough."
"You were managing me."
"I was managing the logistics," she says, with great dignity, and then she steals your coffee cup from your hand and drinks from it without asking, which she has been doing for seven years and has never once asked about.
The coffee is wrong for her—too hot still, you take it hotter than she does—and she makes a face but she drinks it anyway.
Isabeau, still working at her laces a few feet away, very carefully does not look up.
But she's not not listening.
Here is the thing that everyone in your shared life has made peace with, even if they never quite put words to it:
you and Alysa are a thing that happened, and then a thing that stopped happening in the particular way things stop sometimes, not catastrophically, not with wreckage everyone has to step around for years, but with this complicated unraveling that left you both standing on the same side of it, holding pieces of something that was too big to put back together the way it was and too important to put down.
So you kept them.
You both did.
You kept the morning calls.
You kept the habit of reaching for each other in crowds, the automatic move toward each other in any room you're both in, the way her hand finds your arm before she's consciously decided to reach.
You kept the way she says your name—a very specific way, different from how she says other names, with a quality in it that you have no clinical term for but that you've heard enough times to recognize from any distance.
You kept the drawer.
You kept the knowing where things are in her kitchen, the second shelf, the sticky cabinet, the good glasses.
You kept the ability to read her moods from across a room.
You kept the way her head on your shoulder feels like something that was built to go there.
Your friends—the mutual ones, the ones who were there for both the before and the after—have had so long to adjust to the particular shape of whatever this is now that they've stopped adjusting and just started accepting.
Nobody brings it up.
Nobody points out the obvious, or asks the question, or has the conversation that would probably need to happen at some point.
They've absorbed you and Alysa as a unit that exists in one of those spaces that doesn't have a clean name, and they navigate around it with the practiced ease of people who love you both enough to want you both in the room and who have decided that the room is better with you both in it than with anyone having to choose.
Alysa's training circle is different.
Her skating world has a different timeline from the rest of her life, and you slot differently into it.
Isabeau and Amber and Jason have met you before—briefly, in the peripheral way that happens when you've been brought to a competition or a team dinner or one of those events where Alysa's two worlds briefly overlap—but briefly enough that you're still a shape without full definition.
You are Alysa's friend, they know that much.
Beyond that, you're a sketch.
Today is when that changes.
It changes because today is the first day in three weeks where Alysa doesn't have a packed training block, and she has claimed this time with both hands for something she's been planning for at least that long:
Amber is coming to the rink.
Jason.
And two of her closest friends from back home, Danny and Michelle, who have been trying to visit for two months and have finally made it, and who are going to spend the next four days being shown around a city they've never been to by Alysa, who is an excellent guide when she's in the mood and a chaotic one when she's not, which is something they both already know.
And you.
Because she texted you at six in the morning:
come to the rink today. please. I need a buffer.
You had texted back:
from your own friends?
She had sent back a voice memo—eleven seconds, nothing but a sound that could only be described as a deeply undignified whine—that communicated yes, exactly, thank you for understanding without using any actual words.
You had gone back to sleep for forty minutes and then gotten up and come, because that is what you do when Alysa sends you eleven seconds of herself being undignified.
You show up.
You've always shown up.
The morning session runs until ten, and you spend most of it at the boards in the spot you've claimed by default over months of showing up—corner, good sightline, not in anyone's way.
Your coffee goes cold and you drink it anyway.
You watch her skate, and you let your mind go mostly quiet, and that's enough.
Watching her has always been enough.
Isabeau, at some point, parks herself nearby with a water bottle and what appears to be a snack, and for a little while you exist in a companionable parallel quiet—her watching Alysa for technical things you don't have the vocabulary for, you watching Alysa for the things you have your own vocabulary for, neither of you talking.
"How long have you been coming to practices?" Isabeau asks, eventually, not looking at you.
"On and off? Two years, roughly. When she wants company more than space."
"And how do you know which one she wants?"
You think about this genuinely.
"She texts me differently," you say.
"When she wants space the texts are short. Like logistical. When she wants me there it gets longer and then she'll voice memo eventually to make sure I'm coming."
Isabeau looks at you sideways now.
"She voice memos you?"
"Only when she's anxious about something. Or excited. Or both."
"She doesn't voice memo any of us," Isabeau says.
"She voice memos me constantly," you say. "I have hundreds."
Isabeau turns this over visibly.
Then she goes back to watching the ice, and doesn't ask anything else for a while.
But something has shifted in the quality of her attention toward you, a recalibration, something that is going to generate questions later.
You recognize the moment.
You've caused it before.
Danny and Michelle arrive at eleven, coming off a flight and straight to the rink with their bags still half-sorted, because this is exactly the kind of thing Alysa does—makes a plan that requires people to be in two places at once and then acts surprised when logistics get complex.
She'd sent them directions four times and still managed to give one of them the wrong parking entrance, a fact that Danny brings up immediately when Alysa comes off the ice to greet them.
"You said entrance B," he says, with the energy of someone who has spent thirty-five minutes in a parking garage.
"I said probably entrance B," Alysa says.
"That is not what you said."
"I said it in a voice that implied probably."
"Your voice implied no such thing," Michelle says, hugging her with one arm while pulling her bag off her shoulder with the other, the practiced multitasking of someone who has been doing this for a long time.
Then she spots you and her face does the thing—the warm, knowing thing—and she says,
"Hi, you,"
and you say,
"Hi,"
and that's a whole other conversation that doesn't need to be spoken aloud.
Jason arrives shortly after with coffee for an optimistic number of people, which ends up requiring redistribution that eventually leads to you and Alysa sharing one cup.
This is how it's always been and neither of you coordinates it on purpose.
It just resolves itself that way.
You doctor the coffee the way she likes it—slightly cooler than you'd take it, extra sugar—before she's thought to ask, and you hand it to her and she takes it and drinks and doesn't comment because she's never had to comment.
It's just what happens.
Amber watches this with the expression of someone making a mental note.
The morning migrates through a tour of the facility, which Alysa delivers with genuine enthusiasm because she loves this place the way she loves anything that is hers and that she has worked for.
She knows every corner of it, every quirk of every rink, which machines are slightly off and which days of the week the ice is best.
She explains things in depth to Danny and Michelle, who ask good questions, and gestures at things for Amber and Jason who already know most of it but let her talk anyway because Alysa talking about skating is genuinely a pleasure to be around.
You follow at the edge of the group and let it happen and occasionally add something when she's building toward a point and you can see what the point is before she gets there, which is a function of knowing her and her thought process well enough to run slightly ahead of it.
She glances back at you when you do it and makes a face that means both stop doing that and also yes, exactly.
"How do you two do that," Amber says, at one point, having watched this happen twice in ten minutes.
"Do what?" Alysa says.
"You finish each other's—"
Amber stops.
"Okay, I was about to say something embarrassing. Never mind."
"We just know each other," you say, which is true and also radically insufficient as an explanation.
Danny, behind you, does the particular expression he makes when he's thinking something that he knows would be impolitic to say and is keeping it to himself only with effort.
You choose not to engage with this.
The back rink is quieter, less in use during off-hours, the lights a different quality from the main arena.
Alysa has opinions about the boards in here—she's had opinions about them for six weeks, specifically that they are the wrong shade of white, marginally but noticeably, and that whoever approved the replacement boards was either color-blind or didn't care, both of which she finds offensive—and she delivers these opinions at length.
"Tell me I'm not seeing things," she says, turning to the group.
"You're not seeing things," Michelle says immediately and sincerely, because Michelle is a good friend.
"They're a little off," Danny says, squinting.
He's being deliberately conservative.
You can tell.
"They're obviously off," Alysa says.
"They're very obviously off," you agree, because you are also a good friend and also because you have seen these boards three times now and they are genuinely the wrong shade.
Alysa turns and looks at you with the expression you've learned to recognize as: you said the thing I needed someone to say, and something in her loosens that little bit it always loosens when you're on her side of something.
Then she reaches out, not dramatically, just—her hand to your arm, a brief press of fingers, automatic.
Gone before it's fully there.
Isabeau clocks it.
You can tell because she shifts her weight and her gaze lingers the particular extra half-second that attention doesn't usually require.
She's building a picture.
You can see her doing it and you don't have any particular interest in stopping her.
Lunch is loud and collective and full of the kind of conversation that takes nine tangents for every one point, which is what happens when you put Alysa and Danny in the same room because their energy has a particular frequency together—both of them moving fast, both of them finding the comedy in things before anyone else has, both of them talking slightly over each other without either of them caring.
Michelle provides the connective tissue.
You provide the fact-checking, occasionally, when one of them starts building a bit on a misremembered foundation.
Isabeau and Amber and Jason watch this organism function with the attention of people who are encountering something they don't have context for.
The seating resolves itself—it always does, with groups like this—into a configuration that means you're next to Alysa, which is where you end up.
Her knee is against yours under the table.
Her elbow bumps yours when she gestures, which is constantly.
"So how long have you two been friends?" Amber asks, in the pleasant clarifying way of someone establishing baseline facts.
"Seven years," you say.
"Give or take," Alysa says, which is her counting from a different start point, which you're not going to address.
"She sat next to me in a philosophy class neither of us wanted to be in," you say, "and spent the entire first lecture making quiet commentary on the professor's slide design choices."
"The font choices were indefensible," Alysa says.
"They were," you agree.
"I thought she was very funny."
"I was very funny."
"She was," you confirm, to the table. "She still is."
Alysa says nothing to this, but you can feel the particular warmth that goes through her when you say something she's been hoping someone would say, because she's been around you long enough that you feel it even when she doesn't show it.
"How did you go from philosophy class to—" Jason gestures vaguely at the general situation.
"Slowly," Michelle says, which is one answer.
"All at once," Danny says, which is the other one.
Both are, in their way, accurate.
The afternoon wanders back to the rink because Alysa wants to work on something she thought of at lunch—this is a constant feature of her, the ideas that show up sideways, during food or conversation, that have to be chased before they go—and everyone follows because the alternative is splitting up and nobody wants to do that, which is itself a sign of something: that the group has knit quickly, in the way that happens when people are genuine.
The main rink is empty in the mid-afternoon lull, freshly resurfaced, that particular perfect quality the ice has when no one's touched it yet.
Alysa laces up with the automated speed of someone who has done this ten thousand times, sitting at the boards beside you while her hands do the work without her having to look, and she's talking about the sequence she wants to try, using her hands to map it out while you nod and Danny asks clarifying questions he doesn't fully understand the answers to and Alysa explains them anyway with the patience she only actually has for things she loves.
Then she steps onto the ice and she's doing what she does.
Moving through a sequence of footwork with the critical concentration she gets when she's figuring something out rather than performing it—evaluative, self-interrogating, running the sequence twice and slightly differently each time, each repetition stripping a little more of the performance quality and getting closer to the thing underneath.
You watch with the specific attention you've been developing for seven years.
Not for the technical elements—you still don't have that vocabulary, not fully—but for her.
For the parts of her that show up in the skating that don't always show up elsewhere.
The place in the middle of the second sequence where she takes something slightly more, commits slightly harder, and the whole quality of the movement shifts.
She comes back to the boards.
"Second one," you say, before she asks.
"The arm in the back half. First time it held tension that didn't belong there. Second time it released."
She looks at you.
Then she nods, the specific nod that means you've landed.
Goes back out.
Isabeau, to your left, is watching you now instead of Alysa.
"How do you know that?" she asks.
"I've been watching her for a while," you say.
"I've been watching her for two years," Isabeau says. "I couldn't tell you that."
"You know different things," you say.
"You know the technical things. I know her."
Isabeau sits with this.
"That's not a small thing," she says eventually.
"No," you agree.
"It's not."
What happens with Alysa's energy is this:
it comes in waves.
Big ones, sometimes overwhelming, the kind that fill whatever room she's in and make everyone around her move slightly faster and laugh slightly more.
But waves run out.
They always do.
And you've been watching hers for long enough to see the moment before anyone else does—before she does, sometimes—when the current starts to pull back.
It happens around seven.
The group has moved to a quieter room off the main lobby, the one with the good chairs and the vending machine that Alysa has a specific sequence for, and Amber and Jason have pulled Danny into some conversation about something you lost the thread of, and Michelle is telling Isabeau a story, and Alysa has been in the middle of everything, as she always is, moving between conversations, landing and launching, her energy filling the room the way it does.
And then—
there it is.
It's subtle.
Her sentences get a little shorter.
The animation in her face pulls back slightly, like someone turning a dial down by one notch.
She's still there, still present, still following the conversation, but the leading edge of her—the part that was pulling everything forward—has gone quiet.
You're in the middle of saying something to Jason when you see it happen.
You finish your sentence, and then you get up, and you cross the room, and you sit down next to her.
That's all.
You don't say anything.
You don't announce yourself.
You just put yourself next to her, thigh against thigh, arm going along the back of the chair behind her.
The same way you always do it.
The same way you've been doing it for years.
She leans into your side like a plant tilting toward light.
Not dramatic.
Not conscious, probably.
Just immediate and total, the way of something that has always moved in that direction.
Her eyes stay on the room, still tracking, but the tension that had been accumulating in her shoulders starts to bleed out.
You feel it happen.
You've felt it happen enough times to know the exact texture of it—the particular quality of her body deciding it can let something go.
Nobody on Danny and Michelle's side of the room reacts.
They just continue, same rhythm, same ease, because they have seen this a hundred times and it is not news to them.
Isabeau goes completely still.
You see it in your peripheral vision—the way she stops moving, the way her attention pulls sharply sideways.
She's watching the two of you, and she's doing the particular work of someone recalculating something significant.
Amber looks at Jason.
Jason makes a very small, very careful face.
Neither of them says anything.
But later—later you'll understand that this was the moment.
Not the coffee, not the arm, not the hand at the boards.
This.
This is the thing that doesn't have an explanation that isn't the real one.
Later, after Alysa has fully surfaced again—she does, she always does, fifteen minutes of being held like this and she refills—and the evening has continued in the direction of food and then Danny somehow telling an extremely long story about a parking garage that everyone ends up genuinely gripped by, Isabeau finds a moment beside you at the edge of the room while Alysa is arguing with Danny about the ending of the parking garage story.
"Can I ask you something," Isabeau says.
"Sure."
"Are you two—"
she starts, and stops, and tries again.
"Were you—"
"We were together," you say, because it's easier than making her work for it.
"For a while. And then we weren't."
"And now?"
"And now is what you're seeing."
Isabeau looks at you.
Then at Alysa, who has won the parking garage argument by the evidence of the noise Danny is making.
Then back at you.
"She's different with you than I've ever seen her," she says.
"With anyone. At the rink. In the two years I've known her."
"I know," you say.
"Does she know you know?"
You think about this.
"We know the same things," you say.
"We just haven't had the conversation yet."
"Why not?"
It's a fair question and you give it a fair answer:
"Because the conversation changes things," you say, "and right now things are good. And we've both been—cautious. About changing things that are good."
Isabeau nods slowly.
"That tracks," she says, which is the response of someone who has thought about a thing like this themselves.
"But—"
"But we're in the direction of it," you say, which is what you've been saying to yourself for a while, and which keeps being true.
"We're getting there."
She looks at you for a second longer.
Then she nods again, something settled in it, and drifts back into the room.
The next morning starts at seven forty-three with a text from Alysa:
come with me to the rink. not training. just. I don't want to go alone.
You go.
Of course you go.
You have never, not once, when she's asked like this, not gone.
The texture of this particular request is different from the usual training-company ones—more stripped down, more honest.
Not I need a buffer, not I need someone to watch.
Just:
I don't want to be alone with it.
Which is what she means, which is what she always means when she sends something this spare.
There's something she's working through and the ice is where she works through things but the ice by herself is sometimes too much.
The rink is empty.
This early the Zamboni guy is done and gone and the ice is perfect—that particular pristine quality before anyone's touched it, before the day has happened to it.
The cold is the same as always but the quality of it is different without other people, cleaner, more obvious.
Alysa laces up while you get coffee from the lobby machine that makes acceptable coffee if you know the sequence.
You know the sequence.
You bring hers the way she likes it and she takes it without looking up from her laces, the same way she's been doing it for years, and you sit next to her on the boards and for a few minutes you both just sit with your coffees in the cold quiet.
"It's not clicking," she says eventually.
"The second half. I keep losing it in the same place."
"The same place as yesterday?"
"Different place. Worse."
She pauses.
"More different."
"Show me," you say.
She looks at you sideways.
"You can't help with the technical."
"I know," you say.
"But sometimes it helps to show someone."
She looks at you for a second and then she stands up and steps onto the ice, and that's your answer.
What happens over the next hour is the thing you've done before, many times, in this exact configuration:
she skates, she figures things out, and you watch and occasionally say things that are not technical but are useful because they're about her specifically and you know her specifically.
You say things like you tensed before the entry, or that felt different, or you looked down for a second in the middle.
None of it is coaching.
All of it lands.
She figures it out at forty-three minutes.
You can tell from the exhale she does when she comes out of the run-through, the particular one that means something clicked.
She looks at you across the ice and you lift your coffee cup at her and she laughs and the sound of it bounces off the ceiling and comes back.
Isabeau arrives at ten and finds you at the boards and Alysa on the ice looking, frankly, like she's had an excellent morning.
"Early session?" Isabeau says.
"She asked me to come," you say.
Isabeau looks at Alysa, then at you, then at the ice.
"Does she do that a lot?"
"When she needs it," you say. "Yeah."
"How do you know when she needs it versus when she doesn't?"
"She asks differently," you say, simply.
Isabeau is quiet for a moment.
"You know," she says, "I've been trying to figure out what the thing is between you two. Since yesterday. And I keep landing in the same place."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah," she says.
"I think the thing is that there's no thing. Like—there's no performance of it. No story about it. It just—is."
"That's a good way to put it," you say.
"Is it accurate?"
"Yeah," you say.
"I think so."
She nods, satisfied, and goes back to watching the ice.
The afternoon is where it definitively gets away from both of you, which is the natural consequence of you and Alysa being in a certain mode at the same time.
Separately, you are both people who are funny and quick and think faster than the filter catches.
Together, you are an entity.
This is what Danny calls it—an entity—which he means as a compliment and also a gentle warning to anyone who gets too close without preparation.
It starts because Amber makes a reference to something she saw online, and you and Alysa both know the reference, and you start talking about it at the same time, and then you're talking over each other, and then neither of you is finishing sentences because the other one has already taken it somewhere and the original thought is three steps behind the current one, and the whole thing is building in a direction that has a logic to it that is only accessible if you've been in it from the beginning.
Isabeau, who came in somewhere around step two, tries to catch up and can't.
"What are you—" she tries.
"The airport thing," Alysa says.
"You stopped talking about the airport thing five minutes ago," Jason says.
"The horse is related to the airport thing," you say.
"The horse is not related to the airport thing," Michelle says flatly.
"I've been following this and the horse is not related."
"It is if you go through the—" Alysa makes a gesture.
"I followed the steps," Danny says. "I'm not explaining them to anyone."
"Thank you," you say.
"You're welcome," Danny says.
"I'm so confused," Amber says, but she's laughing, which is the key thing.
The chaos between you and Alysa has always had that quality—it generates confusion but it generates warmth at the same time, and people end up laughing even when they don't have any idea what just happened.
Jason, who has been a careful observer all day, is full-on smiling now.
"How often does this happen?" he asks, to the room in general.
"Constantly," Danny and Michelle say, in unison.
"Every time they're in the same room," Danny adds.
"For seven years."
"Longer," Michelle says.
"Since the beginning," Danny says.
"She walked into philosophy class and within twenty minutes of meeting this one—"
he points at you,
"—we lost her forever to the entity."
"That's not what happened," Alysa says.
"That's exactly what happened," Michelle says.
Alysa opens her mouth and closes it and then looks at you.
You give her a small shrug because she's not wrong and you're not going to pretend otherwise.
"Yeah, okay," Alysa says.
"Fine."
Which is an admission of something that goes slightly beyond philosophy class and nobody in the room is going to point it out.
Dinner is the six of you at a place Alysa picked three days ago and forgot she'd picked until you reminded her, which is on the list of services you provide that you don't actually think of as services—it's just knowing her, knowing how her brain holds things and where the gaps are, and filling them in without making it a thing.
The restaurant is right in the way good restaurants can be when someone who knows you chose them—not fancy, not trying, just good food and good light and tables close enough that conversation can move easily between them.
You end up next to Alysa because that's where you end up, and the dinner runs long in the way good dinners do, following threads that wander and double back and find their ends eventually.
At some point Alysa starts telling a story about a training trip she took last year, something involving a miscommunication about timing and a very long wait in an airport that somehow escalated into something that's funny now even if it wasn't at the time, and she's telling it with the full-body investment she brings to stories she actually likes—her hands involved, her voice doing different characters, her face moving through the whole thing in real time.
You've heard this story.
You were one of the people she called from the airport when it was happening.
You sat on the phone with her for forty minutes while she navigated the logistics and you talked her through the part where she was frustrated and you helped her find the part that was going to be funny later.
So you know the story.
But you watch her tell it anyway, because watching her tell a story is its own thing, separate from having heard the story, and it still does that thing to you, the stupid thing, the one that's just a feature.
Danny catches you watching her and says nothing.
He picks up his glass and looks somewhere else and says absolutely nothing, which is the most eloquent nothing you've ever witnessed.
Under the table, Alysa's knee presses against yours.
You press back.
Neither of you moves away.
"Can I ask you something," Amber says, while Alysa is in the bathroom and the table has sorted itself into pockets.
She says it to you the way someone says something when they've been building up to it and have decided they're not going to not ask.
"Yeah."
"What are you two doing?"
You look at her.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean—"
she exhales.
"I've known Alysa for two years. I have never seen her like this. Like not even close to like this. And I—"
she pauses.
"She's happier when you're around. Just obviously, visibly happier. And you look at her the way—"
she stops again.
"You look at her in a way that's—"
"Amber."
"I know, I know, it's not my business. I just—"
she looks at the bathroom hallway.
"I like her. She's one of my favorite people. And I just want to—I want to understand it. So I can understand her better."
You sit with this for a moment.
"We were together," you say, same as you said to Isabeau.
"For a long time. And then we weren't. And whatever we are now—it's the part that comes after all of that, and it doesn't have a name yet."
"But you still—"
"Yeah," you say.
"Still."
"And she—"
"Yeah."
Amber nods.
She's quiet for a second.
Then:
"Why not just—"
"It's complicated," you say.
"We got careful. When you lose something once you get careful about going back toward it. You worry about—about what happens if it doesn't work again. If you try and it doesn't work again."
You look down at the table.
"So we've been in this thing where we're close enough that it—"
you stop, try again.
"Close enough that it feels like something. But we haven't had the conversation. And having the conversation is—"
"Scary," Amber says.
"Scary," you agree.
"Yeah."
She nods again, more slowly.
"For what it's worth," she says, "from the outside? You're not as far away from it as you think you are."
You look at her.
She looks back with the sincerity of someone who means it.
"Thanks," you say.
"Don't thank me, go have the conversation."
You laugh, a little rough.
"Working on it."
Late that night, the group back at Alysa's, the conversation has slowed into that comfortable, post-dinner pace that means people are full and tired and happy in the specific way of a good day going to a good end.
Danny is in the armchair that claims him every time.
Michelle is on the floor with a blanket.
Isabeau has her legs over the arm of the couch, Jason next to her.
Alysa fell asleep on your shoulder at some point in the last hour.
Not slowly, not gracefully—just in the way she always falls asleep when she's post-training exhausted, all at once, like a switch thrown.
Her head turned sideways and she was out.
You'd shifted carefully to accommodate her and pulled the nearest blanket over her with the efficiency of long practice, and now you're sitting there with her head on your shoulder and your arm around her, continuing the conversation with the rest of the room in a quieter register, aware of her breathing changing and then steadying, aware in the particular way you always are when she's asleep and trusting.
Jason has been watching this happen for the last ten minutes.
He hasn't said anything.
But you can feel the attention.
Isabeau looks over from the other couch and looks at you and Alysa and then looks back at the TV, something settled in her expression.
"Okay," she says quietly, to herself, to you, to no one in particular.
Like a question she's been carrying has put itself down.
When Alysa wakes up, she does it the way she always does—four seconds of orientation, and then she's mid-sentence from where she left off, utterly unbothered by the gap.
She pulls herself upright but she doesn't go far—she stays tucked into your side, not because she has to, just because the distance between you is not something she's interested in right now, and you put your arm back and settle and neither of you makes a thing of it.
Danny, from the armchair:
"Are you two making more coffee or having a moment, because either way you've been in there and we're—wait, that was earlier. We're doing a thing."
Alysa:
"What thing."
"A game," Michelle says. "While you were sleeping. We planned it."
"I wasn't sleeping," Alysa says.
"You were absolutely asleep," Jason says.
"I was resting," Alysa says.
"On her shoulder," Danny says, pointing at you.
"Where else would I rest?" Alysa says, with perfect sincerity, as if this is the obvious answer to a very obvious question, and then she gets up to get a snack and the conversation continues, and Isabeau looks at you and you look at Isabeau and something passes between you that functions as mutual understanding without requiring words.
The game is something complicated that Danny invented on the spot and then forgot the rules of twice while explaining, and it devolves within fifteen minutes into something else entirely that's mostly just everyone asking each other increasingly specific hypothetical questions and arguing about the answers.
You and Alysa are, objectively, the worst at this game because you have the same answers to too many things and keep accidentally providing each other's responses before the person can give them, which the rules apparently prohibit.
"Stop it," Danny says.
"We're not doing anything," you say.
"You're finishing each other's answers."
"Her answer is the same as my answer."
"That's not the—"
Danny stops.
"You know what, fine, you're partners. Unbeatable team. Next question."
"Thank you," Alysa says.
"Thank you," you say.
"You're welcome," Danny says, the resignation of someone who has been here before and made peace with it.
The game ends when everyone is laughing too hard to continue, and then it winds down into the pleasant aftermath of things that went well, the particular quality of a room full of people who were a mix of strangers and friends this morning and are now just—all of it, together, in the easy way.
Isabeau is next to you at some point during the wind-down and she says:
"I want you to know that I didn't get it before. Before today. I thought I knew her but I didn't know—"
she gestures, at the room, at Alysa across it, at the general situation.
"This part of her."
"She's different when she's with people she trusts," you say.
"She trusted us," Isabeau says.
"She does," you say.
"But trust and comfortable aren't the same thing."
You watch Alysa laughing at something Jason said, open and unguarded in the particular way she gets.
"She's comfortable here. She doesn't have to—manage anything. She can just be all of it at once."
Isabeau is quiet for a second.
"Because you're here?"
You consider this.
"I don't know if it's because of me specifically," you say.
"I think it's—"
you try to find the right thing.
"I think when she knows she has somewhere to land she can go further out. Does that make sense?"
"Yeah," Isabeau says softly.
"It does."
"She has that with a lot of people. Danny, Michelle. Her family."
You pause.
"I've just been the landing place longest, maybe."
Isabeau looks at you for a moment, and then she looks back at Alysa, and something in her expression does the thing it's been doing all day—settling, calibrating, updating.
And then she smiles, not at you, just at the room, at whatever conclusion she's arrived at.
"Good," she says.
"That's good."
The second-to-last night of Danny and Michelle's visit is the one that stays with you longest after.
It's late—later than it should be for people who have a flight in the morning—and the group has condensed.
Jason and Amber went home at midnight.
Danny fell asleep in the armchair.
Michelle is on the floor with a blanket and her eyes at half-mast.
You're on the couch with Alysa, who gave up the pretense of being awake about twenty minutes ago and is now fully horizontal with her head in your lap, which happened because she slid down gradually and then didn't come back up and you didn't move because you have never, not once, been capable of moving when she settles into you like this.
You're not talking.
The TV is on something neither of you has been watching for at least an hour.
The apartment is doing its late-night thing—slightly warmer, slightly quieter, the light different, softer.
Your hand is in Alysa's hair, moving very slowly, the way it does when she's almost asleep and you're trying not to tip her over the edge before you're ready.
Michelle's eyes are closed but she's not asleep.
You can tell.
"You're going to figure it out," she says, quietly, to the ceiling.
Not to you directly, just—out, into the room.
You look at her.
"I mean it," she says.
"I've been watching you two for seven years and I know you think you're so far from—from saying the thing. But you're not."
She pauses.
"You're right there."
You look down at Alysa, at her face in profile, relaxed in sleep, the particular trust of someone who has let themselves go somewhere and knows they'll be caught.
Your hand stills in her hair.
"We're careful," you say, quiet.
"I know," Michelle says.
"You've both been careful for a long time. But careful and not-ready are different things."
You sit with this.
"Yeah," you say eventually.
"I know."
"She talks about you," Michelle says.
"All the time.
Like—not always about specific things.
Just—you show up in what she says.
Even when you're not the topic.
You're just—there.
In everything."
She opens her eyes and looks at you.
"She's been doing it since she was eighteen.
And it's different from how she talks about anyone else.
There's no distance in it.
Like she's not narrating from outside the story, she's right in it.
She's always right in it with you."
Your chest does the thing.
The ache that isn't bad, exactly.
The one that lives in the specific territory of loving someone a specific way and knowing the love is real and just—being patient with the rest of it.
"I know," you say again, softer.
"So maybe stop being patient," Michelle says, in the direct way she has when she's decided something.
"Not because you've waited long enough.
But because I don't think there's anything left to wait for.
You're both already there."
Alysa shifts in your lap, the small movement of someone adjusting in sleep, and her hand finds yours where it rests against her shoulder and her fingers curl around it.
Automatic.
Not conscious.
Just—there.
You look at your joined hands.
You look at Michelle.
Michelle smiles and closes her eyes.
The apartment holds everything in it, quiet and warm.
Morning comes slowly, the light through Alysa's not-quite-curtains making slow stripes across the floor that move as the sun moves.
You wake up before she does, which is unusual—she's normally the one at some unreasonable hour—and for a while you just lie in the quiet and let the morning be what it is.
She wakes up eventually, does the four-second orientation, opens her eyes and finds you there and does the thing her face does.
The not-surprised thing.
The:
right. Obviously.
thing.
"Morning," you say.
"Morning," she says.
Her voice is rough at the edges from sleep.
"You stayed."
"You were asleep," you say.
"I didn't want to wake you."
She looks at you.
"You could've."
"I know."
"But you didn't."
"I didn't want to," you say, which is the honest answer.
She's quiet for a moment, and the morning holds you both in it, and outside the city is beginning in the distance, that low hum of a day starting.
Inside here it's just the two of you and the particular peace of having not moved.
"Danny's flight is at ten," she says eventually.
"I know."
"We should probably—"
"Probably."
Neither of you moves.
"Same direction," she says, not loud.
Not quite a question.
You look at her.
She's looking back at you, and her expression is the soft one, the underneath one, the one that doesn't get managed.
And you understand suddenly what Michelle was saying—that there's nothing left to wait for.
That you're already there.
That you've been there for a while and you've both been dancing around the edge of saying it because saying it is the part that changes things and you've both been afraid of that and maybe the thing you've been afraid of has already happened, has been happening for years, and you're just—behind.
"Same direction," you say.
She holds your gaze for another moment.
Then she nods—small, slow, the particular nod that means I heard that and I'm taking it with me—and then she sits up and stretches and says,
"Okay, I'm making coffee,"
and gets up, and you follow.
Because you always follow.
But this time it feels different.
This time it feels like following toward something, not alongside something.
Like the direction has gotten clearer.
The airport is chaos in the particular way of airports when multiple people need to be there and everyone has different opinions about how early is early enough.
Danny insists forty-five minutes is fine, Michelle insists ninety minutes is the minimum, Alysa insists on dropping them off herself, which means the car situation requires solving, which requires moving multiple things, which requires more time than it would have if anyone had started earlier.
You help, because of course you help, because this is also just what you do—you fold yourself into the logistics of things and you solve the parts that need solving and you don't make it a thing.
Alysa is directing traffic with the energy of someone who has drunk too much coffee and has a lot of feelings about her friends leaving, which she expresses as an increased focus on efficiency.
At the airport drop-off, there is the usual compression of goodbye into too small a space—hugs, last-minute things that were meant to be said earlier and weren't, promises about visits and dates that are half-plans and half-wishes.
Danny hugs you last, and he holds it a second longer than a regular goodbye.
"Stop being careful," he says, into your shoulder.
"You're both ready.
You've been ready."
You don't say anything because you don't have to.
Michelle hugs you and says,
"Call me after,"
and you say,
"After what?"
and she gives you the look that means she thinks you already know, which maybe you do.
Then they're gone through the doors and it's just you and Alysa standing at the drop-off zone with the noise of the airport and the smell of exhaust and the particular flatness of a goodbye that happened faster than it should have.
"Good visit," Alysa says.
"Really good," you say.
She's quiet for a second.
"I miss them already."
"I know."
"That's annoying."
"That's how it works," you say.
"If you didn't miss them it would mean the visit wasn't good."
She looks at you.
Then she looks at the door they went through.
"Did you mean it?" she asks.
"The same direction thing."
You look at her.
She's not looking at you, still looking at the door, her jaw doing the slightly tight thing it does when she's asking something that matters and is trying not to show that it matters.
"Yeah," you say.
"I meant it."
She nods.
A long moment.
Then she looks at you, finally, and her face is the underneath one, the one that doesn't get managed, and there's something in it that you've been reading for seven years and finally know the name for.
"Okay," she says.
"Okay," you say.
The airport continues to exist around you, indifferent and loud.
"We should probably talk," she says.
"Yeah," you say.
"We probably should."
"Not here," she says.
"Definitely not here," you agree.
She reaches out and her hand finds yours, the same way it's been finding yours for years—automatic, no announcement—and she turns back toward the car.
And you go with her, hand in hand, in the direction of whatever comes next.
Which is:
the conversation.
Finally.
In her apartment, with coffee, in the afternoon light.
Which is not dramatic, not cinematic, just two people sitting across from each other and saying the things they've been holding for a while and letting them finally have room.
Which is fumbled, a little, because that's how these things go when they matter.
Which includes her saying I've been scared and you saying me too and both of you knowing that the thing you've been scared of is much less scary than the thought of not doing it.
Which ends, eventually, with the two of you on the same couch as always, in the same easy shape as always, but different.
Named.
Finally named.
Finally allowed to be, out loud, the thing you've been being quietly for longer than either of you said.
Two days later you come to the rink and Isabeau finds you at the boards in your corner and she looks at you once, takes in whatever is different—and there is something different, something in the particular ease of you, the way the waiting quality has gone out of things—and she says, simply:
"Yeah?"
"Yeah," you say.
She smiles.
"Good," she says.
"Finally."
"Finally," you agree.
On the ice, Alysa is doing a run-through of the second half, and she's in one of her good days, the kind where everything has lift, and she comes out of the spin at the end and she doesn't look for you at the boards but she knows you're there, the same way she always knows, and that specific ease is in her shoulders and her face, and Isabeau sees it and nods like a question answered.
You watch her skate, and your chest does the thing, and this time you let yourself call it by its name.
Which is:
love.
Still.
After seven years and all the shapes they took and the one they're in now.
She’s still close when the silence settles.
Neither of you moves away from it.
From each other.
The apartment feels quieter now, like it’s holding its breath with you.
Alysa looks at you for a long moment.
Not searching.
Not unsure.
Just there.
"Can I ? " she whispers.
"Yeah," you whisper back.
And then she leans in.
This time there’s no hesitation left to speak of.
Just something simple, like it was always going to happen eventually.
The kiss is soft.
Familiar in a way that doesn’t make sense until it does.
Like every moment before it had been quietly pointing here the entire time.
When she pulls back, she doesn’t go far.
Neither do you.
Her forehead rests lightly against yours, and she exhales like she’s been holding her breath for years without realizing it.
"I love you " she whispers.
" Love you to" you whisper back.
And for the first time, there’s nothing left suspended between you.
Which is, it turns out, the only shape either of you ever needed.