Hi! For a prompt would you be able to write a little fix it au where Daniels, Tennessee and Walter make it to the new planet and try to build a cabin and realize they have no goddamn clue what they're doing but it's ok cuz they're gonna stick together after all the shit they went through? Fluff sounds good rn : o
howdy!! if you have an ao3 let me know and i can officially gift it to you <33 if not, enjoy it here!!
ao3 link | implied walter/daniels building from close friendship
She asks him if he’ll help her build the cabin.
He’s honored and humbled to say he will.
Seven years pass.
Walter’s been over-checking everything, constantly on the monitors and looking for anomalies. When Daniels laughs (with relief in it, though, and a certain fondness), he just tells her he’s been thorough.
They don’t wake the colonists until they’ve landed and done full scans for a certain strain of life, just in case.
The official story given for the tragically short-handed crew is a cryo malfunction. These people don’t need to know where they went, or what they saw.
Tennessee learns quick; Daniels is able to teach him how to operate most of the terraforming and construction equipment within a week, and the designated carpenters among the colonists learn from him.
Walter, as promised, follows Daniels further out from their landing site. It’s half a day’s walk away, but it’s beautiful; a lucky clearing, halfway up a mountain, looking out over the eerily-clear water source that leads, miles away, to humanity’s newest pit stop.
A strange, unrecognizable function in Walter urges him to put his arm around Daniels as they look out at the massive, stretching bend of river, so he does. She’s warm, and her arm goes around his waist much tighter than he holds her.
The beginnings of Buzyges rise quickly from the dirt; land is smoothed out quickly even as their temporary shelters are established, and the first building of many goes up within the week. Even with Walter’s help, and a small shelter established so the two of them can keep working on the cabin as soon as they wake up, they’ve only got the frame of it built by the time Tennessee sends word that they’ll be tilling the first fields soon enough.
It never occurred to her or to Jake that neither of them knows the first thing about building a home from the ground up, and she gives the wood a sad smile thinking that even if things had gone as planned, Walter would be helping them build it anyway.
She still keeps that first nail around her neck; it means even more now that it represents not just Jake and the idyllic life taken from them, but also Walter fighting for her, saving her, and having the thought to bring it back to her because he understood the sentiment of it.
They’ve been sleeping in the same single-room shelter since they arrived, but after a couple weeks, Daniels has gotten into the habit of sleeping in the same bed as him, too. Not in any obscene capacity, just for the platonic intimacy of feeling another person near her as she sleeps.
After a couple more weeks, she stops thinking of it as platonic. If Walter notices how hesitantly she drapes her arm over his waist, or how calm her breathing becomes against his neck, he doesn’t say anything.
The cabin won’t be done for another month, at the fastest, but…
She gets the feeling they’ll be turning Walter’s room into an office, instead.
