mickey barnes x reader ⟢ christmas eve, year 1 in space. after a long shift, you find something special waiting for you in your room.
christmassy mickey 17 ficlet | rated teen | 1.3k wc
warnings: sexually suggestive
( i understand light-years make time wrong in space. forget about all that and join me, won't you? take my hand. )
From the moment you signed on for this expedition, you knew there would be plenty of things you would miss about Earth, especially in the first year. You expected your chest to ache when you thought about your family and friends. You knew you’d get nostalgic about the little things, like watching the leaves change in autumn or meeting a friendly cat on your evening walks. Hell, you’ve already shed a few tears just thinking about the way the sun used to feel on your skin because the sunlight simulation lamps did not replace the real thing.
So, naturally, when the time came for the first holiday season off-planet, you knew you’d get all in your feelings about it.
What you didn’t anticipate was meeting a really sweet guy who quickly made it his mission to take care of you in every possible way he could manage.
Mickey Barnes. What would this journey be like without him? Fortunately, you would never know.
Your mind was set on him as you plodded back to your bunk, exhausted after another long day of training. (As a security officer, you’ve seen far less action than you thought you would up to this point, so it felt like overkill to run and spar all day, on Christmas Eve no less. You didn’t even train this much back in your boot camp days on Earth.) All you could think about was crashing onto your bed and curling up with him until dinnertime — safe, warm, unburdened. Your chest flooded with warmth, so swept up in your daydreams you could almost feel his body against yours.
But the feeling faded just as quickly as it came on, and your heart turned to cold, hard ice as reality crashed over you. Mickey’s ‘line of work’ didn’t offer consistent hours, and depending on what his duties for the day entailed, you may not even see him until tomorrow.
You thought back to the mess hall that morning, remembering how he didn’t eat all that much, no matter how much you insisted.
“Not hungry, I guess,” he’d mumbled as he finished the last of his meager breakfast. You’d tried handing some of your food to him, a little worried what his lack of appetite could mean. He didn’t talk about his (terrible, cruel, infuriating) job very much, but you noticed the days when he had to drag himself away from you to head toward the medical bay.
Surely they wouldn’t kill him today, right? you thought, feeling a little panicky.
Then you thought of that oaf, Arkady… He probably wouldn’t even give a shit.
Would you be spending the holiday alone, waiting for your man to be spat out of a printer?
You clenched your fists, so lost in your stormy thoughts you barely noticed you were stomping through the halls, your gait so ferocious people leapt out of your path.
Beneath the clanging of your boots against the metal floor, you started to hear faint music: strings and horns, jazzy, gentle. Christmassy. The volume swelled as you walked, and the sound of it slowed you down, made you smile. Made you wonder which room it was drifting from.
You grabbed the handle to your door, and to your surprise, you found it unlocked. As you slid it open, you saw that your bunk looked nothing like it had when you left that morning.
No, it was transformed — or as transformed as a room could become with limited resources. Multicolored string lights bordered the room in even arcs; paper snowflakes and stars speckled the walls; a small, silver tinsel tree sat on the center of the dining table, adorned with tiny red and green baubles; the wall-mounted TV displayed a roaring fireplace, though the crackling sound was overtaken by the orchestra pouring out the speakers.
Mickey stood before the TV, fiddling with the volume button on the remote, the blaring of the horns blunted more and more as the number on the screen went down.
“Is that too loud?” he winced by way of greeting. “I think it’s too loud, what d’you think? It gets quiet so I turn it up, but then the trumpets go crazy and I turn it down, and I can’t- Oh, here, baby, this is yours-”
“Oh, thank you,” you replied, a little dazed as you took what he offered you.
It was a red paper to-go cup, which you recognized from the coffee stand by the mess hall. You took a sip, finding a rich, warm, spicy drink you couldn’t identify. It wasn’t bad, but the cream made it unpleasantly thick. With a scrunch of your nose, you sat the cup down on the table next to the tree.
All the while, Mickey rambled on, smacking the remote at intervals, “I think that’s supposed to be eggnog, I dunno. It don’t taste like eggnog. They might’ve put coffee in it. I was skimmin’ my meals, savin’ up calories for these, feelin’ all excited, but mine just tasted weird, does yours taste weird? I drank mine really fast, though. Anyway, the music’s just too-”
“The music’s perfect, but Mickey… What is all this?”
“It’s Christmas, what d’you mean?” he replied, his eyes still fixed on the remote. You grabbed it from him as he smashed the volume back up again.
You adjusted the music to a suitable background-noise level before tossing the remote onto the bedside table, and as you did, something caught your attention. A little detail that had you biting your lip to keep in your laughter.
Above the bed, hanging from a length of fishing wire, was a sprig of plastic mistletoe, adorned with a thin red bow.
“I mean…” You drifted over to the bed, batting the dangling mistletoe, sending it swinging side-to-side in a wide, lazy arc. “Where did you get all this? There’s a weight limit on this ship. Everything had to be accounted for when we took off, and all this seems a little…”
You didn’t want to say the words that came to mind — impractical, wasteful, silly — when he’d gone to the trouble to do all this….
“A little what? Illegal?” An impish grin spread over his mouth, his bright, over-caffeinated eyes flashing. In two quick steps, he sidled up to you, his hands clutching your waist. “Is all this stuff contraband? You gonna arrest me, officer?”
Snaking your arms around his shoulders, your lips a breath away from his, you murmured, “Not many people sound so excited to spend the night before Christmas in jail.”
“Well…,” he began, one of his hands drifting down to your work belt, which you’d been too distracted to take off at the door. “I thought the handcuffs were the exciting part.”
You swat him away, your jaw dropped in a playfully scandalized expression. “I’ve told you, no. Those aren’t the fun kind.”
“I’m not listening,” he sing-songed, pulling you closer, pressing his face to your neck. You sighed, and your mouth was forming around a suggestion to skip dinner, just so you could keep him to yourself all evening, when he spoke again with that same agitated confusion, “I don’t know why the music keeps going stupid on that damn TV, don’t you hear that? Do you think we should get maintenance on it or mmph-”
With a quick turn of your head, you sealed your mouth to his. Your hands smoothed over his shoulders to the front of his shirt, and you pulled him with you as you tumbled onto the mattress. When you felt him smile into the kiss, you thought your heart would burn through your chest, on fire with love.
Back on Earth, you’d rehearsed and rehashed reassurances to your family, your coworkers, your friends, insisting this wouldn’t always be so hard. You promised them you wouldn’t let yourself become lonely. And you missed them as much as you knew they missed you right now.
But in all your estimations, you’d forgotten one crucial thing about what it meant to be human: the heart’s ability to expand and pull in new people to adore on sacred, beautiful days like these.
⎯ divider by strangergraphics ⊹⠀ ﾟ ˖
⎯ do not reupload, copy, translate, or feed to artificial intelligence / please let me know if an image i've used was made with ai because i will remove it
