Hiya, a couple of friends recently expressed their frustrations with writing 2nd person POV and I promised to share a couple of tips. I’m sure there are other people out there who might benefit from these so here goes:
The biggest pitfall with 2nd person is that you are forced to use the word ‘you’ a lot, and this can feel very unnatural (both to read and write). 3rd person allows you to use all sorts of different words for your subject and object in a sentence, e.g:
The blonde yawns as she takes a seat by her brother. She picks up her book, turning it towards a dogmarked page. The girl begins to read.
However, when you take this into 2nd person it becomes:
You yawn as you take a seat next to your brother. You pick up your book, turning it towards a dogmarked page. You begin to read.
Oooh nooo… taking even the most basic sentence into 2nd person strips a lot of colour from the language and adds unintended rhythm in the form of you you you. And this is just one sentence! Now you have to make every single paragraph like this—yikes!
So what do we do? Well, there are a couple of techniques we can employ to add variety to a sentence, both in and out of 2nd person, by playing with sentence structure and interiority.
The first, most important rule is to avoid having the word ‘you’ at the beginning of consecutive sentences.
Let’s rearrange the sentence a bit:
Yawning, you take a seat next to your brother. You pick up your book, turning it towards a dogmarked page. Then, you begin to read.
Already this is a bit better, but we can abolish a few more you’s by messing around with unnecessary the possessive pronouns.
Yawning, you take a seat next to Michael. You pick up the book, turning it towards a dogmarked page. Then, you begin to read.
Neato. Right, so, that’s the most basic way to trick the brain into finding 2nd person more palatable, but it’s still a bit sterile.
But! Hold on!! There is another important lever we can pull: interiority. When I say interiority, I am talking about abstract statements that forgo ‘you’ as a subject, because it is already implied by the POV we have chosen. That sounds a little complicated so let me show you what I mean:
Yawning, you take a seat next to Michael, book in hand. The page is still dog-eared from yesterday—its upper corner slightly torn. Setting it on your lap, you begin to read.
We use interiority here to imply a lot of actions that would normally have ‘you’ as the subject. By making the subject the page instead, we are telling the reader that the POV character is interacting with the book without saying it directly. We are also adding padding between the first ‘you’ and the ones that we are putting together in the final sentence. Having that nice big gap followed by a tiny one creates a pleasing rhythm.
So let's look at our starting sentence and our final sentence again together, side by side:
You yawn as you take a seat next to your brother. You pick up your book, turning it towards a dogmarked page. You begin to read.
Yawning, you take a seat next to Michael, book in hand. The page is still dog-eared from yesterday—its upper corner slightly torn. Setting it on your lap, you begin to read.
As you can see, the second sentence feels much more dynamic, but ultimately they are saying the same thing! This is how I approach writing 2nd person in my work, I hope some of you find it useful <3
Summary: You run a successful curse-breaking YouTube channel. It’s very hard to keep an assistant.
There are two packages on the doorstep when you get home, half water-logged from the sprinklers and set right in front of the door rather than behind the pillars. You sigh and pull your messenger bag higher on your shoulder. Key in lock, hard twist and lift until the door gives up its hold on the wooden frame, and kick, kick, kick the packages inside. You could review the delivery driver, sure, but that wouldn’t solve the problem. They’d just send a new one who also wouldn’t know and your packages would continue to stay in range of the sprinklers and in view of the street.
Involve as few people as possible. If you ever get around to writing that book, that will be in the first five rules. You drop your keys in the bowl on the kitchen table, drop your bag onto a chair, head to the fridge. Maybe in the first ten rules. Twenty max.
Six bottles of clear liquid line the top shelf. Each glass is engraved and topped with an ornate cap. Silver, gold, cedar, redwood, wax, and cork. The last you pull out and pop, pouring yourself a shot directly into your mouth. The mix of spearmint and vodka nearly makes you vomit. The back of your throat burns and smoke thrashes in your lungs. You hold your breath for four seconds. Three seconds. Two seconds. Breathe out a cloud of black fog that drifts up to the ceiling and squats, as irritated and unhappy as a toad.
“Ribbit,” you say. The fog fades and you’re left looking at tin tiles it cost you a fortune to install badly and two fortunes to fix. After that you’d sworn off of HGTV reruns and decided to wait until the rest of the 1960s came back into fashion and your wood-paneled, shag-carpeted house became socially acceptable to host in again.
The hall to your front door isn’t illuminated by the light from the kitchen. The void hides your packages from view. If you really concentrate, you can almost make out something staring back at you. To your right is the living room. You could ignore it all, if you wanted. Crack open one of the beers stored in your cheese drawer, throw yourself onto your hideous paisley couch, flip on the TV. There’s a new season of a medical procedural your coworkers from the salon love or a documentary series about fancy chefs cooking fancy foods. You love fancy chefs. You love fancy food.
Your head throbs. Your shields wobble. Silt fills the air and you’re a cave diver looking for a guide rope as you stagger for the front door. Mother fucker. You wish the post office hadn’t cancelled your PO box. You would be able to ignore your fan mail a lot easier if it weren’t dripping on your hall rug.
You pick up and juggle your two packages until they’re both shoved under one arm. Then, holding the wall for support, you make your way to the content room. The shag carpet creates a lot of friction when you drag your feet. Static electricity jumps and sparks every time you reach for the next patch of wall. When you look for the content room’s light switch, a bolt actually arcs between your fingers and the metal plate, jolting the dark room into illumination a beat before you flip the switch.
Maybe the rule should be Involve as few people directly as possible. Three soft light boxes disperse a gentle purple glow across your set. A black desk, a red velvet tablecloth, a wooden bowl of river stones, a set of leather gloves carefully set to one side. In front of the desk, waiting like a silent sentry, is your tripod and camera.
“And the crowd is confused,” you say to the inert packages. They’re not pulling at you, not getting heavier, not thrashing. It doesn’t escape you that you’re beginning to sound a bit like one of your comment sections. The real horror here might be the internet brain rot you’ve slowly subjected yourself to over the past three years. Having an assistant to help moderate alleviates your symptoms.
You toss your fan mail behind the desk and get ready. The cape and mask you wear are piled on the sad, velvet chair in the corner opposite your set. When the assistant doesn’t run away, this is where they sit. When the assistant isn’t a coward, they get paid a generous 20%. When the assistant is a professional, they check the camera as you buckle all six buckles on the back of your head to keep the oval mask strapped to your face.
You take your mask – more accurately, your face plate – off and hang it on the back of your chair where your head would be. Your face plate grins at you with its leering, split mouth. The small, round eyes glow yellow. The LEDs the assistant put in before disappearing off the face of the planet are much better than the sightless, black holes your mask used to have. If the assistant ever deigned to call you back, you’d tell them that. You check the view finder on the camera, make sure that it can see you and your work surface.
Then you put your mask back on, turn on the camera, and stalk around your desk to take a seat.
“Boo boo says the ghost. Goo goo says the baby. Boo hoo says the assistant,” you say. You pick up your gloves and begin the work of wriggling your fingers into them. They’re tight after their cleaning, but much less blood-stained. “That’s the story of our assistant who is, once again, absent this week, dear listeners. Despite the same thing happening on this channel every single video, I might add. Nothing shocking about it and yet…” You look up directly into the camera. “Here we are. Alone. Ready for another unboxing.”
You’re probably going to add the same royalty-free spooky music you’ve always used over this video. The assistant is a lot better at sound effects and “broadening the audience through use of popular sound”, but that doesn’t mean your way isn’t just as good. So what if their videos always gross more views than yours? The algorithm favoring them was a fluke.
The packages make wet, sticky sounds as you adjust them on either side of your velvet workspace. The mic built into your mask likely caught it and you’ll need to edit out your whispered gross as well.
“Let’s see what has found its cosmic way into our seeking hands,” you say. You have to pull your silver letter opener out of the top drawer of the antique desk to slice off the letter taped to the top of the first package. It’s moist from the sprinklers and shines wetly as you gingerly unfold the single page inside. Luckily, it’s still legible. “Dear Breaker. Inside this box is every piece of jewelry my ex gave me. He died two months ago in a freak work accident. Since then, I’ve felt his presence. We broke up over a year ago and I know he never got over me. Since his death, I’ve lost my job. My current partner wakes up with scratches every night. There’s a heavy weight inside my chest. I’m afraid that it’s a sign he’s cursed me from the grave. Please, please, please help me. Cleanse whatever curse he’s left behind and send me back my jewelry. Thank you, Sally.”
You blink. Check the back of the letter. Slice open the box. Inside is a glass vase filled to the brim with jewelry and taped shut with packaging tape. Styrofoam peanuts fill the space around it, preventing it from breaking.
You look back at the camera. “Um, Sally. You didn’t include your return address? Or postage. I’m doing you a favor, Sally. Even if you did give me those things, I’m not paying you by dealing with the post office. They’re basically one step away from banning me anyways. Long story, I’m sure I’ve told it before.”
You don’t actually remember if you’ve told it before. The assistant would. If they were here, they’d encourage you to tell it to make sure your video got to the fifteen-minute mark.
“If you were really a fan of my channel, you’d know I don’t give the cursed items back,” you say. You pull out the vase and start picking at the tape with your letter opener. “And why would you want this back anyway? Your ex gave it to you. Doesn’t everyone throw away ex-partner presents when they break up? Or burn them? Pretty sure curses are the reason people always burn stuff from their ex.”
It's pretty obvious what item is the problem before you even upend the vase. But you have a channel to run so you make a big show of picking up each piece, judging it, and then casting it aside once it’s been deemed safe.
“Sally, the best taste I see here is you breaking up with him,” you say, holding up a small gold tiara. It’s got a spray of hearts coming off the apex. You grimace. “I know you won’t mind me getting rid of this. Un-cursed spiritually, sure, but not un-cursed fashionably.”
It’s fifty-fifty whether your audience laughs or calls you cringe.
After another few pieces, a rant about your useless assistant, and a small knowledge drop about how to use cubic zirconium in spellcasting, and you finally pick up the problem piece. It’s a locket in the shape of a heart (you’re beginning to suspect the ex-boyfriend had a thing for them) about the size of a quarter. The chain is too thick for the pendant and the locket is more yellow than gold. You hold it up by the clasp and let it spin in front of the camera.
“This,” you say, “is cursed.” Carefully, you lower it down onto your workspace. You grab a handful of river stones out of the bowl and place them in a circle around the necklace. “Always contain curses before working on them. Curses are, at their heart, parasites. Once they’ve become untethered, they’ll latch onto the first living thing nearby.” You grin at the camera despite knowing your audience can’t see it. “That’s why I don’t stream, you know. If I ever failed live, the curse could very well come for you, dear listener. So stop asking me to do a livestream.”
If the assistant were here, they’d tell you to be nicer.
You’re honestly thinking about the assistant a lot more than you thought you would. They’re your fourth “the assistant” and you should be used to the disappearing act by now. Sure the assistant spent the night (in the guest room!) whereas your other assistants all said your house was too haunted for them and left directly after filming. And maybe that led you to believe they were more cool with your perpetual haunted nature than the others. And that might have made you feel a little warm inside. And maybe you might have opened up to them a little which led to them telling you about their haunted childhood and you bonded over that. And maybe there are still spaghetti leftovers in your fridge from the first meal you cooked for them after hitting a million subscribers.
But all of that didn’t mean anything because they ran away. And that’s why you should be focusing on the cursed necklace instead of them.
You clear your throat. “Now, whatever is tethering this curse is inside the locket. I warn you, dear listener. This tether could be anything. Bone. Flesh. Or, as we learned last week, a worrying amount of blood with an alarmingly fresh quality.” You lean forward and whisper, “Are you ready?”
The pause you leave after the question is for suspense. It’s definitely not because the assistant would normally quip “Get on with it!” or “Wait, Breaker, let me get behind the ward—wait!”
Surely not.
Suddenly not in the mood for fanfare, you open the locket.
You’re even less in the mood now.
You gag. “Oh, yuck. I hope this doesn’t get me demonetized. For those listening, it’s, uh, hair. Very specific hair.” You frown at the camera. “Sally, for both of our sakes, I hope you didn’t wear this. Ever. I don’t think I need to tell you all what method I’ll be using to break this curse.”
Despite your ire with the assistant, you think you’ll play one of their soundbites here. Start that fire! Said in the same tone as one of those home makeover people would cry for the driver to move the truck out of the way of the new house. The first time they said it, it’d made you laugh.
The curse doesn’t fight very hard. “Because Sally didn’t cherish the necklace,” you tell the audience. You arrange the kindling in the copper cauldron you’ll be using in a clockwise pattern. It’s not really enough wood to keep the fire burning if it were a natural fire. Even with the curse fueling it, you don’t think it’ll burn longer than five minutes. “Curses need energy. Her ex was strong-willed enough to put a little oomph here, but that’s it. If Sally had been attached to this, it’d be a different story. I doubt it’ll even scream. Sorry, folks. I know we all love a good scream.”
The necklace surges away from your hand when you reach for it but runs up against the river stone circle. You snort when it tries to bite at you. Yeah right. You hold it over the cauldron with one hand, letting the audience see how it jerks against your grip. Your sceptics will cry about magnets and wires. Your believer will wonder why you still use a physical lighter when you should set the kindling ablaze with your mind.
Both sides of your audience tend to get it all a little wrong. All of them except the assistant. The assistant always got it right.
You drop the locket into the fire. Like you thought, it doesn’t scream. The flames shiver with veins of black and red. You watch the curse try to fight itself free.
“Will,” you say. Your fingers drum on the desk. Your eyes stay locked to the curse. Even a weak curse will win if you lose focus. “What will it take to meet someone that has enough of it? Enough will to stand bravely in the face of the darkness? Enough will to face the unknown that lurks in my crawlspace? Is it a spell I have yet to find? A sacrifice? What will it take to be known?”
You’ve sworn off spell-casting, but the temptation still lurks close to the surface. It pushes even closer, against your sternum like a begging cat, as the warmth the assistant gave you slowly grows cold.
You jolt when the flames finally splutter and die all at once. Your face burns. You’ll need to edit all of that out. Clearing your throat, you reach for the next package. “We have a bonus today, dear listener. Well-packaged. The letter is sealed correctly on the outside of the box. Take note, future cursed ones. This is how you send a curse to the Breaker.”
You pull off the letter and flip it open. You can tell this box is a dud. There’s no curse in here. You reach in without looking as you start to read.
“Dear Breaker,” you read, “Stop saying dramatic shit.” Your mouth drops open. Rage uncurls in your stomach. You look up at the camera. “I do not say—that’s not—” Your hand finds something long and thin in the box. You pull it out.
There’s a Snickers bar in the box. On the Snickers bar is written KEEP READING in metallic sharpie.
“If you recall, I’m just visiting home for the holidays,” the letter continues. You’re reading it out loud by instinct. A slow blush is pooling in your cheeks. “I’ll be back on the 13th for the Friday special. Eat this Snickers and go to bed. You probably decided to film as soon as you got this and you know that’s too late. You have work in the morning. I have tracking enabled. I’m giving you two hours to text me that you’re in bed before I release the Video.” You frown. “The Video…”
Then the bottom of your stomach drops. Not the Video. The face reveal video. The one where you did that stupid accent and tried to pretend you were British. The one you forgot to delete off of your privated series before giving the assistant access.
“Don’t delete this video,” you read. “We need it for the upload schedule. I’ll edit out all your rambling. Probably. Maybe. If you delete it, I’ll release The Video.”
You really need to get that video away from them.
“I have copies of The Video.”
Damn.
“Drink water.”
The assistant is not your mother.
“You kind of pay me to be your mother, so I’ll also tell you to brush your teeth.”
You won’t dignify that with a response.
“See you Friday, Breaker. Signed, Lu—The assistant,” you hastily say. Your face feels like it’s on fire. Why would they sign their real name?! You flip the letter upside down on the table and clear your throat. “Well. That’s it for the video. As always, stop cursing people and people, stop getting cursed. I’ll see you next time.”
You barely remember to turn off the camera in your haste to text the assistant. You’d fire them on Friday, see if you didn’t. Well, you might not. You think you’re going to hit 1.5 million subscribers on Friday. If you don’t, you’lk fire them. If you do, you’ll probably make steaks.
You think they like steaks.
---
Thanks for reading! If you'd like to support me and what I do, please consider checking out my Patreon (X)! This month we're having a lot of fun with one-shots and return to older works like Cinderella!
Warnings: mild swearing, light angst, themes of anxiety
Word count: 2,050
Summary: While you secretly pack to transfer to San Jose State, your silence sends Will into a slow spiral. He turns to Macklin Celebrini and Tyler & Cat Toffoli for reassurance, only for you to show up at his apartment with the truth — and a future closer to him.
Notes: This is one of my first works ever so please bare with me. i 100% want constructive criticism so leave advise in the comments. I have my requests here so please request!!! and when you do be as detailed as you want! i just dont do smut. also heres my masterlist so check it out!!
It starts with one email — Your transfer to San Jose State University has been approved — and suddenly your entire life becomes a countdown. A list of deadlines. A mountain of forms. A dorm room that looks like a tornado hit it.
Your academic advisor is talking a mile a minute on the phone, you’re scribbling notes, and your laptop is buried under a pile of transfer paperwork.
Your phone buzzes on the bed.
Will: hey babe, how was class?
You glance at it, heart squeezing, but your advisor is still talking, and you tell yourself you’ll answer in five minutes.
Five minutes becomes an hour.
Then it’s midnight, and you’re surrounded by half‑packed boxes, exhausted and overwhelmed. You fall asleep without texting him back.
Day 2 — Boston
You wake up to three messages.
Will: you okay? Will: long day? Will: call me when you can ❤️
Guilt hits you hard.
You type out a reply — Sorry, crazy day, I’ll call you later — but you don’t send it. You want to tell him in person. You want the surprise to be perfect.
You shove your phone in your pocket and keep packing.
By evening, you’re knee‑deep in bubble wrap and stress. You miss another call. Then another. You tell yourself you’ll call him after you finish packing your desk.
You don’t.
Day 3 — San Jose
Will notices.
He’s not dramatic at first. He just frowns at his phone between drills, checks it again in the locker room, then again in the car.
By the time he gets home, he’s pacing.
Macklin Celebrini watches him from the couch. “Dude. You’re wearing a hole in the floor.”
“She hasn’t answered in three days,” Will mutters. “Three.”
“Maybe she’s busy.”
“She’s always busy. She still texts.”
Mack pauses the movie. “Come here.”
Will reluctantly sits.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Mack says. “You’re overthinking.”
Will stares at the floor. “Feels like I did.”
Mack bumps his shoulder. “You’re allowed to miss her. You’re not allowed to assume she hates you.”
Will huffs out a humorless laugh. “I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
Will doesn’t sleep well that night.
Day 4 — San Jose
He tries to distract himself.
Practice. Video review. A workout. A nap that doesn’t happen.
By evening, he’s staring at his phone again.
Will: hey. just checking in. Will: i’m starting to worry. Will: please tell me you’re okay.
Nothing.
He caves.
He calls Tyler Toffoli.
Tyler answers immediately. “What’s up, kid?”
Will tries to sound casual. “Nothing. Just… wanted to ask something.”
Tyler snorts. “You sound like you’re about to confess to a crime.”
Will groans. “It’s not— okay, maybe it’s kind of like that.”
“Hang on,” Tyler says. “Cat’s better at this emotional stuff.”
There’s a shuffle, then Cat Toffoli’s warm voice comes through. “Hi sweetheart. What’s going on?”
Will exhales shakily. “She hasn’t answered me in four days.”
“Oh, Will.”
“I don’t know what I did wrong.”
Cat’s voice softens. “Long distance is brutal. Silence doesn’t always mean something’s wrong.”
“But what if it does?”
“If she was done with you,” Tyler calls from somewhere in the background, “she’d tell you. Trust me.”
Cat swats him (you can hear it). “Ignore him. Listen — you’re allowed to feel scared. But don’t jump to the worst conclusion.”
Will rubs his face. “I just… I miss her.”
“I know,” Cat says gently. “Give it a little more time.”
He hangs up feeling worse.
Day 5 — Morning — Boston → San Jose
You’re at the airport at 6 a.m., running on two hours of sleep and pure adrenaline.
Your phone buzzes again.
Will: i’m really worried now. please just tell me you’re okay.
You close your eyes, guilt twisting your stomach.
You’ll tell him soon. In person. It’ll be worth it.
You hope.
Day 5 — Afternoon — San Jose
Will is sitting on the couch, staring at the wall, phone in hand. He hasn’t eaten. He hasn’t moved. He hasn’t stopped checking his notifications.
Mack sits beside him. “You’re spiraling.”
“I know.”
“You need to breathe.”
“I can’t.”
Mack sighs. “She loves you. She’ll call.”
Will doesn’t answer.
He’s too busy imagining every worst-case scenario.
So when there’s a knock at the door, he barely reacts.
Mack gets up, opens it—
And freezes.
“Uh,” he says. “Will? You might want to get over here.”
Will looks up.
And his heart stops.
You’re standing in the doorway, suitcase behind you, backpack slung over your shoulder, eyes soft and nervous and hopeful.
“Hi,” you say.
Will is on his feet instantly.
“You’re— you’re here?” His voice cracks. “You’re actually—”
You nod, tears pricking your eyes. “Surprise.”
He crosses the room in three long strides and pulls you into his arms, holding you like he’s afraid you’ll vanish.
You melt into him, burying your face in his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” you whisper. “I’m so sorry.”
He shakes his head, pulling back just enough to cup your face. “Are you okay? Did something happen? Did I—”
“No,” you say quickly. “No, you didn’t do anything. I’ve been packing. I transferred. I’m going to San Jose State.”
Will blinks. “You— what?”
“I wanted to tell you in person,” you say, voice trembling. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I just… I wanted to be here. With you.”
For a moment, he can’t speak.
Then he kisses you — soft, slow, desperate — like he’s trying to make up for every day he didn’t get to.
Mack clears his throat loudly. “I’m still here.”
Will doesn’t look away from you. “Don’t care.”
Later — Couch
You’re curled up against him, his arm around you, your head on his chest.
“You really scared me,” he murmurs.
“I know,” you whisper. “I’m sorry.”
“I thought I messed up.”
“You didn’t. I was overwhelmed. And scared. And guilty. And… everything.”
He kisses your forehead. “Next time, just tell me. Even one text.”
You nod. “I promise.”
After a moment, you nudge him. “So… you called Tyler and Cat?”
He groans. “Don’t.”
“You were spiraling.”
“Stop.”
“You probably paced around the apartment like a sad golden retriever.”
“I hate you.”
You grin. “No, you don’t.”
He kisses you again, soft and warm. “Yeah,” he murmurs. “I really don’t.”
You settle against him, fingers intertwined, his heartbeat steady under your ear.
For the first time in days, everything feels right.
a quick one before the eternal worm devours the aether
gojo satoru x reader | one-shot
✦ pairing: gojo satoru x reader
✦ genre: angst. no comfort. not even a little.
✦ warnings: isolation · slow burn · character death · grief · morally complex reader · space au · passengers au · no happy ending
✦ word count: ~11k
✦ she did not mean to give him anything. she thought she was only leaving.
"Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph"
— deathconsciousness, have a nice life
✦ i. vacuum ✦
The ship is not beautiful when you are the only one awake in it.
This is the first thing you learn. The Aether — which the brochures called humanity's greatest achievement, which the promotional materials photographed in golden light with smiling faces pressed to observation windows — is not golden when there is no one to reflect it back at you. It is white. It is the specific white of something designed to impress that has nothing left to impress. The corridors hum. The lights adjust to your presence automatically, which means every room announces you — floods bright as you arrive, dims as you leave — and you have learned to hate this, the way the ship tracks you, the way it responds and still cannot give you anything that feels like company.
You woke up on a Tuesday.
You know this because the ship told you. Good morning, the system said, in the pleasant androgynous voice it uses for everything. The date is— and you stopped listening because the date was not the problem. The problem was the corridor stretching in both directions and the specific quality of the silence and the understanding, arriving slowly and then all at once, that something had gone very wrong.
Your pod had malfunctioned.
A fault in the hibernation mechanism — rare, the system said. Deeply unfortunate. And you stood in the corridor in your hibernation clothes and you did the math:
Eighty-nine years.
The math is simple. The math is the worst thing.
Your class level is Bronze. This is something you discover on day two, when the cafeteria on deck seven dispenses your breakfast — a protein bowl that tastes like nothing, grainy and grey and nutritionally sufficient in the way that a thing can be sufficient without being anything else — and the system cheerfully informs you that your daily allotment has been logged.
Daily allotment.
You look at the protein bowl. You eat it. You eat it the next day. And the day after that. You learn the four options available to Bronze class passengers: the protein bowl, the grain porridge, the nutrition bar, and the coffee. The coffee is acceptable. You drink a great deal of it. You eat the protein bowl every morning and you think about your classroom — the way it smelled, chalk and something sweet from the bakery two doors down, the noise of twenty-six eight-year-olds all existing at once — and you think about the colony planet and the schools that will need teachers and the children who will be born into a new gravity and need someone to show them what learning feels like —
You think: I have to survive this.
The bots are not company. You know this the way you know the difference between a photograph of a person and a person — technically similar, fundamentally not. But the silence is very large.
"Good morning," you say, to the service bot on deck seven.
"Good morning," it says. "The usual?"
"Yes," you say.
You talk to the bots. Not because it helps, exactly. But because the sound of your own voice, even unanswered, is better than the hum of the ship filling every silence. You tell the bot on deck seven about your classroom. You tell the navigation bot about the lesson plans you've started writing in the ship's open documents — all of them, every grade, every subject, adaptations for colony conditions you've been researching because you need something to do with your hands, with your mind, with the eighty-nine years —
The bots listen. They do not respond. You keep talking anyway.
By month three you have mapped every corridor your Bronze access permits. By month five you have read every accessible book in the ship's library and started on the technical manuals. By month eight you have learned more about the Aether's propulsion system than you ever wanted to know, and that beyond the Bronze decks there are Gold decks and Platinum decks and something called Founder Class that isn't listed in the public manifest at all — just a blank space where information should be.
By the end of the first year, the silence has a weight and a texture and a specific quality that you know the way you know your own heartbeat.
You are so tired.
Tired in the way that has no practical solution. That lives underneath everything. That accumulates like the distance between here and there.
You are tired of being the only heartbeat awake in a vessel of five thousand sleeping people.
You find him at the end of the first year.
You are not looking for him. You are doing what you do most afternoons — walking the operational levels, the parts of the ship that run the running, because your Bronze access technically doesn't cover these corridors but the maintenance panels respond to a sequence you found in a technical manual and you stopped feeling guilty about that around month four —
The hibernation deck is long and very quiet.
Five thousand pods. Five thousand people sleeping through the distance, through the dark — and you walk among them sometimes because the sound of the environmental systems keeping them alive is the closest thing to the sound of breathing you have found on this ship —
You find him in row forty-seven. You stop walking.
He is — you stop.
He is very beautiful.
This is an objective observation. You are a person who has not seen another face in a year and you are capable of objective observation and the face in pod 4716 is, objectively, the most beautiful thing you have seen on this ship including the stars. Sharp jaw. White hair, strange and striking even in sleep. The specific quality of someone whose face in stillness still suggests movement, intelligence, a mind that doesn't stop even here —
The pod's classification panel reads differently from every other pod you've passed. No class designation. No passenger number. Just:
Gojo Satoru. Aether Founder. Systems Architect.
Priority: ORIGIN.
You don't know what Origin means. You've never seen that designation.
You stand there for a long time. You tell yourself you are just looking.
You come back the next day. And the day after that.
You tell yourself there is no decision being made here, slowly, day by day, in the specific loneliness of someone who has been talking to bots for a year —
On the three-hundred-and-seventy-eighth day, you open his pod.
✦ ii. perihelion ✦
He doesn't wake up gracefully.
You had prepared for this — for the disorientation, the physical difficulty of coming back from that kind of cold. You had not prepared for the sound. The gasping, terrible sound of a person being pulled from very deep water, and then he is upright and coughing and you are there with a glass of water and your heart is doing something very loud in your chest —
"What," he says.
"Oh—" Your voice comes out with exactly the right amount of surprise you had been practicing with. "Oh, thank god — I heard something from this corridor, I thought it was a system malfunction—" You gesture at the pod, at him, at the vague idea of a person who has just unexpectedly woken up. "Are you okay? Do you know where you are?"
He stares at you. His eyes are not quite focusing. He takes the water. He drinks it. He looks around the hibernation bay with the specific expression of someone running a great many calculations at once.
"I'm on the Aether," he says.
"Yes," you say.
"I'm awake." "Yes." "I shouldn't be awake." Not to you — just the fact, stated. The way you'd state a mathematical impossibility. "My pod is the most secure unit on this ship. I designed the failsafe systems for this entire deck. There is no scenario in which—" He stops. Looks at his hands. Looks at you. "Who are you?"
You tell him your name. "What class?" "Bronze," you say.
Something moves across his face. "How long have you been awake?"
You pause for just the right amount of time. "A year," you say. "My pod malfunctioned about a year ago."
The expression that crosses his face is not pity. Something more complicated — faster, more internal, the expression of someone absorbing information and immediately beginning to do something about it.
"A year," he says. "Alone." "Yes." "What have you been eating."
You blink. Of all the questions — "The Bronze cafeteria. Deck seven. Protein bowls, mostly."
His expression does something that you will later recognize as the specific face he makes when someone has told him about a system that is deeply, personally offensive to him.
"Protein bowls," he says flatly. "And coffee," you say. "The coffee is—" "Come with me," he says.
His name is Gojo Satoru and he overrides your class restriction in approximately three seconds.
Not the upper dining hall's door panel — your entire Bronze designation, lifted, replaced with something that doesn't have a name in the public system. He does it from the ship's main console on the operational level, his hands moving across the panels with the ease of someone who doesn't navigate systems so much as speak to them, and when he's done he turns to you and says: "You can go anywhere on the ship now."
You stare at him.
"The class system," he says, and his voice does something — flat, controlled, the control of someone pressing down on something that wants very much to surface — "was not my design. It was my business partner's. Suguru thought a tiered revenue structure would make the mission financially viable. I thought it was obscene. I needed his funding." He looks at the panel. "You've been on this ship for a year eating protein bowls because of a decision I made in a negotiation I've regretted since the day I signed it."
"That's not—" you start. "It's not your fault," he says. "It's not particularly your problem either. But I can fix it so I'm fixing it." He looks at you with those eyes, which are, now that they're focused, an extremely unsettling shade of pale. "Are you hungry?"
You laugh. It comes out slightly broken — the first real laugh in a year, and it sounds like it — and he watches you with an expression you can't read yet and won't be able to read for months.
"Yes," you say. "I'm very hungry." "Good," he says. "I know where the real food is."
He is scared.
You see it underneath the competence, underneath the easy authority of someone who knows every system on this ship — the specific fear of a man who has understood something he cannot fix. His pod should not have malfunctioned. He says this in pieces, over the following days, while he runs diagnostics and checks failsafes and sits in the navigation deck talking to the ship's consciousness with the quiet focused voice he uses when he's thinking hardest —
"Someone tampered with it," he says one morning, over breakfast. Real breakfast, upper level, eggs and coffee that he makes wrong and doesn't know he makes wrong yet.
"Who would—" "Suguru wouldn't." Immediately. Certain. Then, less certain: "Suguru wouldn't." He looks at his coffee. "There are people who didn't want me on this colony. People who thought my research was dangerous. Who thought a neurologist with my access to the colonist population was—" He stops. "It doesn't matter now."
You look at him across the table. The stars move past the window.
"What were you going to do there?" you ask. "On the colony."
He looks up. Something in his face does the thing you will come to know very well — a brightness, brief and real, the light switched on behind the pale eyes — and he tells you.
He tells you about the blank page. About what it means to study a human brain adapting to a new gravitational constant, a new atmospheric composition, the first generation of children born into a different sky. He tells you about the research he's been building toward for twenty years, the thing that required a new planet because Earth had given him everything it had and he needed more variables, more unknowns —
"You needed a place where everything was a question," you say. He looks at you. "Yes," he says. "Exactly that."
"I understand that," you say. "That's why I wanted to teach there. The first children. The ones who won't know any other sky — I wanted to be there when they start asking questions about it."
He is quiet for a moment. "What grade?" he asks. "Eight-year-olds," you say. "Roughly. Whatever that maps to on a new planet."
"Eight-year-olds," he says, in the tone of someone who finds this both baffling and somehow correct. "They're the best age," you say. "Old enough to have real questions. Young enough to still think the answers are magic."
He looks at you for a long moment. "Tell me about your lesson plans," he says.
✦ iii. accretion ✦
He shows you the ship.
This is how it happens — gradually, the way all the most important things happen, in increments so small each one is dismissible. He takes you through the atmospheric processors first, because you ask about the hum — it changes pitch sometimes, you tell him, around what I think is 3am, it drops slightly and then comes back — and his eyes do the thing and he takes you to deck twelve and shows you the seasonal variation cycle, the way the ship mimics Earth's atmospheric rhythms to keep five thousand sleeping bodies calibrated.
"The human body needs rhythm," he explains, his hands moving over the panel. "Even unconscious. Even in hibernation. It needs to know that time is passing in a way it recognizes. Without the cycle the immune response degrades, the circadian architecture collapses—" He glances at you. "Sorry. Too technical?" "No," you say. "Keep going."
He keeps going.
He shows you the navigation deck and the star maps and traces the route with one long finger — the arc between here and there, the specific trajectory that adds two years to the journey — "a radiation belt," he says, "most people didn't notice the adjustment, they were already asleep, but I spent six months calculating the safest path and Suguru tried to override it because the shorter route was cheaper to fuel—" "What did you do?" "I told him I would dismantle the navigation consciousness I'd built if he changed the route." "Would you have?" He looks at you. "No," he says. "But he didn't know that."
You laugh. He watches you laugh the way he's been watching you — the specific quality of his attention when you do something he finds not surprising, exactly. Something more like confirming.
He shows you the observation deck last. You've found it on your own — of course you have, you've mapped every corridor — but you've never been here with someone else, and being here with someone else makes it different. The glass in every direction. The stars at every angle, their positions wrong, shifted by velocity and distance into configurations that have no names yet —
"That one," you say, pointing. "Cygnus," he says. He leans slightly — closer than necessary — following your finger. "Though from this angle it looks more like a question mark."
You look at him instead of the stars. He looks back. Neither of you says anything.
The ship hums around you. Two people awake in a glass room full of unnamed stars —
You look away first.
He gives you access to the medical level on day forty of his waking.
"For safety," he says. "You've been alone on this ship for over a year. You should be able to access the full medical suite." "Satoru," you say, "I'm not—" "It's practical," he says. Not looking at you. "The full access lets you into the emergency systems. Survival equipment. The cryogenic medical preservation units on sub-level four — those are last-resort systems, built for catastrophic injury, they freeze cellular activity to prevent death until proper treatment is available." He pulls up the clearance on the panel. "You should know they're there." "Okay," you say. "Okay," he says.
He doesn't look at you. You don't think about sub-level four again for a long time.
✦ iv. binary ✦
It takes eight months after he wakes up.
You mark it not by a specific moment but by the morning you wake up and realize the guilt has gone quiet. It was there underneath everything for so long — the specific weight of what you did, the five thousand sleeping people and the eighty-nine years and the word selfish applied to yourself every night — and then one morning you reach for it and find only the hum of the ship and the light coming through the porthole and the thought:
He makes coffee wrong. I should tell him.
You tell him. He argues with the specific energy of someone who has never been wrong about anything and finds the possibility philosophically interesting rather than threatening. You argue back. He makes it correctly under protest and takes one sip and says nothing for a moment and then says: "It's marginally better." "It's significantly better," you say. "Marginally," he says.
You feel something so ordinary it almost hurts.
Two years together looks like this:
It looks like breakfast every morning in the upper dining hall, the real food, the coffee argument that never resolves. It looks like him appearing in the observation deck when you're already there and sitting beside you without asking, close enough that your shoulders almost touch, both of you looking at the wrong-angled stars.
It looks like him pulling up star charts and pointing out things that have no names — "this cluster," he says, "doesn't exist in any catalog because no one has seen it from this angle before" — and you say "then we should name it" and he says "that's not how astronomy works" and you say "we're the only people awake in a billion miles, I think we make the rules" and he is quiet for a moment and then he says, "alright. what would you call it?"
You name seventeen stars over two years. He pretends to find this scientifically embarrassing and writes all seventeen names in his notebook.
It looks like him getting sick — a minor thing, a ship-borne virus from the recycled air — and you bringing him tea and sitting in the chair by his bed while he sleeps because you know what it feels like to be alone on this ship with nothing wrong and you won't let him be alone with something wrong. When he wakes up and finds you there he looks at you for a long moment and says nothing, just: "the tea is cold." "I'll make more," you say. "You make it wrong," he says. "I make it correctly," you say. "You have a fever and compromised judgment." He almost smiles.
It looks like learning each other in the specific way you learn things in a small space with nowhere else to go. The way he goes quiet when he's working on something that matters. The way he talks to the ship's consciousness like it's a colleague. The way he looks at the planet on the navigation charts — Kepler-452b, the destination, the blank page — with something that is not quite grief and not quite longing and takes up a shape in his face that you have never asked about because you know what it is.
It looks like him saying your name in the observation deck one evening — just your name, nothing attached to it — and you turning and finding him looking at you with the expression he's been building toward for eight months, the one with nothing performed in it, just him, and him saying:
"I need you to know that whatever happens. Whatever this is. I'm — glad you're here."
The ship hums around you. "Satoru," you say. "You don't have to say anything back," he says quickly. "I just — I needed you to know."
You look at him. At the pale eyes and the white hair and the face that has been the only face on this ship for two years, the face you woke up to find, the face you found in row forty-seven and told yourself you were only looking —
"I'm glad too," you say.
He exhales. The stars move past the window. Not moving. You are moving.
✦ v. redshift ✦
He finds it on a Thursday.
You are in the observation deck when it happens. You feel it — the specific change in the quality of the ship's atmosphere that you've learned to read after two years of being one of two people awake in it — and you sit very still and you wait.
He comes to find you. His face is doing something you've never seen it do — very still, very controlled, the control of someone holding something enormous and not sure they can hold it —
"The bots keep recordings," he says. "Standard liability protocol. I was running a diagnostic and I found — there are recordings of you. From before I woke up." He looks at you. "From when you were deciding."
The observation deck is very quiet.
"You found me on day forty-three of your first year," he says. His voice is very even. Extremely even. "You came back every day for three hundred and thirty-five days. You talked to the bots about it. About finding me. About—" His jaw works. "You planned it."
"Satoru—" "You knew." Still even. "You knew what my classification meant — Origin class, it's in the public addendum if you know where to look — you knew what my work was and what this mission—" "I didn't know what Origin meant," you say. "I found out after. I didn't know who you were when I—" "When you decided." His voice finally does something. Just at the edge. "Does it matter whether you knew my name? You knew I was a person. You knew what you were taking from me."
The stars are in every window. "Yes," you say. "I knew."
The silence after is total.
"I was alone for a year," you say. Quietly. "I'm not telling you that so you'll forgive me. I'm telling you because it's the truth and I owe you the truth." You look at your hands. "I was so alone. And I told myself for three hundred and thirty-five days that I wasn't going to do it. And then I did it. And I'm sorry. I know what it cost you. I know what the colony was supposed to be. I know what your research—"
"Do you." His voice is very quiet now. The quiet is worse than the volume. "I read everything you published," you say. "After I woke you up. Every paper. Every proposal. I know what you were going to do there and I know what I took and I have been sorry every day and it has never been enough and I know that."
Something moves across his face. "You doomed it," he says. "The research. The colony neurological program. The first generation data that would have taken human medicine forward by fifty years. There were people — there are people who don't exist yet — who needed that work." His voice cracks, just slightly, just once. "What were you thinking."
You don't answer.
Because the answer is: I was thinking I couldn't survive one more day.
"I'm sorry," you say. He leaves.
The silence that follows is a different kind. Before, the silence was the ship's — vast and impersonal. Now it has a shape. It occupies the observation deck without him. The breakfast table with one setting. The navigation deck where he works late and you no longer bring coffee.
You give him the space. You do not follow.
You sit in the observation deck and you name the remaining stars alone and you think about sub-level four. About the cryogenic medical preservation units. About what he told you when he gave you the access:
Last-resort systems. They freeze cellular activity to prevent death until proper treatment is available.
You think about it for a long time. You think: he won't miss me. After what I did. He shouldn't. You think: this is going out on my own terms. You think: at least it will be quiet.
✦ vi. event horizon ✦
You leave a message on the ship's system on a Sunday.
Meet me in the upper bar tonight. I know you don't want to. One drink. One conversation. After that I'll leave you alone.
He comes.
He sits across from you with the stars behind him and you pour him a drink — the good whiskey, the real kind — and you pour one for yourself and you look at him.
"I'm not going to ask you to forgive me," you say. "I know you can't. I just wanted to sit with you one more time."
He looks at you for a long moment. "Okay," he says.
You talk. Not about the big things. Just — talk. The way you used to. He tells you about a recalibration he's been running on the navigation system, a minor inefficiency he found that he is fixing because he cannot leave a fixable thing unfixed, and this is so specifically him that something in your chest does something you don't let show. You tell him about the lesson plans — the complete archive, every grade, every subject — and that you've filed them in the ship's system under a public folder.
"All of them?" he says. "All of them," you say. "Someone should use them."
He looks at you. "You would have been extraordinary at it," he says. Quietly. "The teaching."
You look at your glass. "Another?" "Yes," he says.
You pour. His has something extra in it.
You watch his eyes change.
Not immediately — gradually, the way the ship's lights change at the cycle's edge, so slow you could almost miss it. He's mid-sentence about something in the navigation deck when the words start coming slowly. His hand on the glass goes still.
"What—" he says. "I'm sorry," you say. "I know you wouldn't have agreed any other way."
He looks at you. The pale eyes finding you through the fog, through whatever the sedative is doing, and the expression on his face is not angry. Not anymore. Something past anger. Something that has come all the way around to the other side of it —
"You can't," he says. Slow. Careful with the words. "You'll be okay," you say. "The pod is ready. I've been checking the systems for weeks." "You'll be—" He stops. Tries again. "You'll be alone." "I know," you say. "I don't—" His eyes are losing the focus. "I don't want you to be alone." Your throat does something. "Sleep," you say. "It's okay."
His head tips forward. You are already there — your hands on his arms, careful, guiding — and he looks up at you from that low angle with the losing-focus eyes and his mouth tries to form something that might have been your name —
You put your hand on his face. His cheek against your palm. You look at him the way you have been looking at him since day three-hundred-and-seventy-eight, pod 4716 — the specific look of someone who has made a decision so large it has become a kind of peace.
I love you, you think. I'm sorry I woke you up. I'm sorry I couldn't be sorry enough to not do it.
He goes under.
You put him back in his pod yourself. You know every panel — you've been learning them, quietly, for weeks. You run the sequence. You watch the panel cycle through.
Hibernation stable. Estimated wake: arrival at Kepler-452b.
You put your hand on the glass. You take it away.
You write the lesson plans. All of them. Every grade, every subject, every adaptation for colony conditions, margin notes in your handwriting — for the first teachers, for the children who won't know any other sky — and you file them in the ship's system under a public folder where anyone can find them.
You watch every film in the ship's library. You read every book. You learn the names of the seventeen stars you named together, so you won't forget them even though there is no one left to tell.
You write him a letter.
To Satoru.
I'm sorry I woke you up. I know you're probably still angry at me, and I don't mind that. You had every right to be.
I know you're upset about our last drink. I knew you wouldn't agree to go back any other way. I looked for another option for a long time. There wasn't one that I could live with.
Satoru. I really loved you. I know that doesn't fix anything. I know it doesn't give you back the years or the research or the colony the way it was supposed to be. But I loved you and I wanted you to know, because I don't think I ever said it properly and this is the last chance I have to say anything.
After I put you back I did some research. I didn't know, when I found you, that you were THE Satoru Gojo. Founder of the Aether. Architect of everything. The person this mission was built around. If I had known —
I think I still would have woken you up. I'm sorry. I think I still would have. You were so beautiful and I was so tired and I —
Anyway.
I hope you live out your life on the colony planet the way you wanted to. I hope the blank page is everything you needed it to be. I hope you learn everything again.
I know nobody on this ship will remember me. You don't have to either.
I found the preservation units on sub-level four. The ones you told me about when you gave me the access. I understand what they're for now. I'm going to use one. I know it's meant for injury, not for this, but I've been reading the technical specifications for weeks and I think it will work the way I need it to.
I'm not afraid. I've had the stars and I've had you and that's more than I expected when I woke up on that Tuesday.
I named the rest of the stars. All seventeen. They're in the ship's log now. I thought you should know.
Have a nice life, Satoru.
✦ vii. remnant ✦
The planet comes into view on a Wednesday.
Good morning, the ship says. Arrival at Kepler-452b in seventy-two hours.
He lies in the wake-up bay with the fluorescent lights and the specific fog of coming back from that kind of deep and the knowledge already there waiting for him before he is fully conscious —
You're gone.
Around him the bay fills with the noise of five thousand people waking all at once — coughing, confusion, the slow reorientation of bodies returning to themselves — and he lies in the middle of all of it and thinks about a woman who found him in row forty-seven and performed shock very convincingly and brought him coffee made correctly for two years.
He gets up. He finds his quarters. The box is on the desk.
Small. Plain. His name in her handwriting — four months of her handwriting on coffee arguments and navigation notes and the margins of borrowed books, he would know it anywhere —
To Satoru.
He sits down. He reads it. He reads it again.
I think I still would have woken you up. You were so beautiful and I was so tired and I —
He puts the letter down.
He sits while the planet fills the observation windows — blue-green and new and waiting — and outside his door the Aether comes fully alive for the first time in eighty-nine years, five thousand people moving through corridors that were empty for most of his memory of them.
I know nobody on this ship will remember me.
He stands up.
He finds her on sub-level four.
He knew he would. He has known since the letter — the line about the preservation units, the cellular freeze, and the specific tone of someone who has thought very carefully about a thing and made a decision — and he follows the access log to a maintenance corridor he showed her himself, the clearance he gave her himself, and the door he opens himself —
The medical preservation unit is humming. Has been humming, the log tells him, for eighty-seven years and four months.
He opens the display panel. He reads the cellular status. He goes very still.
The unit was not designed for this. She did not know what she was doing — or she knew exactly what she was doing and not what it would mean, which is different — and the cellular preservation is not perfect, it is not what the hibernation pods achieve, but it is —
It is something.
It is the specific something that a man who has spent his life studying what the human body can survive looks at and does not look away from. It is the specific something that a man who has never left a fixable thing unfixed recognizes immediately and with the full force of everything he is —
He looks at her face through the glass. He has looked at this face across breakfast tables and in observation decks and in the last moments before a sedative took him under. He has looked at this face for two years and then lost it and then carried the loss across eighty-nine years of cold dark sleep —
You are so still. The specific stillness of something that is waiting without knowing it is waiting.
He opens the unit. He carries you to the hibernation deck. He finds an Origin class pod — his own specifications, the ones he wrote knowing exactly what they would do — and places her inside with the care of someone who has been thinking about what the body can survive for his entire career and has never wanted the answer more than he does right now.
He programs it himself. He seals it. He puts his hand on the glass.
He straightens. He looks at the planet in the window at the end of the corridor. Blue-green. New. Full of blank pages.
He takes out his notebook. At the top of a fresh page, in the handwriting she knew, he writes:
maybe the next technology I invent brings back —
He doesn't finish the sentence. He closes the notebook. He goes to the colony. He goes to work.
✦ viii. synthesis ✦
you did not mean to give him anything.
you thought you were only leaving.
you named seventeen stars.
they are in the ship's log.
he knows all their names.
have a nice life, satoru.
he intends to.
author's note: hi hello🤍 so I couldn't go to sleep without writing out this fic, its late and probably not proofread but I had to get it out there lol. dead reckoning chapter should be out by the end of this weekend, thank you all so much for your support I truly appreciate it! I'm always open to requests or just random asks!
orbital resonance series | the margin of error | part one complete | ao3
project hail mary fanfic. second person reader insert. rivals to lovers. ~16k words.
you are a reputation-conscious phd student who has read every word ryland grace has ever published and is absolutely furious about it. he is chaos in a chunky cardigan. this is a problem.
features:
• an argument that gets out of hand in a department corridor
• a lab at midnight and an encrypted hard drive four folders across from the one currently open
• a grant panel where nobody is talking about the grant
• a confession in his office that goes the way confessions go when neither of you has ever once said the thing you actually mean
• coffee that is genuinely terrible. she drinks it anyway.
• a monstera plant that is load-bearing to the entire narrative
the epilogue will not be okay. i’m sorry. i’m not sorry.
Read it all on ao3 here and the tell me what you think because I’m desperate for validation.
Summary: You’re excited for your first day as a Hero until you discover that anybody can be a hero if they have a superpower and lie on the application
“First day,” you say. The kevlar vest is too tight and pinches under your arms, but the Hero Force agent who dropped it off at your dorm room promised it’d loosen up after a few patrols. Your mask smells like balloons and feels like it, too. You can see electric blue out of the corners of your eyes. Your leather gloves – blue to match your mask – feel like a bad decision now as you make a fist to knock on the conference room door. Like your vest, the leather is tight. Pinching. A little squeaky. But none of that matters. It’s your first day, and you’re meeting your team.
“Come in.”
You push open the door.
The first thing you notice is the city. Fuck you love this city. The looming buildings, the endless grey of pollution haze high above, the sharp crack of the elevated train whipping by every 15 minutes. You’re nearly in the clouds in the headquarters building with a perfect bird’s eye view of it all.
That’s why it takes you a minute to realize who’s on your team.
“You’ve got to be fucking me.”
A primitive part of your brain recognizes the voice before you turn. Your smile drops. Awareness of the Kevlar pinching under your arms fades. You can’t even smell your mask anymore, even though it’s still sitting right over your nose. There are three people sitting at the long, mahogany table that seems to adorn every Hero Force conference room. Stacks of paper, pens scattered, a few bottles of water. The details seep into your brain like molasses. Phantasma, your new team lead. A heroine dressed in scarlet who you think might be called Flicker or Flame.
And the man who tried to kill your sister.
For a wild, thrilling moment, you think he’s recognized you. Maybe he, too, suddenly feels like he’s back at that bar, his arm casually slung over the back of his chair, his knees spread wide in a careless sprawl he’d soon learn to regret. Maybe he can feel the bass throbbing in his chest and the smarting of his freshly split knuckles. Maybe he can hear the echoes of your sister’s cries for mercy. Forgiveness. Rescue.
“You look like a bubble,” he says. His mask has spikes on it. You’re reasonably certain he hot glued them on himself. “A halloween decoration, a period pad, and a bubble. Fuck, we look like a cartoon.”
Phantasma’s red eyes narrow. “Dust Storm. You’re not making a good first impression.”
“Third impression,” you say. Your voice is distant. Why should you have to be in the same space as this man? Why should you have to tolerate him? “And probably last.”
“Do you two know each other—Dust Storm? Are you okay?”
Dust Storm isn’t okay. His scowl eases into a look of confusion. His hand goes to his chest. His new leather gloves squeak too. “I—I don’t—” He hiccups.
A bubble shines briefly at the back of his throat before popping against his teeth.
You wish heroes were less observant. Flicker and Phantasma both whip their heads towards you.
“He’s a murderer,” you say. If Phantasma attacks, you won’t be able to stop her. You’d felt thankful to be on the S-class’s team two minutes ago. Now you’re resigned. “He tried to kill my sister.”
Phantasma long, black locks float in an ephemeral breeze. “Nothing came up in his background check.”
“Didn’t he come from PD?” Flicker asks.
Phantasma frowns.
“I told you,” you say. He’s hiccupping uncontrollably now, bubbles actually escaping his mouth to float up towards the ceiling. “Didn’t I? I told you what would happen if you entered my world.”
“Stop!” he says. He’s trying to gather his power. His fingertips trail sand as he claws at the table in an attempt to stand. “You – hic! – crazy – hic! – bitch--!”
Phantasma blows through the table, her form dissolving into a storm cloud that billows to block your view. Her red eyes glow. “Bubble. Stop.”
“He came to Thanksgiving,” you say. Phantasma’s fingers settle like ice around your wrists. You know if you tried to fight, she’d break bone holding you in place. That’s why you don’t fight. You say, “He told me he’d take care of her.”
“There are other ways to handle this,” Phantasma says. She’s reforming in front of you, a dark-haired woman in a black robe that makes her look more like a villain than even Dust Storm. Her face is earnest justice. “Hero Force will investigate. They’re outside law enforcement. They’ll find the truth.”
Liar. But you know that she’s right about one thing. There are other ways to handle this.
“Oh.” You blink and let the electric blue of your power fade. Dust Storm stops hiccupping and instead gasps for breath. “I—I’m sorry. I was just surprised to see him here.”
“Heroes are expected to maintain their composure,” Phantasma says. Her grip remains steady on your wrists.
You slump. “It’s my first day,” you say in a small voice.
Phantasma sighs. At last she lets go, stepping back until she can see both you and Dust Storm. “And it was our fault for not vetting this team properly. Prior connections are supposed to show up so long as both parties are honest.”
Dust Storm coughs. “I didn’t hit anybody. That bi—she said I did to get alimony. That’s it.”
Is that what he called paying her medical bills? Alimony?
Phantasma is talking again, but you hardly hear her. She says there will be an investigation. Reassessment. Maybe even reassignment.
You know how this will go.
Dust Storm will say all the right things. It was a miscommunication. An accident. She hit him back. It was mutual. Hero Force will side with him, an officer of the law with ten years of experience. Mistakes happen. They’ll understand.
There are other ways to handle this.
Phantasma calls an end to the meet and greet. She orders both you and Dust Storm to report to the Evaluation Department. Both of you agree. Satisfied that she’s set the situation to rights, Phantasma goes to write her reports. She has to explain why her team is breaking up on the first day. Nobody is going to be happy, especially not Foresight.
That’s why she doesn’t see what happens next.
Dust Storm gets too close. He looms. Blusters. Breathes sand right into your face so that you rear back with a curse as it blinds you.
“Watch your back,” he hisses, breath like desert air against your face. He grabs your upper arm and drags you towards him. “Don’t say anything you’ll regret.”
Tears roll fat and heavy out from under your mask. Fuck, there’s sand under your eyelids. He takes your tears as fear. Submission. Maybe your lips tremble. Maybe you shudder at his touch.
He swaggers out of the room like he’s won. He doesn’t know that there are other ways to handle things.
Flicker pauses next to you. Her eyes dart like flames to the door, to the window, to the wet drops hanging from your chin. She asks, “Did—did he really hurt your sister?”
Silently, you nod. You rub at the dust in your eyes.
“Maybe it wasn’t him,” she suggests. Her voice is young. “We’re wearing masks. Right?”
She’s never hated anyone before. It’s sweet the hope she has. The naivete. Once she’s hated like you have, she’ll know. She’ll know that there’s no mistaking the instinctive wave of hatred that comes with the mere sound of their very voice.
“M-maybe,” you say and sniffle.
“You should just tell them the truth,” Flicker says. She hesitates and pats your shoulder. “That’s all you have to do.”
Sweet. “Yeah. Thanks.”
Assured that she’s done her part, she leaves. You admire her. She’s grown up in a bubble that’s allowed her to really be a hero, not just a pretend one like you.
You eye the security camera in the corner of the room. It’s lucky that you’re in Headquarters. It’s the only building in the city completely under Hero Force watch. When they watch the cameras back later, they’ll see you withdraw your power from Dust Storm. They’ll see you get suitably cowed by your teammates. They’ll see you leave the building.
When the bubble in Dust Storm’s veins finds its way to his heart, those same cameras will see that you aren’t anywhere close to him. It’ll be hours later. He’ll probably be alone. Nobody will think of you. Not until it’s too late.
You try to think of how you’re going to explain this to your sister on the train ride home. In the end, you decide to take your new team’s advice.
Tell the truth. That’s all you have to do.
And, if that fails, there are other ways to handle this.
You wonder what your sister’s stance on moving is.
----
Thanks for reading! If you'd like to read my Halloween themed story before anyone else, please consider supporting me on Patreon (X)
Summary: You run a successful curse-breaking YouTube channel. It’s very hard to keep an assistant.
