Untitled

20s, She/Her

[lithobatess]

Random bee behavior fact for those who wish to read, just because I feel like it and because it’s late and I’m stalling on sleeping:

Bumblebees look like passive, cuddly, and docile creatures; and they generally are- but they won’t hesitate to defend themselves if they feel their warnings aren’t being seen!

I.e. below, when a bumblebee feels threatened they will raise one or more of their legs into the air, signaling to whatever or whomever may be bothering them as a message essentiality saying: “hey, back off, too close!”

species: top, bombus pascuorum / bottom, bombus impatiens

If their defensive posture goes unnoticed or ignored, they may be pushed into defending themselves by stinging (which is an all around sucky experience for not only you, but also for the bee. (Note that bumblebees do not die after stinging, but it is still stressful for them.) If you ever find yourself getting close to a bumblebee while taking pictures, trying to move them, or just admiring them, remember this posture! If they do this, it is simply asking you to take a step back because it feels it is being threatened! You might get stung.

Now you can understand and use this knowledge to your advantage if you ever come across one in the future. (Of course, because it’s very hard not to anthropomorphize animals, I do admit that they look cute when doing it. Just remember to respect their space!)

[official-bee-posts]

Official back off post! 🐝

[kaijufluffs]

She's being so big and brave.

[kaijufluffs]

The long awaited sequel.

[whocaresstillthelouvre]

Chapter 1: Piece of Cake

Pairing: Joel Miller x Single Mom Reader Chapter Rating: G, right now. Chapter Summary: It's September 2003, and you're starting a new life with your son back in your hometown. You found your dream house; little did you know you'd find your dream man across the street. Chapter Warnings: no outbreak au, alternating pov, slowburn, joel's birthday, grown man with a crush, tommy miller being a menace, sarah's dad joel, lawnmowing, illness of a non-main character, lots of music references, joel saving the day, reader works at a record store, toddlers being toddlers, title taken from mudhoney's 1992 album Words: 4,500

A/N: Beep beep! New, redeeming Joel Miller fic coming through. This time we're rewriting Austin Joel's future. He gets to wear his working watch forever. Sarah lives, and nothing bad happens. This will be a very slow burn with lots of yearning and pining and almosts. My gratitude to @mothandpidgeon, @schnarfer, and @sin-djarin, & @valevntine for dealing with meeeee and having to hear about this. I hope you enjoy! As always, comments, reblogs, and screaming are very welcome.

Goldenrod Lane Masterlist | Series Playlist

Masterlist

—-

You’ve driven past it four times in the past two days. It almost seems too good to be true. A little suburban home tucked away on a picturesque cul-de-sac. The Austin real estate market is in a buyer’s market, and you took full advantage of it.

Your perfect little house, with the blue siding and giant bay window. It’s modest—two bedrooms, a nice-sized kitchen, and a big yard for your son to grow into.

Your safe and sensible Subaru pulls into the driveway just after 8 AM on move-in day, and the cul-de-sac is peaceful in the autumn late morning.

You know some renovations need to be taken care of… the bathroom is ancient, showing its age with bright pink tile and a toilet to match, the carpet in your bedroom is still shag, and the backyard garden is only growing weeds. But, step by step, you’ll get everything cleaned up and make this house into a home. After six years in Dallas, you’re back home, back where you started, and you’re trying to tell yourself it’s not failure.

Your old boss, Stu, called at the right time, needing your help at the record store. It was a simple decision… a job you already knew how to do, your parents close enough to help you with Layne, and a fresh start. God knows you needed it.

“We’re home,” you happily chirp to Layne in the backseat, who’s already wriggling with excitement in his car seat. You get him out, hoist him onto your hip, and kiss the crown of his head, letting this small moment with your little boy help heal you from the past year.

You unlock the door to your home with a proud smile on your face. You’re going to make this work.

—-

"I think our new neighbors are here,” Sarah beams, purple backpack slung across her shoulder.

“Oh yeah?” Joel asks, tossing his tool belt into the back of Tommy’s truck, squinting against the morning sun.

He follows her eyes as the front door of what once was the Marleys’ house opens. You step out, your hand holding the small hand of a smiling little boy whose mouth is moving a mile a minute. You’re… beautiful, and he swallows thickly, stopping in his tracks. You’re looking down at the little boy grinning and nodding along to whatever he says. Joel recognizes the way you look down at him, like he’s your whole world. He can’t look away, even as he opens the door for his own world.

Tommy grins, leans in, and lets out a low whistle. “She’s cute as hell,” he whispers to Joel, with an elbow to the ribs.

His eyes stay on you, and all he can afford is a nod and grunt.

“Go ahead, introduce yourself,” Tommy teases, “or I’m gonna go over ‘n introduce myself.”

Joel shakes his head, eyes wide, lips together in a firm line. He’s not going to let Tommy anywhere near her if he can help it. “Gotta… Sarah’s gotta get to school now,” he says as an excuse, as if Sarah is ever on time when he’s depending on his little brother for a ride.

Tommy slides into the truck, and the ignition rumbles to life. You’re now kneeling in the grass, wiping something from the boy’s cheek. He wonders what brought you to this street, if there’s a dad still inside the house or already at work, or maybe your story is similar to his.

—-

Your parents arrive around noon, your dad manning the small U-Haul while your mom’s car holds a couple plants and more fragile items.

You and your dad team up to unpack the truck, and you’re a sweaty mess by the third trip. At least it doesn’t take long, and by the time you’re done, your muscles ache with an accomplished pain. You’re going to do it all yourself.

You have no other choice.

Your life changed only ten months ago, a week after Layne’s second birthday. Devon couldn’t “deal with” being a father any longer… or he fell in love with his band’s pretty new singer. Either way, he no longer wanted you… nor Layne.

You left your perfect downtown Dallas loft the next day, drove the three-hour trip to your parents’ home, and became the sole parent to your little boy. You promised yourself that night, lying in your childhood bedroom, holding your world, that you’d make it on your own. Move home, pick up the pieces, heal from the past, and start again.

Now, the blue house on Goldenrod Lane will be where your son will grow up happy and healthy. He’ll go to good schools, play in the park a street over, and only be ten minutes away from grandma and grandpa. Layne will always know he’s wanted.

It doesn’t take long to unpack and set the house up, it’s not like you have much furniture. The IKEA in Round Rock is calling your name. You take care of the most important room first… Layne’s. Your dad’s putting together Layne’s new bed, complete with sheets covered in construction vehicles. Your mom helps unpack and put Layne’s books and toys away as he “supervises” in the specific way a toddler can. You hang the decals of cars and trucks on the wall, and you note to yourself to draw roads, buildings, and the sky around them one day.

After your parents leave, the closest pizza place turns out to be good enough for dinner. You and Layne eat it on the new couch—your parents’ housewarming gift and watch a DVD of Elmo episodes. It’s certainly not a housewarming party, but it’s just right after a day like today.

That night, when you tuck Layne in, he tells you, “I love my new house, Mommy.”

You snuggle him a little longer than usual. At the end of the day that had the chance to be so much sadder, lonelier, or worse, you let yourself be okay and happy. You kiss him goodnight, and he’s asleep before you finish closing his door.

It’s so quiet now. The house is unfamiliar in the dark, full of new noises. The ancient thermostat ticks, the fridge compressor whirs loudly, and the wind occasionally rattles the back door. You walk the rooms, checking the locks, then head to your room. You’re used to an empty bed now, and sleep comes quickly.

—-

Joel’s sure the lawnmower’s been trying to die for three straight summers. He knows every trick to get the battered red thing to keep it limping along. Today, he chooses to swear at it. It stutters, hacking up the smell of grass and gas. He wants to lift the damn hunk of junk up and toss it into the Colorado River. This is the last thing he wants to be doing on a Saturday morning. He wipes sweat off his brow and grumbles.

Sarah bounds out the front door, oblivious to any type of strife, skipping down the step. She pauses, watching across the street, and Joel follows her gaze. The new neighbors are outside.

You’re standing in the sun, bare-legged in cut-off jean shorts and a baggy black tee, a coffee mug in your hand. Your kid’s on the grass, trucks splayed out in front of him.

Sarah sighs a little. “She looks so cool. We should go over and say hi. C’mon, Dad.” She yanks him by the wrist, and he has no other option than to be dragged into the street before he can protest.

You look up at the sound of footsteps, and you grin a tired but wide smile that Joel couldn’t look away from, even if he tried. Up close, he can see you’re in a tee with a Soundgarden logo in the middle of the chest, tiny holes across the worn shirt, because of course you like one of his favorite bands.

“Hi!” Sarah says, more to the boy than you. “I’m Sarah. From across the street.”

“I’m Layne!” the kid introduces, then points at you. “That’s Mommy.”

You laugh and introduce yourself with your actual name, and Joel lets your sweet voice repeat in his mind, until he realizes he’s just standing there in silence. “Joel,” he blurts. “I’m Joel. Also from across the street.”

You hmph a sound like you’re entertained by his nervous antics. “It’s nice to meet you, Joel,” you say, and he knows he’s blinking like an idiot.

Sarah’s already got Layne enthralled, squatting down to play truck versus tractor with him. Joel’s fingers patter at his thigh, trying to think of something, anything, to say. He’s not so good at the small talk stuff, especially when it’s with someone as pretty as you.

“It’s a good neighborhood,” he finally offers. “Safe. Quiet. Been here since Sarah was four.”

“It seems it,” you say. “We’re back in Austin from Dallas. It was never quiet there.”

“It’s quiet here,” he repeats. Christ, this is close to the first normal adult conversation he’s had outside of work in… years, and he’s pretty sure he’s screwing it all up.

“So, I’ve heard,” you jest.

Joel lifts his hand to the back of his neck, feels how hot it is when you smile. His eyes drop to your mouth, but snap right back up. Sarah was right. There is something cool about you. Maybe it’s the way you lounge on the step in the bright patch of sunlight, your smooth legs on display, your oversized shirt giving him a glimpse of your shoulder. Maybe it’s in the way you talk, quick and bright, but a bit of reserve there too.

“Well, uh, should go back.” He clears his throat. “Got yard work.”

“Aww,” Sarah groans disappointingly.

“You can stay over here, if it’s okay with your dad,” you offer.

“S’fine with me. I, uh, better get back to mowin’ the lawn. Welcome to the neighborhood.”

“Thanks, Joel.” You gift him an amused smile, and he responds with a dopey, uneven nod.

His feet can’t move fast enough as he rushes back across the street, feeling like a damned fool.

—-

Sarah doesn’t stop talking. She’s fourteen, a Cancer, plays soccer, and loves butterflies. She can’t wait to be a counselor at the summer camp she’s been going to since she was eight, is into X-Men, and is amazing with Layne. Her giggle is high-pitched, and her comedic timing is sharp and a little sarcastic. She instantly charms you.

And yet, all you can focus on is her hot dad. Joel’s keeping busy in the front yard, mowing the lawn. You pretend to be present and listen to Sarah tell you all about Beyoncé’s VMA performance. Still, you’re locked on across the street watching her dad and the way his forearms flex on the mower handle, the way the sheen of his sweat shines under the sunlight even all the way across the street. You’re thankful for your dark-lensed wayfarers and how they block out your eyes following him and the steady back-and-forth as he turns at the end of each row. He stops to wipe his brow, pulling up his shirt to his face, gifting you a peek of golden belly, and you hide your gasp with an “oh wow,” to Sarah. The mower sound begins to fade as he makes his way to the backyard, and you mourn the loss of your show.

“Lemonade?” you ask Sarah.

The first thing Sarah does when she gets in your house is make a beeline for the small CD tower you have by the TV. She spins through it, fingers running down the spines of each jewel case.

“Pearl Jam, my dad’s obsessed. He has like, all their tapes.”

“I didn’t know Nirvana had this many CD’s.”

“Jeff Buckley! I have a picture of him on my wall.”

Sarah’s high-pitched squeal makes you jump as you put away the lemonade. “Oooh!” She pulls a CD out, Combat Rock by The Clash is thrust up into the air, her smile beaming behind it. “Can we listen to this?”

You walk into the living room with two glasses of lemonade and Layne’s lidded juice cup tucked under your elbow. “Of course.”

The opening chords blare.

This is a public service announcement with guitars!

“My dad loves them too,” she says, her head bobbing along to the jangly guitar and drum beat. She grabs Layne’s hand, and they spin in awkward circles, both laughing, and it’s genuinely the happiest and most alive your house has felt since you moved in.

Sarah still talks your ear off, even as the Clash plays. She tells you about school, her favorite movies (Legally Blonde, The Brave Little Toaster, the first Curtis & Viper), and her secret hope to one day dye her hair neon blue, but she’s pretty sure her dad will kill her if she does.

Layne toddles over, climbs on the couch, and lays his head in your lap, too tired to keep up with Sarah. You smooth his hair and wonder if he’ll end up a music nerd or a soccer kid. Sarah’s the kind of older kid who makes you hope he’ll end up like her one day.

Sarah tells you she should head home after “Overpowered by Funk” fades out and you tell her not to be a stranger. You watch from the front door as she crosses the street and talks to Joel, who's now bent over his lawnmower that’s flipped over in the driveway. She looks back at you, and his eyes follow. He holds a grease-stained hand up and waves. You return it and close the door, wondering what it would be like to listen to Joel’s favorite songs with him.

—-

“You’d love her CD collection. She’s so cool, Dad!”

“Oh! And she went to school for business management! She could probably help you get Miller Contracting even more established!”

“Layne’s named after the lead singer of Alice in Chains!”

Sarah doesn’t shut up about you all day. Not from the moment she plopped down on the grass after leaving your house while he struggled with the lawnmower, to eating the slightly burnt Stouffer’s Lasagna he forgot to set the timer for. Hell, even when he said goodnight to her, she had to mention that you also love the Curtis & Viper movies.

The inner quandary of whether it’s good or bad luck that his dream girl has moved in across the street from him makes him toss and turn in bed. He faces the dead plant that sits on his side table, then turns his back to it, staring at the exercise machine stroke closet, and the cluttered dresser. One day he’ll get his life, and this bedroom, together.

Can’t sleep. Stupid. He’s too old to be lying awake thinking about somebody he’s seen for all of five minutes.

You just looked like someone he’d like to know.

—-

“So, new records usually come in on Thursdays, the day before release, and they’re delivered in—”

“I got it, Stu, I worked here all through high school and my summer breaks, remember?”

“Sorry, mind’s just not the same.”

Everything else has changed since you last worked here, and yet River City Records is exactly the same. Rows and rows of records, paperbacks, used CDs, folded band tees, a wall of used VHS and DVDs, and posters upon posters ranging from At The Drive-In to ZZ Top are hung across the walls. The place hasn’t changed, and neither has Stu... though you see how much older he is, his beard is even whiter, his godawful tie-dyed tees hang looser on his skinny frame, and he coughs a hell of a lot more.

You instantly pick up everything, like six years haven’t passed. You man the register, restock, and recommend Mudhoney to a high schooler with raccoon eyeliner and a Nirvana pin.

You get twenty minutes of precious alone time when you leave work to pick up Layne from your parents’. The sun’s beginning to set, and as you pull into the driveway of the home you grew up in and get out, it almost feels like you’re back to being a teenager, especially when you pass the concrete slab near the basketball hoop that still holds your handprints. But then, you hear Layne’s high-pitched laughter and feel the past years and all of its ups and downs age you right back to where you are now.

Your family’s in the backyard, dad sitting in his beloved wicker patio recliner, mom at the patio table, with a book in her hand, keeping an eye on Layne, who’s busily dumping pebbles into a dump truck like it’s his job. Everything feels normal and domestically sweet, as if nothing’s ever gone wrong and you didn’t waste five years with your ex… like this is where you were always meant to return to. You take a seat at the table and tell your parents about your first day back at the record store. They’re happy for you, and even happier that you’re back doing what you love, letting the music you love surround you.

Your mom sends you home with a giant container of her famous triple chocolate chip cookies and some leftover pepper steak, “just in case” you’re too tired to cook. You see right through her, knowing she made double portions just to help you.

You smile when you pull into your driveway at dusk, kids are still outside playing as the sun begins to set over your suburban cul-de-sac. Layne’s going to learn to ride a bike on these sidewalks, learn to walk off a skinned knee, get grass stains all over his jeans here, and always know someone will be waiting at home for him.

Layne hops out of the car once you unbuckle him, and he's off, arms pinwheeling. You're still folding yourself out, diaper bag on one shoulder, your purse on the other, giant containers of cookies and pepper steak balanced in your hands. 'Layne!' you shout.

Layne doesn’t listen, in true toddler fashion. You hurry after him, across the lawn, fighting through the end-of-day exhaustion. You and all the contents in your arms nearly tumble, as Layne sprints straight for the street where the older neighborhood kids are playing basketball. There’s no real danger in a cul-de-sac, but the sight of your little boy barreling into the chaos makes the adrenaline spike inside you.

“Layne! Wait!”

He’s already past the curb, velcro’d light-up sneakers on the pavement, heading straight for the teens. The older kids are in the zone. One goes for a jump shot right as your son heads towards the chaos. All you can see is disaster, straight out of a mother’s worst nightmares. You’re fumbling with panic, half-running, shouting Layne’s name.

“HEADS UP!” Joel’s voice calls from across the street so loud and commanding, it freezes every kid in place.

He bounds out, fast, striding across the street quicker than you ever could move. He lifts Layne up, hauling him out of the way. Layne laughs, completely unbothered, like this is all fun to him and Joel’s just a broad human jungle gym. You want to cry when you catch up, especially when you see how gentle he’s cradling your son.

Your heart is racing, and you try to calm your voice. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—”

Joel shakes his head, dark brown eyes serious under furrowed brows, but his smile is soft and comforting. “S’okay. Toddlers are going to be toddlers.” He holds Layne out to you. “Here, trade ya’.” He relieves you of the heavy containers and Layne’s diaper bag as Layne settles against you.

“I go fast!” Layne repeats, proud of himself. You nod, try to smile, and wonder if you’re a terrible mother or if this is just what parenting small boys is like.

“Thanks,” you say, a little bit of embarrassment heating your face and voice. Joel just shrugs with a half-smile, following you to your porch, where you lead him inside your home.

Other than his daughter and your parents, Joel’s your first guest, and when he steps into your living room, you’re aware of how empty the house is. No personality, no art on the faded beige walls, the only decor in the living room is a framed photo of you and Layne with your parents from last Christmas, and a pile of toddler toys in the corner. Layne’s already upended his bag of trucks, metal and plastic, clattering across the floor. You’re too tired to feign hostess, and you lean against the kitchen counter while Joel hovers in the threshold.

“Been in here once before, when Mr. Marley needed help moving his freezer,” he notes, as if you know every last bit of this house’s history.

You don’t answer, you just let him keep looking around as you grab a Ziploc bag, load it with cookies, and offer it to him. “Here. Take these, as a thank you, for, um, saving my kid… and my dinner.”

Joel eyes the cookies. “Really?”

“I insist.”

“Thanks.” He takes the bag and gifts you a soft, grateful smile.

You walk him out, allowing yourself to admire how his broad shoulders fill your doorway. For a second, when he steps onto the porch and turns back to you, you both just stare. His warm eyes search yours, the setting sun bronzing his skin even more golden, and you forget to breathe and think, but you do see a flicker in his eyes when he studies you.

“Thanks again, Joel,” you almost whisper.

“Course,” he half-smiles. “Sarah used to take off like that. She was a hellion. If you ever need any help, I’m right across the street.”

You mumble a thank you, your eyes tracking down to his strong arms.

Joel turns and walks away, and you let yourself imagine what it’d feel like to have his big arms wrap around you after a long day like today. But before you can dream too much, a large yawn escapes you, and Layne whines that he’s hungry.

—-

“Put that out,” Joel grumbles.

“Happy birthday to you.” Tommy flicks the cigarette out of the truck.

Joel buckles his seatbelt, and when he looks up, you’re outside, putting Layne in the car. You’re in a denim dress he swears is the color of the sky. It really is his birthday.

The truck revs to life, Tommy backs out of the driveway, honking twice when he passes your house. You jump a little, look up, and wave with a smile.

Tommy rolls down Joel’s window. “Hey neighbor! It’s his birthday today!”

You take a few steps forward, hand blocking the sunlight that’s lighting you so beautifully, Joel can hardly focus. “Happy birthday, Joel,” you grin.

Joel’s sure he can feel the deep, red blush taking over his cheeks, and all he can offer is a “thanks,” before Tommy drives off.

“Happy birthday to you,” Tommy repeats, with a shit-eating grin.

—-

“I take this pill for my blood pressure, and this one to keep my liver from shitting out,” Stu’s saying, holding up his Monday-thru-Sunday pill organizer.

You dig through stacks of trade-in CD’s behind the counter, armpit-deep in OK Go and Counting Crows, pretending not to notice his Gollum-like knuckles trembling as he pops open his Wednesday door.

“You need to drink more water,” you tell him. “The human body is like seventy percent water. Yours is at least half bong resin.”

You’ve been spending the past week reorganizing, re-cataloging, stacking, sorting, and calling distributors, and in between, listening to Stu half-joke about his impending doom. The place is a mess, but you’ve made progress: at least the bins are labeled, and the floor isn’t full of half-opened boxes and stray price guns. You’ve even found time to put up a display by the register. Women In Rock. A full spread of Patti and Janis and PJ and Karen O.

At four, you clock out, leaving Stu to take care of himself for the last two hours of store operation. You pick up Layne from your parents’, your mom and you fall into a quick routine of handoff, hellos, and I love yous before you head home.

You’re three streets from Goldenrod Lane when you spot Sarah, walking down the sidewalk, backpack and hair bouncing. You slow the car and roll down the passenger window. “Hey, Sarah!” you call. “You want a ride home?”

“Yeah!” she shouts.

You pull over, and she slides in next to Layne’s car seat.

“Hi Sar-uh!” he shrieks with delight, and she turns in her seat, grinning wide. There’s no awkwardness between the teen and toddler. She gets him.

“Why you walking home? Where’s your dad?” you ask.

She shrugs. “Double shift today. It’s his birthday, and he still has to work.” There’s an edge of betrayal in the way she says it, but she masks it with a smile.

“That’s a shame, working on your birthday is never fun.”

“He’s supposed to bring a cake at least, but I’m sure he’s going to forget.”

You look at her in the rearview mirror and see the slight sadness in her bright eyes. “Tell you what, if you’d like, we can make him some cupcakes. I haven’t had a chance to break in the new kitchen.”

“Really?!”

“Really.”

“Awesome! This will get me out of having to go to the Adler’s,” she grins widely. “She always bakes the worst cookies.”

“I know,” you say. “She brought me over a plate after I moved in. Who puts coconut in a ginger snap?”

—-

Another late night, another late shipment. Tommy drops Joel off at 10, an hour after he promised he’d be home. An hour after he was supposed to bring home a cake for his own goddamn birthday. His whole body aches, 16 hours of hard labor will do that. What a way to spend his 36th birthday.

Joel sighs, sticking the key in the door, happy to find it’s actually locked.

“You remembered to lock the door for once,” he notes to Sarah when he walks in.

She’s on the couch, magazine in her lap, and a chocolate cupcake half-eaten in her hand. “Welcome home,” she says, mouth full of cupcake.

“Cupcakes?” he asks, brows rising.

“Homemade cupcakes.”

“Mrs. Adler actually let you make something good?”

“Not Mrs. Adler.”

Joel freezes when Sarah says your name, and he can only respond with an “oh.”

Sarah reaches the tray out, and Joel plucks a cupcake from it. “Layne put the sprinkles on. Don’t worry, I helped him wash his hands before.”

He kicks off his boots, settles on the couch with a huff, and takes a bite. He hums at the first taste, and he can feel his exhausted body loosen just a bit, thanks to the lightness from your kindness. He can’t remember the last time someone’s done something this sweet for him.

—-

Please follow @whocaresposted for chapter updates!

Tagging those who asked & interacted: @picketniffler, @kellyxo1, @speaktothehandpeasants, @jaymee-draws, @copperhalfcent

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[dubiousculturalartifact]

The new Odyssey adaptation has inevitably gotten people talking about a Muppet version of it, and they’re frequently suggesting Kermit as Odysseus, Miss Piggy as Penelope.

I’m sorry but that’s thinking way too small, hear me out:

We need to have Miss Piggy as Odysseus, and Kermit as Penelope.

Think about it… who’s the more fickle, prideful, warlike one in that relationship? Who is absolutely ready to go ham, at a moment’s notice?

It ain’t Kermit

[anyroads]

Miss Piggy tied to the mast while Statler and Waldorf heckle her from the sea

[mindovermuses]

But who is the single human cast member in this tale? Who gets to put in an Oscar-worthy performance alongside the Muppets and what role are they to play?

[muffinflarp69]

There’s no single human, everyone is a Muppet except for one scene. Circe, played by Janice, turns Odysseus’s crew into humans who still behave animalistic and are all played by Academy Award winning actors.

[bigandlong]

If you see this on your dashboard, reblog this, NO MATTER WHAT and all your dreams and wishes will come true.

[jae-felidae]

Oh hey! Haven’t seen this in forever! Didn’t reblog it when it came across me before, not gonna skip it this time, I need some good vibes.

[elegantmusicdragon]

wishing all who see this good vibes!!

[elysianightsss]

SUNSHINE

Simon Riley × Reader | A One-Shot

20K words, Simon’s hair has grown out, reader wears glasses, Simon doesn’t know how to dance, smut, the fluffiest fluff, angst, size kink, Simon is huge, pee mentioned, Simon is filthy but we all knew that. Tell me if I missed any tags.

He was four years old when he stole your crayons.

Not all of them. Just the good ones. The red one. The yellow one. The bright, sunflower-gold one that you'd been saving to colour the sun in the corner of your drawing, the way all four-year-olds drew the sun — a circle in the corner, rays shooting out like a child's idea of joy.

You looked at him across the low art table in that bright little preschool room that smelled of poster paint and digestive biscuits.

He was stocky even then.

Chubby-cheeked and heavy-set. A thick, sturdy little boy who sat with his legs wide and his fat fists curled around your crayons like he'd earned them.

He wasn't even looking at you.

He was colouring something — a car, maybe, or a blob that might have been a dog — and the yellow crayon moved in big, purposeful strokes across his paper.

You did not cry.

You considered it.

Then you leaned across the table and took them back.

He looked up.

Brown eyes. Even at four, they were startling — dark and serious and far too watchful for a boy his age.

He stared at you.

You stared back.

Then he slid the gold crayon back across the table to you, said nothing, and went back to his drawing.

His name was Simon.

You would not learn that until the register was called the following morning. But you remembered his eyes before you remembered his name.

— ✦ —

He broke your glasses in Year Two.

Not on purpose — or so you believed, for most of your life, until you were old enough to accept that

Simon Riley did very few things without purpose.

He knocked into you in the corridor outside the dining hall, your plastic NHS frames hitting the linoleum floor, one arm snapping clean off at the hinge.

You stood there, the world going soft and blurry at the edges the way it always did without them, and you felt the particular, humiliating sting of being unable to see properly — the vulnerability of it, the indignity.

Simon picked up the frames. Looked at them. Looked at you.

He didn't say sorry straight away. He examined the break with the seriousness of a boy who was already, at seven, very careful about what he said and when he said it. Then, "I'll carry your bag till they're fixed."

"You broke my glasses," you told him like he didn’t know.

"I know." He nodded.

"That's not the same as fixing them."

"No," he agreed. "But it's what I've got."

He carried your bag for three days. And when your mum brought the repaired frames in on the fourth morning, he handed the bag back without ceremony, turned, and went to join his mates by the football cage. No further apology. No acknowledgement that anything had occurred between you at all.

That afternoon, you kicked over his sandcastle in the playground.

He watched you do it. Didn't say a word.

You felt better.

And somehow, after that, you were friends.

— ✦ —

He couldn't read very well. You figured this out in Year Three, during the round-robin reading in class — when the teacher went along the rows and each child read a sentence aloud.

You noticed the way Simon's jaw set and his hands went flat on the desk the closer it got to his turn. The way his eyes moved across the page, laboured and slow, tracking words like they were things to be wrestled rather than known.

He got through his sentence. Barely. His face was blank when he sat back, the particular blankness he'd already learned to wear — that carefully constructed nothing that meant everything was fine when everything was not fine at all.

You didn't say anything about it. Not then. You were eight years old, not stupid.

What you did was start reading with him at break time. You presented it as something you needed — you told him you were practising for a reading competition and needed an audience.

Simon was not fooled. He was never fooled, not really.

But he sat down with you on the bench by the library door and listened while you read, and then slowly, carefully, you handed the book to him and asked what he thought happened next, and he had to read ahead to find out.

It took most of the school year. But by the summer he was reading chapter books. He never thanked you. He did start saving you a seat on the library bench every break time, and that was the same thing.

— ✦ —

He played football and rugby.

You read on the grass bank above the field.

It became a kind of institution — the ritual of your shared proximity without shared activity. Simon on the pitch, broad and determined and already bigger than the other boys by Year Five, already moving with that particular physicality that seemed less like playing and more like declaration.

And you on the bank above, your book open, your reading glasses (a better pair now, tortoiseshell) perched on your nose, half-reading and half watching without ever quite admitting to the watching.

He always knew you were there. He didn't do anything about it. But sometimes, when he scored, he'd look up at the bank first before he looked anywhere else.

You told yourself you were only there because the grass was nice and the light was good.

You were not a good liar, even then.

— ✦ —

The boy's name was Daniel Holt and he pushed you over in the playground in Year Five because you'd refused to give him the answers to the maths homework.

You'd said no three times and the third time he pushed you and you went down hard on your palms and your knees, the concrete was unforgiving.

You were crying before you'd fully registered what had happened. Not dramatically — small, shocked, indignant tears, the kind that arrive before the pain does.

Simon was there before a teacher was. You didn't even see where he came from. One moment the playground was its ordinary mid-morning noise, and the next Daniel Holt had a split lip and Simon Riley was standing over him with blood on his knuckles and a look on his face that was completely, utterly calm.

The calm was the frightening part. Even at ten.

He got three days at home for it. He spent the first afternoon sitting on your front step, eating crisps, because he knew you'd be furious with him and wanted to face it head-on.

You were furious. You told him he was an idiot. He told you Daniel Holt had it coming. You told him violence wasn't the answer. He told you Daniel Holt wasn't going to touch you again.

He was right. Daniel Holt never came near you again.

You didn't thank him either. You went inside and made him a sandwich, and that was the same thing.

— ✦ —

Secondary school arrived like a change in weather — everything slightly larger, slightly louder, the corridors longer and noisier, the stakes somehow higher and more ambiguous all at once. You arrived with a bag so heavy your shoulder ached within the first hour: your textbooks, yes, but also the extracurricular books you carried everywhere, the extra notepad you used for non-school thoughts, the six different highlighters you colour-coded by subject.

Simon took the bag from you on the third day without asking.

"I can carry it," you told him.

"I know," he said.

He slung it over his shoulder like it weighed nothing, which for him it probably didn't. He'd grown over the summer — not just taller, though he was that, but broader, thicker through the shoulders in a way that made him look like a man playing a boy, trying the shape of it on. He wore it well, even at eleven. He wore everything like he'd already decided what he was and was simply waiting for the world to catch up.

He carried your bag when it was heavy, and it was frequently heavy. He did it without comment and without making you feel small for needing it. That was the thing about Simon — he never made you feel small. He made other people feel small, sometimes, when they deserved it. But not you. Never you.

— ✦ —

The bruises were never from rugby.

You knew by the second year of secondary.

You were not naive — you had read enough, observed enough, understood enough about the world to recognise the shape of what was happening in Simon Riley's house even though he never said a word about it.

The bruises were in the wrong places for rugby. They appeared in the wrong season. They were around his ribs and his arms and once, memorably, along his jaw, and he came to school the Monday after the jaw bruise with that face — that blank, carefully constructed nothing face — and you sat next to him at lunch and said nothing at all.

You said nothing because there was nothing you could do. You were twelve. You were a girl with a book bag and highlighter pens and absolutely no power over the man who was hurting your best friend, and knowing that — the impotence of it, the helpless, hollow ache of caring about someone you could not protect — was the first truly adult pain you ever felt.

What you could do was this: you could make sure he had somewhere to go.

Your mother, who was perceptive in the quiet way that some mothers are, never asked questions when Simon turned up at the back door on a Sunday evening or a Wednesday after school.

She just set another plate.

Your house became a refuge without anyone naming it as such. Simon did his homework at your kitchen table, ate your mother's cooking, watched telly with your family, and slept on your sofa sometimes when the option was presented naturally enough that it didn't feel like charity.

— ✦ —

You got your period for the first time on a Tuesday in November, in Year Nine. In the school toilets, third period, when you were thirteen years old and the day had been entirely ordinary right up until it wasn't.

The particular cocktail of shock and pain and embarrassment and the specific existential bewilderment of being a person whose body was doing something enormous without prior adequate notice left you sitting on the closed toilet lid crying in a way you hadn't cried in years.

You got out your Nokia. That familiar brick of a phone, the keypad worn smooth at the number five. You typed Simon's number and pressed call before you'd properly decided to.

He picked up on the second ring. "Yeah."

"Simon." Your voice came out wrong. Too thin.

A beat. When he spoke again his voice had changed — quieter, more careful. "Where are you?"

"Girls' toilets. Near the science block."

"Right," he said. "Stay there."

He appeared outside the girls' toilets seven minutes later — you could hear him through the door, his voice low and flat, telling a Year Eight girl to go use the other ones — and then he was there, right there on the other side of the door, talking to you through it in that steady, even way he had when he wanted to be calm on your behalf.

"You're alright," he said. “Do you need me to go to the office?"

"No," you managed. "I need — I don't know what I need."

"I'll get you something from the vending machine," he said, that Manchester accent of his low and unhurried. "And I'll text your mum."

When you came out of the toilets twenty minutes later, looking wrung-out and clutching what the school nurse had provided, Simon was leaning against the wall. He looked at you for a moment — took you in, the way he always did, that comprehensive, assessing look — and then he stepped forward and kissed your cheek. Quick. Certain. His mouth warm and deliberate against your cheekbone.

"You're alright," he said again. He said it like a fact. Like he was making it true by saying it.

You cried a bit more, for different reasons, and he pretended not to notice.

— ✦ —

He was captain of the rugby team by Year Ten. It suited him — the leadership, the sense of purpose, the structure of it.

You went to his matches sometimes, wrapped in a scarf on the touchline, and watched him move across the pitch with that same quality you'd noticed on the primary school field: less like playing, more like declaration.

He was ferocious and focused and occasionally frightening, and the other boys deferred to him not just because he was bigger than them but because he had the kind of authority that doesn't need to be announced.

Afterwards he'd find you on the touchline, still carrying that quality — coiled, alert — and it would take him a few minutes to come back to himself. To come back to you.

"Good game," you'd say.

"Yeah," he'd say.

And then slowly, the set of his shoulders would ease, and he'd become Simon again. Your Simon. The one who stole your crayons and carried your bag and ate your mother's shepherd's pie like it was sacred.

— ✦ —

He could make you laugh. This was not a small thing.

Simon Riley was not, by general consensus, a funny person. He was serious and quiet and his face in repose looked like a man carrying a private weather system. But he had a dry, deadpan wit that he deployed rarely and precisely, and it landed, every time, like a key in a lock made specifically for it.

He knew how to make you laugh because he'd spent years learning you. The specific frequency of your humour. The things that made you dissolve into giggles rather than just smile. He deployed his wit with the same precision he deployed everything else, and the result was that when Simon Riley made you laugh — really laugh, the helpless, breathless kind — it felt like being given something he didn't give to anyone else.

Which, you would eventually understand, was accurate.

— ✦ —

His name was Ryan Marsh and he was your first kiss, in the park on a Friday evening in Year Ten, and it was fine. It was nice, even. Ryan was sweet and nervous and smelled of his older brother's aftershave and the kiss lasted approximately forty seconds.

Ryan Marsh had a broken nose the following Monday.

Simon maintained, with total conviction, that Ryan had walked into a door. Ryan, to his credit, corroborated this story completely.

You did not push the matter, partly because you had no concrete evidence and partly because some part of you — the part that read on the grass bank and watched the pitch and noticed when Simon looked up at the bank before he looked anywhere else — felt something that was not entirely uncomplicated about it.

You and Ryan Marsh did not have a second kiss. You told yourself it was because the chemistry hadn't been right.

You were getting a bit better at lying to yourself, by fourteen. But only a bit.

— ✦ —

GCSEs arrived the way all important things arrived — with more weight than you'd expected and less warning than you'd have liked.

Year Ten and Eleven were the years you restructured Simon's entire approach to studying, methodically and patiently, the same way you'd helped him learn to read, finding the approach that worked for how his mind moved.

Simon was not unintelligent.

He was, in fact, formidably sharp in ways that didn't translate easily to an exam paper: quick to read people, quick to understand systems, possessed of a spatial and strategic intelligence that you recognised and admired even as you taught him how to write it down in ways that the mark scheme would accept.

He sat with you at your kitchen table night after night — your mother quietly replenishing the tea,— and you explained things in the language that made sense to his brain rather than the language of the textbook.

He sat with you at lunch during school hours and glared at anyone who called you a nerd. The glaring was extremely effective. Simon Riley's face, by fifteen, was a significant deterrent.

His GCSE results, when they arrived, were good. Better than anyone who knew his circumstances might have expected from a boy who'd had so much working against him.

He rang you on the house phone when he opened the results envelope. He didn't say much. His voice, when he spoke, was different — something in it unguarded, the Manchester in it softer somehow, without the armour it usually carried.

"Couldn't have done it without you," he said.

"You did it," you told him firmly. "I just held the torch."

"Still needed the torch."

You smiled so hard your face ached. "Go celebrate, Simon."

"Yeah," he said. And then, quieter, "Thanks, sunshine."

— ✦ —

He was an apprentice at the butcher's on Renshaw Street after school — learning the trade with the same focused, physical competence he brought to everything else, solid and unhurried, his big hands learning new kinds of precision. You had a job at the bookshop two streets over.

On his lunch breaks you would walk over with a sandwich and a packet of crisps, and you'd sit on the low wall around the side of the shop while he ate and you talked about nothing in particular and everything in general.

He had sawdust on his boots and you'd have ink on your fingers from pricing stickers, and you'd sit in the thin afternoon light talking about books and people and where things might go from here, and it was the most ordinary, irreplaceable thing in the world.

You didn't know, then, that you were storing it up. You didn't know you were in the middle of something finite.

You were seventeen and you thought you had time.

— ✦ —

It was the eleventh of September, 2001.

You were at work when it happened — the bookshop had a small television in the back room, and you watched the footage with your hand pressed over your mouth and the world rearranging itself into a new shape around you.

Simon came to you that evening. He didn't knock — he had a spare key, had done for years — and you heard him come in and go into the kitchen and fill the kettle, the sound of him so familiar and domestic and real that something in your chest loosened a fraction.

He brought you tea. He sat on the sofa beside you and you watched the news together in silence, and at some point your head found his shoulder without either of you deciding it had.

"I'm going to join up," he said. Not asking. Telling.

You lifted your head from his shoulder. Frowned at him. "Join up what?"

"The military."

The word landed in the room and stayed there. You looked at his face — that flat, certain expression he wore when he'd already decided something — and you felt the ground shift slightly under you.

"Simon. You're seventeen."

"You can join at sixteen with parental consent," he said. Straightforward, as though he'd already looked into it. Which of course he had. "Seventeen without."

"That's—" You stopped. Started again. "You've thought about this before today."

"Yeah."

Of course he had. You could see it now, the shape of it — this was not a reaction to the footage on the television, not a hot, impulsive thing. This was something Simon had been building toward without telling you. The structure of it. The purpose. The particular kind of belonging that came from being part of something larger than yourself. You'd always known he'd go toward something like this. You'd just hoped, without ever quite admitting to the hoping, that it might be further away.

"You're not going to try to talk me out of it." Not a question.

"Would it work?"

He held your gaze. "No."

"Then no," you said. Your voice was very steady. You were proud of it. "I'm not."

He was quiet for a long moment. The television continued its awful repetition. Then his arm came around your shoulders, heavy and warm, and he pulled you in closer against his side.

You stayed like that until the tea went cold.

— ✦ —

The train station was grey and noisy with other leavings, other arrivals, other people in the middle of things.

Simon stood in front of you on the platform with his kit bag and his big, careful hands and the face he'd spent seventeen years learning to keep blank, and it occurred to you, not for the first time and not for the last, that you loved him.

That you had loved him in different quantities and different registers for most of your life. That you did not know how to say it and were not sure it would do either of you any good if you did.

So you didn't say it.

You went up on your toes and you hugged him — truly hugged him, arms around his neck, your face pressed against his jaw — and he held you back with both arms, the kit bag dropping to the platform, and he was so solid and warm and real that you memorised it.

"Don't be an idiot," you told him, muffled.

He made a sound that was almost a laugh. Almost. "Best I can do is try." The Manchester in his voice, low and warm and his.

"Simon."

"I know," he said quietly, against your temple. "I know, sunshine."

You stepped back. You held it together. He picked up his bag and he walked toward the platform and at the door of the train he turned, and looked at you standing there with your glasses and your coat and your hands pressed together in front of you, and for a second you saw something in his face that wasn't blank at all.

Then he was gone.

You cried on the way home. Proper, ugly crying, in the front seat of your mother's car, while she drove and said nothing and passed you a tissue.

You cried because you thought you might never see him again. Because the world had cracked open on a Tuesday in September and people were going toward the fracture and Simon Riley was one of them.

You cried because you never told him.

— ✦ —

He sent a birthday card every year.

They arrived with no return address and postmarks from places you'd never heard of, and sometimes they were late and sometimes they were so early you suspected he'd sent them weeks in advance in case he couldn't later.

They were always plain — Simon Riley was not a man who browsed the sentimental section — white or cream envelopes, the kind of card that was almost generic, and inside: his handwriting, which had improved vastly from the boy who'd struggled across the page in Year Three, and always the same thing. Your name at the top. Happy Birthday, sunshine. And then: S.

Just S.

Like he was still close enough that you'd know exactly who that meant. Like the initial was sufficient.

It was.

You sent his birthday gifts to a P.O. box he'd given you, wrapped carefully, the tag always: From your best friend. You didn't know if he received them all. You sent them anyway. It felt important to keep sending them — to maintain the thread, even when you couldn't see both ends of it.

— ✦ —

Thirty-four years old now.

You have no husband. You had come close, once — a man named Patrick who had been perfectly acceptable in every measurable way and who had wanted to marry you and had probably deserved someone who could give him more of herself than you could manage.

You had not been fair to Patrick. You knew that. You had been in love with someone else for most of your adult life, and even with the someone else absent and silent and possibly dead, there wasn't room for anyone else.

You have no children, though you wanted them. The timeline on that was becoming its own quiet ache, the kind you didn't prod too often.

You have a job that pays the bills and not much else — admin in an office building that smells of carpet cleaner and recycled air, the kind of work that requires enough of your brain to stop it from wandering but not enough to satisfy it.

You have an apartment that is functional and yours and that you have tried to make cozy, with books on every surface and plants that are mostly surviving and a kitchen you actually cook in.

It is not the house. It is not the house you told Simon about when you were sixteen and lying in his back garden on a summer evening, staring up at the sky.

No birthday card for five years now.

Five years of the particular, specific silence that was different from all the silences before, because the silences before had been interrupted. Annually, reliably, he had broken them.

Five years of nothing had the texture of conclusion. Of a chapter closing. And you had reached the point — slowly, painfully, with the kind of acceptance that doesn't feel like acceptance but feels like exhaustion — where you were fairly certain Simon Riley was dead.

Your heart ached for your best friend in the low, constant way of grief that has become so familiar it's almost structural.

You carried it the way you carried other things, quietly, with your spine straight.

Which is why you are sitting across from a man named — it didn't matter, it really didn't matter what his name was — on what your colleague Debbie had described as 'a perfectly nice date with a perfectly nice man' and trying to remember what it felt like to be interested in your own life.

The man sitting across from you was the complete opposite of Simon Riley.

He was trim and well-dressed and had the kind of face that was handsome in a way that required no effort to appreciate and inspired no particular feeling from you.

He had been talking for, by your reckoning, forty-seven minutes. In that time he had covered: his career (impressive, in his telling), his car (expensive, in his telling), his last holiday (exotic, in his telling), and his general philosophy on modern dating (nuanced, in his telling).

He had not asked about your job. He had not asked about your books or the one peeking out of your handbag; the one he'd glanced at and not commented on. He had not asked if your pasta was nice, which it was, actually, genuinely nice, and you'd have told him so if he'd asked. He had not asked you almost anything, come to think of it.

Simon Riley, who spoke perhaps a tenth as many words as this man, had always asked.

Simon Riley had always wanted to know. Not because it was polite. Because he actually, genuinely, in the particular way of people who care about very few things very deeply — wanted to know.

You excused yourself to use the bathroom and stood at the sink running cold water over your wrists and looking at your own reflection, and you thought: this is fine.

This is a perfectly nice evening with a perfectly nice man. This is what moving forward looks like. This is what being a person in the world, a person with a life and a future and reasonable expectations of company, looks like.

You dried your hands. You went back to the table. He had ordered himself another drink without asking if you wanted anything.

You finished your pasta and smiled at appropriate intervals and thought about Simon Riley and felt, as you so often felt, quietly furious at him for being gone.

— ✦ —

The birthday card arrived on a Thursday morning.

You almost missed it entirely — it was tucked between a pizza delivery leaflet and something from your energy supplier, the cream envelope almost camouflaged by the mundane. You shuffled through the post on autopilot and then stopped.

Your name, in handwriting you would have recognised anywhere, would have recognised in your sleep, had recognised in your bones for thirty years.

You sat down on the bottom stair. Your legs suddenly uneasy.

Your hands were not steady.

The envelope opened. The card was white. Plain. Almost generic.

Inside:

Happy Birthday, sunshine.

I'm sorry it's been so long.

I'll explain everything.

Come, if you want to.

If you can stand the sight of me.

Below that, an address. Three towns over. A postcode you didn't recognise.

And then, at the bottom, the way it had always been at the bottom: S.

You sat on the bottom stair for a very long time.

Then you got up, went to your room, and started thinking about what to wear.

— ✦ —

You plucked up the nerve to go on a Saturday.

The drive took forty minutes and you spent most of it trying to manage yourself — talking yourself through reasonable expectations (he is alive, that is enough, start there), warning yourself against things you could not control (the five years, the silence, the way your hands were doing that unsteady thing again), cataloguing everything practical (the address, the map).

The street was quiet. Semi-rural, the kind of neighbourhood that sits between things — between town and country, between the ordinary and the aspirational. The houses were spread out, set back from the road, each with its own front garden and its own character.

You parked. You looked at the address. You looked up.

And you stopped breathing.

It was a beautiful house.

Large, substantial and solid, the kind of house that had been built to last. White painted render, clean and bright in the afternoon light. A white picket fence surrounding the front garden, which was full of flowers. Roses climbing the gatepost. Lavender edging the path. Foxgloves and dahlias and great loose clusters of something purple you couldn't name from here. The kind of garden that had been planted with intention, tended with care, left to be a little wild in the best way.

A porch. And a porch swing, painted white, with a yellow cushion on it.

And flying from the corner of the roof, bright against the blue afternoon sky: the Union flag.

You sat very still in the driver's seat.

You were sixteen years old. It was a summer evening and you were lying in Simon's back garden on an old sleeping bag, looking up at the sky. He was beside you in the way he was always beside you — solid, quiet, taking up exactly the right amount of space. You'd been talking about the future the way teenagers do, in great floating hypotheticals that feel more like weather than plans.

"What kind of house?" he'd asked. He asked follow-up questions always, quietly, wanting the specifics. It was one of the things about him you loved.

And you'd described it. A big house, not ostentatious but real — space for books and for people and for a garden that did what it wanted within reason. A white fence, because you'd always liked them. A porch with somewhere to sit. A flag, because you were — despite everything — proud of where you were from.

Simon had been quiet for a long moment.

"Okay," he'd said. Just: okay.

You had thought he was humouring you.

You had not thought — you had not let yourself think — what it might mean, that he was going to do anything about it.

You got out of the car. Your legs were not entirely reliable. You held the gate and walked up the path — lavender brushing your hand where it grew close, the scent of it too perfect, almost staged — and you stopped at the foot of the porch steps.

The door opened.

He had to duck.

That was the first thing you noticed. The physical fact of him, the sheer size of him, his shoulders nearly touching the doorframe on both sides simultaneously, the automatic dip of his head as he stepped through onto the porch.

He straightened.

The afternoon light landed on him and you had to spend a moment recalibrating, because the last time you'd seen Simon Riley he had been seventeen years old with sawdust on his boots and a train ticket in his hand, and this man —

This man.

The white button-down shirt was simple, the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and from his left wrist to well past the roll of the sleeve his forearm was dark with ink — a sleeve of tattoos, intricate and considered. A whole geography of imagery that you couldn't read from here but would, you thought, take time to learn.

His right wrist carried a watch. His black slacks were fitted close enough that you could see the muscle of his thighs pulling the fabric with every shift of his weight, and his shoes — loafers, black with gold buckles, completely unexpected and somehow exactly right — were precise.

His hair. A dark sandy blonde, longer than military specification presumably allowed and slicked back from his face, which meant you could see all of it, his whole face; the angles that had sharpened from boy to man, the jaw, the set of his brow, and those eyes. Those brown eyes that had been watching you since you were four years old and had never, not once, looked at you with anything less than complete attention.

He was raking those eyes over you now. Slowly. With the same quality he'd always had — that comprehensive, unhurried assessment that somehow never felt like being measured — and his hands were in his pockets and he was standing there like that, on the porch he'd built or bought or arranged specifically around a description you'd given him at sixteen.

He looked like something out of a magazine and like Simon all at once.

You were going to murder him.

"Hi, sunshine."

His voice. Lower than you remembered, rougher, carrying all the years he'd lived since you last heard it. That Manchester accent — still there, unmistakably, that warm northern flatness underneath everything, the vowels shaped by a city, by a street, by a particular kind of upbringing that no amount of training had entirely smoothed out.

That nickname, in that voice, in that low, deliberate way he'd always said it: like you were his.

Like it was a prayer.

You opened your mouth. And you closed it. And you looked at him — this enormous, tattooed, stupidly handsome man who had stood on your mother's doorstep at twelve years old with bruises he didn't mention, who had kissed your cheek at thirteen and broken Ryan Marsh's nose at fourteen and waved goodbye from a train platform at seventeen and then sent you birthday cards from the edges of the world for a decade and then stopped for five years —

"Five years," you said. Your voice was very quiet.

Something moved in his face.

"I-,"

"I thought you were dead." You snapped cutting him off.

"I figured you would’ve."

"Simon."

"I know, sunshine." He said it the same way he'd always said things he couldn't argue with — not deflecting, not dismissing, just absorbing. The Manchester vowels in his voice like a hand on your shoulder. "I'll explain everything. I promise. All of it. Whatever you want to know."

You looked at him.

He looked at you.

The afternoon settled around the house, around the garden that was your garden in your own sixteen-year-old description, around the flag and the porch swing and the lavender and all of it, and the distance between you on the path and him on the porch steps was perhaps four feet and thirty years and five years of silence and a whole life of choosing not to say the one true thing.

"You built me the house?" you asked, whispering it. Like you were afraid to say it.

He was quiet for a moment. Then, "Bought it. Had the garden done the way you said."

"Simon." Your heart ached.

"You said lavender at the edges," he said. His voice was completely level. "You said a porch with somewhere to sit. You said you wanted to see the flag from the garden."

You pressed your hand to your mouth.

The rage was still there — it was not going anywhere quickly. The five years of it, the grief of it — but underneath it, something else. Something that had been there since you were four years old at a preschool art table, larger and quieter and more permanent than anything else you'd ever felt.

"You were sixteen," he said. As though this explained it. "You told me what you wanted. I just..." He stopped. Started again. "I wanted to be enough first. I wanted to have what you needed."

There was a long silence. A bee moved through the lavender. Somewhere a few streets away, a lawnmower hummed.

"Come inside," Simon said. "I'll make you tea. And I'll tell you everything."

You looked at him on the porch of the house he'd built you from a word, and you thought: you absolute idiot. You wonderful, impossible, infuriating man. You thought I'd stopped. You thought thirty years of this was something you could be enough for eventually, like it was a bar to clear, like there was a version of you I was waiting on instead of just —

Instead of just you. Always just you.

The lavender brushed your hand again. You walked up the steps and he looked down at you with those brown eyes that had never once left you.

"Hi, Simon," you said.

Something happened in his face. Something opened.

"Hi, sunshine," he said, his hand coming to the small of your back to guide you inside.

He made the tea.

You stood in the kitchen of a house that smelled of fresh paint and cedar and something faintly floral from the garden drifting through the open window over the sink, and you watched Simon Riley move around it like he'd always lived here — filling the kettle, finding the mugs without opening the wrong cupboard, knowing where the teabags were — and you thought: how long. How long has he been here, in this house he bought for you, learning where everything lives, waiting.

You sat at the kitchen table. It was a good table, heavy oak, the kind built to last and you ran your thumb along the grain of it and tried to arrange your feelings into some kind of order and failed.

Simon set the mug in front of you. Milk in last, the way you'd always taken it, which he knew because he'd made you approximately four thousand cups of tea over the course of your lives. He sat down across from you, his own mug between his big hands, and looked at you.

You looked back.

The kitchen light was warm and it caught the angles of his face. The jaw, the brow, the slight crook in his nose that was new, or newer, the result of something you didn't know about and weren't sure you wanted to.

He was watching you with that particular quality of attention he'd always had. Complete. Patient. Like you were the only thing in the room worth looking at.

"You're not wearing your glasses," he said.

You blinked. Of all the things. "No."

"Contacts?"

"For about ten years now, yes."

He was quiet for a moment, studying your face with that same unhurried attention, "I missed them."

"You missed my glasses?" You say with the deadpan tone you'd perfected over the years.

"Tortoiseshell ones," he said. "Used to push them up your nose when you were concentrating." He took a gulp of his tea, Adam's apple bobbing when he swallowed.

You stared at him. Eighteen years. Eighteen years of distance and war and God knows what else, and he missed your glasses. "Simon."

"Just saying."

"You are unbelievable." You scoff.

"The contacts suit you," he said, and the corner of his mouth moved — barely, almost nothing, but you'd spent your whole life reading that face and you caught it. "Everything suits you. But I liked the glasses."

"Stop it." You snap.

"Stop what?"

"Whatever that is," you said, and you pointed at his face, at the not-there-almost-smile, at the quality of his voice when he said everything suits you, at all of it. "You don't get to do that. You've been — Simon, you've been gone. You've been gone for eighteen years and for five of them, I thought you were dead." Your voice stayed steady, which surprised you. You'd expected it to crack on that. "So you don't get to walk out onto your porch looking like — like that — and tell me you missed my glasses and flirt at me like no time has passed."

He listened without interrupting. He always had — it was one of the things about him, the way he gave you the whole space of what you were saying before he entered it.

"You're right," he nodded.

"I know I'm right." Your spine straightened.

"I owe you an explanation."

"You owe me considerably more than that, Simon Riley, but yes. An explanation would be a start."

He wrapped both hands around his mug again and looked at you across the table and there was something in his face that was not the blank-nothing face, was not the armour he'd worn since he was twelve years old but something that was quieter and more exposed and a great deal more frightening because of it.

"Not here," he said.

You frowned. "What?"

"I don't want to do it like this. Sat in a kitchen." He glanced around the room briefly, as though orienting himself. "Come to dinner with me tomorrow night."

"What I—"

"The Grill on Merton Street."

You went very still.

The Grill on Merton Street. You hadn't been in years — not since you'd moved away from the area, not since things had shifted and the rituals of your old life had quietly been replaced by other things.

But you knew it. You knew every table in it. The way the light came through the front windows on a Sunday, the smell of it — roasted meat and old wood and the particular warmth of a place that had been feeding families for decades.

Your mother had loved it. Your father used to order the same thing every time and be pleased about it every time, and you and Simon had sat across from each other in the corner booth with the sticky laminated menus and kicked each other under the table and laughed.

"That's still open?" you managed.

"Had a look earlier this week," he said. "Still there. New owners but the same building. Same corner booth."

You looked at him. He looked at you. Outside, through the open window, a late bird was making itself known in the lavender.

"Fine," you said. "Dinner. Tomorrow. And you're going to tell me everything." you struck at him with a serious face.

"Everything," he agreed.

"I mean it, Simon. All of it."

"I know you do."

You drank your tea. It was exactly right. The temperature, the strength, the milk ratio and you hated him a little bit for that. For the fact that he still knew, that across seventeen years and God knows how many miles he still knew exactly how you took your tea, and he'd made it correctly on the first attempt without asking, and you were absolutely not going to cry about that.

You were not.

— ✦ —

You dressed carefully.

Not because you were trying to impress him.

You told yourself this firmly, standing in front of your wardrobe in the room you'd taken in the local B&B — you'd booked a night, not knowing how long this might take, not knowing what state you'd be in for the drive home afterwards — and you told yourself that you were simply dressing appropriately for a dinner at a decent restaurant.

That was all.

That was the entirety of it.

The dress was deep green. Fitted through the waist, falling to just below the knee, with a neckline that was elegant rather than dramatic.

You'd bought it for a work event two years ago and it had lived in your wardrobe since, waiting for an occasion that felt worth it. You put your hair up — not elaborately, just neatly, the kind of arrangement that looked effortless and had taken twenty minutes — and you wore the small gold earrings that had been your grandmother's. Low heels. The good handbag. A slick of red on your mouth that you almost wiped off twice before deciding to leave it.

You were not trying to impress him.

You were absolutely trying to impress him.

He was waiting outside The Grill when your taxi pulled up, standing on the pavement with his hands in his pockets. The air around him relaxed and easy. An anchored stillness, like a man who'd learned to wait and had made peace with it. He has the same dark slacks as yesterday, same loafers with the gold buckles, but the shirt tonight was black.

A deep, clean black that made his shoulders look approximately the width of a doorway, which was in fact an accurate assessment — and he'd left the top button undone. His hair was the same: pushed back, dark sandy blonde curling at the nape of his neck and catching the amber of the streetlights.

He saw you get out of the taxi.

He went very still. Completely, suddenly, entirely present in a way that landed on you like a hand against your sternum. Under your heartbeat.

You crossed the pavement toward him and his eyes moved over you — slowly, comprehensively, that same rake of attention he'd given you yesterday on the porch steps, only this time there was nothing restrained about what it did to your pulse.

He eyed you the same way he used to look at the extra cuts of slow roasted beef your mother added to his plate every time he joined you for a Sunday roast after church.

"Hi," you said.

"Hi, sunshine." His voice was low. The rough Manchester sending tingles down your spine.

He opened the door for you.

The Grill smelled exactly the same.

Roasted meat and warmed bread and old wood and something faintly of candle wax. It hit you the moment you stepped through the door and you had to stand still for just a second, just one second, to absorb the weight of it.

Your father's coat on the hook by the door. Your mother's reading glasses going into her bag as the menus arrived. Simon across from you, fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, his big hands wrapped around a Coke glass, his eyes on you under that careful brow.

The layout had shifted slightly — new owners, as Simon had said — but the bones of it were the same. The dark wood panelling. The low warm lighting. The tables set with proper linen and actual candles in glass holders. And in the back left corner was the booth.

Simon's hand was at the small of your back as the host led you through. A light touch, barely there, the kind of thing that could be merely courteous and was absolutely not merely courteous.

You said nothing about it.

You were almost at the booth when a voice said, "Well. I don't believe it."

You turned.

Margaret and Gerald Howarth.

Margaret had been your mother's friend since before you were born — a small, bright-eyed woman who had somehow barely aged in two decades. Her silver hair cut the same way it had always been, her husband a large, genial man beside her with a napkin already tucked into his collar. They'd been eating here since before you were born too, you suspected. Some people were simply woven into the furniture of a place.

"Margaret," you said, and you felt a genuine, warm rush of it. Of being seen by someone who had known you as a child, who had watched you grow up, who carried that particular knowledge of you that only people of a certain generation can hold. She was already rising halfway from her seat, her hand extended, and you took it and she covered it with her other one, the way she always had.

"We heard you were back in the area," she said — which was interesting, since you'd only arrived yesterday, but news apparently still moved at its old speed around here. Her bright eyes moved to Simon, and something in them softened with recognition and surprise in equal measure. "And Simon Riley. My goodness."

"Mrs Howarth." Simon's voice was respectful, quieter than usual, and you noticed — because you noticed everything about him — that he straightened fractionally. Not stiffly. Just the particular adjustment of a man in the presence of someone he'd known when he was young and unguarded.

"Look at the size of you," Gerald said, not unkindly, staring up at Simon with the frank appreciation of one large man for another. "What are they feeding you?"

"Gerald," Margaret scolded mildly.

"It's a compliment." He shrugged.

Simon almost smiled. "Good to see you, Mr Howarth."

Margaret was looking between the two of you with the expression of a woman who had been quietly observing people her entire life and drawing accurate conclusions from very little evidence. "Are you together?" she asked, with the particular directness that came with age and with having known you since you were in a pushchair.

"We're having dinner," you said carefully.

Margaret's expression said, quite clearly, that she had heard this and had also heard everything it was not saying. "Well," she said, patting your hand once more before releasing it, "it's lovely to see you both. You always did belong together, the pair of you. I said that to your mother once, do you know. I said those two—"

"It was lovely seeing you, Margaret," you said, with great warmth and only mild desperation.

She laughed, a bright, pleased sound and settled back into her seat.

As you turned to follow the host the rest of the way to the booth, you were almost certain you heard Gerald say, to his wife, "told you" in a tone of quiet marital satisfaction.

Simon was very carefully not reacting to any of this. You were very carefully not looking at him.

You saw two others you knew before you reached the booth.

Kim Ashworth, who had been in your form in Year Ten and who looked essentially the same as she had in school except that she had a baby on her hip and a husband trailing behind her with a changing bag.

She stopped mid-step when she saw you, did a small, delighted double take, said oh my God twice, and then looked at Simon in a way that was extremely uncomplicated in its appreciation before remembering the husband with the changing bag. There were promises exchanged to catch up properly, phone numbers that would probably not be used, genuine warmth on both sides.

And then at the bar, perched on a stool with a whisky, Dave Pearce — who had played alongside Simon on the secondary school rugby team and who greeted him with the particular vocabulary of men who knew each other at fifteen and have not changed as much as they think.

There was a brief, loud exchange that involved at least one shoulder-clap that could have knocked a smaller man sideways, and then Dave shook your hand too and told Simon he was punching. Which Simon received without expression and you tried your hardest not to laugh, biting your lip.

Finally the corner booth. You slid in. Simon folded himself into the seat across from you, the table scaled to ordinary human beings and therefore slightly absurd against the size of him, his knees bracketing it, his shoulders blocking the view of the room behind him entirely.

The menus came.

They were not laminated anymore — proper printed card, changed seasonally, the kind that meant the new owners had ambitions. But the roast was still on. The proper Sunday roast, the one your father used to order when you could afford to.

"Same corner," Simon said quietly.

"Same corner," you agreed.

He was looking at you across the table the way he used to look at you across this table, except that now his face was older and larger and had been to places that had clearly asked things of it. The look was different in its texture. Deeper, maybe. Older in the same way he was older. Like it had more weight behind it from all the years of being carried.

"You said everything," you reminded him. "All of it."

"I know."

"So." You gestured for him to start.

He set his menu down. Looked at you. And then he started talking.

He told it the way he told everything — without embellishment, without drama, in the flat, precise language of a man who had learned to communicate facts and trusted the facts to carry the weight without decoration.

He'd gone in at seventeen and he'd been good at it. Not surprising. He was built for the structure of it, for the clarity of having a purpose and a unit and a chain of things that made sense.

He'd moved up fast — faster than he let on in the cards he'd sent you, which had been careful, he explained, deliberately careful, because the more you knew the more you might worry. Which, you pointed out, had not been his decision to make. He didn't argue with that.

Task Force 141 came later. Years later, after deployments that he summarised in a sentence each and you understood enough from his face to know that each sentence was doing the work of much longer things.

He was a lieutenant now. He said it the way he said most things about himself, flatly, without vanity, presented as information. He had certain freedoms now that he hadn't had before, certain ability to make choices about where he went and when and what he did with the things the years had given him.

You both ordered your food.

"And the five years?" you asked, sipping your cocktail the waitress had brought over.

He was quiet for a moment, he stared at his San Miguel pint, the condensation sliding down the glass. Your food had arrived at some point during the waiting, while Simon collected his thoughts.

He picked up his fork and then set it down again.

"There was a man," Simon said.

Something about the way he said it made you put your fork down too.

"He ran drugs. Major operation, international — I won't go into all of it." He said this without flinching, looking at you steadily, not softening it. You'd always appreciated that about him — the way he treated your intelligence as a given. "After I escaped him, he decided to make it personal. He went after the people I—" He stopped. Chose the word carefully. "The people I was connected to."

The candle in the glass holder between you threw warm, unsteady light across his face.

"He killed them," Simon said. "My brother. Tommy's family." A pause that cost him something; you could see it cost him. "My Mother."

The restaurant continued around you — the murmur of other tables, the clink of cutlery, someone laughing softly near the bar — and you sat very still.

"Oh Simon," you whispered, you could feel the way your face formed the sympathy.

"I'm alright." He said it the way he'd always said it, the Manchester flat and absolute. The way that meant; don't make it bigger than I can hold right now. You knew that voice. You honoured it.

"He knew about you," Simon said and you froze. "That was the other thing. He'd done his research." His jaw shifted slightly. "As long as he was alive, you weren't safe. If I'd contacted you, properly contacted you, kept the thread going the way I wanted to, it would have given him a cleaner line. A more reliable way to reach me."

You understood the logic of it. You understood it clearly and immediately in the part of your brain that processed information. The other part — the part that had sat on the bottom stair with a birthday card after five years of silence, the part that had thought past tense — that part was going to take considerably longer.

"So you cut me off," you said. Not as an accusation. As a fact, laid down. You were starting to understand the shape of it.

"To keep you safe. Yes."

"Without telling me why." You sighed but you knew you were being unreasonable, but you hoped he would let you for a little longer.

"If I'd told you why, you'd have known there was a threat. And you'd have—" He stopped. The corner of his mouth moved, something that was not quite a smile and not quite not one. "You'd have done something about it. Gone looking. Made noise."

"I would not have—" You stopped, because you would have. You absolutely would have. You'd spent thirty years being completely unable to sit on the sidelines where Simon Riley was concerned, and the knowledge that someone was threatening him would have made you entirely unreasonable. "That's—" you huffed.

"Yeah," he said.

"You could have found a way—"

"There wasn't one. Not one that was safe." His voice was very level. "I went through every option, love. I promise you. Every one."

The word arrived quietly, without ceremony.

Love.

He'd never called you that — not in thirty years, not in all the time and all the familiarity of what you were to each other. He said it the way he said everything that mattered: without preamble, without dressing it up, laid down like the fact it was.

"And now?" you asked. Your voice was quite steady. Steadier than you felt.

"He's dead." No elaboration. None needed. The flat Manchester vowels carrying the weight of it cleanly, without mess. "And you're safe. And I—" He looked at you across the table, across the candle and the white linen. "I bought the house," he said. "I've spent a while making it what it is. Making if perfect. I saved up for years. The 141 pays well when you get to a certain level and I wasn't spending it on anything else."

"For years," you repeated, feeling a shiver rack up your spine and your toes go numb.

"Since I was about twenty." He said this without apparent embarrassment, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to spend fifteen years saving money to buy a woman a house from a description she'd given you at sixteen years old. "Took a while to find the right one that wasn’t too far from your parents. The lavender took three growing seasons to look like it did when you pulled up."

Three growing seasons.

He had planted the lavender three years ago. He had stood in a garden three towns from where you lived and planted lavender along a path because a sixteen-year-old girl had mentioned it lying on her back in his garden thirty years ago, and he had tended it for three years, and he had waited.

"Simon Riley," you said.

"It's got room for your books Sunshine, built the shelves myself." His lips quirked up at the corners at your flabbergasted expression.

"You are the most—" You stopped. Started again. "Do you have any idea what the past five years have felt like? Do you have any idea what I—" Your voice did the thing you'd been preventing it from doing, cracked at the edge of the sentence like a plate under too much weight. You stopped. Pressed your lips together. "I grieved you. I sat in my flat and I genuinely, actually grieved you and decided you were dead. I had — Simon, I had a plan for getting through it. I was managing it."

"I know."

"Don't say I know." you snapped sounding more like a bratty child than angry.

"I'm sorry." And this was different. This was not the automatic I know, the absorbing of your anger. This was something he said the way he said very few things — carefully, with full weight behind it. His eyes on yours across the table. "I'm sorry for the five years. I'm sorry I couldn't find another way. I'm sorry you were on your own with it." A pause. "I'm sorry it took me this long to have something worth coming back with."

"The house is not—" You stopped. "You didn't need to buy me a house, Simon. I didn't need—"

"I needed to," he said. Simply. "I needed to know I was coming back with something real. Something that wasn't just me turning up with nothing after all that time, asking you to — to accept—" He moved his hand across the table, and his fingers stopped just short of yours. Not touching. Close. "Asking you to take me as I was. I needed it to be enough. I needed there to be something I could give you that was—"

"Simon." Your voice was very quiet.

"I know it's not—"

"Simon." You turned your hand over on the table. Just that. The small, deliberate movement of turning your palm up.

He looked at it. Then he looked at you. Then, slowly, he put his hand in yours — his enormous, careful, tattooed hand. Not quite the one that had carried your bag through every corridor of secondary school and pulled you up off the pavement after Daniel Holt and held you on the platform at the train station, but this one now and his fingers closed around yours and he held on.

"I only ever wanted you," you said softly.

"Sunshine-"

"You were always worth it," you cut him off. And then, because it was time — because it had been time for approximately thirty years and you were done waiting for the right moment when the right moment had repeatedly failed to arrive — "You were always enough. You were always the thing I was — Simon, you have always been the only one I wanted. Exactly as you are."

He was very still.

"I didn't tell you on the platform," you said. "I should have. I've thought about it every day since."

"So have I," he said.

The candle between you flickered in some movement of air from the kitchen, and in the warm unsteady light his face was open in a way you had waited thirty years to see. His hand was warm and sure around yours, and from the other side of the restaurant you were almost certain you heard Margaret Howarth say something to Gerald in a satisfied undertone.

"You planted the lavender," you grinned.

"Three years ago." He finally smiles back at you, it was crooked and uneven and you loved it.

"You are," you said carefully, "the most ridiculous man I have ever known." You shook your head still grinning.

"Missed you too, sunshine," he smirked.

Dinner ended the way the best dinners end — not with a definitive conclusion but with a gradual, reluctant unwinding, the kind where both people keep finding one more thing to say, one more thread to pull, because the alternative is standing up and the evening becoming past tense.

You ordered dessert.

Neither of you particularly wanted it but you both ordered it, and you both knew why, and neither of you said so. The chocolate brownie was very good. Simon ate his methodically, the way he ate everything, and at one point looked up and caught you watching him and said nothing.

The candle between you had burned down to a stub by the time the bill came.

He paid. You protested on principle. He gave you a look that had not changed at all since he was fourteen years old — flat, certain, faintly amused — and handed the card to the waiter without further discussion.

"That's not—" you started.

"Next time," he said.

Next time. You let it sit there between you, warm and presumptuous and everything you wanted.

Outside, the evening had cooled.

The last of the summer still holding in the air, the kind of September evening that felt like a concession, like the year wasn't ready to be done.

The street was quiet for a Saturday, just a few couples moving between the restaurants and a group of lads outside the pub further down having a smoke. The amber of the streetlights made everything look like something worth remembering.

Simon stood beside you on the pavement, close enough that his arm brushed yours when he turned to look down the street, and you were very aware of the warmth of him and the black shirt and the lavender you couldn't smell from here but could somehow still feel in your hands.

"Walk with me a bit," he said. Not a question, not quite. He'd always done that — phrased invitations as though the outcome were already agreed, as though he simply assumed you'd say yes because you almost always did.

"Alright."

He fell into step beside you, and for a little while you just walked — past the wine bar with its fairy lights, past the old library that had become a gin distillery at some point in the last decade, past the post office that had been there since before either of you were born. You talked about small things. Easy things. The kind of conversation that runs alongside the real one underneath.

Then he stopped.

You stopped too.

Simon looked down at you. His hands were in his pockets. That brown gaze of his moved over your face in the way it had been moving over your face all evening — like he was cataloguing it, like he was making up for lost time in the looking.

"Dance with me," he said.

You blinked. "What?"

He tilted his head, "Come dancing with me."

You stared at him.

Simon Riley, who had sat against the wall at every school disco you'd ever attended, arms folded, watching everyone else with the expression of a man conducting a private risk assessment.

Simon Riley, who you had never, in thirty years of knowing him, seen voluntarily approach a dance floor.

"You don't dance," you said.

"No," he agreed. "But you do."

The simplicity of it landed somewhere very central.

You do.

As though that were reason enough. As though your enjoyment of a thing were sufficient justification for him to walk into it without hesitation.

Which, you supposed, when it came to Simon, it always had been.

"Alright," you said, for the second time in ten minutes.

His hand found the small of your back again, that same light, deliberate touch from inside the restaurant and he guided you down the street.

Simon said you weren't far, when you heard it.

The particular sound of a Domino's box. The slight crinkle of a carrier bag. And then your mother's voice, carrying across the quiet street in the way it always had — warm and clear and entirely without volume control.

"Oh honey! We thought - oh!"

"Oh fuck," you cursed.

You said it very quietly. Not quietly enough. Simon chuckled under his breath.

Your parents were coming along the pavement from the direction of the only car park around here — your father in his weekend coat, your mother in the blue one she'd had for fifteen years. A Domino's pizza box balanced in her arms and a carrier bag hanging from your father's hand.

Movie night. Of course. They still did it every other Saturday, had done since you were small, and of course they would do it tonight of all the Saturday nights in the entire calendar.

Your mother's face when she saw you was pure, unguarded delight — the face she always made when she encountered you unexpectedly, as though each time were still a pleasant surprise. Then her gaze moved, naturally and automatically, to the man standing beside you with his hand at the small of your back.

The delight didn't disappear. It did something more complicated.

"Oh honey," she said again, but differently this time. Softer. Her voice going somewhere else entirely. "Simon?"

The Domino's box dipped. Your father caught it with the reflexes of a man who had been catching things your mother nearly dropped for forty years.

Simon had gone still beside you. Not that controlled, present stillness he had, the one that wasn't tension but something adjacent to it. He was looking at your mother with an expression you couldn't fully read from the side, but you could see the line of his jaw, and it was careful.

"Mrs—" he started.

"Don't you Mrs me," your mother said. Her voice was not angry. That was the thing — you'd prepared yourself, in the split second between seeing them and now, for anger, or for the brisk, self-protective coolness she used sometimes when she'd been frightened. But it wasn't that. It was something that had tears in it, which was considerably worse to witness.

She handed the pizza box to your father without looking at him — he took it with the silent competence of long practice — and she crossed the pavement in four short steps and she put her arms around Simon Riley.

He was so much larger than her. He had always been larger than her, even at fifteen when he'd eaten her shepherd's pie at the kitchen table and been careful to seem like it was casual and not like he was starving. Even when she gave him seconds and he looked like he would beg for thirds.

But now it was almost absurd, the smallness of her against the width of him, and he stood there for just a fraction of a second — that fraction where you could see him recalibrating, receiving something he hadn't prepared for — and then his arms came around her and he held on.

Your mother was crying. Small, quiet sounds, the kind she made when she was trying not to. Her face was pressed against his chest and her hands gripped the back of his black shirt and she said, muffled and with great feeling, "You absolute boy."

Simon said nothing. His eyes, over the top of your mother's head, found yours.

You had to look away. The street was very interesting. The lamppost in particular.

You bit into your lip.

Your father appeared at your shoulder.

He was a quiet man, always had been. The kind of steady, observant presence that took things in without making a production of the taking in. He stood beside you with the pizza box over one arm and the carrier bag in the other hand and watched his wife hold the boy who had eaten at their table for a decade, and he said, very quietly, to you,

"Well. He's not dead then."

"No Dad," you managed. "He's not dead."

"Good," your father said.

As though this settled it. As though the entirety of the past five years of your grief and his, because he had grieved Simon too in his quiet way, in the way of a man who doesn't say things aloud but feels them thoroughly. He looked at Simon over the top of your mother's head and gave him a single, deliberate nod. The kind that meant; we'll talk. The kind that meant; I have things to say to you. The kind that also, underneath both of those, meant; I'm so glad son.

Simon received the nod with equal gravity, which was exactly right.

Your mother finally pulled back. She held Simon by the arms — or tried to, her hands not quite making it around the circumference of them — and looked up at him with red eyes and the particular expression of a woman who has a great deal to say and is choosing, for now, not to say most of it.

"You'll come for dinner," she said. Not a question. The same tone she'd used on him at fifteen and apparently intended to continue using indefinitely. "Sunday. Proper dinner. Not a restaurant. Mine."

"Yes," Simon said. Immediately. Without hesitation.

"Good." She released his arms and reached up and patted his cheek once, firmly, the way you might with someone who had done something frustrating and beloved in equal measure.

Then she turned to you, and her expression did something complicated and warm and knowing, and she didn't say any of the things she was clearly thinking, which you appreciated deeply.

What she said instead was: "Don't stay out too late. You're thirty-five, not seventeen."

"Mum." You scolded.

"I'm just saying." She shrugged.

"We're going dancing," you told her, with the energy of someone redirecting a conversation through sheer momentum.

Your mother looked at Simon. Simon looked at your mother. Something passed between them that was private and thirty years old and not yours to have.

"Of course you are," she said.

Your father passed the Domino's box back to your mother, and said, "Right then. We'll leave you to it." He looked at Simon one more time. "Sunday," he confirmed.

"Sunday," Simon said.

Your parents moved off down the pavement.

Your mother looked back once — just once — and her face when she did was the face you'd seen her wear at your primary school nativity and at your GCSE results and on the morning you'd gone to university; the particular face of a woman watching her child be happy and feeling the full, complicated, loving weight of it.

Then she turned back to your father and said something you couldn't hear, and his hand found her shoulder as they walked, and they rounded the corner and were gone.

You stood on the pavement in the September evening and breathed.

Beside you, Simon was also very carefully just standing there.

"She cried on me," he said, after a moment.

"Yes."

"Didn't expect that."

You turned to look at him. He was looking at the corner your parents had turned, and his face had the quality it sometimes had when something had reached him — not visibly, not dramatically, just in that particular stillness that meant something had got through.

"She cried about you," you told him. "When you stopped writing. Three years ago — there were several times, actually, but three years ago was the worst. She held me in her kitchen and we both—" You stopped. Managed the next part carefully. "She loves you too, Simon. She always did. You were at our table every other night for years."

He was quiet for a moment. Something moved in his jaw. "I know," he said. And this time the I know was different from all the other times he'd said it tonight — heavier, and private.

"You agreed to Sunday dinner," you giggled.

"Of course I agreed to Sunday dinner," he said knowing full well he would have been stupid not to and gotten an earful from your mother.

Simon offered you his hand.

Not at the small of your back this time. His hand, palm up, in the space between you. Old-fashioned and deliberate.

You put yours in it.

"Come on then," he said. "Let's go dancing."

There was, as it turned out, only one place to go dancing in this town on a Saturday night if you meant actual dancing — the kind with a proper floor and music with a real structure to it.

It was not a club.

It was not a bar with a cleared space near the speaker.

It was the old church hall on Callow Street, which had been hosting the Saturday Evening Social Dance since before either of you were born, and which Simon seemed to know about with the specificity of a man who had done his research.

"A dance hall," you said, standing outside it. Through the tall, thin windows the warm light was visible, and the sound — strings, a proper band, something with a waltz rhythm that made the windows hum faintly. "You're taking me to a dance hall."

"Only place with a floor."

"Simon, this is a — there will be pensioners in there." you said quietly.

"There'll be a dance floor," he looked down at you. "And you said yes." he shrugged but looked smug.

He pushed the door open and held it, and because you had in fact said yes, and because the music through the door sounded genuinely lovely, and because you were still holding his hand from the pavement, you went in.

The church hall smelled of floor polish and tea. Fairy lights were strung along the rafters — someone's addition, not the original fixtures, and they made the whole space amber and soft.

Round tables lined the edges, most of them occupied by couples in their sixties and seventies and eighties, a few younger faces dotted among them, everyone dressed with the particular care of people who still believed an evening out was worth dressing for.

On the small stage at the far end, a four-piece band was working through something in three-four time with the ease of musicians who had played together for years.

And at the edge of the floor, clipboard in hand, wearing the same expression of organised authority she'd worn every PE lesson for fifteen years was Mrs Valerie Croft.

She was smaller than you remembered. Or perhaps you were simply larger.

She'd retired at some point — the hair was fully silver now rather than streaked — but the posture was identical: spine straight, chin up, the bearing of a woman who had spent decades telling teenagers to stand properly and had eventually simply become the embodiment of the instruction.

She looked up from her clipboard as you approached and her eyes moved from you to Simon, and to her credit, she didn't miss a step.

"Well," she tilted her chin up to meet his eyes, "Riley."

"Miss," Simon said. Which was technically incorrect given that she had a ring on her finger and had for as long as you'd known her, but you suspected it was because he'd called her Miss in secondary school the way you had. "Mrs Croft. Sorry. We were passing and— " He paused, which was unlike him. "Is there any chance we could crash it?"

Mrs Croft looked at him. She looked at you. She looked at your joined hands with the expression of a woman who had supervised enough teenagers to recognise a development when she saw one.

"Can you behave yourselves?" she asked.

"Yes," you said nodding.

Simon said nothing.

Mrs Croft made a sound that was not quite a laugh but was adjacent to one. "Floor's open," she said. "Don't knock anyone over." And she turned back to her clipboard.

The first dance was not elegant.

Simon was, as he had always been and had openly admitted, not a dancer.

He was a man built for other kinds of movement — purposeful, directed, the kind that had somewhere to go. Dancing required a different relationship with your body, a willingness to be present in it without agenda, and that was not naturally his.

But he was trying. And Simon Riley trying at something he wasn't good at with complete, unhesitating commitment was one of your favourite things in the world.

He held you correctly — one hand at your waist, the other holding yours at the right height — because he had clearly looked this up at some point, which you were choosing not to think about too hard. His footwork was careful. Deliberate. Slightly behind the beat in the way of someone counting silently.

"You're counting," you told him trying your hardest not to laugh.

"Shut up."

"Simon, I can see your lips moving." you snorted.

"I said shut up."

You were laughing now. Properly, helplessly, the kind that came up from somewhere real — and he looked down at you with that face, that flat, long-suffering, completely fond face, and something in his eyes that was warm in a way that had nothing to do with patience and everything to do with the fact that your laugh had always been, apparently, one of his favourite sounds.

"You're doing fine," you told him, once you'd recovered.

"I'm doing terribly," he answered. "Keep going."

By the second dance, he was better.

By the third, he had found something. Some adjustment in the way he held you, the way his hand settled more fully at your waist, drawing you closer so the movement between you became less about individual steps and more about one shared thing. He was a quick study. He always had been, once he'd decided something was worth doing.

You became aware, gradually, of the room watching.

Not intrusively. Not all at once. But in the soft, peripheral way of a room full of people who have been in love for decades and recognise the particular weather of it when it walks through the door.

An older couple near the stage — she in pale blue, he in a suit that had been good once and was still cared for — had stopped talking to watch you.

A woman at one of the corner tables had her chin in her hand.

Mrs Croft, by the door, was very deliberately looking at her clipboard and failing to look only at her clipboard.

You didn't mind. You were too busy watching Simon watch you.

The band changed tempo at half past nine.

The waltz gave way to something with a different shape entirely — something that moved from the hips rather than the feet, a rhythm that was slower in its pulse and considerably less innocent in its intention.

A rumba.

You looked up at Simon.

He looked down at you.

"I don't know this one," he said.

"I'll show you." you breathed.

You took his hand and placed it lower at your waist, right above the curve of your ass. Deliberately watching his face when you did it, watching the shift in his expression, the way something in his eyes went very still and very focused. "Hip to hip," you told him. "Slower than you think. Let the music pull you."

He followed your lead with an attention that was frankly overwhelming in its completeness.

Simon Riley giving you his full, undivided, physical focus was not a small thing. He was so large and so present and he moved with you rather than against you, adjusting with every shift of your weight, and somewhere in the second minute of the song the counting stopped and something else replaced it.

He drew you closer. His hand at your hip pulled you in until there was no space left between you, until you could feel the warmth of him through the green of your dress and you were very aware of every point of contact, of the music and of the room full of people who had gone very quiet.

Then he turned you.

It was not technically correct. It was not what the dance required. But he turned you in a single, smooth movement that his body had decided on and yours simply followed, because that was what it did with him.

And then he dipped you.

The room tilted. His arm was across your back, solid and immovable, and you were suspended in the amber light with the music around you and your hand at his shoulder.

He lowered you — slowly, with complete control, no hesitation in the hold and then his face was close, very close, and his nose grazed the line of your throat making your breath hitch.

A slow, deliberate graze. The warmth of his breath against your pulse point. You felt it in places that had nothing to do with dancing, between your legs throbbing.

His hand — the one at your hip — slid down, just slightly, just enough, finding the outside of your thigh where the fabric of your dress lay, and he hooked your leg, slowly, around his hip. His fingers at the back of your thigh. Holding you there. His nose still at your throat.

The music resolved. Somewhere behind you, someone started clapping.

He brought you upright. Smoothly, slowly, until you were standing again and his hand was still at the back of your thigh. Your leg still around his hip and your faces were very close. Your heart was conducting itself in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with exertion.

You were panting. Slightly. Just slightly.

He was not panting. He was looking down at you with the almost-smile, the one that had always been rarer than gold and twice as valuable — and his eyes were warm and very dark and entirely, completely satisfied with themselves.

"You looked that up as well," you managed.

"No," he said.

"Simon—"

"That one," he said, "I just wanted to do."

From the table by the stage, the woman in pale blue was applauding with great enthusiasm. Her husband had two fingers in his mouth and was whistling.

Mrs Croft had given up entirely on the clipboard.

The taxi back was not a long ride.

It felt longer than it was, and shorter than you wanted.

You sat beside him in the back seat with his thigh against yours and the city moving past the windows and neither of you speaking. The silence had a texture to it that was thick and warm and anticipatory in a way that made the air feel heavy in your lungs.

His hand was on your knee. Just resting there, heavy and warm, the way he did everything — with complete, unapologetic certainty.

You did not move it.

The house appeared at the end of the lane with its white fence and its dark windows and the lavender silver in the moonlight.

You were out of the taxi before it had fully stopped and you were aware how eager this appeared and you didn't care.

Simon paid the driver and caught up with you in three strides because his legs were considerably longer than yours and always had been.

He got to the door first. Key in hand.

The door opened.

And you did not wait for him to step through it.

You took him by the front of his shirt, that black shirt, warm from his body, the fabric bunching in your fists and you lips were suddenly on his.

You walked him backwards through the doorway and you felt the moment his back met the wall just inside and you were already kissing him before he'd fully registered the sequence of events.

Your mouth on his. Your hands in the front of his shirt. Thirty years of it finding its way out all at once, without ceremony, without preamble, without any of the careful management you had been applying to yourself since you were four years old at a preschool art table.

He kissed you back.

He kissed you back the way he did everything — thoroughly, completely, with his full attention and no apparent interest in doing anything else ever again.

His hands came to your face, big and careful, tilting your jaw, and for a moment you were simply inside the realness of him and the warmth of him and the fact that he was here and alive and kissing you in the hallway of the house he'd bought for you.

He pulled back.

"Easy, sunshine," he said against your lips. Low. A little breathless, which you would be privately triumphant about later. The corner of his mouth pulled up in that crooked smile.

You became aware, in the slightly dazed way of someone returning from somewhere, that your hands were still in his shirt and his hands were still on your face and you were standing approximately two inches apart in his hallway.

You also became aware, in the refocusing of your vision, of his mouth.

Of the scar on his upper lip.

You didn't know how you hadn't noticed it before — through dinner, through the dancing, through all of it.

Perhaps you had simply not been this close before. Or perhaps you had been looking at so many things that you hadn't been looking at everything.

It was small, a thin pale line bisecting the left side of his upper lip, old enough to have faded to silver, the kind of scar that had been there for years and had been lived with so thoroughly that the face had absorbed it.

You lifted your thumb and touched it, gently. "How'd you get this?"

He went very still, alert and present and reading you.

You kissed it. Softly. Just that.

Something moved in his throat.

His hands shifted from your face to your waist, warm and settled, and he began to move you gently — backwards, one steady step at a time — turning you both away from the wall and deeper into the hallway. His foot found the door behind him and pushed it closed with a quiet, final click.

"If I tell you about that one," he said, his voice low and even above your head as he guided you past the entrance and toward the stairs, "I'll have to tell you about the rest."

He looked down at you as he said it, that look, the one that said you were the most interesting thing he had ever encountered. The one that made you feel simultaneously seen and slightly undone — and his expression had in it something that was fond and amused and entirely, devastatingly warm.

You kicked your heels off at the bottom of the stairs. They went somewhere behind you. You didn't look.

Your bag went next, dropped against the banister.

"The rest?" you repeated. Your voice came out slightly smaller than you intended. Your eyes, entirely without your permission, moved down the front of him — the black shirt, the breadth of his shoulders, his torso, his thick thighs, all of him — and back up again. Slowly.

He watched you do it. He said nothing.

You swallowed. "Tell me then."

His hand at your waist steered you up the first step, and then the second, and the stairs curved slightly toward the landing above, and at the top of the stairs he pushed open the door to a bedroom.

The room was large and furnished.

A bed, properly large, the kind that accommodated a man his size without complaint. Low lamps on either side casting the same amber warmth as the hall below. Dark wood floors, a window looking out toward the garden, the curtain shifting slightly in a crack of night air.

He kissed you, just inside the door you kissed him back and his hands were at your hips.

Then he pulled back with a groan. Both of you breathing slightly harder than was strictly accounted for by climbing one flight of stairs.

"I want to, sunshine," he said. His voice was very low. Restrained. His hands still on your body, holding you there, his thumbs moving in a small slow motion against the fabric of your dress that was doing nothing to help you think clearly. "I do. But I need to hear it from you first. Your permission. Clear words. I don't want to misunderstand you."

You opened your mouth.

And then your eyes moved, over his shoulder, to the dresser.

A skull mask looked back at you.

You closed your mouth. You looked at it. The mask, white and stark and precise but somehow both alien and completely, recognisably his. The balaclava beside it, folded neatly. And tactical gloves — enormous, black, reinforced, approximately the size of your head.

"That yours?" you asked.

Simon turned his head, following your gaze. He looked at the dresser, then back at you. "Yeah."

"What is it?"

"What I wear on missions."

"Oh," you said.

And then your brain did something entirely beyond your authority. It constructed, with great speed and considerable detail, an image: Simon, broad and enormous, in black tactical gear. Gloved hands. That mask. Hovering over you.

You swallowed.

The image did not leave. It simply settled in, warm and vivid and decidedly unhelpful.

"Sunshine."

His hand came to your face — his big, warm, ungloved hand, his actual hand, the one you knew — his thumb sweeping gently under your eye, bringing you back into the room and the amber lamplight and the present moment.

"Hmm?" you managed meeting his gaze.

His eyes moved over your face with the same comprehensive attention he always gave you.

"Your permission, love," he said. Quiet. Certain.

"Oh." You blinked. "Yes. Yes, you have it. Always."

The almost-smile. "Not for everything I want to do to you." His thumb was still moving, very gently, under your eye. "I'll ask. Multiple times."

You stared at him. "Multiple—"

"Times," he confirmed. His voice was entirely level. His eyes were not.

You pushed his shoulder and your cheeks burned.

He caught your hand as you pushed it and laughed, a low, real, full sound, the kind that you had spent most of your life engineering because it was so rare and so completely, unreasonably good.

You laughed too, properly, the helpless kind, and his forehead came down to rest against yours and you were both laughing in the amber light of his bedroom with the skull mask on the dresser and the lavender outside the window and thirty years behind you and everything in front.

The laughing settled.

Not all at once — it unwound gradually, the way laughter does when it's the real kind, leaving something warm and loose in its place.

His forehead was still against yours. His hands had moved from your face to your waist, both of them now, holding you the way he'd held you on the dance floor — with that complete, unhurried certainty, like you were something he'd been waiting to hold properly for a very long time and intended to do it right.

The amber light of the lamps lay across everything. Through the gap in the curtain, you could see the edge of the garden — the pale shapes of flowers, the dark of the lawn.

"Tell me about the rest," you said quietly.

He pulled back just enough to look at you. "The scars?"

"You said if you told me about the one on your lip you'd have to tell me about the rest." You reached up and touched the scar again — that thin, silver line — with the pad of your thumb. "So tell me about the rest."

He looked at you for a long moment. Then he reached up and began, without ceremony, to unbutton his shirt.

You were very still.

He did it the way he did everything — without drama, without performance, button by button from the collar down, and when he shrugged it from his shoulders and set it aside you understood, in a way you hadn't before, what eighteen years of that life had written on him.

He was enormous.

You'd known that in the abstract — had known it from the doorframe and the dance floor and the way rooms seemed to reorganise themselves around him — but this was different.

This was the specific, undeniable reality of his shoulders, the breadth of his chest, the muscle of his arms that carried the tattoo sleeve on the left, the ink wrapping from wrist to shoulder in dark, intricate patterns that in this light you still couldn't fully read but wanted to.

And the scars.

There were more than you'd expected.

Each one a different shape and age and story, written into the topography of him in pale and silver lines. A long one along his left ribs. Something older, fainter, across the top of his right shoulder. A circular scar below his collarbone on the left side that your medical knowledge was sufficient to identify and that made your chest constrict briefly and completely before you put that particular knowledge away for now.

He was watching your face as you looked. Careful. Giving you the time of it.

You stepped forward. You placed your hand flat against his sternum — his heart under your palm, steady and real — and you felt him exhale.

"The lip," you said.

"Kandahar. 2004. Caught the stock of a rifle." He said it the same way he'd told you everything tonight — flat, factual, trusting the fact to carry the weight. "Bit through my lip. Wasn't pretty for a while."

You moved your hand from his sternum to his ribs. Found the long scar there, traced it gently with your fingertips.

"That one."

"Knife. 2009. I moved the wrong way and the other man moved the right way." The shadow of something in his face that was not quite humour and not quite not. "Lesson learned."

Your hand moved to his shoulder. The older, fainter scar.

"Before the military," he said, before you asked. His voice changed, just fractionally. Flatter. Doing more work to stay level. "Not a mission."

You understood. You didn't ask further. You pressed your lips to it instead — gently, just that, your mouth against the old pale mark — and you felt the breath go out of him in a way that was different from all the others. Slower. Deeper.

"Sunshine," he said. Very quietly.

"The one below your collarbone," you said.

A pause. "That one's not a story for tonight."

You tilted your head back to look up at him. "Is it a story for eventually?"

His eyes on yours. Something in them that was considering, assessing, "Yeah," he said. "Eventually."

"Alright," you said. You meant it. You had waited thirty years; you could wait for the story of one scar.

His hand moved to your face. That same gesture from the hallway — his thumb at your cheek, slow and deliberate and he tilted your chin up and kissed you. Not urgently this time. Slowly. Deeply.

His hands found the zip at the side of your dress — careful, unhurried — and he looked at you, a clear question in it, and you nodded, and his hands were very steady and very gentle. Your dress went the way of your heels and your bag, somewhere behind you, unmissed.

He looked at you the way he had looked at you on the porch yesterday, and outside The Grill tonight, and across the restaurant table, and on the dance floor — with that complete, comprehensive attention.

Only now there was nothing restrained about what was in it. It was simply there, open and certain, and it was thirty years of something finally being allowed to be exactly what it was.

"Hi," you said. Which was absurd. Which made him laugh again, low and real.

"Hi, sunshine," he said. His hands at your waist. His forehead dropping to yours.

“Si I need to-“ you breathed in deep, “I um,” he pulled his head away from yours, looking into your eyes with those brilliant brown ones of his.

“What is it Sunshine?” He asked, his finger under your chin tilting your head up.

“I’m, I’ve never-“ you sigh, “I’ve told you so many things, I can’t believe I can’t even say this to you.”

“Do we need to slow down?” He asked, his voice softening.

“No. It’s not that. I mean I’m not a virgin if that’s what you’re thinking I just, no guy has ever-“ you sigh again, your eyes dropping from his.

Simon is quiet. He waits, the way he always waits — giving you the whole space of it, not rushing you toward the end of the sentence.

“Made it good,” you finally say, to his chest. “For me. It’s always just, fine. Maybe sometimes I get close but then it’s over. Not that there’s been loads of guys, maybe three.”

A beat.

You make yourself look up at him.

Something changes in his face.

You see the flare of it.

Anger.

Not toward you — you feel that immediately, the anger isn't at you, it moves through him and settles somewhere else entirely. His jaw shifts. His eyes, for just a moment, go somewhere dark and quiet.

"Every one of them," he says. Low. More to himself than to you.

"Simon—"

"Had you," he says. "And didn't—" He stops. The jaw again. His eyes squeeze shut. "Didn't pay attention."

"It's not—"

"It is." His eyes open. He looks at you, his hands moving to your hips, both of them, settling there with a weight that feels like anchoring, like he needs the contact as much as you do. The darkness has settled now, controlled, underneath everything else.

"And I wasn't here." Something moves through his expression — not guilt exactly, but something adjacent to it, something private and old. "Should've been your first, sunshine. Should've been there to—"

He stops himself. His forehead drops to yours.

"I've waited years for this," he says quietly. "I'm not rushing it. And I'm going to pay attention."

“Pay attention?” You ask breathless.

“To every sigh,” he kissed your cheek, “whimper and moan.” His lips moved down to your jaw. “To the way your hips move, the way your back arches, the way you’ll writhe under me, how I’ve imaged it every time I’ve gotten off for the last two decades.” He whispered the last bit into your ear, teeth tugging on your earlobe.

You gasp, “Simon.” Your cheeks burn.

“Oh don’t tell me you never thought about it.” He grins pulling back to look down at you.

You look at the floor sheepishly cause of course you have. Of course you’ve cum the hardest you ever have in your life only when thinking about Simon fucking you.

"Oh you have." He smirked titling his head.

“Shut up.” You push his shoulder and he laughs.

His hands leave your hips and then you're moving, his arms around you, and the edge of the bed meets the back of your knees.

Then his massive paws are in your hair and his lips are on your neck as your back meets the sheets. His weight heavy and solid on you. You could tell he was holding himself up so he didn’t squish you.

He leaned back on his heels, kneeling between your legs. You sighed in satisfaction when his fingers ran over your bare skin. His blunt nails scratching softly where your pelvic bone sits.

"So beautiful Sunshine," He grabs your hips and squeezes, "Fill my hands with you finally." Simon groans. A noise you've been picturing in your head. This and everything else that happens this evening, you truly believe, will be one of those times when reality is better than anything you have imagined.

Simon's brown eyes have always been intense, but right now the way he's looking down at you it's like he is someone else entirely. His eyes almost black with how much they have darkened.

"Simon." You tangle your fingers with his.

"Can I?" He asks. His hand, the one not in yours, trailing down your thigh and stopping on your mound. You clench around nothing when he pushes down, just a little bit of pressure that you feel in your clit and makes your hips buck.

You don't miss the way his lips do the almost smile thing. You nod furiously but he shakes his head.

"Need your words love." He raises a brow.

"Yes, yes Simon touch me." You breathe out, your chest feeling tight when he nods, moving his hand down to cup your cunt over your underwear.

And maybe its because you haven't had sex in three years, maybe its because you are touch starved or maybe its simply because its Simon, but your back arches and your moan is down right pornographic with a simple touch over your underwear.

"So responsive." He mumbles, his thumb rubbing circles over your clit through the fabric. "Get your tits out for me Sunshine, wanna see em." he grunts feeling your underwear getting wet.

Shakily you reach behind your back and unclip your bra. "Been thinking about them for years. What they look like, how they'll bounce when I fuck you." He groans as you pull the straps down your arms and fling the bra on the floor.

His eyes are on your chest, he doesn't blink. Then as if his system has rebooted, he blows air out of his cheeks and whistles low. "Fuck lovie, so pretty. You're a dream." Simon leans forward and wraps his lips around your breast, his tongue swirling around the nipple as his thumb continues circling your clit.

You moan, fingers tugging at his hair.

He comes off your breast with a pop making you whine and push at his shoulder. He grins pressing his thumb firmer against you, while sliding his other hand over your leg, index finger tracing over the small scar on you leg from when you fell off your bike after Simon broke your training wheels.

There was something comforting about this. Simon wasn't someone you had to explain yourself to, he already knew every version of you, he was simply adding this one to his list. This version, open and honest and begging the man you'd known for thirty years to make you cum on his fingers.

This didn't feel like a hook up, not like other guys have, but it felt like two people who have been each other's home for years and they're finally admitting it.

"Kiss me Simon." You're not even sure if what you said made sense with how much you were panting. But he leaned down to graze his lips along yours. Teasing and soft, despite the fast past he'd started to set with his thumb.

"Stop teasing." You huffed.

"Its my favourite pastime." He grinned hooking his fingers in your underwear, pulling them down and moving with them to settle between your legs.

You gasp, when his tongue slides from your asshole to your clit. "Simon!" His dark eyes are locked on yours as he swirls the tip of his his tongue around your entrance. Your toes curl, your head falling back onto the soft bed sheets.

A few occasions, you could count on one hand, had a guy you were with eaten you out and it was good but fuck, it didn't feel like this.

You felt like you were burning all over with each swipe of his tongue, each dip inside your entrance, each pattern he begins to circle over your clit.

He was learning you.

Simon groans against you, his breath hot, it made you dizzy. You feel everything, its too much to quick and your hips start to buck against his mouth.

Simon clearly had no intention of slowing down or stopping as he slides his arms around your thighs and splays his hands over the tops of them locking you in place.

It feels like fire, like molten lava pooling low in your abdomen the harder his tongue presses against you.

You don’t even recognise the sounds coming out of you, it’s as if every movement pulls a new one from you. 

His thumb replaces his tongue and he rubs the bump in small circles until you can barely breathe. “Sound so pretty,” he murmurs just as your back arches and you moan loudly into the night air. 

He is still speaking but you can’t hear anything he is saying, it’s all blurring together the way your vision is blurring. His thumb slides from your clit down until it’s pushing its way inside you. Your hips jerk away but his other hand is quick to hold you in place.

“No running.” Simon growls.

You cry out when his tongue comes back to torture you, lapping at you like he’s never had a drink and you're fresh water. Soon enough the rhythm he’s built has your hips rolling forward seeking more of whatever he has to give you.

Your hand reaches for his arm and squeezes hard the exact moment your vision turns white and your body shakes, dissolving into pleasure. It's like lightning pulsing through you. He works your through your orgasm, wringing every last wave of pleasure from you before he moves to your lips, kissing you.

“Did so good Sunshine. I’ve got you.” His arms wrap around you, your nipples grazing against the hair on his chest, that alone has you whimpering. 

"Need more, want you inside me Simon. Please." You look into his eyes, your shyness gone with your orgasm.

"Okay Sunshine." Simon chuckles, the sound vibrating against you.

He pulls back and gets off the bed before he starts to unbuckle his belt. He pushes his black slacks down along with his underwear, his large, and he was so fucking big, cock already hard.

"Always wondered what you'd be like in bed," He tilts his head with a smirk, "If you'd like being in control. Or if you'd prefer me to lead," He knelt on the bed again, and oh my god Simon Riley, your best friend of thirty years and the love of your life was crawling up the bed towards you until his cock was flush with your entrance. "If you'd be needy and beg. Or if you'd bark orders at me." He slapped the head of his cock against your clit. "If you'd be loud or quiet."

"If you'd let me do whatever I wanted to you," his head titled back, eyes shut, "Fuck Sunshine, the things I've imagined doing to you," He looks down at you with the most intense gaze, pining you there on the bed, "Would you let me lovie? Do whatever I want to you?" He asks, pearly whites peaking out to sink into his bottom lip.

"Like what?" Your breath is so unsteady, so hitched and uneven you feel your cheeks heat even more than they have done at his words.

He grins, "Like what?" He chuckles pushing the head of his cock against your entrance, not in, but resting against it, "Wanna fuck you so hard you can't walk. Make love to you slow and so deep you'll feel me everywhere. Bend you over every surface in this house and make you cry on my cock-"

"Simon!" You gasp.

"Can I Sunshine?" He groans pushing in a little more and your eyes sting with tears at the stretch.

"Yes! Please yes!" He pushes in slowly. One of his hands coming next to you on the bed and the other gripping your hip. He keeps sliding in further, so slowly until its sheathed inside you.

Simon does not move. You can see the restraint within the way his teeth are gritted, his brows furrowed, sweat forming on his forehead. 

“Fuck you feel amazing wrapped around me, so tight.” He groans. 

You don’t have any words and even if you did, you doubt you would be able to say them. You have never felt so…full. So filled to the brim and unable to get a reprieve from it.

“M’gonna move, gotta move Sunshine,” Simon growls and the fullness disappears for a second before he’s pushing himself back in. 

“Fuck you feel so good Si.” You shudder and stars appear in your vision when he moves forward and takes your legs with him folding you in half.

Simon Riley has you in fucking mating press and didn't even break the slow rhythm he's building. He continues this push and pull movement until it begins to flow, each movement begins where the other ends. The pattern making you sob, “Don’t stop!”

You can't function and its only now that you understand the phrase 'being fucked dumb', rocking your hips, trying desperately to keep up with each thrust, back arched so beautifully.

Simon lets his hand slip and curve around your jaw without thinking about it, "Taking me so well Sunshine." The feral look in his eyes sends a shiver up your spine.

"Too big." You sobbed, your hands grabbing at his large biceps as he thrusts harder. He could feel every ridge and curve of your sopping cunt.

"You can take it." He encouraged you, biting at your neck leaving marks in his wake and looking so damn happy whilst doing it.

You continued to moan and whimper, tears of pleasure falling down your face while Simon's huge body hovered over you. Protecting you from the outside world, in here, it was just you and him.

"Si..oh!" you cried out feeling him hit that rough spot inside your weeping, swollen cunt.

"There it is." He didn't mean to grin like a obsessed man in such an intimate moment but he couldn't help himself. He never can with you. Each thrust hits the one place no man ever seems to be able to find but Simon seemingly found with ease. A spot that makes a tightening begin like a coil, being wound with every drive of his hips.

Your sinful noises morph into higher pitched breathy little screams.

"I know lovie, I know." He cooed, holding you closer. His sweat glazed skin meeting yours as his large veiny hand slips under your head, his other arm curling around your waist.

You move your hips and he groans vulgar into the air, his hand gripping your hair and pulling your head back, a little to the side before he attacks your neck all messy. Smearing his lips across your throat, you don’t even recognise the sound that leaves your mouth.

He pulls away, his dark eyes flit to your squelching pussy, the noise attracting his attention pupils dilating, honing in on the way your cunt sucks his cock back in. He couldn’t pull away even if he wanted to and fuck he doesn’t, he wants nothing more than to stay in your pretty pussy forever.

“Simonfuckyespleaserighttheredontstop!” All the words and moans blend together until your mumbling nonsense trying your hardest to keep conscious, it’s difficult with the way he’s fucking into you so deliciously it’s making you delirious in the best way.

His big body towering over yours, big hands gripping you almost bruisingly. His thick muscular hairy thighs press against your skin compellingly, the sight before you, it's irresistible. All you have to do is look down to see his massive cock sliding in and out of you, a ring of white collecting at the base.

It's too much seeing him like this, feeling the sweet pleasure burn through you and yet Simon moves one of his hands off your head and presses a thumb to your swollen, aching clit.

You're done for.

You sob, so fucking loud you swear everyone in the world can hear it, hot tears flow down your cheeks staining them.

"That's it." The words wash over you with your orgasm, it swirls around you, clings to you, and pushes you down down down the rabbit hole of pleasure. Oversensitivity sets in making you whine at his touch, but you can't stop yourself from wanting more.

Your hips buck into his touch eliciting a dirty chuckle from him.

As Simon picks up his thrusts, he comes to the conclusion that he loves you like this, wants to see it everyday. You're so drunk, so delirious and he loves it. Loves the far away look in your eyes right before they roll back into your skull.

He shoves his face into your neck groaning, "Gonna cum Sunshine, need to. Where?" his thrusts pick up again, as if that were even possible.

"Cum inside me Simon, fill me up." You cry out.

Simon must have been right there as he cums the second you finish your sentence. Hot thick robes of cum pushing deep inside you. He rubs your clit faster and another smaller orgasm zips through you leaving you whimpering.

He stays in you, holding you until he goes soft. He moves your legs so they don't cramp. "Did so well for me Sunshine. I love you so much." He looks into your eyes as more tears spill down your cheeks.

"I love you Simon." you bring your fingers into his hair, pulling him closer to kiss you. The contrast between the way he just destroyed your guts and is now kissing you so softly, is astounding.

He is careful when he picks you up and walks into the ensuite bathroom to the right, flicking the light on and placing you on the toilet. "Gotta pee sunshine, don't want you getting you a uti." He says and you're so tired you don't even have the energy to be embarrassed.

Your eyes as still closed as you pee. Your hand moves to find the toilet paper but a warm flannel is being pressed against you, Simon's other hand on your knee to keep them open. You whine and push his hand away, "Simon that's icky." You frown at him opening your eyes to see him looking at you with a frown of his own.

"Nothing about you is icky Sunshine. I'm clearing up my mess, now move your hand." You do as told and it occurs to you, through your tired haze, while Simon gently wipes you clean that he must be used to clearing up mess with the job he does.

"All done. Want a shower or straight to sleep?" He asks.

"Sleep." You yawn making him smile at you.

He carries you back to the bed, lifting the duvet and settling you both underneath it.

The particular quality of afterwards settles in the room.

The warmth of it, the specific silence, the way the world outside the window continues to exist and you become aware of it again in layers. The sound of the garden. The distant sound of a car somewhere. The sound of him breathing.

You were lying with your head on his chest. His arm around you, heavy and warm. His heartbeat under your ear, steady and unhurried, the same heart that had been beating beside you in one form or another for thirty years.

His hand moved. Slowly, idly, up and down your back.

You watched the lamplight glow on the beside table. You thought about the lavender. You thought about the train station in 2001, and the birthday cards, and the bottom stair with the cream envelope, and Margaret Howarth saying you always did belong together with the satisfied certainty of someone who had known it before either of you did.

"Simon," you said.

"Yeah."

"You planted lavender for three years."

"You mentioned that already."

"I'm still processing it."

A low sound in his chest that was the rumble of a laugh contained. "Take your time Sunshine."

You propped yourself up and looked at him. His face in the lamplight — older, marked, those brown eyes that had been watching you since you were four years old, now watching you from a pillow in the house he'd bought you.

His expression was open in the way it had been open on the porch and at the restaurant table and in the dance hall, the way it had been open perhaps three times in thirty years before tonight and was now, apparently, simply his face when he looked at you.

You loved him so much.

You had loved him in different quantities and different registers for most of your life and now you loved him in this one too, this new one, and it was the same love and completely different and you thought you would be discovering its dimensions for a considerable amount of time.

"You should have told me," you said. "Years ago. Before the train."

"Yeah," he said. No argument.

"I would have said it back then too."

Something moved in his face. "I know," he said. And then, quieter, "I wasn't ready then. Wasn't enough yet."

"Simon—"

"I know what you're going to say."

"You were always—"

"I know," he said. "I believe you. Now." His hand came up to your face, tucking a strand of hair back, his thumb at your cheekbone. "Took me a while to get there. But I'm here."

"You're here," you agreed smiling.

"And you're here." his hand tangled itself in your hair.

"I'm here." you giggled.

He looked at you for a long moment. Then, "Stay with me."

Not a question, not quite — more like a hope said aloud. The rarest thing from him. He had carried so much silently for so long, and this one small thing cost him something, and you could see it, and you loved him for it.

"It's my house," you said cheeky and bright.

He blinked. Then that laugh again — the real one, the rare one — and your heart did what it always did when you earned it, that particular, irreplaceable lurch.

"Yeah Sunshine," he said. "It is."

You lay back down against his chest. His arm came around you. His heartbeat under your ear.

Outside, the lavender moved. The Union flag was still on the roof. The porch swing sat in the dark with its yellow cushion, waiting for morning.

"Sunshine," he said. Into your hair.

"Hmm."

"I love you."

You pressed your lips to his chest, above his heart.

"I love you too," you said. "I've loved you since you were that chubby four-year-old who stole my crayons."

A long pause.

"Chubby," he repeated.

"Stocky," you amended, grinning into his chest. "You were very stocky."

"I was four."

"You were a very solid four year old."

His arm tightened around you — not painfully, just firmly, the way of a man making a point through the medium of holding — and you laughed again, helplessly, into the warmth of him.

He made that sound, that low rumbling laugh that lived in his chest, and the lamp burned warm and low and outside the lavender moved in the dark.

Simon Riley.

Who stole your crayons at four and broke your glasses at seven and learned to read because of you and carried your bag through every corridor of secondary school and punched a boy for pushing you over and kissed your cheek in a toilet corridor and sat beside you through every lunch and glared at anyone who called you a nerd and came round to your kitchen table for years and went to war at seventeen and sent you cards from the edges of the world and planted lavender for three years and bought you the house you described at sixteen and came home.

He came home to you.

Your best friend. Your home. Your Simon.

Taglist | @sdieflwr @pipsysstuff @laswells-cia-assistant @luneiiz @myblogystuff @kitty-kat-crevan @drugs-and-daddyissues @magicwriterinspo @twizkat @sea-4salt

[aeriontargaryenshipthrust]

The best literally anyone has looked ever actually.

[pastel0rchid]

Another Believer (19)

Ryland Grace x F!Reader

Word count: 2.6K

Warnings: Talk of Rocky's dead crewmates

A/N: <3

Masterlist

It wasn’t long before Ryland returned down the tunnel with his arms full of technology.

Your eyes glance over it all curiously while he takes a seat on the ledge where he had been before your little miscommunication with Rocky.

It was a tablet taped haphazardly to a portable laptop, a program already pulled up with an idea of how it was meant to be used. He shows the mash of tech to Rocky with a proud smile tugging at his lips.

“Check this out.”

Rocky gives a little grunting, curious sound as his carapace moves between the screens and Ryland, and you can’t help but wonder if he can actually see what Ryland was trying to show him due to his use of echolocation to see.

“I thought I might record you.”

Ryland explains, while holding up a little microphone that he had plugged into the computer. This seems to freak Rocky out, though, the alien giving a little shriek while moving back from the object.

He must think it’s some sort of human weapon.

“It’s okay, Rocky.” You quickly try to soothe, moving to sit on another ledge nearby Ryland, who glances at you through the corner of his eye before looking back at the alien.

“Oh, no no. Nope. It’s okay; it’s just a microphone.” Ryland holds it up to his lips, speaking into it to try and show that it meant no threat, “Works like this. You say, uh… let’s start with one.”

Ryland grabs the clock from before, holding it up to Rocky and pointing at the taped number one to show the alien, who holds up one of his claws slightly while making a small chirping sound to repeat after Ryland.

You watch as Ryland scrambles to grab the microphone and hold it up to the barrier separating you and Rocky, humming a small chuckle at his slight struggle.

“No, no, wait, wait. Sorry.”

Ryland glances over at you with a glare that has no true heat behind it before his attention is taken back when Rocky repeats the sound, this time, into the microphone. He sets the microphone down, typing what the sound meant into the computer.

“Okay. And… one.”

Ryland presses a few more buttons before the chirped sound meaning ‘one’ is repeated back to Rocky, who perks up and makes a few squeaking sounds in delight. A smile instantly overtakes your lips at the new revelation, Ryland rubbing his hands together happily.

This was a start!

—

“So… uh… we met an alien.”

Ryland speaks to the camera he had set up, where he had begun recording logs to send back to Earth, something he had started doing only here and there since there wasn’t much that needed to be updated before meeting Rocky.

Usually, you stayed out of the small videos, instead keeping to the side or in another room altogether, not really knowing how you could include yourself in them.

But this time, you stood beside Ryland, the excited look on your face reflected back at you on the screen.

“An intelligent alien.”

You include while Ryland begins to unroll some duct tape for the latest thing his brain had determined needed to be worked on.

“And we’re learning to communicate.”

Ryland continues, holding the duct tape up silently, expectantly towards you as you grab the scissors from the table, cutting the strip off for him.

The two of you had started doing that since meeting Rocky, knowing what the other expected of you, even if you didn’t communicate it.

It made you nervous at first, but you grew used to the feeling the same way you had grown used to the memories slowly being filtered into your mind.

It felt like learning to breathe again.

—

“Names.”

Ryland had handed you the microphone, wanting you to hold it up to Rocky while he put the words into the computer to make the process a lot smoother than before.

Due to how short the cord was between the microphone and the computer, you now sit on the same ledge as him, although now you’re a little squished between him and the wall. You did well to quell the flutter in your stomach every time your arms brushed, instead keeping your gaze on Rocky just in case your face couldn’t hide the expression very well.

“Okay, let’s start with you.”

Ryland prompts, causing you to hold the microphone up closer to the wall. Rocky, now understanding what he needed to do, leans towards the microphone. He puts his claws together, just like he had done before, and sings the song of his name.

You’re just as mesmerised as you were last time, wishing desperately that you could speak the language so you could fully understand the words he was speaking.

The song fizzles out, Ryland looking at Rocky and asking a quick, “You done?” To which Rocky responds with a little trill.

While Ryland looks down to type ‘Rocky’ into the computer, you watch as Rocky’s carapace turns between you and Ryland, like he had started doing during the silence.

As if he were making sure that you both were still there when you weren’t making sounds.

“Alright, Starshine, your turn.”

Ryland looks back up at Rocky before his gaze drifts down to the name patch on your suit, and he slightly freezes. Of course, he had forgotten that they had put his last name on your patch instead of your own.

Noticing his gaze, you glance down at the patch yourself before your eyes flicker up to meet Ryland’s.

Something stirs in the two of you, unnamed and sharp, but no memories of the reasoning would appear. A cruel trick from both of your minds.

Ryland, desperately needing to avert his focus, clears his throat and looks back at Rocky while saying your first name. Rocky paused for a little while, as if he were determining how he would say your name in his language.

The alien suddenly perks up, and he releases a soft note, a soothing little sound that ends with a gentle trill.

You felt honored to have your name associated with such a pretty noise.

Ryland hums appreciatively at the small note Rocky had released while typing your name into the computer.

“Alright. My name is… I can’t wait to hear this-”

Ryland points to the nametag on his suit, looking up at Rocky expectantly.

“Is Grace. What’s your word for my name? Go ahead.”

You watch eagerly as Rocky perks up just like he had done for you.

Only to release a little grunt, that sounded more like a burp than anything else, and gesture at Ryland with one of his claws.

Oh…

A burst of laughter instantly erupts from you, filling the tunnel with its sound as Ryland practically deflates at Rocky’s word for his name.

Rocky instantly copies the sound with his own high-pitched warbles.

Ryland looks between the two of you exasperatedly, but it isn’t long before his own small chuckle joins the sound, and he gives your side a gentle nudge.

“It was not that funny.”

“It really is, though, My Grace.”

The nickname leaves you as easily as ‘Starshine’ had left Ryland’s lips.

And he doesn’t do anything to correct you.

Not a damn thing.

—

Ryland holds the computer he had been typing words into up to show the camera while you continue to cut some more duct tape for him.

“You know, enough to order at restaurants. We have about 250 words.”

He sets the computer down, gently taking the cut pieces of duct tape from you to help stabilize the computer and tablet more.

“Our atmosphere would kill him, and his, us. But… I like to keep a wall up in my relationships anyway.”

Ryland grunts at the gentle way your hip nudges his when you stand from the chair and walk towards another lab table to grab him a fresh roll of duct tape, his gaze instantly snapping over to follow your form as it walks away.

A grin, soft and gentle, unknowingly makes its way to his lips as he watches you.

Which he quickly wipes away when he looks back at the camera and notices it etched onto his face.

“He’s a mechanic, I think-”

“Maybe an inventor.” You call out as you continue digging, a frustrated sound leaving you when the roll slips deeper into the drawer.

Which, thankfully to Ryland, wasn’t the one with the picture in it.

“Could be. He uses a metal form of Xenon. He can make anything, and… look at this.”

Your glance over right when Ryland picks up the camera, shuffling it around slightly in his hands and walking over towards a lab table where you kept all of Rocky’s gifts.

He holds the camera out in front of him with one hand while his other hand holds the little strip of metal that Rocky had made for the two of you.

“I’m calling it ‘Xenonite’. And if we can’t understand what he’s saying, which is mostly me and most of the time-” He grabs the little model of the ship Rocky had made, showing it off to the camera.

“He puts on a little puppet show for me and my tiny brain, and you know what? I don’t mind it.”

“You are a visual learner, My Grace.”

Your voice pops in the background, the fun fact popping into your brain at just the right moment as you look over towards where he stood.

Still holding the camera, Ryland looks over the edge of it to look at you, giving you a slight smile.

—

With the camera back in place and you sitting back beside him after placing the new roll on the table, Ryland continues talking while your hands now mess with a loose string found on one of his shirts, carefully pulling it taut so you can cut it.

There was just so much to talk about their new friend.

“He’s kinda growing on me- at least he’s not growing in me, you know, which was a concern for a little while.”

Your hands pause as your eyes flick up to stare at Ryland, your eyebrow raising slightly at his words before giving a slight shake of your head and a small chuckle bubbling past your lips.

“You are the only one concerned about it.”

Ryland dismisses you with a wave of his hand, but the smile tugging at the corner of his lips proves that he meant nothing by it before he continues with what he wanted to say to the camera.

“His sun is dying, too. Maybe we can help each other.”

—

The two of you stand back in the tunnel in front of Rocky, side by side.

In one of Ryland’s hands, he holds the computer, while the other holds a vial of astrophage he had found while searching through the lab.

“Recognize this?”

Rocky looks up from whatever he had been making. A soft mix of a shriek and a growl escapes the alien when he notices what Ryland is holding. Your brows furrow a little at his reaction, a pang of hurt flashing in your heart at just the sound that Rocky had made.

He is affected by the stuff as much as you were.

“We call it ‘Astrophage’. Means star eater.”

Rocky copies the word in his own language by giving a few clicks and notes, and Ryland adjusts his grip to type the unknown sound into the computer.

He makes the sound again before repeating the same grunt over and over. Your eyes look at the computer in Ryland’s hands as he speaks out the words as they appear.

“Astrophage on me star. Bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad- yeah. Same.”

“We have the same problem, Rocky.”

You voice out as Ryland sets the computer on a nearby stand that he had set up, taking a seat while you move to stand behind him.

A few cooed trills escape Rocky, both of your eyes moving to the screen as the words appear.

‘Rocky happy not alone.’

Gosh, that hurt your heart even more as Ryland gave a slow nod, looking back over towards where Rocky had situated himself while he created.

“Why are you alone?”

Rocky gives a few sung notes while his claws flex open and close.

‘Was twenty-three Eridians on ship. Now only one.’

“Twenty-three?” You gasp out in a whisper, eyes quickly moving to look back at Rocky.

“Wow.” Ryland voices in his own soft tone, the air around the three of you instantly becoming heavy with the realization of how alone Rocky truly had been, “What happened to them?”

Rocky makes a few trills while slowly lying down and going still. Ryland fixes the unknown word on the computer.

‘Died.’

“I’m sorry.”

You’re glad Ryland voices the words that had come to your brain, as your throat had instantly closed up in pure sadness for the alien across from you.

Though without memories, at least you and Ryland had each other.

Rocky… had no one.

“How did they die?” Ryland asked after a few quiet seconds passed through the tunnel.

Rocky sings a few notes and trills.

‘Rocky not know. Only Rocky not died. Rocky could not fix.’

You quickly bring your hand up to your lips, feeling the familiar sting beginning to grow behind your eyes, which you stubbornly try to blink away.

“That’s awful.” You whisper weakly to Ryland, whose gaze travels up at your trembly tone. Silently, he reaches a hand out, a slow move while Rocky trills once again. His fingers gently intertwine with the hand limp against your side.

He gives a gentle, reassuring squeeze.

‘How many humans on Grace ship, question?’

Ryland’s hand slowly slips free from yours as he removes his glasses to wipe them on his shirt.

“Oh, um… There were four of us, and two died on the way here. I wish I knew why. Now… it’s only us.”

Rocky gives a few clicks and trills, seconds passing before the computer picks up what the alien had said.

“Only us and Rocky.’

A small bubble of laughter escapes you at the words, the air slowly thinning into something hopeful as you reach up to use your sleeve to wipe at your eyes.

“Correction.” Ryland hums around his own chuckle as he uses his hands to gesture between you two and Rocky.

Another set of gentle coos leaves Rocky.

‘Grace Starshine Rocky save stars.’

You and Ryland take in the sentence with a few breaths escaping you, your smile only beginning to widen at the realization that Rocky was also calling you starshine. Ryland must have input that into the computer when you weren’t paying attention.

Ryland stands from the chair, making his way over towards the wall. You watch from your spot near the computer as he puts a fist up against the wall separating you and Rocky.

Rocky only stares for a second before bringing up a claw and gently thumping it against the wall where Ryland’s is.

“Deal.” Ryland slowly pulls away from the wall after a few seconds of observing the alien, “That’s called a fist bump, by the way.”

Rocky trills as Ryland walks back over to the computer to put on his glasses. You catch sight of the sentence first, laughter echoing down the tunnel as the mood finally lifts into something brighter.

“Fist my bump?!” Ryland echoes the sentence, glancing over at you as you laugh, his own smile crawling its way onto his face, “No, it’s fist bump.”

Rocky makes a few notes.

‘It same.’

“It’s not the same.” Ryland sighs.

Your laughter dies into a smile as you look between Rocky and Ryland, and you find yourself cherishing the moment.

Something finally settles in you, an assurance.

Things might be okay.

[pastel0rchid]

Another Believer (18)

Ryland Grace x F!Reader

Word count: 2.6K

Warnings: Ryland spirals a little

A/N: I'm sorry it's been so long, everyone! >.< I hope this chapter is worth the wait. Thank you to everyone who's been commenting! I love getting to read each and every one of them, and they definitely keep me motivated to keep going!

Masterlist

Ryland’s fingers work quickly with the duct tape in his hands, cutting out thin pieces and rounding the edges of the pieces that need to cover the clock numbers so Rocky would be able to see them with his echolocation.

He couldn’t believe he didn’t think of it before; the fact that Rocky had no eyes should have been a dead giveaway about the fact that the alien didn’t see as you or he did.

A slight cramp slowly begins to form in his hand from how methodical he is being with the small scissors, and he shakes it out as he uses his other hand to tape a piece of thin tape over the ‘1’ on the ‘12’. He needed to make sure that these were perfect for Rocky, knowing that he couldn’t continue making a fool of himself in front of the first alien that any of humanity had contact with.

Opening the drawer beside him to toss the tape roll into it, the things inside tumble around from how quickly he had opened it.

He almost didn’t see it, so focused on tossing the tape roll inside and heading back to the tunnel, but something peeked out at him towards the back of the drawer. The corner of it is bent towards him (something that must have happened during the chaos of zero gravity), like it was taped away, meant to be hidden.

Ryland’s brows furrow in confusion.

What is that?

His brain, now focused on something else, needs to find the answer to the question. Reaching inside, he pushes a few screwdrivers aside, fingers gripping onto the corner and giving a careful pull. He can hear the tap unsticking

Maybe it was something important.

Left for them by whoever sent them into space

It was small, whatever it was, fitting in his hand. Taped to the back of the drawer and hidden with the things inside. He must have missed it in the mayhem that was him dumping out all of the drawers right after he had woken up from the coma and trying to figure out the gravity situation.

Once his arm is out of the drawer, he observes the small rectangular object first. It was white and had a filmish texture with something on it: a date written with a Sharpie and a couple of hearts drawn underneath it. The date resonated deep within him, something special that he should remember. Stupid memory loss.

This definitely was not meant to help them with their space expedition.

Turning it over in his hands, his breath hitches at the sight that meets him. 

Of course. It was a Polaroid.

A Polaroid of him and you on the deck of the hangar.

His right arm was wrapped around your waist, holding you close against his side, while your left arm was wrapped around his waist. Both of your smiles were bright as you looked at whoever was taking the picture, and your unoccupied hands connected in front to make the shape of a heart.

Ryland’s hand holding the picture begins to tremble slightly, his eyes roving over the picture as if to take in the details for the first time. Written in the same Sharpie on the little space below the photo was ‘2 Year Anniversary!’ and the same hearts from before were on either side of it.

The memory begins to play.

Salty ocean air, your voice talking to someone, begging them to take the picture-

He hurriedly places the photo back into the drawer before shoving it closed. His breath came quick, gripping onto the edge of the lab desk he had been working on as he squeezed his eyes shut, willing the memory away.

Ryland loved you. Positively, absolutely loved you.

But the Ryland in the picture and the Ryland now gripping onto the edge of the desk were two different people in his mind.

With each memory that flooded his senses, reminding him of who he used to be, the more and more he came to that realization.

Why was he sent here?

Why were you sent here?

He purses his lips between his teeth, using the pressure as a grounding point while counting each breath he takes in and out. Something he remembered you teaching him to help the students who experienced the same troubles.

God, every thought in his brain was surrounded by you.

You were etched in every crevice, every neuron connection that fired somehow contained you.

He hated it.

He hated how ever since you woke up, his body craved being near you, like it was the one thing that kept him sane while the two of you drifted in space. He hated how your bodies knew each other more than your brains did. He hated you-

No…

He could never hate you.

He hated the coma.

Whoever sent the two of you to space.

The Astrophage and how it was killing Earth.

He hated his mind.

What was once his greatest strength had become his Achilles heel.

Ryland squeezes his eyes closed even tighter, if that was even possible.

Flashes of you appear, on the Hail Mary and off. Different moments of you that stuck out to him, whether they were simple, mundane things or not. Images of you that settled deep in his very soul, as if this was his mind trying to appease him for its shortcomings.

He suddenly opens his eyes, blinking as he adjusts to the light, and grips the clock that he had been working on. The plastic squeaks under his grip, continuing to count his breaths as he stares at the blue duct tape covering the numbers. You and Rocky were waiting on him.

Now wasn’t the time for him to lose control.

That could be saved for later in the night once he’s heard your breathing settle into the familiar rhythm of sleep.

The drawer sits closed in front of him, an ominous feeling settling in the pit of his stomach as he stares at it one last time before turning around and heading back towards the airlock hatch.

The picture remains ever-present as he shoves open the hatch.

—

You had moved to sit beside the clear wall while waiting for Ryland to finish with whatever he had decided to do, Rocky moving to be on a ledge on his side of the wall that was closest to you. The way he sat on the ledge reminded you of a cat resting on a windowsill while it basked in the sun.

Loafing.

It was cute, in an alien sort of way.

The two of you sit in comfortable silence, observing each other now that you are in close proximity. Rocky occasionally hums a song to break the silence between you, his way of communicating, and you hum the same tune back.

That seems to please him, as his claws tap together a little every time you do it.

The lights move slightly around you, a shadow passing over, and Rocky shifts to stand on the ledge as a trill leaves him.

Ryland must be back.

Remaining seated, you turn to face the other side of the tunnel, Ryland walking towards you while holding up the clock. It takes you a second before he’s close enough for you to see what he has done.

He put tape over the numbers?

“Echolocation, right? You need surfaces to see. Try this.”

He speaks to Rocky as he holds up the clock once he’s within a distance of the wall. The silence begins again as you use the wall behind you to move to stand, a small groan escaping you from being seated on the uncomfortable tunnel wall for quite some time.

“That would make sense for the measuring tape mishap, too.”

Ryland glances at you out of the corner of his eye as you speak and move a few steps forward to stand beside him. Your attention is so focused on Rocky’s slight movements and his gentle clicking that you don’t notice the slight tightening of Ryland’s fingers around the clock.

No, not now. He wasn’t going to continue to let it affect him.

He clears his throat, more so to try to keep his voice from cracking when he speaks next.

“Yeah.” He responds simply to you before speaking back to Rocky, “You see the numbers?”

Ryland taps the surface of the clock again, trying his hardest to act like before he found the picture. It’s hard, but he wills his fingers to at least not shake as a starting point. You didn’t seem to realize it, at least.

He silently thanked Rocky for being so interesting.

Rocky suddenly chirps excitedly, bouncing slightly and twirling in place while two claws come up.

“What’s that?” Ryland inquires, glad he could focus on something he could figure out, his own hands slightly copying the alien across from him, “Is that good?”

“I think you figured it out.” You chuckle while watching Rocky.

“Jazz hands mean good?”

Rocky continues his little claw movements, even tapping them together as Ryland puts up two thumbs-up.

“We do this. Your version of this-”

Ryland does the jazz hands again, this time adding a bit more movement to his shoulder than Rocky did. You can’t contain the small laugh that escapes you as your gaze moves over to Ryland, watching his movements with a widening smile.

“What are you doing?” Your soft-spoken words are mixed with a slight laughter, clearly enjoying the sight before you.

“I’m teaching him Earth customs… That’s our thumbs-up.” He finishes his little dance by giving a thumbs-up again to Rocky, glancing over at you as he can’t help the slight quirk of his lips into a smile at your enjoyment of his antics.

God, you made it so easy to be normal. And yet, so easy to fall apart.

Rocky responds with a musical note while his claws try to copy Ryland. But instead of a thumb-up, his claws are pointed in a thumbs-down.

Your laughter only seems to grow at the miscommunication between Ryland and Rocky.

“No, that’s thumbs-down.”

Man, this was a little harder than Ryland thought. He felt like he was back in the classroom explaining the different cell structures in the human body to a bunch of sixth graders who couldn’t grasp it again.

“We do the thumbs uuuup.”

He drags out the last word while turning his thumbs-down into a thumbs-up, hoping Rocky would follow along with the movement. But the alien only doubled down by doing the move again with another happy musical note.

“That’s close enough.” Ryland sighs out, having a feeling that he wouldn’t be able to change Rocky’s mind about it now that it was cemented into the alien’s brain.

Did it have a brain?

A question for another time.

Your smile is bright as Rocky’s carapace turns towards you, and you give him a thumbs-up in response.

“Good job, Rocky.”

Said alien trills at your words before one claw goes down and the other holds up in a ‘wait’ motion, like Ryland had done earlier, his carapace shifting between you and Ryland.

“You want us to wait?” Ryland gestures to himself and you.

Rocky barely turns before looking back at the two of you and putting up a claw again, almost as if he were making sure that you knew he wanted you to wait.

He was a very tenacious alien.

“We wait?”

“We’ll wait for you, Rocky.” You affirm to Rocky as it ventures further into its dark tunnel, with small grunts escaping him as he goes.

“I’m really, uh…” Ryland calls out after Rocky, clearly unsure of how to fill the air as Rocky goes to gather something, “Really excited to be working with you on this. Fired up.”

Your eyes go from observing the tunnel towards Ryland as he rocks back and forth on his heels, holding the clock behind him. You give a small snort at his obviously awkward behavior, his eyes playfully glaring at you over the rim of his glasses on instinct before looking back at the tunnel, finding Rocky prancing back towards the wall with something held in one of his claws.

Rocky sets the thing onto one of the ledges, the shape of it something hard to describe. It seemed to be built of the same material as the other objects he sent you, slightly long with indents all around the side.

“What have we got here?” Ryland mumbles while leaning closer towards the wall, sitting on one of the ledges closest to it to get a better look.

You tilt your head slightly where you stand, as if hoping the new angle would help you with understanding what Rocky could have brought you… It didn’t.

“He seemed excited to grab it… So, it must be important.”

Both of your brows furrow in intrigued concentration before the object suddenly springs open and the two of you flinch in surprise, Ryland’s hand instinctively reaching out to brush against your own to make sure you’re okay.

Just like he had done when you two first met Rocky, a movement of his body he couldn’t control, an impulse to protect you.

You don’t mention the reach- either too focused on the object or just not wanting to voice it, instead calming it by brushing your knuckles against his.

Silent, assuring.

You both stare as it clicks, the top part moving in a rhythm with the middle part only moving occasionally. Rocky coos slightly in anticipation as he watches the two of you take in the object.

“It’s a clock.”

Ryland finally breathes out after a few silent seconds filled with only the ticking from the object, “I showed you a clock and… you’re showing me a clock.”

The end of his sentence merges with a soft, amazed huff of laughter.

“We’re, uh, clock bros.”

And… 

The wonderstruck moment is broken.

Your own huff of laughter escapes you as you shake your head at Ryland’s words.

Rocky, clearly excited by the new development, suddenly bursts into a multitude of different trills and chirps and notes. His claws are moving this way and that as he explains things in a way neither you nor Ryland could follow along.

“Right, um.” The musical sounds continue through Ryland’s confused words.

“Rocky, wait-” Rocky turns to you when you speak, hums of songs you couldn’t understand directed at you as his claws tap and sway.

“I’m gonna be honest, I’m not sure I’m getting all of this.”

Your shoulders droop as you glance between Ryland and Rocky, an exasperated look on both of your faces as Rocky just continues his melodious rambling while his carapace turns between the two of you.

“We need to find a better way to communicate.”

Ryland sighs and nods in agreement at your words.

“Give me a minute. I think I might have an idea.” He mumbles before standing from the ledge he had been sitting on with a small grunt of effort and beginning to make his way back towards the ship.

To grab what?

You couldn’t figure it out, but you knew Ryland had some type of plan brewing in his mind that would help you communicate with Rocky.

Your eyes follow him as he walks, more carefully this time, now that he knows the trek to and from the ship.

When you look back at Rocky, you find his carapace now facing you again, continuing to chirp and hum at you.

And just like when you taught the littles, and a second grader spoke too quickly or softly for you to be able to understand, you give a gentle smile and nod along anyway.

[pastel0rchid]

Another Believer (17)

Ryland Grace x F!Reader

Word count: 2.9K

Warnings: Tooth-rotting fluff at one point

A/N: Sorry for the long wait, everyone! The TikTok I had been using for scenes got deleted, so I had to do some digging. I hope you all enjoy, and thank you so much for your support! <3 <3

Masterlist

The suit was just as much of a struggle to get off as it was to get on for you when you and Ryland made it back into the Hail Mary. 

At least you didn’t have to worry about putting on the helmet anymore, now that the alien had effectively created Oxygen in the tunnel.

While you stumble out of the suit, barely able to catch yourself on the wall before faceplanting into it, Ryland only gets better and better at removing himself from it. The look in his eyes when he glanced over to make sure that you were okay showed that his mind was working overtime, the cogs turning as if there was something that was confusing him.

He pulls his arms out of the undersuit once he’s free of the EVA suit, but doesn’t entirely get out of it, leaving the top half resting limply around his waist. Ryland doesn’t say anything to you as he begins to make his way back to the lab, but for some reason, a part of you knew he wouldn’t when his mind was stuck.

Like a deep crevice of your brain knew that this was just Ryland becoming hyperfixated on something.

Standing alone in the airlock hatch, you glance over towards the small window, staring at the tunnel that had led you to meeting an alien… You and Ryland had met an alien.

Your mind was still trying to wrap around the fact that you had somewhat conversed with a rock-like alien, who had built a tunnel specifically with oxygen just so you and Ryland could breathe. 

Releasing a huff of breath, you reach up and rub hard at your closed eyes with the heel of your palms, watching the little sparks of color that flash behind your eyelids from the pressure.

An alien.

First contact with alien life.

Removing your hands from your eyes, you blink a few times as your vision goes from completely black to slightly blurry to fully normal once again.

While Ryland was sitting in the lab, you had decided now would be a perfect time to head to the sleeping quarters and take a ‘shower’. Well, as much of a shower as you could take in the middle of space, anyway. 

You grab a drink bag, the specialized liquid soap, a towel, and a clean uniform. You were thankful for the time that you had taken to read the manuals a few days ago, so you knew where everything was.

There was a slim mirror placed on the back of a compartment, just enough to see your face. You stare into your own eyes, taking in your features.

Even from when you had first woken up, something had begun shifting in you as you began to remember more and more of your life before the coma: The life of a teacher, your life with Ryland. You knew his memories involved you, too, since he no longer avoided you like you had the plague.

But there was still something holding him back.

A small sigh escapes you as you open the tube of specialized soap, the scent of it instantly filling your nose. It smelled like… baby shampoo?

—

You nuzzle your nose into the soft head of curls of the newborn girl in your arms, Ella, as she was so promptly named. Phillip, almost a year old, was situated on the hybrid carrier against your back, his fist gripping tightly onto your shirt as he looked around curiously.

Even through the salty ocean air, you could smell the baby shampoo that had saturated into Ella’s hair.

Today was a day when Trinity followed alongside you as you walked around the parts of the ship that you were allowed to, keeping you on the designated path as you all got some fresh air on the hangar.

Ella had fallen asleep in your arms, still young enough to need constant naps around the hour, whereas Phillip’s gaze was snapping this way and that at any noise that happened around him.

You stand a few feet from the railing, not wanting to be too close to the edge out of caution, your eyes staring at the waves as they peak into that salty white foam. Trinity stands beside you, her gaze instead looking around the ship, nodding at any officers or fellow military personnel that pass by.

Cradling Ella, you adjust your grip on her just carefully enough that you don’t wake her, Phillip’s grip moving from your shirt to begin sucking on his thumb, leaning his head against the back of your shoulder. It seems he was getting ready for a nap as well.

As much as you didn’t want to return to the room, the one you had grown so used to seeing day in and out, you also knew better than to keep the two from napping comfortably. So with one last longing look out at the waves, you slowly shift your body to face Trinity, giving her a silent nod to let her know that you were ready to go.

Trinity started talking more and more as the days went on, leading you to learn more about her, and her about you.

She had left home to join the military in her early twenties, slowly building up her repertoire with her officers, which had led to her being stationed on this hangar. She was apprehensive of her assignment with you, having expected to be stationed outside a scientist’s quarters.

“You’re cool though.” She had explained one day, the smallest smiles quirking up the corner of her lips.

It was a start to a budding friendship.

Placing your hand on the back of Ella’s head, her nose nuzzling into the warmth of her shirt, with a sweet sigh escaping past her little lips, you can’t help the small smile that tugs at your lips as you begin walking beside Trinity back towards the designated room.

“Starshine!”

A sudden voice calls out from behind you, a familiar voice. Turning to look over your shoulder, you find Ryland waving with a bright smile on his lips, increasing the speed of his steps so he could make his way towards you and Trinity, whose steps had stopped at the sight of the newcomer.

A look flashes across his face when he sees the sleeping faces of the two babies resting against you, a soft ‘sorry’ quickly leaving his lips.

Making sure Ella and Phillip were still asleep, you gave Ryland a reassuring smile.

“You’re good. They’re heavy sleepers.”

Ryland nods, his gaze flicking over the two babies before his eyes meet back with yours behind his glasses, which were resting correctly against the bridge of his nose. A sight that was almost unfamiliar to you. Something softens in his gaze as he stares at you, something warm settling deep in his chest.

He had grown so used to seeing you interact with the sixth-graders you used to teach that there were times he almost forgot you used to be an elementary teacher as well. But seeing you with two babies, who were resting so peacefully against you, clearly finding a sense of security in your presence.

Ryland didn’t know how to explain it. He didn't know how to put what he was feeling into words other than warm.

Reaching up, Ryland gently places his hand against the back of your head, gently drawing you in to place a gentle kiss on your forehead, his lips resting for just a few seconds against your hairline, his thumb rubbing gentle circles in your hair.

He almost didn’t want to pull away, but the third presence and the ever-daunting task of figuring out astrophage forces him to slowly move away. The look in your eyes when he does, a shining look that only brightens when your gaze meets, only makes him melt even more.

“Just wanted to say ‘hi’, Starshine.” He hums out.

“Well, hello.” You hum right back.

A smile forms on his lips before he plants one last, quick kiss against your temple, his hand slowly returning to his side. He glances over at Trinity, giving her a small nod in greeting, the blonde woman giving him a nod in return.

When his eyes move back to you, finding you still staring up at him with that same smile still on your lips, his shoulders relax even more.

“I’ll see you later tonight, Starshine.”

“Don’t work too hard, My Grace.”

Ryland gives a nod, wanting nothing more than to follow you, but knowing that he needs to return to his little lab on the ship. His eyes follow as you turn and begin to walk with Trinity once again, standing there until you disappear behind a corner.

—

“It’s the Petrova Line!”

Ryland’s voice interrupts your thoughts, finding that you had done the motions of the ‘shower’ even as you were remembering your time on the hangar. Your hands stilled in their motion of rubbing the soap off with a damp towel, quickly moving to pull on the clean uniform once you're done, before making your way to the lab.

“What’s the Petrova Line?”

You ask as you turn the corner, finding Ryland sitting while holding one of the objects that the alien had sent over in the containers, the one with a ball and a line coming from it. Ryland stands at your entrance, showing you the object as a smile makes its way onto his lips.

“That’s why it’s here. They have a Petrova Line just like we do.”

Taking the object as he hands it over to you, turning it over in your hands to observe it, you barely hear as he begins to rummage around, grabbing things that he thinks he needs. You look over the grooves and indents, your gaze only flicks up when Ryland calls out to you on his way towards the sleeping quarters.

“Grab the clock!”

The clock?

Why would you need the clock?

Looking around while keeping the object in your right hand, you find that Ryland had begun making a bag of essentials to take to the alien. Okay, it was time to head back to the alien. You move to the table where the clock was sitting, grabbing it right when Ryland returns, wearing a new uniform.

You barely set the clock in the bag before Ryland grabs it and throws it over his shoulder, his eyes quickly finding yours before he nods his head towards a light attached to a tripod for you to grab with your left hand.

“Alright. Let’s go.”

Moving back through the airlock hatch, you begin to make your way through the tunnel once again, this time, without wearing spacesuits. It felt weird, not needing the thing that you had expected to keep you alive through an alien tunnel, but you had a feeling you would quickly grow used to it.

“We’re here for the same reason.”

Ryland calls out to the alien once the two of you move closer to the wall, where the alien was already waiting for you, soft clicks escaping it as it hangs against the wall.

“You have a Pretova Line problem, too. You need to solve it, we need to solve it. That’s why you made us this.”

Ryland gently takes the object from your hands, holding it up towards the alien, who chirps out at the sight of the object and turns around a little bit. It points towards some engravings on one of his arms, a few lines and a circle.

It sings a tune as it points, almost as if it were trying to show Ryland and you something to help with your understanding.

“I’m gonna take that as a yes.”

Ryland sets down the bag, leading you to carefully set up the tripod and light right behind it, helping the two of you to see the alien as it observes you.

“If we’re gonna save our planets, we have to learn how to communicate.” Ryland squats beside the bag, digging through it for just a short second, “You know, they say that math is the universal language. I thought, maybe we-”

He suddenly produces a tape measure, pulling some of the tape out and holding it in front of the alien, who chirps softly at the sight of it.

“Find out if that’s true.”

The alien sings a song as Ryland asks if it can see the numbers, its claws tapping together almost curiously, before a small compartment opens right by Ryland’s leg.

“I think it wants to see it.” You chuckle out, finding the alien almost hilariously intriguing as Ryland goes to place the tape measure into the compartment.

But he quickly yanks his hand away from the compartment, swinging his hand out with a small shout.

“Whoa, Christmas Eve. It’s really hot in there! Is that Ammonia?”

Your nose turns up as a smell quickly invades your nose, the same smell from before when you had gotten the first object. But it was gone as quickly as it came.

Attention quickly turning back to the alien, you watch as it begins to pull on the tape measure, a curious chirp escaping from it. A smile forms on your lips, deciding to remain quiet as Ryland continues rambling on as the alien explores the new object.

“Anyway, that’s… look, see the numbers?” He points towards the tape measure, “Here. Look, there on the other side.”

The alien continues to pull out the tape and let it go back in, your brain instantly remembering the times when you used to work with second-graders. Their curious nature towards what they didn’t understand evolved into playing with anything new.

“Do it again.” Ryland continues, not seeing what you were, “If you do it again, and you don’t let it snap back. So… don’t… don’t do it. Hold it like that.”

The alien holds out the tape measure, and you can see the next movement from a mile away. It lets its claws go from the tape, and you hear Ryland sigh exasperatedly. The sound finally causes laughter to push past your lips, the alien once again copying your sound as it continues to mess with the tape measure.

Your laughter only grows as it pulls out more and more tape, twirling it around one of its arms, Ryland mumbling a shocked “Wow.”

“I don’t think it understands.” You chuckle out, smiling behind one of your hands as Ryland tries quickly to find another way to communicate with the alien, something that it might understand.

“How about something else?” He reaches into the bag, grabs the clock you had put in there, holding it up, and tapping on it, “Look at this!”

The scene reminded you heavily of the times you would peek into Ryland’s room while he was teaching, finding him trying his hardest to gain the attention of the sleepy sixth-graders who couldn't care less about whatever he was spouting about.

The alien chirps, turning towards Ryland for a few short moments, the tape beginning to snap back.

“We both have time, right?”

The alien watches as Ryland begins pointing to the different parts of the clock, explaining it to try and hopefully convey something to the alien.

But it amounts to nothing as the alien instead turns back to the tape measure still around its arm, beginning to play with it once again. Even throughout it, Ryland still tries to explain the clock, but nothing gathers the alien’s attention more than the tape measure it was still messing with.

“Okay.” He mumbles dejectedly before grabbing the light and pointing it down the tunnel past the alien, your attention still happily watching it.

“It’s dark down there.”

Your smile brightens as the alien begins turning around with the tape measure, effectively wrapping itself up in it until it reaches the red section. It chirps when it can’t go any further.

“I got an idea.”

Your eyes move back to Ryland as he holds up a finger towards the alien, telling it to ‘wait’. The alien rumbles in response, holding up one of its claws in mimicry.

“Don’t, yeah-” Ryland chuckles as he notices it, “Don’t go anywhere. Stay.”

You chuckle as the tape measure finally snaps back into place, the alien moving to look at it as it thumps to the ground before it looks back up at Ryland.

“Oh yeah, um, I’m Grace.” He points to himself, before gesturing over to you and saying your name. You both watch as the alien puts two arms together and begins to sing a song, probably how you say its name in its language.

“I’m gonna call you Rocky. You know, cause you look like a giant rock.” He shrugs, keeping a grip on the clock as he begins walking towards the airlock hatch.

“Very original.” You hum out, barely catching the playful glare sent your way over Ryland’s shoulder, effectively causing him to trip over the raised edges of the tunnel. Laughter escapes you as Ryland quickly rights himself.

“I’m fine.” He portrays to both you and Rocky, before gesturing to you, “Stay with him, Starshine. Keep him company, or… something.”

You watch as he walks through the tunnel, your smile remaining, before your gaze moves back towards Rocky, watching as his carapace moves to look over at you.

“You can’t see the numbers, can you?” You hum out to the alien.

A simple light chirp is all you need in response as your smile brightens even more.

[pastel0rchid]

Another Believer (16)

Ryland Grace x F!Reader

Word count: 2.2K

Warnings: Very self-indulgent in the beginning <3

A/N: This chapter felt so nice to write, especially the beginning. I also did end up making a side-blog ( @kenough-for-me ) if you'd like to send requests over there or if you'd just like to chat! I hope you all enjoy this chapter! <3

Masterlist

The car doors slam shut behind you once you finally arrive at your destination.

The salty air instantly hits your lungs, the sharp cry of the seagulls hits your ears, the sun kisses your skin.

You pause where you stand, your eyes fluttering close as you take in a deep breath, taking in something that you hadn’t gotten to experience in such a long time.

“What are you doing, Starshine?”

You hear the familiar hum of Ryland behind you, feel the warmth of his hands against your hips as he moves to stand behind you.

“I’m having a moment.”

You answer in a soft tone, your eyes remaining closed. You couldn’t wait to feel the sand between your toes, the lapping of the waves against your ankles.

Ryland waits for you, watching you behind his glasses with a fullness in his heart, instantly noticing how your shoulders weren’t as tense as they had been the past few weeks.

Ryland remembers about a month ago.

He was lying beside you in bed, the darkness encompassing the room, your voice gentle as you spoke, not being able to sleep well that night.

You had spoken of the beach you visited when you were younger, how you missed living so close to one.

Just hearing the longing in your voice, Ryland had hatched a plan for spring break.

He could keep no secret from you, though, and he revealed his thoughts the next day in jumbled sentences during your lunch breaks.

Leading to where you both stood now.

Your eyes finally open, cringing at the bright sun reflecting on the water, catching the way the waves ripple as they hit the shore.

Taking a deep breath, your smile as bright as the sunshine, you grab one of Ryland’s hands from against your hip and begin to lead him towards the shore.

And he follows with a chuckle and a squeeze of your hand.

It didn’t take long for you two to set up the small canopy you had bought and the two chairs you had brought.

Your towel rests against your chair, Ryland’s mirroring right beside yours.

Both of your flip-flops sit right before your chairs.

The sand felt soft under your feet, warming your skin from where it had previously soaked in the heat of the sun.

Your hands work quickly to massage in sunscreen against your shoulders and face, making sure to rub your ears as a finality before you set your sun hat against your head and remove your bathing suit cover, setting it in your chair.

Ryland follows after your movements, taking the extra step to rub down his legs as well, before removing his shirt, leaving him in his swim shorts.

Ryland’s eyes take you in, the way you basically vibrated in your spot as you stare down the water right in front of you, and he can’t help the way his eyes roam over your form.

The way your bikini hugs you just right, showing off just the perfect amount of skin.

His thoughts are interrupted as you grip onto his hand, interlacing your fingers as you lead him towards the edge of the water.

Your steps are quick, hurried to feel the waves against your skin.

Ryland follows just as fast.

A squeal is forced out of you as you step into the lapping wave, a cold shiver rolling up your spine. Even after the sun is bright and shining, the ocean water still has a nip to it.

Ryland’s laughter soon follows behind your sound, his own grunt escaping him when he finally steps into the water as well.

“Good gracious, that’s cold!”

But you keep walking, your grip on his hand tight before you stop once your knees are submerged, the waves occasionally causing the cold water to kiss against your thighs.

Ryland stands beside you, staring out into the water, watching as the tide pulls the water back before a wave knocks gently against them.

You feel the way the sand moves under your feet, the way the sand shifts with every wave, occasionally shifting your feet when you would lose your footing.

The coast is far and wide, your eyes following every bird that flies overhead.

You take a deep breath where you stand, the salty air kissing your lungs in a way you hadn’t felt in so long.

“Thank you, My Grace.”

Your words are a gentle breath as you squeeze his hand, your eyes remaining on the tide around you, the foam of the sea.

“Anything for you, Starshine.”

He breaths back, his eyes moving to stare at you, to watch you in wonder as the stress from work seems to melt away at something as simple as feeling the cold water against your skin, at the sun kissing your shoulders.

And in that very moment, that very wondrous moment: 

Both of you feel alive.

—

“Another present.”

Your eyes move over towards Ryland at the sound of his voice, finding him holding up the little box towards the alien before heading back towards where you were standing.

Once he gets close enough, you look curiously at the box in his hands, hearing the alien making more song note sounds in response.

The box had the same indentations as the others, but what stood out to you the most was the small design of what appeared to be the Hail Mary on one side.

It cracks open with a hiss just like the other objects did.

And what you found inside increased both your curiosity and your confusion.

It seemed to be a double loop of sorts, with crystal balls all around it at specific points.

The alien’s song continues as Ryland carefully takes the object out of the box, holding it up for both of you to see.

“We don’t have one of these.”

Ryland’s excitement, even if he didn’t understand what it was, was clear as day in his tone, his smile just as bright as before.

“I love it, thank you!”

Your hands reach out to gently trace over the object, feeling the crystal balls with your gloved hands before you look back at the alien, your own smile reflecting Ryland’s.

“It’s beautiful.”

You join in, the alien responding to both of your words with its song.

How you wish you could understand every note it sang.

You wondered what it was truly saying, but were interrupted as the alien began moving its appendages around, trying to get the two of you to understand something.

“Do I put this on my head?”

Ryland lifts the object towards his helmet, the balls gently tapping against the rough surface, but that only seems to frustrate the alien.

“Do I put it on her head?”

Ryland, trying to appease the alien and understand its movements, lifts the object towards your helmet, but the alien gives the same frustrated grumble of notes.

It wanted the two of you to do something.

The alien lifts two of its appendages, another myriad of notes coming from it as it tries to convey what it wanted you two to do.

“Take off my head?” Ryland questions, confusion seeping into his tone as the alien does the same motions.

“That’s not it.” You respond with a shake of your head, focusing on the movements. The alien moves its front from you to Ryland and back, as if wondering who would finally be able to figure it out.

It was like a game of charades at this point.

“Take my helmet off?”

Ryland finally guesses, earning him a happy set of chirps from the alien.

“No,” Ryland says while beginning to shake his head, “It’ll plllbt.” He puts his hand to his head, pretending to make an exploding motion.

“We’ll die without oxygen. Our suits provide the oxygen.”

You try explaining to the alien, showing it by taking a deep breath in and out.

The alien doesn’t take your answers, though, copying the motion again while turning to look at the two of you.

“That’s a big ask.”

Ryland begins, before the flickering of the nearby light informs you that your time there for the meantime is almost up.

“Oh. This has taken a turn.” Ryland looks back towards the other end of the tunnel before looking down at you and then returning his gaze to the alien.

While one hand holds up the object, the other hand places itself against your arm and begins to gently steer you back towards the ship, a leading motion that you’ve felt him do before in the recesses of your mind.

“Thank you for the… what I hope is not handcuffs.”

You chuckle in your helmet, shaking your head as you allow yourself to be led back towards the ship, looking over your shoulder and giving a small wave to the alien, who lifts one of its appendages in a copy of your movement.

“I’m sorry about the whole helmet thing. Unfortunately, we need oxygen to breathe, so...” Ryland continues with a slight chuckle after his sentence.

Before he freezes.

Feeling his hand slip from your arm, you turn to look over your shoulder, finding Ryland standing there staring at the object in his hands, his brows furrowed in thought.

“Ryland?” You question softly.

“Two rings of eight.” Is all he responds, his gaze never leaving the object as he speaks. “O₂.”

“You little rascal.”

His hand flops down, glancing over at you with a certain look, and turns back to face the wall, where the alien patiently waits behind, holding up the object that he had now realized to be the chemical structure of O₂.

“This is Oxygen!”

The alien, realizing that Ryland had finally understood what the object meant, begins to chirp excitedly, its claws tapping together before it repeats its earlier motion.

“It made a model of oxygen.” Your eyes stare up at the model, remaining in your sport, astonishment in your tone, “But… why?”

“It wants us to take off our helmets.” He responds to you in a softer tone before addressing the alien once more, “I still don’t think I can do it, though, sorry. It’s just, uh… You know… if I’m wrong, I’m really wrong.”

Ryland turns back to face you, his hand returning to your arm to lead you back towards the ship, stopping and reaching down to fix where the wires had spliced with duct tape.

The alien is illuminated once more, still positioned right behind the wall, as you could assume, staring at the two of you.

“Ryland… do you think it made oxygen?”

“We can’t chance it, Starshine. Death would be imminent.”

His voice was soft again as he stood once he finished fixing the wires, staring over towards the alien for a few seconds longer before turning and reaching his hand back out to lead you once again.

His voice didn’t sound convincing, not to himself, and definitely not to you.

You follow his lead without fight, though, but once again, he stops right as you two make it to the airlock latch, having it within arm's reach.

His hand slowly falls from your arm, causing your gaze to follow it to his eyes, finding him glancing around before looking at you.

You can hear his breath quickening through the comm link, before his hands slowly begin to reach for the part of his helmet that connected it to the rest of his space suit.

Your heart jolts as you quickly reach out to grab onto his wrists, your eyes widen as you stare up at him.

This was crazy!

“Ryland? What are you doing?” Your voice bled with worry, knowing that if he was wrong…

You didn’t want to think about the consequences.

He doesn’t respond, just stares at you with a look in his eyes that mirrors your own.

Your hands gently tighten their grip around his wrists, willing him to stop before something bad happens, but the look in his eyes…

The same look of fear of the unknown was front and center; past that was a look. A begging look that pleaded with you to trust him.

And you did.

Deep within, you always did.

Giving one final squeeze, you slowly release your hands from around his wrists, shakily moving them to your own spot where your helmet connects to your suit.

Staring into his eyes, you give him a slight nod.

This could kill you. Both of you.

But you trusted Ryland.

You both take deep breaths before unlocking the connection, your eyes stare into each other's as you slowly remove your helmets.

Your hands tremble, Ryland’s hands shake.

You can hear him shakily release a breath through his nose before he inhales deeply through his mouth.

You follow, doing the exact same thing as him.

Nothing happens.

Nothing happens.

You and Ryland breathe deeply as you continue to stare at each other, the adrenaline of what could’ve happened running through both of your bloodstreams.

Your hands still tremble, but the smile on your lips is quickly mirrored by Ryland’s own shaky smile before he huffs out in relief.

You can hear the alien chirping and whooping happily at the moment in the background.

You’re alive. You’re both alive.

[pastel0rchid]

Another Believer (15)

Ryland Grace x F!Reader

Word count: 2.8K

Warnings: None

A/N: And we're back! I had a wonderful vacation at the beach, but I'm glad to be back home and writing for Ryland again. I might do a beach-themed memory in the near future >.< Or I might just make a side-blog for Ryan Gosling characters and write for Ken, who's to tell ૮ ˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶ ა

Masterlist

Ryland was frantic as he moved about the ship, his mind set on what he wanted to do and gathering what he needed to accomplish it.

He never voiced his thoughts to you, instead using you as an unwitting accomplice.

You couldn’t find it in yourself to mind not being told why you were sifting through the storage containers and the lab drawers, somewhere deep within your mind understanding that this was just him in action.

So lost in whatever he was doing, so focused on his task, that the outside world began to slip from his fingers.

You follow along as he tears up light fixtures from around the ship, grabbing nets and duct tape as he goes, following his orders as he points at stuff for you to grab as well.

He even works quickly to build his own model of the alien ship out of uncooked ramen noodles, breaking off the pieces and eating what he didn’t need.

Holding up the finished masterpiece, you find yourself chuckling softly at the crudeness of it.

It reminded you of how your students would rush through projects at the last minute, just throwing together what they believed would work for the passing grade.

Moving on to the next thing, his hands work quickly to empty the container that once held graduated cylinders into a small suitcase. You hold the now-empty container steady as Ryland places all of the flashlights he found in the ship into the holder.

“Ryland,” You finally voice out as you stand beside him in the air-lock chamber, watching him get back into the space suit. Your eyes follow his hands as he grabs the small gun he had found in one of the storage containers and places it into the tiny pouch on his leg.

Would he really need such drastic measures?

He believed so, and the next second, he grabbed a large wrench off the wall, gripping it tightly between his gloved fingers.

An extra weapon if need be.

“What’s the plan here?”

He pauses in the middle of wrapping the light cords around his shoulder, his eyes finally finding yours from behind the shield of the helmet.

His thoughts were so easily readable in just the way he looked at you.

The excitement of the unknown, the guilt for not telling you sooner than now, the realization that you had so easily gone along with his whims.

“I’m going back in the tunnel.”

“Okay… then what?”

You probe further, taking a step towards him to help him with the last few feet of wires, making sure they are steady on his shoulder. His voice fills the space around you, watching as you work.

“I’m going to make second contact. We’ll set up the camera and lights in the tunnel for recording purposes, along with some portable technology. What happens next… I’ll figure out as I go.”

You hum in acknowledgement at his loosely thought-out plan, glancing over him one more time before finally meeting his gaze.

It could work, and you two would be the first people to ever make contact with alien life.

Or it could fail, and Ryland could be killed at worst.

Wait… 

Your brain finally catches up to a specific part of his sentence, one that causes your brows to furrow and confusion to quickly misplace your once thoughtful look.

“We?”

A smile overtakes his lips at the clear confusion on your face, a proud look that only seemed to baffle you more, before he gestures over towards where Ilyukhina’s suit was usually stationed.

“I adjusted her suit as much as I could to fit you better, seeing as you didn’t have a suit.”

And if you looked even closer at the suit, his words were only proven more.

Ilyukhina’s suit was no longer hers; instead, one of the name patches from an extra suit of yours was now in its place.

The suit was yours.

“The torso was tricky, as it's custom-built to fit Ilyukhina, but everything else I was able to adjust to your size.”

You couldn’t believe it.

Your eyes move from the suit over towards Ryland, finding him still staring at the suit, as if it were one of his greatest masterpieces.

“The limb sections, waist, and shoulders were the easiest parts of the adjustment. I’m thankful that they supplied us with a tape measure so I could make sure it was accurate enough,” He continues explaining, before something suddenly clicks in his mind, and his words cease out into silence.

Just as it clicked for him, so too did it click for you.

Ryland never measured you for this.

He knew your measurements by heart.

Like how you knew his mannerisms… he knew you just the same.

He clears his throat, desperate to wave off the way the air between you began to tense. But it wasn’t an uncomfortable suffocation.

It was loss.

The loss of whatever you two had. Clearly, something so much has been fizzled out into memories that barely surfaced when you wanted them to.

“We don’t have time to waste.”

His voice came out small, barely heard from his helmet as he moved to stand over by the depressurization button, eyes locked on it.

Your eyes stay on his back as he walks away.

Ryland was just as lost as you were with all of this.

Your mind wanders as you carefully put on the suit, having memorized how Ryland put on his own. Your slight struggle goes unnoticed by the man standing before you, clumsy in putting on the spacesuit, less so than he was when he first did it.

The heaviness of the space suit against your skin goes unnoticed, less of a priority than trying to force yourself to remember more.

But nothing comes. It never does.

You can never force a memory.

Clicking the helmet into place, you despise that simple fact. The memories come when they want to, not when you need them to.

Waiting for the sound of your helmet being snapped into place, Ryland reaches forward and hits the depressurization button.

He silently gestures towards the wall of wrenches, his movements an indicator that he wanted you to grab one as well.

For protection, you guessed.

Your hands wrap around a medium-sized wrench, finding it a little difficult to grip something with your fingers now gloved.

You barely have time to react as the other door to the air-lock hatch flies open, the force and pressure of it sending Ryland back.

His body slams into yours, both of you forced against the door to the ship, before you slump down with the weight of Ryland’s body still on top of you.

Your ears ring from the way it bounced against the helmet, and the air was promptly knocked out of you.

Barely there, you catch a groan from Ryland, his movement felt against you before you feel him finally relieve you of his weight, your own groan being pushed out of you.

“Sorry, sorry.”

His words pushed through the ringing that was slowly disappearing; his hands felt under your arms as he pulled you to stand.

You blink a few times, trying to will yourself to focus, slightly stumbling on your feet before you feel hands against your shoulders.

“You okay?”

His voice echoes in your helmet, your eyes finally focusing enough to glance up at him to give a slight nod.

“Good. ‘m good.”

Your words were a bit of a struggle, but the ringing was soon beginning to disappear, and the sudden shock of the hit followed with it.

Ryland stares at you for just a bit longer, his hands squeezing your shoulders as if he almost didn’t believe you, taking you in with the efficiency of a scientist.

Your wobbling had ceased, your eyes were now fully focused on him, and you didn’t seem bruised.

His shoulders relax slightly before he gives a small nod.

“Alright. Stay close.”

A nod is all you respond with, moving to grab the contraption of flashlights as Ryland readjusts the wires on his shoulder.

He goes first out of the hatch, carefully landing in the tunnel, waiting to hear the thumps of your feet behind him before he walks deeper.

Your eyes look around as he leads you, staring at the intricacies of the tunnel surrounding both of you.

It was astonishing.

And it was built so quickly!

As you walk, your eyes continuing to move around instead of looking straight ahead, you miss the way Ryland occasionally looks back at you.

As if checking that you were still there, following right behind him.

“Alright, we’re here.”

His voice interrupts your astonishment at the tunnel, your eyes finally moving forward, only to find a wall in your path.

Moving closer as Ryland begins to set up the different light fixtures, your hand slowly traces over the grooves of the wall.

It’s almost as if it were made of crystal.

“It’s beautiful.” You whisper, moving the flashlights around.

“Oh my. This is new.”

Your gaze moves over towards Ryland, finding him now standing beside you in front of the wall, staring at it with the same wonder that you were.

“New?”

“Yeah, it wasn’t all see-through before; only a small section was. This… This is new.”

Ryland sets up the last light fixture against the wall, staring inside of it for just a few moments before bringing up a closed fist, knocking against the wall.

“Anybody home?”

He calls out, clearly hoping that the alien would be able to hear him.

You stand beside him, setting the flashlight contraption onto the floor, but facing the wall for an extra source of light.

“I like what you’ve done with the gravity!”

Ryland continues, giving a thumbs up to the presumably empty tunnel on the other side, before holding up the sculpture he made out of uncooked ramen and duct tape.

“I made you a ship… with ramen.”

Ripping some duct tape off the roll he brought with him, you watch as he begins to tape it to the wall, your brow raising ever so slightly at his actions.

“I only made one, I’m… not sure how many of you there are.”

He pokes the tape edges, making sure that it would stick, before slowly standing straight once again, peering into the tunnel, hope radiating off of him.

You glance up at him, but nothing continues to happen.

“Ryland, are you sure-”

Your voice fades out as you look back at the tunnel, freezing when something begins to move in the shadows on the other side of the wall.

Your heart stutters at the sight before you.

It crawls down from the top of the tunnel, with too many limbs protruding from its short body.

Instinctively, your hand reaches out to grip onto Ryland’s arm for stability, who seemed to be in his own shocked trance.

The two of you stare, watching in silence as it slowly crawls down the wall towards where you both stood.

As it grows closer, you begin to take notice of its features through the cold wave of fear that holds you in its grasp.

It… almost seemed like a giant tan colored rock.

Parts of it move with a deep sound, before a high-pitched coo escapes it, its body turning ever so slightly.

It seems to focus on Ryland for a few seconds before it turns to you, taking you in for just a bit longer.

The three of you observe each other in silence, your grip on Ryland’s arm only tightening as his breath grows heavier, before he slowly lifts his other hand in a peace sign.

“Hi.”

Ryland breathes out to the alien, who turns around in response to his words.

It continues to move around the wall, its appendages clicking against the material as song-like notes begin to leave it.

As you observe it, you can’t seem to find any eyes or mouths, and you wonder how it can produce such beautiful sounds.

You both watch as it moves down to the part of the wall where Ryland taped the model, Ryland slowly bending with you following, your grip on his arm remaining.

It seems to point to the model, with what you can only assume to be a finger?

It suddenly moves its body, too quickly for you to like, and a deep sound protrudes from it.

You and Ryland both scream at the sight, the alien’s own high-pitched screaming mixing in.

Ryland pushes you behind him as you both scream, thinking that the alien is trying to attack you. He raises the hand that protectively holds the wrench, moving to hit the wall as a show for the alien to back off.

Peeking around Ryland, you watch as the alien stumbles back, holding its own appendages up protectively, sounds escaping it as your and Ryland’s screams finally cease.

The alien hisses, lunging his appendage towards you.

Your breath was quick, feeling the misunderstanding swimming through the air, realizing that the alien was clearly not wanting to attack you both until Ryland showed aggression first.

Ryland notices this too and quickly moves to put the wrench down.

“No no no no no, I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

He holds his hands up in surrender, and you move to do the same.

“You scared me when you went… aaagh!”

You flinch when Ryland copies what the alien did, your eyes flying up to him before moving back to the alien as it puts two appendages up and makes a sound.

Wait… was it… copying Ryland?

Ryland puts his hands down slightly and then suddenly raises them and puts them down again.

The alien does the same.

Continuing to peek from behind Ryland, you watch as Ryland slowly begins to do a little dance, and just as expected… the alien follows his every move.

“Ryland, what are you-” Your voice is a whisper cutting through your helmets.

“I’m doing science.” He mutters back in response, moving his arm in the worm before doing a few more poses.

Each time the alien follows his every lead.

Ryland’s chuckle soon fills the tunnel, a soft sound, something you feel like you haven’t heard in a while.

High-pitched squeaks from the alien soon join in right after.

The alien was even copying his laugh.

A giggle bubbles past your lips, slowly moving from behind Ryland to instead stand beside him.

Higher-pitched squeaks leave the alien.

He was even copying you!

Your grip on Ryland’s arm slowly loosens as the two of you begin to make your way towards the wall, the alien following on the other side.

“Wow.” Ryland chuckles out, slowly grabbing the nearest light fixture and holding it up to the alien.

Specks of blue littered the surface of the alien, along with deep grooves that seemed to symbolize something in whatever language it understood.

“This is amazing.” You mumble, your eyes moving quickly to try and take in everything about the alien.

“I can’t seem to see a face. Mysterious.”

Soft sounds escape the alien in response to Ryland’s words.

“Faces are overrated.”

The alien soon reaches an appendage up, tapping at the wall as a melody of sounds leaves it.

Ryland reaches up, poking the wall the same way the alien did, now copying it.

Your brows furrow as the alien does the same motion again, but quicker.

Was it trying to tell you something?

“You like tapping, huh?” Ryland seems to take it as some sort of game, copying the tapping and the sound of the notes the alien had made.

The alien taps again, making the sounds slower now.

Your eyes glance around the tunnel, gaze moving to where the alien had been pointing at.

“Um… Ryland.”

“Not now, Starshine.”

He brushes you off easily, his smile clear through his helmet as he and the alien begin tapping at the wall, the noise becoming incessant.

“Ryland-”

“This is fun.”

The alien’s tapping and noises finally become more forceful, and you tug at his arm, both of you growing tired of Ryland not seeming to notice what was happening.

“What- oh.”

He looked over towards where the alien was pointing, and you had tugged, finding a small box made of the same material as the other objects resting in a crevice of the tunnel.

Ryland’s shoulders droop as he glances at the alien, who gave one last round of sounds.

“You were pointing,” He sighs out, “You’re not tapping. Sorry.”

As Ryland walks over towards the box, you stay in your place by the wall, your gaze moving back towards the alien, its body tilting towards you now.

And even with the fact that it didn’t have facial features.

You could tell that you were both giving each other the same, exasperated look.

[pastel0rchid]

Another Believer (14)

Ryland Grace x F!Reader

Word count: 2.6K

Warnings: None

A/N: Hello everyone! I'm going to be on vacation for the next 5 days, so I won't be able to update until I get back home. Thank you all again for loving my story as much as I do! <3

Masterlist

Ryland had decided that it would be best to send your own little message back to the alien, immediately getting to work on adding Earth to the star map the alien had made, working deep into what would be considered bedtime.

Deep in your mind, you faintly recall him always being like that.

It was just something you knew about Ryland.

Memories were coming quicker and easier; Less so being a hard time, and more just the fact that it was something you remembered.

Lying in your pod on your stomach, your chin rested against your crossed arms, eyes watching as Ryland configured a little Earth to add to the star chart object.

Your eyes fought the sleep that your body so desperately craved, having the need to watch over Ryland as he worked.

Your eyes flutter against your will, closing despite you trying to keep them open.

And when you finally push through the haze of sleep, your eyes just barely cracking open, you find yourself lying on something different, something slightly more comfortable.

Right beside the bed, Ryland sat at the desk, a stack of papers in front of him, barely being illuminated by the lamp that he worked so hard to keep from shining on your once sleeping face.

His eyes were focused in front of him, scribbling something with a ferocity only he could muster when he was working on something that troubled him.

“My Grace?”

Your voice was soft and groggy, breaking the silence that once encompassed the room.

Ryland jumps a little in his chair at the sudden sound of your voice, his knee banging against the desk and a hiss escaping him before he begins to quickly rub at the now throbbing spot.

His eyes quickly snap over towards you, finding you trying to hide the giggle that wanted to escape at his misfortune, a few snickers escaping despite your best effort.

“Starshine,” He breathes out, turning the chair slightly to where he was now facing you, “Did I wake you?”

He reaches forward, his hand coming to rest on your cheek, thumb gently rubbing against the soft skin there. The continuous motion relaxed you even further in the bed you lay upon, sleep risking to take you into its clutches once again.

“A little bit,” You mumble truthfully, “What are you working on?”

Guilt quickly begins to swim in his gaze as he stares down at you, his eyes flicking over towards the stack of papers before finding you once again.

“Just trying to perfect the equation for breeding Astrophage. One wrong move and this hangar goes sky high.”

Ryland’s answer causes a hum of a chuckle to escape you. How, even in the face of danger, his words still had that familiar lilt.

The excitement of science.

His thumb soon begins its gentle caress of your cheek once again, your eyes struggling to stay open just a few moments longer.

Ryland instantly notices.

“Go back to sleep, Starshine. I’ll be in bed soon.”

The addition of his soft spoken tone only added to your struggle, giving the smallest of nods before sleep easily overcomes you once again.

—

The next day was an important one for you while being on the hangar.

It would be your first time taking care of a baby while the parents went back to work after enough time had passed.

A room had been designated for you to work in, decked out with as much stuff as they could have delivered to them on the hangar.

You stood in the middle of the room, gently bouncing the infant boy, Phillip, in your arms while feeding them a bottle of breastmilk that his mother had prepared the night before.

There was a new guard assigned during this time who stood in the room with you as well, talking just enough to introduce themselves to you.

Trinity.

She stood straight, just like any other soldier that you had come across, her blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail, eyes sharp and focused behind her glasses.

She wasn’t much of a talker; that much you could tell just from the few hours you were stuck in a room with her.

You didn’t mind.

You weren’t much of one either towards people you didn’t know.

The little boy in your arms squirms once he’s gained his fill from the bottle, causing you to gently pull it from his mouth and set it on the table beside you.

Making sure the burp rag is placed on your shoulder, you carefully adjust Phillip so that his head is lying against the same shoulder before patting his back to get him to burp.

Your rhythmic patting filled the once-silent room, Phillip’s little fists flailing around, soft sounds escaping him before a burp soon follows.

“Good job, hun.”

You hum out, moving Phillip to where he’s lying in your arms once more, his eyes staring up at you before glancing around the room with soft coos.

You move to sit in one of the chairs placed in the room, making sure to support Phillip’s head before your gaze finally moves over towards Trinity.

“So… what are you meant to do here?”

You ask, adjusting your grip on Phillip as he squirms around. Trinity’s eyes finally meet your own, having been staring out the window of the room this entire time. Her body remains tense, ready for any action that might require her.

Which you doubt would happen anytime soon.

“I make sure nobody else enters the room.” Is all she responds, before her gaze moves back towards the window.

A small sigh escapes you at how quickly the conversation had fizzled out, your gaze moving down to Phillip, only to find him beginning to fall asleep.

This was going to be a long… boring… day.

—

Day in and day out around the same person led to some interesting things.

Weeks of being confined together for long periods of time allowed you to slowly chip at the cracks of Trinity’s personality.

Phillip was currently sleeping in the small crib they had brought aboard, your eyes watching the consistent rise and fall of his chest, his little hands clenched into fists, the occasional soft noise escaping him as he dreams.

You sat at the small table, drinking water that they kept stocked in the fridge. Trinity was still stationed around the door, but her shoulders seemed looser, her body seemed less tense than it did on that first day.

Her eyes not so sharp.

“I heard another private is pregnant.”

Trinity’s voice, soft to keep from waking the sleeping infant, soon fills the room, your gaze snapping over towards her form. Your eyes widen slightly at the news that was given to you, your hand gripping onto the water bottle that you had just taken a sip from.

“Really?”

Your own voice matched in softness, knowing how easily Phillip awoke when his surroundings were too loud.

Trinity glances at you from the corner of her eye, her head doing the slightest of nods in response to your question.

Your lips quirk into a small smile at realizing that she was finally reaching out to start a conversation, even if it was because of a rumor.

And this wouldn’t be the last gossip session between the two of you in the nursery.

—

You yelp as your head suddenly aches, bumping into a hard surface.

Your eyes shoot open, sleep long forgotten as you find yourself floating in the pod, zero gravity having been activated while you had been asleep.

Using the wall of the pod, you carefully turn your body to look past the doorway of the sleeping quarters, finding that while you had been sleeping, Ryland had tied rope all around the ship to make navigating in zero gravity much easier.

How long had you been asleep?

You reach up to gently rub your eyes, willing the sleep away before pushing yourself out of the sleeping pod, gripping onto the nearest rope to keep yourself as steady as you could in zero gravity.

“Ryland?”

You call out, only to have no response be your answer.

You use the rope to guide you out of the sleeping quarters, making your way towards the lab, thinking that he might be there out of all the places on the ship.

But before you can get too far, you hear the sounds of shuffling towards the airlock hatch.

Pushing off one rope and grabbing onto another, you follow towards the sound, finding Ryland getting into the spacesuit once more.

As if sensing your presence, his body stops its movements and turns to face you, his eyes taking in your floating form gripping onto the ropes.

“Hey,” He breathes out, “You were out for a while. We actually got another object. They made a model of the two ships.”

He got the inner suit on easier now that he had done it quite a few times. When he looks back over at you, he finds confusion in your eyes.

“Why didn’t you wake me up?” You ask softly, keeping your grip tight on the rope so you don’t float away from it.

Ryland pauses at your question, as if taking it in and determining the answer for himself.

“I didn’t want to wake you.” He responds simply, giving the smallest shrug as he moves over to the outer suit, “You looked peaceful.”

Peaceful.

Using the rope, you follow after him closer to the airlock hatch, now hanging onto the frame as you watch him put on the helmet without the struggle that he had last time.

“What are you doing?”

“In the model, they added a line going from their ship to this hatch. I’m trying to figure out what it means.”

He suddenly gestures beside where you were floating, making sure his helmet was in place.

“Make sure you put the comm link in your ear.”

His words were said as if this was all normal now, as if the prospect of aliens was slowly becoming something that he was getting used to.

You do as he says, though, following his directions as easily as breathing air.

The airlock hatch hisses as it closes, but he doesn’t open the other end; he instead waits at the window, watching the ship opposite the Hail Mary.

His breathing is all you hear for quite some time, your hands continuing to grip the nearest handle so you can watch him through the window on the door you were beside.

Suddenly, his breath hitches, and before you could even ask what happened, his shocked-filled voice echoes in your ear.

“A tunnel… holy cow, I think they’re building a tunnel.”

You don’t say anything in response, not knowing if you could even voice your own shock at the prospect of such a thing.

Time passes quickly, Ryland reaching over to grab and turn on the flashlight that had once been floating beside him.

“I’m going in.”

His voice crackles in your ear, breathless from fear of the unknown, but also excitement of figuring out what was going on.

“Be careful.”

You breathe back, getting nothing in response as you watch through the window. Ryland slowly opens the door, the outer edges of the lights suddenly flicking on as well.

Ryland double-checks his tether to the ship, his eyes glancing over his shoulder and locking onto yours. All he gives is a small nod, tapping his helmet where the comm link was situated near his ear as a subtle sign to help comfort you, before he disappears into the tunnel.

Minutes tick by slower than normal as you wait for him to say something… anything. But all you get from him is the occasional grunt as he continues through the tunnel.

You stare into the window, as if staring at it any longer would will you to be able to see him.

The silence grows with each minute that passes, your grip on the handle tightening as he goes longer and longer without saying anything.

You’re about to call out his name, before his shocked scream suddenly fills your ear.

“Ryland?!”

Your heart hammers in your chest, his heavy breathing being the only thing you can hear from him before he gives a quick: “I’m okay!”

“What happened?”

Your voice held worry, maneuvering yourself around the window as if you’ll be able to see him at the right angle.

“An alien.” He breathes out, “I saw the alien… and it’s showing me something.”

He pauses for just a few deep breaths, as if he were calming his own racing heart.

“Is that me?”

A few silent seconds pass, and you regretted not getting into Ilyukhina’s suit to follow after him.

“It’s showing me a little figure of myself- it made the ship, too- I don’t understand…” Ryland pauses a little, and you imagine him watching whatever the alien was doing.

“You want me… to go back in my ship? But I just got here.”

The slightest smile tugs at your lips at Ryland’s words, hearing how badly he didn’t want to leave the alien he had just met.

“Okay… Okay.”

It seemed the alien must have been pretty persistent in whatever it was showing to Ryland.

“I-I’ll talk to you later. Bye.”

Silence soon fills the comm link once again, and you only have to wait a few minutes before Ryland emerges from the tunnel into the airlock hatch.

The door hisses shut behind him, and he hurriedly removes the outer layer before opening the door once you had moved out of the way, gripping onto a nearby rope.

His blond hair was messy from the helmet, blue eyes bright in excitement at what he had just experienced.

“There was an alien,” He begins, using the rope to guide himself towards a screen where he can watch the camera that was facing the tunnel, you trailing behind him, intently listening to his words.

“He made a little figure of me and the ship, but there was a wall that separated us with only a little section that I could see through- wait. What are they doing?”

He pauses his excited rambling, watching as the tunnel is suddenly removed from the ship.

His mind so locked on whatever the other ship was doing, he suddenly moved towards the large viewing window, barely having enough time to stop himself on a nearby shelf to watch the other ship.

You follow close behind, staying on the rope and watching the other ship spinning, your head tilting ever so slightly in confusion.

“What are they doing?”

You repeat his earlier question, Ryland tilting his own head before something suddenly clicks, and he turns around to face you.

“Centrifuge. They want us to create gravity again.”

You move your body out of the way just enough as Ryland pushes himself off the window and towards the rope, leading himself towards the control room.

You follow with a little less hurry than Ryland, watching him as he moves around the control room, looking for that certain lever.

‘It is not advised to modify the centrifuge settings of the ship.’ The ship's robotic voice suddenly cuts through.

“Thank you, Mary.” Is all Ryland responds, flicking a few switches before grabbing onto the lever and engaging the centrifugal gravity system.

You keep your grip on the rope as you slowly lower onto the floor with gravity, eyes watching as Ryland already begins making a beeline towards the lab.

“Come on, Starshine. I’m gonna need your help.”

Starshine.

It flowed so easily from his lips.

Like in your memories.

Straightening your shoulders, you try to hide the smile that so desperately wanted to break out on your lips, and you follow after him.

[pastel0rchid]

Another Believer (13)

Ryland Grace x F!Reader

Word count: 2.3K

Warnings: None

A/N: Thank you all for continuing to enjoy my story! <3

Masterlist

Ryland peeks over the edge of the doorway, staring out into deep space as his brain catches up with what he’s really about to be doing.

Endless space.

One wrong move, one wrong calculation, and he would be floating endlessly until he died.

Yeah… no.

He shakes his head, his resounding ‘no’ coming through the communication device that you had found right beside the airlock door and placed into your ear.

Turning around to face the door where you still stood, he uses gravity to his advantage as he pushes himself off the edge to make his way back.

“That’s crazy.”

Your eyes meet for just a split second before the rope tethering him to the ship suddenly snaps him back, his body floating past the frame into space, only kept from drifting aimlessly by that same rope.

His scream, silent in space, is echoed in your ear from the device in your ear.

“Ryland!”

Your shocked cry is heard in his helmet, his hands reaching out to grip onto the edge of the ship, another way to tether himself from floating away.

His breath was ragged, grip tight on the handle as his mind processes how quickly everything happened.

“I… I’m okay.”

He breathes out, his eyes staring straight ahead at the alien spacecraft before zeroing in on the object that was slowly moving towards the ship.

Your shoulders relax at his words, heart racing at seeing him there one minute and then gone the next.

Using a grip on the wall, you float your way back towards the control room, remembering all of the screens that showed camera footage of outside the ship.

Zero gravity was becoming easier and easier the more you were forced to experience it.

His heavy breathing was all you could hear as you maneuvered your way around the ship, finally making it to the control room and staring at the different screens.

It takes you a minute to find him, looking for movement across any of the screens to see him using the rope to make his way across the ship, tethering himself to different handles of the ship as he goes along.

You grip onto one of the chairs to keep yourself steady, staring at one of the monitors as he makes a running start towards the object.

Well, as much running as was possible in zero gravity.

Your eyes follow his movement on the screen, watching as he jumps out to grab the object, his hands wrapping successfully around the thing before the length of the rope goes taut and he’s jolted back towards the ship.

A slight noise escapes him from the shock of it all, but he pops back up, holding up the object, not only in triumph, but to show the other ship that he had received what they had sent.

Your lips tug into a bright smile at the sight of it, laughter bubbling past your lips while Ryland begins to make his way back inside the ship.

By the time you had used the walls to lead yourself towards the airlock hatch, Ryland had made it inside and was beginning to undo the spacesuit he was wearing until all that was left was the undersuit.

His hands grip onto the object, the airlock door hissing as it opens. Your eyes meet before you glance down at the object in his hands.

“What is it?”

You ask softly, following after Ryland as he uses one hand to lead himself towards the lab, placing the object near a table and letting it float in front of both of you.

“I don’t know. It could be anything.”

He answers while observing the object, using the handles behind him to keep him steady before crossing his arms, tilting his head slightly as if trying to look at another angle.

“It looks like it might open.”

You point to the indents at each end, not like the engravings all around the object.

Ryland hums at your observation, reaching forward and gripping onto the object while muttering, “Righty tightey, lefty loosey.”

He grunts as it leads to nothing; the object still remains unopened in his hands.

Situating yourself near a wall, you watch as Ryland hits the object against the table before using himself to hit the object.

Nothing works, though.

The object remains unopened.

Ryland suddenly grabs a scanner from his side, using it to scan the properties of the object as if it might help with understanding how to open it.

But it only leads to more confusion.

“Xenon’s a gas.” He stares down at the scanner before glancing over at you while shaking the scanner, “I think this thing’s broken.”

You watch as his frustration only grows, slamming the scanner down onto the table before throwing it behind him.

Your body instinctively flinches at the sudden sound, eyes following the way the scanner and the part that broke off float behind him.

His eyes flick over towards you at your movement, taking in the way your body cringed, his shoulders drooping in reaction.

He didn’t mean to scare you.

“Sorry.”

He sighs while removing his glasses and hanging them off his right ear, his body beginning to spin as he tries to think of how to open the object.

—

Ryland was spinning in his chair aboard the hangar, staring up at the ceiling as he took a break from work.

Things were better after the two of you talked about your feelings, finding solutions on how to help them instead of bottling them up.

He hears a conversation beginning to approach him from behind, sitting up and scooting in his chair to get out of the way, but also to seem like he was working instead of thinking about you.

“Sorry.” He mumbles, his hands instantly finding the work in front of him.

Stratt pats the back of his chair as she and another scientist walk past him.

He can make out some words of the conversation: Astrophage and Tau Ceti. He also hears them talking about how the equipment won’t work in zero gravity.

Slowly standing to observe the conversation, he makes his way to the doorframe, staring at the two as they converse about the fact that making equipment meant to handle zero gravity would take years of research.

Years that they didn’t have.

“We make gravity.” The scientist determines.

A wire lights up in Ryland’s brain, and he points over towards the two while merging himself into the conversation with just one word: “Centrifuge?”

“Centrifuge.” The scientist approves

Another wire lights up, and before he can stop it, the words flow quickly from his mouth. His mind so full of you that it can’t keep from interjecting the facts that you had told him.

“They, uh, used them to make butter during the Civil War, actually… That’s a… fun fact… from my girlfriend.”

Embarrassment flows through his system at realizing that he didn’t really need to say that, gently hitting his head against the door frame.

—

Centrifuge.

Ryland suddenly claps his hands together at realizing what needed to be done, looking over at you to find you still just staring at him.

He gives you a soft smile, victory shining in his eyes.

“I know what to do.”

And before you can respond, he stops his body from spinning anymore and uses the wall to guide himself towards a control panel, hearing you quick to trail behind.

Your eyes follow as he reaches for a switch once the two of you make it to the control panel, pulling it down and watching as lights begin to flick on all around you.

Something begins to happen.

You feel yourself spin ever so slightly, Ryland reaching out and gripping onto your hand to keep you from drifting too far.

It wasn’t long before everything began to right itself again; things were no longer floating around you, looking down at your feet as they slowly touched the floor beside Ryland’s.

It darkens for just a second before the lights begin to flicker on.

A small bit of laughter bubbles from you as your body begins to adjust to being in gravity again, your hand gripping onto Ryland’s to keep yourself from falling over.

The two of you, reliant on the other to keep your balance, begin to walk your way to the lab.

Walk.

It felt so strange after being in zero gravity for so long.

Your steps were slow, calculated. As were Ryland’s.

But where you had the mind to lift your leg over the doorframe into the lab, Ryland’s was slow to follow, causing him to tumble as his foot catches on the lip.

Thankfully, he catches himself before he can fully fall down and take you with him.

Laughter escapes you once more as Ryland corrects himself, his eyes quickly shooting to look over his shoulder at you with a heatless glare.

Embarrassment was painted on every inch of his face.

“It’s alright, Ryland. You’re just-”

A yelp escapes you as your foot catches on an object that was on the ground, something you had grown used to seeing floating around, causing you to stumble forward slightly.

Now it was Ryland’s turn for his laughter to fill the space between you, a sound you hadn’t heard from him since waking up on the spaceship.

Something flutters deep as you look over at him, your fingers still intertwined with his own.

The sound of his laughter.

So familiar.

So… nice.

Ryland doesn’t seem to notice your look as he continues walking towards the lab, you quick in tow, with the way his hand connected to your own was basically dragging you.

Once in the lab, that’s when his hand finally slips from your own, reaching to grab the scanner before heading towards the object, scanning it once again.

But the sight on the screen causes him to sigh and harshly place it onto the table beside him, a resounding bang coming from the action.

“Still Xenon.”

Moving to stand beside the table the object was resting on, your eyes follow as he begins to pace, frustrated ramblings quickly leaving him.

“Up is down. Left is right. Xenon’s a solid. Aliens are real. I’m wrong about everything, and everything is wrong.”

He grabs two chairs, pulling them up towards the table the object is on, silently sitting in one of them and not acknowledging the other.

It’s like his body moved without thought, grabbing you a chair as if it was second nature.

Slowly sitting beside him, your gaze remains on the object before slowly resting your head on your arms upon the table.

“It’s like everything is opposite.” You huff out.

Opposite.

This causes Ryland to pause, glancing between you and the object before something clicks.

It’s saying that Xenon is a solid, so that might mean…

“Lefty Tightey, Righty Loosey.”

Reaching forward, he grabs onto the end of the object, turning his hand right instead of the left that he had been doing before, a small hiss being the small sound of his victory.

A smile instantly quirks on his lips, the object had finally opened-

Was that ammonia?

The smell instantly causes his smile to drop, barely having enough time to watch as you pinch your nose from the smell.

“Oh no!”

‘Foreign presence detected.’

Ryland quickly rushes towards the advanced fume hood, opening the compartment quickly before shoving the object inside and slamming it shut.

“What was that?”

You question from where you’re sitting, still pinching your nose shut from the smell that had quickly permeated throughout the room.

“Ammonia. And a lot of it.”

Ryland answers as he begins to push his hands through the gloves before opening the object once again, finding things to be inside it.

He hears the soft scraping of the chair before your presence is soon felt beside him, staring down at the object as you watch him maneuver it around. There was one thing that seemed to be a ball with a line coming from it.

On the other end, opening with that same resounding hiss, there was a thing with a lot of spikes and round things at the end of them.

Which suddenly pops open.

Ryland quickly stumbles back into the desk, his arm wrapping around yours to pull you back with him, his mind instantly jumping to the conclusion that it could’ve been dangerous.

But when nothing happens, when no danger is present, Ryland rushes back to the fume hood.

He had a feeling that he knew what it could be.

Once he was sure that the ammonia smell was pretty much gone from the object, he moved the thing with a lot of spikes onto the table.

You stare at it, hearing him begin to type something onto the screen beside you.

“Do you think they’re trying to send us something?”

Your fingers carefully trace over the craftsmanship, making sure not to put too much pressure on the object due to how frail it looks.

Ryland doesn’t respond, though, too lost in testing out his theory as he gently moves the table, making sure it won’t you, aligning it up with the screen.

You move to stand beside him, matching the way he stood, so you could get the same view as him.

It matches exactly with the chart that he had pulled up.

“The stars?”

Your voice was soft, watching as Ryland pointed to the only different spike, his finger following towards the screen and landing on a star labeled ‘40 Eridani’.

His eyes move back to the object, finding yours through the spikes as he gives a slight nod.

“They’re a long way from home.”

Your own gaze flicks from the object to the screen, before finding Ryland’s gaze through the spikes once again.

“Just like us.”

[pastel0rchid]

Another Believer (12)

Ryland Grace x F!Reader

Word count: 2.5K

Warnings: Miscommunication (but it's easily fixed)

A/N: <3

Masterlist

Life on the hangar wasn’t something you found yourself getting used to.

The constant feeling of movement, the incessantness of waves against the ship, the bouts of nausea that continually plagued your daily life.

You were thankful for the daily nausea pills Ryland always seemed to keep handy for you.

But nausea wasn’t the only thing that troubled you while you were aboard the ship.

There weren’t many places on the ship you could go, as guards from every country stopped you, always saying you didn’t have enough clearance to go where they were stationed before.

Where Ryland could easily go, you could rarely follow.

Frustration began to grow as the days and nights bled into each other of the exact same thing.

You were stuck, confined to a small area of the ship that they allowed you to reside in.

The same walls and hallways day in and day out.

The same people.

Weeks came quickly sometimes, and slowly others.

You were able to portray the essence of being fine whenever approached by others on the ship.

For a handful of weeks, you were fine.

Until finally you cracked.

Night had fallen quickly these days.

You and Ryland were sitting in the small room that had been assigned to you, finally allowed to spend time together after a day of him working. The tiny table between you was filled with instant noodles and papers that Ryland was still working on.

The occasional slurp and the writing of his pencil against the paper were the only sounds that filled the room.

Curiosity bubbled in you as you peered over at the papers, only for him to shift his arm slightly to cover the information.

Part of you knew that this was sensible behavior.

You were only a teacher who had been brought aboard for reasons still not disclosed to you.

Ryland had his hands tied. He had to work on whatever these people needed from him while also trying to keep you sane.

But the other part, the human part, became annoyed at the secrets Ryland was holding from you. Something he’d never really done when the two of you had normal lives.

Before all of this, secrets were hard to come by with Ryland, who had always felt the need to be open with you about everything.

Until now.

Finally fed up, you slam your half-eaten cup of ramen noodles onto the table without a care for whether the broth would slosh.

You feel Ryland’s gaze snap up at you at your sudden movement; you know he could see the irked look that just had to be painted on your face.

But you don’t voice your troubles, you can’t.

Not right now.

You stand without a word and head out of the room, craving the fresh air you knew the salty breeze would provide.

Turning sharply through the hallways you’ve basically memorized by now, you barrel past groups of people, scientists or military personnel that you had grown accustomed to seeing.

Right as you’re about to make it onto the deck, a figure steps before you, a familiar sight that you found yourself growing familiar with.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, I can’t let you go any further. You don’t have-”

“Clearance, I know.”

Your tone was sharp, annoyed, something you rarely sounded like.

Your fists clench as you glance around before bringing them up to your eyes, which have begun to water in frustration.

Pressing the heels of your palm into your eyes, you ignore the bursts of color that appear from how hard you press.

You just wanted air.

Why was it so hard to get air on this ship?

A sudden weight was felt against your lower back, a guiding presence that led you away from the guard and towards another hallway.

The weight was familiar; you knew it even with your eyes closed.

Which you keep them as you allow yourself to be led, your palms still pressed against your eyelids as you try to will yourself to keep from crying.

Parts of you were conflicted, your mind arguing with itself as you walk.

You hate that Ryland followed you, needing time to yourself.

But you already had plenty of that.

You needed his comfort, how he always knew what to say and do to make it better.

But he was the root of your frustration.

But he didn’t mean to be.

But-

Your lungs expand with a deep breath as you feel the cool ocean air hitting your nostrils.

Your mind slows instantly at being able to just breathe.

You stand there, taking deep breaths as the pressure against your lower back remains, the silence between you growing comfortable instead of tense like it once was.

The tears that had once been welling in your eyes slowly disappear, allowing you to carefully lift your palms from your eyes and blink a few times to accustom yourself to the light around you.

Your hands reach forward to grip onto the railing, so tight that your knuckles strain from the feeling.

But another hand rests over your left one, a silent reminder that comfort was right beside you.

Your eyes slowly look away from the ocean, glancing up to find Ryland already staring down at you, worry bled into his gaze as he takes you in.

And before you can try and speak, to apologize for your childish outburst, he speaks first.

“I’m sorry, Starshine.”

His voice was soft, guilt oozing in every syllable of his words. His hand against yours squeezes gently while the hand against your back rubs at the clothed skin.

Gentle motions to keep you steady.

You shake your head in response to his words.

“No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have-”

“I should’ve told you sooner.” Ryland breathes out, “I got so caught up with the Astrophage that the moment was never long enough for me to tell you.”

Ryland gently turns you to face him, his hands moving from your hand and back to carefully rest against your cheeks, making you look into his eyes.

“Starshine. When I first asked them to bring you here, they instantly told me no. They told me they had no need for a teacher on the hangar and that you would serve no purpose.”

He gently moves his fingers, pushing your hair out of your face while continuing to stare into your eyes.

“Well, you put a bunch of people on board for long periods of time, force them to be around each other all the time, and things are bound to happen.”

His insinuation was clear, a chuckle escaping your lips at the way he phrased it.

“Birth control and protection can only go so far.”

He shrugs with his own chuckle beginning to leave him.

“They started stressing about how people would leave to go home and how we might lose important people-”

“And where do I come into this?”

“Hush.”

He gives you a look, a look that causes laughter to escape you. It was a look you had grown familiar with when students would talk over his teaching.

Rolling his eyes, his lips quirk into a smile at your laughter before he continues.

“Well, I did mention that you also worked at a daycare for a few years while you were in college. And that your certificate covers early childhood-”

“So you basically signed me up to be a nanny?”

Ryland huffs out at being interrupted again, gently pinching your cheeks as a slight reprimand for talking over him.

“I extended your expertise. And I also couldn’t be apart from you any longer.”

The last bit of his sentence was rushed, but legible enough that you could understand what he was saying.

You look up at him for a few moments longer before shaking your head with a soft chuckle escaping you.

“You’re insufferable.”

You watch as his shoulders relax, his own smile tugging at the corners of his lips as he uses his hands against your cheeks to begin to pull you closer.

“You’re stuck with me.”

He leans down, lips brushing gently against your own-

—

“What’s a ‘Blip B’?”

Your memory is cut short as your body is gently knocked into, blinking away the haze as you watch Ryland float towards the radar screen.

As you stare at Ryland while he fixes his glasses, you wonder:

Does he remember that, too?

‘Current distance from Hail Mary is 800 meters.’

“It’s sending us something.”

Your body moves a bit slower as your mind tries to regain itself after the memory, barely having the time to nod absentmindedly to Ryland’s words before you also unclip yourself from the seat.

That feeling of weightlessness instantly overtakes you again as you float up, but you keep yourself from going too far by gripping onto the straps of the seat.

“What are they sending us?”

You ask out, zero gravity now becoming a little easier to withstand as you push your body off the seat and towards the window where Ryland is.

“It could be a message.” He responds, glancing over at you when you appear beside him before glancing over towards the screens.

“Or it could be a bomb… is it a bomb?”

His words drift off into nervous rambling, pushing himself off the window to float towards the radar screen as the object only gets closer and closer. His nerves began to bleed into you as your own body began to grow nervous at whatever could be coming towards the ship.

“Shields up!”

‘There are no shields on board the Hail Mary.’

“We don’t have shields!”

Both you and the robotic voice inform Ryland after his exclamation, remembering a little about what you had read from the ship manual.

Ryland looks over at you with wide eyes, an incredulous ‘Why not?!’ leaving him before turning to look back at the radar with a worried gaze.

The object only drifts closer and closer, the threat of what it could be growing and growing.

A sudden hand grips onto yours, pulling your weightless body towards his as the robotic voice echoes through the control room, counting down until the object arrives at the spaceship.

Your shock at the sudden movement is short-lived as he curls slightly around you, covering your ears as he does so, a protective motion that seemed to slip out of him quicker than he could process it.

You squeeze your eyes shut as the robotic voice finally reaches zero.

Silence soon fills the control room, your eyes peeking open as you and Ryland watch as the object floats off the spaceship.

With nothing happening.

Ryland uncurls from around you, your body floating off ever so slightly, but he keeps his hand wrapped around yours without much thought.

He leans his head back with a relieved sigh escaping him, chuckling slightly at the conclusion of such worry.

“Well, I guess there’s egg on all our faces, huh?”

He looks over towards you, finding your eyes staring up at him, before both of your eyes glance down to your hands.

Your fingers were intertwined, his grip still tight from how much he had been gripping onto it.

His eyes flick back up to your face, a weird feeling rolling up his spine and settling at the base of his neck.

The grip was familiar, the weight of your hand in his own, the way your fingers fit perfectly between his.

Just like with every memory, with every accidental brush, he hated how it made him feel.

Hated that he was only remembering you in pieces.

His hand slips from yours.

Not quickly.

Almost… regrettably.

The robotic voice suddenly fills your ears again, but is too soft to hear. Or, maybe, you’re too focused on each other to really understand it.

Ryland turns around slightly to where the voice was coming from before looking over towards the radar, finding another blip on it once again.

You float a little closer, looking at the radar as well, watching the blip as it approaches the spaceship just like the other.

But something was different about this one compared to the one before.

“Is that one moving slower?”

Your voice breaks the silent concentration between you before Ryland’s face drops in realization, giving a small sigh and a shake of his head.

“They think we’re dumb.”

The words echo between you, and the softest chuckle escapes you at recognizing what the alien was probably thinking.

“So they want us to catch it? But how would we do that?”

You glance up at Ryland, who also seems confused about how they would be able to catch the object floating towards them.

Before the robotic voice interrupts once again, providing you both with an answer.

‘Would you like to go on a space walk, Dr. Grace?’

You watch as Ryland’s face shifts in a myriad of emotions, clearly determining whether or not what the robotic voice was suggesting would be something he was willing to do.

He sighs after a few silent moments of contemplation with a slight shrug of resignation and pushes himself off the chair towards the airlock. You’re quick to follow after, keeping yourself steady with the wall as Ryland struggles a bit more than you do.

You watch as he spins, pushing himself against this wall and that just to get to his destination, you keep your chuckle to yourself though, gripping onto a handle as Ryland grabs the uniform to the spacesuit.

You can’t keep your laughter in, though, as Ryland struggles with the undersuit in zero gravity, spinning to and fro just to get it on.

You feel his glares as you laugh at his struggles, but even so, there’s no real heat behind them.

He finally gets the undersuit on, reading how to get the actual spacesuit on as he shimmies himself legs first into it with a victorious sound escaping him.

You glided yourself over, keeping a grip on the wall as he goes to grab his helmet.

Stopping him before he could struggle even more, you reach forward and gently fix Ryland’s glasses on his face, slowing him down as you help him place the helmet on with one hand.

Once the helmet is in place, your eyes meet for just a few seconds.

He was actually going out there.

Into space.

To grab something that was sent out by an alien spacecraft.

You glance down at where his harness is connected to his spacesuit, making sure he is locked in, before giving a small sigh.

When your eyes meet again, he gives the smallest of nods, a sign that he is ready, and you float out of the airlock chamber so the depressurization process can begin.

The door locks with a resounding click behind you, and you quickly turn around to face him, using the handle of the door to keep you steady.

As the door leading out to space slowly opens, Ryland glances over to where you were watching through the window of the door leading to the interior of the spaceship.

Your eyes meet once more, your worried gaze staring into his, but you give him a small smile of reassurance even through your worries.

He returns your smile with his own soft one, giving you a thumbs up and a slight nod before turning and beginning to peek past the seal into space.

[pastel0rchid]

Another Believer (11)

Ryland Grace x F!Reader

Word count: 2.4K

Warnings: Nausea and Vomiting

A/N: I couldn't help but keep writing. We're one step closer to meeting Rocky! >.< I've thankfully found a TikTok that's posting clips of the movie, so that helped a lot with this chapter. Question time: What do you think Rocky should call Starshine?

Masterlist

Your mind wakes before your body does at the feeling of movement behind you, processing what’s happening without fully waking up.

Still lying on your side, there was a weight against your waist that was slowly removing itself from you.

As if it was trying its hardest not to wake you.

There was also a warm feeling against your back, a weight so familiar.

As you stretch out your legs with the smallest of groans, the movement halts.

But your body still felt too heavy with sleep, and it wouldn’t be long before you fell back into dreamland.

Once you settle, a few more seconds pass before the movement begins again.

The weight against your waist slowly removes itself, and the form against your back soon follows, leaving the cold to envelop you.

A slight shiver rolls through you, your brows furrowing as you release the softest huff.

Hands soon adjust the blanket above you, before an extra weight is added on top, and warmth surrounds you.

You feel your brows unforrow, and your shivering ceases at the added warmth. 

The gentlest of brushes could be felt against your temple. Fingers tracing against your skin and pushing your hair out of your face.

But before you could put much thought into it, your body falls back into sleep.

—

It was the fifth day.

While Ryland sat in the room covered in screens, you had designated yourself to the control room, looking through the manual after Ryland had shown you how to access it.

You knew you needed to be somewhat useful in this mission.

Blaring sirens and red lights suddenly begin flashing around you.

An alert pops up on the screen, interrupting your current reading of the pilot’s manual.

The words on the alert match the words of the robotic voice.

‘Approaching Tau Ceti orbit. Prepare for engine cutoff.’

You begin to look around the control room, looking for anything that might be helpful in this situation.

Maybe a bright button, or clear arrows to point to what to do.

You hear the familiar clinking of footsteps on the rungs of a ladder, Ryland soon rushing into the control room and looking around.

After climbing the ladder, he moves to sit in one of the chairs, his ramblings about also not knowing what to do interrupted by the same robotic voice.

‘Pilot Detected.’

“I’m not a pilot!”

He grips onto a handle above him, pulling himself up to be off the seat just slightly.

A chuckle escapes you at the exasperation of his tone, looking up from where you had been sitting on the ground to find him staring down at you with a glare.

No true heat was behind it, though.

Such a familiar look with his blue eyes.

The robotic voice begins counting down, and you watch as Ryland grabs onto one of the straps of the pilot’s chair.

You realize a little too late that you have nothing to grab onto yourself.

“What happens at zero?”

You hear Ryland question, but no answer can come soon enough as you both feel the spaceship beginning to still.

And Ryland’s shoelace begins to float.

And the things around you begin to float.

‘You are now orbiting Tau Ceti.’

Followed by Ryland’s body and your own.

Ryland’s and your screams cut through the robot's speech.

But while Ryland could keep himself in place by gripping onto the seatbelt of the chair, you were left to free float from where you had been sitting on the floor.

An instant feeling of nausea bubbles up from your stomach at the sudden feeling of lightness.

You flail your arms out to grab onto something, anything, desperate in your attempt to try and keep steady.

Ryland was having his own struggles, now off the chair and floating towards the window, his body spinning just slightly with his movements.

“What the fudging fudger!”

You yelp as your body hits the top of the control room.

But nothing felt normal.

Up felt down.

Left felt right.

You can’t grip onto anything, leaving yourself floating helplessly as you watch Ryland maneuvering around in the chair, even as it spins with him in it.

‘Petrova Scope operational.’

That robot was getting on your nerves.

Ryland suddenly jumps from the chair towards the scope, gripping onto it even as he continues to float around, holding onto it like it was his lifeline.

He struggles a little while sitting in the nearest chair, maneuvering himself and the scope until he can comfortably lie and look into it.

You move to grip onto the pilot’s chair, trying desperately to find your own sense of grounding, wrapping your arms around the chair even as it spins ever so slightly.

“It’s Tau Ceti.” You hear Ryland speak softly, awe in his tone as he stares into the scope.

Your response is at the tip of your tongue, but the ever-so-present threat of vomiting is front and center.

When your eyes move over to look at Ryland, you find him staring over at you, taking in your struggling form with the slightest quirk of his lips.

He holds a hand out to you, his other keeping a grip on the scope.

You react quickly as the chair continues to spin, reaching out and gripping onto his hand as tightly as you can.

Your other arm unlatches from around the chair as you feel Ryland beginning to pull you towards him, your body weightless without any gravity.

With some maneuvering of bodies, a struggle in itself, Ryland and you sit squished in the chair. Both of your gazes were locked on the scope.

There was no time to think of his body against your own, how it felt so natural, so effortless.

How it reminds you of last night, what you thought was a dream.

Had it been him?

Had it not been a dream?

Your focus was so taken by the scope, the pretty mix of blacks and blues and whites, and the brightest in the center of it.

Tau Ceti.

Ryland reaches forward and presses a button.

And red suddenly glows on your faces.

A bright line was coming from the star, which was now a yellow color on the screen.

“You have a Petrova Line. But you’re not dimming. Why?”

Ryland was speaking more to himself than he was to you.

But you didn’t mind.

You were so speechless from the pretty sight before you, you wouldn’t have been able to respond to him anyway.

You feel as Ryland reaches forward to move the scope, watching as it follows along the line before it stops abruptly.

The line suddenly cuts off and begins again.

“What is that?”

Ryland whispers, reaching forward to gently run his finger against the screen, as if it were only a smudge.

But the spot didn’t move.

“It can’t just stop and start again.”

You finally find your voice, your eyes stuck on the screen just like Ryland’s were, unaware of how close your faces had gotten in the time.

Cheeks almost touching.

Ryland zooms in on the scope, a blink of light showing that whatever it was, it wasn’t the line.

Something was there.

He flicks a button on the scope, the reds turning back into blacks and blues.

The shape remained.

Confusion grows on Ryland’s face.

Fear grows on yours.

What was it?

Was it dangerous?

‘Blip A detected.’

The robotic voice suddenly fills the room, causing both you and Ryland to glance around.

When the two of you made eye contact, it was easy to notice how close both of you had gotten in the short time.

Ryland was quick to sit up in the chair, though, looking over towards another screen.

He doesn’t bring it up, as if trying to ignore whatever had happened.

“What’s Blip A?”

Your cheeks were warm from embarrassment, moving slightly to try to look at the screen alongside him.

It was a blue screen, a radar from what you remember reading in the manual.

Blip A was clearly labeled on the screen.

“Maybe it’s a meteor?”

You suggest softly, but even you didn’t believe your words.

There was no way whatever was on the screen was just a meteor.

There was no way the shape you had seen on the scope was anything scientifically possible.

Something moves in the corner of your eyes.

Both of your gazes soon follow to look towards the large window in the control room, finding something moving alongside it.

While you move to grip onto the chair, your heart dropping at the sight, Ryland goes towards the window.

He floats until he can grip onto the edges of the window, staring out of it with a curious gaze.

“Ryland…”

You voice worriedly, but he doesn’t respond.

He moves his body slightly, as if trying to see whatever was beside the spaceship better, now upside down compared to you.

From what you could see around him, the shape held sharp angles, a mixture of lines that your mind couldn’t fathom to comprehend.

It moves beside the spaceship, before coming to a stop.

“Ryland.”

Your voice was louder now, worry growing.

This finally snaps him out of it.

Using the window, he pushes himself back towards the chair, floating over you and towards the pilot’s chair.

“No no no. Let’s go, Mary!”

He spoke to the ship; his movements were frantic as he began to strap himself into the chair.

You were quick to follow his direction in the chair you were in.

“Pilot detected!”

You struggle just like him to click the straps in the chair, his voice merging with the robotic tone as the franticness of your movements thickens the air.

The lights turn on as he flicks different switches, you reaching forward to do the same, taking in what you had remembered reading in the manual.

“Hurry, Ryland!”

“I’m trying! We’re getting out of here.”

He looks over at you, taking in how you seem to know which things to flick and which buttons to push. He gestures to the joystick beside him.

“Is it this thing?”

Your gaze snaps over to him from where you had finished pushing the last button, staring down at the joystick as images in the manual appear in your mind.

“Yes, be careful though.”

He grips the joystick, and you feel the fuel as it's turned back on, before you're suddenly jolted.

Your own grip moves onto the seat as Ryland tries his best to steer the spaceship.

Keyword… tries.

“I said be careful, Ryland! It’s very sensitive.”

That same feeling of nausea bubbles back up from your stomach, your eyes squeezing shut from every jolt and nudge as he pilots away from whatever had appeared beside the spaceship.

“I am being careful!”

His voice cracks slightly as he goes from both hands around the joystick to just one, glancing over at you. Worry bubbles up at the state he finds you in, but he needs to focus on figuring out where to go.

He slows the spaceship once he believes them to be a safe distance, leaning his head back against the seat as he releases a few deep breaths.

“We’re fine.”

He voices softly, looking over at you to find you cracking open one of your eyes, taking your own deep breaths to control the turning of your stomach.

The silence grows between you, before:

‘Blip A detected.’

Ryland groans out, and you squeeze your eyes back shut as your grip tightens on the seat once more.

“What do they want?!”

You grunt out as the spaceship suddenly accelerates, Ryland moving the spaceship left and right to try and avoid whatever was following you.

He even tried stopping and only accelerating a little bit, but it continued, remaining beside the spaceship without much struggle

Your hand suddenly shoots out to where you knew he was, gripping tightly onto the sleeve of his suit to try and gain his attention.

“Stop stop stop. It’s not going to stop.”

You struggle to voice, your stomach tossing and turning from each evasive maneuver Ryland had tried.

Ryland slows to a stop, glancing down at the hand on his sleeve before following the arm to stare at you, taking in your form.

Your eyes squeezed shut, skin clammy, your other hand gripping onto the seat.

He slowly releases his grip on the joystick, patting your hand in a silent apology.

“You get sick easily, don’t you?”

His words cause your eyes to slowly open and glance over at him, your stomach still turning, but not so much now that you were stopped.

“What?”

Your voice was small, weak from resisting the urge to vomit.

—

“Ma’am. Dr. Grace is requesting your presence.”

You stood outside the school, barely having gotten your bike unlocked, when a sharply dressed figure approached you after getting out of a black van.

You remembered the figure from almost a month ago.

Carl.

Ryland had gone back to Stratt, realizing there was still more he could do, even after his failure.

“What?”

Your confusion was clear, hands frozen from where you had placed your bag in the woven basket in the front of your bike.

Carl adjusts his stance, and the other man in a suit is already opening the door to the van.

“Dr. Grace is requesting your presence. It’s important that we don’t keep him waiting.”

Carl repeats himself, clearly not going to give too much information about what was happening.

Your grip on your bag tightens ever so slightly, worry beginning to flow through your system.

Was Ryland okay? Was he hurt? Why was he requesting you?

You don’t have much time to think as you’re ushered towards the van, the door slamming shut once you’re seated inside.

From the car, you make it to an airport, guided towards a jet plane waiting.

“Afternoon, ma’am. Take this.”

A bottle of pills is thrown in your direction, just enough of a warning for you to catch them.

“Um, what for?”

You’re not answered, but you find out soon enough once the jet takes off and your stomach instantly drops.

Nausea pills.

They were Nausea pills.

You’re thankful for them, as you don’t vomit on the ride, even though you feel like you need to.

But once your feet hit the surface of the ship you landed on, a bag is shoved into your hands.

Which you promptly lose your stomach into.

A gentle hand is placed on your back.

A familiar touch and voice.

“Sorry, Starshine. I warned them. You always get sick so easily.”

—

Your memory is cut short by the robotic voice filling the control room once again, your gaze snapping over to the radar screen to find a small object moving from Blip A towards the ship.

‘Blip B detected.’

[pastel0rchid]

Another Believer (10)

Ryland Grace x F!Reader

Word count: 2.0K

Warnings: None

A/N: It's finally summer!!! Sorry it took so long to write this chapter, the last week of school was definitely the most draining. I'm not the proudest of this chapter, but I still like how it turned out. Please let me know if you notice any mistakes, as I wrote this while definitely exhausted XD. Thank you all for your continuous support! <3

Masterlist

You were going to die.

You were going to die in space with a man that you barely remembered.

Still standing shocked, you barely notice as Ryland moves away from the screen and walks past you towards the sleeping quarters.

Your mind tries to wrap around the fact that your group was sent into space to do something, and yet they didn’t send enough fuel to make it back.

Staring at the screen Ryland had been looking at just moments earlier, you slowly give out, your legs buckling at the revelation, leaving you sitting on the floor of the control room.

You were going to die.

—

Ryland stands in the sleeping quarters, his mind swimming with what the next steps should be in figuring out what four people were meant to do in space.

Two were dead, two were living.

But with limited memory.

Ryland had remembered all the way up until Stratt had moved him onto a Chinese hangar bay to work with the Astrophage.

Parts of the memory flickered with you.

His worry for you, wondering what had happened while he was gone.

He remembers that communication with you was limited, something Stratt had put in place to protect the project's secrecy.

He glances around the sleeping quarters as he continues to think of everything that has happened so far.

From him waking up in the spaceship to the memories that were slowly flooding his mind to just finding out about their fuel problem.

But something bothered him the most.

The sleeping pods engraved into the wall.

There were only three.

Four people sent, four types of suits in the storage bin, things clearly meant for you had been placed on the ship.

But only three sleeping pods, and enough food to last three people with a bit to spare.

His brows furrow as he remembers how he woke up that first day.

He struggled just like you had done, but where you woke up alone in bed, he woke up beside you.

Your body was lying on one side of the bed, his on the other.

It freaked him out once he had the strength to move his limbs, and his mind was coherent enough to realize what was happening.

You weren’t like the other bodies in the sleeping quarters; yours wasn’t mummified, and the wires attached to you still seemed like they were working.

The robot would even help stimulate your muscles, like it had done to him when he was in the coma.

You were alive.

His fists clench a little at his memory, staring at the pod that both of you had woken up in.

The more he stared at it, the more he began to notice that it seemed like your placement on the ship was an afterthought.

He desperately needed his mind off of it.

Off of you.

He calls for the robot, requesting the information from the ship's manual.

He needed his mind focused on something he knew.

Science.

He understood science.

—

Even as Ryland walks back into the control room, your body remains on the floor.

Your eyes, which had been staring mindlessly at a group of buttons, slowly move to watch as he clicks a screen a few times.

He seemed to be looking for something, his gaze flicking between screens before his shoulders slumped ever so slightly.

As if he had found the thing he had been looking for.

“Five days.”

His voice breaks the silence between you, but his eyes remain on the screen.

He didn’t elaborate, didn’t explain, just… five days.

“Five days for what?”

Your voice was small, your body still trying to regain itself after the shock of earlier.

Your words are what caused Ryland to finally look over towards you, his eyes meeting yours as you remain seated, as if he finally realized what you were doing.

Something in his gaze shifts around as he takes in your form on the ground.

A look of empathy.

He understood what you were going through, the fear of knowing that you both were destined to die.

He just put his mind to use to occupy it.

“Five days until we reach Tau Ceti. The star we’ve been sent to go to.”

He begins to move his body towards you, his reluctance to get near you obviously clear in his movement, not physically but emotionally.

Once he was next to you, he sat down on the floor beside you. His gaze moved to the buttons you had been staring at while your eyes remained on him.

“Tau Ceti is the only star that hasn’t been affected by Astrophage. We were sent to find out the reason.” He explains, his eyes flicking from the buttons to the screen, before they move to meet your gaze.

“I don’t know why they would send you, though.”

—

His words haunt you.

Why would they send you?

From what you could remember, you were just a teacher.

You weren’t a scientist like Ryland. You couldn’t pilot a spaceship. You didn’t even know anything about the spaceship you were on.

For the days that followed, you and Ryland continued this weird dance of being forced to be near each other, but still keeping as much distance as possible.

Ryland would figure out more about the ship, and you would just try your best to stay out of his way when he did so.

It was torture.

Knowing that the two of you had something.

You just couldn’t remember it.

Sleep time was the hardest, though.

While Ryland kept the sleeping pod you two had woken up in, you had taken the one that had been assigned to Yao.

It was the night before the day you would arrive at Tau Ceti, your forms lying in your pods, the lights dimmed enough that it was difficult to see the shapes around you.

You lie on your side, eyes staring blankly in front of you.

Nightmares had plagued your dreams almost every night since you had figured out that death was imminent, causing you to barely get much sleep.

You give the smallest huff as sleep evades you, shifting your body to lie on the other side while adjusting the blanket over you.

“Can’t sleep?”

Ryland’s soft voice suddenly enters your ears, your body jolting slightly from the unexpectedness of his words.

“Did I wake you?”

You glance up at the top of the pod you were in as you move to lie on your back, an apologetic note to your tone as you speak softly.

You could hear the smallest huff of laughter from him, as if your apology wasn’t needed.

“No. I can’t sleep either.”

You give a small hum in response to his words, the conversation slightly dying as you have no clue what to say next.

A few moments of silence pass before Ryland’s voice fills it once again.

“Nightmares?”

Your eyes stay locked on the top of the pod as you determine how you should answer, fingers slightly messing with the blanket that covered you before you release a small huff of air.

“Yeah.”

Ryland gives a small hum in response to your answer.

You can hear the slight shuffle of his body on the mattress of the pod, the sound filling the room instead of his voice.

He moves around for a bit longer before it slowly dies down.

“If you think it might help… there’s space up here.”

You feel your eyes widen at his suggestion, and your fingers go still from their fiddling with the blanket.

He was suggesting you lie with him.

To help ease you from your nightmares.

Your grip on the blanket tightens ever so slightly as you wonder if you should take it.

But your body moves before your mind can truly digest what your answer should be.

Human contact was rare.

And your body needed it at this moment.

Moving slowly in the dimly lit room, you move out of the pod you were in and climb the short ladder towards Ryland’s pod with your blanket wrapped around your shoulders and your pillow under your left arm.

From what you could see, Ryland had already moved around to where there would be enough space for you to lie down.

He was on his side, his back facing you.

Carefully, you climb into the pod, making sure not to hit or nudge him as you lie down beside him, shifting slightly to where your back is now facing him.

Surprisingly, once your head hits your pillow and your blanket is adjusted over yourself, exhaustion instantly overtakes you.

Your eyes begin to close as your mind begins to drift off to sleep beside Ryland.

For the first time in a few days, your sleep isn’t plagued by nightmares.

—

Arms slowly wrap around your waist, disturbing you from your sleep.

Your eyes flutter open, moving to look over your shoulder to find that Ryland was now lying behind you.

He had been gone for weeks since you both had been approached by Stratt.

Your mind was still foggy from sleep to truly react as happily as you should’ve at the realization that he was home.

“My Grace?”

Your voice was heavy with exhaustion as you spoke, the softest hum being the only response you got from him as he nuzzled his nose against the back of your neck.

Reaching down, you begin to gently intertwine your fingers with the hands against your stomach, Ryland responding by slightly pulling you closer against his chest.

You can’t go back to sleep, not with knowing that he was finally home, but you were still too groggy to move much.

“My Grace, what happened?”

Ryalnd makes a small sound at your question, frustration beginning to drift off of him in waves. He gives another gentle squeeze around your waist before slightly pulling away from your neck.

“Every single word of my paper has been proven wrong.”

You gently begin to rub your thumb over the skin of his hand.

“Were they made of water?” You prompt softly.

“They were made of water.” Ryland groans out in response.

If you were any more awake, you might have laughed a little at how childish he sounded, but you couldn’t help but feel a pang.

Everything that Ryland backed, the theory that made him the laughing stock of the science community, was wrong.

He had been proven wrong.

“I’m sorry.”

Your voice had softened to a gentle whisper, Ryland’s thumb moving slightly to where it could rub against your skin.

He releases a small breath against your neck, like the worst of his day had been melted away at finally being home.

A small shiver rolls up your spine as one of his hands loosens around yours, only to shove itself under your sleep shirt to rest against the warm skin of your stomach.

“Go back to sleep, Starshine. I’ll tell you everything tomorrow.”

His words were whispered against your skin, nuzzling himself even closer, as if he felt like he couldn’t get close enough.

You gently squeeze the hand you were holding before slightly removing your grip, beginning to turn your body in his arms, to where you were facing him.

His hand under your shirt now rested on the lower skin of your back, his other hand coming up to gently place itself against the back of your neck.

One of your arms moves over his waist, holding him close as you hide your face in his chest, instantly beginning to take in the smell of him.

“I’m glad you're back.”

You whisper softly against him, feeling the gentle huff of his breath against your hairline before he moves to place a gentle kiss there, taking in your own scent.

He squeezes you closer, your legs moving to intertwine before both of your bodies relax at finally being in each other's presence once again.

Your hearts move to beat in sync now that you’re together.

And for the first time since he had left all those weeks ago, your sleep isn’t plagued by nightmares.