Work Text:
The light in Classroom 204 had always smelled faintly of dry-erase markers and cheap floor wax, but to twelve-year-old you, it was the only room in the entire school where the air didn't feel heavy with judgment.
Outside that door, the hallways were chaos. Lockers slammed shut without warning, the sound ricocheting off cinderblock walls like a gunshot. Fluorescent lights buzzed at a frequency that made your teeth ache. And every conversation seemed to follow a script everyone else had memorized but you'd never received.
You sat at the third desk in the middle row, your fingers moving against the metal edge of your plastic lunch tray — index, ring, middle, pinky. Index, ring, middle, pinky. You didn't realize you were doing it. You never did. It was just something your body needed, a rhythm that turned the static in your head into something orderly.
At the front chalkboard, Mr. Grace was furiously erasing a diagram of a mitochondrion, his sleeve rolled up to the elbow, a smudge of blue chalk dust already decorating his forehead. He didn't look up when you failed to open your chocolate milk, but he reached into his desk drawer without missing a beat and tossed a small plastic straw-wrapper across the room. It landed perfectly next to your tray.
"The trick with those milk cartons," he said, his voice carrying that easy, enthusiastic bounce that made twenty-five sixth-graders actually listen to him, "is that the glue they use is a polymer that reacts to shear stress, not pressure. If you try to squeeze it open, you're just compressing the seal. You gotta shear it. Twist the lips outward. Give it a go."
You tried it. The cardboard popped open cleanly.
"See? Physics doesn't care if you're having a bad day. It just works."
You didn't smile but the tight coil in your chest loosened by a fraction. You kept your eyes on the nutrition label. Looking at people's faces felt like trying to drink from a fire hose. Their expressions shifted too fast, meant things you couldn't decode.
Mr. Grace grabbed his own brown paper bag and sat at the desk across from you, angled slightly to the side. He never sat directly in front of you. He didn't demand eye contact. Instead, he stared out the window or at the ceiling, chewing his sandwich and chatting about whatever you'd been obsessively reading that week.
"So," he began, taking a bite of a slightly squished turkey sandwich, "I spent last night reading up on those deep-sea hydrothermal vent ecosystems you mentioned. The Riftia tube worms. You were completely right about the endosymbiotic bacteria. They don't even have a digestive tract! They literally just let the bacteria oxidize hydrogen sulfide inside their bodies. That's not just biology; that's a neighborhood association where the rent is paid in chemical synthesis. It's wild!"
Your fingers stopped tapping. The anxiety that usually coiled tight around your ribs began to loosen.
"They have specialized hemoglobin," you murmured, your voice quiet but precise. "It carries both oxygen and sulfide at the same time without poisoning the worm. Normal hemoglobin can't do that."
"Exactly!" He gestured with his sandwich. "Normal hemoglobin sees sulfide and just shuts down. But these guys? They've got a workaround. There's always a workaround if the evolutionary pressure is high enough."
For two years, that classroom was your sanctuary.
Mr. Grace had a way of seeing things that other teachers didn't. When the fire alarm went off during a surprise drill and you froze in your seat, hands pressed over your ears, he didn't yell at you to move. He walked over calmly, crouched down to your level, and said, "We're going to walk outside now. The alarm will stop in about ninety seconds. I'll count them for you if you want."
He counted. When he reached eighty-seven, the alarm cut out, and you were already in the sunshine, your breathing still ragged but your feet moving.
When you refused to work in groups, when you ate lunch alone in his classroom instead of the cafeteria, when you asked the same question seven different ways because you needed to understand it completely, he never tried to change you. He just made room.
At parent teacher meetings, he used words you never heard from anyone else — "hyperfixation," "sensory integration," "pattern recognition" — not as labels or diagnoses, but as simple descriptions of how your mind worked. Sometimes, during free periods, he would slide articles across his desk toward you. Articles about scientists who worked alone. Articles about people who saw the world differently.
He never said the word.
You wouldn't have understood it then. Neither did he, not really. The understanding of autism was still largely shaped by studies of young boys — boys who didn't speak, boys who rocked back and forth, boys whose struggles were visible and loud.
Girls like you, who sat quietly and memorized train schedules and could force themselves to look at someone's nose if not their eyes, who learned to parrot social scripts so carefully that no one noticed the effort — no one was looking for you yet.
But Mr. Grace suspected something. He saw how your brain worked: the intense focus, the pattern-seeking, the way you needed rules to understand social situations. He'd read an article somewhere about girls on the spectrum, how they presented differently, how they "masked." He didn't speak up about it. He figured it wasn't his place. He figured someone else, your parents, a counselor, a doctor, would notice eventually.
No one did.
So he just made room.
When the social anxiety grew so thick you felt like you were suffocating, or when your quirks felt too heavy, Mr. Grace just adjusted the lesson. He let you put your head down. He let you work alone. He never said "try harder" or "just relax" or "look at me when I'm talking to you."
He just made room.
And when you graduated eighth grade, you stood in the doorway of Classroom 204 for a long moment, clutching a worn copy of a marine biology textbook he'd lent you. He told you to keep it.
"You're going to do amazing things, Y/N," he said, leaning against his desk, hands in his pockets.
---
The years between were filled with libraries and laboratories and the slow, painstaking process of building a life that fit.
High school was harder than middle school had been. More people, more noise, more unspoken rules. You learned to smile at the right times, to nod along to conversations you didn't follow, to sit in the back of every classroom where the light wasn't as bright and the teacher couldn't see your hands moving. Your report card said "gifted but quiet."
No one said the word.
College was better. You found other quiet kids who stayed in the library until midnight, who got excited about things like the metabolic pathways of extremophiles and the orbital mechanics of the Cassini probe. For the first time, being "too intense" about your interests wasn't a flaw — it was just how things worked. You could spend six hours reading about deep-sea biology and someone would say "that's cool" instead of "you're weird."
MIT was where it happened.
You were twenty-three years old, sitting in a small office on the third floor of the cognitive science building, across from a woman with kind eyes and a stack of questionnaires. You'd come in for something else — an evaluation for attention issues, maybe, or anxiety — you couldn't quite remember now.
The woman asked you questions about your childhood. About the lunch tray rhythm. About memorizing bus schedules. About never understanding why people said one thing when they meant another.
"You know," the woman said finally, setting down her pen, "these patterns you're describing, they're not typical of anxiety alone. Have you ever been evaluated for autism spectrum disorder?"
You blinked at her.
"It took us a long time to understand it in girls. We're still learning what it looks like."
The assessment took three months. There were interviews and questionnaires and cognitive tests and long conversations with your parents about things they'd never thought to mention. Your mother said, "She was always a little odd, but she was so bright, we thought she was just quirky."
Your father said, "She didn't like hugs. We figured she'd grow out of it."
She didn't grow out of it. You just got better at hiding it.
The diagnosis came in a manila folder that you carried back to your apartment and set on the kitchen table and stared at for three hours.
You traced your finger over the words. Eleven years since you'd sat in Mr. Grace's classroom, twenty-three years of wondering why everything felt harder for you than it seemed to for everyone else, twenty-three years of feeling like you were missing a manual everyone else had been given.
Here was your manual.
It didn't fix anything. But it explained everything.
---
Thirteen years after you'd walked out of Classroom 204, the world was ending.
The sun was dimming.
You learned about it the way most people did: through the news, through the slow creep of dread that settled over every conversation. Scientists had identified the culprit: a microscopic organism, single-celled, roughly ten micrometers in diameter. Astrophage, they called it.
You devoured every paper that came out. The organism was incredible — it absorbed electromagnetic radiation across the entire spectrum, from infrared to gamma. It converted that energy into something it used for propulsion, for reproduction, for everything. It had a super-cross-section that let it capture particles far larger than its own diameter.
And it was eating the sun.
When the call came from Eva Stratt, you almost didn't answer. You were in the middle of a research fellowship at MIT, buried under a mountain of data about extremophile bacteria. But the name on the caller ID was one even a postdoc couldn't ignore.
"Ms. Y/L/N," Stratt's voice was clipped, efficient, without preamble. "I need someone who understands non-standard metabolic pathways. Someone who can look at an organism that doesn't play by the rules and figure out how to break it. You're on my list."
"What list?"
"This is a one-way commitment. If you say yes, you don't leave until the problem is solved or the Earth is dead."
You said yes before you hung up the phone.
The Sahara desert was a subterranean labyrinth of concrete and steel, a warren of hallways and labs and briefing rooms carved into the earth. The air smelled like disinfectant and ozone and the low-grade panic of three thousand people trying to save a planet.
Dr. Stratt's operation was called the Petrova Task Force. There were physicists and biologists and engineers and computer scientists from every country that still had a functioning government. They worked sixteen-hour days, slept in cots in the sub-basements, and argued about astrophage with the desperate energy of people who knew that every hour mattered.
You spent your first week in a windowless lab on Level Four, staring at astrophage samples under electron microscopes, running spectrometry tests, cataloging everything you could learn about the organism's metabolic pathways. You worked alone, mostly. You ate protein bars at your desk. You didn't talk to anyone unless you had to.
Then they assigned you to the biology team's weekly briefing, and you walked into Conference Room C and stopped dead in the doorway.
Dr. Ryland Grace was standing at the front of the room, his hair a mess, his eyes ringed with exhaustion, pointing at a holographic display with a stylus. His lab coat was rumpled. There was a coffee stain on his collar.
He looked exactly the same as he had thirteen years ago. Just older. More tired.
Your fingers started tapping against your tablet. Index, ring, middle, pinky.
His eyes found you.
The room was full of people — forty or fifty scientists, most of them older than you, most of them decorated — but his gaze cut through the crowd like a laser. He stared at you for a long moment, his jaw going slack.
Then he broke into a grin so wide it crinkled the corners of his eyes.
"Y/N?"
You looked at him.
"Holy moly," he breathed. He set down his stylus and walked toward you, stopping about three feet away, close enough to talk but not close enough to invade. He remembered. After all these years, he still remembered.
"Look at you," he said. "MIT? I heard you were doing metabolic research. I knew those tube worms were just the beginning."
Your fingers stopped tapping. "I'm on the microbiology team. Dr. Stratt recruited me three weeks ago."
"Well, that's good," he said, his voice softer now. "Because I need someone who actually understands this stuff. I've been faking my way through the biology briefings for weeks."
That made you smile.
The briefing continued. Ryland went back to the front of the room, and you found a seat in the back, close to the door, away from the overhead lights. You listened to him talk about the astrophage's energy conversion efficiency, about the impossible numbers, about the way the organism seemed to break every law of thermodynamics you'd ever learned.
He was brilliant. You'd always known that. But watching him work — watching him pull threads of logic through the chaos, connecting dots no one else could see — it was like watching a puzzle solve itself.
After the briefing, as the room emptied, you stood by the door, waiting.
Ryland walked over, stuffing his hands into his lab coat pockets. "Can I buy you a coffee? Or... I don't know what they have in the canteen. Some kind of brown liquid that claims to be coffee. Might be engine degreaser. Hard to tell."
"That's not funny," you said, but the corner of your mouth twitched.
"Everything's funny if you're tired enough."
You followed him to the canteen.
---
The first weeks blurred together into a haze of data and sleepless nights and the constant, pressing weight of the clock. You worked side by side in the lab, poring over astrophage samples, running experiment after experiment, crossing out more than you confirmed.
Ryland talked constantly. You'd forgotten that about him. He narrated his thought process out loud, asked himself questions, answered them, asked new questions. He filled the silence the way other people filled their lungs — naturally, without thinking about it.
Most people found it exhausting. You found it grounding.
"The interesting thing," he said one evening, hunched over a microscope, "is that astrophage shouldn't be able to store this much energy without cooking itself. Its cell wall should degrade. But it doesn't. Why doesn't it?"
You were sitting across from him, cross-legged on a lab stool, a tablet balanced on your knees. "Isolation barrier. It uses a chemical barrier to store enriched light energy inside specialized vacuoles. The barrier separates the energy from the cellular machinery."
"You figured that out?"
"I read your report from Tuesday."
"My report from Tuesday was three pages of me saying 'I don't know' in increasingly creative ways."
"Your footnotes were helpful."
He looked up from the microscope, squinting at you. "I didn't know anyone read my footnotes."
"I read everything."
The next two months passed like that. You fell into a rhythm — work, eat, sleep (barely), repeat. Ryland was always there, a familiar presence in the chaos, his voice a steady thread through the noise.
He learned your patterns without you having to explain them. He left your favorite brand of crackers on the corner of your workstation. He dimmed the lights in the lab when you got headaches. He never commented on your tapping, your need to sit with your head between your knees.
One night, after a sixteen-hour shift, you were sitting in the dark corner of the lab, knees pulled to your chest, fingers pressed against the floor, grounding yourself against the cool concrete. Your breathing was too fast. The overhead lights had been flickering earlier, and you could still feel the strobing behind your eyes, even though they'd fixed it.
Ryland found you there.
He didn't say anything at first. He just sat down across from you — not touching, not crowding — and pulled out his own tablet. He started working on orbital calculations for the launch window, muttering quietly to himself.
After a few minutes, your breathing slowed.
"They put me on the primary biology team," you said, your voice barely above a whisper. "For the Hail Mary."
Ryland looked up. "I heard."
"Dr. Stratt thinks I'm a good candidate for the cellular analysis. She says my pattern recognition is an asset." You paused. "I signed the waivers yesterday."
You didn't talk for a few minutes.
"I have something I should tell you," you said finally, your voice careful and formal, the way it got when you were talking about something vulnerable.
Ryland set down his tablet. "I'm listening."
You took a breath, looking down at your hands. "A few years ago, I was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. It explains... a lot of things about how I process information. Why I am the way I am."
He didn't say anything. His face was unreadable.
"You don't have to say anything," you added quickly. "I just thought you should know. I wanted you to understand."
"You know," he said slowly, a small smile tugging at his mouth, "I had a student once. Twelve years old. Brilliant kid. Could tell you everything about deep-sea biology but couldn't tell you whether someone was joking or serious unless they used the right tone of voice."
Your fingers twitched.
"I never said anything," he continued. "Didn't seem like my place. But I read some articles — about how autism presents differently in girls. And I thought, 'That's her. That's exactly her.'"
You stared at him, your throat tight.
"You were that student, Y/N. And you're the most capable person I've ever met. Autism doesn't change that. It just explains why you notice things other people miss — why you can look at a data set and see patterns that no one else can see."
"Is that your professional opinion, Dr. Grace?"
"It's my personal one. You're going to save all of us."
---
The nights before the launch were the hardest.
You should have been sleeping — everyone told you to sleep — but your brain wouldn't shut off. You lay in your narrow bunk, listening to the hum of the environmental systems, your fingers moving against the thin sheet. Index, ring, middle, pinky.
A knock on the door.
"Y/N? It's me."
You sat up. "Come in."
Ryland slipped inside, closing the door behind him. He looked terrible — dark circles, unwashed hair, the thousand-yard stare of someone who hadn't slept in days. He sat down on the edge of your bunk, his weight making the frame creak.
"Can't sleep either?" you asked.
"I'm not sure I remember how."
You sat in silence for a while. The room was small, barely bigger than a closet, but it felt less oppressive with him in it.
"I'm scared," you said finally.
"Can you stay?" you asked, your voice quieter than you intended. "Just for a while. I know it's — I know we're colleagues now, and I don't want to make things weird —"
"It's not weird," he said. He stretched out on the floor, using his arm as a pillow, staring up at the ceiling. "This floor is terrible. I'm already regretting this."
"You could take the bed."
"And displace you? Absolutely not. I'm a gentleman."
"You're sleeping on concrete."
"A gentleman sleeps on concrete if the alternative is making someone uncomfortable."
He wouldn’t make you uncomfortable. Had it been anyone else? Probably. But not him. Never him.
You lay back down, staring at the ceiling. His presence was an anchor — the sound of his breathing, the warmth radiating from his body, the knowledge that you weren't alone.
"Thank you, Ryland," you whispered.
He didn't answer. When you looked over, his eyes were closed, his breathing already evening out. He was asleep on your floor.
---
The ship was a marvel of desperation engineering — a long central tube surrounded by three massive fuel tanks arranged in a triangle, with engines and radiator fins at the rear. The crew section was cramped, a series of interconnected compartments designed for function, not comfort. Every surface was beige or gray. Every sound was amplified by the metal walls.
Yao and Ilyukhina — the other crew members — never woke up.
Their bodies were stored in the medical bay, preserved against some future that would never come.
For three weeks, Ryland Grace lived as a ghost.
He woke up with amnesia, his memories of the launch scrubbed clean by the coma. The ship's computer walked him through recovery. He learned who he was. He learned where he was.
He kept his distance from the third hibernation pod, trusting the automated systems to monitor its occupant.
He counted the days. He ate nutrient paste. He stared at the stars.
He was so, so alone.
---
On the twenty-second day, the medical bay chimed.
Ryland dropped his spoon — a plastic spork, the only utensil on the ship — and ran.
You woke up gasping.
Not because of the pain — there wasn't any pain, just a deep, bone-tired soreness — but because of the disorientation. Your brain was trying to reboot, trying to make sense of where you were, when you were, who you were. The lights were too bright. The air was too cold. There were tubes in your arms, monitors on your chest, and a machine voice saying something you couldn't process.
You couldn't move. Couldn't talk. Could only thrash, your hands slapping against the sides of the pod, your chest heaving with panic.
And then — hands.
Hands on your shoulders. Warm hands. Steady hands.
"Hey, hey, hey. Look at me — no, don't look at me, look at the floor. Look at my hands. It's okay. You're okay."
You knew that voice.
"Ryland?"
"Yeah. It's me. I've got you. Just breathe."
You couldn't breathe. You couldn't stop shaking. The sensory input was too much — the lights, the sounds, the cold metal beneath your back, the unknown weight of space pressing against the hull.
"I'm going to hug you, okay? Just so you know where I am. You don't have to do anything. Just breathe."
His palm landed on your forearm — warm, steady, present. The pressure grounded you, gave your brain something to focus on besides the panic.
"Count with me," he said. "Breathe in for four. Hold for four. Out for four. You can do this."
You followed his voice out of the darkness, one breath at a time.
---
Three days later, you were sitting in the crew compartment, eating nutrient paste from a plastic pouch, your back against the curved wall.
Ryland sat across from you, his legs crossed, his own pouch dangling from his fingers. He looked like hell. So did you.
"We're nearing Tau Ceti," you said, your voice still rough from the sedation. "The sensors confirmed it during transit."
"Hey," he said, his voice softer now. "I've been meaning to ask. Do you remember the launch? Because I don't. My memory is a black hole. I remember arguing with Stratt about something — I don't remember what — and then nothing."
You frowned, trying to piece together the fragments. "I remember the selection process. I remember signing the waivers. I remember the medical bay. And then —" You shook your head. "Static."
"Stratt had a way of making things happen," he said, his tone carefully neutral. "Whether people agreed or not."
You looked at his shoulder, trying to read something in his posture. "Do you think —"
"I don't know what I think. I'm just glad you're here."
---
The Hail Mary settled into a routine.
You and Ryland established a rhythm.
Mornings in the lab, analyzing astrophage samples, running spectroscopy tests, arguing about metabolic pathways. He talked constantly; you listened and corrected him when he was wrong. He was wrong more often than he'd admit, but he never argued when you showed him the data.
"See, this is why I needed you here," he said one afternoon, squinting at a spectrometer readout. "I would have looked at this and said 'huh' and moved on. You looked at it and found the anomaly."
"The anomaly is the only interesting part."
"Exactly. You see patterns. I see puzzles. Together we're a functional scientist."
"You're already a functional scientist."
"Barely."
Evenings Barely mental health room, watching old movies on the display screen, eating nutrient paste, pretending you weren't both terrified of the vacuum outside.
You sat close to him — closer than you needed to. Your shoulder pressed against his arm. His warmth was grounding, a sensory anchor in the endless cold.
Your fingers tapped against your thigh. Index, ring, middle, pinky.
---
The nights were the hardest.
The dormitory was a rounded room with three oval beds attached to the curved walls — the same beds that had held the crew during their coma hibernation. They were designed for medical monitoring, with robotic arms and sensor arrays and cold, sterile sheets.
You hated them.
Every night, you lay in your assigned bed, staring at the curved ceiling, your fingers moving against the mattress. The environmental control system hummed at a frequency that vibrated in your teeth. The air circulation fan clicked on and off at irregular intervals. The water distillation pump made a low, pulsing noise that felt like a heartbeat in your skull.
You couldn't sleep.
You tried everything — earplugs, white noise, adjusting the temperature — but the problem wasn't the volume. It was the wrongness. The sounds were unfamiliar, unpredictable, out of your control. Every click and hum was a reminder that you were millions of miles from anything familiar, that the only thing between you and death was a few centimeters of metal hull.
On the tenth night, you gave up.
You stood outside Ryland's bunk, your hands trembling, your breathing too fast. The door was open — he never closed it, in case something happened — and you could see him lying on his bed, his eyes closed, his chest rising and falling.
"Ryland."
His eyes opened immediately. "Y/N? What's wrong?"
"The ambient acoustic profile is triggering an elevated neurological stress response," you said, the words coming out in a fast, clipped rush. "The harmonic frequency between the primary air circulation fan and the water distillation pump is creating a low-frequency resonance. I cannot achieve a restorative state of rest."
He sat up, rubbing his eyes. "Okay. Slow down. What do you need?"
You took a breath, forcing yourself to slow down. "I need a tactile anchor. Something — someone — familiar. The isolation is amplifying the sensory input. I can't filter it out on my own."
He was quiet for a moment, processing. "What are you asking me, exactly?"
"I'm asking if I can sleep here. In your room. Not —" You looked away, your face heating. "Not anything else. Just sleep. I just need to be near something that feels safe."
He didn't answer immediately. You could see him thinking, weighing the boundaries, trying to figure out what was appropriate.
"Y/N," he said carefully, "I don't want to make you uncomfortable."
"You wouldn't ," you said, your voice earnest. "You're the best person I know and you are the only familiar element in this entire galaxy. Being near you makes the background noise stop. That's all. It's not — I'm not asking for anything else. I just need to not be alone."
He was quiet for another long moment. Then he sighed — not with frustration, but with something softer.
"There's only one bed in here," he said. "It's not exactly built for two people."
"Then we'll make it work."
"We'll have to be close. Like, really close. There's no floor space in here."
"I know."
"Okay," he said finally. "Okay. But if at any point you're uncomfortable — if you want to leave, if I snore, if anything — you tell me immediately. Deal?"
"Deal."
He shifted to one side of the narrow bed, making room. The mattress was barely wide enough for one person, let alone two. You climbed in carefully, your back against the cold metal wall, facing him.
The bed was warm from his body heat. The sheets smelled like him — soap and coffee and something vaguely metallic. The proximity was overwhelming at first — his shoulder inches from yours, his breath warm against your cheek, the sound of his heartbeat audible in the silence.
"Too close?" he asked.
"No," you whispered. "Perfect."
You lay there in the dark, listening to the hum of the ship, feeling the warmth of his body beside you. Your breathing slowed. The tapping stopped. The chaos in your brain quieted.
"Thank you, Ryland," you said.
"Anytime, Y/N. Now try to sleep."
You closed your eyes.
For the first time in ten days, you slept through the night.
---
The mental health room became your sanctuary.
The best part about it was the 360 projection system.
You could stand in the middle of the room and tell the computer to show you any scene from Earth's databanks — a forest in Oregon, a beach in Thailand, a busy street corner in Tokyo. The images wrapped around the walls, surrounding you with color and light, tricking your brain into forgetting that you were trapped in a metal tube surrounded by death.
You used it almost every night. Forests, mostly. You missed trees. You missed the smell of rain and the sound of wind and the feeling of dirt under your feet. Ryland missed the fog.
One night, about three months into the mission, he came into the room and found you standing in the middle of a projected redwood forest, your eyes closed, your arms wrapped around your chest.
"You okay?" he asked, sitting down on the floor.
"Just trying to remember what it feels like."
He patted the metal platform beside him. "Come sit. We're watching a movie tonight."
"I haven't agreed to watch a movie."
"I'm the commander. I'm ordering you to relax."
"You're not the commander."
"Someone has to be."
You sat down next to him — close, but not touching. He pulled up a movie, something old and black-and-white with fast-talking characters and complicated romantic subplots you didn't fully understand.
Halfway through, you leaned your head against his shoulder.
He stiffened for a moment — just a fraction of a second — and then relaxed, shifting so you could lean more comfortably.
"Comfortable?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Good."
You watched the rest of the movie like that, your head on his shoulder, his arm behind your back.
When the movie ended, you didn't move.
"Ryland," you said quietly.
"Yeah?"
You turned your head, looking up at his face. His eyes were soft in the dim light, his mouth curved in a small smile.
And then — without thinking, driven entirely by weeks of shared beds and quiet survival — you leaned up and pressed your lips against his.
He made a small sound — surprise, maybe — and then his hand came up to cup the back of your head, his fingers threading through your hair. He kissed you back, soft and slow and careful, the way you imagined he did everything.
Your free hand found his chest, your fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt.
He pulled back just far enough to rest his forehead against yours.
"Y/N," he whispered, his breath warm against your lips.
"Was that okay?" you asked, suddenly uncertain. "I didn't — I should have asked —"
"It was more than okay," he said. "I just want to make sure — this isn't because you feel trapped, or because I'm the only person here. I don't want to take advantage —"
"You're not taking advantage. I'm asking. Right now. I'm asking."
He looked at you for a long moment — not at your shoulder, not past your ear, but directly at your eyes. You held his gaze, feeling the weight of it, not looking away.
"Okay," he said softly. "Then yes."
He kissed you again, deeper this time, his hand sliding down to the small of your back, pulling you closer. You melted into him, your arms wrapping around his neck, your body pressing against his.
---
The Hail Mary continued its journey toward Tau Ceti. The work continued — the experiments, the data analysis, the desperate search for a solution that would save Earth. Nothing had changed, technically.
But everything had changed.
You slept in his bed every night now, your bodies tangled together in the narrow mattress, his arm around your waist, his breath warm against your neck. The environmental noise still buzzed and hummed, but you barely noticed it anymore. His heartbeat was louder than any machine.
You worked side by side in the lab, shoulders brushing, passing tools back and forth without speaking. He still talked constantly — narrating his experiments, asking himself questions, answering them — and you still listened, correcting him when he needed it, laughing at his terrible jokes when you didn't.
And at night, in the mental health room, you projected forests and beaches and city streets and pretended you weren't light-years from home.
One night, about a month after the first kiss, you were sitting between his legs on the platform of the mental health room, your back against his chest, his arms wrapped around you. The projection showed a beach at sunset — orange and purple and gold — and the waves made a soft, rhythmic sound that almost felt real.
"I never thanked you," you said quietly.
"For what?"
"For everything. For making room. For never trying to fix me. For —" You gestured vaguely at the room, the ship, the stars beyond. "For all of it."
He pressed a kiss to the top of your head. "You don't have to thank me for that."
"I know. But I wanted to."
The waves projected against the walls, rising and falling, rising and falling.
"We're going to solve this," he said. "We're going to figure out why the astrophage here is stable, and we're going to take that solution back to Earth. And then we're going to go home."
"And then?"
"And then we're going to figure out the rest."
You leaned your head back against his shoulder, looking up at the projected sky.
"Okay," you said. "Together."
"Together," he agreed.
The waves rose and fell.
The stars turned slowly on their axis.
And in the quiet of the Hail Mary, surrounded by digital light and artificial sound, you weren't alone anymore.
You hadn't been alone for a very long time.