Archive of Our Own

‘hold the hand of the god-child,’ they said,

‘as he falls from the sky.’

‘be good to me,’ i beg of him,

‘be good to me,’ i beg of him,

be good, 

be good, 

be good, 

be good, 

be good, 

be good, 

be good,

and he replies–

The last thing Curly gets to experience in his life is cold, and fear, and bottomless sorrow. Which is three things, technically, but by the time Jimmy crams his agonised body into the cryopod and slams it shut and turns it on and exits stage right to— to…

By then, Curly has lost the ability to distinguish them.

But it doesn’t matter. He knows that he has failed. Everyone on this ship, he has failed.

Cold bites into his raw flesh like razors, and as Curly’s mind grows heavy and sluggish he wonders what will come next. His options are limited: he might expire in stasis anyway if his body turns out to be too feeble to withstand the cryogenic process, or the generators might give out by their natural death or if the ship hurtles into something again. And then Curly will…he will wake up in the bitter cold and the utter dark, and wait for the already thin oxygen to run out. Unable to even move himself out of the pod, not that moving would matter.

As Curly finally, finally gives in to the cold blanket of sleep, he wonders with some numb resignation which one it will be. 

***

Despite the stasis, Curly dreams, but his dreams bring him no reprieve. He dreams of the Tulpar, its hallways empty save for the ghosts. He dreams of the crash, of the foam melting him and the ship together, turning them into one amalgamated beast — he doesn’t hold it at fault for that, the captain goes down with the ship, after all. He dreams of the descending darkness and cold, utterly alone as they envelop him.

He dreams of Jimmy plucking him out of the foam, uncaring that it hurts, that it keeps so much of him for its own, and squeezes him tighter and tighter until Curly can’t breathe.

He dreams of Anya telling him about Jimmy, and in those dreams he laughs, and pats her head condescendingly, and tells her not to worry.

Curly never— never did any of those things, never acted this callously. But he never did anything useful either, did he?

He wanted to, he planned. Dealing with Jimmy required tact, required– a careful choice of words, a right moment. He intended to find them. 

But intentions mean nothing. You can’t save anyone with intentions alone.

***

Curly wakes up to pain. It’s the muted kind that heaves sleepily under the deep fog of painkillers. He’s learned to recognise this brand, a relief despite the ulcer he’s sure the oxycodone pills were eating through his stomach.

He’s queasy, but there is no telltale acidity on his tongue, not that he can tell.

There are voices around him, above him, but Curly is too far under to place them, to parse them. Useless, he drifts off again.

***

The Tulpar was intercepted by Spirit, another of Pony Express ships, the crew of which discovered the drifting wreck almost by accident. 

“The signal was so weak, we’d have missed it if she wasn’t almost directly in our path,” the nurse explains to Curly in a monotone voice as she’s rewrapping his arm in fresh bandages. They are almost startingly white in the dimmed lights of the med bay. Curly isn’t used to such cleanliness anymore.

Curly gives a flat ‘ha-a’ in response. He is too foggy, too slow, too stupid to fully agree with the idea that this isn’t just another dream. Even the very act of thinking takes what feels like insurmountable effort.

The nurse doesn’t seem to care that Curly is little more than a flayed slab of meat, treating him with an air of burned out but not unkind callousness that Curly infers is offered to everyone who happens to fall under her care. Which is…refreshing because it means she isn’t cruel like Jimmy, or pointedly indifferent like Swansea. The downside is that she isn’t…she doesn’t try to listen to him, to decipher his strained noises like Anya would. She doesn’t search his bandaged face for clues, doesn’t try to interpret his movements. She doesn’t have to, but this is all Curly can do. Without it, he is locked away from the world, and so, locked away he remains.

“Your crew mate is fine, by the way, should you want to know,” the nurse throws, reconnecting the IV and checking the bag. Curly was very proud of himself for a brief moment when he managed to take in the IV drip in his arm and the tube in his nose and link them to the absence of a drilling crew in his stomach. Liquids, electrolytes. Makes sense.

Now, a chill runs up Curly’s spine at her words, torn muscles trying to contort him into a shudder. Jimmy— is Jimmy alive? Did he somehow…

No. No, no, no. Please no.

Curly feels sick with fear, then sick with shame for hoping that Jimmy is too dead to reach him. 

The nurse spots his expression, whatever it might be. “I’ll relay that you’re up for visiting hours, then,” she mutters, completely skipping over Curly’s despairing confusion, the nascent horror of getting to see Jimmy again, and leaves him alone with it.

***

No matter how much Curly tries to prepare himself, he isn’t ready for the terror of facing Jimmy.

Turns out, he is even less prepared for the shocked grief of seeing Anya.

***

“Ahh…!”

“Oh Curly— sorry, sorry for waking you. I have to, um, I have to ask you something.”

A strangled, alarmed noise.

A wet laugh. “Yeah, I’m…” A rattle of pills. “There will still be some left for you though. For…f’r your pain. Or— or if you want to come with me. That’s— that’s what I wanted to ask. Sorry, I’m a little tipsy. For courage.”

Pills roll out of their bottle onto a palm. A panicked sob, sounds of movement.

“No? You don’t… Are you sure?”

A lowing noise that barely resembles something a human could make.

“Okay…okay.” Sound of pills hitting the bottom of the bottle. Fewer in number now. “Here…hah, here goes then.”

Noises of panicked urgency interrupted by a rough cough.

“God, this tastes bad. Well…this…this is it, then. I think. Should be enough.” A breath, exhaled shakily through clenched teeth. “...Yeah. Sorry. Hah.”

A long stretch of silence, ending with the laborious, visceral sound of unhealing flesh unsticking from the plastic cloth of the cot.

“What– oh Cap, Curl– Curly, no… No no, please don’t try to… I’m okay, it’s all okay.” Slurring slightly, “I don’ need anythin’ anymore.”

Another sob.

“Sorry…sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you, ‘s just… Th’ only room with a lock, r’member? Sorry… ‘M sorry about that. For…makin’ you deal with it.”

More sounds of shuffling, of flesh on plastic, of desperation. They amount to nothing.

“‘S okay that I sat nex’ to you?” Pause, strained breathing. “Din’ wanna be alone…”

A long, thready whine.

“Yeah… Sorry.”

***

Anya takes up her post by Curly’s bedside. This time, his right side is to the wall. They must have positioned him this way because they have no artificial sunset for him to stare at, and now he doesn’t need to strain his stiff neck to look at whoever comes close. 

Which also means there is nowhere for him to look away.

Anya looks like a wraith. Her cheeks are sunken, her eyes are hooded and underlined with dark rings. She is…diminished, somehow, too small for the space meted out for her. Thin and bone-tired. Her stomach, which Curly doesn’t stare at but can’t help noticing anyway, is alarmingly flat.

Was it like this before? Or…

“Hghh-how lon’?”

The ability to speak returns to Curly somewhat after all the fluids and the painkillers he’s been getting. It’s still stunted and slow and made more incomprehensible without the lip sounds, on the account of not having lips, but he can’t stand his own silence anymore. Despite the pain that comes with pulling at his tattered facial muscles, he opens his mouth and makes his voice gurgle to life.

“It’s been ah…about a fortnight since the Spirit picked us up,” Anya replies and back looks down at the book in her lap. It looks like one of the manuals, Curly thinks, though it’s hard to tell from this angle.

Curly tries to frown, winces as a result. “An’ ee’ore that?” he asks.

There is a flash of an expression on Anya’s face, there and gone too quickly for Curly’s drugged mind to follow.

“Ah…long enough,” she says after a pause. “I kept busy, I had…things to take care of.”

Curly means to try and ask more, but Anya hunches her shoulders and bends over her book, gone despite still being in the room. He thinks about how she must’ve woken up at the bloody table, surrounded by corpses. How she must’ve come across Jimmy’s body. How she saw him in the cryopod. How she must’ve, surely, debated whether to trade places with him…

No…No, Anya would never. Someone else would. Not her.

“I… Ah…sorry,” Curly manages through the haze of the painkillers. It pulls at him like a hidden undercurrent, but it’s important that he says it. It should’ve been the first thing to leave his mouth – but what’s another failure, right?

Anya swallows as her eyes flit up to meet his. “It’s okay. We’re here now,” she says carefully.

***

Curly often found it difficult to talk to Jimmy, sometimes to even be around him. He is– was– often moody and unpredictable, quick to take things personally, quicker to retaliate for a perceived wrong. Offering him constructive criticism, even deeply warranted, was always…challenging. Anything ran the risk of offending him.

Did he seem angry?

***

A party at the pilot academy dorm, a late night. Flashes of light, booming music, laughter. Within it all, a fight brewing. Curly, years younger than he is now, correctly identifies the nucleus of it from ages of practice and jumps into the thick to drag Jummy out by the scruff of his neck.

“I’ll fucking kill you!” Jimmy laughs, loud and bark-like, seemingly not even registering that Curly is bodily hauling him away from someone in the crowd he is still jabbing his finger at. “Ha! If I had a gun I’d fucking shoot you here and now, you fucking poser!”

He’s wasted. “Stop, it’s not funny,” Curly tells him, waving at a mutual friend to catch his attention and miming a glass of water with his free hand. 

Jimmy snorts and finally focuses on Curly, and his mouth twists into an ugly sneer. “Ah, the golden fucking boy is here, riding in to save the day. Why are you going after me, hm? You don’t even like these people.”

He is loud enough that his words catch attention. Curly frowns.

“I never said that.” He didn’t. He said he was tired and would rather chill in their room. But Jimmy wanted to go. 

“Yeah you diiid,” Jimmy drawls and knuckles his cheek in what he must think counts as affectionate. Then, he jams two fingers into Curly’s temple and makes a shooting sound. “ Pah! Idiot.” 

Curly tilts his head away and grits his teeth. Jimmy gets on his fucking nerves when he is like this, but arguing with him will only make him explode, and Curly doesn’t want a scene.

“You’re pissed,” he informs him instead, and Jimmy does that exaggerated sideways nod of ‘maybe I am, what are you gonna do about it’. “Seriously, Jim, you can’t fucking joke like this.”

Jimmy’s snort is an ugly sound. “Who says I’m joking?”

Did he seem angry?

Where did he go?

***

Only some of the questions that Curly failed to ask:

How could you? What were you thinking? Why– why, why? Why would you do this?

It wasn’t the end, far from it — but then why did you act like it was? Why did you bring it about? I thought you were doing better, I thought you were changing. Was I so wrong? If you wanted a future like you said you did, why did you–

Why did you?

***

The Spirit travels home, its cargo safely delivered at its destination, and now carrying something much more fragile and far less valuable. In the med bay, Curly slowly regains lucidity, shivering and gasping as he is weaned off the stronger painkillers, and Anya’s shell begins to thaw too.

With great difficulty, they try to talk about what happened. It lurches from one heavy pause to the next, the shared grief hanging between them in an almost tangible presence. Anya shakes her head, and touches Curly’s arm, and they let the silence fill the vast gaps.

Curly sleeps restlessly, and he knows that Anya does too because most nights he is startled awake by the sound of her creeping into the med bay. He can’t see her with the moisturizing patch over his exposed eyeball, but he turns his face towards her, and she apologises for waking him and takes up her usual spot in the chair, and they wait out the night together.

Curly dreams about Jimmy. A lot. About his face, twisted with a cold  hatred that he didn’t even know, couldn’t believe Jimmy was capable of. About his hands, grabbing him, forcing him, wielding the knife to cut his already diminished flesh. About his eyes, both deadened and alert with a single-minded determination that Curly understood all too late.

Every time it happens, he wakes up gasping and shaking, fighting to get away. At first, he is alone in the artificial dark, but after the first night he wakes up to Anya’s cool hand on his brow he finds her there every time.

“I know,” she murmurs, and gently runs her fingers over the layers of gauze that encase him, a shadow of touch to dim the unbearable brightness of a crueler memory. “I get them too.”

Curly cries then – from the one tear duct that still works – and reaches for Anya with what little strength he has. Wishing desperately that he could convey even a fraction of how fucking sorry he is.

But he has no hands, no fingers to squeeze hers, to console her the way she consoles him. “Ahh sorry,” he wheezes anyway, because words is all he’s ever fucking got. “Anya…” her name is like a blessing, easy for him to say without butchering, “ah s-so sorry…”

There’s a pause – maybe Anya nods before she realises he can’t see her – and her hand carefully, lightly squeezes his shoulder. Another trails up on the other side, fingertips ghosting the bandages on his neck and cheek, tracing the edge of the eyepatch.

“Curly, I’m going to lift this for a moment, okay? We can’t have all this salt in the wounds,” she tells him and waits for his sad little hiccup of assent before removing the patch. She cups a hand to shield his eye from the muted light of the med bay and presses a bit of gauze with the other to mop up the moisture.

Curly’s eye darts around as he is torn between looking at Anya and looking anywhere but. Everything is too much. Her care is too much. And there is nothing he can do.

“Curly, I need you to listen to me,” Anya says after a while, inspecting her work and nodding to herself in satisfaction. “I had…a lot of time to think about everything that happened. So I took that time. And…I forgive you, okay?”

A startled tear beads at the edge of Curly’s eye socket, and Anya tsks softly before wiping it away.

“I forgive you,” she repeats, balling up the gauze in her fist. “We both suffered a lot. At his hands. I don’t want…I don’t want to add to it. I don’t want you to beat yourself up for past mistakes. I think I have the right to decree that, don’t you?” Her face is stern as she speaks, with the air of something she’d rehearsed in her mind many times before, but she looks him in the eye again and her mouth softens. 

“Just…learn from it, I guess. Next time someone comes to you for help…listen to them. And take action. Okay? That’s…that’s all I want.”

Curly doesn’t know what to say, stunned and tumbled by the tidal wave of emotion that slams into him. Grief, protest, gratitude are at the forefront of it, but the rest he doesn’t have a chance in hell to recognise. His mouth is open, but no sounds come out.

Anya searches his face for a long moment. Whatever it is she’s looking for, she seems to find it, and nods with a small, rueful smile.

“Okay,” she murmurs and carefully secures the eyepatch back in place, plunging him into darkness. Her hand returns to his shoulder. “Thank you for listening.”

***

“I finally got that psych eval,” Anya says with a wry smile, a distant echo of her humour. “Not that there’s…much to do about it all, you know. Even if I weren’t already fired, I think they’d sack me for this alone.”

A shadow passes over her face, and Curly’s thoughts turn earthwards too. What now?

He worried so much in the past, before all this – is he figured out? is this all he’ll ever be? – and turns out, the ‘ever’ tears as easily as human skin melted to insulation foam. All his tentative plans, all his nebulous dreams, all his wretched stability – gone in a flash of a head on collision.

Curly will be figuring himself out again now, the ‘if’ of it ripped away from him. Funny how it works.

Anya, though, is more proactive, plagued with matters less abstract and more pressing than Curly’s existentialism. The closer the Spirit gets to Earth, the more time she spends hounding websites of headhunters and landlords, frowning at the ship’s thready signal.

Curly, in his forced inactivity, lies there, and listens dutifully to her bit-back complaints, and thinks.

What Anya has told him that night has left a lasting impression on him. Because…because she’s right, of course she is. What is his sorrow to her but another act of inaction? What are his tears to her, however genuine, but another thing to take care of when she was the one in need of care all along?

Anya’s forgiveness doesn’t mean that Curly forgives himself as well for the spectacular way in which he’d failed her. Oh yeah, he ‘talked’ to Jimmy, he made plans, he was going to deal with all of this back on earth, justifying it to himself by their ship’s need for two pilots, if nothing else. Fat load of good his intentions have done him — and the rest of the crew.

Curly failed Anya, and there is nothing he can do to fix it. He can’t turn back the clock and undo it. But he needs to do better now, be better now. That’s what she wants of him, and that’s the least he can do. To offer something more than empty platitudes and tears.

Speaking without lips remains a painful, humiliating experience, but it’s easy for Curly to push past it in his urgency.

“Cuhn…hown…‘ith nee. There’s a s’are…‘edroon,” Curly tries, wincing at the inability to express himself properly, to make the offer the way a friend would, the way he intended to do it before everything went to hell.

“What?” Anya asks, distracted by her borrowed tablet, though she is quick to focus on him. “…What? Curly, are you…” she laughs quietly. “Sorry, I thought you were offering to be roommates.”

He stares at her. Her eyes widen.

“Curly, I don't have a job. I can't pay rent. That’s– that’s the whole issue I’m having.”

For these words, at least, Curly doesn’t require his lips. “No need,” he enunciates carefully.

Anya shakes her head and looks away, her eyebrows pinched.

“No, that’s not right. Thank you, but– sorry.”

Curly deflates, trying not to show it. Anya returns to her search.

Another hour passes.

“It… would make it easier to make sure you’re okay though, right?” Anya muses carefully, and Curly perks up. “I’m kind of…used to it by now, after... What if I let you out of my sight and you…” she trails off with a fragile laugh. She seems to mean it as a joke, or to try at least.

Unbidden, an image rises from the murky depths of Curly’s pre-freeze memory: Anya’s eyes, wide with horror, rove over the fresh splotches of blood blooming on Curly’s grimy gown. His chest still heaves with the memory of Jimmy’s fists, but he tries his best to stop crying, to not alarm her further, burning with shame. Her lips press into a thin line, and she turns away to rummage through a drawer and returns with a sponge, peeling off the crusty fabric and gently soaking up the worst of it.

Now, Curly makes a small sound and shifts his arm towards Anya. After a startled moment, she meets his eye, and her pained expression softens.

***

The nurse must have sent off the psych evals to the HQ, because a week before they make it into Earth’s landing orbit, papers come through to end their contracts. They didn’t even want to wait until the end of the trip, and Curly distractedly wonders if they plan to blame them for crashing the Tulpar. 

Well…they can try. The man who crashed it is gone. At least their lawyers aren’t hounding them quite yet, though that might have something to do with the sour, stubborn expression on the nurse’s face.

***

“Home sweet home.”

Anya’s words startle an approximation of a laugh from Curly where he’s doing his best not to show how aggravated his flesh feels after being hauled around.

His wounds have healed enough to not require daily bandage changes anymore, but it still doesn’t mean he can get himself from A to B. The Spirit’s security guy – apparently the ship needed one for whatever cargo it was ferrying – was kind enough to tag along in their cab to Curly’s place from the landing pad. After that, he was even kinder to get him up the stairs of the building, leaving him on the couch in the living area of his flat.

Anya is timid at first, obviously a stranger here, but after Curly apologises for not giving her the grand tour she deserves, waving his arm around the small space in a sweeping gesture, she smiles and seems to relax a little. Checking on Curly’s bandages to make sure nothing is bleeding after transit requires knowing where the bathroom is to wash hands, then how to turn the water back on when they both remember he hasn’t been here for months, then where he keeps his med supplies (in the kitchen, as the bathroom is too cramped for any sort of extra cabinet). By the time Anya declares Curly fit to stay horizontal on his couch and stops focusing on him as much, he’s more or less directed her through most of the layout.

It’s not a large space by any means. Captains might have higher pay than the rest of the crew, but it’s hardly competitive in the housing market. Still, it’s a functioning place, two bedrooms one bath kind of deal, lift in the building, more than enough for one person.

As Curly explains where to get clean linens while Anya walks quietly around on socked feet, he decides that it’s best not to bring up that the guest bedroom was mostly used as a space for Jimmy to crash between his job disasters. Last time was over a year ago by now anyway.

***

It’s kind of mind-boggling how much of Curly’s time is taken up by simply recovering . 

On the Tulpar, it stood to reason that all he did was suffer and sleep – his body needed all the rest it could scrounge up only to burn it on the next bout of pain management. On the Spirit, he did much of the same, finally able to relax somewhat instead of constantly fighting against the withering pull of blood loss and starvation.

With good painkillers, and antibiotics, and fresh bandages that they don’t have to wait to change until they are soaked through with viscera – and without the constant threat of death or something worse looming over them – Curly finally begins to really heal.

Unfortunately, it means that he spends most of his day sleeping, and most of his waking time loopy from the exertion of simply being conscious. In the short bouts of wakefulness, he tries to speak with Anya, tells her where to find things – though as days go by she seems to need less and less of that, especially when her own belongings get shipped in – checks in on her as best he can, and does his best to eat. It’s a messy affair, eating without lips, a humiliating one too, and as he was at first too injured to do it and then had a feeding tube taking care of it, now he’s forced to figure it out by trial and error. Soon enough, Anya conquers the tricky layout of Curly’s kitchen (‘Tall people and your tall people habits!’) and by the same trial and error makes things that are easier to get down his gullet.

***

Even with him spending most of his time on the couch and largely rendered immobile, Curly is quick to notice that all the mirrors are covered, like in a house where death has occurred.

It is, he knows, for his own sanity. Still, he can’t help feeling like a ghost haunting his own home.

He might as well be one. He is so laughably feeble. The smallest exertion drains him into sleep that doesn’t feel like rest. Whenever he does have the energy to move, he has no limbs to use, no hands to grasp things, no feet to hold him upright. All connections, severed. All vectors, leading nowhere.

***

Curly flinches every time Anya moves too suddenly, does something too close to his face without warning. Even after all the time spent half-comatose on the Spirit, Curly struggles to shake the gut fear. The anticipation of violence.

Anya notices, of course, the way she notices everything. Signals her approach, asks for permission before touching, gives warnings when she thinks something might hurt. Her hands are light and gentle on him in ways that make Curly ashamed of the panicked stutter of his pulse.

Slowly, he stops flinching as readily.

***

Once Curly’s bouts of wakefulness grow longer and less sporadic, he ponders his finances. He’s got some savings, thank fuck, and while it isn’t a lot it should last them some time. Owning the flat instead of renting it certainly helps too.

Aside from that, there are new expenses: a wheelchair the moment he can stomach sitting, a pair of cheap hand prosthetics the moment he can bear wearing them. The biggest investment is all the grafting that Curly needs to do, something to cover up the large areas where his skin simply has nothing to recover from anymore. Which means hospital visits and bloodwork and synthesis starters. 

It’s all cheap, of course, bottom of the pile. The wheelchair is rickety, the prosthetics only have the thumb and the pointer articulated, the rest of the hand fused into one object. The material of the synthetic skin should hold up okay without getting rejected, but there’s a good chance that the rows of pockmarks will not fade even years from now. Donor skin would have fewer of these issues, but the risks of rejection are too high, so their best bet is to peel off a chunk of what he still has on his torso to use as a starter.

But it is what it is. Curly wasn’t exactly banking on even surviving to begin with, so.

But now he’s here, and soon, he will need to figure out his next step.

***

‘I’m sorry, I’ve been an awful host,’ Curly types painstakingly on his tablet and hits text to speech. Anya doesn’t seem to mind deciphering his garbled words, but sometimes the effort of talking out loud is simply too much — and he is eager to use his hands again now that he has them.

It’s been a process, adjusting to them. He’s dropped many a glass from his clumsy grip and couldn’t even sweep the shards, tore some clothes without being able to repair them, got stuck on a doorknob once when the digits caught on themselves and ended up pulling the prosthetic off and leaving it there until Anya saved it for him. He has cried over it too in helpless, aimless anger, keeping quiet so that she wouldn’t hear.

“What on earth do you mean?” Anya asks where she is putting away the dishes from the drying rack.

Curly taps his plastic fingertip against the edge of the tablet, uncertain how to say it.

‘Are you okay? Can I do anything for you?’ is what he ends up with, wincing at the inadequacy of it all, the monotone robotic voice puncturing the air between them. The way it sounds like empty politeness when what he means is a plea. An impossible riddle to solve.

Anya’s caught off guard expression relaxes into something less cautious. “You just focus on you, okay?” she smiles briefly, and Curly’s stomach churns with rejection. “It…It really worried me, what they said at the hospital.”

What haven’t they said at the hospital?

‘Grafting might still be an option, but it’s going to be tricky, the damage is…quite extensive, to say the least.’

‘You were teetering on multiple organ failure for months.’

‘You are lucky to be alive.’

If Curly had a face, he would pout. He contents himself with typing, ‘I am not dying anymore.’ 

“Curly, I’m serious,” Anya snaps, and Curly looks down at the tablet. It doesn’t even count as her raising her voice, and yet something in him withers.

How did they end up talking about him anyway? This wasn’t his goal at all.

‘So am I,’ Curly protests. ‘You went through it all too.’ 

“I—” Air catches in Anya’s throat, and she deflates. “Okay. You want to know if I’m okay,” she says quietly, and closes the cupboards, and comes over to lower herself carefully on the far end of the couch, half-facing Curly.

Silence. Curly waits.

“I’m— I’m not okay,” Anya says eventually in the same subdued voice. “Obviously. I mean, look at all of it. Getting fired and having to start from scratch would already be enough to stress anyone out, but then the whole trip had to be a literal disaster too. Not to mention—” she catches herself and swallows. Curly watches Anya’s face as it betrays the traces of an internal debate, waits for her to reach some sort of decision, but in the end she only shakes her head. “Neither of us are okay. But I don’t— I can’t really get into it right now, you know? Because I think that if I do, it’ll… It will not help me, or either of us, not now.”

Chastised, Curly looks away. In the corner of his eye, he watches her watch his hands, but he keeps them still on the virtual keyboard.

“I know you’re trying to help,” Anya says after a pause. “I see it. Thank you. And I’m not— I’m not dumb, I know I need so much therapy, we both do, it’s just… I just need time to get there. I just need to, um, to be here, with my feet on the ground, and to try living a normal life again, and keep an eye on you, yeah? That’s all I want right now.” A corner of her mouth lifts in a smile, there and gone again. “Just for a bit.”

***

Soon enough, the grafts go on, and Curly gets to marvel at the reinstated degree of separation between himself and the world, a luxury he will never take for granted again. Air doesn’t hurt him anymore, water doesn’t hurt him anymore. A friendly touch doesn’t hurt, the world’s hostility locked behind a thin yet powerful membrane of skin. Anya is still careful with him when she helps with the wheelchair, but now it’s a discomfort and not an agony.

Best of all, event of the century, really – Curly has eyelids and lips again. They are simple folds of skin, leaving him with a somewhat sleepy and goofy expression, but ordering facial muscle reconstruction is not something he can afford, not right now in any case. At least he gets shielding from the light and doesn’t need to use eye drops every other minute. At least he is no longer losing any more of his sight to drying out and irritation. And not dribbling as much fucking rocks, with a nice bonus of improving his diction.

Curly’s other eye socket gets filled in to keep it from collapsing and stitched shut. There was no saving that one.

He still avoids mirrors. It’s almost as if his mind remains unable to comprehend how much his body has changed, and Curly dreads making it face reality.

***

Curly has obviously spent a lot of time with his crews in close quarters, and he’s no stranger to being roommates outside of long hauls either, but it’s different with Anya. There are too many layers to what they both bring into this apartment, too many pieces to consider.

Curly misses too many days in the lingering haze of exhaustion and pain. But the more he recovers, the more attention he is able to pay to his surroundings. The more he notices how Anya acts, the almost apologetic way she takes up the space, the uncertainty with which she reaches for things even though she’s done it many times before by now.

A guest, still.

‘Is there something you need?’ Curly types and hits play. Spending most of his time on the couch means he’s got an optimal vantage point to survey the common area.

Startled, Anya lifts her head so fast that she almost rams it into an open cupboard door where she’s quietly rummaging for something almost out of Curly’s field of vision – almost, but not quite.

“Shoot– sorry, I was just looking for… I thought I put my extras here but I can’t find them.”

Distracted, she doesn’t elaborate what the ‘extras’ are, and Curly doesn’t ask. Instead, he types, ‘We could get more?’

“Uh,” Anya says and looks away. The pause stretches as she hugs herself with one arm, the hand of the other half-covering her mouth in a gesture that strikes Curly through the heart with its familiarity. “I’m…Curly, I’m worried about money.”

Curly swallows. He gets it – he worries too. His remaining savings can only get them so far, and it’s not like Pony Express was falling over itself to offer Curly a pension. 

He types, and Anya watches him carefully. ‘I started looking for something. No dice so far, but.’

“Curly, you shouldn’t even be thinking about it, you’ve got a lot on your plate!” Anya protests, looking deeply alarmed. “No, no. I’ll figure something out. You’re letting me live here, I want to contribute–”

Curly lets Anya rant at him, but it doesn’t exactly change his mind. As if she doesn’t have enough on her plate either. As if she shouldn’t be resting and recovering just as much as she is telling Curly to.

As if he doesn’t keep finding her camped out in the living area with the telly on low, morning after morning, even after he stops occupying the couch and moves properly to his bedroom to give her more space. As if they don’t start meeting there night after night anyway, on that same couch, with mugs of tea or coffee and a resigned sort of understanding mirrored in their eyes even when she can’t bear sitting close to another person.

Their household is nothing but two deeply, deeply broken people, but life doesn’t slow down just for them, and bills don’t stop coming. And Anya has been picking up Curly’s slack for too long.

***

Curly can’t do much in this new life he has, not the way he currently is, not compared to what he was used to in his old body. But his past life is not simply dead and gone, no matter how much it may seem this way… No matter how much he wants it to be. He still has his knowledge, his expertise, his experience. They have to be worth something.

They are worth exactly bugger-all, as it turns out, without official affiliation and certification. Curly always had it easy, could walk into almost any door he wanted with a smile and a quip and charm everyone into giving him something to do. Always had the right thing to say or the right paper to show. Now, the doors keep slamming in his face. It’s…a novelty challenge.

Anya struggles too, he sees. Just like Curly, she’s got no family to speak of – Curly remembers the emergency contact in her file being the head of HR at the clinic where she did her nursing courses before Pony Express – and so he isn’t surprised to see her mostly stick around the house at first. When she starts braving grocery runs, she keeps them short too, and Curly gets it – he can’t even stomach the idea of being outside, in broad daylight, sharing space with strangers. He offers to have their groceries delivered, but Anya stubbornly shakes her head and keeps going out, citing ‘exposure therapy’.

But now, in the full swing of trying to find employment, she starts going out more and more. Interviews, trial days, test runs that leave her coming home exhausted and drawn after long hours of absence. Curly, on his side, dives into the Internet for the same reasons. Luckily, these days, it’s almost as if no one cares to call, so instead Curly starts chat after chat with headhunters and throws himself into them.

***

‘You look like a promising candidate for our Associate Expert position, but unfortunately, we’re going in a different direction right now. Thank you for your interest.’

‘May I ask why, so that I could improve my chances in the future?’

‘Your request has returned no results. If you would like to know more about opportunities at Comet Express, please return to the main menu.’

CometExpress_14 has disconnected from the chat. 

***

“It’s so stupid, I don’t know what I was thinking,” Anya rambles, hands framing her face like a shield or maybe a screen. “Don’t know how I forgot that PE nursing courses are only good for PE and literally nowhere else. I think I heard the HR lady laugh when I was leaving.”

Curly is having a bad pain day. Despite having reached the allotted concentration of painkillers in his bloodstream, his whole body is burning where he’s sitting on the couch next to Anya. Staying upright is hard, speaking is straight up impossible, trying to wear his prosthetics is agony incarnate. Even his thoughts feel as if they are made of burning snakes as they slither around inside his cranium.

Still, feverish and hazy, Curly slouches over and, as gently as he can manage, bumps Anya’s hunched shoulder with his own. Surprised, Anya lowers her hands and looks at him. After a second of hesitation, Curly presses the side of his forearm to Anya’s knee.

He hesitates a lot about things like this. He’s always been a physically affectionate person – even when locked into the tight guidelines of authority, he would clap people on the shoulders, nudge them with his elbows, give out fist bumps and high fives. Now, all of it is gone, locking him deeper inside, and it feels almost intrusive to offer touch in such a way when it isn’t a ‘body’ as much as it is ‘flesh’, and having fake skin haphazardly draped over it doesn’t exactly help make it more palatable.

Still, Anya smiles and places her hand on his forearm, on the edge of the protective sleeve where his pocked, wrinkled skin can feel the warmth.

“But that’s okay, right? I don’t need to be a nurse. I can do other things. Might even get better pay,” she huffs a laugh. “We all know how much it sucks there anyway.”

***

‘Dear Applicant, 

As your Application has failed to contain a legible copy of certification in accordance with our guidelines , it has been automatically discarded. Please make sure your documents package is complete and apply again.

Kind regards,

ARK Logistics’ 

‘Dear Applicant, 

Thank you for your interest in our Coolant Systems Consultant position. As our system has failed to locate the .pciple file in your application form, it has been automatically removed from the pool. Please resubmit the form with all files attached.

If you do not have the PCIPLE Certification or it has expired, our Center offers relevant three year courses. To inquire about the costs and apply, please visit our website . 

Kindest regards,

Lunar School of Aviation Technology

This message has been sent automatically. Please do not reply to it.’ 

‘Dear Applicant,

Thank you for your application. Unfortunately, our automatic analysis system has recognized that you are overqualified for this position, and we had to remove you from the list of candidates. For positions that better match your qualifications, please consult %void%.

Kind regards,

%Company_name%’

***

“...And then I just– I’m not sure, I don’t think I quite fainted, but– and yeah, I guess I caught it on something because then there was blood and all the shouting, and I don’t know really, we disinfected it really well because, you know, the production floor, can’t contaminate anything. So this isn’t really necessary, it’s not bleeding that much anymore.”

Curly looks up at Anya and gives her as meaningful a stare as he can muster. “Hold still, ‘lease,” he tells her.

Anya, to her credit, stops protesting. She’s holding her left hand between them, perched on the edge of the bathtub with Curly parked next to it in the narrow space. He doesn’t have her nursing skills, and his cheap prosthetics are nothing compared to human hands, but when he wheeled out to the kitchen and found her fumbling the bandages and leaving pink droplets everywhere, he couldn’t just leave her to fend for herself. 

Curly presses down slightly on the gauze to hold it in place. Anya’s fingers flex around his in response, and for a moment it’s almost as if he can feel them.

“Sorry,” he murmurs. “Alnost there.” He thinks over her words, but whichever he ends up going with, he can’t avoid mangling them. “So…Not a good, uh…o-shon, then?”

“Yeah no, I don’t think they’ll want me back after this,” Anya lowers her head with a shrug. “No meat packing plant epidemics technician job for this girl. I’m just not…I don’t know, I guess I’m not used to so much blood, still.”

Curly starts a little, and Anya curls her fingers over the bandage when it threatens to slip from his hand.

“Shit, sorry,” she says, her eyes guilty. “Didn’t mean to…”

Curly shakes his head and refocuses on the task. They never mean these reminders, but they jumpscare them anyway. There’s no avoiding them. He’d be a fool to hold it against Anya.

“Here,” he murmurs after tightening the knot and holding the ends of the bandage for Anya to snip off. 

She takes the loose ends before Curly drops them, and turns her bandaged hand to loosely hold his, and Curly wishes so viscerally that he could trick his brain into feeling this too.

***

‘I’m not gonna lie, the pay isn’t great at first, but once you get some seniority it’s not that bad. And the team is good. So if you want, I’ll forward your stuff to the next guy in the pecking order.’

‘Cheers, I’d appreciate that. Honestly, I’m just happy to talk to a human. You’ve no idea how tired I am of running into AI everywhere.’

‘Preach, brother. Also just making sure you know this, the next step is in person.’

‘I was under the impression that this is a remote position?’

‘Must be some kind of mistake in the app, but no, it’s all office. Gotta keep the team together, or the whole magazine falls apart!’ 

‘Hold on, I’m looking at your name again.’

‘Aren’t you that guy? The one who crashed his ship and killed his crew? You were the sole survivor, right?’ 

‘No’

‘No, I was not.’

‘Really? No way, I remember, we were talking about writing something about it recently! You’re from P.E., right?’ 

Applicant_5403 has left the chat. 

***

‘Curly, are you there?’

‘sorry for texting you, aer you still up?’

‘I am, what’s wrong?’

‘nothing, i just might be later than i said i would. i’m not sure’

‘What’s up?’

‘so i finished the trial shift and i was walking home from the supermarket but’

‘i thought i saw someone follow me adn now i’m in the 24h cafe half a block away’

‘but i think it was takeout delivery so i just feel silly’

‘Do you want me to call the police?’

‘nono i told you it was just a delivery man’

‘A cab, then?’

‘no, please, it’s not a big deal, and i’m like, ten minutes away. i’ll just sit here for a bit and then come over.’

‘I’ve got this’

‘just went silly for a moment’

‘sorry for worrying you’

‘Okay, that’s okay.’

‘I’m not sleeping yet, I’ll be up when you get back.’

‘thank you’

‘is it okay if i call you while i walk?’

‘you don’t have to talk’

‘Call whenever.’

‘I’ll be there.’

***

Put shortly, it’s really fucking hard.

***

But they keep at it. Together. They have to.

After what they had to go through? They won’t be deterred by some silly little unemployment.

***

Curly is wrenched from his sleep, pulled between the sticky tendrils of a nightmare and something much more urgent. He stares at the ceiling of his room as he catches his breath, trying to collect himself, figure out what woke him up. And then he hears it again, muffled through the door but undeniably there, a thin sound of distress.

Sleep-heavy and uncoordinated, Curly pulls his hands from their charging station and gets them on. He maneuvers himself into the wheelchair, knocking his elbow into the armrest in the process, but hardly notices the stinging trill of pain, hurrying to get out of the room.

Anya is not on the couch, and the telly is off. They haven’t been camping out here as often anymore, but not finding her there still gives Curly pause.

He stops in his tracks and listens uncertainly in the short hallway. The closed door to Anya’s room is a shut portal. Should he…go back? It would be a bad idea to come in, surely. If she wanted to be disturbed, she’d be in the living area…right? Besides, it’s probably locked anyway…

Curly hears it again, the strangled sob, and his tentatively made up mind is in disarray again. He comes closer and raises his hand to knock lightly on the door.

“...Anya? Are you okay?” he calls and stills to listen, but there is only the ringing silence. 

A cry tears through it. The door is unlocked when Curly, moved by alarm, gives it a push. There is just enough light to make out Anya’s form under the blankets, desperate, mewling sounds escaping her as she tosses.

Heart in his throat, Curly rolls up to her bedside and, after an agonising moment of hesitation, reaches out to touch her upper arm.

Anya wakes with a gasp, shoving herself away from him and to the wall. Even in the near-dark, Curly sees how wide her eyes are against the startling paleness of her face.

“Anya!” he calls again, leaning back in his seat, lifting his hands in a placating gesture as he hurries to leave her personal space. Remembering too late that he might not be a comforting sight. “You’re okay. Sorry, I heard– I heard you.”

Anya sits up properly while he talks, pulling her knees up to her chest, and then she lets out a sob and all but launches herself at him, winding her arms around his shoulders.

“Sorry– I’m sorry if I woke you up,” she hiccups into his shirt. Her accent is thick with sleep, making her roll her r’s, hardening the w into a v. 

Curly carefully, haltingly puts his arms around Anya in turn. She’s wearing a shirt with long sleeves, so at least the metal and the plastic and the silicone of the prosthetics don’t shock her skin with cold.

Curly shakes his head, making unintelligible consoling noises. It can’t be comfortable for Anya, leaning over him like this, but she doesn’t move from the spot. She’s holding him a little too tight for comfort, his body tender from sleep, but Curly only grits his teeth and keeps rubbing her quaking back.

“Do you ‘ant to talk about it?” he asks haltingly. 

“I’m…I didn’t remember very well the days I spent ah– alone on the Tulpar,”  Anya speaks eventually, her voice thick with tears. “At first. Then it– then it came back, all the– the. The table and the blood…and them…” 

Curly’s spine runs cold with dread. 

“I thought…I thought you were dead too,” Anya sniffles. “There was…on the plates…” she swallows as if to suppress a gag, and Curly suddenly knows what she’s referring to. His arms loosen around her a fraction to let her pull away, but she only holds him tighter. “When I found you, I…I wanted to wake you, Curly, just to know if you were alive in there, that he didn’t just… I knew it would be cruel, but I felt so alone…”

Anya dissolves into tears again. Curly’s eye stings as well, and he dares to rest the side of his head on top of Anya’s, enclosing her as much as he can before he even realises he’s doing it.

“I didn’t know why I was alive,” Anya continues after a long pause, her voice stuttering into a whisper. “I felt so awful, and I just didn’t know what it was all for. But then…it’s like…”

She trails off. Curly can feel her rubbing the fabric of his shirt between her fingers, and he makes a questioning noise.

“It’s like this weird calm descended. Like…fatalism, or something. I was there, and everyone was gone, and you…you were still alive too, at least I hoped you were. Weird, right,” Anya lets out a wet laugh. “Weird that out of everyone, it was us, you know? The last people you’d expect…”

She shifts one arm so she can reach around Curly’s neck and wipe her face. “So I…had nothing better to do, I guess. Than to try. We were so busy with– with getting into the cargo hold, with other things that didn’t matter at all in the end, but we never tried, really tried, to fix our signal, did we? Or maybe Swansea tried but got distracted… I don’t know, I…wasn’t exactly paying attention,” she lets out a humourless laugh, the breath of it warm on Curly’s collar bone. “You’d have tried, I think… I guess maybe we were all waiting for– for him to step up, tell us what to do… I don’t even know why.”

Anya pulls away, sitting back on the bed, and pulls the blanket over her lap. She rubs the heel of her palm over her eyes and lets out a whooshing sigh.

“You did it,” Curly murmurs as a memory from the Spirit struggles to the surface. He was told, wasn’t he? “You ‘ere the reason they ‘ound us.”

Anya shrugs. A corner of her mouth lifts, though she still won’t meet his eye. “I guess I just had to try. I had nothing better to do anyway. And– I’d tried…” she finally glances at him, her eyes dark with tears. “I’m sorry, Curly, I tried so hard to help you, I really did…” 

Curly immediately misses being able to hold her, to offer at least something to console.

“You did,” he reaches for her before he realises it, and Anya folds his unfeeling hand between both of hers. “You sa’ed me. You sa’ed ‘oth o’ us.”

Smart, wonderful Anya. So horribly, criminally underestimated. Making it, despite it all.

Anya offers him a watery smile. “I guess I just couldn’t let all my hard work go to waste, huh,” she says and wipes her face again. A deep, shuddering sigh escapes her. “Sorry… It just…jumped me.”

Curly shakes his head again to hopefully convey that she’s got nothing to apologise for. At the very least, he owes her for all the times she was there to soothe him.

He owes her a lot.

Silence descends on them, with the slightly awkward tinge of ‘we’ve both just cried and don’t know how to proceed from here’. Curly suddenly feels jarringly out of place in Anya’s room.

Still, she holds his hand.

“I think…” she says and sniffles. “I think I’m gonna stay up for a bit. If you want to go back to bed though…”

Curly squeezes her hand and retrieves his own. “I’ll ‘ut the kettle on,” he tells her and turns the wheelchair around.

They end up out in the living area again, a late night show playing on the telly that is just stupid enough not to need any brainpower to watch and just engaging enough to somewhat keep their attention. Curly rolls over to the couch with a tray with two mugs balanced on his knees and shuffles onto the cushions when Anya takes the tray.

She waits for him to settle before handing him his mug, waiting to make sure his grip is secure. Her own mug in hand, she pulls an afghan over their laps and shifts close enough to make the best use of the fabric. Anya’s warmth is comforting where they are pressed together, shoulder to hip to knee, and when Curly eventually teeters on the edge of sleep he can feel Anya pluck the empty mug from his lap, gently pull his hands off so he doesn’t end up sleeping in them, and settle in as well.

When Curly wakes up a few hours later, still in the early morning grey, he finds himself having slouched sideways, followed by Anya who is now lying half on top of him with an arm around his waist. His legs have fallen asleep and are going to be a bitch to deal with later, but right now he only carefully pets her hair with the underside of his forearm, and chances resting it around her shoulders, and passes out again.

***

Just about when Curly is ready to– well, not to give up, but to enter some yet-undiscovered dimension of despair – he is finally thrown a bone.

It’s nothing spectacular, in the grand scheme of things. A publishing house specialising in tech literature outsources its copyediting – and for once, all Curly needs to qualify is do a test run of an excerpt. The topic is Civilian Launch Systems, something Curly knows well from experience alone, and soon enough he is given an addendum to a pre-flight checks manual for a new vessel to turn into something if not exactly engaging, then at least comprehensible the way AI editors continuously fail to do.

To his alarm and embarrassment, it takes Curly over an hour of exhausting work to get through the first page. No matter how many times he rereads the paragraph, its meaning dissolves before he can grasp it, and it doesn’t even have anything to do with how much his eyesight has tanked from desiccation. 

“Oh, is this– I think I heard about them releasing a new ship, is this for the Dragonfly?” Anya asks, scrolling up to the top of the file, but the title has been replaced by a string of numbers. Curly probably isn’t supposed to be showing it to her. Anya’s leaning on the edge of the desk in front of the computer, a laundry basket with her work uniform perched on one hip.

Curly leans back in his chair, quietly stunned. He didn’t even retain that it was a Dragonfly. 

‘I think my brain is broken,’ Curly pushes himself forward again and types right in the file comments. He let out a laugh as he does, though he can’t help the twinge of concern. He knows how to read, obviously, he’s never had trouble with it… And yeah, recovery has made him a bit loopy, but it’s going away, right?

Right?

“You are worried,” Anya notes and straightens up, turning to give him her full attention, and something in Curly reels away from it. He doesn’t want it to be a big deal. Talking about it makes it feel like a big deal.

Curly considers what to type. ‘No? I mean, a little, but,’ he exhales softly through his teeth, ‘I suppose I’m kind of foggy? Like I can’t wake up properly. I remember it being like this when I was on meds. Now it comes and goes, but it seems like it chooses to come at the most inopportune moments,’ he lets a note of sarcasm bleed through in the way he hits the keys and gestures at the text, ‘page 1 of 53’ glaring at him at the bottom.

Anya frowns and chews on her cheek as she looks between Curly and the screen. “To be quite fair, this is very boring,” she concedes with a tilt of her head. “It could still be a lingering side effect of the strain your body was under for such a prolonged period of time, or maybe even the cryostasis…” she muses, rubbing her chin. “Do you want to monitor it? Or go get checked up?”

Curly slowly shakes his head. ‘No. If they didn’t find anything wrong with my brain when I was near hypoxia, I doubt they will at this point. Maybe it’s just remembering that I’m deathly allergic to manuals.’ 

Anya lets out a soft laugh and ruffles Curly’s hair. It’s been, miraculously, growing back again, surviving follicles cloned and embedded into his new scalp. Its strands are thin and grey, nothing like the mane he used to have, but Anya says grey looks good on him. Makes him look ‘distinguished’, though Curly physically cannot fathom what he is being distinguished from. 

Technically, he should have a different nickname now, but ‘Straighty’ just sounds weird.

“Well, I’ll make sure to bring you your allergy medication once I load this,” Anya says, patting him for good measure and indicating the laundry basket. “Will tea do?”

Curly nods emphatically. ‘Tea, yes, you’re my angel!’ 

Anya giggles and curtsies jokingly and walks away, front door closing behind her with a soft click as she heads down to the basement. Curly watches the cursor blink and, with some regret, hits ‘delete’ on all recently added comments. All joy successfully removed from the file, he gets back to his excruciating work. 

***

Slowly, they manage to settle into a routine. Anya works her shifts and takes Curly to his PT appointments and does most of the house chores; Curly edits mindless, senseless walls of words and cooks and takes a million naps in between the tasks.

There is a rhythm to it, a certain flair of predictability that eternally teeters on the line between safety and a bored rut. A dynamic balance that is still upset when random variables are introduced: when Anya is asked to do overtime to cover for a sick coworker and is too frazzled to sleep, waking up almost too late the next day for Curly’s appointment, or when Curly gets into the habit of ignoring the buildup of pain until he spends the whole day near catatonic with it and almost scares Anya into a panic attack when she comes back to a too-quiet home.

Still, it is a balance. It holds up well enough, through sleepless nights and pain management and the leitmotif of taking in the shadows at the edge of the vision, and acknowledging them, and going about their day anyway.

***

That balance is put under its hardest test yet the day the lawyer knocks on their door. She is young and assertive in a way Curly can’t describe as anything but ‘plucky’, and swears up and down they’ve got a case against Pony Express, and a solid one enough that she is ready to go to bat for it. 

Curly isn’t exactly convinced, even though he still lets her in and makes everyone a cuppa as she describes the lay of the judiciary land to him and Anya. After all, Curly knows Pony Express – knows the way they work, their policies, their shitty contracts. 

Most of all, he is exhausted. He and Anya survived the unsurvivable, and invoking the company, dragging it back into their lives feels like asking for trouble, like questioning the validity of this outcome. Like somehow, somewhere, they will be able to convince the world that there were no survivors at all. 

It’s daft, Curly knows. Daft and illogical. But it pings around his foggy brain until it begins to sound like a certainty.

The lawyer pushes anyway, her features sharpened with what Curly guesses comes from having a bone to pick with a very large dog indeed. “Interns are provided their own cryopods, or not taken on board at all. There’s a trail of you communicating that with the HR, correct?” she pushes. “This will be a starting point, both simple and something they can’t just wave off. Then the insulation foam – I checked in with the manufacturer, it was not supposed to cause such damage, so it was either stored improperly or not tested enough, and that’s on PE as well. Besides, it destroyed, what, three out of the four pods you did have? That is an oversight on its distribution pathways. The case is building itself.”

Curly would be quietly freaked out about the depth of her knowledge, but the lawyer led into all this with the acknowledgement that she read the report that the company’s lawyers have eventually managed to wrangle from Curly. Why on earth it was publicly accessible enough for her to get her hands on, Curly hasn’t the foggiest.

“The medical supplies were very limited too,” Anya speaks softly, hands wrapped around her mug. She purses her lips, “There wasn’t much beyond the most basic first aid for what was a very long trip.”

“See! That’s another point,” the lawyer spreads her hands. Her eyes narrow. “Say, what’s your medical education?”

Anya blinks at her, taken aback. “ Pony Express’s nursing courses,” she says with some wariness.

Curly fears that the only word fit to describe the lawyer’s answering smile would be ‘triumphant’. “That’s perfect! So we will have your expertise, and either they accept it, which means admitting that you were undersupplied, or question it, which means admitting that their own courses don’t yield adequate results. Do you see why they haven’t sued you yet for the crash?” she leans forwards, looking between the two of them. “Because they know you can strike back. And that’s what we can do. Even better – we can get press involved, get you interviews, blow this whole thing wide open…”

Curly flinches, grateful for the facemask to hide behind. He doesn’t want press, he doesn’t…he doesn’t want any of this. They will flay themselves open again, for the whole world this time even, and for what? Even if they have a case, Pony Express will grind them to dust without thinking twice. They might be going down, but it doesn’t mean they won’t cling to what they can still save. She is wrong – they haven’t sued them yet because they don’t care. 

She doesn’t know how it is. Doesn’t know about the shoddy maintenance schedules, the cut corners, the– the shipments of a thousand tons of fucking– paper clips or whatever. Cargo that will not be missed, along with its crew. Cheap and lazy, just like Anya said once.

But Anya doesn’t voice any of that, and when Curly looks her in the eye he finds something steely glinting back, something he recognises.

And, well, let it be known that Curly can learn to avoid making the same mistake of inaction twice. He listens. Just like she’d asked him to.

Curly taps on his tablet to wake it up. Anya has the patience to wait for him to manoeuvre the words out, but now, in front of a stranger, Curly finds himself too apprehensive to try.

Painstakingly, he types and hits the play button. “We can do it, but I don’t think I’m comfortable with cameras.”

“No, listen, it will boost the case so much!” the lawyer protests. “People will see you on national TV and—”

“No TV,” Anya cuts in after a quick glance at Curly. “And no press without warning us. We can do written responses, but if this is as good as you say, we won’t need the live interviews.”

She is decisive and direct the way Curly doesn’t remember her ever being, and with a start he realises the reason when she looks at him again.

***

“We don’t have to do this, you know,” Anya says later, when they are finally left alone. “Especially if she doesn’t think they’ll try to have a go at us. Even the money thing. I have a job now, you’re doing the editing, we’ll figure it out.”

Curly pauses for a moment where he’s wrestling the drawer with pots and pans after getting one out. It’s already full of water and on the stove, ready for pasta-making, but the drawer comes first before Curly rams his wheelchair into it with his shitty depth perception and breaks a wheel or something.

He used to like it in his previous life – making meals for himself during downtime between trips, happy to make something more complex than pressing a button on packets of gelatin. Now, he does it more and more often too, taking over from Anya’s earlier attempts. It gives him a way to practise using his prosthetics, as well as relieve Anya of the need to constantly figure out what to feed them both. There’s enough stress all around as is.

It’s also something to do before Curly starts losing his mind. One would think that so many long haul trips would inoculate a man against cabin fever – and yet, here he is.

Besides, it gives him explicit control over his food. Curly trusts Anya, but it has nothing to do with her. For the longest time, he couldn’t even stomach the smell of raw meat.

Curly thinks over Anya’s words as he carefully cajoles the burner to life. It requires a level of fine motor coordination that he still struggles to re-master. He can feel Anya’s eyes on him where she’s sitting at the kitchen table, but she, mercifully, doesn’t step in to help.

Instead, she is giving him a clear out with the whole lawsuit thing. Even here, even now, showing grace that Curly never earned.

Will he ever learn to wield this grace the same way she does? So that it lifts up and supports rather than– rather than enabling something sinister?

He has to try. He owes her to try. 

“Do, too,” Curly replies. The burner flares on. “For Daisuke, for Swansea.” For you, he almost says. “For us.”

He throws a glance over his shoulder, and Anya nods. “For every poor sod that the company screwed over,” she agrees.

***

Curly barely registers the first session, hopelessly overwhelmed by the sounds, the lights, the people. Even masked up and wearing sunglasses and barely showing any skin, he feels exposed again, every nerve ending rubbed raw by people’s insistent attention.

It’s only a preliminary hearing, something to introduce the two sides of the game, or so Curly understands it, at least. Still, he is called up for a short statement – an excuse more than anything, as he suspects, to let people gawk at him. Look at the captain who’d crashed his ship, look what became of him now. Call it karma or divine retribution or anything else – whatever name you slap on it, he deserves it all. The lawyers of the company make it clear from the beginning: Curly does not fit the archetype of an innocent man, and there must be a reason for it.

After it’s all over, Curly finds a quieter corner in the front lobby of the courthouse, parking himself against the wall to collect his thoughts. It’s while he is sitting there, head in his hands and trying to breathe through the acidic knot in his chest, that Daisuke’s parents approach him.

He vaguely remembers them from the hearing. They sat in the audience, the father’s black-clad shoulder cutting into the vertical line of a white pillar that Curly’s eye kept drifting to when he zoned out from exhaustion. They are both intimidating even in their short stature, stern and severe. Nothing like their son. Despite probably being closer in age to them than him, Curly suddenly feels like a kid standing over the shards of a shattered vase, which is a peculiar and disturbing feeling when the vase is the broken body of their child, entombed in the ship he was supposed to bring home safe.

Everyone on the ship knew within minutes of Daisuke’s arrival that his mum sent him there and he didn’t particularly want to go, even though he was quick to find the best in the situation and then some. Now, Curly looks at his mother’s face and finds the cracks, held together only by the tense severity of her expression. His heart gains another crack in sympathy.

“Daisuke sent us a few messages back before you left the coverage,” Daisuke’s mother speaks without preamble. “He spoke kindly of you.”

“We…It ‘as a good team,” Curly says slowly. Even though his statement was short – and meticulously edited by their lawyer beforehand – getting through it left him winded, his face sore from tension.

She shakes her head, “I meant you, Captain.” A derisive scowl curls her mouth, “These fools can try to paint you guilty all they want. Anyone with half a brain wrinkle can see you didn’t crash the ship. But that’s what they are doing — focusing on the irrelevant part, blowing smoke in everyone’s eyes.”

“Thank you,” Curly manages past the dark, swirling pool of sorrow and guilt and— and gratitude for believing what he said on the stand. It would be so easy to blame the survivor — he knows that so very intimately.

In the corner of his eye, among the milling people, Curly spots Anya talking with an old woman and two men about Daisuke’s age. She seems to be doing a better job with Swansea’s family than he is with Daisuke’s. Swansea’s widow is holding her hands, their sons watching her face with sharp attention.

How strange, the two of them, ambassadors of the dead to the ones left behind.

“They won’t make it easy on you. If they’re going down, there’s nothing to lose,” Daisuke’s father says, wrenching Curly’s attention back to them. Fuck, he doesn’t even know their names — they never introduced themselves, and Daisuke only ever called them ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’.

Curly nods. “I know,” he says. What else is there to say?

“Your lawyer seems like she knows what she’s doing. How much is her contract?

“It’s, ah, a ‘ro bono situation, so we just hope to share with her whatever spare change we might get out of it.” It’s not untrue, and saves Curly the embarrassment of admitting that they can’t afford the very lawyer currently keeping the case from turning against them. He can’t really afford to drown in guilt over it right now either. “I think she’s got her own grievances to sort with the co’pany.”

The man nods. “I’ll go find her,” he tells his wife, and pauses his gaze on Curly for a moment in what Curly belatedly realises is a farewell, and strides off.

“We’ll bankroll it,” Daisuke’s mother explains when Curly shoots her a helpless look. “Whatever expenses the case needs. Because it will need a lot, I think. And you have enough to worry about as is, with these…vultures.”

“Please, I’m sure that will not be…” Curly tries to argue but she gives him a cold, knowing stare. “…Thank you.”

“We are doing it for our son,” she says, her eyes downcast though the hard line of her mouth doesn’t bend.

The son they haven’t even spoken about in the hearing yet, not really, even though his presence on the ship, sharply contrasted against the absence of the cryopod, is the catalyst of their case.

“Of course.”

They are silent for a few long seconds until Curly can’t keep it in any longer.

“The ‘od I was in— the last one that was still functioning,” the words leave him in a rush, burning, painful. “Swansea, our engineer, I think he was keeping it safe for Daisuke. It should’ve been him in there. I’m sorry.”

Daisuke’s mother looks at him again, and her expression is an open wound. “He shouldn’t have been there to begin with,” she says, her voice strangled. Curly, in horror, watches more cracks appear, but she turns and leaves before he can hope to find any words that would measure up against it.

***

—> Let us go over the chain of events again. You were in the med bay when the crash happened, correct?

Yes. I ran to the cockpit.

—> Why the cockpit? You said the med bay sustained insulation damage, but surely the cockpit wasn’t the only safe space you could think of?

Nowhere was safe, really. And I thought— if anyone knew what happened and what to do now, it would be the captain or the co-pilot.

—> Did you have reason to suspect that either of them crashed the ship?

…No. Not at that point.

—> What did you find when you arrived?

I found both of them. Curly, he— he was… The control panel got badly damaged in the crash, and the foam was— nearly encasing him. I guess he was leaning over the panel when it deployed, so now— it lifted him off the ground when it expanded.

—> And [CO-PILOT]?

He was standing there.

—> Just standing?

Yes.

—> Just standing, watching, doing nothing? Did it seem suspicious to you?

<— Objection, compound question! Also relevance: what does this have to do with the line of questioning?

<—> Sustaining the compounding, overruling the relevance. We are reconstructing the full picture.

—> Just the second part, then: did it seem suspicious that [CO-PILOT] was simply standing there instead of helping [CAPTAIN]?

I-I didn’t think so, not in that moment? We were all shocked. From the crash, and…from seeing him that way, I thought anyone would freeze.

—> What happened next?

Swansea arrived just a second after me, we nearly collided in the doorway. He yelled at us to get moving, to get Curly out.

—> Was there a reason for his urgency? In the chemical attributes of the insulation foam, perhaps?

Well, yes — it is a very aggressive reagent, designed to bond with any surface and material, which under conditions of extreme heat apparently includes…as we found out…um. Human tissues.

—> So the longer [CAPTAIN] stayed there, the more damage the foam would do, correct?

No, not exactly— the reaction goes fast, and it has completed by then. It’s more that…um… [unintelligible]

—> Please speak up.

It’s more that— his face was completely encased. We could tell he was alive from the, the noises and the way he…twitched… Excuse me, I need a moment.

—> Of course.

…

—> Whenever you’re ready.

…We could tell he was alive, but he was at risk for asphyxiation if we didn’t free him quickly. So Swansea snapped at us and we got to work. Um…

—> Yes?

Is it necessary for me to talk about how that went?

—> Not at the moment. The court has the medical report from the documents you brought over to the Spirit, so we are aware of the amputations you had to carry out to get him out.

…Okay.

—> So, to reiterate, [CO-PILOT] watched [CAPTAIN] be in peril and unable to breathe but only acted when told directly, is that correct?

…Yes. I believe so.

—> You did not find it suspicious?

I was just focusing on doing my job. There was so much to do with such limited supplies, and Curly, he was…

—> He was what?

…He was begging for death.

***

“I don’t know how I didn’t see it from the very beginning.”

Curly lifts his head from where he’s slumped in a somewhat sitting position in front of the couch. He hasn’t sat on the floor in ages and felt like giving it a try. In one word: satisfactory. Curly fears the couch will never recover from his indent otherwise, at this rate. “See what?” he asks, though he half suspects it to have something to do with the case.

It’s almost all they talk about, these days. It has embedded itself into their lives like an infection, like a parasitic growth. Curly already can’t wait for it to be fucking over – but he also knows that it’s all part of the game. The sooner they show exhaustion, the sooner the other side will push.

Anya has finally reached some sort of turning point and gone to therapy — and Curly wonders how much of it is spent talking about the case as well. 

“Just, the way Jimmy was…” Anya fidgets with her hands where she’s tucked into her corner on the couch. “Admittedly, I was avoiding him as much as I could, and everyone was stressed all the time which skewed my impression even further, but… If I paid better attention to how he was with others and not just me, I would’ve spotted it sooner.”

Oh. That.

Curly frowns at the telly which is still quietly chirping away – they’ve been going through archives of Animal Planet – but Anya has the remote, so he just tips his head back onto the cushion so he can see her better. “I can’t say I remember the crash very well,” which is…oh god, probably for the best, “‘ut you really don’t think it was shock.”

“Knowing all that we know now, do you…genuinely believe that he wasn’t just waiting for you to die?” Anya meets his eye with a wince. Her voice is uncertain as she speaks it all into existence. “So he could tie up the loose ends, keep you from telling everyone you didn’t actually do it?”

“He was my friend since college. I knew him for years, and…” Curly’s shoulders sag. “I only wish I could answer ‘no’ with any certainty.”

He’s had ample opportunity since then. To…to finish the job. Curly was completely defenseless, entirely dependent on others, mindless with pain. It would be so, so laughingly easy to finish him — and with how much effort, on the contrary, Anya was making to keep him alive, nobody would be suspicious or even particularly surprised if they found him dead.

But maybe, once the adrenaline rush of the incident passed, Jimmy couldn’t quite find the courage to do it — or maybe Curly was more important to him as someone to witness. Someone to confess to.

“Was he ever…did he…”

Curly’s heart rate picks up when he realises what she is asking. “No! At least…” he deflates. “I don’t know. I ne’er heard of anyone coming forward, but it doesn’t mean anything, does it…”

Curly wishes he could say that he would do something about Jimmy if he ever found out, but they both know better. Curly could hate Jimmy’s attitude and actions, but at the end of the day he always believed in the best of him. In his fucking ‘potential’, not even clocking how condescending it must have sounded to Jimmy, how patronising. Fat load of good it’s done Curly — and everyone around their fucked up little relationship. 

Curly covers his face with his hands, breathes into them. Shame sits astringent and heavy in the back of his throat.

“It’s…not a bad thing, necessarily — believing in the good in people,” Anya’s voice reaches him as if through water. “I’m much the same way… It’s just that sometimes that faith is betrayed. Taken advantage of.”

Curly shakes his head. “I don’t want to be absolved of my part in it.”

“Which isn’t what I’m doing,” Anya points out. “I just don’t want you to take on the blame for his actions too.” Her breath shudders as it escapes her. “He despised me, but was violent towards you. I knew he was. I shouldn’t have ever left him alone with you.”

“Neither should I.”

***

Insanely, they win the case.

Curly does end up in court a lot more than he’d ever want, and soon enough someone manages to snap a picture of him. When, later the same week, he is scrolling through news and gets jumpscared by the image of his own covered face above bowed shoulders, he jerks so hard he nearly flings the tablet away.

There are too many people, too many voices, too many lights. Someone is always jumping Curly on his blind side unless Anya is there to guard the approach. By the end of each day, his body spasms from exhaustion, tension struggling to bleed out of it.

He hates it. A lot. But as much as he does, Anya’s presence by his side makes it much more bearable. She insists on covering him up as much as possible, citing risks of re-infection from exposure to a full room, and intercepts people wanting to talk to him, and steers him around when he grows too drained to deal with his wheelchair. She must be exhausted too, but every time Curly breathes his tired gratitude she only gives him that small, sad smile.

The company’s lawyers are merciless with the calculated, deliberate violence of the corporate. They demand Curly’s presence, they dissect his every word on the stand and claim half of them as incomprehensible, they bring up the crash again and again and drill both of them session after session for a month before finally moving on to the next topic. Eager, Curly knows, to find some sort of inconsistency in his and Anya’s stories, but they simply keep repeating the truth.

The only thing they don’t speak of is Anya’s assault. Anya doesn’t bring it up, and there is no information on her pregnancy or lack thereof in the Spirit’s medical files, so Curly follows her lead and leaves it out as well. He burns with guilt and shame at the idea of concealing it, but understands, too, that this isn’t about his punishment or atonement. This is about what Anya wants for herself. 

The suit spirals quite out of scope of normal human understanding as more witnesses are involved and some heinous details of past transgressions come out – enough that, in the end, the company folds and goes for payouts, the remnants of its money draining from the cooling carcass. Whatever its board didn’t manage to steal from the shipwreck.

The deceased are not included in the cut, but Curly and Anya send money to the families of Swansea and Daisuke from their own anyway. It’s not enough — nothing will ever be enough, but they decide on it in unison, without trying to feel for the invisible line in the ledger.

What remains is enough to pay their bills for a while — or for a bit, if some kind of a bigger project comes along.

***

“Sooo, what do you think?” Anya asks. She’s obviously trying to be patient with him, but Curly can practically hear her vibrating in her chair.

Curly scans the shared file again. Everything is written out so meticulously, laid out in a structure that betrays the amount of attention and thought that went into compiling the whole thing. Curly is adept by now at deciphering Anya’s digital shorthand, but there isn’t a single sighting of it. Everything is spelled out in full, and in great detail.

“This is incredi’ly thorough,” he says. Today is a ‘talking hard’ day, but his mind is so busy trying to comprehend the enormity of what he’s just read, he forgets to bring up his trusted text to speech anyway.

“Yeah, well, I had time to do my due research,” Anya lifts her sharp shoulders and lets them drop again. She’s fidgeting with her fingers. “And the charts, did you see the charts?”

“I did,” Curly confirms, scrolling down — there’s an addendum, for god’s sake — to the screenshots cropped from what seems to be at least half a dozen of articles. “You— you think it could work?”

”Mhm!” Anya leans towards his side of the table and cranes her neck so that she can see the screen. Curly turns it to make it easier, and she brings up the index — she made an index — and tabs over to the last part. “And here, look, this clinic — it’s a bit of a drive, but I already called them and they can absolutely take you in for eval, like, next week if you want to.” Anya lets out a soft, giddy laugh. “Isn’t it amazing? I thought too much time has passed, neural tissue degeneration and all that, but apparently half the team that wrote — um, where is it — these two articles,” she scrolls to demonstrate; Carly’s vision blurs with graphs, “they work there too, and according to them it’s absolutely worth checking at the very least…”

It takes Curly a few seconds to catch up and realise that Anya’s chatter has trailed off, slowed down by uncertainty creeping into her voice.

”You don’t…” she begins, shifting in her seat. “You don’t look happy, is it— should I not have? I didn’t share any of your files, even your name…I’m sorry, I should’ve asked anyway, I just thought… I wanted to surprise you. It’s dumb, this is dumb.”

”No, no no,” Curly hurries to say, putting the tablet down and reaching for her before she retreats too deep into herself. “Anya, this is a’azing, seriously. Thank you.”

The tablet lies before them, the open tab showing schematics for cybernetic ports — the type that gets embedded into the body and acts as a link and a translator between it and the robotic limb. 

Cybernetics — something Curly didn’t dare even consider. Something way out of league for mangled ex-pilots of Pony Express. 

But Anya has done the math too, and it checks out. Everything checks out. It’s a risk, still — there are only so many surgeries a human body can handle, and Curly feels like he’s dangling way over the cliff by now — but it isn’t defaulted to being out of his reach anymore.

“But you don’t look happy,” Anya repeats. Her mouth is curved downwards, but she still holds his hand, so Curly counts it as a win.

”Sorry, sorry,” Curly laughs, but Anya only looks confused. “There’s just, you see, something I was looking into as well…”

Anya tips her head, but Curly divulges nothing else as he busies himself with the tablet again, retrieving his own compilation. Once it loads, he slides the tablet to Anya. The ginger way in which she picks it up reminds him, sharp and unbidden, of that one time someone forgot their leftovers in the Tulpar’s communal fridge, and Anya was the unfortunate soul to fish out the suspicious bag from the back of it.

And then Curly gets to be the one waiting impatiently for her to finish reading, and he would be inclined to think that she’s messing with him on purpose, but the way her eyes slowly widen as she scrolls through an, admittedly, much shorter file, tells him otherwise.

“Medical school,” Anya says, her voice doing a weird little jump in the middle. She lifts her eyes, eyebrows pinched. “Curly…?”

”It’s something you want, right? I re…” Curly catches himself. He’s gotten used to maneuvering speech by now, but still doesn’t feel quite brave enough to try saying ‘remember’. “On the ship, you said, ‘Pony Express is only until—’”

“—Until I scrounge up enough for real school, yeah…” Anya finishes for him, looking lost, but colour is already rising to her cheeks. “No, I can’t do this, this is your money too…”

“Our money,” Curly points out, raising an eyebrow. “You did suggest using most of it to turn me into a cyborg just now. I only found an o’jectively better use.”

“But it’s your body…”

“Which is perfectly ‘unctional,” Curly interrupts, proud of himself for almost not stumbling over anything. Anya quirks a pointed brow, and he rolls his eye with a laugh. “This is your dream. Your future. It’s more important.” A life for a life.

“You are important,” Anya blurts out, and her eyes widen. “What I mean is— med school and I, we, uh…we have a history,” she says with a grimace. “I don’t think I’m quite…cut out for it.”

“You’re having a laugh,” Curly can’t help the scoff that escapes him. Anya, not cut out for med school? With how many textbooks he’s always seen her squirreling away on the ship — and turned a blind eye to even when it teetered way too close to weight limits on personal items — he doesn’t believe it for a second. “I can’t think of anything you’re cut out for more.” 

Anya links her hands again, rubbing her palm with her thumb. “It’s not that simple…” she murmurs.

Curly watches her face for a long moment, but she doesn’t offer anything else, chewing on her cheek.

Still, it doesn’t read to Curly as outright rejection, and whatever Anya feels is stopping her, they can work with. Who in this world doesn’t have a history?

But for now, he backs off. “Let’s keep thinking about all o’ this, okay? There’s no rush to decide right now,” He proposes. Anya shoots him a suspicious look, and he is sure he isn’t fooling her with this truce.

But, he sees her realise, it also gives her time to convince him. Or so she thinks — Curly has made up his mind about it a long time ago.

***

“I’ve failed eight times so far.”

It takes Curly a moment to process Anya speaking. The fog in his head is almost too thick to wade through yet does nothing to dampen the way every single muscle fibre in his body feels as if it was set on fire.

His physical therapist told him it was normal, but Curly remains skeptical. This can’t be normal. In no world is this normal.

“…Huh?” He manages.

”Med school. I failed eight times,” Anya repeats in a sullen voice. She lifts one of the many tea towels laid out over Curly’s body in a careful patchwork and soaks it in the small tub of hot water at her feet. If Curly had his faculties, he would cry from the blessed warmth that follows when she wrings it and puts it back on his chest.

For just once in his life, Curly is thankful that he can’t move his eyelid, but Anya still sees his eyebrows jump.

“Yeah, I know, ha-ha, what kind of loser fails eight times…” she says bitterly, but Curly is already shaking his head.

“What on earth happened?” he asks. At her deadpan stare, he elaborates, “Obviss…Obviously it’s not your intellect. Nobody makes this many…attempts…and fails each one just by not being smart enough. You either…get in or try elsewhere.”

He speaks slowly, haltingly, trying hard not to slur his words even as the sound of his own voice feels like irons hammered into his skull.

“You’d think,” Anya sighs. Something must show in Curly’s face because she speaks softer now too. “It just…kept not working out. Dumb decisions and other things.”

Ah, so here it comes, the history. “Care to share?” Curly prompts. Anya is sitting on a chair just out of his very limited reach, but Curly shifts an arm anyway.

“You don’t wanna hear it, it’s boring,” Anya protests.

“I’ll play the bad pain day card, don’t think I won’t,” Curly warns her. He’s joking — mostly — and Anya knows that, but they also both know that he isn’t above committing to the bit.

“Fine, fine, just please don’t move,” Anya rolls her eyes and fixes the damp towels where they have slipped off his shoulder. 

It would be so much easier to just run a hot bath and dunk him there, but Curly struggles being in an enclosed space like that for too long now. No matter how hot the water runs, he always feels too cold.

He’s still able to shower without having a meltdown, obviously, but not when he is in too much pain to sit up.

“Let’s see… First year, I was fresh out of school, and the week of the entrance exam, my wisdom teeth finally decided to show,” Anya explains and grimaces, “I was in so much pain and felt so sick I was scared of throwing up during the exam. I still went, and, well…I totally did.”

“Ouch,” Curly winces.

“Ye-p,” Anya pops the ‘p’. “Second time…I was staying with my boyfriend at the time, studying for the exams, it was— better to do it there than at home.”

“Right. Studying.” 

“Oh hush, you,” Anya rolls her eyes, but the smile she’s fighting tells Curly everything he needs to know — even though it’s quick to fade. “He promised he’d give me a ride — he lived about an hour away, and I didn’t have a car. And thennnn he didn’t.”

“No. What a shit move, I take my teasing back.” Curly risks wiggling a little so he can prop his head up on the armrest of the couch, prompting a tsk from Anya as the towels shift. “Doesn’t get worse than that.”

“Hm, no, it kind of does…” Anya says, and there is a warning pang in Curly’s heart from the tone of her voice alone. “I missed the third attempt entirely because…because a few weeks before that, my mom passed.”

“…I am sorry,” Curly manages. “Anya…”

“It’s okay. She was sick for a long time by then,” Anya’s smile wavers, but she manages to hold it. “I mean, it’s not okay, of course, but…it’s been a while, right. So that’s almost the same thing.”

For a long moment, they sit in silence. Curly curses his brain for not knowing what words to offer her.

He thinks of his own parents, far away, long ago.

Anya checks the water. “I’ll go change it, okay? Be right back,” she throws Curly a quick glance and leaves with the basin.

Exhausted from the pain, harrowed by the brush with Anya’s sorrow, Curly is almost dozing by the time she comes back.

“You’ll love my latest attempt, though,” Anya says as she sets the basin down and carefully picks up the towel from Curly’s forehead. He makes a small noise at the rush of air against his cooling skin, and Anya hums in acknowledgement. Her voice is light again, even if a little wrinkled around the corners, like water that hasn’t settled yet after a brief disturbance. “I actually made it to the exam hall, and I completed everything, and I thought I really, really had it this time. And then they…made a typo in my name.”

“No,” Curly lets out in disbelief. “No, no way this was the reason.”

”Mhm!” Anya raises her hands in indignation. “By the time I got them to actually figure out what happened, we were past all deadlines and they gave the spot to someone else. That’s when I said, screw it, and signed up for Pony Express’s classes.”

Anya wrings the towel like she is trying to strangle it and, after a deep sigh, places it back on Curly’s forehead. She smiles at the relieved noise he makes, smoothing out the edge of the towel with her fingertips, petting his hair back and away from it.

“And you know how it is, the intake is once a year so I spend a whole year waiting, and studying, and working so I can save up enough for all the fees and stuff,” Anya says, waving her hand, “and every year I’m back to square one… And they raise the fees… I don’t know. Maybe it’s a sign that I’m just not meant for it. Not that I was ever much use as a nurse on the Tulpar either…”

It’s physically painful to hear these words. “That is simply not true,” Curly points out quietly.

“…Right, sorry,” Anya mutters, looking chastised. “But— my point kind of stands. I wasn’t some kind of medical genius, I just— knew where to look for info, guessed how best to use our supplies. That’s all.”

Curly stares at her. He’s actually feeling more awake now, brain fog dispelled a little by the wide array of emotions this conversation is wrangling him through. “How do you think this is different? Do you think a ‘real doctor’ would simply know everything without ever reading a book?”

Anya shrugs. “I dunno. Everyone thought I was silly for still trying. That I should just finally do something useful, so. That’s how Pony Express happened.”

It boggles Curly’s mind. There is simply no reality in which this makes sense. That Anya, smart and resourceful and insightful, Anya with a book in her hand and at least three on the waiting list at any given moment, would be ‘silly’ to try and get into school.

School is not for everyone, and not everyone is for school. But Curly can’t think of a single person he knows who would thrive more in a school environment than Anya.

“I need ‘y hands, where are my hands,” Curly mutters to himself, wrenching himself up onto an elbow. Towels tumble off of him in a weird little avalanche, and there is a merciless stab of headache from the sudden movement, but Curly hooks his other arm over the back of the couch and pulls himself up into a sitting position in one mostly fluid and deeply inelegant motion.

“Curly, what are you— you need to rest!” Anya exclaims, catching the towels before they plop to the floor, which means she is too busy to try and catch Curly.

“I’ll get back to resting right after, this is important,” Curly promises, leaning towards the stool with his prosthetics and grabbing one with both of his forearms. He’s practiced this a million times now and wrestles them on with relative ease.

“Okay, here we go. Now, Anya…listen to me very carefully,” Curly says, reaching up to cradle Anya’s face. Stunned, she freezes, still holding fistfuls of towels. “Go to school.”

Anya opens her mouth, protest written clearly across her features, but Curly shushes her. “You read more than anyone I know. You have so much work experience now, you…I’m sorry for bringing it up, but you kept me alive in conditions where anyone would have folded. But you didn’t.”

“I didn’t have a choice,” Anya pinches her eyebrows.

“Of course you did.” Right until she couldn’t bear any of it any longer. “And you stuck with the one you made. Anya, you have determination. You have skill. You have the most magnificent brain, and it was wasted in Pony Express. Do you understand?” Curly shakes her a little. “Go and use it, and I’ll make sure there is no, like, alien invasion on the entrance exam day.”

“Or that I don’t trip and puncture my skull running for the bus,” Anya rolls her eyes.

“Or that you don’t— wait, that happened?”

“Fifth attempt, yeah. I knew by then that head wounds bleed a lot, but not from personal experience. I have a tiny bald spot here to show for it,” she gestures to the side of her head.

They both laugh helplessly. What a cosmic joke, really.

But Curly is ready to kick its arse.

“Okay, you made your point, now take off your hands,” Anya says, tapping his wrist.

“Wow, so forward,” Curly teases but does shift them a little. He was barely holding her in the first place, afraid of putting too much pressure with hands he can’t feel, but now his touch is feather-light in case she wants to move away. “First, agree to give it a try. Say, ‘Yes, Curly, I’ll go to school again’.”

Anya mumbles something with a lopsided smile and ducks her head. It makes her cheeks squish against Curly’s palms.

“Didn’t quite catch that!” He says past the tiny flip of his heart.

“Yes, Curly, I’ll go to school again! I’ll try, at least. I’ll try again,” Anya laughs and circles her fingers around Curly’s wrists. He lets her pull them down, but in the next moment she lets go and hugs him around the shoulders, as tightly as she dares. “And then, when I’m a rich and famous doctor, I’ll get you all the prosthetics you can ever need,” she says, and Curly can hear her smile in the shape of the words.

He hugs her back. His body feels like one big bruise, sore and tender, but he holds her close. “That’s a deal.”

“Thank you,” Anya murmurs, her sharp chin poking Curly’s shoulder. Then, with a laugh, “Aw, way to throw my plans into disarray. I was going to call you ‘RoboCap’ and everything, it was gonna be a whole thing.”

“Oh no,” Curly says with feeling, half in disbelief, half from the thrill of a reputational disaster narrowly avoided. “I already have a nickname. It would never stick.”

”It so would!”

Curly laughs again – it’s easy to laugh with Anya. And they joke around about it, going back to school, becoming rich and famous – but the truth is that, no matter what, Curly owes Anya. And if he can help her get the future she wants, then it is nothing less but his sworn duty to do so.

***

It’s funny how life works, Curly thinks. You live through endless points that you think to be fixed, from one to another, from ‘I just need to live through this’ to ‘I just need to live through that, and then surely I can finally take a breather’, but life, he finds, has a tendency to move goalposts in a way that disturbingly reminds him of someone.

He's been constantly waiting – for the agony to stop, for his life to end. Then, for pain relief once again. For sleep to come and plunge him into the restless dark. For Anya to visit. For the Spirit to reach its destination. For the grafts to take. For the day to end. For the night to end.

Now that the case is over, something that’s been hanging over them for months and months, Curly finds himself with new goalposts, new deadlines in the sand, new challenges to overcome. Having the money means ordering facial muscles means jumping through endless hoops of doctor visits and waiting for them to be grown before they can be implanted. It also means, finally, acquiring leg prosthetics and relearning how to walk. Curly has to go under the knife again for this — the nerve degeneration in what remains of his right calf is too severe to risk putting pressure on it, so they have to remove a section, and Jimmy’s…work on his left knee meant having to clean out the rest of the joint.

(He cried, he screamed, he writhed in agony, not strong enough to get away, just strong enough to stay conscious through it, but Jimmy was unrelenting. This time, at least, he gets the mercy of anaesthesia.)

But even with all that sorted out, Curly feels like a toddler on stilts, or an awkward, gangly baby giraffe perhaps. He has regained some of his upper body strength after ages spent wasting away from immobility and starvation, which is a massive help now that he has to use crutches, but his core strength is still lacking, his leg strength nonexistent and fickle when his body is too acutely aware that it ends a foot and a half above the ground at the very least.

There is physical therapy to continue, balancing tricks to figure out. Once again, Curly lives in a state of constant exhaustion, worrying Anya with how much he sleeps. Once again, he is frustrated and mad at his body, his mind, his brain slipping out of his control despite his spastic, desperate grip.

He fears, sometimes, that time goes by too quickly, runs through his unfeeling fingers before he can grasp it. Fears, too, that there is too much to do, too much ground to recover, impossibly so, and no matter how much he does it will not be enough.

Time passes anyway.

***

Anya aces her exams. 

She spends two full months before the big day stressing out of her mind until she teeters on the verge of a breakdown, at which point Curly stacks her books and gets them both outside. The night is deep and almost cloudless, and they go to the nearby park and stare up into the sky and follow the moon’s steady crawl across its expanse, and there are no dead pixels to look for.

The day of the exam, Curly orders three separate cabs in case two don’t show (which has apparently happened before), packs a bag with pens in ziplock bags in case they leak (which has apparently happened before as well), snacks in more ziplock bags in case they crumble, bottles of water, phone charger and power bank, a small first aid kit, and puts Anya’s ID and application confirmation sheet on the table next to the bag so that Anya can be sure that she’d taken them with her. He also graciously doesn’t notice the teary-eyed look she gets when she hugs him before grabbing everything and flying out of the apartment with almost two hours to spare.

He’d debated coming with her for moral support. But whatever bad luck spell Anya thinks is hanging over her chances of success, he doesn’t want to play into it by adding more variables, regardless of whether he believes in it himself. 

Anya doesn’t text Curly before the exam aside from letting him know that she got there okay, obviously too jittery to be on her phone, and calls him hours later instead, almost incoherent with exhilaration. Curly is puttering about in the kitchen when it happens, so he holds the phone between his cheek and shoulder and makes all the right noises as she chatters at him a mile a minute about the exam. And he isn’t about to jinx it by saying anything out loud, but it sure sounds promising to say the least.

He is, of course, correct. Anya stays at the campus to wait for the results, and so he has the opportunity to cook everything he’s planned for dinner by the time she gets back. The house smells like slow cooked meat and roasted vegetables and reduced wine, and when Anya arrives and Curly rises to his unsteady feet to greet her, she all but collapses into his chest, vibrating with excitement and exhaustion.

“No typos?” Curly asks, a teasing lilt to his voice.

“No typos,” Anya laughs, giddy with it. “I triple checked everything, I hounded the admission staff – oh I’m sure they hate me by now, I asked so many times—”

“Oh hush,” Curly’s arms tighten around Anya’s shoulders as he snorts into her disheveled hair. “A thorough doc is a good doc, or so I’ve heard.”

“I…I did it,” Anya suddenly hiccups. Alarm cools Curly’s spine, but she only presses herself closer, holding fistfuls of Curly’s shirt between his shoulder blades. “I finally made it in. I’m gonna be a doctor.”

An old wound in the fabric of the world begins to heal, like a broken bone finally set right.

***

A full time student now, Anya quits her job, and Curly does his best to pick up the slack. This is where the court case against Pony Express comes through in a peculiar way for him – since the lawsuit made news, headhunters seek him out on their own. Suddenly, he speaks to people, actual people, instead of being faced with endless machines and automated responses. Suddenly, people want his expertise. Suddenly, his lack of affiliation or recently confirmed certifications isn’t such an insurmountable hurdle anymore. 

It doesn’t sit too well with Curly. They don’t know how foggy his brain is, how much he still struggles at random times to comprehend what he is reading, to find the fitting words quickly enough to speak them without a break in the conversation. Turns out, there are quotas for an online course he’s been looking at before. Turns out, he qualifies. Armed with its certificate, he can now take on real contracts instead of proofreading manual addendums.

Maybe he could even get into teaching. Not right now, but sometime in the future. Perhaps it wouldn’t be as impossible as he’d thought anymore. 

(One time he is recognized in the street on his way to PT. In complete bewilderment, he declines a request for a photo. In no less complete bewilderment, somewhat shell shocked by the ridiculousness of the situation, he concedes to an autograph as a consolation prize.)

He and Anya gain more independence from each other. Curly does actually meaningful work for once and goes through the gruelling hell of PT; Anya dives into the packed schedule of med school, lectures and seminars and labs, makes new friends, holds sporadic study sessions online.

Bizarrely, Curly discovers that it’s a point of anxiety for her. The more self-sufficient Curly becomes, the busier Anya gets, the more prominent is the antsy note in her demeanour, which is completely baffling to Curly. She makes the point to come home directly after classes, she brings out her books to the kitchen table to study even though there’s a large desk in her room and all the bookshelves in there are hers to fill. Out here, on the contrary, Curly is constantly bustling about when he gets into the laborious process of cooking, pots clanging, oil hissing, random bits of vegetables flying off the counter and landing on the table when he gets too vigorous for his prosthetics. At least he hasn't accidentally thrown a knife so far.

“Remember the movie we talked about? ‘The endless blue’? It’s hitting streaming in a couple weeks, I think.”

Curly pauses his typing and glances at Anya over the lid of his laptop. They’ve both set up camp at the dinner table tonight, and he was staying quiet (even though there have been some very entertaining plot twists in the accident report he’s reading; he’s half-expecting a banana peel to make an appearance at this rate), but if Anya is taking a break, he’s happy to have one too.

“Oh? I’ll clear my busy schedule for it, then,” he says, tilting his head in lieu of a smile. “God I hope it doesn’t disappoint. The deep sea enthusiasts may never recover.”

“No no, I heard it’s good,” Anya hurries to say, nodding as she speaks. “Kelly and Fern went to see it last week on, like, its last run in the theaters, they really liked it.”

“You didn’t go with them?” Curly asks, surprised at the mention of some of Anya’s group mates.

“Yeah, well, they invited me but it was a school night and kind of a last minute thing and I didn’t really want to…” Anya trails off in a mutter and holds one of her books up.

Curly stares at the ‘Introduction to Histology’ where Anya’s face was just now. The four images on it are supposed to be blown up photos of tissues in the human body, though he can’t for the life of him fathom, which. To him, they look more like galaxies, but that’s neither here nor there. Maybe that’s because it’s what he is more used to seeing.

“Sorry, what was that?” he asks. His puzzlement grows when Anya doesn’t put the book down.

“I didn’t really want to go because I had to come home to you,” she mumbles, and Curly’s heart drops.

He– he thought they’d really been getting farther away from that. From him being her patient, from her being his caretaker. This isn’t what she is supposed to focus on. There is no one ill and ailing, waiting for her to come home and help. 

But, knowing what he knows, Curly should’ve guessed sooner.

“Anya?” he calls, watching her knuckles whiten on the cover. “Anya, that’s a library book; if I know anything about librarians, you don’t want to get on their bad side.”

Anya puts the book down, a frown on her face.

Eyebrows drawn together in concern, Curly lowers the lid of his laptop, then pushes it aside entirely. Anya’s mountain of books between them is already more than enough.

“You don’t… have to rush home the moment you’re done with classes, you know that, right?” he asks in a quiet voice, and the way Anya’s eyes widen a fraction tells him everything he needs to know. “I’ll still be here. There will be leftovers in the fridge, et cetera. You don’t have to miss out on your life just to be here.”

Please don’t feel like you do, he wants to ask her, but the grip of humiliation creeping up on him tightens around his throat. Don’t think of me as your charge. There is no need for it anymore. 

Even back on the ship, Curly tried so hard not to be difficult. Tamped down on his agony as much as he could, because he didn’t want to make it worse for Anya — and didn’t want her to be replaced with Jimmy. Some things — most things — he was still unable to influence. He hurt too much, could do too little.

Now, though — now it’s different. It doesn’t have to be like this. 

“It’s– it’s not that,” Anya says, and Curly tips his head from the mini-whiplash of confusion.

“...No?”

“No– I mean,” she lets out a small laugh. “You really look like you’ve got this, Curly. Between the two of us, I’m the one who is always frazzled and panicking and not having my stuff together.”

That is…not at all what Curly expected to hear. He opens his mouth to try and say something, to disagree, but she beats him to it.

“What I actually mean is… I don’t know,” Anya brushes the cover of the textbook, removing invisible pieces of lint. “It’s just been the two of us for so long that I…” she sighs with something akin to resignation. “I think I’m as afraid of leaving you alone as I am afraid of being alone out there.”

For a moment, there is silence as Curly turns her words over and over in his mind, conflicting emotions offering contradictory lenses to view them through. He surfaces on the other side.

“But you are not alone,” he points out, and Anya’s eyes snap to his. “You’ve got your mates out there. You talk about them all the time, so unless you’ve been dabbling in weaving some really elaborate stories for who knows what reason, I’m pretty sure they are real.” Curly pauses, waiting for Anya to crack a smile, and she does. “They’re there for you to hang out with, and I’m not going anywhere either. So, next time they invite you? Please go with them.”

Anya crosses her arms with a pout, though Curly can tell she doesn’t really mean it, “I won’t, because you and I wanted to watch it together on the TV.”

“Okay, yeah, bad example, we have been waiting forever for that one,” Curly lets out a laugh. “But aside from that? You have to live a little. Spend time with someone who isn’t a cranky sod.”

“I like your crankiness though,” Anya smirks. “It’s a nice contrast to all the unbridled enthusiasm of the young.”

“Hey now, you were meant to say I’m not cranky at all,” Curly shoots back, but his smile eases when he thinks back to something else she said. “Also – what do you mean by not having your stuff together?”

Anya sighs again; her face settles back into its neutral expression, the one Curly has come to recognise as a shield. It pains him to see it coalesce in response to something he said.

“It’s hard to explain, I think…” she muses uncertainly, but Curly has all the patience in the world for her. “I’ve just been so used to doing what I have, you know? Being on the Tulpar, looking after you – I understood myself, who I was, what I was doing, even if it wasn’t something I necessarily saw for myself in the long run. But now…” she waves at the books. “Now I’m studying, all day every day, one among hundreds of people all doing the same thing, and…” She lifts her eyes, suddenly alarmed. “I don’t mean to say that I don’t like it! Or that I’m not grateful! I’m not second-guessing my decision to go there or anything…”

Curly raises his eyebrows to acknowledge her words but doesn’t say anything to avoid spooking whatever is trying to be expressed.

“...I think I just don’t know who I am right now, as a person,” Anya says with a small shrug. She hunches a little over the table, small among her books. “It’s more like I know who I’m not – all the things I started and didn’t finish. Not a nurse, not a–” she cuts herself off with a frown, and Curly doesn’t see her hand under the table but by the angle of her elbow he guesses where it lands. “I don’t know.”

The thing is, Curly understands this rut. The droning of days, one after another, indistinguishable, thick like a landslide and just as unconquerable. No wonder Anya stews in it. Curly has been getting by, but not because he is above the landslide – rather, because he is used to living with his feet stuck. And after such a long time spent diminishing herself, he watches Anya struggle to expand. 

“I think I’d like to try painting,” he muses.

“Huh?” Anya looks up at him in confusion at the non-sequitur. 

“Yeah… It would help me learn how to use my hands for really intricate things, maybe,” Curly says slowly, discovering what he wants to say as it comes out of him, feeling around for the next fitting word. He turns his prosthetics over, bends his fingers. “And people say it’s a good outlet. Uh…mental health-wise. Maybe something would work for you too?”

Anya’s mouth thins in doubt. “I’m not sure… School is very busy,” she points out.

“Didn’t you say someone in your group does show jumping? On, like, national competition level?” Curly asks. “Not the extremes you have to go to – I’ve personally had enough horses to last me a lifetime – but evidently it’s possible to find a balance.”

“Maybe,” Anya rolls her shoulders as if to right a poorly fitting coat. But Curly recognises the discomfort of change – he’s felt it often enough in his life, and has turned the skill of doing everything within his power to evade it into high art of a fucked up little coping mechanism.

But if even he can take the steps to change something for the better in his life, Anya definitely can too.

***

And she does.

Slowly, she starts spending more time with her mates after classes, texting Curly to say she’ll be home late, asking him if he’s sure, no, really sure that he doesn’t need her to come sooner. She holds the study sessions in libraries and cafes now instead of holing up in her room with a computer. Takes up birdwatching after an invitation from a group mate, trying it on as a hobby at random, something to get herself moving about. Soon after, she buys a secondhand Polaroid camera and slowly begins to fill their flat with grainy pictures of birds.

It takes time for Anya to come to terms with it all, the tether she must be imagining between them pulling her stubbornly home. But Curly can do nothing except continue to reassure her, and as his reward, he gets to hear all the school gossip and to spend weekend evenings scouring the Internet with Anya to find recordings of obscure bird songs after she swears up and down she’s heard them in the city.

At the same time, Curly turns out to be atrocious at painting. His mind is – or used to be, at least – well-equipped for understanding connections, following lines of cause and effect, picking out the core among all the fluff, but somehow it doesn’t translate to painting at all, not in the classical sense at least, not even when Anya graciously breaks out her anatomy books and goes over the figures with him.

(They do have to skip over the facial muscles diagram. Curly’s stomach jumps when he catches a glimpse of it.)

But it’s whatever. Perhaps Curly is simply fated for abstractionism. No need to understand human proportions for that one, after all.

***

Days go on. Winter rolls around, and Curly finds himself braving the outside more and more, going on walks on days when he doesn’t have PT and thus isn’t flung into an exhausted coma until the night. Colder weather means that no one looks at him twice when he is all bundled up, covering up his face and limbs, carefully picking out his path on de-iced sidewalks. 

That’s how, one day, Curly meanders over to the university’s campus. He hasn’t exactly planned to come here, but the cafe he is used to taking his halfway coffee break in was booked for a party, and he’s still feeling okay, so he decides to brave a slightly longer route when he recognises the streets.

The university is one of the oldest buildings around here, weathered but still tall and imposing. Curly wanders into the massive courtyard and parks under a smattering of apple trees growing out of their designated circles of soil.

With one eye, it takes Curly a lot of swivelling to take in all the buildings, trying to guess which one might be Anya’s – if any, because the campus sprawls way beyond the main square, and she might as well be there somewhere.

He takes a picture of the main building with its faux-Gothic ornaments cut into dark grey stone, and considers sending it to Anya but very quickly psyches himself out of it. Is it weird? It’s weird. Should he have warned her that he’d be coming over? No, that would definitely be weird. That would be making it into a big deal, which it isn’t. Right?

Busy agonising over it, Curly realises that the classes hit their midday break only when he is suddenly swarmed with students as they move across the courtyard, most of them funnelling towards the exit, some reentering in other buildings. Curly catches a flash of white on the wide steps – medics quick to leave too, some taking off and folding their lab coats on the go, others throwing their winter jackets right over them.

Curly lurches to his feet, scanning the crowd as he wonders if and how he should make his exit – and his eye meets Anya’s. She grins when she spots him, turning to say something to her group mates before running over, and Curly’s stupid heart flutters against his ribs.

“Curly! Hi! Wow, what are you doing here? Is everything okay?” she asks, surprise on her face beginning to switch to concern.

“Yes, no, everything is okay,” Curly hurries to reassure her, hating to see that smile begin to slip away. “I was just— passing by, thought I would say hi.”

“Hi,” she smiles again and looks over her shoulder, leaving Curly reeling in her wake. “It’s great to see you!” she says as she turns to him again. “We’re just going for lunch, there’s this cafe right off campus, it’s quiet and nice— would you like to come?”

Curly’s brows knit in concern. He hasn’t thought this far ahead. “I won’t…scare your friends, will I?”

“As if there was anything to be scared of,” Anya scoffs with a smile. “Besides, this is med school, no one is scared of anything. I’m still the biggest scaredy cat here. Come, I talk about you all the time, they’d love to meet you! Unless you’re tired? Have you walked all this way here?”

“I have,” Curly says, and yeah, maybe he’s a little proud of it. It seeps into the tone of his voice even though he’s still a bit off-balance from the revelation of being talked about by Anya. 

Should he agree? Curly hasn’t exactly banked on meeting new people today. But the way Anya looks at him, waiting for him to decide with a crooked smile on her face…

“I’m not tired yet, no,” he decides to be brave. “Worst case scenario, I’ll call a cab from there. Lead the way.”

There’s about ten of them, and they all pile into the small cafe, easily filling it to the brim. Anya’s group mates are all younger kids, unburdened by the weight of life the way she and Curly are, excitable and intense in their maximalism. 

Curly tucks himself into a quieter corner next to a kid who gives him a solemn nod of understanding and pulls out their book, and watches Anya among them. She is friendly, teasing, and yet with an easy air of authority as the oldest person in the group with actual work experience. She easily defuses a coalescing argument with a well-placed comment and remembers off the top of her head the required section in the textbook when one of her friends is stuck leafing through it. She is relaxed, comfortable. Happy.

So this is Anya, Curly realises. Here she is. The same Anya he remembers chatting with into the late of night, the one easily keeping up with his good-natured teasing and making astute observations with the same ease. The Anya from before all the stress and the horror and the despair.

…No. No, that’s not right. She isn’t returning, she wasn’t gone. This is just her…filling out her space again.

Curly watches her, unassuming and unobtrusive in his corner, and the rest of the world fades away around her slowly, so slowly, until she is all he can see. With a quiet but no less gut-wrenching sort of horror, Curly finally recognises his predicament.

***

He loves her.

It hurts.

***

For a long time, Pony Express wasn’t in the habit of putting thought into their crews’ makeup. If people kept flying together trip after trip, aside from the pilot-co-pilot duo, it was due to either some truly impressive coincidence or a complicated game of favours.

Eventually, though, they seemed to realise that crews that are familiar with each other are less likely to fuck up a delivery contract, more likely to look out for each other and cover each other’s slacking. So Curly, Swansea, and their nurse Marlene became a team pretty quickly, and when their captain retired and Curly was promoted, he was eventually able to pull some strings and get Jimmy in as well, excited to give him this opportunity. He’d grumbled and hounded Curly for months, so maybe now– maybe now he could finally be happy.

Still, Curly hasn’t met Anya until she joined one trip as an intern for Marlene. Curly remembers it still – she was halfway through the company’s nursing courses, excited to be on a real flight and get some hands-on experience.

Further still, Curly doesn’t expect to see her again after that trip concludes and is surprised to spot her name on the roster instead of Marlene’s. She has been talking about retiring and going back to Europe, after all — Earth’s Europe, not Jupiter’s — but Curly just didn’t know it would be so soon.

Jimmy, as it turns out, remembers Anya too, though the sneer he offers Curly at her mention is a bit beyond him. He’s…moody, like this, and it’s often best to just leave him be. Curly is used to it – to placating Jimmy.

“Yeah, what about her?” Jimmy asks, leaning back in his seat with his hands behind his head.

“Oh, nothing, I just thought it was a funny coincidence,” Curly replies with a shrug. “It’s nice to see a familiar face join us.”

“Right,” Jimmy narrows his eyes at him. “A coincidence, cap’n.”

Jimmy's demeanour is inscrutable to Curly, and seems to worsen in Anya’s regard as the trip goes on, so Curly takes it upon himself to help her feel welcome. To balance out Jimmy's sour mug with some polite pleasantries.

He and Anya didn’t interact much outside of whole-crew settings on her first trip, but this time, when he starts dropping by her office and engaging her in some light conversation, Curly gets to know her a bit better and is delighted to discover her penchant for banter.

Some would think there is little to Anya beyond the sweet and quiet exterior, but Curly cares to look just a touch closer and quickly finds a sharp wit and that unassuming brand of humour that leaves her smiling shyly in self-awareness even as her eyes sparkle with mischief.

But it’s not only that, either. She notes things too, things that Curly is too used to people not paying attention to, satisfied with what he offers on the surface level. But with Anya, it’s different. With her, it’s soon enough that Curly finds himself perfectly content to spend time not only gossiping, but sitting in silence too, or gently bringing deeper, more flighty things up to the surface.

…Maybe he starts seeking out her company not just for her own sake anymore after this, trip after trip. Maybe she is fun to spend time with, especially in comparison to Jimmy, who only seems to grow more bitter for reasons Curly can’t fathom. He wonders if Anya knows from her psych evals of the crew, but he’d never ask her to break confidence like this.

“You’ve got this here? I’ll go do the rounds,” Curly says, pushing his chair into a little half-spin and getting up.

“Off to see your girlfriend again?”

“Oh sod off, Jimmy, that’s ridiculous,” Curly raises an eyebrow with a laugh. 

“Ridiculous how?” Jimmy asks, idly flicking one of the side switches off and on again, which makes Curly narrow his eyes, but that’s just one of the air conditioning units somewhere deep in the vents. It’s been broken for ages. “Are you saying I’m wrong?”

It’s the tone of voice Curly is well familiar with. Asking questions to find a reason to be mad at him.

“I’m saying,” Curly repeats, pulling on the first thing that comes to mind, “That you know as well as I do that any company relationships are frowned upon. I'm the captain, after all, it wouldn’t be right.”

“Yeah yeah, now piss off,” Jimmy grumbles, eyes fixed stubbornly on the screens in front of him.

Only halfway through the ship does Curly finally decipher Jimmy’s derisive bark of a laugh. The way that the company policy was the crux of his denial of Jimmy's assessment, not…any other reason.

Still, it’s…not true. Or even if it were, Curly holds to his word — the ethics of it would be too questionable to even consider. Anya is his subordinate, and besides, with most of his life spent ferrying around in space, it’s not like Curly has got much of himself to offer. it’s just…it’s just how his life is. He made his peace with that a long time ago, before he was even made captain.

Yet this feels the farthest from peace. It's almost as if Jimmy has aggravated the splinter in Curly’s side that he’s forgotten to notice, and now he can’t move without being reminded of its insistent presence. It messes with his head, with his sleep.

Anya picks up on the turbulence in Curly, of course she does. She wishes he’d open up more, obviously stung and confused by his closing off, but there is nothing useful Curly can say.

Then the message from the HR arrives, so jarring and casually cruel that Curly forgets to consider his own professional perspectives, focused only on his crew and the news he’s about to break to them.

And the next day, in the break room, despite Jimmy all but shouting accusations at him, for a moment all Curly can think about is how lost Anya sounds. Daisuke has his parents, Swansea is on his way to retirement and spending more time with his children and dogs, but Anya has no one. Nothing.

You have a spare bedroom, the back of his mind whispers to him. And with how much you’re away, she’d basically have the place to herself.

She doesn’t need my help, Curly replies uncertainly. She…she won’t want it, not from me, not after this. 

Still, the least you can do is offer. 

He’d be mad, Curly points out. He probably expects to have it.

You can help him figure out something else. You’ve been helping him with everything so far.

And so, after some back and forth in the same vein, Curly makes up his mind. When this trip is over and their contracts are officially dissolved, he will offer Anya a place to stay. Take this burden off her shoulders. She’s brightened his days on the Tulpar with her presence alone. If– if he can help in return, that…that would be nice.

This will, of course, mean that Curly will have to keep ignoring the pained flutters in his unfortunate little heart – after all, he’d be trading one power dynamic for another. But Anya’s security is more important.

So, it’s okay.

***

It’s, as Curly finds out, not okay.

All his carefully compartmentalised feelings, all his rationalising, all his logical approach – all of it shatters in the face of the admission, one so simple that there is no way to shield from its direct attack. One so complicated that there is no way to cut it into neat little segments and do away with one ache at a time. Wherever Curly tries to make the incision, it grows around the blade of his reasoning. Wherever he tries to cram it into the back of his mind, it expands in bursts of almost tangible pressure and hurt.

His silly little crush, almost juvenile in its innocence, slams into him full force now, grown strong and merciless after months of agony and fear, months of recovery, months of sharing quarters and meals and space on the couch. Months of conversations, and tears, and shoulders to silently lean on. Vague attraction blown up by trauma bond in the face of horror and death, put back together step by step on the long road to recovery as the two of them laboriously relearned how to be people. 

Looking back, Curly can’t help but admit that he should have seen it coming. Really, there were no other options for him. 

But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything. Who does he think he is? What kind of selfish, entitled…

Curly sits himself down for a difficult conversation and comes to terms with his feelings for Anya and decides, once again – once and for all – to do nothing.

She is so much better than him, deserves so much better than him. What can he even offer that he already doesn’t, willingly so?

There is no answer to that. Curly’s curse rears its ugly head, and, his heart in pieces, he chooses inaction.

But Anya would understand, surely, if she knew. He can’t have her be stuck with him – even if it were ever possible in the first place.

Med school lasts a long time, Curly reasons. People grow closer as they go through its gruelling gauntlet. And, depending on her future specialisation, Anya might end up in a field with a higher percentage of men – there’s bound to be someone worthy of her, someone who is smart, capable, sensitive. In tune with his feelings, able to act on them. Able to care for her the way she deserves.

Someone who is not Curly.

Here, Curly realises he has no idea if men are Anya’s only option. He doesn’t even know that much.

But the point is, were he even the very last man, the very last person in the galaxy – why would Anya want him? If she ever decides to be with someone, why on Earth would she choose him?

There is no answer to that either, and looking for one is an exercise in futility and masochism.

As is his habit, Curly loses sleep over this for nights to come after his decision, staring listlessly at the ceiling, breathing through the crushing pain in his chest. He weathers his heartbreak as quietly as he can, both in his resignation to it and in determination not to let Anya know.

Because of course, now that they are both independent people unbound by rank and technically free to pursue whatever they want, Curly recognises the full depth and breadth of his inadequacy, rendering him unable to speak his mind. Now that he would, technically, be able to make his feelings known, he understands precisely how unwarranted that would be.

To be fair though, he was inadequate from the start. He couldn’t even be a good friend to Anya, let alone something else. 

So, that’s what he is going to keep trying to be for her. A friend she needed in the past. A friend who could still be of use to her even now, when she’s deep into establishing a proper social circle for herself.

That is, Curly decides, his place. And if his chest feels like a cave-in at the thought – well, that’s his problem to solve.

***

“Careful!”

Curly zones back in right as he nearly fumbles the coffee pot. He’s already had tea, actually, but the caffeine hit isn’t quite there yet, so.

“Sorry. Wow,” he says, putting the pot on the counter for a moment so he can collect himself. His wheelchair lets out a squeak as he turns it to get over to the drying rack for a mug. “Guess I put in too much water.”

He still needs to wait for it to cool down enough, but it would go faster in the mug. Another reason Curly can’t bloody wait for the plastic surgery: he’ll finally be able to have hot drinks again without the risk of scalding himself. It’s funny what kind of things you start missing when you don’t have properly articulated lips.

“Is everything okay?” Anya asks where she’s rifling through her bag and coat in search of something. “You’ve been kind of…absent, a little.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m just tired,” Curly says, and it isn’t exactly a lie – his sleeping schedule has been all out of whack again, and not having the rigidity of a school schedule like Anya’s doesn’t really help.

“You sure?” Anya pauses her search and puts her bag down, straightening up to look at him from the front door. “I can stay in if you wanna, it’s not a problem.”

“No no, please go,” Curly waves her off and pours half a mug of coffee, swirling it carefully around to make it touch the cold ceramic walls. He can’t for the life of him remember what Anya’s plans are. Something with her friends. Maybe bird watching again? In the corner of his eye, he spots her opening her mouth to say something and hurries to speak, “If you’re looking for your wallet, I think you wore your windbreaker last?”

“Right! Right, it must be there,” Anya turns to search the yellow windbreaker, triumphantly showing Curly her loot. “Ah ha! Thank you,” she beams at him over her shoulder, and Curly wants to perish.

Anya finishes getting dressed and takes a few steps towards the kitchen area, hands shoved uncertainly into her pockets. “Are you sure sure? Sorry I keep asking you, I just…”

She trails off, but Curly reads it in her face. She worries. He’s making her worry.

“I am sure sure sure,” he replies, gingerly saluting her with the mug. “The weather is messing with me, I think. I never understood all those complaints about atmospheric pressure, but I’m getting my due karma now.”

“Honestly, sometimes I feel like I’d rather take a few launch G’s over all this,” she waves towards the window, the leaden overcast sky. “Such a mess. Alright, well. See you later?”

“See you later.”

Once Anya is gone, Curly listlessly drinks his coffee, tries to work, tries to distract himself from the gloom. Watching something doesn’t sound appealing, so Curly makes the valiant effort of breaking out his paints and messing around on the canvas.

He’s still bad at it, not that it stops him. There’s something undeniably cathartic in creating just for the sake of it. He starts with darker colours, broader strokes, but somewhere along the process it begins to shift. Lighter colours appear, pastel yellows and blues. The familiar stormy grey, not in contrast but in harmony, like streams of rain twining with rays of sunlight. 

When Curly remembers himself and looks over the painting – no, he doesn’t find a perfect render of Anya looking back at him. It doesn’t even resemble a human face, not that he was aiming for one.

But he sees her there anyway.

There is, probably, something to be said about how, to Curly, this is what care translates into. This is how his heart’s flutters look, put into brush strokes.

It probably says that he is a complete and utter fool.

In the face of this final defeat, Curly cleans his brushes and shifts the easel out of the way, leaving it facing the wall in its usual spot, crawls under the blankets, and dozes off for the night.

In the morning, when Curly finally shambles out of his room, he finds the apartment empty. A cold needle twists in his heart – has Anya come home and already left again? Or has she not been here for the night? How long has he slept? – and as the remaining grogginess is fighting a losing battle against a spike of anxiety he spots something on the kitchen table.

He shuffles over and picks it up – a Polaroid square with a grainy picture of a bird, a goldfinch — Curly isn’t the most knowledgeable about birds, to put it mildly, but he’s listened to many a ramble from Anya to remember.

The bird in the photo looks kind of grumpy where it sits fluffed up and dishevelled on a thin branch. Anya has doodled over it with a sharpie, giving it tousled hair and a steaming mug and wrapping it in an afghan, making it look infinitely more cosy. When Curly, bewildered, flips the picture over he finds ‘made me think of you))’ written on the back in Anya’s spidery scrawl.

Curly isn’t used to thinking of goldfinches as these bright yellow things. Back home, they have starkly red faces, almost like masks or something far less benign.

…Which would probably be more fitting for Curly, but Anya is a nice person. 

Curly walks back to his room, cradling the picture in his hands like a precious, living being, and tucks it into the frame of the corkboard hanging above his desk. 

***

Time passes, as it tends to do. Winter lurches heavily into early spring, and as everything begins to thaw, Curly decides that he’s done moping about the whole thing. He’s done, seriously, completely over it. Feelings are feelings, but he isn’t going to let them rule him. Anya is his dear friend, and it’s more than he could ever hope for, after everything. 

Aside from that, Curly finally gets to have a surgery again, and comes out of it with muscles installed for his eye and mouth, eyelids and lips remodelled to fit the new tissue, surviving muscles reconnected. They even throw in a rough reconstruction of his nose as a bonus.

It leaves him blind for the first few days, the bandages making sure he doesn’t try to open his eye or move his mouth too much before everything settles. He is antsy about it, uneasy, takes time off work and spends most of it either camping out on the couch again where he at least can hear what’s going on, or bumbling about in an attempt to cling to his routine when he can’t even feel what he is doing. That is, predictably, quite disastrous. Anya takes to narrating his actions and commenting on his surroundings to warn him at least, lending a bizarre, video game-like flair to his life, but at least Curly is more spatially aware this way.

But soon enough, thank fuck, the bandages are replaced with adhesives. They still constrict Curly’s movements, but at least he isn’t blind anymore. The anxiety from earlier slowly ebbs. 

Still, he can’t fucking wait to take the adhesives off as well. He’ll be able to blink! To smile! Even to squint when the text on the screen gets too blurry from the strain. He’s missed it. He had no idea he would.

The day Curly is finally allowed to free himself is a painfully mediocre one. The weather has been changing again, plunging the flat in the leaden grey of spring with the ghost of winter still hovering over its shoulder, the sky unable to decide if it wants to rain or snow, and Curly is slammed with fatigue and a headache so profound that he spends the day in bed and only resurrects enough to sit up towards the late evening.

Still, he won’t let that deter him. It’s a big day, even if by now it’s technically night.

Besides, it being a late Friday night means that Anya is back home from school and done with her nerdy post-school literature reviews. So now the two of them are sitting on Curly’s somewhat made bed as Anya cautiously peels the adhesive off, following it with a cotton ball soaked in a moisturising lotion to get the stray bits of glue off of what passes for stubble for Curly these days.

“It’s looking good,” she says, eyes flicking over the dissolved sutures. She did the eyelid first, then the nose, and is now working on the last section around Curly’s mouth. “I don’t see any inflammation. The colour is good too, overall. Close to what you had, I-I think.”

Curly makes a small noise of acknowledgement, too scared to move and mess it up somehow.

Anya catches it. “Just a little bit left, you’re doing great,” she smiles and leans back in with a deep focus in her furrowed brow. With a soft sound, the last bit comes off. “And we’re done! How are you feeling? No pain?”

Curly blinks slowly (blinks!) and opens his mouth, feeling his lips part. He has been moving his mouth before, of course – he had to eat somehow, after all – but now he dares to tense the new muscles, feeling the almost cascade-like pull as his face is arranged into a smile.

It feels weird, muscles straining from disuse, and Curly probably looks goofy as hell, but he doesn’t care.

It doesn’t hurt, either. He was tender after the surgery, of course, but now it’s all gone.

Just for a brief respite, his body doesn’t hurt.

“I’m– I’m feeling great,” he grins (grins!!!), and Anya’s face lights up as well. “I can move! I…”

He has a face again.

“Awesome!” Anya lets out a giddy laugh and raises her hands. “Let me just check the receptor function again, yes? Tell me if anything is still numb, because it really shouldn’t be, not from what I’ve read.”

She waits for Curly to nod before carefully cradling his face in her left hand, gliding the fingertips of her right over his left eyebrow and around the socket. He blinks and squints at the proximity to his eyeball, but when Anya mutters a ‘sorry’ he only smiles. 

He spent such a long time with his eye completely exposed, helpless against any intrusion, without even the luxury of not having to see it coming. But it’s back now. It’s all coming back. Different, strange, but his. His again.

Anya runs her fingers down his cheekbone, checks the wings of his nose, snorting when Curly huffs at her.

“And, of course, the most complex part,” she says, cradling Curly’s face in both hands now and using her thumbs to press lightly into his skin – for symmetry, he suspects. “Do you feel this?”

“Mhm.”

She runs the pads of her thumbs above his top lip until the cupid’s bow, below his bottom lip to the dip in his chin “And this?”

“I do,” Curly murmurs.

“And this?” The slightest pressure in the corners of his mouth.

Curly smiles, moving her thumbs as he does. He feels his cheeks squish in her palms, too, and a memory shoots through him, of a time when their positions were reversed.

“I do,” he confirms. “It’s a little odd, I can’t deny that, but I’m woefully out of practice, after all.”

Anya stares at him, weirdly elated.

“What?” Curly raises an eyebrow.

“Oh my god,” she says. “Your accent is back!”

“What do you mean ‘back’, it was here the whole time?”

“No no, you don’t get it, it was like— wow, I guess lip musculature really is very important for accent formation–” Anya catches herself. “Anyway. It’s like, back in full swing now.”

Curly only blinks at her.

A mischievous grin splits Anya’s face. “...Say ‘Tuesday’.”

Curly groans. “No-o…”

“Come on, say ‘Tuesday’!” Anya laughs, and Curly tries to turn his face away but only finds her warm hands.

They used to do it, back on the Tulpar. Not the face holding, obviously, but – talking about the accents. Comparing and contrasting his English and her vaguely Slavic trill. Laughing until their bellies hurt, annoying Jimmy to no end when they happened to bring it up on Anya’s visits to the cockpit.

Curly had tried to explain to Anya the difference between RP and Yorkshire, but she had to admit it all sounded the same to her. Not to Swansea, though. He couldn’t stand his ‘posh twpsyn’ accent and only began to grudgingly respect Curly’s authority after he’d stopped code switching when talking to him.

“I will not say Chewsday!” Curly protests just for the sake of it, and Anya lets out a startled chortle. “I know yew lawt, first it’s Chewsday and next it’s gonna be oi where’s my bo’ah o’ wo’ah, innit luv?”

They burst out laughing, Anya clinging to him now as much as she is holding him. Curly plants his hands on the bed between them and hunches his shoulders, shaking with laughter.

It feels so fucking good. To laugh, to smile, to joke about silly things just for the sake of it.

And then Anya kisses him.

It’s a quick thing, there and gone, almost faster than Curly can blink. But it’s there, undeniably – the light pressure, the warmth. The softness.

Anya pulls back. She looks as shocked as he feels.

“Did– did you feel that?” she stutters.

Curly straightens up as well, reaches up, nearly jamming himself in the mouth. Touches his lips, notes the difference. The cool smoothness of plastic. 

“Yeah…” he says.

“Okay! Okay, good, that’s good,” Anya nods and sits back, her hands in her lap now. Her movements are awkward, unsure. Stunned, too.

Her hands were holding his face just now. Bracketing the moment when she…

“Anya– why?” Curly asks.

“‘Why’?”

“Why?”

“I…” She looks far away for a moment, before her eyes widen again, “Oh, Curly, was it not– Oh no, I’m so sorry, I…”

She is thrown into action, scrambling up from the bed, and Curly reaches for her before he can even think about it.

“No, wait– Please don’t go.”

Anya looks down, where Curly’s hand is almost touching her wrist. Curly lets it drop, but Anya nods again and sits back down, on the very edge now, ready to take flight.

Curly’s head swims. How did they get here? They were laughing just now, and then she…

“Did I mess it up?” Anya asks quietly.

Curly shakes his head in a jerky motion. “No, no you didn’t.”

“Okay. Okay,” Anya nods. “Then– we can talk about it later? If you want. If it’s too much right now. We can talk when it’s not, um– oh dear, it’s late, isn’t it,” she looks at her watch where it’s nestled on the inside of her wrist. Even that Curly finds hopelessly, devastatingly endearing. “I could’ve picked a better time.”

“Picked…” Curly repeats quietly, rolling the shape of the word in his mouth, the implication of intent that it leaves.

Anya gives him a quick, rueful smile. “Did I break you?”

Curly loves her. He loves her so much it hurts, and he’d made peace with that hurt, and packed it all tightly away, and now she’s gone and tore it all open again, and he doesn’t know what to do.

He notices he’d started crying only when Anya panics.

“Oh no– no no,” Anya sways in place as if unsure whether to lean in or away, hands put up between them, “Curly, I’m so sorry, please don’t–”

“I’m– I’m very confused,” Curly pleads around something that is either a laugh or a sob. Gestures at himself helplessly, then between them.

“I’m so sorry, I really shouldn’t have jumped you like this, it’s late and with all the face stuff…” Anya shakes her head, apology stealing her breath. “God, I’m sorry. Do…do you think you could still sleep?” she asks with a wince.

What a question. “I don’t know,” again, Curly’s voice straddles that precarious line. A mix of exhaustion and nerves shakes through him, his composure so easily shattered.

God, how deeply is he screwed up? What is going on with him?

“I’m so sorry,” Anya repeats with remorse. “What have I done, I should’ve…”

“No,” Curly interrupts her, catching sight of the full swing of the spiral and refusing to let her enter it. Whatever is going on, it’s not worth it. “No, it wasn’t like that. Never. We’re okay. Okay?”

He needs them to be okay.

“Okay. Um…” Anya looks at the door, down at her hands, at Curly, her brow furrowed. “Do you want me to leave?”

Curly’s throat spasms. “Do you want to go?” he speaks through the strain.

“…No.”

Curly looks down between them, at the unassuming comforter of his bed. “Stay? If you’d like? We could…” he trails off with a frown. It would barely be a change from sleeping on top of each other on the couch, why does it feel so weird? Why does everything feel so weird?

“Sleepover?” Anya prompts.

Curly nods. “Yeah.”

Anya thinks for a moment and nods. “I’ll just go wash my face and change, alright? I’ll be right back.”

With that, she leaves. Curly stares at the spot where she was sitting just now, at the negative space she was filling. Touches his mouth again.

The muted sound of water running in the bathroom pulls him out of it, and Curly shuffles about, wipes his tears, carefully blows his nose, shakes out his bedding. Fishes out a clean T-shirt to change into, a pair of soft trousers with the legs tied off. Fumbles through changing and hooking up his prosthetics to the chargers, gets under the blankets. Sits, listening to the trickle of water, wondering what to expect. If she will come back. He won’t blame her if she doesn’t, if she thinks better of it.

He needs to be ready for it if she decides not to.

Anya comes back. She’s wearing a long sleeved shirt and pyjama bottoms, and when Curly wordlessly scoots over to the wall she turns the light off and climbs in without preamble.

They settle. The bed is just big enough that they aren’t touching with Curly’s back against the wall, but even so, he can feel Anya’s body heat.

“Are you okay?” she whispers. He can hear her swallow.

Is he okay? He doesn’t know. He knows he doesn’t want her to worry, which is the same thing in all ways that matter.

He needs to do something, say something. She wants answers, probably. She wants… What does she want?

“I am,” Curly murmurs. “You?”

He hears Anya nod against the pillow. “Me too.” A pause. “Could I touch your arm?”

Curly shifts a little, more to define the lines of his body than anything else. “Yes.”

He hears her move, and a few seconds later her fingertips graze the wrinkled skin of his upper arm. Curly pulls in a quiet breath, feels it knock into his diaphragm. Anya’s hand travels lower, settling on what remains of his forearm. Curly wishes so painfully that they could hold hands.

But he can only take what is given.

“Thank you,” Anya whispers. “Goodnight, Curly.”

“Goodnight.”

***

Miraculously, Curly manages to fall asleep. Despite the weirdness of the situation, it’s almost as if he’s grown used to their sporadic couch hangouts, to sharing space with Anya, to thinking safety when it comes to her.

He knows he slept because he wakes up to Anya curled into his chest, her hands tucked under her chin. He looks down at her tousled hair and immediately gets some of it in his brand new nose.

Curly is trying to figure out where to put his arms when his shifting rouses her. He freezes, waiting to see if she settles again – his curtains are almost fully drawn, but what feeble light filters through has the steely, cold tint of pre-dawn – but, after a deep sigh, her breathing pattern shifts.

Anya slowly uncurls herself, shifting to lay her head back on the pillow. She rubs her face, blinking herself awake. There is a deep line on her left cheek where she’d rested it on her watch. 

She looks so soft. Curly’s heart knocks into his ribs, heavy, damning.

There is space between them again. “Hey,” Curly says into it, little more than a breath, just to bridge the distance.

“Hey,” even her answering sigh is softer too. A small smile curves her lips, bending the crease from the watch.

“How are you?”

Anya blinks slowly. She must still be so sleepy. An injection of guilt cools Curly’s chest.

“‘M alright,” she finally says. “And you?”

“I’m…still confused,” Curly admits.

Anya rubs her face again, a small sound escaping her, before she looks back at Curly. He watches her eyes track the scar lines on his face. Her hands lie between them.

“Well, I kissed you…” Anya muses. “Which, I’m not happy with myself for the way I did it… But not for doing it.” She takes a deep breath, the kind before a high dive into unknown waters. “I hope it’s self-explanatory, but just so we’re on the same page… I don’t know. I thought I saw something. Like, a while ago. Or maybe I read too much into things, I do that, you know me. And then I kept thinking about it, about you, and us, and… I like you, Curly.” She gives him a small smile, quick in contrast to the slow, halting way she speaks. Still, she says it so casually, as if it isn’t difficult at all. “But I acted on a whim, on a hunch. I startled you. That wasn’t right of me. I’m sorry.”

“Please stop saying that,” Curly asks her. It almost sounds like she is equating this to what happened to her, which is the farthest thing from the truth. She needs to know that. She has to understand. “You…you weren’t wrong. Your hunches weren’t wrong.” Curly feels like a teenager, awkward in his admission, “I like you too.”

“Oh! Well that’s nice,” Anya smiles in relief. Her fingers flex lightly, sliding into the gaps of her other hand, a loose handhold. “Then why the panic?”

Curly thinks of what to say, considers his options. But what can he say except the truth?

“Because…this is all rather unexpected.” He sighs, “Because you can do better than me. You deserve better than me. And I thought, with you going to school, meeting people, eventually you would find someone and…and I would…” here it is, a familiar tremor in the rhythm of his heartbeat, “find it in myself to stop.”

“Curly…” Anya raises a pinched eyebrow. “You forget that most of my group mates are yesterday’s teenagers. Were you going to wait until I got residency or something so I could meet people our age?”

“I was going to wait as long as it would take.” He has been, after all. 

“But it’s you. It…has been you, for a while.” Anya looks somewhere far away – or inwards, perhaps. Curly watches her rub her palm with her thumb, wishing he could know how it feels. “Deserving is such a strange concept. Who ever deserves anything, good or bad? I can't use it as a litmus test to make my choices.” She refocuses on him. “But I can use my understanding of what I want.” 

Curly is reminded of their conversation on the Spirit, something in Anya’s cadence, words linking together with the well-rounded feeling of being gone over numerous times. Smooth like river stones.

“And it’s you, in case it wasn’t clear,” Anya flicks her eyes away from his face and back again. “If that’s what you want too. If— if you don’t, just say the word, okay? I’ll never…I’ll never push you, in anything but especially in this.”

“No, I…” Of course Curly doesn’t have his hands on, can’t reach for her. All he has is words, inadequate, lacking. “It scares me, but…I’m here. I…want to be here. With you.”

Anya tips her head. The crease from the watch, already fading, disappears into the swell of the pillow. “What are you scared of?” she asks.

Of not being enough. Of failing. Of hurting her.

Curly needs to be honest, no matter how difficult it is.

“I just want to be good to you,” he pushes through the vise around his throat.

“You already are,” Anya’s eyes soften. “You are,” she repeats with feeling, answering his frown with a smile. “You are my friend. I trust you. I’m safe with you. I– I want to be here, with you, too. Okay?”

Curly lets out a choppy sigh. “Okay.”

“Great talk, look at us go.” Anya grins, awkward but persevering, and Curly can’t help his answering smile.

He can smile now. Holy shit.

“We’re so good at it,” he says with only the lightest hint of irony.

“Top notch,” Anya agrees and pauses. “So… This means we’re dating now, yes?”

“I suppose we are.” It’s so wild to think about it. To even consider that it’s real. That it’s true. “How are you so calm about this?”

“Oh I wasn’t calm at all when I first connected the dots,” Anya laughs, and Curly tamps down on the immediate urge to ask – how, when? “But I had a lot of time to think. To come to terms with it, to…to decide for myself.” She untangles her hands from each other and places her fingers on Curly’s cheek, featherlight. Her eyes search his – for a reaction, perhaps, a permission or revocation thereof – and relax when Curly pushes wordlessly into her touch.

She took her time to think and decided to act, when Curly decided the opposite. What different views they have on acceptance.

“Well, now that this is happening…” Anya murmurs, pulling Curly out of his introspection. “You can touch me too, you know. If you want,” she smiles. “I promise I won’t bite.”

There is a brief trickle of heat down Curly’s spine, a strange feeling of being caught not doing something he was supposed to do. That he wanted to do, but couldn’t justify. “Sorry, I just didn’t know if you’d like that.”

“Curly, we’ve been all but cuddling on the couch for months. This,” she brushes her thumb over his cheek, “doesn’t change anything. I’m not afraid of you.”

Curly shrinks on himself a little. He’s nothing but scars over scars, folds and stretch marks, pockmarks and pigmentation with no rhyme or reason, already vague and unintuitive lines of his body blurred and masked by the random patterns and changes of texture like some kind of misfortuned savannah megafauna, or a piece of paper that’s been folded into too many different origami. He still can’t bear seeing himself in the mirror most days. Still gets nauseated and claustrophobic in a body that doesn’t feel like his own. No amount of surgeries is ever going to fix it.

“That’s not how I meant it,” Anya says, acute in her observations as always. “Though that, too,” she adds, placing her other hand on his elbow, thumb nestling gently in the crook of it. “You’re not nearly as ‘unsightly’ as you think you are. If that is what you think.”

“I find it hard to believe.” It feels petty to think this way, but— he used to be an okay bloke. In a useless, bland way that people would be inclined to call handsome just for the sake of calling it something, which means that losing it shouldn’t matter. And yet, now that it turns out that he can finally allow himself, can be allowed to show Anya affection, to court her, Curly laments its absence.

“Well, believe it or not, but I’ve been thinking about kissing your face for way longer than I’m willing to admit,” Anya says, ducking her head, though it does nothing to hide the shy smile, the way it wraps around her words. “I see you, Curly.” She shrugs, “And anyway, it’s not like it was about the looks for me.”

Curly makes a questioning noise, confused once again.

“Well, you just…” Anya pauses, smiles, turns her hand over to brush his cheek with her knuckles. Gentle, so gentle. “I mean, you’re cute, obviously, but I know you went out of your way to make sure I felt okay on the Tulpar. It’s probably something they teach you at captain school, maintaining morale and team spirit and all that, but I could see you cared too. As a person.” She sighs – a slow, deep inhale, a quick exhale under the pressure of her ribs. “You care. It…doesn’t always turn out in the best way, but that’s just how things are. But I know that you care, and you try.”

“I know you care too,” Curly blurts out, too overwhelmed to pause and think about his words.

Anya frowns slightly at the change in direction. “Curly…”

He doesn’t let it deter him. “You didn’t have to do anything. So many times, the easy thing, the simple thing would be to do nothing.” And doesn’t he know it better than most? “But you never choose the easy path. You do what’s right.”

Anya’s smile returns, but it’s a self-conscious one this time, squishing her cheek into the pillow. She is so beautiful it hurts. “Curly, this isn’t about me, we were making you feel better–”

“I mean it, though,” Curly interrupts her. “I do. I admire you so much, Anya. I–” he remembers what she said to him just now. “I see you.” 

Breath catches in his chest, his heart stuttering from the pressure. Speechless, words cramming themselves up his throat and getting nowhere, he awkwardly pushes one arm underneath Anya’s neck, puts another around her shoulders, and draws her close. Anya moves readily, winding her own arms around his torso. His lips press to her forehead, and Curly closes his eye, quietly overwhelmed.

He needs her to be okay. To be happy. He will do anything for it. This time, truly anything.

“Me too, Curly,” Anya whispers; her breath is warm on Curly’s spasming neck. “I love you, too.”

***

Things stay the same. Curly and Anya still part for work and school, meet again amd have home-cooked meals, go on slow, meandering walks, watch movies, play board games, read together in silence. Talk – about curious inner workings of the human body that Anya learns in school, about ridiculous anecdotes of human ineptitude and machine malfunction that Curly encounters in the cases he analyses, about gossip, about each other. They are already living together, after all. There is little reason for their established, comfortable routine to suddenly turn on its head.

Yet, things change. Soon enough after that first night, they do a little reshuffling. Curly’s room has a nicer view, but he’s yielded the better mattress to the guest room ages ago, so a-hauling mattresses they go. They sleep in Curly’s bed most nights, holding each other, unless his full body pain flares up and he needs more space. In the mornings, when Curly lurches out of bed early enough to make breakfast before it’s time for Anya to awaken, she shuffles sleepily into the kitchen, hugs him from behind, and tries not to doze off again with her face pressed into his nape. When they go on walks, they hold hands. When they watch something or read on the couch, their limbs tangle together. If they fall asleep there and wake up in an embrace, there is no need to feel guilty or weird about it.

They kiss. Kind of a lot. From quick pecks that Anya gives Curly on her way out of the house to sleepy kisses as they coax each other into the morning to long, thorough makeout sessions that linger with Curly afterwards, nestling in the space around his heart. 

With Anya, he relearns it all again. How to kiss with his new mouth, how to hold with hands he can’t feel. After what feels like a century spent flayed and suffering from anything as light as a movement in the air, after settling into the slight numbness of lab-grown skin, after convincing himself that he will not be with the one he loves, now Curly craves touch so badly he is ill with it. Every time Anya rests her hand on his arm or leans against his side or brushes her thumbs over the circles under his eyes before kissing him, it takes everything he has not to shiver with need.

It takes Curly time to learn to ask for it. To learn to believe, in turn, that his own offers of touch are welcome and wanted. But together, slowly, they get there.

***

Now and again, Curly startles awake from the closeness of Anya’s body, heart hammering in his throat. Instead of the softness of their bed, he feels the cold tile, holds on to something colder still. A familiar terror grips him, moves him in what is almost a compulsion, and Curly, sleep-heavy and uncoordinated, shoves his dumb face under Anya’s chin to check for a pulse.

Anya doesn’t question him the first time it wakes her up, doesn’t even look particularly surprised, only wraps her arms around him, and whispers apologies into his skin, and pets his hair until his needling anxiety is soothed.

***

He tried to convince her not to do it. Shook his head, pleaded with her when she offered to join her.

But, of course, she misunderstood.

So now Curly has to wake up and check.

***

Living together and having an established routine means that many things that could be, in theory, considered fresh romantic gestures (like cooking or going bird watching or yelling together at a ridiculous reality show) are instead familiar comforts. And there is nothing wrong with that, except Curly very quickly finds himself buzzing with the need to court Anya properly, to do something he doesn’t already do, to step up his game. His dating history has always been sparse, with most of his acquaintances kept at an arm’s distance, further exacerbated by the isolation of his job, so now he finds himself floundering without having tried and true strategies to fall back on.

To some surprise, when he confesses this anxiety to Anya, he finds it mirrored. So, as most things, they tackle it together.

Spring rolls around properly, and Curly buys Anya tulips on a whim, enamoured with the small corner shop, its bright colours amidst the concrete grey. He then spends a good hour planted on his butt on the steps of their building and slowly, meticulously plucking out the stamens when he realises he doesn’t know if Anya is allergic to pollen.

She isn’t. When she is done laughing at Curly dramatically narrating the sorry tale of his battle against the tiny stamens, she hugs him and shares, for future reference, that her only foes are canned peaches and bug bites.

When exams begin to loom in all their stressful glory, Anya weathers it with determination. When she mentions a book she could use that is apparently impossible to get, Curly spends half a day scouring torrents and pulling up his old school accounts until he finds its PDF. He sends it to her immediately, not wanting to keep it for when she gets home for the sake of delayed gratification, and she texts him back a series of unintelligible keysmashes in caps lock. His effort, apparently, saves not only her but also half of her group.

When Curly doesn’t know what to cook, in a rut trying to find something new, Anya rustles up her old work contacts and brings home an actual durian. The challenge is fun, and the reviews are mixed: Curly hates everything about its sorry existence while Anya is over the moon, so that’s her lunches sorted for the next week.

When Anya spends extra after school hours in the university’s morgue and ends up getting formaldehyde spilled over her scrubs during a cadaver wrangling incident, Curly, with the advantage of his inorganic hands, sends her, distraught, to bed and spends a good hour in the bathroom, scrubbing out the questionable fluids after making sure he isn’t about to create mustard gas with their cleaning products. 

When Curly wakes up in the morning in too much pain to move and too miserable to be alone, Anya kisses his forehead and arranges his heating blankets and sits nearby, quietly turning the pages of her notebook or talking to him about biology and physiology and organic chemistry to give him something to focus on.

They leave each other small things to find too, like cache hunters lite, or perhaps small animals squirrelling away treasures for each other in their lair.

Under Curly’s habitual mug, a Polaroid of a couple of mourning doves preening each other.

Folded into Anya’s wallet next to the student ID, a lopsided sketch of a lily.

On the kitchen table, tickets to a temporary exhibition of Vrubel, a collection of art made by a painter from a millennium ago and still not lost to time.

Tucked behind the key rack, an invitation to the local art space, live digital painting of the sky accompanied by a string quartet.

Finally, Curly unearths the not-portrait of Anya he’d made ages ago and hid among his other canvases. A queasy sort of unsurety grips him – is this too much? would she think it weird? – but when he takes the plunge and shows Anya the painting, not quite brave enough to tell her what it’s supposed to be, she looks at it for a long moment before turning to him, awe on her face, and asking if he would like to turn it into a diptych. 

“Maybe light blues. And gold… You know better though, you are the artist,” she suggests with a coy smile and shares it with Curly in kisses until he is smiling as well.

He didn’t even think about it – finds it impossible to think of himself as anything worthy of art – but if this is what Anya wants…he did decide to keep his promise of ‘anything’, didn’t he?

Slowly, the canvas is filled. It’s a more laborious process this time, a difficult birth as Curly mulls over his paints, looking pleadingly to the first canvas, trying to recapture the flow he was in when he created it.

It’s pointless, of course. He doesn’t love himself the way he loves Anya. If he keeps pushing it, he will only yield something false, something unkind.

Curly turns his gaze inwards. Thinks of where he was, where he is. Imagining a future was scary for a long time, and then downright impossible, but now, in a warm apartment and in love with his best friend, doing a job he doesn’t hate, Curly finds himself spotting vague glimmers amongst the uncertainties. So he paints them.

They put the twin canvases on the wall above the TV, next to each other. The spot is such that they can see them anywhere in the common area, and Curly notices Anya beaming every time she looks at them even when she doesn’t know he is watching.

It strikes Curly then, how much they have both grown into this space. It used to be little more than a transit point for Curly, a brief downtime location between one trip and the next, as impersonal as the barracks at the flight academy. Hell, his quarters at the Tulpar had more prominent traces of his personality than this apartment.

But now, after becoming grounded for good, confined to it for the longest time, Curly can’t help but notice all the signs of life in it. Anya’s books and notepads scattered about, the ironing board relocated to a more easily reachable spot with how often she needs to wash her lab coats. Hair ties that she forgets to put around her wrist, sun catchers on the kitchen window, crocs and rubber boots and soft slippers by the front door, woollen socks, weekly pill boxes with vitamins. Curly’s own things too, stashes of painkillers in strategic spots, compression sleeves, pastel highlighters and stacks of reports and analyses printed out when he can’t stand the screens. Eye patches on the hook next to the keys, talcum powder, protein snacks, brushes marinating in paint thinner by the open window. Drawings, sketches, photos on the walls, on the fridge, in random nooks and crannies, edited with pens and markers in a constant back-and-forth.

The way they know which cups and mugs to get from the cupboard for each other. The way they have preferences for certain forks in the drawer and certain figurines in tabletop sets. The established rituals of setting the table, arranging themselves on the couch, preparing for bed. Who runs the tricky dishwasher, who waters their new plants.

Some of it has been here before too, from the early days of Anya moving in with Curly. But even those things feel different now, cast in a new light, given new meaning, new intention.

Finally remembering to take a step back and take it all in, Curly, with some surprise and even disbelief, finds himself…happy.

It isn’t what he imagined for himself back when he could afford to daydream about his future. And when it was torn away from him as easily and bloodily as his skin he thought it was gone forever.

But despite everything, through everything, here they are.

*** 

It would, of course, be too good to be true. Something was bound to happen one day, couldn’t not, and Curly was, as always, daft to pretend otherwise.

He gets his comeuppance one morning. Wakefulness is slow to come to him, his senses coaxed to the surface slowly, one by one. The gentle light filtering in through his eyelid. The almost imperceptible ticking of Anya’s wristwatch, easily dissolved in the ambience when a sporadic car drives by. The ebbing and flowing pressure as they ribcages expand and contract again, Curly’s chest pressing into Anya’s back. His face in her hair, the clean smell of her shampoo, tea tree and mint warmed by her skin. His arm in the smooth valley of her waist. His hips—

Curly’s eye flies open and he scrambles back in a thoughtless panic. His startled inhale sends him into a coughing fit, which is just fucking perfect because then of course he can’t keep quiet as he chokes on empty air, and soon enough Anya rolls over onto her back, rubbing her eyes with a concerned frown on her face.

“You ‘kay?” she asks, and her frown deepens when she takes in the way he is angling away from her to the point of plastering himself against the wall. “Curly?”

“Yeah,” Curly manages when he finally stops coughing. He can feel himself flushing with shame, with guilt. He thought he was doing better, that he was treating Anya well, doing right by her, but now, in light of something more carnal as opposed to bloody— hand holding and love notes, his fragile dynamic balance is destabilised, his faults brought to light again.

When the crash happened, the foam bonded best with the shitty plasticky material of Curly’s coveralls, melting with the skin underneath. Which means that the worst damage was done to everything that he had exposed — head and neck and hands — and everything where the coveralls touched bare skin and not the cotton of his clothes.

Which, in turn, means that his torso was protected enough to keep him relatively intact. Still, for the longest time Curly had his suspicions that something must have happened to him to completely strike through his already modest libido. Not that he felt the need to concern himself with anything like that while still on the Tulpar, nor for the longest time after. He had his flickers of worry when he and Anya started sharing a bed, but when nothing happened even then, he thought it was safe to let it go.

If Anya had any worries of her own, she never pushed Curly to explain anything, so he doesn’t know how she feels about it — nor how he feels about it himself.

It’s probably better this way, he thought. It only makes him safer for her, if there is no…potentiality. For anything.

And thus, of course, Curly was lulled into a false sense of security and will now have to answer for it.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—” Curly stammers, burning with embarrassment, but he can already see Anya connecting the dots.

“Curly,” she repeats, something different in her voice now that Curly fails to parse. “You don’t need to apologise, nothing happened?”

“But it did, I—” Curly protests. He thinks of the floor in the cockpit. “I was…”

“You didn’t do anything.” Curly opens his mouth again, but Anya rests the pad of her thumb over his lips. “I think I was dozing for some time, I wasn’t fully asleep, so…” Suddenly, her eyes widen in understanding. “Oh Curly, did you think that I…” 

Curly winces.

Anya shakes her head. “Oh love. Just because of— what happened in the past… Doesn’t mean that it’s something that’s now broken for me forever. That I don’t want.”

She pushes slowly into his space, and though Curly is looking away he can tell she’s watching his face. She comes closer until they are almost chest to chest, ducking under Curly’s arm to coax him into holding her. Her lower half Anya mercifully angles away.

“I love you. I trust you.” Her fingers travel up his cheek and rest on his temple in a silent bid for eye contact. When he looks at her, her gaze is open and her mouth is soft. “Curly, do you want to have sex?”

It feels like a gut punch. It feels like the last thing he could ever imagine Anya say — directed at him or in general.

A new wave of shame slams into him. Anya is right — what basis did he have to make this assumption? To decide for her what she wanted or didn’t want?

But she is waiting for an answer. Waiting for him, as always, to be done grappling with his conundrums.

“I don’t even know if I can,” he confesses, shaking his head in a jerky motion.

Anya’s voice is barely above a whisper. “That’s not what I’m asking. Would you like to try?” Something must show in Curly’s face because in the next moment she cups it gently with both hands, smoothing out the expression with her thumbs. “Hey. Curly, hey. It’s okay. It’s just us, yeah? Just you and me. We’re safe.” She searches his eye. “I’ll back off if you want, love. Just tell me what you want. Whatever you want.”

Once again, Anya treads this so lightly, so carefully, making Curly wish he could give back even a fraction of her assertiveness, her consideration.

“I want you,” he confesses, watching the way the corners of Anya’s mouth lift up, dimpling her cheeks. “I do. But I can’t even touch you. I can’t…”

Can’t stop falling short.

He tries so hard. In some ways, it feels easier. In others…in this…downright impossible.

“Oh? Then what’s this?” Anya asks and wiggles a little, undeniably in his arms. “Or this?” she continues, leaning in for a brief kiss. “Or…or this?” a whisper of her knee against his thigh, warm even through the fabric.

Curly’s heart thuds in his throat. He wishes he could brush the stray hair away from her face. He wishes for many things.

In lieu of all of them, he leans in, touching his lips to Anya’s. She makes a soft noise, one hand sliding up and into his hair, giving it a light tug. Curly parts his lips around an inhale, feeling Anya’s answering smile, the hint of her teeth where she presses closer. She pets his hair, cradling the back of his head, and Curly allows himself to be drawn in.

They have kissed like a thousand times already — Curly was quick to lose count — yet something about it never loses its novelty to him, the gentle trill of touch and connection, as precarious and yet as obvious and true as the smattering of stars on the vast canvas of space.

Anya winds her arms around Curly again, draws him closer in before they finally part. She stays near enough to plant whispers of kisses on his nose and cheek and jaw, leaving Curly to try and keep up. He pants under the gentle onslaught, undeniably, painfully hard now, but when he manages to open his eye he only finds something akin to adoration in Anya’s gaze.

“You’re enjoying this,” Curly realises, smiling despite himself when Anya’s own grin grows. “Getting me worked up.”

“I like you liking me,” Anya shrugs and cranes her neck to kiss the side of his face. “Still good?”

Curly’s arms tighten a fraction around her waist. “Yeah.” He swallows. “Do you…want me to put my hands on?”

”Whatever you want,” Anya murmurs. “You can just hold me, too. I’ll care for the rest.”

He doesn’t fucking deserve her. “I think I want my hands,” Curly says.

”Okay.” Immediately, Anya sits up and stretches to grab the prosthetics from the charging station. There is colour on her cheeks, highlighting the glint in her eyes. “Let me put them on?”

Curly nods. He shuffles closer to the middle of the bed and onto his back, pushing the blankets down to his waist, and Anya settles with her knees bracketing his thighs, hovering above him just shy of any contact. With great care, chewing on her lip as she focuses, Anya pulls one hand on and guides Curly to place it on her hip as she deals with the other. 

The oversized T-shirt that Anya wears to sleep — it may or may not be Curly’s — is long enough to cover her up when she pulls off her pyjama trousers and sneaks under the blankets with Curly, settling firmer on his thighs now. He guides Anya down to kiss her, and she readily bows her back when he encircles her in his arms. Her skin, what he can see of it, is tender with goose flesh, once again making him yearn for the simple feeling of touch. Her hair hangs in a curtain around him, concealing them from the world.

Curly huffs at the brush of cool air, and Anya soothes him with kisses and murmurs, hiding among them the moment she touches him, almost too light at first, then firmer, faster. He gasps into her mouth, his hands roving her back, dipping under the hem of her shirt when she lifts it. When Anya sits up, concentration in the furrow of her brow, Curly is shot through with a spike of alarm, but she shushes him again.

“It’s safe, don’t worry, I’m on the pill,” she tells him, her hands framing his face, her lips grazing his. A broken noise leaves her as she rocks back, and she seals it between them too.

Part of Curly still wants to protest, to ask — are you sure? are you absolutely sure that you want this? — but he thinks back to all the times when the tables were turned. When Anya watched him make maybe questionable decisions and struggle through his difficulties but kept herself from offering help despite obviously wanting to. Recognising that he needed it, giving him the chance to reassert himself in the world.

She’s explained it to him too, something she’d read about in her books and had later confirmed in therapy — the dignity of risk. Who is he to deny her that dignity in her own hurt?

Unable to think much beyond that, desperate with the need to feel more, Curly draws Anya close until they are chest to chest, drinks in her soft moans as he combs through her hair. Murmurs pass between them, melting into kisses and sighs. Soft reassurances, desperate little pleas. Curly cups Anya’s breast through the shirt, moves down to bracket her waist again, stealing the gasp from her lungs at the change in pace. Anya sits up for better leverage, one hand on Curly’s chest, the other roaming his body under the shirt, leaving buzzing shivers in the wake of her fingers.

Her hair dishevelled, her eyes glazed and heavy, the muscles in her thighs flexing on either side of Curly’s waist, Anya is so beautiful he is near tears just from looking at her. She catches him watching and her pace stutters and grows more desperate as her fist tightens around the fabric of Curly’s shirt. She bows her head with a shaky whimper, and Curly wants nothing more but to hold her to his chest again but he settles for murmurs of encouragement and hands on her thighs, not trusting their mechanisms enough to dare moving them closer.

Anya freezes, taut like a string, a strangled cry escaping her as she bows over Curly, and he shudders in the next moment as well, a groan wrenched from him by the blinding enormity of it. There is an endless, breathless moment that is almost painful in its intensity before its spectre releases him, and Curly tumbles in a free fall, letting it drag him down, down, down into weightless deep.

When Curly floats back to the surface, he finds Anya nestled on his chest again, his arms wrapped around her back. Their shivering breaths are slowing down, smoothing out. He is warm, blissfully aware of every single point where they touch. Calm. At peace. In love.

Anya slowly, almost groggily shifts her hands to lay them on top of one another on Curly’s chest, then pillows her chin on them. They are close enough to share breaths. The glazed look is gone from her eyes, replaced with something softer. Almost serene.

“Hey,” she murmurs. Her eyes smile.

“Hey.”

“I’m not crushing you, am I?”

“No.” Even if she were, Curly would let her. He wants to stay like this forever.

“Okay.” Anya plants a gentle kiss on the jut of Curly’s collarbone above his sternum, nuzzles the skin there, and lays her head back down. “Just one more minute, then.”

They stay like this for over an hour. Anya dozes, and Curly pets her hair, and for once his mind is utterly devoid of anything but this calm, settled glow. Slowly, almost like the first twinkle of an aurora borealis, a certainty coalesces from it, and Curly contemplates it and welcomes it:

Time will pass. And they are going to be okay.

***

***

***

don’t hold a glass over the flame,

don’t let your heart grow cold,

i will call you by name,

i will share your road

“Anitaaa! Anechka! Where are you?”

Anya sits up straighter in her seat, though her eyes stay glued to the screen. “In here!” she calls and gets a bit more click-clacking in before Sylvie pokes her head in around the door. 

“What in god’s name are you still doing here?” Sylvie asks in exasperation. She’s already putting on her coat but pauses in a clear affront.

Anya raises her eyebrows. “Completing my shift?” she offers.

“It’s almost over though, go get changed,” Sylvie rolls her eyes in a practised way of the long-suffering.

Anya snorts and returns to the screen. “Yes, in a moment, I’m just updating the patient files.”

In the corner of her eye, she can just about spot Sylvie purse her lips. “She’s riding you too hard. I know nurses are the real rulers here,” she does a little bow as she speaks, pointing at herself, “but come on, doc.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m almost done here,” Anya gestures at the open sheet, typing in the update and hitting the ‘Save’ button. “Just wanted to spend a bit more time with the kids since I’m off tomorrow.”

“Which is what you are totally doing in your empty office at the end of the wing,” Sylvie points out, but Anya only offers her a shrug and a smile in return. Sometimes, being present in the building is enough, even if she isn’t actively doing rounds. If something happens, she is there, ready to help.

“Ah, to be so young again,” Sylvie shakes her head before she slaps the pocket of her coat. “Damn, I forgot my phone. I’m going back to the lockers but after that I’m heading out, want a lift?”

Anya opens the last file. “Not today, thank you, I’ve got someone waiting for me.”

Not waiting quite yet, hopefully — the weather is cold, and Anya still needs a few minutes. But soon.

Sylvie grins, “Ooh! Well, say hi to the Englishman for me! Have a nice day off, and see you back on the frontlines after,” she calls as she leaves, and Anya shakes her head, listening to the sound of Sylvie’s footsteps fading as she walks away down the hallway amidst the pre-dinnertime din.

Anya’s phone buzzes.

I’m here (. 

Dork. Years later, it still never fails to make her smile.

Soon, Anya walks through the front doors of the hospital. The evening is still early, but it’s already dark, and the edges of the well-lit arrivals area are fuzzy with a soft drizzle.

At the bottom of the stairs there is a lone figure, and Anya’s heart jumps when Curly turns around and looks up at her with a grin on his face. She flies down the steps and flings herself at him, and she might be almost as tall as Curly with her heels on, but he picks her up with ease, giving them a little spin before setting her back down. His hold doesn’t loosen on her until she is firmly on the ground, and even then his hands don’t fall away, simply settling into a more comfortable hold on the small of her back.

“Hi there,” he says and pushes his forehead into hers, a pressure she gladly returns.

“Hey you,” she replies before cupping his face and giving him a kiss. His skin feels cool to the touch. “Have you been waiting for long?”

“Maybe a few, I was lucky with parking,” Curly shrugs, and Anya cocks her head as something catches her attention. Namely, the hat he is wearing, a thick thing knitted from deep blue wool with a maroon pom pom on the top.

“Nice hat,” she comments. Her hat, to be precise.

“Oh yeah, what do you think?” Curly unwinds one arm from around her to strike a pose. “My hair is still a bit damp, I mismanaged my gym time, so— this one was the first I saw when I swung by home.”

Anya takes him in, but she isn’t really focusing on the hat. Instead, she looks at the lines of his face, softer now, not as angular and sharp with stress as she still remembers them. The grafting scars are no longer as angry either, the pockmarks no longer so deep. She’s kissed each and every one of them many times over by now, even those blurred by crow’s feet and laughter lines.

Shame that Curly’s silver hair is covered, though she can’t wait to see what kind of hat hair he’s going to have once they get indoors. She’s been getting gray hairs of her own, too, but there’s still a lot of catching up to do. It’s still so strange to think that. Anya’s never imagined she would find herself here.

But Curly looks devastatingly handsome, if she’s honest. Even if he is being a menace and stretching out her hat with his massive forehead right now.

“It suits you,” she replies. Her hands slide down to the lapels of his peacoat, and she raises an eyebrow. “Got carried away on the elliptical again?”

Curly gives her a disarming, crooked smile and covers one of her hands with his. They lace their fingers together. Heck, Anya really likes this new model.

“Just wanted the time to pass faster, and then it did,” Curly replies and ducks his head.

But Anya gets him. Some work days are so busy she barely has time to sit down, and time flies by in a blink of an eye, but today, of course, everything had to drag. Today, of all days, when Anya wanted nothing more but spend all of her time with Curly and wish him—

“Well, here we are now. Happy anniversary,” Anya leans into him, murmuring the last words against his lips. “Are you gonna finally tell me when you’re taking us?”

They’ve got tomorrow planned, a visit to the tropical bird house and a trip down the river to watch the sunset over wine, but Curly has been extremely cagey about this evening specifically. Last year, when it was her turn to plan things, Curly had only just gotten the texture sensors installed, so she took him to the oceanarium to pet rays and sharks.

“Happy anniversary, love.” Curly sticks out the tip of his tongue as if it is physically difficult for him to keep the secret in. Anya loves the doof so much. “Let me just say that I managed to snag a table at that place of interest we had…” At Anya’s questioning stare, he divulges another hint, “The one with the separate menu for specialty dumplings…”

“No!” Anya guffaws. The place with all of her favorite things. Beetroot, sour cream, pickled everything – comfort foods of her childhood, elevated to gourmet in a way that is both ridiculous and hopelessly intriguing. They’ve been talking about that restaurant for ages. “The wait list is like half a year long?”

Curly preens, “I may have snagged it half a year ago.”

“See, that’s why everyone wants your brains,” Anya laughs and kisses him again before finally moving away enough for them to walk. They’ve got places to be, after all. Pelmeni to consume. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” Curly squeezes her hand. “Hungry?”

“Starving,” Anya grins, wrapping her other hand around his elbow. “Lead the way.”