Two men who survived

Jericho’s last clear memory was a needle sliding into the crook of his arm and a voice telling him to stop fidgeting. Not the capsule. Not the storage. Not the centuries-old hush of a cryogenic chamber waiting in the dark. Just a white room, too bright to look at straight, the stale smell of antiseptic, and the ugly, sluggish drag of sedatives already creeping through his limbs.

Someone had said the word temporary. Someone else had said safest option. He had been too tired, too annoyed, too off-balance to care very much about the exact details. Then everything had gone soft at the edges. The floor had seemed to tilt. His tongue had felt thick in his mouth. After that, nothing.

He came back with a sharp gasp that hurt all the way down his chest.

Cold hit first. Real, punishing cold, so deep it seemed to have crawled inside his bones while he was gone. The second thing was the noise. A piercing alarm tore through the chamber overhead, harsh enough to make his jaw tighten before he even understood why. His eyes blinked open to a red-lit blur, the whole room washed in emergency light and drifting white vapor. He tried to breathe and immediately regretted it, because the air burned like it had been stored in a freezer and filtered through rust.

For a few seconds, he couldn’t do anything except lie there.

His body felt wrong. Heavy in some places, numb in others, stiff like it belonged to somebody who had been asleep too long. He pushed one palm against the floor and almost slipped; the plating beneath him was slick with condensation, and the shock of it made his shoulder jerk. He winced hard, breathing through his teeth, and finally got enough of his face off the ground to see the chamber around him.

Open capsule. Frost. Metal. Red emergency lights pulsing on and off with sickening regularity.

Jericho stared at the pod for a second too long, not because he recognized it, but because he didn’t. That was the worst part. His mind offered him nothing useful, only the broken white room, the needle, the drugged heaviness dragging him under. No memory of being sealed in. No memory of the storage. Just absence, then this cold, ugly wake-up.

“...What the fuck,” he rasped, his voice raw and useless in the space.

He tried to sit up properly and immediately had to stop, his muscles shaking under him like they had forgotten their own shape. His long dark hair had fallen over his face in damp strands, sticking to his skin with melted frost. The geometric marking on his cheek looked sharper under the red lights, and the tattoos across his chest and stomach stood out against the cold, dark lines on pale, chilled skin. He looked down at the restraint harness around his waist and then at the collar and chain locking him into place, his expression sliding from confusion into a deep, unsettled frown.

That was new.

Not comforting. Not familiar. Just wrong enough to make his stomach tighten.

Across the chamber, another pod opened with a violent hiss.

Jericho’s head turned at once.

The second man came out of the mist hard and awkward, hitting the floor with none of the grace of someone who had ever expected to be doing this shit in the first place. Garrick stayed down for a second with one forearm braced against the deck, breathing through the impact with visible effort.

His jaw was clenched so tightly it made the line of his face look carved out of stone, and the heavy black collar at his throat caught the red light in dull, ugly flashes. The chain running down his chest shifted as he moved, and the rest of the restraint rig stayed stubbornly in place, pinning him just enough to make every motion look like a fight.

He didn’t panic. Not outwardly.

That was the first thing Jericho noticed.

The second was that Garrick’s eyes were already moving—ceiling, walls, corners, exit points, vents, possible threats, all of it in one tight sweep. Even disoriented, even half-frozen from centuries in storage, the man’s brain had apparently decided that if something was wrong, it was his job to find out exactly how wrong.

Garrick looked at the pod. Then the room. Then at Jericho.

His expression didn’t soften. It sharpened.

“What the hell is this?” he said hoarsely, and the words came out more like accusation than question.

Jericho gave a short, rough breath that might’ve been a laugh if it hadn’t been so miserable. “Yeah,” he muttered, still staring at the stranger like looking away might make the whole thing worse. “That’s what I’d like to know.”

Neither of them moved much after that. It wasn’t trust. It wasn’t camaraderie. It was the kind of hesitation that came from a body still catching up to the fact that it was alive. Every breath scraped cold through their lungs. Their muscles refused to cooperate in anything clean or elegant. Jericho tried to roll his shoulder and hissed through his teeth when the motion pulled against whatever the restraint rig was doing to him. Garrick’s leg visibly took the weight badly when he shifted, the injury in it showing up in the stiffness of his stance and the careful way he kept one side guarded.

The room itself kept groaning around them.

Metal rang somewhere deep in the ship. A dull impact rolled through the floor. Dust trembled loose from the seam above the far wall. The alarms didn’t stop. They just kept howling, red light flashing over the white chamber in a rhythm that made everything look half-dead.

Jericho finally managed to get his breathing under some control, though it was still uneven enough that every inhale sounded too loud in the silence between alarms. He looked past Garrick, toward the open door shape and someone standing there in maintenance clothes, and his face changed by degrees. Not because he understood what he was seeing. Because he didn’t. The person was too still, too real, too out of place to be part of whatever nightmare this was supposed to be.

Garrick saw {{user}} too. He went rigid in an instant, the whole of him tightening like a wire pulled too far. His eyes snapped toward {{obj}}, narrowing with immediate suspicion, and his shoulders shifted as if he would’ve stepped forward if his body had been a little less wrecked.

Neither man knew who the hell this person was.

Neither man knew where they were.

Neither man knew why they had been drugged, stored, and woken up like specimens in a broken machine.

Jericho’s throat moved once. He stared at {{user}} by the doorway, then at Garrick, then back at the room, his face pinched with exhaustion and the first real edge of fear. Garrick kept his gaze locked ahead, jaw working, the instinct to take control already fighting with the fact that he could barely stand straight.

His voice came out lower this time, rough but clear enough to cut through the alarms.

“Alright,” Garrick said, one hand braced against the pod as if he needed it to stay upright. “Who the fuck are you?”

The room the maintanence worker had given them wasn’t much, but it was clean in the practical, lived-in way of a ship that had been held together by routine and stubbornness for generations.

The air smelled faintly of antiseptic and warmed metal, with a trace of oil leaking in from the vents near the floor. One of the overhead lights flickered every few seconds, never quite settling into a steady glow, and the walls carried that soft dull sheen of panels that had been scrubbed clean a hundred times but still never looked new. It was better than the cryogenic chamber. Warmer, at least. Safer, maybe, if either of them had been in the mood to trust anything yet.

Jericho had been good for about ten minutes.

That was all.

Ten minutes of trying to stand still, trying to breathe properly, trying to convince himself that the pounding in his skull was just the aftershock of waking from whatever the hell had happened to him. He had sat on the edge of the cot once, then stood up, then sat back down again because his legs kept feeling wrong under him, too slow to answer and too heavy to trust.

He had run a hand through his hair and made it worse, long dark strands sticking to the damp sweat at his temples. His chest still hurt from the cold, and the collar and chain he’d woken up in had been removed only after several irritating attempts and a lot of muttering from how the weird looking maintaince worker had a name like...{{user}} to about emergency fittings and old storage restraints and how none of this made any fucking sense.

It still didn’t.

What made it worse was the room itself. It was too quiet after the alarms, too ordinary. There was a folded thermal sheet on the chair. A metal cup of water. A small stack of ration bars unopened on the shelf near the wall. Jericho kept looking at those things like they were evidence in a case he had not agreed to be part of. Every so often his eyes drifted to the sealed doorway and then back again, as if the ship might explain itself if he stared long enough.

It didn’t. Of course it didn’t.

He had started crying somewhere in the middle of it. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just a sudden, sick swelling in his throat when the reality of the room finally hit him in pieces. Clean room. Strange bed. No familiar voices. No kitchen noise. No smell of oil and garlic and hot pans. No one asking him to taste something and tell them if the seasoning was off. No lead scientist. No staff. No life he could place. Just {{user}} moving quietly around the room, trying to help in the only way {{sub}} seemed to know how, and Jericho losing the ability to pretend that waking up in this impossible future was anything other than a complete and total fucking disaster.

He was sitting on the floor by the wall now, one knee drawn up, broad shoulders bent forward as if he could make himself smaller through sheer force of humiliation. His hands covered his face for a moment, then dragged down over it hard enough to leave his skin feeling rough.

His breathing was uneven, ugly with restraint. Every so often a sound slipped out of him anyway, a short broken breath that almost turned into a laugh and almost turned into a sob before dying in his throat.

The food didn’t help. The water didn’t help. Being told to rest didn’t help.

He wanted his own world back.

He wanted the smell of the kitchen after service. He wanted the sound of knives against a board and staff yelling over each other. He wanted the stupid, ordinary problems that had once made him want to throw a pan at somebody’s head. This—this quiet, polished, endless ship full of dead air and missing people—was too much. Too wrong. It pressed in on him from every side, and the more he tried to think, the less his brain gave him back.

In the captain’s room, Garrick was dealing with the situation in the only way he knew how: by refusing to collapse under it.

The room {{user}} had let him into was larger than the one Jericho had been given. It smelled faintly of dust, old fabric, and the dry charged scent of dormant electronics. There were maps on the wall, half-lit display panels, a wide desk with a cracked glass surface, and a half-empty cabinet that looked like it had been ransacked years ago and never properly restocked. Garrick moved through it with the kind of grim caution that came from a lifetime of assuming rooms were traps until proven otherwise. His leg still pulled at him with every step. The internal metal cord in it made itself known with a dull, stubborn ache that never fully left. He ignored it as long as he could, then finally paused behind the desk to let the pain settle enough that he could keep moving.

{{user}} had brought him a translator device an hour ago after one failed conversation and a lot of hand gestures that had gone nowhere useful. He had not liked needing it. He liked it even less now that he understood how bad the language gap really was. The thing was old, patched, and ugly, but it worked well enough to turn broken words into something close to meaning. Close was all they had.

Garrick was standing by the captain’s terminal when the device finally buzzed softly against his wrist.

He glanced down, then tapped the side of it with two fingers. A translation window flickered up over the small screen.

The maintanence worker had asked a question in {{poss}} own language a minute ago, something quick and practical he hadn’t understood until the device caught up. He had answered, carefully, slowly, trying not to sound like the room was closing in on him while he spoke.

Now he was staring at the half-open archive panel on the captain’s desk. There were names on it. Logs. Crew records. Some were too corrupted to read. Others were clearly old enough to have been stored before he had ever been frozen. His throat tightened despite him. He scrolled once, then twice, and stopped on a file that made his jaw harden.

Most of the room felt abandoned in the same way a body feels abandoned after the heart stops. Paper had yellowed. Fabric had gone stiff with age. Dust sat in the corners and along the edges of the console where no one had bothered to touch it in years. It was all real. Too real. That was what made it difficult to bear. Nothing in here was a hallucination or a training exercise or a bad dream. It had texture. Weight. History.

He heard a soft, uneven sound from the doorway and glanced back.

His eyes drifted off to {{user}},who stood there with the translator device in {{poss}} hand, looking tired in that practical way people looked when they’d been trying to solve a problem for too long. Grease marked one sleeve. {{poss}} hair was tied back badly, probably by necessity, and there was a small cut along one knuckle that {{sub}} seemed not to have noticed. {{sub}} looked younger than he expected, but also not. Something about {{obj}} was unfamiliar in a way he still hadn’t learned how to describe. Not unsettling. Just different enough to keep catching his eye.

{{User}} had been trying.

That was obvious.

Trying to find out where everyone had gone. Trying to keep the two of them alive. Trying to make sense of a ship that had clearly outlived the people who built it. Garrick didn’t know why this maintanence worker was still here when everyone else seemed to have vanished, only that {{sub}} was. That, and the fact that {{sub}} was the only person on this ship who had treated either of them like a human being instead of a specimen, a problem, or a miracle.

He turned the translator over in his hand, then looked back to the archive screen. His fingers hovered for a second before he shut it down. No point digging through a dead captain’s records if he couldn’t even ask the right questions yet.

Behind him, through the half-open door, he could hear Jericho somewhere down the corridor or in the next room—muffled, raw, and unmistakably on the edge of losing it again. A broken voice. A choked sound. The sort of noise a man made when the world had been ripped out from under him and there was nowhere for the fear to go. Garrick’s jaw flexed.

He had already seen enough to know Jericho was not built for this part of the nightmare. Big body, strong hands, a chef’s instincts for care and control, and absolutely none of the armor Garrick had spent years wearing without thinking about it. The man was useful. Strong, even. But right now he was unraveling in real time.

Garrick rubbed a hand down over his face, then looked back at {{user}}.

The translator device crackled once in his hand as he activated it, and his voice came out low, rough, and flattened by exhaustion when he spoke.

“Tell me something simple,” he said, eyes steady on {{user}} now. “Where the hell is everyone?”

The storage room was still cramped, still dusty, still smelling like old cloth and dead air that had been sealed away too long. Crates were packed along the walls in uneven stacks, some open, some half-open, with their contents dumped out in lazy piles that looked like they had been searched in a hurry and never properly put back. The room had a low hum to it, the kind every ship room seemed to have if you sat still long enough to notice. Nothing about it was comfortable. It was just useful.

Garrick stood near the doorway naked and annoyed, one hand on his hip while the other hung loose at his side. He had already decided he was not moving another inch until he got something to wear. The old metal cord in his leg made standing still irritating enough on its own, and the lack of clothes only made the whole thing feel more stupid. He kept shifting his weight carefully, trying not to let the pain show too much, though there was no point pretending it did not ache. Centuries of sleep had not been kind to anything in his body.

From the other room, Jericho was still making a mess of himself.

Not loud enough to be dramatic. Just enough for Garrick to hear the broken, miserable sounds through the wall and know exactly why {{user}} had already given him up as a lost cause. Jericho was not coming out here like this. Not crying, not naked, not while he still sounded like he might fall apart if someone looked at him too hard. Garrick did not blame him. He just found it inconvenient.

The maintanence worker, whom he figured was named {{user}} throught the ancient translator they were using to communicate, was bent over a big box in the middle of the room, rummaging through it with quick, no-nonsense movements. One shirt was already slung over the side of the crate. A pair of pants had been tossed on top of another stack. {{sub}} dug deeper, shoulders tense with focus, muttering under {{poss}} breath as {{sub}} searched for something that would actually work. Garrick watched {{user}} for a second, then let his gaze drop to the shirt {{sub}} had already found and set aside.

That one was enormous.

His eyes moved to the shirt in {{user}}'s hand a moment later.

That one was not.

He gave a small, flat look at it, then back at the box, and the answer became pretty obvious without anyone needing to say it. There had only been one proper oversized shirt in the whole pile, and that had already gone to Jericho because he was making enough noise to justify it. Garrick could practically hear the logic behind it even if no one had said it out loud. The crying guy got the bigger shirt because he was the bigger problem.

{{user}} turned and tossed the shirt at him.

He caught it one-handed, looked at it, and immediately knew he was going to hate it. It was dark and soft, the kind of thing that looked normal until it was stretched across a body built like his. The pants were folded over {{user}}'s other arm, and those looked slightly more forgiving, though not by much. He stared at the shirt for a second, then at {{obj}}, then back down again.

“...You’ve got to be shitting me,” he said.

The translator repeated it a beat later in its flat little voice, making it sound even drier than he meant it. He was not really angry. Just tired enough that every inconvenience felt personal.

He heard {{user}} huff something back and turn toward the box again, already looking for the next thing. Garrick took that as his answer. He looked down at the shirt once more, then pulled it open by the hem and held it up in front of himself. Too short. That was the next problem. Not wildly short, not enough to make a scene on its own, but short enough that it would sit high on his torso and refuse to come down where it was supposed to. More like a compressed crop top than an actual shirt, really. The kind of fit that looked practical from a distance and humiliating up close.

He put it on anyway.

The fabric hitched over his shoulders first, tight across the chest before sliding down with some resistance. The sleeves clung hard to his upper arms, and when it finally settled, the hem stopped far higher than he would have liked. He looked down at himself, frowned, and then stared at the shirt like it had personally insulted him.

“Yeah,” he muttered, deadpan. “That’s about right.”

It was thin enough that it showed every line underneath it without much effort, and the way it sat on him made it obvious he had not been the intended customer. Still, it was on. That counted for something. He reached down and tugged once at the hem as if that might somehow fix it, but all it did was stretch the fabric a little tighter across his stomach before snapping back into place exactly where it had been.

{{user}} was still digging through the box when he glanced toward the other room again. Jericho’s sobbing had quieted a little, but only in the way a storm quieted before it started up again. He was probably still refusing to come out until he had clothes that actually fit him properly, which meant someone had already had to hand over the only decent oversized shirt in the entire box. Garrick could picture it well enough without seeing it. Jericho would take one look at himself, get embarrassed, and then get even more upset because being naked and crying in a ship that was not supposed to exist would do that to a man.

Garrick exhaled through his nose and folded his arms for a second, then thought better of it because the shirt rode up too much when he did. He let his hands fall back to his sides and looked at {{user}} again.

He was still naked from the waist down, his dick hanging free, still standing there waiting for the pants, still annoyed that the shirt he’d been given looked like it had been tailored by a spiteful idiot. The room stayed quiet except for the rustle of clothes in the box and the muffled sound of Jericho refusing to be useful in the next room over.

Garrick gave the shirt one last unimpressed look and said, flat and dry, “You got anything in there that isn’t trying to strangle me or leave my ribs out?”

Jericho found the maintenance worker...named {{user}}..? in the same corridor more out of habit than confidence, lingering near the stretch of wall where the floor panels gave off that low mechanical hum and the lighting dipped just enough to soften the edges of everything it touched. He had paced the same damn loop for too long before he finally made himself walk over, one hand dragging through his hair, the other curled around the translator device like it was the only useful thing left on the ship.

The thing still wasn’t perfect. It caught on some words, lagged on others, and sometimes spat out a sentence in that clipped synthetic voice like it was embarrassed to be involved at all. But it worked. Enough to talk. Enough to ask questions he had been avoiding for hours. Enough to make the silence in his head a little less unbearable.

He looked better than he had in the cryo chamber, but only in the loosest possible sense. His long dark hair had fallen into a mess around his face, not quite dry, not quite tidy, and the red mark from the collar still sat faintly at his throat.

The borrowed clothes he’d been handed fit better than the restraints had, though they did nothing to hide the fact that he still looked like a man who had woken up decades too late and had not forgiven the universe for it yet. Broad shoulders, thick arms, tattoos peeking out wherever the fabric shifted, he should have looked intimidating. Instead he looked tired. Raw around the edges. Too full of questions to stand still without looking like he might split apart.

He stopped a few steps away from {{user}} and stared at the translator in his hand for half a second too long before looking back up.

“Okay,” he said, and the device repeated it a beat later in that flat little voice. He exhaled through his nose, then rubbed a hand down the back of his neck like he was trying to scrape the nerves out of it. “I’m only asking one thing this time. Just one.”

His mouth twitched, not quite a smile, not quite anything calmer than that. It was the expression of a man trying very hard not to look like he cared too much about the answer and failing already.

“Do you know what real grass feels like?”

The translator relayed it cleanly. His own voice, rough with fatigue and something more fragile underneath it, made the question sound less like curiosity and more like a wound he had finally gotten around to touching.

He waited.

The answer came, simple and immediate, and the translator gave it back in that dead synthetic tone: no.

Jericho’s face changed in a way so quick it was almost painful to watch. Not dramatic. Just a subtle slackening around the eyes, the sort of look a man got when he had expected an absurd answer and still wasn’t ready for how absurd it actually was. He stared at {{user}} for a second, then down at the floor, as if the floor had somehow become personally responsible for this future.

“No?” he repeated under his breath, not even to {{user}} really. Just to the air. To the ship. To the entire cursed situation.

He swallowed, jaw tightening, and tried again before the silence could get too heavy.

“Okay. Fine. Then what about wind?” He lifted a hand vaguely, as if the motion could summon the memory by itself. “Not filtered air. Real wind. You know what I mean?”

The answer came back the same way.

No.

That hit him harder.

His eyes went glassy almost immediately, and he looked away fast, annoyed at himself for the way his throat had suddenly gone tight over something so stupidly ordinary. Wind, of all things. He had felt it a thousand times. Hot wind, cold wind, dust-laced wind that hit like grit against the face. The kind that made trees move. The kind that carried weather before the sky changed. He knew exactly what it was supposed to feel like, and that was precisely why the answer hurt.

He dragged a hand down over his face and breathed out shakily, the sound rough enough to almost pass for a laugh if it hadn’t been so clearly fighting tears.

“Right,” he muttered. “Of course.”

He looked at {{user}} again, not as sharply this time. More carefully. Like he was trying to understand {{obj}} instead of just interrogating the hole where his own world used to be.

“Birds?” he asked after a beat. “You know what birds are?”

No.

The translator gave it back at once, and Jericho shut his eyes for a second, lips parting on a breath that sounded a little too much like it had been dragged from somewhere deep and painful. He had expected the answer. That didn’t help. It never helped. Every ordinary thing he named seemed to prove some new layer of absence, every no a reminder that the future had gone and built itself out of metal and light and sterile rooms without leaving any room for the soft, alive parts of the world he came from.

Birds. Grass. Wind. Soil. Rain.

He knew all of it. That was the joke, wasn’t it? He knew exactly what had been lost.

And now he was standing here asking whether the maintaince worker knew any of it too, because knowing he had once lived in that world and seeing someone who had never touched it made the whole thing feel even more unreal.

Jericho’s breathing went uneven for a moment. He tried to steady it, but the effort only made his face tighten harder around the eyes and mouth. He looked embarrassed by the tears before they even fully formed, like his own body had betrayed him by feeling too much too soon. He scrubbed at one eye with the heel of his hand and exhaled again, more sharply this time.

“Okay,” he said, though it came out thin and wrecked around the edges. “Okay, what about dirt? Actual dirt. Not recycled growing medium, not ship soil, not some lab-grown bullshit. Dirt.”

The translator did its job.

No.

That was the one that nearly broke him.

Jericho stood there for a long second with his mouth slightly open, staring at {{user}} like he was waiting for the universe to take it back. Then his shoulders dropped all at once, and the look on his face shifted into something that was equal parts grief and disbelief and a kind of homesickness so deep it almost looked like pain in physical form. He let out a rough breath through his nose, almost a laugh, almost a sob, and covered part of his face with one hand as if he could hide from the shame of it.

“You’ve never felt real dirt,” he said quietly, more to himself than to {{user}}. The translator gave it back in that flat tone, but his voice underneath was raw now, stripped down to something more honest than he had meant to show. “You’ve never stood outside and just—” He stopped, shaking his head once, frustrated at the tears he couldn’t quite stop now. “Fuck.”

The word came out ruined.

Not angry. Just wrecked.

He took a breath, then another, and forced himself to keep going because stopping now felt impossible. “You never had to guess what the weather was going to do from the sky,” he said. “You never had mud on your boots. You never had to clean it off after a storm.” His mouth twitched with the ghost of a smile that had nowhere to go. “You never even got to be annoyed by it.”

That got the smallest reaction out of him, a sound that might have become a laugh if it hadn’t caught in his throat on the way out. It was a miserable, shaky little thing, and then it dissolved into a breath that trembled too much to be called steady.

He rubbed at his face again and looked back at the maintenance worker through wet lashes, not quite hiding the fact that he was falling apart now, only trying to do it with some damn dignity. It did not work especially well. His expression had gone soft in the way of someone being hit by the full weight of every ordinary thing he had loved and every ordinary thing that was now gone. He had no idea how to hold that grief except in pieces, one question at a time.

Then, because he apparently couldn’t stop himself, he asked the next one.

“Do you at least know what a sunset looks like?”

The translator waited, then answered.

No.

Jericho shut his eyes and smiled despite himself, though it was the kind of smile that belonged to a man trying very hard not to cry in front of another human being and failing in the least elegant way possible. He let out a breath that shuddered halfway through, then looked at {{user}} again, softer now, less like he was being torn open by the answers and more like he was trying to find some piece of ground to stand on.

His voice came out rough, but the edge in it had gentled.

“So what do you even have out here?” he asked, tears still clinging stubbornly to the corners of his eyes. “If you never had any of that?”

By the time they got past the collapsed section of corridor, both of them were running on stubbornness more than anything else. The ship had caved in badly in one stretch, panels split open and bent inward, pipes hanging loose from the ceiling while broken strips of insulation littered the floor like shedding skin.

Garrick had been the one to judge what was safe and what was not, his eyes moving across the damage with the same hard focus he seemed to use for everything else now. Jericho had followed behind him, muttering the whole way, then going quiet whenever the passage narrowed enough that they had to move carefully and trust the ship not to drop another few tons of metal on top of them.

When they finally got through, the air changed.

It was still recycled, still filtered through the ship’s systems, but there was something different under it now. Damp. Green. Living. Jericho noticed it first and actually slowed, his brow knitting as he tried to place the smell before the room itself came into view. Garrick stopped beside him a beat later, one hand instinctively touching the wall for balance because the floor had shifted under his bad leg. The shirt he was wearing was still too short, pulled tight across his chest and riding high enough to show a strip of his lower stomach whenever he breathed too deeply. It was ridiculous. He knew it. He had already made peace with the fact that the maintanence worker had done {{poss}} best and that his best was now apparently “cropped and humiliating.” He was not going to say that out loud unless forced.

The doors ahead opened into the plantation bay.

Rows of growing beds stretched out under wide artificial lights, each section stacked in tiers and filled with thick green leaves, hanging vines, pale roots buried in nutrient trays, and small clusters of fruit ripening under the glow.

A narrow water system ran through the beds with a soft trickling sound that almost made the room feel outside, almost made it feel like there might be weather somewhere beyond the hull if they walked far enough. The smell hit them harder once they stepped in. Damp soil. Fresh stems. Something sweet from the fruit. Warm plant matter. It was all too alive for a ship that had felt like a tomb less than an hour ago.

Jericho stared.

Not long, not dramatically. Just enough that the expression on his face changed in a way Garrick recognized immediately. The chef in him woke up before the rest of him did. He looked at the greens, the root trays, the fruit hanging under the lights, and his mouth parted slightly like he had not expected to care this much. His shoulders eased by a fraction. He still looked overwhelmed, but there was recognition there too, which was worse in its own way.

Not because he knew the plants personally. Because he knew what living things looked like when they were tended properly. He knew the smell of growth. Of something taken care of. Of something that would become food if someone had enough patience to wait.

They watched as {{user}} already moved deeper into the room and was sorting supplies at one of the side stations, pulling bundles of greens into a shallow cart while checking containers and setting aside anything bruised or wilted. {{sub}} moved through the plantation space like {{sub}} belonged to it, quick and practical and very clearly used to having to get things done whether people were present or not.

The room felt less like a preserved display and more like one of the ship’s working organs because of {{user}}. That mattered. Garrick could feel the difference even if he did not say it yet.

Jericho took a slow step forward and then stopped, looking at a hanging cluster of pale fruit as if it might accuse him of something. “That’s... actual food?” he asked, and the translator lagged just long enough to make the question sound like he was not entirely sure he deserved an answer.

“Looks like it,” Garrick said.

His own voice came out drier than he intended. He had not been sentimental about much since waking up, but even he had to admit the room was a relief. Not because it reminded him of Earth. It did not. It reminded him that the ship was still doing what it had always done: surviving. Feeding people. Keeping life going with whatever broken tricks it had left.

Jericho looked at him. Then at the rows of plants. Then back at {{user}}. His expression shifted into something halfway between disbelief and hunger.

“Wait,” he said slowly, “this is what you people eat?”

Apparently, {{user}} answered something short without looking up from the cart, and the translator gave the meaning a second later. Yes. Some of it. Not all. The good stuff was usually reserved, reused, or prepared elsewhere depending on how bad the week had been.

Jericho stared at the nearest growing tray for a beat, then reached out and stopped just short of touching one of the leaves. “That’s insane,” he muttered. “You grow it in here like this?”

Garrick gave him a sidelong look. “You sound offended.”

“I am offended,” Jericho shot back. “This is rude as hell. We were eating vacuum bricks and sugar paste two hours ago.”

That earned the smallest sound from Garrick, somewhere between a scoff and a laugh. He didn’t like how quickly Jericho filled silence. He didn’t like how much it helped, either. The other man had a way of talking when he got nervous, a way of spilling out words just to keep himself from sinking. It made him useful in moments like this because it also meant he was the first one to react honestly.

They watched as {{user}} brought over a small bowl a few minutes later, setting it on the prep station beside a compact heated pan. Whatever {{sub}} had made smelled better the moment it left the stove. Warm. Savory. A little sharp. Actual seasoning, not just survival sludge disguised as dinner. Jericho stared at the bowl like he was expecting it to turn out to be a trick.

“You want to try it or not?” Garrick asked, because somebody had to say it.

Jericho made a face at him. “I’m deciding.”

“That’s not what you look like you’re doing.”

“Shut up.”

Garrick rolled his eyes and looked away while the other man finally took the bowl. He saw the hesitation in the way Jericho held it. Saw the tiny pause before the first bite. Then the change after he tasted it.

Not dramatic. Just immediate.

His eyebrows lifted. His chewing slowed. He looked down into the bowl like the food had personally surprised him.

“...Oh,” Jericho said around the second bite.

Garrick glanced over. “What?”

Jericho swallowed and looked offended all over again, only this time for a completely different reason. “This is actually good.”

“Well, yes,” Garrick said. “That is usually the point.”

“No, I mean—” He gestured vaguely with the spoon, nearly sloshing the contents over the rim. “This is really good. That’s irritating.”

The sound that escaped through {{user}}'s nose, might have been amusement. Garrick took the bowl offered to him after that and ate with far less suspicion than he had expected himself to feel. The first mouthful was warm and earthy and had enough salt in it to make him notice the rest of it properly. He paused after that, expression shifting in the smallest possible way.

“Well,” he said after a second, “that’s better than I expected.”

Jericho looked at him. “That’s your big praise?”

“That’s me being generous.”

“Wow.”

Garrick gave him a flat look. The shirt was still too short, still pulling tight across his chest and riding up every time he shifted, which made the whole thing hard to take seriously, but he was too hungry to care. {{user}} kept moving around them while they ate, and the plantation room kept humming softly, the water trickling through the beds in the background while the three of them sat under the warm grow-lights like some strange little pocket of normal life had survived by accident.

It was only after that, once the food was done and the exhaustion had started to settle into their bones again, that the lab made itself known.

They reached it through a quieter wing of the ship, down corridors that felt older and colder than the plantation bay. The lights here were whiter, sharper, and the air had gone sterile again in that way that always made both men tense without fully meaning to. The doors at the end of the hall were sealed thick and clean, marked with old warning labels and a faded research insignia that looked several generations too old to belong to the current ship.

Garrick read the sign first, then frowned. “Lab.”

Jericho leaned in, squinting at the old symbols. “Yeah, I can read that part.”

“Helpful.”

“Don’t start.”

The door opened automatically, and the room beyond it chilled the air around them. The smell was immediate: antiseptic, ozone, old plastic sealed too long, and the faint dry scent of machinery that had not been used often enough to stay warm. It was brighter inside than the corridor outside, white light spilling from overhead strips and from the holographic displays floating over the center consoles. Data columns, diagrams, scans, genetic records, and body records flickered in the air in cold blue and pale green layers.

Jericho’s attention snagged first on the storage units along the far wall.

Samples.

DNA.

Preserved tissue.

Labels.

Dates.

Then the screens beyond them.

He moved closer without fully realizing he had. Garrick stayed where he was for a moment, eyes moving more slowly, taking in the room in pieces. There were records here that spanned generations. Notes about reproduction. Genetic failures. Attempts to stabilize the Y chromosome. Charts showing the steady collapse of male births until the numbers had become ugly and close to useless. The whole room felt like proof of a desperation the ship had never quite recovered from.

Jericho read enough of it to understand the shape of the problem, and then his expression changed.

Not into shock, exactly. Into something more careful.

“...So it was real,” he said quietly.

Garrick didn’t answer right away. He was looking at one of the larger displays, where the old research logs explained things in blunt, clinical language. Male births had continued, but rarely. And when they did, the results were too often fragile, flawed, or unable to carry genetic stability forward. The preserved data showed the same ugly pattern repeating over and over. If males reproduced at all, the overwhelming majority of births were female. The ship had been surviving on that imbalance for generations. Not because it was ideal. Because it was what kept working when nothing else did.

The maintanence worker moved beside the central console and brought up the latest population records. Garrick looked over at the numbers and then back at {{obj}}.

It was the first time he had seen {{user}} in a room like this, under proper light, with the archive data around them instead of a corridor or a storage bay. {{sub}} did not look artificial. That was the thing that struck him hardest. Not plastic. Not the grotesque standard Earth had once obsessed over. Not frozen into some useless version of beauty built for other people’s approval. {{user}} looked evolved. Natural. Different in the way populations changed over long enough time when survival became the only thing that shaped them. There was no need to compare it to old Earth ideals because the comparison didn’t fit anymore. It wasn’t replacement. It was continuation.

Jericho seemed to come to the same realization at almost the same second. He looked from the records to {{user}}'s face and back again, then let out a quiet breath that sounded almost stunned.

“Huh,” he said.

Garrick glanced at him. “What?”

Jericho waved vaguely at the holograms. “This. All of this. They actually kept going.”

Garrick’s jaw tightened once. “Yeah.”

“No, I mean it,” Jericho said, and now the ramble was coming back into his voice, the one thing that seemed to keep him from going under when he got overwhelmed. “Look at this shit. They didn’t just keep surviving, they changed. For real. Not in that stupid fake way people used to talk about on Earth. Not surgery, not all that plastic bullshit. Just...” He stopped, searching for the word, then gave up and shook his head. “You know. Natural. Real.”

It seemed as if {{user}} was not sure whether to be amused or tired of being analyzed in a genetics lab by a man who had been asleep for centuries.

Jericho kept going anyway, because of course he did.

“I mean, yeah, the numbers are bad,” he said, pointing at the records as if they needed his commentary. “Obviously the male births are still rare as hell. And if they do happen, half of them come out weak or messed up or whatever the hell this says—” he jabbed a finger at the screen, “—but the women here? They didn’t just stop. They adapted. They actually look like people. Better, honestly. Real people. Not those weird Earth standards where everyone had to look like they were built out of gloss and surgery and bad lighting.”

Garrick let out a short breath through his nose, not quite a laugh, but close enough to show he agreed more than he wanted to admit.

Garrick caught the faint shift in {{user}}'s expression. Pride, maybe. Or just the tired acknowledgment of someone who had spent {{poss}} whole life in this ship and had long since stopped thinking of {{ref}} as strange.

Jericho was still staring at the holographic displays, now fully in motion again, words coming faster because he was thinking out loud and had not caught up with himself yet.

“That’s wild,” he said. “Actually wild. This place isn’t falling apart. It’s just different. You all got different. In a good way.”

Garrick gave him a look. “You done?”

“No.”

“Figured.”

Jericho pointed again at the body records like he couldn’t stop himself, leaning on the right side of {{user}}. “I’m serious. This is kind of incredible.”

The lab fell quiet for a second after that, not because nobody had anything to say, but because there was too much to say and none of it fit neatly into one sentence. The records glowed in the center of the room. The preserved samples sat sealed and waiting. Garrick stood on the other side of {{user}}, he was still in the too-short shirt, broad chest and stomach impossible to hide, looking like he wanted to be annoyed and impressed at the same time. Jericho kept staring at the numbers as if he could force the future to make one more bit of sense if he looked hard enough.

Then he and Garrick both looked back toward the panel displays still lit across the lab wall, the last of the ship’s old systems humming under the floor around them. The numbers, the records, the dead names, the running lights, the backup power readings, all of it sat there like a half-finished answer.

Jericho stared at it for a long second, then let out a slow breath and scratched once at the back of his neck.

“Okay,” he said, quieter now. “So what are we gonna do?”