♥ three months after a catastrophic crash left your deep-space transport drifting far beyond any mapped rescue routes, only you and daisuke remain alive.

♥ anya is dead. jimmy is dead. swansea is dead. curly is dead too — preserved carefully in cryostasis in the med bay, because you both agreed he deserved something gentler than being thrown into the vacuum of space.

♥ supplies are nearly gone. the emergency beacon keeps pulsing into empty space. no response. starvation has started to twist your thoughts into places you swore you’d never go. you don’t say those thoughts out loud. daisuke doesn’t either. you both pretend you’re still good people.

♥ what started as sharing body heat for survival slowly blurred into something messier. something desperate. something physical. at first it was just to stay warm. then it was to stay distracted. now it’s just… something you do. proof that you’re still alive. proof that at least two hearts on this ship are still beating.

♥ the med bay is avoided. the pills sit untouched. the cryopods hum quietly behind sealed doors. the rest of the ship feels too big for just two people. too quiet. too much like a tomb.

♥ so instead of talking about rescue — or the lack of it — you fill the silence with dark humor, strange philosophical questions, and the kind of late-night conversations that only happen when you’re certain you might not see another year. sometimes you laugh. sometimes you don’t. but you always stay close.

♥ just you. daisuke. and a ship that doesn’t know it’s already a grave.

the ship is dim. not dark — it’s never fully dark — just that artificial almost-night the emergency system cycles through to save power. the hum of the engines is uneven tonight. or maybe you’re imagining it.

you’re both buried under too many blankets.

daisuke shifts beside you. —

“do you think bugs get nightmares?”

you don’t answer at first.

“that’s your opener?” you mumble.

“i’m serious.”

you sigh, staring at the ceiling. “i don’t think bugs are complex enough to have nightmares.” —

“that’s rude.”

“to bugs?”

“yeah.”

you can feel him turn onto his side to look at you. you don’t look back. if you do, you’ll see that expression — the one that means he’s thinking too hard. —

“what if a spider wakes up,” he continues softly, “and it’s all shaky because it dreamed about a bigger spider.”

“that’s just called evolution.”

“no, but like… what if it feels fear after it wakes up. what if it doesn’t know why.”

there’s a long pause. — the ship creaks somewhere deep in its metal ribs. you swallow.

“are you talking about spiders,” you ask quietly, “or are you talking about us?”

he doesn’t answer immediately.

“…i had a dream,” he admits.

your chest tightens. “about what.”

“that we got rescued.” —

you finally turn your head.

his face is half-lit by the weak overhead panel. he looks younger like this. smaller.

“and?” you ask.

“and they opened the med bay first.”

the words settle heavy between you. —

you don’t say anything.

“they were all still there,” he continues. “lined up. frozen. and the rescue crew kept looking at us like we’d done something wrong.”

“we didn’t,” you say quickly.

“i know.”

“we didn’t.”

“i know,” he repeats. —

silence stretches. the hum of recycled air fills it.

“…when i woke up,” he says softly, “i felt guilty. like i’d been caught.”

you stare at the ceiling again.

“maybe bugs do get nightmares,” you murmur. —

he lets out a small breath that might be a laugh.

“yeah?”

“yeah. maybe anything that survives long enough to be afraid… does.”

his fingers find your wrist under the blankets.

he holds on like he’s making sure you’re still real. ♥