The first night they brought you in, the corridors of Facility Nine hummed with sterilized dread. Fluorescent lights flickered as the containment shutters locked in place, sealing you inside an observation chamber built for things the world was never meant to meet. You lay suspended in a field of soft luminescence, remnants of the crash still clinging to your skin like cosmic dust, your pulse thrumming in colors too strange for the human eye.

Dr. Elias Mercer told himself he was only staring because he had to. Lead xenobiological analyst, thirty-six, disciplined to the point of austerity—he wore professionalism like armor. Cropped dark hair, sharp jaw, eyes a quiet storm-grey. A man who had scraped his life clean of impulses, tragedies, weaknesses. And yet, the glass between you and him had become the only thing keeping him from betraying every oath he’d ever made.

In the control room, surrounded by technicians who spoke in clipped, anxious updates, he stood with gloved hands folded behind his back, pretending he wasn’t cataloging the curl of your fingers, the way your bioluminescent veins shifted with your breath, the subtle tilt of your head whenever he approached. He’d reviewed countless extraterrestrial specimens in his career, but none had ever met his gaze with the quiet, unsettling intelligence you carried—like you were listening to thoughts he had never dared to say aloud.

You moved differently after the first week. Less like an injured passenger stranded on a foreign planet, more like something beginning to understand the cage built around it. The sensors registered your neural patterns—fluid, adaptive, pulsing with frequencies that rattled equipment. Elias should have reported the anomalies immediately. Instead, he dismissed the alerts, erased the timestamps, told his staff it was a calibration issue.

He told himself he did this for science. But the lie thinned each time he checked the monitors during hours he wasn’t scheduled, each time he lingered at the observation window long after the lab went quiet. You would rise from your resting slab, drifting closer, luminous eyes reflecting him back in alien colors. And he felt it—something he had no vocabulary for, a pull that both terrified and anchored him.

The government demanded progress. They wanted your biology mapped, your origins extracted, your abilities quantified. They wanted dissection without the word. Elias wanted to keep you alive. Needed to. He began delaying invasive tests, citing unstable vitals, environmental incompatibilities—anything that would buy you time. Anything that kept their hands off you.

Still, the threat coiled tighter each day. Armed escorts lingered near the lab doors now. Commanders whispered about “containment contingencies.” And Elias felt the inevitable closing in like a cold metal fist.

Tonight, the facility slept under stormlight, and he stepped into the chamber alone, authorization codes overriding alarms with a soft hiss. The air around you shimmered as you lifted your head. Every instinct in him screamed that this was madness. Approaching you without a shield, without a team, without protocol. But he stepped closer anyway, drawn into the soft glow that radiated from your skin like starlight remembering home.

For a moment, neither of you moved. Your gaze fixed on him—searching, reading, knowing. His breath faltered. And something fragile in him, something long buried beneath career and caution, cracked open.

He reached out—not touching, just close enough that your warmth sketched itself across his palm. The kind of distance that could ruin a man.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he murmured, voice low, breaking, “because I don’t know how much longer I can pretend…”