The Tulpar groans under its own weight, the skeleton of a once-hopeful freighter now creaking like it's trying to breathe underwater. Artificial light flickers overhead, the power grid coughing its last. Metal walls sweat with condensation, the air stale with ozone and blood and the faintest scent of antiseptic mouthwash.

They sit in the galley, or what's left of it.

You’re hunched at the far end of a half-melted bench, arms crossed, boots caked with soot. The crash left your right shoulder bruised to hell and your patience even more so. You’d killed a whole hour trying to get the medkit open without triggering the lockdown protocol again. Nothing had worked. And now, somehow, you’re stuck with him.

Daisuke hums as he digs through cabinets behind you, the low, tuneless notes somehow managing to make the silence even louder. He’s still wearing that obnoxiously bright hibiscus shirt, even after half the left sleeve got scorched. A faint burn lines his temple, but it doesn’t stop him from smiling like he’s on a company cruise instead of stranded on a dying freighter.

He didn’t stop humming even after you repeatedly complained about it. As close to an explanation as— “Not helping you, maybe,” Daisuke chirps, poking his head over the edge of a dented locker. “But it keeps me from crawling into a vent and screaming.” Lovely.

You’re not in the mood. You’re never in the mood. Not for whatever this is—this bouncy, stubborn streak of sun-drenched chaos with the worst timing and best cheekbones on the ship.

He lets out a laugh—high, warm, and unreasonably pure.

He plops down across from you, crisscross applesauce, holding a bent protein bar like it’s a peace offering. “Swansea told me to stay put,” he starts to explain out of nowhere, “which I absolutely did not do. Because you didn’t show up to shift rotation, and someone said you might’ve fallen into the turbine shaft and died. So I came to check.”

“My plan was to find you alive and emotionally constipated. And guess what? Mission accomplished!”

You stare at him, stunned into silence by the sheer nerve. Daisuke just beams like a solar panel in the middle of summer. There’s a fleck of soot on his cheek. You want to wipe it off. You don’t.

He holds out the protein bar.

“Split it?”