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here is part 1 and part 2 if haven't read!!!!!

Summary: After of distance and unresolved tension, you and Alysa are once again seeing each other again and constant of running into each other. From Alysa repeatedly confessing that she hasn’t moved on, will you admit that you haven’t moved on or reject her?

↪ Synopsis : A spider bite gives Alysa Liu extraordinary powers, but her greatest challenge may be falling in love.

↪ 𝓦arnings: Pure fluff

A/n: little stressed hope u will like it guys ( Share your opinion in the comments or in my inbox :P) best fic I'v ever write btw

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There is a specific kind of invisibility that has nothing to do with being unseen.

Alysa Liu is seen every day. She walks through the hallways of Westbridge High School the same way she has walked through them for three years — head down, backpack slightly too heavy on her left shoulder because she refuses to use her locker because getting to her locker between second and third period adds four minutes to her route and four minutes is four minutes — and people see her. They step around her. They occasionally say her name if they need something, usually help with an assignment, usually at the last possible minute before it's due, usually with that particular tone people use when they need a favor from someone they have not previously thought about. She helps them. She always helps them. This is not because she is a pushover, though some people mistake it for that. It is because she is constitutionally incapable of watching someone struggle with something she could fix in six minutes.

She is, by every measurable standard, invisible in the way that matters at seventeen in a school like Westbridge. She is not invited to parties. She is not part of any social circle that has a name. She is not on anyone's radar in the particular way that radar operates in high school, which is to say: she is not someone people think about when she is not in the room.

She thinks about this sometimes, in the abstract, in the way she thinks about most things — methodically, without excessive emotion, as a problem with a set of variables that she could theoretically solve if she wanted to. She has decided she doesn't want to. The social architecture of Westbridge High feels, to her, like a system built on rules she didn't help write and doesn't particularly respect, and participating in it fully would require a kind of performance she doesn't have the energy for.

What she has energy for: her classes, which are genuinely interesting, all of them, even the ones people complain about. Her lab, which is technically the science prep room on the third floor that Mr. Okafor lets her use after school because she asked and he said yes and nobody else has ever asked. Her projects, which are numerous and complicated and which she works on with the specific, consuming focus of someone who has found the thing that makes the world make sense.

And, if she is being honest with herself, which she usually is: you.

You are, by every measurable standard, the opposite of invisible. You are Y/N Y/L/N, which at Westbridge means something specific and immediate and understood by everyone in the building. You are a junior, same as Alysa, same year, different universe. You are the kind of person who walks into a room and the room reorganizes itself slightly around your presence, not because you're trying, not because you're performing, but because you have some quality of aliveness that draws attention the way light draws attention — not because light is asking to be looked at, but because that's simply what light does.

You sit three rows ahead of Alysa in AP Biology. You tap your pen against your notebook when you're thinking, a quick irregular rhythm that Alysa has memorized without deciding to. You laugh with your whole face, which is an expression she has catalogued from the side-profile angle available from her seat, which tells her more than a straight-on view would, because the side profile shows the way the laugh starts in your eyes slightly before it gets to your mouth, and that sequence is — she has not found a word for what that sequence is. She has stopped trying to find one.

You have never spoken directly to Alysa Liu.

This is not a cruelty. It is simply the natural order of Westbridge, which Alysa has accepted the way she accepts other fixed conditions — the speed of light, the atomic weight of carbon, the fact that the elevator in the science wing has been broken since October and will presumably remain broken until the heat death of the universe. These are things that are. They do not require her feelings about them.

She has feelings about this one anyway. She keeps them in the category of noted but non-actionable, which is where she puts most things that she cannot solve in six minutes.

The day everything changes starts ordinarily.

Alysa is in the lab after school — which is to say, she is in Mr. Okafor's prep room on the third floor, which she has quietly transformed over the course of a year into something that functions like an actual research space, with three whiteboards covered in diagrams and a shelf of equipment that is technically the school's but which no one else touches and which she treats with the specific care of things that are practically hers. She is working on a project that she has been working on for six weeks, which she describes to Mr. Okafor as "an applied research project on enhanced adhesion polymers" and which she describes to herself, more honestly, as trying to figure out if the thing in my head can actually exist.

The thing in her head: a web-like structural polymer with tensile strength exceeding any currently existing synthetic material, deployable in a controlled filament, strong enough to support significant weight, degrading within approximately two hours. She has notebooks full of the theoretical basis for this. She has a shelf full of prototypes that have not worked. She is on prototype seventeen.

She is deep enough in the math that she doesn't hear the door open.

"Hey," says a voice. "Is this — sorry, is Mr. Okafor here?"

Alysa looks up.

You are standing in the doorway of the prep room.

This is the first time you have been in close proximity to her outside of AP Biology, which means this is the first time she has seen you at anything other than three-rows-ahead distance, which means she is now confronted with the fact that you are even more specifically real up close than you are from a distance, which should not be surprising and yet somehow is. You are wearing your varsity jacket — you are on the swim team, she knows this, she knows more things about you than she has ever examined too closely — and you have a textbook under your arm and you are looking at her with an expression that is open and slightly apologetic and entirely without the particular quality some people have when they look at her, which is the quality of someone looking at a prop rather than a person.

You are looking at her like she is a person.

"He left at four," Alysa says. Her voice comes out at its normal register, which surprises her slightly. "I can leave a message if you need something."

"Oh, no, it's—" You look at the textbook under your arm, then back at her. "It's about the bio midterm. He said I could come by but I must have gotten the time wrong." You look around the room, and Alysa watches your expression shift from apologetic to curious, taking in the whiteboards, the equipment, the general evidence of someone who lives here in some meaningful sense. "Is this your—do you use this room?"

"After hours," she says. "For personal projects."

"Personal projects," you repeat, and there is something in it — not mockery, the very specific opposite of mockery, actually, something that sounds like genuine interest. "What kind?"

A pause. She looks at you. You are looking at her whiteboards, at the diagrams, at the shelf of prototypes. You are not doing the thing people usually do, which is to glance around politely and then redirect toward whatever they actually came here for. You are actually looking.

"Polymer research," she says.

"Like — plastics?"

"Like adhesion structures. Tensile polymer filaments." She hesitates. "Spider silk, basically. I'm trying to synthesize something with comparable properties."

You look at her. A beat.

"That's the coolest thing I've heard all week," you say.

Alysa blinks.

You say it with the same quality that you do most things, which is to say completely and without reservation, without the social hedging that most people apply to statements about what they find interesting when talking to someone they don't know. You just say it, like it's true, like it's obvious that it's true, and then you come further into the room with the easy confidence of someone who moves through spaces without worrying about whether they're welcome in them.

"Can I see?" you say.

She should say she's busy. She is busy. She has seventeen prototypes on a shelf and a whiteboard full of math and a problem she has been trying to solve for six weeks and she does not have time to give a tour to the most distracting person in her AP Biology class.

"Sure," she says.

You stay for forty minutes.

You ask questions. Real ones, not the performative questions people ask to seem interested, but the kind that follow from something you said before, that build on each other, that indicate that you are actually tracking what she's saying and thinking about it. You ask about the tensile strength targets and whether the two-hour degradation is a feature or a limitation and whether spider silk itself has been tried as a base material or if the synthesis has to be entirely artificial. You ask in the tone of someone who is genuinely curious and also genuinely aware that she is the one who knows things here, which is a tone that most people do not find naturally, which requires a particular kind of unself-consciousness.

You sit on the lab stool across from her workbench, your textbook long forgotten on the counter, and you learn about polymer chains with the focused attention of someone who has decided that this is the thing they are doing right now and they are doing it completely.

Alysa answers your questions. She finds herself explaining things in more depth than she usually bothers to with people who haven't already demonstrated they can follow along, because you can follow along, and there is something unexpectedly satisfying about that. She pulls out her notebook at one point to show you a diagram that explains the tensile property problem more clearly than her words are doing, and you lean in to look at it and you are close enough that she is briefly, acutely aware of how close you are, before she redirects her attention to the notebook.

When you leave — you have practice, you say, apologetically, you lost track of time, which she also did, which she is now noticing — you pause at the door.

"I'll come back," you say. "If that's okay. I want to hear how the next prototype goes."

She looks at you.

"It's okay," she says.

You smile, the full-face version, the one she knows from three rows back, and you're gone.

Alysa sits in the lab for a moment after the door closes. Then she looks at prototype seventeen on the shelf. Then she looks at the door.

Then she picks up her notebook and goes back to work, and she does not think about how you said I'll come back and how that sentence has lodged itself somewhere in her chest with a particular and unreasonable warmth.

She does not think about this at all.

Chapter Two : Seventeen Prototypes

You come back on a Tuesday.

Alysa is mid-experiment when the door opens — she has her safety goggles on and her hands in the middle of something delicate and she cannot look up immediately, so she says "one second" to the room and finishes the measurement before she turns around.

You are sitting on your stool. You brought coffee — two cups, from the place on the corner, and you set one near her workbench with the ease of someone who has decided this is a thing that happens now.

"I looked up spider silk," you say, by way of greeting. "I went down a rabbit hole. Did you know the Darwin's bark spider produces silk that's ten times stronger than Kevlar?"

"Yes," she says, pulling her goggles up.

"It's insane."

"It is."

"How far off is yours from that?"

She looks at the shelf. "Prototype seventeen is closer than sixteen. The tensile strength is up. The deployment mechanism is still the problem."

"What's the problem with it?"

She sits down and explains. You listen with the same quality as before — complete, specific, following along. The coffee is the right order, she notices. She has never told you her coffee order. You must have seen it somewhere, or guessed, or —

She doesn't examine this.

This is how the next three weeks go.

You come by the lab two or three times a week. Sometimes you have questions about bio, which she answers, and then you stay for the project conversation anyway. Sometimes you come purely for the project, sitting on your stool with your coffee and your questions, and she works while you talk, and the lab which has always been comfortable and solitary becomes comfortable and inhabited, and the difference between those two things is something she is carefully not analyzing.

You learn her shorthand. Not the technical vocabulary — though you pick that up too, faster than she'd have predicted — but the personal shorthand, the way she uses specific phrases when something is working versus when it isn't, the particular silence that means she's in the middle of something that requires all her concentration, the difference between hm when she means I'm thinking and hm when she means that doesn't work and I know why. You learn to read these things the way you learn to read things about people you are paying close attention to.

Alysa notices this. She notices the precision of your attention, the way you have quietly become someone who knows how to exist in her space without disrupting it, which is something most people don't manage even when they're trying. You don't try, exactly. You just — adapt. You observe and adjust and after a while you simply know.

She keeps this observation in the noted but non-actionable category, along with everything else.

On a Thursday in October, prototype eighteen works.

Not completely — the tensile strength is still not where she needs it and the degradation timer needs calibration — but the deployment mechanism functions, for the first time, in the way she has been designing it for six weeks. The filament deploys in a clean arc, attaches cleanly to the test surface, holds.

She stares at it.

"Oh my god," you say, from the stool, where you have been watching. "Oh my god, that held."

"It held," she says. There is something in her voice that she doesn't bother controlling because she is too busy looking at the filament and the test surface and the first prototype that has done the thing she designed it to do.

"Alysa." You are off the stool. You are beside her. "That worked. That actually worked."

She turns to look at you. You are grinning — the full version, bigger than the one she knows from three rows back, close enough that she can see every dimension of it — and your hand is on her arm, which you have placed there without thinking, the way people place hands on the arms of people they have been paying close attention to for three weeks.

"It's prototype eighteen," she says. "There are still — the strength isn't—"

"It deployed," you say. "The deployment works. You figured out the deployment."

She looks at the filament. Then at you. You are still grinning, still with your hand on her arm, still with the full force of your attention directed at her, and something in the noted but non-actionable category has shifted, very slightly, in a direction she is not going to examine right now.

"Yes," she says. "The deployment works."

"I'm coming back Friday," you say. "We should celebrate."

"It's one prototype," she says.

"It's the best prototype," you say. "It deployed."

She looks at you for one more second. Then she looks back at the filament.

"Friday," she says.

Chapter Three : The Field Trip

The Westbridge annual science field trip to the Harrington Institute of Biological Research is, by the universal consensus of every student who has ever attended it, not a highlight of the academic calendar.

It involves a two-hour bus ride, a tour that is pitched at a level approximately four years below AP Biology, and a free period at the end that everyone uses to sit in the Institute's atrium and wait to go home. The exhibits are fine. The explanations are basic. The only people who get anything real out of it are the ones who ignore the tour and read the supplementary materials on the displays, which is exactly what Alysa does every year.

This year is different because you are in her AP Bio class, and the field trip seating is first-come-first-served on the bus, and you sat down next to her before she could put her bag on the seat in the way that discourages conversation. Not aggressively, not deliberately, just — you sat down and said "hi" and opened your phone and that was that.

She spent the two hours explaining the interesting parts of the Institute to you, quietly, because the tour guide was in the middle of something oversimplified about protein folding, and you were leaning slightly toward her to hear, and the bus was loud enough that this proximity was reasonable and unremarkable.

That is what she tells herself.

The Institute has a research wing that is closed to general tour groups, which Alysa has known about for years and has never been able to access. This year there is a small exhibit on advanced arachnid biology that is technically open, technically on the edge of the tour route, technically something the guide gestures at briefly before moving on.

Alysa does not move on.

"I'll catch up," she tells the group, which no one in the group cares about except you, who falls back with her without being asked.

The exhibit is small but the content is real — genuine research-level information on spider silk production, structural biology, the specific proteins involved in dragline silk synthesis. She reads every panel. You read alongside her, which she is no longer surprised by. You have been reading alongside her for three weeks.

"This is what you're trying to replicate," you say, at the panel on dragline silk tensile properties.

"Trying to," she says.

"You're closer than this paper is," you say, pointing at the cited research date. "This is from four years ago."

She looks at the panel. You're right. The tensile strength numbers in her last prototype, while still below target, exceed what this paper was working with four years ago. She had not framed it that way before. There is something in the reframe that settles in her chest with a particular quality, the quality of being seen accurately rather than politely.

"I'm still not there," she says.

"You'll get there," you say, with the same uncomplicated certainty you say most things with, and she believes you the way she believes things that don't require proof.

The research wing is accessible through a door at the back of the exhibit that is marked authorized personnel only but which is, when she tries it on instinct, unlocked. She looks at it for a moment.

"We shouldn't," you say.

"No," she agrees.

A beat.

"The tour group is probably already in the atrium," you say.

"Probably," she says.

Another beat. She looks at the door. You look at the door.

"Five minutes," you say.

They go in.

The research wing is quieter than the exhibit space, the low hum of equipment the only sound, rows of tanks and terrariums and lab benches with work in progress. She moves through it slowly, reading labels, taking in the scale of the research, the evidence of years of work. You follow her, close enough that she can hear you breathing, looking at the same things she looks at.

They are at the far end of the wing, near a row of terrariums containing various arachnid species, when the spider drops.

She doesn't see it happen. One moment she is reading the label on a terrarium, and the next there is a sharp, specific sting on the back of her hand, and she pulls it back and looks at it and there is a small welt rising.

"Alysa." Your voice is sharp with alarm, your hand closing over her wrist. "What happened?"

"Something bit me," she says.

She looks at the terrarium. On the glass, on the outside — it must have gotten out through a gap, must have been on the edge of the label she was reading — is a spider. Small, deep amber-colored, with a marking on its back she does not immediately recognize.

You look at it. Then at her hand. "Does it hurt?"

"A little," she says. "It's just a bite."

"We need to find someone," you say. "We need to tell a staff member."

"It's just a bite," she says again, but you are already steering her back toward the door, your hand still around her wrist, and she lets you because the alternative is arguing with you and she is currently distracted by the sensation in her hand, which is not exactly pain, more like warmth spreading outward, which is probably fine, which is almost certainly just a normal localized reaction.

They find the tour group. They do not tell anyone, because Alysa says she is fine, because she is probably fine, because the ride home is starting and the welt is already reducing in size by the time they are back on the bus and you are sitting next to her again and checking her hand every twenty minutes.

"It's fine," she says.

"I'm watching it," you say.

She looks at you from the side. There is a particular quality to the way you are watching her hand — not performing concern, just actually concerned, in the direct and uncomplicated way you do things.

"I'm fine," she says, softer.

You look at her. "I know," you say. "I'm still watching."

She looks out the window. The welt is gone by the time they pull into the Westbridge parking lot. She tells herself, and tells you, that it was nothing.

She sleeps for eleven hours that night and wakes up with her hands tingling.

Chapter Four : What Happens Next

The tingling goes away by morning. So does the tiredness. What doesn't go away — what presents itself over the course of the following week with the quiet inevitability of something that has already been decided — is everything else.

She notices the first thing on Monday, in the hallway, when she catches a water bottle that Marcus Kim drops from three feet above her head, in mid-air, without looking, without the reaction time that catching something requires. She holds the bottle and looks at it and thinks: hm.

She notices the second thing on Tuesday, when she climbs the stairs to the third floor and realizes she isn't breathing harder at the top, which she always does, which everyone does, because it's four flights and it's fast. She is not breathing harder. She could have gone faster. She is not sure how much faster.

The third thing is Wednesday, in the lab, when she is reaching for a beaker on the top shelf — the one that is technically too high for her without a step stool, which she has been using for a year — and her hand simply sticks. Not slips, not grabs. Sticks. Palm flat against the surface of the shelf, with a grip that doesn't require any effort from her, with a quality that is immediately, entirely recognizable to someone who has spent six months thinking about adhesion polymers.

She stands there with her hand stuck to the shelf for approximately fifteen seconds, processing this.

Then she unsticks her hand, which is also something she can simply do, intentionally, by — she does not fully understand how, it is like deciding to let go but more specific than that — and she stands in the middle of the lab and looks at her palm.

"Hm," she says, out loud, to the empty room.

She spends the next two hours testing this instead of working on prototype eighteen. She sticks her hand to the shelf, the wall, the window, the workbench. She peels it away cleanly. She tries with different pressures, different surfaces, different intentions. She falls off the lab stool at one point when she overbalances attempting to test the ceiling and grabs the wall instinctively on the way down, which results in her hanging sideways from the wall for a moment before she figures out how to let go and lands on her feet with a grace that is also new and also requires examination.

She lands on her feet from a sideways wall-hang with no impact and no stumbling.

She stands in the middle of the lab.

Her phone buzzes.

Y/N: how's 18 going, still at the lab?

She looks at the text. Then at the wall. Then at her hands.

ALYSA: can you come by

You come by. You always come by when she asks, which is something she has not thought about too directly because thinking about it too directly takes her somewhere she has categorized as non-actionable.

You come in and you look at her standing in the middle of the lab, which she has been doing for twenty minutes, and you say "what happened" before she says anything.

"I need to show you something," she says. "And I need you to — I need you to be the kind of person you are, about this."

You look at her. "What kind of person am I?"

"The kind that doesn't panic," she says. "And doesn't ask questions I can't answer yet. Just watches."

A beat. "Okay," you say.

She turns to the wall. She puts her hand flat against it. She walks up it.

Not metaphorically. Not symbolically. She puts her hand on the wall and then her foot and she walks, vertically, up the prep room wall to the ceiling, where she stays for a moment because she can, because gravity appears to have become optional, because the spider from the research wing has done something to her that she is not yet able to fully articulate but which she is currently demonstrating by being on the ceiling.

She looks down at you from the ceiling of Mr. Okafor's prep room.

You are looking up at her. Your expression is — she cannot fully read it from up here, but it does not look like panic, which is what she asked for. It looks like the expression you have in the lab when something works, when a prototype does something it wasn't doing before. It looks like the expression of someone watching something new become real.

"Okay," you say, from the floor. Your voice is steady. "Okay. Tell me everything."

She climbs back down and tells you everything.

Chapter Five : The Research Wing Spider

They spend six hours in the lab on Wednesday.

She tells you about the bite, the symptoms, the sequence of observations. She shows you the wall demonstration three more times, the ceiling grip, the strength test where she lifts the lab table with one hand and puts it down and it makes a clean impression in the floor and she will have to deal with that later. She shows you her palm, which looks completely normal, which you examine with the focused attention you bring to everything you examine.

You do not panic. You ask exactly the questions she cannot answer yet, which is what she asked you not to do, but you ask them in the tone of someone who is helping figure out what the answers might be rather than demanding she have them already. You bring your notebook. You are taking notes. She is too.

"The spider," you say, at some point. "Did you get a look at it?"

"Small. Amber-colored. Dorsal marking I didn't recognize."

"We need to figure out what species."

"I know."

"The Institute would have records."

"I know." She looks at her notebook. "I also think — the silk."

You look at her.

"The bite. The adhesion. The filament I've been developing." She turns to the whiteboard, where she has started a new diagram, the one she has been drawing for the past three hours that connects prototype eighteen to what her hands are currently doing. "I don't think this is unrelated. The spider's silk production. I think the bite — I think I have something in my biology now that's analogous to what I was trying to synthesize."

You look at the diagram. Then at her hands. Then at the diagram again.

"You have the deployment mechanism," you say.

"Potentially."

"You've been building the external version for months and the spider just—"

"Potentially."

"Alysa." Your voice has something in it. "You have the deployment mechanism."

She looks at her hands. Then at the diagram. "I need to test it."

"Yes," you say. "Obviously yes. How?"

She looks at the prototype eighteen housing on the shelf — the wrist mechanism she's been developing for deployment. She has been testing it with the synthesized polymer, with decreasing success because the polymer still isn't strong enough. But if what she thinks is happening is actually happening — if her body is now producing something analogous, something that comes from the same biology she's been trying to replicate—

"I need to rebuild the housing," she says. "Smaller. More precise. If I can direct the deployment biologically, through the mechanism, without the synthesized polymer—"

"You'd have what you've been trying to build for eight months," you say.

She looks at you. You are watching her with the particular quality of your attention, the full version, and there is something in your expression that is not just scientific interest, something warmer and less categorizable, something she puts in the non-actionable file without looking at it.

"I need to go home and work on the housing," she says.

"I'll help," you say.

"You don't know how to build—"

"I know how to hand you things and not touch things I shouldn't touch and ask questions that make you explain your thinking more clearly," you say. "You've told me that's useful."

She has told you that. She has told you that the questions you ask make her articulate things she was processing silently, which often helps. She has told you this as a fact, neutrally, and you are now deploying it as a reason to stay and she doesn't have a counterargument.

"Fine," she says. "Come on."

They go to her apartment. Her parents are out. You sit at the kitchen table and watch her rebuild the housing, and you hand her things when she asks, and you ask the questions that make her explain her thinking, and by midnight she has something that might work and you are asleep on the couch with your jacket as a blanket, which is something she observes and puts in the non-actionable file along with everything else.

She covers you with the blanket from the back of the couch, which is something she does without examining whether she is doing it.

Then she goes to her room and sits on her bed and looks at the modified housing on her desk.

The next morning she tests it.

It works.

Chapter Six : The Part Where She Becomes Someone Else

Here is the thing that Alysa understands about herself, which she has understood for a long time and which has shaped the specific architecture of her life at Westbridge: she is not a person who does things halfway.

This is not a personality trait she selected. It is simply how she is built. When she is interested in something, she is completely interested, and the interest does not modulate itself to fit the available time. When she commits to a problem, she commits with the entire force of herself, and she does not stop until the problem is solved or until she has run out of approaches to try, which has not yet happened.

This quality, applied to schoolwork, produces the best grades in the junior class. Applied to the lab, it produced prototype eighteen and the modified housing. Applied to the post-bite situation, which she is tentatively calling the development because she does not yet have a better name for it, it produces the following, over the course of three weeks:

A complete suite of modified housings, one for each wrist, built to her exact specifications, black metal with a tensioned filament mechanism that deploys with a specific motion of her wrist and retracts cleanly. A costume that she is somewhat embarrassed about but which is functionally necessary — coverage, movement, anonymity — built from materials she sourced with care and assembled with the same precision she brings to lab work. A testing protocol that starts in her apartment, moves to the roof of her building, moves to the alley behind her building, moves progressively outward as she understands more about what she can do and how to do it.

The strength: she can lift approximately eight times her body weight. She can fall from the third floor of her building without injury, which she tests with some caution and some scientific excitement and some genuine terror. She can run at a speed that makes the city feel smaller.

The webs: the housing works. The filament deploys cleanly, attaches to surfaces with the adhesion she has been trying to synthesize for eight months, holds her weight and more. She swings between her building and the next on a Thursday evening and lands on the opposite roof and stands there breathing hard from the adrenaline of it and looking back at the space she just covered, which is not a large space, which is not a record-breaking distance, but which was air and is now traversed.

She stands on a rooftop in the October dark and understands that something has changed in a way that is not reversible.

The other things are tests she runs and data she collects. This is a realization she arrives at, not a test. This is standing still and understanding, with the particular quality of certainty she has about things that are true, that the development is not something that happened to her and is going to stop. It is something she is now. It has joined the architecture.

She goes home and sits at her desk and thinks.

You text at eleven.

Y/N: how's testing going

ALYSA: the housing works

Y/N: ALYSA

Y/N: the housing WORKS?

ALYSA: the housing works

Y/N: I'm coming over

ALYSA: it's eleven

Y/N: and?

She looks at her phone. Then at the housings on her desk.

ALYSA: fine

You come over. She shows you the housings, the deployment, the controlled filament. She does not take you to the roof yet because it is eleven PM and she has not thought through the logistics of the roof with an audience. You sit on her bedroom floor across from her and you watch the filament deploy from the housing and attach to the far wall and hold, and your expression is the expression from prototype eighteen, the full-face grin, the close-enough version.

"You built the real thing," you say.

"The development built it," she says. "I just made the housing."

"You built the housing for six months first," you say. "You were already there. The spider just — completed the circuit."

She looks at the filament attached to her wall. Then at you.

"What do I do with it," she says. This is not rhetorical. She is asking you the way she asks you things in the lab — genuinely, because you are someone whose thinking she finds useful, because you have this quality of seeing the angle she hasn't tried.

You think about it. Not the quick-answer version of thinking, but the real version, the one where you actually sit with something before responding.

"I think," you say, slowly, "that you already know what you do with it. And I think you're asking me because you want someone to say it out loud so you don't have to be the one who decided."

She looks at you for a long moment.

"The city is right there," you say. Quietly. Not dramatic. Just factual. "You can do things most people can't do. People need things."

"I'm not—" She stops. "That's not—"

"You help people you can help," you say. "That's just what you do. You always have. This is bigger."

She looks at the housing on her wrist. The filament still attached to her wall.

"I'd need a better costume," she says.

"Absolutely," you say.

"And a name is probably—"

"A name would help, yes."

She looks at you. You are looking back with that particular quality, and something in the non-actionable file is straining at its category, has been straining for weeks, is becoming harder to keep contained.

"I don't know how to do this," she says.

"You know how to do this," you say. "You know how to learn things, which is the same as knowing how to do them eventually. Start small."

She nods. She looks at the wall where the filament is attached. She thinks about the roof, about the alley, about the distance between her building and the next one that she crossed on Thursday.

"Okay," she says.

"Okay," you say.

Part Two — After

Chapter Seven : The Natural Order of Things (Revised)

November. Three weeks after the roof.

The thing about becoming someone who swings between buildings at night is that it changes your relationship with insomnia. Alysa has always been a light sleeper, has always had nights where the math in her head won't quiet down, where the next step of a problem presents itself at two AM with the urgency of something that will not wait. Those nights used to mean hours at her desk and too much coffee and tiredness the next morning. Now they mean putting on the suit and going out, which is both a worse idea than staying at her desk and a better one, because at least when she is out she is doing something with the restlessness.

She has, in three weeks, stopped a mugging in the East Village (her first real one, not a practice scenario, not a test — an actual person with an actual knife, which she handled with less grace than she wanted to and more effectiveness than she expected), helped extract two people from a car accident on 7th Avenue, and caught a man who jumped from a fire escape on the third floor and would have hit the pavement badly if she hadn't been passing below at exactly that moment. She is not yet fast enough, or practiced enough, to be doing this comprehensively, with the coverage of someone who knows the city from above. She is learning the geometry of it — the swing radius, the web attachment points, the way certain building facades work and certain ones don't, the weight distribution of different moves.

She is, in short, a work in progress.

You know all of this because she tells you. This has become the architecture: she goes out, she comes back, she texts you, and you parse it together. Not surveillance — you are not her handler, she does not check in because you require it. She checks in because you are the only person who knows, which means you are the only person she can be honest with about this specific dimension of her existence, which means the texts have taken on a particular quality of relief. Saying it to you makes it real in a way that the suit and the city cannot do alone.

ALYSA: mugging on 9th, handled it, scraped my knee on the landing

Y/N: the landing or the takeoff

ALYSA: the landing. I overrotated

Y/N: again?

ALYSA: yes, again, I'm working on it

Y/N: want me to come over

She looks at this text every time. She looks at it and she says no, she's fine, it's late, she has school tomorrow. She says this every time.

Y/N: ok. ice for the knee

ALYSA: I know

Y/N: get some sleep

She doesn't sleep. But she tries, which she counts.

The other thing that happens in November is that the city starts to notice.

Not her, specifically — no one knows who she is, the mask and the costume have done the job she designed them to do. But someone is swinging between buildings on the east side and stopping things that used to not get stopped, and the city notices this the way the city notices everything, which is loudly and with strong opinions.

The first Daily News piece is brief, buried in the Metro section, and calls her "a masked vigilante of unclear motivation." The second one is bigger and calls her "the city's newest costumed figure." The third one is a week later and has the word Spiderwoman in the headline, which is not a name she chose, which is a name derived from someone's description of the web she left at a scene because she ran out of time to clear it, but which is now apparently what she is.

She reads this piece in the lab, on her phone, while you read it on yours sitting on your stool.

"Spiderwoman," you say.

"I didn't name it," she says.

"I know. Do you hate it?"

She considers. "No," she says. "It's fine."

"It's actually pretty good," you say. "Descriptive. Clear."

"It's derivative."

"Everything is derivative," you say. "Does it fit?"

She looks at the article. At the description of the figure someone saw swinging through the East Village at two AM. At the word Spiderwoman in the headline.

"Yes," she says. "It fits."

You nod. You look back at your phone for a moment, and then you look up and you have an expression she hasn't seen before, something that is complicated in a way you're not trying to hide but also not naming.

"You're going to keep doing this," you say.

"Yes," she says.

"I know," you say. "I just — I want to make sure you know I know. That this is the thing now."

She looks at you. "It's the thing now."

You nod again. Something in your expression settles, resolves into something simpler, the something that you usually have when you've processed a complicated thing and come out the other side.

"Then I'm in," you say. "Whatever that means. However you need it."

She looks at you for a long moment, long enough that you look back with curiosity, long enough that whatever is in the non-actionable file presses against its category with specific and unhelpful intensity.

"Okay," she says.

"Okay," you say.

Chapter Eight : The Space Between Desks

December.

AP Biology has a lab practical this week, which means the seating arrangement changes, which means Alysa is no longer three rows behind you but beside you at a shared lab bench, which is an arrangement that happens every few months and which she has always handled fine.

She handles it fine now. She is handling it fine.

You are pipetting a solution with the focus you bring to things you are genuinely trying to do correctly, which is all things, which is one of the things about you that she has stopped trying to categorize and simply accepts as a quality you have. You are wearing your swim team hoodie. You have your hair back in the specific way you do it when you are working on something that requires concentration.

"You're doing the contamination check wrong," she says.

You look up. "I'm not."

"You are. The order matters."

"The order — does the order matter for this?"

"For sterility, yes. Always rinse the outside of the pipette before the inside."

You look at the pipette. Then at her. "Why does no one teach that."

"It's in the supplementary materials."

"Of course it is." You correct your technique. You do it correctly. "Thank you."

She goes back to her own bench section. Two minutes later:

"Why does it have to be outside first?"

She explains it. You listen. The lab practical continues. At some point you are leaning toward her to look at her diagram and you are close enough that she is acutely aware, in the specific and unhelpful way she has been for two months, of exactly how close you are.

"Your contamination ring is smaller than mine," you say. "Mine looks like a crime scene."

"Practice," she says.

"You've done this before."

"I've done this a lot."

"Show me the motion again?"

She shows you the motion. She does it with her hands over yours, very briefly, correcting the angle of the pipette, and then removes them and steps back and goes back to her section with the calm of someone who is not thinking about anything specific.

You get it right on the next attempt.

"There it is," you say, quietly, to yourself, with the tone of someone who gets a small private satisfaction from getting something right. She is not supposed to hear this. She hears it anyway. She files it in the non-actionable category, which is becoming alarmingly full.

After class, in the hallway:

"The Christmas showcase thing," you say, falling into step beside her. "For bio club. Are you presenting?"

"The polymer project. Yes."

"Can I come?"

She looks at you. "It's open to the school."

"I know. I'm asking if you want me there specifically."

A beat.

"Yes," she says.

You nod. "Then I'll be there."

You split off toward the gym. She continues toward the third floor. She walks up all four flights without any change in her breathing, as has been the case since November, and she arrives at the lab and puts her bag down and stands in the middle of the room for a moment.

She opens her notebook to a clean page.

She writes: non-actionable.

She underlines it.

She closes the notebook and gets to work.

Chapter Nine : What Everyone Else Sees

The thing about Y/N Y/L/N is that she is not oblivious.

She is, by some measures, one of the more perceptive people at Westbridge, which is not something people would necessarily list first when describing her because what they list first is usually something about her presence, her energy, the way a room responds to her. But underneath that, she notices things. She notices the way people's expressions change when they're uncomfortable versus when they're performing discomfort. She notices when someone is struggling with something they haven't said yet. She notices the specific quality of silence in different people, what it means when Marcus Kim goes quiet versus what it means when Jenny Park goes quiet, and she has learned to respond to the difference without being obvious about the fact that she's noticed.

She has been noticing things about Alysa Liu since October.

Not the technical things — those she was already noticing before October, before the prep room, before the lab visits became a fixture. She noticed Alysa before she ever spoke to her, in the particular way you notice people who are doing something completely independently of whether you are looking at them, which is a quality very few people at Westbridge have. Most people at Westbridge are performing their existence to some degree, for some audience. Alysa is not performing anything. She is simply doing what she is doing, with her whole self, with no apparent awareness of or interest in whether anyone is watching.

She found this interesting before she found it anything else. She finds it something else now.

She finds, specifically, that she is thinking about Alysa with a frequency and specificity that has been increasing steadily since October and which she has not interrogated too closely because she is not sure she wants to know what the interrogation produces. She finds that the time in the lab has become the part of her day she looks forward to with a particularity that she is careful not to examine. She finds that when Alysa explains things to her — the polymer, the housings, the bio lab techniques, the city from above, the specific geometry of swinging between two particular buildings — she is listening with more attention than she gives to most things, and that this attention has a quality that is not entirely academic.

She also finds that Alysa is — and she has been slow to land on this word, not because she isn't sure of it but because once she lands on it she will have to decide what to do with it — beautiful. Not in the obvious way, not in the way Westbridge would vote on it, not in the way that gets noticed. In the specific, close-range way of someone who has been paying attention to all the details of a face for two months and has arrived at a conclusion that is more comprehensive than the one you'd reach from a distance.

She sits in AP Biology and looks at Alysa from three rows back, and she thinks: I am in significant trouble.

She does not tell Alysa this. She is fairly confident Alysa does not know. Alysa moves through the world with the focused specificity of someone who is thinking about the next problem, and when she looks at you she looks with interest and attention and warmth and also — sometimes, in the specific way of something being managed — with a quality that suggests there is something she has decided not to look at directly.

You recognize this quality because you are also deploying it.

The difference, which you have not fully worked out yet, is what to do about it.

Chapter Ten : 2 AM

It is a Tuesday in December and your phone buzzes at two in the morning.

You are awake. You are usually awake at two, not because you have insomnia but because you have a long-standing inability to go to sleep at a reasonable hour, which your mother has been commenting on since you were twelve. You are on your phone, reading something you found in the rabbit hole that started with Alysa's polymer research and ended, six links later, at a paper on arachnid silk gland evolution, which is not something you ever expected to be reading at two in the morning and which you find genuinely interesting.

The buzz is Alysa.

ALYSA: bad night

You sit up.

YOU: what happened

ALYSA: nothing I couldn't handle. just — bad.

YOU: define bad

A pause. Then:

ALYSA: there was a fire. apartment building, East 14th. I got the people out but I was — I wasn't fast enough for one of them. she's okay. the paramedics got to her. but I wasn't fast enough.

You read this twice.

YOU: she's okay

ALYSA: she was unresponsive when I found her. she's okay now. she is. but

YOU: but you keep thinking about the before

ALYSA: yes

YOU: where are you

ALYSA: rooftop. 20th st

YOU: can you come here

A long pause.

ALYSA: it's two AM

YOU: I know

ALYSA: you have practice at six

YOU: I know. come here.

The longest pause yet.

ALYSA: give me fifteen minutes

She comes in through your window, because this is something she can do now, something that you have both adapted to with a practicality that still occasionally strikes you as surreal. She comes in through the second-floor window and drops down onto your floor and she is already out of the suit top, just the undershirt, and she looks — she looks tired in a way that the suit and the movement usually mask and that is more visible now, in your room at two AM, in the specific light of your desk lamp that is the only light on.

She sits on the floor. You sit on the floor next to her, because the floor is where she chose to sit and you are not going to make this into something it doesn't have to be.

"Tell me what happened," you say.

She tells you. The building, the fire on the third floor, the people on the upper floors who couldn't get down. The woman on the fourth floor who was unconscious when she got there, who she carried down, who the paramedics took before Alysa could know for certain. The waiting on the rooftop across the street while they worked on her, watching, not being able to know.

"She was okay," you say. "You said she was okay."

"She was okay by the time I left," she says. "Responsive. They had her."

"Then—"

"I know she was okay," Alysa says. "I know. I keep—" She stops. She is looking at her hands, which are fine, which are not injured, which have the specific non-state of hands that did not get to do the thing they needed to do fast enough. "I know she was okay."

"Yes," you say.

"I keep thinking about the window," she says. "There was a window of time where if I had been thirty seconds faster she would never have been unconscious at all. If I had been thirty seconds faster."

"You don't know that," you say.

"I know the timing," she says, and this is Alysa, this is the specific way her mind works, precise and relentless, running the numbers even when the numbers are hurting her. "I know what I could have done differently."

"And in six months," you say, "when you know more, when you're faster, you will do it differently. You will have been doing it differently for six months." You look at her. "You started three weeks ago."

She is quiet for a moment.

"Three weeks," she says.

"You are three weeks into this," you say. "You saved everyone else in the building. You have stopped four other things this month. You are learning and you are doing it while you're learning and that woman is alive because you were there." A beat. "Three weeks ago you were only doing it from the roof of your building."

She looks at her hands again. The lines of them, the adhesion capability, the thing she has spent months thinking about in a purely technical register and is now thinking about in a completely different one.

"Yeah," she says, quietly.

"Yeah," you say.

You sit there for a while. The desk lamp makes a small warm circle. Outside, the city does its 2 AM thing — quieter than it is at any other hour, but not silent, because the city is never silent, because the city is exactly what she said it is, the thing that holds together.

At some point you get off the floor onto the bed because the floor is uncomfortable and you are both seventeen and you have practice at six, and she is on the far side with her arms around her knees and you are on your side facing her and neither of you says anything for a while and it is not uncomfortable, it is the specific comfortable silence that has been building in the lab for two months, the one that exists between people who have been in enough silences together that they know what the other person's silence means.

"Thank you," she says. Eventually.

"You would have figured it out by morning," you say. "I just made it faster."

"That's not—" She stops. She looks at you, and in the lamp light her expression has shed some of the layer she usually keeps in place, the managing-quality, and what's underneath it is something warmer and more direct and completely, thoroughly non-actionable.

"I know," you say. Because you do know. Because you have known for a while.

You fall asleep before she does. She lies awake for another hour in the specific comfortable quiet of your room, which smells like chlorine and the vanilla candle you keep on your desk and something else she doesn't have a name for that is simply the smell of your space, and she looks at the ceiling, and she thinks.

In the morning she is gone before your alarm, which is what she usually does when she ends up here. There is a text on your phone from 5:47 AM.

ALYSA: thank you

ALYSA: go get in the water

You smile at your phone before you're fully awake. Then you get up and go to practice.

Chapter Eleven : January

After the holidays — after two weeks apart, which Alysa spends at her grandmother's in a way that is too long and too quiet and that has a shape she doesn't examine too directly — January arrives with the specific quality of a month that is cold all the way through and asks nothing cheerful of you.

She is back at the lab. The project has evolved past the housing, past the suit, into something she is now thinking about in operational terms rather than engineering ones — the improvement of her technique, the expansion of her coverage area, the nights when she goes out earlier and comes in later and the data she is collecting about the city's patterns and her own response times. She is getting faster. The overrotation on landings has mostly resolved. The swing radius is larger.

You are back on your stool.

The weeks in between have produced something — she is not sure what to call it, it is something she notices in the way she notices changes in her prototypes, by comparing what is in front of her to what she remembers. You are the same as before and also there is something different, something that is not dramatic and has no announcement, something that exists in the specific quality of how long you hold eye contact before looking away and in the way you lean against the door frame sometimes when you are leaving, like leaving requires a moment of decision.

She puts this in the non-actionable file. The file is at capacity. She is aware of this.

"The Post did a thing on Spiderwoman," you say, on a Tuesday, looking at your phone.

"I saw."

"They called you a menace."

"I saw."

"Two days before that they called you a hero."

"Journalists are not consistent." She does not look up from the workbench.

"They want to know who you are," you say.

"Everyone wants to know who I am."

"What would you say? If someone asked."

She looks up. You are looking at her with a question in your expression that is both the question you asked and something other than the question you asked, something larger and less specific.

"I'd say it doesn't matter," she says.

"Does it matter to you?"

She considers this with the honesty she brings to most things. "Yes," she says. "But the part that matters is the one that exists here, not out there." She gestures vaguely at the window, at the city outside, at the press coverage and the rumors and the growing accumulation of public opinion about a woman in a red and black suit. "Out there, the identity is a problem. It makes the people I care about into targets."

A pause.

"People you care about," you say.

"Specifically, one person," she says, and then she realizes she has said this out loud and she looks back at the workbench with the specific focus of someone redirecting very quickly.

The silence in the lab has a different quality for a moment.

"Okay," you say, quietly.

She does not respond. She is pipetting something she does not need to pipette. She is giving this pipetting her complete attention.

"I'm not a target," you say. "For the record."

"You don't know that," she says.

"Alysa—"

"I don't know what this becomes," she says, to the workbench. "I don't know how visible it gets, or what the visibility means for the people connected to me. I don't—" She stops. She puts the pipette down. "I need to know that what I'm building stays separate. That you stay—"

"Safe," you say.

"Yes," she says.

You are quiet for a moment.

"I understand that," you say. "I do. But I'm already in it. I've been in it since the prep room." You say this carefully, not dramatically, in the tone of someone stating a position they have thought about. "I know what that means. I'm making an informed choice."

She looks at you. "You're seventeen."

"So are you," you say.

She doesn't have a response to this. She looks at you, and you look back, and the non-actionable file in her chest is making itself very loudly known, and she is about to say something, she is in the process of deciding what to say, when your phone buzzes.

You look at it. "I have to go," you say. "Practice ran over, I forgot to tell my mom." You slide off the stool, pick up your bag, and then you pause at the door in the way you have been pausing at the door more lately, the pause that takes a moment to resolve.

"I'm not going anywhere," you say. "For the record."

She looks at you.

"Okay," she says.

You go. The door closes. She stands in the lab for a moment and then she goes back to the workbench and she pipettes the thing she was pretending to pipette earlier, this time because she actually needs to.

Chapter Twelve : The Part Before Everything Changes Again

February.

Alysa's name is in the school paper.

Not for Spiderwoman. For the polymer project, which she presented at the bio club showcase in December and which one of the students on the paper wrote a brief item on, which ran in January, and which resulted in three things: an email from a professor at Columbia who wants to hear more about the project, an email from a bio competition coordinator about a citywide showcase in March, and the specific kind of visibility she has been trying to manage since November.

She is, briefly, something at Westbridge. Not the kind of something you are — she does not walk into rooms and have them reorganize — but the kind of something that produces recognition, people saying her name in the hallway with the specific quality of people who have recently learned it, the bio teachers mentioning the item in class, Harmon (the AP Bio Harmon, not related to the fictional editor in the previous story) asking her to present the project to the junior seminar.

She handles this fine. She is used to the work being visible even when she isn't. This is different from social visibility, which requires performance. The work standing on its own is something she has always been comfortable with.

What she is less comfortable with is the shift in your presence at school.

You have always been, by the natural order of Westbridge, someone who moves in circles that don't include her. Your circle is large and warm and inclusive in the specific way of someone who doesn't build walls, but it is still a circle, and she has been adjacent to it rather than inside it for three years. The lab visits are their thing — separate, specific, not something that has migrated into the hallways or the cafeteria or the rest of the school day.

Until February.

You stop by her locker on a Tuesday, which you have never done before. You do it in the way you do things — naturally, without ceremony, like it is simply a thing that happens and you are doing it. You are talking to someone from the swim team and you see her and you say her name and include her in the conversation with an ease that leaves no room for awkwardness, and then you say see you later when you have to go and the swim team person says nice to meet you and she stands at her locker processing the fact that you stopped by her locker.

On Thursday you sit next to her at lunch.

You eat with your usual people, most days. Your social gravity pulls you there, and it is not a cruel gravity — you are not one of the people who categorizes, who excludes deliberately, who builds walls. But you eat with your people, and your people are not her people, and this has simply been how it is for three years.

You sit next to her on Thursday with your tray and you say hey and you eat and you talk to her and to the two people from the bio club who are also at this table, and when the swim team people come by looking for you, you introduce everyone without making it a production and they sit down and the lunch is — it is fine. She handles it fine. The swim team people are not awful, they are ordinary, and she can navigate ordinary.

But she notices, and she files it, and the non-actionable file has been over capacity since January and she is not sure what to do about that except continue to manage it.

On Friday, after school, in the lab:

"You keep doing things," she says.

You look up from your stool. "What things."

"The locker. Lunch. The — including."

"The including," you repeat.

"You keep including me," she says, not accusatorially, just — stating it, the way she states things she is trying to understand the logic of. "Deliberately. In places you haven't before."

You look at her for a moment. "Yes," you say.

"Why."

"Because I want to," you say. And then, more carefully: "Because I've been thinking about the categories."

"What categories."

"The one where the lab is ours and the rest of school is something else," you say. "I've been thinking about whether that needs to be true."

She looks at you. This is a direct conversation, more direct than either of them usually does in this particular direction, and she can feel the edge of it, the place where this conversation could become the conversation that she has been managing around for months.

"The lab being ours doesn't stop being true if the other things are also true," you say. "They're not mutually exclusive."

She is quiet for a moment.

"What happens to the categories," she says, slowly, "if the other things are also true."

You look at her steadily. "I think you know what happens."

She looks back. The non-actionable file is open. She is looking directly at it, and it is looking back at her, and every argument she has assembled — the complication, the risk, the specificity of what she is now and what that means for anyone close to her — is present and real and none of it is sufficient to change the fact of what she is feeling.

"Alysa," you say. Quietly.

She picks up her notebook. She opens it to the page that says non-actionable, which she underlined in December.

She crosses out the word.

You watch her do this. Something in your expression opens — not surprise, she doesn't think it's surprise, more like relief, like something that has been held at a particular tension finally being able to release.

"I still don't know what it means," she says. "For the rest of it. For — what I am."

"I know," you say.

"It's complicated in ways—"

"I know," you say again. "I've been next to the complicated for four months. I'm not leaving because it's complicated."

She looks at you for a long moment. Then she looks at the notebook in her hands, at the crossed-out word.

"Okay," she says.

"Okay," you say.

Neither of you moves for a moment. The lab is the same as it always is, the equipment and the whiteboards and the light at this hour going golden, and she is sitting on her lab stool and you are sitting on yours and the distance between the two of them is approximately four feet, which is a workbench width, which is nothing.

"Come here," you say.

She comes. She stands in front of you and you are looking at her with the full version, the one she knows from prototype eighteen, the close-range version, and she looks back.

"Hi," you say.

"Hi," she says.

You reach up and tuck a piece of her hair back, very gently, with the specific care of someone doing something for the first time that they have been thinking about for a long time. She stays still for it. Your hand comes to rest at the side of her face, and she turns into it slightly, not dramatically, just a small lean, and something in her chest that has been noted but non-actionable for four months resolves into something simple and certain and completely present.

"I've been thinking about doing this for a while," you say.

"I know," she says.

"You knew?"

"I observe things," she says. "You know this about me."

You laugh — the full version, the close version, the one she has now seen many times but which she does not think she will ever fully adapt to, because it is the specific quality of a thing that is complete rather than a thing that performs being complete.

"Fair," you say.

She kisses you. It is the first time she has kissed anyone and she is aware of this and also aware that it doesn't feel like a first time in the way people describe first times, doesn't feel fumbled or uncertain, feels like the logical conclusion of four months of everything else, like something that was going to happen at the exact moment when they both had the right information and decided to use it.

You kiss her back with the same completeness you bring to everything.

The lab is the same as it always is. The equipment hums. The late afternoon light comes through the windows at the angle it comes through at this hour. Prototype eighteen is on the shelf where it has been since October, the first thing that worked.

She is, she thinks, the second.

Chapter Thirteen : What February Becomes

February becomes something new, in the way months become something new when the architecture of your life changes in the middle of them.

It is not dramatic. It does not remake every surface. It is subtler than that — a shift in the quality of specific things, the lab and the hallways and the two-AM texts, all of them the same and also different, the difference being that she now gets to kiss you when you stop by her locker, that you reach for her hand sometimes in the hallway without looking around first to see if anyone is watching, that the 2 AM texts have a different register when she's been out and comes back to them, something warmer and more specific, something that says you specifically in a way that the texts already said and now say louder.

You are careful with her. She notices this and she does not put it in any file at all, she simply holds it, the way you hold things that you don't want to categorize because categorizing them risks diminishing them. You are careful with the suit, with what it means, with the specific complications of being the person who knows. You have been careful since October. Now the care has a different quality, the quality of someone who has a personal stake rather than an intellectual one, and she feels the difference.

She is also careful with you. She is careful with the identity, which she has been careful with since November, but now the carefulness has a specific shape, a specific fear that has settled into the architecture alongside everything else: the fear of the day when someone figures out that Spiderwoman is a specific person rather than a symbol, and traces that person to the people she is near. She carries this fear with the same precision she brings to everything — cleanly, specifically, managed rather than avoided.

March arrives. The citywide bio showcase. She presents the polymer project, the official version, the one that does not include the development, the one that is purely the synthetic research. It wins its category. The Columbia professor shakes her hand. The competition coordinator mentions graduate programs that she is, technically, seven years away from, but which she files as something to examine later.

You are there. You are in the audience, which is not a small thing, it is a Tuesday afternoon in March and you rearranged your practice schedule to be there, which your coach was not happy about and which you did anyway. She sees you when she walks to the podium and you are in the third row with the full version of your expression, the close-range one, and she looks at you for exactly one second before she begins speaking.

It is the best presentation she has ever given.

After, in the lobby, you say: "Outside first, then inside."

She looks at you.

"The contamination check," you say. "I've been thinking about how to apply that principle to the suit's grip release mechanism. Outside force first, then internal adjustment. Would that give you more precision?"

She stares at you. "You've been thinking about my grip release mechanism."

"I think about your grip release mechanism a lot," you say, and there is something in it, a deliberate note of the other meaning, and she starts laughing, which she doesn't do often enough, and you are grinning, and the lobby of the competition venue is not the lab and it is not the 2 AM rooftop and it is not the school hallway, it is something else, something new, something that is a part of the architecture that didn't exist in September.

She is, she thinks, doing all right.

Epilogue

April.

There is a building on the corner of 23rd and 8th that Alysa has started thinking of as hers, not because she owns it, not because it is special, but because the water tower on the roof has a particular vantage point on the west side grid that she finds useful for situation assessment, and because she has been up there enough times that it feels familiar in the way things feel familiar when you have been in them enough times, settled-in, known.

She is up there on a Tuesday in April, the suit on, the city below her in its April state — colder than it should be still, the specific stubborn cold of a New York April that refuses to concede spring until it's absolutely forced to — and she is doing what she does up here, which is watching.

Not for anything specific. For the pattern. For the system. For the way the city moves at eleven PM on a Tuesday, the specific rhythm of it, the particular way the lights organize themselves and the streets move and the whole thing works.

Her phone buzzes.

Y/N: I can see the water tower from my window

She looks south. The window of your apartment building is visible from here, lit up, your silhouette behind the glass.

She raises one hand. A wave.

A beat. Then, from your window, a wave back.

ALYSA: go to sleep

Y/N: you first

ALYSA: I have work

Y/N: I know. be careful.

She looks at the lit window for a moment. The city goes on below her, and the cold is still the specific April cold that hasn't given up, and she is on a water tower in the suit she built out of a housing she built out of a development that started with a spider in a research wing in October, and twelve floors down and three blocks south you are at your window watching for her.

She looks at the city. She looks at your window.

ALYSA: always

She goes back to watching.

The city holds together.

synopsis: alysa came back for her sophomore year at UCLA, only to find herself crushing on her roommate

₰ zoe

Whoever decided to shedule shop week into a single week instead of several days, clearly hates seeing college freshmen be happy.

NO ONE MOVE EVERYONE FREEZE AND LOOK, LOOK AT HERRRRR

college reader x alysa liu

(obvi inspired by hayley kiyoko def recommend listening to the movie version of the song while reading)

the party was suffocating. your boyfriend reeked of cheap beer, arm lazily over your shoulder talking to his frat brothers. they were all well past their limit not making any sense. you smiled and nodded along with them as you looked for a way to escape. that’s when you saw her for the first time, she was leaning against the wall scanning the room. your eyes locked and you smiled rushing over.

“im gonna grab a drink babe” you yelled over the music. your boyfriend tried to offer his beer but you rejected it. he placed a sloppy kiss on the top of your head as you walked over to her.

“hi” you smiled excitedly.

“hey” she said smiled back.

“i’m y/n” you stuck out your hand.

“alysa” she shook your hand.

“you looked a little lonely over here and i’ve been dying to get away from my boyfriend”

“yeah, i don’t really know anyone here”

“me neither, wanna go outside?”

she nodded and you grabbed her hand leading her though the crowd. the air outside was cool, refreshing. you decided to sit along the pool. you took your shoes off and rolled up your pants above your knees. alysa followed quickly sitting beside you.

“where are you from?” you asked.

“oakland”

“like the bay?”

“yup”

“im from oregon, very small town. ever been up there?”

“nope”

you nodded your head, kicking your feet lightly in the water. were you nervous right now?

“what are you studying?” she asked.

“psychology”

“shut up me too”

“really? what made you pick it?”

“i don’t know actually” she laughed under her breath. she did know why but wasn’t going to say. you took a mental note of that.

“i want understand why people think the way they do”

“yeah? what made you realize that?”

“nothing specifically”

this time you were the one holding onto the truth, she took note of it.

there was a pause in the conversation. leaving you two in an awkward silence, usually you were very social. telling your life story to anyone who would listen but with her you couldn’t.

“how long have you been with your boyfriend?” she asked breaking the silence.

“since we were fifteen” you said beginning to mess with the polish on your nail.

“high school sweethearts?”

you nodded somewhat excitedly. you loved grant a lot, but you knew you didn’t want to spend the rest of your life with him.

“what about you? anyone special?”

she shook her head and you told her she was lucky. she looked at you puzzled and you went on about how relationships hold people back. you’ve recited this monologue hundreds of times to your friends and when they would question why you were still with grant. you’d told them he was the exception.

the night went pretty well after that. you started to get comfortable with each other, as comfortable as people who just met can get. until grant came through the sliding glass door stumbling.

“baby i’ve been looking for you” he proclaimed attempting to kiss you. his lips tasted like cheap beer. he completely missed your mouth too, basically kissing your chin. you shoved him off, getting up. he leaned his whole body against you making you stumble back, alysa got up helping catch you. you thanked her wrapping grant’s arm around your shoulder starting to walk out.

“hey wait!” you turned around leaving grant at the door where he hit his head against the glass. he mumbled a quick ow before rubbing his head.

“give me your phone” you demanded reaching your hand out.

there was no hesitation from her, she reached in her pocket handing it to you. you smiled when you saw her wallpaper, a picture of her and her siblings. you turned the phone to her to unlock the face id and opened her contacts app. you added your number and sent yourself a quick hello to have her number. then you handed her phone back.

“text me” you said rushing back to your boyfriend.

the night went on after that. you walked with grant back to his dorm. he didn’t make any sense, you had completely tuned him out. all you could think about was your new “friend” alysa. from the short conversation you had with her you knew you wanted her around more. you couldn’t put your finger on what, she was just intriguing to you. you got grant home and into bed, then when you got home you couldn’t sleep. you decided to text alysa.

you: hey

alysa: hi

you: wanna get breakfast in the morning?

alysa: sure

what time?

you: whenever! just text me when you’re up

alysa: sounds good

you woke up the next more with a new found excitement. alysa had texted saying she’d be ready soon. you stumbled all over your dorm in attempts not to wake your roomate before rushing out the door. you were practically running to the dinning hall before grant called you. he was sort of angry at the fact you chose to meet with someone else for breakfast.

“you have nothing to be upset for. i’m meeting a friend, i can have friends grant” you whispered yelled.

“i’m your boyfriend! i should be your priority. i’m hungover, i want to be with you.”

“yeah well i’ll come over later” you hung over before he could say anything else. you spotted alysa sitting in the corner scrolling through her phone. you smiled, fixing your hair and smoothing out your top before walking over. she smiled at up you.

“hey you look nice” she complimented.

“thank you! so do you” you compliment her right back.

“thanks, how was getting back home last night?” she asked as you walked over to get in line for food.

“it was fine, i hate dealing with drunk people”

“yeah i feel you. my roommate was throwing up all night.”

“jeez, how is she doing?”

“she’s fine, sound asleep”

you nodded. you were kind of nervous, you couldn’t understand why. you didn’t really have any friends, most of your time you spent with grant. it was probably just that, the common nerves of meeting someone new.

you grabbed your food and walked back to the table. it was mostly silent between the two of you as you ate, you didn’t mind it though. it was a comfortable silence.

“are you alysa liu?” someone asked from behind you and alysa looked up.

she smiled nodding before the person asked for a picture and told her they were sad about her retirement. you looked at her puzzled, who was this girl?

“i used to skate growing up” she told you nonchalantly picking at her food.

“skate?”

“like ice skating”

“oh cool. did you go to the olympics or something?” you asked half jokingly, you knew nothing about skating. the most you knew about it was about tonya harding’s story. you watched her movie with your mom a while back.

“yeah i did”

“that’s cool” was all you said and you shrugged continuing to eat your food. it’s not that you didn’t care, but if it meant a lot to her she would’ve told you last night. clearly she wasn’t willing to share that side of herself so who were you question it any further.

“you do sports growing up?” she asked trying to steer the conversation away from herself and skating.

“soccer”

“oh yeah? do you still play?”

“nope, quit my junior year”

“can i ask why?”

“i just didn’t like it anymore” you said picking at your food. that wasn’t the truth, you just didn’t want to have to reopen the wound. alysa caught the hint immediately and didn’t push further. it was quiet again between the two of you. both of you just picking at your food hoping the other would start a new topic of conversation. alysa was about to open her mouth but someone called your name from across the dinning hall. you didn’t have to turn your head to know who it was. you rolled your eyes continuing to pick at your food, not daring to turn your head around.

“babe i’ve been calling and texting” he was out of breath, sliding into the chair next to you. he kissed the top of your head and put his arm around the back of you chair.

“grant i told you i was meeting with a friend” you said still not batting an eye his way.

“i know but you don’t really have any so all of sudden to hear you do” he said it condescendingly.

you scoffed, shoving his arm off the back of your chair. alysa watched carefully not wanting to overstep in anyway. her mind was already set though, she hated grant.

“i’m grant” he reached his hand over the table for alysa to shake.

“alysa” she shook it quickly before quickly folding her arms over her chest.

“hey alysa did you still want me to come help with your-”

“yeah i can’t handle my roommate alone” she turned to grant, “she’s been throwing up all morning. i’m scared she might have some kind of poisoning”

“you should call your ra then” grant suggested, resting his arm on the back of your chair again.

“and risk getting in trouble? come on aren’t you in a frat, don’t you know calling ra is like a death wish” alysa replied grabbing both your trays getting up.

you followed quickly behind her, leaving grant alone at the table.

“thank you” you said as you walked out the dinning hall.

“of course, that guy is-”

“an asshole. i know and i really want to break up with him but”

“but what?”

“i can’t get rid of him. he just lingers, ive tried and he always traps me back in”

alysa didn’t say anything she just continued looking down at the pavement.

“hey i need to get shampoo, want to come with me?” you offered.

“yeah of course” she said almost a little too excitedly. you laughed at her excitement, grabbing her hand and dragging her behind you. it was nice being able to hang out with someone who wasn’t grant. alysa was easy to talk to, she was funny, and very caring. you couldn’t believe you hadn’t known her a full twenty four hours yet. she felt like your soulmate, platonically of course.

“i had so much fun today” you said walking into your dorm building.

“i did too”

you smiled at her, you really didn’t want her to leave.

“do you want to come up and watch a movie?”

“of course”

you giggled excitedly letting her into your building. you were lucky your roommates werent in the room for once. you set your things down. alysa stood in the doorway in awe of your room. she looked at all your posters and pictures you had up.

“i love pink pantheress” she said pointing to one of your posters.

“shut the hell up, you’re the first person to know who that is”

you grabbed your laptop jumping on your bed and invited her over. you scrolled for what felt like hours trying to decide what to watch.

“you’ve never seen how to loose a guy in ten days?”

“nope”

“that’s unacceptable, we have to watch it”

alysa was focused on the movie the entire time, as if she was taking notes. you would pay attention here and there, but most of your focus was on her. how is that you clicked so instantly, you felt like you knew her forever.

she looked over to you and you quickly focused your attention back to the movie. she nudged your shoulder and you lightly pushed her back. then both of you turned your focus back to the movie.

“good huh?” you asked closing your laptop once the movie was over.

“actually yeah, i really liked it”

“im glad” you hopped off your bed. she followed behind you starting to grab her stuff.

“what classes do you have tomorrow?” you asked leaning on your desk.

“calc and bio, you?”

“do you have calc at 12 with the ginger lady?”

“yeah”

“i do too! she’s so annoying, i can’t understand her half the time”

“me neither what! we should meet up before class”

“of course!” you put started putting on your shoes, “im going to walk you home”

“you don’t have to”

“i want to, wouldn’t want someone kidnapping you”

those next weeks you two only grew closer. you would walk each other to class, sometimes even sit in on the others class when you had nothing to do. sleepovers became common, so much so alysa knew your roomates starbucks orders. she put in the effort to get to know them, something grant never did. grant kept you isolated away from everything. alysa encouraged you to meet new people and try new things. it was refreshing.

grant wasn’t happy about this new found friend of yours. he hated the way she made you laugh more than he did. the way you started devoting all your time to her. the final straw was the way you looked at her. you looked at her as if she was the only person in the room. no one else mattered to you when alysa was around and he hated it.

you could’ve cared less about how grant felt, you were waiting for him to break things off. he didn’t, he kept trying to lure you back in. taking you to nice dinners, buying you flowers, and getting you away from alysa.

“he really doesn’t like you” you told alysa one night. you two had discovered a look out spot not to far from campus.

“i don’t really care. he’s just mad i’m stealing his girl”

“im not his girl, i haven’t been for a while”

“yeah? and why is that?”

“i just don’t like him. he’s so possessive, annoying, and doesn’t know how to please me”

alysa laughed at you, “please you how?”

“we’re not thirteen alysa. you know how”

“so you like you’ve never-”

“never made me cum ever! the first time we ever had sex he lasted all of thirty seconds”

she bursted out laughing at that. at first you were slightly embarrassed, telling her to shut up. then you started laughing wit her, because what a pathetic thing grant was. once the two of you stopped laughing you looked at her, like really looked at her. without thinking you fixed her slightly crooked bangs. she watched your fingers as they moved across her bangs.

“you’re like really pretty you know that?” you told her.

“you’re really pretty too” she said without any hesitation.

you looked moved your attention from her eyes to her lips. up until this moment you hadn’t thought of her as anything than your best friend. she got you in no one anyone had, specially grant. that’s what confused you, everytime you compared to her to someone it was always grant. there was something about alysa that made you feel different, and looking at her now. you realized what it was, and you hoped she knew it too. you leaned in slowly, cautiously leaving the right amount of space. if she want to meet you halfway she would, and if she didn’t she could back away. there was no hesitation from her, she kissed you. it started slow, then it become needy. her hands landed on your hips pulling you closer to her, your hands wrapped around her neck. she tugged on your hips begging for more. you didn’t hesitate, without breaking the kiss you went to straddle her lap. she began to rock your hips against her thigh, you threw your head back. she started to kiss your neck careful not to leave any mark, you could care less at this point. until you realized you were cheating on your high school sweetheart. you quickly stood up saying how this was stupid and you don’t meant to lead her on. alysa tried to plead with you, but you didn’t listen already walking back to your dorm. you cried the entire way there, you were confused. you knew your feelings for alysa, but what would people think? grant wasn’t a good boyfriend you knew that, but he also didn’t deserve to be betrayed this way.

you hadn’t even think about how this was going to go. you had tried to break up with grant countless times, each time unsuccessful.

you knocked on his dorm door quietly, hoping that maybe he wouldn’t hear you. that you would be able to avoid this conversation for another day. he opened the door, no shirt just some old basketball shorts.

“god you look like shit” he looked you up and down. for once he was probably right, you had been crying the entire way here. the wind had picked up leaving your hair a frizzy mess.

“shut up grant. i need to talk to you” you shoved your way in.

“are you going to trying to break up with me for the millionth time?”

“yeah and it’s going to work because”

“who in their right mind is ever going to love you? you’re a real mindfuck you know that? you’re lucky i’ve put up with you this long”

you sat on the edge of his bed, looking down at the floor. his words hit you everytime, always hurting more than the last.

“because i met someone who loves me”

“oh so you’re a slut? you’ve been cheating on me? let me guess with that bitch”

“yes! grant yes! eveything bad you have to say about me is true and nevertheless she loves me”

“how do you know huh? what if she just wants to fuck, realizes you’re no good then kicks you to the curb?”

“she wouldnt do that” you said under your breath.

“huh? you’re a fool to think that. i love you baby, so much. no one will ever love you the way i do” he came up to you, holding your face with both his hands. wiping the tears falling from your eyes with his thumb, “how will your parents feel when they hear you cheated on me? with some chick, do really think they’ll still love you?”

you didnt say anything, you couldn’t. you knew he wasn’t right, but you knew nothing other than him. how would your parents react? you never actually thought about what your parents might think, would they even accept you? you felt like a damn fool, but once again you fell into grant’s trap. he kissed your temple, telling you he loved you. he pulled your head back to look at him, and he had the same rage in his eyes. he didn’t have any remorse for his words as he kissed you. he lifted you to sit on the dresser by his window. you knew this wasn’t right, but grant’s words echoed in your head. what if alysa really got to know you and realized you were too much, or not enough for her. how could she ever love you the way grant did?

alysa knew she liked you from the moment you approached her at that party. she loved everything about you, especially the way you cared for others. one of the first nights you hung out, alysa overdid it at the pregame. you didn’t get mad at her, you immediately took care of her. much to grant’s disapproval you skipped out on the party that night. you brought her back to your dorm, and watched her all night. you slept on the floor and any movement you heard you got up to make sure she was okay. the next morning you sat with her on the bathroom floor, holding her hair and rubbing her back as she threw up. you never expected anything in return either. you were selfless that way, you loved with your whole heart. that’s why she hated grant, he was selfish. he kept you all to himself, sucking the life out of you. she wanted nothing more than to get you away from him. then hopefully you’d realize you loved her more than just a friend. for the the past couple months it felt like you were finally seeing it. the way grant kept you isolated and alysa let you be free. the way alysa cared for you in ways he couldn’t. until the night you left her at the lookout, she really thought you were finally going to be hers. she gave you space thinking you’d eventually come around but you never did. it had been weeks since she last saw you, you never came to class and you stopped taking your usual routes around campus. her roommates saw the way your absence was affecting her and they couldn’t stand to see that way. they knew what she went through before this, how her love for skating was taken from her. they didn’t want her loose something else she held so close, so they invited her out. they knew you’d be there with grant and they had a plan to trap you two into talking to each other. alysa fought against the plan she didn’t want to see you, especially if you were with him.

“she won’t be there. the pledges are out on some retreat this weekend” her first roomate encouraged her.

“we don’t even have to stay! just drink their alcohol and dip” the second one said pulling her by the arms up.

alysa didn’t fight back this time.

grant was like he was at every party, drunk beyond his mind. this time you joined him taking a couple shots. each one you’d hope help take your mind off alysa. it had been almost a month since you last saw her and everyday you missed her more. you knew kissing her wasn’t a mistake, but your mind couldn’t accept it. you belonged with grant right?

“are you fucking kidding?” grants friend, logan, shouted.

“what’s up my boy?” grant replied and you cringed grabbing his cup and chugging the rest. he smiled whispering into your ear, “that’s my girl” kissing your forehead.

“that weirdo, i forgot her name. we messed around like once, her roommate is your girl” logan pointed to you and you knew who he was talking about. grants grip on waist tighten.

“logannnn” alysa’s roommate sang from

behind all of you.

you all sighed in unison.

“i haven’t seen you in so long baby, what happen?”

“i got busy”

“so am i” she reached over him and grabbed a bottle.

“yo you can’t take all that” logan grabbed the bottle from her hand.

“i’m sharing it with my girls”

your breath caught when you saw her. she looked good, way too good. if you could have it your way you’d reached over the counter and drag her upstairs with you.

“nah, not with her” logan pointed to alysa. she looked down embarrassed and then her roomates grabbed the bottle from logan, running off giggling. logan quickly chased after them and grant grabbed your arm dragging you outside.

“grant stop you’re hurting me!” you yelled as he yanked you outside and slammed the door behind him.

“did you know she was going to be here?” he yelled at you.

“what no? of course not.”

“you’re such a fucking liar. i shouldn’t have taken you back.”

“you didn’t take me back you moron”

“oh yeah? then why am i still putting up with your bullshit?”

“because you’re scared grant. no one will ever love you, you’re pathetic.”

“i don’t know how drunk you are right now but im not some kind of mirror”

truthfully you were drunk out of your mind, you were seeing two of him at the moment. there was such thing as liquid courage though, because seeing alysa made you realize you were a fool. you weren’t the miserable and unloveable one in the relationship, it was always grant. in high school you were the most popular girl, no one ever had anything bad to say about you. grant took notice of that, and wanted you all to himself. star quarterback and popular girl, it should’ve been a fairytale and it did start as one. he was sweet in the beginning then he showed his true colors. he couldn’t stand not having the attention in the relationship, he didn’t want to be known as your boyfriend. you were his girlfriend, so he took your insecurities and capitalized on them. slowly he turned you into a shell of the person you once were. then alysa came along and the same bubbly personality started to come out and he freaked out. you were finally starting to see past him and his evil antics. you wanted to be the old you, the one that was starting to show when you were with alysa. she didn’t hold you back, she wanted you to be the best version of yourself. you wanted to be that person too, not just for you but for her.

“no grant i’m just done with you. i don’t owe you an explanation or reason, im done.”

“we’ll see how long that lasts”

you just rolled your eyes and slammed the door behind you. there was people gathered around who clearly had seen the whole show you two put on. you could care less about what some strangers thought, you needed to find her. you rushed upstairs knocking and opening every door, nothing. you went downstairs pushing through people asking if they had seen her no use. you spotted logan in the corner making out with a new girl, perfect. you cleared your throat looking anywhere but the two of them.

“what do you want?” he asked harshly.

“where did the bottle stealers go?”

“they left”

you rushed out the door knowing where’d you’d find her. you didn’t fully comprehend how hard it would be to run across town drunk, so you stopped halfway to call an uber. he was a sweet older gentleman who listened to your story about how your high school boyfriend was holding you back from your true love. he told you falling in love that young never worked anyways. you thanked him and reached in your pocket reaching for cash to tip him. he tried to refuse, but you told him if he refused, alsya would also refuse you. he was your good luck charm you insisted on it.

you jumped out the car expecting to see alysa sitting there. alone, with the cheap bottle her and her roomates stole. she wasn’t there, you cursed under your breath starting to feel nauseous. you ran to the trashcan and threw up. you couldn’t survive another car ride in your state, the thought already making you nauseous. you also couldn’t walk without the possibility of getting caught by a cop. so you did the next best thing, you reached for your phone telling siri to call her. it went to voicemail immediately.

“i hate do not disturb you know that. i’m going to call you again and if you don’t pick up im going to text you. and im not gonna stop until you answer soooooo” your words were slurred and you laughed before hanging up. calling her again, the phone rang too many times for your comfort. then on the final ring she picked up, there was music playing in the background.

“hello”

“hi please don’t hang up, please. i need you, i need to see you, please” you started to cry into the phone.

“holy shit okay where are you?”

“you know where. i thought you’d be here too but you weren’t.” you said between broken sobs.

“i’m on my way okay? i’ll be there in no more than twenty minutes.” you heard confused voices as she hung up the phone.

you decided the best way to solve your nausea was to sleep, so you laid against the trashcan and closed your eyes.

“my god i gotta go” alysa said to her roomates as she got up rushing out the door.

“what? this is supposed to be our night” her roommate augured.

“that’s not entirely true” the second said.

alysa looked between the two of them

puzzled.

“we knew she was going to be there and were going to trap you to talk to her”

“you what?”

“we know how much you like her and couldn’t stand seeing you so sad”

“we’ll talk about this later, i’ll be back” alysa grabbed her keys and rushed out the door. she surprisingly wasn’t mad at her roommates, she’d been dying to talk to you. seeing you with grant made her heart drop and she would be lying to herself to say she wasn’t scared. you hadn’t called in weeks, what if grant did something to you? what if you were setting her up somehow? she shoved those feelings down quickly as her uber pulled up, she could’ve walked but she needed to get you as quickly as possible.

“i just dropped off this lovely young lady at the same place. such a sweetheart truly, she left me a tip. told me if i rejected her the person she was trying to win back would reject her too. i’m good luck tonight she told me” the man looked at her through the rear view mirror. alysa just laughed at the story, biting her thumb knowing he was most likely talking about you. she left him a generous tip as well, telling him she needed some of his luck. when she got out the car it was colder than she expected, she hugged herself and started looking for you. you weren’t that hard to miss considering you were in a bright colored dress sleeping against a trash can. she immediately rushed over to you, holding your face and shaking you awake. you woke up slowly smiling at her.

“alysaaaaaa you showed up”

“i did, are you okay?”

you didn’t even expect to but you started crying, you shook your head.

“i fucked up, i know i did. i should’ve cut things off with him so long ago. i was so scared what people would think of me. i mean i haven’t even soft launched to my parents that i might be gay or i don’t even know! i don’t wanna label it, i hate labels. my mom had this label machine growing up that used to freak me out” you stopped yourself before you continued on your tangent. you stood up stumbling a bit before alysa caught you, holding your waist firmly. you wrapped your arms around her neck, “look i know i messed things up with us but i need you to know. i like you so much, like it’s bad. i’m sorry it took me so long to get my head out my ass but i’m ready to be here for you. i could give less of a shit what anyone thinks, all i want is to be with you”

she didn’t reply at first she just nodded, her grip on your waist slightly tighter now.

“i think you’re drunk and we should talk about this in the morning”

“nope! no because im not as drunk as i was, like yeah im tipsy. i just really want to kiss you right now” you titled your head.

she laughed and shook her head and you let out another whine. she gave in and kissed you. you melted into her instantly, your hand starting to mess with her hair. her hand was steady on your waist and you smiled the entire time.

she pulled away first, your eyes were still closed hoping she just needed to catch her breath or something.

“does this mean you’re free from-”

you put your finger on her lips, “don’t use that devils name, but yes.”

she smiled leaning into to give you another quick kiss. she insisted on getting you home and you begged her to stay with you. insisting that your roomates missed her but she knew you it was you who did.

you weren’t on sure how things would play out between you. you knew grant would try to come back, but he’d have to give at some point. you weren’t sure how your parents would react but you honestly didn’t care. alysa was your person, you weren’t sure on the timeline yet. you just hoped it would be a while.

Book Title:

Golden Ice, Stolen Hearts

Paring:

Alysa Liu x female hockey player reader

Summary:

At the Winter Olympics, everything is supposed to be about medals, records, and representing your country.

For Alysa Liu, figure skating has always been her world—graceful, controlled, and fiercely individual. After making history with her gold medal performance, she expects nothing more than media interviews, celebrations, and the quiet pressure of staying on top.

For you, Team USA’s star hockey player and newly crowned Olympic gold medalist, life is the complete opposite—fast, physical, loud, and built on teamwork. You thrive in chaos, in the clash of sticks and ice, in a game where emotions run as high as the stakes.

You were never supposed to meet.

But one accidental collision in the Olympic Village—literally—changes everything.

What starts as a sarcastic exchange turns into late-night conversations, secret meetups between events, and a connection neither of you expected in the middle of the biggest competition of your lives. With cameras everywhere, national expectations looming, and your schedules pulling you in opposite directions, falling for each other is the one risk you can’t afford to take.

Yet somehow… it’s the only thing that feels real.

Because winning gold was supposed to be the highlight of the Olympics.

Not falling in love.

Chapter 1: Collision Course

Chapter 2: Accidental Isn't Accidental Anymore

Chapter 3: Edges and Lines

Chapter 4: Lines You Don't Cross

SUMMARY — you find out Alysa made you a friendship bracelet with her number on it, and you can't help but text her about it.

WARNING — none

WORD COUNT — 3.5K

PT.1 PT.2 PT.3 PT.4

MASTERLIST

The noise of the Kia Forum was still buzzing long after the concert ended.

It wasn't music anymore. It was that chaotic mix of thousands of people leaving at the same time—excited yelling, rushed footsteps, stage crews tearing things down, overlapping conversations echoing through the arena halls.

And in the middle of all that, Alysa desperately wished she could go back four hours in time and slap herself.

"That was kinda cute," Madison said for the fifth time, trying not to laugh.

"No, no, no," Amber immediately lifted a hand. "That was clinically insane. Different thing."

"Amber!" Ellie protested, even though she was grinning.

Alysa sank deeper into the white couch in the VIP lounge and covered her face with both hands.

"I wanna die."

"You can't die yet," Isabeau replied calmly. "We need to see how this ends."

That made Amber laugh so hard she almost spilled her drink.

The VIP area was lit with warm, dim lighting. Outside, they could still hear pieces of the stage getting dismantled, but inside everything looked ridiculously fancy: glass tables, untouched catering trays, overpriced bottled water, fresh flowers, giant couches, and the constant hum of the AC.

And there they were.

Amber Glenn sprawled out like she was watching the best reality show of her life.

Isabeau Levito sitting elegantly with her legs crossed, studying Alysa like a scientist observing a deeply concerning phenomenon.

Ellie Kam trying to be the only compassionate person in the group. And Madison Chock stuck between helping and laughing her ass off.

"In my defense..." Alysa muttered from behind her hands, "it sounded smart at the time."

"At the time?" Amber repeated. "Alysa, you wrote your number on a bracelet."

"The bracelet was cute!"

"And then you tried giving it to a literal global pop star in front of twenty thousand people."

"Because I had a plan!"

Everyone stared at her.

Alysa slowly lowered her hands.

"...sort of."

Amber leaned forward immediately.

"You had absolutely no plan."

"Well technically I did."

"What was it?"

Alysa hesitated.

"Hope fate did something."

Ellie accidentally snorted.

Madison covered her mouth.

Even Isabeau cracked a tiny smile.

"Oh my God," Amber said. "You're worse than I thought."

Alysa groaned in embarrassment and buried her face into the pillow again.

It had all started before the concert.

The bracelet had seemed like an innocent idea. Cute, even. She'd spent almost an hour making it: silver beads, tiny stars, letters lined up carefully.

And the beads with her number on them.

Not because she actually thought it would work.

Well.

Maybe a little.

But mostly because she had a massive crush on you and the whole romantic idea sounded adorable at two in the morning.

What she hadn't considered was one very important detail: how the hell she was actually supposed to give it to you.

Because imagining cinematic scenarios in her head was one thing.

Actually getting to the Kia Forum and realizing there was:

Security.

Barricades.

Staff.

Thousands of people.

And exactly zero realistic opportunities to get near you without being tackled by a six-foot security guard.

So for almost the entire concert, the bracelet stayed hidden in her jacket pocket while she silently suffered.

And then somehow—through some absurd, incomprehensible chain of events— you found out about it.

That was the real problem.

She had no idea how.

Nobody did.

But around forty minutes after the concert ended, while they were hanging in the VIP area thanks to some of Madison's connections, Alysa's phone buzzed.

At first she barely paid attention.

Until she saw the name.

And felt her soul leave her body.

"What happened?" Ellie asked.

Alysa had gone completely still.

"...no."

"What?"

"No."

"Alysa?" Amber practically snatched the phone out of her hands.

And then she screamed.

A real scream.

Loud.

High-pitched.

Dramatic.

"She texted you!?"

Madison nearly choked on water.

Isabeau's eyes widened for the first time all night.

Ellie immediately tried grabbing the phone too.

"Let me see!"

"Amber!"

But Amber was already reading the message out loud with full telenovela narrator energy.

"I heard somebody made a bracelet for me and now I kinda need to see it because apparently there's a story behind it."

Amber slowly looked up.

The entire lounge exploded.

Ellie fell backward laughing.

Madison covered her face.

Isabeau was red trying not to laugh.

And Alysa...

Alysa wanted to spontaneously evaporate.

"Who snitched on me?" she asked in horror.

"That does not matter!" Amber was literally bouncing on the couch. "What matters is it worked!"

"It did not work!"

"She DM'd you on Instagram! That is literally the definition of working!"

"That wasn't the plan!"

"Then what was the plan?"

"I don't know!"

Madison was fully crying from silent laughter now.

Ellie finally managed to grab the phone and reread the message. And the more she looked at it, the worse the situation became.

Because it didn't sound cold.

It didn't sound like some copy-paste celebrity response.

It sounded genuinely curious.

And that was absolutely destroying Alysa.

"Oh, you're done for," Ellie said through laughter. "Look at this. She's actually interested."

"Don't say that," Alysa whispered, horrified.

"No, seriously, listen," Amber leaned closer again. "The important question here is—"

She paused dramatically.

"Did you answer yet?"

All four of them looked at her.

Alysa looked away.

Amber's mouth slowly dropped open.

"Alysa."

"..."

"ALYSA."

"I panicked."

"What does that mean?!"

"It means I closed Instagram!"

The whole room lost it again. Even Isabeau was openly laughing now.

"There's no way," Madison wheezed.

"You closed the app?!"

"I didn't know what to do!"

Amber collapsed backward dramatically.

"I have never seen somebody sabotage themselves that fast."

"She's nervous," Ellie said, trying to defend her.

"I would be nervous too!" Madison admitted. "I'd literally pass out."

"Exactly, thank you."

"But it's still hilarious."

"Madison."

"Sorry."

She was not sorry.

Alysa grabbed a pillow and threw it at her.

Madison caught it while still laughing.

And in the middle of all the chaos, Alysa's phone buzzed again.

The entire lounge went silent.

Completely silent.

Alysa slowly looked down at the screen.

Another message from you.

Amber made a strangled noise.

"Open it," Isabeau whispered immediately.

"I can't."

"Open it."

"I can't breathe."

"That's not relevant right now," Amber said. "Open the message!"

With shaking hands, Alysa unlocked her phone.

The second message was short.

"so was the bracelet just an urban legend?"

For one second, nobody spoke.

And then—

"OOOOOOOOOH!" Amber screamed.

Madison literally fell onto the floor laughing.

Ellie started smacking the couch in excitement.

Isabeau covered her mouth, shocked.

And Alysa felt like she was about to die right there. Because now the problem wasn't the bracelet anymore.

The problem was that you were very clearly having fun with this.

Alysa kept staring at the screen like her phone had suddenly turned into a live explosive device.

The message was still there.

Small.

Simple.

Flirty.

"Text her back," Amber said immediately.

"I can't."

"Yes, you can."

"No, physically I cannot."

"Your fingers work perfectly fine."

"My brain doesn't."

Ellie was already pressed against her side trying to analyze every micro-expression on her face.

"She's going into shock."

"She's been in love for months, that's different," Madison corrected while settling back onto the couch.

"I am not in love."

All four of them looked at her.

Alysa paused.

"...maybe a little."

Amber let out another victorious scream.

"She admitted it!"

"Keep your voice down!"

"Why? You think she's gonna hear us from backstage?"

And honestly, considering how the hell you'd somehow found out about the bracelet in the first place, nothing felt impossible anymore.

That was still the detail haunting Alysa.

Because she hadn't talked to you.

She never got close to you.

She hadn't even held the bracelet up during the concert because she was too scared of embarrassing herself.

So the only possible explanation was that somebody talked.

Or somebody saw something.

Or the universe had personally decided to destroy her emotional stability.

"I still wanna know who snitched," she muttered.

"Probably someone on staff saw the bracelet," Madison said. "Or overheard you hyperventilating before the encore."

"I was not hyperventilating."

Isabeau raised an eyebrow.

"Alysa, you said, 'If she looks directly at me, I'm gonna disintegrate'."

"Because it was true."

"And then you hid your face in my shoulder for like two songs," Ellie added.

"Yeah, that really doesn't help your case," Amber commented.

Alysa dropped backward again in defeat.

The VIP lounge still carried the distant echo of the event ending. People walking outside. Staff members coming and going. Faint laughter. The metallic clanging of equipment being taken apart.

But inside that room, time basically stopped around her phone.

Because you still hadn't gotten a reply.

And apparently that was killing the entire group.

"It's worse now because she knows you saw the message," Madison said.

"Don't say that!"

"How long has it even been?" Ellie asked.

Amber checked the time.

"Three minutes."

Alysa's eyes widened.

"Only three!? Feels like thirty years."

It really did feel like thirty years.

Especially because her brain kept replaying every catastrophic possibility.

Maybe you thought she was weird.

Maybe you regretted texting her.

Maybe you expected a normal response and instead accidentally discovered a girl incapable of functioning like an actual human being.

"Okay," Ellie finally said, taking control of the situation. "We're gonna solve this rationally."

"Good luck with that," Amber muttered.

Ellie ignored her.

"First: she is very obviously interested in talking to you."

Alysa made a strangled little noise.

"Second: the message was funny. Which means she's trying to make you feel comfortable."

"Or she's making fun of me."

"Flirting and teasing are not mutually exclusive," Madison said.

"Madison!"

"What? It's true."

Meanwhile, Isabeau kept watching the phone with suspicious levels of calm.

"I think you should send something simple."

"Like what?"

"Something natural."

"I don't know how to act natural."

"That is also true," Amber admitted.

Alysa shot her a murderous glare.

Amber smiled without a shred of regret.

"Listen," she said, leaning forward. "You've got two options."

She raised one finger.

"You either keep ignoring her and spend the rest of your life wondering what would've happened."

She raised a second finger.

"Or you answer and maybe end up married."

"Amber!"

"I'm thinking long-term here."

Ellie was trying not to laugh again.

Madison had already completely lost the battle. And somehow, unbelievably, Isabeau looked like the most reasonable person in the room.

"You could just tell the truth," she suggested. "Something like, 'The bracelet is real, I just got embarrassed trying to give it to you'."

Everyone went quiet for a second. Because honestly... it was a good idea.

Simple.

Honest.

Cute.

And that made it infinitely more terrifying.

"That sounds way too vulnerable," Alysa whispered.

"Because it is," Ellie said softly.

Alysa's expression shifted slightly.

And for the first time since everyone started clowning her, the real nerves showed again.

Because yeah, she was embarrassed.

Very embarrassed.

But underneath all the humiliation was something worse: hope.

That was the real problem.

If you hadn't answered, the whole thing would've stayed a ridiculous inside joke between friends.

The secret bracelet.

The impossible crush.

End of story.

But you answered. And not only did you answer— you sounded genuinely interested.

And that made everything feel dangerously real.

Alysa swallowed hard.

"What if she thinks I'm intense?"

Amber looked directly at her.

"You made a bracelet with your number on it for a celebrity."

"Amber!"

"I'm saying we passed the 'intense' stage hours ago."

Madison started laughing so hard she nearly fell over again.

Ellie finally shoved a pillow over her face.

"Stop helping her spiral."

"I am trying!"

"You're terrible at it."

The phone was still in Alysa's hands.

The conversation open.

Your messages sitting there above.

The empty little text bubble below waiting for a response.

And the longer she stared at it, the more nervous she got.

"What if I type something weird?"

"Then you send another message after," Isabeau said.

"What if I sound desperate?"

"You already gave her a bracelet with your number on it," Amber reminded her.

"I'm gonna hit you."

"But lovingly."

Alysa took a deep breath.

Exhaled.

Inhaled again.

Then finally started typing.

All four girls immediately leaned toward her like emotional vultures.

"Don't look."

Nobody moved.

"I'm serious."

Amber literally adjusted herself for a better view of the screen.

"This is a group project now."

"It is not."

"It is for us."

Alysa finished typing one sentence.

Read it.

Immediately deleted it.

"Too desperate."

She typed another.

Deleted it again.

"Too dry."

Another.

"Too weird."

Another.

"Why did I type 'LOL'? I sound psychotic."

"Everyone uses 'lol,'" Madison said.

"Yeah, but I used four L's. That communicates instability."

"Alysa, babe," Ellie said, "you already communicate instability."

"Thanks, Ellie. Super supportive."

And then something even worse happened.

The notification appeared:

typing...

The entire room froze.

Alysa let out a tiny sound of horror.

"NO NO NO NO NO."

"Just reply!"Amber yelled.

"She's typing!"

"That means she's waiting!"

"I am not prepared for this!"

But it was already too late.

Because while Alysa was still frozen in place, a third message appeared.

"i'm starting to think your friends kidnapped you after the concert."

Amber fell off the couch.

Literally.

Madison was crying.

Ellie had both hands over her mouth.

And Isabeau, for the first time all night, looked genuinely impressed.

Because now it was painfully obvious.

You weren't just replying to be polite.

You were actively trying to keep talking to her.

And Alysa was exactly one comment away from a full emotional breakdown.

Alysa dropped the phone onto her lap like it had physically burned her. Her heart was pounding so hard she could feel it in her throat.

The worst part about the message was how natural it sounded.

So easy.

Like talking to you wasn't the emotional equivalent of walking a tightrope with no safety net.

Amber was still half lying on the floor laughing. "I can't breathe," she declared dramatically. "This is better than any rom-com."

"Get off the floor," Isabeau said, even though she was smiling again too.

Madison had actual tears in her eyes.

"Alysa is living the internet dream."

"Alysa is living through cardiac arrest," Ellie corrected gently.

And yeah.

Absolutely yes.

Because every message from you somehow made the situation worse in brand new, highly specific ways.

It also didn't help that you seemed completely relaxed.

While she was having a full existential crisis, you were cracking jokes. And somehow that made everything more dangerous.

More real.

Way easier to imagine that maybe you actually wanted to keep talking to her.

Alysa slowly picked up the phone again.

"Okay. I need to answer something now."

"Finally," Amber muttered from the floor.

"What do I say?"

"The truth," Ellie answered.

"Something cute," said Madison.

"Something coherent first," added Isabeau.

"And flirt a little," Amber contributed.

"She doesn't know how to flirt," Madison said.

"Hey!"

All four of them completely ignored her.

Alysa took another deep breath and started typing, slower this time, forcing herself not to instantly delete every word.

"Sorry. My friends are definitely making this situation way worse 😭"

She stared at the message.

It wasn't terrible.

It wasn't perfect either.

But at least it sounded human.

"That's good," Ellie said quickly.

"Yeah, send it before you panic again," Madison added.

"Do it," Amber ordered.

"Alysa," Isabeau said with dangerously calm energy, "hit send."

And before she could regret it... she did.

The message disappeared.

Complete silence.

All five of them stared at the screen.

One second.

Two.

Three.

seen

Alysa let out a tiny horrified noise.

Amber screamed again.

And almost immediately, the typing bubble appeared.

"Oh, she is INTERESTED interested," Madison said.

"Shut up."

The new message came in right away.

"then i need to know if the famous bracelet actually exists or if your friends made the whole story up."

Alysa immediately felt heat rush to her face.

Because there it was again.

The bracelet.

The stupid bracelet that had started all of this.

"She wants to see it," Ellie whispered, smiling.

"Obviously she wants to see it," Amber said. "At this point I wanna see it too."

"You made it sound very mysterious," Isabeau commented.

Alysa bit the inside of her cheek. And for the first time since this whole thing started... something shifted.

The fear was still there.

A lot.

But now there was something else slowly mixing underneath the panic.

Courage.

Tiny.

Shaky.

But growing.

Because you kept texting.

You kept trying to continue the conversation.

You were still there.

And honestly...

how many times was she ever gonna get an opportunity like this?

Maybe never again.

Maybe this was one of those absurd stories that only happens once in a lifetime.

The kind of moment that years later turns into:

"Remember when I almost didn't answer her?"

Or

"Remember when I completely ruined my chance because I got scared?"

And Alysa, even terrified out of her mind, didn't want it to become the second one.

She looked at the phone again.

Then at her friends.

Then back at the phone.

"I think I'm about to do something really stupid."

Amber immediately sat straight up off the floor.

"Oh my God. What?"

"Alysa..." Ellie narrowed her eyes. "What are you thinking?"

She swallowed hard.

"I wanna ask her out."

Madison's mouth slowly fell open.

Amber looked like she had spiritually ascended to another plane of existence.

Isabeau blinked exactly once.

And Ellie...

Ellie smiled first.

A small smile.

Soft.

Sincere.

"Then do it."

Alysa stared at her like she'd just suggested jumping out of a plane with no parachute.

"Just like that?"

"It's not gonna feel easy," Ellie said. "But I think you'll regret it way more if you don't."

That hit differently.

Because it was true.

And all of them knew it.

Even Amber stopped joking for a second.

"Listen," she said, sitting beside her now. "Yeah, it's terrifying. Like, really terrifying. But she very obviously wants to keep talking to you."

"What if she's just being nice?"

"Nobody sends three messages in a row after a concert just to be nice," Madison said immediately.

"Especially not after a show that big," Isabeau added.

Alysa looked back at the conversation.

Your messages still felt unreal. And suddenly she started overthinking again.

Where would she ask you to go?

Was that too intense?

Too fast?

Too desperate?

Too—

"She's spiraling again," Amber announced.

"Badly," Madison confirmed.

Ellie gently took the phone out of Alysa's hands.

"Okay. One step at a time."

"Don't send anything weird."

"I'm not sending anything without you seeing it first."

"That does not make me feel better."

Ellie ignored the comment and handed the phone back.

"First answer about the bracelet."

Alysa nodded slowly.

That she could do.

Probably.

She started typing.

"It's real 😭 I got way too embarrassed to actually try giving it to you in person."

This time she didn't delete it.

Your messages had already made it clear you weren't laughing at her in a mean way.

If anything, you seemed to find the entire situation adorable.

Which honestly was another problem because it made it way harder to stay sane.

She sent the message.

And almost immediately your reply came through.

"then i need to see it now. you guys made me way too curious."

Amber let out a strangled squeal.

"She is so soft with her!"

"Amber!."

"It's true!"

Alysa was fully red now.

And the worst part was that she was starting to smile without realizing it.

Small at first.

Then more obvious.

Ellie noticed immediately.

"Ahhh, there it is."

"What?"

"The in-love face."

"I do not have an in-love face."

All four of them looked at her exactly the same way as before.

Alysa sighed in defeat.

"I hate this group."

"You love us deeply," Madison corrected.

That was probably true too.

Alysa looked back down at the phone.

And then, before she could lose her nerve, she typed.

Very fast.

Without thinking too hard.

Because if she thought too hard, she wouldn't do it.

"Maybe I could show it to you over coffee sometime... if you want."

The entire lounge froze.

Even the distant stadium noise seemed to disappear.

Amber's eyes went huge.

Madison grabbed Ellie's arm.

Isabeau literally stopped breathing for a second. And Alysa felt like she had just jumped off a cliff.

Because the message was sent.

She couldn't take it back.

Couldn't delete it.

Couldn't pretend it never happened.

Now all she could do was wait.

And those next few seconds were probably the longest of her entire life.

The typing bubble appeared almost immediately.

Disappeared.

Appeared again.

Disappeared again.

"Why is she taking so long!?" Alysa whispered in horror.

"Because she's probably smiling like an idiot," Amber said.

"Or figuring out what to say back," Madison added.

"Or both," Ellie said.

Finally the message came through.

"i think that would officially be the best possible fate for a bracelet."

And underneath it, almost immediately:

So I’m a big Olivia Rodrigo fan LOOL this is based off her new song which I think is so fun and cute and whimsical and I think every girl should fall so hard like this for someone at least once in her life

Here’s what I think would have influenced popstar!reader to write Drop Dead abt alysa

It’s late enough that your whole apartment has gone soft and quiet. The lamps in your bedroom are on low, your makeup is half gone, and the city outside your windows has dissolved. You are sprawled sideways across your bed in an old shirt from a past tour, hair loose, one sock still on because you had been too lazy to fully get ready for sleep.

Cupid headcanons

𒁂 Cupid! Alysa x reader

I recommend reading the fanfic on which this headcanon is based c: (Click)

It took a long time, although the ideas for this headcanon came to me easily and quickly. But I am happy with the result.

8.8k words

ᥫ᭡ᥫ᭡ᥫ᭡ᥫ᭡

♡ After the official verdict is delivered — terminated, fined, banned from touching bow or arrow for a probationary period of no less than fifty years, stripped of trainee status — Alysa walks out of the Empyrean hearing chamber with her head held high, her wings trembling only slightly, and promptly bursts into tears the moment she reaches the mortal plane. She will never admit this. If you bring it up, she will claim it was "atmospheric moisture."

♡ The fine is astronomical. She is now in debt to the Empyrean Bureaucratic Council for an amount that, converted to human currency, would buy a small island. She reacts to this by developing an intense, almost pathological obsession with your budgeting app. She sits on the counter while you cook, your phone in her hands, frowning at the grocery category. "Do you know how much you spend on oat milk?" she asks, genuinely scandalized. "We could buy oat milk, or we could put a dent in my interplanar debt." You tell her you're going to keep buying oat milk. She adds this to her mental list of "Human Inefficiencies I Must Learn To Tolerate."

♡ Her wing maintenance becomes a shared ritual almost by accident. The first time she tries to groom them herself in your tiny bathroom, she knocks over the shower caddy, the towel rack, and a framed print you'd had since freshman year. You find her sitting on the edge of the bathtub, wings awkwardly half-spread, feathers poking into the shower curtain, looking so defeated that you grab a comb and ask what to do. Now it's a thing. Once a week, she sits on the floor in front of the couch, wings extended across your lap, and you work through the feathers section by section while she makes small, involuntary sounds of contentment she refuses to acknowledge. If you stop before she's ready, one wing will flap pointedly in your direction. She pretends it was a muscle spasm.(Its not a muscle spasm)

♡ She talks to inanimate objects constantly, a habit left over from being invisible for most of her existence and having no one else to talk to :c. Your toaster now has a name (Gertrude) and Alysa thanks it after every use. She apologizes to the coffee table when she bumps into it. One time you heard her muttering to a jar of pickles that wouldn't open, and the muttering was not frustration — it was a genuine, reasoned argument about the philosophical implications of being sealed. The pickle jar did not respond, but Alysa seemed satisfied with the conversation nonetheless.

♡ She loves tactile sensations. She pokes you on the cheek all the time, squeezes your cheeks, holds your hand, bites, and simply strokes your skin. In the Empyrean, creatures don't usually express feelings through touch and aren't as sociable as she is in general. That's precisely why she stood out from them and ended up in this situation. Perhaps fate decided to bring you together? Who knows. But you became what she always lacked. You see her. Those who saw her before you "didn't see" her anyway.

♡ Her relationship with your phone charger becomes a point of ongoing domestic tension. She doesn't have a phone, because she is a supernatural being who communicates through higher planes of existence, but she has decided that your phone charger is "the optimal perch accessory" and keeps stealing it to wrap around her wrist like a bracelet. You have bought three replacements. She has claimed all three. Your phone is constantly at four percent.

♡ She experiences her first thunderstorm as a corporeal, somewhat-human presence and reacts with undignified terror. She has spent millennia watching storms from the other side of reality, where lightning is just light and thunder is just sound. Now, suddenly, thunder is a physical sensation that vibrates through her wings, and lightning is bright enough to hurt her eyes, and the whole experience is so overwhelming that she wedges herself between the wall and the bed and refuses to come out. You end up sitting on the floor with her for two hours, her wings wrapped around you both in a feather fortress, while she flinches at every rumble and pretends she is not clinging to your arm. Later, she claims she was "protecting you from atmospheric discharge." (You don't answer her to that, because you know she's afraid)

♡ She writes letters to Instructor Callow that she will never send. You find one by accident, tucked into your copy of a book you haven't read in years, and the handwriting is precise and old-fashioned and the content is half apology, half defense, half something that sounds a lot like a daughter writing to a disappointed father. You put it back exactly where you found it and never mention it. A week later, it's gone, and Alysa is slightly more subdued than usual, and you both pretend nothing happened.

♡ Her understanding of human technology is wildly inconsistent, which makes perfect sense when you consider that she's been observing humanity for centuries but has never had to use a microwave. She can explain the complete political hierarchy of the Empyrean, the mechanics of love-magic, and the historical significance of three different extinct mortal civilizations, but she once stared at your electric kettle for forty-five seconds before asking, in a very small voice, "Where do you put the fire?" You think about this at least twice a week. She thinks the toaster is a portal to hell, and that's why toast appears.

♡ She develops an inexplicable, all-consuming feud with the pigeon that lives on your fire escape. The pigeon is entirely ordinary and, by all accounts, has done nothing wrong, but Alysa insists it "watches her with intent." She spends hours stationed by the window, wings twitching, glaring at this bird. "I am a celestial being," you hear her mutter. "I will not be intimidated by a glorified rat with wings." The pigeon coos. Alysa clenches jaw. She forbade you to feed the pigeons and is leading you away from them.

♡ She doesn't understand the concept of "lying down in bed normally." Every night, without exception, she waits until you are settled, then arranges herself directly on top of you — head on your chest or shoulder, legs tangled with yours, wings blanketing the entire bed and everything in it — with the methodical precision of a cat kneading a blanket. She is heavier than she looks, especially the wings, which have actual muscle and bone beneath the feathers. The first few nights you tried to gently shift her off. Now you've accepted that you will spend the rest of your life waking up slightly crushed and strangely warm. Sometimes you wake up to find she's wrapped a wing around your head, blocking out all light and sound, and you have to fight your way out like you're escaping a very soft tomb.

♡ She steals clothes(obviously). Not intentionally — it starts with her borrowing a hoodie because "mortal dwellings are unreasonably cold" and the Bureau confiscated her climate-adaptive tunic — but it escalates quickly, because your clothes smell like you and she is a creature driven by sensory input in her newly physical form. You will open your drawer to find your favorite sweater missing and discover her curled up inside it, wings poking through slits she definitely made with scissors while you were asleep. Confrontation yields no remorse. "You have other sweaters," she says. "I have only this one." It's your sweater. She has appropriated it with the unassailable logic of someone who has decided that sharing means "mine, and also some of it is yours, but mostly mine."

♡ Her cooking skills are nonexistent in the most alarming way possible. She was not required to eat in the Empyrean. Food was optional, aesthetic, a sensory indulgence for higher beings. Now she has a mortal appetite and absolutely no framework for what is edible. You once caught her trying to eat a raw potato like an apple. She argued that it was "crunchy and hydrating" and seemed genuinely confused about why this was incorrect. You now handle all cooking. She has been promoted to Assistant Vegetable Washer, a role she performs with intense, slightly unnerving focus. (It's dangerous to give her a knife)

♡ She gets attached to the ugliest throw blanket you own — a lumpy, pilled, faded thing you've had since high school and keep only because it's warm. This becomes her nest. She wraps it around herself constantly, over the hoodie she stole from you, and stalks around the apartment looking like a very beautiful, very strange ghost with wings poking out of the blanket folds. She calls it "the artifact." You call it "that ratty thing." She made you apologize to it once. She named this blanket "Harry".

♡ Fireworks. This is the worst thing that has happened to her in her entire immortal life. The first time fireworks scared her so much that she cried. You comforted her all night and stroked her head as she cuddled with you. Later, you took her with you to a festival where fireworks were supposed to start. You taught her for a long time not to be afraid of fireworks and... it worked. It worked because you were there and held her hand, and she sat next to you and watched the fireworks. You looked at her, at her profile, at her facial features, and how she looked like a sculpture. (People at the festival sometimes looked at you. You stared into the void with a soft smile as fireworks exploded in front of you. But no one dared to approach)

♡ She misses flying. This is a quiet, unspoken thing that lives in the corners of your apartment and the way she looks at the window sometimes. Her wings still work — she can hover, she can glide across the room — but the Bureau's disciplinary measures included a flight restriction. No sustained aerial activity. No altitude above roof level. Her wings are effectively grounded, and some days you find her standing at the window with them half-spread, feathers brushing the glass, looking at the sky with an expression that predates language. On those days, you don't say anything. You just stand beside her and wait until she folds her wings back down and returns to the world. One time, she reaches for your hand without looking. You hold it for an hour. At night, when you can't fall asleep, you notice her wings twitching. She dreams of flying and falling.

♡ On one of the days, she stole your new notebook, which was intended for llecture. Like all celestial beings, she has a wonderful ability to write poems and verses. She wrote her thoughts, her feelings, how she spent her day in this notebook. And you. You found the notebook while she was eating in the kitchen and glanced inside. She wrote about how where she was born, no one thought about people more than work. When she was still studying, she always asked her peers about people, and they always answered as it was written in books. But no one ever warned her that people have feelings that cupids do not possess. To love. To be sad. To care. At the Academy, everyone strove for their own goals, and no one helped each other if it wasn't necessary. Sometimes the sentences are cut off, possibly because it is difficult for her to find words, associations, or she simply cannot describe her feelings. Especially in lines about you. She tries to describe your appearance, but cannot compare. She remembers her homeland, but even heavenly beauty cannot compare to you. Because with you, in this small and modest apartment, she learned what home is. On the edges, she carefully draws a square so that her text doesn't interfere, and draws you inside the square. Not perfectly, almost childishly, but very diligently. Sometimes, she allows herself to draw her and you together. Her, with wings and a bow, arrows, and you, looking tired, as usual after all the lectures, and angry pigeons. But what she describes most often is how your hands feel on her skin. She is used to the cold, to her skin being touched only by the wind. She didn't know what it was like to be touched for affection, for care, for the expression of feelings and emotions, and not for a question or a report. She describes you as warmth. But not temperature. A warmth she has never felt. But what causes the strangest feeling in chest is that she writes all the time about how she spent her day. Sometimes something new, sometimes something mundane, but always "she went to university, I stood at the door and waited for her." She has no problem with time, because she can stand there all day and not lose time, because she is immortal. But the fact that she stands at the door and waits for you, instead of occupying herself with something, makes you think. You put the notebook back and pretend you never read it. Now you try to come back from university earlier.

♡ She is, despite everything, absurdly, impossibly, irreversibly in love with you. It's in the way she steals your food and wears your clothes and crushes you in her sleep and argues with pigeons and steals your phone charger and writes you into her notebook in crossed-out poetry you were never meant to read. It's in the way she chose you — accidentally, at first, and then, every day after, on purpose. She never says it outright. She doesn't have to. The weight of her wings draped over you in the dark says it for her, every single night.

♡ She develops a habit of perching. Not sitting — perching. You will come home to find her balanced on the back of the couch like a gargoyle, wings half-spread for equilibrium, reading one of your textbooks upside down. When you ask why, she says, "Chairs are a mortal construct. I am adapting." You point out that the couch has actual cushions designed for sitting. She looks at the cushions with deep suspicion and does not move. The couch-back perch becomes her official daytime station. You've started leaving a pillow up there for her. She pretends not to notice, but the pillow is always slightly warm when you get home.

♡ Her first experience with spicy food is a disaster of mythic proportions. You made stir-fry with chili flakes, a completely normal amount, and she took one bite before her entire face went red and her wings snapped open so fast they knocked a picture frame off the wall. "My mouth," she gasped, "is under attack." She drank an entire carton of oat milk directly from the container while you watched, torn between concern and helpless laughter. Now she eyes every meal you cook with the wary vigilance of a bomb disposal expert. "Is it angry?" she asks, pointing at your dinner. You have to reassure her, every time, that no, the pasta is not angry, the pasta is pesto, they just sound similar.

♡ She discovers the concept of "lazy Sundays" and embraces it with the fervor of a religious convert. In the Empyrean, every day was structured, purposeful, accountable. Here, you have days where nothing happens, and this blows her mind. The first Sunday you spend together doing absolutely nothing — staying in pajamas, watching bad TV, eating cereal for lunch — she lies on the floor with her wings spread out like a white rug and stares at the ceiling in a state of what she later describes as "transcendent purposelessness." Now she demands Sundays. "It's Sunday," she will announce, blocking your path to the desk. "The rules are different. Return to the pajamas." It was Monday.

♡ She gets jealous of your houseplants. You have a monstera in the corner that you water every Tuesday, and every Tuesday Alysa watches you do it with narrowed eyes, her feathers slightly ruffled. "You speak to it," she says, as if this is incriminating evidence. You do, in fact, say "hello, beautiful" to the monstera sometimes. You didn't realize she was keeping track. One day you come home and the monstera has been moved three inches to the left. Just slightly. Just enough to be wrong. Alysa claims ignorance. Her expression is perfectly innocent. One of her wing feathers is caught on the pot. Sometimes she expresses her feelings to Harry that the monstera is not worthy of you.

♡ Her understanding of personal space, which was already theoretical, deteriorates entirely after the first month. The concept simply… dissolves. She walks into the bathroom while you're brushing your teeth because she "had a thought" and "wanted to share it while it was fresh." She opens the shower curtain to ask if you've seen her notebook. She stands directly behind you while you cook, her chin on your shoulder, her wings folded around you both, narrating your cooking like a nature documentary. "The human approaches the onion," she murmurs. "A bold choice. Dangerous. Note the protective eyewear — ah, she forgot it. Tragedy imminent." You cry over the onion. She says "I told you so" with her wings.

♡ She steals your shampoo. She doesn't have hair that needs washing at a human frequency, but she has decided that smelling like you is a non-negotiable requirement of existence. You buy a new bottle and it's half-empty within four days.

♡ The first time you cry in front of her — bad day, stress, everything piling up — she panics so completely that she forgets how to speak English for a solid thirty seconds. The sound that comes out of her is a string of Empyrean syllables that sound like wind chimes and distress. Then she wraps herself around you — arms, legs, wings, the full crushing Alysa Special — and stays there, silent and trembling slightly, for two hours. She doesn't try to fix it. She doesn't give you advice. She just holds you with every limb she has, a fortress of feathers and warmth, until your breathing evens out. When you finally pull back, her face is wet too. You don't mention it. She doesn't either. But from that day forward, the crushing Alysa Special appears within thirty seconds of any sign you might be sad, even if you're just frowning at a difficult paragraph in your textbook.

♡ She starts referring to the apartment as "the nest." Not in a cute, metaphorical way — in a literal, biological, "this is our territory and I will defend it" way. The mail carrier who shoves packages too aggressively through the slot gets a full-wing intimidation display that he cannot see but somehow, viscerally, feels. He starts leaving your packages on the doorstep instead of forcing them through. Alysa is inordinately proud of this. "The nest is secure," she reports. "You're welcome."

♡ She discovers glitter. You don't know where she found it. You don't know why she thought it was a good idea. All you know is that you come home one day and your apartment looks like a craft store exploded and Alysa is sitting in the center of the chaos, absolutely covered in shimmering particles, her white wings now approximately forty percent glitter by volume. "I wanted to be shiny," she says, as if this explains everything. It takes three weeks to get the glitter out of the feathers. You find sparkles in your bed, your food, your textbooks, your hair. Months later, in moments of direct sunlight, Alysa still shimmers faintly. She loves it. You have accepted your sparkly fate.

♡ She writes a ten-page essay titled "The Ethics of Involuntary Love-Magic: A Case Study in Personal Error and Systemic Reform." It's dense, academic, and absolutely scathing about Empyrean training protocols. She doesn't send it to anyone. She just gives it to you to read, hovering anxiously while you flip through the pages, her wings twitching at every facial expression you make. When you tell her it's brilliant, she cries. Then she makes you promise never to tell Callow she cried. Then she steals your snack from the fridge and eats it in front of you, tears still drying on her cheeks, because emotional vulnerability must be balanced with petty theft. It's her process.

♡ She learns what a forehead kiss is and becomes obsessed. The first time you kiss her forehead — absentminded, on your way to the kitchen — she freezes like a statue, wings locked mid-twitch, eyes wide. You have to ask if she's okay. She whispers, "Do that again." Now it's a requirement. Every morning. Every night. Every time you leave the apartment and every time you come back. Sometimes she just wanders up to you and tilts her head down, pointing at her forehead with an expression of regal expectation. The former Cupid, the celestial being, the immortal entity who once shaped the romantic destinies of mortals — stands in your kitchen in your stolen hoodie, demanding forehead kisses like a cat demanding chin scratches.

♡ She has another nemesis. It is the smoke detector. It went off exactly once, when you burned toast, and the sound — a piercing, mortal-engineered shriek — sent her diving behind the couch with her wings wrapped around her head like a cocoon. She has never forgiven it. Now she glares at it whenever she passes. "I havefaced down the Bureaucratic Council of the Empyrean," she mutters to the small white disc on the ceiling. "You are a plastic circle with a battery."( The smoke detector does not rrespond)

♡ Late at night, when the apartment is dark and her wings are draped over you like a weighted blanket and the city outside is quiet, she talks about the Empyrean. The gardens. The way the light bent through the crystal trees. The way the wind smelled like morning, always, even at midnight. She tells you about the libraries where books wrote themselves as you read them, the rivers that sang in harmonies only Cupids could hear, the fields of silver grass where she used to lie on her back and watch the sky change colors. Her voice is soft and distant and aching. You listen without interrupting, your hand moving slowly through her feathers, and she talks until her voice trails off into sleep. She never talks about the Empyrean during the day. Only in the dark. Only to you. You hold these stories like something fragile, something precious, something given. But she doesn't talk about other Cupids. They were not as sociable and open as she was, so they didn't take her seriously.

♡ You are a being she cherishes too much. All the celestial beings she was familiar with before treated her with condescension, neglect, and irritation. She sometimes had to trail after her determined groupmates and ask something. You, on the other hand, could easily communicate with your groupmates and friends. Sometimes, more often than she should, she gets jealous. She sees you interacting with friends, hugging them, smiling at them. Without realizing it, she constantly reaches for your hand to squeeze the fabric of your hoodie or to hold your hand. One day, she squeezes your hand and doesn't let go. Tears stream down her eyes. " Please promise me that you will be only with me. No one else. Promise that I will be your only one, even if I can't give you anything but myself. Please." Her voice trembled on the last word. She practically begged you. And you swore to her that you would only be with her.

♡ The first snow catches Alysa completely off guard. She stands at the window, palms pressed to the glass, wings slightly lifted, watching the white flakes fall from the grey sky with an expression that can only be described as reverent horror mixed with childlike wonder. "Frozen water is falling from the sky," she whispers. "Millions of tiny crystals. And humans just… walk on them? Like it's normal?" She refuses to go outside for the first hour. By the second hour, she is standing barefoot in a snowdrift because she "wanted to feel the texture," and her wings are dusted with snowflakes that don't melt, because the temperature of her feathers runs lower than human body temperature. You drag her back inside, wrap her in a heated blanket, and ply her with hot tea. She shivers, but she smiles like she's witnessed a miracle. From this day forward, winter is her favorite season.

♡ She does not understand the concept of "dressing for the weather." You can explain layers, thermal underwear, moisture-wicking fabrics, but she looks at you like you're speaking a dead language and then walks out into the freezing cold in your stolen hoodie and shorts. Her wings offer some insulation — the feathers contract, trapping heat — but her legs and arms still go numb. She returns from her walks with blue lips and absolutely radiant. You buy her her own winter coat with wing slits that you make yourself, because such a thing does not exist in nature. She wears it every day. She sleeps in it, if you don't stop her.

♡ The pigeon on the fire escape vanishes with the coming of the cold, and Alysa declares victory in their war with the triumph of someone who has personally conquered a continent. "I knew it," she says, pacing the apartment like a general. "Perseverance and resolve. The bird understood who it was dealing with." You do not remind her that pigeons migrate or shelter in warmth. You give her this victory. A week later, she starts to worry about whether the pigeon froze. You find her sitting by the window with breadcrumbs in her palm, staring at the empty fire escape with an expression suspiciously close to concern. "He was a worthy adversary," she says quietly. "I don't want him to suffer." You kiss her forehead and tell her pigeons have been surviving winters for thousands of years. She scoffs and pretends not to care. But she leaves the breadcrumbs on the windowsill. Just in case.

♡ The heating in your studio apartment is unreliable, and on especially cold nights the temperature drops low enough to see your breath. Alysa responds by turning your bed into a feather cocoon that blocks out everything — light, sound, cold air. You sleep at the center of this construction, wrapped in her body and wings like a living sleeping bag. It's the warmest thing you have ever experienced. In the mornings you don't want to crawl out, and she doesn't make you — just lies there, murmuring something Empyrean into the crown of your head until the sun rises high enough to warm the room.

♡ She discovers hot chocolate. This becomes a problem. Not financially — you're willing to buy cocoa in bulk, that's fine — but logistically. She drinks it by the liter. She adds marshmallows, cinnamon, whipped cream, and one time, in a fit of experimental madness, a pinch of cayenne pepper, after which she declares she has "recreated the taste of sunset over the Crystal Gardens." You don't know if that's true, but cayenne hot chocolate becomes her signature drink. She makes it for you every evening. You're not sure you like the taste of sunset, but you drink every cup to the dregs because she glows every time you do.

♡ Before the New Year, you decorated the walls, the tree, and other things. She was so happy, happier than any child. She took the transformation of the house with complete seriousness and made sure that everything was perfect. She even decorated you (she wrapped tinsel around you)

♡ She builds a snowman. It's lopsided. It has pebbles for eyes because you couldn't find coal, and a twig for a nose because the carrot froze and snapped. Alysa names it "The Threshold Guardian" and demands you treat it with respect. She bows to the snowman every time she leaves the apartment. The neighbors give you strange looks — they can only see you, standing beside a girl they cannot see, bowing to a crooked snowman. You have stopped explaining. You simply live with it.

♡ On the coldest night of the year, she tells you that she used to sing. In the Empyrean. Before the training, before the field work, before the bow and arrows. She was in the choir that greeted the dawn over the Crystal Gardens, and her voice was part of the harmony that made the flowers bloom open. She hasn't sung since she was dismissed. You ask her to sing now. She's silent for a long time, staring at a candle on the windowsill, and you're already sure she'll refuse. Then she starts — quiet, uncertain, in a language you don't know. Her voice trembles on the first notes, but it gains strength with every word. When she finishes, the room is silent, and the snow outside is falling thicker, as if the world had been listening too. "I miss it," she whispers. "But here, I miss it less." You pull her into your arms and hold her until the candle burns out.

♡ She gives you a Midwinter gift — a feather from her own wing. Not a shed one. She pulled it out herself, and you know it hurt, because it's from the very edge, one of the flight feathers, and there's still a tiny bead of silvery, non-human blood at the tip. She places it in your palm as carefully as if it were the most fragile thing in the world. "This is a part of me," she says. "Now it's yours. If you ever lose me, if I disappear, if the Bureau decides… This will stay. It won't vanish. It's real." You can't speak. You just close your fist around the feather and pull her close, and you stand there in the silence while the snow falls outside.

♡ You taught her to make snow angels. To your surprise, she leaves a trail in the snow. She enjoys this activity, but afterwards she shivers to the bone, even though you told her to dress warmly. At home, she presses her cold body against you, warming the two of you with her wings, with an old "Harry" blanket. At this time, she tells you that she would like to dedicate herself to winter someday. She would like to become a person, to love winter and snow. Perhaps, in another world, she would like to become a figure skater.

♡ Somewhere around the second year of living together, you notice the change. Not a sharp one — Alysa doesn't shift overnight, she doesn't change outwardly at all — but noticeable nonetheless. She's become… closer. Not just physically (though that too), but in a different way, a deeper way. She used to be able to let you go — to class, to work, to meet up with friends — with a small sigh and a murmured reminder to "come back soon." Now she stands in the doorway, shoulder leaning against the frame, wings slightly drooped, and in her eyes is a longing she's desperately trying to hide. "You won't be long, right?" she asks, and her voice is too even, too calm to be real. You kiss her forehead and promise you'll be back in two hours. She nods, but you know — she will be counting the minutes. She will wait at the door and write about it in her notebook.

♡ The jealousy arrives without warning and completely blindsides her. There was no jealousy in the Empyrean — Cupids don't experience emotions, they trigger them. Alysa has absolutely no idea what to do with this hot, unpleasant feeling that flares in her chest when you laugh at the barista's joke, or when a classmate's hand lingers too long on your shoulder, or when you mention someone's name with warmth in your voice. She gets angry at the feeling itself. "It's not okay," she says one evening, lying on top of you with her face pressed into your neck. "I know you're mine. I know you come back to me every night. But when someone looks at you, I want to…" She trails off. "What?" you ask. "Spread my wings," she whispers. "Full span. So they understand." You stroke her hair and tell her it's normal. She scoffs. "Normal for humans. I'm not human." But it helps.

♡ At night, often, she opens her eyes and looks at your face for a long time, studying your features. Sometimes she runs her fingertips over your skin, snuggles closer, inhales your scent, and looks at your sleeping face. She is immortal. You are not. She is afraid of not hearing your breath one day.

♡ Your friends notice that something about you has changed. Chloe says you've become more… absent. Not in a bad way — just that sometimes you stare into empty space and smile, or answer a beat too late, as if you're listening to someone else. "Are you okay?" she asks. "Yeah," you say. "Just zoned out." You can't tell her that Alysa is standing right behind your shoulder, murmuring commentary about everyone who walks past into your ear. "That man looked at you twice," Alysa mutters, her breath tickling your neck. "His aura is the color of stale soup." You choke on a laugh. Chloe gives you a bewildered look. You take a sip of coffee and explain nothing.

♡ She becomes possessive in the smallest ways. Your mug — now her favorite, and she will only drink from it, even when the others are clean. Your side of the bed — now her side if you get up first, because "it's warm and smells like you." Your daily schedule — she's memorized it and starts to fret if you're fifteen minutes late. "You said you'd be home at six," she says, meeting you at the door, wings folded, arms crossed. "It's six-seventeen." You apologize, explain the traffic, hold out a box of cookies as a peace offering. She takes the cookies, but she still hugs you a second longer than usual, and her wings wrap around you so tightly you feel every feather.

♡ You can no longer cook with garlic. Not because you have an allergy, but because Alysa refuses to kiss you after garlic. "It's an assault on the olfactory senses," she declares, scooting to the far edge of the bed with the air of an offended queen. You laugh and tell her humans have been eating garlic for millennia, and it's fine. "Humans also eat raw fish and call it a delicacy," she retorts. "I don't trust human tastes." You eat the garlic pasta anyway. She doesn't kiss you for two hours. But at night she presses against you just as tightly as always, nose buried in your shoulder, and you know — she was just waiting for the smell to fade.

♡ She gets jealous even of your thoughts. Once, you were lost in thought, staring at the ceiling, and you didn't answer her question the first time. Alysa immediately loomed over you, wings blocking the lamplight, her face inches from yours. "Where were you?" she demanded. "I was right here," you said, bewildered. "Just thinking." "About what?" You hesitated, because the truth was something mundane — a deadline, a grocery list, the need to change the batteries in the smoke detector. "About you," you said, and it wasn't entirely a lie, because you're always thinking about her somewhere in the background. Her wings relaxed. "Good," she said, and settled back onto the bed. "You may continue."

♡ She hates your phone. Not the phone itself — but how long you sometimes look at it. "You spend more time with that rectangle than you spend with me," she says one day, and her voice carries such genuine hurt that you immediately set the phone aside. It turns out she's been keeping count. She has a mental log where she tracks how many minutes you spend on the screen and compares them to the minutes you spend on her. You don't ask about the results. You just institute a rule: after eight in the evening, the phone goes in the desk drawer, and you belong entirely to her. She blooms. Literally — her feathers get glossier, her wings lift slightly, like she's ready to take flight from happiness.

♡ The jealousy toward Chloe becomes the most complicated. Alysa knows Chloe is your best friend. She knows there has never been anything between you. She knows the spark she herself tried to plant has long since faded. But Chloe can touch you in public. Chloe can hug you when you meet. Chloe can sit with you in a café and laugh, and no one looks at her strangely. Alysa cannot. Alysa stands invisible two steps away, fists clenched, feathers bristling with tension, and she says nothing, but you feel that gaze on your skin. After every meet-up with Chloe, she's quieter than usual. She clings to you tighter. She asks — casually, far too casually — "Did you have a good time?" You sit down beside her, take her face in your hands, and say, "I love you. Only you. Always you." She closes her eyes and exhales. "I know," she whispers. "I just… remind me sometimes."

♡ "You're mine," she says one day, and it doesn't sound like a question. "I've learned this now. To love is to know that you're mine."

♡ People stare at you strangely all the time. It's not surprising because they only see you, not Cupid complaining about pigeons in the street. You smile into the void, placing part of the food in the empty spot next to you.

♡ At cafés, you always take the corner table, and you always order two drinks. One for yourself, one that you place on the opposite edge of the table and never touch. Alysa drinks hers when no one is looking — or rather, when no one can see her. You've learned to time it carefully. The barista thinks you're waiting for someone who never shows up. One day she asks, with careful politeness, "Is your friend still running late?" You smile and say, "No, she's here." The barista looks at the empty chair, at the untouched latte, at you, anddoesn't ask again.

♡ In public, you sometimes forget yourself. You're walking down the street and suddenly you smile — because Alysa said something funny, because her wing brushed your shoulder, because she pointed at a pigeon with the expression of an offended aristocrat. You laugh into empty space, and passersby turn their heads. Some smile back — a nice girl, probably listening to a podcast or remembering something pleasant. Some frown. An elderly woman once asked if you were feeling all right. "Yes," you answered, still smiling. "Just a good day." Alysa, standing beside you, beamed.

♡ Your coworkers notice that you sometimes stare into an empty corner of the room and nod. "Are you talking to someone?" a colleague asks, glancing into the same corner. There's nothing there. "Myself," you say. "Thinking out loud. It helps." The colleague accepts this explanation, because people tend to accept plausible explanations. But you're not thinking out loud. You're answering Alysa, who is sitting on the windowsill critiquing your work, her wings trailing down to the floor.

♡ The neighbors are a whole separate story. You've lived in this apartment for several years now, and some of them have noticed odd things. Music playing when you're not home (Alysa figured out how to work your playlist). The sound of wings, like wind, even though the windows are shut. A silhouette in the window — tall, with something like enormous wings behind it — visible when you forget to close the curtains. One neighbor asked if you keep a large bird. You said no. She didn't believe you. Now she eyes you with suspicion whenever you meet in the elevator. Alysa, standing behind you, stares back at her with regal disdain.

♡ You can't take normal photos anymore. Every picture where you're alone, you come out slightly out of focus — as if the camera is trying to capture something else, something just behind your shoulder, and can't quite manage it. Friends joke that you have an "aura" or a "ghost in the shot." You laugh along with them. You don't tell them it's not a ghost. It's a girl who insisted on being in every photo, even if no one can see her. "I want to be part of your life," she said. "Even the part that other people can see."

♡ The strangest thing is when someone accidentally walks through Alysa. She's intangible to everyone but you, but when a person passes through her wing, they shiver — like a draft, like a sudden chill, like something they have no name for. Once, on the subway, a man walked straight through her spread wing and froze, looking around with an expression of deep bewilderment. "What was that?" he muttered. Alysa sniffed. "Rude," she said. "He could have apologized." You hid your smile in your scarf.

♡ Dating. Oh, dating. You don't go on dates anymore, but once, in the very beginning, you tried — out of inertia, because everyone around you said you should. It was a catastrophe. Alysa would sit at the next table and comment on every word your date said. "His aura is the color of swamp water." "He doesn't wash his hands thoroughly enough, I saw in the men's room." "Ask him about his views on household chore distribution. Now." You choked on laughter, your date had no idea what was happening, and the evening ended in awkward goodbyes. After the third attempt, you surrendered. "You're impossible," you told Alysa. "I'm protecting our interests," she replied, her wings spreading in victory. " You are still mine, don't forget "

Time.

♡ You don't notice it right away. A year passes, two, five — and you realize Alysa isn't changing. Not a single new wrinkle, not a single grey hair in her dark strands. Her face remains exactly the same as the day you first saw her beneath the atrium ceiling — young, frightened, beautiful. You bring it up at breakfast, trying to keep your voice light, almost joking. "Do you even age?" Alysa freezes with a piece of toast in her hand. Her wings press flat against her back. "No," she answers quietly, and in that single word there is an abyss. It's the first time you talk about it. Not the last.

♡ Thirty. Your temples aren't touched by grey yet, but fine little rays of lines are gathering around your eyes — lines Alysa calls "laugh tracks" and kisses every morning with particular tenderness. You're still young, still full of energy, but somewhere deep inside, the awareness is already ticking: she hasn't changed a single day. Her skin still just as smooth, her movements still just as light, her wings still just as snow-white. You watch her sometimes when she's not looking and try to imagine what she'll look like in ten years. The answer is always the same: exactly the same. It's terrifying and comforting in equal measure.

♡ Forty. You find your first grey hair and pluck it out while Alysa isn't watching. She notices anyway — she always notices everything that concerns you — and finds you in the bathroom with tweezers in one hand and that treacherous silver strand in the other. She doesn't say anything. She just takes the tweezers from you, cups your face in her palms, and kisses your forehead very, very slowly. "You're beautiful," she says. "Always. At every stage." You cry. She holds you until you stop. The next day, you notice she's gathered your grey hairs — the ones you missed — and woven a thin silver thread into a strand near her own temple. "Now they're mine too," she says, shrugging as if it means nothing.( It means everything)

♡ Fifty. Your peers are marrying, divorcing, having children who are already finishing university. Your mother asks why you're still alone. Chloe, who never learned the full truth but has learned to accept your strangeness, gently asks if you'd like to "meet someone." You smile and say that you're not alone. You've never been alone. They don't understand, but they stop asking. Alysa is standing behind you as they say these things, invisible to them, her wing brushing your shoulder, and you feel the warmth even through your clothes. "I'm here," she says, though you already know. "I'm always here."

♡ Sixty. Your hands start to tremble when you groom her feathers. It's barely noticeable — a faint tremor that comes and goes — but Alysa feels it with every cell of her unchanging body. She takes the comb from your fingers and replaces it with a warm mug of tea. "Let me do it myself today," she says, but she's not good at it alone — the wings are too large, the angles too awkward. You help her anyway. You manage together, slowly, clumsily, like two people learning all over again how to do something that was once simple. You laugh about it. The laughter turns into coughing, the coughing turns into silence. At night, she presses against you tighter than usual, her wings wrapping around you like a shroud, like a shield, like a promise — I won't let go, I won't let go, I won't let go.

♡ Seventy. Your body is a map of the life you've lived. Wrinkles, creases, scars, age spots that Alysa calls "constellations" and names in Empyrean. On your left forearm, you have a cluster of freckles she named "The Three Sisters" — after a star system visible only from the highest tower of the Empyrean — and when she kisses that spot, you don't feel old. You feel sacred. She hasn't changed. Her face is the face of the girl she was the day you met. Sometimes that hurts. More often, it doesn't. More often, you just look at her and think: how lucky I am that I get to see this, that I get to know this, that this miracle chose me.

♡ Eighty. You can no longer walk as easily as you used to. Alysa carries you in her arms — literally. Her arms lift you as carefully as if you were made of smoke, her wings create a cushion of air, and you hover a foot above the floor, wrapped in her body, as she carries you from bed to armchair and back. You protest — "I'm not an invalid, I'm just slow." She ignores you with regal Empyrean haughtiness. "You carried me," she says, and she doesn't mean with her body, she means with her heart, her life, everything you gave her. "Now it's my turn." You surrender. Her wings smell like snow and something not of this world, and you feel safer than you ever have.

♡ Ninety-two. You look like a raisin, and you know it. Your skin is parchment, your fingers are knotted twigs, your voice is a whisper the wind could carry away at any moment. But you're still here, and she's still here, and that's the only thing that matters. Your nieces and nephews — Chloe's children, because you never had children of your own — come to visit you once a week. They've grown used to you talking to empty space. "Grandma's talking to her angel," the youngest one said once, and everyone laughed, because it sounded like a sweet old-person quirk. Only you and Alysa knew it was the truth. Alysa glowed for the rest of the day.

♡ Ninety-eight. You can barely see and barely hear, but you can still feel. You feel the weight of her wings on your body every night. You feel her forehead kisses — more of them than ever, as if she's trying to fit an eternity into every touch. You feel her fingers laced with yours, young and strong, holding your old, trembling hands as if they are the fragile thing in need of protection. "I'm scared," you whisper one night. You don't specify what you're scared of — death, loneliness, oblivion, the unknown — because you're scared of all of it at once. Alysa is silent for a long time. Then she says, "Me too. But I won't leave. I'll be here until the very end. And after." You don't know what "after" means. Maybe she doesn't either. But her voice sounds so certain that you believe her.

♡ One hundred. You never thought you'd live to a hundred. No one did. The nurses at the hospice call you a miracle, and you laugh — quietly, raspingly, because laughter is harder now — because they don't know the half of what made your life miraculous. You're surrounded by people who love you — nieces, great-nieces and nephews, their children, tiny great-great-niblings you held in your arms when they were newborns. They look at you with love, but also with a kind of wonder — how you've lived so long, how you've stayed so serene, how you never complained of loneliness even though you never had a partner. "I have someone," you say, when someone finally gathers the courage to ask. They think you mean God. You mean the girl with white wings standing in the corner of the room, smiling at you through tears.

♡ You leave in your sleep, quiet and peaceful, like snow falling to rest. Alysa is holding your hand. She was singing to you — that same song, the Empyrean dawn hymn — and your breathing slowed, slowed, until it became silence. She doesn't scream. Doesn't cry — not yet. She just sits there, holding your hand as it slowly cools in her fingers, her wings wrapped around the both of you, just like that very first winter when she was terrified of the thunderstorm and you held her on the bathroom floor. Now everything is reversed. Now she is the one holding you.

♡ She vanishes from the human world that same night. The magical bond no longer holds her here. The Bureau no longer holds her here. Nothing holds her here anymore except memory and love, which didn't end with death. She goes where Cupids go when their time among mortals is done. But before she leaves, she places something on your pillow. A white feather — long, a flight feather, with a silver shimmer — and a note, written in your native language, in that same old-fashioned handwriting she once used for letters to Callow.

"Thank you for seeing me. I will come again. Wait for me in the gardens."

♡ Your relatives find the feather and the note when they go through your belongings. They don't understand. They turn the feather over in their hands, wondering what kind of bird it could have come from to be so large and so white — no bird they know has feathers with a silver sheen. They read the note aloud, and someone suggests it must be an old love letter from someone you knew in your youth. They're wrong only in the details. It is a love letter. It is old and new all at once — written on the last night of your life and somehow still smelling of snow and morning. They place it in a box with other important papers. A generation from now, no one will remember where it came from. But the feather will not decay. The feather will lie in that box, white, silver-edged, untouched by time — a small miracle that refused to disappear.

♡ Somewhere in the gardens of the Empyrean — those very gardens where crystal trees bend the light, where rivers sing in harmonies, where the wind always smells like morning — a girl with white wings stands at the threshold and waits. She looks exactly the same as the day you first saw her. Young face, enormous brown eyes, silver bow finally returned to her hands. She waits. She has always been waiting. And when you appear — young, radiant, at the very age you were when you met — she doesn't say anything. She just opens her wings. And you step into them, like an embrace, like a home, like forever. And there is no snow falling, but the air smells like snow. And somewhere in the distance, someone is singing the dawn hymn. And everything is right. Everything is finally right.