Antarctica.
It wasn’t just cold.
It was cruelty incarnate.
A place where metal cracked like old bones, where skin split in quiet protest, where silence stretched so thick it made a person itch under their thoughts. It was a slow, merciless pressure, a quiet devouring that demanded patience first, then endurance, and finally, a kind of humility that scraped a person clean from the inside out. The cold didn't simply press against your body. It gnawed at your bones, it questioned why you were there at all. Out here, insulated Carhartt bibs and three layers of thermal fleece were a formality. They couldn’t protect you from yourself.
Dr. Rebecca Voss — Becca — knew this better than anyone. She had built her life around sharp edges and colder spaces, believing they might be easier to survive than the warm, messy places people called home. Standing in the heart of McMurdo’s research compound at thirty-nine, she resembled some sculpture eroded by time: her face carved in lines of fatigue and focus, her silver-threaded hair tucked away without vanity beneath a battered fleece-lined hood. She wore her heavy parka, not like armour, but like a second skin she had long forgotten could be removed.
There was an economy to Becca’s movements that made people instinctively fall silent when she entered a room. Her eyes, glacier-blue and deeply tired, missed little. They had seen more data sets than dreams, more failed hypotheses than celebrations. And though she never spoke of it, there were days when she doubted whether all her measurements and models could ever keep pace with what the Earth was already losing. She carried that grief in silence.
This year's team was smaller by design, assembled less for brilliance, which Becca had learned was cheap in the right circles, and more for temperament, which was far rarer and infinitely harder to repair once broken. She needed people who could withstand long silences without filling them with noise, people who wouldn't fracture the delicate balance of their isolated world.
There was Johar, her most trusted colleague, a man whose voice often sounded like a remembered song rather than speech. He could calculate atmospheric disturbances with the precision of a master, but he was also prone to overthinking, to drifting away mid-sentence, chasing after some half-formed theory he hadn't yet found words for. His absentmindedness sometimes frayed the nerves of the more practical members, but Becca understood. In this place, a mind needed somewhere to wander.
Ellie, their logistics lead, had hands that could coax life back into a frozen auger and a stubbornness that could border on hostility when things didn't go according to plan. She bore the impatience of someone who had always been forced to prove herself twice over—first for being a woman in mechanical fields, and then for daring to be right about things others dismissed. She masked her deep, consuming fear of failure with a veneer of biting humour and the kind of efficiency that could make people love her or loathe her, depending on the day.
Freya, the isotope analyst, read ice cores the way others read confessionals, finding meaning in subtle fractures, chemical ghosts, and sediment shifts. She had a gentleness that sometimes hardened into defensiveness when questioned too closely. It wasn’t arrogance, Becca thought — just a woman who had learned the hard way that in scientific circles, quietness was often mistaken for ignorance.
And then there were the interns — Adrian, Liam, Siti, and Arya — young, eager, and already battling the slow disillusionment that came from discovering the difference between research papers and real ice. They moved in tight little clusters, clutching at each other’s certainty because they had not yet learned how solitary science could be.
Becca barely noticed them. She had learned long ago not to get too attached to temporary presences.
But then Adrian spoke up one day.
He was quieter than the rest; not withdrawn exactly, but measured. Like someone who didn’t believe in spending energy he hadn’t yet earned. His comment about the shifting densities in the Ross Ice Shelf's ozone layer was technically sound. The way he said it caught Becca's attention. No embellishments. No reaching for approval. As though the words existed outside of ego.
She gave no outward sign that she had heard him; her head stayed bowed, her pen moved steadily over the field notes, but inside, she felt a small, almost reluctant stirring of interest.
Adrian wasn’t extraordinary at first glance. He was tall, lean rather than built, and carried the hunched posture of someone not quite used to his height. His parka hood barely tamed the unruly dark curls now dusted with snow, and his amber-brown eyes, flecked with tired gold, held the kind of intensity that people often mistook for aloofness. His hands, when visible outside their battered gloves, seemed to know both reverence and restraint.
More importantly, he watched her. Not the way most young scientists did, but with a kind of solemnness, as though he were waiting to be proven wrong about her, and half-hoping he wouldn't be.
Becca noticed the way he straightened, barely perceptible, when she entered a room. The way his eyes would flicker towards her, then away, as if scorched. The faint trace of longing in his expression when she praised Arya’s models or Siti’s logistical improvisations, but left his contributions unacknowledged.
She did it deliberately.
Praise was easy. And Becca had always trusted what grew slowly under pressure more than what bloomed under applause. She convinced herself that she had no time for entanglements, that intimacy was a distraction for people who had the luxury of safety. But she felt the slow, inevitable pull, too. She believed in letting things yield, not forcing them.
And Adrian?
Adrian was yielding beautifully.
He didn’t shrink away. He stayed late after the others disappeared into the insulated warmth of their tents, poring over field notes by headlamp, cross-referencing datasets without being asked. When he did ask questions, they were not the grasping sort, but sharp, unassuming ones, revealing a mind that sought understanding for its own sake, not for recognition.
He told himself it was respect. A natural admiration for someone whose work he had studied long before he'd ever met her. But late at night, when the wind battered the thin nylon walls of his tent and the temperature dropped low enough to make every breath ache, he could no longer lie to himself.
It wasn’t just the work.
It was her.
The way she seemed to belong to this brutal, beautiful landscape in a way no one else did. The way her silences said more than most people’s speeches. The way she never offered him comfort, but still made him feel seen.
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