Ross Ice Shelf. 16 kilometres from base camp.
The morning briefing unfurled like a slow exhale of static and sleep. Everyone swaddled in fleece, hunched like exhausted saints in prayer, their hands wrapped around mugs of bitter coffee. Radios crackled. Whiteboards squeaked. The sun spilled in through the seams of the tent like an indifferent god prying open a confession booth.
Adrian shifted in his folding chair, his spine was stiff and aching from yesterday’s supply haul. It was the kind of pain that whispered of effort, of use, of being tested. He held onto it, as though she might notice.
Dr. Rebecca Voss.
Zipped to the neck in matte gear, she stationed herself by the expedition maps with her hands behind her back. When assignments were read out, Adrian felt it when his name landed beside hers for the southern quadrant, penguin colony survey.
A quiet click.
Like a leash buckling around his throat.
She still didn’t look.
Liam smirked with the expression of someone who had seen a dog sit for a treat. “Lucky bastard,” he mouthed.
Rebecca was already gone. She was outside, calibrating sleds with a kind of surgical indifference. She moved like a robot.
Beautifully mechanical.
She didn’t wait for him.
She never waited.
And he? He scrambled after her as if he were tied to her.
The chill knifed through layers of synthetic insulation and left no part of him untouched.
Wind chill: –26°C, the last reading on his HUD.
A number that felt clinical until it wrapped itself around his bones and started gnawing. The air punished the skin like a grudge that hadn’t thawed in centuries. It was a cold so pure it felt personal. But Rebecca moved through it like she’d made a pact with it with bare hands, sleeves pushed back just enough to reveal fingers that bore the history of hard seasons. Her knuckles were raw and ridged, nails clean but never painted.
She crouched beside the drone, toggling its manual release with the careful aggression of someone who didn’t waste movement. He stood there, stunned for a breath too long, until she straightened and tossed the harness toward him in one practised motion. The gloves followed, arcing through the air like an afterthought. He reached out, and when their fingers brushed for a split second, it felt like the cold paused to make space for the heat.
She smelled faintly of eucalyptus. Not the floral kind, but sharp and medicinal. It hit the back of his throat, clean and and impossibly intimate. It reminded him of the sting of antiseptic. The kind of scent that didn’t linger, but haunted.
He bent to lift the lidar crate and immediately regretted the angle. His grip slipped, knees locking too late to catch the momentum. But, she was already moving. Her hand shot out, steadying the crate before it tipped. She didn’t grunt. Didn’t even seem to try. It was effortless. Like the laws of physics deferred to her. Like gravity itself bent its spine to her command.
He looked up.
She just glanced at him.
A glance that scraped across his surface and filed him neatly away into some internal catalogue he’d never be allowed to read. Probably under: Has Potential. Subfile: Occasionally Useful. Sub-subfile: Mostly a Mess.
He swallowed thickly.
His heart pounded a half-beat too fast.
And, it occurred to him that he might actually whimper if she ever said his name in that same tone she used for system diagnostics.
But she turned away.
And just like that, the wind resumed its violence.
The snowmobiles growled low beneath them, engines reverberating through the ice like beasts in chains. Adrian could feel the tension in the handles, the pulse of barely-restrained power, and yet it was nothing compared to the force riding ahead of him.
Becca led in matte black, her silhouette cutting against the white horizon. Her back was straight, and her shoulders squared. She tapped her thigh twice. And before the thought had fully formed, before he could name it, his body obeyed. Muscle memory that didn’t belong to him anymore. She had trained him with gestures, with glances, with the kind of presence that didn’t need explanation.
Then, without warning, she extended her arm back without glancing over her shoulder. He didn’t hesitate. The GPS tracker was in her palm before the cold could sting his fingers. He pressed it there like an offering because being useful to her was the closest thing to worship he’d ever known. He half-expected her to close her hand and crush the device, just to show it could be done.
Her mouth twitched barely; It was fleeting, unreadable, suggesting something cruel and exquisitely pleased.
It was gone in an instant, just like that. But he caught it. And it lived in his chest like a lit match. That flicker sustained him. It stitched itself into the hours ahead, into the brutal wind, into the ache of his hands and the burn in his lungs. For the rest of the ride—hell, for the rest of the week—he would carry it like a secret medal pinned to his ribs.
She didn’t need to look back.
Survey Ridge. 1130 Hours.
The wind moved across the ridge like something alive. It curled around them, brushing over their skin like a memory of touch. Above, the drone held its path like a quiet sentinel in the white.
Adrian shifted on the slick surface, the ice beneath his boots deceptive in its stillness. One misstep and the world tilted just slightly beneath him.
“Adrian.”
His name slid into the cold air like warm oil poured across polished marble. A sound that bypassed logic and instruction and went straight to the part of him that obeyed without question.
He stopped moving.
The correction of his stance wasn’t reflex so much as reverence, a return to the posture she would have wanted. She didn’t need to raise her voice. She simply existed in a frequency that tuned his body like a string being brought to pitch.
When he looked back, he found her gaze waiting, narrowed behind the glacier goggles. Just a tilt of the head, a barely-there adjustment of her posture. Yet it sliced through him with surgical precision like a hand brushing over the spine of a book not yet chosen.
And in the hush that followed, he could almost hear the unsaid message thread itself around his ribs. At least his delusions told him so–
Good Boy.
Later, when the crate threatened to pull his wrist apart, the tape biting into already-bruised skin, he refused to speak. His pride kept his grip tight even as the pain climbed. But before it could drop, and before he could yield, she was there.
She stepped forward with the calm precision of someone accustomed to taking what she deemed hers.
Base Lab. 1900 Hours.
The fluorescents hummed overhead, their tremulous buzz like flies trapped in a jar. Adrian sat slouched before the console, the sterile glow washing his skin pale. His wrist, finally wrapped in proper compression tape, throbbed in rhythm with his pulse. She had made certain of that by pressing the med kit into his chest without ceremony.
“You’re not ruining my numbers tomorrow.”
My.
Not ours. Not the team's. Just hers.
She never bothered with the illusion of equality. Authority settled on her like a second skin, worn with the calm assurance of someone who had never needed to raise her voice to be obeyed. Across from him, she worked in silence, fingers gliding over the keys with ruthless grace. Her jaw made something in his core dissolve. Adrian could still feel the phantom imprint of her hand from earlier. He was still warm from it.
Before he could reminisce, Liam collapsed into the chair beside him. The intern carried chaos like a badge.
“So,” he began, voice low, lips curled into mischief. “What’s it like being her emotional support sled dog?”
Adrian turned his head slowly.
Liam grinned wider, “You know. Sit. Stay. Fetch the drone. All that.”
Adrian opened his mouth, something sharp on the tip of his tongue—
“Liam.”
She didn’t glance up. Didn’t spare them so much as a flicker of her gaze. But her voice landed like a scalpel, sliding through the din of the lab. It came from the place beneath her breath, the place where warnings lived.
Liam went rigid. “Uh. Sorry.”
She said nothing more.
Silence fell again, uneasily this time, like the room itself had shifted around her presence. Minutes passed. Long enough for the hum to return, for Liam to slink away under some pretence, and for Adrian to pretend he’d forgotten it.
Then she passed behind him, a binder tucked under her arm. Her gloved fingers traced a single line across the back of his neck, impossibly light. It felt like a ghost of contact. Nothing anyone would notice. Nothing he would ever forget.
It was a claim.
And in that small moment, his entire posture changed. His spine straightened, his shoulders were drawn back, and his chest lifted just enough to feel seen. He breathed in the electric silence she left in her wake, heart pounding against the walls of his restraint, and sat still in his place.
Exactly where she expected him to be.
Exactly how she expected him to remain.
Like a good boy should.
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