Next Morning. Fog Valley.
The horizon shimmered like a mirage, or the edge of a mirror left too long in the cold. Around them, Antarctica stretched infinitely and was indifferent.
The team moved in layers of synthetic bulk, half-human, half-equipment, exhaling fog like old engines. Rebecca led from the front, and her voice crackling through Adrian’s earpiece with instructions.
“Node 3B’s showing a low thermal flux,” she said, crouching by the logger. “Could be microfractures. If it is, we lose the CO₂ sequence.”
She peeled back the panel, her bare fingers moving over the controls like she could will them into cooperation. She handled the machine without apology.
Adrian stood just behind, blinking away fog from his lenses, curls slipping loose beneath his hood. He adjusted a setting, then paused, head tilting at something off to the side.
Then he crouched.
A lone Adelie, no taller than his boot, was waddling toward them like she owned the glacier.
Belligerent.
Determined.
Fluff-shouldered and full of purpose.
She stopped a meter away and stared up at him like she was filing a noise complaint.
“Ma’am,” Adrian said softly, bowing his head with mock gravity. “You’re trespassing on a restricted survey site.”
He waited.
She blinked. Then sneezed violently, shaking out her wings like she was personally offended.
Adrian laughed, “Okay, okay, I take it back. You’re clearly in charge.”
He fished out his tablet and snapped a photo. Then another. The penguin flared her wings and turned her back to him with a haughty little strut, vanishing into the white like a tiny empress.
He didn’t see her watching. But Rebecca had turned just enough.
She had looked up from her task, drawn by the sound of something… unfamiliar. Something that didn’t belong here. Not in this place, carved from wind and silence and rules.
Laughter.
His cheeks were flushed, eyes crinkled at the corners with warmth that hadn’t come from a heat pack. And for a moment, he looked younger. Softer. Like someone who hadn’t yet learned to flinch from this continent’s bite.
Rebecca stared with curiosity.
As if trying to pin the shape of something she’d forgotten.
The rest of the team was disappearing into the wind ahead, voices muffled, coordinates drifting.
But she lingered.
“You’re supposed to be cataloguing melt patterns,” she said finally.
Adrian didn’t startle. Just looked up, still grinning. “Penguin migration could be relevant. They’ve got opinions.”
A pause.
He stood slowly, brushing snow from his knees.
“She reminded me of someone...,” he added, a glint in his eye. “...Confident and terrifying.”
Her goggles didn’t move, but he felt the shift.
Another pause.
She stepped closer. “You forgot to cap your lens,” she said, so quietly it felt like a secret.
He looked down. “Shit.”
And then, for the briefest second, she smiled.
Not fully. Just a twitch of her mouth. A flicker of amusement, sharp-edged and fleeting, like sunlight off a blade.
She stepped forward, slow and precise, her boots imprinting deep hollows in the crusted snow as though even the Earth yielded to her. The moment stretched like a taut wire of unsaid things vibrating between them, plucked by proximity.
Adrian straightened instinctively, the camera half-raised in defence or reverence, he wasn't sure. Around them, the world blurred. Wind muttered past his ears like a reprimand. The penguin had wandered out of frame. Becca came to a stop in front of him. Her face was obscured behind the reflective lenses of her glacier goggles, and still, he felt the weight of her gaze.
“You think she’s like me?” she asked.
There was no inflexion.
Adrian’s throat bobbed. “The… the penguin?” he said, too quickly.
The silence that followed was colder.
Becca unzipped the top of her wind shell with gloved fingers, just enough to reveal the clean line of her jaw, the faintest sheen of windburn at the apple of her cheek. She exhaled, and the warmth of her breath coiled into the air between them like smoke from an extinguished flame.
“She’s loud,” Becca said. “Clumsy. Gets in the way.”
Adrian, foolish with adrenaline and caffeine and whatever chemical cocktail she induced simply by standing too close, shook his head. “She’s relentless,” he said. “Goes where she wants. Even when the wind fights back.”
Becca tilted her head slightly. The corner of her mouth curled, but not into a smile. It was the barest twitch of something unreadable. Then she turned away. “Don’t anthropomorphise the wildlife,” she said over her shoulder.
He should’ve let it go. But he didn’t.
He followed, the camera swinging forgotten at his side. “You don’t actually think I’m useless out here, do you?” he asked.
No answer. Just the mechanical hiss of her breath in the mask, the soft crunch of her footsteps over wind-pressed snow.
He quickened his pace to match her stride. “I’ve read all your papers,” he tried again. “Even the early ones. The glacial albedo series from—”
“2009,” she said flatly.
“Yeah. That one.” He glanced over, trying to catch her face. “You wrote about how the melt patterns weren’t just technical phenomena… they were signals. Messages. And if we ignored them—”
“They’d rewrite the coastline,” she finished.
He nodded. “That paper changed how I thought about everything. Made me want to be here. Out here.”
Becca stopped. Then, she turned.
Her gloved hand reached up and pulled her goggles off, slow and deliberate. Her eyes were sharp, framed by lashes kissed with frost. They searched his face for something rawer. Truer.
“Do you think this is a place for admiration?” she asked.
He swallowed. “No.”
“Then why bring it?”
He didn’t have an answer.
But he didn’t look away.
Becca’s gaze held his a second longer. Then she looked down, adjusted the strap on her sled pack, and started walking beside him.
Back at the centre
The meeting had stretched well into the evening: graphs, calculations, speculative models flying across the room. Becca had led the discussion with her usual precision, arms folded tightly across her chest, her expression unreadable behind rectangular black-rimmed glasses. She asked questions with the sharpness of a scalpel and dissected theories with a kind of brutal grace. Adrian had stayed quiet for most of it, though his mind had been racing. He didn’t just have data. He had something else. Something big.
But how do you interrupt a woman like her?
It wasn’t until the others dispersed with murmurs of exhaustion and plans for next-day simulations echoing in the halls that he finally found the courage to gather his papers and walk to her quarters.
He stood at her door for a full ten seconds before knocking.
The door clicked open softly.
Adrian had prepared himself to see Dr. Rebecca Voss, the no-nonsense woman whose idea of casual wear was thermal parkas zipped up to her chin. Instead, he was met with a version of her he never imagined existed.
She stood in a pale, ivory bathrobe that clung to her form with lazy folds, damp from the shower. Her hair, usually knotted back into a severe bun, was loose now, strands still glistening with water. Droplets rolled down her neck, and there, just at the edge of her collarbone, inked in fine, sweeping lines, was a tattoo dragon that coiled and poised as if it might come to life at any second.
Adrian’s breath caught.
She raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”
“I, uh—sorry—it’s late, I know. I wouldn’t have come unless it was...” He swallowed. “Unless it was urgent. I think I found something. Something... significant.”
She studied him for a beat. He seemed nervous, cheeks flushed, and his fingers gripped his reports like a lifeline.
Then, wordlessly, she stepped aside and opened the door wider. “Come in.”
The warmth of her room enveloped him immediately. The moist air from the shower, hints of eucalyptus and sandalwood, soft amber light spilling from a desk lamp…everything here felt different from the lab.
Softer. Quieter. Intimate, even.
She returned to her desk, tying her robe a bit tighter as she sat. “Show me.”
Adrian approached slowly, setting the files in front of her. She took them, flipping through pages, reaching for her pen without looking. She didn’t rush. She read with focus so intense, the room seemed to narrow around her.
He began to explain, stumbling at first, but finding his rhythm.
“There was a spike in the signal patterns from last week’s deep core samples. At first, I assumed it was noise, maybe a miscalibration, but when I ran it through the older scalar model.. uh.. the one you used for the Nova region..? It held. Consistently.”
Her eyes flicked up, interested. “That filter was too sensitive for the earlier datasets.”
“I know,” he said, edging closer. “But this signal... It’s different. It’s not static. It moves like…like it’s responding. Like something’s alive in the pattern.”
She leaned in, scanning the printout more closely, her lips slightly parted in thought.
He paused to watch her. The way her brow furrowed, the gentle arch of her neck, the slow rise and fall of her chest beneath that robe. His gaze drifted again to the dragon inked along her skin, its tail disappearing somewhere beneath the robe's edge.
This wasn’t the same woman who led the lab with cold logic and efficiency.
This woman is different.
And for a moment, he forgot entirely why he had come.
There was a quiet tension hanging between them now. Neither of them spoke. Even the soft whirr of the laptop had stopped. The air thickened around them, slow and charged.
Adrian’s voice dropped into a whisper. “I think we’re looking at a response pattern. Not just an anomaly.”
She nodded absently, her eyes still fixed on the printouts, her fingers trailing under a line of data as if anchoring herself to thought. “Show me the simulations tomorrow.”
She slid the report back toward him without looking, then rose and walked to the door. Her robe shifted with each step, revealing the quiet grace of her calves beneath the hem, her silhouette softened by the lamplight behind her. The fabric clung ever so slightly to her skin, still damp from the shower, and it struck Adrian then. He had never really seen her. Not like this.
Not as a figure of authority. But as a woman.
She stood by the open door now, her hand resting on the handle, waiting. He should’ve taken the report. He should’ve thanked her and left.
But he didn’t.
He didn’t move, not right away.
Instead, he let his eyes linger on the way the curve of her waist disappeared into the robe’s cinch, on the way her neck arched slightly as she turned to glance back at him with an unreadable expression.
He stepped toward her.
His fingers brushed the edge of the report, but he didn’t grasp it. Not really. His gaze lifted instead, drawn helplessly back to her face. Her lips. Her eyes.
He forgot, for a moment, who she was.
He forgot the rules.
He leaned in, closer than he ever had before. Closer than he ever dared to.
His breath caught as he neared her, so near now that he could feel the heat radiating from her skin, he could see the delicate water droplets still clinging to her collarbone just above that inked dragon. The scent of eucalyptus clung to her like an invisible veil.
She didn’t move.
Not at first.
And just as his lips were about to brush hers, just as that fragile space between breath and touch dissolved, she lifted the report between them like a shield. It was a subtle gesture, but her meaning was unmistakable.
Adrian blinked, coming to, his lips a hair’s breadth from hers. He stepped back, embarrassed and breathless, his heart pounding loud enough he thought she might hear it.
She tilted her head slightly, her mouth curling into something between amusement and restraint. Her fingers were still on the report, pressing it gently against his chest now, guiding him back with a touch that was neither cold nor cruel.
Then came her voice—
“Tomorrow.”
Just that.
He took the report this time, properly, holding it like it might burn him if he gripped it too tightly. He nodded, unable to speak, and turned toward the hallway. The door closed behind him with a soft click that echoed far louder in his head.
And as he walked away, the paper still warm from her hands, Adrian realised two things:
One, he was irrevocably drawn to her.
And two, she knew.
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