Friends With Time ⌛ (Tyler Galpin x Reader)

Day 1

Day 1:

You were not surprised by the Bubble.

"Most people don't expect it to be this large," Commander Afua says, ducking under the swaying roof of the Bubble's pod.

"I did," you say, following him and stepping onto the bobbing deck, open to the sky. It was all dark wood, wet with the dampness of the day. He glanced at you, then turns back to pacing the deck. The floorboards creak underfoot.

"Of course you did," Afua says appraisingly, raising an eyebrow as he turns back to you. "You were top of your class at the Outsider Action Team Academy. I'd be surprised if you didn't do any research." He kicks at the floorboards, and a gull crows somewhere in the twilight distance. "What did you do to deserve a Bubble Shift, anyway?"

Your stomach tightens, and you try to wave it off.

"It's not important," you say, shrugging and striding over to the edge of the floating platform, playing with a piece of net caught in the wooden guardrail that separates you from the choppy water. The Bubble is more like a raft, you think, a raft with a guardrail and its iconic sphere inside of it. And somewhere, inside that sphere...

"It's spherical," Afua explains, pointing to the sphere inside the ring of wooden deck we stood on now. It almost seems planetary, like Saturn with its rings. "You'll stand out here to check your location in the stars at night. Inside, in the top of the bubble, are your living quarters. Down below..."

He trailed off, then stomped hard on the wood of the deck.

"I can handle him," you say, stepping forward. "I was trained for a-"

"Yes," Captain Afua says shortly, "but this is no ordinary shift. It's a Hyde." He pauses. "And a manipulative one, at that. Rumor has it he pretended to date one of the Nevermore girls so he could leave her for dead."

"Wednesday Addams," you amend, remembering the file you'd been handed two days ago. You'd skimmed it last night, but a part of you had hesitated when you turned the pages. Was it right to read the Outsider's history? Even if he was a Hyde, even if he was dangerous. Reading what he'd said in therapy felt like a violation.

Afua shoots you a meaningful look. "She was about your age."

The blazing sunset beams the gold on his wrist cuffs like they are melting, smoldering away with the last strokes of daytime. Afua shifts, unconsciously shifting back towards the dock.

Afua knows what he is doing. Afua is a strategist, a master of all things weaponry. And if he's scared, that means you should be, too.

But you have no license to be scared, even though the fear pinches at your muscles and writhes in your stomach.

"Remember, Y/N," he says, looking up at the sky. "'You can't make friends with time.'"

You knew the saying, one you heard over and over at home and at the school. Bitterly, from your mother. Cautiously, from the teachers that believed in you. Echoing, inside your own head, when you wondered if you were really cut out for a job with USOAT.

Some things were not to be talked to, not to be befriended, and if any Outsider was dealing with the US Outsider Action Team, they had crossed that line long ago.

"Come on," Afua says, looking up at the sky and hurrying over to the stairway. "I'll show you your living quarters before we send you off."

A knot twists in your stomach like a knife. Send you off. And then you'll be floating in the middle of the ocean, trapped with a mysterious beast, for an entire year. Alone.

You try not to think of it as you descend into the middle sphere surrounded by the raft, taking one last gulp of sky before you close the hatch behind you. It thuds, a final noise, and then all you hear are Afua's boots on the metal stairway.