Friends With Time ⌛ (Tyler Galpin x Reader)

Days 4-7

Day 4:

The monster doesn't speak today, and turns his face to the wall whenever you're there. If you're being honest, you're fine with that. You don't really want to speak to him, either.

Although you do tell him about the sunset again. It was a fiery orange today, a deep contrast to the infinite dark blue of the sea.

Day 5:

You get up to the music and do your fitness requirements, then feed the monster all his meals and attend all of your meetings. Today he looks up and thanks you for remembering his coffee, to which you grunt a reply and hurry out before he can say anything manipulative.

The relative monotony of your duties, though, leaves you time to catalog what you have in the storeroom. Afua warned you that the fresh food would be the first to go, so you grab a notepad and make a plan to eat everything in the refrigerator section before it goes bad. Then you plan your meals for the next week, but you still have hours once you reach the back of the cavernous storage room.

You tap the pen against your chin, the sound echoing through the dripping, concrete cavern of the storeroom. You move to tap your other fingers against the shelf by the door to harmonize, when you see the corners of a white book peeking out at the bottom.

You drop down, the shelving slats separating you from the rest of the storeroom, and realize that it's a whole stack of white books. Gingerly reaching your fingers between the slats, you pull out one of the books and hold it up to flip through the pages.

They're entirely blank.

You set that one aside. The next one is the same blank white on front, but its pages are slightly larger. On the front, in black calligraphy, it reads Guestbook.

The inside is filled with scribbled notes from who you guess are previous occupants of the Bubble. They note the dates, their names, the kinds of monsters they were guarding, occasionally leaving behind a little note. Brina, Rogue Siren. Gebralt, Vampire. David L/N...

Your eyes skid back, and you drop the book, the cover slipping through your fingers and landing with a dusty thud on the storeroom floor. You hurry to pick it back up, thumbing through the pages until you find the entry.

David L/N, Desmond.

What kind of monster is a Desmond? You think, staring at the handwriting. It's spidery, but legible, and that's when you realize that your Dad must have written the monster's name instead of its kind.

You shove down the book, angry tears pricking to your eyes. The monster would kill him, and your Dad wrote its name.

Stupid. Your mother's voice fills your ears. He thought he could change things, and look what that got him.

You can't stop staring at the book, wondering what his handwriting said about him. Maybe he wrote fast, because he had so much on his mind. Maybe he thought about you, sometimes, barely five before he'd been recalled to the Bubble shift that killed him.

You'd heard he was a man full of energy, from his colleagues at USOUT. They said he was the kind of person who would invite the more stoic members of his team to dance to music and sing with him, in the strong voice you were always told he had.

You slam the book shut as your vision starts to wobble, and move to throw it on the ground before you realize that you can't drop something with so much of him in it. You lower it to the ground, ripping your eyes back to the rest of the shelf. The other white books are journals, filled with official USOAT memos and reports about their lives on the Bubble. You guess the empty one is meant to be yours.