Friends With Time ⌛ (Tyler Galpin x Reader)

Day 8-9

Day 8:

"I'm facilitating a call between you and your father today," you say, forcing out your words as you place the monster's breakfast in his tray. Your voice is cold. Gullible. Stupid. His words ring in your ears.

His head jerks up, and his eyes briefly meet yours, then pull away like ripping away a bandaid. "I don't want to see him."

"Are you crazy?" you say, flicking the switch to send the tray rattling over to him. "I would kill to see my Dad one more time, forget if I was on a life sentence."

His body seems to seize at that part, but he refuses to look up. "Yeah? Well, I'd kill to see my Mom again, and look how you treat yours."

You don't respond to that.

You leave the room, your heart trapped against invisible walls, and put yourself through another recorded fitness class on the TV to stop thinking about it. Then you shower, and then you're in your room with an hour or so until the call.

You play around with your paintbrushes, but you can't think of anything to paint. Trees? Forests? You already hung a few of your old  paintings around the white walls when you unpacked, but it feels like you've lived in this stark white Bubble forever, nothing in your world but video calls, monsters, and vast, vast ocean and sky.

You jerkily grab your paintbox, pulling out a large brush and covering the lower half of the canvas in bold green. You dip it into the water dish you brought, then cover the sky in gold, pulling out a smaller brush to detail the clouds of a sunset.

You zero in on the work, tracing the curves of each gilded cloud, until your phone buzzes with the notification that Sheriff Galpin is waiting for you. You close your eyes, then open them and purposefully set the paintbrush down to clean it, the sky drying out on your easel. Later you'll paint Paris, you think, moving your fingers to picture a graceful Eiffel Tower in the midst of the pink-hued clouds.

It will be beautiful, and it will be something other than life on the Bubble.

It's been easy to keep yourself busy, but you wish your friends from the Academy could see it. With most of you fresh on assignment somewhere, calling together is not allowed.

You wipe your hands with a painter's towel and move into the living room, setting up the laptop. There's a ding, and the Sheriff appears on the laptop, looking strained.

A stab of pity seizes your heart. "Hi, Sheriff," you say unsteadily, adjusting the camera. "I'm Y/N, the USOAT agent on the Bubble with your son."

He shakes his head, sighing. "Please, call me Donovan."

You bob a nod. "Okay."

"How..." he swallows, as if working out the words, tilting a finger through the air.  "How is he? How is Tyler?"

"Angry," you say. "Bitter. Mean."

"He didn't want to see me."

You don't answer that, but your silence says it all.

"I turned him in, you know," the Sheriff says, eyes drifting down towards his desk. "But it wasn't because he was a bad kid. I turned him in because he's a good person, deep down, because I wanted him to get better. To come back home."

His voice breaks at the last line, and something inside you cracks like ice.

You shake your head, then lean in, your voice like a wisp of ghostly wind.

"You know USOAT isn't in the business of sympathy, right?" You say. "I mean, the board wants to keep him here. Forever."

The Sheriff closes his eyes, throat moving as if processing a deep pain. "Is there any hope for him?"