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“Eye movement detected.”
You didn’t know where you were. All you could currently do was lie there, collecting your thoughts, and watch something adjusting objects that were attached to you.
Your eyes scanned the room. Where were you? All you could see was white. Your vision was blurred, a jumbled mix of colors.
You sat up, and the robot objected. Ignoring it, you attempted to pull off all of the cords. Your movement felt agonizingly slow from the stiffness in your body. But you had to investigate.
You wobbled, pushing the robot off of you. Its protests were unintelligible to you. You pushed your hand against the wall and slowly walked away.
As you were walking across the hall, you began to wonder deeper things. Your senses were quickly being regained, and you felt more confident now. But what stifled that confidence was your unknown whereabouts… and the unknown of who you were.
You were thinking of your own memories now. Why didn’t you have any? Why couldn’t you think of anything? What was even your own name?
You reached the end of the hallway and stumbled upon another person. He was drawing on a whiteboard. A list of questions he seemed to be writing on there.
“Hello?” You said, feeling alien to even your own vocal cords.
“AH!!” He shouted, flinching away from you.
You shouted in response, retracting away as well. You immediately noticed how unkempt he looked. And how messy the room was.
“Oh, it’s just you.” He sighed in relief, engulfing you in a bear hug. “I’m so glad you’re awake. I’ve been freaking out over here!”
“What?” You said, peering at the whiteboard again. You weren’t sure whether to return the hug or step away from the stranger.
“What is this place?” You asked.
He let go, then capped his marker and clasped his hands together. He thought for a moment, trying to gather his words together. “Um… maybe it’s better if I just show you.”
He began walking and gestured to you to follow him. You trailed behind him, questions buzzing in your head. “Why is my head so fuzzy? I read your whiteboard. Is your head fuzzy too?”
“I can’t exactly remember anything. So, I’m looking through my items to figure it out,” he replied.
You stopped in your tracks, looking into the large window. Your gaze was glued onto the millions of stars that lay before you. It was beautiful, but also very terrifying.
“We’re in space?!” You screamed.
“I know!” He whipped his arms up in a frenzy. “What are we even doing here?!”
You whipped your head away from the endless void. Faint images of your life on Earth began flickering into your mind, but they were too blurred together to be able to tell anything from them.
But right now, you knew the stranger next to you was your best bet.
“Do you know who I am?”
He paused for a moment, then went running toward the same hallway again.
“Hey!” You ran after him.
He dug through the pile of mess. It was filled with clothes, items, and whatever else kind of junk there’d be.
The stranger picked up a polaroid and handed it to you.
It was a picture of you and him. He looked a bit different, cute with his ruffled, short hair. Along with that thought grazing your head, you and him were side-hugging, and it looked quite cozy to you.
The cherry on top was the heart drawn below.
“Uh, we look close.”
“When I looked at it, that’s what I thought as well.” He hummed to himself.
“What are our names?”
“My name is Ryland Grace. I think your name might be in this duffle bag of yours that I have right here.” He dragged it out from the corner of the room and handed it to you.
You lugged it onto the floor and examined it. There, you read your name in bold print.
“I see.” You said, unzipping it. “So, were we sent here for something? Do you know?”
Ryland grabbed the marker again and fiddled with it. “I don’t know. What I do remember is… my students. I had students.”
You peered at your things. You immediately noticed you had a lot of biology books. As you touched them and picked them up, you felt as if you knew the content in them.
“You are a teacher?” You asked.
“Bingo.” He said. “A science teacher, as I recall.”
Funny, you thought. But you felt unfortunate for not being able to remember what your occupation was. Although the items in your bag were telling you one thing: you were knowledgeable. Or just loved body knowledge.
“Uh, I think I’m obsessed with science too.” You said, throwing a book onto the floor. It was a grotesque anatomy book.
He picked it up and flipped through it, then tossed it near your duffle. “So we’re nerds.”
You stopped in your tracks and thought for a moment.
“We’re nerds in space.” You thought out loud.
“Yeah.” He chuckled.
You found a document that was filled with scribbled writing. As you read through it, you could tell whoever was writing on it was insanely flirting. So you decided to check if it matched the writing on the whiteboard.
It was a match.
Ryland looked at you with curiosity. He looked over your shoulder to read what you were reading.
“Ah.”
“Mmm…” You murmured. “I’m starting to think we were an item.”
“That makes sense. We’re here together, and we’re both science nerds… and… I think you’re really attractive. I know I don’t need memories to figure that one out.”
You looked at him, bewildered, then smiled, unable to resist receiving the flattery.
“I guess you’re kind of cute too.” You joked.
“Hey.” He laughed softly.
There was a beat of silence that came between the two of you. Although you knew your silence on your end was you trying to think of anything that you really remember.
“I have an idea…” You started.
“Hm?”
“If we kissed… or hugged, do you think we would jog any of our memories? Like, if we really were dating.” You said, feeling embarrassed.
Ryland’s cheeks tinted pink. He rubbed the back of his neck, clearly looking nervous.
“It’s fine if–”
“No, let’s do it. I think it’ll help.” He stated.
You nodded.
He stepped forward to you, minding your and his own space. You looked up at him, shyly meeting him as you came a bit closer as well.
You instinctively put your arms around his shoulders. If you two were really doing this, you figured you'd get into character.
He leaned down, hesitantly coming closer. You closed the gap with your lips, politely pressing them for a solid few seconds, then pulling away.
You and he didn’t dare to say anything for that brief moment. As much as it was tense, it also felt rather intimate.
“Any memories?” He asked quietly.
You shook your head. You pulled your arms off of him and heard a hum of disappointment escape from him.
“Me neither.”
“But we were definitely dating. I think it’s pretty obvious.” You said with profound confidence.
He nodded vigorously. “I think so too.”
“Maybe, if we act like a couple, it’ll help.” You smiled at the sound of your own idea in the air.
Ryland laughed, looking at you fondly. “Let’s do it. While we figure this whole…” He gestured to the entire room. “Thing.”
You giggled. “Yeah.”
You were sitting down, right next to the window. There wasn’t much to think about. Or look at.
Ryland stepped softly towards you and sat down, kissing your head. You felt your face heat up.
You looked at him and noticed his hair was shorter. It looked akin to how his hair looked in the photo.
And you knew you really liked it.
“Hm?” He tilted his face at you.
“Ah… do you remember anything else?”
“The last thing I remember was a woman coming up to me in my own classroom.”
“Who was the woman?”
He shrugged. “Dunno.”
You laid your head down onto his shoulder. Even if he still felt a bit unfamiliar, your feelings about him did feel familiar.
“I think there’s some kind of urgency provided to us. Like something is at stake.” You said.
“Yeah?”
“I’m nervous. Are we supposed to be doing something here? Feels like it.”
His arm wrapped around your shoulder. “Maybe it’s best we just get used to all of this, get our memories back… and then we’ll figure out what to do.”
“Yeah.” You nodded.
“Would another kiss help?” He asked softly.
You sat up and turned your face toward him. Your eyes trailed down to his lips, contemplating for a moment.
“For remembering?”
He placed his fingers onto your chin, tilting your head up at his eyes.
“Yeah.”
His lips immediately met yours as soon as he heard the sound of your agreement. You figured you did truly feel some sort of way about this man, because your instincts were telling you to not let the kiss end.
He pulled you closer to himself with his hand on the small of your back. You responded by putting your hands on his chest and partly straddling his lap.
The kissing kept going for a few minutes, and you felt a somewhat familiar sensation of desiring closeness with him. But, to no avail, there was nothing you remembered. At least it was becoming enjoyable to both of you, and a sufficient distraction for the atrocity of being in space.
For what felt like days (in which Ryland was the one counting), all the two of you did was talk, explore the ship, share each other’s newly coming memories, rummage through storage, and make out. That was the pattern. A lot of making out involved. But nothing further than that. And to go along with it, there was strangely nothing you particularly remembered about him. Almost as if there was a lack of history between the two of you.
You were beginning to wonder if the hypothesis you two shared was faulty.
If it was, you were making out with someone you weren’t dating.
Ryland explained to you the significance behind the Petrova line. Something in your body told you it was something to be feared, but also to be questioned. Studied.
You remembered you were a biologist. You knew that. You knew countless things about the human anatomy and its systems, and sometimes you’d spitfire random facts at him, and he would counter with facts he knew as well.
You were slowly becoming unnerved at the thought that if it were true that you two weren’t dating, it would come to an end. It’d be entirely embarrassing, but you didn’t want to stop that train either. You felt the push of lack of memories, but the pull of how drawn you were to him.
The way he was affectionate with you made you feel like he was drawn to you too. Or perhaps he was simply still going along with the whole, “let’s act like we’re dating” shebang.
A couple of days passed again. Your memories were flooding in, painting a clarified picture of who you were and what the mission was about.
You were a biologist who was in a governmental project to try and stop the stars from dying. You were simply studying the astrophage, and Ryland was simply a coworker of yours, one you didn’t know very well, but had to work with for some time. But also one you recall having a raging crush on.
When almost all the scientists were killed, you and Ryland were the only ones who could go on the mission to fill the empty spots that needed to be filled.
You willingly agreed to go on the mission and to be induced into a coma. But Ryland did not. Yet he was here.
The picture, the document, and the mission… it was a duty. Not a partnership.
The heart on the picture was jokingly drawn on by another coworker of yours. The document was a hopeless display of your heart in the form of humor. The fact you two were together here was not a mutual decision.
He said no to the mission. Why was he here?
You didn’t really want to mention it, but you knew you had to.
As soon as you mustered up some half-baked courage, you set off to look for him.
Once you found him, you saw he was with two bodies in bags, which you immediately recognized as the folks who were actually assigned to the mission. It seemed to be like he was creating a memorial for them.
“All of their stuff.” You said in a hushed voice.
He smiled at the sudden appearance of you. But he looked sad. “Hey, there.”
“Why didn’t they make it?” You sighed despairingly.
“How did we?” He echoed back.
The burden on your chest felt heavier at those words.
You watched him eject their bodies off of the ship. Afterwards, you and him sat together in a peaceful quiet.
“Ryland?” You asked.
He perked his head up.
“We weren’t dating. I remember now. The kissing… and the affection, it didn’t help at all because we weren’t a couple.”
He kissed his teeth in response, then exhaled a sigh.
“Honestly? I was also beginning to get the notion that we weren’t.”
You brought your knees to your chest and buried your face there, groaning.
He wrapped his arm around you, like he had already a dozen times, and scooted closer.
“Why are you doing that? You know now that we aren’t dating.”
“What, now we know that, we shouldn’t?” He said, almost sounding offended. “It doesn’t take rocket science to know we both still enjoyed it.”
You laughed heartily, and he squeezed you closer in response. “Rocket science.”
“And, speaking of which, we should probably start doing what we were actually sent here to do. No experience, but at least we have our nerd knowledge.” He laughed, tapping his finger onto his temple and then pressing it against your forehead.
You playfully waved his hand away, then took it into your own hands. “How much do you actually remember?”
He cleared his throat awkwardly. “Everything, up until we were asked to go on the mission.”
“So, you knew?” You asked.
“I wasn’t sure, okay?”
You lightly punched him in the arm. “Liar. You just wanted us to continue acting like we were dating.”
“Uh, maybe. Can we continue that?”
You sigh dramatically. “I GUESS so.”
He looked at you with an unamused expression.
“Okay, well now that that’s all figured out, let’s get on with this!” You said, standing up.
He smiled. “Alright, alright. Let’s do this thing.”