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Bryan Hodukavich had exactly one job description in life, and it was to deliver the package; don't ask what's in the package. He had followed that rule for two years, through snowstorms, through a guy who tried to pay him in expired lottery tickets, through the single worst Tuesday of his professional career involving a dog that should not have had that many teeth.
He was about to break the rule for the first time, and it was entirely the fault of the man currently yelling at him from across a shipping crate.
"Do not open that," said Grace, in the exact tone of a substitute teacher who has just watched a student pick up a Bunsen burner by the flame end.
"I wasn't gonna open it," Bryan said, opening it.
"I said," Grace lunged. He was not built for lunging. He had the frame of a man who spent most of his adult life either strapped into a spaceship chair or standing in front of a whiteboard, and both of those environments had left him spectacularly unprepared for tackling a courier the size of a vending machine. He got a fistful of Bryan's jacket and absolutely nothing else. "It's live cargo, you cannot just-"
The latch gave.
In Bryan's defense, the crate had said FRAGILE and HANDLE WITH CARE and nothing at all about the third thing, which was apparently PRESSURIZED, because the moment the seal broke, the lid detonated upward with a soft whumpf and a cloud of fine, glittering, faintly green dust rolled out and hit both of them square in the face.
Bryan inhaled approximately all of it, because Bryan inhaled most things enthusiastically. He coughed once, sneezed twice, and blinked watering eyes at Grace, who had gone very still, very pale, and was staring at the crate as if it had personally betrayed him.
"Okay," Bryan said, waving a hand through the last of the settling dust. "So that's bad."
"That's-" Grace's voice cracked. He cleared his throat and tried again, scientist-brain visibly rebooting. "That's reproductive dispersal spore matter from a specimen that I have spent four months keeping in a sealed, climate-controlled, sterile environment because exposure protocols are completely undocumented, because nobody has ever been exposed, because I designed the containment specifically so that nobody would be, and you just open crates? That's your whole method? See crate, open crate?"
"It said Bryan's Delivery on it," Bryan said. "That's my name."
"That is not how names work on shipping labels!"
"It's a system I use."
Grace opened his mouth to explain, with some heat, exactly how bad a system that was, and instead sat down very abruptly on an overturned bucket.
"Whoa, hey." Bryan was at his side before the bucket had finished wobbling, hands hovering uselessly over Grace's shoulders like he wasn't sure where a person was supposed to be held up from. "You okay, man? Grace? Hey, doc, talk to me."
And this close, under the flat fluorescent buzz of the warehouse lights, Grace's scrambled brain did something it had absolutely no business doing: it was thinking.
Bryan's hair was a mop of soft brown curls, longer than practical, falling in loose waves across his forehead as he'd never once considered a comb an essential tool. There was the faint shadow of a mustache he clearly hadn't committed to shaving off, and a mouth set somewhere between concern and confusion, like his face hadn't decided yet whether the night called for panic or another joke. A courier lanyard hung crooked around his neck over a mustard plaid scarf, both half-swallowed by the collar of a battered navy work jacket with a little stitched heart patch on the chest, as if the company that issued it had wanted to make certain nobody mistook him for dangerous.
But it was the eyes that snagged Grace hardest: wide, brown, faintly glassy with worry, flicking over Grace's face with an open, unguarded concern that had nothing performed in it at all.
Every small detail registered like it had been backlit: the softness at his jaw, the crease of a frown he probably didn't know he was making, the way his shoulders curled in like he wanted to make himself smaller and more useful at the same time. It was an inventory Grace had no scientific justification for taking and could not, no matter how hard some rapidly dwindling rational fragment of him tried, stop.
Bryan, for his part, was having the same problem in reverse.
He'd clocked Grace as "the science guy" the second he'd shown up with a clipboard and a nervous energy, and hadn't thought much else about him, but now, with the green dust still settling in his lungs, Grace's face refused to stay in the background of Bryan's brain the way ordinary faces did. It was the hair first: a little too long, swept back in messy waves that caught the light as he'd just run a hand through it and given up on the result.
Then the eyes, sharp, quick, darting over the crate and the spores and Bryan's own face with the restless, assessing energy of a man doing four calculations at once, ringed underneath with the kind of tired shadows that said this isn't the first apocalypse I've almost caused. There was a dusting of stubble along a jaw that tightened every time he talked too fast, and a mouth that quirked sideways instead of smiling all the way, like he'd trained himself out of easy joy a long time ago and only had the corner of it left. Even his hands, long-fingered, restless, currently gesturing through an explanation of alien pheromones, seemed suddenly, urgently worth watching. Bryan didn't have a word for the feeling. He just knew he wanted to keep looking.
"I'm not a doctor," Grace said faintly, to the middle distance. "I'm a junior high school science teacher who used to have a PhD and then had a small disagreement with the scientific establishment about panspermia, and now I am sitting on a bucket in a warehouse having apparently just been dosed with alien pollen, which is, hold on." He looked up.
Bryan's face was very close. Bryan's face was, in fact, extremely close, and for the first time all night Grace seemed to actually notice this. "Oh," he said, in an entirely different voice. "Oh, that's you have really nice eyes. Has anyone told you that? Like, structurally. The bone underneath. Orbital architecture, Bryan, is what I'm-"
"Thanks, man," Bryan said warmly, and then blinked, because his own chest had just done something strange and swoopy, like the drop on a roller coaster, except the roller coaster was located entirely inside his ribs and its only passenger was intense fondness for the guy currently complimenting his eye sockets. "Wait. Hey. Why do I feel like this?"
"Feel like what?" Grace replied
"Like-" Bryan gestured at his own sternum, searching for the word with the focused concentration of a man trying to solve a math problem using only vibes. "Like when you meet a golden retriever, and it likes you immediately. But about you. Specifically. Right now."
Grace's brain, which had spent the last several minutes running increasingly frantic hypotheses, arrived with the horrible clarity of a man watching his own experiment go sideways in real time at the correct one.
"Pheromone analog," he breathed. "Oh, that's clever, evil. The spores aren't just reproductive. It's not pollinating flowers; it's pollinating us. It's hijacking mammalian bonding chemistry as a delivery mechanism because if the carrier falls for whoever's nearby, they'll protect the host. This is fascinating"
"Grace." Bryan looked at him, worried now.
"This could rewrite everything we think we know about interspecies chemistry." Grace was going off the rails.
"Grace." Bryan caught both of his hands, which stopped the sentence dead, mostly because Grace was now looking at their joined hands with the same expression he'd give a groundbreaking spectrometry readout. "I don't know what half of those words mean. But I know I would fight a bear for you right now. Like, an actual bear. With my hands."
"You don't know how to use the gun in your jacket." Grace looked worried now.
"I know. That's how you know it's real." Bryan said this with total, sunny sincerity, the way other men might say I love you for the first time, and possibly, functionally, he just had. "I'd just, like, hit the bear. A lot. Until it left."
Grace laughed a short, startled, entirely unscientific sound and some small stubborn part of him, the part that had spent a year and a half alone on a dying ship doing math to save a species that didn't know it needed saving, recognized this feeling for exactly what it was: chemically induced, biologically illegitimate, and completely, helplessly working anyway.
"This is going to be a nightmare to explain to an ethics board," he said.
"What's an ethics board?" Bryan looked dumbfounded.
"Never mind." Grace was already leaning in, spore-drunk and grinning in a way that felt entirely unlike himself and entirely like exactly who he wanted to be right now, which was, apparently, a man about to kiss a himbo courier in a warehouse that smelled like ozone and crushed green pollen. "Bryan."
"Yeah?" Bryan replied.
"For the record, this is bad science." Grace facepalmed.
"Cool," Bryan said, and closed the distance.
The kiss tasted like glitter dust and adrenaline, and somewhere behind them the crate sat open and innocent, spores drifting lazily in the fluorescent light, entirely pleased with itself.