Aliens she’d googled instead. Alien abduction stories. Survivors stories. She skimread over them, avoiding any websites that analyzed the stories too hard, hitting back whenever the comments beneath the stories were too skeptical (or downright vicious.) She didn’t want to read about people being called delusional, crazy, stupid, attention seekers, didn’t want to read people being accused of being abused or traumatised so deeply their minds had broken. All she wanted was to find a similar story to her own, about people who might have lost time, and about what happened to them afterwards. Searching for the answer to the question: when other people had lost time, had the world lost them?
She found it hard to focus, though, even when it was aliens she was looking at and not anything – hah – closer to home. She wanted to be searching with someone, that was the thing. But it felt too weird of a thing to message Avery about at half past midnight on a Tuesday, and Rosario…
How on earth was she going to talk to Rosario about this?
It kept her up. Really late. By two she was still debating whether or not to message Avery. Would he even be up? He seemed nocturnal, maybe he would? Maybe he’d even be willing to meet up again (at two?) and they could research together, or she could pull him into bed again, and either way she wouldn’t feel quite so alone anymore.
This was so dumb. She had a best friend like, right down the hall. She had to tell her.
Frustrated with herself, Lyra had thrown herself down in her bed and squeezed her eyes shut, sulking herself to sleep, trying not to wish too hard that there was someone else behind her, arm wrapped around her middle.
She felt a bit better in the morning. More determined, in the light of day, though she was still the world’s most distracted window washer that morning. On her morning break (still mostly wearing her harness) she messaged Avery, offering another weird fact about Archer so she wouldn’t just feel like she was leeching off him. She needed him and his knowledge and his belief, she needed stories of abductees that he believed as well, she needed to say to someone else that she was gonna tell Rosario. And Avery gave her everything she wanted, even advice about which angle to take in the telling, and yeah, Lyra had already figured which aspects of the story she needed to lean on the most, but it still felt like validation, hearing it from him. She was probably definitely going to sleep with him again.
Not today, though. Today was for Rosario, and Lyra’s stomach felt like a sack of electric eels as she made her way across campus to meet her.
And the eels went fucking berserk when the doors to Rosario’s lab opened and Archer followed her out – no, not even followed; he was walking at her side, only a fraction behind her because Rosario seemed so intent on motoring out of there. He caught sight of her a second after Rosario did, and every paranoid thought she’d had about him and every suspicious thing Avery had said about him all surged through her at once.
He was gorgeous. Was there something there, behind the beautiful mask? Something sinister her human eyes couldn’t see?
And then Archer grinned at her, and slung an arm around her shoulders. “Hey champ!” he beamed, and Lyra… grinned back? Champ was what they’d all started calling her, after their second round of (very drunk) golf. Champ made her feel like she was part of something exclusive and oh holy god this is exactly what Avery meant.
“Heeeey,” Lyra said, trying to be as normal as possibly with a grin and a squeeze back around his perfectly toned waist, though her eyes quickly found Rosario’s- was she freaking out?? “You guys have the same lab...”