Notes: Alternate universe, astronaut Ichigo. From the August 12, 2005 prompt for the lj community 31_days.
He imagined he could see it from here.
The dry grass crunched under his feet; he wandered in and out of fields.
Space was silent all around him.
Somewhere to his left, a few birds rustled and took wing.
He imagined birds flying without air.
He stood in the middle of the field and watched time go on without him.
He was swallowed into the walls, resolute and cold, surely pulling on his suit as it wrapped itself around him; his limbs felt trapped. He was immovable, unmoving. Everything was shrinking.
His fingers curled in her hair; he didn't know what she tasted like; he didn't want to stop. They were drunk on the sun; everything was alive for miles.
Earth reflected in his helmet; he was scowling behind the mirrored glass and no one could see. Once in a lifetime, he thought, and life was so far away. Earth reflected in his dreams, swimming in limitless blue. If he wanted to drown now, he couldn't.
He felt everything; his skin was breathing and everything was on fire; he looked away when he realized she was looking back.
The sparks danced off his fingertips, jumping from the wiring and wiggling, sputtering into little deaths. He cursed when he accidentally soldered the wrong ones together.
He could give up on oxygen he thought, and subsist on her forever. He inhaled greedily her eyes, her lips, her hands, and touched in every place a prayer.
How long would it take before his soft tissues became too soft, before the absence of pressure was too much (not enough?), before he needed to breathe? He breathed, and counted.
He felt like he was living for the very first time; he was starved for air; he wanted more than anything to touch her again; he felt like he was dying every time.
There were a million ways to die, he thought. But he wasn't crazy, and he wasn't waiting around for it. More often than not, out here it was waiting for him.
He kissed her bare legs in the grass; she laughed at him. She ruffled his mess of hair, bringing his chin down for another kiss. Her breath soft against his ear, his face buried in her neck, they pulled apart. Their sneakers torn and faded, kicked off one atop the other. Her fingers traced words soft on his wrist; she could be soft; she tasted sweet and strong. He pulled his jeans on; she reached for his hand again impatiently. He was self-conscious; she watched him pull his shirt over his head; he was dressing so slowly; didn't this usually go faster; it came off so fast; was she still looking; damn was it really inside out. She pulled it off again just as slowly, palms against his stomach, his shoulders.
His boots were laced up high; he stretched his fingers experimentally in the gloves before fitting his headset to his ears and positioning the mouthpiece just so. He almost wished for the comforting crackle and buzz of the speaker in his ear, but this was top-notch equipment. The suit didn't pinch, bunch, snag or drag on his body and he knew he would feel even better in it without the art-grav. The engineers must've been nostalgic because it felt so forcefully present, realer than the physics of earth.
She wore his shirt home, as she traipsed carelessly through the dust and the wheat she didn't look back to see him; she smiled to herself; she fisted her hands in his too-big shirt. He almost ran after her, it'd be silly there was always tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and he could realize everything about her all over again - how she touched him slightly without seeming to, how openly her eyes searched his, how she almost frowned when she slept almost cuddled into him, how good she looked in his ratty T-shirt.
He could be swallowed into the sun, he supposed. He would reduce to ash, a streaky black-gray dust. He could give up on burning; he could superheat. He would never be collected into anything or buried or scattered because there was no dirt, no air, no people. Her ashes would seep into everything, or be inhaled by some lucky son-of-a-bitch who would have the audacity to cough, or swirl up into the sky and fall down again. She would never escape the atmosphere and he would never enter it, and they would never be together.
When he enlisted she didn't see him off; his family went but not her, and he'd looked once, twice, again. He knew she was angry, of course she was angry, but she never stayed angry, not at him. She really hadn't come; he'd be off-world for two years; she couldn't exactly visit; he'd have to write her so that she would know where to write. It was new, exciting; he was changing the world; she couldn't see that if she could why wasn't she here. He saw girls crying, making those eyes and cracked voices and watery smiles; he heard babies crying; shit how could guys leave their kids?
The flag seemed like a quaint landmark in the midst of the sprawling colony city. How much higher would you create life? It had been nearly six years of service and the skyscrapers only seemed to get taller, the streets more crowded. More people were relocating, every week it seemed; he scanned the lists for her name. He knew his dad wouldn't move while his sisters were still in school.
She saw him but he didn't see her; she saw him at five years old grinning like an idiot, at ten with his eyes so wet and hard; she saw him at fifteen years old in nothing but his underwear. She didn't want him to see her; she looked at him and saw everything, heard his voice in her ears saying nothing, maybe humming, his arms around her waist where no one could see, his letters, his cd collection sitting on his bed, sitting under the sky. His eyes scanned the crowd again; she lowered her eyes she couldn't, didn't want to be here; she didn't want him to see her like this.
He was writing history. Wryly, he thought that he'd be sitting next to dinosaurs on the lofty shelf of unsustainable fantasies that once amused the universe.