Title: Immolation, Part 1 of 2

Series: This story is the third of a three-part series. This is a sequel to Wanting and Reconciliation. While I deeply encourage reading those two first, you honestly don't need to read them in order to understand this one.

Author: Hephaistion's Thighs

Rating: Adult, NC-17

Pairing: Mace/Capa

Warnings: plot alternative to canon, sex, dirty talk, sap, violence, death, grief, foreshadowing, angst, some dialog taken directly from the film

Dedication: To The_Azure_Blue for her many messages of encouragement and to DreamSolitudeInnocence for her kind messages on Tumblr.

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Living in space wasn't so bad. There was a zen calm to it. They had the work necessary to stay alive, and little else to do but have deep thoughts and find ways to entertain themselves.

When Mace and Capa would get back to Earth, they might as well just marry each other and settle down, because their lives for the majority of the past year had been a peaceful, domestic existence as a couple. They found a good way to fill their copious time was to experiment with new and interesting ways to have sex.

It wasn't a big deal on the ship. The other crew members knew about it because they weren't idiots. There was general bemusement and the on-board relationship made some of them uncomfortable, but it hadn't become an issue of significance.

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"Concentrate," Capa urged, "You assured me you could perform maintenance under any conditions."

Mace was crouching in front of one of the computer panels of the Payload test control room. That wasn't so unusual, however it was somewhat less typical for him to be nude.

He was trying his damn hardest to focus on the job before him, but Capa's hands were running all over his exposed flesh, taking frequent interest in the space between his legs. Hot lips and the occasional smooth, wet tongue were not helping matters.

The engineer jerked a little at the tweaking of a nipple. "That's cheating!"

"Shh, don't get distracted." Shallow bites began just below Mace's ear and slowly trailed down the tendon there.

Mace groaned as fingers wrapped around his hardness and stroked. His hands were noticeably less steady than usual in their work. He finished the maintenance and hurried to replace the panel cover.

Screws were tightened in a flurry, then the screwdriver was tossed down. "Done!"

Capa smiled. "Good job, I'm impressed. Turn over."

Mace obliged eagerly, maneuvering around and laying back on his elbows. He was rewarded by Capa slinking in between his legs and going down on him.

Soft wet heat enveloped his most sensitive appendage, and a gasp ground out of his throat. He closed his eyes and just enjoyed himself until what was left of his brain reminded him Capa might appreciate some praise for all his kind ministrations.

"God, Capa." Okay, so maybe he didn't have much eloquence with which to generate praise. "You're so good," he managed, "I love you."

The dark-haired man seemed to respond positively to this, one hand moving to add more attention to Mace.

"Can I fuck you?"

Capa released him for a moment. "Sorry, I have my own work to get to soon."

"Oh come on. You have plenty of time to do that later. It's the same thing every time anyway. The bomb works."

"I already spent too long torturing you. I have sequences I'm scheduled to run today. We can fuck tonight," Capa reasoned.

"But I mean..." Mace was determined to talk his way into sex. "You've got to be hard as hell by now. What kind of person would I be if I didn't get you off in return?" He was surprised he was able to make an argument at all in this state. "That will take a while, so we might as well just make love together and solve both our problems at once."

"You're almost there," Capa said. By contrast, he was still fully clothed and didn't have anything but his boxers for manual stimulation. "You'll be done long before I am."

"Well stop suckin' on it and it will calm down."

Capa sat back and studied Mace, who gave his best come-hither look. He saw Capa bite his lip and knew he had to be extremely turned on. He leaned forward and ran his hands up the other man's shirt. "You want this."

Capa consented by kissing Mace and straddling him.

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The Icarus I. It was half a miracle and half an unwanted ghost. The Project Icarus mission planners had run innumerable scenarios and crunched endless numbers, but the probability of encountering the other ship had been considered so remote, there had been no protocol established.

"It's a risk assessment. The question is: Does the risk of a detour outweigh the benefits of an extra payload?" Searle proposed.

No one said anything, only looking between each other silently.

Mace broke it. "We'll have a vote."

"No, no," Searle interjected quickly, "No, we won't. We're not a democracy. We're a collection of astronauts and scientists. So we're going to make the most informed decision available to us."

"Made by you by any chance?" Mace challenged.

Kaneda spoke up, ending the discussion. "Made by the person best qualified to understand the complexities of the Payload delivery: our physicist."

All eyes turned to the corner, to the person most removed from the group.

"Shit."

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"I know you don't agree with my decision."

Mace turned to look at Capa and took a deep breath. He didn't want to be angry at him. He knew and trusted that the physicist made the decision he thought was best based on the function of the dark matter bomb. He still thought he was wrong. He couldn't help but harbor some anger. They should stick to the mission; going to the Icarus I was not part of the plan.

"That ship will not fly," he said finally. If it could, the original crew should have made it all the way to the delivery point.

Capa didn't want a fight. He knew he had to explain his thinking in the right way to make Mace understand. "Unpredictability is the problem," he said. "At this point it doesn't look like we'll encounter any problems by detouring, but we don't know. There are a huge number of problems that have the potential to present themselves."

"Are you arguing my point now?" Mace asked.

Capa shook his head. "That uncertainty is trumped by another. The mechanics of the two ships matter, but the real problem comes down to quantum mechanics, neutrino astronomy, nuclear physics... The fact of the matter is, my bomb might not work. And it wouldn't necessarily be because the design is just wrong. There are infinite variables..."

Capa's eyes moved in thought and Mace knew he could never fully understand the things going through his lover's head in that moment.

"If the first one doesn't work, there's still a real chance the second one would. Two last hopes are better than one."

Mace nodded slowly. "Okay. I hope this goes routinely."

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The couple passed through the flight deck where the ship's navigator had his calculations laid out.

"Don't forget the shields," Capa said as they went.

"I've got it, Capa." Trey's voice held a restrained irritation. All of the crew members were brilliant, but only two of them stood far above the rest as geniuses. Trey always quietly resented being considered the 'other', secondary genius, and his self-confidence didn't need the other child prodigy on board encroaching on his work.

Mace gave Trey a sympathetic look and followed his boyfriend out.

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Capa watched Mace reading.

People didn't seem to notice just how beautiful Mace was. Perfectly shaped muscles shifted beneath pale skin. The perfectly shaped quality of Mace's body deserved elaboration in Capa's mind. The structure of his form had bulges and dips Capa's own never had. His composition was dense; when he tensed the muscles became tight and hard. Capa loved watching them twitch and ripple under his touch.

Unable to resist, he ran a hand down Mace's chest. The engineer glanced toward him and gave a small smile. It was a tight fit for them to lie together on the bed, but they were accustomed to managing.

Capa turned his contemplation toward his lover's face. People liked to remark upon Capa's eyes, but the physicist was partial to Mace's blues. Framed nicely by the man's strong brow, they were a greyer blue than Capa's and had yellow around the iris that reminded Capa of the light of the Sun's corona in an eclipse.

"What are you looking at?" Mace asked curiously.

Capa just smiled.

"C'mere." Mace set his book aside – not his book, he hadn't brought any, but one borrowed from Cassie - and pulled Capa into his arms.

Capa hugged him in return, body settling into place against Mace's. He was anxious about their impending rendezvous with Icarus I, but he still felt content in this moment.

He thought enough credit wasn't given to Mace's personality either. The man did have some problems expressing his emotions - he had been trained to suppress so much in favor of hard-cut black and white thinking that everything else inside him had a bad habit of seeping out in antagonism to his crewmates or bursting out in anger or overreaction. But his extended closeness to Capa made their interactions the exception to the rule, and Capa felt fortunate to have access to Mace's deeper nature. There could also be no doubt that having Capa helped keep Mace more calm and steady.

In truth, Mace was a good guy. Highly intelligent but unconcerned with pretension, straight-forward and genuine, Mace had a fierceness to him that Capa couldn't help but feel strongly attracted to. Now that they were no longer at each other's throats every day, Mace was really quite companionable and - dare he say it - sweet.

Capa pressed his lips to Mace's skin. "I love you."

"...love you..." Mace mumbled, already half asleep.

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The docking procedure between the Icarus II and its wayward predecessor was rocky, which only heightened the apprehensive tension among the crew.

The ship was stable, but the resilience of its structure did nothing to detract from the sense that it was decaying. So much dust, it was like the walls themselves were sloughing dead flesh.

Kaneda and Searle went to the living quarters, both looking for any record of what had caused the mission to fail. Corazon went to the oxygen garden. Mace went to the flight deck to see if they would be able to operate the ship. Capa went to the Payload.

The physicist entered the vast bomb chamber. To say it was eerie was an understatement. Capa was the only Icarus II crew member to have been on the Icarus I before. He had spent a great deal of time here, actually. The stellar bomb was built in space, and he had been present intermittently for its construction and constantly for its testing. He'd slept here. This was his baby.

It was supposed to be the one and only. He wasn't supposed to ever be back here again after he let it go.

As he crossed the long path toward the door to the interior, a chilling voice echoed through the dark void around him.

"I am Pinbacker, commander of the Icarus. We have abandoned our mission. Our star is dying! All our science, all our hopes, our... Our dreams are foolish! In the face of this... We are dust, nothing more. And to this dust we will return. When He chooses for us to die, it is not our place to challenge God."

Capa did not shudder, but the instinct to do so was strong.

"Okay, that make sense to anyone?" Mace's voice over the comm tags broke the effect, and the reports between the others continued.

Capa continued down into the interior platform and plugged into the console. The lights came on, fingers executed a well-known routine, and tiny miracles sparked to brilliant life around him.

Capa smiled. It worked, and it was so beautiful. There had been a time when making this thing go off was the only thing that would make him smile.

"The Payload is fully operational."

"Repeat, Capa?" Kaneda requested.

"The Payload is fully operational, it's A-okay," he reported again.

"Excellent. It looks like the detour gave us what we hoped."

Capa had a lifting feeling of joy. This meant they had two shots; this could make the difference that would save mankind. But his joy was short-lived.

"No it didn't." Mace's voice came through.

"Go ahead, Mace," the captain prompted.

"I know what caused the distress signal. There was a coolant failure of some kind, and the bottom line is it doesn't matter that there's an extra payload. Without the mainframe, we can't fly. It's been sabotaged."

The detour had been for nothing. One last hope was all they would have. All they had gained was the knowledge that their heroes, the men and women they had years ago been sure would save the Earth, had lost faith in their mission and chosen to let humanity die.

"I got something to say." Searle's voice seemed removed from everything else being discussed. "I found the crew."

The recent moment of joy may not have existed. Capa turned the console off, plunging his creation into final darkness.

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He joined Searle and Kenada in the observation room.

"What happened?"

"They had an epiphany... saw the light."

"They burned themselves?" Emotion shook his normally even tone.

Mace entered silently. He saw Capa looking especially pale and staring at one of the charred skeletons. He moved to his side, a gesture both comforting and instinctively protective.

"Nakazawa..." A metal bar was visible in the burned form's arm. Dr. Thomas Nakazawa had it permanently implanted after a bad broken bone when he was thirty-eight.

Nakazawa had been the Icarus I physicist. He had been Capa's friend and the closest thing to his intellectual equal. They both operated on a different wavelength from the rest of the population, and Nakazawa had been absolutely key in bringing the young Robert Capa's idea into reality. They had exchanged weekly messages until the Icarus I had entered the dead zone, and Capa had always wondered with distress what had happened to him.

"He wouldn't do this," Capa said. Mace couldn't hear real conviction in his voice. The man needed denial to deal with his colleague's self-inflicted fate. He could tell Capa hadn't been prepared for this level of horror. He hadn't been either, but he wasn't as affected. For himself, he didn't feel much grief for the Icarus I crew.

"I suspect the observation filter was fully open," Searle said. "If we weren't behind the screen of Icarus II, we'd join them. Ashes to ashes... Stardust to stardust..."

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Cassie and Harvey were staying on the flight deck to talk to the exploring crew. Trey paced behind them anxiously.

Learning of the first crew's fate made him fight the desire to tell Harvey to call the others back quickly. They were safe behind the shield, but, against logic, he couldn't shake the feeling that the threat that had ended Icarus I was still there with the corpses.

He made his way to the airlock, as if waiting for them would make them return sooner. He turned the last corner and froze.

There... He stepped back, a bodily reaction to his own shock.

"There's a... thing!" he shouted. He didn't even know what he was seeing.

The face of the entity turned toward him.

"It's a person! There's someone else on the ship!"

The image before Trey's eyes shook. What he was seeing didn't seem real or possible. It didn't make sense. The figure turned away from him and moved toward the auxiliary airlock controls.

Trey just stared until his training kicked in. He could hear urgent questions coming through the communication link, but there wasn't time to answer, he could only charge forward and tackle the unknown being.

The creature was pushed away from the controls and knocked to the floor under the young mathematician's force. But it struck back, and Trey was quickly pinned with a hand around his throat.

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Seven panicked astronauts converged on the passage between the two ships.

Cassie and Harvey got there first. They both stilled for a moment of disbelief at what they were seeing, but the flailing form of their crewmate beneath the anomaly made them move.

It didn't even seem to be a creature made of flesh that they pulled away. Light bent and warped around what might once have been a man, and his skin made a horrible sound when they touched it.

Trey was freed with a gasp and a cough, but his assailant threw Cassie's light weight away and shoved Harvey backward.

Corazon arrived next. She hadn't been with the others in the observation room; she had no interest in seeing death.

"What happened? What's going on?"

The monster was gone.

"One of the other crew is on the ship," Harvey said breathlessly.

"He tried to decouple the airlock!" Trey supplied.

"Where is he?" Kaneda and the others arrived at a run. "Trey! Where did he go?"

"I don't know-"

"He's still on the ship," Harvey said. "I'm not sure which way he went..." The officer's eyes darted between the surrounding doorways.

"Cassie, move us away from the Icarus I," the captain ordered. "Icarus, where is the unknown person on board?"

"Mainframe room."

"Shit!" Mace's exclamation was appropriate as he disappeared down the corridor at a sprint.

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The ship's lights went off and were replaced by the sparse emergency lights as Mace arrived. Kaneda and Capa were right behind him.

All four mainframe towers were standing out of the coolant.

"You cannot fight the will of God," the terrible voice came from the shadows.

But this was no deity, this was one insane man. The other men didn't know why he was doing this or what had happened to him - all that mattered was that he was trying to stop their mission.

Mace attacked him, striking hard and fast. The other was inhumanly strong, and grabbed the engineer by the throat in between blows, throwing him into one of the mainframes with a crash.

Kaneda blocked the invader from pursuing retaliation against Mace. The captain's opponent was much larger than him, but Akira Kaneda was a force of human nature in himself. He wouldn't allow anything to cause his mission to fail.

When Searle arrived, the others had the mutated being overpowered, though not easily. The doctor plunged a syringe into the juncture of the burned man's neck and shoulder. He kept fighting, but gradually stopped and slumped to the floor when his saner successors released him.

Shaky breaths filled the dark room.

"Pinbacker." By the stripe of light cast across the prone man's face, Capa's mind caught up enough to realize who this was.

"Searle, help me bring him to the medical bay," Kaneda ordered. "Mace, get this fixed!"

The mainframe was still out of the coolant, the sub-system monitor was flashing the short amount of time they had to amend that before heat damage became permanent. A few of the computer boards had been cracked during the fight, one even had a jagged chunk broken off and lying on the floor.

He addressed the crew as a whole over the comm tags, "Everyone get to the mainframe room to assist in repairs. Corazon, bring portable lights."

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Capa wrapped his arms around Mace's shivering body, rubbing him through the blanket and lending his body heat. His partner had been forced to submerge himself in the coolant tanks in order to lower the mainframe stacks.

Mace's teeth chattered and he leaned into Capa more. He wanted nothing more than to be enveloped by Capa and let him take care of him for the next eternity.

Searle brought another heated blanket and helped Capa tuck it firmly around Mace.

Pinbacker was dead. The captain of the Icarus I had gone quickly and quietly by way of a sedative overdose. With a whimper, as the hollow men would say. They would never know what had caused such an extreme and complete transformation in the once principled man.

"We'll need you to help the others go through the system and see the effects of the damage," Searle said.

Capa looked reluctant to leave Mace. "Alright."

"You can have a few minutes more," the psychologist added kindly.

"Thank you." Capa stroked Mace's back.

"Too s-stiff to le-let him go, anyw-way," the engineer got out with a miniscule chattering laugh.

With the two men's care, Mace's body temperature was soon returned to normal and it was safe enough for him to sleep and recover his strength.

Searle went with the couple as Capa brought Mace to the living quarters. It was a little funny to watch the smaller man support the bigger one, and he took note of the fact that Capa didn't stop at the engineer's room but rather his own.

Mace and Capa made an extremely unexpected pairing, but they had become inexorably endearing to Searle. Seeing them so in love every day made him happy and sad at the same time. He was glad they had found each other, but they made him wish he had someone of his own to be that close with.

Capa escorted Mace to his bed and pulled the sheets and blanket over him, crouching to be at his eye level and caressing his short hair. Mace took hold of Capa's hand.

"Don't go," he murmured.

"I have to. I need to make sure we're okay," Capa said gently.

Mace relented and let him go. Capa gave him a soft, chaste kiss and left him.

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Mace found Capa at one of the consoles on the flight deck, brow furrowed at the screen in front of him.

"What's going on? Kaneda said you were going to check the Payload and report back to him, and that was over an hour ago."

The engineer hadn't stayed asleep for long; his body was tired, but his mind was in mission mode and couldn't rest while his ship was in disrepair.

Capa kept at what he was doing, only turning his head slightly toward Mace for a moment without actually looking at him. "Not right now. I need to do this." Capa was preoccupied and didn't have excess focus to allow for Mace distracting him.

"Is there a problem?" Mace asked.

"Mace, I need to concentrate. Can you talk to me later?" It was the indirect way of saying, 'Can you just leave me alone?'

"Okay." Mace backed off and left the other to his work. That was very unusual, though. Normally Capa was fine with him hanging around while he worked; just as Mace could finish a job while Capa was testing every ounce of his resolve, Capa was quite comfortable with holding a conversation while processing massive equations in his head.

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The crew was assembled once Capa finally reemerged from the Payload. The rest of the damage assessment had been completed some time ago, but they had been waiting for the most critical component. Capa waited quietly for everyone to gather and for the captain to signal him to begin.

"The Payload is operational." The man's affect warded off any cheering over this good news. "But we no longer have the ability to initiate the detonation sequence from the flight computer."

"We can't detonate?" Harvey asked with a definite tinge of panic in his tone.

"No, we can still detonate," Capa clarified, "but the delivery program was lost in the damage to the mainframe. I will initiate detonation from inside the Payload."

"Can you do that before the separation?" Cassie asked.

Capa paused. "No. Normally detonation would be automated as the end of the delivery sequence. Now we need to manually initiate delivery, and then manually initiate detonation once the Payload reaches the Sun's interior."

Mace straightened abruptly. "From inside the Payload?" He had just grasped what exactly Capa was saying.

Capa met his eyes. He had avoided looking at him up to this point.

"Yes."

"No. No way in hell. We'll find another way," Mace said firmly.

"I'm open to suggestions, but I haven't come across any alternatives yet." Capa's voice was flat and worn; he was mentally and emotionally exhausted by this point. He couldn't keep looking at Mace and try to square with the fact that when they had woken up they were going to spend their whole lives together, and now he had no life left to spend.

"Well fuck that plan! We're not doing that!"

"Mace-" the captain began.

"No! He'd die!"

"Mace!" The engineer went quiet for Kaneda to speak. "We will pursue any alternatives we can. But you have to understand that this is a contingency we may be forced to utilize." He wasn't being callous, but he was being firm on this point. The mission was more important than any of their lives.

"We can't do this," Mace continued to argue.

"We're less than twenty-four hours from the delivery point," Searle spoke up. "If there is an alternative, we need to find it soon."