For Days 10 (Distant) and 11 (Safe & Sound)
Title: but I think I'm a believer, I believe in something new
title lyric from: Space Melody; VIZE/Alan Walker
Tags: Space AU; Space Opera; rebellion; drama; romance; Expanse influences
"By the time this finds you, beloved, I'll be a fragment of a star."
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Neptune's been in the rearview for days, the outside of the emergency podship's creeping with a crackled, severe coating of frost, and Sakura removes her gloves, clutches her communicator in her hands which are already trending blue-grey. It'll have to be quick.
Navigation's damaged after clipping a particularly large shard of space debris, spinning even further off course from the intended, invisible gridlines in the vacuum void, and she's spent the last hours (or is it days or weeks or months or nothing because what's time here) ruminating, following thought-threads in her head into places too dark to voice, say out loud.
She hooks her foot under a pipe snaking as undergrowth beneath the command panels to hold herself in place; the gravity mechanism's failing and she's now used to intermittently going on the float. And who wants to be tethered in the end anyway?
Options dwindling; if she wasn't a premiere ship mechanic, brainiest of the military class she'd ended up spurning anyway — not for brighter, twinkling star frontiers but for gritty, outer belt enterprises; did she regret that now? who could say? — she'd already be a floating meatsack. Airless, mouth frozen mid-scream, the way most people perish in the middle of space.
Panic is a demon, and walking alongside Charon, both accompany souls across the river.
Thankfully there's only the slightest hairline crack in the screen. He'll be able to see her face one last time, albeit tinged and turning blue from the thin oxygen atmosphere, the frigid temperatures of blackest space.
The communicator would sputter if it could, on its last legs, giving all its effort. Blinking in its brightness, quelling shivers, she taps the screen hard and begins to record.
"By the time this finds you, beloved, I'll be a fragment of a star."
Pausing, already. How do you say goodbye?
"First let me say what you already know — I adore you. Your love and likeness exist in every part of me, imprinted on each atom, and when they're scattered, inevitably, just know I'm there."
Small talk, winding down to eulogy and ending in . . . will she have to say it?
"I suppose you should know what happened after we all split up. The Lagertha took on heavy fire from the other pirate factions, and in the end there was no room to talk, to convince them of our common enemy — only to fill them with slugs and tear them apart. The language of ships beyond the Belt, as you know."
When her foot slips she lets it, booted toe scraping the metal until the last second in which she pushes off to wind herself in a languid roll, turning over in the air with a behemoth density so reminiscent of many of the ships she spent her time in.
"But we'd sustained damage too, and long story short, we had to kiss and fly. Ino secured an emergency pod with Neji; Lee got one too, somewhere in that mess." Turning over slowly in the air as if roasting on a spit, except it's far too cold and dead for that.
Pink hair fanning and floating around her head as some phosphorescent rainforest species. Could be a halo.
Could be a ritual headdress for the dead.
"Knowing you both, I'm sure you and Naruto were able to fight your way out on your end as well. Or perhaps you're snug and warm on our homeship, in which case I hope there's coffee left, so you can have a cup for me. Or that you didn't take on too many prisoners or refugees in the hold. It could be either one."
She pauses, and hates the tears that ebb out of her eye and stay suspended, edges collapsing and shimmying, fermenting some primordial discomfort in her gut.
"Speaking of Naruto . . . I hope he's okay."
He wasn't. Never would be. Hadn't been for a long time. Not with his first wife functioning as a princess pawn in an intergalactic skirmish and dying for the honor; not with his second great love being on the other side of enemy lines as an eminent Mars general, where the motives for pursuing one another would never be truly transparent. Swirling in a torrid fable, layered with betrayal and tragic pining and prominent details that were true, baked in archetype and sprinkled with each storyteller's zest: Love, honor, intent, justice — these things were so easily corrupted in larger political games.
Their own legacy, she knows, is not much different. Two average kids spurning the easy path for the fraught and messy business of trying to revolutionize the world. Idealistic. Stupid.
It's getting harder to breathe, in this thin and fraying air.
There's a sharp, honed scent; it burns and withers the tip of her nose. Another ship system is failing. These emergency podships weren't meant to last.
Sakura's laugh cantillates as gentle chimes, a facsimile of breeze where there is none. Tears keep slipping, undulating, and she hopes this all reaches him.
"Ah, what else can I say?" she murmurs, tilting her head. "I'm remembering the whole of my life now, as you do when you sense the end. The mind knows, rips you through a thousand memories in fractions of seconds. I see my graduation as I remember earth's soil, our first meeting as I remember killing my first man, and all they do is fall on top of one another until the context disappears."
Lights on the command panel flicker and snuff themselves out one by one, beginning as a single bulb here and there, as raindrops swallow dry dust in the desert by way of pinpoints until it all becomes a sweep.
"But never forget," she says quietly, swallowing around the sob in her throat, "that we caught fire and changed the world, and I've never wanted to do that with anyone but you."
Dwindling.
"Live," she hisses. Thumb hovering over the screen now, the split in the screen reflecting the one in her voice. "Whoever wins will tell the story, but the only person who knows ours . . . is you, beloved."
Disassociating for a second, green eyes fixed on the encroaching ice. Life reflected in the fractals; she has been reduced to this, entombed.
"Fight on." Whisper threaded now, out of time, out of oxygen —
"Burn bright, Sasuke."
When her finger presses the glaring red send key and the tinny confirmation pings, echoing in her icy tomb, she slips from consciousness with a small smile on her face.
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If a message pings in the middle of space and no one's around to hear it, does it make a sound?
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An underwater sensation, groggy and soused.
Then — pain, coming in hot and prickling, successive layers of crushing and overwhelming —
"Whoa, whoa!"
Eyelids like lead, opening them seems insurmountable: Instead comes the clipped and keen scent of disinfectant, starched sheets touching her skin and they are somehow unbearable along with the rank smell of someone holding vigil for days.
She knows that annoying voice.
Naruto?
"I almost hugged ya," he says, clicking his tongue. "Almost messed that one up." His heh! sounds tic-like, throat sounding the noise around a lump. Gods, was he crying?
So she opens her heavy, bruised eyes.
The brightness of the white sickbay and its lights sends her stomach lurching, spurring nausea, the afterimages of the familiar and so particular tone of hospital wattage lingering after every blink. Sprawled and unshaven in a chair, a knitted and frayed thing from his first wife — and now she tries to swallow her own lump — rumpled on the floor.
"Is this—?" She coughs, cries out from the pain from it, tries again, raspier this time. "Is this our ship?"
Naruto nods, hitching on a smile for her sake. "We got you. It's been a while, though. A lot's gone on since you—"
"How long?"
"Ahh, shit." He actually counts on his fingers. "I don't know, you've been in a coma, the bastard's been a total wreck, we lost a lot of people, ship's toast."
Sakura turns her head toward him, wincing at the kink in her neck. Feels a pinch in her nose, emotion welling up so fast, too fast, embarrassing.
"C-can you . . . please?"
"Oh! Yeah, sorry, look at me, wasting time here — he's gonna be — just stay here. Well," and he rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand, laughing weakly again, "you're sorta in no condition to, okay! Don't look at me like that, geez . . ."
He hurries out, and she swears there's a spring in his step.
Sifting through her thoughts, frankly, hurts. Trying to grasp the edge of each memory floating as fragments in the murk, catching them one by one only for them to slip, faintly-outlined, questionable existence.
Sending the message, the creeping frost, the gravity mechanism finally giving up; that all, she remembers. But the flashes of
using all her weight to wrench the closet open, the door bent from the collision,
clutching the oxygen tank from the suit, the yellow glow a searing color through the edges of her vision fluttering, fading into black
checking the seals desperately, saying a prayer,
and flinging herself through the airlock —
Heartbeat monitor skipping, beginning to wail as her chest pounds and he's in the doorway, looking fucking disheveled and bruise-eyed and held together by nothing but she sees him mouth her name through the deafening alarms summoning who knows, they have no doctors or nurses in their crew and suddenly he's close, shaking when he takes her arm and no no no that hurts, groaning, and he lets go and instead bends over her, still splayed out on this sickbed, pressing his forehead to hers while tears mix salty, no way to tell who's whose.
Hand tethered by an IV line, she strains it to touch his hair. Sasuke thumbs away her tears and likely his own; she can feel them as they range in temperature, all the cold dead ones making way for the new, living, hopeful. The fire she fell in love with at their first meeting and all the desire still.
"My father was right," she whispers. "Following you was trouble."
But she laughs, quiet and constrained by pain, and the pull of his lips, the way he smirks, causes those same physical signs of affection — butterflies, trembling fingers.
"You're still healing," he says, taking her fingers. "You'll be in here for quite a while."
"I've already been here 'quite a while,'" she mimics, flashing a grin. "I need to know what's going on, Sasuke."
Some inscrutable look from him, but he takes up Naruto's vacated seat, obliges, clutching her hand in a way that belies the brave front he's trying to show her now.
"How did you find me?"
"Your last message included location data, so we were able to burn toward you quickly. At least it led us to your podship."
"What . . . do you mean?"
Sasuke's eyebrows furrow in concern. "You don't remember?"
"I sent the message and heard it ping, and by then was running out of air. I remember . . ." But Sakura trails off, realizing she doesn't.
He leans forward, grip a little tighter, hair falling over his eyes.
"We found you floating a few klicks away," he continues. "In an evac suit. No oxygen left to speak of, the seals in it giving in to the pressure and about to blow. Comms were broken and you were unconscious by then anyway, so."
A pause.
"You really don't remember, Sakura?"
I won't die here; not in this junkship.
"Bits and pieces. But I don't understand," and she clears her throat, "why you sound so angry with me."
"Right." Sasuke's head snaps up, nostrils flaring. "Why would I be upset that you were bombed, escaped in a junker pod that barely missed being destroyed, and found you floating in the fucking void, basically dead, what could I possibly," he hisses, sloe eyes glittering, "be upset about?"
"Sasuke—"
"I sent you out there," he interrupts. "My orders put you there."
"Everyone's risking their lives for this cause, not just you and I."
"Then I find you floating out there, in that nothingness; at best it was reckless." His exhale is angry, a wounded, skittish bull. "At worst it was suicidal."
"Would you want to die that way?" she lifts her head, anger cleaving through the pain. "In a tiny pod, wilting away as each basic building block of life bleeds out? No, screw that. I wanted to live."
"Well you did," he retorts. "And I'm making sure it stays that way."
Dangerous and still, Sakura's voice takes on a new quality, like steel wool. "And what does that mean?"
Releases her hand, getting to his feet.
"We're stopping off at the nearest ship repair outpost." His tone is odd, neutral. "Naruto and I will continue on to the Ring."
All that Sakura can muster is a snort. "Um, no, not if that means you're going without me."
"This isn't a request. I'm the Captain."
"You're a coward. And you would cut me out of a revolution and a new galaxy over what? You think this is noble, hiding me away like a prize? You think you can save me when the real fight begins? When every major military power comes down on this wormhole and vies for its value?"
Muttering angrily, her fuck this is lost in the alarm that starts up as she removes her IV without ceremony.
"I'm ordering you to—"
"Over my dead, spaced body."
Sitting up, she tries to stifle every groan while testing each limb, wishing she was strong enough to stand up straight and shake him. Even at full height he's towering, but she lifts her chin, glaring.
"I love you," she says. "I know you have a hard time saying it. I know your guilt, Sasuke."
He mutters something about her IV. She ignores his snark.
"I broke out of that pod because I was desperate to live; to see you again and carry out this revolution." Steps closer, limping. "Believe me when I say I'll do that with or without you." Feet dragging still, every muscle searing, just wanting to be close enough to grab him by the collar, show him his idiocy and shortsightedness.
And she trips, weightless —
into his arms.
"Didn't . . . didn't you hear my message?" she whispers, soaking his shirt with hot, uncontrollable tears.
"You're ridiculous," he murmurs. "You can't even stand." Slipping an arm under her knees, he comes with her to the floor in a gentleness she's been missing for days, weeks, months since the skirmishes began, and again, what is time in space like this?
Nudging her head under his chin, she continues her tirade through snuffles and the edges of sobs.
Nothing revolutionary, or worth changing, ever came without cost.
With his lips in her hair, he says, so quiet it may not be real,
I couldn't live if the cost was you.
Now that he has a hold on her, the crushing sensation and meaning of her loss dire and smothering presses on his shoulders, fills his lungs to manifest in simultaneous anxiety and terror as choking and breathlessness in common overwhelm, but she's real now, though the haunting phantasm branded in his grey matter of blue-tinged skin bringing out the hollow whites of her eyes that crossed the dead river and back, he knows, will linger.
He gently takes her by the scruff of the neck, coaxing her to look at him. Eyes jade and so sparkling, tenacious, alive.
Voice, hers, like a melody he's ached for, sorely missed,
"We have a story to tell, beloved."
In agreement Sasuke offers her the tenderest kiss, something shy that brings her back to their young military academy years — before the defection, before the word or even mere concept of revolution was a star in her orbit — and she remembers him then, ambitious and talented and even a little ruthless, fire in his heart and in the tips of his ears when he went for it the first time, a chaste press of the mouth that spurred over a decade of romantic rebellion, the shattering of how they thought the world worked and the plan to remake it in the image of the people.
And he holds her face close, mouthing the prophetic mantra against her split and swollen lip,
"Let's catch fire."
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Incoming transmission, tightbeam, text only:
sender: Yamanaka Ino . . . |
forehead! … made it to asteroid outpost. hyuuga = spacesick from lo gravity. too pretty for all this puking! if you & your handsome space terrorist are planning to scoop us up now's a good time! Including coordinates ❤︎