Chapter Text
Even though he never lives for anyone but himself, Phil still likes to keep a schedule.
To those who were raised in space, Phil knows, days mean nothing. They are a mark of when to call a meal ‘breakfast’ and when to call it ‘dinner’, a way to know whether to set an alarm for six hours of sleep or eight.
Not for Phil.
He can still remember the sunrise.
Maybe that’s why he wakes up at what his clock calls 7 A.M. every day, even when he has nothing to do (which is always). Maybe it’s a force of habit at this point. Maybe he likes to pretend that he still has some mission to keep records for.
Whatever the reason, Phil never lets himself sleep in. Even on weekends, he wakes up at the same time, and immediately marks the new date in his log. After that, he makes himself whatever breakfast he can find and pretends that it tastes any different than what he ate the day before. He writes the recipe in his log, too, just in case he wants to use it again.
He never does. It usually takes a few minutes of thinking for him to come up with new foods to try, and following a recipe takes no focus at all. Sometimes the most interesting thing that Phil is able to do all day is finding an interesting way of combining three of the same vegetables that he’s been living on for over a decade.
After that, Phil’s schedule is open for the rest of the day.
When he left Earth, he was given instructions to take care of the plants daily, and take inventory of the seeds once a week. Now, he spends most of his day sitting among the plants, checking their water and light sources once an hour. He takes inventory daily, even though he has it almost memorised by now.
Phil has never hated keeping schedules. He has always accepted the necessity of building a life off of a list of things so small that he has to work to notice them.
(There aren’t any more small things left for him to notice.)
Phil never goes to bed early. There are days when he wants to, when he wishes that he could do anything other than stare at the metal walls or the darkness around him. There are days when he wakes up still remembering blue skies, and all that he wants to do is find them again.
That wouldn’t work. There is nothing waiting for him in his sleep but a lost past and an unlikely future. He knows that by now.
Phil goes to bed at the same time every night. Before he sleeps, he always checks the date, just so that he does not completely lose track of the outside world.
His clock is still set to GMT. Back before he learned to keep to himself, he used to tell that to anyone who was willing to talk with him.
None of them ever knew what it meant.
///
Minx loves sleeping.
She’s sick of pretending that she doesn’t, really. For months, she would wake up every day and mutter something to herself about how lucky she was to be alive, how brilliant it was that she had accomplished her goals when it seemed impossible.
Those were lies, of course.
(She had always known that.)
So this becomes her daily routine: she sleeps in until she cannot possibly sleep for any longer. She kicks her transmitter, or messes around with it until she feels like she has done something. She eats, maybe one time or maybe five. She yells at the sky.
Then she scratches another mark into her tree, watches the sunset, and goes to bed.
It’s a terrible schedule, really, as much as it is a schedule at all. Minx hates it, but that’s fine. She hates many things more.
The only thing that she does not hate is sleeping.
So she does it as much as she can, and when she wakes up, she retells her dreams in enough ways that she will be able to remember them until she can go to bed again.
“It’s a real shame,” she tells herself one day, “that nobody would believe me if they got my signals. They’d probably just think that it’s some insane lonely bitch. Real fuckin’ shame.”
She doesn’t know exactly why anyone would think to call her a liar, but she’s heard as many stories as everyone else.
(It drives you insane, being lost in space with no goals and nobody to talk to. Makes you think that you’re doing things that you’re not. Humanity would go a long, long way to see the colour green again.)
Her transmitter is beginning to make strange noises. Minx doesn’t care, not really. It was always the job of other people to play the technician on their mission, to make sure that everything was running smoothly, and there is nothing that any of them can do for her now. The most that she can do for herself is to ignore it and watch which foods the animals eat. Maybe, if she does that for long enough, she’ll find something that tastes slightly better than what she currently has.
Minx watches the sunset every night, even if she does not want to. She stares at the trees around her, towering and almost familiar to her by now. The sky is something that she thinks she remembers from her youth, but tilted slightly. The colours are brighter, or maybe duller, and Minx is not sure which. The sense of déjà vu threatens to overwhelm her.
Still, it is beautiful.
She hates to admit it, but it is beautiful.
The sunset is beautiful, even if the day presses in on her and the night has too many stars, and Minx always finds herself drawn to it. Sometimes she even almost smiles.
She lives her days by the sunset, now. She wakes up whenever she feels like it, but she always goes to bed when the sun does. It is a habit, the only one that she has, and she grounds herself with it.
Time is waking up. Time is the sunset. Sometimes the days seem longer or shorter, but Minx does not know if that is her imagination.
All of her clocks broke long ago.
///
This is what a dream that has been abandoned feels like:
Phil, looking out of the window and marking down the appearance of a planet that nobody else has paid attention to before, only to find that it holds no potential at all.
If his mission succeeds, Phil will be a hero to what is left of Earth.
If there is nowhere else at all, there will always be a reason for him to keep searching.
He takes care of his plants and stares out of the window. There is almost certainly something out there, but Phil doesn’t know what he would do if he found it. On his most selfish days, he thinks that it might be better to keep it to himself.
(When he first volunteered for this mission, Phil had refused to even call the plants his own. He swore oaths to be true to science and to his goals, and he hugged his parents goodbye, and he would not lay claim to anything that was part of his new life.)
(Phil, who had too many ideals and not enough patience.)
(Phil, who was about to learn just how wide the space is between planets.)
Something within him still holds the hope that everyone was right, that he is guaranteed to succeed if he searches hard enough and treats the life of his ship like his own. This was his destiny, his goal, his promise: he is going to be everything that it implies, and more.
Then another ship calls him in the night, wanting his plants and nothing more, and he remembers that there was always another side to humanity.
He does not accept any offers. This is his one rule to himself, something that he holds in higher regard than even any of his goals.
He’s alone again.
///
This is what a dream that is a lie feels like:
Minx, trying to fix her hut so that she can wake up to something other than a maze of puddles every time that it storms, marking down the leaf shape of every tree that she can find and making up her own categories to tell the species apart.
If she is ever found, Minx will give all of her information to another scientist and try to never think about it again.
If her calls for help lead to nothing at all, her diary will contain more secrets than maybe anyone else in the universe.
She tries to grow fruits in new soil and screams at the sky. She swears as much as she wants to, because in every situation that she currently faces, swearing is exactly as helpful as watching her mouth. Besides, it’s something to say. On her worst days, Minx does not talk at all.
(When she first saw what a planet looked like from space, Minx gasped and pressed her face to the window of her ship. Her crewmates laughed at her, but all that she cared about was the way that a new world was spread out before her. That night, she talked for fifteen minutes into her log, describing every detail she remembered of a planet that had already been studied by other, more experienced teams.)
(Minx, who always wanted to see everything.)
(Minx, who was about to see something that nobody had ever seen before and hate every second that she spent looking at it.)
There are many corners on this planet that she has not yet explored. Minx knows that she should, and she wants to. Really, she wants to be anywhere but where she currently is. She wonders if the planet that she is stranded on has oceans, and if the beaches are made of sand or rock or something that she is not able to identify. She wonders if there is a mountain that she could climb and watch the sunrise from the top of.
She wonders if, somewhere on the other edge of the world, there is a way to make this place her home.
Her transmitter is in front of her, completely broken. Minx has no way to fix it, and even if she did, she has no clue where any tools are.
Minx sighs and sits down next to it. She stares up at the sky and watches for the glint of metal against the sun.
She’s hoping again.
///
Another ship is trying to get his attention.
Phil rarely bothers to pick up their calls anymore, but today he is feeling especially lonely. So he does, and he listens as the person who he has connected with tells him all about the opportunities that await him on a larger ship.
I take the deal, he almost says. Take it all-- all my plants, all my knowledge, all my projects-- and give me a room to sleep in that is crammed with other people. Never let me set my own course again, if I get to talk to them.
He doesn’t say any of that, of course. He’s not sure if he’s too responsible or not responsible enough.
“So,” the person who is talking to him says. She is a woman with a cold voice, smooth enough that Phil has to guess at exactly where her lies begin and end. “It’s a wonderful deal, as I’m sure that you know. We could give you work in the farms, if you want, or as a mechanic-- we have a lot of space open, and I’m sure that you have a wide skill set. No rent is required, other than work. What do you say?”
It is almost an instinct, at this point, to ignore her words.
He still has nightmares about the last time that he tried to integrate into the culture of a ship. He almost lost his own vessel, and even worse, his plants. The captain wanted to use them to start a new section of his own farm.
By now, Phil has learned all too well that Earth’s word carries no weight outside of its atmosphere. The plants are his, and their goal is his goal.
“I’m sorry,” he says, “but I’m doing fine on my own. I have goals that I’m trying to reach. Thank you for the offer, but I don’t need your help.”
She begins to speak more, about loneliness and psychology and recommended courses of action. In the end, Phil has to be the one to cut the connection.
By the time that he does so, he is almost angry, hearing this woman talk about loneliness like it is the worst thing that anyone could ever experience. He can tell, by the tone of her voice, that she has never even truly known it.
She was probably born on the same ship that she now works on.
Phil thinks that he should probably envy her, but he does not have the strength to do so.
Each one of his plants is in its place, that day. He hums under his breath as he counts them, because at the very least, he talked to another person.
///
“Day 331,” Minx says. The timer on her scientific log has long since ceased to function, but somehow, it still records, saves, and plays back her messages-- if you can navigate it interface without the help of a display, of course. Minx is pretty sure that the device could survive the end of the world.
(Maybe it already did.)
God, she wants to stop doing this already. Because she is still technically a professional, and because she trained for years to be allowed to do what she is currently doing, she feels like it is what she has to do. If she could, though, she would give it up even more easily than she gave up setting alarms in the morning.
“It’s really fu-- really bad here,” she says. “As usual, I guess. I found a new bird, though? Or at least I think it’s a new bird. It might just be a male variant of those small ones that feed on flowers and only come out at night-- it shows most of the same behavioral patterns.”
Minx hates naming things. They all feel false on her tongue, like she’s being rewarded for doing something as simple as looking around. The only species on the whole planet that she gave a name was one of the creatures that looks suspiciously like a snake, which bit her on her second day here.
It’s the Fuckface Snake, even though it barely has a face and probably isn’t technically a snake. Minx couldn't care less. She avoids Fuckface Snakes at all costs and never talks about them in her logs.
She talks a bit about edible plants and then ends her log.
When she first arrived here, Minx would play each one back the next day and try to commit the information in it to memory. She gave up on that long ago.
She never says anything that matters in them, anyways.
The only time that Minx says things that matter is when she is staring at the sunset. Sometimes, then, she whispers everything that she still remembers about Earth.
///
Somewhere outside of Phil’s window there is deep space. He knows because he is headed directly towards it.
He cannot see it yet. He knows that he cannot see it yet, because it is all that he looks for whenever he moves to his window. Planets are beautiful, but when they’ve been studied before, he forgets what they look like quickly.
For years, every single moon that he passed was recorded on his maps, with paragraphs of information about the elemental composition of it. Now, most moons are ignored, and some planets have no more information about them than their name.
Someday, Phil knows, he will be able to add a planet to the maps. He already knows what he is going to name the first one that he sees.
The day that he is truly waiting for, though, is the one where he reaches the edge of the map entirely. After that, he will be on his own-- probably for the rest of his life.
The planet that he is currently passing is bright orange. It has a lot of moons and is named after the system that it is in. Its elemental makeup has not been tested.
It’s lovely.
Phil watches it closely, taking note of each of the bands in its colouration. He does not write down anything about it, even though he is still close enough to Earth that his logs may still be returning to them. Nobody was clear about the exact limit of their communications with him, other than that he would be truly alone by the time that he reached deep space.
Phil wants to keep this planet to himself. He doesn’t quite know why. All he knows is that he likes the way that orange looks against the void of space, and he dreamed about being an architect instead of a scientist the night before.
“You’re a good one,” he says to it, “but not for me.”
His ship carries him away.
Phil moves away from the window and waters his plants.
///
The knowledge that she will survive this did not come quickly to Minx. Instead, it was one small part of a revelation at a time, in quiet moments when she was collecting water or watching the ruins of her ship or finding a new tree to make marks on and yell at.
One day, she wakes up with a knowledge of what to do to make it through the day, and that is when she finishes realising that she is still alive, and likely will be for the foreseeable future. That is when Minx starts to think of herself as a survivor .
The knowledge that she will, more likely than not, be able to live here for a full year is not like this. There is nothing to remember. It comes to her all at once, as she is making the mark for day 335.
She’ll be able to make her one-year mark on the same tree that she is currently swearing at. She’ll probably be able to do it on the same line that she just made a scratch in.
That shuts her up quickly. Suddenly, swearing feels wrong.
Even talking feels wrong, so Minx does not talk for the next two days. She watches the way that vines hang down from the trees above her, and they seem greener to her than they have ever been before.
She can only hold one thought in her mind: in less than a month, she will have lived here for one year.
She does not tell this to her logs. She does not know how many entries she has made, but she decides that she will not make any more until it has been a year. It feels right to spend the next month with only her own thoughts for company.
(One year. That’s close enough to a lifetime for it to give Minx pause.)
She tries to observe the world around her, the things that look like insects and the things that she cannot even begin to categorise, for a whole month.
It doesn’t work. After only a week, she finds a tree and starts trying to carve an entire phrase into it:
MINX WAS HERE, ASSHOLES! SHE HATED EVERY SECOND.
While she’s working, Minx can almost forget to pay attention to the sky. She tells herself that it’s just something above her, that it carries no special significance beyond the fact that its atmosphere is the sort that humans can breathe in.
She always goes to bed before it is night. It helps her ignore the universe above her.
Minx is still busy carving her legacy into somewhere that nobody else will ever see, so that she does not have to consider the meaning of one year, when she hears a strange noise.
If she didn’t know better, she would almost say that it sounds like engines.
Minx looks up. The glare of metal nearly blinds her.
///
Phil does not know what to expect when he sees the other ship in the distance.
It is smaller than his, even, an escape probe or something similar. It is not meant for long flights, he knows, but it looks to be headed on the same course as him-- directly into uncharted territory, the sort of place that is only entered by the very desperate and the very naive.
Phil does not know which one he is, but he can make a guess about the ship that is getting closer to him every day.
It is being run on autopilot, by someone who probably does not know enough about maps to correctly program autopilot. Ships aren’t supposed to go as quickly as this one is, Phil knows, unless they are large enough that they only travel pre-approved courses.
Dead space is not a pre-approved course.
It’s enough to make Phil curious, this ship moving like no other ship that Phil has ever seen, careening towards somewhere that no unprepared pilot should ever be.
When the person on it reaches out to Phil and is honest about how much he needs food, it catches Phil off guard.
“You’re a-- one of those ‘vault’ people, right? The plant people, from Earth? Well, I didn’t bring enough rations, and if you have a farm, it would be great to share. I can-- I can do a lot of things. Whatever you want me to, really.”
Rule one. Do not accept any offers.
Phil doesn’t even really need the help. He has his own routine, and it is enough that he could spend his entire life wandering through space without any real goal.
“Why should I?” Phil asks as a courtesy, both to the person who he’s currently talking to and to himself.
His conversation partner knows how to tell a story.
“Please,” he ends with. “I just-- I fucking need this, you know? Out of options. I’m a fun roommate, I promise.”
“Fine. I’ve got your contact, now. Give me your diagnostics, and we can plan a meeting.”
The line cuts quickly. Before it does, Phil can hear the beginnings of a shout.
Despite himself, he smiles.