Chapter Text
Day One. nebulae - vague, conceptual, dreamlike. full of potential and what might be, swirling with the hopes and dreams of stars yet to be born.
It had been years, but Yuuri remembers the first time he had seen a nebulae. He had been 8 and bored out of his mind at school. He wasn’t a bad student, and he usually found his classes interesting, but that day the time had seemed to drag and not even Science, his favourite subject, had made it better, especially because they were on the History part of it. He just wanted to finish class and run to find Mari, who had promised to get him a holovid recording of last night’s skate. He had wanted to watch it live, but not even being the first time Hasetsu had an athlete in the Olympics had been enough for his parents to let him be awake late. He was sure Yuuko had done great and he couldn’t wait to watch it. To witness how, for the first time, an inhabitant of Hasetsu space station was taking part and, he was sure, medaling in an Olympic competition. For once his little corner of the universe would be known aside from the few habited planets near them. And he knew that when he grew up he’d be their second Olympic athlete. He was good at skating; he could help make his people be known. He’d get that gold medal.
But all thoughts about the Olympics went out of his mind when the teacher made them turn to their next lesson. And there it was. An old picture on his screen full of colours: blue, black and red with shining points of gold around it, like the stars he had seen in old cartoons instead of the glowing suns he knew them to be; like the medals he had been dreaming about since he learnt Yuuko had classified for the Olympics.
Yuuri drew a breath, surprised by how breathtakingly beautiful it was; his eyes moving to the bottom of it where the legend explained its name.
He started reading the text following the picture, trying to get as much information as he could. He remembered getting more and more fascinated as he learnt that it had been taken a lot time ago. That it was the most well-known picture among all the ones, 20th century Terrans had taken of nebulae. The birth of stars, the beginning of space. He remembered his teacher’s voice explaining that the pictured had been taken by the Hubble telescope. A telescope so old Yuuri couldn’t figure out how that big and clunky thing had worked, let alone make that wonderful picture he had on his screen. He had been fascinated by how they had reached up, how they seemed alive even if it was just dust and gases. It looked like something amazing was happening, and Yuuri, for the first time, thought that he wanted, no he needed, to see something like that with his own eyes. To find what else was hidden in space. If 20th Terrans had been able to find things as wonderful as that nebula with an old clunky telescope, what could be done now with their technology and spaceships? What was waiting for them out there?
That was the first day that Yuuri thought of space as a place, a big place full of wonderful things he didn’t know about, instead of something that was just there, like the oxygen he was breathing, like his family and the other people in the space station.
That was the first time, Yuuri thought of the stars as a goal.