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"Rise and shine," says Jeongguk.
He is met with silence. This, in and of itself, is not unusual. Mornings are always like that. He keeps his eyes shut for a brief moment; he tries to breathe. How does one breathe? He seems to have forgotten. Inhale, exhale. The broiling pit of anxiety in his stomach lessens slightly. He opens his eyes, hoists himself up and out of his sleeping pod, and heads over to wash up as best he can.
When he comes out, his tablet is playing a soft, [melodic] song, something that tugs at a corner of his brain—maybe something he's heard back home? Whatever it is, it's right on schedule. He picks up the tablet and opens up his list of tasks for the day. The first reads:
- visit plants
Visit the plants he does. The laboratory is cool and fresh and green; he breathes in the air and tries not to think very hard. Today, he's doing a check-up of collections 3E through 3H.
"Aera," he coos. He pulls a pen out from his pocket and gently touches the tip to the leaves. They curl inwards, albeit briefly—the motion shifts the plant’s tag. 3E-45.TW, it reads. He's pleased to see that the response is quick.
He moves on to Kkot. Kkot should be flowering soon, and he's keeping a close eye on her. She’s the only one of the bunch he's waiting on results for. He hopes she flowers. The blooms are tiny and purple and remind Jeongguk of home—not his home, necessarily, but they remind him of warmth and comfort and safety, and safety is hard to come by out here.
Once he’s done with the plants, the incubators are next on his list, but he can take care of those in a few hours' time. He puts his checklist aside.
"How long?" he asks, like he does every single morning.
Two months, twelve days, and fourteen hours until we reach our destination, replies a pleasant, robotic voice, like it does every single morning.
Jeongguk notices the music has stopped. The pleasant, robotic voice has given its answer and is silent once again. The ship creaks. His chest—almost imperceptibly—begins to feel tight again. Two months, twelve days and fourteen hours is the closest they have ever been. He should feel happy. He should feel glad, he should feel optimistic. Instead—
Tone it down, says an evil, evil voice in his head. After all, you are still alone in space.
Do you remember what I said to you?
Because I remember. Maybe it’s weird, that I remember my own words like that. But I remember exactly what I said to you. I said love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. I said maybe we should trust that, even if we don’t understand it.
You didn’t believe me, then. You’re gone, now, and I still believe it—maybe foolishly, hopelessly, because it’s all I have.
It sounded stupid to you, I’m sure. Wanting us to change course and head for a planet I wanted us to go to just because I felt something. I wish I could have described to you how it felt. I wish I could have reached into my soul and pulled out all the strings, rearranged them in a way that made sense, because that’s what you wanted—for things to make sense. I didn’t make sense. Love didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense that I could feel that for someone I had never met, someone I had never spoken to, someone who was a billion miles away from home. And most of all, it didn’t make sense to you that every molecule in my body was telling me that it was the right place to go. His planet was the right one. His planet was our only hope.
I don’t blame you. I still don’t. It didn’t make sense to you.
But it makes sense to me.
A long time ago, Jeon Jeongguk applied for a new job.
A long time ago, Jeon Jeongguk got the job.
For a long time now, Jeon Jeongguk has been trying to save humanity from its inevitable extinction.
Right now, it's an endless cycle. During his day, he checks up on the ship, he talks to MUSA, his robot crewmate, he runs diagnostic tests, he keeps up the experiments, he sits in the pilot’s seat and he stares into the inky blackness until he feels nothing at all. The days are tough. His nights—
The nights come, and they bring more. He dreams of gentle hands, of a warm smile, of promises. He dreams of the stars and the universe and of love, of what he doesn’t understand, of what is pulling him across an entire galaxy in the form of an inexplicable tug in his chest. He can't explain it. He simply lets himself feel. He loses himself in it, in these visions, in the arms of someone he's never even met.
And then he wakes up, he cries, he aches, and he does it all over again.
I’m not sure what to say anymore.
I want to. I want to say something, because the days are passing and there’s a knot in my chest that just won’t go away, which is why I try to write these. But I really, honestly don’t know what to say anymore.
Behind me is a scene of complete destruction. We lost all but one of our crew members. I’m flying on to our last possible destination alone. And in front of me is nothing but uncertainty. What if it isn’t habitable? What if he isn’t alive? What if I can’t survive there? What if I can’t even land? What if—
I wonder if you wish you had listened to me the first time.
I wonder if you wish anything at all.
A long time ago, Jeon Jeongguk started trying to save humanity from its inevitable extinction.
Of course, he was not the only one, and he most certainly wasn’t the first. Before he came along, they’d been trying everything they could to survive. Planting newer and newer genetically engineered crops and altering the landscape—
—and then came the inevitable, terrifying truth: there was nowhere to go but up.
We’re not public, they’d told him, when he’d first gotten the call and been whisked away from his lab at the university in a dark, unmarked car. No one outside of the team knows what we’re planning. The world isn’t ready for this.
Jeongguk thought about spaceships; he thought about galaxies and wormholes and time dilation and their dying planet and the idea that he might never see home again, and he wondered whether or not he was ready for this at all.
On the tenth day since he left Yoongi behind, he says out loud: “Am I being ridiculous?”
In what way? asks MUSA.
“Ridiculous,” he whispers. “I don’t know what I’ll find. I don’t know if I’ll live. And here I am, latching on to this—to the fraction of the chance that he might still be alive, that I won’t be alone, that—”
The ship creaks.
“I hope,” says Jeongguk, and he doesn’t finish.
Humans need hope, says MUSA. And you are human.
The hardest thing of all is not knowing.
He remembers a name: Kim Namjoon.
He remembers a face, too. He knows the face from the pictures in the hallways of the launch center—he’d seen every single astronaut’s picture and read every single description, but he was undeniably and repeatedly drawn to one.
He knows the story like the back of his hand. He knows about the government’s very first expedition, made up of the best pilots and scientists and technicians. He knows about the potential landing sites—he knows which ones were immediate failures. (He knows which of the astronauts were lost before they ever had a chance.)
(He knows of the astronaut who did have a chance.)
The truth is that: he knows of this astronaut. He knows the astronaut’s name: Kim Namjoon. He knows that Kim Namjoon sent up a signal a long time ago, marking the planet as habitable. He knows anything could have happened since then.
The truth is that: Jeongguk has never met him, and yet he knows in the deepest reaches of his soul that he is in love with Kim Namjoon.
This is the truth.
He just doesn’t know if he will ever understand it.
"Give me control," says Jeongguk through gritted teeth. "Hand it over. I can do it. I will do it."
If it was ever possible to detect hesitation from a completely silent robot, Jeongguk feels it now. "I can do it," he insists. Pleads, almost. He's not above it. "You keep an eye on our readings. I'll get us down."
He takes the stick for the first time. Every muscle in his body feels like it's pulled taut, but he has never before felt so sure about doing something. How could he not? After everything the universe has thrown at him, after being handed humanity’s fate and future to carry, after Yoongi—
Jeongguk has never flown a craft on his own, let alone landed one, but there’s a first time for everything.
His boots slip on the rocks. The fingertips of his gloves are beginning to look a little torn and scraped away and dusty, but he can’t help it. He scrambles up the rockslide on his hands and knees and nearly tumbles down the other side, wanting to see something, anything, any sign at all—
There. Pinpricks of light in the distance.
He can’t help it. He can’t help it when he falls to his knees, he can’t help it as he fumbles and gasps and yanks his helmet off, he can’t help but take huge, shaky gulps of the cool air of this—this desolate, alien planet. He can’t help it when the tears come and mix with the dust at his legs, red and brown like soil, like mud, like Earth, like—
Home. An alien planet, alien warmth on his face, an alien breeze whistling past his ears. His home.
Everything is intact. Everything is exactly as per shutdown protocol. All the equipment is on a low power mode— slow, quiet, but still working. Some of the lights are still on. There are signs of life—of a person’s life. A notebook on the table with a pen in between the pages. Someone’s jacket slung over the back of a chair. With every sign Jeongguk spots, breathing comes a little easier, his steps feel more certain.
He finds the hypersleep pods. He approaches the one still running, stares at the slowly blinking red light.
He punches in the code with trembling hands.
The first thing Kim Namjoon sees when he wakes up from the long nap and leans over the side of the pod, gasping for air, is his pair of shoes.
The second thing he sees is Jeongguk.
“You made it,” whispers Namjoon. He lifts his hand, presses his fingers to Jeongguk’s cheeks. Jeongguk closes his eyes. The skin against his own is damp with condensation and freezing cold but still undeniably human.
“If anyone else was around, no one would have believed me,” says Namjoon. He’s smiling so brightly, though his cheeks shine with tears. “I felt it. When I was settling in for the long nap. It all caught up to me for a second—all alone out here, not knowing if anyone would ever make it here to wake me up, and then I felt it. I knew someone was coming, and I knew it was you. I knew it.” He taps his chest. “Deep inside. Like I knew my own name.”
None of it should make sense. None of it.
“I’m here,” whispers Jeongguk again, and again, and again. “I’m here. I made it."
As Jeongguk is setting him up with a foil blanket and electrolytes, Namjoon says, “Someone was with you,” and Jeongguk feels the resulting shock travel right through his entire body and exit through his toes. But of course Namjoon knows. Of course he knows, of course he understands Jeongguk was never supposed to come here alone.
He doesn’t move to speak.
“Was it anyone I know?” asks Namjoon, and his voice is quiet, thin.
How strange it is. How odd it is, to simply know these things so readily and unquestionably. Jeongguk takes one look at Namjoon’s tense face and thinks about Yoongi and knows they are connected, somehow—the same way he knew about himself.
“We were a crew of four,” says Jeongguk, avoiding the question. “I don’t—I can’t talk about it, not yet—”
“Okay,” says Namjoon. He takes one, two, three deep breaths. “Okay. That’s okay. You’re here now, and you’re okay. That’s what matters.”
“That’s what matters,” Jeongguk repeats.
Against all odds, he was drawn here. Against all odds, he made it here, and that’s what matters.
The nights come and go. So do the days, but they feel longer.
Everything is different with Namjoon. They have tasks, menial ones and tedious ones; they run into problems—mostly trivial ones, but definitely one or two that have Jeongguk wondering if he might’ve lost a few years off of his life. He’s been doing this sort of thing for a long time, and it’s nothing new, but—
It’s nothing new, but with Namjoon, it’s... something else.
“What do you think it was?”
Jeongguk looks up from his sample tube. Namjoon is perched on a rock, and though he appears to be gazing off into the distance, his eyes are unfocused.
“Think what was?”
“You,” he says. “Me.” Finally turns to look at Jeongguk, a faint smile playing at his lips. “You know, us.”
Jeongguk caps his sample tube, now filled with fine dirt for analysis. “I don’t know,” he says.
Namjoon hums.
“I’ve always prided myself on understanding,” he says, eventually. “Following the method. Collecting the results. Proposing hypotheses. Finding explanations for things. And then you came along—”
“Are you saying I’m inexplicable?”
“Very,” deadpans Namjoon. Jeongguk laughs and places his tube in a sterile plastic bag. “One of the greatest scientific mysteries of our time.”
Jeongguk pockets the bag and shields his eyes against the starlight. “I don’t understand what happened, hyung,” he admits. “I never have. I think I’ve come to terms with it.”
“I don’t understand it either,” says Namjoon. “But, well…”
“Are you okay with that?” asks Jeongguk.
“Look at you,” whispers Namjoon, “how could I not be,” and Jeongguk’s heart swells.
This time: the night comes, and Jeongguk’s dreams are fitful, uneasy.
Dream Jeongguk is flying through what appears to be an infinite 3D array of bookshelves. He’s not sure why there are so many bookshelves, but that’s how it is. He sees Yoongi. (He always does.)
“Look at this,” says Dream Yoongi, floating in front of Dream Jeongguk in his spacesuit. He stretches out a gloved hand. The bookshelves are not bookshelves anymore. They look like bookshelves, still, but they are made of strands of light.
“I can change reality,” says Dream Yoongi, tugging at the light. “From here, I can access every point in space and time, and I can influence it. I can change the past, present, and future.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” says Dream Jeongguk.
“No,” muses Dream Yoongi. “I suppose it doesn’t.”
They float in silence for a while. In the corner of Dream Jeongguk’s eye, he can see the illusion folding in on itself, collapsing in the distance.
“I wish I could change the present,” says Dream Jeongguk. His vision is beginning to fog. “Namjoon-hyung and I are running out of time, and we don’t know if anyone else is coming.”
“Your endless sleep approaches,” says Dream Yoongi. It sounds like nothing like Real Yoongi. It sounds terrifying.
Dream Jeongguk sounds like a petulant child when he says, “I don’t want endless sleep.”
“You’ve got no choice,” says Dream Yoongi.
“I know,” says Dream Jeongguk, and their dream reality folds in on top of him.
Jeongguk knows he's not the only one thinking about it.
He knows this because he sits down in their station's common room with a packet of water and asks Namjoon, "How long do we have?" and Namjoon barely blinks before answering.
"Four days," says Namjoon, from where he's doing repairs on an incubation unit. Jeongguk can't see his head—he suspects Namjoon has wormed his way underneath the storage cabinets to get a good angle. "Unless we witness an actual miracle, and the next mission comes here in the next four days, we have to start prepping to shut down. We can’t carry the whole thing out on our own."
"You sound calm," comments Jeongguk, as he wills his hands not to start shaking.
"Do I?" says Namjoon. He tosses one of his tools onto the floor. "Maybe it hasn't hit me yet," he muses. "Or I guess—if you've done it once, the second time doesn't feel so daunting."
"What was it like?" asks Jeongguk quietly. "Going under?"
The drilling noises stop, and Namjoon slides out from underneath the unit.
"Falling asleep is the worst of it," he admits. "Just that part, right on the precipice, waiting for yourself to lose consciousness."
"Hmm," says Jeongguk, trying to maintain his composure. “And the rest?”
“The rest is… well,” says Namjoon, setting his tools aside and joining Jeongguk at the table. “It’s a lot of… nothingness. There’s nothing to be scared about, because there’s simply nothing to think. You’re not scared, or excited, or calm, or anything at all. You just—you’re just there.”
Almost unconsciously, he reaches out and runs a gentle thumb over Jeongguk’s knuckles.
“I dreamed, a couple of times. Abstract stuff. I’ve already forgotten a lot of it.”
“I don’t know if I can do this,” Jeongguk says, words stumbling over themselves in their haste to get out.
“You won’t know a thing,” says Namjoon, soft and gentle and calm. “When you’re under. You won’t know a thing. And when we’re preparing for it, I’ll be right there with you.”
“How the hell did you do this alone,” whispers Jeongguk.
“I wasn’t really alone, was I,” says Namjoon, and he stands up and leans down and presses his lips to Jeongguk’s forehead. “Had you in my heart the whole time,” he says, and he kisses Jeongguk’s cheeks, and his chin, and his nose, and the corner of his mouth, and then—
This time: the night comes, and Jeongguk stays awake.
He sits outside with his dinner and watches the neutron star set and the moons rise. Namjoon wraps up his last task and joins him, just as Jeongguk’s eyes are beginning to adjust to the darkness.
The stars appear, one-by-one, and then all at once.
Jeongguk finishes his dinner and laces his fingers with Namjoon and breathes. He wonders if his lungs know what’s to come, if they’re counting down the gulps of air along with his brain. He wonders about Yoongi, wonders if he’d found a way back. He wonders about home—his old home. His friends, his family, the people he worked with who had been spending day and night trying to find a solution when he last saw them. He wonders whether or not they’ve figured it out yet, somewhere to stay while a handful of them ventured out into interstellar space, searching desperately for a new home—
He wonders about Namjoon, and he wonders if there might be anything left to say.
Namjoon silently presses up against him. There is nothing to say. Jeongguk closes his eyes and breathes.
There is nothing to say, even when they go back inside and do one final check of all the equipment.
There is nothing to say, even when they find the hypersleep pods already going about the required setup process. How lucky , thinks Jeongguk, filled to the brim with envy and fear and deep-seated melancholy. How lucky of these machines, to be incapable of feeling anything. How lucky of them not to understand what is to come.
Falling asleep is the worst of it, Namjoon had said.
You won’t know a thing, Namjoon had said.
How lucky, how lucky, how lucky.
"I'll be right here," Namjoon says, lacing his fingers with Jeongguk's and squeezing his hand. Everything is so cold when he lets go. "When we wake up, I’ll be right here.”
When, notes Jeongguk. Not ‘if’. When.
Namjoon climbs in first, talking him through it, encouraging him. Jeongguk lowers himself into his pod with shaking arms. He can hear beeping and whirring as the machine prepares; the temperature drops a little. Goosebumps erupt across his skin. He looks at Namjoon one last time—not last last, he thinks, panicking, don’t say that—
“I love you,” Namjoon says, just as Jeongguk’s pod closes above his head.
The hardest thing of all is not knowing, but with Namjoon—
This time: the night comes, the night stays, and Jeongguk dreams of home.
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