Chapter Text
There is a place on the ship that only Wilbur Soot knows about.
At this point, that should be impossible. His ship is far from small, but there are always just a few too many people on it, and every single one of them is seeking distraction in any way that they can find it.
However, Wilbur is the only person willing to crawl through the vents.
It breaks every important rule on the ship, and he knows them better than nearly anyone else here. There was a time when he would have been able to stand tall and recite them, in order, listing each exception as it became relevant.
There was a time where he hoped that maybe, just maybe, he could belong here.
That time is a distant memory now, and Wilbur sits in a room that nobody is supposed to be able to enter. It’s not meant to be aesthetically pleasing, not like the garden that’s always busy near the center of the ship. Instead, it’s overgrown, filled with rows of plants that would take far too much effort to contain. Wilbur doesn’t know why they are kept here, whether they’re meant to be food or abandoned decorations, but somehow they’re still getting water, and they have climbed over the old pathways and support beams.
Wilbur is careful with them, even though nobody else would know if he wasn’t. In return, they let him sit among them, his overgrown thoughts blending in with the scenery.
One night, when he is supposed to be asleep, Wilbur sits among the plants and thinks about how he has never seen space.
It surrounds him, he knows. He doesn’t doubt that he was told the truth about where he lives (a spaceship, one of the biggest that is still moving and one that it is an honor to be raised on). He grew up learning to adjust his movements to the different gravities on different areas of it, and that doesn’t seem like something that he would need to do on a planet. He knows why his ship only has windows in the cockpit: the hull needs to be powerful to protect from the debris that is scattered across the universe, and windows are delicate things not made for vacuums.
Still, Wilbur misses the stars.
When he was younger he would ask his parents if it was possible to miss something that you had never seen. They had just smiled at him.
He longs to look at the world outside of the ship more than anything else. He knows that the stars are beautiful, in the way that he knows that his heart is beating. When he was younger, he had applied for the intensive training to become captain just to see them, but nobody ever even considered him for the program, and eventually he gave up.
If he could only see the stars, Wilbur thinks, then he would sing.
The plants, which are almost enough to fill up the emptiness all around him, seem to agree.
///
Phil is offered passage on yet another ship that passes by him in the night.
To him, it is always night. Day is a concept made for places where he can watch the sun rise over the horizon. It has nothing to do with sleep schedules, and nothing in common with the pattern that he finds himself in now.
See a star in the distance. Move closer to it, enter its gravity as much as is safe. Watch it grow brighter in the window until it hurts to stare at, until the curtains have to be closed. Look at the planets around it, searching for one that might offer you something special.
Find nothing.
Leave, watching the light fade as quickly as it had once approached. On to the next system.
Phil has spent years in the same routine, with nobody else on his individual probe to distract him from the way that afterimages of stars dance behind his eyes. He sleeps alone in a small cabin with two beds, and he navigates by his instinct because he was never taught to read the electronic charts that would tell him where to go. There’s nowhere that he needs to be, even if he did know how to read them. It’s lonely, but not nearly as lonely as the space that surrounds him, so he makes do.
He knows that he could escape from this life if he really wanted to. Once every month or so, a larger ship will offer him the honor of being allowed to board and join their crew, trading his work for people to talk to when it gets late and he feels hopeless.
Phil only had to fall for that lie once. He learns quickly.
Hidden in a small room in the center of his ship are the things that people really care about. Phil has a farm to provide for himself, which is rare but not unheard of for a ship as small as his, but in the center of the farm are some of the most important exports from Earth to exist, and he has full control over them.
Neatly labelled by scientific name are thousands of seeds, held in airtight packages in order to last as long as possible. When Phil left Earth, he took the most important part of it with him, and the green stripe on the outside of his ship shows the world just how precious his cargo is. It’s a recognizable marking no matter how much distance he travels.
Phil tends to his garden and survives, alone, for as long as he can. At this rate, he will be able to float through space for his whole life.
There is nothing left for him to do but stare out of his windows, looking for a planet that glitters blue and brown.
///
Niki stares at her small craft in the hanger of the ship that she still, against all odds, lives on.
It’s been a year, or maybe a little longer. When she boarded, the captain asked if they could take her ship and repurpose it as a landing craft for their missions.
Niki had refused. When they asked her again six months later, she still refused.
She knows what happens once she gets into a routine on a new ship. At first, everything is bright and shining and she makes friends who are drawn in by her smile. But then, as soon as everyone else becomes comfortable enough around her to forget about her, Niki realizes that there is something wrong about where she is living.
There is always something wrong. Niki knows that she’s probably being too picky. The wrongness is never obvious, never something that she can point out to others.
But wherever she goes, it is not home.
Niki stands alone in the hanger of the latest ship that she has come to understand she does not enjoy living on. The hanger is very large, and her ship is very small. She is smaller.
There is nobody else around. When she had boarded this craft, the captain had proudly called it a city. It does not feel like one now. Niki likes the feeling of a city, with all of its bright lights and infinite crowds, but she will be fine without it. She has gotten used to what it means to live her life alone.
Nothing here feels like home.
Even on this massive ship, with a central hub that is always busy, Niki lives her life alone. She has never been able to survive any other way. Her friends always notice, eventually, once they stop being distracted by her newness and her smile.
It has been months since she has seen the stars. Niki longs to return to them.
She hates that she misses the stars far more than she has ever missed a person, but she accepts the truth in her feelings.
It is time for her to go.
No matter how many times she realizes that it’s time to leave yet another spaceship, it never hurts any less. Now, for the first time in a year, Niki’s world crumbles around her. The ceiling is collapsing, and the stars are too far away to touch.
At age 15, Niki is given a ship by her parents. They tell her that they are sorry that they raised her to be a wanderer, they tell her to leave them and make her own way. She listens.
Niki sits down on the ground in front of her craft. She will board it as soon as she has gathered her things.
Alone in the hangar, with the wide doors that open into space closed securely in front of her, Niki takes a notepad out of her pocket and begins to make lists. She lists food that she will need, and clothing that she should buy before she goes.
As the last list, she writes down the name of everyone on the ship who she will want to say goodbye to.
It is complete too quickly. It is not a long list.
///
Minx kicks the ruined landing gear in front of her and scrawls another large X on the tree that she uses as a calendar.
It’s been 326 days since her life ended and a new one began.
That’s almost a year. She considers planning some sort of anniversary celebration, but instead she mutters a stream of curses as she makes her way back to her hut.
She didn’t expect to survive this long stranded on a planet in the far reaches of her galaxy, with only her own thoughts and the noise in the trees around her for comfort. To reach the one year mark would be a victory.
To reach the one year mark would be awful. Minx fucking hates it here.
It’s too loud at night and too quiet during the day. There are edible plants, but she had to figure out for herself which ones they were, which took more trial and error than she would care to admit. She lives in a shack that she built, but she’s an awful builder, and the rain always comes in during storms.
Worst of all, she’s technically on a scientific mission right now, which means that she has to keep a log of everything she does. Minx has never had an assignment more excruciating.
Talking to nobody drives her insane. It would be better to talk to herself, because then there would be no limitations on swearing. It would be better to stay quiet, because then she wouldn’t have to pretend that anybody was ever coming to retrieve her, smiling with her log clutched tightly in her hand.
Minx never smiles, not anymore. Even when she records her logs, and she calls her mission a “success”, she does not smile.
She remembers when she did. She remembers when it would have been a miracle to find the planet that she is now stranded on.
It is a miracle, isn’t it? Minx looks around her, taking in the land that she has managed to live on for almost a year. Even after this long, the plants still look eerie, tall and curved around each other and covered in neon buds. The sky, though, is the same blue as the one that Minx grew up with, and though the sunrises are not as brilliant, they are made of the same colors.
If looked at during the day, the planet could almost be Earth.
The stars give it away. Minx cannot bear to look outside at night anymore. The sky transforms and becomes a thing as unfamiliar as the dirt beneath her feet.
The planet is not Earth.
It is the impossible. It is life that was not born of the same sun that Minx was.
It is so far from Earth that there is no certain map leading to it, and Minx’s ship crashed onto it 326 days ago exactly. Her signalling device is still broken. At this point, it would be as much of a miracle for Minx to fix it as it was for Minx to find herself on the sort of planet that she had spent years looking for.
It seems selfish, for Minx to ask for more than one miracle.
Instead, she screams and slams her fist into a tree.
///
Techno stands in the central hub of a ship that is not yet his to command.
There should be people flowing around him, talking far too loudly as they make their way to wherever it is that they need to be. Instead, Techno is alone in the room. There is nobody talking with their friends or realizing that they went the wrong way and turning around, a shocked look on their face. There is nobody sitting on a bench, waiting to meet someone. There is nobody to see that Technoblade is standing close to them and shift their gaze to the floor, straightening their back and dropping their voice to a whisper.
Techno relishes it. He looks around him and memorizes the feeling of a moment that only he is a part of, one that is so intoxicatingly his that it makes him dizzy.
He wants it to last forever.
It will not. Soon, another person will come running through one of the large doors that lead to this place, and Techno will have to start moving and pretend that he did not feel any joy in his loneliness.
Is this what the stars feel like?
Techno smiles and begins to move, replacing the silence around him with the clicking of his boots. He walks in a precise rhythm, four quick steps and then a pause, which echoes throughout the room.
Only a short walk away, Techno knows, is the cockpit, where the captain of the ship probably still sits in his chair and watches the stars as they pass.
Techno has only seen the stars three times, each during a training exercise where he was not allowed to be in the cockpit alone. He hated hearing his classmates chatter with each other in front of the wide window, saying useless things about the scoring of this assignment or trying to describe the way that space felt to them.
Techno has never liked talking. But he did like the feeling of the stars around him.
He would do anything to stand by himself in that cockpit, with the vastness of space as his only company.
He tries to carry the knowledge that he is surrounded by beautiful things far greater than himself into this moment. In the hub, alone, he lays down across an entire bench because there is nobody around to challenge him.
Here, in this space, there is only him.
Techno liked the feeling of seeing the universe as it truly is.
He thinks that he may like this feeling almost as much.
It is the opposite, but it occupies the same place in his thoughts.
Power and weakness. A short moment and an infinite one.
Above all else, an emptiness that conquers everything around it. It conquers even him.
Techno observes each of his emotions from every angle, until he is satisfied with the result. He stands up from the bench and lets the sound of his breathing scatter to the corners of the room.
He leaves the hub before his moment has the chance to.
///
Tubbo wakes up before Tommy does, as usual. He gets out of his bunk as quietly as possible to check their small ship for failures that would need to be repaired.
There are none. Everything is running smoothly. Tubbo smiles.
He begins to count the food packets, placing them into small piles as he works.
Tommy tells him that there is no need to count their rations each morning. They have a schedule, and both of them are very good at following it. They both fear what will happen if they don’t, even more than they fear the stars outside of their window.
Tubbo counts despite this. Lost hours of sleep are far, far less important to him than his need to know that everything is going exactly according to plan.
A year ago, it had seemed like there was infinite food.
Now, there is only enough to last the two of them a few more months.
This is the one thing that Tommy is not willing to mention. Each day, the two of them will spend hours talking. Tommy will make jokes and throw things at the wall and tell stories that he learned on Earth and laugh and laugh and laugh.
If Tubbo tries to bring up the food, Tommy will stop laughing.
“Soon,” he’ll Tubbo, smiling too widely for it to be the truth. “Soon a big ship will come pick us up, Tubbo, and then you’ll feel so stupid for worrying about it!”
“Yeah, I probably will.” Tubbo never presses the issue.
Instead, he counts the food every morning, and eats only half of what is marked down on the rations list.
He knows that Tommy does the same thing late at night. Sometimes, when he wakes up after a nightmare, he’ll find his friend surrounded by freeze-dried noodles and vegetables. This is a part of the larger food issue, which means that Tubbo is not supposed to mention it in the morning.
Tubbo has just returned the bags to their shelves when Tommy comes in, rubbing his eyes. Tubbo frantically opens up a map of the galaxy on the cockpit interface and pretends to look at it.
“Good morning!” Tubbo waves, but continues to look at the map. It is very interesting to him, far more interesting than counting packets of food could ever be, and he needs to convince Tommy of this.
“Tubbo. Why are you looking so far away from where we are? How fast do you think we go?”
“Um.”
Tommy laughs. “Yep, I knew it. Come on, let’s get breakfast.”
They split one ration.
Neither of them mentions it.
Outside, there are far too many stars. They stretch for an infinity in each direction, each one so large up close that Tubbo struggles to comprehend it.
Surely, at least one of them must be blocked out by a ship that is closer to them than the star is. Tommy and Tubbo have sent out an emergency signal, a constant cry for help, since they first decided to travel together three years ago.
So far, nobody has come running.
What could the universe possibly gain by accepting two sixteen-year-olds raised on Earth?
After breakfast, Tommy and Tubbo argue about which path to take for the best chance of rescue. It is an argument that used to leave them both sobbing in separate rooms. It lost all meaning long ago.
Instead, after the argument, they lean against each other in their small cockpit. Tubbo puts his head on Tommy’s shoulder.
“Clingy,” Tommy mutters, and pretends to shake it off.
Tubbo smiles when Tommy reaches for his hand.
It’ll be okay. It’ll be okay.
We have so much time.
Together, the two of them watch for a distant star to be blotted out.
Together, they pretend that they have found what they were looking for and return to their sleeping room, where there is no window. Tommy makes up stories about his childhood for the rest of the night, and Tubbo laughs at every joke, even the ones that don’t land.
Tubbo tells Tommy about the stars. Instead of talking about how they look outside of the ship, he explains the science of them and the way that they were charted. He keeps talking about them with a critical eye until they become nothing more than distant objects. Tommy groans and asks him to stop, but Tubbo ignores him, and Tommy keeps listening.
They eat one more time before bed. They hug before Tubbo goes to sleep, clinging to each other tightly.
Tommy slips out of their sleeping room and counts the food.
Tubbo dreams of stars, growing so close that they threaten to burn him.
Their ship travels on.