Work Text:
In the end, you land at Gliese fleet.
There is an emptiness beyond what can be explained by outer space. Blue stars without a blue sky.
You meet Setsu's eyes on the floor of the observation deck. Share a quiet, gentle pause as you rediscover your bodies in a heap of limbs and sweat, having tumbled into a corner sometime during warp.
In the old world—the reality that ended without Setsu—you had dreams about this spacecraft. About finding yourself still trapped in the corridors you've memorized, with the same people who'd long since moved on. You have landed at Gliese before. Watched all your friends scatter to the corners of the Universe.
"You came back for me," Setsu repeats, emphasizing for me as if they haven't even thought about being worth anything for a while.
Please be real, you think, holding their hand tighter. There are years flashing unspoken between your eyes. Lifetimes of information that simply did not happen. Gone, somewhere beyond the cosmos. Please, God, you think. It has been so long since you prayed. Please, God, let this be real.
The rest of the evening is a blur of paperwork and bureaucratic problems.
You are not sure how many years you've looped. You ran onto the DQO as a nineteen year old refugee, spent however many years stuck in time, spent another four or five in the alternate reality that led you back to this one—you're beginning to understand why everyone else's age is approximate.
At the very least, your deadname is actually, finally dead.
Your pen trembles in your hand, and Setsu steadies it.
It's finally over, you want to say, to reassure them. Maybe you also want to hear it, but you are both so good at noticing lies, and even better at knowing when to tell them.
You keep your mouth shut. You should be overjoyed. Their reassuring touch on the back of your palm is everything you ever wanted, and yet—
Returning to the page, you continue to write yourself back into existence.
It apparently snows on Gliese.
It is neither a planet nor a system, just a collective of spaceships linked together somewhere in the outer orbit of Nada's Binary Star. Freighters and passenger craft and warships, all under the delicate web of a false atmosphere and a system of airlocks so complicated that even Jonas was forced to leave docking maneuvers to the port authority.
None of you are allowed in the spaceport yet. There's a mandatory quarantine to test for Gnosia infection and other diseases, and yet another waiting period while, in Raqio's words, we sit here and shove paperwork up the DCI's ass until words come out of their mouths. Until then, the DQO and its crew are stuck on a landing platform inside an atmospheric partition, and, in Sha-Ming's words, there's fuck all we can do about it, so we might as well sit around jacking off and making out with each other.
Unfortunately, murdering him is no longer an option.
"Ew," SQ says from somewhere across the platform. "What is this stuff?"
"It's snow," Gina says, sticking her tongue out to catch a flake on the tip. "See?"
SQ makes another confused face. She can't read, so Gina has been helping her with customs forms all night and they are both exhausted.
You have been through all this before. Alone, crying about a person who didn't exist until customs took you into a room for a psychiatric evaluation, scanned you, fondled your dick for legal reasons, scanned you again, and finally let you go when you shut up and agreed that Setsu was never aboard to begin with. That was it.
Gina catches another snowflake in her mouth. Her tongue is so numb that she can only really slur words out and laugh. They are cute together, you think. They'll probably end up together in this world, too.
Setsu sneaks up behind you and circles their arms around your waist.
"Hey," you say.
"Hey," Setsu responds. Their chin grinds against your spine when they talk.
Breath clouds into the air, and the cold strikes back with bared teeth.
(How many times is it, that you've held each other and had the world ripped away before you could say anything?)
Shigemichi is laughing in the distance. He has discovered that falling off the edge of the landing dock leads directly into a gravitational updraft that launches him back onto the platform. He most likely figured this out after someone pushed him off in contempt, but now he's doing it on purpose with both fists extended like a superhero.
This is a celebration, you remember. Everything is supposed to be okay. Everything is okay.
You trace your thumb around the back of Setsu's hand.
"You're here," you say.
"Yeah," they reply. "I'm here."
Later, Remnan encounters you behind the ship while you're on a smoke break. You've finished about a third of the paperwork and about half of your cigarettes; exhaustion is a concept you're too tired to make sense of.
"That one's a frontier crusader," Remnan says, gesturing to the husk of a gargantuan spaceship near the outskirts of the cluster. This is how he begins conversations with you. "It must be from the Thousand Years' War—or... I don't know. I-I'm..."
"Looks like a Dreadnought," you say, taking a draw on your cigarette. It is technically Jonas' cigarette, but Jonas is a hoarder and you're the only person aboard with a nicotine addiction and enough spare time to have gone through all of his shit.
Remnan folds his hands together and sits.
"There used to be one of those crashed in the sea just outside the Rodgers depot," you prompt him. "On Four. Most of it was covered in these huge mounds of salt so you could only really see the outline of the hull. But there were also huge turrets covered in stalactites that went floor to ceiling."
"Bollingers," Remnan says.
"We used to sit up on the conning tower and watch the sunset," you say.
Remnan's breathing becomes difficult.
"So... so she's..."
You follow the wild change in topic without hesitation. Remnan has confided in you about Manan before, in the universe without Setsu. You and he and Raqio shared a condo for several years before the revolution, and that household might be the only part of that universe you miss.
"Gone," you affirm. "Not just obliterated, but disappeared from this reality."
"Did you ever see the engines?" Remnan blurts. "O-Of that ship you..."
"Yeah," you say, undisturbed. Remnan was one of your best friends, and you can read his trauma responses almost as well as your own, so you indulge him: "We actually used to climb the rudder to get up onto the deck."
"Were there two or three of them? The engines?"
"I wanna say there were two."
"So that's probably why it crashed," Remnan says. "The triple-screw formation had an intake vulnerability where scrap could get sucked into the central turbine and blow it out. The Union actually started making debris fields on purpose just so dreadnoughts couldn't get near."
"That makes sense. There was loads of shit in orbit around Liu-An," you say.
"Sorry," Remnan says.
You flick your cigarette butt off the platform and it flies back to hit you in the chest, almost leaving a burn.
"What if she comes back," he whispers.
It's possible, you think. You don't want to think about it, but that's basically what you did.
(You still remember the pull of the silver key. How it tore your body apart atom by atom, into sheared tendrils of static that it ripped backwards in time, over and over until you expect it in your bones every time you go to sleep.)
In the world without Setsu, you studied astrophysics. Raqio also studied astrophysics and did basically everything else, because you're at worst an intolerable dumbass and at best a C student, but you did it. Spent years researching and perfecting your thesis, until it all somehow worked and you found the door to the person you—
Love is a really, really complicated word. Remnan probably understands that, too.
"Sometimes you're just allowed to be safe," you finally reply. "Things get to be okay."
Neither you nor Remnan believe it.
"Once we get out of this bubble, do you wanna go explore it?" you ask. "I mean—that ship over there."
"I-Isn't that trespassing?"
"That was never a problem for me," you say. In fact, in the other universe it wasn't a problem for either of you. It was probably the moment where you and Remnan actually became friends.
"You can't commit a crime on Gliese!" Remnan says. "Do you even know what..."
"Doesn't matter. We want to, so we can. If they're not okay with that maybe it's time for a little revolution."
Remnan stares at you in attempted horror, but his eyes smile somewhere underneath.
You're probably going to be friends this time, too.
"Evelyn," Comet whispers, elbowing you. "Why are you lying so much?"
"Shut up," you grit.
"Who did you kill?"
You accidentally glance at Sha-Ming, and accidentally glance at Setsu. Deer in the headlights. Setsu has, to your amusement, also marked 'No' on number 31.
"Don't worry," Comet whispers. "I won't tell."
Sha-Ming scratches his balls.
Later, you catch up to Setsu in the hallway and whisper, "We totally could, though."
"Trust me, I've had my fun," Setsu says, still glancing around to see if Comet is there.
"We could have more fun? Together this time?"
"Shut up!" Setsu hisses. "You're going to get us deported."
"Then we'll get deported. Where do you wanna go?"
Setsu catches an indignant reply in their throat, and they turn to look at you.
"I don't know, Ev," they say, quieter.
They've been stuck in loops all along, you remember. This is the first time they can answer that question and mean it.
"I haven't really thought that far ahead, I guess," Setsu says.
You haven't either, you realize.
There is a sense of awe, then. The grandeur of the universe next to the tiny simplicity of everything you've ever wanted. How vulnerable it is to be truly alive.
You haven't felt that in a while.
You have been stuck in customs for over seven hours.
Raqio is long gone. They are probably sleeping in their own bed by now, deliberately ignorant to the fact that they could have helped everyone else get this done quite a lot faster and chose not to. It would be infuriating if it wasn't so typical of them.
(You should know. You were their roommate for three years.)
Setsu eventually joins you on a smoke break, hip against hip on the bottom steps of the DQO's passenger ramp. Comet and SQ are throwing snowballs in the distance while Gina completes their paperwork, and Setsu keeps nodding off on your shoulder every ten seconds.
"I don't know," you say unprompted. It isn't true at all, because you know exactly how you feel and what you want to say.
Setsu nods again.
"Do you think if Sisyphus ever got a chance to stop rolling that boulder up the hill, he'd take it?"
"Of course," Setsu yawns.
"I don't know," you repeat. "What if he pushed the boulder for so long that it became everything he knew? Like he couldn't even remember to dream about it ending."
"Then I would be sad for him," Setsu says. "I think I'd be sad for everyone. Didn't he have a family? Wasn't he in love?"
All of the embers fall out of your cigarette onto the ground.
"Probably. Maybe with the boulder," you say. "For some definition of love."
"Well, there's lots of those."
"Maybe not enough to save Sisyphus," you say. "Torture is real. Brains can break."
Setsu laces your fingers together.
Snow is still falling from somewhere above. Steam venting out of a huge boxy spacecraft is hitting the engine draft of another and freezing in midair, falling through the quarantine airlock with tiny electric crackles.
Setsu closes their eyes and takes a breath. "Maybe he kept trying anyway."
"All on his own?"
"Yeah."
"Is he still?"
You feel tears fall over your hand. "I think he tried so hard that maybe he can't tell the difference anymore. Between what he wants and what he has."
You relight your cigarette. "If he can't tell, maybe he can just have it."
"I don't know how to have anything anymore," Setsu says, bitter. "I don't know what it feels like to keep. I don't know what it's like to not have to let something go to save it."
"Four years," you blurt. It aches.
"Seven," Setsu says.
"Just—promise this is real?"
Setsu shakes their head in raw horror. "I don't know how to promise that anymore, Ev."
"Please," you say. Beg. You are holding them and it feels so much like holding just their body. "Just please don't go."
You think—you might never have been more desperate than this moment. Not when planets were falling out from under your feet. Not when you sat on the dreadnought's tower and looked up into the sunset and thought about jumping until you didn't.
How pathetic is it, you think. That you so plainly love someone and can't find any way to say it. That you're so plainly loved and won't believe it.
You stay until cold stings your skin and your cigarette burns into the filter.
Later, Setsu walks back into the ship and you let them go.
Later, you think about every way you have ever failed to say goodbye.
Later, you pick a pebble off the ground and roll it down the exit ramp, again and again until it bounces into the snow and disappears.
Five hours later you trudge your way into the customs office carrying the same things you've had since you fled Liu-An. A pocket knife. Farm gloves. Your father's leather jacket and your sister's high school graduation ring on a chain around your neck. Every piercing and tattoo you gave yourself when you were alone.
This might be your second time here but it's Setsu's first, and the immense relief of unfamiliar architecture shows on their face.
The rest is as expected. The security guard operating the body scanner guesses everyone's gender wrong. Jonas is denied asylum and leaves with Stella in an anticlimactic departure you can barely even see from the window. Chipie and Otome are pulled aside for additional questioning, and Shigemichi is detained.
Eventually, you meet Setsu on the other side.
"I got us a room," Setsu says, elbowing you. "Military credit."
The spaceport adjoins the most luxurious hotel you've ever seen. You've never stayed there before, primarily due to your astronomical student loan debt and the fact that you burned it down during the revolution.
Now that you think about it, you might as well go back to Gliese University and get your PhD. Your research into parallel universes was, in fact, completely correct.
Dr. Evelyn Selby, you think. It is the most ridiculous thought you've ever had.
Like the last time, your exit occurs without celebration. You don't see everyone together for a final time. They simply slip away, one by one as the customs agents see fit, off to the far corners of the universe, or just a stop on the way.
You have always been terrible at goodbyes.
Inside your hotel room, you leave your boots on the tile and jacket on the hanger and find yourself alone with Setsu for what feels like the first time.
There have been times before, interrupted when the loop restarted or when the ship needed to warp, but never quite like this. Never with the option of a bed and hours and hours to waste away. Never with the safety to fall apart completely.
Exhaustion is destroying both of you. Not just the twenty hours you've been awake and slaving away to ingratiate yourself to the paranoid border security of a police state, but the years and the emptiness between.
"Bit of a romantic suite," you say. Not to make anything romantic on purpose. It's just the truth.
"How?" Setsu says.
"Dunno," you say, setting the hotel key on the bureau to marvel at the crisp interior design. "The balcony, and the light, and—oh. Hey."
Setsu buries their face in your button-up. "No, Ev. How?"
"I... I mean," you say. "I studied astrophysics. I wrote a thesis on moving between parallel dimensions, and I guess I kind of just proved it?"
Setsu splutters. "But you're..."
"A total dumbass, I know," you complete. "I still have no clue how I did it. It was some sort of quantum stuff, I think?"
"You..." Setsu stutters, conspicuously not disagreeing that you're a total dumbass. "You really did all that to come back for me?"
"Of course I came back for you! Why would—"
"I'm sorry," they blurt, breath spreading warm into your shirt.
"No, no, no. Don't apologize for that. Never apologize for—"
"But I am. Because you were lonely, and scared, and—"
"No. It doesn't matter. It—"
"Yes it does!" Setsu says. "It does matter! It matters because I wanted you to be happy, and you weren't, and you should never have had to be that strong—"
"I wanted to," you say, your voice failing. "I wanted to, and I did, because how could I do anything else?"
"I'm sorry," they sob. You have never really seen them cry before. You've seen it under the surface of their carefully guarded emotions, but never watched as they let it happen, and it breaks you more than anything.
All you can do is hold them, and it might never be enough.
"I missed you," you say into their ear.
"I missed you too." they say. You hear them swallow past the lump in their throat. "I missed you for so long that I still miss you, and you're right here."
"None of this is your fault. Don't ever say any of this is," you say, stroking the back of their head. "It was too much. It was too cruel."
"It was," Setsu chokes out. "And everything with you, and—and the world without me, where I never even existed—how could I? How could I have done that to someone who—I must have broken your heart."
"And you saved me," you say. "You saved my life, and now we're here, and—"
"And I just wish there was a way we could have both been okay in the end."
"This is the way," you tell them, a hand steadying each of their shoulders, eye to eye. "This is the way, right now, where it's finally over. This is the only way it could ever have happened, because this is the way it did happen, and we're going to be okay because we fucking deserve to be. Okay?"
"Okay," Setsu says, their voice tiny.
"Okay," you breathe. Feel their body falling into yours.
Snow glances past the window, sparkling under the light of departing spacecraft and a foreign night sky. Constellations are a product of perspective, a unique space and time, reminding you that maybe everything about Liu-An really is gone. The homes and the planet and the culture and the things you never learned and could have—just gone.
"So what do we do now?" Setsu whispers. Their mouth is so close to your ear that they don't have to speak any louder.
"We can lay down in bed," you say. "Try to go to sleep."
"And then?"
"We wake up tomorrow and eat a real breakfast downstairs."
"And if we loop?"
"Then... we do it all again until we actually get tomorrow."
Setsu laughs, a transparent mask over their horror as they pull you closer to the bed. "And then?"
"We take our time," you say, laying down. "We do everything we've ever wanted, and probably a whole bunch of stuff we don't want to, but have to. And we keep going."
"You make it sound so easy."
"It is," you say. You spend a minute not believing it, and another minute tangling your bodies together in a way that doesn't make your arm numb. A third minute just breathing.
"Ev," Setsu says. "I think I might owe you everything in the world."
"Never," you say, holding them tighter.
"You've done so much for me. You came back for me," they pause, and you feel them fail to suppress a smile. "You traveled across dimensions for me—you went to college for me."
"Yeah? You saved my stupid fucking life!"
"Yeah, and I also murdered you and broke your heart. And you saved my stupid f-fucking life."
"Well, fine. We saved each other."
Setsu hugs your arm to their chest, looking sideways into your eyes with their hair splayed over the pillow. "We did."
"And this is real," you say. It still feels like lying. More accurately, it feels like how lying felt when you were first learning how to lie. Like building yourself up until you believe what you're saying because you can and you want to.
"It is," they say. "And I'm just as scared as I've ever been."
"Me too."
Setsu pauses. Looks into your eyes, traces a hand along the side of your face. Normally, the loop ends by now. Normally, things go back to normal, time reverses, all the pieces fall back into place, and things end before they ever begin.
"Thank you, Evelyn," Setsu breathes. "For being here. With me."
"Yeah. You're my partner," you say, like it's the most obvious fact in the world.
"You're my partner," they echo. The hand on your cheek moves to brush hair behind your ear. "Is that what you want to call it?"
"I mean—it's just a word, right? I think no matter which one we use, it is what it is, and that's what's important."
"Yeah, but words mean things," they say. "Remember that loop when I called us lovers?"
You hold your breath for so long you forget to answer.
"I think I was just telling a fib a the time," Setsu says. "And I still don't even get it. I don't know if I feel love the way other people do, or if my idea of 'lovers' is your idea of 'partners'. I'm probably aromantic, but I don't think that means I can't love or be 'in love'."
"Yeah," you say.
"Or maybe I'm not aromantic, and I still have no idea what I'm talking about. I don't know."
You'd be lying if you said your heart wasn't stuck in your throat, and you're terrible at lying, so you pick a safe truth to redirect to. "I think you have time to figure it out?"
"I don't think so," they say. "There's no more loops. There's going to be an awful day where I see you for the last time, and there will be a last thing I say to you—and I don't want it to be the wrong thing, and I don't want to lie to you ever again, and..."
"Hey. I've got you, okay?"
"What I'm trying to say is—I don't know the difference between caring deeply, and being someone's partner, and loving, and being in love. It might all be the same thing and I might never understand it, but if I was ever in love with someone—it would be with you."
Normally, you'd have some sort of response prepared. A contingency, or a plan, or a general comprehension of what was possible and what could happen. Of course, right now, you have nothing.
"Yeah," you say.
"Yeah?"
"I mean—I don't know," you say. "I kind of really wanted that to be the case but also I didn't want to make our friendship weird by falling in love with you on accident so I sort of just, like—"
"Evelyn."
"I mean—I'm also, like—yeah. I love you. Sorry."
"Why are you sorry?"
"I—don't know?"
"Evelyn!" Setsu says, grabbing both of your hands.
"Hi!"
"Hey," they smile. "It's just the same old me. Right?"
"Right," you say. It's the truth, after all. It would have been the truth even if you never figured it out.
"How are you doing?"
"Yeah," you say, catching your breath. "I mean—okay. More than okay. Honestly, I'm really happy right now."
You feel them exhale.
"So there." Setsu nuzzles their head against your chest. "I finally said it."
"We finally said it."
Fingers comb through your hair. "It only took us ten years."
You laugh. "Come on. In this universe, we met like a week ago."
"Long week," they shrug. "What can I say? You were worth it."
You figure if Setsu is willing to be so honest, you might as well return that honesty. It's not like your friendship would fall apart. The worst that could happen is you both learn more about what what won't work.
"Hey," you say. "I kind of really want... Can I kiss you?"
You're about to keep panicking and cover every possible contingency for consent, but instead their eyes just soften and they say, "Yeah. Let's try it."
It isn't your first kiss. Your first was back on Liu-An with a girl your sister went to high school with. A couple more happened whenever you went to any of the good clubs on the mainland, and you shared a final one with your old best friend, just before you came out to him and he left for good.
Out of all of them, Setsu is by far the worst kisser. It is almost comically awkward. They have absolutely no idea what they're doing.
Neither do you.
It's a little bit romantic, you think. Not sexual in the slightest, because Setsu is definitely asexual, but it's romantic.
"Of course it's romantic," Setsu says, somewhere in between. "You're my best friend."
You have absolutely no idea what that means, and you no longer care.
You kiss them again and again until neither of you can stop laughing.
"What is that," you say in trepidation.
"Huh? It's natto?"
"Why is it like that?"
"It's fermented?"
"Huh," you say, still not really understanding the appeal of slimy beans.
There is no sun on Gliese, so the sun does not rise outside the window. Instead, a holographic ceiling and a series of fans simulate the breeze and gentle warmth of a street cafe. You aren't exactly sure where Paris is, but it seems like a planet worth visiting.
It is, of course, the next day. There was no loop. No silver key left in either of your bodies. Just flesh and blood and empty stomachs.
"I think we made it," you say. Low, like everything you're fearing could suddenly leap out from behind the holographic boulevard and become real again.
Setsu blinks. "I think so, too."
On the other side of the cafeteria, Gina is eating across from SQ. Remnan is nowhere to be found, but from experience you know he's safe with Raqio in their condo.
It was a good household. It'll probably be a lot different with Setsu, and they'll probably still have to do military stuff, but they'll exist and everything you liked about the old world can be built again and better. You'll do the revolution a second time. Steal old spaceships with Remnan, travel the galaxy, finally figure out where Yuriko went.
This time you'll also have a best friend, and a partner, and a lover, and a home.
Please, you think, holding eye contact until Setsu blushes. Please let this be real.
It is.