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Two hundred seventy thousand kilometers per second. That was what Donghyuck had told them last week.
Just under the speed of light, so that you don’t get flattened into a pancake . A pause, a shaky sip of coffee that is more water than caffeine, because God knows that their stomachs can barely keep anything down at this point. It should be enough to break the nebulous cloud, get you beyond our solar system.
Two hundred seventy thousand kilometers per second. The numerical, complicated way of saying possible death and disaster . The defiant, brittle way of saying there is hope .
Donghyuck had been wiping his glasses as he spoke, meticulously going over the lensless aluminum frames like he had something to prove. They’ve all chosen ways to deal with this, after all: he hasn’t seen Jaemin since the mission was confirmed, and he’s seen Renjun way too often. His own nails are worried bloody, ragged down to the quick, and it hurts to dig them into the armrests of the cockpit.
And what about Jeno?
Sweet, quiet, wonderful Jeno who’d brought breakfast into the control room every morning while they crunched numbers and calculated the possibility of ever escaping the cosmic fallout of a distant star, the galactic envelope that had descended upon their skies less than half a year ago. Patient, hardworking Jeno who’d stay up conducting maintenance and archiving calculations and draping a lab coat over Mark’s shoulders when he fell asleep at the console.
Jeno, who’d blanched when Jaemin had finally conceded that two of them would have to be on the shuttle to even get it off the ground. Fingers like a vice grip around Mark’s wrist when they’d drawn lots, loosening into a resigned knot when he’d pulled the short stick after Mark.
Beside him, Jeno is reading.
Mark recognizes the book in his hands, has seen it tucked between manuscripts and textbooks in their lab back home, and Jeno turns the page with an almost reverent finger. His hand is looped through the crash harness, padded suit patched at the elbows and rolled up his forearms for better mobility. A smile tugs at the corners of his lips, etched across his jaw as though lying in wait.
He realizes that he’s probably staring, which shouldn’t matter as much as it does when they’re flying through nothingness like this, grasping at cosmic straws. But Jeno doesn’t bring it up, acknowledges him with a gentle tilt of his head and curves his long legs into the small space under the control panel. Waiting for him to speak first.
“What did you bring with you?”
It had been Renjun’s idea, for them to bring something important along with them. It’ll keep you grounded , he’d said, maybe bring you comfort if things go...if they…
Donghyuck had called him a sap, then promptly excused himself to the restroom for personal reasons. None of them had contested the suggestion.
Jeno turns to look at him, snaps the book shut and gives it a little wave. “This one, and a few more in the back.” He flushes red at the thought, and it seems incredibly brave of him, to be colorful and alive in the emptiness of space. “Just in case it was a long trip. None of us really knew.”
Mark has lost track of the hours they’ve spent flying—they’d both stopped counting a while ago, and Donghyuck had warned them that it might not matter anyway. “How’s the book so far?”
“I’m actually just going back and forth at this point. I finished it a while ago.” He laughs, but it rings hollow in the cockpit, never quite reaching his eyes. Mark knows too well, what Jeno looks like when he laughs, how the lines of his face and shoulders seem to go upwards all at once. There is nothing there but the thrumming motion of the shuttle, further and further away from home.
“What did you end up bringing?”
It’s Mark’s turn to grin, and warmth creeps into Jeno’s posture as he returns it. “I brought a telescope.”
“Why?”
He shrugs, and Jeno giggles with him, counter to the shaking of the cockpit with how earnestly he moves. “I wanted to see the stars.”
There’s a painful, beautiful sense of irony in it, Mark thinks, in the fact that he’s this close to stardust and cosmic matter and everything he’s ever planned to find, but can’t see it from the cockpit window, can’t find each pinprick of light across the darkness.
Because it’s always been the stars: doodled in the corners of his laboratory manual, sketched in detail across published research papers and conference presentations. He’s understood, more intimately than anyone, the delay involved in the loss of a constellation. Watching them wink out one by one, according to distance and time, from the observatory six months ago.
“Do you think we’ll end up seeing them?” Mark doesn’t answer, and Jeno doesn’t present him for a response, allows the question to sit heavy under his tongue, to nestle into some deeper place filled with exhaustion and doubt and something terrifyingly light. It is dangerous, he thinks, to wonder about things that no longer have a place in the void, to wonder about things like stars and home and planets that they can no longer see. Things like telescopes, tucked into the landing bay at the last moment in an act of defiance. In an act of hope.
Outside the cockpit window, the darkness is still empty.
Jeno settles back into his seat, and it is oddly reminiscent of the day’s end back home. Mark can almost see his goggles pulled up over his head, lab gown half tucked in. Head buried in a book, or tinkering with Jaemin’s coffee machine that always seems to break down. The harness seems insufficient to hold him, to hold the weight of memory that he knows they both carry. Can he feel it bursting out of their chests?
“What do you think the others are doing right now?”
Jeno hums under his breath, worries his bottom lip between his teeth as he thinks. “Renjun is probably watching the tracking screen.” A muscle in his jaw tightens ever so slightly. “Even if we all know that the tracker stopped working several sectors back.”
Renjun hunched over the workstation then, three or more empty coffee mugs beside him because he can’t be bothered to make extra trips (or buy a thermos). “Donghyuck is probably with him. Maybe crying. Or pretending not to.”
“Injun knows him too well for him to hide it.” He presses his lips together, swallowing down the tail end of an unformed sentence. It’s an ugly, inaudible suggestion, and Mark calls Donghyuck to mind, places him beside Renjun with his head on the table, face buried into a suspiciously wrinkled hoodie.
“What about Jaemin?” Jeno turns to look at him. “Do you think he’ll come in?”
“I hope he does.” The air feels more stale than before, somehow aware of the vacuum outside, and Jeno picks up on it.
“But you also hope he doesn’t?” Jaemin, maybe at home, maybe in some corner of the lab on his own. Unfathomable in how he deals with certain things, and Mark thinks that he understands, even several months late, that it is forgivable to leave parts of Jaemin buried, unknowable. Three out of five, and two hurtling further and further away.
He looks out the window, and the Earth glows blue and brown in the distance, something like decay in how it spreads into the darkness of the cosmos. It seems preordained at this point, that humanity would have been swallowed up eventually, for it was they who dared to defy the empty stretch of nothing that filled the spaces between their planets, the moments between waking and movement and action. Their memory, Mark realizes, is defiance in itself. A burning weight in the pit of his stomach, millions of kilometers behind them, between Renjun and Donghyuck’s fingers and within the pages of Jeno’s book.
It bursts out of his chest. “What do you think you’ve left behind?”
Jeno doesn’t move, only breathes. In and out, in and out. “Do you want me to be honest?”
“Please.”
“Not much.” A pause, and he supposes that Jeno is working through the words, letting Mark find his way around them as well. Two words, and a web of obligation and memory and hope has filled the spaces between each exhale. “I don’t think there’s much I’ve left behind.”
It drowns out the whir of the engine, the uncertainty of the moment. “Why?” He thinks back to Renjun, Donghyuck, Jaemin, star charts and telescopes and a world beyond the confines of theirs. “How?”
Silence, and then Jeno is unbuckling the clasp of his harness, shoulders wedged against the pilot’s chair as he turns to face Mark. It is as though he has cast the weight of the world off his chest, and it is not impossible to imagine galactic burdens and solar masses sliding off the curve of his back as he straightens up.
“I’ve loved enough.” He leans on the armrest separating them, pale and vibrant all at once at the admission. “With how things are, I don’t think there’s any other way to put it.”
The admission should be revelatory, or at the very least shocking, but it sinks into Mark’s bones instead. Envelopes him like cosmic fallout from a distant star, because what is Jeno’s love if not sufficient, if not constant, if not overflowing? Jeno, with his love for books and scribbled notes in the corners of their blackboard, who had cultivated a garden in the only sunlit corner of the lab and made them all salads on whim, who is arguably more earth-bound, a child of humanity and knowledge and things that bind, has loved enough.
And the more he thinks about it, the easier it is to find each moment, highlighting them like pinpricks in the dark, heralding them on their way. They are nestled in the times when Jeno has worked past closing, reading in a swivel chair as Jaemin and Mark finish their blueprints. He sees them in the corners of the break room, the five of them laughing as Jeno tries to write a poem about their failed test launch. Maybe even in the tense, quiet breathing of that final night, huddled around the console table as they’d drawn lots for the mission. Jeno’s fingers bumping into his, then Renjun’s, inexplicably reaching for something in the darkness of the lottery box.
Jeno has loved enough. The hopeful, beautiful way of saying I am here, now, with no burden on my shoulders . The terrible, aching way of saying I have so much more left to give .
“How about you?” The ship shudders a little and their elbows collide on the armrest for the briefest of moments. Is it hopeful, defiant too, to find flesh against flesh and skin against skin in the emptiness of the void? “Is there anything you’ve left behind?”
There is an evening that Mark remembers vaguely, one that had taken place just after they’d drawn lots for the mission. Donghyuck had decided to leave the lab earlier than usual, and it had just been him and Jeno left, trying to finalize the fight plan before dawn. The smell of instant noodles, humming quietly under his breath to the tinny sound of Frank Ocean over a faulty pair of headphones, and Jeno had crossed the workstation in two clean strides, chest warm against the line of Mark’s shoulder blades.
Mark, he’d started, somehow all the more tremulous in the quiet of the room. Do you want to come outside?
For what? He recalls laughing softly, curling the cord of his headphones around an idle index finger. Jeno’s hands just out of reach, almost too warm against the edge of the console table.
Jeno had shrugged. Stargazing? A pause, admission in the silence more than anything. There’s something I want to tell you.
Let’s finish these plans first . Jaemin needs them first thing in the morning . At that point, Jaemin had barely been coming to the lab at all, but Mark sees the excuse in hindsight, feels himself tabbing on and off diagrams idly, putting together pieces of spacecraft and star map and terribly, terribly misplaced fear. He wonders if Jeno sees it too, understands the fatal error, the doubt.
Okay. Then Jeno had tucked his chin into the crook of Mark’s neck and shoulder, arms gently intertwined with his, and he knows that Jeno sees it too, that he probably understands it better than Mark ever will. His cheek had been warm against the column of Mark’s neck, too warm for an empty laboratory in the middle of the night, for a mission far from saving their dying planet, for a night sky that has long since abandoned its stars.
“A lot. There’s a lot I’ve left behind.” In this moment, he is closest to the stars, to the object of his study and aspiration, untethered, and there is so much left unfinished. So much that he is now finding insufficient, borders never crossed and lines never blurred, separated by workstations and fear and the worn leather of the armrest between them.
And Jeno doesn’t press him on it, only leans across the armrest as klaxons sound and they both flinch under the red tint of the warning light.
“We’re about to break through the barrier.” It’s little more than a statement at this point, and it is so like him to be calm, Mark thinks, to hold firm as the shuttle begins to shake.
“I’m sorry.” He chokes out, and it is nearly absurd in the moment. They are minutes away from oblivion, seconds—time no longer seems to matter, and it is not because Donghyuck’s words hold weight in the vacuum of space, but because Jeno is looking at him, quiet, resigned, beyond gentle, and—
“What for?” They’ve been pressed into the backrests by momentum, bones filled with lead, but Jeno speaks like nothing is easier, smiles like they’re back home, about to head outside to look at the sky. Is it a sort of defiance too, in a way? A sort of hope? “Mark?”
For pulling away when things mattered most? For looking skyward, always fucking skyward, when he could have glanced across the laboratory, turned his head to the left and found planets and galaxies and things beyond oblivion? For bringing the senseless, blind hope of a telescope on a journey into the starless cosmos, and being too afraid to see things with eyes unclouded under a clear sky? For trying to leave things behind when he could have just as easily, so easily, tucked it into the hollow between his heart and ribcage, carried it with him, and it would have been enough.
The roar of cosmic matter against metal plating has grown louder, louder, and he cannot hear the click of their harnesses snapping into place, inertia pinning them backwards, stealing the breath from his lungs as Jeno pushes him back into his seat with a palm, flesh like a brand on the skin of his wrist.
Two hundred seventy thousand kilometers per second. Mark turns his head at a laborious, beautiful fraction of the speed, presses his lips to Jeno’s ear with the little motion that the universe still allows him. He doesn’t know what he says, closes his eyes until he can barely feel the warmth of skin against skin, but he allows himself to hope that Jeno understands. Sends a portion of himself into that moment in the lab, retrieves it from the hollow of memory and claims it as his own, lightens the burden of things left behind.
It is oblivion and nothingness for longer than they can ever estimate—and time does not seem to matter, it does not matter, it does not when Jeno’s fingers find their way to the skin of his forearm, keeping them in the moment, beyond time, beyond it—
Silence.
A part of him, however small, however naive, wishes. Defiantly. Hopefully. Wishes that he will find stars outside the cockpit window when he opens his eyes (does he dare). That there will be pinpricks of light streaking into the darkness, beyond and in complete defiance. (Does he dare?) That he will turn to the left and find Jeno, and that the moment will be enough. Does he dare?
Mark opens his eyes.