Chapter Text
She spends so much of her time in the sky, forty thousand feet above ground, one thousand miles an hour, looking across the horizon and seeing the world like so few people ever get the chance to, that she forgets at some point how big it is. She knows the sky—the fading expanse of blue that turns bright at the edges, pink as a blush where it kisses the sun. Its every shade, from the inkiest black to the glorious oranges and icy grays. The dusting of stars like the dapple of freckles on summer skin. From within them, she has mapped the ever-changing spread of its clouds, whose names are as familiar as her siblings’. Stratus. Cirrostratus. Cirrus. Cumulonimbus. She turns the words, their hard Cs and quiet susurrus, over in her mouth as she climbs higher and higher, faster and faster, watching the green and gold glory of California’s mountains receding until she can see their slopes and valleys in whole.
When Natasha was younger, the sky always felt just in reach. As a kid, she thought that one day, when she grew big enough, she’d be able to reach up and pluck a cotton candy cloud out of the pale blue above her, and turn it over in her palms. That her fingers would graze that soft blue and feel its cool shimmer beneath her skin.
She believed that one day, when she got fast enough, she’d finally find the edge where water turned into sky. That magical space where everything was possible.
Her entire life has been about reaching farther, going faster, chasing the uncatchable and feeling it slip through her fingers. Like the remains of a dream, dancing away just as she gets close, farther and farther from her the harder she tries, daring her to try harder, to be better, to finally hold them within her grasp.
When she earned her wings, pinning the gold insignia to her uniform, it had felt like a conquering. Some small piece of the sky, however ephemeral, however gossamer, beneath her wings, on her chest, in her hands.
She stopped looking up as much, focused on the chase, the endeavor, the adventure—the continued conquering.
She’d forgotten how small the sky could make her feel.
The top of Hangman’s Wrangler is off, and they’re both leaning as far back in the seats as they can. The Milky Way opens above them like a crack in the night sky, the universe unable to contain itself, the purple-white points of a million stars spilling out eternally in a state of constant motion and endless arrest.
So close she can almost taste them, and yet out of her reach, daring her to come closer.
She is small, insignificant, and so very human, facing the spread of an expanding, uncaring sky. She feels like a pinprick, a speck of sand, an eyelash on her fingertip, a small thing carrying a wish to the heavens.
Hangman is quiet, his breathing beside her steady and deep. She half expects him to have fallen asleep, but when she shifts her gaze to him, his eyes are open.
It takes him a long while to speak. When he finally does, his voice is thick with disuse, so quiet she almost doesn’t hear him.
“Have you ever found yourself in the sky?”
What? “What?”
“Phoenix.”
“Yeah.”
He laughs, more a soft puff of air than the loud, boisterous thing she’s grown used to hearing. “I meant the constellation,” he explains. “Phoenix.”
“I didn’t know there was one,” she admits. Or if she did, she forgot it long before she earned her callsign.
She hears him shift in his seat, the cotton of his t-shirt rustling against the leather at his back. “It’s probably too early in the year to see it,” he says as he turns to face her and then back again to the open roof when she catches his gaze. “It’s visible low in the southern sky in the fall.”
Natasha doesn’t know what to make of that, so she just murmurs something nonsensical in response, and Hangman doesn’t continue any further.
She doesn’t know how much longer they stay like that, side by side and silent, watching the slow turn of stars above them, but eventually, Hangman is shifting in his seat once again. This time, he raises the seat back to an upright position and opens his door. He steps out into the parking lot with a crunch of gravel beneath his feet. Natasha watches idly as he pauses a moment to stretch out the kinks in his back before shutting the car door behind him quietly and hoisting himself onto the hood of his car.
Natasha follows him slowly and reluctantly, unraveling herself from the threadbare Academy-issue sweatshirt she’d grabbed from his backseat and pulling it over her head before coming to sit beside him.
“I never would’ve taken you for an astronomy buff.” She says it to the night air, more a quiet and philosophical rumination than a question for him.
“I—” he begins, sounding slightly uneasy. “My dad loved space. Growing up, he would take me and my sister out with this old telescope he had from when he was a kid and show us all these stars and constellations. Kate hated it, because she hated the bugs out there, but I ate it up. I loved the idea of aliens and going into space more than I cared about the stars, but as I got older, it ended up becoming the only time we really got along.”
Pensive is not a look she’s used to seeing on Hangman’s face, and it puts her off-kilter to see the unguarded expression he’s wearing.
“He thought I was a little shit,” he explains when she’s quiet for slightly too long. “Entitled. Selfish. Arrogant. He wasn’t wrong.”
“He was in the Navy too, right?” One of her first memories of Hangman—MIDN 2/C Seresin then—is of him bragging about his legacy status her plebe year, and she vaguely remembers him walking around the Yard with an older man who carried himself in a way that made her suspect.
Hangman nods, “Medical corps. I think he would’ve been an astronaut if he could, but his eyes weren’t great. He was gone a lot, especially after he and my mom split up and we moved back to Texas for good. But he’d always say he was looking for us in the sky. If we missed him, all we had to do was look up, and we’d be doing it together.” He’s quiet for a second, and then adds, “I’ve been looking up a lot these days.”
This time, when she’s quiet, he doesn’t fill the silence.
“Is there a constellation that you look for specifically?”
“Orion,” he answers. The hunter. That much she knows. “My middle name is Hunt, so that was my constellation. If I’m ever in the Southern Hemisphere, I look for Carina.”
“For your sister?”
Hangman nods. “Her middle name. The keel of a ship, which keeps her upright.” He looks over at Natasha with a soft smile, the hint of a joke in his eyes. “My dad was a bit of a nerd. Bob reminds me of him, actually.”
She agrees that Bob would give his daughter something like that—steadiness, stability, strength in a roiling, unsure world. She thinks Hangman would too.
He breathes in and rubs his palms against his thighs, moving to stand up. “Sun’s up. How ’bout some breakfast, Phoenix?”
He’s bathed in golden morning light when she looks over at him, the burst egg yolk sunrise reflecting off the mess of his hair. There is something in his expression that’s beginning to shutter now, in the light of day. She finds herself already missing the softness. “Jake—” she stops him with a hand against his arm. “Thank you. For telling me.”
His lip quirks up in a half smile. “Thanks for listening.”