Work Text:
Joe was a big fan of emails.
Nicky never truly understood it; when they were popular, they seemed a more circuitous, indirect method of communication in an age where you could travel the globe in less than a day to speak directly, or, should it be urgent, simply pick up the phone.
Andy understood it even less, griping at Joe’s travelogs appearing in her inbox and possibly being eaten by “the anglorhythm or whatever”, forever afraid of the footprints they might leave behind.
Joe was not to be dissuaded.
More than once, Nicky had a ten paragraph love letter caught in his spam filter because the subject line was far too suggestive for hotmail.
Really, he thinks with something between frustration and affection, this is not much different.
This being, broadly, the fact that he cannot seem to open a single godforsaken function on this entire stupid spaceship without finding a missive Joe left him somewhere.
Looking forward to seeing you, the unlock codepad on the door said when he entered the keycode.
Can you believe this thing still flies? Actually taped to the engines with a bit of duct tape when Nicky goes to check them. Duct tape will outlive them all, he’s sure.
It would be sweet if finding all the messages didn’t delay Nicky’s already very slow progress.
To say Nicky took to space travel like a duck to water would be massively misleading, and also confusing given that along with Nile and Booker, he and Joe make up the only four remaining humans who remember ducks. Nicky took to space travel like most sentient, sensible beings took to it, which is to say badly and with a lot of vomiting.
He still doesn’t feel entirely at home, clambering around a spaceship and pulling at all the gears and levers required to make it become airborne, let alone traverse through the atmosphere. It feels like it ought to be illegal for him to do this, but then, if he does manage to explode himself and the aircraft somewhere on the way towards the coordinates Nile dictated on their last phone call, his body will probably reform painfully slowly, drifting through darkness and nothingness until someone finds him.
Booker tested this theory a hundred years ago and he still won’t shut up about it.
Taking a deep breath, Nicky fires up the comm system.
Remember when we went to Singapore after they invented cars and I had to learn to drive on the wrong side? Joe has written, a pop-up message that lights up in blue across the whole windshield. You are much better at spaceships than I was at automobiles.
“Flattery,” Nicky scoffs. “You ought to know better, love.”
He closes out of the message and checks the settings.
This ship has been sitting in a for-rent hangar spot for the past twenty years, and it’s shocking how out of date it already is. When did things start moving so fast?
A blinking red light on the dash distracts him from his musings.
s–t–o–p b–i–t–c–h–i–n–g a–n–d f–l–y o–l–d m–a–n the light flashes out in morse code.
Pursing his lips, Nicky huffs an exhale out through his nose and shuts off the light.
“I’ll show you old, hayati,” he says.
The ship is a little unsteady as he lifts her off the tarmac, but he’s always been a better driver on freeways than downtown. It takes all his concentration to maneuver through the atmosphere and out towards space, both waiting for the all clear from ground control and monitoring traffic en route.
The quiet of space once he’s cleared the planet is a breath of fresh air, despite the accompanying awareness of how thin the metal plating between him and absolutely nothing is.
He plots the course and then exhales in relief.
The comm system pings.
It’s a timed message, set to arrive now but planned months in advance.
Are you ready?
For a moment, because he doesn’t like to take things for granted, Nicky thinks of what it might be like, someday, when at the end of a months-long absence from his family, Nicky returns home in a ship devoid of all of Joe’s little missives. What it might be like to read each little message only to return to find Joe gone.
He imagines what it might be like if it’s him who goes first, if Joe records all these messages only to have to read them all himself the next time he flies because Nicky isn’t there to receive them.
Then, he takes a deep breath and presses OK.
The letter is easily a few thousand words, paragraph on paragraph spinning across the front window of the ship, blocking the starscape around Nicky.
If anyone is listening to his comms, he must sound like an idiot, laughing until his sides hurt and, by the end, crying just a little.
Once he’s done, the trip is already half-over.
He entertains himself working out a response in his head, words he’ll say to Joe in person rather than through a medium, and before he knows it, he’s docking in the spaceport Nile built up over the last few decades.
She greets him in overalls, covered in engine grease stains and with pink highlights in her hair.
“Nicky!” she cries. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get you out earlier, and that you had to fly alone. I know you hate it.”
Over her shoulder, he spots the familiar shape of Joe’s curls emerging from under one of the other spacecrafts. “I wasn’t alone,” he says, smiling at them both. “But I’m very glad to be home.”