Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

If one thing could be said about the funeral of Payload Commander Gojo Satoru, it was appropriately maudlin. Heavy clouds churned over Kyoto, casting the temple grounds in a dull, wintry gloom. Snow dusted the corners of the temple stairs and smoothed out the grooves in the ornamentation. The chill was cutting.

Gojo would approve of the overcast sky and rain misting everyone’s cheeks like they’d been sobbing. Everything else, Kento thought, he’d hate. The guest list, the glitz, the glamour. But the sky itself opening up to grieve his loss? Gojo would’ve eaten that shit up.

“There’s like a billion people here,” Haibara said with awe.

“Gojo’s family is very affluent,” Kento said needlessly.

Gojo’s family was upper-crust, but Gojo was beloved by the public on his merits, not through nepotism. Rich, handsome, devastatingly intelligent. Gojo was an obnoxious philanthropist who thrived under the attention his name on a hospital wing brought him—though Kento planned to leave that part out when speaking of him. Truly, Gojo might have been a dangerous man if not for a stubborn streak envied by the gods and a downright unholy sense of self-confidence.

Haibara only nodded as they made their way through a throng of reporters and well-wishers gathered outside the temple. Kento pressed his way through the crowd after him as politely as he felt capable of. The crowd was anonymous, packed together along the sidewalks and spilling into the streets.

Kento entered the temple prepared to be battered by the obscenity of the Gojo clan’s wealth and still, somehow, was blown away. Inside, he was sharply reminded that while Gojo had nurtured a peacock demeanor and loose wallet, he had also been a rebellious man. Not even Gojo would have selected so many flowers, they spilled over the temple altar and down, through the space and into the aisles between two columns of benches, until there was little else to do than ease around them. He wouldn’t have selected that massive spirit tablet, that picture, or the horrendously long kaimyo—

Actually, Kento reconsidered, staring at the string of characters, Gojo would have been amused by the ostentatious Buddhist name awarded to him upon death. He’d like the ironic depravity of it; think it was just right and perfectly suited to his majesty. Kento could hear the exact words rolling off that flippant tongue. The part Gojo would be mad about was that it was bought and paid for like he hadn’t amassed honors aplenty with his own two hands.

Gojo would love the drama of how belated his funeral was. Preen about how even dead, he was fashionably late. But he’d hate that it was such an occasion for those who only wanted to suckle off his grandiosity like vampires. He’d hate the farce of it. No faux wailing in agony over his casket, please, genuine mourners only.

The gloom outside had tendrils creeping into the temple. Even the garish gold frame of Gojo’s portrait was muted and dull. Kento shuffled his way through all the flowers, to the head of the temple where he placed two Mont Blanc-flavored Kit-Kats inside the casket. Without a body there were only offerings, and Kento was painfully ordinary in his selection. The casket was filled to bursting with candies and paper cranes. An assortment of plastic astronaut figurines stood guard where Gojo’s head might have laid.

They might offer the same nostalgia, celebrate the same accomplishments, but this temple full of extended family and friends so precious, the clan couldn’t deny attendance—they didn’t grieve like Kento grieved. Everyone shared the cognitive dissonance of reconciling a funeral with the minor grief of a long, dangerous voyage. But they didn’t know the polarity of counting the days left while the rest of the world counted the days away. They didn’t have two hundred forty-seven little, unresolved griefs lining a beaten and battered path that kept branching off, into the unknown.

To the rest of the world this was an auspicious occasion. A great tragedy. For Kento, the past thirty days had felt like the coming of Ragnarök.

“Come on, let’s find your seat,” Haibara said, encouraging Kento away from the casket.

The first row was reserved for family. Everyone else was sorted into twelve rows, proportionally by importance and wealth. Kento’s was assigned the third row with the cousins, colleagues, and other miscellany. Honored, but not more than the family who paid for all this glory. At the far end of Kento’s row, the shadowy profiles of Megumi and Tsumiki hunched together, eyes warily on the rows in front of them. Impressive placements, considering Gojo did everything in his power to shield his benefactors from the might of his family. Even more impressive considering the pettiness of Gojo’s will.

The only person Kento knew in his row was Tsukumo Yuki, about halfway in. He apologized his way to her while Haibara did the same, the next row back. A yelp drew an uncomfortable amount of attention to them when Haibara stumbled on someone’s foot.

“Oh, don’t you just look like you’re doing capital-f-fine,” Yuki said when Kento sat next to her. She eyed his tense hands and shined shoes with something strung halfway between amusement and sympathy. “Good to see you again, Kento. It’s been, what? Three years?”

Thereabouts. The last time Kento had seen her was definitely before Five’s launch. They barely knew each other, too. Yuki had always lived in friend of a friend territory; an easy designation when one’s best friend was Gojo Satoru. She grinned at Kento, unconcerned with the setting. Ignoring the fact that she’d read him to filth because Kento had been spewing that godawful four-letter-word for a month solid. He’s fine. It’s fine. Everything’s fine.

What else was he supposed to say? It’d been a month. The world didn’t stop just because Kento’s got ripped apart.

“Sorry,” Yuki said when Kento stayed quiet too long.

“It’s fine.” Hell.

Haibara smothered a laugh but all three of them graciously ignored it.

“God, girl. I haven’t seen you in ages!” Haibara propped his elbow on the back of Kento’s chair and rested his chin on top. “How’ve you been?”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to ask that at funerals,” Kento hissed.

Yuki, however, was not offended. “I’ve been good! Working with the Jet Propulsion Lab in California.”

“Like cool rockets shit?” Haibara asked.

A laugh burst out of Yuki. “Yeah, man. Like cool rockets shit. Sometimes even literal rockets shit, too.”

A shush from further towards the front clamped all three of their mouths shut.

The funeral was painfully traditional. Anyone who’d met Gojo twice would know he’d hate this contrived grandstanding about honor and presumed legacies. If Kento had been responsible, the flowers would all be camellias. Savagely red and winter-blooming: an homage to Gojo’s tenacity and unfathomable depths. Instead this gauche smorgasbord of mixed metaphors and clumsy depictions courtesy of the Gojo clan was on display and amped up to eleven, courtesy of the International Space Administration and Gojo’s posthumous notoriety.

Gojo would hate that part, too. Kento could hear the exact way he’d bitch, “What good’s being a hero if you’re dead? You don’t even get to enjoy them sticking your face on money.”

Maybe the part of this that felt so wrong was that Gojo hadn’t breathed this air in nearly a year, and no one had expected him to for another. How was one supposed to grieve someone already so far gone? Every emotion Kento mustered for this loss felt fraudulent and incorrect. The only thing in his bones that felt real was his guilt, misguided though that might be.

Once the rites concluded and the casket was properly smothered in flowers—more lilies, more roses, more orchids—Yuki hooked her elbow in Kento’s and dragged them around the corner to the first bar she found. She bought a pair of pitchers and a flight of appetizers for the table. Before long another man turned up who Kento recognized from the ISA. Then another and another. Before long the room was packed and conversation had turned to reminiscing about Gojo. People shared how they met him, about the last time they’d seen him.

Haibara had met Gojo in college. Yuki last saw him two months before his launch. A guy further down the line had helped Gojo with some legal matters. Another friend from college, this time grad school. Then another from undergrad who looked put on the spot and Kento did not remember the face of at all. Kento was easily the last to see Gojo alive. He’d known it but to have it laid out in front of him, after that ghastly funeral…

From the moment Kento clocked the handful of stories twisting into a parade of expectations, up until he was pouring beer number four and it was suddenly his turn, Kento thought about what he should say. There wouldn’t be many opportunities to get this out in such gentle, drunken company.

To hell with it, he figured. Why hold back? “The last time I saw Gojo was at the Hokkaido Flight School, a couple days before Five launched. We don’t see any real action and haven’t in ages, so everyone gets excited when they bring in the newbies and set up the sims to see what’s what. Run the thing all day so there’s twelve slots, up to five go to the recruits. Only I got six on the tarmac and guess who one of them is.

“When I asked what the he was doing there, he told me he wanted to be more legend than man when he got back.” An appreciative chuckle rose from the group. Kento twisted his mug in place: clockwise, then counterclockwise. He grasped the mug by the handle and decided they didn’t need to hear everything. "I wish he could’ve gotten to see it happen, even if he’d be insufferable for the rest of his life.”

“Here, here,” Yuki said after another few seconds ticked by, tilting her glass towards the middle of the table. “To Gojo, and his legend.”

“To Gojo,” the room agreed without hesitation.

A knot situated somewhere in the realm of his upper intestines kept Kento company as he strolled through the sleek, gunmetal-blocked glass doors of the ISA’s Tokyo headquarters. The building was the same as both the first and last times Kento had been there; same floors, same matte, modern paint job and metallic fixtures. The only thing that ever changed was the lobby portraits. Every year the rows and rows of them moved a handful of spaces to make room for promotions and accolades. Not long after Expedition V went up, the seven portraits went up: the six crew, and Kento. They’d had to reorder Ino’s nameplate to honor him as pilot rather than alternate, and Kento’s had a narrow addendum explaining he’d been injured and replaced.

Kento was happy to see his greatest disappointment was no longer front and center, but Gojo’s portrait wasn’t any better. The heroics had earned him a larger frame and full color print. He was a legend. Just like he wanted.

Kusakabe’s office was on the third floor, next to the emergency exit. A summons wasn’t necessarily a bad thing—he was, technically, still affiliated. But it’d been ages since he’d been needed in an official capacity, and he’d avoided Tokyo since accepting his reassignment to the Hokkaido Flight School.

Kento knocked on the door frame still feeling unnerved but not unprepared. Whatever Kusakabe had to say, it had to be big. “You wanted to see me?” he asked when Kusakabe looked up from his desk.

Kusakabe stood and gestured Kento in, offering a hand across his desk for a hello. “Thanks for coming by. Hope it wasn’t too much trouble. Close the door and have a seat.”

“Yes, sir,” Kento said, obliging the door and after a moment’s hesitation, the chair. Conversational unknowns were easier standing, but Kusakabe wasn’t really one to drag out a moment. He was like Kento and preferred getting to the point. “And it’s no trouble.”

True to Kusakabe’s career-ISA status, his office had also not changed since the last time Kento had been invited into it. Everything came in twos. A pair of double-wide, chest-height filing cabinets filled the left wall, tops bare. Above the cabinets a massive chart of the stars hung on the wall without a frame. Two windows framed a cramped-looking desk with two chairs for guests. To the right, a sofa and uncomfortable looking chair pincered a narrow coffee table. Kusakabe was the sort of reasonable man to keep the overhead lights off, instead relying on the sun from his east-facing window and myriad lamps strategically scattered about—one on the filing cabinet, one on his desk, two on either end of the sofa. It was the sort of pace that Kento automatically felt at ease in, and Kusakabe used this to his advantage with vicious consistency.

Kusakabe sat once Kento did, and shuffled a few of the loose papers scattered on his desk into a folder. Satellite images? They looked to be from Mars, too. Kento frowned at the folder while Kusakabe frowned at the orderliness of his desk. He drummed his fingertips on the folder and said, “I’m really not sure how to do this.”

“Sometimes it’s best to just say it.”

Kusakabe nodded, looking up. He fiddled with his stapler. “SETI picked up a signal.”

Kento knew better than to react to incendiary news, and yet he couldn’t suppress a baffled, “You must be fucking kidding.” Was this aliens? Did they have aliens now?

Kusakabe chuckled. “You’re the third person to have that reaction today. Rein it in a little, reality is far more exciting. The signal is extraterrestrial but not unfamiliar. It’s from Pathfinder.”

Kento barely restrained himself from parroting back ‘Pathfinder?’ like a toddler. Something dangerously close to hope bloomed in his chest. The conclusions within leaping distance were deafening. “I don’t understand how that’s possible. What does it mean?”

“It means that Gojo Satoru could not have died in the storm, three months ago.” And Kusakabe graciously let that sink in for nearly a full minute before opening his manila folder and shuffling its pages around to extract a single matte satellite image. He slid the picture across his desk, face up. “I thought you should hear it from me. And I thought you would want to see for yourself.”

The picture was a distant shot of Expedition V’s Hab on Mars. It wasn’t a particularly impressive structure; just three circular pods connected by tunnel walkways. Each pod was about the size of Kento’s apartment, with a dedicated airlock; built to live an uncomfortable six for the meager span of 30 days. It looked like an overstylized triangle from a birds-eye and was a shot Kento had seen many times between the previous expeditions and training for V. But there was something odd about it, Kento realized the longer he looked. Shouldn’t there be damage? From the storm that rolled through but also from three months of sitting abandoned on site. But that wasn’t the case: the solar panels were clean. The rover was parked as if by habit; pulled up to the southernmost airlock. And just next to the rover the unfamiliar, ancient bulk of Pathfinder stood monument.

It was undeniable evidence, and Kento felt an unrelenting panic grab him by the throat. Gojo was alive? He was alive, alone, and stranded. Irretrievable, but in a new and terrible way. As for Kento— Did this mean he didn’t have to reckon with the hideous ache in his chest? He didn’t have to reconciled two competing and unresolved griefs? There was the one loss now, and if Kento had anything to say about it...

Resolve was already hardening in his bones. Anything. He would give anything. The satellite image trembled between his fingers. “Well, when are you sending up Six?”

“We can’t send up Six, they’ve barely started training. They’ve got two years to cook before they’re space-worthy. Can’t fly out to meet the Yahata either, they won’t be back to the ISS for a redirect until July and there’s six month’s turnaround. The return voyage wouldn’t make it before he runs out of food.”

“Well what are you doing then?! We can’t just—”

Sternly, Kusakabe interrupted. “Can you just trust that I know? I know. I’m working on it, I promise. But that is not why I called you here.”

“Then why did you call me?” Kento snapped.

“Just sit down,” Kusakabe said.

Kento hadn’t realized he stood. Contrition did work calming his temper as he sank back into his seat. He asked, deliberately level, “Why am I here, Atsuya?”

“Because we’re about to have communications up. Gojo’s worked out how to resurrect the Mars Rover. Before long that signal from Pathfinder will go live, and I need someone both Gojo and I can trust in that comms chair. Gojo’s too smart to let this be the end of him. He’ll figure out a way to survive, all we have to do is go get him. I have to believe that and so do you, for the record. He’ll make it, Kento. He will. But we also both know he’s not forthcoming and won’t listen to orders unless he agrees with them. Easy to make him agree when it’s the team on the line but when it’s just Gojo? He’s going to do whatever he feels is best and if he knows it’ll piss us off, he’ll lie.”

“I thought we were talking about why I’m here.” But they were, in some uncomfortably roundabout way.

Kusakabe drummed his fingers on his desk impatiently. “I have a thousand reasons. You’re here because you won’t let him get away with it. You’re here because he’ll want to gossip with you and I can use that to my advantage.” Kusakabe’s fingers stilled but he didn’t look at Kento, instead directing his sights to the massive astrological chart hung behind his filing cabinets. “You are here because I have a Herculean undertaking on my plate. And I don’t have time to drag Gojo through the process of building rapport with the people trying to save his life. But he’ll trust you. He’ll trust you and the rest will follow.”

The knot in Kento’s stomach seeped into his chest as heartburn. He cleared the sudden tightness in his throat. “Is that all?”

“Actually, no.” Kusakabe scooted back from his desk and relaxed, letting his arms drop to the armrests and finally looking Kento in the eye. “You’re also being tapped for this posting because Tsukumo Yuki demanded it.”

Kusakabe couldn’t have shocked Kento more if he’d told him Gojo was alive all over again. “What’s Yuki doing here? I thought she went back to California.”

“To the Jet Propulsion Lab, yeah. You happen to know what they work on there?”

Kento drawled, “Cool rocket shit, I presume. I do know her. Literally sat next to her at the funeral.” Kento ruminated on that statement for a moment. Apparently that funeral was even more of a farce than it seemed.

“Okay, smartass. Since you’re besties with one of the JPL’s finest, tell me what else they work on besides ‘cool rocket shit?’”

But Kento was already there, he’d realized the instant ‘cool rocket shit’ came out of his mouth. Not just rockets. Rovers, too. “They built Pathfinder.”

“Yes, they did. They also rival only SETI in terms of communication capabilities. We have both Yuki and a number of satellites on loan from the JPL for this mission. Thanks to them, establishing contact with Gojo is a matter of hours, not days. Don’t know how we’re gonna talk, but we’re gonna talk. We have to find some way to tell him he’s not alone and we’re gonna get him back.”

“And you want me to be the one to tell him that.”

“I want someone who cares in that seat.”

Never let it be said Kento didn’t care for Gojo far more than was appropriate or advisable. “I’m a pilot, not a comms officer. I wouldn’t know where to begin.” And yet he wanted it more than he’d wanted that slot on Expedition V.

Kusakabe’s tense frown broke in half, curling up at the sides of his mouth into a rueful grin. “You really gonna try to tell me there’s anyone better for the job? That if I called someone else, you wouldn’t be tearing my door down, demanding point? You can do it and you can do it better than anyone else. Keep Gojo alive. Say what he is not. And let’s get him home.”

When speechless, Kento enjoyed falling back on a full-bodied, “Sir.”