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With a swift, clean clack, the billiard ball rocketed into the corner pocket, and Ronald leaned back, a soft smile of satisfaction on his face. Jason clapped him on the back, his palm lingering affectionately between his shoulder blades for a few seconds before returning to his own cue.
“I can’t believe you only started playing when we met,” he said in mock complaint, bending forward to line up his own shot. “Pretty soon you’re going to be better than I am.”
He glanced up to meet Ron’s eyes, cool pale blue creased into a warm smile. “I could never be better than you,” he replied, waiting for Jason to take the shot and stand back up before nudging his elbow with his own.
Jason gave him a reproving look out of the corner of his eye. “Well that’s a goddamn lie. It’s literally your job to be at least as good as I am. And you…” He turned to face his backup, his counterpart, his partner, taking in the faint flush that spread over his nose and the tops of his cheeks, a mirror of his own. “...are good at your job.”
Ronald ducked his head and didn’t respond. Jason clapped his shoulder. “Come on. Your turn.”
Playful and innocent touches while playing pool together were all one could get away with in public, but it was enough. After all, they spent all day working and training together. And as for nights, well, it wasn’t entirely unheard of for two bachelors in Houston to live together while training, even if the lack of a wife or even a girlfriend got them both mocked mercilessly. And it was a running joke amongst the astronaut corps that sooner or later Jason would have a suspicious accident at home, ensuring Ronald a trip to the space station in his place.
“Let ‘em,” was what Jason had to say to that, pressing his backup, his partner, his lover, into the sheets. “The more they’re looking out for some kinda rivalry, the less chance they’ll spot anything else.”
Ron grinned and rolled them over, leaning down to kiss him eagerly. “I wish they would see,” he said, mouthing along Jason’s jaw to the oversized sideburns he’d regularly tease him about. “I wish everyone could see how good we are.”
“I wish you could come with me,” Jason murmured, sliding his fingers into Ronald’s cropped blonde hair, and felt the other man chuckle into his neck.
“Can you imagine? Six months on the ISS together without getting to do this—” He slid his hand down to Jason’s boxers, making him gasp.
“We’d out ourselves within a week,” Jason replied with a breathless laugh.
“So you’d better stay one step ahead of me, then. All the way to the top. Because I'm getting to space no matter what.”
Jason had been prepared for the mission to take him away from Ronald for months, knowing that he’d still hear his voice on CAPCOM, unspoken endearments in every sign-off. He hadn’t been prepared for the misfortune of life getting there first.
The initial shock of seeing Ronald laid up in a hospital bed after the crash, one leg in a cast and an apologetic smile on his face, wore off quickly. He dropped in most days to visit, sitting by the bed and holding Ron’s hand discreetly in his as he recounted events of the day. Ronald himself seemed to be in good spirits, joking to anyone who came by that the accident was the universe’s way of making things fairer on Jason so he wouldn’t be left in the dust.
It took two weeks in hospital followed by rehab clinic before he could come home, bundled up with crutches and a strict physical therapy routine. Jason’s days became, if anything, longer, in bringing a new backup up to speed while continuing his own training, but he’d make up for his absence by practically waiting on Ronald hand and foot when he got back home, a situation that Ron found hilarious for a week before Jason’s excessive care-taking began to grate on him.
“I’m not broken,” he growled, pushing away from his crutches and pressing Jason against the wall in a fierce kiss. “I’ll catch back up, just you wait."
"You'd better. I'm not leaving you behind."
It took three months for Ronald to be healed enough to be cleared for flight. Jason expected he'd go right back up, but he was surprised to hear that Ronald had gone back out to the airfield, even gone so far as to sign out a jet, only to back out at the last moment.
"I thought you'd want to get back in the air as soon as possible," he remarked one evening, making dinner. He'd had a bunch of practice at that lately.
"I don't know," Ron replied, his voice oddly flat. "I get into my flight suit and everything and then I just… can't. It's like my chest feels tight, like I'm short of breath. I guess I'm not ready yet."
Jason frowned. "How about I take you up? You can just sit back and get the feel of it again. Get over that last hurdle, you know?" He winked. "You trust me to take care of you?"
"Always," Ron answered with a tenuous smile. "Yeah. That might help."
Jason's schedule was packed, with launch less than a month away, but they managed to find time to book out one of the T-38s one afternoon, Ronald curling hesitantly into the back seat while Jason felt the familiar rush of firing up the engines from the pilot seat. "Okay to go ahead, partner?" Jason called back.
"As I'll ever be," Ron replied. Jason leaned on the thrust and felt the jolt of acceleration through his body, the thrill of it that never went away, no matter how many times he flew. He could feel the pulse of the plane in his very heartbeat, its own eagerness to get into the air. He didn't hear the increased raggedness of Ronald's breathing until seconds from takeoff, until it was already too late—the howling air beneath their wings, the welcoming sun bright in the sky, and his stomach dropping in horror as Ron cried out for him to make it stop, gasping for air like the cabin had depressurised.
He flew the loop around to bring them back to land safely—it was barely minutes, but every heave of Ron's breath felt like an eternity, pounding in his ears louder than the jet engines and the roar of wheels back on the ground. He taxied them safely to a stop, but as soon as he was able he leapt out of the cockpit and helped a shaky Ron to the ground where his knees gave way and he near collapsed. Jason went down with him, holding his gasping form close as a couple of the marshallers ran over to help, not caring who saw.
"I'm sorry," he whispered as Ronald shuddered in his arms. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
He took Ron right home, where the terror first gave way to rage, and then to a sullen weariness. "Just focus on your training," he told Jason that night, brow pressed between his hands and a grimace on his face. "You can't wait for me. I'll catch up."
Jason went to space. Even a vertical climb roll couldn't match the exhilaration of a rocket launch. He tried not to feel guilty at the thrill of it, at sinking himself into his work, at enjoying the camaraderie with his crew and marvelling at his view of the Earth from above, weightless and detached. And he tried not to let his disappointment show when it was his backup's voice on CAPCOM, not Ronald's. There was no opportunity to communicate with Ron, not how he would have liked. Just the occasional friendly email, one colleague to another, asking how things were going. Jason missed his voice.
Once, Ron was able to swing by Mission Control and use his previous CAPCOM training to negotiate a turn on the comms, "just to shake things up for them up there, remind Jason he's not seen the last of me"—it got a laugh out of ground and space crew alike, and though the conversation was brief and otherwise professional, Jason felt like it might sustain him through the rest of the mission.
Even so, his time on the ISS felt like such an isolated chapter in his life that it might as well have happened to another man. As he strapped himself into the return capsule five months after arriving, a part of him still felt as if no time had passed. There would be an alarmingly fast drop back to Earth, and then life would pick up as normal.
It still seemed to take an eternity between being helped from the capsule, heavy with the weight of five months of gravity missed, and finally walking through his front door and, closing it behind him, into Ronald's arms, but once he was there it was as if the time away had vanished in a blink.
"It's so good to see you again," Jason murmured into his shoulder. Ron said no words in reply, only held him a little tighter.
There was the debrief, there was the intensive medical and recovery program, there was the press and outreach tour, and only then did life approach some semblance of normalcy again. Still, Jason and Ronald didn't see each other daytimes any more, getting lunch with their respective teams and smiling ruefully across the cafeteria on the occasional day their schedules happened to overlap. Their days went unspoken at home, and it grew quiet between them. Ron hadn't been assigned to a new crew yet, and while his physical fitness had returned to normal he still seemed to carry a tired sort of sadness with him that Jason didn't want to aggravate. He seemed more curled in on himself and didn't often want to be touched. Jason let him ride it out, whatever it was. Maybe it would take a little longer than he thought for things to return to their baseline, but he'd happily wait.
In the meantime, Jason tried to keep a brave face about things and keep Ron's spirits up, encouraging him to hang in there—it was only a matter of time before he'd get a new assignment, with the whole business of the crash being months behind him now. Things were surely getting better. They must be—Ron would have said something otherwise. But he barely said anything at all, these days.
"Hey, it'll be your turn soon," Jason told Ron after another crew selection was announced, his name notably absent. "It's got to be the next one, I'm sure of it. There'll be a lot of spacewalks needed for the assembly of the new module. You've always been fantastic in the neutral buoyancy lab, so—"
"Stop that," Ron snapped.
"What?"
Ron slammed a hand down on the counter where he'd been half-heartedly putting together a sandwich. "Just—stop talking about work. I don't want to talk about it."
Jason got up from where he'd been sitting at the kitchen table. "I don't get it," he protested. "You're one of our best. They're stupid for not reassigning you. If I were Chief of the Astronaut Office I'd have done it in a heartbeat! I mean, you've been flying again for ages at this point, right?"
"I haven't."
Jason shut right up, stunned. Surely that couldn't be right? But then, when had been the last time he'd checked? They'd never talked about it, not since he returned to Earth.
"I haven't been up since…" Ron cut off, gritting his teeth. "I've never flown again."
"You've been getting therapy, though, right? Working it all out?" Jason came up behind him, putting a hand on his shoulder. Ron shrugged it off.
"How can I? My therapist wants me to be honest with him, but I can't be, not about us. And that's at the heart of it. That magic trick. How you can do it, and not me. I don't even have it in me to get in a plane any more, let alone fly it." He gave a heavy sigh. "We're not getting anywhere."
Something wrenched inside Jason's chest. "Can't you talk to me about it?"
"No!" Jason recoiled at the force of the word. "I can't drag you down with this. But I can't keep up, either. Not any more."
A year after Jason returned to Earth, Ronald gave up. Jason couldn't persuade him to stay—not at NASA, and not at home either. With no more reason to live there, Ronald packed his bags.
"You don't deserve me," he told Jason. "You need to go right ahead and climb that ladder. I’ll just get in your way."
"Whatever happened to getting to space no matter what?"
Ronald gave him no answer to that.
Jason's sense of loss came with the sting of betrayal. He'd been counting on Ronald to remain at his side. Even if he left the astronaut corps, wasn't their relationship worth staying for? Had Jason only ever been something for him to aspire to—blazing the trail ahead for a path he could no longer follow? Or maybe Jason would always be a reminder for him of what he'd never been able to achieve. Maybe a clean break was what he needed to move on with his life.
Jason turned back to the ladder. There was nothing else for him to do.
The Chief's office was large, but he was used to ambling around a house by himself, so it suited him just fine. On the walls he hung photographs of the astronaut crews as the number grew over the years. Among them, unobtrusive, were the crews he'd been on. Some of the shots included backups, and so there was one photograph of Ronald among the many, a piece of him left at NASA even as the man himself had never returned. Eventually, his face blended into the rest of them, and Jason no longer felt pain to look at it, just a passing sadness.
His eyes scanned from that photograph to a far more recent one, in which Hibito Nanba grinned out of the frame, eager and as yet unaffected by his troubles on the Moon. Jason's thoughts turned to the man's older brother, and his cheeks turned pink. Truly, he had a good life if the biggest of his problems was a cute young rookie making highly inappropriate confessions of love via T-38.
For the sake of both brothers, he hoped that Ronald's story would not repeat itself.