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The smell of smoke met him the moment he set foot into Earth’s orbit, which made no sense.
It was space, after all.
Mars frowned and scanned the mostly-empty darkness until his gaze landed on the distant form of Earth. Unlike on Earth’s surface, scents tended to be the weakest of their senses (which was probably a mercy to the few of them that had their atmospheres made up of the less pleasant gases) so the fact that he could already smell it? Not great.
He knew it wasn’t the Sun, given that he was a big ball of plasma and not flame like Earth said his Earthlings had thought before. Still half in-thought, Mars shot a look towards said Sun out of sheer reflex, met with the sight of him chatting with Mercury, too distracted to notice Mars was on the move. (Not that it really mattered, since they’d been given the okay to leave their orbits.)
It wasn’t him, either. Mars definitely would have smelled it before he’d left his orbit if it was.
Then the only reason he could be smelling smoke was… Earth? But why in the stars would Earth be smelling like smoke? Mars couldn’t remember anything like that happening before, and he was pretty sure he would’ve remembered that.
Mostly sure.
Hastening his step a little bit, Mars kept his eyes locked onto the tiny form of Earth in the distance.
Just his luck that he’d been orbiting at a farther point than usual, but that only made it weirder that he could smell smoke where he was. The smell only got stronger the closer he got to Earth, enough that by the time he reached shouting distance he’d stopped his habit of breathing, not really wanting to deal with the stench longer than he already had.
Mars stopped, cupped his hands around his mouth, and called out. “Earth! Dude!” He’d been halfway through the shout before he realized he should have waited and watched Earth from that distance for a little.
After all, Earth definitely wasn’t going to make it easy to figure this out.
Earth didn’t look up, but Luna did. His head jerked around right to him before he relaxed in visible relief, waving him over with one hand. “Mars! Come here,” he whispered loudly, continuing to gesture until Mars closed the distance between them. “Finally, someone else is here! Earth’s been… Earth all day.” He scowled, but his eyes drifted towards his planet, who still hadn’t noticed Mars’s arrival. “I need you to talk to him. He’s not listening to me.”
“You think he’ll listen to me over his moon?”
Luna just shot him a look. “Seriously?”
He glanced towards Earth, who was hunched in on himself, hands shaking (even if it was almost imperceptible, Mars could see they were) in his lap. “Okay. Alright, Luna, I’ll talk to him. But you need to tell me what’s wrong. I can’t go in there blind. Please?”
“Fine, fine,” Luna said, frowning. “But I really don’t know what it is. I know it’s a problem on his surface, but he’s not explaining what it is, and it’s not like—he’s blocking me, okay? I—It’s not… I don’t know.” “Just—” His shoulders slumped. “Please.” Luna followed the plea with a look. It was the same one his own moons used when they wanted something he’d already said no to.
Mars sighed. “Alright. Just don’t be surprised if I don’t get anything either.”
Luna’s expression twisted.
“You probably will,” he said. He turned away. “Earth likes talking to you.”
Mars…wasn’t sure where that came from, and definitely didn’t have it in him to find out right now. Still, he flashed Luna a single look of concern before stepping away to the still-hunched Earth.
“Earth? Dude, you alright?”
His voice didn’t seem to register at all. Mars reached out with his gravity and nudged him, barely. Earth jerked up with wide eyes and a wheezing cough. “M-Mars!” he said, trying and failing to get his cough under control. “Dang it, man, I was able to hold that one back for so long!”
Mars tilted his head and stared, unamused.
“The cough?”
“Uh…” Earth’s eyes darted back and forth. “Maybe. What are you doing here?”
He sounded like he was trying to make a bad impression of Venus.
Mars didn’t say that out loud. With his luck, it’d probably somehow summon Venus and then he’d have a lot more to deal with than just Earth. And Earth was definitely enough. “You alright, dude?” he finally asked, instead of answering Earth’s question. He didn’t look alright; the shaking hands and bags under his eyes were new. But it was easier to start with something simple when it came to Earth, who dodged questions about his well-being as easily as he slid out of the way of asteroids in dodgeball.
“What? Come on, Mars. I’m fine! Fit as a fiddle. Perfect.”
“I have no idea what a fiddle is, but it must be terrible,” he said flatly. “You wanna try again?”
Earth’s jaw clenched against what was obviously another cough.
When he spoke, his voice was even rougher. “No. I’m fine!” He threw his hands in the air. “Stars, first Luna, now you?” His next inhale crackled. Mars didn’t say anything, letting that evidence speak for itself. That netted him a groan. “You guys are so nosy. Can’t a guy just deal with a few wildfires in peace?”
Mars’s brow pinched. “Wildfires?”
“You wouldn’t know, Mr. I don’t have oxygen in good quantities,” Earth huffed. “It’s a big fire.”
“Low blow, dude.” He crossed his arms and squinted, eyeing Earth a little harder than before. “But I’m not leaving until you tell me what’s wrong. Jokes or not.” If anything, the joke told him more than any answer would have. Recently, he’d been trying to make his jokes less… hurtful? (Mars wasn’t sure if that was the right word, because they’d never been outright hurtful, just pointed jabs.)
And he’d been succeeding.
Earth made a suspiciously cough-like sound and flattened one hand over his mouth, cheeks darkening above the back of his hand. “Wow,” he said into his palm, “did you hear that? Sounds like your moons are calling you.”
“Now you acknowledge them?”
Mars ignored the blatant attempt to send him away and instead stepped closer. Earth eyed him warily and tightened the hand over his mouth, fingers digging into his cheeks. “Would you stop that, dude?” Stars, it looked like he was hurting himself. “Just tell me what’s wrong. These wildfires are… hurting you? Is that it?”
Earth’s eyes narrowed, his hand dragging away.
He opened his mouth—probably to deny it—and Mars leaned in a little more…
Just in time to watch a single strand of Earth’s hair go up in flame.
He wasn’t even sure Earth realized before he snapped one hand out and snuffed it between two pinched fingers, eyes locked onto the burnt strand and the soot smudged between his fingers. “Uh… Mars? You going to let my hair go?”
Blinking, Mars backed off, rubbing his fingers together. “Sorry, dude, just… what was that?” He couldn’t remember Earth’s hair ever lighting on fire. At least not in front of him. It was entirely possible that this had happened before and Earth had just never said a word about it, because for a long while he was closed-mouth about anything that involved his status as a planet with life unless it involved boasting.
Mars rubbed the soot off against his jacket.
(Now there was soot on his jacket. Great. Very useful.)
“Don’t,” Earth muttered, ducking his head. He patted wildly at his hair. “I don’t really feel like explaining it, man. It’s… stuff.”
“Stuff,” he repeated. “Dude, your hair was on fire. In space.”
Earth’s face flattened. “Thanks, Mars, for that observation. I truly didn’t understand until you told me what just happened. Wow. My hair was on fire. Crazy.” The combination of a rough voice and the flat affect sounded so wrong coming from Earth that he took an actual step back, brow furrowing as he took him in.
“It was fire,” he repeated, unwilling to let it go. “You can’t be on fire.”
That time, Earth made no effort to hide his coughing, his shoulders hiking up while he did so into one fist. “That’s—” Cough. “Another great observation—” Cough. “—Mars. Got any more?” Cough. “What do you want me to lose to stop fire? My oxygen? My trees? You know, just take away the biggest stretch of forest in that whole state and it’ll solve the whole problem.” A harsher cough that time, like the sentence had taken all his strength to muster. “Maybe just take away the Earthlings, ‘cause it’s always possible they caused it. Just—” Earth’s shoulders slumped. “Stars, you don’t think I’d do something about it if I could?” His jaw flexed, fingers curling into his palms. “I can’t.”
When he closed his eyes and turned his head, Mars’s eyes caught on a patch of irritated, reddened skin on his neck.
It looked like a burn.
“Earth… how bad is it?”
“It’s fine,” he muttered. “I’m fine.”
Mars knew better than to take that as an answer. “Earth, I’m serious.”
“And I’m Shirley. What? It’s fire season, it happens every year!” He whipped around and coughed into his fist, wheezing between them. “It’s not… going to stop.” Earth’s eyes were duller when he turned around, and despite everything Mars was somehow glad for it, because it meant he’d dropped at least part of the act.
“It happens every year? How have I not noticed before now?”
Earth flapped one hand. “This is just a bad one. You know Earthlings and their global warming and general indifference to my surface. Nothing new, nothing horrible, nothing to worry about. You can go back to your orbit now, actually!”
“Dude. Your hair was just on fire.”
“Dude,” Earth parroted, “I don’t care.”
“Well,” Mars said, taking a step forward to close the distance between them again, “I do. I do care about you, Earth, okay? Can you please just talk to me?”
That time Earth stared at him, lips parted and eyes wide.
Mars let him have the time to register that—and when he finally started speaking, Earth sounded even rougher than before and more defeated than Mars had heard him. “It’s a bigger one,” he admitted. “It’s about half a state. And all those people have to be evacuated, and they’re tired, and scared, and—And I can feel it all. It’s never-ending.” His eyes went distant. “I can hear some of them. Before they…”
“Earth…”
“But it’s fine,” Earth said, flashing him a false, ear-to-ear smile. “I’ve dealt with stuff like this for a while. It’s nothing!” He coughed. “Nothing, really.”
Mars studied him, frowning. “How bad is it?”
Flexing his hands as if to distract himself, Earth didn’t answer for a moment. “You know when one of your dust storms gets really big, and you always start sneezing like a maniac and—”
“I get it,” Mars said, cutting him off. “It’s like one of my bad dust storms.”
“But imagine it’s fire, and there’s little people within it dying all the time, and you can feel each and every one of them,” Earth said, blinking nonchalantly at him. “And that’s a little like what I feel right now.”
He rubbed one hand against his chin. “Stars.”
“Stars is right.” Earth sighed so heavily his entire body crumpled with it until he was sitting back down where he’d been before, eyes back on the darkness. “And yeah. Sometimes my hair sets a little bit on fire. There’s more burnt strands in there, if you really look. Wanna?” He tilted his head towards him, hair falling in a blue-green swath. “I don’t mind.”
Mars hesitated.
(Just for a moment.)
Then he knelt down next to Earth and stared, eyes catching on the numerous burnt spots visible with a closer look. “How has Luna not seen these?”
“Luna has,” Earth said, shrugging. “I just haven’t really told him… uh, all of it. I guess I should, huh?”
Nodding, Mars reached out and carefully brushed away the newest soot smudge in his hair; his mind not-so-nicely waited to remind him what he was doing until he’d already done it, and then he immediately snatched his hand away and cleared his throat awkwardly, avoiding Earth’s eyes as his head swung around. “So… there’s nothing to do?”
“Not really,” Earth admitted. “I sort of just wait them out. You could… wait with me, if you wanted?”
“Sure, dude. Want to play a game?”
“Eh.” Earth shrugged as he dropped down next to him, thigh brushing lightly against his. “I don’t really feel like it.” They fell into a comfortable sort of silence—though he did turn his head to find Luna still floating where he’d left him, met with an aggressive thumbs up from the moon that he returned hesitantly—interrupted only by Earth’s crackly breathing and occasional cough.
Then he set his hand down and recognized warmth a split second before Earth yelped and snatched his hand from where it’d been… right where Mars had put his down.
“Sorry,” he reflexively said, head jerking towards him. “Didn’t mean to—”
“No! No, it’s fine,” Earth said, waving his hand several times. “I just didn’t expect that. I’m sort of… a little tender. Fire, you know?” He tilted his head to the side. “But… hey, you’re cold, right? Can I see your hand?” Mars slowly held out his hand towards Earth, who immediately reached out and grabbed it, letting their fingers intertwine.
His cheeks felt as warm as Earth’s hand against his.
“Uh… dude?”
“You’re so cold,” Earth groaned in relief. “Let me have your hand for a bit.”
Not that his answer seemed to matter, since Earth took that as the chance to flop over against him, awkwardly stooped to tuck his cheek against Mars’s shoulder—and then before Mars could even ask him if he was alright, he closed his eyes and seemingly fell asleep.
What? How in all of the stars had he fallen asleep so quickly?
Mars had no idea what to do with Earth holding his hand and cuddling up against his side, but…
He certainly wasn’t going to wake him up. Or ask him to stop.