Work Text
“Ground Control to Min Yoongi.”
“Copy.”
“How is it up there today?”
“Sunny, with a light breeze.”
“Very funny, hyung.”
“I try my best, Jungkook.”
Yoongi’s waking hours, for the past several months, had begun with a similar exchange. The days that Yoongi now lived, if they could truly be called that, were no longer marked by the rising and setting of the sun. They were marked with vitamin pills and dehydrated packaged meals, and by Jungkook’s voice. Sometimes, Yoongi called first. Usually, Jungkook beat him to it.
Talking to Jungkook was as much a part of his routine now as was brushing his teeth and washing his face - which he did with water particles hanging in front of him, like raindrops frozen in place. It was, most decidedly, the
best
part of his routine. Maybe it was Jungkook’s bright tone, which always made Yoongi forget momentarily that he was several worlds farther from the sun than he should be. Maybe it was his strangely innocent sense of humor, not entirely fitting for his position.
“It’s a special day, hyung.” Jungkook’s voice was light, soaring easily over the 17 million miles it took to reach Yoongi.
“Oh yeah?” Yoongi said, pretending.
“You’re halfway there.”
He was right. Yoongi’s calendar bore one hundred and fifty wide black Xs. After one hundred and fifty more, he would stand on red soil for the first time - for all of humankind’s first time. Among the clash of excitement, terror and devastation, he tried to smile.
“I guess I am.”
Somewhere on Mars, crouched at the bottom of a canyon to hide from radiation, his new home waited. Unmanned landers had carried it there before he’d even left Earth. Shelter, communication equipment, and enough supplies to last him until he became self sustaining. He imagined it piled there amongst the dust, as lonely as a desert oasis.
“I guess I am,” he said again, and propelled himself through the
Wayfarer I
.
The strange thing about being in space was that there was no up or down, no forward or backward. He didn’t think about those words anymore unless he happened to read them somewhere, in which case it took him a moment to remember what they meant. The thought of gravity, once a constant companion, was surprisingly hard to conceptualize. It was amazing and frightening, the speed at which humans could adapt to things they were never meant to adapt to.
His body knew differently - though he couldn’t tell, his muscle mass was leaking away, his skin becoming thin. That’s where the endless supplements came in, carrying the bitter taste of dirt, tricking his anatomy into thinking he was right where he was supposed to be. It couldn’t have known any better, continuing to operate with a kind of grim determination, silently accepting tiny tablets of B12 in place of days in the sunlight. Yoongi tried not to think of the adjustment period that would happen when he was on solid ground again.
“Any office drama to catch up on?” Yoongi asked as he pulled himself from one side of the ship to the other. Checking things, taking notes.
Jungkook's voice fell conspiratorially, though they both knew nothing that passed between them was private, no matter how softly he spoke. He didn’t seem to mind, and if he didn’t then Yoongi certainly didn’t. Nothing could touch him, anyway.
“Jin erased part of Namjoon’s chalkboard calculations last night. He says it was a mistake, but Namjoon thinks he’s getting back at him for breaking his favorite coffee mug.
Scientists
, you know.”
There was an eye roll in Jungkook’s voice, as if he wasn’t also technically a scientist. Yoongi laughed.
“You guys are still using chalkboards down there? How antiquated.”
Yoongi made a note of the temperature on the tablet that followed him on a tether attached to his wrist.
“How about friend drama?”
Jungkook answered immediately. “Well, remember how I told you I was going out drinking with Taehyung and Jimin the other night?”
“Affirmative.”
“It turns out, old habits from college die hard.”
That was another thing about Jungkook. He was a welcome respite from the barrage of scientific terms and lengthy instructions that assaulted Yoongi from the others at mission control. Though Yoongi liked and appreciated them all for their hard work and their place in the mission, Jungkook gave him something that seemed often forgotten in the technicalities. A sense of normalcy.
Jungkook shared his life with Yoongi as easily as if they were old friends. Often, a bit shamefully, Yoongi brewed himself coffee to drink while they chatted, as if they'd stepped out of work for a bit for a break at the cafe down the street. Yoongi smiled as he listened to Jungkook’s stories, sometimes even picturing that he was somewhere warm and Earthen with Jungkook and his group of friends. He closed his eyes, removing himself from his reality.
“Alright,” Jungkook said somewhat resignedly after a long time of speaking, that wasn't long enough. “I should collect some numbers from you.”
And so they went through the other routine, the official one, where Yoongi listed off statistics and mission control ran reports, and eventually other voices replaced Jungkook’s. Information was exchanged in the cold, clinical language in which it was best understood.
Jungkook came back on toward the end. “See any aliens out there yet, hyung?”
“Still looking.”
“Well keep me posted.”
“You know where to find me. Over.”
When the comm dropped signal, Yoongi was left to his solitude again. Though in a way, Yoongi was never alone. Mission control had tabs on him at all moments, right down to where he was in the ship and what piece of it he was using. As he went about his responsibilities - reading meters, writing reports, checking equipment - mission control chimed in every few moments. Even as he spent hours daily reading and researching - and there was a lot to read up to prepare himself to be the sole inhabitant of a planet - they called to him. They instructed him to check this or that piece of the ship, to report on numbers of supplies. Their voices rattled around the inside of his metal vessel at an almost constant rate.
Later, after Yoongi had added water to his lunch of steamed vegetables, wheat bread and prunes so that they swelled like sponges, Jungkook's voice came on the comm again. It followed Yoongi as he traveled through the ship. It was as if Jungkook was everywhere with him.
“Just checking on your calorie count,” Jungkook said. Yoongi heard the click of a pen on his side.
“I’m at just over 2,000.”
Some sounds of typing followed, keys pressed against metal springs. “You were a bit low yesterday. Try to eat some chocolate, or something.”
“Affirmative.” Yoongi had chocolate, in tiny airless bags, single servings of M&Ms whose bright colors were almost ostentatious against the ship’s landscape of white and silver.
Jungkook was silent for a moment then, but he hadn’t called “Over”. Yoongi thought he could hear the sound of his breathing. He waited, curiously.
“There’s another reason I said today was special," Jungkook said finally.
“Why’s that?”
“It's Valentine's Day.”
“Oh.” Yoongi allowed himself a long pause. “That's why it's so damn cold.”
Though he joked, it was true. Space was colder, all the time, than any February he’d ever felt.
“It's all hearts and roses over here.”
“Sounds fun. You got someone special waiting for you to get off work tonight?”
Of course, Yoongi knew he didn’t. Jungkook would have told him, and he would have remembered. He sometimes even dreaded the day that Jungkook would tell him that there was
someone
in his life.
“That’s a negative.”
“Me neither,” Yoongi said, his voice drier than it should have been for a joke.
Jungkook’s crackly sigh filled Yoongi’s ears. The comm would cut in and out every once in a while, and though it was normal it always filled Yoongi with a pure, liquid dread, that he might suddenly lose contact forever. More terrifying than the thought of never hearing another human voice again, was the thought of never hearing Jungkook’s voice again. “I’m probably just going to catch up on work here. Taehyung, Jimin, Hobi - they all have dates, so I can’t hang out with them.”
Yoongi chuckled. “I never cared much for Valentine's Day. Never did anything special for it, even when I was with someone.”
“Never?”
“Nope. No one ever bought me flowers, or made me dinner, or anything like that. Not to sound bitter.” He smiled to himself.
“I'd make you dinner,” Jungkook said, almost too quickly. “If you were here.”
Yoongi tried not to think overly much about the implications behind this sentence. Those kinds of thoughts would get him nowhere.
“You cook?” Yoongi knew a lot about Jungkook. Almost half a year of daily communication will do that, yet as their relationship had somehow, strangely and distantly, worked its way beyond colleagueship, Yoongi had never heard Jungkook mention cooking.
“Well, not so much. I could learn though.”
“You'd learn for me?” Yoongi surprised himself, with the genuine flattery he felt.
“Sure, hyung. If I messed it up, I'd take you out someplace nice instead.” The conversation was light, easy, spoken in parody most likely. Yet it seemed on the edge of something deeper, or maybe that was just wishful thinking on Yoongi’s part. Yoongi flowed along with it.
“I'd dress up either way,” he said.
Jungkook was silent for a while, until Yoongi started to wonder if he'd said something wrong, or if communication had cut out.
Finally, in a voice that seemed to struggle to make it across the galaxy, Jungkook said, “Would you wear a tux? Like the one you wore to your last press conference here on Earth?”
Something seemed to shift, maybe the very shift Yoongi had wanted, and he swallowed. His gaze turned to the closest porthole to him. There was nothing to focus on in all of that open space.
“You saw that?” Yoongi asked, thinking of Jungkook watching him in his tux, remembering what he had looked like. It had felt stiff that day he’d worn it, too tight to contain his nerves.
“I was watching on TV. I’d had my interview for mission control a few days before.”
Yoongi blinked. “I’d have to go shopping if you want me to wear one. I don’t own any tuxedos like that anymore.”
“They look good on you,” Jungkook said, lightly. “You look nice in a bow tie.”
It was strange that Jungkook had seen him, but in turn Yoongi had no idea what Jungkook looked like. Jungkook had started at mission control after the
Wayfarer I
was already out of video receiving range. In the distance, stars flickered at him. On second thought it was fitting, almost, that he had to rely on his imagination to evoke Jungkook. He was sure that whatever he pictured couldn’t be as good as he really was. There was something grimly satisfying about that.
“Hyung? Yoongi?” Jungkook’s voice clung for him as if reaching to pull him from underwater. “Are you okay? Your heart rate and breathing are elevated.”
Sometimes, Yoongi forgot about the biometric shirt he wore that collected his vitals like acorns and spilled them across the screens of his coworkers on Earth. He felt naked to them; to Jungkook.
“You’re at eighty bpm,”Jungkook said tentatively, wanting an answer. “And going up.”
“I’m exercising,” Yoongi told him quickly. “On the treadmill.”
He looked at the treadmill where it hung from the wall in motionless defiance. It should maybe have felt invasive that Jungkook knew intimate details about him, like that his resting heart rate was fifty beats per minute and his body temperature held steady at 36 degrees celsius. Instead, it was a comfort.
“Copy that,” Jungkook said. “I’ll check in later.”
Then more time passed still, or so Yoongi thought. Time was squishy, malleable, and if it wasn’t for his own need to eat and sleep, Yoongi was quite sure it wouldn’t exist at all. Much later still, Jungkook called again, long after Yoongi had expected that he would have returned home. The sun had undoubtedly set on Earth. It was quiet on Jungkook’s side, although Yoongi knew he wasn’t alone. Mission control was always a bustling place, or so he had been told.
“You're not usually at work so late,” Yoongi said.
“I don't have anything to do tonight, like I told you. This way, neither of us have to be alone.”
“I’m always alone,” Yoongi said by reflex. He caught a glance of himself in the porthole nearby. His reflection appeared to himself quite melancholy.
“I’m sorry you feel that way, hyung,” Jungkook said softly.
Yoongi shook his head, pained by the sadness he heard in Jungkook’s voice, audible enough to carry over the vastness of space. He felt ashamed of himself. He lifted his shoulders. “I didn’t mean it like that,” he said. “This was my choice, and I don’t have any regrets.”
Jungkook made a sound that Yoongi couldn’t discern. It might have been meant as an affirmative. Yoongi’s answer might have come because he had been caught off guard by Jungkook's call, wrapped in one of those moments that often happened to him shortly before it was time to sleep. This was the stretch of time he was most frequently left alone, where mission control had nothing to tell him. The edges bled together during these minutes, and Yoongi would feel a shiver in his resolve. He cast around for a way to fix it, something to make Jungkook smile. He remembered him mentioning aliens before.
“I guess I can’t be sure I’m alone, anyway. You ever see that episode of
Star Trek
, with the invisible aliens? They could be here right now, and I wouldn’t know it.”
Jungkook might have snorted, it was hard to tell over the comm’s unique cacophony of static. Yoongi bathed in warm affection. “No, I haven’t seen
Star Trek
. You’re old.”
“And much higher ranking than you, so be careful.”
There was quiet for a while, a comfortable silence.
“Did you mean what you said?” Jungkook asked eventually, maybe uncertain.
“Mean what?”
“That you don't have any regrets.”
Yoongi hesitated. If he spoke a regret he would be back in that grey place in his head, with risk of Jungkook joining him. There was no sure way to keep the discussion of regrets from slipping into a feeling of sadness. He imagined Jungkook sitting in mission control now, the lights dimmed for the night.
“I do have one regret,” he said honestly. Around him, tiny multicolored control lights blinked like the pulses of the machines they were connected too. “I would have liked to have had that dinner with you.”
What he meant was that he would have liked to sit across from Jungkook on a Valentine’s Day like this, maybe with a candle burning between them, cheesy as it was. He would have liked to have been a part of Jungkook’s life beyond his caffeinated work day, to follow him to the bars he talked about. He would have liked to have known that he would want all this before launch day. One hundred and fifty days later, was a cruel time to have this realization.
Yoongi wondered if Jungkook could hear the sincerity in his voice, the way he could hear the exhaustion in Jungkook’s when he hadn’t slept well the night before or was overworked. He wondered if it was alright to feel this way about someone he had never met, would never meet. He wondered if those feelings could even be real, stretched out along that distance where he had no right to exist.
“Me too.” The signals that carried Jungkook's voice were thicker, remorseful. “Why did you do it, hyung? Why did you take the mission?”
It was a question Yoongi could have once answered easily. Almost everyone had asked it, at some time or another. Curiously this was Jungkook's first time asking personally, though Yoongi didn't think it was because of a lack of wanting to know.
Now, that same answer he used to give felt almost foolish. “Because I could. Because no one has done it before. To do something for the first time, really the
first time
anyone has ever done it.” He paused. “Imagine doing something that's never been done before. I felt as if it was made for me, like my destiny.”
Yoongi felt Jungkook considering his words. Yoongi spoke again. “I never used to mind being alone,” he said. He wondered, if he hadn't ever heard Jungkook's voice, if he
would
feel alone right now. If loneliness would even exist if Jungkook didn't. He didn't voice this thought.
“You won’t be alone forever,” Jungkook said. “Mars is at an ideal launch trajectory - ”
“Every twenty six months, I know,” Yoongi said, finishing his recitation. “If everything goes to plan, I’ll only be alone for about four more years.”
Four years, a bitter number. He probably wouldn’t be alone forever, that was true. That didn’t erase the fact that the
Wayfarer I
had no launch gear. That this was, undeniably and irrevocably, a one way trip. That was the single most glaring truth of Yoongi’s life.
He wanted suddenly, desperately, to see Earth. He remembered the day it had finally, completely slipped out of identifiability among the stars. That day, he had wanted to be able to turn the
Wayfarer I
around and come home, more than he had ever wanted anything in his life. The feeling had faded and healed, though the wound flared from time to time still. He’d never told mission control.
“Holidays make me homesick,” he said now. “I remember being a kid, and spending the night away from home for the first time, just down the street. I’m homesick like that, now, but for the whole world.”
“I'll send you a bouquet on the next voyage,” Jungkook said. “You said you'd never gotten flowers for Valentine's Day. I'll send some, though you'll have to forgive that they're late.”
“I think I can forgive it,” Yoongi said gently. “What kind of flowers?”
“Red roses. To match the red planet.”
Yoongi thought of what he would buy for Jungkook, if he were there. Roses, and jewelry, and chocolate. Anything he wanted, probably, and just because he could. Because Jungkook deserved it, for keeping a lonely spaceboy company, and making him warm in all that airless void.
The silence between them was heavier than the asteroid belt. Though Earth was gone from Yoongi's line of sight, he often thought it was strange how the sun seemed not a bit diminished. If anything, it was resolved to shine brighter. He felt tired. If only it would set, he could rest. He wondered if, after he saw a Martian sunset, he'd be able to sleep easily. He would be the first to see it in person, after all.
“I should get my eight hours, Jungkook,” he said.
A pause longer than the life of a star followed. He felt, between himself and Jungkook, a sort of deep yearning. Yoongi thought that all of the empty, uninhabited space between them probably wasn’t enough to contain everything he wanted to say, that he never would. He left each of those unspoken aches behind as the
Wayfarer I
continued on, cresting the unseen border and carrying him to his new home, which was now closer to him than Earth. He wondered if Jungkook felt the same.
“Roger that,” Jungkook said, at last. “I'll check in when you wake up.”
“Affirmative.”
“Happy Valentine's Day, hyung.”
“Over.”