Chapter Text
I.
On the lip of the roof just above his childhood bedroom window, Matt holds his breath and examines extremely important squiggly lines.
That’s all he does nowadays. Boiled down, that’s all any engineer of his station does: it’s a class of people educated to sit still and look at squiggles until they translate to something in the brain. It’s a process that requires nearly eight years of study to master, and it’s also a pain in the ass to do when the equipment isn’t cooperating.
He adjusts the cables running between his laptop and the ancient transceiver. He tests and re-tests the fuses, the valves, praying that it keeps singing. It’s a hunk of old tech from the Third World War that his father’s father’s father kept in the attic to collect dust; Matt had decided to drag a second life out of it so long as it could continue to harmonize the wavelengths around.
The sun ekes out a final plume of light out over the tree line, bold and yellow-pink like peach juice. The lithium batteries of a soldier’s field radio shouldn’t have lasted as long as they have, but the lines keep wiggling on the graphing software of Matt’s computer, so it’s probably still puttering out enough ions to stay alive. All he wants to do is to let it feel useful again. If the transceiver lets him establish a communications link with his sister for them to play games once the holidays are over, then he’ll count it as two successes. Finishing the Holt Radio download will count as three.
He leans back, stretches. Cracks his neck and inhales air that smells of rotting acorns and summer flowers. His mom’s geraniums (genus, not a species) have swollen like necrotic organs and smell a little like meat. Maybe that’s just his nose, or maybe it’s the possum that snuck into the attic ten years ago and died next to the radio. Or maybe it’s the radio.
In the rare moments he searches for tranquility, this is where he finds it. Alone and positioned strategically according to the stars, a puzzle in his lap, communicating through waves and photons and electrons. Dicking around with the synthetic equivalent to voltage-gated sodium ion channels, which are themselves, at least in the greater picture of the human body, the organic equivalent to electrical signals through circuit boards. Engineering as anatomy; anatomy as gestalt; something about witnessing the self through the machinations of the natural world, and then using those observations to sow peace in the system. Homeo-motherfucking-stasis. Is that tacky? It sounds tacky. This is the closest he has ever gotten to meditation, or medication, though he probably should at some point try both.
“You gonna be up there for much longer, spider monkey?”
“Jesus!” Matt swears, startled, before Shiro’s even done speaking. The laptop pitches forward in his lap. He dives to secure it before it slips off the roof and into a wet bush.
“Don’t fall, either,” Shiro admonishes. He’s probably standing on the ground somewhere just out of view, and so Matt refuses to look out of principle. That, and because he’s giving urgent triage to the laptop, whose cables have disconnected and cut off from the radio.
“Aw, geez,” he mutters. It fizzles weakly, displeased by the jostling.
“You alright?”
“You wanna come up here and fix the thing you just busted? I can’t come down until I’m done taking a round of accurate readings.”
From below, a sigh rings slightly more exasperated than usual. Kerberos training is running Shiro’s ass to the ground, probably. “What are you even doing?”
“Wavy stuff.”
“Don’t you do that already at the Garrison? You need to bring it home for the holidays?”
“Yeah,” Matt says, stretching the word like a yo-yo. Uh-yeah-uh. In the split second before speaking, he conceives of the yo-yo as another wavelength with a crest and a trough and chuckles at how ubiquitous the shape is.
Shiro grumbles something he doesn’t catch except for the end. “… seen you in a while, come down.”
“Alternatively, you could always just come up here and, like, talk to me.” He pauses meaningfully. “You know. For once.”
For an interval of ten seconds, it seems as though Shiro’s given up the ghost and gone back in the direction of the shuttle to the Garrison. Until, to Matt’s small relief, he hears harsh creaking: the metal pipes of the house’s storm drains groaning under the weight of a grown man. Shiro clambers over the side of the house with no more difficulty than if it were a wall of rock-climbing handholds and shuffles on his ass to Matt’s side, in full uniform, despite the sandpapering that the shingles will do to the fabric.
“I don’t mean to be scarce,” is the first thing Shiro says, as if that will change anything about anything. But he says it softly and apologetically, so the fucker knows he’s in the wrong.
Even so, it does change things. And he knows it does. Which is why Matt refuses to glance at him sidelong, even if he itches to. His own voice comes out in an embarrassing waver: “You haven’t had a decent conversation with me in, like, seven weeks. I was beginning to think you’d forgotten about me.”
In Shiro’s resounding chuckle, a fragile note of self-consciousness sneaks out. “It can’t have been that long. We went to the beach just two weeks ago.”
“Yeah,” Matt mumbles. “For you to swim laps and ignore me the whole time.”
“I thought you liked being left alone at the beach.”
“Not when we haven’t talked since before the new year, Takashi.”
Government name employed. It must start to dawn on Shiro that he’s in deep water, because more silence burns out between them, tense and unfriendly—that is, until a hard nudge to Matt’s shoulder jostles the laptop in his grip.
Matt swings a glare over at Shiro, but the face that greets him is smiling that earnest, true smile of superhuman optimism, uninhibited by mortal troubles, that always throws Matt’s frustrations aside like venting cargo.
“I’m sorry,” Shiro says.
It’s the easiest thing in the world for Matt to forgive him, despite the work his heart is doing to stop him dead. He swallows, glancing back down at the wiggling, wormy lines that tell him the transceiver still breathes, even if he doesn’t.
“Whatever,” he says.
He wants to say instead, We’re supposed to be partners for this, you know? And, Do you notice when I’m not there? And, Do I matter as much to you as you do to me?, but the point is moot, because the answer to every question is, Of course, Matt, in Shiro’s gentle, instructional voice—a tone that says There’s no problem here, what are you talking about?, which is several orders more agonizing than if they were to just start screaming at each other—so he doesn’t even bother asking. It’s been like this for years. He’s resigned to it by now.
Shiro takes that as an acceptance to the apology and leans in to peer over the screen. He notes the window at the corner with a flickering green progress bar that reads 55% and a file size in the double-digit terabytes. “You… You working on something?”
“Yeah.” Matt smirks. “Guess.”
“These are MP3 and WAV files. Audio?”
“Mhm.”
“Can’t be music. That’s superfluous.”
“Oh, you think I’m gonna let us go without music in space?”
Shiro leans back to look at him in the acidic green haze of the laptop light. His face has gotten more sculpted these past few months than ever before, nearly Adonic, and his mouth opens slightly in relaxed surprise. “Whoa.” A beat, in which he fishes for an appropriate joke. “That’s great. Now I don’t have to worry about listening to your anime CDs on repeat.”
“I figured space was a good place to leave behind the vintage stuff for something more state-of-the-art.”
Shiro smiles again, then hesitates. “Can you, um… I was talking to my dad the other day, and he showed me this really good Japanese jazz album from the 2230’s, from when he was a kid. I think that’d be nice to listen to. Good driving music for a few billion miles.”
“I wrote a program to scrub all the tracks available on HiveSound with over 20,000 plays.” A sweeping, declarative statement: “We got music.”
Shiro splutters a disbelieving laugh that goes on forever, and Matt’s heart twists and takes off like the pigeon that flies from the roof that same moment. “I’m sorry—is that not felony piracy? Grand larceny, at least?”
“I’ve disguised it as digitized high-resolution video-photography from the orbiter, don’t worry.” Matt waves his hand dismissively. “We’re coasting. We’re snoozing, man. We’re gonna be listening to Holt Radio the whole time, it’ll be awesome. We’ll be needing it locally anyway, unless you plan on waiting for signal. And if we meet aliens, we can show ‘em Pink Floyd.”
It takes a photon sent from the sun roughly five hours to arrive on the surface of Kerberos. Radio takes—a lot fucking longer. He’s drilled enough math in his head to know how long the wideband data link will take to transfer data to the connected orbiter, and from the orbiter to Earth, but he doesn’t even want to think about how slow the direct data link will be; it’s the only one of their communications processes that the Garrison has given them reign to use at will, and it’s going to take so long to download anything, it’ll be hysterical. Three weeks’ wait for a ViewTube video. Come on.
Hence all that practice turning cobbled-together components into functional pieces of exploration mission technology. Hence the tetchy antique radio that smells like possum; hence the calculations rotating in his mind’s eye like the wheels around a gravity generator, or maybe one of those freaky Ophanim angels that look like the aliens from his dreams.
A warm, broad hand secures on Matt’s shoulder and breaks him from his thoughts. Shiro says, quietly enough for the rustling of the trees to come through, “Thank you for the lengths you’re going to make the trip comfortable.”
Matt squirms in the compliment, rejecting it bodily. “Oh, god. Alright. What if I said the only reason I’m going these lengths is because you’re a good leader?”
“You’d be deflecting.”
“Rats. Got my ass.”
Shiro squeezes that hand; Matt’s soul hovers around and returns to his body like a wave flatlining. Shiro says, “I’m serious. You’re a star engineer, Matt. You’re going to do a great job out there.”
Matt meets his eye. In that instant, he’s rocked with an ache in his chest so potent and sad, it makes him feel like a child. “Yeah. Yeah, you too.”
The other words that don’t leave his mouth: I know you’ve only been distant because you’re working so hard.
Because you’re terrified.
Because you don’t want to let anyone down.
But the ache isn’t fear. He knows this at least: that Shirogane is never the weakest link of any group, no matter the fight. That Shiro would sooner lay down his life than let anyone else pay for his failure. That the roof of this house has seen more of Shiro’s tears than the field ever will.
Matt curls into his side, hoping the meaning finds Shiro through osmosis, and looks up at the stars where he knows Kerberos awaits.
II.
The first time he kisses Shiro, it’s to a seven-minute rock song with a name made up of numbers.
They’ve decided to be irresponsible. It turns out that hurtling towards a satellite moon at the edge of a solar system inspires a certain sense of impulsivity, probably motivated by a cocktail of dread and fear and cortisol and other kicked-up stress hormones, all of which Matt decides are taking responsibility for the brunt of his actions. Humans aren’t supposed to be in space. They signed on to suffer the consequences.
The lights have come down in the cabin in accordance with the circadian rhythm-stabilizing cycle he programmed. Shiro’s been at the cockpit all night, probably losing feeling in his toes, when Matt sits at the passenger’s seat beside him with a tiny computerized speaker-radio and the precious cargo in his flash drive: Music with a capital M. Holt Radio, baby.
They shuffle through oldies first. Stuff from the 20th and 21st centuries, immemorial and sonically challenging. Shiro asks him to skip a few of the chewy hip-hop tracks from the 2050’s, a big bummer, and then settles comfortably into a genre that Matt’s dad likes to call “space rock”—which, in hindsight, might not be a Sam Holt exclusive title—made up of sweeping soundscapes that evoke the asteroid fields they navigate in real-time.
They listen for hours in meditative silence. Shiro’s eyes come down halfway as if hypnotized. His eyes don’t meet the end of the stars anymore, instead stuck on the controls in front of him, and there’s a strange, dark cast over his expression. Matt waves a hand in front of his face—Shiro bucks backwards and breaks from it, smoothing it over with a laugh—and Matt takes this to mean that they both need to go to fucking sleep.
Wrestling Shiro out of the pilot’s seat is a Herculean task, but he gets it done. They stagger to their dorms arm over arm. Matt’s about to go into his own when Shiro stops him by the elbow and throws him an inquisitive, soft look.
They’re both in Shiro’s bedroom before they can think better of it.
This is not the first incident of its kind, not by a long shot; they used to room together in the barracks, used to all but share clothes, but this is a novelty if only because something seems to have changed invisibly between them since the moment they shuddered off into the sky on a supersonic shuttle. Maybe it’s the distance between them and the Earth that makes it easy for them to put distance between each other—if you don’t confront another person’s homesickness, it won’t remind you of your own—or maybe it’s the fact that, on the day before launch, Shiro drank half a bottle of rubbing alcohol and vomited so violently that Matt had to improvise some IV fluid.
It’d taken some face-slapping and screaming to get him to put his head back together, but the launch went off without a hitch. At least, that the Garrison knew of.
It still bothers Matt. That there was a crack in the marble he didn’t see.
The door behind them clicks shut like a secret. Something in here smells cottony and fresh. Shiro sits down hard on the soft white bedding prepared by countless engineers and goes about removing his boots. He’s still wearing the pilot’s uniform designed by those same engineers—including Matt’s own father—and, apropos of nothing, reaches to pull his top off.
Matt inhales audibly. The radio-speaker clipped to his waist is still buzzing out the trapped sound of a guitar that played on Earth over eighty years ago, and it thankfully muffles the sound of his surprise.
Shiro doesn’t notice. On autopilot, he strips to his underclothes: a black sweat-wicking tank top of a material that probably costs thousands of dollars and matching boxer-briefs. Space underwear. Stupid white socks. He moves like a robot in short, stopping, methodical gestures, almost in a reverie, or guiding himself through something with absolute focus.
He looks up at Matt. His hair is the color of the soil they left behind.
“Sorry. Maybe I should’ve asked if you wanted to sleep over,” he says.
Matt feels like he missed something. “Is that what’s happening?”
Shiro, in the same spirit of confusion, looks a little disengaged, a little off. His eyes aren’t moving like normal. “Sorry. I’m—“ he starts. His tongue catches. “I’m just—I thought we could—“
Before he knows what he’s doing, Matt moves between Shiro’s legs and cups his face in his hands.
All movement ceases but for the infinitesimal slide of stars outside the viewing window. Shiro’s eyes widen a margin, finally connecting. Matt’s head is chanting: sodium chloride, dextrose, ringer’s lactate solution, sterile water, electrolytes. He thinks of Shiro’s glazed-over eyes on the floor of their high-clearance quarantine room at the launch site. The fear, the responsibility, the doom.
“What are you so afraid of?” Matt asks.
Shiro makes a tiny clicking sound in the back of his throat. He’s somewhere out there in the black of space, spiraling without a tether, and Matt’s hands on his face are the only thing reaching for him.
“I miss you,” Shiro says. For such a big man, his voice is so small.
“Not what I asked.”
He tries to pitch his head down, but Matt won’t let him.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Shiro says.
“Is this something they should have caught on the psych eval?”
Matt knows it was the wrong thing to ask even as the words leave his mouth. Shiro pulls away, nearly gasping as he says, “No. No, I’m fine. I’m just. I wanted to…”
“You wanted me to sleep in your bed,” Matt repeats, nodding the way you nod to a child, urging him to nod in kind. “That’s fine. That’s fine, buddy. I’m on it.”
Matt disrobes unceremoniously. Shiro watches him carefully the whole time—another complicated lance of emotions hits Matt in the gut that he recognizes in seconds as horny, Jesus Christ—and he lands on Shiro’s other side, waiting for the proverbial shoe to drop.
Shiro gently removes the radio from Matt’s discarded belt on the floor and sets it on the ledge beneath the viewing window. Pink Floyd, Matt recognizes, or maybe some alternative rip-off.
They curl around each other like the boys they used to be. Shiro breathes deep and fast and abrasive, something roiling behind his eyes that he can’t seem to completely vocalize, as if the act of explaining it will make it real—and that making it real is the scary part, not everything that came before it.
But his breath slows eventually. And when it does, he calls out the voice command to dim the lights of his bedroom further, plunging them in a blackness that might as well be the same blackness of their dormitory in the barracks, or the cursed quarantine room, or Matt’s own bedroom on the rare holidays they spent together, bowed over a handheld gaming console beneath blankets for nostalgia’s sake.
Boyhood silence. Intimate. Foreign and familiar all the same.
A puff of air, warm and soft, caresses Matt’s face. The ghost of a kiss. Shiro’s relaxed, slackened face illuminates pale in the last light of the stars. A tiny white reflection gleams in his eye, alone in the black, revealing that they’re still open despite the exhaustion, still open to look at Matt specifically. It makes Matt’s stomach swoop, makes his skin feel taut and fluttering.
Oh, god, he thinks, recalling pilot mantras of fearlessness, of taking plunges, of diving from impossible heights without guarantee of survival.
“I missed you too,” he whispers.
Shiro shifts awkwardly and grimaces, prepared to admit something ugly in turn. Matt can’t possibly listen harder than he already is, but he tries.
The words—dark, quiet—fatal—“I think I’m fucked without you.”
Matt’s eyes shoot wide.
Shiro isn’t vulgar with anyone that isn’t him. Shiro isn’t this cracked-open with anyone that isn’t him. Shiro doesn’t bleed; he’s steel and chrome and made of the same stuff as this fiberglass space-time-splitting supership.
But he’s here, treating Matt’s absence like a relapse.
Matt shudders with his whole body. He lunges. He puts his mouth to Shiro’s, irreversibly.
Shiro shifts their weight so fast that Matt loses his breath. Broad hands snake up the back of Matt’s tank top between his skin and the bed, finding hard-fought muscle, wiry and aerodynamic and nothing like Shiro’s own heroic density. Matt is built for flying—Shiro is built for surviving a fall. Fingers dig into the gymnast-thick blades of Matt’s shoulders, the slope of his spine; another hand fits like a mitt around the base of his skull, and Matt kisses him back as if it’s the last thing mankind will ever find him doing.
The song plays. Dreamy, swirling, driving endlessly onward into the sliding horizontal colors of light-speed, and meanwhile, Matt loses his mind trying to restore Shiro’s. They roll together slowly, savoring, making out with the fullest satisfaction, somehow skillfully despite their inexperience—something to be said about prodigies—as Matt discovers the appeal of vibrations at close-range. When they’re loud and proximate enough to rumble the bones in his chest—holy fuck. Shiro’s groan is its own sonic weapon, it reverberates in his teeth, in the roof of his mouth where his tongue slides, in some part of his abdomen that keeps flipping, flipping, churning adrenaline into his bloodstream as if he needs any fucking more of it.
“God, took you long enough,” Matt hisses when they separate. Shiro debuts an all-new laugh: shiny, sparkling, restrained with embarrassment, quiet enough to be heard only within the boundaries of the bed. He replies to the compliment with a volley of smaller, urgent butterfly kisses all over Matt’s face. Each one makes his skin flinch and tickle and—something else—something like the sensation of a dog licking the hand; a displaced and alien nerve-reaction to another human’s touch that bip-bip-bips up to his teeth and sizzles there.
The kisses leave a dozen tiny cold spots. Matt can’t breathe. Shiro is on top of him—Shiro, Takashi, his Shiro—kissing him endlessly, so romantically it feels like he’s dying.
Matt has to hold back a whimper when a shaking hand that isn’t his own reaches down to his belly, down past the band of his underwear. Shiro rasps, “Can I?” and Matt nods and Shiro descends until his head is by Matt’s hips and—fuck. His mouth rises up and down on Matt for only a handful of minutes before he tightens like a string and snaps, thighs shaking, blood rushing so hard in his head that it makes his ears ring.
It’s the most stupid-human-guy-thing he could have done, is what it is.
Sorry about your brain, man. You wanna suck me off about it?
In the morning, (in their bed), Matt will ask (from all of three inches away), “Did that help?” and the answer will be a bashful, “Yeah. Yeah,” of the kind Shiro only gives when he’s done something he can’t and won’t take back—and Matt will be relieved that he’s allowed to want it again.