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Jeon Wonwoo was everything.
He was everything to Kim Mingyu.
His voice was the sound of the early morning birds who fluttered past the window of their shared apartment. His scent was permeated around the spring lilacs, the sweet honey almond wafting throughout the wind. His touch was like the warmest cup of coffee on his sun-kissed skin.
Their friends liked to joke that Mingyu and Wonwoo were total polar opposites—like the sun and moon. Wonwoo liked the comfort of isolation and the peace of quiet, yet Mingyu broke all of Wonwoo’s rules and barged in with the beam of the sunlight blaring directly to his lover’s face.
They were undoubtedly smitten.
⁺⋆ ☾⋆₊
The helmet felt slightly tighter today. He heard the mechanical hiss of the recycled oxygen and the sharp weight of gravity pulling at his chest, trying one last time to keep Kim Mingyu anchored to the Earth.
But that’s the funny thing about the Earth—it does not hold onto the things that keep him tethered.
To his right, Choi Seungcheol handles the control panels with a practiced focus. He was the mission commander, hands steady as he flipped a few switches.
"Trajectory looks clean, Mingyu," Seungcheol’s voice breaks through the comms, low and crackling with a slight radio hiss. "We’re officially shedding the atmosphere. Next stop, lunar orbit."
“Copy.” Mingyu replies, his voice steady in his chest as he looks over to their mission specialists. Joshua Hong and Lee Jihoon, both of which were hyper-focused across data streams with a protective intensity.
"Separation is clean. We are officially in translunar injection." Jihoon muttered, his fingers flying over his display with a precision that masked the adrenaline everyone was feeling.
For a moment, his eyes catch the outer window as gravity soon lets go of whatever grasp it had on them. The world looked vast and terrifyingly beautiful from where they were despite the lack of morning birds, the absence of a scent, and the empty hand he had forgotten to hold back down on Earth.
⁺⋆ ☾⋆₊
“You were chosen?” Wonwoo’s gasp had rung from the static of Mingyu’s phone. He held a sheepish grin that he was sure Wonwoo could hear from the other side. It was the loudest and happiest he’s heard the boy, which is funny, because it wasn’t like he was the one who passed the final selection board.
Out of the eighteen thousand applicants, they had picked five. And Mingyu’s name was on the final flight masterlist.
He stood outside one of the large Space Center offices, the humidity clinging to his skin, but his chest felt entirely weightless.
He had bypassed the official press conferences, slipped past his celebrating peers, and walked straight out to the gravel parking lot just to hear the one voice that could make the reality of it sink in.
"I'm an astronaut, Wonwoo-ya," Mingyu grinned into the receiver, his own voice trembling with a mixture of disbelief and awe. "They're sending me to the sky!"
On the other end of the line, there was a brief, breathless silence—the kind Wonwoo always kept before he let himself fully feel something. When he spoke again, his voice was softer, laced with a pride so thick it made Mingyu’s chest ache.
"I knew they would," Wonwoo murmured. "The universe would be stupid not to want you."
⁺⋆ ☾⋆₊
Out here in this vast, empty space, the hum of the Orion capsule was deafening. Everything was still.
“Entering lunar insertion burn in T-minus sixty seconds,” Jihoon’s voice hummed with a casual intonation, betraying his own nerves.
Mingyu couldn’t help but blink away at what he could only imagine was the direction of the sun, his fingers tightening around his controls. Through the thick glass of the viewport, everything changed.
Earth was nothing more but a blue marble—distant, fragile, and left behind. Such a horrifyingly magnificent sight.
The moon was not the gentle, glowing pearl that he remembers Wonwoo describing it as. Wonwoo was always so keen on reading those silly little space novels and non-fiction works about the science of space despite himself graduating as an education major. He remembers seeing him asleep on the couch, a book called Earthrise by some guy called Robert Poole on his chest.
Wonwoo was not one to show enthusiasm with his face, but it was clear that between the two of them, he was definitely more excited for Mingyu than he ever was about his own situation.
“We’re in orbit,” Joshua announces, his breath catching slightly as the capsules swings around the far side, cutting off the direct line of sight to Earth.
For the next few hours, they are entirely on their own, cast in the shadow of a celestial body.
“Wow, holy shit. We made it.” He heard Seungcheol curse under his breath, a breathy laugh escaping as they each took a good view of the large body.
Mingyu lets out a low whistle, leaning slightly forward in his harness. "It looks surreal. Like we aren't even supposed to be here."
⁺⋆ ☾⋆₊
“Do you think the moon ever gets lonely?”
Wonwoo’s voice was barely louder than the buzzing noise of the old refrigerator in the corner of their kitchen. It was barely past two in the morning, the time when the city was asleep, yet the two of them sat and talked on the narrow balcony of their apartment.
Mingyu looked over to the man who he’s fallen in love with countless times already, his half-eaten container of almond ice cream on his knee.
Wonwoo’s head rested comfortably on his shoulder, his oversized glasses slipping slightly on the bridge of his noise.
“Lonely? It’s a giant rock, Wonu. I don’t think it feels much of anything,” he chuckled, wrapping his larger arm tighter around Wonwoo’s shoulder to shield him from the crisp autumn breeze.
Wonwoo let out a satisfied huff, “Think about it. We’re so loud down here—full of life, I guess.”
The tanned man’s eyes softened, the teasing light fading from his face. He dropped his chin onto the crown of Wonwoo’s head, inhaling the scent of shampoo—sweet, clean, and entirely grounding him.
“Maybe,” He hummed, “but it has the stars. And it has us looking up at it.”
Almost like it’s bound to Earth. Like they’re chasing each other, even if they cannot ever touch.
But he didn’t say those words aloud. He kept them lodged at the back of his throat.
Wonwoo let out a soft, breathy laugh—the kind that rumbled between Mingyu’s chest as he tilted his head up. His eyes were a dark, searching color that looked at Mingyu as if he had put the stars in the sky.
“You’re such a romantic, Kim Mingyu”
“You say that whenever I say anything half as meaningful,” He responded with a grumble, playful and tender.
“It’s a good thing you’re going up there, then. So you can keep it company for a while.”
Mingyu caught Wonwoo’s hand, lacing their fingers together, his thumb rubbing soothing circles over the back of Wonwoo’s knuckles. The skin was warm, vibrant, and fiercely alive.
“I’m only going so I can come back,” Mingyu told him, pressing a soft, lingering kiss to the center of Wonwoo’s forehead. “The moon can keep the dark. My home is right here.”
Wonwoo rolled his eyes, “Disgusting romantic,” He mouthed with a playful grin.
“Hey, you’re over here worrying about the moon, but what if I get lonely up there?” He crinkled his nose, a pout forming on his face as he felt a tinge of jealousy at the fact his boyfriend mourned the isolation of a piece of rock and not his lovely boyfriend right in front of him.
“I’ll look up at the sky so you won't be alone. I’ll still be able to watch.”
“You promise me, okay? Y’now the other only reason I’m going up there is so I can finally one-up you,” Mingyu had a smirk on his face as he looked down to watch Wonwoo’s reaction as he spoke.
As suspected, he was met with Wonwoo’s confused gaze, a brow raised from suspicion. “What?”
“So I can finally and truthfully say that I had loved you to the moon and back,”
Wonwoo motioned a gag, overly exaggerated as he hit Mingyu’s lap with a playful hidden expression “Ugh. Yeah, yeah, whatever Shakespeare. Just bring back the moon for us, I guess.”
⁺⋆ ☾⋆₊
"Alright, boys. Welcome to the neighborhood,"
Seungcheol’s voice crackles over the comms, entirely stripped of its usual commander gravity. He speaks as if he’s been here before. There’s a distinct, boyish grin evident in his tone. "Depressurization is complete. Hatch is unlatched. Who's going out first to make sure we don't sink into the dust?"
"I vote Mingyu," Joshua chimes in from the secondary console, adjusting his wrist tethers with a casual flick. "He’s got the longest legs. If it’s quicksand, we only lose half of him."
"Hey, respect the pilot. Besides, if I sink, who’s going to carry the heavy equipment?" Mingyu shoots back, his voice surprisingly light as he checks the seal on his heavy EVA gloves.
He twists his wrists, locking them into place with a satisfying, mechanical click. He’s grinning beneath his gold-tinted visor.
"Good point. Jihoon’s too short to reach the top shelf of the lander anyway," Seungcheol teases.
“Alright, buddy, pack it up,” Jihoon irked, voice monotonous from the upper deck.
Mingyu lets out a breathless laugh, the adrenaline finally kicking in as he backs down the ladder.
The suit is incredibly bulky, a heavy fortress of fabric and life-support tech, but in the one-sixth gravity of the moon, he feels bizarrely buoyant.
His heavy boot clears the final rung. He hesitates for a fraction of a second, his heart giving one solid, erratic thud against his ribs, before he plants his sole firmly into the gray silt of the Descartes Highlands.
A small, powdery cloud of lunar dust blossoms around his ankle, settling instantly in the vacuum.
"One small step for Kim Mingyu, one giant pain in the ass to clean off the suits later," Mingyu broadcasts, his tone easy and conversational. He takes an experimental hop, sliding a few feet across the fine, charcoal-colored soil. "It’s actually pretty sturdy down here. Like walking on packed, frozen flour."
“Copy that, Gyu. Look alive, we gotta a couple shit to finish before heading back down home.” Joshua says as he begins his own descent down the ladder.
⁺⋆ ☾⋆₊
Mingyu knew exactly what the apartment looked like at three in the morning on a Tuesday. He could picture it with his eyes closed.
He knew Wonwoo would be shifting slightly in his chair, adjusting his oversized glasses as he rubbed at the bridge of his nose. Spread out in front of him would be a chaotic sea of intermediate pads, colored pens, and lesson plan outlines for his student teaching seminar.
He would be exhausted, but those papers wouldn't grade themselves.
Oh, how much Mingyu would have traded to have been with him then.
Beside his laptop, Wonwoo's phone would be sitting completely silent. There were no new messages from Mingyu.
Not because Mingyu didn't want to text, but because he had been non-stop in-and-out of the office and training centers for weeks, completely consumed by the final crunch before flight finalization.
That night, Mingyu was locked inside the training facility across town, pulling a grueling all-night shift in the high-G simulator chambers.
He hadn't been there to see it. He could only reconstruct the timeline later from the coroner’s report and the terrifyingly peaceful state of the room.
It was probably somewhere around three-thirty in the morning, while Mingyu was breathing heavily through an oxygen mask, a sudden, silent pressure must have bloomed right in the center of Wonwoo’s chest and stole him out of Mingyu’s arms for as long as he would be alive.
Mingyu barely remembers it anymore.
It’s a blur, he says, especially to his therapist whom the station offered to Mingyu before his mission—a frantic ploy to keep one of their Astronauts for the mission.
But who was he kidding?
He remembers it. He remembers every single menial detail. And that’s what he hates most about it.
When the heavy steel door of the centrifuge simulator finally hissed open across town, Mingyu had stepped out slick with sweat, a breathless, triumphant grin on his face because he had broken his personal record.
He pulled his phone out of his locker, expecting a string of sleepy, comforting text messages. The screen was completely blank.
“Go get some sleep,” Seungcheol had told him, clapping a heavy hand onto his shoulder. “You look like a zombie.”
Mingyu had just chuckled, shoving the phone into his pocket, assuming Wonwoo had finally gone to bed early for once. He drove home through the foggy, pre-dawn streets, humming a mindless tune against the quiet of the radio that played Bruno Mars’ new song, Risk it All.
He unlocked the front door of their apartment with a soft click, stepping inside and kicking off his sneakers, careful not to make a sound.
"Wonu-ya, I'm home," he had whispered into the dark hallway.
“Wonwoo?”
⁺⋆ ☾⋆₊
The lunar dust behaves differently when you aren’t jumping. When you stand completely still, it settles instantly, leaving a quiet so absolute it presses against the thick layers of your spacesuit like a physical weight.
Mingyu stands on the rim of the high ridge, the heavy solar wind sensor array resting on the ground by his boots. Below him, the vast expanse of the Descartes Highlands rolls out in shades of monochrome ink and blinding white crests.
"Data feed is live, Gyu," Jihoon’s voice breaks the quiet, crackling crisp through the comms. "Telemetry is registering the deployment. Good job."
"Copy that," Mingyu says. His voice is perfectly steady. It's the voice of a primary specialist completing a checklist on the lunar surface.
He looks up. From here, the Earth is a small, glowing crescent of blue and white, fragile enough to be covered by the tip of his gloved thumb.
On that marble, a radio station was probably still playing music. People were grading papers. The apartments were warm.
But Mingyu looks away from the Earth, turning his visor down toward the shadow-drenched typography of the lunar crust beneath him.
The sun hits the edge of a massive, previously unnamed impact crater stretching just north of their landing site. Because there is no atmosphere to scatter the light, the contrast is absolute; the rim of the bowl catches the solar rays, glowing with a soft, pearlescent brilliance that seems to shield the deep, untouched quiet inside its center. It looks exactly like the rim of a pair of oversized glasses catching the lamplight at three in the morning.
"Commander," Mingyu calls out, his voice dropping just enough to lose its casual edge.
"Go ahead, Specialist," Seungcheol replies instantly.
"According to the mission protocol, we have naming rights for the primary landmark coordinates of our landing sector, correct?"
A brief pause over the radio, filled only by the rhythmic hiss of recycled oxygen. Seungcheol’s tone softens when he speaks again, the authority of a commander giving way to the understanding of a friend who had sat through the long, agonizing months of pre-flight quarantine with him.
"We do. You have a designation in mind for Sector 4-Alpha?"
Mingyu takes a slow, deep breath of the sterile air. He reaches up with his bulky glove, his fingers brushing the cold, outer gold-visor of his helmet, right where his eyes are locked onto the glowing rim of the crater.
"I want to register it as Jeon Wonwoo," Mingyu says, the name leaving his throat with a quiet, solid certainty. "The Wonwoo Crater."
On the other end of the line, Joshua and Jihoon remain quiet, letting the silence of the vacuum carry the weight of the request.
"Coordinates logged," Seungcheol murmurs back, the clicking of a data terminal faintly audible through the static.
Mingyu looks back down at the packed, frozen soil beneath his boots. He reaches into the small tool pouch at his waist, drawing out a small, metallic surveying spike used for marking core sample locations. Slowly, with the awkward, deliberate buoyancy of the one-sixth gravity, he kneels.
With his right hand, he presses the metal deep into the gray silt at the very edge of the ridge, carving a sharp, clean line into the ancient dust that no wind would ever come to blow away.
I’ll look up at the sky so you won't be alone. Yet ironically, despite Mingyu being three hundred and eighty-four thousand four hundred kilometers away from their apartment, he’s still the one looking up at the sky.
"You promised," Mingyu whispers into the hollow of his helmet, where no one else can hear him.
He stands up, the buoyancy of the moon lifting his heavy frame with ease. He looks back at the crater, shining just a little brighter than the dark expanses around it, safely tucked away where the loud, chaotic world could never break it.
He had brought him back the moon, just like he said he would.
"Specialist Kim," Joshua’s voice returns, warm and grounding. "We’re wrapping up the secondary readings. Ready to head back to the module?"
Mingyu takes one last look at the white rim glowing in the dark before turning back toward the lights of the lander.
"Yeah," Mingyu grins behind his visor, a genuine, peaceful thing that settles deep into his chest. "Yeah, I'm ready. Let's go home."
No matter how far we travel from Earth, we're still so human.