Work Text:
Anaxagoras
On the Icarus, Capa would often wake up shouting, scaring the shit out of everyone who was sleeping that shift, and sometimes the people who were awake. Mace would lie there silently waiting for his heart rate to return to normal, listening as someone kinder than himself talked Capa down from his nightmare, usually Cassie or Searle. Their gentle, murmuring voices commiserating with Capa would wrap around Mace, and he’d heard Cassie confess once she had the same dream: of falling into the sun. Capa’d be awake the rest of his sleep shift, giving up on trying to go back under, instead going to his work room to do whatever it was he did there. Eventually, Mace had asked Kaneda to switch his shifts so he was already awake if it happened, and they’d only have to cross paths with each other at certain meals.
Even after they’d completed their mission and were heading back to Earth, Capa had the dream. Mace had never been able to understand why—or why he’d walk the length of the ship at times like a space ghost, pale and shaky, hollow-eyed. It had creeped Mace the fuck out; Capa had saved the goddamn world and still had nightmares about the sun. Mace had frequently thought that the fact that their lives were in the hands of someone so emotionally compromised was nightmare fuel, himself. No wonder he’d ruined Mace’s last chance to send a message packet home: Capa had been a wreck, one who’d only shown his colors in the small quiet moments of their manufactured night.
Night had been merely a pretense of home then, something relative. Night was no longer relative now that they were really home—it came and went on a predictable schedule because it was programmed by Mother Nature, not a ship computer, even though her schedule had been fixed by that emotional basket-case. Mace didn’t care enough about Capa to ask if he still had that dream now that they were here, safe on the ground.
The other thing that was different at home: Mace was the one who woke up with a shout scraping from his lungs, clutching his chest, the one who couldn’t go back to sleep and wandered spaces like a hollow-eyed ghost. When they’d left, the sun had been barely visible during the brightest part of daytime—when you could spot it at all—shrouded in a soft haze like some 19th-century painting of the sea; when they’d returned, he couldn’t blot it out, it loomed over everything, burned all it touched, even his dreams. No softness left in it, just searing heat and the sound of the sun, which was the sound of exploding bombs.
Mace sat up in bed, clutching at his damp shirt, and took a sip of water. He still hadn’t grown tired of the pleasure of nonrecycled water. He went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face, drank some more straight from the faucet. When they’d left, hotels like this had been an incredibly rare luxury in only the warmest places, but now that they were the rock stars, the saviors of the world, they were temp homes to him; wherever he went, someone let him stay at no cost, plied him with freebies, so he still hadn’t settled on a real place to live. There was no need. He wasn’t sure there was a place he could belong to anymore, like parts of him were still soaring through space, searching for another star to call their own.
Toweling off, Mace looked at himself in the mirror, the deep circles under his eyes, and wondered if any of the team were awake for him to bug. To talk about...stuff.
He sent a mail to the group alias. No one else was on his floor, or he might creep down the hall to see if anyone had light spilling out from under the door. He didn’t have to worry that there’d be many people to catch him in the act: that was the thing about apocalypses, they opened up a lot of space for the survivors.
Anyone else up? Mace asked. Anyone else not know what to do without Icarus telling us? Maybe it’s just because I was the maladjusted one. (That’s a joke, Searle, don’t send me to the sim.) He took a beer from the mini bar and cracked it open, savoring it. As sad as a lot of things were now, even crappy beer was nirvana after years of survival mode. You wouldn’t catch him griping—everything was precious now. Everything.
After a few minutes of sitting in front of the screen, waiting, he got a text response from Corazon: “Go back to sleep, Mace.” She would never have insomnia, she was too self-actualized and well adjusted. She’d never seemed to feel a burden at being the last hope of humanity, took everything with an equanimity he’d envied. “See you in the morning.”
A breakfast was scheduled with a bunch of diplomats from the countries who’d been part of the Icarus project, then photo ops, a private lunch with the heads of the UN and NASA, and finally the anniversary ceremony. A fun-filled day, one he’d rather have had some sleep for.
After waiting for a while, he didn’t get any more responses, so he dug around in his duffel for some pills he’d hoarded from the ship. He figured he’d get back in bed, set some extra alarms just in case they knocked him out, when he heard a soft bing sound and looked at the screen. Fucking Capa. Why. Only the right half of his face was visible, like he didn’t understand how screens worked, and he was disheveled, like he was coming off a bender or something. The typical distracted scientist thing that had always driven the military man in Mace kind of crazy. “Now it’s your turn?” Capa asked, dispensing with a greeting. He had the same scruffy hair and gaunt face as when Mace had last seen him—the huge welcome-home-saviors-of-the-universe celebration after quarantine. Those startling blue eyes were as unsettling as ever. Corazon had once described him as angelic, which had made Mace snort in derision, but even Mace had to admit—when he got down off his fucking high horse—that Capa did have the uncanny aura of someone who didn’t quite belong on this planet, who made you look and wonder how he got here.
“Looks like you’re still not sleeping, either.” Mace had never talked to Capa about his dreams, they had never been on such terms with each other and Mace’d never wanted to acknowledge he could have concerns for his welfare. It would have felt too much like opening himself up, although to what, he’d never really examined closely.
Capa’s right brow rose at the mention of his behavior onboard. “I keep weird hours,” was all Capa seemed willing to say. He also still had that scholarly air of abstraction, which had always conflicted with his rock-star appearance. “You want a drink?”
The workers building Icarus had violated their weight restrictions up to the base all the time, especially the long-haul ones who had to live on the station for considerably longer than the specialists. That meant the mission crew had discovered lots of little gifts hidden in cupboards and drawers after departure: half to full bottles of booze, six-packs of beer, bottles of wine, recreational drugs, all stuff Kaneda should have demanded they hand over to him but he’d looked the other way for. Once on their way, they hadn’t really been interested in the mind-altering stuff, still tense and nervous and terrified of making mistakes when the fate of humanity was on their shoulders. But when the boredom of the months set in, they’d quickly given up on that policy, needed to reduce the stresses that came from adjusting to living on top of each other, figuring out how to handle all the quirks and conflicts without staying in the Earth Room 24/7. The close-quarters training hadn’t prepared them for the hard reality of such a life, and Mace had noticed quickly that before the supplies ran out, Capa would sometimes retreat with a bottle of whiskey to hide with his bomb, like the crew were all too much stimulation for him. He wasn’t always happy in his skin, Mace had thought then, but maybe he’d just been projecting.
“Sure. What room?” Mace wanted to go there rather than have Capa come to his room, so he could leave whenever he wanted. Which he imagined would be soon, after they’d awkwardly tried to find more than two things to say to each other.
Capa made a weird face that Mace couldn’t decipher. “Five oh four,” he said quietly, like it was a secret, and Mace switched off the screen. He’d left his room door open partly with the swing bar, so Mace knocked lightly and let himself in. It was typical Capa: there were papers scattered across the suite’s desk and dining table, a couple of small models, and diagrams taped to the wall by the desk. He was wearing a loose, soft T-shirt and pajama pants, but his bed was still made, like he hadn’t even tried to sleep yet.
Mace shut the door, feeling weird all of a sudden, clumsy in a way he never felt usually, before realizing he’d never really been alone with Capa outside the confines of the ship, not even being isolated when paired off in training. Something about Capa’s...softness made Mace nervous. “Working on a new project?” Mace asked and jerked his chin in the direction of the models.
“Yeah, a couple of things. We really missed the window on going off-world, humans should have done that long before Icarus One even took off. But some of us think the concepts of it are where the future is for the planet. One part of the project’s a long-term, self-sustaining station—kind of like a generation ship for vulnerable populations while we fix what happened here,” Capa said, grabbing two glasses and pouring kind of a lot of whiskey in them, handing one to Mace. “Not just for humans, either. We learned so much on Icarus, it’s a shame not to use it. Since...” and he waved a hand around before sitting on the little couch.
Knocking back some of the whiskey, Mace said, “Earth’s a shitshow.”
“Yeah.” He said it gravely, like he saw that as his own personal failure. “And then the second part of that is the idea of terraforming. There was a lot of research, you know, before the bomb concept, into building colonies on other planets like Mars. Now that the bomb has been proven, we can turn back to the ideas for terraforming here on earth where we’ve evolved to be instead of some hostile planet we’re not exactly meant to be on.”
“Huh. So, who’s ‘some of us’? I thought you’d gone full hermit or something up in the mountains.” He pulled up the desk chair and sat across from Capa rather than share the tiny couch with him.
He had the nerve to laugh out loud at that. “It’s only an hour and a half away from Seattle,” he said. “There are universities right there. And it’s not the mountains, it’s north of the city.” Oh right. His parents had lost their home in the Melt and had to relocate, and his sister, who was some kind of famous photographer, was still living in Australia or some such. There wasn’t an institution around that didn’t want the great Robert Capa on their faculty, dreaming up physics solutions to whatever the next big problems for humanity were, but Capa had chosen to go where his folks were. They’d all been able to write their own tickets, could have just chosen to coast on their reps, yet to a person the crew had only wanted to keep making the world better. Except, apparently, Mace. Not that they hadn’t struggled with the after-effects of the mission, but they had adjusted to life back on Earth better than he had. Figured out their new purpose.
“Sorry. It sounded like you went total Unabomber or something, some cabin in the woods and cutting off contact with the modern world.” He raised his glass in acknowledgement.
“Only you would think that.” He sipped the drink. “I wanted some land around me, as much as I could get. With whatever survived the Winter that you couldn’t get in an oxygen garden. Didn’t you want to feel like you had space to move? To think and breathe without someone right there, without having to go into a sim or hide in the garden?”
“Well, we had space,” and Mace laughed darkly, which made Capa smile a little. He shrugged. “I just wanted to see faces—as many different faces as possible instead of the same seven ones every waking moment.”
Capa stared down at his feet. “Certain ones, especially.” The polite thing to do would be to say that’s not so. Mace drained his glass and held it out. Capa smiled wryly and dumped some more whiskey into it. “That why you can’t sleep? Still feel like you’re trapped onboard with us because we’re all together again?”
“I can get to sleep, I just can’t...I wake up and can’t get back to sleep.” It felt too weak to tell Capa, of all people, that he had his own nightmares now. The same ones, over and over. They all had their burdens; Mace was keeping his to himself.
But Capa was too smart for that, he could see things with those alien eyes. “What’s the dream about?” He had a weirdly soothing voice when he spoke to you one-on-one, low and calming, and there was something that, when combined with his rectitude, gave you a sense of assurance. Different from the lighter, slightly higher voice he used when he gave speeches. Mace had grudgingly admitted he could see why he’d shot to the front of the list of physicists when they were cooking up the idea of the bomb. Whatever else you could say about Capa, he knew his shit and who he was, and it only took one conversation with him to figure that out.
Mace didn’t quite meet his eyes, instead stared out at the cityscape, the sparsely dotted lights of the high rises. It would be years before the view looked anything like it had before solar winter, maybe decades, but the signs of life were there. “Do you ever question the decision to ignore the distress beacon?” It was Mace who’d pushed hardest to continue, or rather, the only one who had pled that case, but what if he hadn’t convinced Capa to go that route? Kaneda had always had a soft spot for Capa that he didn’t for anyone else; he knew that Capa had never felt like he fit in with this group of trained astronauts, so Kaneda had taken him under his wing. Mace would never have been able to convince the captain on his own. However Capa had reached his verdict, he’d only done it because of Mace’s objections in the first place, and maybe that made them partners in crime. That was a pretty fucking insane thought.
“Every fucking day.”
“Oh, is that what’s got you keeping weird hours now?” he asked, not even trying to mask the irritation. If Capa felt so damn guilty, then why didn’t he still have bad dreams? Mace wasn’t the cold bastard everyone else on the Icarus crew thought he was. Hell, he’d never wanted to be the logic guy at all, but part of the reason he’d been chosen for the mission above all the other candidates was his strength of resolve, his clear-headedness, his discipline. Now his subconscious apparently couldn’t stop questioning that resolve, and Capa’s was too. Fantastic.
“The fact that we’re sitting here on Earth again, in a fully functioning hotel, drinking a bottle of liquor that was created before the planet began dying, means that...no. We didn’t make a mistake. Kaneda knew it was the right call, because we believed in our reasons for making it. Doubt is like water seeping through a tiny crack—it just keeps expanding and expanding, till something breaks open.” He closed his eyes, tapping his long fingers on his knee. “You know.”
Sometimes, it was as though Mace saw things through beams of light—a layer of bright sunshine streaming every which way, filtering and bending the image. Like his retinas had been burned in. He’d squint against it, trying to see past the golden blur. He wondered if he had developed that freaky space madness Searle had. Searle had gotten over it after the payload went out and they were on the route back home—or Kaneda had ordered him to get over it, Mace never knew—but who was to say what had happened to Icarus I’s crew? Who was to say the sun didn’t fuck you up big time just because you had the nerve to get too close to it and mess with it? Naming the mission Icarus had been one seriously dark-ass joke. “Would you have still pushed Kaneda to continue on if I hadn’t made my case, though?”
He crossed his legs, played with the hem of his sleep pants. “Guess we’ll never know.” The decision had caused a schism in the crew that wouldn’t heal until some time after the payload was delivered, when they knew they could actually survive the journey home—and that there’d be a home to go to. He still wasn’t sure Cassie had truly forgiven them. She was agitating hard for the agency to send out a probe.
Mace rolled his eyes. For a minute, he wanted to ask why Capa’s own dreams had finally stopped haunting him, long after the mission’s proven success. For a minute, Capa was the only person he wanted to talk to. For a minute, he thought about reaching out to touch him, like Capa’s certainty could pass through his skin.
But the minute passed. “Busy day tomorrow. Better let you sleep.” He set the glass by the sink.
“Where are you at these days?” Capa looked up at him with those visionary eyes, searching through the beams of sunlight that obscured Mace’s vision. It was unnerving.
“I, uh… You mean work? I was leaning toward Cal-Tech, but I haven’t decided.” The idea of going back to a normal position, to a regular life, seemed as remote as reaching the sun had when they launched. But the world was slowly crawling back toward normal, and he was part of that world now. Again. Possibly Capa thought Mace should be with his family, the way he was with his, and help his brother—sometimes Mace did, too. His family was still in Panama, though, and Mace didn’t feel like he fit there, not now. And he wasn’t certain he was of any use to anyone.
“You’re a great engineer,” Capa said evenly, but Mace’s gaze kept landing on the pulse that seemed to have sped up in his throat, the rhythmic undulation of skin. “You’ve been good at that sort of thing your whole life, I know your background.”
“Eh. I was just the kid who ran with scissors,” Mace said, annoyed at being complimented, and he disliked thinking that somewhere in the back of it all there was pity, for his childhood, for the loss of his sister and what happened to his brother. He and Capa came from vastly different worlds. “A force of destruction. I had to learn how to fix the shit I did.”
“You could throw in with us—it’s mostly grant money through private funding.” He caught Mace’s surprise. “I mean, it’s a shame about your personality and everything, but that military background wouldn’t hurt us, considering some of the funding sources.”
There weren’t enough people left to make most schools viable anymore; now it was the governmental and military rebuilding agencies connected to academic institutions that were keeping them alive. It was a world he knew well enough. A military brat, Mace had never put down roots before, he’d gone into the army because his brother and his father had and because it was the only thing he knew—and by that point, the most reliable way to eat, not to mention live near the equator, if you weren’t rich. Mace shook his head at Capa’s offer. “I’ll think about it,” he said with a shrug.
The idea of working with any of the crew again hadn’t crossed his mind—they’d been varying degrees of thrilled to see each other’s backs after quarantine lifted, and kept up through chats and the occasional public appearances, not usually as the full group, though. And of all the people to throw in with, Capa would have been his last choice. Before. “You’re a nuclear physicist,” Mace said. “Do they have much call for that in blueprinting a station?”
He tilted his head back and chuckled. It was funny how rarely he’d seen Capa smile, considering the years they’d spent together. Part of his mystique, Mace thought. “I suppose my masterpiece was Icarus and the payload, and I’ll never do anything that spectacular again. So now I’ve settled on becoming a bit of a journeyman.”
Mace huffed a small laugh. He tried to find something to settle his gaze on besides Capa’s blue eyes and the way he was thoughtfully rubbing his chin, but he couldn’t. “Decent engineers are probably a dime a dozen, and I bet most of them are a shitload easier to work with.” When his sister died of cancer, he’d despised himself for following his dream of becoming an engineer instead of doing something useful like becoming a doctor. Someone who could make an actual difference. When his brother had received a traumatic brain injury trying to put down one of the worst of the food riots, Mace had applied for the Icarus mission, his last, desperate gasp at trying to save someone.
“No one who’s seen and done what you have.” Capa knew about Mace’s family story, they all knew the basics about each other. They’d all had their reasons for signing up.
He fidgeted. “It’s strange we never really talked about this before.” There had been multiple sessions where candidates had been tested in all sorts of bizarre scenarios for their abilities to get along, who with and how they communicated best. Find the roster who’d slot together perfectly, be most dedicated to the mission objective. He’d seen Capa as icy then, and they hadn’t exactly tested well. “Sorry that I never said anything about your...dreams.”
Capa let the acknowledgement of his own kindness go by. “We all had our emotional crises up there. You always seemed too...self-contained? for an existential dark night of the soul.” As though it wasn’t something existential that had motivated him to attack Capa over the slightest transgressions. The worst part had been the dead zone, not being able to send a possibly final message, not knowing for months if the world was even still there to feel the sunlight.
Frowning, Mace said, “I guess my crisis is just more earthbound.” He moved to the door, and Capa got up, holding it open as Mace hovered on the threshold. He’d told Capa about his greatest shame, and instead of the rejection he’d expected he got a tender smile, and an offer of a future. It made him think of the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras and his heretical belief that the moon had no light of its own, but instead reflected the light from the sun. Maybe Mace was only the dark moon, reflecting Capa’s dazzling light.
Capa rubbed his chin and looked hard at Mace, and it felt like trying Searle’s weird sun filter experiment, like the light was burning a hole right through him. “You know, Mace, it’s easy to be the conscience of humanity when your whole mission is about saving people and every evaluation judges how empathetic you are. It’s a lot harder to be the voice of reason, to speak the cold, hard truths.” Those luminous blue eyes were fixed on him, he wrapped his hand around Mace’s forearm and squeezed hard. “We needed you up there. It was the right call.”
On ship one time there’d been a spectacular meteor shower that had occurred on his shift, but he hadn’t alerted anyone else to it, not even the ones who’d most have enjoyed it. Mace had watched it from the observation room alone with reverence, and when he had turned to go, he’d found Capa standing at the doorway, awestruck at the same sight. He didn’t know how long he’d been standing there, since it was Capa’s normal sleep time, but as Mace had moved past him, Capa’s eyes cut over toward him, full of betrayal and...resignation, like it was all he’d ever expected from Mace. Like Mace was just the animal he appeared to be, no more, no less. Had Mace just been jealous of Capa’s intellect, or even his humanity?
As he made his way back to his room, Mace considered that—he had never thought of his choices about the first ship in terms of “we” and “us,” because he and Capa had always been at odds, for reasons he never tried to know. He’d never allowed Capa to be anything to him at all, but clearly the opposite wasn’t true for Capa. Mace wasn’t sure what to make of that.
The anniversary ceremonies were, like all ceremonies, boring, the high point of a day filled with suits and faces that looked exactly the same to Mace, no matter where they came from. He’d never had any patience for formal events, too much talking and puffing up the people in charge, and now he had to stand in front of huge crowds and pretend he hadn’t heard all this before, endure the fulsome praise. When he’d signed up for Icarus, it had never occurred to him he’d become a public figure, even on the heady days when he knew they might make it back.
“There is a lot more in our future,” Kaneda reminded him at the crew dinner afterward, the single event he’d looked forward to. Enough time had passed since their last meeting that they didn’t hate each other’s faces or despise the grating of their voices. “This is only the anniversary of the payload launch. There will be one for date of our return, for first spring—in both hemispheres… My advice is to paste on your smile and accept the honor with humility.” That was so Kaneda, and Mace smiled at him with fondness.
“Anniversary of launch, anniversary of payload delivery, anniversary of first pass by Venus...” Searle commented.
“Anniversary of taking the first dump on Icarus,” Mace added.
“Euccchh,” Cassie groaned and stabbed his arm with a chopstick. “You’re still such a dude.”
He pressed his lips together. It was hard to blame her for that, considering everything he’d shown them of himself. In his own mind, he thought he’d been changed by the mission maybe more than anyone else, but if none of them saw that, his self-awareness must be pretty faulty. It baffled him when he looked in the mirror, barely recognizing the older man staring back. On ship, you didn’t really pay attention to yourself, hardly looked in a mirror. Or maybe it was just that once they’d returned, the rest of them found it easier to return to themselves, and Mace was the outlier.
“They’ll get bored with worshipping us soon enough,” Cory said, reaching for the last of this round of rice. They were so greedy still for certain foods that hadn’t been easy to grow on ship, grains and meat especially—once the ship’s stockpiles were gone, they were gone. They’d had to do some careful planning for the final third of the trip, use their practiced skill in scarcity from the world they’d left behind.
“I hope not. I like being a demigod,” Searle said, and Trey wadded up his napkin and tossed it at him with a grin. Though he’d gotten over his weird sun fetish, there was still an aspect about Searle that left Mace wondering how he’d ever been put in charge of judging anyone else’s sanity. But he seemed to be doing well at home, leading research into the long-term effects of the Winter on mental and physical health. The crew had missed some of the worst outbreaks of disease in the Melt, but it wasn’t like the threats were gone.
“My granddad once told me about being a kid during the time of the Apollo program, how revered the astronauts were,” Mace said, drinking his tea. “Free cars, free houses, free drinks everywhere they went, and all they did was take trips to the moon. Even if they never went on a mission, they made bank just for appearing at, like, shopping mall openings and speaking for a half hour at conventions.” More things that had gone the way of the passenger pigeon—Trey was young enough he probably didn’t even know what they were.
“Until they cut the program,” Cassie reminded him.
Mace shrugged. “Only seemed to make them more appealing.”
“The fact of us being here in the States every time they want to shower us with affection isn’t lost on us,” Harvey said. Lots of head-nods around the table. Though the US had put up the lion’s share of the money for the Icarus program, out of all the major countries involved, they’d done the worst job of taking care of their people when the sun had started to dim. Food shortages turned into famine before the greenhouse and bio-dome systems got underway, birth rates plummeted, death rates soared. Wars were waged over real estate closer to the equator. But when the bomb worked and the sun came back, they’d been the first to throw all the parties and take all the credit. The government had abandoned a lot of people—like Mace’s own family—when they were no longer of any obvious use to them.
Harvey’s wife, Serena, a state senator in New Jersey, shot a sideways glance at her husband. “I thought we’d agreed to keep politics out of it,” she said with an ironic smile. Harvey had definitely married up, Mace thought: where Harvey was kind of twitchy and remote, his wife was warm and open, a rare well-loved politician whom everyone agreed would become a future national leader. Perhaps Mace’s own sense of patriotism wouldn’t have vanished if there’d been more people like her in government.
In truth, everyone had done well with significant others: Trey was engaged now to his long-term boyfriend, and Cassie was talking marriage with a guy she’d met in her new work teaching flight. They hadn’t prohibited married candidates in the program, but they hadn’t exactly encouraged it, either—and while Kaneda and Corazon had handled their long absences from their spouses well, Harvey hadn’t. Mace had never really understood his acute homesickness; sure, he’d missed his family fiercely, but Harvey’s suffering had been almost pathological. Returned to her, Harvey’d become a new man. Which just left him and Capa, apparently, as the losers without partners.
Looking around the table at everyone, all coupled up, Mace was starting to question his own convictions about staying single. He’d always hated the emphasis on couplehood, long before the Winter, and he wasn’t ever going to complain about the attention he got now from groupies. But then he’d be around these guys and wonder if he wasn’t missing something really obvious. They were all so content, comfortable. None of them were plagued by the kind of restlessness that simmered just under Mace’s skin. Their minds weren’t drawn back to the shadow of Mercury—and they all slept through the night.
“Well, as much as I hate to trade on the project’s success, it helped me jump the queue and I managed to get a dog,” Capa said proudly, and Mace whipped his head around to stare at him. The crew were all suitably impressed by this achievement, and Mace felt a twinge of envy—people were starting to keep pets again, slowly, but it wasn’t common yet. Humans weren’t the only creatures that had been decimated.
“I’m gonna try to get one—give me the name of the breeder,” Mace said. “So I can bring a plus-one with me next time and I don’t have to feel like a putz around all you happy couples. Why didn’t you bring yours along?” he asked Capa. He would have loved to see a dog again.
“My mom won’t let him out of her sight. I was gone for years, my sister and her children live halfway around the world—the dog is Mom’s chance to have another kid around. She spoils him way more than she ever did me.”
The idea of Capa frolicking around with a dog particularly amused Mace. “You seemed more like a cat guy to me.” Unpredictable and a little slinky, Mace thought.
“I have one of those now, too.” He smirked, and Mace found himself smiling, despite himself.
“By our next reunion, everyone will have pets,” Cory said. “I’ll get a lizard. Maybe a bearded dragon.” That’d be even harder to come by than a dog or cat, but she was living in what remained of the Philippines now, so maybe. Tropical countries had been the only salvation for a hell of a lot of species.
For all the crew’s faults, and his, he cared about them in his own fucked-up way, Mace thought as he looked around the table. No one else had done what they had done. No one else had experienced what they’d experienced, and they were forever bonded by it. Even if he’d known what would happen, if he could do it all again, he would.
They finished their meal, and as a group they headed back to the hotel through the jumbled streets of Manhattan, which had looked like a dystopian movie even before the Winter, to Mace’s eyes. Capa fell into step next to him. “Have you given any more thought to the project? I know it was a busy day, so I understand if you didn’t...”
“I mean, if I end up at Cal, I could head up north once I’m settled, take a look—since we’d be on the same coast.” He had the rare sense that Capa wanted him around, and not simply because they wanted more engineers on the team. He thought Capa actually...needed him. It was kind of sweet and irritating at the same time—like putting a perfectly ripe cherry in your mouth you thought had been pitted and biting down hard on the unexpected stone.
Cory glanced over her shoulder at them, swinging her and her husband’s hands back and forth while they walked, almost bouncing in a girlish way. “Look at you two, getting along like grownups.”
Mace leveled a look at her. They’d all be heading home tomorrow, so he’d let her mock him before they split up again. He supposed he deserved it, anyway.
“Did he help you figure out how to get back to sleep?” she teased.
His eyebrow went up; Mace hadn’t realized Capa’s response to him had been noted by anyone else. “Sort of. A few minutes of listening to that droning monotone talking about physics problems was remarkably effective.”
What a shit thing to say; Mace winced inwardly. But Capa didn’t appear to be put out, he smiled serenely, mysteriously, and told Cory, “He’s basically a seven-year-old. You just have to tell him a story.”
“Ha.” Mace grunted a laugh, slapping Capa lightly on the arm.
They all split up at the hotel, hugging and saying their goodbyes until the next event would bring them together. He wound up on the elevator alone with Capa, and so took the chance to apologize—a real one for a change. “Sorry about what I said. That was a dick thing to do. For what it’s worth, you’re actually a good speaker.” The first few times they’d done the panel interviews, listening to Capa talk about the Icarus mission made him zone out, until he realized Capa was actually saying interesting things each time. The more he liked a subject, the less icy he was, and he became a surprisingly relaxed and magnetic speaker.
Capa merely tilted his head, eyes crinkling with some private amusement, and stepped out at his floor, holding the door open. “Sleep better tonight,” he said, and gave that little half smile Mace had once found so infuriating. “And I hope I’ll hear from you before the next whatever ceremony.”
“I’ll be in touch.”
As the doors closed, Mace watched him walk down the hall.
He didn’t want to like Capa. But he did.
Daedalus
You could say a lot about the nightmare of existence that was the post-Winter planet, but there were a few things people had done right in the time Icarus was on its way home. One of those things had been the revival of rail in North America, since flight had nearly disappeared anywhere outside the warmest areas in the final years before they’d left. Jetliners were still being fixed and rebuilt and put back into the skies, but the infrastructure had been so badly damaged that a solid recovery of commercial air travel was years away. Which was okay with Mace—it meant employment for guys like him, and he preferred being on solid ground these days, anyway. Except for Cassie and Trey, most of the Icarus crew only flew when they had to now.
Hidden within the planet’s devastation were unexpected grace notes: deserts carpeted by flowers from long-dormant seeds which had bloomed after the Melt; desertified land suddenly teeming with the seedlings of trees once thought extinct in those regions; animals that had somehow adapted and waited out the ice, revived by the warmth of a new spring. Mace could see the understory clawing its way back to life in the forests along the coast now that sea levels were stabilizing, and he took endless photos from the train carriage, all along the slow route north.
Capa picked him up at the train station in Seattle, but instead of dropping Mace at a hotel downtown, he went in the direction of the university. It was probably not the kind of place that had ever fielded such a shining star as Robert Capa, but he had only the nicest things to say about the department as they drove north. The city had done a lot to rebuild itself but still had a long way to go, like most places built around water, and Mace found himself wondering: what if I came up here, even if it weren’t on Capa’s project? What kind of other work could I do? He could think of worse places to stay. It wasn’t long before Mace was being introduced around the neglected building that housed Capa’s department, viewing the team’s concepts and plans.
Capa was only five years older than him, but Mace felt like some middle-school dipshit who’d been suddenly, inexplicably befriended by the star high school quarterback. Mace had never wanted for friends or sexual partners, he’d always been the one other people chose to orbit around, but now he was the planet revolving around Capa’s brilliant sun, and he found he didn’t necessarily mind.
While he did his best to make it sound enticing, nothing intrigued Mace so much as the fact that this was what Capa had chosen to do next. He’d given the world a reprieve from destruction, yet somehow that hadn’t been enough, he was driven to fix all the problems.
After a late lunch with his colleagues, Capa took them out of the city, heading north along sparsely traveled, eroded freeways. “Might as well stay with us, we have the room,” Capa said, without really asking if Mace wanted that. He watched out the window, taking in the conditions, what had still to be rebuilt. It was ironic, he thought, especially here on the coasts: if it hadn’t been for the warming effects of climate change in the decades before the sun began failing, places like this would have seen even more destruction from the cold. Humans had fucked the world themselves, long before the universe had added the Q-ball into the fuckery mix.
The mountain ranges of the Olympics and the Cascades were beautiful with their blue-white caps, flanking them on the left and on the right. It would be years yet before they returned to a normal schedule of seasonal snows and melts, and the snowpack was down at a level it would normally have been in early spring, in the Before. Mace had loved snowboarding when he was young; if he never set foot on snow again, it would be too soon.
Eventually, Capa exited toward a town near what a decrepit sign said was Deception Pass, barely repopulated, and they followed a long road of rutted pavement till they reached a sprawling home with two smaller bungalows set nearby. His parents lived in the large house, and Capa had taken one of the smaller places, a family friend who’d also been displaced in the Melt taking up the other. His parents were waiting outside to greet them; it looked like they’d just come back from working somewhere on the property and the dog was with them. Mace could hardly contain his excitement and he knelt to pet and scratch the dog, whose name was Mercury. As a kid, he’d had pets despite his family moving around so much, but once those animals had been gone, there were no more, and by then, the world was freezing—people could barely feed themselves, let alone animals. It was funny what you got used to when life turned upside down, he thought, laughing as the dog jumped around him and licked him, ruffling its fur. All the things you stopped thinking you couldn’t live without. You could get used to anything.
Capa’s parents were nothing like Mace had expected, they didn’t have his physical beauty or that distant, dreamy quality; they just seemed like regular people, not the parents of the revered savior. Both medical doctors—his father had been a researcher who’d gone into general practice when things got really bad—they were zealously dedicated to helping people in this community, and obviously the apple hadn’t fallen far from that tree: saving people apparently ran in the family. His dad shook Mace’s hand and said, “You’re the hothead we’ve heard so much about.” Mace managed an embarrassed smile, trying to hide a little shiver of excitement that Capa’d spoken of Mace at all.
They invited him for dinner, showed him around the large greenhouse they still used—like many of their generation, they weren’t leaving things to chance. The climate had already changed before the sun even began to dim, so who was to say something equally catastrophic wouldn’t happen again? Which was a line of thinking Mace got: even though he’d been born before it had weakened, the slowly dying star was the only one he’d ever known, until they’d come home. Living in this restored world came hard.
At dinner, they plied him with questions, and the cat, Venus, decided Mace’s lap was the best seat in the house, while the dog begged for scraps next to his feet. Capa’s parents called him Robbie—Mace had almost laughed out loud the first time he heard it—as did his sister, whom they video-called afterward so Capa could introduce Mace to her, too. He was showing Mace off as though he was his BFF and not the guy who, on at least two occasions, had gone so hard after him that he’d nearly choked him out. None of them treated him like some hanger-on obscured by Capa’s shadow: Mace was one of the heroes who’d saved the world with him; he was important.
Spending time with Capa’s folks also made him homesick for his own, an odd, unsettling feeling he’d never had before he’d left for the mission. He’d always thought he could do without regular parental contact once Erin had died, after Marcus’s brain injury—until he did do without them, for tens of millions of miles. For the first time, he considered that he might want something like this from his future, that maybe there was more to life than merely drifting around this newly bright world, at odds with everything and everyone. There was a sense of purpose to Capa’s life that went beyond survival now, and Mace wondered if he had earned that kind of fulfillment himself.
Yet when they were sitting out on the porch that evening enjoying the cool night air and Capa asked Mace what he’d thought about the project, Mace was noncommittal. Instead of trying to convince him, Capa only picked at the label on his beer bottle. They were silent for a long time before Capa asked, gazing up at the sky, “Do you ever see Venus out there, twinkling in the sky, and think, ‘I was there’?” He pointed just below the curve of the moon and to the right.
With a short, sharp laugh, Mace said, “Sometimes. But more often it feels like something that happened to someone else.” He wasn’t the same guy who’d flown past that planet; none of them were the same people after they’d been out there. “Like I saw it in a movie.”
“Do you want to go back?” Capa had never felt like he belonged with the astronauts, because they’d all been military or from one of the space agencies. He’d heard Capa tell Kaneda once, after one of Mace’s sarcastic tear-downs, that he thought they all distrusted him because he was “just the bomb whisperer.” As though Mace hadn’t been the lone crew member who’d treated Capa that way. As though Mace wasn’t just an animal wearing a human skin.
“Is that what your involvement in the project is about—a way of going back? I always thought you hated it.”
“I think I was afraid of my own incompetence in some of the mission expectations, like if there’d been a crisis, I’d have failed badly. You guys were so well trained. But I never hated it. It was...beautiful, and mysterious.” He turned to Mace, a cryptic smile on his lips. “Einstein said something like that once: ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.’ I’m not doing this because I want to go back to a ship or because I think there’s one magic bullet I can make like the bomb. It’s because I want humanity to get there, I want all of us to fix the world together.”
Noble goals, Mace supposed. The army had promoted Mace when he got back, to major, and given him his pick of anything he wanted to work on, any posting. Instead, he’d resigned his commission and started putting out feelers for infrastructure work, yet he couldn’t seem to settle on anything. What did you do for an encore after you helped save the solar system? “Don’t laugh… For a while now, I’ve been thinking about giving up engineering, doing something like Corazon is, but with animals. There’s a lot we lost, a lot to try to save, even if you guys do build Noah’s ark.” She was working at one of the big seed vaults that were set up when people realized Norway couldn’t handle saving an entire planet’s worth of flora by itself and that the small seed library networks might not remain viable as everyone fled toward the equator. Few places had developed the capacity to do the same for animals; species that had been teetering precariously on the edge of extinction were in even more dire need now—the ones that had survived, anyway. He hadn’t been useful for his sister, or even his brother, but he could still be useful to something.
When the project had first been announced, Mace had looked up the myth it had been named for, because he hadn’t recalled all the details but he’d thought it was a dangerous name, in the superstitious way soldiers had. The story of Icarus always seemed to center on the wings, and not why he and his father had been imprisoned in the first place: Daedalus had told Ariadne the secret of how to escape the inescapable labyrinth he’d built for the king, using a long golden thread of flax. Without realizing it, Mace had been waiting all this time for the secret way out of this place he’d been trapped in since they’d returned, and he thought that if there were any golden threads for him to follow, they would come from Capa. And maybe that was all right.
“I’d never laugh at that. It’s important work. And you’d be good at anything you chose to do.”
Mace wasn’t so sure of that, but it left him with a weird sensation that Capa thought so, a warmth in his chest he hadn’t felt since...well, since he’d watched as the sparks of the payload detonating lit up the observation room screen. They were quiet for a while before saying their good-nights, and he went to the little guest room next to Capa’s. While he was trying to get comfortable in the unfamiliar bed, he looked up Capa’s Einstein quote on his phone. It was funny Capa didn’t mention the rest of it: “He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead—his eyes are closed.” That’d never be Capa. His eyes were always open.
On the ship the crew had been touch-starved, almost from the beginning; they’d been isolated in a lengthy quarantine before launch, and by the time they were well away from the base had been rubbing up against one another’s personalities—keeping distance physically had become paramount. Searle had figured it out eventually, after yet another outburst with Capa and Mace as well as a few where Trey and Harvey got into it over some inconsequential, ridiculous thing. Searle couldn’t really force the crew to have physical contact as a prescription—with so many typical guys on crew he knew that’d never fly—but at least Corazon and Cassie and Trey, to some degree Searle himself, had had fewer issues with touch, and they tried to model that behavior, somewhat fruitlessly. Searle had asked Mace once if that was part of the motivation for his outbursts—that he needed simple human contact, however it came, but Mace had laughed in his face.
Mace woke with a shout buried in his lungs, like he did almost every night, uncertain for a moment where he was. But this time when his hand flailed wildly in the air it came in contact with Capa, and his face filled Mace’s view, brows knit in concern. “It’s okay, you’re safe. It’s okay, Mace,” Capa soothed. “Hey, talk to me.” He was clutching Mace’s shoulders; when he saw he was awake, Capa slid his hands down Mace’s arms, letting him catch his breath. His fingers brushed lightly up and down Mace’s arms as Mace clutched at his sweaty T-shirt.
“Still having those dreams,” Capa said, less a question than an acknowledgement. “I’d hoped the further away we got from the mission, the fewer you’d have.” Even though it was dark, Mace felt like he was looking through those slanting beams of sunlight again; he squinted, trying to see past the glare.
Mace dropped his head back to the pillow. It occurred to him that he should push Capa’s hands away, but he didn’t want to. For years he’d let himself continue to be touch-starved, ignoring Searle, and when he’d come home, he hadn’t wanted for physical attention from women or men. None of it, however, had been meaningful, and he could see that for what it was, now. “I haven’t had one for a while. Maybe it’s the proximity to you that brings them on.”
Capa laughed, though Mace had expected him to take offense and leave. He said, with that familiar distracted air, “I never expected to make it back. I signed up with the conviction that I was giving my life to the project.” His head jerked, he closed his eyes briefly, like he’d tried to forget that and couldn’t. “Maybe I didn’t really want to, and that’s why I always dreamt of the surface of the sun.”
Mace’d never taken him for a fatalist, not even a pragmatist, and he wasn’t military, so he’d never had that lie down on the wire for your comrade mentality, either. But assuming it hadn’t been a round-trip ticket and being willing to give it up without knowing if the project succeeded...man, that was a whole other thing. Never once had Mace thought he wasn’t going home, regardless of the state home was in.
It shocked Mace enough to say, “I dream… It’s their voices begging us to save them. The first crew. They’re all alive and we can hear their voices begging us to come back. For someone to save them. And I still say no.” They were each of them carrying the weight of what they’d done, in their own unique ways, even those who had wanted to go to the first ship. What they’d been through was unique in human history, and all the psych tests in the universe couldn’t predict how much the weight of humanity’s hopes fucked you up, tore at you. How buckled over you were by the expectations. All they had was each other, the only people in the galaxy who’d understand. All he had was Capa.
“It’s more than that, though.” Capa didn’t elaborate, but Mace knew he knew: every single step that had led them on the path to lying down on that wire for a planet full of strangers. When he’d been passed over for the first mission, Mace had almost lost his shit, but now he wondered if there hadn’t been some sort of destiny in that. Maybe his residual anger at everything he’d seen and lost was the only thing that had saved them from perhaps experiencing the same mission failure as Icarus I had. The crew members who’d wanted to answer the distress call could have swayed Capa and Kaneda without opposition, and now earth would be in its death throes instead of stumbling back to life.
It was awkward lying here with Capa staring down at him, so Mace laughed at himself and wiped his nose on the back of his hand, scooting up till he was sitting. Jesus, what a mess he was. The funny thing was that Capa took Mace’s hand, just the way someone would when they were telling you bad news.
I have ovarian cancer, Matt. Stage three. Mace stared at their hands together.
“I’ve never betrayed a confidence, ever,” Capa said. “But I think if Kaneda was here now, he’d tell you this.”
“Sounds serious.” Matthew, something’s happened to your brother. His heart rate rose, just a little.
“You know how pissed you were when Patterson made the cut for engineer on One?” Mace nodded. “Kaneda was just as pissed that Pinbacker was selected for their captain. Kaneda thought Pinbacker wasn’t one hundred percent stable—so giving him that kind of position was dangerous. I didn"t have as much interaction with him, but I knew of others who thought the same thing.”
He gave a little sigh, like he could breathe again after all this time of holding his breath, holding this secret. “Kaneda played those recordings of Pinbacker’s over and over, trying to see something in them that would provide a clue as to what happened. He wondered if it had been some kind of deep-space madness, that Pinbacker or someone else lost their mind and killed everyone. Or maybe sabotaged the ship somehow.” He let those words settle between them, the implication that maybe the distress beacon could have been a ruse. “After Searle developed that sunlight obsession, Kaneda went into the observation room and tried it himself. He said he could see a little of what Searle was talking about, and it disturbed him, so much so he never did it again. But it made him wonder: what if Searle hadn’t pulled back? What if someone on One had also gone a little sun-mad but didn’t pull back, and what if that person was Pinbacker?”
“Jesus,” Mace said, shaking his head. The head docs in the program had been really worried about the crew going bonkers in space; no one really knew what that length of travel would do to them. He’d scoffed at their concerns then; by the midway point of the journey he’d started rethinking his position.
“That’s why Kaneda never got that fussed about our...disagreements—he thought that was a healthier display of conflict or mission stress. He wanted it to stop, but he wasn’t worried, either.”
“I always thought I was the only one who believed Searle was a wackjob.”
With a chuckle, he tapped Mace’s arm. “Listen. I did my calculations and I could have recommended we retrieve the second payload, it would have been the smart thing to do. But I kept thinking about Kaneda’s assessment of Pinbacker. I’m glad that you and Kaneda didn’t make the cut for first mission. Doesn’t make the ramifications of the decision any easier, but you should know. Whatever other challenges we faced on that mission, they’re plenty enough to deal with—don’t let this one get to you.”
So scrubbing Mace really might have been the thing that had saved them; someone else might have gone off-mission to Icarus I. He’d never even thought of himself as that focused or disciplined, not back then—once, in training, he’d violated curfew to go out with a girl he’d seen around the base, enjoy the pale warmth of Baja in summer. Kaneda had dressed Mace down for his lack of military discipline and concern about the mission, and he hadn’t forgotten that.
He wanted to say so many things: that he was glad he and Capa could be friends now, that it helped knowing Capa stood by their choices, that he regretted all the hostility he’d wasted so much time on. But instead he said, “I should try that tincture Cory made me, see if that’ll help. I think she’s pissed that I’m ignoring her advice.”
Capa smiled and looked over toward the wall, a little shy. But his hands still touched Mace’s arms, and they made Mace’s brain feel like it was on fire, every stroke of his fingers followed by a curl of flame. A snide comment Cassie had made after Searle had dropped his touch-hunger diagnosis on them abruptly came to mind: “Maybe that’s why Mace is always going after Capa—he just wants to touch him.”
They stared at each other for the longest, stupidest time, and Mace eventually cleared his throat, because he didn’t know exactly what was going on here but he did know he should stop it. “I should probably head back to California tomorrow.” Travel was slow; he didn’t want the committee down there to wait for him.
“You don’t have to.” Capa was disappointed. “I promised my mom I’d start clearing some space for an outdoor garden. She says if farmers can move stuff outside the greenhouses now, she can too. If you felt like a little manual labor, I would love the help.” While traditional agriculture had made an obvious comeback in the past few years, it made sense she’d stuck with the greenhouse for a while: redundant systems. If you’re unsure of the viability of growing food outside again, keep the current system, just in case.
It amused Mace, thinking of Capa being outdoorsy, so he said “sure” just to have the chance to see it. He’d always enjoyed doing physical labor—he’d never been much for staying indoors. He liked to get his hands dirty. Capa did that thing again where he looked at the wall, as if seeing something far away that normal humans couldn’t. “Get some real sleep,” he said, and got up. “I’m right next door if you need me.”
He did sleep, a little, but his mind was stuck in a loop where he kept replaying the way Capa’d touched him, how uncertain he’d been. In the morning, after a great breakfast, he went into town with Capa’s parents to take a look at their clinic and some of the municipal buildings, give some systems advice. Before Icarus, he’d been just another hotshot engineer in a field that had less and less work the deeper the Winter had become; now people treated him like some kind of oracle. Which must have been what life had been like for Capa, even before his great bomb. He liked Capa’s parents, his mom especially was funny and gregarious, and you could see how they had brought two such amazing children into the world. Up here, Mace was realizing what being noticed by someone like Capa actually meant.
When they were done, he caught a ride with a local back toward the property and walked the rest of the way, enjoying the summer heat. Heat. It felt almost unimportant now, all the fucked-up, fraught intensity of the mission and what it had done to them, the years of boredom and frustration and uncertainty and fear. There was heat and light and growing things, there were people coming back to empty places, bringing the world to life. And he’d helped to make that happen.
The roads were in terrible condition and wouldn’t be repaired for probably a decade at least, but he found himself thinking about what he could do on a larger scale, once again fantasizing he might belong someplace the way Capa did. But then he checked himself, because that’s all it was: a fantasy of something he really didn’t know how to do—staying here wasn’t in the picture.
When he got back to the house he found Capa way out back toward the edge of the woods, swinging a mattock at the area his mom had staked out for her garden, the dog watching forlornly because Capa wasn’t playing with it. He had a wiry, deceptive strength, Mace had learned from their fights on ship, and he’d clearly worked out even before the program, but he still didn’t look terribly comfortable with tools like that. So Mace laughed at him and said, “Give me that, princess.” He scratched Mercury and ruffled his fur.
Capa made a face, but he tossed the mattock over, rolling his eyes when Mace caught it one-handed. “Let’s see if those puffed-up arms can move as fast as your mouth does.”
He picked up the ax instead and started hacking at some of the stubborn brush, pointedly not looking at Mace. Glaciation had killed a lot of the trees and left stumps or heavy roots behind, especially where they hadn’t been protected in stands, but there were still plenty of survivors among the remains. There was a lot to do here, he thought, looking around. There was a lot to do everywhere.
They worked quietly for a while. After chipping away at a particularly stubborn stump, Mace looked up to see Capa taking a moment to wipe sweat off his forehead with his arm, and the movement pulled up enough of his T-shirt that Mace caught a little peek of stomach. The exertion and sunshine had brought out the freckles on his skin. Capa was unaware of Mace watching till he turned and caught him gawping, and he swiped his hands across his jeans legs and smiled bashfully.
Before payload delivery, Capa’d stepped up his tinkering with the bomb, making sure every contingency was accounted for. It wasn’t something he could do alone, he’d insisted, and asked Mace to help him. Mace recognized an olive branch when it was handed to him, so he’d taken the offer, getting a crash course in astrophysics while he did. When they finally launched, Capa’d called everyone to the observation room looking like a kid on Christmas, thrumming with a kind of a manic energy Mace had never seen in him before, even when they were arguing. The sweet, shy pride on his face as the bomb did everything he’d programmed it to do had left Mace surprisingly soft toward Capa, catching hold of that pride for himself even though he hadn’t done anything to deserve it, watching as the bomb made its way into the mass of the star. They’d applauded its creator as they sped away from the recharging sun, popping open the bottle of champagne they’d been saving, and Capa’d looked then like he did now, endearing and a little alien, theirs but still not of this world. All the years of theorizing, never knowing for certain, but he’d saved the world and let Mace be a part of that.
It hit Mace now, right between the eyes, like the blade of that ax. Shit. Motherfucker. Goddamn fucking hell, Mace thought, rattled by the sudden understanding that all along, he’d wanted Capa. All along, he’d wanted something close to this.
Mace dropped the mattock and took a few halting steps toward him; at first Capa seemed confused—Mace could hardly blame him, after all the times he’d stepped toward him before—but then tossed the ax away, and Mace moved faster. He brought his hands up to push against Capa’s chest and they stumbled back a ways to a tree, Mace shoving him hard against it, Capa grunting when his back hit the bark. Mace brought his mouth to his, rough with hunger, and was met with the same. Just like the familiar push-and-pull shoving matches they’d had on ship, except that this time, Mace was kissing him and his hands were trying to pull Capa closer, not strangle him or hurl him across the room.
He was glad he’d let his hair get a little longer because Capa shoved his fingers into it, gripping it tightly, almost pulling as he kissed down Mace’s neck. “We should...I mean, shit, have you done this before?” Capa panted, sticking his knee between Mace’s thighs, pushing his hips against Mace’s. “Because if you want to fuck me, I think we better go back in the house.” He spoke as though none of this was a great surprise to him, as though he’d been biding his time until Mace figured it out.
“Not for a while, not with a guy.” Most of the star-fuckers he’d encountered these recent months were women, but he’d had a few guys back then, too—though he’d never wanted any of them with this kind of intensity. He was panting, his heart pistoning and erratic, and he couldn’t stop kissing Capa’s mouth, the line of his jaw, his neck. Wait. So Capa was saying he wanted Mace to fuck him? He pulled his head back, squinting, and Capa laughed at him—not with him, at him, the asshole.
“You taste really fucking good,” Capa said in that hypnotic voice, pulling Mace’s mouth back to his.
“Capa...” and Mace stopped, rubbing his lower lip with his thumb. “I guess if I’m humping you up against a tree, maybe we should be on a first name basis?” Mace didn"t think he could call him what his parents did, but thinking of him as Rob or Robert was just as weird. Capa sucked his thumb into his mouth, his eyes sparked up with challenge, and that was almost enough to make Mace climax right there.
When he let go, Capa said, “I feel like this is who we are with each other. Unless you want me to call you by yours.” He didn’t—he liked the sound of his last name in Capa’s mouth, the way his lips moved on the M. In one speech, Capa had listed everyone by their full name, and he remembered how he’d blinked at hearing “Matthew Ryan Mace” in his voice, the way he’d almost wanted Capa to say it again.
How the fuck had he never figured this out, all this damn time?
Capa was unbuttoning Mace’s jeans, his hands sliding down Mace’s ass, little shocks of pleasure following in their wake. His fingers pushed through Capa’s hair, his tongue was almost in the back of his throat, and Capa was moaning through all of it, moaning for him.
Mace stopped. Pressing his forehead to Capa’s shoulder, he said, embarrassed, “We should go inside?” While Capa’s parents were great, Mace didn’t exactly want them to come home and find him railing their son out in the great wide open.
Capa only laughed and took his arm, hauling him further into the woods, where they clawed frantically at each other’s clothes. Mace’s jeans were halfway down his ass again when Capa pushed him to the ground, and he’d never had the upper hand with Mace when they were fighting on Icarus but Mace didn’t mind being manhandled now. “Jesus, ouch. Fuck,” Mace grumbled, because the pine needles were nasty. He hooked an ankle around Capa’s knees and brought him down next to him with a thump. “Shove over.” There were less painful-looking leaves toward the ash trees. He had Capa on his back soon enough, his T-shirt pushed up his chest, and Mace knelt over him, working on his fly, Capa watching him avidly. Mace didn’t even remember the last time he’d felt such a head-buzzing rush, such urgent need to just be in contact with someone’s skin, their mouth. To be scrutinized by such singular eyes. Fucking touch-starved.
Jesus Christ, seven years. He’d wanted this for seven years, maybe even longer, he’d longed for this across millions of miles, and it made him laugh out loud at what a dumbass he’d been. “That’s not exactly a confidence-booster,” Capa said unhappily, his hands going still in Mace’s hair, and Mace bit his neck, sucked on it, wrapping his fingers around Capa’s cock.
“I was just thinking of all the stupid fucking wasted time. Do you think everyone knew this except us? They must have, the things they said.”
“You weren’t the first person to find me strangleable.” Capa smiled, though, and pulled Mace’s mouth back to his, reaching into his jeans for his own handful. It was like having sparklers in his head, and he let out an undignified groan. “But I won’t lie, I wished sometimes it might lead to...something else. I’m sure it was obvious to some of them.”
Mace let his hands rest at the base of Capa’s neck, his thumbs brushing over the hollow of his throat. At least twice that he could remember, he’d had his hands right there, only he really had been trying to hurt Capa at the time. Instead, underneath it all, he’d just wanted this. He gracelessly fumbled off his jeans and underwear the rest of the way, and Capa followed his lead, kicking his off. He’d seen him without clothes in the locker room in the training base, seen him on the ship, but he’d never looked with these eyes. Capa licked his lips, almost like he was nervous—this must be weird, having often been on the receiving end of a beat-down, to have Mace looming over him, naked and hard and every bit as intense as before.
“How—how do you want to do this?” Mace asked, because he wanted Capa in charge of this thing now. Wanted to make him happy.
“However you want.” But he rolled onto his stomach, over their shirts and jeans, and Mace found he was pushing himself between Capa’s legs, one arm slipping under his rib cage.
It was almost like being inside him, fucking between his thighs, and Mace knew he wouldn’t last long, spread out on top of Capa, head to toe. The ground must have been cold beneath their clothing though he didn’t show it, holding his arms out wide to kind of leverage himself against Mace, and Mace covered them with his own arms, twined their fingers together. He bit down lightly on Capa’s shoulder, which elicited a sort of growl low in Capa’s throat—he could feel it rumble in his own chest. He’d heard Capa make that noise before, but always in hostility, and so Mace didn’t last, because he had been waiting seven goddamn years to have Capa like this and that sound yanked him right over the edge.
After Mace pulled away, breathing hard, Capa rolled over on his back, sweeping his hair off his sweaty forehead. Mace brushed something off his face, relishing the view of him lying like that, sort of...wanton, with that abstract, dreamy smile. “Capa...Jesus, Capa,” was all Mace could manage, getting up on his knees. He wasn’t going to leave him hanging: Mace scraped his fingernails down Capa’s torso, over his hips and along his thighs, wiped some of himself off Capa’s pale, freckled skin. Then he dipped his head and took Capa in his mouth, and the loud gasp above his head brought a shudder of excitement. Giving Capa pleasure was more powerful than any punch Mace’d ever thrown, and when Capa came in his mouth, he knew he had him. Mace owned him.
They fucked again in the living room when they’d stumbled back to the house, this time with lube, and then fucked again in the kitchen, shoving stuff off the table like in some kind of rom-com, and then fucked again in the bedroom. Mace was a glutton and he wasn’t sure he’d ever be done with this, now that he finally had it.
But they needed rest. It was coming on evening and they’d never gotten back outside, though Mace imagined that if Capa’s parents were back, they must have figured it was best not to bother them, because it had been remarkably quiet. They lay on the bed, Mace on his stomach watching Capa’s hands dance in the air as he described something from his new pet project. Mace didn’t even give a crap what he was saying, he was content just to listen.
It was silent for a long time and he realized he must have shut his eyes. Capa was on his side now, smiling at him, when he opened them. “I’ll have you know many people pay really good money to listen to me talk about that shit,” he said, his fingers skating up and down Mace’s spine before he pressed his mouth to the small of Mace’s back.
“You wore me out. You’re an animal.”
“Stay,” Capa said, his voice a little thick, pure blue eyes fixed intently on Mace’s. “Stay here. It doesn’t have to be on the project, you can do whatever you want, just...stay.”
They’d carried their fears and triumphs for millions of miles together, when they thought they hadn’t been together at all but as far apart as two humans could be. Mace wondered what the rest of life would be like now that he’d given in to this, now that Capa was offering that golden thread to help him find his way out of the cold darkness of space, inviting him instead into the sunlight and warmth. Into this future they’d never hoped to have but that had been granted them by Capa’s exceptional mind.
Maybe there was something greater for Mace here and he could let go of the guilt, hold fast to something there in the pale starlight of Capa’s eyes.
“Yes,” he said, looking at Capa through beams of warm sunlight. “But just to be clear, I’m mostly staying for the dog.”