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The thing about space is that it keeps the cold in. It’s all that emptiness—limited heat transfer, too much distance between the tiny flares of heat that make life go. Namjoon likes to talk about it, solar winds and atomic density and the interstellar shores, like thermodynamics is something you can tease apart into poetry. Seokjin says Yoongi just spends too much time huddled up in the heat of the engine bay like a cat in the sunshine and forgets what it’s like out there for the rest of them. That’s ridiculous, though—if Yoongi wanted sunshine, he wouldn’t hide away with the engines to find it.
“You’re late,” Hoseok says when Yoongi gets up to the observation deck for the third shift. He’s peeled the shutters all the way back, the way he always does when it’s just them up there. Jimin hates it—gives him vertigo, he says. Yoongi doesn’t mind too much. It’s not like there’s an up or a down to worry about in space, just the distant blip of home and the endless sweep of the stars reminding them how small they really are.
That, and Yoongi has a hardier stomach than Jimin.
“Maybe you’re early.”
Hoseok rewards him with a flashfire grin. They’ve been skirting the outer haze of Messier 78 for almost a week now, and the blue of the nebula catches on his smile, brushes his cheekbones and nose and the hollow of his throat. If Yoongi runs cold, Hoseok runs warm—he’s stripped half out of his coveralls, leaned back on his palms with his legs crossed, t-shirt crooked at the collar. The breadth of the window dwarfs him, paints him small and human against the viewport’s vast curved shell, space spilling in all around. Yoongi clears his throat and crams his fingers into the pocket of his sweatshirt.
“Not even a chair?”
“View’s better down here. Are you going to sit?”
Yoongi wrinkles his nose and picks his way past the observation benches to sit next to him with a groan. The floor is space-cold, same as everything else, but Hoseok is right—the observation window towers over them, and up close like this it’s almost like being out there, only the thin hull between them and the universe.
“Is it just you?”
“Don’t sound so disappointed,” Yoongi replies, stretching his legs out. Hoseok laughs, a bright sound ricocheting around the cool silence of the deck.
“No, no, I didn’t mean it like that. I only thought maybe the others would want to be here. Joonie, at least.”
“And stay up for another shift? Eight hours won’t make that much difference.”
“I guess,” huffs Hoseok. “We’ll know, though.”
Yoongi hums. “How close are we?”
“Close.” Hoseok’s pad sits balanced on his crossed ankles, and it lights up when he taps it, system readouts scrolling sideways. “We’ll reach periapsis within the hour.”
“Sensors holding up okay?” They should be. They were all in the green when he left the engine bay half an hour ago. He hadn’t bothered to check the readout in his bunk—hadn’t been there long enough.
“Everything’s nominal. How’re the engines?”
Yoongi shrugs. “Nominal.”
Back when they’d first met—years ago now, trainees in the program, Yoongi with a chip on his shoulder and Hoseok almost coltish, still growing into those long limbs—Yoongi’s flat-iron humor would throw him. Now he only grins and sways into Yoongi with such grace and ease Yoongi could almost think he imagined it, except for the sear of warmth against his shoulder.
“Well that’s a relief,” he says. “The way Jungkook was talking about the D-coils, I thought something was going wrong.”
“Just a little dust. Nothing we didn’t expect.”
The M78 sweep is the closest they’ve come to a stellar object since they left Sol space. It had taken weeks of arguments with Mission Control back home to approve the maneuver, and nearly two months of course correction to get them here: positioned to watch the cloudy reflection of a two-star system, each blue-burning giant larger than the sun, pass closer to them than any living human has ever come to a stellar cloud. The data they’ll collect is extensive. The photographs will be tightbeamed back to Mission Control as soon as they clear the interference.
Yoongi and Hoseok, alone on the night shift, are the only two who will see them brush close enough to reach out and touch the stars.
“Did you think we’d make it?”
“Of course,” Yoongi returns, automatic. It takes a moment for the question to register, and a moment longer to parse the pursed look on Hoseok’s face as uncertainty. He’s tapping at his pad, but the screen doesn’t change, still a steady stream of incoming sensor data. Nervous habit.
“Of course,” Hoseok echoes. “Yeah.”
Yoongi frowns at him. “Didn’t you?”
“It’s just been so long since we started.”
“Always said we’d get here, though.” It had been their mantra, back when it was only them, and then Namjoon, and then the others coming to them as the training went on, as the mission was finalized and the course mapped and the directive set. As the stars became a certainty and not just a possibility.
Five years in space. Seokjin likes to joke about it—enough time for another doctorate, so what are they all lazing around for? Yoongi doesn’t feel the time too much. It’s like being in stasis, mostly. The stars are the same and so is the wake-sleep cycle, and even the biolab gardens don’t flower or fruit on any earthside schedule.
He feels the time with Hoseok, though. He feels every second with Hoseok.
“Little late for second guessing,” he says, mostly wry. “Can’t exactly turn back.”
“No. Guess not.”
He’s still not looking at Yoongi, not really. He’s hunched himself forward, elbows braced on his thighs, all of him turned toward the blazing nebula.
“Hey,” Yoongi says, quiet. Hoseok hums. “Seok-ah.”
“Yah, what.” He tilts to look at Yoongi out of the corner of his eye. “I’m here.”
He is. He always has been, right in arm’s reach. All these years later and Yoongi still doesn’t know if that makes it better or worse.
For a moment, he hesitates. Outside, stellar dust drifts past, the ship drawing eddies in the great cosmic ocean. The reflection of starlight makes Hoseok beautiful. Most things make Hoseok beautiful. It’s an inevitability, Yoongi has found, like gravity and entropy and all the other laws of being that make the universe function. And Yoongi’s just a simple mechanic—even with all his math and equations and study, he’ll only ever capture a fragment of it.
He pulls his hands out of the cradle of his sweatshirt pocket and carefully sets the bracelet he’s been carrying down on Hoseok’s knee.
That, finally, draws Hoseok’s attention away from the nebula. He blinks, fingers skimming over the metal, and his mouth quirks as he picks it up.
“Is this why you were late?”
“Might be,” Yoongi mumbles. He’d stopped at his bunk to collect it, an anniversary present of sorts. He’s been making them for everyone, pilfering scraps of the things they can’t fix or reuse to do his own sort of recycling. Nothing fancy, nothing slick. He’d thought Hoseok might like it, is all. He’d worn them all the time dirtside, fine silver chains and hand-beaded bands around his wrists, until they’d entered orbit and had to leave them behind. Regulations and all that.
They’d left a lot of things planetside.
Hoseok goes quiet again. It isn’t the most unusual thing—he gets like that sometimes, when everyone else is loud. All careful and watchful, keeping an eye on them, cataloging. A good system operations engineer, making sure everything is working together the way it’s meant to. A better friend, keeping an eye out for them, making sure they’re all okay.
But he doesn’t usually get quiet when it’s just them. Not since— not since.
“It’s been two years,” says Hoseok. His thumb smooths over one of the polished beads.
“Tomorrow,” Yoongi shrugs. It’s a pleasant coincidence that their nebula pass lines up with the two-year anniversary of voyage, a little something to mark the occasion. The clocks haven’t rolled over to the facsimile of Earth midnight they keep, but this is close enough, and a few hours won’t make that much difference. “I’m a little early.”
“No,” Hoseok says. In the window, Messier 78 bleeds blue and gold and red and green, two white-blue stars burning away and painting the cosmos with their light. Hoseok stares at it, glowing, and Yoongi stares at Hoseok. “No, not— I don’t mean the mission.”
Yoongi wets his lips. “Oh.”
“You forgot.” Hoseok glances up at him, finally, mouth smiling and eyes sad. Yoongi is already shaking his head, even before he finishes speaking.
“No,” he says. Not that, never that. “I just— I wasn’t sure you’d remember.”
“Of course I remember.” He nudges Yoongi, playful, a flash of warmth against Yoongi’s shoulder and then cold again. “Yah, hyung, really. You think I wouldn’t remember?”
“Wasn’t sure you’d want to,” Yoongi revises, and Hoseok sags. Starlight makes a shadow of his brow, the purse of his mouth. They’re not the kids they were, dreaming of the stars. Maybe he’s right to wonder if they’d ever really get here—grown, tired, stitched back together after Yoongi nearly ruined everything by being in love.
He looks away, staring into the shifting heart of the nebula. They must be close now. Glowing motes of dust scatter against the observation window, too small and light to impact the steady pulse of their engines. He’ll find it gritty in the D-coils later, and Jungkook will complain, but now it’s like sitting inside a firework, watching color and light bloom around them.
“How’d you do it?” Hoseok asks. Yoongi looks at him out of the corner of one eye.
“Do what?”
“Keep everything so…” He trails off into a shrug, expansive. “Weren’t you scared?”
Yoongi isn’t sure what they’re talking about now, the mission or the smaller, sharper anniversary. It doesn’t matter, he supposes. The answer is the same. “Of course.”
“So how— Nevermind. Ignore me.”
It almost makes him laugh. Ignore Hoseok? He doesn’t know how to. He watches him steadily, watches until Hoseok pulls a face and looks away.
“I never would have known.” He laughs a little, thin on humor, and shakes his head. “Looking at you, I mean. You were always the most steady of all of us. I could always lean on you. Even in the beginning, I knew I could lean on you. You made it so easy. And then you asked, and it was like… Aish.”
He drags a hand across his face, and for a moment Yoongi’s pulse spikes, afraid he’s crying. But his eyes are clear when he looks back at him. His bangs hang low, grown out past regulation, but his eyes are clear and bright.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?” His tongue is heavy in his mouth. Gravity is a strange thing in space; it comes and goes.
“When you asked—before launch, when you asked if I would—” He leaves it dangling there, heavier than a star, and shakes himself again. His face scrunches in frustration. “I was so scared, hyung.”
Yoongi takes a slow breath. “Of me?”
It had been, he’d known with hindsight, a stupid thing to do, poorly timed and poorly planned. But the vastness of space had waited, countdown ticking in their heads and hearts and on every screen up at Mission Control, and he had seen Hoseok outside the barrack in the blue-black of night with his freshly-shorn hair and his head hung low and it had been impossible not to go to him. It had been a gravity-choice, an inevitability, Hoseok his sun and himself nothing but a lost and lonely satellite pulled into orbit.
He shouldn’t have said it, but sitting next to him, the last time their feet would be on solid ground for five long years, it had been so easy to speak it aloud. Weightless, incendiary. His open hand between them, an invitation, had been a foregone conclusion.
And then Hoseok had folded his fingers back into a closed fist and given him a sad, strained smile, and said no. And that was it.
Here, now, Hoseok shrugs again, the heel of his palm rubbing circles against his sternum. The bracelet around his wrist glints in the starlight.
“I just thought,” he says, “if something happened—if it went badly—I’d have to stand on my own. I didn’t know how to do that.”
“That’s stupid,” says Yoongi, startled into bluntness. Of course Hoseok could stand on his own, and of course he wouldn’t have to. Of course Yoongi wouldn’t abandon him, even broken-hearted. Haven’t the past two years proven that? “That’s— Hoseok-ah, seriously.”
Hoseok, of all things, laughs.
“Sure, spare my feelings.”
“Really though—”
“Ah, what did I know? We were right on the edge of something so… you know.” He waves a hand, stardust drifting all around them. “How was I supposed to imagine it would be like this?”
“What,” grouses Yoongi, “cold?”
Hoseok laughs again. “Yes, exactly. Are you cold, hyung? I’ll keep you warm.” He holds his hand out between them, palm up in invitation, and Yoongi’s heart thunders engine-loud in his chest.
“Hoseok,” he says. He isn’t much for hope—that’s always been Hoseok’s area. He feels it now, though, bright and burning as a star.
“I wish I’d been braver,” Hoseok says. “I wish I’d been brave like you were. Sorry it took me a little longer to get here. I just didn’t know what would come next.”
Yoongi looks at his open hand, his open face. All of him unfolded, expansive as the universe. “And now you do?”
“Oh, no.” He grins like this is a joke that they’re in on together, the two of them alone with the vast unknown. “No, not at all. But I’d rather find out with you. If that’s still— If you want.”
“That— Yeah.” His voice is thick in his throat, but his fingers slot neatly between Hoseok’s, whose palm is sunshine warm, chasing away the chill of space. “Nothing’s changed. It’s always been you.”
“Ah, I’m sorry. I made you wait so long.”
“Doesn’t matter. Didn’t make me do anything.” He sits back to look at Hoseok’s face, star-bright and shining. “We’re here, yeah? I’m here.”
“I know. You always have been.”
Yoongi hums. As long as Hoseok knows. That’s all that matters.
“Gonna have to talk to the captain,” he says after a moment, watching the nebula shift and spiral around them. “Clear lines of crew communication.”
“Sure,” Hoseok nods, tipping himself sideways to rest his head on Yoongi’s shoulder. Yoongi imagines this must be what touching the stars feels like—gleaming, burning, everything so much bigger than himself. “Regulations and all that.”
“Important,” he agrees. Not that he thinks Namjoon will have an issue with it. Not that he thinks any of them will. It will be nice, though, to say it. To share.
Somewhere around their knees, Hoseok’s pad beeps.
“Oh.” Hoseok shifts to check the reading, but he doesn’t pull away. “That’s periapsis. We’re touching the stars, hyung.”
Hoseok’s hand is fast in his, Hoseok warm at his side. Thousands of miles away, the twin stars of Messier 78 spin around each other, blind to the nebula they illuminate and the universe around them and the tiny man-made ship drifting at the edge of their gravity well, passing closer than any living thing before swinging back out into the long, dark quiet. When Yoongi squeezes Hoseok’s hand, Hoseok squeezes back.
“Yeah,” says Yoongi, burning bright. “Always said we would.”