Okay hear me out, this is absolutely Simon's song. It's in my playlist for Malcolm and it came on while I was writing Escapism and like hello??
Why don't you get it? Can't you get it? Understand
They're gonna execute the mother to elevate the man
They're gonna propagate the killer, eliminate the youth
They're gonna blind date everyone until you
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The world watched the Atlantis launch beneath a morning sky so bright it almost looked staged.
Grace had thought that when he first saw the broadcast feed projected against the classroom wall, the rocket standing impossibly tall against the Florida horizon while camera drones swept slow, reverent arcs around the launch site. The image was beautiful in the way humanity’s most expensive dreams tended to be beautiful, all white metal and sunlight and carefully polished hope, but there was something fragile beneath it too. Something painfully human. A thin spear of machinery pointed at a universe that had never promised to be kind.
His students noticed the rocket first, of course.
They had been restless all morning, buzzing with the kind of contained excitement that made chairs creak, pencils tap, shoes scuff beneath desks, and whispers travel faster than any teacher could reasonably stop. Grace had given up on pretending it was going to be a normal class period after the third student asked whether aliens would probably have eyes, and the fifth asked whether astronauts got to bring snacks into space.
“They absolutely bring snacks into space,” Grace said, because that was easier than explaining ration schedules and nutritional optimization to a room full of middle schoolers ten minutes before launch. “Probably not as many as they want, though.”
“That’s cruel,” one of the kids said immediately.
Grace pointed at him with the remote. “That is exactly the sort of ethical concern I expect from this class.”
The room laughed, and Grace let them. He liked the sound of it, liked the way excitement could make the classroom feel bigger than it really was. He had spent enough days trying to make photosynthesis sound interesting to children who would rather be anywhere else that a little wonder felt like a gift. Today, the whole planet had been handed something enormous to wonder about, and for once no one was pretending otherwise.
On the screen, a reporter’s voice rolled over the footage with practiced awe, summarizing facts Grace already knew because everyone knew them by now. The Atlantis Expedition. Ten astronauts. First deep-space crewed mission designed not simply to explore nearby systems, but to search for signs of alien life and potentially habitable worlds beyond humanity’s immediate reach. Years of travel, maybe longer depending on trajectory adjustments, with communication delays stretching farther and farther until every transmission became less a conversation and more a message in a bottle thrown backward toward Earth.
The reporter called them brave.
Grace looked at the ten small portraits arranged along the side of the broadcast feed and felt something tighten beneath his ribs.
They looked young.
Not all of them. Not impossibly young, not children, not untrained idealists pushed into suits for a publicity stunt, but young enough that Grace couldn’t stop noticing it now that he had. Younger than him, most of them, or close enough that the difference felt uncomfortable. Twenty-somethings with bright eyes, nervous smiles, carefully chosen public personas, and numbers instead of names displayed beneath their faces.
The anonymity had been debated endlessly online for months. Some people thought it was smart, a humane way to keep the crew from becoming too mythologized while still allowing the public to support them. Others thought it was eerie, dehumanizing, proof that whoever had designed the mission was already thinking about loss. Grace had read enough mission analysis to know the official reasoning was more complicated than either argument, though not necessarily kinder. Numbers created distance. Numbers simplified communication. Numbers made it easier for the world to attach to an idea instead of a person, and easier for the crew, theoretically, to function if one of those people never made it back.
Theoretically.
Grace had taught long enough to know that people didn’t stop bonding just because an institution wanted them to.
On the screen, Five leaned slightly out of formation in a pre-recorded crew introduction clip, purple suit panels catching the light as he appeared to say something too quietly for the microphones to catch. Seven, standing beside him in brown, visibly tried not to laugh and failed badly enough that the camera caught it anyway. Five’s mouth curved, quick and sharp, before he straightened under the stern glance of someone off-screen.
Several students laughed.
“He’s my favorite,” a girl near the front announced immediately.
“Because he looks like he’s about to get in trouble?” Grace asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s fair.”
Five had become a lot of people’s favorite for exactly that reason. He was the engineer, if Grace remembered correctly, though public mission releases were frustratingly selective about personal details. He had purple hair beneath the regulation cut visible in older interviews, piercings removed for launch prep, and a way of answering questions that made reporters laugh even when he technically didn’t answer them. He was sarcastic without seeming mean, clever without polishing himself into blandness, and young enough that Grace had caught himself, more than once, wondering what kind of person agreed to disappear into space at twenty-three.
Seven was easier to like in a warmer way. Brown suit, biology division, expressive hands, bright enthusiasm, the kind of person who leaned toward people when they spoke as if pulled there by genuine interest. In every clip, he and Five seemed to exist in each other’s orbit. Grace noticed because his students noticed. The internet noticed too, of course, because the internet noticed everything.
“They’re friends,” one student said confidently, pointing at the screen as the broadcast shifted to a live shot of the crew walking toward the transport vehicle.
“They’re crewmates,” Grace said.
“No, friends.”
Grace watched Five glance sideways toward Seven as they walked, the motion subtle enough to go unnoticed unless someone was looking for it. Seven bumped his shoulder against Five’s like he had meant to do it. Five rolled his eyes, then smiled.
Grace sighed. “Yeah, okay. Friends.”
The classroom erupted in smug satisfaction.
At the launch site, Malcolm was trying not to throw up.
It was not, he thought, a particularly dignified way to begin humanity’s grandest expedition into the unknown, but it was also not his fault that the combination of nerves, too little sleep, too much coffee, and the knowledge that every camera on Earth seemed pointed at them made his stomach feel like it had been replaced by something alive and deeply unhappy about its current circumstances.
Beside him, Seven looked thrilled.
That should have annoyed Malcolm more than it did. It would have been much easier if Jace had looked smug or careless or unbearably calm. Instead, he looked like someone trying to hold the entire sky inside his chest without breaking open from it, green eyes bright behind the controlled professionalism they had all been coached into wearing. The sight made Malcolm’s own fear shift sideways into something softer and more complicated.
“You look like you’re about to start crying,” Malcolm murmured, careful not to move his mouth too much in case someone zoomed in and decided to lip-read his final words on Earth.
Jace didn’t look at him, though his smile twitched. “You look like you’re about to bite someone.”
“That’s my normal face.”
“No, your normal face is more smug.”
“My deepest apologies for failing to appear smug enough for you at our historic launch.”
“You are forgiven.”
Malcolm huffed softly through his nose, the closest thing to laughter he could risk while mission staff guided them forward with gestures that had been rehearsed a dozen times. The suit felt heavier than it had during practice. Everything did. The boots against pavement, the helmet against his hip, the number displayed on his chest where a name should have been. Five. Purple, because someone somewhere had apparently decided color coding was essential to keeping ten fragile humans visually distinct when the void inevitably tried to swallow them.
He had fought for purple more viciously than was professionally reasonable.
One had red, which suited her in the immediate and commanding way she stood at the front of their line, shoulders squared beneath the weight of leadership. Captain by role, pilot by training, twenty-eight years old and already carrying the expression of someone who had been told too many times that calm was her responsibility. Two walked behind her in blue, broad-shouldered and steady, the mission chef and nutritional specialist, though calling him a chef made him sound gentler than the man who could reduce a room of panicking astronauts into obedience by threatening to revoke dessert privileges. Three followed in green, their doctor, gaze focused, posture composed, gloved hands resting too still at his sides. Four wore orange and kept looking toward the rocket like he wanted to dismantle it before trusting it, which was fair, given that he was their systems technician and professionally obligated to mistrust everything until proven otherwise.
Then Malcolm. Five. Engineer, structural maintenance, mechanical adaptation, and allegedly the person least likely to set something on fire by accident, according to one extremely insulting interview question he still hadn’t forgiven.
Six came after him in yellow, geologist and navigation support, quiet but dry in the rare way that meant every time she spoke half the crew either laughed or wondered if they had been insulted. Jace was Seven in brown, biologist, morale disaster, chronic optimist, and Malcolm’s personal problem by this point. Eight walked behind him in black, security and mission operations, reserved enough that most journalists had described him as mysterious when Malcolm privately thought he was just uncomfortable being perceived. Nine in pink was communications, bright-eyed and sharper than people expected because the color made them underestimate her. Ten in white was data analysis and astrophysics, youngest after Malcolm by only a few months, and so calm during every emergency simulation that Malcolm had once asked if he had blood or coolant in his veins.
Ten had considered this seriously before answering, which had not helped.
They were not supposed to be family. The mission psychologists had said that more than once without saying it directly, because no one wanted to sound cruel in a conference room full of people preparing to leave Earth behind. Strong teamwork was encouraged. Emotional overdependence was not. Identity boundaries mattered. Numbers helped. Privacy helped. Professionalism helped.
Malcolm thought that was bullshit.
He had thought that from the beginning, though he had been smart enough not to say it in front of anyone who could remove him from the mission roster. You couldn’t lock ten people inside a ship for years, send them farther than any human beings had ever gone, tell them death was a realistic possibility, and then expect them to keep their emotional distance because numbers were tidier than names. People didn’t work that way. Malcolm didn’t work that way, no matter how often he pretended otherwise.
Jace especially didn’t work that way.
Jace had known Malcolm’s real name within two weeks of training, and somehow Malcolm had never managed to be angry about it for longer than an hour.
“Hey,” Jace murmured as they reached the final stretch before boarding transport. “You still with me?”
Malcolm glanced sideways. “Unfortunately.”
“Good.”
“That sounded disgustingly sincere.”
“It was.”
“Gross.”
Jace smiled more openly that time, and Malcolm hated him for it a little. Not really. Never really.
The rocket towered closer now, too enormous to feel real. Atlantis. Humanity named things like prayer even when pretending to be scientific. Lost cities, gods, explorers, myth stitched into metal. Malcolm had run his hands over parts of that ship months ago during final inspections, had traced wiring routes and panel seams and access points until its structure lived somewhere deep in his bones. He knew the way it breathed when powered. Knew the vibration patterns it should and shouldn’t make. Knew where to hit certain panels if they stuck and where never to improvise unless he wanted One to murder him before space got the chance.
It was a good ship.
That was the frightening part.
A bad ship would have been easier to distrust. A bad ship would have given him somewhere to put the fear. But Atlantis had passed every test they could throw at her, and now she waited bright and patient against the morning, ready to lift them out of the world.
Malcolm looked past the launch infrastructure toward the crowd. They were too far for faces, but he knew people were there. Families, officials, press, strangers who had cried during crew interviews and argued online about mission ethics and made fan art of the suit colors like they were fictional characters instead of people about to spend years in a metal tube. Somewhere out there, some of his family might have been watching too, though he had stopped letting himself think about that too closely.
They had wanted a future from him once, a very particular one.
He had chosen stars instead.
That thought steadied him more than anything else had.
In Grace’s classroom, the countdown began with five minutes remaining.
The room went strangely quiet as the broadcast shifted fully into launch coverage, every graphic and commentator’s voice taking on the solemn cadence of history unfolding live. Grace turned the volume up and leaned back against his desk, arms folded loosely across his chest while twenty-seven children watched a rocket prepare to carry ten human beings into the unknown.
He wondered if any of the astronauts had slept the night before.
He wondered if their parents were proud or terrified or both.
He wondered how anyone that young could decide to go.
Then he thought, with sudden discomfort, that twenty-nine was not exactly ancient. When he was twenty-three, he had been teaching, learning how to manage classrooms and lesson plans and the specific horror of cafeteria duty. Five was twenty-three and leaving Earth. Seven wasn’t much older. Ten might have been even younger when selected.
The scale of it pressed against him.
“Mr. Grace?” one of his students asked quietly.
“Yeah?”
“Do you think they’re scared?”
Grace looked at the screen.
The broadcast had cut to interior helmet footage now, each crew member strapped in, suited, waiting. One looked focused. Two had his eyes closed briefly, perhaps breathing through the moment. Three looked calm in a way Grace found hard to read. Five turned his head slightly toward Seven, and Seven answered with something Grace couldn’t hear. Whatever it was made Five’s mouth move around a quick, unmistakable smile.
Grace swallowed.
“Yeah,” he said. “I think they probably are.”
The student frowned. “Then why go?”
The question was simple enough that it deserved a better answer than the one Grace had ready.
On the screen, the rocket waited.
“Because being scared doesn’t always mean stopping,” Grace said after a moment. “Sometimes it means something matters enough that you’re scared and you go anyway.”
The class absorbed that with varying degrees of seriousness. Some of them looked back at the screen immediately. Others looked thoughtful in the way children sometimes did when they stumbled accidentally into adult truth and didn’t yet know where to put it.
Grace hoped it was a good answer.
He hoped it was true.
Inside the Atlantis, Malcolm’s whole body had narrowed down to straps, breath, and sound.
Everything outside the capsule felt distant now. The cameras, the crowds, the interviews, the months of preparation, the old life waiting behind him like a shoreline already receding. There was only the seat beneath him, the weight of the suit, the low murmur of systems checks, and Jace’s breathing over the comms where their private channel had not quite been muted correctly.
“You’re breathing weird,” Malcolm said.
“You’re listening weird.”
“You’re loud.”
“I’m nervous.”
“That’s unprofessional.”
“I’m about to leave the planet.”
“Still unprofessional.”
Jace laughed softly, though it shook around the edges.
Across the crew channel, One’s voice cut in, steady and crisp. “Final internal check. Respond by number.”
“One ready.”
“Two ready.”
“Three ready.”
“Four ready.”
Malcolm flexed gloved fingers once against his restraints. “Five ready.”
“Six ready.”
“Seven ready.”
“Eight ready.”
“Nine ready.”
“Ten ready.”
The words settled around them, ten small confirmations against the impossible violence of what came next.
Malcolm stared upward, though there was nothing to see but the interior panels and the reflected curve of his own visor. Somewhere below them, Earth held its breath. Somewhere above them, space waited with all its silence. He had wanted this for so long that he had forgotten wanting didn’t erase fear. If anything, it sharpened it. He was terrified because he knew exactly what he was leaving, and more terrified because some part of him had never felt more certain.
Jace’s voice came again, quieter this time. “Malcolm.”
Not Five.
His real name sounded impossibly intimate inside the suit.
“Yeah?”
“If I start crying during launch, you’re not allowed to tell anyone.”
“I’ll tell everyone.”
“Rude.”
“I’ll make it sound heroic.”
“That’s better.”
Malcolm’s chest hurt. He didn’t think it was fear anymore, or not only fear. “Hey, Jace?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t die in space. It’d be really inconvenient for my emotional stability.”
Jace was quiet for half a second.
Then he said, soft enough that it almost vanished beneath the engine rumble beginning far below them, “Same to you.”
The countdown reached ten.
Grace’s classroom counted with it.
At first only a few students joined in, then all of them, voices overlapping in uneven rhythm as the numbers dropped one by one. Grace didn’t count aloud. He watched the rocket. Watched the crew portraits still displayed along the side. Watched Five’s purple suit feed flicker once as vibration began distorting the camera. Watched Seven’s gloved hand tighten briefly around his restraint.
Ten.
Nine.
Eight.
Seven.
The engines ignited.
The screen filled with fire.
In the classroom, someone gasped.
Malcolm felt the world become force.
It slammed through him so completely that thought vanished beneath pressure and sound. The rocket didn’t lift so much as tear itself away from Earth, every system screaming against gravity while Atlantis climbed on a pillar of flame bright enough to turn the inside of his eyelids red. His chest compressed. His teeth clenched. Breath became work. The vibration moved through bone and muscle and memory until there was no separation between him and the ship, no Malcolm and Atlantis, only a single impossible act of leaving.
Then they were rising.
Actually rising.
Earth fell away beneath them, and even though Malcolm couldn’t see it yet, he felt the shape of that departure somewhere deeper than fear. Every horrible thing behind him remained behind him. Every unknown ahead waited with teeth or wonder or both. He had no way of knowing which.
He grinned anyway.
In Grace’s classroom, the children erupted when the rocket cleared the tower.
They cheered like it was a game, like humanity had scored some impossible point against the universe. Grace laughed despite himself, startled by the sudden noise, by the joy of it, by the way the rocket climbed higher and higher until fire and smoke blurred beneath it.
On the screen, the reporter’s voice cracked slightly.
Grace heard it.
He thought everyone heard it.
Some moments were too large for professionalism.
The Atlantis rose through the atmosphere while the world watched, carrying ten numbered strangers into legend before any of them had the chance to become ghosts. For now, they were alive. One through Ten. Red, blue, green, orange, purple, yellow, brown, black, pink, and white. Ten human beings strapped to fire and calculation and hope.
Grace looked at Five again just before the broadcast switched camera angles. Purple suit. Sharp smile. Younger than he should have been. Beside him, Seven looked like he was laughing or crying or both.
“They’re gonna find aliens,” one of the kids whispered, reverent.
Grace watched the rocket shrink into brightness.
“Maybe,” he said.
The word felt too small for what had just happened.
Above Earth, Atlantis pushed onward.
Malcolm didn’t know then that years later a man named Ryland Grace would remember him from old launch footage as purple-haired, sarcastic Five, the engineer who smiled like trouble and made a classroom full of children laugh before vanishing into history. He didn’t know that the same man would someday look into a ruined cryopod adrift far from Earth and fail, at first, to recognize the ghost inside it. He didn’t know that the stars he had wanted so badly would take almost everything from him before giving anything back.
He only knew the ship was climbing.
He only knew Jace was breathing beside him.
He only knew Earth was falling away, bright and blue and impossibly alive beneath them, while the crew of the Atlantis crossed the first invisible threshold between the world that made them and the dark that had been waiting all along.
Summer changed the way Grace watched the Atlantis.
When school ended, the classroom went quiet in a way he usually appreciated for about two days before it started feeling wrong. The bulletin board still carried the crew’s color-coded portraits beneath a scatter of construction paper stars and inside jokes that made no sense without months of context. Five’s purple cluster remained the most dramatic, crowded now by a paper sun wearing sunglasses, three hand-drawn popsicles, and a tiny spray bottle beside Two’s picture that someone had labeled ‘emergency mist’ in marker. Seven had gained more brown stars than Grace remembered giving anyone permission to cut out. Eight’s pale blue dots still circled him like a constellation, precise and oddly delicate, which meant one of the quieter students had likely stayed in during lunch to finish them without telling anyone.
Grace left the board up.
He told himself it was because taking it down only to rebuild it in August was counterproductive, but that wasn’t the whole truth. Without the students filling the room, the Atlantis pictures made the emptiness feel less complete. They were familiar now, these ten numbered astronauts drifting farther from Earth with every delayed transmission. They belonged to the school year in a way the solar system chart and lab safety posters did, but they also belonged to Grace himself, which was the part he tried not to examine too closely.
He watched the logs from home during summer break.
At first, it felt strange to view them without a room full of children reacting over his shoulder. There was no chorus of gasps when Five appeared on screen, no furious whispering when Seven looked at Eight too long, no immediate accusations whenever Two and Nine sat close enough to make plausible deniability insulting. Grace watched alone with leftover takeout cooling on the coffee table and the living room lights dimmed against the late evening heat, and the quiet made the distance feel sharper. The logs were already old by the time he saw them. The laughter had happened weeks or months ago. The jokes had already faded into ship memory. Every casual moment came to Earth as a ghost of itself, bright and living and already gone.
Still, he watched.
The first summer log after the heat failure opened with One at the command station, red jacket unzipped but posture as composed as ever while she explained course adjustments with the solemn clarity of someone determined to keep the public focused on the mission rather than on the crew’s accidental emotional transparency. Grace knew enough now to notice the exhaustion in the set of her shoulders and the faint fondness she couldn’t quite hide when someone off camera interrupted her with a muffled crash.
Her eyes flicked sideways. “Four, if that was the replacement housing, I’m assigning you and Five to inventory review until one of you learns remorse.”
Five’s voice came from somewhere out of frame, offended and immediate. “I wasn’t even in the room!”
One didn’t look away from the camera. “You were logistically involved.”
“I accept that charge but reject its legal standing.”
Grace smiled into his empty living room before he could stop himself.
The log moved from station to station after that. Two and Nine appeared in the galley, where Two demonstrated a new ration rotation while Nine sat beside him and supplied commentary that turned every step into a test of his patience. She kept stealing small pieces of rehydrated fruit from his workspace, and he kept catching her wrist without looking, placing her hand back on the counter with the gentle firmness of someone who had done it a dozen times already. When she leaned against his shoulder and said the meal would taste better if he looked less betrayed by ingredients, Two closed his eyes briefly like a man asking the universe for strength.
“You’re making this much harder than it needs to be,” he told her, though his hand settled over hers afterward and stayed there.
Nine smiled at the camera like she knew exactly what Earth would do with that. “That’s the romance of space cuisine.”
“Don’t call it that.”
“You love when I call it that,” she hummed, eyes sparkling with mirth.
“I love you. That is a separate and unrelated crisis.”
Grace paused the video, stared at the screen for a moment, then started laughing alone on his couch because he could already hear his students screaming across the summer silence. The internet, predictably, had become unusable about Two and Nine within hours of the log’s release. They trended alongside serious mission analysis, a fact Grace thought would probably have made mission control consider walking into the ocean if the ocean were closer to their offices. Fan edits existed now. So did speculative timelines, joke wedding invitations, and an unsettling number of essays about the symbolic value of soup.
Grace didn't read those. Or at least, he hadn't intended to, then before he knew it he had read three.
The Atlantis, meanwhile, kept moving as if unaware of its own mythmaking.
Malcolm learned quickly that holidays were more dangerous in space than maintenance failures.
Maintenance failures were honest. They announced themselves through alarms, drifting diagnostics, temperature spikes, strange vibrations, or Elias appearing in doorways with the specific expression of a man who had just discovered something deeply expensive had become his problem. Holidays were subtler. They approached through dates on Earth calendars that didn’t match the ship’s emotional weather anymore, through mission prompts asking whether the crew intended to acknowledge seasonal traditions, through forwarded messages from families and schools and strangers who said things like ‘we hope you still get to celebrate up there’ as if celebration were a button someone could press in the galley.
By autumn, the ship had become far too familiar for anyone to pretend the answer was no.
The first attempt was small. Mateo framed it as a morale meal, which everyone understood meant holiday dinner, because Mateo had the kind of pride that made him allergic to admitting he was sentimental until sentimentality had already prepared three side dishes. He spent two days bartering for ingredients, arguing with storage manifests, and muttering darkly at ration packs while Elodie sat on the counter and offered moral support in the form of stealing whatever he left unattended.
“You are not helping,” Mateo said, catching her hand halfway toward a container of rehydrated apples.
Elodie smiled up at him, utterly unrepentant. “I’m helping with quality control.”
“You haven’t let anything reach the final quality stage.”
“I’m thorough.”
“You’re a menace.”
She leaned forward and kissed his cheek, quick enough that he tried to remain stern and failed instantly. “You love me.”
“It’s actually very romantic that you think my presence is a chronic condition.”
Across the galley, Malcolm looked up from the tablet where he and Elias were pretending not to work on a maintenance patch during personal hours. “As someone frequently described as medically interesting, I support this relationship taxonomy.”
Ilyan, who had been taking inventory nearby, glanced over with one eyebrow raised. “No one describes you as medically interesting.”
“You implied it with your aura.”
“My aura would like you to schedule your overdue joint assessment.”
“My joints and I are not available for comment.”
Elias snorted beside him and kept scrolling through the diagnostic file, but Malcolm noticed Ilyan linger at the edge of the conversation instead of returning immediately to inventory. That had been happening more lately. At first, everyone had assumed Three was simply loosening up by accident, the way all of them had begun to loosen after months aboard the Atlantis. He had started appearing in common spaces without a medical reason. He spoke more during meals. He corrected Tomas less like a doctor and more like someone who had learned Tomas enjoyed being corrected as a form of social enrichment. He even laughed once at something Noa said under her breath, which startled the table so badly that Noa stared at him for a full five seconds before announcing that she would need time to emotionally process the achievement.
Most of that social drift started around Malcolm.
It made sense, in the way things aboard the Atlantis often made sense only after they had already become normal. Malcolm was easy to speak to if someone didn’t mind being insulted affectionately as a bonding mechanism. He occupied a strange place in the crew’s social architecture, somewhere between irritant, engineer, morale hazard, and unofficial bridge between quieter people and the louder orbit of the galley. Jace was warm but direct enough that shyer approaches risked immediate emotional sincerity. Elodie was delightful but terrifying. Mateo noticed too much. Mara carried authority even when she was off duty. Elias turned every exchange into a competition if left unsupervised. Malcolm, for all his sharp edges, made room for people by pretending not to.
So when Ilyan began speaking to him more often, the crew interpreted it as a kind of social acclimation. Three had simply chosen the least intimidating doorway into the group, which happened to be Five because Five could turn almost anything into a joke and therefore make awkwardness survivable. Grace would later see the same thing in the logs when school resumed, though he would miss the private versions beneath it. On camera, Three stood near Five more often because Five was where the conversation happened. Three answered dry remarks because Five gave him openings. Three handed Five supplies because Five forgot where he put everything unless the lost object was personally insulting.
It looked, eventually, like friendship.
That was easier to understand.
On the night of Mateo’s morale dinner, the crew crowded into the galley beneath warmer lighting than the ship usually allowed, ten people pressed around a table not really designed for ceremonial meals. The food was a strange approximation of Earth holiday dishes assembled from ration components, hydroponic greens, and Mateo’s sheer refusal to be defeated by texture. It looked better than Malcolm expected, smelled almost convincing, and tasted enough like memory that several people went quiet after the first bite.
Mara recovered first, because Mara always recovered first. She raised her pouch in a captain’s toast, expression steady but less guarded than it would’ve been on a public log. “To the Atlantis,” she said, and then paused just long enough for the words to become heavier than ceremony. “And to all of you.”
Mateo looked down at the table as if pretending to check the food.
Elodie reached for his hand beneath the edge where only half of them could see it.
Jace’s shoulder pressed against Malcolm’s on one side, warm and solid, while Elias leaned in from the other to whisper that if anyone cried into the potatoes, he was blaming atmospheric pressure. Malcolm elbowed him lightly, though his own throat had gone tighter than he liked.
“To Earth’s worst traditions following us into space,” he said once he trusted his voice enough to use it.
Jace huffed a laugh beside him. “You mean holidays?”
“I said what I said.”
Ilyan, seated across from him, looked at the meal with the faintly analytical expression he wore when deciding whether something counted as nutritionally viable or emotionally reckless. “Traditions provide psychological continuity during prolonged isolation.”
Malcolm pointed his fork at him. “That is the saddest possible way to say happy holidays.”
A flicker of amusement crossed Ilyan’s face. “Would you prefer I say it worse?”
“Yes, actually.”
“Happy psychologically stabilizing ritual.”
The laugh that broke around the table was immediate, startled, and warm enough to make Ilyan glance down at his plate like he regretted succeeding. Malcolm grinned at him across the table, delighted, and Ilyan’s mouth twitched in response before he hid it behind his drink.
No one thought anything of it except that Three was finally starting to become funny on purpose.
That was the kind of explanation people liked aboard the Atlantis. Simple, kind, manageable. Three was opening up. Five made that easier. The crew was becoming a crew in more than function.
Outside the galley windows, stars slid past in patterns no holiday calendar had ever named.
Grace watched the holiday log alone during winter break, wrapped in an old sweatshirt while rain tapped against the apartment windows hard enough to blur the city lights beyond them. The school had closed for the holidays the week before, and he had pretended he was looking forward to the quiet. He had meant it, too, until the first night he found himself checking for Atlantis updates with the same habitual expectation his students usually carried into class.
The log began with Nine speaking directly to the camera in the communications room, pink sleeves pushed to her elbows and a paper decoration stuck crookedly to the wall behind her. It looked handmade, which meant someone aboard the ship had spent their limited free time cutting shapes from ration packaging.
“We have been instructed by mission control to reflect on the emotional significance of holiday traditions during long-duration spaceflight,” she said, voice solemn enough to be suspicious. “Unfortunately, mission control failed to account for the fact that we are not emotionally qualified to do that without making it weird.”
The camera shifted, revealing Five leaning into frame from the side with purple hair pinned back and a strip of silver packaging taped to his shirt like a badge. “Speak for yourself. I am extremely emotionally qualified. I once cried because Two made bread-shaped matter.”
From somewhere off camera, Two said, “It was bread.”
“It was bread-adjacent.”
“It had yeast.”
“It had ambition.”
Grace smiled and let the video keep playing.
The footage cut between small fragments of the celebration. One adjusting decorations with the air of someone trying not to care too visibly. Four and Five arguing over whether a strip of foil looked festive or like a system warning label. Six and Ten building a small model tree out of repurposed sampling sticks, while Ten insisted it was mathematically stable and Six said that didn’t make it less ugly or out of season. Eight appeared briefly in the background of the galley, long blond hair loose over his black shirt as he helped Jace hang something near the viewport. Jace said something too soft for the camera to catch. Eight looked at him, and for half a second his guarded expression gentled enough that Grace leaned closer to the screen without meaning to.
Then Five’s voice cut in from off camera, far too pleased. “Seven, you’re staring.”
The image jolted violently as Jace apparently tried to wrestle the camera away from whoever was holding it.
Grace laughed into the empty room and wondered what his students would do with that when school returned.
He got his answer the first day back from Thanksgiving break.
The room buzzed before Grace even opened the video file. Half the class had watched the holiday log at home already and arrived carrying opinions, theories, and one extremely detailed ranking of Atlantis decorations by emotional significance. Grace had planned a lesson about closed-system agriculture and crew morale. The students had planned a tribunal about Seven and Eight.
“He was looking at him,” one student said before the bell finished ringing.
Grace set his bag down slowly. “Good morning to you too.”
“Mr. Grace, this is important!”
“I can see that.”
Another student leaned forward over her desk, eyes bright with purpose. “Eight smiled at him. Like, actually smiled. Not a background smile. A real one.”
“Are we categorizing smiles now?”
“Yes.”
Grace looked at the board, then at the classroom of children who had somehow turned space psychology into a romance seminar with visual evidence. “Fine. After the science portion, we can discuss your smile taxonomy.”
They cheered like he had announced recess.
When he played the log, the room reacted exactly as expected. They laughed at Five’s commentary, applauded Two’s holiday meal, groaned when Ten described festive decorations as inefficient symbolic clutter, and went almost unnaturally silent when the camera caught Seven and Eight near the viewport. Grace watched them watching, and something about it made the whole moment feel fragile. They saw affection everywhere now. Maybe because the crew had taught them how to look for it. Maybe because distance made small gestures easier to treasure. Maybe because children, for all their chaos, understood wanting people to be loved.
The holiday log became part of the bulletin board by the end of the week. A foil star appeared over One. A tiny drawing of bread appeared under Two. Someone added a handmade black paper braid near Eight’s pale blue dots, which Grace decided not to question. Three gained a speech bubble that said ‘happy psychologically stabilizing ritual,’ which the students thought was hysterical.
Grace thought it was funny too.
He also found himself watching Three more carefully after that.
Not for romance, exactly. The class’s earlier theory had faded as quickly as it started, overtaken by the far more dramatic Seven and Eight developments and the ongoing saga of Two and Nine being unsubtle enough to make even official edits give up. Three’s attention to Five began to read differently over time, less like a crush and more like a man learning how to step into warmth without making too much noise. Five was easy to approach because Five made difficulty theatrical before it could become painful. He gave Three something to answer. Something to push against. Something to join.
Grace understood that, maybe more than he expected.
Teaching worked like that sometimes. Some students entered a room through the loudest friend, the easiest joke, the group member who made the table feel less closed. It didn’t mean the doorway was the destination. It only meant someone had needed a way in.
By late winter, the Atlantis logs had become richer and stranger. There were still scientific updates, still course reports, still careful summaries of plant growth and equipment efficiency, but the human parts threaded more deeply through everything. Noa recorded a navigation explanation while Tomas silently rearranged her visual aids into more accurate positions until she threatened to bite him. Elias and Malcolm presented an engineering complaints segment that Mara allowed only because it contained actual maintenance education beneath ten layers of nonsense. Mateo and Elodie hosted what was technically a food preservation update and functionally a date with an audience of millions. Alaric appeared in more group shots now, never loud, never careless, but present in a way that made his earlier absence more noticeable in hindsight.
Jace followed him with his eyes too often.
Malcolm noticed every single time.
Aboard the Atlantis, this became one of his favorite hobbies.
“You’re doing it again,” Malcolm murmured during one evening cycle while he and Jace sat outside the medical bay waiting for Ilyan to finish reviewing exercise compliance reports that everyone had apparently failed in personally unique ways.
Jace blinked, tearing his gaze away from the corridor where Alaric had just disappeared. “Doing what?”
Malcolm looked at him with deep pity. “It’s tragic that you still think lying is an option.”
“I wasn’t staring.”
“You were contemplating. Romantically. With your whole face.”
Jace groaned and leaned back against the wall, rubbing both hands over his eyes. “I regret telling you anything.”
“You didn’t tell me. I discovered it through investigative friendship.”
“That’s not a thing.”
“It is now.”
The medbay door opened before Jace could respond, and Ilyan stepped out holding a tablet, expression calm in the way that usually meant several people were about to receive medically phrased judgment. His gaze moved from Jace to Malcolm and lingered there with the mild suspicion of a doctor who had learned that unattended patients were usually committing crimes.
“You’re both here early,” he said.
Jace straightened immediately, grateful for the distraction. “We were told to report.”
“Ten minutes from now.”
Malcolm widened his eyes. “Look at us, being responsible.”
Ilyan’s gaze dropped to Malcolm’s crossed ankles, then to the tablet half-hidden beside his thigh. “Is that the calibration unit from the lower exercise rig?”
Malcolm slowly looked down as if discovering the object there for the first time. “No.”
“It’s labeled.”
“It could be lying.”
Ilyan held out his hand.
Malcolm considered arguing, then surrendered the unit with a sigh dramatic enough to make Jace laugh under his breath. Ilyan accepted it with the faintest flicker of amusement and turned toward the medbay, leaving the door open behind him.
“Come in, then,” he said. “Since you’re being responsible.”
Malcolm followed because refusing medical authority became much less satisfying when Ilyan got better at sounding amused by it. Jace trailed after him, still flushed from being caught staring at Alaric and clearly relieved Malcolm had been temporarily redirected by theft charges.
Inside the medbay, everything was too clean, too ordered, too carefully lit, but it had become less hostile over time. Ilyan had started keeping one of Mateo’s terrible maple bars in a drawer because Malcolm complained constantly and ate them anyway. There was a paper decoration still taped near the cabinet from the holiday dinner, a crooked green shape Elodie claimed was festive and Elias claimed looked like an infection. Ilyan had not removed it. That said more than any public log could have.
Malcolm noticed, he always did.
He sat on the exam bench and watched Ilyan set the calibration unit aside without comment, then caught the doctor glancing briefly toward the paper decoration as if embarrassed by its continued existence. Malcolm smiled before he could stop himself.
“Careful,” he said. “People might think you’re sentimental.”
Ilyan looked back at him, expression composed but not empty. “People think many inaccurate things.”
Jace, still standing near the doorway, muttered, “That’s true.”
Malcolm turned his head slowly. “Do you want to elaborate, Seven?”
Jace froze.
Ilyan glanced between them, and for one alarming moment Malcolm thought he might ask. Instead, Ilyan's mouth twitched in a small, deliberate way.
“I don’t think he does,” he said.
The betrayal was immediate and profound.
Jace looked wounded. “Not you too!”
Ilyan returned to his tablet with a calm that would’ve seemed clinical once. Now, somehow, it read almost like mischief. “Social adaptation is important during prolonged isolation.”
Malcolm pointed at him. “See? He’s funny now! I did this!”
“You absolutely did not,” Jace said.
“I am the people’s social lubricant.”
Ilyan closed his eyes briefly. “Please never phrase it that way again.”
Malcolm grinned so widely his cheeks hurt.
The ship moved on.
Holidays passed into routine again, but the warmth they left behind stayed. The decorations came down slowly because no one wanted to be the first to admit they liked them. Mateo saved the last foil star in a galley drawer. Elodie claimed it was evidence. Mara pretended not to see the small strip of colored packaging Elias stuck near the engineering console. Noa and Tomas left the ugly little model tree in navigation because Tomas insisted it was a useful reminder of structural compromise, and Noa said if he hated it so much he could remove it himself, which he didn’t.
Malcolm found Ilyan’s green decoration still in the medbay two weeks later.
He said nothing that time.
On Earth, Grace watched the classroom fill with Atlantis again.
The students returned from winter break taller, louder, and somehow even more invested. The bulletin board became crowded enough that Grace had to expand it onto the neighboring wall. Official science vocabulary mingled with jokes. Communication delay diagrams shared space with hand-drawn hearts around Two and Nine. A student made a chart labeled Evidence Seven Likes Eight, which Grace confiscated on principle and then, against his better judgment, checked for spelling before giving it back. There were still stars around Five, still suns and spray bottles and purple paper scraps, but now Three had gained more green decorations too. Not romantic hearts. Just little bridges, drawn after one class discussion about how people joined groups slowly.
Grace liked those best.
He didn’t tell the students that.
The Atlantis kept sending pieces of itself home. Grace kept showing them. His class kept learning more science than they realized because curiosity had disguised itself as affection and attached itself to ten people moving through the dark.
By the time the next holiday approached, the footage had shifted again. Not brighter, exactly, but deeper. The crew looked more tired than their first logs, more comfortable too, as if both things could be true at once. Five’s purple hair had faded a little again. Seven sat closer to Eight in group shots. Two and Nine didn’t bother hiding their hands beneath the table anymore. Three stood among them more often now, still quiet, still precise, but no longer quite apart.
Grace paused one of the newest logs at the end of class, meaning to ask about communication delays and emotional continuity during isolation, but the students were already packing up, laughing over a clip of Five accusing Four of celebrating the holidays by inventing new maintenance problems while wearing a stupidly festive hat.
On the screen, the Atlantis galley glowed with improvised decorations and tired warmth. Five leaned against the counter mid-laugh, Seven beside him, Eight just beyond them with a faint smile turned partly away from the camera. Two stood behind Nine with his chin nearly resting against her head. Three was there too, not watching Five this time, not looking away from anyone, simply present in the cluster of bodies and voices as if he had finally found a place to stand.
Grace let the image remain until the last student left. Then he gathered the worksheets, shut off the projector, and stood for a moment in the quiet room with the afterimage of the crew still bright behind his eyes. The classroom no longer felt dimmer without them, not exactly. It felt like holding a light that had traveled a very long way, fragile and delayed and still somehow warm.
Now that the first chapter of my Bloodymary themed fic is out, I would love to get yall's opinion! :)
What pov do you want for the first few chapters?
Keep the split pov between Grace and Malcolm
Just Grace's pov as he and the world watch the Atlantis crew through video logs
Malcolm’s pov withe the Atlantis crew
Voting ended onJun 2
For some context, the first chapters will be following the world watching the Atlantis crew's first few years in space before switching fully to Malcolm's pov after they lose contact with Earth. So for sure you guys will be getting his pov at some point.
If the split pov is decided on, it will give some the opportunity for more insight into what's happening on the Atlantis. So I will say that and get back to work on writing some more space yaoi.
Everybody say thank you to the amazing @indysinks for this meme redraw of the Bloodymarh polycue! 💕
They are literally one of the only things keeping me sane right now and I adore this so much Im making it my phone wallpaper adhakhd /vpos /aff
Sorry for the delay on the next Escapism chapter again, Im in the middle of a flare up and my body is being very mean especially when it comes to screens kafhakfh
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That was the first thing Malcolm said when the cooling system started failing, though it came out less like a diagnosis and more like a personal accusation against the universe. He stood beneath an open ceiling panel in the central corridor with one hand braced on his hip, his purple hair tied messily off the back of his neck, and his glare fixed upward as if the ventilation system could be shamed into cooperation through the force of his disappointment alone. The ship hummed around him in a way it shouldn’t have, low and uneven beneath the normal layered sounds of controlled survival, while warm air moved sluggishly through the corridor vents.
Elias stood beside him with his arms crossed, orange tank top already damp between the shoulder blades. “You know, I’m starting to think space hates us.”
Malcolm kept staring into the panel. “Space doesn’t hate us. Space is indifferent. The Atlantis, however, has developed an attitude problem.”
“You always say that like you don’t love her,” Elias said, leaning closer to peer up into the exposed wiring as if proximity might reveal something Malcolm had missed.
“I do love her. That’s why this is betrayal.”
Elias snorted, then shifted back onto his heels with the air of a man who had been personally victimized by machinery and was trying to decide whether it could be insulted into submission. He had stripped down to his lightest ship trousers and a tank top sometime after breakfast, which made him look less like the systems technician of humanity’s most ambitious expedition and more like a man who had been interrupted halfway through a beach vacation nobody had invited him to.
“Mara’s going to ask how long repairs will take,” he said after a moment.
“Mara can ask whatever she wants. Time is an illusion and coolant circulation is currently a hate crime.”
“That answer might need editing before it reaches the captain.”
Malcolm tilted his head just enough to glare at him. “Fine. Tell her Earth’s worst season followed us into the void and we’re all being punished for humanity’s collective sins.”
Elias considered that with visible seriousness, because Elias respected ridiculous statements most when they contained structural truth. “That one might actually work.”
The cooling problem had started as an inconvenience and become everyone’s central personality trait by the second day. The Atlantis hadn’t turned dangerous, not yet, but temperatures in the common areas had crept high enough that the crew collectively abandoned any remaining attachment to professional appearance. Uniform layers disappeared first. Then flight suits got unzipped and tied around waists. Then the ship became a patchwork of tank tops, shorts, loose sleep pants, sports bras, crop tops, and bare feet against warm floors, everyone moving more slowly than usual through the heavy air while pretending not to be cranky about sweating inside a spacecraft.
Malcolm hated it most because he was engineering, which meant everyone looked at him whenever the vents exhaled another breath of lukewarm air as if he had personally built summer into the ship.
He had not.
If he had, there would’ve been a pool.
By afternoon, the galley had become the unofficial cooling shelter despite being only marginally better than everywhere else. Mateo had declared the stove off-limits except in emergencies, which apparently included coffee substitute but not soup, a hierarchy Malcolm found morally inconsistent. Elodie sat on the counter in pink shorts and an oversized shirt knotted at her waist, fanning herself with a ration packet while Mateo stood beside her in blue boxers and a sleeveless undershirt, misting the air from a sanitized spray bottle in a desperate, futile attempt to cool down the miserable room.
Mara had tried to maintain full uniform standards for approximately four hours before giving up with the exhausted dignity of a captain who understood morale sometimes meant letting people suffer half-dressed in peace. She still wore red, but now it was in the form of a loose athletic top and shorts, her hair twisted up severely enough that it looked like an act of discipline. Tomas had switched into white sleep pants and nothing else, then sat in the corner with a tablet and the expression of a man too deeply detached from worldly concerns to acknowledge discomfort. Noa, wearing a yellow sports bra beneath an open sleeveless overshirt, had claimed the best airflow spot and refused to move for anyone below captain rank.
Three remained unfairly composed.
That, Malcolm thought, might have been the most offensive part.
Ilyan had loosened his green shirt at the collar and rolled the sleeves to his elbows, which was apparently the doctorly equivalent of complete social collapse, but otherwise he looked as calm as ever. His dark hair was tied back, his posture straight, his expression measured as he passed out electrolyte pouches under the guise of medical necessity. If he was suffering, he refused to do it where Malcolm could appreciate it.
“Hydration,” Ilyan said when Malcolm finally emerged from the corridor with Elias trailing behind him, holding one pouch out like an offering and a command at the same time.
Malcolm looked at the pouch, then at him. “Is that a suggestion or a threat?”
“It’s medical advice.”
“Worse.”
Ilyan’s gaze flicked over him with professional precision that lingered only a fraction too long at the sweat dampening Malcolm’s cropped black tank and the pale skin visible beneath it. His expression didn’t change, but something subtle moved behind his eyes before he held the pouch closer. “Drink it anyway.”
Malcolm took it because refusing would require energy he didn’t have. “You’re very bossy for someone whose department isn’t currently on fire.”
“Your department isn’t on fire either.”
“Technically, it is. Or close enough at least.”
A sound came from the other side of the galley, soft and amused enough that Malcolm nearly missed it beneath the sluggish hum of the ship. Alaric stood near the wall where shadows gathered despite the bright overhead lights, black sleeveless shirt loose over pale skin and long blond hair braided down his back in an attempt to survive the heat. He had been quieter than usual all day, though that was hardly saying much. His pale blue eyes were on Malcolm now, faint amusement barely visible at the edges.
Jace, unfortunately, noticed.
Malcolm noticed Jace noticing, and that was where the problem began.
Jace had been stretched across one of the bench seats in brown shorts and an old tank top cut low enough at the sides to show the clean curves of his top surgery scars. Malcolm’s own scars were visible too in the same manner, not that he had thought much about it until Ilyan’s eyes flicked there and away, then Jace’s followed the motion with a quieter kind of recognition. It wasn’t the first time the crew had seen them. The Atlantis was too small and too full of communal schedules for bodies to stay mysterious forever. But the public logs were another matter, and Elodie’s camera sat charging on the galley table with its little red indicator blinking like a threat.
Jace caught Malcolm’s eye across the room, then glanced deliberately toward Alaric.
Malcolm raised an eyebrow.
Jace’s face did something catastrophically revealing before he looked away too fast.
Oh, Malcolm thought, with immediate and exquisite delight. Oh, absolutely not.
He crossed the galley slowly, sipping the electrolyte pouch like a man with all the time in the universe. Jace narrowed his eyes before Malcolm even reached him, already bracing for impact because friendship with Malcolm had taught him the value of early defensive measures.
“Don’t,” Jace said quietly.
Malcolm sat beside him with as much innocence as a person could manufacture while visibly plotting. “I haven’t said anything.”
“That’s what worries me.”
“You know, it’s really brave of you to develop a crush in this temperature,” Malcolm said, keeping his voice low enough that the others wouldn’t immediately hear but not so low that Jace could pretend he imagined it. “I would’ve waited for environmental stability.”
Jace’s face flushed so fast Malcolm would’ve blamed the heat if he weren’t enjoying himself so much. “I don’t have a crush.”
Malcolm hummed thoughtfully and looked across the galley, where Alaric had turned his attention back to the tablet in his hands. “Sure.”
“I don’t.”
“Of course. You just looked at Eight like a Victorian widow seeing sunlight for the first time.”
Jace kicked him under the table.
Malcolm wheezed, clutching his shin with enough drama that Mateo looked over in alarm. “Violence. During a climate crisis.”
“You deserved it,” Jace said, though his mouth was twitching despite himself.
“I usually do.”
Elodie, who had been watching them over the edge of her ration packet fan, looked between them with growing interest. Heat had made everyone slower, but it had not dulled her instincts for gossip in the slightest. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” Jace said too quickly.
Malcolm smiled at her. “Jace is experiencing feelings.”
Jace turned on him with betrayal bright in his eyes. “Malcolm!”
The use of his name made Elodie’s expression sharpen. Names off camera still felt like secrets sometimes, little proofs of closeness slipped into ordinary air. She leaned forward, delighted, but Mateo caught her around the waist before she could physically launch herself into the conversation.
“No interrogation during heat failure,” Mateo said, voice warm with practiced authority. “We agreed.”
Elodie looked up at him, offended but not enough to move away from the arm around her. “We agreed you wouldn’t interrogate me.”
Mateo kissed her temple absently. “I’m expanding the treaty.”
Earth saw the heat log nine weeks later, after the footage crossed distance and delay and compression artifacts and arrived in classrooms, living rooms, offices, and crowded train stations full of people who had begun measuring time through Atlantis updates without meaning to.
Grace almost didn’t show it to his class.
Not because there was anything inappropriate in the obvious sense, but because there was something strangely intimate about the footage that made him hesitate with his hand over the mouse. The crew looked less polished than ever. More tired, more human, more physically present in a way that the uniforms often softened. Bare shoulders, sweat-damp hair, unguarded irritation, laughter made loose by discomfort. Five in a cropped tank with purple hair tied back and scars visible across his chest. Seven beside him with matching evidence of a story the public hadn’t been told and didn’t need explained in order to respect.
Grace saw it before his students did, or at least he understood what he was seeing before the room settled into recognition.
A few kids whispered. One or two looked confused for a second, then thoughtful. Nobody laughed. Nobody made it strange. Grace found himself suddenly, fiercely proud of them.
One student raised a hand after a long moment, expression careful in the way children became when they sensed they were standing near something important. “Mr. Grace, are Five and Seven trans?”
Grace paused the footage with Five leaning back against the galley table, head tipped toward Seven while he said something that made the other man shove at his shoulder. The scars were visible, pale lines beneath the dark fabric, not centered in the shot but impossible to miss once noticed.
“Yes,” Grace said simply. “It looks like they are.”
The class absorbed this with a seriousness that lasted approximately three seconds before another student said, “That makes Five even cooler,” and the room erupted in agreement so immediate that Grace had to look down at the desk for a moment because his eyes had started to sting.
“Seven too,” someone added, scandalized by the possibility of omission.
“Yes, Seven too,” Grace said, recovering enough to smile. “Very important correction.”
The heat log became one of the most discussed updates of the mission, though not only because of the scars. Earth, collectively, seemed delighted by the absurdity of summer following humanity into deep space. Screenshots circulated of Two misting the galley with a spray bottle, Nine holding her arms out like a tragic victim beneath the faintest current of air, Four lying flat on the floor and declaring himself a casualty of atmospheric betrayal, and Five stating into the camera with utter seriousness that if the ship wanted to recreate July, it could at least provide popsicles.
Mission control issued a carefully worded statement about a minor thermal regulation issue that had been resolved without risk to crew safety.
No one liked that version nearly as much.
The crew’s version had Nine filming from the galley while Four and Five argued under an open ceiling panel, both of them damp with sweat and irritation. It had One ordering everyone to stop hovering because engineering went faster when half the crew wasn’t breathing directly beneath the vent. It had Two presenting cold rehydrated fruit mash in cups and calling it dessert with the grim courage of a man asking others to believe alongside him. It had Ten looking into the camera after one bite and saying, “This has the mouthfeel of regret,” in a tone so even that the internet immediately adopted it.
It had Three handing Five another hydration pouch and looking away too late.
Grace noticed that too, though he wasn’t sure if his students did. The doctor’s gaze, usually clinical, caught briefly on Five as he complained into the pouch straw about being medically bullied. It wasn’t obvious. It wasn’t even necessarily romantic if someone didn’t already suspect tenderness could hide under precision. But it was there in the hesitation, in the way Three’s attention sharpened whenever Five moved too fast or forgot to drink, in the faint softening around his eyes when Five accepted the pouch instead of arguing more.
“Three likes him,” one of Grace’s students announced, proving once again that twelve-year-olds were terrifying.
Grace stared at her. “You got that from a hydration pouch?”
“He looked at him weird.”
Several students nodded with immediate confidence.
Grace glanced back at the screen, where Five had just made some dramatic comment about heatstroke and journalistic integrity while Three stood beside him looking entirely composed to anyone who hadn’t spent months watching these people become familiar.
“I am not officially endorsing that interpretation,” Grace said.
“But unofficially?”
Grace closed his eyes for a second. “Unofficially, please finish your worksheet.”
They did not finish their worksheets.
Aboard the Atlantis, the cooling system was repaired by the end of the third day, though Malcolm insisted repaired was too generous a word for what he and Elias had achieved. It was more of a negotiated truce between several aging thermal regulators, one replacement fan assembly, and a wiring harness Malcolm had personally threatened in three languages, only one of which he actually spoke.
When the cool air finally returned, the entire crew reacted like people witnessing divine mercy.
Mateo hugged a vent.
Elodie filmed it.
Mara pretended she wasn’t also standing directly beneath the airflow.
Noa closed her eyes with visible relief, then informed everyone that if heat came back, she was mutinying, but in a quiet and organized manner.
Jace leaned against Malcolm’s side in the corridor once the others drifted away, shoulder warm through thin fabric. “You saved us from summer.”
Malcolm, who was exhausted, sweaty, and stained with something that might have been coolant or might have been one of Elias’s crimes, let his head drop back against the wall. “I expect worship.”
“I can offer you the last cold fruit cup.”
“I accept this devotion.”
Jace laughed, and Malcolm let himself stand there a little longer than necessary.
The months after the heat failure felt different, though Malcolm couldn’t have explained why. Maybe it was the scars, the way a part of him and Jace had become visible to Earth and the sky hadn’t cracked open because of it. Maybe it was the fact that the crew had survived an embarrassing, uncomfortable, deeply annoying ship failure and somehow come out the other side more fond of each other instead of less. Maybe it was simply time, doing what distance had done before, rearranging things by degrees too small to notice until they were already changed.
Whatever the reason, the Atlantis softened.
Not in function. Never there. Mara made sure protocols stayed sharp, and the ship demanded discipline no matter how affectionate they became inside it. But the spaces between duty became easier to inhabit. Mateo and Elodie stopped pretending to be subtle and became far more entertaining as a result. Their relationship settled into the galley like a second heat source, warm enough that even Mara’s exasperated looks couldn’t fully cool it. They bickered over ration spices, shared quiet touches when they thought cameras had turned away, and became both the crew’s favorite joke and, unintentionally, Earth’s favorite ship.
Elodie discovered the term in a forwarded message and laughed for ten straight minutes.
Mateo didn’t understand why strangers had assigned them a ship name until Malcolm explained with the gravity of a man delivering scientific news. Mateo listened, looked at Elodie, then said he hated it.
Elodie immediately declared she loved it.
That settled the matter.
Ilyan’s feelings for Malcolm remained quiet enough that Malcolm didn’t notice and obvious enough that everyone else suffered.
It appeared in small things. Medical checks that lasted perhaps a minute too long. A hand at Malcolm’s elbow when the ship jolted during a calibration shift. Ilyan saving him the least offensive nutrient bar after Malcolm complained three days in a row about the texture of the standard ones. The way he listened when Malcolm talked too quickly about repairs, not with Jace’s open warmth or Elias’s competitive enthusiasm, but with a focused patience that seemed to catch every detail and store it carefully.
Malcolm interpreted all of this as doctor behavior because Malcolm, despite everything, could be remarkably stupid about being wanted.
Jace didn’t share this limitation.
“He likes you,” Jace said one night while they sat together in the observation room, artificial gravity steady beneath them and two drink pouches abandoned between their knees.
Malcolm didn’t look up from the small repair diagram he was sketching on a tablet. “Who?”
“Ilyan.”
Malcolm paused just long enough to prove he had heard, then resumed drawing. “Ilyan likes blood pressure readings and making people uncomfortable by asking if they’ve been sleeping.”
“He likes you.”
“He likes monitoring me because I am medically interesting and verbally difficult.”
Jace leaned closer, trying to see his face. “Malcolm.”
“Jace.”
“He saved you the maple one.”
“The maple one is terrible.”
“It’s your favorite ‘terrible’ one.”
Malcolm opened his mouth, then closed it again.
Jace smiled slowly.
“Don’t look like that,” Malcolm said.
“Like what?”
“Like you discovered a new species of idiot.”
“I might have.”
Malcolm set the tablet down and turned toward him with exaggerated seriousness. “That’s bold from a man who loses all higher brain function every time Alaric ties his hair back.”
The effect was immediate and deeply satisfying. Jace went bright red, glancing toward the observation room door as if Alaric might manifest from the wall through sheer narrative consequence.
“I do not.”
“You absolutely do,” Malcolm chuckled.
“He has nice hair.”
“He has beautiful hair and a mysterious haunted prince vibe, and you are being so normal about it.”
Jace shoved him, not hard enough to hurt but hard enough to make Malcolm laugh. “You’re insufferable!”
“You love me.”
“I tolerate you under extreme circumstances.”
“Space counts.”
Jace tried to glare at him, but the corners of his mouth kept betraying him. Then his expression shifted, softer now, eyes dropping toward the tablet before lifting again. “Do you think he knows?”
“Alaric?” Malcolm asked, and when Jace nodded, he considered lying. It would’ve been kinder for approximately three seconds. “I think Alaric knows everything and chooses not to say it because he’s either polite or evil.”
“That doesn’t help.”
“It wasn’t meant to.”
Jace groaned and sank lower in his seat, pressing the heel of one hand against his eyes. Malcolm watched him with fondness he didn’t bother disguising, partly because Jace wasn’t looking and partly because he was too tired to keep pretending every soft feeling needed armor. Beyond the observation glass, stars burned in unfamiliar patterns, bright and indifferent and farther from Earth than they had been when the heat broke, farther than they had been when Malcolm dyed his hair, farther than they had been when names first began slipping loose from numbers.
A home was harder, Malcolm had thought once.
He still believed that.
But Jace was laughing beside him now, embarrassed and warm and alive. Mateo and Elodie were probably tangled together somewhere pretending they weren’t. Elias was sending him increasingly hostile notes about regulator calibration. Mara was awake because she was always awake. Noa and Tomas were likely making each other worse in navigation. Ilyan was quietly, inexplicably saving him maple bars. Alaric moved through the ship like a secret the rest of them were slowly being trusted to keep.
Harder didn’t always mean worse.
On Earth, Grace saw only pieces of it, but the pieces were enough to hurt sometimes.
His students adored the summer log, then the post-repair log, then the quieter updates that followed. They noticed the way Five and Seven kept sitting close. They noticed Two and Nine holding hands beneath a galley table and cheered so loudly Grace had to pause the video until everyone regained the ability to behave. They noticed Three watching Five, because apparently romance analysis had become part of science class now whether Grace liked it or not. They noticed Eight’s rare smile when Seven spoke to him off camera and immediately began debating what it meant with the seriousness of scholars.
The Atlantis crew kept becoming more real in front of them.
That was the miracle and the danger.
Grace understood that better with every passing month, though he didn’t know yet what shape the danger would take. He only knew that ten numbered astronauts had turned into people with habits and histories and favorite terrible foods. He knew Five was trans and purple-haired and sarcastic and too clever to hide how much he cared forever. He knew Seven laughed like sunlight and looked at Eight too softly when he thought no one could see. He knew Three’s calm wasn’t as empty as it seemed. He knew Two and Nine loved each other with the reckless confidence of people too far away for Earth’s rules to feel real.
He knew his students loved them.
He knew he did too, a little.
The newest classroom bulletin board had changed again by the start of summer vacation. Someone had added a construction paper sun wearing sunglasses beside Five’s portrait in honor of the cooling failure. Someone else had drawn a tiny spray bottle next to Two. Purple stars still clustered thickest around Five, but Seven had gained brown ones, and Eight now had a ring of pale blue dots that Grace suspected had taken someone all of lunch to cut out.
When the bell rang and the students poured out, Grace stayed behind a moment longer, looking at the board in the quiet they left behind.
On the screen at the front of the room, the paused video still showed the Atlantis galley during the heat failure. Five was laughing at something Seven had said, head tipped back, top surgery scars visible beneath his cropped shirt, purple hair escaping its tie. Seven watched him with an expression so open it made Grace’s chest ache. Behind them, Three stood with a hydration pouch in one hand, looking at Five like he had forgotten, briefly, how to be only clinical.
Grace reached for the remote to turn it off, then stopped for a moment.
The footage had already happened months ago. By the time Earth watched the crew laugh through artificial summer, the Atlantis had moved on. They were farther away now, deeper into dark, carrying their jokes and feelings and names toward whatever waited beyond the reach of familiar stars.
Grace didn’t know why that thought unsettled him.
Not yet.
He only knew that when he finally turned off the screen, the classroom felt dimmer without them.
The Atlantis became easier to love once everyone stopped pretending it was only a mission.
That was the dangerous part, Malcolm thought, though he rarely let himself put it so plainly. A mission could be measured. A mission had objectives, routes, contingency plans, supply estimates, repair schedules, sleep rotations, medical requirements, and communication delays long enough to make every message from Earth feel like opening a preserved artifact. A mission could be endured because it had shape. It had rules.
A home was harder.
A home asked things from people that protocol didn’t know what to do with. It asked them to remember who took their coffee substitute with extra sweetener even though everyone agreed it still tasted like regret. It asked them to know which footsteps belonged to One before she entered a room and which silence meant Eight was nearby but refusing to make himself known. It asked them to notice when Six stayed too long in navigation because she didn’t like sleeping after bad dreams, or when Four’s jokes became meaner because he was worried, or when Three’s calm turned brittle around the edges after difficult medical reviews.
It asked them to learn names.
Not all at once. Not as some grand rebellion against mission rules, though Malcolm would have preferred that version because it sounded cooler. The numbers remained in logs, in official reports, in public broadcasts, in recorded mission check-ins where Earth saw colors and titles and edited fragments of personalities more than whole people. One remained One there, red suit and captain’s composure. Two was Two, blue and steady in the galley. Five was Five, purple and sarcastic and apparently now beloved by an alarming number of schoolchildren with poor judgment.
But off camera, the names started slipping through.
One became Mara first, though Malcolm had known her name from private crew files long before he dared use it aloud. Two was Mateo, which suited him in a way that made Malcolm irrationally pleased, warm and grounded and impossible to say sharply no matter how angry someone was at him. Three was Ilyan, precise and quiet and unsettlingly calm, a name Malcolm didn’t use often because Three somehow made even familiarity feel like a medical instrument sterilized to an uncomfortable shine. Four was Elias, which had startled no one once they heard it because it fit him perfectly, all restless hands and quick temper and clever eyes constantly looking for something to take apart. Six was Noa. Seven was Jace, of course. Nine was Elodie. Ten was Tomas, though he answered to either with the same deeply unimpressed expression.
Eight held out longest, which surprised no one.
He was blond in a way that looked almost silver beneath ship lighting, long hair usually tied at the nape of his neck when he was working and loose only when he thought no one would pass through the corridor. Pale skin, pale blue eyes, black flight suit, a quietness that made people either underestimate him or watch him too closely. Malcolm did both depending on the day. Eight had a way of standing still that seemed less like relaxation and more like readiness, as if some part of him had remained braced since launch and never found a reason to let go.
The first time Malcolm learned his name, it happened by accident.
They were in the equipment storage bay, which sounded more dignified than it was. Mostly it was a narrow room full of labeled compartments, replacement filters, sealant cartridges, tool housings, emergency restraints, and the pervasive smell of warmed metal and cleaning solution. Artificial gravity was on throughout the ship that afternoon, steady beneath Malcolm’s boots while he crouched with half his torso shoved into an open lower cabinet, searching for a coupling Elias swore he had returned to the correct bin.
Elias was a liar. Malcolm respected that professionally, but it did make his afternoon worse.
A shadow crossed the open doorway behind him.
“If that’s you, Elias,” Malcolm said without looking back, voice muffled by the cabinet, “I want you to know I’m adding theft to your official list of sins.”
“It isn’t Four,” Eight answered.
Malcolm hit his shoulder on the cabinet edge when he tried to look back too quickly, which was undignified and therefore unforgivable. He glared over his shoulder while Eight stood in the doorway with an expression that suggested he had seen everything and would be quietly filing it away for later. His hair was tied back, though several pale strands had escaped around his face, and there was a tablet tucked beneath one arm.
“Then you are either here to help me or to witness my decline,” Malcolm said, rubbing his shoulder. “Only one of those is morally defensible.”
Eight considered him for a moment, gaze dropping to the open cabinet. “The coupling is in upper storage. Four moved it after the latch failed on this drawer.”
Malcolm slowly turned his head back toward the empty compartment in front of him. “I see.”
“He logged it.”
“He absolutely did not.”
“He logged it under system containment miscellaneous.”
Malcolm closed his eyes. “That’s not a category, that's a cry for help.”
Eight stepped into the room with the silent certainty that made him impossible to startle unless he wanted to be, reaching up to open one of the higher compartments. He found the coupling immediately, because of course he did, and passed it down without comment. Malcolm took it with the sour expression of a man who had just been rescued by someone too composed to appreciate how annoying rescue could be.
“Thank you, Eight,” he said, dragging the number out with theatrical resentment.
Eight hesitated.
It was small, almost nothing, a pause where there usually wouldn’t have been one. Malcolm noticed anyway because he noticed too much when he shouldn’t and too little when it mattered.
“Alaric,” Eight said after a moment.
Malcolm blinked. “What?”
Eight’s hand returned to his side, fingers flexing once before stilling again. “My name. It’s Alaric.”
For once, Malcolm had no immediate joke ready.
The storage bay seemed abruptly quieter around them, the hum of the ship narrowing into something oddly intimate. Malcolm held the coupling against his palm and looked at the man in front of him, really looked at him, at the tension tucked beneath the stillness, at the way his gaze stayed level as if daring Malcolm to make it strange. As if offering the name had cost him something small but real.
So Malcolm nodded.
“Malcolm,” he said, though Alaric probably knew that already.
A faint shift crossed Alaric’s face, not quite a smile but near enough to make Malcolm feel like he had witnessed something private. “I know.”
“Rude. I was being emotionally generous,” he huffed, tone laden with faux irritation.
“You were stating publicly available information.”
“Emotionally generous publicly available information.”
This time Alaric did smile, just barely, and Malcolm decided immediately that he was going to become unbearable about making it happen again.
On Earth, Grace’s students treated the crew names like a government conspiracy they had personally uncovered, despite the fact that none of those names had been released publicly.
The anonymity protocols fascinated them more the longer the mission went on. They argued about whether the crew called each other by numbers all the time or whether, once the cameras were off, they became ordinary people with ordinary names and bad habits and snacks hidden in drawers. Grace had no official answer, because the logs never said and he wasn’t about to speculate too wildly in front of children who already treated every paused frame like evidence.
That didn’t stop them.
“They definitely know each other’s names,” one of the girls announced one afternoon while Grace queued the newest Atlantis compilation. “You can tell.”
Grace looked over his shoulder from the computer. “Can you?”
“Yes.”
“That was very persuasive.”
“They look at each other like friends,” another student said, as if that settled the matter. “You can’t be best friends and call someone Seven forever.”
“You can if it’s literally his assigned mission designation.”
“Mr. Grace,” she said, with the heavy disappointment of a student realizing her teacher had chosen to be difficult. “Be serious.”
Grace raised both hands in surrender and turned back to the screen before they could smell weakness. “Fine. I’m sure they use names sometimes.”
The class accepted this as victory.
It was strange, how real the Atlantis had become to them. The crew no longer lived only in posters and official news segments. They existed now in inside jokes, in routine arguments, in the softening that came from months of footage stitched together across unimaginable distance. The students spoke about them with the casual familiarity of people discussing neighbors. One was strict but fair. Two gave dad energy despite his age, which Grace had been forced to hear from twelve-year-olds and then pretend not to remember. Three was creepy but probably nice, depending on which student was asked. Four was chaos with a wrench. Six was underrated. Seven was sunshine. Eight was secretly everyone’s favorite if they liked mysteries. Nine was queen of the communications room. Ten was, according to one boy, “the human version of a loading screen,” which had made Grace laugh so hard he’d needed to sit down.
Five was still Five, which was a category unto himself.
The newest log opened on Five sitting in what appeared to be one of the bathrooms aboard the Atlantis, a towel around his shoulders and visible horror on his face. Seven stood behind him wearing gloves, holding a dye applicator, looking far too pleased with himself for anything good to be happening.
Grace paused the video immediately.
The class began screaming before the footage even continued.
“Oh my god,” one student said, half out of her chair. “He’s fixing the purple.”
“He’s fixing the purple,” someone else echoed with reverence.
Grace looked at the frozen image of Five, whose brown roots were indeed extremely visible beneath the duller remains of old violet. He looked like a man who had agreed to something and was regretting it too late. Seven looked like a man who shouldn’t have been trusted with chemicals near another person’s head.
“This,” Grace said carefully, “is either going to be an educational demonstration of personal grooming in space or evidence for a future disciplinary hearing.”
The class demanded he play it.
He did.
Malcolm had made three mistakes.
The first was admitting aloud that his roots were bothering him. The second was trusting Jace with dye. The third was allowing Elodie anywhere near the camera while this was happening.
In his defense, the mission had included personal grooming supplies because even humanity’s greatest expedition into the unknown understood that people became unstable when forced to watch themselves slowly decay in reflective surfaces. Hair dye, however, had not been prioritized with the urgency Malcolm felt it deserved. He had packed what he could, along with enough color-safe maintenance products to make Mateo raise both eyebrows during personal inventory checks, but months in space had done what time always did. Purple faded. Brown returned. The universe took and took.
Jace, being an optimist and therefore dangerous, had offered to help.
Now Malcolm sat in the bathroom with a towel around his shoulders while Jace stood behind him in gloves, the applicator in one hand and concentration furrowing his brow as if he were about to perform surgery instead of ruin Malcolm’s life.
“I need you to understand that if this goes badly, I will tell everyone you sabotaged me,” Malcolm said, watching their reflection in the small mirror.
Jace’s eyes flicked up to meet his in the glass. “You asked me to help.”
“Under duress.”
His friend raised one brow skeptically. “You were looking at your roots in the microwave door and whispering insults at your reflection.”
“That was private!”
Elodie’s voice came from behind the camera, delighted and utterly merciless. “It was in the galley.”
Malcolm turned his head just enough to glare at her. “The galley is communal privacy.”
“That means nothing.”
“It means I trust my crew not to exploit my vulnerable moments for content.”
Elodie adjusted the camera angle with professional smoothness. “You opened my bedroom door on a public log.”
Mateo’s voice called from somewhere outside the bathroom, warm with vindication. “She has a point.”
“You’re all obsessed with punishing independent media,” Malcolm said, turning forward again when Jace gently but firmly redirected his head with one gloved hand. “History will remember this.”
Jace started applying dye near the roots with the slow precision of someone trying very hard not to laugh. “Hold still or history will remember you with a purple ear.”
Malcolm went obediently still, though not without making his suffering visible. That was important. If a man endured cosmetic maintenance in deep space and didn’t make it everyone’s problem, had he really endured it at all?
The dye smelled faintly floral and artificial, weirdly comforting in a way Malcolm hadn’t expected. For a moment the bathroom became something other than ship metal and recycled air. It became an apartment sink at midnight, old towels stained beyond saving, music playing too loudly, fingers stained purple for days afterward. It became Earth, but not the heavy version of Earth, not the launchpad or mission control or his family’s expectations folded into every phone call before he stopped answering. A smaller Earth. A private one. One where he had belonged to himself more clearly.
Jace must have felt the shift in him, because his voice gentled even as his hands kept working. “You okay?”
Malcolm’s first instinct was to dodge. It always was. But the mirror caught Jace’s face before Malcolm could look away, and something about the sight of him there, careful and focused and warm, made the joke stick in his throat.
“Yeah,” Malcolm said after a moment. “Just miss this, I guess.”
“The purple?”
“Me.”
Jace’s hands stilled for the briefest second.
Behind the camera, Elodie quieted too.
Malcolm regretted saying it immediately, not because it was false but because it was too true, which was worse. He dropped his gaze toward his hands in his lap, where faint stains were already marking his knuckles despite the towel. The bathroom light made his face look too pale, his hair too dull, his expression too young and too tired at once.
Then Jace resumed working, gentle enough that the applicator barely tugged.
“We’ll get you back to yourself,” he said.
It was such a simple thing to say. Too simple, maybe. Ridiculous, considering they were millions upon millions of miles from Earth and farther every day, with alien stars ahead and a mission large enough to swallow them whole if they looked at it too directly.
Still, Malcolm believed him a little, and that was dangerous too.
For a little while, the silence returned, filled only with the rhythmic rasp of bristles in hair and the smell of the dye. Malcolm let himself relax slightly, watching his crewmates behind him in the mirror, lips curled faintly into a smile he couldn't seem to shake.
Then, the bathroom door hissed open without a knock because karma was apparently real and uninterested in proportionality. Elias had a tablet in one hand and a loose screw tucked between his teeth, which fell immediately when he saw Malcolm sitting there with dye piled high and uneven in his hair while Jace held a stained applicator like a murder weapon.
Elias stared at him.
Malcolm stared back.
Elodie slowly zoomed in.
“Don’t,” Malcolm said.
Elias removed the screw from the floor with the solemnity of someone gathering himself before greatness. “I’m sorry. I just need a second to appreciate that you look like a radioactive mushroom.”
Jace made a choked noise behind him.
Malcolm’s expression went flat. “Get out.”
“No, I need this. This is healing something in me.”
Elodie was laughing silently behind the camera now, shoulders shaking hard enough to make the frame tremble. Malcolm reached for the nearest object, which happened to be a folded washcloth, and threw it with enough force to hit Elias squarely in the chest. In low gravity it would have been majestic. In normal ship gravity it was merely satisfying.
Elias caught it against himself and looked down. “Was that meant to hurt?”
“It was meant to emotionally wound.”
“Then you should’ve thrown the mirror.”
Jace finally lost his battle and laughed, which made Malcolm turn on him in betrayal. Unfortunately, turning too sharply caused a streak of dye to slide down the side of his face, toward his ear.
Jace lunged with a towel. Malcolm ducked instinctively. Elias tried to help and somehow made it worse. Elodie kept recording because she valued journalism more than friendship. Mateo arrived to investigate the noise and immediately attempted to reverse out of the doorway before anyone could involve him. Noa appeared behind him seconds later, took in the scene, and said with devastating calm that Malcolm’s hair looked as unstable as he was.
Tomas was summoned by the commotion and stood in the hallway long enough to observe, “This seems avoidable,” before leaving again.
Alaric didn’t appear, though Malcolm suspected he heard everything and chose peace.
By the time the dye was finally rinsed, the bathroom looked like a purple crime scene and Jace’s hands were stained despite the gloves. Malcolm’s hair, however, was vivid again. Dark violet at the roots, brighter where the older color caught beneath it, messy and damp and unmistakably his. He stared at himself in the mirror longer than he meant to.
The others were still gathered behind him in various states of amusement and judgment.
Jace stood closest, towel draped over one shoulder, smiling softly in a way that made Malcolm’s chest feel unhelpful. “Better?”
Malcolm tilted his head, watching the purple shift under the bathroom light.
“Yeah,” he said, quieter than usual. “Better.”
The public adored the dye log with a level of intensity Grace could only describe as alarming.
His students were worse.
They arrived the next morning already discussing it before the bell rang, their opinions passionate and completely unavoidable. Five’s hair was better dark purple. No, bright purple. No, actually the faded purple had been iconic. Seven was clearly not licensed to apply hair dye. Nine deserved a journalism award. Four’s radioactive mushroom comment became classroom legend within an hour. Someone drew a commemorative poster of Five with exaggerated purple hair and the words ‘humanizing but professional’ beneath it in block letters.
Grace confiscated it only because everyone kept laughing.
He returned it at the end of class on the condition that the culprit took it home so everyone could focus on schoolwork tomorrow.
The Atlantis had become famous before launch, but this was different. Fame had made the crew distant at first, flattened them into symbols bright enough for the whole world to see but too far away to touch. The logs slowly undid that. They made them specific. They made them odd. They made them human in a way official portraits never could.
Grace noticed the shift in himself too.
He no longer thought of Five only as the purple engineer, though that remained part of it. He thought of him as someone who missed himself when his hair faded. Someone who turned vulnerability into performance before it could hurt too openly. Someone who let Seven help him with dye because trust, apparently, could look like stained gloves and a towel around the shoulders in a cramped bathroom millions of miles from home.
He thought of Seven as someone who knew when to laugh and when not to.
That mattered.
The students caught pieces of it without necessarily understanding all of them. They laughed at the chaos, because of course they did, but they also grew quiet during the moment in the mirror. Grace saw it happen. Saw the room settle around Five’s quieter admission. Saw several students glance toward the bulletin board where the paper stars around his portrait had multiplied again.
One student raised her hand after the clip ended, her expression unusually careful.
“Do you think space makes people different?” she asked.
Grace looked at the frozen frame on the screen. Five stood in the bathroom doorway now, hair damp and vividly purple, while Seven hovered beside him with stained fingers and a smile he wasn’t quite hiding. Behind them, Nine’s camera angle had caught Four laughing and Two pretending not to.
“Yes,” Grace said after a moment. “I think it probably does.”
The student frowned. “But he said he missed being himself.”
“I know.”
“So is he different or not?”
Grace let out a quiet breath, not quite a laugh. Teaching had a way of producing questions much larger than the lesson plan deserved. He looked at Five again, at the bright hair and tired eyes and expression balanced somewhere between embarrassment and relief.
“I think,” Grace said slowly, “sometimes people change and still try to hold onto the parts of themselves they want to keep.”
The class considered that with a seriousness he hadn’t expected.
Then someone near the back said Five should sue Seven for emotional damages because of the purple ear incident, and the room dissolved again.
Grace allowed it.
The Atlantis kept moving.
Months stretched into something softer than anyone expected and stranger than any training simulation had prepared them for. The crew’s personalities kept slipping through the public logs in pieces, some accidental and some deliberately offered. Mara’s composure cracked once during a maintenance failure when she muttered something so creative mission control censored it with a tone that made Earth collectively lose its mind. Mateo recorded a serious segment about food sustainability, then ended it by presenting a tiny dessert he had made for Elodie’s birthday out of ration ingredients and pure defiance. Ilyan gave a medical demonstration using Malcolm as an unwilling volunteer and somehow managed to reveal more about Malcolm’s inability to sit still than about the risk of muscle loss in space.
Noa’s dry humor became more visible whenever she appeared beside Tomas, whose deadpan delivery only made her worse. Elias began conducting unofficial engineering complaints of the week with Malcolm until Mara discovered the segment and demanded editorial review. Alaric remained quiet, but he appeared more often in the background now, long blond hair visible over dark clothes as he listened more than he spoke. Once, the camera caught him smiling faintly at something Jace said off-screen. Earth analyzed that smile for days.
Names stayed off the logs.
But aboard the ship, they settled into daily life like roots finding cracks in metal.
Malcolm used Mara when he was serious and One when he was trying to annoy her. Mateo called him Malcolm only when he wanted him to eat or stop pretending he wasn’t exhausted. Elodie used everyone’s names like little acts of rebellion, slipping them into conversations when cameras were off with a warmth that made the ship feel smaller in a good way. Jace used Malcolm’s name more than anyone else, often casually, sometimes deliberately, always with enough ease that Malcolm started forgetting there had ever been a time when Five was supposed to be safer.
One night, after the rest of the crew had scattered from dinner and the galley lights had dimmed into artificial evening, Malcolm found Alaric standing alone near the observation window.
Normal gravity was active, so there was no excuse to float or pretend the ship had become weightless enough to make emotions avoidable. Malcolm carried two drink pouches because Mateo had handed them to him with the specific expression of someone assigning kindness as a task. He stopped beside Alaric and offered one without comment.
Alaric looked at the pouch, then at him. “Did Two send you?”
“Mateo would never use me as a delivery system.”
“He would.”
“He did,” Malcolm admitted, and Alaric accepted the drink with the faintest hint of amusement.
They stood quietly for a while, looking out at stars arranged in shapes neither of them had grown up naming. The silence felt different from Jace’s silences. Less warm, maybe, but not cold. Alaric’s quiet had edges, but it wasn’t empty.
After a long moment, he said, “You use our names now.”
Malcolm glanced over. “Not on logs.”
“No. Not on logs.”
“I can stop if it bothers you.”
Alaric looked down at the pouch in his hands, pale hair falling loose beside his cheek. “It doesn’t.”
Malcolm nodded once, then looked back toward the window.
That should have been the end of it. Sometimes, with Alaric, almost nothing was the whole conversation. But then he spoke again, softer this time, as if the ship itself might overhear and misunderstand.
“It makes it harder,” Alaric said.
Malcolm didn’t ask what he meant. He knew.
Harder to lose them. Harder to pretend. Harder to remain a numbered shape in a mission file instead of a person surrounded by people. Harder to survive the thought of any room going empty.
“Yeah,” Malcolm said.
Alaric’s jaw shifted slightly. “And better.”
Malcolm looked at him then.
Alaric didn’t look back, but his reflection in the glass did, pale eyes faint and ghostlike beside the stars.
“Yeah,” Malcolm said again. “That too.”
On Earth, Grace wouldn’t see that moment. There was no public camera, no edited mission release, no classroom full of students laughing over purple dye or leaning forward when someone said something too honest. That part of the Atlantis belonged only to itself.
For now, Grace saw what the rest of the world saw.
He saw Five with purple hair restored and sarcasm bright enough to cross the dark. He saw Seven laughing beside him. He saw One becoming Mara in everything but name, Two becoming Mateo, Nine becoming Elodie, all of them becoming more themselves the farther they traveled from the planet that had sent them away.
He watched the logs with his students and told himself it was for science.
Sometimes it actually was, but not as often as it had been in the beginning.
By the third month, the Atlantis no longer felt like something leaving Earth.
It felt like something suspended between homes.
Malcolm noticed it first in the windows, though he would have denied that if anyone asked because noticing things too poetically made him feel like he had accidentally become one of the sentimental people he used to make fun of. The first weeks had still carried Earth with them in obvious ways. Blue lived behind them then, shrinking but present, bright enough in memory that every viewport felt haunted by it. The moon had lingered for a while too, familiar and scarred and almost comforting in its cold indifference. Even once both were gone from sight, the star patterns still looked close enough to the ones humanity had named that he could pretend, if he was tired enough, that they hadn’t truly gone anywhere irreversible yet.
Then distance began doing what distance did.
The stars shifted by degrees too small to feel dramatic until one day Malcolm looked up from the panel he was calibrating and realized the sky outside the forward observation window had stopped looking like the sky.
It was not empty. That might have been easier. It was crowded with light, but light arranged wrongly, constellations stretched out of recognition and old anchors nudged just far enough away from their usual places that the part of his brain trained on Earth evenings and childhood planetariums refused to settle. The view was beautiful, objectively. He could admit that much. Endless dark, hard silver points of unfamiliar fire, the faint smear of distance glowing where cameras compensated for what human eyes weren’t meant to see clearly.
It also made him feel impossibly small.
So he looked away before Seven caught him staring.
Unfortunately, Jace caught him anyway.
“You’re doing the thing,” Jace said from behind him.
Malcolm kept his attention fixed stubbornly on the open access panel in front of him, one knee braced against the wall while low gravity let the rest of him drift slightly off-center. “I do several things. You’ll need to be more specific.”
“The thing where you stare dramatically out the window like a man realizing the universe is vast and emotionally complicated.”
“I was checking for debris.”
“You were gazing.”
Malcolm tightened one of the interior couplings more aggressively than necessary. “I don’t gaze.”
Jace drifted closer with the easy confidence of someone who had stopped fighting the ship’s shifting gravity schedules weeks ago. “You absolutely gaze.”
“I inspect with melancholy.”
The laugh Jace gave him was bright enough to bounce off the metal walls, and Malcolm hated how much warmer it made the engineering module feel. That was one of the worst things about him, in Malcolm’s opinion. Jace had brought warmth into space as if it were just another item packed into the mission manifest, tucked somewhere between biological sampling kits and nutrient reclamation supplies.
He made the hallways feel inhabited instead of occupied. He made long stretches of silence less dangerous. He made Malcolm’s irritation feel like affection, which was frankly rude.
The ship hummed around them, alive with the layered sounds of controlled survival. Ventilation whispered overhead. A water reclamation unit clicked somewhere behind the wall. Farther down the corridor, someone’s music played too quietly to identify, probably Nine’s, because she had recently declared that morale statistics improved by at least twenty-three percent when the ship didn’t sound like a sterile coffin with ambition.
Mission control had objected when the phrase appeared in a public log. Nine responded by using it again in the very next one.
Malcolm respected her deeply for that.
Jace hooked one foot beneath a safety rail and caught a handhold beside him, stopping himself from drifting into Malcolm’s workspace. “Are you almost done?”
Malcolm glanced at the panel, then at the collection of tools floating in a tethered pouch nearby. “Define almost.”
“Five.”
“Seven.”
Jace gave him the look that meant he was being annoying on purpose and Jace knew it, which in Malcolm’s opinion only proved he was right to continue. “One said meal check in fifteen.”
“One can come loosen this bolt herself if she wants me punctual.”
“She also said if you skip another communal meal, Two is allowed to physically collect you.”
Malcolm paused with the tool still braced against the panel. After a moment, he looked over his shoulder and found Jace smiling at him with the serene cruelty of someone who had saved the most relevant information for last. “That’s cheating.”
“That’s leadership.”
“That’s tyranny with better branding.”
Jace’s smile widened, but there was a softness behind it that made Malcolm look down again before it became too much. In the brown fabric of his suit, with his hair grown slightly longer than prelaunch regulations had allowed and his face softened by months without Earth gravity pressing quite the same way against them, he looked younger and older all at once. Most of them did now. Space had a way of stripping public polish from people by force. Nobody looked like their launch portraits anymore.
Malcolm’s own purple had begun fading at the roots, which he considered a personal attack by time.
He had filed a complaint.
Four had signed it as witness.
Two had written ‘eat a vegetable’ beneath it and stuck it to the galley wall.
Jace’s voice gentled again, pulling Malcolm out of the memory before he could decide whether eating the note counted as retaliation. “Besides, we have recording rotation after dinner. Public log.”
Malcolm let his head tip back against the edge of the open panel and groaned loudly enough that it echoed. “I cannot believe humanity invented space travel just to make me answer reflection prompts.”
Jace’s expression immediately turned pleased. “You love the public logs.”
“I love being adored by my captive audience back on Earth. I don’t love mission-approved personal reflection prompts.”
Jace raised an eyebrow. “You told twelve million people that the coffee substitute tasted like burnt sadness.”
“And I stand by that journalistic integrity.”
The fondness on Jace’s face became unbearable enough that Malcolm returned to the panel with renewed dedication, pretending the wiring required more visual scrutiny than it did.
Three months in, and the public logs had become one of the strangest parts of their new life. At first they had felt artificial, little performances packaged for delayed broadcast, a way to reassure Earth that their ten numbered almost-strangers were alive and functional and not yet eaten by hostile aliens or driven mad by recycled air. Mission control sent prompts when the delay allowed. ‘How are you adjusting? What surprised you most? What do you miss? What does the crew do for recreation?’ The crew answered when they could, sometimes earnestly, sometimes with the strained cheer of people aware that millions might watch their faces over breakfast.
Then the logs changed.
Not officially. Never officially.
But somewhere between week five and week ten, the crew had stopped speaking only to mission control and started speaking to Earth as if Earth was someone who might miss them.
The messages got messier after that. Warmer. Funnier. Less polished in all the ways viewers loved and administrators probably hated. Two recorded cooking experiments using rehydrated vegetables while threatening to throw Four out an airlock if he called the texture structurally suspicious again. Nine explained communication delays using increasingly unhinged visual aids. Ten gave the most monotone tour of the astrophysics station in human history and accidentally became beloved online because viewers decided his deadpan delivery was comedy rather than personality.
Five and Seven, unfortunately, became a recurring feature.
Malcolm blamed Jace.
Jace blamed Malcolm.
Earth blamed neither and demanded more.
Grace had not meant for the Atlantis logs to become a weekly classroom ritual.
It just happened.
At first, he had shown clips because they were educational. That was the excuse, anyway, and it wasn’t even entirely a lie. The mission logs were full of teachable moments: physics, biology, engineering, communication delays, closed ecological systems, the psychology of isolation, international cooperation, the absurd complexity of keeping ten humans alive in a vessel smaller than some people’s houses. He could build whole lessons around them, and he did, because teaching worked best when curiosity was already awake.
But if he was honest, the students were not the only reason he kept the broadcast schedule bookmarked.
He wanted to see them too.
By month four, the Atlantis crew had become part of the classroom’s emotional architecture. Their pictures lived on the bulletin board near the solar system chart, each number printed beneath a color-coded patch Grace had made after one of his students complained the official portraits looked too governmenty. Red for One, blue for Two, green for Three, orange for Four, purple for Five, yellow for Six, brown for Seven, black for Eight, pink for Nine, white for Ten. Someone had added little paper stars around Five’s portrait after the burnt sadness coffee log. Grace had pretended not to notice.
The kids had favorites. Of course they did.
One made them sit straighter because she seemed like the kind of person who could sense bad posture from space. Two was beloved because he talked about food like it was both science and emotional support. Nine had a devoted following due to her chaotic communication lessons. Ten had somehow become a meme among twelve-year-olds, which Grace doubted mission control had planned for. Seven was liked almost universally because he was sunny and expressive and had once spent an entire log explaining microbial adaptation with such visible joy that even the kids who normally checked out during biology had leaned forward.
Five remained the classroom favorite by a landslide.
Grace had tried not to let his own bias influence them, but it was difficult when Five kept being exactly the sort of person who made students pay attention. Purple suit, dry humor, expressive face, engineering demonstrations that somehow mixed actual technical clarity with a near-constant stream of muttered complaints. He had a way of making the ship feel tangible, not a symbol or a miracle, but a place full of stubborn panels, rattling ducts, misbehaving valves, and one engineer who refused to let anything break without taking it personally.
The newest log began with a shot of the central habitation ring, camera floating slightly off-level as someone adjusted it.
“Is it recording?” Seven asked from behind the camera, his voice bright with the particular tone that meant he already knew the answer and wanted Five to say something incriminating.
Five appeared upside down in frame, drifting through low gravity with a tool clamped between his teeth and one hand braced against the ceiling rail. He looked toward the camera, entirely too comfortable being inverted, and said around the tool, “No.”
Seven laughed softly. “It is absolutely recording.”
Five removed the tool from his mouth and turned himself slowly upright with a practiced twist that made several students gasp appreciatively. “Then why did you ask?”
“Because I like when you lie to me.”
Five’s expression sharpened with immediate delight. “That’s unhealthy. We should discuss this with mission psychology in six to eight business weeks.”
Grace smiled before he could stop himself.
Around the classroom, his students settled in with the particular focus they reserved only for things they cared about and substitute teachers they hoped to manipulate.
The log shifted into montage after that, edited loosely but clearly less polished than official releases from earlier in the mission. One narrated a systems update while walking through the command module, posture as composed as ever despite the dark circles beneath her eyes. Two showed off a galley experiment involving something he insisted was soup and Four insisted was a fluid with aspirations. Six floated near the navigation display, explaining course corrections with quiet precision while Ten occasionally corrected terminology from off-screen in a voice so dry the class started giggling before anything funny happened.
Then the camera cut to a corridor outside the crew quarters.
The image shook violently.
Grace recognized Five’s laugh before he saw anything else.
Malcolm had not intended to create one of the most replayed moments in Atlantis broadcast history.
That, in his defense, was entirely Two and Nine’s fault.
He had been behind the camera because public log rotation had somehow become his responsibility that week after losing a card game he still believed had involved cheating. The objective had been simple enough: gather casual morning footage of the crew beginning their day, prove to Earth that no one had murdered anyone over limited shower schedules, and maybe get enough usable material that mission control would stop sending phrases like ‘humanizing but professional’ in their prompt packets.
Humanizing but professional.
Malcolm intended to have that carved on his tombstone if space did not atomize him first.
Jace followed him because Jace followed him often, not in an irritating way exactly, though Malcolm pretended otherwise. He was barefoot, hair rumpled, brown thermal shirt wrinkled from sleep, and holding a squeeze pouch of coffee substitute like it might personally save him. He looked too pleased about Malcolm’s suffering.
“You’re enjoying this,” Malcolm said quietly as they moved down the crew corridor.
Jace took a sip from the pouch and hummed thoughtfully, as if the accusation deserved academic consideration. “I enjoy seeing you forced into team-building activities.”
“This is journalism.”
“This is you waking people up with a camera.”
“This is investigative journalism,” Malcolm corrected, angling the camera toward One’s door like he expected the phrase to protect him from consequences.
Jace snorted behind him.
They got One first, because One was already awake and doing stretches with the terrifying discipline of someone who considered sleep a tactical choice rather than a biological necessity. She gave the camera a flat look, told Earth good morning, and informed Malcolm that if he entered her room without warning again she would assign him to waste-system inspection for a month. Malcolm thanked her for supporting independent media, then left before she could make good on the threat.
Two’s room was empty, which was unusual but not alarming at first. Two woke early most days because galley prep had become his kingdom and he ruled it with benevolent threats. Three’s door was closed and locked with a privacy indicator active, which Malcolm respected mostly because Three had the eerie calm of someone who knew exactly how to make medical checkups unpleasant if annoyed. Four shouted something unintelligible when Malcolm knocked and threw a sock at the door from inside. Six was already at navigation. Eight didn’t answer at all, which probably meant he was awake, aware, and choosing silence as a weapon. Ten opened his door, stared at the camera for three seconds, said, “No,” with devastating calm, and closed it again.
“Compelling footage,” Jace said after a moment.
Malcolm gave the closed door a wounded look. “I am surrounded by cowards and enemies.”
Nine’s door was next. The privacy indicator was not active, which meant she was free game.
Malcolm knocked once, waited approximately one second, and slid the door open with the breezy confidence of a man about to be proven catastrophically wrong. “Good morning, emotional support communications officer, the people of Earth demand—”
He stopped but the camera kept recording. For one long, perfect second, nobody moved.
Nine lay half on top of Two in a tangle of blankets, pink undershirt twisted off one shoulder, hair an absolute disaster. Two, shirtless and very awake now, stared at the doorway with the expression of a man calculating exactly how long it would take to cross the room and destroy the camera before footage transmitted anywhere permanent. Nine blinked sleepily, looked at Malcolm, looked at Jace behind him, then slowly pulled the blanket higher.
Jace made a strangled sound.
Malcolm lowered the camera by an inch, which did nothing to stop it recording because he was too busy experiencing spiritual enlightenment. “Oh,” he said, the word soft with dawning wonder
Two’s eyes narrowed. “Five.”
“Oh my god.”
Two pushed himself halfway upright, dragging the blanket with him and somehow looking more intimidating despite the fact that he was very obviously trapped beneath another crew member and several layers of bedding. “Five, I am saying this as calmly as possible. Turn the camera off.”
Malcolm’s mouth opened, closed, then opened again around a grin so wide it nearly hurt. “Oh my god.”
Behind him, Jace lost the battle completely and started laughing so hard he hit the wall.
Nine groaned into Two’s shoulder, but her voice was already carrying the exhausted resignation of a woman who knew history had chosen its witness poorly. “How much trouble are we in?”
“So much,” Malcolm said, voice shaking with barely contained glee. “An illegal amount of trouble. The paperwork alone is going to reach escape velocity.”
Two looked toward Jace as if searching for the only reasonable adult present and finding, to his visible disappointment, absolutely no help there. “What are they going to do, ground us? We’re already pretty damn far from Earth.”
That made Jace laugh harder.
Malcolm nearly dropped the camera.
In Grace’s classroom, absolute chaos erupted.
Several students screamed. One fell halfway out of his chair laughing. Another slapped both hands over her mouth with the scandalized delight of someone witnessing adult drama unfold at a safe distance. Grace lunged for the remote out of pure teacher instinct, fumbled it, and somehow paused the footage on the worst possible frame: Two glaring at the camera from bed while Nine hid under the blanket and Five’s hand blurred at the edge of the image.
The classroom lost its collective mind.
“Mr. Grace!” someone shrieked.
“Okay,” Grace said loudly, face hot despite himself as he stood in front of the projection like his body could somehow protect them all from the frozen image behind him. “That is enough volume from everyone.”
“They’re dating!” one student shouted, sounding both triumphant and betrayed that adults had apparently been interesting without warning.
“We don’t know that,” Grace said, which was objectively the wrong thing to say and he knew it the moment the words left his mouth.
“They’re in bed!”
Grace immediately regretted every word before he said the next sentence, but by then it was already too late. “People can share beds platonically.”
“People can share beds platonically,” Grace said, and immediately regretted every decision that had led him to this moment as twenty-seven middle schoolers turned on him with the devastating judgment of children who knew weakness when they heard it.
One girl in the front row slowly lowered her hands from her mouth. “Mr. Grace.”
“Do not say my name like that.”
“They were cuddling.”
“We are moving on.”
“But we need to know what happens!”
Grace stared at the screen where Five’s delight was visible even through motion blur, and felt laughter press dangerously at the back of his own throat. He was an adult. A professional. A science teacher entrusted with impressionable minds.
He unpaused the video.
The log resumed with the camera now pointed at the floor, though audio continued in crystal clarity.
“Cut that,” Two said sharply.
Malcolm’s reply came immediately, bright with the terrible confidence of someone who knew he had just captured the greatest footage of the mission so far. “Absolutely not.”
“Five.”
“This is humanizing.”
“This is blackmail.”
Malcolm sounded delighted by the distinction. “Both can be true.”
Nine’s muffled voice came from somewhere under the blanket, dry enough that even Grace had to bite back another laugh. “For the record, Earth, this was consensual and Five is a menace.”
“You hear that?” Malcolm said, apparently lifting the camera again because the footage lurched back up toward the ceiling. “Official statement.”
Jace, still laughing, managed to say, “We’re going to get such a long message from mission control.”
Two’s answering tone was grim enough to sound like prophecy. “In eight weeks.”
Nine emerged just enough to point toward the door. “Leave before I commit violence.”
Malcolm backed out slowly, still laughing, camera shaking wildly. “Congratulations on love or poor decision-making. Unclear which.”
The door shut in his face.
The footage cut immediately to the galley several hours later, where Two stood behind a meal prep counter with all the dignity of a man pretending nothing had happened. Nine sat beside Six across the room, drinking from a pouch and wearing the serene expression of someone who had decided embarrassment was optional. Malcolm’s voice came from off-camera, far too pleased with itself.
“Today, Two will be demonstrating how to prepare breakfast after being publicly compromised.”
Two lifted a spoon without looking up. “I will put this in your eye.”
“Hostile work environment.”
Nine smiled into her drink.
Grace laughed with the rest of the class that time, because there was no point pretending not to. The footage was funny, yes, but that wasn’t all. There was relief in it too, though he didn’t know if his students recognized that part. The Atlantis crew was laughing. Teasing. Falling in love, apparently, or at least falling into something reckless and human enough to survive the official numbering system meant to keep them apart.
They were far from Earth, and they were still people.
That mattered more than Grace expected it to.
The farther the Atlantis traveled, the more the logs began to feel like proof of life rather than updates.
Malcolm understood that gradually, mostly through the messages mission control forwarded in compressed files whenever bandwidth and delay allowed. Schoolchildren sent drawings. Families sent questions. Engineers sent admiration thinly disguised as technical critique. People made playlists for the crew they would never meet. Someone knitted a purple scarf inspired by Five’s suit and held it up in a video while crying so hard Malcolm had to leave the room for a while because sincerity from strangers made him want to crawl out of his own skin.
He still watched every forwarded message eventually.
Most of them did.
Even Three, who pretended not to care about public sentiment with such clinical consistency that Malcolm assumed he cared deeply and found it inconvenient. Three had become quietly popular in certain circles too, especially with medical students who admired his composure and the way he explained health monitoring aboard ship. He was not warm, exactly, but he was precise and calm and occasionally dry enough to be funny by accident.
Eight remained the most private among them, rarely appearing unless duty required it, though that only made the public more curious about him. Malcolm suspected Eight hated this but refused to acknowledge it because that would require admitting he noticed attention at all.
Life aboard ship became routine in ways that would have sounded absurd back on Earth.
Gravity schedules were posted weekly. Low-gravity maintenance windows. Exercise rotations. Hydroponics checks. Sleep cycles. Shared meals. Video logs. Scientific observation. System inspections. Arguments over music. Arguments over showers. Arguments over whether Two and Nine had violated any regulations by making eye contact too affectionately in the galley after the incident.
They had. Probably.
Malcolm made a chart which One confiscated. So he made another.
Jace helped with color coding this time.
For all the jokes, though, the ship changed after Two and Nine were discovered. Not dramatically, not badly, but the pretense cracked in a way nobody could fully repair. They had already become attached before then, all of them, but the discovery made it impossible to pretend the mission could remain cleanly professional forever. They were too far from Earth for ordinary rules to feel ordinary. Too close to each other for distance to survive. They still worked, still followed protocols, still understood that failure could kill everyone.
But sometimes Nine leaned her head briefly against Two’s shoulder after long shifts.
Sometimes One saw and said nothing.
Sometimes Malcolm found himself watching that small gesture and feeling something strange twist in his chest, not envy exactly, though maybe something related.
Jace noticed that too. Jace always noticed too much.
“You okay?” he asked one night during artificial night cycle, when most of the ship lights had dimmed and the observation module held only the two of them and the dark beyond the glass.
Malcolm floated upside down near the window because gravity was off in that section and because it annoyed Jace when he refused to orient himself normally. “You ask me that too often.”
Jace let himself drift until one shoulder bumped gently against the wall, unbothered by the slow spin of low gravity around them. “You avoid answering too often.”
“That’s because I’m mysterious.”
“That’s because you’re emotionally constipated.”
Malcolm turned slowly in the air to stare at him. “That was vicious.”
“It was accurate.”
“It can be both.”
Jace smiled, but it softened too quickly. He was quiet for a moment, looking out at the stars that no longer made familiar shapes. His reflection hovered faintly in the glass, brown shirt, tired eyes, face still open in that way Malcolm found increasingly difficult to look at for too long.
“I think about Earth less now,” Jace said.
Malcolm’s chest tightened. “Is that bad?”
“I don’t know.”
Jace began to drift again, slowly enough that Malcolm reached out without thinking and caught the loose strap at his hip before he floated farther. He steadied him with two fingers, the gesture small and practical and therefore easy enough to pretend meant nothing. Jace looked down at the hand against his strap, then back toward the window, and Malcolm knew he had noticed anyway.
“I still miss it,” Jace said after a while. “But when I think about home, sometimes I think about here too.”
Malcolm looked out the window because that was easier than looking at him.
The stars stared back wrong and beautiful.
On Earth, Grace watched that log two months later, long after the footage had crossed the impossible distance back toward a planet still trying to feel connected to the people it had sent away.
He watched it first alone at home, because not every log became classroom material immediately. Some were too quiet for twelve-year-olds high on end-of-day restlessness. Some deserved stillness. The clip of Five and Seven in the observation module had been bundled near the end of a longer update about course correction and hydroponic yield, almost an afterthought in the official release. Grace wondered who had decided to include it.
He was glad they had.
The footage was dim, grainier than usual, the camera likely mounted somewhere rather than actively held. Five floated upside down for most of it, purple thermal sleeves pushed to the elbows, faded hair drifting slightly in the low air movement. Seven hovered nearby, quieter than he usually appeared in public logs. Neither seemed fully aware they were being recorded at first, or if they were, they had forgotten enough to stop performing.
Grace watched Five reach out to stop Seven drifting away.
It was such a tiny gesture but it stayed with him.
The next day, he showed a shortened version to his class as part of a lesson on long-duration spaceflight psychology. The students were quieter than usual during it, perhaps because even they could sense the tone had changed. No one made jokes about Five gazing dramatically this time. No one shouted that Seven was obviously his best friend, though Grace saw several meaningful looks exchanged across desks.
When the clip ended, one student raised her hand, and Grace nodded toward her.
“Do you think they’re lonely?” she asked.
“I think they probably are sometimes,” he said.
The student frowned. “Even together?”
Grace thought about the launch. About numbers instead of names. About Two and Nine laughing through embarrassment because distance had made punishment meaningless and closeness had made loneliness harder to maintain. About Five smiling like trouble in one clip and staring into the dark in another with an expression too complicated for a classroom wall.
“Yeah,” Grace said. “Even together.”
The class stayed quiet for a moment.
Then someone near the back spoke softly, with the kind of conviction children sometimes carried when they understood something emotionally before they had the words for it. “I’m glad they have each other, though.”
Grace looked at the screen again.
Five’s hand remained caught in Seven’s strap, holding him in place against the drift.
