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.

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.”

Mateo’s expression softened despite himself. “That remains medically concerning.”

“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.