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.
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So, as yall may be aware, my health has been in a horrible, quite frankly dangerous place lately, and I will be going into a residential program to get the higher level of care that I need.
Unfortunately, that does mean I will have limited access to my phone and unreliable wifi, so my posts and chapter updates will likely be stalled or nonexistent until I recover enough to return home.
Which may take over a month, so I am going on a hiatus and am hoping that yall will stick around for my return!
Thank you all so very much for the kindness, support, and understanding you've shown to me and Escapism, I can not tell you how much it means to me!
Take care of yourselves and remember you are all loved, valid, and valued! 💕
I will be trying to get one more chapter out if I can or maybe a snippet of writing I have for future chapters with Simon, Grace, and Malcolm. But if I don't get around to that I am so sorry!
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.
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
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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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
Gonna break down the lyrics a bit more before I head to bed (sorry for no Escapism chapter today, Im finishing up my edits to catch mispellings and such but the day got away from me amdhakfg)
ANYWAY—
They're gonna execute the mother to elevate the man (Simon is a mama's boy, we know this, and there is no doubt in my mind that Eden weaponized that against him at some point)
They're gonna propagate the killer (Simon becomes the Butcher and literally propagates the tree, in a sense of course, though that becomes more literal when you factor in the last seed, with the corpses of those he has killed),
eliminate the youth (he never had much of a childhood to begin with and was young when the Filament Station was attacked, thus his youth was taken and adulthood forced upon him alongside burdens and responsibilities punishments he never should have had to bear)
They're gonna blind date everyone until you love them too (cult brainwashing and blind faith, need I say more?)
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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
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.
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