Chapter Text
-Begin Transmission-
Captain’s Log, Stardate 4132012
I’m beginning to wonder if space adventuring is really all it’s cracked up to be.
Not that space isn’t cool!
Space is super cool!
But…
Well to be honest when First Mate Egbert and I departed on this mission, I kind of hoped we’d be doing a lot more! Boldly going and saving green alien babes and whatnot.
But really it’s a lot of staring out portholes and wishing I was home again.
And as long as we’re being completely honest, First Mate Egbert is being a total buttface and won’t stop complaining about the rations. Honestly, I never saw someone scream so much over a simple Crockercorp Dehydrated Meal.
Hey are you talking about me on that thing?!
NO JOHN GO AWAY!
NO WAY, I CAN HEAR YOU! YOU CALLED ME A BUTTFACE!
YOU ARE A BUTTFACE, JOHN. YOU KNOW IT’S THE TRUTH, YOU SHOULD STOP WHINING AND JUST ACCEPT THAT YOU HAVE TERMINAL BUTT OF THE FACE!!!
LET ME IN, I AM GOING TO ERASE THAT TAPE!
-End Transmission-
When you look out at the stars you feel very small. You never realized back home how big the world was. Well, you sort of knew. You knew that the sky was vast and the ocean was deep. But your world was tiny. It was Grandpa and Bec and the little island you lived on with all its mysteries and hideaways that kept you entertained as a child.
And then you’d spent six years (SIX!!!) in the academy, training and learning algorithms and strategy and fission and physics, and you were good at them!
There’d been no time. No time to appreciate the variety and the people. The drunken kisses on finals night and the summer roadtrip upstate where you’d met Rose’s mom and gotten sick on tequila shots. All the times you’d hugged John and told him you’d see him in class, and even the time you’d had all to yourself waiting for that class to start.
And now you look out through the tiny viewport of your suit at the stars, the galaxies and the nebulas and the vast, vast, vastness of it all.
And you are so full and so empty all at once.
Your name is Jade Harley and you are the captain of a small vessel. You command a crew of two. There is the Worldcom Voyagebot (you call him WV for short, because who wants to say all that really). And there is John.
John Egbert is your first mate and your best friend since you started at the Academy. He is also a horse’s ass but only sometimes. Lately it’s all the time.
He’s on the other side of The Prospit, attempting to install a new waste disposal chute. The EFS Prospit is the small scouting ship that you both have called home for the last year. When you first arrived it was wonderful, like the dorms at school except you didn’t have to share and you had no classes or monitors and you could replicate nearly any food you needed provided you had the raw dehydrated materials. This meant about a week of ice cream sundaes before you and John got violently ill and swore off them for life.
The problem is that after a year The Prospit’s gotten cramped. You see John nearly every minute of the day. It’s not always a bad thing. When you get along it’s like a party.
When you fight it’s a disaster. Yelling and punching on your part, passive aggressive hissy fits on his. Every time it’s the same. You argue. You get him good in the gut and he always lets you get it out of your system.
Then he clams up and won’t speak to you for hours, days at a time.
It’s one of those days.
You give up on trying to figure out the problem with the radio relays and float over to him, your bulky suits identical except for the extra star on yours that marks your rank. He’s wrapped himself around the waste hose like he’s trying to wrestle with it.
“Give it up John, it’s never going to love you back,”
“Go away, I’m busy teaching this stupid thing a lesson,”
“John we’ve been over this, you’ve got to account for the anti-grav-“
“Blah blah blah space blah blah science stupid shit, I don’t care Jade leave me alone,”
“John stop being an ass!”
“You’re the ass, assbutt!”
“Oooooh John I am going to kick your assbutt all across this nebula if you don’t shut up and let me help you!”
You grab the hose from him and shove him with your foot. He floats away a bit and then lets his boots scuff to a along the hull. Eventually he’ll coast to a stop. You go about recoiling the hose like you always do. This is an old fight; John is never good at following regulation maintenance. He was trained to be a Communications Specialist on a big cruiser but somehow he got stuck with you.
Lately you’ve noticed with John it’s best to just follow routine. It goes something like this:
- Wake up
- Eat
- Shower
- Check radio relays
- Check star maps
- Eat
- Perform maintenance
- Watch a movie
- Talk shit about the movie (unless it’s a good movie and then you talk about how awesome it was)
- Play a game with WV
- Eat
- Set coordinates
- Say goodnight
- Sleep
Deviating from this routine can be disastrous. John isn’t good with change, and he certainly doesn’t like talking about how long you’ve been out here. In the last month the only difference has been that you talk less and less about movies and spend more and more time trying not to reach out and hold his hand during the sad parts. You’ve wanted to do more than that, actually, but you always stop yourself from thinking too much on it because really, what are the chances that macking on your idiotically handsome first officer on a two man one-robot ship will end well?
You stash the hose and look up to where you last saw John. Your heart stops.
He’s not there.
He’s not on the ship at all.
He’s floated away, you’re sure of it. He’s a wonderful person and a brilliant Comm Spec but he is shit at tying knots and he’s worse at making sure his tether is secure.
You proceed to flip your shit.
“John? JOHN?! JOHN DAMMIT, RESPOND! HOW FAR OUT ARE YOU, WHAT’S YOUR POSITION!?”
You pull on your tether to get some slack and shout an order at WV to trace any heat signatures around the ship. Then you take a running start and launch away from the hull, checking the circumference to catch a glimpse of his goldenrod suit, his blue eyes, his smile.
You can’t see him anywhere and that’s when you begin to scream.
What if his oxygen runs out before you find him? What if he freezes to death in his suit?
What will you do if you lose him?
"KSSSHHHH That’s, uhhhh, one small step for Jade, and uhhhh KSHHHHH, one giant leap for SAPKIND HEHEHEHE"
It’s around this time you stop screaming and look over to the main viewport of the shuttle.
John is standing inside with his helmet off waving like an idiot. He’s got a bowl of popcorn.
You are going to fucking kill him.
When you get through the airlock, the first thing you do is throw your helmet at him. He laughs and dances away like a manic ballerina on speed. He’s giggling like a child and wiping tears from his eyes as he holds his stomach.
“OOOOH my gosh Jade, I got you so good! This is better than when I put green dye in your showerhead back at the Academy!” He says this as you shuck off your suit down to your undergarments and all the while you can feel a blind fury pounding at the back of your head. Up to this point you’d always thought yourself a cheerful person. Mellow. Low-key.
Right now you feel like a demon steam pipe about to explode hot acid.
“YOU ASS!” you scream, upending his popcorn everywhere. He stops laughing as you start rounding your little communal table. He keeps to the other side warily. His eyes aren’t meeting yours; instead they are wide and glued to your chest.
“Er-Jade, I don’t wanna be rude but you’re uh…you’re kind of almost naked and I don’t know-"
“SHUT UP, SHUT UP SHUT UP YOU STUPID…TERRIBLE…STUPID ASS!!!”
“Jade I really don’t think you should-"
“NO!” You realize your voice is warbling and tears are spilling over your cheeks and smearing on your glasses. “NO THAT WASN’T FUNNY JOHN I THOUGHT YOU’D…you’d…” You choke again and pound a fist hard on the table while you fumble with your stupid glasses.
At least John has the decency to look ashamed. He finally comes around from his hiding spot and stands next to you. You can see, blurrily, out of your periphery that his hand is hovering above your shoulder, quivering like he can’t quite will it to settle.
“Jade, I…I’m uh…” he stammers. You try to fix him with a glare but all you do is blubber a little more and try to snort all the snot dribbling down your face back up into your nose. He starts again, “Gosh Jade, I’m sorry, I didn’t think you’d…I guess I shoulda realized, you would…care a lot if I uh…if I was in trouble…I just…didn’t think you’d get so upset.”
“Ugh, John you can be a real jerk, you know that?”
“Sorry, Captain,” he mumbles. He lets his hand fall.
“You’re not forgiven,” you scowl. Drawn up to your full height you’re still a head shorter than him. His hair is dark and mussed from his helmet, and he’s sweating a little, just enough to make his skin shine with the gold reflecting off his suit. His big, bright eyes stare down your small, tear reddened ones. He smells like butter and ozone.
Something snaps.
You grip the front of his suit at the same time that he fists a hand in your hair and you both smash your faces together like your lives depend on it, because way out here in the void it feels like they do.
John’s lips are surprisingly soft and his teeth scrape against yours. He opens his mouth too wide and slobbers on your chin while you’re busy dragging him down until both you’re sprawled across the floor and you finally settle in his lap. You pull back for breath but he dives in again and this time his tongue finds its way into your mouth and you pull him closer just to taste him better.
Between smacking noises and groans you hear yourself saying:
“Never. Ever. Ever. Do. That. Again.”
“I’m sorry,” he murmurs back as he nuzzles against your chin, your neck, bites at the tender flesh there, “I’m sorry I’m sorry I love you I’m sorry,”
You’ve got your hand around the back of his suit, a kind of zipper-clasp-button-down monstrosity. Meanwhile John’s fingers are making a beeline for the waistband of your underwear and your first thought is how annoyed you are that he’ll beat you to third base and your second thought is who the hell cares he’s finally going to touch your junk.
Then the world careens sideways and you both bash your heads against the console.
“WHAAAAT!?” you screech.
“HOLY CRAP!” John cries.
The two of you scramble up to the viewport. Something big and spiny is lodged onto the hull underneath the left engine. The Voyagebot’s automated voice chirps at you in loud exclamations.
“YOU THERE. BOY. GIRL. COLLISION DETECTED. UNIDENTIFIED OBJECT HAS MADE CONTACT WITH THE PROSPIT. KINDLY PLEASE INVESTIGATE. THANK YOU.”
You jam your discarded glasses back onto your face and grab John’s hand.
He squeezes your fingers tightly and looks you in the eye.
“What now Captain?”