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certain stars - a shigaraki x reader fic

Nothing in your training prepared you for this: A deadly virus that burnt through Space Station Ultra, leaving only two survivors -- you, and Mission Specialist Shigaraki, trapped together in the command module. With time, food, and life-support running out, you have a choice about how you'll spend your final hours. You just wish you had any idea what you're supposed to do.

This is for @shigarakislaughter (happy birthday!) who asked for a forced-proximity roommates to lovers situation. Being me, I had to make it weird, and being one of my fics, it had to get away from me. I'm posting part 1 now so you'll have it for your birthday, and part 2 as soon as it's done! Shigaraki x reader, rated M, space station au, angst + suggestive content. dividers by @cafekitsune.

You stare out the windscreen, into the darkness. As empty as what lies before you is, a pure black void pierced here and there by distant stars, it’s less disturbing than what lies on the other side of Station Ultra’s rotation – Earth, wrapped in clouds, brown and green and blue. It’s only four hundred kilometers below you, no distance at all when compared to vastness of space beyond your high orbit, and yet it’s never felt further away.

It shouldn’t be. There’s nothing wrong with the space station, no malfunction that would prevent the shuttle docked to this very module from bringing you and your fellow astronauts home. It’s not a mechanical problem that’s keeping you here. And as if you needed a reminder, your control panel blips at you, the shipboard computer speaking up in its cool, mechanical voice. “Ventilation recycling complete for all compartments. Parts per million remains unchanged.”

You knew it would. Your heart still sinks. “Understood. Contact Mission Control.”

Mission Control picks up right away. Director Sasaki’s voice fills your headset. “Status?”

“I recycled the ventilation system in all compartments. Parts per million in the affected compartments hasn’t changed.”

“All other systems?”

“Normal,” you say. “Propulsion, auxiliary, heat-shield, life-support. It all works like it’s supposed to.”

“And what about you?” Sasaki asks. “Are you functional?”

You haven’t slept well in three weeks. You aren’t eating much, to conserve food, but even if you could eat as much as you wanted, you’d still be too stressed to be hungry. You’re getting claustrophobic in here. The air feels stale, even though you know it isn’t. “As functional as can be expected. Given everything that’s happened.”

“Yes,” Director Sasaki says after a moment. “This was not an outcome anyone could have predicted.”

Someone, somewhere must have, though. You’ve taken three trips up to Station Ultra since you graduated from the academy, and every time you’ve come back down, you’ve spent a month in quarantine, just to make sure you didn’t pick up any deadly space bacteria while you were in orbit. It was kind of a joke to you, like it was a joke to everybody. The vacuum of space is completely inhospitable, incompatible with any form of life. There’s no way anyone could come back to earth with a disease.

But a virus isn’t life, not the same way other things are. A virus could survive inert, waiting for the correct conditions to claim a host and multiply within them. Conditions like warmth and light and ample food. The kind of things that exist inside a space station. It came inside on Togata’s spacesuit, when he returned from a walk to fix some of the reflective tiles on the propulsor housing, and as soon as it touched air, it exploded to life.

You were in the command module, because it was your shift. By the time the viral load in the compartment was significant enough to trip the ventilation system’s alarms, it had already spread to six other modules, infecting everyone it found. You sealed off all the modules in response, isolating each ventilation system from the others. It’s the only reason you’re still alive.

You, and one other person. “What about Mission Specialist Shigaraki?” Director Sasaki asks. “Is he functional?”

“Close enough,” you say. Shigaraki’s been climbing the walls, but then again, this is his first trip into orbit. Most first-timers are anxious enough without being walled up in a single module, hiding from a virus that’s deadly on contact. “He’s sleeping right now.”

“I’d like to speak to him as well. Wake him up.”

You’d rather not. He’s been having a hard time settling down enough to sleep. Still, you’re not interested in getting busted by Control right now. “Right away.”

You pick up a pen, stand it upright in the air, then give it a flick, sending it rotating end over end across the compartment to bump against Shigaraki’s cheek. He’s a light sleeper. He jerks awake at once, grabbing for his mask. “Is it –”

“Everything’s fine,” you say, then wince. “Control wants to check in with you.”

“Don’t know what they want me to say.” Shigaraki rubs his eyes. “Same shit, different sol.”

“Then it’ll be a really short check-in.” You hold the headset out, and Shigaraki makes his way across the compartment to you. Station Ultra’s gravity is about a quarter of Earth’s, enough to make smaller objects float and enough to let Shigaraki get from his makeshift bed to you without touching the floor once. “Director Sasaki, he’s here.”

Shigaraki settles the headset over his tangled white hair, and you go back to staring out the windscreen, listening with half an ear. “It’s shit,” Shigaraki says, in response to whatever Sasaki just asked him. “I’m sick of listening to you all pretend we aren’t going to die up here.”

Your stomach clenches. You can’t hear Sasaki’s response, but Shigaraki’s comes through loud and clear. “You all are stupid if you’re thinking about taking that kind of risk. If this thing gets down there, everything’s fucked, so stop lying and figure out a way to off us both. Go to hell.”

He takes the headset off, ends the call, and tosses it back to you. “You were right. It was short.”

“I told him you were functional,” you say lamely. “Now he’s going to think you’ve got Pandorum or something.”

“We’d be better off with Pandorum than whatever got in here,” Shigaraki says. You’re expecting him to go back to bed, but instead he sits down next to you at the windscreen. “At least Pandorum fucks off once you’re planetside.”

He stares out the windscreen. You study him, like you’ve been doing when you get the chance. Out of all the crewmembers you could have picked to get stuck with at the beginning of the mission, you wouldn’t have chosen him. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t happy he’s here.

Shigaraki was a last-minute addition to the crew, after the mission specialist who was supposed to go caught the flu, and he was unhappy about it from the second he set foot on the shuttle. You don’t think anybody in the history of manned spaceflight has ever bitched about going into space as much as he did on the way up, but once you docked at Station Ultra, you figured out why in a hurry. He has motion sickness – bad – and short of being on a fishing trawler in the North Sea during a storm, there’s no worse place for that than a space station that orbits the earth while moving in a constant rotation. In his spot, you’d have bitched, too.

You tried to help him. Whenever you were on shift in the command module, you altered the gravity of whatever compartment he was in, trying to make it more like Earth’s and less like whatever his version of Hell is. You parted with most of your share of Dramamine, then all of it, hoping it would help. Maybe if you’d let him know you were doing it, he wouldn’t have been such a jackass to you – or maybe he’d have been exactly the same. Worse, even. Based on the way he snapped at people who asked after him, he doesn’t want anybody’s pity.

As far as mission specialists go, though, he’s great at his job, using the lack of signal interference in orbit to gather data from the most distant unmanned probes that have been sent out, ones that have been lost to contact on Earth for decades. Voyager, Pioneer, New Horizons, Odyssey, Earendil – all of them in interstellar space, all of them still transmitting. One time you wandered into the observation module on an off-shift and found him hunched over something, headphones clamped down over his ears. You knew better than to ask what he was listening to, but when he looked up and spotted you, he kicked out the chair next to his.

You were so surprised that you didn’t question it. You sat down, accepted the pair of headphones he pushed at you, and settled them over your ears, too. At first there was nothing but silence, the quiet of deep space without a hint of static. And then you heard it, so faint it was almost a mirage – soft humming, interspersed with high, clear notes that reverberate endlessly, overlapping with others before growing too distant to hear. It sent chills down your spine.

The two of you listened in silence for a long time, until even the humming faded away. You pulled off your headphones and turned to Shigaraki. “What was that?”

“Earendil’s been picking it up. This is the first time I caught more than a few seconds.” Shigaraki tapped something on his console, and a red light flickered off. He was recording. “It’s music.”

“From where?” you asked. “Aliens?”

Shigaraki shook his head. “It’s not a signal,” he said. “It’s something else. People used to theorize about it, back before science existed, but –”

“Musica universalis,” you said, and he nodded. “The music of the spheres. It’s real?”

“If that was what I think it is, yeah.” Shigaraki’s expression was thoughtful, softer than you’d seen it before. “Cool, right?”

“Yeah,” you said, even though it didn’t feel like the right word. Eerie. Awe-inspiring. Unreal. You watched as Shigaraki bent back over his console, pulling out an old-fashioned jump drive and feeding it into the nearest port. “Cool.”

It was hard to look away from him then. It’s hard to look away now, even though he’s the only person you’ve seen for weeks, the only person still alive in here with you. His white hair, which needs a trim. His red eyes, half-lidded as he looks out the window. The scars on his eye and his mouth, which you’ve wondered about but never asked after. You’ve got questions about him. And even though he’s right, even though you probably are going to die up here, you still can’t get it together enough to ask.

The two of you sit in silence until one of the alarms you’ve set goes off. You know what this one’s for. “Virus check,” you say, and Shigaraki nods. “Let’s get this over with.”

Every six hours, you check for signs of the virus. Temperature, pupil response, blood pressure, pulse oxygen level – and then a self-exam to make sure the pale splotches that signify infection aren’t anywhere on your bodies. The air in your module is clear, still, but you and Shigaraki still act like you’re in quarantine. Like at some point you’ll be declared virus-free and safe to go home.

Your vitals are normal. So are Shigaraki’s. “I was thinking,” he says as you put the blood pressure cuff away. “I’m pretty pale. I don’t know if I’d be able to pick out the spots on myself.”

“Do you want me to check for you?”

“We should check each other,” Shigaraki says. Your face heats up, and you look away. “Accountability or something. In case one of us gets infected and tries to hide it.”

“If one of us got infected, it would be too late for the other one,” you say. “Fine, though. Let’s check each other. I’m sick of trying to look at my own back without a mirror.”

You feel beyond awkward stripping down in front of Shigaraki, even though you leave your underwear on. He leaves his on, too. “I’ll check you first, since you’re the one who’s worried about it,” you say. “Turn around.”

His back is more muscled than you expected, not that you were expecting much. Other than patches of eczema, dry and angry red from the bone-dry air, he looks clear. “I’m not seeing anything.”

“Check for texture,” Shigaraki says, and your face heats up again. “Himura was pale like me, and they thought he was clear until they touched him.”

You set your hands on Shigaraki’s back, and he startles at your touch, even though he asked you to do this. You try to think back to what you’re looking for, what the others in the infected modules reported before they succumbed. Hard, pale circles on the skin that don’t change color when pressed on. Shigaraki’s skin is clear, everywhere you run your fingers over it, but you check again, and again. You haven’t touched anyone in weeks, not even to high-five or shake hands. It’s hard to pull away.

You make yourself do it before things can get weird. “You’re clear. On your back at least.”

“Your turn,” Shigaraki says, and you turn away immediately. At least now you won’t have to keep your arms crossed. He takes one look at your back and laughs. “A tattoo? Are you yakuza or something?”

“People get tattoos where I come from. Not just gangsters.” You jump as the rough tip of one finger traces over the design on your shoulder. “Don’t touch it if you’re just going to make fun of it.”

“I’m not. What is it?”

“I thought you didn’t care about backstory stuff,” you say. “Isn’t that what you said when we got stuck? We’re not gonna bond just because we’re breathing the same air?”

Shigaraki doesn’t answer. He usually doesn’t answer when he’s wrong about something. “Are you going to tell me or not?”

“Are you going to check me for the rash or not?” You wait until Shigaraki’s hands move, then answer his question, mainly to give yourself something to think about other than the fact that he’s touching you. “It’s Centaurus. The constellation.”

“I know what Centaurus is,” Shigaraki snaps, almost absently. His fingertips drift across your shoulder blades. “Closest stars to the sun, right?”

“Yeah. Alpha Centauri.” For some reason, your throat goes tight. “I always wanted to be an astronaut, even when I was a little kid. But kids are bad at distance, and time – the stuff that tells you what’s actually possible when it comes to space travel. I used to say I wanted to fly to Alpha Centauri and back. Just a few light-years away.”

You wait for Shigaraki to make fun of little-kid you for not understanding how spacetime works. He keeps quiet, his hands moving down your spine, and you don’t know what to do except to keep talking. “I don’t remember who told me. Probably some smart kid in elementary school. And I felt really stupid about it for a long time.”

“So you got a tattoo of it?”

“Yeah. When I got accepted to the academy,” you say. “Everybody was talking about why they wanted to be astronauts – I know we seem like a bunch of meatheads to you scientists, but it’s not easy – and I thought about how excited younger me would have been to be where I was. All the amazing things I was going to get to do and see. And if it was daydreaming about Alpha Centauri that got me there, even if I could never go that far, I didn’t want to be embarrassed about it any longer.”

Shigaraki’s hands come to a stop at your lower back, fingers curling around your hips in a way that’s not strictly necessary for what he’s supposed to be doing. “Did you ever think you’d die out here?”

“I knew it was possible,” you say. In the academy, they take you through every fatal accident, one by one, teaching you ever detail to demystify it. “I didn’t think it would go like this.”

“Yeah.” Shigaraki exhales, and you feel his breath against your shoulder. “You’re clear, by the way. Turn around.”

You turn to face him and realize that the two of you are standing much closer together than you started out. Shigaraki’s hands lifted away as you turned, but they settle back on your hips at once. “Um –”

“I’ve seen you watching me,” Shigaraki says. Of course he has. There’s nothing for the two of you to watch here but each other. You should have known better than to think you could get away with anything. “What do you think about when you do that?”

You’re going to die, right? Both of you, up here, whether Mission Control finds out a way to kill you humanely or just lets you starve. It doesn’t matter what you say. “You’re pretty. I like looking at you. I look at you and I can think about something other than this.”

His grip tightens ever so slightly. “Were you ever going to do more than just look?”

You’re both going to die. It doesn’t matter anymore. You lift your hands, set them on his shoulders, and step in close. Close enough to kiss, if Shigaraki wants to – and he closes the rest of the distance himself.

It doesn’t mean anything. You’re the last two alive. If it wasn’t you, it would be someone else. You aren’t special. You remind yourself of that as his lips press insistently against yours, as you tangle your hands in his hair and hear him mumble your name. You could be anyone. It doesn’t matter that it’s you.

It’s an effort to detach yourself from Shigaraki long enough to lead him over to the pile of blankets you’ve each been sleeping in when it’s your turn to rest. You’re both mostly naked already, so it’s not a question of where things will go. It’s not the best sex you’ve ever had. With what’s hanging over the two of you, what you’re both trying to forget, you don’t think it’s possible to have really good sex. What you get instead is what you need – connection, contact, a way to ground yourself in one moment, with the only other person in the universe who understands what it’s like to stare this down.

Shigaraki’s desperate in a way that surprises you, responsive in a way you wouldn’t expect, even though this was his idea in the first place. Clingy, too – you’ve both finished, and he won’t let go of you, not even to let you get more comfortable. “I’m not leaving,” you say, exasperated. “Where would I even go?”

He finally shifts to one side, and you’re able to get settled, just in time for him to crawl all over you again. “Touch-starved much?”

“I waited too long,” Shigaraki says. You make a questioning sound. “I should have done it when I figured out who was messing with the gravity.”

Maybe you’re hallucinating. There’s no way he’s liked you that long. Or at all. “Okay, but if we’d hooked up in the command module back then everybody would have known about it.”

“They’d have been jealous.” Shigaraki’s eyelashes flutter against the side of your neck. “And alive.”

And now they’ll never find out, because they’re dead. You feel sick when you think about all the people who will mourn your crewmates, who are mourning them right now – their friends, their families, their girlfriends or boyfriends or spouses or children. Some of them have kids. Who lived, and who lived a little longer, came down to luck. Being in the right place at the right time. Being on shift in the command module for you, and standing in the doorway for Shigaraki, just as the alarms started to sound.

Something crosses your mind. “What were you doing at the command module that night, anyway? I never asked.”

“Why do you think?” Shigaraki’s voice is blurring with sleep, and you resign yourself to being stuck here until the next timer goes off. “Tell you later.”

You’re not all that familiar with hookups – you didn’t have a lot of time for that stuff with your job, or maybe you didn’t make time. You’re pretty sure you’re not supposed to fall asleep together, all but intertwined. But maybe the rules are different when it comes to hookups when you’re both about to die. Hookups where you like each other. Where things could have gone somewhere, maybe, if you’d had more time.

Sleep is tugging at you, trying to lure you down. It’s hard to resist when it’s warm. How long has it been since you were warm? Your sleeping pouch in the dormitory module feels like a distant memory, and with the ventilation isolated, the heaters haven’t been able to shift warm air to the command module in weeks. You and Shigaraki should have been sleeping like this the whole time, if it was ever appropriate for both of you to sleep at once. One person needs to be awake in the command module at all times. That’s you.

Station Ultra completes half an orbit, putting you on the dark side of the planet, and when the module rotates to show you the blackness of space, you look through the windscreen and pick out the stars. Alpha Centauri is right there, close enough to see, millennia away. You’ll never get there, but some virus could drift through space, right up close to Earth’s atmosphere? Bullshit. Then again, a virus isn’t as complex as a human. It doesn’t need air or atmosphere or water to survive. The only thing you and the virus have in common is –

Heat. The virus is inert in the vacuum of space. It activates in sufficient heat. Out in space, it can’t hurt anyone. What if you could send it back where it belongs? You sit up, shifting Shigaraki out of position, and he swears sleepily at you. “What the hell? Lie down.”

“No.” You tolerate Shigaraki’s attempts to drag you back down for about two seconds, then use the hand-to-hand training you received in the academy to pin him. “Listen to me. I have an idea.”

He stares up at you, wide-eyed, a weird flush in his face. “About how to die painlessly?”

“No,” you say. “About how to get home.”

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