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shantechni · 1 year ago

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Leo the Leader vs Leo the Learner

I know almost every iteration of TMNT emphasizes that the boys cannot properly function as a team without everyone there, especially without their fearless leader.

In terms of cartoons and movies though (as much as I've had time to watch/rewatch), the '03 and '12 series are my personal favorites, with Rise and MM tying for a very close second, because they both acknowledge issues in the team that the characters work to fix. '03 Leo and '12 Leo both struggle to lead the team at significant points in their respective stories, but the manner in which they struggle and what they struggle with differentiate, in a good way mind you.

In the 2003 series, the very first episode opens with Leo already being in the leading position as he tries to keep his brothers from going off script or doing something irreparable while they work to find Splinter. And when they do eventually find themselves in trouble, he's the one to lead them through it and make it back to Splinter in one piece. We see this formula more or less repeat for almost three seasons with a few different variables to spice things up; the brothers look to Leo for guidance, think of a plan of action with their combined efforts, and go from there.

Until the S3 finale.

The boys had times where they wondered if they'd make it out alive, but this was the first where it genuinely seemed like the end for their little family, and Leo could do nothing but watch as they execute their plan to blow up with the starship.

Of course they survive, otherwise we wouldn't have another four seasons💀but that short amount of time was more than enough to scar Leo, physically and emotionally. When he begins closing himself off from everyone, April's the only one to get him to open up and he lays it all out: He feels like a failure of a leader. He wasn't strong enough to protect his family or stop the Shredder, their last resort was going out with a bang, and they had to be saved by the Utroms. It doesn't feel like they won and he doesn't feel like he accomplished anything.

His fears and frustrations manifest into an ever present anger, slowly going from cold to hot, that chooses its target at random. His brothers don't know what to do since they don't seem to know why Leo's behaving this way, nor have they ever seen him like this. And dear Mikey says something that so accurately sums up their team: "...it can’t be fun always being the responsible one, and we’re the ones who really benefit. Raph’s free to not think ‘cause Leo does all the thinking for him. Don’s free to dream, and I’m free to take it easy, all ‘cause Leonardo is busy being responsible enough for all of us."

Mikey knows Leo is cracking under the pressure of his role partly because they've become so comfortable in their own roles, and no one refutes him. They didn't intend for Leo to translate this dynamic into, "everything is on you," but that's how it inevitably turned out over time. One could even argue that them not knowing how to handle this new Leonardo is yet another downside to them getting too comfortable, and it doesn't help that Splinter is the only one (aside from Usagi on one instance) who attempts to help Leo, even when the young turtle is pushing him away.

Things finally boil over when Leo pushes a little too hard though and harms Splinter during training, a regrettable action that clears away the steely air he had around himself for so long.

It's not until Splinter sends him off to see the Ancient One that Leo finally pulls himself out of that bubble of negativity and he accepts that there was nothing more he could've done in their final fight against the Shredder.

He did all that he could, and he can continue doing all that he can for his family.

In a weird way, Karai's violent eviction notice was exactly what everyone needed.

Leo was told his family likely hadn't survived the attack, something he'd spent countless days trying to prevent through relentless training, but he believed they were okay and ultimately found them alive. He wasn't there to protect them, but he sees for himself that they made it out without his help, and this was also a learning experience for the others if you think about it. They've already been shown to be capable of handling situations on their own or in pairs, but this was the first time they had to deal with a huge confrontation as a team without the comfort of their leader behind their shells.

Raph is the one who takes the helm for a brief few seconds and dishes out instructions amid the chaos, telling everyone to split up, find their way out and meet back up on the surface, with one last demand for them to be careful. And when Leo finds him, his distress is palpable; he couldn't find the others and therefore had no idea if they were okay, let alone alive, while he kept himself hidden from Karai's forces. Before this, we see that Raph is willing to make his own plan of action in this series' version of City at War when he doesn't go with Leo's word. But this time, in Leo's absence, we see he's willing to fill in as leader when the situation calls for it, and he realizes he isn't quite cut out for leadership like Leo.

We don't see any significant shift in team dynamics after this, mainly because Leo's inner turmoil from their fight with the Shredder is what caused problems with the team in the first place, but that goes to show that outside influences are what gave birth to the team conflict. Despite me pointing out earlier how Leo shoulders quite a bit not just because of his role but because of his brothers' roles as well, we can see throughout the series that Leo doesn't buckle from the pressure until they're in a situation where he can't effectively perform his role to his satisfaction.

As I mentioned in the beginning, Leo had been a leader in essence and in name for many years before their first home was raided by the Mousers. It makes perfect sense for him and his brothers to be accustomed to it by now.

2012 Leonardo is not used to being a leader. He may undeniably be a leader in essence, and had the drive and desire to be one, but he definitely wasn't a leader in name. The very first episode doesn't even open up with Leo being a leader, let alone with the turtles being a team. Their first time fighting together is a train wreck, and rather than Leo's strong sense of ethics and honor being the catalyst for his recruitment (not at first at least), it's the beginning of their long battle against the Kraang that convinces Splinter to officially deem him the leader of a newly formed team.

Being leader doesn't automatically mean the team will follow or respect you, which is something Leo learns right away thanks to his brothers, with Raph in particular challenging him when they butt heads over their opposing plans and ideals. It's touched upon in Rise of the Turtles Part 2, but Raph's desire to lead isn't a major plot device until New Girl in Town where he gets a taste of how Leo feels everytime he's responsible for his brothers and their wellbeing. However, Raph makes it known that even though he's resigned himself to not being the leader, he still doesn't like being told what or how to do something. Even Donnie challenges Leo when they can't agree on the best course of action in preparation for the Kraang, but Donnie realizes arguing was pointless as the invasion begins without warning and makes the idea of a second base the more favorable option.

His brothers aren't his only test of will though, as there are a handful of times where Leo questions his ability to lead and wonders if Splinter chose the right turtle for the job. Throughout all of that though, the boys ultimately rely on Leo and follow his lead when all is said and done.

Where this Leo truly differs from '03 Leo is that he not only struggles with leading a team that isn't so keen on being led, but he also struggles to grasp that he leads a team.

There are many times in the series where Leo runs off on his own or makes the decision to tackle something himself rather than with help, and that's not out of the norm, especially in comparison to his own brothers and '03 Leo. The problem is that '12 Leo's solo decision making more often than not leads to trouble (we all know the tale of him trying to turn Karai to the good side without informing the team about her). One of the first major examples of this though was in the S1 finale when he takes Splinter's words a little too close to heart and gives his brothers the scare of their life. Granted, him holding back Kraang Prime kept it on the sinking Technodrome, but you get what I'm saying.

His family actively calls him out on this behavior on two separate occasions during S4.

After they'd spent six months with the Fugatoid fighting the Triceratons and racing to collect every piece of the black hole generator before them, Fugatoid reveals that he was the one who made the world ending device, a reveal that lights a flame of betrayal in everyone, especially Raph and Leo. Believing that they're being used by Fugatoid, Leo rides off in a stealth ship on his own and nearly gets himself killed, a move that has his brothers scolding him, with Raph being the most vocal about Leo's idiotic decision: "Leaders are called leaders because they're supposed to lead a TEAM!"

The moment isn't lingered upon for long, but they all make it clear that they're tired of Leo's one man missions. They're a team, so they should plan and function like one.

Then, in Broken Foot, Leo starts doing missions with Karai and Shinigami in secret to aid them in taking revenge against the Shredder, but, in an attempt to find out what Leo was hiding from them, the other turtles get caught up in their plans and Donnie gets hurt. Leo immediately abandons Karai (who later apologizes for what happened) and Shinigami to check on them and come clean.

He explains to Splinter later on that he didn't fill anyone in on the situation at first because he knew no one would've agreed to help Karai get revenge, and he acknowledges that it was stupid of him to think he could control the situation. Splinter expresses his disappointment, and April reprimands him for once again not trusting his own team enough for them to help him.

Leo apologizes to Raph and Mikey afterwards, even going so far to say he probably doesn't deserve to lead the team after this, something Raph just harumphs at while Mikey remains silent. He pleads for their help in stopping and eventually aiding Karai and Shinigami, and they go along with him to fix things as a team.

We no longer get any one man missions from Leo in S5 (there surprisingly weren't any in S3 lol), likely for a whole list of reasons ranging from leading in Splinter's absence to learning from his mistakes over time. But he makes sure that whatever they have to do gets done together, and he does his best to keep his brothers in line.

I suppose one could say that '03 Leo remembered what it meant to be a leader, while '12 Leo discovered what it meant to lead.

#tmnt #teenage mutant ninja turtles #tmnt 2003 #tmnt 2012 #tmnt 2k3 #tmnt 2k12 #tmnt leonardo #tmnt leo #2003 leo #2012 leo #analysis

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taruchinator · 4 days ago

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“When We're Together” A Starshipping Fanfic 🎄

🎄 General Audiences

🎄 1k Words

🎄 Written for @starshippingweek!

Spending Christmas in a different time period was interesting to say the least.

Yusei sat on the soft carpet flooring of his boyfriend's home, with a mug of hot cocoa in one hand as he took in the sights of the small apartment. It was the first time he'd visited Jaden's home—not because he didn't want him to, but rather school didn't allow him to leave the dorms until the holidays started.

And so here they were, ready to do their Christmas gift exchange.

On the seventh day of Starshipping... 🎄

I'm not late in posting for once! Huzzah!

Enjoy the wrap up to this little story I built up over the last few days—it was truly an experience to get to come up with little prompts to go off of for each day.

Happy 12 Days of Starshipping and a Happy New Year! ^^

🎄 AO3 LINK 🎄

#my stories #12 days of starshipping #starshipping #jaden x yusei #yusei x jaden #jaden yuki #yusei fudo #yugioh 5ds #yugioh gx

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starshippingweek · 8 days ago

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On the third day of Starshipping,

Mod B gives to you a little silly analysis essay on the topic of: the boys’ “favorite” foods.

It’s a widely accepted and/or portrayed idea that Judai’s favorite dish is エビフライ (fried shrimp) and a less prevalent idea that’s nevertheless also found in fics and arts that Yusei loves milk. Some parts of the Asian fandoms even use the 🍤 emoji as a shorthand for Judai (thus making Starshipping 🦀🍤)! But where did these ideas come from - and how much of it is actually based on canon?

(Note: This analysis is sourced from the subbed version of both shows. I have not watched the dub of either and cannot account for how the dialogue may influence the conclusions drawn here.)

The fried shrimp dish first appeared in GX in Episode 66 (Judai’s First Dream Duel!). It is said to be a special, once-in-a-month treat at Slifer Red Dorm.

Earlier, in Episode 63 (Kenzan VS The Curry Fiend! A Spicy Duel), Manjoume complained that the food at Red Dorm was the same everyday. We can see that it basically consists of fish, pickles, rice, tofu, and miso soup. However, Kenzan remarks that no matter what the meal is, Judai just digs right in, and without his enthusiasm it is hard for the others to have the appetite. So, even though Sho calls this meal Judai’s favorite in Ep 66, it’s not hard to imagine that if you have to eat the same things every single day, you’d come to appreciate something rare and more indulgent like this fried shrimp meal in comparison, right?

I personally think that Judai is the kind of guy who loves to eat, who enjoys the experience of tasting food of all kinds, and he’s prone to excitement towards things that are hard to come by (another example being the Golden Egg Draw Bread - an very nice detail to reinforce the worldbuilding). Perhaps, outside of the context of Duel Academia, fried shrimp wouldn’t particularly stand out as Judai’s absolute favorite amongst all the other food options he may have at his disposal.

However, Judai must’ve developed a sentimental connection of some sort to fried shrimp. It’s entirely reasonable to imagine that after the show ends, as he travels the world, he will come to crave this dish as it reminds him of the memories he’s made at Duel Academia.

Yusei’s connection with milk, on the other hand, is considered as more of a meme that originated from Episode 11 (The Special Pursuit Deck Returns, Regain the Bonds with a Friend), where he walked into a bar at the direction of Himuro to meet Saiga. The bartender got pissy when Yusei ordered milk, but upon seeing the card that Himuro’d given him, complied and gave him a glass on the house.

Now, there’s practically no information to deduce why Yusei made this order in particular. The beverage never came up again in the series (unlike fried shrimp, which made another appearance at the very beginning of GX’s Season 4). Some on the interwebs have speculated that he was not of legal age to drink, so he ordered something non-alcoholic in order not to attract attention, but why not order something else less outrageous in the setting of a bar - such as juice or soda?

Here's my speculation: Since right after he’d been born, Yusei’d never been outside of Satellite. And Satellite, as it’s portrayed, is basically a colony, kept under blockade and sanctions by Neo Domino City. Food is hard to come by, and there is probably not enough agricultural land to keep cattle at a scale where dairy products would be widely available (given that the “island” was a part of the City not long ago). Based on living conditions during wartime and sanctions irl, and based on the fact that there is a black market in Satellite where goods are illegally transported in from Neo Domino, it is likely that dairy products were only available in processed, non-perishable, and lightweight forms such as milk powder or condensed milk.

Perhaps Yusei's always wondered, at the back of his mind, what fresh milk tasted like ever since he was a small child - the stuff they give the babies at the orphanage having all been formula/powder, and was also hard to come by. Perhaps the very first stop (aside from jail) he makes in Neo Domino presented him with an opportunity to quench his curiosity - and he took it. And, perhaps there might not be any meaning to infer at all - it was just an inside joke that the script writers and animators were making amongst themselves.

Whatever it is, he quickly downs the glass and leaves, the letting the plot move on to more serious beats - but this for sure became one of Yusei's most iconic moments because it seems to give us a glance into something about his character that we don’t often get to see. I, for one, would love to know all about the things he likes to eat/drink, as well as any emotional connections he might have to them because of his upbringing - similar to Judai’s attachment to fried shrimps, and I think it's great fun to keep thinking that he really is into fresh, whole milk.

These little details get me imagining so many ways they would show love and affection to each other. In Episode 152 of 5Ds’, Yusei is seen taking charge of shopping and cooking up a feast for Team 5Ds - an expression of the love and care he has for his friends. When they're together, he will learn how to prepare a perfect meal of fried shrimps for any time Judai’s cravings arise. On the other hand, Judai’s enthusiasm for food will definitely open up new avenues and culinary adventures for Yusei, who probably does not put as much care into this aspect of his life due to his origin. I especially love it when people touch on this kind of complementing differences between them in their arts and fics.

What do you think? What would a perfect Starshipping meal consist of? What will become their new favorite foods once they get together and get to know each other’s eating habits? Hopefully if you've read all the way to the end (woah!) your head is now filling up with ideas regarding this topic - feel free to share, I'd love to hear 'em!

#12 Days of Starshipping #starshipping #yugioh #yugioh gx #jaden yuki #yusei fudo #yugioh 5ds #judai yuki #headcanon #fanon #discussion

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will80sbyers · 8 months ago

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Do you still have the list of movies that inspired ST4? I had a picture of it but I lost it and I haven't been able to find it since. Please and thank you in advance.

Yep!

Long post warning lol

300

2001: A Space Odyssey

47 Meters Down: Uncaged

12 Monkeys

28 Days Later

13th Warrior

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective

Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls

Altered States

Amelie

American Sniper

Analyze This

Annihilation

Aristocats

Armageddon

Assassins Creed

Avengers: Age of Ultron

Arrival

Almost Famous

Batman Begins

Batman V. Superman

Basket Case

Battle at Big Rock

Beauty and the Beast

Beetlejuice

Behind Enemy Lines

Beverly Hills Cop

Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey

Billy Madison

Black Cauldron

Black Swan

Boondock Saints

Borat

Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Burn After Reading

Broken Arrow

Blade Runner

C.H.U.D

Con Air

Cast Away

Congo

Constantine

Children of Men

Cabin in the Woods

Crank

Casablanca

Carrie

Crimson Tide

Clueless

Dukes of Hazzard

Don’t Breathe

Death to Smoochy

Doom

Dark Knight

Dogma

Deep Blue Sea

Dreamcatcher

Drop Dead Fred

Die Hard

Die Hard 2

Die Hard 3

Don’s Plum

Dances with Wolves

Dumb and Dumber

Edward Scissorhands

Enter the Void

Ex Machina

Event Horizon

Emma (2020)

Forrest Gump

Fargo

Fisher King

Full Metal Jacket

Ferris Bueller

Fallen

Fugitive

Ghost

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Ghostbusters

Good Fellas

Girl Interrupted

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

Get Out

Good Will Hunting

Hackers

High Fidelity

Hellraiser 1

Hellraiser 2

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Hidden

High School Musical

Hurt Locker

Heat

Hunger Games

Highlander

Hell or High Water

Home Alone

I am Legend

It’s a Wonderful Life

In Cold Blood

Inception

I am a Fugitive from Chain Gang

Inside Out

Island of Doctor Moreau

It Follows

Interview with a Vampire

Inner Space

Into the Spiderverse

Independence Day

Jupiter Ascending

John Carter of Mars

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

James Bond (All Movies)

Julie

Karate Kid

Knives Out

Kingsmen

Little Miss Sunshine

Labyrinth

Long Kiss Goodnight

Lost Boys

Leon: The Professional

Let the Right One In

Little Women (1994)

Mad Max: Fury Road

Magnolia

Men in Black

Mimic

Matrix

Misery

My Cousin Vinny

Mystic River

Minority Report

Mr. and Mrs. Smith

Neverending Story

Never Been Kissed

No Country for Old Men

Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

North by Northwest

Open Water

Orange County

Oceans 8

Oceans 11

Oceans 12

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Ordinary People

Paddington 2

Platoon

Pulp Fiction

Papillon

Pan’s Labyrinth

Pineapple Express

Peter Pan

Princess Bride

Paradise Lost

Primal Fear

Prisoners

Peter Jackson’s King Kong

Reservoir Dogs

Ravenous

Rushmore

Road Warrior

Rogue One

Reality Bites

Raider of the Lost Ark

Red Dragon

Robocop

Shooter

Sky High

Swingers

Sword in the Stone

Step Up 2

Spy Kids

Saving Private Ryan

Shape of Water

Swept Away

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

Superbad

Society

Swordfish

Stoker

Splice

Silence of the Lambs

Source Code

Sicario

Se7en

Starship Troopers

Scrooged

Splash

Silver Bullet

Speed

The Visit

The Italian Job

The Mask of Zorro

True Lies

The Blair Witch Project

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

Tangled

The Craft

The Guest

The Devil’s Advocate

The Graduate

The Prestige

The Rock

Titanic

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

The Fly

Tombstone

The Mummy

The Guardian

The Goofy Movie

The Peanut Butter Solution

Toy Story 4

The Ring

The Crazies

The Mist

The Revenant

The Perfect Storm

The Shining

Terminator 2

The Truman Show

Temple of Doom

The Cell

To Kill a Mockingbird

Timeline

The Good Son

The Orphan

The Birdcage

The Green Mile

The Raid

The Cider House Rules

The Lighthouse

The Book of Henry

The A-Team

The Crow

The Terminal

Thor Ragnarok

Twister

The Descent

The Birds

Total Recall

The Natural

The Fifth Element

True Romance

Terminator: Dark Fate

The Hobbit Trilogy

Unforgiven

Unbreakable

Unleashed

Very Bad Things

Wayne’s World

What Women Want

War Dogs

Wedding Crashers

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape

Welcome to the Dollhouse

Welcome to Marwen

Wet Hot American Summer

What Lies Beneath

What Dreams May Come

War Games

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Weird Science

Willow

Wizard of Oz

Wanted

Young Sherlock Holmes

You’ve Got Mail

Zodiac

Zoolander

#stranger things #ask #st4 #st4 movies

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rambleonwaywardson · 5 months ago

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Clegan Astronaut AU - Part 10

Masterpost Read on AO3

AU Summary: the boys as modern day NASA astronauts. Taking place in 2025, Bucky is about to head to the moon as mission commander of Artemis III while Buck is CAPCOM at NASA. Established relationship (obnoxiously in love).

Author's Note: Since some of you were interested in exactly how accurate some of this is, fyi the experiments Curt and Bucky implement here, LEAF and LDA, are real experiment proposals that have been selected to fly on Artemis III. Not much info is available on them though, so much of their installation processes are made up by yours truly.

---

November 18, mission day 12 Ridge near Shackleton Crater, Artemis 3 Landing Site

It’s raining.

At least, Bucky imagines it is. He imagines that there’s dark clouds rolling in overhead, pops of electricity jumping across them, flashing through the sky. He imagines he can hear thunder rumbling, a breeze ruffling through his hair the same way it did on launch day, when he stood outside and stared at the sky, no one to say goodbye to. He imagines big, fat drops of rain hitting his face, splattering on the tip of his nose and streaking down his cheeks.

He can almost smell it, the damp earth scent of a hurricane mixing with the salty air blowing in from the gulf. Home. He can almost feel it, just out of reach.

Bucky opens his eyes. He has half a mind to close them again when faced with the reality that it is not, in fact, raining. But he sighs, deciding he can’t really complain, even if he misses something so simple as weather. The lunar horizon is a decent trade-off. He just kind of wishes it wasn’t so still all the time. It reminds him of survival training in the desert, when the only movement was the heat radiating up from the ground, creating a teasing mirage to goad his dehydrated brain. Except here, there’s not an atmosphere to do even that.

It’s their third full day on the lunar surface.

“Is it raining in Houston, Benny?”

There’s a brief pause. “Is that… some sort of code, or…?”

Bucky thinks for a moment, and then realizes that his words did, in fact, sound similar to ‘are the flowers blooming in Houston,’ a coded transmission from Apollo 13. That’s what Commander Jim Lovell said in order to ask Ken Mattingly, on CAPCOM, if he’d contracted the measles, exposure to which had caused Mattingly to be scrubbed from 13 at the last minute.

“No,” Bucky clarifies. “Just wanna know if it’s raining.”

There’s another brief silence while, Bucky assumes, Benny asks if anyone knows the weather outside of their windowless Mission Control room. He doesn’t bother to ask Bucky why he wants to know. All the CAPCOMs have quickly figured out it’s easier just to answer whatever bullshit question the astronauts ask. “No. It’s colder than usual, though. Only 46 degrees now.”

Bucky’s satisfied with that answer, and he’s not really sure why. He imagines Gale, who at this moment is probably just waking up in their home on the bay. Since it’s cold, he’ll be bundled in flannel pants and Bucky’s Yankees sweatshirt, which is just the slightest bit too big for him and hangs off his frame in a way that makes Bucky want to wrap him up tight in his arms. He might even have a throw blanket pulled around his shoulders as he wanders groggily through the house. Bucky doesn’t know how that man doesn’t overheat, but he knows all too well that Gale’s hands are always freezing. Bucky usually takes it upon himself to warm them up.

Two huskies are probably trailing at Gale’s heels. Bucky hopes they keep his hands warm.

He wonders if that’s a weird thing to think about. He decides it’s not. He mindlessly grabs at the wedding ring dangling from his neck, only to remember that he’s in an EVA suit. His ring is in Starship.

“Quit whatever the fuck you’re doin’ and help me out over here, Bucky.”

Bucky blinks and tries to turn his head to look at Curt, and then remembers that that doesn’t work in the suit either. He awkwardly turns his whole body before bounding several steps towards his crewmate, who is standing beside their rover. That’s the only way to move on the moon, bounding. Bucky used to mimic the movement as a kid, pretending to be Neil Armstrong in his backyard. But he’s learned in the past few days that it’s actually, literally, the only way to get anywhere in these bulky suits with almost no gravity to hold them down. Especially while they’re still early on in the EVA. The pressure in the suit is almost as high as it goes and inhibits their range of motion.

“What’s up?” Bucky stops in front of the open, unpressurized rover. They may be the first Artemis crew members on the moon, but as far as transportation goes, they drew the short straw. Starting with Artemis 4, surface crews will have a fully pressurized rover for long-distance drives. Bucky and Curt get basically the same piece of shit (sorry, NASA) that Apollo got, but bigger and supposedly less shoddy.

That last qualification has yet to be proven. Curt drops to his knees by the front left wheel. “Hold the damn tire while I replace the lug nuts.”

Bucky joins him on the ground and holds the tire in place. During their EVA yesterday, they took the rover on its inaugural drive, and that damn wheel is already causing them problems. But hey, at least they have the equivalent of a truck bed for hauling things.

Except, you need functioning wheels to haul things.

He grumbles about it the whole time, but Curt manages to get the wheel secured, though he’s still suspicious of it. “Well, good as we’re gonna get.”

Bucky stands back and stares at the wheel, agreeing that it’s still not quite right. But whatever it is is beyond what they can fix at the moment. So Bucky steps onto the rover, turns it on, and drives it forward. Curt takes a couple of bounding steps to catch up, jumps on beside Bucky, and they get on their way. It’s drivable, so they’ll take it.

–

“Oh shit. Fuck. Shit.” Bucky tries to reverse the rover, then tries to go forward again. Reverse, forward, reverse, forward. “Fuck.”

“Shit?” Rosie’s voice buzzes in Bucky’s ear. He and Alex are well on their way into deep space, approaching the furthest point in their orbit.

“Why the fuck are you here? Don’t ya have observations or somethin’ you could be doin'?”

“This is so much more interesting.”

Bucky has gotten the front left wheel of the rover stuck between two rocks. They’re not even very big rocks, so it’s embarrassing in that same kind of way as when you get your hand into a small space but then can’t get it back out.

It’s also the same wheel that he and Curt just fixed. Curt looks on, judgmentally. “If you break that wheel again I’ll murder you with a hammer.”

Brutal. Bucky’s mouth moves on autopilot, like a parrot repeating something unhelpful, as he conducts a pathetic million-point turn, shifting the angle of the tire by mere degrees every time he changes gears. “If iron can kill a star it sure as hell can kill you.”

There’s a pretty lengthy silence as Bucky continues his sad attempt at getting out of this predicament. Personally, he’s thinking about how, at this point, it would be faster to walk to their destination. Everyone else, however, is still hung up on his little proverb.

“What the hell does that mean?” Alex finally asks. Oh great, he’s here, too. Witnessing Bucky’s failure.

“It’s something Buck says,” Benny offers helpfully. “Something about stars dying when they start fusing iron.”

There’s a chorus of understanding hums that rise and then trail off as everyone realizes that it still doesn’t really make sense.

Alex: “Is that… a threat?”

Curt: “Can it be a threat if no one knows what he’s sayin’?”

Rosie: “Kinda makes it more of a threat, doesn’t it?”

Alex: “I don’t usually know what Buck is sayin’.”

Curt: “That’s just cause he don’t say much.”

Alex: “Or he’s too smart for us.” The others make noises of agreement. Major Gale Cleven. Mr. High school valedictorian, graduated summa cum laude with a degree in aerospace engineering and a minor in physics. Whatever.

Bucky: “Got it!”

The rover lurches forward, nearly throwing Curt, completely unprepared, off the side. He reaches out at the last second to grab Bucky’s arm, and for a moment it seems like they both might take a dirt bath on the moon, but Bucky holds tight to the steering wheel and keeps them both on their feet as he drives triumphantly into the distance.

They’re heading in a straight line towards the sun on the horizon, and in Bucky’s mind they’re cruising at high speed like Thelma and Louise (though, ideally, not off a cliff). In reality, they’re bumping along pretty slowly towards a little greenhouse that’s going to house their little plants for their cute little moon experiment.

Bucky parks the rover outside of the greenhouse. They spent much of the day yesterday setting it up, flipping NASA’s assembly directions this way and that as they tried to make sense of them like a piece of IKEA furniture. It’s kind of laughable, how such an unassuming little structure can look so damn out of place. It’s not even pressurized, having to do nothing but stay standing and block some of the solar radiation. It reminds Bucky of the Wizard of Oz, as if a tornado just picked a greenhouse up off the Earth’s surface and deposited it in the middle of the moonscape, where it sticks out like a sore thumb.

He steps down off the rover and walks around the back, where their first experimental payload is sitting on the bed. “LEAF” is printed across it in huge letters, and underneath, “Lunar Effects on Agricultural Flora.”

Curt meets Bucky at the back of the rover and pulls down the little cart they’d brought with them. Together, they heave LEAF off the bed and onto the cart and wheel it, inelegantly and with a lot of swearing, to the door of the greenhouse.

“Okay, you go in, I’ll cover you.” Curt steps aside and presses his back to the greenhouse wall, holding his hands together in front of him in what Bucky assumes is supposed to be an approximation of a handgun. The effect is lost with the EVA gloves.

Bucky glares at him – though that effect is also lost through an EVA helmet – as he opens the door and struggles to drag the cart over the threshold. “You’re an idiot.”

“I’m your idiot.”

Benny chuckles over coms. “Don’t let Buck hear you say that.”

“Buck ain’t here,” Curt says.

There’s a crackle, and then a warm, tired drawl. “Buck’s right here.” Bucky’s got no idea what time it is – that’ll happen when the sun stays basically in the same spot all day – but Mission Control must be in the middle of a shift change.

Curt: “Shit, our cover’s blown.” He lowers his hands and steps away from the wall.

Bucky: “Hey babe.”

Gale: “I’m watching you, Curt… Hi, John.” John smiles. It’s not darling or babe, but he grudgingly accepts Gale’s insistence on trying to speak professionally on shift. Even if Bucky refuses to do so.

Curt: “Actually, you’re only listenin’ to me.”

Benny: “That’s my cue to leave, boys. Have fun with your plants.”

Curt: “I will, thank you very much.”

Curt finally decides he’s had enough of watching Bucky struggle on his own and grabs onto the back of the cart, giving it a good shove that sends it the rest of the way into the greenhouse, narrowly avoiding knocking Bucky on his ass.

Curt: “Hey, Buck, wanna know what else I’ll have fun with?”

Gale: “No.”

Curt: “Bein’ Bucky’s big spoon since you ain’t here.”

Bucky: “Buck’s the little spoon. So that means you gotta be my little spoon.”

Silence.

Bucky wonders how hard Gale is blushing, and how many people just turned to stare at him in Mission Control. He wonders how many of them will start calling him Little Spoon, at least for the day. He feels a little bad. But only a little. Everyone’s always told him that he doesn’t have a filter, so it isn’t his fault that Gale married him anyways.

Gale: “I want you to know, the only reason I’m not gonna give you both the silent treatment is because it’s my job to keep you alive.”

It’s a good thing Bucky won’t be home for dinner tonight, or any night in the near future, because he’s pretty sure Gale “everything you say is being transcribed” Cleven would give him the silent treatment for embarrassing him like that.

Gale: “Get to work, boys.”

Bucky’s not sure exactly how LEAF works, but they’ve been tasked with it anyways. It’s a little space-age terrarium straight out of a sci-fi movie that’s being housed within the greenhouse structure. Inside is an enclosed growth chamber, in which a few different crop species that Bucky has quite frankly never heard of are supposed to grow hydroponically. The chamber protects them from the lunar environment, allowing NASA to study the effects of space radiation and partial gravity on plant growth and stress.

Bucky and Curt have been instructed to give the seeds inside LEAF water and nutrients through some elaborate external insertion mechanism as well as monitor their progress every day. By the end of the week, they’ll hopefully be able to harvest some of the faster-growing plants.

Once LEAF is in place, Curt sets to work ripping strips of duct tape off the roll he keeps strapped to his EVA suit. He sticks them on the glass above each crop species and labels them: Duckweed, Field Mustard, and Thale-Cress. Bucky is setting up the cameras and sensors they were instructed to deploy around it. Gale is grudgingly forced to speak to them – and act nice about it – so he can relay instructions on what the fuck they’re supposed to do.

“Is it working now?” Bucky asks. He’s spent far too long trying to get this one specific camera in front of the growth chamber to record.

“No,” Gale answers. “Did you turn it on?”

“Yes I fuckin’ turned it on.” Bucky crouches in front of the camera and gets as close to it as his helmet will allow. “Wait. wait wait wait.” He presses another button. “Okay now it’s on.”

Gale stays quiet for a moment, presumably waiting for video feed to pop up in Mission Control. “We see it now, Bucky.”

“Alright,” Curt says. “Let’s grow some moon plants!”

–

Thankfully, Gale doesn’t follow through with his threat of the silent treatment even after he finishes his shift and hands the console over to Helen. Thirty minutes after leaving Mission Control, he’s tucked into a small room at Johnson Space Center that they’ve designated “the Family Room,” where NASA has a direct two-way audio/video line set up for Artemis astronauts to talk to their family members, even on the moon. His tie is loose, top buttons undone, and his hair gel has given up. Exhausted, he takes a sip of his coffee. His… fourth? Fifth? Of the day? Maybe?

Bucky has told him time and again that if he drank alcohol the same way he drinks coffee, he wouldn’t be sober a day in his life.

With Curt off in another corner of the lander, headphones on as he watches a movie downloaded on his NASA-issued computer, Bucky is in his commander’s seat. He’s looking back at Gale through the webcam on his own computer, for once able to talk to each other with some semblance of privacy. And they can see each other.

When the video call first connected, the first words out of Bucky’s mouth were that Gale looked like shit. Gale glared at him until Bucky rolled his eyes and gave him a more appropriate greeting. Then, and only then, did Gale drop the iciness and take the opportunity to talk to his husband.

“So you know how in The Martian they say once you grow crops somewhere you’ve colonized it?” Gale’s not entirely sure what part of their present conversation – about their elderly neighbor, Mrs. Mason’s suspected torrid affair – caused Bucky to ask this question.

To be honest, though, the ability, as CAPCOM, to disregard the why of an astronaut’s question and simply follow up without a second thought, is a trained skill. And Bucky has always been the only training Gale needs. “Pretty sure that’s not just from The Martian.”

Bucky narrows his eyes and shrugs. “Okay. But yeah?”

Gale nods. “Okay.”

“Are we colonizing the moon?”

“No.”

Bucky eyes Gale suspiciously and leans closer to the camera. “Why?”

Gale sighs and leans back in his chair, thinking about it for a moment. “Shouldn’t the plants be in the lunar soil to call it colonized? Yours are growing hydroponically above the surface. And they haven’t grown yet.”

“Are you just sayin’ that cause you’re still mad at me?” Bucky knew he wouldn’t escape his ‘little spoon’ comment unscathed.

Gale lifts his coffee cup and takes a sip to hide his smile.

They sit in a familiar and comfortable silence for a moment before Bucky runs a hand through his hair and leans back. “I wish you could see this, Buck. I wish you were here with me.”

“I’m with you,” Gale reminds him.

“You know what I mean.”

Bucky glances out the window of Starship, and he looks so wistful and beautiful. His eyes are wide with love and wonder, at the beautiful alien world around him on one side of the camera and at the wonderful man that keeps his world turning on the other. He looks excited with a child-like awe, just like he looked on the station. Just like he looks every time he flies a plane. Just like he looked so often in college when Gale was still falling in love with him bit by bit. And just like he looked on their wedding day. That same wild wanderlust and love for the universe that has always blown Gale away.

When Bucky looks at him again, Gale says, “Tell me about it.” He’s been right there with the crew almost every step of the way. He knows the mission plan inside and out. He’s seen the footage they’ve taken and he’s heard their reactions to almost every milestone. But he wants to hear it from Bucky. Not from Mission Commander Major John Egan.

Bucky grins at him. “It’s like a dream, Buck. Like… nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s better than I thought it would be.”

“Even the whole being stuck in a space capsule and you die if you leave it without a suit thing?”

Bucky shrugs. “If I had to die, the moon isn’t a bad place to do it.”

He knows he made a mistake the moment the words are out of his mouth, and he’s not usually one to admit that. But he watches Gale deflate, his brow crinkle as he works his jaw and looks away from the camera. “Don’t say that,” Gale whispers at the same time that Bucky raises his hand and says “Sorry, not the time.”

Bucky knows that Gale is a little scared, no matter how much he tries to hide it from everyone else. He won’t say it out loud, and he would hate it if Bucky did. So Bucky doesn’t. He’d be afraid, too, if the roles were switched. And one day they will be. Gale gives a curt nod to his apology, and they don’t speak of it again.

“The sun is always so low in the sky,” Bucky says instead. “Like you’re always waitin’ for it to rise but it never does. The shadows are something out of a nightmare, I swear to God. They’re huge and fuckin’ dark. We use flashlights to walk through them. You know that.” He tells Gale every detail he can think of about what it’s like on the moon. The way the shadows streak the landscape like spilled ink. The way the soil feels under his boots, sinking and crunching at the same time like the sharpest grains of sand. The way Earth looks so small and unassuming, how peaceful it seems even though they know it’s anything but, a little blue oasis in the middle of a dark universe. He tells Gale that he looks at that planet in the lunar sky every night before he sleeps, and he thinks about him. Gale was right, after all. He is sappy. At least about his husband.

He tells him about the parts of the EVAs that Gale missed, when Benny was CAPCOM instead. He talks about the rover breaking not even a full day into its life cycle, the tire somehow coming clean off when it got caught on a rock and causing Bucky to tumble into the dirt (“I’m fine! Gale, I’m fine. Benny would’ve told you if I wasn’t fine”). He talks about the strange rock formation that he and Curt found yesterday morning – several giant boulders stacked on top of one another in a way that doesn’t look a) natural, or b) balanced. Then they start discussing the other experimental payloads that Curt and Bucky are scheduled to install in the coming days, but they quickly agree that talking shop can wait until they’re actually working.

When Gale yawns and rubs his eyes, looking distractedly off to the side, Bucky frowns. “Hey, doll, look at me.” Gale blinks and then does as he’s told, lazily tilting his head and raising his eyebrow in a way that says ‘happy?’ Bucky wants to reach through the screen and brush back the loose strands of hair that have fallen over his forehead. “You’d tell me if you weren’t okay, right?”

Gale huffs and nods, allowing the smallest smile. “Yeah, darlin’. I’d tell you. Just tired as hell.”

“Promise?”

“Cross my heart.”

As their call comes to an end, they spend a minute or two simply staring at each other, taking each other in. Neither of them know when, or if, they’ll be able to schedule another call like this during the mission.

“Stay safe out there,” Gale finally says. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

Bucky wants to say ‘don’t count on it,’ flash a shit-eating grin, like they used to before either of them did anything remotely dangerous. It’s their little morbid joke. Their way of dealing with the uncertainty and worry without having to think too much about it.

But he knows this time is different. This mission isn’t like the others, and there’s no use pretending it is. Looking at Gale, seeing how exhausted he is and knowing how tirelessly he’s working on the ground, how much sleep he’s probably losing between his job and worrying about Bucky… hell, Bucky can’t bring himself to say it. He doesn’t want to risk making his husband’s face fall again today.

So instead, he says a quiet, “I miss you.” It makes the corner of Gale’s mouth pull up in a sweet little smile, and Bucky thinks he did something right.

Gale presses his fingers to the corner of the camera. “I love you.”

“Talk to you tomorrow, angel.”

–

When Gale gets home that evening, he grabs the mail out of their mailbox. Flipping through the various advertisements and envelopes, he stops short at the front door. Tucked into the middle is a piece of paper with unfamiliar, messy handwriting scrawled across it.

“Praying the queer dies on the moon.”

Gale stares down at the message, then glances up and down their quiet, friendly neighborhood street. They’ve lived here for a few years now, since before Gale’s ISS mission. They’ve gotten to know their neighbors well. Other than Benny, who lives at the end of the road, it’s mostly a collection of young families – many of which are associated with the space center in some way – and retirees who have never been anything but kind to Gale and John. Everyone has always been very neighborly, and Gale would go so far as to call most of them friends. They have dinners together, throw a block party here and there, do the usual neighborly favors for one another. Hell, Gale’s even babysat for some of the families from time to time. John taught a couple of the kids how to ride a bike.

Certainly, none of them have ever expressed something like this, and Gale doesn’t believe for a moment that this message came from anyone around here. He has half a mind to go next door and ask Mrs. Mason if she saw anyone stick this in his mailbox. Aside from the fact that Gale is fairly certain the widow is having an affair with a much younger married man, she’s always looked out for him and John. She also takes it upon herself to play neighborhood watch and always seems to know everything about everyone on their street. If anyone saw this happen, it’s her. But he doesn’t want to worry her, and he certainly doesn’t want her telling their other neighbors about it.

He’s done a decent job of avoiding the worst comments on social media, mostly because he barely goes on social media unless Marge tells him he needs to keep up his online presence. He knows the naysayers are still out there, though. And now it’s crossed the digital line.

If we’re lucky, the fag…

Disgusted, Gale grits his teeth, crumples the paper, and tosses it straight into the recycle bin with the rest of the junk mail. He takes a breath and tries to push down the anger. Then he walks into his house, the one he shares with his wonderful, brave husband, and he laughs as the dogs rush to greet him.

–

November 19

It’s close to 3am in Houston. Benny’s desk is littered with empty coffee cups, gum wrappers, and an empty takeout container from what he supposes is technically lunch. Meals don’t make as much sense when your work schedule is from midnight to 8am. Nothing makes as much sense when your work schedule is from midnight to 8am. He finds it funny: he used to eat tacos at 3am when he was in college, but that was a product of burning the candle at both ends rather than working the night shift. Night shift for NASA Mission Control.

Except, it’s not technically night shift either, because according to GMT, the time zone that Mission Control and the crew operate on, it’s actually nearing 8am. Which is a far less acceptable time for eating tacos.

The crew has been awake for two hours now. This morning’s wake-up alarm on Starship was Hot To Go by Chappell Roan. No one has admitted to choosing that song yet, but most people are betting on Curt. Benny, however, thinks it was all Bucky. He has to admit, there are few things funnier at 1am than a room full of extensively trained, highly professional, and terribly exhausted flight controllers in business clothes singing “H-O-T-T-O-G-O, You can take me hot to go” over and over.

“Missing the wife, Egan?” Benny asked once Bucky had shut off the alarm. There was quiet snickering from the flight controllers behind him. Bucky didn’t dignify that with a response.

Gale really doesn’t know what he’s missing with these wake-up calls.

While Rosie and Alex are nearing apolune, the point in their orbit farthest from the moon, Bucky and Curt are now out on the lunar surface once again. They’re just about 15 minutes into their morning EVA, which is scheduled for 5 hours. Their first stop is checking in on LEAF.

Bucky: “Is that…”

Curt: “Yes.”

Bucky: “Hi there.”

The flight controllers look at the video feed in awe.

Inside the growth chamber, two little seedlings have sprouted, tiny green leaves reaching up towards the sunlight. No matter how small, there’s something about seeing life take root in an environment designed to take life away that feels extraordinary.

–

40 minutes in, and Curt and Bucky have driven the rover further out from Starship than they’ve gone thus far. That busted wheel is holding, but they’ve brought a repair kit with them, not liking the way it rattles here and there over the uneven terrain. “Ain’t no Triple A on the moon,” Curt had said as he tossed the kit into the rover. Then he looked at Bucky a little too pointedly. “But don’t think for a second that this is permission to do somethin’ stupid.”

Either way, they made it to the other side of the connecting ridge next to Shackleton, and the rover is still intact. They’re surveying the surface, trying to hash out where they should install their second of three scientific instruments. The Lunar Dielectric Analyzer (LDA) is meant to use electric currents in the soil to detect the presence of water ice below the surface. The astronauts are also collecting soil samples for the geologists back home, dumping dusty regolith into bags and labeling them with their coordinates.

In the pitch black shadow of the connecting ridge, they have to work by flashlight. They were instructed to check a variety of sites, both light and dark, but they’re starting with the ones that receive less sunlight, since they’re colder and more likely to have the right conditions for ice to exist. Shackleton itself was identified by scientists as having ice deposits, making the ridge an ideal mission site. However, short of rappelling into the crater, which they will not be doing, this is the closest they can get to those known deposits at the moment. Bucky is closer to the crater, up on an incline with the rover, while Curt is further down, about 60 or 70 yards away.

“Note,” Bucky says. “Site B, sharp gray dust that won’t get the fuck off my gloves.”

“Hey, that’s what I have at site C!” Curt exclaims. He pops up in the distance, shining his flashlight up towards Bucky. Bucky shines his back, and Curt waves.

Bucky: “Houston, site B doesn’t seem any more promising than A, and I don’t like this incline. Thinkin’ we should stick to flatter surfaces.”

Benny: “Roger. We will eliminate site B as an option.”

Bucky: “Okay, I’m gonna head back down to Curt.”

Bucky steps up onto the rover and turns it on, waiting for the headlights to flicker to life. Then he eases into drive, and starts to slowly descend the slope.

–

Benny sips on his coffee and jots down a few notes about the LDA candidate sites. They’ll have to make a decision in the next hour or so in order to stay on track with the EVA schedule. But with the issues they’ve been having with the rover, he doesn’t want to rush them along too much.

“Bucky, how’s that rover wheel doin’?”

“Seems fine,” Bucky replies, but Benny doesn’t like the hint of uncertainty coming through. “Still seems off, but goin’ smoother than it was.”

“I’ll check it when you get down here,” Curt says. “Might just need tightened again.”

Benny makes a note for Red Shift that they’ll have to build in time to troubleshoot that wheel a little better during the afternoon EVA. He relays the thought to Red Bowman, the Blue Shift flight director. He agrees.

“Alright Bucky,” Benny says. “We’ll get you guys some time to work on that wheel this afternoon. For now just take it easy and-”

“Fuck!”

“Bucky?”

Benny hears Bucky’s breath catch, followed by a few aggravated grunts, and then silence.

What the fuck just happened?

“Bucky?” Benny glances around the room. Red and several of the other flight controllers are doing the same, many looking right at him. He blinks and looks at his console. His own heart rate is creeping up. “John? John, do you copy?”

Nothing.

He pushes his chair back and gets to his feet. He doesn’t know why, but he can’t stand sitting down all of a sudden. He tries to keep his voice steady as he watches the seconds tick by on the mission clock. “John, come in John.”

“Flight?” Smokey, the Blue Shift flight surgeon, looks first to Red, and then to Benny. All three of them are on their feet, forming a triangle that stretches across Mission Control as they stare at each other in alarm. The rest of the room is silent.

Smokey looks down at his console. “Major Egan’s vitals are all over the place. His suit pressure-”

Benny is suddenly aware of a very faint beeping noise coming in over Bucky’s coms. A suit alarm.

He’s very worried, just for a moment, that he might pass out.

–

From where he’s kneeling in the darkness of the ridge, Curt can hardly see anything. Since the moon has no atmosphere for sound to travel through, he also can’t hear anything other than the voices over coms. He scrambles to his feet the moment he hears Bucky yell “Fuck.” One word, but the tone in which it’s said is all too familiar to Curt, a fellow pilot. It’s a tone that’s, all at once, as horrified as it is resigned. The moment you know you’re going down and there’s essentially nothing you can do about it.

His flashlight beam barely goes far enough for him to make anything out for certain, but he can see glinting metal flashing through the darkness. Its pattern isn’t consistent enough to be the rover easing down the slope like it’s supposed to.

He squints, watching it for a few more seconds, before he says “Oh god.” The rover is tumbling end over end down the slope, and part of him can’t help but think how wrong it is that there’s no crashing sounds, no sound of metal banging and bending. It’s just quiet. Like a silent movie. Benny’s in his ear, trying to get John to respond, and Curt realizes that, wherever John is, he can’t respond. John’s not going to respond. And he knows he needs to tell Mission Control what he’s seeing, but there’s not enough room in his brain for that. All he can think is run.

So he fucking runs.

His boots slip and slide in the regolith as he takes awkward, bounding steps up the slope, too much effort for not enough gain. His suit is still stiff, keeping him from bending his joints enough to run, but he has to. He has to.

Smokey must note that his heart rate is spiking, because Benny’s saying “Curt, are you okay? You’re using too much oxygen.”

“I’m not concerned about my fuckin’ oxygen,” he growls. The slope is getting steeper, and he starts stumbling over his own feet after about 20 yards. The beam of his flashlight is shaking uncontrollably, but he can see the metal of the rover somewhere ahead, reflecting the light. It’s finally come to a stop, about 15 more yards away.

He hears Benny ask, “Curt, do you have visual?”

“Uh huh.” That’s all he gives them, trudging on even as the loose dust and rock under his feet falls away, making it near impossible to get anywhere. He’s practically running in place like a damn cartoon. He slips and goes down on his knees, catching himself with his hands. His flashlight tumbles away and he lunges to grab it before he gets himself lost in the darkness. “Fuck fuck fuck.”

He rips a piece of duct tape off the roll looped to his EVA suit and uses it to secure the flashlight to his shoulder. He adds a few more pieces over top, ensuring it’ll stay, and then he drags himself to his feet again. He’s breathing too hard. He knows with sudden clarity that if he doesn’t get himself under control, he won’t have enough oxygen to get back, just like Benny said. And if he can’t get back, he can’t save John.

He takes one more deep breath and then forces himself to calm down.

Benny is still saying John’s name.

When Curt finally makes it to the rover, though, he knows there isn’t going to be an answer. All there is is a quiet beeping noise buzzing around Curt’s brain like a fly.

The rover is on its side but, somehow, miraculously, still on, headlights shining into the shadowed unknown. That stupid left wheel is laying flat on the ground right beside it. All of the materials they’d packed, including the LDA payload and the repair kit, are scattered across the slope, and Bucky…

Bucky is lying on the ground, face up and half under the rover. When Curt gets to him, he drops to his knees and puts one hand on Bucky’s shoulder. With the other hand, he rips the duct taped flashlight off his suit and shines it on his commander’s face. “Bucky?” he whispers, even though he knows it’s useless.

Bucky’s eyes are closed, and Curt can’t tell if he’s breathing or not. He realizes that the quiet, incessant beeping he’s hearing over coms is an alarm from Bucky’s EVA suit. In the glow of the flashlight, he sees something dark glistening inside Bucky’s helmet, above and behind his head. After a second, he realizes that it’s blood, seeping through his com cap. It's smeared across his forehead, too, trailing down his temple.

For all the oxygen he was using before, Curt can barely breathe, now. “Benny?”

“Is he awake, Curt?”

Curt freezes, trying to sort through that question. Is he awake means he’s not dead. Houston still has his vitals. He’s not dead.

Curt swallows and clenches his jaw. “Benny, we have a big, big problem.”

–

Alive. He’s alive. He’s alive.

For how much longer?

Benny is forced to remain calm, something he’s familiar with as a pilot. It’s just, usually, as a pilot, your crew members aren’t on another planetary body hundreds of thousands of miles away.

But he works through it anyway. Work the problem. Work the fucking problem.

He guides Curt through getting the rover righted, through pulling Bucky’s unconscious body away from the wreckage, through tracking down the repair kit, through reattaching the wheel. He’ll barely remember any of this by tomorrow. He barely remembers any of it now.

He looks at Red across the room as a horrible, urgent thought strikes him right in the chest. “We have to tell Gale before Red Shift comes in.”

Usually, when an astronaut gets hurt on the moon, they wait until the situation is under control to contact the family. It’s just, usually, when there’s an astronaut involved, the family members aren’t scheduled to come in for a Mission Control shift in two hours.

Red's eyes lock on him, and Benny sees them widen almost imperceptibly. He nods. They both know: it has to be Benny. There’s no other choice. Red turns to the nearest flight controller and grabs them by the arm. “Get Helen here. Now.”

–

It’s raining.

Fat, heavy drops pounding on the roof of the house in Nassau Bay. Pops of electricity flash through the sky, jumping from cloud to cloud, and the smell of damp Earth mixes with the salty air blowing in from the Gulf.

But none of these are what wake Gale Cleven.

It’s not even the dogs, with their wet noses and hopeful eyes and insistent whines. Instead, it’s a gentle hand shaking his shoulder. John?

No, not John. Can’t be John.

“Buck, wake up.” The voice is calm and low and yet… sad. There’s only two other people with a key to this house. One of them is Marge, and the other… shouldn’t be here either.

Gale opens his eyes and stares out the window into the eerie, rainy night. Slowly, he turns his head to squint at Benny in the dim light of his bedside lamp. “Benny? Why…? Am I-”

Why are you here? Am I late? Did I oversleep? That’s not like myself. It’s still dark outside.

These are all thoughts that don’t make it out of his mouth, stuck in the quicksand of his brain as he groggily turns his head and looks at the clock on the bedside table. It’s only 5am. He wasn’t even planning to get up until 5:30.

He stares blankly at the time for a few solid seconds, trying to understand, before his entire world comes to a screeching halt. If Benny’s here…

Benny would’ve told you if I wasn’t okay.

Gale’s heart starts pounding before he feels like it drops clear out of his chest, nausea rising to take its place. His lungs stop taking in air, and his hands scramble at the bedsheets as he tries to sit up straight.

No.

Benny’s hand slides off Gale’s shoulder in his panicked movement, and the disappearance of that warm, comforting touch is another shock to Gale’s system. He’s untethered. A feeling of loss swells through him as he looks up at his friend.

Benny is looking down at the floor, though, avoiding eye contact. He isn’t saying anything.

The room spins.

No.

When Benny looks up again, Gale is staring back at him with the widest, most horror-stricken eyes, sitting there, looking exhausted and confused and wrecked and frightened, gripping too hard at the fabric of the old Yankees sweatshirt that Benny knows doesn't smell like Bucky anymore. Benny’s own heart breaks into pieces. He wants to fall apart right there and then, but he can’t. It's his job not to. Instead, he sits there calmly on the edge of the bed, puts his hand back on Gale’s shoulder, and he realizes that there’s a faint trembling there.

He takes a deep breath as he looks Gale in the eye.

“No,” Gale whispers. He shakes his head. His breath starts coming back in slow and shallow spurts, like his body is trying to boycott oxygen until he knows that his other half is still breathing, too. “Is- Is he-”

Talk to you tomorrow, angel.

If we’re lucky the fag will die up there.

Praying the queer dies on the moon.

I love you.

If I had to die, the moon isn’t a bad place to do it.

Don’t count on it don’t count on it don’t count on it...

“He’s alive.”

Gale makes a terrible noise somewhere between a gasp and a sob, his heart and lungs going back to work in fast-forward as he bows his head, clutching it in his hands.

Benny swallows. “But it’s bad, Buck. It’s bad.”

…

Part 11

#clegan astronaut au #clegan #clegan fic #masters of the air #mota #john egan #gale cleven #buck x bucky #bucky egan #buck cleven #curt biddick

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duckprintspress · 7 months ago

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12 Great Reads for Agender Pride Day

May 19th was Agender Pride day, and while we are a couple days behind on posting our rec list, we are no less proud to share these books with explicit or implied agender representation! Note that as very few books have explicit agender rep, we (as we always do) have allowed our rec list helpers to suggest books that served agender vibes as well, so if you read/have read some of these, you may feel differently about the gender representation in the books…and that’s okay! All readers bring and take away different things from their readings, and we support you, as we hope you’ll support us. These recs are from E. C. and several anonymous contributors. This list overlaps a little and adds some new titles to the eleven recs we had for Agender Pride Day last year!

All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries series) by Martha Wells (The Murderbot Diaries series) by Martha Wells

How Your Garden Grows by Nicola Kapron in the anthology Aether Beyond the Binary

The Heartbreak Bakery by A.R. Capetta

Fortune Favors Felines by R. L. Houck

A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Monk & Robot series) by Becky Chambers

RG Veda by Clamp

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Breaking Bread by Beth Lumen in the anthology Add Magic to Taste

Land of the Lustrous by Haruko Ichikawa

The Left Hand of Dog (Starship Teapot series) by Si Clarke

Love Me for Who I Am by Kata Konayama

On Not Going to Parties by Stephen G. Krueger in the anthology He Bears the Cape of Stars

You can view this list as a shelf on Goodreads!

Looking to buy one of the above books? Set us as your bookshop.org affiliate and browse this and our other rec lists as shoppable lists!

We’d LOVE to read more books with agender representation – do you have any recommendations for us?

#duck prints press #rec list #agender #agender pride #agender pride day #book recommendations #agender books #agender characters

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ak-vintage · 8 months ago

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Quarry - Chapter 12

Pairing: Din Djarin (The Mandalorian) x f!reader

Summary: Din Djarin is on what he expects to be his last bounty hunt for Greef Karga. After all, Nevarro is swiftly moving away from its previous reputation as a Guild member’s paradise, and Din has more important concerns now, like finding a Jedi to train his mysterious foundling. However, after capturing a wanted starship engineer who would rather go anywhere other than “home,” the Mandalorian is forced to reassess his priorities.

Your taste of freedom had been brief but glorious. Now you are a prisoner of the most infamous bounty hunter in the Outer Rim – it’s only a matter of time before he turns you in. There isn’t much you would not do to keep from being sent home, but as you find yourself growing closer to your captor and his strange little companion, you start to wonder whether escape is really what you want.

Set after Chapter 13: The Jedi but before Chapter 14: The Tragedy.

Chapter Tags & Warnings: 18+ MDNI! Reader is Mando's live-in starship engineer, second-person POV, Din Djarin POV, no use of Y/N, minimal descriptors of reader character, unresolved sexual tension, pining, canon-typical violence, peril, angst, mild possessive language, Din speaks Mando'a

Series Masterlist | Read on AO3

A couple hours after sunset in the Karthakk system, Din Djarin settled himself into a booth in the back corner of a cantina. It was a dingy spot – its hard-packed dirt floors ensured that everything was coated in a fine layer of dust, cloudy liquor bottles and seedy patrons included – but that was to be expected on a backwater planet like Lok. A remote, desert planet infested with all manner of underworld scum and not much else, the fact that there were actual tables at which to sit was about the best he could have hoped for.

His quarry was one of those underworld scum, a notable Weequay smuggler called Kevok Toklelq. Over the last several days, Din had managed to narrow down his location to this district of Nym’s Stronghold, and all of the local intelligence he had gathered indicated that this nameless cantina was a popular place to do business, that anyone with any kind of pull on this world could be found exchanging credits and trading merchandise while bellied up to the bar. To the bounty hunter, it sounded like precisely the place he needed to be if he wanted to put eyes on his target.

Din had stopped in earlier to scope out the place and get a lay of the land before he made his move, and the booth he had selected was perfectly situated for his needs. From his corner, he could easily observe both the door and the bar, and the ambient orange lighting from the back bar left the edges of the establishment almost entirely in shadow, lending him an air of anonymity that otherwise might have been difficult to achieve in head-to-toe beskar’gam. As it was, all that was left for him to do was melt into those shadows and watch as the cantina filled up around him.

As he had expected, the crowd grew as the night deepened. To anyone who might have glanced his way, the Mandalorian was the picture of nonchalance, but behind the impenetrable surface of his helmet, he was focused, vigilant, intent only on finding his quarry. The crush of bodies was loud now, laughing and shouting and slinging insults over the sound of music pouring from a jukebox in the corner, but somehow Din cut through all of it. He held the image of the Weequay’s leathery, hard-eyed visage in his mind, and he waited.

So absorbed was he in this task, scanning the faces of each and every patron as they entered the bar, that he almost didn’t notice the young Twi’lek waitress approach his table.

“Evening, honey. Anything I can get for you?” she prompted. Her pale blue skin shone faintly in the dim lighting, and a warm, flirtatious smile quirked the corners of her lips.

The Mandalorian drew his head back, startled, before schooling his body language back into something closer to indifference. Leaning back into the cushion of the booth casually, he replied, “No, thank you. I’m fine.”

The girl arched an eyebrow at him. “You’ve been here a while. You sure there’s…nothing you need?”

He watched as her dark, hooded eyes traced over his form, her gaze settling on his black visor, then his shoulders, then his chest in quick succession. Her cheeks flushed in poorly-concealed interest, and Din fought the urge to fidget under her gaze.

This sort of thing happened occasionally. He knew that others found his stature appealing, that the bulk of his armor, the mystery of his helmet, and the legends of Mandalorian ferocity sometimes inspired intrigue rather than intimidation. As a younger man, he had found the attention flattering. Puzzling at times, but flattering. He certainly had been guilty of taking advantage of that interest on more than one occasion – a man had needs. But that had been years ago. It felt like a different lifetime since he last had felt the urge to indulge in that way.

It had been a life before he had anyone other than himself to consider, a life before his commitment to the Nevarro covert. A life before Grogu.

You, of course, were the glaring exception.

The bounty hunter burned for you, fierce and desperate, with an intensity that he might have found embarrassing if it weren’t so all-consuming. His control dangling by a thread that grew thinner with each passing day, there was no room left in him for shame. Even in the aftermath of your argument, the days spent in hyperspace traveling from Trevi IV to Lok had been torturous. He could hardly bear the proximity, the nearness of you – always within reach and yet never touching. Not how he wanted, how he needed. It was driving him mad.

No. If he were to have you, it would not be an indulgence. It would be…cataclysmic.

Before his thoughts could travel too far down that path, however, Din wrenched his attention back to the matter at hand. He had promised himself that he would keep you as far from his mind as possible while on this hunt. His quarry was a dangerous man. Toklelq was well-connected in the Outer Rim smuggling networks, a friend of the Pirate Nation, and a skilled fighter. It had been some time since Din had faced an opponent of this caliber; he refused to allow himself any distractions.

“Nothing, thank you. I’m waiting for a friend,” he said. The half-truth came easily, and he watched as something like disappointment colored the Twi’s expression. However, she recovered quickly and instead offered him a coy, practiced smile.

“All right, honey,” she demurred, heavy-lidded eyes giving him a final once-over. “Well, if you change your mind, you can find me at the bar. I’ll be here all night.” She slipped into the crowd then, and the bounty hunter caught himself smirking behind his visor in return. The girl’s choice of target had been off tonight, but he appreciated the tenacity.

It reminded him of you.

___

Just before midnight, Kevok Toklelq entered the cantina.

From his dim corner booth, Din watched as he swaggered through the door, a female Theelin on his arm and two other male Weequay close on his heels. He was precisely as his bounty puck had depicted him – his long hair tied back in a series of ponytails wrapped in dusky red fabric, his sharp eyes partially visible through a pair of yellow-tinted glasses, his expression cool and arrogant. With how frequently the Mandalorian had studied it over the last several days, he would recognize that face anywhere.

The group approached the bar first, appearing to order a round of drinks before seeking out a table right in the center of the venue, but their progress to their seats was slowed multiple times by Toklelq stopping to converse with other patrons. His reception, however, was mixed. Some appeared uncomfortable at the smuggler’s attention, their bodies stiff and their laughter forced as though they had hoped not to see him that night. Others, however, greeted him warmly, clasping his forearm or cuffing him on the shoulder in comradery. Din made note of each of them regardless, mentally cataloging them in his mind.

If a fight broke out while attempting to take his quarry into custody, it might be useful to know just how many enemies he would be up against.

The bounty hunter hoped that could be avoided. Teklolq, according to his research, was a known tabac smoker. At some point during the night, he would need to step outside with his pack of cigarras, and Din would follow so that any confrontation might happen outside the crowded cantina. It was possible that some of his companions might accompany him, of course, but even if he didn’t go alone, Din was confident that he could handle a handful of drunken smugglers. Now that he had eyes on his target, he needed only to wait for the right window of opportunity to strike.

Of course, nothing was ever quite so simple.

About an hour after the group in question arrived, something in the air…shifted. As though they had been waiting for some cue that only they could perceive, the Mandalorian watched with apprehension as his quarry’s companions one by one began to drift away from the table.

One of the other male Weequay was the first to leave, offering Teklolq something like a salute before ducking into the press of the surrounding crowd. He looked to be heading toward the exit, but when Din attempted to track his movements, he lost him almost immediately to the faceless mob of bodies that seemed to pack every square inch of the cantina. He never appeared by the exit, seemingly having vanished into thin air somewhere between the table and the door.

Then the Theelin woman rose from her seat. She pressed a lingering kiss to one of the many horns jutting from Teklolq’s lower jaw, and a moment later, she was gone, melting into the throng just as stealthily as her companion but in the opposite direction. Din cursed under his breath as he watched her bright orange hair be swallowed in the masses, the heat of her biosignature becoming instantly indistinguishable from the rest. Like her companion, she never reappeared.

It was only when the last of his target’s escort, the other Weequay male, kicked back from the table and rose to his feet that the bounty hunter felt a sinking sensation in his gut – the tug of his intuition, an undefinable feeling that something had truly gone awry.

On instinct alone, Din’s gaze snapped to Teklolq. If he had managed to sneak away while Din was too preoccupied with his colleagues…

But no, the smuggler had not escaped. Instead, he was staring directly back at him, meeting the Mandalorian’s eyes through the milling crowd, the dusty haze, the long, dark shadows. And he was smiling.

___

Through dimly-lit streets, down grimy alleyways, past cantinas and brothels and abandoned warehouses, Din Djarin ran.

“Razor Crest! Come in, Razor Crest!”

Streaks of blue blaster fire zinged past, lighting up the night in flashes of cold flame and splitting the atmosphere around him with the reek of ozone and carbon. One round ricocheted off his breastplate, sparking and skittering away harmlessly, barely a blip on the surface of his armor. Another flew ineffectually past the left side of his helmet, mere centimeters away from hitting its mark, but the Mandalorian didn’t so much as flinch. Yet another arced wildly and collided with a pile of crates stacked high against the side of a building, blasting it to smithereens. Scraps of wood and metal shrapnel flung into his path, crunching under the heavy pounding of his boots, pinging off his beskar.

His quarry’s aim was getting worse. And Din was gaining on him.

“Razor Crest! Come in!”

The moment he had locked eyes with Teklolq, Din had known that whatever plan he might have had to bring him in without any casualties had suddenly become obsolete. He had watched with senses on high alert as his target stood from the table and downed the remainder of his drink, and he could have sworn he saw the smuggler wink at him from behind his thick-framed, yellow-tinted glasses before making his way toward the door.

It had felt like an invitation, like a dare, and the Mandalorian felt his hackles rise instantly.

He had never backed down from a challenge in his life. He certainly wasn’t about to start now.

The night beyond the cantina was deep and dark, the streetlights in his part of Nym’s Stronghold few and far between. Din had taken one step, then two beyond the little pool of light cast by the cantina’s open doorway, and as though he had summoned them from the shadows themselves, he immediately had been met with the business end of four blasters all trained in his direction.

A Weequay thug had stared him down from each side, their bony chins jutted out in defiance, ice in their eyes. Behind him, the Theelin woman had slinked forward and waved the barrel of her compact blaster pistol inches from his shoulder blades. And with a smile still twisting his thin, hard lips, his target had emerged directly in front of him.

“I’m here for Kevok Teklolq,” the bounty hunter had said, neither raising his hands in surrender nor reaching for his blaster. “I have no quarrel with the rest of you. Lower your weapons and stand aside, and no harm will come to you.”

He hadn’t truly expected them to surrender, but he couldn’t imagine not offering the small mercy. As long as he got his quarry in the end.

As it was, three corpses lay crumpled outside the cantina now, smoking in the aftermath of his whistling birds, leaking blood into the dirt. And his quarry was several meters ahead of him, running at full tilt, dangerously close to getting away.

“Razor Crest reads you, Mando – what’s going on?”

Stars, it was good to hear your voice. You sounded groggy, as though he had pulled you from sleep, and for a reckless moment, Din allowed himself to picture you. He could see it so clearly – your cheeks flushed and your clothes mussed, your hair loose around your shoulders as you pushed it out of your face and tried to wake up enough to concentrate. The image buried itself in his chest, warm and bright, easing his breath, soothing his racing heart.

“Quarry gave me the slip. I’m in pursuit,” he panted in reply. He clutched his comm link in one hand and his blaster in the other as he returned fire, legs pumping all the harder as he tried desperately to close the distance between him and Teklolq even further. “He’s headed for the yards – he’s going to run.”

“We going after him?” you asked after a beat. The warm fuzz of sleep coloring your voice had evaporated.

He fired again at the smuggler’s retreating form, and his shot seemed to graze the outside of the other man’s thigh. Teklolq howled in pain and stumbled, but in an instant, he was on his feet again. The fumble didn’t last long enough for the Mandalorian to catch up, and still, he remained just out of range for Din to use his grappling wire or his flamethrower. Loosing a colorful curse in Mando’a, the bounty hunter jammed his thumb down on the comm link’s sending button once more.

“Absolutely.”

Your reply was quicker this time, curt and efficient. “Understood. One second – let me get to the helm…” A handful of seconds passed, and then, “Okay. Deactivating ground defenses, starting preflight checks, extending the port gangplank.”

A thrill of pride shot through him at that, making the ache in his muscles and the burn in his lungs all but disappear. Even if Teklolq made it to the shipyards, even if he somehow managed to get in the air without Din taking him out, he wouldn’t be getting away. Because Din had back-up. Din had you.

“That’s my girl.”

___

It took every ounce of strength at your disposal to keep your eyes on the flight controls, to keep your mind on the engine read-outs and your ears tuned into the sound of the port-side ramp dropping. Those words, spoken in that deep, warm voice, strained and breathless, throat tight with exertion… Those words would be your undoing if you allowed yourself even a moment to think about them.

His girl. He had called you his girl.

Goosebumps broke out across your body at how perfectly, undeniably right that felt. You were still clad in your sleep clothes, your feet bare and cold on the metal deck plating, but you had never been more awake. Your very cells responded to the phrase – the fondness, the intimacy, the possessiveness of it. You couldn’t deny that it frightened you; the idea of belonging to anyone was a tender topic. But something about it, something about the fact that it was Mando and not anyone else…

It felt safe. Natural. As easy as breathing. You were his girl, and you were so tired of pretending like you weren’t.

Before you could allow the realization to sit with you any further, however, your comm link sputtered back to life once more.

“Haar’chak!” Mando swore. Grogu, still half asleep but now strapped into one of the co-pilot chairs, whined at the sound of his guardian’s voice in distress, and you reached behind you to pat him comfortingly on the head.

“What’s your status, Mando?”

When he replied, his words came in short bursts, sharp and strained. “I have a visual on the bounty’s ship. He’s taking off. Now.”

Your hands had already found their way to the scanner controls before he had finished speaking. “What’s he flying?” you asked, taking broad readings of the entire spaceport, small though it was.

A pause, and then, “An A-24 Sleuth.”

You adjusted the scanners in response. “Dank farrik,” you murmured to yourself, this time not bothering to broadcast your concern over the comm link. You had worked on a handful of Sleuths in your career, and there were few vessels that could match them for speed and stealth. If the quarry managed to get it out of the atmosphere, the Razor Crest would have a difficult time keeping pace with it. If he made it out of the Karthakk system, Mando’s hunt would need to begin again from scratch.

As though the Crest had heard your apprehension, the scanners beeped at you, and you watched as the monitor before you shifted from a view of the surrounding spaceport to one of a long, narrow vessel about 150 meters away rising slowly into the air.

“I’ve got him on scanners,” you said into the comm link’s receiver. “How far out are you?”

A gruff, modulated exhale crackled through the connection. “…about 30 seconds.”

Even though you knew he couldn’t see you, you nodded to yourself as you ran through your mental checklist one final time. Everything was in place for a quick take-off, and you had locked the scanners onto the Sleuth so it would remain in your sights even as it began its ascent through the arid atmosphere.

“Acknowledged, we’re ready to pursue once you’re inside.”

You sat in silence for those 30 seconds, Grogu keeping vigil with you, your hand hovering anxiously over the switch that would retract the landing gear. Taking a deep breath to center yourself, you realized that you had never been in a chase like this before. Although it had barely begun, you already found it oddly exhilarating. You had never thought of yourself as someone who might enjoy being under this particular kind of pressure, but that didn’t change the fact that the racing heart behind your ribcage wasn’t unwelcome.

Did you find Mando’s job…exciting?

The sound of heavy boots thundering up the durasteel ramp and rocketing into the cargo hold interrupted that train of thought. Mando had flung himself onboard at top speed.

“I’m good, get us in the air!” he shouted from the base of the ladder – unnecessarily, as you already had it in progress. In the span of about three seconds, the twin engines turned over with a rumble, the landing gear lifted back up into the ship’s underbelly, and by the time the port gangplank had folded back into place, the Razor Crest was already making its ascent.

Mando, also, was still moving quickly. One moment, you heard him panting against the rungs of the ladder, as though he had paused to lean there for a moment and collect himself. The next, you felt his looming presence behind you, the breadth of his shoulders suddenly taking up a ridiculous amount of space in the cockpit.

You threw a glance at him over your shoulder from your perch in his pilot’s chair, your gaze tracking up and down his form, assessing, scanning for injuries. “The Sleuth just broke the atmosphere, we’re right behind him.”

Thankfully, he didn’t appear harmed, just a bit winded.

The bounty hunter nodded once, letting out a rather vocal sigh. “Well done. Keep on him,” he replied, pointing out the transparisteel viewport to where you could just barely make out the glow of the quarry’s engines against the blackness of space, growing closer by the second as the Crest followed him into orbit.

You felt your eyebrows raise in surprise. “You don’t want the helm?” you asked, gesturing vaguely to the controls spread out before you in your current seat.

“No. I think you’ve got it handled.” He dropped heavily into the other copilot chair – your favorite chair, you noticed with a thrill – and turned slightly to face his own set of knobs and switches. “Give me weapons control.”

You couldn’t fight the grin that bloomed across your face at that. “Yes, sir.”

Unfortunately, your good humor ended almost as soon as it had begun. As you began to chart a course in pursuit of the Sleuth, a glaring warning appeared on your navigational readout – an asteroid belt, stretching dense and wide across the star system, wrapping itself around the yellow sun almost exactly halfway between the system’s two habitable planets, Lok and Maramere.

In any other situation, you would have taken the Razor Crest out of its way to circumvent it. As it was, you doubted the quarry was going to take the extra time. If either of your two ships wanted to get out into open space, you were going to have go through it.

If your read-outs were correct, the quarry had come to the same conclusion. He was headed straight for the heart of the asteroid belt.

And he was powering up his weapons.

“Mando?” Apprehension colored your voice as your deflector readings spiked, dust and debris from merely the outer edges of the thing already making navigation a challenge.

“I know, I see it,” he acknowledged. “Charging blaster cannons. Follow him in.”

Your heartrate spiked at the instruction, but you obeyed all the same. You were a good pilot, you told yourself as you poured on the sublight power, closing the distance between the Crest and the Sleuth as fast as you dared. You could chase a dangerous smuggler flying one of the nimblest ships in existence through an asteroid belt and not end up splattered across the surface of a spinning hunk of rock.

Right?

You cursed colorfully as a bolt of energy exploded from the Sleuth’s aft laser cannons, missing the belly your gunship by a hairsbreadth.

“Returning fire,” Mando called out, and the Razor Crest’s twin heavy repeating blaster cannons roared to life, loosing a volley across the smuggler’s tail just as both ships breeched the asteroid belt.

And just like that, you had no more space in your mind for trepidation. There was only the Crest, the quarry, and the twisting, lurching lumps of space rock through which both of you wove.

Keep the Sleuth in sight. Don’t crash. Dodge that attack. Don’t crash. Get closer. Help Mando line up his shots. Give him a nice, wide window. Don’t crash.

Don’t. Crash.

You felt yourself sink into your body, your grip firm and sure on the joysticks, controlling your pitch and your altitude and your speed through intuition and muscle memory. You blocked out everything else, allowing all other thoughts and sensations to roll off of you like rainwater on a leaf. A part of you wondered if this was how Mando felt when he was in combat – if he could feel all his other thoughts vacating his brain and leaving him only with what he needed in that exact moment, what had been trained into him since he was a child. Just him and his weapons, an extension of his body, doing what they were best at.

In that moment, the Razor Crest was an extension of your body. And it was beautiful.

The Sleuth careened through the slalom at breakneck speeds, firing round after round, landing some, missing others. You kept the Razor Crest on its tail as though the two ships were connected by a wire, following every arc, every dive, every spin. From his position behind you, Mando gave as good as he got – firing the blaster cannons at every opportunity, wearing down the quarry’s shields blow by blow – and Grogu simply giggled, his hands in the air as though enjoying the dips and banks like an amusement park ride.

It seemed to you that you might be evenly matched, that this battle might be decided not by skill or agility or firepower but by one party simply waiting for the other to make a mistake. But as the density of the asteroids around you started to thin, as both ships drew closer to coming out on the other side, it became apparent that the quarry had been holding out on you. The moment it was not quite so taxed by its own maneuvering, the Sleuth released a deluge of laser fire.

The Razor Crest shook with the impact, nearly sending you out of your chair and throwing Grogu against his seatbelts before the artificial gravity could compensate for the disruption, and an alarm sounded on the console to your left.

Your deflector shields had suffered heavy damage. The ones mounted to the front of your port engine had been completely knocked out. One more shot and –

The Sleuth fired again, and you banked the ship sharply to the right to try to avoid it, but it wasn’t enough. The shot landed, and your felt the Crest shudder and seize.

“Direct hit to the port engine,” Mando warned, his voice tight. Grogu cooed worriedly in response.

“Shit,” you swore. Something not unlike rage burned in your chest at the sight of smoke streaming behind the ship – your ship – as you banked again to avoid another volley, this time to the left.

“How’s she looking?”

Your attention darted briefly to the engine readouts, the ones you knew like you knew the veins on the back of your hand, the ones you had worked so hard during your first weeks aboard the Razor Crest to optimize. It had been damn fine work. And now it was smoking.

You wanted to punch someone.

“Output is down 47 percent,” you replied after a moment. “I can compensate, but if we take another hit like that, I’ll have to take it offline or risk overloading the reactor.”

The Crest wasn’t designed to run on one engine. Redirecting power from other systems to the reactor was a stop-gap measure. It might be what you needed to give Mando enough time to take out the Sleuth, but…

“Bring us in closer,” the Mandalorian ordered. “I have an idea.”

Your eyes widened, and you fought the urge to glare over your shoulder at him incredulously. Getting much closer to the other ship than you already were was a risky move. One erratic choice, one unpredictable dive or spin by the Sleuth could mean a collision. The margin for error was miniscule. Did he know what he was asking? Did he know just how much he was gambling?

Even in the fraction of a second that it took you to process that thought, it was as though Mando could sense your indecision. “Just trust me, cyare,” he added, his words curt but not unkind.

Of course, you did, and he knew it. Just like he knew that saying so would spur you forward. Banishing your worries from your mind, you poured on the power, and the Razor Crest shot forward. The aft end of the Sleuth dominated the view out of the cockpit, drowning out the surrounding blackness of space. You squinted against the glare of its engines, suddenly so close you swore you could almost see inside them.

“Be ready,” Mando quipped, and before you could ask what for, the twin blaster cannons flared to life, and a thick, black plume of smoke exploded from the Sleuth’s engines.

You didn’t think – you simply reacted. White-knuckle gripping the joystick controls, you pulled back hard, effectively throwing on the brakes and sending the Crest careening upward before it could run right into the quarry’s now-limping vessel.

“Direct hit,” you confirmed, bringing the ship back around again. Satisfaction had a smirk tugging at the corners of your lips as you skimmed through the scanner readings displayed in front of you. “His engine nacelles are ruptured. He’s lost light speed capabilities, and he’s leaking coolant. He’s going down.”

You felt Mando’s sharp nod behind you. “He’ll try for an emergency landing on Maramere.”

Your eyes skipped to your navigational readouts, doing a few quick calculations in your head. “…Confirmed, Sleuth is adjusting course for Maramere. He’s coming in hot.”

“Follow him down,” the bounty hunter ordered. “If he somehow manages to touch down on a land mass, I want to be right behind him.”

Quirking your brow, you risked a glance at him, meeting his glinting black visor with your gaze. “A land mass?” you echoed.

“Maramere is almost completely aquatic.”

You swallowed thickly at the thought. How terrifying that would be – to evade capture only then to crash land into a never-ending ocean, your ship helpless against the crush of the waves as you sank beneath the surface.

You couldn’t lie to yourself. You had found the chase thrilling, and the surge of gratification you had felt at the sight of the Sleuth diving hard toward Maramere, belching black smoke and glowing with the unforgiving friction of the planet’s atmosphere, had been almost addictive. It was an incredible rush, escaping your own destruction, watching someone else’s.

You didn’t want this man to die…did you?

A wave of nausea rolled over you, but you tamped it down, forcing those thoughts as far away as you could manage. The Razor Crest. That was where your focus was needed now. You could reckon with your own morality later.

You plotted a descent pattern just behind the Sleuth’s, modulating your angle just enough to reduce the drag from the atmosphere without widening the gap between the two ships. As the old gunship dropped into the mesosphere, you turned your attention to the navigational computer.

“Based on his current approach speed and trajectory, he’s going to crash…here,” you said, gesturing for Mando to peek over your shoulder at the monitor before you. “On land, but barely. It looks like an archipelago in the northern hemisphere.” On the topographical map the ship’s computer had generated, a sparse chain of islands freckled the surface of the never-ending sea.

The bounty hunter studied the readout for a moment then nodded once. “When he does, see if you can put us down about 100 meters from the crash site. I’ll need to go see if I can pull anything from the wreckage as proof of death.”

“You think…” The words caught in your throat, and you coughed into your fist to clear it. “You think the impact will kill him, then? Even if he doesn’t land in the water?”

He seemed to weigh his response carefully before he spoke, but when he did, his voice was calm, matter-of-fact. “With the speed he’s dropping in at, I think he’d be lucky to make it to the surface in one piece, let alone when he hits the ground.” He met your gaze then, really looking at you for the first time since he came barreling back onto the ship. “This will be the first time I’ve brought in a dead quarry since you’ve been with me. You doing okay?”

The unexpected question made you smile faintly, and your heart throbbed in your chest with fondness for this man, somehow continuing to surprise you with his kindness even all these months later. “Honestly, I’m not sure,” you replied. “I think I am okay. Which admittedly is freaking me out a little. I’m trying not to think about it too hard.”

A breathy, rasping sound, unmistakably a laugh, filtered through Mando’s helmet at that. “I appreciate the honesty,” he chuckled.

Before you could speak on it any further, however, an alarm blared from the console to your right, and the monitor for the navigational computer switched from a birds-eye view of the archipelago to a live feed of the Sleuth. It had lost several panels of its hull on the way down through the atmosphere, its engine chassis were still spewing black filth in a stream behind it, and its thrusters were coughing and sputtering as the quarry tried to keep it in the air as long as possible.

The island chain was in view now, but only barely. It was the middle of the night on Maramere, the ocean waves were high and wild, and it was pouring rain. The only thing that indicated that you were anywhere near land was the silhouette of tall, dense trees against the black sky, outlined in cloudy moonlight, and they were getting bigger with every moment that passed.

“30 seconds to impact,” you said, your eyes jumping between the scanner readouts and viewport.

The Sleuth wobbled dangerously, its underbelly dragging along the tops of the trees of one island, sending splinters of wood and vegetation spraying everywhere, overshooting its first landing attempt, heading for the next island over.

“20 seconds. 10.”

Durasteel scraps and engine oil poured into the choppy water, and just as it passed over the rocky shoreline of the next closest island, the Sleuth’s thrusters flickered out one final time.

Your heart in your throat, you watched through the rain-streaked cockpit window as the quarry’s vessel dropped the final few feet out of the sky and burst into flames.

Behind you, you heard Mando release a breath. Grogu, however, was silent. “100 meters from the crash site,” the bounty hunter reiterated. His tone was inscrutable, somewhere between relief and resignation. “See if you can keep us upwind of the fire.”

You nodded once in acknowledgement and adjusted your grip on the flight controls, throwing on the reverse thrusters to bring the Crest into a gentle drop. The ship’s headlights combined with the column of flame rising from the remains of the Sleuth illuminated the island’s coastline enough that you were able to make the landing by sight even with the rain, and suddenly, what had begun as one of the more thrilling experiences of your life had come to a rather somber ending.

However, as the Razor Crest’s landing gear finally touched down on the jagged, rocky surface of the shoreline, a flash of movement from the decimated vessel caught your eye.

“Wait. Mando, is that – ” You gestured for the Mandalorian to follow your gaze, pointing emphatically out the viewport.

And it was. The dark silhouette of a man – hunched over oddly and limping but very much alive, tumbling from the flames onto the gravel below.

“He survived,” Mando breathed, seemingly unable to look away, his gaze locked forward as he watched the injured quarry stagger to his feet, tamp out a fire on the shoulder of his flight jacket, and begin stumbling toward the tree line. “The skanah is still fucking running.”

The bounty hunter lurched to his feet then, moving out of the cockpit and down the ladder with a swiftness that made him almost impossible to follow. You tried anyway, and although Grogu squealed from his seat strapped into the copilot’s chair, you paid him no heed. You would come right back for him. And if you didn’t, at least you knew he would be safe there until either you or Mando made it back –

By the time you made it down into the cargo hold, Mando had already flung open his weapons cabinet and was arming himself to the teeth – additional blaster cartridges threaded into his bandolier, thermal detonators added to his utility belt. Once he was satisfied with his load-out, he gave his blaster a quick once-over and brought his fist down on the control panel next to the rear exit, bringing out the gangplank.

You didn’t wait for his request or his approval. Instead, you simply darted over to the bunk where you had left your brown cargo pants in a crumpled pile on the floor. You roughly tugged them up over your hips, zipping them closed over your sleep shorts and shoving your bare feet into your boots as quickly as you could manage. When you reached into the weapons cabinet to grab your own blaster, however, you felt a gloved hand clamp around your wrist.

“No. Stay on the ship,” the Mandalorian commanded, and you felt your eyebrows fly to meet your hairline.

“What if you need back-up?” you replied, refusing to drop your hand. “This guy is slippery, Mando, maybe if there’s two of us – ”

“What? You’ll shoot him, gotabor’ika? Hm?”

Your cheeks burned at the not-so-subtle taunt, and you yanked your wrist out of his grip. “Look, as far as I’m concerned, we’re in this one together now, and that man is dangerous. You can’t just go out there in the dark on your own – ”

“I don’t have time to argue with you,” he growled, crowding into your space, forcing you to tilt your chin up if you wanted to keep your eyes on his visor. “You will stay. On. The. Ship. That’s how this works. I capture the bounties. You protect my kid.”

You faltered a bit at the mention of Grogu, who you could still hear whining in the cockpit, and it was as though the bounty hunter could see your resolve beginning to buckle. You might have begun to protest again, but it hardly mattered. Holding your eye contact with an intensity that ought to have been intimidating, Mando closed the remaining distance between you and brought his hand to the side of your neck, and with demanding force, he tucked his orange-tipped thumb under your jaw and angled your face to up his. You felt your breath leave your lungs at the contact, but before you could even begin to process it, he was resting the forehead of his helmet against yours.

The beskar was cold against your heated skin. Your eyelids fluttered of their own accord, almost closing completely as your heartrate spiked. The warmth of his body bled into yours, and you found yourself bringing your own hands up to clutch at his breastplate lest your knees suddenly give out from under you. He’d never touched you like this before – with intention, with such single-minded focus and something not unlike desperation boiling under the surface.

“Please. Promise me,” Mando whispered, and you swore that you could hear not only the modulated version of his voice through his helmet but also his real voice, his natural voice, like an echo that would have been lost had you not been so impossibly close. “Keep yourself safe. Keep Grogu safe. My sweet, fierce girl.”

You swallowed heavily and fought the urge to allow your eyes slide closed, to permit yourself to simply savor this moment for as long as he would allow it. Instead, you brought your fingers up to his neck, threading them through the folds of his cape, the high neck of his cowl. Stars, he was so warm there – so vital and real and alive.

You wondered then if he knew what this did to you. If he knew you would do anything he asked if only he asked you like this, with this body pressed against yours, his hands on your skin.

A moment of silence stretched between you, marked only by the sound of your breaths and his, both heavy and labored.

“Fine,” you said, digging your fingers into the back of his neck with an urgency you couldn’t disguise. “But you have to keep yourself safe, too. Keep yourself safe…for me.”

You felt him gulp beneath your touch, his throat working against your fingertips in a way that made you blush. “I’ll do everything I can, cyare.” He took a deep breath, his chest expanding against yours, and then, “If I’m not back by sunrise – ”

“Don’t,” you murmured, biting back a whimper at the thought. You knew he couldn’t promise you anything. You knew every time he walked out the door, he took his life into his own hands. But you couldn’t bear the thought…

“It’s all right,” you said. “Go. We’ll be here when you get back.”

Maker, how many times had you watched this man leave you? How many times had you prayed to every deity ever imagined in the cosmos that he would return to you, safe?

Why was this time so much harder?

You couldn’t make your hands release him. He had to take the first step back.

Releasing his grip on your neck, he almost threw his body away from yours, increasing the space between you like he was ripping off a bandage. You stayed rooted to the spot as he backed out of the cargo hold, as he retreated into the pouring rain and the blackness beyond, and giving you one last, long look, the Mandalorian drew his blaster from the holster at his hip and ran off, disappearing into the forest beyond the shoreline.

___

Mando'a Translations:

beskar'gam - armor haar'chak - damn it! cyare - beloved skanah - a very hated person, on the same level as calling someone a "fucker"

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