#Spoiler: Gale is not fine | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

rambleonwaywardson · 5 months ago

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Clegan Astronaut AU - Part 11

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: Issuing an apology for making people panic earlier this afternoon. Sorry y'all. It was kinda fun though. I promise if an MCD tag was needed it would be there (spoiler: It's not needed)

---

November 19 Nassau Bay, TX

“Buck?”

“Gale? We don’t have to go. Helen’s on console. We can stay here.”

“Maybe you should sit back down, take a minute.”

“Gale? Can you hear me?”

“I need you to breathe, Gale. Please.”

“Look at me.”

Hey doll, look at me.

Gale’s eyes snap to Benny, who is watching him with the same wariness with which you’d regard a spooked animal. His hands are up, placating, as he sits on the edge of Gale’s mattress. Gale realizes that, at some point in the course of this conversation, he threw the blankets to the floor and scrambled out of bed. He’s on his feet, sheets wrapped around his ankles, and he’s stopped breathing again. Pepper and Meatball are standing beside him, whining. They know something’s wrong. He feels like he might throw up. His chest burns from holding his breath.

He wants it to burn.

“I need you to breathe for me, Gale,” Benny instructs. He stands and reaches out to put his hands on Gale’s shoulders, but Gale stumbles backward, pressing his back to the wall. The only person he wants to touch him right now is his husband, and his husband is on the moon, unconscious and dying. He doesn’t know why he can’t stand the idea of someone else’s hands on him. His brain isn’t working right. His eyes dart from Benny to the dogs to his own bare feet and back.

Hell, he feels like a spooked animal.

“Okay, okay.” Benny yields, stopping with his hands up in surrender. He’s acting calm, but Gale knows him. He can tell Benny is starting to panic, and it’s because of Gale. “Just take a breath for me, okay Buck? Breathe with me.”

Benny takes a deep breath in, watching Gale carefully. Then he breathes out. In. Out. In. Out. Gale is staring back at him, completely still. He watches the exaggerated motion of Benny’s chest expanding and contracting, and he knows he’s supposed to do it, too.

His chest burns.

He flexes his hand and feels the metal of his wedding band dig into the skin.

Breathe, he tells himself. Or, more accurately, he hears Bucky’s voice in his head. Breathe, angel.

So Gale takes a breath. Benny sighs in relief, nodding his encouragement. Gale exhales. He forces the mechanical motion of his lungs, drawing in oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide. He forces himself to keep doing it, even though he doesn’t know if his other half can do the same.

“We… we aren’t sure he’ll survive the trip back to the lander.” That’s what Benny just said a moment ago, sending Gale spiraling. The words ring in his head, back and forth and back and forth like a ping-pong ball trying to break out of his skull.

We aren’t sure he’ll survive the trip back… he won’t survive.

We aren’t sure he’ll survive,

Back to the lander…

the lander,

The lander.

Aren’t sure

we aren’t sure… aren’t sure he’ll survive survive survive survive survive.

Survive.

Won’t survive. He won’t survive.

Benny handed the console over to Helen the moment she arrived, right as Curt was getting Bucky’s body back onto the rover. It was a hell of a bad time to change CAPCOMs, but it was understood among flight controllers and crew alike: Benny had to get to Gale

Benny sighs, sitting helplessly back down on the bed. “Gale, we don’t expect him to… it would be nothing short of a miracle if he…” He can’t finish the sentences. Doesn’t want to. Can’t bear delivering this news to his friend. But it doesn’t matter. Gale knows, and the only thing he can hear is his own heartbeat, too loud in his ears.

We aren’t sure he’ll survive. We don’t expect him to survive.

“I’m so sorry.”

Bucky was alive when Benny ran out of Mission Control. But the seemingly infinite time between catastrophe and salvation is a no-man’s land, and no one can be sure what injuries and suit damage Bucky sustained until Curt gets him back through the airlock. All they know now is he’s unconscious, his suit pressure dropped far too much far too fast, and his vitals are too weak.

And now Gale has to fight to breathe, too.

What would you say differently, if you knew the last time you talked to someone might be just that – the last time? What would you tell them? Would you say things a little differently, use different words, speak in a different tone, express different thoughts? Would you try your best to shove every ounce of love you feel for them into every single syllable?

What words can there possibly be for an eternal goodbye?

Or is it not about the words at all? Maybe it’s about looking, touching, listening. So that when you let go, when they finally drift away, you can remember every trivial and yet crucial piece of them. Everything you loved and everything you hated and everything you wish you could hold close to your chest for just one more minute. One more day. One more lifetime.

How do you let go, though, when you know you’ll never hold on again? Do you let yourself drown in the sound of their voice, in hopes you never forget the exact resonance, the exact cadence, the exact rise and fall of their laugh and the way their smile twines through every word – the sound of how much they love you? Would you pay just a little more attention? Would you stare at them just a little longer, lingering on every feature that you want to etch into the canvas of your brain even though you know the picture will fade, leaving a hole in your heart and a pit in your stomach as you sob into their pillow and wonder why you’re not strong enough to carry the mantle of their memory for the rest of time.

The human consciousness is not built to know which goodbye will be the last. Because that goodbye will burn you alive. It will pin you under the weight of grief until someone has to tear you away, kicking and screaming, because if you knew you were never going to hold the love of your life again, you wouldn’t ever let go.

I love you.

Those are the last words Gale said to Bucky yesterday, when their goodbye was a when you come home, not an if you come home. How can there be anything more profound to say? If that goodbye had to be their last, what else is there? And yet here Gale is, wondering, obsessing, insisting that he should’ve said it better, said it more, said it differently. That he shouldn’t have let go.

His husband. His best friend. The love of his life.

Gale thinks there should’ve been something else to say. But he can’t think of it. He can’t think of anything. His brain is stuck. His body is stuck.

John.

“Gale?”

Gale is leaning with almost all of his weight pressed against the wall now, fists clenched tight at his sides beneath the cuffs of the too-big sweatshirt that smells, wrongly, like himself. No longer like John. He takes a deep breath in, and Pepper scoots closer to his side, nudging at his hand. Gale exhales and uncurls his fist so he can idly run his hand over the dog’s soft ears. She whines and pushes into the touch, eyes not leaving her person’s face. A good dog. A very good dog.

“Gale?” Benny says again. “Are you with me?”

Gale nods slowly, but his eyes look right past Benny, out the window across the room, unseeing. It’s still raining.

“Why don’t you sit down,” Benny repeats.

Gale doesn’t move, save for lips that he’s shocked are capable of forming coherent words. “I need to get to JSC.”

Benny shakes his head, reaching a hand out only to remember what happened just moments ago, and he leans down to scratch Meatball instead. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Buck. They’ll let us know when they know anything. I think you need-“

“I need to be there for my husband,” Gale bites out. “That’s my job. It’s my job.”

Benny averts his eyes, closing them tight. It’s a losing battle. Any other loved one, Flight would bar from being there. Any other loved one would have to wait for news. Any other loved one would only ever know exactly what NASA chose to tell them, no more, no less. But Gale isn’t any other loved one, and they don’t have a protocol for this, for an astronaut facing death while their spouse is working in Mission Control. He knows there was a long debate over whether or not to allow Gale to stay on CAPCOM for Artemis 3, but he insisted he could handle it, and Harding believed him.

So Benny nods. “Okay. We’ll go. You gonna wear that?”

–

Gale looks at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, the harsh light highlighting every sign of exhaustion. His hair is messy, hanging limp and shaggy over his forehead. His eyes are red and swollen, dark bags beneath them. The sweatshirt had been discarded in favor of a fresh white button-up and a black tie that Benny had nearly had to tie for him. But Gale had swatted his hand away and forced his own fingers to quit disobeying him long enough to finish getting dressed. He looks at himself now, and he can’t reconcile his own reflection with that of a man who was just told his husband may or may not be dead by the end of the day. It’s wrong.

It’s all wrong.

He forces himself to stand up straight, shoulders back, like a good soldier, and he stares at himself hard in the mirror. He reaches for his comb, for his hair gel, and his cold fingers freeze in the air above them. He envisions himself styling his hair, brushing it back in a neat coif. It’s what he does every day, even though he runs his hand through it about twenty times an hour so that it’s pointless by noon. It’s what he does every single day, so why won’t his hand move?

Bucky always liked Gale’s hair in the morning, when it was messy and unstyled. He said it was cute, sexy, perfect – that it was special because Bucky was one of the only people that got to see Gale soft. “No just leave it like that,” he would plead, grinning as he wrapped his arms around Gale from behind, trying to wrestle the hair gel out of his hand. Gale would roll his eyes and snatch it back, slicking the gel through his hair before Bucky could stop him. They’d stare at each other in the mirror, and Bucky would slowly reach a hand up towards Gale’s hair, threatening to mess it up again. But Gale would snatch his fingers in his own, shaking his head, and Bucky would pull Gale’s hand back to press a kiss to his knuckles.

Gale feels phantom lips on the back of his hand, and he considers not styling his hair after all. It doesn’t feel right, all of a sudden. He wonders if he really has to style it ever again, and he only has half a second to think about how that question is just absurd before an unwelcome answer smacks him in the face.

For the funeral. Have to look nice for the funeral.

Gale about stops breathing again. And for a moment, it’s real. For a moment, he sees in the mirror a grieving man. For a moment, it’s not early in the morning of mission day 13; instead, it’s the day his husband will be laid to rest, a mile marker for the rest of Gale’s life without the love of his life.

For a moment, Bucky is gone, no doubt about it, and Gale is an island, alone in this world, lost without his other half to hold him above water or tether his feet to the ground. He’ll be forever in limbo as a newlywed, because they never got a chance to be anything more.

He’ll have to fly to Virginia, where Bucky will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery as per his wishes. “If I die, make sure I get the whole nine yards,” Bucky had said to him once, long ago. Gale can’t even remember when; they were just boys, really, the first time he said those words. The first time Bucky looked at him with the knowledge that wherever he was going, whatever he was doing, there was a decent chance he wouldn’t come back alive.

Even then, Bucky knew that the kind of life he intended to live may not be a long one. It’s a risk he took with no hesitation, sacrificing time for living exactly the way he wanted to. Gale fell in love with him anyway, followed him to the ends of the Earth, because they were two halves of the same whole.

“If I die, make sure I get the whole nine yards,” Bucky had said to him again, just months ago. Gale can remember exactly when; they were engaged, their wedding soon, the mission looming over them, and Bucky was rewriting his will to reflect his new and rightful next of kin.

Gale hadn’t wanted to discuss it, even though he knew they had to. A little-mentioned and not at all glamorized consideration of diving headfirst into the unknown – the what-ifs, the contingencies, the acknowledgement of putting your life on the line and what that will mean for the people who love you most.

“I know it’ll hurt,” John told him that day. “But if-“

“Bucky-“

“If things go south, Gale. I need you to know-“

“Don’t.”

“Buck,” Bucky sighed.

“I don’t wanna hear it.”

Gale may never know what Bucky had been trying to tell him that day, and that thought claws at his throat. Why hadn’t he just let him say what he wanted to say? Why couldn’t he give him that peace of mind? Why had Gale been so selfish, in that moment?

If nothing else, he’ll give Bucky the whole damn nine yards, everything he deserves.

He’ll have to request a flyover. The request will be granted, he’s sure. The Department of Defense will spare no expense; Major John Egan, U.S. Air Force, the first man to die while stationed on the moon, will receive any honor Gale asks of them. Bucky would like that. He would be proud of that.

Four jets will soar over his funeral right before the sun sets, friends and family looking on as they approach, the buzz of the engines rising with their love and grief. One aircraft will lift up and away towards the heavens, a missing man leaving the others to continue on without him, a gaping hole in the formation to match that which has been left in the lives of Bucky’s family. A symbol of the fallen, a symbol of the future he sacrificed, a symbol of a life lived and taken away.

As an Air Force Major, Bucky will receive full military funeral honors. Lines of airmen will march behind his casket, escorting him to the next unknown. A color guard will carry the flags, rising and falling in the breeze as if they, too, are offering a final salute. A military band will wail down the hallowed paths between rows of gravestones. Seven riflemen will fire a three volley salute, and with measured steps and trained precision, the pallbearers will transport the casket to its grave. It will be draped with a flag, to be folded and given to the deceased airman’s next of kin.

How many times has Gale been one of those pallbearers? One of those unsmiling men charged with delivering an American hero to their final resting place. More than he cares to count, in any case. That’s just how being an Air Force pilot goes sometimes; a lot of good men and women are lost too soon.

He never expected to be on the other side. Never expected to be the devastated loved one looking on, trying to decide if he can allow himself to cry, or if he should breathe through gritted teeth and act like a good soldier, as expressionless as the pallbearers carrying Bucky’s body in hands that never knew him the way Gale’s did. It comes so easily, playing the part of Major Buck Cleven, keeping the walls up and sandbagged against the flood threatening to drown him.

Is he an airman, or is he a husband?

Or is he a widower?

Is it an affront to John’s legacy if Gale doesn’t cry for him as his body is returned to the earth, nothing but stardust and a memory carved into Gale’s soul? Gale can imagine him saying “don’t cry for me, angel” just as easily as he can imagine him saying “you better cry for me, babe,” and Gale is struck by the paralyzing panic of not knowing. He doesn’t know what Bucky would want. How can he not know? Shouldn’t he know?

He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do. He doesn’t know what his husband would want him to do. He doesn’t know how to keep going. He doesn’t even know who he is without John Egan at his side.

He doesn’t know…

He never expected…

He’s not sure what, exactly, he did expect. For him and John to go down together or not at all? That’s the way they’ve lived their lives for so many years, to the point that Gale is hardly sure where he ends and Bucky begins. They’re tied to one another, an invisible string in the form of a name, a silent and resounding commitment engrained deep in the blueprint of their life, as if their mutual coexistence is written into the laws of their universe.

One cannot exist without the other. Buck and Bucky, it’s just how the world is meant to be.

Gale never expected to be forced to sit in the front row of a military funeral, clothed in the exact same dress uniform as the casket team committing his dead husband’s body to the Earth. He’ll sit, straight-backed and composed, in those uncomfortable chairs. He’ll stand and salute, Benny and Marge on either side, as other men hold the flag aloft over his husband’s casket, quiet and somber as the bugler plays Taps into a descending dusk that promises to surrender the fallen flyboy to a peaceful rest. The mournful, haunting notes will ring out over white marble headstones, calling home an extinguished soul, and Gale will have to use every last ounce of composure he has not to scream. He will watch, unblinking, as the flag is folded into a neat triangle, the crisp white stars facing the open sky like a final reminder that among the stars is where Bucky died.

Gale will sit silently, unable to say a thing over the painful lump in his throat, and he will wonder if he’ll ever breathe easily again. He’ll wonder if the hands of grief will ever unwrap their chokehold on his lungs, or if that’s the price he has to pay for living when John couldn’t be afforded such luxury. He will resent the prospect of living this life without John’s hand on his, holding him close, kissing his cheek. He will fear the day he can no longer recall his smile from memory alone, his laugh, the feeling of his arms wrapped tight around him. He will grieve, and he will wonder if the grieving will ever end.

How can it possibly end when a piece of you will be missing forever?

Gale will feel his heart break for the millionth time, a plummeting, debilitating feeling that will assault his entire being on repeat every single day. He will feel sick, tired, angry, alone. He will feel like he died in the same breath that his husband did, and he will have to force his lungs to keep working because if he doesn’t, he fears his body will simply give up altogether. He will bite his cheek until he tastes blood on his tongue to keep the agonized cry from tearing out of his chest.

He will wish he’d gone down at Bucky’s side.

And yet he will stare straight ahead as an officer kneels before him. They’ll hand the flag to him, unsmiling, eyes filled with an odd comfort and a shared sorrow that can never truly match the sorrow that is threatening to bury Gale alive. But Gale will take the folded flag in his hands, shaking fingers gripping the fabric far too tight because it’s the closest he’ll ever get to holding John’s hand one last time. The only reason Gale will remember what the officer says to him in that moment will be because it’s standard, because he’s heard these words time and again said to the distraught loved ones of other soldiers.

He’s one of them now.

“On behalf of the President of the United States, the United States Air Force, and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your loved one’s honorable and faithful service.”

So scripted. So simple. And yet it will twist like a knife into what’s left of Gale’s heart. A finality. Those are the words that Bucky would want Gale to hear, if nothing else because they’re what Gale is prepared to hear. If nothing else, because they are the words that have been slated for his death since the moment of his birth, since the moment the universe put forth such an uncontainable force as John Clarence Egan.

Gale will sit there, his hands clutching a tri-folded flag that he’ll have to find somewhere to display in a too-empty home as a final remembrance. Friends, family, fellow airmen will look on as he cradles it to his chest, bearing witness to a pain that they can only just barely begin to comprehend.

And Gale will no longer be able to stop the quiet, anguished sob that rises from his constricted lungs and finally breaks through the facade of Major Buck Cleven. Because Buck Cleven can’t exist without the man who gave him his name in the first place.

–

“Buck? Are you okay in there?”

Gale blinks, and his head clears. Benny is knocking at the bathroom door.

It’s November 19, 2025. Mission day 13.

Bucky isn’t dead. Not yet.

As long as that remains true, Gale has no choice but to assume that he will survive this, because if he doesn’t… well, Gale doesn’t know what he’ll do. Bucky has kept him steady for so long that he isn’t sure he can relearn how to keep himself afloat in time to come out the other side.

He has to believe that Bucky will make it, that he won’t abandon Gale here on this beautiful, terrible planet. That he’ll find a way, somehow, because that’s what Bucky Egan has always done. No matter the damage, no matter the stakes, he’s always, always come home.

So what the hell is Gale doing standing here imagining his husband’s funeral?

We don’t expect…

Staring into his bathroom mirror, Gale bites down hard on the inside of his cheek until he can taste the blood, and he locks eyes with his reflection. He watches the expression of grief and fear on his face twist into an ugly disgust and self-loathing, eyes dark with an abject ferocity that threatens to tear this world apart.

How could he, even for a moment, imagine his life without Bucky in it? How could he so easily give up hope? John deserves better than that.

Gale doesn’t really know how it happens, but he’s winding his right arm back, hand clenched in a tight fist, and before he can even blink, before he can even process the course of his own anger, his knuckles collide with the mirror. He doesn’t hear it. He doesn’t feel it. His ears are ringing and he can still see the reflection of his narrowed eyes and his set jaw in the shattered glass, now stained with blood.

“Gale?” Benny calls out in alarm. He’s pounding at the door. Gale looks down at his hand, torn and bloodied, red dripping onto the tile floor by his feet. He wonders why he can’t feel it. “That’s it, I’m coming in.”

The door slams open, and Gale looks into the shattered mirror, spiderweb lines breaking the image into jagged puzzle pieces that just don’t quite fit. He watches the sadness and pain and shock flash across Benny’s face behind him in a stop-motion of emotion. “Fuck,” Benny mutters.

Gale raises his hand slowly, so he can inspect the cut flesh, and he thinks that, surely, he should be able to feel this right now. Surely, it should sting and burn. He tilts his hand back and forth and watches the blood trickle down, but Benny grabs him by the wrist. “Come here you idiot.”

Gale doesn’t protest this time. He lets Benny shove his hand under the faucet to rinse out the blood, lets him painstakingly remove the shards of glass with tweezers from the medicine cabinet, lets him dab the mosaic of cuts with rubbing alcohol. Slowly, he becomes aware of the pain, of the fact that his hand is throbbing as his body tries to mend itself. He wonders how it can do that, when he feels like there’s nothing left to mend.

When Benny places gauze over his hand and starts wrapping it with a bandage, Gale finally has the sense to do something. He grabs the bandage from Benny’s hands and starts winding it around and around his own fingers, securing it over his wrist. When he looks up at his friend, Benny is staring right at him, assessing him. “I’m fine,” Gale mumbles.

Benny shakes his head, eyeing Gale’s liberally wrapped hand, blood still staining his fingertips. “Yeah, you look so fine.”

Gale grits his teeth and looks down at the floor. “I have to be fine. It’s my job to be fine.”

“As a flight controller or as a husband?”

“Both.”

“I think you should stay here this morning.”

Gale looks up, and Benny tries not to take the furious glare being leveled at him personally. “Like hell.”

“Buck-”

“I’m going.”

Benny closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “Fine. I’m driving you.”

“You’re off shift.”

Benny tilts his head, giving Gale an unimpressed look. “I don’t give a damn. I don’t trust you right now.” Gale supposes that’s fair. “And I’m scared as hell, too.”

“Someone’s gotta let the dogs out.” Gale has half a mind just to take them, walk right on into Mission Control flanked by two huskies. Who would stop him?

Benny sighs and runs a hand through his hair. Then he turns to leave the bathroom. “I’ll ask one of the neighbors.”

Gale nods. “Ask Jane, across the street. Her little girl loves Pepper and Meatball.” What he doesn’t say is that Jane has a husband in the Navy, currently stationed overseas. If anyone is going to understand this situation without being overbearing with their sympathy, it’s her. “Tell her what happened. She deserves an explanation for being woken up this early.”

Then Benny is gone, leaving Gale alone with a bloody hand, a bloody floor, and a bloody mirror. He flexes his injured fist as much as he can with the bandage on, feeling the sting. Then he takes a deep breath and turns off the light. He doesn’t put any gel in his hair.

–

Mission Control goes utterly silent when the door at the back opens and Major Buck Cleven walks in. Major Buck Cleven, dressed in his usual slacks, white button down, and a black tie, ever the professional. His jaw is set, his back straight, his eyes hard. There’s little to give away the fact that he’s living his worst nightmare, save for the lack of product in his hair. Instead, his hair hangs messily over his forehead in a soft and unkempt way that few in this room have ever seen, and they don’t know what to make of it. The strangeness of it is menacing in its own way, a symbol that something terrible has happened, and yet it makes each and every one of them want to hug Gale tight and protect their CAPCOM at all costs.

And then there’s the fact that there’s a thick bandage wrapped tightly around his right hand, the edge stained with blood. For those who can see him up close, there’s tell-tale redness around his eyes, but he doesn’t look away. Anyone who dares to look at him, he looks straight in the eye.

Marge shoots to her feet at the front of the room, an unreadable mess of surprise and empathy and sadness and fear plain as day all over her face. The other flight controllers follow her lead, rising slowly, solemnly.

Harding, who had been alerted of the situation immediately and arrived at JSC not long ago, steps in front of Gale. He reaches a hand out, and Gale stares at him, daring him to hold him back.

“Chick.”

Harding’s eyes are sad – which Gale hates – and he takes a deep breath. Some of these younger astronauts are like sons to him. John Egan and Gale Cleven, especially. The dynamic duo. The partners in crime. The newlyweds. Some of the best pilots – some of the best men – he’s ever known. His fear for John and his empathy for Gale clash uncomfortably, almost unbearably, with his commitment to this program. “You shouldn’t be here right now, Gale,” he says, as gently as he can.

Gale clenches his jaw and shakes his head. “It’s my shift.”

“Helen’s doing a fine job.”

“She’s damn good at her job,” Gale agrees. “But you need three of us.”

“We’ll put Macon on.”

“Macon doesn’t know this mission like I do.”

“He can learn.” Harding matches Gale’s insistent gaze, and he watches the expression on Gale’s face twist into resentment. It breaks his heart, having one of his boys look at him like that. But he knows that grief is no state in which to work through a life or death situation, and he can’t in good conscience put Gale through that or sacrifice the well-being of the rest of the crew. Gale doesn’t speak. Harding sighs again, softening his features. “Go home, Gale. There’s nothing you can do for him here. We just have to wait.”

Gale feels the rage fill his body. He hardly even knows what happened, hardly even knows what the fuck he’s supposed to be waiting for. For his husband to either die or not?

“He’s alive, then,” Gale says simply.

Harding doesn’t reply for a long moment. Then, “We’ll let you know when-“

“Bullshit,” Gale sneers and shakes his head. “No. No. You are not treating me like some astronaut wife with no choice but to wait around in the dark until you decide to tell me what you think I should know. No.”

“I’m not trying to do that, Gale. I’ll make sure you’re updated on anything that happens. But I can’t put you on coms. I can’t risk the mission.”

“The mission?” Gale scoffs. “The mission!” How about Bucky’s goddamn life?

“You know that’s not what I meant,” Harding insists. Gale can see the pain on Harding’s face, and he knows very well what he’s trying to say: that Gale isn’t capable of doing his job right now. That he isn’t stable or focused. That they need someone with less investment to make sure his husband keeps breathing and the mission keeps going and nothing else gets fucked up.

Harding puts a hand on Gale’s shoulder. “I don’t think it’s the right choice to put you-“

“I am fully capable- get your hands off me.” Gale shakes Harding’s hand away and squeezes his eyes shut. When he opens them again, he levels a hard, decisive stare at his boss. His voice is low and angry, carefully controlled. “I am fully capable of taking over CAPCOM. Don’t you dare act like I’m not. You know me, Chick. You fucking know me.”

Harding doesn’t say a thing, just watches Gale, evaluating the pilot and astronaut he knows Buck Cleven to be at the same time that he’s wishing he could make this better, take away the pain, save both of these boys from the unfairness of the universe.

But these were discussions that were already had, months ago. They always knew this was a possibility, and Harding let Gale into Mission Control anyways. Granted, he hoped it would never come to this, but it was a judgment that he himself made. He decided that, in the event Bucky faced the worst, Buck would still be a reliable flight controller.

Gale watches as these thoughts swarm through Harding’s head. “Let me do my job, Chick.”

“As a flight controller or as a husband?”

That damn question.

Gale feels his heart pounding, and he’s shocked to realize that his lungs are working of their own accord. Bucky is alive. So now Gale has to get to work. “Both.”

“Fine,” Harding agrees. “But I’m bringing Macon in to be briefed so he can take over if needed.”

Gale nods in silent agreement, and Harding squeezes his shoulder before motioning for him to go ahead.

He looks out at the Red Shift flight controllers around the room, and he is keenly aware that most of them witnessed this entire exchange. They’re watching him warily, with varying levels of pity and empathy, but he just nods to them, too, and they track his motion as he walks past console after console towards the front of the room. The only people who don’t turn to look at him are Helen and Dr. Huston, who are laser-focused on working the crew through this.

Gale stops beside Albert Clark’s console, and the Flight Director reaches out to put a hand on Gale’s shoulder. He leans in close. “He’s sticking with us. Determined bastard.”

Bucky is still unconscious and relatively unstable, but Curt managed to get him inside the lander. Best they can figure from Curt’s account and the suit telemetry, the rover’s wheel broke going down the slope of Shackleton, and Bucky got stuck beneath the rover when it tumbled down. He hit his head pretty hard, and the oxygen regulator in his suit was damaged, causing both the pressure sensor and the mechanism that slowly decreases the pressure over a set period of time to malfunction.

His suit depressurized from over 8psi to less than the minimum anticipated 4psi, which not only makes it hard for the body to take in enough oxygen, but the rapid depressurization can cause decompression sickness symptoms that vary in severity depending on how much nitrogen was left in Bucky’s body. He lost consciousness due to head trauma, but they remain concerned about the effects of hypoxia on the brain after being in low pressure for so long.

Since getting back to the lander, Dr. Huston, Helen, and Rosie have been in constant communication, monitoring Bucky’s vitals and guiding Curt through every step. He managed to get Bucky out of his busted suit, which he’ll inspect for damage later. He has Bucky breathing pure oxygen again, trying to get enough of it to his brain. EECOM increased the cabin pressure to nearly double the standard atmospheric pressure in an approximation of a hyperbaric chamber. Ideally, this will mitigate decompression sickness and assist with oxygen uptake in Bucky’s body. The external head wound itself was not serious, no doubt thanks to Bucky’s com cap softening the blow, but it did lead to a decent amount of blood loss. After cleaning away the blood to inspect the injury, Curt had to wrap Bucky’s head. He has no way of checking for brain damage on Starship as long as Bucky is unconscious.

They’ve been running through abort scenarios, but with Orion at the furthest point in its orbit, it would take Starship almost as long to reach the crew capsule if they aborted now as it will for Orion to reach them on schedule. With Bucky unstable, they don’t think it’s a good idea to strap him into a launch vehicle until they know more about his condition, so he and Curt are staying put.

After thanking Clark, Gale walks over to Marge’s PAO desk in the front corner of the room. He wraps his arms around her, and he can feel her trying not to tremble in his embrace. “I’m glad you’re here,” she whispers, hugging him tightly back. “You should be here.”

Gale squeezes her a little harder, and she squeezes back, before they both let go. She reaches across her desk and picks up a cup of coffee, extending it towards him. “I picked this up for you. Benny told me you were refusing to stay put. What’d you do to your hand?”

Gale takes the cup in his good hand and glances at his bad one. He bites his lip in embarrassment. “Punched a mirror.”

Marge scrunches her brow and tries not to laugh or cry or say much of anything. “They’re trying their best for him.”

“I know,” Gale whispers back. He takes a sip of coffee, letting the bitter taste burn his tongue. Then he walks to his own console, patting Croz on the shoulder as he passes, and he and Benny flank Helen on either side.

She looks up at them both, and Gale sees exhaustion on her face that mirrors his own. “Curt’s checking for other injuries, now that we’ve got the recompression and the head wound under control. He’s got a lot of swelling in his right lower leg,” she tells them, straight to the point. Gale appreciates that; he doesn’t need another person’s pity right now. “Curt was able to x-ray it. He’s got a non-displaced tibial fracture.” She points to an image on her computer monitor that Curt no doubt sent through moments ago. They’d tested the capabilities of Starship’s med bay their first night on the surface. They just never expected to have to use it like this.

The image shows Bucky’s tibia, a crisp line right through the middle. The separated pieces of the bone are perhaps just millimeters out of place. Helen hands Gale the second headset. Once it’s turned on, he finds that he’s tuned in to chatter between Curt and Rosie, who is trying to aid from Orion, thousands of miles away from the moon. “I need you to do this, Curt,” Rosie is saying.

Curt: “You have to be kidding.”

Rosie: “It’s not hard. Just tap it in.”

Curt: “I’m gonna make it worse.”

Gale looks at Helen, eyebrow raised. “Gotta set it,” she whispers.

Well, shit.

Rosie: “You did it in training. You’re gonna have to do it now.”

Curt: “In training it was on a dummy.”

Rosie: “Think of it this way, it’s still on a dummy.”

Gale snorts, and he’s startled by the fact that laughter is possible right now. Helen smiles beside him.

Curt: “Fuck.”

Rosie: “Come on Curt. Just one little push. He’ll be pissed if he wakes up and learns I have to re-break his fucking leg to make it heal right.”

Curt: “Fuck, okay. Okay. One, two…”

Gale can hear Curt gagging as he presumably crunches the bone back into place, and he makes a disgusted face of his own as he nervously twists his wedding ring around his finger. The visual of Bucky’s leg, of all things, being unprofessionally set by Curtis Biddick, of all people, on the moon, of all places, makes him squirm.

Curt: “Okay, I think I got it.”

By the time Curt gets Bucky’s leg splinted and wrapped, Macon is there, making four CAPCOMs in Mission Control. Curt hasn’t identified any further injuries other than a mottled bruise-like rash on Bucky’s upper arms and abdomen, a symptom of decompression sickness that indicates Bucky still had some nitrogen in his blood when his suit depressurized. Rosie instructs Curt to monitor the rash closely for swelling and see if the recompression therapy alleviates it.

Helen then alerts Curt that she’s handing the console over to Gale so she can find a nice cot somewhere in JSC and get some unrestful sleep before her actual shift starts later in the afternoon.

Benny decides to stick around a while longer, and the following couple of hours fall into a quiet and tense waiting game. Gale talks with Curt about his condition, Bucky’s condition, the lander’s condition, and EVA findings (which feel trivial now and yet remain necessary). He talks with Rosie and Alex about various observations and experiment results, including the behavior of certain medical devices and procedures in deep space (somewhat ironic).

Around 7:00 GMT (3pm Houston time), Mission Control is uncharacteristically somber. A group of flight controllers that is usually focused yet friendly, collected yet outspoken, doesn’t feel much like talking at all. Benny left an hour or so ago to try and get some shut eye before Blue Shift takes over at midnight. At the end of their workday, Alex, Rosie, and Curt are all eating dinner, their coms off. EECOM had eased the pressure in Starship back down to normal, though if Bucky starts showing more decompression symptoms they’ll have to increase it again. For now, he’s as stable as he’ll get.

Gale, Macon, and Croz are eating takeout sandwiches and playing I Spy, like children, in order to avoid thinking too much about the situation at hand.

“Buck?” Curt’s voice sounds tired when he switches his coms on, a little wobbly with nerves. Gale has been through Hell today, and he can barely imagine what it’s been like for Curt.

“I’m here, Curt,” he says. There’s a long silence. “Curt?”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t-” Curt cuts off, like he doesn’t know what to even say. Couldn’t what? Prevent this? Stop this? Do better? Do more? Fix it?

Gale doesn’t want to hear any of it. “It’s not your fault.”

“It was that wheel,” Curt insists. “If I had… I dunno. Done a better job fixin’ it? Told him not to drive it up that incline? If I’d gone with him?”

Gale closes his eyes, running a hand through his hair. Macon and Croz sit quietly beside him, eyes downcast. “It’s not your fault, Curt. There’s nothing you could’ve done.”

When Curt is quiet, Gale turns off his mic so he can address Clark and Dr. Huston. “Fellas, where are we at?”

Dr. Huston studies his console, no doubt analyzing Bucky and Curt’s vitals. He looks up at Gale. “Tell him to rest. He should check on Bucky every hour, and we’ll wake him up if there’s a change before then. There’s nothing else he can do now.”

Gale relays the message to Curt, who predictably puts up a fight about it. “You’re no good to him or to us without some rest,” Gale argues. Curt finally, grudgingly, agrees. “And Curt?”

“Yeah, Buck?”

“Thank you.”

–

At 6pm, two hours after Gale was supposed to end his shift, Harding finally convinces him to go home. “No, Gale. Home. You’re not sleeping on a cot here. You’re going home.”

Since Benny left hours ago, Marge is tasked with making sure Gale gets home in one piece. He tries to tell her that she, too, should go home, but she insists on staying the night with him. No one trusts him to be alone right now, and he doesn’t really know what they’re so afraid of. As Marge pulls her car into his driveway, though, he looks down at his bandaged hand. With a frown, he realizes that maybe he doesn’t trust himself to be alone either. It’s dark, and he feels a loneliness and a fear creeping back into his head now that he’s not on shift, now that he doesn’t have any purpose other than to worry about John.

He doesn’t want to be alone. So he tells her to go on in while he grabs the mail.

As he closes the mailbox and glances through the flyers and envelopes in his hand – no threats, thankfully; that would probably about do him in – the front door of the house across the street flies open. He squints through the light of the streetlamps as Maggie, the little girl that lives there, comes tumbling out, red curls bouncing as she runs down the front walk. As if she only remembers at the last second, she skids to a stop at the edge of the road and checks both ways three times, even though their sleepy neighborhood street rarely has any cars going up or down its length. Like a game of red light green light, she goes from a halt to a dead run across the road, right towards Gale.

“Mr. Cleven?” she says as she stops at his feet. There’s something pure and innocent about her voice that feels out of place in the dark turmoil of Gale’s mind, but it breaks through like the smallest ray of sunshine. He looks down at her. She hardly reaches his waist, and she’s grinning up at him, freckles dotting her little face like constellations. She told him once, when he babysat a few months ago, that sometimes other kids say mean things about her freckles. He shook his head and stood her right in front of her bedroom mirror. Kneeling down beside her, he pointed to a few of the freckles on her face, and he told her that she carries the stars with her everywhere she goes.

“Space obsessed,” her mother, Jane, told Gale once. “Says she wants to be just like you.”

Now Maggie’s smile turns to a frown, and she looks at her shoes before slowly looking back up at him, as if she’s not sure that she’s allowed to. So instead he kneels down to her level, so she can look him in the eye. He motions to the piece of paper that she’s gripping in her hand, so tightly that there’s tiny, wrinkled, finger-shaped imprints on it. “What’s that you got there, Mags?”

He knows the smile he tries to give her doesn’t reach his eyes; it barely even reaches his mouth. But it’s the best he can give her, now. She juts the piece of paper towards his chest, turning it so he can see the drawing on the front, scribbled in colorful crayon. It’s an astronaut, no doubt, wearing a white EVA suit with a big helmet and the American flag across the chest. They’re standing next to a tall white triangle that Gale knows is a spaceship, and the ground – drawn as a straight line directly beneath the astronaut’s feet – is pockmarked with circles that he assumes are supposed to be craters. There’s stars in the messy blue sky. In what is unmistakably a child’s handwriting, the words “Feel Better Jon” are scrawled across the top in red crayon. The J is backwards and the h is missing, but there’s a little heart drawn at the end of his name.

Jane must have told her that John got hurt up there – the reason they had to take care of the dogs today.

Gale feels his eyes threaten to well up, and he bites down hard on his lip as he takes the drawing from Maggie, willing his hands not to shake as he stares down at it.

“It’s John,” Maggie explains. She rocks back and forth on her heels, watching Gale shyly. “He’s on the moon. And that’s his rocket, right there.” She points to the oblong tower that is Starship.

“So it is,” Gale says. He’s surprised by the small chuckle that erupts from his chest, and he’s even more shocked to see a drop of water fall onto the drawing, leaving a wet spot in the corner. He tries to wipe it away with his thumb. “Sorry ‘bout that,” he tells her, squeezing his eyes shut for a second, trying to compose himself. When he opens them again, though, Maggie reaches out with her small hand, and she wipes another tear off Gale’s cheek.

“I know he’s not here,” she says, pulling her hand slowly away. “But I thought you could give it to him when he comes home.”

Gale looks at her, and he feels like his heart has been shredded to pieces for the hundredth time today, simply unable to beat anymore. Maggie watches him sadly, and Gale hates himself just that little bit more. He’s the adult here. He shouldn’t be making this kid sad. He shouldn’t-

But then Maggie throws her arms around his neck, nearly toppling him over. “He’ll come home,” she says, not a single doubt in her voice. “He has to. He promised he’d teach me how to ride a bike.”

Gale can barely stop the gasping sob that tries to primally tear its way out of his mouth, but he winds his arms around the little girl and holds her close, clutching the drawing so tight behind her back that he makes bigger finger-shaped imprints right next to hers. “Thank you,” he whispers.

He looks up, over Maggie’s shoulder, and sees Jane standing on the front porch. She lifts a hand in a wave. When Maggie lets go, Gale takes her hand in his and leads her back across the road, stopping to check each way. On the porch, Jane sends her daughter into the house.

“Thank you,” Gale says to her. “For watching the dogs. And for this.”

“That was all her idea,” Jane says with a small smile that doesn’t reach her eyes any more than Gale’s reached his. “I’m sorry to hear about John.”

With little left to say, Gale thanks her again, promising to update her, before heading back across the street. Inside his own house, Marge has the news playing on TV. Harding is standing at a podium in one of JSC’s newsrooms, explaining to the whole world that Mission Commander Major John Egan has suffered a near-fatal accident and is in unstable condition.

Gale stares at the television, his vision tunneling, as he stumbles backward until the backs of his legs hit the front of the couch.

Near-fatal.

Unstable.

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

Might not survive.

Nothing short of a miracle.

After Harding answers a small handful of questions from disgustingly over-eager reporters and walks out of frame, the screen shifts to a news anchor, who highlights what the director of the Human Spaceflight Program just said. As the broadcast ends, she looks gravely into the camera, and her words add to those that have been ringing in Gale’s ears on repeat all day.

“Our hearts go out to Major Gale Cleven and the entire NASA community at this time.”

Gale doesn’t know if it’s those final words or the child’s drawing gripped between his fingers or the fact that the whole world now knows about Bucky’s accident or the horrifying realization that all of the hateful skeptics who prayed for his husband to die just might see their wishes come true… but that’s the moment his body gives out.

The room spins in slow motion, walls closing in. His throat closes up. The breath rushes from his lungs. His head is pounding, his fingers grasping for something, anything to keep him above water.

John.

“Gale?”

“Gale, honey, are you okay?”

“Can you hear me?”

“Gale, look at me.”

Gale barely comprehends the fact that, somehow, he ended up crumpled on the floor in front of the couch, his bad hand pressed to the floor and the other clutching the drawing to his chest like that damn tri-folded flag at an airman’s funeral. He barely comprehends Marge sitting beside him, but she pulls him into her arms. He turns to her, and she puts her hand on the back of his head, guiding him to rest against her so he can hide in the crook of her neck. He cries into the fabric of her blouse, and he has half a mind to feel bad about it, but his entire world is falling away too fast. Hiccupping sobs fill the silent living room and wrack his entire body as every tear he refused to shed, every emotion he refused to feel over the course of this entire mission, finally bursts out of him in an onslaught of all-consuming anguish.

Marge shushes him and holds him tight, the only thing keeping him in one piece, telling him that Bucky's strong, that he'll find a way through. She rocks him back and forth like a child, and he just can’t seem to stop or to catch his breath.

His chest burns.

“I need you to breathe, sweetheart,” Marge says to him as she strokes his hair. “Breathe for me.”

He can’t. He can’t. He can’t.

He can’t breathe. He can’t stop. He can’t keep going.

He can’t.

His hands scrabble at Marge’s back, holding on for dear life.

He needs his husband. He needs John. He needs-

“Take a breath, Gale. Please.”

Don’t cry for me, angel. Just breathe.

---

Part 12

#“Don't cry for me angel”#Gale “I'm Fine” Cleven #Spoiler: Gale is not fine #No one's dead!#clegan astronaut au #clegan #clegan fic #masters of the air #mota #john egan #gale cleven #buck x bucky #bucky egan #buck cleven

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rambleonwaywardson · 5 months ago

Text

Clegan Astronaut AU - Part 13

Masterpost Read on AO3

Author's Note: Every week I think "this chapter will be shorter," and every week it is longer. There was a time when I would have looked at 11k words and split it in two, but now is not that time. You get it all in one go. Plan your time accordingly.

---

November 21 Lunar South Pole, Starship

It might have been better if Bucky didn’t dream. More merciful. A blissful unawareness, nothing but a deep, uninterrupted sleep full of nothing and no one and nowhere. Maybe he wouldn’t feel so afraid, if he didn’t dream. Or maybe dreams are the only thing keeping him from drifting away forever.

He dreams about the moon a lot. Bounding across that wide open nothing, staring up at a never-ending universe full of stars. The stuff of his childhood fantasies. We’re all made of stardust, Gale likes to say.

He dreams about the rover crashing down on him, smashing him into the ground as they both skid down a sandy slope. He dreams about the sudden inability to breathe, the explosion of pain in his leg. He dreams about Benny’s voice in his ear before everything went dark. If he could wake up, it would be one of those dreams where your eyes shoot open at the end, the breath pressed in a rush out of your chest.

He dreams the most about Gale.

Gale’s smile, his laughter, his voice. He dreams about pulling into their driveway and seeing Gale through the window, dancing with the dog. He dreams about Gale throwing the bouquet at their wedding, grinning in exasperation as he covers his eyes. He dreams about Gale looking over at him as they fly their plane out over the water. He dreams about Gale handing him coffee in the morning when they’re both only half dressed and half dead to the world.

And he dreams about Gale, his face worried, looking down at him with tears in his eyes. He looks scared, and Bucky doesn’t even know why. He wants to know why. Needs to know why so he can make it go away. He wants to reach out, to say something, anything to make it go away, whatever it is. He wants to brush Gale’s messy hair back away from his face and hold his hand against his cheek and tell him that everything is alright. He wants to take away all of the pain.

But he can’t.

He can’t move a muscle.

—

“Rosie? Are you awake?”

Curt lays in his hammock in the middle of the Starship cabin, looking out the window at the star-filled sky beyond. He is the epitome of alone. The moon is not a different planet, it’s just a moon. One lonely moon orbiting the little miracle that is planet Earth. But the moon itself is 2,160 miles wide at its equator. It is 6,786 miles in circumference. A vast expanse of dust and rubble marked by impact basins billions of years old. 260 degrees Fahrenheit in full sun and -280 in the darkness. Nothing about this place is welcoming. An astronaut’s Everest. And yet it is peaceful in the strangest of ways.

Empty. Imposing. Beautiful.

Lifeless.

Except for him.

Scattered across the lunar surface are the remnants of the few voyages half a century ago that dared to step foot on this alien terrain. A flag here. A camera there. Another era. Another age. The same dream.

And even still, Curt is but an invisible, lonely speck at the southern pole, existing along a boundary of dark and light that parallels this strange liminal limbo of life vs. death. Just him and the stars and a world that wants to kill him with every heartbeat, nothing but a fancy tin can separating him from an end that would claim him in a single breath.

He supposes that being alone, the only conscious human being on an entire planet, would make most people feel lonely. It doesn’t, though. He doesn’t feel lonely up here. It’s not the being alone, really, that has lodged this tense, shuddering ball of anxiety in his chest. It’s the fact that he isn’t. The fact that there is someone else beside him fighting for breath, and he doesn’t have a say in whether or not that breath is drawn.

He doesn’t expect an answer when he reaches out into the radio silence. He doesn’t know what time it is, but Helen’s been on shift for a while now, so he’d guess around 12am GMT. He’s surprised when there’s a soft crackle on the other side of the radio transmission, and Rosie says, “Yeah, Curt. I’m awake. So’s Alex.”

Curt throws his legs over the side of the hammock and climbs out, turns the music back on – Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day – because he can’t stand the silence all around him. Maybe it’s the quiet that makes it hard to sleep. The quiet that’s too loud. Or maybe it’s the loudness inside his head that keeps him up. He wishes he could turn down the volume on his own thoughts, turn those off instead. He feels crazy. Like maybe this is all just a weird fever dream. But he’s experiencing all of it in frightening technicolor, and even though he doesn’t feel lonely, he is so, so alone.

I walk a lonely road, the only one that I have ever known.

He wanders over to Bucky, who is laying still and quiet on his cot. He opened his eyes for just a moment sometime after that seizure, when Curt had to adjust the IV in his arm and accidentally let it tug at the sensitive skin. But not again since.

“What are the odds of another seizure?” Curt asks now.

Rosie is quiet. Curt can imagine him rubbing the back of his neck as he thinks about what to say and how best to say it. How to let Curt down gently.

My shallow heart’s the only thing that’s beating.

Curt strokes a wayward curl away from Bucky’s forehead, hating the way Bucky feels clammy beneath his touch. Then he rifles through their med bay supplies while he waits, looking through the medications they have packed away.

“I don’t know, Curt,” Rosie finally says before going into what Curt calls his doctor voice. “Sometimes, traumatic brain injuries can cause seizures. It just… happens. It doesn’t mean he’ll have another. It doesn’t mean he won’t. Since it’s only been a day or two, it was an early seizure. They’re less likely to indicate long-term epilepsy. If he has another, the odds of him developing epilepsy increase. If he has one over a week from now, it’s almost guaranteed.”

He sighs. “So, I don’t know. All we can do is take this one step at a time.”

Curt looks over at Bucky again, at the bandage around his head, the splint on his leg, the shallow rise and fall of his chest. He thinks about how unfair it is that Bucky has to rely on him to keep him alive. Curt took the same medical training as all the other non-physician astronauts, but he’d hardly trust a single one of them, much less himself, in this type of emergency.

It’s not fair.

“I wish you were here Rosie,” he confides. He hates the way his voice sounds thick and strained. “I don’t… I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.”

“You’re doing great, Curt. Really.”

Curt frowns, takes a deep breath. He looks down at his hands and shuffles through the medications he has available once again, skimming over their names. The lead weight in his chest rests heavy on his lungs when his fears are confirmed: the one he’s looking for isn’t there.

Curt: “Rosie?”

Rosie: “I’m still here.”

Curt: “We had anti-seizure medication on ISS. I’m not seeing it here.”

Silence.

Rosie: “I advocated for it to be included on Artemis. It was a whole debate. You’ll have to ask Houston.”

Curt doesn’t like the sound of that at all. Another score for NASA’s backpack problem: medications. They have a far lower mass restriction and far less storage capacity on Orion and Starship than they do on the station, and therefore they could bring far fewer supplies. Rosie was involved in the task force that determined which medical supplies were necessary for a lunar exploration mission, but he was only one person among many. And many of the others had never even been to space. In the end, did anyone really think an astronaut was likely to have a seizure during a mission that lasts only a month or less?

Curt rubs a hand over his face, dreading the answer.

Curt: “Helen?”

Helen: “Working on it.”

They wait, Curt fidgeting impatiently, his frustration building up again.

Far From Here by Marianas Trench is playing in the background. It feels alright but that’s a lie that’s always near, sit around and blame the one that put you here.

Helen: “We do not have anti-seizure medication on board Orion or Starship.” She sighs, and she sounds like she hates to be telling them this. “It was decided that a seizure was not a likely complication on a short-term lunar sortie.”

Bingo.

Rosie: “Fuck.”

A disbelieving laugh pops out of Curt’s mouth. He can’t help it. Because what the fuck?

Helen: “I’m sorry, Curt.”

Curt: “So… if he has another seizure. If he keeps havin’ seizures. We can’t do anything?”

Rosie: “No.”

Curt: “That’s… that’s… Yikes.” Curt laughs again, shaking his head. “That’s a fuckin’ yikes.”

His mouth twists into a sour, resentful smile as he holds an arrangement of fucking useless medications in his hands. His laugh turns from shocked to bitter as he lets the meds tumble carelessly back into their storage box, and he runs a hand through his hair. He hasn’t slept in… he doesn’t know how long. The flight surgeon probably knows, but Curt doesn’t give a damn. He’s felt this feeling of dread weighing him down ever since that seizure.

And now he’s told that it’s something that could happen again. Could happen multiple times. And if it does, he can do nothing. All he can do is hold Bucky down, make sure he doesn’t choke, and hope for the fucking best.

Laughter just keeps bubbling up out of his chest in an angry, sordid, deranged sort of noise.

Helen: “Curt? Are you okay?”

Curt shakes his head, rubbing his eyes. He can’t stop laughing.

“Yikes,” he says again. “Yikes yikes yikes yikes yikes.” He claps his hands together as he says it, and he leans over, hands on his knees. Slowly, he eases himself to the floor, so he’s sitting with his head leaning back against the cot. He presses his fingers to his mouth and chuckles into his hand. “Fuckin’ yikes, guys.”

Helen: “Curt?”

He doesn’t care what Mission Control has to say. This whole situation is a mess. A mess that could’ve been avoided, even if it couldn’t have been planned for. He’s exhausted, he’s angry, and this is absurd.

Helen: “Curt, do you copy?”

Curt: “What the fuck? What the fuck NASA? What the fuck!”

—

Nassau Bay, TX

Gale hasn’t checked his email since before John’s accident. He knows it will be filled with “thoughts and prayers” and questions from the media even though they know they should be contacting Marge. He knows reading a single email with the words “We’re praying for you and John” or “What does this mean for the Artemis program” will be enough to make him scream and throw his laptop across the room. And anything else, any other email about literally anything else, he can’t think about right now. Because he still can’t accept the fact that the world continues to turn.

Anyone who really needs him has his number. And anyone else can cut him some damn slack.

He managed a few hours of sleep after his home emptied out last night and left him alone again. Except for Marge, who has, without asking, taken up residence in his guest room until further notice to make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid or generally stop breathing since he can’t seem to remember to do that on his own.

He didn’t manage to fall asleep until around 11pm, and his eyes shot open again, jostling him out of a nightmare he can’t remember, at 2am. Vague visions of a mangled body, a casket, the expression of pain stretched uncomfortably across his husband’s face flashing in his mind. Bucky’s pained scream in his ears. Or was that him?

He’s sleeping in the living room again, on the couch that he’s nearly too tall to fit on. He tried to go back into the bedroom, but he couldn’t. The bed is too big, the blankets not warm enough, the memories too painful even as they drift away. He tried to sleep again, too, he really did. He tossed and turned and squeezed his eyes closed and tried to remember to breathe. In, out, in, out… in. in. in. in. out.

He buried his nose into the pillow case that mercifully still smells like John. He thought about their wedding, about strong arms wrapping around him, a soft smile, gentle lips, bright eyes crinkled at the corners with all the joy that John carries through their life.

But he couldn’t do it. He’s exhausted, and yet he feels wide awake. He wonders if he’ll ever sleep again. If he’ll carry on like this, plagued by a nightmare he can’t navigate his way out of, or if one day his body will simply collapse under the weight of this grief that he can’t control.

It’s all too much.

So he turns on the light, grabs his laptop off the coffee table, and he opens his email for the first time in over two days. He stares at his inbox numbly, and he presses his wedding ring to his lips as he fights the urge to slam the laptop closed again. He scrolls through uncountable messages, deleting most of them on the spot regardless of who they’re from or what they want. There’s one, though, from yesterday afternoon, that stops him cold.

When he sees the sender’s name, he does slam the laptop closed. His heart rate skyrockets, his whole body going stiff. He looks around the room at just how alone he is. It’s dark outside. Marge is asleep. Benny is on shift. The dogs, even, are asleep.

He takes a deep breath and squeezes his eyes shut before slowly opening the laptop again. With shaking fingers, he clicks on the email.

Gale,

I know these may be hard to look at right now, but I do hope, if you choose to let them, they can make you smile.

I’m thinking of you, and I pray that John makes it home.

XO.

His fingers are trembling so bad that he can barely click the link at the bottom of the email. But he swallows thickly and fights to breathe, blinking the tears out of his eyes when the page opens.

Their wedding photos.

It feels so long ago now, the way Gale struggles to remember parts of it. Like his mind simply won’t allow him to find comfort in the memories of the best day of his life.

How has it only been a month, and already the world threatens to take his husband away from him? He feels sick. Sick at the thought that this life can be so cruel. Wondering what he did to deserve this. He feels sick at the memory of the day he proposed. The very reason that drove him to spit out the words he’d been kicking around for years already.

We should get married, he said, all that time ago. We should get married, he said, terrified that something would happen. If they were bound by law rather than just by name, he would get a say in John’s fate, should John have no say himself. He would get a key to the room where NASA keeps their secrets from the world, even if he got himself booted from Mission Control. He would be guaranteed a place at the table of John’s life if his life came under threat somewhere up there, too far away.

We should get married, he said, praying to God that nothing would happen.

But here they are. Something’s happened.

You knew the risks, he thinks to himself, biting down too hard on his lower lip.

You always knew the damn risks. You knew the risks of space travel. And you knew the risks of John Egan. Don’t act for a second like you didn’t.

He wouldn’t trade it, though. He wouldn’t change a thing. If he could go back a thousand times, he would still attach himself at the hip to John fucking Egan. He would still fall for that smile and that laugh and those wild curls. He would still follow him to the ends of the Earth. He would marry him a million times over. No matter how it ends.

He blinks rapidly as he stares at the computer screen.

The cover photo is the one taken right after their kiss. Gale, in bright white, is leaning back in John’s arms, laughing in a way that makes his nose scrunch and his cheeks turn pink. John, in his black tux, is grinning from ear to ear as he holds Gale by the waist, eyes locked on his new husband. Pepper and Meatball are at their feet, Pepper standing with her front paws on Gale’s thigh, wanting to join in, as Curt tries to keep Meatball from knocking John over.

God, did he ever feel that happy? It seems too far away now.

He hovers his mouse over the button to enter the gallery, but the thought makes his head spin and he can’t bring himself to do it. He glances around again at the empty, lonely room. He’s never had so much trouble with being alone before. Now it makes nausea rise up in his stomach, makes a fearful feeling settle over him, He rubs a hand over his eyes and picks up the laptop, padding quietly down the hall.

He hesitates outside the door, one hand holding the laptop and the other raised to knock. He feels like a little kid who can’t sleep, going to his parents because he had a nightmare. He only made that mistake once or twice, quickly learning that all he could expect was his father yelling at him to get back in bed.

Maybe he shouldn’t.

None of them are getting much sleep right now; it’s not just him. If Marge is asleep, he shouldn’t wake her. She has no obligation to chase away the monsters under his bed.

He drops his fist and takes a step back, wincing when the corner of his laptop bumps quietly against the wall behind him. He’s a grown man. If he can’t sleep, that’s his problem. If he feels like his chest is too tight and he can’t breathe and his hands are shaking and his head is spinning just because he got back the wedding photos he paid for… well, that’s his problem, too.

But it’s Marge. Marge, who has always been there for him. Marge, who let him hide in her bedroom when they were just kids because he was too afraid to go home. Marge, who would hold him close and try to make him laugh and tell him everything would be alright even when they were both too young to know. Marge, who has gone out of her way for 20 plus years to make sure he knows he is never, ever alone.

He steps forward again and raises his hand to knock. Lays his hand flat against the door instead. Takes a deep breath. Closes his eyes.

No. No. She deserves to sleep. He shouldn’t worry her. He should-

“Gale?” Marge asks softly. “I know you’re out there, darling. Don’t act like you’re not.”

Warily, Gale opens the door, unsure if he feels guilty that he woke Marge or relieved that she woke up before he could talk himself out of it. He stands in the doorway, unsure of why exactly he came here, what he’s supposed to do now, what he expects her to do. But Marge sits up and turns on the bedside lamp. She takes one look at Gale’s face, and she frowns before forcing a weak smile. “Come here,” she says.

He walks further into the room to sit down on the bed. He hears paws click-clacking down the hall, and Pepper wanders in, followed by Meatball. Marge urges him to scoot back to lean against the headboard next to her, and the dogs hop up onto the foot of the bed. Meatball crawls up to rest his head on Gale’s leg. Pepper whines quietly as she watches him, forlorn. Meatball is familiar with them leaving. Buck, Bucky, Benny. They’ve all been on the station for months at a time. Pepper, though. Pepper’s just a baby, really. She’s only been part of their family for a matter of months. This is strange, for her, having one of her dads gone for so long. She knows something is wrong, but she doesn’t know why he isn’t coming home.

Gale’s heart breaks that little bit more every time she stares at him with those sad, confused eyes.

Marge presses herself against Gale’s side and leans her head on his shoulder. “Couldn’t sleep?”

Gale shakes his head. “It’s not…” he sighs. “It’s not fair.” And damn does he feel like a whiny child. But it’s not. It’s not fair.

He opens his laptop again and turns it back on, handing it over to Marge. She looks at the screen. “Your wedding photos.”

“Mmm.”

“Have you looked at them?”

Gale bites nervously at his thumbnail and shakes his head.

“Do you want to?” Marge asks. They’re both just staring at the screen, at the beautiful, beautiful photograph inviting them to look at the rest.

Gale’s breath stutters before he says “I don’t know.”

“Can I…?”

He hesitates. Then he nods.

Marge raises an eyebrow in question, but she clicks the button. When the page loads, the screen is filled with a gallery of vibrant, fairy-tale-esque photographs that make Marge gasp. Gale holds his breath.

“These are gorgeous,” Marge says. “Look at you!” The first set of photos are of Gale and his attendants getting ready in the bridal suite. Bright whites and navy blues. Sunlight streaming through the windows. Gale looking at himself in the mirror, running a hand through his hair or nervously adjusting the sleeves of his tux. The girls with their perfect flower bouquets. Gale and Marge sharing a moment in front of the mirror. His attendants raising a glass to him as he smiles, ready to marry the love of his life.

There are photos of the groomsmen going on a wild goose chase, sprinting down the hall after Pepper when she stole the rings. A picture of Marge stepping out of the bridal suite and looking horrified. A picture of Brady tackling Pepper in a heap on the floor, the others trailing breathlessly behind them.

Then there’s photos of the groom’s suite. “Oh, look at John,” Marge sighs, a soft smile on her face as they reach the first row of pictures of him. But when she looks at Gale, his brow is wrinkled as he bites at his lower lip.

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “No.”

He can’t do it. He can’t sit here and look at these. Not now.

Marge puts her hand on his. “Okay,” she says. “It’s okay. We don’t have to.”

“I can’t.” Tears are welling up at the corners of his eyes, his whole body still and on guard for the next thing that tries to tear out his heart.

Marge closes the laptop and sets it on the bedside table, and then she pulls him into a tight side hug. “It’s alright, honey.”

“I can’t,” he says again, choking on the breath that won’t fill his lungs. Can’t what, he doesn’t know. But he can’t.

“Just breathe, Gale. You don’t have to. You don’t have to.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, hating the way his throat feels tight, the shakiness of his voice. He’s so tired of crying. He’s so tired of trying not to cry. He’s so tired. He’s shaking so bad. He can’t stop.

“Breathe, honey,” Marge says, stroking his hair. “In and out. Come on.”

Gale tries to match his breathing to hers as she guides him gently through it, but he keeps choking on air, rogue sobs breaking through and wracking his bones.

Marge shushes him and holds him close. She’s been holding him up for the last two days. Listening to him fight against his own emotions, on the constant verge of breaking down, toeing the line until he can no longer stop himself from tipping over. As if he thinks he isn’t allowed to feel these things. As if he thinks feeling them is a last resort that he’s being continually driven to, every loss of control a mark of some sort of failure that no one else can see.

“You shouldn’t hold it all in, Gale,” she tells him. He thinks about the fact that he fell apart in her arms that first night after the accident, in front of the TV with Maggie’s drawing in his hands. And he crumbled in her arms yesterday, after the seizure. She continually pulls him back from some sort of edge, keeping the pieces of him held together with scotch tape and a determined kind of love. Isn’t that enough?

As if she can read his mind, she says, “It doesn’t matter how much you think you’re allowed to hurt. You need to let yourself feel all of it, hon. You can’t hold it in forever.”

But it hurts so much. It hurts just as much to let it out as it does to hold it in. He presses the ring to his lips and bites at his knuckle until it hurts and now that he’s crying again he can’t fucking stop. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever stop. He can’t breathe. Doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to breathe again.

But John needs him to keep breathing. He has to keep breathing. He has no choice.

Marge holds him and rocks him and presses her lips to his hair. She doesn’t let go even when it feels like they’ve been wrapped up like this forever. But finally, he settles again.

“I’ll have to look at them eventually,” he mumbles, sniffing quietly as he feels tears drying on his face. “I… I wish I could…”

“It’s alright,” Marge says again. “Maybe tomorrow.”

Maybe tomorrow, things will be better.

John has been unconscious for 2 days. 48 hours. 2,880 minutes. 172,800 seconds. It feels like so much longer.

172,800 seconds that Gale hasn’t felt whole.

But.

Maybe tomorrow.

—

Benny looks at the list of songs he’s been provided. Among them, So Far Away by Avenged Sevenfold, What a Catch Donnie by Fall Out Boy, Gun Dogs by TOVA, Therapy by All Time Low, Before You Go by Lewis Capaldi, PIECES by Daughtry, Miserable at Best by Mayday Parade.

Now Buck by nothing, nowhere.

“I’m not okay, I’m not alright, I need a break, I need a light,” Curt is singing. “I gotta keep it a buck, keep it a buck.”

The singing has become increasingly angry over the last couple of hours. Helen warned him that Curt was getting agitated.

“Buck, Curt, really?” Benny asks.

“Didn’t really think of it like that,” Curt admits before he continues on. Feel like this every day, shit kinda suck.

“Curt, we’d really like you to get some sleep.” Benny runs a hand through his hair, fighting back his own yawn. Smokey has been relentless in pointing out that Curt has basically not slept in 48 hours, and the effects are becoming obvious. “We’re concerned-”

“Oh you’re concerned, are you?” Curt scoffs.

“Yes, Curt. You need to sleep.”

Curt changes the song to Fuck You by Lily Allen and lets it play for a while before turning off his coms without another word.

—

Curt kneels next to Bucky’s cot, resting his forehead on the thin mattress. He squeezes his eyes shut against the dizzy feeling in his head and tries to catch his breath.

He knows Benny is right. He needs to sleep. He’s driving himself crazy up here. He has half a mind to turn his coms back on and apologize to him, but he’s just so goddamn angry. Not at Benny. Just at NASA. Just at the world. Just at everyone who gave Bucky shit and hoped he’d die up here. Just at himself.

Not your fault, he tries to remind himself. Not your fault.

He pulls himself to his feet and walks back over to the console, picks up his tablet. Having a playlist running through his head and assaulting his ears at all times is what’s keeping Curt from thinking about his situation on a constant loop. It’s the only thing keeping him from crumbling to pieces. But he can’t think at all. He feels all sorts of mixed up, like he’s somewhere between tipsy and a panic attack but not quite veering towards either one.

Chasing Cars is playing. If I lay here, If I just lay here, would you lie with me and just forget the world.

For once, he needs the quiet. He turns off the music. He turns on his coms.

“What if he dies in my sleep?” he asks. It makes sense and yet it doesn’t, and his head feels fuzzy, everything coming at him just a little too slow and a little too fast all at once.

“He won’t,” Benny says.

“You’ll wake me up if anything changes?”

“Yes.”

Curt knows, if nothing else, he can take Benny at his word. “Fine.”

He ensures he isn’t on VOX but keeps his coms on just in case. He looks over at Bucky, and for a second he’s unable to look away. He can see the rise and fall of his chest, knows his heart is still beating. He knows his friend is somewhere in there.

“Stay alive for me, okay?”

—

He wakes two hours later to a master alarm and just about falls out of his hammock, tumbling to the floor on his hands and knees. He feels around for the push to talk button on his coms. “Benny?”

The alarm turns off. Curt slowly rises to his feet, glancing around the dark cabin in terrified confusion.

Benny: “Sorry Curt. You weren’t waking up to our transmissions.”

Curt: “So you decided to give me a heart attack?”

Benny: “Worked, didn’t it?”

Curt: “Fuck you.”

Benny: “We think he’s awake.”

Curt freezes, trying to comprehend that statement.

Benny: “Can you check?”

Curt isn’t sure if he responds, maybe giving some sort of noncommittal noise of acknowledgement as he fumbles around to get the cabin lights turned on. He approaches Bucky’s cot slowly.

“Bucky?” he says, almost scared to look. But he stands over the cot and grips the edge of the mattress between white-knuckled fingers.

Bucky is looking at him. His breathing is irregular, eyes wide. His fingers twitch.

“Eyes open, Benny,” Curt says.

Rosie must have woken up, too, because his groggy voice comes over the coms in response. “Heart rate?”

“Elevated,” Benny replies. “He seems to be under stress.”

No fucking shit, Curt thinks. He realizes he’s still white-knuckling the cot.

Rosie: “Try talking to him, Curt.”

Usually, when he talks to Bucky, he keeps his coms off, feeling that NASA – the whole world – doesn’t deserve to listen in. But now he knows they need to hear. He switches his coms to VOX.

Curt: “Hey, Bucky. It’s, uh, it’s about 9am GMT, up here on the moon. November 21st. Surface Mission day six. 4am Houston time.”

He doesn’t know what the hell he’s supposed to say. He’s been talking to Bucky offhand over the past day or so, but suddenly he feels all out of conversation starters. He sighs and takes Bucky’s hand in his own, nodding at the fact that it feels warm.

Rosie: “Keep going, Curt.”

Curt rubs his thumb over Bucky’s knuckles. He looks at Bucky’s wide blue eyes. Wonders what they see. He forces himself to smile.

Curt: “You scared the shit out of us yesterday. God, John. Not cool. If you could, like, not do that again, that would be great. We all took it pretty hard… Buck took it pretty hard. Don’t worry too much about him, though. We’re all worried about him. That’s for damn sure. But he has a family down there. He has Marge, and Benny, and Pepper and Meatball. Harding, Dr. Huston, Croz. We’ve got eyes on your boy, don’t worry. They’re tryin’ their best to take care of him while you’re gone.”

Benny: “Heart rate is stabilizing. It’s working, Curt.”

Curt: “Our uh… our plants are doin’ good, too. I haven’t checked on them or nothin’ – they got me locked up in here lookin’ after your ass. But they’re growin’. We’re growin’ plants on the moon. If you wake up, I might even get to go harvest some of them before we go. But… well, it’s alright if I can’t.” His throat is starting to feel tight, and it’s getting harder to keep his voice steady. He takes a shaky breath.

Curt: “It’s alright if you need… All that matters... Fuck. You just keep pushing through, alright? Just… yeah. Whatever you need to do, Bucky. It’s alright. You do whatever you need to do. I-I’m here. I’m here.”

Suddenly Curt can’t keep the tears out of his eyes and he reaches his free hand up to wipe at them. “I’m here,” he whispers.

When he drops his hand again, though, he notices the way Bucky’s eyes flick down, tracking the movement. Curt raises his hand, and Bucky’s eyes follow slowly.

Curt: “He’s uh… he’s tracking my hand motion?”

Rosie: “That’s good, Curt. How’s his motor response?”

Curt cocks his head. “Sorry I have to do this,” he mutters to Bucky. Then he presses down hard on the nail bed of Bucky’s middle finger. Bucky twitches, pulling his hand backwards the littlest bit. A small grunting noise grates its way out of his chest. Curt repeats with Bucky’s forefinger and gets the same result.

Curt: “Responsive to pain. He flinched away and kinda grunted a bit.”

Rosie: “Try asking him to squeeze your hand.”

Curt takes Bucky’s hand in his again. “Can you squeeze my hand?”

Nothing.

Curt: “Go on. Think about all those times you’ve wanted to sock me in the face and put it into this, okay? Squeeze my hand.”

Nothing.

Curt: “Not responsive.”

Benny: “That’s alright. This is good. This is progress.”

Rosie: “How are his vitals?”

Benny: “Staying stable.”

Curt didn’t have a chance to turn any music on after Mission Control scared him awake. The silence filling the cabin feels so loud, and it weighs on Curt, but he lets it wash over him. He stands there watching Bucky until his eyes close again. But he wonders if he imagines the feeling of Bucky’s hand ever so lightly squeezing his own.

—

Within Gale’s first hour of Red Shift, Bucky starts seizing again. He feels like his own heart has stopped, his own lungs, his own muscles. His own nervous system is shot as he listens to Dr. Huston count the seconds. Ten. Twenty.

“Just hold him steady, Curt,” Gale says. Because it doesn’t matter how he feels. He has a job to do, and his job is to keep this crew alive. His job is to work them through this. His job is to be okay even when nothing is okay.

It doesn’t matter that he wants to jump right off the face of the Earth at the mere prospect of John not coming home. He can do that on his free time, if Marge will take her eyes off him for more than ten seconds (she won’t). Sometimes, though, in the last 24 hours, he’s wondered to himself if it would be worse for John not to come home, or for him to come home in a body that will never again do what he wants it to do. If it’s between death, and living a life that is so limited compared to the way Bucky Egan has always thrown himself at the world, what would he choose? If he was given the choice.

A second seizure. Dr. Huston warned Gale that if John had another seizure, it may not stop at two, or three, or four. It may not stop, ever. Not to mention the fact that the longer he takes to regain full consciousness, the more likely it is that there will be more damage than they can even anticipate. He warned Gale that, while they are seeing promising signs of him waking up, there are plenty of cases where a patient never recovers past this minimally conscious state. Open eyes and a pain response bring hope, but not enough to stand on.

He’s trying to prepare Gale.

No longer is he preparing him for the potential of Bucky not returning home. Instead, he’s preparing him for the potential that if he comes home, he may never be the same John Egan that he was.

Gale will love him anyway. He will never stop loving him. Bucky could push him away, spit in his face, shove him off the face of the Earth himself. It doesn’t matter. Gale is incapable of not loving him.

So if he comes home, he’ll take what he can get. He won’t complain. He won’t wish for better or for more. He will hold John together himself if he has to. He will pick up the pieces no matter how badly his own hands shake. He will grieve the loss of who John was before, but then he will wrap his arms around his husband and cry into his shoulder, and he will have to be dragged away if anyone ever tells him he has to let go.

It’s not himself that he’s worried about. He will love his husband in any shape or form.

Today, he’s grieving more for the pain that John will feel if he comes home and can no longer live the life he’s spent his whole life chasing. No one knows what that will look like.

Gale worries that, at minimum, it’ll mean no more flying. And for John, no more flying is like no more breathing. He needs to be up in a plane or on a spacecraft in the same way that he needs oxygen in his lungs, iron in his blood, Gale in his arms.

Gale is still grasping at the wispy tendrils of hope that dare to believe that John will wake up, but simple consciousness is a far cry from the whirlwind that is John.

If he surpasses minimal consciousness, if he wakes up and walks and talks on his own, it’s still not a guarantee. If his leg doesn’t heal right, he may never be cleared to fly. If the seizures don’t stop, he will not be cleared to fly. If he has lasting impairment to any part of his brain or his nervous system or his body, he will not be cleared to fly. And even if he walks away with none of that, if he develops any post-traumatic stress, he will not be cleared to fly.

And if he walks away with none of that, it will be nothing short of a miracle.

Gale isn’t so naive as to believe that he alone will ever be enough of a reason for John Egan. He knows his husband. He knows Bucky’s restless soul, never satisfied to sit by while the world turns around him. He knows Bucky was not born to keep his feet on the ground, because Gale wasn’t either.

So if Bucky did have a choice, what would he choose?

Thirty. Forty.

It doesn’t matter. None of them have a choice. Gale is going to bring his husband home if it fucking kills him. So when Curt tells him that Bucky is seizing, he works him through it. He keeps his voice as measured as he can even when he feels the way his heart is fighting not to tear away the stitches that keep trying to mend it back together. He presses his wedding ring to his lips and forces himself to breathe, and he works through it.

Fifty.

Sixty.

Gale: “You’re doing alright, Curt. You’re doing alright.”

Curt: “He won’t stop.”

Gale hears the panic rising in Curt’s voice. The very reason he can’t afford to panic himself. Curt’s on VOX so he doesn’t have to worry about turning his coms on and off while his hands are busy keeping Bucky in place, and in Mission Control they can faintly hear See You Again playing in the background. It’s been a long day without you my friend, and I’ll tell you all about it when I see you again. .

Gale: “It’s gonna be okay. It’s normal for a seizure to last a couple minutes.”

Curt: “Seizures are not fuckin’ normal, Buck.”

Gale: “You got me there.”

Curt: “How long has it been?”

Gale: “Seventy-two seconds.”

Curt: “Fuck.”

Gale: “Take a breath, Curt.” Ironic. Hypocritical.

Curt: “We don’t have anything stronger than water to drink up here, do we?”

Gale: “That’s a negative, Curt.”

Curt: “Double fuck.”

Gale: “I’ll buy you all the beers you want when you bring my husband home.”

Please. Bring him home. I don’t care if he’s different. I don’t care how hard our life could be. I don’t care. Just please.

Bring him home.

Curt: “Yes you fuckin’ will.” Gale barely has time to laugh and wonder if he should be laughing when Curt’s voice comes through again. “He stopped.”

Ninety.

Gale: “That’s ninety seconds.”

Curt: “Felt a hell of a lot longer.”

—

Curt wants nothing more than to collapse on the ground, his own body tense and sore from holding Bucky on the cot. But he doesn’t have that luxury. He sets to work settling Bucky into a more comfortable position. He cleans him up, checks his IV, checks his head wound, checks the splint on his leg. Check check check.

He’s shoving a spare pillow beneath Bucky’s foot in a pathetic attempt at elevation when he hears it. He stops, one hand on Bucky’s wrapped ankle and the other holding the pillow too tight. He wonders if he imagined it. But then he hears it again.

A weak, gravelly voice trying its damnedest to get his attention.

He looks up at Bucky’s face and finds those blue eyes staring back at him. He watches Bucky’s lips try to move, try to shove out whatever it is he needs to say. His eyes are wide, his brow scrunched in discomfort. Curt wonders how much pain he feels. How much fear. He wonders if any of this makes sense. If he remembers. If he sees Curt when he looks at him, or if Curt’s no more than a stranger.

Bucky’s fingers twitch where they’re curled limply against his lower belly. Then his wrist. His whole arm. Curt worries for a second that he might start seizing again. Bucky’s head jerks to the side the tiniest bit. He blinks, looks Curt right in the eye.

“Fuck.”

That Curt can make out, even if Bucky’s voice won’t quite work with his brain. He can’t stop the amused raise of his eyebrow, the way the corner of his mouth quirks up the littlest bit, the way his voice comes out as a relieved laugh. Because that’s John. That’s John fucking Egan.

“Yeah, bud,” Curt agrees. “Fuck.”

—

Gale is sitting on a chair in Marge’s office, waiting for her to finish kindly yelling at someone over the phone about waiting to release the planned magazine article about his and John’s wedding until the other groom is home safely.

“I don’t care what your deadline was. No. No. I’m talking, sir. I don’t care what your deadline was. How will it look to publish an article about their wedding when one of them is in critical condition? To publish that article while one of the grooms is grieving over his husband.” There’s a brief silence. “No. No sir, that is not a good look for you.”

Gale bites his lip against a laugh as he stares blankly down at his phone. Everything about him is exhausted. He feels like he can barely move or think. But at the same time, if he doesn’t occupy himself with something, he feels the anxiety rising up and up and up.

After the seizure, John had wanted to speak. He wasn’t quite there, but he tried. It made Gale’s heart do all sorts of weird things. John woke up two more times after that. Once, he stayed awake for almost 20 minutes and seemed alert, though agitated. Curt had to gently hold him down when he tried, albeit weakly, to lash out with his right arm, jostling the IV. His heart rate had spiked, his breathing irregular, and Curt noted that he looked “terrified.”

But once Curt started talking to him again, he started to calm down. He was able to blink on command and even weakly squeeze Curt’s hand when asked, but Curt couldn’t tell how aware he was.

He woke for the third time of the day just about an hour ago, managed to mutter the word “fuck” again, and passed out after just two minutes.

Gale rubs a hand over his eyes and bites his lip as he thinks about it. Thinks about his husband confused and in pain.

“Okay, sorry about that,” Marge says as she stands up from her desk chair, still typing something on her laptop. “I got them to hold it until we know John is home safe. Honestly, it’s better for them anyways. Then they can include something about the trials and tribulations of marriage, for better or for worse, whatever.”

She aggressively taps the send button on one last email and slams her laptop closed, looking up at Gale. He’s still staring down at his phone, chewing on his lip. “You’re gonna break skin again if you don’t stop that,” she warns him. By the time his shift was over, his lower lip was red and bloody from how much he’d worried it. But he just shrugs. He absently flexes his bad hand, letting the tight skin pull at the scabs over his knuckles, as if to drive home the point. I don’t care.

Marge walks around her desk and swats gently at his hand, a silent cut it out. Then she looks at his phone screen.

“You made it further.”

He’s still at the beginning of the photo set, hasn’t even made it to their first look, much less the ceremony or the reception. He’s been looking at this single photograph for what feels like hours, but really was only about half the time Marge was on that call. It’s a candid photo of John in the groom’s suite. He’s looking in the mirror, a nervous smile on his face as Rosie secures one of his cufflinks. That wayward curl is hanging over his forehead, his cheeks a little pink and his blue eyes wide as he looks at himself.

Gale wants to stroke his thumb over the photo, but knows that will only make the page scroll on, and he’s not ready to see another one yet.

“He was so nervous,” Marge chuckles. “Rosie told me he kept dropping the cufflinks because his hands were shaking so bad.”

“Really?” Gale asks. Bucky? Nervous? About marrying Gale.

He finally releases his lower lip and runs his tongue over it. He can taste blood.

Marge nods and puts a hand on his shoulder. “He loves you so much, Gale. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if, somehow, that alone brings him home.”

Gale squeezes his eyes shut and turns off his phone. He can see the photograph in his mind, and he wants to burn that image of John into his memory. When he opens his eyes, he looks up at Marge, and she offers her hand. He takes it and lets her lead him out to the car.

—

Jackie has closed the Hundred Proof for the night, kicking out any and all paying and non-paying customers who are not affiliated with the Artemis 3 mission, no matter how many scowls and curses it got her. It’s nearing 6pm, so it’s early to be closing a bar, but anyone who takes issue with it can kindly fuck off.

Tonight, the Hundred Proof is a gathering place for the weary NASA crew just trying to bring their men home. It’s an open bar. The TVs are pointedly tuned to anything but the news, which can’t get enough of John Egan and the fight for his life. Exhausted men and women gather around the pool table or the dart board or sit, huddled together, around tables, conversation levels varying from loud and boisterous to quiet and somber.

When Marge opens the door and Gale trails in behind her, he feels dizzy, on edge, but he follows Marge to a table, where Croz, Bubbles, and Sandra are already nursing beers. He nods to them, mutters something by way of greeting, and stands beside the table, his hand clutching the back of a chair. All around him are the people he works with every day. Much of Red Shift is already here. Some of Blue shift is filing in. People are talking and playing and drinking, snacking on bar food.

His eyes dart around the room as he tries to remind himself to breathe, locking on the smallest details. The sounds and the visuals assault his senses, overwhelming him. Too loud. Too bright.

A beer here, a cocktail there. A glass of wine.

The condensation on the outside of Croz’s beer can, drops of water rolling down the side onto the wood tabletop.

Clark taking aim with his pool cue, the sound of a clean break, heavy resin balls clacking against each other with a loud crack that rings in Gale’s ears.

The sound of laughter. The sound of silence. People sipping on their drinks.

One of the Blue Shift flight controllers that he doesn’t know all that well flirting with Jackie across the bar, leaning lazily on the bartop with a lazy grin, in the same way Bucky used to do to him in college, when he was still trying to convince Gale to go out with him.

Behind the bar, astronaut portraits arranged across the wall. Buck and Bucky. Bucky and Buck. Wide grins, American flags in the background, space helmets tucked under their arms. Side by side. Always side by side.

Gale feels bereft, missing a part of himself.

Music plays over the speakers. Elvis. A little less conversation and a little more action please…

Gale can remember Bucky obnoxiously singing that song when he wanted Gale’s attention, grabbing his hand and dropping to his knees like he was begging. Gale would roll his eyes and try to shake him off, but in the end, when Bucky got back to his feet, he’d pull Gale into his arms. And Gale would fall right into him. Again and again.

Gale is so tired. His mind is fuzzy and his heart is breaking and his phone weighs heavy in his pocket, taunting him with those wedding photos. It’s warm in here, and it’s noisy, and God he could use a fucking drink.

He hasn’t slept. He’s barely been eating. He’s living off coffee and granola bars and pure adrenaline and grief. He can’t think straight. There’s so many people everywhere and they’re laughing and they’re talking and he can’t imagine how that must feel.

Gale doesn’t drink. Everyone knows that. Some champagne on his wedding night. An occasional glass of wine. A sip from John’s cocktail. He comes to this bar and he drinks water or soda or some virgin thing Jackie concocts for him. The thought of drinking usually makes him feel sick.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense. Bucky gets drunk. Marge gets drunk. Benny gets drunk. And really he doesn’t give a damn. He’s never been worried a day in his life that Bucky would raise a hand against him. Bucky, like his father in so many ways. But not a thing like him in the ways that count.

But when it comes to Gale, himself? He can’t stand the idea. He can’t stand the idea that he could be just like his dad. He can’t stand the idea of losing control, of taking out his anger and misery on someone who doesn’t deserve it. But damn does he understand the need… he wishes he could get drunk, just so he didn’t have to feel like this anymore.

Gale Cleven has only been drunk a handful of times, and the truth is, he’s nothing like his father at all. Gale is a happy drunk, if anything. He’s affectionate. Bucky told him once that he was a cute drunk, and it made Gale blush even as he reprimanded himself for drinking in the first place.

One time in college, he woke up after a party only for his friends to present him with a notebook chock full of detailed sketches of a fighter jet. And not just any fighter jet, but one that didn’t exist. And not just any fighter jet that didn’t exist, but one that was physically and technically viable, complete with almost all necessary design specifications to build a sky-worthy aircraft.

Yep. Gale Cleven is the type of drunk that lays across his boyfriend’s lap with an engineering notebook and designs a whole-ass functional airplane that could very well be submitted to the Air Force for review.

Gale drinking is about the least dangerous thing in the whole world. But it doesn’t matter. The thought still makes him sick. And the screaming thoughts clanging around in his head are compounding on one another. The noise and the people and the need for a drink and the disgust at himself for wanting a drink and the sadness and the fear and the exhaustion and the lack of food and…

“Gale?”

There’s a hand on his arm.

“Gale?”

“Buck?”

“Take a breath, hon.”

Oh. Right.

Gale suddenly becomes aware that his chest is burning, his face hot. He wonders how long he’s been standing here, not breathing. Drawing oxygen into his lungs, he blinks and tries to come back into himself. Marge is staring at him with unfiltered concern. Croz, Bubbles, and Sandra are watching him. Benny is watching him. When had he gotten here?

He reaches a hand out to rest on Gale’s other shoulder, but Gale steps back, causing both Benny’s hand and Marge’s to drop limply away.

“You good?” Benny asks.

No. They all know he’s not good. But he could also be worse, at this point. He could be worse. Things could be worse.

So Gale nods.

“We don’t have to stay,” Marge tells him. “We can go home.”

Gale shakes his head, looking around at the flight controllers crowding the bar. Friends. The same people who were in his home last night. The same people he trusts, quite literally, with his life. He should be able to handle being here.

“Just…” he grits his teeth, flexes his bad hand, feeling the sting that’s fading but still undoubtedly there, grounding him. “Someone get me a soda so I don’t order something I’ll regret.”

Marge nods and heads off to the bar, and Gale finally takes a seat beside Croz. Only belatedly does he realize that Benny, who is about to trail after Marge, isn’t alone.

“You brought the dogs?” Gale asks. He means to laugh a little when he says it, but he just sounds tired.

“Yep,” Benny says.

“Are you allowed to do that?”

Benny looks down at the dogs and then over at the bar. “Jackie! Can I have Pepper and Meatball here?”

“Do they like beer?” Jackie asks.

Benny shrugs dramatically. “Why don’t you ask ‘em?”

“Don’t give my baby girl beer,” Gale warns him.

Jackie gives Benny a look, but rolls her eyes fondly. “Just don’t let them on the furniture.”

Benny smiles at Gale, eyebrow raised, and holds his hands out as if to say there we go.

Gale does laugh this time and shakes his head, reaching out to scratch Pepper’s ears, then Meatball’s when he inevitably shoves his way in between. “You two are lucky dogs, you know that?”

—

How Do I Live Without You is playing. How do I live without you? I want to know.

Curt is singing along dramatically, sliding his way around the cabin in his socks, using his glorified capri-sun of a water packet as a microphone. He slides over to Bucky’s cot and points at him, moving his shoulders in slow motion to the beat. How do I breathe without you, if you ever go?

Bucky’s eyes are closed, his breathing slow and shallow again. He hasn’t woken up again as long as Gale’s been off shift. Curt managed another hour of sleep here and there throughout the day and is feeling slightly less deranged, but only slightly. He’s still mad as hell, but got tired of being mad as hell. So he’s back to rocking out alone on the moon.

As the song comes to an end, he stops and stands at the end of Bucky’s cot, sipping at his water packet. “Gonna make me dance on my own, Bucky?”

Rosie: “Hey Curt, Alex has an idea.”

Curt jumps at the sound of Rosie’s voice. He’d forgotten he left his coms on VOX for the express reason of annoying Mission Control, so Rosie and Alex can also hear him if they bother to tune in.

Curt: “Oh yeah? What’s that?” He sips his water again, thinking about how it’s a lot more fun in zero gravity, when he can make the droplets float like bubbles.

Alex: “Play Can’t Help Falling In Love.”

Curt pauses mid-sip, the little straw pressed between his lips. He looks at Bucky’s face, soft in sleep, and thinks about how agitated he’s been every single time he’s woken up.

He thinks about Buck and Bucky, holding each other close alone on a dance floor, Gale beautiful in white. Bucky singing along, spinning Gale around before kissing him softly.

He wonders if that “uck” noise Bucky has been making was “fuck” after all.

—

Gale is leaning his hip against the side of the pool table, watching Sandra beat the shit out of Benny at eight ball, the dogs laying at his feet, when his phone rings. He sets his glass of coke down on the edge of the pool table. Marge has been checking in on him throughout the night and has continued to go to the bar for him any time he needs a refill so that he isn’t tempted to order anything stronger.

When he shoves his hand into his pants pocket to grab his phone, one of the bandaids across his knuckles rips off, causing him to grimace as a scab breaks free and specks of blood well up on the skin. He frowns when he sees the contact on his phone screen – Helen.

“Helen?” He says, pressing his phone to his ear with his right hand while he tries to re-stick the bandage across his knuckles with his left. He can’t keep the edge of panic from bleeding into his voice, and everyone around the pool table freezes. Sandra and Benny rest their cues on the floor, and Bubbles, Marge, and Croz stop laughing at whatever joke Croz had been telling. They’re all staring at him.

“Buck?” Helen doesn’t sound panicked. She doesn’t sound worried. She doesn’t sound sad. But the deep pit of anxiety doesn’t lift from Gale’s chest. “I need you to come back to Mission Control.”

“Why?” Gale worries his lip, ignoring Marge when she smacks him lightly on the shoulder in admonishment. With his left hand, he’s rubbing his thumb absently over the surface of the silver wedding band.

“Just come,” Helen insists. “Now.”

—

When he shows up at JSC, barging through the door of Mission Control, he’s not alone. Trailing behind him is Marge, Benny, and two huskies. Harding is there, standing next to the Flight Director, and he looks up in alarm when he notices the two dogs.

Gale is still in the same clothes he wore to work, slacks and a white button down. The top two buttons of his shirt are undone, the tie lost somewhere in Benny’s car after he couldn’t stop pulling at it in worry. His hair is a limp mess from running his hand through it all day, and he knows he has dark circles under his eyes from a lack of sleep and proper nutrition.

He knows he looks crazy.

He feels crazy. He’d been putting the pieces of himself back together ever so slowly tonight, trying his damn best to feel some semblance of normal, and Helen’s call had shattered all of that. His breathing is unreliable at best. His heart rate is erratic. His body is tense at the same time that he feels weak. And he can’t keep the threatening tremor out of his voice when he stares back at Harding and motions to the dogs.

“You told me to come immediately,” he says, even though Chick hadn’t said a word. He runs a hand through his hair again. “I was out. I was with Benny. I’m not allowed to go anywhere myself ‘cause they’re worried I’m gonna get in an accident or hurt myself or somethin’.”

Gale knows he looks just about distraught at this point. He’s losing energy. He’s so fucking tired. Tired of it all. “We had the damn dogs,” he concludes, motioning dramatically with his hand. This is, perhaps, the most animated anyone in this room has ever seen him. “So. Now I have the damn dogs.”

Harding blinks before raising his hands up in surrender. “Fine. A happy welcome to the damn dogs.” Then he points to Helen.

Gale turns on his heel and marches past a slew of startled flight controllers until he gets to the CAPCOM console.

Helen is smiling at him. Smiling.

Gale feels tears welling up and he doesn’t even know why yet. It’s all too much. Whatever it is, it’s too much. Today is too much. Marge, standing behind him, flicks him on the shoulder to remind him to breathe.

“He’s asking for you,” Helen says.

The whole world spins, the ringing in his ears fading in and out. He opens his mouth to say something, but he isn’t sure what.

Helen hands him a headset. “Curt put a comcap on him. He can’t really say anything yet, but he’s awake. He’s been saying your name. He got pretty agitated about it, really. We thought maybe you’d like to just talk to him, though. Let him know you’re here.”

Gale’s heart isn’t beating right. He takes the headset carefully, putting it over his ear. He looks at Benny and Marge behind him. At the dogs settling quietly on the floor at his feet. Pepper nudges at his left hand, as if she’s telling him to go on. As if she finally understands where John is and that Gale needs him.

“He needs his husband, Buck,” Helen says.

—

Bucky worries that he’s dreaming. He’s been thinking that a lot recently. Whatever recently is. He doesn’t know how long it’s been. Curt told him it’s surface mission day six. He doesn’t know if it’s still day six.

His leg is enough to make him want to close his eyes and go back to sleep. He’s in excruciating pain, and he can barely even make a sound to express that. He can’t tell anyone. He can’t formulate the words in his brain. He can’t make his lips move. He can’t make his throat work.

Pain. That’s all. Pain.

Curt’s here. Bucky isn’t alone. Curt said he’d be here.

He keeps talking about Gale.

Bucky wants Gale. He needs Gale.

“Hey darling.”

Bucky’s breath catches, making a weird choking, gurgling noise in his dry throat. He knows Curt is standing somewhere next to him, but he can’t quite turn his head enough to see. His head hurts.

“They tell me you’re awake up there. I’m not on shift now, it’s about 9pm here in Houston. So it’s 2am your time. But they thought maybe you’d like to hear my voice. Said you’ve been askin’ for me. So I’m here. With Marge and Benny. Even the dogs. You should’ve seen Harding’s face when I walked into Mission Control with a dog on either side.”

Pepper. Meatball. Pepper. Meatball.

“They miss you, you know. I miss you. I miss you so much, John.”

Don’t cry, angel. Don’t cry.

He can hear the tears in Gale’s voice, though. He thinks about Gale’s tendency to hold his breath when he’s upset. Breathe, baby. Breathe for me.

He hears Gale take a deep breath. Good.

“Y’know, I got our wedding photos back last night. I can’t bring myself to look at ‘em. Every time I reach the pictures of you in the groom’s suite, I just… I can’t. I don’t know if I should without you… But it’s alright. We’re, uh, we’re gonna get you home, okay, darlin’? You’re gonna be alright. It’ll be alright. You just gotta stick with us.”

Gale is drifting into his western drawl, the way he does when he lets his guard down. Bucky wants to reach out to him somehow. Reach across the moon and the stars, hold Gale close, tell him it’s all gonna be okay. Tell him not to be scared.

His lips move, but he can’t make the sounds.

Don’t be scared, angel. Just breathe. I’ll see you soon. I’ll see you soon.

“Please, John,” Gale whispers. “I love you. I love you to the moon and back. So just, make sure you come home.”

Bucky thinks he smiles. He feels like he is, but he doesn’t know if his mouth is doing the right thing. His eyes close. He can’t keep them open anymore.

And all of a sudden, he’s back to not knowing if he’s dreaming or not. The last thing he hears is Gale saying “I love you” over and over again, trying not to cry. But Bucky is drifting somewhere far away.

I love you, he thinks. I love you.

…

Part 14

#“fuck”#I love you to the moon and back #Gale “I’m fine” Cleven #spoiler: Gale is not fine #no one is fine #but they are doing their best #clegan astronaut au #clegan #mota #masters of the air #gale cleven #john egan #buck x bucky #bucky egan #buck cleven #clegan fic #mota fic #gale buck cleven #john bucky egan

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