#voyager week 2025

[phoenixfeathersinfall]

The tags from @the-oracle-of-the-lost make this post even better: #and aside from ds9 its one of the more diverse crews so there would be more communication difficulties #setting aside the idea of a federation standard language that everyone speaks the results would be–#janeway tom & harry are all from the US and would likely all speak english. i dont think janeway or tom would be fluent in another language#but tom might speak a little french bc he was trying to impress girls. janeway probably speaks a few phrases of a few languages but i think #itd be funny if she was just really bad at it#i definitely see harry as someone who might speak some korean or chinese bc of his heritage but would also get really into learning an #obscure alien language in the Academy for fun and then never being able to use it #chakotay & b'elanna would probably be able to speak in spanish even if its neither of their native languages #tuvok is extremely embarassed that he never bothered to learn another language bc the idea of the universal translator failing was so remote #now he has to bring vorik around to help translate things #neelix has tried to learn a few federation languages but exclusively food/cooking related words #kes has genuinely tried to learn about everyones culture & language since being onboard but theres only so much she knows #she tries to telepathically translate things (it goes badly) #seven realizes that shes lost her native language and speaks in a combination of languages assimilated by the borg but cant actively control #what language she speaks at any time. this is confusing for everyone. #the emh's universal translator was wired into the ship's so he can only communicate in gibberish and cant understand anything #eventually the crew realizes that Naomi Wildman as a child growing up and learning language on Voyager actually speaks a combination of al l#their languages and starts getting passed around like a Rosetta Stone across all the departments to fix the problem

Voyager would have been an excellent contender for a 'universal translator breaks down' episode bcos 1) shit breaks down on Voyager all the time and 2) Kes & Neelix

[hellaoriginalnovels]

A voyage to the stars - Original Novel by Hella

My name is Take Hatoshi - I was born and raised in Kagoshima as the oldest of four siblings - I was the firsborn, then my brother Tetsu, next was my only sister, Yuki and the youngest one - Kaji. While my mother was caring and family - oriented, my father didn't me as fit to be his firstborn - the only words he said to me that I remebered throughout my entire life were: You aren't good enough. Never enough. I wanted to prove myself to my father so I recruited myself into the army to fight in the Russo - Japanese War. Along with me, came my one year younger brother and the golden child of the family - Tetsu. I tried to talk him out of it but Tetsu was deadset on joining the war. He claimed that would be selfish of him, in fact an entire family to let me go alone on the war. We fought side by side, like brothers - but it wasn't in the cards for us to stay alive together. Tetsu died ripped apart by the grenade, while was holding his guts in my hands. My rage couldn't be stopped and soon enough I gained a nickname - Take "Unbreakable" Hatoshi. But even with my war achievements and gaining a military rank, my guilt of not being able to save my brother couldn't be erased, like it never existed. My feelings of guilt also deepened when I delivered the news to my family that Tetsu didn't make out of the war alive, while I held his diary covered in dried blood in my hands. I stayed in Kagoshima for a while until I finally opened Tetsu's diary and he wrote to me a message while he was dying - to discover the world and see beyond the war and suffering. Live a life you can be proud of and find the Mountain of Riches, where gold and luxurious jewelry lie hidden. And then, a few months later, when I was exploring Hokkaido I found a Alascan 20 years old woman who landed here by a pure accident!

[leschauffeurssolidaires]

2025 : L'année des longs week-ends ! ️ Profitez au maximum de vos jours fériés

Prêts à poser vos valises et à partir à l’aventure ? 2025 s’annonce comme l’année idéale pour les amateurs de longs week-ends ! Avec un calendrier particulièrement bien agencé, de nombreuses opportunités s’offrent à vous pour vous évader du quotidien et profiter de moments de détente bien mérités. Le calendrier des jours fériés, votre meilleur allié : Cette année, les jours fériés tombent à pic…

[voyagerweek]

Welcome to VOYAGER WEEK!

Voyager Week will begin on 10 January, 2025 and end on 16 January, the 30th anniversary of the airing of the first episode! This week is for any and all fans of Star Trek: Voyager and will have daily optional prompts. Art, edits, fic, meta, playlists - any and all kinds of fanwork will be accepted! Guidelines on posting will be provided when prompts are announced in August.

[sirellas]

okay asking for real now. caretaker will be 30 years old on January 16 2025

would be open to anyone and anything. fanart, fanfic, edits, meta, all seasons and interpretations of star trek voyager. as long as everyone is respectful of other fans and tags appropriately, anything goes. i'm thinking a 7 day event with one or two loose prompts a day, either ending or beginning on jan 16. with the priority being fun first and foremost, and no pressure to participate, just a chance to talk about voyager for a dedicated week with a bunch of other fans!

[ofmdrecaps]

11/13-14/2024 Daily OFMD Recap

TLDR; David Jenkins; Rhys Darby; Taika Waititi; Con O'Neill; Nathan Foad; Kristian Nairn; Anapela Polata'ivao; Vico Ortiz; Jes Tom; Zayre Ferrer; Petition Status; Articles; Transgender Awareness Week; Love Notes;

Hey crew! So I am trying VERY HARD to be better about alt text across all the platforms, and it's taking way longer for me to get things out because of it. If anyone has a good idea on how to do those more easily will you please let me know? I do want to try to be more accessible (and I know the Repo is absolutely not terribly accessible at the moment). Anyway-- thanks Crew! Happy Friday!

= David Jenkins =

Chaos Dad out partying!

Source: King Malisz's Instagram

Apparently (and I didn't know this, so thank you to the folks who explained to me wtf was going on) apparently CIS is considered a slur on twitter and will literally make your posts un-retweetable, and so Dad decided to go full hog and cause Cissmegeddon the other day. Props to our crewmates who helped him irritate the shit out of Elon.

Source: David Jenkins Twitter

= Rhys Darby =

Rhys is going to Australia in April! Apr 30, 2025 at the Princess Theatre in Brisbane you can see the legend in person! Are you in town then? Get tickets here!

Source: Adopt Our Crew's Twitter

He's also announced all his UK & Ireland Tour Dates for 2025! You can buy tickets here!

Source: Rhys' Instagram

Reminder about new Atlanta show at the Helium clubs Nov 29, 30, and Dec 1st! Get tickets here!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Rhys Darby (@rhysiedarby)

Source: Rhys Instagram Stories

= Taika Waititi =

Interior Chinatown is almost here! Remember to check it out on November 19th on HULU! Taika was out doing lots of promos with the crew!

Source: Sthanlee's Instagram

Source: Variety Instagram

Source: Jerabraham

= Con O'Neill =

Con is going to be in a new sitcom SAS Rogue Heroes! Thank you to Irene Adler for finding this! Sun.co.uk Article.

Source: Irene Adler's Instagram

= Nathan Foad =

Nathan sent us a bathroom selfie-- and ALSO shared this awesome review of Voyage of the Damned (the book he narrated) by _brainbowie_ on instagram! OH AND JUST BY THE WAY-- IT WAS NOMINATED for Audible's "Best Audiobooks of the Year 2024 in both the SFF list AND the Top 20 overall!!"

ANNND if you have read it and would like to help Voyage of the Damned out -- please put a review up on Audible! Let the world know how much Nathan's voice should be cherished! In addition - if you haven't already, please help Nathan and the author out by voting for it on Goodreads for 2024's Goodreads Choice Awards!

Source: Goodreads

= Kristian Nairn =

Kristian was kind enough to share a playlist featuring his love of synthwave!

Source: Kristian Nairn's Instagram

= Anapela Polataivao =

Source: The Guerilla Connection Instagram

BTS of The Guerilla Connection!

Source: TheGuerillaConnection

= Vico Ortiz =

Vico had a great time at their first stand up comedy show! More random IG stories of it!

Source: Vico's Instagram Stories

= Jes Tom =

Jes Tom is out at Little Secrets Comedy tonight at the New York Comedy Festival if you're in town! November 15 @ 10:30 pm - 11:30 pm!

Source: Jes Tom's Instagram

= Zayre Ferrer =

Thank you so much to @adoptourcrew and Zadry Ferrer for highlighting this awesome Fellowship award awarded to our dear writer Zayre Ferrer! They were named one of the #inevitablefoundation's 2024 Visionary Fellows!

Source: Zadryg.bsky via @adoptourcrew

== Petition Status ==

Great news! Up to 90,150 signatures! To all our new OFMD fans out there, have you signed the petition yet? Thank you luci5459.bsky.social for sharing! (and @adoptourcrew for promoting!) https://www.change.org/p/save-our-flag-means-death

Source: Luci5429.bsky.social

== Articles ==

More articles featuring OFMD and Zayre Ferrer! Thanks @adoptourcrew!

Source: Adopt Our Crew Bsky

== Transgender Awareness Week ==

Happy Transgender Awareness week crew! Sending all my love out to our trans siblings out there <3 Especially know, please know how much we see and love you, and we have your backs no matter what comes, okay? Wanna learn more about Transgender Awareness Week and how you can help be a better ally? Visit GLAAD's website.

Source: Glaad Website

== Love Notes ==

Wow, now as you can tell, a lots gone on the last couple days! Especially with Rhys! Jeez! Everything seems to be ramping up, which is pretty great -- I don't know if you all are feeling the energy too, but it's nice to see some good things going on in these uncertain times. I know things are still rough right now, and some of you are itching to get out and make a difference. Please know that if you are feeling up for it now, it's totally okay to do that. Find things to do in your local community, find out how ot help online-- whatever you feel comfortable with. --and if you're not quite ready yet, that's okay too. I took two days off work this week despite having a huge project to finish, because I got sick, and my brain told me it needed a break, that there had been too much. I know not everyone has the luxery of doing that-- but if you do, please take some time if you need it. I've probably mentioned this before, but something that always bothers me about the phrase "You can't help anyone else if you don't help yourself!" is that that's not entirely true. YOU CAN. You can do all sorts of stuff without helping yourself, and by tiring yourself, and burning yourself out. But it's not sustainable, and you can't do it forever. You are so very strong, and I bet you could help so many people, and family and burn brightly until there was nothing left of you-- but that's not what any of us want. We want you to be okay on the other side of all this-- and sometimes that means taking a break even when things feel like they just can't wait. We care so much for you lovelies. Please care for yourselves too if you need it <3

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by You Are Another Me (@you.are.another.me)

Source: You are another me Instagram

[akookminsupporter]

Jin and Hobi’s video about their 2025 resolutions—such a funny video, btw—got me thinking about what the guys might do once the rest of them complete their military service and they’re finally back together as a group. That led me to wonder what I’d like them to do when all seven of them are reunited, or how I’d organise their schedule if they asked me.

This is all just for fun—and probably because I haven’t slept properly in three days, and my mattress is so uncomfortable it desperately needs replacing.

Hobi will be on tour until 31st May, which is about 20 days before Yoongi finishes his military service, making him the last member to be discharged. I imagine Hobi will take that time off to rest and recharge, both physically and mentally, for everything that’s coming next. Around then, it will also be their debut anniversary, so he’ll likely want to do something to mark the occasion, which leads me to my next thought.

Jimin, Jungkook, Joon, and Tae will finish their service just a few days before the group’s debut anniversary—right before FESTA, as we all know it. They might do something small for that day, like a Wlive or something similar, but I don’t think it’ll be anything major since Yoongi won’t be back yet. After that, I don’t think they’ll have much going on until Yoongi is officially discharged. Once they’re all back together, this is how I’d plan their schedule:

Late June to mid-July: Rest. Proper holidays for them to relax and fully adjust to civilian life again.

Mid-July to mid-October: Return to work. Focus on recording a studio album, filming MVs, and managing everything that comes with it.

Late October: Take 1–2 weeks to film another season of Bon Voyage or In The Soop. Ideally, they could travel abroad for Bon Voyage, though staying in Korea could be just as fun.

November: Release a single that would, of course, be part of the upcoming album. This would serve as a reminder to the world that they’re back and that 2026 is going to be their year. Promote the single and rehearse choreographies from the new album’s tracks, plus start prepping for the 2026 tour.

December: Attend one or two year-end award shows iSK and possibly perform at the New Year’s Eve concert in NYC.

January: Briefly return to Korea to wrap up things with brands, sponsors and stuff like that. Do interviews about the upcoming album etc.

January: On the second of January, officially announce the new album and tour, kicking off the countdown to its release. They’ll also head back to the US for additional rehearsals and preparations.

February: The new studio album drops. Along with that, they’ll announce the dates for their world tour, which will kick off in late March. They will spend the month promoting the new album and the world tour.

They won’t participate in Korean music shows.

Diablos, I need a more active social life, something to help me sleep, and a better mattress, haha. Anyway, this is roughly how I would organise the guys’ schedule from June this year onwards. Obviously, they’d have days off for rest, other activities, etc. It’s not very detailed, I’m not that obsessed yet, haha. How would you guys do it?

[rambleonwaywardson]

Clegan Astronaut AU - Part 13

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: 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

[itsduckinghard]

James May: why Top Gear didn’t need to sack Jeremy Clarkson

As his new programme about famous explorers hits Channel 5, the former Top Gear presenter talks to Andrew Billen about life after The Grand Tour

Friday January 31 2025, 12.01am GMT, The Times

We are, obviously, in a bar, although not the Royal Oak, the pub James May part-owns in the Wiltshire village where he lives, but the Cross Keys, near his other home in west London. We have secured an unheated games room at the back, but it does not stay unheated for long once May spots its wood-burning stove. He is soon making a fire. As he works, he delivers a mini-lecture on why the stove door should initially be kept ajar so as to adjust the ratio of oxygen to carbon dioxide, and what to do thereafter (close the door). I thank him for this gratis masterclass.

“But I don’t think anybody really knows,” Mays says. “Well, actually, the Scandis do, because they write big books about it. They love a bit of log bollocks.”

When we meet he is a week off turning 62, but although he trembles in the January chill, he looks otherwise as roadworthy as when he joined Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond on the BBC’s Top Gear two decades ago. This testy, testosteronic triumvirate became heroes of the counter-counterculture, reactionary in everything from their jokes to their alcohol consumption. (This mid-morning, May, a fan of beer, wine and spirits, is on the hot chocolate, because there is one beverage he hates and it is coffee.) When Clarkson crashed their telly vehicle in 2015 and was fired for assaulting a producer who had failed to conjure a steak after a day’s filming in North Yorkshire, May and Hammond resigned in solidarity, but the three did not have to wait long before Prime Video pounced on them. For another eight years, they bumped and bounced classic cars around the world until The Grand Tour was itself hauled to the scrapyard last year, by which time the trio were multimillionaires and — or so they would insist — heartily sick of one another’s company.

But age cannot depreciate May. His hair, for one big thing, remains defiantly Seventies roadie. “I either look like I’ve had some sort of weird Victorian ailment or a bit like Valerie Singleton in her Blue Peter days,” he says of having tried it shorter. With his white moustache and goatee, I say he is going a bit Big Yin. “I think,” he says, “men have a duty to experiment with facial hair.”

Last summer he broke his wrist falling off his bike after failing to negotiate a puddle, and without his regular ten-mile cycle rides he has felt “podgy and lethargic”. You will clock his bandaged hand on Channel 5’s James May’s Great Explorers, in which he disassembles the myths and scrutinises the nuts and futtocks of the voyages of Christopher Columbus, Walter Raleigh and James Cook. The three-parter is funny and irreverent — at one point he calls the British Museum “the world’s largest lost property office” — but also one of the most seriously educative series he has made (and he has made nearly 30 since 1998). For Channel 5, his signing is a big deal and its PRs have supplied him with briefing notes, because, he explains, they think he is senile.

“So it reads here, ‘Channel 5 is the destination for unmissable, high-quality factual programming.’ That’s not the sort of thing I am known for, is it?”

Or it. When Channel 5 launched, it was famous for its soft porn.

“Yeah, porn,” he says turning faux-naive. “Apparently a lot of teenagers look at porn now on the internet, whereas when I was a teenager, it was something you might find on a building site, if you were lucky.”

Or in a hedge on the way to school. Pretty vanilla by today’s standards (I believe). “Not even sex. In some ways I’m glad I’m not young any more. It sounds like hard work.”

The briefing notes put to one side, we turn to his series’ verdicts on history’s great grand tourists. He accuses Cook of being party to a “land grab by an empire [British] hellbent on world domination”, calls Raleigh a “wild boy with a taste for violence” and relays the unwelcome news that Columbus was the largest single trader of enslaved indigenous people of his era. Such debunking may surprise those who assume that Clarkson’s politics were something that his Top Gear amigos had also navigated towards. Does May, I ask, think Kemi Badenoch will approve of Great Explorers?

“Is Badenoch pro or against reparations? She would be against, wouldn’t she? Well, my first response to your question would be, I hope she enjoys it. And I hope…”

She learns something?

“I mean, I don’t want people to get the impression that this is a deep analysis of the psychology and policy of colonialism. It is really about navigation and sail technology and barrel-making and biscuits. Those ship’s biscuits are so awful.”

The thing is, I say, he is a centrist who identifies as a “bloke”, but the term seems to have been colonised by the right.

“I think the definition has changed. Being a bloke used to mean camaraderie. And then, at one point, it meant being dependable and handy, and then more recently it came to mean sort of endearingly hopeless. Now ‘bloke’ possibly means yob. Men are being, in many ways, belittled. My idea of man-ness — and I would say this, because I’m not a tough guy or anything like that — is a kind of dependability and practicality. Men are supposed to be able to do things. They’re not supposed to rejoice in their own uselessness and think it’s cute, because it isn’t. It’s feeble.”

I suppose people could be suspicious of him because his shows have featured so few women (although some are interviewed on Great Explorers including — political correctness gone mad — a female skipper). Does he enjoy the frisson of male-only company?

“I like the company of women because I find them really fascinating and they’re sort of the most wonderful thing on earth, but there is a camaraderie that men have when they’re trying to achieve something. You see it on building sites and factories where things are being made. There’s a bit of a movement going on, people saying, ‘Oh, we need to reinvent safe male spaces,’ and I used to think, ‘Oh, sod off. They’re called garages and workshops.’ ”

And if you’re posh, gentlemen’s clubs.

“I’ve been to a few of those places and if it’s blokes together eating too much red meat and farting a lot, I haven’t got much time for it, to be honest. But a load of blokes building a shed or playing darts, I could go for that. But I’m perfectly happy if there’s a load of women there as well.”

He has been with his partner, Sarah Frater, the dance critic, for 24 years (he has said he felt he left it too late to have children), but does he have platonic women friends? “Yes, loads. Some of them I’ve known for 45-plus years.”

I imagine his technique with women was to make them laugh.

“Well, maybe a bit later on. Not when I was young. I think I was actually too nerdy. I was a bit of a late developer.

Were there girls at his school?

“I went to a modern comprehensive. I had lots of girlfriends and things.”

But no sex involved?

“Not until I was about 16.”

That sounds quite early to me, I say (envious). “Sixth-form college. I must have been 17 actually.”

‘I don’t actually think our Top Gear had to end’

May hates the television cliché of celebrities on personal “journeys” in order to discover themselves. “I think, ‘Oh, f*** off!’ Find out some stuff and tell me something authoritative, or at least considered.” For him, one of the merits of Great Explorers is that it is about journeys to the end of the earth, not the soul.

Compare and contrast The Grand Tour, the diesel-oiled phoenix that rose from the ashes of Clarkson and co’s Top Gear. During its run, the show increasingly depended on our interest in its presenters. Particularly once the portable big-tent studio that substituted for the BBC’s aircraft hangar in Surrey was decommissioned, The Grand Tour no longer gloried in its cars. Instead, we watched hoping to observe the drivers’ characters revealed under pressure. The problem was, every time crisis stripped off a layer of self, the new layer revealed looked exactly as tough and leathery as the one before. And if it was insights into an inter-bloke dynamic you were interested in, you could never be sure the trio’s hostility was scripted or spontaneous. Someone’s car would break down and the other two would gloatingly zoom past. But why wouldn’t they, since a film crew with its attendant mechanics, was already at the beleaguered party’s side, ready to help?

I would judge last September’s feature-length finale of The Grand Tour a masterpiece, epic, funny and moving — because parting is always such sweet sorrow, even for frenemies. Only in the most limited sense, however, was The Grand Tour factual programming. In one scene the three smelted a pile of silver trinkets bought cheap in Zimbabwe and came up with the idea of moulding them into accessories for their cars, in May’s case a solid silver steering wheel. In the morning it had miraculously been fitted to his Triumph Stag. It was magic realism, I say, not documentary.

“It was a pantomime, really, I think. We ask you to go along with it. I mean, it was a mixture of things that were obviously deeply and knowingly contrived, but then a lot of the stuff that made it in was just stuff that happened. The expression in television is, ‘The universe will provide.’ If you’re going to drive across the spine of Africa or drive through India, stuff is going to happen. It just is. If the cameras are rolling, well, you’ve got your content.”

Perhaps, to continue this line of thinking, the universe provided for Clarkson, Hammond and May when stuff happened in that Yorkshire hotel in 2015. Perhaps ten years ago this spring the universe decided to give Amazon’s then newish streaming service a blast of front-page publicity and make three motoring journalists super-rich. Or perhaps the trio’s split from the BBC was avoidable?

“I thought it was very unfortunate and I don’t actually think our Top Gear had to end because of it. I think it could have been patched up and put down to a bit of high stress and flightiness, to be honest. It happened. It’s regrettable and it’s unfortunate, but it didn’t need to lead to the collapse of something very successful. Maybe these things are ordained and it was time for us to move on. We had been doing it by then for a decade, I think, more. And I never imagined it would last as long. I went into it from magazine journalism and I thought it would be a good laugh probably for a couple of years.

“I mean, without being big-headed about it, we were Top Gear and we were one of the biggest TV shows in the world at the time. It was quite an intense environment and it’s not entirely surprising that it occasionally went off the rails. If we’d been AC/DC or Thin Lizzy, nobody would have been the slightest bit surprised.”

And they were blokes.

“We’re all blokes and we worked quite hard and quite long hours and it was exciting but it was quite difficult.”

Did they fight? “No, not seriously. We used to squabble but, no, we weren’t Fleetwood Mac. We didn’t get that bad. We didn’t end up absolutely loathing each other, taking legal action against each other or anything like that.”

Although I have always thought May and Clarkson shared the same speech patterns and that Hammond was Sorcerer Clarkson’s devoted apprentice, the three, May says, were never very alike. “I like to think of myself as fairly liberal. I think of the other two as Stuckists, trying to live in the Twenties. I’ve always said Jeremy is a bit of an Edwardian and Hammond is Toad of Toad Hall with his little waistcoat and his vintage car.”

On location, May and Hammond convened meetings of “James & Richard’s Debating Society” (up for debate one night: how do you know a dog is a dog?) and the club has never been dissolved. “Jeremy never really got involved in that. I think he just thought we were being boorish or something. Or maybe he doesn’t have very many views on, say, a society that grows vertically and then falls over.

“I think Jeremy likes to have strong opinions. It’s what on the internet would be called, ‘Trust me, bro.’ But then again, when we went to the North Pole years ago, I spent many days sitting alongside Jeremy Clarkson and indeed sharing a tent with him, and we had some very entertaining discussions about banalities like food from our childhood and people’s trousers. Stuff like that.”

Does he share Clarkson’s view, as expressed on the GT finale, that electric vehicles are unreviewable as they are, like fridges, just “white goods”?

“No. I completely disagree with him on that. We have debated that quite a lot. I think the electric so-called revolution — it isn’t one really, as we’ve had electric cars for well over 100 years — is a great experiment and it makes cars interesting to talk about again. I know what he means because he’s saying there’s no engine to fall in love with. We have become very obsessed with internal combustion mainly because it’s flawed and it’s the flaws that make it fascinating. It’s a bit like people.”

‘I saw Jeremy recently. He seemed all right. We just seem older’

It strikes me that TG and GT were never about friendship. They were sit-docs about people who had to work together, and more The Office than Last of the Summer Wine. May likes that thought. “We’re not natural friends. That’s actually why it worked. I often looked back at Top Gear and The Grand Tour and thought in many ways I didn’t really belong on it. But that’s exactly why I was on it. It needed one of each of us for it to work.”

At the end of the last Grand Tour, the three stood on a mound on the Makadikadi salt pan in Botswana and gazed in opposing directions. Then they roared off towards their different horizons and we saw May delete his colleagues’ numbers from his phone. He came up with the joke, he says, but when I ask whether they will ever work together again, he says he wouldn’t have thought so, no.

So how are Clarkson-May relations? The former has banned the latter from his pub, the Farmer’s Dog in Oxfordshire, but May says he wasn’t intending to visit it anyway, given it is 80 miles from his own hostelry. I ask whether, when Clarkson had his heart attack (which is how Clarkson described it to Newsnight in November), May rang him. “I didn’t read that bit. I thought he was warned that he would have a heart attack. I did actually see him a few weeks later, at a funeral, unfortunately, of someone we both knew. He seemed all right. We just seem older.”

The three have certainly ended up in different places, Clarkson, most successfully, on Prime Video’s Clarkson’s Farm, Hammond on his car restoration show Richard Hammond’s Workshop and May in his nerd-fest, James May and the Dull Men, shown, like Hammond’s programme, on Discovery+. None appears to be on a route back to the BBC, although May advised the corporation to release Top Gear from the state of permanent suspension it has been in since presenter Andrew Flintoff’s accident in December 2022.

“I think it should come back. There have been mutterings about Amazon reinventing The Grand Tour as a sort of Son of Grand Tour without us. I think it’s time to reinvent the genre of car programming. There must be another way of doing it, but it will require some other young and worldly people to work out what it is. I don’t really know what it is.”

For May, however, it does seem the end of the road for him and Prime Video, the streamer having terminated his shows Oh Cook!, in which he learnt to cook, and Our Man in…, in which he explained the ways of Japan, Italy and India to blokes. Has Amazon cancelled him?

“I don’t really know, to be honest. I remember at one point, Amazon told me they wanted to do either really big stuff like their James Bond series or Lord of the Rings, or very small things like Oh Cook!, which for them was a tiny budget programme. But then they changed again and just wanted to do really big things. So, that wasn’t me. I’m not big enough or I don’t have enough viewers. Channel 5 is a nice home.”

He muses on what he might do for it next. A surgery programme maybe. “I mean, I would actually like to film a hip replacement.”

I wonder, however, how much he misses the travel, given that for Great Explorers Channel 5 flew him no further than Seville, supposedly on the grounds that if you replicated their original voyages the series would take at least 11 years to make.

“Yes, I still get excited about getting on aeroplanes and passport control and so on. But I’m also quite enjoying staying at home or going to places in Britain like I did in my childhood. I’ve done enough deserts and rainforests. If I want to go to Italy or Scandinavia, which I also love, I can just go on a simple holiday.”

We must not forget that Amazon left May and his former colleagues so rich that a weekend break in Europe is the smallest of change, and even a divorce such as the one Hammond announces days after I meet May is quite doable. May never reveals how much Amazon paid him, but the fact he owns two homes, his own gin business, nine cars garaged in an underground bunker (in London he drives a VW Polo and a Tesla) and a light aircraft, gives us an idea. It is far from the middle-class comforts he grew up with as the son of an aluminium factory manager in Bristol, then Newport in Wales and then Rotherham. Although a good-with-his-hands Blue Peter lad rather than a groovy Magpie viewer, he resented the BBC’s assumptions about its audience.

“There was that show called Why Don’t You Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go Out and Do Something Less Boring Instead?. There were always kids on who had things their grandpa had made them like a go-kart or they had a sailing dinghy or a radio-controlled aircraft carrier or something and you used to watch it and think, ‘Oh, f*** off!’ ”

Like those Enid Blyton children who lived in big houses and had uncles with another big house by the sea?

“And a cook. That used to really annoy me because it was very overindulged rich kids with things that I didn’t have.”

And now he has?

“I don’t really think about that. I think the secret to a happy life — and I always thought this and I pretty much stuck to it, even when I was flat broke in my twenties — is to live within your means.”

So he doesn’t really think about money? “No, not really.”

That is a luxury for most people, isn’t it? “Well, it probably is unless they strictly live within their means.”

‘I read a lot of poetry’

We know that Great Explorers, a series visibly intent on living within its means, is not about its presenter’s self-discovery. Nevertheless, watching it you glean hints of who May is when not being sitcommed on The Grand Tour. I ask which of Columbus, Raleigh and Cook is his favourite.

“Columbus was obviously a bit of a badass. He ended up clapped in irons by his own king and queen. He definitely enslaved people and he definitely brutalised people. Raleigh? I think in modern terms we’d call him a grifter, wouldn’t we?”

I thought May, who studied music at college, plays the harpsichord and collects art, might appreciate Sir Walter, the sonnet-composing renaissance man.

“And some of his poetry is quite good. Some of it is pretty awful. People like Sir Philip Sidney are rather better. I read a lot of poetry and I’ve even written a bit.”

Does he still?

“Not very much. I write haikus.”

Can he give me one?

“Forest of bamboo/ What then should we make of you?/ Probably a hat.”

Take that, Raleigh. So Cook, with his cartography and science, is his man?

“Because I think he’s a bit of a nerd.”

It is time to go. Gathering his briefing notes, May realises triumphantly he has not referred to them once. The wood-burner is dying down, but the fire in my interviewee’s belly? It burns bright. James May is the eternal combustion engine that never combusts into anger, the Grand Tourist more likely to write a poem than raise a fist, a bloke, but one suited to the age of the electric car.

James May’s Great Explorers starts on Channel 5 on February 13 at 9pm

[thelastomnitect]

AN ART/WORLDBUILDING CHALLENGE FOR 2025

Hello, Voyagers!

So, many of you Artists & TTRPG Creators may be familiar with Yearly Art/Worldbuilding Challenges such as #LORE24, #DUNGEON23, #ARTOBER or #NaNoWriMo. Basically, within a timeframe, do an Art/TTRPG/Creative thing on a repeating basis for an entire year. Its always so inspiring to see all these creators come out of the woodwork, create volumes of work and chart them over the course of a year, and I always wanted to try it myself. Well, last year (2024) I briefly participated in #LORE24 (Challenge: Write some worldbuilding lore every single day. I dropped out quickly. Too many things on my plate already) and #ARTOBER (Draw something every day of October. I actually successfully completed that one, but it felt over too soon), and I realized that I very much appreciated the structure of these challenges, I just needed one that would work for me. So, I made one! Year long, but weekly, and significantly more flexible for folks with busy schedules or multiple methods of creative expression. You're more than welcome to join me on this little experiment! I call it:

I wanted this one to be a cross-media challenge, so folks of all artistic stripes (Writers, Artists, TTRPG Worldbuilders, Comic Artists, Musicians, whatever) can participate!

WHAT'S #WORLD52? HERE'S THE JIST:

-Every week, participants will create a piece of art in their medium of choice (Visual Art, Comics, Writing, Music, Sculpture, Video, etc) pertaining to a Setting, World or Creative Project they're interested in or working on. -Post that work to the social of your choice (Might I suggest BLUESKY or TUMBLR if you've disabled Tumblr's GenAI Scrapper) with the #WORLD52 hashtag, and drop a little lore explaining the piece's relevance! -Share the Hashtag & the Challenge with friends and artistic peers and have some fun! -NO GENATIVE AI SUBMISSIONS OR NFTS ALLOWED. The focus of #WORLD52 is to foster Human Creativity, not defile it.

THE FULL #WORLD52 GUIDELINES ARE HERE:

As for me, I'll be posting my #WORLD52 entries here on this Tumblr and on Bluesky every Saturday before Midnight EST.

My entries will be focused on my Webcomics

My Traitorous Helldivers Fancomic:

My Space Marine Grimdark Future Fancomic:

... and on my TTRPG works My Faster-Than-Light Space Opera Homebrew TTRPG:

My Lighter-Than-Air High Fantasy Pathfinder 2e Setting:

My Primal Fantasy Monster Training TTRPG System/Setting:

HAVE A GRAND NEW YEAR, VOYAGERS!

And for those who join me in #WORLD52, good Worldbuilding, my friends!

[pulsdmedia]

The Week Ahead 1/20-1/26

If dry January has slipped through the cracks, that's where we come in! We're talking wine adventures, boozy festivals, and a rooftop open bar - we're so ready! Nothing warms you up from the inside out like a couple of sips, so get thirsty for it all, New York City!

$39: Spend 3.5 Hours Drinking 100+ Wines From All Over The World

This Saturday, you could be sipping 3.5 Hours of Unlimited Red, White, Rosé & Sparkling Wines from Local, National & International Wineries - this is the big Wine Festival in NYC! Feel the winter air melt away as you explore a selection of bold reds, crisp whites, and elegant rosés from renowned wineries such as Sauvage, Shoe Crazy Wine, Ferreira Carpenter, and Pale Moonlight Wine. While you're at it, fill up on Chavas Empanadas & Angry Archie's lobster rolls, playing a few games and boogying to live music along the way. It's sip-tastic!

Free Ice Skating at Bryant Park

The @bryantparknyc winter village ice rink will be free admission! You MUST make a reservation to ice skate and if you bring your own skates it is totally free. If you do not have skates you can rent them as well. Reservations open daily for dates one week out. It's open daily through March 2, 2025

$29 Ticket To A Rooftop Y2K Open Bar Party: Emo Edition

Dive into your black eyeliner days of the early 2000s at Elsie Rooftop's Y2K Day Party: Emo Edition! DJ Kevin Riddagh will be spinning the ultimate Y2K pop-punk and emo anthems, cranking up those nostalgic guitar riffs and angst-filled choruses. From Fall Out Boy’s "Sugar" to My Chemical Romance’s "Black Parade," this is your chance to scream along to the soundtrack of your teenage heart. Your ticket gets you into this 2 hour open bar, so you can sip your way through the party like it's the good old days - no regrets, just good vibes...

And Scene Improv Show

New York top improvisers and actors from Broadway, TV and beyond perform in scenes from Mamet to Moliere and everything in between. The actors will know their lines and the improvisers will improvise with no prior knowledge of the scenes.

$29 New York Times-Praised Winery Tour & Wine Tasting Experience

Unwind and savor the season's best wine harvests at the Forbes, The New York Times, & The Wall Street Journal-celebrated Brooklyn Winery. Bring a date for a cozy fall getaway, or round up your pals for an enchanting voyage through Williamsburg's hidden wine hideaway, as their signature wine tour will take you on a journey of flavor & viticulture! At the end of the tour, enjoy a tasting of five Brooklyn Winery wines, allowing your taste buds to absorb each sip with newfound appreciation and understanding...

Daiya Crustbuster Pop-Up

Daiya knows its new and improved pizza line made with Daiya Oat Cream™ Blend delivers all the rich, cheesy, gooey satisfaction people love. So the brand is inviting people to see this for themselves at its Crustbuster pop-up. Come taste-test the latest Daiya dairy-free pizza flavors for free—no strings attached.

[couxchie]

Week 2 of my little composition challenge for 2025. A voyage through the murky waters of a mysterious jungle--and a brush with the denizens who dwell within.

Inspired by this art by Steven Hake

I'm having a blast with this project so far, and I'm learning so much! Everything was built from the ground up by me in Ableton Live Standard using my Novation Launchkey Mini and sound packs by Abletunes and Eastwest.

[crossingscon]

Our voyage between worlds begins in one week! On November 23 at 8pm EST, the Crossings Book Club presents Diane Duane's interdimensional mystery, Stealing the Elf-King's Roses. The next CrossingsCon takes place August 15-17, 2025, in Philadelphia, PA! Visit our website to find more details and register.

[airasilver]

It’s been a big week for Robert Eggers.

A day after Focus Features’ announcement of Werwulf, which he’s set as his next film on the heels of Nosferatu, we’ve learned that the filmmaker has closed his deal to write and direct a new Labyrinth film for TriStar Pictures.

The news comes following the unveiling of the 2025 Oscar nominations, which included four for Eggers’ hit vampire flick in the Cinematography, Costume Design, Production Design and Makeup and Hairstyling categories.

Plot details for Eggers’ Labyrinth are under wraps, but we’re told the film is a sequel to, rather than a remake of, Jim Henson’s 1986 classic. Eggers is writing the script with Sjón, his collaborator on 2022 Viking actioner The Northman and with whom he’s also working on Werwulf. Chris and Eleanor Columbus will produce alongside Lisa Henson, with Brian Henson executive producing.

A beloved musical fantasy starring a young Jennifer Connelly and the late David Bowie, Labyrinth follows the former’s 16-year-old Sarah as she navigates a vast, otherworldly maze to rescue her infant brother, Toby (Toby Froud), whom she inadvertently wished away to the realm of Goblin King Jareth (Bowie). Throughout her journey, Sarah encounters a variety of magical creatures and challenges that test her resolve and maturity.

In its theatrical release through TriStar, the original underperformed, grossing only around $34 million against a reported budget of $25 million and faring better overseas than domestically. Still, the film earned nominations at the likes of the Hugo Awards and the BBAFTA Film Awards and now is appreciated as a cult classic. Among its most memorable features is the innovative puppetry that emerged for the project from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. Over the past few decades, the film’s popularity has led to tie-in novels and comic books, video games, perennial screenings and even an annual fan masquerade ball, which is considered one of the largest in the world.

Efforts to get a Labyrinth follow-up off the ground have been ongoing since at least 2017, with Doctor Strange‘s Scott Derrickson most recently attaching to direct a prior incarnation from a script by Maggie Levin.

Still playing in theaters, Eggers’ take on gothic vampire tale Nosferatu is the highest-grossing film of his career, having passed $156 million worldwide since Christmas Day. Heading into its eighth weekend at the box office and recently hitting PVOD, the film also is Focus Features’ second highest-grossing title stateside behind Downton Abbey. It marks the celebrated genre filmmaker’s fourth on the heels of The Witch and The Lighthouse for A24 and The Northman for Focus.

The plot of Eggers’ Werwulf hasn’t been divulged, but the title gives one a good sense. Produced and financed by Focus Features, the film is scheduled to debut in North American theaters on Christmas Day 2026. Eggers and Sjón will produce alongside Focus, with Maiden Voyage’s Chris and Eleanor Columbus executive producing.

Eggers is repped by WME and Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz. News of his attachment to Labyrinth was first reported by Jeff Sneider of The InSneider.

I don't know how I feel about someone else playing Jareth.

[voyagerweek]

VOYAGER WEEK PROMPTS

DAY 1 - JAN. 10: Favorite Episode | Away Missions

DAY 2 - JAN. 11: Favorite Character | Meet You in the Runabout

DAY 3 - JAN. 12: Favorite Relationship | Allies & Enemies

DAY 4 - JAN. 13: Favorite Season or Arc | Time Travel

DAY 5 - JAN. 14: Favorite Quote | Home Away From Home

DAY 6 - JAN. 15: Favorite Holodeck Program | Lost in the Holodeck

DAY 7 - JAN. 16: Caretaker (S1E01) 30th Anniversary | FREE SPACE

Fanwork originally made and posted on Tumblr for this event with the tag #voyager week will be reblogged by this blog. Racism, bigotry, harassment, or discrimination of any kind will not be tolerated. Be respectful of other fans and have fun! FAQs ↴

How do I participate? Make a new post on Tumblr with the tag "#voyager week" during the week of January 10-16, 2025. Crossposting to other sites such as AO3 is allowed, but please also make a new post on Tumblr so this blog can reblog it. If your post has not been reblogged within 48 hours of posting, please send a DM to @voyagerweek along with the post. Submissions will only be reblogged during the event week and for up to two weeks after the event. Please do not post a submission before January 10, 2025.

Why are there two prompts for each day? Do I have to use one or both? There are two prompts to cover multiple interpretations of the event. A prompt that is accessible for a writer may not be for a gifmaker, for example. You may choose to use one or both prompts for each day, or multiple prompts from different days combined in one post, or no prompt! These prompts are being provided 5 months in advance of the event so that there is plenty of time to consider them, but if none of them inspire you, feel free to make a fanwork about Voyager that does not incorporate any of the prompts. The prompts are meant to inspire but not constrain your creativity. You may also submit multiple posts in one day. Participate as much or as little as you would like!

Can I post X kind of fanwork? Yes! If it is made by you (or you have express permission from the original creator) for this event, it counts as a fanwork and will be accepted. The following list of types of fanwork is not meant to be restrictive but to provide examples: fanfic of any length, fanart/comics, gifs/edits/fanvids, playlists, moodboards, meta discussions/essays/headcanons, crafting/textiles, cosplay, and anything else made by fans to show appreciation for Voyager. **Please put long written works below a "read more" cut**

What if my fanwork is part of an ongoing work such as a multi-chapter fanfic or series? That's fine! As long as whatever you post is new and made for this event, whether you use one of the prompts or not, it will be reblogged (i.e. you may not make a post for a previously published chapter of your fic, but a new chapter or installment posted during the event is acceptable).

Can my work include other Star Trek shows/movies/books/etc? Yes, as long as Voyager or its characters are one of the main focuses of the fanwork, you are welcome to incorporate other media properties, Star Trek or otherwise.

Can my work be about an actor or the production/behind the scenes of Voyager? Yes, as long as the work's focus is still on Voyager (i.e. not a gifset solely of the actor in another show/movie).

Are OCs (original characters) allowed? Yes, if a Voyager setting or its characters are included in the fanwork as well.

Are AUs (alternate universes) allowed? Yes. Canon divergence and different settings (i.e. modern AUs) are allowed if the work still features Voyager characters or elements.

Is NSFW/adult content allowed? Yes, as long as you tag appropriately with trigger warnings and follow Tumblr's restrictions for explicit content. Reblogs of works that contain graphic violence, sexual content, strong profanity, or nudity will be tagged #nsfw for filtering.

Threshold Day is January 29 and already a recognized fan event on Tumblr, why are you having a Voyager event that doesn't include this day? The dates were chosen to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the original airdate of the first episode of the first season. This event is meant to share enthusiasm for the entirety of Voyager, and hopefully that will continue after the event week is finished.

**If you have any other questions not covered by this list, please send an ask to @voyagerweek.**

[dokjasweep]

▞ ▖SHIPPING NOTICE

we have received the replacement cards and will begin packing orders this week! we understand this has been a long voyage, so if you have an updated address, please reach out to us before january 30, 2025 via the contact information included in your order.