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The void of space between planets doesn’t leave much room for anything but light years of self-reflection. Long stretches of darkness with only pinpricks of a destination. Namjoon isn’t sure he feels at home anywhere, anymore, but he’s trying.
(In the silence, the ship speaks to him, tells him that the stars are calling, that there’s a home for him out there if he could only push just a little farther than last time.)
-
He had always heard the energy of the core thrumming through the ship the way others heard a voice. But it was only a ship, and perhaps Namjoon was just very good at listening.
-
The ship first speaks to him on his 158th day aboard.
The ship says, “Don’t.”
Namjoon ignores it.
-
(It was on his 158th day that he thought briefly about letting the space between stretch into nothing, forever.
It’s very easy to meet nothing at all, in space.
It takes a concentrated effort to go anywhere other than nowhere.)
-
The ship speaks to him again, on his 206th day aboard.
It says, “It hurts.”
Namjoon silently runs diagnostics.
-
(On his 207th day aboard, Namjoon discovers an infestation of acidic space slime beneath the metal flooring in the cargo hold. He’s so angry when he sees what it’s done to his ship, the way the corrosive substance has eaten away at the wires there so viciously.
He’s furious, but in the end, it isn’t a sentient creature; it’s just slime. It exists to do what it biologically must do to survive; there are no emotions involved, no agendas or motives. It just is what it is.
It’s just slime, Namjoon thinks, even as the process of removing the infestation gives him an overwhelming sense of vindictive, triumphant glee. He repairs the ship carefully afterward, his fingers gentle against the damaged parts as though tending an open wound. It’s just slime.
The ship says, “thank you,” but he pretends he doesn’t hear it.)
-
On the 315th day—
(“Can you hear me?” The ship asks. “Please, can you hear me?”)
—Namjoon decides to dock at the nearest space port. The android that greets him says, “Lifeform detected. Human, male. Hello, traveler. If you prefer, I am programmed with nearly nine thousand languages and sub-dialects; how may I assist you?” in the common tongue, then in English, and then again in Mandarin Chinese when he doesn’t respond.
Namjoon finally says, “Korean, please,” when it’s clear that the android will continue a rotation of human-oriented languages indefinitely.
“Language detected,” the android says. “Korea, South. Primary dialect: New Seoul. How may I assist you?”
It’s been nearly a year since he left (Earth, South Korea, Ilsan, home), nearly a year since he’s heard his mother tongue spoken by another—android or human or otherwise—and he feels almost too untethered to himself. His being feels laid bare, a live wire for anyone to see or touch. He had wanted the freedom to explore, but with so much emptiness from one point to another, he has only himself to look at.
In the end, he asks for directions to the nearest market, to which the android responds, “The general market is located approximately 237.56 human meters southwest of this building. Any exchange of illegal goods is strictly prohibited and will result in the confiscation of the aforementioned goods and your immediate expulsion from the spaceport. Happy travels!”
He trades the metal deposits he had collected from passing m-type asteroids in exchange for rations and water. The more valuable materials—the ones he had tracked via long-range scanners—he trades for fuel and materials for repairs. He hovers in the marketplace afterwards, milling around the gates and trying to ignore the tug in his chest that says, “Please, come back.”
He catches the eye of a nearby merchant, pale-scaled and vaguely humanoid—someone from beyond the Kuiper Belt, he thinks, maybe from Eris or Haumea—who beckons him closer.
“You seem to be looking for something,” the merchant says in the common tongue, with a slick, hissing enunciation that sounds like a secret. “Perhaps I can help.”
Namjoon had learned the common tongue for necessity and uses it only when he must. It’s an ugly language, no matter the being that speaks it. He hates it; he hates the consonants, the vowels, and every combination of the two.
He says, “I’m not looking for anything at all,” and leaves.
-
Namjoon dreams for so long of places he’s never visited that he almost forgets where he’s been.
He dreams of—
(—a planet with bronze skies and a wild brewing storm that makes him feel calm. The plantlife sways in the wind, reaching out with restless dark tendrils as he passes by—)
(—the untouched ground of a newly discovered earth. There are sharp, looming figures in the clouds and a maze of amethyst crystals. The crystals shiver and the figures are angry and he—)
(—23 moons orbiting a planet with rivers that bleed purple. There is poetry he shouldn’t be able to read scratched into a boulder. His heart asks him if he should settle here and flourish, but—)
(—a person, made of pure energy—)
(—a hand touching the side of his neck, simultaneously solid and barely there, the way it feels to be translucent—)
(—a voice saying, “Hello? Can you hear me? Please—”)
—many things.
But sometimes he hardly dreams at all.
-
On his 400th day exactly, Namjoon says, “I feel alone,” into the silence of cabin, because he hasn’t said anything aloud for almost twenty days straight.
His voice cracks and breaks and his quarters are so, so quiet that it scares him.
The ship says, “I’m here,” and that scares him even more.
-
He’s so good at listening, but maybe that just means sometimes he hears things he thinks he shouldn’t.
-
The silence becomes too much and he stops at the space station orbiting Europa just to hear another person’s voice, whether it be the harsh, choppy consonants of the common tongue, the whispery clicks of Titan’s shimmery populace, or his own planet’s business-related default. He trades more precious metals than last time, filling his ship with water and rations and fuel, and his interplanetary mining pass with universal credits.
(He has half a dozen 1000 won bills taped to the walls of his cabin and 500 won coins in the chest pocket of his jumpsuit—the contents of his wallet the day he left. The value of money is relative; the currency of his home has no use in the outer reaches. Here, it’s just paper, no more valuable than the receipts at the bottom of his backpack or the crumpled, unsent letters below even that.)
(He keeps it all anyway.)
His pockets feel heavy now, despite the lack of physical coin. He just wants to feel lighter. He always wants to feel lighter.
Instead of returning to the ship, he goes to a bar on the space station, a semi-friendly establishment with metal plating and strange markings on the walls that make him feel like he’s missing something important.
He thinks he might have been here before, in a past life, if he believed in that sort of thing.
He’s busy watching the condensation on his glass drip into a puddle on the countertop when a man sits next to him. It wouldn’t have been too notable, except for the way Namjoon has been sitting here alone for, oh, maybe four hours now, nursing a single glass of bourbon and trying to make small talk with the robot serving drinks.
Robots aren’t very good at small talk, but then neither is he.
He asks, “What’s the square root of 475.3?” and the robot replies, “21.80137610335641,” on its way past to serve another weathered individual on the far end of the bar. They’re wearing the insignia of an Io colony and he can smell the volcanic ash clinging to their jumpsuit.
Namjoon takes another sip of his drink and decides not to ignore the interested glances the man next to him has been sending his way for the past twenty minutes.
It burns in his throat.
-
The man’s name is Hoseok and he holds Namjoon’s wrists to the mattress as he kisses him.
The man’s name is Hoseok and he laughs in delight when he fucks Namjoon until he’s a whining, crying mess beneath him, and he coos affectionately while taking care of him afterwards.
The man’s name is Hoseok and he hears the ship, too.
-
The ship says, “I wish—”
-
“When did this start?” Hoseok asks, later, and for a second Namjoon doesn’t register the fact that Hoseok is no longer speaking the common tongue—there hadn’t been much talking at all, for a while there. Now he’s speaking Korean and it isn’t the same as Namjoon’s hometown, but it’s soft and natural in a way that an android’s approximation of dialects can never be.
It must have been the currency on the walls that gave him away, or maybe the books tucked against the far shelf of his cabin, or maybe it doesn’t matter anyway.
Namjoon briefly entertains the idea of pretending he doesn’t understand, to protest as though he has no idea. Instead, he says, “around four months into… into whatever it is that I’m doing here.”
Hoseok purses his lips, humming in thought. “Are you in the market for a crewmate? I’m looking to head out for something new anyway.”
“Just like that?” Namjoon asks, shocked. He tries to sit up, hands scrabbling for purchase anywhere not related to the heat of Hoseok’s skin against him. He knocks over the notebook on his nightstand where he’s started keeping an incident log. The book opens as it tumbles down and lands on the page that says They asked me if I was lonely.
Hoseok leans over, anchoring himself with a hand on the juncture of Namjoon’s hips and thighs while he grabs the notebook off the floor.
“Don’t look,” Namjoon says, embarrassed. “It’s private. And you’ll probably think I’m making it up anyway.”
“I don’t think you’re making it up.” Hoseok says, gently, reaching out to lay his fingers on the pulse point of Namjoon’s wrist. “I heard it, too, remember?”
The ship asks, “You can hear me, too?”
-
Hoseok had seen him on the space station before, it turns out, and had been drawn to him, although they’d never formally met. He’s a mechanic, Hoseok had explained, typically traveling between ports and outposts for freelance work every other month or so.
“But the last time I was here…” Namjoon had mused, doing the calculations. It had to have been four months at least.
“Well,” Hoseok had replied, sliding his hand around Namjoon’s waist, “there was something telling me to stay.”
-
The ship’s voice sounds like a whisper, a metallic ghostly echo of speech that Namjoon hears only on the edges of his thoughts, hardly a language at all. The only time it’s been louder was—
-
“—Wake up!” The ship says, or shouts, or screams. Their voice is loud and overwhelming, ripping through Namjoon’s consciousness and forcing him awake. The flashing scanners on the main console show two vessels rapidly approaching, an approach that would normally have triggered the ship’s alarms light years earlier, if not for the way he’d been meaning to fix them for two weeks now.
The other ships have no insignia to show, a sure sign they were stolen.
At this point, the only thing he can do is run away. (But lately it seems that’s what he’s good at.)
-
Date: 2359.34
Log: 94
Kim, Namjoon
They say, “Hello?” and “Are you listening today?”
I ask, “How do I know that you’re real?”
They say, “I don’t know what I am.”
-
Date: 2359.79
Log: 126
Kim, Namjoon
“I’m tired, Namjoon.”
Mineral deposits have been collected; returning to Europa for supplies and minor repairs. Uncertain regarding this visit’s length of stay. (NOTE: Gum seals around hydroponics chamber require reapplication again. Do not do it yourself this time.)
-
Date: 2359.186
Log: 131
Kim, Namjoon
“I wish that I could touch you like he does.”
-
Date: 2359.187
Log: 132
Kim, Namjoon
“I wish that I could touch him, too.”
-
On a day not long after Namjoon stopped counting, the ship says, “A name, I want a name.”
Namjoon startles awake, the surreal space of his dreams fading into darkness as he opens his eyes. Hoseok is next to him and he looks narrow and small when curled up in his sleep. (Namjoon had once measured the length of his hand by the depth of Hoseok’s hips. He can wrap his fingers fully around Hoseok’s wrists with room to spare. The way Hoseok’s body is built is deceptively delicate.)
“You have a name,” Namjoon says, thinking of the one already applied in shiny dark paint, big and bold in its finish against the light grey metal of the ship’s body.
“It doesn’t feel like mine,” the ship says, and then, “A name like yours.”
“Like mine?” Namjoon murmurs. “A human name?”
“Yes, a human name like yours and his, but my own.”
“Hey, wake up,” Namjoon whispers, nudging Hoseok gently in the side.
Hoseok grumbles sleepily, smacking his lips and turning onto his back. “Joon-ah? What time is it?”
“They want a name.”
Hoseok hums in thought, unsuccessfully attempting to blink away the fuzziness of sleep. “Mm, something shiny and glowing, like reflected moonlight.”
“Like gloss,” Namjoon says.
-
The core of the ship had always felt like a heartbeat. Namjoon had more than once put his hands to the walls just to feel the energy pulsing through the wires like blood through veins long before the ship had made its sentience known.
Now, when Namjoon presses his palms to the cabin wall in the early hours to ground himself, the energy presses back.
-
When he was a kid, Namjoon used to think he’d be an explorer, the kind that would have museum exhibits like the ones back home.
Turns out the daily grind in outer space isn’t that much different from the grind on Earth. It’s just colder here.
He’s always cold, really. The ship is primarily metal and the average temperature outside of it is several hundred degrees below the human standard of comfort; the spaceports are only marginally warmer with their artificial atmospheres. Wearing Earth’s insignia in full view on his uniform jumpsuit is an interplanetary law, and legal requirement for those with mining passes, and he’s spent more down time than he cares to admit sewing insignia patches on his sweaters.
(He misses the sun and the way the warmth of it felt on his face when visiting Seoul and sitting by the Han River. Nowadays, he’s more worried about the radiation.)
-
(He thought he’d be an astronaut like in the history books, discovering new planets, new life, new phenomena.
He’s nothing like the explorer he thought he’d be.)
-
(But he supposes two out of three isn’t too bad.)
-
Sometimes Namjoon sits just outside the room that houses the core, with his back against the wall. He sits with—with Yoongi, in the space that feels nearest to them, that feels strongest. The energy of them thrums through him, resonating in the marrow of Namjoon’s bones.
Sometimes Hoseok is already there when Namjoon visits, smiling and murmuring too quietly for Namjoon to clearly hear the words coming out.
Sometimes he leaves Hoseok and Yoongi alone.
Sometimes he sits with them both together and feels like maybe the home he was searching for among the stars isn’t very far after all.
-
“Creating a new life-form from bio-organic construction matter isn’t that hard,” Hoseok says, the next time they’ve stopped to restock their supplies. “It’s been done before. Experimentation with artificial production of living matter began in—what? The early 21st century?”
Yoongi is in the docking bay as usual, but it feels more and more wrong to be anywhere without them.
Namjoon sighs, laying a hand on the strange fruit on display at the market. He thinks it might be a product from the greenhouses on Mars—those have always looked strange—but he doesn’t know if it should be squishy, or firm, or green or yellow or red-speckled or anything. “Is this ripe?”
Hoseok grabs the fruit, squeezes twice, and says, “Overripe. You don’t even like this kind; it’s bitter. Now, as I was saying—”
“I know,” Namjoon cuts in, taking a step away from the vendor giving the two of them a suspicious look; the far folk aren’t fond of languages they can’t understand—or perhaps it’s just humanity they aren’t fond of. He can’t blame them for that. “The bio-matter isn’t the problem. It’s them. I’ve never heard of anything like this. How can we be sure that trying to put them in a body won’t destroy them entirely?”
“It’s what they want.”
And—because who is he to decide what a sentient being beyond human comprehension can and cannot do?—Namjoon supposes that’s that.
-
Namjoon dreams again. This time, there are trees that sing, and they sound the way his favorite color looks. The cloud formations are the same as the ones in Ilsan the day he left, but when he looks past them, the constellations are all wrong.
One hand on the back of his neck is Hoseok’s.
But the other—
-
When Namjoon first began traveling, the thrill of exploration faded once he realized space was essentially 99% nothing and only 1% something. Entering interplanetary space to see the stars means feeling farther away first, and the freedom of being able to go (almost) anywhere soon became stifling upon discovering five big rooms in a spaceship were startlingly lonely when housing a single occupant.
(There are approximately forty billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars and red dwarfs in the Milky Way alone.
At first, it made Namjoon feel full to bursting with endless wonder for the universe and its mysteries.
Later, it just made him feel small.)
-
(Now, Yoongi and Hoseok make him feel limitless.)
-
There’s a face Namjoon sees in his dreams these days. (Never all at once, just flashes of skin and light—the smooth slope of a button nose, the pout of a downturned mouth, the full curve of a high cheekbone, shadows cast by long eyelashes—that seem familiar.)
(They say a person never dreams of a face they haven’t seen before, but then Namjoon supposes he has seen Yoongi—all the parts that matter, anyway.)
-
They scrimp and they save and they hire a specialist to build Yoongi a body that’s partially robotic and partially grown organic tissue meant to simulate the texture and sensitivity of skin, the suppleness of muscle.
“It has to be able to withstand huge amounts of energy,” Namjoon says, “I mean, like huge influxes of power in long-term intervals.”
“Regenerative elements, too,” Hoseok says, eyeing the models available, searching for one that feels right. Something that Yoongi can become a part of, not just something to reside in. Yoongi had entrusted him that task and he intended to follow through. “High durability, resistance to wear and tear. Oh, and it would be great to get the blueprints, or—”
“Anatomically correct?” The specialist asks, almost entirely detached from the conversation as she taps something out on her keyboard. There are diagrams on the wall over her shoulder, all-business and quietly intimidating. “Fully functional?”
Namjoon blushes so fiercely he thinks he could use the heat as its own power source, thinking about the way Yoongi had once said I wish that I could touch you both, intimate and warm like a whisper in his ear and Hoseok’s.
Hoseok curls his hand over Namjoon’s, threading their fingers together. “Yes.”
-
Namjoon thinks about it later, about what it would be like to hold both Hoseok’s hand and Yoongi’s.
He thinks about how being all alone and feeling all alone in the universe are two very different things.
He thinks about how alone Yoongi must have felt, in the beginning, when Namjoon was busy pretending nothing out of the ordinary was happening.
Namjoon keeps holding Hoseok’s hand as they make their way to the shuttles. He keeps holding Hoseok’s hand and he thinks about how none of them will feel alone ever again.
-
For as long as it took them to save, it takes longer for the specialist to put Yoongi’s body together, piece by piece.
“It’s incredibly intricate work,” she says on the first check-in. The skeletal structure isn’t even finished, never mind anything else. The hands alone have several thousand pieces to build and connect for optimal fine motor control.
“These things can’t be rushed,” she says on the second. The organic tissue will take time to grow properly. It will have to be attached to the skeletal structure in infinitesimally small increments to make sure it takes root, to make sure it doesn’t reject the connection.
“This is the most advanced piece of technology I have ever personally overseen the production of,” she says on the third, sounding nearly exasperated, “it’s going to take time, especially if you want it done right. Now, would you like to see what we have so far?”
They do and it’s—it’s not anything cohesive. There’s nothing that screams Yoongi about the parts laid out neat and even on the table. Right now, it’s just a half-metal shell, because what makes them Yoongi isn’t there yet.
He can almost see it in his mind’s eye, though, the figure of Yoongi between him and Hoseok.
Namjoon wants it, fiercely, and because it’s not Yoongi here with them, he wants to go home.
-
“It’s time,” Yoongi says, excitement as evident in their voice as in the pulses of energy running throughout the ship. The lights in the corridors keep fluctuating sporadically and Namjoon watches affectionately as Hoseok grins at the sight. “It’s time, it’s time, it’s time.”
“Careful with the lights,” Namjoon says, smiling so wide he thinks the shape of it might be permanently etched on his face. “We don’t have the credits right now for new ones if these burn out.”
“It’s time!” Yoongi says again, and the metal plating of the floor vibrates beneath Namjoon’s feet.
They make their way to the room that houses the core, fingers trailing along the walls where Yoongi’s messing with each set of hazard lights as they pass by. Namjoon stares down at the figure on the cart between him and Hoseok and it’s nothing like their earlier visit with the specialist.
It’s different, because it doesn’t feel like a shell this time. It feels like Yoongi.
It’s Yoongi and it only looks as though they’re sleeping. They’re small and their skin is so soft, but Namjoon knows the metal bones beneath are stronger than the material of the ship itself containing them. They’re modestly clothed in one of Namjoon’s old jumpsuits and Namjoon will have to buy new ones soon and it’s Yoongi.
“It’s time.” Yoongi says once more, as Hoseok and Namjoon are setting the body gently—so, so carefully—against the chamber walls. The light of core briefly glows so bright that Namjoon has to shade his eyes.
Namjoon takes Hoseok’s hand and, together, they press their palms to the wall where they can feel Yoongi’s energy. Namjoon nods once and, before they both leave the room, says, “it’s time.”
-
When it finally happens, when Yoongi finally comes stumbling on unsteady legs out of the room that used to hold the core, it feels like deja vu. Namjoon’s never seen this, or experienced it, but it’s so, so familiar. (The way their hands are shaped is new, but the curve of their mouth is not.)
Yoongi opens their eyes and the white-blue light of the core shines from behind them, and Namjoon can’t think of anything to say beyond, “Hello.”
“Oh, hello,” Yoongi says (gasps), “I want to kiss you.”
“I want to kiss you.” Yoongi says, again, reaching out to them both with trembling, terribly human fingers.
“I want to kiss you.” Yoongi says, and they press one palm to Namjoon’s chest, where Namjoon can feel the energy of them against his heart, familiar and warm and closer than ever before. (Their other hand finds Hoseok’s wrist to pull him closer and Namjoon feels warm, warm, warm.)
Namjoon whispers, “yes, please,” a shallow, broken thing between the three of them. His own hand on Hoseok’s hip shakes.
“I’m going to kiss you,” Yoongi says, and they do.
-
Namjoon dreams now of Yoongi’s lips at his throat, of Hoseok’s hands at the small of his back, of his own bare feet stepping into a moss-covered forest that smells like the moon.
He dreams of many, many things, in fact, but none so clear as the shape the three of them make when curled around each other in the darkness.
Namjoon feels lighter than he has in years.
-
-
-
“I think there are more.” Yoongi says, in the far-off way they sometimes do.
“More of what?” Namjoon asks, through a mouthful of dried rations. They’ll need to stop again soon. The nearest space station isn’t too distant, but it is somewhat difficult to get docking clearance for; he’ll have to contact the station director in advance.
“More of us.”
“Do you mean—” Hoseok pauses, hesitation wrinkling his brow. His hand on Yoongi’s waist tightens visibly. “—do you mean there are more like you?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” Yoongi says, softly, and cryptically, with a gravity to their words that Namjoon feels in his chest. “Just—more.”
Namjoon tries to listen, the way he always does, to what Yoongi isn’t saying. Yoongi’s thigh is pressed to his on the seat next to him and he can still feel the pulse of their energy even now, strong and steady and the same, but somehow different too. Namjoon leans back, his shoulders pressed to the wall of their newly designated eating area, and thinks that the ship doesn’t feel much like anything these days. The ship only feels like metal and patchwork tech, a vessel to travel from one place to the next, and Namjoon wonders how he ever thought what turned out to be Yoongi’s influence was just a normal part of life in space.
Nothing about Yoongi is normal, it’s just—more.
And maybe a ship is a home, or maybe it’s the people in it, or maybe it’s the people who have yet to arrive. He thinks that maybe what Yoongi is saying is “keep going.”
Keep going
Keep going
Keep going
There’s more home to find, keep going.