Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Scott Hunter (Game Changers), Theriault (Game Changers), Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Hayden Pike, Rose Landry, Dallas Kent

Additional Tags:

Sunshine (2007) x Project Hail Mary (2026) fusion sort of, except if i ruthlessly neuter sunshine to only kill characters i don't like, i mean come on no spoilers but take a look at that character list and take a guess who isn't making it out of here, here are all our favorite characters and also fucking dallas kent, Temporary Amnesia, Minor Character Death, Alternate Universe - Space, woke up in a cold sweat 2 days after trying to think of a title for this fic and went you are so STUPID the title is OBVIOUS, when you and your [REDACTED] go to space but he thinks you're [REDACTED] and you have [REDACTED], I need to be SO clear here: the plot is sunshine and i stole amnesia and ONE relationship dynamic from PHM, unfortunately it was NOT the relationship you probably want, anya is NOT in this as a fun alien, and i apologize for that, Angst with a Happy Ending, Scientific Inaccuracies, this idiot thought she'd write a fic starring ilya as a genius level physicist, guess who's not a genius level physicist? ME, please endure the vague ass science for the sake of the angst and the romance, We might be working with THE most unreliable narrator of all time fellas, canon-typical ilya's dad behavior (being the worst)

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-06-25 Completed: 2026-06-28 Words: 54,881 Chapters: 8/8

solnyshko

Summary

Ilya Rozanov wakes up from a medically induced coma, sixteen months into a mission to save the dying sun, and he can't remember a single one of his crewmates.

He's immediately drawn to one of them, though. Too bad Hollander won't give him the time of day.

Notes

This fic is largely done, so I'm going to post through the weekend as I edit the chapters! It's largely based on the 2007 movie Sunshine, with some Project Hail Mary thrown in, but again, not the fun alien parts, unfortunately lmao.

Chapter 1

Solnyshko, what have you done? Solnyshko, why are you crying? Who made you cry like this? Where are you going? Do not leave me alone here. Please don’t leave me alone here. Please don’t leave me…

He knows immediately that his name is Ilya Rozanov, but that’s the only thing he knows, and he only knows it because the fucking robot thing hanging from the ceiling announces that he's awake, using his full name. 

It calls him “Doctor Ilya Rozanov”, so he supposes he also knows that he’s a doctor. There is nothing else in his memories. He’s a black hole of information, strapped to a strange bed, with a threatening-looking robot floating over him, in a room with lights that are far too bright. His heart races, and there’s something he knows he has to do, something he knows he has to say to make things right, but it’s like when he’s tired and overwhelmed and trying to search for a word in English that he doesn’t often use. Like it’s there, behind layers of fog, and he just can’t reach it. The urgency fades, and his heart slows down. He thinks the robot has possibly injected him with something to make him more calm, and he wonders if he’ll fall asleep again, but he doesn’t. He drifts there, alone.

He doesn’t have to wait in isolation for long. He’s staring up at the robot hanging from the ceiling, following its structure with his eyes, trying to work out its exact number of robot arms, which is difficult because it keeps whirling them around, various tools doing various incomprehensible things, scanning over his body and his brain, looking oddly anxious or fussy in its movements. He has barely looked at the rest of the room, and certainly hasn’t done anything to try and get free from his restraints, and then a door whooshes open, somewhere behind his head, and he cranes his neck to look. 

He’s disappointed when he sees who’s standing there. He’s not sure why, or how he can be disappointed when he doesn’t even know who he is, and when he can’t pull a single memory of a single other person from his empty brain, but he recognizes the emotion as disappointment, like he’d wanted it to be someone else. 

The intruder is fairly handsome, with dark hair and dark stubble and a faintly exhausted look to him, but he is not the one Ilya was hoping to see. 

“Welcome back, Rozanov,” the man says, and even his voice is tired. “Do you know who I am?”

Ilya is relieved that he's been asked such an easy question.

“No,” he admits. The man laughs a little. 

“Small mercies for me, I guess,” he mutters. “Try not to be too worried; we all knew this was a risk.” He speaks into some kind of communication device in his hand. “Another one with amnesia.”

The reply comes with a crackle of static. 

“Who?” asks a voice, gentle and warm. Ilya's ears perk up to hear it, like a dutiful dog. His chest hurts. His fingers twitch where they’re restrained at his sides. 

“Your boy Rozanov,” is the answer. The voice on the communicator sighs. 

“He's not my boy,” it says bleakly. 

Ilya is put through multiple indignities at the hands of the robot arms to make sure it’s only his head that has failed him, and then the intruder returns to release him from his tiny prison cell of a room. 

“All clear on the medical front,” he says when he enters, like he'd been watching from somewhere nearby. He says everything very blandly; he has a terrible bedside manner. “The amnesia is an unfortunate side effect of being kept in a medically induced coma for the last sixteen months, the length of our trip so far. We've got two other crew members showing the same symptoms. The good news is that it should resolve within the next few days. The bad news is that you're eventually going to remember what a pain in everyone's ass you are.”

He sticks out his hand to shake, very American, flashing a bright smile. 

“Hunter,” he says. “Scott.”

Ilya reluctantly shakes his hand. 

“Ilya Rozanov, apparently,” he answers, which makes Hunter laugh. 

Ilya lets Hunter talk at him as they move through the spaceship. Because it is a spaceship. That much is obvious from literally everything about it. Ilya recognizes the various parts, most of the equipment, the shape of the modules through which they pass, like he once must have known every inch of this place, but he doesn't have any idea how. It's a large ship, like something out of science fiction, although of course he doesn't know how he knows that, either, or what a typical realistic spaceship looks like, with its cramped quarters, but he somehow does know these things. 

“We trained for a long time?” he asks. 

“Almost two and a half years for this mission,” Hunter replies. “While the ship was being built. And you did more, before that, for the first mission; I only came on for the second. Not counting your little nap, you’ve been working on this project for, god, maybe seven years?” 

“I went on another mission?” Apparently Ilya is a seasoned cosmonaut. Good for him. 

“No, no. You missed out on selection for that one,” Hunter says. He sounds like he’s only pretending to be sympathetic. Like it secretly thrills him very much that Ilya wasn't chosen. This makes Ilya laugh, and he decides that he likes this Hunter guy. 

“They were stupid, then,” he says. Hunter's expression goes a little sour. 

“Well, they never made it back, so it's probably lucky for you that you didn't,” he says. 

Ilya is brought into a room that looks surprisingly lived-in and homey, for a room on a spaceship. There is a sort of kitchenette along one wall, and in the center is a round table with some chairs, and another table along the back wall with a booth-style seat that has a fluffy blanket tossed on it, and a book on top of that, like someone had been using it as a reading nook before this meeting started. 

There are a bunch of other people in the room already. He doesn’t recognize any of them. A few are standing against the walls, but two are seated at the round table, and Hunter gestures for Ilya to sit, too. Ilya does, slouching into his seat and feeling a bit like a sulky teenager. One of the people already seated is a pretty woman with big eyes and brassy hair pulled into a tight bun. She offers him a bewildered smile. The other person at the table is a scowlingly handsome man towards whom Ilya feels a flare of dislike. Apparently, some things have stayed with him, even through the memory loss. That’s probably a good sign. 

Standing near the back of the room, his arms folded across his chest, one hip popped in a way so casual it might look fake, except it reads natural on him, is a very tall man with dark hair and dark stubble. Considering his blue coverall is already grease-stained, Ilya is guessing that he's one of the people who keeps the ship running. Another man, leaning back against the kitchenette, looks like he’s about to start giving them a speech. He’s an older, upright gentleman who looks like he left his ability to smile back on Earth. Ilya immediately pinpoints him as the commander. There's an older woman standing beside him who is looking between everyone with an assessing gaze. Some kind of medical personnel, maybe? There's a bland-looking man with an uneasy smile near the breakfast nook who could be literally anyone. Ilya doesn't have any guesses as to what he does. 

One of the doors wooshes open, and the man who walks in then is so beautiful that Ilya can feel himself sitting up straighter. He's wearing a dark blue flight suit, unzipped to the waist so that the pristine white t-shirt underneath is visible. He has dark hair and a spray of freckles across his cheeks and beautiful brown eyes that are torturing Ilya by refusing to meet his. The smile on his face is flat, awkward, like he’s surprised to find everyone waiting. Ilya hears a sharp intake of breath from the woman next to him. 

“Shane,” she sighs, like the name has suddenly returned to her, and the beautiful man smiles at her, and, great, you might as well stomp Ilya's heart into the dirt. How come she gets to remember him and Ilya doesn't?

“Hey, Rose,” says the beautiful man. Shane. He doesn't look at Ilya once. Ilya can’t make himself look away. 

“Now that we're all here,” the commanding man drawls. “We will explain the mission to the three of you unlucky enough to experience the worst of the side effects. I know you must have questions, and I will answer them for you, but please wait until the end. No interruptions.” He looks at Ilya in particular when he says that. Ilya is unsurprised to be shown more evidence that he is, apparently, a bit of an asshole. Maybe that’s why Shane won’t look at him.

The commanding man introduces himself as Commander Theriault, and he gets down to explaining the purpose of the mission with a sense of efficiency that impresses Ilya as much as it annoys him. 

Apparently, the sun is dying. 

Ilya understands why Theriault felt the need to tell him not to interrupt, because Ilya's first instincts are to say, uh, hey, what the fuck? The pretty woman—Rose, apparently—furrows her brow and looks around the table. When he meets her eyes, she mouths what the fuck? at him. Unfortunately, he thinks he must like her too. Why is he so reluctant to like these people? Is he that much of a dick? Maybe his memories should stay gone so he can become a nicer person. 

The sun is dying, due to something that Theriault doesn’t even bother trying to explain. Either he figures they will all remember eventually, or he hasn’t bothered to understand the science of it, himself, and either way, Ilya understands him. The important bit is that the sun will die if they don’t intervene. Things are already getting cold on Earth, and they will continue to get worse, because even if the sun is only dimming a tiny bit over hundreds of years, a few degrees is enough to guarantee humanity’s extinction, and so they have no choice but to try and fix it.

“Humanity’s first attempt at this, a few years back, was a similar mission. We lost contact with The Voyageur at the expected point, as they were passing through Mercury’s orbit, but the payload was never delivered, and we have had no contact with them since. That was supposed to be our last shot. Our Hail Mary. As you can imagine, what we’re doing now is a little more desperate than that.”

He looks at Shane, then, who looks uncomfortable with the attention, leaning back against the wall, fiddling with the zipper of his flight suit before he lifts his hands away with visible effort and shoves them into his pockets to hide them. Ilya needs him, actually.

“If we fail, the planet dies,” Shane says, in the general direction of the round table with its three amnesiacs. “There's not going to be a third chance.”

“So, you know. No pressure,” the bland man agrees, from over by the reading nook. 

“What's the mission, exactly?” Rose asks. “Why are we here?”

Theriault launches into an explanation, looking relieved to be allowed to keep talking. The man apparently loves a monologue. Ilya is surprised to find that he can keep up. It's like rereading a book he hasn't touched in many years. He would not have said that he remembered any of it, but as the commander speaks, the details come back to him. 

They are in a state-of-the-art ship—this one called Chiron, because it was cobbled together, centaur-like, from the old Voyageur blueprints and newer designs meant to compensate for every potential failure of the Voyageur, since they apparently don’t know what actually caused the failure of the first mission. It is designed to keep them alive and relatively comfortable for three-ish years, and to get them closer to the sun than anyone has ever been. The ship itself is much larger than the original Voyageur, and its entire structure is tucked behind an enormous array of solar shields that need to be gently tweaked to face the sun every time they change positions, which means Pike—the bland man—has to do a lot of math and spends most of his time in the cockpit with Shane, who is apparently the pilot.

Of course the hottest man on this mission is a pilot. Fuck. He's so fucking cool. Ilya gives him what he hopes is an appraising once-over. Shane notices him looking, and his expression shutters, and his jaw clenches, and his eyes dart away. 

Great. Another person on this ship who can’t stand him. 

“Everyone on this ship has been chosen for one primary asset they bring to the mission, as well as one backup specialty, due to the small size of our crew,” Theriault says, in this droning, awful voice that would put Ilya to sleep if this wasn’t so important. He gestures to the older woman beside him. “Galina and Hunter are our medical team. Galina specializes in keeping your brain in check, while Hunter is focused on the rest of the body, but there’s a lot of crossover between the two of them. Landry, you are our primary botanist, which has crossover with nutrition, so you’ll be working a lot with Hunter. We have plenty of rations to make it there, but you're the one who's in charge of growing enough food to get us home and making sure our oxygen levels keep steady.”

“Oh cool, definitely no pressure for me, then,” Rose says with an easy smile. 

“Marleau over there knows the ship better than anyone on Earth.” The tall man with the greasy coverall raises one grease-covered hand in greeting, laughing at Shane's wrinkled-nose expression. “He’s also our auxiliary botanist, so he’s your new best friend, Landry. He’s also one of our backup pilots.” 

“I'm a man of many talents,” Marleau agrees. He winks at Ilya, and Ilya tries not to feel too gratified that he has at least one friend here. 

“Kent.” The handsome, unlikeable man sitting beside Ilya looks up, ready. “When we get closer to the sun, you will be piloting the detached vessel that will make the final approach. You are also Rozanov's backup.”

“And what do I do?” Ilya asks, unable to help himself. He notices the way Shane looks down at the ground when he speaks, squeezing his eyes shut, annoyed. 

“You are the man who invented the bomb that's going to save the world,” Theriault sighs. “And believe me, we are all very annoyed about that.”

Light laughter from everyone who doesn't have amnesia, except for Shane. Shane is still looking at the ground. His shoulders are tense. Ilya feels very unfairly judged. 

“Obviously, it's not ideal that both of our bomb experts got hit with the amnesia side effect,” Theriault says. “But we have full confidence that you will retrieve your memories over the coming days, which is why we woke you now: two weeks before we reach Mercury. We still aren't sure what took out the Voyageur team, so we want to have everyone ready by the time we get to their last confirmed location.”

“And if we can't remember?” Kent asks. It's a valid question. Ilya is a little worried about that, too. 

“That's where Hollander comes in,” Theriault says, gesturing to Shane, who is no longer staring at the floor, but is now staring at Theriault like an eager student taking notes for a test later. “Hollander is cleared to do all of our jobs. If we could have cloned him in a lab, we would have done so.” More laughter. “Our job is to make sure we all stay alive so he doesn't have to try and save the world himself, all right?” Vague agreement from everyone but Ilya, who is now just spinning in his chair and staring openly at Shane, irritated by Shane's refusal to look back. 

Ilya, Rose, and Kent are each given handy, overwritten mission information packets in little three-ring binders. Rose gets shown to her room by Shane, of course, but Ilya is stuck with Galina, who is nice enough, but not nearly as beautiful. She shows him to his tiny room, indistinguishable from any others, except that his personal effects are stored in a flat case under the narrow bunk. He shifts through his things, interested to see if there are any clues about the person he’s supposed to be. His items are very neatly packed, every clothing item folded with military precision, so apparently he's a neat person. That’s nice to know. There's a necklace in a baggie on top of everything else, a gold orthodox cross on a chain. He slips it over his head, his heart thudding loudly in his chest as he does so. He doesn't remember it yet, but he supposes it was probably important, and he feels better once it's on his chest. He tucks it under his shirt, against his skin, and it feels odd there, off-balanced, like the weight is not quite right. He moves it out over his t-shirt instead; maybe that’s how he wore it.

He has some pictures that he shifts through without much interest. He’s hoping they’ll trigger something, but they don’t. A grave-looking older man, some kind of professional headshot, inspires no warmth. There is a softer picture of a blonde woman and a child, the picture faded and older; he assumes the child is himself, and that the woman is his mother, and he smiles at it. There’s a selfie of himself and a beautiful woman with warm brown skin and a riot of pretty curls, kissing him on the cheek. A girlfriend, maybe? He smiles at her, too. He’s surprised that there are only three pictures. Are some missing? He will keep a look out for more. Maybe some slipped out into his clothing. He tucks them beneath his pillow for later. 

He has a few books in Russian, beaten-up old paperbacks of classics. Maybe he should start reading them before his memories come back. He clearly chose to bring along some old favorites, and now he has a chance to read them for the first time all over again. 

Tucked between the cover and the first page of one of the books is a scrap of paper, folded in half, sticking out like a bookmark. Ilya opens it, but it only says I'm so sorry, Ilya, in shaky handwriting. Beneath it, erased poorly, are the words forgive me, as if the note writer had believed that Ilya would not, and had changed the message accordingly. Ilya frowns at it, but can't remember why it's there, why he would have put it in his book, and so he puts it back in place.

None of these personal effects trigger any new memories. It feels like going through someone else’s things, a stranger’s things, and trying to come up with the shape of the person implied by their existence. He supposes he’ll just have to wait a little longer. He lies on the bed, pleased that it's actually comfortable, and then reads his information packet cover to cover. 

The little binder answers most of the questions he had. Most of the crew was put into induced comas because it was decided that the risks of mental health deterioration and the pressure of staying ready for the mission would be too great to risk, especially given that they still don't know what happened to the Voyageur team, who had to stay awake for all those months in space, apparently. Chiron has been in space for sixteen months, and it will be a little more than sixteen months before they get home. Reading that length of time makes Ilya feel panicked for some reason, like there is something on Earth he left behind. Like he’s afraid he left the stove on in his apartment, or something. It’s just a sore spot that sticks at him. Maybe he’s missing his girlfriend.

Apparently Shane, Marleau, Theriault, and Hunter were all awake the entire time. Ilya doesn't like the annoyed flare of something petty that flashes through him at that. What, they were mentally healthy enough to stay awake, but not Ilya? What's wrong with Ilya? Maybe they put Ilya to sleep like a sick dog because Ilya is just so annoying they couldn't deal with him. He has gotten the impression that he’s not very well liked. 

He reads through the descriptions of his crew members and all of their duties. They’re all geniuses with doctorates, of course, except for Theriault, who was originally a fighter pilot, and Shane, whose biography surprisingly doesn’t include mention of any modeling contracts. 

Everyone on the ship has multiple duties except for Ilya. Ilya is the bomb guy. His only job is Bomb. Theriault said that Ilya invented it. He tries to remember it, can't, but when he flips to the section of his packet with the bomb information, he knows everything written there. Like uncovering something that has been barely hidden beneath sand. It’s frustrating, like he has failed himself and this entire mission by getting something as stupid as amnesia.

He refamiliarizes himself with the bomb information. It's a complicated device, and it took a lot of trial and error to figure it out, and he knows it must have taken a long time to build it, especially given they would have had to build most of it in space. He understands all of that even without having the exact steps in his brain, the memories of how he'd created it. He remembers…

Oh. He remembers. 

Then

“Ilya Rozanov?” 

Ilya looks up from his laptop, and there is a beautiful man standing in the door of his office, an awkward smile on his face that doesn't quite reach his eyes. He's pulling a hat off his head, dotted with little white snowflakes from the early afternoon flurries. He steps in without waiting for an invitation or confirmation, which seems rude, but Ilya has never been very concerned with politeness, so whatever. From the man's voice, the pronunciation of his name, Ilya can tell that the beautiful man isn't Russian, and so of course he answers in Russian, just to be a dick. 

“Must be my birthday, if someone sent me such a beautiful present,” he says, trying to look casual, kicking his feet up on the desk and twirling his pen in the air. The beautiful man’s smile turns into an embarrassed grimace. 

“My Russian is not very good, but I understood that,” he says, and Ilya drops the pen, and he laughs at himself. 

“Okay, fine. What do you want, Mr. Beautiful Man?” he asks, in English this time. His English is a bit rusty, since coming back to work in Moscow, but he would rather butcher English than listen to someone else butcher Russian, today. 

“I'm, uh, Shane Hollander.” Mr. Beautiful Man waits, like he's expecting recognition. Ilya shrugs apologetically, though the name does sound familiar. Hollander strides across the room and sticks his hand out. Ilya tries to hide a smile as he consents to shaking it. 

“Okay, hello,” he says. “Why are you here?”

“I'm the mission liaison with the Voyageur Committee?” Hollander says, like a question. He clears his throat, as if realizing how hesitant he sounds, and then suddenly he is all confidence, all business. Ilya admires it, almost, the way he so neatly packs his awkwardness away behind a mask. “I was hoping I could have a moment of your time to discuss the possibility of you developing a bomb for us.”

Ilya was prepared to turn this man down the second he heard Voyageur Committee. He knows about the Voyageur mission, of course. The whole world knows about it. He supposes it would be an honor to be involved in a thing that the whole world will be watching, in any capacity, but Ilya is not interested in working for the government—for any government, really. Not as some middling peon, anyway. He has worked hard to get to his position as young as he is. He is an important physicist, a man who commands respect in his field. He’s not the kind of person who wants to sit in a room and be yelled at by old men who are trying to save the world via committee. But this? This is a little promising.

“You want me to build a bomb?” he asks, considering. Hollander smiles a little more genuinely this time. 

“I thought that might get your attention,” he says. 

Now

Ilya comes back to his own body, and he flips through the bomb information again. Yes, he remembers Shane’s hand, Hollander's hand, in his. He remembers Hollander's smug amusement, inoffensive because Ilya has always loathed false politeness, and he was just glad that Hollander hadn’t been that. He remembers, too, the bomb. He remembers why he was approached, rather than some big American company with too much experience in such things. He remembers the careful chemistry of it, the way it started out so theoretical and so seemingly impossible but slowly morphed into something that seemed, actually, like it might work. Ilya had not, at first, enjoyed the idea that he was creating something that might one day be repurposed to hurt people, but his friend Svetlana had said…

He puts his binder down. 

Svetlana. 

“There is a way to receive messages, yes?” he asks Hunter, the first unlucky crew member he ran into after leaving his room and bumbling down the unfamiliar hallways with a confusing sense of almost physical memory, like he would be better able to walk the halls with his eyes closed than with his eyes open, like his body remembers what his brain does not. 

“Yeah, you should have all of them saved up in the Earth Module,” Hunter says. Ilya hits him with an unimpressed, eyebrow-raised expression that hopefully reads as I don't know where fucking anything is, idiot.

Hunter feels guilty enough about the slipup that he leads Ilya to the Earth Module, which is apparently Galina's territory. That makes sense, Ilya supposes, considering it’s all about staying connected to the planet they left behind, which is probably a huge part of keeping everyone’s mental health at least fairly steady. Its main area has several off-shooting rooms. One is labeled Earth Room. A second is unlabeled. A third is labeled Comms (Crew), and it's to that room that Hunter directs him. The door is closed, with a little red light above it, which according to Hunter means someone is inside sending their own messages, so Ilya must wait in a little seat that has been placed in the hallway for that purpose. Ilya is glad when Hunter leaves without trying to make awkward conversation, and is glad that he brought his binder for something to do. The binder came with a pen clipped to the front pocket, and Ilya uses it to jot down notes about his first official memory, about Hollander in his office. He makes sure it reads professional by leaving all his opinions about Hollander’s attractiveness off the page, but he thinks his admiration probably comes through in the tone anyway. 

Galina's office is apparently the source of the unmarked door, because she leaves the Earth Room and heads to open it, but not before stopping to smile at Ilya. 

“Waiting to see my messages,” he says to her, hoping to head off any suggestion that he might want to step in and talk to her about how he’s feeling. 

“You will need to schedule a talk with me soon,” she replies in Russian, and Ilya can't help but perk up. He hadn't heard any Russian traces in her voice when she delivered him to his new room, but her accent is perfect, and it’s such a relief.

“Oh thank god, a civilized person.”

Galina rolls her eyes at him, but she looks fond. So Marleau and Galina are his two friends, and maybe Rose likes him, too. It could be worse. 

“Come in when you are done with your messages, okay? Knock first.”

“Of course I will knock first. Civilized, remember?”

She laughs again and disappears into her office. The door to the Comms room opens only a little while later, and of course it’s Hollander who steps out, looking unhappy, and looking even unhappier once he registers that Ilya is so close. For less than a second, before his expression smoothes over into a maddening, very professional blankness, he looks afraid, like he thinks Ilya will strike him. That feels fucking awful, after remembering their fairly friendly first meeting. Is their relationship now so terrible? 

“I remembered something,” Ilya says, and Hollander goes still in the way a frightened rabbit goes still, eyes flicking up to meet Ilya’s for a second before they dart down to somewhere around Ilya’s cheek. 

“All your memories will come back soon enough,” Hollander says. 

“You aren’t curious what I remembered?” 

“No,” Hollander replies. “I didn’t forget anything. I know what you’ll remember.” 

He’s nothing like the man Ilya remembers from that one memory. Well, he was polite in the memory, too. Polite and very polished, like someone who was put out into the world because he had a friendly smile and a grasp of social niceties but wouldn’t get too wrapped up in them to get the job done. This feels more unglued, like he is clinging to politeness as a shield. Ilya supposes that however many years it has been since that memory have probably changed both of them, but still. 

“I remembered meeting you for the first time,” Ilya says, pushing. “You were more polite, then.” 

Hollander breathes out a laugh, but it’s shaky, tense. 

“I really wasn’t,” he says. “Do you need help figuring out the message system?” 

Ilya is tempted to say yes, just so Hollander will stick around a little longer, but he thinks it would be humiliating, and Hollander would probably be very condescending about it and would maybe continue to look insultingly terrified, so he shakes his head. 

“The bomb stuff wasn’t hard to figure out. I think I can probably handle messages.” 

Hollander does that breathy little reluctant laugh again, and he looks down at the ground, and it tightens something unfortunate in Ilya's stomach, because Ilya is predictable. Of course he thinks Hollander is sexy. Hollander is sexy. Of course Ilya wants to fuck him, at least a little bit. He probably wanted to fuck Hollander back on Earth, too. Maybe he made too obvious a pass once, and maybe Hollander is afraid he’ll do it again now that he doesn’t remember the initial rejection? It doesn’t sound right. Maybe they did fuck, and it was terrible. No, that doesn’t sound right either. 

Hollander leaves with a single nod, still not meeting Ilya’s eyes, but he shoots a look back over his shoulder, raking his eyes over Ilya when he thinks Ilya isn’t looking. It would be stupid to read too much into it, but Ilya is sure he sees a hint of a flush on Hollander’s cheeks before he turns around and walks out, and he decides that reading too much into it might not be the worst thing. 

Accessing his messages turns out to be as easy as he’d expected, which makes sense. He might not remember specific memories, but he remembers certain things, on some level. He remembers physics, remembers how to use a cellphone, remembers what a cellphone fucking is. It’s just everything personal that has been excised from his head. The messages are a piece of cake.

There are a number of video and text messages waiting for him, though not as many as he was hoping to see. Hollander probably is swimming in messages from loving parents, a loving girlfriend, a million and ten friends. Ilya’s are mostly from Svetlana. There’s one from someone named Alexei, near the very beginning, that he almost deletes without opening, out of some impulse. He stares at the name until he gets flashes of something. An older boy growing into an older man, the same sneering disinterest on his face. Alexei, he thinks. My brother. It’s just text, thank god. He doesn’t remember much, yet, but memories of his childhood are trickling in slowly, and there are very few good ones. Svetlana, on the other hand, has sent multiple videos, and his memories of her are warm. He knows now that she is the beautiful woman from that selfie. Not a girlfriend; she is more vital than that. 

He opens Alexei’s, first, to get it over with. 

You fucking traitor. You told me you wouldn’t go. You promised me you would stay here to take care of papa. Fuck you. 

Ilya blinks in surprise at the message, reads it again. He feels affronted, like Alexei should have considered, more than a year ago, when he sent the message, that Ilya would wake up and not remember him, or their father, before he sent such a rude fucking message. 

But it also doesn’t feel like a surprise, and he thinks back to those pictures that were with his personal items: father, mother, Sveta. No Alexei anywhere. That’s probably for a reason. Those memories, too, that are coming back piecemeal, all feel haunted with something. Fear, desperation to prove something impossible, the bewildered hurt of not being loved by a person who should love you.

He tries to remember his father. He gets his mother, instead. Flashes of her: a beautiful smile, a ringing laugh, a gentle scolding that always, always had love behind it. The two of them out shopping together, his mother helplessly giggling because of how bundled up baby Ilya is against the cold. He remembers the necklace, suddenly. It was hers. He remembers losing her, finding her, grieving her, holding the necklace close the rest of his life, like a totem. He's glad that he put it on even before knowing its significance, so he can clutch it in his hand now, in a way that feels reflexive, familiar. He’s so happy with himself for having packed it right at the top of his things, out in front, knowing that he would want it immediately after waking. That was considerate of him. 

Was that note tucked into his book from her? Forgive me, erased? He can’t remember it, yet.

He remembers more of Alexei as a child, too. Softer in his youth, or maybe just softer because their mother was still alive. 

He puts his head in his hands and breathes for a few seconds, needing to recover from the blow. It’s not necessarily like being hit with the same grief that he remembers feeling as a child. It’s more like uncovering something that must have been waiting for him to catch up. Like his body remembered that grief even when his mind did not, and so it settles into its old, familiar places. He remembers his father, finally, cruel and cold and arrogant. Always assuming that he was smarter than Ilya, stronger than Ilya, more important than Ilya, even after Ilya got his degree young and then his doctorate young and then an invitation to build a bomb to save the fucking world, and all anyone could talk about was how young and brilliant and special he was. It was never good enough. Ilya was never good enough. 

You promised me you would stay here to take care of papa. 

The message seems even more cruel now that he remembers. Why would he have stayed? He's on a mission to save everyone in the world. What is Alexei doing that's so fucking important that he would have Ilya give that up? And why would Ilya have promised such a thing, anyway? Promised to tether himself to a home that didn’t want him? For two men who are apparently not worth remembering? 

There are no messages from his father. There are no messages from anyone other than Alexei and Svetlana, and it aches a little, to realize how empty his life was, back on Earth. Maybe that's why he decided to come to space, even though he is apparently as well liked here as he was back home. 

“My father is dead,” he tells Galina, grateful to say it in Russian. “I have messages from my friend back home, Svetlana.” He looks curiously at Galina, who nods. 

“I've met her, actually. You'll remember in time. She came to the project base often to see you.”

“She's my best friend. Maybe my only friend. The only friend I can remember, anyway.” 

“You have always been surrounded by people, when I've seen you.”

“But that's not the same as having friends, is it?”

Galina smiles. 

“No,” she agrees, like she's proud that he put that together without having to be told. He feels an unfortunate flare of competitive spirit at that. Like he is succeeding at tricking Galina into believing he's self-aware. “But I think you would be surprised. Everyone here cares about you quite a lot.”

“Everyone?”

“Well, most of them,” Galina admits with a laugh. “Even the ones you might not expect. Give it time. Now, tell me about your father. Was Svetlana watching him for you?”

“No. I set him up in a very expensive care home, apparently. I have no idea how I was paying for it. I certainly don’t remember doing it. But Svetlana was getting updates from my brother, who told her when he died. He didn't even send me a message. Blamed me for coming here, I guess.”

“How do you feel about your father being dead?”

“I'm not sure. I remember he was not a kind man. Did I speak about him to you?”

“Yes, many times.”

“You were my therapist, then?” 

“On Earth, even before you joined the mission officially, I offered my assistance to anyone on the project who wanted to talk. We were all under a lot of pressure, of course. You, more than most people, and it was helpful for you to have someone to talk to in your native language. You were very resistant to talking to me about some things. You preferred to keep a lot of your personal feelings close to the chest, but you spoke of your father a lot.” 

“What did I say?” 

“You had a very strong sense of duty, even if you were conflicted, because you understood that your efforts would never be reciprocated. You were worried, when we spoke, about how best to handle him. You thought it was your duty to stay behind and care for him, even though you knew the cost.”

“I wanted to stay behind?”

“At first, yes.”

“What changed my mind?”

“I don't know. You never told me.”

Ilya nods. That sounds like him, or at least the version of himself that he is slowly coming to understand. He doesn't think he likes talking about things with people. Svetlana’s messages implied as much, and it felt right, settling into his skin. He thinks he is definitely the sort of person who would choose to carry things closely, and who would probably value duty even when it didn't make sense. 

“I probably realized it would be fucking stupid to put my duty to my father in front of the safety of the world,” he says. Galina hums thoughtfully.

“There were also some extenuating circumstances. Do you remember anything of the explosion before the launch?”

Ilya searches his memory, but can find nothing that even remotely feels like that. He shakes his head. 

“Okay. We will speak more about it when you remember, but I think you'll find the answers soon enough. In the meantime, I am sorry about your father.”

Ilya smiles at her and stands to go. 

“That makes one of us, I think,” he says.

Chapter 2

Chapter Notes

fuck it, here's another chapter!

After leaving Galina’s office, still feeling like a largely empty vessel, filling too-slowly with childhood memories that it turns out he would rather have forgotten permanently, Ilya goes to visit his bomb. 

The bomb is leading the charge, apparently, according to his little map of the ship. It’s situated at the very front, just behind the shield. He has to walk past the cockpit to get to it. It's a strange feeling to have the cockpit closer to the center of the ship, because Ilya is used to airplanes and boats and helicopters and cars, even, where the pilot must see out the front window. It turns out this isn't necessary in space, especially in a ship that is covered by a gigantic metallic shield to help deflect the heat of the sun so that they aren't vaporized before they get a chance to bomb the stupid star back into full brightness. 

He peeks his head into the open door of the cockpit as he’s heading past, and he’s greeted with the impossibly brutal sight of Hollander curled up comfortably in the pilot's chair, reading glasses on his face, a book in his hands and a fuzzy blanket on his lap. 

“Fuck,” he mouths to himself, and he stops walking, unable to force himself to keep going. Hollander hasn’t noticed him yet. He flips to the next page of his book, and he covers his mouth with the back of his hand to stifle a yawn, and Ilya feels as if someone has punched him low in the gut. 

How did Hollander get into this program with reading glasses? How did he become a pilot? Maybe being a pilot of this ship, which is all about mechanical precision and readouts and very much not about visual cues, had different standards. Still. Maybe the truth is that they don’t let pilots wear glasses on Earth because they know everyone will try to fuck them, because they will look too sexy, and then it will be very difficult to get any piloting done. That makes more sense. Hollander looks fucking adorable. 

Ilya nearly speaks, ruins the quiet, but then another voice comes from deeper in the cockpit, and Hollander laughs a little at something that was said, and Ilya realizes that he isn't alone, and so moves on. 

The bomb, according to the information packet and also the slow rebuilding of his memories, contains roughly the mass of Manhattan. The first bomb was a bit smaller, and used a frankly disgusting amount of resources. Some very difficult choices and some very difficult negotiations with uncooperative countries were necessary to build the second one, and that’s why this is the last chance. The Earth literally cannot handle building a third. 

The idea of the Stellar Bomb is to create a star within a star, to jumpstart the sun as if it’s a dead car battery. It sounds stupid when he reads the information, but he can only be mad at himself, he supposes, since he's the one who came up with it.

He enters the small auxiliary vessel that sits on the back of the bomb like a bloated tick on the belly of a dog. It has its own airlock, but the doors open easily, not needing to pressurize. The air in this section of the ship is stale, as if no one has been here in a while. There is a much smaller living area than the one in the main ship, and there is one tiny bunkroom, barely big enough to hold the bunkbeds it contains. A smaller cockpit sits near the center, and then, further up, there is the launch room, and then there is the bomb. 

Much of the bomb consists of empty space. There’s a door in the front of the launch room, and Ilya walks through it, and into the shockingly cold air of the bomb itself. He looks up, cranes his neck back, and cannot see the ceiling. That’s how big his fucking bomb is. He feels proud of it, as if he built it with his own hands, though of course he didn’t. It feels like a force of nature more than it feels like a thing that was built by people. A desperate last chance to save a species, and he’s the one who made it. Too bad he can’t remember that part. Hopefully, he will get those memories back soon so that his inflated ego can at least feel earned.

He goes back into the launch room, and he stands at the long window that will allow him to watch as the bomb is jettisoned toward the sun, when it’s time. Kent will be piloting the vessel; it will be only the two of them in this small ship for the final approach, for three days, which is too bad, because Ilya is already sure that he doesn’t like Kent. Ilya will stand in the launch room and run the final calculations and will trigger the bomb. He will ensure that the bomb fires—nothing will happen, at first, and so it’s important that he witnesses the first sparks in the darkness. The empty space of the bomb will fill fairly slowly with those sparks. He will see the first of them, and then he will know that the bomb is primed, and then he will decouple it, and tell Kent, and Kent will turn on the thrusters, and the bomb will thrust through the sun’s orbit and then will be pulled into its gravity, hopefully. Ideally.

Then it will be up to Kent to get them away from the sun at the exact right time; too fast, and they will lose connection with the bomb, and they will risk the extinguishing of the new star before it can be born. Too slow and, of course, they will be vaporized in the blast. Ilya remembers, suddenly, joking about that with someone. 

Definitely too slow, if you have to pick. That way we can still say Ilya Rozanov saved the world, and he only had to die to do it. 

He remembers laughing as he spoke. Remembers a scoff of disagreement. 

How about we just do it on time, dickhead? That way no one dies? 

Hollander, he thinks. Or maybe he’s just still thinking about Hollander because he looks so cute in those glasses. Would Hollander even say dickhead? 

He touches all the instruments in the launch chamber, though he supposes he should probably be more careful until he knows better what everything is. He has ideas, of course. He thinks he knows, like muscle memory. It’s all coming back to him. He goes back out into the vessel and finds a room labeled “Test Chamber”, and he enters it. It’s this large white room, totally featureless until he uses a handheld tablet clipped to the wall to turn on the simulation. It projects all around him, on every surface. It asks him what he wants to see, and he asks it to run a simulation of a successful bomb. 

The visuals make his head swim. It's almost too perfect. It’s as if he is strapped to the bomb, hurtling into the sun. The sun approaches, and his mind tricks him into thinking he can feel the heat. He rides the bomb all the way to the detonation point, and it explodes, and the computer informs him in her chirpy, too-polite voice, that he has simulated a successful attempt at reigniting the sun. 

“And what about an unsuccessful attempt?” he asks, and then he watches that one to completion, too. They look remarkably similar, right up until the point where the sun is supposed to glow brighter. It depresses him to watch this failure run, especially when the chirpy computer tells him that there is a sixty percent chance of success. 

Sixty percent? He invented something that only has a sixty percent chance of succeeding? Bullshit. The hopes of their entire planet? And it’s sixty percent?

He sits cross-legged on the floor of the simulation chamber, and he makes the computer run through it again and again, tweaking the angle every time, tweaking the distance. The highest certainty he can get it up to is seventy percent, which still doesn’t make him feel very good. Could they really not come up with something better? Could he really not come up with something better?

Then

“It’s not good enough,” he says, turning away from his whiteboard to look at both Hollanders and fucking Crowell. He likes both Hollanders a lot—one of them more than the other, sure—but Crowell is a pain in the ass. Unfortunately, he’s the man in charge of the entire mission, and so Ilya has to play nice with him if he wants to keep getting the insane funding that will be required to pull this off.

“There’s no such thing as a sure thing,” Crowell replies, uncharacteristically positive. “But it’s a better chance than zero, which is what we’ll have if we do nothing.” 

“And we’re not even close to being ready for launch,” says Yuna Hollander, eyes already on her iPad, typing notes frantically as she leads Crowell out of the room, on their way to their next meeting, hopefully with someone who has better news to give them. She gives Ilya a reassuring look, tight with tension. “We have every faith you’ll be able to iron out the kinks before then.” 

They both leave Ilya’s office, and Ilya sighs and scrubs his hands over his face, trying to work out the tension in his neck. Ilya’s favorite Hollander stays behind, still leaning on Ilya’s desk with his arms over his chest. He’s got this sympathetic little look on his face that makes Ilya want to eat him alive, so Ilya stays firmly on the other side of the room, just to make sure he doesn’t try.

Over the last few months, as they’ve continued working together, Ilya has noticed the obvious difference in the way Hollander acts when he’s around the suits who run the project and when he’s around the scientists and the astronauts and the other peons who are actually working on the project. He feels sorry for Hollander that his mother is one of the people around whom he’s always tense, but he’s selfishly pleased that Hollander seems unburdened around him, at least a little. 

Hollander has been relaxing, little by little, his tight hold over himself in Ilya’s presence. What that means, exactly, Ilya isn’t sure yet. He has his guesses, though.

“Are you going to give me empty words too, Hollander?” he asks, trying to sound goading. He doesn’t, though. He sounds weary, defeated. He sounds exactly like he feels, which is always mortifying.

He feels too splayed open by the slip-up in tone, and so he turns around to erase his work on the whiteboard. All his equation-writing feels stupid and performative now, considering none of his audience understood the math anyway. Hollander makes a considering noise, almost a protest, and when Ilya turns over his shoulder to look, Hollander is frowning at the math as if he’s reading it. For half a second, Ilya feels this ugly sense of disbelief at the idea that Hollander might really think that there’s something he can suggest that Ilya would not have already thought of, but Hollander just shakes his head, and his expression goes openly admiring in a way that Ilya can’t help but feel touched by.

“No, no empty words,” Hollander says. “You’re the genius. You’ll figure it out.” 

That is so much worse. Hollander really, actually believes in him.  No one has ever sounded like that when they talk to Ilya. It’s not the kind of unwavering personal faith that Svetlana has always had in him. She believes in him so deeply, is always so openly proud of him, so awed by the things he says without thinking, because she has always been tickled by the fact that her troublemaking best friend grew up to be smarter than anyone else she knows. Hollander doesn’t sound the way she does, like she can’t believe it but is so proud that it’s true anyway. Hollander just sounds steady, faithful. The way his mother used to talk about her god, like it was a thing that was pointless to even talk about, because her faith was so deeply baked into her. It’s very dangerous to act like that around Ilya, but of course Hollander is so innocent, he doesn’t seem to notice it. 

Maybe not entirely innocent; Ilya sees, sometimes, the way Hollander’s eyes flick down to his lips, or the open collar of his shirt when Ilya leaves a few too many buttons unbuttoned, and then away. It has been weeks of noticing, and hoping for further signs, but unfortunately Ilya is starting to think that Hollander actually isn’t going to do anything about it. 

“You must be some kind of genius too, right?” Ilya prods. “Since you’re here?” 

Hollander looks surprised by the comment, and a little suspicious, like he thinks Ilya is making fun of him. Maybe that’s fair, because Ilya has goaded him non-stop, mostly because he likes the way Hollander blushes, and Ilya is pathetic and lonely and bored, even doing something so important as this. Hollander has been around the project for all the months Ilya has been working on it, but he has been in and out, and Ilya has never fully understood exactly what his job is, other than serving as a friendly face to recruit sexy Russian scientists with a weakness for freckles and big doe eyes. 

“Uh, not a genius, really. I’m just good at picking things up once people have already put them down, I guess.” 

This sounds like the kind of canned answer that Hollander has probably practiced alone in his room at night so that he can sound more human. Ilya nods, understands him a little better. 

“So you are here to learn everyone’s jobs. My job, too? So they send you to space alone?” 

“I fucking hope not,” Hollander laughs weakly. “I’ll go if I have to, but it’s not my thing.” 

“Scared?” Ilya asks, expecting a deflection, or more hopefully a red-faced, furious denial. 

“Fucking terrified,” Hollander agrees. 

Now

Ilya tracks down Commander Theriault in the kitchenette area, and he waves around the writing tablet that he found in the Test Chamber, which he has stolen to scribble his notes. 

“These percentages are shit,” he announces. Theriault sighs. 

“Rozanov, we’ve been over this.” 

“You went over this with whoever I was on Earth, which was a stupid fuck who thinks seventy percent is good enough.” 

“Seventy-five was the number you gave us.” 

“Oh, so I was a fucking liar too.” 

“Or maybe you’ve just been woken up from a coma with a bunch of your memories missing, so you don’t have the optimal settings worked out yet.” Theriault is trying to be comforting, it seems like, but he’s not very good at it. He sounds stiff and disgusted with himself, like the few seconds of empathy are grating. 

“I remember the bomb. I remember…” 

“Rozanov, we have two fucking weeks before we hit Mercury, and that’s not even close to the end of our trip. Give it a rest.” 

He stalks off with his coffee, doing the thing that all boringly small men do where they try to take a sip too quickly, burn their tongues, and then stalk off looking like they want to scream, fighting to remain impassive, as if a display of pain will make them weak, or something. He reminds Ilya of his father, which is annoying, because there are still mostly only foggy memories of that commanding, unfriendly man from the photograph in his personal effects. None of them are very good memories, though. Maybe there’s nothing else to remember.

Rose is sitting in the corner, reading through her little binder, and she waves Ilya over when Theriault is gone. He slinks into the chair across from her, glowering down at his tablet still and trying to force himself to remember something that will set his mind at ease. 

“He’s so intense,” Rose whispers. “And I think he’s probably an asshole. Any luck with the memories?” 

“A few. Remember meeting Hollander. Hollander’s mom.” 

“Yuna!” Rose says, like it has just come to her. “Oh my god, yeah. She’s so hot.” 

Ilya arches an eyebrow at her as she laughs in horror at herself. 

“Well, yes,” he agrees. 

“I don’t know why I said that. Oh my god, don’t tell Shane.” 

“I don’t think Shane and I are the type to gossip with each other,” Ilya says, annoyed with himself for the bitterness in his tone. He can hear it. 

“Really? I think I remember you guys being besties. This memory stuff is exhausting. You have a friend named Svetlana, right?” 

“You remember Sveta?” 

“Yeah! She came to visit, and I remember she and Shane were talking about hockey. I think we were on a double date? You and I kept looking at each other and rolling our eyes.” 

Ilya’s eyebrows shoot up to his hairline. He tries to school his expression. 

“Ah,” he says. “You and Hollander.” 

“I think so, yeah. Uh, for a little while, anyway. You and Svetlana?” 

“For a little while,” Ilya agrees. 

He sulks around the ship, hides in his bunk, sleeps. Two days pass like this. He works out in the tiny gym Hunter forces them to use regularly, usually with Marleau, who talks to Ilya always as if he hasn’t lost his memories, and always seems surprised when Ilya has to ask him for clarifications about things. If he wasn’t an engineer and an astronaut and therefore smarter than most of the people on the planet, Ilya would assume Marleau was a moron. Because he’s an engineer and an astronaut, Ilya decides to believe that Marleau just misses him.

Galina and Hunter have both repeatedly stressed that Ilya and Rose and Kent should all let their memories come in naturally, but Ilya doesn’t give a fuck about that, and neither does Marleau, so whenever they’re together, Ilya is asking him questions about things, trying to trigger his past to fill in faster. 

He tells Galina during every session that he’s fine, that the pressure of trying to remember in time to fulfill his duty doesn't bother him. But he goes to the Test Chamber every day and he fiddles around with his projections, because of course the pressure is bothering him, and he wants to make sure that he gets it right. He’s here for a reason. He’s literally the most important person on this ship, which Theriault never lets him forget, and he’s in danger of fucking everything up for everyone if he doesn’t remember in time. So of course he doesn’t give a fuck if it’s healthier to wait for those memories to come back on their own.

Marleau can be no help with the bomb stuff, because it’s like the one area of the ship he knows nothing about, other than the very technical repairs that must happen if they get hit by space debris or something, but he’s a help with navigating the interpersonal stuff, because it turns out he’s an even bigger gossip than Rose. 

“Okay, so. I’m your best friend. Obviously.” 

“Obviously,” Ilya replies, rolling his eyes. He and Marleau are wedged into a tiny compartment behind the oxygen garden, because Marleau had to do some apparently very important work in this dark, narrow space, and Ilya followed him, because he’s pathetic and tired of sulking in his bunk by himself. He has so far just been handing Marleau all the tools he asks for, which is apparently enough to make him useful. Marleau is a simple man. 

“Even back on Earth, we became buddies pretty quick. You were on the project before me, obviously, but once I got brought in, I was on a team helping you with making your design a reality. I mean, you’ve been inside the fucking bomb, right? My man, this was an engineering feat. I went to space three times to supervise putting that shit together. But my main focus was on the ship. We made a ton of improvements from the last one, because we never found out what happened to it, you know? Wanted to make sure we weren’t leaving anything to chance. So you helped us out with that, too. Designing the bomb drone and stuff. Anyway, you’re fine. You’re kind of an acquired taste.” 

“What the fuck does that mean?” 

“I mean, like, kind of prickly and defensive and you’re a dick to like ninety percent of people who talk to you. Don’t get me wrong: I love you, man. You’re hilarious. But, you know. Not everyone thinks the same shit is funny.” 

“Okay. That feels fair.” 

“Most people get that the dickish thing is, like, well. Not an act, exactly. But you’re a loving dick. Yuna Hollander was obsessed with you. I think if Crowell was handed a gun, he would have shot you on sight, and Theriault thinks you’re a huge pain in the ass. Pike hates you. Hunter hates you, as far as he’s capable of genuinely hating anyone, but in a kind of fun way, I think. Like you’d probably get along if you only had to see each other once a month, but on Earth he wanted to drown you in a fucking toilet. Galina would adopt you if she could. Rosie kind of thinks you rule despite herself, but she’ll pretend to be neutral for the sake of keeping team unity or whatever. Kent definitely hates you.” 

“So I'm an asshole. You could just say that.” 

“What? No. They’re all just dumb. You’re an annoying prick sometimes, but you’re great. Very lovable. You’re just smarter than all of them combined.” 

“And baby Hollander?” 

“Man, do not let him hear you call him baby Hollander. He’ll kill you.” 

“Because he hates me?” 

“Nah,” Marleau laughs. “Hollander doesn’t hate anyone. It’s not in his programming. The two of you were inseparable on Earth, but, I don’t know, it was always kind of weird.” 

Ilya seizes on this in the same way he’d seized on Rose’s mention of Hollander. 

“Weird how?” 

“I don’t know. Just really intense. Always arguing and shit, but then someone would make a crack about Hollander to you and you’d bite their fucking head off. Like the kind of thing where you’d make fun of him constantly, but you were the only one allowed to do it, you know? It makes sense. The two of you were like the first people on the project. You went through a lot of shit that other people didn’t, and you were fucking competive about it.” 

“Friends, though?” 

“Yeah, dude, definitely. I don’t know why he’s acting so weird around you now. Maybe it’s just odd for him because you can’t remember anything.” 

Ilya supposes that makes more sense than anything else, and it releases some of the tension that has been in him. He and Hollander had been perfectly friendly in those two memories he’s unlocked so far, and when he looks at Hollander he has this awful, aching feeling in his chest, this awareness that something is missing, this feeling like he’s late for something, or like he had something he was supposed to say, or do, and hasn’t had the chance. 

Then

Hollander is everywhere. He haunts Ilya. Even when he’s away from the compound where they’ve based the project, Ilya sees him on his television, in ads on his phone, in fucking magazines. The Voyageur Program is the most important thing in the world, because it is the thing that’s going to save the world, and it should be enough to make it stand on its own. People should care about saving the world. But, of course, people are petty and short-sighted creatures, and so the Voyageur Program puts Shane Hollander out on their pedestal, and they let the world thirst over him in the hopes that he will make them want to make him proud, and they make him the face of hope for the future of humanity. 

They drag Ilya out too for interviews, which he loves. He loves the interviews because he loves talking about his project, and because he loves that everyone thinks he’s hot. He reads all the comments he can find on his videos. I will never judge a movie for having unreasonably sexy scientists ever again in my life if this is what real physicists look like. He reads them again when Sveta texts him screenshots with laughing emojis. He laps up the attention, preening and pleased, and then he agrees to any interviews they want. He loves that they ogle him and giggle at him on camera and ask him to wear his button-up shirts with the sleeves rolled up for extra babe points. He loves winking into the camera and answering questions in ways that he knows the audience will find incomprehensible..

But he is not the face of the Voyageur program. He’s the brains of the operation, and he’s the rebellious bad boy scientist who’s going to save them all, but Hollander, of course, is their perfectly poised champion. 

He’s inoffensively bland, polite, beautiful in a way that's less about sinfully unbuttoned shirts and sweat-slicked skin and perfect biceps and more about fantasies of him saving you from a burning building or maybe meeting your parents (for people whose parents aren't either dead or an asshole, like Ilya's, anyway). He’s Ilya’s perfect foil. Ilya still has no idea what Hollander technically does on the project other than looking cute and smiling into cameras like his family is being held hostage. 

When they’re sent out together to do media, to drum up support for the project or just to keep the public informed so that people won’t completely give up and start looting and rioting in hopeless despair, or whatever Crowell is afraid of, they make headlines. Everyone loves them together, in part because Ilya is so good at riling up Hollander enough to make some fun cracks show in his perfect facade. People like when they snipe at each other playfully. One interviewer calls it flirting, and Hollander goes very prettily pink, and Ilya laughs, and only doesn’t confirm it because he thinks he should probably not push it, at least in public, since he will probably have to go home, someday. 

But when he is sent out alone, by himself, pimped out by his mother and Crowell to save the species with his perfect pecs, Hollander is some kind of bizarre sex symbol for boring people. He gives speeches at events, always with the same bland delivery, the same passionless smile. He films videos of their training camps, always working out alongside the other astronaut candidates. He poses for pictures in the team jacket. Yuna Hollander is behind most of this; she’s the marketing director for the project. Ilya thought at first that it was stupid for the project to save the world to need a marketing director, until he realized that part of their biggest hurdle is getting the public to buy-in on the premise that this is the last chance the world has. Not everyone believes that the sun is actually dying, and so Ilya gets in front of the camera and winks as he tells everyone that if they fail, they will all die in a slow, choking winter. Shane gets in front of the camera and earnestly tells everyone what they’re going to do to stop it. 

And so Hollander is everywhere. 

Everywhere Ilya goes, Hollander is on magazine covers, on billboards, on television screens. He’s beautiful, untouchable. His eyes are inescapable. They always seem to be looking to the heart of Ilya, pleading with him for something. It’s untenable. Ilya jerks off about it an uncomfortable amount. 

“He’s ruinous,” he confides in Svetlana one time, before Svetlana has met Hollander so she can see for herself why he’s so perfect for Ilya in such a pathetic way. “It’s such bullshit that he does it for me. He’s so…boring.” 

“He’s hot.” 

“Yes. So are lots of people. This is different. I don’t know what it is about him. Sometimes I think he wants to kiss me, but then I realize I’m just projecting because I want to fuck him on my work desk until he cries.” 

“Maybe start with the kiss and see where it goes from there,” Svetlana suggests. 

“Not helpful,” Ilya replies.

Not that he doesn’t think about it. Hollander is always popping in to see him, often in ways that read as unnecessary. He always has some overwrought excuse for it, of course. Some reason why he’s there. He explains himself too much, which is part of why Ilya thinks Hollander must want him, and instead of doing anything about it, has chosen the more technically noble route of microdosing on Ilya’s presence and pretending it’s for the sake of humanity.

He thinks they will probably do this stupid, circling dance for a while yet. Months, maybe. Ilya is in no rush to get himself kicked off the project by misreading everything and making an unwanted move, and Hollander probably has never made a move in his life, and so they’re at an impasse. 

They’ve taken over this old airforce base somewhere in the Midwest of America. Ilya’s office is in the “science building”, which is just a repurposed admin building, tall and narrow, that overlooks the giant airplane hangars where they’re constructing the modules of the ship that will be flown into orbit separately and then built in space. It’s fascinating to watch, but it doesn’t help his nerves. The project is continuing apace, and Ilya’s bomb is still not perfect. He’s beginning to suspect it might never be. They might have to content themselves with maybe good enough.

Ilya likes to pretend that pressure doesn't bother him, that he doesn’t even feel it, but of course, that isn’t true. The pressure has been eating him alive the last few weeks, as they start getting deeper into the process. Every time he starts to relax into his work, someone pops up to remind him that the entire world is counting on his design of this fucking bomb, and that the world is working together for now, pooling their resources, but that this is a one-of-a-kind type of thing, and there’s no way they’re ever going to be able to do it again. 

Which is why he’s still in his office long after everyone else has left for the night, and it’s why he’s standing by the window and staring down at the airplane hangars, and it’s why he almost shits himself when he turns back to his desk and sees Shane Hollander standing in the doorway, frowning at him. 

“Fuck, Hollander! What are you doing?” 

“Sorry,” Hollander blurts, flushing. He steps in from the dark hallway, looking sheepish. He smiles his media smile, and Ilya scowls back at him. “I saw the light on in your office. I thought maybe you left it on by accident, or…I don’t know. That you were still up here. Are you okay?”

“Not really,” Ilya finds himself admitting, to his own surprise. 

“Oh. Uh. Do you want to talk about it?” When Ilya makes a face at him, Hollander laughs. It's surprisingly sweet, the laugh. Gentle. “Yeah, sorry. That sounds like hell to me, too.”

“Very polite to offer, though.”

“Yeah, that's me. Polite.”

Hollander sounds a little bitter as he says it, like the word stings, and it makes Ilya feel sorry for some reason he can't quite nail down. He tries to cover it up by being a pig, like he often does with Hollander, because it usually works. 

“I can think of things other than talking that might help,” he says. He makes sure to put a little extra juice on the suggestive tone, because he has noticed that Hollander will always generously choose the least horrific interpretation of whatever Ilya says, and he doesn't want there to be any mistake about this one. 

Hollander frowns at him, as expected. His grumpy little frown where his mouth downturns so perfectly. It always makes Ilya laugh, and this is no exception. He's very pleased with himself for learning Hollander so well so quickly. He always knows what Hollander is going to…

Okay. Maybe he spoke too soon, because instead of blushing and saying something very virginal and then fleeing, Hollander is still frowning as he steps into the room more fully and closes the door. 

“Like what?” he asks. There's something challenging in his tone, and Ilya finds himself feeling oddly flustered, as if his bluff has been called. He stammers out an embarrassingly senseless series of syllables, and Hollander grins this private little grin, pleased with himself for causing it. “Oh, you weren't serious,” he says blankly, and Ilya fucking hates that he can't parse it, which is probably why Hollander uses that tone so much in the first place. 

“Of course I was fucking serious,” he says, rising to the challenge, feeling affronted by the idea that Hollander has forced this admittance out of him just because Ilya can never back down from a challenge. 

“Okay,” Hollander says. “So…like what?” 

“Hacky sack,” Ilya says, defiantly, and Hollander's nose crinkles with disgust as he laughs. His hand, Ilya notices, drifts behind him to settle on the doorknob, like he’s going to back out of the room, and Ilya is suddenly filled with a humiliating desperation. “Or, you know. I could suck your cock.”

Hollander's fingers drift away from the doorknob, and Ilya is filled with a heady triumph that feels better than almost all of his breakthroughs on the bomb. 

“What if I sucked yours?” Hollander asks, and Ilya is so fucked. He's so in over his head. Sure, he's been flirting with Hollander since the beginning, but he never actually thought it would go anywhere! Now that it's here, he's left feeling awkward, insecure, out of his depth. What is wrong with him?

“I mean, yes, also good,” he manages. Hollander's eyes search his, and he takes half a step forward before falling back. 

“Sorry,” he says finally. “Is this, like, are you being serious? Or is this a bit? I can't tell.”

“You were going to suck my cock as a bit?”

“No,” Hollander says, but he draws the word out slow, like he's not sure. “I think I was hoping to figure it out before then.”

“Hollander. What?”

“I'm not always the best with jokes.”

“No, you're very funny. What are you talking about?”

“Most people don't think I'm funny, I think.”

“Because they're stupid, and I'm a genius. Does it make it easier if I tell you I want you to suck my dick, and if you don't, I will be very sad, and maybe the bomb will never be made?”

“Not really,” Hollander says with a chuckle, but he's moving forward anyway, slowly. “Because that one's obviously a joke.”

“Okay. True. Maybe you are not bad at jokes. Maybe I am bad at saying true things without jokes in them. I want you to suck my dick, Hollander. Please.”

Hollander shrugs one shoulder, as if to say, was that so hard? And then he is sinking to his knees so smoothly and gracefully that it's almost like it's part of a dance. Ilya has watched him working out, of course. He has joined him. The science team typically doesn't join the astronaut trainees, but Ilya has expressed interest in maybe going with them when they launch the ship, and Hollander's whole thing is that he does not ask anyone to do what he would not also do himself. So when the trainees started complaining about how exhausting it was, keeping up with Hollander's training regimen for them, Hollander joined in and worked twice as hard, so they would shut up. And so Ilya has seen the way Hollander moves, all efficient motion. It should not be a surprise that he's the same way now, sinking to his knees in front of Ilya's desk. 

There is something a little nervous and a little insecure in Hollander's expression, like he's afraid that Ilya will groan with disgust and commit a hate crime after letting this joke go on for too long. Ilya reaches for Hollander's hair with gentle fingers, hoping to settle him. Brushes his thumb over Hollander's cheekbone. Hollander closes his pretty eyes and leans into the touch, and then he reaches for the button on Ilya's pants, and Ilya allows it. Now he's the one who suffers a few seconds of thinking, like, this cannot possibly be real, right? He's fucking with me somehow? But then his dick is, in fact, in Hollander's mouth, and he can't help the strangled, disbelieving laugh. If it is some kind of fucked up game of chicken, Ilya has certainly lost. He reaches down and threads his fingers through…

Now

No no no no no!

“Fuck you!” he growls disbelievingly at the alarm on his wall that has just woken him from the dream. He stomps around the ship in a terrible mood after that, and he purposely circles around the cockpit for five minutes like the world's most pathetic, impatient shark, before finally he opens the door and slips inside. Hollander is alone, so early in the morning, before Pike has appeared to be his annoying shadow. He's reading his book again, and his pretty glasses are on. 

“What would you do if I asked you to suck my dick, right now?” Ilya asks. Hollander blinks up at him in surprise before removing his glasses and pinching the bridge of his nose between two fingers. 

“Remind you that this is technically a workplace and I'm technically higher ranking than you? I guess?”

“Oh, so I have to suck your dick, then?”

“Can you stop saying that?”

“That's not what you were saying when...”

“Rozanov,” Hollander hisses, glaring at him. 

“So it was not just a dream.”

Hollander sighs, and he fiddles with his book.

“No,” he admits, his blush deepening. “Look, your memories are…”

“Well they're fucking inconvenient, for one thing. Like someone started playing a porno designed specifically for me in my brain while I'm trying to remember physics.”

Hollander's bafflement is funny, maybe. Would be funnier if Ilya wasn't freaking out.

“I'm sorry?” Hollander tries, then cringes at his own tone as Ilya laughs giddily. His fingers itch to reach out and thread into Hollander's hair, the way he had been about to do in that memory. Maybe it would spark some more. But then Hollander scrambles to his feet, edging around his chair in a weird way so he doesn't have to get any closer. “Look, Rozanov, just…”

“I'm not going to fucking assault you, Hollander, Jesus,” Ilya snaps, brutally offended, suddenly, by Hollander's bizarre wilted maiden act, the way he fumbles for the door. 

“I know, I know. Fuck. I just. I need…Galina. I need…” He waves his hand vaguely in a gesture that Ilya doesn't understand, and then he's gone. 

The next time Ilya sees Hollander, Hollander is calm and put back together, his freaky robot smile in place. His eyes land on Ilya briefly as he enters the living space, but they do not linger, and they do not dart away. Ilya is furniture, instead, and it might be worse than his trapped, animal panic in the cockpit. Ilya leaves the room soon after, abandoning the coffee he'd been in the middle of making.

He sulks in the oxygen garden with Rose and Marleau for a bit. It's comforting to sift through dirt with his hands, actually. It feels like being back on Earth. Rose has him harvesting things like potatoes and radishes and turnips and kale and lettuce, and he settles into the work, and he tries hard not to push at the memories, because he’s afraid of what could have made Hollander look at him like that, so afraid.

He wants to ask Marleau about Hollander again, but he’s not sure if he should, and he definitely knows that he shouldn’t with Rose in the room. Surely, if there was anything to tell, Marleau would know, right? Or was it all a secret? Did it only happen the one time, maybe? Was Hollander so embarrassed, such a terrible giver of blowjobs, that he’d stopped talking to Ilya entirely? 

No, no. He doesn’t think that’s it. His fingers sometimes curl, reaching for something that isn’t there, the shape of a hand in his, maybe. Sometimes, when he wakes up, he finds himself shaking, dreaming of something horrible, a dark abandonment that he can’t quite explain. He wakes up with an apology on his tongue, desperate to find someone, tell someone something, make up for some mistake. I promised I wouldn’t…he finds himself thinking, horror creeping over him, before the memory sinks back down under the murk, and he loses it. 

Other times, he wakes up hard, Hollander’s bright laughter echoing in his memories. 

No, there was something there. Something bigger than one very porny blowjob in his office. He just has to be patient. He’s afraid, though, of what he will find. The anxious way Hollander looks at him most of the time is heavy. He wonders what he did to earn it. 

He continues to work on his bomb calculations, though he suspects there’s no improving it. He sends a video message to Svetlana, asking her for information about his life before, trying to ask it in such a way that it doesn’t make it obvious that he’s trying to find information about the shape of Shane Hollander in his life, to see whether she was aware of it. He rewatches her videos to him, the ones she sent when he was asleep, and something new catches his interest that he didn’t think to overthink before. 

“I am so happy you changed your mind, Ilyusha,” she says to him, in one of the first videos, even as her eyes are teary. “It’s getting so much colder, and I know how much you would hate it. And it’s so nice to know that you won’t be alone up there, even if I miss you too.” 

Her videos had been sent in a mix of English and Russian, usually depending on whether she was being teasing and light or whether she was being emotional. This particular bit had been in English, and he wonders now if I miss you too had actually been I miss you two.

Chapter 3

Chapter Notes

I was like "I can be totally reasonable and leave this as a WIP for the weekend, and just post chapters every night as I edit them" but it is 11:43 in the morning here, and I am huddled in my car during my lunch break, on a wifi hotspot, posting the three chapters I've edited so far during the work day lmao. Being very normal, as always! Thanks to everyone who has read it so far! I was genuinely giddy when you immediately started commenting theories!

Svetlana’s return message doesn't make it to Ilya in time; Theriault calls an emergency meeting, where he reveals that something about the iron content of Mercury has unexpectedly moved up the window for when they will no longer be able to send or receive messages. Everyone who wants to send the last messages they’re going to be able to send before the return journey should send them. Ilya doesn’t bother, letting everyone else line up for a chance. Hunter is married apparently to someone who works for Mission Control back on Earth, and Galina has unspecified family, and Pike has a wife and too many children, and Ilya has no one except Svetlana, and he has already sent her a message recently. Hollander ducks into and out of the message room quickly when Ilya is waiting for an appointment with Galina to start. He doesn’t look at Ilya on the way in, but on the way out, he hesitates. 

“I’m sorry,” he says. “For the way I freaked out.” 

“Okay,” Ilya says, pretending to be bored as he pokes around at nothing on his little tablet. 

“You’ll understand eventually,” Hollander says, in that horrible, calm voice. It’s not natural, Ilya realizes suddenly. It isn't just that Hollander is trying to pretend to be blank and indifferent. It's something else. Ilya looks up from the tablet, allows his eyes to drift over Hollander’s shoulder to the closed door of Galina’s office. 

“You are on something? Something Galina has given you?” 

Hollander looks caught out. 

“It’s all been cleared and approved, and Galina is monitoring me carefully. There’s no problem.” 

“Did I say there was a problem? You just seem…weird.” 

“Yeah,” Hollander admits lightly. “I guess I would, if that’s the last thing you remember.” 

“Did I do something to you?” Ilya asks, his voice low. He doesn’t think he would. He doesn’t want to believe that about himself. But, well, his memories of his childhood have been filling out faster than the rest, stuffing his head full of the terrible examples of manhood he grew up around. He has been remembering more things about his father, and about his brother. Maybe it runs in his blood, to destroy precious things, no matter how much he wishes it didn't. 

“Oh, Ily–, ba–, Rozanov, no,” Hollander says, the strength of his voice despite the stammer surprising. His voice is so filled with horror and pity that Ilya could have been thinking such a thing about himself. What was Ilya supposed to think, though, after Hollander practically climbed the walls to escape him? “No, you’re perfect. It wasn’t anything you…” 

The door to Galina’s office slides open, and Kent steps out, scowling, and Hollander is already halfway into the hall before Galina can call Ilya’s name. 

After the talk with Galina, during which Ilya does his best to not reveal anything about whatever fucked up nonsense is happening with Hollander without seeming like he’s avoiding the topic on purpose, Galina prescribes Ilya some time in the Earth Room, which is apparently a circular Virtual Reality suite that allows you to feel like you are really in the environments that are being shown on the screen. She tells him not to come out for an hour. Apparently, his files indicate that he’s depressed, and that he will be missing Earth. Ilya isn’t sure he’s either of those things, but he finds himself in the annoying position of not even being able to argue for the state of his own mind, so he goes into the stupid little room with no complaint. 

When the door closes, an inoffensively bland male voice asks him what he wants to see. He asks for views of Moscow, at first, but scrolling through various views of the city doesn’t make him feel homesick, like he wanted. It just makes him feel regular sick, and so he says that he wants to see something else. When the stupid voice asks for input, he snaps at it to figure it out itself, because apparently he is even a dick to computers. The program cycles through a bunch of other stuff at random, trying to see if it can capture his attention, like a parent trying to tempt a child out of a tantrum with various suggestions for favorite foods that they can have for dinner later. Ilya stands in the center of the room with his arms crossed, saying “no” to all of it. The deep sea and a South American rainforest and a tropical beach and a city skyscraper and a wheat field that could be anywhere and a snowy mountaintop and massive waves on a foggy beach. He’s not impressed with anything until suddenly he says, “stop.” 

He’s not sure why this particular view carves a hole in his chest, but it does. It’s a lake in the morning, fog on the water, a dock under his feet. When he turns around, there are trees, and a rocky shore, and at the end of the dock, there is an incline that leads up to a house, lit up nicely, giant windows all around it. His breath catches in his throat; it’s a beautiful house, but he doesn’t think it’s just that. It sparks a fire within him, and he has to rub his chest, over his mother's necklace, to relieve a sudden ache. He imagines that he can see movement through one of those big windows, but he squints, and he can make out nothing more than a few indistinct shapes moving around inside. It’s probably all some AI generated view. It’s probably not real. Still, he wants to see the people inside that house so badly. He realizes, after a little while, that he’s wiping tears from his cheeks, and that his tears are not stopping. 

Later, Theriault gathers them all in the Observation Room, which is a long room with an uncomfortable couch and a room-sized viewscreen. It’s capable of allowing full brightness, but the computer keeps it set very low, because the Observation Room is always pointed directly at the sun. Ilya knows that a few of their crew, including Kent and Rose, like sitting in there and watching the sun. Galina likes it, too. She mentioned something offhandedly to Ilya about enjoying the thrill of turning the brightness up more and more to see how much of the sun she can take. Ilya told her that he isn’t sure she should be their psych expert, and she’d laughed at him. 

Ilya has avoided the Observation Room largely because he doesn’t trust technology enough to sit in a room where he could be fried like an ant under a magnifying glass if the computer decides to shit itself, so he lurks near the back of the room when Theriault proudly shows off the view of Mercury passing in front of the sun. It is pretty, seeing Mercury so close. Ilya does feel tears in his eyes, admittedly. Even with the brightness turned down, the sun’s expanse is beautiful, the way it writhes always, the hot mass of it, growing ever-closer. Ilya understands why Galina likes to watch it. He still leaves the room before anyone else, and he goes back to his bunk. He remembers being on Earth, scoffing at the idea of the Observation Room. So many resources devoted to something so pointlessly dangerous. He remembers Hollander laughing at him for being so cynical, but then agreeing with him that it was stupid. Hopefully he's misremembering saying something as mortifying as why would I look at the sun when I could look at you? My own little sunshine? Because surely Hollander had understood that, even though the memory had been in Russian. 

He's so fucking sick of this. He feels like he's missing a limb.  

Then

“Holy shit,” Hollander breathes. “Holy shit, Rozanov.” 

“Doctor Rozanov,” Ilya teases. Hollander laughs, but it morphs into a very lovely whining sound when Ilya gently starts to pull out of him. Two hours ago, they were on Good Morning America, where Hollander insisted on politely referring to him always as Doctor Rozanov because one of the hosts had made some pretty uncool comments about Ilya’s occasional dropped articles. Hollander had taken it a lot more personally than Ilya had. Now they’ve fucked for the first of hopefully several times tonight in this project-provided hotel suite. Ilya intends on taking advantage of this time away from the base and thanking Hollander properly for standing up for him.

Not that discreet fumblings in his office or in the tiny single rooms they’ve both been assigned in the barracks haven’t been nice, but there’s something so lavish about a hotel room fuck, even if it’s just a budget hotel like this one. 

“Fuck off,” Hollander says. “I’m not calling you that here.” 

“It’s my title, Hollander! You don't want to be rude.” 

Ilya cuddles up close, because he doesn’t want Hollander to get any stupid ideas about getting up and putting his clothes back on. Several months into this, this whatever they’re doing, this sneaking around, Ilya has found that he has some success in getting Hollander to stay if he makes it clear that he wants Hollander to stay. A Hollander who isn’t 100% sure he’s wanted will basically teleport away as soon as some part of Ilya is no longer inside his body, but a Hollander who’s being needily and greedily smothered in kisses will typically smile his content little smile and press closer. 

He does so now, and Ilya is so stuffed full of victory that he almost doesn’t let himself get maudlin by thinking about the fact that the project is almost over. 

His job is technically already done, at least in terms of what his recruitment initially entailed. He designed his bomb, and it is currently being put together in space by a team of astronauts and engineers or whoever does things like that. Ilya occasionally sits in on long video conferences with those people, confirming that everything is going as planned, but Yuna Hollander and Roger Crowell do most of the talking in those meetings, and everyone knows Ilya is essentially there to make sure no one is doing anything catastrophically stupid, which they aren’t, because they are all geniuses even if they are not quite as smart as him. He has spent more than a month now essentially showing up with Hollander to do puff pieces about the world-saving mission and helping the science team with various other things that have nothing to do with his Stellar Bomb and therefore are not his area of expertise. He probably could have gone back to Moscow ages ago; his father certainly seems to think he should have. He’s calling more and more often, asking when Ilya will be back. Asking other, more upsetting things, too, like where his mother is, and when Ilya will be home from school. Alexei keeps saying their father is fine, just stressed, but Alexei is clearly lying, either because he doesn’t want Ilya to worry or, more likely, because he hasn’t checked in on their father at all, like he’s supposed to. 

Maybe that’s part of why Ilya hasn’t wanted to go back, of course, but there is also Hollander, and it’s easier to admit that to himself when Hollander is so prettily sated beside him.

Not that they have talked about any of this, at all. Not that they have discussed anything about what they’re doing except where and when to meet up and fuck. But they have been fucking more and more often, as the project has progressed, and Ilya knows he isn’t imagining how they have been softening towards each other, lately. Like maybe there could be something else, once the project is done. 

“They want me to go,” Hollander says quietly, after a while of just silently cuddling each other, Ilya planning on lingering as long as Hollander will let him, for once. Hollander looks over at Ilya after he speaks, and his expression is cracked-open, his eyes big and fearful, as if he hadn’t meant to say anything and is embarrassed now that he’s spoken. 

“What?” Ilya asks with surprise. 

“The, uh. The Voyageur team. They want me to be on the mission.” 

“In space.” 

“Yeah. In space.” 

“Why? You’re not a scientist. You’re not an engineer.” 

“No, I know. I guess they want a few people on mission who aren’t those things, and I actually got the highest scores they’ve ever seen on the flight simulator, so.” 

“Hollander…you’re terrified of space.” 

“Yeah. Fuck. I really am.” 

“So you told them no.” 

Hollander makes a cringing expression at that, and Ilya breathes out a frustrated breath and almost pulls away, but he knows that Hollander will only turn to smoke and disappear into his own room if he does, so he holds on tighter, instead, presses his forehead against the side of Hollander’s face.

“Hollander,” he says. 

“I know.” 

“You cannot go to space.” 

“I know.” 

“But you will do it anyway, if they insist, won’t you?” 

Hollander nods, and he closes his eyes, and there is something about his resigned annoyance with himself that makes Ilya want to wrap him in these blankets and keep him trapped, hidden away from the world. Why should the world get any of Hollander’s attention when they do stupid shit like trying to send him to space? Ilya sighs and kisses Hollander's shoulder gently. 

“Okay,” he says. “Then we will both just have to make the cut, yes? Then I can fuck you in space. Fuck all the anxiety out of you.” 

The look Hollander gives him then is impossibly fond. 

“Yeah, okay,” he says, instead of calling Ilya ridiculous, as Ilya had assumed he would. “That sounds kind of nice, actually.” 

Now

Hollander has taken to avoiding Ilya completely, which is annoying, especially since he’s also avoiding everyone else. Does he think that makes it less obvious that he's trying to dodge Ilya specifically? 

He keeps the cockpit door locked even against Pike, who has to knock to be allowed to enter his own workspace. Anyone else would tell Hollander to fuck off for a stunt like that, but Pike endures it with his uneasy smile, like Hollander’s oddness is self-explanatory. When Marleau asks about it at one dinner—which Hollander is skipping, like he has skipped every other dinner the crew has eaten together—Pike only shrugs and says “security reasons”. Ilya feels slapped, like a dog who has jumped up too eagerly to greet his master and has been scolded for his enthusiasm.

The first time Hollander emerges from his self-imposed exile is when Theriault calls another team meeting, a few days later. Of course, perfect Rose Landry and annoying shithead Dallas Kent both have all of their memories back, which makes Ilya feel pathetic, especially when they feel the need to report this progress during the team meeting so that then everyone must turn and look at Ilya, and Ilya must shrug and shake his head and admit that things are coming back more slowly, for him. Rose kind of smirks at him, which makes him wonder if she knows something now that she didn’t before. Unlike before, though, he doesn’t feel the impulse to ask her for more information. He’s stopped asking Marleau, too. He doesn’t know if he wants the memories, if they keep coming up with stuff designed specifically to torture him. Not before he knows how they end, anyway. He’s still thinking of Hollander’s empty, blank smile, and the panic that preceded it, the way he’d rushed out of the cockpit. 

What did I do to you? he would ask Hollander, if he could get him alone, and maybe that’s why he can’t. Maybe that’s why Hollander is so careful not to give him the chance.

Hollander is impatient, buzzy with nerves, while everyone else is speaking, and at first Ilya assumes it’s because he wants to go back to hiding, but finally Theriault nods at him and steps aside, and Ilya realizes that Hollander is nervous about speaking to the room. This strikes Ilya as a bit strange, because this was like Hollander’s whole job back on Earth, and he never seemed particularly nervous about public speaking, before. Maybe he was just better at hiding it, then. 

“Pike and I have, uh. Picked up a signal,” he says quietly, once the attention of the room is on him. “And we need to have a discussion about what to do about it.” 

He looks around at everyone in the room and makes dedicated eye contact with all of them except for Ilya, who might as well not even be there, tucked into the back of the room. Ilya wants to scoff loudly, make his presence known, but he fears it would come off as childish, and so he doesn’t. 

“What kind of signal?” Rose asks. Hollander locks eyes with Pike, who sighs and steps forward. 

“It’s, uh. It seems to be a distress signal. From the Voyageur.” 

Galina gasps loudly at that. Marleau whistles lowly. 

“What, like, an active distress signal?” Rose asks. 

“We don’t know. It’s unlikely, but…” 

“But if their oxygen garden is intact, and their water recycler is still working? They could absolutely still be alive, right?” Rose presses. Pike nods. Marleau whistles again. 

“Holy shit. Did you try and make contact?” 

“We have been, for the last two days. Nothing. No response. But the distress call just, uh. Keeps going.” Pike smirks a little at Hollander. “It’s really fucking annoying. I think Hollander’s about to snap.” 

Hollander gives him a half-smile that does look faintly unglued. Ilya wants to say something uncharitable about how maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if Hollander didn’t insist on isolating himself in the cockpit for the entire day to hide from his crewmates, but of course he doesn’t, because that would be even more obvious. 

“And even if they’re not still alive,” Theriault says, like he’s leading an unruly class back to the topic they’re supposed to be discussing. 

“And even if they’re not alive,” Hollander parrots responsibly. “We need to discuss the potential benefits of changing our course to rendezvous with the Voyageur, because there might be stuff we could use. Like the other bomb.” 

He locks eyes with Ilya, finally. 

“Oh,” Ilya says, without thinking. 

“Yeah. So when I say we need to discuss the benefits,” Hollander laughs hollowly. “I really mean, you, Rozanov.” 

“Me? You’re leaving the decision to me?” 

“We need to know if you think it’s worth the risk to have a second shot on the net,” Hollander says, and Ilya leans back in his chair, and considers. 

Then

“I’m sorry,” Hollander says, and the worst part is that Ilya knows he really means it. “I know you wanted to go.” 

The competition between them, these final few weeks of the project, was fun when it had no stakes, because they didn’t actually think that the choice would come down to one of the two of them. Ilya assumed that they were both going to make the cut, because it only made sense to bring the bomb expert on the mission to fire a fucking bomb at the sun. And of course Hollander would make it, because Hollander is good at everything, and he’s apparently especially good at piloting the Voyageur, according to the simulation tests that all of the potential candidates had to take. That he desperately does not want to go on the mission apparently doesn’t matter, even though Ilya had made sure to drop that tidbit of information on Yuna Hollander, trying to sound casual and only a little concerned, in the hopes that she would be reasonable enough to realize that her son didn’t actually want to go to space, no matter how many times he bleakly said it was fine. 

Of course, Yuna Hollander had not listened to him, because she’s as unreasonable as her son, or at least supports him in being unreasonable about this.

And then the selection committee had gone ahead and chosen Hollander, and they had not chosen Ilya.

Hollander looks cracked open, now, devastated and afraid in a way that Ilya doesn’t like, in particular because he knows that Hollander would never choose to show these things to him if he was even remotely in control of himself. Hollander always seems to have a desperate aversion to showing any weakness—and that’s coming from Ilya, who always thought that he was the same, until he met someone even more dedicated to stone-facedness than himself.

But Hollander looks really shaken, and he looks upset, and Ilya wants to tell him that he doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to do, but he’s said things like that before, and Hollander always looks at him with this baffled expression, because it’s just not true, in Hollander’s experience, and Ilya understands it, because Ilya is really the same. Sveta is always telling him you do not have to answer the phone when Alexei calls and you do not have to stay in Moscow for your father, and Ilya looks at her in the same way Hollander does, so they’re both fucking stupid, probably. Hollander does what people need him to do, and what they want him to do. Ilya has obviously benefitted from that, because that eagerness to please translates so well into fucking. Hollander looks at him with starry-eyed adoration, blissed out of his fucking mind when Ilya gets him to that special place where he allows himself to float. Hollander’s entire life is being strong, and making hard decisions, and being the person the entire world expects him to be, and with Ilya, he says it’s easy, because behind closed doors, he only has to do what Ilya wants him to do, and apparently that’s freeing, for him. Ilya understands it. He would give it to Hollander always, if he was allowed. 

But that eagerness to please feels like a trap, now, or at least like a weight that Hollander should not have to carry, but he will never think to put it down on his own. He would rather face his biggest fears than risk disappointing people a little bit. He would rather go to fucking space than tell the selection committee ‘no’, as if ‘no’ isn’t one of the physically easiest words to say.

“It should not be you,” Ilya says, and Hollander frowns at him. “You are fucking terrified of that ship. You’re terrified of the whole thing. They only want you up there to make stupid Youtube videos to make everyone on Earth try to forget they’re resting all their hopes on a fucking bomb that might not even work.” 

“Rozanov, come on,” Hollander says, fear bleeding through in his tone. A little pleading.

“It doesn’t make any fucking sense. I designed the bomb. Why would they not send me? Why would they send you? You are their beautiful Canadian face of the project, their model, okay, yes. You can fly the shuttle. So could anyone else. Why you?” 

Hollander looks at him, his pretty eyes wide with betrayal for only a second. 

“What?” he asks. “My…I told you, my scores were…” 

“Fucking scores in a game,” Ilya scoffs. 

One thing about Ilya that has always, unfortunately, been true is that when he’s backed into a corner, he lashes out. This is true even if he’s not actually backed into a corner, but has just convinced himself that he is. Svetlana says it’s the ugliest thing about him, and he has heard people say some variation of the same thing, all his life. His teachers, when he was a child. His mother, even. His friends. Everyone knows that Ilya is a good time, a fun person to be around, a great friend, a very smart guy. But when he feels cornered, or defensive? Fucking dickhead. He’ll say the sharpest, meanest thing he can think of, just to make the other person back off. In this case, he thinks he’s feeling more cornered by his feelings than anything else. Like he is startled by his fear for Hollander, his pity for Hollander, his helplessness in the face of Hollander’s stubbornness, and so of course his first move is to snarl and shove Hollander away.

“Yeah, my scores,” Hollander says, voice growing a little stronger. Like he has forgotten to be afraid because he’s so annoyed with Ilya for being a prick. “They were better than yours, apparently.” 

“Oh my god, Hollander, you are so fucking pathetic! Who cares about your fucking scores? You want to die in fucking space? Go ahead. I don’t know why you thought you had to come fucking brag about it to me. Congratulations on your scores.” 

Hollander’s eyes do that terrible thing they do where they instantly get wetter, a film of tears that he will never let fall if he can help it, and Ilya looks down at the ground, because he refuses to be drawn in by them. They’re so fucking brutal. And the rest of his face is hardly any better; Ilya gets a half-second glimpse of that cracked-open betrayal, that confused hurt, before he’s smart enough to move his eyes down to the ground, where Hollander’s expression can’t do anything to him.

“Okay,” Hollander says easily, as if responding to a command or a question from Ilya that wasn’t spoken aloud, and then he turns and leaves the room, and he slams the door behind him. 

The next time Ilya hears Hollander’s name, it’s in a news briefing that Hollander has been replaced in the mission by one of the bigger dickheads from the pool of potential mission members: a former fighter pilot and rocket scientist named Patrice Drapeau. Ilya, back in Moscow because he hadn’t seen the point in lingering around the mission when they clearly didn’t want him and Hollander wouldn’t even look at him, is relieved at first, because he thinks that Hollander came to his senses and made the choice to back out on his own, but then he hears from a few different people he’s still in touch with that Hollander was removed after being hospitalized for some reason that no one will say aloud—which means, Ilya knows, that it was probably a fucking panic attack, because of course it was, because Hollander was fucking terrified. No one seems to have any more information than that, or maybe they just don’t want to tell him. 

Ilya tries to text Hollander, tries to call him. Tries to do both things a pathetic amount. He doesn’t hear back.

Now

Ilya sits in his little testing chamber, and he runs his calculations through the computer, even though he has just as quickly done them in his head, and he knows what his answer should be. He likes watching it play out, likes the tumbling freefall of the bomb into the star. He knows that he can’t delay for much longer, but he doesn’t think anyone will be surprised that he’s taking his time with this. It’s a big question, and Ilya remembers enough about himself now to understand that he has always hated making big decisions. It always feels like someone has made a huge mistake, when they get to the point where they’re trusting him to make the call.

Hollander knocks on the door. Ilya’s not sure how he knows that it’s Hollander, but he does. He feels awkward, opening the door and letting Hollander in, in the same way he has felt awkward around him after every new revelation of his returning memories. This time hurts especially badly, because he has all these beautiful memories of fucking Hollander and kissing Hollander and sucking Hollander’s beautiful dick, and now he has this terrible memory of the end of it, and it feels like the first time seeing someone after a breakup.  

What happened to you? Why did they put you in the hospital? Are you okay? All this time, for some reason, Ilya has been assuming that his memories were connected to this current mission, even though he should have known they weren't. He has been remembering the first mission, the failed mission, years ago now. What happened to them in the intervening years? Did Hollander ever text him back? He has all these memories of his heart bursting with affection for Hollander, and it seems impossible that that could just be over. Ilya is not the type to give up easily on someone he likes, and he thinks he liked Hollander quite a lot.

And why the fuck is Hollander here if he had a panic attack so bad at the thought of being on the first mission that he had to be hospitalized because of it? Whoever was in charge of selecting the crew for this mission is a fucking idiot. 

“Well?” Hollander asks politely. Ilya can tell just from the look on his face that Hollander’s drugged up on whatever he gets from Galina. Maybe drugged up is a cruel way to put it. Judgemental, even in his own head. It’s not judgement, though, he doesn’t think. It’s horror, maybe. How did they ever approve Hollander’s presence on this mission when he has to be given drugs just to exist up here? 

“I don't think you really need me to tell you what my answer is,” Ilya says, leaning back against the wall and gesturing to the projection. “Seventy percent, maybe seventy-five, and this is assuming that I do my part correctly and the computer does her part correctly, too. And that my bomb works at all, and isn't just a total fucking fluke.”

“Yeah,” Hollander admits quietly. 

“But, it’s better than no chance, I know. And two bombs, of course, would be better than one.”

“Right,” Shane agrees. It’s difficult to tell, but Ilya thinks he sounds relieved, like that was what he’d been hoping Ilya would say. 

“But, you know, this isn’t just about the bomb. Our flight path has already been set, planned out, confirmed. Varying from the mission in any way….you can't account for that. Anything could go wrong. Our slingshot move around Mercury is designed to save us fuel for the return trip, but we should be good if we go out of our way, yes? According to Pike. But what if there is another emergency? And what if there is no fuel on this other ship to supplement it?”

“It is a risk to deviate from the plan,” Hollander agrees placidly. Ilya wants to rile him up on purpose, the way he used to do so gleefully back on Earth. Wants to say something rude and intrusive just to make Hollander stop looking so blank and frightening. It feels like a punishment, Hollander talking to him like this after the memory he just unlocked, and it makes Ilya feel guilty. But Ilya is, despite himself, a professional, and so he only shrugs and turns back to the projection of his calculations on the walls around them. 

“It is a risk, and I don't know that I can make that choice. It could end up being a risk for nothing. Maybe the bomb doesn't work. Maybe the oxygen and the food and the water are all gone. Maybe the ship has been destroyed except for the beacon. I don't know.”

“No one is expecting you to have all of the answers,” Hollander says, and there's something so straightforwardly good about the way he says it. He meets Ilya's eyes for a heart-stopping second, and then he looks away, back at the model. “Theriault sent me to talk it out with you because he knows I’ll make the hard call. I’ve been doing it since we were back on Earth. That’s what I’m for. And this mission is it, Ilya. If we fail, we all die. Everyone on Earth. That's the only consideration that can matter. So, yeah. It's a risk. But two last hopes are better than one, right?”

“Yes, I guess so,” Ilya admits quietly. He feels sorry for Hollander, suddenly, that Hollander thinks he has to be the one to make this decision. He seems so resigned to it, and Ilya knows that it must be resignation, because the Hollander he remembers would not have been so calm about making the kinds of decisions that could affect the fate of the planet. What happened in the years between the last launch and now to make Hollander look like this? Maybe it was just the desperation of pulling together a second Hail Mary mission. Maybe when Ilya gets the rest of his memories back, he’ll find that the soft heart he remembers having has also calcified into something strong enough to survive this shit.

Kent and Theriault are both clearly unhappy with the choice to change their course, and Rose and Hunter don't seem especially thrilled either, but when Hollander announces his decision—accepting it as his own call, as if Ilya could not have persuaded him from his course, taking on all the responsibility and all the potential blame for failure, like it’s nothing—they all agree to it, and Pike scurries off to put the new coordinates into the computer and begin the extremely delicate process of turning the ship. 

Ilya skulks back to his bunk, turning over all his memories like a child searching for bugs under rocks. They're coming more quickly now. He remembers trying to get into contact with Hollander. Remembers Hollander sending him a single text—you were right—before blocking his number. Remembers calling Yuna Hollander the day before the launch, desperate for any information, and hearing the sad wariness in her voice when she said that she couldn't give him anything, that it was Shane's choice to tell him, or not, when he was done with his treatment. Ilya had considered telling Yuna what he and Shane had been to each other, but stopped himself before he could make any such unforgivable mistakes. He’d just waited, wishing he hadn’t been such a defensive asshole, wishing his last words to Hollander had been even a little kinder. 

He remembers watching the launch and wishing that he felt more of the pride in humanity that he probably should have felt. He remembers his father scoffing and saying there are no Russians aboard that ship, because you weren't good enough to make it. 

He remembers the months of waiting. 

He remembers the silence. 

He remembers the slow-growing panic when the Voyageur had been out of contact for too long, and when the sun did not grow any brighter. 

He remembers when they trotted Hollander out again, paler and thinner and looking like he was being held together by scotch tape, to beg the world for a second chance. 

The gaps in between all of his uncovered memories are slowly filling in, too. He's remembering not just Hollander sucking his dick and Hollander riding him and Hollander looking at him coyly in the shower, fingers curling warm and wet around him. He's remembering Hollander laughing at some stupid fucking joke Ilya made, covering his face, embarrassed to find it funny. He's remembering Hollander snuffling up against him in sleep. He's remembering Hollander smiling into the curve of his neck. Monstrously, it seems that it was not ever just fucking, with them, even if they maybe tried to convince themselves that that was all it was. Those little gap-filling moments add context that make their fight and Hollander's disappearance afterwards all the more painful. Is that why he can't look at Ilya properly? Does he really believe that Ilya thinks he’s pathetic? Does he feel like a coward for having walked away? Or does he still blame Ilya for being the monster who pushed him?

He jerks awake from another dream, and he heads into the crew area to get some coffee. He promised Marleau he would help him with some general repairs today, and he's eager to get started, because he wants to finally do something useful. Watching the same fucking simulation of the bomb falling into the sun over and over again is not going to help anyone, and it might be driving him insane. It makes him think uncomfortably of Galina in the Observation Room, the way her skin has been looking sort of blistered and burned sometimes, lately. Like she’s spending too much time in there, with the brightness set too high. If there were physical signs of the simulation runs, Ilya knows that he would be covered in them. 

Hollander is in the crew area, of course. Sitting under that fluffy blanket and reading his book. He looks startled, like a possum caught going through the trash as the porch light flicks on. 

“Relax, solnyshko, fuck,” Ilya grumbles. “I remember, okay?”

Hollander freezes, his breathing shallow. He nods. He fumbles for something in the pocket of his flight suit, and Ilya scowls fiercely at the coffee maker when he realizes that it's a little sachet of pills. Hollander takes one. 

“I'm so sorry,” he says, after a while, like he has been waiting for Ilya to speak first, or maybe just waiting for the medicine to kick in and give him some courage. “I know it doesn't…”

Ilya turns to face him, waiting, as Hollander's words die out. Hollander looks agonized. Dramatically so. Ilya rolls his eyes and stalks forward, bending over Hollander in his corner seat, trapping him by gripping the back of the booth and the table on either side of his perfect body, and kissing him fiercely, trying to make it into an apology and a forgiveness at once. He feels fucking starved for it. The kind of hunger that only sharpens when you’ve had a taste. Hollander makes a wanting, desperate little noise against his mouth, but then he jerks back, hitting his head on the wall behind him, looking aghast. 

“Hollander, it really is not a big deal,” Ilya says, confused. Hollander's eyes flood with tears, as brutal as Ilya now remembers. How does anyone ever deny Hollander anything? 

“You don't…what do you remember?” 

“You ghosting me after you dropped out of the last mission,” Ilya says, and Hollander barks out a sound that might be a laugh, or maybe not. He pushes himself even further out of Ilya's reach. 

“Okay,” he says. “Okay. That makes sense.”

“Hollander, you're killing me. Seriously. I mean, what the fuck. I just ..” 

“I know, I'm sorry. I'm sorry you don't remember. I just…Ilya, you have to understand, if you can’t remember…there are things you need to remember. I can’t…”

“Okay,” Ilya sighs. “Okay, yes. I understand. Of course there is more. I just…sorry.”

Hollander looks like he’s trying to be relieved about it, but his eyes are still so wet with despair. Ilya has to brush his thumb under his eyeline, wipe away one of the tears that looks like it might actually fall, and Hollander allows it, his eyes fluttering closed for a second, like he can’t help himself. 

“Okay,” he says, his voice steady. His chin trembles a little bit with emotion, which Ilya can only see because he’s standing so close, and it makes Ilya realize that he probably shouldn’t be standing this close, actually. He backs off a little, holding up his hands as if to promise Hollander that he won’t try to touch him again. 

He wants to ask, or maybe even just make a joke. He doesn’t, though; he’s nervous. Nervous about the tense and frightened way Hollander has been regarding him, mostly. Nervous, too, about the shape of the memories that are still missing from his skull. Almost like he can sense them lurking somewhere, waiting to surface and fuck him up. He understands, suddenly, that they must be worse than he thinks. Worse than Hollander ghosting him, obviously, and that was already pretty bad.

“You're okay?” Hollander asks, like an olive branch. 

“Yeah. Fine.”

“You're up early.”

“Yes. Nightmare, whatever.”

“I keep having dreams about the surface of the sun. Like, falling into it.” Hollander offers this up like he expects Ilya to make fun of him, probably because you cannot possibly fall anywhere close to the sun. You would be vaporized immediately. 

“My dreams are strange,” Ilya admits quietly. “Sometimes they are memories, things coming unlocked. Other times, I don’t know. Just feelings. Just fear, I think. I've been trapped, abandoned. Maybe betrayed. I'm hurt. I wake up crying.”

Shane nods, his expression closing off again. 

“I'm sure it will all become clearer in time,” he says. 

They are saved from having to continue this awful conversation by the panicked ringing of a ship-wide alarm. 

Chapter 4

Chapter Notes

Pike is pale and shaking by the time Hollander and Ilya arrive in the cockpit. Theriault is already there, going red-faced, screaming at the computer to shut the fuck up, which Ilya agrees with even if he thinks Theriault is a moron for shouting at a machine. Hollander steps up and grips Pike’s shoulders hard in both hands, forcing eye contact.

“I fucked up,” Pike admits. 

Ilya finds the intricacies of the ship’s navigation coming back to him as Pike stammers through an explanation of what he did—or, more accurately, forgot to do. The shield that protects the ship is made of thousands of sunlight-reflecting panels that need to be adjusted every time the ship changes course. Pike has handled every adjustment flawlessly so far, so it’s not like he’s a complete fucking idiot, but still it seems incomprehensible that a man with a single job could have fucked it up at all, and Ilya only holds himself back from saying that because he knows everyone on this ship hates him enough already. He lurks near the back of the cockpit and tries to look unobtrusive. Galina steps up to put a comforting hand on Pike’s shoulder. Hollander pops another pill when he thinks no one is watching. 

It seems like Pike forgot to account for something in his math. He’d been so eager to get on course to rendezvous with The Voyageur that he forgot to carry the one, or something, and now there are three damaged panels that will need to be fixed manually before Chiron makes it around Mercury fully, because if they’re slammed with the unfiltered power of the sun with three panels out of whack, it will possibly fry the entire ship, and it will definitely, at least, fry parts of it. Pike has bought some time by angling the shield a certain way, so the damaged panels will be out of the sun’s path for a little longer, but there’s not much more he can do from inside.

“Okay,” Hollander says, admirably calm. “So we fix the panels.” 

“I’m sorry,” Pike says to the room. Galina rubs his back. Hunter murmurs some comforting words. Theriault says don’t let it happen again. Maybe Theriault’s a bigger asshole than Ilya, because Ilya is quiet, and doesn’t feel the need to kick the guy when he’s down. Pike swallows back his shame. “I volunteer to head out there and fix the panels.” 

“Should be Rozanov,” Kent mutters. “Since he’s the reason we’re even changing course in the first place.”

Ilya opens his mouth to agree on impulse, because he doesn’t like backing down from a challenge and because he really doesn’t like Kent, but Theriault stops him. 

“No, it’s going to be me and Marleau, he says. “We’re both rated for those repairs, and Rozanov is more important than the rest of you combined. Don’t fucking forget that. We have two hours before we’ll be hit with the full power of the sun. Hollander, you’re on standby.” 

Hollander nods, like it’s nothing. Ilya remembers him shaking in that hotel bed just thinking about going to space, but now he nods like a space walk is within the realm of possibility. Then again, that was apparently years ago. Maybe he’s worked through his fear by now. How would Ilya know? So much is still missing.

Then

“Hey.” 

Ilya closes his eyes, sighs, opens them again, braces himself, and only then turns around to look at Hollander. 

“Office hours are over,” he says in Russian. Hollander doesn’t smile. 

“We need you,” he says, eyes big and scared. 

“Send your mother to ask me nicely, then,” Ilya replies, turning back to his computer. “I have nothing to say to you.” He waits for a response, but there’s nothing. He turns around, ready to keep talking, but Hollander has vanished from the doorway. Ilya frowns at the space Hollander has left until he’s half-convinced that he imagined it. He’s been spending a lot of late nights in the office, and he has missed Hollander a lot. Maybe he fell asleep, and was dreaming. It’s not like dreaming of Hollander is unusual for him, at this point. The dreams are usually just a lot more fun.

But no: the next morning, Yuna Hollander knocks politely on the doorframe, and Ilya curses up a storm in Russian and throws his notebook across the room. 

“I wasn’t fucking serious,” he says. Yuna arches an eyebrow at him. 

“He said you wouldn’t talk to him. He said you’d only talk to me.” 

“So they put you on an immediate flight to Moscow to sweet talk stupid idiot physicist who was an asshole to Mr. Golden Boy?” Ilya snaps. Yuna shrugs, nods, as if to say, well, yeah. “I was just…being a bitch because he hurt my feelings!” 

He immediately feels stupid for having said it like that, but Yuna Hollander has that way about her. She might have that way about her even more now than she used to, with the slightly more lined face and the slightly more gray hair. She’s still so powerful and strong; she has not decayed in her advancing age the way his father has. He finds her comforting, even though she immediately starts laughing at him. 

“He’s not always the best at telling when someone’s just being an asshole,” she says gently, when she has laughed enough. “I think he knows the thing about hurting your feelings, though. He feels guilty.” 

“For what?” Ilya wonders aloud, because he’s not sure how much Yuna knows about what happened between him and her son when they were trying to save the world the first time. It’s not like they ever talked about what they were or were not saying to their families, other than one early comment from Ilya about why he was so glad to take a break from Russia. 

Maybe they would have talked about it, if Ilya had handled their last meeting differently. He has tortured himself with all the possibilities of things he should have said instead. But now more than a year has passed since he last spoke to Hollander, Hollander has been whoring himself out again for the good of humanity—this time with a pretty botanist by his side instead of Ilya—and Ilya has been mouldering away at his old job in Moscow while his father dies by miserable inches, still a fucking asshole. 

“Oh, you know Shane. He feels guilty about everything, all the time, even stuff that has nothing to do with him.” Yuna steps into the room, smiling at Ilya sympathetically. “I know you two were close, as much as you pretended to bicker.” 

“We were not pretending.” 

“Well, okay. You were competitive. It was good for him, I think.” 

Ah, okay. So she doesn’t know. Ilya nods politely and tries to look like the kind of respectable good boy who could have plausibly been a friend for her son before the ghosting. He’s not sure he pulls it off.

“He was good for me, too,” he admits. That could be platonic, right?

“He felt guilty that he was chosen instead of you and then felt like a failure when they took him off the mission.” 

“He never should have been on it,” Ilya argues gently, unsure why he’s bothering. “He was so afraid. He was never going to pass those psych evals.” 

“We really thought he’d be able to do it,” Yuna says, sighing again, shaking her head. “He would have been great once he got up there. Except, well. Obviously I’m glad he didn’t make it, but I know he feels guilty about that, too. Certain that he could have done something to save the mission.” 

Ilya very generously doesn’t say his first thought—that they still don’t know what caused the failure of the Voyageur, and that it’s highly improbable that a simulation-trained pilot and glorified PR representative would have been able to do anything to fix it. Yuna seems to recognize his restraint for what it is, because she gives him an arch look and then drops a stack of papers on his desk. 

“We’re sending a second ship. A second payload. With technological advances in the last few years, and obviously the increased cooperation from several previously uncooperative countries, we’re hoping to narrow the launch window.”

Ilya had known, of course, that they were gearing up to try a second time, but his naturally cynical nature ensured that he has convinced himself that all that talk was just a ploy to keep everyone from killing each other in resource wars. The best thing that that first mission did for humanity was to make them hope that someone would fix the problem, and when that was gone, and when hope died, it could have spelled the end of civilization. Dragging Hollander out and parading him as a symbol of hope had seemed, at the time, like a concerted effort to buy more time so that the elite could build their bunkers a little faster, or whatever. 

But no, Ilya reads through the documents as Yuna walks around his office looking at the framed pictures on his wall, and he can see that this is serious. Construction on the ship has already started, and they have the raw material for the bomb, and are just waiting for him to approve it or to suggest any improvements to the design. Of course Ilya has a few in mind; he’s been thinking about the failure of the first mission a lot, like everyone else in the world, and trying not to worry that it was the design of his payload that was the problem. 

Yes, of course this is something he has been hoping for, but it stings to realize that he will have to go back there, to that place, because he has thought of little else in the time since he has been away, and he hates wanting things. Hates even more when he gets them, because then he has to deal with the risk of fucking up and losing them.

Yuna plops a little beanbag on his desk in front of him. He stares at it, offended. He’d tucked it behind a few models of the Voyageur payload that he’d stolen from the project, on one of his bookshelves. It’s dust-covered, untouched since he hid it. Hollander gave it to him, as a joke, a week after Ilya had said that stupid thing about how they could play hacky sack because he was too nervous to earnestly suggest that Hollander suck his dick. It’s patterned green and blue, looks like Earth. 

“Why are you touching my things?” he asks. 

“Thought it would be a nice reminder that this is what we’re fighting for,” Yuna says with a shrug. She looks at him carefully. “If there’s anything we can do to make your life a little easier…” 

“What?” 

Yuna sighs, annoyed that he didn’t pick up the hint she was apparently trying to make, although she must be used to it, with her son being who he is. 

“I know that your father has been having some medical issues, and I know that it might be difficult for you, right now, to leave Moscow for long stretches of time. We could set up a workshop here for you, or you could be involved in a consulting capacity only, or you could bring him and his caregivers with you to our new location. We’re willing to accommodate whatever you need, Doctor Rozanov.” 

Ilya feels like he’s been caught doing something obscene. Like Yuna Hollander has looked into his brain and has seen all of his very depraved fantasies about her perfect, angelic son. Everyone here knows that he cares for his father, but no one has mentioned it with the kind of sympathy dripping from Yuna Hollander’s tone that makes him fear that she has somehow witnessed the way his father has always acted. Here, among his colleagues, caring for his father is seen as a good thing to do. He’s a good son, settling down from the wild ways of his youth to ensure that his father has an easier final few years. Nobody knows, or would particularly care, that Ilya’s father treats him the way he always has, and that his treatment has been getting worse. Yuna Hollander, though, would care. She would tell Ilya it’s not right, the way he treats you, and so maybe that’s why her mention of his father makes him feel so afraid. He doesn’t want her to understand anything more about it. He doesn’t want her to pity him, or think that he’s doing anything out of the ordinary. Svetlana tells him he’s a martyr, sometimes, always with this scoff of disgust, and he prefers that to her earnest sadness, when she’s drunk enough to admit how much it hurts her to watch Ilya reach out to his father again and again and be rebuffed because even in the throes of his dementia, he’s still such a fucking dick. 

Ilya is blindingly glad that he sent Hollander away yesterday, suddenly, because he tries to imagine hearing that devastating series of sentences from Hollander’s mouth. He doesn’t like to think of Hollander and his father in the same cluster of information, at all. Like, he would prefer if they weren’t even on the same planet. He’s still mad at Hollander, maybe, but with a guilty tinge, because he knows that Hollander wouldn’t have disappeared on him if Ilya hadn’t been a prick first and said all the terrible things that Hollander probably was already believing about himself. And he knows that Hollander is stronger than he seems, and possibly stronger than Ilya in some ways, and he can handle Ilya’s father if only because he doesn’t care about Ilya’s father’s opinion, probably at all. 

But the thought of Hollander very earnestly planning to help his father, to take care of him, knowing that his father would fucking hate Hollander for all the things that make Hollander so beautiful, makes Ilya feel itchy and uncomfortable and too hot. He’s glad it’s Yuna, instead. The look on her face says that she has done her research, and that she isn’t very impressed by what she’s found. There is probably nothing Grigori Rozanov could say to her that would make her feel anything but disgust. 

Hollander has probably politely refused to listen to anything that she might have gotten about Ilya’s family history, but Yuna would have looked through it all, and the Voyageur Program is incredibly powerful. She’s probably read everything there is to know about the kind of man Ilya’s father is. The kind of man his brother is. 

“I would like for him to be taken care of, somewhere near where I will be, but not so close that I can’t…avoid him,” he says, hating the way his voice goes quiet. “A nice place would be better. More than I can afford, right now.” 

Yuna sighs with relief, and she briefly touches his hand where it rests on the desk. 

“You’ll have it,” she promises. 

Now

And now he remembers telling Alexei that he had to go to America for the project, and he remembers just how poorly that conversation had gone, and he remembers not particularly caring, because he’d been emptied of empathy for his brother, after years of not being enough for him, despite all his efforts.

Yes, I will not be going to fucking space. I will be here to watch papa die, just as you want, he remembers saying. Which was, apparently, enough to be considered a promise. Ilya finds that he's not very upset at the idea of breaking that promise. He's mostly just impressed with himself that he did, that he said fuck your hold over me and left, knowing that his father would likely be dead before he returned. He never thought he'd have the strength to do that himself. 

He's thinking of strength as everyone helps Marleau and Theriault through the one million steps to get themselves into their spacesuits. The suits are these giant, unwieldy, golden things that require at least two people to assist with donning. Ilya has to assume that there is some reason for them to look as ridiculous and bulky as they do, because there was probably an entire team of geniuses working on the design, but that doesn’t make them look any less stupid. 

Hunter and Kent help Theriault while Rose and Hollander dress Marleau. It takes such a long fucking time. Ilya lingers outside the airlock bay, watching the process, just in case, and he tries not to think about the fact that they are working against a clock. 

When both men are finally ready, everyone else clears the airlock, and they watch Marleau and Theriault float out into space. They will use the miniscule jets in the suits to get up to the shield, at which point they will activate their magboots, which will allow them to walk across the shield at a plodding pace. Every part of this is so fucking slow and careful. 

Hunter and Kent return to Pike, in the cockpit, who is on the intercom now, keeping everyone on the ship updated on the progress Theriault and Marleau are making as they move across the shield, sounding like he is still feeling sick with guilt. Ilya feels the guilt pricking at him, too, even though Kent is an asshole, which is the only reason he said what he did about blaming Ilya.  

Ilya knows he made the right choice, the smart choice, and he knows that Hollander approved of it, but still. He doesn't like carrying that weight. He's not sure how Hollander does it, making decisions and accepting the consequences for them. Maybe that's why the poor guy always looks a bit like someone has just slapped him harshly across the face, and he's trying to figure out why. 

And so is it any wonder that Ilya is thinking about strength, and comparing the quiet, inevitable strength of Hollander to the stupidly performed, pathetically false strength of his father and brother and all of the men like them that Ilya has ever known. When Theriault and Marleau are gone, Hollander turns quietly to Rose and asks for her help in getting into the final suit, just in case. His face is blank, his eyes steady, but Ilya feels those memories of Hollander's terror so acutely, perhaps because they're so newly returned to him that it feels like they happened only yesterday. And now Hollander is really going to go out on a spacewalk, in only this stupid gold spacesuit?

And the other memories, the gap-filling memories, have been trickling in, all this time, so he knows they didn’t have just the two conversations about Hollander's fear of space. It was months of hooking up and spending their more public moments chatting, becoming friends around the frankly insane sex they were having, and Hollander revealing more and more pieces of himself, presenting little morsels of information so casually, as if they were not precious things that Ilya hoarded to himself. Because of course Ilya hoarded them, because looking back on it now, it seems obvious that their relationship was probably never truly casual—at least, not for him.

For Hollander? Maybe. It’s hard to tell, looking back on it. Hollander was always so good at following the rules they laid out for themselves. He was resistant to staying longer than the few minutes it took to come down, unless they were in a hotel room. He was like that about everything in his life, though, so it wasn’t like Ilya took it personally. Hollander was just a rule-follower, someone who liked structure, and who didn’t always understand sarcasm very well, despite constantly employing it himself, and Ilya had been charmed by that, even if he had maybe also, a little bit, been annoyed, because Hollander’s way of holding himself separate made him nearly impossible to get a real read on. 

But Hollander, as the first project went on, he’d gotten more open about some things, had opened up to Ilya about the kind of pressure he felt he was under from everyone on the project. He was open about his anxiety. A little ashamed, maybe, but open. He always smiled when he talked about it, like it was an unfortunate quirk he had come to terms with, like Ilya used to talk about his moles, as a child, before he realized that there were people who found them hot. As Hollander got more comfortable with Ilya, he would sometimes talk through his fucking exhausting thought process, and it always made Ilya feel sorry at the thought of how difficult it must be to exist like that. It reminded him unfortunately of how he felt around his father, and that was bad enough when he visited a few times a week, when he was home. He couldn't fathom feeling like that all the time. 

And so Ilya steps up to help Rose and Hollander with the suit, and he's thinking about how fucking strong Hollander must be, because he’s remembering all the things that Hollander has said to him about this shit.

I hate feeling trapped. It makes me feel like I can't breathe.

I hate being in small spaces, unless it's a small space I've chosen, I guess. I like being constricted sometimes, like if someone is holding me really tightly, but if it's not someone or something I want, I kind of want to crawl out of my skin. 

Maybe that's stupid. 

I'm afraid of the vacuum of space, about what would happen to me. Do you know what happens to a body out there? And there are so many accidents that could happen. And one little tear in your suit and you'd be fucked. 

And yet here he is, preparing to get even closer to the vacuum. How had he even gotten on the ship in the first place? How had he ever been chosen for this mission? Who let him go to the sun? This isn’t where he should be. He’s afraid, isn’t he? Why didn’t somebody stop him? Why isn’t anyone stopping him now? 

Rose moves to the equipment panel on the wall to run the diagnostic tests. Hollander is still half in his suit, looking pale and sweaty because the climate control is one of the things Rose is going to be testing. Ilya remembers, suddenly, every little step that must be undertaken to make sure these suits are safe and ready to be used. It's not like the other memories have been, like replays of his greatest hits. This is just knowledge that suddenly reappears in his brain just as he has cause to want it. 

He steps forward and grabs a sweatband out of the box on the wall, and he approaches Hollander, who looks startled by Ilya's sudden appearance. He leans his head forward, though, eyes lowering, and Ilya feels a surge of sense memory, a slideshow of Hollander bowing his head forward like this a dozen times, so trusting as he sinks to his knees for Ilya. He's usually smiling at least a little in those memories, but he's not smiling now, so Ilya doesn't have to get too wrapped up in it. He pulls the sweatband around Hollander's head and uses it to push Hollander's hair out of his face. 

He finds the wire for the microphone where it's supposed to be, tucked against the front of the collar, just below where the helmet will connect. The helmet gapes open, the back of it still attached to its holder on the wall so that the suit stays steady until Hollander is fully inside. Ilya has always thought that these silly suits look like cartoon bears or lions with their helmets open, and he thinks it looks like a lion right now, especially, with Hollander so scared but prepared to go out there anyway. 

Ilya has to lean close to maneuver the microphone wires into the correct place, his arm reaching around Hollander's head, touching it briefly, like he's trying to reassure him without being too obvious about it. Hollander is totally still, his breathing rabbit fast. Ilya feels sick for him. He doesn't know how to handle it. 

When he finally gets the wire around the back of the suit and pulls the mic into the proper slot near the top of the helmet, he finds that Hollander's eyes are squeezed shut.

“Hey,” Ilya hisses, before he can stop himself. Hollander's eyes open, blinking a few times. This close, they're even more beautiful than Ilya has been slowly remembering, and his stomach flutters at the sight of them, though maybe ‘flutters’ is too sanitized a word. It feels instead like his stomach is clawing at itself. “I can go instead, if you want.”

Hollander looks surprised by the offer, then confused, then blank, his expression wiped clean.

“I can handle it,” he says. Then, excruciatingly polite, “thank you. But you’re too important to the mission. We can’t risk you.” 

“But we can risk you? Mr. Does Everything?” 

“Yes,” Hollander answers, like it’s obvious. Ilya curses under his breath in Russian, forgetting for a second that Hollander probably knows what he’s saying. 

“I don’t understand why you think you have to martyr yourself,” he mutters in English, after a bunch of colorful Russian that does seem to be making the furrow between Hollander’s brows ease into something that’s at least approaching a smile. The smile darts back behind the blankness after hearing the English, though. 

“Martyr myself,” he says, scoffing.

“What, you think I don’t know these words?” 

“I know you know those words. I’m not the one who…” He sighs, twists his head a little, like he’s stretching his neck. He doesn’t finish his sentence, and Ilya can’t think of how to force it out of him, because Hollander has this mulishly stubborn look on his face, and Ilya knows it will be impossible to get him to speak if he doesn’t want to. 

Ilya’s hands are already moving to the next step, wiping a cleaning pad over the small bar of thick glass that will be Hollander's only real view of the world outside his suit. There's a camera on the front of the helmet, and a screen that Hollander can pull up with a control that he will work with his mouth, but in the case of equipment failure, the designers of the suits correctly figured they should have some way to ensure that someone wearing it could still fucking see. 

It's not a very big faceplate, though. Even Ilya feels uncomfortable, thinking of this helmet coming down over his head and trapping him inside. He can't imagine what Hollander feels, in part because Hollander is doing such a very good job of packing it away. Ilya didn't see him take any more pills, but maybe he did. 

Another reason to panic. Another thing to fear. 

He puts the cleaning pad in the recycler and moves on to the checks on the inside of the suit. Rose is reading off the numbers from the screen on the wall, but Ilya listens to her tone more than he’s listening to the actual words, because she sounds placidly pleased with all of them. Pike is still reporting progress over the intercom; it seems like they’ve managed to fix the first panel, and are moving on to the second. That’s good. Maybe Hollander won’t have to go out at all. 

The suit lights up as Ilya activates it in pieces. He makes Hollander move one arm, and then the other. He makes him move his legs. Hollander responds to his direction with the wide-eyed look of someone who’s barely clinging to his sanity. Ilya can’t look at his eyes for too long, because he’s remembering all the times he told Hollander what to do in a much nicer context, and how Hollander always responded so beautifully then, too, his eyes half-lidded with pleasure, and not this visible distress.

“We’re good to go on our end,” Rose says. “Should we seal the helmet now or wait?” 

She asks it gently enough, but Hollander bristles, probably at the implication that he might not want to be sealed pointlessly into a metal box. 

“We do it now,” he says. Rose’s lips twist in an unhappy expression, and she flicks her eyes to Ilya as if expecting him to argue. He shrugs; Hollander can do what he wants. Ilya thinks it’s stupid of him to pretend not to be afraid, but Ilya has pretended not to be afraid this whole time, so he can hardly be an asshole about it.

“Necklace has to come off,” Rose says quietly. “You’ll have magboots, but it’ll still be zero G.” She starts moving across the airlock, and Ilya reaches for Hollander’s throat without thinking, just trying to make things easier. He can see the gold chain tucked into Hollander’s white t-shirt, now that he knows to look for it. 

“Don’t,” Hollander breathes suddenly, jerking back, like he thinks Ilya is going to try and strangle him. “Rose?” 

“Yeah, okay. I got it, big guy, relax,” Rose says, laughing a little, though her voice is tense. She grimaces apologetically at Ilya as she steps around him, and Ilya pulls his hands away, annoyed. Rose blocks his view of Hollander’s face as she eases the necklace over his head, and she tucks the necklace into the pocket of her jumpsuit before Ilya can get a good look at it.

He and Rose finish their final checks, and then they step back, and Hollander activates the helmet. It's sickening to watch Hollander’s face disappear behind the thick black plate. He could probably see Hollander’s eyes if he got close enough, peered well enough to see through the glass, but he doesn’t bother, because now he’s angry all over again. Angry with Hollander for ghosting him, and angry with him for acting like Ilya was some kind of predator when he kissed him, and angry with Hollander for doing this even though everyone knows he’s fucking terrified. He’s angry with Galina for giving out those pills and giving Hollander unsupervised access to them. Doesn’t she know that people can take too many? Doesn’t she know that Hollander is the exact kind of person who actually will take too many pills by accident because he’s too busy trying to prove something to someone? 

He makes sure that Rose is all set, asking with a lifted hand and a questioning eyebrow. She seems surprised, but she nods, and so Ilya leaves, and he goes to the cockpit to lean in the doorway and pretend to not be worried about stupid fucking Hollander, and he tries not to think too much about the way Hollander had flinched away from his attempted touch.

In the cockpit, they have camera views from Marleau and Theriault both pulled up on the screen. Marleau is Marleau, and is keeping up a steady stream of yapping that Ilya smiles a little to hear. He still doesn’t remember any of Marleau from before, so he must have met him during the training for this second attempt at saving the world, but Marleau has the shape of a friend in his memory, probably because of stuff like this. Theriault is giving him nothing, barely grunting in response to all of Marleau’s chatter, but that doesn’t seem to bother him. Ilya remembers being like that, before, on Earth. Loud and obnoxious even in the face of stoicism. He feels like he hasn’t been like that since he woke up again, but he doesn’t think anyone can blame him. 

The second shield panel is apparently going down a little harder than the first one. Ilya stews over it, watches the clock. Hunter is a good person to run point on communication between the team inside and the team outside, because he’s the only one who seems actually calm. Galina, even, is plainly nervous, worrying at the zipper on one of her pockets. Pike is probably going to end up on some of her stronger drugs if he doesn’t stop pacing. Kent is scowling his usual scowl, but he’s also running his fingers through his hair anxiously every so often, so apparently even this dickhead is capable of nervousness and concern for his fellow man, or whatever. 

Ilya feels a terror that threatens to consume him, and he finds his hands curled in front of him into an almost claw-like shape before he forces himself to straighten them out. He moves around the back of the cockpit anxiously, not wanting to get too close to the action. He ends up near what must be Hollander’s workstation, because his book and glasses are sitting there. Ilya picks the book up, turns it over in his hands to read the back. It’s something he wouldn’t have ever pictured Hollander reading, some massive fantasy novel. Then again, if Hollander has been up here for sixteen months in space, awake, while most of the rest of the ship slept, he probably brought the biggest books on purpose. Ilya has this notion that Hollander prefers reading on paper, like a snob, though he’s not sure if that’s a half-remembered memory or just a vibe he’s imagining. 

He puts the book back down and freezes when he sees the beanbag that has apparently been hidden behind it. It can’t be the same one, can it? He picks it up, feels the familiar weight of it. He remembers Hollander handing it to him with a cheeky smile. He remembers Yuna Hollander putting it on his desk. Why does Hollander have it now? It has to be the same one. Some of the color has leeched away, the blue and green fading to the original dusty tan of the fibers, like someone has been holding it often. Did he give it back to Hollander at one point? Did Hollander take it back? Now that he’s looking at it, he’s realizing that he searched for it, that first day, in his belongings. Not with any intention, but just as something that his body remembered holding and squeezing when he was stressed, and something that he went looking for, hopeful. Something he couldn’t find. 

He hates this shit. Not remembering. He hates not being himself. All people are is a collection of memories of their lived experiences, and Ilya is still years away from the person he should be, and every sign he gets that there are things beyond his understanding is making him feel lost, hunted. It makes him feel like his fucking father, and he hates it. 

He tucks the hacky sack into his pocket, feeling petty as he does it. 

Marleau curses loudly, suddenly, and then Theriault is cursing, too. Ilya moves back into the center of the cockpit, squeezing his fingers around the miniature world in his pocket, happy to have something to worry at with his fingers.

It’s difficult to tell what’s going on out there, at first. Each screen contains two images: the exterior view of what each man is looking at, and then an inset view of their faces. Both men are sweaty, but Marleau looks like he’s in pain, grimacing harshly. 

“You’re okay. You’re okay. Can you move the leg?” Hunter’s calm voice is even more infuriating when Ilya is starting to panic. 

“Yeah, shit. I can move it. It just fucking hurts.” Marleau’s voice is growled out, tense. 

“Okay. Hollander?” 

“On it,” comes Hollander’s voice. 

“Exiting the airlock now,” replies Rose. 

No, wait, are they actually sending Hollander out there? Fuck. They can’t do that to him. 

“He…” Ilya starts, but his voice is quiet, and he cuts it off ruthlessly. He doesn’t make those kinds of decisions. He doesn’t know Hollander like that. He doesn’t know Hollander at all anymore. 

He squeezes the beanbag willfully, grounding himself, because he can’t let himself say anything else, because it’s not his place. The screen shifts around, makes Marleau and Theriault’s views smaller so it can add Hollander as he stands in the airlock. Ilya watches the tiny inset image of his blank expression, his sweaty face. He doesn’t look afraid, but Ilya knows how little that actually means, when it comes to Hollander. He’s remembering the way Hollander vaporized from his life, was hospitalized, came back looking thinner and paler and more washed out, like something had been taken from him, like his fear had had a vampiric effect on him. Ilya isn’t sure how Hollander has gotten away with it for so long. How is it that no one else thinks he’s as obvious as Ilya does? How is it that no one managed to protect him from himself and convince him to stay behind? 

The airlock door opens, and Hollander takes one massive, watery breath, and then he’s drifting out into space, attached by a single tether. Ilya closes his eyes and lowers his face to his chest. He tugs his necklace out of his shirt and holds it in his fist for a second, but the feeling is all wrong, and he drops it in frustration, and he squeezes the stupid fucking hacky sack instead. 

“Heading to you now. Commander, you’re free to move on to the next panel,” Hollander says, and then he’s magnetizing his boots to the shield, and he’s clomping his way across the expanse of it to approach Marleau. 

He’s moving so slowly, and Pike is watching the countdown clock, which is very helpfully blinking at them from the front of the cockpit. Ilya finds himself squatting down in his little corner, holding his mother’s cross up to his mouth as he watches. Rose enters the room and brushes her fingers through his hair in a surprisingly gentle gesture, like an unthinking attempted comfort as she walks past, though when he looks up and meets her eye, she looks startled by her own move, and she smiles apologetically, and it just makes his heart sink again for some reason he can’t figure out. 

Hollander makes his way to where Marleau is still crouched by the second shield. Through Hollander’s eyes, Ilya can finally see that Marleau’s suit has malfunctioned, leaving him stuck, his leg half-bent, unable to straighten out. 

“I can’t move it. It fucking hurts,” Marleau says, when Hollander asks. “It’s like it’s being squeezed or something, fuck. I don’t know.” 

“Hunter?” 

“Got it,” Hunter says, leaving his post by the communicator and heading back towards the airlock. Hollander unclips his own tether and clips it to Marleau. 

“He’ll drag you in and get you out of the suit, okay?” Hollander asks. Marleau’s eyes are closed, tense with pain, and he nods. Ilya knows that they want to move as quickly as possible, because the suit is still holding for now, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to hold forever, but still it feels like things are moving too fast. He wonders if he’s supposed to be doing anything to help.

“Okay, Shane, I’m with you,” Rose says, stepping up when no one else does. “Commander, you’re nearing the third panel. You have thirty minutes.” 

That doesn’t seem like very much time at all. So much time was lost on getting them into those fucking suits. How much will they need to close the remaining panels and get back? Rose doesn’t sound concerned, but maybe she’s just a better actress than he expects. Ilya moves closer, squinting at Theriault’s screen. The commander looks unbothered, unhurried, his heavy gloves manipulating the inner workings of the shield panel like it’s second nature. No wonder he’s the one who went out there; clearly, he knows what he’s doing. 

On the other screen, Marleau is being pulled into the airlock by the tether. Hollander has started working on the second panel. He looks so calm. Ilya knows he isn’t, because Ilya can see the health stats displayed on the little screen below the camera feeds, and he can see how fucking fast Hollander’s heart is beating. 

Rose is watching his stats too, and then going back to Theriault’s, and then back to Hollander’s again. She looks up at the clock, and she bites her lip. Pike looks like if someone could spontaneously die of guilt, he would, even though Ilya doesn’t think it’s necessarily all his fault. Theriault was supposed to check and approve his work, which is another reason why Theriault is the one out there; he knows he’s to blame just as much as Pike. Still, Ilya understands. It’s hard not to blame yourself for these things, and it’s Hollander out there. Hollander. He feels sick with the guilt of it, himself, though he keeps trying to remind himself it's not his fault Hollander was stupid enough to get selected for this mission a second time.

Marleau is flat on his back in the airlock now that it has been pressurized, and Hunter enters to help him out of the suit. The leg of it is awkwardly bent inward, though it’s unclear how it actually happened. Did he get it stuck on something in the inner workings of the panel? 

“Second shield done,” Hollander says suddenly. Of course he has managed to complete his shield on his own, faster than Theriault. Theriault gives a little huff of a laugh under his breath, clearly thinking the same thing, but there is something distant and bitter about it that Ilya understands immediately, though maybe he wishes he didn’t. Ilya has always been such a fatalistic person, about everything. Always certain that things aren’t going to work out in his favor. Always bitterly annoyed whenever he reaches out for any good thing and then has his hand slapped away.

“Head back to the airlock, Hollander,” Theriault says, and the cockpit explodes with sound, people talking over each other, but Ilya doesn’t join them, because Ilya understands. 

They have thirteen minutes now. Hollander would be lucky if he made it out to Theriault in that time at all, and he probably wouldn’t even get a chance to help, if he did. He and Theriault would both fry out there pointlessly. If Theriault isn’t able to fix the shield in the next thirteen minutes, they’ll all be fucked anyway, but sending Hollander back at least gives Hollander a chance if Theriault can get it done.

“No,” Hollander says. “That’s not…” 

“Shane, get back inside,” Ilya says loudly, surprising himself. 

“That’s an order,” Theriault agrees.

“Shane,” Rose says. Kent is saying something else, and Galina is talking over him, and Ilya squeezes, squeezes, squeezes the beanbag in his pocket, and Shane stands there, frozen, wasting time, before he finally shuts his eyes, and nods, and turns back. 

“Ship returning to original orientation,” the ship announces, suddenly. Rose frowns at the screen. 

“What?” she asks. “No. Override.” 

“Threat to ship imminent. Returning to original orientation.” 

“Shane, run,” Rose says. “Commander…” 

“I heard it,” Theriault says, unbothered. He curses as he fails to make the right connection again. 

“Explain, computer, please,” Galina says, in her calm voice, only a little fucked up with panic. “What is the threat to the ship?” 

“Fire in the oxygen garden,” the computer relays, sounding unfairly unbothered by something that makes everyone else’s blood run cold. Rose scrambles with the feeds and pulls up a view of her oxygen garden. There is a bright light obscuring the lens, and Ilya understands immediately. 

Pike angled the shield so they would have more time to fix the panels, but they’re running out of that extra time now, and Pike hadn’t considered that the sun beginning to peak around Mercury would be a problem. He would have expected, like any of them would have expected, that it would only be the full force of the sun that would be problematic. Not a few stray, early rays.

Except, of course, the beams are coming through the window of the oxygen garden, because the oxygen garden windows are tilted perfectly at this new angle to intercept them, and the light is being refracted somewhere that isn’t entirely visible in the video feed. 

It’s like when fucked up children burn ants under magnifying glasses; the spot of sun is lasering through the window and burning up the leaves of a tomato plant, sending little tendrils of smoke into the air. 

As they watch, something happens, a bright flare of explosive light. The beam must have hit something more volatile. Fertilizer? An oxygen tank?

“Oh fuck,” Rose breathes. “Fuck! Kent! With me!” 

The two of them take off, and Ilya steps up to the communicator. 

“Do not turn the ship, computer,” he demands. 

“Fire in the oxygen garden,” the ship returns, pleasantly. 

“Yes, fuck, no shit! We know! Do not turn the ship. If you turn the ship now, we all die.” 

“Fire in the oxygen garden,” the ship replies, horrible and smug. 

Chapter End Notes

I am not beating the idiot allegations with the vague-ass explanations for things in this chapter.

Also, 1) the suits in Sunshine really do look like silly gummy bear lions when they're open, imo, and they are of a very silly design, so I had to keep them.
2) I had Theriault in the commander role from the beginning, but during my recent rewatch of Sunshine, I was like, damn, the captain is actually really hot in this. Should I make the commander Wiebe instead? Because I felt too guilty making someone so hot into Theriault, but I ultimately decided to leave it as it was lmao

Chapter 5

Chapter Notes

This chapter is a bit shorter than the others, but I wanted to end it in a place between Big Events, since I won't have a chance to post more chapters until later tonight! I'm still not exactly sure how many chapters there will end up being, but I would guess 8/9? I'm hoping to have the whole thing done by the end of the weekend!

Then

“There you are,” Ilya says. Hollander looks over his shoulder, startled, like he’s been caught doing something more damning than just watching out the window as a bunch of people scurry around, unpacking their shit. Hollander has been given an office, this time. It’s weird that he wasn’t given an office last time, probably, but he was really only a glorified poster boy, then. Now, he has been given actual decision-making power, which he probably hates, unless he has become a completely different person since they last saw each other.

“You were looking for me?” Hollander asks. Ilya considers lying, but only for a second; he’s looking for Hollander specifically to apologize for being an asshole, which will be difficult if he immediately starts being a fucking asshole about it. 

“Yes,” he says. Hollander turns around more fully, brow slightly furrowed. Apparently he expected Ilya to be a fucking asshole, too. 

“Oh. Settling in okay?” 

“What is this? What are you doing? This blank-faced thing.” 

“That’s just how I look.” 

“No, it’s not. You’re doing something very strange. Look, can you please just turn it off, whatever it is? I want to talk to you.” 

Hollander’s face does a few things before it finally settles on exhausted bewilderment, which feels real, at least, and it makes Ilya feel better. He gestures at Hollander’s desk, and Hollander sits warily. 

“If you need something for the project, you can…” 

“Shush, Hollander, please. Shut up. I am going to do something I almost never do, and it is going to be very annoying for me, so please.” Ilya takes a sharp breath, closes his eyes, and says, “I’m sorry. I was an asshole.” 

He opens his eyes again, half-smiling, to find that Hollander is frowning at him. 

“What? When?” 

“When you thought I was serious about speaking to your mother?” 

“Oh. Oh. Jesus. I’m…you weren’t?” Hollander huffs in irritation. “I’m not, uh, always the best at picking up on what people are thinking. I was pretty sure you were serious, though.” 

“Yes, clearly. I wasn’t. I was being an asshole for no reason. Well, not no reason. You disappeared on me. I was hurt. But I was being an asshole then, too, so I get it, I guess.” 

“Oh.” 

“I think maybe the ten million unanswered apologies I sent you should have told you that, though, so you can’t pretend you didn’t understand that.” 

“No, uh. That one, I got. Kind of. I was not doing great? Spiraling, maybe. I’m still maybe…well, it’s not important. Sorry, I guess. If you need that.” 

“If I need that,” Ilya mocks gently, and he’s gratified when Hollander’s face scrunches up with familiar kittenish annoyance. Ilya has always adored that face, which was fortunate, because he saw it a lot, back when they were fucking. 

“Well, I don’t know. I was an asshole too, I guess. 

“Okay, so we are both assholes. Great. Want to still fuck?” 

Hollander’s expression goes even more incredulous, and he looks behind Ilya, as if Ilya would have forgotten to shut the door behind him for this conversation. 

“I mean, yeah, I guess,” he says, as if exhausted, and it makes Ilya laugh. “You want that? Seriously?” 

“Hollander, you are the hottest person on the planet. Of course I want that.” That doesn’t feel like enough, and he hates it. Hates that he wants to say more. “I did, actually, feel very sorry when you left, and when you would not text me back. I missed you. Okay? Is that okay?” 

“What? I mean, yeah, obviously. I missed you too. I thought…I figured…” 

“I was mean to you,” Ilya suggests. “Because I was angry, and upset, and maybe a little afraid that you would leave and I would never see you again. I wanted to be on the ship, and I wanted us to be up there together, and I was angry that you were chosen over me, and so I said shitty things to you. That is a constant problem for me: saying things I don’t mean to try and make people angry when they hurt me. A defensive thing, I don’t know. I have to work on it. Nothing I said was because I do not like you.” 

Hollander looks surprised by that comment, and a little gratified, like it’s something he’s been wanting to hear. 

“Oh,” he says. “Okay. Uh, so I guess this is where I say that I overthink everything? Like, all the time. And I assume the worst. And when I’m anxious about something, I just sort of leave?” 

Ilya thinks of Hollander phasing out of existence from his doorway, like he’d literally bent space and time to escape the awkwardness of thinking he wasn't wanted. 

“Yes, okay,” Ilya says with a strained laugh. “I noticed.” 

“So just, like, I guess we both work on that? On saying what we actually mean, and on not assuming the worst? If we’re going to fuck.” 

“Okay, yes. I would promise a lot more difficult things to fuck you again, Hollander. I’m so serious. So I promise I will not lash out and say shitty things when I'm scared or annoyed, and you promise you will not just fucking disappear on me.” 

Hollander smiles genuinely for the first time, and he looks really pleased, as if he has been offered something more precious than just an old hookup’s dick. 

“I can promise that,” he says, sounding relieved. Seriously, how are you settling in?” he asks. 

“What? You want to ask me this? How about I suck your dick under that desk instead?” 

“So, ‘I’m settling in well’, is the answer, apparently,” Hollander replies, just a bit sassy in the way he gets sometimes, and Ilya laughs at him, relieved to hear it. 

“I really have missed you, you know,” he says, but he tries to sound sexy when he says it, and not like he’s showing some part of his heart. “You’re very funny.” 

“Am I? I think you’re the only one who says that.” 

“Ah, I don’t know. I heard that pretty botanist calling you funny.” 

“Oh my god,” Hollander sighs. “Don’t.” 

“Don’t what? Talk about the pretty botanist?” 

“Her name is Rose…” 

“No. It can’t be. She's a botanist. That’s ridiculous.” 

“I know, but she is. And we fooled around exactly once before I realized I’m definitely not, uh. Even slightly straight.” 

“Does she know that?” 

“She’s my best friend. Don’t be a dick.” 

Ilya considers pushing it, because he is a dick, but he’s been moving slowly towards Hollander’s desk this entire time, and now he’s reached it, and so he just leans forward and grips the armrests of Hollander’s chair, and he turns him slightly to face him, and he sinks to his knees smoothly. 

“I just want to make sure I’m not getting in the way of anything.” 

“You’re not,” Hollander says quickly, breathlessly. “You’re the…the only person I could really think about.” 

Well, that unfortunately goes straight to Ilya’s cock, and even more unfortunately his heart, because he's so predictable. 

“Tell me more about that,” he demands. “About how no one else measures up.” 

“Okay,” Hollander replies, eyes wide and guileless. Ilya feels a bit like how he feels when he returns home after a long and grueling day and slips into a hot shower. That feeling of being in a safe place and being warm and cared for, knowing what to expect, knowing that for at least the next couple of minutes, he will be feeling nothing but blissful comfort.

Now

Ilya, for some reason, is the only person remaining in the cockpit by the end of it, which seems like a massive mistake, because he is coordinating a thousand different things, and he’s the only one whose brain is still fucking broken.

But he must have some muscle memory still working for him, because he manages. He argues with the computer, forcibly takes back the controls when it tries to turn the ship. There would be no point turning the ship back to protect the oxygen garden, because the fire has very much already started, but the ship is a stupid fucking computer who doesn’t understand that until he enters three thousand manual overrides and finally gets it to give up, at least temporarily. Ilya blocks off the garden module from the others so that the smoke will not get through the vents and so their now-precious oxygen won’t continue stoking the fire, and he warns Kent and Rose that he has done that, and that they won’t have long in the garden to try and contain the fire before he pulls them out and floods the entire room with oxygen to burn the fire out before it takes out the entire ship.

Marleau is with Hunter, getting checked out, and Pike and Galina are helping. Theriault is still fucking working on his shield. They only have a few minutes, but Ilya is surprisingly calm. Knowing that it might all be over soon really isn’t as scary as he was expecting. He feels sorry for it. Sorry that they failed, that the earth will die without them. But it feels like something that’s happening far away, to someone else.

Theriault asks for help identifying one of the wires, because sweat is dripping into his eyes, and he can’t see, and so Ilya helps him. Theriault thanks him in his distant way, and Ilya thinks that they are having very similar reactions. He regrets not liking Theriault very much since he woke up. He hopes he doesn’t unlock memories of the man being super nice and friendly anytime soon. He feels sorry enough. 

Finally, finally, Theriault is able to fix the panel, and it begins to lower itself. Theriault will not make it back in time; Ilya can only continue to fight the computer for another minute or so before it decides he’s a fucking moron and takes controls back. Even if he could override the computer, it would mean risking all of their lives, because the full force of the sun will be upon them soon, and so they need to be back in the original orientation, and he knows that. He hates it, though. Hates that he’s holding the power to try and buy a man some more time and knowing that he can’t use it. He has always loathed decisions like this. Choosing lives over other lives, even though he of all people understands the math of it. 

Hollander has made it to the edge of the shield, but he lingers, turns back to look at Theriault, and his expression is so sad, so afraid. Like he’s thinking that it should be him out there, instead. Him about to fry in the full glare of the sun’s light. 

“Solnyshko, please,” Ilya says into his private channel, and Hollander jolts with surprise, and then nods, swallows heavily. 

“Returning to airlock,” he says, and he doesn’t say anything else. 

Rose and Kent are able to put out the fire in the oxygen garden, but thirty percent of their plants are burned completely before they get there, and roughly sixty percent have taken at least some damage. They’re both injured with burns, Rose more than Kent, so Hunter has suddenly found himself with quite a lot to do. Marleau’s leg is a more typical crush injury, and it will have him off his feet for a while, which he accepts with the kind of jovial good grace with which he probably accepts every bad thing that happens to him. No one has had the heart to talk about Theriault yet, but Ilya keeps hearing the commander’s short, dying gasp on a loop in his mind. 

Ilya is the one who helps Hollander out of his suit when Hollander finally makes it back to the airlock. They apparently aren’t anything to each other anymore—that has been made very clear to Ilya, at this point—but it’s difficult for Ilya, not being able to reach for Hollander with the same gentleness he remembers being allowed on Earth. He is still mentally in Hollander’s office, pleased and relieved to be allowed to touch Hollander again after so long apart, having promised to be more clear with Hollander to avoid driving him away again. Did he fuck that up, somehow? Is that why they’re not anything anymore? Was Ilya unable to help his nature?

Hollander is shaky and exhausted in the airlock, sweat-covered. Ilya tends to him carefully, afraid at first that Hollander is going to bristle and pull away the way he has every time Ilya has gotten close, but now, apparently, Hollander is too tired and too grief-stricken for that. With his hands still in the gloves of the suit, he can’t wipe away his tears before Ilya sees them, and Ilya almost wants to apologize for the intrusion. He uses the sleeves of his suit to wipe them away instead, and Hollander nods grimly in thanks, closing his eyes. 

“Okay?” Ilya asks. “Do you need one of your pills?” 

He doesn't quite want to offer one of Hollander's mysterious little medicines, but he supposes he will, if Hollander needs it. He will just try very hard to remember that Hollander is not his mother. Hollander's eyes open again, surprised. 

“I wouldn't ask you to do that,” he says, and Ilya's stomach sinks and sinks. 

“Oh,” he says. “You know.”

“Yeah,” Hollander sighs. “I know. Sorry. I don't need anything, sorry. Thank you. Except to never go out there again.”

“Okay,” Ilya says, laughing, though he doesn't want to. “Next time, it will be me, okay?”

“Okay,” Hollander agrees, almost smiling back at him. 

Ilya wants to push, because that's who he is at his core. He knows it, even though he doesn't even know himself completely yet. He wants to beg Hollander for answers, because he fucking hates this, this not knowing. He can't take the back and forth between memories like this. I cannot have another fucking memory of you coming hands free on my cock and then coming back to now and you flinch every time I look at you. I cannot handle this. But this would certainly be the worst time to ask, and so he doesn't. 

He helps Hollander out of the suit. Hollander is disgusting with sweat, and Ilya is unsurprised when he immediately wants to shower. He meets them all in the living space soon after, looking more put together. Everyone knows he's in charge now, and he looks faintly sick about it. 

“Report,” he says.

The report boils down to everything being fairly shit, but not as bad as it could have been, because of Theriault and Marleau and Hollander. Rose is weepy over the loss of so much of the oxygen garden, and she's concerned, too, about the numbers. She has run multiple scenarios—best case, worst case, most likely—and cannot promise that the remaining plants will produce enough oxygen to get them to their separation point, and only the very best scenario will allow them to get home again on the oxygen reserves they have left. Hollander looks more settled the longer this talk goes, nodding along. 

“So there's no choice,” he says, like it’s the answer he’s been looking for. “We have to keep going to the Voyageur.”

Kent swears under his breath, and Hunter doesn't exactly look pleased, but everyone agrees, and Hollander breathes out a long, stressed-out breath, but he doesn't reach for his pills. He touches his chain around his neck, instead. 

Then

“Hollander, holy shit, if the world really knew who was going to save their dying sun…”

“Fuck off,” Hollander groans, laughing, resting his face on Ilya's thigh. Considering he just sucked Ilya's soul out through his dick, he looks unruffled, like it's just another day to him. Ilya is always faintly jealous of Hollander's ability to compartmentalize even in this. Ilya gets sweaty and red-faced and always looks obvious, whenever they sneak out of whatever office or supply closet they have been fooling around in like teenagers, but Hollander always looks so put-together, as if he hasn't just literally been crying on it. 

“They would know they were in good hands. You're good at everything. It's disgusting.”

“Disgusting, is it?” Hollander asks beatifically. He turns his head a little so that his brown eyes meet Ilya's, and Ilya stifles what would have been a very embarrassing moan. 

“You're so fucking perfect,” he says instead, which might not be less humiliating, after all. Hollander looks cracked open by the praise, as always. Like Ilya has reached into his chest and squeezed his heart. He stands up from where he has been kneeling at Ilya's feet, and he pushes himself into a kiss, holding on to Ilya tightly. 

“You're perfect. You're the one who's going to save them. You're the smartest person I've ever met. It's insane how smart you are. It makes me feel like a fucking caveman.”

Ilya laughs at him, delighted by the almost annoyed stream of words. 

It has to end eventually, like it always does, because Hollander is meeting with some of their corporate sponsors, and Ilya is going to supervise the training of the astronauts who will be competing to see who will be in charge of his bomb in space. Ilya has made that a condition of coming back to the project; things are different now, and he needs to stay home and make sure that his father is cared for, and so there is no chance that he will be going on this mission. He was almost disappointed when the Hollanders agreed, because he knows that it would be his last chance to go to space, and it does feel a little sour, to give up yet another thing for a father who has never treated him well. But it’s not a question of what he wants. It's his duty, and he will do that duty, and someone else will get the glory.

The astronauts are fine, anyway. They're probably smarter than him. They pick up everything he teaches them with a speed that's admirable. There will be one main bomb expert on the ship, and one backup. The commander and his second in command will be trained in everything, but it is good to know that there will be at least two people on the mission who will be specifically trained in this. It makes him feel much less guilty for not being able to go. It's nice, sometimes, to feel needed, or irreplaceable, and maybe his ego would sort of prefer it if they begged him and said oh we need you so badly in space, Doctor Rozanov. No one else will be as good at pressing this button and setting off the bomb as you, but it's also good to know that he isn't going to ruin anything by staying behind. 

Now

“I just don't understand why I would have left,” Ilya mutters to Marleau. They've been working together in the oxygen garden for the last day, cleaning up the ashes, tending to the plants, while Rose and Kent work on the banged-up oxygen and water reclaimers, refitting the extra oxygen tanks to replace the ones that were damaged. Ilya feels a bit like a child set out of the way, in a place where they can't cause any problems, because the other available job had been running airlock checks with Hollander and Pike, and they clearly hadn't wanted him there. He's glad to sulk out of Hollander's view, if that's what Hollander wants, especially since Hollander has been even better, since Theriault’s death, at avoiding him. 

“You’ll remember in no time, dude,” Marleau says. If Marleau had been the one to lose his memories, he probably would have been totally fine with it. Completely chill. Might not have even noticed the memories were gone. Then again, maybe that's not fair; Marleau is smart enough that he was chosen to go on this mission. He just seems like an idiot, sometimes. 

“I keep getting flashes of shit that make no sense. I know that I had to stay on Earth to take care of my father, and yet here I am.”

“Maybe it's because your father fucking sucks, dude. You remember that, at least, right?”

“You met my father?”

“Yeah, once, and he was a fucking asshole. Thought I couldn't understand him chirping me in Russian even after I was training with like fifteen Russian engineers for half a year. Fucking dumbass. I thought Yuna Hollander was going to kill him. Like he was just a cop or whatever, right? Or like a fancy cop, I guess? Not nearly as important as he seemed to think. He made Hollander cry, bro. Like, that dude is the worst.”

“He's dead,” Ilya says. Marleau laughs. 

“Good. I mean, shit. Sorry, wow. That's so mean to say. But, like. Not sorry.”

“Eh, it's okay. He was an asshole. Still, motherfucker.”

Marleau laughs and sprays Ilya a bit with the bottle he has been using to clean the leaves, and unfortunately that makes Ilya glad for their friendship again. 

“Sorry for your loss, or whatever, if you want me to be polite about it.”

“Okay, whatever, but. He made Hollander cry? Really?”

“Eh, kind of. Not really my place to say. It was like angry crying, I guess. Hollander was a little drunk and a lot pissed off at the way your old man was talking to you. Told him to his face he was a piece of shit who was lucky he couldn't remember all the shit he was putting you through. Stormed out of the bar we were all chilling at. Got a standing ovation the next day and almost bit all our heads off. He was so embarrassed.” Marleau laughs at the memory. “Adorable.”

Ilya feels a flare of jealousy to hear Marleau describe his Hollander as adorable, even though he's sure it was true. 

“I wish I could remember that,” he mutters. 

“You will eventually. Just give it some time. You were so mad at Hollander. It has to come back.”

Mad at Hollander for yelling at his father? Yes, unfortunately, Ilya can imagine that. Maybe Hollander said something that implied too much about what they were to each other? That doesn't sound like Hollander; they were both careful about what they were doing, neither of them wanting people to think they were distracted. There were plenty of people hooking up on the project—it was literally a project to save the world. Of course people were fucking—but they were both very public, very important parts of that project, and they had been nervous about the fallout, especially with Ilya needing to go back to Russia when it was done. 

Or maybe it was just that Ilya was ashamed that Hollander felt like he needed to stand up for him. That feels more realistic, mostly because it's so pathetic. He probably would have been thinking that he was humiliated in front of his father, or maybe that his father had been humiliated, and either way, he would have been angry about that, even though his father never seemed to mind humiliating Ilya. Fucking reveled in it, usually.

Ilya remembers the fight with Hollander a few days later. It pops into his head, fully formed. He remembers his father's sneering contempt for everything about the project, and for Yuna Hollander at its head specifically. He remembers the shame of it, the immediate regret that he'd even agreed to bring his father to the project. To America in the first place, maybe. His father had been slipping more and more as the project went on, but he’d still been coherent enough that he had resented being packed away to a care home in the same city as the project headquarters, and so Ilya, in an apparent fit of madness, had agreed to show him around on one of his more lucid days. His father had belittled and talked down to him at every turn, maybe eager to get some sort of revenge, or maybe because he had always been an asshole, and the dementia hadn't made him any kinder.

He remembers the hot, spreading shame, the uncomfortable realization that everyone was going to know what kind of man his father was. Seeing the sympathetic, confused looks from Hollander and his mother. Seeing the baffled disgust from Marleau, and Rose, and his science team. Ilya's father valued only a very particular type of power, and he looked down on anyone who did not wield it, and so he hadn't even been embarrassed by his own lack of manners. He'd still been so arrogant, so disgustingly certain that he was above all of these fucking geniuses who were going to save the world. Ilya had been furious with himself for ever thinking it could be different. He always fell for it, with his father. Always reached back out, like he thought it was possible for his father to change.

He remembers Hollander coming up at the bar, trying to be friendly, trying to praise Ilya in that guileless, polite way he had. His Public Relations face. Ilya hated it, usually, and he’d hated it especially that day, because he knew that Hollander had been hiding his real feelings even from Ilya, and he hadn’t done that in so long. Ilya's father had, bizarrely, liked Hollander when they met earlier in the day. He was the one person Grigori would speak well of, maybe because Hollander's awkward manners made him seem more stoically masculine to someone who didn't know him. And so maybe that was why Hollander tried to come up and chat, tried to talk up Ilya, like he was doing Ilya a favor. Ilya had been pissed at him just for that, but he was furious when the conversation went sideways, like it was always going to, because Grigori did his favorite thing and started ruthlessly shit-talking Ilya while Ilya stood next to him, impassive, and then Hollander was looking so earnestly confused, like he thought maybe he was missing a joke. 

“I'm sorry, you're talking about Dr. Rozanov?” he asked, after a long string of insults from Grigori about how Ilya was a disappointment. He even gestured to Ilya, after, like he was sure there was some mistake. “Not your other son?”

The air had gone out of Ilya, then, and he tried to catch Hollander's eyes, tried to warn him off, but Hollander had suddenly become Yuna's son in a way he rarely was. 

“Ah, no,” Grigori had said with surprise, laughing a little. “Alexei is very different from Ilya.”

“Yes,” Hollander agreed. “From everything I've seen and heard, yeah. Very different. Dr. Rozanov is, of course, a genius, and is going to save the world, but you know that. That's why you're here.” 

Hollander, terrible at artiface usually, was smiling this polite little smile, and it should not have turned Ilya on the way it did, especially when it also made him so fucking furious, but Hollander always did weird shit to Ilya, and this was no exception.

“Hollander,” Ilya had replied, warningly. 

“Dr. Rozanov,” Hollander parroted back at him. 

“Ah, Ilya has always been a very studious boy. We had other hopes for him, of course. Hockey, first, but he gave up after his mother died. Could not handle the strain. And he can be very lazy.”

“Dr. Rozanov? Lazy? The man who invented the bomb that's going to restart the fucking sun?” 

“Hollander,” Ilya snapped. 

“Dr. Rozanov,” Hollander snapped back, without looking at him. To Grigori, he said. “I am sorry for your current…difficulties. It must not be easy. Maybe you’ll luck out and you can forget what a piece of shit you've been to your phenomenal fucking son and you can fool yourself into thinking you deserve everything he has given up for you.”

Unfortunately, lying in his bunk and staring at the ceiling, Ilya finds that he is half hard about the memory. Hollander's red eyes, his embarrassed scoff as he turned and fled the bar. He even remembers Marleau's open-mouthed expression of joy. 

“Fuck, Hollander,” Ilya sighs to the ceiling, and then he jerks himself off about it, only a little ashamed. 

Chapter 6

Chapter Notes

Still loving all the theories and comments! It's funny, in the past, I used to get really nervous about people theorizing about where I was going with something, because I would inevitably end up going "oh, damn....that's a better idea. well, it's too late now!" but I think I may have finally killed my imposter syndrome, because I keep going "oh man, that's a great idea!" with sheer delight and without any accompanying insecurity, and it's a lot of fun!

anyway, sooooo many of you were right about this, and i LOVE that, genuinely

Hollander is stoic the next morning, command appearing to sit on him easily, though that’s likely massive amounts of bullshit. 

Ilya can remember, now, the blistering fury, and the coldness with which he’d avoided Hollander for days after that blow-up with his father. He remembers his father’s anger dissolving into confusion as Ilya drove him back to his stupidly expensive care home. He remembers the relief that his father would not remember being so humiliated by someone he would consider an inferior. 

He remembers hating himself for giving his father even that amount of consideration. 

He feels a bit stupid for his anger with Hollander now, but maybe that's just because his father is dead, and Ilya is no longer even on Earth, and he doesn't have to feel that mingled cocktail of duty and fear and shame anymore. It weighed him down, on Earth. Stones tied to his ankles, sinking him every time he tried to swim. Like he’d been molded from clay in his childhood to be deferent to his father and brother, to respect their opinions above all others, and it was only in moments he stole away from them that he could remember what it meant to be himself. 

His blind obedience and loyalty to his father and also his anger with Hollander all feel very far away from him now, like something that happened to someone else. Now that the memory of his anger is back, he's mostly angry with himself for not fucking Hollander about it immediately. Hollander dropped all his careful politeness for Ilya’s sake, called Ilya’s personal demon a piece of shit while insisting on calling Ilya Doctor Rozanov in that steel-strong voice Ilya likes so much, and then doubled and tripled down even when Ilya tried to stop him. Why had Ilya given up the prime opportunity to reward him for that kind of insane display for the sake of sulking unattractively for three whole days before finally forgiving Hollander—without apology, of course, because Hollander had steadfastly refused to apologize, his brows furrowed and his face set in stubborn anger, like he was desperate to prove to Ilya that he was worth something, even if it meant that Ilya would never fuck him again.

 Ilya has to wonder if that moment with Hollander had anything to do with why he signed up for the mission despite his promise to Alexei. He's been wondering how he managed to finally break away, what gave him the strength to stop giving up everything for a family that does not want him. It would make sense, he thinks, if it was Hollander. If Hollander gave him the strength just by being so strong himself. Maybe Ilya saw Hollander signing up for the mission again, despite how fucking stupid that had to be, and he decided he could not let Hollander go alone, because if one of them was going to overcome the thing keeping them tethered to Earth, the other had to do it too. They had always been competitive like that.

He tries to remember how Hollander had reacted to his icy avoidance for those three stupid fucking days. He remembers a stunned expression, hidden quickly behind his usual blank layers of professional distance. Like Hollander couldn't understand why Ilya would choose the feelings of his shitty father over those of someone who sucked dick like a pro and openly praised him as a genius and a phenomenal person. Great fucking question, Past Hollander. Present Ilya isn't sure, either. He can remember eventually going to talk to Hollander again, offering the dubious olive branch of a gentle joke. He remembers Hollander refusing to apologize, and Ilya accepting that refusal, but it had been an awkward conversation. His stomach hurts a little, remembering it. Surely, Ilya would have gotten over it before they got on the ship, right? Can Hollander really think that Ilya still hates him for that? It seems absurd that that could even be in question, but Ilya is too afraid to ask and be slapped down again by Hollander’s upset little expression, or his even more insulting visceral panic.

Pike makes a return to duties, finally, after several very long sessions with Galina and some medication to make sure that he doesn’t blame himself too much for the mistake. Ilya doesn’t really like Pike, generally, but mistakes happen, and everyone knows Theriault should have caught the error, and so he goes out of his way to be polite so Pike doesn’t think Ilya is like Kent, which seems to be equally uncomfortable for both of them. 

They are making good time to The Voyageur, and Hollander makes sure to emphasize that, in his little morning meeting. He says Pike and Rose and Galina will stay in the cockpit while they’re docked with The Voyageur, Kent will go into the bowels of the ship to see if the engine is still in working order, Ilya will go to the bomb to check for the same, and Hollander and Hunter and Marleau will all work on transferring any full oxygen tanks from The Voyageur back into Chiron. 

“We don’t know what we’re going to find over there,” he says, looking around at all of them with the kind of steely reassurance that makes him so good at this. Ilya figures that if he was a little older, or if he needed less medication to keep him steady, he probably would have been the commander of this mission in the first place. “So we have to be prepared for everything.” 

“No one would blame you, commander, if you chose to stay in the cockpit,” Galina says gently, and Hollander looks hurt, briefly. It’s the same face he made when Ilya snapped at him about that conversation with his father. 

“I will be going into the other ship,” Hollander says, finally, gently. “It’s the least I can do, after I failed them.” 

Ilya is annoyed by that, but knows better than to try and say anything about it, especially not in front of the others. He returns to his own room to sulk and pace and try to get some sleep, instead, though the idea seems laughable. He’s too annoyed to sleep. Of course Hollander blames himself for the other mission failing, even though they still have no idea what happened to make that mission fail. Does Hollander just blame himself for everything, all the time? Ilya remembers what he said about not always recognizing social cues, and he remembers a thousand other moments of Hollander apologizing for things, even things that were stupid. They really were probably terrible for each other, in the sense that their specific issues line up so poorly. Ilya has always been the type to snap and snarl and push people away when he’s hurt, and Hollander meanwhile buttons himself up and directs all that pain inwards, blaming himself for everything that goes wrong. Ilya feels sick with it, now, wondering exactly what Hollander is blaming himself for, with Ilya. Because that’s it, isn’t it? Hollander looks frightened to face him, every time they speak. Every time Ilya says a memory has come back, Hollander looks like he’s gearing up for a fight. What did Ilya do, or say, the last time they spoke? And what does Hollander think he’s done to deserve whatever it was?

Ilya still has the little earth beanbag that Hollander gave him initially, and that he stole back from the cockpit. He has been sleeping with it under his pillow, although he prefers not to think about why, and whether this is strange. He pulls it out now, and he bounces it in his hand, and he looks at the well worn, color-faded dye, like someone has been holding it a lot. Was that him, back on Earth, or was it Hollander over the last sixteen months? Does Hollander miss it now? Has he torn the cockpit apart looking for it?

Ilya goes through his personal effects again. He’s not sure what he’s looking for, but he knows there’s something he should have. He touches his necklace, makes sure it’s still there, and is unsatisfied. His clothes all feel wrong, too stiff, too scratchy, and he doesn’t like them, though he’s not sure why, because he knows that they’re his. He pulls a soft hoodie out of the very bottom of the pack, and he smells it, and he’s not happy with that, either, because it doesn’t smell like anything. Neutral and colorless, just like the rest of his things, like all of his personality has been scrubbed clean. He wears the hoodie anyway, and he stews in bed until the alarms sound out, because they’ve reached The Voyageur at last. 

Hollander checks everything fifteen thousand times, of course, before he gently brings the ship in to connect to the Voyageur airlock. Then he checks everything a thousand times more before he opens the outer airlock doors and fully allows the ships to be connected. The Voyageur still has viable oxygen, and their life support systems are all still working fine. Their lights still work. The ship has just been floating silently, blaring out its little distress call, for years, seemingly intact. Ilya doesn’t like the wary feeling that settles into his gut, but he figures they all probably feel the same uneasiness, and so he ignores it. He chews on his necklace, though it still irritates him in a way he can’t describe. He spits it back into the collar of his hoodie, and he catches the little grimace of disgust that Hollander flashes his way. He smiles at Hollander, and Hollander looks away, of course. It does nothing to improve Ilya’s mood. 

When Hollander is satisfied that they will not die from entering the other ship, they’re allowed to go in, but of course Hollander has to go first, leading the way. Ilya thinks it’s very sweet, and very Hollander, to want to be the one out in front of everyone else, but his foul mood means it irritates him anyway.

Nothing immediately attacks them when they enter The Voyageur. They’re all wearing masks to filter out dust and other contaminants, but the readings are all within healthy levels. There is a lot of dust, but the air is clear of anything that will kill them, which means life support systems weren’t what caused the problem. Kent takes off towards the engine room, and so Ilya heads for the bomb without being told. Hollander watches him go; Ilya knows this because he turns and looks over his shoulder, and catches him. Hollander flushes and looks away. 

The bomb is still in good shape, and he relays this information over the radio, which has everyone in good spirits. 

“Two chances,” Hollander says, audibly relieved even with the crackly connection. “Better than one.” 

“Let’s not get too excited,” Kent puts in, suddenly. “Engine’s fucked. Looks like somebody fucked it on purpose, too.” 

That’s met with silence, for a little while, and Ilya is a little annoyed. Standing in his bomb, looking at the perfect engineering work, it feels like such a waste, that all of these resources should be left to rot up here. 

“Sabotage?” Hunter asks, finally. 

“Yeah,” Kent replies. “I guess so. I’m gonna try a few things, but this doesn't look recoverable.” 

“That’s okay,” Hollander says, still managing to sound steady and commanding and confident. “If we need to, we can still retrieve the second bomb. It’ll just take a little longer to do it.” 

“That depends on whether we can…oh, shit.” Marleau, cutting off at the end of his curse. 

Silence for long enough that Ilya fumes and asks, “hello? Did an alien kill you?” 

“No, dude. Rosie, you gotta see this.” 

Ilya pulls up the tablet that he’s been using to check the functionality of the bomb, and he switches to Marleau’s camera feed, and he sees that Hollander, Marleau, and Hunter are standing in the middle of what looks like untamed wilderness. It almost looks like they’re in the Earth Room, in a jungle simulation, but it’s The Voyageur oxygen garden, after years of unchecked growth.

“Oh wow,” Rose breathes over the radio, laughing. “Oh, it’s so beautiful. Holy shit. Take as much as you can! Marly, oh my god. We’re not going to die! Because, not gonna lie, guys, I was really fudging the numbers I gave you. We were totally fucked without this.”  

“It smells so fucking good in here,” Marleau says happily. “Bro, you gotta come check this out.” 

“I’ll head back to the cockpit and switch places with you,” Hunter laughs, and Rose squeals with delight. Ilya shakes his head and runs through a few more tests with the bomb, because he might as well, and he watches Marleau’s camera feed idly, Hollander in view, staring up and smiling at the vines that creep up the walls and hang from the ceiling. 

Ugh, fuck. Ilya wants to be where he is, even if it’s annoying. He leaves the bomb room behind.

Then

“So you’re the bomb guy,” Rose Landry says as she slides into the seat next to Ilya at the bar. Ilya is startled to see her in the flesh, even though they’ve both been living in the same place for so long now. And she’s Shane’s best friend, a person who Shane talks about all the time, so Ilya probably should have already met her at least once. 

If it was up to Ilya, he would have met her by now. He probably would have very obnoxiously staked his claim on Shane by now. 

Unfortunately, while Shane is absolutely willing to flaunt the rules to be in a relationship with Ilya, he’s only comfortable flaunting those rules in secret, and so Ilya has been reduced to sneaking around, and that means that Rose can’t possibly know anything, and that means he should not be so nervous about that look on her face, but he can’t help it. 

“I am the bomb guy. And you are Hollander’s girlfriend.” 

“Oh, I am?” Rose asks, laughing delightedly. “News to me.” 

“You were on People Magazine together seven weeks ago.” 

“Oh please, it's because we're both hot and because you refused to do it. And wow! Seven weeks? You remember that so specifically?” 

Ilya cuts a look at her and sees the teasing arch of her eyebrow. He considers. 

“What do you know?” he asks. 

“I got it out of him last night through very diabolical means that I like to call ‘asking him directly when he’s not expecting it’. I’m surprised he hasn’t told you already. He’s probably so embarrassed.” 

Ilya feels his shoulders loosening a little bit. 

“That sounds like him,” he agrees, taking another long sip of his drink. Rose does the same, but she doesn’t stop eyeing him. He can feel her eyes on the side of his head. It freaks him out. “Okay, so this is, what, interrogation? You tell me that I should watch out? Not hurt him?” 

“Eh. He’s a big boy. I’m sure he can handle himself. Plus, I think this has probably been going on longer than he was willing to tell me.” Ilya snorts at that, and Rose nods, like he confirmed it. Maybe he did. “I’m completely fine with it, by the way. He acted like I wasn’t going to be. I don’t know if you’re the same.” 

“I don’t care very much if people know, or care,” Ilya admits. “He is…different.” 

“Mm. Yeah. You’d think he was committing, like, a literal crime, the way he acted about it. Like half the team is fucking each other.” 

“Yeah, no shit,” Ilya laughs. 

“I mean, what did they expect, getting a bunch of hot, smart people and sticking them in a compound in the middle of nowhere? Of course we’re going to fuck.” 

“That cute guy from Mission Control is engaged to that hot doctor.” 

“Kip and Scott? Yeah.” 

“My friend Sveta picks up a new person every time she comes to visit.” 

“Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Rose says brightly. 

“Of course not. And you would not know anything about Cliff, either.” 

“Of course not,” Rose agrees. “Just, you know. Vibing. Having fun. Like a normal person, because I’m not, like, a seventeenth century quaker woman or whatever. Which is what he thinks he is.” 

“Yes,” Ilya agrees with a fond smile. 

“I notice you’re not exactly fucking your way through the intern pool, so it must be more serious than he implied.” 

“Maybe I already got through them the first time I was here.” 

“Yeah, that must be it. Next time Sveta’s around, we should double date.” 

Ilya smirks a little at his glass. 

“Yes, okay. Is this your way of giving me your approval?” 

“I don’t think you need that, do you?” Rose teases. “But, yeah.” 

“I know,” Shane groans, as soon as Ilya slips into his room, eyebrows raised. Shane looks miserable. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize she was setting me up until I started talking. She’s so fucking good at that.” 

“I think maybe you are just bad at it,” Ilya replies with a smile that goes far too soft and gooey, far too quickly. “Why are you sorry? You know I don’t care.” 

Shane hesitates. 

“I mean, we…we talked about not telling anyone. Between the mission guidelines and your…” 

“Everyone is fucking, Shane. Everyone. Lots of them are not even straight.” 

“I know that! But I thought, with your dad, and with Russia, you said…” 

“Okay, yes,” Ilya admits with a sigh. “A little quiet is best, for now. But I do not care if Rose knows. Or anyone who isn’t an asshole. Ideally, only my father would not need to know.” 

“I don’t know if we can manage that level of specificity,” Shane says, but he’s smiling a little bit. 

“No, I know. But Rose, okay. Your parents, if you wanted to tell them.” 

Shane’s face goes so studiously blank that Ilya is afraid he has overstepped, or has shown too much longing in his expression, or something. He does feel that longing, of course. They haven’t talked about much in terms of how not casual their relationship has become, other than agreeing to an exclusivity to which they had both already been adhering separately, and occasionally slipping words like partner and boyfriend into conversation with each other and then trying to surreptitiously clock the other’s reaction. Normal things for two people who are repressed in different, weird ways, and who originally hooked up via a game of Blowjob Chicken. 

They were more casual back during the first mission, if not entirely casual in the way Ilya used to enjoy casual flings, when he was younger. There was always something a little intense about it. This second time, it’s like picking up where they left off has allowed them to slip right away into some pretty heavy feelings. For Ilya, anyway. He’s not sure if Shane feels the same, but he hopes. 

“You want me to tell my parents?” Shane asks. Ilya shrugs, leans across the nearest available surface, hoping it makes him look more calm than he feels.

“Only if you want to,” he says. “If you think they would not be good about it, obviously…” 

“No, they would be fine,” Shane says quickly, reassuring Ilya with a gentleness that is surprising. Sometimes, Ilya forgets that Shane is one of the gentlest people that he knows, and one of the most thoughtful. He can be so blunt, and so dryly funny, and so dedicated to the cause. But there are other times when Ilya is forced to remember how much he cares. It makes his stomach hurt. Shane doesn’t do things as obvious as saying I am sorry your father is a bag of dicks. He will instead treat Ilya very carefully after he knows that Ilya has been to visit his father, and he will ask a million stupid questions about the trainees that Ilya has been training, and he will get Ilya’s mind off of it, always with this sympathetic furrow between his brows, like he’s trying to get a good grade in making Ilya happy. No one has wanted to do that for Ilya since his mother, and so it touches him, unfortunately, very deeply. “They would be okay. I just…I wasn’t sure you wanted…” 

“I want whatever you want,” Ilya hedges. Shane frowns. 

“I don’t think that’s true,” he says. 

“What? Why? You want some weird sex thing you haven’t told me?” 

“No,” Shane scoffs. “I want, I don’t know. A lot.” 

“Hm? Well, tell me. I will tell you if I want it, too.” 

“Um, no?” Shane looks vaguely harassed, now, as if he has surprised himself by admitting to wanting something. Like Rose said earlier: there is an odd, prudish quality to him sometimes. Ilya, of all people, knows it’s a front, but Shane really does seem to hate being caught wanting things. That he’s gotten cagey about it makes Ilya immediately curious, and so he moves closer, reaching out, brushing a hand down Shane’s arm in a way that always makes Shane shiver.

“Must be very embarrassing, if you won’t even tell me.” 

“Yeah, it kinda is,” Shane murmurs, which makes Ilya laugh, because he was expecting Shane to deny it in his stubborn, furious way.

“Should I tell you what I want from you?” Ilya asks. 

“I know what you want from me,” Shane points out, eyes traveling down to Ilya’s dick, and Ilya laughs again. 

“Yes, always. I also want everything else.” At Shane’s dark-eyed look, he shrugs. “Nothing you say would surprise me, Solnyshko. I want all of it.” 

“Okay, well, I want to marry you,” Shane blurts, some streak of competition coming out of him, like he’s trying to prove that Ilya is wrong, and that Ilya will be scared off by his wanting, and that Shane can somehow win by losing, because of course this is the kind of thing that Shane thinks. Ilya kisses him desperately, to prove him wrong, and to make sure he doesn’t freak out and run away before Ilya can find the right words to tell Shane that he’s a fucking lunatic, but lovingly. 

“You go from apologizing for letting one person know we fuck to proposing in less than five minutes? You are so impressive.” 

“Shut up,” Shane says fondly. 

“It’s yes, obviously. Do you have ring for me?” 

“Fuck off,” Shane laughs. “Yes. Not here, though. I was going to do it properly, at the cottage, next break.” 

“Before even telling your parents you were seeing a man,” Ilya cackles, and Shane shoves him back on the bed, also laughing. 

“You’re such a dick.” 

“And you are so strange! You know, I don’t think we have even told each other ‘I love you’ yet?” 

Shane looks confused by that, and he straddles Ilya, his weight a welcome distraction from the way Ilya’s heart can’t stop racing. He’s trying to play it cool, but of course he doesn’t feel it. He feels like if he releases any amount of control over himself, he’s going to start begging please don’t be joking please don’t be joking, and then Shane will understand that Ilya is the pathetic one, out of the two of them. Ilya has mostly done well at hiding that fact so far.

“We haven’t?” Shane asks. “Huh. Well, I do, obviously.” 

“Obviously,” Ilya mocks. 

“Well, yeah. I just proposed.” 

“Kind of,” Ilya challenges. Shane laughs. 

“Kind of,” he agrees. 

“Because we all might die in like five years if the project fails, anyway.” 

“Yeah. That. And also because I just fucking love you.” 

There’s something about the way he says it, so casual, as if he’s been saying it for ages. Maybe he really thinks he has been. Maybe he has been, in his own, quiet way. With actions instead of words. Ilya has been trying to work up the courage to admit the words aloud. He almost said it, after Shane argued with his father. He almost said it, a month later, when Shane took them to his parents’ cottage for the first time, nervous to be alone for a weekend together, like they were play-acting at being a real couple. This hasn’t been casual for months, maybe ever. Maybe Ilya has been feeling this tender-hearted disbelief for Shane Hollander since the first time Shane responded with genuine curiosity instead of disgust when Ilya joked about sucking his dick, but that feeling has been deepening more and more, the more time they spend together, and of course Ilya loves him. Of course he does. Ever since they picked this back up, things have been moving forward at a breakneck pace, and it’s like they sped past falling in love so quickly that both of them forgot to put it into words. 

“I fucking love you too,” Ilya says finally. He’s vaguely sorry that it’s so anticlimactic. He thinks of Shane saying obviously, and yes, it does feel obvious. Still. He should have planned this better. Shane deserves a very romantic love confession, even though he would probably hate it.

“We can drive up to the cottage this weekend, maybe. I can get the ring.” 

“Okay,” Ilya agrees, delighted. He was supposed to visit his father this weekend, but he’s more than happy to postpone. 

Now

Ilya comes back to himself standing in the middle of the hallway, his hand braced against the wall, his shoulders braced against the blow. Holl- Shane. Shane is looking at him over his mask, concerned. 

“Rozanov?” he asks intently, a little worried, like it’s probably the fifth time he’s asked. Ilya shakes his head. 

“I’m fine,” he chokes out. 

“Are you sure? You can head back to the ship, if…the air is pretty bad in here.” 

“No, I am okay,” Ilya says. His fingers fumble for his necklace, the lack of weight on it. He briefly considers grabbing Shane by the collar and digging around for the necklace he knows is hidden there. He manages to talk himself out of it. 

Shane looks concerned, still, but he nods, and he continues down the hall, and he only looks back twice. He has a push-cart filled with oxygen tanks, and now that Ilya is out of his own head, he can hear people talking in his radio, excitedly discussing moving things from this ship back to their own, since the ship itself is a bust. How long was Ilya standing there, shocked by his own stupid fucking memories. 

Engaged. He and Shane were engaged?

“The bomb vessel engine is probably fixable,” Kent reports, and there are cheers at that, relief. Ilya doesn’t join them. He feels sick, physically sick, nauseas, like he's on a small boat in a big storm, and he can't understand it. His chest feels like it's cracking open with love for Shane, so shy and sweet and brave, proposing by accident, confessing his love because he was goaded into it. How did that end? How could Ilya have allowed it to end, when he now knows exactly how it feels to hold that love in his hands? 

He doesn’t want to follow Shane, and he doesn’t want to join the others in the oxygen garden, doesn’t want to have to pretend to give a fuck about some tall plants when he’s dealing with the fact that his engagement apparently imploded back on Earth, and he doesn’t even remember it. He wanders into the living space of the old ship, instead, moving his flashlight around. It's similar to their own ship, enough that it's eerie, especially since everything is just a tiny bit smaller, more claustrophobic. There are still coffee cups on the table, and some discarded food wrappers, too. Whatever happened to the last crew must have happened quickly. 

Shane could have been on this ship. Ilya technically could have been on it too. They could have been here together, dead together. It's a sobering thought, especially since Ilya had been so hurt not to be asked, so angry that he drove Shane away the first time. 

He thinks about the years that followed, falling back into bed with Shane, falling in love with Shane. It’s impossible that they aren’t in love anymore, even though he knows he’s missing something enormous. He remembers putting that engagement ring on his necklace. He remembers at the cottage, remembers Shane smiling as he slipped the ring onto Ilya’s finger the first time with a bashful smile. He remembers thinking that he would never take it off for anything, just like his mother’s necklace. 

But his mother’s necklace is still here, and his ring is gone, and it's an absence that he doesn't understand, and doesn’t know how to understand. Waiting for his memories to come back has never been more torturous. Should he just ask Shane for an explanation? Beg Shane to tell him what happened, so he can stop driving himself insane with all the possibilities? Surely Shane would understand that, from a mission perspective. I can’t focus on the mission when I’m trying to brace myself for the memory of my heart shattering. 

He steps into the Observation Room, and at first he’s not sure what he’s seeing. There’s debris everywhere on this fucking ship, most of it incidental. Panels that fell off the ceiling, tools abandoned in the middle of some kind of repair job, personal effects scattered from where someone clearly dropped something and never got the chance to pick it back up. All the dust from the last few years has settled uneasily on top of all of those things, making awkward lumps that look like moldy growths on the ground until they’re brushed off. He thinks at first that the mess in the Observation Room is exactly like that, but then he sweeps his flashlight over the floor and realizes that the dust-covered lumps are bodies.. 

He steps closer, examines them. They look petrified, almost. Like statues. They remind him of pictures he saw as a child, of ancient people who died from a volcanic eruption, curled up on the ground, perfectly preserved. Two of them are embracing, huddled on the floor. A third is collapsed against the wall, their hand on their stomach, as if they were wounded, near the door, like they were trying to get out. Had someone locked them in this room and turned up the brightness until they burned alive? He looks at the embracing pair for far too long. 

It could be anyone. There are no identifying features left. It could be him and Shane. 

“I found some of the crew,” he announces into the radio, finally, after clearing his throat, and forcing himself to look away. 

The rest of the crew is found, gradually. There are some bodies in bunks; one murdered spectacularly, but another lying in bed peacefully. The commander barricaded himself in the cockpit, apparently, and there’s no sign of what caused his death. Someone painted some fucking bible verse or something on one of the walls in the engine room in what looks like blood but is likely just paint, so that’s probably related. They don’t bother identifying anyone specifically, or figuring out which of them was the one who killed the others. Ilya has his own theories about it, but Shane is right that it doesn't really matter. It was human error, human folly, that caused the failure, so at least now they know that.

They make sure that all of the crew members are accounted for, just to make sure their murderer isn’t still hiding in this graveyard of a ship, and then Shane awkwardly stumbles his way through saying something appropriately but professionally sad to mark their passing, with only Kent and Ilya to witness it. 

He looks hollow-eyed and a little lost as he stares at the embracing couple in the Observation Room, and Ilya wonders if he’s thinking the same thing Ilya had been, when he found them. He has to assume the answer is yes. His fingers twitch with a need to reach out and squeeze Shane’s shoulder, offer comfort the way he once would have done so unthinkingly, but he thinks he would die if Shane flinched away from him right now, and so he doesn’t. He has to leave the room entirely to stop himself. 

He goes to the garden, where Rose and Marleau are leaking enthusiasm everywhere. They accept Ilya’s help gratefully, and he loads plants into the handcarts and then pushes them down the hall towards Chiron, and he tries to let the work empty his head, but of course it doesn't.

He knows that he and the others were put into comas because someone back on Earth suggested it, because they had no idea what caused the failure of the first mission and were trying to cover all of their bases. He remembers the idea being floated despite the inherent danger of a medical coma, because it was deemed more dangerous to keep so many people awake in so small a space for the entire journey to the sun. He remembers scoffing, thinking that they were being ridiculous. He thought the scientists and astronauts would be rational enough to handle themselves. Apparently, he’s more of a naively trusting idiot than he thought. It maybe feels a little gratifying to finally know for sure that his payload wasn't the problem, but it makes him feel a little sick, too. Annoyed, maybe, that this first crew couldn't keep their shit together in the face of extinction. 

He knows that if they were back on Earth, he would go find Shane and try to say something kind that would make Shane stop blaming himself. Shane is a very fucked up person in the sense that he genuinely believes that he can solve every single problem that’s put in front of him if he just tries hard enough and denies his own happiness enough and is good enough. He wore himself thin, those last few months on earth. Ilya remembers the way he looked so stunned and so bewildered by every new issue that cropped up. Not just irritated that things kept going wrong, but like each successive blow took something from him, and he was privately wounded that people kept fucking up anyway, though they had to know they were killing him. Ilya remembers wishing he could do anything to help, anything to lighten the load, knowing that Shane would never burden him with that kind of responsibility, because Shane thought that every responsibility was his. 

But this is not Earth, and so he doesn’t go looking for Shane. He just does his job of hauling plants and oxygen tanks back and forth into Chiron, and he listens to the chatter of the others over the radio, and he pretends not to notice that Shane doesn’t speak at all. His fingers keep reaching for his mother’s necklace, and that’s annoying, too, because now he knows about the weight that should be there, but isn’t, and he knows that finding out the truth is going to hurt even worse than he’d imagined.

Rose and Marleau have taken the bulk of the plants out of The Voyageur’s garden, and are about to head back for another load. Kent and Shane are talking in the engine room, apparently, trying to see if there’s anything they can do to fix the sabotaged engine—Kent, predictably, is irritated that Shane feels the need to check himself, because he takes it personally that Shane wants to make sure that Kent’s assessment is accurate before just giving up, because Kent is a petty fucking asshole. Ilya is making a final trip back to Chiron with some of the freeze-dried rations from the kitchen of The Voyageur, because he figures he might as well grab them even though everyone agrees they taste fucking awful. And then he’s suddenly on his ass in the middle of the hallway that leads to the airlock, the ship apparently shaking apart around him, emergency alarms blaring. 

“Report,” Shane says, surprisingly calm, into the radio, despite sounding like he’s already running. 

“I don’t know! Something happened with the airlocks. They just separated.” Pike’s voice, panicked. “Both inner airlock doors shut automatically before it happened, thank fuck.” 

“Was anyone in the airlock?” Shane asks, voice thready with panic.

“No, no. Both airlocks were empty.” 

“Status,” Shane barks, his clear relief not enough to entirely settle his nerves. 

“Marly and I are in our oxygen garden,” Rose says.

“Galina and I are with Pike in the cockpit,” Hunter says. 

“I am still on The Voyageur,” Ilya answers, feeling a momentary concern that he might be the only one. 

“Kent and I are here, too,” Shane says. “Okay. Fuck. Rozanov, meet us at the airlock.”

Chapter End Notes

some notes for those of you who love Sunshine:

1) there will be no mega sunburned Mark Strong character in this. I briefly considered making it Drapeau, but decided I did not want my romantic drama in space to turn into body horror lmao. you may notice I have them actually COUNT the bodies, which the crew of the Icarus should have done (I know he's a controversial aspect of the movie, but I actually love that whole plotline lmao. it's so absurd and insane, like all the best danny boyle things).
2) you may be like, bro, if there's no mega sunburned Mark Strong, how did the airlocks separate? DONT WORRY ABOUT IT! I WANNA DO THIS NEXT PART OF THE MOVIE

Chapter 7

Chapter Notes

There will be one more (probably quite long) chapter after this one, and then it will be finished!

Then

Ilya knows that he’s insufferable about Shane. People tell him so all the time. He assumes that part of the problem is that there are still not enough people who know about them, so he has too few people among whom to spread the obnoxiousness.

It makes sense to mostly keep it to themselves and the people who are closest to them, because they’d both been nervous about being accused of being a “distraction” on the mission, or risking anyone blaming any future failures on them. People will find all sorts of reasons to be fucking terrible to people like them, in Ilya’s experience, and there is still his father to consider. 

Yuna Hollander has naturally become their staunchest supporter, because despite her refusal to agree with Ilya that sometimes Shane needs to be told do not do a stupid thing like trying to go into space even though you are afraid, she loves her son a lot, and would probably be supportive if he showed up engaged to fucking Crowell or whatever, and is certainly not disappointed in him for bagging the most important physicist in the world.

They had actually been nervous about telling her, because she’s so much like Shane in her total dedication to the mission. Like, yes, Ilya agrees that saving the world is important, but Yuna and Shane would both give up anything for it in a way that Ilya probably wouldn’t. So if anyone was going to come up with mission-related reasons why they should not be getting fucking engaged in the run-up to the most important thing that has ever been undertaken by people, ever, in the history of humanity, then it would have been her.

But Yuna had been surprisingly relaxed about it, and hid her shock and elation well, Ilya thought, because Shane didn’t seem to notice it. Ilya could see little cartoon dollar signs flying around her head as she dreamed up the tell-all book and documentary and whatever else she was going to milk their relationship for when the mission was over, but Ilya was fine with that just as long as she accepted him, which she did without reservation. Ilya kept waiting for her to come to her senses and warn him off her son, but she never did that, and in fact she kept inviting him and Shane over for dinner with her husband, David, who was equally as bizarre and accepting of Ilya’s presence. 

Ilya knows he has probably been poisoned in some ways by his lack of familial affection growing up, but still. The Hollanders are all so fucking weird and nice, and if they didn’t keep feeding him delicious home cooked meals and being okay with the fact that he’s railing their son, he’d probably be a little afraid of them.

So he and Shane have Shane’s parents, and they tell Rose and Svetlana, too. One annoyingly astute female friend for each of them, and it’s a bonus that those female friends are also occasionally fucking each other. A few people on Ilya’s science team find out in a very horrifying way, including the man who will likely be chosen to accompany the bomb to space, but they are all likewise cool about it once they get over the shock of having barged into their boss’s office without knocking on the one day ever in his entire life that Shane forgets to lock the door. 

Ilya loves having people to whom he can talk about his perfect Shane, is the point, and he knows it will probably be better for all his friendships when he can finally tell everyone in the world how he feels, so they don’t have to bear the burden of being his trusted confidants. 

Everyone is counting down, all the time, to when the mission will launch and they will finally be done with it after so fucking long. But for Shane and Ilya, there is that other layer to it. They want to wait until the mission launches, until it succeeds, so they can tell everyone that the two most important men in the entire program were romantically involved the entire time.

Neither of them want to go public until they know if it’s going to work. Shane worries about the optics more than Ilya does, because Ilya does actually believe his bomb will work and also has every faith in the team Shane has pulled together, but Shane has always been the more cautious of the two of them, and he’s right that it would be super fucking embarrassing if they made a big deal about their romantic relationship only for the bomb or the ship or the team to end up being a total dud. Not that people need reasons to be homophobic, but it would definitely make the two of them the butt of a lot of very bad, very mean jokes until they froze to death, so he does understand and reluctantly respect the need for patience. 

It’s Shane who comes up with the idea of calling themselves married before they’ve done it officially, after they’ve been engaged for just long enough that Ilya is starting to get used to thinking of himself as engaged. People probably wouldn’t believe it of Shane, but he can be very romantic, and so he makes the suggestion when they have a few days to sneak away to the cottage, which is quickly becoming Ilya’s favorite place in the world, because Shane keeps doing things to deepen their relationship when they go there, and keeps making Ilya cry stupid, embarrassing, happy tears.

Shane insists on taking off their engagement rings and then re-exchanging them, calling them wedding rings. 

“I want to call you my husband, in my head, at least,” he says. “And I don’t want it to be a lie.” 

Ilya laughs at Shane for not wanting to lie in his own head, but he agrees, and he cries more than Shane does when they do the stupid exchange, because maybe Ilya is more romantic than he wants to admit, too. 

It stands out as a magical memory: linking hands in front of those giant cottage windows, during sunrise, the fog spreading prettily over the lake, he and Shane both pretending not to be crying as they slip the rings back on each other’s fingers. The fact that he ever forgot feels like something unforgivable, once he finally remembers.

A husband. He had a husband. A husband who promised forever, even if they couldn’t promise it aloud. 

What could he have done to merit losing something so precious? Ilya knows himself; he never would have given it up willingly.

Now

Ilya is waiting by the inner airlock door, his rations abandoned somewhere back on the hallway floor, by the time Shane and Kent come running up. Kent looks washed out under the cool blue lighting, pale and shaky. He keeps glancing at Shane with a kind of beaten-dog look, but Shane doesn’t look back at him. Ilya doesn’t bother asking, because he figures it’s not really the time, but also because he can put the pieces together: he’s guessing that Kent probably overstepped when trying to fix the mechanical problem and fucked everything up against Shane’s advice, and somehow that led to the airlocks getting blown open. Pretty impressive, actually, in terms of mission fuckups. Maybe not quite as bad as Pike’s, yet. It probably depends on whether anyone dies because of this one. 

Shane is probably trying to be the kind of commander who doesn’t waste time berating someone for something that’s already done, and Ilya is feeling less inclined to be a shit than he usually would be, because he’s still rattled from the returned memory of calling Shane my husband, but he at least takes the time to look at Kent witheringly before looking away and paying attention to what Shane is doing.

Shane fiddles with the computer panel that controls the airlock doors, and he frowns down at it.  

“Have to override the automatic airlock controls to get the door shut. Looks like it was damaged in the separation, but it’s pressurizing normally now. How about you?” 

“Pressurizing normally here too,” Pike responds. “Thank fuck.” 

“Hayden, try reconnecting.” 

There’s a pause as Hayden presumably does just that, and then a choked-off curse through the radio. 

“Not happening, commander. Sorry. The computer says the docking mechanism on The Voyageur was busted when it disconnected. And, uh, my eyeballs can see the pieces of debris drifting off into space on the video feed, so I’m thinking she has a point.”

Ilya looks at Shane nervously to gauge his reaction, but Shane is just nodding calmly, like he’s trying to reassure Pike that this isn’t his fault, even though Pike can’t see him. He opens the inner airlock door, and Ilya watches the muscle in the side of his jaw jump as it clenches and unclenches rhythmically. He still looks calm, which is why Ilya is so surprised when he says, “Hunter confirmed earlier that The Voyageur only has a single remaining EVA suit. Rozanov is taking it.”

Kent’s head whips around to glare at him, and Ilya starts shaking his head already. 

“What? No. That's…”

“Commander, you’re probably going to have to manually override the outer airlock door to get it open again, and I don’t know if…” 

“Yes, I know, Hayden,” Shane says quietly.

“Bullshit!” Kent snaps. “No, fuck that.”

“We have no other option,” Shane replies. He’s certainly acting like there’s no room for argument. And it’s not even like when he’s had to make a difficult choice and is very sorry for it. Ilya feels like he remembers what Shane looks like when he has those moments—he can remember red-rimmed eyes, panicked breaths, but only for a second, without any context. This is much more steady; he really believes it’s the only choice. 

Shane goes to the functional suit and starts the process of unclipping it from its spot on the wall. Ilya knows that he should help him, that there really isn’t any time to argue, but he doesn’t know if he can. He feels like bugs are crawling under his skin. If there is only one suit, how are Shane and Kent going to make it back over? Surely they can’t just stay here alone, right? How long can they survive in this place? 

Can Ilya really allow his husband to stay on this fucking ghost ship with Dallas fucking Kent? 

“Shane, buddy,” Hayden says gently. Shane talks over him.

“I’m going to have to force override the airlock door open to get Rozanov out, and it’s going to risk damage to the inner airlock door and the integrity of the ship, yes. I understand. There’s nothing else to discuss.” 

“So we have to get fucking sucked into space so this motherfucker can survive?” Kent asks. Ilya feels like he's been hit in the head. His ears ring. 

“Wait, no. That is…don't do that.”

“Rozanov, get in the fucking suit,” Shane says, whirling on him. He doesn’t even look afraid, now. It’s like he has gone past fear to an almost comfortable steeliness. As if he’s thinking I always knew it was going to end like this. This is why I didn’t want to come. To Kent, Shane says, “this is the mission. Rozanov takes top priority.”

“What about you? You know how to do everything,” Ilya insists. Kent scoffs. 

“If neither of you cocksuckers want it, give me the fucking suit,” he says. Ilya glares at him. 

“No,” he says. 

Kent punches him so suddenly that Ilya doesn’t even have a chance to brace for it. He barely arches away from the hit, enough that Kent lands a glancing blow across his cheekbone rather than the straight suckerpunch it could have been. He still falls back against the wall of the airlock, tripping over the outstretched legs of the spacesuit. Shane gets between them before Kent can take another shot or Ilya can bounce back and return the favor. Kent is shouting something, but Ilya can’t understand him, his ears ringing with fury and fear and panic, and Shane tries at first to just block Kent from landing any more hits, but Kent won’t fucking stop, and so then Shane’s the one punching, hitting Kent with a brutal uppercut out of nowhere, still looking so calm. Kent crumples, his eyes rolling back in his head like a fucking cartoon character. 

Ilya thinks of Shane crying out, gasping as Ilya fucks into him, looking back over his shoulder, reaching for Ilya's hand. So soft and vulnerable and sweet sometimes, but so perfect like this otherwise. Strong and unyielding and sturdy. His husband. Fuck, how could Ilya have forgotten his husband? How could he have lost him? This precious, beautiful gift. 

“Ilya,” Shane snaps, as if he has been saying it for a while. “Get in the fucking suit.”

“I can't,” Ilya admits. “I can't let you die.”

“You can, and you will. I'm not going to die. I have an idea.”

Ilya searches Shane's expression for a lie, but he doesn't see one. Whatever the idea is, Shane is at least a little confident that it will work. Ilya isn’t, though. Kent moans on the ground, starting to swim his way back to consciousness, and Shane gestures more emphatically at the suit, and Ilya understands why, because it will be a lot harder for Kent to put up a fight when Ilya is already sealed in, but he can’t make himself do it.

“Solnyshko, I don't like this,” he admits quietly. It feels wrong, impossible, to take this suit, leaving Shane unprotected. He doesn't want to be here without Shane. He doesn't want to survive without Shane. He has always believed that he would give up his life for Shane in a heartbeat, and now he finds that it's true. He would. But Shane won't let him. 

“I’m sorry, but it doesn’t matter. I’m not giving you a choice. I’m telling you.” 

Shane looks at him steadily, as if trying to remind him of a conversation that Ilya doesn't remember them having. Maybe they did, before they went on this mission together. Maybe they sat down and discussed boundaries, since Shane apparently divorced his ass or something, and wanted to make sure that Ilya would take his orders. That seems like something Shane would do, and it aches. 

“Since when do you give the orders between us, huh?” he asks desperately, and Shane's expression does the thing Ilya loves so much, where his eyebrows furrow and then open again, like he doesn't understand the question for a second and then catches up. He flushes prettily, and he turns his back on Ilya, and he gets the suit open. 

“I make the hard decisions,” he says finally, his tone flat and dead, all humor and warmth gone from his voice. “That's my job. Get in the suit, Rozanov.”

Ilya can't. He fucking can't. But Shane looks at him with that horrible, blank distance in those beautiful eyes, a nothing where there used to be something, and Ilya is angry enough for the ten seconds it takes to step into the suit and allow Shane to start getting it closed, and then he realizes that he has been tricked, at least a little. He sulks as Shane works on getting all the fastenings closed, and he panics, and he tries to tell Shane that he has changed his mind, but Shane ignores him. He watches Shane's face as Shane works. It's a reflection of how Ilya helped Shane into his suit, and Ilya wonders if he looks as frightened as Shane had. Probably not. He probably looks angry and resentful and desperate. He wonders if he looks like he’s in love. 

“What is your plan?” he asks plaintively. When Shane finally allows himself to meet Ilya’s eyes, Ilya can at last see the animal panic in them, barely hidden, and his stomach aches as if Kent had punched him in the gut instead of the cheek.

“Insulation,” Shane manages to say, but his voice sounds thin, barely audible.

“What?” Ilya asks. 

Kent finally rouses himself, but it's too late; Ilya is in the suit, strapped in, everything except the helmet in place. 

“You fucking asshole,” Kent fumes. “He just has to press a fucking button on a fucking bomb! We don't fucking need him!”

“Rozanov is the priority,” Shane replies, his voice stronger than before. “You knew that when you joined the mission, and you knew that when you boarded my fucking ship. The bomb team has always been top priority, and you’re only his fucking backup.” 

Kent sputters uselessly around those facts, because surely he must know that Shane is right, and is only lashing out because he's afraid, too. Ilya hates being the fucking priority. He thinks Kent is sort of right that it’s silly to think he’s important enough to keep alive. He wishes Shane would have taken the suit instead. Shane could probably handle his job, if he had to, and he’s the commander, and he can do everything. Ilya can’t even remember why his husband left him.

“Shane, what did you mean, ‘insulation’?” he asks, trying to recapture Shane's attention. 

Shane goes over to the wall of the airlock and rips off a panel, exposing the silver metallic insulation that lines the wall beneath it. There are long strips of it, layered in the walls. 

“We wrap ourselves up in this. Should be enough to cover both of us head to toe, completely. Hayden lines up our ship with this airlock. When I blow the airlock on this side, we should shoot right in. We'll only be in vacuum for a few seconds.”

“Get me the fuck out of this suit,” Ilya seethes. “That is so stupid, Shane!” 

Shane has gone back to ignoring him. He’s already ripping the insulation from the walls, and Kent is even helping him, both of them acting as if this is not the stupidest fucking thing anyone has ever suggested, and Ilya is going to be sick. 

Then

The explosion happens on a day when Ilya isn't on base; he's visiting his father, who is in a terrible mood, as always, and who berates Ilya for more than an hour for slights both real and imagined. Grigori has been talking to Alexei, apparently, about wanting to go home to Russia. Ilya knows that Alexei has no interest in taking over for the care Ilya has been buying with his spot on this project, but Alexei has been riling Grigori up by pretending, at least over the phone, that it’s only Ilya being controlling that is keeping him from doing his duty, and their father always, for some reason, believes him.

When the project ends, soon, Grigori will probably be going back to Moscow anyway, but Ilya doesn't feel like telling him that. Ilya isn't sure what will happen to him when the project ends. Shane keeps telling him not to worry about it, but of course Ilya does. He suspects that Shane and Yuna have many multi-layered plans about getting Ilya Canadian citizenship through various means, and it makes him feel warm and cared for. Remembering that he has a family who loves him is one of the things that helps him get through these meetings with his father.

So he’s not on base, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t hear the explosion. People hear it from three states away, apparently, though he doesn't see how that's possible. His father even comes back to himself, like he has been startled back into his own mind, and he asks—with what sounds like genuine concern—if something went wrong with the project. Ilya thinks of Shane, and he runs. 

He gets back to base in record time, beating even the first responders, except the ones who work for the project, and who are uselessly standing around and watching the inferno that used to be the science building. Ilya's office was in that building, and he wonders for a sickening second if it was his fault, if he left something in a place he shouldn't, but he finds out later that it was a miscalculation by one of the men who was meant to be going on the mission. Over-ordering a very explosive compound and then leaving it in a place where it would get hot. The entire building is gone, and all of Ilya’s friends on the science team with it. 

Shane is ashen with horror, when Ilya finally finds him. He’s standing in a big group of people, watching the fire burn. He’s usually very good at keeping his expression neutral even if his thoughts are not, but there has been no attempt to hide his feelings now, and Ilya is enough of a grasping, greedy monster to be touched by the open devastation on his face. 

That heartbreak shatters into an almost childlike relief when Ilya calls his name, but Shane manages to keep himself together enough to bundle Ilya into his own office in the headquarters building. He locks the door with shaking hands and pulls down his blinds and turns off his light so no one will come looking for him, and then he wraps himself around Ilya desperately, sobbing into his neck in a way that’s frankly shocking, alarming. Even Shane’s biggest emotions are usually at least a little muted, but not this. Ilya is always so impressed with his husband's ability to be many faces at once; he thinks he would have screamed himself hoarse and possibly run into the building and gotten himself killed if he thought Shane was in there, but Shane was thinking of everyone, of the project, of the world. Maybe it would have bothered Ilya once, or made him feel like Shane doesn't value him, but he understands Shane better now. He's glad Shane is the way he is, because he knows that he would never be able to make those choices. He thinks he would give it all up for Shane. The whole world. The fucking sun. All of it. And that’s not really very healthy, probably.

Shane's voice is shattered, keening with desperation, and he keeps whispering you're alive you're alive you're alive as Ilya holds him tighter, squeezing Shane back into his body so that he can recover. He is, maybe, a little gratified to see this, though he wishes he wasn't. Wishes he could be less desperately obsessed with any signs of Shane's love.

“I'm here, my little sun, it's all right,” Ilya says, and Shane sobs, and shudders, and comes apart, and Ilya is so fucking happy that he went to visit his father. He can't imagine leaving Shane like this, alone. 

Shane pulls himself back together with a trembling amount of effort that makes Ilya wince. He holds Shane through it. He lets Shane have all the time he needs. Shane will need to be back out there soon, to deal with the fallout, to understand the extent of the damage, but Ilya will give him as much as he will take in the meantime. 

“Where were you?” Shane finally asks, his voice only a little less desperate. 

“I was with my father,” Ilya says. “I went this morning, instead of waiting for later. I had nothing else to do today, and I thought, if I got my visit finished early, maybe we could have lunch together, you and me.”

Shane nods, eyes filling with tears, so prettily relieved, and Ilya makes a punched out noise and kisses him, because he can't help it. 

“I guess I have to be grateful for him, then,” Shane finally says, his voice shaking too much for the chirp to be effective, except Ilya laughs dutifully, because he hates to see Shane like this, so afraid, so sad. Shane hates it too, he knows. Shane can allow himself desperation sometimes, if Ilya has worked him up enough, or edged him enough, but that’s a different kind of desperation. As much as Shane is still sometimes so ashamed of his desires, he’s not ashamed when it’s just him and Ilya. It’s where he allows himself to fall apart. Ilya naturally finds it delicious when he does, because there's nothing that makes him feel more proud than when he forces his very straight-laced, very professional Shane into babbling incoherence. This kind of desperation, though, is different. Ilya does feel, maybe, deep inside, in a very unforgivable place, that it’s nice to see Shane like this, so open with adoration for Ilya that he can’t pull himself back together easily. Like Ilya has inserted himself so deeply into Shane’s heart that it would break him thoroughly if Ilya left. But he won’t say that, of course, or imply it, or even think it, really. 

He holds Shane until Shane has recovered enough to thank him and step away, looking only a little wrung out. Then he follows Shane, sticks to him like a protective shadow as they tend to the fucking mess that's been left of their project, and he watches Shane grow steadily wearier, more blank, more drawn within himself, because of course Shane understands, long before Ilya does, what has to happen next.

Now

Ilya is shaking out of his skin, he thinks, and would have maybe vibrated at some magical frequency to turn himself into human jelly, except for the fact that he's strapped into this stupid fucking spacesuit. They have turned off the life support systems in the ship, because Shane has determined that they will need as much power as possible to manually blow the airlock doors from within the airlock. Considering the alternative is that someone will have to stay behind and pull the manual lever in the cockpit, they all agreed to this option instead, but now it’s fucking dark, and the air is running out, and gravity has disappeared, and Shane is still acting like this is going to work. 

Kent has churlishly wrapped himself up like a messy mummy in insulation that's apparently supposed to keep him from dying immediately in the vacuum of space. Ilya still thinks it's fucking stupid, but he had been helpless to do anything but stand and remember and remember and remember as Shane and Kent went about it. Shane had been diligent, layering himself up. He looks like a platinum version of that fucking marshmallow thing from Ghostbusters. Kent’s application was sloppier, of course, but Shane helped him out a bit, added a few pieces in places where Kent was looking a little thin. Maybe Kent has forgotten the uppercut, or maybe he has just learned from it. Either way, he's docile now. 

“Shane,” Ilya tries, but Shane only shakes his head, and Ilya knows it's too late to change their minds now, but still, he can't fucking take this. The last thing he remembers of his life before this ship is Shane sobbing in his lap in his office, breathless with relief that Ilya was still alive, and now Ilya is supposed to just let him die in space in probably the exact way Shane has always been afraid of? Because why? Because he’s important? Because they think he has the best chance at being able to ensure the bomb works as intended? Fuck. It’s pointless. 

It makes sense now, of course, why he's here. Of course this is why he chose to leave his father behind on Earth, despite that cloying sense of family loyalty that has been making his life difficult since he was a fucking child. With the science team dead three days before launch, there wouldn't have been any time to train anyone new, and Ilya had been working hard with those team members for years. It was the right choice. The noble choice. The only choice, probably. He's still proud he had the strength to do it. His family has been a weight around his neck for his entire life, and he has always been so fucking irrational about it, he knows. But maybe Shane was…

Wait. That doesn’t make any fucking sense. 

Three days before launch? That explosion happened three days before launch? 

What happened in three days that made it so Shane could go from sobbing in his lap to the empty-eyed refusal to look at him now? 

And why the fuck is Shane here? What happened in three days that made it necessary for him to come? Only the science team died, right? They had so many other fucking pilots to choose from. Had Shane followed him? But then why…?

“Grab on to Rozanov,” Shane says to Kent, and then he looks up and meets Ilya's eyes, and he nods. Ilya wants to kiss him a final time, or maybe blurt out why the fuck are you here? But he doesn't. Just swallows and then hits the button that will close his helmet and seal him in.

His faceplate is dusty. He can't see anything. His breathing goes fast, against his will, panic rising. 

Shane figures it out without having to be asked, of course, because he's Shane. He uses his fingertips to brush the dust away, and then he rewraps them carefully in his stupid fucking foil, and then he wraps the last of the insulation around his face. He's completely covered up. It might not be the stupidest idea of all time. Ilya still feels like he's going to die. 

“We're ready to catch you,” Pike says, voice shaking with the same terror Ilya feels. “Rozanov, you might have to maneuver a bit with your jets to get in the door, because I don’t think it’s going to be an entirely steady flight. Guys, just…just hold on to him. Try not to wiggle around too much. Fifteen seconds, at the most. Rose and Marley and Hunter are at the airlock. The second you're in, they'll pressurize, and you'll be okay. Okay? I'll count us down. Take a deep fucking breath at three. Got it?”

Muffled affirmatives from both mummies, both of them hugging Ilya’s arms like he is a giant teddy bear, some fucking Disney mascot and they are children trying to cling on to him. Ilya wishes that he could feel them. His fingers are tight around Shane's wrist on one side and Kent's on the other, but he can't feel anything through the thick, golden gloves. 

Shane's face is pressed against his arm. He can't feel that either. He can only hear his husband’s short, sharp breathing in his ear from the radio.

“Three,” Pike says. “Two. One. Now, Shane!”

Shane presses whatever button he has been holding in his hand, and the airlock explodes, expelling Ilya with it. Even safe in the suit, it’s jarring, the force of it, and Ilya is thinking oh god, it must be so much worse for him, and he’s wishing that he could have brought Shane in the suit with him, found a way to jam them together in this tiny space, like how Shane used to crawl into Ilya’s oversized hoodie when Ilya was wearing it, lying in bed, because he knew it always made Ilya laugh to have Shane koala-clingy, shoving himself into the warm, dark space between Ilya’s sweatshirt and his skin.

He holds on, knows that Shane’s hand is still in his, not because he feels it, but because he can see from the readout screen that the numbers representing the pressure and position of his right glove are all the same, and that he is holding something, and that his hand isn’t empty. He activates the thrusters in his suit, and he makes sure that they’re oriented directly at the airlock of the other ship. It looms ahead of them, getting quickly closer, but fifteen seconds is taking for fucking ever. It’s strangely quiet, everyone gone completely silent. Ilya can hear only breathing.

Kent moves, suddenly. Ilya can see through the tiny strip of glass on his helmet that Kent’s feet come up in front of Ilya’s stomach, kicking, and for a second, Ilya tries to readjust his left grip to help him, thinking that the force has blown Kent sideways, or maybe he’s just panicking, flailing in the vacuum, that maybe the isulation isn’t doing shit, and Kent is turning into a fucking popsicle on one side, and Shane is dying on the other. 

But then Kent’s feet flail out again, and they connect with Shane’s ribcage, around Ilya’s body, and Ilya realizes that he has been too generous in assuming that Kent wouldn’t do something so catastrophically evil.

“Kent!” he bellows. His next words come out in Russian, too panicked for English, but he hears Galina translating almost as soon as he speaks. “He’s attacking Shane. He's. Fuck! Stop it, you fucking monster, you fucking idiot. Fuck you!” 

Chaos in the radio, various voices all interrupting each other. Kent is howling wordlessly, furiously, a panicked chant of fuck you fuck you fuck you as he kicks out at Shane again, trying to use his grip on Ilya’s arm as leverage to get to Ilya’s fucking husband, and Ilya doesn’t even think. Shane has curled closer to him, trying to hide behind the bulk of his suit, and Ilya can see from the readout of his glove that his hand is slipping, and it’s not even really a choice, when he makes it. It’s automatic. 

He opens his left glove, and he shakes his left arm, like Kent is a mosquito buzzing in his ear. The force of the motion sends Kent spiraling off into space in a way that would, perhaps, be funny, if it wasn’t something that Ilya just chose to do, to kill a man. 

He uses his now-free left hand to reach over and secure Shane, grabbing him by the shoulder, or the arm, or something, and then suddenly fifteen seconds are over, and the airlock is right there. The scuffle with Kent has left them just a little bit off course, and Shane is going to hit the side of the door and probably ping away the same way Kent did, but Ilya anticipates this, and he uses the thrusters on his suit to spin himself, pulling Shane with him as he goes, and he launches Shane into the airlock first, and then he follows. Shane is flailing a bit in the zero G, looking like a turtle that has flipped over and cannot right itself, but then the airlock is pressurizing, and the artificial gravity is coming back, and Shane falls flat to the ground. Again, this might be funny if it was happening to someone else. 

Ilya falls hard, and it’s lucky he didn’t get a chance to float over to Shane the way he’d hoped to, because he probably would have killed Shane himself, falling on him. 

He can only wait helplessly for the airlock to finish cycling; he doesn’t know if Shane is okay, if the insulation was enough. He can’t take the helmet off his suit, even, until the suit is satisfied that there’s air in here, and even if he could, it would be fucking stupid, so he wouldn’t. 

“Shane?” he’s yelling, despite himself. “Shane? Solnyshko?” 

His helmet chimes with permission to open it, and so he hits the button frantically. He finally registers that other people are talking, trying to calm him down, trying to calm Shane down, because Shane is alive, and making these terrifying, pained sounds on the floor that Ilya has never heard from him before. He’s holding his hand up, away from the rest of his body. His thumb and fingers are raw and red and look damaged, frostbitten. The webbing is slightly black. But Hunter unwraps the insulation from his face, and Shane is a bit blue and is shuddering violently but he’s alive. He’s alive. Ilya still can’t breathe.

“Relax, Roz!” Hunter is trying to say to him. “Relax! Jesus Christ. Galina, we need a sedative in here.” 

“No!” Ilya barks finally. “I’m okay. I’m okay. Shane? Are you? Are you? Get me out of this fucking suit.” 

“I’m okay,” Shane finally says, his voice tight with pain, but not otherwise damaged, and Rose finally heads over to start the agonizing process of removing Ilya from his claustrophobic prison. Shane makes an effort to sit up a little so that he can meet Ilya’s eyes, so Ilya can see that he means it, that he isn’t just saying it, the way he usually does. “I’m okay, Ilya. I’m okay. Please calm down. It’s all right.” 

Ilya lets his head rest back against the suit, feeling that maybe he should be embarrassed by his outburst. He forces himself to breathe, and Rose pushes his sweat-lank curls out of his face with a careful gentleness as she works. It’s probably for the best that Ilya is still trapped for now, because if he wasn’t, he would be trying to pull Shane into his arms, would be trying to hold him the way he’d held him the day of the explosion, and he knows he probably shouldn’t be doing that anymore. 

They all meet in the crew area, after Shane’s hand has been treated and bandaged and proclaimed “probably not as bad as it looks”, and after Ilya has refused several attempts at sedation because he will eventually stop shaking on his own, probably, and has refused Galina’s attempts to get him to at least take ten minutes in the Earth Room. The thought of standing on that dock and looking at the cottage makes him want to start hurling very breakable things at very hard surfaces, and he doubts that’s the reaction the Earth Room is supposed to inspire, so Galina should be glad that he refuses. 

Shane looks better, showered. Ilya had this idea that he would be nearly catatonic, drugged to the fucking gills or something, but he doesn’t seem it. He seems normal, a little sick-looking, a little pained. He doesn’t look like a man who just had to face his worst fear, but then again, maybe that’s part of it. He just faced his worst fear and survived, so maybe there’s less to be nervous about now. Ilya doesn’t think anxiety really works like that, but what does he know? 

He feels pathetic for being the one who’s still falling apart, when he was in an EVA suit the entire time, and was the only one probably not in any danger. It was fifteen seconds of spacewalk for him. No big deal. So he slinks into his seat and buries his face in his arms, folded on the table, until everyone else has arrived. There’s one more empty chair now, and he knows that they will have to talk about it, but he really wishes they didn’t.

“Status, Hayd?” Shane asks quietly, looking down at the table. Pike clears his throat and steps up, tablet in his hands. 

“Oxygen levels are good. The, uh, the oxygen garden is thriving, obviously. We got more than enough plants out of The Voyageur to produce what we need to make it home. We also got a bunch of replacement parts that Marleau was hurting for, so he can make repairs to the oxygen reclaimer, which will put us in an even better spot, technically? Um, and the fresh food will be good to have, but we also have enough rations to get us the rest of the way, no matter what happens with the plants. The airlock of The Voyageur, unfortunately, was irreparably damaged by the override, so it’ll be harder for us to take the other bomb, if we need it. Not impossible, but…kind of a ‘we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it’ situation, I think.” 

“Right,” Shane says, some of the tension leeching out of his shoulders. “Thank you. All of you.” 

“We’re putting it in the mission report that he attacked you,” Rose says suddenly, arms folded over her chest like she’s ready for a fight. “I know you’re going to say something stupidly noble about how his family doesn’t deserve to know he went out like an asshole, but he went out like a fucking asshole, and we’re not letting Ilya get any shit for not saving him.” 

Ilya sits up just in time to see that Shane smiles a little, ducks his head. It almost makes Ilya want to hide his face away again like a bashful teenager, but he manages to act like an adult instead.

“Yeah, okay,” Shane says quietly, and Ilya can breathe normally again. Not like he thought anyone would have a real issue with what he did, considering, but still. It’s strange to have it so quickly brushed aside. 

“I did not know what else to do,” he croaks out, and everyone turns and looks at him at once, and he feels very foolish, and naive, and not like himself at all. 

“You did the right thing,” Rose says fiercely. 

“Yeah, dude, fuck that guy,” Marleau agrees. 

“You saved my life,” Shane says. He meets Ilya’s eyes, and he holds them. “Thank you, Ilya.” 

Ilya swallows, and nods, and tries not to think about how easy it was to open his hand and flail his arm and shake a man off to his death. Easy, mostly, because it was for Shane.

Chapter End Notes

One thing from the movie that has always bothered me is that chris evans is like "cilluan murphy should be the one to do the dangerous job of fixing the panels, because he's the one who suggested we go to the Icarus I" and then like 45 minutes later is like "Capa needs to be in this suit because he's too precious to the mission" like YEAH, chris, he IS precious to the mission, which is why you shouldn't have put him out to fix those panels 45 minutes ago???

Anyway, I knew I wanted to include this scene (because I think it's very romo to cling to your husband's arm while shooting through space), so I've lifted almost everything ridiculous from the movie (like the insulation bit). For anyone who HAS seen the movie, hopefully it's obvious by now that I am not being faithful to it, plotwise (it is one of my favorite movies of all time, but this is an AU fic for a show about hockey players falling in love; I'm not going to go full Sunshine)

Chapter 8

Chapter Notes

Their adventures have not left them very far off course, nor very far off their timetable. Hayden charts their new course to the sun, and Shane and Marleau both check his work and confirm it carefully this time, so there are no more incidents as they start up again. In two more days, they will detach the bomb vessel from the rest of Chiron. Since Dallas Kent has been flung off into space, Shane will be piloting. Ilya feels guilty for thinking of it as an upgrade, even though it is one. He and Shane will be alone for three days there, and three days back, if they survive. Ilya is maybe dreading it. 

There isn’t much time to waste on dread, though. There’s so much to do. So many final preparations to make. Ilya has, at this point, most of his memories intact, and so he's able to work on the bomb and the bomb vessel without stumbling around like a baby deer anymore, and he runs every check a thousand times, feeling a bit like Shane as he does so. With his memories has come back his old confidence: a seventy-five percent chance seems solid, no matter what the projections have to say about it. He’s thinking maybe eighty. 

He and Shane mostly avoid each other. Ilya wakes up from dreams of Shane writhing beautifully underneath him, or looking at him with desperation, or holding him close, and sometimes he feels like he’s on the verge of unlocking the last days, but it’s like his brain is afraid to make that final push and allow it to come back. He thinks that makes sense. 

He goes through his personal effects again, still looking for something that’s missing, and he’s even more struck by the fact that there’s very little that’s personal about them. Nothing that he would have expected to have taken. Shirts that have no meaning to him. A pair of sweatpants that he has no particular attachment to. Why not the ratty sweatshirt that Shane bought him from the gift shop down the road from the base five years ago? Why not the soft t-shirts that he started buying after Shane admitted to having a texture aversion to the old brand that Ilya wore? Why are those bad textured t-shirts with him now? Why are there pictures of his mother and father and Sveta, but no pictures of Shane? Where is his fucking wedding ring? Where is his fucking stuff? Was he trying to punish Shane as he packed his things? Was he trying to say yes, you have dumped me, so I will cut out every part of you from my life? That doesn’t sound like him. Ilya is usually such a wallower. He's the sort of man who will wear an ex’s sweatshirt to bed, crying into their scent. He’s pathetic. Svetlana calls him a drowned dog when he’s sad, pets his hair and coos because she knows he gets horrible when people leave him. He’s not someone who reacts like this. He can’t figure it out. 

He spends a final stint in the Earth Room, at the cottage. He thinks about exchanging rings with Shane, feeling like they had the rest of their lives to be together, and he thinks about what could have happened in three days to unwrite that memory, make it into nothing.

When they’re alone in the bomb vessel, preparing for the final separation, he hovers over Shane’s shoulder, watching him work. This cockpit is smaller and more contained than the one on the main ship, and Shane seems as comfortable in it as he was in the other one, which makes sense. He has been awake all this time. Plenty of time to practice. 

He’s gentler with Ilya than he was before, but no less wary. He seems to understand that Ilya must be close to having his full complement of memories, and of course he’s very considerate about it. He doesn’t comment on Ilya’s longing gazes or those occasional moments where his hands twitch forward to touch, or soothe, or comfort. It’s a reflex, and Ilya always shoves it down, and Shane dutifully pretends not to notice. Ilya can tell he’s nervous, though. Anticipating Ilya’s reaction to the fallout. 

He makes sure that Ilya is comfortably settled in his new room, and then he sort of politely implies that Ilya would probably be better off testing the bomb than looming over his shoulder in the cockpit the entire time. Ilya rolls his eyes and runs those fucking tests until he's worked himself up into a fury. Shane announces over the intercom that they've separated successfully and are on their way to the sun. There is cheering and whooping from the others, who pretend they aren’t afraid of this last leg of the journey more than anything else, and there are many well-wishes for them both. Ilya responds as politely as he can, but he’s still angry, and he’s in the sort of mood where he’s angry with everyone. He’s angry with Rose, who knows everything, and with the others, who are too stupid to have figured it out. He’s glad to be leaving them behind. He doesn’t want to look at any of them. He’s angry with Shane, too, for not helping him. For letting him flounder like this, waiting for the end. 

When the ship’s computer chimes in again to confirm that they’re away, and that they will be out of contract with the main ship until they make their return journey, Ilya thinks, great, no reason for me to worry about distracting him anymore, and stomps his way across the very small vessel and into the cockpit again. Shane looks up from his stupid fucking book with wary, polite surprise. 

“Everything okay?” he asks. 

“No,” Ilya says. “I want my wedding ring back.”

Shane’s eyebrows do that confused thing again, but they stay confused this time, instead of opening back up after a few seconds. 

“Your…what?” he asks. 

“Don’t try to pretend it didn’t exist. Don’t fucking…” 

“I’m not. I’m just…it’s on Earth.” 

“What? It’s not on your necklace?”

Shane’s hand flies up to his chest, covers the necklace beneath his shirt protectively. 

“No,” he says. Before Ilya can call him a liar, he says, defensively, as if Ilya is trying to steal it, “this is mine.” 

“Shane, what? That doesn’t make any sense.” 

Shane frowns at him, then, and he looks like he’s trying to decide if he wants to get up or not, which means he just huddles in his seat, looking vaguely bullied, his shoulders hunched forward. 

“I can’t…please don’t ask me to tell you. You’ll remember. You will. And you’ll tell me you fucking hate me again, and, and that’s fine. I’ve come to terms with that. But I can’t tell you. Okay? I’m sorry.” 

“What, did you fuck Rose Landry?” Ilya snaps, even though he knows that’s ridiculous, but he just can’t think of anything that would…

Oh. 

“Oh,” he says aloud. Shane’s expression crumbles for a second before it goes all blank and closed off again. His stupid, most media-trained expression. And Ilya doesn’t remember, exactly. Not yet. But he understands. It’s like when you’re doing a jigsaw puzzle, and you don’t know exactly what the piece you’re missing looks like, but you have an idea, based on the context of the pieces around it. You know what the rest of the pattern has to be. 

“Ilya,” Shane says. 

“The science team,” Ilya laughs, disbelieving. “Dead. Three days before launch. Fuck.” 

“Ilya.” 

“All this time, I thought I must have chosen to leave my father behind, but I didn’t, did I? You fucking chose for me.” 

Shane winces, and he looks down at his hands, clutching his book in front of him like a shield. Ilya wants to call him a coward, wants to insist that Shane meet his eyes, but it makes him fucking sick to see Shane looking so cowed and so frightened in front of him. Ilya watched this man take out Dallas Kent with a single punch, but he’s frozen now with shame, made small because of Ilya, and it hurts. 

“Fuck this,” Ilya says, and he leaves the cockpit, and he goes back to his new, smaller room, and he sits on his bed and scrubs his hands through his hair until he wants to punch someone, and then he goes to the bomb and runs more fucking tests, the projections all lying to him about seventy or sixty percent, as always. The bomb chamber is bigger than his entire room, and so he lies down on the cold floor and stares at the ceiling and thinks about his wedding ring, abandoned on Earth. Was he that angry with Shane? Was he so purposefully, lethally angry that he threw his wedding ring away and packed nothing personal that would remind him of Shane at all? It feels absurd, impossible. Just because of his father? His father who never loved him?

He tries to force the memory to return, now that he knows what’s waiting for him. He doesn’t want it back any more than he used to, but he needs it now, because he needs to make it make sense. He needs the context of it. 

Because his father…

Ilya wanted to stay behind and take care of his father. Or, not wanted. Wanted is the opposite of the right word. Needed comes close, but even that…it wasn’t a need, and it wasn’t a want. It was a duty, and that was something that was important to him, yes. But if the entire science team was dead, and if Shane said to him Ilya, we need you in space to save everyone, including me, and including Sveta, and including everyone you have ever cared for, wouldn’t he have just said yes? Wouldn’t he have understood that as a kind of duty, too? He hates being backed into a corner, hates not having a choice, but they’re talking about the fate of the entire planet. Could his devotion to his family really have been that much of a bone-deep rot inside him? 

He falls asleep on the floor there, and he dreams about falling into the sun, screaming on his way down, and when he wakes up, he expects that Shane will be standing in the doorway and looking down at him, judging him for sleeping on the floor like an idiot, but there’s no one. The lights are dimmer than they used to be. Maybe Hollander is asleep, or maybe he dimmed them because he saw Ilya asleep on the floor and felt guilty. A lot of his actions and his words feel like guilt, now that Ilya knows. 

He’s so fucking angry, and he doesn’t even know what he’s angry about, which is making him angrier. He keeps thinking back to the way Shane had talked to Grigori, all his injured pride on Ilya’s behalf, not only confused but disgusted that Ilya’s father didn’t realize his son was good, was important, was someone to be proud of. But Ilya’s father had never been proud of him, and Ilya had been so angry with Shane for trying, and now he has apparently taken off his wedding ring and indicated to his husband that he doesn’t want him anymore because Shane did what Shane was always going to do and made the difficult choice that Ilya could not. Why would that have been enough to shatter what they had? What had Shane said during that conversation? What had he done? It must have been so horrible, if it made Ilya react the way he did, right? But Ilya can’t imagine it. Not from Shane. He still feels all that love, and none of the hate that must have followed, and he doesn’t understand how his affections could have so quickly changed, and he hates this feeling, like he can’t understand his own heart.

The next day, his back hurts from lying on the floor, but there is nothing to do, so he lounges in his bed and reads a book on his tablet, and he avoids Shane, or maybe Shane is avoiding him. If Shane needed anything, he would call on the intercom, but he doesn’t. On his tablet, buried in the archives, Ilya finds scans of his personal notebook from his years of working on the project. It ends before the science building explosion, but it’s helpful, anyway, to read up on more specific information about his thoughts and feelings, refreshing the memories that have only just been restored. It’s focused on the science of it, but bits of Shane slip through anyway, of course, because he was such a big part of everything. Ilya notes every yearning comment disguised as annoyance, and he finds himself smiling at them softly, amused at his younger self, who was so bad at wanting. 

He wishes that he could have listened to Svetlana’s messages one more time, watched her sad face. He wonders if she misses him terribly, or if it just feels like he is busy at work, like it sometimes gets between them. They have been friends for such a long time that absences hardly touch them anymore; they will get back together when he gets back to Earth, and it will be like no time has passed at all. He wonders how she feels about everything that happened. Did he tell her about what Shane did? But she has always hated his father, and she’s not as soft as she pretends to be. She probably likes that Shane did what he did. 

Ilyushka, you know you would not be able to make that choice, she would have chided, if he told her. Which is why you let him do the choosing. 

It always seemed, in their private life, that Shane wanted him to decide everything, and Ilya liked that a lot. Shane would look at him with his big, wanting eyes, and he would watch Ilya carefully, see Ilya in ways no one else did, and Ilya would say get on your knees, and Shane just would, like it was nothing. Like it was so easy to give control over to Ilya. And of course that was a heady thing, that trust, the promise of it. Ilya is not someone who has been trusted like that before, in his life. Even with Sveta, there were always walls up between them. Shane didn’t have any walls at all when they were together. It was like he hadn’t realized he was supposed to build them, and so he hadn’t. He was so beautifully bare. 

Ilya supposes at some point he made the connection, in the sense that he understood that Shane was making decisions that had an impact on the entire world, and that he was fucking tired, exhausted with being a role model and with being the savior of the planet. Ilya was always saying things to him like stop thinking and take off your clothes and don’t move, you do not have to say anything, and he could see the look of aching relief on Shane’s face to hear those things. Ilya would say beg, and Shane would beg. Ilya would say on your hands and knees, and Shane would do it. It was always good, for Ilya, and it would have been good for Ilya anyway, because of the way he felt about Shane, but it was especially good because he has so often felt like there is nothing in his life that he can control, and Shane handed that gift to him so fucking easily. Wanted him to have it. Wanted to not have to make any more fucking choices. 

But here, since he woke up, Shane has been making choice after choice, and Ilya has been glad to let him do it, and he remembers being glad to let him do it back on Earth, too, about things that were not just about the two of them. Shane understood the stakes; the world needed a person like him to say “we will do this, even if it’s the difficult thing”. Yuna and Crowell were both on that team too, the first time around, but Crowell resigned after the first failure, and Yuna took a backseat to Shane and the various faceless government entities who orbited around Shane, whose names Ilya never even bothered to remember, because they had nothing to do with his specific part of the mission, so why would he? That was Shane’s job. That was what Shane was for. 

Of course there were all the scientists and all the sponsors, all the people with money, everyone who was involved with the project in any capacity. Everyone in the world, really. Everyone who believed the sun was dying and that Shane represented their last hope. They were all, always, looking to Shane. 

Can Ilya really have been surprised when Shane made the choice he made? 

There’s only a small room on the vessel for their food storage. They took a few tomato plants, mostly just to spruce the place up, but Ilya sticks to the awful dried rations, because he’s the sort of person who punishes himself when he’s angry, because he wants to stay angry, even though he’s not even sure who he’s angry with. 

Shane edges out of the cockpit with the politely anxious look of a student late for class, and he slides to the cabinet in which they are keeping their food, and he takes a single tomato off the vine and smiles at it rather than looking at Ilya. Ilya watches him openly, remembers kissing him and loving him and fucking him and thinking that he would die if he didn’t get his dick in his mouth, so how can they be like this, now? 

“Everything okay?” he asks, mostly to be an asshole, because he knows it will make Shane jump. He’s right, and it does, but he doesn’t feel any better for it, really. He still loves Shane, in his memories. In his memories, he’s holding him while Shane sobs with relief that he’s still alive and is not dead like the rest of the science team. He wonders, now, if Shane was also maybe crying because he understood something else that Ilya had not yet been able to put together. Had Shane known, even then, what was going to happen? 

“Yeah, we’re on schedule,” Shane answers. 

“Okay,” Ilya scoffs, because that’s not really what he was asking, but he knows that’s stupid, and that he’s just looking for a fight, and he thinks Shane probably recognizes that, given how he looks briefly angry, affronted, like Ilya has just insulted him. 

“Okay,” Shane says, and he walks away, still holding his little tomato, looking less pleased with it, like Ilya has ruined even that. 

Then

Shane is strange even before he calls Ilya into his office, and it has Ilya on edge. Ilya has been left homeless, in a sense, with no science building, and no science team to tutor in the ways of his bomb. Three days before the launch, he was pretty much done with the tutoring anyway, but he was always lurking around in case anyone had questions. No one has questions anymore. Everyone is avoiding questions. He’s beginning to think the launch won’t happen at all. 

But of course the launch has to happen, because they have no alternative, and Ilya has just been waiting to see what they decide. 

There are other qualified scientists, of course. Some of them can probably even be considered astronaut material, if they can be flown in quickly enough after being talked into taking a three year post in a fucking space ship with almost no warning. It was bad luck that there were no other scientists off post the day of the explosion; literally all of them were caught in that building, and are now dead, except for one man named Dallas Kent, who would not have been Ilya’s first choice as a backup, and certainly isn’t qualified to be the resident bomb expert. Ilya has been teaching him anyway, trying to evaluate him, but Kent is churlish and focused primarily on his other duties, and seems to regard the bomb as a means to an end, and not the end itself. Yes, of course, very funny, Kent. You point the bomb at the sun and launch it and that’s all there is to it. It’s a sequence of steps, button-presses and lever pulls and math equations worked out quickly in your head, but yes, sure. Just pressing a button and there it goes. 

Shane knows how he feels about this, because they have barely been apart since the science building exploded, not particularly caring if anyone knows they’re sharing a room now, because Shane had needed Ilya close that first night, and because Ilya wants him close always. And so Ilya has complained about Kent, and complained about the lack of other qualified candidates, and Shane knows, and listens, and tries to reassure him. He says I’m working on it, and I’ll figure it out, and maybe Ilya does notice that Shane looks stressed every time they talk about it, but he doesn’t really think about it. They’re all stressed. The whole world is stressed. 

News about the explosion spreads immediately, and even Yuna Hollander hasn’t been able to keep a completely tight lid on things. She got Shane in front of a camera to put out attempted reassuring messages to various morning shows, where he said his bland, comforting things, and Rose Landry said her perky, comforting things about how they have such a good team and they’re still going to launch on schedule, and no one seemed to care very much about whether they had a bomb expert on board. They hadn’t had one on the last flight, either, which was why everyone was so sure they should have one on this flight, just in case that was the issue, but maybe it’s not such a huge deal that they don’t have any surviving bomb experts just as long as they don’t talk about it, and that’s what Shane and Rose are sent out there to do: not talk about it. 

And still, Ilya doesn’t notice. 

He doesn’t notice even when Shane is sitting down at his desk with red-rimmed eyes, breathing fast, and when he hesitates, like he doesn't know how to say what he has to say, though they have gotten to the point, mostly, where they don’t really have to overthink such things, at least in private.

“Ilya,” Shane says finally, his voice tumbling out of him, like he has forced it. “Ilya, you know I wouldn’t…” He bites his lip, waits, looks at Ilya for another second, as if he’s hoping Ilya will figure out what’s happening without him having to say it. Absurdly, Ilya’s immediate guess is that Shane is going to tell him that they couldn’t work out the citizenship thing, and that Ilya and his father will have to go back to Russia when the project is over, and he’s stung, a little hurt by the fact that Shane and Yuna couldn’t handle something that they have been telling him will be easy. He doesn’t want to go back to Russia. It’s the worst thing he can think of, to go back there with his father, to try and live a life apart from Shane.

“Shane,” he starts, though he doesn’t know what to say. “What’s wrong, solnyshko?” 

“Ilya, there are no other options. I’ve been trying, baby, I really have been. But we need a physicist who knows the Stellar Bomb on the mission, and all of our other options are dead.” 

Ilya understands, as a single tear leaks out of Shane’s eye, before he ruthlessly wipes it away and then sniffles and rubs at his face, packaging himself away behind the Shane Hollander mask, the golden boy mask, the savior mask. 

“What,” Ilya says. 

“We need you to join the mission,” Shane replies. He looks painfully wilted, for a second, as if he expects Ilya to injure him, and his eyes flit down to the desk, like he can’t bear to keep Ilya’s eyes, the way he often avoids eye contact with other people. 

Other people, never Ilya anymore. But apparently Ilya, now. 

“I can’t, solnyshko,” Ilya says apologetically, gently. “You know I can’t. My father…” 

“I know.”

“So, I’m sorry, but I can’t do it. But I know you will find a solution.” 

Shane exhales shakily, and he forces himself to meet Ilya’s eyes. 

“You are my solution,” he says, and Ilya realizes that this is not an offer, or an attempted negotiation. 

“Shane.”

“I’m sorry.” 

“Shane. No.” 

“Ilya, I don’t…” 

“We can send anyone. Kent can fucking handle it.” 

“You were telling me two hours ago that Kent is…” 

“Yes, but that was before I knew you wanted to fucking send me to fucking space for three fucking years, Shane!” 

He’s yelling; he can’t help himself. Shane nods, keeps his eyes on his desk. His fingers are gripping the edge of it, his knuckles white, like he’s ready to push up and back from it, like he thinks Ilya will attack him. Could he really believe Ilya would do such a thing? Ilya knows he’s probably more likely to run. 

“None of this is what I want,” Shane says, his voice only a little louder, still shaky. “Ilya, you know I…” 

“And you know that I have to stay here. My father will be dead by the time I get back.” 

“I know.” 

“I cannot go, Shane.” 

“I’ll make sure he’s taken care of. I’ll fucking do it myself, Ilya, I…” 

Even now, even as the trapped sense of betrayal is spreading through him, the thought of Shane trying to help his black hole of a father makes Ilya want to die. He never wants anyone to treat Shane the way Grigori Rozanov has treated him, all his life. It’s disgusting, the thought that Shane would face that down for him. It’s one thing for Ilya to endure it; he’s used to it, and it’s his duty. But he can’t let that happen to Shane.

“You will not go near him,” Ilya snaps, and Shane nods, expression flattening even further, getting even further out of reach. Ilya feels a real panic settling over him now, because he knows Shane. He knows him so well. He knows that Shane will not have risked this confrontation unless it was the only option, and he knows that Shane will make it happen, somehow, even if Ilya doesn’t agree. The panic builds in him in a way that’s unfamiliar. Like it’s taking him over. 

“Okay,” Shane says, placatingly. He stands up, and he meets Ilya’s gaze, and his face is horrible, expressionless. A mask. “I’m sorry, Ilya.” 

“If you were sorry, you wouldn’t fucking do it.” 

“You know that’s not true.” 

Shane smiles, only a little, like he’s trying to, what, commiserate? Act like this is just some funny little thing that’s happening? Ilya has never been so angry in his life. It’s similar to the hot flush of fear that struck him when he failed to make the cut on the first mission, and he lashed out at Shane and drove him away because he couldn’t handle it. It’s worse than that, though. He feels like an animal being backed towards a cage. He knows, somewhere in his heart, where he’s still capable of being rational, that he isn’t supposed to do this anymore. Shane asked him not to do this anymore, admitted that he always takes people at face value. He will believe whatever Ilya says now. 

But Ilya doesn’t care. He wants to hurt Shane enough to make this stop.

“You’re a fucking coward, sending people to do something you cannot do yourself,” he says. “Forcing people away from their duty. Just because you wouldn’t know anything about that…” 

He is, maybe, expecting Shane to remain quiet and take the shouting and the fury and all of Ilya’s hurt feelings until Ilya tires himself out, because he looks like he’s settling in to do just that, and because Ilya has seen people lose their tempers at Shane before, and he usually just waits until they’re finished. Now, though, he makes a strangled sound, incredulous. 

“You think I don’t know anything about duty? Ilya, this is my fucking duty. My duty is to everyone! The whole fucking planet!” 

“It’s certainly not to your husband,” Ilya says. He’s getting frantic now. Shane doesn’t react to that, and Ilya is so angry, and so he wrenches the ring off his finger and hurls it at the wall where it pings, pathetically quiet, and rolls off the bookcase, falling behind it. Shane looks after it with unease, as if he wants to go and pick it up and dust it off, and then back at Ilya, who feels a bit pathetic for the lack of sound it made, but not pathetic enough to dissolve his anger.

“I can’t choose you,” Shane says rigidly. “Over everyone in the world. I can’t…when we started this, we knew what we were doing. I thought you understood that I…” 

He doesn’t finish, looking at Ilya incredulously still, as if Ilya is causing a scene over nothing. Meanwhile, Ilya’s heart is pounding out of his chest, and his head is swimming, and he thinks he might genuinely be having a panic attack. He has talked Shane through them before, but he’s never had one himself. It’s awful. He fucking hates it. It feels like he’s trying to talk to a brick wall, trying to move a planet with his own two hands. He knows Shane. He has known Shane forever. He knows Shane will not put him above the rest of the world; he wouldn’t be Shane, if he did that. 

And he knows that this is fucking stupid. He knows that he’s acting irrationally. He doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t want to go. He can’t leave his father. But is Shane right? Is he right that there are no other options? Can Ilya really say his father’s final years are more important than the entire world? No, of fucking course not. But that’s rationality, and he isn’t being rational now. 

“I thought I knew you, too,” Ilya manages to say. “I thought you loved me. I guess we were both wrong.” 

Shane’s eyes do that thing they do, which he insists isn’t crying; they get wet with tears, but he blinks them away, and somehow that is always worse than if he’d sob openly. He nods, once, like Ilya has just said something professionally upsetting, like Ilya just said the printer is broken, or your admin assistant just walked out and isn’t coming back. Ilya knows better, though. He’s viciously glad, for a second. 

“Okay,” Shane says. “I am sorry, and I do love you, for what it’s worth.” 

“It’s worth nothing, if you still try to do this to me,” Ilya says. “I won’t go. You know I have to be here. I have to…” 

“You’re right that I don’t understand,” Shane says, talking steadily, quietly, over Ilya. “I know I can come off as emotionless, or cold. I’m not, but I know why it might…why it might seem that way. I know I’ve had to be practical.” He says the word like it’s dirty, though he has never seemed unhappy about his practical nature before. “The way he talks to you makes me want to kill him, and I don’t understand why you would give up so much for him, for your whole life, because you are so…” He shakes his head, looks away. “Sorry. I’m sorry. But, Ilya, this wasn’t me asking. And this wasn’t me giving you a choice. I just hoped it would feel like one. That you’d make it one, I guess.”  

Ilya understands, abstractly, that he is very undignified when the security guards come into the room, and when he tries to fight them off, and when he tries to run. He understands that he is shouting very stupid things, and very hurtful things, and things that aren’t like him at all, but through this entire conversation, he’d expected to be given more time. He hadn’t expected that they would take him now, here. 

When they finally tackle him to the ground, Shane is standing over him, his eyes closed, shaking, now that it’s over, now that he can allow himself to unclench, and someone is standing beside him, telling him that he did what he had to do, and Ilya understands this, technically. It’s easier to understand with the sedation coming over him, with the panic receding. Can he really be surprised? He should have seen this coming. He should have…

I didn’t mean it, he wants to say. Can I have my ring, at least? Can I take it back? Shane is nodding along with what the government official is saying, but he’s biting the inside of his cheek, and Ilya is remembering the things he just screamed at his husband, at the man he loves, and he’s so angry, and despairing, but he doesn’t think Shane is a coward, and he doesn’t hate him, and he doesn’t wish he’d never met him. Those are not the kinds of things he meant to say, and now he won’t get a chance to take them back, because he’s already falling asleep, and by the time he wakes up, he will be more than a year removed, in space, and Shane will be here on Earth, alone, and he will have spent the whole time believing everything that Ilya told him in the throes of panic, when he was at his worst.

Maybe he has turned out like his father, after all. His father would have reacted in the exact same way.

Now

“Fuck!” Ilya yells, jumping up from his bunk, tripping over himself, smacking his knee on something as he goes. It’s as ungainly as the attempted escape from Shane’s office that’s still rattling around in his memory, but at least this time, he’s alone in his room. 

He trips, too, over his crate of personal items, still sitting on the floor where he once again went through them, earlier. Yes, of course it’s impersonal. Of course there’s nothing of Shane in there. Shane probably packed all this shit himself, and he thought Ilya would want nothing of him. 

“Shane!” he shouts into the hallway. The bomb vessel is small, but he would rather not go on a tear through the whole thing. Shane sticks his head out into the hall from the open door of the food area. 

“Are you okay?” he calls back.

“No!” Ilya fumes, stalking down the hall towards him. Shane straightens up, his face smoothing over into semi-blank concern. He bites his lip. It’s the only tell.

“Okay,” he says. “So you remember.” 

“Yes, I fucking remember,” Ilya says, and then he’s there, finally standing in front of Shane with all of his entire self present, and he wants to grab him and shove him back against the wall and kiss him, but he finds himself crushing Shane into a hug, instead, wrapping his arms around him, squeezing him tight. Shane lets out this little oh! Fuck, okay, and is hugging Ilya back, trembling with his relief, and Ilya thinks he feels panic threatening to come over him again at the depth of the knowledge that he has unlocked, but he forces it back ruthlessly, and he holds Shane even tighter. 

They do eventually end up against the wall, because Shane backs up a little bit to brace against it, to better hold the weight of Ilya clinging to him like some sort of giant space squid, which is very fucking considerate of him, the fucking asshole. Ilya kisses him for it, finally, and he feels the finally of it exhaled into him by Shane, too, so he knows it is welcome. He supposes maybe he should have been nervous about that, about Shane having more than a year in space to regret ever getting involved with Ilya, but he hadn’t been nervous about it at all, and now he has been proven right to not be nervous, because of course Shane will not do something reasonable like hate him for being a fucking dickhead. 

He hates that it feels like Shane is holding him up, like Shane is comforting him, when he came in here with every intention of immediately comforting Shane, saying, tell me you did not believe me, solnyshko, all this time. 

He pulls back to say just that, but then he finds himself kissing Shane again instead, because he is uniquely terrible at this, it turns out. It’s a good fucking kiss, though. Shane seems to agree, judging from the way he’s grabbing the front of Ilya’s shirt and trying to haul him closer, like that’s even physically possible, at this point. 

Ilya’s heart hurts, feels like it’s being crushed in his chest, remembering Shane, Shane, Shane. “Why did you come?” he asks desperately, once he can finally pull away. “After what I said to you, Shane, fuck, solnyshko. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean any of it.” 

“Okay,” Shane breathes out, squeezing his eyes shut. He smiles, only a little. “I, uh, I actually wasn’t completely sure. I thought maybe there was a chance you were just mad and freaking out and trying to be a dick on purpose? But also I thought maybe there was a chance you weren’t, so. I don’t know.” 

“Yes, the first one, even though I promised you I wouldn’t.” 

“Oh, well. Whatever. I know what I did was unforgivable.”

“Not unforgivable.”

“No?” and of course Shane looks hopeful, wrecked, like he still doesn’t think this will last. Ilya feels that he has a lot to make up for, really. Maybe they both do, but…

“I was proud of myself, this whole time, for finally leaving him behind. I thought I was finally…strong enough.” 

“It isn’t about strength, Ilya.” 

“Maybe not. I don’t know. It felt like strength. You made the right choice.” 

“I know I did,” Shane says, sadly, like that was never the issue. It probably never was, for him. Even if he broke his own heart doing it, he would think it was the right choice, just as long as it helped everyone else.

“Why are you here?” Ilya asks again, more gently this time. 

“I mean, Jesus. I couldn’t send you if I was too fucking scared to go myself,” Shane says. He’s really crying now, not just doing his lethal watery-eyed thing. Like he has run out of masks to hide behind. Or maybe he’s just responding to the fact that Ilya is definitely crying, too. Either one. “So I, fuck. I don’t know. I passed the psych evals. I knew the right things to say. I got Galina to give me medication. No one was going to tell me no. I wouldn’t let them. I’m sorry. I couldn’t stay behind and prove you right.” 

“Sweetheart, of course you could have. I would never want you to put yourself through this. I was…I was just…” He doesn’t want to diminish how angry he was, how betrayed in the moment, but he doesn’t know how to express it while also making it clear that it doesn’t matter. Shane could have done so much worse to him, and Ilya would still love him. He doesn’t have the right words. He doesn’t know how to say it never would have been enough to make me hate you. It never would have been enough to make me give you up. I need you. I have never hated you, and I never could. I was angry. I was betrayed. But you were right about my father, and right about me. Please tell me you didn’t believe me when I said those things. 

He doesn’t say any of that, because he can’t figure out how to do it yet, but he thinks there is probably time. 

The worst part is that he knows that Shane did believe him, at least a bit. Probably believed him more than he's admitting to. Like, sure, maybe there was a part of him that thought Ilya was possibly just reverting to the old defense mechanisms that he thought he'd outgrown, because they both made their mistakes sometimes, going back to old habits. The difference is that they always had a chance to apologize and fix it quickly, without being put into a fucking coma for sixteen months. 

He can see the relief on Shane now, the way it changes the shape of his spine, the way he holds himself. This whole time, Ilya thought it was just nerves, just fear about the mission, and yes, of course there has probably been that all along. But it's so easy now to see just how afraid Shane has been about this conversation. Not because he didn't have any hope that it would be all right, but because he has held on to his hopes, and he was probably very afraid that they would be dashed. 

And he hates that Shane probably thought very seriously about whether it would be safer to pack only things from Earth that had nothing to do with him, just so that Ilya wouldn’t have any reminders of him if he really didn’t want them anymore. He can imagine it: Shane standing in Ilya’s little room in the barracks, eyes still red-rimmed and too wet, hands probably still shaking, holding that comfortable oversized hoodie in one hand and the impersonal spare hoodie in the other. Not exactly the most difficult choice he has ever been asked to make, but of course he still would have given it weight, because he’s Shane. 

He made the wrong choice, in the end, but it’s not like Ilya can blame him for that. He does wish that Shane had brought his wedding ring, at least. Worn it on his own necklace so that Ilya could have it back now. He can imagine Shane hesitating over that, too, not wanting to be presumptuous or something. It’s probably collecting dust on Earth behind that bookcase, left behind like all the other things Ilya would have chosen to keep close. Or maybe Shane put it with the rest of Ilya’s belongings. He probably at least prepared for the possibility that Ilya’s panicked words had been, well, panicked words, and not entirely honest. 

And then he had sixteen months to waffle back and forth on it, probably talking himself into and out of both interpretations every other week, and Ilya’s stomach hurts, just thinking about it.

“Fuck, you should be so angry with me,” he says. Shane frowns, leans back. 

“If this is another thing where you don’t actually remember, I’m flying us into the sun,” he says. Ilya pulls him into another bruising hug, so Shane doesn’t get any ideas about trying to escape. 

“I remember everything. Fuck. I remember saying those horrible fucking lies to you, solnyshko. Of course I don’t hate you. Of course I love you. I was angry and hurt and panicked and I said stupid shit, and I promised I would not do that to you.” 

“Oh,” Shane says. “Yeah. I get it, though. It was a fucked up circumstance. It’s okay.” 

“It’s fucking not.” 

“Maybe not. I don’t…I’m too tired to care, I think, right now. We can figure out how mad we are at each other later, maybe. When the sun is back on? I’m just…fuck, Ilya. I’m so fucking relieved. I thought…” 

“Yes, I know.” 

“I kept thinking…” 

“Yes, a fucking year and a half, you put me to sleep, and you tortured yourself, of course, because you are the most annoying martyr on the planet.” 

Shane smiles, only a little, but it’s a start. It feels like one, anyway. 

“Not on the planet, technically,” he says, like he can’t help himself, and Ilya groans and kisses him again, because he has to. 

“Okay, sit on the table so I can suck your dick,” he says, and Shane laughs incredulously, sort of breathily, this delicious sound as if Ilya has said something sweet and romantic instead. Maybe it feels romantic for a man who hasn’t had his dick sucked in more than a year and a half. 

Ilya is frantic with need when he finally gets his mouth on Shane. He expects Shane to be more hesitant, afraid to direct Ilya the way he used to, but instead Shane grips Ilya’s curls in his fingers hard, like he’s afraid Ilya will explode into stardust if he releases him, and Ilya, of course, fucking loves it. He always does, with Shane.

Shane is making delicious little noises, and he’s saying things like holy shit, and oh fuck, Ilya, and wow!, and Ilya almost laughs, at one point, and he swallows as much of Shane as he can, rewarding him for being so awed, as if this is his first time again. 

After, Shane pulls him up, into his arms, kisses him filthily, and then returns the favor with a spit-slick hand, maintaining scary eye contact with Ilya the entire time, which unfortunately is very hot, to Ilya. All of it.

When Ilya collapses against him, shoving Shane back onto the table so Shane makes a delightful little oof sound, his head lands on Shane’s chest, and he can feel the shape of the ring there. He thinks maybe they should leave it at this, for now, and maybe talk about everything later, when the mission is done, but he doesn’t want to wait. Shane has waited enough. Ilya has waited enough, too. 

“You kept it, at least,” he says. Shane’s face goes all pink, and Ilya tilts his head back and kisses the underside of his chin, not wanting to move yet from the pillow of Shane’s chest, even though his lower body is standing on the ground, and all of it is very awkward and uncomfortable. 

“Well, yeah,” Shane says, defensive. “I didn’t think you would want yours, so it didn’t feel right to take it. I wasn’t sure…I’ve never been divorced before.” 

“You are not divorced now,” Ilya mutters. 

“Well, no, because technically we aren’t even married.” 

“Technically. But in our hearts.” 

“Yeah, okay. In our hearts.” Shane admits, with that sappy, incredulous smile he does sometimes when Ilya says something he isn’t expecting. “But, uh. I didn’t really know what to do. So I just…I probably should have stayed on Earth, I guess, technically. I thought you’d be so fucking pissed when you woke up, and I knew it would probably impact the mission. I knew it would suck. But I also figured you were right, when you said I was a coward? And I thought that if I was here when you woke up, maybe I could talk you down. Get you to focus on the mission, I guess, even if you hated me for it. And I guess I just couldn’t stand the thought of you waking up here alone, if you didn’t hate me.” 

“Solnyshko, I think maybe you need more sessions with Galina than you are currently doing.” 

“Shut up.” 

“I mean it. Fuck, Shane.” 

“I know. I’m sorry.” 

“Stop, enough. Later, maybe. We have another fucking year in space to talk about it, okay?” 

“If we survive the bomb.” 

“Of course we will survive the bomb. I made the bomb. The bomb will work, and you will fly us away from it, because you are a very good pilot.  And then we will find something to use as lube on this fucking ship, and I will fuck you in three days as many times as possible, to make up for your year of not getting fucked.” 

“Year and a half,” Shane says, smiling a little shyly, like he can’t quite believe, yet, that he gets to have this again, and that he can joke about it, and that they are not completely finished. Ilya will, if nothing else, make him believe it by the end of their journey back to the rest of the ship. 

“Year and a half. Okay. I will fuck you even more, then.” 

“Gonna be weird explaining to the rest of the crew why I can’t walk when we get back.” 

“I will carry you to your little pilot seat, tuck you in nice and good with that cute little blanket you are always using.” 

“Okay. And that won’t be weird?” 

“No. I will tell them all we got married on the surface of the sun and then fucked a lot about it. They will understand.” 

“The surface of the sun, huh?” Shane asks, in that goopy, fond voice he gets sometimes. Ilya could cry to hear it again. 

He is still very sorry, and maybe still a little angry, but only in the way you are angry when a choice has been taken from you, even if you know that it’s the right thing. He doesn’t mourn missing his father’s last days, necessarily. He’s almost glad, in the end, that he did. He wishes that he had been the one to make that choice, if only because he wishes he had been strong enough to make it, though he thinks maybe Shane is right that it isn’t about strength. If there had been more time, if he hadn’t started to panic…there are so many things he wishes he had done differently, but he can see a way forward, at least, in a way he was afraid he wouldn’t. 

Svetlana and Shane and everyone were right when they told him that he was giving up too much, everything, for a man who would never love him the way Ilya has always wanted to be loved. Why not, instead, follow a man who has promised to give him everything, and who has tried so hard, every time, to follow through? 

They do not die in a ball of fire falling into the sun. 

They are not incinerated by the shockwave of the bomb. 

Shane follows their course, and then he calls Ilya into the cockpit, and he very seriously hands over a ring that he made from scrap metal. And of course he didn’t just make a shitty ring by bending a piece of scrap into a circle, like a normal man might have. This ring is nicely made, smoothed over, all its edges buffed out. Shane put actual work into this thing. He shrugs like it’s nothing when Ilya tears up, and then laughs when Ilya kisses him hard enough to almost knock him out of his chair. 

They have to separate for the next part, and Ilya will never tell Shane this, because he knows Shane will only worry about him, or scoff at him, make fun of him, whatever. But when it comes down to it, Ilya is not actually very worried about this next part, because he believes that the bomb will work, and he also feels like, if they die trying to outrun it, oh well. At least he will have time to get back to the cockpit, and they will be together. 

He runs his final calculations, and he initiates the sequence, and he confirms the ignition of the bomb, the sparks multiplying prettily like stars in the night sky in that massive expanse of his creation, and he watches as the bomb flies towards the sun, pulled into its center. 

And it works. 

On Earth, back home, like eight and a half minutes later, everyone will know that it worked. The sun’s light will immediately get a little brighter.

Here, in the ship, Ilya makes his way through the now-much-smaller bomb vessel, with its much-smaller solar shield, holding on to the handrails as the ship rocks with the force of the bomb. 

Here, in the ship, Ilya trips his way into the cockpit, and he slides into the seat beside his husband, and he buckles in, and he lets Shane fly them out of the way. 

He knows they’re out of danger when Shane reaches over and takes his hand, because he knows that Shane would keep his focus on flying if he wasn’t sure they were safe, and that is something that Ilya does love about him, even if he briefly forgot. 

And there is so much that they have to talk about. So much to make up for, and apologize for, and forgive. He knows that. It will be uncomfortable, and he might be unhappy for stretches of it, but it’s impossible to imagine, because he is so incandescently happy right now. 

The sun gets a little brighter behind them, and Shane is holding his hand between them, and they are both still alive, and maybe there are difficult times to come, but Ilya thinks that love and sunshine make for a pretty good foundation on which to build the rest of his life.

Chapter End Notes

a lot of people sort of guessed what was happening here, and there were some "but this can't just be about his DAD, right?" comments, which made me chuckle nervously, because yeah, it sort of was just about his dad! But I hope it was clear it was also a panic attack, and it was just helplessness and anger that he probably would have worked through if he had more than, like, three and a half minutes to do it. but then they wouldn't be in the torment nexus, and I wouldn't have just spent a month writing 50k, so hopefully it works out, emotionally, for you all.

I love the ending of Sunshine deeply, but obviously I was not going to do the same thing here, except everyone can imagine Svetlana or Yuna watching the sun get a little brighter as they stand in the snow in Sydney for some reason :)

ALSO, most people seemed to guess there would be a Stratt thing happening. I want to be soooo super clear that I love Eva Stratt (esp the movie version) with all my heart, and I love Shane with all my heart, and like, if I had to choose a "side" in that argument, I do think Shane made The Right Call (and MyIlya agrees with me). I knew I wanted this to be a VERY heightened version of the Boxing Day fight, but with maybe the opposite emotional conclusion (it would be literally insane if Shane "chose" Ilya in this context, imo lmao). So, idk, basically the point is that I love them both, and even though this fic is from Ilya's POV, I hope it doesn't come off like Shane is in any way a villain in this, just because he hurt Ilya's feelings, because that's absolutely not what I want to portray!