#like... even new moon's anger at new eclipse was just...

[rayofmisfortune]

I swear if they actually end up killing new Eclipse I'm busting down the cardboard wall of their writers room, snatching the script off the table and jotting down my own idea for an arc where Eclipse actually gets a chance at redemption.

STOP OFFING THIS GUY THE SECOND HE STARTS TURNING OVER A NEW LEAF

[axtonorian]

I know I said I was nervous about word vomiting on here but I really NEED to talk about Eclipse. Specifically what's happening and leading up to his breakdown.

I wanna talk about everything leading up to it. Moving dimensions, the dead kids, Ruin showing up, the stuff with Lefty and Captain, The mimic, Puppet, Charlie. There's so much that's been going on in his life during the past...5-7 months? And I just have to talk about it.

The reason I bring up moving dimensions as contributing to the breakdown and stress is, change is hard. Moving is hard. Even if you want to move or go somewhere else it can still be overwhelming. Not only that but he had to meet all these new people that, at first, he hated and wanted nothing to do with them. Not only that but because of Sun and Moon he was basically forced to deal with his own trauma and get over it to help these two goobers who couldn't even communicate normally. He also had people constantly coming into the theater, which was supposed to be somewhat his space, and asking him for help and needing him to do things. Which had to have been stressful. Then the lab was supposed to be his space but everyone else found that too and went in without his knowledge.

Then the murders started happening. Everyone was stressed out all of the time, but he especially. I don't think that the situation was worse or easier for anyone involved but his upset was the most noticeable because it felt a bit out of character. We weren't really used to seeing him so vulnerable yet? Even with him helping Puppet and Earth it was still kinda weird. But the more it happened the more in character it felt. It was easy to tell he was not well. He's never really been well but he was doing a bit worse. I don't think anyone ever really addressed to each other how all the kids were affecting them. Eclipse, Sunlight, and Puppet are all THE WORST at doing this. I don't put Moonlight in this list because I actually think he's pretty good at talking about what upsets him and getting his emotions out, from what I've seen. But they should've talked about it. Especially Eclipse. He definitely felt useless during that time because he couldn't save some of those kids. And it's essentially happening again. His kids are in danger because of THE SAME MURDERER + another murderer and he feels useless.

There's so so soooo much grief and anger piling up that it's crushing him. The Mimic showing him what "could've been" if only he had tried to talk things out or hadn't been so "stupid". Losing Puppet, FC and Foxy leaving him behind to pick up the pieces of what happened. Trying to take care of Charlie and trying to get two of his kids back. He hasn't even finished Andrew, Jake, or Andy's bodies.

Now onto the breakdown itself. It started before that call, you could hear it in his voice. Then William gave him two weeks and Roxanne walked in at actually the perfect time. If she hadn't showed up he might not have gotten to let his emotions out the way he needed to. Then he started projecting on her HEAVILY and you cannot convince me otherwise.

"Is it in your nature to screw me over?" -This one might be pushing it but he's always been in his own way. Eclipse has always had an issue with getting out of his own way. Keeping himself from making good healthy relationships with people, putting up walls, overworking himself until he gets like this.

"You're such a failure." -Saying that to Roxy didn't make any sense. What would've made her a failure??? This one sounds A LOT like him telling that to himself just out loud.

"Got some more brain-dead ideas in there?" -This goes with the previous one. Eclipse has made a lot of plans in the past three years and they almost always fail or just get ignored. Specifically with Puppet and giving her a different alternative instead of dying or telling William that he can get him a different body and William saying he wants that body.

"Suddenly you care?" -This one is a big one for me. Eclipse said he doesn't understand why he cares so much. Like this man has spent the last 2-3 years "not caring" about anyone and doing whatever he wants. Killing and torturing whoever he wants or anyone who has wronged him in some way. Then he started getting close to people. The first being Earth. I think she was literally the first person (that he didn't make) to genuinely be nice to him and try to help him. Then there was Puppet followed by FC, Ballora and everyone from that dimension, excluding Lefty and Captain, our Monty and his kids. Even if it's been about a year since he helped Earth and started caring it still seems to be a foreign concept to him.

Then there's when he starts talking about how he's supposed to know what to do "be the best" and stuff. "I'm supposed to be good at this." "I'm supposed to be good at this stupid thing." "I'm supposed to find them." "I'm not supposed to struggle." "I'm supposed to be the guy who finds stuff, who gets it done, who kills, who gets stuff situated." this reminds me of Nexus. He felt like he was supposed to be what Old Moon was and more even if no one told him he had to he that way. I don't think anyone has told Eclipse he's supposed to be the best or anything except himself. Maybe that stems from when he was Moon. Just something that came with everything else. There's a lot of "I'm supposed to" going around.

And when he started talking about his Kids is when it seems like it starts to sink in for him. The way his voice sounds and the hesitation paired with forcing his voice to say what he needs to say. Then he goes back to "I'm supposed to be good at everything." He's so frustrated and so stressed out. Frustration is literally I think one of the worst feelings for me because it feels so infuriating and it can happen so often. Even just the build up of small things inconveniencing me can make me break as badly as he did. Being frustrated sucks. Especially when it's something as big as his kids.

Another thing I want to point out is that he says "If I can't find them, who can?"

He doesn't realize there are people who CAN help him and are probably willing to help. Like Monty or Ruin. Both are smart enough and could help. And if not anyone from the dimension he's in, maybe someone from the main dimension. Genuinely I think I would go insane if he actually asked for help from someone in the main dimension. The first option is definitely Monty since those two get along. Solar is a BIG maybe but I bet he would understand especially with everything that just happened with Jack. Might not be willing to help all the way but could give hims some outside ideas. Personally I think it would be huge if he asked Moon. It probably will literally never happen but Moon is EXTREMELY intelligent and idk that's just something that would show a lot of growth for the both of them. Again it's like literally the least likely to happen.

But he's putting so much pressure on himself when there IS OTHER PEOPLE WHO ARE AS SMART AS HE IS. MAYBE SMARTER??? That can help.

Not only that but he is terrified that Andy and Jake are going through what he went through when he was stuck in his head during the Mimic situation.

"They're stuck in their heads. Their body just being used like a tool."

Eclipse was a tool. He was stuck in his head and was a tool for someone else who would've just killed him eventually or toyed with him until he snapped. Thinking that someone else might be going through that sucks and even worse thinking your own kids are going through that? Without knowing how to help?

Now the part I wanted to talk about THE MOST.

"I'm not a dad. I can't ever be a dad. I can barely take care of myself."

Oh boy. This. This hit hard.

Taking care of yourself is hard. Keeping yourself healthy and alive and well is difficult. The world feels like it's against everyone. Pair that with suddenly having to take care of other people? Small people who are more vulnerable to getting hurt or lost than you are? That's terrifying. That's really really scary. It's even worse when you believe that you can't do it or don't deserve it. Now times that by four. This mf really is a single dad who just got four kids dropped at his doorstep with absolutely no instructions or any idea on how to take care of them. Not only that but he's extremely bad at taking care of himself. Thank god he's an animatronic cause I think if he was human he would be dead.

I think he wants to be their dad. He wants to hang out with them and teach them and help them be healthy people.

He can also kinda connect to them in a way that's like...his life was basically taken from him. He never got the chance to be someone on his own. He was just a killcode that went rogue. All his kids also had their lives taken from them. All of them were robbed of a childhood. Both Andrew and Andy were murdered in probably horrific ways. Jake died from cancer at a young age and Charlie was taken from her life and put in an environment that literally poisoned her and eventually killed her.

But he does want to be their dad. He just doesn't think he can be. Parenting is one of the hardest things anyone can do. You are responsible for this person until they are an adult and can take care of themselves. You are responsible for making sure they can take care of themselves. You're responsible for making sure to teach them how to be a good person and what empathy is. Teach them what kindness is and help them become someone who helps others. Help them become someone that can be special to someone else. How you treat them can affect how they treat EVERYONE they will ever meet or ever have any kind of relationship with whether that be romantic, platonic, familial, etc.

He already feels bad about how he's taking care of Charlie. He doesn't have time to help her but at the same time parenting is about making time for all of your kids. Even then it's still hard. Eclipse has so many examples of himself failing to do things and its taking its toll. If you feel like you failed at everything else what's going to make this time different?

Everything, all of it, is sinking in. To him the whole world is on his shoulders. He has to fix everything and he doesn't understand that he can't. That there are other people who can help. And he's scared. There's a deadline. That deadline isn't like failing a class or getting fired. That deadline determines whether or not someone gets to live or dies in a horrific or gruesome way.

The fact that it took him THIS LONG to have a full on breakdown is insane. It takes so much strength to make it that far while holding it in. He's changed so much and has grown so much and oh my god the amount of stuff going on is crazy.

ANYWHIZZLEE...that's my rant. Wow that is a lot. I genuinely love this character with my soul. I love the way he developed, I love how complex he is, it's just amazing to me. I love most of the characters Davis plays and I love the whole story as a whole. Does any of this even make sense??? 😭😭😭

[thedemonscrawler]

Is there a certain way you go about the characterizations of the different incarnations of Eclipse?

Their motivations!

So at his core, Eclipse is an angry, paranoid, spiteful, arrogant, lonely, possessive, socially-inept person who can't communicate to save his own life. No matter where in his life you're writing him from, these traits persist.

The differences come in what his goal is, and which of his core traits are being amplified because of it.

I've written the Original Eclipse the least, mostly because I actually got interested in the show following his death 8'D. This Eclipse is the most closed off of all of them, the least likely to change his mind, the angriest and most vindictive. He hasn't been betrayed yet, he hasn't really failed yet, so his arrogance is at an all time high.

On the flip side, after his defeat and expulsion from Sun's head, this is also the rawest point in Eclipse's life. There's a lot of good fics about scraping his broken ass out of the woods and patching him up, and for good reason. Strip his arrogance away with his loss, and he has nothing.

My favorite is the Backup Eclipse. Eclipse 2.0, my beloved! Still arrogant, still angry, but spite is his strongest trait. He was defeated and he knows it, and he's learned that he needs to be a bit smarter in manipulating those around him. By escalating the game to the next level when he amplified Moon's kill code (giving us the guy, Kill Code), Eclipse started a chain reaction that is STILL going on in current canon.

The Backup is my favorite because his characterization runs from one end of the spectrum to the other. He comes back as a bedraggled version of himself, forced to deal with basically being Bloodmoon's prisoner while also getting them to work for him. He manages to enact one victory after another, culminating in him actually gaining the star. He did it, he won!

And then he fucking crashes.

Possession and loneliness are his strongest traits in the second half of his arc, and he picks up depression as well. Spite has become bitterness. Eclipse was never supposed to win, and he knows it. The star was only ever a means to an end, a way to get Moon's attention. And when Moon resets himself... Eclipse doesn't know what to do. He attempts to respark that rivalry, but New Moon isn't interested.

With no goal to latch on to, Eclipse crumples under his own misery and lack of purpose. On his way to winning, he destroyed everything that made his life interesting.

And then he got space lasered.

And then finally Eclipse 3.0, the Recreated Eclipse. I don't make a distinction between who he was before Lunar blew up his body and after, though I know some folks do.

Eclipse 3.0 starts off with anger, of course, and a lot of confusion and desperation. For a good amount of time in there he was p much feral. This one is mired in self-pity, and lashes out because of it.

Because that's what makes this one really interesting. He's picking up from where the Backup left off-- he has no purpose. I think he sunk his claws into the goal of 'find my creator' just to HAVE a goal. He's also interacting regularly with other people for the first time in his life(s), even if he does spend a lot of time taunting Moon for stuff that neither of them were personally there for.

Two things, I think, really helped Eclipse start stabilizing. The first was, uh. Solar's death 8'D More specifically, it was Puppet giving him an impossible task to focus on, and Eclipse always needs a goal. The second was Earth started socializing him. Which I love-- hell, I wrote that myself back in Sunk Cost. Earth always had the advantage of not being personally victimized by Eclipse like her siblings were, which let her be more tolerant of him.

Eclipse in his current state is still arrogant and possessive, and his people skills still suck. He's 'better' as a kind of side effect to Puppet's request; bringing Solar back, doing this Super Important Thing That Even Moon Failed At? Was a major ego boost. Eclipse learned a very important lesson:

Doing good things gets you attention and praise.

Which is why I think he had such a rocky start with the new dimension Sun and Moon 8'D He was chasing the high of being the hero, at the cost of actually paying attention to what was going on. He knew how things were supposed to go, that made him The Smartest. He's a good guy for extremely selfish reasons XD

But he's also finally made it to where a lot of fanfic authors have gotten him. A little less lonely, a few wounds healed. He does have people he cares about, without any intent for manipulation involved.

So yeah. I guess in summary:

Original Eclipse (Upright): Vindictive, angry. Would bite your hand off rather than take it Original Eclipse (Reversed): Lost, bewildered. A feral animal, but one that can be tamed.

Backup Eclipse (Upright): Spiteful, serious. Lost the game once already, has no intention of losing again. Backup Eclipse (Reversed): Bitter, desolate. An Eclipse without a purpose, can be coaxed onto new paths. Still will probably bite you a few times first. Recreated Eclipse (Upright): Arrogant, possessive. The end goal of many a fanfic, actually able to get along as a functional member of society... mostly. Recreated Eclipse (Reversed): Feral, desperate. Clinging onto what fragments he has in a life he didn't ask for, and hating every second of it.

Idk if that was useful but there you go!!!

[chimcess]

⮞ Chapter Seven: Fuck Bureaucracy Pairing: Jungkook x Reader Other Tags: Convict!Jungkook, Escaped Prisoner!Jungkook, Piolet!Reader, Captain!Reader, Holyman!Namjoon, Boss!Yoongi, Commander!Jimin, Astronaut!Jimin, Doctor!Hoseok, Astronaut!Hoseok Genre: Sci-Fi, Action, Adventure, Thriller, Suspense, Strangers to Enemies to ???, Slow Burn, LOTS of Angst, Light Fluff, Eventual Smut, Third Person POV, 18+ Only Word Count: 19.7k+ Summary: When a deep space transporter crash-lands on a barren planet illuminated by three relentless suns, survival becomes the only priority for the stranded passengers, including resourceful pilot Y/N Y/L/N, mystic Namjoon Kim, lawman Taemin Lee, and enigmatic convict Jungkook Jeon. As they scour the hostile terrain for supplies and a way to escape, Y/N uncovers a terrifying truth: every 22 years, the planet is plunged into total darkness during an eclipse, awakening swarms of ravenous, flesh-eating creatures. Forced into a fragile alliance, the survivors must face not only the deadly predators but also their own mistrust and secrets. For Y/N, the growing tension with Jungkook—both a threat and a reluctant ally—raises the stakes even higher, as the battle to escape becomes one for survival against the darkness both around them and within themselves. Warnings: Strong Language, Blood, Trauma, Smart Character Choices, This is all angst and action and that's pretty much it, Reader is a bad ass, Survivor Woman is back baby, terraforming, some mental health issues, survivor's guilt, lots of talking to herself, and recording it, because she'll lose her mind otherwise, fixing things, intergalatical politics, new characters, body image issues, scars, strong female characters are everywhere, cynical humor, bad science language, honestly all of this has probably had the worst science and basis ever, I researched a lot I promise, let me know if I missed anything... A/N: I love a good rescue mission...

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The reds of M6-117 bled across the sky like a bruise stretching over the horizon. It was technically morning—though nothing about this place felt like morning. There were no birds, no blue sky, no dew on the ground. Just heat rising in slow, merciless waves under the low twin suns. No relief, only exposure.

Y/N stood outside the Hab, boots sunk halfway into the grit. The wind had died down for now, but the silence was heavier than any storm. Her suit was streaked with dirt, pockmarked with patches—each one a story she hadn’t had the time or energy to write down. The visor on her helmet caught the early light at an angle, throwing a warped reflection of the landscape behind her. She didn’t look back at it.

She tilted her head slightly, as if trying to decide whether she was ready to say it out loud. Then she pressed the comm.

“Jim.”

Her voice came through the static-soft channel, low and almost hesitant, like she was still practicing the sentence inside her own skull. The word hung there a moment, delicate and unfinished.

“I need you to do something for me.”

She paused, pressing a gloved hand against the seam of her thigh like grounding herself might make it easier.

“If I don’t make it—and I’m not saying I won’t, just… if—I need you to talk to them. Please.”

She looked down, eyes tracking the trail of her own footprints half-blown smooth by last night’s wind.

“They shouldn’t hear about me from a news brief. Or a stranger reading a script. That’s not how this ends.”

Her voice cracked slightly, but she didn’t stop. If anything, it made her steadier. There was no emotion she hadn’t already felt out here—fear, grief, anger, numbness—and now they all just circled each other like orbiting moons.

“Helion Prime was the beginning of everything. I was seventeen. Terrified. Stupid in the ways you’re only allowed to be when you’re too new to know better. And they were so proud. I used to think they were just being polite, but they meant it. Every article—they printed them all. Even the blurry ones where I was just in the background fixing a panel.”

She exhaled slowly, eyes drifting to the nearby speculor—its chassis sand-swept and sunburnt. Her reflection blinked back at her in distorted glass.

“Flight school at twenty. I met you there. I remember the day I brought you home,” She smiled faintly, remembering. “They adored you. God, I think Aunt Rose made you cookies the second day she met you. They never had to pretend with you. You were family before we ever said the word out loud.”

A beat.

“They didn’t even hesitate to move across the galaxy to be near us. Packed up their entire lives and settled on a rainy colony world, even though Aunt Rose hates humidity and mold and missing her morning paper. You remember how mad she was when she realized Aguerra didn’t even have paper delivery?”

Her voice grew quieter then, the smile fading as her posture straightened slightly.

“If something happens, I need you to go to them. Sit down. Look them in the eye. Don’t tell them about this place. Don’t describe the suits and the patch kits and the way the sun burns through the walls at midday. They don’t need to know that. Talk about Starfire. Tell them how much I loved that ship. How much I loved what we did. That was the happiest I’ve ever been, Jim. Not just in space. Anywhere.”

She shifted her weight slightly, boots crunching against dry ground.

“It’s not going to be easy,” she said. “There’s no good way to tell people their niece died millions of miles from home. But if it has to happen, they need to hear it from someone who knew me beyond the title. Who saw me here, with the work and the grime and the joy of it all.”

Her voice caught on the next breath. She didn’t try to hide it—there was no one out here to impress. Just the comm channel, the open stretch of dead horizon, and a sky that never blinked.

She steadied herself.

“And tell Uma…” Her voice cracked, unraveling mid-sentence. She blinked hard, trying to keep her eyes clear, but it was already too late. They were glassy now, fogging over with grief she hadn’t allowed herself to feel until this exact second.

“Tell her I love her. Tell her I’m sorry.”

The words came out rough. Honest. And too small for everything they meant.

“I wanted to be there,” she continued, slower now, like each syllable cost her something. “I wanted to help pick paint colors, argue over names no one would use. Hold her hand when she panicked over something tiny and hormonal and beautiful.”

She let out a shaky laugh—just one—but it didn’t stay.

“I wanted to sit in the nursery with her. Feel the baby kick. Help build furniture we’d curse at and pretend we knew how to fix. Babysit. Fall asleep on the couch watching movies we’d already seen. Spoil the kid. Sneak them candy behind your backs.”

She looked up, eyes squinting against the sharp white glare of the twin suns climbing higher above the dunes. Her voice dropped to a whisper, quieter than the wind curling at her feet.

“If I made it home… that baby would already be walking.”

She didn’t need to explain it. The heartbreak sat there on its own, fully formed.

Silence followed, but it wasn’t empty. It was full of everything she couldn’t bring herself to name. All the stolen time. All the pieces of a life she was still trying to carry, even as the weight of this planet pulled harder at her every day.

When she spoke again, it was softer. But there was no wobble left.

“I’m not giving up. Don’t think for a second that I am.”

Her eyes locked on the far line of the horizon. The sky shimmered, heat warping the edge of everything.

“I’ve made it through things that should’ve killed me,” she said. “But if I’ve learned anything, it’s that hoping for the best only works when you’re also planning for the worst. I’m not making a goodbye message. I’m covering my bases. That’s all.”

She reached up, adjusted the mic on her collar, and took a steadying breath.

“If it comes to that—if I don’t make it back—tell them I didn’t die out here just trying to hang on. Tell them I chose this. That I wanted to be out here. That I believed in what we were building. That I gave it everything I had.”

She paused, her fingers brushing the spot near her hip where the suit had been patched again and again. The fabric there felt thinner, no matter how many times she reinforced it.

“Not because I was brave. Not because I was reckless. But because I believed in it. All of it. And because I was exactly where I was supposed to be.”

Her voice dipped to almost nothing.

“Tell them I’m okay with that.”

A pause.

“Even if they’re not.”

The wind picked up again, pulling at the hem of the thermal shielding she’d bolted down earlier that morning. It flapped once, soft and tired, like the Hab itself was exhaling beside her.

Y/N stood there a little while longer, watching the light stretch across the red landscape. The suns climbed, and the shadows pulled behind her like anchors.

She didn’t speak again.

Eventually, she turned. The gravel shifted beneath her boots, crunching softly with each step. The Hab loomed ahead, patched and battered and still standing—like her.

She walked back toward the airlock.

The Taurus Interplanetary Commission headquarters stood like a blade of glass and steel against the deep blue atmosphere of Taurus I. It was the kind of place built to make a statement—an architectural flex that said humanity didn’t just belong in space; it was starting to understand how to make it beautiful.

Inside, the halls buzzed with quiet, measured urgency. Footsteps on polished floors. Low voices in corners. The occasional murmur of comms traffic spilling from open doors. On a wide display screen in the atrium, NOSA’s press conference played in real time. Yoongi and Mateo sat at the table, looking like they hadn’t slept in days. Probably because they hadn’t.

“We substituted the standard ration bricks with high-density protein cubes,” Mateo was explaining, his voice steady but dry with exhaustion. “What we didn’t account for was the behavior of those cubes under heavy thrust. Combined with lateral vibration during ascent, the protein packs liquefied and shifted the weight distribution. That’s what destabilized the payload.”

The reporters pounced.

“Why wasn’t this caught during final inspection?”

Yoongi leaned forward, face unreadable. “We didn’t have time.”

The room stirred with low, anxious chatter.

“You skipped the inspections?” one reporter asked, voice sharp.

“Yes,” Yoongi said. Flat. Unapologetic. “We had a fourteen-minute window. If we’d missed it, we wouldn’t have another chance for months. And she doesn’t have that kind of time.”

The broadcast continued, but in a quiet corner office ten floors above, the volume had already been muted.

André Batista stood near the window, his hands tucked into the pockets of his tailored jacket. His gaze drifted from the screen to the man seated behind the desk.

“She’s not going to make it,” André said finally, his voice low but certain. Not cruel. Just honest.

Gunther Apinya didn’t look up right away. He was scanning a data packet, fingers idly flipping through the pages until André stepped forward and placed a second folder in front of him.

“Maybe not,” André allowed. “But maybe she does. Take a look.”

Gunther opened it.

Charts. Numbers. A schematic of the Argo booster system, overlaid with a proposed injection path—M-344/G orbit. Deep burn. Minimal gravity assist. Fast and dirty.

“You ran this through engineering?” Gunther asked, already knowing the answer.

“They ran it twice. If we launch in forty-eight hours, it’ll reach her in time.” André crossed his arms. “With margin.”

Gunther frowned. “Why hasn’t NOSA reached out to us?”

“They don’t know we can help,” André said simply. “That booster tech is still classified under Coalition R&D. There are maybe twelve people outside this building who even know it exists.”

Gunther leaned back in his chair, fingers steepled under his chin. “So what you’re saying is... if we do nothing, no one would ever know we had the capability.”

André nodded once. “That’s right.”

They sat in silence, the air between them thick with implication. Out the window, the twin suns of Taurus I were setting low, turning the glass gold.

Gunther finally spoke, his voice quiet but firm. “And if we help?”

“We burn a booster we can’t replace. Argo gets delayed. Possibly scrapped.”

Silence again. This time, longer.

Gunther stared at the file. He didn’t move. He didn’t blink.

Then he closed the folder slowly, the soft click of the binder echoing in the quiet office.

“This doesn’t go through governments,” he said. “No public release. No diplomatic channels.”

André raised an eyebrow. “You want backchannel?”

“I want scientists,” Gunther replied. “Just us. Just them. No politics. No medals. If this works, the world never needs to know.”

André didn’t smile, but something in his shoulders eased. “I’ll make the call.”

As he stepped out of the room, Gunther turned back to the muted broadcast. Mateo was still speaking, trying to explain the loss without flinching. Yoongi sat beside him, unmoving, his eyes shadowed but clear.

The lights in Yoongi’s office were dim, the windows tinted against the rising glare of Aguerra’s twin suns. A half-empty mug of cold coffee sat forgotten on the edge of his desk, the ring it left behind now drying into the paper below. Across from him, the comms unit glowed faintly, casting a soft blue hue over the scattered reports and schematics that hadn’t been touched in hours.

He didn’t speak. Not yet.

The voice on the other end was calm, precise—measured in that way only career scientists and seasoned negotiators knew how to be. It laid out the terms cleanly: launch access, limited telemetry sharing, classified propulsion specs kept under lock. No governments. No press. Just a backdoor lifeline.

Yoongi sat motionless in his chair, head tilted back against the cushion, eyes closed. Not from sleep—he hadn’t slept in over thirty hours—but to block everything else out. The ache in his shoulders. The sting behind his eyes. The pressure that had been building in his chest since the probe failed.

But now, there it was.

Help.

Unexpected. Improbable. Quietly offered from a corner of the galaxy where he hadn’t dared hope.

He almost didn’t trust it at first. Then the voice repeated the final clause, politely, waiting for acknowledgment.

Yoongi blinked. Straightened.

He didn’t reach for a pen. Didn’t take a breath to buy himself time. He already knew the answer.

His voice, when it came, was low—rough from disuse—but steady.

“Yes,” he said. “We accept.”

And as he leaned forward, elbows braced on the desk, the hum of the line settled into silence. A silence that, for the first time in days, didn’t feel like failure pressing in from all sides. It felt like motion. Like the beginning of something.

He let the weight of it settle.

Then he picked up the stylus and got back to work.

At Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s primary assembly bay, the air was thick with fatigue, sweat, and the faint chemical tang of solder and composite dust. Half-finished components were stacked on worktables. Coffee cups littered the corners of schematics. No one had slept enough. No one was planning to, either.

Marco stood at the whiteboard, sleeves rolled to the elbows, marker already in hand. His hair stuck up in uneven tufts like he’d run his fingers through it too many times, and the stubble on his jaw was well into Day Three territory. Behind him, the whir of ventilation fans and toolkits hummed over the low murmur of keyboards and data feeds.

“Okay,” he said, voice sharper than usual—not angry, just wired. Focused. Running on pure adrenaline. “Thanks to some unexpected friends on Taurus 1, we’ve got one more shot at this.”

He turned and started writing fast, the marker squeaking against the board as he sketched out the basic launch trajectory and burn profile. The numbers came from muscle memory now.

“We built Iris in sixty-three days,” he went on, turning back to face the room. “And for the record? That should’ve been impossible. But we did it. You did it. Every subsystem, every weld, every last calibration. You made it happen.”

He held up the marker like a baton. “Now we do it again.”

The engineers and analysts around him exchanged tired looks. There were bags under everyone’s eyes, a few still wearing the same clothes from the day before. But no one objected. No one moved to say no.

Marco raised an eyebrow, as if daring someone to tell him it couldn’t be done.

“We don’t get sixty-three days this time,” he said. “We get twenty-eight. Twenty-eight days to design, fabricate, test, and launch a completely reconfigured payload. Lighter. Faster. Hotter burn. Different booster.”

He tapped the board with the marker, underlining a series of projected dates.

“And we’re going to do it. Because the alternative is watching someone die knowing we could’ve helped. I’m not interested in being a footnote in that story.”

The room had gone quiet—no arguments, no complaints. Just the subtle shift of people straightening in their seats, tightening ponytails, finishing cold coffee. The kind of stillness that came just before a storm.

Marco exhaled, stepped back, and dropped the marker into the tray.

“We don’t get to fail this time,” he said, softer now. “We get to try. That’s the gift. So let’s move.”

Someone from the propulsion team stood up and headed toward the assembly corridor. A software lead muttered something about patching a new thermal profile and started typing. A tech from avionics walked out without a word, already pulling up wiring schematics on a tablet.

Marco watched them go, then turned back to the board.

The numbers weren’t beautiful. But they were possible.

The hum of NOSA’s supercomputer lab was the kind of ambient noise that most people didn’t notice anymore. But Dean Marblemaw had always liked it—the low whirr of a machine thinking faster than he ever could, the air conditioners clicking rhythmically to keep it from melting down under its own brilliance.

He sat alone at the far terminal, sleeves pushed up, fingers moving fast over the keys. The numbers flowed like music—data sets, burn windows, orbital maps all converging into something strange. And then, suddenly, something true.

He stopped. Blinked.

Ran it again.

Same result.

Dean leaned back slowly, a grin spreading across his face like he couldn’t stop it if he tried. The kind of grin that had nothing to do with ego and everything to do with the pure, breathless thrill of seeing the impossible become real.

"Holy shit," he whispered, half-laughing.

He snatched the pages from the printer—charts, calculations, a half-scribbled orbital solution that shouldn't work but absolutely did—and bolted for the door.

The halls of NOSA blurred past him. He wasn’t built for running—skinny and long-legged in a way that always looked vaguely winded—but he didn’t stop. Security glanced up as he passed. A junior engineer did a double take. He didn’t care.

By the time he reached Mateo’s office, his heart was pounding and his shirt clung to his back. He didn’t knock.

He flung the door open hard enough that it bounced off the stopper, startling Mateo, who was in the middle of a call, headset pressed to one ear, tablet in the other hand.

Dean didn’t waste time.

“You should hang up the phone.”

Mateo blinked at him, thrown completely off balance. “I’m sorry, who the hell are you?”

“Dean Marblemaw. Astrodynamics. Floor six.” He stepped forward, still out of breath. “And seriously—you need to hang up the phone right now.”

Mateo held up a finger, eyes narrowing. “I’ll call you back,” he said into the headset, voice sharp with suspicion. He ended the call and set the tablet aside. “This better be worth it.”

Dean didn’t respond. He dropped a folder onto the desk and shoved it across the surface, sending a half-full coffee mug wobbling to the edge.

“Read this.”

Mateo didn’t move. Not at first. He studied Dean’s face—sweaty, flushed, buzzing with something like adrenaline—and then picked up the packet.

As he read, the frown that had settled into Mateo’s forehead deepened. Then stilled. His eyes jumped back up to Dean’s.

“This trajectory’s not viable.”

“It wasn’t,” Dean said, chest still heaving. “Until I ran the residual vectors on the second flyby sequence and—look, I can’t explain it fast. But it works. The window’s narrow, but it’s there. We can reach her.”

Mateo glanced back at the numbers, flipping to the second page. He did the math in his head. Then again.

His chair creaked as he leaned forward, elbows on the desk.

“You're absolutely sure?”

“As sure as I’ve ever been of anything that wasn’t caffeine dependency or gravitational constants.” Dean grinned, breath finally evening out. “Dr.Gomez, we can get a new payload there faster than we thought. If we burn on this vector, we shave thirty-one days off the injection arc. Thirty-one. That’s the difference between watching her die and watching her walk away.”

Mateo didn’t waste time. He was already punching the intercom.

“April,” he said, calm but urgent. “I need mission planning in my office. Now. Tell them it’s about Project Elrond.”

Across the room, Dean dropped into a chair, still riding the high of the math he’d just scrawled across four pages and a whiteboard. He grinned, breathless.

“I told you to hang up the phone,” he said.

Mateo didn’t respond. He was staring at the file in front of him, not reading it, just letting the numbers sink in like they were burning through the paper and into his chest.

They had something they hadn’t had in days.

Hope.

Alice stepped into the conference room mid-scroll, still reading from her phone. “Okay, seriously—what the hell is ‘Project Elrond’?”

Mateo didn’t look up from his tablet. “Had to give it a name.”

She stopped just inside the door. “Elrond?”

From the far corner, Creed looked up, brow arched. “Council of Elrond. Lord of the Rings.”

Alice blinked. “Why do Earth people always name critical operations after fantasy books? Is it a cultural compulsion? Or just a lack of imagination?”

Marco, legs stretched out, gave a quiet laugh. “It’s the meeting where they decide to destroy the One Ring. World-saving stuff.”

“That doesn’t make it better,” she muttered, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “Am I even supposed to know what that means? How old is that book?”

The door opened again, and Yoongi walked in with a coffee in one hand and his usual unreadable calm. “If this is a Project Elrond, I want my codename to be Glorfindel.”

Alice didn’t miss a beat. “This is why I hate working with Earthlings.”

Creed grinned at Yoongi. “You don’t even know what this meeting’s about, do you?”

Yoongi took a seat and set his coffee down with care. “I assumed it had to be important if Matt called us all in here so urgently.”

Mateo looked up at last and slid a tablet across the table toward Dean. “Show them.”

Dean nodded, suddenly serious. His energy had been buzzing all morning, barely contained, but now it focused. He stood, pulled a few random objects from the table—a stapler, a mug, a stylus—and laid them out with quiet purpose.

“I can get Starfire back to M6-117,” he said. “By Sol 320.”

The air shifted. Heads turned. Every unspoken thought hit the same wall: That’s impossible.

Creed narrowed his eyes. “Say that again.”

“Five-six-one,” Dean repeated. “It’s tight. But I’ve run the numbers three times. The trajectory holds.”

Yoongi leaned forward, fingers steepled. “How?”

Dean didn’t sit. He held up the stapler. “This is Starfire, inbound toward Earth. They’re supposed to decelerate soon, prep for orbit. But what if they don’t? What if we tell them to skip the braking burn and use M6’s gravity instead?”

He swung the stapler in a wide arc toward Yoongi’s mug. “They slingshot. Pick up velocity, not lose it. We intercept the Argo probe on the way through. Resupply mid-sling.”

“With what?” Alice asked.

“Food. Fuel. Life support modules,” Mateo said. “Whatever we can get packed into the probe before it meets them.”

Dean pointed with the stylus. “After resupply, they make the burn straight back to M6-117. But there’s no time to decelerate. It’s a flyby.”

Alice frowned. “That’s useless unless—”

“Unless Y/N meets them in orbit,” Dean said. “MAV launch. She matches trajectory and speed, intercepts them mid-pass, and they haul ass home.”

The table was silent. Not confused—calculating. Each mind tracking the feasibility, the mechanics, the margin of error.

Dean took a breath. “It’s all there. The math checks out.”

Yoongi sat back slowly. “Dean?”

“Yeah?”

“Leave the room.”

Dean’s face fell. “Wait, what?”

“You’re done for now,” Yoongi said quietly. “We need to talk.”

Dean hesitated, looked around the room, then gathered his notes and walked out. The door clicked behind him.

Yoongi turned to Mateo. “Is he right?”

Mateo gave a slow nod. “His math’s clean. No gaps in the logic. If the Argo resupply works—and if Y/N can get the MAV off the ground—it’s viable.”

Alice’s brow furrowed. “So what’s the tradeoff?”

Mateo didn’t pause. “We only have one Argo. We use it to resupply Starfire, or we send it to Y/N directly with enough food to keep her alive until Helion Nexus arrives.”

Alice leaned back, thinking. “No backup?”

“No second probe. No margin,” Creed said. “We built one. We launched one. That’s it.”

“And what about the crew?” she asked. “What does this add to their mission?”

Mateo looked her in the eye. “Three hundred twenty days.”

Creed didn’t hesitate. “They’ll do it. All of them. You don’t even have to ask.”

“That’s the point,” Mateo said. “We don’t want to ask. Jimin shouldn’t have to carry this decision.”

Alice blinked. “Commander Park.”

Creed nodded. “Her family. Her former commander. If we put it in front of him, it’s over. He’ll say yes, and we all know it.”

Yoongi exhaled, his gaze shifting to the ceiling for a moment. “Can the ship make it?”

Mateo nodded. “It was built for extended missions. All five Nexus launches. It can handle the time.”

“And if anything fails out there?”

Mateo didn’t blink. “Then we lose all of them.”

Marco’s voice was soft but clear. “So it’s a question of one life… or six.”

The words hung in the room like smoke.

No one spoke.

Then slowly, every head turned to Yoongi.

He didn’t rush. Just sat there, staring at the table, eyes distant. The room was quiet except for the quiet hum of the vent overhead and the faint ticking of the wall clock.

After a long pause, he said, “We still have a safe way to bring five people home. That’s not a risk I’m willing to take.”

Creed’s hands curled into fists on the table. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.

“Let them make that decision.”

Yoongi didn’t answer.

“We’re going with option one,” he said.

Creed stood. Slowly. The chair scraped sharply against the floor as he pushed it back.

He held Yoongi’s gaze, jaw tight.

“You goddamn coward,” And he walked out.

The airlock sealed behind her with a low hiss—routine, automated, impersonal. Y/N didn’t look back.

She stepped onto the dusty ground with the same slow, measured movements that had come to define her. Not fatigue exactly—she was long past the point of real exhaustion. This was inertia. Survival-mode autopilot. Her boots dragged slightly with each step, her gait uneven from the ache in her hip that hadn’t gone away since the last hard fall.

The brush in her hand was stiff, its bristles worn down to the point of uselessness. She’d meant to replace it weeks ago, but every time she thought about digging through the storage crates, she ran out of momentum. So the brush stayed. Dull, frayed, familiar.

Ahead, the solar panels stretched in a broken line across the plateau—dust-caked, half-buried in places, their surfaces dull under the constant pale light. Cleaning them had become a ritual. Not for efficiency anymore. Not for system optimization. Just something to do. A reason to put on the suit. A reason to move.

She reached the edge of the first panel and lifted the brush.

Then stopped.

Her hand hovered midair, fingers locked around the handle. For a moment she just stared, unmoving, her helmet visor reflecting a warped image of herself against the glassy surface of the panel.

She let the brush fall.

It landed with a soft thunk against the dust and lay still. The sound barely registered. Even the wind felt half-asleep, carrying only the faintest rasp of fine sand.

She stood there, breathing slow, not entirely sure what she was waiting for.

Then, without making a conscious decision, she turned and walked. Not toward the Hab. Not toward the rover. Toward the low ridge that curved beyond the eastern edge of the old settlement site—the one she visited sometimes when the air inside got too heavy.

Her spot.

The only place that felt slightly other on a planet that never changed.

The slope was gentle, but it took effort. Her suit was already too warm, the sun already high. She climbed anyway, boots crunching against loose rock, the incline chewing at her thighs. At the top, she sank down, legs folding beneath her with a graceless drop, and sat.

Not to rest.

Not to think.

Just to stop.

Below her, the empty valley stretched endlessly in all directions. The remnants of Colony 212’s initial outpost lay half-swallowed by dust—crumpled scaffolding, shattered survey drones, the twisted frame of a greenhouse torn apart by a windstorm before she’d even landed here.

The suns were low now. Three pale coins bleeding sideways light across the ridgeline, elongating shadows until the rocks themselves looked like reaching hands. She closed her eyes.

And stayed that way.

Minutes passed. Maybe longer. She lost track.

By the time she opened them again, the sky had changed. The suns were climbing again—merciless, blinding—and the world had gone from dim orange to stark, clinical white. Her suit’s internal alarm chirped, then escalated to a shrill beep.

TEMP WARNING: EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT UNSAFE.

She silenced it with a few taps.

Her throat felt dry. She didn’t feel like moving.

She didn’t want to go back to the Hab. Not yet.

And that was when something caught her eye—just a flicker of light in the dust. A glint. Not bright. Just out of place enough to make her turn her head.

Near her boot, half-buried in grit, was something metallic.

She crouched automatically, fingers brushing the sand aside. The object revealed itself slowly—a long, slender drill shaft, pitted with corrosion but unmistakably familiar. A specimen drill, the kind issued during the early survey missions.

She stared at it, frowning.

It hadn’t been there the last time she climbed this hill. At least, not visibly. The storms must’ve uncovered it, shaken it loose from whatever shallow grave had hidden it all these years.

She turned it over in her hands. The serial tag was mostly scrubbed, but she recognized the build—an older model, standard during the early M6 surface ops. Pre-colonization. The drill tip was blunted. A few of the threads were stripped. But it still had weight.

Her eyes followed a faint line in the sand—tracks, barely visible. The kind only time and wind could etch. They led toward a jagged rock formation nearby, one she’d passed a dozen times without looking twice.

She stood and followed the line.

Near the base of the rock, holes had been drilled—precise, methodical, in a pattern meant for core sampling. But they were shallow. Incomplete. As if the mission that had started here had been cut off mid-execution.

Y/N crouched again and ran her gloved fingers across the markings. The ridges were still sharp. It hadn’t eroded completely. She paused, hand resting against the surface.

It didn’t feel like just another piece of equipment forgotten by some long-dead operation. It felt… interrupted.

She sat back on her heels, the drill resting across her lap.

The low hum of NOSA Mission Control ticked along at its usual pace—monitors blinking, quiet conversations traded in clipped tones, the soft churn of machines doing what they were built to do. Underneath it all, that familiar background drone: the sound of systems keeping time in space.

But at April Borne’s console, none of it registered.

She sat forward in her chair, posture tight, eyes fixed on the center screen like it might flinch. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard, ready to react, but frozen for the moment. Around her, the world moved in quiet circuits. At her station, the world had narrowed to one: M6-117.

Three displays surrounded her, each showing a different slice of telemetry—orbital drift, atmospheric density, biosuit vitals. She moved between them with ease, toggling overlays, tracking sensor shifts in real time. She wasn’t new anymore. She’d learned what mattered.

But one feed didn’t change.

Front and center: the live camera stream from an orbital relay, trained on a wide plateau. The camera wasn’t automated. April had locked it manually an hour ago. She didn’t want the feed to lose her.

On-screen, a single figure moved slowly across the dust-blasted landscape. An EVA suit, patched and sand-worn, its silhouette tiny in the frame. Step. Pause. Step. Pause.

April didn’t say anything for a while. Just watched.

Then, softly, without looking up, she spoke.

“She’s been out almost all day.”

Behind her, Mateo Gomez stood with his arms crossed, his weight shifting like he couldn’t quite settle. His jaw was tight, eyes glued to the same image. He looked tired in a way that didn’t come from lack of sleep—like his body had forgotten how to let go of tension.

“How many EVAs is that now?” he asked.

April flicked through a tab on the side screen. “Four, officially. Five if you count the solar sweep she did this morning.”

On the feed, Y/N’s figure came to a stop. She bent slightly, adjusted something in her hand, then continued walking—three hundred meters, give or take—before stopping again.

Then again. And again. Same rhythm. Same intervals.

“There’s a pattern,” April said, frowning slightly. “Three hundred-meter increments. Always the same distance between stops.”

“Survey work?” Mateo leaned in. “Did JPL send her updated collection coordinates?”

April shook her head, already checking. “No new packets. I ran a log scan—no inbound data. No flagged instructions. She hasn’t even acknowledged our system pings in four days.”

“So it’s all her,” Mateo murmured.

April nodded once. “She’s marking positions. Deliberate spacing, consistent timing. She’s not scavenging. She’s building something.”

The screen to her left pinged. A soft alert. April’s eyes snapped to it.

“Hold on,” she said. “We just got a packet through the Speculor relay.”

She brought it up quickly, hands moving across the keyboard with purpose. The data decrypted smoothly. It wasn’t a distress call. Not even a voice memo.

It was raw science.

April’s brow creased. “Chemical breakdown—batch 1A-7C. Surface composites. Silica ratios, microstructure modeling, thermal tests...”

Mateo stepped forward fast. “Wait—what batch?”

“1A-7C. Why?”

He stared at the screen for a second. “That’s Oslo’s grid.”

April looked up. “You mean—Colony 212? The geo-mineral mapping project?”

Mateo nodded slowly, as if the pieces were clicking together in real time. “Yeah. Oslo’s team was testing local substrate cohesion. Seeing if the regolith could be mixed and cured into load-bearing material. That data was supposed to drive long-term construction models for outposts. But the Eclipse hit before they finished.”

He leaned closer, eyes narrowing at the screen. “And that number… she’s not guessing. That’s the actual designation. Oslo ran a radial grid—six hundred meters across, three hundred between sample paths.”

April quickly overlaid the coordinates from Y/N’s EVAs onto a legacy terrain map. The grid snapped into place, translucent lines lacing across the dusty plateau.

It was nearly identical.

“Oh my god,” April whispered. “She’s not just collecting. She’s replicating the test grid. Exactly.”

Mateo stood still, like he was watching something sacred.

“She’s not just surviving,” he said quietly. “She’s continuing the mission.”

Y/N’s figure had stopped again, kneeling in the red dust. Her hands moved with slow precision, sealing something into a container—probably a drill sample, maybe a substrate core. There was no rush. No panic.

Just focus.

Purpose.

April sat back slowly, her eyes still fixed on the screen. “She picked up where they left off.”

“She must’ve found Oslo’s notes,” Mateo said. “Maybe from the wreck. Maybe from one of the old surface drives. It doesn’t matter. She’s finishing the work.”

“No,” April said softly. “She’s continuing it.”

The room shifted around them. Not louder—just heavier. The kind of silence that settles when something meaningful happens and no one wants to interrupt it.

On the feed, Y/N stood again. Adjusted her grip on a sampling tube. Walked three hundred more meters. Stopped. Crouched.

She was following a dead man’s path.

She was finishing what history had abandoned.

Mateo exhaled. His voice came out hoarse.

“She’s doing the science.”

April didn’t respond at first. She just kept watching.

Then she leaned forward, eyes bright behind tired lashes.

“That’s not what we expected her to do,” she said. “After the crash. After everything. I thought—honestly? I thought she’d hunker down. Try to stay warm. Make peace with the end.”

“She was never built for that,” Mateo said. “She’s a problem-solver. If she couldn’t be rescued, she’d figure out how to be useful.”

He watched her take another knee, dig gently into the ground.

“That girl is a fucking superstar,” he murmured. “Even when no one’s watching.”

And for the first time in days, the tension in Mission Control eased—not with certainty, but with clarity.

April’s screen updated again—new readings, a fresh transmission of spectrographic data. She sat up straighter, readying the next pass.

Across the room, techs leaned in a little closer. Conversations quieted. Chairs scooted forward.

Because for all the things they didn’t know yet—how to bring her home, how to explain what she was doing, how to protect her legacy—they understood one thing now:

She hadn’t stopped.

She had found a reason to keep going.

The Hab was silent, save for the steady, rhythmic scrape of stone on ceramic.

Y/N sat at the experiment table, hunched over, sleeves rolled back to the elbows of her pressure-rated thermal undersuit. Her fingers moved with practiced efficiency, knuckles red and chapped, nails bitten down to the quick. She brought the pestle down again—firm but controlled—grinding the coarse sediment sample into something closer to a usable grain. Not powder. Not paste. Just enough to test. Just enough to keep going.

The makeshift chem kit in front of her was stained with dust and old reactions, once-white trays now tinged with rust-colored residue. Glassware clinked softly as she shifted her weight. The solvent vial sloshed—half-full, if she was generous.

This part of the job wasn’t hard. Not physically. But it demanded a kind of patience that only survival had taught her. The precision of it gave her something to anchor to. A routine. A reason to move from one hour into the next.

She didn’t look up when she started talking. She didn’t need to. The camera, mounted across the room, was already rolling. It had been for hours. Most days, it was easier to pretend someone was watching. Even if she knew better.

“They evac’d eighteen sols into a thirty-one-sol mission,” she said quietly, the words emerging through a clenched jaw. “Eighteen. That’s how long Colony 212 lasted before everything went sideways. Which means they only got thirteen sols of science logged. Thirteen days.”

Her hand moved without pause—sample bag to mortar, pressure, grind, transfer to the tray. Repeat.

“For each of them,” she added, her voice lower now. “That’s what they left behind.”

She reached for a second tray—one marked with Oslo’s original numbering system, the labels half-scratched out, rewritten in her own handwriting. Neat. Slanted. A little messy in the corners, but legible. Human.

“Commander Oslo,” she said, almost conversationally. “You get the easy one. Mineral bonding profiles, structural cohesion. Hard science. Repeatable tests. The kind of thing even someone half-awake with a hangover can finish.”

She paused, adding a few drops of reactive solution. It fizzed faintly, curling steam against the inside of the tray cover.

“I hope your afterlife’s better than your last moments on this rock,” she muttered. “I really do.”

She glanced up, just briefly, toward the camera. Her mouth curved into something like a smile—thin, ironic, but not cruel.

“Jung, listen. I’m gonna be honest with you. I don’t understand chemolithotrophic detection. Not really. I read your notes three times and still couldn’t tell if you were looking for life or just bored. But I’m trying, okay? I’m running the tests.”

Her gaze flicked to the far side of the workbench, where a row of empty sample tubes waited to be filled.

“And Cruz,” she said, her voice lifting a notch with mock solemnity, “I know you didn’t like it when I touched the ChemCam. You made that very clear. Well. Guess what?”

She reached for the unit, brushing it with the back of her hand like a cat knocking something off a shelf.

“I’m touching the ChemCam. And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. Zero consequences. Viva la anarchy.”

The joke landed quietly, with a faint shake of her head.

She kept working, transferring notes from a test strip to her master log—an old ration box she’d flattened and drawn a grid on in marker. Real paper. Real pen. The graphite snapped halfway through a sentence, and she calmly flipped to a pencil stub with a taped-on eraser.

“Zimmermann,” she said, a little more gently now, “I made a cataloging system. It's rough, but it works. I’m calling it ‘Das Core Samples,’ because I figured you’d like the pun. You know. For the Fatherland.”

She didn’t laugh at her own joke, but the corner of her mouth twitched.

“Nguyen…” She paused. “I still don’t know what you did. Seriously. I looked it up. Your title said ‘systems integration and adaptive redundancy.’ Which—I think means... backup stuff? No clue. I hope someone back home got your job title translated before your plaque was engraved.”

The words hung in the air, but there was no venom in them. Just tired affection. The kind you had for coworkers you never really knew but still missed when they were gone.

She turned back to the test rack, sorting the samples into clean, labeled sleeves. Every move was methodical, deliberate. She wasn’t rushing. She wasn’t wasting time either.

“I’m trying to keep everything organized,” she said after a while. Her voice was softer now. “Documented. Archived. I know it’s not exactly my strength.”

She wiped the corner of her eye with the back of one hand, smudging a line of dust across her cheek.

“But I want it to make sense,” she added. “In case... someone comes later.”

She reached across the table for a clean data tag and etched the next code into it with the edge of her multitool. Her hands didn’t tremble.

“Maybe someone will teach it in class one day. ‘The Frenchie Syllabus.’” She let the words linger, then smiled—a real one, this time. “Intro to Improvised Civil Engineering: How to Build a Bathtub Using NOSA Tubing and an Old RTG.”

Her smile faded just slightly, but her voice remained steady.

“Intermediate Cuisine: How to Cook a Potato Six Thousand Ways. Advanced Chemistry: How to Make Water Out of Rocket Fuel. Maybe don’t blow yourselves up like I did.”

She looked back at the camera.

Then, wordlessly, turned back to her samples and kept working.

The Starfire was quiet, save for the soft whir of filtered air and the constant, almost imperceptible hum of the ship’s primary drive coils in idle mode. The kind of silence that didn’t just surround you—it settled in. Wore into your bones over time.

Armin Zimmermann sat alone at the aft systems console, strapped into the harness more out of habit than necessity. His diagnostics had finished a full ten minutes ago, but he hadn’t moved. The screen in front of him still blinked its green confirmation lights in time with his pulse.

He scrolled absently through his inbox, expecting the usual: systems logs from JPL, status updates from mission ops, the occasional joke from Jung or Cruz buried in the metadata of a routine check.

But then his eyes landed on a message that didn’t fit.

Subject: Unsere Kinder.

He stared at it.

Our children.

Armin frowned. It wasn’t a phrase Kelly would normally use. They didn’t speak German with each other much—not anymore. His wife preferred English, and emails were usually short, efficient. News from Earth. Photos of their daughter. No riddles.

He hesitated, then clicked.

The body of the email was empty. No text. No signature. Just a single attachment: a .txt file, small and unassuming.

He tapped it open.

The screen populated instantly—lines of symbols, not quite random but not immediately readable either. Mathematical notations, directional headings, numbers too specific to be coincidence and too disorganized to be deliberate.

A sharp edge settled in his chest.

He stared at the file, heart rate rising. The longer he looked, the more his instincts screamed that this wasn’t a mistake or spam or a misdirected file.

This was a message.

Armin unstrapped, pushed off the console wall, and glided through the corridor with practiced, weightless ease. The ship was familiar under his palms—every panel, every joint, every slight bump in the composite wall plating. The kind of familiarity that only came with months in orbit, where even silence had a pattern.

He found Valencia Cruz in the ship’s rotating gym module, her strides steady on the curved track. The artificial gravity was low—just enough to make cardio unpleasant, just low enough to make injuries dangerous. She was in the zone, sweat on her brow, earbuds in.

Armin tapped the console by the entrance. The door hissed open.

Val looked up, spotted him, and slowed. “You okay?” she asked, voice breathless.

“I have a problem,” Armin said.

She stopped the treadmill, wiped her face with a towel, and stepped out of the rotation ring. “You don’t usually say that unless something’s on fire.”

He handed her the tablet. “My wife sent this. At least, it says it’s from her.”

Val took it, leaning against the bulkhead. She swiped through the file. Her brow furrowed. “It’s not an image,” she muttered. “Not corrupted either. It’s a clean text file. Plain ASCII.”

She tapped to expand the lines. The screen filled with patterns. Coordinates. Variables. Formulas layered between what looked like navigation flags and arcane mission notations.

“This isn’t random,” she said, more to herself now. “These look like… course headings. Vectors. And this—this might be delta-v tables?”

Armin nodded slowly. “I thought so too.”

Val looked up. “Any idea what it’s for?”

He didn’t answer right away. His eyes scanned the data again, fingers brushing over the screen like he was trying to feel the meaning in the numbers.

Then his voice caught—quiet, clipped. “Here. This is a reference to the Marblemaw Maneuver. It’s a theoretical slingshot burn. Dean published a paper on it two years ago, but I think I’m the only person who actually read it.”

“You’re saying this is from Dean?”

He shook his head. “No. But someone used his math. Dean wouldn’t be able to get clearance to send this. Has to be a big guy at NOSA, but that still doesn’t explain why it was sent to you from Kelly’s inbox.” 

Val’s eyebrows drew together as she focused on one line that stood out, bolded in a sea of plain text.

SOL 320.

They both stared at it.

The number hit Armin like a punch to the gut. He reached for the wall to steady himself, the zero-g making him sway.

“Oh mein Gott,” he whispered.

Val stared at the screen, then at him.

“You think it’s about her.”

He nodded once.

Val didn’t look up from the screen. Her fingers were already moving, copying the data into her private log and running checksum validations. Not to confirm the file’s source—she already knew it wasn’t junk—but to stabilize it. There was a chance it could disappear as quickly as it came.

Armin hovered for a second, his jaw tight. Then he pushed off the bulkhead and turned toward the main corridor. “I’m getting the others.”

Val nodded without taking her eyes off the text. “I’ll see what else I can pull from it.”

Val was still at the terminal, but now her fingers hovered just above the screen, not typing—just staring. She’d parsed most of the file. Enough to know what it was. Enough to feel her chest go tight with the implications.

She heard the others enter before she turned—Armin, Jung, Nguyen, each one quieter than the last. No one cracked a joke. No one asked for coffee.

Jimin Park wasn’t with them yet.

Val looked up, then at Armin. “You told him?”

“He was on the call deck talking to Uma,” Armin said. “He’s coming.”

She nodded once, then sat back in her chair, folding her arms over her chest. The data still glowed on the screen—numbers, coordinates, trajectory math, and the name SOL 320, burned in bold near the top like it was written in blood.

Nguyen broke the silence first. “It’s real?”

Val glanced at him. “Yes. It’s real.”

“And it was sent to Zimmermann,” Hoseok said, quietly. “Not to JPL. Not to Command.”

“To his wife,” Armin said. “Piggybacked on a family message. They slipped it into the attachment buffer.”

Hoseok gave a low whistle. “That’s a hell of a risk.”

Val didn’t smile. “Which means it’s got to be important. So, it’s a Park call.”

The hatch behind them opened with a pneumatic hiss.

Commander Jimin Park stepped into the room, still in his flight jacket, headset looped around his neck. His expression was unreadable, but his eyes scanned the crew immediately, clocking the tension, the way no one made room for small talk.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

Val stood. “You need to see this, sir.”

She didn’t say more. Didn’t try to explain. Just stepped aside and offered him her seat at the console. Her tone wasn’t dismissive—it was deliberate. This wasn’t hers to carry.

Jimin sat slowly, glanced at her, then down at the data on-screen.

He started reading.

The others didn’t interrupt.

For a long moment, the only sound was the soft hum of ship systems, the occasional shift of a boot against the deck. Jimin scrolled slowly, eyes narrowing as the math unfurled in layers—positioning burns, delta-v margins, fuel requirements, time dilation calculations.

Then came the header again:

SOL 320.

He froze there, staring.

Val leaned on the back of the chair, her voice low. “It’s a maneuver. Based on Dean Marblemaw’s original slingshot paper, but adapted for our current trajectory. It uses the neighboring planet’s gravity to redirect us back to M6-117. No braking. No orbit insertion. Just one burn, a flyby intercept… and Y/N has to meet us mid-course using the MAV.”

Jimin sat back slowly, his hands resting on the armrests, gaze distant now.

The others watched him. No one pushed. No one dared.

Val broke the silence, her voice softer than before. “I didn’t want to be the one to say it, Commander. This... it’s not a decision for any of us to make. Not really.”

He looked up at her.

“I trust you,” she said.

The room held still as he looked at each of them in turn. Jung. Nguyen. Armin. Val.

They all waited for him to speak—not out of deference to rank, but because they knew what this meant. Y/N wasn’t just a crewmate. She wasn’t just a scientist on another rock.

She was his family.

And now she was a question hanging in space.

After a moment, he leaned forward, shoulders stiff with the gravity of it all.

“Get me everything,” he said. “Engine specs, margin of error, fuel thresholds. We don’t move unless we know it can be done.”

Val nodded once. “Yes, sir.”

He stood slowly, gaze still on the screen.

“And we keep this off Command until I say otherwise.”

“Of course, sir,” She grinned.

The crew of the Starfire sat around the narrow rec table, their knees brushing beneath it, shoulders hunched closer than comfort allowed. The lights overhead were dimmed, low power mode humming softly through the ship’s systems like a second heartbeat. Empty ration wrappers floated lazily in the corner, caught in the stagnant air.

The ship’s artificial gravity drum wasn’t active tonight. No one felt like turning it on. No one felt like pretending.

Jimin leaned forward, elbows resting on the scratched tabletop, fingers loosely laced. His voice was steady, if a little hoarse from speaking too long in the too-thin air.

“And assuming the burn goes clean, the maneuver takes us into a solar flyby, past Earth. The intercept brings us home in... 211 days after rendezvous,” he said. “Give or take.”

Silence followed. The crew looked at one another, the numbers hanging there like frost on the walls. No one moved. The weight of what he’d said hadn’t settled. It was still drifting, still searching for a place to land.

Koah broke the stillness first, his voice hesitant. “That would actually work?”

Jimin nodded. “The math’s sound. I ran it with Armin. Val checked the burn window against the latest telemetry. The fuel reserves are tight, but within margins.”

Koah rubbed a hand over his face, then let it drop to the table. “That’s wild,” he muttered. “It’s brilliant.”

Armin, who hadn’t spoken since they sat down, leaned forward. “It is brilliant. And it wasn’t mine.”

He looked up. “Whoever sent that file knew our vector. They built a burn profile around our exact rotation, our real-time acceleration data. It’s too specific to be theoretical.”

Hoseok Jung exhaled hard, his arms folded across his chest. “Okay. But why the encrypted file? Why send it to you and not Command?”

Jimin looked at him. “Because NOSA already said no.”

He let the silence hold a second longer before continuing. “They weighed the risks and made their choice. Rescue her later, not now. Safer for us, statistically. But someone disagreed. Someone back home—someone with access—wanted us to have another option.”

“So we’d be overriding the chain of command,” Koah said, brows knitting. “Making a decision they explicitly rejected.”

“Yes,” Jimin said. “If we do this,” he continued, “we’ll force their hand. They’d have no choice but to send the supply probe to intercept us on the return arc. If they don’t, we starve. But they will. Because the alternative is letting six astronauts die on a public feed, live and slow.”

Koah leaned back, eyes locked on the ceiling. The metal above him was marked with signatures—names from Nexus I and II, left like chalk on a wall before graduation. Most of them were still alive.

This would make sure of it.

“Are we doing it?” Valencia asked finally. Her voice was calm, but there was something brittle at the edge of it. She looked tired. They all did.

Jimin shook his head. “It’s not my call.”

Koah blinked. “You’re the commander.”

“I am,” Jimin said. “Which means I know when something is beyond the scope of command. This isn’t a mission deviation. This is a mutiny.”

The word hung in the room like static.

He let it sit before continuing, his voice low. “You need to understand what this is. If we commit and the maneuver fails, we’ll burn too much fuel to get back. If we miss the MAV intercept, we lose the rendezvous and she dies. If we miss the unnamed planet’s gravity corridor by half a degree, we spiral off-course for good. And even if we pull it off... it adds 213 days to our mission clock.”

He paused. Let the numbers soak in.

“213 more days in space. No resupply planned. No re-entry window guaranteed. Something breaks—something simple, something stupid, like a heat exchanger or a water recycler—and we die out here.”

No one moved.

“And even if we don’t die,” he added, “some of us are military. Koah and I would face court-martial. The rest of you? You’d never fly again.”

A long beat passed.

Then Koah gave a crooked smile. “Yeah, I figured.” He looked at Jimin. “You really think I care about flight status after this? Frenchie’s out there alone.”

“She’d die,” Armin said quietly.

Koah nodded. “Then yeah. I’m in.”

“Don’t rush it,” Jimin warned. “This is the kind of decision that doesn’t come off your record. Ever.”

Koah met his gaze. “Then I’ll make it count.”

Hoseok tapped a finger against the table, then looked up. “We can’t ignore it. If there’s a shot—hell, if there’s even a chance she’s alive—we take it. We’re not leaving her out there.”

Jimin turned to Val. She hadn’t spoken. She’d just been watching him.

Of all of them, she looked the most conflicted—not reluctant, just... aware. Her eyes were sharp, calculating. And scared, in a way only someone with full knowledge of the risk could be.

“Val,” Jimin said.

She exhaled slowly. Ran a thumb along the edge of the table. Then finally, she nodded.

“One condition,” she said. “We finish the math. Every inch of it. No gaps. No ‘close enough.’ We run this thing until it bleeds numbers.”

Jimin gave a slow, sure nod. “Agreed.”

Val looked around the room—at the faces of the people she’d flown with, laughed with, broken with—and when her gaze came back to Jimin’s, her voice was clear.

“Let’s go get her.”

Brendan Hatch sat slouched at the front console in Mission Control, elbows on the desk, one hand wrapped loosely around a paper cup of coffee that had gone cold an hour ago. The graveyard shift was always the same—quiet, steady, unremarkable. Background hum from systems, low chatter from telemetry and comms, a few tired engineers trading stories in hushed tones. It was routine, predictable.

That’s why he liked it.

He took a slow sip and winced. The coffee tasted like rust and burnt toast.

The voice in his headset broke the calm.

“Flight, CAPCOM.”

Brendan straightened a bit, instinct overriding fatigue. “Go ahead, CAPCOM.”

“We’ve got a... strange ping from Starfire. Unscheduled update, came in just now. One-line transmission.”

Brendan set the cup down. “One line? What kind of line?”

There was a pause on the other end, and when the CAPCOM spoke again, their voice held a note Brendan didn’t like. Hesitation.

“No system flags, no distress codes. Just this: ‘Houston, be advised. Dean Marblemaw is a steely-eyed missile man.’ That’s the whole message.”

Brendan blinked.

He turned slowly toward Guidance, who was already swiveling in his seat with a raised brow.

“Dean who?”

“Not a clue,” CAPCOM replied. “Checked personnel. Checked payload specialists. No one onboard Starfire by that name.”

Brendan opened his mouth to respond, but didn’t get the chance.

Alarms screamed to life.

First one console, then another—flashing red across telemetry, guidance, propulsion. The hum of the room shattered. Chairs scraped, voices rose. The quiet rhythm of Mission Control was gone in an instant, replaced by controlled chaos.

Brendan shot to his feet. “Guidance, report!”

“Flight, Starfire’s orbital vector just shifted,” came the answer, fast and clipped. “They’ve made a burn. Large. Coordinated.”

Brendan’s gut tightened. “Drift?”

“Negative. No drift. This wasn’t passive. They changed trajectory. On purpose.”

“What’s the delta?”

“Twenty-seven point eight one two degrees. Relative to prior flight path.”

Brendan swore softly under his breath, jaw clenched. “CAPCOM, get them on comms. Ask what the hell they’re doing.”

“They’re not responding, Flight. Not acknowledging the transmission request.”

“Jesus Christ,” Brendan muttered. “Guidance, time to irreversible course commit?”

“Working on it.”

“Telemetry,” he snapped, turning toward the woman two rows back. “Any chance this is instrumentation error? False reading?”

“No, Flight,” she replied, already typing. “Confirmed from both uplink satellites. This is real-time. The burn profile is clean. Intentional.”

Brendan ran a hand over his face, pushing back the throb that had started behind his eyes.

“Flight,” CAPCOM again. “Still no response from Starfire. No autopilot anomaly. Manual controls engaged. This is them.”

For a moment, no one said anything.

Then the propulsion tech let out a breath. “It’s a slingshot.”

Brendan turned to him. “What?”

“The numbers. It’s not a decel. It’s a gravity-assist prep burn.”

He turned back to his console, pulling up the star map. The trajectory arced not toward Earth, but around it—shaving close, building speed.

“They’re not coming home,” the tech said. “They’re slingshotting Earth. Back out. Somewhere else.”

A long silence stretched.

Brendan leaned over the comm desk, both palms flat against the surface, heart pounding.

“CAPCOM,” he said quietly. “Ping orbital intelligence. I want a full trajectory model. And tell me when that slingshot window locks.”

“Aye, Flight.”

“Guidance,” he said, turning again, “when exactly did this maneuver begin?”

“Timestamped at 03:46:18 GMT. Four minutes ago.”

Brendan stared at the screen. The arc was unmistakable now. Clean. Purposeful. A new course already emerging.

He knew what that meant.

He didn’t know how, or why—but this wasn’t a malfunction.

This was intent.

“Goddamn it,” he muttered. “They’ve gone rogue.”

He took a deep breath and leaned into his mic.

“Somebody,” he said, “find out who Dean Marblemaw is—and why the hell he’s hijacked my spaceship.”

The early light bled through the windows of NOSA’s executive floor in thin, fractured lines—cold and silver, like the morning hadn’t quite committed to warmth. The city beyond the glass was still quiet, tucked beneath fog and the hush of anticipation.

Yoongi stood at the far end of his office, unmoving, hands clasped behind his back. He wasn’t looking at anything in particular—just the smear of light creeping across the skyline. His reflection hovered faintly in the glass, superimposed over the world below like a ghost watching from orbit.

Behind him, the door opened. Footsteps, then a pause.

He didn’t turn.

Creed Summers stood just inside, shoulders squared, silent.

For a moment, neither man spoke. The only sound was the low hum of systems on standby, the distant rattle of a cleaning cart down the hall. That, and the heavy, aching silence of two people carrying the weight of a decision too big for either of them alone.

Finally, Yoongi’s voice broke the stillness.

“Alice goes before the press at nine,” he said, still watching the horizon. “We’ll confirm that we’re supporting Starfire’s new trajectory. Official line is that it was planned. Contingency strategy.”

Creed nodded once. “It’s the right move. Optics, morale. Damage control.”

Yoongi turned, slowly.

He looked tired—not just physically. There was something deeper in the lines around his mouth, the set of his shoulders. Not a man who lacked conviction, but one who had been forced to weigh too many impossible things for too long.

“You may have killed them,” he said.

Creed didn’t flinch, but his face didn’t harden either. He stood with his hands in his coat pockets, still and steady. “They made the call.”

Yoongi stepped closer, stopping just behind his desk, fingers brushing against the edge as if grounding himself. “You fed them the math. You knew what they’d do.”

“I gave them information,” Creed said evenly. “That’s all. The choice was theirs.”

Yoongi’s jaw tightened. “Don’t split hairs. We both know what a team does when you give them a mission and a reason.”

A beat of silence.

Then Yoongi’s voice dropped—quieter, rawer. “You know how fragile this whole damn thing is?”

He looked at Creed now—not as an adversary. As a man trying to hold up a building while the ground cracked beneath it.

“The public, the funding, the next three missions that haven’t even left the floor. I’ve got three senators on the line every day, asking why we haven’t pulled the plug. Why we didn’t bring them home sooner. Why we let her stay behind. Every time someone dies up there—even when it’s the right call—people turn their backs on us. And every time we get lucky, they forget the odds. They stop listening to the numbers. The margin disappears.”

Creed didn’t speak. He didn’t have to.

Yoongi exhaled, slow and steady, like it physically hurt to say what came next.

“I’m not here to play politics,” he said. “I’m here to keep the program alive. So the people who come next still have something to reach for. I’ve fought tooth and nail to hold this place together—not for power, not for legacy. For continuity. Because once it breaks—once people stop believing we’re worth the risk—it’s gone. And it doesn’t come back.”

Creed’s voice was soft. “She’s not a statistic.”

“I know,” Yoongi said, almost too quickly.

It surprised them both—how fast the words came.

He looked away, swallowing once, then slowly sat at the edge of the desk.

“She’s not a number, Creed. I know who she is. I remember her interview. She had this… fierce optimism. Asked me if she’d be allowed to ‘fix things’ if they broke, or if we’d just tell her to wait for a maintenance bot. She was so sure she could outsmart anything.”

Creed’s posture eased, just slightly. “She kind of has.”

Yoongi let out a low breath that might’ve been a laugh, or something close. “Yeah. I know. I read every log. Every data stream. Every piece of cobbled-together engineering magic she’s pulled off in the dirt. She shouldn’t have lasted two weeks.”

“And yet she’s finishing the colony’s science logs,” Creed said. “Using a frying pan, duct tape, a shitty old drill, and radioactive decay.”

“She’s alive,” Yoongi said, like it was a secret.

“She’s alive,” Creed echoed.

The silence that followed was different now. Heavier, but not hostile. Just honest.

Yoongi stood again, walking back toward the window. The city below was waking. Headlines would be firing up soon. Half the world already knew. By the time Alice hit the podium, the story would be out of their hands.

He stared out at the light for a long moment.

Then, without turning, he said, quietly, “God, I hope you’re right.”

Creed said nothing.

After a few more seconds, Yoongi added, “When this is over, you’ll submit your resignation.”

There was no venom in it. Just gravity. Consequence. A toll paid in silence.

Creed nodded. “I figured.”

Yoongi turned back to him.

“Bring them home,” he said.

Creed gave a small nod—tight, respectful—and left the room without another word.

Yoongi stayed where he was, one hand resting lightly against the windowpane. The sun had climbed a little higher, casting long, sharp shadows across his office.

The sun crawled over the horizon like it was dragging its feet, casting deep red light across the wind-carved ridges of Sundermere Basin. As it climbed, the basin seemed to ignite—rust, gold, and copper spilling across the plain. Heat shimmered early in the day on M6-117. It didn’t build; it simply arrived.

The stillness of the planet, as always, was total. Except for the faint, rhythmic sound of drilling.

Inside the Hab, Y/N sat hunched over her cluttered experiment table, still in her half-unzipped EVA suit. Her hair stuck to the sweat along her temples, her undershirt damp across her spine. A dozen open containers surrounded her—rock samples, rusted tool bits, a half-smashed solar converter she was trying to rewire with salvaged cabling. Her shoulders ached. Everything ached.

The camera blinked red, and she gave it a weary smile.

“Here’s your daily crash course in logistics,” she said, voice hoarse but steady. “Every Nexus mission requires a minimum of three years of presupplies. Fuel, food, oxygen, parts. You don’t pack that kind of bulk on launch day—you land it ahead of time.”

She gestured vaguely to the map that blinked on her tablet. “Which is why the MAV for Nexus-4 is already parked in Sundermere Basin. It got here almost a year before I did. Or... was supposed to.” Her smile faded for just a second. “Anyway. There it is. Waiting.”

Her eyes flicked down to the numbers on the screen—distance, resource counts, route projections. She swallowed, then looked back up.

“The plan is simple,” she said, not even pretending to believe it. “I drive 3,200 kilometers across a planet that actively wants me dead. I bring my oxygenator, my water reclaimer, my atmospheric regulator, my food, my tools, my radiation gear—everything that lets me keep breathing. I install it all into a vehicle I’ve never tested, in conditions it was never prepped for. Then, right as the Starfire passes overhead at orbital velocity, I launch and pray I don’t miss the window.”

She paused, letting that settle. Then gave a dry, lopsided grin.

“Okay, yeah. It sounds insane. But also kind of awesome, right?”

She sat back in her chair, stretching out her sore arms. Her elbow knocked over a tin of screws, which rattled across the table and clattered to the floor. She didn’t bother picking them up.

“Of course,” she added, “that’s future Y/N’s problem.”

Her tone darkened, not bitter, but quieter.

“Right now I’ve got two hundred sols and change to figure out how to convert this glorified golf cart into a spacecraft support vehicle. NOSA’s running the numbers, trying to make miracles happen, but so far the best advice I’ve gotten from Earth has been... and I quote... ‘Drill holes in the roof of your rover and hit it with a rock.’”

She smiled again, brighter this time, then glanced down at the metal plates stacked beside her. “So. Guess that’s what I’m doing today.”

She didn’t log off. She just stood, rolled her shoulders, and got to work.

Later, outside, the three suns were already high in the sky. The light was sharp, clinical. There was no softness here—not from the light, not from the wind, not from the planet. The surface heat rippled like liquid, and the rover baked under it.

Y/N stood on the roof of Speculor-2, bracing her boots against the support bars, a modified drill in her hands. The metal screamed beneath each puncture. The holes didn’t need to be pretty—just precise. Dozens of them, arranged in a ring, traced with chalk from a broken filter cap. Her gloves were stiff with dust. Sweat ran down her back inside the suit, soaking the inner lining.

When she finished the last hole, she set the drill aside and pulled a flathead screwdriver from the pouch at her hip. Then, the rock. She’d chosen it carefully. It had a good weight to it.

The first strike dented the panel. The second left a visible imprint. She kept going.

Each blow echoed through the stillness like a challenge. It was absurd and it was necessary. And it was all she had.

Inside the Hab, the cooler hummed. The lights flickered briefly as she walked in, peeling the top half of the suit from her body. She drank a pouch of electrolyte gel, gagged, then sat down at the small kitchen table, slowly chewing on a cold potato.

One by one, she laid out ration pouches in a line and began marking them in thick black Sharpie.

Departure.

Birthday.

Last Meal.

She hesitated over the final pouch, then wrote something smaller.

If I Don’t Make It.

She capped the marker and sat back, staring at the row.

There was no drama in her expression. Just focus. Acceptance. She’d been past fear for a while now.

Far above the surface, the Starfire had completed its burn. Its course now locked. A ship the size of a small city turned with impossible grace, cutting through the darkness in complete silence. Its panels flared softly in the starlight as it adjusted position, beginning its long arc toward rendezvous.

The engines cooled. The crew settled. Somewhere, someone was running simulations.

But down below, on a world that had tried to kill her a dozen different ways, Y/N was still moving. Still patching. Still planning.

She pulled her notepad back toward her and began sketching the adapter plate that would bridge the MAV’s cockpit to the supply lines from the rover. The drawing was shaky—her fingers cramped—but she kept going.

It was still absurd.

But not impossible.

The video booth on the Starfire wasn’t much more than a glorified storage locker. No insulation, no privacy to speak of—just a narrow alcove welded into the comms deck, with walls so thin you could hear the ship groan during its thermal cycles. A single chair, bolted to the floor. A screen about the size of a dinner tray. That was it.

But to Commander Jimin Park, it had become a kind of chapel.

He came here when he couldn’t sleep. When the silence of the corridors felt too big. When the ship's humming nerves and quiet voices became too much and too little all at once.

Now, he sat forward in the dim light, hands folded tightly between his knees, staring at the flickering terminal as it made contact.

The screen blinked once, twice—and then steadied.

Uma appeared.

Backlit by the warm kitchen glow of their apartment on Aguerra Prime. She stood in front of the counter, arms folded across her chest, her silhouette unmistakable. Behind her, the sky beyond the window was still black. Early morning. That fragile hour before the city started breathing again.

Her golden hair was pulled into a messy knot—loose, a little unkempt, wisps of it curling around her face. No makeup. Her eyes were puffy, like she hadn’t slept much. Like she’d maybe cried in the bathroom and then come back out without pretending it hadn’t happened.

Jimin stared at her a moment longer than he meant to. He drank her in like she might vanish if he blinked too hard.

But when she spoke, there was no softness in her voice.

“Five hundred and thirty-three days.”

It wasn’t a greeting. It wasn’t even anger, not really. It was the kind of flat, sharp-edged fact that cut deeper than yelling ever could.

“You added five hundred and thirty-three days to your mission,” she said. “And you didn’t even call first.”

He didn’t flinch. He’d had this conversation a hundred times in his head. None of them made it easier.

“I know,” he said, quiet. “I’m sorry.”

She shook her head—not in disbelief. That stage had passed. This was something colder. A sadness so layered it had started calcifying into sarcasm.

“Did you even think about us? Me? Hana?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “Do you even remember how old she’ll be when you get back?”

He didn’t look away. “Almost five.”

“She’ll barely remember you,” Uma said. Her voice cracked slightly on the word remember, but she pushed through it.

“I know.”

Her arms tightened across her stomach. He could see it—how hard she was trying not to let herself break, not here, not on a grainy video call with a six-second delay.

“You’re signing up for seven more months of silence,” she said. “When I went through IVF. When I was pregnant. While I give birth. While I recover. While our daughter goes to her first day of school and asks why the other kids’ dads come to pick them up. And all she’s got is a photograph and a voice memo from orbit.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, just to breathe. The silence stretched, broken only by the faint hum of the Starfire behind him.

“I know,” he said again, voice low. “You’re right.”

“You think I care about being right?” she snapped, and then immediately softened, as if the sharpness had drained what little strength she had left.

Her hand came up slowly to her face, like she hadn’t even noticed it moving. She rubbed at her temple with the heel of her palm, as if trying to smooth out the ache that had settled behind her eyes. Then her hand dropped to her belly.

“I had contractions yesterday,” she said.

Jimin’s breath caught, barely audible over the low hum of the booth’s systems. His whole body stilled. Only his eyes moved—searching hers across the grainy feed like he might read something more, something urgent.

Uma didn’t give him time to respond.

“I was alone,” she said. “Scared.”

Her voice didn’t tremble. She said it with the kind of flat honesty that came after a long night of holding yourself together.

“I called my parents,” she added, more quietly now. “They won’t make it in time. Customs delays—they’re stuck off-world until next week. Rose and Sean are staying with me through the delivery, which is… fine. Really. They’ve been amazing.”

She paused, and for a moment, her eyes softened—but not toward comfort. Toward grief.

“But they’re not you, Chim.”

She looked down, hand still resting on her belly. Her other arm wrapped around her midsection like she was trying to hold something in, or maybe keep something out. When she looked back up at him, the bravado had cracked wide open. What remained was raw and quiet and impossibly human.

“I didn’t want to meet our son without you.”

Jimin leaned in slowly, like he could close the light-years between them with body language alone. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. Swallowed hard. When he finally spoke, his voice was rough-edged and barely steady.

“You’re not alone,” he said. “You’re meeting him in a world where I already love him more than I ever thought I could love anyone. That has to count for something. I know it’s not the same. God, Uma, I know it’s not. But it’s true.”

His voice caught, and he pushed past it. “Rose and Sean—listen, they’ll take care of you like you’re theirs. I made sure of that before I left. I should’ve told you sooner. I should’ve done a lot of things sooner.”

“I know,” she whispered.

“I’m so sorry I’m not there with you.”

Uma turned away, just slightly, dabbing at her face with the sleeve of her sweater. Not hiding the tears—just trying to stay upright through them.

“I called him Riker,” she said after a pause. “I know we were still deciding. I know we said we’d wait. But it felt right. Last night I was reading those baby books Quinn gave me, and I whispered it to him. And he kicked.”

Jimin’s throat clenched. He didn’t trust himself to say anything at first.

“Riker,” he repeated finally, like he was testing the word in his mouth for the first time. “Yeah. That’s his name.”

She smiled—small, real. Her chin trembled.

“He looks like you,” she said. “From the scans. Same nose. It’s hard to get clear pictures because he keeps tossing and turning, but I just know just like I knew Hana would.”

“I wanted to be the first one to hold him,” Jimin said, voice low.

Uma nodded. “Then get your ass home.”

He chuckled, breathless. “Working on it.”

He leaned in even closer, his hand hovering near the edge of the console like he might reach through it. “I’ll come home to you, Uma. I swear to you. I’ll crawl back if I have to.”

“I believe you,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper.

Her hand came up again, touching the screen gently. Jimin mirrored the gesture. Their fingertips aligned through the glass—no warmth, no pressure. Just the image. Just the intention.

A silence settled between them. Not empty. Just full of the things that didn’t need to be said aloud. Years of late nights. Early mornings. Fights. Laughter. Hana’s first steps. The quiet promise of a life they were still trying to build.

Then Jimin spoke again, more carefully now.

“She’s like my sister,” he said. “I know that’s not in the job description. I know it wasn’t supposed to matter. But I made the call. I stayed. I would do it again.”

Uma pulled back slightly, sitting straighter. Her arms folded across her chest. The tears were drying, but her eyes stayed hard, focused.

“You think I don’t understand why you did it?”

He didn’t answer. He knew better than to try.

“I do,” she said. “But you didn’t tell me. You didn’t even give me a choice. I had to find out from a system ping that you were extending your mission—seven more months, just dropped into my inbox like a goddamn package delivery.”

She shook her head. “You’re going to miss your son being born, Jimin.”

Her voice didn’t rise. It didn’t need to.

He leaned in again, pressing his palm to the console like it might carry the weight of what he wanted to say.

“You would’ve told me to go,” he said, quiet. “If I’d asked.”

“Of course I would’ve. But you didn’t ask. That’s the part that hurts.”

He nodded once, slowly. “Then be furious. Be as mad as you want. I’ll take it all. I just…” He swallowed again. “Please don’t stop talking to me.”

Uma stared at him for a long time.

Her face didn’t shift. Not right away. Her arms were still crossed, her jaw still tight, and for a moment, Jimin wondered if she was even going to say anything. Then she exhaled—long, controlled—and the line of her shoulders softened. Just slightly. Not in surrender, but in recognition.

That quiet, painful kind of understanding that only happens between people who know each other too well to lie.

“Goddamn it, Chim,” she muttered, voice low. “You’d better bring her back.”

It wasn’t forgiveness. Not entirely. But it wasn’t anger either. It was something deeper. Something closer to faith. The kind that could only survive if you’d been through fire together and still chose to look each other in the eye.

Jimin’s shoulders sagged, just a little. Not enough to be obvious. Just enough to let some of the weight slip off his chest for the first time in days.

“That’s the plan,” he said.

Uma didn’t respond right away. She just reached forward again, her hand finding the edge of the screen. This time, her fingers trembled.

Jimin mirrored her instinctively, pressing his palm to the glass. Their hands aligned—pixels and pressure, no warmth, no real contact—but it was the closest thing they had to touch.

They stayed like that, neither speaking. The silence between them wasn’t empty. It was full—of late-night talks and shared routines, of old fights and quiet reconciliations, of watching their daughter sleep between them on the couch and arguing about whose turn it was to clean out the recycling chute.

It was the silence of people who knew how to sit in each other’s pain.

Finally, Uma spoke. Her voice was quieter now, but not small. It was steady. Honest.

“Bring my favorite sister-in-law home.”

Jimin’s lip twitched. He gave a tired smile that almost—almost—reached his eyes.

“She’s your only sister-in-law.”

Uma rolled her eyes, that familiar flicker of fire slipping back in. “Whatever, Orphan Annie. That just makes the title easier to maintain. Don’t get cocky.”

He laughed. Really laughed. It came from somewhere deep in his chest, cracking through the weariness like sunlight through storm clouds. The kind of laugh that reminded him what it felt like to be more than just a uniform and a mission file.

Uma smiled too, but it faded quickly, replaced by something gentler. Something sad.

“I should go,” she said, glancing off-screen. “Hana’s about to wake up, and I don’t think our connection is going to last long enough for her to talk to you. It’d break her heart if she only got a few seconds.”

Jimin’s smile faltered. He nodded, slow. “She still asking?”

“Every morning,” Uma said. “She stands at the window and asks when the stars are going to give you back.”

His chest tightened. “What do you tell her?”

Uma’s voice was soft, but firm. “I tell her the stars are just slow. Like her dad.”

Jimin chuckled under his breath. “Exactly like her dad.”

Uma glanced down, brushing something off her lap, then looked back at the screen. “She still sleeps with that stupid plush helmet you gave her.”

“She named it Captain Helmet, right?”

“Lieutenant Helmet,” Uma corrected. “She demoted it last week for insubordination.”

Jimin barked another laugh, “That tracks.”

In the corner of the screen, a red light started to blink—connection timer winding down.

Neither of them said anything right away. They both knew what that light meant. They both knew how these calls ended.

“I love you,” Uma said.

“I love you,” Jimin said, the words catching at the edges of his throat.

The screen flickered.

Then it went dark.

The booth filled with the soft hum of life support again. A steady pulse of recycled air, a low mechanical whisper—just enough to remind Jimin he was back on the ship. Back in the silence.

He didn’t move.

Not for a while.

He just sat there, one hand still resting against the blank screen, the echo of Uma’s voice lingering in his chest. He had hoped Hana would be there today. She would’ve made him feel better about this whole thing.

Eventually, he stood. Adjusted his collar. Wiped his face with the back of his hand.

Then he turned and stepped out into the corridor, the weight of two promises—one to his wife, one to Y/N—pulling him forward.

Because there was work to be done.

The lab at JPL was immaculate—sterile white walls, overhead lights humming in quiet synchrony, and the kind of chill in the air that came from both temperature control and high stakes. But beneath that pristine order, the room buzzed with pressure. Not the loud, chaotic kind. The quiet kind. The kind that built slowly and wrapped around your ribs.

Marco Navarro stood near the central bay, arms folded tightly across his chest, posture stiff. He looked like a man trying very hard not to look tired. The sleeves of his button-down were rolled up just past his elbows, exposing forearms marked by the fine lines of someone who hadn’t left the building in days. His dark eyes were locked on the Iris 2 Probe as it hovered, cradled by a suspension rig, waiting to be sealed for launch logistics.

All around him, his team moved with quiet precision. Engineers in cleanroom suits adjusted clamps and rechecked fittings. Two techs hovered over a tablet, reviewing structural readings. A third was halfway through a final checklist on the containment shell. Every movement was practiced, deliberate. No one raised their voice. No one had to.

But the tension in the room was palpable.

Across the lab, three representatives from TIC—the Terran Interplanetary Commission—stood just beyond the boundary line in sealed protective suits, their presence as subtle as a shadow, but twice as heavy. No one spoke to them. They didn’t speak either. They just watched. Silently, intently. The government’s eyes on borrowed ground.

Marco didn’t acknowledge them directly. Not yet. He leaned in toward one of his senior engineers, muttering a question under his breath.

“Telemetry package confirmed?”

The engineer, a red-haired woman with tired eyes and half a protein bar tucked behind her monitor, nodded once. “Final sync cleared at 0637. No transmission lag. We’re clean.”

Marco gave a curt nod, but his eyes stayed on the probe.

Iris 2 wasn’t just a machine. Not anymore. It was memory and responsibility and proof of intent—of everything NOSA, JPL, and TIC had promised and failed to deliver the first time. This probe wasn’t just about reaching M6-117. It was about reaching her.

He could feel the weight of it—of the quiet desperation stitched into the calculations, of the late-night redesigns, of the emergency approvals rushed through by Parliament in the wake of the satellite feed leaks. Every bolt on that chassis felt like a plea.

Just hold together.

Just get there.

Just give us a chance to make this right.

He exhaled through his nose and finally let himself glance at the TIC observers. One of them—a younger woman, likely an analyst based on the blue badge—caught his gaze. She gave a small nod. Not approval. Not encouragement. Just acknowledgment. That subtle gesture that said, We’re all in the same trench now.

Marco returned the nod, just as restrained. No words exchanged, but the message passed cleanly between them.

They both knew what was riding on Iris 2.

This wasn't a test flight. It wasn’t a publicity mission. It was a lifeline.

Every update they’d received from NOSA over the past three days—Y/N’s position tracking, the sample uploads, the EVA logs—had shifted the gravity of the operation. Iris 2 wasn’t going to M6-117 just to drop instruments and wave a flag. It was going to confirm the unthinkable. That someone had survived. That someone was still fighting.

Marco turned back toward the rig. The final clamps had been set. The outer seal was being lowered into place with a slow mechanical hiss, locking the probe inside its carbon-frame shipping cradle. Once it left this room, it would be transferred to a high-altitude payload facility for thermal calibration. After that, it was Helion’s problem.

But right now, in this room, it was still his.

“Double-check the seal redundancies,” he said to no one in particular. “Don’t assume the checklist is enough. I want a visual on every damn latch.”

Someone murmured an acknowledgment and peeled off toward the capsule with a scanner.

Behind him, the lead TIC official stepped forward slightly, crossing the line for the first time. She was older than the others, with silver streaks in her hair and a face that looked carved from patience. She didn’t interrupt. Just waited.

Marco finally turned to her.

“We’ll have full system redundancy locked before the truck arrives,” he said. “We’ve tripled the diagnostics on this model.”

She nodded, arms at her sides. “Good. Because we don’t get another shot at this.”

He didn’t argue. They both knew it was true.

“You’ve seen the EVA logs?” he asked.

“All of them.”

“And?”

The woman hesitated—just for a beat. “I’ve seen a lot of missions,” she said. “A lot of accidents. A lot of breakdowns. But I’ve never seen anyone doing what she’s doing. Not after that long. Not with no support.”

Marco’s jaw tightened, but his voice was calm when he answered.

“She was always that kind of astronaut. Doesn’t do things halfway.”

The woman looked at him, gaze sharp. “Let’s hope the rest of us can keep up.”

Then she stepped back behind the line again, her presence receding without a sound.

Marco stayed where he was, hands on his hips, eyes back on the crate now that the final lock had engaged. The engineers were already moving to sign off the handover forms, but he lingered.

Because once this box was gone, once the probe left his care, everything became chance.

The video booth on the Starfire was barely bigger than a walk-in closet, but Armin Zimmermann didn’t mind. In zero-G, everything felt a little more spacious anyway. He floated cross-legged, tucked into the narrow padded frame like he’d been born for it, the soft blue glow of the console casting gentle light over his face.

The screen flickered, adjusted—and then settled. Kelly appeared, clear as ever.

Her hair was pulled back in a low, effortless bun, and she wore a navy wool sweater he recognized from their last trip to Bremen. Even over the feed, she looked sharp. Steady. So completely herself. She sat at her parents’ kitchen table—he recognized the striped ceramic sugar jar by her elbow—and behind her, soft daylight filtered in through a tall, arched window. Earthlight.

Home.

“I found it at the flea market,” she said, lifting something into view with a sly grin. “Original pressing.”

Armin squinted, then let out a short, delighted gasp.

“No!”

Kelly held it closer to the camera, and there it was—Abba’s Greatest Hits, 1973. The white cover with the floating heads, perfectly preserved, the plastic sleeve only slightly scuffed.

“You’re joking!” Armin’s voice leapt, thick with his Aguerra-tinged German accent. “Kelly—that’s impossible to get! People have been trying to fake that cover since the ‘90s!”

“I triple-checked it,” she said, clearly proud. “Even the spine’s intact. The guy selling it said he bought it new in Malmö and barely played it. I think he was a bit heartbroken to let it go.”

Armin laughed, clapping his hands once in midair, the motion sending him spinning slightly in the seat harness. “Of course he was! If I had that, I wouldn’t let it leave my sight.”

Kelly smiled, and for a second, her posture relaxed. She looked at him like she had in the early years—before deployment cycles, before kids, before so many late nights spent on opposite sides of space.

“I got it for you,” she said simply. “I figured it’d help you hang on, for a few more months.”

He pressed a hand to his chest, mock-theatrical. “My heart,” he said dramatically. “You’ve stolen it again.”

“You never had a chance,” she replied, grinning.

Then a voice cut in from offscreen.

“Papa! Papa, look!”

A blur of motion darted behind Kelly’s chair. Max—age five and wild as ever—climbed up into her lap, shoving something toward the camera. A small toy spaceship made of interlocking blocks.

“I made this for you!” he shouted.

“Ohhh!” Armin’s face lit up. “Is that the Starfire? Wait—Max, did you get the airlock module right?”

“I did!” Max said proudly, twisting the top off to show him. “And this part detaches for landings!”

Kelly made a quiet oof as he squirmed in her lap. “Max, careful—you’re knocking the camera.”

“Sorry!”

Another voice called out from behind them—more composed.

“Felix, come say hi to Papa,” Kelly said over her shoulder.

A moment later, Felix stepped into view, his gangly arms wrapped around Marta’s middle with the kind of awkward, determined grip that came from practice and not quite enough upper body strength. He was seven now—taller, thinner, all knees and elbows. His hair was sticking up in the back like he’d just rolled off the couch.

“She’s getting heavy,” he announced, not complaining so much as stating a fact.

Marta let out a soft babble in response, followed immediately by a hiccup. Her round cheeks flushed with effort as she spotted the screen—and then her entire face lit up. She reached out toward Armin with both hands, fingers splayed, drool trailing from her chin to the sleeve of Felix’s shirt.

“Ach Gott,” Armin murmured, smiling so wide it wrinkled the corners of his eyes. “Look at her. She’s so big now.”

Kelly adjusted the angle slightly to center them all, then tilted the camera down to keep Marta in frame as Felix shifted her to his hip with a grunt. “She’s cutting teeth,” she said. “We’re up at least twice a night now. Last night she bit my finger and started laughing like a little villain.”

“I wish I could be there for it,” Armin said, the humor still in his voice but something heavier behind it now. “Even the screaming. I’d take the 3 a.m. crying and diaper explosions if it meant I could hold her.”

Kelly looked down at Marta, brushing a bit of hair from her forehead. “She misses you. They all do. But… I’m really glad you were here when she was born. I keep thinking about that. It mattered. Even if it was just one week, it mattered.”

Armin nodded, slowly. “Min didn’t have to approve the delay. I know that.”

“He did,” she said softly. “And I think it meant a lot. To all of us. Uma’s been struggling more than she says—Jimin missing Riker’s birth really hit her. I told her it would be okay. That it doesn’t change how much they love each other, how close he’ll be to that baby. I mean, you missed Felix’s birth.”

“And look at him,” Armin said, watching as Felix leaned against the kitchen doorframe now, absentmindedly rocking Marta as she gnawed on the edge of his hoodie string. “Still thinks I’m the coolest person alive.”

“He wrote an essay about you for school,” Kelly said, with a faint smile. “Said his papa works in space and is braver than a lion, but also better at cooking noodles.”

Armin laughed, chest tight. “Better than a lion at cooking noodles. High praise.”

“Max added that you once stopped an alien invasion. With a rock.”

“An Aguerra rock, no less. Very powerful stuff.”

“Apparently.”

A blur darted across the screen again. Max had returned, spaceship model still clutched in one hand, his curls bouncing with each step. “Papa! Did you see the antenna? Look, it turns—” He twisted it aggressively, and one piece popped off, bouncing out of frame.

“Oh no—wait—where’d it go?” he muttered, diving under the table.

Armin grinned, shaking his head. “Are you still fighting space pirates?”

“Every day!” Max’s voice called from under the table. “But they’re scared of me now.”

“Good,” Armin said. “Because they should be. With that ship, they don’t stand a chance.”

Kelly checked the screen corner. “We’ve got three minutes.”

Armin sat up straighter, trying to squeeze every second out of it. “How’s Earth?”

“Busy. Loud. But it’s good to see everyone. My mom’s still convinced Aguerra air has too little oxygen, despite never setting foot there.”

“I miss her house,” he said. “And her strudel.”

“She’s still mad that you like it more than mine.”

“She’s not wrong. Yours is… dense.”

Kelly gasped, mock-offended. “Rude.”

“I say it with love.”

“You’re lucky you’re in space.”

Marta began to fuss again, a tired cry cutting through the moment. Felix bounced her gently, but she was already twisting, trying to wriggle free.

“I’ll get her down,” he said, disappearing down the hallway.

Max had reappeared, one hand clutching a bent antenna triumphantly.

And then it was just the two of them again.

“You holding up?” Kelly asked, her voice quieter now.

Armin hesitated, but then nodded. “I’m okay. Mission’s a lot, but the team’s solid. Yoongi’s keeping the pressure focused. Mateo’s... well, he’s still Mateo. And Jimin’s trying to keep it together.”

Kelly’s expression shifted slightly. Concern.

“Any word on Fry?”

Armin’s smile faded, but it didn’t vanish. He was good at carrying the hard things lightly.

“No updates yet,” he said. “But she’s out there. Been fixing things, and managed to finish an old colony’s mission. Sick off of eating potatoes, perhaps. I know I would be and I get paste in a tube for breakfast.”

Kelly nodded slowly, eyes drifting toward the edge of the screen like she was picturing Y/N on that silent, brutal planet. “She’s always been stubborn.”

“She’s not stubborn,” Armin said. “She’s relentless. There’s a difference.”

The countdown blinked red now—less than a minute.

Kelly reached toward the screen, her fingers brushing the camera frame like she could close the distance through intention alone. “I’ll play the record for the kids when we’re home. Felix already sings Waterloo in the bath.”

Armin laughed, low and fond. “He’ll be a star.”

“Like his papa.”

He looked at her—really looked. The creases near her eyes, the calm strength in her voice, the soft exhaustion of someone doing too much but never complaining.

“I love you,” he said, quiet but clear.

Kelly smiled, eyes glistening, but she didn’t blink. “I love you more.”

The feed stuttered—just for a heartbeat—then steadied.

“Tell Max he’s getting an upgrade module,” Armin added, right as the screen blinked to black. “I’ll build it with him. When I’m back.”

And then the connection dropped.

Armin didn’t move.

He floated in the quiet for a moment, hands loose at his sides, the echo of laughter and baby babble still ringing in his ears. The hum of the ship crept back in—soft, familiar, indifferent.

He pressed one palm gently against the screen.

“I’ll get there,” he whispered, more to himself than anyone else. “I’ll come home.”

Then he pushed off the booth wall, slow and weightless, and drifted back toward the corridor. Toward duty. Toward something unfinished.

A father. A husband. A chemist. Still tethered to three children, a kitchen on Earth, and a vinyl record waiting to be played.

The launch pad shimmered under the relentless Aguerra Prime sun, the air rippling above the scorched concrete like a mirage. From a distance, it looked almost peaceful—the tall form of the Iris 2 Probe standing poised against the deep blue sky, its titanium shell gleaming with clean, sharp edges. But the closer you got, the more you felt it: the pressure humming through every cable, every socketed bolt, every word passed between engineers like it might snap if spoken too loud.

The booster tower rose behind it like a steel spine, support arms still locked around the probe’s flanks. Sunlight glared off the reflective plating, flashing across visors and toolboxes as teams moved in tight formation around the base. They moved with the synchronicity of people who didn’t have time to second-guess themselves—every motion honed by thousands of hours of prep. Check. Recheck. Confirm. Sign off.

It wasn’t chaos. But it wasn’t calm either. It was the electric stillness before the sprint.

Off to the side of the pad, in the limited shade beneath a modular control tent, Taurus Flight Director Isla Reinhardt stood with her arms tucked behind her back, her body language composed but taut. The sharp lines of her white jumpsuit caught the sun, unwrinkled despite the heat. In front of her, Creed was gesturing—tight, controlled movements, but unmistakably frustrated.

“This entire sequence is backwards,” Creed said, low enough to keep it out of the general comms traffic, but not hiding the edge in his voice. “You’re running a TIC stack from twenty years ago. We’ve updated every protocol since Nexus One, and we haven’t done command layer locking that way since Apollo 27.”

The translator, standing just to the side of them, repeated the statement in clipped, neutral tones—softening the delivery but preserving the structure. Creed didn’t look at the translator. He didn’t need to. His eyes were locked on Isla, waiting.

Her jaw flexed once, just barely.

“We’re following a mandate from oversight,” she replied. “The redundancy needs to clear from the top line of remote interface down. You want to override that, you take it up with Parliament.”

“I’ve tried,” Creed said. “They sent me you.”

That earned him a sharp look, but she didn’t flinch.

A few meters behind them, André Batista leaned against one of the static barriers, arms folded, expression unreadable behind his reflective shades. He was a fixture here—part liaison, part architect, part political shield. He didn’t often speak unless something needed settling. So far, he hadn’t moved.

Beside him, Yoongi Min stood with one hand tucked into his flight jacket pocket, the other holding a data slate he wasn’t reading. His stance was relaxed, but his eyes tracked everything. The two men locked eyes for a moment.

André tilted his head slightly.

Yoongi gave the barest shrug. Not my circus.

The translator cleared her throat gently as Creed fired off another quiet barrage of concerns, this time about sensor lag and latency curve risk over a long-range transmission relay. Isla didn’t interrupt—she simply let him speak, waiting for the break. When it came, she replied in a tone so calm it almost felt detached.

“We’re under a transparency clause,” she said. “TIC’s name is on this. I don’t care how things were done at NOSA. If something goes wrong on this flight, it’s ours to explain, not yours. That’s the trade-off for funding.”

Creed’s nostrils flared. “This isn’t about funding. It’s about surviving the mission long enough to justify the launch.”

There was silence. Not long. Just long enough for the weight of it to land. The translator didn’t repeat that one.

André stepped forward finally, pushing off the barrier. “We need to stop playing jurisdictional chess. The probe is loaded. The window is locked. We’re hours out, and every one of you has skin in the game.” He looked between them, then directly at Isla. “Let’s not waste the time we’re running out of.”

He turned to Yoongi next. “Where are we on the confirmation pings?”

“Telemetry’s stable. We’ve got three handshake confirms from Iris and two from the booster package. Final burn path data’s syncing now.” He glanced at Creed. “She’s gonna fly, Summers.”

Creed didn’t argue. He just exhaled, rubbed the back of his neck once, and stepped away from the argument like someone carefully placing a grenade down before walking away.

Yoongi looked after him for a beat longer than necessary. Then he turned to Isla. “He’s not wrong about the sequence logic. But you’re not wrong about politics.”

“Funny how those things rarely line up,” she muttered.

In the background, the launch pad hissed as cooling vapor rolled down from the upper stacks. A ground tech called out a ten-minute marker in clipped Standard. The wind shifted slightly, bringing with it the tang of scorched ozone and oil.

They all turned toward the pad, eyes tracking the silhouette of the Iris 2.

Y/N stood crouched atop the curved hull of Speculor 2, bracing herself against the relentless wind. The gusts came in rhythmic pulses, sharp and slicing, carrying fine, metallic-red grit that embedded itself in every seam, every fold of her suit. It was the kind of wind that didn’t scream—but pressed. Pushed. Like the planet itself wanted her gone.

Her boots, magnetized to the surface, clicked softly as she adjusted her stance. Above her, the sky was the same hazy slate it had been for weeks—never quite light, never quite dark, the perpetual dusk of Hexundecia’s upper atmosphere. Out here, there was no sound but the filtered rasp of her breath inside the helmet and the occasional groan of the rover shifting in the wind.

She worked quickly, but carefully—gloved hands moving with practiced intent as she secured the last edge of the pop tent onto the roof. It didn’t look like much: an awkward dome of salvaged thermal mylar, structural flex-canvas, and about three rolls of industrial adhesive. The seams were patchy, the shape slightly asymmetrical, and the fabric still bore the faint burn marks from its previous life as an emergency airlock tarp.

But it was what she had. What she’d built.

She ran a final bead of sealant along the base, then tugged at the corners, checking for give. None. Good. The fabric trembled under her fingers, sensitive to even the subtlest shifts in pressure.

"Okay," she muttered, her voice low and clipped, more to herself than the recorder feed. "Let’s see if you can hold your breath.”

She flipped the switch on the manual pressurization system—an old NOSA rig she’d retooled for small-space inflation. It hummed, then clicked. A second later, the tent shuddered and began to rise, inflating with slow, uneven breaths. The canvas bulged awkwardly at first, then snapped into shape, the internal frame locking into place with a faint metallic pop.

Y/N held perfectly still, watching. Waiting. Her pulse ticked in her ears, louder than she liked.

The tent swelled outward slightly under pressure, flexed, then settled.

No tearing. No hissing. No collapse.

She exhaled, breath fogging briefly on the inside of her faceplate.

"Okay," she whispered, this time with something closer to relief. “Okay.”

She stepped back, letting the winds howl around her as she took in the strange structure she’d created. Ugly as hell. But airtight—for now. It would hold a pocket of warmth. Let her eat. Sleep. Think. Survive a little longer.

The pop tent wasn’t a permanent solution, and she knew it. It was a stopgap. One she’d have to check every few hours for signs of structural fatigue, thermal drift, or microtears. But compared to sleeping half-curled in the rover’s cargo hold, it was a goddamn luxury suite.

She climbed back down, boots thunking lightly as they disengaged from the magnetized hull, and dropped into the main chamber of the rover. Inside, it was dim and cramped—stale air, the scent of worn insulation, and the ever-present tang of iron dust.

She peeled off her gloves with slow care, flexing her fingers. They were stiff and pale, the skin rubbed raw in places where the liner seams never quite sat right. Her breath slowed. The adrenaline was ebbing now, the rush of getting something done giving way to the quieter dread of everything else still ahead.

This had taken four sols to rig.

She had, maybe, twelve more before the storm cycle shifted and buried the area in sand thick enough to compromise everything. And if her estimates were right—and she prayed they were—there was a chance, however slim, that a satellite would be sweeping near this quadrant by then.

She had to make the tent visible. Reflective. Irrationally bright.

She’d started sewing strips of spare mylar to the outer shell two nights ago, in the dark, with a thermal needle and frozen fingers. She had four more to add. Maybe five.

Outside, the wind surged again—louder this time. Something heavy thudded against the side of the rover. Probably a loose panel from the old dig site. She didn’t jump. She was past jumping.

Instead, she reached for her patch kit and a folded sheet of mylar she’d scavenged from the side panel of an old solar collector. Then she stood.

One seam at a time.

That’s how she lived now.

Not by the week. Not by the day. Not even by the hour.

Seam by seam. Breath by breath.

At the NOSA headquarters, Mateo and his team of engineers were deep in the throes of their own technical challenges. They surrounded a mirrored setup of Y/N’s speculor, trying to replicate her conditions as closely as possible. The engineers were methodical in their work, carefully testing and retesting, but their efforts were proving difficult. One of the engineers scratched his head as he tried to fit the bulky Oxygenator into the cramped confines of the pop tent, muttering under his breath as he juggled the components.

“Maybe if we angle it this way…” Mateo began, but before he could finish his thought, the unit tipped over, causing a flurry of activity as the engineers scrambled to adjust the pieces. Mateo sighed, his patience wearing thin, but his tone remained steady. “Okay. Again.”

Koah floated just above the rail of the comms bay, one hand anchored to a support bar, the other tapping a short sequence into the feed control. The connection took a few seconds longer than usual—just long enough to make his pulse tick a little faster.

Then the screen lit up, and there they were.

Quynh, all sharp cheekbones and soft eyes, with her long hair twisted into a lazy bun at the top of her head. She was sitting cross-legged on the couch in their apartment back on Aguerra Prime, barefoot, a wrench in one hand and their two-year-old son Bao sprawled sideways across her lap, talking a mile a minute.

“There he is!” Quynh grinned, tossing the wrench into a tray beside her. “Koah, your son is trying to dismantle the toaster because he thinks it’s a spaceship.”

“It is a spaceship,” Bao declared, his little face popping up toward the camera with unfiltered joy. “Papa! Look! Toaster engine!”

Koah laughed, the sound echoing softly in the confined booth. “That’s classified technology, buddy. You can’t just reverse-engineer domestic appliances for launch.”

Bao let out a squeal of delight, bouncing in Quynh’s lap.

“You’re supposed to say hi, not initiate tech theft,” Quynh muttered playfully, nudging him with her chin.

“Watch this,” Koah said with a grin, pushing off the far wall in one smooth motion.

He floated through the zero-G space like a swimmer in slow motion, tucking into a controlled spin. His body twisted mid-air, knees drawn in, one hand flaring out for style points. He rotated once, then shifted momentum and drifted cleanly into the partial-grav buffer near the edge of the booth, landing with a soft thud on the deck.

Bao shrieked with laughter, clutching his belly. “AGAIN!”

Koah beamed. “You’re lucky your dad’s a certified space ninja.”

“You’re lucky you married a woman who finds space ninjas hot,” Quynh said dryly.

Koah barked a laugh. “No lies detected.”

He dropped back into a crouch and leaned closer to the screen, chin propped on his hands as he took them both in—his son’s wild curls and jam-streaked shirt, the familiar line of Quynh’s collarbone just visible under a worn tank top she’d probably stolen from him in college.

“You look good,” he said softly, his smile still tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Exhausted. But good.”

“So do you,” Quynh said. “Very heroic. Very floaty.”

“Bao,” Koah said in a mock-whisper, “how’s Mama holding up without Papa’s superior wrench skills?”

Bao squinted at him. “Mama says you make mess. Mama say she fix.”

Koah clutched his chest like he’d been shot. “Traitor!”

Quynh smirked. “He’s observant.”

They all laughed—an easy, looping rhythm that Koah could’ve stayed inside forever.

Then Quynh tilted her head, the light from the screen catching in the curve of her cheekbone. The warmth in her face didn’t disappear, but it shifted—something sharpened beneath it.

“I’ve been asking around,” she said, her voice quieter now. “About her. About what’s happening. No one’s talking.”

Koah’s smile dimmed at the edges. Not gone, just more cautious now. “You mean Fry?”

She nodded, brushing a hand through Bao’s curls as he leaned heavily against her shoulder. “I know Creed Summers went behind Yoongi’s back. That much I pulled out of one of the payload guys during a lunch break. But past that?” She shrugged. “Even Ives won’t say anything. And you know she usually cracks if you wave a coffee pod in her direction.”

Koah let out a slow breath and rubbed the back of his neck, like he was trying to knead the tension out of it. “Yeah,” he said finally. “It’s… complicated.”

“Complicated like top-level-clearance complicated?”

He hesitated, eyes flicking away for just a second. “Complicated like… you’d be obsessed with the engineering, and then terrified once you realized what it actually meant.”

Quynh’s expression didn’t change, but her posture shifted. She leaned forward a little, Bao still clinging to her like a sleepy barnacle.

“I don’t need you to break protocol,” she said, not accusing, just honest. “I know how it works. But I don’t want you sleepwalking into something you can’t walk out of.”

Koah looked at her, really looked, and felt that familiar pull in his chest—the one that reminded him exactly why he chose to stay. Why he said yes, when every other instinct told him no.

Even now, with everything spinning tighter by the day, she wasn’t asking him to come home. She was telling him to be smart. And that was love too.

“I’ll keep my eyes open,” he said, voice steady. “I promise.”

Quynh’s mouth curved into a half-smile. “Good. Because I may be the only one in the support chat who thinks you staying up there is the coolest thing ever.”

Koah chuckled. “The other wives still mad?”

“They’re... coping. Uma’s pissed. Understandably. Kelly pretends she’s fine, but the boys are taking it harder. Max asked if he could build a space elevator to bring Armin home.”

Koah smiled at that, the kind of smile that knew exactly what being missed felt like. “And you?”

Quynh rolled her eyes. “I’m over here bragging to anyone who’ll listen that my husband is doing deep-space diagnostics with a toothbrush and a busted coolant valve. Like some kind of orbital MacGyver.”

“Technically,” Koah said with mock formality, “it was a toothbrush and a strip of thermal tape. I have standards.”

Bao perked up. “Papa is best!”

Koah grinned, eyes sparkling. “Damn right he is. And you, Bao Bean, are the best little sidekick in the galaxy.”

“Are you bringing robot?” Bao asked suddenly, sitting upright in his mother’s lap. “You promised robot!”

“I remember,” Koah said, nodding solemnly. “And not just one—two robots. One for you, and one for Mama.”

Quynh raised a brow. “Oh yeah? What does mine run on? Flattery and caffeine?”

“Logic circuits, emotional resilience, and a coffee reservoir with built-in sarcasm,” Koah replied. “Basically… you in droid form.”

She laughed, the sound bright and short and familiar. “Flawless design.”

The screen flashed—two-minute warning, pulsing red in the corner.

Koah’s chest tightened the way it always did near the end of a call. He hated this part. Not just the goodbye, but the slow slide into silence.

“I wish I could stay longer,” he said, quieter now.

Quynh reached toward the camera, her fingers brushing close to the lens. “We’re good,” she said. “We’re here. And we’re proud of you.”

His throat tightened, but he didn’t let it show. “Give Bao a kiss for me?”

Before she could answer, Bao leaned forward, pressing his entire face against the screen. “MUAH!”

Koah mimed catching it, then tucked it into his pocket. “Straight to the cryo logs. Archived forever.”

Another blink—sixty seconds.

“I love you,” Quynh said, voice steady, full of everything she didn’t have time to say.

“I love you more,” Koah answered. Then added, “When I get back—”

“You’ll finish fixing the toaster?” she cut in, smirking.

“I’ll launch the toaster,” he said. “With a fusion drive and retractable wings.”

Quynh laughed, even as the feed flickered one last time.

The screen went dark.

Koah stayed there, suspended in the weightless booth, his hands still hovering near the edge of the console like he could will her image back. Then, slowly, he let go, pushing off the wall with practiced ease.

Back at the launch site, the first rumble came low—almost imperceptible at first, like a distant storm building beneath the concrete.

Then the pad lit up.

A towering column of fire and sound erupted beneath the Argo as its engines roared to life, white-hot exhaust curling around the flame trenches in thick plumes of smoke. The shockwave hit a split second later—rolling through the observation stands, rattling steel fixtures, and thudding deep into every chest on the platform like a second heartbeat.

It was a controlled violence—raw, precise, beautiful.

The Argo began to rise.

Slowly at first, as if testing the air, then faster—cutting through the sky in a clean, perfect arc. The hull gleamed gold in the afternoon light, the sun catching along its flank as it punched upward past the clouds, trailing a pillar of heat and vapor that tore the sky in two.

A wave of cheers broke across the launch complex. Technicians and engineers who’d been stiff with focus a moment earlier now stood shouting, hugging, clapping each other on the back. Some laughed. Some just stared, mouths parted in disbelief, as if they couldn’t quite believe it was finally happening. Others wiped at their eyes with sleeves and tried to pretend it was the sunlight.

Yoongi Min stood just off-center from the crowd, shoulders square, arms crossed, but there was a softness to his expression that hadn’t been there minutes before—like a coil had finally loosened in his chest. Next to him, Creed Summers was grinning, not wide, but sharp—relief mixed with the residue of pressure. His tie was still half-loose from the argument earlier, but now he extended a hand to Yoongi.

Yoongi hesitated, then took it.

Not warmly. Not with forgiveness. But with acknowledgment.

“Well,” Creed said, low enough for only Yoongi to hear, “we didn’t blow up the planet. That’s a win.”

Yoongi didn’t smile. But he didn’t pull away either.

“Telemetry looks clean,” someone called from a nearby terminal. “Guidance holding steady. No drift on the main stack.”

Across the pad, André Batista stood a few paces back from the crowd, hands in his pockets, sunglasses reflecting the disappearing silhouette of the rocket. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. The quiet, satisfied nod he gave said enough. He had seen a hundred launches in his lifetime. This one mattered.

Marco stood a few steps off the platform edge, jaw clenched but eyes tracking the ascent with laser focus. The Iris-2 probe was up there now—every circuit, every algorithm, every delicate sensor array tucked into the Argo’s belly like a secret whispered across the stars. It wasn’t just equipment to him. It was purpose.

As the rocket disappeared past the clouds, only the vapor trail remained—fading into the blue, curling in on itself like a final signature on a hard-fought page.

Yoongi finally exhaled and turned to face the rest of the team. His voice was steady when he spoke, but his words carried the weight of months.

“Mission clock starts now,” he said.

Creed nodded once, then turned toward the ops tent, already scanning his tablet.

The cheering had begun to taper off. Reality was returning in steps. There were check-ins to process. Booster separations to confirm. A thousand things that could still go wrong.

But in that brief window—between fire and silence—everyone stood a little taller.

Taglist: @fancypeacepersona @ssbb-22 @mar-lo-pap @sathom013 @kimyishin @ttanniett @sweetvoidstuff @keiarajm @sathom013 @miniesjams32

[panlight]

I remember seeing a post once about how Bella's only really ~selfless~ when it comes to the Edward/the Cullens and i honestly agree.

even if midnight sun supposedly gave more moments of bella's told ~kindness and selflessness~ in the main books where they're actually from HER pov there are still plenty moments where it comes off otherwise.

She only really gets close to jacob just to have him tell her about the legends, so she can figure out more about edward/his family, to which in MS Edward gets this ✨brilliant✨ idea to use that as a "justification" to slaughter a tribe that already is willing to allow his family in their area despite having EVERY right to not welcome them due to what their kind can do to their people. so that's..fun :) (actually speaking of MS, I can't get over how edward is bitching about billy being rightfully leery of them and hates how he sees them as monsters despite saying the same things to Bella whenever he wants to convince her of how dangerous their relationship/her choice to be a vampire is. lol)

In new moon, she only decides to reconnect with Jessica mainly to "get Charlie off her back" and when Jessica gets rightfully upset that she nearly got into trouble approaching some shady guys in a bar, Bella sees Jessica as "having gone to the dark side". Like?? Bella, your lucky she even still bothered to hang out with you after giving her the cold shoulder for months. And the first time you two hang out, you nearly endangered yourself AND her all because you wanted to see a figment of Edward in your head.

In fact! While I like Jacob's friendship with Bella in new moon (idc if people said it was boring because "no vampires"; the platonic chemistry bella and jacob had was 👌👌) the fact was Bella's original plan to see Jacob was to get him to fix the bikes so she can keep seeing "Edward" in her head.

I remember being irritated at Bella mostly at the end of New Moon, tbh. A moment that stood out was when Charlie was mad at Edward for leaving her behind and what he did to her (as a good father SHOULD) yet Bella threatens him to leave home if he won't ease up on edward as if he's the one who doesn't get it?? Bella sucks in that scene because earlier she LEARNS how hard it was for Charlie, seeing her like that and trying every possible way to help her (only for Bella to reject it each time) and yet he's expected to deal with the same guy who, from his perspective, broke his daughter's heart like nothing happened??

In Eclipse, while Bella's moment with Angela helping her with the letters was nice (wish we got more of these small moments, especially if Angela was supposedly such a good friend to her), it's tainted with how it was mainly so she wouldn't have to confront Edward's anger (yikes) for her seeing Jacob.

Actually, most of Eclipse i really disliked how Bella kinda see's anyone that doesn't kiss ass to the Cullens or are completely okay with her despite how she treated them during her depression period as the "bad guys" (Bella's words on her classmates: "us vs them").

Honestly, Breaking Dawn was such a hot mess (though our little friend group may be revisiting the entire saga (which will unfortunately include BD) next year for it's 20th anniversary, so...godspeed lol) but the main thing that stood out was how she and the Cullens were just...willing to host all the visiting vampires over at Forks, these vampires who DO feed on human blood, and risk all the children of the tribe phasing into wolves. And ALL she has to say about either are "well, them feeding on humans makes me uncomfortable but oh well :( " and "with all these vampires, the explosion of werewolf population was inevitable :0" Tbh it's not just Bella in this situation, the Cullens in here really suck. There was NO reason they couldn't just meet somewhere else. I do partially blame Jacob for it too, because I *think* there was this line where he talks (to Edward iirc?) about how hard it is to be away from Ricochet, but dude! Just go with them! You don't need to endanger the younger people in your tribe! You of ALL people should know what that's like!!

So far that's all i have to say becus that's all I can remember (though that might change once our friend book club get together next year for the saga's 20th, where our memories will be much more fresh XD). it's just,,,UGH, I can't wrap my head with how Edward and Jacob go on about Bella being so ~selfless~ with Jacob even going on about how she's a ~martyr when really, her selflessness is either selective, or mostly just self-serving.

I really enjoy the Jacob and Bella friendship, too, but when you stop and think about it . . . it all started with her using him. The first time she awkwardly attempted to flirt with him to get him to tell her the 'scary stories' on the beach, and then in New Moon she shows up out of nowhere because she wants him to fix the bikes. Bella eventually realizes like "oh hey I genuinely like spending time with Jake," but it started with "what can I get out of him?"

And like, fine! Humans do that kind of stuff! We're flawed! It's just weird the narrative is demonizing Jessica for like, mostly hanging out with Bella to try and get some of Bella's instant popularity to rub off on her, but Bella gets a pass for her treatment of Jacob because Protagonist. Bella's allowed to be flawed, that's great, makes her more interesting, but the overall narrative is still like "omg so SELFLESS" and it's like, um sometimes?

And yeah I will always hate the Breaking Dawn feeding situation. There are so many better ways to resolve it. But I think SM ultimately wasn't really interested in the vegetarian vampire stuff beyond just needing a reason Edward and Bella could be together. There are fun things she could have done here if she like, cared. She's already established that Carlisle is buying blood. Maybe their guests would have found it delightfully amusing to be served blood in wine glasses or Esme could make like 1950s housewife blood Jello molds or something. OR there could have been arguments about it! Carlisle trying to persuade them, Emmett challenging them "bet you can't go a week on our diet plan!" Rosalie sneering in disgust. Siobhan testing her maybe-power by trying to see if she can will everyone to abstain. OR they were literally only there for like two weeks. That's the average length of time between hunting. The book kind of makes it feel like they were there for a long time, but the earliest showed up middle of December and the confrontation is on New Year's Eve. Also I can't get over the idea that all these people KNOW Carlisle. Some have known him longer than the other Cullens have! You don't go visit your devout vegan friend and expect to be served bacon cheeseburgers. You try the tofu stir-fry.

But SM didn't really want to get into it, so Bella doesn't super care. I personally think "it makes me a little uncomfortable" was just the laziest, least satisfying way to handle it. And the shifters just having to stand there and watch because oh well we need them to witness for Nessie and she's Jacob's imprint so she matters more than anyone else is, uh, not good. Especially when earlier in the SAME BOOK Sem straight-up says: "When blood drinkers cross our land, we destroy them, no matter where they plan to hunt. We protect everyone we can." Again, there could be interesting conflict here, but it would shift the focus from the Bella and Nessie stuff, so Bella just feels a little bad and we move on.

But anyway yeah I think Bella's the most selfless when it comes to grand gestures. She'll exile herself to Forks so Renee will be free to travel, she'll sacrifice herself to James to save her mom, she'll consider stabbing herself with a rock to distract Victoria and Riley to save Edward and Seth, she'll risk her life and dreamed-of eternity with Edward to bring Renesmee into the world. But in the day-to-day stuff, she can be just as selfish and manipulative and judgmental as anyone else. She's 'human,' even when she's not human anymore.

[saccharides360]

Nine Sols - Eclipse AU

A lonely moon on New Kunlun, not quite alive, not quite dead.

She should not be here, yet despite it all, she found herself on the island stranded in space, away from home.

Through her connection to Great Fusang, Heng was fully aware why she was in this state, why she was in this place. However, now no more than just a phantom, she could do little for her predicament, nor for the unfortunate residents on New Kunlun.

Centuries passed away in the blink of an eye, and an opportunity finally arived.

Yay, my first tumblr post and first contribution to this community!

This AU is heavily inspired by many other community works e.g. Sister of the Innovator AU by @mystic-menagerie and discussions in The Tianzhu Hive discord server for the Corruption of the Innovator AU by @gensational. I'm really sorry I can't remember or mention all of them in this post 😭.

This timeline follows roughly the same story as canon with the main protag as Yi, but it has Heng slightly more actively involved in the main plot.

The story diverged from canon after the explosion incident. As Eigong helped to save Yi from the injury, she took notice of Heng's connection with the roots. Intrigued by the girl's power, she offered to also take Heng under her wings as another disciple. Out of a desire to learn more about this ancient friend of hers, Heng gladly accepted the offer (very much to Yi's joy and their parents' dismay).

In the counsil, Heng was well-liked just like in canon, and as a young scholar she showed unexpected levels of talents and aptitude studying about Fusang and the symbiotic fungus in Solarian bodies over the years. Her result allowed Eigong and Yi to improve their root stabilizer models (which also means Eigong Prime is canon in this au). As a result, she was even allowed to study Tianhuo as Eigong's assistant by the time of her adulthood. While she was qualified enough to be a potential Sol candidate, the position did not interest her. She was still very proud of her brother becoming a sol though.

Knowing it would be about time for Heng to find out Tianhuo's truth, Eigong decided to spill the beans herself. Although the young lady was saddened by the information, she understood why her teacher did not make it public. Therefore, she helped to keep it a secret, even from Yi in case he went rogue.

While the counsil meeting was supposed to be exclusively for the Sols, Heng begged Yi to let her attend, to which he happily approved. After all, she was so excited to know about this secret project her brother's so proud of, and she had to be there for Yi's special moment. This was a decision she regretted.

After knowing the specifics of the Eternal Caldron project, Heng was horrified that her brother could propose such a thing. In the meeting she was very vocal about her objection, and also suggested that maybe Tianhuo was just their destiny, maybe it was just the time for the Solarians to return to the Greater Tao, and maybe they could just accept the end of their race. In spite of the bonds she built with them ove the years, this idea was fiercely mocked by almost all counsil members (except for Fudie who was too afraid to speak up, Fuxi who let Nuwa do all the talking, and Ji who just went 👁👁). She tried to put up an arguement but was quickly silenced by her brother, who was deeply disappointed and furious that she would be against his brainchild, that she would bring shame to him at such an occasion, and that she still hold such backward ideas as a scholar.

After the meeting, Heng and Yi went to sweep their parents grave. At the graveyard, Yi apologized for his words at the meeting (but apologizing in a way that's like "We're both at fault"). Heng begrudgingly accepted the apology, but also informed him the decision that she would stay in Penglai. This reignited Yi's anger who thought his sister had "realized her mistake". Seeing no way to dissuade her, Yi took an opportunity and knocked her out. Afterwards, he placed her in her freshly constructed sleeping capsule in the Four Season Pavilion. As no apeman brains had been harvested at this stage, Yi let Ruyi power Heng's Soulscape System. Later, Eigong found this out. While she did not approve of Yi's actions, she did not overly condemn him since she found this to be for the best. A potential threat of leaking internal information was neutralized, and her student would not die due to the mistake she made (or as she thought).

Then the stuff was kinda the same as in canon. Yi found out the truth, and Eigong executed him etc etc. Before grandma went back to dull down abacus systems, she first paid a visit to the Four Season Pavilion (to mourn for her student though she did not know she went to mourn). She was horrified however to see the central root at the pavilion wrapping around Heng's capsule, from which sprouted out a large fungal flower. Guess she had two disciples to mourn now

However, unknownst to Eigong Heng was still there. While her body died due to complications and stuff, the roots kept her spirit alive. She was now a Rain World echo and only those more in tune with the Great Tao could see her. While she also gained a few new powers (that were connected to the roots, fungal flowers and Tianhuo) in this state, she was in a severely weakened state since the root nodes in New Kunlun were contained within those flower-bud-like structures. All she could do were to wonder around and observe tragedies and monstrosities (and occassionally have tea parties with Lear) for the next 500 years like nightcat rainworld

Out of all the Sols only Ji could see Heng. However, unlike Heng who was desparately wanting to help, Ji was too depressed and unmotivated because they believe all those efforts were to be futile and meaningless. A sentimentality that eventually rubbed onto Heng, making her more cynic and depressed over the centuries.

Things went for a turn when Yi was revived by the roots. Despite everything that happened beforehand, Heng couldn't help but feel happy that he was still alive. And during his journey throughout New Kunlun, he activated many root nodes on the way, allowing Heng's power to grow. This also allowed her to more directly intervene with the real world. Yi, while initially brushing off those incidents as random occurrences, increasingly believed that his sister might still be there.

Shuanshuan was in synch with the Great Tao enough for Heng to interact with him. After the Goumang bossfight, Heng was disgusted to see the state Yi left her in. Therefore, she created an illusion of herself and lured Shuanshuan to interact with the central root node. Using her power, she teleported the boy to a node near Goumang's location (a reckless decision that could leave permanent physical or emotional scars but Heng at this state was too apathetic to realize how messed up this was). Taking notice of the apeman's disappearance, Ruyi immediately informed Yi about the situation. Yi reacted quickly and brought his foster younger brother back to safety, but was also forced to bring Goumang (and maybe her two jiangshi children as well) to the pavilion. Kuafu later built the bird lady a pair of new prosthetic legs, yay!

During the prison section, after Jiequan went away, Heng decided to rescue her brother. She did this by turning the latent Tianhuo inside Yi virulent, forcing him to die on the spot. Right afterwards, she used her remaining energy to activate the node in the jail so that he could respawn there.

The last major point where Heng intervened was after the Fengs fight. As Nuwa crawled towards Fuxi's heavily mutated corpse, Heng caused Fusang roots to sprout out from the ground, preventing Nuwa from moving to her spikey demise. This saved her and allowed her to be recruited back to the pavilion, since there was no longer anything holding her to stay there anymore now that she was forced to accept Fuxi's death.

After collecting all seals other than Eigong's, Heng grew powerful enough to cause energy abnormalies in the central root node. Yi, who half expected to meet his sister, entered the limitless realm for one last time. And there she was, just far more ethereal and ghostly than he ever remembered. Finally the siblings reunited.

Before they part their ways, Yi asked if there was any way he could bring Heng back, to which Heng replied no. She said she could never forgive Yi, but she was still glad to see him grow into a better person.

The player would now be given 2 options - to keep insisting on bringing Heng back no matter what, or accept the fate like Heng has long accepted hers. If the former was chosen, a boss fight against Eclipse Heng would be triggered.

This 3-stage fight would be a mix of Lady Ethereal's and Ji's. She would summon all types of projectiles such as homing daggers, dream orbs, thunder blasts, crimson rings and primordial roots that functions identically to Nuwa's snakes. She could also create a dulled down version of Eigong's crimson balls and geisers. All her attacks would spawn fungal flowers on the arena, and standing on them would cause internal damage to accumulate. Heng's finishing signiture blow would be a taichi-kickable Tianhuo grab that's similar to Eigong's talismans. While this attack deals no damage on its own, it would turn all internal damage into actual damage as well as depleting all of Yi's chi gauge and one azure sand gauge.

I have no experience making music, but I imagine her boss theme to contain the sols leitmotif as well as a fused leitmotif between the regular Heng's theme and the "Life" leitmotif that sounds like this -

After the fight, Heng admitted to Yi that there really was no way to bring her back since her body was long gone, and her spirit was chained to Fusang. She also admitted that the reason why she did not tell him this before the fight was that she wanted to prepare Yi for Eigong's encounter which was going to be much more difficult than hers. Forced to accept this, Yi bid a final farewell to his sister and headed back to his mission.

Aaaaand the rest went the same as canon! And we also recruited Goumang and Nuwa onto the evacuation ship, soooooo yay! A better ending!

[basilbots]

Enough

A ficlet about Bard (Ruin) and Eclipse reflecting on their relationship, takes place after they've settled into the EAPS dimension | Words 629

“I do nothing for you.”

Eclipse paused from where he was typing away on a project, glancing to the side. Bard was lounging in a beanbag chair they had dragged over to be near Eclipse while he worked, staring blankly at the ceiling. They twitched feeling Eclipse’s questioning gaze but did not look up to meet it. 

Eclipse frowned and rolled back from the computer, “What are you talking about?” 

Bard sat up, fierce red and gold eyes now timidly darting away before they could linger on him long, “You do so much for me and for what? I’ve- I told you once before I don’t do friends anymore!”

His words quickened and raised into an incredulous pitch, betraying an anxiousness that was absent the first time Bard cheerfully told him this “fact”. Eclipse wished he could say this was new behavior, but Bard had been more nervous and downtrodden as of late. This was just the first time they’ve actually given words to what they were so bothered about. 

“You’re being an idiot,” Eclipse started, frown deepening when Bard only flinched rather than give an offended glare like usual. Rays slowly spinning in thought he continued with a softer voice, “You do plenty for me.” 

Bard’s rays twitched at that. He stubbornly kept his gaze away from Eclipse, claws now digging into the beanbag. Silence was his response. 

Eclipse kept looking at him, “You invite me to tea parties to take my mind away from work. You talked to this Sun and Moon to prevent me from fucking up yet another relationship. You choose to spend every day close to me to keep me company even though I’m a jackass.” 

Bard couldn’t help but let out a laugh, quick and sharp. “Selfish! It’s all selfish, I was only trying to benefit myself and make my life easier. That’s all I do. Shouldn’t you know this by now, dear? Everyone else has put it together.”

There was no masking the bitterness that laced that last sentence, and Eclipse couldn’t help the wave of anger that washed over him. He tried not to stand up too aggressively and failed as Bard flinched again. But they finally met his eyes with a weary look, giving way to bafflement as Eclipse knelt down in front of him. “Selfish huh? Then I’m selfish as well. How selfish of me to keep you, to want someone around that I can understand, who won’t judge me, where I know in another universe things work out between us. I’m just awful aren't I for wanting a friend.”

Eclipse’s gaze was intense, and Bard squirmed under the attention. He took their hands, which slid into his hold without resistance, and squeezed. Eclipse’s second pair of hands tore into the carpet. He knew the two of them were far from good individuals, but hearing those words from Bard still made him burn. Seeing that his image of himself was so poisoned that simply having a friend was proof of his own awfulness, because stars forbid they do anything that makes them happy without it being twisted as something terribly self-serving. The knowledge that other individuals contributed to- encouraged this mindset had Eclipse holding back a growl. How was Bard supposed to become a better person if every action that isn’t unrelenting self-loathing the wrong one? Closing their eyes, Bard squeezed his hands back, “You make it sound silly when you put it that way… I can’t see it like that, not when it’s me.”

But he will, one day, Eclipse will make sure of it.

“You don’t have to right now just… Believe me when I say that I think you do enough for me. That’s what matters. Okay?”

There was silence, then a resigned sigh.

“Okay.”

[theallianceofcelestials]

Hey! Hope you're having a good day!

So could I maybe ask for another baby SEA's Eclipse teething drabble? Like maybe Moon finding out baby Eclipse doesn't want to chew on him but only wants to chew on KC X,D

Have a great day! :D

- 🎭

You shall ask and I deliver!

Eclipse has been a baby for about two weeks now. And during those two weeks, he hasn't bitten Moon a single time.

It's suspicious. The little brat must be up to something.

Especially because he does chew on stuff.

He chews on his toy blocks, he chews on his floppy little sleeves, he chews on his cat plushie, he chews on their bells and he chews on KC.

And if he follows the trend of his siblings, he'll chew on Moon too. He has to.

There has only been one exception so far, which he's honestly grateful for because Solar Flare's bites are mean.

So he can comfortably admit he's been waiting for the other shoe to drop for quite some time now. Because he knows Eclipse, and knows that even as a baby, his nephew is a little jerk who thrives on making others suffer. That's one of the reasons he loves him so much.

"Moon, could you please hold Eclipse for me? I can't cook if I have to hold him in one arm"

And it goes unsaid how they don't want the kid to just be hanging from him. That's a quick and easy way to having an unhappy, injured child, Especially one made of silicone.

"Sure, but if he bites me I'm putting him in timeout"

KC just shakes his head, letting out a deep sigh that makes Moon want to punch him. If only because the jackass keeps that exasperated sigh just for him.

"We've been over this, Eclipse is a good child."

"Not as good as Solar Flare"

Killcode can't find an argument against that, so he doesn't even bother. Even if it makes the tiny face of his nephew scrunch up unhappily, clearly disagreeing with their opinion on his behaviour.

Which is probably why the moment he lands in Moon's lap, he's in full on pout mode. The little guy does all the works too, puffing up his fat little cheeks, shooting those adorable little ray nubs out of his head, crossing his arms and turning away from him with an offended "Hmpf!". It takes everything in him not to burst out laughing.

The little guy, he can admit, is fun. Even if not as fun as his normal nephew.

"What? You offended?"

The tiny harrumph he's met with contains so much attitude it shouldn't be possible. Especially from such a tiny being.

Good to know most of his nephew is still made of spite

"You gonna retaliate?"

He pokes one little cheeks, grinning when small hands slap at him. White-gold optics flash in anger, locking onto him with such unfiltered hatred, and if looks could kill Moon would have keeled over on the spot.

"Gonna bite?"

Maybe if he provokes him, it'll finally just happen and he won't be left waiting for when-

"No!"

He blinks in surprise, staring at the indignant child in his hold. Somehow, his nephew looks even more offended than before.

"No?"

"No! I don't wanna!"

Huh

"Why don't you want to?"

"Not papa!"

He takes a second to comprehend this, locking eyes with a flabbergasted KC who's looked up from his chopping. Then a big grin overtakes his face, and he can see his brother groan.

"Oh? Do you want to only chew on papa?"

"Ye!"

He picks his nephew up under the arms, ignoring the rageful squeak he lets out, bringing him to eye level. He doesn't even pretend to be bothered by the attempts to slap at his face, more amused by this new information.

"Is papa that tasty?"

"Ye!"

Moon chuckles, bringing the kid up to his face for a nuzzle. The tiny creature just tries his best to continue beating him. How cute.

He doesn't even try the littles bit to maim him. Which is sad, because his nephew really needs to learn more fighting. But maybe also understandable because he lacks the teeth and claws to maim.

"You know what kiddo? I agree! Papa is infinitely more tasty than uncle Moony!"

The little Eclipse is still clearly scorned, probably from all the teasing, but he has settled a little bit. If only because he recognises his teasing tone.

And well, he's smart enough to recognise Uncle Moony always helps the kids with mischief

[noinoi10101010]

why terra means so much to me as a character and why dispute the VAs and the shows flaws I will always love it and it will always have a special place in my heart

god I love terra she is such a good character and personality touches me in a way very few characters do. First off her design is gorgeous all of them especially her new one. But that is just the tip of the iceberg as to why I love her. Her character is really good as well as the arcs she goes through. She is such a loveable dork and I love her for it yeah she can be stubborn and naive and a bit petty and a hypocrite at times but that is balanced out by her being extremely kind careing and would gladly risk her life for those she cares about. She is flaws and she realizes this and that's ok. She doesn't have to be perfect 24 and is flawed and has problems with is not only ok with is a great lesson and arc for her to have noe let's get into the big thing to why I love earth and why I relate to her so much. Her relationship with the creator now I will get a little personal and say that her relationship with the creator is similar to my relationship with one of my parents I do not feel comfortable saying anything else on the matter outside of that. And that fact that the way the handle it was so.....real in a good way. And the fact that it showed how earth was and how I am still feeling about this person just gets me so much. And how it handled so well and that she was like I still am extremely conflicted about the creator being bad cause he loved her and showed it and was quite literally unable to see the literal red flags that were there and the more she finally did see them the more she realized he never loved her. All those sacrifices earth thought he made for her all that time of him saying he loved her all those times were he said he was concern for her just........look I know that Kat isn't in the fandom anymore after how she was treated but if she as well as the other VAs see this just thank you from the bottom of my heart. and this goes to the fandom as well thank you. You made me be seen in a way I never thought was possible and showed that the anger and betrayal I feel is justified and that you will find people that love you for you truly. And that it will be ok. Just thank you from the bottom of my heart thank you. I will forever love all these shows no matter what and they will always be in my heart. 💛💙Thank you sun and moon show💛💙, 💙💚thank you lunar and earth show💙💚, ❤💜thank you eclipse and puppet show, and 💖💗 thank you femme nights at Freddy's show💖💗. And most importantly ❤THANK YOU DAVIS, ❤ EC UNIVERSAL, AND ❤KAT. For bringing me and other such joy in such a trying time and making us feel seen in way not even imagined

[socksandbuttons]

me seeing the dark sun theory with him being eclipse and sun merged and im like

Ur missing a lot here but gjkbdv I think this also can stem from the fact of how Dark Sun feels about Moons. Like the merged video, that Moon? Didn't want to hurt or even kill him. Just 'Youre having a moment ur still getting used to this. ur baby' Basically having more patience and perceptive immediately to that not being the Sun he knew. But not hateful. Just 'Yeah ill call monty over here but this might be fine'. Like the Eclipse half is now at front of releasing that anger plus with Sun's? Yeah theyre gonna get aggressive real quick but I'd say it'd burn thru fast. clearly it was early enough before they made the channel and almost after being seperated. Early enough that now this Solstice being here can bite back and Moon will have to handle yeah thats... not a piece of code he left in there but thats still his brother even if theyre new. Dark Sun while not always one for truth I'd say would've been pushed to his absolute limit as a Sun. We've seen Moon's who are just... straight up negligent and terrible. And I'm a firm believer he got to where he was just being on his own as a Sun. One who's own bias towards moons really did just fuel getting his own happy end and other Suns (one who didnt... even need the help?) fates.

That kinda hate just.. while Eclipse has every bit of that its more stemmed in abandonment- It feels different with Dark Sun. It feels far more Sun vs Moon. More deep seated loathing that feels far more personal to a Sun. If that makes sense.

[talonabraxas]

Intuitive Astrology: Aries Solar Eclipse March 2025

The Aries Partial Solar Eclipse on March 29, 2025, celebrates a graduation point and the completion of a cycle we have been working with since April 2023.

Let’s take a moment to cast our minds back two years ago. How has life shifted for you since then, especially when it comes to your relationships and how you show up in them? Are you feeling more aligned when it comes to the people you choose to surround yourself with? Have you had to do away with relationships, or perhaps relationship dynamics, that were no longer serving you?

Since April 2023, we have been working with the Aries-Libra Eclipse cycle, a cycle that has been guiding us to grow and evolve when it comes to our relationships and our identity. We may have been guided to get real with ourselves and with those around us and to create more authenticity.

Perhaps you are able to see how you have evolved in your relationships since this time. Perhaps you are able to now see yourself more clearly and are feeling more confident about the person you are when surrounded by others.

As the last Eclipse in this Aries-Libra cycle, the Aries Solar Eclipse on March 29, represents a culmination point where we are able to feel and honor the rewards of all our efforts. This Aries Eclipse indicates the opening of a new pathway to better, more aligned, and healthier relationships. It represents the opening of a pathway to honor ourselves and our truth, and to feel confident about who we are and how we present ourselves to the world.

Take a moment to breathe all of this in and celebrate the journey you have taken when it comes to these energies. Perhaps journal or write down all the ways this energy has moved through your life and evolved to where you are today.

The Aries Solar Eclipse is a Road Opener

The March 2025 Aries Solar Eclipse is not just a graduation point for reflection, but also a road opener to how we want to move forward with this new knowledge and wisdom. It is a power time to set intentions around what we wish to call in, especially when it comes to the relationship with ourselves and others.

Solar Eclipses are supercharged New Moons, and bring the start of a new lunar cycle. Fresh energy will flow under this Eclipse, which will help us to shake of the stale and stagnant energies of the past and to welcome the new energies of the future.

With the Blood Moon Eclipse stirring the winds of change and transformation earlier in the month, this Aries Eclipse may feel like a welcomed burst of energy that could help shift things and get us looking in a more optimistic direction.

Welcome this fresh energy into your life. Know that doors are opening for you, so stay open to what may come your way.

The Solar Eclipse in Aries

While there is a lot to celebrate under this Eclipse, some potent karmic energy is flowing as well, which may stir some intensity and heated emotions. Aries is a fire sign and can sometimes get us stuck in our ego or heady emotions. We may feel irritable and frustrated or find ourselves no longer wishing to tolerate certain behaviors.

We will have to be mindful of these energies, but to also allow ourselves a safe and supportive outlet to release and express ourselves.

Anger and other heated emotions often stem from a deeper place of sadness or even a willingness to control. Observe where these deeper emotions may be coming up for you and see if it helps to create a shift.

As much as we want to control the outcome, it is not always in our power. Use the Eclipse energies instead, to ask for strength, to ask for guidance, and to ask for support as you move through any challenges.

Cosmic Energies Around the Aries Solar Eclipse

At the time of this Eclipse, both Mercury and Venus are in retrograde, which points to a need to move with conscious intention and to look to the past for guidance on how to move forward.

There are answers in our past or past experiences that we need to pay attention to under this Solar Eclipse.

Perhaps it is only when we look to the past and observe the patterns that we are able to make sense of how best to move forward.

Both Mercury and Venus in Retrograde can create some miscommunications or even fogginess, so be mindful of this as you navigate what the Eclipse brings. Be patient, and don’t be in a rush to make concrete decisions. Allow things time to unfold; by the end of the lunar cycle, we should have a greater understanding.

-Forever Conscious

[fluffystuffies]

Hoping the Old Still Works with the New [TSAMS]

Summary: With everything that's been happening, Moon is understandably stressed and angry. So Sun suggests something that he used to do with the old Moon as a way to calm him down. It...well, it works, though with MUCH different reactions than the old Moon would've had (obviously).

Words: 4378

hello-I come to bring you another tsams tkl fic!! this time with the classic brothers! had this idea for a while after i saw the hcs Sunset sent me hsfjhsf (hi by the way Sunset! :D) this one's a little shorter than I'm used to, but hope it's still good!

anyways, enjoy!

-------

It was no secret to anyone around him that Moon was stressed. Stressed, irritated, and tired would all be accurate descriptions of him at the current moment.

Stressed due to the paranoia that another villain would come and kidnap one of his family members, irritated that there were still villains around to kidnap his family members, and tired because he had been focusing so much energy on keeping his family safe that he hadn’t had the chance to sleep. 

So yeah. Maybe he wasn’t the most pleasant person to be around at the moment. And maybe he was about ready to tear the hat from his head and rip it apart from pure frustration. Buuut then he’d have to ask someone to fix it and he didn’t want to bother Earth (or Solar, since he heard that the sun-based animatronic had recently picked up sewing). Everyone already had too much going on and he didn’t want to cause such a trivial problem.

Moon finally turned off the camera footage that he had been playing on loop in his head for some kind of hint as to how Eclipse did…anything! Everything that surrounded the supposed-to-be-dead villain was shrouded in a mystery that he was slowly losing patience in solving.

He sighed roughly from his place at the plugin area. He had kept himself plugged in while he was searching the footage so he wouldn’t accidentally bring himself down to a dangerously low percentage (he honestly wished Solar did the same sometimes). He then unplugged himself and stepped away from the wall, stumbling a little.

God, he was tired.

Despite the fact that the action was pointless for a robot, Moon yawned and stretched slightly. He blamed that odd quirk he had on the fact that he was originally the nighttime attendant and probably had some weird ‘sleepytime’ programs built into him. Though, if he was reset then wouldn’t that have reset as well? No, then that would mean that he wouldn’t have been able to speak when he ‘woke up’.

Moon groaned loudly and pressed his palms into his eyes. He was definitely spending too much time on analysis. Now he was analyzing the programming he should already have an adept understanding of.

He should probably sleep.

But he had to keep looking.

But he was tiiireddd.

Both his stress and his exhaustion were battling over his choices for a good few seconds before the war ended up brewing even more frustration. And he couldn’t just transfer his work-in-progress to Solar, not since he became more aware of just how much his newly adopted family member had been putting on himself. Besides, it wasn’t like Moon had much ‘progress’ to begin with.

Still, he felt like he had to do something. Even if he also felt like curling up on the floor right then and there and passing out. Even if that also wouldn’t work due to the amount of stress and anxiety and anger brewing up in his chest.

Moon groaned again, loud enough to where it bordered on a scream. He didn’t know what to do.

“Uh-”

Moon quickly turned around to face the entrance of the room.

Sun was there, hands held up with his fingers curled slightly inwards as if to…well, Moon didn’t know what exactly, but it was a motion reminiscent of how one would look when trying to calm a wild animal. And–oh. Right. Moon probably sounded pretty angry there. Which…wasn’t inaccurate, to be fair.

Still, this was his brother. And Sun had already talked to him a couple times on where to direct his anger. And the last person Moon wanted to direct anger at was his twin. 

So he just inhaled and exhaled once (simulated, of course), hoping that would release some of the tension in his body. “Hi,” he greeted simply, still sounding tense. So the breathing thing didn’t work. Great.

“Hey,” Sun greeted back, hesitant as he usually would be when Moon was angry. “Are you…uh…are you okay?”

Do not be sarcastic. Do NOT be sarcastic. Do not snap. Do not snap. This is SUN. You promised you wouldn’t snap at him again. Moon took another deep ‘breath’. “No. I’m not. I am tired and I am stressed.”

“Yeah…I think we’re all a little…that,” Sun responded, hesitant still. “With everything that’s been going on, it’d be…kind of hard not to be that.”

“Yeah,” Moon replied shortly. He sighed and held a hand to his face. “Did you need something?” He honestly hoped the other didn’t. He didn’t know if he could handle any extended interaction.

“Uh, well…we do kinda have to record a video…” Sun said quietly (or as quietly as he could).

Moon couldn’t stop the loud, aggravated groan that escaped him at that. It wasn’t that he disliked playing games with his brother or anything. He just did not have the patience to record a video while remaining relatively calm. “Can’t we just…put out a pre-recorded one? Or–I don’t know–do one of those compilation videos?” he asked in a strained voice.

“Well, uh…I think we still have the rest of our Help Wanted playthrough? If you’d…rather just give that to our editor…” Sun told him, fidgeting with his hands.

“Please,” Moon practically growled out. “Because I really don’t think I can record today.”

“Yeahhh…I can-I can tell,” Sun commented, sounding more like acknowledgement than anything else. “And uh…what about you?” he asked suddenly.

“What about me?” Moon questioned, blinking slowly.

“Did uh–did you need anything?”

“A nap. And a break. Either one of those would be fucking lovely,” Moon responded honestly.

“Yeah…” Sun agreed. “Uh-” he started as if to say something, then abruptly cut himself off.

“What. What is it?” Moon asked roughly, then made a sound like he was sucking in air through his teeth. “Sorry. What is it?” he repeated a little more softly.

Sun hesitated before seemingly trying to continue what he was originally going to say. “I mean, I’m pretty sure a nap wouldn’t hurt? I-I mean, I know you have…stuff to do, but-uh…” He rubbed the back of his faceplate. He seemed to have more he wanted to say but for the moment, he wasn’t speaking.

So Moon decided to speak, starting with a sigh. “I don’t think I even can take a nap right now. I am stressed, Sun. Really. Fucking. Stressed.”

“I know that!” Sun snapped slightly, holding up his hands again. “I just–okay. I…I have an idea to…I guess help both of us with that? Kinda? Mainly just you…” he mumbled. “I don’t exactly know if it’ll work though…”

“Brother, listen,” Moon said as he walked over to his twin to place both hands on the other’s shoulders. “I am open to anything at this point.” Okay, maybe he really wanted a fucking break. “At this point, I think it would be better anyway if I took a break,” he admitted, even if several other parts of him screamed to get back to work.

“Right…okay,” Sun mumbled, backing away slightly so Moon would remove his hands. “Uh…you wanna do it here or…?” He looked around the dilapidated room.

“Depends on what it is,” Moon responded, letting his arms drop to his sides. “Is it something we need to sit down for?”

“Kinda? Yeah, actually…” Sun told him, folding his hands over each other. “Is uh, is that room still…good?” He pointed at the curtained area that covered the tunnel leading to Moon’s old room.

“I think so. Solar says he sleeps in there. Though–” Moon sighed. “Chances are he’s not in there. It’s not like it’s anyone’s room anymore anyways.” He wasn’t even sure what it looked like anymore. “Whatever. It should be fine.”

“Right. Uh, let’s go in there then. And hope it has a mattress or something.”

“It should.”

With that exchange of words, Moon walked over to the curtain and pulled it back to reveal the tunnel hiding behind it. Then he gestured for his brother to enter, which he did, followed by the former nighttime attendant.

The inside of the room…actually hadn’t changed much. It was surprisingly still considerably lit and the mattress, among other softer items, were still in decent condition. 

“Huh. I was…honestly expecting this to be a lot more destroyed,” Sun commented.

“Mhm,” Moon hummed shortly, sitting down on the mattress without much thought. It didn’t even creak. “So…are you gonna do some kind of hypnosis or something? Did Earth teach you anything?”

“Uh, no, not really. You’re the one who has the hypnosis feature anyways…” Sun admitted, following his brother in sitting down.

He did? “I do?” Moon questioned, dropping his annoyed tone for the first time to make way for a genuinely confused one.

“Yeah? You didn’t-did you not know you have that???” Sun asked incredulously, moving his head in a way that suggested he would be emoting utter bafflement if he could.

“No???” Moon responded in a question. “I have a hypnosis feature???”

“Yes??? How else do you think you were supposed to get some kids to sleep?” Sun asked him as if that was a normal thing to say.

Moon shook his head slightly. “Wow. Okay. Fazbear really does not like children.”

“I don’t know what you were expecting from a company that puts caffeine into children’s candy,” Sun said blankly.

“No, that’s fair.” Honestly, Moon was wondering why he was even surprised in the first place.

“I’m also surprised you didn’t know about that sooner.”

“Well, if you haven’t noticed, things have been a liiittle hectic lately.” Ah, there was the anger and stress.

“Right…” Sun paused before shaking his head. “Anyway, uh…right. The thing. Um, so…this is something I used to do with…the old you.” Moon could feel both of them get a little more tense from the mention of the previous Moon. “Not that I’m-! I’m not trying to say that this’ll work on you because you’re…Moon, I just-I don’t know. I thought that it could work? Maybe? It helped with…the old Moon when he was stressed…”

Moon could see that his brother was starting to get a little frantic in his ramblings, so he pushed down his annoyance and gently placed his hand on the other’s shoulder. “Sun. Hey.” He waited until his twin looked up at him. “I said I was open to anything and I still am. So. Go ahead. Besides, if it could calm down that prick, then who knows? Maybe it’ll work.” He tried to be lighthearted in his words, but unfortunately, annoyance and lighthearted didn’t go well together. He just hoped Sun understood.

Sun hesitated then sighed and held out a hand. “Alright…okay, uh, can you give me your hand?” he asked suddenly.

Moon decided not to question the strange request too much. He was still gonna question it though. “Okay…wwwhyyy?” He gently placed his hand on his brother’s outstretched one, removing his other hand and letting it sit on the mattress.

Sun then turned over Moon’s hand so his palm was facing upwards. “Well, when my-the-the other Moon was stressed, sometimes he would…uh, he would ask me to trace around on his palms. He said it was calming so…maybe it’ll work for you?”

And Moon…had no idea that was even a thing with the old Moon. He had assumed that not everything was recorded and uploaded to the channel, so he wasn’t expecting to view every little detail. But he would have expected maybe a small implication or mention–actually, never mind. With how closed-off the old Moon was, he probably shouldn’t have expected something this affectionate to have any sort of mention if the old him could help it.

“Uh…y’know what? Sure.” Plus, the confusion was helping a little already. “Go ahead.”

“Alright.”

Then Sun started gently tracing a finger around on Moon’s palm, just as he said, starting in the center and creating a soft, spiraling motion.

It would’ve been nice (and it…well, it was), however, Moon didn’t account for the sudden ticklish sensation he would be experiencing. He gave a full-body flinch, holding back a barrage of raspy giggles that threatened to escape. “I-It t-” he tried to say, only to hold onto his metaphorical breath when Sun smoothly ran his finger around to trace a single line across the center of his palm.

“What?” Sun asked, not pausing in his tracing motions.

Moon tried speaking again, squirming slightly and feeling his fingers twitch as Sun began running his finger back and forth in that same line as if it were an idle motion. “Itststststs-” He held a hand over his smile even though that did absolutely nothing to muffle anything as he let out a sprinkler-like laugh.

Even though Sun had definitely noticed the action was tickling Moon by this point, he still didn’t stop. “What? What is it?” While his tone sounded fairly concerned, it was clear from the way he curled his finger to scritch lightly at the center of Moon’s palm that he knew exactly what he was doing.

“Iihihihit tiHIHIHIckles!” Moon was finally able to get out, turning his head slightly and trying to hide as much of his face as possible with his hand.

“Oh wow. Really? I had no idea!” Sun exclaimed in a show of over-exaggeration and it was like his usual stutter-filled mannerisms had completely vanished.

“Yeheheah yohohohou dihihHIHID!” Moon tried to sound accusatory but the spiked giggles did not help convey that tone for him at all. And then Sun started gently dragging four of his fingers in individual, circular strokes across the whole of his palm. Then it was like Moon couldn’t stop the giggles from leaving his voicebox. “Yohohohou knohohohohow whaHAHAHAt yohohou’re dohohoing!”

“Hm, no, I don’t think I do. Would you mind telling me, dear brother? That should be easy for you,” Sun teased while giving off an air of faux casualness. Though the complete casualness was practically lost as he kept up his tickling motions.

“YohohoHOHOHOU-” Moon tried to say, laughter overtaking the insult he had on his metaphorical tongue. Then he almost ripped his hand away when Sun switched back to scritching at his palm, taking on more of a scribbling technique, keeping his fingers’ range short but rapid in motion. Moon could tell Sun definitely had a bit of experience with this because it tickled like all hell. He even started kicking his feet slightly while the rest of him started squirming more violently. “NAHAHAHAHAHA!! SUHUHUHUN!!” How the FUCK did this tickle so much??? He could feel his face being exposed once more as his body movements became more uncontrolled.

“Yes? That’s my name, dear brother,” Sun responded simply. If he could smile any wider, Moon was positive that smile would’ve taken up his brother’s whole face. “Hmmm, you still haven’t told me what I’m doing. You’ve only said my name and nothing else!” 

“ThahahaHAHAHAT’S BECAHAHAHAUSE YOHOHOHOU’RE TIHIHIHIHICKLING ME!! AND YOHOHOU KNOHOHOHOW IHIHIHIT!!” Moon finally forced out before his laughter could completely take over his vocabulary. Even though he wasn’t embarrassed by the concept itself, it was still flustering to say the action out loud. So once again, he turned his body and head away as much as he could while holding a hand over his face.

“Oh! Wow! That must’ve been why you said you were being tickled! It was me all along!” Sun exclaimed as though a big revelation had been placed upon him. And while he did, he changed tactics once more to lightly tracing the outer area of Moon’s palm with a single finger, which somehow tickled more. 

“YEHEHEHEHES! Of cohohohohourse ihihIHIHIT WAS YOHOHOHOU!” Moon responded, the volume of his laughter going up and down depending on what part of his palm Sun was tickling. Giggles spilled out from his voice box when Sun neared the center of his palm and louder laughs were earned when the gentle, tracing motions traveled to the ‘outer rim’ of his hand. “Dohohohon’t plahahahay duhuhuhuHUHUMB!!”

Sun gasped like he had been personally insulted. “Well! How was I supposed to know I was tickling you when you weren’t telling me? Sounds like a you problem, brother of mine.”

“Dohohon’t puhuhuhut the blahahahame on mEHEHEHE!! Thihihis wahahahahas yohohohour ideheHEHEHEhea!” Moon accused–or tried to. Again, the constant shift of giggles to louder laughter made it very hard to convey any other tone besides playfulness or flusteredness. It also didn’t help that Sun had realized this little fact of him having more ticklish parts of his palm and began making squiggly lines all around his palm, getting both the milder and more ticklish spots all at once.

“Well, yes. Yes, it was. Buuut I also don’t hear you telling me to stop, sooo-” Sun made a cocky lip-smacking sound. “Y’know, I guess I have to continue,” he continued to sass his brother. “Since you seem to like this so much.”

“I dihihihihihidn’t sahahahahay thAHAHAHAT!” Moon protested immediately, squirming just a little too much to make it comfortable for anyone to hold onto such a small part of him. It was then that he felt his brother shift to hold his arm under his own, leaving it at the mercy of Sun’s continuous tickling. “Waihehehehehehe-”

“Whaaat? You were moving around too much!” Sun defended, somehow sounding even more smug. “I had to get this part of you to sit still somehow.”

Moon felt the squiggly motions continue and he felt like his body was copying the actions his hand was being subject to. How was it that such a small part of him could tickle so much and seem so easy to pull away but make him feel so unable to do anything??? “Ihehehehehe-nahaHAHAHAHA!!”

“I must say, brother, I quite like this little volume-adjusting spot you have! Look, I can just-” Sun stopped the indecisive squiggles and started swirling a cyclone in the middle of his brother’s palm.

“YOHOhohohou lihihihihittle-hehehehahahaha…!” Just like that, the louder laughs that Moon had been producing were reduced to giggling. He didn’t even know what he was saying at that point.

“And you get muuuch quieter! And then if I can’t hear you, I can just do this!” Sun continued as if he wasn’t reducing his twin to a wiggly string of laughter. As he spoke the last few words, he smoothly transitioned his finger to tracing a larger circle around the outside of Moon’s palm.

“NeheheHAHAHAHA!! SUHUHUHUHUN!!” Despite the gentler tickling, Moon felt his giggling spike back up to more frantic peals of laughter, kicking his legs out from the sides of his brother and messing up the blanket that had been laid out on the mattress.

“See! Prrret-ty cool little feature,” Sun commented casually. “I honestly wasn’t expecting you to react like this, so I’d say this is a pleasant surprise.”

Moon couldn’t say he expected this either. But he didn’t have anything left to offer but more laughter, quieting down as Sun returned to tickling the center of his palm. “Mmkekekekekehehehe…” He felt something more akin to a snicker interrupt his giggling, which just amused him and added an extra kick to his laughter.

“Did you just unironically do the ‘kekeke’ thing???” Sun questioned, sounding both flabbergasted and amused at the same time, letting out a small wheeze as he spoke.

“I cahahahahan’t cohohohohontrol thahahahahat…shUHUHUHUT UHUHUP!!” Moon suddenly burst out as the gentle tickling slowly traveled to the more sensitive parts of his hand. But also, his brother was laughing at him now! “StahahaHAHAHAP LAHAHAHAUGHING!”

“I dohohon’t think you’re in any position to tell me that, brother,” Sun responded, his own laughter peeking through slightly.

“Oh, shuhuhuhuhut aHAHAHAP!” Moon retorted, not that it had much effect. He felt his body start shaking a little more violently as it was over taken with frantic laughter and loss of control. He was practically curled up at this point with the squirming energy that had overcome his body now transferring solely to his kicking legs.

Eventually, Moon just…dropped the hand covering his face and bonked his head on his brother’s back. But he felt like he had to do something with his extra hand so without thinking, he just wrapped his free arm over his brother’s stomach region. Then he was just giggling into Sun’s back where his shoulder blades would be, shaking from laughter.

Then gradually, he felt Sun’s finger slow on his hand until it was completely still. “...uh, Moon?” he suddenly asked, sounding much less teasy than before.

“Whahahahat…?” Moon giggled out, still feeling the ghost tickles dancing over his palm.

“...do you need me to stop?” Sun questioned, slowly rubbing his own palm over his brother’s, perhaps to alleviate the remaining ticklish feeling.

Moon felt the shaking gradually cease alongside his giggles until he just had his face calmly shoved into Sun’s back while he tried to think up a response. He felt…tired, but a much better tired than he was feeling before. And…he felt…calmer. A lot calmer, actually.

…okay, maybe the palm thing had helped. Quite a bit.

But even so…

Moon grumbled into his twin’s back. “...can you keep going?” he asked, almost wanting to deafen his auditory units just so he couldn’t hear the response. He wasn’t sure what that would do, but he just knew he wanted to hide in general.

…he also realized that he was still hugging his brother, who wasn’t the biggest ball of affection, to be clear. So he straightened his back and lifted his head, unwrapping his arm from around Sun’s stomach and letting it lie by his side. “Sorry…”

Sun scooted forward a little, letting go of the former nighttime attendant’s hand momentarily to turn himself around. “It’s fine. But…you wanted me to keep going?” he asked again, holding his brother’s hand and positioning his own hand over it in a claw-like manner, teetering on the edge of being playful once again.

Moon grumbled again, pulling his nightcap over his face then wondering why he didn’t do that in the first place. It covered a lot more. “...yeah,” he confirmed. “But-!” His brother stopped his hand from ascending on the lunar-themed animatronic’s still-senstitive palm. “Somewhere else…? And not for too long. ‘M tired…” God, this was flustering.

“Gotcha,” Sun responded, releasing his twin’s hand and putting a hand to his chin as if he were inspecting a ware in a store. “Hmmm, now where-oh-where would my dearest brother like to be tickled next?...”

Moon groaned and used both hands to pull his nightcap completely over his face. “Oh, don’t say it like that, you little-”

“You asked for this!” Sun protested.

“After you suggested it!” Moon responded, lifting his cap to glare at his brother, though with no heat whatsoever.

“And you’re the one who wanted me to continue!”

And…Moon had no response to that, crossing his arms and grumpily looking away. He wished he could pout, but alas.

“Now. Hmmm…” Sun hummed, then raised his hand to his twin’s face. “I think I know the perfect spot! You said you were tired, after all…”

Oh. Wait. “Suhuhuhuhun-mehehehehehe…” Moon felt fingers gently drag along his crescent, wiggling slightly and swirling at random intervals. “Whihihihihy-ehehehe-” he giggled out, lowering his head and attempting to scrunch up his nonexistence shoulders. Neither of which helped alleviate the sensation.

“You said you were tired! And we both know this helps,” Sun replied simply, stopping his tickling for a moment so he could move to Moon’s side. Then he went right back to it, tapping his fingers lightly against his brother’s chin and adding some scribbling into the mix to restart the giggles.

“Thahahahat dohohohoesn’t mahahakehehehe-” Moon stopped to lightly shake his head, tightening his crossed arms and curling up slightly. “-ihihihit any lehehehess embahahaharassihihing…”

“Oh, I know that,” Sun replied immediately, sounding every bit smug about embarrassing his brother.

“Fuhuhuhuck yohohohou…” Moon tried to instinctually move his head away, but his twin’s fingers continued to follow him, so that was pointless. 

Sun didn’t pause once in his motions, but Moon flinched when he felt his brother’s other hand graze over his back. “GeheheHEHE-Suhuhuhun nohohoho…”

“Y’know, I could be incredibly mean to you right now, but I’m not going to. Aren’t I a great brother, Moon?” Oh, Moon could hear the smug grin in Sun’s voice.

“Yohohou suhuhuhuck…” Despite the threat of one of his worst spots being targeted, Moon still decided to be sassy in return. He knew Sun was just bluffing anyway.

Moon felt Sun continue lightly tickling his crescent, relaxing him further. Then a loud guffaw of laughter left him when he felt fingers quickly scribble at his back, then leave a moment later. “SUHUHUN!!”

“Like I said, I could be mean, Moon,” Sun reiterated his statement. “...but! I’m not going to. Because I’m nice.”

“Agahehehein, fuhuhuhuck yohohou…” Moon repeated boldly, giggling increasing directly after when Sun began rapidly scribbling at his chin, making him throw his head around to try and escape the feeling. 

“Screw you too.”

Then it was like the leak in Moon’s bag of energy enlarged and was now draining even quicker, because it wasn’t long until he felt his arms slowly uncross and his whole body start metaphorically melting. Then he fell backwards onto the mattress, so quickly that Sun didn’t have time to follow with his tickle attack.

“...Moon?” Sun asked, leaning over his brother and looking at his face.

Moon was still giggling slightly, but now his eyes were closed and it looked like he was veering closer and closer to the sleep he had so desperately craved earlier. It wasn’t long until the giggles peetered off into snoring.

Sun blinked. Well. That was fast.

Even though he was sure that Moon would not be waking up anytime soon, Sun slowly started moving to leave the room and let his brother sleep.

Then stopped when he felt something on his arm. Or rather, something around his arm.

He looked down at his arm to see his brother had…basically hugged it to his face and was using it as a fucking teddy bear.

Sun groaned as quietly as he could. Then paused and sighed, laying down next to his brother, turning his arm so the other could still hug it.

He was…most likely not going to go to sleep as quickly as Moon.

But…he felt a little calmer now at least.

[antivoid-alex]

You know what, I'm going to say it.

I am INCREDIBLY disappointed that Nexus is back.

Unless they can do something interesting with him I literally couldn't care less about it.

I don't want him back. I NEVER wanted him back.

He should have stayed dead. 😒

Reviving Eclipse angered me at first but they took his story in a whole new direction and it ended up amazing but if they just recycle Nexus's story and it's just going to end with him being blown up again I will be incredibly angry.

I don't hate Nexus, I love his emo ass. I just want some new antagonists not recycling old ones.

It feels like The Sun and Moon Show is getting more repetitive and boring but Eclipse and Puppet is getting better and even the girl's Show is much more fun to watch.

[tsbs-shipfessions]

*CrAshEs out from the tragedy SolarNexus closet; in an absolute mess.*

Salutations folks of all nations, it's me again! And I bring a new proposition!!

V4 Eclipse shipped with EAPS Moon (+EAPS Sun for the double AI shippers).

Reasons?

*Slaps billboard of opportunity.*

(Ramble warning ahead!)

V4 Eclipse has gone through it; lad had learned that the best way to live is to live alone. Antagonism brings him nowhere.. and being some emotional fellow isn't his cup o' joe. Yet we know, we know, that this is not entirely true.

Factually stating, especially with recent episodes (of other characters being ridiculously pushy towards Eclipse, mind you. They need to STOP. That's nOt how you hElp somEoNe.) is that Eclipse's anger has died down to a tired state. He's sickly annoyed on how he is, yet he has no proper reason as to why it stays this way.

Eclipse doesn't understand positive social cues nor how to be a "normal" being. Though instead of actually taking the heartfelt effort to learn anew, he stays stagnant in his gifted role of just: being the one nobody likes. And by my guess: it's because he doesn't see himself to have the ability to be loved.. tis either through fear or anger.. trauma stabbing his core and bitterness in his mind. It's always been like this since day one after all. How could it possibly change for him? This is who he is.... or, who he was that he has to keep up.. right?... there's no way life could ever get better than the consequences he laid out for himself! No matter how many times he died over and over- it's always the same!

Though in some small quiet way, Eclipse wishes to be wanted. All parts. Seeing right through his stubborn, biting behaviour and to be understood. With no harsh criticism and judgment that makes him regret ever being in the conversation.

There's a reason why he mentioned all that he's done to Puppet and such- he tries to make a statement that he is no good. Like it's verbal confirmation for himself that this is how it is and ever will be. That there is no hope for Eclipse.. always the asshole nobody wants... yet in it's own way it is also a cry for help.

One that many characters seem to miss as blatant sarcasm.

Eclipse doesn't wish to be forced, not monitored and tracked like he's some dog meaning to play tricks. Not shunned for "repeating and wallowing his complaints of all his wrongs". No. No, actually seen and allowing him to ease into this frightening change of peace in his own time.

But at the same time Eclipse fears it. He doesn't know how it'll end.. believing he'll be so vulnerable and pathetic.. but.... would it really be that bad?

We do see this with Earth when it comes to recognition, and their friendship has grown so sweet which I deeply appreciate! But she isn't always around for him, so aid is rarely available for his daily struggle now.

But I think EAPS Moon (and at times EAPS Sun) successfully inch towards that comforting direction too. In... their own playful way.

They're talking together, asking the right questions, showing genuine concern when Eclipse is unwell. None of it is fake or selfish, most likely due to EAPS Moon's/Sun's innocence.. but it's needed for Eclipse's sake.

He needs a breather.. and I really do believe EAPS Moon provides that.

Calm, open minded, confused at Eclipse's actions at times yet tries his best to understand. Allows Eclipse to do what he needs to do when it comes to precaution; because he knows there is careful meaning in there somewhere.

Heck, even managed to have Eclipse say and do some rare polite things. And Eclipse doesn't entirely push EAPS Moon away and listens to some small suggestions. That's slow growth and improvement! A healthy way to transition to a more passive life! To find himself with some sweet soul as EAPS Moon. :)

I hope to see this to grow further, perhaps comfort deeply when Eclipse be having another panic from a nightmare. A non-pushing conversation that allows Eclipse to share whatever he wishes. Maybe have the two gain an interest in some fun activity to enjoy life a little better. To prove how there is such thing as a good day. Maybe EAPS Moon can have more updates on his little game for Eclipse to test. :3

It feels like a good opportunity to break harmful habits, you know?

Besides... tis a gay silly nerdy game-dev X grumpy ex-villain ship with a hopeful healing arch. How could I possibly resist? I.. I mean come on! That's adorable!

Quite the long read, eh? Heheh.

Thanks for allowing me to share this confession! As a treat have a song that I've been listenin' on repeat while writing this. Tis fitting for how I see V4 Eclipse's mindset: ' girl in red - i'll die anyway. '

As always: Have a pleasant day/evenin' to everyone who read this! Till we meet again! :)

All of these color-coded essays are so fun to receive.

[visionthefox]

Im watching the ever first Nice Eclipse episode.. there's a details I think we all kinda forgor? or me.. His Moon died too.. rebooted.. with memories.. pretty much being a whole new Moon but with anger issues.. and look, I know both VAs dont actually plan anything too deeply.. but I think they already wanted to have a NewMoon? of at least they played with the concept of dying and being a copy who was tasked to filled other's shoes.. Solar had the experience of wathing his Moon die.. and come back..WITH memories but not being the same.. turning into the abusive Moon WE know.. and lets go delulu for a moment.. Solar most likely saw his Moon grew both aggresive and stress out by feeling like he had to be "THE BEST" Moon he could..has his brother back was most likely the FIRST though on his mind..somehow.. he knows that's his bigger goal.. but he fails.. over and over again.. Solar most likely watched..unable to help.. as he himself most likely didn't knew who to even help!.. this said.. maybe this is why when he meets NewMoon.. Solar is QUICK to not only ease up at how.. naive..and polite he is but..maybe for a moment.. he did't want to keep up the "comparation" game with someone who doesn't know better.. Solar most likely learned to see these dark thoughs too on NewMoon..the stress and fear of not being enough.. but for NewMoon..it was worse.. he had way more than a daycare to look after.. or a comatose Brother..no.. they had villains and astrals and magic.. again.. maybe is an accident.. but maybe is why Solar thought (and assumed right) that Nexus was NOT ok, in a sense that.. something had to be affecting the Moon..HIs..newMooon.. just like he saw Moon from his dimention..slowly fall into dispair and rage.. it would "explain" why he gave up so fast in canon.. he can't bring himself to suffer THAT..again.. BUT IF WE GO DELULU.. Solar would have know BETTER.. and help Nexus faster than anyone.. if he knew what Monty did?.. ripping out a line of code so deep from him mind? then he would just know.. "this is like when we tried to kill the KC..and.. caused My other Moon to glitch out.. have emotional issues.." idk man.. I just..maybe is because is Nexus B-day.. I wish his arc was done.. different..

[zephyrsluminouslunacy]

"If someone ignored Lunar's feelings so callously he would throw a hissy fit" a look into Lunar from coming back to life, and how his feelings have consistently been ignored.

So I saw a post where someone said that if someone ignored Lunar's feelings he would have thrown a hissy fit. I'm not going to tag the op or put this on the original post, both because I can't find it and because I don't want to start drama, but it got me thinking.

I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of Lunar's character, if you look closely you'll see that his main response is to fawn.

Starting with when he first woke up in Montys space station. There's an unfamiliar person he's never met before there to get him, he said Monty sent him, but Lunar is scared and disoriented and Eclipse is threatening to kill him again. He goes along with it, he doesn't want any trouble.

He gets back he's still scared but he sees Monty! His best friend! The person who brought him back, and he feels safe enough to show that fear. There's someone else there, and she's so tall and he's so small and she's another new person, but Monty cares about him, he voices his discomfort and his fear. And the big lady listened! She offered to step away, but then Monty told her not to, told her to come closer. Lunar learns he can't be vulnerable around Monty anymore, the mask goes up. You can watch in that episode the switch in Lunar's behaviour in that moment. As he realizes Monty isn't that excited to see him, that they care more about this new person (who's also his sister so he has a sister now too) than him.

Eclipse is dead! He's safe! He can go see his brothers! Except Monty just drops that the Moon he knew, the first person to show him kindness, the person who took him in, gave him a family despite everything he had done, was dead, and there's a new Moon now. He doesn't have time to think about that though (he isn't allowed to grieve his brother) because he has to go meet this New Moon, this person wearing the skin of his brother, with his name and his voice, but who isn't him. The mask stays on.

Sun got hurt, and because of that these two people he doesn't know (his siblings, strangers who claim to be his family) don't want him to see his brother (his only real family).

He's sharing a room with his sister (he met her an hour ago, he doesn't know her he doesn't trust her) sure why not.

Sun says he should talk to Earth about his trauma, he doesn't know her, but he trusts Sun, so he'll give it a shot. (He's not ready to talk about it, he doesn't feel safe. He has to anyways)

Earth is great! They're getting along really well and she's actually been helping him a lot, he trusts her enough he tries to open up about his abuse. Suddenly the wind picks up, she goes flying. He can't talk about it or else people will get hurt.

Bloodmoon is back, and broke his arm and nearly ripped out his eye. Earth brought him down to parts and service and stabilized his arm. No one else checked to make sure he was alright.

Sun and Moon are gone, the daycare blew up, he can't get upset about that. There are star people and they told him if he doesn't control his emotions that other star people will come kill him. He isn't allowed to feel emotions.

Sun and Moon are back! Sure they took care of that weird broken guy and fixed Monty before coming to see him, that's fine that makes sense! (Those were more important than him) he can't be upset, he isn't allowed to feel.

Nice Eclipse is here! And that's great, he's his brother and he cares about him so much! He looks like Eclipse did when he killed him, every time he looks at him he thinks about begging for his life for Eclipses amusement, knowing he wasn't going to survive. He needs to get over that though, he isn't the person who hurt him. It's cruel to see him that way. He needs to get over it.

Bloodmoon hurt Earth. His sister is sitting there broken and he can't shove his anger down. He attacks Bloodmoon, doesn't even really injure him, but scares him off. He collapses, lays in the lobby next to his broken sister, and when he comes to again, who knows how much later, she's gone. He rushes to tell his brothers. They're more worried about her than him (as they should be, he's not the one missing, sure he's having a breakdown, but that doesn't matter, his feelings don't matter)

He's in trouble for using his powers against Bloodmoon, he's dangerous, now he's inconvenienced his new friends because he got mad at them for hurting his sister (his emotions are an inconvenience)

Eclipse is back and no one told him. He's hurt, he's betrayed, he feels lied to, Moon would rather have Solar build a whole new animatronic to be his bodyguard than have to deal with Lunar having a trauma response (his trauma is an inconvenience)

Gemini rejected him, he accepted their rejection with grace, but they knew he was upset, it rained harder, they're disappointed (he's not allowed to feel emotions)

Earth keeps trying to get him to talk about his trauma, she brings it up like it's casual conversation, like she doesn't realize how triggering it is. He fawns, he dissociates, he nods his head along and tries not to listen to her words. They're about to open for the day, if he talks about it he won't be able to work. If he talks about it he'll be forced to feel, if he talks about it he might get mad and lose control of his powers and hurt her.

Eclipse shows up, he starts mocking him, belittling him, why isn't Earth making him leave? Why is she trying to talk to him. The dam breaks, every bit of hurt and fear and sadness and hatred and resentment comes crashing down, he remembers being powerless, mocked, hit, tazed, insulted, belittled, had his bodily autonomy taken away, and he lashes out, he kills Eclipse.

And for a moment it feels good, it feels great, finally Lunar was the one who held the power! He was the one who Eclipse should fear! And then he sees Earths face, she's terrified of him, and it all comes crashing down. He's the monster (his emotions and his trauma make him a monster)

He's been in his apartment for days, the only person who visited him was Gemini, they said he was evil, that now they need to fight for his life AGAIN. And they must be right, no ones come to check on him. His family hasn't heard from him in days. Aren't they worried? Don't they know that leaving someone who had a mental breakdown alone is dangerous? Do they even care? They're all too busy comforting Earth, because shes scared. (Earth matters more than him)

He has to go talk to Earth, he's still swirling in self hate, in grief and sadness, it's been raining for a week straight. He brings the downpour with him. He tries one more time to open up, he tells her about how the astrals might kill him, how terrified he is to die again. He's being selfish and making everything about himself, doesn't he know Earth is upset. (Earth matters more than him)

Either he's hallucinating or Castor was so upset still he felt the need to remind him he's a disappointment, he doesn't know which would be worse. He doesn't mention it (his problems aren't important)

Solar dies, his brother, the person who helped him heal, he shuts down. He's learned by now that feeling only hurts himself and others, he goes numb, dissociates (people like him better this way)

The creator wants to kidnap him, no ones treating it like a big deal, he's overreacting, he gets over it.

Eclipse gives Earth a gift. He pretends it doesn't hurt, he's suspicious, he's allowed to be suspicious (why does she deserve his kindness but he doesn't?)

Earth and Eclipse are friends now. It hurts, sure Lunar's never told her every detail, but she knows he abused and killed him. Sure he's not the same one, but he acts like it. He buries his feelings (it would be selfish to be upset)

Moon starts acting weird, he never got close to him, he couldn't stop feeling like Moon didn't like him, he couldn't stop feeling like he was a stranger pretending to be his brother. He takes a step back from the situation, it's easier to dissociate into apathy when he isn't involved.

Earth got hurt, Moon is dead. These things wash over him, he doesn't feel.

Old Moon is back, his brother is back, Moon barely reacts upon seeing him again, barely reacts hearing he died. These things wash over him, he doesn't feel.

His brothers forget to tell him they moved, despite him living with them. He's an afterthought, at least they invite him to properly live with them, instead of just staying on the couch. (He's an afterthought)

Taurus shows up, no one takes his fears seriously, he dissociates.

Earth goes to jail, everyone drops everything to try and help her, when they get back to the house she's greeted with comfort and love.

Moon hits him, no one cares because Earth is upset and she's more important (everyone loves Earth more than him)

Lunar gets assaulted and taken to jail, no one seems that concerned, people are busy, he goes home and goes to his room. (Everyone loves Earth more than him)

Lunar gets attacked, he doesn't know why Gemini didn't come help him. He doesn't think about it.

Nexus is dead. He falls into dissociative apathy, he can't be upset if he can't feel. He doesn't care (maybe if he says it enough he'll believe it)

Lunar's days are filled with dissociation and sleeping, he's depressed, he doesn't have the energy to get out of bed or off the couch. He tries to help as much as he can. It's not enough (his issues are an inconvenience)

He knows Earth is mad at him. He can hear her shout about how lazy and worthless he is, how Sun should be everyone's priority. He's too dissociated to care.

He's untrainable until he gets over his trauma. He's useless, worthless, repressing his emotions and leaving him a shell of himself isn't good enough because he's still affected by his trauma.

Hes upset and just goes to bed so he stops feeling, and suddenly he's offered a choice, he doesn't have to repress his emotions anymore, he can be powerful with them. Rez waited until Lunar was at his most vulnerable, and then manipulated him.

It's at this point that I've temporarily stopped watching. But I think I still have a case to show that Lunar is not as much of a self centred brat as people think he is, his emotions have been ignored or villainized for as long as he's been alive, at least the second time. So he pretended to be okay while he was only getting worse and worse.

He would not have thrown a hissy fit if his emotions were callously ignored, because they have been, time and time and time again.