(no subject)
TITLE: Indefinite Variables, part 1, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4, pt 5, pt 6, pt 7 (COMPLETE).
RATING: PG, for now.
AUTHOR: johnwilmot
CHARACTERS: Eugene Morrow/Robert Capa (GATTACA/Sunshine crossover!)
WORD COUNT: ~2000 and not finished!
DISCLAIMER: Characters/movies not mine, no profit being made, etc.
WARNINGS: Spoilers if you haven't seen GATTACA - which, if you haven't, GO NOW. Change in the ending of it. Takes place before the launch of Icarus II. Also, I haven't posted a fic of any sort in years upon years, but this idea just struck me, so if you read, please comment!
SUMMARY: In the not-so-distant future, man has all but perfected his own genetic code, essentially ruling out the possibility of error. Or so they thought. A mission has failed. Eugene Morrow takes in the young trainee Robert Capa as he prepares for any further mistakes.
More than a century ago, scientists estimated that our Sun, the yellow dwarf star that centres our solar system, A G V star that generates light through the fusion of hydrogen and helium and brings life to a tiny little satellite that we call Earth, had roughly seven billion more years to live.
They were wrong.
Our sun is dying, its lifespan cut short by the depletion of hydrogen, effectively taking its transformation from its middle age to a path only certain in that it will be cataclysmic for the forms of life that depend on it. GATTACA's finest, once so self-assured in their genetics and the efficiency in their humanity, had once again overlooked the unavoidable wild card that fate occasionally draws and plays at her leisure. Some religious fanatics claimed that it was divine punishment for tampering with life, as they have through every seemingly-apocalyptic event that shook a weary and worn Earth. Only this time, their arguments were even more futile, because never had mass extinction been more certain.
The trip to Titan had been scheduled to return two years ago. Jerome Morrow - GATTACA's Jerome Morrow - had been expected to navigate Saturn's largest moon and stretch out the reach of humanity's knowledge beyond its usual comprehension. Instead he had only left more answers as his ship abruptly and inexplicably lost communication near its approach and failed to return, after one simple orbit of the Earth around the sun, as promised.
It was not the first time that Jerome Morrow - Earth's Jerome Morrow, the now socially invisible Jerome Morrow - had seen fit to spit in the faces of those who been so secure in the science of success. It had been a very last moment of reflection when he'd crawled into the incinerator that he'd pictured Vincent's face, extending upward as he saw every star he had studied like long lost relatives coming nearer and nearer, and realised that his own self-pity and desire to preserve the man's identity were temporarily overwhelmed by the desire to see his expression when he returned. He had never found peace after such a heavy fall from society's pedestal, a fall that crippled his legs permanently, but being with Vincent in their short time together had taught him about dreaming like no other person in his life had. It had gleamed the shine of the sun into the darker parts of him that wallowed in whiskey throughout most of his days and effectively pulled him out of that incinerator and back into a half-life.
Ironic, then, that the sun should be the thing to destroy it all. He had kept tabs with Irene on a regular basis, wanting to be sure that the process was going smoothly, eagerly awaiting any information that they were closer to their destination. Sun spots, they had said, had caused a disruption in communication, but the ship should be fine. And then not another word. They had been so certain of their success that no one had even thought to prepare for failure, to steady themselves for the possibility of loss. Irene's hope gradually dissolved into tears. Jerome's - Eugene's - came a bit more harshly. He had flung his glass of whiskey when she'd told him, smashing it into the metallic refrigerator that still held the samples he had prepared for Vincent's return. As it turned out, the initial reaction was the tip of an iceberg; wheeling himself up to GATTACA and demanding answers from the mission director in a drunken stupor had taken some very efficient work on Irene's part to smooth things over and pretend it had never happened.
Still, he could never enter that place again, never mind how rigorous the steps were. Which was perfectly fine with him, even with Irene coming periodically to check on him, as if willing herself to seek out some remainder of Vincent in him, in the home they had shared together, much like an addict searches for the scrape of just enough of his poison to get by when there is nothing left. But Eugene, he looked to the stars.
It had never been a habit before, never been an area of interest to him, but now he listened to Irene's somewhat-lifeless reports of the hurried build of Icarus I with his eyes upward out on the balcony, closing his eyes to feel the breeze of the passing wind and imagining that, even with his useless legs as heavy weights, he were drifting that much closer, assembling himself into pieces not unlike Vincent. We all come from stardust, Eugene, Vincent had always said with a smile. I get the feeling that's true for you more than some, Eugene had replied sardonically. He had always known where Vincent belonged, and it certainly wasn't among GATTACA's elite, not unless they were behind him in his excavation to the stars.
But that was all gone now. It had taken him much longer to accept Irene's resigned state, her matter-of-fact explanations of the space particles that had been observed floating in the far-off gravitational pull of a planet on the direct trajectory of the Titan mission, of the many attempts at contact that had reached no conclusion, led to nothing but radio static. Vincent's - Jerome Morrow's - funeral was eventually held, and no one questioned the man in the wheelchair wearing a black suit lined in red, pale green eyes stony and glazed with alcohol and withheld grief misplaced as anger as they labeled his old friend a hero, a man dedicated. His dark gaze upon each member of the prestigious team of scientists was mostly passively ignored, which had only further infuriated him. His hands worked at frantic speed as he wheeled himself up to a man that finished speaking about Jerome Morrow's bravery, grasping him by the lapels. "What do you know about Jerome Morrow!" He had shouted, spit lining the man's face. "What do you really know! Nothing! Nothing!"
That day, Jerome Morrow was officially dead. Not just in the government's system, not just to friends and colleagues - the idea of Jerome Morrow, the child that he and Vincent had combined their efforts to create, was wiped from the planet as easily as a layer of dust on a desk. As easily as a misplaced eyelash blown away in the wind. As easily as a man's will to survive with the impossible bearing down on him.
Again, Irene had been his saviour, but she was just as much of a ghost to him as he to her, only instead of wanting to be near her he repelled her, barely looked her in the eyes when she made her routine visits to see how he was doing. He would watch her take her heart medication discreetly as she sat, her aura uncomfortable, as if necessity kept her here years after Vincent's disappearance into the unknown, across from a cripple that she barely knew, and he would laugh. Once he asked her, "Why bother? The sun's well on its way to killing us all anyway, and I think it's a bit more determined than your GATTACA friends, who can't even get one bloody man onto one bloody little rock." Again, said with a salute of whiskey, and again, she had wisely said nothing and forgiven him for his aggressive grief and self-destruction.
It was a joke to him, their hurried and vastly funded efforts to build a ship and a crew that would reach the sun and effectively 'restart it', and Irene was smart to keep him away from anyone that he could share this opinion with. Had been, anyway, for the last several years, as the mission was hurried with due expedience. When it, too, launched, amidst the worldwide gratitude, a sort of symphonic tremor of hope rippled throughout the entire planet, and for a distinct moment, Eugene could understand Vincent's feeling of complete separation, of a desperate will to depart from a world to which he had never been a true part of. In a way, he always had, ever since he'd been awarded the silver medal and seen the badly disguised shock and disappointment in the eyes of his peers and family. He had stepped in front of that car just as easily as Vincent had stepped onto his ship to depart. Eugene could have laughed at the bond that still lay between them in how they had both failed, but he still didn't dare disrespect Vincent's memory or dare compare the two. Vincent was up there, somewhere, where he belonged. He was still here, living in a dead man's house, mustering up the courage to try, try again.
"Eugene, there's someone here to meet you," Irene's voice from upstairs had announced. He'd been sitting on the balcony again, staring vaguely upward at the dying sun, feeling the chill in his usual suit vest a little bit colder as the star crept closer to the horizon, just as it did every day in its own Sisyphean pattern. He turned around in his wheelchair, glancing up in the direction of her voice. "If it's police, I've got no answers and have a very busy schedule of getting drunk and belligerent to tend to." Nevertheless, he wheeled himself into the house completely as he heard Irene's heels clicking down the spiral staircase.
"It's not a policeman, Eugene." She turned to allow him to see the man beside her. Youngish looking lad, something like 27, with blue eyes that must have certainly been the work of fine genetics and yet a waifish build, as well as a certain demeanour, as if he didn't quite know how to hold himself, how to communicate to the world through body language that he was of any importance.
"This is Robert Capa," she announced after a brief pause, in which neither man chose to speak first. "He's a physicist, working for GATTACA in preparation, should anything go wrong with Icarus I." Jerome scoffed first and then visibly laughed, pulling out his cigarette pack and slipping one between his lips, taking his time lighting it, enjoying the obvious discomfort of the situation for both of them. "Should anything go wrong," he repeated with an edge to his voice. "You mean when something goes wrong. Your facility might as well be a scraps shop for all the good its done getting to space and back in the past several years." He glanced up, saw the flicker of defiance in the young physicist's eyes, the set of his jaw, the shift of his hand to his hip. He noted all of it, seeing precious few people these days, and smirked at how he obviously disagreed but didn't have it in him to verbally argue.
"Precautions are safest, we're learning that now." Irene said levelly, much too used to Eugene's stinging verbal onslaught by now to be affected. And anyway, Eugene suspected that there was a tiny part of her that had lost hope in the cause anyway, no matter how hard she worked to fight for it regardless. It was what Vincent would have wanted. He could almost hear her saying it, could see it in her eyes when their gazes met.
"Well what's he doing in my house? This isn't some centre of hospitality for people with death wishes," Eugene said casually, exhaling smoke toward the ceiling and glancing at Capa for reaction. Again, nothing, only subtle movements. The patience on this one. Eugene was fairly sure he could whittle him down to nothing on a bad day with a good amount of whiskey in his system.
"He needs somewhere to stay while he undergoes training. The new mission director is pooling as much money as possible into hurrying the build of the next spacecraft-" Eugene snorted, "-and it would be easier if those preparing for the mission could stay close by."
Eugene's next question was probably obvious. "And what makes you think I want him here?"
"You can't live off of what he left behind for you forever, Eugene," Irene said with a look of pity across her face, like she was doing this just as much for his sake as for Capa's. She always spoke of him like that in a way that made Eugene unsure if he wanted to shout at her or curl himself into a ball and force tears that never came easily. Damn her, always reminding him, always putting it back in his face, precisely where he didn't want it.
"Sending them younger and younger, aren't they?" Eugene tapped ash in a nearby ashtray. "Engineered to die from the moment they're born." Irene glanced at Capa, her gaze knowing, silently seeming to implore him to take no heed to the man's words, but it didn't seem that the physicist was eager to do so anyhow. Eugene was satisfied with the uncomfortable and pregnant pause.
"I'm not easy to live with," he said with another long drag of the cigarette, eyeing Capa this time more than Irene, as if he were speaking to him and not her.
"I made sure he knew that."
There was a long stretch of silence, Capa looking increasingly uncomfortable as he stood in space that didn't seem to belong to him, something of a mirror of Vincent when he had first arrived to make his deal, to buy the identity of Jerome Morrow.
"Well?" Eugene said, his eyes directly locked on Capa, excusing Irene from any involvement in the arrangement henceforth. "You're the supposed genius. Run the calculations in that pretty head of yours of how long it will take this to end in complete disaster."
Unexpectedly, Capa smiled, the sort of smile that was never allowed to reach full bloom, restrained just as much as his other gestures, as if that, too, were genetically engineered into him. "Too many indefinite variables."
"Can't predict fate," Eugene tacked on, and Capa's smile seemed to tug a little bit further, desperately threatening to expand itself beyond half mast.
And so Eugene let him stay.
RATING: PG, for now.
AUTHOR: johnwilmot
CHARACTERS: Eugene Morrow/Robert Capa (GATTACA/Sunshine crossover!)
WORD COUNT: ~2000 and not finished!
DISCLAIMER: Characters/movies not mine, no profit being made, etc.
WARNINGS: Spoilers if you haven't seen GATTACA - which, if you haven't, GO NOW. Change in the ending of it. Takes place before the launch of Icarus II. Also, I haven't posted a fic of any sort in years upon years, but this idea just struck me, so if you read, please comment!
SUMMARY: In the not-so-distant future, man has all but perfected his own genetic code, essentially ruling out the possibility of error. Or so they thought. A mission has failed. Eugene Morrow takes in the young trainee Robert Capa as he prepares for any further mistakes.
More than a century ago, scientists estimated that our Sun, the yellow dwarf star that centres our solar system, A G V star that generates light through the fusion of hydrogen and helium and brings life to a tiny little satellite that we call Earth, had roughly seven billion more years to live.
They were wrong.
Our sun is dying, its lifespan cut short by the depletion of hydrogen, effectively taking its transformation from its middle age to a path only certain in that it will be cataclysmic for the forms of life that depend on it. GATTACA's finest, once so self-assured in their genetics and the efficiency in their humanity, had once again overlooked the unavoidable wild card that fate occasionally draws and plays at her leisure. Some religious fanatics claimed that it was divine punishment for tampering with life, as they have through every seemingly-apocalyptic event that shook a weary and worn Earth. Only this time, their arguments were even more futile, because never had mass extinction been more certain.
The trip to Titan had been scheduled to return two years ago. Jerome Morrow - GATTACA's Jerome Morrow - had been expected to navigate Saturn's largest moon and stretch out the reach of humanity's knowledge beyond its usual comprehension. Instead he had only left more answers as his ship abruptly and inexplicably lost communication near its approach and failed to return, after one simple orbit of the Earth around the sun, as promised.
It was not the first time that Jerome Morrow - Earth's Jerome Morrow, the now socially invisible Jerome Morrow - had seen fit to spit in the faces of those who been so secure in the science of success. It had been a very last moment of reflection when he'd crawled into the incinerator that he'd pictured Vincent's face, extending upward as he saw every star he had studied like long lost relatives coming nearer and nearer, and realised that his own self-pity and desire to preserve the man's identity were temporarily overwhelmed by the desire to see his expression when he returned. He had never found peace after such a heavy fall from society's pedestal, a fall that crippled his legs permanently, but being with Vincent in their short time together had taught him about dreaming like no other person in his life had. It had gleamed the shine of the sun into the darker parts of him that wallowed in whiskey throughout most of his days and effectively pulled him out of that incinerator and back into a half-life.
Ironic, then, that the sun should be the thing to destroy it all. He had kept tabs with Irene on a regular basis, wanting to be sure that the process was going smoothly, eagerly awaiting any information that they were closer to their destination. Sun spots, they had said, had caused a disruption in communication, but the ship should be fine. And then not another word. They had been so certain of their success that no one had even thought to prepare for failure, to steady themselves for the possibility of loss. Irene's hope gradually dissolved into tears. Jerome's - Eugene's - came a bit more harshly. He had flung his glass of whiskey when she'd told him, smashing it into the metallic refrigerator that still held the samples he had prepared for Vincent's return. As it turned out, the initial reaction was the tip of an iceberg; wheeling himself up to GATTACA and demanding answers from the mission director in a drunken stupor had taken some very efficient work on Irene's part to smooth things over and pretend it had never happened.
Still, he could never enter that place again, never mind how rigorous the steps were. Which was perfectly fine with him, even with Irene coming periodically to check on him, as if willing herself to seek out some remainder of Vincent in him, in the home they had shared together, much like an addict searches for the scrape of just enough of his poison to get by when there is nothing left. But Eugene, he looked to the stars.
It had never been a habit before, never been an area of interest to him, but now he listened to Irene's somewhat-lifeless reports of the hurried build of Icarus I with his eyes upward out on the balcony, closing his eyes to feel the breeze of the passing wind and imagining that, even with his useless legs as heavy weights, he were drifting that much closer, assembling himself into pieces not unlike Vincent. We all come from stardust, Eugene, Vincent had always said with a smile. I get the feeling that's true for you more than some, Eugene had replied sardonically. He had always known where Vincent belonged, and it certainly wasn't among GATTACA's elite, not unless they were behind him in his excavation to the stars.
But that was all gone now. It had taken him much longer to accept Irene's resigned state, her matter-of-fact explanations of the space particles that had been observed floating in the far-off gravitational pull of a planet on the direct trajectory of the Titan mission, of the many attempts at contact that had reached no conclusion, led to nothing but radio static. Vincent's - Jerome Morrow's - funeral was eventually held, and no one questioned the man in the wheelchair wearing a black suit lined in red, pale green eyes stony and glazed with alcohol and withheld grief misplaced as anger as they labeled his old friend a hero, a man dedicated. His dark gaze upon each member of the prestigious team of scientists was mostly passively ignored, which had only further infuriated him. His hands worked at frantic speed as he wheeled himself up to a man that finished speaking about Jerome Morrow's bravery, grasping him by the lapels. "What do you know about Jerome Morrow!" He had shouted, spit lining the man's face. "What do you really know! Nothing! Nothing!"
That day, Jerome Morrow was officially dead. Not just in the government's system, not just to friends and colleagues - the idea of Jerome Morrow, the child that he and Vincent had combined their efforts to create, was wiped from the planet as easily as a layer of dust on a desk. As easily as a misplaced eyelash blown away in the wind. As easily as a man's will to survive with the impossible bearing down on him.
Again, Irene had been his saviour, but she was just as much of a ghost to him as he to her, only instead of wanting to be near her he repelled her, barely looked her in the eyes when she made her routine visits to see how he was doing. He would watch her take her heart medication discreetly as she sat, her aura uncomfortable, as if necessity kept her here years after Vincent's disappearance into the unknown, across from a cripple that she barely knew, and he would laugh. Once he asked her, "Why bother? The sun's well on its way to killing us all anyway, and I think it's a bit more determined than your GATTACA friends, who can't even get one bloody man onto one bloody little rock." Again, said with a salute of whiskey, and again, she had wisely said nothing and forgiven him for his aggressive grief and self-destruction.
It was a joke to him, their hurried and vastly funded efforts to build a ship and a crew that would reach the sun and effectively 'restart it', and Irene was smart to keep him away from anyone that he could share this opinion with. Had been, anyway, for the last several years, as the mission was hurried with due expedience. When it, too, launched, amidst the worldwide gratitude, a sort of symphonic tremor of hope rippled throughout the entire planet, and for a distinct moment, Eugene could understand Vincent's feeling of complete separation, of a desperate will to depart from a world to which he had never been a true part of. In a way, he always had, ever since he'd been awarded the silver medal and seen the badly disguised shock and disappointment in the eyes of his peers and family. He had stepped in front of that car just as easily as Vincent had stepped onto his ship to depart. Eugene could have laughed at the bond that still lay between them in how they had both failed, but he still didn't dare disrespect Vincent's memory or dare compare the two. Vincent was up there, somewhere, where he belonged. He was still here, living in a dead man's house, mustering up the courage to try, try again.
"Eugene, there's someone here to meet you," Irene's voice from upstairs had announced. He'd been sitting on the balcony again, staring vaguely upward at the dying sun, feeling the chill in his usual suit vest a little bit colder as the star crept closer to the horizon, just as it did every day in its own Sisyphean pattern. He turned around in his wheelchair, glancing up in the direction of her voice. "If it's police, I've got no answers and have a very busy schedule of getting drunk and belligerent to tend to." Nevertheless, he wheeled himself into the house completely as he heard Irene's heels clicking down the spiral staircase.
"It's not a policeman, Eugene." She turned to allow him to see the man beside her. Youngish looking lad, something like 27, with blue eyes that must have certainly been the work of fine genetics and yet a waifish build, as well as a certain demeanour, as if he didn't quite know how to hold himself, how to communicate to the world through body language that he was of any importance.
"This is Robert Capa," she announced after a brief pause, in which neither man chose to speak first. "He's a physicist, working for GATTACA in preparation, should anything go wrong with Icarus I." Jerome scoffed first and then visibly laughed, pulling out his cigarette pack and slipping one between his lips, taking his time lighting it, enjoying the obvious discomfort of the situation for both of them. "Should anything go wrong," he repeated with an edge to his voice. "You mean when something goes wrong. Your facility might as well be a scraps shop for all the good its done getting to space and back in the past several years." He glanced up, saw the flicker of defiance in the young physicist's eyes, the set of his jaw, the shift of his hand to his hip. He noted all of it, seeing precious few people these days, and smirked at how he obviously disagreed but didn't have it in him to verbally argue.
"Precautions are safest, we're learning that now." Irene said levelly, much too used to Eugene's stinging verbal onslaught by now to be affected. And anyway, Eugene suspected that there was a tiny part of her that had lost hope in the cause anyway, no matter how hard she worked to fight for it regardless. It was what Vincent would have wanted. He could almost hear her saying it, could see it in her eyes when their gazes met.
"Well what's he doing in my house? This isn't some centre of hospitality for people with death wishes," Eugene said casually, exhaling smoke toward the ceiling and glancing at Capa for reaction. Again, nothing, only subtle movements. The patience on this one. Eugene was fairly sure he could whittle him down to nothing on a bad day with a good amount of whiskey in his system.
"He needs somewhere to stay while he undergoes training. The new mission director is pooling as much money as possible into hurrying the build of the next spacecraft-" Eugene snorted, "-and it would be easier if those preparing for the mission could stay close by."
Eugene's next question was probably obvious. "And what makes you think I want him here?"
"You can't live off of what he left behind for you forever, Eugene," Irene said with a look of pity across her face, like she was doing this just as much for his sake as for Capa's. She always spoke of him like that in a way that made Eugene unsure if he wanted to shout at her or curl himself into a ball and force tears that never came easily. Damn her, always reminding him, always putting it back in his face, precisely where he didn't want it.
"Sending them younger and younger, aren't they?" Eugene tapped ash in a nearby ashtray. "Engineered to die from the moment they're born." Irene glanced at Capa, her gaze knowing, silently seeming to implore him to take no heed to the man's words, but it didn't seem that the physicist was eager to do so anyhow. Eugene was satisfied with the uncomfortable and pregnant pause.
"I'm not easy to live with," he said with another long drag of the cigarette, eyeing Capa this time more than Irene, as if he were speaking to him and not her.
"I made sure he knew that."
There was a long stretch of silence, Capa looking increasingly uncomfortable as he stood in space that didn't seem to belong to him, something of a mirror of Vincent when he had first arrived to make his deal, to buy the identity of Jerome Morrow.
"Well?" Eugene said, his eyes directly locked on Capa, excusing Irene from any involvement in the arrangement henceforth. "You're the supposed genius. Run the calculations in that pretty head of yours of how long it will take this to end in complete disaster."
Unexpectedly, Capa smiled, the sort of smile that was never allowed to reach full bloom, restrained just as much as his other gestures, as if that, too, were genetically engineered into him. "Too many indefinite variables."
"Can't predict fate," Eugene tacked on, and Capa's smile seemed to tug a little bit further, desperately threatening to expand itself beyond half mast.
And so Eugene let him stay.