(no subject)
TITLE: Indefinite Variables, pt 1, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4, pt 5, pt 6, part 7 (COMPLETE).
RATING: PG-13.
AUTHOR: johnwilmot
CHARACTERS: Eugene Morrow/Robert Capa (GATTACA/Sunshine crossover!)
WORD COUNT: ~20000
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! (Warning: character death)
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.
Nothing changed and everything changed. Eugene could remember morning-afters back when he had had the function of his legs and had mingled with polite society as a member of it, infiltrated the strongholds of attractive men and women and fraternised with them accordingly. Those morning-afters had always been shy, awkward, uncomfortable at best, and Eugene had wanted little to do with them, pretended to sleep as a pretty brunette slipped on her heels from the night before and crept out the door. The morning after the distinctly unexpected night he had spent with Capa, Eugene awoke first, looking over at the thin shoulder, the layer of hair as the sun intruded upon them through the blinds, not penetrating enough to disturb. Eugene had dreamt that Capa had slipped away, first out of his arms and then into an awaiting pod outside that would take him to Titan to be with Vincent, and the ache in his arms was insurmountable. Seeing Capa laying there after such an event was an amazing relief, and his hangover was forgotten in lieu of turning on his side to snake his hand down the man's side, to lean his cheek against the skin on his shoulder. There was fragility to his touch, as if the morning light would break the spell, would take away the gentle and sweet Robert Capa from the night before and bring him back to the cold, harsh reality of things.
Happiness was never a constant. It was a fleeting moment that you had to grab at like a firefly, and if you tried to stuff it into a jar and have a collection of stars of your own, you would kill it. It could not be homegrown, was not a force from within when the world had so many stakes against you. That was the way it was, and Eugene was realising that he was paying for having everything handed to him in spades. True despair was to be handed everything and to have it snatched away. If he were smarter he never would have gone near Robert Capa, would have spat venom at the poor boy until he hated him. But Eugene had so little stock left on his life that he wanted to cheat his hand, wanted to grab what happiness it had left for him before he finally folded and cut out of the game early.
And life had afforded him happiness that morning when Capa had rolled over sleepily and then smiled at him, the wordlessness between them somehow not a problem at all. The sun was creeping further upward, but for once Capa's schedule did not revolve around it, and it seemed a long time before he crawled out of the bed to the shower.
Eventually he would leave for training, not speaking a word about whether it had made him late or not. And Eugene would return to his routine of writing on his long and unnamed project on his otherwise-neglected computer and smoke on the terrace and drink from the alcohol that Capa kept stocked even though he knew that the physicist disapproved. And he would look up at the stars as they began to appear in the sky and curse them evermore. And he would wait.
Some days there would be shared dinners, moments when Capa would come home early and they would talk about his training that day and laugh and pretend that it wasn't any kind of training that would take him away anywhere. They would play chess and occasionally, very occasionally, Eugene would win, and Capa would smile at him over the chess board, the surprise at Eugene's genius long since gone. They would read poetry, Capa lending his favourite titles, trying to be inconspicuous as he brought more and more of the books that Eugene hadn't read downstairs, although Eugene noticed it. Some late nights with a little alcohol they talked solemnly about what would happen when the mission finally launched, Capa trying to map out things for Eugene to do, ways for him to thrive while he was gone, and explaining with restrained emotions that they had more than enough resources to get them back to Earth safely. And Capa would wind up in Eugene's bed again with Eugene holding him close in desperation, burying his face into his hair and willing the alcohol to numb the loss he would experience in the future.
And some days would be cold. The winter chill had settled in, enough to keep Eugene off of the terrace late at night, which made him more nervous and ill-tempered than usual. He was seated in the living area with his laptop on his lap and a cigarette between his lips when Capa's return home was announced by the door. Eugene didn't look up, continued typing as Capa pulled off his coat, pausing and looking in Eugene's direction.
"I'm writing about Vincent," he said suddenly, unceremoniously, despite the fact that he had had his little project under lock and key for months, never speaking a word about it other than that it was 'coming along'.
Capa paused, aware of this change and trying to understand what it meant, actually walking to the kitchenette to find the bottle of scotch and pour himself a glass. Eugene was having a bad effect on him.
Not receiving any kind of response, Eugene watched him and then continued. "You know what Irene told me. She told me that one of the last things he said to her was that he found it ironic, for someone so desperate to leave the planet his whole life, that he'd finally found a reason to stay, right before his mission took off."
Capa looked over at him, their eyes meeting, his sad and reluctant and holding too much uncertainty for one man to carry, too tired to meet with Eugene's expectations.
"He loved her," Eugene continued, unable to help but sound aggressive when his emotions were high.
"I know," Capa said softly, turning away and looking anywhere but at Eugene, anywhere but outside at the stars. How could he not see the way Irene still silently mourned, was a shell a woman, and think inevitably of what would happen to Eugene if something should go wrong with Icarus II? How could he not see the similarities between the look in her eyes when she spoke of Jerome Morrow and the way Eugene looked at him when they lay under the sheets and stared at the stars outside the wide-pane windows together?
"Just tell them you won't. Tell them you'll botch the whole bloody thing up. Tell them you don't believe in it anymore, tell them... tell them anything." Eugene said, desperately close to pleading with Capa's back.
"You know I can't."
"You can. It's not your dream. Let it be someone else's job to save the world."
"We've been over this. I'm the most qualified. It's the most certain calculation."
"GATTACA's been wrong before. Let them be wrong again."
"Eugene," he said softly, turning. "I could never live with myself. I've prepared too long. No one else can do this."
It wasn't logic Eugene liked, but logic he had to accept.
December was colder than usual, and both men knew the reason as they huddled closer in their warmth. They had long since given up on the logic behind why they should keep their relationship "appropriate" and within normal boundaries, even if Capa was tight-lipped enough about it to not breathe a word to anyone and Eugene had no one to tell or that he wished to tell. All they could do now was pretend that neither of them was counting the days as Eugene smoked until he felt sick and Capa's teeth ground together as he stared distractedly at calculations long since finished, an exercise that was supposed to quiet his mind, make him feel more assured in the mission. He was still clinging to the hope of returning home, of doing what he was sent to do and coming back to Eugene's sniping sarcasm and pointed looks, his comments about his cooking just to get a rise out of him, his surprising literature collection and the soothing nature of his voice as he read to Capa in bed.
Christmas was the launch date, and the two men chose a night during the week beforehand to celebrate on their own. The crew would be going out, Capa knew, and tonight was his last true night of freedom. The heaviness in the air felt like their training of low-oxygen situations, made it hard for Capa to struggle to breathe as Eugene sat silently, his cigarette burning slowly down to ash between his fingers as he ignored it, let it waste away just as Capa worried he would do with himself with no one to tend to him. He'd all but harassed Irene to keep an eye on the man, liking her now more than ever before when she agreed unquestioningly, seeming to understand the bond between them without reading into it. Eugene's previous devotion to Vincent had made certain of that, he supposed.
"Here," he said, setting a glass of spiked egg nog in front of Eugene, shaking him from his reverie abruptly. The man looked up at a smiling Capa, wearing a Santa's hat and one of his own pullover sweaters, blue eyes as prominent as ever.
"I hate the holidays," Eugene said without real malice, playing his character well, to which Capa's smile widened, threatening full capacity again as it had been doing increasingly of late, despite the narrowing down of their time together. The physicist settled himself on the couch next to Eugene's wheelchair.
"Then you can't hate my present too much," he said, holding a thick notebook in his hand. He opened it to one of the pages in the middle, showing sketches he'd doodled of the path to the sun that they were taking.
"These are the exact trajectories for where we'll be, at all times. GATTACA has pictures, great camera detail on us. Irene's already told me she can get you clearance, but, for when you just want to stay in..." he glanced to the terrace, at the large box sitting there. "I got you a telescope so you can look for the little light blinking in the sky and know exactly where I am."
His blue eyes searched, looking for something, the reversal of roles not lost on Eugene as he stared at him. Slowly Capa closed the notebook, setting it aside, leaning in to stroke his hand through Eugene's hair, hovering close to his face.
"Thank you," Eugene murmured, just loud enough for the physicist to hear. "I got you something, too. It's over there," he nodded toward a chair, which held a neatly packed-and-sealed stack of something small, like cassette tapes. "But you can't open it until you're upstairs." And then he closed his eyes, ignoring the ache in his chest at the repetition of words he had said years ago.
"I'll make it back to you," Capa said, pressing his forehead against the other man's as if to will the information into his head.
"What if you don't?" Eugene's eyes opened, this time searching fiercely, and Capa understood. It wasn't a rhetorical question. "I won't have a life."
Capa didn't know what to say, fell back into old habits of being tongue-tied in the face of pressure, and bit his lip. "I will."
Their last night together was long, thanks to the sun's retreat from the horizon during the extended winter season, and they created their own warmth, both wordlessly willing the sun to never rise.
Robert Capa attended the formalities required for the Icarus II mission, donned his Santa cap and posed for the group picture of Christmas day before the launch, steadied himself in the chambers as they gained altitude and left behind a beloved planet called Earth, the sound of his crewmates far away as he clutched the handles, felt the propelling rockets below them burning. He closed his eyes, remembering Hafiz and imaginary red and blue chess pieces, eggs in the morning and scotch in the evening. Down below on the Sun's most inhabited satellite, Irene and Eugene watched the launch from Vincent and Eugene's terrace, her hand on his shoulder saying as much as the kiss of Capa's lips and the stroke of his cheek, the soulful blue of his eyes, before he had left.
The ocean rolled softly, lapping at the worn and smooth stones over and over, wind whistling in Capa's own personal paradise as he curled into a corner, closing his eyes and smelling the salt, swallowing the sea air, listened to the birds. His hands clutched tightly around a stack of something small, shaped like cassette tapes, his ears plugged with headphones as he listened to the soothing sound of Eugene's voice.
He'd heard so many of them now, curled up in his bed at night, wondering how many hours the man had invested in preparing this for him while he was away. There were bits that were pieces of his book, his dedication to Vincent, bits that were him reading some of their favourite poems or passages from books that he particularly loved, bits that were details of his life that he had never divulged, a life before Vincent, before his accident. He talked about swimming in the Strait of Dover and how right the water had felt around him, how the water had been his endless void of space and that was why winning the silver medal had shattered him, because he had failed himself at the one thing that meant anything. When he spoke about his life or read things he had written, he showed his extremes, his necessity for all or nothing, the pressure of perfection that had been bred into him that would never fully be removed, no matter how ill- fated his odds became. Capa knew this, had known this, as much as he wanted to avoid it, because it meant a fate he didn't want to accept.
Right at that moment, as the waves lapped gently as if they could crawl up and tickle his toes, he leaned on his folded arms over his knees and listened to Eugene speak to him directly, as he often did. "Robert. I know you have faith in this mission, because you have to. And I have faith in you, because you're right. There's no one better suited for the job. But I don't have faith in God, if he even exists, being kind enough-" the recording on the data file paused, crackled, Eugene's voice breaking, and then he sighed, "-to bring you back to me."
Slam. A fist hit the hefty clear side of the Earth Room, shattering the illusion of the tide that Capa had programmed in and turning it back to regular white. Capa uncurled himself from the corner, pulling his headphones down to look up at Mace's scowling face outside of the glass.
"Capa. Get off your ass and get in here. Kaneda's calling a meeting."
Capa sighed, gathering up his things. "Yeah, okay." The data files would be stored safely away, hidden well from the others. When Harvey talked about being homesick, Capa would be tight-lipped, resolute, solid.
"I wish I could take you to the sun with me." Capa's hasty, scribbled handwriting confessed to him. Only until after the mission had launched had Eugene bothered to thumb through the beginnings of the hefty notebook, expecting to find a physicist's notations and instead finding a man's inner thoughts and feelings, swirling between some sort of internal dialogue that was screaming to get out and then, eventually, notes to Eugene himself, some of them addressed, some of them simple. The one he was reading now was one of the last entries before the sketches resumed, the only words on the page as ash fell from Eugene's cigarette onto the blue-lined white, a wet teardrop interrupting the ink as he blinked furiously down at the scribbled sentence. He had stared at these pages so many times, found so many pieces of Robert Capa that he wasn't sure if a whole lifetime with the man would have allowed him to unlock. It was funny what a person revealed when they weren't sure if they were going to return, and Eugene found that uncertainty in the pages, despite the desperate hope to the contrary.
It was between the lines, this exchange between them, and Eugene turned to his laptop to survey his finished work. Yes, it had been about Vincent, and he had sent those parts to Capa to read about halfway through the mission, but the story about Capa himself was one he sent when the blinking light was difficult to see in the sky anymore, when the messages Capa sent back became less frequent, when Eugene could see the tenseness in his expressions just as easily as he could when he was on Earth. Although there had been secrets for years, Eugene opted for the truth this time, because while Jerome Morrow was a great man, Vincent Freeman was the greater man underneath him, and his story deserved to be told. The same was true of the godchild Robert Capa, designed by a god that he didn't believe in to inspire love in a man whose lease on life was on a month-by-month basis. Capa hadn't known what to say about the passages Eugene had written about him, but the wordlessness between them had always been understood. Almost always. They certainly didn't need words to express the affection that had developed between them, if there were even words for it.
So it was heavy to Eugene to read those words on the page. I wish I could take you to the sun with me. He had received the data file, the last data file, a short clip attached to the one Capa had sent to his parents and sister, explaining that they were entering the dead zone. And it was Capa's eyes that spoke volumes, the shift of his hands as he fidgeted, at a loss for what to say, but he looked directly into the camera during those last few seconds, reserved only for Eugene.
"Eugene. I told you I would come back. I... if I don't, just know that I made the sun shine a little brighter for you."
And Eugene understood, just as he understood the words on the page. Capa would never condone anything, not outright - he would want him to live on, even though he understood the pain that would come with it. Jerome Eugene Morrow could not bear the weight of two men's legacies, heavier than the bricks that were his deadweight legs. And Earth had finally lost its lustre completely, night and day blurring into the same whirl of colour. He read the words over once more and then slowly lifted himself, up out of the wheelchair and into the incinerator, closing the door with the silver medal around him and Capa's favourite blue shirt clutched in his hands.
Robert Capa activated the payload, against all odds, shielding himself from the light of the sun as it engulfed him, twisting and contorting space and time until he was shining, smiling, one with it. Jerome Eugene Morrow turned on the incinerator and closed his eyes, Vincent's words we're all stardust floating through his head until every particle of him drifted and realigned itself higher and higher, where it belonged.
RATING: PG-13.
AUTHOR: johnwilmot
CHARACTERS: Eugene Morrow/Robert Capa (GATTACA/Sunshine crossover!)
WORD COUNT: ~20000
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! (Warning: character death)
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.
Nothing changed and everything changed. Eugene could remember morning-afters back when he had had the function of his legs and had mingled with polite society as a member of it, infiltrated the strongholds of attractive men and women and fraternised with them accordingly. Those morning-afters had always been shy, awkward, uncomfortable at best, and Eugene had wanted little to do with them, pretended to sleep as a pretty brunette slipped on her heels from the night before and crept out the door. The morning after the distinctly unexpected night he had spent with Capa, Eugene awoke first, looking over at the thin shoulder, the layer of hair as the sun intruded upon them through the blinds, not penetrating enough to disturb. Eugene had dreamt that Capa had slipped away, first out of his arms and then into an awaiting pod outside that would take him to Titan to be with Vincent, and the ache in his arms was insurmountable. Seeing Capa laying there after such an event was an amazing relief, and his hangover was forgotten in lieu of turning on his side to snake his hand down the man's side, to lean his cheek against the skin on his shoulder. There was fragility to his touch, as if the morning light would break the spell, would take away the gentle and sweet Robert Capa from the night before and bring him back to the cold, harsh reality of things.
Happiness was never a constant. It was a fleeting moment that you had to grab at like a firefly, and if you tried to stuff it into a jar and have a collection of stars of your own, you would kill it. It could not be homegrown, was not a force from within when the world had so many stakes against you. That was the way it was, and Eugene was realising that he was paying for having everything handed to him in spades. True despair was to be handed everything and to have it snatched away. If he were smarter he never would have gone near Robert Capa, would have spat venom at the poor boy until he hated him. But Eugene had so little stock left on his life that he wanted to cheat his hand, wanted to grab what happiness it had left for him before he finally folded and cut out of the game early.
And life had afforded him happiness that morning when Capa had rolled over sleepily and then smiled at him, the wordlessness between them somehow not a problem at all. The sun was creeping further upward, but for once Capa's schedule did not revolve around it, and it seemed a long time before he crawled out of the bed to the shower.
Eventually he would leave for training, not speaking a word about whether it had made him late or not. And Eugene would return to his routine of writing on his long and unnamed project on his otherwise-neglected computer and smoke on the terrace and drink from the alcohol that Capa kept stocked even though he knew that the physicist disapproved. And he would look up at the stars as they began to appear in the sky and curse them evermore. And he would wait.
Some days there would be shared dinners, moments when Capa would come home early and they would talk about his training that day and laugh and pretend that it wasn't any kind of training that would take him away anywhere. They would play chess and occasionally, very occasionally, Eugene would win, and Capa would smile at him over the chess board, the surprise at Eugene's genius long since gone. They would read poetry, Capa lending his favourite titles, trying to be inconspicuous as he brought more and more of the books that Eugene hadn't read downstairs, although Eugene noticed it. Some late nights with a little alcohol they talked solemnly about what would happen when the mission finally launched, Capa trying to map out things for Eugene to do, ways for him to thrive while he was gone, and explaining with restrained emotions that they had more than enough resources to get them back to Earth safely. And Capa would wind up in Eugene's bed again with Eugene holding him close in desperation, burying his face into his hair and willing the alcohol to numb the loss he would experience in the future.
And some days would be cold. The winter chill had settled in, enough to keep Eugene off of the terrace late at night, which made him more nervous and ill-tempered than usual. He was seated in the living area with his laptop on his lap and a cigarette between his lips when Capa's return home was announced by the door. Eugene didn't look up, continued typing as Capa pulled off his coat, pausing and looking in Eugene's direction.
"I'm writing about Vincent," he said suddenly, unceremoniously, despite the fact that he had had his little project under lock and key for months, never speaking a word about it other than that it was 'coming along'.
Capa paused, aware of this change and trying to understand what it meant, actually walking to the kitchenette to find the bottle of scotch and pour himself a glass. Eugene was having a bad effect on him.
Not receiving any kind of response, Eugene watched him and then continued. "You know what Irene told me. She told me that one of the last things he said to her was that he found it ironic, for someone so desperate to leave the planet his whole life, that he'd finally found a reason to stay, right before his mission took off."
Capa looked over at him, their eyes meeting, his sad and reluctant and holding too much uncertainty for one man to carry, too tired to meet with Eugene's expectations.
"He loved her," Eugene continued, unable to help but sound aggressive when his emotions were high.
"I know," Capa said softly, turning away and looking anywhere but at Eugene, anywhere but outside at the stars. How could he not see the way Irene still silently mourned, was a shell a woman, and think inevitably of what would happen to Eugene if something should go wrong with Icarus II? How could he not see the similarities between the look in her eyes when she spoke of Jerome Morrow and the way Eugene looked at him when they lay under the sheets and stared at the stars outside the wide-pane windows together?
"Just tell them you won't. Tell them you'll botch the whole bloody thing up. Tell them you don't believe in it anymore, tell them... tell them anything." Eugene said, desperately close to pleading with Capa's back.
"You know I can't."
"You can. It's not your dream. Let it be someone else's job to save the world."
"We've been over this. I'm the most qualified. It's the most certain calculation."
"GATTACA's been wrong before. Let them be wrong again."
"Eugene," he said softly, turning. "I could never live with myself. I've prepared too long. No one else can do this."
It wasn't logic Eugene liked, but logic he had to accept.
December was colder than usual, and both men knew the reason as they huddled closer in their warmth. They had long since given up on the logic behind why they should keep their relationship "appropriate" and within normal boundaries, even if Capa was tight-lipped enough about it to not breathe a word to anyone and Eugene had no one to tell or that he wished to tell. All they could do now was pretend that neither of them was counting the days as Eugene smoked until he felt sick and Capa's teeth ground together as he stared distractedly at calculations long since finished, an exercise that was supposed to quiet his mind, make him feel more assured in the mission. He was still clinging to the hope of returning home, of doing what he was sent to do and coming back to Eugene's sniping sarcasm and pointed looks, his comments about his cooking just to get a rise out of him, his surprising literature collection and the soothing nature of his voice as he read to Capa in bed.
Christmas was the launch date, and the two men chose a night during the week beforehand to celebrate on their own. The crew would be going out, Capa knew, and tonight was his last true night of freedom. The heaviness in the air felt like their training of low-oxygen situations, made it hard for Capa to struggle to breathe as Eugene sat silently, his cigarette burning slowly down to ash between his fingers as he ignored it, let it waste away just as Capa worried he would do with himself with no one to tend to him. He'd all but harassed Irene to keep an eye on the man, liking her now more than ever before when she agreed unquestioningly, seeming to understand the bond between them without reading into it. Eugene's previous devotion to Vincent had made certain of that, he supposed.
"Here," he said, setting a glass of spiked egg nog in front of Eugene, shaking him from his reverie abruptly. The man looked up at a smiling Capa, wearing a Santa's hat and one of his own pullover sweaters, blue eyes as prominent as ever.
"I hate the holidays," Eugene said without real malice, playing his character well, to which Capa's smile widened, threatening full capacity again as it had been doing increasingly of late, despite the narrowing down of their time together. The physicist settled himself on the couch next to Eugene's wheelchair.
"Then you can't hate my present too much," he said, holding a thick notebook in his hand. He opened it to one of the pages in the middle, showing sketches he'd doodled of the path to the sun that they were taking.
"These are the exact trajectories for where we'll be, at all times. GATTACA has pictures, great camera detail on us. Irene's already told me she can get you clearance, but, for when you just want to stay in..." he glanced to the terrace, at the large box sitting there. "I got you a telescope so you can look for the little light blinking in the sky and know exactly where I am."
His blue eyes searched, looking for something, the reversal of roles not lost on Eugene as he stared at him. Slowly Capa closed the notebook, setting it aside, leaning in to stroke his hand through Eugene's hair, hovering close to his face.
"Thank you," Eugene murmured, just loud enough for the physicist to hear. "I got you something, too. It's over there," he nodded toward a chair, which held a neatly packed-and-sealed stack of something small, like cassette tapes. "But you can't open it until you're upstairs." And then he closed his eyes, ignoring the ache in his chest at the repetition of words he had said years ago.
"I'll make it back to you," Capa said, pressing his forehead against the other man's as if to will the information into his head.
"What if you don't?" Eugene's eyes opened, this time searching fiercely, and Capa understood. It wasn't a rhetorical question. "I won't have a life."
Capa didn't know what to say, fell back into old habits of being tongue-tied in the face of pressure, and bit his lip. "I will."
Their last night together was long, thanks to the sun's retreat from the horizon during the extended winter season, and they created their own warmth, both wordlessly willing the sun to never rise.
Robert Capa attended the formalities required for the Icarus II mission, donned his Santa cap and posed for the group picture of Christmas day before the launch, steadied himself in the chambers as they gained altitude and left behind a beloved planet called Earth, the sound of his crewmates far away as he clutched the handles, felt the propelling rockets below them burning. He closed his eyes, remembering Hafiz and imaginary red and blue chess pieces, eggs in the morning and scotch in the evening. Down below on the Sun's most inhabited satellite, Irene and Eugene watched the launch from Vincent and Eugene's terrace, her hand on his shoulder saying as much as the kiss of Capa's lips and the stroke of his cheek, the soulful blue of his eyes, before he had left.
The ocean rolled softly, lapping at the worn and smooth stones over and over, wind whistling in Capa's own personal paradise as he curled into a corner, closing his eyes and smelling the salt, swallowing the sea air, listened to the birds. His hands clutched tightly around a stack of something small, shaped like cassette tapes, his ears plugged with headphones as he listened to the soothing sound of Eugene's voice.
He'd heard so many of them now, curled up in his bed at night, wondering how many hours the man had invested in preparing this for him while he was away. There were bits that were pieces of his book, his dedication to Vincent, bits that were him reading some of their favourite poems or passages from books that he particularly loved, bits that were details of his life that he had never divulged, a life before Vincent, before his accident. He talked about swimming in the Strait of Dover and how right the water had felt around him, how the water had been his endless void of space and that was why winning the silver medal had shattered him, because he had failed himself at the one thing that meant anything. When he spoke about his life or read things he had written, he showed his extremes, his necessity for all or nothing, the pressure of perfection that had been bred into him that would never fully be removed, no matter how ill- fated his odds became. Capa knew this, had known this, as much as he wanted to avoid it, because it meant a fate he didn't want to accept.
Right at that moment, as the waves lapped gently as if they could crawl up and tickle his toes, he leaned on his folded arms over his knees and listened to Eugene speak to him directly, as he often did. "Robert. I know you have faith in this mission, because you have to. And I have faith in you, because you're right. There's no one better suited for the job. But I don't have faith in God, if he even exists, being kind enough-" the recording on the data file paused, crackled, Eugene's voice breaking, and then he sighed, "-to bring you back to me."
Slam. A fist hit the hefty clear side of the Earth Room, shattering the illusion of the tide that Capa had programmed in and turning it back to regular white. Capa uncurled himself from the corner, pulling his headphones down to look up at Mace's scowling face outside of the glass.
"Capa. Get off your ass and get in here. Kaneda's calling a meeting."
Capa sighed, gathering up his things. "Yeah, okay." The data files would be stored safely away, hidden well from the others. When Harvey talked about being homesick, Capa would be tight-lipped, resolute, solid.
"I wish I could take you to the sun with me." Capa's hasty, scribbled handwriting confessed to him. Only until after the mission had launched had Eugene bothered to thumb through the beginnings of the hefty notebook, expecting to find a physicist's notations and instead finding a man's inner thoughts and feelings, swirling between some sort of internal dialogue that was screaming to get out and then, eventually, notes to Eugene himself, some of them addressed, some of them simple. The one he was reading now was one of the last entries before the sketches resumed, the only words on the page as ash fell from Eugene's cigarette onto the blue-lined white, a wet teardrop interrupting the ink as he blinked furiously down at the scribbled sentence. He had stared at these pages so many times, found so many pieces of Robert Capa that he wasn't sure if a whole lifetime with the man would have allowed him to unlock. It was funny what a person revealed when they weren't sure if they were going to return, and Eugene found that uncertainty in the pages, despite the desperate hope to the contrary.
It was between the lines, this exchange between them, and Eugene turned to his laptop to survey his finished work. Yes, it had been about Vincent, and he had sent those parts to Capa to read about halfway through the mission, but the story about Capa himself was one he sent when the blinking light was difficult to see in the sky anymore, when the messages Capa sent back became less frequent, when Eugene could see the tenseness in his expressions just as easily as he could when he was on Earth. Although there had been secrets for years, Eugene opted for the truth this time, because while Jerome Morrow was a great man, Vincent Freeman was the greater man underneath him, and his story deserved to be told. The same was true of the godchild Robert Capa, designed by a god that he didn't believe in to inspire love in a man whose lease on life was on a month-by-month basis. Capa hadn't known what to say about the passages Eugene had written about him, but the wordlessness between them had always been understood. Almost always. They certainly didn't need words to express the affection that had developed between them, if there were even words for it.
So it was heavy to Eugene to read those words on the page. I wish I could take you to the sun with me. He had received the data file, the last data file, a short clip attached to the one Capa had sent to his parents and sister, explaining that they were entering the dead zone. And it was Capa's eyes that spoke volumes, the shift of his hands as he fidgeted, at a loss for what to say, but he looked directly into the camera during those last few seconds, reserved only for Eugene.
"Eugene. I told you I would come back. I... if I don't, just know that I made the sun shine a little brighter for you."
And Eugene understood, just as he understood the words on the page. Capa would never condone anything, not outright - he would want him to live on, even though he understood the pain that would come with it. Jerome Eugene Morrow could not bear the weight of two men's legacies, heavier than the bricks that were his deadweight legs. And Earth had finally lost its lustre completely, night and day blurring into the same whirl of colour. He read the words over once more and then slowly lifted himself, up out of the wheelchair and into the incinerator, closing the door with the silver medal around him and Capa's favourite blue shirt clutched in his hands.
Robert Capa activated the payload, against all odds, shielding himself from the light of the sun as it engulfed him, twisting and contorting space and time until he was shining, smiling, one with it. Jerome Eugene Morrow turned on the incinerator and closed his eyes, Vincent's words we're all stardust floating through his head until every particle of him drifted and realigned itself higher and higher, where it belonged.