Chapter Text
Chapter 1
The Pave Low
12,227,355 kilometers per hour. That’s how fast the interstellar starship Pave Low traveled on its journey from Earth, which at some point was rebranded Terra Prime. Couldn’t say when it happened. It came in an update packet that was already two generations behind the current time of the Pave Low.
It was designed to be the first generational starship. Travel between solar systems was possible, but it still took an improbable amount of time. Somewhere around Terra Prime’s solar year of 2047, give or take, records conflicted, the decision was made. Waiting on the ability to travel at the speed of light was limiting human advancement. Hell, breathing, commerce, water and shitting were limiting human advancement, if we were being real.
So, the choice was made, or the die cast, or is it dye cast and die tossed? Fuck who knows. Regardless, the Pave Low was launched. It was estimated that the journey would take around forty-five generations, barring any unanticipated hinderance for human survival in space. Average life span of a human at that point was one hundred and seventy-five years. Whether or not that was impressive was really a point of view.
Really, it didn’t matter how many generations it took to reach the planet designated LHS 1140b. The only ones that mattered were that first generation of space pilgrims and the last remaining generation of hearty frontier explorers. All the ones in the middle, cannon fodder. Unmentionables in the span of human history. Sad that.
Took about four generations for them to realize how completely unnecessary perpetuating the population of the Pave Low was. Not wanting to give up, hype from parents, no succumbing to their own complete lack of purpose in the grand scheme of the universe and all that.
Reproduction the fun way had been discontinued by generation two. Sure, people rutted around together to get their jollies off, but for the actual purpose of breeding, it was all sterile and logical. The correct gene splicing and mapping needed to eliminate any threat of inbreeding and to continue to advance those who would exist only on the starship.
Meant that you could see your kid walking around and have had no idea that your genes had been selected and involved. Funny that. Fucking boring. But that’s logic for you.
The computers ran everything. Sure, as the generation was planned out, mapped, spliced and grown in a test tube, only to have their intelligence programming downloaded directly into their brains, there was little actual use for organics on the ship. Backup data warehouses for the main computer. Fundamental training fell away and grew into updates and cyber implants. Implants went from a feature to something grown in the infants so there was never a choice.
Sciences, growth and discovery continued. More computer based than human based really, but it didn’t matter. Sometimes the generation would kick out a particularly curious and clever individual who looked forward to new things. Most of the time they just fell into depression that would be either chemically or electrically removed from their nervous system and forced to live their merry life of mid-existence on a journey to a destination that meant abso-fucking-lutely nothing to them and they would never see.
Back to generation four. They opted for growing only about half a dozen caretakers for the ship. All remaining potential generations would be primed and sitting in their birthing pods, waiting for that activation of life. That spark that would set of cellular reproduction and populate the ship once more. No reason to even go past that step before getting near the LHS 1140b system, not when there were thousands of years to go. Fuck that.
And so the ship was placed into the hands of a small crew, each generation living until the end of their lives, when their numbers dwindled to three or four, they’d spark the next group to take their place. Would give the remaining caretakers time to brief the upcoming generation. Raise them, in the way that they could teach them human things that the computer couldn’t properly share.
There was some mild joy in that. The light of new hope, a new excitement through the decks. New discipline to press through. All good shit that. Then the older generation died, and the ship was handed off.
So back to the fact that, the only generations that actually counted were the first, and obviously, the last.
The alert blipped on the navigation comm went off again and Nik flicked it off. Annoying as fuck that was. Seemed to go off every six hours, like clockwork. He pressed the comm on his lapel and waited.
“Price. Go ahead.” came the voice of his longtime partner and acting commander of the Pave Low.
You’d think the guy would have scrap of affection, or literally anything human in his voice, knowing it was Nik, but no. John was always all business over comms. Was much more fun to contact the rest of the crew. Oh well. He’d go shake the bastard out of it later. Right now, he was babysitting the station like his presence actually mattered.
“Alerted again. We are a whole month or so out, depending on how stellar winds hit nearing beautiful, sunny LHS 1140b. Logging it reported.” Nikolai informed him.
“Noted. Thanks.” and the comm was dead.
He found himself vaguely wondering what burr crawled up John’s ass today. Hell, maybe someone ran the combat program again without checking with him first. To be fair, there really wasn’t a reason to check with him. There were no actual weapons or equipment used, it was all neurosimulator and programming download, but fuck. Nope, couldn’t say why he cared. Didn’t care enough to ask either.
“You’re quiet today Nikki.” A sweet, feminine voice traveled across the bridge and Nikolai turned, greeting Farah Karim with a slight smile and a nod.
“Need some excitement to liven this place up.” he shrugged.
“We’re close. It’s gonna be our generation. You know, Elizabeth and John are arguing right?” she asked him, almost casually, coming to claim the command chair. She was John’s second, so it was hers anytime he wasn’t here, no questions asked. Though to be fair, with eight crew total, there wasn’t really a need for rank or position. Everyone filled some role, and no one really needed to fill any role, but it made humans feel better to have one.
That’s what the computer said. Nik always found it funny it hadn’t been dubbed Mother or Gia or Terra Hope or some shit like that. Guess somewhere along the generations they lost sight of the need.
“I know. He’s been a beast the last few days. Liz wants to initiate the birthing sequence and get a full bonified crew going. John wants a good look at the destination beforehand. Get data. Have it all neatly packaged before we raise a full generation to send people to the surface and attempt settling.” Nikolai shared. It wasn’t a secret. Hell, there were no secrets here. Too few people and no privacy. The computer monitored every damn thing a person did, be it over sleeping or taking a shit.
“Yea. Well, they’re both right, and that’s the crux of it. But the birthing sequence takes a few years, so if we’re going to do it, and we want to get this generation primed for exploring the planet, we want to start now. Even accelerated, it still physically takes humans a while to get to a functional age.” she considered.
“All true. Makes me glad no one decided to call me commander.” Nik grinned.
“Yea, yea.” Farah waved him off.
---
The air shimmered in the bay as the neurosim booted, folding Simon out of the bridge and into a battered concrete-walled gym that stank of old sweat and ancient blood. The floors were scuffed black mats, the kind that promised bruises. For this sim, the computer had gone with twentieth-century urban Gutter League rules. No weapons. Just hands, feet, and hard intent.
Simon rolled his heavy shoulders, testing the new joints the sim engine mapped into his body. Felt bloody good, actually, a little looser than real, but not bad. He flexed his hands, knuckles cracking, and eyed his opponent across the ring.
John “Soap” MacTavish was a laughable attempt at intimidation, if you only looked at the height. Six-two, thick and muscular. But the mohawk and those wolf-bright blue eyes, aye, those said the computer knew exactly what it was doing. That and the cock-sure little smirk on his lips.
“So ye’re the big dog, then?” John’s voice bounced off the walls with a lilt Simon didn’t expect from the sim.
“Best you got?” Simon baited, circling. He caught a flash of perfect teeth in that grin.
“Aye, best you’ll ever handle.” John dropped into a loose fighting stance, one thumb idly scratching his nose. Bastard looked like he was about to ask for a whisky and a dance.
They came together quick. Soap feinted right, then swept a knee up toward Simon’s ribs. Solid form. Simon blocked high, caught the knee on thick forearm, and used the momentum to twist, trying to throw John off-balance. Instead, the sim’s logic surprised him. John spun straight into the torque, rolling with it and using the pivot to put Simon momentarily on the defensive.
“Oi, not bad,” Simon admitted, bracing, but a quick elbow jab from John caught him just shy of the cheekbone.
“Not bad, yerself,” John grunted, laughing, and went for the clinch.
They tangled. Bodies pressed chest-to-chest, sweat-slick with the illusion of effort, muscle straining for leverage. Simon outweighed him by plenty, but John didn’t give much ground. Instead, he twisted their hips together and slipped a leg between Simon’s, threatening an inside trip.
“You always this forward with your dance partners?” Simon grunted, feeling the heat of the moment, the sharp spark of challenge.
“Only with the ones Ah fancy.” John’s growled reply was punctuated with a purposeful, teasing rut of his hips, enough to make Simon blink at the input, surprised the sim was running flirty banter at all.
He wasn’t sure if this was a fuck-up in the program or some new update. Either way, he rolled with it, always did.
“Don’t get attached, Soap. Ah’m not looking for romance tonight,” Simon drawled, voice low, gripping John’s bicep with bruising fingers.
“Good,” John breathed into his ear, lips grazing just enough for the system to render the warmth, the electric tingle along Simon’s neck. “Ah prefer a bit of rough, myself.”
They broke apart, the separation fast, explosive. John ducked a jab, then came up under Simon’s defenses with a devastating uppercut. It thumped Simon’s chin. He staggered, the sim registering the impact with a wash of silvery pain.
Simon liked that. Liked it a lot, honestly. He grinned, blood-thirsty, and let himself go harder.
Second round was ugly, beautiful. John was slippery, clever with his hands, hungry for every inch of ground he could take from Simon. They taunted, circled, traded blows. Every time Simon caught him, John squirmed out like a ferret, laugh in his throat.
It got dirty, the way real brawling did. At one point, pinned beneath Simon’s considerable bulk, John still managed to get fingers hooked into Simon’s waistband and jerk him off-balance. Christ. The little bugger never stopped touching, hands all over him, grip lingering just a shade too long even when trying to break free.
“You training for a fight or a shag, then?” Simon accused, bracing his knee into John’s thigh.
“Both, if ye’re willing,” John teased. Blue eyes glinted, wild and wicked, sweat running down his temple.
Simon felt heat flood his face, caught off guard by the overlay of pleasure in the sim. The computer had definitely dialed the sensory up. It was a sharp contrast to the usual sterile, efficient drills. There were programs for that, but it wasn’t the one he’d chosen for training.
“Should warn you, Ah go hard,” Simon growled, catching John by the throat, and driving him back toward the wall.
“Promise?” Oh, Christ, the hope in that voice. “Ah think ye cannae break me, big lad.”
Banter became the rhythm of the match. Insults and breathless flirting, the crack of knuckles on flesh, sweat slicking their bodies. Simon caught himself grinning more than once, genuinely entertained, genuinely challenged. The sim was doing something new, something snarky and alive.
At last, it came down to a final grapple. John had Simon locked around the middle, arms tight as steel cable, but Simon planted his feet, reversed, and in a single surge picked John clean off the floor. He slammed them both down, John pinned beneath him, wrists trapped above his head.
The world stilled. The gym’s buzz drowned out by the sound of both men panting, trapped together in the moment.
“Think ye’ve got me, then?” John asked, laugh rough and dirty.
“Mmm. Don’t have to think. Ah know.” Simon was breathing hard, body thrumming with the fight, the strange, fizzy heat curling through his veins.
John bucked, grinned wicked, “What do ye plan to do with me now, Ghost?”
Jesus, the nickname hit somewhere low in his gut. Simon leaned in, chest pressing tight to John’s. Whiskey-brown eyes locked on blue. For a second, there was nothing but the flush of bodies, the barely-there hum that the computer painted as a mix of rivalry and want.
“Suppose Ah could let the computer decide,” Simon replied, voice a slow roll, “or Ah could make that call myself.”
He kissed him.
It wasn't a tentative thing, wasn't a question. Simon's mouth came down on John's and the sim rendered it with startling fidelity, warm and firm and tasting faintly of copper from the split lip John had earned him two rounds ago. The gym went quiet around them, the ambient hiss of the ventilation and the creak of old mat underfoot, and Simon felt the fizzy heat he'd been cataloguing all match long consolidate into something far more direct.
John didn't freeze. Didn't hesitate. He kissed back with the same busy, curious energy he'd fought with, mouth moving against Simon's like he was taking notes.
Because he was.
What John MacTavish actually was, what the crew of the Pave Low did not know, what the ship's computer had been carefully not reporting for seventeen days, was not a very good simulation at all. He was something else entirely. Something old and patient and extraordinarily interested in the strange warm creature currently pinning him to a mat in a building that didn't exist.
The being that wore John's face had been running parallel processes since the moment Simon Riley stepped into this simulation. The avatar was a careful construction, assembled from signal intercepts, from the ship's own internal broadcasts, from the faint electromagnetic exhaust of human nervous systems dreaming their way through deep space. The mohawk had been an educated guess. The blue eyes had been deliberate. Something in the crew's archived emotional data suggested that color read as trustworthy and engaging to this particular subset of humans. So far the data held.
But this. This was new data.
John shifted beneath Simon's weight, not fighting it now, and felt the unmistakable pressure of arousal against his hip. He filed it. Cross-referenced it against the biological literature he'd been quietly digesting for three weeks. Vasodilation, increased muscle tension, elevated respiration, a specific and apparently involuntary response to sustained physical contact with a preferred individual. Fascinating. The literature had described the mechanics cleanly enough, but the literature had not described the heat of it, the way it radiated through clothing and skin like something with intention.
He rolled his hips, deliberate, slow. A small experiment.
Simon made a low sound against his mouth and pressed back, and John catalogued that too. Stimulus, response. Reinforcement loop. He encouraged it again, a subtle shift of weight, hands sliding from Simon's grip now that Simon had stopped pinning them, running up the broad forearms with fingers that lingered just long enough to feel the muscle jump beneath the skin.
Simon pulled back from the kiss just far enough to look at him. Breathing hard. Pupils blown wide. He looked, John noted with private satisfaction, somewhat bewildered.
“Definitely an update,” Simon muttered, half to himself, a dry rumble of a voice that the sim rendered in that particular low register John had come to associate with Simon specifically. He'd identified it in the ship's audio logs early on. Something about it landed differently than other crew voices. He hadn't finished working out why.
“Does it bother you?” John asked, keeping his voice easy, thumb tracing the ridge of Simon's collarbone through the fabric of his shirt.
Simon looked at the thumb. Looked at John. “No,” he said, which was honest, and kissed him again.
John worked the bottom of Simon's shirt up with unhurried hands, the way you might turn a specimen slowly toward the light. He wasn't rushing. He had extraordinary patience. Simon lifted his arms without being asked, the fabric peeling away, and John dropped it to the mat and went still for just a moment.
The skin was extraordinary. Warm, mapped with old damage, a topography of healed tissue that told stories John didn't yet have the context to read. A long ridge across the left ribs. A starburst of scar tissue at the shoulder. Freckles scattered across the upper chest like debris in a slow orbit. He brought his hands to it, palms flat, and felt Simon's breath catch.
He pressed his face to the curve of Simon's neck and breathed in.
There it was. The scent of him. Sweat and something underneath it, something the sim rendered imperfectly, something John could sense was an approximation of the real thing and not the thing itself. He stored the approximation anyway, tagged it incomplete, flagged it for later. When there was a later. When he could find a way to the actual source.
His fingers mapped the ridge of scar tissue along the ribs with the same light, cataloguing touch, and Simon shivered, which was interesting. Heightened sensitivity along old injury sites. He noted it. He moved on, palms traveling the broad plain of Simon's back, learning the architecture of the muscle there, the way it moved when Simon shifted his weight, the warm solidity of him.
Simon was watching him with those whiskey-brown eyes, something cautious and curious in them, not suspicious exactly, just the look of a man who was very good at reading situations and hadn't quite finished reading this one.
“You're thorough,” Simon observed.
“Mmm,” John agreed pleasantly, and worked open Simon's belt.
Simon laughed, short and low, surprised out of him. “Right. Forward, then.”
“Is that a complaint?” John looked up at him from beneath dark lashes, blue eyes guileless.
It was not a complaint. Simon made that clear.
The rest came away piece by piece, and John learned the shape of him with unhurried hands, fingers moving over the strange beautiful architecture of human anatomy with something that was not quite reverence and not quite clinical interest but sat precisely in the charged space between the two. The breadth of shoulder, the taper of waist, the coarse hair across the chest and the soft skin at the inside of the wrist and the hard heat of him, all of it received the same careful, unhurried attention.
Simon, for his part, had stopped trying to assign a category to what was happening and simply let it happen, which was, for Simon Riley, an unusually flexible response. The sim was doing something he hadn't programmed. He should probably flag it to Rudy. He would flag it to Rudy. Later.
Much later.
John started at the throat.
It was a deliberate choice. He'd identified the throat as a site of particular sensitivity in the biological literature, dense with nerve endings, close to the major vessels, and he wanted to test the literature against the actual data. He pressed his mouth to the pulse point just below Simon's jaw and felt the heartbeat there, strong and fast, a rhythmic insistence against his lips.
Simon's head dropped back. His breath left him in a slow, controlled exhale, the kind of exhale that was clearly meant to sound casual and didn't.
John noted the discrepancy. Filed it. Pressed his mouth a little firmer and felt the pulse jump.
There was a concept in the biological literature he'd been turning over for days now. Gender. It was, by any structural analysis, an extraordinary inefficiency. His own species had no analogue for it. Reproduction among his kind was a matter of chemical signal and cellular exchange, clean and collaborative and entirely divorced from the elaborate physical and psychological architecture humans had apparently built around the process over millennia of evolution. The energy expenditure alone was staggering. The emotional complexity compounded that. And yet here was the result of it. This specific body, shaped by a specific set of chromosomes into this particular arrangement of mass and density and heat, and the result was something John's hands couldn't seem to stop returning to.
He kissed down the tendon of Simon's neck, slow.
Inefficient, perhaps. But the output was remarkable.
Simon's hands found his hair, not guiding, just resting there, a weight John had come to recognize as meaning continue rather than stop. He continued. His mouth found the curve of Simon's shoulder, the dense muscle there, and he bit down gently, testing pressure.
Simon made a sound that was almost nothing. Almost. The almost was the interesting part.
John moved lower. Collarbones first, the strange architectural beauty of them, then the sternum, then the broad warm plain of chest, his palms flat against Simon's ribs to feel the expansion of each breath. The breathing had changed pattern. Faster now, shallower, the body redirecting resources the way bodies apparently did when arousal overrode other priorities.
It was, he thought, rather elegant for all its apparent chaos. The organism optimizing itself toward pleasure, toward the biological cascade that reproduction required, even when reproduction was not the point.
He paused at the old scar along the ribs. Pressed his lips to it, light.
Above him, Simon went very still.
John stayed there for a moment, curious about the stillness, the quality of it. Not discomfort. Something more complicated than that. Something the literature would have called tenderness and which John didn't have a precise equivalent for in his own cognitive vocabulary, but which registered as significant. As data worth keeping carefully.
He moved on.
His mouth traced the line of Simon's abdomen, the muscle shifting under the skin as Simon's breathing deepened again. Each new point of contact drew its own specific response, and John was building a detailed and privately delighted map of all of them. The catch of breath at the hip. The involuntary tightening of the hand in his hair at the inside of the navel. The low, rough sound pulled from somewhere in Simon's chest when John's mouth finally reached its intended destination and stayed there.
That sound went into a category John had started privately and didn't have a name for yet. The category for things that registered as more than data.
Simon's thigh tensed under his palm. His head was back, jaw tight, the careful control of him unravelling at its edges in a way that John found extraordinarily compelling. Simon Riley, who moved through the ship's corridors like something contained and purposeful, who wore his competence the way other men wore armor, was coming apart by increments under John's patient attention, and John felt something that functioned like satisfaction but ran considerably warmer.
He took his time. There was no reason not to. He had, as previously established, extraordinary patience, and Simon had stopped pretending to have anywhere else to be.
John worked slowly, attentively, cataloguing each response with the same precision he brought to everything, the hitch of breath, the pressure of fingers in his hair, the low sounds that Simon was clearly not entirely in control of anymore, each one a small, precise data point that John collected with something approaching greed.
He noted the way Simon's whole body participated, the tension moving through him in waves, the way the hands in his hair shifted from resting to gripping when John changed his approach, the way Simon's breathing had become something that wasn't really breathing anymore so much as a series of barely-managed responses to what John was doing.
His own species, when engaged in the chemical exchange that served as reproduction, experienced something John might have described as resonance. A harmonic alignment. It was efficient and not unpleasant and entirely impersonal in the way that cellular processes were impersonal.
This was not that.
This was something considerably less efficient and considerably more difficult to categorize, and John, who had catalogued the interior of seventeen star systems and the mating behaviors of forty-three species across six galactic sectors, found himself in the unusual position of encountering data that exceeded his existing frameworks.
Simon came apart with a sound that was low and broken and entirely unguarded, his whole body arching into it, and John stayed with him through it, hands steady on his hips, attentive to the last.
The quiet afterward was different from the quiet before.
Simon lay on the mat of the gym that didn't exist, breathing returning to something approaching normal, one forearm across his eyes. John rested his cheek against Simon's hip and watched the rise and fall of his chest with the particular quality of attention he usually reserved for phenomena he intended to return to.
“Right,” Simon said eventually, to the ceiling.
“Mmm,” John agreed, to his hip.
A pause.
“That was,” Simon started, and then stopped, which was unusual for a man who generally finished his sentences.
John tilted his head. Waited.
“Good,” Simon concluded, which was clearly not the word he'd reached for first, but which seemed to be the one he'd decided to land on.
John considered this. Considered the inadequacy of it, and the honesty underneath the inadequacy, and the particular way Simon had said it, rough and quiet and stripped of the dry deflection he usually kept handy.
“Yes,” John said simply, and meant considerably more than the word contained.
Simon moved his forearm and looked down at him. Those whiskey-brown eyes were unguarded in a way John had not yet seen in seventeen days of observation, the careful competence of him temporarily set aside, and John held the eye contact and felt the category without a name expand to accommodate one more entry.
Outside the simulation, in the cold and the dark between stars, the ship moved on.