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cetaceans-pls · 7 years

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you and me are drifting into outer space

So the thing is that, water is important, has always been important, likely always be imporant, because people are more water than not and it's important the same way blood is important... it's almost the same as blood in that way, sort of, yes.

The thing is, water is vital, and to some, so is laundry. It's hard to manage on a Space Utility Vehicle (SUV for short, the world is full of people with frankly awful taste in humour). The engine room is extremely hot and toasty, great for drying, but dripping water on top of quite delicate machinery has been agreed upon by one and all to be a truly terrible idea. What to do? Morale will suffer a most awful blow, without clean-smelling fluffy fresh laundry?

In the thousands of years between the first invention of the loincloth, probably, and now, where popping off in a small vehicle to cross galaxies ain't no thing, man has managed to come up with some ideas regarding water-less laundry. They're all awful, frankly.

So there he is, Mako-chan, man of the hour every hour (if you ask Rin), with a bundle of warm, damp clothes, most of it sheets (it's, ah, been a sheet-y day). After much trial and error on this little camper van hurtling through the universe, they've figured out that the best place to deal with laundry is in the airlock. The ambient heat from the nearby engine room is enough to dry the clothes, and clotheslines strung near the roof (?) and the floor (?) meant that with enough pegs the free-floating desire of fabric in 0 gravity can be wrangled to stay in approximately one place.

The airlock being just one measly door away from the endless wide open expanse of empty space, it's a firm and fast house rule that anyone who wants to go out into it must do so in a suit, regardless of whether or not they were planning on leaving the vehicle. Better safe than sorry, in this cheap, 2nd-hand piece of shit that occasionally rattles so heavily it's like the dying breath of a star, and with a worrying tendency to just turn the heating off when they go into the shadow of a planet.

Auto-pilot is left well alone; one time on their way to Alpha Centauri they found themselves in the King Crab cluster, a hundred thousand gazillion miles away from where they were headed. It made the phone call to the friends waiting to celebrate Makoto's birthday in a really quaint and lovely sea(?) side resort excrutiatingly embarrasing.

But that's a different story. Now Makoto is gently floating in the airlock, bangs flying all over the place in his helmet because possibly vanity but more likely laziness meant he's once again neglected to put on his hairnet or at least pin his hair back before getting suited up. He grabs one end of a sheet, kicks off, and gently catches himself on the line close to what's been arbitrarily designated as the roof. It's a slow, arduous process, but they're not in a rush. Laundry needs to be hung; this is good place for it;

They are effectively immortal.

Rin watches from the little porthole that looks into the airlock. He was told by the woman that sold the SUV to them that portholes were generally a bad idea in space mobiles, for obvious reasons, but the previous owner evidently had a fondness for orgies and voyeuristic tendencies a mild wide. The inside of the airlock had been covered in shag carpeting (lord god, the things that last the longest are only the absolute worst kinds of things), where a horde of sentient beings could go at it while the owner watched, and clean up was just a matter of opening the air lock and letting space suck it up.

A few hundred years ago, there were enough birds in the world that having one crap all over your windscreen was a commonplace occurrence. Rin has nightmares, sometimes, of piloting this old junker and having something gelationous and oddly coloured going SpLAt! on the window. He knows most of space is just... yeah, space, but he also knows that live long enough and everything is possible.

After all, haven't he and Makoto been privy to a whole bunch of stuff? It's been, mmm, what? 2000 years, maybe? The first few hundred are a bit fuzzy, when the concept of time was a bit fuzzy, and Rin doesn't spend much time thinking about such things (there's just too many for him to account for absolutely all of them, by this point).

Whatever his feelings of grave disgust regarding the carpeting that had taken him days to rip out, the porthole, it's a nice touch. Makoto looks so very, very sweet, whistling an old lullaby that has been around for much of modern civilisation, floating around with long limbs akimbo, occasionally bumping into walls and going Oof! even though there is no way in hell it actually hurts.

Rin wonders if he's going to miss this, when the time comes. After all, if all goes well, this is the absolute last voyage they'll ever take. What will happen to them? Other than the supposedly sweet release of death, of course. The concept of the afterlife is still something of an enigma, even with thousands of years of progress. After all, how can one interpret the data once the brain is dead?

There're lots and lots of questions that deal with mortality, no big surprise there. Things were a lot better but also a lot worse near the start of their lives, different as they were. Death... was more absolute. When was it that people stopped folding charms into burial clothes and going good luck with what comes next, yes, and moved instead to trying desperately, so very desperately to prolong it.

It's not worth it; outliving everyone, almost. Seeing everything that has ever been familiar to you age and crumble and eventually disappear. Some nights, Rin's tongue dreams of fruits that have been extinct for so long that they may as well have never experienced.

It's... not the worst, if you're not alone. He's been besotted with Makoto for literally thousands of years, and if they'd died any sooner than what they're planning to now, this most precious spectacle of this quite large (for way, way back then, a little on the stockier side for this day and age where babies can be born in space and never touch down on a solid planet go long, lanky and seem to comprise mostly of stretched-out limbs) man tumbling head over heels in his vicious fight against wet cloth.

Death. They've had so long to get used to it, and yet Rin still finds himself faintly scared of it. Being scared of something has never stopped him from going after things, it often works the other way, terror bringing wings to his feet to head on right into it. It's different, for Makoto, who has been around for even longer than him, and has a stronger sense of fear of many many things embedded in him than in Rin.

However, the things that scare Makoto seem to be quite limited, restricted to carbon-based life forms and folk beliefs of spirits. There are no spirits in space; running by the popular theory of ghosts, it's awfully hard to form strong attachments that go beyond death to inky black nothingness. There are no be-fanged monsters creeping behind you, no snakes hissing and lying in wait.

In space, where Rin fears that there is too much of nothing, Makoto is beautifully calm of just not enough.

Shit, voyeur portholes and the search for the opposite of the fountain of youth. It's all a bit too much to handle some days; a lot of the things that go on in their lives are like that. Rin pulls himself away from the airlock and shuffles to the tiny kitchenette area; no point being maudlin, he's been told a hundred times, a hundred thousand times by now, maybe, that he's awful company when he's miserable.

#suv au #free! iwatobi swim club #tachibana makoto #rin matsuoka #makorin

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