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Sunshine: Interlude	By : cuvirgin Category: S through Z > Sunshine Views: 1269 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own the fandom of Sunshine; I didn’t create the characters, setting or the film itself. I don’t profit from writing or publication of this work of fanfiction. Names & likenesses of copyrighted characters used in a fictitious manner

Chapter List
- 1-Sunshine: Interlude
- 1
Disclaimer:
Sunshine (2007 movie), characters of Cassie and Capa, are originally creations
of writer Alex Garland and director Danny Boyle. I do not profit from the
writing or publication of this work of fanfiction. Actual names and likenesses
of copyrighted characters are used in a fictitious manner.

Author’s
Note: I’ve sought to write this interlude of
intimacy as though it could have actually occurred in the movie itself, seeing
as it had been the director’s intent originally to include such a scene. But
rather than employ it, (though according to him it would’ve incorporated these
same characters and taken place in the Oxygen Garden,) he’d
decided that sex in space would have been ‘embarrassing’. And, quite honestly,
I think I prefer the film in its duration and focus without the romantic
subplot. Still, I couldn’t help imagining what such a scene would have
involved, since I love watching Murphy do love scenes. So even though Boyle did
without, I hope that I’ve succeeded in writing what would have been acceptable.
I hope my slight character adjustments upon the personalities of those involved
can be forgiven, for the sake of making the scene plausible. Furthermore,
despite the comparison between his and Cassie’s MySpace profiles, I have
indicated that Capa was the youngest member of the crew, since that is what I
initially believed to be the case when first writing after viewing the movie,
and I think this also makes more sense because Kaneda’s backstory indicates
that he felt paternalistic towards the physicist. (WARNING: SPOILER ALERT! I
advise you read the character backstories before continuing to read this story.
The backstories can be found at http://web.archive.org/web/20071210210821/www.sunshinedna.com/?p=247.)
Please consider these changes creative license. Enjoy!

Sunshine:
Interlude

Capa’s head rolled to face Cassie. “No, I’m
not scared.”

She looked at him after his admission for
only a moment longer, then turned her head with a bit of nonchalance to look
back out the window of the control room. “I am.”

He pushed off the wall of instruments,
stepping forward to align his feet with where she was standing at the window.
“Wouldn’t Searle have helped you with that?”

“Maybe it didn’t take you much or even any
time at all to reach that conclusion. That acceptance. But I still need time,” Cassie kept her arms crossed, but showed her
helplessness by dropping her head to look down at her feet. “And there’s none.”

Capa took her words literally, socially
uncertain of how to console her but wanting to do so anyways. “So what would
you do if you had more time?” It was a logical question utilizing the potential
variable presented.

Despite the fact that her last words had
begun with a hint of malice, a bit of an insult to his involuntarily selfish
consideration of the well-being of others—an unfortunate side-effect of his
intense focus on science and generally unsociable mannerisms—she hadn’t meant
for him to take her seriously. And by his query, he obviously hadn’t. He’d
actually done the opposite of what an offended individual would do, and
displayed further interest in what she had to say. But for the moment, not
expecting his response or predicting he’d even have something to say to her
last words, her previous statement remained her last words. Until something
she’d forgotten completely about over the last sixteen months they’d been on
this mission popped into her brain. “Cheesecake.”

Capa didn’t think he’d heard her right,
blinking to turn his awed gaze away from the payload outside the window to look
at her again. “What?”

“Not just eating it, but sitting and
smelling it as it’s being prepared,” Cassie’s crossed arms tightened around
herself, as if she imagined the delicious dessert’s aroma enveloping her. Her
lids shut as her eyes rolled back in her head in transcendent memory and a warm
smile graced her lips. “And then having it served up to you with fresh cut
strawberries washed in cold, cold water, and drizzled with the richest natural
acacia honey money can buy.” She licked her lips in anticipation, nearly
moaning aloud in remembrance of the taste as she opened her eyes again. Her
sideways glance at her crewmate caught him scratching the back of his head with
his eyebrows upraised, in a look and gesture of nervous incomprehension. She
had the feeling he wanted to laugh outright at her. “Okay then, what is it that
you’d do?”

He quickly looked to her, mouth a bit agape
as he caught her offended tone and was at his own loss to put forth a
reasonable memory. “Admire the night sky.”

Now she felt like she’d laugh herself, the
first thing entering her head the fact of his irony in his statement,
considering that they were being transported through space, so all around them
technically was night sky. But she held back her urge, as the second thought
that entered her mind was the reality that the night sky was not what
surrounded them, but what they witnessed from Earth. The very first time any of
the crewmembers had ever lay eyes on the darkened sky was from a stance upon
the land of the third planet from the Sun, looking with craned necks straight
upwards. While they’d have felt so small and insignificant standing on home
ground and gazing up and outwards into the vastness of space, speckled as it
was with alien lights but providing a limitless sight beyond into the history
of the Universe, they’d been surrounded by familiar aspects: outdoor trees and
buildings constructed by fellow members of mankind. Yet even those recognizable
life forms and creations had been alien, growing from the elements that came
from the existence of stars: stardust. Indeed, all of life upon their
homeplanet was due to what was cast off from the residents of the night sky
they, as young initial witnesses, would so fear and revere in their distance
and power. So inevitably, with the Earth’s closest star threatening to give off
the last of its dust within their own lifetimes, the crew had realized their
significance after all: to commit themselves to assist in the rebirth of a
member of the Universe, thereby ensuring the continued existence of the only
thing they were completely certain of against the vastness of space. “How would
you do that?”

He’d since turned to look back out the
window, as though in consideration of her mind’s musings. His cheeks inflated
and forced a breath out through the slit of his lips in a sort of sigh as he
shoved his hands into the pockets of their issue sky blue cotton pants. Then a
sudden energy injected itself into his words, “When I was still in school, on
hot nights I couldn’t sleep indoors. So I’d take my comforter out of its
storage and go up to the dorm’s flat rooftop, and fall asleep on the blanket
under the stars.”

Cassie admired Capa’s reminiscence, his
lapse in composure as he actually smiled and slowly closed his eyes in
remembrance as she had in recalling her favourite dessert. Though his face was
turned away from her to look straight out the window, she could see his eyes
moving beneath their lids. She knew the movement as she’d seen it when she’d
sit in his room with him as he slept, and knew then from the rapid eye movement
that he’d been dreaming of falling into the surface of the Sun. But right now
he was wide awake, and his eyes swam slowly under the skin and eyelashes, as
though the darkness they saw was the space he described adoring, and his eyes
were roving to gaze upon the remembered stars. But then when he opened his eyes
again, she regretted the decision as he did making it, for his face fell into
sadness to see not the indigo darkness, but instead the core of the payload,
located on the other side of the glass he stood before.

“Is that what got you first interested in
Dark Matter?” Cassie attempted to cheer him by getting him onto the topic that
so enthralled him.

While the sadness didn’t immediately
dissipate from his countenance, it melted into his introspective grimace,
involuntarily cutting him off from her interest. He may not have meant it, but
it really was the best condition he found himself to work under. So he took a
step backwards, and turned himself completely away from her as he wandered back
towards the instrument panel he’d previously leaned against when he told her he
had no fear. He needed his silence, the thought that he was alone to work
without possibility of interruption, to arrive at the conclusion he sought.
Arriving at the panel one hand slipped from its pocket, to examine with splayed
fingers the exponentially numerous buttons and knobs and triggers, one for each
star in the sky it seemed. But these mechanisms, a contrast to the violence of
the spawn of nebulae, required his interest, to instigate a man-engineered
interruption that was constructed of familiar stardust. If the Universe had
been left to its own devices, it certainly, if the fate of the Sun were proof
of the eventuality, would be lonely. And despite what others may have deemed
obvious, Capa’s tendency really wasn’t to be so physically alone.

He needed to remind himself of his true
reasons for all of this, to get his mind back on topic, and turned back to look
at Cassie. He found that she had followed his meander, her head turned so her
eyes could remain locked to him even as she remained still standing at the
window with arms crossed. But his sudden attention on her again made her
quickly look away, so as not to give away how interested she really was in his
answer, but not to seem so desperate to seem disinterested: only slowly did her
head rove down and then turn back to face the window. Once she faced away from
him, she didn’t mind that her reflection in the glass, were he to pay that
close of attention, showed that she was looking out the corner of her eye, and
at the reflection of Capa in the adjacent window.

“Yes, I think so,” he agreed. “I’d learned
that that darkness was so vast; I couldn’t believe that it was utterly empty.
If that were true, being on Earth would seem so...lonely.”

Cassie caught herself smiling in her own
reflection before she’d realized that the corners of her mouth had upturned.
“How sentimental of you. But Earth isn’t all bad, you know. I did enjoy the
cheesecake.”

It was his turn to smile as he recalled how
he’d attempted to hold back his mirth as he witnessed her relishment of her
memory of the sweet dessert moments ago. He crossed his arms and turned to lean
and press his back to the metal wall astride the instrument panel. He let his
head lean back, too, resting the top of the back of his head against the cool
stud as his eyes drifted shut. He had the feeling Cassie had more to say, and
besides, he wanted to hear her sweet, purposeful voice some more without
interruption.

“That and a good book,” she now turned her
body around to face him, leaning her backside against the panel beneath the
window, but keeping her arms crossed as she smirked as if to challenge what
else he might say is worthy of being missed.

Now he did laugh, dropping his chin and
pulling his head forward so it didn’t rest on the wall any longer. He opened
his eyes to give her a sceptical look. “I thought that’s what you brought with
you in your personal kit-bag?”

Cassie shrugged. “I’ve read better,” her hands
crept up her own upper arms to cup her shoulders, causing her to hunch forward
a bit, a contradiction as a gesture of being cold to the sensuous smile he saw
grow across her face. “Especially while relaxing in a long, hot bath.”

“Ah, now that’s what I expected you to
say,” he laughed again at how visible her emotions were, admiring her ease and
honesty.

“And what you admitted to is also what I
expected you to say,” she sounded like she was scolding him. “Does everything
have to do with space with you?”

He squinted a little in slight annoyance of
her hitting the nail on the head; however, she’d thrown her hammer a bit
off-angle, and instead bent the nail. “No...I also like Belgian waffles,” his
irritated pout swelled into a wide grin as her head jostled a bit backwards on
her neck in her disbelief, and she looked up at him from beneath her eyebrows
in a sceptical way. He continued to prove it to her, “With cinnamon,” he
considered, “and cirrus dollops of thick whipped cream.”

Cassie could only nod her head in complete
agreement. “You’re competing with my cheesecake.”

“Not at all,” Capa quickly denied. Then he
realized something and his eyebrows jumped to make use of the wit. “I never
enjoyed the waffles while relaxing in a long, hot bath.”

Cassie’s laughter sputtered and then burst
outright, forcing her to bend forward and drop her head to let its gravity draw
it out, her shoulders shaking. “Oh, my,” once she’d nearly finished and
straightened her back, she uncrossed her arms to wipe her humourful tears away
with the sides of her index fingers. “Now that’s
something we haven’t had enough time for: a well-timed punch line.”

He realized he was smiling as he caught his
own reflection in the window in the wall alongside the one he leaned against.
It surprised him to also realize that the smug look on his face was not
actually due to pride at having made a witty retort. Rather, the smile was in
his enjoyment of her enjoyment of his quickness. She looked do happy when she
laughed, a circumstance he had noticed early on when he’d met her for the first
time. All the crew members of Icarus II had been made aware of one another
before ever meeting: by means of reading up on their assigned crew, of each’s
status on the team, and personal histories and accolades that warranted their
selection for this momentous world-altering endeavour. On paper, Cassie had
been all militaristic vernacular, painting a picture for him of her as a
dedicated and regimented woman. He’d never dreamed that she wouldn’t mind her
own tendency to wear her heart on her sleeve. But he understood that that
aspect about her was what made him admire her so. It couldn’t have been easy
for her to have subjected herself to the air force’s rigors, and yet maintain
her character that marked her as kind and loving. He hadn’t prepared himself to
effortlessly be charmed by her immediate intentions to be friends.

Despite his cheer over her cheer, Capa was
at a loss over what to say next. Because watching Cassie smile, and listening
to her laugh reminded him of the happiest he’d ever been, and that memory
reminded him he may never get to re-experience that happiest time again. Since
the happiest he could recall being had been acting as uncle to his sister’s
children, and hearing them laugh and play and enjoy life. A life they would not
realize unless he followed through with this mission to preserve the means of
their world continuing its existence. Now he fell silent at the thought, that
if the Icarus II couldn’t meet up successfully with the Icarus I, there would
definitely be no chance of him hearing his niece’s and nephew’s laughter
firsthand ever again. And a wry smirk at the irony that he could be sacrificing
himself to maintain the reality, though all he had left for himself was memory
and possibly certainly no potential to know the reality again for himself,
twisted at the corners of his mouth. Contradicting the tears he felt beginning
to well up.

Luckily, he’d had his head lowered in his
humour at Cassie’s mirth, so could shake his head to try and distribute the
sadness evenly over the surfaces of his eyes as he raised his head to look at
her again, hiding his emotion. But she, too, had fallen silent at his silence,
and he should’ve realized that one doesn’t readily wear their heart on their
sleeve unless they can read the emotions of others just as easily. Raising his
head, Capa saw that she was looking at him with a thoughtful expression on her
face, her arms crossed once more.

“What is it?” she probed sceptically.

Not so lucky, after all.

“What is what?” he turned his head
completely away, facing the instrument wall entirely, to blink to reabsorb the
threatening tears as his mind had yet to move from its reminiscence of the
world’s next generation: his family he may not be able to contribute to, or
even ensure the longevity of if he failed in his assignment.

“What you need more time for.”

“Family,” the word—no, the reason—leapt
from his tongue before he even thought about the term to describe it. Not that
he could think of anything else, as he tried to remember what it sounded like
to hear his niece’s and nephew’s laughter, happy and carefree.

Slowly, he let his head turn to return
looking to Cassie, having felt his eyes finally dry off. He thought they must
have cleared too quickly, for his irises suddenly felt scratchy, and he thought
he beheld an image of Cassie that couldn’t possibly be what she actually held
her body as. So he rubbed him eyes with his knuckles, to squeeze their
moistness and restore some wetness back across them to correct the way the
artificial light must have been hitting his corneas, then blinked a couple
times deliberately before letting his sight focus on her again. But he found he
was looking at her in the same poise he’d thought was wrong: she stood leaning
against the windowed wall still, arms crossed still, but face not so confident.
Her mouth seemed to be a little agape, as though an expression of a sense that
she did not know quite what to make of her own thoughts, her eyes staring in
his direction yet somehow not at him, and a single tear slid down her cheek.
The salty bodily fluid treaded through a mole on one of the apples of her face,
her eyes lacking their usual definite focus. As though the emotion she didn’t
mind wearing vividly had flooded her entirely, overstepping its boundaries and
her ability not to be broken, and had inevitably leaked and disrupted the
clarity of the gaze Capa saw was cast without a purpose in his direction.

“Cassie?”

His voice was so quiet in its apprehension.
Too quiet—like a soft voice that had never been used before, and was testing
the air to find out whether or not it was acceptable. Like a person who feared
the reaction of the person they tested their words with, a fear founded on the
wonder upon how the listener would react. Whether the listener would accept the
individual himself or herself.

That ambiguity translated in Cassie’s mind
to be the potential mindset of an individual who’d never had a chance to live
before. A brand new human is learning and trying to fit into a world of already
established lives, pondering and trying to fit themself in. And the tear that
had shed without her intent had followed that line of subliminal thought, as
her subconscious considered her own family. Or rather, the family she’d never
have. Because she had killed her baby.

Only Searle had known that fact, and had
helped her hide her abortion so she could remain as a member of the mission of
the Icarus II. She sometimes felt she could never forgive herself for what she
had resorted to, but she couldn’t have let the mission go without her. It felt
to her to be what she had prepared herself to do her whole life. And the
mission’s purpose was to preserve humanity: all families of the world, not just
her own. She had to sacrifice her chance at motherhood for the sake of all
mothers, who would ensure the existence of mankind for all time. She had to
help save the Sun to save all sons.

“Cassie, I’m sorry you’re scared,” Capa’s
voice broke through. He was somebody’s son.

She suddenly realized what, or who, she’d
actually been looking at the entire time her train of thought had been sulking.
The watery sadness glazed over her eyes finally fell with assistance from the
artificial gravity, her focus restored to see Capa standing not far from her,
but seemingly so far from the subject matter she’d previously been brooding
over. Seeing the anxiety in his eyes, his face turned to fixate on her
unmoving, his eyebrows raised in concern; Cassie doubted he could understand.
She suddenly felt so alone, and found herself crossing her arms tighter around
herself, squeezing her own ribcage as if to compress her own ability to breathe
and disallow her heart to beat. Punishing herself, reducing her ability to live
that couldn’t equal the complete denial of even a chance for her child to live.
She choked in a sob as she had for Kaneda, turning away from Capa to face the
corner of the control room she stood by.

“Cassie!” Capa quickly crossed the metal
floor, taking the span of his crewmate’s shoulders between his palms to turn
her back to face him.

She kept her head downturned as he forced
her body back around, refusing to look at him. For one impractical moment she
wanted to blame him, to blame all men, for the necessity of their mission was
to preserve mankind. It was a desperate,
depressed thought, despite the split second it took to rear its ugly head, only
to be quashed immediately by her guilt. Ashamed, though Capa couldn’t have know
her true thoughts, Cassie kept her eyes downcast, knowing her carefree nature
at showing her emotions was her unchangeable mannerism, so he would’ve been
able to see something in her eyes.

Capa stood nearly toe-to-toe with her after
forcing her around, but had to bend a bit backwards and hunch forward to turn
his head up to look into her downcast face. Now he saw her eyes had an almost
malignant fire sparked behind them, faint but definitely there, and realized
she was staring daggers down at the communication device strung around her
neck. Her leash that tethered her to the mission.

It frightened him to see that kind of fire
in her eyes, and he sought to extinguish it by immediately removing her
lanyard. The loop noosed around her great bun of hair, pulling it apart as the
nylon cord was dragged up by the pull of his hands. He hated that she felt this
way. Even though she was strong, and her psych tests had indicated that she was
perfect for the mission as she had no breaking point, he despised that some
small part of her, even for a brief time, would encroach upon that threshold of
human sanity that, for the rest of the crew, their tests hadn’t guaranteed
wouldn’t be crossed. She deserved to never feel any sadness.

The next thing Cassie realized, after Capa
had forced her around to face him again, he communication device, which all
members of the crew possessed and sported nearly constantly, flew up around her
head and away, floating away. It seemed a great burden had lifted itself from
her shoulders, that she was suddenly freer than she had ever been in her life.
She’s disciplined herself in the air force, and committed to the further
restrictions that becoming an astronaut had placed upon her. All of the psych
reviews may have attested that she wouldn’t break, but they were nothing
compared to the definite reality of the situation.

Having cast off Cassie’s communication
device somewhere behind him, Capa delved his fingers into her loosened hair,
his hands holding her face between them, forcing her again to move by turning
her head upwards. He mustered up as much earnestness he figured he could
display with his eyes; needing to convince her she was the strongest of them
all. That was how she stood apart from the other crew members. Capa was well
aware that he was very much a loner, case in that role voluntarily and
involuntarily thanks to his vast knowledge of the Stellar Bomb. Regardless of
this fact, that he was definitely smarter than his fellow astronauts, he was
also the youngest, and as such felt that he was additionally cast in the role
of adolescent compared to the older and more socially experienced Icarus II
scientists and military professionals. It isolated him further, yet it had
usually been Cassie who had reached out to him. Sure, he’d played chess with
Kaneda, letting the Captain win sometimes, and he also shared a sense of humour
with Searle. But Cassie, very much alone thanks to her psych results, which
cast her as the stabilizer, was seemingly aloof, though she readily showed her
emotions to keep to the rest of their sanities. He’d told her that he wasn’t
scared, but she knew that he must scream in his dreams of the surface of the
Sun. They were nightmares, but with her happiness in peril, he couldn’t
remember what that level of fear had been compared to potentially losing her.

Well-being. Losing her well-being was what
he was afraid of, yes. That’s what he meant.

“Cassie, I’m sorry you’re scared,” briefly
considering how he felt like he was the adolescent actually reduced him to that
mindset momentarily, preventing him from thinking of something wise to say. It
was juvenile to repeat himself, but once he said it he regained his real age,
sensing confidence that it was right to reassure her that he understood her.

“It’s not that,” Cassie nearly let contempt
slip into her voice, a lingering remnant of her previous brief desperation to
justify her selfish want to be a mother, humanity be damned.

“Don’t cry, Cassie. It’s your laughter that
reminds me of my family,” his hands slid down from cupping her face to her
shoulders.

He didn’t know her secret thoughts. Her
abortion, and that his request was selfish and cruel to remind her that she
herself was without offspring. He was oblivious, so she was unfoundingly angry.
But, finally letting herself meet his gaze, the look in his eyes told her he
must indeed understand her somehow, that he did realize her pain, and that
though his words sought to distract her, his eyes only wanted to console.

His eyes...Cassie suddenly found herself unable
to look away from them. Her own sights were no longer clouded by tears, clearly
aligned with bright irises the shade of the beautiful blue sky she feared she’d
never see again. Blue eyes had also belonged to the father of her almost-child,
so she saw what she could’ve had, but ended. And Capa’s sweet, understanding
smile was so close. She’d lost something, so now, she sought to take. And
kissed him.

Her arms uncrossed so her hands could begin
to slip around his torso, to embrace him, to hold him to her, as she took his
plump lower lip hostage between her own lips. Feeling Cassie’s mouth finally,
that soft and inviting-looking pout he’d always wanted to see smile, Capa took
a moment to inhale deeply, and draw the knowledge of what was occurring
immediately to his brain. Cassie was kissing him. She couldn’t actually have
realized that she was doing so, so he had to ensure that she was well-informed.
He used his hands on her shoulders to gently push her away, ending the kiss.

“Ah, Cassie, what are you doing?” Capa
stepped backwards, slipping out of her almost-embrace. Her action had surprised
him, despite its pleasantness, and he suddenly found all his scientific
knowledge, the whole reason why he was on this mission, shoved to one side as
he tried to sort through the scant knowledge of social interaction he
possessed. He tried to spread that little knowledge around, to analyze it from
all sides and try to determine what she meant. He found her composure didn’t
help, not seeing any sort of sensuality grace her face or poise: her spine
hunched and eyes rimmed with desperate sadness. He knew what a kiss was, what
men used them for. So why would a woman, in her obvious vulnerability, risk a
miscommunication, a mixed signal, and therefore garner his attention improperly
on his behalf to inevitably take advantage of her in her weak state?

As if an observer couldn’t already gather,
Capa wasn’t like other men. His crewmates had, some of them anyways, decided
that he was more like an instrument than an astronaut, as he was an integral
part to their understanding of the effectiveness of the Stellar Bomb. It took
nurture to train these people, this crew of eight members of mankind, to
harness their brainpower to preoccupy all thought with science and logic and
survival. It seemed a demand that they, operating a massive machine, become
machines themselves, with their intelligence and computations and intense
dedication to a successful outcome to their mission. Only because they were
human did they need a psychiatrist on board, and routine, and each other. All
their scientific wiring couldn’t override their nature: their humanity. And the
millions of years of evolution that backed them up to this point had constantly
imbued in them as humans, despite all other physical and mental changes, the
drive to survive. As mammals, as members of the animal kingdom, man’s instinct,
the same as all living creatures’ below him, is to procreate. To continue
perpetuating the species on into the future. The crew of Icarus II had been
trained to nurture the drive to assist all of their species, and all species
they knew of, to future existence. They were to put out of their heads all
consideration of personal legacy in its physical terms. None of them had
children. But that fact did not negate the truth that their nature, though it
could be ignored with willpower, was a constant presence that told them they
should take advantage of their animal instinct.

The energy and focus most teenagers put
into getting sex Capa had instead put into science, publishing a paper at age
seventeen. It must have been a reversal of his brain’s wiring, that most of his
focus was on Dark Matter instead, while only a small portion—if there was any
he’d acknowledge—that was the same size which his peers allowed to study their
own mandatory science classes in school, would only occasionally be occupied by
Capa’s personal ideas of physical satisfaction. Very few, that he could recall,
of his meetings with Searle had broached this subject matter: of his own
unfulfilled fantasies with his mortality defined in the undertaking of this
mission. If he’d considered his procreative abilities, those thoughts had
inevitably been tied in with a necessity for love, which was something he
didn’t need in his comfort in being a loner. Since he didn’t need the one
emotion, he didn’t think he needed the activity that followed it. His mind,
however, could not control his body in this sense. It is a male curse to appear
physically aroused regardless of his mental state, and unable to deny his
corporeal demands, Capa had not been entirely celibate over the last sixteen
months: he had deigned to get his physical state to subside more quickly by
ministering himself.

Cassie moved her feet, stepping forward
towards Capa, close to him again. Quickly Capa took another step backwards,
retreating from her advance by backing up sideways into the wall adjacent to
her windowed corner, unconsciously raising a hand to block his mouth as he did
so. Or to touch his lips to feel with secondary confirmation the warmth Cassie
left there.

But she did not pursue him further. Her
gaze lowered again, the empty embrace she’d nearly offered to envelope Capa
with returning its grip around herself, arms crossing once more. Her unbroken
step merely took her one step forwards and then veered off sideways; walking
over to the wall of the control room parallel to the one Capa had flattened
against. Then she turned back to face her crewmate, standing with her back to
the wall that Capa had earlier fiddled with its neighbouring instrument panel
when she’d asked him whether or not he was scared. Though she faced him, she
didn’t face him: her head downturned in her depression maintained and her eyes
were on the floor.

Looking at her, wondering what she was
thinking since she didn’t answer his query, Capa’s hand lowered itself from his
mouth in relation subconsciously to his unmoving gaze upon her. As she stood
facing him, her back to the metal wall, the texture contrast of her against
that background got to him, as the thought entered his brain that she looked
broken. That she hadn’t approached the construct of the Icarus, but rather it
had risen up to her, and that its next act would be to knock her down, grimly
reminding her that it would be her downfall. She had said as much to him
earlier, commenting that just how Icarus I’s situation ended up, that Icarus II
was on the same path: that this fresh crew of astronauts given the same task
would also assumedly die out in space, far from home. Except before, she’d shed
that light—like the omniscience of the Sun ahead of their craft—upon that
revelation with words said with a wryness; an inevitable truth she could only
acknowledge with respect to the irony that they’d lose their lives to save all
others. And now she said no words, and she also didn’t have any humour left,
and while her meaning was quite clear to be the same, her mindset was
definitely one of a desperation suddenly so final, that she was to the point
where she’d nearly let her mental death occur before her physical one. She
looked so vulnerable.

So soft-looking, her body yielded to her
own harsh grip around herself, her fingers mercilessly squeezing the tender
flesh of her upper arms. She sighed, sounding depressed—or irritated—as her
hands moved up a little, hugging herself because she’d lost what would’ve
distracted her from recalling what she’d lost.

But he
couldn’t be distracted: Capa found himself still staring at Cassie, though it
had been he who broke off the kiss. One of her hands had clamped so far up her
humerus that the thumb had slipped beneath the cuff of the short sleeve of her
charcoal polo, and from the angle he viewed her at, Capa’s eye followed the
outline of her thumb as it melded to the curve of her shoulder under the
fabric. His sight’s traveling was interrupted by the great cascade of her
chestnut hair, as it had been loosened from its tied-back state when he removed
her communication device earlier. Unable to see how her arm socket connected to
her shoulder, Capa’s eyes skipped over her waterfall of tresses to skate along
the rim of her polo’s lapels, encircling the ivory tower of her neck. He felt his
own cheeks warm to catch a glimpse of her collarbone, but wouldn’t let his eyes
rove lower. He was afraid he’d reminisce upon a memory he had of Cassie from
before—not that the memory actually took place.

Capa couldn’t have ignored his own
masculinity over the course of over a year, as being human meant having both
mind and body. His mind was his reason to be on the mission, but his body of
course had to come along. It and all its mortal idiosyncrasies, including the
aforementioned nocturnal arousals. Insomnia would’ve plagued him had every
dream been a remembered nightmare of falling into the Sun. And within this
envelope of recollection was Capa’s personal account of meeting Cassie
face-to-face for the very first time. He’d been happy to meet her after having
read the file about her, as in person she possessed a vibrance he hadn’t
gathered from her paperwork to expect. She was friendly, and pretty, and a
great travel companion. However, he didn’t linger on his handshake with her
that he’d noticed the young engineer Mace did.

And remembering that sight gave way to a later event nearly halfway to their
destination, when Capa had overheard a conversation between the hot-headed
computer technician and Dr. Searle. At the time Capa had been sitting in the chair
of the Communications Centre, considering what he’d say in his message home
this time, when voices raised in the neighbouring Earth Room. Capa wouldn’t
have eavesdropped if he hadn’t resorted to masturbating to sideline a sudden
erection before undertaking his most recent mandatory scheduled sleep cycle,
and the words he overheard being used by the other two men made him listen in
to hope he’d hear of a way he could avoid what he’d done the previous ‘night’.
For he thought he heard Searle consoling Mace about the engineer’s unsettling
niggling sense that the dreams he’d been having during his sleep cycles (the
ones he could never remember) must have something to do with someone he knew,
and that he must have some feelings towards the individual he dreamt of, but
whose face he couldn’t recall. The consummate psychiatrist, Searle tried to
shrink the emphasis Mace was placing on these unimportant dreams—for he would
remember them if they were important—and strived to be a friend to his crewmate
by getting him to talk about what normal, non-astronaut men casually consider:
their affection for women. That new focus relaxed Mace’s tone of voice, freeing
him up to fondly reminisce on interactions with striking specimens of the
female persuasion, but didn’t offer the eavesdropping Capa and advice for
coping with involuntary physical situations.

If anything, the socially comfortable men’s
ease with the topic made the listening loner’s plight more confusing. For the
next time he was involuntarily afflicted right before his scheduled sleep
cycle, Capa’s mind was devoid of thought, just like he’d overheard Mace confess
to Searle that he had tried in an attempt to leave space for memory to build
about what he was dreaming. As he’d lain in the darkness of his room, eyes closed
to begin his sleep, Capa had allowed one hand to stroke down his own bare
stomach, only to slide over the transition to his covering sheet to discover
that the flannel did not lay flat. And in thinking about Mace’s confession, he
thought about seeing Mace have more than casual feelings for someone once: upon
all of their initial introductions and seeing the engineer zealously shake the
pilot’s hand. And with his own hand hovering near the tent in his sheet, Capa
allowed himself to think about the pilot, of liking how friendly she was, and
how agreeably pretty, too. To cope with his current affliction he realized he’d
found his solution, liking the feeling that washed through his body as he
admired Cassie, and that those thoughts were enabling him to progress though
his ‘situation’ quicker than before. So he slid his hand under the sheet, and
found it helpful to think of that one crewmate who was sleeping herself just
down the hall, and that he’d gotten to know her well, and liked her very much,
and she was single.

And remembering that fantasy, right here
and now in the control room of the payload in the company of the subject of
said fantasy, Capa’s eyes, connected to his brain which he had such command
over, were forced to rove along Cassie’s neckline, up a tendon therein to ride
the slope of her jaw up versus the expectation of gravity. His eyes darted back
and forth over her face, spotting and mentally recording the locations of each
one of her visage’s moles, like observing a constellation. And that was all he
could see, as her downturned face cast her eyes to the floor, avoiding his
gaze. But she suddenly sniffed her nose, and sighed as though annoyed,
uncrossing her arms once again to raise one up and tuck some of her thick
loosened hair behind an ear.

“I’m sorry you’re not scared, Capa,” the anger at herself, the annoyance that
he didn’t seem to appreciate why she was frightened, and the desperation for a
distraction were all funnelled into her tone. All around her was her destiny,
and unless she was able to close her eyes to it for just a moment, and not
worry that she’d see the surface of the Sun because her own blood would be on
fire instead, she felt she’d collapse inward on herself before the Sun would do
for itself. That is why she had kissed Capa.

Lowering her hand from her face drew Capa’s
gaze with it, dropping it down to hang limply at her side. That was where her
hand ended up, but his eyes had been stopped by the sight of her nipples’
hardened state beneath the charcoal polo. His eyes quickly darted away as his
head swam with physics computation and permutations in general: the equations
had nothing to do with fission of the Bomb. As the numbers and variables faded
away from his mind in their irrelevance, Capa realized that he’d been trying to
distract himself. He allowed his eyes to return their gaze to Cassie’s face.

The Icarus II was essentially a giant
computer, programmed to traverse a direct course to achieve a specific result,
as determined by the humans who programmed it. Even with that pre-design, the
machine was still accompanied by humans, since a computer is unable to take
interruptions into consideration by improvising, yet compensating in such a way
that does not jeopardize another aspect of its efficient design. For example,
weighing priorities, as judged by the human operators, to lose the Communication Towers in
order to shield human technicians. The computer may have deemed the Comm Towers equally
essential, the computer unable to foresee and anticipate consequences of its
immediate sequential prioritization. The humans couldn’t have engineered the
machine to improvise for the sake of their mission: they were necessary;
spontaneous, impulsive enough to consider the best consequences: the lesser of
two evils. Even then, the impulses themselves, what defined them as human, were
an evil.

That time he’d used to think about
Cassie—and the times since—Capa had never dreamed that anything more would come
of his fantasies than, quite literally, himself...coming. Certainly if he’d put
more thought into consideration beyond merely picturing her pretty smile as he
ministered himself, he may have realized that, would she ever consider
utilizing him for the same purpose—and beyond—he wouldn’t immediately want to
diffuse such attention. Subconsciously, he wanted her to want him, but socially
didn’t know how to acknowledge that aspect. And now having been kissed, he was
more confused than ever.

She was in a vulnerable state, that much
was obvious. And while he took advantage of the memory of the sight of her
sweet lips when he was feeling ‘vulnerable’, he didn’t think it proper to
actually commit such deeds with her when her own psyche was desperately
weakened. But it had been she who had
kissed him, which was distracting him from the truth.

Then it hit him. She was missing something
so much, that she was about to really break. And though that was a marked
vulnerability, she was seeking for him to fix her before she could break. She
needed a fix, a distraction, or else in her vulnerability she would also
increase the weakness of the mission. Left to him to decide, as the lone man to
see the mission’s effectiveness, was which was acceptable for him to allow to
continue to exist. The lesser of two evils. Their platonic relationship,
without one interruption, or the potential of the safety of the mission even
with her mental exodus.

She had begun to cry again, silent tears
screaming shame at how emotional she’d become, and how desperate she’s let
herself come to feel. She was sorry she’d suggested that Capa didn’t understand
her fear.

But he didn’t shy away. With only two
strides of his long legs he crossed the control room to stand toe-to-toe with
her. Surprised, at his first step she backed up, flattening herself to the wall
behind her. But she couldn’t get away, and now had to deal with his reaction.

Slightly taller than she was, his face was
downturned to look at her, but she kept her own face downturned as well. He
brought a hand up between them, catching his thumb and forefinger beneath her
chin as his hand raised, forcing her head to turn upwards in that direction.
She didn’t meet his gaze, afraid that looking into those blue depths would make
her cry to remember her lost child’s eyes, or the sapphire sky she’d never see
or fly through again.

“Cassie, I’m sorry,” his fingers slipped
into her loosened hair, palms against her cheeks, holding her head at its
angle, keeping it from falling down again. “But you’re wrong. You’re wrong
about me not being scared. I am scared. Just not about that.”

Now she did stare straight into his eyes,
clasping her hands over his hands holding her face, holding his hands there,
hostage. “Please, Capa. Help me to forget. If only for a little while.”

As she’d pleaded with him, the physicist
caught his lower lip up between his teeth, biting back a sigh of anticipation
relieved. He was already so close to her, her brown eyes drawing him in, that
he didn’t realize his head had fallen forwards until the tip of his nose
actually rested on the prominent bone of the apple of her cheek. Her hands over
his had flowed down along his forearms, then around the bends of his elbows and
up to his shoulders, and finally slipped around his neck until her own elbows
rested atop his shoulders. She’d done this carefully, as though lassoing a
horse, so as not to scare him away once more as she had upon first attempting
to distract herself. By kissing him.

His jaw dropped a little at her bold move,
his lower lip released from the bite of his teeth. Cassie felt his exhalation,
the breath he’d been holding blowing past her, a chill she hadn’t felt for a
long time, what with her dreams constantly of the fiery surface of the Sun. It
made her shiver, and tighten the grip of her arms around his neck in reaction.

That further closeness gave Capa no room to
turn his head away from her. He was forced to press into her further, and dip
his head down more, his parted lips finally landing down onto hers.

With that definite contact made that she’d
been seeking all along, Cassie sighed almost happily. It wasn’t that her mind was
considering this specific interaction in so many words, rather, the distraction
she needed her subconscious knew needed to be this extreme, since it had been
successful before. In the midst of prepping for the mission, even though the
constant physical and psych tests had indicated she was handling all of the
pressure very acceptably, there was still that part of her, that remained with
her now even as the mission was nearing its end, that was desperate to either
continue her life or to experience the pleasurable extremes if offered before
she would lose all chance to. Humanity had invented some pretty wild way to
feel alive: thrill seekers and extreme sports enthusiasts striving to live each
day to the fullest. But ingrained in the mission, Cassie’s thrill, dependent on
her tendency to wear her heart on her sleeve, had been to allow herself to fall
in love, even though her future was dictated by the success of the Icarus II.
Her fling with the blue-eyed mission technician had helped her to push away her
stress, though it created a new stress when it resulted in her abortion.
Despite that, she didn’t regret her affair, only the choice she had to resort
to in order to stay on the mission: the affair had helped her to re-feel alive,
and to appreciate life on Earth and become re-focussed on the plight she’d
assigned herself to. Her epiphany had helped her to leave Earth behind, to
leave her future, but now, she was the furthest from that she would ever
be—literally and figuratively: physically and from any potential to do
something with her life she hadn’t had a chance to do yet. Like be a mother.
Her mortality was looming, like the Sun’s rise on Earth, indicating another day
past as another day lost of what they had left.

And if she was to make the most of what the
crew of the Icarus II had left to them, in order to make the most available to
the people left on Earth, she needed a distraction: a reminder of what she was
giving up. The closest she’d ever get to choosing her own future again.

Until he chose to pull away again, breaking
his own kiss this time. His status as the youngest member of the crew wasn’t
necessarily to blame for his lack of social experience: he’d had plenty of time
between being too young for Icarus I and being integrated into Icarus II to
make use of his freedom before he’d destined himself to this future. Though he
was so focussed on his science, he had collected a few memories of simply being
a man to the few women who’d gotten to him so deeply that he’d forgotten he
generally preferred to be a loner, and wanted only to be alone with them. He’d
used those memories to satisfy himself—that is, until he missed the pleasing
sight of a woman herself as fuel for his fire so much, that he began to
concentrate on Cassie’s sweet smile. The same smile that had greeted him the
last time he’d awoken from another nightmare of falling into the Sun.

That juxtaposition caused a sudden panic in
him. With his eyes gazing longingly at her lips, it took all his effort not to
give in before he asked his sudden question. “How many times did you watch me
while I was dreaming?” She could’ve seen him before he began to fall asleep.

Her arms slipped from their embrace around
his neck, her hands on his shoulders sliding down his arms, reversing their
previous travel. But she did not seek to break contact, so he assumed that if
she had sought to be there another night as he was scheduled to be on his own
mandatory sleep cycle, perhaps she’d been made aware already of his occasional
pre-sleep activity in his privacy. Given the distraction she needed now,
perhaps she’d sought him out for exactly that reason. She may have heard him
whisper her name as he’s climaxed.

She wouldn’t say. “I wanted to know what I
looked like when I dream of the
surface of the Sun,” she whispered. Once her hands reached his elbows she let
the artificial gravity pull them down further, closing them inwards over his
hips, holding him around his waist. His hands remained holding her face between
them. “That though the sight frightened me into fits, even awake now, that I am
not alone in that fear. Even as you say it’s beautiful. Because inevitably,
you’re right, Capa. It is beautiful. It is the only reason we’re alive.”

“Cassie, do you really see the surface of
the Sun, every time you shut your eyes? Even now?” he leaned in and kissed her
again, causing her to moan when he pulled away once more.

So he wouldn’t get far, one of her hands
left his side to hook the index finger into the loop of his communication
device that hung between them, its cord around his neck pulled downwards to
hold his head down close to hers.

On the Icarus II they were floating through
a sea of stars. Cassie’s mind likened it to a memory of floating upon the
waters of Earth, in the company of military comrades who were in the Navy. It
also put her in mind of an old proverb she’d read, that described her current
predicament. The proverb stated that kissing was like drinking salt water: one
drinks and their thirst increases. Mercilessly pulling down on Capa’s lanyard
was her communication to him that she needed more, that her hunger had
increased.

“No, Capa,” her eyes shut as she tipped her
own face upwards between the hold of his hands, pulling him down by his lanyard
so his cheek touched the end of her nose. “I hear you breathing, I smell you, I
feel you,” her hand that still wrapped about his waist squeezed him there a
bit, “and I taste you on my lips,” her tongue slipped out to lick her lower lip
before returning into her mouth, then her lips rolled backwards into her to
smooth against one another and distribute her saliva over their surfaces. “With
my eyes closed now, with you, I don’t even remember what the Sun looks like.”

Hearing that admission from her made him
forget too, and he pressed his lips to hers again, to taste them, to feel them,
and to smell her with his nose against her cheek again, at hearing himself
growl as he aggressively went forward once more. And, with his eyes closed, he
could see a fire: her fire, rising up from her like hot exhaust condensing in
cold air, visible in his fantasy of what he was now about to do with her.

“Cassie,” Capa’s shoulder suddenly crashed
into hers, sandwiching it to the wall as his teeth nearly scraped against hers
in his kiss’s urgency.

Now she didn’t have to keep Capa snagged by
the cord of his communication device, so she straightened the finger hooked
over it and let her hand fall down between them, back to its previous position
of hugging the corner of his waist. Her fingers curled around to his back, her
grip tightened on him, causing her nails to dig in through the navy fabric of
his jersey knit long-sleeved shirt. Getting back at her for that pain, Capa let
out a groan as he turned his head to the side, scraping his stubbled chin along
her jawbone as his lips sought to kiss the mole centred on her cheek that in
her earlier sadness a tear had fallen through.

As she took her turn to moan, Capa finally
released her face from its place between his palms, moving his hands to her
shoulders, then over them around to her back, embracing her to him. He had
since turned his head downwards, pressing his mouth against her neck. With that
tender attention to this first erogenous zone Cassie was forced to moan again,
and her back arched for him to have room to fit his arms between her and the
wall of the control room. The pressure of her instinctual arching hurt him,
with his forearms about her shoulder blades, his embrace was protecting her
from the influence of the Icarus.

Cassie gasped, completely forgetting her
emotion as pain registered to communicate that Capa’s stubble had scratched
into her porcelain facial flesh, knowing she wasn’t bleeding but feeling
utterly physical because of it. Like her mind had lifted itself away, taking
with it all her sadness and stress, and left behind simply her body, with all
its instincts and urges, to take complete advantage of her humanity. In its
physical nature, at least.

She turned her head to the side, eyes shut against
viewing the core of the payload outside of the window she now faced, stretching
out her neck in the process, giving him more surface to touch down upon with
his mouth. Capa’s mind was aswim with an
irony, that though it understood Dark Matter really well, the dark waves of her
hair his nose and forehead pushed aside offered no rhyme or reason as to why he
was currently adoring the sensation of her skin through his lips. Her hair
pushed off her shoulder to fall down her back, Capa sank further into her,
placing his lips to suckle at Cassie’s neck where her hairline met the nape,
just behind her ear. If he was forceful enough to bruise, the others wouldn’t
see it there.

With him attentive to the back corner of
her skull, his lips sucking upon the thin skin over her cranium could have been
to blame for affecting the part of her brain closest. Because the cerebellum
regulates motor function, integrating accurate timing of coordination as it
receives input from sensory systems such as the spinal cord, and the force of
Capa’s mouth there felt like it was trying to draw up all her on-fire nerves up
through her spine, as though it were a straw. Instead, with him at the moment
distracted, Cassie used the timing to coordinate her hands to motor, quickly
grabbing up the hem of his shirt around his hips in her fists, the jersey
fabric lifting about his torso contrary to the ship’s artificial gravity. She
got as far as his ribs, stopped by his arms still embracing her around her
shoulders.

At this point in the journey, the Icarus II
was not yet close enough to the Sun that space and time had become smeared
together. So, enthralled with fulfilling his fantasy of Cassie, occupying space
could not allow Capa to simultaneously take the time to realize what she was
attempting. He had to slow down in kissing her neck, and take a second to
understand what she had utilized space to try, and then after that hesitation
stretch himself out in that relativity. He unwound his arms from about her,
then raised them above his head. Waiting for Cassie to realize this after another
second, Capa had put his lips against hers once more, using space while she
considered it in time. But then it was her turn to understand she could now
make her move, and he had to stop kissing her so he could wait as she pulled
their issue navy long-sleeved shirt off him over his head.

His body was different from that of her
last partner: her near-child’s father. That lover’s body, despite his
occupation of the project of the Icarus mission as a technician, had been
slightly muscular, while Capa’s ectomorph form was slight. But embracing her
again, Cassie felt this physicist’s unexpected strength to be iron-like, firm
in his conduct, and resolute in their current carnal entanglement that was much
more demanding than her tender love with her other blue-eyed paramour. She had
seen her crewmate shirtless before, most recently as he’d woken up from another
Sun nightmare and she was waiting for his consciousness to inform him that she
had faith in his verdict to rendezvous with the Icarus I. Most of the time she
only saw most of his skin whenever he wore one of their issue grey cotton tank
tops. But now she could actually touch him, completely bare and all accessible
to her, and she wanted to feel even more of him to sense the heat that had
scorched him as he’d fallen through the Sun in his dreams.

After she’d thrown Capa’s shirt behind him,
she’d brought her hands down between them even as he had thrown his arms around
her again, her palms against his chest ensuring some breathing space for their
rapidly expanding and contracting ribcages. While their lips wrestled her eyes
were closed and the sight of the Sun loomed up between her eyeball and eyelid.
She should’ve been scared, as usual, as it suddenly expanded, that flaming
sphere nearly taking up all darkness behind her closed lids, but then it
shrunk. And then grew and then shrunk again. Like it was breathing. And this
cycle seemed to increase in frequency. But then a sound seemed to accompany the
imagined Sun’s pulsation, and Cassie realized that that was exactly what it
was. If she was to open her eyes, her gaze would be locked onto his chest, upon
her palm cupped over the ribs that encased his heart. She was seeing the
heartbeat she felt hammering beneath her hand, and then the sound of it was
drowned out by her own increasing heartrate thudding inside her ears. Her blood
pounded in her veins, having no specialized organ it would be assigned to in
its throes, as she hoped he was experiencing.

But she wouldn’t be allowed to find that
out yet, as he kept his hips still, some space remaining between their loins,
as he hunched his back to wrap his arms around her more tightly, squeezing
their chests together and her hands upon his bared pecs between them. Now she
could feel how quickly he was breathing too, just as turned on as she was. When
he exhaled another heaving breath, she was able to slide her hands up, back to
encircle his neck and shoulder with her arms, her fingers gripping around his
nape and the back of his head through his sweating hair. Now their chests were
flat against one another, as Capa was without his communication device as well:
Cassie hadn’t realized that it had caught up in the telescoping folds his shirt
had made as she had raised it up along his torso, and that the nylon lanyard
had aligned with the shirt’s collar to clear his head with it and be tossed
amongst the heap of navy jersey fabric to the floor.

As their kissing deepened, her tongue
sliding along his, his hands around her back seemed to grapple with her shirt,
as though trying to hold on, yet slipping somehow. It was because his arms were
sliding out from behind her, numb through the forearms from being sandwiched
between her back and the metal wall, his palms seeking to make contact with the
front of her body as hers had the privilege of doing to him. His hands came
around her body about her waist, as he pulled his upper torso off from its
contact with hers and began to move his palms up her sides. If he had actually
paused to think about what his hands were doing, he may have hesitated to
consider that they would eventually cup her breasts. But when they did so, it
was his nature that made him compress them together, to feel her curves, and to
make her moan pleasingly at his attention.

“Capa!” Cassie’s lips broke away from his
at his pressure against her chest, her hands slipping from their grip around
the back of his head and neck to land upon his shoulders, not to push him away,
but to hold onto for support. His hands, with their fingers so dextrous thanks
to their constant exercise of fiddling with and testing buttons that would
inevitably control the ignition of the payload, were toying and testing her,
squeezing around her breasts to be aroused by her feminine form. She shut her
eyes as she cried out, thinking about what she hoped he would do next. While it
felt good, what he was doing was not enough, though he seemed to be having a
grand old time. So she slid her hands from his shoulders down his arms again,
all the way down to cup his hands, cupping her, with her hands.

It was his turn to groan, as since she’d
broken their kiss he’d puller back a bit to look down at how her body twisted
between him and the wall, beneath his hands. Then her hands on his gripped his
knuckles, squeezing him squeezing her. Encouraging him by signalling that he
was right to put his hands there. Since, though outwardly he was being so bold
as to be aggressive in getting this want of his fulfilled, subconsciously he’d
been nervous to actually do so. But he was caught up in the moment, and on a path
that allowed his fantasy come to the fore, and wouldn’t consider the aftermath
any longer.

He pushed his palms against her harder,
nearly compressing her ribcage as he sought to fell her arousal by means of her
firmed nipples through her garments. Cassie moaned again, unable to catch her
breath, her hands one part of her body where the blood reaching them had been
lacking oxygen, so she was unable to remain holding them up. The artificial
gravity pulled upon the sudden heaviness of her carpals, making her hands
release their grip over Capa’s. They fell, allowing the oxygenated blood in her
arms to flow down into even the very tips of her fingers, and just as they were
beginning to fall past the hem of her shirt. So they caught on, her fingers
curling around the bottom of the charcoal polo, and then—because oxygen is an
element less dense and so lighter that iron and zinc and all the other elements
that make up blood—rose up.

Since Capa was having a difficult time
feeling for the firm arousals upon her chest against his palms as he’d watched
her, he thought he would be able to feel it better if he buried his sight, and
so had bent his head forward against her neck once more. But, not looking as he
was kissing her neck, he only became aware of her latest movement as he felt
folds of fabric roll up from under his wrists. He pulled back to look, and also
readily removed his grip upon her chest to let her raise her shirt. But she
only got as far as pulling the cotton up to around her torso beneath her arms,
as she was stopped by the sudden touch of a finger upon her sternum.

Her breath caught at the sensation, so
unexpected was it that it felt like a dart. But it was soft, surprisingly so,
considering Capa had repetitively used the digit to test buttons on the control
device to the payload, which would warrant the development of a callus upon his
obsession. Instead the tip of Capa’s index finger, while it had felt like a
rapid jab at the instant she’d finished raising her shirt, was now gentle to
graze across her upper chest, slowly. It was following the path of a blue vein
that stretched from shoulder to shoulder, starkly visible beneath her
paper-white skin.

The blue beneath the white appeared to be a
negative to Capa, of a memory of seeing white upon blue. As part of initial
introductions to all of who would be his fellow crewmates on the mission of the
Icarus II, he and the others had witnessed a demonstration of Cassie’s Air
Force talent, of her flight skills, and the white smoke of her jet’s exhaust
had cut a swathe across the clear cerulean sky. But that display he hadn’t seen
firsthand: they’d been shown a pre-recorded video of Cassie at work. Whereas
seeing the colours switched was a sight right before his very eyes, right now.

Eventually, Capa’s fingertip had followed
the vein’s origins to the crevice of her arm to her torso, and he lifted it
away to lay eyes upon that starting point. Cassie swallowed the anxious lump in
her throat when she felt both his hands again, only this time he’d hooked his
thumbs under the gathering up of the hem of her shirt, at her armpits, holding
the folds up as the rest of his fingers wrapped around her upper arms. He bent
his head down again, towards her chest now, and softly planted his lips right
upon the starting sight of the blue vein his fingertip had just left. Then
lifted off and touched down again, reversing the travel the forefinger’s graze
had made, moving towards her sternum now; her heart.

His kisses were maddening: a complete
opposition in their tenderness of the violence their mission had come to
represent for her in her depression—what she’d done to ensure she could remain
with the mission; the death of Kaneda; and the omniscient Sun they would
eventually set a bomb off within to continue its existence. Violence to
continue all of their existence, as members of mankind. How could Capa still be
so considerate, so sensual, knowing that, as she’d stated before, they would
all die?

His lips had landed upon her sternum, and
she exhaled the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. But she did
realize that all along her hands had been free, clenching and unclenching in
nervousness as Capa had taken up the chore of holding up her shirt, and her
fingers had nothing to do. Before he could continue his journey of kissing
across her chest along the vein, her hands itched for a distraction, a sob
choking in her throat at the memory of the last time she’d been treated such
loving attention; having still been on Earth then, her home she now feared
she’d never see again. So she brought her hands into her body again, right
close so their backs scraped across the fold of her arm next to her ribs, so
her own thumbs slipped under the fabric of the cups of her bra, outside of its
straps and under the straps, hooking around them then pulling them outwards and
downwards, pulling the undergarment down to expose her chest completely.

Capa hesitated, still stopped upon where
his lips had landed at the top of her breast bone with his last kiss, as he
realized he’d felt Cassie’s bra was what had fallen down against his chin. He’d
had his eyes closed, to ensure he only felt Cassie’s burning skin as he’d
kissed his way across it, not wanting to be distracted at all from that
sensation by his eyes being too close to her. He’d wanted to try and only feel
her, as he’d tried to feel for her arousal hardened upon her chest with his
hands cupping her previously. Now he opened his eyes, the irises darting
quickly back and forth to notice that the straps of her bra on either side were
no longer perpendicular to the tops of her shoulders, but instead stretched far
off-angle. And his chin no longer drifted across the grey cotton of her
wireless bra—were he to resume his kisses—for now he felt the very ends of his
stubble were into the skin covering the bottom half of her bared sternum.

Cassie had shut her eyes, her lower lip
rolling up and inwards into her mouth a bit as it caught underneath her front
teeth. What would he do now? Now that she had really initiated this growing sex
act, boldly showcasing her nudity. Now that she had really displayed sexuality
to him, laying it open for him now to make whatever move he wanted. Now that
she was just as turned on as she could only hope he was, still judging merely
on his kisses and not yet able to on the male sign of undeniable arousal.

But she felt nothing—literally, with her
eyes closed she couldn’t see what his next move would be. His hesitation seemed
to stretch on forever.

But then she felt the prickles in her skin
pulling out, not even realizing they’d been there to begin with, a coolness
suddenly blowing past the bottom of her ribcage. She slid her hands down, her
thumbs under the straps of her bra to inside the cups, following the curve of
the fabric and ensuring it was completely pushed down and caught under her
breasts. Her hands having moved down along the seams of the undergarment had
them follow the curve of it in towards her body, so her hands had pushed up
against her breasts from the outside, pushing them against one another at the
middle of her chest, forming cleavage. Her breastbone was now overlaid with
more than just skin, hidden by the crush of the pressure of her breasts
together, so he couldn’t have kissed down her sternum had that been his next
move.

It wouldn’t have been so, for even with his
eyes open now, Capa did not pull away to survey what his crewmate had exposed
for him; what he’d fantasized about. Instead, he continued kissing her, along
the cut of the blue vein that continued on across her chest to terminate
beneath her other arm. In the video he’d watched of her flying the Air Force
jet she’d flown from horizon to horizon seamlessly, and he wasn’t about to end
this journey until he’d covered the entire beautiful scape, too. But a new
change in the terrain affected this half of his travel: her burgeoning cleavage
now forced him to tip his head back a little, so only his stubble would barely
scrape the top of her breast, and not his whole chin colliding with it.

But that barest touch still elicited a moan
from her, as it was his direct touch upon her bare chest that she wanted next.
Her hands holding her breasts together and bra down also held her shirt up, the
rolled-up hem of it stretched taut across the top of her chest and pinned
beneath her upperarms tight against her ribs either side. So Capa could unhook
his thumbs from holding the hem up, and release the rest of his fingers’ grips
around her humerus bones, letting his palms slide down to cup her elbows. Then
they dropped off of that bend of her arms and went in to cup her waist, and
action she’d earlier done to him, but his hands then slid around to and up her
back. In the meantime his lips had left the end of the blue vein, as he raised
his head to look for her lips and then kiss her again while her eyes were still
closed.

His lips were nice upon hers again, Cassie
inhaling deeply at the unseen contact to take in the manly scent of his
exuberant sweat. Despite this simple pleasure, she still didn’t have his touch
exactly where she wanted it, as his hands around to her back were stroking up
and down, in a circle that also had his palms sliding around her ribcage to her
front, down to her pelvis’s edges, the again around to her back. His hands were
absolutely avoiding her chest, so the next time he drew his palms from her back
around her ribs towards himself, and slid them down to the line of her pelvis
before following it back around to its connection up with her spine again,
before his fingertips could slip around to her back she flattened herself to
the wall, so his fingertips were interrupted and butted against the metal like
a row of battering rams.

Distracted by the softness and sweet taste
of Cassie’s lips as his tongue occasionally slipped out to stroke against them,
Capa unexpectedly felt pain as he’d allowed his hands to caress her tender skin
in a cycle of pleasure. She had moved her body to prevent him from fingering
her perfect vertebrae again. She’d realized his hesitation: that though he’d
fantasized about fondling her erogenous zone that was directly over her heart,
though he’d sought to touch her to make her feel good, he was also in a dilemma
where he was desperate subconsciously to not touch her: in order to avoid
making her feel good. Because if he accomplished the former, he’d be burdened
with an awareness of what it was she found arousing, with knowing exactly how
he was able to arouse her, and would forever after—or, at least constantly
during whatever time they had left to them—remember precisely what it took to
make her feel her humanity so completely. That she trusted him this much to let
herself let go entirely, to be seen at her most vulnerable and revealing of all
of her desire, was knowledge he feared may change his relationship with her—if
his fantasizing of her already hadn’t in his corner. But this interaction
wasn’t out of any emotion they had for one another, other than a need on her
part to be distracted from her emotion and his want to be physical with a
striking woman at least one last time before he reached his mortality. If he
worried about the rest of the crew finding out, the way the others would judge
the pilot and the physicist would be changed for each of them. But the only
criticism Capa really worried about was self: that he would know, and couldn’t un-know. He would be the one of them
who knew her most—figuratively and literally. Her feelings that were upon her
sleeve, as well as those that were just underneath her sleeves. That she really
would go to these lengths in order to forget her fright.

Capa suddenly felt her mouth turn away from
his, so he opened his eyes from the kiss again to see what she was doing
instead of kissing him. He was taken aback, actually jerking his head backwards
a bit in shock, to see her head downturned once more, but her eyes were looking
up at him from beneath her sweat-glistened brow in a sultry stare. Finally
making that eye contact with Cassie made Capa see that she knew what they were
doing, knowing that she needed it, but that unlike him there was no anxiety to
be seen behind her bold presence. That this was no facade of feigned fortitude
about this way she’d chosen to forget her fear of the mission. That she not
only needed it: she wanted it. And that demeanour had been how he’d actually
fantasized she’d conduct herself.

Then her eyes cast downwards, and his eyes
followed her gaze, past her lips that she sexily licked, and down further to
another body part laid naked to his stare. Glowing pink with an aroused flush
under a sheen of perspiration, he witnessed a sight he’d only imagined seeing
before: concentrating on her visage and her possible nudity as he pictured her
straddling him, sitting on top of him as he lay on his back, so she’d be the
tightness around himself instead of his own hand trying to get himself to begin
his sleep cycle. Now he blinked, but the case this time really was that the
sight he’d had to mentally create before was actually bared right in front of
him, and that it was much more beautiful than what he’d fantasized. So if this
mere sight of her was much more arousing than what his mind could conjure up,
how much better would her real actions he could predict after this discarding
of modesty be from his imagined sex with her?

His hands, having stayed holding about her
waist after they were stopped from slipping around her back, now suddenly
applied a great pressure to her, pressing her between him and the wall like a
vice. He pressed her as he moved his hands up the sides of her body, squeezing
her like a tube of toothpaste, and forcing the air from her lungs as he pushed
against her ribcage. The force wasn’t intentional, but this had become his way
to get his hands upon her chest, since his eyes stared at it so heavily that
any reaction he was to take would also have such great gravity.

It felt strange to her, and somehow wrong to
have this massage on her front, as the pressure could displace her internal
organs. Cassie looked back up at him after glancing downwards at herself, her
own hands pushing her chest to create cleavage men found so enticing, and saw
Capa blatantly staring, as though unable to look away. And then his hands
pressed her as they moved up her sides, and it hurt, but that was welcome
distraction to prevent her from the prolonged affect her mental pain could have
on her—and inevitably, the fate of the world.

She let her own hands drop to loosen her
arms’ tightness against the sides of her body, which had been to hold her shirt
up, but now she needed to relax her sides to be able to breathe. And she could
drop her arms as her hands no longer needed to hold her own breasts together,
as Capa’s hands had finally roved up to cup one with each hand. As he finally
did grasp hold of her, finally feeling the aroused hardness at the centre of
each breast he’d struggled to feel by squeezing her through her clothes before,
a low growl, a hum of satisfaction emanated from his throat. Cassie was heard
to giggle, her tinkling laughter what he loved to hear most causing him to
become even more aroused over her, and he bent his head down to her chest to
give her pleasure, too.

Cassie had sighed when his tight grip upon
her had eased, relaxing, but one hand released so much as to actually move away
from palming her nipple. But then she let loose a short, sharp moan as Capa’s
head closer had his lips close around the exposed nub, and she relished the
feel of his tongue against a part of her that wasn’t her own tongue, or lips,
or neck. With his attention now exactly where she wanted it, Cassie relaxed
herself—also because his activity in her erogenous zone drained her of control,
weakening her ability to stay upright—and pulled away from where she’s
flattened herself to the metal wall, bending forward over Capa bent over her,
and bringing her arms back up to lay about his shoulders to hold him to her.

Cassie’s moan made Capa draw harder upon
her, so she moaned louder and longer, causing him to suck harder and pull his
head back a little and pull her with him. Her back arched, his drag upon her
seeming to be pulling the rest of her body as though tethered to that crucial
point of her breast. Her spine bending outwards caused her to peel nearly
completely off of the wall, her head falling backwards as her skull rolled up
along the metal panel until she rested against it only with her scalp.

“Capa!” she’d said his name before, when
he’d first laid hands upon her chest, regardless of it initially having been
clothed. She seemed to grapple with the word, grabbing onto his name, the way
it felt in her mouth as she said it, as though it were her only means of
communication at this point. She was too weakened by pleasure to do anything
more than ensure the snare of her arms around his shoulders was a complete loop
that wouldn’t slip off, each of her hands gripping the forearm of the other.

If he’d thought her laughter was the
sweetest noise he’d hear while on this mission, Capa considered, before now
he’d been right. Hearing her say his name had been a calling he’d always
heeded, never ignoring her as she’d advised him of mission tactics, or asked
for his attention in casual conversation. But now, hearing her say his name in
a manner and with a meaning that was so much more vital, a request to receive
more from him—a demand to feel more of him—he wouldn’t even let any other
thought enter into his brain. Not of the circumstances of how they’d met, nor
of why they shouldn’t have, really, entangled themselves in this current
interaction. Only that they had met, and that right now, all he wanted to
experience in life was her.

His spine bent too much, his head still
down to kissing her chest as his train of thought caused his pelvis to thrust
towards her, the edge of it gouging into her barren midriff. It threw him a bit
off-balance, and put his weight to one knee, the leg joint jousting forward to
smack against the metal wall behind her by bending out between her legs.

Though Capa’s mind may have been fixated on
her, and her alone, as he suckled her chest to hear her moan to arouse the both
of them together, Cassie’s mind was suddenly seeking a distraction from this
distraction. Her mind wandered to recall Mace, in his frustration with the
physicist, saying something in a concealed manner, a euphemism, to say that
Capa himself was essentially a piece of equipment, like the Bomb itself. That
the youngest crewmember knew more about the Stellar Bomb than anyone else on
the mission, and therefore was the most important member of the crew—even
though he really didn’t have to be as thorough an astronaut as all the others
in order to get to this point—making the rest of the crew, to one degree or
another, consider him to be an instrument rather than a person. That he, like
the payload, had to be transported to the drop-off point intact as well, to
ensure without a doubt that the mission would be a success. Mace’s impression
of Capa was at the extreme of this opinion: that the physicist was very much
the trigger of the Bomb instead of a crewmate. The distracting thought that
Mace would say this and then let his anger get the better of him so that he got
into the fist-fight with Capa had Cassie grinning now at the hypocrisy; but
then another thought entirely overrode the humour of the irony. That right now
she was using Capa like an instrument, too. Not to use his physics training,
like the payload would require, but instead the fact that besides being that
trigger he was still a man, and she would take full advantage of him in this
sense as well.

Her breasts were so firm together by his
own hold, so dense-feeling that they had their own gravity that made his mouth
remain at their surface. But those physical traits were too similar to aspects
of astronomy, and he was beginning to be distracted by recalling, along the
vein of how he’d originally met Cassie, why he’d met her. He didn’t like how
the Sun loomed in the back of his mind, invading this erotic event, so he
sought to forget it again by changing the physical attributes. He couldn’t of
the Sun, but he could right now upon Cassie. And his hands released their grip
around her breasts, disrupting the created cleavage, and allowing them to fall
with the artificial gravity to lay naturally upon her chest. This re-exposed
the expanse of skin over her sternum, giving him place to set his lips down
directly over her heart. In the meantime, his hands fell further, back to their
stroking cycle about her waist and back, now that Cassie wasn’t flattened to
the wall deliberately any longer.

Capa seemed content now to merely caress
and kiss wherever he saw Cassie’s skin that he hadn’t seen before, but Cassie
wanted more again. She’s wanted his touch here, and when she got it, her mind
then took the next step to focus on what she wanted him to follow up with. His
hands, having resumed making their circuit of rubbing slowly and gently around
the circumference of her lower torso, were teasing her. She doubted he intended
to have that effect on her, but every time his palms came around to the front
of her body they seemed to descend in their flow incrementally lower on her
midriff—this pass nearly hitting the lip of her navel with his pinky
fingertip—and wouldn’t assure her that he’d ever get his hands to stroke about
the lowest point of her torso.

Her body was completely in tune with her
mind, knowing without her thinking in so many thoughts, what to do to get a new
reaction from him. When he’d been thrown off balance and had thrown out his
knee to catch it again, resulting in his leg joint painfully hitting the wall
from where it shot out between her legs, it made her body react instinctually.
Feeling his thigh between hers, its cylindrical shape was a preliminary
introduction to another part of him that was its neighbour, and also his upper
leg on its own felt warm and sturdy enough for her to bear down against. For
suddenly, instinctually, of their own accord Cassie’s hips picked up the slack
of her arched spine, moving downwards so she straddled Capa’s thigh, and then
her back re-arched, causing her pelvis to grind forwards and upwards along the
femur, up the angle towards where it connected to the physicist. As soon as the
action took place Cassie felt embarrassed, realizing that it had been an
animalistic gesture; humping stereotypically a movement that revealed the
basest drive of life, and reduced the individual from whatever height of mental
accomplishment they possessed, as in that sexual moment they discarded their
willpower. She was a pilot, but her body had completely disregarded that
achievement of man in order to connect to the primordial portion of her brain,
and be driven to commit an act that would further this erotic endeavour.

For a brief second, she remembered, in its
entirety, the scope of the mission. The scale of it, the planning that had gone
into it, and the dedication of a crew of eight that went beyond the First
Animal Law: self-preservation. If Cassie’s initial thoughts upon first meeting
with Capa here at the payload were true, that they would die despite setting
out from Earth with a strategy that would enable their return, it was obvious
that they had considered this demise before leaving home, and yet had still
assigned themselves to the mission. They were not merely animal. They could
reason, and understand consequence, and unselfishly resign themselves to
preventing their species’ extinction at the cost of their own lives.

Before Cassie could have caused her own
depression to rear its ugly head again, all thought about the mission slipped
away, but the aspect of her animal nature remained with her. Or, rather, the
fact that she was not entirely defined by her instinct. That she possessed
knowledge and skill to conduct the human invention of flight, and that those
attributes could be depended upon most of the time. But right now, it was all
right for her to connect to a baser portion of her mind’s capacity, and take
advantage of that part of her that made her kindred to all who the mission was
designed to save.

Despite that permission she’d given
herself, Cassie was still a bit anxious, wondering what Capa’s consideration of
her bold move was exactly. He didn’t acknowledge it—verbally at least, since
instead he moaned, but that could have been attributed to his change of venue,
as he ceased kissing her chest and raised his head back up to put his lips upon
hers once more.

Cassie moaned too, but in a frustration
that her crewmate hadn’t seemed to feel her suggestion when she’d ground her
privates up his thigh, nor did his hands stroking about her lower torso become
any more adventurous. So she extended her permission, and decided on making
another bold move, as a pilot should be able to do in the situation warrants
it.

She handled his controls, his hands. Her
arms slipped down from around where they encircled his shoulders, the palms
skimming down his arms, following their reaching direction about her own torso.
She pressed her hands to hold the backs of his hands, holding him holding her
at the waist before his hands could slip around to her back again. Then she
forced one of his hands to reverse its travel, making his palm slide back
around to her midriff. Then she turned her hand sideways to turn his hand on
her to point with his fingers downwards, pointing to the floor of the payload’s
control room. It was just a matter of sucking in her own stomach just a little,
unnoticeably, as she guided Capa’s hand to slide downwards, and slip it
underneath the waistline of the issue pants she wore without his nails catching
on the beltline and him hesitating. Instead, she smoothly slid his hand down
into her pants.

Capa ripped his mouth away from hers, but
her hands tightened their grip over each of his as soon as she felt him try to
pull his hand back up along her midriff.

When she opened her eyes to look into her
crewmate’s, Cassie saw a worried expression on his face. He was either nervous
for him or nervous for her, obviously not having even considered the intimate
situation her guidance of his hand suggested. While Capa had fantasized of
Cassie, he hadn’t done so to imagine how he would make her feel good; only that
she was the reason there was a constriction about himself and not the grip of
his own hand. Of course, he loved to see her smile, loved to hear her laugh,
and that was all he’d allowed himself to know of how she could feel good.
Before now, at least. Because though he knew that she was a woman, a human who
could also experience the need for sensuality physically, like he did, he
hadn’t endeavoured to muse upon that fact. They’d been meant to be strictly
crewmates, and consequently friends, but his loner nature didn’t have him
ponder in detail the personal preferences and idiosyncrasies that composed his
associates’ personalities. And now Cassie was trying to reveal one such
preference of hers, and Capa wondered whether it was wise for him to know.
Learning one would eventually uncover others: like the possibility that she may
not enjoy his contribution to the actual act.

But the way they were going now was
basically him following her lead, when she’d make him follow her gaze down to
her chest, letting him put his hands there, and even before that when she’d
looked down at her own communication device, directing him to assist in what
was a burden she found too great a responsibility to shed herself for even one
necessary moment. It wasn’t that he didn’t have a mind of his own; it was just
that he wasn’t used to this sort of social interaction, what with preferring to
be a loner and all. It wasn’t that he’d never experienced the like of it
before, but he did perhaps let whoever she had been do exactly what she wanted.
He did enjoy it, but didn’t have as much to contribute since he didn’t spend
too much of his time thinking about what he wanted to do. His fantasies of
Cassie had consisted of him being on his back, just as he lay in bed. The
majority of his thoughts were, of course, on Dark Matter, and his Stellar Bomb.
And he had joined the Icarus Project to utilize his physics theories, and had
trained vigorously at the direction of aviation and space specialists to be
ready to take this trip out to the Sun, to take part in the mission.

Cassie’s hostage-hold over Capa’s hands
loosened, and their eyes stayed locked while she took her hands off his
completely. She feared that if she moved her eyes even a little, that tiny
shift would make him jump and turn and run, like a scared rabbit. He couldn’t
see her hands’ movements if his eyes looked straight into hers, so she could
bring her hands in against herself, now not touching him at all, and unbuckle
the simple built-in belt on the issue slacks she wore.

It was as if his fingers were nervous, as
one knows that if they are feeling anxious there is a tightness in their chest
and it becomes difficult to breathe. As Cassie unbuckled her belt that
restriction of it around his fingers of course loosened, and suddenly the
digits seemed to take a breath, a jolt going through the carpals to restore
sensation. The pads of his fingers were against the front panel of Cassie’s
grey cotton panties, the waist elastic snug around her not having pulled away
from her skin when she sucked in. Lightly, one at a time his fingertips lifted
consecutively from feeling her warmth through the colourless fabric, then
softly tapped down again, the barest of drumming of his fingers as secondary
affirmation of where his hand actually was.

A tertiary confirmation occurred as
Cassie’s hands left the front fastening mechanism of her pants, and one raised
up to catch around Capa’s wrist that posed above her former beltline, and the
other hand raised further to cup the side of his face. His chin stubble
bristled against the tender heel of her palm, his head seeming to drop a little
into her influence as her other hand tightened its grip about his wrist. His
hand that wrapped around one side of her pelvis squeezed her a little more
there, as it a confirmation to her, communicating that her hand encircling his
wrist didn’t need to use so much constriction. Since the thought didn’t even
cross his mind to remove his hands from her.

With her hand on his cheek Cassie made her
fingers curl, to catch around the corner of his jawbone near his ear, getting a
hold of him to draw his whole head down to her height again, to kiss him. Their
eyes remained locked to one another’s as she guided him back from the quick
kiss with the movement of her hand, so all it took from her was to say
“Please,” to make him take the next step she wanted. Of the hand against her
midriff his fingers curled up inside towards his palm, just enough that their
tips were above the waistline of her panties, and then straightened into her
skin to push it back from the tautness of the elastic around her pelvis. It
made a space between her stomach and the fabric, so he could then flatten his fingers’
lengths to her again, slipping them down into her underwear.

The thing about his nightmares of falling
into the surface of the Sun was that Capa was not willing in those dreams. In
his waking hours he went through the motions of what he’d assigned himself to,
of using his knowledge of Dark Matter to willingly assist in achieving the
mission’s goal. But when his subconscious was tapped as he slept, his secret
fear reigned, contradicting his belief that the ignition of his Bomb within the
solar entity would be a beautiful sight. That beauty’s cost was great violence,
of enormous fire erupting, and that could be expected to frighten anyone. No
matter how attractive its existence was to him, it was inherently a thing of
destruction.

Too close to it, anyways. The path of orbit
Earth had situated itself in around the Sun was in a perfect position to allow
life to begin to begin with. Not too close and not too far, their home planet’s
distance had assured their evolution to crawl up from a single-celled existence,
to develop into creatures with complex life systems and the intelligence to
undertake the responsibility of giving their solar origins a resurgence in its
lifespan. Prolonging the span of their evolution, which had thus far promoted
some striking specimens. Capa would confess he was looking at one right now,
that he didn’t fear being so close to this specific aspect of the Sun’s
influence. That he wanted to touch it, to feel its intense warmth and surface
that looked like it was slick with fluid, and whose core was throbbing with a
gravity that would pull him in, deep inside of it, into his own personal
oblivion.

His hand was about to slip off of the
surface, her skin was so slickened. That was his hand on her hip. The hand
inside of her pants put the fingers up, his arm pushing down so far that it
followed the direction of the fabric that lay closest to Cassie’s body. Where
it curved down between her legs his hand curved, and his fingers slid up
against her between her folds, melding to her in her intense heat like the
payload would be sent through the surface of the Sun to do.

Her moan sounded like she was in pain, like
she wasn’t ready for his invasion yet. But her constricting grip released his
wrist to slide up his arm and wrap around his elbow, holding his arm to stay
reaching down against her, and her hips instinctually bucked against his
fingers. He didn’t think her involuntary movement was without dignity at all.
He only thought that she was more certain of what she wanted than he was, and he
envied her for that. That she was confident when conducting herself in any
social interaction, especially this one. Her sure actions aroused him, and he
wished that he was so self-assured so she would be aroused by him. His
answering moan to her was in pain, that he worried he couldn’t distract her
fully, and his hand shook nervously as he slipped his finger inside of her.
Doing that definitely distracted him from his anxiety, as he now felt her
warmth and her flush from the inside, and in his next inhalation could smell
her sweet breath as she exhaled in another vulnerable moan.

“Robert!” with his forefinger inside of
her, saying her crewmate’s given name was her way of getting inside of him.
Getting to him on a personal level, perhaps even more personal than where his
touch upon her was located now. Because that was merely a physical notion, one
that really was a capability of anyone, whereas the mentality behind it was
unique. He knew her, as a friend, as a colleague, and now as one of only a few
men who she let her guard down completely with, entirely in trust, to allow him
to see how pleasure could weaken her. To see her, as she wanted him, at her
most vulnerable, and in need of another’s trustworthy touch. The crew was so
casual in addressing one another, even Kaneda who was actually their Captain,
that they were reduced to family names, to origins. But Capa was more than just
one of only a handful of people who were charged with kick-starting the Sun. He
was also a son, a brother, an uncle, and that was as Robert. And that he had
such family, and knew the second generation of it, was what made her envy him.
By addressing him by his first name, given to him by his family, which gave it
a personal meaning, Cassie helped to distract herself, and momentarily could
consider being like his family. That she could call on him so informally, by
something that gave him meaning, and could thereby enjoy the presence of the
second generation it had spawned. A generation that would benefit from their
mission, but that she had prevented herself from actually contributing to,
aside from getting the payload to its destination. She could piggyback on the
feeling Capa got from being a guardian to children. Beyond origins and on into
the future. A future she’d never experience.

His arm slid a bit further down into her
underclothing, his finger sinking up so deeply into her that the curve of his
forefinger inside extended down and out along his thumb, which was right up
against her. He curled his finger within her as his thumb flicked side-to-side
over her bud, much like a person can’t help curling their ring finger when they
collapse their middle finger, the digits interconnected. Her vocal cords also
seemed to be interconnected with his index finger, as she moaned each time he
moved it inside of her.

“Cassidy,” it was his turn to use her given
name, to test the limits of their friendship, though where his hand was now was
another consideration of that, as well. Her full name, not just the slang she’d
allowed her crewmates to address her by, was her love, an emotion that her
fellow astronauts hadn’t seen her wear on her sleeve with all the other
feelings. Her parents had Christened her this, and little did he know but her
mission technician paramour had insisted on calling her by it. All knew it, but
all didn’t know what it really meant. And though Capa wasn’t in love with her,
he did love her nonetheless, and strived to show her that he took her full
meaning to heart.

He slid a second finger into her, and both
of her hands flew up to wrap around the back of his neck, for leverage as her
loins thrust forwards towards him and down onto his hand. After one additional
moan she closed her mouth over his, kissing him to have a reason to shut her
eyes so she wouldn’t continually blush at the sight of his intense stare upon
her. Her head fell back thanks to the simple weight of her thick hair, she too
weakened by pleasure to hold even that up, as she arched forward to peel her
back from the wall and press her bared chest to his. As if to prevent her head
from dropping off her shoulders completely, Capa brought up his hand from her
hip, and since it was slick with her sweat from her torso, as the fingers
slipped into her hair they invariably stuck to the cascade of chestnut waves.

Cassie felt so hot, her head was spinning.
Her thoughts were whirling like hydrogen and helium, making her feel
light-headed. And like swirling elements of a nebula’s cloud of dust, her
thoughts spun faster and faster, being drawn in to her mental core deeper and
more densely until the gravity it developed fused some thoughts together: like
that of what Capa’s fingers inside of her felt like, with how arousing the
noises his lips were making as he parted and then renewed kissing her sounded. Again
like a nebula, as these erotic thoughts were so dense that they’d ignited this
fusion process, it seemed she was about to self-ignite, to begin to case her
own glow as her nerve endings would catch fire. Knowing that every atom in the
human body was once also a part of a star, that juxtaposition bewildered her;
that the simple periodicals that once could only create starlight now were
about to contribute to her climax.

Despite the fact that this was what she’d
sought to distract herself, Cassie still was an individual of consideration,
and so didn’t want to be selfish and leave Capa out. So though she felt herself
pushing harder and with increasing frequency against his knuckles, she knew she
had more drive to make this interaction more connected. And she would do the opposite
to achieve it. Though he was the physicist, she understood as well as he did
the Third Law of that scientific respect: that for every action, there is an
equal and opposite reaction. She knew that the push down of the fuel and fire
of the Air Force jets she used to pilot raised her up into the air to fly. And
right now she was nearly flying, but she doubted Capa was receiving enough fuel
to help keep her airborne. So as his action was inside of her, her equal
reaction was her hand, opposite in that it was outside of his body. One of her
hands slipped out from under the hold of the other hand around the back of his
neck, sliding down his back as there was no room to noticeably journey between
their naked torsos, and then came around his hip. Her hand bumped against the
back of his hand though his had disappeared into her underpants of grey cotton,
and hers was cupping him over top of their issue sky blue pants.

“Cassie!” the shortened form of her name
was quicker for him to say, and get out of the way so next he could distract
himself from this new touch of hers by trying to delve his fingers deeper into
her. She choked on a moan, and in retaliation her grip around him, where his
length was forced to lay along the crease of his leg to his pelvis as he
hardened, tightened. His thumb flickered faster against her and she cried out,
her knees weakening so her legs nearly went out from under her. As her legs
bent that bend took up the slack along her spine, bringing her head back up
straight onto her shoulders. No longer needing to keep his hand around the back
of her head to keep the whole thing from dropping off, Capa somehow
disentangled his sticking fingers from her hair, then quickly slipped that arm
around her back to hold her up from falling off her feet. His other arm
remained sandwiched between their bare chests, the fingers at the end of it
reaching into her as though reaching for her core on his own personal mission,
just like the goal of the Icarus Project was to reach the core of the Sun with
an extra burst of energy. The difference between that macrocosm and his
microcosm with Cassie right now was that his attentions to her were making her
endlessly weak and vulnerable to more of his ministrations.

Unfortunately for him, her pilot’s instinct
caused her to know exactly what control to initiate in order to keep herself
airborne, like if she was in one of her Air Force jets. Like an infant’s
instinct to throw out their arms, to slow themselves down if they suddenly feel
like they’re falling, she had utilized her hand’s holds on what they currently
grasped to help keep herself from dropping. She had no idea that Capa would be
conscious enough after she’d applied her palm to his arousal to be aware of her
state, and to think of assisting her in avoiding that simple danger when he was
already focussed on the perilous heartrate her was fingering into her. To keep
herself standing, her hand around the back of his neck had taken to
transferring some of her body weight to it, to anchor behind Capa’s sturdy column
of vertebrae—so like iron though it was slight—so she could invariably hang
from it, but also pulled him forward deeper into their kiss. Her other hand
also sought to grip to prevent her from slipping down with her collapsing knees,
regardless of it being wrapped around a part of his body that, though it was
currently firm, was far less sturdy to withstand her immense touch. She
squeezed in her effort to catch a certain handhold, causing him to feel like
his knees would go out from under him.

His moan was more of a protest than a sign
of enjoyment, it sounding nearly scolding to her as his loins sank forward into
her hand. His head followed suit, pushing forward ever deeper into kissing
Cassie, right up until the back of her head hit the wall. Once her cranium
connected with the metal panel again, Capa’s balance had been thrown too far
from his control, and his head continued on its forward course, slipping
sideways off of her lips to go on into the empty space above her shoulder. Then
his skull was stopped by the wall too, his forehead thunking against it, his
eyes shut still so he couldn’t have foreseen how soon he would collide. So he
hit the metal with some speed, but not enough to cause a concussion. Not that
he would’ve realized it, anyways, feeling so weak he didn’t feel he had any
control over himself, so he doubted he even had a brain.

Capa’s neck now alongside Cassie’s, her was
now close enough to her that her ear caught the sound of his Adam’s Apple
bobbing in his throat, as he swallowed hard and his lips parted to gasp and
take in a much needed breath. She turned her head towards his, kissing his neck
to distract him as his nape became bared again by her hand releasing its grip
around it, and the fingers of it joined those of her previously groping hand in
unbuckling his pants. She heard him cease breathing: he was holding his breath
until she completely opened the front of the slacks, not inhaling again until
she’d finished dragging down the zipper’s pull.

“Cassie,” he whispered her moniker this
time, and the tone of that pleading noise could have been asking her to stop or
to continue. She pretended she couldn’t hear him over the sound of her own
moan, turning her hand to curl the fingers over the waistband of his
undergarment, while her other hand distractingly slipped around his side to his
back. She made a point of slowly sliding her fingers up his ribcage, causing
Capa to mentally count off each rib as she grazed it, so her more adventurous
hand slid down into his undershorts without interruption.

As he fingers closed around him, Capa
suddenly withdrew his fingers from her, quickly drawing his arm up and breaking
that contact. His arm about her back mirrored that movement, both arms now
synchronized as they simultaneously went forward, palms flattening to the wall.
Either side of Cassie’s shoulder level his hands had thrown up to support his
weight, bracing him from being affected entirely by the gravity of her
influence, wanting only to crash into her but knowing she wasn’t ready for that
just yet. He was able to push back on the wall, to move his upper torso
backwards atop its spine that lacked the strength to pull him back on its own,
and bring his head away from being neighbour to Cassie’s, so he could actually
look at her again. And, if he thought he could remain in control following,
possibly look down to see what he was allowing her to do to him.

Beginning to feel her hand tighten around
him, Capa tried to concentrate on his underwear itself, the last thing his mind
had thought of before it realized what her hand’s destination was her intent.
He forced himself to think about his shorts to maintain his self control as her
hand began to telescope him, to distract himself—much like the type of
undergarment issued to each of the crewmembers was in consideration of their
sanity. It had been Searle’s contention that the human crew needed to retain
routine and the comfort of personal preferences in order to not be driven mad
that, essentially, their lives were actually completely committed to the
mission. And expendable. By keeping simple tasks intact, like preparing their
own food from harvest of the Oxygen Garden instead of the same pre-packaged
stuff day in and day out—if they even remembered what ‘day’ was, anymore—they
could still keep their vestiges of humanity, their feeling of free will and
freedom to like. So other simplicities included comfortable clothes, to feel
relaxed and calm in, and so their skin didn’t itch and crawl against something
it wasn’t used to. The crew had been issued the same kinds of clothes: cotton
from the Earth weaved into cool tanks, casual polos, and scrub-like sky blue
pants. Cassie herself had modified her own slacks, cutting off the calves to
create capris. But as for what would really
be against skin, the men of the mission got to keep their personal style
preference of undershorts. A tightie-whitie man could be driven insane by too
much freedom in boxers. For Capa, he’d adjusted to the hybrid, so his wardrobe
on the Icarus II consisted of dark grey boxerbriefs. And now Cassie knew it.

But unlike how he had tried to focus
entirely on that simple trivia, Cassie didn’t seem to even care. She had since
turned his appendage inside his briefs, moving him so he was directed upwards.
Then, with her hand still wrapped around the underside of his shaft, between
the dark grey jersey knit fabric and his arousal, she bent her elbow, lowering
her forearm and shoulder to accommodate the movement, and bending her wrist.
The waistband of the undergarment had been restricting, holding the inside of
her wrist flat to the lower half of his midriff. But now her wrist bent,
forcing the waist elastic to slide down her arm, and down to scrape the back of
her hand. She didn’t cease the slow drop of her arm’s bones until her bending of
her wrist had also included her hand, it falling backwards and downwards as
well, first the palm and then her fingers—and the part of him her fingers had
wrapped around. He didn’t feel the movement, since he didn’t feel the sensation
of the elastic slipping down. Rather, he indirectly felt it as the band
tightened against her hand, causing her hand to increase its pressure against
him. That sensation had caused a
shortness of breath for him, and made him instinctually downcast his eyes in
slight shame, and definite embarrassment at his own vulnerability to the
feeling of this, at least for him, uncommon activity. His eyes barely saw past
his own cheekbones, but undeniably witnessed a part of himself that had the
ability to, and did, jut out further. Because of Cassie. Because she’d forced
his briefs down so he extended towards her from above the elastic, the
tightness of which now felt quite unnatural at a false waist level around his
lower torso.

As she tugged on Capa, letting her hand
wrap around his base and then pull along it towards its opposite end, drawing
on him and towards her own personal gravity, Cassie looked down at him. No, not
at him; at what she was doing. Focussed to distract herself, to ensure she
would arouse him enough so he’d be able to participate in what she anticipated
next. Her fervour may have led an observer to believe that she would’ve been
with any man in her desperation. Well, Mace was kind of cute, though he was
extremely dedicated to the mission. She’d noticed more of his obsession with
their goal than his attractive appearance ever since his fight with Capa—so
perhaps she’d felt a bit sorry for Capa to have picked him over the engineer.
She also didn’t agree with Mace’s adamance to deny the possibility that Icarus
I was not worth attempting to save, when Harvey had played
for them the echo of the predecessor’s distress signal. These aspects of his
demeanour, the way he conducted himself as it bereft of a personality for the
sake of accomplishing their goal, communicated to Cassie that he likely
wouldn’t have given in to satisfying this need of hers. Even though she needed
it to secure her role in the success of the mission. They had, bottom-line,
been sent out to save the personality of their planet: humanity. And while it
seemed to her that Mace had none, the more sociable of the crew might’ve thrown
Capa into that boat just because he preferred to be alone. But as for Cassie,
she like the loner. His personality was that he was quiet, which made him her
opposite. It also made her jealous of him, because unlike her, he didn’t show
his emotions. As an individual who willingly wore her heart on her sleeve,
Cassie also was witness to her own emotions, and seeing how worked up she got
about the things she’d given up made her even more depressed. If Capa was so
saddened—which had prompted her to maliciously taunt his lack of feeling
earlier—he wasn’t the sort to readily reveal it, and she envied that. Because
he hid how much he logically missed home, Cassie was always happier to talk with
him. Looking at him, not seeing how he must inevitably be desolate, didn’t
remind her of how unhappy she really was. Most of the time, anyways. Here now in
the control room talking about it, addressing it, reminded her, and made her
need this distraction.

It hadn’t been enough to try to distract
herself alone. When assigned to her mandatory sleep cycle, left alone in the
dark and afraid to shut her eyes to see the surface of the Sun, she was left
awake with her thoughts. Of how alone she really felt amongst the crew, knowing
that her psych tests had defined her as stable enough to bear the pressures of
the demands of the mission without breaking. Feeling pressured not to break,
though she was heartbroken. How amongst the things she loved of her life on Earth,
she also had loved her mission technician. And thinking of him, she’d
occasionally staved off her impending nightmare of solar fire by pleasingly
recalling her amorous escapades with the stoic scientist. Her own hand,
however, couldn’t make her forget that her greatest sadness was her lost
child—her reminiscence had actually led her to remember it, since she’d become
pregnant because she’d loved the technician. It was a vicious cycle. She
couldn’t have continued trying to forget unless she had a different memory to
replace it. And that was the reason for this distraction.

That hand that couldn’t satisfy herself now
seemed to be doing a fine job pleasuring Capa, if his continuing gasps and
groans were anything to judge by. Stroking her encircling hand along his length
a couple final times made her sense that he was as firm as he could get. He was
ready for her. By their own accord her eyes roved, and tried to meet up with
his though she would have been embarrassed to deliberately seek that visual
contact. So she didn’t realize she was looking up at his face until she saw the
lack of focus in his eyes. The lids half-closed, hooded, eyes going off nearly
in different directions, she doubted he even knew he was looking down at her.
But it still looked like he was, and she figured he’d realize he was soon
enough, so she blushed and turned her head away, breaking the stare before it
could begin. Her head had turned sideways, in the direction of the windows that
faced the core of the payload, and right next to her head Capa still had a hand
braced against the wall. The other hand still was too, but from the one she
faced she could detect her own scent, as this was the hand whose fingers had
been inside of her only moments ago. Though her cheeks were hot as she blushed
at her own enjoyment of his moans of enjoyment, her eyes were not shut against
the pleasure, so she was looking out the window at the Stellar Bomb. She
couldn’t fathom that the fingers she was smelling herself on were the same ones
that possessed the ability to set off the machine she was gazing at. She was
vaguely aware that Capa must have leaned into her again, for he was kissing her
neck, and his shaft in her hand had pushed deeper into the circle formed by her
thumb and forefinger, the sweat of her own palm enabling him to slide himself
when she had slowed her ministrations to muse on her thoughts. She moaned at
the sensation of him sucking upon her earlobe, her hand about his back flying
out from under his arm to reach up and grip his braced forearm, suddenly
needing support again as the thought that he was really ready for her
ironically weakened her bones. She held on to stay standing, as her other hand
held onto him to draw him towards her ever closer.

With her one ear pillowed by her thick hair
cascaded between her and the wall, Cassie was shielded from the hard metal
panel as her hand’s movement back and forth along Capa invariably made her
whole body shift to and fro on her feet. His attentions to her earlobe felt too
intimate, because his lips were soft and he was feeling so gentle even though
he rarely released it to catch his own breath. Thinking of that, she thought
she could hear him silently inhale, and it seemed the air rushed into his
mouth, to be circulated by his rapid heartbeat across his aroused body. Now
knowing that Capa’s lips felt as tender as they looked, upon her own lips and
now on this favourite erogenous zone of hers, she knew that from this new
memory they were making—which she would only be able to reminisce on for the short
period of time they had until they completed their mission; if she was right
that they would die out here—she would be made to blush every time she looked
upon them afterwards. When she’d inevitably have to converse with him in
regards to the mission, she knew that when she’d hear him speak again, if he’d
say her name or she’d hear him breathe, her eyes would eagerly drop to gaze at
his mouth and make her fantasize she could feel them again.

It would also be the case with his eyes,
which was the one aspect she placed importance on in terms of adoring an
individual. If someone didn’t wear their heart on their sleeve as she did—which
was usually the case—she could always count upon looking into their eyes to
determine their true emotions, regardless of their devised gestures and false
words. She had fallen in love with her mission technician because of what she
saw in his eyes; that though they were a steely shade of blue that almost
constantly showed an intense focus on his contribution to the project, the
brief moments he didn’t his gaze was instead cast upon her, and displayed
exactly why he was so dedicated to their cause. He was in love with her. And
while she knew that emotion didn’t exist between any of the crewmates here on
the Icarus II, seeing such eyes in Capa’s possession, looking upon her with an
emotion that was closest to being in love as she’d find from any of her
colleagues here and now, comforted her. Because as an emotional person she
thrived on the sensation of love, and would grasp at even a facade of it in
this desperation of hers. So though it wasn’t true, it was trust, and it was
saving her to continue on their course, so she wouldn’t feel ashamed to have
taken advantage of him. While she didn’t feel the same way for Capa that she once
did for her near-child’s father, Cassie still loved him enough to not want to
let the mission be his end. Nor any of their fates; for the world, let alone
the crew. And his sky-blue eyes reminded her of that world, and she knew that
every time they’d make eye contact following this encounter she’d be reminded
of this activity that transpired between them that both distracted her from and
displayed how she felt most of life.

Despite the fact that she blushed to ponder
conversations she’s have to have with him, following this escapade but while
still on the mission, and the first conversation would likely be in regards to
meeting up with the Icarus I. Cassie let her eyes again roll to meet up with
his. This was part of the time they had left to them, and the last time she’d
ever be upon this path to her own human transcendence before her prediction of
this crew’s fate became true. As they were on a mission to preserve humanity,
this was, right now, all about her feeling hers, for as many moments as she
would be permitted to extend that eternal sensation. Trapped in her own orgasm
times before, regardless of being in love with her lover or not, the event’s
duration seemed to her to have no beginning and no end, that she couldn’t
remember how many seconds ago her ministrations had pushed her body’s nerves
into contractions of pure pleasure, nor could she recall past sessions’ actual
signification of their end. So, for the moment of her climax, she couldn’t be
reminded of the difference between feeling its occurrence now, and how it would
feel after. During her orgasm, life felt like one long pleasure trip. And
whether she was in love with her lover only added to the intensity of the
experience. So with Capa now obviously couldn’t be as intense as she had
achieved with her mission technician paramour, but that was now matter. Once
she’d again be in her orgasm, she wouldn’t remember her sadness before, or know
of her eventual death after. Only that in climax, she would know naught but her
purest humanity. A race, that, like the Sun, seemed to have no beginning, nor
any end would their mission be successful.

His eyes were endlessly showcasing his
pleasure as she continued to minister him with her hand. Her head had to turn
away from its sideways direction of facing the window, to look back into Capa’s
eyes, and now stayed facing him. Even though the return had forced him to pull
back from sucking upon her ear, and in his pleasure he could still only view
her from beneath hooded eyelids. She was still a bit embarrassed at her own
aggressive conduct with her work colleague, but she was too intent on achieving
her own climax to turn back now. Forwards her hand encircling his shaft slid
once more, towards his body, palming nearly his entire length. Whatever her
small hand couldn’t encase had become adjacent to the inside of her wrist, and
she wondered if his sensitive head, pressed alongside her pulse point, could
feel her rapid heartrate.

Capa found it wasn’t warm enough. Life
needs warmth to survive, to breed, and is instinctually driven to find their
future in such a guaranteeing climate. All along his hands had been upon the
cold metal wall, bracing him from collapsing into her. There was no future for
any of the crew if Cassie’s pessimism was founded. There would be essentially
no reason for him to give in. Other than she needed him to so that she would
survive her own desperation, so they could go into the warmth of the Sun and
ensure the survival of the rest of their species. But at the moment, just like
Cassie, he was no longer thinking that far ahead: all his consideration would,
for this moment, be in regards to just the two of them. There would be no
future for them—except for what was immediate. And right now, though he didn’t need her warmth, he still wanted it. And
couldn’t stop his instincts from animalistically making him thrust his pelvis
into her hand, forcing her own arm to fold into itself as his torso followed
his loins’ movement forward, and his arousal nearly collided with her bare
midriff.

Cassie moaned at his earnestness, shutting
her eyes as she believed he would move completely forward, so his lips would
meet with hers again. Instead his head went far forward, him mouth upon her
neck. This distracted her from noticing his hands sliding along the wall in
towards her, clasping over her shoulders to get that warmth. She let out a
small cry of surprise, as his palms transferred their temperature drop from
their contact with the wall to her burning skin; a new sensation from him as
she herself with her bared back on the wall was already used to the cold metal
itself. His fingers gripped around her arms squeezed in eager reaction to her
vocalization, then slid down them as they maintained that pressure, like how
he’d squeezed her torso as he’d moved his hands up it to cup her breasts
before. Now his hands moved down, forcing her non-fondling hand to release its
grip on his forearm, and her fondling hand to release him as his pressure
constricted her upperarms in parallel against her ribs. Her forearms hung limply
until his palms flattened down them, continuing their forcefulness even past
the ends of her fingers, and onto her thighs. At that point he’d extended his
arms down as far as they would reach, hunched forward as he kissed her neck so
his collarbone rested against hers.

But then she felt all the pressure remove
itself, and his warmth disappear. She opened her eyes to see his head moving
down, his bottom lip pushing against the bottom point of the opened collar of
her polo, so he could kiss her collarbone. Then he made his chin jump over the
gathers of her polo’s hem pushed up to expose herself, nestling his stubble
into the folds of the grey cotton of her pushed-down sports bra as he kissed
her sternum. Then away he was and against her again, to kiss above her navel.
Only when once more his mouth removed its closeness to touch down below her
navel did Cassie realize his movement, his hands at her thighs contradictorily
moving up only so far as the waist of her pants. Having stood before his hands
had the top of this garment within their reach, but could not have gone
further. So his kisses touching down on her had been in alignment to the drop
of his whole body, as instead of bending his back forward to her it had
remained straight as he’d bent his legs, kneeling before her.

Capa was vaguely aware that Cassie had put
her hands onto his shoulders as he knelt down, and he took that as her
go-ahead, but he suddenly felt awkward. For as he’d taken knee his arousal,
jutting out from the opened fastening of his pants, in its hypersensitivity
became very aware of the texture of the very fabric those issue slacks were
made of. Without the buffer of the dark grey jersey of his boxerbriefs
cocooning him, the feel of the sky-blue cotton should have been a comfort, knowing
that it had been woven from the Earth, but his hardened member brushing against
it against the inside of one upraised thigh felt rough. Bumping into creases
made in the pantleg by the positions his legs took, a texture not friendly to
his over-sensitized flesh. He wasn’t feeling pleasure by this incidental
contact, nor was he by having pulled away from standing parallel to Cassie to
look at and touch her. So he quickly grasped the waist of her version of their
issue pants, pulling them down her legs. She began to step out of them even
before he’d brought them completely down, but they also had a longer ways to go
since she’d cut off their calves to turn them into a pair of capris. Capa
didn’t allow himself to consider her readiness as could be gathered from her
quick step to shed the garment, so he wouldn’t be distracted from following it
with her underwear. The nails of his forefingers actually gouged into her hips
as he hooked them over the band of her panties, and rushed to pull them
downwards, too. Having done this without checking for her signal first—though
her stepping out of her clothing was a signal on its own—revealed to him also
that he was now completely committed to the act.

Rising up off of his knees to his full
height again, Capa was quick in that movement, too. His urgency resulted in
another awkwardness as his arousal plunged against her bare stomach, the head
sliding upwards in her sweat to lie pointed up against her as his arms raced up
to embrace her. Her own hands went from his shoulders to either side of his
neck, as if to hold his head up and out of her way so she could look downwards
at him.

“Cassie,” quickly he’d said her name, but
he breathed it, breathless but feeling embarrassed if she saw how aroused he
was. Luckily, her eyes returned to stare into his, and he slid his hands from
embracing her around her back to her sides, moving them down. She moaned at the
contact of these dextrous appendages upon her torso again, distracted as he
pulled his hips back a bit so his arousal no longer touched her. With her eyes
locked onto his, both of them breathing heavily in anticipation, he barely
blinked as he raised one hand up to his mouth, and spit into his own palm. She
kept her eyes on his face as he lowered his hand again, and applied it around
himself. Then, as if she knew, she raised one of her legs up, bending it to
hook the knee around the edge of his pelvis, and giving him room to move his
hand to and fro along himself in his close proximity to her.

“Capa,” his eyes had dropped when he’d felt
her leg wrap around him, and he’d looked down to see her open herself up. He’d
moaned, and moved his hips forward again, not yet touching her with the head,
but aligning himself with the avenue she presented. Saying his name made his
eagerness hesitate, and his eyes, quickly, anxiously, looked back up to hers
for permission. Eyes locked one last time, he found his closing as he saw hers
doing so, and felt her hands about his neck pull him down towards her, so they
could kiss again. He opened his mouth against hers as his hand still about her
hip slid down, because below it her leg there had been the one that had raised
to wrap around him, and now his hand slipped under the origins of her thigh, to
hold it upraised. Finally, as his tongue delved into her mouth, his hips
mirrored the forward thrust, and he ceased to hold himself waiting any longer,
and drove himself into her.

She couldn’t hear his groan of pleasure
over her own moan that growled up between her ears. The last time she’d been
familiar with this invasion was in her tryst with the mission technician. And
the difference between her normal bodily stat and this addition now was even
more apparent as Capa eagerly pulled back, then immediately pistoned forward
again. Her hands squeezed inwards upon his neck in reaction, and his reaction
to that was to stop moving altogether—even breaking from their deep kiss. But
she kept her eyes closed, as he kept himself inside of her. There was a sudden
density she sensed with him than without, much like the Sun would be with the
addition of the payload. This was a different sensation than that of his
fingers. His index and middle digits had been like the warm-up exercises the
crew had been put through by the astronaut aspects of their training program, before
they’d been given physical endurance tests. It took a moment for her to
internally adjust, then, like how the Sun would be affected by the triggering
of Capa’s Bomb within it, she took the sensation of the invasion into herself
to make the best use of it. She even glowed brighter, her cheeks redder and her
skin glistening with even more sweat.

“Ah, Capa, yes...” her hands against either
side of his neck relaxed their grip, allowing his to inhale once again. She
opened her eyes slowly, rolling her lips backwards and pressing down on the
insides of them with her incisor teeth. She became aware of the texture of his
skin, specifically that which stretched over the exterior edge of his pelvis
bone, as it was in direct contact with the back of her raised leg’s thigh. Her
heel against his backside dug in, forcing him deeper into her as a result, and
forcing her breath to expel in a gasp.

Capa’s own eyes were hooded, pupils
half-covered by the line of his eyelashes, so he could only see and not see.
The blockage was compounded by an inability to comprehend what he should have
been paying attention to, as his whole body was assaulted by the pleasure that
overtook all of his senses. Suddenly he found himself remembering when he’d
first heard of the Sun’s demise. That was nearly a decade ago, which had
prompted the development of Icarus I, for which he had been to young to take
part. But he recalled vividly his first thoughts after uncovering the knowledge
that the Sun was doomed: how the Sun could cease to exist. How it would
contract in size, tightening its area, withdrawing its heat and light, thereby
ending the Earth’s ability to exist as it ended its own. And contemplating that
memory of picturing the shrinking of the Sun, with his eyes now squeezing shut,
he suddenly felt as though the whole universe was actually closing in on him. A
great pressure of stars and planets and the vacuum of space bearing down on him
alone, as though he were the centre of it all. He felt it upon his shoulders,
against his back; up through his feet, shooting up his legs. It was bearing
down all around him from all sides, seeking to reach his core. But this gravity
that was all his own, pulling the weight of all outside of him towards him, was
not dragging towards the centre of his being. Rather, he felt the focus
elsewhere, upon a part of him that was lower than centralized. And the pressure
of light years of universe shifted to instead feel immediately upon him, right
against his skin. And despite the fact that the vacuum of space was bitterly
cold—fatally so—the tightness around him, right against him, was very
warm—enticingly so. So through this implausibility of science he realized what
he was actually feeling, and remembered what he was actually doing: he’d just
put himself into Cassie. So all the pressure was focussed around the part of
him that jutted out below his actual centre of gravity, and the tightness was
actually warm, and inviting, but still drawing upon him like a vacuum. It
seemed a contradiction, and logical that it would be unwise to allow himself to
be sucked in further. But that is exactly what he let himself do, forcing his
pelvis harder against Cassie’s.

She moaned again, mouth opening to release
the gust of pleasure, lips returning to stretch across the exterior of her
face, and in kind reopened her eyes. She did so in time to watch him let his
head fall backwards, his neck stretching tall before her between her hands. But
she didn’t rush to cup a hand around the back of his cranium as he did for her
before. His mouth was opened in the process, so his own groans could escape his
throat vertically, loudly, as his loins began the cycle of thrusting earnestly.
Every time an exhalation of his was audible, picking up the delectable range of
his voice as it rustled past his vocal cords, it coincided with a movement of
his pelvis backwards, as he was made aware of how pleasurable it was to be
inside of Cassie only when he was outside of her. Their mission was conducted
on the basis of humanity’s realization that the Sun could be gone: they didn’t
realize what they had until they knew they’d lose it. The personal mission of
these two crewmembers exclusively right now had them appreciating an aspect of
their humanity they hadn’t yet lost, but shouldn’t have been undertaken while
they were assigned to this journey. But, just like the plight of the Icarus II,
it was far too late for them to turn back now. They would see the mission
through, and be enabled to do so when Cassie’s focus was restored, after she
would feel this one last time completely what she was going to lose.

For now, she was only gaining as Capa
gained speed: gaining a higher body temperature as her sweat thickened on her
skin, gaining extra heartbeats versus the passage of time as her pulse
increased its frequency, gaining all the sensations compiling from all the ends
of the nerves of her body to amount to one massive acknowledgement that was her
mounting arousal. If Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was considered, as Capa
had to in regards to his study of Dark Matter, it would explain that his
momentum within her was continually massively increasing, taking into
consideration the inertial frame of reference. As they were on the Icarus II
flying through space towards the Sun, and coincidentally the wall surface
Cassie’s back was to was perpendicular to the solar entity’s surface, the
thrusting direction of Capa’s hips was parallel to their travel on the
spaceship. Just as an insect buzzes about within the container of a moving car
without being held back, so an outside observer might witness that the movement
of Capa’s pelvis traversed the same distance that the ship did in the time it
took him to thrust. His speed seemed to be gaining a higher measure every
reversal of his direction from within to towards the Sun inside her, compounded
on the Icarus’s present rapid rate of travel.

But he only seemed aware of this fact as
his own throaty groans became so hoarse that he eventually attempted to hold
back such exhalations, his breath not escaping quickly enough for him to take
in much needed oxygen to satiate his exertions. Ceasing his vocalizations Capa
ensured no further sound by bringing his head back up on its perch atop his
spine again, his eyes opening during the move so he saw ceiling and then wall
above Cassie’s head and then Cassie herself. He felt her hands move from his
neck to holding him, palms astride either side of his face. He found her eyes
were also upon him, her chin dropped down almost to connect to the bit of
collarbone peeking out from the lowest point of her pushed-up polo’s collar,
the bit he’d kissed before. From that angle of her head her eyes stared up to
connect to his from beneath her eyebrows, enhancing her look of concentration.
A focus into his eyes, pleasured by memories of seeing those blue irises
staring back at her from a previous lover; a focus into what lay behind his
eyes, the mind of the crewmember who would do anything to ensure the success of
their mission. Including this distraction from it, for her sake.

Still, Capa felt that, with his pace ever
increasing and him unable to stop himself, he must be ravaging her, breaking
her himself. And the innocence he’d allowed himself to have as his impression
of her. If he’d been told so, he never would have believed she was this sexually
aggressive—he would’ve thought he was fantasizing of her again instead. Though
his loins kept pushing into her harder and deeper with each reciprocation, his
upper body leaned back away from her, to give her room to consider whether he was being too aggressive for her. Her
hands remained along the sides of his face, arms extending to follow his
movement backwards, so he couldn’t slip out of that contact. But then she
slipped her hands back down to his neck, then further to his shoulders, lower
to palm his chest and to feel his heartbeat faster than his thrusting pace,
then finally turning to go beneath each of his arms. Sliding around his ribs to
palm his shoulderblades, and then pull him forward into her proximity once
more, her arms going around his back to embrace him. If his actions were
savage, she obviously didn’t mind.

His hand that had steadied himself to push
into her was by this point back on her hip, the one it had risen up from
earlier to hold her head from falling off. His other hand was still around the
underside of her upraised thigh, his fingers holding her leg aside, his
fingertips reaching under enough to lightly hold open her folds. Cassie figured
his fingernails must be grazing himself as he pistoned into and out of her,
potentially scraping and therefore injuring himself. But she’d found herself,
in her emotional sensitivity and this physical vulnerability to his relentless
force, that the pain is what had made her personally feel most alive.

Despite the attempt at steadying her with
one hand palming her thigh and the other holding her pelvis, her loins rippled
of their own accord, moving like the ocean’s waves to and fro. Rocking back and
forth into and reversing from his thrusts at the end of her fluid, sinuous
spine. It was too warm, though the Icarus was designed with regulated air flow,
and some of the lower degrees could be attributed to the influence of the chill
of the cooling liquid the computer components were submerged in to prevent
overheating. Right now they could only blame their own current activity, and
not their proximity to the Sun—given that the celestial body’s exterior
presence could not yet reach their bodies’ interior locations (doubly so for
Capa)—for the fact that their sweat could not evaporate. Each time he pushed
himself forwards inside of her, her foot that had remained downwards lifted up
off the floor.

Capa knew how women reach their orgasm, and
he found solace, thinking about it now, that the sensation for her must be
similar to the stellar explosion that the Icarus project was charged with
setting off. Or rather, that he was
charged with initiating, as the sole crew member with the knowledge to do so.
It was his mission to see through: the detonation of the explosives, and at
this moment, he was also about to be responsible for causing a smaller—but just
as vital to the individual experiencing it—climax. Or at least he suddenly,
unfoundingly, found himself hoping: that she was thinking of him while he was
thinking of her. But he was glad that their position was not like that which
had been in his fantasy: he was forced to exert himself as he stood up against
her, instead of lying down to her influence, and so he was distracted by the
extra effort, so he would not climax himself too quickly. Which was ironic, as
that had been the point of him fantasizing before to begin with. But he was
still losing his mind as he was losing his self control, not used to this
carnal passion; this impulsive lovemaking. He’d never had an experience like
this before. Just like she’d been, now, he
was desperate.

“Oh, my God,” despite his atheism, Capa
utilized the involuntary social expression to communicate his inability to
handle her voluntary tightening of her muscles around him. He thought he heard
her laugh a little, as she rocked her pelvis more violently against his and
brought her arms out from embracing him beneath his arms, and then sent hers to
encircle him about his shoulders again.

Rather than displaying a mirth at his lack
of control, Cassie actually felt her breath catch as she felt like she was
drowning. Even beneath her thin sheen of her won sweat, she felt she couldn’t
inhale; felt like she was treading an ocean of her own engulfing pleasure,
regardless of the irony of their closeness to the Sun.

She began to cry in desperation; in
previous depression; in pain at how hard he was pounding his loins against her.
Her back arching, the back of her skull rolled up along the wall, and her
involuntary push against him caused him to pull back himself, looking at her.
He slowed down as he saw the tears welling down her face, but her hands slipped
around the back of his head to snarl into his hair, and brought him forwards
back against her, crushing his face to her neck as she demanded, “Faster!” His
moan sputtered as he obeyed, and his hand gripping at her hip went around to
her back, tightening its embrace so much she thought he’d displace her
vertebrae with his radius and ulna. His other hand beneath her upraised thigh
slid down it to where her knee was hooked onto the edge of his pelvis, and
clamped over the leg joint to hold it there, holding her closer to him so he
could go deeper.

She was vaguely aware that he had regained
his momentum, distracted by a sudden light she saw spark into existence out
amongst the walls of the core of the payload. Capa was kissing her neck as her
head turned to look out the window again, the corner of her eye now leading her
eye to catch sight completely of the fission reaction, as she had witnessed
when he had tested the Bomb only moments ago. For a panicked second she thought
the machine had actually initiated, especially since she began to see more of
the sparks pop into the air outside of the control room, more and more of them
as she had imagined they’d appear once Capa had shown her by the test what it
would start out like. The little lights hovered, increasing in their number
exponentially, and prompting her to look to the control device Capa had used to
trigger the test. With the two of them pressed up against an adjacent wall, it
was beyond logic that they may have accidentally hit the starting button to the
payload. Even taking into consideration the barest possibility that her leg had
shot out across that distance to smack the controlling knobs—it couldn’t, since
it was wrapped tight around Capa’s hip, her heel rooted into his backside as he
thrust into her. No, the payload had not been started to its explosive end.
Rather, it suddenly dawned on her that it was she who was nearing climax, since
as she gazed at the control panel the hovering lights began to appear even
around it, right here on the inside of the glass windows, inside the control
room. It was starting in her eyes again, her sight getting patchy, similar to
the way her crushed nerve endings in her eyeballs would transmit her visibility
when she’d rub her eyes awake from dreaming. The harder she’d press her
knuckles into her eye sockets, the more brilliant splotches of colours and tortoise-shelling
of her irises she’d witness against the insides of her eyelids. But familiar
with her own solo physical stimulation, she knew this action her eyes made signalled
her nearing her climax when instead of fabulous and neon colours, she’d see
spots of white. Because orgasms for her, while they affected her entire body,
so blinded her to the immediate instance of four out of her five evolved
senses, all in the favour of focussing entirely on touch to feel good. She’d
suddenly go deaf, couldn’t smell his masculine musk any longer, couldn’t taste
her overabundance of saliva, and could only see pure white fade in across her
gaze at the moment she’d finally fall over her pleasure threshold. So in a
moment, she wouldn’t be able to hear his laboured breaths and groans, and she
wouldn’t be able to smell his sweat, and she wouldn’t be able to taste his last
kiss upon her lips, and the multitude of infinity tiny white sparks she saw
outside and inside of the payload’s control room would swell in size until they
completely blocked out her ability to see with a wash of bright purity in her
transcendence.

And almost as soon as she considered all of
this, the sparks she saw each swallowed up a bit of the empty air surrounding
them, growing in size. Then they did it again, such that they began to make
contact with their neighbours as they hovered. Then one last time so that there
was more white taking up her gaze than the instances of seeing the walls of the
core of the payload and devices along the perimeter of this control room
through the tiny spaces between individual sparks as their auras overlapped.

Each enlargement of the whitenesses had
been accompanied by a consecutively harder thrust by Capa, and, if she had been
able to hear him, a hoarser growl from his throat. He could hear her breath
leaking, squeaking moans that lacked control to funnel her expression of
pleasure into a forceful show. She must be feeling his presence, his hard
pushes against her and his hardness expanded within her. Though she was slick
with her arousal, making his trips into her an easy glide inside, each time she
was made to cry out as though in pain. And each time he also vocalized his
sensation that, despite her lubrication, her body’s feminine channel was
relentlessly constricting about him. While the surface of the Sun so frightened
Capa with its immense gravity determining his fate, ironically he was choosing,
willingly, to allow himself to be crushed by Cassie, in her warmth and her glow
and her current position as the draw of his hips’ orbit about her equator—the
centre of his focus, his universe, right now.

Capa’s fingers dug into her skin, where the
one hand held her upraised bent knee wrapped over his hip and his other hand
encased the side of her ribcage from behind where his arm embraced her back. In
that attempt to penetrate her flesh by starting with his nails, he was
unconsciously trying to mimic the action of his pelvis, with the logic that he
could get his initial appendage deeper into her if he allowed himself to meld
all of his exterior limbs into her. He raised his head from her neck, mimicking
the arc of a protractor as his head rolled from one side to the other, his head
blocking her sideways view towards the window. His scalp connected with the
metal wall as it dipped sideways, his lips connecting with hers again. But his
tongue was another appendage that wanted to get deep into her, and his head
pushing into her to do that only made her head move back, her ear to the wall,
without any obstacle at the back of her skull to hold it still so his tongue
could go further. So he pulled his head back, and she followed to stay kissing
him, so her head was forced to turn to be situated the right way on her
shoulders, facing forward, facing him.

Even with her eyes now closed to enjoy the
kiss, Cassie still saw the whiteness of her pleasure behind her eyelids. “Capa,
I’m coming!” she saw all corners of her vision flood completely with the
seeping drops of light, and in her instinctual embarrassment of her weakness,
despite her encouragement to follow, she ripped her mouth away from his,
turning her head back towards the window, eyes squeezed shut in concentration
as she felt her nerves begin to shudder. “Finish it!”

And his ability to hold his head’s weight
on his neck was also ripped away, as his spine turned to liquid so his pelvis
could float and move recklessly back and forth without the restraint of its
usually taut tether. Her heel in his backside was the thorn on the stem of the
rose, hooking into his flesh to force him to remain close to the beauty, and
the arousing aroma. With his loins’ to and fro movement his head could have
fallen backwards or forwards to parallel the direction of at least one of his
thrusts. But it fell forward again, again against her neck where he’d been
kissing her earlier when she’d been turned to face out the window before. But
this time his lips returned to the spot on her neck that had begun to show a
faint bruise, where he’d suckled the tender skin behind her ear, intent now
with a forceful draw to inhale some of the skin between his lips momentarily
and make the bruise darker and bigger. To make it possibly more visible to the
rest of the crew, to act as proof of this act that was about to reach its end
between them. Though a loner, the thought that others could be jealous of his
human impulse was a part of his nature; an instinctual aspect of him that made
his body react finally upon his heightened arousal, to reach his own climax in
her warmth and closeness and yield to him.

The loudest groan, the release of his
control completely wracked him at a volume she didn’t think possible from her
usually quiet crewmate, or perhaps Cassie only thought so simply because his
mouth was right beside her ear. But she felt the great vibration of his breath
in his throat as well, as his neck stretched along her shoulder, astride it as
his cranium had nestled itself in the gravity of her own neck once more. His
forehead bedded down into her thick chestnut hair, his sweat ran down the
already damp tendrils, collecting with her sweat to drip down on their bared
and compressed chests, finding friction when each tried to move along the other
when the sweat should’ve helped them along. So, her ribs plastered to his, she
could feel his breath heaving, feel it become shallower until it stopped
completely, hitching just as she felt his incisors earnestly press against the
enlarged hickey, and his hips smash into hers at their deepest attempt yet. And
hold. His parted lips coughed out an involuntary groan, or at least she could
only describe it in that human term; otherwise she could only attribute the
noise he made as inhuman—animal. The complete stop had been his shift, his step
over his physical threshold, from the nurture, to pause and be absolutely
certain of circumstances before continuing, into nature, and go headlong and
take the chance to prolong his personal legacy. Though by nurture he knew his
lifespan had been shortened by going onto the Icarus, and he wouldn’t live to
progenerate his family line, nature, as always, could be disconnected from that
knowledge, and forage on as though he could survive. So after that unmoving
moment, he had been changed to be like all other species on the planet his
intelligence had developed and mission been undertaken to save. And he was
riding on instinct, his voice gasping as his climax had been reached, and his
bipedal frame had evolved over millennia to dominate by brain capacity all
other creatures, and dominate by arousal the need to undeniably exist.

“Cassie!” her name rasped from his lips
attached to the tail of one moan even as it led into another. It sounded slow,
drawn out in a single breath he was struggling to maintain after all those
useless shallow breaths; consciously trying to acquire the fuel for what his
hips were involuntarily poised to do. And then he did it, or couldn’t help
doing it, as his pelvis used the fuel of the big breath to go from zero to
sixty, and rapidly withdraw from and thrust into her at his quickest pace yet,
to take advantage of the short span of sensation of his climax.

It was her turn to vocalize her climax she
had finally achieved, surprised into the extreme pleasure by Capa’s furtive
lovemaking, and completely focussed on it without any other thought in mind.
Her eyes were squeezed shut as her jaw dropped wide, and if Capa’s face wasn’t
buried into her neck, and he could see her face, he might have thought the
Icarus had already reached the Sun, and that space and time had already smeared
together, since upon his last deepest thrust her face had frozen in this
expression. As he groaned extensively with increasing volume, the vocalization
coinciding with the influence of his orgasm flowing down his limbs to their
outermost reaches, their most sensitive nerves located at the edges of his
body, Cassie’s mouth was opened in a silent scream, having no other words to
say after having demanded her crewmate complete his ministrations upon her, and
now concentrating upon his end sequence until he did achieve it in its
entirety. His hips still rocked back and forth against her, so while she didn’t
voluntarily cry out, it was as though each speedy push into her forced the air
in her lungs up, and out in a sound of her pleasure. Each crash of his pelvis
into her seemed ever violent, and built her arousal up to finally reach its
peak, and in a crescendo of louder and louder moans by her, Cassie’s orgasm was
met.

“Capa!” she felt his warmth spill into her
as the bridge of his nose ground into the back of her skull, and her answered
her cry with the most feral noise rumbling up from his innards—deeper than his
throat, deeper than his heart, perhaps even so low as to come from the part of
him that was currently acting so animalistically: was coming—than she’d heard from him yet. It seemed all her senses had
suddenly switched on: when before she only knew what she was feeling, now she
heard the growl of his voice as though, despite its baritone, it was broadcast
at the highest decibel possible heard by human ears; and now her olfactory
abilities were assaulted with his musk as if overpowered by the stench of
decay, yet that power was instead causing her to inhale his arousing
pheromones; and now she could taste the barest remnants of his contact on her
lips as though they were ambrosia, and were so sweet that she suddenly decided
her favourite cheesecake had been delectably comparable to sour milk; and now
she could see all aspects of the mechanisms within the control room in the most
vivid colourations, as if all was suddenly illuminated by the close and
unshielded presence of the clean-burning Sun, though the Icarus was completely
contained to keep the solar light out. And what she was sensing was compounded
to her knowledge, of knowing her senses were only enhancing miniscule details
to an exponential effect upon her thanks to her current activity. Even as one
is in the act, it is still human to become ever more aroused, as they had been
progressing in building up to the sex. Preaching to the choir, yet still
extremely pleasurable. And it rattled her bones, easily in their limp weakness
to her enjoyment, and vibrated outwards through her muscles to her nerves and
veins, and to her skin, a personal earthquake from the inside out. As her skin
shuddered the sweat drops speckling it bounced upon the surface. Her organs all
contracted, her lungs forcing out her breath in one final exuberant expellation
as her lowermost internal organ, the one that defined her as female, closed
mercilessly around the one that defined Capa as male, drawing his pleasure from
him to contribute to hers. And her eyes rolled back into her head as she
gasped, though she wouldn’t have been able to admit seeing the insides of her
sockets for seeing only the vivid colours of the control room trail after the
turn of her retinas’ orientation, too focussed on the orgasm to devote any
space of the sense to observe what may be seen from when she climaxed until her
nerve endings stopped their electric dance.

Hearing Cassie’s final vulnerable moan as
though it was her final gasp of life—her final grasp at life—made Capa respond
with his own death rattle, his little death. He was pumping into her, and his
highly sensitized flesh within hers was swimming in her lubrication and his, as
he was still expelling his pleasure into her. Another intention for it would
have been to generate the next generation of his family. But his focus had to
be further than that, as this mission of the Icarus would preserve the legacy
of humanity, and to ensure that success, if Cassie was correct, Capa would be
sacrificing his own legacy to do so. Not only his potential future, but his
immediate one. That he was to be without life in favour of all others. Except
for the one he’d become closest to over this last couple of years: Cassie’s.
She would die alongside him to achieve their common goal. Simultaneously he
felt his efforts were futile if he couldn’t save her, and worthwhile that he
was able to undertake the grim task with her. She who loved life so much, had
honourably resigned herself to invariably be martyred, and that she’d been
cheered to have him as a colleague. And though it seemed a bit undignified,
that knowledge added to his carnal sensations, in his endless pleasure over
everything about her: from her aggressively confident sexuality to her noble
professional dedication, and even her simple kind friendship with him. It
helped him to keep his speed up—even though his forcefully deep thrusts were
tiring his pelvis—until he had emptied his hardened flesh completely into her.

The shake of her nerve endings reverted
Cassie’s physical vibration, from outward to her finest fringes back inside
through her skin and veins and muscles to bone. As her climax’s denouement
encompassed her, her very bones shook again in the aftermath, in their attempt
to re-harness control over every cell in her pleasure-weakened body. The fine
tremors also bounced Capa sideways, from resting his face into her hair against
her skull, to slipping forward further along her cranium’s curve until his
forehead was stopped by wall once more.

Following his experience of the climax,
Capa realized that his head felt cold, and his eyes, which had shut out any
possible sight of distraction to concentrate on his orgasm, now saw close-up
the polished metal panel that made up this wall of the control room. He hadn’t
even realized that he was leaning by his forehead against the panel over
Cassie’s shoulder again. And he only realized his hands were still holding her
up when he felt her shaking in his grip, and a wry irony twisted humour at the
corner of his mouth as he determined he was only certain on his own feet thanks
to his weight steadied by his forehead on the metal, his straightened body a
hypotenuse to the wall and the floor of this side of the control room.

As Cassie finally became aware of her body
once again, it ceasing to shake in its uncertainty of interconnected systems
after having felt only pleasure for the last past thousands of beats of her
heart, her eyes dropped back down from their cast heavenwards—though, flying
through space there was no physical attribute of Heaven; it could be argued
instead she felt it all around her as she felt her climax—to resume their
normal coordination within their sockets. The vividness of the colours around
her dulled to an unheightened sensation observation, and she saw that she was
looking out the window at the core of the payload again. As her orgasm slowly
ebbed away, her sense of touch revealed what contact remained, and she realized
that Capa’s lips were resting upon her collarbone, through the sweat-damp
charcoal polo. But as she was regaining consciousness of her faculties, Capa
made no move, remaining poised within her even as his speed dropped to zero.
But after her skin stopped vibrating, Cassie was utterly stationary as well.
They stayed that way for long moments and simply breathed, both coming to the
realization that their deep breathing was continued not due to recovery from
their exertions, but due to a subliminal panic, as both knew that there wasn’t
enough oxygen in the Icarus II alone to complete the mission’s round trip—if
that capability was still, at it’s barest possibility, on the table.

As Cassie regained control of her
breathing, her subsided shudders developed again, instead of from her fading
orgasm, now rising up from a completely unexpected emotion. She began to laugh,
at first giggling, until it built up to a chortle, and went too far to be,
loudly, near hysterical. She was blushing and grinning and sounding amused, but
Capa raised his head back from the wall to look at her in his surprise. She
turned her head forwards, then to the opposite side, then back to face the
window, then opposing once more: she was shaking her head side to side as
though to shake away her sudden laughter. At first he didn’t realize it was
hysterical, since it immediately reminded him of his family. But when he raised
his hands to catch her thrashing head he became worried, as her stopped face
revealed the tears that had fallen down her cheeks. At first he didn’t realize
that this laughter was really her desperate sadness.

Stopped from shaking her head, Cassie was
forced to make eye contact with him. The expression on his face showed pain,
though it had been she who had felt a sudden surge emotionally in the irony of
their activity. She’d wanted it, but now that it was over, all that their
interaction had been building up towards achieved, she was reminded of the next
goal they’d have to accomplish, tasked to them long before she sought a release
from its stressed. As both of her eyes jumped side to side to look into each of
Capa’s eyes in their closeness, his eyebrows knit upwards in queriful
expression.

“If you had known that we were going to end
up like this,” Cassie’s voice wavered as her nose sniffled, “would you have let
me into the payload now in the first place?”

Now he felt true humour, struggling to keep
the grin from flashing across his face as he considered her thought. He had to
assure her seriously, moving his palms down from holding her cheeks to cup her
shoulders. “I knew going into this mission that we may end it without returning
home. We’re now certain it is most likely the case. Beyond that, what else are
we supposed to know for certain? I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought of you
in the capacity we’ve just engaged in. Are still engaging in,” he paused as he
slid his hands down to hold her around the hips, holding her steady as he drew
his own hips backwards one final time, withdrawing to the sound of them gasping
simultaneously. “But I’d never believed we’d actually do so.”

Now she smiled at his ironic statement,
given his admission could’ve been harassment had she not just finished coercing
him into their activity with physical gestures of that classification—had he
actually not wanted it. Once he’d removed himself from her she unwrapped her
leg from around his waist, her nerves now steady enough that her legs could
stand straight on the floor without vulnerably collapsing. “You thought of me
that way?”

He blushed and looked away. “I thought of
what we just did, and that it was something I’d miss.”

“More than Belgian waffles?”

He ignored her teasing, “And that I like
you more than any other member of the crew, and was left to ponder what we
could accomplish in our time waiting to reach the Sun, given any chance
possible.”

“You considered this?” a giggle.

“That’s all this mission is at this point.
Despite all our predictive calculations, all we can really do is theorize and
hypothesize. That’s why we’re going to meet up with the Icarus I: for a better
chance at succeeding in out mission.”

“And what would you be left to do if you
hadn’t taken this chance?” she was actually thinking about herself, about the
chance she’d taken in being intimate with Capa, but not thinking about the
depressed feelings that had required it. So she was glad she’d taken her
chance.

He tilted his head at the obvious answer to
her question, looking at her as he turned back to face her with upraised
eyebrows and half-hooded eyes. A look of incredulity, wondering if he really
had to state the obvious.

Her laughter bubble out in amusement now,
as she stepped up on steady tip-toe to kiss him. But the reality was that she
agreed with him. Alike with his admission, she had fantasized on what she’d do
if given the chance. Not just sex, but what other things she hadn’t yet
achieved in life but still wanted to, and would do if they absolutely had that
chance to return to Earth; a hope in contradiction with her determination that
their fate laid precisely this close to the Sun. The chances she had for
certain now laid out before her, that the mission could fail or it could
succeed. That they could succeed completely, and go back home, or they would
give up their chance to return and focus entirely on ensuring the chance to
fail did not occur. Cassie was saddened to believe that they’d die out in
space, but found solace that it gave their home planet the chance to continue its
existence. And she was certain of that.

She was suddenly certain she heard a new
noise. In the silence that followed the strain upon their vocal cords as they’d
achieved the furthest heights of pleasure their humanity had evolved to strive
for, Cassie heard a voice that could still speak without a hoarse accent. She
heard it sound from the opposite end of the control room, quiet against the
floor.

“Cassie? Cassie, where are you?”

The pilot quickly pushed the physicist
backwards, bending down to re-step into her undergarment that had only slipped
off of the leg she’d raised to hook around his waist, and had stayed around her
ankle closest to the floor for the entire duration of their intimate
connection. She stepped into and grabbed up the waist of her issue pants at the
same time, pulling both up her legs and quickly refastening the closure to her
self-styled capris as she re-stood and stepped sideways out from between Capa
and the wall.

He watched her as she rushed towards the
new voice in the control room, turning so his eyes could stay on her. As she
crossed the room she quickly pulled up the cups of her brassier and pulled back
down the hem of her polo, but he did catch a glimpse of her bared lower back
before she did so, and he suddenly got an animal urge: that he would’ve liked
to have taken her from behind, to have been able to skim his palms up and down
her back, and witness her spine writhe beneath his fingertips.

Then, though she had righted her clothes to
look as they had when he’d first allowed her into the payload, as Cassie knelt
to the floor where the invisible speaker called her from, Capa saw her back
hunch forward vulnerably, or rather, that is how he thought he was seeing it.
His mind was aligning what he actually saw to a fantasy he’d imagined of her
before, when he’d lain on his back in his bed, ministering himself as he’d
awaited his body to fall instinctually into its mandated sleep cycle, and he’d
pictured Cassie to be straddling his waist as she faced away from him. In the
fantasy, she had sat upon him and arched her back backwards above him, her
hands supporting her weight as her palms pressed against the mattress on either
side of his ribcage, and her head had dropped to hang backwards weakly as he’d
pictured himself to be holding her by her pelvis between his hands, holding her
steady so he could thrust up and down within her. That imagined scene rose up
in his mind, though he was actually seeing her bent over in the opposite
direction, fully clothed, and not straddling him.

When Cassie stood up again, she held what
she’d retrieved from the floor. It was her communication device, and it had
been the biologist’s voice that had emanated from it in search of her.

“Copy, Cory, I’m in the payload. What’s
up?”

“We’re just about to pull up next to the
Icarus I now. You want to come to the bridge and guide us alongside it neatly?”

“Ah, right, Corazon,” Cassie ran a hand up
the back of her own head, separating some of the tangles in her hair as she
held her comm device close to her lips with the other hand. “I’ll be right
there.”

Capa had begun to right his own clothes
once he’d realized whose voice had been calling for his favourite crewmate. He
was careful as he tucked himself back in, still quite sensitive to any touch
immediately following her yearning attention. He was feeling a bit embarrassed,
paranoid at the impossibility that Corazon could glean from talking to Cassie
what and who the pilot had just done in the payload, though the biologist
didn’t seem to hesitate or have any evidence to believe such truth. He was also
a bit ashamed as he realized that there was his and her wetness along the top
of the waistband of his boxerbriefs, because it had been anchored uncovering
him beneath the base of his shaft. But the others shouldn’t be able to see it
anyways, as he closed up the front of his unaltered issue blue pants. Still, he
was conscious to pull the hem of his navy long-sleeved shirt down securely over
the height the waist of the built-in belt rose up to, after he’d swiftly plucked
it up from the floor and threw it back on over his head. His own communication
device clattered to the floor as it fell from his focus on re-dressing. But he
remained clenching his fingers about the hem of his shirt to hold it down, in
case the waist of his pants fell a bit naturally to expose the top of the
waistband of his boxerbriefs, and the stain of their intimate lubrication on
it. Like if he fought again with Mace.

Cassie turned to see her friend
compulsively pulling down his shirt, stretching relentlessly the cotton jersey
fabric. She bent her head to put it through the loop of her communication
device’s lanyard, now wearing it without any rage. She bent down at her waist
towards the floor again to pick up what had fallen from his shirt, then took
confident steps towards him.

His downcast eyes, uncertain in his social
paranoia, were now looking down into a pair of sweet brown irises, smiling up
at him even before he could glance down further to glimpse her actual smile.
Her two hands held open the nylon cord of his communication device, and he bent
his head so she could put it around his neck. Then her hands slipped around to
his back, her arms encircling his neck as she rose up on her toes to kiss him
again.

“Thank you, Capa,” Cassie whispered as she
separated her mouth from his, then her face continued moving forward, over his
shoulder, as her arms tightened about his neck to embrace him.

“Are you okay, Cassie?” his voice was
quiet, but sure as he asked for this knowledge, his own arms having slipped
around her torso to hug her back.

Corazon was waiting on the bridge for
Cassie to get there, to pilot the Icarus II up to the Icarus I, so the crew
could increase their chances and focus on succeeding their mission. It was
proof that they had completely dedicated themselves to their goal. She’d merely
said the words before, but now she knew for certain that they weren’t meeting
up with their predecessors: they had become as purposed. “Never better.” She
was at peace.

The embrace made her smile to herself,
completely relaxed and satisfied, and feeling closer to her crewmate now than
they’d actually been when he’d remained within her even after they’d finished
vibrating from their respective orgasms. Minutes passed as they stayed
encircled by one another’s arms, and the emotional pilot felt herself blush to
feel his chest breathing at a natural pace against her through her cotton polo
and his jersey top. He was calmed as well, and she thought she caught him
softly moaning as she contracted the circle her arms made about his shoulders.
Her smile grew at that.

“...pa...apa...”

Now the physicist pushed back from his
crewmate, but not so quickly as she had earlier. In their pleasant embrace
their communication devices had been sandwiched between their chests, and that
was the place from which another new voice was sounding. Capa had taken only
one foot and set it a step backwards, without actually taking the step away
from Cassie, so her arms could still rest upon his upper arms and shoulders.
But he did remove his own arms from around her warmth, folding his arms into
his body, hands precisely at the centre of his torso to handle the device that
hung down against it.

“Searle, is that you?” Capa brought his
communication device up to his lips to respond.

“Hey, Capa. You should come to the
Observation Room to see this. We’ve arrived at the Icarus I.
It’s...incredible.” The psychologist almost sounded as awed as he did when he’d
viewed the Sun up-close for the first time in the Observation Room. That he was
so amazed at the project’s first constructed vessel surprised the physicist,
until Capa remembered how close they were to the Sun at this point. The loner
was recalling standing around the dining table with the rest of the crew,
viewing the projection that revealed where Icarus I’s distress signal had been
broadcast from, the exact coordinates, and how close the initial ship had been
to the surface. Searle was merely ever further awed every mile they cut off
from their distance from the Sun.

But as the psychologist’s transmission
ended with that word in that tone, Capa remained staring into the eyes of the
crewmate he was currently with. He held one hand poised to hit his device’s own
transmit button if necessary, while the other hand reached towards Cassie’s
face, tucking some of her hair behind her ear. Though she faced him head on,
from his vantage point Capa could see more than a shadow cast along her neck by
her thick hair. Peeking beneath her earlobe was the outer circumference of his
hickey, stark against her pale skin. Sudden embarrassment washed through him at
that sight, and his hand flattened against the side of her head to make the
curtain of her chestnut tresses fall forward again.

“Give me a minute, Searle. I’m in awe of
something else at the moment. Someone else,” he switched his communication
device off.

While Cassie didn’t turn away, she downcast
her eyes. “Capa, we both need to go.”

“I know, Cassie,” has hand slid down from
her face to her shoulder, then down the entire length of her arm to her hand,
where his fingers caught with and intertwined with hers. He held her hand as
his other released his communication device, and reached out for the handle of
the door to the control room.

“Wait, Capa,” she stayed still, so he
turned back to stand toe-to-toe with her again, nose to nose.

Cassie sighed. “Thank you, for this.”
Bittersweet: this final experience of her evolved physical humanity.

He smiled. “What do you want me to say?”

She blushed as her eyes darted away from
his contact. “I don’t know.” Nothing, perhaps. Their species’ existence didn’t
always take the time to talk in the aftermath, as they couldn’t always talk.

“Can I say ‘Thank you’?”

“Yes,” her eyes returned to connect to his
piercing blue gaze. She nearly fell in love with him, after his last question
of her.

“Let’s go, then,” his hand holding hers
squeezed in reassurance. He took step back towards the door, and this time her
feet were in sync with his.

They held hands until they left the
payload: the climax to their personal mission. They did, however, smile at one
another as they re-entered the ship section, even though physical contact had
been broken. They had resumed their roles as crewmates, back to focus on their
parts in the mission.
- 1
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Sunshine: Interlude