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I'd love to read your thoughts on this piece that I wrote in just over an hour. Enjoy!
Summary:
"Don't forget to look back," she whispers to the upper atmosphere, to the ionosphere, to the vacuum beyond. "I'll be right here when you're ready to come back to earth."
Content Warnings: None
You can also read the fic on AO3.
Summary:
"Don't forget to look back," she whispers to the upper atmosphere, to the ionosphere, to the vacuum beyond. "I'll be right here when you're ready to come back to earth."
Content Warnings: None
You can also read the fic on AO3.
Through the reinforced glass that stretches from the floor to the high ceiling, the rocket stands as a monolithic needle of white ceramic and titanium against the cerulean backdrop of Sinnoh's coastline, a singular artifact of human ambition daring to pierce the heavy blanket of the atmosphere. Leaf presses her palm against the cool transparency of the window, her breath fogging the surface in a fleeting cloud that obscures the launch tower for a heartbeat before fading, and she thinks about how small she is compared to the machine, and how the machine is microscopic compared to the void it intends to breach.
Lucas is inside that white needle.
It is a thought that refuses to settle in her chest, fluttering there with the anxious energy of a trapped Staravia, because the reality of her husband's physical presence has been replaced by a terrifying abstraction. He is no longer the teenager who fumbled with his scarf in the biting winds of Snowpoint, nor the young man who would fall asleep with his cheek pressed against the pages of a dusty textbook on orbital mechanics. He has been sublimated into the mission he has been working towards since even before they had become lovers.
Technicians in blue jumpsuits swarm the control room below her, a hive of organized panic and intellectual rigor. They speak in a language of acronyms and telemetry, a dialect that Lucas speaks fluently but one that Leaf has only learned in fragments, like a tourist trying to navigate a foreign country. She knows what Max Q means. She knows about apogee and perigee and the terrifying window of blackout during reentry.
And she knows that the man she married is currently strapped into a couch designed to mitigate G-force, encased in a pressure suit that costs more than the house they bought in Sandgem, sitting atop four million pounds of explosive fuel.
The countdown enters the final minutes, and the venting of the cryogenic propellants creates a cascading waterfall of white vapor that pours down the sides of the rocket, shrouding the base in a mystical fog that glows iridescent in the morning sun. The clamps that hold the vessel to the earth seem fragile now, insufficient metal arms trying to restrain a beast that has swallowed fire and is waiting to exhale.
Leaf stands next to Professor Rowan, who has flown in for the occasion, the older man gripping his cane with a tension that betrays his stoic facade. He does not look at her, his gaze fixed on the monitor displaying the telemetry data, the numbers scrolling faster than the human eye can parse.
"He was always looking up," Rowan rumbles, his voice gravelly like the shifting tectonic plates of Mt. Coronet. "He calculates everything, that boy. He has already flown this mission a thousand times in his head."
"He's not a boy anymore, Professor," Leaf says softly, watching the gantry arm slowly retract from the upper stage of the rocket, severing the final physical umbilical cord between Lucas and the infrastructure of humanity. "And he's not calculating right now. He's listening."
She knows this because she knows his ritual. In the final moments before ignition, when the checklist is complete and the systems are autonomous, Lucas closes his eyes and listens to the hum of the ship. He listens to the fuel pumps spinning at thirty thousand revolutions per minute, he listens to the creaking of the thermal expansion, he listens to the heartbeat of the machine that will carry him and the small contingent of scientists who are accompanying him into outer space. He is merging with the vessel, becoming the guidance computer, the thruster, the hull.
Leaf closes her own eyes, tuning out the murmurs of the VIPs and the press in the viewing gallery, and tries to project her thoughts across the three miles of marshland, trying to send him one final image—not of space, not of stars, but of the lakefront at Verity, its waters still and reflecting the moon, a promise that there is beauty here, too.
"Orbiter is on internal power. Ground launch sequencer is auto." The voice over the intercom is smooth, devoid of humanity. It is the voice of mathematics.
With that, the sound suppression system activates at the launchpad, dumping thousands of gallons of water onto the flame trench in a preemptive attempt to dampen the acoustic energy that is about to be unleashed. The steam rises in massive, billowing clouds, creating a localized storm system that swirls around the base of the rocket.
Leaf feels a vibration in the floor, a subtle trembling that travels up through the soles of her shoes and settles in her knees. The rocket is waking up. The main engines are chilling down, the turbopumps are spinning up to flight speed, and the liquid hydrogen is flowing into the combustion chambers.
She recalls the night he got the acceptance letter. They had sat on the floor of their first apartment in Hearthome. He hadn't cheered. He hadn't shouted. He had just sat there, staring at the official seal of the Space Agency, his hands shaking.
"I'm going to miss the trees," he had said, a non sequitur that broke her heart. "I'm going to miss the smell of rain on asphalt. I'm going to miss the way the light hits the leaves in Eterna Forest. There's no green up there, Leaf. It's all black and white and silver."
"You'll have the stars," she had reminded him, pulling him into a hug that was desperate and fierce and so, so tight.
"The stars are incapable of loving me the way you do."
But he signed the papers. He packed his bags. Because for Lucas, the pain of leaving was eclipsed by the agony of not knowing, the unbearable itch of curiosity that could only be scratched by hurling himself into the infinite stars.
"T-minus one minute," the flight director announces, and the gallery goes deathly silent. The ambient chatter evaporates, replaced by a collective intake of breath. Every eye is fixed on the white obelisk.
Leaf grips the railing in front of the glass, her knuckles turning white. She imagines Lucas in the capsule, the visor of his helmet down, his gloved hands hovering over the abort handle that he will never pull. She imagines his heart rate monitor on the mission control screens, a steady, rhythmic drumbeat that contradicts the adrenaline flooding his system. She knows he is checking his monitors. She knows his heart rate is being displayed on a screen in the room below her, a jagged green line that proves he is still a biological entity and not yet a purely celestial one.
She wonders if he is thinking of her, or if he is thinking of the trajectory. Knowing Lucas, the two are inextricably linked. He is likely calculating the parabolic arc that will carry him away from her and the elliptical orbit that will eventually, inevitably, bring him back.
Then she wonders if he is tired of checking everything and has decided to look out the window, or if he would rather look at the picture of her he'd slid into the clear plastic sleeve of his checklist binder: a polaroid from their honeymoon in Alola, where they are both sunburned and laughing, drinking coconut milk. She hopes he is looking at the picture. She wants to be the last thing he sees before the world falls away.
"Guidance is internal," the voice on the speaker says. "T-minus thirty seconds."
The reality of it crashes down on her—the finality. This isn't a train ride to Saffron City. This is a separation of verticality, a departure from the biosphere itself. Lucas is leaving the realm of biology and entering the realm of physics.
"Twelve... Eleven... Ten..."
The automated sequence initiates. The sparklers underneath the engines ignite to burn off excess hydrogen in a shower of sparks, a celebration before the main event.
"Nine... Eight... Seven..."
"Go, Lucas," Leaf whispers, the words catching in her throat, a secret prayer offered to the god of thrust and trajectory.
"Six... Main engine start."
First, there is the smoke. A sudden, violent expulsion of gray and black that erupts from the base of the rocket as the solid rocket boosters ignite, a chemical reaction of power that cannot be stopped once it begins.
"Five... Four... Three... Two... One..."
"Liftoff."
The light hits before the sound. It is a blinding, magnesium-white flare that sears the retina, a second dawn occurring at 10:00 AM. The base of the rocket vanishes in a cauldron of fire, a controlled explosion that pushes against the earth with enough force to move a skyscraper.
And then, the movement.
At first, it is agonizingly slow. The rocket seems to hang in the air, suspended by nothing but will and fire, balancing on a column of incandescence that outshines the sun. It looks too heavy to fly. It looks like a building trying to jump. Then it is climbing past the tower, riding a pillar of flame that is longer than the ship itself, a tail of fire that scorches the air.
Then the sound arrives.
The glass of the viewing gallery vibrates, the floor shakes, the air in Leaf's lungs resonates with the low-frequency thrum that bypasses the ears and goes straight to the marrow. It is the sound of the atmosphere being torn open. Tears begin to stream down Leaf's face unbidden, both from sadness and from the sheer, overwhelming magnitude of the spectacle. The rocket accelerates, gaining speed with every second, turning from a slow-moving building into a streak of silver light.
She imagines Lucas inside that tip of the spear. The G-force is crushing him now, pressing him into the cushions, flattening his lungs. The vibration must be teeth-shattering. But he is rising. He is punching through the thick soup of the troposphere, climbing higher, faster, breaking the chains that have bound his species to solid ground for eons.
He is riding a controlled catastrophe.
The rocket is a bright star now, ascending higher and higher, shrinking against the vastness of the azure dome. The roar begins to fade into a rolling thunder, lagging behind the impossible speed of the vessel.
Leaf watches until her neck aches, until the tears streaming down her face blur her vision. She wipes them away furiously. She cannot miss a single second more.
He is doing it. He is leaving.
The first stage separates—a tiny flicker of light detaching from the main body—and falls away, its job done. The second stage ignites, a fresh bloom of light that pushes him even higher, toward the infinite dark.
He is almost there. He is almost at the place where the sky turns black in the middle of the day.
And before she realizes it, he is gone. He is no longer on Earth. He has become a creature of the heavens.
Leaf stays at the window long after the contrail has begun to disperse in the wind, long after the other spectators have begun to clap and gather their things. She presses her hand against the glass one last time, feeling the residual vibration of her lover's departure.
She looks up at the empty blue where he vanished, and she smiles, a sad, proud curvature of her lips that mimics the horizon.
"Don't forget to look back," she whispers to the upper atmosphere, to the ionosphere, to the vacuum beyond. "I'll be right here when you're ready to come back to earth."
Lucas is inside that white needle.
It is a thought that refuses to settle in her chest, fluttering there with the anxious energy of a trapped Staravia, because the reality of her husband's physical presence has been replaced by a terrifying abstraction. He is no longer the teenager who fumbled with his scarf in the biting winds of Snowpoint, nor the young man who would fall asleep with his cheek pressed against the pages of a dusty textbook on orbital mechanics. He has been sublimated into the mission he has been working towards since even before they had become lovers.
Technicians in blue jumpsuits swarm the control room below her, a hive of organized panic and intellectual rigor. They speak in a language of acronyms and telemetry, a dialect that Lucas speaks fluently but one that Leaf has only learned in fragments, like a tourist trying to navigate a foreign country. She knows what Max Q means. She knows about apogee and perigee and the terrifying window of blackout during reentry.
And she knows that the man she married is currently strapped into a couch designed to mitigate G-force, encased in a pressure suit that costs more than the house they bought in Sandgem, sitting atop four million pounds of explosive fuel.
The countdown enters the final minutes, and the venting of the cryogenic propellants creates a cascading waterfall of white vapor that pours down the sides of the rocket, shrouding the base in a mystical fog that glows iridescent in the morning sun. The clamps that hold the vessel to the earth seem fragile now, insufficient metal arms trying to restrain a beast that has swallowed fire and is waiting to exhale.
Leaf stands next to Professor Rowan, who has flown in for the occasion, the older man gripping his cane with a tension that betrays his stoic facade. He does not look at her, his gaze fixed on the monitor displaying the telemetry data, the numbers scrolling faster than the human eye can parse.
"He was always looking up," Rowan rumbles, his voice gravelly like the shifting tectonic plates of Mt. Coronet. "He calculates everything, that boy. He has already flown this mission a thousand times in his head."
"He's not a boy anymore, Professor," Leaf says softly, watching the gantry arm slowly retract from the upper stage of the rocket, severing the final physical umbilical cord between Lucas and the infrastructure of humanity. "And he's not calculating right now. He's listening."
She knows this because she knows his ritual. In the final moments before ignition, when the checklist is complete and the systems are autonomous, Lucas closes his eyes and listens to the hum of the ship. He listens to the fuel pumps spinning at thirty thousand revolutions per minute, he listens to the creaking of the thermal expansion, he listens to the heartbeat of the machine that will carry him and the small contingent of scientists who are accompanying him into outer space. He is merging with the vessel, becoming the guidance computer, the thruster, the hull.
Leaf closes her own eyes, tuning out the murmurs of the VIPs and the press in the viewing gallery, and tries to project her thoughts across the three miles of marshland, trying to send him one final image—not of space, not of stars, but of the lakefront at Verity, its waters still and reflecting the moon, a promise that there is beauty here, too.
"Orbiter is on internal power. Ground launch sequencer is auto." The voice over the intercom is smooth, devoid of humanity. It is the voice of mathematics.
With that, the sound suppression system activates at the launchpad, dumping thousands of gallons of water onto the flame trench in a preemptive attempt to dampen the acoustic energy that is about to be unleashed. The steam rises in massive, billowing clouds, creating a localized storm system that swirls around the base of the rocket.
Leaf feels a vibration in the floor, a subtle trembling that travels up through the soles of her shoes and settles in her knees. The rocket is waking up. The main engines are chilling down, the turbopumps are spinning up to flight speed, and the liquid hydrogen is flowing into the combustion chambers.
She recalls the night he got the acceptance letter. They had sat on the floor of their first apartment in Hearthome. He hadn't cheered. He hadn't shouted. He had just sat there, staring at the official seal of the Space Agency, his hands shaking.
"I'm going to miss the trees," he had said, a non sequitur that broke her heart. "I'm going to miss the smell of rain on asphalt. I'm going to miss the way the light hits the leaves in Eterna Forest. There's no green up there, Leaf. It's all black and white and silver."
"You'll have the stars," she had reminded him, pulling him into a hug that was desperate and fierce and so, so tight.
"The stars are incapable of loving me the way you do."
But he signed the papers. He packed his bags. Because for Lucas, the pain of leaving was eclipsed by the agony of not knowing, the unbearable itch of curiosity that could only be scratched by hurling himself into the infinite stars.
"T-minus one minute," the flight director announces, and the gallery goes deathly silent. The ambient chatter evaporates, replaced by a collective intake of breath. Every eye is fixed on the white obelisk.
Leaf grips the railing in front of the glass, her knuckles turning white. She imagines Lucas in the capsule, the visor of his helmet down, his gloved hands hovering over the abort handle that he will never pull. She imagines his heart rate monitor on the mission control screens, a steady, rhythmic drumbeat that contradicts the adrenaline flooding his system. She knows he is checking his monitors. She knows his heart rate is being displayed on a screen in the room below her, a jagged green line that proves he is still a biological entity and not yet a purely celestial one.
She wonders if he is thinking of her, or if he is thinking of the trajectory. Knowing Lucas, the two are inextricably linked. He is likely calculating the parabolic arc that will carry him away from her and the elliptical orbit that will eventually, inevitably, bring him back.
Then she wonders if he is tired of checking everything and has decided to look out the window, or if he would rather look at the picture of her he'd slid into the clear plastic sleeve of his checklist binder: a polaroid from their honeymoon in Alola, where they are both sunburned and laughing, drinking coconut milk. She hopes he is looking at the picture. She wants to be the last thing he sees before the world falls away.
"Guidance is internal," the voice on the speaker says. "T-minus thirty seconds."
The reality of it crashes down on her—the finality. This isn't a train ride to Saffron City. This is a separation of verticality, a departure from the biosphere itself. Lucas is leaving the realm of biology and entering the realm of physics.
"Twelve... Eleven... Ten..."
The automated sequence initiates. The sparklers underneath the engines ignite to burn off excess hydrogen in a shower of sparks, a celebration before the main event.
"Nine... Eight... Seven..."
"Go, Lucas," Leaf whispers, the words catching in her throat, a secret prayer offered to the god of thrust and trajectory.
"Six... Main engine start."
First, there is the smoke. A sudden, violent expulsion of gray and black that erupts from the base of the rocket as the solid rocket boosters ignite, a chemical reaction of power that cannot be stopped once it begins.
"Five... Four... Three... Two... One..."
"Liftoff."
The light hits before the sound. It is a blinding, magnesium-white flare that sears the retina, a second dawn occurring at 10:00 AM. The base of the rocket vanishes in a cauldron of fire, a controlled explosion that pushes against the earth with enough force to move a skyscraper.
And then, the movement.
At first, it is agonizingly slow. The rocket seems to hang in the air, suspended by nothing but will and fire, balancing on a column of incandescence that outshines the sun. It looks too heavy to fly. It looks like a building trying to jump. Then it is climbing past the tower, riding a pillar of flame that is longer than the ship itself, a tail of fire that scorches the air.
Then the sound arrives.
The glass of the viewing gallery vibrates, the floor shakes, the air in Leaf's lungs resonates with the low-frequency thrum that bypasses the ears and goes straight to the marrow. It is the sound of the atmosphere being torn open. Tears begin to stream down Leaf's face unbidden, both from sadness and from the sheer, overwhelming magnitude of the spectacle. The rocket accelerates, gaining speed with every second, turning from a slow-moving building into a streak of silver light.
She imagines Lucas inside that tip of the spear. The G-force is crushing him now, pressing him into the cushions, flattening his lungs. The vibration must be teeth-shattering. But he is rising. He is punching through the thick soup of the troposphere, climbing higher, faster, breaking the chains that have bound his species to solid ground for eons.
He is riding a controlled catastrophe.
The rocket is a bright star now, ascending higher and higher, shrinking against the vastness of the azure dome. The roar begins to fade into a rolling thunder, lagging behind the impossible speed of the vessel.
Leaf watches until her neck aches, until the tears streaming down her face blur her vision. She wipes them away furiously. She cannot miss a single second more.
He is doing it. He is leaving.
The first stage separates—a tiny flicker of light detaching from the main body—and falls away, its job done. The second stage ignites, a fresh bloom of light that pushes him even higher, toward the infinite dark.
He is almost there. He is almost at the place where the sky turns black in the middle of the day.
And before she realizes it, he is gone. He is no longer on Earth. He has become a creature of the heavens.
Leaf stays at the window long after the contrail has begun to disperse in the wind, long after the other spectators have begun to clap and gather their things. She presses her hand against the glass one last time, feeling the residual vibration of her lover's departure.
She looks up at the empty blue where he vanished, and she smiles, a sad, proud curvature of her lips that mimics the horizon.
"Don't forget to look back," she whispers to the upper atmosphere, to the ionosphere, to the vacuum beyond. "I'll be right here when you're ready to come back to earth."
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