#asteria-star

[lenle-g]

I got this t-shirt for Christmas and who else but @asteria-star would wear it to annoy the hell out of John ‘I mean that’s technically true but why’ Tracy

[starman-john-tracy]

** ok u know wat I’m double dipping XD XD #8 pls

8. “I would have been there for you.” - Star [ask is from this ask meme]

John looks up at her from under the limp curl of his rain-damp bangs with wet blue-green eyes and shakes his head. The ugly bruise blooming across his cheek and up the arch of his nose looks truly awful in the shadows of the blue toned street light. He has to peer around the bulk of fussing Virgil to meet her actually meet her eye. His brother is poking at the scrape to the underside of his jaw with his face set in a tight, angry frown.

“It was fine, really.” John Tracy sounds far too chilled for a man who just got his ass handed to him by street thugs. “I wasn’t going to let them hurt Alan, now was I?” John Tracy is the absolute picture of pacifism, and while the idea that he put himself between his little brother and the muggers isn’t all that surprising, the fact he’d thrown the first punch certainly was. “I calculated there was a 95.8% chance that they would attack us regardless,” He protests at the look Star’s giving him, because of course he’s applied math to it, “and the best course of action was to keep them distracted.” There’s blood spotted on his collar from where his lip had been split and put together with the earnest look on John’s dumb face, it’s very distracting from just how mad she is at him. 

Alan, evidently the one using the one Tracy brain-cell today, had run, like a sensible person, straight to Virgil and Star, who’d both only been just around the block - doing the heavy lifting of their shopping trip while John had taken Alan to the pokey little bookshop on the corner, and managed to, in classic Tracy fashion, run headfirst into trouble.

John kind of gets why Star is so furious at him. She could have been right there.  That he could have Commed her had, apparently, not even crossed his stupid-genius mind, until she was scowling down at him sat on a curb with ripped jeans and bloodied knees, Virgil hurrying in to make sure he’d not broken anything.

The thugs, interestingly, were nowhere in sight.

“Sorry Allie.” John shoves his hair out of his face, lamenting, of all things, the fact he hasn’t found time recently to get it cut to back to his ideal neat, perfect length. The soft drizzle of rain isn’t helping make him look any less pathetic or miserable as he holds a soggy paper bag with a very battered astrophysics book inside out to his little brother. “The compendium got all wet but we might be able to dry it out back at the hotel. They took my wallet as well but there wasn’t anything irreplaceable in there. I’m just glad you’re ok.”

[starman-john-tracy]

**“You’re going to be fine. I promise.”

From this ask meme

“Star.” John gasps, the sound wet in his abused lungs. “I... ouch.” There's a thick layer of upper-atmosphere frost clinging to his skin and spacesuit and lashes, frostbite darkening painful purple marks high on his cheekbones and across the top of his nose. His eyes are half-lidded, his expression a little too vacant, curled into himself as he is with his head resting loosely against the side of the airlock. 

It almost serves him right for climbing outside the Space Elevator at just over one hundred kilometres above sea level. Just over the Kármán line - the edge of space itself. It might have been to grab a inexperienced, falling Balloonist, but John had done so without a helmet on - no time to grab one in the urgency of the plummet. Sending John over his brothers had been decided on as the fastest, only option that guaranteed getting to the falling man in time, but it had also proved to be incredibly risky.

Weak, grapply fingers search for some kind of purchase on the airlock door, like he might be able to get himself somehow upright like this.

“Where’s David?” The astronaut asks, raspy, his ridiculous priorities, as always, focused on the man he’d rescued over himself. “Is he... alright?”

He’s in a lot better way than John himself is, to be sure.

He’d, at least, had an emergency helmet.

[starman-john-tracy]

**29 >:3

29. “I don’t... I don’t think I can.” - From this ask meme

“You can.” John insists, ever so soft but with an urgency to the way his hands are stretched out toward her, reaching across the dangerous maw as if he could actually reach her across the ridiculous distance that’s opened up between them. “I’ll catch you Star, you know I will.” There’s a firm set to his jaw and a strength to his shoulders, blocky and static like he really believes she can.

The jump must be over six feet, nearly seven. Possible for a human if they were, say, average at long jump, but with the unstable edge and the broken, sheared off bits of concrete scattered around them, the twisted, weakening rebar strands, the only things that are sewing together the dark, terrifying chasm that’s split open between them, are being pulled thinner and thinner, this jump feels anything but average.

“It’s only going to get wider as the building subsides.” The urgency is growing in his voice, “You need to be on this side.” He presents it like it’s all very logical and rational, but that doesn’t mean it’s not also absolutely ridiculous. “You can do this.” John promises, his expression open and certain in the face of her panic, “Don’t look down.” He prompts her wandering eyes back up to his face, waving a little to keep her attention. “Just focus on me, ok? Take a deep breath then jump. You know I won’t let you fall.”

If Star screams a lot as she sucks in a breath, takes a run up and leaps into the void on faith in him alone, nothing but air beneath her feet and terror in her lungs, then John isn’t going to judge her for it. 

Fingers meet fingers and there’s a pull across the last few metres and a slam as they’re sent crashing, colliding into each other. John’s got a arm around her back and her chest is heaving and it would have been fine, would have been perfect, if only the slushy rubbley concrete beneath John’s left foot, the one closest to the edge, hadn’t pick that exact moment to give way.

And, with a look of pure shock, he starts to fall.

[starman-john-tracy]

** Star comes to stand in the doorway of John’s room. He’s sitting at his desk, scribbling away at something or another that she can’t quite see. She’s loud enough that he has to have heard him, but she doesn’t announce herself further, just shuffles in to stand over his shoulder.

John finishes his line without looking up, the pen looping smooth curved lines over themselves to complete his thought. After all, he knows it can't be Scott or the tinies; that particular trio are impossibly loud at all times, and it's unlikely to be Virgil because he's been up in his studio for the last four hours, thoroughly absorbed in his latest painting. Which leaves the stomping boots to be Kayo, unlikely, or Star.

"Uh..." His gaze flicks up to find it is Star, looming vaguely ominously over his shoulder. "Hello?" He tries, a little baffled. "I'm working on a paper," He adds, his tone insinuating that she's disturbing him, but there's an edge to it that suggests he'd drop his work instantly if she does need his help. "I'm summarizing the latest telemetries of the Tracy Quasar from Five's telescopic array for NASA." John explains, "Did you need something?"

[nibenhu-cas]

**✅

The blanket fort collapsed around them.

{ asteria-star }

[nibenhu-cas]

**Can you come pick me up??

Nibs had got a call on her way back into the base, helmet in hand she stopped has her phone went off, she looked at it and frowned slightly in puzzlement.  Why would Star be calling her at this time.  She answered and got the question. 

“Sure...uh...where are you?” She hoped it wasn’t too far and didn’t involve the high jacking of a plane or helicopter.

{ asteria-star }

[nibenhu-cas]

**You're safe here

Nibs was shaking, she felt like she was going to be sick, she’d seen a flash and heard a bang and it had triggered it off, the feeling of having her flesh ripped through, as the bullet ripped through her.  She had cried out and stepped back, her hand going to her side.  She had gone back into the wall and slid down it, feeling trapped. She could even smell the blood.

Then she had heard Star’s voice, and she realised Star was close and should she really be part of this memory? “St...Star..help..” She said her voice sounding tiny and pained.