SYNOPSIS : A quick thought about the 141 being stationed on a space station and catching the eyes of a cosmic horror.
WARNING : None. But this is intended to be a subtle kind of horror, so it might be unsettling. The x Reader part is very subtle, but it’s here !
Author’s Note : I was daydreaming, like I always do, and started to mix Space and Sea in a same setting again. So here you go.
I do not allow anyone to translate, re-use or re-publish my works, be it here or on any other platform, including AI.
CoD AUs - Masterlist
Main Masterlist
Contrary to what people might think, a space station isn’t really quiet.
First, there’s the constant humming of the machinery. They tend to forget it a lot, having gotten used to it echoing day and night in the back of their heads. There’s also their own voices - bantering, chatting, laughing, yelling, cursing. When they work on whatever machine needs maintenance at the time, the clinking and banging of tools also adds itself to the subtle cacophony that surrounds them on the daily.
Over the years, they’ve come to find it comforting. It’s the reason why, when repairs need to be made on the outside of the station, the cosmic silence sometimes makes them even more uneasy than it should ; especially when exhaustion weighs heavy on their bodies after months of floating away from the world, in a void where Mother Earth and the Moon both linger on the infinite horizon.
Those daily sounds bring them peace.
Until they don’t.
-
It comes slow, at first. It takes them a while to realise why they’ve all been feeling like something’s wrong. They couldn’t say how long, but after days of anxious fidgeting, awkward and confused silences, and constant checking of the machinery inside and outside of the station, Kyle abruptly interrupts himself in the middle of a sentence, a look of strange understanding on his face.
« Do you hear that ? » He says, and it’s when they finally all focus on their surroundings that they hear it.
There’s a peculiar melody floating in the air. A mesmerising song made of laughter, coos, and other sounds they’ve never heard before. For a moment, they think they left a CD player run somewhere in the station, close enough for them to hear - but they quickly realise that it’s not the case, and the confusion only gets stronger as they rattle their brains in order to find where that music could be coming from.
Simon mentions that it sounds like it’s coming from outside. A crazy thought. But the more time passes, the more it seems to be true.
The cosmos is no longer silent.
-
Then come the lights, adorned with colours they can’t bring themselves to describe. They light up the corridors of the station in the strangest of hues, creating new shadows in the corner of their eyes. Unfamiliar silhouettes giggle and dart in front of the windows, taking a second to cut the streams of light before immediately disappearing.
Are they inside the station ? Or are they outside ?
-
Johnny is the first to mention the dreams. But they all have them.
They all describe the same strange, almost fish-like creatures they see dancing in the blaze of supernovas. The same voices, high and low at the same time, calling them from the abyss of black holes. The same feeling of drowning among comets and asteroids, suffocating under the force of cold, invisible currents before suddenly being pulled away by scaly limbs.
They always wake up in the middle of the night, sweating bullets and cursing at the same, distant vision of round, slitted eyes and glowing fins. One that keeps haunting the back of their minds during the day.
-
Price doesn’t know if he should mention it to the team waiting for them at home. He could swear his daily check-ins with the base back on Earth keep getting interrupted by a strange rhythm of static, even though there seems to be no problem with the comms.
There’s a strange pressure in their stomachs now, that keeps growing with every new event. When they don’t instinctively hold their breaths as if they were underwater, they can hear the harmonious remnants of waves in their ears, feel an unfamiliar taste of salt on the back of their tongues. Sometimes, it becomes impossible to know whether they’re still dreaming or not, and they have to pinch each other’s cheeks to the point of bruising to realise they’re wide awake. It all looks, sounds, tastes, smells and feels so real. Every single one of their senses is constantly filled to the brim with waves and waves of strange sensations.
The more time passes, the more they feel like they’re being watched. As if they had suddenly become a prey in the eyes of a being they are unable to see.
The radars, however, never show anything.
Are they having a collective hallucination ?
Or is there really something lurking behind the stars, watching their every movement, and tasting their fear with hunger in its eyes ? No matter what they do, the song never seems to stop.
SUMMARY : A quick thought about the 141 being stationed on a space station and catching the eyes of a cosmic horror.
WARNINGS : A few lines mentioning blood and death in Simon’s part. This is intended to be a subtle kind of horror, so it might be unsettling.
I do not allow anyone to translate, re-use or re-publish my works, be it here or on any other platform, including AI.
CoD AUs - Masterlist
Main Masterlist
The song never stops. Covering their ears in the hopes of getting a few seconds of silence is useless. If anything, it only seems to get louder, as if they were trapping it inside of their heads instead.
It soon get mixed with a series of strange knocks on the windows. It soon evolves into banging, violent and loud, shaking their very bones painfully. It wakes them up at night, when the nightmares seem to quiet down.
They barely sleep anymore.
-
The silhouettes are getting clearer. Instead of playing hide and seek, they now linger behind the windows. Cooing. Whispering. Watching. Despite their best efforts, the strange, flashing lights burning behind them make it impossible to make out the details of their bodies. But the team knows they’re far from being the stranded humans they once tried to think they were once the knocking and banging echoed on the walls of the station. For they don’t seem to wear any protection against the ruthless void, and their eyes glow dangerously among the shadows. Catching them coaxes a sudden, ear-shattering screech from the cosmic depths, full of tortured wails and mad laughter. It rattles their minds and bones, lingering in every single one of their cells for hours afterwards.
The silhouettes, however, always disappear in the blink of an eye.
-
Kyle remembers every single one of his nightmares.
Most of the time, he sees groups of countless birds fly in an underwqter sky with fire licking at their wings, so quick and graceful, leaving burning embers in their wake. Around them, flames erupt from clouds of lightning. He floats among them, then gets carried away by silent, violent currents. Asteroids collide in his chest, and he feels the deep rumble of their fall echo in his bones, bounce around the walls of his body like shockwaves and bass. Colours resonate with the otherworldly sounds around him, pulsing in his eyes as silence turns everything back to a black and white monotony. The symphony is demonic, hellish even - but beautiful and mesmerizing all the same.
Then the dream shatters. Shards of glass escort him back to the waking world, mind shredded and numb.
And the banging continues.
-
Sometimes, Simon hears a voice behind him. Familiar, and clear as day. « Simon, » it calls out, « did you get any news of Tommy ? »
His mother sounds worried - scared, even. It takes him back to those times when he had to fish his brother out of muddy sidewalks, barely conscious due to the drugs flowing through his veins. Barely alive.
His broken, guttural groans still echo in his ears, and the memory becomes too real when Simon sees Tommy’s lifeless body float in the corridors of the station, littered in needle and bullet holes, leaking bubbles of blood against the white walls. Then his mother joins in the macabre scene, with his sister in law and nephew, replaying the disastrous day he lost them all, this time in the infinite cosmos. The sight is scorching, akin to the sun - it burns his mind, the ashes clogging his throat and lungs. Thick, dry and heavy.
They’re gone the second Simon blinks. But the visions keep haunting him now, and he once collapsed under the pain tearing through his guts. It was Kyle who found him, wandering aimlessly through the space station, unresponsive, with a living death clawing at his face.
« Thought you were dead, Sir, » he said once Simon came back to his senses. The man only grunted in response.
For a moment, it felt like he was.
-
More and more static covers the voices of their colleagues back on Earth. Price can barely decipher their words anymore - but they seem to hear him perfectly. It’s as if nothing was wrong on their side, as if they didn’t hear him ask to repeat themselves more and more often. The few words he manages to catch seem joyful, unbothered ; a stark contrast to the exhausted tension haunting his. They always end the calls with a broken « Catch you later, John ! » - leaving him to wonder if there will be a next time.
He tried shouting at them during the latest call, letting his frustration get the best of him. But nothing changed. Their voices remained full of enthusiasm and glitches, and the conversation stayed the same - except he barely understood a single word from his contact.
No matter how much Johnny tried to tweak and twist their wires and cogs, it was impossible to find the source of the malfunction. The systems detected nothing either.
After that, it didn’t take long for the comms to fully go down.
To realize how real the nightmares had always been.
i think it's gonna be a long, long time (sid/geno astronaut!au)
It's all cheesewithmy's fault. I have a background in aviation, but lololol space is not my thing; handwavey science, loose technical terms, and only vaguely thought out space travel ahead!
Sid's out on routine maintenance, doing a regular check of the heat shields when everything goes wrong. The anchor line snaps tight, jerking around his middle as the spacecraft rocks in the wake of an explosion, the black glittering canvas of space blown white and burning as an oxygen tank ruptures.
He’s snapped out to the end of the line, dangling beyond the edge of the ship, flailing helplessly in space, vision shot all to hell, and for a moment he can’t think through the panic, through the animal terror that rips through him as he windmills his arms and goes nowhere.
They train for a reason, though, and for a split second it’s like he’s back at Pensacola, listening to the instructor drone on about safety and recovery protocols. He takes a deep breath and stops moving. He’s got to preserve the line, which is still tethering him to safety. At least he hopes it is. It feels like there’s resistance at the end, like it’s still anchored to the ship, but he can’t see, and he’s not sure how he’s oriented. He thinks the blast pushed him portside, but all the navigational cues he’d use to confirm that are gone-- he can’t see, he can’t reach anything, and he hasn’t heard anything from Flower.
Jesus Christ, he thinks. Flower.
He doesn’t know which tank blew, but he hasn’t heard Flower’s voice since before the explosion, none of the fast, irritated Quebecois that streams in through his headset when his pilot’s displeased. An ox tank going should mean furious swearing, and a terrible worry starts to curl behind his ribs.
“Flower,” he calls out, his voice shaking. “Flower, do you read me?”
He’s met with silence.
-
He doesn’t know how long he’s been out there. His vision still hasn’t come back. He’s flash blind, he knows, but he can’t help hoping that it’s temporary. Sid’s clinging to his training, but there’s only so much he can do without his sight, without any support from--
He can’t think about Flower right now.
If his estimates are right, he needs to start worrying about running out of oxygen. The suit’s equipped for extended walkabouts, but he’d already burned through a quarter of his oxygen supply when the tank blew. He’s got to be dipping below half-empty by now.
Sid blinks, hoping against all logic that his vision will return.
The world stays blank and silent.
-
He’s been holding out on changing his radio frequency, unwilling to close the line to Flower, but he can’t wait anymore. He’s definitely past half-empty now, he can tell just from the weight on his back.
It’s dangerously light, and Flower still hasn’t responded to his calls. He has to assume Flower’s injured, or worse, at the very least unable to communicate. If they have any chance of making it out of this alive, Sid’s going to have to roll the dice and hope he can find an active frequency, that someone out there will hear a distress call.
He fumbles with the control panel on his forearm, trying to remember which buttons are where. He’s going to have words with the instructors at Pensacola, at Johnson and Kennedy when they make it home. Astronauts don’t train for flash blindness, don’t train for what to do when your visor doesn’t protect your vision. He can picture the control panel perfectly, but the thick suit means he can’t feel the buttons, can’t gauge where his fingers are; for all he knows he’s adjusting the suit’s internal temperature.
Please, he thinks in every language he knows, in Maritime English and Flower’s Quebecois and the rudimentary Russian he had to learn to qualify for rotation on the ISS. Please, let this work.
-
He’s cold now, and a little bit light-headed.
The emergency beacon is out on all ISS frequencies, and he’s been hailing manually at what he estimates to be intervals of ten minutes.
He’s still blind and floating alone in the vault of space, trying to keep his breathing even and his voice steady as he broadcasts his name, ship, and approximate coordinates, name, ship, and approximate coordinates, over and over.
Throat dry, he’s trying not to give up when a burst of static flares through his headset, ringing in his ears.
“....responding………”
It’s a voice, thick and accented, and he’s never heard anything sweeter. Heart beating like a frantic thing, he has to remind himself not to fling his body forward at the sound.
“Do you copy? This is Lieutenant Sidney Crosby of the USS Steel City. We blew an ox tank on walkabout and are in distress. Do you copy?”
More static, screaming in his ears.
“......copy! This Ensign Malkin from ISS, I’m copy. You have coordinates?”
The relief that floods through him is insane, so powerful it’s almost debilitating.
“Yes,” he gasps out, choking for breath as he rattles off the the last location he was absolutely sure of. “I don’t-- I don’t know how accurate they are, the explosion pushed us around, and I haven’t been able to radio my pilot--”
He stops as the voice on the radio breaks in, warm and steady. “Only two of you? Sending craft now, a skiff, should be there soon.”
“Yeah, there’s-- there’s only two of us.” He swallows, trying to draw moisture into his parched throat. He’s freezing now, and so tired. “I don’t know if Flower’s alive. I’m flash blind, I can’t see the Steel City, I don’t know how badly it’s damaged.”
“Can’t see anything?” The voice on the other end, Malkin, he sounds worried now. “How long you out there?”
“Two hours, maybe more, I don’t know.”
“How much oxygen you have left?” The worry is tamped down now, or maybe he just can’t hear it under the accent anymore.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” he says, and he can hear his voice rising, cracking with fatigue, with distress. He’s definitely dizzy now, low on oxygen and crashing as the adrenaline spike that jolted through him at the sound of another human voice fades away.
“Okay, Sidney, is okay,” Malkin says, “I’m stay on channel with you.”
He fights down something like a sob. He’s knows it’s fatigue, lack of oxygen, but now that he knows help is on the way he can’t seem to hold himself together anymore.
“Please,” he says, the same desperate prayer he thought over and over as he started to broadcast.
It slips out in French, in Russian, almost by rote, and there’s a burst of startled laughter from Malkin.
“Your Russian terrible,” he says, and the whole situation is suddenly so absurd that he laughs too.
“Jesus Christ,” Sid says, incredulous. “This is a distress call and you’re criticizing my pronunciation?”
“Can call me Geno,” Malkin-- Geno says, “and yes. Worst Russian I’m hear in a long time.”
He clings to the sound of Geno’s voice, chirping his pronunciation, anchoring him more firmly than the line around his waist as he waits for the skiff to reach the ship.
Geno’s words keep him calm as his breaths get shallower and shallower, as his oxygen creeps towards empty. His training kept him alive, his training and the biggest turn of luck that’s ever come his way, but Geno’s the one keeping him from falling apart.
He listens to Geno talk about his family, about his ridiculous friend who plays in the NHL - he says it’s the Caps’ phenom, Ovechkin, and at this point Sid’s willing to take it on faith - about his enormous dog and his plans for the summer. Geno wants to swim with whale sharks.
Sid huffs a breathless laugh, almost inaudible, at that. “What,” he says, “space not exciting enough for you?”
“Maybe I take you with me, listen to you bitch whole time.”
“Geno--” he tries to say, but he’s so tired. His vision hasn’t come back at all, and he can’t tell if his eyes are still open.
“Shhh, Sid. Rescue almost there. Take you back to ISS, then we go see whale sharks.”
The last thing he hears before he blacks out is Geno’s voice, telling him the skiff is pulling up to the Steel City.
-
Sid wakes up and panics.
His vision is still gone, and for a few horrible heartbeats he’s back in space, floating next to his silent, dead ship, waiting to run out of oxygen.
A monitor starts screaming next to him, blaring as his pulse skyrockets as he tries to fight off the memory. He can feel the sheets beneath him, scratchy hospital cotton, and he can smell the distinct bleach and recycled air scent of a sick bay. By the time a nurse makes it into the room, he’s started to get his breathing back under control.
She calls the doctor in, and over the course of the day they give him bits and pieces of information, until he can reconstruct what happened.
The ox tank blew, and he got spun portside. It took out the forward nacelle and damaged the cockpit. By the grace of god Flower was fussing with something in the rear cabin - the blast knocked him out, and he was just starting to come around when the rescue skiff showed up.
They were both evaced planetside. Flower’s under observation, the doctors worried about the length of time he was out. Vero’s with him.
Sid’s flash blind. He’s known that since the white glow of the explosion burned into his retinas. What he doesn’t know, what the doctors can’t tell him, is if it’s permanent or not.
Flash blindness is tricky, they all say. The words echo hollowly, and even though he’s got his feet firmly planted on terra firma, it feels like he’s right back in the vast emptiness of space, alone and desperate.
His breathing kicks up again, and he thinks dimly that he might be having a panic attack. He gets himself back under control before the monitor starts wailing at him this time, but he can’t hide that he’s shaken.
When the doctors release him three days later, he’s got orders for a post-mission psych eval.
He still can’t see, and he misses the voice that anchored him - misses Geno - like he’s never missed anything in his life.
-
Three months post-mission, Sid’s resigned himself to the fact that his vision probably won’t ever come back, at least not fully. The panic attacks are under control now, though, which he counts as a win.
He tries to be embarrassed about needing so much help to adjust to being effectively blind, but frankly he’s too grateful that Taylor is willing time off from school and help him set up in Pensacola to feel anything but relief.
He hasn’t had off-base quarters since he was in flight school, and she bullies him first into finding a small apartment and then into going to Ikea to decorate it, blithely ignoring his protests that it doesn’t really matter what it looks like, at least not to him.
“I get shadows and shapes sometimes, but you know I still can’t see colors, or really anything at all.”
“Don’t bitch, Squid,” she says. “I refuse to visit only to stare at white walls and eat off of gross mismatched plates you nicked from the commissary. Do it for my sake.”
So he lets himself be dragged hither and yon through Ikea and tries to carve out a new life for himself. Flower comes to visit, fully recovered, and rapid-fire French isn't the language he's so desperate to hear but it's infinitely reassuring nonetheless. Vero bakes cookies, most of which Flower eats himself, claiming he's earned them by dint of visiting Sid in Florida - honestly Sid, couldn't you have picked a place where the mosquitoes are smaller than shuttles? - and it's good.
It's good.
He's got a job, too. He had words with the instructors, just like he promised himself he would, and they’ve asked him to take charge of a new crisis protocol seminar. He’ll be discussing adaptation in crisis situations, and running flash blindness drills.
It’s a temporary gig, but he was one of the best exploratory crewmen in the program. He’s got a future with spaceflight, even if it’s from the ground now.
Through it all, he misses Geno like a physical ache. It seems silly, this incessant longing - there’s no other word for it - for a man he’s never met, for a man who was just doing his job, but it’s as real as anything Sid’s ever felt.
Sid tried to track him down after he was first released, but Russia’s space program is structured differently than the NATO program that hooked him up with NASA, and none of the channels or contacts he tries can point him to an Ensign Malkin. He still misses him, but he’s had to compartmentalize. It’s just like with his vision; he can’t spend his life waiting for something that’s never going to happen.
Sid’s got a future, even if it’s one that won’t ever let him lay eyes on Geno, won’t let him hear his voice again. He has to be content with that.
-
He’s walking into the seminar room to start lecturing his fourth batch of students, listening to the hum of idle chatter when he hears a familiar voice, a voice he’d know anywhere. He’s the instructor in a room filled with nervous cadets, still fumbling a little bit with his cane, but none of that matters.
“Geno?”
His voice cracks, high and disbelieving, the same way it was all those months ago. He’s lightheaded again.
“Sid?”
That’s him, that’s Geno, and without any thought at all he’s stumbling forward toward the sound, ignoring the cadets, voices pitching up in surprise as they start to gossip.
He collides with a warm, broad chest. A pair of arms wrap around him, steadying and impossibly familiar.
“Geno, what the hell are you doing here, how did you--”
“I’m hear about seminar, had to come--”
“I looked for you,” Sid says, voice a little steadier now, “I looked for months and I had, I had to stop. I couldn’t keep looking.”
Geno makes a wounded noise, and god, this is surreal. Geno's voice carried him through the worst moments of his life, but this is a man he's never met, and he's clinging to him. It's strange, and he's immediately self-conscious.
“I’m sorry,” he says, trying to disentangle himself, but Geno just rearranges them so Sid’s tucked against his side.
“No sorry. Is inconvenient though,” Geno says, and there’s the warm, smug humor that kept him from falling to pieces during those hours he spent floating in the dark. “I’m have to do everything. Have to talk, have to rescue, have to come find. Hard work.”
It makes him relax a little, enough to risk some humor of his own. “And now you have to take me to see the whale sharks.”
“You remember!” Geno sounds delighted, and a little unsure.
“Yeah,” Sid says, and he’s about to say more when he remembers they’re in room full of officers in training who are all probably staring at them.
He pushes away from Geno and tries to sound authoritative when he tells the class the seminar is cancelled, go take a free hour and come back tomorrow.
When the quality of the silence tells him that he and Geno are alone in the room, he gropes for the nearest chair, letting Geno guide him to it.
“I remember everything, Geno,” he says, picking up right where they left off. “You saved me out there.” He can feel himself flushing, but he keeps talking. It’s his turn this time. “I know this is weird, but I feel like I know you. I’ve-- I’ve missed you. I’ve missed your voice ever since I woke up planetside.”
“Me too, Sid. We’re talk for almost two hours, and I’m think we know each other. Try to find you after evac, but called back to Russia. Think about you, think about you lots, and then I’m hear about lecture, and think, maybe--”
“Yes,” Sid says, the word bursting out of him, and then he’s reaching for Geno. They meet each other halfway, and the press of their mouths isn’t rushed, isn’t desperate, isn’t anything like Sid imagined when he couldn’t stop himself from missing someone he’d never met.
It’s soft and gentle, and for the first time since the tank blew, Sid’s anchored, safe, home. Geno breaks the kiss and presses their foreheads together. They stay like that for a long time, breathing together, and even as they start adjusting to being more than just voices on opposite ends of a frequency, Sid feels like he knows Geno down to his bones.
Geno’s not just the voice that anchored him; he’s a man who tells embarrassing stories about his friends, who wants to swim with whale sharks, who traveled across the world on nothing more than the hope of a shared connection. He’s a man who kissed Sid like he’s something precious, something amazing.
Sid draws in a breath, steady and easy, and stands up, pulling Geno with him.
“Maybe we should swing by my apartment before we think about whale sharks. It’s nice. I even have matching plates.”
Geno laughs, and Sid doesn’t have to see to know he’s grinning, wide and bright and blinding.
“Lead the way,” he says, and Sid does, fingers tangled with Geno’s as they step outside into the warmth of the sunshine.
astronaut!au where they're playing with bubbles of water in spaceshuttle >3< cuz it's water time weeeeee
And i cant help but imagine them do the space training in pool when on earth too.
