young sam/colleen *finger guns* - not keith/kenith
relationship; prompt - long distance relationship
send me a character/ship and a category, and i’ll write you a fic!
note: i ship them so hard i ship samcoll so hard holy shit
Sam leans against the wall, twirling the phone cord between his fingers. It’s kind of stupid, he thinks; the Garrison has some of the best tech in the country, and they’re still using these old, junky phones like they’ve walked straight out of one of those old movies Colleen likes.
It rings. Rings, and rings, and rings.
Sam worries his lip and casts a glance down the hallway. There’s no one around at nine on a Tuesday.
Maybe she’s asleep. Texas is two hours ahead, which means it’ll be about eleven. It’s a little late to be calling, but he’d wanted to finish up an assignment after hours, which meant he hadn’t had any free time before now.
He’s about to hang up when there’s a soft noise on the other end.
“Hello?”
The breath leaves his lungs in one long exhale. Hearing her voice makes his stomach twist and a blush raise on his cheeks. Even now, after dating for more than a year, he still feels like it’s the first day and she’s walking up to him with confidence in her eyes and his name and a date on her lips.
“Hey,” Sam says, then adds, “I know it’s late. M’sorry, Col.”
There’s the sound of shuffling, like she’s moving.
“No, it’s okay,” she replies. “Stayed back to work?”
He smiles. “I think I have something. It’s just - the planetary conditions of, like, well, all the far out planets… we don’t really know that much about them. But I keep imagining how it looks out there, what kind of secrets the universe still has…”
“Yeah,” Colleen says softly. “You’re gonna go far, Samuel Holt. You’ve got Jupiter in your eyes, babe.”
“Farther,” he says, a laugh on his lips.
Farther. Farther from her.
She’s never asked him to stay for her, not once. Not when he’d told her he wanted to go to the Garrison the second semester of sophomore year; not when he’d called her that first night, saying he wanted to see the stars.
You’re gonna go far.
To Jupiter and beyond; to infinity and beyond, as his childhood would say.
He suddenly misses her. Sam wants to reach through the phone to hold her hand, wants his love to travel through telephone wires and the miles between them, wants desperately to press his lips to hers but even more than that, to see her smile.
“I miss you,” Colleen whispers, her voice so quiet he almost misses it.
Sam swallows and manages to say, “I miss you, too.”
“Wish you were here,” she murmurs. And God, does he want to be, curled up on the couch in the basement. The dim light of the moon on her face. His hand tangled in her hair. Her legs, propped on his. Comfortable, quiet, a fleeting moment.
“I want to be,” he replies. “How’s it going over there?”
“Okay,” she says. “Odie misses you, too. He won’t stop whining at the door. The light in the kitchen is burnt out, actually, so every time I want a midnight snack, I’m stumbling through and running into the counter.”
“Shortie,” he teases.
“Oh, shut up,” she says, but there’s a smile in her voice now, as tired as it is. “Do you come back for Thanksgiving?”
Sam blinks, then counts the days in his head. She’s right - Thanksgiving break is in a little less than a month, though the time leading up to it will be filled to the brim with long hours and studying and keeping Ben out of trouble.
“Yeah, we get a week,” he tells her. A whirlwind of a week, probably - Aunt Marge will host Thanksgiving dinner as usual, and then there’ll be work to do, of course, and Mom will want them to go up to Houston for three days like they always do, and-
-and. And. There’s always an and, always more - to see, to do. His life is like that; he’ll go and keep going, orbiting around Colleen like she’s the sun and he’s running laps around her.
“What about graduation? That’s soon, right?”
His blood thrums with his excitement.
Soon, he’ll be out there with all the other pilots and technicians and engineers; all the women and men who make it to space and back; people who stand tall and proud on television screens and walk the halls of the Garrison in crisp uniforms. He’ll be one of them.
“Yeah,” he says. “You coming?”
“’Course, stupid.”
He checks the time. 9:32 PM.
“Getting late over there,” he says. “You should probably go to sleep.”
“Yeah.” She doesn’t hang up, though, and neither does he.
If he pretends, if he tries really, really hard, he’s next to her on the roof of his childhood home in deep summer, looking up at a starless sky. The only thing there is the moon, a sliver of a thing, and her, brighter than any star. Their hands are sticky from melted popsicles, and there’s a sweet taste in his mouth.
Later, they’ll climb down to the balcony, and he’ll put his hands on her waist as they twist the telescope upwards.
As if she’s thinking about it, too, Colleen says, “Remember we used to stargaze in the summer?”
“I miss those days,” Sam admits.
“You were in love with the stars first,” she says, and he can’t quite tell what she’s thinking, if her tone is more wistful, or sad, or terrible, or lonely. Sometimes the question haunts him - if she regrets loving him, because he’s had his eyes on the stars long before he met her.
“Maybe,” he says. “But you’re one of them, Col.”
Another pause.
“Call me tomorrow, yeah?” she says, and there’s a promise in those words.
They linger for another moment; he can hear her breathing, air ghosting across the receiver.
“Alright, Colleen Montgomery,” he says finally.
“Alright, Samuel Holt.”
Click.
Sam wraps the phone cord tight around his fingers and pretends it’s her hand in his. There’s a window down the hall; he stares out of it and up at the stars.
“Colleen,” he says to them, feet on the ground, his heart with her in a dark house in the middle of Texas. Sam’s already there, though, already in the stars.
He wonders if she knew what she’d signed up for. To love a boy who loves the stars, to love a boy already light years away.
