#nct astronaut

1811: the 166th day of your voyage in space with your sole flight companion, astronaut!haechan, starts like any other.

the mission had been running smoothly, with nothing remarkable on the schedule. analyse some samples, go through any new messages from earth, double-check supplies.

on paper, it was meant to be one of the least eventful days of the week ahead.

you had both been spending time in the gym in your rare overlapping break time, getting your daily exercise; running on the treadmill with him on the one adjacent, in the middle of a contest of endurance to see who could hold out the longest.

the ship spins around to grant you a once-in-a-lifetime view of earth through the windows, just a tiny blue speck against the vast void of space. your gaze locks onto your home, and you let yourself get lost in thoughts of your life. right there, on that pinprick of colour smaller than your fingernail, was everything you knew and loved.

“missing home?” haechan calls out, seeming to have noticed what your attention was on.

you glance over at him with a sheepish laugh. reaching out to slow the treadmill down, you catch your breath before you make to reply as he does the same.

“it’s been so long since i’ve seen my niece,” you tell him what you’ve been dwelling over for a few nights in a row, chest still heaving from effort.

he snorts, wiping sweat from his forehead with a towel. “she sent you a video message just yesterday. what was it about? her new elephant plushie she named after you?”

you can’t force the smile off your lips as you recall the very file he was referring to. “yeah, well… you know it’s different.”

he sucks his teeth and nods slowly. “fair.”

“just the thought of her naming a doll after me because i’m not there in person, you know?” you don’t need to verbally add that it breaks your heart for him to understand.

“yeah.” his eyes fall to the treadmill control pad in front of him. “hey, i’m sure she’s super proud of you. she’s probably bragging to all her friends that she has an actual astronaut in her family, and they’re ‘up in space at this very moment’.” he holds up air quotes and speaks in a proud, matter-of-fact voice in an attempt to imitate your niece.

your smile breaks wider at the image of her, beaming baby teeth and all. “hey, what about you? who’s boasting about you back home?”

haechan opens his mouth to speak, but is cut off by your yelp of surprise as your weight vanishes with warning, your stomach lurching with horror as the floor disappears underneath your feet. you register him cursing loudly as his body floats—floats—up, without the comfort of gravity.

you swear the ship has abandoned you.

you were, of course, familiar with the sensation of weightlessness in space—but only when it was meant to be so, and the very implications makes your brain go haywire.

“shit, shit, shit—” momentary panic forces your arms to flail out to grab onto something, anything—and a hand catches your wrist as haechan pulls you into his chest.

“i got you,” though comforting, haechan fails to hide his own shock and confusion, “i got you.”

he unwraps one arm from around you to gently push off the approaching ceiling, sending the two of you drifting slowly back towards the floor again.

grabbing onto the handlebar of a treadmill (you felt tremendously thankful for the fact that they were fixed to the gym floor), he pulls both of you as close to the floor as possible in case the gravity machine decides to function properly again without warning.

your heart jumps to your throat again as his back thuds on the floor and pulls you down with him, falling onto his chest. neither of you having let go of one another the entire time you spent in unplanned non-gravity. “are you okay?”

your stray hair falls on your face as you push your head off his chest and nod blankly in reply.

“well,that wasn’t supposed to happen,” he says, though his face shows no sign of joking like usual.

“no shit,” you breathe out.

you both flinch when an alarm blares through the speakers, screaming of certain impending doom in the form of a system malfunction.