Summary: Liam is shy and awkward and all he wants to be is an astronaut. Then he meets his partner and maybe being an astronaut isn't all he wants any more.
By: Aceofdiamonds.archiveofourown.org
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Liam's first day of Astronaut Training (it has a proper name but it's too long and hard to spell for Liam) is scarier than he thought it would be. When he signed up to train to be an Astronaut he thought he would be straight in with rockets and wearing the funny suits but instead he gets put in a room with a dozen other people like him and is given a big speech involving phrases like a lot of pressure and thousands of feet a minute. He thinks it’s to try and weed out the not-fully-committed and it’s working; he's beginning to wonder if this is the right career path for him after all.
But he sticks around and makes friends with a happy-go-lucky boy at lunch called Niall so things aren't as bad as they first seemed; at least now he has someone to go through the gruelling (another word from the speech that morning) experience with. Niall is loud and permanently hungry. He makes Liam enjoy the experience more than he thought he was going to three hours previous. He’s also hilarious - he takes the piss out of their trainers when they're not looking (and sometimes when they are) and his dirty jokes have Liam blushing and giggling at the same time.
Liam goes home after his first day and when his mum phones at six on the dot he lies and tells her he's having the time of his life because he dropped out of Uni to chase this Dream (it is his dream, okay, it has been since he was five even if he's not acting like it is at the moment) and she's been iffy about it but she cheers up when he tells her he made a friend. This is a New Thing. In Liam's defence, he's always liked being on his own better, he preferred it, but it worried his mum and Liam hates worrying his mum more than anything in the world (even his first day of Astronaut Training) so now he has Niall and that's good enough for the both of them.
"What d'you think it'll be like, going all the way to Jupiter?" Niall asks through a mouthful of Coke one lunch time. It had been a tough morning with circuit training for three hours so Liam has to take a few minutes, gulping down the rest of his Sprite, before he can find it in him to answer.
"Amazing." is all Liam can think to sum it up. He thinks about this constantly, the whole Astronaut thing, so maybe the fact that he only has one real friend, who is also an Astronaut in Training, is a good thing because he can't focus on anything else.
That's another thing his mum worries about: his lack of love life. He had came out when he was sixteen and he's not totally inexperienced, he's had a couple of relationships, nothing too serious but serious enough, but his mum wants him to find a Nice Boy to bring home with him next time he goes to see her. And Liam, Liam hates disappointing his mother, but he really, truly can't look at another boy outside the building he's been spending six days a week for the last six months.
Then one day he's sitting learning about the engineering side of the mission (everyone has to learn about everything in case something goes wrong. Liam's been assured nothing should go wrong but y'know, better safe than sorry, learning about engineering isn't all that bad in a life or death situation), and their lesson is cut short when Walsh, their main tutor, comes in and tells them that there's been a change of schedule and they're being assigned their partners for the mission nowrather than three months down the line.
This has Liam panicking a little because he's not good with people, not even a little bit, apart from his mum and Niall and his big sister (not his younger one, they just politely ignore each other, it's fine, it's amicable) and so the thought of having to spend the next year, at least, with someone is a thought that makes his throat close up and a sort of gurgling noise comes out that results in Niall sending him a sharp look.
