"Like this," you offer your hands out and help him strap the helmet on properly. He gives you a thankful smile and you nod, heart pounding as you think of what you are about to do.
The both of you turn to the round hexagonal wall that appeared blank yet held so much power. It was the only obstacle between the inside and the outside and it made the biggest difference to life.
You gulp, trying not to rethink the situation. You knew how much he wanted to do this and you also didn't want to appear cowardly. It's important to take risks to know the worth of life. Someone had quoted that ... you just couldn't remember who. However, if that saying was true you wanted to experience it.
Lying in that chamber you'd realized that you'd lived the most in those two years than in your entire life. You'd felt alive and throbbing through the fear you'd accomplished so much and grown mentally. It made you feel stronger in so many ways and you knew that now- on this space ship- on your way home you're heading back to normality. A bleak normality of school and home and a repeat and it did bum you out a little.
You had to make the most out of it. Now you were in space and like Taehyung pointed out you'd probably never have the chance to ever try this again. It made the moment more crucial.
"Y/N?" You hear his voice echo from the back of your mind. Jungkook? you think at once but no it was coming through that little fuzzy rasping of the mic.
"Huh?"
You look up to see Taehyung staring intensely at you. He's studying your face as if trying to understand what you're thinking by that. You stare back for a few moments before the invoice comes in again.
"Y/N? Can you hear me?"
"Yeah," you answer half-heartedly.
He purses his lips. "Are you having second thoughts?"
"No," you give him a reassuring smile. "It's more of the opposite. I'm preparing myself and convincing myself that this is right."
"I swear," he vows again. "You won't regret it."
Together the both of you look away to the huge door. As you still stare at it, Taehyung secures the belt at the navel of your spacesuit, making sure you are well attached. Suddenly, Taehyung wraps his arms around the chord and pulls violently. You entire body comes swinging along with the pull and your front crashes into his. You look up, his hand still firmly the the cord but now at his waist, your face inches away from each other, spacesuits pressed against each other. The tension suddenly rises as your eyes meet Taehyung who is looking down at your with an with an expression you cannot identify.
"Good," you breathes, huskily, the transmition coming through the helmet. He stays like that only the second longer before moving away, creating distance between the boys of you.
"Pull," he demands, pointing at his own cord with his eyes. You lightly tug of it, the movement feeble and inactive unlike the strength and confidence when he done so. However, he seems satisfied will the security. Finally, after rechecking the cords on the ship-end, he moves to the lever.
Your heart pounds faster as his hand rests over the bar. "Oh by the way," he adds, looking right at you suddenly. "Where's Jungkook?"
Jungkook? You look at him perplexed not expecting that name to turn up suddenly. What about him? Had they planned to do this together?
"Jungkook is sleeping ...?" you reply, confused.
"Oh," Taehyung raises his eyebrows, a little disadvantaged by the situation. "But...you can wake him up right? Like he can still hear you?"
"Yeah," you nod, wincing as you remember how he'd crawled into your dreams many a time turning them into dumb, romantic scenarios or to ask random unanswerable questions or discoveries that kept him awake.
"Good," Taehyung repeats. "Just in case of any emergency, at least the guys will know what happened."
Emergency? Slight panic rushes to your ears and you try to calm yourself down. It was going to be fine. He knew what he was doing right? And in any case, like he'd just mentioned, you could wake up Jungkook. And if you had to, you weren't going to hesitate to do so.
"Taehyung ..." you say, gulping. "You're scaring me."
"Come here," he holds your hand in his, giving it a firm squeeze. "Hold me tight." You obey at once, locking your palms so firmly not even super glue could force you to let go. Heads angle up to look at the huge horizontal door of fate. "You ready?"
You don't even reply, not knowing what to say. Hand reaching out, Taehyung pulls down the lever with the force of all five long skinny fingers.
Nothing happens.
Then, with a slow rumble the the door in front of your cracks apart like a camera lens. Cracks slipping away from each other, you watch a small black hole grow larger and large until it's encompassed the entire doorway and then ...
you see the universe.
Automatically driven to the door like a moth to a flame, Taehyung floats heavily towards the empty, airless space. Glove firmly in his, you can't do anything but follow frightened and intrigued at the same time. The platform-like runway stretches out past the doorway, welcoming your suicidal exit. Walking tentatively to the edge, feeling the cord rope out behind you, you gulp. It was not even liking jumping out of a plane because you couldn't feel any rush of air or wind or clouds or anything. Worse of all ...
there was no bottom.
Don't look down, don't look down, don't look down you beg yourself over and over again. You weren't really afraid of heights but this was a height way beyond any extreme. This was above the clouds, the sky, the atmosphere ... this was in the middle of the universe. You knew you wouldn't fall even if you "fell" but it was still an extremely frightening thought. You'd lived your entire life in the presence of gravity so stepping off this platform was like jumping to your death.
Your face goes white in rising panic and your heart beats faster. All around you, it's extremely dark. It's a dark empty space, like a globe of black. It's not even like the sky at night, twinkling with a billion of skies because it was utterly empty.
"Taehyung?" you contact him at once. The view was extremely different than the one you'd seen earlier because it was fully void of those shining bright dots. It was just plain empty with an intense darkness.
"Where are the stars?"
Looking in front of him at the black view, he presses his lips together. "We can only see the stars during the day with the light of the sun. Perhaps on the other side the ship, now. But they're still there ... if you look closely." Squinting through your helmet, you try to make out stars, planets, flying objects ... anything. Any sign of movement or resemblance to the sky you were so used to. Then, looking deeply you can see those soft shining dots but so faint, so faint they were almost non-existent.
Hand grasping his tightly, you feel his hand rise higher and higher as if he was ascending to heaven. Looking up, you see his hand as left the platform, arisen into the weightlessness of space. The long tube holding him secure to the ship extends as Taehyung floats further and further away, hand leaving yours momentarily. You stand there, struck, watching him float away into the wide expanse of never-ending space.
"Tae wait...where are you going?"
When he doesn't reply, you feet dig further into your boots. As he had no intention of replying to you until you followed him, you reach out and grab the long belt unwinding after him. Pulling at it, you grab his attention and he jerks to a stop in space. Turning around slowly holding the other end you wave him over. It was a little amusing to see how it attached to him like an umbilical chord. He was like a baby flowing away from the mother.
Instead of complying to your request he responds the same way. With a wave he beckons you over, fumbling over his mic: "Get over here, Y / N."
You look at him unsure, before raising a single a little more off of where it was already floating with body force. The entire leg raises on its own accord as if invisible threads were pulling you upwards. Calculating the distance you look towards Taehyunh figuring you could get to him quick if he just stayed put. That way if anything went wrong ... he had you.
You take a deep breath, mentally writing your own will as you slowly, so slowly, lift the other leg. It glides upward, the force of your weight pushing you upwards instead of the usual downwards and you're uplifted.
Your entire body immediately lurches forward with the sudden off balance and you find yourself falling forward. A mini heart attack surges through you as you dive headfirst into blank, airless, empty space, doing a sort of slow-mo full body roll before you come upright again. You can hear Taehyung's laughter pop through the microphone.
"What in the world are you doing?"
He swims over in the emptiness towards you, looming closer like expanding balloons. You can barely identify his face behind the helmet but you knew it was him. Who else could it be? He grabs your wrists, holds you upright so you don't go spinning into the vacuum like some ball again. Feeling a little nauseous, his touch was quite soothing.
"Don't move too much," he instructs. "Let it do it's own thing."
He gently lets go, holding you barely by the finger tips. You try to center yourself. Don't think so much about it, it was just like inside the spaceship. Slowly, you start to get the hang of it. Allowing your body to become the puppet of the forces of space, you clasp Taehyung's hand in support. Another heart, a living thing, a human being was here with you and that made all the difference.
It gave you the courage to look out into the blank expanse of the universe. Your body felt empty, insignificant, lightweight like a speck of dust floating about a limitless room. The beauty of the inky ocean of the universe, the dainty firefly like stars that teased from afar and the mingling purplish hue of ARMY, the planet not far away. There is nothing out there who makes you something out here. You feel like you have everything.
The eight of you had sailed from the ground to the sky. You were now abnormal among normal things rather than normal among abnormal things. You were foreigners, tourists, visitors of space and it encompassed you whole showing you the beauty of ignorance. There were miracles and inexplicable magic behind science and nothing manmade could every express it. For up here, in every direction you looked there was nothing but the infinity of the universe, stretching further beyond the borders of your mind. You were but a piece of matter amongst others, something invented by this world that strangely existed.
"Y/N..." Taehyung's voice interrupts the wild reality again. Speechless you can hardly reply with an affirmative noise that you were there.
"Let's not stray too far from the ship."
You startle into consciousness with that. Like you'd been under some sort of spell, bewitched into straying into the beckoning arms of the nothingness you'd hardly noticed how far you'd actually gone. The long white rope-like tube securing to the ship uncoiled far behind you like a river. A sudden fear pierces you. Your eyes go wide and you look at Taehyung who'd taken the mind to stop a few meters before you. You immediately swim back to him.
Beautiful, but terrifying. This place was a danger zone for a human beings. It was the Bermuda Triangle of body and existence. Furthermore, a small hole, a little tear, a simple cut or malfunction would be dire. If you got lost or detached out here ... you were just as well as dead. It was impossible to be found again.
Underetimating the control your have over yourself you find your body drawn to Taehyung like a magnet. Before you can stammer out a warning you go crashing into his body with the infinite velocity. He staggers backwards like a ball, but his large frame acts as a barrier, an obstacle. He immediately grabs your arms, laughing a little at the way you seemed to just go spinning about.
"I got you," he reassures and you give him a nervous chuckle. After looking at the deep colorless universe, Taehyung's spacesuit seemed to emanate a bright white among the background. It was definitely distracting which was perhaps why it was meant to be such a color. However, the suit hardly compared to the man inside, his flushed cheeks glowing.
"Oh oh and look the most beautiful star!"
"Where? Where?"
"Right ... here."
You smile wider with that memory. Look how far you'd come. That little astronomer had bloomed into an astronaut. And you were here too, stargazing amongst the stars with the most beautiful one of them all. He was a special star. His starlight shone brighter in the darkest night.
"It's beautiful isn't it?" you say looking at him. He nods, holding you close beside him as the both of you embrace this enormous sight as two fierce, brave little creatures. In the grace of the moment, poetry spills from his lips, words that warm you:
"Perhaps the reason this night looks so beautiful, is not because of the stars or lights, but us. "
You squeeze his hand as the both of you smile ear-to-ear at each other through the helmets.
"We shinin'."
[Na na na na na na]