![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The sun rising over the Earth is one of the most beautiful things she's ever seen. She floats in the capsule, one arm hooked around the support bar, watching as the fiery star peeks over the horizon of her home, lighting the crescent edge of the world on fire, slowly taking the land back from the shadow, inch by inch, mountain range by mountain range.
And then she heads off to do the spacewalk, an EVA to replace one of the central connectors to the outer solar panels of the ISS. As she slips on the spacesuit and checks and rechecks and triple-checks all of the buckles, the clamps, the connectors, she closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, and the memories rush towards her like the water of the 'dunk tank'. It's a diminutive name for something rather grand, actually — the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory — but spend enough time around anything grand, even a pool large enough to drop a spaceship in, and you start giving it a pet name.
The difference, of course, is that instead of being surrounded by hundreds of gallons of water and being a few stories from the air, she's about to step out into an ocean of vacuum, where it wouldn't be a matter of holding her breath until the rescue divers come in to bring her up and give her oxygen. The other memory, the one that gnaws at the edges of her consciousness, starts to form, but it's interrupted by a radio check. She responds, clear and confident, and then cycles the airlock.
The 'air' — the vacuum of space, really — gets a little colder, but that's it. No sound but for her breathing and the slight crackling of the radio, no visible dispelling of the oxygen and nitrogen particles into the solar winds of space. Just her, travelling at about 17,000 miles per hour, with the boot of Italy far below her, the azure of the Mediterranean.
She pushes off lightly and steps out into nothingness, adding a small twist to slowly turn in place. She drifts off, away from the crew module, watching and waiting for the tug on her waist, a sign that the cord was taut. And then she heads towards the solar panels, replacement in hand, taking care, as she was trained, to make sure that every step is in the right place, every handhold gripped firmly.
There's another tug on her memory, as she almost, almost slips, as her breath catches, as she prompts another radio check-in, which she acknowledges quickly, hurriedly. She had — she remembers being in the tank, doing something routine, for the fifteenth time, how she missed a handhold, how she windmilled her free arm to try and slow her momentum, how she failed, and slammed her head against the metal rung of the ladder, how the spiderweb of cracks had expanded, and expanded, and that first taste of water—
She dismisses it from her mind with a physical shake: focus, she thinks, on the here, the now. And she does, staring intently at the next rung, the next clip-in position, and slowly makes her way from the inner modules to the kelp fronds of the solar panels, each one huge and gleaming and angled to catch the sun. Her mission is here, and she's going to do it, she tells herself; she just needs to keep moving. She's gotten all the way out here, with no incidents, and there's only one thing left: an untethered jaunt to the far panel, where the connector is that needs to be replaced. She tests the thrusters, unclips from the support strut, and mutters a very, very quiet prayer before powering away from the attachment, replacement panel in one hand, other hand making small, tiny adjustments to her velocity.
Here is where the memory that's been hovering around the edges of her vision, around the edges of her helmet, becomes too hard to ignore. Here, even though she has her eyes open, she stops seeing stars and starts sees the flow of water in front of her, sees the water as she's maneuvering away from the support structure, towards the panel. At first, it's coming towards her at the right speed, slowly, surely, but suddenly, she's going fast — too fast — too fast — the warnings blare, but she can't do anything, can't do anything, her retro-thrusters are fully firing, she's going to hit it, splatter across the panel like a bug across a windshield, she might break it and go with it and be lost forever and all she can do is, all she can do is—
Her radio crackles. "Space," he says, calmly, in his I-am-playing-this-straight voice that she's come to get to know quite well. "The final frontier," and with her laugh, the water disappears from her vision as she comes back to here and now, and not what happened in a training accident once upon a time. She's been firing her retros, but not as much as she feared — she's simply floating in space, at a perfect standstill.
She doesn't say anything for a moment, and then keys the mike, and says, quietly, "Thanks, Scotty," with a voice that's carefully not trembling, and she can picture so well the half-smile on his face, as the two of them share an understanding that mission control and the rest of humanity isn't let in on. She makes the landing on the maintenance panel gently and gracefully, and completes the disconnect and replacement quickly — unscrew, snap out, snap in, power on. And then she floats back to the superstructure — without any further visions — and starts walking back to the crew module, though she doesn't say anything except to respond to regular check-ins as per protocol.
But then she stops, a few paces from the airlock, and looks out one more time, towards the sphere that takes up most of their sight. She sees now the edge of sunset, where the dark is creeping into the area that the light had occupied, and simply takes a few slow breaths. She had come so close, so close to panicking, to doing something that she shouldn't have, to going into a spin, to slicing open her suit, to perhaps being stranded out there, forever, trying to figure out whether it would be better to wait for the oxygen to run out or to simply unlatch the helmet.
But she didn't. She had made it through, she focused, she did what she had to do. And she could let a breath out, now, and appreciate the view.
"It's really something," she whispers.
"The blue marble," he says, and she nods in agreement, knowing that he'll know she agrees, even if he can't see.
And then, after a moment of silence, "Thank you, for—"
"Nothing to thank me for," he interrupts. "Everyone has their first walk," and he pauses just long enough so that she understands.
"Now come on in — there's much more to do."
And then she heads off to do the spacewalk, an EVA to replace one of the central connectors to the outer solar panels of the ISS. As she slips on the spacesuit and checks and rechecks and triple-checks all of the buckles, the clamps, the connectors, she closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, and the memories rush towards her like the water of the 'dunk tank'. It's a diminutive name for something rather grand, actually — the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory — but spend enough time around anything grand, even a pool large enough to drop a spaceship in, and you start giving it a pet name.
The difference, of course, is that instead of being surrounded by hundreds of gallons of water and being a few stories from the air, she's about to step out into an ocean of vacuum, where it wouldn't be a matter of holding her breath until the rescue divers come in to bring her up and give her oxygen. The other memory, the one that gnaws at the edges of her consciousness, starts to form, but it's interrupted by a radio check. She responds, clear and confident, and then cycles the airlock.
The 'air' — the vacuum of space, really — gets a little colder, but that's it. No sound but for her breathing and the slight crackling of the radio, no visible dispelling of the oxygen and nitrogen particles into the solar winds of space. Just her, travelling at about 17,000 miles per hour, with the boot of Italy far below her, the azure of the Mediterranean.
She pushes off lightly and steps out into nothingness, adding a small twist to slowly turn in place. She drifts off, away from the crew module, watching and waiting for the tug on her waist, a sign that the cord was taut. And then she heads towards the solar panels, replacement in hand, taking care, as she was trained, to make sure that every step is in the right place, every handhold gripped firmly.
There's another tug on her memory, as she almost, almost slips, as her breath catches, as she prompts another radio check-in, which she acknowledges quickly, hurriedly. She had — she remembers being in the tank, doing something routine, for the fifteenth time, how she missed a handhold, how she windmilled her free arm to try and slow her momentum, how she failed, and slammed her head against the metal rung of the ladder, how the spiderweb of cracks had expanded, and expanded, and that first taste of water—
She dismisses it from her mind with a physical shake: focus, she thinks, on the here, the now. And she does, staring intently at the next rung, the next clip-in position, and slowly makes her way from the inner modules to the kelp fronds of the solar panels, each one huge and gleaming and angled to catch the sun. Her mission is here, and she's going to do it, she tells herself; she just needs to keep moving. She's gotten all the way out here, with no incidents, and there's only one thing left: an untethered jaunt to the far panel, where the connector is that needs to be replaced. She tests the thrusters, unclips from the support strut, and mutters a very, very quiet prayer before powering away from the attachment, replacement panel in one hand, other hand making small, tiny adjustments to her velocity.
Here is where the memory that's been hovering around the edges of her vision, around the edges of her helmet, becomes too hard to ignore. Here, even though she has her eyes open, she stops seeing stars and starts sees the flow of water in front of her, sees the water as she's maneuvering away from the support structure, towards the panel. At first, it's coming towards her at the right speed, slowly, surely, but suddenly, she's going fast — too fast — too fast — the warnings blare, but she can't do anything, can't do anything, her retro-thrusters are fully firing, she's going to hit it, splatter across the panel like a bug across a windshield, she might break it and go with it and be lost forever and all she can do is, all she can do is—
Her radio crackles. "Space," he says, calmly, in his I-am-playing-this-straight voice that she's come to get to know quite well. "The final frontier," and with her laugh, the water disappears from her vision as she comes back to here and now, and not what happened in a training accident once upon a time. She's been firing her retros, but not as much as she feared — she's simply floating in space, at a perfect standstill.
She doesn't say anything for a moment, and then keys the mike, and says, quietly, "Thanks, Scotty," with a voice that's carefully not trembling, and she can picture so well the half-smile on his face, as the two of them share an understanding that mission control and the rest of humanity isn't let in on. She makes the landing on the maintenance panel gently and gracefully, and completes the disconnect and replacement quickly — unscrew, snap out, snap in, power on. And then she floats back to the superstructure — without any further visions — and starts walking back to the crew module, though she doesn't say anything except to respond to regular check-ins as per protocol.
But then she stops, a few paces from the airlock, and looks out one more time, towards the sphere that takes up most of their sight. She sees now the edge of sunset, where the dark is creeping into the area that the light had occupied, and simply takes a few slow breaths. She had come so close, so close to panicking, to doing something that she shouldn't have, to going into a spin, to slicing open her suit, to perhaps being stranded out there, forever, trying to figure out whether it would be better to wait for the oxygen to run out or to simply unlatch the helmet.
But she didn't. She had made it through, she focused, she did what she had to do. And she could let a breath out, now, and appreciate the view.
"It's really something," she whispers.
"The blue marble," he says, and she nods in agreement, knowing that he'll know she agrees, even if he can't see.
And then, after a moment of silence, "Thank you, for—"
"Nothing to thank me for," he interrupts. "Everyone has their first walk," and he pauses just long enough so that she understands.
"Now come on in — there's much more to do."
