Chapter 1 - The Smooth

They were twenty years old, the two of them, and they had been doing this long enough that they had started talking through it.

Two twenty-year-olds who have everything the ship can offer, who live in a module where the furniture configures itself and the air is dosed with a compound that keeps the edges off, who have access to the best food and the best company and a view of the corridor that frosts automatically when they want privacy. They had everything. They were bored out of their minds. They were bored in their bodies. They were bored, and the smoothest solution they had found to that particular problem was each other, and they had been using it so long it had become part of the boredom.

---

Nathaniel was on his back. Eric was on his knees over him, and what Eric was doing was taking him apart with a patience that was frankly inconsiderate given the conversation they were attempting to have.

His cock was hard. It had been hard for a while. Eric's hand was wrapped around him and moving in long, deliberate strokes and had been since before the Reyes question, which Nathaniel now calculated was approximately four minutes ago, which meant he had been lying here being thoroughly attended to for four minutes without doing anything about it because his brain had drifted off to think about upper-deck women and their various deficits and the ventilation hum and the ceiling.

The ceiling was 2.4 meters, warm white composite, reflecting nothing.

"Reyes," Eric said.

"Technically yes." Nathaniel shifted his hips. Eric adjusted his grip without breaking pace, a minor course correction, nothing disrupted. This was the problem with having done a thing long enough: the other person had learned every involuntary response and could accommodate it without thinking. "But she only wants to talk about the governance rotations afterward. And not in an interesting way."

"Faraday-Cho."

"She cried."

Eric's hand slowed for just a second, considering. Then continued. "She cried well or she cried badly?"

"She cried in a way where I had to get the module to dispense chamomile," Nathaniel said. "So."

Eric made a sound. Noncommittal. He filed it. His other hand braced against Nathaniel's hip, thumb pressing into the ridge of bone. His expression was the one he got when he was modeling failure modes, working through something in parallel, elsewhere, which was ironic given that one of his hands was presently stroking Nathaniel's cock at a pace that by any reasonable measure should demand full attention. Nathaniel knew every expression Eric had. He had been watching them since they were fourteen years old and sneaking into maintenance shafts for the same reason people poke bruises: just to confirm the sensation was still there.

Eric's cock was, empirically, a very good-looking object. Long and thick, flushed dark at the head, and hard against his stomach without anyone touching it: specific evidence that Eric was, at minimum, more invested in this than his conversational tone suggested. Nathaniel had thought this the first time and thought it now with the same mild, factual approval. He reached down and added his hand to the situation below Eric's, not rushing anything, just participating. Eric glanced down at him. The corner of his mouth moved.

"Huang-Park," Eric said.

Nathaniel thought about it. The lavender was loud tonight, underneath the bergamot he could not entirely isolate no matter how he tried, the two of them folded together in the ventilation so completely that the module smelled like a single invented thing that had no analog in any plant that had ever lived on Earth. He had stopped being able to smell it years ago, most of the time. Now, lying flat with the amber light cycling down toward whatever an algorithm thought constituted a restful evening, he could smell it again because the absence of everything else made the background very loud.

Sweat underneath the lavender. That was newer than the lavender and considerably more honest.

"She's good but she only schedules forty-five minutes," he said. "And honestly that's more of an insult than a compliment."

"I've been scheduling forty-five minutes."

"You're not insulting me, you're just efficient."

Something moved at the corner of Eric's mouth and stopped. He refocused. His thumb dragged slow across the head of Nathaniel's cock, pressing into the slit, and Nathaniel's breath caught, brief and involuntary, a small defeat. His hips lifted before he finished deciding not to let them. Eric registered it with the accuracy of someone who had been studying this particular data set for years.

Then Eric put his mouth on him, and the conversation stopped.

Eric closed his lips around the head and sucked, and Nathaniel's hand moved to the back of his head, not guiding, just resting there, aware of the curl and chaos of his hair and the slow deliberate movement of his jaw as he took more. He went down until his lips pressed the base, held it, then pulled back to the head and tongued along the underside in a long drag that made Nathaniel's thigh lock up. His free hand braced on Nathaniel's hip, thumb pressing hard into the bone, keeping him still. Eric knew he needed that. Nathaniel had never said so. He had stopped needing to.

The ceiling was 2.4 meters up. The filtration was cycling through the vent above the sleeping alcove. The module was locked at 21 degrees, calibrated to keep no one uncomfortable, which meant it kept no one anything.

He thought: oh.

Eric hollowed his cheeks and worked him in long pulls, jaw moving with focus, and Nathaniel's hand tightened in his curls and Eric took that as information and went faster. Nathaniel could feel the suction and the grip of it, and his hips tried again and could not move against the thumb holding them down. Pre-come slicked Eric's tongue. He swallowed. His cheeks hollowed again. Outside the frosted viewport the corridor chimed once, something about a meal cycle he would not be using, and the amber light ticked another degree toward its programmed dusk.

He came with less ceremony than the buildup had suggested. His cock pulsed against Eric's tongue, once, twice, and he heard himself make a sound. Eric swallowed, kept his mouth around the head until the pulsing stopped, then pulled off and sat back on his heels and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He looked like he always looked afterward: hair destroyed, skin warm, the flush across his cheekbones already fading back toward his usual baseline. The only evidence anything had happened at all.

Nathaniel lay there. His chest was damp with sweat. The module air moved across it in a way that was neither cold nor warm, which was the module's whole problem as a living environment. He could feel the sheets under his back, slightly twisted from before, and the specific weight of his own limbs, heavy and useless, and Eric's knee warm against his calf where he had not moved yet. His cock was soft against his thigh. The amber light made everything the same color: skin, ceiling, wall. All the same calibrated dusk.

He looked at the ceiling.

He had known for about eight months that the smooth was not natural. He had found the maintenance documentation by accident while running a systems-access query for something else, an authorization he had no business pulling but pulled anyway because nobody had ever stopped him from pulling anything. The compound dispersed through Deck 2 ventilation was listed as a nutritional supplement in eleven pages of the most boring language he had ever read. He had read all eleven pages. Then he had closed the file.

His comm chimed.

Eric went still.

The chime was his father's channel, a soft three-note sequence Nathaniel had set to cut through anything because his father was on the governance council and had opinions about being missed. He must have left the channel open from an earlier call, because the comm did not ring twice and nobody spoke. What came through was background: the low murmur of a meeting, voices in the middle distance, something about water reclamation authorization on Sub-seven.

Nathaniel did not close it.

Eric went still. The meeting voice continued. A different voice, not his father's, not the administrator's, someone peripheral, said something as they passed through the room: a junction they had been running pressurized, something about Deck 14. Something about below.

Nathaniel was aware of the ceiling again. The hum of the ventilation. The temperature, which the module maintained at exactly 21 degrees and which had never in his life felt either warm or cold.

He realized Eric was looking at him.

Neither of them said anything. On the open channel the meeting murmured on, and the voice that had said the word had already moved on to flow rates and maintenance windows and nothing that mattered. The channel hissed faintly. Nathaniel's father said something in his governance voice, measured and certain, the voice of a man who had never once doubted that the ship was correctly organized.

Nathaniel reached over and closed the channel.

Silence, except for the ventilation, except for the hum.

Eric sat back. He ran both hands through his hair, which was already in a state of low-grade chaos, which meant he had been thinking about something before this and was now thinking about something else instead. He looked at Nathaniel with an expression Nathaniel had no name for, which was unusual. Nathaniel had names for all of them.

"How far down," Eric said, "is Deck 14?"