A/N: title reads as "Gwangnyeon" meaning "light years" in Korean

They live light years away; the picture on Gwiboon’s bedside table reminds her for the fortieth time this week.

She should switch that holograph off and change the slide to something else—a family portrait, a graduation picture, a group shot with the other astronauts. Something that doesn’t have anything to do with Eonsook. There’s plenty of choice really, and Gwiboon’s narcissism has been helpful in propagating several selcas in a wide variety of angles and backgrounds. It’s not a very tedious job, either. One click of a button and she only need browse through the thousands of memories captured on the microchip to make the switch.

She raises her arm to do it and it feels heavy. Cold raises pricks on her skin so she tucks the limb back into her blanket and tosses around.

“That doesn’t know how to cook,” Gwiboon spat out her japchae and aggressively wiped her tongue with a paper tissue. “The least a woman deserves between bull lectures at seven-thirty in the morning is something to fill the stomach but apparently that’s too much to ask of these ers!” she groused. “Ugh, I can’t believe I spent the last of my change to eat… this.”

“Yah,” Eonsook rapped the back of her forehead in one swipe.

“What the ?!”

“Don’t waste food. You’ve bought it now finish it.”

“But it’s gross! Here, you try,” Gwiboon held the plate under the other’s nose and within minutes it was wiped clean. Her eyes widened at the sight.

“Dude, you even ate what I coughed out, ew…”

“Indirect kiss.”

Gwiboon laughed and pushed Eonsook away by her face. “Idiot!”

When her eyelids decide to behave, someone is banging their fist on the door of her sleep station. “Wake the up!” that someone orders. “Thermal control displaying erroneous discharges from fifth solar array truss, . Get out of bed and make yourself useful!”

The words take a long minute and half to register. And even by the end of that time she’s not sure she understands what she’s supposed to do. If she walks too long down memory lane it makes her groggy and plastic. In her movements and her thoughts, alike. She slips on the suit and gloves she’s always worn for the last three years. But today the neoprene lining catches on her flesh. The rubber rings burn and itch like synthetic fabrics worn too long in the sun without washing. Her stomach grumbles for breakfast, tastes like a cocktail of nacho cheese and bacteria and her brain…

She doesn’t harbor any sympathy for her brain since it ed up her heart.

“Baby, why are your marks not like they used to be,” Eonsook stamped a kiss on the back of Gwiboon’s neck and wrapped her arms tightly around a wiggling twisting waist.

“, I don’t like when you do that, I told you.”

“Sorry,” Eonsook raised her hands and backed away. “So. What’s up with you man? You plan on using your report cards for toilet paper?”

“First off I don’t use toilet paper it’s unhygienic,” Gwiboon clarified like it was an important thing to clarify. Eonsook simply shook her head. “Second. I’m… planning on quitting the course.”

“What?! Why?”

“Uhh, cause I want to?” Gwiboon raised a sarcastic eyebrow.

“But—”

“Besides, I’ve always wanted to be a designer not a boring scientist. Aeronautics is for losers. Like you~ I’m meant for the fabulous world of glamour and money and dubious morals yahaha~”

“So… you’ll leave?”

If microgravity can affect her movement could it also change the course of her blood? Could it alter her thought pattern and challenge the speed with which her pulse throbbed in ? The day she picked up her degree from off her thesis professor’s unattended table, she’d wanted to ask him. She still doesn’t know for sure but she’s certain that gravitational force had nothing to do with the damage she rendered her life.

In Earth time, today is the eleventh of June twenty-nineteen. Today is the day Lee Eonsook is getting engaged to a man she’s only ever met before via webcam. Somewhere in an old temple in north Jeolla-do, a family is gathered in celebration. The rings have been exchanged. The festivities are well underway. The temperature is perfect for a nice long private walk along Gingko trees that were deliberately planted in a straight line. So they form a wall of golden sunlight right about now. Of course, Eonsook will have to give up her career and her life in Gwangmyeong—the city she was born in, the city she grew up in, the city where everyone knows her—so she can follow her husband to America, where he has a job for himself and the well-rehearsed promise of a better life for her.

It doesn’t matter. It’s of no consequence. This was meant to happen. This was bound to happen. Gwiboon doesn’t complain as she floats around the satellite’s control quadrant with her wrenches and her measurement gear and her walkie. She understands that she pushed Eonsook to this. Slapped away the feeble string between them cut it up and let it fall off her midriff.

“Listen,” Eonsook tugged at Gwiboon shirt sleeve.

“Tch, go away, I’m typing my application here. It’s important.”

“Boonie, listen.”

“What?!”

“Don’t go?” The light of her eyes was strange. Desperate. She launched forward unexpectedly, and Gwiboon’s reaction system was instantly fried. They lips touched. For a long while at that, if the ticking of her wristwatch against her eardrums was anything to go by. Something in the warmth of Eonsook’s bottom lip, something in the moisture of her saliva, something in the way her tongue throbbed with a hyperactive heartbeat… left Gwiboon forgetting to inhale after an exhale.

“Don’t go…” Eonsook repeated like it’d changed meaning now. Maybe it had. For her.

Gwiboon floats from service module to service module. She passes window after window on her way back to the very end of the ship. The very end of humanity in this little hunk of metal running its regular orbit of the year for some cancer research or other. And she doesn’t bother looking out of a single circle of reinforced glass to the hook-shaped chunk of land that is her home. Not like she used to the first few times up here.

She has nothing to look out for anymore.