Dork Side of the Moon
Title: Dork Side of the Moon
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Matsumoto Jun/Ninomiya Kazunari
Summary: Jun hadn’t grown up thinking he’d spend part of his working life on the moon.
Notes/Warnings: An AU request from MYSELF to put Nino and Jun on the moon. There's a great sci-fi movie with Sam Rockwell called Moon, and that's where I got the idea for Jun and Nino's means of employment.
LUNA H3, OCEANUS PROCELLARUM BASE
LOG ENTRY: 57.04.08
Employee 197821 Matsumoto Jun
Soil processor 4B stalled around 0620 hours during Ninomiya’s shift. Repairs completed by me around 1030 hours. Running at expected capacity again. Operations normal.
--
Ninomiya spun in the chair, fingers moving at a rapid pace over the buttons of his gaming device. It was an antique, but the man wouldn’t be parted from it. His game, however, didn’t keep him from irritating Jun.
“You made me look like I didn’t do anything to fix 4B. I can read the log just the same as you can,” he pointed out. “Repairs completed by ME, you wrote. You forgot to mention the half an hour I spent getting into the suit, then the hour and a half I spent outside banging the damn thing with a hammer. And then I had to get out of the suit without any help. I worked over an hour past my shift because you were asleep!”
Jun snorted, monitoring the processing units. Everything was running smoothly.
“I covered for you last night,” he reminded his co-worker. Ninomiya was always switching their hours around so he could download the latest baseball games to his handheld computer (although there was that nasty 2 day delay so they were always a bit behind the people on terra firma).
Jun hadn’t grown up thinking he’d spend part of his working life on the moon. Most people didn’t, he figured. But Luna H3 was the premier Japanese mining outfit up here, and in exchange for a two year stint at one of the outposts, you got paid enough to retire on. You just had to pretty much disconnect yourself from everything.
With the money he was making by flipping switches and staring at monitors twelve hours a day, he’d have more than enough to open the hat store he’d always dreamed about. Not that anyone knew he was saving to open a hat store. Least of all his co-worker. Aside from the computer, each Luna H3 post was manned by a 2 person crew so they could work around the clock. The computer couldn’t fix a broken soil processor as effectively as a human worker.
Twelve hours on, twelve hours off. That was Jun’s life, and he only had a year left in his contract. He was halfway done, but each day felt longer than the last. He liked to think he used his off time well. At least six or seven solid hours of sleep, plenty of exercise, cooking his own meals (although freeze dried veggies were not as good as the real thing). The problem was that his co-worker didn’t use his time very effectively.
Jun worked 8 AM to 8 PM, and Ninomiya took the night shift. But it seemed like the guy only took periodic naps, since he was always hanging around during Jun’s shift, bugging him with pointless questions and keeping the sound on his old game device up a little too loudly. Ninomiya had kept mostly to himself for the first several months - Jun had thought it was shyness, but it had turned out to be an aversion to people. Of course, Ninomiya claimed he just “preferred solitude.”
While Jun had taken the job to make money, Ninomiya wanted to work in a place with as little human contact as possible. And aside from Jun, the only other soul they saw in person was Ohno from the Mare Imbrium station, and that was only once a month when the guy dropped off supplies. Ninomiya seemed to enjoy the isolation, but that had changed recently. Now he was always hanging around, and it was starting to annoy Jun.
It was bad enough that Ninomiya left freeze dried wrappers all over their shared kitchen space, but he also left things in their work space. Jun would find cards scattered all over the operations console from magic tricks gone south. It was just the two of them - was it that hard to keep tidy?
“What did you make last night?” Jun asked him a few minutes later after he’d come back from his routine check of the mainframe computers down the hall. “It still smells like something burnt in the kitchen.”
“Ramen.”
Jun wrinkled his nose. “That stuff will kill your heart in a few years.”
Nino closed the game and shrugged. “Oh well, something has to kill me. If it’s not ramen, I’m banking on killer space ants.”
Jun rolled his eyes. Nino liked to make little comments about space ants or space cockroaches or murderous space grasshoppers before they’d switch shifts, knowing that Jun would probably have a nightmare or two about being eaten by bugs. On the moon.
He completed his final check and logged out of the system. “All yours. I’m going to make a real dinner and go to bed.”
“I eat real dinner,” Nino protested, getting up and moving to the chair Jun had just vacated. “If something breaks this time, and I help fix it, I want credit in the log, alright?”
“Whatever.”
--
LUNA H3, OCEANUS PROCELLARUM BASE
LOG ENTRY: 57.05.19
Employee 197604 Ninomiya Kazunari
jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks
--
“Jun-kun.”
He tried to ignore the increasingly grating sound of Nino’s voice.
“Hey, Jun-kun. Wake up.”
He pulled the pillow over his head. Sure, Jun heard the dull computer voice and the broadcasts from headquarters, but Nino’s was the only real voice he heard in person most of the time. He was kind of sick of it, especially now when he was in the middle of a sleep cycle.
“How do you delete something from the log?”
Jun growled. “What did you do?”
“Oh...oh, it’s nothing. I just mentioned the wrong helium sensor array so...”
Jun sat up, scratching his head. “Well, you have to...” Hmm, he couldn’t think. He had to see the console to remember. He kicked the blankets off, startling Nino who had perched himself quite comfortably at the foot of the bed. “Let me go look.”
Nino raced to the door, blocking his exit. “You can just tell me. I’ll fix it myself.”
Now this was suspicious. “What did you really type in the log?”
“You’re paranoid. Go back to sleep. I’ll look it up in the manual.”
He pried Nino’s short little fingers off of his doorframe and padded from the living quarters into the control room.
“Jun, seriously, go back to...”
It was visible from halfway across the room, seeing as how ‘jun sucks’ was written at least 50 times. And that was just the part of the log entry he could see without scrolling through it.
He scowled.
“You threw my cards out the airlock. I was angry,” Nino explained.
Jun stared at the monitor unblinking. “That was a month ago, and that was after I told you every day for a week to keep them in your room.”
“Well, I hit save by accident, so how do I delete this?” No apology of course. Not from Ninomiya, not ever. He was god’s gift to lunar helium-3 mining operations.
Upon seeing this, he wasn’t sure he wanted to help Nino out. Sure, it was all a matter of hacking SHO’s system, changing timestamps, things like that, but Jun wasn’t feeling up to assisting. It would come up on Nino’s next performance review if it stayed in the system, and he’d probably get some kind of pay penalty for rude behavior. That would sting, Jun thought. Nino knew how much money was in his bank account 380,000 kilometers away to the very last yen. Let him deal with that.
“I’m going back to bed.”
“Jun-kun!”
“Now who sucks,” he grumbled under his breath as he pressed the button and his bedroom door whooshed shut.
--
LUNA H3, OCEANUS PROCELLARUM BASE
LOG ENTRY: 57.07.11
Employee 197821 Matsumoto Jun
Replacement rotor for drill 416 expected today from Mare Imbrium. Installation scheduled for tomorrow morning.
--
“Want some tea?” Jun asked as Ohno set down the heavy crate with the new drill rotor inside.
“Okay.”
It only took a few minutes sitting at the kitchen table before Ohno laughed.
“What?” Jun asked, drumming his fingers nervously on the tabletop.
“That drill rotor isn’t really broken, is it?”
For such a quiet, unassuming guy, Ohno was pretty sharp. Maybe it came with the job - transporting things all over the moon, dealing with isolated people and serving as their only real human contact for months at a time.
“I didn’t know who else to talk to,” he admitted, eyes darting to Ninomiya’s closed door in the hall just across from the kitchen.
“Ah,” Ohno said. “You’re having problems with Nino, then?”
It sounded like he and his co-worker were in a relationship or something. Which they totally weren’t, even if Nino was kind of cute (but only when he wasn’t talking, Jun reminded himself, and that wasn’t terribly often if he was awake). Living with the guy for over a year was bound to bring something on, wasn’t it?
Things had escalated since the “accidental” log entry. Nino had retaliated for Jun’s not helping him by mentioning computer issues, drilling issues, that sort of thing when they’d change shifts instead of fixing things himself. He’d complain about Jun’s hair in the shower drain by leaving passive aggressive comments on the mirror when it was steamed up. He’d replace Jun’s freeze dried cabbage with freeze dried ice cream. He’d program SHO to greet Jun in the morning for his shift with “Good morning, Eyebrows-kun” or “Work hard today, Leg Hair-kun.”
It was really starting to piss him off. And when had Nino ever gotten a look at his leg hair?!
So Jun struck back by hiding Nino’s games in the air vents or programming security alarms to go off when Nino was outside repairing something, effectively locking him out of the station. That one...well, that was definitely against protocol. It was getting out of hand, and he’d get in a LOT of trouble if his co-worker ran out of oxygen the next time Jun pulled a prank like that.
All of these things happened, but neither of them spoke about it. He needed an outside opinion.
“Should I put in for a transfer?” he asked Ohno. “I don’t actually want to kill the guy, but he replaced all the movies I downloaded with German scat porn the other day. I was so close to turning off the grav unit in his room and leaving him to float.”
Ohno took this all in with a straight face. “That would be hard to explain to the company though.”
“The German scat porn?”
“Uh, no...the potential for rage-induced grav unit tampering. You know the company values hardware over people. You wouldn’t get a transfer. You’d get fired and shipped back planetside.”
“Well, what can I do?” he lamented, getting up to run the hourly diagnostic on the drilling units. Ohno followed him into the control room.
“Have sex with him.”
Jun’s hand slipped on the controls, and he set off one of the station-wide alarms. He hurried to get it turned off, whirling on Ohno in surprise. “I beg your pardon?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Nino likes you.”
“He puts moon dust in my conditioner.”
Ohno shrugged. “Well, someone like Nino never outgrew junior high methods of flirting. He’s kind of a loner, you know.”
Jun’s fury grew as his fingers tapped the console with more force than necessary. “I don’t like him that way.”
“Then why go out of your way to prank him back? It’s more than a pissing contest, and you know it.” Did Ohno play weird matchmaker at all of the different stations he visited?
He sulked. Maybe he did like Nino. He hadn’t originally. Maybe it was all because he was the only person Jun saw every day.
Okay, no, that wasn’t it. Nino was actually quite likeable when he wasn’t being a conniving little shit. He had a good sense of humor, a decent enough work ethic when he actually worked, and he was so helpless in the kitchen that Jun just kind of wanted to take care of him. To put the med spray on his hands whenever he got blisters from a long batch of repairs. To make sure he got enough sleep, ate better, and...
Oh god. He really DID like Nino.
He bolted from the chair, fingers already tugging on Ohno’s jumpsuit to drag the man out of the station.
“Thanks for the rotor! You need any Tang for the road?”
“...wait...Matsumoto-kun...”
He hit the button for the door, and it opened with a decisive whoosh of air. “Thanks, really! Be sure to keep Aiba on the Lacus Gaudii station from blowing up the mainframe, right?” Ohno barely had a moment to grab his helmet from the corridor. “Bye! Bye now!”
Jun closed the door again and shut his eyes tight. Damn it. He did not need to like Nino.
--
LUNA H3, OCEANUS PROCELLARUM BASE
LOG ENTRY: 57.08.06
Employee 197604 Ninomiya Kazunari
there must have been a typhoon or something b/c no games beamed up today. stuck listening to ham fighters games from may since it was all i could access. darvish’s grandson is pitching for them now. whatever. morale is low. everything else ok.
--
How many times did he have to tell Nino that the employee log wasn’t his personal journalling tool?
Jun sighed. He was right about employee morale being low though. Ever since Ohno’s visit, Jun had been in quite a snit. Being around Nino was weird now. Before, Nino had simply existed as someone who annoyed him and complained to SHO about how much work he had to do. Now Jun would sit and eat his dinner, watching Nino yawn, stretch, rub his face in the control room. He’d look at the little mole on Nino’s chin before poking him awake after he slept in yet again.
Jun knew he was prone to overthinking and overanalyzing. It was one of the things they’d pointed out in his psych eval before they’d sent him up here. Being particular helped him find small errors in the data input or let him notice when a drill wasn’t working at full capacity. But being particular didn’t help when he was attracted to his co-worker.
Now he worried about Nino catching him staring or Nino figuring out that Jun cooked extra food so they’d have an excuse to eat together or maybe Nino would even notice how Jun wore a little extra cologne after Nino had said it didn’t “stink as bad as that other kind you were wearing yesterday.”
It was driving him crazy. His perfect sleep cycle was getting messed up. He burnt himself taking something off the thermal stove. He almost went outside the station with a hole in his glove. He jumped when Nino said his name.
Maybe if he confessed, he wouldn’t be so paranoid. Nino could outright reject him, and it would still feel better than keeping it all inside. Sure, it would make working and living together incredibly awkward, but Nino was so anti-people that Jun figured he’d just forget about a confession entirely. There was only half a year to go on their contracts, and then he’d be surrounded by hats and the whole Nino thing could be a distant memory.
But what if Nino didn’t reject him?
He was halfway through his shift and getting a little hungry for lunch. He was just getting up to grab the bento he’d put together the night before when he heard the heavy suction clomping noise and the door slid closed.
“Nino, what are you doing?” he asked, seeing his co-worker grinning by the door. That was when he saw the remote in his hand. “Wait, don’t!”
Ninomiya hit the button, and in seconds, Jun was clinging to his chair at the console for dear life. His body was ridiculously light. The bastard had turned off the gravity for the whole room, smiling in his gravity boots.
“This isn’t fair,” Jun said. “I’m working right now!”
“Ah, we need to have a talk.”
Jun maneuvered his way to the console, pushing the button for the computer. “SHO, restore gravity to the control room.”
Nino laughed as the computer responded in its usual monotonous way.
“I am sorry, Jun,” SHO replied. “Nino has switched station operations to manual control.”
Jun smacked the console. “Damn it, SHO, you’re a computer! Do something!”
“I am sorry, Jun,” SHO repeated. “Nino has switched station operations to manual control.”
He scowled, desperate to maintain his grip before he floated up to the ceiling. “You want to talk, you turn the gravity back on.”
Nino clomped his way across the floor, obviously straining even with the boots. “No.” He started nudging at Jun’s fingers, prying them off of the back of the chair. “I’m growing concerned about morale around the station.”
“Morale?” Jun shrieked. “There’s just the two of us!”
“And SHO too,” Nino pointed out. “He may be a computer, but don’t think he hasn’t noticed how you’ve been acting. You’re zoning out and slacking off, Jun-kun, and that’s usually my area of expertise. This station can’t function unless you give 110 percent.”
“Put the gravity back on, and then I can do my job.” He tried scratching at Nino with his thumbnail, but it was no use. The prying finished, and Jun was left to float. Nino sidestepped the hand Jun tried to send in the direction of his head.
“I just want to clear the air here,” Nino explained. “Since it seems like you’ve finally come around.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Jun grumbled, even though he very well knew what Nino meant. Jun had wanted to be the one to start this conversation. Nino had jumped on the chance, and now he was just going to humiliate him. He was going to make fun of his feelings and make the next six months hell.
Nino gave him a gentle push, sending Jun across the room until he smacked the opposite wall. “Oh, come on. You like me!”
“I definitely do not.” Especially not now, Jun thought bitterly.
“You stare at me with those big, watery eyes. You make me food...”
“That doesn’t mean I’m in love with you. In fact, you are the biggest pain in my ass. You leave your crap everywhere, and you play your stupid video games, and you program SHO to call me a boner licker. In fact, I cannot wait to get off this stupid rock and go home so I never have to see your annoying face ever again!”
Nino paused, the clomp clomp of his gravity boots going eerily silent.
Jun tried to work his way along the wall, but there weren’t any handholds. “What?”
“I just...” Now Nino looked embarrassed. “Jun-kun...”
He inched his way back to the console, feeling the air in the room change. Maybe he’d been a little harsh. But Nino HAD stolen his gravity and that made Jun testy.
“You really hate me that much?” Nino asked quietly. “I was...never mind. It doesn’t matter.”
“Nino?”
The door whooshed open, and Nino heavily clomped out, looking more dejected than he had the day Jun had airlocked his cards.
Maybe Nino was just as nervous as Jun. Maybe he’d wanted to confess in his own strange Ninomiya way? And it was Jun who had completely shot him down rather than the other way around? Damn it.
“SHO, can you...” He nearly backflipped over the console trying to get back to his chair. “Can you please just go evil AI for a minute and override the manual gravity control?”
But in seconds, Jun smacked against the console hard, finding a particularly pokey series of switches jutting into his side.
“Ow.”
“It was not me,” SHO informed him.
“Shut up.”
--
LUNA H3, OCEANUS PROCELLARUM BASE
LOG ENTRY: 57.08.07
Employee 197821 Matsumoto Jun
Something broke today. I fixed it.
--
Nino hadn’t come out of his room. He even waited until Jun had signed out and left the room before starting his shift. It was beyond awkward. And it was really Jun’s fault.
In Ninomiya’s strange mind, it seemed that turning off Jun’s gravity was the only way he could get Jun to listen. And apparently it was the only way Nino felt comfortable confessing, since that was what Jun imagined would have happened if Jun hadn’t made it abundantly clear that he hated Nino’s guts (even though he really didn’t).
He felt horrible. Seeing how sad Nino had looked leaving the control room cemented it for him. He liked Nino. And Nino liked him. There was no use fighting it. His work quality was just going to continue deteriorating until he did something about it.
Of course, SHO was being very unhelpful.
“It is a breach of station protocol. Unless you intend to vent poisonous gas...”
“SHO, you let Nino pull the same trick!”
“Nino claimed there was poisonous gas in the control room undetectable by my sensors.”
“And you believed him?”
“Belief does not compute. I am incapable of such processes.”
He smacked the console hard. “Damn it.” He took a breath. “SHO, I have detected poisonous gas in Ninomiya’s room.”
The computer beeped a few times. “I do not detect any gas in Nino’s room.”
This was so irritating. “Yeah, well, you can’t detect it. It’s special gas.” Jun smirked. “It’s from killer space grasshoppers.”
“Killer space grasshoppers do not compute. I am incapable...”
“Well, they’re brand new. We haven’t updated your data banks yet. Just...just give me manual control so I can make sure Nino doesn’t suffocate, alright?”
“Manual gravity control granted.”
SHO had barely finished telling him that before he opened Nino’s door, seeing the man sprawled with arms and legs in every direction on the bed. He didn’t even stir when Jun entered. This was an incredibly stupid idea, but Nino had gone out on quite a limb to confess. Jun had to one-up him on this at least.
He still had to do this quickly. Nino was under his blanket, and Jun put on the gravity boots he’d carried along as quietly as possible (which wasn’t all that quiet when they suctioned on). He added some grav bracelets and launched himself onto the bed and on top of his co-worker.
Nino let out a startled “Oof!” as Jun landed on him, and that was the cue. Jun hit the button on the gravity control, and Nino’s body floated off the mattress. And all that was holding him from floating up to the ceiling was Jun’s own body.
It had seemed sexier in his head, but the water in Nino’s small fish tank was floating upwards, beta fish in tow, and all of his carefully constructed Gundam models were hovering around. Yeah, this was probably much safer in the control room since everything was bolted down there.
“What the hell are you doing?” Nino screeched, trying to shove Jun off of him, but the gravity boots were heavy as hell, and already Jun’s limbs ached. “Turn it back on!”
“Listen to me...”
“Turn the gravity on now!”
“But Nino...”
“I’m going to barf all over your face!”
Definitely sexier in his head.
He hit the switch, hearing all the models crash down on Nino’s desk and the splash of the water going back into the tank. Hopefully the fish was okay.
Nino scowled at him. “Have you proved your point?”
“I didn’t get to do anything!”
“I assumed you were attempting to violate me in zero gravity. Do you start all your relationships this way?”
He rolled off Nino, undoing the gravity bracelets. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“You can just say, ‘Ninomiya, you’re annoying as shit, but I still want your body.’”
“I would never say something like that.”
Nino sat up, stretching his limbs and yawning. “But you think it, Jun-kun. You think it all day long when you’re staring at the monitor but really staring at me. Or when you’re saying my name in your sleep...”
“Wait, what?”
“I told SHO that I was concerned for your mental welfare, so I had him monitor your sleep patterns. It’s what gave me the courage to try pursuing you in the first place.”
He glared at Nino. And he wanted to erase SHO’s data banks. But somehow, he wasn’t as mad as he’d normally be.
He let Nino kiss him first, just to make him work for it.
--
LUNA H3, OCEANUS PROCELLARUM BASE
LOG ENTRY: 57.08.08
Employee 197604 Ninomiya Kazunari
jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks
XD XD XD
--
He woke the next morning, naked and with a gravity bracelet under his back. He felt Nino’s hand ruffling his hair. “What? Go away.”
“Jun-kun, how do I delete a log entry again?”
“What did you write?”
Nino smiled. A genuine smile and not one of his little crafty grins.
“Oh, just the truth.”
--
The End
--
More about helium-3 and the moon!
Yes, I read a Popular Mechanics article when I was working on this story.
Moon locations
oceanus procellarum - ocean of storms (wah wah wah, how's that for a bad pun)
mare imbrium - sea of showers/rains
lacus gaudii - lake of delight
And in my mind, the computer's actually SHO-S (substitute human operating system) LULZ
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Matsumoto Jun/Ninomiya Kazunari
Summary: Jun hadn’t grown up thinking he’d spend part of his working life on the moon.
Notes/Warnings: An AU request from MYSELF to put Nino and Jun on the moon. There's a great sci-fi movie with Sam Rockwell called Moon, and that's where I got the idea for Jun and Nino's means of employment.
LUNA H3, OCEANUS PROCELLARUM BASE
LOG ENTRY: 57.04.08
Employee 197821 Matsumoto Jun
Soil processor 4B stalled around 0620 hours during Ninomiya’s shift. Repairs completed by me around 1030 hours. Running at expected capacity again. Operations normal.
--
Ninomiya spun in the chair, fingers moving at a rapid pace over the buttons of his gaming device. It was an antique, but the man wouldn’t be parted from it. His game, however, didn’t keep him from irritating Jun.
“You made me look like I didn’t do anything to fix 4B. I can read the log just the same as you can,” he pointed out. “Repairs completed by ME, you wrote. You forgot to mention the half an hour I spent getting into the suit, then the hour and a half I spent outside banging the damn thing with a hammer. And then I had to get out of the suit without any help. I worked over an hour past my shift because you were asleep!”
Jun snorted, monitoring the processing units. Everything was running smoothly.
“I covered for you last night,” he reminded his co-worker. Ninomiya was always switching their hours around so he could download the latest baseball games to his handheld computer (although there was that nasty 2 day delay so they were always a bit behind the people on terra firma).
Jun hadn’t grown up thinking he’d spend part of his working life on the moon. Most people didn’t, he figured. But Luna H3 was the premier Japanese mining outfit up here, and in exchange for a two year stint at one of the outposts, you got paid enough to retire on. You just had to pretty much disconnect yourself from everything.
With the money he was making by flipping switches and staring at monitors twelve hours a day, he’d have more than enough to open the hat store he’d always dreamed about. Not that anyone knew he was saving to open a hat store. Least of all his co-worker. Aside from the computer, each Luna H3 post was manned by a 2 person crew so they could work around the clock. The computer couldn’t fix a broken soil processor as effectively as a human worker.
Twelve hours on, twelve hours off. That was Jun’s life, and he only had a year left in his contract. He was halfway done, but each day felt longer than the last. He liked to think he used his off time well. At least six or seven solid hours of sleep, plenty of exercise, cooking his own meals (although freeze dried veggies were not as good as the real thing). The problem was that his co-worker didn’t use his time very effectively.
Jun worked 8 AM to 8 PM, and Ninomiya took the night shift. But it seemed like the guy only took periodic naps, since he was always hanging around during Jun’s shift, bugging him with pointless questions and keeping the sound on his old game device up a little too loudly. Ninomiya had kept mostly to himself for the first several months - Jun had thought it was shyness, but it had turned out to be an aversion to people. Of course, Ninomiya claimed he just “preferred solitude.”
While Jun had taken the job to make money, Ninomiya wanted to work in a place with as little human contact as possible. And aside from Jun, the only other soul they saw in person was Ohno from the Mare Imbrium station, and that was only once a month when the guy dropped off supplies. Ninomiya seemed to enjoy the isolation, but that had changed recently. Now he was always hanging around, and it was starting to annoy Jun.
It was bad enough that Ninomiya left freeze dried wrappers all over their shared kitchen space, but he also left things in their work space. Jun would find cards scattered all over the operations console from magic tricks gone south. It was just the two of them - was it that hard to keep tidy?
“What did you make last night?” Jun asked him a few minutes later after he’d come back from his routine check of the mainframe computers down the hall. “It still smells like something burnt in the kitchen.”
“Ramen.”
Jun wrinkled his nose. “That stuff will kill your heart in a few years.”
Nino closed the game and shrugged. “Oh well, something has to kill me. If it’s not ramen, I’m banking on killer space ants.”
Jun rolled his eyes. Nino liked to make little comments about space ants or space cockroaches or murderous space grasshoppers before they’d switch shifts, knowing that Jun would probably have a nightmare or two about being eaten by bugs. On the moon.
He completed his final check and logged out of the system. “All yours. I’m going to make a real dinner and go to bed.”
“I eat real dinner,” Nino protested, getting up and moving to the chair Jun had just vacated. “If something breaks this time, and I help fix it, I want credit in the log, alright?”
“Whatever.”
--
LUNA H3, OCEANUS PROCELLARUM BASE
LOG ENTRY: 57.05.19
Employee 197604 Ninomiya Kazunari
jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks
--
“Jun-kun.”
He tried to ignore the increasingly grating sound of Nino’s voice.
“Hey, Jun-kun. Wake up.”
He pulled the pillow over his head. Sure, Jun heard the dull computer voice and the broadcasts from headquarters, but Nino’s was the only real voice he heard in person most of the time. He was kind of sick of it, especially now when he was in the middle of a sleep cycle.
“How do you delete something from the log?”
Jun growled. “What did you do?”
“Oh...oh, it’s nothing. I just mentioned the wrong helium sensor array so...”
Jun sat up, scratching his head. “Well, you have to...” Hmm, he couldn’t think. He had to see the console to remember. He kicked the blankets off, startling Nino who had perched himself quite comfortably at the foot of the bed. “Let me go look.”
Nino raced to the door, blocking his exit. “You can just tell me. I’ll fix it myself.”
Now this was suspicious. “What did you really type in the log?”
“You’re paranoid. Go back to sleep. I’ll look it up in the manual.”
He pried Nino’s short little fingers off of his doorframe and padded from the living quarters into the control room.
“Jun, seriously, go back to...”
It was visible from halfway across the room, seeing as how ‘jun sucks’ was written at least 50 times. And that was just the part of the log entry he could see without scrolling through it.
He scowled.
“You threw my cards out the airlock. I was angry,” Nino explained.
Jun stared at the monitor unblinking. “That was a month ago, and that was after I told you every day for a week to keep them in your room.”
“Well, I hit save by accident, so how do I delete this?” No apology of course. Not from Ninomiya, not ever. He was god’s gift to lunar helium-3 mining operations.
Upon seeing this, he wasn’t sure he wanted to help Nino out. Sure, it was all a matter of hacking SHO’s system, changing timestamps, things like that, but Jun wasn’t feeling up to assisting. It would come up on Nino’s next performance review if it stayed in the system, and he’d probably get some kind of pay penalty for rude behavior. That would sting, Jun thought. Nino knew how much money was in his bank account 380,000 kilometers away to the very last yen. Let him deal with that.
“I’m going back to bed.”
“Jun-kun!”
“Now who sucks,” he grumbled under his breath as he pressed the button and his bedroom door whooshed shut.
--
LUNA H3, OCEANUS PROCELLARUM BASE
LOG ENTRY: 57.07.11
Employee 197821 Matsumoto Jun
Replacement rotor for drill 416 expected today from Mare Imbrium. Installation scheduled for tomorrow morning.
--
“Want some tea?” Jun asked as Ohno set down the heavy crate with the new drill rotor inside.
“Okay.”
It only took a few minutes sitting at the kitchen table before Ohno laughed.
“What?” Jun asked, drumming his fingers nervously on the tabletop.
“That drill rotor isn’t really broken, is it?”
For such a quiet, unassuming guy, Ohno was pretty sharp. Maybe it came with the job - transporting things all over the moon, dealing with isolated people and serving as their only real human contact for months at a time.
“I didn’t know who else to talk to,” he admitted, eyes darting to Ninomiya’s closed door in the hall just across from the kitchen.
“Ah,” Ohno said. “You’re having problems with Nino, then?”
It sounded like he and his co-worker were in a relationship or something. Which they totally weren’t, even if Nino was kind of cute (but only when he wasn’t talking, Jun reminded himself, and that wasn’t terribly often if he was awake). Living with the guy for over a year was bound to bring something on, wasn’t it?
Things had escalated since the “accidental” log entry. Nino had retaliated for Jun’s not helping him by mentioning computer issues, drilling issues, that sort of thing when they’d change shifts instead of fixing things himself. He’d complain about Jun’s hair in the shower drain by leaving passive aggressive comments on the mirror when it was steamed up. He’d replace Jun’s freeze dried cabbage with freeze dried ice cream. He’d program SHO to greet Jun in the morning for his shift with “Good morning, Eyebrows-kun” or “Work hard today, Leg Hair-kun.”
It was really starting to piss him off. And when had Nino ever gotten a look at his leg hair?!
So Jun struck back by hiding Nino’s games in the air vents or programming security alarms to go off when Nino was outside repairing something, effectively locking him out of the station. That one...well, that was definitely against protocol. It was getting out of hand, and he’d get in a LOT of trouble if his co-worker ran out of oxygen the next time Jun pulled a prank like that.
All of these things happened, but neither of them spoke about it. He needed an outside opinion.
“Should I put in for a transfer?” he asked Ohno. “I don’t actually want to kill the guy, but he replaced all the movies I downloaded with German scat porn the other day. I was so close to turning off the grav unit in his room and leaving him to float.”
Ohno took this all in with a straight face. “That would be hard to explain to the company though.”
“The German scat porn?”
“Uh, no...the potential for rage-induced grav unit tampering. You know the company values hardware over people. You wouldn’t get a transfer. You’d get fired and shipped back planetside.”
“Well, what can I do?” he lamented, getting up to run the hourly diagnostic on the drilling units. Ohno followed him into the control room.
“Have sex with him.”
Jun’s hand slipped on the controls, and he set off one of the station-wide alarms. He hurried to get it turned off, whirling on Ohno in surprise. “I beg your pardon?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Nino likes you.”
“He puts moon dust in my conditioner.”
Ohno shrugged. “Well, someone like Nino never outgrew junior high methods of flirting. He’s kind of a loner, you know.”
Jun’s fury grew as his fingers tapped the console with more force than necessary. “I don’t like him that way.”
“Then why go out of your way to prank him back? It’s more than a pissing contest, and you know it.” Did Ohno play weird matchmaker at all of the different stations he visited?
He sulked. Maybe he did like Nino. He hadn’t originally. Maybe it was all because he was the only person Jun saw every day.
Okay, no, that wasn’t it. Nino was actually quite likeable when he wasn’t being a conniving little shit. He had a good sense of humor, a decent enough work ethic when he actually worked, and he was so helpless in the kitchen that Jun just kind of wanted to take care of him. To put the med spray on his hands whenever he got blisters from a long batch of repairs. To make sure he got enough sleep, ate better, and...
Oh god. He really DID like Nino.
He bolted from the chair, fingers already tugging on Ohno’s jumpsuit to drag the man out of the station.
“Thanks for the rotor! You need any Tang for the road?”
“...wait...Matsumoto-kun...”
He hit the button for the door, and it opened with a decisive whoosh of air. “Thanks, really! Be sure to keep Aiba on the Lacus Gaudii station from blowing up the mainframe, right?” Ohno barely had a moment to grab his helmet from the corridor. “Bye! Bye now!”
Jun closed the door again and shut his eyes tight. Damn it. He did not need to like Nino.
--
LUNA H3, OCEANUS PROCELLARUM BASE
LOG ENTRY: 57.08.06
Employee 197604 Ninomiya Kazunari
there must have been a typhoon or something b/c no games beamed up today. stuck listening to ham fighters games from may since it was all i could access. darvish’s grandson is pitching for them now. whatever. morale is low. everything else ok.
--
How many times did he have to tell Nino that the employee log wasn’t his personal journalling tool?
Jun sighed. He was right about employee morale being low though. Ever since Ohno’s visit, Jun had been in quite a snit. Being around Nino was weird now. Before, Nino had simply existed as someone who annoyed him and complained to SHO about how much work he had to do. Now Jun would sit and eat his dinner, watching Nino yawn, stretch, rub his face in the control room. He’d look at the little mole on Nino’s chin before poking him awake after he slept in yet again.
Jun knew he was prone to overthinking and overanalyzing. It was one of the things they’d pointed out in his psych eval before they’d sent him up here. Being particular helped him find small errors in the data input or let him notice when a drill wasn’t working at full capacity. But being particular didn’t help when he was attracted to his co-worker.
Now he worried about Nino catching him staring or Nino figuring out that Jun cooked extra food so they’d have an excuse to eat together or maybe Nino would even notice how Jun wore a little extra cologne after Nino had said it didn’t “stink as bad as that other kind you were wearing yesterday.”
It was driving him crazy. His perfect sleep cycle was getting messed up. He burnt himself taking something off the thermal stove. He almost went outside the station with a hole in his glove. He jumped when Nino said his name.
Maybe if he confessed, he wouldn’t be so paranoid. Nino could outright reject him, and it would still feel better than keeping it all inside. Sure, it would make working and living together incredibly awkward, but Nino was so anti-people that Jun figured he’d just forget about a confession entirely. There was only half a year to go on their contracts, and then he’d be surrounded by hats and the whole Nino thing could be a distant memory.
But what if Nino didn’t reject him?
He was halfway through his shift and getting a little hungry for lunch. He was just getting up to grab the bento he’d put together the night before when he heard the heavy suction clomping noise and the door slid closed.
“Nino, what are you doing?” he asked, seeing his co-worker grinning by the door. That was when he saw the remote in his hand. “Wait, don’t!”
Ninomiya hit the button, and in seconds, Jun was clinging to his chair at the console for dear life. His body was ridiculously light. The bastard had turned off the gravity for the whole room, smiling in his gravity boots.
“This isn’t fair,” Jun said. “I’m working right now!”
“Ah, we need to have a talk.”
Jun maneuvered his way to the console, pushing the button for the computer. “SHO, restore gravity to the control room.”
Nino laughed as the computer responded in its usual monotonous way.
“I am sorry, Jun,” SHO replied. “Nino has switched station operations to manual control.”
Jun smacked the console. “Damn it, SHO, you’re a computer! Do something!”
“I am sorry, Jun,” SHO repeated. “Nino has switched station operations to manual control.”
He scowled, desperate to maintain his grip before he floated up to the ceiling. “You want to talk, you turn the gravity back on.”
Nino clomped his way across the floor, obviously straining even with the boots. “No.” He started nudging at Jun’s fingers, prying them off of the back of the chair. “I’m growing concerned about morale around the station.”
“Morale?” Jun shrieked. “There’s just the two of us!”
“And SHO too,” Nino pointed out. “He may be a computer, but don’t think he hasn’t noticed how you’ve been acting. You’re zoning out and slacking off, Jun-kun, and that’s usually my area of expertise. This station can’t function unless you give 110 percent.”
“Put the gravity back on, and then I can do my job.” He tried scratching at Nino with his thumbnail, but it was no use. The prying finished, and Jun was left to float. Nino sidestepped the hand Jun tried to send in the direction of his head.
“I just want to clear the air here,” Nino explained. “Since it seems like you’ve finally come around.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Jun grumbled, even though he very well knew what Nino meant. Jun had wanted to be the one to start this conversation. Nino had jumped on the chance, and now he was just going to humiliate him. He was going to make fun of his feelings and make the next six months hell.
Nino gave him a gentle push, sending Jun across the room until he smacked the opposite wall. “Oh, come on. You like me!”
“I definitely do not.” Especially not now, Jun thought bitterly.
“You stare at me with those big, watery eyes. You make me food...”
“That doesn’t mean I’m in love with you. In fact, you are the biggest pain in my ass. You leave your crap everywhere, and you play your stupid video games, and you program SHO to call me a boner licker. In fact, I cannot wait to get off this stupid rock and go home so I never have to see your annoying face ever again!”
Nino paused, the clomp clomp of his gravity boots going eerily silent.
Jun tried to work his way along the wall, but there weren’t any handholds. “What?”
“I just...” Now Nino looked embarrassed. “Jun-kun...”
He inched his way back to the console, feeling the air in the room change. Maybe he’d been a little harsh. But Nino HAD stolen his gravity and that made Jun testy.
“You really hate me that much?” Nino asked quietly. “I was...never mind. It doesn’t matter.”
“Nino?”
The door whooshed open, and Nino heavily clomped out, looking more dejected than he had the day Jun had airlocked his cards.
Maybe Nino was just as nervous as Jun. Maybe he’d wanted to confess in his own strange Ninomiya way? And it was Jun who had completely shot him down rather than the other way around? Damn it.
“SHO, can you...” He nearly backflipped over the console trying to get back to his chair. “Can you please just go evil AI for a minute and override the manual gravity control?”
But in seconds, Jun smacked against the console hard, finding a particularly pokey series of switches jutting into his side.
“Ow.”
“It was not me,” SHO informed him.
“Shut up.”
--
LUNA H3, OCEANUS PROCELLARUM BASE
LOG ENTRY: 57.08.07
Employee 197821 Matsumoto Jun
Something broke today. I fixed it.
--
Nino hadn’t come out of his room. He even waited until Jun had signed out and left the room before starting his shift. It was beyond awkward. And it was really Jun’s fault.
In Ninomiya’s strange mind, it seemed that turning off Jun’s gravity was the only way he could get Jun to listen. And apparently it was the only way Nino felt comfortable confessing, since that was what Jun imagined would have happened if Jun hadn’t made it abundantly clear that he hated Nino’s guts (even though he really didn’t).
He felt horrible. Seeing how sad Nino had looked leaving the control room cemented it for him. He liked Nino. And Nino liked him. There was no use fighting it. His work quality was just going to continue deteriorating until he did something about it.
Of course, SHO was being very unhelpful.
“It is a breach of station protocol. Unless you intend to vent poisonous gas...”
“SHO, you let Nino pull the same trick!”
“Nino claimed there was poisonous gas in the control room undetectable by my sensors.”
“And you believed him?”
“Belief does not compute. I am incapable of such processes.”
He smacked the console hard. “Damn it.” He took a breath. “SHO, I have detected poisonous gas in Ninomiya’s room.”
The computer beeped a few times. “I do not detect any gas in Nino’s room.”
This was so irritating. “Yeah, well, you can’t detect it. It’s special gas.” Jun smirked. “It’s from killer space grasshoppers.”
“Killer space grasshoppers do not compute. I am incapable...”
“Well, they’re brand new. We haven’t updated your data banks yet. Just...just give me manual control so I can make sure Nino doesn’t suffocate, alright?”
“Manual gravity control granted.”
SHO had barely finished telling him that before he opened Nino’s door, seeing the man sprawled with arms and legs in every direction on the bed. He didn’t even stir when Jun entered. This was an incredibly stupid idea, but Nino had gone out on quite a limb to confess. Jun had to one-up him on this at least.
He still had to do this quickly. Nino was under his blanket, and Jun put on the gravity boots he’d carried along as quietly as possible (which wasn’t all that quiet when they suctioned on). He added some grav bracelets and launched himself onto the bed and on top of his co-worker.
Nino let out a startled “Oof!” as Jun landed on him, and that was the cue. Jun hit the button on the gravity control, and Nino’s body floated off the mattress. And all that was holding him from floating up to the ceiling was Jun’s own body.
It had seemed sexier in his head, but the water in Nino’s small fish tank was floating upwards, beta fish in tow, and all of his carefully constructed Gundam models were hovering around. Yeah, this was probably much safer in the control room since everything was bolted down there.
“What the hell are you doing?” Nino screeched, trying to shove Jun off of him, but the gravity boots were heavy as hell, and already Jun’s limbs ached. “Turn it back on!”
“Listen to me...”
“Turn the gravity on now!”
“But Nino...”
“I’m going to barf all over your face!”
Definitely sexier in his head.
He hit the switch, hearing all the models crash down on Nino’s desk and the splash of the water going back into the tank. Hopefully the fish was okay.
Nino scowled at him. “Have you proved your point?”
“I didn’t get to do anything!”
“I assumed you were attempting to violate me in zero gravity. Do you start all your relationships this way?”
He rolled off Nino, undoing the gravity bracelets. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“You can just say, ‘Ninomiya, you’re annoying as shit, but I still want your body.’”
“I would never say something like that.”
Nino sat up, stretching his limbs and yawning. “But you think it, Jun-kun. You think it all day long when you’re staring at the monitor but really staring at me. Or when you’re saying my name in your sleep...”
“Wait, what?”
“I told SHO that I was concerned for your mental welfare, so I had him monitor your sleep patterns. It’s what gave me the courage to try pursuing you in the first place.”
He glared at Nino. And he wanted to erase SHO’s data banks. But somehow, he wasn’t as mad as he’d normally be.
He let Nino kiss him first, just to make him work for it.
--
LUNA H3, OCEANUS PROCELLARUM BASE
LOG ENTRY: 57.08.08
Employee 197604 Ninomiya Kazunari
jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks jun sucks
XD XD XD
--
He woke the next morning, naked and with a gravity bracelet under his back. He felt Nino’s hand ruffling his hair. “What? Go away.”
“Jun-kun, how do I delete a log entry again?”
“What did you write?”
Nino smiled. A genuine smile and not one of his little crafty grins.
“Oh, just the truth.”
--
The End
--
More about helium-3 and the moon!
Yes, I read a Popular Mechanics article when I was working on this story.
Moon locations
oceanus procellarum - ocean of storms (wah wah wah, how's that for a bad pun)
mare imbrium - sea of showers/rains
lacus gaudii - lake of delight
And in my mind, the computer's actually SHO-S (substitute human operating system) LULZ