They do get in trouble for sneaking out but their punishment is laughable. Confined to quarters for two weeks with the exception of classes and meals, regular check ins to make sure they’re where they are supposed to be. It’s not fun and it means that Valentine and Gee don’t see each other for a while but it’s not like they had much else to lose to begin with.

Valentine worries about Gee. He’s always talked about escaping but Valentine had thought that talk was all it ever was, that it was just a way for him to vent his frustrations and stress. Now Valentine’s not so sure. And now there’s the whole space pirates thing! Where did that even come from? Does Gee seriously expect to hold him to that promise? All Valentine had wanted to do was be a good friend. Then Gee had to go and get all weird about it.

Valentine can’t stop thinking about it now though. It would be fun, stealing a ship and making it theirs. They could go wherever they wanted. Do whatever they wanted. Explore space, meet some aliens. Fight some space ghosts.

But in order to do that they’ve first got to get off planet, and the sooner the better. He worries that Gee might really try to escape. Or that he might succeed even, and leave Valentine behind. Valentine tries really hard to not worry about being left behind because the minute he thinks about it too much it pretty much just breaks his brain.

Being part of the program was tolerable before Gee but now that Valentine knows what it’s like to have a friend he can’t go back to the way things were before. Loneliness was much easier to bear when he didn’t have anything else to compare it to.

The more time they spend together the more Valentine comes to hate the time that they’re apart. Gee’s the first person who has ever actively tried to get to know him and he didn’t realize just how much he needed that until now. Someone knows him now. Someone would miss him if he died. It’s an incredible feeling.

Valentine’s classmates still give him a lot of shit but these days it’s more talk and less hitting him when the teachers aren’t looking, less stealing food off his cafeteria tray, less ‘accidental’ destruction of his coursework. Some of them have even warmed up to him a little, like now that one person has decided he’s worth hanging around that must mean something. Valentine’s too wary to really take advantage of this. He’s just glad that he doesn’t have to watch his back quite so closely these days. He’s not really interested in getting to know his classmates better anyway, Gee is enough all on his own.

Gee seems to really latch on to the space pirates thing and these days most of the conversations he and Valentine have revolve around what traveling in space will actually be like. They wonder what it will be like to put to use everything they’re being taught, how often they’ll really come across restless spirits or monsters that they’ll have to deal with. Gee seems to think that all their textbooks are pretty biased against supernatural creatures and spirits that haven’t moved on, that they can’t all possibly be evil and in need of exterminating. It’s nothing Valentine himself hasn’t thought a time or two before but there’s a difference between thinking it and saying it and he says as much and they end up fighting over it.

Gee calls him a conformist sheep that’s desperate for approval and Valentine punches him in the face and cries.

They don’t speak for days and it’s horrible. Valentine doesn’t want to take back what he did because Gee was being an asshole but now everything is ruined. He doesn’t know what to do other than sulk and avoid everywhere he knows that Gee will be.

But Gee tracks him down, grabs him as he’s walking out of his last class of the day and heading back to the dorms. He gets dragged down the hall to a blind spot underneath a security camera.

“What the fuck Gee!”

“I’m not sorry!” Gee whisper-shouts, keeping his white knuckled grip on Valentine’s sleeve.

“Fuck off, neither am I!” Valentine debates the merits of kicking Gee in the shin versus punching him in the face. He thought they were friends and now Gee’s turned out to be like all the rest, just another bully backing him into a corner.

“I thought you were different!”

“Stop stealing my lines you fucker,” Valentine hisses, mind made as he takes a swing at Gee. Gee lets go of his sleeve and dodges the punch. Valentine curses at him for dodging, and again as he overbalances.

Gee catches him, wraps him up in a hug, pinning his arms to his sides. He’s breathing hard and his voice is uneven when his speaks. “I miss my friend!” His voice breaks on the last word.

Valentine tries so hard to hold onto his anger even as it’s slipping away. “Maybe don’t be such a gigantic dick then,” he grumbles, face mashed into Gee’s chest. He hates how Gee’s so much taller than he is. Hates his stupid face, his total lack of apology.

“You can’t tell me you’ve never questioned what they’re teaching,” Gee says. He speaks softly, but his arms are like iron and he’s so, so warm.

“It’s called keeping your head down genius. Can’t you at least wait until we get out of here before you start making a big stink out of everything?”

Gee loosens his grip and steps back just far enough to look Valentine in the eye. “They told us that we should be grateful, that we were chosen—”

Valentine snorts derisively. “Yeah, they ran out of volunteers.”

“I know, right?” Gee says with a bitter smile. “Don’t you ever get tired of it, all the lies?”

Sure, he’s tired of it. Aside from Gee Valentine doesn’t really trust anyone to tell him the truth. But that’s just life in the program.

“It’s not forever Gee.”

“I hate this.”

“I know.”

Gee is obviously not handling things well, not that Valentine can really blame him. He thinks that if his teachers ever try to talk up the program like that, try to bullshit them into believing that they ever had a choice, that they are anything other than the unluckiest motherfuckers around, he’d probably be pretty homicidal over it.