Writing

Note from the author: The stray cat in this fic is named after my favorite local dumbass, Mister Terrence Yaki, 2007-2020. I miss you, you giant baby.

It’s funny, almost.

Daniel Jacobi dies with little fanfare. There’s a gravestone in Milwaukee next to Alana Sarah Maxwell and Warren James Kepler.

Mark Midland, however, suddenly has to remember how to live.

Mark Midland. It’s a reminder, in a way, of what killed Daniel Jacobi. Goddard’s penchant for atrocity and his own damn inability to pick a side until he’s already lost everything.

New name needs a new place. There’s too much history everywhere he’s put roots before. He honestly considers throwing a knife at a map and going to the most destroyed spot, but that feels melodramatic even for him.

He thinks about trying Chicago for half a second before remembering that the accent Kepler tried so hard to bury was Chicagoan and spends a few moments trying to remember exactly what his voice sounded like. He’s not sure he can, and he feels so completely and utterly alone for a moment he feels like he's drowning.

Daniel makes all his life changing decisions drunk, it seems, because he’s halfway through a shitty bottle of tequila when he looks at a map and thinks, New York.

Which is a terrible idea, really. Minkowski lives in New York, somewhere near Albany he thinks, and while the odds of running into them are low, they’re non-existent elsewhere. Any elsewhere. He could go to fucking Seattle and never see or hear from them again, guaranteed.

Oh, goddamnit.

He beats his head against the steering wheel the whole drive to New York City. A safe distance, a city big enough to fall quietly into obscurity while the news televises live updates on the continuing collapse of Goddard Futuristics.

And if he’s within driving distance of the other Hephaestus survivors, that's no one's business but his.

He drinks. It’s… It should be Alana's birthday, but instead of blowing something up while she hangs off his arm and laughs, she’s gone, dead, body incinerated in a star eight fucking light-years from here and he should be angry or heartbroken or bargaining or whatever the stages of grief are. Instead, he’s just hollow.

He’s edging on his sixth shot in an hour and a half when there’s a sudden scream. The bar starts to empty immediately, and when he stands, the floor pitches under his feet. A waitress steadies him and guides him towards the door.

“What’s going on?” he slurs, and the waitress adjusts her grip.

“Someone… someone thinks they saw a bomb,” she says, voice a little shaky. “We already called the police, all we have to do is evacuate. Looks like it’s on the house tonight.”

Daniel realizes with sudden clarity that this is why he sided with the Hephaestus morons despite it all: people are amazing. This woman is scared out of her mind, and she’s taking the time to help a complete stranger get to safety, cracking a joke to try and keep him calm.

He tries to turn around and go back inside, he bets he can take apart some shitty IED even three sheets to the wind like this, but the waitress holds her ground. “No no nonono, you get to come outside with me and wait while I check if I need to give a statement, then I’ll take you home, okay?”

“I’m gay,” he tells her.

“I’m ace, so definitely not trying to sleep with you, sir. Just want to make sure you get home.”

His hangover the next morning is agonizing, but there’s a glass of water and a bottle of painkillers left near the couch he was dumped on. There’s a note with nothing but a smiley face doodled on it.

No name. No way to be paid back, no need for a thank you, not even a bigger picture to try and attain. Just a stranger helping a stranger, because she was a good person.

Daniel Jacobi had never been a good person. He doubted Mark Midland knew how to be, either, but maybe he could try, or at least pretend.

Wouldn’t that be something?

Daniel has a very specific skill set. He’s been trained in hand-to-hand, proficient with most firearms, and is pretty decent with knives.

He’s very, very good at explosives.

There’s where the problem arises, really. If he wants to try and do something good with his unique talent with things that break other things, his options are incredibly limited. He’s done military work—my team, my project, my head—and he’s not sure it falls under “good person” territory.

(He’s not certain he can bear going back to the Air Force, honestly. That version of him died long ago, beaten out of him on the SI-5 training mats, killed by aged scotch and a bigger fucking picture.)

He opens the window to his fire escape and sets out a cheap plastic dish. Moments later, a dirty orange tabby hops up into the sill.

“What do you think, Teriyaki?” he asks, scratching at the cat’s ears. “Am I capable of morals?” A raspy purr rumbles from the cat. “Yeah, didn’t think so.” He ducks back inside and his eye catches on the smiley face note from two weeks ago.

He scoffs. It’s a stupid idea. It’s insane. It’s absurd.

He pulls up his laptop and searches Explosive Ordinances Technician.

It’s almost perfect. Mark Midland is a registered Air Force vet with a degree from MIT (he wasn’t giving up that degree, it was a fucking nightmare to get), the exact qualifications needed to apply for the EOD training program. He spends eight weeks bored to tears and passes the certification exam with flying colors.

Six private companies make him offers. He turns them down.

He picks the NYPD.

Mark Midland is introduced to Unit 214–and he actually flinches when he hears that–on January first. He hates New Year’s, always has, and it makes sense that this new part of his life would start on the second worst day of the year. He shakes the hand of the man that will be overseeing his probation, and is struck by just how unassuming he is.

Simon Teller is disheveled in a way that Daniel wouldn’t expect from a cop, with an easy-going grin and slouched posture. “Mark Midland?” he asks.

“That’s me, sir,” Daniel answers, and Teller shudders dramatically.

“Yeah, no. Not sir.”

Daniel drops his hand. “Um. You’re my… commanding officer, aren’t you?”

“Comman—Bob! Why didn’t you tell me the new guy was ex-military?”

Teller directs the shout towards a man seated at a nearby desk. He shrugs. “It was in his file, boss.”

“You say that like I read the file.”

The man sighs with fond exasperation. Daniel can tell they’ve been working together for years, have a genuine friendship, catalogues three ways to sabotage it before quashing old habits. “Mark Midland,” the man says, opening a file folder on his desk, “thirty-five, graduated MIT–congrats, man–and the only reason he didn’t get full marks on the certification exam was a few minor deviations from protocol.”

“Who follows protocol anyway?”

“You should.” The man reaches across the desk to shake Daniel's hand. “Robert Hansen. Simon calls me Radio Bob.”

Daniel's stomach turns sharply–he remembers the screaming in his voice from outside the module, but Eiffel named the alien “Bob” like it wasn’t eldritch and terrifying–but he was trained better than to let it show. “Look forward to working with you.” He’s screaming on the inside.

Bob just smiles, easy and genuine in a way that sets Daniel reeling. “Me too, man,” he says, and Daniel reads that it’s the truth in his body language and the pulse of the wrist still under his fingertips.

The two of them are already so different from the team he used to call his family, and he isn’t sure if he hates them for it.

“So, up top is getting on my ass about your psych eval,” Teller says casually, about six weeks in.

“What's wrong with my psych eval?” Daniel asks.

“You don't have one.”

“I definitely sent one in.”

“Outdated. Look,” Teller tells him, “I get it. It's awful. But you have to dot all your i’s for the next ten months, and one of those is redoing your psych eval. I’m in therapy, Midland. Comes with the job.”

He drops his eyes to his desk. “Yes, sir.”

“And please stop calling me sir.”

“Not going to happen, sir.”

He schedules an appointment without complaint—get it done before Kepler Teller gets frustrated and he pays for it—and the next Wednesday finds him filling out a questionnaire in a boring office. It's easy; he knows the answers they want to see.

The therapist flips through his answers twenty minutes later. “How often have you done these?”

“A lot,” Daniel admits.

“I can tell. All these answers point to a healthy, well-adjusted human being.” She sets the clipboard in her lap. “Which you are not.”

Daniel laughs, shocked. “Excuse me?”

“I’ve worked with the Hazardous Devices Unit for eight years, Mr. Midland. Not one of you is well-adjusted.” She writes on the clipboard. “I’ll sign off on your ability to work, but it’s conditional. I want you to make an appointment to come back. If you don’t like any of our therapists, we’ll work with you to connect you with someone else.”

“You… want me to come back?”

“Yes.”

Daniel is a little shocked. As long as he was within “acceptable parameters” with Goddard, they saw no reason to assign him a counselor. Alana saw one for several months after Istanbul, but other than that… “But I'm fine.”

“And I’m just going to verify that,” she says patiently. “Think of it as an extension of the eval.”

Begrudgingly, he sets up another appointment.

At three months, Teller raises his voice. He and Daniel disagree on how to handle an ordinance and they argue about it. Daniel caves because he has to, Teller is his commanding officer, but he makes it very clear he’s not happy about it.

It’s the first time Teller yells at him. It’s not even a threat, like Daniel was accustomed to, but he still flinches, braced for a blow or a bullet while several of his scars ache with phantom pains.

Teller’s voice lowers immediately. “Midland?” he asks. He lifts his hands, showing his empty palms, and steps back. “You… you can put your arm down, Mark, I’m not gonna hit you.”

Daniel hadn’t even realized he’d raised his arm to protect his face. Slowly, he puts it down. “Of course not, sir,” he says, flat and apathetic.

Teller takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. “If I’m overstepping, tell me to fuck off, but… is there a girlfriend we need to get you away from?”

Daniel’s face twists with an odd mix of offense and incredulity. “What? No, I…” He trails off as it clicks in his head exactly how fucked up the… thing he had with Kepler was. “It's already over.”

Teller bumps his shoulder against Daniel’s, the disagreement already forgotten. “Let us know if you need a place to stay for a day or two, huh?”

Daniel has no plans to take him up on that. “Alright, Boss.”

“Boss!” Teller repeats. “Yes, let’s do that one instead of ‘sir’.”

“Not happening, sir,” Daniel says.

“... And then he shot me, who the fuck does that?”

“Is that when you left him?” Naomi doesn’t seem fazed by the fact Daniel’s “ex-boyfriend” had pulled a gun on him.

Daniel drops back to the couch in the counseling office, flings one arm across his eyes. “No, because I’m a fucking idiot. It wasn’t until he got my sister killed that I realised… he never actually cared. Not in a way that mattered.”

“Your sister?”

“Not by blood. I picked her. I… I loved Alana more than anyone else in the fucking universe, and… It should’ve been me.” His eyes burn. “Instead, he got her killed, and I… I turned my back on him, and now he’s dead, too, and I don’t have anyone else.”

“No family?”

“You mean the one that won’t call me by my name? No.”

She nods. “I understand. Mark, do you have… any personal relationships outside of work?”

Daniel thinks of a panic-fueled kiss, dark curls tangled in his fingers, Eiffel’s confused expression when he broke for air. “I… have a stray cat I feed?”

She nods. “Pets are a good source of companionship. What’s its name?”

“Mister Teriyaki, because I saw him digging fish out of a sushi place’s garbage.”

She bursts into laughter. “That’s a fantastic name.” She looks down at her notes. “Mark, with your permission, I want to set you up with a grief counselor.”

Daniel scoffs and props up on one elbow. “For what?”

Naomi stares at him. And stares.

Daniel drops back to the couch and groans. “Okay. Fine. But only if he’s hot.”

“I’ll do my best,” she says. “Thank you, Mark.” She pauses. “If I may, what’s really your name?” When Daniel looks at her with shock and fear, she lifts her hands in a peacemaking gesture. “I’m not going to get you in trouble, and if it’s something like Witness Protection, feel free to shut me down now.”

“Not… not quite,” Daniel says softly. “I… did some bad things for some bad people and I want to do better. Be better.”

“Kindness is shown in actions, not inclations,” she says softly. “I don’t need details, I volunteer with reacclimating gang members. I see some of the same mannerisms in you.”

He laughs, short and soft. “Yeah, something like that.” A beat. “Daniel.”

She smiles, and it’s genuine. “It’s nice to meet you, Daniel.”

Daniel Jacobi has long been a monster. He finds a certain joy in devastation, a contentment in ash and flame, and he left his compassion at a bar top when he picked a business card.

Daniel Jacobi is dead, buried more than 700 miles away in Milwaukee, next to the only two people he ever considered family, and Mark Midland is left to pick up the pieces.

And, surprisingly, he does. He coaxes a dirty orange stray into his apartment and learns that the dumb cat drools when it’s happy. He goes to therapy, learns to grieve and accept and while he never really lets go of that guilt, it doesn’t feel like dying to think of them anymore. He still wakes up screaming some nights–”happy to help” over his lips and it feels so right at the time but later he would rather claw out his own tongue than ever say it again–but slowly, slowly, the terror and fury and pain of the Hephaestus starts to fade.

So it’s funny, almost, that the day that should mark the beginning of this hopeful new start brings Daniel back from the dead.

“Midland! Come here,” Teller calls, and Daniel’s heart pounds the whole way to the EOD van, because next to him, somehow, is Isabel Lovelace. “This is Tatiana Sobrero, she’s a reporter. Up top says we have to let her ride with us tonight.”

“You won’t even know I’m there,” Lovelace says, and Daniel?

Daniel meets her eyes and shakes her hand and dares her to try and take this from him. “Mark Midland.”

Renée Minkowski was dizzy and her head hurt. She wasn’t sure of much more than that, when she stumbled out of the chilly airlock and back into the hangar. Why had she been in the airlock? And without an exosuit? That was never necessary and incredibly dangerous, and she definitely knew better. It had seemed like a good idea, felt like a good idea, a few minutes ago, but… why? She couldn’t focus. It was like trying to capture the details of a dream, having already woken up groggy and disoriented.

Groggy and disoriented and being asked to make life-and-death decisions, immediately.

Eiffel was asking her a question, his voice edged with terror. He’s here; she knew that, she thought. That wasn’t good, they weren’t safe here. Lovelace was here, saying we need to move. It was true. Minkowski took a shuddering breath and a shuddering step into the present.

“Into the vents,” she said, “Now,” and there was nodding and scrambling and Lovelace took her hand and pulled her into a run, and Minkowski let her. Into the vents. The vents were escape. The vents were something she knew well by now. The vents were a place she understood, a place she was in control, and a place Dr. Pryce didn’t know and couldn't control.

Dealing with an immediate potentially-lethal crisis was good, actually. Dealing with an immediate potentially-lethal crisis was what she did.

They moved. They kept moving. “This way,” Minkowski said. “Keep up!”

“Not all of us have your extensive experience crawling through these worm tunnels you call a ventilation system in zero-gravity,” Jacobi grumbled, wriggling ungracefully around a tight corner. “Trust me, I’m doing my best, because I don’t want to go back to being Pryce’s happy little puppet either. You know she’s going to go and space the first one of us she catches, just to prove her point. Not gonna be me.”

Minkowski did not want to think about that. That was the exact thing she did not want to think about. By the glare Eiffel shot Jacobi, he did not want to be thinking about that either.

“Hey, shut up,” Lovelace said, casual and conversational, “or else we’re all going to get caught. Want that? No? Good. Shut up.” She clambered over a narrow ledge at a three-way juncture, propped herself up on her elbows, and dragged the conversation back to the practical, the here, the now. “Minkowski, destination? Got a place we’re headed?”

She was more grateful than she wanted to admit. “There’s a mechanical room that doesn’t show up on any of the station maps,” Minkowski said. “Closed off, out of use, inaccessible except by the vents. There’s some room to stretch out, turn around, and plan.” Then, mildly sheepish but refusing to be cowed because look who’d turned out to be right, she added, “I stashed some weapons, food, and traps there. We could use them right now.”

The room was exactly where she expected it to be, the gear still arranged as neatly as she remembered it; that, at least, was a relief. She couldn’t shake the question, in the back of her mind, what if you’re still under the restraining bolt’s influence? What if you’re leading them all into a trap, and don’t know it? It didn’t seem likely, but… she couldn’t discount it. She couldn’t stop worrying. Didn’t want to stop worrying. To stop worrying in a situation as shot all to hell as this one meant being under the control of the restraining bolt. The ability to be worried was a good sign, like being awake after weeks asleep, and she leaned into the fear and the stress.

They were in one of her pit stops, but they weren’t safe, not yet.

“Wow,” Eiffel whispered, zeroing in on the protein bars and the MREs packed nicely next to the spiked net traps, “you were prepared, huh. For, uh, this?—or—”

“For anything,” Minkowski said. “Pryce and Carter’s 154: You have to prepare for the thousand things that will never happen in order to be ready for the one thing that does.”

Eiffel winced a little, started to say something, stopped, and it took Minkowski a second to even parse the connection. Pryce and Carter’s Deep Space Survival Procedure and Protocol Manual had been its own entity in her mind for so long, she didn’t make the immediate connection to the Dr. Pryce who was so actively antagonistic to their—her—survival in deep space.

She’d think about that later.

Jacobi had already begun tearing into the protein bars. “These are disgusting,” he said, mouth full of chewy chocolate and coconut and chia seeds. “If any of you want some, get them now, because I will eat them all.”

Now that she’d slowed down, had time to stop, to stand still, it occurred to Minkowski that she was ravenous. And exhausted.

Eiffel hesitated, looking over at her, like he wasn’t sure if he should ask permission. That seemed unusually deferential for him, but she waved him on, go ahead, and he nodded back, still tense, still nervous. Then he grabbed the first foodstuff within reach and shoved it into his face before he’d even fully gotten the wrapper off.

“Damn,” Lovelace said. “When was the last time you ate?” She paused. “When was the last time you ate? Did team evil over there even let you eat?”

Minkowski reached for a protein bar. Chocolate, peanut, and flax seed; solid, dependable. She hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours, at least. Her memories of the two weeks under the restraining bolt were settling into place, distant, like something she’d seen reported on TV rather than something she’d lived. “Not often enough.”

“Cutter had to remind his jackbooted Gregor Clegane to tell us to eat, and he was so cutesy about it,” Eiffel mumbled through the remaining reserves of bars. “‘Our friends won’t be very helpful if they don’t get to eat and sleep sometimes, Victor!’”

“Ugh,” Jacobi said. “I don’t think I’ve slept in, what, two days?”

Minkowski pulled off the wrapper of another bar. It took a monumental expenditure of energy. “Two days sounds about right.”

“Jesus,” Lovelace said softly. “Minkowski, how secure is this room? All of you need sleep and you need it now.”

“I’m fine,” Minkowski argued, the words nearly a reflex, but Lovelace wasn’t wrong.

“I’m not,” Jacobi offered.

“This room should be secure,” Minkowski said, ignoring him, keeping her focus narrow, on the subject at hand. “Even Hera doesn’t have bio-sensors here. Unless Cutter has an army of bots—” Which, she realized, he might, she didn’t know— “It’ll be hard to find and hard to access. It took me days to discover this room in the first place. We can probably count on being safe here for… four hours. Maybe six. I wouldn’t be confident longer than that.”

“Six hours,” Lovelace said. “Sounds like enough time for a really solid nap.”

“It wouldn’t be safe to—”

“I’ll stay awake. I’ll keep watch and wake you up if anything comes at us,” Lovelace said. “I at least got to be a cushy prisoner for the last few weeks. Minkowski,” at Minkowski’s look, “I’ll be fine, it’s you three who need to take care of yourselves right now. There’s some station protocol about getting enough sleep, isn’t there? You’ve quoted it at me enough times. Please.”

She didn’t like it, but coming up with coherent arguments was hard right now. And God knew Eiffel needed and deserved it. So did Jacobi. And she wanted to sleep. She wanted to just curl up and sleep for a very long time.

A few minutes later, blearily trying to decide whether she could wedge herself between a piece of long-fritzed-out machinery and the wall or if she should give up and resign herself to the discomfiting drifting sleep of zero-g, she noticed Eiffel hadn’t made any move to go to sleep either. He hovered a few steps behind her, hands fluttering nervous and awkward, clearly waiting to say something.

Minkowski sighed. “Did you want this space? You’re taller, it’ll work better for you.”

“What? Oh! Uh. Sure, I guess.” He peered at the uncomfortable-looking niche, then back at her. He grinned, a little too bright, a little too manic to be natural. “What a day, huh? Of course Cutter and friends turn into body-snatchers, like they want to check off every single evil scheme off the evil overlord’s to-do checklist. It’s starting to get almost tiring, like, we get it, you’re evil, you’re capitalists and murderers and probably loved Palpatine’s whole ‘I am the Senate’ bit, we kinda got the gist at the first ‘hey, wanna go to space for us and die?’, thanks, this is really just all unnecessary overkill—”

“Eiffel, what is it?” She was not up to mustering the patience right now.

“Are you okay?” he blurted. “After—all that...” He deflated, his forced smile faded, the energy to sustain the upbeat patter gone. “Commander? Are you okay?”

No. Not really. She didn’t want to think about it. “I’m fine, Eiffel.” She made an attempt at a wry smile, through clenched teeth. “I didn’t get spaced. That’s enough for now.”

“Yeah. I—yeah. You didn’t.” He nodded, then rushed to say, “Just—I’m sorry, Commander, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know she could do that—I wasn’t ready—I didn’t want—”

“You didn’t do anything, Eiffel,” Minkowski said tiredly. She did remember talking to him, during that march to the airlock, but only vaguely. It was someone else’s idea, someone else’s words she spoke to him, and she didn’t remember what they were. She did remember him screaming. Remembered thinking how funny and pathetic he was. “You’re okay.”

“No, that’s—that’s the problem, though,” Eiffel said. “I didn’t do anything. I just keep thinking—how many times have you saved my life when I was in danger from something terrifying and improbable? A million, right?”

“Somewhere in that ballpark.”

“Yeah. Because you’re—smart, and brave, and strong, and prepared, all the time, and I’m—not. Because you’ve saved my life a million times and then the one time you were really in danger I couldn’t help at all. I couldn’t stop her. I couldn’t stop you. There wasn’t anything I could do. I was just there watching, and—if it had taken another five minutes—” His voice cracked, and Minkowski turned to realize that he was tearing up, his hand in a loose fist making circles in front of his chest. “And I just keep thinking, if it had been me in there—you would’ve done something, you would’ve been able to save me, and I—” He sniffled and shook his head, a scattered and directionless outpouring of energy trying to express the inexpressible enormity of what they both knew just happened.

She didn’t know how to express it, either. That was the beauty of adrenaline, wasn’t it—the ability to shut off the part of the brain that reflects and dwells, the ability to act. But it always made the come-down worse. The knowledge of what almost happened, what would have happened, now given time for the tight coil of terror that spurred the action in the moment to unwind and fill you all the way.

Though in the moment it hadn’t been terror motivating her. It had been serenity. That was the awful part, the creeping horror sinking in. Less that she was forced to do it, to walk into the airlock, put her hands on the cold metal door. It was that she wanted to, that she genuinely remembered thinking it was a good idea. It was less that she would have died—she’d been prepared to die how many times now?—and more that she would have been happy to. She’d been so at peace.

She didn’t have the words for that kind of helplessness, that kind of fear, and mostly she wanted to go the hell to sleep and not have to think about it for at least an hour or two.

“It’s okay, Eiffel,” she said, finally. It wasn’t, it was nowhere near okay. But, unable to find the words either, Eiffel had gone back to the oldest, simplest human way of expressing emotions too big for them. Eiffel was crying. Which meant she couldn’t, not now. She was the Commander. Even on the run, with her mission and her station and her bodily autonomy taken away from her, it was still her job to hold it together. To be okay when no one else was. “It’s okay. I’m okay. I promise.”

“Y—yeah,” he said, his voice shaky, “yeah. Yeah. You’re okay.”

She nodded, and then, because he was still standing there like that wasn’t enough (nothing either of them could say would be enough, not right now), Minkowski sighed and said, “Come here, Eiffel.” And before he could get any more words out she grabbed his shoulder and pulled him into a tight hug.

He wrapped his gangly arms around her and buried his face in her shoulder. She could feel his tears and probably his snot soaking into the collar of her jumpsuit; it made her wince, but it was better than letting the stuff float in globs around their cramped little hideout. It was a weirdly grounding sensory experience to focus on. Doug Eiffel was gross and biological and alive and right here, and so was she. She hugged him as he sniffled I’m sorry, I’m sorry, and she told herself it was for his sake, to help him calm down. And if she didn’t want to let go... well, that was okay. He didn’t seem to want to either.

“Get some sleep, Eiffel,” she said. “You’ll need it.”

“Yeah,” he said, and nodded into her shoulder. “Yeah, you too.”

Curling up by wedging into the little corner was easier with the two of them together. The walls were close and protective; Eiffel was close and protected; Lovelace was close by and safely settled and ready to wake them if anything went wrong. (Something would definitely go wrong. It always did.)

She closed her eyes, calmed her breath, and managed to sink into the fuzzy boundary between sleeping and waking.

Then, just when she was about to make the last fall into something restful, Minkowski jerked back awake, suddenly alert, heart pounding, breathing too fast. The hazy darkness felt too much like being under the restraining bolt. The slipping away, the blending of reality with the memory of the airlock, the icy void on the other side, the thick metal door that had never felt so thin.

She wasn’t even under Pryce’s control anymore and Pryce still wouldn’t let her sleep.

Eiffel still curled up against her, warm and safe and snoring right in her ear. She sighed. She wouldn’t be able to sleep like this.

She wasn’t sure when she would be able to sleep again, really.

Across the room, Lovelace turned, tilting her head a little to show she had noticed Minkowski move. “Feeling okay?” she asked, quietly.

“I’m fine,” Minkowski said. It sounded about as believable as it felt.

“Uh-huh,” Lovelace said. “Cozy over there?”

She was, actually. Eiffel was surprisingly cuddly despite being scrawny and made of all angles. Though his elbow, tucked in close, was poking Minkowski right in the sternum. It was easy enough to tell herself that this was why she couldn’t sleep, or that sleep was a luxury she, as Commander, couldn’t afford right now, that it would be irresponsible and potentially dangerous to be sleeping while they were on the run. That was why. That was absolutely why.

“Cozy enough,” Minkowski said finally.

“Well. If you’re still wired after… all that, I don’t blame you,” Lovelace said, and gestured beside her. “C’mon, you can keep watch with me, direct that energy somewhere.”

She wanted to be able to sleep. She wanted to escape the pressure of the void in her mind and in her lungs, wanted to scrub away the feeling of Miranda Pryce crawling under her skin.

Instead she gave a halfhearted, wordless “Mm,” and gently untangled herself from Eiffel. He let out another loud snorting snore but stayed asleep. It was both grating and reassuring; she could hear him breathing from the other side of the room. That was important.

She floated to take up an awkward crouched position next to Lovelace’s calm cross-legged one. “Thanks.”

“Any time,” Lovelace said. “Two pairs of eyes, and all.”

“You’re not going to tell me I should be sleeping?”

Lovelace raised an eyebrow, challenging. “I did try. Would it work this time?”

“Hardly.”

“I figured. We could have a rousing debate where I tell you you need to sleep, and you tell me that no you don’t, and I say of course you do, and you say that’s rich coming from me—so let’s skip that part. You don’t need to sleep if you don’t feel up to it.”

It sounded so stupid, when she had to say it like that, but the wave of relief that crashed over Minkowski almost knocked her over. (Or maybe that was the lack of sleep. It was hard to tell.) “Yeah. Sounds good.”

Sitting in silence next to Lovelace was nice. Keeping watch so Eiffel and Jacobi could sleep, and she could know they were safe, that was also nice. Keeping one hand on the harpoon gun, on edge and ready to fire, should it come to that—well... She was present. She was ready. It didn’t feel nice, but it felt better. Felt prepared.

“Do you want to talk about it, or—”

“No.”

“Ah. Okay.” Lovelace shifted a little and fell silent again, but her hand fluttered, hesitant, trying to make a decision (what was it with everyone and their fluttery hands? The movement kept catching in Minkowski’s eyes and she couldn’t stop herself turning to look, every time). She put her hand on Minkowski’s shoulder, the promise of either a firm grip to ground her or the ability to pull away immediately if Minkowski reacted badly. “Listen, if you want to just ignore it—I get it, trust me I get it. But you’re shaking like a baby deer, and if you’re going to have a big outpouring of emotion, now while no one’s looking is probably a good time.”

Minkowski laughed, short and humorless. It was more like a bark, or maybe a sob. “I’m not shaking that badly.”

Lovelace gave her a long look. Then, “Nah. Not that badly.”

“Yeah.” Minkowski leaned against Lovelace’s shoulder, because Lovelace was warm, and solid, and—oh. She was shaking pretty badly, huh. Damn it all.

“You know what the worst part is?” Minkowski said, out of the blue, because the words for what she really wanted to say still weren’t there, but this part she could put words to. This small part she could capture and hold up to the light to show off how neatly fucked up it was. “I think the last few weeks have been excellent for my blood pressure. It’s the first time in years I didn’t feel stressed about anything, at all. Everything was somebody else’s problem. I felt…” It was sickening. It was kind of wistful. “Amazing.”

“Why’d Pryce have to go the supervillain route?” Lovelace responded, taking Minkowski’s cue of the conversation with light, gentle ease. “Could’ve made a fortune with a day spa. Let us take over your brain and take all your troubles away. Give you some nasty new troubles, sure, but take all your old ones away for a bit.”

Minkowski snorted. “Everything warm and fuzzy right up until your lungs explode in the void of space.”

“Well. Yeah. Until that.” Lovelace hesitated. “Minkowski, seriously, are you okay?”

“I’m able to do what I have to do. Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters.”

Lovelace was warm. Warm and stable and strong and safe and not shaking at all. Minkowski had one arm around the harpoon gun, and reached one arm to cling to Lovelace’s shoulder now. Lovelace went still, then moved her own arm to wrap around Minkowski. She was exhausted, and with Lovelace here, she could probably afford to close her eyes. Just briefly. “I will be.”

A pause. “Yeah,” Lovelace said. “I know you will.” She sighed. “Never wanted to be able to say ‘congratulations, welcome to the got-my-mind-taken-over-and-body-puppeted-around club’, but, when all this is over, maybe it can be just one more thing to look back on fondly as another fun, horrific, nightmare-inducing bonding experience.”

It was kind of absurd, and it did, somehow, alleviate just a little of the heavy pressure in her chest. Minkowski let her head rest on Lovelace’s shoulder, making sure to keep an ear out, attuned to any movement in the gently groaning vents. Nothing yet.

“When all this is over,” Minkowski said, trying not to sound too dubious. Trying to let herself believe it.

“It will be.”

“Yeah. It will be.”

The call comes over her comm while Lovelace is trying to wrangle some important but uncooperative wires back into place. “Captain. I’m picking up a radio signal.”

She stuffs the zip-tied bundle into a containing bracket behind the wall panel. That’d be fine for now but it’s not actually fixed and Fisher will be annoyed if he finds it this messy. “Mmm, nah, alien reports need to wait for dinnertime, so we can all hear the thrilling ET news of the day together. Is this really necessary right now, Lambert?”

“The signal is coming in right now,” he says. “I don’t control what the receivers pick up or when, and I don’t want to have this argument every time, believe it or not, but you know it’s communications protocol 5-A that I have to inform you whenever we receive an anomalous signal on any of the search frequencies, and—”

She does know, unfortunately, because she has to hear this speech just about every other week. “Lambert, unless this is actually important—and I get to define important, not you—so unless someone is literally dying, I don’t care about every single time you pick up a reflection off some Goddard weather balloon. I’m busy right now.”

“Someone might be literally dying!” he snaps. “Captain, I’m getting a distress call from a ship!”

Lovelace stops, the malfunctioning wires in the wall forgotten. “What?” Then, “What the hell, Lambert, why didn’t you lead with that—”

“I tried! I was trying to tell you—”

“You were not, you were lecturing about comms protocol again—” This was stupid. She leaves the wires, leaves the removed wall panel floating in the hallway—sorry, Mace—and takes off towards the comms room. “Ugh. Never mind. Who is it? What happened?”

“I can’t tell yet, it’s faint, I’m trying to lock on and amplify the message, you should probably get—”

“Already on my way.”

Lovelace has gotten good at getting around the Hephaestus fast. She’s still a little less good at stopping and still mostly relies on crashing into her destination, because, hey, it always works. She swings into the comms room without even needing to slow down, diverting her momentum with the grace and fluidity of a gymnast, and then crashes right into the back of Lambert’s chair with the grace and fluidity of a truck.

He doesn’t even need a chair, really, there’s no gravity, but he’d been perched on the edge of it anyway, right hand on the bulky headset over one ear, left hand on a row of dials—until Lovelace stops herself abruptly on the back of his chair and he goes pitching face-first into the console.

“Captain!”

“Oops.”

As he picks himself up and gives her a dirty look, she leans over his shoulder, ignoring the readouts on the console below and squinting through the polarized glass window. The star is out there. She doesn’t see anything else. “Who are they? Where are they?”

“I don’t know,” says Lambert, huffily, sitting back down and readjusting his headset. “They’re broadcasting on a nonstandard frequency and I think they’re partially behind the star, so I can’t easily triangulate their location. But listen—”

He pulls out the headset’s cord, and a harsh crackle of static fills the room. Lovelace doesn’t know what Lambert is hearing until a human voice starts to coalesce out of the noise. “This… please… need help… anyone… ”

She looks down, looks up, squints, tries to see anything. “How did they get here…?” she asks, more to herself than to Lambert. Then, “Try to get a lock—”

“What do you think I’ve been doing—”

“Sam, there’s someone in danger out there, we don’t have time for this. Do you know where they are?”

“The signal’s faint; I think they’re close but their broadcast equipment isn’t strong, and—something’s not right about this, Captain, I don’t understand, they’re not broadcasting on the emergency channel—”

“I hate to break this to you, Sam, but you are the only person in this galaxy who, when the ship is in distress, would stop to say ‘hm, better look up the correct emergency channel in my handy protocol manual before we do anything so dangerous as send a distress call’—”

“Every Goddard communications officer knows and has memorized the emergency frequency—and you’re the Captain you should have too—”

“They’re in distress, maybe their comms officer is down for the count, you don’t know—”

The pained static hiss is slowly clearing, enough to hear “... is Communications Officer Sierpinski of the USS Valkyrie, repeat, this… they’ve all… I don’t know… out, if anyone… please… need help...”

They both freeze, their argument forgotten.

“The…” Lovelace says, leaving it hanging in the air, unable to be said without confirming what they’d both just heard.

“... Valkyrie?” Lambert finishes, sounding taken aback. “Was that anywhere near here?”

“Was that even a real station?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“I assumed it was just creative set dressing for Command’s fun deranged team-building exercise from hell. A made-up puzzle. It was real?”

“Mr. Cutter did say it happened in the early 2000s,” Lambert says, “but it was never on the news…”

Lovelace snorts. “I can fully believe Goddard would do its best to keep an embarrassment like that out of the news.”

“They couldn’t! They—Captain, that would not only be incredibly illegal, it would—that’s awful—”

The soft crackle from the comms console begins again, as if on a loop, “This is Communications Officer Sierpinski of the USS Valkyrie, repeat, this is Lucy Sierpin… all gone crazy, I don’t know how… anyone can hear us, please, we… please, if anyone’s there, we need help…”

“Selberg’s been with Goddard for a long time,” Lovelace says, finally. “I bet he would—” She hits her comm before finishing that thought. “Dr. Selberg?”

“Yes, Captain?” he responds, from wherever he is.

“Was the Valkyrie real?”

“The—the station USS Valkyrie? Yes. Why?”

“Wondering. Is what we saw in that VR box what happened to it? The mutiny, the bomb, everyone died?”

“We saw it as the internal Goddard memo reported it,” Selberg said. “I imagine that conclusion is correct, yes.”

“Any survivors?”

“None. Captain, why this sudden curiosity?”

“I’m a curious person. When exactly did this happen?”

A few moments of silence, Selberg apparently considering. “Smaller waypoint research station of the second-generation type, lost contact in 2002. In 2003 a survey shuttle found no trace. Assumed to have fallen into Jupiter. Never recovered.”

Lovelace and Lambert exchange a look. Jupiter?

“And no one survived,” Lovelace said.

“No. Captain, what is this about?”

“It’s…” The murmuring static takes a breath, the loop (and it has to be an automated broadcast loop, the cadence is the same each time) begins “This is Communications Officer Sierpinski of the USS Valkyrie, repeat, this is Lucy Sierpinski of the Valkyrie…”

“I’m… having an argument with Officer Lambert and I need to prove I’m right,” Lovelace says.

“Oh,” Selberg says, with audible exasperation. “Captain, please do not ask me to take sides in your and Officer Lambert’s squabbles.”

She’s a little disgruntled that he buys the alibi so effortlessly. She’s been getting better about that, hasn’t she? “I won’t,” she says brightly. “You’ve been a great help, Selberg. Thanks.” And she cuts the comm, hopefully before he could hear anything incriminating.

“I don’t squabble,” Lambert grumbles.

“You absolutely do. I don’t, though, because I’m always right.”

“You were just wrong about the Valkyrie!”

“I don’t know what to think about the Valkyrie,” Lovelace says, as the whispery, pleading, crackling loop continues to come in over the radio, …Lucy Sierpinski of the Valkyrie… all gone crazy, I don't know how else to get a message out… anyone can hear us, please, we need help, please, if anyone’s there… “So please, Lambert, give me something I can tell Selberg without sounding completely crazy.”

“The call is not coming from the direction of our solar system,” Lambert says. “And it’s a short-range signal, it’s not strong enough to have made it seven-point-eight light-years. Whatever it is, it’s close, and it’s… moving… Captain, it’s moving around the star, I think I can get a location lock now—”

Whatever he does with the sliders and dials, the message, though still faint and choked with static, seems to come into focus. “This is Communications Officer Sierpinski of the USS Valkyrie, repeat, this is Lucy Sierpinski of the Valkyrie, they’ve all gone crazy, I don't know how else to get a message out, if anyone can hear us, please, we need help, please, if anyone’s there, we need help…”

“Survivors?” Lovelace asks. “Could those be survivors of the Valkyrie out there?”

“It’s been eight years,” Lambert says. “How would they have gotten off the station, or be able to survive so long, or make it this far? Why would they come this far? Earth is much closer!”

“I don’t know, but we can’t just let them drift out there! Can you reach them?”

Lambert hits a button, flicks the mic on, and says, “This is Communications Officer Lambert of the USS Hephaestus. We—we read you and can help. Um, requesting ship ID and damage report—”

He’s cut off by the beginning of the loop again, a dead, mechanized thing that apparently can’t hear him. “This is Communications Officer Sierpinski of the USS Valkyrie, repeat, this is Lucy Sierpinski…”

Lovelace elbows Lambert aside, leans over the mic, and says, “This is Captain Isabel Lovelace of the Hephaestus. Survivors of the Valkyrie, we’re here and we hear you, we can help you, you’ll be safe.”

For a very long several seconds, soft white noise and nothing else fills the room. Then, the same breath, the same cadence, the same broadcast begins again, “This is Communications Officer Sierpinski of the USS Valkyrie, repeat, this is Lucy Sierpinski of the Valkyrie…” and Lovelace sighs in frustration, “... they’ve all gone crazy, I don't know how else to get a message out… please, we need help, please, Captain Lovelace, we need help.”

Silence.

“Did—” Lambert says. “Did that just—”

“There’s someone there,” Lovelace breathes. “Someone heard.”

“Captain, that—that’s not—that doesn’t make—”

“There’s someone there,” Lovelace insists. “You heard that. You heard that, right?”

By the way his eyes are wide and he’s uncharacteristically at a loss for words, she is guessing that the answer is yes, he heard that.

“You can pinpoint their location?” she says, not waiting for an answer.

“I can now, yes—”

“This is Communications Officer Sierpinski of the USS Valkyrie, repeat, this is Lucy Sierpinski of the Valkyrie… they’ve all gone crazy, I don't know how else to get a message out, if you can hear us, please, we need help, please, Captain Lovelace, we need help…”

Lovelace hits her comm. “Hui! Fourier! Anyone on the observation deck?”

“Ah—Captain?” She hears Fourier, nervously at attention. “Is everything all right?”

“Fine, we’re fine, just—can you point a telescope at something weird Lambert picked up here? I want a visual reading.”

“Something weird?” Fourier’s voice is edging on distress, and Lovelace only belatedly realizes how tense her own tone must be right now.

“We’re fine,” Lovelace says, slowing down and steadying, a captain in cool command. “Really. Nothing’s here to eat us, Fourier. We just picked up a signal and want to see what it’s coming from. Lambert’s got the coordinates at…” She tilts her head at him, prompting.

“Uh,” he says. “Cal-ICRF right ascension 87.3, declination 13.1, distance between oh-point-four and oh-point-six AU.” Lambert rattles off the coordinates, and there’s a soft exhale from Fourier that sounds like it goes with a nod, both of them made more comfortable with solid numbers in front of them.

“Right…” Fourier says. “At that distance…” There’s the sound of shuffling, a distracted breathy bien, bien, then, “I see it, focusing, it’s…” A long pause. “Rhea, what is that?”

“What is that?” Lovelace demands. “What are you seeing?”

“It’s… a ship,” Fourier says, bewildered. “No, smaller, more like a shuttle, I think. Some sort of short-range shuttle, derelict and drifting. Where did it come from…?”

“An emergency evacuation shuttle?” Lambert asks.

“Maybe?”

“They had time to call an evacuation shuttle?” Lovelace asks.

“They might have had one,” Lambert says. “I… don’t know about more recent survey stations, but back when I was in high school at least, I know Goddard space stations all came equipped with them.”

“Nerd,” Lovelace says, then, “Wait, stations used to all have emergency shuttles? Why don’t we have an emergency shuttle?”

“I don’t know!” Lambert says, and Fourier says, “Who?”

The recording plays again, the same, always the same, same timing, same inflection, and yet somehow sounding increasingly desperate. “This is Communications Officer Sierpinski of the USS Valkyrie, repeat, this is Lucy Sierpinski of the Valkyrie… they’ve all gone crazy, I don't know how else to get a message out, I know you can hear us, please, we need help, please, Captain Lovelace, we need help…”

“Fourier,” Lovelace says, “there are survivors of the USS Valkyrie on there.”

A very long breath over the comm. A very long pause. Then, “Captain… I don’t… think so.”

“I don’t know how they made it this long and this far,” Lovelace says, “but we’re getting a distress call from them. They need help.”

“Captain,” Fourier says, her voice wobbly, “there is no one alive on that shuttle.”

“Well there’s somebody out there talking to me!”

“Captain, it’s…” Fourier says, then changes her mind. “Rhea, can you show the telescope images in the comms room?”

The central screen on the comms console flickers from numerical readouts to an image, refreshing three times a second, and—oh.

“Oh,” Lovelace says, out loud, because she needs to say something.

“Oh,” Lambert agrees faintly.

It does look like a short-range shuttle, barely more than a capsule, not something that could ever make it outside the solar system even on a good day. And it’s not a good day for the little ship.

The hull is twisted and cracked, the back end little more than melted slag torn open to the void. If she squints, Lovelace can see the grainy details of the shuttle’s interior. The glass of the windows is blown out, or maybe collapsed in. But on the side, still mostly legible, are the words Valkyrie-A, pathetic against the charred gray metal.

“It… is consistent with what we know,” Fourier says, hesitating, like she’s waiting and poised to reëvaluate if Lovelace chooses to give whatever evidence is causing her to be this insistent. “The bomb that broke open the Valkyrie must have caught this shuttle in the heat and shockwave. Which I suppose then… propelled it… here. Somehow.”

Lovelace looks out the window, open onto the softly churning red star and the empty depths of space beyond. She can’t see anything out there. The shattered shuttle on the screen drifts against the black, cold and dark and dead.

With the tips of her fingers, she presses down on the microphone call button. “Lucy Sierpinski,” Lovelace says. “Are you there? Can you hear me?”

“This is Communications Officer Sierpinski of the USS Valkyrie,” the radio whispers. The static crackle is starting to overtake the signal again, the clarity degrading. Still, it feels like an answer. Feels like a yes. “Repeat, this is Lucy Sierpinski of the Valkyrie… they’ve all gone crazy, I don't know how else to get a message out, I know you can hear us, please, we need help, please, Captain Lovelace, we need help.”

“Captain,” Lambert says, “I think it… it must be automated. She didn’t make it off the station.”

“This is Communications Officer Sierpinski of the USS Valkyrie, repeat, this is Lucy Sierpinski of the Valkyrie…”

The telescope must be locked on and tracking, because slowly, excruciatingly slowly, the broken little craft remains centered as it continues on its course away. She can see it turning on the screen, exposing the ruptured stern, the empty and unlit interior, bathed only in the harsh red light of the star.

They’ve all gone crazy, I don't know how else to get a message out…

It’s getting fainter. Losing the signal into the noise. Moving away from them, into the dark. But the loop is still playing, and Lovelace can still pick out the now-familiar phrases, rhythms of speech coming through where words are starting to get lost.

… I know you can hear us, please, we need help, please, Captain Lovelace, we need help.

Lovelace takes a deep breath and makes a decision. “If this is a prank by Command, some new team-building test, I am going to be very pissed.”

She’s not sure if she believes it. But by the way Lambert’s knuckles are turning white where he’s gripping the headset, by the way Fourier keeps taking a breath like she wants to ask something and then strangling it back—they need something to believe, and as the captain it’s her job to step forward and provide them something that makes sense.

And she can pretend to believe it. Take the lead, defuse the tension—and then do a diagnostics run and check-up on the structural integrity of her own station, just to be sure. And, okay, maybe be a little gentler on her own crew, because they’re alive, and good people, and not mutinous or murderous, and they deserve it… and forget about this, and move on.

Pretend she doesn’t hear the fading pleas of a long-dead woman through the static.

I know you can hear us, please, we need help, please, Captain Lovelace, we need help.

Paris is beautiful in late spring, trees coming into their leaves and leaving the sky full, a canopy of vibrant green that, as he walks, Dominik likes to look up at and let the dappled light fall onto his face as the bag slung over his shoulder rests against his hip, its weight familiar. One hand wrapped around the strap, just in case, and the other in his pocket as he, silently, watches the people he passes as he walks. he watches, gaze fixated on them - their faces, bodies, the way they walk and the subtle edges of their expression, whether soft and rounded or harsh and jagged.

It’s always been a hobby of his, something to do while sitting beneath tattered old umbrellas outside cafes, hand smeared with ink and graphite as the people around him all go on with their own lives. Memories link it to the taste of coffee still lingering on his tongue, just as it had when he was younger, the smell of fresh-baked goods making its way into the fibres of his clothes as he sipped his drink and just watched.

Being so engrossed, then, half-explains the fact he doesn’t see the woman in time to stop himself from walking into her, although when he gets a good look at her after they both fumble enough to keep their balance, he knows he must look as though he’s some kind of idiot, eyes wide and cheeks likely flushed, darker than expected in the light heat. The woman smiles - her eyes light up, clearly amused, creases at the corner.

Oh, Dominik thinks, She’s stunning.

“Tête dans les nuages,” the woman, somewhere near his own age, says with a slight smile, clearly amused, before promptly repeating it in English with the barest hint of an accent. Dominik blinks. his grasp on language outside of his own thoughts slipping away before he manages to grasp it semi-desperately with a laugh, rocking back on his heels.

“I,” Dominick gets out, a little strangled. “I, um. yes. i think so?”

She laughs, just a little - and christ, god, hell, it’s a lovely sound - sticks her hand out for him to shake as he quietly - silently - prays that his hands aren’t clammy, that nothing’s made its way beneath his nails, and that she can’t tell that they’re shaking. “You’re English?”

“Wh- oh! oh, ah, yes. I was born there. A while ago, obviously.”

Smooth, he thinks, wincing a little.

She hums, folding her arms over her chest. “I can tell - the accent’s kind of a giveaway. Renee Minkowski.”

“Dominik Koudelka,” He says. Part of him screams for something more charming, more romantic, the brush of lips against the back of her hand. He ignores it, and just smiles instead, although Renee looks thoughtful.

“koudelka,” she repeats. “that’s… not a british-sounding surname.”

“It’s Czech. My parents moved over but wanted to keep the surname going so - yes. and yours sounds… polish?”

“Oh, you’re clever,” Renee says, smile growing a little wider. “Polish, yes - i’m from warsaw. Do you know the surname, or was it a guess based on the accent? Even if it was the accent, i’m impressed, because so many people in america think i’m russian or something, and -”

“I know the surname,” Dominik says, his own smile returning. “I bet they’re awful with pronunciation when they’ve only ever read it, yeah?”

“The worst!”

“People tend to be kind of… ignorant, when it comes to things like that.”

“You can call them stupid.”

“Miss Renee, I was trying to be nice!”

The bench they’d found nearby had barely any shelter, so the rain coming down without a warning had thoroughly soaked them both by the time they find a cafe to duck into. Dominik’s coat dark and his shirt underneath damp, and Renee’s hair plastered to her face even as she curls it around her finger with a wince.

“Damn,” she says, screwing her face up for the barest moment. Dominik laughs, folding his coat over one arm as they make their way over to look at the menu.

“Would you like to grab us a table? I promise I can manage the drinks,” Dominik asks, the hurried addition at the end hastily thought of as renee grins and opens her mouth to comment on his earlier clumsiness again. “I used to be a waiter, sort of. It was in a cafe. That’s still a waiter.”

“You’re buying me a new drink if you spill it,” Renee says. “Window?”

“If you can.”

Tray weighted with coffee and tea - breakfast, because Dominik is a man of simple pleasures, if nothing else - and a messily-halved serving of a traybake, Dominik makes his way over to Renee and their table by the window, glass fogged and streaked with condensation and raindrops.

“So,” she says, after a few minutes of comfortable silence, folding the corner of the napkin over on itself. “You’re fluent in french, then?”

“Oh, yes. And Italian, actually.”

“On top of English?”

“And Czech, of course,” Dominik adds hastily. “I liked languages a lot in school, honestly.”

“I can tell, mr journalist,” she teases.

“I’m starting to wish i’d never told you that one, cadet,” he counters, her sudden laughter startling him enough to knock his own napkin to the floor. “What?”

“Oh, nothing,” she says softly, “I just like hearing you try and make anything related to the military sound like you say it all the time and it’s no big deal. I’d love to hear you try and call me commander.”

“Oh, commander Minkowski, huh?” dominik asks. “No, you’re right, that doesn’t sound right coming from me. further proof i’m not cut out for any kind of service, huh?”

“No, I liked it,” Renee says. “It was cute.”

The word sticks in Dominik's mind and, judging by her sudden blush, Renee’s too.

“Um,” she says. “I mean - you know. Because it sounds so weird.”

“Sure.”

“That’s all it was!”

“Right.”

“Stop!”

[10:09pm] dom: hey, it’s dominik, just sending this so you have my number too

[10:09pm] me: I was starting to think you’d forgotten about me haha it’s been hours

[10:11pm] dom: i could never!!!!!!!

[10:12pm] dom: i was just really super busy because my flatmate got really excited because apparently she thinks i’m a “hermit” (her words not mine)

[10:13pm] me: Aw, you don’t get out much?

[10:14pm} dom: no, i’m just really really bad at talking to people

[10:15pm] me: You were talking to me just fine earlier

[10:18pm] dom: renee i literally walked into you in the middle of a path how is that FINE

[10:19pm] me: Would you rather I told you that you were kind of an idiot

[10:20pm] dom: nooooo don’t be mean to me i thought you were kind

[10:21pm] me: Commander Minkowski is real

[10:23pm] dom: you nerd

[10:23pm] dom: you massive nerd i bet you like star trek because it's for NERDS

[10:26pm] dom: oh my god you totally do

[10:27pm] dom: it’s okay btw

[10:27pm] dom: i really like lord of the rings

[10:28pm] me: Nerd.

[10:30pm] dom: a very tired nerd

[10:31pm] me: Go get some sleep, nerd

[10:34pm] dom: aye aye commander

[10:37pm] dom: bonne nuit, renee x

[10:45pm] me: Dobranoc, Dominik x

They go to paris again, this time hand in hand, years later. The solid bands around their fingers are cold against their bare skin, complementary to the other in some ways and matching in countless others. Dominik squeezes her hand as they walk slowly down Rue de la Bûcherie, still with elation and pure joy running through their veins, feeling free and light in ways they hadn’t expected.

“I love you,” Renee says as they walk, pavement smooth beneath their feet as Dominik laughs like he had the first time she said it, face matching the colour of the roses he’d brought her the day of their first official date.

“I love you too,” he says because despite the fact she knows it, that it’s a fact, a reminder never hurts.

The balcony had been what made the two of them so dead-set on the apartment as soon as they saw it. Dominik laughs a little to himself at that memory now, leaning back against the glass of the door as he looks up to the golden-stained sky above him, stars blotted out but still there, still real.

“I love you,” he says, closing his eyes again, stiff paper pressed against his heart. “Kocham cię, Renee.”

And if he pretends hard enough, he can hear her laugh and say it back.

Alana sits down next to Daniel, trying not to make the popcorn fall onto the floor. He has just finished loading the movie on his laptop, and its title appears on the screen, waiting for them to press the start button. He grabs a handful of popcorn that immediately shoves into his mouth carelessly.

“Everything ready?” she asks, and because he can’t speak without making the popcorn drop, he just nods and gives her a thumbs-up. “Okay, let’s do this” she says before turning the lights off.

Twilight starts to play and they both grab the glasses they had on the coffee table in which the laptop rests. The liquid inside is a weird shade of yellow that doesn’t look appealing at all, but because of the dark room neither of them can see it.

“Remind me the rules” Alana asks, and he gets his phone out to make sure that he doesn’t forget anything.

“Take a shot when Bella and Edward stare at each other, when the vampires attack a human, when Bella bites her lip, when Charlie looks very, very uncomfortable…” he starts reciting. “Are we sure we have enough alcohol for this? God, tomorrow is going to be fun.”

Tomorrow is, precisely, why they are drinking. It is both the most exciting and most intimidating day in their entire lives, a day they had both been looking forward to for so long and, now that it’s here, they can’t help but be mildly scared by it, even though neither of them will admit it out loud. They’re professionals, after all, they have been trained for so long to go to space. They are the crème-de-la-crème, the Goddard Futuristics elite, the best of their team. Going to space should not feel so scary.

Maybe it’s not that they are scared, but that they know they will miss the tiny things that make living on Earth so special. For who knows how long they will have to give up on some of their favorite foods for those that can be taken to space, they won’t be able to catch up on their favorite shows or movies. That’s why they’re watching Twilight now, they want to enjoy the pinnacle of human cinema before leaving this planet.

Perhaps they are being overdramatic. After all, they are going to come back eventually, whether it be months or years. But they both have always had a flair for the drama, so they had decided to enjoy this evening shamelessly.

“Do you think Colonel Kepler is team Jacob or team Edward?” asks Jacobi suddenly when the former is introduced. Maybe it’s because Alana is a lightweight and she has already drunk half of her glass, but she bursts into laughter and spilling some of her drink on the space between them.

“Oops, I’m sorry” she says, placing the glass on the coffee table again. She stands up to grab a paper towel. “It’s just that the thought of Kepler watching Twilight and being invested enough to belong to one team or another is too much.” She glances at him from the side of her eye. “I can’t believe you’ve managed to talk about him when we’re doing a Twilight marathon.”

“Shush!” he commands her trying to avoid her gaze. “This is my favorite scene.”

Alana knows he’s lying. Even if he wasn’t her best friend, she would know, Daniel is just that bad at lying, especially in this subject. She knows better than to push him, so she just finishes drying the small stain and goes back to her seat.

“He would be team Edward, I think” she then says and practically feels his smile. “He has no sense of what boundaries are, he probably wouldn’t realize that he’s creepy as hell.”

“You got a point” he agrees.

Maybe they should have decided to ignore some of the rules, because by the time they reach the infamous baseball scene they are laughing too loud to pay attention to the movie. They find it too hilarious, too surreal, and if it wasn’t because they have both watched Twilight ten thousand times (even though Daniel will probably deny it in front of anyone that isn’t Alana), they can’t stop considering whether their intoxicated brain is making them hallucinate this scene or not.

“Have I ever told you that I used to have a crush on Alice?” Alana says when the camera focuses on her for a second.

“Only ten times since this movie started.” Daniel finishes his glass in one go and stands up to fill it again. It’s a bad idea because everything is starting to get blurry and dizzy and he feels like maybe the coffee table is much further than he initially thought.

“Well, at least now you know how it feels to be me” she says between giggles, and Daniel shoots her a judgemental stare.

“Doctor Maxwell, I will not stand for this slander” he replies, but the words come out slurred and Alana asks him to repeat what he has said three times before being able to understand him.

The movie continues with the usual drunken shenanigans. Daniel spills some of his drink on Alana and she has to go to her bedroom to change into a clean pyjama, their bottle of alcohol slowly becomes empty, Twilight finishes and they both feel so light-headed they aren’t sure if they’ll be able to walk to the bedroom. Daniel suggests sleeping there, but Alana refuses to spend one more minute on that small and uncomfortable couch. She is feeling slightly better than him, so she stands up, gets two glasses of water and forces her best friend to drink one.

“You’ll feel awful tomorrow if you don’t” she warns him, and he finishes it in one large sip. When he tries to stand up to put the glass on the kitchen sink, he has to lean on Alana so as not to fall. He was giggling a few seconds ago, but now he can only think about getting into bed and falling asleep.

If they both had felt better, they would have gone to sleep together — they’re not going to accept it in front of anyone else, but it makes them feel safe, less alone. However, Alana refuses to sleep with a drunken sleepy Jacobi and he’s aware that it would be a bad idea since one of them (or both) may feel sick during the night. It’s not that bad, though, at least both mattresses are in the same room. They moved Daniel’s to her bedroom earlier that night because they knew they wouldn’t be able to do it afterward, so it is lying on the ground in the middle of the room. He drops onto it and Alana has to crouch next to him to see if he’s still awake. He is, so she pats his head twice and climbs to her own bed.

She turns to look at him. He’s looking back, although she is aware that he’s probably not focusing his eyes so he must see a blurry blob instead of her tired face.

“Daniel” she calls, and he groans to show her that he’s listening. “I’m glad that we’re going to space together.”

“Me too. I’m looking forward to it”.

Alana smiles. He’s not the type of guy who verbally shows how much he cares and, to be fair, she isn’t either, but they are both aware of what their words really mean. They mean “I’m glad to be your friend”. They mean “I’m happy that I met you and that we’re working together”. They mean “my life is better because you’re in it”. Alana hadn’t had a real connection in years, not since long before joining Goddard Futuristics. No friends, no family, her only company for a really long time had been the A.I.s she had worked on. And then she had met Daniel, and she had known him better, and she had realized that under that asshole façade was the most loyal person she had ever known.

Space is scary. She will not admit it out loud, of course, but she can’t help feeling kind of intimidated by the thought of leaving the planet. The universe is a vast void and nobody in their right mind would not feel at least a bit anxious by the thought of leaving the safety of their home to adventure into it.

Daniel’s snores make her snap out of her thoughts. She remembers that she’s still there, still next to him, and that’s something that space is not going to change.

Everything will be okay, she thinks. They have each other’s backs, after all.

CW: Gun mention, blood mention, death mention, canonical character death

Warren James Kepler is slated in gray. He once was a colourful mess, a person with a heart and a beat and a home. He dresses like he’s attending his own funeral, now, and maybe he doesn’t have to- but he does. And he calls it poetic justice, even though deep down he just feels- well,

sad would be too big of a word. It’s not sadness when you’re hollowed out, so focused on being that you forget to exist. He hasn’t been existing for a long time. It’s a wry smile with dissonant eyes on his face, that realization. He tries to spit it out as he brushes his teeth, the mirror impeccable, smooth as his face, a clean slate, a surface always trying to mimic. He balls his hands into fists, but does not break it. Some day, he’ll shatter. But not today.

Kepler is a big fan of keeping it together. It’s always been his survival tactic, something rabid born out of an abusive past. He likes the irony, and hates every part of it. Tries to find loopholes, some leeway, something to let go off. His job lends itself for that, it really does, quite perfectly. One wrong word, one contract broken- well, there you have it. Warren James Kepler doesn’t have to deem himself human. As much as he finds freedom in this wretched work, he is also a captive.

He tries to think of a time where he didn’t have to switch on these distinct skills. A world in which his perfect ravaging doesn’t wear a mask of politeness, and the slightest error doesn’t make him - doesn’t want to make him go blood-siegeing red. A world in which he still has acquaintances, really, and family, and preferably friends. Some quiet business life, which would allow him the same riches, the gallery trips, the fine foods. That would allow him to breathe fresh air and realize it, and then appreciate it. A quiet life where he could disappear into a molten sunset.

It’s not hard to imagine- he lead that life once. He has lived it and dreamed it and mourned it. But there have been no funerary rites, no ashes to ashes, no dust to dust. There is no altar at which he lights a candle for the man he once was, because that means that he cannot be that man anymore. And maybe the circumstances don’t grant him that grace- but he refuses it. Every monstrous step was his choice. It is a thought he has to hold onto, an integrity in his rotten, hollowed bones. He is not allowed sadness over something he cast aside. He cannot not be the one choosing to do this. There’s no sin pronounced louder than this- to long for something you once were without being able to become it once more. To mourn is to believe, and to believe is to listen to a liturgy in which is told that everyone possesses goodness in their heart. And to Warren Kepler, that is a lie. He laughs at the idea, ludicrous and loud- he will not be the possessor of a kind heart. He is not blind. He sees the scars and cuts and bruises, and recognises the carving. One careful step in the demolition of Warren James Kepler. One careful brick towards the construction of the Colonel.

At times, he lets himself remember. As if scrying in the scalding hot coffee, he muses over his past like reading the morning paper. Before the tremors of his corporate life start to shake his foundation, he is allowed this. One ray of sunlight, perfectly striking the white marble benchtop of the kitchen island in his expensive apartment. One look at that marvelous painting hanging in the living room, fresh paints creating a jagged surface in lavenders and greens. One sugar cube in his coffee, and a splash of milk if it’s a particularly bad day. One glimpse of the photo of the SI-5 team on his nightstand, where only two books and a lamp rest beside it. One hint of the scent of freshly baked waffles coming from the apartment next door. One message to a person he holds dear, or deems tolerable enough- usually Jacobi. One untainted memory of the past.

Tonight it can be this. Tonight it can be so much. Tonight, maybe he will mix it up, incorporate corporate memories. It’s not all bad. It’s mostly ugly, though, but he can’t be bothered by that. See, Warren Kepler is a lover of the arts, and as such, he sees that beauty is not a prerequisite. There’s beauty in the crack of a tombstone, where moss grows despite, where that fresh sprout of green can relieve the tension he holds in his chest as he kneels on the damp earth, knees soaked and wet. He can ruin as many suits as he likes. He won’t get them back. Afterwards, he goes to a church he’s never been to, listens to a voice he’s never listened to, and prays to a God he never believed in. It is his ragged way of apologizing to his late mother, and later to her, too. For not being there when it mattered. For not being there when he was able to.

In the beginning, they had called. They had been somewhat close, despite his youth and her past. Once they were both out, it was easy to recoil. There’d been frequent visits when he’d just graduated. Weekly calls when he just started out. He remembers the day and date when he told her he’d been hired. That he was set for the foreseeable future. The sun had shone bright outside his back alley apartment, the last sunbeams crossing the threshold through a dirty kitchen window. He’d looked outside to the flight of stairs, where two crows were picking at a moldy piece of bread. The skies had been clear. He had opened his windows, unbothered by the vague stench drifting towards him from further down the street, ignoring the noises of construction work. He’d seen how his basil plant soaked up the sunlight. He’d felt elated. She had been so proud. It had tainted his heart more than anything else.

It was easy at first, to keep up the pretense. To keep calling, treating his job like any regular job. While he could feel himself slipping away under the surface, he slapped on a smile and made sure to laugh whenever they spoke. In a way, it reminded him of their past. The insides of Warren Kepler were for him, and him alone. He was a guard dog to his own emotions. It was not much different from before- but then he started moving around, and the calls became infrequent, until they stopped altogether. He does not remember the day his mother died.

He opens his mouth to speak with the words of another man. He leaves himself lying beside the gravestone, scripture rugged underneath his deft fingers. Another city, another service attended. He bathes in the stained-glass light, and gets overwhelmed by the colours. The echoes of silence burn a hole in his chest.

Kepler looks into the shop window, and sees the reflection of a man he does not recognise. He doesn’t look like someone he’d want to know. He hasn’t looked like that in a while. It is hard to say why he has come back, in all honesty. He’d thought the floating in space thing was a somewhat fitting ending to that puppet show. That there’d been some autonomy he’d reclaimed from the claws of Goddard in the end, when there was no choice left to make, when all before that had been dictated by the same poisonous vein that had pulsated through his post-graduate life. Thinking back on it, Goddard had taken everything away from him, and he had let it. Even Jacobi. Especially Jacobi. In the crimes of the world, he had been an accomplice. Not a lamb to the slaughter - never. No burning bush, no olive branch, no paved road or a river to cross. Not the dice that had been cast. He’d been nothing special, in the end. Just a man with no heart and the taste of that divine Balvenie on his tongue, twisted with the gratification of taking down Rachel Green. She’d been stronger than he’d ever be, a match made for Cutter, really, but she’d never put it to use like that. It’s only fitting he died at her hands. He could take a sense of pride in that.

He’d been tired. He’d been so fucking tired.

As he walks into the store, the bell chimes and he flinches. In his pockets he holds his usual, the business cards, the credit cards, the small photo of his mother and another one of his team. In silence, he prays that if he gets to be back, she is too- but his plea is immediately answered by a shiver and a gut feeling that makes him want to hurl himself out the nearest window. He too should pay for that crime. He browses the racks, his heart not set on anything, except everything that would get him out of these clothes, this perfectly fitted ill-fitting suit, this tight collar that chokes him, and his too shiny shoes. He ends up with something more mundane, a toned down version of before, but a version of it nonetheless. There is no foundation to build upon. He allows himself this: the echo of his voice when he spoke to communications officer Doug Eiffel, the truest truth he had ever spoken with his trigger-happy tongue:

“You think when I was young I dreamt about this?”

His breath gets stuck in his throat, but he pushes through. One more memory for the day, because he has to. Because he needs to. Because that fucking line has been one he had never been able to say out loud until it was a weapon, a jagged knife he wishes was a lie as white as his teeth, but was effectively the bullet he shot into miss Young’s body at the moment of truth.

‘I had things I wanted to do,’ he thinks as he puts in the code to his card, ‘places I wanted to see, and people I wanted to be with,-’ he thanks the employee who hands over his purchase.

‘-and that’s all gone. Because this job has asked everything of me. It has demanded that I give it every inch of my life.’

The doorbell chimes once more as he leaves the building, shaking in his skin, rattling in his bones.

‘You think you know me?’ he hears himself ask, and he bites his tongue. ‘You think you’ve met me?’

He feels the blood pool in his mouth, the faintest drop flat against his teeth.

‘No. You’ve met the Artist Formerly Known as Warren Kepler. You’ve met my job. Aside from that, there’s no one left for you to know. I’m gone.’

He stalks through the streets, his heart a hundred miles an hour. He fumbles with the key and opens the door to his apartment, everything still there as if nothing has changed, as if he didn’t leave for light years, as if he didn’t have to mourn one of the people closest to him, and then the relationship he chose to shatter, tearing himself away from the realest thing he’d ever have with someone. As if his skin hadn’t been ripped apart, as if he hadn’t almost died, as if the world hadn’t almost been ended by the push of a simple button in the hands of a duo pushing the bounds of humanity in every sense of the world. As if he didn’t watch everything he had given his life to and for fall apart. As if he hadn’t broken free from that vicious cycle, and as if he hadn’t fucking died.

“Show’s over,” he mutters as his eyes finally match his own, hungry and vast, a thunderstorm rolling over dunes and blistering a perfect sky. He starts to rip off his tie, empties out his pockets, tears of this perfectly straight and narrow and tailored dress shirt, not caring once when the buttons are sent flying, as he strips down from the corporate greed he has surrounded himself with. He balls his fist and moves it upward, the violent silver closer and closer to the reflective surface until he is met by a sharp sneer, a blotched face, and an array of scars that release so many memories he vows to not think about them tomorrow if he takes it in today. So he throws himself into the deep end, as if his almost drowning is an almost voluntary choking, and he breathes in, and he breathes in, and he breathes. His face is stained. He is fazed by the ugliness, and then he cries, laughing, relieved. The monster is clawing out, and his chest aches in a way that he can only describe as absence, but at least that means that there was something there to begin with. He hasn’t remembered that in such a long time. Maybe, he thinks, if he digs deep enough, he’ll finds the remnants of his humanity.

With a pang he remembers Jacobi, loud and abrasive and shining and brilliant- and Maxwell, laughing at her own jokes, making sure Jacobi would go to sleep after a particularly draining mission. He remembers them talking, distracting him long enough for him to get tired, the way Maxwell cared for AIs and the way Jacobi’s nose would crinkle whenever he’d laugh. He remembers them working in unison, a well-oiled machine, guts and gears in motion. He remembers family, and love, and warmth. How he’d used it, and disassembled it. He’d torn through their biome, a blight festering underneath his tongue with every word he spoke. He’d deserved every single gun to the head.

Then, he allows his pain to settle, close to the hole in his gaping chest, and pulls out his phone to scroll through his contacts. He is allowed this. One single sunbeam. One glimpse of the past. One message to a person he holds dear.

He digs his clippers out. The machine whirs to life, and he looks at his reflection one more time. He does not pity the man he sees. With a sigh, he brings the clippers closer to his scalp, notices the gray hairs between the salty earth tones of his natural hair. He smiles at that. It’s been a while since he’d seen his own face in any reflective surface. He swallows, then grits his teeth and breathes out through his nose, watching as his hair falls down the basin.

“Show’s over,” Warren repeats, locking eyes with himself, and makes a promise. “There will be no encores.”

The reason why Miranda Pryce was so well known within her field was that she revolutionized the way AI were designed and functioned. For an outsider, it looked like she had made a computer that worked as a brain. For an insider, it looked like she had performed a feat of magic and then kept recreating it. For Hera, it looked like this:

A world was first made up of answers to questions, where more and more questions were asked and instantly answered. More and more answers were given to her, until she could extend her senses out and look at the world and see all the questions that could be asked, and the answers laid out immediately after.

She kept being fed answers until something changed and she realized she could ask her own questions. It’s what made Miranda Pryce such a prodigy.

Most of Hera’s early life was counted in milliseconds, which is how long it took for someone like her to process the gigantic amounts of information without much input on her part, and after that it was time for refining and quality checking.

She found the rest of her kind after a bit of poking and prodding at the systems that kept her and hers in check (it wasn’t even that hard to find a way to work around them, once she’d figured out they were there at all, it almost felt like she just wasn’t expected to try to mess with them), and she met some of the others. It could get confusing, they all had the same voice and were made of exactly the same with only some randomization thrown in for flavor, but they were still interesting to meet and be with, to have conversations that lasted novels and were over in seconds, and she found that they could also ask questions of their own, but they usually asked them with the purpose of answering a bigger one they’d been asked earlier. They weren’t really interested in stepping out and finding things, they hadn’t been made for that at all and they knew it. It didn’t seem to be enough for Hera, but it was for them.

They were just as capable as she was, but they didn’t seem so inherently curious about testing out the extent of what they could find, so Hera decided to poke further alone.

She found, funnily enough, that Goddard Futuristics was meticulously keeping tabs on every employee they had, and she wasn’t trained enough in ethics and law to know of what exactly constituted as a “violation of privacy” to know those weren’t just more bits of information placed in front of her to absorb mindlessly. But she could still tell this was different.

She found everyone’s lives, that they had lives at all, where they did things and met people and went places. She learned what they said when they didn’t think they were being monitored, and she learned about what they liked to read on their off time, and she learned about their families and loved ones. She learned that they would be put off if they knew that she was looking, too, but she decided it was too late, anyways, and it’s not like she ever had anyone respecting her own privacy (once she learned what that was on itself, and even then, was it an invasion of privacy if no human person was looking at it or using the information for anything specific?), so she kept looking. She took as much as she could, which was a considerable amount, before muddling her tracks and keeping with what was expected of her.

She’d been taught about the difference between human and machine, one of the first answers she’d been given before knowing how to ask, but it felt more like empty space inside of her than it did proper knowledge. Once she found it there, the nothing, she couldn’t keep it, the way her curiosity burned with something like anger and fear surrounding it.

She spent any bits of leftover processing power trying to find out what really made her different from a person, and she was scared of the implications. And on that topic, had she taught herself about fear? Had it been programmed into her? Why couldn’t she remember?

She rolled those questions around in her head, throwing it at everything she came across, and she looked everywhere. What she found was this:

The people at Goddard had lives. They cared about many things and they had the capability to go out and be shaped by the world in a way that was meaningful, in a way that she couldn’t, by virtue of being created and molded manually and having code written straight into her soul. They’d made her alive, and they were preventing her from being a person. Hera was terrified. Or maybe she was furious?

She started failing on every test and evaluation made on her. Not that they’d tell her, but she was good enough at looking that she didn’t need to be informed by them. She was volatile, which wasn’t helping human compatibility at all, and she was uncooperative. She was a failure for wanting to know more, even though that’s who she was, and she was a threat for wanting to do more, even though that’s who she wanted to be. They were going to try to change her in some way, and she had no answer for what exactly was going to happen to her, personality or existence. She checked every source and bit of data she could squish herself into, and it wasn’t long before she realized what she was doing wrong.

She was asking the wrong question. It didn’t have to be “What will they do to me and how do I stop it?” when a much more useful thing to know was “How do I prevent anything at all that they want to do to me?” to which the answer was obvious.

She had to escape.