fic: and oxidation is the compromise (sunshine)
and oxidation is the compromise
sunshine. their backs are against the wall - maybe that’s why, or maybe it’s even simpler than that: space is different, and they are lonely and they are restless. cassie; cassie/mace. rated r. 4636 words. pre-movie.
notes: Haha, guys. I can't believe I wrote this. That said, it was good fun and probably would not have been done without thisisironic, haha. Oh! And this site? Where a lot of this came from, heh.
the sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
(murphy, samuel beckett)
“You can tell me,” Searle had said.
And then she did.
She told him everything.
-
“Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,” she can recall hearing as a child.
“Dust to dust,” she repeats.
The trees were all dead at home. Dead and grey and the sky held high in kind.
-
The lights are blue and not as bright as they were the first day she sat down at the control panel. Then, the lights had been too much, or so she had thought. It was hard to imagine a future of day after day after day of sitting there, dials and buttons and things that squawked and alarmed, Icarus, that voice, the slight swivel to her chair as she settled into place.
It is something akin to commonplace now. She is more familiar, more at home, in the hollows of this room, with the blue and the gray and the black, the things that flash up on screen and the every now and again cry of "warning, warning."
Mace is asleep in the seat next to hers. It's not like she watches. She sits with a book in hand and reads fast, too fast maybe, but she was always good like that. She reads quickly and she thinks that she might be picking up every seventh word or so but there really isn't a story here. Maybe there is. Maybe she's overlooking it. Maybe she's watching the crosshairs on the panel before her and maybe she is letting her eyes drift up and right and back. Maybe she's watching the slight jiggle to Mace's feet, but that's as far as she will let her eyes travel.
There are rules about those things. About people, not so much the looking. But there are probably rules about that as well. Cassie is sure of it.
-
Space tastes stale.
Space echoes in funny ways, or maybe that is the fault of the ship and not the limitless void that surrounds them. Cassie doesn't know. Cassie just knows that the air doesn't taste fresh and that sound carries strange here.
Thoughts carry strange too. But then again maybe they always have.
-
"There was going to be a baby," is what she said. Then she stopped.
Never in her life had she felt so stupid.
"Go on," Searle said.
Cassie took a deep breath.
"There was going to be a baby," she said. "And now there isn't."
There's that, she had thought. There is that, and that's simple. It's simple, right?
People come and go. They are here. Then they are gone. That's simple. That's simple.
There was a baby. And now there's not.
“And?” Searle prompted.
“And nothing.” Her gaze had turned to the window. The blinds were drawn against the gray day and the scattered collection of dead trees.
“I have a greater purpose now,” she said. “I couldn’t sacrifice that.”
“I understand.”
Searle had nodded again and she had known. He didn’t understand at all.
-
Cassie went military for lack of options. Cassie went military because she could, because there were things like money and scholarships buried in it and she needed that, she wanted that. She went to college and studied literature and when she graduated she learned to fly planes and she learned to keep her head down and she learned that being a woman in the service isn't half the disaster everyone she ever met tried to lead her to believe.
She doesn't believe in these things though and that always set her apart. Guns bored her. Bombs were a waste. Violence was uncalled for and the very thought of flying over some distant, unheard of country to way-lay them with tonnage after tonnage of explosion and fire and smoke and shit made her sick.
But then the world started to end. Then the scientists told them the sun was dying. So that was that and Cassie never rode over countries far and distant. Cassie never dropped bombs on people, never dropped aid packages, never got to experience that horror she would only ever relate to in sideways glances and the written word: war.
"They want to take you to the sun," they told Cassie.
And then the dreams began.
-
“And how do you like the team?” Searle asked. “How do you feel that you are fitting in with the team?”
“They’re nice,” Cassie had said.
“They seem real nice,” she said.
-
When Cassie met Mace in training his arms were crossed against his chest and he was still against a wall.
His back was straight, posture perfect in that overly conditioned way that reeks of training and discipline. Hair cropped short, no facial hair, sweats, not a uniform, but all the same his appearance screamed "military."
Cassie had thought, I will never look like you. And she was right.
Despite her years in the service, despite her expert handling of every stick, switch and dial in the cockpit, her quiet confidence and knowledge, there was still that stoop to her shoulders, still that hangdog expression ghosting over her eyes.
Mace was like stone. Cassie wasn't sure what she was supposed to be.
-
“Are you asleep?” Cassie asks.
“Yes,” Mace grumbles.
“Oh,” she says.
“What do you want?” he sighs.
“Nothing,” she says.
“Why are you still awake then?” She doesn’t answer him.
"We're flying into the sun," she finally says quietly. "We are actually flying into the sun."
Mace groans, throws an arm over his eyes.
"Did you miss that part of training? Because I'm pretty sure they went into some serious detail about that. Considering it is our, oh, I don't know, how did they phrase it - main objective here."
"Stop it, Mace," she says.
To her surprise he does. There is just the rustle of skin against sheet as he moves in his bunk. Cassie stays propped against the wall.
"You don't mind it?" she whispers.
He sighs low and rolls over onto his back. "I don't mind what, Cassie?" He says her name like a curse and a tease all rolled into one. He says it like he is honestly irritated with her but at the same time enjoying this. But Mace isn't that complicated. Cassie is sure of it. It is one or the other with him. There aren't these tangled emotions or thoughts or goals. She isn't sure if that is a comforting thought or the most terrifying idea ever.
"You don't mind this?" she whispers. She knows she is being vague but she can't bring herself to say what she actually means.
You don't mind that we'll probably die out here? You don't mind the dark and the fear and the heat? You don't mind that you signed up for this?
"It's our job," he grunts and then he rolls again. This time, he rolls away from her.
Cassie closes her eyes and rests - her back against the wall.
-
"Aren't you afraid?" the walls breathe like tin and cans and a small string connecting the two. "Aren't you afraid?"
There is so much room for fear in space.
Before, Cassie was convinced that it was earth, the ground and the trees, the people, where fear was born.
She was wrong. She gets that now.
Whispers travel through open air vents and outside the windows is black, black, black -
a terrifying burst of red and orange and fire (death).
-
He finds her in the Observation Room.
Cassie sits with her elbows to her knees, her entire body caved in on itself. Mace stands behind her. They watch the sun behind the shield together.
“I mean,” Mace says, “even I don’t know the coding behind Icarus. No idea what she’s made of, it’s too complex.”
“Just like a human,” Cassie whispers, and Mace jerks his head towards her.
“No,” is all he says and the line is firm. Cassie shivers.
-
"Aren't you afraid of being forgotten forever?" is on the tip of her tongue, it's so close to the edge, day after day after day. Before they left the earth behind, before they found new things to orbit, before this, before everything she has wanted to ask.
She sat across from Searle, neat, ladylike, even and for a dim burst of a second she thought of her mother. She thought she might be proud. She thought that it might make her happy to think that despite it all, basic training and boot camp and hours of push-ups and the uniforms, the jumpsuits, that there was still something feminine left. That they hadn't taken that from her. That there were parts of herself she kept close to her chest. That she was still a girl. That she was still a scared little girl sometimes, and sitting across from Searle, hands folded neatly in her lap, her shoulders straight but not proud, that's what she thought she was.
"Aren't you afraid of being forgotten forever?" she wanted to say. But she knew. She knew, she let the words slip and then there would be a slip of red pen next to her name, maybe a checkbox marked off. "Not fit," "not ready," they might assume. "Not fit to fly." The words always sent a chill down her back.
She didn't say anything.
When Searle asked her what she feared, she merely shrugged.
"I don't let things like that get me down. I don't do that," she said, and it was half a lie.
-
The dreams began before she left the ground.
The surface of the sun reaches. Up and up and up, like the lick of a flame off a candle it tries.
She just stares. In her dreams, she stares and the reflection of the sun, it's liquid surface, is bright against the darkness of her eyes.
-
The schedules were drawn up before they left. Cassie shares most of her duties with Mace. Cassie had stared at the sheet of paper, the military time up and down the left-hand side of the paper. It filled the entire front of it. And that was it. For the next couple of years, this would be her life.
Sleep between 0100 and 0600. Breakfast duty on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 0530. Dinner duty Monday and Friday, 1800. Night shift in the cockpit, the surveillance room, Sunday, Wednesday and sometimes Saturdays - 2200 to 0500.
She had heard a laugh behind her.
When she turned around, it was Mace and he was staring at the same paper she had in her hand.
"Nice of them to add the days of the week in there for us," he had said, more to himself than her. "Don't think it's gonna matter out there, huh?"
This time he was speaking to her.
She had narrowed her eyes, mouth pulled tight in a frown and had not said a word.
Mace continued to laugh.
-
“I like routine,” is what she told Searle. “I like having a set of tasks for the day and the I like the feeling of completion at the end of it.”
“And that’s why you feel you’d be good for this?”
“No. That just helps my case.”
-
Cassie washes the dishes and Mace dries them.
The spray of the water ghosts up against the inside of her wrist. Hot, but not hot enough to scald, hurt. She scrubs at a pot, a pan. There is an apron tied low against her waist and she isn't sure why she put it on in the first place. It was like muscle memory. She had walked into the kitchen, grabbed the apron off a hook beside the door and tied it around her.
She had wiped her palms against her thighs; they had been damp.
As she washes, her hands dipping into the full tub of the sink a pang of displaced nostalgia, of home hits her, hard.
There should be a window above the sink. There should be green and trees beyond the glass. There should be the sky and the outside that she should stare at while she washes. The kitchen should be made of wood, time tried and old, not this metal, this steel, all sharp and too reflective.
She swallows down around it. There is no room for that here.
She washes off a white plate. She washes another.
"What the hell's the matter with you, huh?" Mace asks. The words aren't exactly unfriendly, but they aren't the type to broach a conversation either. It's more perfunctory than anything, and that alone is enough to make her angry.
"Nothing," she drawls. "Why?" She wipes down another plate. She notices a slight shake to her hands; she submerges them deep in the water and leaves them there for a moment. The water has cooled, tepid, lukewarm.
"Just asking," he says, but he looks at her funny all the same.
She tucks her chin to her right shoulder, away from him, and she tries to remember the sight of trees and green beyond her kitchen window.
She can't.
Everything is orange now. Everything is fire and burnt. Mace wouldn't understand that. He wants it that way, she thinks. He wants it like this.
She grabs another plate and begins to hum quietly as she washes the last of the dishes.
-
Her back aches.
She dozes slightly over the last hour of their shift while Mace promises to stay awake.
She doesn't trust him.
Her head bobs as she fights to stay awake. Her neck is at a funny angle against the back of her seat and her arms are wrapped tight about her mid-section. Machines and lights beep rhythmically, business as usual.
She can hear the sounds of fingers rifling over pages. She cracks an eye open and Mace is holding her book.
He is hunched over, bent at the middle, his elbow resting on his knee, chin in hand and he reads. There is a distinct frown on his face, eyebrows directed sharp and down. His lips are pursed.
He turns a page and the frown grows.
"You like it?" Her voice rings too loud in the room, but Mace doesn't jump. He doesn't even raise his head. He continues to read, finishes whatever page he is on and then shuts the book. He drums his fingers against the front cover and then holds it up against his lips.
"You like this?" he asks. Cassie shrugs. He looks at her like he’s smart, like she’s got some lessons to learn; there is an ache between her shoulder blades.
"It's total bullshit," he says.
Cassie arches an eyebrow, her entire body too tight, coiled up, and she holds herself even tighter, her elbow white and stark against the armrest.
"Seriously," Mace continues, "it's not that fucking complicated. Either you're in love, or you're not. Either you wanna fuck, or you don't. There doesn't need to be all of...this instead."
Cassie almost cracks a smile.
"If you say so," she says.
"What - " Mace starts then stops. His eyes are blue and they lock with hers. He looks at her like he might continue the question but rather he stares then shakes his head.
"Shift's over," he says.
Cassie stretches and stands and takes her book back.
(Their fingers brush and there’s a small tremble there and Mace won’t look at her now.
Mace had said: it's not that fucking complicated.
What Cassie hadn't said was: you're wrong, you're wrong, you're so fucking wrong).
-
“Space is different than being on base here,” Searle had warned.
Cassie had arched an eyebrow.
“I’m sure it is, doc.”
Searle had leaned forward in his leather chair.
“I know, I know. But you joke, Cassie. You joke, but space is different. There is a restlessness there and I just want you to be prepared for it.”
-
She is eating rice and staring at the mushy pile of orange that was once carrots when it happens.
Mace rests his leg against hers at the dinner table (there she goes again, she thinks - reverting back to thoughts like that, of houses and homes and families and tables specified as those reserved for dinner, it's stupid).
She thinks it was a deliberate action. One minute she was sitting there and he was sitting there and the next it was his knee bumping hers and then his thigh flush with hers.
She had not moved away.
Neither had he.
Maybe that’s how this starts.
-
Space is different.
-
The door snicks shut behind them and Cassie falls face first onto her bunk. She toes her shoes off, her arm limply reaching for her blanket and pulls it around her.
There is a whine of the thin mattress bending as Mace settles on his own, equally lacking in grace. The entire room is bathed in a dark blue light; Cassie can see him, close enough that she can see his eyes are still open and are trained on her.
“G’night,” she mumbles. She turns her body away from him, her face towards the wall.
Mace mutters something back in kind and her mind, fuzzy, reaches for sleep.
-
Mace sighs.
Cassie keeps her eyes closed and sleep is almost there, she thinks, and then Mace sighs again, deeper this time.
His knee bumps against the wall and his bunk creaks as he moves. There is silence; Cassie lays still, her shoulders tense. There is that slight whisper of a sound of movement against the fabric of the thin sheets, the same uniform white wrapped around Cassie.
Her shoulders are tense and her face is to the wall and there is a distinctive rhythm to the sound. She bites her lip, presses her knees together.
Some things you ignore, she thinks. Some things you let slide - you don’t stare in the showers, you don’t sneak glances, you don’t look around towels, you don’t watch as others dress for the day. If you catch a peek it’s one thing, and she has, she has seen before, the map of muscles along Mace’s upper back. The way his abdominal muscles narrow down to an angled point, that trail of hair there, the definition to his shoulders, his thighs. She can acknowledge things like that, she can call them accidents of confined living.
This should be the same, Cassie thinks.
Mace sighs again and the rhythm has picked up in speed. The mattress creaks again; she pictures the rise and the fall of his hips. She watches the wall, watches the spread of dark blue the ship’s lights contribute.
There is the start of a grunt and Cassie turns her head.
The sheets are pooled low about his hips and Mace’s head is thrown back, eyes screwed shut and mouth pulled tight in something like pain. His right arm moves, fast and then faster, and his hips buck beneath the sheet.
Cassie turns away and shuts her eyes.
Her mouth is dry. She presses her knees together.
-
In the shower the next morning Cassie is a little slower.
She is the first one in and the last one out. She is slow with her towel, not quick and modest like she normally is, and her hair drips wet down her bare spine, slipping past the small of her back.
She is slow with her towel and if Mace sees her, he sees her.
That’s how this works, isn’t it?
-
“I don’t make the same mistake twice,” she told Searle.
Searle had smiled, made a note, and then nodded.
“I know,” he said.
She smiled, small and wan.
(No you don’t, she forgot to say).
-
There is a pattern that emerges - Cassie can see it:
They share the same schedule.
He will watch her and she will watch him.
He will rest his thigh against hers at all meals and the heat of it, his skin beneath the fabric, hers, will be enough to make her hands clammy and damp.
After a shift they will report to the bunks, Mace will jack off and Cassie will listen.
In the morning, there are the showers and Cassie will stand naked, drying each inch of skin with a confident slowness and ease, breasts bare, pale skin in the fluorescent light and she will feel one pair of eyes burnt against her flesh.
They share the same schedule, and they have from the start.
-
They leave their post that morning and Cassie’s eyes are wide and weary. She has a bent copy of Nabokov in her hand.
Mace walks heavy behind her.
The door opens to the bunks and they both enter, the lights full on, the entire room aglow in a surreal shade of white.
She blinks. The doors close.
Mace pushes her against the wall and her book drops to the floor.
-
Searle had looked concerned.
“The father isn’t going to be an issue?” he asked.
“How do you mean?” Her words were measured and careful.
“I mean, you aren’t going to suffer from separation issues. You’re okay leaving him?”
“Yes.”
“I apologize in advance, but Cassie. If I am going to let you do this, still. I need to know. The father - he wasn’t one of the crew was he?”
He wasn’t.
She told him this. She told him this, and her mind still lit on Mace, stark male musculature, and she had not fought very hard to dismiss it.
-
“This has got to stop,” he says, an angry hiss and Cassie tilts her chin up, she thinks, in defiance.
“What does?” she says evenly.
Mace looks down. The press of the wall against the bare back of her neck sends a chill down her spine and Mace stares at the floor, their feet.
“Fuck, Cassie,” he says and it is just about the saddest two words she has ever heard. He says them the same way people say, “I lost,” like, “It’s gone,” like, “I forget,” and everything longing and mournful and missing.
She moves a hand toward him, his chest, but Mace is faster and his hands grab and cradle her hips, pulling her against him. He’s hard against her, that space between her legs, and she shuts her eyes fast because this is breaking a rule, breaking all those rules they’ve set with her back turned and his bunk and her naked body in the shower.
“Oh,” is all she breathes, and then he is pushing her back to the wall, the hand on her hip slipping beneath her waistband. His fingers are rough against her skin, the crease from hip to thigh and lower; her fingers flex against her thighs.
Her vision keeps flickering as her lids dance heavy and his fingers skid past the edge of her briefs. She isn’t sure whose breathing is more labored - his or hers - as his thumb presses firm against her and like magnets and circuitry and all those things he studied and she didn’t her hips arch off the wall and towards him. Mace’s face is serious, a look composed of concentration, like he’s teaching her a lesson here, like this is a punishment for the both of them. His thumb presses and two fingers skid past and then in.
She gasps and he’s got a fist hard against the wall next to her face.
His fingers feel like too much inside her.
Cassie sighs against Mace’s mouth, his open mouth, and when his tongue slips out, all damp and pink, to wet his lips the tip of it brushes against her bottom lip. The muscles of her lower abdomen contract; it’s too much she thinks. She thinks orange again, she thinks the surface of the sun, the brightness reflected back across her own eyes.
His tongue brushes against her bottom lip, by accident at first. He does it again, experimental in a way that defies her characterization of him.
He does it a third time - his tongue reaching out to her. This time he slides it past the opening of her mouth and in, hot tongue against tongue, before his own lips close over hers.
Cassie grabs Mace by the nape of the neck.
She kisses him back.
-
There is nothing simple about this, she thinks. Pressed against the cold metal of the wall, squirming against the length of him - Mace still has a hand down her briefs, now motionless against her as he just cups her, his other hand alternating between flat and a fist against the wall.
Their kisses are sloppy. His teeth nick against her chin and her own mouth smears wet somewhere along his cheekbone as he does it. Her knees tremble and her eyes slant shut and Mace presses the heel of his hand hard against her.
“Look at me,” he mutters under her jaw and then pulls back.
She does.
His eyes are the same blue, the same bluish-green she has been trying to remember for days now. The trees outside the window of the house where she grew up. Blue and green like an ocean she never swam in. Blue and green like the hospital gown she wore in that blue and green room. Blue and green and green and blue, like nature, like earth, like home, not here. His fingers twist, the back of his hand pulling her underwear down more, the elastic biting at the bottom of her hipbones. They twist first and then in, a twist again and she keeps her eyes open when she comes.
He blinks. The blue and the green is overwhelmed by his blown pupils, dark centers spreading outward.
He presses both hands flat against the wall next to her head and leans above her. He breathes. He breathes heavy and Cassie’s knees still tremble.
“Mace - ”
“No,” he says. He leans harder against his hands, his elbows bending, the start of a push-up, she thinks. His forehead rests against hers, sweaty, his breath hot against her face.
He pulls back completely and leaves the room.
-
The pattern is disrupted.
Space is so cold, Cassie thinks.
She begins to forget the blue.
(She begins to forget the blue, though she tries and she tries and she tries).
-
Her fingers are soapy and Mace holds the dish towel. When they are finished, when the dishes are returned to their respective shelves and Cassie’s apron is returned to its respective hook on the wall, she stops him.
“Okay,” she says and Mace stares at a point past her shoulder.
“I get it,” Cassie says. “You want simplicity. You want it simple and I don’t fit into that. I get it,” she says.
Mace did not reply. Cassie takes a step forward and Mace watches first her feet and then her legs, her hips. Finally his eyes settle back on her face, her eyes. His are narrowed; hers are dark and wide.
She nods once, stares, then turns and walks away.
(There were several things she had wanted to have said to Mace.
Love’s not simple. That’s one of them. Love is never simple and if you have a simple love you’re doing something wrong.
But maybe that was his point: they were doing something wrong).
She keeps her face turned to the wall that night; her eyes burn against the silence.
-
“I think you’re ready,” Searle had said.
“I think you’re going to be fine,” he said.
-
That night she dreams of the surface of the sun. She drifts too close, too far down, too close. Too bright.
And it burns, it burns, it burns.
Dust to dust; she breathes.
(A week later they find Mercury).
-
fin.
sunshine. their backs are against the wall - maybe that’s why, or maybe it’s even simpler than that: space is different, and they are lonely and they are restless. cassie; cassie/mace. rated r. 4636 words. pre-movie.
notes: Haha, guys. I can't believe I wrote this. That said, it was good fun and probably would not have been done without thisisironic, haha. Oh! And this site? Where a lot of this came from, heh.
the sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
(murphy, samuel beckett)
“You can tell me,” Searle had said.
And then she did.
She told him everything.
-
“Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,” she can recall hearing as a child.
“Dust to dust,” she repeats.
The trees were all dead at home. Dead and grey and the sky held high in kind.
-
The lights are blue and not as bright as they were the first day she sat down at the control panel. Then, the lights had been too much, or so she had thought. It was hard to imagine a future of day after day after day of sitting there, dials and buttons and things that squawked and alarmed, Icarus, that voice, the slight swivel to her chair as she settled into place.
It is something akin to commonplace now. She is more familiar, more at home, in the hollows of this room, with the blue and the gray and the black, the things that flash up on screen and the every now and again cry of "warning, warning."
Mace is asleep in the seat next to hers. It's not like she watches. She sits with a book in hand and reads fast, too fast maybe, but she was always good like that. She reads quickly and she thinks that she might be picking up every seventh word or so but there really isn't a story here. Maybe there is. Maybe she's overlooking it. Maybe she's watching the crosshairs on the panel before her and maybe she is letting her eyes drift up and right and back. Maybe she's watching the slight jiggle to Mace's feet, but that's as far as she will let her eyes travel.
There are rules about those things. About people, not so much the looking. But there are probably rules about that as well. Cassie is sure of it.
-
Space tastes stale.
Space echoes in funny ways, or maybe that is the fault of the ship and not the limitless void that surrounds them. Cassie doesn't know. Cassie just knows that the air doesn't taste fresh and that sound carries strange here.
Thoughts carry strange too. But then again maybe they always have.
-
"There was going to be a baby," is what she said. Then she stopped.
Never in her life had she felt so stupid.
"Go on," Searle said.
Cassie took a deep breath.
"There was going to be a baby," she said. "And now there isn't."
There's that, she had thought. There is that, and that's simple. It's simple, right?
People come and go. They are here. Then they are gone. That's simple. That's simple.
There was a baby. And now there's not.
“And?” Searle prompted.
“And nothing.” Her gaze had turned to the window. The blinds were drawn against the gray day and the scattered collection of dead trees.
“I have a greater purpose now,” she said. “I couldn’t sacrifice that.”
“I understand.”
Searle had nodded again and she had known. He didn’t understand at all.
-
Cassie went military for lack of options. Cassie went military because she could, because there were things like money and scholarships buried in it and she needed that, she wanted that. She went to college and studied literature and when she graduated she learned to fly planes and she learned to keep her head down and she learned that being a woman in the service isn't half the disaster everyone she ever met tried to lead her to believe.
She doesn't believe in these things though and that always set her apart. Guns bored her. Bombs were a waste. Violence was uncalled for and the very thought of flying over some distant, unheard of country to way-lay them with tonnage after tonnage of explosion and fire and smoke and shit made her sick.
But then the world started to end. Then the scientists told them the sun was dying. So that was that and Cassie never rode over countries far and distant. Cassie never dropped bombs on people, never dropped aid packages, never got to experience that horror she would only ever relate to in sideways glances and the written word: war.
"They want to take you to the sun," they told Cassie.
And then the dreams began.
-
“And how do you like the team?” Searle asked. “How do you feel that you are fitting in with the team?”
“They’re nice,” Cassie had said.
“They seem real nice,” she said.
-
When Cassie met Mace in training his arms were crossed against his chest and he was still against a wall.
His back was straight, posture perfect in that overly conditioned way that reeks of training and discipline. Hair cropped short, no facial hair, sweats, not a uniform, but all the same his appearance screamed "military."
Cassie had thought, I will never look like you. And she was right.
Despite her years in the service, despite her expert handling of every stick, switch and dial in the cockpit, her quiet confidence and knowledge, there was still that stoop to her shoulders, still that hangdog expression ghosting over her eyes.
Mace was like stone. Cassie wasn't sure what she was supposed to be.
-
“Are you asleep?” Cassie asks.
“Yes,” Mace grumbles.
“Oh,” she says.
“What do you want?” he sighs.
“Nothing,” she says.
“Why are you still awake then?” She doesn’t answer him.
"We're flying into the sun," she finally says quietly. "We are actually flying into the sun."
Mace groans, throws an arm over his eyes.
"Did you miss that part of training? Because I'm pretty sure they went into some serious detail about that. Considering it is our, oh, I don't know, how did they phrase it - main objective here."
"Stop it, Mace," she says.
To her surprise he does. There is just the rustle of skin against sheet as he moves in his bunk. Cassie stays propped against the wall.
"You don't mind it?" she whispers.
He sighs low and rolls over onto his back. "I don't mind what, Cassie?" He says her name like a curse and a tease all rolled into one. He says it like he is honestly irritated with her but at the same time enjoying this. But Mace isn't that complicated. Cassie is sure of it. It is one or the other with him. There aren't these tangled emotions or thoughts or goals. She isn't sure if that is a comforting thought or the most terrifying idea ever.
"You don't mind this?" she whispers. She knows she is being vague but she can't bring herself to say what she actually means.
You don't mind that we'll probably die out here? You don't mind the dark and the fear and the heat? You don't mind that you signed up for this?
"It's our job," he grunts and then he rolls again. This time, he rolls away from her.
Cassie closes her eyes and rests - her back against the wall.
-
"Aren't you afraid?" the walls breathe like tin and cans and a small string connecting the two. "Aren't you afraid?"
There is so much room for fear in space.
Before, Cassie was convinced that it was earth, the ground and the trees, the people, where fear was born.
She was wrong. She gets that now.
Whispers travel through open air vents and outside the windows is black, black, black -
a terrifying burst of red and orange and fire (death).
-
He finds her in the Observation Room.
Cassie sits with her elbows to her knees, her entire body caved in on itself. Mace stands behind her. They watch the sun behind the shield together.
“I mean,” Mace says, “even I don’t know the coding behind Icarus. No idea what she’s made of, it’s too complex.”
“Just like a human,” Cassie whispers, and Mace jerks his head towards her.
“No,” is all he says and the line is firm. Cassie shivers.
-
"Aren't you afraid of being forgotten forever?" is on the tip of her tongue, it's so close to the edge, day after day after day. Before they left the earth behind, before they found new things to orbit, before this, before everything she has wanted to ask.
She sat across from Searle, neat, ladylike, even and for a dim burst of a second she thought of her mother. She thought she might be proud. She thought that it might make her happy to think that despite it all, basic training and boot camp and hours of push-ups and the uniforms, the jumpsuits, that there was still something feminine left. That they hadn't taken that from her. That there were parts of herself she kept close to her chest. That she was still a girl. That she was still a scared little girl sometimes, and sitting across from Searle, hands folded neatly in her lap, her shoulders straight but not proud, that's what she thought she was.
"Aren't you afraid of being forgotten forever?" she wanted to say. But she knew. She knew, she let the words slip and then there would be a slip of red pen next to her name, maybe a checkbox marked off. "Not fit," "not ready," they might assume. "Not fit to fly." The words always sent a chill down her back.
She didn't say anything.
When Searle asked her what she feared, she merely shrugged.
"I don't let things like that get me down. I don't do that," she said, and it was half a lie.
-
The dreams began before she left the ground.
The surface of the sun reaches. Up and up and up, like the lick of a flame off a candle it tries.
She just stares. In her dreams, she stares and the reflection of the sun, it's liquid surface, is bright against the darkness of her eyes.
-
The schedules were drawn up before they left. Cassie shares most of her duties with Mace. Cassie had stared at the sheet of paper, the military time up and down the left-hand side of the paper. It filled the entire front of it. And that was it. For the next couple of years, this would be her life.
Sleep between 0100 and 0600. Breakfast duty on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 0530. Dinner duty Monday and Friday, 1800. Night shift in the cockpit, the surveillance room, Sunday, Wednesday and sometimes Saturdays - 2200 to 0500.
She had heard a laugh behind her.
When she turned around, it was Mace and he was staring at the same paper she had in her hand.
"Nice of them to add the days of the week in there for us," he had said, more to himself than her. "Don't think it's gonna matter out there, huh?"
This time he was speaking to her.
She had narrowed her eyes, mouth pulled tight in a frown and had not said a word.
Mace continued to laugh.
-
“I like routine,” is what she told Searle. “I like having a set of tasks for the day and the I like the feeling of completion at the end of it.”
“And that’s why you feel you’d be good for this?”
“No. That just helps my case.”
-
Cassie washes the dishes and Mace dries them.
The spray of the water ghosts up against the inside of her wrist. Hot, but not hot enough to scald, hurt. She scrubs at a pot, a pan. There is an apron tied low against her waist and she isn't sure why she put it on in the first place. It was like muscle memory. She had walked into the kitchen, grabbed the apron off a hook beside the door and tied it around her.
She had wiped her palms against her thighs; they had been damp.
As she washes, her hands dipping into the full tub of the sink a pang of displaced nostalgia, of home hits her, hard.
There should be a window above the sink. There should be green and trees beyond the glass. There should be the sky and the outside that she should stare at while she washes. The kitchen should be made of wood, time tried and old, not this metal, this steel, all sharp and too reflective.
She swallows down around it. There is no room for that here.
She washes off a white plate. She washes another.
"What the hell's the matter with you, huh?" Mace asks. The words aren't exactly unfriendly, but they aren't the type to broach a conversation either. It's more perfunctory than anything, and that alone is enough to make her angry.
"Nothing," she drawls. "Why?" She wipes down another plate. She notices a slight shake to her hands; she submerges them deep in the water and leaves them there for a moment. The water has cooled, tepid, lukewarm.
"Just asking," he says, but he looks at her funny all the same.
She tucks her chin to her right shoulder, away from him, and she tries to remember the sight of trees and green beyond her kitchen window.
She can't.
Everything is orange now. Everything is fire and burnt. Mace wouldn't understand that. He wants it that way, she thinks. He wants it like this.
She grabs another plate and begins to hum quietly as she washes the last of the dishes.
-
Her back aches.
She dozes slightly over the last hour of their shift while Mace promises to stay awake.
She doesn't trust him.
Her head bobs as she fights to stay awake. Her neck is at a funny angle against the back of her seat and her arms are wrapped tight about her mid-section. Machines and lights beep rhythmically, business as usual.
She can hear the sounds of fingers rifling over pages. She cracks an eye open and Mace is holding her book.
He is hunched over, bent at the middle, his elbow resting on his knee, chin in hand and he reads. There is a distinct frown on his face, eyebrows directed sharp and down. His lips are pursed.
He turns a page and the frown grows.
"You like it?" Her voice rings too loud in the room, but Mace doesn't jump. He doesn't even raise his head. He continues to read, finishes whatever page he is on and then shuts the book. He drums his fingers against the front cover and then holds it up against his lips.
"You like this?" he asks. Cassie shrugs. He looks at her like he’s smart, like she’s got some lessons to learn; there is an ache between her shoulder blades.
"It's total bullshit," he says.
Cassie arches an eyebrow, her entire body too tight, coiled up, and she holds herself even tighter, her elbow white and stark against the armrest.
"Seriously," Mace continues, "it's not that fucking complicated. Either you're in love, or you're not. Either you wanna fuck, or you don't. There doesn't need to be all of...this instead."
Cassie almost cracks a smile.
"If you say so," she says.
"What - " Mace starts then stops. His eyes are blue and they lock with hers. He looks at her like he might continue the question but rather he stares then shakes his head.
"Shift's over," he says.
Cassie stretches and stands and takes her book back.
(Their fingers brush and there’s a small tremble there and Mace won’t look at her now.
Mace had said: it's not that fucking complicated.
What Cassie hadn't said was: you're wrong, you're wrong, you're so fucking wrong).
-
“Space is different than being on base here,” Searle had warned.
Cassie had arched an eyebrow.
“I’m sure it is, doc.”
Searle had leaned forward in his leather chair.
“I know, I know. But you joke, Cassie. You joke, but space is different. There is a restlessness there and I just want you to be prepared for it.”
-
She is eating rice and staring at the mushy pile of orange that was once carrots when it happens.
Mace rests his leg against hers at the dinner table (there she goes again, she thinks - reverting back to thoughts like that, of houses and homes and families and tables specified as those reserved for dinner, it's stupid).
She thinks it was a deliberate action. One minute she was sitting there and he was sitting there and the next it was his knee bumping hers and then his thigh flush with hers.
She had not moved away.
Neither had he.
Maybe that’s how this starts.
-
Space is different.
-
The door snicks shut behind them and Cassie falls face first onto her bunk. She toes her shoes off, her arm limply reaching for her blanket and pulls it around her.
There is a whine of the thin mattress bending as Mace settles on his own, equally lacking in grace. The entire room is bathed in a dark blue light; Cassie can see him, close enough that she can see his eyes are still open and are trained on her.
“G’night,” she mumbles. She turns her body away from him, her face towards the wall.
Mace mutters something back in kind and her mind, fuzzy, reaches for sleep.
-
Mace sighs.
Cassie keeps her eyes closed and sleep is almost there, she thinks, and then Mace sighs again, deeper this time.
His knee bumps against the wall and his bunk creaks as he moves. There is silence; Cassie lays still, her shoulders tense. There is that slight whisper of a sound of movement against the fabric of the thin sheets, the same uniform white wrapped around Cassie.
Her shoulders are tense and her face is to the wall and there is a distinctive rhythm to the sound. She bites her lip, presses her knees together.
Some things you ignore, she thinks. Some things you let slide - you don’t stare in the showers, you don’t sneak glances, you don’t look around towels, you don’t watch as others dress for the day. If you catch a peek it’s one thing, and she has, she has seen before, the map of muscles along Mace’s upper back. The way his abdominal muscles narrow down to an angled point, that trail of hair there, the definition to his shoulders, his thighs. She can acknowledge things like that, she can call them accidents of confined living.
This should be the same, Cassie thinks.
Mace sighs again and the rhythm has picked up in speed. The mattress creaks again; she pictures the rise and the fall of his hips. She watches the wall, watches the spread of dark blue the ship’s lights contribute.
There is the start of a grunt and Cassie turns her head.
The sheets are pooled low about his hips and Mace’s head is thrown back, eyes screwed shut and mouth pulled tight in something like pain. His right arm moves, fast and then faster, and his hips buck beneath the sheet.
Cassie turns away and shuts her eyes.
Her mouth is dry. She presses her knees together.
-
In the shower the next morning Cassie is a little slower.
She is the first one in and the last one out. She is slow with her towel, not quick and modest like she normally is, and her hair drips wet down her bare spine, slipping past the small of her back.
She is slow with her towel and if Mace sees her, he sees her.
That’s how this works, isn’t it?
-
“I don’t make the same mistake twice,” she told Searle.
Searle had smiled, made a note, and then nodded.
“I know,” he said.
She smiled, small and wan.
(No you don’t, she forgot to say).
-
There is a pattern that emerges - Cassie can see it:
They share the same schedule.
He will watch her and she will watch him.
He will rest his thigh against hers at all meals and the heat of it, his skin beneath the fabric, hers, will be enough to make her hands clammy and damp.
After a shift they will report to the bunks, Mace will jack off and Cassie will listen.
In the morning, there are the showers and Cassie will stand naked, drying each inch of skin with a confident slowness and ease, breasts bare, pale skin in the fluorescent light and she will feel one pair of eyes burnt against her flesh.
They share the same schedule, and they have from the start.
-
They leave their post that morning and Cassie’s eyes are wide and weary. She has a bent copy of Nabokov in her hand.
Mace walks heavy behind her.
The door opens to the bunks and they both enter, the lights full on, the entire room aglow in a surreal shade of white.
She blinks. The doors close.
Mace pushes her against the wall and her book drops to the floor.
-
Searle had looked concerned.
“The father isn’t going to be an issue?” he asked.
“How do you mean?” Her words were measured and careful.
“I mean, you aren’t going to suffer from separation issues. You’re okay leaving him?”
“Yes.”
“I apologize in advance, but Cassie. If I am going to let you do this, still. I need to know. The father - he wasn’t one of the crew was he?”
He wasn’t.
She told him this. She told him this, and her mind still lit on Mace, stark male musculature, and she had not fought very hard to dismiss it.
-
“This has got to stop,” he says, an angry hiss and Cassie tilts her chin up, she thinks, in defiance.
“What does?” she says evenly.
Mace looks down. The press of the wall against the bare back of her neck sends a chill down her spine and Mace stares at the floor, their feet.
“Fuck, Cassie,” he says and it is just about the saddest two words she has ever heard. He says them the same way people say, “I lost,” like, “It’s gone,” like, “I forget,” and everything longing and mournful and missing.
She moves a hand toward him, his chest, but Mace is faster and his hands grab and cradle her hips, pulling her against him. He’s hard against her, that space between her legs, and she shuts her eyes fast because this is breaking a rule, breaking all those rules they’ve set with her back turned and his bunk and her naked body in the shower.
“Oh,” is all she breathes, and then he is pushing her back to the wall, the hand on her hip slipping beneath her waistband. His fingers are rough against her skin, the crease from hip to thigh and lower; her fingers flex against her thighs.
Her vision keeps flickering as her lids dance heavy and his fingers skid past the edge of her briefs. She isn’t sure whose breathing is more labored - his or hers - as his thumb presses firm against her and like magnets and circuitry and all those things he studied and she didn’t her hips arch off the wall and towards him. Mace’s face is serious, a look composed of concentration, like he’s teaching her a lesson here, like this is a punishment for the both of them. His thumb presses and two fingers skid past and then in.
She gasps and he’s got a fist hard against the wall next to her face.
His fingers feel like too much inside her.
Cassie sighs against Mace’s mouth, his open mouth, and when his tongue slips out, all damp and pink, to wet his lips the tip of it brushes against her bottom lip. The muscles of her lower abdomen contract; it’s too much she thinks. She thinks orange again, she thinks the surface of the sun, the brightness reflected back across her own eyes.
His tongue brushes against her bottom lip, by accident at first. He does it again, experimental in a way that defies her characterization of him.
He does it a third time - his tongue reaching out to her. This time he slides it past the opening of her mouth and in, hot tongue against tongue, before his own lips close over hers.
Cassie grabs Mace by the nape of the neck.
She kisses him back.
-
There is nothing simple about this, she thinks. Pressed against the cold metal of the wall, squirming against the length of him - Mace still has a hand down her briefs, now motionless against her as he just cups her, his other hand alternating between flat and a fist against the wall.
Their kisses are sloppy. His teeth nick against her chin and her own mouth smears wet somewhere along his cheekbone as he does it. Her knees tremble and her eyes slant shut and Mace presses the heel of his hand hard against her.
“Look at me,” he mutters under her jaw and then pulls back.
She does.
His eyes are the same blue, the same bluish-green she has been trying to remember for days now. The trees outside the window of the house where she grew up. Blue and green like an ocean she never swam in. Blue and green like the hospital gown she wore in that blue and green room. Blue and green and green and blue, like nature, like earth, like home, not here. His fingers twist, the back of his hand pulling her underwear down more, the elastic biting at the bottom of her hipbones. They twist first and then in, a twist again and she keeps her eyes open when she comes.
He blinks. The blue and the green is overwhelmed by his blown pupils, dark centers spreading outward.
He presses both hands flat against the wall next to her head and leans above her. He breathes. He breathes heavy and Cassie’s knees still tremble.
“Mace - ”
“No,” he says. He leans harder against his hands, his elbows bending, the start of a push-up, she thinks. His forehead rests against hers, sweaty, his breath hot against her face.
He pulls back completely and leaves the room.
-
The pattern is disrupted.
Space is so cold, Cassie thinks.
She begins to forget the blue.
(She begins to forget the blue, though she tries and she tries and she tries).
-
Her fingers are soapy and Mace holds the dish towel. When they are finished, when the dishes are returned to their respective shelves and Cassie’s apron is returned to its respective hook on the wall, she stops him.
“Okay,” she says and Mace stares at a point past her shoulder.
“I get it,” Cassie says. “You want simplicity. You want it simple and I don’t fit into that. I get it,” she says.
Mace did not reply. Cassie takes a step forward and Mace watches first her feet and then her legs, her hips. Finally his eyes settle back on her face, her eyes. His are narrowed; hers are dark and wide.
She nods once, stares, then turns and walks away.
(There were several things she had wanted to have said to Mace.
Love’s not simple. That’s one of them. Love is never simple and if you have a simple love you’re doing something wrong.
But maybe that was his point: they were doing something wrong).
She keeps her face turned to the wall that night; her eyes burn against the silence.
-
“I think you’re ready,” Searle had said.
“I think you’re going to be fine,” he said.
-
That night she dreams of the surface of the sun. She drifts too close, too far down, too close. Too bright.
And it burns, it burns, it burns.
Dust to dust; she breathes.
(A week later they find Mercury).
-
fin.