Work Text:
“I’ve got better luck in my head
We’re just ghosts inside my bed
I’ve got better luck in my head
Playing poker with the dead.”
Captain Isabel Lovelace dreams. Dreams of cards, poker on the Hephaestus, just like her crew had done hundreds of times, just to kill time…just to kill…
Cutter is dealing. Lovelace thinks she has a good hand, but he’s smiling like he knows something she doesn’t. Rhea quietly beeps a warning overhead, but she can’t understand…
Fisher is out first, and quickly. His cards are spread across the table, stark black and white against the dull gray of steel. Fisher is gone and Lovelace’s arm hurts and Selberg is frowning at her and Cutter hasn’t stopped smiling once…
And then Cutter’s dealing the next hand, without reshuffling the cards, and there isn’t time to think…
She is there and not there and the pain in her arm is a long way away…
Lambert is panicking, clinging to his cards like a lifeline. Selberg’s face is blank again. Cutter keeps looking at him like they’re on the same side of an inside joke, but Selberg won’t meet his eyes, or hers. His hand is the only one that matters. Lovelace thinks she glimpses one of the cards from Fisher’s hand between his fingers, before he swiftly angles them out of her sight.
Through her daze, Lovelace doesn’t see how it happens – she catches fragments, sees Lambert growing more frightened and trying to hide it, Selberg playing mechanically and efficiently, and Cutter’s grin growing, widening…
And again it’s sudden, and Lambert is gone, his cards scattered in a blur of crimson diamonds and hearts on the table. Rhea’s beeping grows more rapid, more insistent – then stops, and is silent, and all that’s left to Lovelace is the thudding of her heart, too loud in her ears.
And then it’s only Fourier and Hui, sitting close together, and Selberg, who still won’t look at anyone or anything but the cards in his hand, rearranging them over and over like if he somehow puts them in a different pattern they’ll spell out a different result.
Selberg wins the next hand. He doesn’t look happy about it, face impassive as Hui leaves the table, cards dropped face-up in another spread of red – a suite of hearts. A good hand, but not good enough. Fourier looks after him, almost catches his hand as he goes to leave.
And then it’s Fourier and Lovelace and Selberg, all playing hard and fast, hand after hand, winning and losing and keeping in balance and for a second everything seems normal.
But Cutter’s still sitting at the head of the table, still smiling as he deals each hand, and Fourier’s frowning at her cards, and Lovelace is hoping, hoping it’s a bluff…
But neither Fourier nor Hui never could hold a bluff, and in a matter of seconds Fourier’s cards are scattered on the table, and she’s standing, and Selberg is collecting the chips…Lovelace wants to stop him, wants to reach up and grab Fourier’s arm and pull her back in for the next hand…
But Fourier’s gone, stepping back to join Hui and Lambert and Fisher and Rhea in the shadows and Lovelace can feel their eyes on the back of her neck. She can feel their eyes, judgmental as she faces Selberg across the table, she can feel their eyes even as Selberg refuses to meet hers, as she looks at her hand and knows that as good as it is, it won’t be good enough…
She knows it from the blur of red and black and white (like the way that Selberg can read her fear and fury all over her) of her cards and she knows it from the way that Cutter’s smiling, same as before but somehow different, like he’s known from the start that this is the way this game will end, but it’s still fun, for him, to watch the conclusion. She knows there’s nothing she can do, not when Cutter’s holding all the cards.
Lovelace slips an ace up her sleeve. She stands up, throws her cards across the table; turns and leaves the room of the Hephaestus where they’re playing. Lovelace turns the corner of the long hallway of the station, and walks into a room. The same room. Different players, but the same room.
Captain Isabel Lovelace wakes up.