Work Text:
“You don’t need somebody standing beside you. You don’t, but you do.”
— Lila, Marilynne Robinson
It is cold, in the compound. Not an all-encompassing, bone-clattering kind of cold but something slower, a cold that starts at your fingertips and reaches in, raising goosebumps with each moment of restless quiet. Madeline sits on the counter closest to the archway, her feet just barely reaching the ground, watching the screensaver on one of the abandoned computers. It’s one of those tube programs, all the colors snaking around each other like bumper cars at an amusement park, reaching and tangling and never hitting the corners just right.
Madeline tries to focus on the tubes. Whoever programmed this screensaver doesn’t know shit about color coordination: the green clashes with the yellow, the purple clashes with the blue, and all of it is intertwining at just-slightly-off widths. No matter how many iterations the thing runs, the pieces just don’t fit.
Thacker is back. She keeps circling to this, circling and not quite hitting, as the tubes snake around the screen and land just off-center. Thacker is back, someone pulled him from the Quell, maybe it was Aubrey, that girl is getting stronger every day, or maybe it was someone from Sylvain, or it was someone else entirely, she’s been out of it for—how long has it been? Two months? She was keeping track of the days at first, counting her meals and pee breaks with scratches on the wall, but she ran out of space, or she slept wrong, and it all runs together now. Two months, three, what does it matter. They don’t need her anymore. Left her here, dangling on the FBI’s cold table, the last line of defense. She always thought she’d go out in the woods, rifle in one hand and knife in the other, screaming something about protecting her family. It’s almost worse than the capture and the questioning to be left here, quiet.
“HELLO, HUMANS!”
Madeline turns, and nearly tumbles off the table. The door cracks and falls open—didn’t it have a keypad and retina scanner before—and through it strides a woman—a woman? Something like a woman, impossibly tall and dark, in a tunic over armor that shines faintly in the dim light. Madeline has to tilt her head up to see her face. And it’s—she hasn’t seen an unfamiliar face in months, so this could be the loneliness talking, but what a face. Her fingers itch to sketch it, to shape it in clay, to carve it line by line into the trunk of an oak tree. The lines, the angles, the way her mouth turns up and stretches towards each ear, grinning as though it’s what she was born to do.
“I AM GLAD TO SEE YOU ALL ARE STILL ALIVE.” She keeps talking, but Madeline can’t quite make out the content of her words through the tone, rich and deep like a bass trombone. Madeline was never really one for classical music, prefers jazz and sometimes classic rock, but she thinks there’s a symphony where the trombones wait three movements and then come in at the end, blaring low and clear and finally grounding the rest of the orchestra. That is what the woman sounds like, she thinks. The booming, the grounding.
Agent Stern starts to approach her, pulling a gun from his belt as he moves, but Barclay stops him with a hand to his forearm, and damn if there isn’t a whole gallery’s worth of emotion there.
“Hey,” Barclay says. “Glad to see you, too. Indoor voices, though, right?”
The tall woman nods and lowers her volume. Madeline mourns the lack—it feels too quiet now again. But still, she can admire the woman’s long arms, their definition, the easy way she holds her sword as though it is a twig she could snap. It’s much more successfully distracting than the screensaver.
Barclay and the newcomer talk for a minute, exchanging updates—Madeline catches something about portals, and reinforcements, and Leo staying on Mount Kepler—and then the tall woman leans her long sword up against the wall and comes to sit by Madeline. She is even more striking up close: the fluorescent light shines on her shaved head, like a spotlight installed just for the purpose, and Madeline can make out patterns along her scalp, intricate lines of blue and turquoise that her fingers itch to trace.
“Hello,” the tall woman says. “We have not met. I am Minerva.” And her voice, too, is more striking: not booming as it was before, not filling the room, but emanating, turning every airwave to kneel to her vibrations.
Minerva holds out a hand. Madeline takes it, her fingers moving to clasp slowly, and Minerva squeezes, then shakes. Up, down, up, down, up, down. Each pulse exaggerated, as though steeling for a recoil.
“You have a strong grip,” Madeline says.
Minerva smiles—and it’s ridiculous, this smile. The size, the intensity, the sheer brightness of it, her teeth shining under the fluorescents. It should be locked up in this fucking FBI facility as a biological weapon.
“So do you,” she replies.
She holds Madeline’s hand a moment too long for politeness, then drops it, resting both her palms on the table.
“I’m Madeline Cobb,” Madeline says. “But you can call me Mama. Everyone else does.”
“Madeline Cobb,” Minerva repeats. The name sounds different, from her—deep and rumbling, as though pulled up from somewhere deep beneath a mountain. Mined, like coal or diamonds. “Why does everyone call you Mama?”
“Because I run Amnesty Lodge, the refuge for folks from Sylvain. I’m kind-of like a surrogate parent to them, I guess.”
“Amnesty Lodge.” Minerva nods. “Yes. Duck Newton and Aubrey Lady Flame have told me about you, Madeline Cobb.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. They said you are a great warrior, and Aubrey is very fond of your—some special type of pastry, I believe—”
“Banana bread?” Madeline does make a mean banana bread. It was her mother’s recipe, but she added a little bit of rum. It brings out the sweetness.
“Banana bread, yes.” Minerva smiles again, and Madeline ducks her head so that she doesn’t do something embarrassing, like smile back. “She tried to make it, a few weeks ago,” Minerva goes on, “but messed up the timing and nearly burned down Duck’s apartment.”
Madeline can just picture it—Aubrey’s face when she smelled the smoke, her frantic attempts to open every window, probably some magical attempt fire extinguishing that only stoked the flame, Duck coming in and insisting she replace the burnt pan even though he hasn’t used it himself in years, Ned telling them all—well. No Ned. Not anymore.
Still, the look of shock and disappointment on mental-image-Aubrey’s face is so precious, Madeline can’t help laughing. And after a moment she catches Minerva looking at her—staring, really, as though Madeline is a painting in a gallery and she’s a tourist who paid ten bucks just to come close.
Madeline isn’t used to being looked at like this, accidentally. She can command a room, sure, but that’s because she commands it: stomps around in her size ten hiking boots and puts her hands on her hips, glowers at everyone until they shut up and let her make the plan. This is different, softer. Her laughter echoes in the compound and fades up with the moonlight over the arch.
She clears her throat, looks down at her hands—her wrists are reddened by weeks of handcuffs—then looks back at Minerva.
“So, uh. You been in Kepler long?”
“Two lunar cycles,” Minerva says. “Months, I mean. I opened a portal in Duck Newton’s head—we are psychically linked, you know—and arrived in time to fight at the battle of the Green Bank Telescope.”
Madeline nods. She heard something about that, from the agents. They wanted to know if she knew anything about unidentified beams making contact with the telescope, or the whereabouts of one Dr. Sarah Drake. Figures that the explanation was an alien making portals to Earth.
“That’s two months for you to explore our fine town, then,” she says. “What do you think?”
Minerva thinks about this, hard, as though contemplating the fate of the universe. “Good food,” she finally replies. “Good trees. Good people.”
Madeline smiles. “Can’t argue with that.”
And then she asks which restaurants Minerva has tried, which trails Duck has taken her on, which shortcuts they’re using to get around the FBI, and Minerva answers, and answers, and answers. Their conversation flows easily as the moonlight shifts along the archway, as the wind whistles against the compound. Minerva is fascinated by everything about Kepler, from its ski shops to its tiny orange salamanders, and talking to her is like seeing the place new all over again.
Madeline is almost disappointed when a sonic boom shakes the forest, and the away team tumbles out of the arch. They did it, because of course they did—Aubrey shouts and shoots a spark out of her palm, sending a firework up into the night sky. Duck yells at her for doing that without a permit, Thacker asks if she can do one in purple, and Madeline is so proud of them, all of them, she holds out her arms and laughs, then pretends she’s not crying as Aubrey runs in for a hug.
And it is Duck, at last, after a round of embraces and high fives and celebratory shots of the whiskey Thacker was somehow carrying in his pocket, who says, “Let’s go home.”
Madeline hops down from the counter, and then wobbles—like a fucking Russian nesting doll or something, she wobbles, has to put a hand up to steady herself. It’s embarrassing, really, especially with the way Aubrey rushes to her side and puts an arm around her shoulder. She’s a grown-ass woman, not a drunk kid coming home from a party who needs to be coddled. Forget that her feet don’t want to go quite one in front of the other, that her knees are stiff, her thighs sore from sitting on cold ground.
“Do you want a ride?” Minerva asks.
Madeline looks at her. Six feet tall, wearing armor, carrying a zweihander, arrived in Kepler through a portal in Duck’s head—she doesn’t exactly seem like the type to own a neat little Subaru with leather seats and an aux cable.
“A ride on my back,” Minerva says. “Like—what is it called, I did this for Leo earlier—”
“Piggyback,” Aubrey supplies. She’s grinning from Minerva’s side, as though this is the plot of an ABC sitcom and she’s just happy to be holding the camera.
“Yes!” Minerva exclaims. “Piggyback. Back of piggy. Why is it called that?”
“I don’t know,” Barclay says. “I don’t think it has anything to do with pigs.”
Madeline takes a deep breath, lets it out. She’s fine, she is, but her legs are stiff, and this conversation is spinning faintly, unraveling, like she’s a loose thread in a wool sweater and they keep tugging.
“Hold on,” she says. Everyone holds, looks at her—and yes, she missed this, the quiet respect of a room full of people who know her.
She looks at Minerva, standing restless by the counter. “You want to give me a ride. On your back.”
Minerva nods. The top of her head shines faintly in the fluorescents. “I am very strong, Madeline Cobb.”
Madeline Cobb. How strange, to hear that name here, like this. Like she’s sitting, fingers folded, at a scuffed green desk, and the teacher is calling roll. Only this is no school room, and Minerva is no teacher—Madeline looks at her, takes stock of her thick arms and her broad shoulders, the planes of her chest and the way her fingers move, folding in and out.
A warrior from another world, come to Kepler through a portal in Duck’s mind to help them defeat the Quell. If Madeline saw it in a movie, she’d call it unbelievable. But then, she’s been running a secret monster-hunting crew for thirty-odd years, and she has a patch on her jean jacket that gives her safe passage to another world, and Bigfoot is one of her best friends. And Minerva is here, all six foot something of her, her broad shoulders and her deep voice like trombones arriving to push the orchestra forward.
Minerva walks closer, as though she can hear Madeline thinking—crosses the room and stops in front of Madeline. One more step, and they’d be sharing oxygen.
“Sometimes, giving help is the strongest thing to do,” Minerva says. “And sometimes, accepting it is. I learned this from Duck Newton.”
Madeline considers her a moment longer, while Duck sputters somewhere in the background: Minerva’s bright eyes, the long plane of her nose, the roughness at the corner of her lip like the memory of a scar.
And she smiles. “Well. It’s hard to argue with that.”
And so Minerva turns and crouches, levels her shoulders with Madeline’s hands, and Madeline puts her arms around Minerva’s neck and her knees up at Minerva’s waist and Minerva stands—
Madeline’s mother used to pick her up. Cooking, or cleaning, or grocery shopping, or returning from long hikes in the woods to pick wildflowers and herbs, and see the box turtles sunning on the sides of ponds, their little noses shining in the sun. Madeline would try to walk as long as she could, of course, but her legs were tiny saplings, hadn’t done quite enough photosynthesis to weather the storm, and so eventually her steps would slow and her mother would turn back and she would tug at her jeans, insistent. Mama, Mama.
It has been many years since those hikes. Years of growing, putting on weight and responsibility. Tiny saplings to thick trunks, moss and fungi and a whole nest of mourning doves living inside. She can carry enough water for a week’s hike, a rifle and ammunition, an injured friend. She can carry the ghost of herself, young and whining, unable to understand why the box turtles always scurry away before she can touch their shells. She can carry Amnesty Lodge, all its tenants and their shadows. Madeline Cobb and gravity are old friends, by now. They get lunch on Saturdays, they complain about the weather, they spoke at each other’s weddings.
And so how strange, now, to be carried. To say to gravity, actually, someone else can do this, just for today.
Madeline knew Minerva was strong, heard it in her trombone voice and saw it in the shape of her shoulders, but it’s something else altogether to feel it. Minerva holds Madeline easily, curled against her back, with Madeline’s legs stowed in the crooks of Minerva’s elbows. Madeline can feel the slow sway as she walks, steadily, like keeping time. Her muscles straining but not burning, her lungs working but staying constant, the slow in and out a backing rhythm for Minerva’s conversation with Duck as he walks alongside them, interrogating him on his role in the battle.
Minerva runs warm. Runs hot, in fact—her shoulders are a furnace beneath Madeline’s arms, resonating heat up into Madeline’s muscles, still sore from weeks sitting in the same position. Compassionate conduction. Madeline wonders if all people from her world are warm-blooded like this, if they’re built for more work or colder weather, or if Minerva’s biology is unique somehow, temperature risen slowly by months of training. She called herself a warrior—does swordfighting make your blood run hot? Does talking to Duck Newton?
It doesn’t now, at least. Minerva asks questions as they walk, Duck stammers out answers. No doubt downplaying any heroics that he may have been part of. Madeline listens to the rhythm of their voices, back and forth. Minerva’s low trombone, Duck’s stuttering euphonium, pushing and pushing and finally arriving at a melody. She’s proud of him, that anxious park ranger. From the way Minerva laughs, rumbling up from deep within her chest, at something he says, she must be proud of him, too.
Madeline closes her eyes, leans her head forward to rest on Minerva’s shoulder. It’s strange how easy this became, once she said yes to the ride. To lean into it. To press close, to cocoon herself in Minerva’s warmth, like turning onto her back in the ocean to feel the sun on her face. Yes, that’s it—like the ocean. The steadiness of the waves, in and out like a massive set of lungs. The quiet rhythm. The buoyancy. Does Minerva know how to float on her back in the ocean, Madeline wonders. Is there an ocean on her planet? Has anyone told her about the oceans on this once? Would she like to go?
“Madeline Cobb, I must let you down now.”
Madeline opens her eyes, resurfaces. Blinks once, twice, adjusts to the sudden brightness of an apartment doorway with the lights on inside. A stone step up, and then deep green carpet, wood paneling, a coat rack with a wide-brimmed hat perched on top. This must be Duck’s place—of course, Amnesty Lodge was taken into FBI custody, they can’t go back there yet.
Minerva shuffles a little, shifting her weight from one foot to the other and then back again. “Madeline Cobb. Are you awake?”
“I—” Madeline clears her throat. “Yes. Thank you.”
“I must let you down, the doorway is short.”
Because she’s too tall for it. Oh, my God.
Madeline clears her throat again, manages to croak out, “Okay.”
And so Minerva crouches—contracting herself inch by inch, joint by joint, until Madeline can detach her arms and slide back down to the floor. Gravity returns, but not fully. As though being carried is her default state of motion now, and solid ground is strange. Like returning to the beach after a long swim—too solid, no rhythm to match yourself against.
The door to Duck’s apartment is open, and they go in together, Minerva ducking her head beneath the frame.
“Duck Newton is urinating,” she says, “he could not wait. But he said you can have his room.”
Madeline opens her mouth to protest—Duck just helped save the world, he deserves his own bed—but Minerva puts a hand out. One finger to Madeline’s lips, a warm point of pressure. Madeline has the strangest urge to open her mouth and bite down.
“He said, you need sleep. I agree.”
Well. If a savior of Earth and Sylvain is to insist she take his bed, who is she to refuse?
Madeline nods, mourns the loss of pressure as Minerva takes her hand back and points at a door past the kitchen, painted with the silhouette of a pine tree. She heads over, and is just pushing the door open when Minerva says—
“Madeline Cobb.”
Madeline turns. Already she would cross mountains for that trombone voice, that long a and short o, those careful consonants, given weight as though every wave of sound in her name is important.
“Yes?”
Minerva reaches a hand out, then drops it at her side, then links both hands behind her back.
“I—I have heard of your battles, your victories. I know this isn’t a good time, you are tired, but I wanted to say. It was an honor to meet you. And to give you a ride. And—I would like to see you, and talk more, once you’ve rested. If you like.”
“Yes,” Minerva replies, as though on instinct. Replies, before she registers how stilted Minerva sounds, how different from her questions and commands. “Of course. I’d like that.”
“Good.” Minerva nods to her, long and measured, like a bow. “I hope you sleep well, Madeline Cobb.”
She turns to Duck’s kitchen cabinets, and Madeline goes into Duck’s room and just stands there for a minute, amid the model ship building kits and the stacks of field guides and the piled-up jeans.
And then she sits down on his bed, hard.
“Did Duck’s interdimensional swordfighting warrior mentor just ask me out?”
“Yeah,” Duck replies, coming in behind her. “And you said yes.”
“Oh, my God.”
And, okay, Madeline’s not proud of this, but she spends the next half hour—somewhat borrowing an old Tony Hawk shirt from Duck and washing her face and eating some Oreos and finally lying down in an honest- to- God bed with pillows and everything, yes—but mostly freaking out like a teenager. Fuck, freaking out like Aubrey the first time Dani smiled at her. I would like to see you, and talk more, Minerva said. What will they do, go to Kepler’s one movie theater and share popcorn? Get pizza and eat in the back of Madeline’s truck, parked in the woods at twilight?
She doesn’t have time for courting, she has a hotel to rebuild, and friends to take care of, and probably the full force of the federal government to evade. She hasn’t been in a relationship for decades, and that’s fine. It’s practical, it’s responsible. She has no need to enter a relationship now.
And yet, as Madeline drifts off finally, warm beneath Duck’s comforter in an apartment full of friends, she does it thinking of floating. On her back in the ocean, her weight lifted, easily yet carefully, and carried, safe beneath the sun.