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Maria wakes up because someone is tapping on her window.
It should freak her out, because she's on the second floor, but she knows who it is before she even opens her eyes. She rolls over and yeah, it's Carol, floating outside her window and glowing gently.
She snorts and gets out of bed, walks over to the window. She pushes the window up and rests her crossed arms on the sill. The humid summer air spills into her room like a sigh.
"Hey," Carol says. Her cocky grin is just a little sheepish around the edges.
Maria gives her her best unimpressed face. "What, you're too good for the back door now?"
"I didn't want to wake up Lieutenant Trouble," Carol says.
It's been a year since Carol flew off to protect a caravan of interstellar refugees, but Maria's heart lightens like it was yesterday, like it never happened. She shakes her head as much at herself as at Carol.
"Meet me on the roof," she says, and pulls the window closed.
She checks on Monica before she goes up, but Monica is sleeping the deep, peaceful sleep of the blameless pre-teen, a sprawl of gangly limbs under a Star Wars top sheet.
Maria climbs out the bathroom window where the porch roof wraps around and the roof of the house slopes down low enough to grab the gutters and hoist yourself up. The shingles are a lot more firmly attached now than when they first moved in, but she's careful picking her way across the roof to where Carol is waiting.
When she's close enough, Carol hugs her. Maria closes her eyes, breathes in the sweet, scorched electric scent of starlight on Carol's skin and leans into that hard grip.
"I missed you," Carol says against Maria's shoulder.
"Yeah," Maria says, low and hoarse. "Me, too."
They sit down carefully, side by side, shoulders and thighs touching. The night air is hot, humid enough to drown in if you breathe too deep. It smells like jasmine and mud and rotting plants, and it's full of the buzz of cicadas and the occasional scream of something dying or courting.
"What crisis brings you back this time?" Maria asks. "Am I going to get to shoot down another enemy spaceship?"
"Nah," Carol says. "Nothing like that, just -- shore leave."
Maria gives her a sharp, sidelong glance. For a second she thinks Carol final remembers everything, but Carol's smile is wrong, hesitant, uncertain, not the filthy smirk it would be if she remembered that inside joke.
"I just missed you guys," Carol says, and Monica lets it go.
The moon is setting, just shy of full, a huge luminous pearl sinking into the screen of cypress trees. They watch in silence, leaning into each other, until it's completely gone.
Maria makes coffee in the morning. If Carol wants pancakes, she can make them herself. Which she promptly does.
Maria sits at the kitchen table and drinks her coffee and watches Carol bop around her kitchen like she's always made breakfast there. She's changed out of her fancy space suit and into one of Maria's worn and faded Air Force tees and sweatpants.
The smell of pancakes clearly lures Monica out of bed. "Mom are you making -- Aunt Carol?" Monica's whole face lights up with joy and she throws herself across the room into Carol's arms.
"Ooof," Carol says and pretends to stagger back. "You've grown so much!"
"It's been a year," Monica says pointedly.
"Yeah," Carol says.
"Why don't you set the table, baby?" Maria says.
Monica lets go of Carol and opens the cupboard, shooting questions back over her shoulder. "So where have you been? What have you been doing? Did you bring me anything?"
Carol looks helplessly at Maria. Maria gives her a smirk and takes a deliberate slurp of coffee.
Monica gets the table set and Carol answers the questions with diplomatic vagueness. Maria watches Carol as she eats, and in the bright, sunny kitchen, she can see the strain in her face, the marks of exhaustion and stress. Too much fighting, not enough sleeping.
"So what are you doing here?" Monica asks, licking the last of the syrup off her fork.
"It's a vacation. Like spring break," Carol says.
Monica's eyes widen. "Really? So we can hang out? What are we going to do?"
"Well," Carol says, leaning back in her chair and flashing that old, familiar smirk. "I thought we could go to the moon."
Carol's ship is parked in their backyard again, but this time, it's cloaked. Carol taps something into the panel on the sleeve of her suit, and the empty air in their backyard splits open to reveal the inside of her ship.
The front of the ship is a cockpit with two pilot's chairs and a whole dashboard of buttons and switches labeled in an alphabet Maria doesn't recognize. The back of the ship is larger, with soft padded benches, a tiny enclosed alcove with a toilet and a shower, and storage built into the walls.
Carol pops open one of the panels on the wall and rummages around. She pulls something out and holds it out to Monica. It's a space suit like Carol's, but child-sized and colored white and black.
"Suit up," Carol says.
Monica gasps and grabs the suit out of Carol's hands, almost vibrating with excitement. She dashes back to the house to change.
Carol pulls another suit out of the storage locker and hands it to Maria. Maria takes it with more dignity, but she's not fooling Carol.
"So does this go over anything, or..."
"Nope," Carol says, waggling her eyebrows.
Maria sighs like this is an imposition, but she's still not fooling Carol.
It goes on easier than she expects, like the material is adjusting and resizing itself to fit her. It's easily the most comfortable flight suit she's ever worn, which is not saying much. But everything that needs to be supported is supported, and nothing binds or chafes or pinches. She looks at herself in the full length mirror on the back of her closet door. Her suit is black with silver and gold accents. It makes her look sleek and tough and sexy, like the hotshot pilot she used to be.
"Mo-om!" Monica yells. "Are you ready yet?"
Maria closes the closet door and goes downstairs to fly to the moon.
It's different this time, because they're not going on a desperate mission to prevent a war crime, and no one is shooting at her.
Maria gets the co-pilot seat up front, and Monica gets strapped into a seat in the back.
"Aww!" she says.
"Wait for it," Carol says, and taps a few things on the console. The whole roof of the ship shimmers and then seems to disappear, and they're looking up at the house and the sky.
The ship takes off smoothly, no crushing Gs, just a sense of speed and power as the Earth drops away beneath them. Maria still dreams about flying that quadjet sometimes, and this ship is as far beyond that as the quadjet was beyond anything she used to fly for the Air Force. Fury said he'd put in a word for her with that Project Pegasus crew -- they've got to need test pilots with her record and experience -- but no luck. She's not surprised. But she's missed the feel of that quadjet almost as much as she missed Carol.
The sky fades from clear blue to night black around them. Carol turns the ship, so the Earth becomes visible. Maria's seen pictures of the Earth from space, of course, but pictures are nothing compared to the impossibly graceful curve of blue and white arcing away beneath them.
"Ohhh," Monica says, and Maria nods.
Carol angles them away from the Earth and the moon appears in their view instead, glowing cold and white against the velvety black.
It fills up the sky as they get closer, and it gets less smooth and pale, turning grey and soft and touchable. Carol sets them down in the sunlight.
Monica wriggles out of her harness as soon as they're not moving. She jumps -- and comes down as hard as she would on Earth.
"Wait until we're outside, Lieutenant Trouble," Carol says.
Monica swivels around to stare at her. "Outside?" she says.
Carol fiddles with the collar of Monica's suit, and a mask and helmet just appear on Monica's head. Her curls get pulled back into a long, thick pouf of a ponytail.
"Whoa!" Monica says, and it comes out with the faint metallic tinniness of radio.
Carol turns to Maria. She steps in to touch Maria's collar, close enough to kiss, Maria thinks. She watches Carol's mouth as Carol frowns in concentration, thumbing the controls on Maria's suit.
The helmet flows up over the back of her head and the faceplate shimmers into being in front of her eyes. No ponytail for her.
Carol looks up and meets Maria's eyes, her hand still resting on Maria's shoulder, her thumb almost touching the hollow of Maria's throat.
"Outside," Maria says, not quite a question. She looks over Carol's shoulder at Monica, who is busy poking at her own face mask. Outside on the surface of the moon, in an alien space suit that Maria doesn't even know how to do a safety check on.
"Do you trust me?" Carol asks, like she knows what Maria is thinking.
Maria looks back at Carol, and the answer to that is the same as it's always been.
"Yeah."
"Good," Carol says, and grins, huge and dazzling. "Because this is going to be awesome."
It is awesome. How could it not be, it's the moon. Carol lowers the gangway at the back of the ship. There's a hum of energy behind them, a force field snapping up to protect the rest of the cabin from, you know, the vacuum of space.
The end of the gangway touches the ground, sending up a puff of dust.
"Caref--" Carol starts, and Monica bounds past her.
She hits the surface of the moon and bounces in a long, high arc, legs kicking. "Woooooo!"
Carol sighs and looks over at Maria. "She gets that from you, y'know."
Monica bobbles the landing and ends up rolling gently across the lunar plain like tumbleweed, laughing the entire time. She finally manages to stop herself and sit up.
"Holy shit!" she says.
"Language!" Maria says automatically, and it comes out in stereo, Carol's voice an echo of her own.
"Sorry," Monica says, but it sounds like she's rolling her eyes.
Carol bumps Maria's shoulder with her fist. "Tag, you're it," she says.
"Oh," Maria says, outraged, and it is on.
The three of them play tag until they're too tired to run anymore. Maria is whooping as loud as Monica with every huge, bounding lunge.
Carol is surprisingly bad at tag in low gravity. "I'm used to artificial gravity!" she says, and Maria and Monica exchange a deeply skeptical look.
They have a rest and a snack in the ship, drinking water from pouches and eating some kind of pre-packaged rations. They come in weird colors and shapes and have tendency towards gelatinous quivering, but they taste better than MREs.
Monica falls asleep on one of the benches, and Carol makes the benches rearrange themselves into a bed that takes up most of the back of the ship. Maria and Carol sit in the cockpit and watch the earth rise over the horizon of the moon.
Joy and contentment fill Maria's chest, so deep it hurts. She breathes in slowly and tries to commit everything about this moment to memory.
Then Carol looks over at her and says, "Hey, you wanna fly the ship on the way back?"
Maria does want that, of course, but she draws the line at figuring out how to fly an alien spaceship with her daughter in the backseat. She'll risk her own self in a fiery training crash, but not her daughter.
So they drop Monica off with Maria's mom and dad. It's well past dinner time, and Monica is still fast asleep. Carol picks her up like she weighs nothing, hoisting her up against her should like Maria hasn't been able to do for years.
"We're just going for a little joyride," Maria explains quietly to her mom as Carol carries Monica up to the guest bedroom.
"Mmm hmmm," her mom says.
But she kisses Carol's cheek before they leave, and says, "It's so nice to see you again, dear."
Carol blushes and mumbles something appropriately polite, shakes her dad's hand, and escapes to the ship as soon as Maria moves towards the door.
Maria straps into the pilot's seat and lets Carol point out the important features of the ship's interface. It doesn't take that long.
"That's it?" Maria asks.
Carol shrugs, runs her palm over the edge of the console. "These ships are smarter than the shit the Air Force had us testing. It's almost like -- well, you'll see."
Maria shrugs internally, and pulls back on what Carol said was the throttle.
The ship leaps gracefully into the sky. "Holy shit," she says.
The ship moves smoothly, an astonishing sense of controlled power under her hands. As she eases them up, she gets what Carol was saying. It's like the ship understands what she wants. A church tower appears out of nowhere as she's taking off, and Maria flinches, but the ship just tacks gently to the side, smoothing and gentling her jerk on the throttle.
It's amazing.
They climb higher and the ship goes faster, like it knows Maria wants to be up among the stars. She can feel it when they break free of the atmosphere, the way that almost imperceptible drag drops away and there's nothing but vacuum to slow them down. She turns the ship, and the HUD shows her flight paths: the low earth orbit, the shortest route to the moon, the routes to Venus and Mars.
Carol laughs when she sees which one Maria chooses. "Open her up," she says, and Maria does.
The ship responds like it's been waiting for that command, knifing through the dark at impossible speeds. The moon looms up before them and Maria adjusts their course, catching the edge of the moon's gravity well and riding it all the way around, letting it slingshot them back around towards earth like the solar system's biggest and best rollercoaster.
Maria's laughing as they soar back towards the earth. (Carol is right, Monica does get it from her.)
It's like nothing she's ever flown before. She throws in a couple of barrel rolls, just to hear Carol curse. She could fly this thing forever, but she finally slips them into a high earth orbit, the ship angled to keep the gleaming curve of the planet above them.
She takes her hands off the controls. Her heart is racing, adrenaline silver-hot in her veins. She kinda wishes someone was shooting at them, just to see how the ship handled a dogfight.
She turns to Carol, and Carol unclips her harness and lurches forward to kiss her.
Maria gasps and pulls Carol closer. She struggles out of her own harness, trying and failing to keep kissing Carol while she does it. Carol slaps at the ship's console, and a helpful voice says, "Autopilot engaged."
Maria barely registers that, pulling Carol towards the back of the ship. The benches are still configured into a bed, and they hit the soft, padded surface in what might generously be called a controlled fall.
"Wait," Maria pants, "is this because of the flying, or--"
"No," Carol says. "Well, yes, obviously because of the flying, but also -- I remember. I remember..."
Maria can see everything she remembers in the grief and the longing in her face, and kisses her again, just like old times.
Afterwards, they lie curled up under the transparent ceiling, the luminous blue and white of Earth hanging above them. Either their body heat or the ship itself warmed up the cabin enough that Maria is comfortable in her bare skin.
Carol traces an idle pattern over Maria's stomach. "Come back with me," she says. "Both of you. I miss you. And we need good pilots."
Maria's heart stutters. She closes her mouth on the first rush of words, exhales slowly. She looks at the planet, not Carol. "You want me to take Monica in to a war zone?"
She's not talking to Carol, not really -- she's talking to the part of herself that is shouting, Yes, yes, let's grab Monica and go, right now.
"I wouldn't ask if I thought we'd be taking Monica into real danger. We found a place for the Skrull. It's safe from the Kree, as safe as Earth is anyway--"
Maria flinches at that, at the memory of what is out there, what is angry at them. What Fury is trying to defend against with the technological equivalent of bubblegum and masking tape.
Carol props herself up on one elbow and looks down at Maria. "I swear I wouldn't put Monica at risk. Just -- just come for summer vacation."
Maria lets out a startled laugh -- summer vacation in a different solar system, a back-to-school report by Monica Rambeau. She finally looks away from Earth and meets Carol's eyes.
Carol's face is serious, intent. Monica reaches up and cups the curve of her jaw. Carol's skin is warm and smooth beneath her palm, real, as real as the planet hanging above them, as real as the spaceship around them, as real as the future Maria has always wanted, laid out in front of her.
"Okay," she says, and Carol's whole face lights up like sunrise.