Work Text:
“What is this?”
Lovelace watched Minkowski’s head jerk up from where she was bent over the scattered guts of some sort of unidentifiable machinery. She hissed in surprise as Lovelace flicked on the light switch, throwing an arm above her head.
“Minkowski.”
“Captain,” Minkowski returned uneasily, slowly lowering her arm to watch as Lovelace pushed herself off the doorjamb and wandered into the room.
They hadn’t been here long, in this house. It was Jacobi who had found and secured it, who had then found and secured them, mostly, weirdly enough. It was large and labyrinthine enough that Lovelace had gone nearly two full days without seeing Minkowski upon her belated and bloody arrival. They’d been lost to different corners of the house, celebrating or mourning their own separate yet intersecting battles, and Hera hadn’t felt like intervening in anything that wasn’t to do with Doug yet, and so their first re-meeting had happened over Minkowski dropping a wine glass to shatter on the floor at three in the morning and Lovelace cutting her foot on a shard as she’d gone, heart hammering, to investigate.
A few weeks (maybe—it was still so hard to tell, sometimes) later, and Lovelace still wasn’t entirely sure which room Minkowski had settled in for her own. Judging by the bareness of this one, with the pieces of some something strewn all over the generic carpeted floor, Lovelace thought that she could hazard a guess now.
Lovelace frowned and nudged what looked like a handle with her toe. “So… What the hell is this? It looks like you’re having some—uh—trouble.”
Minkowski scrubbed a hand across her face before planting both hands on the ground behind her, leaning back onto them. “Don’t laugh.”
“Only if it’s not funny.”
Pained, Minkowski forced a smile that looked more like a grimace than anything else. “It’s supposed to be a treadmill.”
Lovelace blinked.
“I know.”
“Dude,” Lovelace said, brows pulling together, “you almost built a spaceship. From scratch.”
“I did not,” Minkowski snapped, almost whined, and Lovelace bit her lip to keep from grinning. “Look, it’s harder than it looks.”
Lovelace exhaled, as if greatly grieved, and slowly knelt down at Minkowski’s side. “Why don’t you just go for a run outside? You know, the old-fashioned way?”
Minkowski glared. “I like the treadmill.”
All at once, Lovelace was in a different place and a far-flung time, gasping while she sprinted and sprinted and tried to keep her mind blank as Minkowski watched, somehow dispassionate and unbelievably intense at the same time. She shook her head a little bit and made herself smile, though she knew it felt strained. “I know you do,” was what she said, and she sounded more confident than she felt.
Minkowski stared for a long time, expression terribly unreadable. Very carefully, Lovelace watched Minkowski reach for a small sheet of glossy paper and extend it in offering to Lovelace.
“This is just pictures,” Lovelace said after a moment of examination, bewildered.
“I know.”
Hesitantly, she picked up the handle-thing that she’d nudged earlier, trying to locate the step where it came into play. “Good lord.”
Neither of them voiced the obvious: that they should go ask Jacobi to make sense of whatever the hell this was or Hera if she could assemble a new set of instructions just by looking at the pieces. There was something intangibly fragile about the way that Minkowski was watching Lovelace try to make sense of things, something in the quiet way that she let herself share her frustration, that made Lovelace want to close the door and not come out until they had figured this project out together, on their own.
Lovelace was staring at the indecipherable instructions and she was thinking about Minkowski extracting a shard of glass from the sole of Lovelace’s foot and she was remembering the bliss and the fear of running breathless in full view of Minkowski’s judgment.
“Well,” Lovelace said softly, after a few long moments. She found the long belt of track among the detritus of parts and lifted it. “We can figure this out.”
She watched the tension leak from Minkowski’s shoulders very slowly and very subtly. Her chest ached. “Yeah,” Minkowski said, exhaling a little bit. “Yeah.”
Three hours later (and this she knew—Minkowski wore a watch that beeped every single hour, and Lovelace had made sure to count), they were staring at something that vaguely resembled the lower half of a treadmill.
“Well,” Minkowski said, disturbed, and Lovelace winced.
“How the hell can we test that we’re on the right track?” Lovelace demanded, though she was almost certain that they weren’t. “I’m not finishing this only to deconstruct it again.”
“Uh. Try—” Minkowski made a sweeping gesture, “—moving the belt-thing.”
“Sure.” Lovelace planted a hand against the conveyer belt and pushed, sighing when it moved with her.
“Wait,” Minkowski said, pained, “I just saw something detach when you—”
“Well, fuck.”
Minkowski bowed forward and gasped, and for a wild moment, Lovelace thought that she was in pain, that maybe her scar tissue had ripped open or something new had hurt her and that this was going to be it, but then she rocked back, and Lovelace realized, stunned, that she was laughing.
“Oh, god,” Minkowski managed, digging the heels of her hands into her eyes. “We can’t do this, can we?”
Lovelace felt something within her soften, and she didn’t quite bother trying to hide the way it made her face gentle as Minkowski slowly calmed down. “May take us a few months,” she admitted.
“We’ll workshop it,” Minkowski teased, eyes alight. “Break out the whiteboard.”
Lovelace snorted. “Not the whiteboard.”
“I can’t look at this anymore. I think it may be sentient. It’s mocking me.”
“There, there, Commander,” Lovelace said flatly. She stood, knees cracking, and extended her hand. “Come on.”
Minkowski’s eyebrow jumped up. “What?”
“Get your shoes. We’re going out for a run.”
Minkowski put her hand in hers. As Lovelace pulled her to her feet, she heard her watch beep distantly, and she felt her fingers tighten before she made herself release.
On her way to hunt for some running shoes, Lovelace passed through the kitchen, where Doug was watching Jacobi root through the pantry, muttering to himself.
“Everything good with you?” Doug asked as she went by, and Lovelace paused, vaguely surprised by the concern in his face.
Jacobi glanced up, eyes narrowed. “Yeah,” Lovelace said belatedly. She smiled, and it wasn’t a grand thing of bared teeth and promises of vengeance. It was a smaller thing, almost private. “Minkowski and I are going for a run.”
Jacobi rolled his eyes and turned back to the pantry while Doug visibly brightened, flashing his teeth and beaming while Hera laughed at him. “Have fun!”
Lovelace tried to swallow around the sudden lump in her throat and could only salute as she turned away.
“Maybe we should give up,” Minkowski said cheerfully as they started their second lap around the house. “This is fine, I suppose.”
“You want a treadmill, we’ll make you a treadmill,” Lovelace returned. “Who am I to disobey a command?”
“Oh, please,” Minkowski snapped, grinning, and she shoved Lovelace with her elbow, hard enough to make her stumble. The laugh tore its way out of Lovelace’s throat before she realized it was forming at all. “You, going against my orders? Must be Monday,” she mocked, turning to jog backwards as Lovelace got her footing again.
“Is it really?”
“It really is.”
“Hey,” Lovelace protested halfheartedly, “I only commit mutiny when you’re being stupid.”
“How efficient.”
She reached out before she could stop herself, catching Minkowski’s wrist. The touch made Minkowski stop abruptly in her tracks, and Lovelace crashed into her.
“Sorry,” Lovelace said breathlessly, trying to withdraw, but Minkowski grabbed her by the shoulders.
“Isabel,” she said, and Lovelace felt her breath hitch.
The name felt so, so alien to her, and yet somehow almost sacred in Minkowski’s voice.
She remembered one of her many repeated days on the Hephaestus, remembered reaching for Minkowski’s hand and watching the retreat in her eyes as she pulled away. It was a moment lost to them both, rendered meaningless to the endless loop of that one day, but Lovelace remembered.
Now, she watched Minkowski’s hand slide down her arm to grab her hand, paralyzed with it, waiting.
Minkowski’s lips were chapped with the cold, brushing hers, briefly, dizzily. She felt the warmth of her exhale as she leaned back, and Lovelace could not help but follow the movement for an unsteady instant before she made herself stop. She kept her eyes closed, not sure when she’d shut them at all.
Minkowski squeezed her hand and let go, and when Lovelace made herself look at her, she saw something alien from the unknown stretch of the endless galaxy and the boundless, meaningless folds of wavering time. She saw someone who knew Isabel Lovelace.
“I’m building you that god damn treadmill,” Lovelace whispered, knowing she’d rebuild the fucking Hephaestus from scratch herself if Minkowski asked for it.
“Either way,” Minkowski whispered, eyes alight. “I’ll take it.”