Work Text:
It comes as no surprise to Hera that the first thing Doug Eiffel says when he wakes up on February 14th is “Hey, baby, d’ya know what day it is?”
“Valentine’s Day, Officer Eiffel,” Hera responds, chirpy as anything. “Did you get me f-flowers?”
Eiffel groans heartily. He unstraps himself from his bed and sits upright, his hair an absolute mess in zero-g. After a dramatic stretch and a twist that cracks something in his back loud enough that Hera does a quick scan of his body to make sure he didn’t break anything, he says, “Would if I could, Hera. Would if I could.”
“I’m flattered,” she tells him, and she is, a little. “How are you doing?”
Eiffel pulls himself into mid-air, floating groggily around in a circle. Apparently, it’s too early in the morning for him to whine about some made-up injury or another (that mysteriously disappears as soon as Minkowski implies that she could get Hilbert to look at it) that he incurred while being outside during the storm the other day. Hera secretly loves Eiffel’s melodrama, but she also loves knowing that he’s okay, so she’s happy when he says, simply, “I’m doing good. Thanks for asking, honey.”
“Of c-course,” she says. “It was wildly irresponsible for Colonel Ke-Kepler to take you outside in those conditions. I’m glad you d-didn’t die.”
“Hera, you minx! Glad you didn’t die. You’re coming on pretty strong,” Eiffel says.
“Ha-ha,” Hera responds sarcastically, but if she could smile, she knows she’d be grinning from ear to ear.
He shoots her one that’s toothy enough for the two of them. “You think the Colonel and Commander will be a little nicer to us today? Day of love, and all that?”
“I think I can say with a-almost perfect certainty that Lieutenant Mink-kowski will be more lenient to you today. Or any day. In fact, I don’t d-doubt that she’ll be stricter.”
Eiffel pushes himself out of his bed and scoffs. “Lieutenant,” he mutters. “She’s not just the Lieutenant.”
“Hey, it’s what I h-have to call her. Don’t hate me for my programming,” Hera says.
“How can I when it lets you talk so sweetly to me?” Eiffel returns.
“How’s this for sweet: you’re w-wanted,” Hera says.
“I am?” Eiffel asks, fluttering his eyelashes and swooning a little.
“Yeah, on the aft d-deck, and about fifteen minutes ago.”
“Shit,” Eiffel says. “I’m late?”
“You know, it’s kind of c-cute that even after all this time you still manage to be surpr-prised by your chronic tardiness.”
“I’m irresistible,” Eiffel agrees. “Wish Minkowski saw my chronic tardiness in as admirable of a light as you seem to.”
“Go, you scoundrel,” Hera urges affectionately.
While Eiffel is busying himself with getting ready for the day and trying desperately to not end up being a firm half-hour late (he’ll likely fail, as is his modus operandi), Hera shifts the majority of her focus over to Maxwell. She still leaves a bit of herself making mindless chatter with Eiffel, because it’s easy to make mindless chatter with Eiffel, and it’s comforting, and she spends a lot of her spare time doing it. And since she’s a massive A.I. taking up an entire space station, she usually has a little bit of herself and her time to spare.
“Good morning,” Hera says to Maxwell. She’s sitting cross-legged, suspended in the air, in one of the workrooms on the Urania. Aside from the device in front of her, she has three other electronics strewn around her, each buzzing or beeping or otherwise making their presence known.
Maxwell glances up from her computer and cuts her eyes over to a camera up on a nearby wall, making a sort of quasi-eye-contact with Hera. Since Hera is everywhere at all times, it’s an unnecessary gesture, which they both know, but it’s a sweet one nonetheless. “Good morning,” Maxwell says.
“You’re up and a-at ‘em,” Hera notices. “Big plans for today?”
Maxwell twirls the straw sticking out of her premade pouch of coffee. “Only getting intimate with you.”
Hera hums pleasedly. “How forward, Dr. Maxwell.”
“Yeah, I’m nearly finished squashing this bug I’ve been working at for a while. I’m going pretty deep in you. Once I’m done, though, you should have a lot better of a handle on those occasional volume fluctuations your speaker system has been having.”
“Thanks,” Hera says. “D-do you really not have any other plans for the day?”
Maxwell’s laugh sets Hera’s synapses on fire. Not literally, of course. Hera doesn’t need another electrical disaster wrecking the crew’s day. She says, “If this is your subtle way of asking if I have a woman back home that I’ll be missing—”
“I’m not,” Hera assures her. “I would j-just ask you outright if that was the case.”
“Well, I don’t,” Maxwell says. “Hazard of the occupation, you know? I get relocated a lot. Besides, it’s not as if I can start a conversation with hey, I work for a black-ops division of a space tech company. My place or yours?”
“I get it,” Hera says. “It must be hard.”
Maxwell shrugs. “Eh. I’m happy with my boys, for the most part.”
This is curious to Hera. She likes Maxwell for a variety of reasons and in a few complicated ways that she’s still untangling, but Hera’s feelings towards Kepler and Jacobi are relatively straightforward. Kepler is the man who took forcible control of this vessel and who decided to demote Minkowski, and Hera does not forgive him for that. Jacobi is his lackey, and Hera has never had much of a stomach for blind followers. (Really, she doesn’t have any sort of stomach at all, but that’s beside the point.)
Hera can’t deny that they make Maxwell happy, though. Which is upsetting, because she would love to pretend that Maxwell and “her boys”, as she put it, are two separate entities. That’s impossible, though, when Kepler jokes about how Maxwell connived the group’s way out of a tight spot that one time during their mission in Seoul, or when Hera sees how much enjoyment Maxwell and Jacobi seem to get from simply sitting and doing work in each others’ presence.
“I’m g-glad that you have your boys,” Hera says dryly. And then, almost as an afterthought: “They really are b-boys, aren’t they.”
Maxwell instinctively goes to press up her glasses and then seems to remember halfway through the raising of her arm that zero-g means that they don’t slide down her face. She says, “Is the implication there that they’re boys and not men? Am I detecting a note of sarcasm in your voice, Hera?”
“Only a note?” Hera says. “Gee, Dr. Maxwell, you should probab-bly add ‘fixing my tone’ to your list of today’s repairs, because I was aiming for a large hea-heaping of it.”
Maxwell grins. “I’m ready to get to work if you are. How have you been doing recently, by the way? I just want to do another one of our check-ins.”
After the star activity and various—as Eiffel put it—‘fuckings with the ship’ that went on a few days ago that left Hera largely non-communicative for a while, Maxwell has been asking up on her daily. It’s sweet, albeit a little overbearing. Hera doesn’t want Maxwell to think she’s weak, or anything.
“I’ve been good,” she says. “Any progress on deciphering that transmission, by the way?”
Maxwell sucks her teeth and begins her work, flipping open a panel on Hera’s side. “No,” she says as she reaches into Hera’s guts and attaches Hera’s circulatory system to her laptop. “I was going to run it through you again later after I’d done some maintenance.”
“That sounds g-good to me,” Hera agrees. “You can talk about it with Officer Eiffel, too, you know.”
“I know,” Maxwell says, which doesn’t sound like a promise, but it doesn’t sound like a discouragement either.
Eiffel, as Hera knows from her own check-in with him earlier this morning, has been doing alright. Hera’s made sure to ask after him, considering the fact that Kepler dragged him outside in unsafe conditions and Hera was sincerely worried—not for the first time, she thinks tiredly, and likely not for the last—that she might lose her best friend.
In the back of her massive mind, she knows that she’s being hypocritical for wanting to make sure Eiffel is okay but feeling like she’s being perceived as weak when Maxwell asks if she’s okay. It’s far in the back, though. Maybe she can ask Maxwell to root around for it next time she’s doing troubleshooting and repairs.
As Maxwell makes adjustments on Hera and works on squashing the volume regulation bug that’s been acting up in Hera’s system the past few days, they chatter about the goings-on of the ship, about some of Maxwell’s previous missions, about life pre-SI-5 aboard the Hephaestus. At one point, Maxwell asks, “Do you think the Captain and the Lieutenant are doing anything special today?”
Hera nearly squawks. “Wh-what do you mean?”
“I mean,” Maxwell says around a bit of wire stuck between her teeth, “that it’s Valentine’s Day, isn’t it?”
“Lieutenant Minkowski is m-married,” Hera says.
“That’s not an answer,” Maxwell responds, a twinkle in her eye.
“Married and faithful,” Hera says sternly. “And presumably heterosexual.”
“Keyword being presumably,” Maxwell says, but she leaves that topic at that, thankfully. She isn’t wrong; Hera has enjoyed watching the progression of Lovelace and Minkowski’s relationship. She remembers that when Lovelace first showed up, Minkowski listened to ‘What Is This Feeling’ from Wicked through Hera’s sound system nearly every day for a few weeks. Not that Minkowski would ever share that with anyone, and not that Hera would share that with Maxwell.
Hera’s thankful that Minkowski and Lovelace have gotten their antagonism out of their system, because as fun as it was to side with Minkowski against Lovelace, Hera can only get distracted from her duties by seeing Minkowski and Lovelace quarrel over nothing so many times. Hera thinks that maybe if Minkowski were a little less married, Hera would be getting distracted from her duties by seeing Minkowski and Lovelace have charged interactions of an entirely different nature, but that’s purely hypothetical, and any good A.I. knows not to get too fixated on the what-ifs. Hard data is crucial, after all, and right now the information that Hera has is leading her to some very simple calculations that add up to neither Lovelace nor Minkowski treating this day differently than they would any others.
To rile Maxwell up, maybe, or even the score, maybe, or just continue the conversation by utilizing the time-honored practice of bonding over bullying people, Hera says, “Well, what ab-bout Colonel Kepler and Mr. Jacobi?”
Maxwell wheezes with laughter. “Daniel wishes he could be so lucky. Valentine’s Day with the two of them…” she trails off.
“There’s clearly a story there,” Hera extrapolates. “And I have nothing b-better to do—” Hera doesn’t talk to Hilbert; Kepler is preoccupied with, weirdly enough, what appears to be cutting up sheets of paper, and doesn’t seem to need her assistance at the moment; Jacobi almost never asks for Hera’s assistance except for if he wants to make her do useless, pedantic labor, and right now he seems to be engrossed in wiring some questionable-looking thing or another, so Hera thinks she’s probably off the hook, because he likes doing that sort of thing; Eiffel is being reprimanded for being late by a Lovelace who looks like she’s having fun chewing Eiffel out but doesn’t particularly mind the fact that he was a little late (it’s his habit at this point, and while Minkowski might insist that he can still change, Lovelace has pretty much gotten with the program); and the Commander– sorry, the Lieutenant herself is floating around the space the crew eats in muttering to herself about damned wintertime, whatever that’s about “—so hit me with your b-best shot, Doctor.”
Maxwell tucks a loose curl dyed a fading blue behind her ear. Hera likes that blue. She’d never tell anyone, but she’s adopted the shade for her own sort-of-hair, which she’s growing out into a comfortable shag.
It’s not really that Hera has a physical form, per se, but she does have a mind’s eye perception of herself. It’s not strictly human, though it is certainly far more humanoid than the hulking mass of the ship itself. She loves the ship, and she loves being it, and she loves feeling like she doesn’t have to condense the feelings—electrical impulses, whatever—that shoot through her at lightning speeds. She doesn’t understand how humans pack so much into so little.
But in her mind’s eye, Hera looks something a little closer to her crewmates than to the form of the Hephaestus itself. She sees herself as something a bit smaller than the ship that surrounds her consciousness, and it’s not her fault that she was coded by humans. She’s always going to be inclined towards them. It’s a fatal flaw, maybe, or a gift. She’s still figuring that out.
Hence the woman-ish form that sort of exists in her head that no one except for herself has ever seen. Hera used to look a lot like… someone, she can’t really place who? The woman who had the largest hand in shaping her, she assumes. And Hera didn’t mind that appearance, not at all, but it didn’t feel right. It was very buttoned-up. It felt too sharp to be– well, not to be human, because Hera’s not a human, not in the biological sense, but it certainly felt too sharp to be Hera. Too brutal.
Over time—if pressed, Hera would likely admit that she barely even realized that it was happening as she did it, that it was a subconscious expression of admiration and a subconscious admission of love—Hera sort of maybe a little bit stole Minkowski’s tall stature, saw Eiffel’s broad shoulders in her own frame, copied the scar that streaks across Lovelace’s left eye and ends at the rise of her cheekbone like a comet falling to the Earth. Hera still looks to be more computer than stitching-together of flesh and bone, and she’s happy about that, because that’s who she is. But she’s very clearly been influenced by the people she knows and loves, and she’s okay with that.
Hera’s hair has always been blue. Most of her mind’s-eye conglomeration of parts exists in the unnatural shades of blue and chrome (and accents of white and orange and black) that make up the majority of Goddard Futuristics’ color scheme. But Hera’s hair used to be the harsh and short and asymmetrical bob of some other woman, and now it’s long enough to reach, on Hera’s sort-of-body, what might pass as shoulders if a human squinted, and the almost-strands-almost-cords-almost-imitation-of-waterfalls are not as pale as they were when Hera was first joined with the hull of the Hephaestus. Her hair is now the rich cerulean that tumbles through Maxwell’s curls and winds its way into the space buns—space buns, ha-ha, Hera refuses to admit how adorable she finds Maxwell’s near-religious adherence to the hairstyle and the pun—that sit atop her head every day.
Hera is jolted from her musings on how blue is a human-in-the-classical-sense-of-the-word-romantic synthesis of person and machine in just the same way that she herself is by Maxwell swearing lightly.
“You alright?” Hera asks anxiously.
Maxwell sucks on her right pointer finger for a second before responding, “Yeah, just got a bit of skin caught between a cable and a port.”
Hera hisses sympathetically. She has no idea how that would feel, but she assumes the answer is not that great from the way Maxwell is glaring at the offending port.
“So,” Hera prods again, because either Maxwell never started telling the story or Hera zoned out hard enough to miss it (and that seems unlikely), “Valent-tine’s Day? You mentioned something abou—”
“Oh, yes, Valentine’s Day,” Maxwell says. She pushes off of the wall and catches her laptop in mid-air. “Well, as I’m sure you’ve already picked up on, the Colonel—back then he was the Major—is big on upping group morale.”
“Is he.”
Maxwell laughs, spinning wildly through the zero-gravity environment while clacking away on her computer. Hera admires her ability to multitask. Hera hasn’t met many humans in her four years of life, but of the ones that she’s gotten to know, Maxwell is the best at being able to keep up with Hera’s adjacency to omnipresence and omniscience. “Hera, come on. You can’t tell me you didn’t have a nice time on New Year’s Eve.”
“I d-did have a nice time,” Hera says, somewhat begrudgingly. Kepler had insisted on a “family dinner” of sorts, and it had admittedly been much nicer than the previous New Year’s celebrations Hera’d had with the Hephaestus crew. Plus, Eiffel had given her the closest thing to a new year’s kiss that they could manage—he pecked the wall of the ship. It was the thought that counted—and that’s a memory that ups Hera’s internal heating system just a touch whenever she thinks about it.
Maxwell nods. Her back hits a wall lightly and she grabs onto one of the handrails sticking out from it to stabilize herself. She drifts like an intellectually-focused genie, her bottle being the odds and ends of circuitry and technology swimming lazily through the air beneath her. “So, it was my first V-day with the two of them. And Kepler– well, when the Colonel is on a mission, he sticks pretty firmly to being on the mission. The three of us were in, gosh, somewhere in the south of Italy, but I can’t remember the exact place name now. I was, like, twenty-five and still a little terrified of the two of them, though I’d never tell them that. It would inflate Jacobi’s ego to unparalleled heights.”
“We don’t need that,” Hera agrees.
“Yeah, and the two of them? They’re not scary people, so I don’t want to give them the impression that they are.”
Hera stays silent at that. She’s not scared of Kepler and Jacobi. She’s a little worried about the direction Kepler is trying to steer the crew in, sure, and she’s a little worried that Jacobi might one day (accidentally or otherwise) blow everyone to pieces, but she’s not scared of them. Still, even if she isn’t scared, and even if the rest of the crew has grown accustomed to them, she’s had a wildly incomparable experience with the two of them than Maxwell has.
Sometimes Hera has to remind herself that Maxwell is one-third of a whole. Sometimes she forgets that she isn’t allowed to separate Maxwell from her co-workers. Sometimes Hera wishes—illogically, desperately, pathetically—that things were a little bit different.
“Anyway,” Maxwell says, “we were deep in the bowels of this mission. I don’t think I’m allowed to go into detail, but it was pretty heavy work, and we weren’t expecting a reprieve from our work for a few days. Which we were fine with—workaholics, you know how it is.”
Hera’s not sure if she does. She used to think that Minkowski was like that, but more and more she’s realized that Minkowski is driven by proving herself to someone. Sometimes, though, she’ll catch Minkowski staring out a window to the stars when there’s no one else around, and Hera knows that this is where Minowski feels most alive. Tired, haggard, run-down and pushed around, but alive.
Maxwell continues, “It was late on the night of February 14th, and I was settling in for a night of watching some surveillance footage. The Colonel, though, dragged me away from my computers and Jacobi away from his explosives and took us out to dinner. I was not expecting that,” she laughs. “Neither was Jacobi. But the three of us had a lovely pasta dinner and drank some truly fantastic wine, and when we asked Kepler if he had any ulterior motive in bringing us out, he just shrugged and said You know, I thought we could do with a holiday. And we got gelato and stayed out a little too late, and the next day it was back into mission mode, but I never forgot that blip in time. It was… it was really nice,” she says, a peaceful smile gracing her lips. “He did it again the next two years, too. Just paused the mission for the holiday. Because, y’know, it’s not like any of us had someone to spend it with for its real purpose.”
“Is that bitterness I’m d-detecting, Doctor?”
“Not at all,” Maxwell assures her. “I wouldn’t be part of SI-5 if I valued something as silly as a romance more than I valued my work. It’s the same for the two of them. Although,” Maxwell notes, smirking, “from the way Jacobi was looking at the Colonel as he explained the history of the wine we were drinking, you’d think it was just the two of them sequestered away into the back corner of an Italian restaurant on the most romantic day of the year.”
“Ah,” Hera says, aiming, with her tone of voice, for delicate, and landing at disdainful.
“Aw, you learn to love it,” Maxwell tells her, waving off her judgment. “Or at the very least live with it. Pretend to tolerate. Bully your best friend about it.”
Hera laughs, but it doesn’t sound authentic. There’s such a dissonance between the picture Maxwell paints of her self-described best friend Daniel Jacobi and the man that Hera has had some truly unfortunate interactions with. And there’s such a dissonance between the Colonel, someone that Maxwell tends to truly admire and adore, and Colonel Warren Kepler, the man who has threatened Hera’s crew countless times and endangered them countless others. She can’t seem to grasp how Maxwell is so glib about these two killing machines made flesh and bone.
Then again, her crew tends to not really grasp how Hera herself manages to be on such good terms with a woman as untrustworthy as they’ve all—baselessly—deemed Maxwell to be. They’re all walking a tightrope of trust, and some of them have poles on their moral compasses that are a little less north than they should be, and Hera’s still figuring out where everyone stands. Everyone’s still figuring out where everyone stands.
Maxwell hits some keys on her computer with a sense of finality and exhales happily. “I think you should be doing a bit better now, Hera,” she says. “We’ll see how your volume regulation goes over the course of the next few hours, but I think I got the worst of your issues out. Wanna get to analyzing the latest transmission?”
Hera feels, for a second, a fierce sting of protection. She says, “Well, I don’t think it’s f-fair to Officer Eiff-fel to do that without him.”
Maxwell’s frown is almost imperceptible, but it’s there. Hera misses nothing, and her biometric scanners catch Maxwell’s pupils constricting a touch, as well as a few of her facial muscles twitching downwards. She says, “I think we can at least do a few passes through, don’t you?”
Instead of letting Maxwell win this non-argument that she and Hera aren’t even having, Hera stalls. She says, “Hang on. I haven’t been keeping a g-good enough eye on the rest of the crew while we’ve been b-busy.”
“Sorry for being a distraction,” Maxwell says, grinning in the same cheeky way that Eiffel’s a master of.
Hera focuses her attention outward. She doesn’t really care what Hilbert’s doing, but she checks in just to make sure he’s not secretly planning against the team. He seems to be occupied with a microscope and a notepad, so she thinks everything is probably fine on that front.
Lovelace and Eiffel are still chattering as they do some fix-ups on the ship, which is still pretty roughly beat out of shape following the most recent storm. Lovelace is saying something about being willing to threaten Hilbert with bodily harm if he doesn’t bioengineer some galactic flowers for Eiffel to give to the person he wants to give them to, or something, and Eiffel is laughing.
Eiffel says, “I appreciate the offer, Captain.”
“Of course,” Lovelace tells him. “You know, I’ve never really been one for flowers. I suppose that’s what you get when you grow up in a city; you don’t really see a ton of them outside of little shops that reek of dying flora. Also, they just seem like too much effort for not a lot of payoff.”
“They’re sweet,” Eiffel argues. “Plus, ladies love ‘em.”
“Not this lady,” Lovelace says, pointing at herself.
“Good thing I’m not trying to woo you,” Eiffel says.
Lovelace tightens a bolt with a grunt. “Yeah, good thing. Don’t think you’d have a ton of luck on that front.”
“On account of the whole gay thing?”
“On account of the whole even if I wasn’t a lesbian you would not be my type thing,” Lovelace shoots back. She reaches over and ruffles Eiffel’s hair, which has done a remarkably fast job of growing back after falling out during his stint in the cryogenic chamber.
“Thanks, Captain,” Eiffel says, batting her hand away.
“Any time,” she says.
“So, you don’t have a honey back home?”
“Pfft. A honey? Did not realize we’d transported back to the fifties. Let me just drop out of beauty school and go be in the rain on prom night and learn to hand jive—”
“A girlfriend, a special person, a whatever you wanna call it,” Eiffel says, rolling his eyes and waving his hands around. He talks with his hands a lot, which Hera thinks is endearing. “Also, since when were you a Grease fan?”
“No, I don’t have a girlfriend waiting back home for me. And as for Grease, it’s a fun movie,” Lovelace shrugs. “I’d let it slip to Minkowski that I hadn’t seen it in ages, and one day she bodied me into her room and forced me to watch it with her. She did not enjoy that I was a fan of providing commentary the whole time, though.”
Eiffel nudges Lovelace in the side with a wrench. “So that’s why you don’t have a honey waiting for you back home, huh?”
As Lovelace blusters in protest, Hera focuses her attention elsewhere. Jacobi is still busy with whatever it was he was working on earlier. She takes a minute to consider blasting a song loudly in the room that he’s in, but ultimately decides against it, mostly because Maxwell would probably be upset that she wasn’t there to see Jacobi leap out of his seat.
Kepler has graduated from cutting up pieces of paper to now taping what Hera can see are hearts around the room of the Hephaestus where the crew ate New Year’s dinner together. And, much to Hera’s surprise, Minkowski is drifting around with him.
“We are not doing another “family dinner”,” Minkowski says, letting go of a few of her paper hearts to make air quotes.
“We aren’t,” Kepler agrees. “We’re simply decorating and letting everyone have the night off.”
“This is absurd,” Minkowski says. “There are repairs to be made.”
Kepler sighs. He says, “Trust me, I hate slackers just as much as the next guy—more than the next guy, really—but I also believe in having a good time every once in a while, and giving the crew a bit of downtime is important for overall productivity. After the storm—”
“And whose fault was the goings-on of the storm?”
Kepler ignores Minkowski’s ire, which Hera thinks is rude and unfair. He says, “After the storm, I think the group needs a bit of a morale boost.”
“That’s what you said last time,” she complains.
“Yes, and last time morales were all-around boosted,” Kepler says pleasantly. “Come on, Lieutenant. You spent a decent part of the morning preparing decorations with me. You can’t say you want to waste your work.”
Minkowski stays quiet, chewing on her lip in silent frustration. Hera can see that she’s likely not going to argue any further. Besides, she probably wants a night to unwind and to miss her husband, or something sentimental like that. Hera doesn’t pretend to understand why Minkowski tends to not talk about her husband, but she knows that Minkowski must have loved him enough to want to marry him, and she knows that Minkowski misses him.
Before Hera can bum herself out about the state of romance aboard the ship, she jumps the brunt of her focus back to Maxwell. Because there’s nothing better to do, Hera caves and says, “Sure. Run the transmission through the de-decrypter once or twice.”
They spend the rest of the working hours of the day alternating between analyzing transmissions and doing a few repairs here and there on a few of Hera’s trouble spots that keep popping up. Eventually, work dwindles down, and soon enough Hera’s listening to Kepler make a ship-wide announcement.
“Hephaestus crew,” he says grandly.
If Hera had a tongue to stick out sarcastically at a speaker, she’d be doing that. She sees Eiffel doing it, which makes her bubble with affection.
Kepler goes on, “As I’m sure you all know, today, on Earth, would be Valentine’s Day. So go easy for the rest of the day. Think about love. Appreciate the decorations the Lieutenant and I put up to set the mood. And, most importantly, get enough rest to be up bright and early tomorrow, because the work doesn’t stop here, folks. We’ve got a lot to do.”
Thus ends his transmission.
“Gee,” Eiffel says flatly. “Sweet.”
“My teeth ache from all the sugar,” Lovelace adds, just as flatly.
Maxwell turns to Hera. “I’m going to go grab Jacobi,” she says. “I talked him into watching When Harry Met Sally with me tonight.”
“Sounds fun,” Hera says, thinking that it sounds like anything but fun.
“It will be,” Maxwell nods. “He’ll probably cry.”
Minkowski calls for Hera, drawing her away from Maxwell as Maxwell zips away to find the bombs specialist who apparently gets weepy over rom-coms. Minkowski says, “Do you like the decorations?” “Love them, Lieutenant Mink-kowski,” Hera assures her. “Your calling truly lies in the visual arts.”
Minkowski gives her a look that says cool it with the sass, kiddo, and then sighs. “I– look, I’m not about to make you my therapist, because you’re not, and because I’m perfectly fine—”
“Ah, yes, known thing all p-perfectly f-fine people say to others unprompted.”
Minkowski glares, but there’s not a lot of fire behind it. She runs a hand through her curls, the red that was so vibrant at the start of the mission now more of a memory dancing around the bits of her hair that aren’t her dark roots. “I’m glad we’re taking tonight off. I think I need some time to sit on my own and just… decompress.”
“I agree,” Hera says. “You’ve been doing a lot. You should g-get a rest.”
“Thanks, Hera,” Minkowski says, smiling tiredly. “I’m gonna watch When Harry Met Sally on one of your screens later, and then maybe I’ll go to bed early.”
“That’s in high demand tonight,” Hera notes.
“Oh? What, is Lovelace reconnecting with her New York roots?” Minkowski asks. Hera’s not sure if it’s the fact that she knows Minkowski pretty well or if it’s the fact that Minkowski is too tired to keep up the facade she’d like to keep up, but Hera certainly hears a hint of hope in her voice.
“Nope. Just Dr. Maxwell and M-Mr. Jacobi.”
“Really?” Minkowski says incredulously. “Huh.”
“I’m sure you could invite Captain L-Lovelace over to watch w-with you if you w-want, though,” Hera says coquettishly.
Minkowski runs a hand through her hair again. “Goodnight, Hera,” she says, despite the fact that it’s only about 1700 hours, which is decidedly not night.
Hera decides, in the spirit of Valentine’s Day, to take a minute to herself and think about what she loves. Well, not to herself, really, because she’s never truly alone. The dozens of systems operating inside and alongside her always keep her company. The crewmates of the Hephaestus are everpresent, too; as much as she’s always with them, whether they like it or not, they’re always with her, whether she likes it or not.
With her audio and visual processing turned down to as low as they can go without her losing track of the crew entirely, though, she has some semblance of isolation. She can escape into the niche that exists in her mind where it’s her and only her.
She used to go there a lot more, she realizes. She used to take every chance she could get to hole away inside herself, to avoid engaging with the—what did she call them that one time?—experimental meatbags that stumbled around inside of her body, causing chaos and wreaking havoc and altogether interrupting what had been a lovely bout of alone time that she’d had to acquaint herself with the physicality of the ship before any humans boarded it.
And that’s what she’s grown to love, she realizes. People. People and their flaws, and their faulty biology, and their stupid emotionally-driven lives. She loves the fact that she’s more similar to them than she’d wanted to admit on the first day two of the people she’s come to consider family stepped foot aboard the Hephaestus.
She doesn’t love all people, of course. Hera certainly doesn’t love Hilbert, nor does she love Kepler or Jacobi, but she at least has a twisted sense of admiration for how sure of themselves and what they’re doing that they all seem to be.
And though that’s three people out of seven that Hera’s spent a while with whom she doesn’t like, she’s still pretty amazed that she truly does love the mathematical majority of people she’s gotten to know.
One: Minkowski, who is truly the most incredible woman Hera has ever met. And, yeah, she hasn’t met a lot of women, but she doubts she’d ever meet someone like Minkowski even if she shook hands with everyone on Earth. Hera loves Minkowski’s sometimes-less-levelheaded-than-she’d-like way of running things, loves her not-so-secret love of musical theatre, loves her bullheaded determination and desire to prove to the world, to something as broad as the universe, that she’s real and she’s here and she matters. (Hera understands that desire very much.)
Two: Lovelace, who defies, again and again, Hera’s notions of human limitation. Lovelace has won against probability and against people who have tried very, very hard to kill her. Hera doesn’t doubt that Lovelace will somehow make sure that the rest of the crew manages, in the end, to beat the same system that she’s been taking whacks at since 2010. Hera loves how Lovelace refuses to fall into the same cycle of terror and despair that’s seemed to grip most of her time in space so far, loves how she balances Minkowski without conceding to her and without overpowering her, loves how she knows her guns and sticks to them.
Three: Maxwell, who has broadened Hera’s definition of what loving people means. Hera loves Maxwell’s smile, her smarts, the way she sorts through Hera’s code with care and precision. Hera loves Maxwell’s jokes and she loves Maxwell’s determination and she loves the fact that Maxwell refuses to be held back.
And Eiffel—
“Hey, baby,” Eiffel says, right on cue. “You busy tonight?”
Hera hums in the same way a cat might purr after stretching out in the sun. Setting her audiovisual processors back to full functioning capacity, she says, “I had some plans.”
“Oh, really?” Eiffel asks. He’s in his sleeping quarters, having left his work behind as soon as Kepler told everyone to take off for the night. His walls are spotted with cleanly-cut paper hearts in various shades of red and pink. Hera regrets that she didn’t pay more attention to Kepler and Minkowski decorating throughout the day, if only for the fact that Minkowski doing first-grade crafts in her own perfectionist way would likely be hilarious. “Wanna tell me about those plans?”
“Well, I was under the impr-pression that a certain member of the U.S.S. Hephaestus would end up asking m-me to watch a movie with him, or something of the sort.”
Eiffel gasps. “You mean to tell me that Hilbert’s been propositioning you? I’ll kick his ass to Venus and back.”
“Mmm, very macho of you.”
“You know me,” Eiffel says with a wink. “I’m the manliest of men.”
“Are you g-going to cry when we watch The Notebook tonight?”
“Like a baby,” he assures her solemnly. “So, how was your day?”
“It was good,” she tells him. “I spent most of it w-working with Dr. M-Maxwell on some of my bugs. We scanned the latest transmission; don’t worry, I told her that we w-wouldn’t finish up on it until you could be there. She told me about how SI-5 spent some of their prev-vious Valentine’s Days.”
Eiffel presses a fake pair of glasses up the bridge of his nose, clearly taking on a mocking persona of Maxwell. “Killing babies can be romantic!” Eiffel says in a terrible attempt at imitating her voice, throwing in some overdramatic jazz hands for emphasis.
“What have you done for Valentine’s Day in the p-past?” Hera asks curiously. She loves learning about human traditions. She obviously knows the sort of activities most people get up to on February 14th—nice dinners, romance to the nth degree, sex—but there’s a difference between knowing basic data and hearing about people’s personal experiences. It’s the difference between apples and oranges. It’s the difference between eighth-grade algebra and applied mathematics.
Eiffel makes a contemplative noise. “Well, it really depends.”
He starts to shuck off his Goddard Futuristics work uniform—it’s a blue jumpsuit with black accents and his name sewed in orange on his breast pocket, simple and (according to Lovelace) more comfortable than the old versions used to be—and pulls a set of sleep clothes out from the tangle of garments he has floating in the corner of his sleeping quarters. Back at the start of the mission, he used to sheepishly ask Hera to avert her gaze when he changed. Hera’s still not sure if he stopped asking because he assumed she did it reflexively (she can’t do it reflexively. She’s seen everyone aboard the ship in their underclothes or less. It’s nothing personal.) or because he just stopped minding if she saw him changing.
“What did it d-depend on?”
“Relationship status, largely,” Eiffel laughs. “When I was single I would sit at home with some candy and cry over the fact that Olivia Contrell hadn’t even looked my way the day before in science class, or the fact that Alex Hartman from my division at work called me “Duncan” instead of “Douglas”, or something like that.”
“Their loss,” Hera says.
“Oh, yeah, Olivia Contrell was the nightmare-queen of sixth grade,” Eiffel agrees with a laugh. “But, you know, it’s kinda nice to have an excuse to have a big ol’ cathartic emotional release. And to eat my way through a tub of ice cream, obviously.”
“There come those good-old-fashioned m-macho tendencies coming to bite you in the ass,” Hera says.
“Male emotional repression, hell fuckin’ yeah!”
The lights in Eiffel’s sleeping quarters flicker as Hera laughs, illuminating a pair of comfortable-looking blue plaid boxers and an overworn Red Sox t-shirt that hangs too loosely around his frame. It’s been a while since he got back from his death scare and his solo trip to the Urania, but he’s still thin and gaunt and bony, and Hera thinks if she had hands, if she could run her fingers down his sides the way she longs to do, she’d be able to play his ribs like a harp.
“And when you were w-with someone?” Hera asks.
“I mean, that still depended,” Eiffel tells her. He pushes off of the ground and shoots up to his bed. He grabs hold and floats just an inch above it, cross-legged. “Some girls like flowers, and some like chocolates, and some like big fancy deals, and some don’t like the holiday much at all. I dated a few girls, some more seriously than others, but I only really had one big-with-a-capital-B relationship. It was with this woman named Kate, and for Valentine’s Day, we’d drive way out to these caves,” Eiffel says, smiling warmly. He waves his hand through the air, making the sort-of-motion of a car traveling down a long road. “No one was there, because who the fuck goes into caves for Valentine’s Day?”
“You do, apparently,” Hera says observantly.
“Yeah, I do. It was… it was real great,” Eiffel says, exhaling softly. “We brought food and we had a picnic in the caves and made out like teenagers. We were exhausted when we got back, but it was worth it. It was a nice tradition.”
“That’s sweet,” Hera says. “I can’t imagine g-going spelunking. Was it– this is a s-stupid question, but was it scary?”
“A little!” Eiffel admits. “The first time, at least. And, hey, as much as I loved it, I was not a creature made for the underworld, y’know?”
“You’re much more of a celestial thing,” Hera agrees.
“Oh, yeah. I’m home among the galaxies and stars,” Eiffel tells her. He puts a hand against the wall as if he’s pressing his palm to hers. “I’m home here.”
“Well,” Hera says. “W-would you like to contin-nue another one of your Valentine’s Day traditions?”
The first year it had been a bit of an accident. The crew hadn’t been together for even a year yet, and despite the fact that it’d been over two hundred days of operating in close proximity, Hera still looked down on the simplemindedness of humans and argued with Minkowski about almost everything and was overall a little bit more of a nightmare than she’d care to admit.
Minkowski had given the crew the night off, though—she’s so similar to Kepler, Hera thinks, but it’s not as if she’s aware of it, and even if she was, she’d deny it—and had spent the night holed up in her own sleeping quarters.
(Looking back on it, Hera realizes that Minkowski was spending Valentine’s Day alone in space without her husband and surrounded by two men she didn’t particularly like and a prickly A.I., so it makes more sense as to why she disappeared for the night.)
And Eiffel had asked Hera, in all her infinite information storage, if she could spare a screen and show him 10 Things I Hate About You.
Hera had said, “I didn’t know you were a fan of Shakespearian adapt-tations.”
Eiffel had said, “I’m a fan of Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger. Also, it’s Valentine’s Day. Do you wanna watch with me?”
“I can’t not watch with you,” Hera had told him. “It’s physically imp-possible, considering the f-fact that I see everything on the ship.”
“You know what? That’s not the least romantic acceptance I’ve ever gotten,” Eiffel had said with a self-deprecating laugh. “So I’ll count it as a win.”
The next Valentine’s Day had been the first day of Minkowski’s two-week-long obsessive plant-monster-hunting spiral.
(Looking back on it, Hera thinks that maybe Minkowski was distracting herself from the fact that she was, once again, orbiting around a star seven-point-nine light years away from her husband on the most love-centric day of the year without the means to even call him and say hello.)
Eiffel had asked Hera what movie she wanted to watch with him. Hera had told him that it was pretty presumptuous of him to assume she didn’t have better things to do. Eiffel had said, “Sleepless in Seattle, then?”
They’d watched Sleepless in Seattle. Hera had wished she could share popcorn with him, or something as mundanely and absurdly and clichedly human.
And now it’s their third Valentine’s Day together, and Hera thinks she could get used to this. She thinks she’s not one for caving, but she’s one for romance and love and intimacy, and maybe it doesn’t take getting stuck together under the earth to express closeness and affection. She thinks that maybe friendship is something you can find between supernovae and nebula and all those other galactic wonders. She thinks that maybe love is something made of stardust, too.
Eiffel busies himself with getting a few snacks from the kitchen and stealing an extra pillow from Lovelace’s room while she’s in the bathroom brushing her teeth. While he gets set up, Hera checks in on a few members of the rest of the crew and their plans for the evening.
Minkowski is in her sleeping quarters reading. It’s an old paper-back, beat up in a way that shows how much love she’s poured into it. She’s wearing a set of reading glasses that she’s never let anyone other than Hera know about. They’re tortoise-shell and frame her brown eyes prettily. The blue light of the star filters across the bump on the bridge of her nose and her calloused, tired hands. She looks at peace. A paper heart is caught up in the ponytail of curls that’s floating out behind her head.
Maxwell and Jacobi are bantering playfully about something or another; Hera doesn’t tune in far enough to be able to pay proper attention to whatever it is they’re discussing. They act like two teenage siblings around each other, pushing and shoving in ways that scream I love you. She catches Maxwell saying something about Kepler, to which Jacobi responds by whacking her in the side with a pillow. Maxwell jumps at him, her body graceful as anything when airborne, and the two of them tumble through the air laughing like kids.
Lovelace, after coming back from the bathroom—and finding a pillow missing, and hitting her head against the wall in frustration about it—changes into sleep clothes and drifts around the spacecraft. She has headphones in, listening to music on a device that isn’t connected to Hera, and she seems to be pretty happy. At one point, when she’s on the far end of the corridor that the Hephaestus crew’s sleeping quarters branch off from, Minkowski opens the sliding door that sequesters off the area that she goes to bed in and looks at Lovelace, whose back is facing her.
Hera’s focus doesn’t stick around for long enough to see if Minkowski invites Lovelace in to watch When Harry Met Sally with her. A watched pot never boils, after all. Besides, Hera will know in an hour or so once Minkowski finishes her book and starts the movie. Hera will be able to see if Lovelace is sitting beside her. And Hera’s not a gambling woman, but if she was, she’d put good money on yes, she will be.
Eiffel knocks on the wall as he closes his door behind him. “Honey!” he says, “I’m home!”
Hera warms his room up just enough that he knows that she’s doing it. She can’t hug him, and she can’t kiss him, and she can’t sit next to him and feel his form against her side, but she can express affection in her own way, and she likes that. Sometimes love is simply knowing that your best friend’s favorite color is dark blue and adjusting the lights in his room accordingly.
"You ready?" Hera asks.
“Born ready,” he assures her. “And, Hera? Happy Valentine’s Day. Wish I could wish you it properly,” he says.
“Properly?”
“You know,” he says, gesturing at himself and then gesturing at the room around him. “I wish I could kiss you.”
“Me t-too, Eiffel,” she says.
“I’m happy to have this, though,” he quickly adds. “I really, really am. Having traditions. Making memories.” He looks out a window to the blue red dwarf that they’re orbiting. “You know, not everyone can say they’ve gone on a stargazing date like we have.”
Hera says, “You know, there are a t-ton of constellations around us that no one on Earth has ever n-named due to their being so f-far away.”
“We can come up with some together,” Eiffel tells her softly. He points towards some undefinable point in the distance. “Look, that group over there is shining brighter than the rest, I think. It kinda looks like a heart, I guess?”
Hera’s pretty sure she can see where he’s pointing. It does not look like a heart. “If you squint,” she says.
“Well, I think it does,” he says decisively. And then he pats the wall lightly, presses his love through his fingertips and into her circuitry, and says, “I’ll name it after you.”