Chapter Text
She was so sure, after that unexpected, teasing goodbye, that that was it. Maureen Robinson had satisfied her curiosity about the sister and where they were keeping the colony’s most controversial prisoner, and could now vanish off into her pristine life amid the vast and welcoming beauty of Alpha Centauri while she, Doctor Smith, Zoe-Jessica-June (the real one last said so long ago she could almost pretend it had never even belonged to her, and which she’d pointedly left out of her confession) would stay locked away as Prisoner 002 with her little padded cell and her weekly book privileges and her dirt-bland diet of leftover MREs no one else wanted to touch, not now that they had a planet producing fresh, home-grown food all of its own, wasting away her middle age in style.
Maybe, in the end, she would look her up, the sharp-eyed Robinson who’d always seemed to (grudgingly) like having her around. You know. When she wasn’t actively manipulating the children or commandeering the robot or trying to get the husband blown up in space.
It was the grudge, after all, that told her it was real.
———
Less than three books later (Sense and Sensibility bored her to death; she was now halfway through a space opera with sharp political intrigue and a torrid lesbian affair she couldn’t believe had made the cut for the cross-galactic library, but which was much more fun), there she was again—that sharp-eyed, pretty face framed in all that lovely Robinson-auburn hair, standing outside the window of her cell, looking… guilty?
“Well this is a nice surprise,” said Smith, giving her her most winsome smile. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“I brought cake,” said Maureen, too fast. “Nothing inside it— I passed the x-ray. And Judy made it. Not me. But I was presenting to the budget committee yesterday and finally got a look at the food plan for these cells and—”
Smith popped open her little food hatch and stuck out her hands, palms up. “Yes please,” she said. She could care less about whatever the excuse was for the cake. The important thing was Maureen. Who had remembered her joke. And came back.
(Also… cake.)
Maureen let out a rusty laugh and set the thin paper plate down on her outstretched hands, tugging off the plastic wrap. “Here you go.”
The side of a finger brushed skin as she drew back.
She paused there for a second, pinky resting on Smith’s thumb, warm and solid and, for a woman who'd been locked up alone for going on four months now, achingly real.
She made herself pull away faster than she wanted to. A tiny bit of contact, then none again for infinitely more months after this, seemed like it might be worse than just being used to it: total isolation.
“Oh, wow,” she said. Her tone was dry—it always was—but she meant it. “This looks incredible. Give Judy my thanks.”
Then she swiped a fingertip through the icing and popped it in her mouth. Sugar was weird here: it got smooth and a little fluffy when you cooked with it, instead of staying grainy or melting away. She couldn’t have told you why. Maureen probably knew, but who cared. Sugar was sugar.
And sugar—pure, sweet, weird-textured sugar—was way more delicious than she remembered. She sat back on her bunk and let out a full-throat groan of enjoyment, closing her eyes, savoring it. After nothing but meals-in-a-bag, icing was actual heaven.
When she looked up again, Maureen was staring at her, lips just parted, eyes a little dark. Her tongue slipped out, flicking over her upper lip, then she said, “I take it I’m invited back then?”
Smith arched an eyebrow, considering whether to ask, but her curiosity could wait. If Maureen had decided to pay her another visit, the why was less important than the when, and the when was less important than making sure it happened at all. Every visit was its own opportunity, one she hadn’t thought she’d get. “God yes,” she said, lifting the cake for an actual bite, and Maureen halfway smiled.
———
The guilty look made more sense a week later, when Maureen came back.
“I’m being driven out of my mind by men,” she said after the most perfunctory of hellos. “I don’t shuttle up again for another week and if I have to stick around through one more lunch of Grant complaining about ag-tech because the scientific advancements of the last twenty years make him feel too emasculated to apply for the exploratory mission while every time I mention the Fortuna Nova, John tries to ham-fistedly remind me of everything I miss each and every time I shuttle up to work on the Solidarity, I think I’m going to walk out of an airlock.”
Smith’s brow got progressively higher with each increasingly frustrated word out of Maureen’s mouth. So she’d wanted to come here to vent. As delicious as the cake had been, she couldn’t help but think that this, wherever might go, was going to be even better. Already, that was more tasty morsels about life outside her four tiny walls than she’d had in months of trying to overhear guard conversations or pester them with questions at meal time. And a pent-up, fiery Maureen…
She was most curious about that, about what it was that had Maureen so personally on edge, but had a feeling the best way to get her talking would be starting with the buzzwords. “Exploratory mission?” she asked. “And did you say Fortuna?”
“Yes,” said Maureen eagerly, whirling to face Smith’s curiosity head-on. “The Fortuna Nova. Oh, it’s the most amazing thing. I did the initial designs myself, pitched the proposal to the council—with so much focus on the colony here on Alpha Centauri and on getting the Solidarity back to Earth, we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of everything else that’s around us. We’re a stone’s throw away from mineral deposits on three nearby moons that could save us a dozen trip’s worth of storage on the new colony ship. Getting the same from here would be five years of local deep mining, not to mention the environmental cost of beginning to tear up this planet’s crust when we’ve only just arrived. And then, if we go just a bit farther out, out where all we can see are the blips of planetary shadows crossing suns… who knows what else we might discover. Not to mention, with all we’ve learned from the robots so far… we can go twice the speeds we used to without even having to rip holes in the universe to get there.
“The council approved three research missions: a local exploratory group—places we can get in Jupiters, since we’re building the Solidarity’s habitation units from scratch; then Hephaestus, a short-range mining vessel with a full science lab, destined for the most promising moons; and finally, the Fortuna Nova, a faster ship equipped to travel longer distances with a skeleton crew, to seek out and map the edges of this end of the galaxy.” Maureen’s eyes were gleaming. “After all, we wouldn’t want to have just settled in with our new friends, only to be surprised to find out we’re not alone.”
“Again,” Smith agreed wryly. It was hard not to smile. She’d missed this (she guessed): the contagious excitement of a Robinson scheme, watching Maureen’s mind spark off at a million miles a minute just thinking about some new mess of science and probable danger. She pretended to be the responsible one, but Smith knew her better than that. She liked a little danger in her best-laid plans, as long as the kids weren’t getting hurt.
The single-word quip seemed to remind Maureen how long she’d been talking; she flashed a half-apologetic smile, then started to pace away from her cell. “You didn’t need to hear all of that.”
“No, I’m interested.” She tried not to sound too much like her fake-therapist persona as she pressed, “Tell me more.”
“Not much to say.”
And yet, Maureen kept pacing. There was definitely something more than new spaceships on her mind (though, this was Maureen Robinson: the spaceships obviously played a starring role). Something was itching at her, though. Itching badly enough to bring her back to a prison cell when she had a whole rest of a planet with a lot more room for pacing. Carefully, she prodded, “Sounds like you’ve been busy. How’s life, you know… down here?”
Maureen missed a step. “It’s… good.”
She waited out the reluctance in that answer, fingertips tingling with proximity to a sore spot.
After six or so steps, Maureen turned to pace back again and said quietly, “It stayed good, for a long time.”
Smith slinked closer to the mesh, making sure she could catch the words.
“We went out. To a restaurant,” she said with a disbelieving laugh. “I can barely believe those exist here.” A longer pause. “...I can’t remember ever doing that with him on Earth. Without the kids. When we met, Judy was already…” She shook her head, staring up at the ceiling, then her steps picked up speed, nervous energy stiffening her fingers at the ends of her wrists. “We go out. We take camping trips with Will and the girls. John’s being… a total gentleman about having my ex along for the ride. We have dinner as a family every night, and we had… weeks of the same perfect teamwork I’ve gotten so used to, back when we were still rebuilding from the attack. It kept us busy. Busy was good. But… then I started shuttling up to work on the Solidarity and… I started remembering. Remembering what it was like when we weren’t fighting for our lives, clinging to each other in the midst of some new storm. Remembering why I…”
The pause, then, and the fact that she’d answered an innocuous question with a small, pointed speech centered around the husband …
It seemed like an invitation to pry.
She cocked her head to the side. “You two were almost separated when we met.”
A jerky little head-nod met the question. “I thought we’d fixed that. I thought we were fine. I thought we’d be fine, but…” She let out a long, slow sigh. “He really thought I’d just stay.”
Her pacing had her facing away from Smith’s window at the moment, but her voice carried in the empty nexus beyond. “He really thought, after everything, after we’ve been together almost two full decades, that it all just… ended here. That after I’d had my couple years of adventure, landed us on the colony, proven we could all do this, together, I’d… settle in at home. Finish the new ship, then come home. Get better at, I don’t know—” Her hands flew up in the air. “—fucking baking. Who does he think he married? ‘Maybe,’ he said—he said ‘Maybe’ to me—Maybe I’d take an engineering position here, on the colony. Working on power generation and the light rail. Redesign the defense system. Maybe! Had to make it perfectly clear he'd rather I didn’t even do that.”
Maureen arrived right back in front of her, eyes flashing rage.
(God, she was hot.)
“Can you believe he would say that to me?”
She stared back for a minute, trying to keep inappropriate thoughts off her face, trying to calculate the right thing to say, but she’d always found it a little harder than average to be conniving around Maureen Robinson. “Yes,” she said, and Maureen reeled back.
“Excuse me?”
“I mean… yeah, I can. He’s a guy.”
For a good thirty seconds, Maureen stared at her with the same kind of reflexive shock that had made her back up a pace, then a laugh slipped past her lips without moving a single muscle in the rest of her face. “Ha.”
Smith tipped her head and shrugged, and with nothing more than that, Maureen was smiling at her.
Then, quick as it had come, it faded. She let out a sound of frustration and turned her back again, sinking down the door. If Smith craned her neck, she could just see the top of her head resting below the window, chin back, eyes closed. She groaned: “I hate that you get it.”
“Sorry,” said Smith, but her tone… wasn’t.
“No you’re not. That’s fine. You shouldn’t be. You’re right. He’s… He’s a good man, my husband. Dedicated, caring, better with the kids than I am, these days. But he… he doesn’t think I get to have a life of my own anymore. Honestly, it would be easier if it were just me. But he’s the same way about himself. He loves it here. He adores the peace and quiet. Loves how much time he gets to spend at home. Takes the unassigned worker rotations as they come and only complains about the worst jobs, and even then it’s… good natured. He cooks, he cleans, he never talks about… missing what he used to do. He’s just happy, and he just wants me to be happy, and I—”
“You want to go back to space,” said Smith.
It was a guess, but not a hard one, from the dozen and a half context clues she’d given her in that impressive opening speech.
Maureen turned her chin to the side enough to look up and meet Smith’s eyes through the crosshatching of the window. “Did I ever tell you I was supposed to be an astronaut?”
Smith tried not to make a face of total confusion. “Is that not what you are?”
Maureen laughed, but it wasn’t mocking. “Unofficially. The colony ships are… post-astronaut. No one’s really an astronaut anymore. The whole idea is that any old person with the right kind of brainpower and willpower to pass the tests can ship off to space in something like the Resolute, or the Solidarity. We can fly Jupiters, but they’re designed to act like… an airplane that just happens to be vacuum-proof. You and I are pilots, but not astronauts. Still, with everything my family did… Yes, fine. We might as well be. No one would say we haven’t earned the title. But that’s not the important part. I just meant… you’re right. I want to go back. I want to go back to space. After everything I put into it, I want to be the one who takes the Fortuna Nova to her first new star. I want it to be my job to go to space, and come back, and then go to space again. But I didn’t get to have that when I was twenty and I sure as hell don’t get to have it now.”
“Why not?”
Maureen went very still. She lowered her gaze back to the empty hub between the cells. “Nevermind. I’m… frustrated, so I’m venting at a captive audience. That’s all this is.”
Smith rested her chin on the lip of the window with a sigh, fogging up the mesh. “You really aren’t going to tell me the whole story? Because believe me: when I say this is the most entertaining thing that’s happened to me all month, I mean that with the utmost sincerity.”
For a moment, Maureen kept quiet. “Do they ever let you out of there?”
Smith nodded, then realized there was no way Maureen would see it. “Yeah. There’s a tiny cube of grass they let us walk around in once a day while they clean up these cells. It’s just me and a guard though: they take us one by one because there’s not enough staff to deal with us if we all three started scheming together.”
Maureen let out a tiny snort. “If only they realized how anti-social you are.”
“Hey!” Smith protested, then shrugged, equally unseen. “Okay, fair. I do my best scheming by myself.”
“Honestly I’m amazed you’re still in there,” said Maureen, then shifted, running her hands through her hair, mussing it up. “I hate that,” she said, more quietly. “I hate that we still have to do… this to people. Here. It’s supposed to be our chance at starting over and we’re still locking you up in tiny boxes. Solitary confinement. Of all the evil things we could’ve brought with us… We know it makes everything so much harder, if you ever get let out. How bad it is for your mental health, your… emotional well-being.”
“Don’t worry,” said Smith. “My emotions have never been well.” Flippantly, she added, “It’s better when you’re here.”
Slowly, Maureen shifted up onto her knees and stood, turning face-to-face with her again. “Is it, really?” she asked. “Do you not… hate me over… oh, I don’t know. Generally fucking up your entire chance at a new life?”
“You curse a lot more when the kids aren’t around,” she said, then, “I like it.” As Maureen let out a tiny laugh, she shrugged and added, “I fucked up my chance on my own. Honestly… you almost made it possible for me to get away with it a couple times, though I’ll pretend I never said that if it bothers you.”
Maureen stared at her. “It should, shouldn’t it.”
“Hey, don’t ask me. I’m the poster-child for unbothered. ”
A crooked little smile wrinkled lines between her freckles. “You never bothered me as much as you should have,” she confessed, seemingly unashamed. “This might just be my… current frustration talking, but I always kinda liked how… you just did what was best for you, because you knew no one else was going to give you a damn thing.”
“You and your stupid family went and trained that out of me,” she said with an eyeroll.
Maureen’s smile curled a little higher, softening. “Yeah, my kids will do that.”
Smith didn’t fail to notice she hadn’t included herself in the assessment.
She thought about the moment she’d almost killed the man who’d locked her in here, about Maureen’s firm, reassuring voice on the other end of the comm, promising her she’d have a tomorrow worth living if she made it through that day, and decided not to disagree. Maureen had never been the one pushing her to develop a conscience; just the one reminding her to never, ever, mess with her family, if she valued her own life as much as she claimed.
A threat from Maureen Robinson had always been surprisingly effective at curbing her baser instincts, but it was a different kind of incentive than not wanting to earn Will or Penny or Judy’s disappointment.
“I don’t have anywhere to be,” Maureen continued softly. “I can stay and talk for a while, if that’s what you really want. For all I know, this kind of solitude is exactly what you were hoping for.”
Smith shook her head. “Really wanted it to come with a lot more of a view.” Maureen’s smile got a little sad. Maybe she could poke some fun back into it. “Lake-side,” she added wistfully. "With a nice hot tub, a nearby vineyard that always lets me sample the wine. A guard robot at the gate to make sure no one bothers me. Except the Robinsons, of course.”
There, she’d done it: a real smile. Maureen had such a serious smile, most times she saw it. It was always nice to see one that had a bit of trouble in it, a crooked edge. That kind of smile made it hard to resist tacking on: “Maybe find a nice Alpha Centaurian lady to share it with me.”
Maureen’s eyes got just the tiniest fraction wider. In her throat, Smith could see her breath hitch, just once, but enough that the swallow after was a little harder.
Interesting.
“So, yeah,” she finished, not willing to toy with that brief curiosity too much. It wouldn’t have been the first time she flirted, but she wouldn’t want to chase her surprise visitor away: They weren’t trapped on the same spaceship anymore. “Seriously, talk to me. I’m all ears. Tell me about what it takes to become an astronaut. A real one.”
Maureen hesitated for a moment, giving Smith an unreasonable look, then she nodded, retook her seat below the window, and started quietly recounting a very personal story about a girl, and her telescope, and the stars.
By the time she left, Smith was feeling a little wrecked. Like, it was one thing to like Maureen Robinson. I mean, sure, it was rare. June Harris, as a rule, didn’t like people, but the only kind of person she ever broke that rule for (before those damn kids and that damn robot) were interesting, self-sufficient women. Obviously, it was because she saw some of herself in them, and she was a bona fide, certified, unashamed narcissist who liked herself just fine, (thank you very much), selectively sociopathic tendencies and all. So, sure. Maureen was Maureen: an interesting, self-sufficient woman. She was allowed to like her. They were allowed to (even thinking it made her wrinkle her nose in vague disgust) get along.
It was a different, sometimes-related thing, acknowledging Maureen was… easy on the eyes. Like, c’mon. A tall, lean redhead with freckles absolutely everywhere and curves in all the right places in even the boxiest of space suits and with a brain like its own galaxy to boot? Just try to not find that attractive. Not to mention the thing. The thing. The I have everything under control, and we’re going to be fine, because I will figure it out thing; the thing where Maureen Robinson got all shoulders-back jaw-squared eyes-flashing bossy-and-in-charge… man. Was there anything sexier? Like, on one hand, if someone told her there was a perfect woman for her, it would obviously be the kind with Maureen’s knack for getting them out of an impossible situation relatively unscathed, and on the other hand… Every time Maureen Robinson got that I’ve got this look on, it was all Smith wanted in the world just to dig in her own stubborn heels, tease that steely stare till it cracked, then... you know. Help her work the stress away. Let the woman relax for once. Preferably while stretched out, naked, in her bed.
Those were just… the usual kinds of thoughts a woman of her persuasion tended to have around a woman like Maureen. The end. Predictable, ignorable, a little fun.
But as Maureen’s quiet words filtered through her cell window, telling the story of how she’d veered so hard off her self-driven, one-track life course over a child she’d never planned to have; as Maureen’s voice held perfectly steady, like it was something that happened to someone else, like it was someone else’s story, just some fable with a warning for young girls about men and their careers and their careless wants and the way responsibility would just pile down onto your shoulders if you didn’t push them away…
Smith felt her heart start doing funny, twitchy, icky things in her chest. Almost like it was swelling, or sucking her ribs and her stomach up into itself like a tiny, hungry black hole.
She was allowed to get along with Maureen. She could like her, could think she was unfairly hot, and could be glad as hell for a couple hours less boredom every time she came back, but she couldn't care. She couldn’t be lying in her padded-wall cell hours later, still fuming about how Maureen Robinson deserved so much better than staring up at stars through a window. She couldn’t have… feelings. Those weren’t allowed.
God, it would be such a bad idea, after all this time, to fall in love with Maureen Robinson.