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He’s probably not in the best state to be making good first impressions when he meets her.
They’ve barely reached altitude and have gotten out over the ocean, and he’s just trying to slip through a relatively uncrowded area to reach the passage up into the hull. All around are men in nicer suits and women in fancier dresses, sipping drinks or reading books or engaging in light chatter with each other as they point out the long windows at ships and sights on the sea below.
He doesn’t quite blend in—his work clothes are supposed to, but he knows he’s smudged with oil and probably a little more windblown-looking than he should be, here on the main level with the passengers—but he’s decent at being inconspicuous when he wants to be, and he's been instructed to check on if there’s a mechanical reason that no one in the galley will pick up the radio.
He’s not sure why he notices her, at first.
She’s standing almost in the doorway, waiting and watching and listening politely to a group of people who seem to be obstructing her path as well. Her dark hair is cropped a bit above her shoulders, and she’s dressed in more businesslike attire than many of the optimistic vacationers onboard.
There’s something about her that seems more... alert than most of the people here. More focused. Maybe that’s what’s standing out to him? He’s not sure.
Regardless, he has a job to do.
“Excuse me,” he whispers, once he reaches where she’s standing and she’s still part of the crowd in the doorway area. He might’ve been able to slip by, but it seems more polite to say something.
“Sorry,” she murmurs, glancing at him briefly as she steps aside. Her eyes seem sharp, at first glance—but when they land on him, they don’t seem unkind. He gives her a quick smile and nod before slipping through.
—
The next time he sees her, she’s in the lounge area, listening to the head of staff give one of his usual brief presentations of the amenities and wonders afforded to them on their flight. There’s a notebook open in front of her on the little table, and he thinks he can hear her pen scratching swiftly across its surface.
A man is standing at the table next to hers, with a few books and his wallet on the table, half-listening as he sorts through a handful of receipts and pictures. Across the room, there’s a dull but sharp tumble-thud —and before Varian can register where the sound came from, a child shrieks and starts to cry.
The man’s head jerks up, whatever he was doing clearly forgotten—and he’s already rushing across the room to where a young boy is sitting on the floor beneath one of the viewing windows, blubbering half-words to his father between sobs. Varian flinches. The boy must have slipped while trying to balance high enough to look out the windows and hit his head on the booth or the rail.
The little boy is still crying, and the steward is now beside the boy’s father as they tend to the child.
It’s a perfect storm of distractions. Everyone, even the head steward, is focused on the scene in concern. Varian, still fairly far back along the opposite wall, sees movement out of the corner of his eye.
A different man has paused by the first’s table, looking in the same direction as everyone else with the same expression of concern. Varian almost misses the way he picks up the wallet on the table as if it were his, starting to slip some money out.
There’s a sharp clearing of someone’s throat. The dark-haired woman is staring pointedly at the newcomer, eyes piercing and unreadable. Whatever she says to him—it’s muffled to a murmur—sounds threatening, even from too far away to make it out. The man’s shoulders stiffen, and he replaces the wallet on the table and looks back toward the commotion as if he weren’t doing anything abnormal. He leaves for the passenger rooms, as quietly as he’d appeared. It’s all so subtle, so quick, that Varian is left embarrassed that he’d hesitated to do anything about it.
His eyes land back on the woman. She’s watching the man go, at first—and then she’s watching the father return holding his hiccuping son. She seems to hesitate, as if deciding whether to say anything. Amidst the father murmuring condolences and fumbling to carry his things in his free arm, he must have looked at her—because her eyes suddenly soften, and she smiles up at the two with a sympathetic, if awkward, expression. She doesn’t say anything.
The father leaves, and then her gaze flickers to him , suddenly unreadable again. Varian smiles a bit, sure there’s a twinkle in his eye. He doesn’t feel quite as awkward as he might’ve otherwise for staring. It’s always nice to know that your good deeds don’t go unnoticed, isn’t it?
She blinks, an almost embarrassed look crossing her face, and glances away with an uncertain little smile.
She’s pretty. In part, because she seems brave.
—
She is brave. She comes to talk to him before he leaves. He doubts he would’ve done the same, in her place.
“So,” she says conversationally, and Varian tries to give her a curious glance to cover the way his heart rate speeds up. “You’re a mechanic?”
He cracks an awkward smile. “Well—mostly, yeah. I stand in for stewards when they need some maintenance up here too.”
He really just gets called up here to check out reports of things not quite working correctly or making funny noises, but he’s not supposed to tell that to passengers. Somehow, he’s fairly sure she can already guess that.
“How’d you end up working on an airship?” she asks, lifting a brow as she adjusts her hold on the notebook under her arm. It’s sharp and businesslike, much like her.
“I saw one once, thought it was very awesome, worked my way up and pestered my way in,” Varian replies, unable to help a crooked grin as he puts a hand to his puffed-out chest. It is the truth. “As far as convoluted ways to get hired go, it worked fantastically. Ish.”
She chuckles, raising both her brows with a tiny smirk of acknowledgment. Something about the gesture feels... friendly, and his heart warms at it despite himself.
“I’m Cassandra,” she says, tucking one arm around her journal and holding out the other hand to shake. “I’m with the Corona Sun.”
“I’m Varian,” he greets, hesitating only a fraction of a second before shaking her hand. Her fingerless gloves feel both soft and rough and the same time—though it’s not like he’s paying attention to that—and fleetingly, he wonders if that’s a bit like her. “I’m with the—well, just the flight crew right now.”
Cassandra glances at him curiously, a gleam of amusement in her eye. “Right now? Plan on going somewhere else soon?”
He chuckles. “Maybe? I’m still, uh—working that out. I’d really love to fly one of these things at least once. Maybe not an intercontinental, but a guy can dream, right?”
Before he can accidentally make yet another conversation about himself and his wild ideas no one really needs to hear, Varian tries to change gears. He tilts his head a bit and regards her curiously.
“How’d you end up with the Sun?” he asks. Cassandra, oddly apathetic to working at such a major newspaper, just shrugs.
“My dad works in security. He thought it’d be a good place for me to get a job. Not sure it’s what I want to do forever, but... it pays alright, and I like the challenge.”
There’s a hint of a smirk on her face, and even when she glances away and lets out a quiet breath as if it’s tiring, there’s a gleam in her eye. He can relate to that—the sense of excitement that comes with finding a job that’s both interesting and satisfying, even if you can’t see yourself there forever.
“And you get to travel in style?” Varian teases, gesturing grandly with one hand to the murals on the walls and the window-lined promenade.
Cassandra laughs quietly, and something in his chest leaps at the sound. “When the occasion calls for it. It’s not too bad, I guess.”
This hotel in the sky was usually held in high regard, lauded as a novel marvel of engineering by most. To hear it described as not too bad makes him laugh at the same time as it gives him a sense of warmth, because it’s nice to hear people being honest. “Hey, you should’ve seen it last year. There was actually a little grand piano in here.”
To his surprise, Cassandra looks almost intrigued by this.
“Really?” she asks, in a no way tone that sounds even friendlier than before. She’s grinning faintly in amusement.
Before he can continue—he loves talking about the engineering that goes into things like a lightweight, airship-worthy grand piano—his radio crackles, and in the language of almost-unintelligible static, he’s called back to the generator room.
“Yeah,” he settles on replying, with a crooked grin. “It was really neat. Uh—hey, sorry, I’d—better get back down there before I’m in trouble. It was… nice meeting you, milady.”
She seems to close up a bit, though not noticeably, and gives him a thin smile and a little nod of parting. He tips his cap and returns it, hoping his movements don’t look terribly awkward as he turns to go.
When he glances back at her—out of the corner of his eye, because he doesn't really mean to—she’s watching him go out of the corner of hers. It makes him hesitate for a fraction of a second.
Their eyes meet. She cracks a tiny smile before turning away.
A funny lightness grows in his chest, and it doesn’t go away for hours.
—
He’s not sure how he ends up near her this time. He’s tinkering with one of the lights in the dining room during the post-breakfast lull, and she’s seated nearby, notes spread out in front of her.
“Where are you headed after we dock?” he asks before he can remind himself not to talk to passengers, after she greets him and asks him a few more things about the ship. She doesn’t seem to mind talking to him, and it makes that light feeling in his chest even more buoyant again.
Cassandra sighs, as if the thought is wearying, but she’s smiling. “Back to work. I have a couple assignments I need to bring in by the end of the week.”
“No time for sightseeing?”
She just chuckles. “After you’ve seen New Jersey once, I’m pretty sure you’ve seen all of it.”
“Really?” Varian grins. “Maybe you just haven’t found anything that interests you yet.” There were plenty of points of interest all over the world, he’d been finding, and small American states were no exception. “There’s a few nice places there. I’ve been around with my dad before.”
She pretends to be engrossed with her work, but the corner of her lips twitch upward again. “What would you recommend?”
“Well, the beach at Manasquan is supposed to be really neat. There’s microorganisms in the water that makes the tide glow at night sometimes. I, uh—never made it at the right time to see it, though. There’s a pretty nice library at Newark, too.”
She gives him a look of amusement he can’t quite place. “You like books?”
He hasn’t had the time to spend poring over new volumes lately—save for the books he’d brought on the intricacies of airship flight and mechanics, which he consulted as often as he’d once read his favorite adventure novels—but if there hadn’t been a strict cargo weight limit for each member of the crew, he would have brought a much larger assortment of things to read.
“Well, I can’t mess with the mechanics around here constantly ,” he replies, screwing the last piece of the light back into place. “I have to have hobbies.”
A wry little grin of amusement appears on her face, as if it’s a quiet stand-in for a laugh. Something dumb and immature and probably worth ignoring in his chest starts up a fluttering mantra to himself of keep it up, keep it up.
“How about you?” he asks, pushing any and all dumb flutteriness aside, because he really is curious.
“Sometimes,” Cassandra says with a shrug. “I like firsthand accounts. But it really doesn’t beat being there when it happens, you know?”
Varian cracks a grin. “That’s fair. Some of us haven’t figured out how to be in the right place at the right time to see the exciting stuff.”
She laughs again, and the warmth in his chest turns brighter. “I wish I knew the secret. It’d save me some interviews.”
If there’s one thing he’s generally good at, it’s being where… interesting things are happening—though causation, of course, isn’t the same thing as observation.
“Heh. Well, if you want, you can try hanging around me,” he says with a grin, and is that amiable like he meant it, or is that too weird? “I’ve been told I tend to be a catalyst for things happening when I’m experimenting.”
Cassandra glances sideways at him at that, the corner of her lips turned up and a faint gleam in her eyes.
“Maybe I should,” she replies, and she says it so casually that his brain doesn’t quite register what she said for a moment. He blinks at her, uncertain, but her expression doesn’t change. “We reporters do look for those kinds of people.”
She doesn’t give him time to process that before she looks back to her notebook, flipping to a previous page that’s nearly filled with notes. Her handwriting is quick and angular, and it seems she doesn’t waste space on the page.
“Can you tell me anything else interesting about the airship?”
—
Transatlantic voyages are way too long, and yet far too short.
He’s not supposed to be in the same areas as the passengers, really. He’s not a waiter or a cook or an attendant, and there’s a separate mess hall and quarters for the crew. There’s usually no real reason for him to be up there, particularly during the hours the passengers are up and about. If everything continues going as smoothly as it has, there’s no real reason for him to even have a chance of running into her again.
If he doesn’t run into her again here, there’s definitely no reason for him to ever see her again. He’s pretty sure they never exchanged last names. (It’d be way, way too weird to call the Sun and ask for a Cassandra. He gets the feeling she prefers the sense of a more meaningful destiny that comes with chance encounters—encounters like they may never have again, once they land and go on their separate ways.)
The thought makes it hard to focus.
There’s a call from the naval air station warning of bad weather around the time they’re supposed to dock. Lightning and hydrogen are no joke together, so the captain shifts their course until the storms clear up. The crew is well-adapted to quick changes of plans, and through the speakers and windows of the crew areas, Varian can hear the tour being given of the coastline beneath them and see the beaches passing by as they drift beneath thin grey clouds.
He’s not worried. The captain and crew’s main concern is safety, and even if he’s still a fairly new hand, they’ve all dealt with inclement weather in the past. He’s grateful for the extra time it gives him to sort out a plan in his head.
Say hi, make conversation, just ask her. It’s a simple enough plan. The only problem with it is that the crew is busy and everywhere, and he’s busy and everywhere, and they’re not even supposed to be in sight of the passengers if they can help it. That’s the stewards’ job. It’s only professional, and he doesn’t usually contemplate not being professional.
Still, he has to do this. He’s not supposed to do this , and that fact is making his nerves even worse than they would be otherwise, but he knows he won’t stop wishing he had if he doesn’t.
The clock ticks as time flies by. It’s radioed in that the storms have let up, that it’s safe to dock. They only have a few miles until they reach the station, and that’s not far away. He’s still stuck doing his actual job checking everything over in the generator room, in the maintenance areas, at the radio terminals. Finally, he’s called up to start shutting down a few of the passenger amenities in preparation for docking.
Varian does his job first, because that’s his job. If he does it a little more quickly than normal, or if he’s a bit distracted and keeps finding breakers that need flipped and things that need corrected when he remembers to double check his work, it’s his fault, and he bites his lip and forces himself to focus.
There’s only one panel in the main section of the passenger deck he needs to check. He’s almost done with it when he lets himself start glancing around. He spots her briefcase at her usual table, but there’s no sign of her near it. People are milling everywhere, crowding at the windows, the excited murmur of dozens of conversations filling the room with a low hum.
He’s so busy trying to figure a way to accidentally-on-purpose end up close enough to her table to talk to her when she comes back that he nearly jolts when a voice speaks up behind him.
“Hey,” greets Cassandra. He turns to look at her, trying to pretend his heart didn’t jump into his throat in surprise and that he’s completely calm about everything right now, and offers her a warm smile. Only the corner of her lips quirks upward, but her eyes are bright, and he feels sure that it’s her version of returning it.
She’s wearing a more sturdy travel-outfit—everyone does, for docking; since the showing off for everyone aboard will so quickly turn into days of travel, for many—and she has a satchel over her shoulder. She looks ready to go elsewhere, like everyone does. Ready to leave while he stays here—to filter into the throngs of people in a busy city in a busy country, likely never to be seen again.
“Hey!” Varian says, and it sounds far too loud in his ears. He hopes he doesn’t catch his embarrassed flinch, and that the background noise is loud enough in the room that it doesn’t stand out. "Hey," he adds without meaning to, a bit more quietly.
Judging by the look of mild amusement that’s once again on her features, she notices both—and maybe, doesn’t mind.
“You, uh—looking forward to getting back on the ground?” he asks, because most people are, and his brain apparently likes being dumb with small talk.
Cassandra chuckles, glancing over at the luxury seating and ornate murals in the main room of the ship. She raises her eyebrows and tilts her head into her shoulder in a little shrug, her smile teasing. “Yeah, I think so. Being on an amazing luxury flight really makes you miss a run-of-the-mill travel hotel, doesn't it?"
A breath of laughter escapes him as he smiles nervously, glancing upward and away in the closest thing he can do right now to rolling his eyes. "Heh. Yeah, okay. That's fair."
Ask her! his brain shouts, because the clock is still ticking and he can’t lose his only opportunity—but his brain also isn’t very considerate of making respectful conversation sometimes, so thankfully, she continues before he can sound blurt anything out too quickly.
“I just wanted to say thanks. For letting me bug you about this thing.” She shrugs and glances briefly at their surroundings in the airship. “There’ll be a column about it at some point, if you ever want to check the Sun for it.” The thought of information he’d explained making it into a big-name paper was exciting enough that it made him lose his train of thought for a moment. He grins crookedly, happy for her, and she smiled. “I hope I didn’t hold you up too long.”
“No! No, uh, definitely not. I love bugging people about interesting dirigible facts. Not everybody wants to hear me talk about all that. I... appreciate it.”
He rubs the back of his neck, and goes for it.
“Hey, uh... when we hit the docks, there’s this neat little place to eat not too far from the base.” Varian’s heart is in his throat again, but his worries that it’d make it harder to talk melt away quickly. The nervousness is somehow invigorating, and he cracks what he hopes is a casual, hopeful-but-not-too-hopeful smile. “I’ll be here working for a while, but if you’re still in the area tonight or tomorrow... Would you, maybe... want to grab something to eat?”
He’s nervous, and probably missing some words somewhere in there, but he knows his point is clear. There’s an odd expression on her face—surprise? Not dismay or disgust?—but it doesn’t look like a no. The moment Cassandra seems to collect herself, she smirks and raises a brow.
“What, like, grab something and bring it back for you?” she teases. Varian purses his lips and tries half-heartedly to roll his eyes. He can only hope she isn’t noticing the flush he can feel creeping up his neck and flooding his ears.
“You—know what I mean,” he mumbles into his hand as he rubs the bridge of his nose, trying not to look quite so completely embarrassed. Cassandra laughs—and the sound is so warm (and almost a touch nervous? Did he do that?) that any exasperation he’d mustered up disappears as quickly as it’d come.
“I’m kidding,” she says quietly. It seems as though she’s studying him, when she holds his gaze, but her eyes are alight. “I... I’d like that. Thanks.”
He smiles a probably too hopelessly happy smile, and all the ballasts in the world couldn’t weigh down the lightness in his chest that he’s sure will last for weeks.
Through the staticky intercom overhead, the pilot announces that they’ll be to the naval air station in just under a quarter hour.
Cassandra gives him a bright-eyed glance that makes her sharp features soft and hard to look away from, and she tilts her head at the big promenade windows in a motion for him to follow.
He’s technically not done with everything—with turning off all the valves and breakers to keep everything tight and contained before they dock. But the view of the New Jersey shore and the greenery beyond it is an amazing sight after so many days over an empty blue ocean, and the small smile Cassandra seems to be trying to cover up is even more so.
The ship drifts over the bustle of homes and businesses on the coast as it makes its way closer to Lakehurst. The sky is still a misty grey, foggy with rain that hasn’t fallen, but with the lightness in his chest, it might as well have been the most brilliant of blues. He’s not sure if he could contain the excited butterflies in his stomach if he tried. He glances to Cassandra, and their eyes meet for a second.
They exchange bright, hopeful little smiles.