Chapter Text
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4 November 2022 | 8.62° N 25.97° W | 06:45:00 UTC
Expedition 67 | Day 51
Traveling at nearly twenty-eight thousand kilometers per hour inside mankind’s greatest feat of engineering, Mission Specialist James Fitzjames was French-braiding his hair.
It was by now a familiar routine, but still Francis watched him at it. James had velcroed a little mirror to the zippered flap of his quarters and strapped his knees to the railing above so as not to drift. Even upside-down and in reflection, his face was the very picture of dogged determination. It was the sort of look Francis imagined he himself might wear while piloting the station’s robotic arm to a docking target, inch by exacting, finicky inch, where one false movement spelled very expensive disaster.
“Nearly down to a science, I see,” Francis said by way of good morning. They were alone in the Harmony module. Silna had apparently gone off for an early start to the day’s tasks; Harry was already in the galley fixing tea for the daily planning session. Francis had been in the galley, too. Then he’d had a prickly notion to pop back to crew quarters to see how James was faring.
James’s hair floated out behind him like a living thing. Even the portions tucked between his fingers—glossy little locks, painstakingly separated—bobbed gently in midair. Sophia had sometimes worn a French braid. Francis had had occasion to watch her do it, during their brief cohabitation, and it had seemed fraught work then, too, in the full gravity of Earth’s surface.
“It doesn’t help to be interrupted, actually,” James said around the little comb clutched between his teeth, not taking his eyes from the mirror.
“You could have just cut it,” Francis said, “if you didn’t want it in your face.” This particular observation, too, was by now routine. “Don’t know why you didn’t just cut it.”
“Get over it,” James told him cheerfully. “Some of us don’t come to space to avoid being perceived by the rest of the human race.”
“Got some scissors in the med kit,” Francis went on, panning through the hatch to the Destiny module behind him. “I’ll cut it for you myself if you like.”
“Come anywhere near me with scissors, Commander, and you’ll have a mutiny on your hands,” James said, twisting and tucking hair into place with long, nimble fingers. James met Francis’s eyes in the mirror and grinned ever so slightly around the comb. “Besides, I do believe you’d miss these little chats of ours.”
“I certainly wouldn’t miss the twenty minutes you spend each morning loitering in quarters.”
“It’s not been twenty minutes,” James protested.
“Yet. Come on. Breakfast at zero six thirty,” Francis said, pushing off from the jamb.
“There in a mo,” James said, turning back to his work.
“You had better be,” Francis said. “Or no rehydrated waffle for you.”
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In her quarters mere feet away, Silna, who had not, in fact, left the module for an early start to the day’s tasks, shook her head. Dreadful, the both of them—absolutely dreadful, and with nearly half the expedition still to go. But better, by far, than the way they’d begun.
