Work Text:
Seven people sharing a space meant for, at most, four, has its obvious downsides. It’s always a little too hot, you can never find any privacy, and someone will inevitably grab the good rations before you can. On top of that, it seems Rolan and Ed are entrenched in a log sawing competition, which is easily one of the worst side effects of the Helios, NASA, and Roscosmos teams sharing a hab, but it does not stop there. Danielle is literally counting the days until Helios’ Hab 2 is suitable again, but the thing took an insane beating in the landslide, so repairs are slow going.
It’s crazy how unlike Jamestown it is. The three of them, bored out of their minds, felt cramped in that tiny room. Danielle laughs; if only she could have seen the way they’re packed like sardines now. Rolan has stepped on her feet so many times, she’s started keeping a running tally. “I am big guy in a little space,” he’ll say, and she gives him a smug grin before adding another line to the scoreboard in their makeshift mess hall.
They’re on top of each other. Someone’s always bumping into someone else. Dr. Mayakovsky is always up their asses about something. Oh, and it smells.
There’s things they’ve grown accustomed to; you get very familiar with each other when you’re assisting the putting on and taking off of space suits. There also isn’t much privacy, most of them changing clothes in the corridor of the bunks, which means they’ve gotten beyond used to seeing one another in various states of undress. Today is another day where such a thing occurs. Danielle finds it funny, as she’s struggling to turn her long-sleeve shirt right side out, the way Kuz throws a hand over his eyes, not unlike horse blinders, and continues his path past the bunks and into the lab. It’s an insignificant exchange, destined to be forgotten in a few days time as more pressing, memorable matters arise.
Except this time, it isn’t.
They’re sitting together that night in the control room, performing their weekly diagnostics of the panel. It’s beyond boring. The funny thing about being an astronaut is that people think every moment is action-packed, when in reality it’s mostly hurry up and wait. A lot of things that have to happen to facilitate the fun stuff are an absolute drag to get through - especially without Kelly’s expert music selection in the background. Will just doesn’t set a vibe the way she did, but at least he’s trying.
The two commanders are blowing through the checklist, months on Mars having rendered this little ritual second nature. She calls out a command, he confirms functionality, rinse, repeat. They’re able to get it done in fifteen minutes, these days. As they confirm emergency depressurization controls are in working order, the last box to check, Danielle lets herself slump back into the cushy chair with a sigh. “Another week down,” she says, submitting their report, “sixty-three more to go.”
He laughs a little bit, himself reclining and allowing a week of hard labor to roll over him. Grigory has this almost meditative look on his face when he’s trying to relax; his eyes close, and then he takes a couple loud, deep breathes in through is nose and out through his mouth. He told her he’d learned it in the military. Danielle watches him, notices how the tension seems to leave his shoulders, and thinks maybe one day she’ll give his dumb little breathing exercise a try.
They sit like that, backdropped by the occasional mechanical beep, for a stretch of time. It’s nice to pause - their lives have been nothing but go, go, go since landing. The silence isn’t awkward, it just is. Dani and Kuz aren’t exactly chatting it up constantly - though his moods are getting easier to follow. She knows what a grumpy Grigory looks likes by now, and a lot of it depends on whether or not that man got enough sleep the night before.
Danielle’s about to get up, tired of watching Kuz breath, and head into the jungle to check out Kelly’s plants, when the other commander clears his throat. He mumbles something under his breath, something resembling a question, and she hears enough to have her curiosity piqued.
“Huh?”
He shakes his head, eyes scanning the screens before him, and his mouth works a little before he responds; “I ask… Erm, you have a tattoo?”
She’s taken aback. “Yeah, I do,” she replies, and it’s true; she has a small peony tattooed between her shoulder blades, where it typically goes unseen. “How did you know?”
“When I walked past you earlier,” he continues, still not looking at her, and she realizes he is concerned of her being offended. “I saw, before I covered my eyes.”
Of course. He walked by when she had a bra on, meaning a rare moment when the little flower below her neck could be seen. “Oh, right! Yeah, I’ve got a little ink. Why, surprised?”
Grigory finally looks over, satisfied that Dani isn’t going to ream him for stealing a glance at her upper back, and rolls his eyes. She wonders if he ever gets tired of pretending to be so aloof all the damn time. “You do not give me the impression of someone who has tattoos,” he says with a shrug. “It did, in fact, surprise me.”
Danielle smirks. “Well, happy I could help keep things interesting.”
She stands, stretching her body up toward the low ceiling, when he continues; “What does it mean?”
“My tattoo?” She tilts her head, taken aback by the question. Danielle leans against the alcoved entrance and crosses her arms across her chest. She doesn’t think anyone has asked her about the tattoo in nearly 25 years. Considering she got it at 19, the realization has her feeling a little old. “It’s just something silly I got when I was younger.”
“Something silly?” he parrots.
“Yeah.”
“So… you got a permanent tattoo of something silly?” he asks, smirking in amusement. “Is this American thing?”
Dani sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose; it’s been - and this shames her slightly - quite a long time since she’s talked about the man behind the flower on her back. Life certainly goes on, she thinks, but he deserves so much more than her silence. It’s just that days turns into weeks, into months, focus straying from the things that really matter beneath a constant flood of distraction.
It’s hard to get the ball rolling, a tiny lump forming in her throat. She hasn’t told anyone this in years. Hell, she doesn’t even think Ed knows about it. “It was for my first husband,” she tells Grigory, whose face gives the impression that he is listening intently. Danielle finds herself watching a little blue light blink on and off to avoid his attention. The light anchors her in the moment, a tiny life-line to the present as she prepares to relive her earliest memories of Clayton Poole. “He was in the military, and I was flying planes, so we spent a lot of time apart.”
The Russian commander nods knowingly. There’s nothing so uniting for astronauts as the universal experience of leaving your loved ones behind. She realizes she’s never bothered to ask him (read: any of them) about their lives back home. Not that they have either, beyond what naturally comes up. She hesitates, wondering if maybe she should have just made something up instead, said something about a wild spring break and headed to The Jungle, but the look he’s giving her, without any of his usual ‘cool guy’ cynicism, has her wanting to tell the truth.
“Anyway, we would talk on the phone,” she continues, still watching the blue dot blink on and off, on and off. “When we got ready to say goodbye, one of us would say ‘I love you’, and the other would say ‘I love you bunches’, and then we’d ask ‘bunches of what?’ and Clayton always said peonies. That’s the flower he brought me on our first date. So, I got one on my back for our first wedding anniversary.”
Grigory’s tongue wets his lips, thick eyebrows furrowing in confusion. She watches his eyes look up and off, the Russian clearly thinking. “I do not understand ‘bunches’,” he admits after a moment, looking back at her. “Like, bunch of flowers?”
Danielle chuckles. “Yeah, it’s a pun. It’s… Kind of hard to explain. I’d say ask Kelly, but…”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah…”
“So,” he says, scratching at the back of his neck, “you said this tattoo is silly. Is it because marriage with your first husband ended badly?”
The question is a bit like a gut punch. The ball of emotion in her throat starts to sting a little; the weight of all the death and destruction that has filled their mission since day one threatens to come crashing down for a brief, unstable second. “Um,’ she says, and her voice sounds so small and foreign to her. “Um, yes. Yes and no. Not bad in the way you think, probably.”
Kuz cocks his head, and he’s starting to make her feel uncomfortable with the genuine look on his face. They’ve been working together for a while, have had their share of serious conversations, but this… She’s used to him always acting a little bit ‘above it all’, especially with her. They argue like siblings, Ed says, which considering the circumstances is probably the best outcome. He’s gotten extremely good at pushing her buttons. This is not that kind of interaction. Not that she thinks he would make fun of her, but she hadn’t expected him to be interested in the first place either.
“The way I think?”
“He… passed away. While we were married, so, you know, that’s pretty bad, considering all the ways a marriage can end.”
His lips fall open, shoulders slouching. Kuz does the thing everybody does when you tell them your husband died: tries to find the right words to make it better. People never understand that there really isn’t anything you can say, but it’s more for them than her, anyway. He hems and haws for a bit, and she’s half expecting some Russian proverb when he surprises her with something entirely unlike it.
“I cannot think of any good way for a marriage to end, now that I think about it.”
She laughs, just a breathy chuckle, a stray tear or two escaping past her steely resolve at his lame joke. He laughs too, glad to have been able to at least put a smile on her face. Dani honestly appreciates it more than ‘I’m sorry for your loss’ or ‘He’s in a better place now’, which she’s heard a thousand times over at this point.
“No, I think you’re right,” she adds, wiping her tears away with the back of her hand. Grigory frowns.
“I am sorry,” he says, and she believes he is. “I did not want to make you upset. I was curious.”
She shakes her head. “No, it’s… it’s just been a while since I’ve talked about it. It’s good to talk about him, really.”
She takes a deep breath, hugs herself tightly. Something new hangs in the air between them, a closeness that she’s hesitant to acknowledge. Dani takes a moment to really look at him. Grigory is an odd guy; he likes to sit cross-legged, which Dani finds goofy, especially considering how tall he is. His knees stick out on either side like wings on a fighter jet. He’s also a fidgeter, which he and Lars bicker about constantly. Even now, he’s rapidly flicking a stylus back and forth over his first two fingers. And boy is he a jackass, often wearing a dumb smirk, but in this moment his face is soft. It reminds her of the way he looked as they released the bodies of their fallen after the rescue. It occurs to her, again, that she’s just assuming things about him instead of asking, and considering how much interest and compassion she’s just shown her…
“Do you have any tattoos?”
“What was his name?”
They speak at the same time, then share a laugh. “You go first,” she says. “Any tattoos?”
Grigory nods, affirmative. He unzips his hoodie all the way, shucking the sleeve to pull the arm of his t-shirt up over his bicep. He has to bend in a weird way, but eventually she sees the palm sized, shaded face of a bear beneath his dark arm hairs. “Hmm, check that out,” Dani says, punctuated by a cheesy wolf whistle.
“This is an actual silly tattoo,” he tells her, settling back into a normal position. “I paid someone a weeks worth of wages for it. I thought it would make me look cool.”
“Well, that was your first mistake.”
The eye roll he gives her is dramatic. “Har har. So funny. Your turn; what was his name?”
Danielle takes a deep breath, biting the very tip of her tongue. “Clayton,” she says. “Clayton Poole.”
Kuz nods solemnly. “Clayton Poole. Thank you, Dani, for sharing him with me. Let the memory of him be a light.”
She feels another tear slide down her face. “Thank you, for- for asking about him.”
A silence passes, buzzing with the electricity of what they’ve just shared. It is moments like these that inspires Dani to think there is a utopian future possible among the stars, away from borders and governments and the like. Just people, connecting. It’s not why she went up in the first place, but it’s a pretty good reason to continue working toward… whatever it is they’re trying to do for humanity.
“I’m going to… go check on Kelly’s plants,” she says, admittedly a little awkwardly. “Catch you around.”
“Yes, yes. ‘Catch you later’, Dani.”
And she turns on her heel and heads toward The Jungle, Happy Valley feeling just a little happier.