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"You've been avoiding me and I know why."
Molly didn't look over at the sound of Margo's unmistakable voice intruding on her peace and quiet. She stayed right where she was, stretched out on the hunk of concrete wall outside JSC, one knee up, one foot dangling down, experiencing unmissable gravity. Her cigarette had gone out twenty minutes ago but here she still was, holding the filter overhead, rolling it between her thumb and forefinger. Restless. Too tired to do much about it. Her back ached, lying on a hard-ass slab of rock like this, but that pain made sense. What didn't hurt these days?
I'll tell you what. This view.
Above her: stars. And one big, full, beautiful moon.
Eclipsed, with a few final clicks of heels, by Margo Madison's scowling face and crossed arms.
Molly sighed and closed her eyes. "Oh yeah?" she asked like she wasn't worried. Like there was any world where Margo Madison said she knew something and it was a lie.
"Yes," said Margo squarely. "You may have fooled the flight surgeon with that dosimeter reading but I looked at your oxygen consumption, Molly. By the time they got you back in that airlock you were almost dry. That doesn't happen sitting in the back of a lava tube for two hours and forty-five minutes."
Molly raised the cigarette butt to her lips before remembering it wasn't even ash. She'd thought up lies for that, for how much air she'd sucked down hauling a man twice her weight through the regolith-popcorn moon, but then nobody'd asked. They were fixated on radiation. On Wubbo.
Course, Margo Madison wasn't the rest of them.
Molly could say, "I was climbing hard when we got the warning. Must've overdone it on the way down. Then I was pacing that lava tube like a madman, worried for Wubbo."
She could say that, but Margo wouldn't believe her. And Molly had to save up her quota of plausible lies for when they'd really count.
She opened her eyes. The flecks and swirls of nothing took a while to clear away, but then she took in Margo's face. Margo, chewing her lip. Margo, bruised around the eyes. Margo, fidgeting with the blazer sleeve over her elbow. Shoulders high, a little scared. It would've been almost touching if it didn't have a high likelihood of ruining what was left of her career.
"What are you gonna do about it?"
Margo looked momentarily stunned. "I—" She swallowed and said in a smaller voice, "You're not denying it then. You actually— You went out in the middle of that storm and dragged him in. Molly, what were you thinking? What would have possessed you to— Did you at least get a head start? How long were you out on the surface? I did some rough calculations based on the telemetry of the rover accident and the mouth of the cave, but without knowing the O2 you had to start out with..."
"I could've," Molly admitted because at this point, why not? Why not let it be Margo fucking Madison to whom she finally fessed it all. "Thought about it. But for those last few minutes between when I spotted him and when the storm hit, I— I kept trying the comm. Kept hoping he'd up and wake up on his own.” She swallowed down the rest. ‘Cause then I wouldn't have to make the damn decision I’m stuck with for the rest of my life.
"But he had a serious concussion," said Margo slowly.
"Mm-hmm. So... yeah. I got radio silence — storm hit — and I went. At best I got forty-five seconds less exposure than Wubbo."
Margo swallowed, the motion of it visible in her throat even this late at night, this many hours after neither of them should still have been lurking around JSC. Wasn't the first time since the storm that Molly'd decided to do a little courtyard camping. Get home five hours too late for dinner. Too late for Wayne to blame her weird behavior on anything other than a long day.
"You saved his life, then. You know that, don’t you. If he'd have taken more than twice the dose he did, Molly, he— he wouldn't have made it back from the moon."
Molly looked up at the stars again, craning her chin back to get around Margo's skewering stare. Even with a crick in her neck, she was still seeing pinpricks through the littlest flyaways of Margo's red hair. Red moon, red stars, red dosimeter... "Yeah."
She couldn't see it exactly, but the stars wiggled, so she knew Margo was shaking her head. "You have to report this."
"Not if you don't decide to snitch."
"Molly, I'm serious."
"So am I! It's all a bunch of bullshit anyway. No one knows what's going to happen in between catching a few nice solar rays in the morning and turning into an irradiated puddle of space slush, and clearly I'm still walking around."
"You're scheduled to go back up again! I saw your name on Ed’s list this afternoon."
"Yeah." Molly brushed some hair out of her face dismissively. "It’s all by the books. Completely regulation. Six months."
"Molly."
"Margo."
A tiny, irritated huff. Instantly, Molly felt better than she had all week. Funny, the things you miss on the moon. Not much, but ruining the heck out of Margo’s day one unwelcome tease at a time? Man, that was priceless.
Then Margo said, "You can’t seriously think you can fly after that," and her mood sank all over again.
She refused to give Margo the reciprocal pleasure of hearing it in her voice. "Sure I can. Not this second, maybe, and I know, I really do— probably not for long. But it’s not like I had a fifty year career ahead of me anyway. I’m the old guard, blah blah blah. I’m on a short rope and I know it. But hey.” She took careful upside-down aim for the ashtray four feet down the wall and flicked the long-dead filter towards it.
In the dark, she was pretty sure Margo couldn’t tell that she’d missed.
“I'm a couple weeks out from a sweet spot, yeah? Between all this and, you know, turbo-cancer. My brief and miserable retirement is well on its way and when it catches up to me, fine. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I'm gonna pull a Wubbo and go running home the first time things get tough, commit myself to even more time pacing the walls and worrying the hell out of Wayne, but I'm not about to endanger anyone either."
There was some kind of weight off about saying it out loud, instead of just in her head. Like however Margo took it, at least now it wasn't just her, telling herself she'd get past this without anyone even knowing, unable to stop wondering where that put her on the scale between "determined idiot" and "danger to herself and everyone else."
She looked Margo in the eyes and added, "When my time's up, my time's up. But till then, I am not letting anyone else tell me not to waste what I have left. A few more microdoses of moon juice are not gonna break the bank."
Margo stared down at her in silence for a stretch of direct eye contact that had to be uncomfortable for the both of them, then sighed and said, "I don't know if I believe you, Molly. And you'd better believe I'll be keeping a close eye on you from here on out, you got that?"
"Roger." Molly smothered a grin and offered a two-fingered salute. "Yes ma’am."
The effect was probably ruined by being horizontal, but at this point she was pretty much melded with the wall, and if Margo saw how much effort it was going to take her to get vertical again, the tentative hall pass she'd just been given was definitely going to be revoked.
This wasn’t entirely new. Sometime over the last few years, with Molly spending as much time as she could get off-planet and Margo single-mindedly powering herself up the NASA ladder at JSC, they’d fallen into some kind of truce. Not the kind where Molly didn’t regularly find time to sneak in a private barb over the public comm, or the kind where Margo didn’t make her every stint in the sim a personal hell, but the kind where Margo didn’t tense up anymore if she spotted Molly in her audience at the jazz club, and the kind where Molly admitted, in the privacy of her own head, that Margo throwing curve balls into her training was one of the few kinds of challenges that really helped keep her sharp, not just keep going through the motions till she could get herself back up there again. It was the kind of truce that said there was just enough respect between them that Margo wasn’t going to try and end Molly’s career over some minor rule-bending, and Molly wasn’t going to threaten her with her personal-life blackmail every time she pissed her off.
Admittedly, things had been tenser than usual since she’d landed Earthside this time around. Yeah, Margo was right— Molly had been avoiding her. Nothing personal, except it was. It was hard to keep the banter light. Everything Margo said or did hit harder than she meant it to because Molly had come back as one big bruise, the kind of on-edge that came from watching her future shrink down into something she could barely hold, something that threatened, at any moment, to slip out between her fingers. Like any day now she’d have to give up even this hope of a few more golden years and say adios to space, to the moon, to any tiny glint of a chance she ever had at seeing Mars, something that hadn’t even been part of the dream till suddenly all the dreams she’d squashed back in Mercury had turned into reality, then into just another day at the space office and…
All she’d be left with was turning into another Ed Baldwin. Days at a desk. Afternoons on a golf course. Nights like this. Just… NASA.
The only halfway decent thing about NASA that didn’t involve getting herself the hell off this planet was pissing off the tiny woman looming over her with twice the presence of the shadow of JSC.
So, yeah. Maybe Molly’d been pushing her away.
More than usual.
Still, she figured this was about what they were due for. One more late-night confrontation going down as the latest compromise on the list. Margo’d chased her down where she didn’t want to be found and called her on her bullshit and now everything would go back to normal, because they were mutually committed to three things: space, a little good music in the off hours, and not blowing up each other's lives.
Except Margo wasn’t leaving. Margo was hovering. Margo was shifting nervously from foot to foot, still denying her her peace.
And biting her lip.
Never a good sign, Margo biting her lip. That was Margo Madison working her way up to an insensitive question no one was going to stop her from getting an answer to.
“Be honest with me.”
Molly suppressed a groan.
“How bad is it?”
“I’m fine,” she said, too fast, too hard.
“No,” said Margo, stepping closer. “I heard you. You said there was gonna be a sweet spot, but you also said you weren’t in it yet. Why are you still coming in to JSC? It’s not like we’re putting you through flight training when you just got back down here.”
“Tired of having your eye on me already, Margo?”
Margo crossed her arms and stepped directly up to the wall. “Worried about you,” she said plainly.
Having Margo out and admit that was pretty much the worst.
Having Margo reach out and touch her shoulder almost made her roll off the other side of the wall. “What the fuck, Margo?”
“Did I hurt you?”
“Jesus Christ, no, just scared the shit out of me. Don’t you know better than to poke a woman on a ledge?”
But Margo’s hand stayed, two fingers pressed carefully and firmly against the dress code-compliant button-up she’d hated putting on that morning because it wasn’t the jumpsuit because right now, yeah. Margo was right. At least for the next few months, she couldn’t fly.
Molly glowered up at her, but Margo’s hand stayed right where it was, and Molly felt the glare fading off her own face because… it didn’t hurt. It could have hurt, but It didn’t because Margo was being unconscionably gentle. And Margo was doing that because… Margo knew.
Margo knew.
It sank in hard and fast, how that was different. Every single careful interaction she’d had with every coworker and friend since they got her and Wubbo out of that tube— With Margo, that was out the window. Even if Molly hadn’t said it in so many words, Margo could tell there were things going on behind the game face she’d worn while putting on the I’m fine parade around JSC. Maybe not the extent to which trying to get through a day on the ground right now was a package of shot nerves and aching bones, but enough to know to be a little patient. Not prod away at an open wound.
Fuck. Margo was barely touching her and all of a sudden she was right back up in that blue-lit room on Jamestown Base, a second away from losing her grip and letting out some honest-to-god tears and this time for absolutely no reason at all. It was just… trying to get through a day without Wayne realizing how something as simple as standing up made her dizzy and something as kindly-offered as getting a hug felt like her insides were going to boil their way out of her skin and having him walk into a room from an angle where she’d only seen shiners had almost made her throw something at him twice in as many days, and one of those times it was not going to have been a pillow. It wasn’t fair to him, but that was true of her whole career. Breaking that habit, the place where pretending we’re both fine had become a central part of the marriage now that her job had her up in space… Something this big came along and she still couldn’t do it. She didn’t know what would happen when she finally did.
And in the meantime, Margo’s fingers slipping up to take her pulse? Warm, a little shaky, so soft she clearly thought Molly might snap clean in two?
It was kind of mortifying, yeah. But it didn’t hurt.
Honestly, for the first time since landing, having something on her skin felt good.
She had to swallow before she could get out, voice strained, “You can’t seriously think you’re the first person to check my pulse since I got back here.”
Margo, oblivious to Molly’s racing thoughts, kept frowning and chewing her bottom lip to the tempo of Molly’s equally-racing heartbeat under her fingertips. “I have to ask… muscle spasms? Weakness? Vomiting? Aches and pains?”
Needing this to end, Molly shrugged off the contact and said, “Yeah, yeah, all of it. But I’m waking up fresh every morning feeling a solid forty percent better than the day before so I’ll be back to myself in no time.”
“All of it? In the traditional sense of the word, pain would be a very bad sign with radiation poisoning, Molly. Is it localized or all over?” Her hand still hovered close enough to Molly’s throat that she could feel it tickling bits of her hair.
“Save it, Margo. You’re not a flight surgeon. Besides, I heard every single lecture they gave Wubbo.”
Margo crossed her arms. “If you don’t get more specific with me right now I’m going to assume you’re about to drop dead.”
Molly pursed her lips and shot her a look that would’ve sent pretty much anyone else she’d ever met the clear message to fuck off, but Margo Madison always had been annoyingly immune to her anti-charms. Giving up, she sighed and stared over at the side of the building, counting squares up to the roof to calm down. From this angle, JSC was one big gray wall. There was a reason (besides the decent view of the night sky) that this was her chosen exile. There was something she liked about that facade too. Bleak, desolate stone stretched out under the stars.
Last night, Wayne had accused her of being moon-sick and almost sent her into a panic before she realized he meant it like “homesick,” not that he’d figured out she’d gotten actual-sick up on the moon.
“It’s not pain, not really.”
She felt more than heard Margo taking a cautious seat beside her head.
“Took a while to shake the dizziness. Now…” She closed her eyes. “I’m just tired, Margo. That’s all it is.” She worked up a smile. “You have no idea how many times I’ve wished I could tell you I wasn’t just being a prick yawning in the middle of your debrief. When I’m being a prick, I’m doing it on purpose. There’s a difference.”
Margo’s tiny laugh sent a little jolt of gratification through her. (Not that she was admitting to anything anything, but it was almost as good as making Margo mad.)
“That’s fine. Ed’s been in the astronaut office for nearly a decade now and he yawns every single time I make him sit down in a chair. What’s his excuse?”
The teasing nudge of Margo’s knuckles against her shoulder made her tense. She pulled back again immediately. “Sorry. I did it again, didn’t I. Are you sure I’m not hurting you?”
“Nope,” Molly said carefully, squinting up at her through narrowed eyes. “Just surprised at you, Margo. You don’t usually go around casually patting backs and squeezing shoulders.”
Hard to tell in this light, but Molly had the distinct impression Margo’s cheeks were pinker than usual.
“Yeah, well—” Margo swallowed, firmed up her jaw, and put her hand very intentionally back on Molly’s arm, not looking at her, staring resolutely out into the parking lot across the way. There was nothing natural about the gesture, not like the previous two, not even the semblance of a poke or a squeeze or a quick couple reassuring pats. Just Margo’s hand, flat-fingered, burning a hole through her blue-striped blouse.
“I’ve been worried, alright? I’ve been worried about you.”
She sounded downright murderous about it. “I’m touched,” Molly deadpanned.
“I mean that,” said Margo irritably. “Not just this week while I’ve been digging through base transcripts and the equipment manifest trying to parse out if there was any chance I’d gotten the tanks mixed up, or the schedules switched around to the wrong days, or there was some other error in my math on your O2, I mean— Molly, every time you go up there it’s— When I realized you weren’t going to make it back to base, during the storm— The day you got flung off the back of Apollo 24— I— And the time you wouldn’t just shut up and climb back out of Shackleton Crater on your very first lunar mission, I was… I—”
“Hey.” It took a lot of sheer willpower to sit up as fast as she did without immediately tipping over, and Molly couldn’t even see Margo’s face through the resulting sheen of sparks crackling across her vision, but she managed to get a hand on Margo’s knee. Approximately. “Margo, hey. I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine, Molly!”
She’d already heard it in Margo’s voice, but now she could see it, too. The angry red at the tip of her nose. The hand frantically trying to hide the evidence of a couple tears crawling down Margo’s right cheek. It was kind of a shock, Margo getting this upset over her stupid decisions, but then again, it kind of wasn’t. Margo let her get under her skin way too much for a woman who didn’t care.
“You took half a solar flare’s worth of radiation straight through every organ in your body and you’re acting like— like the only reason it even matters is if it cuts short your career!”
Molly studied her for a couple seconds, then said carefully, “Wouldn’t you?”
Margo blinked at her, managing to keep a glare on through the blinks and even the tears. “Excuse me?”
“Don’t tell me if you got run over by a bus your first thought wouldn’t be I can’t let this stop me from showing up to work tomorrow; I’ve got rockets to launch. Hell, I’m pretty sure at the end of your career someone’s going to find you dead under your desk, Margo. We’re exactly the same.”
Molly got her third gratifying Margo expression of the night: supremely taken-aback. “I— That is not—” She was so clearly trying to stay serious, but what came out mid-sentence was a choked-off laugh. “Oh God, I hope not. I may be widely loathed among certain departments at JSC but I try my best to be on very good terms with our custodial staff.”
Molly joined her with a snort. “So glad your first worry about your own impending demise is who’s gonna have to clean up after your stress-induced heart attack. Proving my point, Madison.”
Margo was smiling at her. Softly.
Well that was just unnatural.
“Molly, why are you here,” she asked.
The pivot left her off balance. Or maybe the smile. One of the two, because what came out of her was the kind of honest answer she definitely should have used one of her plausible lies on instead. “I can’t deal with home right now.”
Margo frowned. “How come?”
“Wayne, he—” For the first time in too many minutes, Molly realized she’d left her hand on Margo’s leg this whole time. It wasn’t too surprising on her part: since the storm, it took three points of contact to keep her balanced even sitting her ass in a chair. Margo’s knee was part of her structural integrity.
More surprising that Margo hadn’t pointedly extricated herself out from underneath it. Carefully, trying to make it a natural shift not at all attached to this turn in the conversation, she retracted it back to her own side.
Safely parked there, she dragged her knuckles back and forth against the stone. “Wayne has no idea what the hell’s wrong with me. I mean he’s obviously onto something, but that just means I get pity, I get worry, I get this constant hurt confusion… I can’t be around it right now. I have to focus. Work my way past this.”
“Have you tried talking to him?”
“About this?” she gestured vaguely up and down the length of herself before putting her hand squarely back down on the wall too hard, gripping it, white-knuckled, against the resulting surge of vertigo. “God no. Then, on top of the pity, he’d give me his best kicked-puppy act for not telling him first thing when he picked me up from the landing. At least you came right on out and called me a goddamn idiot.”
“Molly. I did not say tha—”
“Oh, c’mon Margo. You said, ‘What the hell were you thinking?’ Means the same thing.”
Margo muttered some unintelligible denial, then said more cautiously, “It’s not that I don’t appreciate that what you did out there was an act of heroism. It just… surprised me. That's all.”
“You expected me to do the smart thing. I get it. I’m the selfish prick who should, first and foremost, do the mission and get myself home in one piece. Well. Hate to break it to ya, Margo, but you and all the other self-aggrandizing bastards around here have rubbed off on me and now I can’t stop thinking stupid bullshit like, You work for NASA. You signed up to be a goddamn hero.”
“Oh, so now it’s my fault,” said Margo in that tone of voice that conveyed absolute displeasure, making Molly look at her just to find her fighting back a smile.
Her own lips twitched. “You're goddamn right it is. Light enough fires under people’s asses and somebody’s gonna get burned.”
There was something a little too obvious in her voice just then. A little too far over the line she tried not to cross with Margo Madison, because the handful of times Molly’d let the tiniest bit of flirtation into their most enjoyable fights, Margo had shut her down so hard she’d felt like she’d taken a physical door-slam to the face.
But Margo didn’t seem to be having a door-slamming kind of night. Instead, as the moment of levity passed, Margo was twisting the button on the cuff of her blazer. Searching Molly’s face. Biting her lip and turning at the waist and, after two false starts from somewhere around the elbows, reaching out to take Molly’s face in her hands, leaving Molly wide-eyed, the smile falling away.
Margo’s was serious, brow furrowed. “You stop that right now, you hear me?”
“What?”
“If I let you get back up there, Molly, I want you to be the most selfish—” She stumbled over where the word prick was supposed to be. “—astronaut to ever set foot on that moon and come back down again without so much as a scratch on your helmet or so help me I will ground you myself.”
With Margo this close, this serious, this unable to hold eye contact for any longer than it took to make her point before night-wide pupils started darting anywhere else they could get to, Molly couldn’t resist the absolute devil’s calling, the troublemaking urge to smirk between Margo's slightly shaky palms and say, “What’s it to you?”
And Margo glared at her, instantly laser-focused in. "Molly, I—" she started, and she opened her mouth to do it, but then closed it again, and closed her eyes too, and took in a deep breath through her nose—
—dove in, and kissed her.
Molly gave herself a second for her eyebrows to crawl all the way up her forehead, for her mouth to curl up in a not-really-all-that-surprised grin against Margo’s determined, tactless press of lips. Then she closed her eyes on a last glimpse of star-gleaming red, got her hands all up in Margo’s hair, and tugged till Margo gave in to a better angle for actual kissing.
So Margo'd leapt after all. Well shit. Molly could absolutely take it from here.
And Margo leaning in against her, her hand opening and closing on thin air above her thigh, still trying to be careful with Molly's whole irradiated self but ten seconds into something she’d clearly been thinking about for a hell of a lot longer than she could’ve worked up the guts to actually go for in one night (and already, in the same ten seconds, way less tidily controlled than Molly had ever seen her in all the dozen-or-so years since they'd met)?
Yeah, that felt good too.
Maybe this was a good goddamn reason to get back to being selfish for a while.