Work Text:
The first thing Jack sees when he walks through his door is Samira in a ball on his living room couch.
The next thing he sees is that she's crying and his heart skitters to a stop.
"Hey," he murmurs gravely, any thoughts that had been swirling from the end of his shift instantly forgotten as he rushes to her side. "Samira, what's going on, are you okay?"
He triages quickly, scanning her surroundings for some clue that might hint at the cause of her emotional distress. A text notification on her phone—from Robby, maybe, or from her mother. A rejection email from a fellowship on which she's pinned her hopes.
What he finds instead is her laptop open to a YouTube livestream:
NASA's Artemis II Live Mission Coverage (Official Broadcast)
She blinks up at him for a moment before turning back to the screen, but her hand finds his thigh when she eventually finds the words she's searching for. "Did you always want to be a doctor?"
From anyone else he would consider it a non sequitur, but Jack knows—in the way that he knows Samira in her entirety, inside and out, sometimes even better than she knows herself—that it isn’t. That there is some beautiful, miraculous point, some spark they'll arrive at together. He indulges her accordingly. "For a while I thought I might be a firefighter."
"You've always wanted to help people."
He hums in agreement, though her assessment is generous in its elision of the fact that he's always needed the rush, too. "How about you?"
She sniffs. "The first thing I ever wanted was to be an astronaut. It’s one of the earliest memories I have. We had this cut-out at kindergarten graduation—you know, one of the ones where there's a hole for the face and you stand behind it to get your photo taken. It was an astronaut in a spacesuit that said something like reach for the stars or blast off into first grade. I remember going home after and immediately wanting to learn everything there was to learn about space." She smiles to herself, a little watery, as she remembers. "Appa got glow-in-the-dark stars for my bedroom ceiling and everything."
The stars stayed there even when Samira hit double digits. Even when appa became celestial himself.
"I wouldn’t have been able to put it in those terms then," she continues, "but I think I’ve been looking for perspective all my life. A way to zoom out from all the noise and see what really matters."
When she finally looks at him, her eyes are wide, planetary in the way they draw him in, in, into her orbit. "I was sitting here watching the Artemis footage and all I could think about was how I wanted you to be home so we could watch it together. Not whether I'm running out of time, or whether my mom is being impulsive, or any of the other things I've been worrying about for weeks. Just that. Just you, and that I want to share every moment with you, the mundane ones and the astronomical ones, and that – that I love you."
A profound sense of peace washes through her with the confession, not unlike the peace she felt upon seeing the pictures of Earth coming from the crew onboard the spacecraft. How small all of their insecurities were, barely fitting in the curve of her fingernail.
"And you don't have to say it back," she adds assuredly. "I've considered that maybe I have this all wrong. But - well, I'm pretty sure I don't. In fact, I'm pretty sure—"
Jack interrupts her with a kiss. It starts as a whisper of a thing, tandem sighs of relief—of homecoming—passing between them, but blooms before long into something more fervent, more sure, until everything else falls away.
“Samira," he laughs, soft and affectionate, against her mouth when they finally break for air. Tethered, even then. "I love you, too.”
She swears the image of Earth on her screen looks a little bit clearer, a little bit brighter.