Chapter Text
Two Years Ago
The thing about free wine at academic events was that it was never actually free.
Lauren Ellis had been at the postgraduate mixer for exactly twenty-two minutes and had already been asked four times what her research focus was by four different senior professors who stopped listening approximately eight words into her answer. The wine was warm and had a cheap industrial after taste. The room was the specific kind of loud that happened when a hundred people who spent most of their time alone in libraries were released into a social setting and collectively decided to communicate. Someone near the window was laughing at something that wasn't funny with the energy of a person who needed this to be going better than it was. She should not have been here.
This was, technically, a postgraduate event. Lauren was third year undergraduate, which in the academic hierarchy of this particular university placed her somewhere between tolerated and invisible, and she was only here because her friend Adelina had said “it'll be fun” and “there's free wine” and “you never come to anything” and Lauren had made the mistake of being in the corridor when Adelina mentioned it, which meant she couldn't pretend she hadn't heard.
Adelina had in fact disappeared within four minutes of arrival. Lauren had watched her go with the resigned expression of someone who had known this was going to happen and had come anyway and was now going to have to deal with the consequences of that decision. The plum chiffon maxi-gown she was wearing stuck to her in the wrong places, her usual dead-straight hair in luscious waves sprouting dead hairs, and now she felt entrapped within herself.
Resigned, Lauren found a corner that was not aggressively a corner; not the standing-alone-at-a-party corner, just a natural pause in the architecture of the room, a place between a bookshelf and a window where a person could exist without it meaning anything. She was good at finding those. She had spent three years learning which spaces in rooms required performance and which ones didn't. Lauren had been standing there for six minutes, watered-down drink in hand, doing a very convincing impression of someone who was between conversations rather than outside of them entirely, when she heard the argument.
He was saying quite a ridiculous spectacle about Artemis IV with the confidence of someone who had read one article on the subject and was treating it as expertise. The woman he was talking to was nodding in the way that meant she had stopped engaging and was now just waiting for a pause long enough to escape through.
Lauren listened for approximately thirty seconds.
“That's not how it works,” she said. Both looked at her. She had not entirely meant to say it out loud. She had, however, said it out loud, which meant the only available move now was to continue. “The touchdown sequence,” she corrected to the man specifically, because he was the one who was wrong. “Artemis 4 isn't landing the same way Apollo did. The terrain around the south pole is completely different; you've got permanently shadowed craters, slopes that Apollo never had to account for, surface regolith that behaves differently at those temperatures. The descent trajectory must be recalculated from scratch. It's not Apollo with better technology. It's a fundamentally different engineering problem.”
The man blinked. The woman he'd been talking to made a small sound that might have been a hidden laugh disguised as a cough or might have been relief at the interruption. “The basic physics are the same,” the man raised an eyebrow before continuing. “Gravity is gravity. You're landing on the moon either way-”
“Gravity is gravity,” Lauren said, “but the landing radar has to contend with crater geometry, which is why saying it's basically the same as Apollo is like saying a cardiac surgery and a broken arm are basically the same because they both involve a human body.” She paused. "The physics are the floor. The engineering is the entire building. Did you not see Artemis III’s trans-lunar injection burn? How much aerodynamic it required to facilitate the movement of Orion?”. Silence. Brief. The specific silence of a room when something has been said that lands a blow.
“She's right,” said a voice to her right.
Lauren turned. He was leaning against the bookshelf with a glass of the same warm white wine everyone had, and he had apparently been there for some portion of this exchange without her noticing, which was; she noted, filed, moved past - unusual. Lauren usually noticed. He was - she took in information the way she always did, quickly and without making it visible; tall, dark jacket, the kind of face that was more interesting than conventionally attractive, which was a more dangerous category. Somewhere in his early thirties. He was looking at her with an expression she couldn't immediately place, which was also unusual. She was good at expressions.
“She's right,” he repeated, to the postgraduate student, pleasantly, with the specific pleasantness of someone who wasn't being pleasant so much as being efficient about ending a conversation. “The terrain relative navigation system alone represents a decade of development in autonomous landing technology. The new approach is arguably the most complex landing sequence ever attempted in crewed spaceflight. It's not a footnote; it's the entire problem.”
The postgraduate student looked between them. He made the calculation available to him and decided to find someone else to talk to, which was the correct decision, and left, muttering under his breath something about ‘people these days”. Lauren looked at the man by the bookshelf.
“I had it,” she grimaced.
“I know,” he said. “I couldn't help it.” Broody and tall dark jacket guy said it without apology but also without the smugness that would have made it annoying. Just - factually. I couldn't help it. Like Artemis 4 was a thing worth not being able to help. “James,” he said, and held out his hand. “Lauren,” she said, and shook it.
“Are you postgraduate?” he cocked his brow. Lauren shook her head. He waited, in case there was more. There wasn't. She watched him decide not to pursue it and liked him immediately for the decision, which was the beginning of the problem, though she didn't know that yet. He was quiet for a moment. Outside the window the Houston evening was doing what it did - grey and indifferent and beautiful in the way of things that don't know they're being looked at.
Lauren drank her wine. It was still warm. She didn't care. “What do you research?” she asked. “Astrophysics,” he replied. “Electrical systems in deep space environments specifically. How hardware behaves at temperature extremes, radiation exposure, the gap between how we model systems performing and how they perform under mission conditions.”
“So, you spend your time finding out where the models are wrong,” she said. Something moved across his face - not quite a smile, something adjacent. “I spend my time finding out why they're wrong in the specific way they're wrong,” he smirked. “Which is more useful.” Lauren said nothing for a moment. Around them the mixer continued its particular noise; the occasional clink of glasses, voices, the specific social hum of people performing ease - and in the corner by the bookshelf she was having a conversation that felt like the first real one she'd had in a room like this and she was twenty one years old and she knew enough to know that was something worth paying attention to. He looked at her with the expression she still hadn't fully categorised. “Third year,” he questioned. “Astrophysics and Electrical Engineering.”
It wasn't a question. She answered it anyway. “Sure.”
The movement of his eyebrow raised shouldn’t been a question, but she smiled anyways. “Close enough,” she said, which was the most she was going to give him and he seemed to understand that because he didn't push it, just nodded once and drank his wine and looked at the room the same way she'd been looking at it - like someone watching something from a useful distance. They talked for another two hours.
Not continuously - people interrupted, the way people did at these things, attaching themselves briefly to the conversation and then detaching, and each time the interruption ended they found their way back without discussion, naturally, like water finding its level. They talked about Artemis 4 and then about whether the Apollo 13 mission could’ve been avoided was a genuine necessity with his research, the specifics of it, a paper he was finishing on gravitational failure rates in arrays at the lunar south pole temperatures, and she pushed back on one of his modelling assumptions and he pushed back on her pushback and they arrived somewhere neither of them had started from which was - she noted, filed - her favourite kind of conversation and also the rarest.
At some point Adelina materialised at her elbow, looked between them with a vacant but questioning expression Lauren chose not to decode, said I'm heading off, you okay? and Lauren gave a simple nod whilst Adelina disappeared back into the thinning crowd.
When Lauren looked at her wristwatch again, room was mostly empty. At one point they were the last two people standing near the bookshelf and the bar staff were collecting glasses as it was eleven fifteen and Lauren had a nine am lab demostration which meant she had been at this mixer for three and a half hours and she had not once thought about leaving. “I should go,” she said. James simply nodded. Neither of them moved for a moment. They got their coats and walked out into the Houston night; October, cold, the pavements wet from rain that had happened while they were inside. The metro station was a seven-minute walk, and it seemed to drag on forever. Lauren found out later, much later, that this was because he was walking slowly deliberately. He told her this.
At the crossing he stopped. She stopped. The station was quiet at this hour - the quiet of the last-metro crowd, everyone purposeful, nobody performing. “It was good to meet you, Lauren,” he said. Not this was fun or we should do this again - the social norm of endings. Just: it was good to meet you. “You too,” she responded. He looked at her for a moment in the way he'd been looking at her all evening and then he leaned in and kissed her once. Brief. Certain. The kind of kiss that knows exactly what it is and doesn't apologise for knowing. He pulled back. “I'll call you,” he smiled.
Lauren gave him her number, then walked through the crossing. She didn't look back -not because she didn't want to but because she had decided not to and was good, generally, at doing what she decided. She sat on the metro all the way home with the cold still on her face and a warm feeling underneath it and thought about a man who spent his career finding exactly where things failed and had spent three and a half hours making her feel like the opposite of failing.
She waited four weeks.
He didn't call.