Fandom: Against Entropy

Ship: Isabel Lovelace/Renée Minkowski

Rating: General Audiences

Wordcount: 553

Genre: post-canon

Notes:

Midnight now, at least by the clock's standards. Hours and hours before reveille. She was scheduled for a late rotation the next day, but that might give her some alone time with the chemical shed. Maybe then—

Maxwell shoved a thigh between Lovelace's legs and Lovelace lost her train of thought. That was fine. She needed to concentrate on keeping quiet, anyway. Her quarters were private enough, Hera's discomfiting presence aside, but they echoed like the Grand Canyon.

(Or like she imagined the Grand Canyon would echo, anyway. She'd never quite gotten that far west, as a kid or otherwise. Funny to think that now.)

Teeth dug into her lower lip and Lovelace knocked her head back against the wall. She cringed inwardly as the sound reverberated throughout the room. Maxwell snickered and Lovelace shoved her away long enough to hiss, "Shut it," before she kissed her again. It was easy enough, this arrangement they had. They had a rhythm.

In the end, Lovelace came with more of a whimper than a bang, but sometimes that was how the orgasmic cookie crumbled. Maxwell seemed to fare better, once Lovelace got a hand down her pants. She muffled herself with her face in Lovelace's neck before completely defeating the purpose of doing so by slamming her hand against the wall, but that was Maxwell for you. Contradictory and infuriating.

After a few moments to regain her wits, Maxwell stepped back, gave Lovelace some space. Some weak segment of Lovelace's brain hated this part. She felt flushed from head to toe; Maxwell, miraculously, was barely even breathing hard anymore. Lovelace crossed her arms over her chest and Maxwell, fastening her own belt buckle, flashed Lovelace a grin. "Not gonna let me stay the night?"

She had, once or twice before—sometimes a particularly good orgasm knocked her out, and unlike Lovelace she could sleep anywhere—but Lovelace just rolled her eyes. "What, you worried you can't find your way back on your own?"

"You're no fun. Same time tomorrow?"

Lovelace raised one shoulder, hating what an obvious yes it was, and watched Maxwell breeze her way out the door.

Fourier, she thought. Hui. Rhea. Lambert. Just a few more supplies to commandeer and then she'd be off this tin can.

For the most part, Lovelace and Maxwell weren't made to work together. They had different specialties: Lovelace was master-at-arms these days, and Maxwell was the tech expert. Lovelace was an enlisted officer, a veteran, she'd seen action in Iraq; Maxwell was a prodigy with computers that Goddard had scooped up from God knows where. During the daylight hours, their paths rarely crossed.

Of course, that had to come to an end eventually.

"Colonel," Maxwell said as she stormed onto the bridge. "What the hell is this?"

Kepler turned away from Lovelace to look at Maxwell and the paper clutched in her fist. "Dr. Maxwell," he said, all pleasant. "If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that looks to be your work assignment."

"Grid repair detail? With her?" Maxwell pointed at Lovelace. "You got me a babysitter?"

"If you want to put it that way, sure."

Maxwell stared at him. "Sir, I am perfectly capable of repairing Hera's systems by my—"

"Oh, I'm sorry. Do you want to remind me what happened last time I left you to repair an electrical grid without supervision? Or," he continued, voice rising dangerously, "did that near-catastrophe knock the memory clear out of your brain?"

"Colonel—"

"You will be deemed fit to work on sensitive systems without supervision when I say you are. Until that time, a second pair of eyes can only do you good. Dismissed."

Maxwell stared for a few more dangerous seconds, openly furious. Lovelace found herself torn between glee at getting to witness this and grudging respect. She'd never risk showing that kind of open hostility to Kepler.

Well—not anymore. She needed Kepler's trust.

Finally, Maxwell gritted her teeth. "Yes, sir. Thank you, sir." She glanced at Lovelace for the first time since entering the room, said, "I'll meet you in standard lab four," and turned sharply to leave the way she came.

Kepler watched her leave, impassive. He turned back to Lovelace. "Now, Captain," he said, mild once more. "Where were we?"

Finished with her briefing, Lovelace joined Maxwell on the aft deck.

"Ready?" Maxwell said, pushing off from the wall across the lab. She was back to her usual arrogant demeanor, all signs of discomposure vanished. Maxwell was like this: hotheaded but rarely flustered. Lovelace hated her a little for it.

"Let's get this over with," she replied.

Maxwell opened the hatch leading to the lab and made her way to a panel on the back wall. She input a code on a keypad and the panel doors slid open, revealing a small space with what looked like the casing for an electrical grid mounted on the back wall.

"A closet?" Lovelace asked. "Why is that in a closet? Why is there a closet in here at all?"

"Who knows? Probably some holdover from the first—sorry, from your Hephaestus mission," Maxwell said. Lovelace felt her eyes narrow. "Do you not remember?"

"We didn't use this room for much."

"Oh, well." Maxwell shrugged. "It's likely just a storage closet. Toolbox, please."

Lovelace suppressed a sigh, following Maxwell into the closet and handing over the toolbox Kepler had provided for her. She was under no impression that she was doing anything more today than playing the glorified gofer.

Maxwell produced a cordless drill from the box and within a few moments had the casing removed. As it came apart, it revealed behind it an electrical grid, a maze of crisscrossing wires. Some of the wires were visibly frayed.

There was a pause, and Lovelace glanced at Maxwell. She was staring at the grid. After a long, silent moment, Lovelace hazarded an interruption. "Maxwell?"

A blink, and Maxwell looked at Lovelace. "Yes?"

"You… okay over there?"

"Fine," Maxwell said. "Just thinking about the last time I saw a grid like this."

Lovelace pondered that for a second, then let it pass. She grabbed the wire cutters from the box and offered them to Maxwell.

"Thanks," Maxwell said, and got to work.

In all honesty, Lovelace wasn't sure what she was doing here. She wasn't an engineer; she didn't know what the hell Maxwell was doing, much less how she'd stop her from cutting the wrong wire. She suspected her presence was meant as a punishment to Maxwell, little more.

Flattering thought.

Maxwell, to her credit, worked quickly. Her slim fingers deftly removed, replaced, and rearranged wires as necessary, and Lovelace felt her face heat a little, remembering what else those fingers were good for. She dismissed the thought, deeply annoyed—with Maxwell, with herself, with the whole damn situation.

The telltale crackle of the intercom interrupted that line of thought. Hera's panicked voice shouted, "Brace yourselves, we've got—"

Then several things happened in quick succession.

First, a ship-wide jolt. Lovelace and Maxwell were thrown against the wall holding the grid, hard. Lovelace smacked her head and her vision exploded into fireworks.

Second, Maxwell regained her bearings. She reached around the corner, hitting the intercom button. It clicked uselessly. "Hera?" she said. "What the hell was—"

Third: the panel doors to the closet closed around her arm. There was a sickening crunch. Maxwell screamed.

The fourth thing was silence, punctuated only by Maxwell's laboured breaths and the far-off clang of an alarm.

Finally, the edges of Lovelace's vision cleared. It was dark in the closet now, only a crack in the door—the crack where Maxwell's arm was stuck, and don't think about the angle of it, not now—letting the light of the wider room in. Lovelace located the toolbox, fished out the flashlight, and turned it on.

Maxwell's face was screwed up in pain. Her voice was strained when she said, "Can you… Can you try to get the door open?"

Right. Of course. Lovelace slipped her hand through the opening in the door and yanked. Nothing. She dropped the flashlight, letting it float, and pulled with both hands. She threw her weight into it; it didn't budge.

"Hera?" she tried, catching the flashlight back up. "Hera. Can you send someone down to standard lab—"

"Save your breath." Maxwell, not Hera. "I can tell you right now the comms are offline. Probably another stellar flare."

Lovelace had guessed as much. "Okay, hold on. I'll figure out what's holding the door together and disassemble it. It won't be as fast as Eiffel could do it, but we should have the tools, and maybe someone will come find us before…"

She trailed off at the look on Maxwell's face. Her eyes still scrunched up against the pain, Maxwell shook her head.

"No, that's… um. No. I'm afraid we don't have time for that."

"What do you mean?"

"Do you hear that? That hissing sound?"

Lovelace strained her ears. Faintly, under the sound of the distant alarm, she identified a persistent hiss. "Is that bad?"

Maxwell nodded. "Most of the systems in this room were knocked offline when we were hit. Including the pressurization system, it would appear."

The room seemed to go cold. "Oh. No."

"Yes. The good news is I can probably fix it. All of the systems in the room are linked up to this grid. The bad news is we have at most twenty-five minutes before we…"

"Die horribly," Lovelace supplied, doing some quick math. They couldn't expect anyone else to get here from the bridge in less than half an hour.

"Yeah. That."

Lovelace aimed the flashlight at the grid. "All right, Doctor," she said, trying to inject some confidence into it. "Work your magic."

It wasn't easy, working sideways with one arm crushed between the jaws of death. Lovelace could see that in Maxwell's face, her body language. But she worked almost as quickly as she had before, handing tools back and forth to Lovelace and telling Lovelace how to assist her when more than one hand was necessary. Lovelace could see the pain on her face when she moved so much as an inch further than her trapped arm would allow, but she didn't slow down, and she didn't panic. She remained—as she had once called Jacobi—the consummate professional.

Still, though, the minutes ticked by, and with them the dread in Lovelace's heart rose. They rounded on twenty minutes since the flare. They got me after all, Lovelace thought, still holding the flashlight stead. Two goddamn missions and they finally got me. At least she'd be taking one of them with her.

No. Fourier. Hui. Rhea. Lambert. Revenge would come later. Revenge would come when she had a way out.

Finally, Maxwell muttered, "Almost there." With Lovelace's help, she reconnected a final wire, and the room whooshed audibly as it repressurized.

The door slid open and Maxwell muffled a whimper as it jostled her arm. Lovelace made an aborted gesture; instinct demanded she help, while intellect told her Maxwell probably wanted her far away. Then the comms crackled to life and Hera's voice rang through the room.

"I don't know, I don't—wait, I can sense them! Dr. Maxwell, Captain Lovelace, can you hear me?"

Lovelace shot Maxwell a relieved grin. She was surprised to see it returned. "Loud and clear, Hera. Is Hilbert in his lab? Tell him he's got a patient."

Things wrapped up fairly neatly after that. Lovelace finished her rotation ("I don't see you laid up in Dr. Hilbert's lab," Kepler had said), ate her dinner (a burrito she'd won off Eiffel in a bet), and went to bed early, Minkowski's orders.

But going to bed early never seemed to work in her favour these days. She woke, sweating, to a clock that read 2:46. Briefly she considered reading—she'd snuck a few detective novels out of Minkowski's quarters the week before—but her skin was itching and it was getting worse the longer she stayed still. Prime time, then, for a late-night promenade.

Crew quarters on the Hephaestus were clustered together, so it wasn't long before she found Maxwell's door ajar. That was… unsettling. They all slept with their doors firmly shut in an effort to block out the worst of the station's creaks and groans and echoes. While Minkowski or Eiffel sometimes left theirs open in an invitation for her to step inside when they couldn't sleep, either, Maxwell and her merry men had always kept up a pretty clear closed-door in their own quarters—as in, the door was always closed.

But here was Maxwell's, open far enough for Lovelace to slip inside if she were so inclined. If it hadn't been for the day they'd had, Lovelace would have written it off as an uncharacteristic oversight and passed it by, but tonight the image of Maxwell's face, twisted in pain, lodged itself firmly in her brain.

Maxwell might need medical attention. Lovelace shouldn't care, but...

Well, Kepler might be monitoring her, right? What if he saw that she'd ignored his pet mad scientist in her time of need? He'd be back on his guard. Lovelace pushed her way through the door.

It was darker inside than out, the harsh lights of the hallway barely reaching past the threshold of Maxwell's quarters, and it took Lovelace's eyes a moment to adjust. When they did, she was greeted by a second unsettling image: Maxwell, floating hunched over, her bad arm held in front of her in its cast and her head in her free hand.

Lovelace pulled herself closer. "Do you need me to get—"

"No," Maxwell snapped.

She still hadn't removed her head from her hand. Lovelace was close enough now to see her shoulders trembling. She tried again. "Is it the pain?"

"No."

"Then what—"

"Panic attack."

A beat. "What?"

Maxwell huffed a bitter laugh and shook her head. She was taking deep, measured breaths.

Lovelace ran her mind through everything she remembered about panic attacks. The few she'd encountered in Iraq had been dramatic—hyperventilation, tears, claims that the sufferer was dying—but her college girlfriend had been a psychology student and Lovelace thought she remembered something from helping her study for an exam.

Namely, there were a lot of ways to panic. And it figured Maxwell wouldn't even do that like a normal person.

"What do you need?" Lovelace asked finally.

Maxwell was silent for a moment. She kept taking those careful breaths. "Just… talk to me?"

Right. She could do that.

"It's okay," she tried first, feeling horribly out of her depth. This vulnerable being in front of her was nothing like the image of Maxwell she held in her head. "You're—you're going to be okay."

No good: Maxwell was still trembling. Lovelace found herself gazing at the nape of her neck. God, she wanted to put her hand there, try to steady her.

Lovelace blinked at that thought. She must have been even more uncomfortable with other people's anxiety than she used to be.

She'd need another tactic. What would she want someone to say, if their roles today had been flipped? What would she want Maxwell to say?

"You did good today," she said finally. She pitched her voice soft and pulled herself further along the wall until she was beside Maxwell, not quite touching. "You got us out. You keep saving our asses, you know that?"

Maxwell made a sound that could have been a laugh. It could have been a lot of other things, too, but Lovelace decided to take the encouragement where she found it.

"I don't trust Kepler as far as I can throw him, but he was right about you and Jacobi. You know what you're doing." A pause. "Hey, he really cares about you, you know? Jacobi." She mimicked his voice. "If I were the one in trouble, she'd be exactly as smart as she needed to be to get me out."

Definitely a laugh this time. Maxwell had a lovely laugh—infectious.

"That sounded nothing like him," Maxwell said. Her voice was a little less strained.

"Come on, I'm great at impressions." She nudged Maxwell a little with her elbow, and was surprised and pleased when Maxwell nudged her back.

"I wouldn't pay to see your one-woman show, that's all I'm saying."

"Well, no, that's really more Minkowski's area of expertise, isn't it?" Lovelace said, and this time they both laughed.

Maxwell scrubbed a hand through her short hair and looked up. Lovelace couldn't see her eyes in this light, but she knew they were on her. It made her, somehow, nervous.

"Jacobi's a good guy," Maxwell said. "A little too fond of explosives—"

"And cheeses?"

She snorted. "And cheeses. But he's always had my back."

Lovelace let a silence fall, after that. She didn't want to think about the last people she'd trusted to have her back. Instead she shifted her gaze to the opposite wall and tried to fit her mental image of Jacobi with the phrase "good guy."

Thinking on his laugh, his sense of humor, his face when Maxwell woke up after the last incident, it was, she thought, alarmingly easy to do. She'd have to take care not to get too close.

After a long moment, Maxwell touched Lovelace's hand, and Lovelace's heart, incongruously, jumped. She looked over at Maxwell, at the delicate slump to her shoulders and the shadows the dim light cast across her skin, and thought, Oh, hell.

"Thanks," Maxwell said. Her voice was starting to regain its usual cocky verve already. "Don't expect any return favours, though."

"Wouldn't dream of it," Lovelace said, extricating her hand from Maxwell's. She only hoped she didn't sound too relieved for the out. "Good night."

She left Maxwell's quarters and didn't pause again until she was safe and secure in her own. She leaned heavily against the door and pressed her hands to her eyes.

It was weeks before they met in Lovelace's quarters again. Lovelace wasn't surprised; pain and Oxycontin tended to kill your sex drive, after all. She would certainly know.

Tonight, though, Maxwell was back, her arm fresh out of its cast and her teeth biting a line up Lovelace's jaw.

"Miss me?" she said.

Lovelace suppressed a shiver as Maxwell's breath ghosted over her ear. "Shut up," she replied, and slid her hand up the back of Maxwell's shirt.

Maxwell turned Lovelace's face toward her with a hand on her cheek and pressed her grin to Lovelace's mouth. "Aye aye, Captain." She slipped her hands between them.

Later—after—Maxwell hovered. She did this, sometimes, took a little longer to leave after the grand finale. Tonight she was still pressed up against Lovelace, her forehead resting on Lovelace's shoulder as she breathed. She was warm and pliant and Lovelace wanted to kiss her: her mouth, her forehead, the tip of her ear. She wanted it so badly her chest ached with it.

Instead she squeezed her eyes shut. Fourier, she thought. Hui.