A/N: I said I might continue this fic, and continue it I have! A few months later than I thought, but better than never, right? I'll try to be more prompt with updates now that I actually have an idea of where I want to go with this and also a little more time for fanfic. I've made a few minor tweaks to chapter one since I posted it, because after I saw the movie again I realized I'd messed up a few details. Now, without further ado…

2.

There are two coffee cups, but only one person at the small Formica table in the habitat module's mess. Eying the empty mug at the empty place across from her, Amelia wraps her hands a little more tightly around hers, as if to coax all the warmth possible from the melamine into her cold fingertips. Was Cooper really just here, sipping from that cup following a quickie on top of a cryosleep pod? Or is it just another of her cups, left out from breakfast?

A line read long ago, or perhaps read to her, snakes from some crevice in her mind: I have measured out my life with coffee cups. Or maybe it's spoons. Teaspoons, more probably, if the poet's English-which most of the ones she knows are. Then again poetry, English or otherwise, was always more her father's cup of tea.

She doesn't want to think of him.

Swallowing the last of her coffee, Amelia pushes back from the table, takes her empty mug and the other one to the sink. The breakfast one stands upside-down on the draining board, where she put it after she washed it this morning.

Cooper's definitely here, then. She's not crazy. Well, she's not hallucinating, anyway. Jumping his bones within ten minutes of his arrival probably qualifies as one of her less sensible decisions. Certainly one of the least thought-out. Then again, maybe crazy is the right way to feel about a man who fell into a black hole for you.

For his children, for humanity's children, she amends, to try and stop grinning like a madwoman.

It doesn't work.

She's fallen, too.

Speaking of which…

"CASE?" She pokes her head out the doorway of the mess to address her companion. "How did Cooper and TARS manage not to get spaghettified by Gargantua?"

"Do you want the long version, Dr. Brand, or the short?" he asks, moving forward, metal limbs clanging on the floor.

"Give it to me abridged," she says, turning on the tap. "They'll be back any minute."

As CASE relays their adventures in the black hole, as told to him by TARS, Amelia appreciates how he waited to give her the narrative until she asked him to. It's his programming, of course, but she can't help but feel he's attuned enough to her emotions to know she needed a moment after Cooper left the hab to process what happened between them. She barely resists the urge to interrupt him by throwing her arms around him and kissing his display, ducks her head to hide her face as the heat of a flush prickles along her cheekbones as this thought reminds her of the earlier impulsive show of…affection. Not that CASE would ever be so indiscreet as to mention it. TARS, on the other hand, probably has no such restraint with Cooper. Her smile doesn't, either, stretching across her face as she scrubs the coffee cups. She's just so happy they're back, both of them…

Presently, as predicted, the clang of the heavy door signals their return to the hab, as well. CASE falls silent as Amelia shuts off the water, places the mugs in the draining board, and steps out of the mess. Cooper stands just inside the door, shouldering two duffel bags while TARS carries a crate. They flew here in a single-pilot ship, a stolen one at that, so apart from the small amount of supplies they were able to smuggle off the space station, Cooper's only got a few personal belongings.

"Did you bring me anything?" Amelia asks.

The familiar grin slants across his face, slow as his drawl and fully aware of its charm; she'd would roll her eyes, if only she hadn't missed the cocky bastard.

"What," Cooper replies, sauntering toward her, "you mean besides an aspiring stand-up comedian and the pleasure of my company?"

"Is that your coy way of asking to turn up my humor setting, Coop?" asks TARS.

"Good one, TARS," says CASE, a light winking on his screen.

Cooper lifts an eyebrow at Amelia.

"CASE's is up a tad higher than normal," she replies without considering the implied admission of her loneliness.

It's a fairly recent development. The first several weeks here were too busy, shuttling back and forth between Edmunds and Endurance, to want a companion for more than an extra pair of hands and another brain. When it came to the latter, CASE filled the void pretty well. Once the heavy lifting was done, however, and base camp was more or less complete, she became more aware of her isolation, thought of what Dr. Mann said about his robot, KIPP: I thought I was alone before I even shut him down. Had similar feelings driven Wolf into cryosleep? Determined not to succomb to that fate, she began to tweak her taciturn robot's personality settings.

That was not her fate, though-thank her lucky stars-and she changes the subject.

"Let's find somewhere to put your stuff."

"I was gonna ask for the grand tour," says Cooper.

"Hope you're wearing good shoes. It'll take all of three seconds."

His chuckle follows her from the common area with the cryo pod and down the narrow hall, where she points out the mess, the lavatory, storage cupboards and personal quarters, including her own. Sidling around her, Cooper stands in the last doorway.

"Mind if I hang my hat here?" he asks with a backward glance over his shoulder.

Amelia shakes her head, part of her pleased that he doesn't presume since they just had sex she wants him to share her quarters, another biting back a snippy retort: So you're not the kind of guy who spends the night, huh?

"It's not like I was saving it for anyone else."

Cooper's face changes at that: smile sadder, eyes softer. It's obvious he wants to ask about Wolf-just like she wants to ask more about his kids-but she can't bring herself to talk about either.

She lifts her chin, straightens her shoulders. "Need any help unpacking?"

Turning to look inside the closet of a room, slightly larger than the crew's personal quarters onboard Endurance, but just as stark, utilitarian, Coop steps inside, shrugs his shoulders to let the bags slide off, one making a more solid thud on the floor than the other.

"Place could use a woman's touch," he remarks.

Amelia snorts, glimpsing her reflection in the lavatory mirror across the hall: unkempt hair, pale face, dark-ringed eyes, baggy sweatshirt and scrub bottoms. She's hardly the poster girl for femininity at the moment-although Cooper hadn't exactly objected earlier. The thought brings a little color into her cheeks, and her lips curve into a smile as she shuffles into the room.

She crouches beside the bags as Cooper unzips the first, watches him take out a stack of clothes, cross the room in two of his long, easy strides to store them in a drawer beneath the bunk. A glance in the bag reveals what's left to be mostly underwear, so she decides against helping him with that-which is kind of silly, considering not half an hour ago she was tugging his boxers off his hips, unable to get him naked fast enough. Still, she starts to open the other bag, when a bit of tan catches her eye.

Reaching past the underwear, she draws out the garment, unfurling with a shake the old farmer's jacket he had on that night when he stumbled upon NASA and got himself tased by TARS for taking bolt cutters to the gate. She can't resist teasing him a little.

"Mankind left earth, and this jacket did, too?"

"Hey now, be gentle with that," Cooper drawls. "It's vintage. A museum piece."

Amelia laughs, and though Cooper's smiling, there's something else in his expression, as he takes his jacket from her. Self-consciousness, she thinks, and presses her fingers against her lips to smother her laugh.

"Oh my God," she says. "You're serious?"

"As a heart attack."

Cooper leans back against the bunk, one ankle crossed over the other, looking every bit the country boy getting ready to spin a yarn. Amelia sits back on her heels, peering up at him, enthralled before he's begun.

"They took the farmhouse up to the space station. Turned it into a goddamn museum. After they found me floating in space, they thought I might want to live there. Murph's idea of a joke."

That sounds like Murphy. Amelia only met her the once, of course, at NASA, but Cooper talked about his kids all the time on Endurance. She never was sure whether Cooper was oblivious to the looks Doyle and Romilly exchanged whenever he uttered the phrase There was this one time Murphy... or Tom used to... or whether he simply didn't give a damn whether his parenting stories annoyed the crewmates who didn't have kids of their own. Not that she did, either, but she liked them. Liked Murphy, anyway, right off the bat.

And she knew something about the bond between fathers and daughters.

Or thought she did.

She's glad they reconciled, at least to the point where Murphy could make jokes.

"And that was part of the exhibit?" Amelia teases. "You stole an antiquity of Earth agriculture even though you hated farming?"

"Ain't stealing if it was mine to begin with."

A valid point-but after he hangs it in the cupboard at the end of his bunk, Cooper turns to her and says, "Matter of fact, I did bring you something. Unless you really object to contraband?"

"Are you kidding?" Amelia says. "Everything I own is NASA-issue."

"Then why don't you take a look at what's behind door number two."

Amelia unzips the second duffel as he unpacks the remainder of his clothes. "Books!"

Hanging the jacket and a few button-downs in a cupboard at the foot of his bunk, Cooper looks as pleased with her reaction as she is with what he's reacting to.

"I told Cooper books were an unnecessary addition to our payload," TARS' voice reaches them from just outside the door. "CASE and I each have a substantial library which we can play."

"And I told you," Cooper replies, "that audiobooks just don't provide the same aesthetic as holding actual books in your hands. How can we start a human colony without books? Don't you agree, Dr. Brand?"

"Depends who's reading them." Amelia raises her eyebrows at him, which earns her a mock-glower. Laughing, she gets up with a stack of books, goes to the desk in the corner of the room. Above it, anchored to the wall, hang three steel shelves. She begins to line them up on the bottom one, scanning the titles on the spines.

"I guess I don't have to ask which books you'd take to a desert island. No Bible."

"Thought this had more to say to future generations about where we came from."

She looks back over her shoulder to see him kneeling by the bags again, holding up a battered textbook on the history of the space program.

"NASA probably could have given you something more up-to-date, if you'd asked instead of resorting to petty theft."

Amelia moves to resume her task of arranging books on the shelves, when it occurs to her for the first time: they are in the up-to-date textbooks. She turns back to Cooper, but her question dies on her tongue as she sees him thumbing through the book. He couldn't look more reverent if it actually were the Bible.

"It's got sentimental value. Murph…"

"Wait, is that the space book?"

Cooper looks up at her as she approaches, emotion pushed back as his brow furrows.

Amelia explains, "When I showed her around the labs, she told me how she couldn't wait to go back to school and tell her teacher she was wrong, the Apollo missions were real and NASA was still operational."

"Did she, now?" Cooper asks, voice hoarse.

With a corresponding tightening in her own throat, Amelia realizes it probably didn't go down quite like that, after Murph learned NASA in fact wanted to send her father from her in search of a new planet. She wishes she'd thought about that before she made him think of it.

But as she picks up another stack of books and carries them to the bookshelf, Cooper says, "It probably doesn't come as much of a surprise to you I got a little hot around the collar when blondie said the lunar landings were propaganda."

"A short fuse? You?" Relieved her thoughtlessness didn't upset him too much, and amused to find in the stack a copy of Emma, the playful mood returns. "But frankly, Cooper," she says, holding it up, "I am astonished you're an Austen fan."

"Maybe I just want to make you think I'm a sensitive guy."

Amelia rolls her eyes. "At least you didn't say you brought it for me."

"Hey, I may be a little rusty at this, but I'm not a complete moron when it comes to women."

Amelia's heart speeds up at this, at the hint that there is something more between them than impulsive reunion sex between a woman who spent the past three months convinced she was the sole surviving member of the human race and a man who outlived his entire generation, and his children's, too. She's at a loss for a response, though thankfully Cooper doesn't seem to expect one. Another benefit, she supposes, of having a talkative man for your sole human companion on a planet.

"No, the Austen ain't for you," he says, rifling through the book bag.

"Please tell me the Stephen King is. The Stand should keep me busy for a while."

Her smile falters when he approaches to her with a slim volume: T.S. Eliot, Selected Poems. She takes it from him, a tremor in her hands as she opens to the table of contents.

"The Wasteland. Apt."

It's a weak joke, to which Cooper replies seriously, and softly:

"I thought it might remind you of your father."

Something shifts between them, like a change in air pressure, or gravity. It leaves Amelia feeling heavy, and breathless. Certainly speechless. She wants to speak, as Cooper watches her expectantly, awaiting her reaction to his gift, her throat has tied itself into a tight knot. Finally he breaks the silence himself.

"I know Eliot didn't write that poem the Professor liked so much, but we didn't have a Dylan Thomas book. I checked three times."

His eyes follow the movement of Amelia's hand as she lays the book on the desk, her fingertips resting on the cover. Relieved of its weight, she musters a voice.

"I can remember so many nights after my father worked all day on the gravity equation he'd say, Why didn't I just become a professor of literature? Most of the time I'd answer, Because you're a scientist, and you're going to save the world. One night I wasn't so kind. Wolf had just gone up on his Lazarus mission, and I was upset."

Even now, all these years later-eighty-nine years-tears pool suddenly in her eyes to remember it. She blinks hard, swallows, grits out the words through her teeth.

"I said, You didn't become a professor of literature because poetry won't save the human race. And Dad looked at me and said, Oh no, Amelia. It's because of poetry that the human race must be saved."

"Sounds like something he'd say."

Cooper smiles slightly at her, covers her hand with his own. The gentlest of touches, but Amelia flinches away, averting her gaze because she can't bear to see the kindness in his expression.

"And like something I'd believe."

The books referenced in this chapter are a few that were on Murphy's bookshelves in the movie. Of course the line Amelia garbles at the start of the chapter is a reference to T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.