threads

sweet mother, I cannot weave-
slender Aphrodite has overcome me
with longing for a girl-
Sappho.

"It looks fine to me." Sara's focused on the movement as Suvi runs the tip of her tongue over her lips experimentally- it was only an Eos rock and the radiation levels were so low now it was almost the same as an Earth rock so it should be fine, shouldn't it?- "I don't think it's swollen at all."

(Never mind that she knows the curve of Suvi's mouth by memory, now, or the way her tongue pokes out, catlike, when she's concentrating. She shouldn't stare, she shouldn't, but-)

"Are you sure?" Suvi beckons her over to the workbench. "It took about a minute the first time it happened. Do my lips feel different?"

"How would I know if your lips feels different?" Head tilted, she gets up from the terminal and crosses the room. She's used to Suvi's leaps of logic, her glorious scientist's brain three steps ahead of the words spilling off her tongue, but that question doesn't make sense at all. "That's-"

Suvi sighs and spins around in her chair, grabs her by the drawstrings of her sweatshirt and pulls her down. "Oh my God, Ryder. Would you just come here?"

Oh.

Oh.

"You know," she says later- a lot later; it's the middle of the night and no one else wanted the lab, so they've got all the privacy they could want- "there are easier ways to ask me to kiss you than pretending to lick space rocks."

When Suvi blushes her cheeks almost match her hair. "I know. But I wasn't-"

She laughs, and kisses her again.

-x-

"Research log A5684-C. With radiation levels now within habitable limits, the geology of Eos exhibits significantly different characteristics than noted on previous field trials. Of note, Eos rock no longer appears to generate a pro-inflammatory response on contact with human mucous membranes. This has promising implications for large-scale agriculture in the developing colony, though further testing with other Milky Way-native species may be necessary."

Lexi looks up from the report.

"I have to hand it to you, Doctor Anwar. That's the most elegant way of saying 'I licked the rock again' that I've ever seen."

"The universe is like a giant tapestry," Suvi says one day, head bowed over the hovering model as she pulls at its edges, shaping and molding it like a little god at the dawn of a new creation.

(When Mom died, there was a while when Sara didn't believe in anything. So many people with so many stupid platitudes about her being in a better place, that sometimes things happen for some higher purpose- she couldn't stand to hear it any longer. And then the universe took Dad, too, for no reason other than because it could, and her brother lay comatose and it was like half of her own soul was locked away behind his bruised eyelids.

But now Mom's alive, she's alive, and Scott's awake, and there is so much to wonder at in this new place despite the monsters lurking in its shadows. In the face of all that beauty, it's almost impossible not to believe.)

"I love following its threads," she continues, one last subtle adjustment before she steps back from the projection with a satisfied nod, "but it distracts me from the whole picture."

"Isn't that a good thing sometimes?"

"How so?"

She smiles, slipping up behind Suvi, wraps her arms around her waist and rests her chin on her shoulder. "How much time have we spent studying this galaxy since we got here?"

"Minus the time you've been fighting the kett? Pretty much all of it." Suvi relaxes, tilting her head so it leans against hers. "Why?"

"How many stars are here? In Andromeda?"

"A trillion, give or take. Enough to spend a dozen lifetimes exploring."

She nods. "Do you ever look at them? Not through a telescope, not as datapoints on a screen. Just- sitting. Quiet. Looking at them."

"I-" When she sighs, Suvi's breath rustles her hair. "Not as often as I should. I ought to relax, but there's so much to do and so little time-"

"Come on." She reaches down to take her hand. "You're due for a break."

Letting herself be led across the room as they walk toward the door, Suvi follows along behind her. "All right. But we can sit down here, can't we?"

"Not if you want to see the stars."

-x-

The windows of her quarters curve high onto the wall above her bed, enough that with her head on the pillow she can look up and feel like she's floating, weightless and untethered, as the stars drift by.

"This is nice." Suvi, beside her, curls onto her side to face her. "Though I keep looking for constellations and not finding them. Orion, Ursa Major-"

"I bet the Angara have constellations." She points. "That one looks like an anchor, doesn't it?"

"Mm. And that one's sort of bird-shaped."

She smiles. "We should ask Jaal tomorrow. I'm sure he'd tell us all about them."

"We could ask him now. I thought I heard him in the crew lounge when we passed by earlier-" Suvi blinks, reflexively, when she leans over and kisses the bridge of her nose. "Or we could ask him tomorrow."

"I can think-" for once bare of the gloves of her lab coat, Suvi's fingertips brush along her waist and oh, God, her hands are soft- "I can think of other things to do tonight."

When Sara was seventeen three guys asked her to the Winter Formal- they were all Scott's friends, and she politely pretended she didn't know that he'd put them up to it- and she turned them all down. Instead, she put on the dress Mom helped her buy and ditched the dance entirely to spend the evening with her best friend; they sat on one of the support beams high above the Presidium, drinking malt liquor out of the bottle and letting the petals of their corsage flowers fall, one by one, into the lake below.

Scott gave her shit about it for a week afterward.

"You're going to end up like that lady in that book we read in Lit class," he said. "All alone except for, like, eighty cats."

She grinned and threw the bagel she'd been pulling out of the toaster at his head. "Good. I like cats."

(When she finally managed to tell him, right after they enlisted, he just rolled his eyes and wrapped one arm around her shoulders, pulling her down to muss her hair with his knuckles just like he did when they were little.

"You should've told me six months ago. I'd have set you up with-" he stopped short as she squirmed out of his grip. "Oh my God. You said 'I like cats.' Why didn't you just say 'I like-"

She put him in a headlock, laughing so hard they both fall over.)

-x-

"That sounds about right." Suvi grins up at her from her spot on the couch as she comes back from the counter with a mug in each hand. "When you signed up for the Initiative, did they make you watch that speech? That one with the bit at the end about repopulating a whole new galaxy?"

She nods, reaching up to take the cup, breathing in the sweet scent of the peppermint tea. Not coffee, not after today; the shock of the last battle still has her heart pounding a little in her chest and caffeine might make it jump out of her body completely. The tea does the trick, though, the mint soothing her rattled nerves as she takes a sip. "I may have made an inappropriate noise."

Curling in beside her as they both sit looking out the window, out at the bright stars in the parts of the sky still clear around the churning edges of the Scourge, Suvi chuckles. "I remember thinking that unless cats counted as babies, they were probably going to be disappointed."

"Speaking of which, where's Kallo?"

"On the bridge. He was sleeping and I didn't want to wake him, he looked so sweet all curled up with his little feet twitching-"

Sara pauses mid-sip. "Just to be clear, we are still talking about the cat, right?"