AN: You'll notice some sections that may not be in sync with the novelization. The reason if I wrote this before I got the novel. It all fits with the movie, though; so I hope the die-hard fans will be forgiving.

Amelia Brandt was wondering if she should have Cooper's baby.

Plan B was always a long shot. She had a thousand embryos, and instructions on how to start a colony of infants.

And as far as she knew, she was the only human left in the universe.

I wish Coop was here. The thought came back to her more and more often. Coop was a father. Coop knew how to protect and raise a child. Coop knew how to...

She shook it off.

She'd never considered parenthood as a serious option. Okay, that was a lie. She'd thought about it often. As a scientist, she understood the biological imperative inherent in reproduction. It wasn't sexist to say that a woman felt the need for kids stronger than males. She had data to prove that.

But she also had other data. Enough that she'd known the world was ending. Having a child was cruelty in her mind.

But now, here she was with a thousand embryos, and a bunch of incubators... And she had to play mother to a new human race.

But there was an option not covered in her training. All astronauts provided genetic material as part of the program.

She had spoken the truth that day on the ship. Love transcended logic and math. At least, it did for her. Because all her logic and math said that having a child would be cruelty, but... the one time she'd seriously considered committing to motherhood anyway, was when she'd realized how in love she was.

Edmunds had donated, of course. All of them had. NASA had its pick of people for the Lazarus Missions. Wolf was one of the elite astronauts, chosen for physical and mental prowess, just like her. Exactly the kind of pedigree needed for a new human race.

Amelia hadn't made her feelings for Wolf general knowledge. Cooper, the insightful bastard that he was, had spotted it instantly. But what he hadn't known, was that when Edmunds made his little donation, Amelia had quietly moved some numbers around. The fertilized embryo in the test tube she held was the progeny of Wolf Edmunds... and herself.

Nobody had noticed, or cared. It was meant to be random, and Plan B meant the human race was already dead.

"Scary thought." Amelia said aloud. But she didn't feel bad about it, really. It was impossible to comprehend, even for her mind. Humanity being gone was an abstract number about something happening in another galaxy. Cooper being gone I could picture just fine.

She had plenty of incubation chambers. She could start one up as a trial run, and produce a child. Hers and Wolf's. She would check the readouts, and adjust temperatures and nutrient supplements until the timer went off...

She could also implant the embryo in herself. She could get pregnant and have the child in a more natural way. At least, the closest to natural that she had available to her.

Data said that sometimes tank-grown humans had emotional problems. There was something about growing inside the mother that had an effect on a baby that tank-born would never have. Plan B meant there was nobody left to do it the old fashioned way.

And she wouldn't be the only human left in the universe.

The odds of a successful implantation are one in four. She thought to herself. Using the incubator makes it better than fifty-fifty.

But now, here in her other hand, she had a second sample. A blood sample, taken when Cooper had been exposed to an alien atmosphere... Full of genetic markers. Enough that she could run it through the sequencer.

And Amelia was seriously considering whether or not to have Cooper's child.

I cost him his daughter. I was the reason he ran out the clock on Murph.

The guilt came at her in waves. It was the only emotion she had left that didn't make her want to claw her hair out. If she thought about earth she'd go mad. Breaking up one father and daughter was a much smaller nightmare. One that she could feel bad about without letting it overwhelm her.

Cooper is dead. Or at least, suspended in time at the horizon of a black hole, never to escape.

And that made it harder to let him go. She could see the singularity in the sky. She could see Edward's grave too. But Cooper had died saving her life. And Edmunds had left, telling her goodbye, without her saying anything. Her father... She never said goodbye to him either.

She was smart enough to calculate a thousand different ways it could have happened. Cooper could have gotten the angle wrong, and been spun off into space. He could have gone in too steep and broken apart before reaching the event horizon. He could have gone in too slow and failed to reach the event horizon. He could have gone in too fast and failed to get the data...

And there might be nobody on earth left to receive it anyway.

The HAB included a radio setup. She could scan the entire EM Spectrum for radio waves, transmissions, beacons... Wolf had kept it running constantly on automatic.

Amelia shut it down. She hadn't planned it, she just shut it off.

CASE had observed her doing it, but hadn't commented.

She explained anyway. "I can use the receivers to scan the rest of the EM Spectrum. If I'm going to get a fatal dose of solar radiation, I'd like to know it."

CASE just waited.

Brand sighed and confessed. "And I hate the idea of Wolf sitting here at the console, day after day, waiting for rescue that didn't come."

"My subroutines include a network key that checks for shared patch data." CASE reported. "It was meant as a backup battlefield communication, and a way to share target and tactical data without needing words." The Machine almost seemed mournful. "Every four seconds, my subroutine sends a ping out, searching for a connection to anyone like me. Every four seconds, I get a reminder that there's nobody answering."

Amelia felt the strangest urge to hug the machine for dear life, but she fought it down. "More often than I get reminders." She shivered.

The reminder hit her again, and she felt a cold gnawing in her guts. It wasn't going to change. There was nobody coming, and every time she thought about it, the gnawing just got worse.

She pushed the thought down. She was alone. Thinking it didn't help.

Which brought her back to Plan B, and the two vials she had already prepared.

In one hand, she had Wolf's sample, in the other, she had Cooper's.

She didn't have a lot of experience with babies. Fraternization was frowned upon in NASA's Lazarus Base, but as the Doomsday Clock finally struck midnight, there was no stopping anyone. There had been a period where orgies were the only thing keeping morale from bankrupting.

She'd had a friend named Ellie, who'd dealt with fear of extinction by having wild parties and going home with a random guy every other night. She'd told Amelia that she was expecting a child. Amelia had given her condolences... but Ellie was positively radiant about it.

"And so was the father, once we figured out who it was."

Brand jumped, coming out of the memory, and found herself back in the HAB, with one exception. She could imagine her father there, and so clearly that he was practically in front of her. She didn't startle. She'd had these sorts of 'conversations' with increasing frequency.

"Strange, isn't it?" Her father commented. "We know that the world is ending, and that there's no future for them yet, but we keep getting married and we keep making babies."

"It's a way of saying Life goes on." She offered. "Even when it doesn't. I talked to Ellie about it. She says that it's the most important thing she'd ever done. We were racing extinction, and that's apparently not enough for her now."

"I went through the same thing. So did your mother, rest her soul." The Professor nodded at the sample. "If you ever have kids, you'll know it too. Every generation has been looking at an ever growing list of things that'll make life end too quickly, and what do we do? We throw these tiny helpless creatures made of our genetic soup into the future and hope they land soft."

"Do not go gentle." She intoned her father's favorite phrase.

"Doctor Brand?"

Brand jumped. CASE had come into the HAB behind her. She flicked a look back at her father, but he was gone.

"Is everything alright?"

Brand sighed. "I think it's starting, CASE. Isolation is making me talk to imaginary people. Two years in isolation. A one-way trip to the Rubber Room."

"My scans indicate no unusual brain activity, your bio-metrics say there are no abnormal brain chemistry yet, beyond some stress indicators; and the environment sensors can detect no pathogens or natural hallucinogenics in the air." CASE reported dutifully. "Could be you're perfectly sane, and you just miss your dad."

"You humoring me, CASE?"

"I would never do that."

"90%?" She reminded him.

"With a zero-point-zero-four margin for error." CASE told her with dignity. "Humor is subjective, after all. You ever hear the one about the robot and the rubber chicken?"

"Another time." She drawled. "Let's start the day."

"Morning, Cooper." Amelia said to the sky as she stepped out of her habitat.

It had become a habit. She was intimately familiar with the effects of time dilation. If Cooper had survived his first contact with the accretion disc, he would be moving in slow motion. If the event horizon hadn't chewed him up, then the closer he got to it, the slower time would be moving. Theoretically, if Cooper was still alive, he could outlive the universe; suspended at the point of oblivion.

Amelia didn't like that feeling. Cooper deserved better than that. Gargantua was almost never out of the sky entirely. The wall of plasma and hydrogen gasses that burned on their way into the black hole provided light and warmth, and they too would hang there, suspended for a million years.

Cooper's resting place hung over her head, never beyond her vision, never out of her thoughts. Neither was Wolf. She had laid him to rest on a hill, just at the edge of her little outpost. She had the permanent company of the dead.

Which brought her back to the idea of pregnancy. Her greenhouse couldn't support a colony of incubator-made kids, but she could easily provide resources for just one more person.

She wanted the company of the living.

"What should I do?" She asked the only other voice on the planet. "I... I miss them both, and I owe it to both of them. I'm probably the last human, Case. I'm the last one, and I can nurture another human into existence, before I ever get started with Plan B."

"More than one." CASE said immediately. "I calculate a 74.6% chance that you can have multiple pregnancies."

"74.6?" Amelia smirked a little. "Not 75? If you could go 75 I'll buy this car today."

"Plenty of miles left in you, too." CASE shot back, and his light switched on.

Amelia rolled her neck back. "Okay. So I can have more than one kid, I know. But... Who do I pick? What's the best option? Wolf was brilliant, driven, compassionate... But Cooper was so fiercely loyal, adaptable, tenacious... Out of the box was where he lived. Is my best choice a kid with Wolf's insatiable curiosity, or with Cooper's powerful family instincts?"

"You could just mix the samples." CASE offered. "Make the attempt with both at once, and let chance decide."

"I could, but..." Amelia let out a breath. "It seems cowardly. I can't make a choice, so I flip a coin? It's not the act of a mother." She sighed. "Of course, I have no idea how I'll do as a mother. And... I don't know, if I screw up the last child ever born..."

"And if you don't?" CASE countered. "I have full access to your records, and your mentors all say that you never take more than seven months to master any new field of study. My knowledge of humans suggests that no child can remember the first seven months of their lives. You'll have plenty of time to figure out what you're doing wrong."

Amelia found that hilarious. Her emotions were getting more... intense. She had bad days when she could barely handle getting out of the sleeping bag, and then CASE would say something that would have her in sick hysterics.

"CASE, having the chance to have both isn't the problem." Amelia told him. "It's not just that I'm wondering whether or not to go through with this. Who do I pick first? It's the same problem."

"Oh. Problem with choosing a life partner."

Amelia snorted. "CASE, that's not even close to the point. Neither of them are here. Or alive, come to that. I never had a chance with either of them. Cooper didn't even like me."

"TARS thought otherwise." CASE didn't even hesitate. "But are you struggling to choose because you want to get one back, or to to say goodbye?"

Amelia hesitated. "What?"

"You were describing their qualities. Are you hoping to have a son that looks exactly like Cooper, so that you can win one last argument, or are you hoping to have another Wolf, one that you have permission to love?"

Amelia blinked. "You know, it really bothers me sometimes that the machine is better at reading emotional subtext than I am."

"Basic psychology is part of my subroutines." CASE reported. "I could get you to start Phase Two of Project Lazarus now if I brought your mother into it." Light on.

Amelia grinned and headed back inside.

She took the day off. There was plenty to do, but no real urgency. Not yet, anyway. Her routine had kept her from just laying in bed and giving up, but sometimes she wondered if it mattered.

She loved Wolf, but she'd never really... had a chance.

She and Cooper hadn't exactly been friends, but he'd saved her life, and sacrificed so much because of her.

And then there was Murph.

"You're pretty." Murph had said sleepily.

"Why, thank you." Brand smirked. The direct honesty of kids was something she had always admired.

"Y'know, my dad's single." Murph yawned. "Grandpa would want me to tell you that. He gave me and my brother cookies if we promised to keep an eye out."

Brand couldn't help the burst of laughter. It only lasted a second, and she smothered it quickly. "I'll keep that in mind."

"My dad's going with you, isn't he?" Murph said sleepily. "That's why we came here."

Brand hesitated, and crouched down to look the girl in the eye. "Sweetie, be honest with me. The story about gravity in your bedroom. Is it true?"

"Uh-huh."

Brand took it very seriously. "Then... yes, he might just be coming with us."

When she opened her eyes, she realized that she'd been dreaming it. Her dreams were taking her into memories more and more.

Amelia made her choice.

A few days later, she was working on the patch. She took very careful readings of the soil she had treated with the engineered bacteria. Adjustments had to be made, and once the right balance had been reached, she'd have to start breeding enough bacteria to make a whole planet green. Part of her was really looking forward to it.

"CASE? Were you able to get anything from Mann's logs, before they blew up?" She asked one day.

"Very little. I haven't bothered to decode the subroutines, as he was on a different planet. What were you looking for?"

She rested a hand over her stomach. "Variables."

"There are millions."

"I know. We... We trained our pioneers to be unbreakable in the face of adversity. Mann cracked completely, and-"

"You're not alone here." Her reminded her. "You've got me."

"I know." She sighed. "If he went nuts, will I?"

"What sort of answer are you looking for?"

"A reassuring one."

"Ninety percent." It reminded her.

"Live dangerously." She pushed.

"There are several documented cases of survivors in isolation. Some of them go mad, some of them choose suicide, but some of them flourish. There has never been a set formula for determining which one has it in them to keep going."

Brand let out a breath. "NASA thought it could test for that. They chose Mann." She looked up at the machine. "Mann was my... well, my hero, for lack of a better word. I admired him tremendously, and he actually tried to kill me."

"It's hard, when the example you try to follow lets you down."

Brand was silent a long moment. "There's a history of suicide in my family, CASE."

"I know." CASE agreed.

She looked over at him. "I used the equipment last night. I may be pregnant right now."

"That equipment is designed for incubators, not for natural insemination. Biology does what it will always do, but I predict the odds of success are sharply reduced."

Amelia nodded. "One in four chance of success; not unlike mostin vitro." She cleared her throat. "If it doesn't work, I can try again."

"Which sample did you end up using?"

Amelia pretended she hadn't heard. CASE was discreet enough to take the hint and not ask again.

The Weather station had been recording for years, but dust and dirt had collected in some of the moving parts. Amelia made a day of it, heading around to all the monitoring stations. Wolf had mounted the stations on poles, and Brand had a collapsible ladder, which CASE held steady for her.

Six feet up, Amelia had a pretty impressive view.

The world was stark, but not... oppressive. It was like being on any rocky wasteland. So many of the ancient parts of Earth had looked like this. There was power in the wide open country. It was the sort of place one could believe in spirits and powers. She was looking at things that no human had ever seen. In another few years, she would have been here longer than Wolf had been.

"Armstrong and Aldrin described the moon as 'magnificent desolation'." She called down to CASE.

"I have been recording movement. There is far more life here than is typically visible during the day."

Amelia nodded. "I figured. Anything dangerous?"

"The ecosystem isn't necessarily diverse enough for apex predators." CASE reported. "But if you're that lonely, we might be able to catch you a pet."

"Y'know, CASE..." She said after a moment. "Sometimes it's not so bad. I spent my life trying to get out here, and now I've arrived." She took a bite of her lunch. "If it weren't for the fact that I'm the last of my species, it'd be almost worth it."

"I'm the last of my kind too." CASE pointed out.

Amelia gagged on her lunch. "Oh. Yeah, I guess you are. How... aware of it are you?"

"More than you are." CASE said lightly.

"You knew Mann's machine was offline?"

"It wasn't a surprise. My model was designed with a power core and several components that were designed to be workable with other devices. In the event of equipment damage, I'm the one that gets cannibalized for parts."

Amelia snorted. "Now would I do that to you?"

"If you're about to have somebody's kid, you'd do it in a heartbeat." CASE commented. "Hey, it's what I'm here for, Doc."

Amelia smiled a little. "Think that's how we survive? Think of ourselves as tools in use for the good of humankind?"

CASE said nothing.

Amelia looked down at him. "Sorry, was that insensitive? Do you have a sensitivity setting?"

CASE said nothing.

Amelia felt her heart give a solid thud. "CASE? Don't fall apart on me here! Report!"

CASE tilted so that its Optics looked up at her. "Doctor Brand, I'm getting a return ping."

Beat.

"Meaning?"

"There's another Machine out there, and it's just come into my range."

Amelia jumped up. "Wolf had a second droid?"

"Unlikely. I recognize the IP." CASE reported. "It's TARS."

Brand ran back to the HAB at full speed. She'd deactivated the radio gear. It was ridiculous. How could she have been so selfish? She'd go back to the HAB; she'd get the radio back together, and-

She skidded to a halt so fast she actually felt her feet go out from under her, and she landed hard on her ass in disbelief.

There was a new spaceship, landed forty feet from her outpost. "Impossible!"

CASE swept up behind her. "I see it too."

"Good." Amelia said shortly. If the machine could see it, then she wasn't insane. It wasn't Cooper's ship. This was something new, polished, advanced... "How the hell did something sneak up on us from space? To go sub-orbital, there should have been... I don't know, a sonic boom, retros firing... Something loud enough to be heard from the weather station!"

She picked herself up and ran toward the new spacecraft... When a figure in a spacesuit stepped out from behind the ship.

Amelia froze, feeling like she'd just encountered an alien. A visitor from another planet that she never saw coming.

And then the figure took the helmet off.

He was saying something to her, but she couldn't hear him. He was talking, coming closer, but she couldn't hear a word. There was just a roaring in her ears that drowned out everything else, and it kept going, until he was close enough to touch. He held out his arms to her, but she didn't take them. TARS hoisted himself out of the ship and rolled into position beside CASE.

He finally fell silent, realizing she wasn't answering. He waved a hand in front of her eyes for a moment, trying to cause a reaction of some kind...

Amelia reached one hand up slowly, and gave him a hard poke with one finger.

"You're real." She breathed, not believing it.

"Yeah. I'm real. I'm here." He held a hand out again, but didn't step forward. He was letting her come to him.

She didn't move. Her face didn't shift, her gaze didn't waver, she didn't tear up. Nothing. She was looking right through him. Her jaw tightened, hard enough that she could hear her teeth creak, but nothing more.

"Nothing to say?" Coop offered. "A reaction of any kind?"

"Mann reacted." She said harshly. "Mann didn't expect to see anyone ever again, and when he did, he went insane."

Cooper's face changed as he suddenly understood. "And Mann was supposed to be the greatest of you."

"Of us." She corrected him quickly.

"Us." He agreed.

"I can calculate a thousand different reasons you should be dead. I make myself crazy thinking of them when I should sleep." She said tightly.

"So you don't quite know what your reaction should be."

"I'm still not entirely sure that you're real." She commented. "Hallucinations are one of the psychological effects of long term isolation." She waved at the spacecraft. "CASE says the ship is really here, but I'm going to reserve judgment until I can run a few diagnostic tests for signs of a psychotic break."

"That's the sort of comment that could make a man feel self conscious."

"Two years." She reminded him. "And day one began with me holding a memorial for you."

Cooper considered that. "And if I was really here, what would you want to say to me?"

"You want a thank you?"

"Who doesn't like a thank you?"

"You lied to me." She said flatly.

"And saved your life doing it."

"Apparently not, if you survived."

"A fact I'll keep in mind next time."

"Did it seem like a kindness to you? You saw Edmunds, you saw Mann... Did you think you were being nice?"

"I thought that you'd be better at Plan B than I would."

That caught her off guard. "Why?! What, in the hundreds of years that we knew each other, led you to think that I could play mother to an entire species better than you could?"

"Because I didn't think I could stand to outlive any more of my children."

That caught her off guard. He was here. That meant something had happened. His suit was different. He'd hadn't found that on the ship he'd left her with. So what happened?

Cooper glanced at her, and gestured back at the ridge. "I saw Wolf's grave."

She twitched.

"Can I ask what happened to him?"

She sighed. "An accident. A stupid accident. He'd been testing subsurface stability, and the hillside fell on him. Broke his leg in three places, and he bled to death." She shook her head hard. "If there was one more person here, he would have been fine."

Cooper couldn't look at her. "If I hadn't made a fuss about you choosing the planet for personal reasons, we wouldn't have lost so many decades. You might have found him." He spread his hands wide. "I'm sorry, for that."

"If you were real..." She choked out with difficulty. "I would say that I was sorry too."

"For what?"

"Where do I begin? For taking you on the mission at all. For making my personal reasons a priority for our flight plan. For going after that damn probe and costing you so many years, to say nothing of your family. For not realizing that Plan A was a joke that my own father was playing on us. For surviving when you took a dive into the black hole..." She broke off when she saw his face.

TARS piped up. "Too much."

"What?" Both humans looked at the machine in surprise.

"Human psychology. This is causing emotional harm now. When family members are separated for a long time, a counselor is present at the reunions. The emotional risk is increased ten-fold when the parting was not consensual. A child given up for adoption, for example, and finds a birth parent many years later. Supervision and counsel is recommended for such events. I think the principle applies here."

"Y'know, it really bothers me that the machine is reading the emotional subtext." Cooper snarked at him.

Amelia smothered a hysterical little cackle. "I have made the same observation to my guy over the years."

"He's right though." Cooper offered. "The one thing we have is time."

Amelia took a breath. "Would you... like the tour?"

An amazing smile bloomed across his face. "Oh, I thought you'd never ask."

She showed him the HAB. "Wolf set it up complete before he... Well, before." She explained. "The HAB was designed to stand up under everything from an F5 tornado to an earthquake. The lights and equipment was all clean powered, and it just kept running. I've got years worth of solar and weather observations."

"That would have saved you a lot of time experimenting." Cooper agreed.

"When I got here, the greenhouse was overgrown. Every generation of plants had rotted into compost, so I converted one of the storage rooms into a vegetable patch. One thing I haven't had to worry about was food. The vacuum bags that we used for human waste out in space were still intact, so I took to vacuum sealing my crops."

Cooper looked around her little garden, in several sealed off sections, under the warm lights, with plastic sheeting sealing off the sections. "Ever read a book called 'The Martian'?"

"Old Survival Sci-fi? Sure, it's a classic." Brand nodded approvingly.

"I had a signed first edition, back home." Cooper smiled.

"It was Mann's personal favorite. Book and movie." Amelia smirked. "I don't think there's anyone on the Lazarus Project that hadn't seen it." She shook her head. "It's almost painful to think how Mann turned out, compared to his literary hero." She gestured at her garden. "But it's what gave me the idea. And it works, too. Turns out it saved my life, because the climate is tricky here."

"How so?"

"The HAB has cameras, and I watched the whole annual weather cycle on fast forward. When the planet come around to perihelion, the whole plain breaks out in wildflowers. But this time of year, the temperature swings back and forth from light to dark. Ice crystals form every night from condensation, and evaporate every morning."

"So, not habitable then?"

"I wouldn't say that." She countered. "It's a desert. Every desert on earth has tribes of it's own. Sub surface water is fairly easy to find. There's plenty of insect life; three or four scavenger species that I've been able to categorize." She led him over to one of the container planters.

They were made of transparent plastic, and he saw a few feet of dirt. Amelia handed him a peel from one of her greenhouse cucumbers. "Go ahead."

Cooper dropped the ring into the container, and after a moment, he noticed movement near the bottom of the container. "Whoa."

"There's something almost like an earthworm crawling around at a depth of about four feet. They come up whenever there's something edible." She waved eagerly over at the readouts. "I've been adapting Dr Miller's biology proofs. If I can breed some plants with hardier roots, they'll survive the crawlies. Hardier leaves, they survive the frost. We can make a whole ecosystem here."

"That's why you held off on Plan B." Cooper said, thinking aloud. "Your greenhouse could keep a few people alive, but not a whole generation."

She nodded. "My plan was to start the plants growing, sleep for a few months, check the progress, and then use the first generation of plants as compost for the second try."

Assuming I'm still here to do it...

It was strange, having a man around again.

Brand had been the only woman on the mission, and she'd held her own against the tide of testosterone. Something her father had taught her was to be as relaxed as possible around the guys. They were in a tin can with hard vacuum around them for months. Though the crew took turns sleeping through it, and even if Brand had grown up on the base, surrounded by academics and military, both of which were still Boy's Clubs as the world ran out; it was hard for Amelia not to feel a little surrounded.

But she had to admit, she was really glad to have him back.

She didn't sleep a wink. She spent most of the night sneaking over to his bunk, trying not to wake him, making sure that he was indeed really there.

The fourth time, he wasn't there, and she had a moment of panic, before she found him in the Greenhouse. He was staring at the seedlings with disturbing intensity. He had tears rolling down his face.

"Cooper?"

He jumped, like she'd prodded him with a live wire. He wiped his face quickly, but they both knew she'd seen the emotion.

She suddenly put it together, and felt a wave of shame at her selfishness. If he'd made it back to earth, or at least, back to anyone other than her; it meant he'd been confronted with his past in a way that she never would be. "Coop?" She asked softly. "What was back there?"

Coop started to say something, but he changed his mind at the last minute. Tried again. "It... It was bad. I mean, it was the best I could ever hope for, and it was just awful."

Brand did the one thing she'd been thinking about since the moment she realized she was alone on the planet. She took two steps forward and held him gently. A hard shiver ran though her. She and Cooper had never been anything. Barely friends. But she still owed him the whole universe, and she hadn't had so much as an email from another human being in two years, let alone a handshake, let alone a hug...

The strength of her reaction scared her a little, but not enough that she didn't notice him reacting the same way. One thing she knew with sudden clarity: He hadn't had a happy homecoming of his own.

"The day I left the farm..." He croaked. "Murph wouldn't say goodbye. She was mad at me for going. I tried to talk to her, tried to break through it; but... She wouldn't say goodbye to me. Wouldn't even look at me."

Amelia felt her heart break all over again. "Did you find her, Coop?"

Coop sniffed. "Just in time to say goodbye." He shook his head. "Decades, she's had to carry that. She was over her anger before I was down the driveway. Decades, tormenting herself about what she should have said to her father. I should have been there to make it all be okay. I should have phoned, or something; before we took off."

Amelia shushed him. "Last time I spoke to my father, I didn't even know it was goodbye." She admitted. "He never told me the plan was doomed. He never told me he was sick. Whether the mission was a success or failure, I never would have seen him again, and he didn't even tell me that."

Cooper spun. "I'm sorry, Brand. I didn't mean to bring up bad things."

"No, you didn't." She pulled him back again, not wanting to let go just yet. "That's the point I'm trying to make. I don't know what I would have said. Neither did he. I think... I think that something like that can't be said. They have to be felt."

Cooper sighed hard. "When my wife... We knew her time was coming. We never talked about it. Every time it occurred to either of us, we just pulled in a little tighter to each other. Denial was our weapon against the inevitable."

Brand fought the urge to laugh at the irony. "When dad showed me the numbers on the blight... we spent the rest of that day talking about baseball."

"Wouldn't have pegged you for a baseball fan."

"My brother, more than me."

"Didn't know you had a brother."

"Half brother. He was a teenager when dad came clean about the future of earth to him. He couldn't handle it. Killed himself that night. Years later, I had to force dad to tell me why." She sniffed. "I think that was when dad decided to hide the truth about Plan A."

Cooper's hands came up and moved around her. He straightened up suddenly, and she was now being held by him. There was little real affection in it. They were just holding each other up before they both collapsed; which was a very real description of their entire situation.

"I still love my brother." She said quietly. "Do you still love your wife?"

"Very much."

"When I told you that love can transcend time and space... I had to believe that; because one thing's for sure: Love transcends words."

Cooper smiled for the first time. "It does." He agreed. "It has to. Everyone who ever got a crush turns into a low-grade moron who can't thread two words together properly."

"Then... maybe it's okay that Murph didn't want to say goodbye when you left, and maybe it's okay that I didn't say it to my dad. Because it wasn't about saying things." Brand smiled into his chest. "I only knew Murph for a little while, but I think she was sharp enough to know that."

"Almost a dozen grand-kids? She knew." Cooper agreed. "That's why she sent me away once we said our peace. She's right. Nobody should have to watch their kids die. Least of all from old age."

They still had their arms around each other. "Cooper?" She wavered. "Don't take this the wrong way, but... would you sleep in my bunk tonight? I'm still not totally convinced that I haven't just lost my mind. I might be having this conversation with thin air right now."

"I would tell you if you were." TARS said brightly from the other side of the corridor.

The two of them jumped, having forgotten he was there, but they couldn't help the rueful smiles. Neither of them said anything more as she led him back to her bunk.

AN: Read and review.