Work Text:
"Good news, everyone!" announced the professor. "The ship Leela was returning from the Proxis Eleventy-Three delivery in was caught in the blast of a supernova!"
The collective crew of Planet Express stared at him. "So—the good news is that we know Leela made it off safely?" Fry asked at last.
"Oh, my, no, I have no idea!" Farnsworth said. "We won't be getting any transmissions from that system for a month, not until the radiation fades."
"Wasn't Zapp Brannigan taking Leela back?" Amy asked tremulously.
"Yes, indeed!"
" But..." Amy's eyes filled with tears. "Kif was on that ship...!"
"And we don't know if any escape pods made it—how is that good news?" Fry demanded. "Because the Planet Express ship was in the shop, so we didn't all blow up? Just—just Leela?—And Kif," he added hastily, at Amy's loud sob.
The professor blinked, his eyes behind his lens twinkling like two hopping fleas trapped under soda bottles. "No, that was just a coincidence. A tragic irony, really."
"So what is the good news?" Bender asked.
"My mega-distance nova-inducing stellar ray is a success!" Farnsworth beamed. "Well, it seems the targeting system needs a few teensy tweaks, but the theory is sound—isn't that wonderful?"
* * *
As things would have it, both Leela and Kif had made it to an escape pod, and were presently being pushed along the crest of the supernova's radiation wave at very nearly the speed of light, in one of the more thrilling variations on extreme surfing known to sentient, semi-sentient, and Californian life. Leela failed to appreciate that thrill, however, being too busy debating the merits of escaping, seeing as one Zapp Brannigan had also made it to the pod.
As Zapp's ship had been state-of-the-art, the D.O.O.P.'s finest, the escape pods were a step up from the Planet Express Ship's mini-pods, which required certification from a physician, a chiropractor and a yoga instructor to enter (as stated the fine print on the side, in an unobtrusive font just technically large enough that Escape-With-Ease Ltd. had been successfully ducking lawsuits for over a century.) The D.O.O.P. pods not only had both comestibles and cosmetics, but also working plumbing, and an opaque plastic privacy curtain for the comfort of multiple guests.
Unfortunately, Kif had gotten on one side of the curtain, while Leela ended up with Zapp on the other side. Before she could ask how that had happened, Zapp interrupted. "Leela...!"
The starship captain was looking a bit odd, his face going red and then white in alternating stripes, like a rotating barber pole. If she didn't know better, Leela might have thought he was suffering under the heavy burden of a captain losing yet another crew. As she did know better, she just sighed, "What is it, Zapp?"
"Leela," Zapp gasped, his voice low and thick with pain, "I need...I need...I need you to have sex with me right now!"
"What?"
"Or any time in the next 2.6 hours! Soon, though!"
Leela considered kicking him, but Zapp was panting and sweating and maybe drooling and she had on new boots she didn't want stained. Instead she said, "I will not have sex with you, Zapp," speaking slowly and avoiding contractions and multi-syllabic words which might confuse the issue.
"But you have to! If you don't, I'll die!" Zapp dropped his voice to a hoarse, embarrassed whisper. "I've—I've got this condition, you see..."
He explained.
Leela rolled her eye so hard it hurt. "Testicular ceruleanitis is not a real syndrome, Zapp."
"I'm afraid it is," Kif said miserably from behind the curtain. "Not in Earthicans, but it's common among Aaszhahtz. The doctors aren't exactly sure how your species can be infected with it, since all acts that could possibly transmit it to a humanoid species are illegal on any D.O.O.P. planet, and also there's only one known case in intergalactic medical history."
"I deny everything," Zapp said with the confidence of a man whose career often rested on his unashamed and egregious ignorance.
"So you left your medication back on the ship," Leela said. "Why does that mean I should give you my body?"
"Because you're a kind and generous soul, with an infinite capacity for love?" Zapp said hopefully.
Leela considered. "Actually, last week I saved that adorable litter of razor-clawed ultra-predator pups on Straczynski Five, so I think my karma's good for the month. Sorry."
"Because if you don't, in two hours and twenty-one minutes a very sensitive part of my anatomy will have swollen to the approximate size and mass of bowling balls, and will ricochet off my body at hypersonic velocities with enough force to punch a hole in the hull of this pod?"
Leela considered again. "Candlepin bowling, or regular?"
"Regular," Kif moaned.
Leela sighed. "Oh, fine, I'll do it."
* * *
It took the Planet Express crew a solid week of rigorous searching before they pinpointed the location of the escape pod. If by "rigorous searching" one meant "flying about aimlessly like an aging Denubian bat who refuses to get a hearing aid and goes around insisting pod-broadcasts were so much louder when they were a pup and gliding headfirst into walls"; and by "pinpointed the location" one meant "tractor-beaming into the airlock every hunk of space debris larger than a breadbox that they bumped into."
There was quite a lot of debris. The developing black hole that had once been known as MSR-1121x, Future Site of Niven Gated Ring Community - Redefining Class! (now Future Site of Niven Garbage Disposal - Redefining Trash!) was encircled by the orbiting remains of some seven hundred million half-constructed space-plywood pre-fab split-levels. As their external sensors were useless in the supernova radiation, the Planet Express ship dutifully took aboard the refuse one piece at a time, and scanned each for life-signs before tossing it back.
On the eighth day Fry tractored aboard a largish chunk that proved to be mostly metal. "Should I space this one?" Bender asked. He was presently in charge of the airlock controls.
"Yeah...wait!" Amy cried from her position at the scanner. "I'm getting life-signs—two humans and an Amphibiosan!"
"Great!" Bender said. "So, should I space it?"
But Fry and Amy were already racing down to the airlock, in time to watch the doors open and reveal their beloved comrades and friends. Also Zapp Brannigan.
"Kif!" cried Amy, going to the Amphibiosan, who folded himself away in a corner under the pod in what would have been a fetal position, had he ever been a fetus, rocking back and forth.
"Leela!" cried Fry, running up to greet his captain with a grin. "Are you okay?"
"Better than okay," Zapp said, and put his arm around Leela's shoulders.
"Exactly, precisely okay, and not a degree more," Leela said, and removed Zapp's arm by grabbing his hand and twisting backwards at the wrist while simultaneously elbowing him in the ribs.
Fry blinked at this uncharacteristically gentle rejection. "Did something...happen between you guys?"
"No," Leela said.
"Leela shared with me the most precious and intimate experience two beings can share," Zapp said, beaming.
"No!" Fry frowned. "...But where'd you get the bubble-gum?"
Leela sighed. "We had sex, Fry."
"What?" Fry's head whipped back around to her, then Zapp, then her, then Zapp, like he was watching a ping-pong match between two hummingbirds with paddles attached to their wings. (Super-Extreme Animal Planet was one of Fry's favorite channels.)
"Not merely sex," Zapp said. "Leela and I made glorious love, hour after languorous hour, bathed in the shimmering golden lights of the supernova."
Fry gulped. "Really?"
"Technically, yes," Leela said. "Except that we'd been slingshot away from the nova at almost the speed of light, so we were experiencing severe time dilation effects—time was passing for us much slower than it was for you out here. So more technically, no, no, no, and hell no."
"How long was it for you, then?"
"Thirty-seven seconds," Leela said. "Counting the time it took him to get on the condom."
"But there aren't any condoms in escape pods," Fry said. "Not in the medical kit or the storage cabinet or the menu-matic or the antigrav generator—um. Not that I've looked or anything."
"No, but you're right, there shouldn't be a rubber anywhere on the pod," Professor Farnsworth confirmed.
"Weeeell...not a rubber," Zapp said, "but there was something of a rubber-like consistency."
They all looked at Kif, shivering pitifully in the corner, his translucent and stretchy skin jiggling like the proverbial bowlful of jelly that has been assaulted.
"Oh, Gummi-Wummi," Amy said, going to put her arms around him. Kif whimpered and sucked his eyeballs deeper into his skull-less head cavity.
Leela's complexion was almost as green as the Amphibiosan's. "But—you said the D.O.O.P. prophylactics are always that color—"
"Don't worry," Zapp said, "he's very hygenic, aren't you, Kif?—What's the matter, man? I know sharing such profound carnal ecstasy with me is bone-melting, but it's been almost an hour, grow a spine!"
* * *
There were two lasting consequences from the incident. First of all, metal oxides in the Planet Express Ship's latest hull paint job reacted with the supernova's radiation, turning the ship a striking shade of neon paisley.
Second, Fry mostly stopped speaking to Leela off-duty. Much less doing anything else.
"Do we need to talk about this, Fry?" Leela finally asked him.
"Talk about what?"
"It seems like every time I try to have a conversation with you lately, you squeeze your eyes shut, jam your fingers in your ears, and say LA-LA-LA very loudly."
"LA-LA-LA!" Fry said.
"I don't think he can hear you, Leela," Bender advised in passing. "He's got his eyes squeezed shut and his fingers jammed in his ears."
So Leela removed Fry's fingers from his ears and sat him down for a serious, composed talk.
That lasted two minutes and eight seconds, an impressive new record in the relationship annals of Fry and Leela. Hermes later collected on the pool.
"If you were really my girlfriend, you could've at least said you were sorry for having sex on the escape pod without me!" Fry shrieked.
"I don't know why you're so upset about that," Leela shrieked back. "You're not the one who had to have sex with Zapp Brannigan! I'm the one who deserves the apology—from the universe!"
"But the universe didn't cheat on you!" Fry protested.
"It's not cheating if it doesn't count! And it doesn't count, because it's not like I wanted to do it!"
"Are you sure, Leela? Are you really sure?" Fry sighed. "You know, once upon a time, I thought I hated brussels sprouts."
Leela blinked. "How could you hate Brussels Sprout? He's the funniest guy on the Food Network's Biodome of Death Showdown."
"Not the genetically modified sentient Belgian green-bean stalk," Fry said. "The food. I had brussels sprouts once when I was a kid and they were all squishy and yucky, so I thought I hated them, and I wouldn't eat them no matter what my mom said about how they'd make me taller. But one time I was going out with this girl, and she cooked brussels sprouts for me for dinner, and she was watching me eat. So I had to eat one. And then I found that they were actually yummy little balls of butter-absorbing leafy goodness, and I ate all of them, and I ate my mom's, too, and I even asked her to make them. And not just because I wanted to be taller, either. So what if Zapp Brannigan is actually your brussels sprouts, Leela? And I'm just iceberg lettuce? Where does that leave us?"
"Hungry," Leela said. She got up and headed for the kitchen, then stopped and said over her shoulder, "Also, if you don't trust me to know whether or not I'm going to ask for sex with Zapp Brannigan ever again—which I'm not, by the way—then maybe we shouldn't be going out after all."
"Fine!" Fry said sulkily. "...Hey, can you get me a sprout-flavored Slurm, while you're up?"
He ducked just in time for the soda can to leave a large dent in the wall behind his head.
* * *
"This is why coworkers shouldn't date," Bender complained as he piloted the Planet Express ship out of orbit.
"Why?" Amy asked. "Because Leela is in such a bad mood that she's gotten into fights on three deliveries in a row, and only some of our clients like getting punched in the nose by a girl? Or because Fry is so mopey that he keeps walking into furniture and off cliffs and it was lucky our last job was to a planet with .1 G gravity or he could've broken something? Or because they've been so busy with this that no one's gotten around to repainting the ship and we keep getting tickets for violating interstellar fashion codes?"
"Yeah, that, too," Bender said. "But mostly 'cause I wasn't programmed for this."
"Bender," Leela said, "tell Fry that if he keeps kicking the back of my seat, I'm going to kick the back of his. And I don't mean his chair."
"Bender," Fry said, "tell Leela that threats of bodily harm only turn me on if I know we're going to make out afterwards. Or if she's wearing her new boots with the high heels. Which she's not."
"Bender," Leela said, "tell Fry that I'm not trying to turn him on, especially since he's only interested in fresh produce anyways."
"Bender," Fry said, "tell Leela that I like frozen veggies as well, thank you."
"You two back there, shut up or I'm turning this spaceship around!" Bender shouted, then turned back to Amy. "You've gotta do something! I can't be the responsible one—I wasn't built for maturity!"
Amy sympathetically patted Bender on his metal shoulder. "Don't worry, Bender," she said. "I'm sure they'll work it out eventually."
* * *
Three days later, they still hadn't, so Fry was understandably suspicious when Bender announced he was calling in sick to work.
"I thought robots didn't get sick," Fry told his roommate. But Bender's normally matte lead bodywork did look oddly shiny. "You didn't accept another download from Hedonism-bot, did you?" Fry asked doubtfully. "It took three reboots to flush the last satellite transmission virus from your system."
"Nah, I don't think it's an STV," Bender said. "I just feel kinda...weird."
"Also you're leaking," Fry said, pointing out the dark puddle on the locker floor under him.
"Oh my god, is that blood? Look at all of it! I'm dying!" Bender wailed. He staggered and clutched at Fry's shirt. "Fry, old buddy, promise you'll bury me with a blender and a case of Lo-Brau and the limited edition holo-discs of All My Circuits—"
"I thought robots don't have blood, either," Fry said.
"Oh, yeah." Bender straightened up, then bent down to examine the puddle. "Huh, then what is this? Smells like...oil?"
"We gotta ask the professor," Fry said.
* * *
Professor Farnsworth made various thoughtful noises as he opened up Bender's chest chamber, wedged a screwdriver into his eye-sockets to pry up the bulbs, and disassembled two of his limbs.
Fry watched enviously. "I wish my check-ups with Dr. Zoidberg were this easy and painless."
"So what's the problem, Professor?" Leela asked from the other side of the counter, far enough from Fry that she only accidentally glanced at him five or six times.
"Oh, there's no problem," Farnsworth said. "It's merely that Bender's reaching a particular age in a robot's life—his warranty's recently expired. So there'll be a few changes, now that he's no longer factory-ready. Patches of rust where there wasn't rust before, and his vocal production unit may lower a bit from wear and tear. And there will be oil build-up—his lower reservoir will be prone to filling now and again, especially in the mornings, or when certain of Bender's circuits are activated."
"So what do we do?"
"Well, you can wait for the reservoir to filter and drain on its own."
"But then I walk funny," Bender whined, "with all that sloshing around down there."
"And you leak, too," Fry said. "What else can we do?"
"Or you can change his oil manually," Farnsworth said. "It's simpler with help—come here, Fry, I'll show you how. Now, sit down, Bender, and spread your lower appendages to give him access."
"No need," Bender said. "You haven't re-attached the right leg yet."
"Oh, quite right," the professor said. "All right, Fry, now put your hands here, and here, and twist like this—"
"Um," Bender said anxiously, "are you sure about this, professor?"
"Yes," Leela said, sounding almost as anxious for no good reason, "shouldn't robot maintenance be left to a trained professional?"
"Nonsense," Farnsworth said. "I've serviced robots countless times. It's so simple a procedure even Fry should be able to handle it."
Fry beamed proudly. "Thanks, Professor! That means a lot to me. Now, do I turn this triangle thingy clockwise or counter-clockwise—"
"Counter!" Bender screeched. "Counter-clockwise! That's not supposed to turn that way—oh." Bender's yellow robot eyes blinked off and on again. "That's. Um."
"Wrong way?" Fry inquired worriedly.
"Noooo..." Bender's eyes flickered again.
"I really should be going," Leela said, not going anywhere.
"That's it, Fry," the professor encouraged, "just keep pumping like that and you'll have his reservoir drained in no time—there you go!"
Used engine oil splashed everywhere. Leela barely shut her eye in time to avoid getting a drop right in the pupil.
"Ew," Fry said, rubbing his oily hand on his jeans. "I'm all sticky, I need a shower."
"I need a cigarette," Bender said, lying back on the table with his eye-shield lowered at an irregular angle and his eyes glowing at a dreamy half-power.
"I need to go punch something hard," Leela said. She looked at Bender and the fine sheen of metal polish dotting his dome above the eyes, and felt something oddly like a very large, very green boa constrictor wrap around her heart and squeeze tight. "A couple of dozen times."
* * *
Fry helped with Bender's maintenance every morning, and irregularly throughout the day as needed. After a week he had it down to an art-form, deftly draining the oil and checking the dipstick one-handed.
Leela dented six walls, cracked four monitors, and ruined two pairs of steel-toed boots and a set of brass knuckles. Hermes helpfully offered her a pamphlet for a free anger-management retreat on Titan. Leela added Hermes's console monitor to the tally, and Hermes helpfully ripped up the brochure for her.
It didn't make the boa constrictor go away, though. "I just didn't think he'd move on so quickly," Leela confessed to Amy late one night in the Planet Express building. Alcohol may have been involved. Ice cream definitely was.
Amy shrugged. "Men are jerks," she offered. "Human men, anyway." She offered Leela a fresh tissue and another spoonful of Mom's Old-Fashioned Robot-Churned Vanilla.
Leela dabbed at her eye with the tissue. "He seems happy with Bender," she said, "so I guess I should be happy for him, but it's..."
"It's hard," Amy commiserated. "Especially with Bender rubbing your face in it. Or your shirt, anyway." The Planet Express Ship's quarters were close and they hadn't quite gotten the splash-guarding down yet.
"But I should try to be happy for him, right?" Leela said. "If I still want to be friends with Fry..."
"You could try," Amy said. "Or..."
"Or...?"
"Well, Fry's the jealous type, right?" Amy said. "I mean, he wasn't with me, but you're different, apparently. So...if he found Bender getting up to something with someone else..."
"Amy, you're a genius!" Leela said. Then she blinked at the assortment of bottles on the table, most of them empty. "Either that or I'm very drunk."
"Little of column A, little of column B," Amy suggested.
* * *
The next day Leela planted a few extremely risqué circuit diagrams about the office (the number of potentiometers was totally ridiculous, but most robots didn't care about whether an electronic schematic actually closed the circuit), then bided her time, waiting for the opportune moment. Bender being Bender, this took about ten minutes.
After making sure Fry was locked in the bathroom, she went and found Bender alone in the locker room. "So, Bender," she said.
"Leela!" Bender jumped and spun to face her.
"You have a little fluid build-up, I see," Leela said, dropping her voice low as she sauntered closer to the robot. "And Fry's not here, so how about I help you out with that?"
"No thanks," Bender said. "I'll just wait for Fry."
"But he might be a while," Leela said, drawing nearer still, to slide one finger down Bender's smooth metal cylinder of a torso. "And I'm here...now."
Bender brushed off her hand. "Sorry, Leela, but I don't see you that way."
"What way?"
"As a robotic maintenance provider," Bender said. "You're not a mechanic. Maybe you should try disassembly instead? I think it'd play to your skills. And by skills I mean brutal violence."
"Oh, like Fry knows anything about robotic maintenance!"
"Hey, maybe he starts out clumsy, but he tries hard and he learns fast."
"...True," Leela admitted. She sighed and sat down on the locker-room bench. "But why him, Bender? I know Fry likes robots, but I always thought you and him were just friends..."
"We are," Bender said.
Leela blinked. "You are?"
Bender shrugged. "This is a bonus service he's doing for me. A benefit, guess you could say."
Leela eyed him skeptically. "That feedback loop in the cockpit the other day, with the sparks—that's just a benefit?"
"It don't say anywhere that I can't enjoy a benefit with a friend."
"But couldn't you find a nice girl-robot to change your oil?"
"Hey, all the femme-bots I know are ladies," Bender said. "You can't ask a lady to do something like this!"
"What if you paid them for a lube job?" Leela suggested, getting out her wallet.
Bender's eyes extended from their sockets with a whirring sound. "Well, that's different," he said. "If it's just a business transaction." He watched Leela count out a smallish pile of cash on the bench. "Though the ladies I know, they do better business than that..."
Leela sighed and put down a few more bills.
* * *
The next morning Bender came into his closet to tell his roommate, "Sorry, Fry, it's been great, but I shouldn't be needing your services anymore. I got a new, um, mechanic."
"Oh, okay," Fry said. "Glad I could help."
The doorbell rang. Fry went and found Leela standing on the other side of the door. For some reason she looked like she had been waiting there for a while.
"Fry," she said, glancing down and then up into his eyes. He'd been avoiding meeting her eye for a while, but he couldn't help but look into it now. It was as beautiful as he remembered. Maybe even a little more so.
"I just wanted to say," Leela said, "that I'm sorry for cheating on you with Zapp. Or, not really cheating, because it wasn't like I wanted to do it, and even if he keeps sending me roses and cheap chocolates and stuffed trophies of giant Jovian spiders that he made Kif kill for him, it doesn't mean anything—but I know why it bothers you. I'm sorry it was him in the pod instead of you."
"Oh," Fry said.
"Zapp's not my brussels sprouts," Leela said. "You are, Fry."
Fry grinned. "I like you better than any vegetables, Leela," he said. "I'd escape in a pod with you anytime. Even if there wasn't a supernova."
"Me, too," Leela told him. "Now promise that I'll never have to watch you change Bender's oil again."
"Why?" Fry asked, confused. "Don't you want Bender to be well-maintained?"
He looked so obviously bewildered, in that ignorant, weirdly sweet twentieth-century way of his, that the boa constrictor around Leela's heart let go like it had been kicked soundly in the head. Leela smiled back at him. "Oh, no reason."
"Okay, I promise," Fry said, and Leela kissed him.
And if Fry's mouth tasted slightly of used motor oil, Leela decided in the name of herpetological management not to ask him why.