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Doug Eiffel was not the sort of person whom you could rely on.
It was a thought that Minkowski had had within the first few minutes of meeting the man, and it had run through her head, oh, maybe a million times a day ever since.
He was lazy, self-centered, reckless, cowardly, incomprehensible, and frankly, an idiot. She just could not figure out what Command had been thinking, sending him up here. 7.8 lightyears away from planet Earth was not the sort of place anyone in their right mind would send an idiot. Not alongside people like Minkowski, who had worked her whole life for an opportunity like this. Perhaps he was meant as a test of her leadership abilities under pressure, but it still seemed like an insane risk of money, time, and resources. His mere presence endangered them and the station almost every day!
And so she (barely) survived 580 days of his nonsense by keeping a close eye on him, confiscating his many, many contraband cigarette packets, stopping as many of his bad ideas in their tracks as possible, always having a backup plan, and in general relying on him as little as she could possibly get away with.
And she’d have no reason to think that that would ever change. He’d even been particularly bad that Christmas day, whiny and childish to a degree that was unusual even for him (not that she’d bothered to question why, ask if anything was going on, until after she’d already found out the reason). When she’d received the comm call, she’d assumed she’d just be in for more of the same.
She wasn’t.
The Eiffel that had called her down to the comms room and explained the situation wasn’t any version of him she’d ever seen before. Not the cavalier jokester or the cowering scaredy-cat, not even the bitter, jaded Eiffel she’d caught rare glimpses of and was still half-convinced was just her imagination.
He still threw in a joke or self-deprecating comment or two, but this Eiffel was serious, competent. Almost professional, even, in the way he explained that they couldn’t jump to conclusions without further proof of this being more than just a weird phenomenon. He actually understood the weight of what they’d stumbled across, in a way that Minkowski hadn’t thought him capable of.
For a handful of blissful, exhilarating minutes, the entirety of Minkowski’s crew of four, her people, were able to work together in perfect harmony for the cause of pure human discovery.
And then everything shattered around them.
But Eiffel didn’t.
He panicked, of course he did, but he didn’t break. He got himself to safety, pulled Hera back to herself, and the two of them worked together to figure out a plan. And he did all that with the pieces of his unfathomably stupid plan to smoke in space, for Christ’s sake. And their plan worked.
He saved her life. …Even if neither of them was quick enough to save Hera.
He stepped in again and saved her from blurting out everything that had happened to Mr. Cutter, whom he was absolutely right should not be told everything. And after the call had ended, he had looked to her for guidance and reassurance.
To her, who’d failed catastrophically. Who had absolutely no idea what to do. Her world had been irrevocably rocked, and she was adrift in the storm. They might be in the eye for a moment, but who knew when everything would fall back into chaos?
Even more remarkably, he recognized that she was lost and immediately pivoted to trying to cheer her up instead. She didn’t think she’d ever actually laughed in front of him before, not a true laugh. Somehow it was his stupid impression of her on this terrible, awful day, and his unbelievable faith in her that finally broke her.
As the feeling of active emergency slowly slunk away over the next few days, Eiffel went back to being a bit more…Eiffel-y. He cracked his jokes, made his references, even tried to get out of some duties. But it was dulled and half-hearted. When it came down to it, he did the work necessary to keep them afloat just as much as she did.
They worked side by side to keep the station running and she realized that he’d always been this good with hardware and technology. She’d just been so caught up on his poor attitude about doing it that she hadn’t noticed. He cleared up the disjointed garble of Captain Lovelace’s message in seconds, and she remembered a hundred times he’d done something in the same vein before, and Minkowski had no idea if any of those were harder or easier tasks, because this wasn’t her field. It was his, and he was an expert in it. And she’d never given him a chance to prove it.
They were adrift in a storm, and it was just the two of them on this lonely boat. He missed Hera, maybe even more than she did. She missed Hilbert, even though he was chained up right there in the observation deck, someone utterly unlike the doctor she thought she knew.
He only had her to rely on, and she only had him. And for the first time since they’d met, Minkowski thought that, just maybe, Eiffel was a person she could rely on.