Work Text:
“Would you mind,” Margo breathes from across the CSC conference room table, “uh - taking a second look at these trajectory calculations.”
Aleida glances warily around the room - only two other stragglers left, deep in conversation with each other - then down at the paper.
The first rough cut at the trajectory calculations for 2003LC since Leningrad - very rough, they’re still working out a lot of kinks - does, in fact, take up the top three-quarters of the page. Aleida could replicate every line in her sleep, and Margo knows that. So it’s for someone else to review, not her.
The bottom quarter of the page contains two unfamiliar equations. A message of some kind. The one Sergei had asked Aleida to give to Margo had - he’d strongly hinted - geographic coordinates as the solution. Without trying to solve this one herself, she’s certain this is something else. Aleida’s not planning to solve it on her own time, to be clear. She has more than enough problems to work right now; she doesn’t need to take on another. Margo probably knows that, which is why she doesn’t mind if Aleida sees.
What Margo probably doesn’t know is that she just interrupted Aleida’s favorite part of these meetings. The part where Aleida gets to stand over the conference room table in the power heels she’d shunned for years, weight in her toes, and lean down to scratch her thoughts out on paper as they percolate in her brain. No one’s talking to her for these few precious minutes, interrogating her on risk assessments and why can’t we mine the iridium faster, so she has space to move around and fit together all the different pieces of the mission in her head; to rework her plan to tie up the lingering loose ends, in a way that still slots impeccably into her life. Victor’s reading Singularity Sky and having trouble putting it down; those extra twenty minutes with the lights on tonight are exactly what Aleida needs to prep for tomorrow’s debrief at Helios, which means she might have time to surprise Graciana at her dance class this afternoon…
As much as she’d scoffed at Dev, at first, no way, I’m an engineer, I’m not…there’s a strange ease she’s developed with this kind of external-facing work, and the way it fits into her life. And yet, at these meetings - there’s been an unease too, at the back of her mind. The constant unsettling awareness of Margo, standing on the other side of the table, writing her notes, too. And what Margo’s asking her to do now…well, it’s not a surprise. She should have expected it. She started it, after all.
“All right,” Aleida says, reaching across the table to catch the edge of the paper with her fingertips and slide it into her folder.
She doesn’t lift her gaze up far enough to risk glimpsing a look of surprise - or worse, gratitude - in Margo’s eyes. Aleida’s just acting out of a sense of obligation; where would you be today without her, rattling around in her head.
And not only obligation to Margo. If Sergei had said, where would you be today without me - not that he seems capable of such a thing - he wouldn’t have been far off the mark. Where would she be today, if that man hadn’t scared the shit out of her in her driveway, then patiently unfolded the only version of the last eleven years that made sense? Still blinded by her own anger, probably, I wish she was still dead. Where would she be today, in fact, if he hadn’t unexpectedly bolstered her confidence in her own work, and maybe Margo’s in her, twenty years ago when Aleida didn’t know how to be anything but a fuck-up: She’s good. Keep her. Engineers who like to get their hands dirty are the best.
Before Sergei had driven away from Aleida’s house, he’d left her with a phone number, the address of a local motel, and a distinct impression that he was planning to camp out in Houston indefinitely. In other words, Aleida doubts Sergei wants the one communication with Margo she’d arranged to be his last. And, well - if he wants to keep speaking to Margo, then Aleida owes him that, at least.
But more than that - it’s occurred to Aleida that she wants to help Sergei. It’s been a strange journey for her, from what the fuck are you doing here and you shouldn’t be here, to: There was someone else who was probably as fucked up as I was, after she disappeared. Would I have been less fucked up these last eight years - would he have been - if we’d somehow gotten to talk before?
Margo wants to keep talking to Sergei, too. And Aleida owes it to Margo to help her - she reminds herself - but does she want to help her? She’s pretty sure she doesn’t, not really - not if she’s being honest. She can’t be mad at her anymore, not exactly; not after learning that she staunchly refused to give up Aleida’s design, even under threat of FBI arrest. Margo had only done it after watching Sergei get strangled; and of course, Aleida doesn’t think she should have just left him to die.
She’s sorry for Margo, that she had to make that terrible choice; at least she has to be, since she cried about it, didn’t she, after Sergei left her house. But any softer feelings than that - no. Not when the questions still loop in her head every time she’s in the same room with Margo, and not like questions; like a refrain of loud, cold, statements. Why didn’t she tell me. Couldn’t she have tried to reach out, even if it was hard. Why didn’t she try. Did I really mean so little to her. Why didn’t she tell me.
Victor’s been trying to cheer her up, at least, on these difficult days she has to go into CSC; he’s been getting up earlier to cook up huevos rancheros, the real kind with beans that don’t come out of a can, and with salsa that’s made from scratch. It’s lonely in both offices, though, at NASA and Helios, not having anyone who understands about Margo. It doesn’t help that Brandt, who’s done an about-face from patronizing to fawning since Aleida’s breakthrough at Leningrad - and the younger set of employees at Helios, who view her as a bona fide celebrity for flipping off an Eagle News reporter - keep expressing their sympathy that she has to play nice with Moscow Margo.
Aleida’s glad Sergei told her the truth - of course she is - but sometimes, she thinks life would be easier if she could just resent Margo the way the rest of the world does.
At least there’s one co-worker who seems to understand - just from a long distance. Kelly recently sent Aleida a vidmail from Mars. Most of it contained a long and glowing description of Kelly’s expedition to Korolev Crater - which had warmed Aleida’s heart, and given her a chance to take her mind off Margo for a little while. But at the end of the vidmail, Kelly had taken a deep breath, and said:
Listen, I’m so proud of you. Seriously, you worked a miracle in Leningrad - something that’ll change Earth for the better. I just - I hope you’re doing okay, too. Maybe I’m overstepping, but - let me put it this way. Seeing my dad after eight years, it was a lot. I love him, and I owe a lot of things in my life to him, but…he made some promises to me that he didn’t keep, and betrayed my trust in a big way. And we’re both such different people now. Anyway, it’s really complicated. A few people in my life think I must be insanely happy to be with him again, and a lot of people think I should just…hate him. I wish it was that simple. It’s both - or maybe it’s neither - and I go through cycles, you know?
So anyway, if that’s anywhere close to how you’re feeling right now…I get it. And you’re not crazy.
***
When Aleida dials Sergei’s number to let him know she has some notes to pass along, she hears an audible sigh of relief over the line. Clearly, a part of him had feared that Margo might want nothing more to do with him after their initial communication.
The designated coffee shop for their meeting, two blocks away from the Travel Inn where Sergei’s staying, turns out to be completely deserted. Well, except for the woman behind the counter and Sergei himself, who waves at her cheerily from an inside table in the back corner, far away from the windows.
“There is a much better coffee place down the street,” Sergei whispers conspiratorially, so the owner can’t hear him. “Even the coffee at my motel is preferable. But this allows me to read and work in better lighting, and not worry about who comes and goes. And the green tea is pretty good.” He smiles at her. “Would you like a cup?”
Aleida doesn’t really like green tea - too weak for her taste. But Sergei has a hopeful expression on his face. He’s probably starved for any sort of company, she realizes. Russians wear wedding rings on their right hands, judging by Kelly’s mother-in-law, and he has a band on his right ring finger. But Sergei’s wife must be somewhere in the Midwest, and given how abruptly the man arrived in Houston, Aleida doubts they’re talking much - if at all.
“Okay,” she says, shrugging. “I can stay for a bit. If you have questions on…” She gestures toward Margo’s paper, resting on the table between them. “I’ll, uh, go order at the counter. Be right back.”
As the shop owner prepares her tea, Aleida watches Sergei in the distance - bent over the paper, moving his pen back and forth on the page. Solving the equations at the bottom first, she suspects.
When she returns with her steaming mug, Sergei’s carefully tearing off the bottom quarter of the page. There’s a soft smile playing on his lips as he folds the fragment of paper and slips it in his pocket.
He taps the leftover section, the one with the calculations for 2003LC, with the back of his pen. “This is a good start, I think.”
He underlines the optimal intercept for Ranger, about halfway down the page, and asks her a question about it. Aleida hadn’t calculated this - a young Roscosmos engineer called Tatyana Volkova had come up with it, Margo had said, calling it brilliant work, and Aleida would be lying if she said it didn't sting. But she understands the mechanics of the calculation, of course. She shares the gist with Sergei, and they go back and forth for a little while.
It’s helpful. For someone who hasn’t done real engineering work for a decade, Sergei has some surprisingly good insights she hadn’t considered. But it just feels…trivial, compared to their last conversation. Sitting with him, trying to figure out a stupid asteroid, when there are so many huge overwhelming things she still can’t work out.
The shop owner throws her a look - probably noticing how unenthusiastically she’s been sipping the green tea, and resigning herself to the fact that she won’t be ordering another one - then disappears into a back room behind the counter.
“Tell me more about the IAC,” Aleida blurts out.
Sergei’s facial muscles tighten; expression closing up. “This is a painful memory, Aleida, and I could not - I should not…”
“Not ‘92,” she says quickly; maybe a little desperately. “I wouldn’t - I know all about almost-dying trauma. And I’m not gonna ask why she let you into her hotel room in the first place, I, uh - I think I’ve worked that one out.”
Sergei had spoken discreetly about the ‘92 IAC. But the implication about what the KGB had thought might work on Margo - and Sergei’s look when he said he refused - seemed pretty clear, at least to Aleida.
“The conferences before that, I mean,” she continues, resolutely. “You used to see her there, sometimes?”
Aleida’s not sure why she’s asking, exactly. But maybe, she’s trying to ask: She had a secret life, didn’t she? A life that you knew about, but I didn’t. A life where I mattered, but only sort of - only because I was her best engineer. Can you tell me about that life? I need to understand if it was worth it for her. Was it worth it?
Sergei meets her gaze, and the look he’s giving her is a close variant of the expression on his face after she told him, I don’t know how to forgive her.
“Yes,” he says. “It was through the IAC conferences that we became - friends. More than colleagues. We did not share information there, not much. Outside the conference, yes. We had our own system of communication. But in London - except for the one year, I was not on a leash, not much. We had drinks, personal conversations with each other - more of these as the years passed. On a few occasions, we would have dinners together, outside the conference hotel.”
Dinners together, Aleida thinks, looking away toward the distant windows of the coffee shop, and it’s not as if he could know - he wouldn’t have said it, if he knew it would hurt - but he might as well have punched her in the gut.
Sergei draws in a quiet but audible breath - like he’s about to say something significant.
“She spoke of you often,” he says, gently. “In London. Every year we met, I think.”
Aleida swivels her head back to face him, so fast she feels a little dizzy. She reaches for her mug and pulls it closer; clutching the handle, trying to steady herself.
“About my work,” she says, more loudly than she intended; the only way it makes sense. “That you were right - engineers who like to get their hands dirty really are the best. That my engine was going to win.”
Margo gave up her engine design, but she hadn’t planned to. And in the end, neither NASA nor Roscosmos; neither Aleida nor Margo nor Sergei had, in fact, won.
“No,” Sergei corrects her, in that same gentle voice. “I mean, yes. We engaged in those light conversations. But the stories I remember were not about your work, not so much. It was striking to me, always, when Margo did not speak about the work. So I remember.”
He drums his fingers on the table.
“1984…this was a quick drink. Mostly business talk. But when I asked about you, she said something about your status with the American government - that it improved after your great contributions to Soyuz-Apollo. I do not understand migration laws in your country, but she seemed relieved - more certain that you could now stay for good, and work at NASA as long as you wanted. She mentioned you still had family in your home country, and she hoped you would be reunited one day.”
Sergei pauses to take a sip of his tea. Then he stares into it, meditatively.
“1985…mostly I remember a very engaging political debate. But before this…she mentioned her star engineer was engaged, in a different way, to be married. She liked him, I remember, your fiancé…deemed him worthy of your hand.” He tilts his head toward Aleida, with a small smile. “1988…oh, we had more time for conversation that year. We went outside to a sushi restaurant - my first time.
“There was a dish she said - Aleida would have loved. Let me think.” He furrows his brow. “Oburi…no.”
“Aburi salmon nigiri,” she corrects him, quietly.
“Yes!” Sergei’s eyes light up in recognition. “She said this was your favorite. The surface was seared, but Margo explained to me that the center of the fish was still raw. And for that reason, you were forbidden to eat it for most of that year.”
Aleida closes her eyes, and she can picture it like it was yesterday - Margo slipping through the unlocked door of her home, the first visit after Javi’s birth. One bag in each hand - baby toys and books in the first, and something else. A soft glance at Javi, snoozing contentedly on his father’s shoulder, then a quick turn to Aleida. Gesturing her over to the dining table, brandishing the mystery bag. You’re gonna love this. Boxes and boxes of take-out from Nippon, it turned out, and half of them contained aburi salmon.
“Margo also said-” Sergei hesitates for a moment, seemingly wary of her reaction. Then he forges on. “She said you had already chosen a name. For the culprit who deprived you temporarily of your raw fish. A name she liked very much. Javier.”
“Yeah,” Aleida says, lifting her head to gaze up at the ceiling. “That’s my baby. Fifteen now.” She releases her mug and fidgets with her ring. “He was the sweetest little kid. Now he’s - kind of an asshole to me, honestly, a lot of the time. Not always.”
Sergei laughs quietly. “I think if this teenage boy is not always an asshole, as you say, then he must love his mother very much.”
“That’s what my husband says. I don’t know if I believe him.”
Sergei shakes his head in amused disbelief before returning to his recollections. “1991. Well, I mostly remember the ‘91 IAC conference did not end so well, but-”
“I know,” Aleida interjects. “I mean, I think I know.”
Sergei looks up, surprised.
“She was in a bad mood after,” Aleida explains. “I remember because I was having a bad week, too - some things going on at home. She’d never done this before, but she took me out to her jazz club-”
“11:59?”
“Yeah,” Aleida confirms with a lopsided smile. This was another thing that had made the ‘92 IAC story make a bit more sense to her, in hindsight. “Got drunk together. She shared a story about, uh - a missed opportunity in an elevator. Said the mystery guy wasn’t anyone from Roscosmos. I was too intoxicated to challenge it.”
Sergei smiles back, ruefully. “Well, I think she did not talk about your family that year. But she spoke of your career. You were lead propulsion engineer for the Mars mission, and if NASA were to win the race in five years…anything is possible for her, she said. It was one of the biggest reasons, I think. Why she wanted NASA to win. With this success in hand, you could be whatever you wanted to be, take on any role you desired. Still at NASA, she hoped, but - if not, she dreamed that you would still be a part of her life. Either way.”
Sergei leans back in his chair, and studies her face like it’s an engineering problem.
“My words, they surprise you,” he says, simply.
“I didn’t know she talked about me so much,” Aleida admits, dazed and a little embarrassed at the sudden tremor in her voice. “Or talked about me like that. I’m not - upset, or mad about it, I just…I didn’t know.”
“I am glad you do not take offense…we were not strangers to each other, of course, but she herself may not have realized how often she spoke of you. I do not think she meant to share personal details about you, but I do think - you were never far from her mind.”
“But,” Aleida blurts out, and then stops.
Sergei looks at her questioningly.
“But she didn’t share things with me,” Aleida says. It comes out a lot more childish and petulant than she’d planned; she’s 42 years old, for fuck’s sake, and she’d meant to emphasize with.
“And it’s not like she didn’t have chances,” she continues, wildly. “A whole fucking lot of chances. And sometimes I thought she’d take them. Before she defected, she told me, after all this is over, we’ll talk. And when she said that - I actually thought we would. That she would tell me everything. But she probably already knew she was leaving - if not then, then soon - so that was her chance, and she didn’t take it.”
“No,” Sergei acknowledges, quietly. “She did not. I think - we are speaking of you and Margo, I do not mean to speak of myself. But when I called her from Germany, to let her know that my family and I were out of Soviet Union, safe - I think she knew then, too. It’s going to be an adjustment, she said; living in a new place. She did not tell me, either. So… I understand.”
“She should have told you,” Aleida whispers. “She should have told us. If you care about someone. Aren’t you supposed to confide in them? I know you said she couldn’t - that it wasn’t possible to talk to us, once she was already there. But what about before, and - and after? Even in Leningrad, she didn’t tell me the full story. Why didn’t she?”
“I do not know,” Sergei answers, delicately. “I could imagine…many reasons for this. Eight years ago, and before that, she was trying to protect you, perhaps. This was your nuclear engine design. She thought, maybe, that if you knew the full story, you would try to stop her from defecting in ‘95. I would have tried to stop her, Aleida,” he adds, more passionately, his voice cracking a little. “If only I had known. And it is reasonable to think…you would too. You would try to find a way for her to stay, try to help her case with the FBI, and ruin your career in the process.”
“I…” Aleida suddenly feels stupid, ashamed, that she had never once considered this.
“Or perhaps…” Sergei has a faraway look in his eyes. “For you, not confiding in you was the greatest betrayal, I think. But she did not know your feelings. That after everything that happened between you, after knowing the truth, you would have wanted her to stay. At NASA, and in your life. And telling you the full story, whether in ‘95 or this year in Soviet Union, would have meant - sharing her own feelings. There is some shame in this, I think, for Margo. Talking about the work, explaining about the work - that is easier for her. It is something she was taught from a young age, I believe. To keep feelings out of it.”
Sergei sighs heavily and meets her eyes.
“Just because she does not speak of her feelings does not mean she does not feel. Deeply.”
Aleida bites her lip, nodding. “Right. Look, this was really…but I should…”
She gestures awkwardly toward the door.
“Of course,” Sergei says at once, standing up from the table. “I hope to see you again, and I am happy to help more, with the mission…”
Distracted, all of a sudden, he tears out a sheet of paper from his notebook and leans down to scribble a set of equations, four of them, on the page. He folds the paper in half, then hands it, along with the separate sheet of notes he’d been making on the trajectory calculations as they chatted, to Aleida.
“Give this to Margo, please, and tell her - that I will be in town for a while.”
Once Aleida makes it back to the inside of her car, she slams the door shut and leans against it. Closes her eyes, presses her cheek against the cool glass, and takes deep, calming breaths.
***
Aleida had thought she’d gotten better at keeping her Margo angst at bay during family time. As it turns out, she’s still not great at it. Not even close.
Friday movie night - a few hours after her tea with Sergei - had seemed like a nice break. Aleida was fastest to call dibs on the popcorn bowl again, which means she gets to have one kid on either side. But Graciana keeps bumping her shoulder every time she leans in to grab a small fistful from the bowl; and it makes her think of Margo, bumping her shoulder at the Flight console after the Mars landing. Margo, showing her pride and affection, even - affection Aleida had thought was a figment of her imagination.
Javi’s arm is long enough for him to grab popcorn while keeping his typical teenage distance from her. But he slouches on the sofa, and it reminds her of the last moment of real closeness she’d had with her son: both of them leaning back against the futon in his room, shoulder-to-shoulder, the night she came back from Leningrad. Eight years of rebuffing him when he dared to ask about Margo, then he had to watch her come alive on a TV screen - it would have been confusing to anyone, she thinks guiltily. But Javi was perceptive enough, or his father had told him enough, to understand that his mother was angry and hurt; hurt most of all that Margo hadn’t cared to contact her, and him by proxy, for so many years. Still, he’d posed a question to his mom that had seemed so naive to her at the time: What if she did care? But she had some reason, a good reason.
Even later, in bed with Victor, she can’t seem to push any of it away. She’d thought maybe she could - he was a little tired after the movie, but not too tired to mess around a bit, and that’s usually a good distraction. Victor’s somewhere down by her waist now, and his fingers are warm, shifting the bottom edge of her camisole up a couple of inches so he can press little kisses along the curve of her hip. It’s slow, and it’s nice - it’s always nice. The cynical part of her never really imagined she’d still have this - old, well-intentioned, mildly irritating words, you wanna be an engineer, you’re not gonna have time for anything else - but Victor’s been here, somehow, for the better part of nineteen years. Sanding off the lingering traces of doubt that she could feel safe like this, bridging her from nobody gets to see that to hands and lips exploring her skin under the dim glow of a bedside lamp. He’s good at this, and he’s had to get better in recent years: adapting the frequency and intensity of his touch to her cycles of heaviness and heartbreak, perfecting the art of how to make a deeply hurt body feel good.
So of course it’s nice, but maybe it’s a little overwhelming, too - this gradual build-up of sensation in her lower body when there’s already so much tension in her head right now, and it’s the same camisole, isn’t it? The pale pink one, with lace on the neckline, that she was wearing under her bathrobe when she hugged Margo in Leningrad. Embraced her blindly, instinctively, the whole weight of missing Margo crashing down on her and bursting out of her before she even knew what was happening.
And Victor’s hands, now gently shifting more fabric aside, skimming the inside of her thighs, are the same hands that gripped her body back in ‘95 after that policeman or fireman or whoever it was had handed her over to - some other person she can’t fully remember, maybe an EMT, who had checked and treated her surface-level head wound in some tent that was blocks away from the crime scene, but still close enough to smell the smoke; you’re lucky to be here, need to keep the hospital beds free for the serious injuries, he’d said all too casually, before waving some woman over, who’d walked her over to that waiting area for families. You think your husband will be there, or one of your parents, or…the stranger had asked, and she hadn’t responded, partly because she was too shell-shocked to speak, partly because - well, she only had Papá and Javi now, didn’t she, and she’d had their lone car, probably blown to pieces now, and why the fuck was she even thinking about the car, neither of them could drive anyway. Margo was supposed to be at JSC, supposed to be her family, but she wasn’t there - dead, she’d thought, until she learned that she was actually in a private jet on her way to Russia, or maybe even switching planes in Mexico, of all places. But Victor was there, crying harder than anyone else in that room, harder than Aleida had ever seen her annoyingly unflappable husband cry; reaching for her, folding her into his chest after six months of not touching her at all.
I stood there in the remains of your office for so long - thinking about you, praying and hoping that you were in heaven - that Victor was sure I’d died, she didn’t say in Leningrad, because even in her daze she hadn’t wanted Margo to inquire after him, ask whether they’d reconciled; the woman had had eight fucking years to reach out and find out, but apparently hadn’t cared enough to do it, or so she’d thought. It had made her sick, too, the idea of Victor’s name in Margo’s mouth - she had no right to talk about him, Aleida had seethed in her feverish rage, the one adult in her life who’d had a choice to stay with her, stay true to her after all, and seized it with both hands. Margo, faced with a similar choice…and Aleida had said that, ostensibly about the treason, you had choices all along, but you didn’t take them…Margo hadn’t chosen her, Margo had never chosen her. Or so Aleida had thought, until Sergei corrected the record.
Margo hadn’t had a choice. Not a real one, anyway. Aleida did know that after the first conversation with Sergei, but now, at the heart of it all: it must have hurt Margo too, deeply, all of those times, not being able to choose her.
She reaches down now, and her fingers brush Victor’s hair. She runs them through his strands, and it reminds her that they’ve both aged. Not bad for middle-aged parents of a teenager and elementary school kid, Victor had said, grinning at their reflections in the mirror the other night - the one Brandt had dragged them out for an overpriced dinner with some political hack who was visiting from Washington and his wife. Victor’s hair is starting to thin a little, though; he’s been rolling with it, getting it clipped just a little bit shorter every time he goes to the barber. And Aleida’s gray streaks rival his, at this point. Margo’s fully gray now, but that’s not natural, Aleida thinks distractedly - too even and well-blended, and doesn’t red hair usually turn white?
“Okay,” Victor agrees, voice a little muffled by the quilt - he knows she means I like this but it’s not working for my brain right now - and carefully smooths her nightclothes back into place.
“Sorry,” she says after he’s scooted back up the bed.
“Since when do we say sorry for that?” he answers, brow furrowing a little. It’s a rhetorical question, and he softens it by reaching for her left hand with his right; tracing his thumb along her wedding band. She’s so tough and unapologetic to the outside world that no one would ever guess this about their relationship, but this is a thing Victor has to do sometimes - remind her to shamelessly prioritize her wants over his wants, over his idea of what she wants, in the bedroom.
Not pushing back forcefully enough in this setting, it’s a pesky, incongruous tendency of hers that Victor’s been trying to rid her of since ‘84, and she’s not exactly sure when it started. Victor, whose own irritating habit is acting as her therapist after failing to convince her to see one, thinks it started when she was 17. Something to do with the way Aleida lost her virginity after a party when she was at the Kennedy School - not to the kind, smart boy who talked to her for an hour at the event, but left early to catch the bus across town to where he lived with his working-class, single mom. No, she’d given it up to the guy who was kind of an asshole, but had an allowance and a huge student apartment for her to crash at, gifted to him by his parents who lived in Orange County, California, and who said he’d take her out to the best restaurant on Bryant Street on the weekend if she stayed over. Aleida didn’t have money for food, didn’t have anywhere else to stay, although no, she thinks, that wasn’t her fault, either, at least I stopped blaming her for that a long time ago.
Anyway, it wasn’t a terrible first time, with that guy, but it wasn’t good. She continued to sleep with him on and off for longer than she should have, considering it never got much better. And later, after the shotgun incident, as long as her boyfriends didn’t pressure her to take her shirt off in bed, or didn’t go behind her back like Davey had, she - well, she put up with a lot. It didn’t fully sink in for her that this part of her past was nearly as fucked up as the rest, until the third, or maybe the fourth time she slept with Victor - that time she was in an insecure mood and not quite sure anymore about the new thing they were trying, even though she’d been the one to suggest it; and Victor called a pause in the middle of sex and said point-blank, This isn’t some kind of transaction, okay? We can stop if you want and I’m still making you migas in the morning.
In most other settings, especially when dealing with people at work, she’s always been great at saying no - shouting it, even. Well, maybe not with Margo. With Margo, she remembers never being sure whether she pushed back too much, I thought I told you to let this go.- I couldn’t. Or too little, trusting her, believing her, finding anyone else to blame - poor Emma Jorgens - even when the evidence was staring her right in the face. It used to eat at her, whether she should have been different with Margo. Whether Aleida would have been enough for her, if she had. To think, now…that it probably didn’t matter.
“Right,” she says now, giving Victor a small smile. She shifts onto her side facing away from him and lifts her hair away from her neck in silent invitation. He scoots closer to press a light kiss to the nape of her neck, and she hums in assent - that’s better. She’s calmer when she can hear and feel him breathing next to her.
“Mm…sigue,” she murmurs, keep going, at his next approach - lips parted experimentally against the base of her neck. He hooks his fingers around the camisole straps for leverage, and leans back in to kiss her more fervently. It’s a different kind of intensity but it’s pitch-perfect, the opposing sensations of soft mouth and rough stubble as he works his way along the back of her neck and sides of her throat, and something unclenches deep in her chest.
“Vic,” she whispers.
“Hmm,” he responds a little hoarsely, lifting his head up from her shoulder. As much as it gets him in the mood for more, kissing her like that, he never passes up the chance for a breakthrough conversation.
“Okay.” She props herself up on her elbow. “Uh, did you ever…” She pauses, because vulnerability, especially about this - well, she’s pretty shitty at it. But she’s getting better at it, opening up to him twice since Leningrad, which for her is a whole fucking lot. After the Eagle News interview. And after Sergei’s visit - when she’d called out sick from work and then paced the house for an hour, maybe more, and finally phoned Victor’s office in tears and just said, please come home, you’re the only person I can talk to about this. And he’s rubbing a circle on her shoulder right now, and it’s comforting. So she starts again.
“Did you ever spend years feeling - wronged, I guess, by someone in your life? Like you thought you were important to them, that you meant something to them, at one point. Something real. But then they did some shit to you, and you got the sense they never cared for you after all. And you did and said some shit too, in your anger, and then one day you realize that actually, they did care. They cared about you the whole fucking time. That it wasn’t their fault they hurt you, they were just in an impossible place, and maybe your anger and frustration at them made the situation even worse for them. And you feel confused, and lost, and…guilty, I guess. What do you even do with that? How do you fix it?”
Then she exhales, and laughs at the terrible ridiculousness of it all. “Oh my God. Did all that shit really come out of my mouth? Of course you haven’t experienced any of that. I’m just unloading on you. You’ve been nagging me to unload on someone for years, though, so don’t you dare complain.”
Victor’s neither laughing nor complaining. She turns her head on her pillow to look at him properly, and he seems serious, like he’s really contemplating what she asked. “Actually, I kinda have experienced that.”
“What? Really?” she asks, surprised. He tilts his head at her, with a gentle look, and suddenly she gets it.
“Oh,” she says, and there it is - the soft little twist in her gut she always feels when they talk about him, the first man in her life that she loved so hard it hurt like hell. Still hurts. “I mean, that was, like - a much smaller scale than what I’m talking about. Just a little misunderstanding between you two.”
“Yeah, but I did feel guilty. It was shitty of me, wasn’t it?” Victor muses. “Thinking he stopped caring for me. Or that maybe he never cared, and he was just pretending before. That he was putting cheese in my food on purpose, and committing all these other, like…weird microaggressions that I made up in my head.” He sighs. “I never even told you some of the shit I said to your dad when you were up at Jamestown. It was stupid. He was the most big-hearted person I’ve ever met. That I’ll ever meet, probably.”
She shifts back onto her other side, so she’s facing him, and bumps her nose against his. “You didn’t know,” she says quietly. Last year, Javi had made an offhand comment to her during an argument - I think Dad cried more than you when Abuelo died. Javi had been furious at her - she'd just disciplined him for some bad behavior by taking his PS2 away - and he meant it to sting. But it had actually warmed her heart - the thought that Victor was as cut up as she was about her father’s death, even if he hadn’t let her see.
“Yeah, well. You didn’t know, either,” he replies, slinging his arm around her waist - and from the way he’s looking at her, she knows that he’s not talking about her dad’s dementia this time.
“Yeah. Still.”
“Look, baby. You can’t change what you did or said or thought about her before,” Victor adds. “But it’s all about what you do from here, right? Showing you understand now. Showing that you care. After I moved back in with you guys, I was determined to be the best damn son-in-law in the universe. I don’t know if I succeeded-”
Aleida shakes her head against his shoulder. “You did, and you know it.” Even if Papá never really had the words to say it, it was patently obvious. She remembers the meltdowns, intense episodes where Papá would cry and yell and lash out in his frustration and confusion. Graciana would cry too, not knowing any better, and Javi would just stare sadly and silently curl up in a ball on the sofa. But Victor would take charge of the situation at once, handling his father-in-law with gentle pressure, speaking clear, simple Spanish to him in a slow and soothing voice, letting him know he was safe; and Papá would calm down in minutes. Ironically, Victor’s skill at keeping Papá settled allowed them to hold off on his abandoned suggestion to send Papá to an old-age facility for longer than any of the doctors pushing for memory care thought possible. Truthfully, she’s never found Victor sexier than when he stepped so confidently into that role of caregiver to her dad. And whenever she’s having a maddening conversation with him these days - when he’s pushing her, again, to face the questions she doesn’t want to face, refusing to leave her alone to be the fucking mess she wants to be a lot of the time - it’s the recollection of how well he cared for Papá in the end, always, that softens her frustration.
“Well, whether I did or not,” Victor says meditatively now, absently massaging her spine. “I tried, did my best. And you gotta do that, too.”
“Hmm,” she says, considering it - he has a point - and then, she yawns.
“I don’t believe this,” Victor says incredulously, his eyes lighting up with mirth.
She rolls her eyes and shoves him back over to his side of the bed.
“Aleida Rosales is actually tired,” Victor continues in a tone of exaggerated shock, grinning up at the ceiling. “Miracles do happen. Keep this up and you might have me believing in God one of these days.”
“Shut up,” she retorts; but she leans toward him when he rolls back for a good night kiss.
“Don’t wake me up with weird drilling noises from your latest home maintenance project, all right?” he murmurs in her ear.
She runs her thumb along the waistband of his sweatpants; she finds this comforting, too, how familiar the little ridges in the elastic feel under her hands. “Well, if the kids haven’t banged down the door by the time I’m up…I could maybe wake you up a different way. I said maybe!” she reminds him as he quirks his eyebrows at her, and wrestles him back to his side again.
“Mm, all right,” he laughs softly, when she releases him. “I’ll keep my expectations low.” He doesn’t need to; her head’s already a little less cloudy, and she’ll probably feel like herself in the morning. But she’s learned to manage expectations, whether it’s her marriage or delivery timelines at work. One of the many ways Aleida’s changed in the last eight years - you don’t know me anymore, she’d exploded at Margo in Leningrad, and she wasn’t wrong - as much as Aleida wishes now that she had never voiced it. “‘Night.”
“‘Night,” she replies, and then adds: “Love you.”
“Love you too,” Victor says warmly, switching off the bedside lamp. Aleida can still make out his dimples, can tell he’s still smiling as he settles onto his pillow. She often forgets how good it can feel: being the one to push forward and convey sentiment first, watching the other person receive it.
Maybe she should do that more often.
All about what you do from here…showing you understand…you care, Aleida thinks, staring up at the ceiling; and she turns the words over a few more times in her head before the sleepiness wins out.
***
“I think we could use another set of eyes on these engine test results from Ranger,” Margo tells her in a low voice. Aleida’s standing at the whiteboard by the window, and Margo’s positioned right behind her, tilting a paper toward her while blocking the view of anyone who could be looking in their direction. Aleida has a strong suspicion that if she searched, she’d find an equation or two hastily scribbled on the third or fourth page of the stack.
Margo sweeps her gray fringe away from her face, and Aleida thinks distractedly, her hair looks nice. Margo’s been styling her hair in a subtly but increasingly softer way, ever since she arrived in Houston - there’s a gentle little curl on the side, now, echoing her longer bob on that night two decades ago when she and Sergei and Aleida had worked together on Apollo-Soyuz. But it’s not like she actually plans to see anyone, not like it would be safe - otherwise there wouldn’t be any need for the notes, right?
“If it’s not too much trouble,” Margo continues, and there’s an odd little hint of anxiety in her voice about this second request, so small that Aleida almost misses it, “do you think you could get this to-”
“Margo,” Eli Hobson’s gruff voice sounds from behind them, and they both jump. “I almost forgot-”
Aleida turns to find Hobson standing behind Margo with his feet frozen in place - swiveling his head from Margo to her and then back again, as if he can’t quite believe what he’s seeing.
As Margo slips the test results back into her folder, Aleida swallows down a laugh. Hobson’s surveying this unexpected collaboration - between the woman who once stormed into his office unannounced, and the woman she’d railed against in that encounter before proclaiming defeatedly, well, I can’t work with her - with zero suspicion, but rather a mix of astonishment and pride at his own apparent ability to bring people together. It’s presumptive as hell, but it’s harmless. He means well, she’d told Margo, and she meant it. He’s the only person working in this building who treats Margo like a human being when their boss is out of earshot. The only boss Aleida’s had who treated her well after she committed blatantly fireable offenses. No - she corrects herself - the only other boss.
“Well, uh - Margo,” Hobson repeats, shaking his head a little and collecting himself. “I haven’t forgotten our little chat we had on your first day here. Right out of the gate, you said you were interested in connecting with the engineering team at MSFC - you said they’d have valuable insight.”
“I did,” Margo acknowledges, warily.
“My first call with the head of the Propulsion Systems Department, Evelyn Noll…well, it didn’t go great, let’s put it that way. She sent over some materials to aid with the Ranger-2 mission, but she turned down my suggestion to send a representative from Huntsville to participate directly in our meetings. It didn’t sound like she’d budge on that, either.”
Margo sighs, quietly enough that Aleida doesn’t think Hobson would be able to hear. Aleida used to know the woman Hobson’s referencing pretty well, at one point - Evelyn Noll was Aleida’s primary contact at Huntsville during the Sojourner-1 mission, and she’d gone out of her way to help Margo on numerous occasions. Knowing what she knows now - or thinks she knows now - it’s probably not surprising she turned down a chance to participate in meetings that Margo’s chairing.
“But now that we’re down to the wire on this thing, I thought I’d give it another shot - before going back to the drawing board. I managed to connect with a sharp fellow on her team who agreed to look over the Ranger-2 engine test results. Name’s Ben Garcia. Said he has enough influence with the department leadership that he could convince them to fly him over for next week’s meeting, too, if we need him. Very intelligent guy. Nice, too, and willing to collaborate for the greater good. Even told me in confidence - he thinks that as a nation, we may be a bit too harsh judging, uh, the motivations of some folks with long-standing Huntsville connections.”
Margo’s face has taken on a stony expression, Aleida notices. Hobson continues speaking cheerily, seemingly oblivious.
“Anyway, I think you should rope Garcia into this - get those test results over to him, make sure he’s on the same page about the changes Ranger can make to the Goldilocks trajectory. Oh, and the game plan for that gravity assist from Mars. All that good stuff you ladies can explain far better than an old automotive executive like me.”
Hobson chuckles and glances down at his watch. “Well, I have to call it a day. Margo, I’ll have my assistant come by your desk first thing tomorrow with Garcia’s contact information. Aleida, good meeting today, I’ll leave you and Margo to it…”
He casts one more delighted look at the two of them before exiting the room.
Aleida looks back at Margo and realizes that her face has fallen a bit; Hobson’s unwittingly given Aleida the perfect excuse to push back on Margo. It would be so easy to say, we already have an expert at NASA we can talk to about this, we don’t need…
Just because she does not speak of her feelings does not mean she does not feel. Deeply, she hears in Sergei’s voice, and then Victor’s, close behind: It’s all about what you do from here, right? Showing you understand now. Showing that you care. And it hits her like a ton of bricks.
This is how Margo shows care, for Sergei - and maybe even for Aleida. Talking about the work, explaining about the work - that is easier for her, Sergei had reminded her. It’s always been through the work, hasn’t it; this time is no different. Passing these notes to him. Trusting her to be the messenger.
Maybe…this is how she can show care for Margo, too.
“I guess,” Aleida says aloud, softly. “I hear Garcia’s a good engineer, but you know - his Mars knowledge is pretty theoretical. So…it’s probably better for me to still consult our contact.” She scans the room quickly - empty, and the babysitters stationed outside look distracted by the tray of leftover snacks that an assistant’s wheeling through the hallway - then extends her arm for the paper. “I mean, if that’s still okay with you.”
Margo’s expression lifts completely. She suddenly looks more open and wide-eyed behind her glasses than Aleida’s ever seen, and - there’s no other way to describe it - it’s like her whole face is lighting up.
Margo clears her throat. “That's, uh - still okay. Aleida…thank you.”
Aleida stands over the table for a long time after Margo departs the conference room for her temporary office - spinning her pen between her fingers, shifting her weight back and forth between her heels and her toes, ruminating on it all.
***
VIDMAIL TO K_BALDWIN
Hey, Kelly! Okay, I think I timed this perfectly. My Earth day and your Mars day are finally in close enough alignment that you’ll probably respond tonight! Fingers crossed. I’ve got alcohol, so if you do too, it’ll be just like we’re drinking together at Julio’s.
No tequila or beer today, though. Check this out - this is a fancy bottle of brandy. I know, right? Victor got it from someone at work as a thank you gift for - well, I think I’m on my third glass, so I don’t even remember. When he saw me take it out of the cabinet tonight, he said, and I quote, Look, Kelly’s the best, glad you’re finding a way to keep up girls’ night, but you sure you don’t want to save this one? What if we have a guest come over? Anyway, I set him straight. I mean, it’s not - a terrible idea. Having someone over for dinner, breaking this out. But you know, if that ever happens, I can buy another one. I still have some of that sign-on bonus from Dev left after paying off the last of our medical debt for my dad. This shit’s really good. Nice and strong. So…cheers, I guess.
Oh my God. With all this diplomatic shit I’ve been dealing with, I never got to geek out with you about Korolev Crater. I watched your vidmail about it like ten times. It sounds unreal. I’m really glad you got to go and set up the seekers yourself. Cheers to that, too.
Okay, so you know what I always wanted to ask you, but never did? I’m kinda drunk, so I’m just gonna say it. What was it about Alexei for you?
You know, was it the accent, nice arms? I’ve always been curious, but felt bad asking because…well, the obvious reason, but also I was a real dick to him about the NERVA engine protocols. Sorry about that, let’s just say I was going through some, uh - complicated shit at the time. Anyway, it’s just interesting to think about why strong independent career women like us sometimes risk it all for a guy, you know? Whether it’s having sex, or…sharing secrets, or something else. Even if we end up having to give up a lot of shit, or uproot our lives, or…whatever. Do you ever think about that? Why do we do that?
Sorry, um, that was a really personal question, and possibly offensive. I don’t really have a lot of female friends, so, uh - well, if I’ve overstepped the bounds of our friendship, go ahead and yell at me in your vidmail back. See you soon…hopefully.
VIDMAIL FROM K_BALDWIN
Hi! I can’t believe we managed a same-night vidmail exchange. Two moms with insanely busy jobs navigating a constantly-shifting time difference? We should get some kind of medal for this.
I’m not going to yell at you, I promise. Honestly, I hate when people tiptoe around it - your directness is so much better. Of course it’s okay for you to ask about Alex’s dad. And I’m pretty sure I was the one who asked you drunken, overly personal questions about Victor, that first time we were leaving Julio’s. I don’t remember what you said now, but apparently I repeated some of it at your house and traumatized Javi before I barfed on your carpet, so look…I owe you one anyway.
Unlike you, I haven’t been able to procure any fancy brandy up here, or even cheap tequila. So I’m doing this sober. Here goes!
I honestly never thought I’d give anything up for a guy. I’ve always been so focused on my career, barely even bothered to have crushes. When I told my mom I wanted to go to Annapolis, she thought maybe I wanted to go because of…well. For a guy, let’s just say. But that wasn’t why I wanted to go, at all. I just wanted to fly.
But Alexei…okay. You said something about shared secrets. That’s the thing. Alexei told me in secret over my radio that his crew members were dangerously pushing their engines to try and win the race to Mars. And we were in a race against each other, but there were things that transcended it, you know? That mattered more - like international cooperation and human lives and being there for each other. You know, so few people care about that stuff, but I cared about it, and he cared about it enough to think that maybe I would, too, and I think…I really think that’s a big part of why I was drawn to him.
Okay, and I guess, debating and bantering back and forth in confined spaces was pretty sexy too. And, yes, he did have nice arms.
So there you go. That’s what it was about Alexei. Did that make sense? If you wanna know anything else, just ask.
Ugh, sorry, I have to go. I think I heard Dev’s voice outside in the corridor. It’s late, but it’s been impossible to track him down to talk more about the data from Korolev Crater, so this is probably my best shot. Honestly, he’s kind of useless up here - he only seems to want to hang out with Alex these days, or weirdly, my dad. God, he should just make you CEO. I know you’re rolling your eyes at me, but I’m serious. I bet Victor would get on board fast. Remember that night at your house after we took over Helios, he toasted you for getting him one step closer to his dream of becoming a kept man? I thought he was joking around, but now that I know him better, I think he was serious. And I don’t want to say I told you so, but you’ve been crushing it as a power broker.
I’ll talk to you soon, okay? Bye!
VIDMAIL TO K_BALDWIN
Thank God you’re not angry at me. I’m a little more sober now - some annoying guy, who I won’t be “keeping” anytime soon, confiscated the brandy during the transmission delay and replaced it with this giant tumbler of water.
I can always count on you whenever I want a little clarity. ‘Cause you know what, yes - that makes sense. Actually, it makes perfect sense. Like, so much sense I could almost cry about it, but…in a good way?
Anyway, I’m rambling at this point and I have a meeting at NASA in the morning, so I should probably go. But thank you, Kelly. Seriously.
***
“Can I ask you something?” Aleida blurts out. “This question’s kind of personal, so…you don’t have to answer it, if you don’t want to. But it’s been driving me insane, so - sorta have to ask.”
Sergei glances up, his pen-wielding hand - the one Aleida’s been eyeing suspiciously for the past twenty minutes - stalling on the page in front of him. They’ve been sitting across the table from each other, in the dim, crammed space just inside of Sergei’s motel room door, going over the latest Ranger-2 test results and modeling asteroid scenarios.
“I understand,” he says, with a hint of amusement in his voice. “You are an engineer. It is in your nature to - keep digging. You may ask. I will not promise to answer, and hope you will respect this.”
“Yeah. ‘Course.” Aleida exhales. “Um, you’re - you were married, right, when you came here? I don’t mean that in a creepy way, obviously, uh…” She holds up her left hand and shows him her own wedding ring. “I just mean - you were wearing a band like me, just on your other hand. But you haven’t been wearing it, the last two times I’ve seen you, so. Are you still married?”
It’s an extremely nosy question, but, well - it seems like a relevant one.
“No,” Sergei answers after a soft pause, looking down at the papers on the table. “Well, yes. Legally, yes. In spirit, and as of a phone call I made to my wife a little while ago…no.”
“Oh - yeah,” Aleida says awkwardly, because that state of being, oddly enough, is something she once related to. “That in-between place where you’re still technically married, but you’re not in a marriage, and you’re faced with that God-awful question. Do you still wear the ring? Been there.”
“In-between,” Sergei repeats, with a soft smile of amusement. “It is a clever way of describing this.” He hesitates for a moment, then adds, “Margo did not share this, about your history. It was a personal thing, for someone so dear to her - she would not have…”
“Just not the right timing,” Aleida interjects, shaking her head. “1995…” She trails off. March. She remembers watching the Soviets walk out of Mission Control, abandoning them for a joint mission with Helios after they’d stolen from NASA and gotten their asses saved by them, too. She still had that photo with Victor on the Flight console, even though he walked out that month, too. Sergei must have left NASA the same day as his estranged colleagues, she realizes, though she’d given it barely any thought at the time - sent back to Moscow. And by the time he returned, perhaps hoping for - something with Margo, a chance, a life? - Margo had died, for all he knew, for all Aleida knew, but really switched places with him.
“So how did you decide?” Sergei asks - and while he’s obviously deflecting her attention from his own, less-dated situation of wedding ring angst, his voice sounds so kind and genuine that Aleida can’t find it in herself to be irritated. Not much, anyway. “To wear, or not to wear.”
“Um,” she says, considering it for a moment. “Look, there were times I considered flinging the damn thing off the freeway. But I thought I should wear it as long as I still wanted to be married to him. To my husband, I mean. My dad was still wearing his wedding ring at the time, more than 25 years after my mom died, because she was still the only one he wanted to be with. And my husband was still the one I wanted to be with. So I wore it.”
“Your husband, at the time, the one you refer to,” Sergei says delicately. “This is Javier’s father?”
“Yes.”
“And is he - if it is permissible to ask,” Sergei adds, in the same respectful tone. “The father of the young lady who I saw striking a spirited pose in a photograph at your house. She must be your child, that at least I can say with confidence.”
Aleida smiles in spite of herself. “One and the same.”
“Ah,” Sergei replies gently, nodding. “Then this is a love story. And the ring you still wear, on your hand - a symbol of this.”
“I suppose.” Aleida can’t claim to be much of a romantic. Sure, she kisses her husband and says love you every morning and night, but that’s a ritual that bloomed from post-bombing trauma, in all honesty; if I die suddenly, I want you to know I still do. And Victor’s learned the hard way about getting the anniversary gift receipt every time. Still…Sergei’s not wrong. Not even close to being wrong.
She looks up to find Sergei gazing not at her, but at a fixed point somewhere over her shoulder - seemingly deep in thought.
“You see…for me,” he says reflectively. “The ring was never of great importance. More important to me has been…its absence.”
Aleida furrows her brow. “What do you mean?”
Sergei sighs. “I mean…I wore a ring to show society, at work and outside of it, that I was a married man. To please my first wife, and my second wife, who both cared for the symbolism of such a thing. For myself, I cared little about this. It was a symbol, perhaps, that at one point I made a choice: to live with another person, to share parts of our lives, to look after each other as best we could. I am not sure I ever felt a deeper feeling, beyond this.”
“And I do not mean…” Sergei trails off. “I was happy, for some length of time, in my first marriage. I have been…in certain ways, happier, in my second. But - and I regret to say this, it was not fair to either one of the wonderful women I married - I never felt any great attachment. To the symbol, to the idea of staying married. When my marriage was over, when I was no longer wearing the ring - or when I forgot I was wearing the ring, when I could indulge in the possibility of a different life - those are the moments I felt most alive.”
He runs a hand through his hair, distractedly. It’s almost like he’s speaking to himself, now, not to her. “When I have taken the ring off - that has always been the real symbol, for me. A symbol that I am walking away from a life that was lovely, in many respects, but no longer suits me. A symbol that perhaps - if the stars align, we could say - I might step into a life that I want.”
“Huh,” Aleida says, mulling it over. “Right. That, uh, makes sense, I think. But wait. Did you say” - she grins in spite of herself, and arches an eyebrow at him - “you forgot you were wearing the ring?”
“Well, now you must think worse of me than you did when I set foot in Houston!” Sergei exclaims, laughing. “No, I must say - I have never been unfaithful to my wife, either one. There was only one time - while engaged in design work on a spacecraft, I climbed into a small enclosed space with…a woman I found rather captivating, and for a moment I forgot that I was wearing a ring on my right hand. Nothing happened that should not have happened, I assure you, but I have to admit that I considered it.”
“Hey, I’m not judging,” Aleida says, smiling at him. “I think we’re friends now, at this point, and I’m kind of curious. What part of a spacecraft are we talking about here?”
Sergei glances down at his notes on Ranger-2, ducking his head. “A docking module.”
Oh. “Okay, and what excuse would you have contrived to climb inside a docking module? Looking for inspiration?”
Sergei clears his throat. “You see…cosmonauts from two separate spacecraft intended to meet in the middle of the docking module for a symbolic photograph. I was concerned that the angle of approach would block all camera views of the meeting. So…I needed to test this concern with a - colleague.”
Aleida bursts out laughing. Sergei stares at her impassively for a few seconds - and then he begins to chuckle, too.
“Oh my God. I spent 30 minutes inside that thing, Sergei,” she finally manages. “The camera views would have been, and were, perfectly fine.”
Sergei holds up his hands, smiling, with a guilty as charged expression. And as Aleida smiles back at him, she’s struck by it. By the innocence mixed into all of this, this chain of events leading up to a thing that the whole world would label a crime. By the strange sweetness of it all…coded messages and confidences and dinners and drinks and docking modules.
She sits there, just marinating in it, until Sergei glances down at his watch - and starts when he sees the time.
“Aleida, I apologize, I’ve kept you with my musings.” He stands up swiftly from his chair. “I will be in a different room when you return - I think it is best for me not to stay in one place. When you visit next time, please go to the front desk and ask for Sergei Bezhukov’s room.”
“It’s fine,” Aleida says quickly - reluctant, all of a sudden, to part with him so abruptly. “I could…actually stay a little longer. I won’t interrogate you anymore, just - just to go over your notes on Ranger, if you’d like.”
“No, Aleida,” Sergei says firmly, not budging from his standing position. “I would not have you drive back late on my account.”
Then he adds, more quietly: “Your family needs you home safe. I am sure you wish to be with them.”
He says the words kindly, but there’s a wistfulness to his voice that Aleida hasn’t heard before. She suddenly realizes, guiltily, that she’s shared a fair bit about her family, but never bothered to ask about his. Margo had said she decided to leave in ‘95 once she knew that Sergei and his family were safe in West Germany. His family, whom the KGB had threatened to harm before forcing him to press Margo for the engine design. She wonders if General Bradford, or whoever helped Margo orchestrate Sergei’s escape and defection, allowed Sergei’s family to stay near him in the United States, when he was - no doubt - deeply grieving Margo’s apparent death. She doesn’t dare ask him now. If Margo had stayed, if she had been able to stay…she would have insisted that the government keep Sergei and his family together. Aleida’s certain of that, at least.
As Aleida shuts the motel room door behind her and starts to make her way down the steps, she realizes that there’s a wistfulness, a heaviness, descending on her too.
It’s not that she doesn’t want to be with her family. Of course she does. Mamá! Graciana always yells when she walks through the door, and Aleida’s already dreading the day she stops calling her that. There’s a new thing Graciana does now - stepping back from Aleida’s hug for a second, and then leaning back in, with a silly smile, to kiss her mom on the right cheek. It’s so endearing that everything usually grinds to a halt for a moment. Aleida just gets caught in the grip of it, Aleida and Graciana, the sweetness of a mother-daughter bond forged anew; Victor freezes over the dinner prep with an expression of complete vindication written all over his face, anyone who thinks we were idiots for having a kid nine years after our first hasn’t seen this; until Javi scoffs and jolts them both out of it.
They’re a perfect family, by American standards: Aleida and her spouse and her kids. But as fiercely as she loves them - Aleida thinks as she reaches the bottom of the motel staircase, and fishes out her keys - it’s a stupidly narrow view of what family is.
For Aleida, being with her family means gazing across the dinner table at her beloved father in 1998. Marveling at this milestone, not a birthday, but the event of his cleaning his entire plate and asking for seconds, even though he didn’t prepare an ounce of the meal. Laughing at Javi loudly taking credit - yeah, because I helped Dad this time! - not yet ten, old enough and not too old for his eyes to soften when Papá would reach up to touch his cheek. Staring at her father and her son, holding that image of them loving each other in her mind, attempting to commit it to memory and keep an increasingly wiggly Graciana nursing at her breast and clumsily eat her own food one-handed; until Victor would snatch her fork and wave away her protests with a groan-worthy joke, what, you can feed your baby but I’m not allowed to feed mine?
And, as much as Aleida had blocked it out these last eight years…Being with her family means sitting in the armchair of her old living room, looking up from her latest Sojourner-1 design to see Margo perched on her piano bench next to Javi in 1991. Watching Margo demonstrate a scale, then watching her mouth twist in amusement as Javi would just bang on the keys. Savoring it for a moment, the sight of them together, the sound of Papá clinking dishes together in the kitchen, the brush of Victor’s fingers against her shoulder as he’d stand there watching, too, before calling out to his son: Javi, it’s almost bathtime, five more minutes with Tía!
***
“I want a fresh pair of eyes on these dispersal trajectories,” Margo says quietly.
And as she stands next to Margo, listening to her spell out some rationale for getting the calculations to Sergei, Aleida feels the irritation, the impatience, rising in her chest.
“No,” she responds - for the first time - “I’m done with that.”
She didn’t realize it, really - not until this moment - but she is done with it.
I’ve been passing these notes between you guys for the past month, she reminds Margo. We don’t have time for all this back-and-forth. But she doesn’t really mean we, because, well - source deadlines and fucking politicians aside, everything’s running pretty smoothly on the Earth side of Helios. Of course it is, because Aleida’s running it. The meetings with Sergei have cut into her family time, a bit, but Victor’s been mostly understanding; the worst she’s had to deal with on the home front is deflecting Javi’s nosy, harmless questions. And honestly…the meetings have been good for Aleida. Sergei’s been helping her understand, and that’s been more valuable than Margo could ever know.
It’s Margo who doesn’t have time. And Sergei, too. As soon as the asteroid’s headed for Earth - Aleida can’t imagine there’ll be any need for Korzhenko to keep her here. She’ll head back to Moscow, and that’s it, right?
Aleida hasn’t asked Sergei, surely he’d never tell her if she did, but all of this - rushing to Houston, camping out here, blowing up his marriage - it can’t all be for nothing, can it? He removed his wedding ring, didn’t he, and told Aleida - whether he meant to or not - that it was a symbol. Perhaps - if the stars align, we could say - I might step into a life that I want. Maybe he has some plan…for him and Margo. Some plan outlined in all of his coded messages that Aleida’s not privy to, but Margo is, and Margo’s avoiding seriously discussing it - for some reason.
But we need his help, Margo pushes back, and Aleida can detect the tremor of panic in her voice. She’s terrified to lose him - Aleida realizes with a jolt, as she tunes out Margo’s proclamation that Sergei’s the only person who can help with this - but she’s also afraid to do what she really needs to do. The thing Aleida’s going to have to push her to do.
“Okay,” Aleida says, making up her mind. “But we have to do this face-to-face.”
When she turns back to Margo, Margo’s already dismissing the notion they can pull this off, they’re watching me 24/7 - and of course she is. It’s easier for her, isn’t it? Easier to see Sergei just once, then close herself off to a real dialogue, a real life, a real something with him - than face the terrifying feeling of wanting something like that against all odds. But Aleida’s already worked the problem. She’s come up with a good place for them to meet. The three of them, with the three other people whose lives are bound inextricably with Aleida’s.
Margo will push back on the location too, she knows, under the guise of risk. And it’s not that it’s not risky, everything about this is risky, but - this is easier for Margo, too, isn’t it? Easier, in a way, to reconcile herself to you don’t get to ask me about my family or my son again than attempt a true reconciliation with Aleida; easier to say no, rather than let Aleida try to fold Margo back into her life, and watch it fail spectacularly.
Aleida gets that more than anyone - because when it comes down to it, that’s exactly what Aleida’s been doing, to varying degrees, since Leningrad. Keeping her distance from Margo - so there’s no chance of getting hurt again.
But just like the note passing…Aleida’s done with that, too.
She turns away from Margo’s questioning gaze, and stares determinedly at the capture plan documents on the wall in front of her.
“We can meet at my house.”