(12)

Gary looks at her with real fear in his eyes.

"Quinn," he says, "I don't think we're going to make it out of this."

(1)

Quinn didn't mean to fall in love with Gary, which probably goes without saying, because who the fuck would do that to themselves on purpose?

There were a lot of reasons to not love Gary. Sometimes, when Quinn's in the mood for regretting her life choices, she starts listing them all out in her head: he's reckless, he's irresponsible, he's a shitty pilot. He has terrible judgment. He takes nothing seriously.

As if reading her mind, Gary looks over at her and grins impishly.

"You know what, Quinn," he says, "this is a good look for you. A little disheveled, covered in the blood of your enemies—uhh, at least, I hope that's not your blood—"

"Shut up," Quinn interrupts without any real malice. She risks a quick peek over the boulder that they've taken cover behind—two, three seconds tops—and counts eight Uxtillians still in the canyon behind them. "And of course it isn't!"

Gary, who either never learned proper gun handling technique or just doesn't care, points one of his pistols straight at his face while he clumsily reloads it, and then pulls back the slide with his teeth. "So, how screwed are we?"

Quinn slides back down into a crouch beside him. "Pretty screwed," she admits.

The sun is hanging low in the sky ahead of them, just barely above the horizon, casting long shadows across the barren ground. Quinn squints against the glare, trying to draw up a map of the area in her head.

"There's a cave," she says eventually, "about ten meters southeast of here. Don't know how big it is, but the entrance is narrow. We can probably hold them off from there."

"Sounds great!" Gary agrees cheerfully. "Which way is southeast?"

Quinn gestures with her head, and Gary's expression falls. "Wait—you want to go back towards them?"

"Would you rather just wait here while they surround us?" Quinn takes another glance over the top of their cover, and fires off two quick shots. Only one of them hits and Quinn curses under her breath as she ducks back down.

"No," Gary says, a little petulantly. The low light is casting strange shadows across his face, and it makes his expression look more stern than usual. "I would rather not be in this situation in the first place!"

His statement is punctuated by the sudden burst of an explosion behind them. It's followed by the sound of rocks crackling and crumbling, and moments later a cloud of dust engulfs them, carried surprisingly far by a warm breeze.

In between bouts of coughing, Gary manages to gasp out, "Was that a frickin' bazooka? Because it sounded like—"

"We've gotta move fast," Quinn interrupts. "You got my back?"

Gary casts her a sidelong glance. "Do you even have to ask?"

Despite everything, Quinn smirks.

They both dash out from their cover, guns blazing, perfectly in sync. Gary doesn't say anything but Quinn can predict his every step, like they're moving in a choreographed dance—a half-turn here, a slide there—as they cross to the far side of the canyon. He goes low when she goes high, covering each other's blind spots, until at last they dash into the safety of the promised cave.

For reasons that Quinn has never understood, it's always been easy for her to work with Gary. Even when it hadn't been easy for her to like him, it had been easy to fight alongside him—there had always been a comfortable familiarity in their partnership, a natural chemistry that wasn't predicated on friendship. It felt as natural as breathing.

And, well, Quinn hadn't meant to fall in love with Gary—but somehow that just came easily too.

The cave is a tight fit—the two of them can barely stand side by side, even though the ceiling towers high above them—but it's defensible. Quinn exhales deeply, feeling a sudden sense of relief, and Gary lets out a disbelieving peal of laughter.

"Okay," he says, just a moment too soon. "I think we might actually make it out—"

He cuts off abruptly at the sound of a second explosion. It's much closer this time, and for a second Quinn thinks that she's dead. But the moment passes and she's somehow still alive, even as the ground shakes and the cave around them rumbles ominously.

It starts with dirt, shaken loose from the ceiling in small cascades. Pebbles come next, breaking off the walls in chunks, and Gary lets loose a string of minced oaths.

Quinn sees it a fraction of a second before he does—a piece of sandstone as large as a melon hurtling towards their heads.

She didn't mean to take the hit for Gary—but, well. It was just too easy.

(13)

"Don't say that," Quinn says. "Don't—"

(2)

The lights are too bright.

Quinn squints her eyes, but everything around her is blurry and shimmering, unfocused shapes slipping in and out of her view. She tries lifting her head to look around, but there's a sharp pain in her temple that makes her hiss and squeeze her eyes shut again.

"Quinn?"

Cautiously, Quinn cracks one eye back open. All she can see are colors—red and yellow and peach.

"What happened?" she asks hoarsely. Her throat is too dry and the words reverberate painfully in her skull.

"Oh, thank God," Gary breathes out. "I thought I'd lost you."

He sounds… different. His voice is serious in a way that Quinn isn't used to, all the bravado and bluster stripped out, leaving behind a raw honesty gives her pause.

"You suffered a cerebral contusion," H.U.E. says, interrupting the moment. Quinn winces—he sounds louder than usual, and it's making her head hurt—as he continues, "You have been unconscious for the past twenty-six hours."

Quinn hesitates. She replays H.U.E.'s words in her head, going through each one individually, but for some reason they just swim around hopelessly in her mind, refusing to come together into a single coherent thought. "I… what?"

There's a light pressure on her shoulder. "You hit your head really hard," Gary says near her ear. His breath tickles against her skin. "Do you remember?"

Quinn pauses to think for a moment. Does she remember?

"No," she eventually decides.

The pressure on her shoulder gets a little heavier. "Oh no—do you remember anything? Do you remember ME?"

Quinn scoffs at that. "I wish I didn't," she mutters.

She thought that comment would've made him playfully indignant, but instead Gary exhales deeply—something halfway between a sigh and a laugh. "Oh good," he says. "There's the Quinn I know."

Quinn dares to crack her eyes open again. It's still too bright, but she can make out some shapes now—faint outlines of furniture and equipment bathed in the obnoxious blue-tinted lighting on the Galaxy One.

Gary's sitting beside her, and he looks like crap. He's close enough for her to clearly see the bags under his eyes, the greasy tangles of his hair. His jacket is covered in a splatter of reddish-brown stains.

"I hope that's not my blood," Quinn says, eyeing the garment suspiciously.

Gary really does laugh at that. "It's not," he answers, still smiling. He leans in like he's going to kiss her on the forehead, then thinks better of it at the last minute and mimes a kiss at the tip of her nose instead.

"Sit tight for a minute," he says. "I'm gonna let Mooncake and Cato know that you're all right, but then I will be back ASAP."

Quinn's ashamed to admit it, but it takes her a minute to fully process that sentence, by which point Gary's already left the room. Hesitantly, she lifts one hand to her forehead and gently prods at her temple. There's a sharp pain just above her right eye.

Quinn closes her eyes again and takes a few deep breaths. She's still got a splitting headache, but her brain feels more like a brain now and less like a murky pond of semi-conscious thought. She takes a moment to march her thoughts into proper order and then quietly asks, "Twenty-six hours?"

"And thirteen minutes," H.U.E. confirms calmly. "Gary was very concerned."

Quinn doesn't doubt that. Gary would be worried if she got so much as a papercut. He can't stand to watch the people he loves get hurt, no matter how small. She can scarcely imagine what sort of hysterical nonsense H.U.E. has been witness to for the past day.

She glances up towards the ceiling. "Were you concerned?" she asks.

"I am still concerned," H.U.E. admits, sounding pained.

Quinn purses her lips. She doesn't like that answer.

"So what's the prognosis, doctor?" Quinn asks, trying to hide her worry under a mask of humor. It only halfway works.

"There is a very high probability that you will survive," H.U.E. replies diplomatically. "It is good that you have regained consciousness."

It is good—but Quinn already knew that. It's what H.U.E. doesn't say that has her worried.

(14)

"Quinn," he says, like his heart his breaking.

(3)

"Who is the president of the United States?" H.U.E. asks.

Way back in undergrad, when her parents were still trying to convince her to study medicine instead of physics, Quinn took an intro anatomy course. It was dreadful and Quinn hated it, but she's a perfectionist by nature, so she studied hard and learned a lot. There was an entire chapter on the physiology of the brain, and even now Quinn remembers more than she'd like about it. Grey matter, neurons, the medulla oblongata—all that stuff. She can still recite the neurotransmitters from memory: glutate, aspartate, glycine, GABA, serotonin…

She knows that twenty-six hours is a long time to be unconscious.

"I don't remember," she says.

Gary's brow furrows in concern, but he doesn't say anything yet. He just tightens his grip on his chair and forces himself to wait.

"Do you know where you are?" H.U.E. continues pleasantly.

"The Galaxy One," Quinn answers easily. "Med bay."

"Do you remember how you got here?"

The lights in the room are entirely too bright. Quinn's never liked the damn high-output LEDs that the Infinity Guard insists on using in every ship, but right now she hates them more than ever. She squeezes her eyes shut and then covers with her hand for good measure. "I mean," she answers slowly, "I'm assuming Gary dragged my unconscious ass back to the ship, but I guess I don't really know."

"Do you remember the events leading up to your injury?"

Suddenly, Quinn feels dizzy, like the floor just jolted underneath her feet. There's a yawning pit of emptiness that just opened in her gut, with a lurch so powerful that it feels somehow physical, and for a moment Quinn thinks she might vomit.

The urge eventually passes—but the cold sense of dread lingers in her chest.

"No," she answers hesitantly. "I don't—I don't remember anything."

Quinn can hear Gary shifting anxiously in his seat. "What do you mean by that?" H.U.E. continues, tone still carefully pleasant.

"I don't… remember anything," Quinn says slowly. "I mean—I remember some things. But nothing recent."

After a pause, H.U.E. asks, "What is your most recent memory?"

Quinn feels a brief flicker of panic. She doesn't know. She remembers people and places but she can't name a single thing that's happened within the past few months—or within the past few years, for that matter.

Gary rises abruptly from his seat—he must be able to tell that she's upset. "H.U.E, that's enough," he says sharply. There's an edge in his tone that Quinn doesn't think she's ever heard before.

"Gary, the examination—"

"No," Quinn interrupts. "He's right. Can we… finish this later?"

H.U.E. falls silent, and spends a few seconds calculating all the various probabilities and permutations before he makes a decision. "Very well, Quinn," he eventually concedes. His tone—normally so placid and detached—is laced faintly with worry. "We will resume this another time."

The silence that follows is deafening. Gary doesn't say anything, but he doesn't need to. Quinn peeks through her fingers to glance over at him, and his every thought is written plainly on his face.

"It could be worse," Quinn says, and she honestly doesn't know whether she's trying to reassure him or herself. "I could be dead."

Gary's frown deepens. He breaths in deep and sinks back into his chair at her side, slouching grumpily all the while. "That," he says slowly, "is not funny."

Has H.U.E. dimmed the lights in the room, or is it just Quinn's headache getting more manageable? She cautiously peels her fingers back away from her eyes and discovers that keeping them open no longer makes her temple throb.

"We could both be dead," she continues dryly.

"Even less funny," Gary says, but some of his tension has finally dissolved. His forehead is no longer creased with worry, and the darkness in his eyes has faded.

"I mean, it's not the end of the world," Quinn says, faking nonchalance. "We can handle this."

Right? Quinn adds in her mind.

She's too proud to say it out loud, but it doesn't matter anyway—Gary's expression softens and Quinn is suddenly certain that he knows exactly what she's thinking. With a heavy sigh, he lifts one hand up to cup her cheek and leans in close.

"We can handle this," he agrees, pressing his forehead against her collarbone. "You're safe now. That's all that really matters."

Traumatic brain injuries have a notoriously shitty rate of recovery, but for just one moment Quinn really does believe that everything is going to be okay. The only sound she can hear is Gary's breathing, in and out, as regular as the tides, and she finds it strangely soothing.

"But you know," Gary continues lightly, "the world could still end."

(15)

"This is it. This is the end."

(4)

Quinn's memories come back to her in bits and pieces.

They don't always make sense at first. They come to her in flashes, little fragments of memories that don't quite fit together. Some things come back crystal clear, like brief videoclips of memory. Other memories are so barely-there that Quinn doesn't even know what they really are—just flashes of color, or a few notes of music, or vague recollections of emotion.

It's not much, but it's something. It's progress.

She still wishes it was more.

At least it's just amnesia, Quinn tries to tell herself, again and again. It could be so much worse. So many people come out of head injuries with permanent disabilities—migraines, seizures, aphasia, cognitive deficits. A few missing memories is no big deal.

But every time Gary mentions something that she should remember but doesn't—a past mission they went on, or their time at the academy, or some old inside joke—it stings.

He's in the middle of some long-winded anecdote about the crappy control layouts in F71 Hawks, referring liberally to their shared early days in the Infinity Guard, when all of a sudden he realizes that she doesn't remember a single thing that he's talking about and stops mid-sentence. He grimaces and looks away, suddenly ashamed.

"Sorry," he apologizes, fiddling awkwardly with a loose thread on his sleeve. "I forgot that you… you know. Forgot."

Quinn shrugs one shoulder. "We can't keep tiptoeing around it forever," she says quietly.

"Are you sure?" Gary asks. It might sound sarcastic coming from someone else, but Gary has a unique ability to make even the most inane of statements sound completely sincere. "Because I'll have you know, I am an excellent tiptoer."

Quinn doesn't have a direct response to that. "Tell me about the first time we met," she says instead.

Gary hesitates. There's a flash of something in his eyes—worry or melancholy or some other equally sappy emotion—and in that instant, Quinn regrets asking.

But then the moment passes. Gary forces a grin, then slings one arm around her shoulders and pulls her in close. "It was winter," he begins, gesturing over-dramatically with his free hand. "New York City. It was snot-freezing cold outside, and yet somehow you still managed to look incredibly hot."

Quinn rolls her eyes and he laughs. "You were working on some kind of, I dunno, math problem or something," he continues. "I saw you from across the room and in that moment I knew—I knew!—that we were meant to be together."

Quinn scoffs. "Seriously?" she asks skeptically.

"Love at first sight," Gary confirms, dead serious. "Then you judo-flipped me over your shoulder. It was awesome."

Wow. Quinn really doesn't remember that.

"And what on earth made me do that?" she asks.

A faint red flush rises up on Gary's cheeks, and he looks away sheepishly. "O-oh," he stutters nervously, "I don't think we need to rehash that."

"I don't know," Quinn says casually. "It sounds like it might be important."

Gary's face is flaming red now. "Maybe some things are better left forgotten," he says, voice strained.

"Hmm," Quinn says. He's piqued her curiosity, but for now she's willing to let it go. She files this little tidbit away for later, though. "If you say so."

Gary's relief is immediate and palpable. She settles down against his shoulder, resting her head in the crook of his neck, and for a moment they're both quiet. He reaches up towards the top of her head, like he wants to run his fingers through her hair—only to immediately find them snagged in her curls.

"Oh wow," he says. He gently tries to disentangle his fingers, but the joints of his robot fingers have gotten caught on the individual strands. He tugs gently on them—hard enough that Quinn can feel it, but not so hard that it hurts. "That did not go the way I expected."

"You're an idiot," Quinn mumbles into his chest.

He lets out a quiet puff of laughter. "Yeah," he says, "but you love it."

It takes him a few minutes, but he eventually manages to free his fingers from her hair. He sets his hand down on her waist—a much safer resting spot—and for a moment they're both quiet.

"You feeling alright?" Gary eventually asks. Quinn can hear the worry in his tone.

"Yeah," Quinn says. She shifts slightly in his arms, trying to find a more comfortable position. "It's just..."

"Just what?"

Quinn frowns. "Our first meeting," she says reluctantly. "I remember it differently."

(16)

A part of Quinn always knew that it was going to end like this.

(?)

It's hot.

It's always hot on Zetakron Gamma, but today the heat is positively unbearable. Quinn feels like she's burning up, like she'd spontaneously combust if the air was a little drier. Fortunately—or unfortunately?—the air is so thick and humid that Quinn is practically drowning in it. There's a heavy cloud cover overhead, but instead of providing respite from the sun it just acts like a blanket, trapping the ground beneath it in boiling hot weather.

The battlefield is a mess. The rain and the ships and the bodies have turned the ground into a hot, wet soup, so slick with mud that Quinn's standard-issue boots don't stand a chance. Every step is a struggle, her feet sinking into the too-soft earth, like the planet is trying to suck her down into the ground.

She spots him just a few meters away. He's filthy, covered in ash and blood and God knows what else, to the extent that Quinn can't even tell whether his uniform is Infinity Guard or not. His left arm is—or was, maybe—cybernetic, but it looks like it ended up on the wrong side of a Ventrexian neutron blaster. From the elbow down, it's all twisted metal and shorted wires, electricity sparking in dramatic arcs as he tries vainly to reassemble the pieces of his shattered hand.

The heat must have fried Quinn's brain. Instead of reacting, or moving, or doing anything at all, she just… stares.

He notices her eventually, glancing up from his arm just long enough to catch Quinn staring at him. Their eyes meet and a strange shiver runs down Quinn's spine.

She knows those eyes.

She's confident that she's never seen this man before in her life, and yet she recognizes something about him. His face, his arm, the way he moves—it's all somehow familiar to her. She feels it in her bones.

He stares too, but only for a split-second. Then he's fumbling for his pistol with his good hand, and there's a lurch in Quinn's heart when she suddenly finds it pointed straight at her.

She flinches, but the shot never comes.

"Duck," he says instead.

(17)

(It always ends like this.)

(5)

Sometimes, when Quinn gets sick of trying to sift through the garbage pile of her own broken memories, she sits upstairs in the commissary and looks at the stars.

The stars make sense.

People who don't have a solid background in astrophysics sometimes ascribe some sort of spiritual or mystical quality to the stars. But really, there's nothing magic about them. If anything, stars are boring. Stars are born and die and collide in entirely predictable manners, their entire lives dictated by the laws of physics and charted out by a few math equations. Quinn finds a certain solace in that knowledge.

The ancients looked to the stars and saw gods. But Quinn knows that they're just big balls of hydrogen.

That's where Gary finds her, around what must be lunchtime. He doesn't say anything at first, and for a while the only sound in the commissary is the rattling of trays and silverware. After a few minutes, he approaches slowly, carefully balancing two trays of prepared food.

"Hungry?" he asks hopefully.

Quinn's not, but she takes one tray off his hands just so that he won't dump everything all over the floor. She sets the tray in her lap, drumming her fingers against its edges, and doesn't eat.

Gary sits down next to her, and already has a forkful of pasta in his mouth before he's fully seated. "So, what's up?" he asks before he's finished chewing.

"Nothing," Quinn says. "Just… thinking."

Gary nods seriously, shoveling more food into his mouth all the while. "You wanna talk about it?"

"Not really," Quinn admits. She picks up her fork and pushes some noodles around on her plate, but it does nothing for her appetite.

Gary casts a sideways glance at her. Quinn can tell that there are a lot of things he wants to say, but to his immense credit he refrains from saying any of them. She knows that he knows that she's still sulking over her missing memories, a topic that's still something of a delicate issue for them.

"Hey," he says eventually, "you want to hear about the five frickin' years I spent alone on the Galaxy One?"

Unshared memories are safe territory. Quinn thinks about it for a second, before finally asking, "Was it interesting?"

"Not really," Gary admits freely. "You know, there's really not a lot out there. It's just… you know, empty space. That's why they call it space. Because it's empty and totally boring."

It is. Quinn knows that better than most people.

"And lonely," Gary continues amiably. "Sweet Grandor's glove, the loneliness. It makes you crazy."

Gary sets his fork down for a moment and glances over at Quinn. "I mean—literally crazy," he says. "I tried to kill myself like ten times."

Quinn stares blankly at him. She doesn't know how to deal with that information, so she mostly just… doesn't.

After the silence stretches on just a moment too long, Gary flashes her an uncertain smile. "H.U.E. got really good at saving my life," he adds nervously, as if that somehow makes it better.

"That's messed up, Gary," Quinn finally says.

"Yeah, it kinda is," Gary agrees, blasé as ever. "I must say, the Infinity Guard did not adequately prepare me for this emotional hellscape of eternal nothingness."

That's a fair complaint. The Infinity Guard has never exactly been great about mental health.

Gary picks his fork back up and starts poking hesitantly at his food. "It's not all terrible, though," he says, flashing her an uncharacteristically shy smile. "I mean—it's how I found Mooncake. And Avocato. And you—you know, the second time."

Quinn glances away. "Yeah," she says uncertainly. "I guess that's true."

Gary huffs softly, something that's not quite a laugh. "What are the chances, though?" he muses aloud. "That I'd find you guys out there, little islands in a vast ocean of loneliness. It boggles the mind."

Quinn hesitates. It's not something that she'd ever spent much time thinking about before, but now that Gary mentions it—it does boggle the mind.

(18)

Gary takes a step closer to her, raising his hands up to her face. His palm of his right hand is soft and warm against her cheek; the fingertips of his left trace icy cold lines along her jawbone.

(6)

Space is big.

Really big. Not big like an ocean—or even big like a planet—but vastly, hugely, unfathomably large. You could spend entire lifetimes searching just one system—to say nothing of the literal billions and billions of other stars that are out there. The probability that you would find anyone in space is vanishingly small. The chances of stumbling across someone by chance are so slim that they're little more than a rounding error away from zero.

The chances that Gary Goodspeed just happened to be close enough to pick up Quinn's mayday call all those months ago? Negligibly small. Infinitesimally small. Unrealistically small.

Quinn wouldn't believe it was possible, except that it had obviously happened.

He had to have been there for a reason. Right? It was far too unlikely to chalk up to mere coincidence. The Infinity Guard must have sent him on a related mission, something that would've ended with their paths crossing anyway. Or maybe he'd been intentionally tracking her. Or maybe...

The sensible thing to do, probably, would be to just ask Gary about it. Quinn decides to corner Avocato instead.

"I don't remember why we were in that sector," Avocato says, barely looking up at her. He's carving up an alien fruit, some kind of Ventrexian apple or something, and for the moment it's occupying the entirety of his attention. "Does it even matter?"

Quinn crosses her arms over her chest and leans back in her chair. "Something doesn't add up here," she mutters.

Avocato does look up at her now, arching one brow. "It doesn't?"

Quinn bites down on the inside of her cheek and glances away, trying to find the right words to voice the uncomfortable feeling in her gut. "Gary just happened to find Mooncake?" she says. "And then he just happened to find you, and me?"

"Wasn't anything coincidental about that, baby," Avocato says dryly. He spears a piece of fruit with the tip of his knife—at least, Quinn hopes it's fruit, because for a split-second it looks like it's alive and wriggling—and pops it into his mouth. "I'm a bounty hunter, remember? I found him."

"Well, what about the Galaxy One?"

"What about it?"

"This isn't a single-person ship!" Quinn exclaims. She gestures broadly at the commissary around them as she continues. "It's built to hold a crew of twelve people. Twelve!"

Avocato looks unimpressed. "So?"

"So—so you don't just send one low-ranking Infinity Guard alone on a mission in a ship of this size. For one thing, it's in clear violation of protocol. Not to mention that it's just plain stupid."

Avocato regards her skeptically as he slices off another wedge of fruit. "So… what? You're trying to tell me that you think there's some kind of Infinity Guard conspiracy?"

"No," Quinn says quickly. "No, that's not it."

Quinn doesn't believe in a higher power—all that religion and faith stuff is too unscientific for her physicist's sensibilities. Still, she finds herself checking nervously over her shoulder before continuing. "I think … maybe we were all brought here for a reason," she says quietly. "You and me, Gary and Mooncake. It can't just be a coincidence that we all ended up here together, on this ship."

If it felt heretical to think, it feels even crazier saying it aloud. Avocato is silent for just long enough to make it awkward. He probably thinks that she's gone insane.

Hell, maybe the concussion really has made her delusional.

"So," Avocato begins slowly, "you think that there's someone out there who's..." He trails off for a moment, gesturing aimlessly with the knife in his hands. "Who's orchestrating all of this?"

Quinn narrows her eyes.

"Someone," she mutters darkly, "or something."

(19)

He's kissing her like he's never going to get the chance to kiss her again—

(7)

"No," Gary says. "I remember it distinctly! It was the place on 108th Street, the one with the—uh—shiny sparkle ball of migraines and suffering—"

"The disco ball, yes!" Quinn snaps. "But you weren't there."

"Yeah, well, actually I was." Gary raises one finger up to Quinn's face, waggling it condescendingly. Quinn scowls. "You might not remember, Quinn," he continues, tapping her gently on the tip of her nose, "because of that time you got hit really hard in the head with falling rocks, but I promise you—"

"NO," Quinn interrupts forcefully. She swats his hand away, none too gently, and Gary quickly pulls back. "You are wrong. It was Tribore's 28th birthday—"

"With the weirdly spicy cake," Gary says, scrunching up his nose at the memory.

"Mexican chocolate," Quinn says. Gary looks like he's about to say something else when Quinn quickly adds, "Not that you had any, because that was two years after you left on the Galaxy One. There' is literally no way you could have been there."

Gary hesitates. His mouths twists into a frown and his eyebrows draw together, like he's thinking really hard about it. Seconds tick past in complete silence, without a single bad joke or even an attempt at banter and finally, reluctantly, he starts counting out the years on his fingers.

Quinn is silent too. She's not sure what she's waiting for, but she waits for it anyway.

"Dear heavenly lightning lord," Gary eventually says. "I am really bad at math."

(20)

—which, Quinn realizes with a jolt, is probably true.

It's desperate and hungry and rough, too much teeth and not enough air, until at last they're forced to part. But Gary leaves his hands on her face, and presses his forehead to hers.

He says, "Sometimes it feels like

(8)

Quinn wakes with a start.

The Galaxy One looks different in the dark, and for one brief, terrifying moment Quinn doesn't know where she is. But the panic quickly fades as she recognizes the familiar shapes of the room: shadowy edges of furniture, the outline of the door in the corner, the blinking red lights of the ship's sensors.

The darkness means that the ship must still be in its night-cycle, but Quinn has no idea what time it is. Gary's half of the bed is cold and empty.

Quinn casts her eyes towards the ceiling. "H.U.E., where is he?"

"The commissary," H.U.E. replies, in his usual soothing monotone. As he speaks, the lights in the bedroom flicker on, though at a dimmer setting than their full brightness. "He's been there for quite some time."

The Galaxy One has always been a little too cold for Quinn's liking, so she drapes the bedsheet around her shoulders before heading over to the gravity elevator. The sheet flutters around her as she takes the elevator up, then settles again as she steps out into the hallway.

She finds Gary in the commissary, just like H.U.E. said. He's at the very back of the room, sitting sideways on one of the benches along the window, staring out at the stars in silent contemplation. Quinn approaches slowly, but he doesn't acknowledge her.

"Can't sleep?" she asks gently.

Gary practically jumps out of his skin. His whole body jolts and he whirls around to face her, eyes flashing wide.

"Good Lord," he says when he's recovered enough to speak, one hand pressed to his chest. "I thought you were a ghost."

Quinn slowly walks over to join him, bare feet padding against the cold metal floor. Gary makes space for her to sit beside him and she climbs up onto the seat next to him, tucking her feet up underneath her.

"You're up early," Quinn says.

"Yes, well—actually, it's always nighttime in space, so technically it's late, not early."

Quinn silently arches one brow, and Gary looks away. He hesitates a moment before speaking again, fingers drumming nervously against his thigh. "Sometimes I just like to… look at the stars," he explains, still defensive. "You know. 'Cause they're super cool. Stars, man."

Quinn tilts her head slightly to look out the window. "Stars are boring," she says.

Gary gasps aloud, clearly affronted. "Quinn!" he hisses, more playful than serious. "You are an astrophysicist! You can't—can't say that about the stars!"

She shrugs. "I just did."

"What if they hear you?"

"They don't have ears, Gary."

"Okay, but what if they did?"

Quinn narrows her eyes skeptically at him, and Gary swallows nervously. "You wanna tell me what this is really about?" she asks.

Gary glances away. He exhales slowly, sinking down a little lower in his seat, then reaches out to sling one arm around Quinn's shoulders. She lets him pull her close, until her head is resting against his shoulder.

He traces slow circles against her skin with his thumb as he works himself up to the things he really wants to say. "Do you ever feel like… you've done this all before?" he asks, voice wavering with uncharacteristic uncertainty.

No, Quinn thinks, but doesn't say. "What do you mean?" she asks instead.

"You know," Gary says, fake-casual. "Like, you're doing a thing, and then all of a sudden you feel like you've done this before, this exact thing that you're doing right now?"

"That's called deja vu," Quinn says. "Everybody gets that sometimes."

Gary laughs hollowly. "It's not like deja vu," he says. He glances briefly over his shoulder, turning his gaze back towards the window, towards the endless void of space just outside. "It's more like… having memories of the future."

Quinn furrows her brow. "Okay," she says slowly, still confused. "What kind of futures do you remember?"

His throat bobs nervously. He shifts uneasily in his seat, running his fingers along the edge of a cushion. "Oh, you know," he says casually. "The Earth is destroyed and everyone I love is dead. Just normal stuff."

Ah, Quinn thinks. That.

Quinn would be lying if she said that she didn't think about it sometimes too: the what-ifs, the worst case scenarios, nightmares so vivid they seem almost alive. It's a pretty common affliction in the Infinity Guard—from the oldest veterans to the greenest cadets, no one is immune from the occasional anxious vision of an apocalyptic future.

"It's not real, Gary," Quinn says, matter-of-fact. "They're just nightmares."

Gary's mouth twists in dissatisfaction. "It feels real," he says, voice full of anguished conviction. "I close my eyes sometimes and I can see it. It's like I'm there, and..."

He trails off. "And?" Quinn prompts gently.

He turns towards her with serious eyes.

"And you're not."

(21)

the universe is trying to keep us apart."

(9)

Human memory is fallible. Quinn knows that.

Part of the trick with memory is that, more often than not, you're not remembering the thing. You're remembering remembering it. The more times you repeat a memory in your head, the more likely you are to remember it later—but the more likely it is to get distorted, too.

So things get forgotten, or misremembered, or invented entirely out of thin air. That's just human nature.

And yet...

Quinn couldn't tell you the name of her high school, the street she grew up on, or even her sister's birthday. But there are plenty of other useless childhood memories that remain: the cacophony of shrieking cicadas and crickets and red-winged blackbirds from the swamp behind her house, the blue-and-gray paisley pattern of her bedroom wallpaper, the day in fourth-grade science class when they got to dissect cow's eyes. She still remembers her grandmother's recipe for caramel flan, down to the teaspoon.

Some flashes of memory are easy to place—days in the academy, or her early assignments in the Infinity Guard. Others stick out uncomfortably, fuzzy and half-remembered, like snatches of a dream.

It's an exercise in futility, but Quinn starts jotting down the bits and pieces that she does remember, carefully noting as much detail as possible on little three-by-five notecards, and then tries to rearrange them like pieces of a puzzle.

The only problem? They don't fit together.

Quinn remembers things that didn't happen. Things that couldn't have happened. She remembers battles on planets she's never been to, grieving the deaths of people that are still alive. She traces out two parallel sets of memories of Tribore's 28th birthday, one set with Gary and the other without.

(She remembers dying. She remembers light and heat and then that sudden horrible emptiness of nothing—)

"H.U.E," Quinn says, with a calm that belies her nerves, "what do you know about temporal worms?"

There's a pause. When H.U.E. finally responds, he sounds… unusually reticent. "What do you want to know, Quinn?"

Quinn finds herself biting down nervously on the inside of her cheek. What does she want to know?

She glances briefly over her shoulder, checking that she really is alone in the engineering bay, and then turns forward again. "A temporal worm is a bridge," she says slowly, "that connects two points in spacetime. Right?"

"Defined topologically," H.U.E. answers pleasantly, "a temporal worm is a compact region of—"

"No—I don't need the formal mathematical definition," Quinn interrupts, frowning. "It's a metaphorical bridge."

"And here I thought it was a worm," H.U.E. says dryly.

Quinn rolls her eyes. "The point is—it's a shortcut through spacetime, right?"

"I suppose you could say that," H.U.E. agrees.

"Not just space," Quinn says pointedly. "But time too."

"Yes, Quinn."

Quinn looks down at the notecards strewn on the floor in front of her. "H.U.E," she says, with only the faintest hint of a tremor in her voice, "what happens when a temporal worm takes you back in time?"

"No one knows for certain," H.U.E. begins cautiously. "But the mathematics suggests that you would retain no memory of future events. Only fragments."

It's the answer that Quinn expected, but hearing the AI confirm it makes her pulse quicken nonetheless.

It makes sense. How else to explain all her impossible memories? But if she was remembering two—or three or four or even more—different timelines, then everything made sense. The conflicting memories resolved themselves.

"Quinn," H.U.E. says gingerly, "I think you know that human memory is extremely fallible."

Quinn sighs. Yes, of course she knows that. It's a much better explanation—a much simpler explanation. With a flicker of irritation, she starts picking up her cards, gathering them all haphazardly into a single pile. "You think I'm crazy," she says.

"Of course not," H.U.E. reassures her gently. "But there are other possible explanations for the discrepancies in your memory."

"But what if I'm right?" Quinn says, glancing upwards. "What if this is it? You have to admit, it is plausible."

H.U.E. is silent for a long time. "It is," he finally confirms. "But if so, it raises troubling questions."

Yeah. Questions like: How many times have we done this before? and Why do we keep going back?

(22)

Quinn holds him a little tighter.

"The universe can go fuck itself," she spits.

(10)

If you applied the principles of projective geometry to spacetime, two distinct moments of time would intersect at infinity. But spacetime isn't linear—Quinn scowls, she should know that better than most people—and besides which, you could never reach infinity anyway.

She scribbles down formulas, numbers that don't mean anything and don't go anywhere, and tries to remember Einstein's field equations. If you altered the curvature of spacetime—changed the gravitational constant—then could you…?

"Chookity?"

Quinn glances up from her work. Mooncake is hovering in the doorway, wide-eyed and curious. Quinn sets down her pen and beckons him over with one hand.

"Hey, Mooncake," she says, as the strange alien creature sets itself down in her lap. "You wanna learn about general relativity?"

"Chookity pok," Mooncake says. The distaste is clear in his voice.

"Yeah," Quinn agrees, "me neither."

Somehow, her equations turn into doodles. Numbers and variables are replaced with squiggles and stars. Mooncake watches with childlike glee as Quinn starts sketching out a solar system: suns and moons and asteroids belts and little planets with rings.

"You know, I think about it a lot," Quinn says.

"Oou?" Mooncake asks.

Quinn glances down at Mooncake. She's never been entirely clear on just how much he understands, but he's looking at her with expectant eyes, so she keeps talking. "Space," she says. "Time. Antimatter and crap. How does the universe even exist, you know? And why?"

Her sketches start devolving into fractals, little repeating patterns of galaxy-shaped swirls. "Why do things happen the way that they do? Is there some grand mover out there, writing out all of our destinies? Or is it all just random?"

"Chookity," Mooncake says solemnly.

Quinn sets down her pen. She's run out of space on the sheet of paper, the whole front and back of it now covered in unsolved equations and half-hearted doodles.

"Can we even win this," Quinn wonders aloud, "or were we doomed from the start?"

(23)

Gary cracks a small smile, despite everything.

"I mean it," Quinn continues. "Maybe this is the end. But I don't care. Because no matter what happens after this—"

(37)

Sometimes, Quinn dreams of a kinder world.

She dreams about being back on Earth, someplace remote and tranquil, far away from everyone and everything that's trying to kill her. She dreams of the sun, the wind, the scent of wildflowers blooming in the spring. She dreams of twilights in the forest and sunrises on the beach.

It's stupid, but all she really wants is a moment of peace.

Quinn's dreams are full of things that she never bothered with when she was actually on Earth, things that she didn't care about and never had the time for anyway. But now that they're gone forever, she misses them so fiercely it almost hurts.

Tonight her dreams have brought her to some idyllic prairie, a fantasy land where the grass is soft and the weather is perfect. Quinn leans back on her arms and tilts her face towards the sky, enjoying the feeling of the sun on her skin.

"I wish we could just… be together," she murmurs.

Dream-Gary laughs. "We are together," he says.

Quinn cracks one eye open to look over at him. Gary is sitting next to her, lounging in his civvies, looking conspicuously out-of-place in her pastel-hued dream.

Quinn glances away again. "You know what I mean," she says.

He wouldn't in real life, but since this is just some dumbass dream, he understands her perfectly. He pauses a moment, his face suddenly grown somber. Pensive.

"You don't really want that," he says.

It's true, but Quinn bristles anyway. "Maybe I do."

Dream-Gary kisses her lightly on the forehead. "You don't," he murmurs. "You're way too hardcore for this, Quinn Ergon. You're like the most intense person I know. You've still got so much stuff you want to do."

Quinn scowls, because he's right and she knows it.

"Wake up, you silly thing," he says fondly, and she does.

(24)

"—wherever we end up—"

(11)

"You know what," Gary announces, as loud and brazen and obnoxious as ever, "we should do codenames."

"Hard pass," Avocato says dryly. Normally Quinn would agree, but there's an uneasy pit in her stomach, and it makes Gary's ridiculous banter more tolerable than usual. Comforting, even.

"I will be Thunder Bandit," Gary continues, pointedly ignoring Cato, "and you can be Twilight Ninja. No—Dusk Ninja! No, I take it back, Twilight Ninja was cooler."

Avocato rolls his eyes but doesn't protest further. He checks his weapons one more time, a little tensely. Like he's nervous.

"What about me?" Quinn asks, mock-annoyed. "Don't I get a codename?"

Gary spins around to face her, bright-eyed and smiling. He gives her one of those looks—like she's the greatest thing he's ever seen, like she's the one who hung the stars in the sky—and grabs her by the hand. He lifts it up to his mouth and presses a brief kiss against her fingers, and a sudden surge of affection bubbles up in Quinn's chest.

"You, my darling," he says, "will be Nightfall."

(25)

"—I'm going to find you again."