I, er, actually liked the movie. But the more I read about the internet's reaction to it (particularly the SJW community), the more I realize how squicky it was. Aurora really had no choice about anything, and that's awful. The worst part is that I walked into that movie not realizing that Jim was actually going to wake Aurora, and I was really confused when they didn't run into each other immediately. So, I wanted to write the romance I thought I was going to get. I'll only be writing the first year, partly because I figure the climax plays out the same whether they're feuding or still in love, and partly because I don't want to touch the "we're stuck here for the rest of our lives what are we going to do" with a ten-foot pole.
Note: I live in Colorado, so we're going to hear more about Jim's hometown because I said so.
Further note: does anyone remember what Aurora's dad's name is? Because I don't. I totally borrowed Jim Kirk's middle name.
Jim doesn't see her until after his empty orientation. He's the only human he's seen since his revival, and the ship's assorted virtual people aren't helping him at all.
He hopes the computer has mistaken him as crew. He hopes the crew are all in another part of the ship, recovering from their own hibernation and getting the ship ready for passengers like him to revive in another month.
This image of a room full of people who will know more about his situation than he does is the only thing keeping him calm. He's tempted to run throughout the ship—his footsteps echo through the hallways—but he keeps himself at an even pace.
As he reaches the mess hall, he stops walking. The footsteps continue to echo.
"Hello?" he calls.
"Hello?"
A female voice calls back. Despite all of his earlier self-reassurances, Jim breaks into a sprint.
He stops a few table lengths away from a woman. She has chin-cut blonde hair and a smart-looking black jacket with a low-cut tank top underneath. She has a cool jacket too, he thinks to himself—the same thing he told himself this morning. His breath catches when he meets her eyes.
"Are you crew?" she asks him, stepping into the distance between them.
"I was about to ask you the same thing," says Jim. Up close, her eyes are blue and even more piercing than he expected. She examines him with the same emotions he's been grappling with: relief, confusion, anticipation. Fear.
"The ship didn't wake up anyone else on my floor," she says. "What about you?"
"I was alone too. So you haven't seen anyone else?"
"Just you."
They examine each other. It's clear from their outfits that, dressed to impress as they are, they aren't anything but passengers.
"What track are you?" he asks. "I'm engineering."
"Lucky you," she says with a small, tilted smile. "Discounted ticket. I'm a journalist, but apparently that doesn't count for anything on a new colony. So, no track. Aurora Lane," she says, offering her hand.
Jim takes it. "Jim Preston. I saw an elevator near my quarters," he says. "We might be able to find a crew member at the center of the ship."
They realize after a day of increasingly frantic searching that they're the only two on board who are awake. Jim arrives at the mess hall second, having broken into some crew areas that Aurora doesn't know how to access.
Aurora looks up from her meal, some meat covered in brown sauce and with a side salad. Her arms are crossed and set on the table; she hasn't even picked up a fork. "Any luck?" she asks.
"I don't have access to the crew's quarters," says Jim, lowering his voice as he comes closer to her table beside the food generator. "But from the looks of it, they're all asleep. Still."
"All of them?" asks Aurora. She stands from the table. "Even the captain?"
"Far as I can tell." Jim looks Aurora up and down. "I'm guessing you didn't find anyone either."
"Nobody," says Aurora. The statement is nearly a whisper.
They examine each other for a moment. Jim can tell Aurora is trying to keep herself together, but the grip she has on the back of her chair shows how much of a strain it is.
"I can try to break into their quarters," he offers, feigning casualness as he steps up to the food generator to place his order. If he can keep calm, maybe she can too. "I got access to the supply deck, and they have to have tools. Maybe even a blowtorch, if it comes down to it."
He presses a button that resembles the meal Aurora got. The machine chirps. "I'm sorry, this meal is available to Gold Star passengers only."
He frowns and tries for another, something that looks like a frittata. The machine chirps its apologies again.
He presses the third and fourth buttons, not even letting the machine make a full apology, until he finally reaches the last option and the machine gives him a sandwich on dry bread with thin turkey and nearly insubstantial lettuce. It doesn't ask if he wants mustard or chips, but it does leave him an apple.
He takes his tray to Aurora's table and sits across from her. She looks first at his expression—deceptively casual again—and then at his tray.
She lifts her tray with one hand and slides his to her place. She sets the tray of still-warm meat on Jim's side.
"Next time," she says, "I'm buying for both of us." She picks up the apple.
"You sure about that?" asks Jim, eying the meal she's stolen from him. He's not especially hungry, but he has skipped lunch to run around a spaceship all day.
"I'm not very hungry," she says. She takes a bite and speaks again with her mouth partially full. "And if you can actually break in there, you deserve the meal."
"They might wake up tomorrow," Jim points out. He cuts himself a piece of meat. Upon closer inspection, it's Salisbury steak. "We could just be a day early."
"Let's hope."
As he's trying to unscrew the bolts making up the crew's door, Aurora approaches Jim with a haunted expression. "Jim," she says.
Her trembling tone is the only signal he needs to set down his tools and follow her wordlessly down a series of hallways.
"I ignored this room because no one was inside," says Aurora as she leads him into a darkened room with a series of steps and a single window showing the stars, "but it's an observatory."
As if on cue, the observatory introduces itself, projects a holographic galaxy, and asks what they'd like to see.
"Show me Earth," says Aurora.
The computer obeys.
"Now show me Homestead II," she says. Jim raises an eyebrow at her. He knows where they're going as well as she does. His stomach turns queasy at the thought that they might be off course.
When the computer shows the second planet, she issues her last command. "Now show our trajectory."
In a deep voice, the computer explains the trajectory it's laying out. "The Avalon is thirty years into its one-hundred-and-twenty-year voyage. We will approach Homestead II in ninety years."
Jim stares at the projection. He's never seen a parabola that could fill him with such dread. He looks at Aurora, who has her hand over her mouth as if she's seeing this for the first time, as if she's seeing her death warrant.
"What do we do?" she croaks.
"…We have to wake the crew," says Jim. He looks down at his shaking hands. "But first I need a drink."
Aurora leads him to Arthur, the robot—"Android, technically," he corrects—who serves them their drinks. Jim never saw him because Aurora volunteered to look in this part of the ship, and he nearly has a heart attack when Aurora leads him to the first human face he's seen since her.
They neglect dinner and drink far more than Arthur approves of, and Jim walks—or rather, stumbles—Aurora to her quarters. When she opens her door and Jim sees a corridor and a living room instead of a tiny bed, he whistles.
"Pricey ticket for three months of luxury, dontcha think?" he asks. He's never been much of a slurrer, but he's close to it right now.
"Not three months anymore," says Aurora. "Not unless you open those doors." She makes to pat him on the forearm but misses, and seems to consider that enough effort for one night.
She walks into her suite and lets the door close behind her, leaving Jim with a racing mind that sobers in only a few seconds.
Jim finds them two earpieces for communication the next morning, and then they divide their labor. Aurora, being the one better off financially, pays for a message to Earth soliciting help. Jim resumes working on breaking open the crew door. Aurora scours the medical center for information on the hibernation pods. Jim picks up more tools from the hold. Aurora checks that no one else has woken. Jim tries the blowtorch on the door.
They take lunch separately—Jim feels guilty waiting for her to come down and pay for a better meal, and he expects she'll want some alone time—but they reconvene for dinner.
"The blowtorch doesn't work," he rants to Aurora. "It's gotta be fireproof. Why the hell is it fireproof? Do they think one of us is going to try for mutiny?"
"You can't just—" Aurora makes an abstract gesture "—hack into it?"
"I'm an engineer," says Jim. "I can make things and fix things, but hacking into computers is another thing."
"They can't be that different," says Aurora. "Computers are just another thing that can be fixed."
"Look, I'll try something else tomorrow," says Jim. "Maybe I'll try to find some manuals."
"Already done," says Aurora. "I skimmed them over lunch. A lot of that stuff is too advanced for me, but maybe you'll find something I missed."
Jim examines her. She's getting better at suppressing her fear, and part of him wonders if she's doing it to keep him calm. Just like he does for her. And he really does appreciate that she's been trying to help him, instead of leaving it to him and not even trying to understand what he's doing.
"Thanks," he says. He looks her in the eye.
"No problem."
They eat quietly for a few minutes. The cleaning bots hum quietly nearby, waiting for one of them to drop a crumb.
"I've been thinking," she says suddenly. "If we're going to be awake for…a while," she says, not willing to put a number to it, "why don't you try for a better quarters?"
"Hm?" asks Jim. "I mean…it never really occurred to me. Doesn't it belong to someone?"
"Yeah, but…think of it this way. I'm in a giant empty spaceship with only one other person. And that one other person is on a completely different floor. What if something goes wrong? I don't think you sleep with this," she says, gesturing to the earpiece she's set on the table beside her tray.
"Oh, I get it," says Jim. It's the first time since he's been in hibernation that he's felt like teasing. "You're scared of the dark."
"Not the dark," says Aurora, scowling, "or else I couldn't handle space. But what if there's a malfunction somewhere, and I can't get to you? Malfunctioning hibernation pods is a big problem, so what if—"
"Maybe that'll be my project tomorrow," says Jim. He smiles. "It'll be comfier to read manuals in a nicer quarters, anyway."
"With how much you drool over my suite? No kidding."
"Hey!" Despite himself, Jim snorts. She's not wrong.
The next day he breaks himself into the Vienna suite and lounges in the chairs in his new living room. Aurora joins him with all the manuals she's found so far and they spend the day ordering meals to his room, both of them leafing through the pages and Aurora reading him aloud passages she thinks might be useful. Half of them aren't, but he writes down the better ideas.
Over the next week they refocus their efforts on opening the engine room doors so they can monitor life support and other ship functions. Once she finishes her morning jog and passenger checks, Aurora usually arrives to be Jim's assistant, handing him tools and reading aloud warnings or instructions from the manuals.
"You do get pretty greasy doing all this, don't you?" asks Aurora as they leave for lunch. They've given up any pretense of wanting more alone time than they get at night.
"You would too," Jim points out. "The ship is shiny, yeah, but even shiny things are just surfaces. They cover all the greasy parts that keep it running."
"'Shiny things are just surfaces,'" Aurora echoes with a grin. "An engineer and a poet. I like it."
"You would, journalist," says Jim. He nudges her into the wall of their hallway and refuses to budge when Aurora tries to nudge him back.
"I'm actually an author," she says as they enter the mess hall. "I just put down 'journalist' so Homestead would think I'd write about how great they are. What do you want?"
Jim waves a hand apathetically, and Aurora orders him the same meal she's getting. "So you've written books?" he asks. "Like, published them?"
"A few collections of short stories so far," she says. "Nothing near what my dad did."
"Well, can I read them?"
Aurora looks at him oddly as they sit down with their trays. "You know, most people ask who my dad is."
"Oh. Uh, who's your dad then?"
"Tiberius Lane."
Jim nods.
"He's a Pulitzer Prize-winner."
"Oh, huh. No pressure."
"Right?" Aurora laughs. Jim pauses. It's the first time he's ever heard her laugh. His heart picks up its pace. "And what's even worse is that he wrote about me pretty often."
"Well you know I'm gonna have to read about that," he says, grinning. He's hoping she'll laugh again, and it works. He could do this for the rest of their meal. He could do this for the rest of the day. "Seriously, though, how was that? Being written about?"
"I mean, in some ways it was interesting. Maybe a bit more of myself than I wanted to know about, at times. But it also felt kind of strange. I mean, my dad had all of these stories. He took trips to Antarctica, he had lovers and enemies—and…"
"And you didn't."
"No," she says. She takes a bite of her food.
Jim considers this. "Is that why you're going to Homestead II?" he asks. "For stories?"
"Absolutely," she says, and the sincerity of her answer surprises Jim. "My plan is to stay for a year, then to come back."
"Wait," says Jim. "You have a round-trip ticket?" He didn't know that was possible.
"Right."
"But then…you'll only have a year of stories."
"But I'll come back to Earth two hundred and thirty years later," says Aurora. "I'll know it in two different eras, and I'll have Homestead II in between. No one else can tell that story. Only me."
Jim nods. The smallest part of him thinks that this, their current situation, is a story no one else has either. Just him and her.
Over the next month and a half, Jim reads first her work, then her father's. It takes him that long because (a) he spends most of his days with Aurora and/or working on the ship, and (b) he's not a bookish person. But for Aurora, he's willing to become one.
"She's good," he says to Arthur. He and Aurora have made a friendly agreement that they each have one day to have Arthur to themselves. He's part friend and part counselor, and Jim isn't sure which one he needs right now.
"How's that?" asks Arthur. His gentlemanly charm comes to life in the lilt of his voice and the tilt of his head.
"She's funny," Jim explains. "But she's also really good at making me imagine what she's talking about. I mean, I come from Denver, and I know it's not anything like New York. But the way she writes, I feel like I've been there. I've only seen pictures of the Empire State Building, but she makes me feel like I'm standing on the sidewalk and looking up at it. And Denver has trees, but only she can make me imagine the leaves changing in Central Park. She's really good."
"Have you told her so?" asks Arthur.
"I'm not even sure she wants me reading it," says Jim. "But she didn't say I couldn't."
"I imagine that's an invitation, then," says Arthur.
"I just…I don't know," says Jim. "I want to talk to her more about it. But she usually ends up talking more about her dad. I think she wants to live up to him, get more life experiences and all that. And…how's she supposed to do that when she's on the same ship every day, with only me?"
Arthur sets down the glass he's been polishing. "Forgive me if I'm ignoring some professional boundaries," he says, "but I've heard it said that one person can be an entire universe. Perhaps," he intones when he sees Jim's raised eyebrow, "she needs to hear more about your life. Perhaps then she'll trust you well enough that you can bring up such topics. At the very least, she'll see you as a compelling story."
"You think so?" asks Jim.
"I'm not paid," says Arthur, "being an android and everything. But if I were, I would bet my wages on it."
"Hey," says Jim before Aurora can turn them down the path to the mess hall, "do you want to try something different tonight?"
"What do you mean?" she asks.
"I mean, there's a whole lido deck full of restaurants. And I kind of doubt those robots are going to deny us service because we're ordering food ninety years before we should."
Aurora pauses, considering. "I've been craving burritos," she concludes.
Jim exhales with a smile—was he holding his breath?—and leads them down the hall.
"Can I ask you something?" he says.
"Sure."
"Just—do you have any clothes that are actually good for a colony?"
"I'm not sure what you mean," she says with a slight laugh. Good, she isn't offended just yet.
"I mean, that shirt doesn't look like it'd be useful if you were building a house," he says, nodding to her shirt that seems to be made of nothing but gold sequins. "And I haven't seen you wear flannel yet or anything. Do you own any?"
"First of all, buster," she says, and Jim laughs at the antiquated nickname, "I figure I'll leave the house-building up to you. And second of all, if I'm only staying for a year, what does it matter?"
"I'm not complaining," says Jim as they reach the elevator. "But how are you going to survive winter?"
"Figured I'd share body heat with someone."
Jim flushes.
"Kidding," she says, grinning up at him. "I've got a parka and some thermals. They're just not really useful on a spaceship."
"But the cleavage is," says Jim. He looks away innocently when Aurora shoots him a fake glare.
"I can show all the cleavage I want," she says. Jim wonders how close she is to actually being angry. "Everyone in New York does it. And what, everyone in Denver wears flannel?"
Ah, finally they're reaching the topic Jim hoped to reach. Incidentally, they've also reached the lido deck, where Aurora spies the Mexican restaurant and leads the way.
"Well, some of us," says Jim. "Mostly the guys. Since we were all so close to the mountains, everyone either liked to pretend they were just about to go skiing or they were in New York. So, fifty-fifty I guess."
"Mountains," says Aurora thoughtfully. "So I guess you know all about roughing it. For Homestead II."
"You kidding?" says Jim. "I'm an engineer. I spent more time fixing Elitch's than I ever did in the mountains."
"Elitch's?"
"Elitch Gardens. It's an amusement park, and my mom always took me there as a kid…"
Jim keeps talking after they're seated at their table by a robot waiter who introduces himself as Hector. He promised himself he'd go for maybe a childhood story or two—Arthur assured him even that much would paint him as trustworthy—but Aurora listens to him so intensely, as if she's putting everything he says to memory, and asks so many follow-up questions that Jim ends up talking for most of dinner and only stops when they revisit Arthur for a wink (for Jim) and a nightcap (for both of them).
As he escorts her to her suite, he acknowledges the evening. "Hey, sorry I spent so much time talking tonight. I didn't mean to—"
"It's okay," says Aurora. "It's nice. I like stories."
"Yeah, you mentioned. But I'm glad." Unsure of what to do with himself, he manages an awkward salute. "Well, Miss Lane, thank you for accompanying me to dinner tonight."
Aurora laughs. "I do every night. But thanks, I had fun. We should do it again."
"What, get Mexican food?"
"I saw a sushi place," she says with a daring look. "Do you landlocked people have seafood?"
Jim rolls his eyes, but chuckles all the same. "We do. But I'd be interested in trying to eat it in space."
"Well then," says Aurora, "it's a date."
She waves and lets the door close before Jim can figure out what she means by that.
Months pass. Although Jim and Aurora do their best to relieve stress in the evenings, their days become increasingly worrying. Jim can't access anything restricted to crew, although he does have access to most of the ship's supplies. Their message to Earth won't be received for another thirty years, and every scrap of information about hibernation pods assures that they're flawless with no chance of malfunction. They've read enough that Jim knows how to wake someone, but the only people worth waking are inaccessible.
Jim feels trapped. He rereads Aurora's work and seeps himself in memories that aren't his; ones of home are too painful. He asks Aurora for another day of the week alone with Arthur, one which she happily concedes provided she gets one too. They still have breakfast and dinner together, but with no new ideas of how to send themselves back into hibernation, they only fill their days with distraction. And of the distractions available on the ship, only Aurora reminds Jim of his own worries, of how permanent their situation might be.
One day he doesn't see Aurora at breakfast. When she doesn't answer her communicator about dinner, he worries. He checks the theater and the pool. He checks the restaurants. He checks with Arthur. She isn't anywhere.
Finally, hesitantly, he knocks on her suite door.
"Go away," he hears muffled by the door and some distance.
"Are you alright?" he calls back.
"I said, go away."
"Just tell me if you're okay. Then I'll leave."
"I'm…" He doesn't hear the answer.
"What?"
He hears distant rustling and footsteps, and then the door opens.
She looks like she's been crying. That's all he registers before she throws herself into his arms and buries her face into his chest.
He freezes only a second before wrapping his arms around her. They stand there in silence, her breathing heavy and his nearly stopped, for several minutes before she pulls away.
"Sorry," she says. She wipes away a tear. "Today's not a good day. I needed that."
"Anytime," says Jim. He wants to say more—he wants to say she can do it again, he wants to say he'll say yes, he wants to ask what happened and if he can help any more than he apparently has—but she shuts the door again.
Her imagery of the Empire State Building sticks in his head that night as he tries to fall asleep. It lingers with him, that and the sight of her tear-stained face, throughout the next two days as he tries and fails to see her around the ship.
After his second sleepless night, he decides to put the image to good use.
He makes his way to the supply part of the ship and borrows some scrap metal (or possibly ship repair metal, but what is he going to need to repair, anyway?). He sets to work.
By the time exhaustion finally catches up with him, he's finished. He leaves the final product sitting in front of Aurora's door, returns to the Vienna suite, and falls into a dreamless slumber.
When he wakes, it's to the sound of knocking.
He answers the door only in boxers, partly due to fatigue and partly because he wants to see the one person who could be knocking more than he cares about modesty.
Aurora is holding the model of the Empire State Building delicately with both hands.
"This is beautiful," she says.
"I know it's not the same," says Jim. He yawns and rubs the back of his neck. "Hope you like it."
"I do."
They examine each other. Aurora still seems defeated, but any sign of depression is held at bay. Jim's stomach sinks as he wonders what else he could possibly do the next time despair overtakes her.
But Aurora apparently decides that's a question for another time. "Come on," she says. "Let's get some lunch."
She doesn't break the topic until two days after he makes her the model. "So you've been reading my work?"
She's watching him work at a punching bag. When he glances up at her, she doesn't seem angry, only curious.
"Yeah," he says. He delivers two swift punches. "Do you mind?"
"Not unless you're going to tell me it's bad."
Jim delivers a final punch and takes off a glove. He wipes his forehead. "It's not."
"I'm glad."
"It's really good, actually. Ask Arthur."
"He read it too?"
"No, but I've been telling him all about it for weeks." Jim comes to lean against the wall beside her. He takes off his second glove and suddenly wishes he weren't so sweaty. He feels like he's too close to her to allow himself to be sweaty.
"Want to know what I've been telling Arthur?" she asks.
"If you want to tell me." He would be lying if he said curiosity hadn't crossed his mind, but, well, they'd asked for alone time with Arthur for a reason.
"He's probably sick of me at this point for it," she says. "But I keep going between how unlucky I am and how…well, lucky I am."
"How's that work?"
"I was woken up ninety years before I was supposed to be. I was supposed to live more than two hundred years, by Earth terms, and now unless you or I figure something out, we might die here. Probably just of old age, but we'd die."
Jim reels at the firmness of her voice. Neither of them has said it before, and he frankly expected her to freak out before putting it into words. But she only stares straight ahead, looking at the punching bag as if she'd like to give it a single whack of despair. Maybe she's said more of this to Arthur than she has to him.
"But," she says, "I'm not alone. I couldn't imagine being here all by myself, especially knowing as little about this ship as I do." She turns to look at Jim. "Don't get me wrong—I'm not saying I'm glad you're a mechanic. Which I am. But I'm also glad you're here." She pauses, and then offers a morbid grin. "That's awful, isn't it? I'm glad you're in the same hellish situation as I am. But we're in it together. And I realized last night that you'd only know just how much that gesture"—she doesn't mention which gesture, but Jim understands she means the model—"means to me if you'd read my writing, and I realized I was glad you did."
"Anyone would have read it," points out Jim. "If you only had one other person around, wouldn't you read their stuff?"
"But you wouldn't have to remember it. And you definitely wouldn't have to refer back to it. You could have ignored me," says Aurora. "That's what I would have done. I would have let me be angry and upset and feel alone. But you didn't, and I don't feel alone. For the moment, anyway. But that moment is enough." She looks into Jim's eyes, as intensely as when they first met but for a different reason. To convey gratitude, sincerity, warmth. "Thank you."
Jim keeps her gaze. He's still sweaty, but he no longer cares as much.
"I'm glad you're here too," he says.
Jim feels a tension between them, but Aurora doesn't seem to. She carries on with him like in their early days, asking questions and slipping in banter. She's a little more subdued about it, but the more information she picks up about his old life, the more information she has to tease him with.
Jim senses her closeness. She sits closer to him, lets their feet mingle under tables, takes him by the wrist or the arm to guide him places. She takes him shop(lift)ing and insists he approve her "colony-worthy" wardrobe. She ignores his eyes lingering on the curve of her back leading down to her waist, or the shape of her breasts even when she forgoes cleavage-bearing clothes. She presses against him just a second too long when they brush during basketball.
Jim doesn't know whether he craves romance or simple human contact, and he's stumped even more by Aurora's intentions. He's discerned that she's straight or at least bi—numerous stories of old boyfriends have proved so—but he has a feeling that "not if you were the last man on earth" might play heavily into their situation. She might need human contact—the warmth, the heartbeat, the endorphins if he wants to get technical—simply for how grounding it is. He knows he needs that much too, but if that were all he needed, he wouldn't find himself aching for more every time she moved away.
"How do you know if you're in love?" he laments to Arthur on one of their personal days. "Or whether it's love or lust?"
"I imagine love involves a general caring," says Arthur as he polishes a glass. "Putting their needs before yours, and so on."
"But both our needs are taken care of already."
"Not all of them," says Arthur.
Jim straightens. "Why," he says, "what has she been telling you?"
"A gentleman never tells," says Arthur. "But from what I've been hearing from you, Jim, you might be needing more than you currently have."
"But does she?" asks Jim.
"I can't say," says Arthur.
"Just give me a guess, then," says Jim.
"Would you take an idea instead?"
"Sure, anything."
"Try asking her."
He knows he won't have the nerve to say it in person. He doesn't even have the guts to say "we might die here" like she has. So he hijacks a cleaning bot.
He mounts a camera to its head and gives its grasping claw a message on paper. He remotely rolls it around the ship, searching until he finally finds Aurora at work on a laptop. He thinks she's writing—he knows she prefers to speak aloud, but she could have two mediums—until he sees that the screen has some sort of software on it. When she sees the bot he's sent, she immediately closes the screen.
"Well hi," she says, looking straight into the camera. "You lost?"
Jim smiles at her teasing tone and makes the camera shake itself side to side. He sends out the claw with his paper—"Date tonight? -Jim"—and waits for her to take it, trying to time the claw so that it lets go at the right time.
Aurora takes it and reads over. By the time she turns back, Jim has already made the bot offer her a pen too. She smiles, still amused with the ordeal, and scribbles back an answer to give to the bot. She waves it goodbye, and Jim keeps the camera trained on her for as long as he can before he needs it to steer. She's smiling as the bot leaves, but that could mean anything, he tells himself.
He directs the bot back to his hiding spot and impatiently makes it hold out the message the minute the door opens. He snatches the paper and absently pats the bot's camera as he reads.
Love to. -A
Jim can't contain his grin.
He loots one of the clothing stores for a nice blazer—Jim has the opposite problem of Aurora, too much practical clothing and too little (sexy) formalwear—and paces his suite in his nice shoes for a good half-hour before he can call himself reasonably early. He walks the thirty seconds it takes to reach her door and knocks.
She opens the door just as she's reaching her downstairs area, and Jim appreciates the sight almost immediately. She wears a slit black dress that hugs her in a way that makes Jim think she was paying attention to where he was looking after all. She hasn't worn her hair any differently, which is fine because Jim likes the way it frames her face. She's smiling gently and with a hint of a dare.
"You look fantastic," he says before he can even try for suaveness.
"You clean up pretty well yourself," she says. She closes the door and takes the arm he offers.
"So where are we going?" she asks.
"The one place we haven't gone," says Jim. "That French restaurant, L'espace."
He says it like "less-pace", and Aurora laughs. "Not a lot of French out there in Denver, huh?"
"Well then you say it," challenges Jim.
"I studied Russian. Much prettier than French."
"No, go ahead, I actually want to hear you say it now."
"I think the emphasis is on the second syllable," says Aurora, but she's blushing now. "Alright, I take it back. You say it however you want. I'm sure the waiter will correct you."
The robot ends up introducing the restaurant as "leh-SPASS", and Aurora and Jim look at each other with properly chastised expressions as they're seated. Once the waiter leaves with the promise of wine, they snicker.
"So," says Aurora once they've calmed down, "I gotta ask. Is this a special occasion?"
"What, like our anniversary of unfreezing? No, I think we're still a few months away from that." Jim rubs one of his wrists. "I just…I dunno, I was talking to Arthur. Because I was worried about you."
"I've been okay," says Aurora. "Better than some days."
"Yeah, I noticed. And I'm glad about that, definitely. But just…" He exhales. "I like you, Aurora. And I don't know how I like you, and I definitely don't know how you like me. So I'm trying to figure it out."
"So we're on a date."
"We're on a date. If you want."
"I could save you some time."
Jim blinks.
"I like you too." She smiles, and after the robot returns with wine, she minutely lifts her glass to him before she sips. "Let's see how tonight goes."
Jim's shoulders slump in relief, although very few of his questions have been answered. He raises his glass in return.
They end up discussing the happiest of their memories of home. The topic of the ship doesn't feel safe yet, and they try to stay away from wistfulness. Instead Aurora entertains him with the exploits, both dating and work-related, of her friends in New York, and Jim talks about the struggle of balancing his engineering degree with an actual social life. They talk and laugh so much that it takes them twice as long as usual to finish dinner, and they have enough room for dessert.
"So I know we've been avoiding it," says Aurora as they wait for their chocolate mousse, "but I just have to ask one question."
"Sure," says Jim. He admittedly gulps a little more wine than he meant to.
"What's the biggest thing you miss about home?"
Jim presses his lips together, thinking. Most of his friends drifted away after high school or college, and his mom is dead. Any way he entertained himself in Denver is also here on the Avalon.
"Every so often," he says, "I'd get off work early and drive west."
"Driving, then?"
"That's part of it, yeah. But also, the mountains are west. And the closer you get to the mountains—like, Golden or Lakewood—the better the sunset is. There was this park I liked to go to in Lakewood, and I'd just sit on the hood of my car and watch it. Sunsets behind the mountains are different from other places I've been. They light up the whole horizon so all you can see are these huge blue outlines, and then the orange sky behind them. And the city lights beneath them." Jim shakes his head. "I never understood how you could see a sunset anywhere else."
Aurora stares at him. "Jim. That's beautiful." And then she smiles. "I hope you don't mind if I steal it."
"Steal away," says Jim. They both laugh, and the moment is broken as the robot waiter brings their dessert. Aurora launches into the topic of her favorite routes to jog in New York, and Jim has to assume that that's what she misses most, although he was sure she'd say something about Central Park.
They finish their mousse and Aurora declines a stop at Arthur's bar on the way to their suites. The closer they get to their respective doors, the more nervous Jim becomes. He knows sex on the first date can be frowned upon, but they've known each other a while, and she keeps pressing herself against his side…
They pass his door, and Aurora stops beside it.
"Can I come in?" she asks when Jim looks back at her.
Jim swallows. "Sure. Just, uh…" He flashes his wrist at the reader (he's long had it programmed to let him in, something he can't do for the crew's doors because he has to break himself in and rewire from within) and gestures for her to enter first.
Aurora is standing in the middle of his living room when Jim closes the door and turns to her.
"So I know what you're thinking," says Aurora, "or at least I think I do. But I'm actually here for two reasons."
"Oh. Huh." Jim's mind—and select other parts—are whirring. He can only think of one thing she'd be doing in his suite after a date, weeks after an intimate talk discussing how glad she is to have him around, and although he refuses to let himself believe that's one of her reasons, he hopes, he hopes—
(He's pretty sure he's in love, has been sure since she took the hand he offered to escort her home tonight, but he can't deny the desire that throbbed through him when she stopped at his door.)
Aurora reaches into her cleavage—oh god—and pulls out a thumb drive.
"This is the first thing," she says when Jim stares at her unwittingly. "Mind if I go up to your bedroom?"
Jim nodes silently and follows her up the stairs. She passes his bed and approaches the panel that projects scenery for him. She feels on the side for a port and inserts the thumb drive, and after some brief manipulation the screen changes its image to show—
Denver at sunset.
Aurora steps back and to Jim's side to admire her handiwork. "I was working on it when you sent the bot," she says. "I pulled up some images of Denver, since you gave me a bit of New York, and the first thing I saw was…"
"Sunset," he says. He's in awe. Aurora has included the Denver skyline, which was usually behind him in real life, but otherwise it's perfect. He's forgotten the tinge of purple that gradually overtakes the sky as the golden sunset fades over the mountains. "How did you do this?" he asks.
"I was a journalist at one point," says Aurora with the smallest of laughs. "You have to have some graphics and editing experience to be in the industry, so I've played around with image editing before. This was the biggest thing I've ever tried to do, though, so I'm glad it turned out okay."
"It turned out great." Before he thinks, Jim wraps an arm around her waist and kisses her on the cheek. "Thank you."
They stay pressed against one another for another few minutes, admiring Aurora's work. Then Aurora shifts, and moves herself to stand before Jim. One of her hands finds his, and the other the back of his neck.
Jim looks down at her.
"You didn't ask about the second thing," says Aurora. She leans up and slowly, so slowly that Jim realizes what's happening and is halfway to believing it's real, she kisses him.
Nothing really changes, except that now they wake up in Jim's bed every day. They keep their days with Arthur and occasionally eat lunch apart.
Addendum: some things change. Jim has a tiny, hidden desire to have sex in every room of the ship—except the rooms containing the hibernation pods, because that freaks him out a little—and Aurora is willing to indulge him in some of his favorite locations. Their research of the ship veers more into finding new supplies, into surprises for one another and changes to their everyday lives. Jim tells himself he's searching for a hidden manual, but he emerges with roses. He genuinely does search for a captain's log or a way to send a distress message, but he finds wires of precious metals.
The metals can wait until he and Aurora are ready to say the words "I love you". He does love her, but just as with their current situation on this ship, he skirts around it. He busies himself with fixing bots and with reading the new book Aurora is writing.
"You're right," Jim says one night as they're reading in his living room, "it's really weird to read about yourself."
"If you don't like it, stop reading," says Aurora. She jokingly glares at him.
Jim grins back. "And miss whatever happens next? Not a chance."
He knows what's going to happen next. Aurora's birthday is coming up, almost exactly a year into their early revival. A year since an unknown error woke two random pods. A year since he's met the woman he loves more than anyone he's ever known.
A year in which—until yesterday—he never thought to open the door at the other end of the bay of hibernation pods, where two spacesuits wait patiently to be worn.
He knows exactly what his gift to her is going to be.
Gus Mancuso wakes up two years into Jim's waking-up, so these two still have a (drama-free) year to go. (EDIT: this comment makes it sound like I meant to continue this fic. I don't. I marked it as complete when I published it because I only wanted to write the first year of their relationship.)
Fun fact: if you're watching the sunset from Denver and you see the cityscape as well as the mountains, you're watching from the suburb of Aurora.