You Are Lieutenant Sam Puckett

You have completed the chores necessary for the day. You have nothing else to do but play around in between shifts of keeping the station in working order as the nerds go about their business. Half of what they say is over your head. They speak almost an entirely separate language (at first you thought it might be Russian, but they insist it is English) and play with extremely complicated, spindly little tools. You have enough professional etiquette to bite back any jibes about how pointless what they are doing seems to be—after all, who cares? After biting back enough of them, they stop coming to mind, and suddenly you find yourself admiring them for their brains.

For some reason you can't think that they are being serious when they call him "Dr. Benson," and you actually laugh out loud when someone, very seriously, calls him simply "Fred." Curious how one little "ee" sound can change a name from something that evokes child hood memories into something that makes you look twice and notice scruff on his cheeks and a muscle jumping in his jaw as he concentrates on ever-so-carefully putting a Petri dish of something under the microscope.

Bedtime consists of calling dibs on a strip of Velcro on the walls and sticking oneself to it in order to avoid bumping into vital switches and knobs in the night. You and the senior pilot sleep in half hour shifts; some one has to be awake at night in order to do the routine thrusts and things and keep alert for anything that might happen, such as a meteor shower.

You find yourself trying to go to sleep as the last body at the end of a row of geeks lined up like sardines. The lights have been dimmed for your comfort. You can hear the murmurs of your partner talking to mission control. In other pasts of the space station, scientists from around the world are resting for the night. Your eyes are drooping while you watch as one lone scientist remains awake and at work—refusing to give up an experiment that the others have deemed "impossible to replicate."

The next night, during your shift, you stay unnaturally silent so that the busy scientist can work. Idle comments keep coming to mind; a few times you nearly say them. This happens enough times for him to notice, and when you turn a word into a throat-clear, he sighs.

"What's on your mind?" he asks as he pulls something sticky off a microscope slide using a pair of tweezers. You just shake your head, "Nothing, I didn't mean to bother you."

"Oh, I was sighing in boredom, please, talk to me." He says as he works. You see him blink sleepiness out of his vision and shake his head to concentrate. You propel yourself to his side of the room so that the two of you can talk in low voices and not disrupt your crew members' sleep.

"So go to sleep, I hear this is impossible anyway." You say.

He rests an elbow on the table and rubs hard at a muscle in his neck. "I can't. It's sort of a weird OCD thing, you won't get it."

You don't know if you should take the OCD thing seriously. "Try me." You say. He opens his mouth and you intelligently ask him to "Keep the science stuff in laymen's terms, could you?"

He smiles. "I know this is possible, I've seen it once. I need to see it again. I can't sleep until I do."

"Makes sense to me," you say with a shrug, glancing over the gauges and readings again for lack of anything else to do.

He rubs at that muscle again. You have uncrossed your arms and swam to him before thinking and now you are silently requesting to take over for him. He lets you, pushes stuff around his desk pointlessly for a few seconds before getting back to work. The skin on his neck is warm and you keep remembering the way he blushed when you were kids, the color starting at his neck before crawling to his face.

You bite your lip to keep any condescending remarks to yourself as you continue to massage his shoulders. When he says nothing about the relief your work is giving him, you ask, "Better?"

He laughs boyishly. "Yeah, er--lots."

He doesn't tell you your work is done so you don't stop. You like having something to do—night watch is the most bored you've been ever since leaving earth—and it keeps your mind from searching for conversation that would disrupt his research.

He breaks the silence, putting the rubber eraser end of his pencil to his temple and letting it float there. "There's something I've been meaning to do say to you for a long time now…"

Intrigued, you slow the massage. "Yeah?"

"Back when you took the heat for me, that was really a very loyal and selfless thing you did for a friend. Thank you."

Embarrassed, but pleased to receive the thanks left wanting for nearly ten years, you smile and pat his shoulder. "You're welcome… but I don't think it was all that selfless, I mean you didn't do it alone, I was busted for my part, all I did was take on the slack of your end."

"Still, it means a lot." He said. "About who you really are, you know?" he looks straight up to see your face. You look down so he can't look up your nose, and now your faces are maybe two inches apart. Suddenly you are aware of the fact that just because your are standing here, doesn't make it the floor. The Velcro on all four walls makes it possible to choose one's floor and suddenly you feel as if you are actually standing on the ceiling, or maybe a wall. The vast blackness of the space outside, quiet easily something that can press in on you, is suddenly wide open and spinning, but you and him, you aren't moving; you're anchored somehow.

Suddenly, an alarm clock jumps and starts ringing its bell shrilly. Both of you jump apart, as if caught with your hand in the cookie jar.