cactusy | IC contact for lastvoyages

Do you have one of those?

I can make one!

Dumbass.

[It's said very tiredly, but very fondly.]

You can stick it through the bars as long as you back up right away after.

Bet I made you smile, though. Be there in two ticks.

[It takes a few minutes to make some coffees to bring down for the pair of them, but soon enough he's in Zero after a passing chat with Yunlan, and he knocks on the bars of Shaw's cell with his knuckles.]

Delivery for Shawp Shooter?

[To get to her, he'll have to pass Root's cell too, all the way at the other end of the hall. The murder wives are both in time out right now.

And Shaw, it turns out, is in even more than that. She has a pair of fancy padded restraints cuffed around her wrists, which are in turn securely fastened to the bed frame, offering her limited freedom of movement even within the cell.]

Hey.

[She says, tensing just a little when he approaches the bars.]

Can you, uh, slide it?

The fact she's handcuffed immediately makes Eiffel look uncomfortable - not for the reasons she thinks, though. He's just vaguely distressed about seeing her all tied up.

"Uh- yeah, sure." He bends down to put the coffee on the floor, trying not to get closer to the cell - and then sits down with it, and uses his sneakered foot to very carefully eke Shaw's coffee closer to the cell, within her reach. Admittedly he's more focused on making sure the coffee doesn't fall over than he is worrying about whether or not Shaw can grab his foot, but the coffee's more important.

She tenses further as his leg extends out towards her, unwillingly but automatically running through a mental list of all the things she could do to harm him if he came within reach. She thinks of fighting against Lestat's directive to kill him, knowing all the while that she wasn't strong enough to keep it up forever. She thinks of holding her gun to Reese's back, feeling the world glitch as Samaritan's chip spasmed inside her head, and then coming to to find she'd already pulled the trigger. She thinks of leveling her gun at Root's head, thinks of I killed them, and now, I'm going to kill you, and can the fact that she hadn't actually done it really completely make up for the fact that she'd threatened to? Nothing else is real inside the simulations, but she is. She always is. And if she could do it then, she could do it here.

"Eiffel."

The note of distress in her voice is subtle, but it's there.

Eiffel actually yips with the sudden bolt of alarm that sends through him, and he yanks his foot back - it rocks the coffee dangerously, but it settles safely, and even just inside the edge of Shaw's reach.

"I'm okay you didn't do it--" Even if there's now a wet patch on his own sleeve from where his jerking motion spilled his own coffee, but he's not hurt.

He's scared of her, is how she immediately interprets that. That's a good thing. He should be, even if it feels like crap.

"I'm sorry," she says, pulling in the coffee and settling it in her hands.

His heart settles a little as she takes her coffee, but the mechanical response makes it ache instead.

"Shaw." He scoots closer, still out of arms reach, and nurses his coffee in both hands. "You didn't do anything. You know that, right? You didn't kill anyone."

"You're wrong," she says quietly; evenly. "I've killed the people I care about thousands of times. There's no reason they'd do things any differently here."

"Okay, but did you kill your people, or did you kill the super creepy T1000s of them that were being used to torture you? There's a difference, right?"

She's quiet for a moment. Still.

"Not if I didn't know that's what they were," she says - and even though her voice only shakes a little, only does a tiny crack at the very end, it's still the most blatantly vulnerable he'll ever have heard her sound.

"You know you're not making it easier to stop myself from coming over and hugging you," he points out, but the dry comment is a little bit thick in his throat.

But he looks down at his coffee, and he's... quiet for a minute. In a way Eiffel rarely is, except when something is weighing on him.

"..I had to make that call once, you know," he comments quietly. "It's not quite the same, sure, but... yeah. The good old Two Guards puzzle, except both of them were telling the truth."

Luckily, he can't, so she just delivers him a flat look. It fades to something more contemplative when he says the second bit, though.

"What happened?"

He doesn't lift his gaze, instead just rolling the coffee cup between his hands.

"We were two weeks out before the contact event," he starts. "So there's four of us in our home-grown Mystery Shuttle launched around the opposite side of the Wolf to check the weather before we don't get another chance. Me, captain Lovelace, Maxwell and Jacobi. And within like an hour of losing contact with Hephaestus actual - which was expected, we knew the solar flares were gonna screw that up for us - we get a situation."

He doesn't want to take a drink now, but his throat feels suddenly dry.

"We got Jacobi back inside the rowboat right before the first wave of solar flares start hitting us, before it gets real choppy, but after we locked the doors and got ready to settle down, well." He frees a hand from his coffee and knocks on the floor, three deliberate raps of his knuckles.

Shaw pauses, mulling this over.

"... One of the others got stuck outside while you were dealing with Jacobi?"

Sorry, Eiffel; her fluency in sci-fi tropes is very low.

He lifts his head to give her a good-natured flat look.

"God, I need to get more sci-fi in you," he comments dryly, but hey - it does get his mood to lighten a little. "But... not quite. There were four of us on the boarding list, and four of us inside the boat - and someone freaking knocking on the door, of the shuttle. In space. Orbiting a star. On the other side of the freaking galaxy from any other human life."

"... The hull creaking under pressure?"

Sorry about her, Eiffel.

He can't fault her that one, because: "Yeah, that's what we were hoping as well. Until it hailed us, and we opened the comms channel to hear Jacobi on the radio. With Jacobi numero uno inside with us looking completely freaked out."

"... So what was it?" she asks, her brow crinkling faintly.

"...honestly, I couldn't tell you. We didn't open the door."

He leans back so he can take a swig of his coffee. "Maxwell gave the Boom Brothers their Turing Test, asking them to prove crap about her that no-one else could possibly know - and they both nailed it, three for three. So we were gonna err on the side of human decency, let him in to see what the deal was..."

He makes a face, bitter and rueful. "But Minkowski's already made sure we couldn't. She disabled the motion sensor on the door - a fun little party trick she learned from me. So, uh." He's less proud of this one, but it's still the full story. "So when the solar storm hit, and the outsider got put through the pressure cooker, he was... still on comms. So. I left the comms on. So the real McCobi and our illustrious captain could hear what they'd done to someone."

He looks down, resting his coffee in his lap. "Whatever else the thing out there was... he was scared."

"It still bothers you."

Not a question.

"Do you hold it against them, or do you understand why they did it?"

Though, she supposes, those two things might not be totally incompatible.

He wrinkles his nose gently. "I'm not sure I'm good at holding things against people. If my prime directive is trying to get people to get along, it's not much good if I'm being an asshole about it."

He looks back at Shaw. "Besides, I... I get why she did it, kind of. I don't like it, and I don't have to. But I couldn't do it. I guess that's why I'm not the captain."

"And I'm not the captain because I could do it too easily."

Even if it's right - and she thinks that it probably was - she figures it's the type of thing that should be hard.

"I hope I get to meet her someday, your commander."

IC contact for lastvoyages

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Spoilers for ep 42 heyoooo

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