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“Were you scared?” Frances asked softly, out under the stars with the wide expanse of space stretching above her.
Vanessa had always thought it looked infinite. With her head tilted back, she could make out Cassiopeia over to the left, a collection of pin-pricks poking through a velvet-dark canvas. The narrow belt of the Milky Way strode through the night, pale and breathtaking, barely-visible. It would be darker, later, as the sun sank further and further and her watch’s gears tugged the hour hand closer and closer to midnight.
In the time since Vanessa’s feet had been back on solid ground, the known universe had only continued expanding, the furthest place light could reach more distant than it had ever been before. She’d always imagined space so full. Possibility, at the tips of her fingers. It wasn’t until she’d gotten there and looked out of the window at the expanse before her that she understood how much of her cosmos she’d left behind. She had something infinite here, too.
She felt Frances’ gaze flit towards her, then drift back up to the sky, and out of the corner of her eye Vanessa watched an absentminded hand land on top of Frances’ head, Joan’s palm affectionately smoothing over the top of braids Frances shouldn’t have known how to do by herself yet.
“Terrified,” she admitted, because Frances, more than most people, deserved honesty.
Joan’s other hand rested beside Vanessa’s on the red and white chequered picnic blanket they’d brought out into the park with them, and quietly, subtly, the knuckle of her pinkie brushed up against Vanessa’s. When Vanessa didn’t pull away, Joan looped her pinkie around Vanessa's fully, without looking down.
Vanessa could feel the thud of her pulse foolishly in her eardrums.
Months ago, she’d been the first female astronaut to fly the shuttle, the only astronaut in history to ever navigate re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere alone. She’d had a crewmate’s life entirely in her hands as the sky had burned up around her, but this -
“Are you scared now?” Frances asked, voice hushed, eyes so much like Joan’s. Gentle. Thoughtful. Glimmering, in the low light.
She’d always been perceptive, but since Vanessa had returned to Earth, she’d noticed a maturity in Frances far beyond her years. It should never have been asked of her. (Joan had noticed the same; she’d heard about it in murmurs, in tears, in frustration.) Frances’ eyes flicked briefly down to Joan’s hand, to hers, and Vanessa swallowed. Her skin prickled. Joan’s eyes met hers over the top of Frances’ head, dark pools she could sink into, never to resurface, and it was the only thing that stopped her from pulling away. Joan, catching Vanessa off balance in a way she hadn’t been since her first steps back under Earth’s gravity, turned her hand over, slipping her fingers defiantly in between Vanessa’s and squeezing, lightly, with a certainty she’d found somewhere between an explosion on a space shuttle and a reckless, determined return home.
Frances waited, patiently, for an answer to her question.
“Yes,” Vanessa whispered.
Joan had found courage, somewhere. Courage to wrap her arms around Vanessa the first time they saw each other after the shuttle, in a nondescript control centre hallway, fingers curling into her and face tucked into the crook of her neck, Antonio and NASA be damned. Courage to inhale the shuttle smell of zinc-aluminium-burning that clung to her skin, to her hair, to every cell in her body.
(“Sorry,” Joan said hoarsely, wiping her eyes as she pulled away.
“I think I'm already fired,” Vanessa said dryly. Her fingers stayed curled into the waist of Joan’s thin sweater, and Joan reached down with a gentleness that didn’t belong to these halls, easing them off the fabric and holding Vanessa’s hand, just for a moment, flat between both of her palms. She lowered it gently, in a way that had Vanessa’s eyes stinging. The glance over Vanessa’s shoulder at her escort felt perfunctory at best, but then again, space related catastrophes always did have a way of pulling life into sharp perspective.
“Come over later,” Joan had murmured, softly, insistently. The words held grief in quantities Vanessa hadn’t worked out how to face, and an ache she’d felt through a crackled comms line from further apart than they’d ever been before, but they tasted like a promise, in the space between them now.)
Frances’ eyebrows pulled in, ever so slightly, as if she was slowly tying threads together, all of Joan’s intelligence and logic but - Vanessa hoped, fear lodged in her chest - all of her heart, too.
“Why?” Frances asked next. A laugh caught at the base of Vanessa’s throat, caught off guard by the childhood simplicity of it all.
Why was she scared?
Because she’d learnt, recently, how quickly things could change? How people could be beside her one moment, and gone the next? How easy it would be to blink and have it all disappear, how important it was to grasp hold of every minute, every second, every breath? She thought of Joan, up there in the Starlab, staring out the window at a vast expanse of blue down below, knowing her whole world was out of reach because she’d chosen to leave it far behind. Wanting to go home.
She hadn’t quite understood it, when Joan had first tried explaining it to her. Not until she was up there too, shoulder to shoulder with Griff, looking out across the deep navy of the Pacific, the swirling clouds circling the edge of South America, the ridge connecting Colombia to Panama and spreading on upwards towards where everyone she loved awaited her return.
“You know how the shuttle is able to orbit, Franny?” Vanessa asked.
Frances nodded, of course. She wouldn't be Joan Goodwin’s niece if she didn’t. The pad of Joan’s thumb brushed lightly over the knuckle of Vanessa’s first finger, threatening to steal the air from her lungs. Her eyes were warm, crinkled at the corners.
“It has to catch on the Earth’s gravity.” Vanessa said simply. “If it didn’t, it would keep going out into space forever - but if it’s launched right, if the flight path is correctly calculated, and if everything else falls into place just so, the mass of the Earth bends spacetime enough that the shuttle stays close by, circling, unable to tear itself away.”
“You’re the shuttle,” Frances said, and Vanessa nodded. She glanced between Frances and Joan, who was still watching them both, the stars they’d come out here to gaze upon left temporarily to themselves.
“Caught in your gravity,” she said softly.
Joan’s attention was warm, and secure, and hers. “There’s no need for that to scare you.”
“You two are the best thing that ever happened to me,” Vanessa admitted, “and that’s what’s so terrifying. I don't ever want my world to not have you in it.”
Joan’s expression twisted, for a moment, and Vanessa’s heart tripped - she’d heard enough, from Joan but also from Jack, Donna, Helene, about the moments before the control centre managed to get back in contact with the Navigator. But as quickly as it had come, Joan tucked the grief away for later - when it was just them, back home, Frances fast asleep on the pull-out couch. When they weren’t sitting here balanced on a knife-edge, with ten-year-old smarts analysing every word.
In another life, this would be where Vanessa leant over and pulled Joan in for a kiss, surrendering herself to the pure, undiluted affection coursing through her. She’d tangle her fingers into Joan’s hair and inhale her love, her joy, her delight, she’d catch breathless laughter with her lips and she’d remind them both that they were home and alive and infinite.
Frances sighed, and nodded, content with the answer she’d been given so turning to lean back into Vanessa and peer up at the sky, her attention recaptured by the vastness above them. Her elbow was bony against Vanessa’s stomach, her fingers strawberry-sticky as they pointed up at a passing satellite, blinking as it drifted slowly towards Orion. At some point, the punnet of berries they’d brought with them to snack on had been knocked over, and a dark smudge on the picnic blanket indicated Joan would probably be scrubbing fruit juice out of Frances’ dungarees in the morning. But what did it matter? Joan’s hand was in hers, Frances was safe and cared for, and the canvas up above was as awe-inspiring as it had ever been.
When they grew cold, they would get back in the car and head home. Vanessa would help unfold the couch and set up a bed for Frances while she reluctantly brushed her teeth. Joan would tuck her in and kiss her goodnight, then follow Vanessa out into the hallway, catching her hand as she had often since Vanessa’s return and asking her to stay.
And Vanessa, the world she’d been searching for exhilaratingly at the tips of her fingers, would.