Work Text:
They share a bed, because space is cold. The Captain had tried to offer them singles of their own- Wilson’s head engineer, after all, and Rob equal to that even if Wilson’s technically his CO- but when they’d declined she hadn’t pushed the offer. One bed in a double does mean that they have enough space for a terminal, a watercycler and various beloved unopened boxes of Wilson’s.
Rob has no idea what’s in any of them; a fact he’s more or less contented himself with. Wilson knows when Rob’s opened his boxes and he repays the favor with interest.
Today Wilson’s in bed before him, smelling vaguely like grease and the ever-present iron smell. AT-5 is fun like that. Really all Rob can see is the shiny top of his head and then the blankets they’ve accumulated.
He undresses in the corner- they have an attached shower, but shower rations aren’t today and their light sensor is just broken enough to have to do the sacred and traditional dance of Beating It With The Nearest Large Metal Object to get it to work. If Wilson’s back this early, Rob won’t be waking him for what essentially amounts to an empty room.
Technically they could fix it themselves.
Technically they could also call in any of their men and make them do it.
Rob finds it half ironic that they don’t. He fills a bowl with water and a washcloth and begins to wash off the associated grime of the day. From the bed there’s a long breath, like someone stirring from a doze.
Not his problem. Wilson can sleep through alarms from tertiary all the way up to primary, and every variety too. If he’s up, it’s not because of Rob.
“Guess what,” Rob says, scrubbing the last of the water along his ankles, at the gap where his pants don’t quite stretch long enough to meet his socks.
“Hm?”
“Terminal’s fucked.” Getting their work orders is such a pain that every member of Rob’s team has learned to memorize lines of abbreviated messages from a couple seconds’ flash.
“Yes and, Mouse,” Wilson drawls. “The terminal’s been fucked since launch.”
“Well I dunno,” Rob says. “Maybe it magically got fixed, and now it’s magically not fixed anymore, just in time for your next shift, and you won’t be expecting it.”
“Oh God,” Wilson deadpans.
“God’s dead and we all just forgot. Budge over,” Rob tells him. Wilson budges over.
The bed creaks, but this is familiar, too. Rob’s never been the smallest guy, and they’re two grown men on one regulation bed. Wilson had flipped it and made a crossed-beam brace once it became obvious neither of them were going to go back to sleeping across the room from each other.
The pot Engineering and Software share is huge. Rob’s heard everything: He and Wilson are secretly married. He and Wilson have been divorced twice. He and Wilson are oblivious, still scared of getting caught out of the closet, fucking on their lunch breaks, dating interminably, secretly crossdressers, former or current pornstars, old star-crossed lovers before they went offplanet- everything their men can come up with and even a few things Rob honestly didn’t think they were capable of imagining.
Lacey- Wilson’s favorite gopher, electrician by trade- is the only one who’s maintained her position that, whatever they are, they’re stirring the pot on purpose. Smart kid. Shame nobody will ever believe her. Rob settles himself more deeply into their thin mattress.
“God’s not dead,” Wilson argues back. “There’s, like, a difference between dead and abandoned, I feel like. If God’s dead we should be dead, right?”
Rob opens his mouth to say something- something like what do you think the last eleven years have been, but Wilson winces before he can. “Sorry,” he says. “That’s- that’s depressing.”
“I started it,” Rob says in apology.
“You’re right, actually, you did,” Wilson says, all smug-like. “I retract my apology.”
“You suck. I’m requesting a new bunk.”
“You suck more than I suck. Your suckage is- it’s adding to my suckage. We suck together.”
“You say the nicest things to me when your shipments are late.” Sarcasm. The shipments are always late.
“Fine, then, you talk!” Wilson shuffles, flips onto his back. “Tell me about what the Captain wants to start doing.”
There is a weighted, heavy pause. This is, Rob realizes, why Wilson has been in bed early the past few nights, why he’d stopped working doubles and refused to give the work he’d not finished doing over to his men. Rob had been wondering.
Well. No. He hadn’t been wondering. He’d been hoping he was wrong.
“It’s-”
“Bad,” Wilson says. “It’s bad.”
“Sevens-” No. “Yeah. Yeah it’s bad.”
Silence.
It isn’t a fight. Rob hates fighting before bed, and they’d seen each other in the mess and walked down so Wilson could recalibrate the fridge, and there’s no better place for having a screaming match than the maintenance tunnels where their men know better than to try and interrupt. If this was going to be a fight, it would have happened earlier.
It would be better, he thinks, if it were a fight. Rob shifts in the bed and feels the sheets slip around him.
“Are we bad people,” Rob says conversationally. “I mean, like. There’s a case.”
“Man, I don’t know,” Rob’s best friend sighs back, words too loud in the dark of their room. “Maybe?”
A huff of a laugh escapes him. “You know, I’m not sure how I feel about our answer to philosophical questions being maybe.”
“Who said anything about ‘our’ answer,” Wilson shoots back. He’s stiff on his back, breathing evenly. There’s a good foot of space between the two of them. Must be a bad day for touching. “That’s my answer, you’re just agreeing with it.”
“Mmmmnah, our answer.”
“You can’t just steal my answer,” Wilson says, but he’s got the resigned tone that tells Rob he’s already decided this is one he’s going to lose. In the dark, not making eye contact, it’s harder to see the sliver of levity that Rob could take, the push to drive them out of the quiet that comes with pondering questions they really ought not in the heart of the Consolidation.
“I can,” Rob says. The silence returns.
Two weeks ago one of Wilson’s men (Adrean, Rob thinks, although the spelling is unclear) got marched out of their bunk.
Hoarding spare parts from the rewiring of their upper secondary east quadrant. Storage territory, which is the kind of place nobody spends too much time fussing with. Somewhere you could believably cut corners on your electric or coolant system. It wasn’t one of Rob’s, or even one of David’s. It was one of the comms switchers, of all people, who went digging for dirt and found a whole stash of melted-down scrap. Somewhere in him it stings that it wasn’t one of their men who came to them about it, although someone must have known- between him and Wilson they direct half the damn station.
Flogging, it was decided, and sixty days’ hard labor. Relatively light, considering how incandescent the Captain’d been about the whole ordeal. Wilson stood at her arm through the flogging.
Rob should know. He was right behind him.
Maybe- God, there’s the maybe, Wilson is getting philosophic all over Rob’s head now- maybe it would be right for them to defect. Or be broken. Maybe it would be right for Wilson to go to the Captain and make a case for lesser punishment for his man. Make some other off-station captive take their place, like the Captain wants to start doing. Or not. Loyalty’s odd like that. Rob knows he owes deference and obedience to his Captain. He can feel in his bones the same burden the Captain owes him and Wilson demanded to his own men.
It’s not a light thing. There’s a lot Rob has wished for at one point or another, but Ava’s position has never been one of those things.
If he defects-
(If Wilson defects, and Rob goes with him-)
Their men will be led by someone else. The Captain will appoint someone, but she’s military above all, and military can’t bend where other section leaders can. She’ll ask for obedience first and expertise second from a successor. Especially if they defect.
(Mistake. Wilson was from off-station, out of Consolidation territory. He cannot imagine anyone else in charge of the half-rabid fleet of engineers Wilson runs out of the lower west levels.)
Point being: Rob doesn’t know who that someone will be.
Someone less experienced in fixing boilers with not enough material and too much tape, maybe. Someone who will spend shorter hours staring at lines of their subordinates’ code, catching mistakes able to fry airlocks. Someone so much more willing to sacrifice a life for a few cut corners.
“You’re right. It’s bad.”
“Mhm.”
And somewhere, Rob knows, these are excuses. There isn’t the choice for a blank slate, no scrap to build a new shield: he can be complicit or leave.
“If you want to go…”
And where would they go? In this too, the Captain is right: they do not have enough lives left to be throwing them away on utopian ideals. Out of an oxygen fire, straight through into atmo.
“You’ll go with me, yeah, yeah, freeloader,” Wilson grumbles like mercy. “Come on, man, that’s mine too, you gotta be original.”
Fine. “Don’t like the idea of gambling with anyone else’s money,” Rob says, and feels the breath of Wilson’s understanding echo it. The Consolidation cannot afford not to be ruthless, but they can afford people who don’t seek out opportunities for it.
Rob hopes he’s one of those people. He thinks, in the dark with his best friend, talking like the stars are still alive, he could be.