Archive of Our Own ^beta

They spend their first night back on Earth in a hospital for observation. Isabel has a private room, which looks clinical, but has a bed. An actual, normal bed, with a mattress, and pillows, and blankets that don’t float away if they’re not strapped down. There’s a nightstand with a small lamp on it, and there is a bathroom attached, with a regular toilet and a shower with water that actually falls down.

She spends half an hour in that bathroom, just watching the water from the shower crash down to the floor. Marvelling at the foreignness of it, after so many years in space. Wondering if it will ever feel familiar again. A nurse comes to check up on her every now and then, but he doesn’t comment when he sees her staring at water coming down from a shower, so she ignores him.

When Isabel finally turns off the shower and returns to her bed, there is a steaming mug of tea on the nightstand, which she picks up. She inhales the steam and focuses on the warmth of the mug between her hands as she sits down on the edge of the bed.

She tries to take a sip, only to find the tea is still too hot to drink; so she lets go of the mug, expecting it to float. She pulls her feet up just in time to keep them from getting splattered with boiling hot water.

The nurse comes back in and looks unsurprised, which tells her that the same thing has probably happened to one of her friends already earlier this evening. He gives her a smile that is probably meant to be reassuring and sets to cleaning up the shards and the puddle of water. Minutes later, he brings her a new cup of tea.

It’s too quiet. There’s no creaking of metal or hissing air. There’s the humming of machinery, in the distance, and the beeping of instruments, but it’s far away and too soft and not the same.

She doesn’t think she’ll be able to sleep in this quiet.

She tries. She crawls into the bed and she tries to sleep. The bed is too soft, though – nothing like the rack she’s used to strapping herself to. She feels heavy in the gravity, like she might sink into the mattress until it swallows her up. Eventually, she drags the blankets off the bed and moves to the floor. That’s still not good, but it’s better.

In the quiet, she’s hyperaware of every sound she hears. She shoots up with her heart pounding in her chest when a toilet is flushed in the room above hers and she hears the water rushing through the pipes. She flinches when a door closes somewhere down the hall, even though it’s not a loud sound at all.

After everything they’ve gone through, she thinks she feels more alien now than she ever has before.

A noise in the hallway has her on edge again, especially when she hears it come closer; but then there’s a quiet knock on her door and when she goes to open it just enough to see out into the hallway, it’s to find a tired-looking Eiffel on the other side, a pile of blankets in his arms.

Isabel doesn’t say anything. She just lets him in.

He notices her blanket nest on the floor and smiles ruefully. “It’s weird, isn’t it?”

She looks at him.

He shakes his head. “We’ve been waiting for so long to get back to Earth. And now we’re here, and we’re getting a shit-ton of money from Goddard once everything is settled in court – I mean, fuck, we’ll be on easy street, where the rich folks play, for the rest of our lives, and yet it’s just… weird.”

“God, we’re messed up,” Isabel mutters before she can help herself.

Eiffel barks a laugh. “It won’t just be easy street, I guess. More like the junction between Easy Street and Anxiety Street.”

His mindless chatter calms Isabel down somewhat. It’s familiar, at least. Not everything has changed.

Besides, he’s right. It is weird. The air is weird, and the sounds are weird, and the gravity is weird, and the fact that it’s really over is weird.

All she says is, “Yeah.”

He tosses his own blankets onto the floor beside hers, only to turn back and look at her. He’s obviously trying to keep things light, but she can see the genuine concern in his eyes. He’s still an open book. That’s another thing that hasn’t changed. Maybe she’ll find more things that haven’t changed as she goes along.

She hopes she will. She hopes everything will stop feeling too different and too overwhelming and too big.

She swallows. “Is…” Her voice catches, and she clears her throat. “Is this how it’s going to be now?”

Something in Doug’s face softens and he nudges her shoulder with his in a playful, but genuine reassurance that he’s there. She’s not alone.

“For now, yes,” he tells her, serious for once. “But not forever. It’ll take a while, but it’ll get better.”

Isabel simply nods, choosing to believe him, because that’s easier. “Okay.”

He gives her arm a gentle squeeze before burrowing into his blankets on the floor. She curls up in her own spot, a few feet away. It makes her feel a little more human again, knowing that he’s going through the same thing she is.

This is not happening because she’s not human. This is happening because she is human, in all the ways that count.

They don’t speak again, but it turns out that the sound of another human being breathing is enough to lull Isabel Lovelace to sleep on her first night back on Earth.