Chapter Text
He had been months in space now, flying through darkness and dust and seeing nothing of it, even if there was really nothing to see. And nothing to hear either, except for the sounds of TARS’ engine running in the back, really low. He had fixed it as better as he could, but he was no robot expert. Thinking about TARS reminded him of his every day question to it.
“TARS?”
“Yes Mr. Cooper”
“How long?”
“3 days and 7 hours until arrival, sir”
“Thanks”
He sighed. Space travel seemed much more amusing and less boring back when he started working on the Endurance project, but he couldn’t tell if it was the grand motivator (saving the entire humanity and his family altogether) or the human company on board that kept him excited. Now it just seemed empty and, more than it ever was, time consuming. That last part was certainly ironic to him, considering that now that both Tom and Murphy were gone, he had all the time in the world to himself, but no one he would actually like to spend it with. Or maybe just one.
“Oh Murph” he said in a whisper so low as to not allert TARS or have it thinking he wanted to talk or something. He felt heartbroken, despite thinking that, against all the impossible odds, he had kept his promise to come back to her. But it was so fast and brief that it felt bittersweet. Even if she was already an old lady with grandchildren, she was still his baby, and Cooper felt like the shittiest a dad could possibly be. “To only be present for your daughter on her deathbed”, he thought. He would probably never forgive himself.
Still, however brief that last meeting was, it had been the most important contact he had made in the 100 and some years of age he had lived in the midst of space travel. She made his mission come true, she saved mankind, she brought hope to millions of desperate people. That scrawny 10-year-old ginger, who believed in ghosts. His absolute pride of her was the only thing that served to heal his mind sometimes. And, to top it all, she gave him one last gift. The gift of hope.
“Brand.” her voice echoed in his mind. “Go find her.”
Since that chaotic goodbye right before Cooper and TARS dove into the black hole, he hadn’t really thought about Brand. He assumed she had landed peacefully in Edmund’s planet, reencountered the love of her life and started that plan B of making new babies right away. And they lived happily ever after or something. Maybe because he was thinking about his own bad odds of returning home, he never once thought that Brand’s odds could have been just as bad as his. But Murphy did have a point. Maybe she was, in fact, all alone there. Maybe that Edmund Wolf guy hadn’t survived. Maybe , just maybe, she felt lonely and missed him and wanted him to be there with her. He wasn’t really sure as to why he expected her to be missing him, so he assumed he was just uneasy with the fact that no one needed him anymore. And maybe he felt that way because he had lost his time with his children. Whatever the reason was, he felt a little bit comforted by having this new mission of helping Brand, even though there was a possibility of her not needing his help at all
After days that felt like weeks, he finally left the intimidating shape of Gargantua behind his spacecraft and saw the tiny gray ball that was Wolf’s planet approaching his view. It seemed like a tiny moon from a distance, but with less craters and a brownish tone to it. It was beautiful. Maybe not as obviously beautiful as the Earth once was, but the possibility that this could be a new home for humans gave it an attractive touch. We might really cheat death with this one, Cooper thought. And then the tiny moon grew into a giant rock, and he started wandering how to find one tiny little human in this enormous planet.
“TARS!”
“Yes, Mr. Cooper”
“Try to detect signals from CASE, please”
“I’m on it”
He waited no more than a minute.
“Anything?”
“Yes, I have its coordinates. I’ll send the data to the craft’s GPS”
“Thanks Slick”
He lowered the spacecraft close enough to enter its atmosphere when the reality of what he was doing struck him. He really had sent a person, who he considered a good friend, all alone into a strange far-away planet. She did go with CASE to help her but still, it was only a robot. What if she didn’t survive? Or what if she did survive, but ran out of food and supplements to keep a human alive and died from starvation? It had been almost 8 months since they parted ways. Or what if she had been killed by some strange different species that already existed in this new land? The possibilities for bad endings were infinite, he just had never considered them until that very moment. He felt his throat closing a little bit at the thought but clenched his fists and accelerated the craft, as if those extra minutes were vital to Brand’s survival. If the worst had happened to her - he realized as he landed in an empty zone - he had no reason to keep going.