Work Text:
**9:12 p.m.**
Christina had folded her flight clothes twice.
The first time, she had done it after the crew’s quarantine dinner, working through the familiar motions without really needing to look at what her hands were doing. She had laid the dark blue trousers across the foot of the bed, aligned the seams with the edge of the mattress, and smoothed both palms over the fabric until there were no wrinkles left to find. The polo had gone on top, folded inward at the sleeves, the mission insignia facing up. Beneath those she had placed clean socks, undergarments, and the thin black base layer she would wear under the white pressure suit tomorrow morning. Everything had been arranged in the order she would need it, although a member of the closeout crew would be waiting to help her dress and although she knew the entire morning sequence down to the minute.
The second time, nearly forty minutes later, she had taken everything apart and done it again.
Now the clothes sat on the chair beside the desk, squared so precisely that they looked untouched. Her shoes waited underneath with the laces loosened. The watch she would not be permitted to wear during suit-up rested beside her wedding rings on the desk, where she had placed them after dinner and then moved them twice, first nearer to the lamp and then farther away from tomorrow’s timeline. Her credentials had been tucked into the outside pocket of her duffel. A small plastic bottle of water remained unopened beside the bed.
There was nothing left to prepare.
That was the problem.
For four years there had always been one more thing. Another procedure to review, another ascent case to rehearse, another contingency to discuss until the edges had been worn smooth. Even during the final months, when the spacecraft had been stacked and the simulations had become less about learning than proving they could do what they already knew how to do, there had been schedules dense enough to keep her moving from before sunrise until late at night.
Now the work had narrowed to waiting.
Christina stood at the window in an old gray sweatshirt that belonged to Reid.
It was not an official exchange between them, nor had there ever been a moment when he had handed it to her and told her to keep it. She had taken it from the back of a chair in Huntsville after an overnight simulation almost a year ago because the air-conditioning in the hotel suite had been brutal and because she had been too tired to walk three doors down to retrieve her own. She had worn it through the rest of their debrief, fallen asleep in it sometime after two, and packed it the next morning without thinking.
At least, that was what she had told him.
He had noticed it again two weeks later at Johnson and had only looked at her for a moment before asking whether his sweatshirt was having a nice life. She had said it was being treated better than it had ever been treated with him. He had smiled, touched two fingers to the frayed cuff, and never asked for it back.
It hung loose on her now, the shoulders too broad and the sleeves long enough to cover the heels of her hands. The fabric had been washed so many times that the NASA lettering had begun to crack, and whatever scent it had once carried had mostly disappeared beneath her detergent. Still, when she pulled the collar toward her mouth and breathed, she could sometimes convince herself there was something of him left in it.
Outside the glass, Kennedy lay quiet beneath a moonlit sky.
The quarantine building did not provide the dramatic view people imagined when they talked about the night before launch. The rocket was not suspended outside her window, waiting in cinematic silence. From where Christina stood, she could see pieces of the complex interrupted by dark bands of trees, service roads illuminated in pale intervals, and floodlights that softened in the humidity before they reached her. Somewhere beyond the visible structures, farther than the window made it seem, Orion sat at the top of the launch vehicle.
She knew exactly where it was, even when she could not see it.
The Moon was easier.
It hung high enough that she had to tip her chin slightly, bright and untroubled by anything happening below it. The reflection of the room floated faintly over the glass: the squared clothes, the pale rectangle of the bed, the abandoned mission timeline, her own face superimposed over the night. For a moment, the Moon appeared to rest beside her reflection, close enough to touch.
Tomorrow, they would begin the journey toward it.
She had wanted that sentence for most of her life. Long before the astronaut office, long before Russia and the station, long before four years of Artemis training had given the dream weight and hardware and risk, she had wanted to go somewhere that made Earth feel impossibly far away. She had wanted to stand at the edge of the known and look back.
She was not afraid to launch.
That had surprised people when they asked, because they expected fear to be the most honest answer. She respected the vehicle. She understood the forces. She knew exactly how many systems needed to work and how quickly a survivable problem could become one that was not. Fear was too simple a word for the way she thought about launch.
What frightened her was the certainty that the life she had occupied for the last several years was already ending.
It would not end tomorrow morning, when they crossed the crew access arm.
It would not end when the engines lit beneath them.
It would not end when the coastline fell away and the blue of the sky deepened into black.
It would end later, after they had rounded the Moon and returned through atmosphere, after recovery divers reached the capsule and the hatch opened onto noise and saltwater and cameras. The crew would be pulled into a world that had been waiting for them. There would be medical checks, reunions, speeches, interviews, receptions, tours, and thousands of questions about what it had felt like to see the far side.
They would become the mission in past tense.
They would stop belonging to one another in the private, habitual way they had learned to during training.
The tear reached her mouth before she realized she was crying.
She tasted salt when she pressed her lips together. She did not lift her hand to wipe it away. There was no one in the room to perform steadiness for, and she was suddenly tired of performing it for herself.
Two quiet knocks came from the door.
The sound was soft enough that another person might have wondered whether they had imagined it, but Christina knew the pattern before the second knock had fully faded.
Reid never used two knocks anywhere else.
In ordinary hotels, he knocked once and entered when she called out. During training trips, he sometimes texted from the hallway rather than risk waking her. Two knocks belonged to the places where they had needed to be careful. It had begun during an extended quarantine months earlier, when everyone had lived close enough together that a voice in the corridor could travel beneath three doors. Two meant it was him. Two meant he had checked the hallway. Two meant she should open quickly.
She crossed the room without turning on a light.
Her hand was already on the handle when she paused, not because she was reconsidering, but because the force of wanting him there made her unsteady. She drew in a breath and opened the door only wide enough for him to pass.
Reid slipped inside sideways, one hand braced lightly against the frame so the door would not swing wider than necessary. He glanced once over his shoulder before Christina closed it. The corridor had been empty, but the caution remained automatic. The rest of the crew was nearby. Flight surgeons and support staff occupied rooms along the same wing. Tomorrow, every movement would be observed and documented, but tonight there were still pieces of themselves they were trying to keep beyond the reach of other people.
The latch settled into place with a muted mechanical sound.
For a moment they remained where they were, close to the door and closer to each other than they had allowed themselves to stand during dinner. Reid had changed out of the polo he had worn downstairs and into a dark T-shirt and jeans. His hair was still damp near the temples, as though he had showered and then walked over before it had dried. He looked tired in a way no amount of sleep would have corrected, his face carrying the strain of a day spent smiling at people who kept telling him to enjoy the last night before the Moon.
His gaze moved over her face and stopped at the track the tear had left.
Christina watched the recognition reach him. She saw the muscles in his jaw tighten and the careful expression he had worn in the hallway disappear.
He gathered her into his arms before either of them spoke.
There was nothing tentative in the movement, but there was nothing hurried about it either. His right hand came up along her jaw, his palm warm against the side of her face, while the other circled her waist and drew her into him. She went willingly, pressing the full length of her body against his and wrapping both arms around his back with enough force that she felt his breath leave him.
He lowered his face into her hair.
Christina closed her eyes and held on.
They had touched one another in hundreds of acceptable ways. They had strapped each other into seats, checked suit connections, steadied one another in aircraft, and slept shoulder to shoulder on long flights home from training. They had spent years learning how each other moved in confined spaces, how to pass without colliding, how to reach across one another without apology. Even after the boundary between them had shifted in private, they had remained disciplined in every room where someone else might be watching.
There was no discipline in the way she held him now.
Her fingers clenched in the back of his shirt. His hand slid from her waist to her hip and remained there, holding her so close that the shape of him felt less like contact than shelter. The hand at her jaw moved into her hair, his fingers spreading carefully over the back of her head, not restraining her but keeping her near.
She could feel his heartbeat against her cheek.
It was faster than she expected.
That small evidence of his own unraveling broke something open in her, and she pressed her face more firmly against the hollow beneath his shoulder. Her breath caught against his shirt. He tightened his arms immediately, one palm moving slowly up her back beneath the heavy sweatshirt as if he could calm her by tracing the shape of her spine.
They stayed beside the door long enough that the position should have become uncomfortable.
Neither adjusted.
Christina did not know whether a minute passed or five. Time had become strange during the final days before launch, at once too slow and vanishing too quickly. Every meal had taken forever. Every evening had ended before she was ready. Now she could feel the seconds moving around them and wanted to resist each one.
Reid turned his face toward hers and pressed his mouth against her temple.
The kiss was not an attempt to begin anything. It was the sort of kiss he had given her many nights before, after long debriefs and before flights, when neither of them had enough language left for tenderness. His lips remained against her skin for a quiet moment, and she felt him breathe in.
When he pulled back, he did not release her. His thumb moved beneath her eye and caught the dampness there.
Christina looked at him, trying to hold his face in her memory exactly as it was in that room. She noticed everything at once: the faint line between his eyebrows, the gray threaded through the hair above his ears, the exhaustion beneath his eyes, the way his mouth softened when he was trying not to show that he was hurting.
She reached for his hand.
Their fingers met at his side and folded together with the ease of a reflex. She gave a small pull, guiding him away from the door, and he followed her across the carpet without asking where she was taking him.
At the window, she turned back toward the Moon.
Reid moved behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. He did it slowly, giving her the chance to create distance if she needed it, though both of them knew she would not. His chest settled against her back. One of his hands covered hers where it rested over the front pocket of the sweatshirt, while the other spread across her stomach and held her there.
Christina leaned into him until the back of her head rested beneath his chin.
Together, they looked through the glass.
The room’s reflection became more crowded now. Their bodies overlapped in the window, dark and indistinct against the lights outside. Reid’s face appeared beside hers. The Moon floated above both of them, impossibly clear.
She felt his mouth against her hair first.
Then he moved aside one of her curls and kissed the place behind her ear.
The contact was familiar enough that her body responded before her mind did. Her head tipped slightly, making room for him, and his hand tightened across her stomach as though he had felt the invitation travel through her. His next kiss landed lower, at the soft place where her neck met the collar of the sweatshirt. He lingered there, breathing against her skin.
Christina closed her eyes.
A fresh tear slipped free, then another.
Reid must have felt the change in her breathing because he lifted his head, but she reached behind her and caught the back of his neck before he could retreat. Her fingers slid into his hair. She did not pull him toward her so much as ask him not to leave the place he already occupied.
He understood.
His mouth returned to her neck, gentler now. He kissed her once beneath the ear, once along the curve of her jaw, and then rested his cheek against her temple while she cried without sound.
The room seemed to hold the grief with them. The air-conditioning cycled off, leaving behind a silence so complete that Christina could hear both of them breathing. Somewhere outside, a vehicle moved along one of the service roads, its headlights passing briefly between the trees before disappearing. No one knocked. No one called. The launch complex continued its preparations without needing anything from them for a few more hours.
Christina covered Reid’s hand with both of hers.
“I thought I would feel different tonight,” she said.
Her voice was quiet and rough from not using it.
Reid did not ask what she meant. He waited, his mouth near her hair.
“I thought there would be more of the mission in it,” she continued. “I thought I’d be standing here looking at the Moon and thinking about ascent, or insertion, or everything we’ve worked for. I thought I would be impatient for morning.”
His thumb moved once beneath her hands.
“What are you thinking about instead?” He whispered.
She looked at their reflection because turning toward him felt, for the moment, like more than she could manage.
“You.”
The word did not sound dramatic when she said it. It sounded tired, which made it more honest.
Reid’s eyes closed in the glass.
Christina felt the movement of his chest as he drew in a breath and held it. When he released it, his forehead came to rest against the side of her head.
“I’ve spent the entire day trying not to think about you,” he said.
She gave a small nod. “Did it work?”
“No.”
There was no humor in the answer.
His arms tightened, and she let herself be held by him without trying to soften what was passing between them.
“At dinner, you were across the table from me,” he continued. “Jeremy was talking about the weather, Victor was pretending he could eat another dessert, and everyone kept asking whether we were ready. I kept looking at your hands because they were under the table and no one else could see them.”
Christina remembered curling her fingers into the fabric of her trousers each time someone used the word tomorrow.
“You knew I was nervous.”
“I knew you were trying not to show it.”
“I wasn’t nervous about launch.”
“I know.”
That was the cruelty of him. He knew.
He had learned the differences between all her silences. He knew when she was concentrating, when she was angry, when she was frightened, and when she was simply tired of other people. He knew the way her shoulders changed when she was carrying something she would not say. He knew which version of her smile was real.
Tomorrow, he would still know all of those things.
They would simply have to pretend that knowledge belonged only to the crew.
Christina turned inside his arms.
The movement placed them face-to-face without separating them. Reid kept one hand at her waist while the other rose to the back of her neck. Her own hands settled against his sides, then moved restlessly, first gripping his shirt near his ribs and then sliding down until her fingers caught in the belt loops of his jeans.
It was an old habit between them.
She had first done it in a hotel room in Cologne, reaching for the nearest part of him when he had stood to leave too soon. After that, the gesture had returned whenever she wanted him closer without having to ask. He had always allowed himself to be drawn in.
Tonight he looked down at her hands and covered one of them with his.
“I noticed the first time you did that,” he said.
Christina’s mouth trembled. “I know you did.”
“You pretended you hadn’t.”
“I was trying to pretend a lot of things then.”
“So was I.”
She pulled gently, and he stepped closer until his hips met hers.
The contact made both of them still.
There was a history in the ease of their bodies together, evidence that this was not a first confession or a first touch. They did not need to discover where hands belonged or how close was too close. Reid’s palm settled naturally against the curve of her hip. Christina’s fingers moved into the hair at the nape of his neck, where she knew he liked to be touched. When he lowered his face, she turned toward him before his mouth reached her skin.
He kissed the edge of her jaw.
The kiss traveled slowly, not as seduction but as remembrance. He pressed his lips beneath her ear and then along her cheek, pausing near the corner of her mouth. His hand held the back of her head with a tenderness that made the gesture feel almost unbearable.
Christina drew in a trembling breath.
“This is our last night,” she said.
Reid’s eyes opened.
She had not intended to say it so plainly, but anything softer would have been dishonest.
He remained close enough that their noses nearly touched. “I know.”
The answer did not reassure her. She had not wanted reassurance.
She looked past him toward the carefully folded clothes on the chair.
“Tomorrow, we become whatever they need us to be.”
“The crew.”
“The mission.”
“History, if we do it right.”
She looked back at him. “And after?”
His hand moved slowly from her hip to the small of her back.
“After, everyone gets a piece of it.”
She nodded because that was exactly what she had been trying not to imagine.
They had spent the last several years inside a world built around four people and one objective. The world had been demanding and exhausting, but it had also been sealed. Their schedules had justified every hour together. No one questioned shared dinners after simulations, late-night calls about procedures, or the way they found each other in every room. Proximity had been required. Dependence had been encouraged. They had been instructed to learn one another thoroughly enough to recognize a problem before it was spoken.
Somewhere inside all that sanctioned closeness, they had created a life no one else could see.
It had not felt temporary while they were living it.
“It was a bubble,” Reid said.
Christina’s fingers tightened at the back of his neck.
He looked toward the window, though his body stayed pressed to hers. “Training made it feel like we could keep doing this forever. We were always going somewhere together, always preparing for the next thing. There was never an ending because there was always another simulation on the calendar.”
“Another trip.”
“Another review.”
“Another night in some hotel no one would remember.”
She lowered her gaze.
Reid touched his forehead to hers.
“We could tell ourselves it wasn’t a real life because it belonged to the mission,” he said. “That made it safe.”
Christina felt tears gathering again.
“And now the mission is about to become real.”
He nodded.
“We launch tomorrow. We come home. The hatch opens, and the bubble goes with it.”
The image was so exact that she had to close her eyes.
She imagined the capsule in the water, recovery teams moving around them, the inside of Orion suddenly filled with daylight and voices. She imagined Reid being pulled out ahead of her or after her, their bodies passed into different hands. She imagined seeing him through a crowd and not being able to reach for him.
When she opened her eyes, he was watching her.
“I don’t want to lose this,” she whispered.
His face changed, though he tried to keep it from doing so.
“You won’t lose what happened.”
“That isn’t the same thing.”
“No.”
She tightened both arms around him, drawing him against her until she could no longer see his expression. Reid held her with equal force. His hand moved over the back of her head, fingers sinking into her curls, while the other pressed firmly against her waist.
Christina could feel both of them trying to contain the same impossible instinct: to hold tightly enough that tomorrow could not separate them.
“We need to stop,” she said into his shoulder.
The sentence was muffled by his shirt, but he heard it.
His hand paused in her hair.
She felt him swallow.
“For the mission,” she continued, because she needed the words to be complete even if saying them hurt. “Not only while we’re gone. After we come back too. We can’t carry this into the spacecraft and expect it not to change something.”
“It already changes everything.”
“I know, but it cannot change how we work. It cannot change the crew.”
“It won’t.”
She pulled back enough to look at him. “You can’t promise that if we keep doing this.”
Reid was quiet.
She watched the truth settle over him.
There had never been carelessness between them. Even when they had first crossed the line, it had happened after years of restraint and months of admitting in private what neither would allow to exist publicly. They had made rules. They had broken some and protected others. They had convinced themselves that because their work remained untouched, what happened behind closed doors could be held apart from the mission.
Tomorrow, there would be nowhere private to retreat.
There would be ten days of shared air, shared risk, and nowhere to look that did not contain the other person.
When they returned, the world would be watching for signs of what the Moon had done to them.
Christina lifted a hand to his face.
Her thumb moved beneath his eye, where his lashes had begun to shine.
“I need you to be my crewmate,” she said.
Reid leaned into her palm.
“You have me.”
“I need that to be enough.”
His eyes closed briefly.
“For you?”
“For both of us.”
He opened them again, and she saw that he understood what she was asking him to surrender.
They stood together in the center of the room, surrounded by objects prepared for morning. The neatly folded clothes. The timeline. The shoes. Her wedding rings on the desk. His sweatshirt around her body. Everything seemed to testify to a different obligation.
Reid turned his face and pressed his mouth into her palm.
Christina’s breath broke.
He kissed the center of her hand, then each of her knuckles with a slow care that made tears spill freely down her face. He had done this before, usually without ceremony. On flights, in hotel rooms, once in the back of a crew van when everyone else had been asleep. He liked her hands because they were always moving, always solving something, always reaching for the next task. In private, he held them still.
She curled her fingers around his.
“I don’t regret you,” she said.
His mouth remained against her knuckles for another moment before he answered.
“I would do all of it again.”
“Even this?”
“Especially this.”
A sound left her that was too unsteady to be laughter and too soft to be a sob.
Reid rose and kissed the wet track beneath her eye.
Then her cheek.
Then the corner of her mouth.
Christina held his shirt in both fists and waited there, breathing against him, until restraint became more painful than surrender.
She kissed him.
There was no surprise in the contact. They had known one another’s mouths long enough that the first movement felt like continuation rather than beginning. Reid’s hand came to her jaw, his thumb resting beneath her ear, and Christina tilted her face into the kiss without hesitation.
They moved slowly because neither of them wanted to lose any part of it.
The kiss deepened in measured increments, a soft pressure becoming firmer, a pause for breath becoming another return. Christina’s hands slipped beneath the back of his shirt and found the warmth of his skin. Reid drew her closer at the waist, his palm spreading over her lower back beneath the sweatshirt she had taken from him so long ago.
She felt him smile faintly against her mouth when her fingers caught his belt loop again.
The expression vanished almost as quickly as it came. There was no lightness available to them tonight, only recognition.
Reid kissed her jaw, and Christina tipped her head back. His mouth moved down the side of her neck, tracing familiar places with the quiet confidence of someone who had learned her over time. She held the back of his head and closed her eyes, listening to the uneven rhythm of his breathing.
Every touch seemed to contain two moments at once: the present one, warm and immediate, and the future memory of it.
When he kissed the place beneath her ear, she began crying again.
Reid stopped.
Christina tightened her hand in his hair before he could lift his head.
“Don’t,” she whispered.
He remained still against her neck. “You’re crying.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want to make this harder.”
She turned her face until her cheek rested against his hair.
“You aren’t making it harder. It is hard.”
His arms closed around her again.
For a while they stood that way, holding one another with their faces hidden, letting the grief move through them without trying to turn it into something manageable.
Eventually Christina drew back and touched his face with both hands.
“I love you,” she said.
The words were quiet, but they did not tremble.
Reid’s eyes closed.
She had told him before. Not often, and never casually. The sentence had always seemed too large for the spaces where they were allowed to use it. Tonight it entered the room and changed the air.
When he opened his eyes again, his expression was so unguarded that she nearly looked away.
“I love you too,” he said. “More than I know what to do with.”
She brought his forehead to hers.
“We do nothing with it.”
His breath caught.
“For the mission,” she added, because she could not leave him alone inside the cruelty of the sentence. “We put it somewhere safe, and we do our jobs, and when we come back…”
She stopped.
Neither of them knew what came after that.
Reid’s thumb moved over her cheek.
“When we come back, we keep the promise.”
Christina nodded, although the motion hurt.
“No more hotel rooms.”
“No more finding reasons to stay after everyone else leaves.”
“No more two knocks.”
Her face crumpled then, the grief arriving before she could stop it.
Reid pulled her back against him and kissed her with an urgency that had been absent before. It was not rough, but it carried all the desperation they had kept contained: every goodbye they had delayed, every future moment in which they would have to stand close without touching.
Christina met him with equal need.
Her hands moved into his hair and held him there. His palms traveled over her back, her waist, the curve of her hip, touching her as though familiarity itself could become a form of preservation. They kissed until breathing required them to separate, and even then Reid kept his forehead against hers, both of them drawing air in short, unsteady breaths.
Christina looked toward the bed.
The white coverlet remained smooth except for the shallow indentation where she had sat earlier to refold her clothes. A single pillow had been turned upright against the headboard. Beyond it, the window still framed the Moon.
She took Reid’s hand.
He looked down at their joined fingers and then back at her face.
“This is the last time,” she said.
He did not make her repeat it.
“I know.”
There were tears on his face now, though neither of them acknowledged them. Christina brushed one away with her thumb and then kissed the place where it had been.
They moved toward the bed slowly, not because either was uncertain, but because neither wanted to rush the final distance. Reid kept one hand at her waist. Christina held the front of his shirt and walked backward, watching him as the room narrowed around them.
At the edge of the mattress, she stopped.
He touched her jaw and looked at her with the same steady attention he gave everything that mattered, as though there were no launch, no Moon, no history waiting beyond the window.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “you’re my crewmate.”
She covered his hand with hers.
“Tomorrow, you’re mine too.”
“And tonight?”
Her eyes filled again.
“Tonight, stay.”
Reid bent and kissed her and lowered them onto the bed.
Outside, the Moon remained suspended over the launch complex, bright enough to cast its reflection across the glass. Tomorrow they would leave Earth together and begin the journey that had shaped nearly every day of the last four years.
Tonight, while the room was still dark and the world had not yet claimed them, they held on to the life they had built inside the waiting.