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dryad-of-the-dogwood · 11 months

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The Grav Jump Tango Chapter 10: The Bridges We’ve Burned Pairing: Sam Coe x Spacefarer

Excerpt below the cut for main story spoilers

Much to Cora’s disappointment, the second temple hadn’t made Cass’s gravity powers stronger after all. Instead, it had given her the ability to create some strange… bubble of clean air, which was an odd thing to try to connect to the gravity-related nature of the Artifacts and temples themselves. Sam had joked it would come in handy if she ever accidentally spaced herself. Cass had looked thoughtful and pointed out that it could save someone with a suit leak, too. Not that either of those things were particularly likely, but it couldn’t hurt to have in her back pocket just in case.

Things settled into a kind of routine, after that. Sometimes Sarah would stay in the Lodge and Andreja or Barrett would join in for the surveys Vlad set for Cass, but every time she’d extend an invite to Sam and Cora, too. A few times they stopped a while in Cydonia or Akila, to shop or hunt down rumors. Often as not, Cass would find someone like that little girl in Akila City who she couldn’t say no to helping out—including another kid who had wanted help hanging drawings of a space frog, of all things. He’d expected that one once the girl pulled out the puppy dog eyes at least, and Cora had been over the moon when Cass sneaked out one of the posters for her room in the Lodge.

Their most recent visit had seen Cass first break out her mining laser to help the crew meet their quotas, and then somehow managed to snowball into her leveraging her background in corporate espionage to get them new mining equipment, talk down a miner turned attempted thief, and ended with her handing evidence to the head of security that cost the governor of Cydonia his job. Personally, Sam didn’t think the murderer deserved the dignity of stepping down before he stood trial, but with bureaucracy there was never a real win, just a mildly less distasteful solution.

They’d been on downtime since then, and Cass seemed to keep herself busy in the city a lot when they were on Jemison, so it had been a couple of days since he’d more than passed her having dinner. Not that he was keeping an eye out or anything, but her absence from the Lodge seemed oddly obvious already, despite what a relatively short time she’d been there. Nobody to referee Mattias and Noel except Barrett without her, after all, and his version of refereeing was usually more like goading them both.

So Sam had made sure Cora was tucked in—with her reading lamp on and some dusty novel in her hands, naturally, but tucked in nonetheless—and then gone to check on his ship to avoid the latest disagreement over the nature of the divine, or whatever Mattias was most recently convinced the Artifacts really were. Sam hadn’t taken his ship into the ’field in a couple of weeks by that point, but he didn’t feel like trying to squeeze in an evening departure slot so he settled for giving the drive a little TLC. Until Lillian called, and then he was glad he was far out of Cora’s earshot.

That conversation had gone about as well as it ever did, especially after Lillian tried berating Sam for putting Cora in danger again. Apparently, based off something she had heard from Pryce in Neon about Cass. Like Lillian had any damn ground to stand on as far as protecting Cora was concerned, when she couldn’t even manage to show up for visits. Whether Jaylen’s info was true, Sam didn’t know or care, because it didn’t much matter. He’d seen by now how high keeping Cora busy enough to stay safe ranked on Cass’s priority list, and also how much having someone to talk to who loved books as much as she did meant to his little girl. Cass had volunteered to stay away entirely rather than risk being a bad influence, for fuck’s sake. Those were the important things as far as he was concerned.

Sam was still fuming when he made it back to the Lodge sometime around midnight, glad that at least everyone else should be asleep. Maybe he could get in a few rounds on the punching bag until he was too exhausted to be angry. But despite the hour, Sam heard a glass clinking as he came up the stairs. He paused on the landing and then let his feet carry on past the hall. He was curious to see who might have stayed up for a nightcap, and then only more so when he realized it was Cass. He’d never seen her in the bar before, but she was pouring what appeared to be at least her second glass.

“Long night?” he asked cautiously as he approached. She seemed like the type who when she did drink, might prefer to do so alone.

Cass didn’t exactly startle but her head did snap toward him unusually quickly, so he thought he might have still caught her off guard. The tension in her shoulders relaxed fast enough though. Maybe she preferred having her late night drink witnessed by him rather than Sarah. He knew he sure would, in her place.

“For you too, it looks like,” she said, taking a sip. Sam would’ve liked to have been able to say his eyes didn’t focus on the way the tip of her tongue ran over her lips afterward, but that would’ve been a lie. Still failing at not paying attention to those small, tantalizing little motions, no matter how many times he reminded himself he should. She frowned once she got a look at him. “You all right?”

“Well, managed not to break my neck trippin’ over another one of Cora’s experiments, so I’d say I’m ahead so far for today,” Sam evaded, though he still didn’t take his eyes off her. “Have I just missed every other time you’ve come up here, or is there a special occasion?”

Cass hummed noncommittally, taking another drink and then staring down into the glass as she swirled the liquid around inside. “I wouldn’t exactly call it a special occasion. More like a nice trip through purgatory, with a non-zero chance of a detour to hell.”

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