DEFYING GRAVITY – JEN/ZOE

Moments Previously Restricted to Encyclopedias

sakuracorr

FIC: Moments Previously Restricted to Encyclopedias – R – by sakuracorr

Title: Moments Previously Restricted to Encyclopedias

Author: sakuracorr

Pairing: Jen/Zoe

Rating: Light R

Disclaimer: Not mine. Not at all.

Summary: Some discoveries are worth the journey.

Moments Previously Restricted to Encyclopedias

sakuracorr

There’s a poem Zoe doesn’t remember. The lines say something about a person who’s yet to be discovered. They phrase it something like “the cave never explored, the garden never walked through, the star that can’t be seen in the night sky.” It takes her over a year, but she finally spots a star like that, just barely echoed light in the distance. Somewhere with a huge microscope, she’s sure it is a tiny, tiny dot in the sky, so maybe it doesn’t count, but it counts to her.

Jen’s throat tastes slightly salty. There are hollows to it, pulses, and warm patches of skin. Her tongue finds all of this while her fingers are busy in other places, other places Zoe has yet to taste… but she wants to.

There were undivided cells, tiny rabbits that will never be rabbits, and an echoing, ‘what would they be like?’ that for Zoe isn’t about rabbits at all. And those things can pass as quickly as it takes her to smile. For some reason she can’t put her finger on. Letting it fade until she can’t see it anymore is easy. It makes the moment feel light.

Zoe brought plain comfortable underclothes, plain white bras and panties that her grandmother still wouldn’t wear but are nothing special. Jen, though, has an assortment of things she brought for six years with a person who isn’t there except the occasional chatter in their ears. There are people who look for the person they want to be with, but even those people, desperate in their search as they can be, are closer to that other person than Jen is to Rollie.

“Do you get lonely?” They are busy being good scientists, and the method is calming. The routine is calming. They feel most at home there, emerged in fact finding that will never end, tireless in their quest for something solidly true that they know they’ll never find.

“Don’t ask,” Jen says. After a moment, she adds. “Of course I get lonely.”

Zoe never had doll houses or baby dolls. She had a package of glow in the dark stars that she glued to her ceiling and a cardboard spaceship that been painted a sloppy black and white. She had science books. She remembers nothing else.

Jen’s body has its own reactions, and she takes her time to discover them all. Maps out the skin of her stomach as if she were detailing the surface of a planet. Remembers, because someday she knows she’ll forget, or she’ll need to forget, or she’ll want to forget, and whichever it is, she wants to be prepared.

When Jen slept with Ted, she’d held her guilt like she’d put it in a jar to observe later, just another fetal pig for her lifelong biology class. Zoe had felt it though, just at the edges, where she keeps her own guilt. They catch each other’s eyes sometimes, and it passes between them. The recognition is itself comfortable, because they both know it will pass, fleeting as the life of embryos in test tubes. Whatever all those things can be is stilted. Natural selection.

“Oh god, Zoe,” Jen says, and they kiss, and it’s sloppy and needy, and Jen’s mouth has that lingering minty fluoride taste to it. Six years without a dentist. Imagine the cavities.

She’s already came with Zoe knelt between her legs, and now Zoe’s fingers go over places again, see reactions, and she can remember the taste, not minty fluoride, but somehow more organic. Jen comes again, eyes closed, and Zoe wonders if she sees stars, but in this case stars would be the red blood of light filtering through her eyelids and maybe something else. Jen is the biologist, but Zoe thinks she knows enough about this.

They were eating alone because they both didn’t feel like being around people. “Come to bed with me,” Jen says, not looking at her.

“Alright,” Zoe agrees.

The rest doesn’t need to be said. And the day it does, Zoe knows she won’t be ready to hear it.

When they first see Europa together they hold hands, fingers lightly entwined, and no one says anything. Everyone is too busy thinking the same thing. This is the closest looking thing to Earth that we’ve seen in a long time.

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