DEFYING GRAVITY – JEN/ZOE

When California Becomes an Island in the Ocean

sakuracorr

Title: When California Becomes an Island in the Ocean

Author: sakuracorr

Pairing: Jen/Zoe

Rating: Light R

Disclaimer: Not mine. Not at all.

Summary: If time travel were possible, what would Zoe change?

When California Becomes an Island in the Ocean

sakuracorr

1.

Dylan tells her about a theory of time travel that involves spinning backwards around the Earth faster than the speed of light, kind of like Superman, and at the moment she doesn’t think anything about it. It isn’t until later that she realizes the implications.

When Zoe was ten, she broke her leg, so she didn’t get to go on a trip. That was the trip her former best friend, Kayla, kissed her former crush, Ryan. She was devastated, as ten year olds are apt to be very easily. But what if she’d gone?

Part of her wonders because at fifteen, she’d have an argument at the back of the school with Kayla. “I think I did it because I like you,” Kayla would whisper exactly fifteen seconds before Zoe got her first kiss from a woman.

She loses her virginity to Patrick, who loved her much longer than she loved him. Five years after that she sleeps with Amy, and when they wake up in the morning, they know it was a mistake.

Ten years after that the closest she’s ever gotten to a real relationship packs her bags and leaves because women who want to go into space and still haven’t solidified their sexuality are slightly inaccessible. Her name was Maggie, and the thing that finally made her leave had the name Jason.

A few years after that, while drunk, she decides to sleep with Maddox Donner, and that part is a sore, sordid history she doesn’t get into much. Then she ends up on a spaceship with him, but she’s still a space woman, she never wanted him, and she’s still entirely too inaccessible.

If that doesn’t make someone think about the what ifs, Zoe isn’t sure what would.

2.

“I’m in love with Rollie,” Jen says, flat out. “I just wanted you to know that.”

“I know that,” Zoe responds, and she does, somewhere inside of her.

The first kiss is awkward, and they kind of tilt their heads to one side, before trying the other side. Jen finally grabs her face and does it.

“Am I your first?” Zoe asks between kisses, knowing there will be a telltale blush of red across her nose. “Woman I mean?”

“Cute,” Jen says, looking down at her for a minute. Zippers are unzipped and clasps are undone. Jen looks at her again. “But no.”

3.

“Sure, we’ll go back to Earth, and all there will be is monkeys,” Paula says sarcastically.

Dylan corrects her. “Apes, technically. And California will be an island.”

“Tectonic plates,” Zoe throws in, because that’s her part. She’s the geologist.

If she’d had the baby, Zoe knows she’d be on Earth right now hating herself, resenting it, or maybe there would have been an adoption, and she’d drink herself to sleep on lost chances. It would seem like regret is something more aligned with an abortion, but sometimes it isn’t the case.

She doesn’t think about it much anymore. She doesn’t think about Maggie anymore. Things gone are things gone, and what really would there be to do about it.

“I’d worry more about global warming than California,” Jen interjects herself into the argument. She’s just come in from lunch, and she seems to have some cube of some freeze dried food in her hand. It disappears into her mouth. “Species you now know well are going to be fairytales to our grandchildren.”

In some other life, Zoe is sure that she’d settle down, start a family, and that Zoe might spend her life teaching chimps to communicate with symbols in the rainforest. She’s not that Zoe. She likes rocks, and not just the pretty ones that go on gold bands or chains. She likes that even the unmovable and unchangeable can be shaped slowly into something completely new.

California can become an island. New York can disappear into the ocean, and one day they will find it and wonder if maybe people lived under the sea.

4.

They’ve just both come, and Jen says, “If I wasn’t an astronaut or a biologist I’d smoke right now.”

They lie together in Jen’s bunk. Zoe smiles at nothing in particular. She rolls back onto her side and curls into Jen’s body. As weird as it sounds, sex in the air gets old pretty fast, so she’s content to do it the old fashioned way.

There will be a good five years left with Jen before they go home. Zoe figures that’s more than she has a right to ask for, considering that it’s still a good chunk of the time Rollie will ever get to have with Jen. Still, Zoe feels increasingly resentful that there’s already an end, and that she doesn’t get to cause it, because at least if she had the chance, she could change. Now, now it’d just be fruitless.

“What are you thinking about?” Jen asks, running her finger over the worry lines on Zoe’s forehead. Zoe can feel her skin relax.

“If it were just me and you–”

“Don’t,” Jen says. She doesn’t turn away, but her eyes are resolutely not on Zoe. “I’m not going to feel guilty. This is what it is, alright?”

If she had really loved Maggie, would she have left her to go to space? Would she have thought about space at all?

5.

If they got back to Earth and just spun around it wildly for a few days, could they start this over? Would Jen be six more years older before she stepped off the shuttle to greet her husband?

Zoe would be happy just to watch these six years play again, like a movie she knows won’t end well but that she watches all the same. Unable to tear her eyes away.

If she’d met Jen, back when she was just starting to realize what she’d wanted, would she have stayed for her? If Jen were a man, would she have left Maggie for her? Would she have stayed home and done dishes and waited for the baby knowing at that point she could have been seeing something bigger than Earth could ever be?

If Rollie had gotten on board, would she have gently drifted into herself until what was Zoe was even farther away from everyone than she had ever been before? So that when people met her, she’d been like the light of a star, some kind of reflection of something long dead.

Jen pulls her closer, and their bodies are so close, she can’t tell where she ends and Jen begins. Their mouths meet, their breaths mingle, and for a moment there is no Zoe, and there is no Jen. What there is, she can’t be sure.

If they got back to Earth, and it was gone, Zoe knows she’d only feel the twinges of mourning, like a kid leaving for college. A goodbye laced with anticipation of something else.

When she gets off board, her mother will be there waiting, and all she’ll be able to think is, “What now?”

Now, though, Venus is bigger than Earth outside the window. Jen’s breath tickles against her ear. “We’re here, Zoe, we’re here.” Zoe can fill the thrill racing through her, and all she can think is yes. Yes.

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