Work Text:
“Whoops.”
“Whoops? What do you mean, whoops?”
“Nothing.”
“Dude.”
“Nothing!”
“Show me the control panel.”
The teen sitting at the control panel hunched their shoulders. The dials and lights on the panel were calm, not betraying anything, but the way Marcus was speedily playing their hands over the various knobs and buttons said otherwise.
“I’ve got it,” they insisted to their best friend. “It’s cool, we’re cool, everything’s cool.”
Quartz huffed in disbelief from where she was sitting on the other side of the small space ship, reading through a notebook that was somehow spotless. It was incredible, some part of Marcus thought, that she kept her books so pristine when she was always eating while reading. It didn’t make sense. She loved eating and drinking while she did any intellectual work, especially reading and homework, which was one of the reasons that they were going to the restaurant district to work on studying for the exams coming up. It was only one light-jump away from the university station, with a short stretch of free-cruising after the jump to get there, and it was the perfect place to find a corner table in some random café and enjoy muffins and coffee for hours while plowing through classwork. It was a good plan. This was because it was Quartz’s plan. Quartz, who was eating an apple that she’d found somewhere and reading back through her magically spotless notes. Quartz, who was still suspicious.
“Bro,” she said.
“What.”
“You’re allowed to ask for help, you know.”
Marcus stopped what they were doing and turned around in their swivelly captain’s chair. They loved their swivelly captain’s chair. It was the perfect thing for moving around and staying focused even while they guided the spaceship.
“We should find a restaurant with swivel chairs,” they said before remembering that they’d already been having a conversation and that chairs were irrelevant.
Quartz nodded easily. “Okay. But why’d you go ‘whoops.’”
Marcus shrugged. “It’s no problem. I’ll fix it.”
Quartz put her pencil in the spot where she’d been reading and stood up from the table she’d folded out of the wall in the back of the spaceship. They’d found that when Marcus was in the captain’s seat, it was better for both of them if Quartz sat closer to the back; she still got the view through the window, but she was far away enough from Marcus’s driving at the front of the room that she wasn’t constantly tempted to check on them and correct what she called “mistakes” and they called “friendly chaos” and “style.” Less stressful for both of them. It was a small room, though, and was clean and shiny and metallic and totally reflected sound, which was why it didn’t work for them to hide their “whoops.”
Marcus swivelled back around to face the control panel, but they could sense it as Quartz walked over to loom over their shoulder, looking over the instruments. She was tall—like, six feet even without her heels—which meant that she was good at looming.
“You’re good at looming,” they told her.
She hesitated. “I think that’s a compliment?”
“Totally.”
She puffed up a little. “Then thank you!”
“No problem!” They had given a successful compliment! Excellent.
She moved back to looming, then pointed at the dial whose needle had started swinging wildly. “Bro.”
“I know.”
“You know?”
“I know.”
She watched as they finagled with the controls again. Outside the window, the stars wheeled madly around them. It would have been a dizzying sight if the artificial gravity on the ship wasn’t so stable. Marcus quickly realized that she was waiting for them to admit that they needed her help, and they smiled wryly at themself.
The needle was still refusing to cooperate. This was bad. That needle indicated the ship’s alignment with the standard plane, which allowed most ships in the area to be roughly oriented similarly, with the same idea of up and down, so the needle going crazy meant that they were basically speedily rotating like a rotisserie chicken as they hurdled through space.
That was how their captain’s license teacher had explained it to Marcus, anyway. The analogy made them hungry. Rotisserie chicken was good. Well, not as good as, like, maybe a pizza, or definitely their mum’s homemade casserole, or Quartz’s dad’s recipe for bitter melon, but better than fruit salad from the cafeteria. That fruit salad was also good, but it had something wrong with it. It was too sweet to taste like that naturally, but Marcus liked eating it at the end of the lunch as a sort of palette cleanser.
“Palette cleanser.” They’d learned that phrase from a novel they’d read in fifth grade, the one with a golden egg full of clock gears on the front. There was a character who was a painter, and he’d made some pun about how he needed a palette cleanser after painting gory scenes all day before he could do a couple’s portrait.
“Palette cleanser,” they said out loud, “is a great phrase to fit in the mouth.”
“Are you focused?”
They jumped. They’d forgotten that Quartz was standing right behind them. “Oops. Uh…”
Quartz snorted fondly. “Zoned out, I know.”
Marcus jerked their hands off the panel and stuck them in the air. “Alright, alright, I give up, your turn.”
“Mm-hm. Scooch over.”
Marcus shamelessly gave up the seat for Quartz to take over. They knew when they were beat.
Quartz slung herself into the seat and cracked her knuckles. “Alright, what’ve we got here… oh, look, it’s just this. You’ve got the calibration for the side thrusters turned off.”
Marcus leaned in, and yup, she was right. “Crap. How did I even do that?”
“Probably got caught on your massive sweater sleeves,” she pointed out with a grin. Marcus made a noise of protest. She stretched and stood up. “But that was it.”
In the time it took Quartz to stand up, Marcus got distracted by how her glittery the pendant on her necklace was. It was made of glass and full of some unidentifiable liquid, throughout which floated a school of tiny fish-shaped bead things, like she had scooped up some of a coral reef and shrunk it for jewellery. It was pretty cool. They thought it would also be cool if it was full of bird-shaped bead things, with the liquid acting as the sky.
Oh, what if they painted clouds on the back of the necklace? Then it would be like the fish were flying! “Flying fish” sounded like the name of an indie punk band, or maybe an early model of the airplane. If they ever started up their own line of spaceships, maybe they should use that name—that’d probably be better than their earlier idea of “Iron Craft,” right? Well, unless they planned for military contracts, because the military would probably want something that sounded tough. But—
“Military contracts are kind of a weird way to get business, aren’t they?” Marcus blurted out. “I mean, I’ve heard that they’re really profitable because you can charge higher prices because the government can afford it, but I don’t know if that’s true, and anyway why would you want the government in your business?” They stopped themself.
Quartz paused to think about it, squinting into the distance as she turned it over in her mind. “I mean, they’re kind of weird. I don’t think I’d want to work with our government, anyway. Too much colonialism. I guess it makes sense from a business perspective, though.”
Marcus didn’t know how to apologize for the interruption to the conversation, because they never really knew how to apologize for their interruptions, but they were glad that Quartz went along with it, and they valued listening to her thoughts on the topic. Instead of saying all that, though, they just added, “Tony Stark had contracts with the government, and it haunted him.”
She snorted. “Yeah, no kidding. He nearly got blown up.”
Now Marcus was thinking about Tony Stark, one of their favourite characters to think about. “Tony Stark is trans.”
“Obviously.” Quartz put their hands on Marcus’s shoulders and guided them back into the captain’s chair. “Gotta love those trans headcanons.”
“Yes!” Marcus let themself be guided and started looking over the instruments to make sure they were still on course even as their brain whirred with excitement over Tony Stark. “Especially about Tony! Oh, dude, I saw this totally awesome fanart the other day, with like the top surgery scars and everything? I think I have it somewhere—I could send it to you if you want.”
When they turned to check her reaction, they saw that Quartz was quietly laughing at them.
“Hey!”
“Sorry, sorry, it’s just that—did you take your meds today?”
“...uh, well—”
“Great job, genius.”
“I know, right.” Still half-watching the control board, they dug around in their satchel for their ADHD meds and their water bottle. “But okay, after I do that, would you be interested in the fanart?”
They found the water bottle pretty quick, but where’d they put—nope, there it was. They grabbed their meds from the side pocket and quickly washed it down, then checked Quartz for her reaction.
Quartz smiled at them with genuine delight. “I’d love to see it sometime, but right now we need to get to the café and study for exams, remember?”
“Right, right.” Marcus ducked their head and ran an index finger around the texture of a dial, letting the motion carry some of their embarrassment. They hadn’t meant to get so excited so fast, or to distract themself and Quartz from the study plans.
Quartz loomed over them again, this time at Marcus’s side so they could see her face. “So how about we drive the spaceship safely, find a place to park it, pick out a café—hopefully one with swivel chairs—and then you can show me the fanart and talk to me about headcanons while we’re waiting in line to order something. That sound good?”
The whole world instantly brightened, and Marcus beamed and flashed a thumbs-up. “Sure! That’s a great plan. I love that plan.”
Quartz made a thumbs-up back, similarly elated. “Fantastic. I’m gonna go back to Chemistry, then.”
Marcus mockingly gasped in horror. “Gross.”
“I know right.” She rolled her eyes. “Mr. Stutzman, I’m telling you. Anyway, don’t crash.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Marcus hunched back over the controls and let Quartz reclaim her spot with her notebook, but then glanced back quickly one more time. “Hey, bro?”
She looked up from stoichiometry. “Yeah, bro?”
They didn’t know how to say everything. “Thanks.”
A delighted smile. “No problem.”