Victoire Fourier's relationship with space
Warning(s): major character death and suicide warning!! be careful with yourself
also I don't format on Tumblr I'm sorry if it sucks... I'll fix it... probably.
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Space was always the answer for Victoire.
She grew up in the upper class of Brussels. The only daughter of a retired ballerina and an engineer for the Euro Space Center - she was always sure of exactly what she wanted to do, and how she was going to achieve it. Even if she never needed much (she had a butler, after all), she always lacked a steady familial dynamic. When her father wasn’t around, Victoire and her twin brother Luc didn’t speak a word to each other, and the only time their mother spoke to either of them was to berate them or compare the two.
However, competing with her brother all throughout her schooling didn’t bother her. They had been competing since birth, herself and Luc, always fighting to see who would bring back higher test scores or better book reports in grade school. Her teachers always spoke of them with high regard saying that their fondest memories of the two were how driven the two were, even at the extent of their own relationship.
Even though Victoire didn’t get along with her mother, she was her father’s carbon copy. While Victoire and Luc both got their looks from their mother - with their light blonde hair and sharp cheekbones, Victoire got her love for everything and everyone around her from her father. She may have never gotten along with her mother and the unachievable expectations she laid down for Victoire and Luc, but she and her father were inseparable. All throughout her childhood, he would take her to work, letting her run around the space center and gawk at the shuttles. That’s where her love for space was born, being nine years old, and her father taking her to work. She even got to help her father repair a test shuttle when it broke. (Was all she did hold the roll of Kapton tape for him? Yes, but that doesn’t matter).
Victoire and Luc both graduated from secondary school when they were sixteen, while grieving the death of their father a few months prior. Victoire had gotten early admission to The University of Oxford, majoring in astrophysics. She completed her bachelors by the time she was nineteen, and got her masters and PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She hadn’t spoken a word to Luc since their graduation. He was at Cambridge, she assumed, probably getting his degree in aerospace engineering, just like their father.
While at MIT, she read a paper, from a graduate student her age at Tsinghua University in China. His name was Kuan Hui, and Victoire was determined to meet him one day to ask about his work with theoretical astrophysics, rather than her own observational astrophysics. So many times before graduating, she had to ask herself if this was even worth it, why she was even doing this in the first place. However, it’s like she always said.
Space was always the answer for her.
Within months of graduating with her PhD, Victoire was contacted by Goddard Futaristics, having come across many of her papers and even talks she gave in undergrad, impressed by her young age in such a complex field. Going on a space exploration mission was never on her radar, never something she was interested in. However, she knew she would have regretted it if she didn’t accept this opportunity. So, she ended up in Cape Canaveral, Florida, having lunch with her future crew. Her future crew, who happened to include none other than Dr. Kuan Hui himself.
Desperate to try and impress him, she tried playing it smooth. However, when Dr. Hui told a joke that caused the whole table to laugh – even Samuel Lambert, who Victoire could already tell would be a stickler for rules – she choked on her coffee, and had to walk away to collect herself. Dr. Hui, or Kuan, as he assured her she could call him, joined her outside a few moments later to make sure she was alright, and they were never seen apart after that.
The mission went on fine for a while. However, things started taking a turn for the worse. Mason Fisher died first, during repairs on the outside of the ship he was caught in a meteor shower. Victoire tried not to blame herself, but she wasn’t trained to deal with crew deaths like anyone with a military background. She and Kuan were just scientists. However, she chalked it up to a horrible accident, and tried to continue on with the mission.
Lambert was next, a mystery sickness that had spread through his body quickly. Captain Lovelace took it the hardest. Victoire stayed out of the way for the weeks following, trying to figure out how to get them home after the damage from the meteor shower that killed Fisher.
The mission was supposed to end in January, but every time they tried to contact Canaveral, they got no response. So, there they stayed.
Six months later, Kuan died. Victoire sat in his bunk for days, not wanting him to be alone- not wanting him to die alone. She didn’t know what happened to him with the box, it seemed so long ago- but she knew how it affected him, how he now struggled to be alone.
Victoire never handled grief well, so she threw herself into her work, determined to get them home. She didn’t expect to figure it out so fast. Victoire was only able to fit one person in the escape pod, and she knew it had to be Captain Lovelace. Isabel would be able to figure everything out- she was smarter than Victoire in that way.
Rhea had always been loyal to Victoire, always been the one to give Victoire a straight answer when asked a question. So, despite how much Rhea wanted to refuse, when Victoire asked Rhea to open the airlock with Victoire in it, she obeyed.
Victoire needed to die to help save Isabel, and she was always too much of a coward to do it herself.
After all, space was always the answer for Victoire.
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