#avalilitrice

[thistleation]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[daisychainsandbowties]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapters: 1/4 [25k] Rating: Explicit

Summary:

Ava's having a really normal gay situation when her ship, the Nostromo, picks up a strange SOS signal on a distant moon and her problems suddenly become a lot bloodier and more acidic than her sex thing with the ship's navigator, Lilith, and her stupid crush on the perpetually grease-stained ship's engineer, Beatrice.

But if you asked her she'd probably say the two are pretty much on par.

or: the Alien (1979) au

///

She found Beatrice watching her raptly; the way you might stare at a the very distant pulse of a neutron star. According to Beatrice, people once experimented with telling the time based off of these pulses – neutron stars spin very precisely, loosing beams of electromagnetic light toward the telescopes of watching planets. She says it’s like a lighthouse in that the light can only be seen when it points toward the person looking for it.

Ava always thought that the idea of lighthouses in space sounded romantic, but Beatrice at the time only poured hot water sloppily into a mug and stabbed at the teabag with a spoon, and told Ava that atomic clocks remained by far more reliable than distant electromagnetic phenomena.

From her position on the sofa in her navy jumpsuit, blue-and-pink pin winking in the better lights of her carefully uncultivated space, Beatrice looked at Ava like that. The way you look at a light that appears only intermittently. Never all the time.

Standing there, with water still hanging in long droplets off the tips of the fingers on her damaged hand, Ava didn’t dare to use the word romantic to describe neutron stars. Beatrice had her hands held very tenderly in her lap, palms upraised. They made her look small.

It took a while for Ava to find her voice. Too long, probably, but then Beatrice was never one to notice if a response came after a minute of silence. She had her own listing moments, staring into space counting prime numbers on her fingers. It was self-soothing, Lilith had said, looking at Ava over the rim of her mug with serious eyes – “Don’t give her a hard time about it.”

“Look in the mirror the next time you want to see a massive bitch, Lilith, because I’m not one.”

The droplets clung to Ava’s fingers and then fell – not in slow motion, slapping loudly into the little puddle at the bottom, rainbowed in oil thanks to Bea’s habit of emptying things right into the water mains on the ship even though she complained about everyone else doing it. The sound startled Ava into motion, speech. “Hey, Bea?”

A look. No a whisper of sound from her mouth, but Beatrice stirred in her seat. Ava tried to feel normal, looking into those eyes.

She cleared her throat, “Will you wash your hands, please? I think it’s better if the burn treatment goes on clean skin.”

And then there they were, Ava standing at one edge of the skin and Beatrice on the other, leaning toward the midpoint to stick her hands under the faucet. Then, after, and all in silence, Ava took Beatrice’s hand and spread the lotion over her palm.

Only then did she hear a slight sound from Beatrice. Low, in the back of her throat, the faintest edge of a giggle as Ava’s fingers played over the spot where each finger joined to the palm, where the metacarpals slotted against the jostle of many bones in the basin of the hand.

“Sorry,” Ava murmured, not daring to look up past the fall of hair over her face. From the twitch at Bea’s fingertips as she drew a line across that spot again, unnecessarily. “Does that tickle?”

When it was done, both of them held one hand out away from their body as they worked together to make hot chocolate. Beatrice insisted on picking only the white marshmallows for hers and only the pink ones for Ava’s.

They were mini marshmallows, and Beatrice seemed to have stashed at least twenty bags of them in her quarters. There was always one open on the table, dwindling as the days went by, Beatrice stopping to snatch a few out with her bare hands whenever she passed through.

She was careful to avoid the ones with stains on them as she chose Ava’s, dropped one, two, three, four, five, six, seven into the cup. Seven was, after all, a prime number.

They sat on the sofa and Beatrice balanced her mug on the arm where it had sagged to a flat enough plane. She wrapped her arms around her knees – carefully gripping the wrist of her injured hand to keep the lotion undisturbed – and she spoke again. Her voice shifted in pitch all the time, down and up, breaking like waves against rock before floating to her comfortable middle-C. She told Ava about the cosmic microwave background, then, since they’d used the microwave to heat up their hot chocolate – the cup still close to scalding as Ava hugged it against her chest, listening.

She told Ava about electromagnetic radiation, pronouncing ten to the third power aloud a little morosely. Three was a prime, but not ten.

“Think of it,” she suggested, “as fossilized light. It sits at the furthest point any telescope can see, and we think it illuminated first at the advent of the Big Bang. We can look at it, but as the universe expands it gets pushed further and further away from us. It shows us how far things are, I suppose, and you used to be able to see it inside the television.”

“I’m not sure how it worked, really. This was back in the 1900s, but apparently you could make a television sit at the in-between of two channels and see the CMB as a static signal on the screen. Interesting, isn’t it? How… um… sometimes more primitive technology allows us to see better, to see more?”

Ava grabbed a marshmallow out of her cup with the tip of her tongue – and then, when Beatrice looked aggrieved, she quickly snatched up another.

Five is a prime number.

continue on Ao3

[daisychainsandbowties]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

(5.6k)

Rated: M

ava x lilith x beatrice

summary:

they meet in a corridor, in a hospital, on a ward. they fall in love slowly, together. you can’t fix everything but you can sometimes survive.

the wardmates au

excerpt:

//

‘I can be like Voyager 1,’ she told Jillian, who did not quite understand, who never quite understood the way that Beatrice phrased things. She was only fourteen, and her brain was already a monster they had couched in metaphors.

Beatrice loved space, so when they told her that the disputed cells in her brain were shaped like stars, it took every slow sermon, every brief genuflection of her endurance to stop from laughing.

‘What did you mean by that?’ Jillian asked, lingering when Beatrice’s parents went to make phone calls, ‘About… what was it? Voyager 1?’

Beatrice shrugged, already thinking in litanies of stars, listing their names and their designations. Polaris (HR424) and Arcturus (HR5340) and Zhang (HR3903), slotting them into their constellations and painting them roughly onto the night sky of her ceiling.

‘Beatrice.’ Jillian did not say her name impatiently, which was novel enough to make Beatrice’s eyes move back down, to this pretty woman with her strange, small hospital for only the rarest or the worst of sicknesses.

Her eyes were evaluating; they were probing. Beatrice felt precisely like a specimen in a jar, like a large spider caught under a glass.

‘It’s a space probe.’ Beatrice tugged at the collar of her shirt. Her parents had laid out her clothes in the hotel room that morning, all starched and fitted and deeply, atrociously uncomfortable. She thought the top button might give her a headache of its own accord.

‘It is the farthest man-made object from Earth, drifting out in interstellar space – it even passed through the heliopause.’

She liked seeing the doctor look at her with a total lack of apprehension. Her eyes, which could so easily unravel a body, could not so much as skim the surface of this subject.

Manners would not permit Beatrice to smirk with her mouth, so she did it with her eyes instead.

‘That’s the edge of the cavity that the sun imposes in interstellar space. It’s here, for all intents and purposes. The Voyager took pictures of moons and it drifted on and out and endlessly forward, and we let it go with no intention of getting it back, to be our eyes in something bigger than the sky.’

‘Very clever,’ Jillian said, and she might have meant it, but Beatrice found her sinister. Not dangerous, precisely, or ill-intentioned, but menacing in a way that did not bear describing.

Jillian grimaced, ‘But what does that have to do with… with what I’m proposing?’

you mean your proposal where I am a laboratory rat? you mean the proposal where I am a little body to pump full of things that won’t work?

‘I told you,’ Beatrice said, impatient with her slowness, with her optimism, with the inadequacy of her ceiling in its mimicry of a curved sky. ‘I don’t mind what you want to do, or where you send me or that I can’t go back, so long as Lilith is here.’

Her eyes darted towards the door, but her parents were not there. They didn’t feel like an absence in their absence, not really. Last week she’d been playing football, tangled in the mud with Lilith hissing curses in her ear, tugging her to her feet and laying a none-too-gentle hand on her cheek – the shadow of a slap with her eyes hard and dark and wonderful behind the gesture.

Last week she was surrounded by white-capped mountains, and in the locker room she’d let Lilith press her against the cold metal with the mud dried on her cheek. She’d let her lips part, and permitted a second set of exhales into her mouth. Her parents had been back in England, thinking that she might return, one day, with her brain fixed.

But it was broken in ways they couldn’t comprehend, and a part of Beatrice felt cursed for liking it. How she’d sat on the airplane with them, watching her mother triple check the belt-buckle, like it would save them if they dropped out of the sky.

Jillian raised one perfectly plucked eyebrow, ‘I thought you were only classmates.’

‘We are.’ Beatrice insisted on this, without knowing why, except that it was what Lilith would say, what Lilith would insist upon.

But, softly, she added, ‘We’re something else now, I suppose.’

[thistleation]

Beyond our Space and Starlight - Chapter 5: Respites

It was 1 year, 4 months, and 11 days since they lost Shannon. 

Some days were better, some days it still felt like they were just stumbling on without her, adrift in space, coasting purely on momentum, mission to mission, with her shadows all around. 

She was still so present in the people around her, in Beatrice herself, in the things she did, the things she didn’t, the things she couldn’t… 

Beatrice and her sisters were in a clearing on an arid relay moon in what was only theoretically still Protectorate space. They’d just met up with Mary and, to their surprise, Ava as well. She’d gotten a haircut in the two months since they’d last seen her, a cute little chin-length thing she wore half-up, half-down, but everything about her presence was still unmistakable. 

Beatrice was already going over the odds of a confrontation — not great with her riderless, it would depend on what Mary would do — but that was just how her mind worked, how she was trained. It seemed unlikely this would devolve into an outright battle — for now at least…  

“I cannot believe you’re working with these people, Mary! What the fuck?!” Ava was still very much upset with the situation. 

“Language!”

“Don’t you fucking start with me Lilith!”

“Ava,” Mary tried again, a placating hand between them, “Put your gun away first, same to the rest of y’all.” 

There was a pause as everyone looked at each other. Beatrice was the only other person with a gun out, being riderless at the moment, Camila and Lilith had both summoned their blades. 

Beatrice was the first to put her weapon away, followed by Ava — who’s expression still made her displeasure very clear — then Camila, with Lilith only reluctantly dismissing her two-handed longsword when it was obvious she was the only one left and everyone was waiting on her. 

“Thank you.” Mary enunciated the words clearly, “Now how about you all tell me what’s going on and how you all know each other?” 

CONT on Ao3

[daisychainsandbowties]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

(1.7k)

Rated: M

ava x lilith x beatrice 

Summary:

they meet in a corridor, in a hospital, on a ward. they fall in love slowly, together. you can’t fix everything but you can sometimes survive.

the wardmates au

///

Ava has grown accustomed, over the months, to the dead crow imprint of Lilith’s hair over her pillow. How she would gather it up in her hands, sleepily, after 5am rounds brought them all back to consciousness. Glaring as Ava pointed her nerf gun at her from across the hall.

Try it, twerp

You want to fuck me so bad it makes you look stupid

Beatrice brushed it for her after the first round of chemo. With the deftness she brought to everything, she took it in sections until it shone.

But after a week the brush brought down a rainfall of stray hairs.

Departed from the scalp, deep and black and beautiful and dead.

She tried braiding it, but with each overlapping motion new strands came away in her fingers. Beatrice - who is so ghoulish Ava sometimes thinks she’s half a ghost already - went around gathering up the fallen hair, the way seagulls strut down the street sometimes picking up damp twigs and rooting weeds out of the concrete.

Building a nest? Ava asked her, wheeling deliberately almost over Beatrice’s fingers as she reached down to take up another sick black strand.

Her eyes, great hooded things, purplish-red and oozy with drugs, only looked at Ava. On the verge of hitting her, no doubt, with her stupid dangly fingers, her needle-sore wrists.

I’m just- she made that frustrated little sound that emerged sometimes instead of words. Beatrice could go days and days without words, until Ava started putting nerf bullets into the back of her head, saying nothing but mercy kill when Bea’s baleful eyes skipped over her shoulder.

What? Planning to use it as kindling? You’re not her sad wife yet, Bea, so no need to throw yourself on the pyre.

They bickered for days in the way that only those who are desperately in love can.

Then, one morning, the sound of a razor, and Mary decanting from Lilith’s room with a bucket in one hand, dustpan in the other. Uncharacteristically serious while the edge of a sob drifted through the gap in the door.

It is still strange to see the bones of her skull bared to the air.

At least her eyes are dark.

cont. on ao3