Binary Systems [Complete, Slice-of-Life Sci-Fi Romance]

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Vincent: I just hope you know it won't always be butterflies and romance; there's also taxes and splitting up the chores.

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Sol 499 FY 26, 11:00 Mars Time, Bonestell Crater Colony, Hab Layer, 9.32.002.B

"I always wondered if I'd have liked paper," Marie murmured, her pen scratching a dry rhythm across the foil page.

It wasn't a sharpie—though it looked like one, felt like one—but it didn't smear, didn't smell, didn't bleed. Whatever ink it used left no residue. Just a tight carbon trail etched into the aluminum, permanent as dust scars on glass. Gordon watched the line appear behind her strokes, puzzled. He had no idea what it was.

Gordon picked up the stylus, curious. It looked like a fat, stubby mechanical pencil. No clicker. No eraser. Just a dark, ridged grip and a smooth black tip that didn't seem to do anything.

He dragged it slowly across the foil page. A line appeared behind it—clean, matte, precise. It felt. . .dry. No resistance.

"Oh," he muttered. "That's not a pencil."

Marie looked up, already smiling. "Oh, Gordon."

He blinked at her.

"You can't erase that."

He glanced down at the page—at the crooked line cutting across a column of neatly etched notes.

"Oh."

She shrugged, taking the pen back. "Don't worry. Now it's part of the text."

"I drop it all the time," Marie said, not looking up. "Stuff gets marked up. Martian documents just . . .kind of look like that. Lived-in."

Gordon watched, horrified, as she casually set her iced coffee—sweating slightly in its double-layered can—right in the middle of her notes.

Not paperwork. Foilwork.

A scatter of sheets fanned around it like silvery leaves on a forest floor. Her handwriting—carbon-dark and permanent—glinted faintly in the room's soft LED wash.

"You couldn't do that with paper," he said reflexively. "That'd leave a coffee ring."

Marie shrugged.

"So what is all this?" Gordon asked.

Marie didn't look up from the stack of foil sheets. "Follow-up paperwork. You're roomed here, and so am I, but now I'm taking legal responsibility for upkeeping this hab. And so are you. Provisional on your ability to attain Martian citizenship."

She tapped the signature field with her stylus. "It's romantic, really. Going through paperwork with you."

Gordon opened his mouth, closed it. Tried again. "What's the time period?"

"Gordon?"

"Not for us," he said. "For the hab."

That got her attention—briefly. She gave him a look: half fond, half are-you-serious. Then turned back to the forms.

"Nothing is set in stone," she said. "We use them until we don't need them. Nobody gets forced out—where would we go?"

She made a dry little mark. "Except. . .sometimes something breaks. If there's an atmosphere problem, they'll shunt us wherever we can survive."

A pause. Then, more lightly:

"You know."

He did.

"So your parents. . ." Gordon began.

Marie didn't look up. "Have been over there since they set foot here and will die there, unless they divorce. Which—"

She scrawled a signature, the foil whispering beneath her stylus.

"—seems likely, but I've been thinking that for years. They stayed together for me, I'm pretty sure."

Gordon nodded slowly. "That's tough."

"Mmm." She didn't look at him. "Yours didn't stay together at all, and I'd say that seems like it was tougher."

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Silence, broken by skittering pages.

"Time for coffee," Gordon announced. "I can catch up on sleep on the way back—I want to be awake for every second here."

Marie smirked. "Of course you do. I'm worth staying awake for."

"You are the strangest woman," he said. "Sometimes you're completely confident, sometimes you're totally uncertain. About the same thing."

She shrugged, reaching for a foil packet. "I have to try it to know if I like it."

"There is that."

She watched him doctor his drink. "What are you doing to your coffee?"

"WELL," he said, mock-formal, "on Earth, instant isn't exactly considered top-tier. But I'm adding rice milk. Vanilla. And—is this cinnamon real?"

"No," she said. "That's extract." She leaned in, solemn. "Gordon. You're making bitch coffee."

"I am a basic white girl," he replied, deadpan.

She narrowed her eyes. "Is that how Claire drinks hers?"

"Pumpkin latte. Soy milk. Four sugars."

"THAT we have on Mars. Pumpkin."

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And so, as the day reached evening, Gordon prepared a massive cup of bitch coffee. And Marie had baked for him.

Baking, she told him, was one of the most profound enjoyments of her life. It was a way to put all your feelings into something tangible you could give to someone. A way to say, Hey—I thought about you. You matter. Enjoy this.

He was a little touched when she told him what she was making for it. The Martian sugar cookies were. . .okay. They tasted like sugar cookies. Gordon had never been much for sugar cookies—but sugar cookies and coffee was perfectly fine.

The important part wasn't that she be a gourmet cook. Not everyone needed to go out and get the fifty ingredients required for one gourmet recipe. Claire would. Whatever. Hiram was out of the house because Claire wanted to relax, and Claire couldn't relax if everything wasn't perfect.

But Marie just gave him something to stave off the reaper that much longer. Just a little nutrition, some calories. Her little way of saying I care about you, and I don't want you to starve.

And it meant, surprisingly, a lot.

They both dismissed the idea of watching a movie—they could do that anytime. They both dismissed the idea of reading, or even streaming in Ghostlands, despite how excited she'd been to finally get to play with him. That too could wait.

They had much more immediate and pressing needs from each other.

And in between, they could always talk. And there were the little necessities.

Martian toilets were odd. Martian showers, too.

Martian showers—with real Martians in them, though?

Just fine.

"So," Marie said on their way to dinner, "we've talked a lot about how you like Mars. And I mean—at this point, I'm going to be a little disappointed if you don't have long-term plans here."

He nodded wryly.

They were following the green line. Apparently that had to do with human welfare, but it didn't matter because they were going opposite the chevrons. Which always led back to the cafeteria / dining hall / forum structure at the heart of the colony. At this point, he suspected he could already find his way around intuitively.

"But. . ." She hesitated just a fraction. "Is there anything you're worried about? Anything I should worry about?"

He tore his eyes away from contemplation of the large steel tanks they were passing. Feed tanks, but for what purpose? "Yeah, sure. There are quality-of-life improvements I'd like to make. I mean, I don't really want to eat communally for every meal."

"But we don't," she said quickly. "You can bring stuff home and put it in the fridge."

"I know," he said. "But a stove would be good. Little things like that. But, you know—little things I can either get over, or engineer a way around."

He met her eyes, just long enough for her to know that he was serious, and trying to comfort her..

"So if it makes you feel better—yes, there are things I want to change. And no, that doesn't mean I'm not prepared to like it here."

"Besides," he said, "my name is on the door."

She smiled up at him. "That's right," she said. "Don't you forget it. You're committed. We signed all that documentation."

A formation of drones passed them, some sort of long parcel supported by group effort. The colonists stopped to give it room to pass like this was an everyday thing. Perhaps it was.

"I can't wait to be your live-in boyfriend," he said.

Her brow crinkled a little.

"I hope that we can start moving closer to. . .other titles," she said carefully.

Yeah, he thought. But when?

"I know," he said. "It's Vincent, right?"

"Yes. I just. . .I can't do what he did. I can't say the words, and fall in love, and perform that closeness if I'm not one hundred percent sure. I'm not going to be—I just can't do that."

Having seen Adya in action, Gordon understood her concern that perhaps, just perhaps, her parents did not truly love one another.

Vincent seemed more resigned to her than anything else.

He kissed her.

"Some things take time," he said. "I don't think what you're saying is that you're not sure how you feel about me. I think what you're saying is, you want the depth of commitment to be even on both sides. You don't want to be the one who plays dove, and have me play hawk."

She nodded. "I want us to get there. Soon," she said.

He could see the admission in her eyes. It cost her.

"I would like that," he said. "But if we're already off to the races with moving in, and taking care of each other, and making time. . .if we're a little bit unusual in how we order things, then we're a little bit unusual. That doesn't make it any less real. We can check off all the boxes in a different order, that's all."

I do want to check off the boxes.
All of them.
Eventually.

She looked at him. "Thank you."

She felt the urge to break the following silence, and allowed herself to do so.

"Your dad thinks I should go to Earth," she confessed.

It had been a weight on her chest all day.

"I know," Gordon said. "But he's gonna have to live with being disappointed."