The ding of a notification from the console caught Tomil’s attention and she finally stopped numbly staring through the window at space going by. She reflexively checked the autopilot but the ship was fine. She didn’t even need to be at the helm, she just didn't feel useful anywhere else. It was hard to focus, but at least monitoring the flight she could tell herself she was doing something. She could tell herself that she wasn't just sitting and soaking in her misgivings, even if she was just literally 'staring into the void' as it went by.

On the screen, she saw that the client had finally finished processing their last cargo delivery and confirmed payment. Now they had enough credits they weren’t going to run out of fuel or supplies for a while and be left drifting or go hungry. She let out a deep sigh of relief. The freedom of having her own ship, of technically being able to go wherever you wanted was great, but the reality of being able to afford to was another thing entirely. Always looking for work was exhausting and stressful. Always keeping an eye out for new jobs, new clients, new leads, and such. Even when you had a contract signed, until the credits transferred you never knew if you were being screwed, and not in the fun way. Tomil had been burned too many times before and it only made it harder to feel ok now. It always felt like the other boot was about to drop and ruin everything.

But for now they were ok.

She rubbed her eyes and peeled herself out of the chair to go tell her partner the good news. Gods, she must’ve lost track of time staring at the void; now that she was moving, everything ached. Or maybe that stiffness was less from sitting so long and more from holding that tension. Of course, neither of those were things her engineer had to worry about. 

She left the bridge and made her way past the other compartments along the main corridor to the back of the ship, to where Hpexiv was always tweaking something. Trying to coax a little more oomph out of the engines, trying to optimize the life support recyclers a little more, trying to boost the transmitter range slightly. There was always something that could be a bit better and they were determined to find it. While Tomil worried about keeping the credits flowing and charting a course, Hpexiv focused on keeping the ship not just running but thriving and getting better. Just like they did for Tomil, too.

She tried to feel better about the job as she ambled down the corridor. She knew it was a win, but it just felt like delaying a loss. She couldn't quite get it right in her head, couldn't quite shake that dim view. She kept trying as she passed the medbay, the quarters, the accessway to the hold, the various other compartments, and went all the way to the back.

Tomil stopped at the door to the engine room and looked around for the only other person on board. It would have been a large room if not for the dense core of machinery jutting into the middle of it; instead it was basically a buffer of space wrapped around that core, allowing access to all sides of it except the rear. A plethora of indicators and readouts dotted all the convoluted surfaces inside, speckling everything around the room in a variety of blinking lights. The buzzes and whirrs and hums of the many different things required to keep the ship running and its occupants alive merged into one big background din. 

From the entryway in the center, she stepped out onto a catwalk looking out at the familiar assemblage of apparati. Tomil tried to look around the massive core in front of her to spot any scattered tools or the edge of a small spacesuit peeking around a corner that might betray where in the room Hpexiv might be. She craned her neck to look above then bent over the railing to try to look underneath. She could've sworn she heard something over the background din, maybe saw something in the back, just behind the- something familiar fell onto her back and caught her in a pint-sized hug. 

Tomil smiled and looked over her shoulder and partially through Hpexiv’s translucent green, amorphous “head”. As ever, it looked like someone had sculpted a playfully grinning face and long, wavy hair out of animated gelatin. Those eyes that twinkled at seeing her only existed in relief, shaped from the same stuff as the rest of them. Hpexiv had explained once that their eyes were only for show; that their homogenous body could sense and breath and speak from every surface. But if you didn't have eyes, you couldn't meet other humanoids' gazes and help make yourself understood or try to put them at ease, so they'd learned to make some and use them to fit in better. And a face around them, and arms and legs and even hair and so on. Humanoids read a lot into facial expressions and body language and Hpexiv had gotten very good at expressing themself that way to be able to connect with humanoids. With one humanoid in particular.

Hpexiv leaned in to greet Tomil with a very wet kiss. 

"Sneaky little thing." Tomil teased afterwards, "I'll catch you one of these days."

"You? surprise me? Here, in my own domain?" They pretended to scoff "Ha! Ha, I say, Ha!"

"With enough time, maybe I'll learn all your hiding spots"

"Well, then I'll just have to build more in!" they teased back, scrunching up their nose, and sticking out their tongue before smiling again. "Besides, this time I knew you were coming. I saw the confirmation come through."

"Yep, we actually got paid this time. Not gonna starve yet," she half joked, but couldn't keep some bitterness from peeking through.

"Aw, sweetie, I was hoping you'd be in a better mood. This was a big one!" Hpexiv tried to cheer Tomil up. "Practically all the calanthiset we could hold and none of it expired. Payment in full. This is great! And already halfway to our next stop and another payday. What's there to be so glum about?"

"I know, I know, I know it is and the accounts look good and we're rebuilding our buffer, and we have things lined up, but I just…" Tomil sighed heavily. There wasn't a reason, at least not a current one. She knew that but it didn't help. "Things are going ok but I never know if the next job will. If it'll keep going well, you know? It all feels so …uncertain."

Hpexiv climbed down so Tomil could stop looking over her shoulder at them. They only came up to her chest, and looked up at her with a face full of concern. A caring face above a form fitted spacesuit that matched hers, since all that ooze still did need to breathe and it did help them keep their humanoid shape. A short, round, wide suit next to Tomil's relatively taller, leaner one. They both had their helmets retracted, as usual.

“Aw sweetie,“ Hpexiv comforted, “of course things will go wrong again. But we can handle it. That's why I've got all these backups and spare parts. That's why you've been saving up a buffer fund. Stuff will happen but we’ll be ok.”

They took Tomil's hands and looked into her eyes. "We'll be ok. Ok?"

"Ok." Tomil agreed reflexively, without feeling.

"Ok"

They gave her hands a squeeze, then considered things for a moment. "You've been in a real funk since those Landusian asshats stiffed us and then we had that dry spell for a bit. I told you it'd be ok and it is now, see?"

“For now,” Tomil allowed, unconvinced. She sighed. “I just…It’s not just them. Before them, it was the Herkins, and before that, that bastard Jyllill, and before that, there was that time we had to sell the spare parts for fuel and just hope nothing broke on the way to Kalis-3 or we would’ve  been…” she had to look away even thinking about it, and couldn’t bring herself to say the words she was thinking ” … left drifting. It just all feels so precarious."

Hpexiv reached up and put a hand on Tomil's cheek.

"But we made it to Kalis-3 and we're still here. I'm still here. With you. We weren't …" they paused too. " 'left drifting'. We made it. Things have been hard but we've gotten through it before and if things get hard we will again." Hpexiv reassured her, then joked "Better this time! We've had more practice."

Tomil gave a small nod and weak smile. She took Hpexiv's gloved hand, squeezed it, kissed it, and held it as she relented, admitting "I know. I know it will. It's just hard to feel like it sometimes, y'know?"

"I know.", they agreed. "That's why I was hoping the confirmation would cheer you up. You can't just let the losses get you down and pile up; you need to celebrate the wins! This is a win. Let's celebrate it!" Hpexiv flourished her arms for emphasis.

Tomil tried to feel the win, she really did. To feel up to celebrating.

Hpexiv relented and relaxed, changing the approach slightly.

“Besides that Kalis-3 run was ages ago! That was back when we were starting out and barely knew the ship and the trade. That was dicey, but since then we’ve both been a lot more careful about how we do things and it's never been that close again. And the Herkins and Jyllill, you're going back cycles and cycles to find these failures!" they chided. "Past scores and scores of runs that went just fine and paid out. Most of the time everything is alright and when it's not we can handle it. You’re focusing on the wrong things.”

"Ok, that's, that's true." Tomil admitted to both of them, buying in least a little bit and perking up some. "It feels like when things go wrong it wipes us out recovering, but you're right," she caught the slide back down and corrected, more successfully starting to convince herself. "Its not that often, it's not as bad as that first one, and we are building up something. It may still feel fragile, but we're doing ok." She took a deep breath. "We're doing ok."

"That's right" Hpexiv took her hands, and looked at her and reiterated, "and this was a win. We did good."

"This was a win." Tomil agreed with a nod and a brittle smile.

"And we should celebrate," Hpexiv supplied, hopefully.

"We should," Tomil reluctantly repeated, but couldn't stop herself from continuing, "but," and Hpexiv winced, "it's hard ‘cause even when we do win, there's so much overhead cost that we only make a little net. It's like we make a little and a little and a little and then when we do lose we lose big and it wipes us out. It doesn't feel like we get anywhere … in the long term." she added.

"Oh!" 

Hpexiv lit up, both with an epiphany and an opportunity. "Oh oh oh! Actually I've been working on that," they excitedly scurried over to another monitor. Tomil knew that look and always thought it was adorable when they got so delighted and eager to geek out about something.

"So I was thinking, when we were at the bar at that station in Olus, you were complaining that the biggest expense every run is the fuel and if we weren't paying for that we'd be making so much more. So I was trying to squeeze more efficiency out of the engine we had but there's only so much you can do there. I kept hammering away and getting nowhere, so I realized I needed a different approach."

They stopped navigating menus and shared a soft, knowing look with Tomil. "Actually it reminded me of back when we met." 

Hpexiv remembered working maintenance on that remote little moon colony and desperately trying to convince themself they were happy to be there, before everything changed. Tomil remembered being part of the crew for a supply run and meeting that poor, miserable little slime engineer all the shitty two-bit colonists thought was weird. She was so glad she'd convinced them to leave and join the ship's crew. And later, after they'd grown closer, to eventually leave that crew to just be the two of them. 

"Sometimes no matter how hard you try, you can't get what you need," Tomil recalled.

"Right, and then you need to change what you're doing entirely." They reached up and pecked Tomil on the cheek then turned back to the computer terminal, "So instead of desperately trying to make the engine more efficient, I've been looking at other systems we could use; trying to find a way to eliminate or at least mitigate the cost of fuel entirely." They pulled up a series of images and part listings and calculations and graphs. A web of different components in lots of configurations scrolled by, first with many crossed out, then a few with question marks, and finally one at the end highlighted and circled in bright colors.

Hpexiv pointed at it and gestured at various pieces.

"The Ronians have been developing this new sub-space scoop that harvests certain energetic particles while we're flying through space. If we combine that with this kind of reactor and then run the output through one of these converters and into these types of matrices to separate out…" They noticed Tomil failing to follow "Look, I know you don't like to get into the technical details but the point is I've been working it out and I think I've found a system that would be expensive to get but that, even by conservative calculations, would cover almost all of our fuel each trip." They pulled up another page full of figures "We might need a little to top off, we might come out a little ahead, but even if we need a little bit, it'd be a rounding error compared to the fuel bill we have now."

They turned from their figures and plans back to Tomil.

"Now if we can do that, cut that much expense from each run, would that feel better? Be less wiped out and rebuild faster? Would you like watching that buffer grow into actual savings?" They probed hopefully.

Tomil briefly looked at the details, then paused to think through the idea.

"But you said 'expensive'. How much do we need to get ahead in order to set this up?"

"Oh, I mean ahead a bit, but it's doable. We just had that big payday, and that's like, maybe a third of the way there. And if this is where we're trying to get, that's progress worth celebrating too."

"But if that's true why isn't everyone doing this?"

"Oh, I don't think they've figured it out yet. The Ronians, they're developing it to sell in bulk to big shipping fleets, to gather exotic particles during a trip they can sell at the end. But a little ship like us? Literally not even a concern, no marketing and we'll have to get like 3 different adapters just to mount the damn thing. I only noticed it ‘cause I saw it in a tech journal. But! But if we do hook it up and we process the output right” she waved at the complex diagram of components, a tangle of reactors and converters and processors that eventually converged on a singular output, “and have the right engine we can run on them, then we're small enough that, if my calculations are right, we should generate enough fuel by cruising to cover most of each trip."

Tomil scanned the figures again, and found the bottom line estimates. She whistled. "You really think it'll reduce margins this much?"

"That's the conservative estimate."

"And you're sure it'll work?"

"Sweetie, would I be showing you if I weren't sure? Risking getting your hopes up again when you're already in a funk? Besides, when have I not made things work? Don't you trust my engineering?"

"What about that time you blew the power regulators as we passed Dena?"

"You still think that was carelessness? Oh, why could I possibly have made the ship dead in space for 3 days while it rebooted, with plenty of fuel and supplies, leaving us all to ourselves with nothing we could do." They smirked and bit their lip, remembering the lovely time the two of them had had. "Well, almost nothing."

Tomil smiled back. "Devious little thing. You're encourage-able."

"So encourage me then!"

Tomil smirked and turned her attention back to the monitor and the estimates.

Worn down by Hpexiv's optimism and expertise, Tomil finally was forced to grapple with the possibility that things could get better. With how that margin would make more runs viable and it would make the runs they'd been doing worth more. With how their accounts would build up faster and setbacks would be easier to handle. It felt too good to be true right now, but she knew that good things could happen. Still having their own ship and being together was a reminder of that. If this was the next step and things could get better, she'd be a fool not to go for it.

"If you can make a setup that will do those numbers, that'd be amazing. I would feel so much better with that math," Tomil finally admitted, letting herself see a glimmer of hope as Hpexiv beamed. "You're amazing, what did I do to deserve you?"

"Just being yourself!" Hpexiv teased her back, but sincerely.

"This looks great and, and thanks for trying to help," Tomil said feeling unnecessarily guilty but very appreciative. "Sorry to be a downer, it’s, it’s just hard sometimes."

"Oh I know." Hpexiv said "I've been there too and you're the bestest at getting me through it too. That's why I love us and want to help you. You're great and I care about you and want to help you feel better. Especially when things are getting better. And they are, right?"

"Yeah"

"And we have a plan to make things even better"

"We do now"

"And we just had a big payday"

"Yep"

"And it's a big win for us that we should feel good about"

"I suppose" 

"And we should ce-e-elebrate it." Hpexiv pushed again and smiled hopefully, bouncing a little with anticipation.

Tomil rolled her eyes and smirked. She knew just how Xiv liked to celebrate and still wasn't sure she was up to that but she was feeling better and they were too cute to say no to. That energy was infectious. 

"We should celebrate it," Tomil agreed, amused, humoring the encourageable jelly. Xiv lit up and gave a cartoonishly large, toothy grin, unconstrained by anatomy. Xiv thought that getting Ily to admit that things were good (and really mean it) was a win right now. Everything that came afterwards would just be a bonus, but it could be a very enjoyable bonus.

Xiv bit her lip (as her mouth scaled down to fit in her face again) and tried to contain herself and act cool, though she couldn't stop grinning.

"And how, pray tell, would we celebrate?" Ily asked, playing along. "In the middle of our next trip. In a ship at speed," she added with mock exasperation.

"Oh, I'm sure we can think of something," Xiv said coyly, and turned to casually check on a nearby panel. Deliberately casually.

It was only a few steps to the panel, but they made them count.

Ily had asked before about why Xiv had picked the shape they did, for themself and their spacesuit. They had said it was simply math: being more spherical was a higher volume to surface area ratio and easier to maintain. That meant being short and curvy was a balance between being spherical and being humanoid. That there were mathematical reasons to have hips that wide and thighs that thick. They had even managed to keep a straight face as they said it. But both of them knew it was because Xiv liked to look like that and especially liked the way Ily looked at their curves. The very fact they had tits and the convolution of cleavage and a waist showed it was more about aesthetics and sex appeal than physics and reducing surface area. And of course actions spoke louder than words. 

Right now Xiv's actions were swaying those impractically wide hips, and that huge, delicious ass side to side, each step sending ripples through it. Ily just put a hand over her mouth and watched equally deliberately as Xiv completed their short trip across the walkway. Step, step, step. Jiggle, jiggle , jiggle. They hummed a bit and checked readouts on the panel, then bent at the waist to check some lower ones, not at all trying to present for Ily. They poked at some controls down there to one side, then looked at the result on the other side, then tried another setting, and checked again, rear waving back and forth, definitely absent-mindedly.

Ily snorted. 

"That's how you think we should celebrate?"

"Oh, I was just checking grav levels to give you a moment to think," Xiv objected oh so innocently. Still bent, they looked back over their shoulder, the playful heat in their eyes making the game very clear, as if they didn't both already know. Seeing the way Ily was looking at them felt so good and was worth having to walk away from her. "Why? Did you think of something you want to do? Something you'd rather focus on?" they asked and gave her a big, not-at-all-innocent grin, still wavering a bit.

Ily tilted her head and pleasantly considered the offer.

"Maybe. But I don't know if you'll be able to hear me over all this," she joked, waving at the machinery. "Maybe I should tell you about it back in our quarters"

Xiv giggled and stood up, "Maybe you should!" They agreed and headed to the corridor.

Ily followed and enjoyed the show all the way down the hall.