Chapter Text
They're still a week, or more, away from the Hephaestus station and Warren realizes he has a problem. Before setting off, Mr. Cutter had pulled the three of them aside and said that in no uncertain terms were the crew of the Hephaestus to make it back to Earth, alive or otherwise.
But Warren likes Officer Doug Eiffel.
He's a man Warren can see fitting into his team, joking with Maxwell and Jacobi, running the radios and feeding them intel when they go undercover. He's terribly resourceful and clever and he should have died long before the Urania picked up the little piece of shit he was adrift in. Sure, he has been to prison, but who among them hasn’t? Sure, he has pesky things like morals and a conscious, but Warren knows that those could be ignored and trained away.
Jacobi is quick to notice that he's watching the recovering officer with more than just casual interest, and Warren is forced to clear the air before assumptions can be made.
"I don't want to sleep with Officer Eiffel," he informs Maxwell and Jacobi, taking small pleasure as his team makes faces at him.
"Oh god, why would you say that?" Maxwell asks, fake-gagging. "I don't want to either? Is that something we needed to clarify?"
"You say that, and now that's all I can think about," Jacobi says, screwing up his face. "Dead fish, breaking up with Aaron, naked grandma-"
Warren rolls his eyes. "Stop being so overdramatic," he says, snapping his fingers and calling their attention back to him. "My interest in him is merely...hypothetical."
Maxwell and Jacobi shared a confused look. "Which...means you hypothetically want to have sex with him?" Jacobi asks, even as Maxwell shoves him across the room.
"He would make a good addition to the team, had the circumstances been different," Warren says, and both his operatives open their mouths to argue. "You both like him already."
"I- yeah- but-" they stammer, and he smiles.
"He's an idiot but he can usually follow what I'm saying in some capacity," Maxwell admits finally. "And he cares a lot about the AI running the Hephaestus. I almost feel like I know her already."
"Sometimes the shit that comes out of his mouth is funny?" Jacobi adds. "And his taste in music is pretty good. But our orders are-"
"I know what our orders entail, Mr. Jacobi," Warren interrupts. "Such as why I said that this was a hypothetical ."
But was it?
Following the hypothetical conversation, he begins to notice small changes in his team. Before Maxwell had been keeping Eiffel an arms length away at all times, but now she was slowly letting him further into her personal space. Jacobi too was loosening up, his comments going from biting to merely sarcastic. Both of them were drawing him into conversations, creating a repertoire.
It was just too bad that it wasn’t going to last.
Eiffel gets used to the three of them as well, despite his sensable dislike of Goddard, and as they come closer and closer the the Hephaestus, Warren finds himself, for the first time since Major Littlewood, displeased with their orders.
But there isn’t anything he can do, so he smiles and Jacobi and Maxwell smile and they do their worst. Maxwell gets to work on Hera, Jacobi plants a bomb or two, Warren talks.
Eiffel's eyes go wide as Warren starts his so-called 'whiskey speech', but not for quite the same reasons as the rest of the crew. He recognizes the Balvanie for what it is, obviously recognizes the price and the quality, and Warren only hopes that he understands the second message hidden in his words.
‘ You are disposable ’ is the first interpretation, and he watches as the Captain and Lieutenant become hostile as he speaks. ‘ You are useful and the loss would be devastating ’ is the second, and while Eiffel is stone-faced and angry, Warren doesn’t believe it’s the same kind of anger. Betrayal at not being allowed to return home, to Earth, but not anger towards him, Maxwell, or Jacobi.
Small mercies.
Warren ignores the dismayed cries as Jacobi removes the plant monster Eiffel talked about from the station, dismisses the group, and collects his team.
“Opinions?” he asks, but they both shake their heads.
“It’s too early- ask me tomorrow,” Jacobi replies, Maxwell nodding.
“Tomorrow, then.”
Warren sits in as Dr. Alexander Hilbert-slash-Dr. Elias Selsburg-slash-Dr. Dimitri Volodin gives Eiffel a check up, and within moments finds it increasingly difficult to contain his ire. He understands what Hilbert is working towards, Decima is for the greater good- Warren is all about the greater good, the entire mission is about the greater good after all- but he wishes that Hilbert had someone else to experiment on.
He’s sure that Eiffle finds the whole appointment uncomfortable, what with Warren threatening the doctor every few minutes and generally being what Maxwell would call a ‘creepo’ the entire time until Eiffel flees and he’s left alone with Hilbert.
“I’d be careful, doctor. Let’s not have Decima get out of hand again.”
"Captain Lovelace managed to get into your computer," Maxwell tells him that night, nearly awestruck. "She got further than I did when I tried to get in there; probably would have kept going if me and Jacobi hadn't shown up."
"That's…" worrying. "Impressive. And rather brash, considering."
"She built herself a ship and flew it into the star. I think brash is her middle name," Jacobi says. "Sir, you remember that conversation we had a little while ago? With the hypotheticals?"
Warren smiles. "Of course. Do you also have a hypothetical to bring forward?"
"So, I know we were talking about Lovelace but Minkowski? I would love to have her watching my back." Jacobi's eyes light up, bouncing his leg as he talks. "I found these weird disks with sticky notes on them that said do not touch and I asked what they were to find out if I needed to do something with them and Minkowski turned pink? So I was, understandably, even less interested because if it was some kind of sex thing I wasn't going near it but then Eiffel started to laugh and said they were acid bombs."
"Acid bombs?" Warren asks, mentally trying to figure out if that was something the Hephaestus would have had on the manifest.
"Apparently for about a week she decided she was going to hunt the plant monster with a harpoon? So she made acid bombs...and a bunch of other boobytraps, but-"
"-but the acid bombs are obviously what you're focusing on," Maxwell says. "I’m more impressed with the harpoon, to be honest."
"And so our hypothetical team would move from three to five, hm?" Warren says, but both Maxwell and Jacobi shake their heads. "No?"
"From three to at least seven," Jacobi says. "We would need to have Lovelace too."
"And Hera- Eiffel was right, she is amazing." Maxwell adds. "The only one not on our hypothetical team is Hilbert."
The three of them float in silence.
"I don't think I'd want to work with Hilbert any more than I am now," Maxwell says.
"I don't think I would trust him to keep me alive, considering that Decima thing," Jacobi says.
"He is a rather repulsive man," Warren muses. “So...hypothetically, if we could get away with only disposing of one member of the Hephaestus, it’d be Hilbert?”
“Yep.” Jacobi says as Maxwell nods.
Warren would have to keep that in mind…Hypothetically.
Warren knows that the two groups need time to get used to each other, but aside from Eiffel and Hera, the rest didn’t seem keen on the SI-5. Minkowski is uncooperative and testy, Lovelace secretive and caustic, and Hilbert teeters between fear and disgust.
It’s understandable. It’s disappointing.
Warren is working on his next report to Cutter, and Jacobi and Maxwell are animatedly whispering behind him.
"Something going on?" he asks, pausing, and they look almost embarrassed.
"We were just, you know, talking. About stuff," Jacobi says, and Warren raises an eyebrow. "Just, uh, just-"
"We came up with a new time-waster game," Maxwell interrupts. "Hypothetically."
"We're running through some of our missions and guessing what would change if we were a set of seven," Jacobi adds. "We don't know if anyone speaks any other languages- Hera would be good in all situations-"
"-but we can't agree on who we'd bring for that mission in China when we had to pretend to be missionaries."
“Hm…” Warren taps his chin, thinking out loud. “Minkowski speaks a handful of languages, but none that I believe would translate to a more successful egress from China. Eiffel speaks English-”
“Supposedly,” Maxwell interjects, grinning.
“-And I believe some Spanish and ASL, which could assist communication with Mr. Jacobi, but not with yourself,” he continues, ignoring the commentary. “And as for Lovelace, her file states that while she dabbles in languages, she isn’t fluent in any except for English and French. So if an irate woman demanding to speak to a manager or asking where the nearest restroom was would have helped…”
“Ha! I told you Eiffel would have been the best option!” Jacobi crows, and Maxwell puts her head in her hands.
“That’s just because you’re a big gay disaster, Daniel.”
“Really, Mr. Jacobi? Officer Eiffel?” Warren smirks, and before Jacobi can snap at him, continues. “I had no idea that your ideal type was a dadd-”
“Oh my god, no, shut up-” Jacobi goes from pissed to mortified in seconds while Maxwell bursts into laughter.
“You think Eiffel’s a dilf,” she eventually gasps as he curls into an embarrassed ball. “Oh my god- if you call him ‘ Daddy ’ at work I’m going to scream.”
“I can’t believe you’d do this to me, your own brother,” Jacobi whines, so red that Warren thinks he might start to steam. “I thought you both loved me.”
“We do, Daniel,” he tells him solemnly. “We just don’t love your newfound interest in sharing your kinks in public.”
“I’m defecting!”
“Remember Istanbul?” Maxwell asks as they’re working in the bridge, and Warren grunts. He remembers a mission done successfully, and an operative whose body really should have been dumped, alive, in the Bosporus while wearing some comically sized concrete shoes.
“Why do you ask?” he answers, and she shrugs.
“Just thinking, hypothetically, how that would have changed were we a larger team.” Maxwell rarely speaks of that mission in particular, and for a moment Warren wonders why she’s chosen him to go this round before deciding that she must be bored.
“I would say all seven,” he muses carefully. “Less chance that any of us would end up alone with P- with an unfamiliar operative, that way.”
“It would have been nice to have a few more women around to watch my back,” Maxwell admits after a moment.
“What are you guys talking about?” Hera asks suddenly, and Warren doesn’t start because that isn’t something he does, but Maxwell does.
“Uh-” she shoots him an almost panicked look. They had both forgotten that they weren’t in the Urania’s bridge, but the Hephaestus’s and that she was there as well. “One of Kepler’s dumb travel games.”
“My games aren’t dumb,” he protests, not nearly as offended as he pretends to be. “Fortunately/Unfortunately is a classic , same with the questions game.”
“What’s the questions game?” Hera asks, and Maxwell lets out a melodramatic whine as Warren smiles.
“Why do you want to know about the game?” he asks, ignoring Maxwell’s theatrics. Perhaps Hera will be the one to finally give him a challenge.
“Bec-because I want to know,” she snaps, and Warren sighs.
“I was hoping you’d last longer- I win.”
If Hera had eyes, Warren imagines that he’d be able to see the understanding enter them. “Why did you think I’d last longer?” she asks, and Warren gets ready for a lengthy game.
Maxwell only groans into her hands.
Warren is more careful since the incident. When Maxwell or Jacobi say the name of a city or town or country, he makes sure that there's no one from the Hephaestus side around to ask questions.
It would be not only embarrassing but awkward to have to explain Hypothetically to them, especially when they were the subject.
Still, that doesn’t stop them from continuing the game in private.
“Toronto?” Jacobi asks, and Maxwell answers with Lovelace while Warren replies with Eiffel.
“Venice?” Warren muses, and there’s a fifteen minute argument about whether or not Minkowski or Eiffel would be best.
“Colorado?” Maxwell says in the middle of the night, and Jacobi nearly wakes up everyone in the ensuing discussion with his enthusiastic love of Minkowski’s acid traps.
“Sir, can I come in?” Warren turns, waving Jacobi inside.
“Is something wrong, Jacobi?” he asks, and Jacobi almost hesitates.
“How...how hypothetical are our hypotheticals? Because the longer we’re here, the more they seem almost like plans .”
“We have our orders, Mr. Jacobi-” Warren starts, a repetition from the first hypothetical conversation, but Jacobi interrupts before he can finish speaking.
“Oh, you think they’re bullshit. And you keep leaving your transcripts in the Urania’s comms room. Me and Doug were in there and about half the shit you told Cutter never happened.”
“You and Doug ?” Warren says, stressing the first name usage, and Jacobi points at him.
“I’m a gay disaster, yes we all know, don’t change the subject.”
Warren nods. “Perhaps Maxwell should join us?” he suggests, and Jacobi frowns.
“Colonel Kepler-” he sighs. “What are you doing?”
“If we are to have this conversation, it needs to include Maxwell as well,” Warren says.
“You sure you don’t want me to go get everyone else too?” Jacobi says sarcastically, and raises his hands as Warren growls.
“Watch your tone, Jacobi,” he says, but the bite is gone. “Find Maxwell, please, if you insist on this conversation.”
“So?” Maxwell asks, and Kepler sighs.
“Mister Jacobi has noticed some discrepancies in my reports.”
“Oh, those. I assumed it was on purpose?” Maxwell says. “There’s nothing hypothetical about you wanting to recruit Minkowski, Eiffel, Lovelace, and Hera, is there.”
“If I can just...figure out something to convince Mr. Cutter that we should keep them in our employ…” Warren sighs, aggravated. “Of course, I doubt that any of them would find that agreeable.”
And that was the main problem.