Jove shared a glance with Aster and Eve, seeing reflections of his own complicated emotions toward his mother in their expressions. He hadn't seen his mother in person since shortly after his father, Turner, had died in a car crash two years earlier.
They hadn't argued or experienced a dramatic falling out, but a rift had formed, regardless. Jove did feel somewhat bitter over his impression of his mother diving so deep into her work, seeming to run away from the world in both a figurative and literal sense. It was a bitterness that he was ready to thaw out, however, hopefully with more ease and speed than the ice surrounding them.
The passageway outside the command center was narrow enough to necessitate them to walk in single file. Jove was first at the door when they arrived where Andromeda had directed them. It slid sideways, revealing itself to be thinner and lighter than it looked.
The first thing Jove noticed wasn't his mother, but the sheer scale of the command center. Walls were lined with screens, some flashing with live feeds of Termina's exterior – a snowscape whipped by swirling winds. Other screens displayed vibrant images of the hydroponics lab, lush with vegetation. A few displayed more distant locations, stark points of interest nestled into the desolate Antarctic landscape.
He let his eyes fall upon his mother. Even absorbed in her work, a radiant aura surrounded her. Her beauty was striking — vibrant red hair cascading down to just past her shoulders, a shock of color against the sterile backdrop of the formless and practical lab coat.
She was spice to his Aunt Aster's vanilla, both sisters beautiful and curvaceous but in different ways. Her eyes were narrowed at the screen in concentration, and a faint dusting of freckles was visible on her cheeks.
She was hard at work. Slender fingers danced across a keyboard and touchpad in front of her, busy with whatever happened to be the problem of the day. There was an intensity to her focus, the same single-mindedness that Jove had seen growing within her in the time after his father's death.
For an instant, he wasn't sure whether he was looking at his mother or a brilliant scientist in her element, a conductor orchestrating a symphony of technology within an icy fortress of solitude. The obvious answer — that she was both at the same time — seemed too simple, too easy, too unsatisfying to be the truth. He felt the full depth of how much he missed her and yet simultaneously wondered if he truly recognized her.
"We're not interrupting, are we?" he said.
"Oh!" Kira jumped in her chair, bracing herself against her desk. "Jove! Sorry, I wasn't expecting you until later this afternoon."
"It is, in fact, later this afternoon," said Andi, over the speaker. "I would have informed you of that, along with your family's arrival, had you not insisted on muting my audio channel."
"I needed to get work done and you were distracting me," said Kira, a touch defensively.
"Mother." Eve stepped forward from behind Jove, voice surprisingly vulnerable. "It's been a while."
"Eve…" Kira pulled her daughter into a tight hug. "Oh, my sweet Eve."
Jove was touched by the reunion, touched in the wrong way. He felt petty, and moreover, annoyed that he couldn't turn that sense of pettiness off. The catty sister who'd betrayed him and the distant mother who'd ignored him, having their grand reunion.
"I'm also here, sister," said Aster, with a bit of edge that mirrored Jove's own frustration.
"Aster." Kira's smile waned slightly as she parted from Eve. "I'm surprised you had the time to come all the way out here."
"I made the time," said Aster. "I suppose it remains to be seen whether that was a good idea."
"I would assume that depends on your attitude," said Kira.
Aster let out a tiny, foreboding scoff.
"How about we pretend to get along for, say, five minutes before we descend into the usual bickering and mind fucking?" said Eve.
"Eve, please don't say things like that," said Kira. "Jove, come here. I need to hug you, too."
He did come forward, and he did hug her. It felt like an afterthought on her part, and he hated the kernel of hope it stirred within him. He'd never stopped feeling like he was a disappointment to his mother in comparison to Eve.
Eve, the elite cross-country skier. Eve, with the perfect grades. Eve, always bringing home her tall and charming and respectful boyfriends to serve as physical manifestations of the gap between Jove and what he should have been.
He'd taken after his father, moody and quirky and apparently incomprehensible to the world at large. He still wondered how his father, Turner — short for Saturn by the way, long line of creative names in the family — had bagged his mother to begin with.
"What happened to your forehead?" Kira began prodding at the cut he'd taken with he thumb. Jove winced and pulled back, snapping out of self-pity.
"It was in the alert I sent you earlier, which you would have received if I'd not been muted," said Andi over the speakers, seeming amused rather than annoyed.
"Um, sorry, Director Faremont," said Ryan. "I forgot to warn him about the crevasses. He crashed one of the snowmobiles."
Kira's expression hardened back into the serious woman who Jove remembered. "It's still out there, then?"
"One of the skis was broken," said Ryan. "I can head out to set up a tow. It'll take a bit but it's no big deal."
"I'll help him out," said Jove. Ryan had been quick to take responsibility, but in his heart, Jove knew the crash had been his own fault.
"You need medical attention," said Kira. "Ryan, get it done."
"On it."
Ryan left the command center like a soldier following an order. An odd silence hung in the air in the wake of his absence, revealing the rawness of a family dynamic that hadn't seen the light of day in years.
"At least tell me that there's palatable food here?" said Aster. "I skipped breakfast this morning for my salon appointment. Well, what passes for a salon back in Port Sirius."
"Yes, there is food here," said Kira, voice flat. "Obviously."
"A fair portion of it is freshly grown!" said Andi. "The water recycling vertical hydroponics setup serves as both an experiment in extreme weather crop production and a fantastic source of fruits and vegetables."
"Jove," said Kira. "You need to get that cut cleaned and bandaged. Come."
"Yeah," he muttered. "Thanks for the concern, Mom."
She raised an eyebrow at him as she started leading him through the research center. The infirmary was in one of the smaller modules, about the size and dimensions of a shipping container, but equipped with tech that Jove had only seen in videos of expensive hospitals.
"It's not actively bleeding, which is good," said Kira. "I don't think it'll need stitches."
"It would have if the wound had been a little deeper or slightly further toward his eye," said Andi. "You're so lucky, Jove! But it still must have hurt a great deal to suffer such an injury."
"It wasn't too bad," he said. "I iced it immediately after I suffered it."
Andi laughed, and it sounded somehow both forced and enthusiastic, which made Jove laugh.
"Hold still." His mother's fingers dug into his shoulder slightly. "So. How have you been doing?"
She took a disinfectant wipe and began dabbing at his cut and the skin around it. It stung quite a bit, and it made it hard to focus.
"Fine," he said. "I've been fine."
"Are you still working at the Drone-Drop warehouse?"
"Yeah," he said. "Still gainfully employed."
More of an exaggeration than an outright lie. He hadn't been fired, exactly, but all of the warehouse employees had been reduced to just two or three hours a week.
Each of them would show up and scan over the warehouse to make sure the bots were picking items and loading the delivery drones properly and then leave. He had been less than shocked that a company with Drone in its name had been quick to leverage the power automation.
"Are you still living in that apartment over the flower shop?" she asked.
He tried to summon his resolve. There would never be a better time than right then to ask about having her help him out with rent. He felt so ashamed to need the help to begin with, twice over for it being his real motivation in agreeing to come out on this stupid Antarctic vacation to begin with.
The honest truth was that Jove had written off his relationship with his mother in the same way he had his relationship with his sister. They'd just never really clicked, never been close in a way that felt like what family was supposed to be.
Hell, he almost felt like he knew Aster better than he knew his mother, having at least been given the occasional update on what she was doing through news articles and speculation videos while she was in the limelight.
"Yeah," he said. "Same apartment."
"That's nice." His mother put a band-aid over the cut and began smoothing it out with her fingers, and Jove felt an odd tickle run down his spine. "I always liked how that apartment smelled."