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Language:
English
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Published:
2025-09-22
Completed:
2025-09-22
Words:
894
Chapters:
5/5
Comments:
32
Kudos:
20
Hits:
148

Five to the Power of Two

Summary:

Five, five sentence fics in honor of the love of two people: Margo Madison and Sergei Nikulov. Mini-fic titles are:

  1. Brazil AU: Waking Up
  2. Regular People (Redhead)
  3. Work, the Problem
  4. Tear Down This Wall (Between Us)
  5. The Lines She Crossed

Notes:

Watching the Margo x Sergei fandom on Tumblr has been inspirational. I first shared four of these micro-fics there, and I might not have written any if not for the lovely people who post and share and squee about this achingly beautiful pairing.

Chapter 1: Brazil AU: Waking Up

Chapter Text

His knees were hammocked in hers, chest warm on her back, his hand splayed and resting on her stomach. Not the firm stomach of her youth, but he didn’t seem to mind, his hum of contentment becoming a crescendo of appreciation in the musical score of her life. Their apartment was already filled with papers, schematics, and plans to bring new technologies to the Alcântara spaceport. But, before getting up, before getting out of bed to prepare for another day of fumbling in Portuguese and finding comfort in familiar math and an oh-so-familiar man, there was his hand, no longer resting but sliding downward … lower … lower … slip-sliding between her legs, careful not to put pressure on her bad hip. And in her not-firm-anymore stomach there was a blossoming of the closest she may have ever felt to pure joy.

Chapter 2: Regular People (Redhead)

Chapter Text

“You don’t feel pain the way regular people do,” says the little boy in the airplane seat next to Margo’s, his tone superior in that way of intelligent children who have a fact to share.

And it’s as if the whiplash of that evening returns as she sits in her seat, seatbelt fastened, choking, she’s choking, Sergei was choking, shy touches turned hungry turned throat-closing fear, he could die, she couldn’t let him die, what could she do to keep him safe, no, no, no, no, no —

“I’m so sorry,” the boy’s mother leans over, an affectionate hand on the child’s knee, “my husband is a dentist and he told our son how redheads often need more anesthesia and smaller doses of painkillers. We don’t mean to bother you.”

“No bother,” Margo says, a bald-faced lie of false reassurance as, safe in her airplane seat, she feels pain, she feels pain, she feels pain.

Chapter 3: Work, the Problem

Chapter Text

Legal pads of equations lay on her desk, a slide rule next to a calculator, yet the piano was what beckoned. 

Music followed rules but also broke them, notes quiet until they were soaring, jazz allowing for improvisation within a form, her hands almost caressing the black and white ivory keys that wouldn’t be hers for much longer.

If only she was the kind of person who could be satisfied with a small life, with wherever the Witness Protection Program would send Sergei and his family to achieve the banality necessary for anonymity. 

Instead, she was the Director of NASA, soon to be a defector to the Soviet Union and the safety from the FBI offered by a Roscosmos that would let her continue to do her work.

And she was deeply, deeply in love with a man whose equation was the inverse of her own, his journey to the United States a quiet note of victory while her impending escape to the Soviet Union was a new variation on the ever-dissonant chord of her life: the quest to achieve a job well done.

Chapter 4: Tear Down This Wall (Between Us)

Chapter Text

Sergei would deny it if anyone asked, ridiculous, a man of science who believed in ghosts. 

Except. 

His grandparents would hug him and kiss him in his dreams, his childhood friends would pontificate on politics in the passenger seat of his Prius, long-dead people who visited him and helped him feel less alone in this country of Cool Whip and Cheez-Its and very bad borscht. 

And Sergei would also deny, if anyone asked, his ache of confusion that Margo had never come to him in this way, her absence a vacuum—like space, he is cognizant of the terrible joke—until there she was in the flickering light of the television, alive, alive, his joy leaping and everything made sense. 

Then, after he got to touch her again and he was denied his last hamburger, Sergei was where Margo had never been, learning what she didn’t yet know, and when she fell asleep, he went to her to find out if it would be all right to visit her in her dreams, to spend time together in this way, but he didn’t get a chance to ask because, when he appeared before her, she leapt forward with the spryness of her youth and held him close in an embrace.

Chapter 5: The Lines She Crossed

Chapter Text

The FBI interrogation room is clean and sparse, no stench of blood or vomit, just a hard-backed chair, a table, and a polygraph machine. 

Sensors for the machine are placed on Margo’s chest, affixed to her fingertips, held within a blood pressure cuff wrapped tight around her arm. What she already knows is explained to her: information from the sensors will lead needles on the polygraph to draw steady lines if she tells the truth, but to jump and form jagged lines if she lies. 

Listening to questions and speaking her answers—“because the space program should be more important than borders here on Earth … because I felt saving lives, whether Soviet or American, was the right thing to do … no, I wasn’t aware of the JSC bombing in advance”—yield the steady lines of honesty.   

Until the question that drops her belly in sorrow and regret for could-have-beens, a depth of grief and pain and she must answer—“no, no, my feelings for Mr. Nikulov were entirely separate and had no influence on my actions”—and the polygraph needles leap and arc and if Sergei were here he might point out that the curves and lines of Margo’s lie could be rearranged to form a broken heart.