The Return of the Mac - and the Dance of Shame

Posted on Wed Jan 7th, 2026 @ 11:47pm by Commander Dean House & Lieutenant Commander Bonnie "Bon-Bon" Durnell

2,398 words; about a 12 minute read

Mission: Character Development
Location: Earth - Washington DC
Timeline: Pre-Lost in Space

Sunlight stabbed through the slats of the old blinds and hit Bonnie directly in the face, an unsubtle cue from the universe that last night’s bliss had a very short shelf life. She rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand. Her brain felt sticky and slow, but some primal survival instinct shoved a thought through the fog.

Too bright. Too early. Too... suspiciously early. “Computer,” she croaked, voice raw and tiny. “Time?” The fog of hang-over prevalent.

“Zero-seven-fifty-five hours.”

Her eyes went wide. Her stomach dropped. Her soul left her body with a soundless, internal scream. “Five, no, FOUR minutes, no, oh ancestors,” she hissed as she stumbled out of bed, grabbing the sheet, dropping the sheet, grabbing the nightshirt, missing the head hole entirely.

"Dean! Get up!" The room turned into an obstacle course designed by a sadist. She tripped over an old crate, kicked a hydro-spanner, stepped directly on a stray isolinear rod, swore creatively, and hopped on one foot while trying to locate the other.

“Boot, uh, where’s my... BOOT!” She found it under Dean’s discarded jacket, jammed her foot into it, and hissed again because apparently this was the boot she’d blown the heel out of while dancing. Fabulous.

Her uniform was a half-folded lump on the dresser. She snatched it up, hugged it to her chest, then froze mid-stumble. Her panties were... not immediately visible. She stared down at the carpet like it might offer a clue. Nothing. The carpet remained smugly unhelpful.

“No time, no dignity, fine,” she muttered, stuffing the uniform bundle under one arm while slapping her comm-badge onto her nightshirt with the other. It stuck crookedly, but at least it stuck. She dashed out the bedroom door, hair still a chaotic sculpture of last-nights passion and poor decisions. Dean’s footsteps followed behind her, she didn’t dare look at him; she’d combust.

They made it to the front porch with seconds to spare, Bonnie wildly out of breath, one boot on, legs bare, nightshirt slightly askew, clutching her uniform like a security blanket. Her heart hammered. Her pulse sang.

“We made...”

The air shimmered. A transporter hum rose. And then... schrrrp... A perfect “Deanwhich”, their unfortunate earlier test transport accident, materialized right in front of them on the porch. Still wrapped up, warm, perfect. Stacked. Pressed.

Bonnie stared at it. The universe stared back. “Perfect,” she whispered, voice cracking with disbelief and inevitability. “This is exactly the sort of energy my day deserves.”

Dean picking it up, giving a little look at it. For some reason he liked going on without a shirt. It wasn't trying to show boat his scars though. Lifting it up to his nose. "Smells okay," A pause and then a bite out of it. "Tastes fine. I think we're good." He sat the Deanwich back where he found it, knowing it was technically from their past. Temporal Mechanics preserved.

Bonnie tapped her badge, a signal they were ready for transport, though she had already preset the time and coordinates. Her comm-badge chirped, acknowledging she was ready for beam-out. She didn’t even have the strength to swear. Her only thought was that if she survived this trip back to the Sunfire, she was absolutely stealing a shower before anyone saw her in this state. The beam caught her, and Dean, while she was still holding her uniform and wearing exactly one boot.

Dean closed one eye, given this was that experimental. They did it together, he was very proud of that, more so in Bonnie, however, there was always the risk.

Time passed slowly as it had done before. The distance over time equation running around in her mind along with many other things, during the trip.

The cargo bay welcomed them back with a slap of cold air, a shimmer of transporter light, and a sharp metallic crack as something overloaded inside the test platform.

"I guess that worked and you've still got your bosom covered for the moment. I'm going to have to ask you later why you didn't at least put my wife beater on. Less you want to do it again. We can do that," Dean grinned.

Bonnie rematerialized clutching her uniform bundle under her arm, one boot firmly planted, the other foot completely unprotected against the unforgiving deck plating. Her hair stuck up like a frazzled antenna array. Before she could inhale, the test Trans-transporter coughed, an electrical sputter, a flash of sparks, and then a gout of smoke so dramatic it might as well have been protesting its own existence.

Dean finished half of the Deanwich during transport. "You know," he grinned, "Since you've already got your pants off. We could always go round two and t.." Dean was cut off by fireworks. Oh, come on, he was even going to share the Deanwich. "Now what."

“No! No no NO! Don’t you dare die on me!” Bonnie shouted, already lunging toward the sparking console.

She didn’t notice that Dean materialized beside her looking equally disoriented. She didn’t even notice a cargo specialist dropping a clipboard in shock as he took in the sight of her half-naked panic. All she saw was the delicate calibration matrix she’d spent days perfecting, now sizzling and burning like it had personally offended the laws of physics. Which, it had.

"Out!" Barked to the specialist, who skirted off and got out of the cargo bay as quick as they could. Dean looked back to Bonnie.

She skidded on the deck, stubbed her bare toe, hissed, and still kept going, smacking the console with the heel of her hand. “Don’t you do dare this to me, you ungrateful, quantum-stuttering gremlin! I leave you alone for ONE night, ONE! And you go and fry yourself? Did I not love you enough?”

The console belched another spark. A small flame licked the side panel. Something inside sizzled like breakfast gone wrong. Bonnie grabbed a nearby extinguisher, yanked the tab with surprising fury, and blasted the transporter housing until foam slid down the casing and dripped onto her exposed legs. “Great,” she muttered, breathing hard. “Perfect. Exactly how I wanted to start my morning, mostly naked, covered in foam, and performing emergency triage on a transporter I JUST...”

Someone cleared their throat behind her. Bonnie didn’t turn. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t care. “Not now! My baby is bleeding!” she snapped, hands diving into the open panel to assess the damage. “I swear, if one more isolinear chip melted I’m going to hunt the universe down myself and file a personal complaint.”

Only after a long beat did she remember the rest of reality, Dean, the dancing, the... everything, and that she was standing in front of half the cargo bay in nothing but a nightshirt, one boot, and foam. She chose, gracefully and defiantly, to completely ignore that part. The Trans-Sector-transporter (she still hadn't decided on an official name) was burning. Her pride could burn later. And if the universe wanted to embarrass her more than this, it was welcome to try. The poor thing likely wasn’t ready for the challenge.

Just as the tears started rolling down her cheek, she felt Dean's hand once more upon her shoulder, comforting her.

Dean knew for the most part to stay out of her way when she got in this mode, bottomless and teasing aside. He knew a lot of things but she still knew way more, at least on the mechanical side of things. The foam could be dealt with later. Anyone else that potentially may have been in there had been run off when he snapped at the specialist.

"Bonnie..." His voice softened, comforting, soothing, but at the same time just hard enough to get her attention. "Bonnie. Look at me." She should know by now as soon as she did he was there to hold her and more than likely she was going to.

Bonnie didn’t pull away, but she didn’t lean in either. She lifted a hand, gently resting it over his, grounding herself before she spoke. “I can’t talk about it,” she said quietly, eyes fixed somewhere just past his shoulder. “Not yet.” A breath hitched, then steadied. “I don’t regret it. I just… don’t know what to do with it yet.” Her shoulders sagged a fraction, the fight draining out of her. “Right now I just need a shower, some quiet, and a little time to get my head back where it belongs.”

"I wasn't talking about what happened between us." He took a breath, the opening was still there, the teasing aside. That would have been great again but that moment has passed. "Stay here."

Going to find where her under uniform pants were and either putting them on her, or just giving them to her to do so. Since, she didn't want to be bottomless still. Again, standing in front of her, close. "I was talking about this, the machine. Your frustration. We'll fix it. As well as, the other part. I'm right here." His voice still in that lower tone. "And later, if you want to get the anger out. You can beat on me."

Bonnie let out a breath that sounded more like a crack than a sigh. His words nudged her gaze back to the wrecked machine, to the scorched housing and warped panels, evidence of how close everything had come to slipping through her fingers. “It’s always like this,” she murmured, not quite looking at him, not quite talking about them. About systems held together by stubborn will, about being the one who keeps pushing until something finally gives. She scrubbed at her cheek with the back of her hand, annoyed at the tears as much as the damage.

She took the uniform pants from him, fingers brushing his in a fleeting, grounding touch, and stepped back just enough to pull them on. The movement wasn’t rejection so much as self-preservation, a thin line drawn before the rest of her spilled out. Her eyes lingered on the ruined console once more, cataloging what could be salvaged, what would have to be rebuilt from scratch, filing it all away like she always did.

“I just need a minute,” she said quietly, already turning toward the hatch. The shower wasn’t about modesty or escape, it was a reset, a way to get her breathing back under control before the next wave hit. The problem, like everything else, would still be there when she came back.

By the time she got back, if she got back, instead of completely running away. Bonnie would find Dean elbows deep in fixing some of the parts he knew how to. It was a gesture of good faith, as was she still had half of the deanwich waiting on her as well. It wasn't just her baby . It was theirs. They managed this achievement together and it was just as important to him as it was to her.

Bonnie left the cargo bay with the smell of scorched circuitry still clinging to her like a bad memory. Smoke had a way of sticking to everything, hair, skin, thoughts. The transwarp rig lay behind her in pieces, its brief, brilliant defiance reduced to slag and curled plating. It hurt in the precise way only engineers understood: not heartbreak, not grief, but the quiet ache of a thing that almost worked. Almost was the cruelest word in her vocabulary. Almost meant she’d been right, and wrong, at the same time.

The shower was too hot at first. She let it be. Steam filled the stall, blurring the edges of the world until it was just water and breath and the steady drum of her pulse. Dean drifted through her thoughts uninvited, his warmth, the way the night had unfolded without planning or permission. Regret wasn’t the right shape for it. Neither was comfort. It sat somewhere stranger, heavier: a collision of timing and want and exhaustion. She pressed her forehead briefly to the cool tile and let the water rinse the night down the drain, not erasing it, just… setting it aside. There would be time later to name what it was. Not now.

As the heat eased and her breathing slowed, her mind did what it always did when things felt unmanageable, it rebuilt. Capacitor failure. Phase variance. The moment the trans-transporter screamed before it died. She replayed it, not with guilt, but with curiosity. Failures were just data that hurt your feelings. By the time she shut the water off, the fog in her head had thinned. She dressed with methodical care, hair damp, spine straighter, hands steadier. When she returned, she would return whole, ready to argue with physics again, ready to face Dean without running. The work was still there. Their work. And Bonnie, collected at last, was not done with it yet.

Dean was still being vigilant in trying to fix what he could while Bonnie was gone. He wasn't going to let this happen if he could manage it. It meant so much to Bonnie. This had to be done.

Bonnie stepped back into the space she’d left steaming and smoldering, both literally and otherwise. The transporter assembly lay open, half-organized, half-hopeful, components rerouted, a few things done correctly, a few done with determination rather than precision. She paused just long enough to take it all in, then moved without ceremony. One hand reached past him to steady a wobbling isolinear rack, the other adjusted a phase coupler that had been almost right. The system’s tone softened a fraction, from angry protest to wary tolerance. Not fixed. But listening.

She exhaled through her nose, a ghost of a smile tugging at one corner of her mouth. “You know,” she said lightly, fingers dancing back to her own console, “If this thing decides to explode, I’m absolutely blaming you in the report.” There was no bite in it... just the familiar, Bonnie-shaped release of pressure. She pulled up diagnostics, eyes sharpening as the numbers scrolled. “Okay,” she murmured, more to the machine than anyone else, “let’s see how mad physics still is today.”

The work resumed. Shoulder to shoulder. Quiet. Whole again.

 

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