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Half of her is starting to wonder when the others will notice, and the other half -- the stronger, smarter half--- is praying that no one ever notices how much time she's been spending with Topa since her surgery. Kelly is intelligent, skilled, trained, street smart, and she wears these facts with pride; she knows when the lines start to get a little bit too blurry, a little bit too suspicious. She knows what will make eyebrows raise.
God, she's abhorrent. The term God is only an expression for her; she doesn't believe, puts her faith solely in the cold hands of science and galactic knowledge, but it's still a little bit amusing. Believers from old Earth often imagined a place of punishment that people like her go after death, stories of eternal torture. You go there to be torn apart and then torn apart and then pieced back together intricate and gentle and then torn right apart again. You go there to have warm hands line your bones with tendon and muscle like they’re wrapping holiday presents, your skin pasted back on with precision and your body reconstructed, just to have all of that work undone by a force of retribution. Everyone who goes to Hell deserves it. They didn’t repent, so they deserved it, and the stir this concept caused made centuries fall. Kelly repents even so, her guilt insurmountable, but it doesn’t fix her, doesn’t patch up the illness within, She asks the universe to sacrifice her sometimes, when it gets too hard, to place her outside of fables and faith and divinity. Things that don't exist, like divinity, have no meaning--she herself is a believer, at least in this idea of nothingness in nothing, in this idea that one day she will face punishment for the time she wants to spend with Topa. The things she wants to do. Topa, who makes the absence of certainty in the face of the Krill-Moclan alliance bearable. Topa, who gets older every day. Topa, who she must protect. When she dies and descends, the realm will be entirely desolate except for Kelly's own soul.
She prays. When those hands rebuild her, she will imagine them as Topa's tiny palms.
Topa is so close to her now. Topa had wanted to be near her. Topa chose her.
Most people don't choose her. Most people can't. She is their commanding officer first and friend second—this is what you sign up for when you join the Union. She condemned Ed for drowning himself in his work, but things are—things are just different now. She can't get married again unless she meets someone outside of the ship. A new rule she implemented for herself after Ed. No Union officers. Cassius was an instructor, but he still worked for the Union. Topa…
Topa is…
Well. It doesn't matter. She won't meet someone outside of the Orville; with the state of the galaxy now the ship needs her more than ever. No leave of absence. No rest. No way to exhale.
All she can do now is protect Topa. She would do anything for this precious girl, she’d kneel to anyone, she’d open herself up to let Topa crawl into the safety of her chest, she’d cross almost any line, she’d hold her own head underneath the water until it all gets dark and damp and peaceful, to keep Topa safe.
Topa wants to spend every off-duty second Kelly has in the simulator, sitting with Kelly on cliffs and in flower fields and 21st century Earth aquariums and Xelayan islands. They’re making a checklist of different sunsets to watch together, checking off a new one every night before Topa’s curfew. Even Claire has commented on her absences.
Topa finds everything beautiful. She is fascinated by the universe, even after all that she has endured. It is a mindset Kelly had when she first joined the Union, and Topa is beginning to excavate the wonder in her, opening up new pathways all around Kelly just by smiling and asking questions out of her natural endearing curiosity. Topa digs her out of her own grave as Kelly pours more dirt on top of her body, dedicated to the suffocation like it’s a religion, burying every emotion down into the coffin of the brainstem, just to extinguish the wanting. She burns, and she will burn.