intermission: the peculiar wartime romance of Tyler Jackson and Maya Bunch

November 2083- February 2085. Tyler Jackson was 21, Maya Bunch was 24.

* nevermind that I changed Tyler's hair in the middle of this. Let's just pretend he needed a haircut at a few points over the year, lol! 


Tyler Jackson and Maya Bunch first met in Fort Palmetto, and then continued to get to know each other while they were both stationed at the Lunar complex. In the early years of the war, casual dating was quite common on base, and even allowed as long as both people did not work in the same department and signed a consent agreement. In the early days, the Lunar complex was far removed from the frenzy of what was going on with the Jupiter stations, which made it easy for people to mingle in their downtime.

Tyler met Maya over a game of chess in the common room. She won, and she won hard. Tyler was intrigued. Tyler was a newly recruited patrol shuttle scout. Maya was a aerospace engineer. They were a curious pairing, to say the least.



They had effectively nothing in common, that they knew of, but maybe after his tumultuous failed relationship with his high school sweetheart, Summer, that might have been exactly what Tyler was looking for. Maya was unlike Summer in just about every conceivable way. But Tyler and Summer had made their peace before he went off to war, even if it was a vague and fickle peace, and Tyler felt free to explore new connections. Different connections.

Maya was the kind of girl Tyler would have bullied in high school if he had known her in high school. He was glad he didn't know her then, because he never would have discovered how wonderfully quirky, brilliant, geeky, and completely unfashionable she was. She snorted when she laughed. She was serious when she was serious and dryly humorous when she wasn't serious. Maya didn't do drama. At all.



Maya thought Tyler was hopelessly romantic and totally handsome, of course, but what she liked about him most in those days was the tenderness when he spoke of his family, his dog Mary Jane, and even his ex, Summer, and how he used to want to marry her. He was a heart breaker, for sure. Maya saw that coming from the start. But she just couldn't resist the charms. She found it strange and fascinating that a man like Tyler would even want to charm her at all. So she vowed not to get into it too deeply, and so did he. They just enjoyed each other’s company, found each other attractive, and didn’t think too much about it beyond that. They were at war, after all, and everybody had work to do.

They both intended to keep things low-key, but that wasn’t what happened. Maya started to feel strongly about him first, but he really liked her too. Much more than he expected for so soon after Summer. He couldn't even explain how he and Maya worked so well together when they seemed to have nothing in common. They just worked, somehow.


Their affection for each other became especially apparent after Tyler had his close call with mortality in a shuttle malfunction. He was fine, mostly, just spooked. She came to the infirmary to sit with him during his checkups and she rarely left his side. Seeing how shook up and concerned for him that Maya was, it became clear to him that they’d gotten too involved.


He really wanted to keep seeing her, but he wanted to keep things on the casual level they'd started with. It just felt like too much, too soon after Summer, and during a war. He wasn’t ready for that, especially not right now.


So he broke things off before they could get any more involved.


They both took it rather hard.

But this was just as the conflict intensified around Earth, and they didn’t have time for the drama, so it was swept under the rug and they both went on. In the spring of 2085, just before the conflict came to Earth, Tyler was among one of the Lunar units sent back down to fight on the ground, and they didn't see each other again until the war was over.


After Reclamation Day, they ran into each other a few times on the ground in Fort Palmetto. He tried to charm her, but she wouldn't have it. They never disliked each other and he would have been happy to continue seeing her casually, but she didn’t want that. So their meetings were only fraught with sadness on her part. She saw the heartbreak coming from the start, and she got it.

Tyler completed his military service in March of 2086 and decided not to continue. He moved to Potomac Heights to pursue a career in professional athletics. Soon after, Maya moved to Sierra Nova where she found government contract work in wormhole generator research. They have not spoken again since.