THE SPACE NAVY AU (18+)

"Oh, I see, by offering me tea what you meant was ordering me to make tea. Such hospitality." It's just pro forma grumbling, really; the task is a welcome chance to get hold of yourself without him looking at you. This Erskin has plenty of scars -- he's got an eyepatch, for crying out loud, a roguish sexy eyepatch -- but he also doesn't seem like he's poised to fling himself into the jaws of the most lethal thing he can find and then complain while it chews, and you find you're resenting the hell out of that. Which is unfair and weird, if you're honest with yourself.

You wonder how your Erskin is getting along with Commander You.

 

"Commander Kadros isn't such a goddamn whiner, you know!" you call cheerfully, and fumble around for the mediascreen's remote. "What's a movie you like? I want to see if we have it here!"

 

"I asked you first," you fire back, stung and trying to hide it. You're not a whiner. You're just not a doormat. So there.

 

"Uuuggghhh," you sigh, enormously put-upon. "Okay, I'm putting on one of my spy flicks, and you're going to hate it, and I will say I told you so, because I am right at this moment telling you so!"

You put on the latest from your favorite director, a lady who favors bright colors, cartoonish violence, intricately woven double-crossing sort of plots where just about everyone is working for at least three rival employers and playing five increasingly dubious trolls against one another per quadrant. Also, an absolutely artistic amount of tits in as many scenes as possible.

Bel isn't really suited to duplicity, the poor soul, and extensive meditations on the theme of disloyalty and manipulation tend to leave him cold, tits or no tits. Sometimes you make a big show of taking notes just to make him frown.

 

You love it.

It's so complicated and tricky, you can feel the gears of your brain engaging and taking up the load and it's great. The gratuitous rumblespheres are kind of perplexing, though; you can't figure out whether it's a running joke, or whether the director just has a particular thing for girl tops. Anyway, you're on the edge of your seat and your tea is getting cold, and you have no idea why he thought you'd hate this.

 

"You're actually enjoying yourself," you comment, surprised. "Would you want to see the others in the series, then?"

 

"Yeah! Commander Me really doesn't like these? They're brilliant! I'm gonna raid his fridge while you queue up the next one."

 

"No, he puts on his whole, Big Cold Marine Stoneface thing—" you demonstrate, "—and goes on and on about how unrealistic the violence is. No taste for social subtleties, that man. No talent for them, either, he rather tops out at 'hide the body after you shoot it'."

 

"Hm. Well, same, but I'm working on it. The subtleties, I mean. I prefer my violence unrealistic."

After a brief rummage through the thermal hull, you sit down with a bowl of vegetables and dip and gesture imperiously to the paused screen with a carrot. "Engage."

 

"'Make it so'?" you tease him. You get the first movie in the series playing and then stick your fingers in the dip. Eating the dip with vegetables is for suckers.

 

You load up a celery stick and try to insert it in his ear.

 

"You ungrateful little shit!" you yelp as dip gets wiped across your fin, then manage to grab his wrist and brace against the couch to keep him in place. Frowning severely, you take the dip away. "This is mine now. Enjoy your bloody carrots."

 

"Ungrateful? It's my dip from a parallel universe, you larcenous meathead, get your own!" You're finding it surprisingly difficult to take back from him, but that's not stopping you from trying.

 

"Well excuse me, princess pupa, it's my alternate universe!" you grin, fending him off. He's so small! You're used to the raw strength advantage, but it's not always enough to carry the day against someone three times your mass and significantly more martially adept. It's so easy to keep this size of Bel in place.

 

You are absolutely determined to stuff your half-eaten carrot down the back of his shirt. All your stress and confusion has been sharpened to this one point. This is do or die. Why is he so strong.

 

He makes a clever sort of feint at you and you nearly spill the dip down your front. Laughing, you captchalogue the thing, and then bowl him clear across the floor with one good overhand throw. It feels good to have a bit of muscle back from what a pathetic skeleton you were when you came out of that bloody VR tank. Between Jethro, Pancho, and Ironfist, you're not in too terrible shape.

"I might share if you ask nicely, you absurd little cabbage," you tell him, decaptchaloguing the bowl again.

 

You almost stuck the superhero landing when he bowled you, but you know when you're beat. You heave a deep sigh so he knows that wasn't sexy at all. "May I please have the dip back. And will you please only stick your fingers in like, one side of it, I don't know where they've been."

 

"Many enjoyably unhygienic places, I assure you," you smile, and scoot over to make room for him on the couch again.

 

As soon as he relaxes his hold on the dip container, you grab it and captchalog it, then abscond to the kitchen, trailing triumphant laughter.

 

You captchalogue the vegetables, then look supremely unagressive when he finally comes back to peer at you.

"I thought we were watching movies, not scampering about like sprightly lemmings," you say in tones of mild confusion.