THE SPACE NAVY AU (18+)

ok i took the time i was traveling in another country to write up a little bit of captain aspera's baby officer backstory, and here it is.

Spoiler: cut for length

You’re holed up in a little metal tunnel somewhere, scared almost entirely out of your mind. It’s been a terrible perigee, it really has, and you’ve tried so hard to survive every new circumstance you’ve found yourself thrust into, you really have, but you’re fairly certain this is it for you. You’re going to die in a little metal tunnel and nothing you’ve ever done has actually mattered because it just led to here.

You gnaw on your clothes a bit. They’re more irritating than sunburn, and you’ve had a lot of sunburns to compare them to. But the fabric is tough and doesn’t give much, even when you gnaw the buttons, and you don’t have all that much room in your tunnel, and it’s just absolutely the terrible cap on the horrible situation, that you’re going to die all tangled up in this thick, confining nonsense. You hate everything.

Something taps, three times, on the outside of your tunnel. You freeze. After a long, long moment, it taps again. Someone says words, in addition to the tapping.

You curl up very tightly and hope very hard they go away. And they do.

After a long time, long enough that you’ve uncurled a bit and actually made progress in chewing the outermost layer of clothes off, there’s more tapping. You curl up again. If anyone finds you they’re going to be so angry about that other poor bastard you ripped the throat out of because you’re not supposed to do that and you did that and you’re in space now. You’re on a spaceship. You do understand that bit. You’re on a spaceship and you can’t just run away from people forever after you’ve bit someone’s throat out in a fit of somewhat irrational terror. They catch you and then they kill you in some kind of civilized space person way.

You’re going to die.

Three more taps, and a lot more words. You hug your knees against your face, trembling all over, and don’t entirely quite manage to swallow down a miserable peep. The words stop for a moment, and you expect— to be stabbed, or shot, or just the whole tunnel you’re in to be heaved out into space and you’ll suffocate— but instead something just smells like food.

You raise your face from your knees enough to sniff. It definitely smells like food. You wait a long, long time, but the smell doesn’t go away, and all the person outside is doing is making soft words and every now and then tapping three times on your tunnel.

Are they feeding you? Did someone bring you food? Is it the rest of that guy you bit?

Well, either you’re going to die, in which case you might as well face it head-on and biting more people, because fuck it, or someone’s feeding you, and you should get the food and see if there’s any way to get them to do that more.

You are hungry. You have always been hungry. You consist of hunger. It is the fundamental fact of your existence: you are hungry. Sometimes you feel like even if you died the hunger would still be there, a little bundle of white-hot need in the tangle of your bones.

Sometimes, people feed you. Most of those times you have to jump on them with a rock and force them to. Every now and then, they’ll just give food to you freely. You desperately hope this is the rare second sort of event, because you don’t have a rock, and you did already just kill that one person, and there’s only so much trouble you can get into on your way out to the freezing vacuum of space.

You reach a hand, cautiously, out of the tunnel. Nothing grabs you or cuts your fingers off. Instead, you find something squishy and cold right outside, and when you drag it back in you find a very large chunk of fresh meat. You devour it immediately, hardly daring to believe your luck, and carefully lick every bit of blood off your hand, before reaching out again. It's always worth it to see if insanely rare events will happen twice in a row.

It does! There’s another handful of meat, just a bit further off than the first one. Tonight is really looking up.

The third piece of meat is actually quite a bit farther to reach. You have to shuffle up towards the entrance of the tunnel before you can snag it with your claws, and you really don’t like where this is going. When the fourth bit turns out to be so far you’d actually have to lean out of the tunnel, you decide that you’re very grateful no one’s chopped your arm off so far but who knows what would happen if you offered them your head. You scoot a safe-feeling distance back into the tunnel and, feeling a really excellent amount of not as hungry, you curl back up and fall asleep.

*
You wake up to more tapping, and growl. The tapping pauses, then starts up continuously. You growl louder, but don’t even earn another pause. Trying to go back to sleep does not work. It takes a long while to decide whether or not you want to die from a lot of people pouncing on you when you come out of the tunnel, versus dying of exasperation in the tunnel, but eventually you decide that it will be worth it if you can bite whoever’s doing the taps.

Also, maybe they won’t kill you, and will just give you more meat. You don’t know hardly anything about spaceships, maybe that’s just what they do here, give you meat and let you kill whoever you want. You can hope.

The person doing the tapping is sitting on the round metal outside of your tunnel, tapping with the handle of a really enormous metal knife. It’s just gigantic. She’s a lot bigger than you, too, but instead of taking a swing at you she just waves. You duck back into the tunnel.

She starts tapping again. You hold out for what feels like ages, chewing on your tattered sleeves, before finally giving exiting the tunnel and biting her another go.

This time she’s got a handful of meat. You’re still extremely worried about the knife and the size issue, and not too happy about all the noise, but the meat focuses your attention almost entirely.

She makes some words. You lick your lips uneasily, and shake your head. You can’t understand her. Sometimes people say things and they make a little bit of sense. When you’re scared, nothing makes sense. She frowns, shrugs, tosses you the meat anyway. You grab it out of the air and have it down in one bite, though it sticks a bit and you have to swallow hard.

Then she gets up, licks her hand clean, and walks away. You crouch at the entrance of the tunnel, staring in total confusion, but she just leaves.

After a minute, when it appears that she’s really gone and no one else is waiting around to do you in, you go and curl up in the tunnel again, and try to sleep. It doesn’t take. You’ve digested a perigee’s worth of food in what feels like a night— no more than two nights— not to mention the meal you got just now, and you’ve got more energy than you know what to do with.

Well, you do know what to do with it. You can follow that girl. You just don’t want to do that, because it would be stupid.

You follow her anyway. It’s not hard. She smells like something sweet and synthetic, and also like meat, and also like… fire, perhaps.

You come in sight of her in a long hallway. She’s not even walking fast or holding her gigantic knife. No one else is around. She glances over her shoulder and waves at you, and you jump and flatten against the wall like an idiot. Obviously she can still see you, no matter how flat you are, but the instinct remains. She just laughs.

It’s been a long time since you heard anyone laugh. You like it, and find your mouth curling up at the corners despite yourself. Then she holds up another piece of meat and you like that a lot more. You follow her for ages and ages, hoping she’ll throw it, but she doesn’t. She just walks along like leading awful little wild things like you around a spaceship is her only purpose in life. You eventually come back around to disliking her a lot and wondering if you should run up and bite her after all, but don’t quite dare.

She opens a door. She walks through the door. She does not close the door.

You stop quite a ways out from the door. This is ridiculous. If you go in she’s going to close the door. Obviously that’s what she’s going to do. You wouldn’t lure someone through a door and then not close the door.

But is anyone else on this whole ship going to give you meat?

Maybe. Possibly. But almost definitely not.

You go through the door.

It’s… a room. It’s a lot smaller than a lot of the rooms you’ve been in lately, and it’s got soft furniture items in it, squashy and attractive, and lamps in beautiful moonlight colors. There’s a table with chairs and she’s sitting on one. You think you know how this goes: people sit on either side of tables, and don’t kill each other. They eat and talk. People only kill each other away from tables.

You crouch, very carefully, on the other chair, knees pulled close to your chest. Ready to spring for the still-open door.

She points at herself. “I’m Lainey,” she says. You think you understand her, unless lainey is an adjective. She points at you.

You swallow, hard. Words are difficult. You still haven’t really picked up the knack again. But she looks patient. You open your mouth, make an awful choking grunt, and snap your teeth closed, totally embarrassed.

“I’m Lainey,” she says again, very slowly, like you’re stupid— because you’re stupid. You glare.

“I’m,” you manage. Then, startled and proud of yourself, you try, and succeed, at saying: “Erskin.”

Triumphantly, you conclude: “Pleaseda meeyou.”

She gives you the food.

*

Lainey is a junior leutenant, which is the term for someone who makes people do work but doesn’t get any respect for it. You are the captain, which means you’re charge of everyone and everything on the ship, until they kill you for doing it badly.

“Tha’ll be soon,” you say, dismayed. Even after a couple nights of trying, your words are still slushy, growling, you can’t get any of them right.

“Maybe,” she says. “I mean, like, the last guy was bugfuck and he lasted a whole sweep.”

“Am I…” You lick your teeth, trying hard, “bugfuck?”

“Yep." She flops sideways on the couch. Your couch. "Sorry, kiddo. You're pretty screwed up.”

You think about it. “A sweep’s pretty long,” you say. “I could be… unfuck by, er, by… the… unfuck by the end. Unbug?”

“Ha! Yeah, maybe.”

You think some more. Line everything up very carefully. “If you make people work, you can, you, you can make me. You can make me work.”

She raises her eyebrows at you. “You think so, kid?”

You nod, a little less certainly. “…Do you? Think… think so?”

She looks at you, looks at all of you, and grins. “Yeah. Yeah, I do, actually. Let's give it a shot.”

*

The small room is yours. It’s colder than home in the day, but warmer than home at night. You will never go home again. Once you are in space, that’s that. This is your home now. It’s always the same temperature, it never burns, it never freezes. The furniture is so soft you sink into it. The door closes but only when you close it, and there’s a lock. There’s a second door that leads to a smaller room with as much water as you want, even though you’re in space, and you don’t know where anyone’s getting water in space. You don’t know where they’re getting meat, either. You’re getting your meat from Lainey, who comes by once a day with food and toys and computers, and knocks three times so you know it’s her.

You think you like her a lot, in between being scared. You’re scared about as much as you’re hungry, which is a lot less recently, actually. Which is why you like her, you think. You’re pretty sure. People that appear more than once in your life is a new thing. You’re still figuring it out.

*

“You need a better accent,” Lainey says. “I mean, if we’re getting all Troll Pygmallion up in this bitch.”

“Are we?” you ask. You’re in the bath. She’s brought you new clothes, soft and loose, with no chains or glitter or buttons. You’ll put them on in a bit. For now, you’re in the bath, and it’s warm and you’re sleepy. She’s running her fingers through the unfamiliar short fuzz of your hair.

“Yeah. I mean, you’re not really hot enough for Tarzan.”

You stick your tongue out at her, and she laughs. You really like her laugh.

“Yeah, keep rocking the sickly urchin thing, Erskin. It’s working.”

“I’m working,” you smile.

She takes one of your fins between her fingers and pulls on it, spreads the tines. Explores the ragged edges. You close your eyes, feeling genuinely comfortable and good, and let her, enjoying the sensation of living fire on the other side of her skin. She can melt metal in her hand but she won’t hurt you. She’s fixing you. A slow, deep purr works its way up your throat.

“Damn,” she says softly. “…damn, boy.”

She touches your jaw, turns it. You blink your eyes open and she’s… very close.

“Can I— do you want—" she’s looking at your mouth, “fuck, I mean— you’re cute, okay?”

“Okay,” you say, bemused, and she kisses you. It takes you a moment to realize, and then you kiss back eagerly, reaching up with wet hands to grab her shirt in case she might think you’re not interested enough. You’ve had sex before, there were— there were people, just before you were taken to space, they had food, they made a fire and sang and gave you whatever you wanted, and sex too, and you’d only had to point. You’d woken up sore and sandy and optimistic and then there had been drones and pails and even more sex and you really like sex, even if it leaves you starving and thirsty afterwards. But there’s as much food and water here as you want. You don’t have to worry about it even a little.

She stops kissing you after a bit. You whine, confused and upset about this, and hold on to her shirt. If she leaves now you’re going be really unhappy.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“Yes,” you snap.

“I mean, with thi—“

“YES.”

She laughs again. You love her laugh but you’d love more if she would have sex with you. She looks at you, down at your body, then back at your face, and she’s smiling, she likes what she sees.

“Okay,” she says. “Damn! Ready to go, huh?”

You get out of the tub. Then you pick her up, very careful not to break or even bruise anything, carry her off to your favorite long squashy furniture, the couch, and sit down on it with her in your lap. She's a lot bigger than you, but it turns out, not that much vertically. And anyway you've carried much larger rocks and corpses around, so it's easier.

“Wow,” she says. “So you’re like, a little bit Tarzan. That’s, uh, that’s cool.” Her face is brightly flushed, her eyes wide. This is new, but you think it’s good. She looks good. She kisses you even more enthusiastically and that’s great. It’s not like it was with those strangers in the desert, it’s better: you know her.

She knows a lot more about sex than them, too.

*

You like the Jeeves and Wuster show that Lainey gave you a lot. The costumes are lovely and the stories are delightful and the accents aren’t especially difficult to echo: you must have spoken just like them once, as a wiggler, you must have taken those language modules. The turns of phrase are familiar, the long vowels and confident drawl, you learn it all in a way that feels like remembering.

“You’re sounding a lot better,” Lainey says. She’s brought you little cakes and tea instead of meat. You’re trying and mostly failing to use a fork.

“Well, I’m feeling better, old bean,” you tell her. She laughs.

“Old bean?” she repeats. “Don’t you old bean me, you ungrateful little punk.”

You grin, shrug. “My dear walnut,” you say, poking her with a fork. “My darling tortoise.”

“You can’t make any random combination of words into a compliment.”

“I can when I have such an appealing subject to speak of! Of which to speak?”

“Oh my god.”

“My lovely dinner set. Fork of my admiration.” You poke her again. She swats you, laughing again, then leans over the table and kisses you, which is exactly what you wanted. Wuster is a charming fellow, in his own way, but entirely buckfuck, to so assiduously avoid kissing his lady friends. Kissing ladies is precisely the best thing ever.

 

Being 'kept in line' by the adult version of your moirail is an experience you don't have the emotional range to even remember properly, let alone process. You're grateful you have sleep and work to avoid her with. At the end of your next work shift, after delivering Lycaon to his quarters, you can't stomach the idea of going back to Commander You's quarters to have a big cynical Pancho treat you like lusus spawn instead of her best friend. You go wandering instead. Captain Erskin is probably going to have another hissy fit about it, but you're not so mature you don't kind of enjoy the idea of that.

You practice gathering intel, just to structure your travels. It's appallingly easy to find out where the captain's private quarters are, and what his schedule's like. You decide you'll do him a favor by testing his door lock. The security on this ship is worse than on your house back home. It's shameful.

 

You're having lunch in the kitchenblock with Lainey, working your way through a huge pot of crabs with her terrifically kind assistance in keeping the pot boiling.

"Oh, hallo there," you say, when he wanders in, and eat another fistful of crabs. "You're just in time to help me eat an ungodly amount of crabs. The population's exploded again."

"Oh my god," Lainey says gleefully. "Is this him? The grub version?"

"This is him," you say, and she makes a noise of abject cuteness overload.

 

You hold up a hand wearily. "Stop. I can't take any more of that right now. Coo over me at a later date, please -- Jegus, are you Lainey Gawker? I knew you two were vibing red!" You perch on the counter and snag a crab with one hand as you casually toss the door lock to Erskin with the other. "Security 101: fancy locks are useless if you stick them to the door with accessible screws."

 

You let the door lock hit the table, skid across it, and fall off the other side on to the kitchen floor, then eat another fistful of crabs. How in all the wide void of space are you supposed to not find this freak accident adorable, when he dares to stroll into your kitchen and lecture you like some sort of baby heistmaster?

"Security 101," you drawl, picking shell from between your fangs, "my matesprit can melt through steel plate if she gets tetchy and she doesn't much care for people getting their grubby little mitts on things she's claimed as her own, like myself. I think I'm fairly well set, Kadros."

Lainey gives you the kind of smile that means you're definitely getting plowed over the nearest semi-horizontal surface at her earliest convenience. You give her a smile in return that says you understand and appreciate this.

 

"Oh, she's always here, is she? Guarding your paperwork?" You roll your eyes. "No offense, Gawker, but your BTU output has zero influence on how secure the Captain's quarters are. This is ridiculous." You eat five more crabs while you're talking. They're small, okay? You did physical labor today! You are a growing troll! And growing, and growing, if the size of your alter's clothes is any indication.

 

"Oh, paperwork, Empress fucking forfend someone go and steal the paperwork," you laugh.

"Like the uninitiated wouldn't take three steps into that fucking transdimensional hazard zone of an office space and then just go absolutely cartoonish levels of insane," Lainey snorts. She sticks her hand directly into the boiling water and pulls herself out a crab, then nibbles the legs off. She points the abdomen accusingly at Bel. "You were supposed to fix the damn place up, you know, not add yet another layer of fuck-madness to the proceedings."

"We did fuck in there a few times," you say thoughtfully, and eat a few more crabs.

"Well I mean yeah, sure, obviously paperwork gets Big Blue gagging for it, but I meant like fuck-madness as a metaphor."

"I know my way around both metaphorical and literal fuck-madness, thanks much, and how dare you imply I don't."

"God, you're like so small, though," Lainey says, marveling over Bel's adolescent version all over again. "Come here and eat more crabs, holy shit."

 

"I'm working on it," you say irritably, throwing Erskin a raised eyebrow. Does she think you're Commander You but shrunk? Around another mouthful of spicy steamed goodness, you go on, "I'm juft faying. I could give myshelf a fousand perfent raise while you're in the bafroom."

 

"Wouldn't it make more sense to give yourself a five percent raise every perigee or so, so that the staff handling payroll don't raise the alarm over it?" you ask, propping your chin in your palm. "As dastardly plans go, I've found that slow and steady tends to get you a lot further than big dramatic gestures, even if you do rather want to convey to your superiors that you're very well extremely clever."

 

"It's not the money, who wants money?" You tilt your head, perplexed that he doesn't get it. "It's to piss you off."

 

"Aww," Lainey goes.

"Aww," you also go. "Bel, that's adorably blatant, but also your older self has much more sophisticated ways of pissing me off that doesn't involve making more work for himself by screwing around with the paperwork. Is sneaking into my crew quarters and touching all my things how you flirt with my younger self?"

"No one ever did anything that romantic for me," Lainey says.

"Yes, because if they did you would incinerate them, darling."

"It's the thought that counts."

You raise an eyebrow at Bel, like Well, does it, though?

 

"I wouldn't know if thought counts for much," you say primly. "Your younger self doesn't do any. I think he uses his brain as a heat sink."

 

You couldn't help yourself for all the gold in the Empire and a free motorboat of the Empress's tits: you give Bel's adorable juvenile counterpart an extremely significant look up and down.

"It does seem to be a feature of the age bracket, yes," you say in tones of sweetly considerate agreeableness.

 

You give what you're aware is probably the most teenage eyeroll within a thousand parsecs, but you just can't help yourself. "Cheap shot, Captain. You seem very reluctant to accept that my Erskin is an exceptional fuckup, but I swear that seeing this you engaging in basic self care and not actively trying to get murdered was the shock of my life. Mine probably attacked Commander Me immediately and got killed." Ugh. You wish you hadn't thought of that. "Shit."

 

You sigh, fairly gently, and pop another crab into your mouth. "Again, Kadros, I do want to point out that the very first thing you did after promising me you'd stay put until we developed some sensible kind of action plan for integrating you with my crew was wait until I was asleep, then go joyriding in just about the most lethal possible area of the Sunslammer on the say-so of a demented Helmsman with a kill list longer than some assasinihilators and a particular grudge against bluebloods. Then you were remarkably pissy when I was concerned about this.

"I have no problems with the fact that I was as dim as a box of spectacularly ill-advised rocks at eight sweeps, having been eight sweeps-- it's that you yourself can't quite seem to apply the obvious conclusion to your own situation that's currently amusing me."

 

"The fact that you think it's the same thing proves you have no idea what an idiot my you is. I'm reckless when I'm upset. He's a soufflé rolling downhill toward the sea." You sound kind of sad and tired, which suggests this is maybe a topic you should lay to rest at this point. "Anyway, none of that matters to this you, so I'd rather hear how you and Lainey got together. Did you meet on the home planet like you did in my timeline?"

 

Lainey laughs. "No, wow, hell no, I don't think he was out of the caves before I was off planet," she says. "Nah, his feral ass got posted here a couple sweeps back because he beefed the aptitude tests but was too highblooded not to give a ship to. Galley had just bumped off our last captain and the interim bitch was a real asshole, did way too much distributing drugs and groping the lowbloods and made me mop up after her, even though she wasn't more than a shade or two bluer, the snob. So when the first thing Erskin did was tear her throat out--"

"You fell in love instantly," you tease her. She laughs and gives you a crab.

"I was like 'hey, I can use this!'" she says, without a single perceptible sign of shame. "He like, went and hid in a pipe for a couple nights running after that but I lured him out with steak and trained him how to use words and shit like a big troll, and here we are."

"Madly in love," you say again. "Besotted. Enamored."

"I'm really just still in it for how choice your nook is, moonflower," she says, and gives you another crab.

"Horseshit," you say. "My bulge is terrific too and you know it, sugar-star."

"Ehh," she says, and waggles her hand ambivalently. You mime a mortal blow to the vascular nexus, then eat the latest crabsnack.

 

"Okay, that's honestly precious," you say, and you're not even being sarcastic. It is. And way healthier than... well, anyway. "Did you ever write a gossip blog back home, Lainey? That's how we met my timeline's you."

 

"Oh, fuck, maybe? I did some shit back when I was like, eight, nine, cared about fashion and stuff. Right now I just recreationally photo-chop celebrities into historic battle footage on whatever the losing side was and then get Arguus to replace the original stuff. Then I wait to see who notices. It's way more fun."

"Has anyone spotted Troll Sinatra getting his head scissored off by that mantis queen thing yet?" you ask.

"No, and it's frankly insulting," she sniffs.

 

"I bet there's a breathless conspiracy theory website about it somewhere," you reassure her. "Our you is pretty damn media savvy, so you're probably way better."