THE SPACE NAVY AU (18+)

"Yes," you snap.

...no. After some increasingly frustrated fumbling with the little tube you shove it back at him. You don't need it anyway.

You're just-- useless now. You'll just sit here and be stupid and useless with the rest of the fucking zombies.

 

"Okay, I can do it. You're my Erskin, I'll do it." You study the tube until you make it spritz cold stuff on your chin. He's angry and flinchy, but maybe this will make him better, because his ears look super terrible. By the time you've got yourself sitting steadily and aiming in the right direction, the wet spot on your chin is numb, which you think is a good sign. You give the nearest ear a proper spraying.

 

You growl at him, though it certainly doesn't help. What are you going to do, pick a fight with him? Like this? Being angry with yourself for being angry doesn't help anything either.

The sprayed fin's starting to numb, sending everything spinning, so you shuffle about and let him get the other. Then you heave off the cot and get your balance with your cane, gauging whether or not you can get out of here without plowing into anyone.

 

You get up and kilt the blanket around your waist, pleased to find you have better luck at staying upright if you don't move so fast, because it's apparently going-somewhere time.

 

Oh, alright, you're evidently going to have an entourage. Splendid.

"What's the exit procedure for this place?" You ask an unsubtly hovering ensign. They give you a golden gelcap pill and a cup of water, then point you towards an attached ablution chamber.

Twenty awful minutes later you limp back out, wiping your mouth, to find Bel wearing a pair of drawstring trousers, a crisp arm bandage, and an eager expression that would not be out of place on a woofbeast wiggler. You soften a little.

"Let's have soup," you say. "I'm starving and you haven't eaten in a week."

 

"I haven't? That was dumb of me." You take his hand so you won't get lost.

As you set out, you struggle to unearth a kernel of memory. "I remember you telling me... asking for... special soups? Or large soups? Magnanimous soups. Worthy soups." None of these are right. "What was it? And did I give it?"

 

"Not really, you got sick pretty soon after. But you can make it up to me. I always like soup."

The big kitchens in the recreation areas got stuck behind the quarantine line, but there's a decently sized chowhall in a corner of residential. You set off slowly and carefully, your numb fins badly affecting your balance and Kadros at the end of your free arm a further instability. By the time you get to the food it's going to be a bloody miracle if you even want it.

 

After about five interminable minutes of travel, you give an exasperated whine. "This is extremely terrible. We should make someone carry us. Someone should push us in a wheelbarrow."

 

"I left the fourwheel device back in the medical block," you tell him. "Also being pushed around in one is worse. You should only let that happen to you if you can't manage to kill yourself first. Or whoever it is that's coming at you with the damn thing."

He lags behind far enough to nearly pull you backwards off your feet. You grit your teeth and carefully refrain from giving him a sharp whack on the shins with your cane. He's brainlessly adorable like this and it wouldn't be fair.

"Would you like to go back?" you ask as mildly as possible. "We can go back and you can lie down."

 

You give it some serious consideration, but even though you can't imagine literally not eating for a week no matter how pukey you were, and certainly not if you were also fighting (?), you are definitely feeling a seriously unpleasant crampy emptiness in your stomach, which juice cubes did nothing to dispel. You steel yourself and forge onward, shaking your head. "Soup is so important."

Apparently showing off for Erskin how walky you are is the key to achieving travel. It shouldn't be easier to walk now, but somehow it is, just because he offered to let you lie down. It's pretty cool.

Food smells reel you in the last dozen meters or so. You find yourself in a block containing a scattering of tables and chairs, a very small number of trolls, and a sort of counter dealie with food in warmers. You're so focused on that food, you almost walk right past a familiar curly head and pair of horns. Almost. The importance of those shapes is printed deep in your mind, and your reaction is automatic: you give a soft, happy cry and glomp her.

She makes a funny squeaky noise, because she had her back to you and was bent over a bowl of something, mechanically shoveling it into her tired, grubby face. But the next second she catches on it's you, turns around to hug you back, and starts giggling. You start giggling too, out of sheer joy.

"It's my Pancho!" you tell Erskin.

 

It'd take a significantly more bitter asshole than you are to remain untouched by such a display.

"Congratulations," you tell him solemnly, and trudge forwards the last bit to the food counter. You get a tray, a bowl of thick stew, a bowl of thin broth with nearly all the bits strained out, a few pieces of grain-loaf, and, after consideration, an apple muffin. You tuck the tray under your free arm and very, very carefully inch back to the table.

You put the tray down in front of the combined mass of Bel and his Pancho and sit across from them.

"The muffin's for you, Sergeant," you tell her. "I'm willing to further reward you with any amount of gold, jewels, and carnal acrobatics but it's going to have to wait until I've had some lunch."

 

You're sitting on Bel's lap for the first time in a sweep, and the idea that there might be some further reward beyond this is hard to wrap your head around. He's disoriented, talks like a wiggler, and is about as graceful as a rubber glove full of egg salad, but there's every chance that's just the effect of low blood sugar, dehydration, and exhaustion. There's every chance he's going to be absolutely fine.

The way he's rubbing his cheek against your hair is scandalous, and he would never do it in public if he were all there. If he does recover all the way, you're never going to let him live it down.

"How about wood, Captain?" you say as you take the muffin. "I've got a stash from planetside deployments, but once it runs out, I'll be hungry for woodworking materials, and it's so expensive in space. Gold and jewels are silly on a greenblood, but hand me a nice bit of bird's eye maple and I'm your best friend."

 

You squint thoughtfully as you work on your stew.

"Might be tricky, all our trees here are scaffold-grown. It's just down to weight and time limits, you know, and I've only been working with them for a sweep or two, so I don't think we'll be able to get you anything over the size of a plank. You're welcome to tour the recreation blocks with Eli, of course, he'll let you know where there might be something decent to harvest."

Belatedly, you realize, "Oh, did you mean purchased? I could—" a bit of mental calculation, "— probably get some at the next port."

It'll be hell to balance the accounts, but if anyone deserves a load of expensive fripperies, it's this lady.

 

"A plank? I don't need anything bigger than my hand! Here, this is the sort of -- Bel, no, not yet," you interrupt yourself as Bel tries to steal your muffin. He pouts shamelessly, and you laugh and pinch him off a grape-sized crumb. "See if that'll stay down.

He opens his mouth like a baby bird so you can feed it to him. You wibble.

Returning your attention to Aspera, you de-log a recent project, a miniature chessboard of almost-black tropical wood inlaid with fossil ivory. The black squares have pinpoint silver beads set into them in the patterns of constellations. You also show him a few of the black chess pieces you're in the process of carving: they're in the shapes of Fleet ships, and the rook is a carrier just like the Sunslammer. "The white pieces will be alien ships, but I haven't started those yet."

Bel takes one and raises it to his face, and for a moment you think he's going to try to eat it like a wiggler, but he sniffs it instead, and laughs. "I don't know why I thought it was chocolate."

 

"Because your thinkpan's mostly pudding," you tell him. "No chocolate for you. Or nummy wooden spaceships." You take it away from him just to see if he'll try to get it back, and it cheers you up almost more than the hot meal when he tries. You put it behind your bowl and rap his knuckles with the spoon when he thinks he's being sneaky.

"Gorgeous work, Sergeant," you say, peering more closely at the board. "Marvelous! Is this fossilized ivory? What sort of aliens do you think you'll be doing?"

 

You discuss your plans and show him your sketches while you eat, warmed by his interest and his friendly manner. You like him quite a lot already. Every few minutes you feed Bel a bite of something to see if he's up to digesting. So far, he seems to be, so eventually you let him have a small bowl of buttered rice and a mug of broth.

His color is improving by the minute. The dead gray of the infection is being flushed out of his bloodstream, and his skin is once again living pewter with a subtle blue tint. The sclera of his eyes are nearly back to their proper yellow. He tires easily, though, and his efforts to steal the chesspiece back from Aspera aren't terribly graceful. Much as you'd love to cuddle Bel and chat with Aspera for the whole of the one-hour break you're allowing yourself, it's probably best if Bel gets some more rest, and you reluctantly say as much.

"Maybe you could hand him off to his lusus, sir," you propose. "Or to Helmsman Galgal."

 

"Hmm, if you don't think he's had too much excitement for the day. I shouldn't like for him to have some sort of meltdown on Galley, the chap's got all the problem-solving capabilities of a dead mouse."

You watch Kadros blissfully mauling a spoonful of rice.

"He's awfully cute like this," you comment. "Think the brain damage's permanent?"

 

You shake your head more confidently than you feel. "It's too early to be sure, but this doesn't look like damage so much as temporary reduced capacity. He hasn't lost his vocabulary, and his personality right now is kind of how he is when he's tired and safe, when it's just us two."

Bel points his spoon at Aspera explanatorily: "That's my Erskin. I am tired and safe."

"True. I just don't usually see you act like it in a big public space like this."

He looks around the mealblock consideringly, eyes lingering on each troll. "These... these are my crew. They're all right. I sort of remember fighting, but I really don't want to."

"Don't want to fight, or don't want to remember?"

"Both." He focuses pointedly on his rice.

 

"He led the, ah, clearing-out of the Zero-Sum," you explain. "The blockade-runner that landed us in this mess. If that sort of thing didn't give a fellow the screaming gibblies I don't know what would. Here's hoping we all have a nice long peaceful spell, what?"

You push the wooden ship slowly past Bel's bowl of rice, making enticing brrr noises, then palm it quickly when he pounces. You let him have your hand and work on prying your fingers loose from the object one by one. To make things particularly difficult you start to curl your fingers back whenever he lets one go, and he makes perhaps the most adorable indignation face ever known to trollkind.

 

"Yeah, some of the Zero-Sum's survivors told me a bit about it."

Wibblefacing hopelessly, you watch your moirail contend with his rival's teasing, watch the expressions flit over his face. You haven't seen him so expressive in a long time. He's got no inhibitions right now, and yet all he wants to do is eat rice, noof your hair, and play where's-the-chesspiece with Aspera. How someone so gentle by nature can be so deadly by design is one of the great mysteries of your life.

"I bet you weren't even trying to be a hero," you say, and he blinks at you, having lost the context in the thirty seconds you were silent. While he's looking away, Aspera drops the chesspiece into his other hand, which he hides. Aspera lets Bel succeed at getting his fist open, but behold! it's empty!

Bel gawks at Aspera with an extremely annoyed sort of admiration. "You," he accuses. "Your whole face is trouble."

You can't stop laughing.