In the moments between being asleep and awake, the most basic part of Alex’s brain determined everything was right enough to not worry. He was somewhere dark, comfortable and warm. Didn’t even need to open his eyes to double check.
Something soft moved in his arms and panic shot through him. This wasn’t his bed. His body twitched as the rest of his brain came to life and demanded all the information it could get, leaving him disoriented in the darkness before he remembered where he was and that it was Carbon who had her face pressed against his chest.
Everything else came flooding back. Honestly, the night had ended pretty well for one of them getting drunk enough to throw up almost at the start of it. Alex didn’t even feel like he’d been drinking, which was a pleasant surprise.
She stirred now and made a low rumble as her head poked out of the comforter. He could just barely make out the gloss of her eyes as she inspected the clock over his shoulder. Carbon sounded like she wanted to be annoyed but was too tired for it. “Alarm is not go off for hour. Why awake?”
He gave her a squeeze and shrugged, not actually knowing why. “Just did. Go back to sleep.”
She made an affirmative noise and rubbed his ankle with her own, a gesture he now understood as slightly more than affectionate. The glint from her eyes disappeared and she curled up under the comforter again, wheezing softly.
Alex wasn’t going to go back to sleep so easily, the surprise he’d received waking up had flooded him with adrenaline. Maybe he could just get a shower and start breakfast before she got up. Alex reached out and felt around for a zipper pull on the comforter. There wasn’t one on the wall side of the bunk, which he was facing.
The prospect of having to extricate himself from Carbon in the very limited amount of space he had and then roll over to get to the zipper wasn’t very appealing. There were many worse ways to spend an hour, and he believed that for at least fifteen minutes. As it turns out, when you are wide awake letting someone sleep in your arms isn’t that exciting. It sounds like something that should be adorable, but in almost perfect pitch darkness it really doesn’t translate. Carbon had also somehow managed to press her shoulder into his arm in just the right way to pinch the nerve, rendering his right arm numb from the elbow down.
The alarm clock going off was the sweetest sound he had heard in a month. Carbon seemed to disagree, squeezing herself into a ball for a moment before grumbling as she poked her head out of the bunk, ”alarm off. Lights, ten.”
Pins and needles flooded his hand and forearm as the alarm shut off and the lights came on at ten percent brightness. She unzipped the cover, crawled over him and sat on the edge of the bunk, eyes bleary and more bedraggled than he’d ever seen her before. “Sleep okay?”
“Yes. I have... Nh, hangover? Overhang? The appropriate one.” Carbon rubbed her eyes and slicked back her antennas, smoothing out the fluffy tips.
Alex rolled over and sat up next to her, suppressing a laugh. “Had it right the first time.”
Carbon nodded, then latched onto his arm and rested her head on his shoulder. “Thank you for last night.”
“It’s...” He wanted to say it was nothing, but he knew that was wrong. It had clearly meant quite a bit to her, even if she’d only really gotten around to literally sleeping with him. It might have meant something to him, as well. “It was my pleasure.”
She smiled and squeezed his arm before getting up to dig through her dresser. “I am just sorry that there are not enough females on board for you.”
Carbon said that with such a matter-of-fact tone that for a moment, Alex thought he was out of the loop with his own species. He turned the statement over in his head a few times, but it never made any more sense. “Huh?”
“Your... mating requires two females.” She picked the word carefully, apparently for a very deliberate statement of fact. She didn’t look like she was putting him on as she plucked an article of clothing from the open drawer and tucked it under her arm.
His eyebrow went up, wondering where she’d gotten that idea from. “Uh, no. We usually only have one partner at a time. Most Human relationships are monogamous, when you get into the romantic ones anyway. That’s how it's worked for me.”
“You do? That was not what I saw-” Her eyes visibly dilated as her face twisted from surprised and earnest to a sort of abject horror before it smoothed out into an unconvincing façade of composure. “I require to shower.”
“Uh huh.” He watched as she shot across the cabin, and let her go. That reaction did not bode well. It was clearly a misunderstanding... though, apparently one that weighed more heavily on her than was necessary. If anything, it was a little funny. Two women. Sure, he’d been a teenage boy once. Thinking about it now just felt like it would be a lot of effort to keep it equitable.
Alex shrugged to himself and retrieved the clothes he’d worn for maybe twenty minutes last night, and got dressed to face the day. But first, coffee. Down the corridor he could hear the shower faintly, so that was good. He stopped in at the mess, dialed in a medium roast with two cream for himself and poked through the menus on the Tsla’o dispenser until he hit the beverages and pressed the one that she almost always got. Based on how fast she left, he assumed Carbon would prefer a bit of space between whatever she thought she’d done and when he started bothering her about it, and who couldn’t use a hot beverage in the morning?
He checked on the ship was maybe-sorta-probably headed their way. The general alarm on the Kshlav’o hadn’t gone off so nothing significant could have happened to it. Sure enough, it was still on the same course, just about eight hours closer. Not great, but not unexpected. His dispenser dinged and deposited a piping hot tube of coffee for him, and the Tsla’o dispenser followed suit a moment later, the dark amber tea Carbon seemed to prefer threatening to scald his hand through an entirely too-thin layer of plastic.
For the first time ever, Alex knocked on the door to the head to announce his entrance. She hadn’t hard locked the keypad, so presumably she would be expecting him to just come on in. But probably not with beverages. “Hey, it’s me.”
The sound of the shower continued, the sliding door to stall very much opaque. The occasional bump of an elbow or knee seemed to indicate something was going on other than hiding.
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“I got you a tea, it’s... uh, out here when you’re done.” If the gravity had been on, he might have poked his head in there, or at least cracked the door to talk through, which probably would have flown with any girlfriend he’d had in the past, but that was not this situation. No gravity precluded that entirely. Everything was proofed against all sorts of intrusion, but inviting damage by spraying water droplets everywhere was stupid.
And this more romantic aspect of their relationship wasn’t even a day old. Would intruding on bathing like that have run up against some Tsla’o taboo nobody had even thought to mention? Probably. He rolled his eyes and rested his back against the wall and pressed a foot against the base of the shower to wedge himself there, taking a sip off his coffee. “I don’t know what’s up, but from my end of that conversation, there’s been no transgression. Just an odd statement.”
He was pretty sure he heard a grumble over the sound of the high efficiency showerhead. The water shut off and the vacuum came on. Can’t have any water getting lose in this environment. Dried you off pretty well, too.
“It’s not that big a deal.” Alex continued talking at the door of the shower while Carbon vacuumed herself dry inside.
“It is.” A reply finally came, very emphatic, and he could hear her gesturing with the vacuum nozzle.
“It was a simple misunderstanding. Nothing to be embarrassed about.” Still wasn’t going to say that he thought it was funny. Definitely not at that point in their relationship yet.
“I should have known better.”
Alex wasn’t sure why the mix up about humans and the minimum number of partners they required to have sex bothered her so much. He reviewed the incident, still very fresh in his mind. He hadn’t laughed at her, so at least that was out. Pretty sure he hadn’t gotten a tone or anything, either. “How could you have known better?”
She was quiet for a heartbeat, the mildly obscene sucking noise of the vacuum filling the head. “I should have.”
Alex huffed, exasperated. “Sure. You thought you had solid information, so logically you would ask around about how humans prefer to bang each other just to be on the safe side. Right?”
A long silence this time. “No, that would have been absurd.”
“So is the assertion that you just should have known better.”
She sighed, sounding resigned through the shower door. “I should have known better because I had seen humans interacting in a manner I perceived as romantic while the Kshalv’o was being built and none of them had third partners. I had assumed that she would just be acquired from a pool of them at a temple or something similar.”
“That’s, uh... I can see-” He really couldn’t see where she’d gotten that idea from, but maybe that was just some Tsla'o thing he didn’t get. What did they distribute at their temples? Did they have temples? He was sure nothing like that came up in the primer. “Well, you know what they say about assuming.”
“I do not.”
“Never assume, because it makes an ass out of you and me.” He chopped the word up with his hands as he explained the old saying. He assumed it did not translate properly into Tsla, the irony of that thought not escaping him as he smirked at it.
The longest bout of silence yet. At least he could hear her vacuuming the walls dry now. The soft whir of the vacuum’s pump shut off, “that is a terrible saying. Some assumptions are perfectly safe.”
“That is true, but it’s the premise of the thing.”
Carbon finally came out of the shower, an oversized towel long enough to be a dress wrapped around her torso. She hung there in space, eye to eye with him and a little bit peeved. “It may be, but it is a terrible saying. Inaccurate.”
“Fine, it’s bad. That doesn’t change the fact that you just made a small mistake.”
“It is not that I made a mistake.” She hissed, poking a finger into his chest. “It is that I made a fool of myself in front of you.”
“There,” Alex closed his eyes and nodded. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“Delightful.” She sneered the word as she turned and pulled a cabinet open, rifling through the contents for a dental spray.
“In a way, yes. At least I understand why you’re upset now.”
She glared at him in the mirror as she jammed the bite plate into her mouth and depressed the trigger, cheeks puffing up momentarily. Carbon closed her eyes and her shoulders slumped. “Yes, you do. I was foolish for thinking that pornography was a reasonable window into your culture. To my knowledge, ours is very pragmatic and I allowed myself to believe yours would be as well.”
“Ah, no. Ours is not pragmatic, at all.” In all honesty he wasn’t sure how that would even be defined. It seemed... Somewhat antithetical to the purpose of the thing.
“I see that now.” She turned, a wry smile on her lips. “I am actually quite relieved.”
Alex was relieved as well, laughing as her mood turned around. “Good. Come on, there’s ship business to attend to.”
“In a moment.” Carbon wrapped her warm, damp arms around his neck, eyes closed as she pressed her mouth to his, lips parting tentatively as she explored their boundaries. It caught Alex off guard but he didn't mind her taking a more active role. Her tongue was warm and silky, but much more minty during this brief kiss. Her eyes fluttered open with a twinkle and she looked very pleased with herself. “I will clothe myself, then we can get to ship business.”
“Was that my dental spray?”
She nodded, the smile back. “It was the first one I saw.”
“Thought it tasted familiar. I’ll meet you in the mess.”
She grabbed the previously untouched tea and departed with a wave. Alex went back to the mess, dialed in an oatmeal and waited on Carbon, who returned in a fresh jumpsuit and still slightly damp fur faster than he expected. He picked the tablet off the table before she sat down, tapping through the menus for the information from the sensors from the previous night. “So, we have a little problem.”
Carbon’s eyes had widened a little as she slipped into her usual seat. “You mean with ship business. Yes?” She emphasized the last word heavily.
“Yes. Sensors picked this up last night. It’s still like eight hundred and sixty million kilometers away and headed in our direction. Not a collision course, but it’ll come within half a million klicks of us.” He handed Carbon the tablet and picked his oatmeal out of the dispenser, settling down across from her.
She squinted at the display, “it is very pixelated.”
“Yeah, resolution is bad without the active sensors.” They both knew turning the actives on would tip the Eohm off to them still being alive, which would assure their death without the FTL drive operational.
Carbon grimaced and nodded her head. “Why did you not tell me about this last night?”
“You were kind of drunk and you looked so damn miserable. If it was a fast mover or closer, I’d have told you. The sensors would have triggered the ship alarm if it was a more present danger... and then we’d either be fine or dead anyway.”
She looked over the tablet again, pursed her lips and handed it back to him. “I did feel quite miserable and that is a reasonable assessment. We should be able to have the drive ready and tested well before it comes within weapons range.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
Carbon smiled sadly and shook her head, slipping out of her seat and dialing in a meal on her dispenser. “Bring up the schematics for the ventral plasma fracture array. It appears we will be very busy for the next few days, it would be best if we plan ahead.”