Ohhhhhhhh, she'd done it. Finally done it, when she was beginning to suspect her rescuer was as immune to her natural state of curiosity as a rock was to romantic overtures.
Alex had made another captain grumpy.
It was one thing to not talk, as he had proven more than once he'd let her ramble, not even cutting in when she stopped for air, but rather waiting until she'd run out of steam. But his face was taut, his jaw grim, definitely not the stoic man she'd met before. She tugged on the sheet stuck in the elevator door, a fruitless diversion that let her face away from him as she wondered what she'd said that had finally changed things. She rapidly picked apart both her words and her physical state as he stood there, unmoving save the tension in his jaw that her ingrained instincts took to mean as "duck!".
Maybe he had been lying about the whole "naked" thing. An emergency shower had been fine but now she really was prancing about with all her flaws highlighted on her skin...she hadn't gotten a full look at herself yet. Maybe he was just angry on her behalf instead. Maybe the scars were simply hideous.
"Is there such a thing as hideousness being 'simple'?" she murmured to herself, scarcely realizing it was aloud. She brightened then, noting which level he'd pointed the elevator to. Maybe he was pissed that the princess could have been blowing up his book-and-used-cigarette laden common space.
Of course that must have been it--she jumped as he spoke at a rapid clip, the words cutting through the tense silence and slicing through her concerns like a synthblade.
Fired upon? She turned wide, wide eyes toward the captain. Did he just say, FIRED UPON? Of course he did. Of course they are. Her life could never be so easy as a nice lift to a habitable system without something going wrong. Alex grabbed at the helmet as he thrust it toward her and scurried after him as he snarled curses, freckles forgotten in lieu of far more important things. Like whether the princess had woken and done more damage. (She hadn't.) On the bridge, she marveled at the arrays. The ship manifest he'd given her had quirky bits but here, things were still shiny. It certainly didn't mesh with what she'd considered a retrofitted prison ship would contain in its command center. Updates. Just like his suit.
Her fingers twitched around the helmet.
Zasz's assessment meant the volleys against their shields weren't done. She made a sound in the back of her throat at the mention of the distress beacon that had been her salvation, and now might mean her destruction. Not destruction, she corrected, casting a glance over her shoulder toward the common room. "They wouldn't blow us up with her on board then, right?"
Alex gripped onto a console to steady herself as more shots were fired. The orders over the comm system confirmed the captain's rather smug conclusions, and she tipped her head toward him. "Not your first boarding party, then," she said, her words pitched a little higher than usual, less curious and more concerned. Probably not even his first princess. It was a good sign, she tried to reassure herself, that he had experience with these matters and knew what he was doing. The smirk was far more reassuring than it should have been, tension easing from her shoulders even as she realized there might be more weapons battering the ship soon enough. "And obviously it's not you, it's me," she quipped lightly, "I've had a lot of off days lately." She pushed away from the console to trail after him. "Not in terms of work, see," she hurried to correct, "my work is never in question. It's just. Well. You saw the ship I came in on."
A morass of metal and tech more than half bared to the void of space. She didn't think the ships attacking them now were the aggressors that had demolished the Diem Vuong. But she had indeed been on it, and it was her presence that made him forget about the tracking signal. Because he'd been busy cooking her a hot meal.
A flighty smile that evaporated under his sudden scrutiny, her bare toes fidgeting against the flooring. "But I like fixing things," she said faintly in response. Whether he considered them square or not didn't matter...and there were other issues with the way he tossed out the offer. "You'd be working a lot more extra random jobs to cover what I can fix, you know. Besides, it's sort of at least halfway my fault they're breaking more things and--I guess it's too late now to disable that beacon, yeah? I could do that, but if they already radioed for reinforcements...and what exactly does 'first chance' mean? Airlocks are pretty accessible, after all, and I'm not real partial to the way my hair behaves in a zero-G, zero-everything environment."
This babbling continued as she took the gun he offered to cradle it in her arms along with the helmet, and as she followed his confident strides forward. "Cover...oh gods you're serious. Are you serious? This is...not what you want to do with this."
Alex did not do weapons.
"It's great you can defend us against them. But you really shouldn't have to defend yourself against me too, yeah?" She was, in fact, inept with guns, the opposite of useful. The Agency had despaired of her, had tried to find other tactical methods for her to employ. But she couldn't exactly hobble the ships out there unless they connected and she didn't exactly have the little devices handy that would render them adrift in space. Handy, no, but she'd bet anything that storage room had had everything she needed to at least rig some IEDs. Not that that was particularly use--Boarding party. She blinked at the captain's back. "If they both hook up to our ship...I can build something that will keep them here while we get away. Or--and this is your call but I really don't want to do it and have you leave without me--I could go over there and 'fix' their ships in person."
Both ideas had merit. Both could get a little more explosive than she usually liked. "Keep in mind my repair jobs don't normally render a ship immobile or blown to bits. But it is a thing. I can. Do." She shrugged, her arms full of tools and a weapon she didn't dare use lest she singe the hair off Zasz's head--or worse. "And at least that way you won't get a chance to accuse me of trying to kill you." Probably these were terrible ways to reassure her rescuer that she had any level of expertise in anything.
Dreams come in a size too big so we can grow into them.
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