Disclaimer: obviously none of the characters or specifics belong to me.
Chapter One
The soles of her shiny black boots stumbled over the ridged surface of the loading ramp. Cool, smooth steel was suddenly under her hands as she barely kept herself from falling, using the Andromeda's sleek curves as a handy wall to lean against. She couldn't believe she'd actually made it this far. For a moment, Beka just stood, not trying to move, but swaying all the same. She couldn't seem to find her balance. Couldn't seem to get her wind back. Lowering her head, and closing her eyes against the spinning and tilting of the world around her, Beka rested her cheek against the glossy surface, grateful for its coolness against her fevered skin. Grateful for its motionless presence.
"God, I hope I don't puke," she said suddenly, the possibility only now occurring to her. She hadn't experienced a drunken binge in a long time, but that was no excuse not to remember the consequences until far too late to do anything about them. What the hell was she doing at the Andromeda's door, anyway? "Should've gone to the Maru," she slurred sleepily to herself, trying without much success to straighten back up away from the ship. She had the terrible certainty that without the hull for support, she would fall over in an ungraceful heap, unconscious and ignominious until one of her crewmates stumbled over her, literally.
God, what humiliation. Harper, she might be able to handle. It wouldn't be the first time one of them had helped the other to bed after a night of maudlin excess. But what if Dylan found her? Or Rommie, who would tell Dylan? Or, worse yet, Tyr? Damn stuffy Nietszchean would never let her forget it, probably.
Ok, so her only option was to somehow get herself inside, unseen, and to her quarters before she passed out. From the blackness fading in and out around the edges of her blurred vision, that wouldn't be very much longer. Why did she have to go and get drunk, anyway? She'd had a good reason, she remembered. Something truly worthy of the occasion. Something to fucking drink to.
No, not something, someone. She remembered now, and the remembering brought back with it a keen edge of pain and guilt, barely dulled by the copious amounts of liquor in her system. She could still see the glowing electronic words of the data file burning across the back of her eyes every time they closed. She couldn't read them anymore, in the haze her mind had become, but she still remembered what they'd said. Remembered too well to be as drunk as she'd thought.
"Need another fucking drink," she managed to mutter, around the tears that were starting to clog the back of her throat again. Need to forget, whispered a corner of her mind. Forget she'd ever received that transmission, forget the two year old date across the top, that said more clearly than an accusation how long it had taken for the news to finally reach her. Most of all, she needed to forget ever knowing a sharp witted, soft hearted old smuggler who'd laughingly called himself Twinkle.
"It's from an old song, Beka-me-lass," she remembered his raspy voice saying. "A very old song written for children, and it's a lot nicer a moniker than the one me mum gave me, I can tell you!" And when she was still young yet, and he of a generation older than her father, he'd taught her the song. Just as any grandfather ought to do for his granddaughter. Nevermind that they shared no blood between them; Twinkle had been family. And she missed him horribly. And she wished to God he hadn't died forgotten and alone on some backwater slum like Parsidia. But he had. Because she hadn't been there, hadn't even thought to check up on him in the last decade.
No matter how many shots she knocked back, no matter how much she loaded her system with the numbing presence of alcohol, she couldn't change any of it. And, it seemed, she couldn't forget it, either.
"Who says ignorance isn't bliss?" She meant the words to sound challenging and disdainful, but they came out choked and broken in her ears. She needed to get inside, get locked away from anywhere she might embarrass herself.
In a supreme effort of strength and will, she shoved herself away from Rommie's hull and stood weaving for a moment, arms spread for balance. She thought, just maybe, she might be able to make it inside and to her quarters. If she could manage the control panel. She thought longingly of the Maru, docked in tandem with the Andromeda, and mentally weighed an extra twenty steps over the rough floor plating of the dock `port, against the siren call of being able to simply collapse where she was, once on the other side of the Maru's outer door. Not to mention that she could handle the key code drunk, sober, or dead.
It was that more than anything that decided her. Turning a few cautious degrees to her right, she took her first unsteady step toward her ship. Not too bad, Valentine, she congratulated herself as she took another step, and another, only seventeen more to go.
"What are you doing?"
The voice was carefully cultured and cool, and full of the mild disdain that grated over her nerves on a good day, which this certainly wasn't. It startled her so badly she shrieked and nearly fell flat on her face. With a considerable amount of wobbly arm wheeling, she managed to avoid that humiliation, a fact which proved to be the only small scrap of pride she could cling to.
"Tyr," she said a little breathlessly, without looking at him. It was taking all of her concentration to stay focused and standing. She could feel his ominous presence at her back, a huge looming darkness that stood watching her with arms folded across his chest. Where had he come from so suddenly? It was, she decided firmly, completely unfair for a person as huge as Tyr to move as silently as the proverbial cat. "What the hell are you doing here? Shouldn't you be out having fun, like everyone else?"
Now, that was a bit of a stretch. Harper and Trance were out "having fun" somewhere, she was sure, because she knew Seamus Harper wouldn't waste the opportunity of some down time on a resort world like Xeradin. Dylan and Rommie, on the other hand, rarely relaxed enough, in Beka's opinion, for true "fun". (Did the human avatar of a computer even know the concept?) Still, with all the stress the crew had been under for the last several months, Dylan had made shore leave an order not to be ignored. Harper had even been forbidden from picking up a soldering gun.
She could almost hear the disapproving frown in Tyr's voice as he replied, though she noticed he didn't answer her question. No, instead he asked a question of his own, and one she didn't appreciate much.
"Are you drunk?"
At this point, Beka truly wished she could turn around and look him in the eye. It would give her answer more impact if she could be glaring at him defiantly when she said it. She settled for scowling darkly at the space that still separated her from the Maru.
"And if I am, what business is it of yours? Dylan did say we were supposed to unwind, have a good time, and all of...all of that." Her scowl changed to a frown. It was starting to become more difficult to form coherent thought, much less speak it. The blackness was crowding her vision a bit more, too. Damn it, she could have been safely inside her ship by now, if not for Tyr.
Even as she thought it, the world tilted crazily, and something warm and firm caught her, steadying her balance. She stared bemusedly at the dark fingers wrapped around her arm before managing to raise her eyes to Tyr's face. For some reason, his forbidding expression gave her the urge to giggle. She tried to hold it back. How inane was that, to be struck with a fit of giggling by the Nietszchean's frown? Besides, something told her the giggling had a hysterical edge that might very well turn to tears if she let it loose. She didn't want to cry in front of Tyr.
Even the thought made her angry, in a petulant sort of way, and bolstered her enough that she could almost manage to scowl right back at him.
"I hardly think what you have done to yourself qualifies as a good time, Beka," Tyr admonished, helpfully giving her anger more of a target. She tried - rather ineffectually - to yank her arm away from his grasp.
"What the hell do you know about it?" she asked. "I don't see you out cav - cavor-- having fun. I'll have you know that alcohol figures heavily into most traditional forms of...of...what was I saying?"
Grimly, Tyr stared at her for a moment before suddenly turning toward the Maru and dragging her toward it with a rather ungentle yank on her arm.
"Hey--!" Beka's protest was cut short as her feet fumbled and twisted in Tyr's wake. One of her boots caught the edge of a deck plate, and she fell, hard. Her knees and free hand broke the fall, with a burst of pain like white fire along her nerves. The only bright spot Beka could see was that at least Tyr wasn't trying to pull her other arm from its socket anymore. He'd stopped, she was sure, to glare down at her as if it were all her fault. "Goddamn high handed, arrogant, meddling, vain-as-fucking-peacock, fucking Nietszchean!"
"What did you say?" Tyr rumbled from above. Had she really said all of that out loud? Beka swallowed back more epithets to his character, and struggled to stand again. She didn't have much luck, since every time she put weight back on her injured hand, pain throbbed along her arm clear up to her shoulder.
" 'S nothing," she managed with what dignity she could muster. "Fall just hurt." And she couldn't get up, and she thought maybe the fall had jarred a bit of sobriety back into her, because the pain in her heart was starting to overwhelm the pain in her arm, which she thought was maybe broken. Tears welled up in her eyes again.
Suddenly hands were lifting her from the deck, firmly and gently placing her back on her feet. They were wrapped around her ribs, presumably to avoid further injury to either abused arm. Beka tried to stop weeping as she avoided Tyr's eyes. At the moment, this topped her list of ten most humiliating experiences, and it was an impressive list.
"Beka..." She waited for Tyr to finish whatever chastisement he was no doubt thinking, tears streaming down her face.
To her surprise, he never finished whatever he'd started to say, but instead began to gently guide her to the Maru, with a steadying arm around her waist. He deftly kept her blundering feet from tripping, and also prevented the world from throwing her off balance again. She was surprised at how good it felt to simply let someone else handle the difficult things. To relax against the steady rock that was Tyr. His skin radiated heat underneath his chainmail, and especially where his arm wrapped around her, and she felt herself relax into his comforting embrace. The thought jarred her slightly. Comfort? Embrace? Tyr?
But even something as shocking as that couldn't stir her to protest. She was so tired, so heart sick. She just wanted to get inside and lie down, so she could give Twinkle the really good cry he deserved.
The thought of Twinkle absorbed her until she realized they'd stopped moving. She looked up, and the two of them were standing inside the Maru, Tyr still holding her as if he feared she'd fall without his support. Which she probably would. Reluctantly, Beka stirred herself to lift her head from where she'd been leaning it, against the rock solid surface of his shoulder. The only unpleasant thing about it was the imprint his chainmail had probably left on her cheek. But his skin had been warm, and the hard muscled surface of his chest surprisingly...whoa! Stop already, Valentine, she ordered herself firmly. Don't even go there. Nevermind that alcohol and sex were the two things she usually turned to for comfort when life dealt its harsher blows. She'd already thought about the whole sex thing at the bar she'd been to, but discarded a one night stand with a spacer she didn't know, and probably wouldn't ever want to know, as pathetic, even for her.
Resolutely, she stood as far from touching Tyr as she could with his arm still firmly attached to her. Sex with Tyr wasn't a viable possibility, either. Not that she hadn't noticed how sexy he was beneath that veneer of Nietszchean pride and vanity. She was only human, after all, and what red blooded woman wouldn't notice, especially during their morning work outs? It was difficult to mind getting your ass kicked every morning by a half naked, hard muscled man, his skin slick with sweat as it slid over yours... Ok, so maybe she'd done more than notice. She might have drooled, just a little - once -- when he'd straddled her with her arms pinned above her head at the end of a match...
"...you all right?" Dimly, she realized Tyr was talking to her, and she was staring down at the dark fingers that curved around her waist to splay across the exposed pale skin of her midsection. "Beka?"
She looked up, to find him watching her with an unreadable expression. Probably he knew what she'd been thinking. She was pretty sure he could smell pheromones with his heightened senses. He'd certainly gotten off of her quickly enough that day in the gym...
She cleared her throat.
"Yeah, I'm fine. Thanks for getting me inside without hurting myself anymore. Can you...can you help me to the bed?"
He did, easing her down carefully onto her bunk before letting her go. Even so, breath hissed between her teeth when she forgot and accidentally put weight on her injured arm.
"You shouldn't try sleeping on that without binding it, I think," Tyr said neutrally. "You may injure it further, otherwise, and we need our slipstream pilot well and able within fort-eight hours." He frowned. "And sober."
"Right. Sure. Whatever..." Pleasantly, Beka's awareness was already starting to fade, now that she was lying comfortably prone on the softness of the bed. Behind her closed eyes, the glowing words that haunted her from the data pad were fading as well. She almost couldn't see them at all anymore, and she sank gratefully into oblivion.
On to Part 2