Fandom: Andromeda
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Beka/Harper
Archive: only with permission
Spoilers: nothing specific. Set pre-Andromeda.
Webpage: http://www.ravenswing.com/~mirrorgirl/door.html
Feedback: makes my dataport spark : janestclair15@hotmail.com
Summary: Harper lives in the dark.

Disclaimer: Andromeda and associated concepts belong to the estate of Gene Roddenberry, Majel Roddenberry, and the Tribune Entertainment Company. But, on the other hand, my tax dollars did help fund the show's production, so since I'm only taking the kids out for a little non-profit story, it'd be utterly declasse to sue. Right?

Sex disclaimer: It won't make you go blind. That's just a myth.

Sex disclaimer, 2.0: The story contains (gasp!) het sex, but it's of a kinky sort, and it was written by a slasher, so proceed with that in mind.

Thanks hugely to Viridian5, who led me into this fandom, and fascinated me, and nursed me through this story, and betaed, and was otherwise a fabulous girl.

***

The thing that didn't occur to him until he was away from Earth was that spacers would look like ice. Even given the amount of his life he'd spent underground or living nocturnally, he'd still managed a few sunburns, a few freckles. Celtic heritage being what it was, he'd been born for somewhere perpetually overcast, so he supposed he probably didn't look as strange to Beka as she did to him, but.

Ice. Not just the skin at the base of her throat or the back of her neck, the places that would normally be covered up. Hands, forearms, face. White. Big pupils in her eyes.

He remembers sitting on a bunk while she cleaned the wire-cuts on his wrist. Her fingers on the skin of his forearms curious, until eventually she spit on her thumb, the way his mom used to sometimes, and rubbed at the skin, pushing back the dirt to get a better look at him. Then shook her head, got a cloth and washed his wrists and bandaged them in something palely skin-toned and apparently waterproof, and told him to go shower.

The heat of the water the Maru produced would have been enough to keep him with her. Blasting heat he could wet himself down with, tiny plexiglass room that contained all the steam so he didn't freeze between one water-stream and the next. He found her liquid antibacterial soap on the first pass through the bathroom. It reminded him of one of the better-equipped missionary medical stations that grew up on Martha's Vineyard when he was a tiny kid. The smell of his mother's body while she held his face against her body, out of the ocean spray, while priests ferried people across, her voice in his ears reminding him how lucky they were that someone had decided he was worth treatment. Hours in the prefab station next to the beach, while tattooed nurses scrubbed him down and checked him over, listened to his chest and click-hissed back and forth to each other in some language that he didn't understand. Whatever they gave him stopped the chest-ripping cough he'd had since the previous winter, so he wasn't going to complain. And while he were on the island, before they had to go back, he saw surf for the first time.

Big waves, big rocks. One of the orderlies was looking out at it like something magical, and Harper was feeling brave enough to ask. Which is how he learned the word "surfing," eight years before he first got a shot at doing it.

Harper thought about that, in Beka's shower. Scrubbing himself as clean as he could get with the medical-smelling gel. Even in his hair, thinking it might kill whatever'd decided to hitch a ride on him out of the gravity well. After most of an hour's cleanup, he still had two minutes of his allotted hot water, and he ached. All over. Crouched on the floor, head over his knees, and let the spray hit him in a continuous rush that he had no right to expect. It felt so good he was almost crying from it by the time the water temperature shifted back to cold.

Afterwards, he sat on her bunk again in coveralls pulled back to leave him naked to the waist, and she went over him inch by inch. Touched every scar, traced the lump of every rib that hadn't healed into quite the same curve he was born with. She spit on his arm again and rubbed at it until he jerked away.

"It's *clean*. I swear to god I know how to take a bath."

"You're always this colour?"

He cocked his head at her. Caught his reflection in the metal-shimmer of the wall and realized how much he looked like a wet cat, straightened. "Depends on how much sunlight I'm getting."

Beat. "Radiation burn."

"*Suntan.*"

"Harper, I can't tell it from a scar, my med scanners can't tell it from a burn, and solar radiation did it to you. Does it hurt?"

She wouldn't leave it alone, even after the twentieth promise that it didn't bother him *at all*, and she didn't let it go until months later, when he'd finally faded to the point that she couldn't see the colour distinction in him anymore. It was probably then that he took to wearing long sleeves. The Maru wasn't as cold as a Boston night, and he could have survived with more skin showing than he did, but he worked better without his jacket on, and less skin showing was just better in many ways.

She burned everything of his she could get her hands on. The first time she hurled one of his t-shirts into an inflammable container along with something that smelled suspiciously like gasoline, he didn't actually believe she'd light it until it was in flames. Sealed and oxygen controlled, funnelling the fumes back into the Maru's atmosphere recyclers, but undeniably on fire.

He scavenged through the ship. The coveralls he'd pulled on after that first shower, old crewmembers' discards, a box of clothes in a side hold that turned out to be her father's, and that he'd have done better to leave alone for the shit it got him. And even after that fight, which went down as the single most terrifying of his life, he didn't put everything back. Eventually she gave in. Not on the smoky leather jacket he was coveting, but on some of the
basic things that he needed, though she took them off into the bathroom, and when she gave them back they didn't smell like anything but her perfume.

The first time he went digging through *her* clothes, he managed to stop her cold. His shoulders were broader than hers, but she was taller, and at the time she probably weighed fully as much as he did, and to him it didn't matter. Tight, skin-black, functional around the ship. Like everything else he was wearing at the time, those shirts smelled like Beka. So did the ship, the soap, his bed at night, the pilot's seat. Her ship.

His baby, though. It took him something less than three months to learn the Maru. He got up in the night and explored, feeding off the liquid caffeine he'd discovered in cold-storage in the Maru's galley. Finding things and fixing them, sometimes for hours before Beka came and found him. And even then, more often she just asked him something and then went back to piloting or captaining or whatever it was she did while he wasn't watching her.

Just occasionally, she caught him by the collar or the hair at the base of his skull and dragged him back to bed, and by that time he was usually shaking from sleep-deprivation. Thirty, thirty-five hours on his feet. The second time he tried to wander away after she'd brought him back, she put him in her bed with her. Clamped her arms around his shoulders and refused to let him move until he settled down enough to rest. Something like a cave, sandwiched between Beka and the wall, not really listening to her growl at him.

Beka hung onto him for a long time before she let him out on his own the first time. Like a dog you want to stay home, so you keep it chained in the yard until it can smell itself on everything. That was what she told him, at least. And it wasn't planetside, either, just a drift. But it was more open space than he'd experienced in months, enough that he could let loose and just run for a while, dodging people and carts until he got through the market. Running flat out after. He was out of breath before he expected to be, but after weeks on the Maru he shouldn't have expected anything else. And even Earth's mess of an atmosphere had more oxygen than any he'dencountered in space.

By the time he collapsed, though, he was far outside the high-traffic areas of the drift. Industrial storage units on all sides of him, lined with exposed circuitry that set all of his scavenging nerves screaming. A lot of what showed was redundant, and it only took a few minutes for him to rewire five boards to a single set of power cables and salvage the freed-up wiring.

The wires, plus the various machine parts he carried habitually on his pockets, plus a board that he separated very carefully from its circuits, were enough for him to establish a link to the drift's mainframe. It didn't contain anything as elaborate as an A.I., and its security features were random, free-ranging dog-soldiers that took out whatever they found but missed way too much to be effective. They shimmered whenever they moved, and he could hide from them just by sliding himself into whatever data archive he was accessing.

Later, when she figured out what he'd been up to, Beka had a very direct conversation with him, the upshot of which was if he was going to run blackmail projects on the side, he had to let her know first. She made him give her the money he'd extorted from her then-current employer, which he supposed was fair, since it'd been earmarked for her originally. But some of the things the bug'd been into were miles into illegal even by the drift's shaky definitions of law and order, and it would have been so *easy* to let that information loose. No firewalls anywhere. Enforcement's database was on the same system with the business records, and they didn't even see fit to go through the information at their fingertips.

Beka laughed. She'd been hitting him, smacking around his head in a way that didn't really hurt, but made it *really* clear how angry she was with him. Furious, shrieking, listing the things she was going to do to him, the least ugly of which involved spacing just the lower half of him, and seeing how long it took his balls to freeze and fall off. While he tried to explain, while he offered her money. While he waited for 'send you back' to come up on the list of his unspeakable punishments. It didn't, but he could feel it, somewhere back there, and the fact that it didn't come out made him wonder how angry with him she was, really.

When she broke down and laughed, she was positively scary. Tears streaking down her face, hugging herself, still swearing at him while she slid down the wall to sit on the floor.

Hours later she tracked him down, hunched over him hunched over the AP tanks, and bit his ear. Hard. He yelped, snapped his head back and was surprised not to catch her in the face. She was already gone. Leaning back against the rail, smirking at him while he clutched at the bloody, aching cartilage.

"Fuck, Beka!"

"Don't *ever* do that again. I did *not* want to have to sell that shipment myself just to make expenses."

He glared at her. "I gave you the money."

"Seamus, I can't walk away from a deal unpaid, even if I do get the cash from you under the table. It gives the next guy the idea that he can fuck us over one better, understand?"

"Yeah."

"Fine. Come on and I'll feed you."

She meant it literally. Actual fruit, a bit dried out from being shipped but not rotten. Not even softening, mostly. She carved it up with the sharpened edge of a file that he'd put together for her, fed the first apple slice straight into his mouth.

The fruit was part of the attraction. Others things fed it, too. Refined sugar. Beka's media salvage, pirated data written onto scraps of whatever she had lying around. Hot water. He wasn't supposed to have all of this at once. He maybe wouldn't appreciate it so much, he'd get used to it, expect this *availability* of precious things when he should still be being grateful for eating on a regular basis. It might be what made the Ubers into such bastards, having all of this at once.

It made him shake sometimes, though never when Beka was around. And then for different reasons when Beka collected Rev from wherever he'd been. Magog. She warned Harper a couple of times, but it was one thing to hear her say it and another thing to see one actually on the Maru.

Harper disappeared. Crawled down into the ship, borrowed Beka's clothes, grabbed food when there was no one near the galley and ate what he'd stashed around the ship the rest of the time, trusting that Beka's smell and her perfume would be enough that the Magog couldn't track him too easily. He did, for whatever it was worth, know that he was being unreasonable. If it got along with Beka and hadn't hurt her in however many years they'd been together, it probably wasn't going to eat him. Not if Beka still thought he was useful. But this wasn't the kind of thing he really got to think through, just a gut reaction. And sometimes Beka came looking forhim. Stood still long enough to make it clear she was alone, and waited for Harper to come out.

She brought him Sparky. She'd bought it on the last station, stashed it somewhere that he hasn't been able to find. Hugged him hard when he came close enough to get it. He let her sway back and forth with him for a minute, shaking him from foot to foot like a ratty stuffed animal. Though he would have thought Rev was better suited to the role. But maybe that close was too close, with Rev. Or maybe she just didn't like mauling things that could maul her back.

He bit her. Not hard enough to draw blood, but definitely hard enough for her to stiff-arm him back against the wall. Glaring while he laughed at her.

And Rev was watching them, at the far end of the corridor, showing all his teeth. This horrible second where Harper was sure he was going to die, then the world-twisting one where he understood that Rev was laughing at them. Twistedly alien, and yet. A sense of humour.

Sometime after that, Harper went back to bunking above Beka. Padded in with his boots off when Beka was curled up and Rev was meditating, vaulted onto his mattress, curled up and tried very hard to be asleep. And did, eventually, and rolled out of bed in the morning at the same time Beka did, at least an hour after Rev, and stole her breakfast while she wasn't looking.

Rev gave Harper a lot of space for a long time. It was nearly impossible on a ship as small as the Maru, but he stayed out of arm's reach as much as he could, and kept his claws tucked into his fur if they had to brush closer. When he did approach, it was usually verbal rather than physical. From across a room, a gentle-voiced question, or an offer of something.

The particular gift he found for Harper came in the form of recaptured radio waves. Distant signals, hundreds of years old at that point, damaged by radiation and relativity, but still. Human voices, some of them from Earth. Echoing music. Harper taught himself wave theory in the process of sorting out the broadcasts. It took a month to clean up the waveforms on the first set, then two hours to write them all to storage. On the next drift, he traded shining bits of music for clothes that had never belonged to Beka or her father. Hair gel that smelled like too-sweet tropical fruit, and something else that he thought was hair gel until he absent-mindedly licked a bit off the back of his hand and discovered it was flavoured. Not quite food, just entirely edible, very playful, and, he found out later, disturbingly aphrodisiac.

The luminous, slightly reptilian girl he met later in that hour liked the smell that lingered on him. Her tongue sliding between the folds of his fingers was the most erotic thing he'd ever felt. She left glittering trails everywhere she licked him, stuff that he couldn't wash off for days. And while he didn't appear to be allergic to the lubricant, he did seem to be at least mildly allergic to *her*. He itched, all over.

He stood in the shower stall for half an hour one morning, scratching frantically until he took off the traces of her, along with the top layer of his skin. More than a fair trade. He scrubbed hard, after, until he was faintly red all over, shedding that first moment of alien sex like a sunburn.

Four mismatched radio tracks spliced together gave him enough white noise to work to, most of the time. Overlapping chords and eras, never as completely discordant as he thought they should be.

And still, on some level, his body always knew that he wasn't where he was supposed to be. The artificial gravity made him sick at odd moments. He got past that, got used to running in the half-hanging state that planets never had. That his planet never had. If he could ever master that feeling, he was sure he'd be able to walk on walls.

What he experienced when Beka took him out to work on the Maru in zero-G was nothing like that, though. It was sickening. One thing to climb, another to have no idea which way he might fall and be falling at the same time.

In his ear, "Harper."

"Oh *fuck*, Beka."

"Close your eyes."

"Gonna be sick."

"No you're not. You've been swimming. Close your eyes and pretend you're in water." She pressed herself against his back, pressed his EVA suit against the hull. Her gloves in the hand-holds on either side of him. "Breathe."

Her knee between his knees. Holding him down. "Breathe."

Breathing.

"You're okay. You can't drown. You can dive any way you want to. You're just floating. The water's very clear; that's why you can see so far. You cool?"

"I'm good."

"Good."

She let him go, after she checked his tethers. Watched him dive for the next ten minutes while he tested himself, then slammed him back against the hull and made him work.

Pulled him in through the airlock behind her, finally. Pulled his helmet off and slammed an oxygen mask over his mouth, talked to him wildly while he pulled back out of oxygen deprivation, ranting about the way he *breathed*. Too used to unlimited oxygen, maybe the only luxury he'd ever had that she didn't.

"Strip."

He was so high on asphyxiation followed by too much oxygen that he didn't question. Just peeled down, suit, then clothes. Let her march him into the bathroom and into the shower without even thinking about how she'd managed to shed her clothes when she always had at least one hand on his back.

The shower was blasting hot. He was so cold. The night outside had been sucking out his body heat for god knew how long, and he hadn't *felt* it. Couldn't even really believe it, not until Beka showed him how cold the water was running while it scalded him. Scrubbing the fear-sweat off himself, brushing against Beka's skin. Breast against his cheek for a second while he turned.

Naked.

Beka tangled around him, her face turned up into the shower's spray, smoothing her hair back. Tattoo on her belly, just below her navel. Pubic hair in an oddly patterned tangle of red and blonde. Her breasts pushed out every time she arched back.

"Beka ..."

"How's your body temp?"

"I'm cold."

"If you can tell you're cold, you're better off than you were. Here, get under the spray." Quick turn with her breasts brushing his collarbone, and then searing heat that pushed him down to hisknees, whining. "Get up." She hauled him to his feet, held him upright until he was willing to stand. Taste on her like soap and metallic heat. She wasn't as hard as he was used to women being, but she was bigger. Softer. Hair between her legs, but none under her arms.

One kiss, his mouth reaching up to hers under the water.

He crawled down to lie beside her, later that night. Both of them with very clean hair and skin, in clean clothes. He was still unsteady from the return to gravity. Even so, hanging by his knees from the rail while he looked down at her helped in some obscure way. He stayed doing it until she snaked out a hand in a way that proved exactly how little faith she had in his ability to keep from falling on his head.

She rolled over when he dropped down beside her. Let him nuzzle into her throat and push up against her, smell skin and warm human, like she really got how lonely he was. Carded her fingers through his hair and then dozed.

When he touched her, she didn't flinch. Didn't respond, either, but he hadn't really been expecting her to. He was exhausted, aching from the return to gravity. Just needed to touch her. Fingers on her skin, in her hair. Under the edges of her clothes. Hollows at her neck. One finger hooked into the waist of her pants to trace the line of her tattoo.

Soft. Tiny hairs at the edges of his touch.

She wasn't asleep. When he slid a hand down to rest just below her navel, she caught her waistband and pulled it down level with her hipbones so he could touch. Her trust in him made him ache all over. Her eyes stayed closed, even when he traced the tattoo marking the bottom rim of her belly's outward curve. She was soft there: not quite a swell, but actual flesh on a human body, more than he'd ever expected to see or touch.

"Harper."

He dropped his mouth, kissed her. Tongued her navel until she gasped. "Please?"

This flesh in the palm of his hand. It moved whenever she breathed, twitched with every tense shift of her body. Soft in spite of that, feminine in a way he'd never expected. Dark, deep taste of her in her navel, shivering under his tongue.

Until she pushed him off, finally, and pulled her pants up to cover the wet skin he'd left.

He curled up beside her, listening to her breathe. One clothed breast just barely touching him.

He kept her smell on him. Her perfume was in the bathroom; it wasn't hard. He was wearing her shirt a week later when he found the market stall full of chemical drink-mix packets. Electrically-bright colours that spilled into his hand, though the powder turned out, when he tasted it, to be bitter and sugarless. Spitting onto the floor, then staring at the colour stain in his palm.

He bought dozens of them. Hauled them back to the Maru with their box under one arm and a case of machine parts under the other, let them spill onto the flight deck floor.

Beka said, "You want us to what?"

"Dye Rev."

"I beg your pardon, Master Harper?"

"Dye you. Change your colour."

"Harper, if Rev wanted to be a different colour, he could get nanobots or something."

He shook his head. "It's not the same. This stuff is *weird*. It's sticky. It smells almost like food."

Rev picked up one foil packet, very carefully, and slit it open with a claw. Poured it into his hand and dipped his tongue into it. Spat horribly onto the floor. "That is foul."

"Yeah, well, nobody told you to eat it."

"Harper, I believe I would prefer to retain my current colour."

"You suck. What'll I do with all this, then? Beka?"

She shifted her hair colour quickly, red to gold to black. "No hope."

"You do realize what I'm going to have to do."

"If your hair all falls out, you'll have no one to blame but yourself, Harper."

"Hey, if I end up bald, I can get tattoos." The smell from the open packet was disturbingly tempting, like something that should taste amazing, a trick that would've worked best on poison. He'd checked the powder, and himself, to make sure it wasn't deadly before he brought it in. Vague mental images of spending the next week curled up in the head puking his guts out still had his skin crawling. The powder had nothing in it, though, but a few preservatives, a few esters, a lot of dye.

So. The Maru's bathroom wasn't designed for body modification, and the door was open so Beka could laugh at him and still watch.
Handed him petroleum jelly and told him what he looked like with the electric blue dripping down his naked back. Described a couple of diseases she'd run into that would have had the same result.

The drooling paste he'd made to do this with stung his scalp. He smelled wild sugar that he knew wasn't there, and not-quite-natural fruit. Strange, primitive chemicals turning him into a brightly-coloured form of food. Reverse camouflage, maybe. Making him highly visible but too inorganic to be nutritious.

He was still wet when Beka grabbed him from behind. Smeared something across the back of his neck and then licked him. Pulled away and laughed.

Sugar on her fingers, sparkling at him in the bathroom's too-bright light. "It's official. Add sugar and serve. You're lunch, Seamus."

He chased her. Dripping, shirtless, too cold in the Maru's constant chill, through the corridors in his bare feet, listening to her shriek laughter at him and feeling maybe happier than he'd been since a couple of really good, bright days when he was a kid in a pack of cousins. Caught her at the edge of the tiny bridge and licked her face, leaving brilliant blue in a trail after him.

"Gotcha."

Later, while she was chasing him, Rev caught him around the waist to keep both of them from falling, as carefully as anyone with claws like that could. Rev *grinned* at him. Terrifying, really. Too many teeth and claws, and Harper grinned back. Smeared the last of his nearly-dry colour onto Rev's arm, leaving a faint dark place. If it was going to really show up, they'd have to bleach him first.

He landed in her bunk, finally. Just wrestled with her for the longest time. Sticky and pale, both of them showing more blue on their skin than had stayed in his hair. And with the sugar, he found out, it did taste good. Beka-scented candy fingers covering his mouth to keep him from yelling. That he pulled into his mouth and sucked on.

This weird dominance thing, him half on top of her, sucking on her fingers while the nails of her other hand dug into the base of his skull. Some kind of message there that he was ignoring. He wondered if she thought she'd adopted some kind of spiky, strange pet with touching privileges.

She smacked him. Not hard, but enough to get his attention and to free her fingers. "Seamus."

"Trust The Harper."

"With what?" Hard fish-eye look. Something very, very wrong with his brain for it to be that sexy. Too many hormones. Brain damage from the dye seeping through his scalp.

"We're in bed, half naked, covered in blue stuff and sugar. Wanna have sex?" She sighed. Tapped her fingers on the currently accidental spikes of his hair. "Hey, boss. I'm still yours. Even if you say no."

She rolled him under her, kissed him hard. "Sure. Why not?"

"Because Rev'll get to watch?" He had an evil brain. It made him say Very Bad Things.

"He's on watch."

"You think I'll be done by the time he gets off? You wound me."

"You have to work in eight hours whether you get any sleep or not."

"But I suppose you get to sleep in."

"I'm the Captain."

"That's not --"

"Harper."

She was bigger than he was, and strong enough to hold him down. Fast hands, too. Like he'd said the magic word and she'd kicked herself into high gear. One of the very good things that'd happened to him in the last six months, though all of her fell into that category, and the fierce, bitey sex-Beka was mostly just a sharp edge he hadn't caught himself on before.

Naked against her with his leg hooked around hers to hold her in place, doing war on the macrame disaster of her shirt while she rubbed against him violently enough to hit the crown of his head against the wall. Growling at him. He could smell her, soaking wet through the dark layers of her pants. When he snaked a hand down and rubbed hard at the seam, she bucked and she fought him when he tried to take it away again.
 

"Seamus, I swear if you stop that . . ."

"Picky, picky, picky. Give me a sec to get this stuff *off*. Who the hell dresses you, some kind of fetishist?" Toolbelt. He found the sharp edge of a screwdriver and hooked it in at the back of her neck. "Hold still." Pulled until it ripped, then pulled the whole mess off her.

"Harper!"

"You want sex, you need nakedness." She pushed him off. "Hey!" Aching. Watching her roll off him and walk away.

She said, "I want to have some clothes left at the end of this."

Something half-furtive about the way she stripped, like she was way too used to being mostly naked in front of him to want to turn it into a show. She stood there afterward, watching him, with one hand cupping her sex almost absently.

"Do you want this?"

A hugely stupid question, considering that he was hard and naked and reaching for her. Considering that he had dreams about the way her mouth tasted, and they were definitely sex dreams, even if some of them involved bananas and nanowelders and rabbit ears as well as naked Beka. "Bite me."

"Seriously."

"You're gonna kill me, Beka. Yeah, I want you."

She cocked an eyebrow at him. "How?"

Harper rolled out of her bunk and padded over to her, closed his lips on the nipple nearest his mouth. Bit it carefully, then harder. Pushed his thigh up hard against her clit when she growled at him and rocked her there. "Any way I can have you."

She pulled free and padded off to one of the cabinets. He grabbed for her, missed her shoulder, caught her wrist. Decided never to let go of her, then was struck sideways by a disturbing mental image of Beka travelling the known worlds with a naked Harper wrapped around her and clinging.

She offered him. Blue. He thought it might be silicone. The harness attached to it was definitely leather; he could smell it. Actual animal hide bracing one very dark blue, disturbingly pretty plastic dick.

"Oh man." Weakly.

"Yes?"

Did he? God yes. Anything. For her, from her, all over her and any way he could get her. Anything he needed to do to prove he was hers. "Yeah. Oh yeah."

She stayed watching him while he crawled back into her bunk, like she expected him to Assume The Position or something. He didn't, though, just crouched and stared back at her until she pounced.

Too small a space for the two of them to be doing this, but he decided he didn't care. She had tiny, hard nipples, and she loved it when he bit them. And she didn't ask permission after that first time, just moved his knees when she needed to and got one slick finger up him, and another one sometime after that. Worked on finger fucking him until he was way too close to frantic, reaching to finger her back and never quite reaching deep enough to get anything but shallow, slick touches. Her taste on his fingers that he fed to her.

On his back, finally, under her, with his legs around her waist. Letting her push into him, deep enough to hurt. Babbling at her when she finally took him. She hissed when he twisted. He was only half aware that something connected to the cock in him was in *her*, that she was fucking both of them. It didn't seem possible, except in those little moments when her breath caught. She had too much control. More like she was feeding on the blindingly intense thing she was doing to him. Fucking him slow and hard and way too deep, making his belly twist around her voice in his ear, telling him he was pretty, smelled good, that she liked the blue on him. Laughing whenever he moaned.

"You playing me, Beka?"

"Nope. Just fucking you." Fingers rubbed at his temples. "Seriously, are you okay?"

"I'm good. It's just. God, Beka. Deep in me, you know? Have you got any idea how this feels?"

"Yeah, I do."

She kissed him. Never for long enough for him to tangle his tongue around hers, but wet and constant, listening to him and shifting and listening again like she could get off just on the sounds he made. Her fingers wrapped around his cock, finally, about the time his knees gave and he had to spread for her as best he could with his feet braced on the mattress. Hissing at her that he loved her. Very fiercely not looking over at the alien eyes that watched him from the door.

"Rev's watching us."

"No he's not."

"You're the captain and I -- oh god -- I know you're always right, but he really, really *is*."

"Nobody here but me fucking you, Seamus." She pushed in, hard and deep, and rocked there. Made sure he felt it all over. "Come for me." Squeeze. "Come on."

Not as perfectly as she'd commanded, but he did. Sticky mess on her fingers, on both their skins, and she didn't stop the slow rock inside him while he came. Didn't stop after, either, not until he finally just clamped onto her and whimpered. Not quite *no*, but something like *hurts*.

Beka pulled out and settled down beside him with the strap-on pushing against his leg. Some kind of reminder that she hadn't come yet. He stupidly caught it in his hand before it occurred to him there wasn't any point. Except. She moaned when he tugged. Aching underneath that harness if he could just get to her.

Soft hair under the leather. She was soaking wet. All down her thighs, all over the inside of his thighs too. He peeled the harness back and found slick, swollen Beka underneath. Mouthed and fingered her, careful of the shaft still pushing up inside.

He licked her all over. Fucked her gently with the body-warm silicone and sucked at her clit and rode her out while she came. Pulled the shaft out after and rubbed gently at the wet opening with his thumb. Kissing her for most of the night.

She kicked him out of bed five minutes before his alarm would have dragged him awake. He made sure that by the time she was out of the shower she couldn't find him.

She only hunted him down hours later, and kissed his neck until he relaxed against her. He could have kissed her for hours, just loving her skin and her hair, the fierce Beka-smell that crawledinto his brain whenever he nuzzled her.

"You good, Seamus?"

He sighed. "Yeah."

"Good." She ruffled his hair before he could push her off, then used the top of his head for leverage while she stood. Petted him again before she left.

Sometime after that, claws ground against the deck plating and Harper worked very hard on not flinching while Rev Bem came and crouched beside him. Big, terrifying mass of fur who loomed over him with way too much patience, like he'd stay there for however many weeks it took Harper to stop ignoring him.

"What can I do ya for, Rev?"

"Are you well?"

"Beka already asked. I'm good."

"I was concerned that you might be disturbed. I have occasionally observed that Beka's affections can bloody their objects."

"I heal pretty good. And you gotta believe that I enjoyed it, Beka being the lovely girl she is."

"Harper." Rev settled fully onto the floor. Leaned in and. Hugged him.

It went down as the moment in his life that he had to work hardest to resist the screaming spazz-attack clawing up from the base of his stomach. Wrestling it down took all the energy he had. Very, very still in the middle of that hug, trying to ignore the warm, frightening scent of Rev's fur. Something under the Maru's soap that was beyond primal.

Rev held onto him for a long time while Harper fought the terror down and as a result sat stiller than he ever had before in his life. Something more fundamental even than his own vibrating energy at work. He ached inside, and Rev was telling him about things he didn't believe, and he was sure, somehow, in spite of her utter invisibility, that Beka was watching.

There were eyes on him all the time. Everything he'd seen his space was murky, except Beka, who glowed luminously pale. And he did too, now. Paler than he'd ever been before in his life, utterly visible in this new darkness.

*
end
*

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