TITLE: Zero Hours
AUTHOR: Viridian5
RATING: R; Harper/Dylan. If m/m interaction bothers you, pass this by.
SPOILERS: "Under the Night," "D Minus Zero," and "Be All My Sins Remembered."
SUMMARY: Harper won’t go to bed without an incentive, while Dylan tries to connect with his new crew.
ARCHIVAL/DISTRIBUTION: Anywhere, as long as you ask me first.
FEEDBACK: can be sent to Viridian5@aol.com.
DISCLAIMERS: All things Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda belong to Gene Roddenberry’s estate, Tribune Entertainment Company, and Fireworks. None of them are mine at all, and I’m putting them back when I’m done with them, though I can’t promise that they won’t be disturbed in the process. No infringement intended.
NOTES: This story takes place immediately after "D Minus Zero." Harper is listening to "Zerøspace" by Kidneythieves.
Thanks to LuzMaria for the beta.
"Heeeey, Beka."
She was on the Maru, where he figured she’d be. "Heeeey, Harper," she said. "You look like shit."
"Thanks, boss. You’re good to my ego."
"You look pretty good for a guy who almost died. How’s that?"
"Better." Harper crouched down beside her pilot’s chair. "Is everything all right? I hear you took some hits. Saw ‘em myself before I walked in."
"Nothing my engineer can’t fix."
"Sounds like somebody I’d like. Hey, boss, I want you to know that I would’ve backed you if I hadn’t been so nearly dead and all." While he would have missed the Andromeda Ascendant like he’d miss one of his hands, some things, some people, were more important. He still couldn’t believe that Rev and Trance had mutinied against her, preferring to stay with Dylan. Damn, Rev had been with Beka longer than he had. The Divine had led Rev to Dylan? Oh yeah, that was something the ever modest Dylan Hunt needed to hear.
She smiled a little. "Dylan’s technology saved you."
"His plan put me down to begin with."
"Very true. Why do you like him so much, anyway?"
"Sometimes, like you, I lose all sense over somebody big and dumb."
Her smile turned into a smirk. "Oh, Harper. I guess I should have figured that one out from your ‘Greek god or something’ comment."
"Hey, you’d be singing a different tune if your first meeting with him had been like something out of a porn holo. He was standing over me, all big and imposing, with this phallic weapon pointed at my head. I half expected him to say, ‘Suck on it, boy!’"
"You bastard! I’m imagining him saying that now!"
Harper cackled. "Suffer, boss."
"I’ll never be clean again...."
"He has some respect for my skills too, and not just my, uh, sucking skills. Sue me for liking that."
"He knows how you can suck?"
"Not really. Poor guy."
"That’s not all he doesn’t know. Rev had to tell him that you were feeling bad over how we got our asses kicked while you were piloting."
"Like Bobby was a great judge of human emotion." He smiled as she smacked his arm. "Someday Dylan might realize that we’re civilians."
"I wouldn’t hold my breath."
"Don’t worry. I’m regaining my sense of self-preservation and all. It’s a shame he can be such an ass sometimes." He looked down at the floor. "I didn’t know he’d use the FMS against you. I never would have built it if--"
"Harper. You’re sweet, but it’s over and done. We’re good. Captain Terrific rooked you. It’s what he’s good at." When she put her hand on his forehead, it felt cold. Nice, but cold. "Go get some rest. Radiation poisoning is serious stuff. Considering that you were the one dying of it, you should know that."
He waggled an eyebrow. "You gonna enforce that bed-rest personally?"
"How many different ways have I said no over the years?"
"Hundreds. Maybe thousands. But you’d get insulted if I stopped trying."
"Maybe." She smirked. "You’re my guy?"
"’Til death do us part, Captain, my Captain." She’d put her foot down hard with Dylan over him getting ill. That had been the breaking point for her. A guy could be flattered by that. "Though it would be nice if you and Captain Terrific could decide how to split things up so I’m not left with my ass torn between two captains."
"We’ll figure something out." She grabbed him around the neck and hugged him that way. "I’m glad you’re gonna be okay."
He hugged her back, loving her. Love of her was essential to him, like oxygen and blood and caffeine. "Me too. Think how disappointed I’d be if I died."
When she ruffled his hair, it was part caress and part noogie. "Now get some sleep."
"Can’t. Been lying down too long. I figure I’ll go do something life-affirming."
"Don’t work on the Andromeda too long, okay?"
-----
Dylan heard loud music coming from engineering. At least the rhythmic drumbeat suggested that it might be music, though otherwise it sounded like noise to him.
Twirling a tool, Harper moved his head to the drumbeat and sang along, "Said I was an afterthought you’d bring along, / Well, who you after now, bitch? Run, motherfucker, run...."
"Shouldn’t you be in bed?" Dylan asked.
Harper turned around. He looked far too pale, and his eyes had a fevered glitter. Dylan remembered him collapsing on the bridge, too weak to do more than feebly writhe. "Nobody was willing to enforce it personally, so I decided to get some work done. It’s life-affirming and all. Coffee is my best friend."
"You actually asked everyone?"
"Well, I asked Beka, and she said no, as usual. I don’t wanna encourage Rev too much--tempt him with how tasty a treat I am or anything--so I never ask. He feels me up uninvited enough already. Trance pretends she doesn’t understand the question. Tyr? Ha. No. Rommie told me to dream on." Harper picked up the song again at "I think you are my hero / And we were one, it all was clear-oh...."
"You missed someone." Did he actually just say that? He hated it when people overlooked him, but come on.
"You threatened to put Beka in the brig for ticking you off. Military as you are, I don’t think you’d be happy with a lower rank making you an offer, and my rank can’t get much lower than none at all, which is what I have. I’m civvie through and through."
"Do you people tell each other everything?"
"Almost." Harper smiled. "We’re family."
And Dylan wasn’t. Harper had adopted Andromeda and even included Tyr in his conception of crew but had held Dylan apart, as something separate. Not crew. Dylan had to change that. If he couldn’t bond with these people, he had no hope of surviving or accomplishing anything in this time period.
Besides, among people who took everything personally, he found that his military detachment was a cold companion and no comfort at all, leaving him lonely. Andromeda was his fellow exile, but she’d been programmed to subordinate herself and be loyal to him. He missed Rhade so much sometimes....
"Do you really want me to add you to the list of people I ask for sex and snuggles who turn me down?" Harper asked. "You might want to think hard about that."
"I do. We’re crew."
"Okay. If you say so."
"Harper, you should be in bed."
Harper grinned, all smart-ass, challenging. "You gonna enforce that personally?"
In the absence of any other way of making Harper actually go to bed working, Dylan said, "Yes."
Harper looked hilariously stunned, his mouth open and eyes wide. Dylan might ask Andromeda to play back the footage later. "Huh?"
"I’m not having sex with you, but I think I can handle the sitting on you to make sure you stay."
Andromeda popped up in hologram form and said, "Dylan, he may look like hell, but his repair work is lucid."
"You’re not helping," Dylan answered.
"That depends on whose agenda I’m supposed to be serving." She smiled. She’d been taking on more character lately....
"Sorry, Rom-doll, but it’s not every day that Captain Terrific offers to go to bed with me." Harper smirked. "Your avatar had her chance. I’ll have to get back to you later."
She gave him an overdone annoyed look, and he gave her an air-kiss, displaying once again the new-style modern engineering. Dylan supposed he should be happy that Harper wasn’t punching things to make them work, as he’d caught him doing earlier. Then again, it seemed to work, for Harper then and for Dylan later.
"I’m all yours," Harper said, then staggered a bit as he stood. "Oooh, head-rush." He pressed the button on a remote, turning off his music, leaving only the pulsing hum of the slipstream engine.
Dylan grabbed him by the shoulder to help keep him up and steer him. "Let’s go."
Walking next to Dylan, Harper leaned on him briefly from time to time. Harper walked with his usual energy, but his movements suggested that his legs hadn’t recovered full strength, since his stride had a somewhat rubbery look to it.
As if the corridors didn’t seem wrongly empty enough already, Dylan had nearly killed off a member of his new, far smaller crew by accident, through ignorance and arrogance. He had only one engineer now, although Harper talked and did enough to almost equal an engineering division himself.
Would Harper have gone for help for himself if he hadn’t been assigned FMS-building duties and felt like he had to make up for his piloting earlier? Or would he have holed up somewhere and died quietly if he hadn’t been compelled to come to the bridge to present something to Dylan? Dylan didn’t know. Trance said that Harper had reported feeling hot to her, but she hadn’t thought anything of it, since they’d all felt hot while sitting in that star’s corona. He hadn’t mentioned to her that he was coughing up blood.
"Next time, tell us what you know, Dylan. Then we can let you know if we’ve sworn pacifism or have crappy immune systems," Harper said. "No, you didn’t say anything, but I can almost hear you thinking."
"You seem to be taking your near death better than I would have thought."
Harper shrugged. "You should have seen me my first year out in space. Seemed like something new was knocking me on my ass weekly. Bugs that gave spacers a bit of a cough had me tearing up my lungs. A lot of those bugs never made it down to Earth, so I had no antibodies for anything. Put that together with a weak immune system, and you had a recipe for daily sickliness. I spent most of my life figuring I was dying, so eventually my attitude got to be been there, done that."
That was no life for anyone. "I want to change that. For everybody."
"That’s one of the reasons why we stayed on. Well, that and the hot showers and the coffee and your gorgeous ship." Harper closed his eyes and leaned a little more. "Besides, I was dying when I first met you."
"So I’ve saved your life twice."
"Uh, Dylan, considering that I wouldn’t have needed saving this time if you hadn’t exposed me to all that rad, I don’t think you can claim a credit for this one, unless you’re into that, what, Munchausen by proxy thing."
About 20% of what Harper said went over his head, but the other 80% came through clearly. "I’m sorry."
"You should be. You’re, like, 340 years old, but you don’t know how to talk or listen. Sucks."
"I don’t know how to talk or listen? You could have mentioned to someone that you were coughing up blood."
"Trance would have taken me off FMS duty, and it needed to be done."
A sense of duty. Loyalty. Self-sacrifice. Dylan knew he should stop being surprised when these scavengers showed such qualities, because they kept doing it.
"I didn’t tell what I knew because we had to hide in the corona anyway."
"Yeah, but if you told us, we could have warned you that you might not have as much safe time in the corona as you expected, so do not try to turn this around on me. I was happy to build your Fuck-Me Switch for you, since it suggested that you trust me, which I like, but I am deeply pissed that you used it to force Beka to stay."
"I gave her a choice."
"Some choice. ‘Stay with me or get blown to hell by guys who think you’re flying the Andromeda.’ We’re getting your number, Dylan. You play dirty when you think you have to."
He didn’t see it as playing dirty. He just did what was necessary. "Do not."
"Do too. Hey, where are we going?"
"My quarters."
Harper started to pull away. "No. No, no, no. I’m not sleeping in the captain’s bed."
Dylan kept his grip on Harper’s shoulder. "My bed isn’t good enough for you?"
"I’m sure it’s the captain of beds, but no. I’m fine. I’ll go be a good boy and sleep in my bunk, no sitting on necessary."
In his bunk. He had a bunk on the Eureka Maru; he had a bed on the Andromeda. Like any wounded creature, he wanted to go home, and home to him was the Maru. Dylan had to change that conception of home.
"My quarters. Don’t make me carry you."
"I may be small, but I weigh, so it won’t be as easy as you think."
"My mother was a heavy gravity worlder. I’m stronger than I look."
Harper looked annoyed and frustrated. "Don’t you trust me?"
"Considering that you told Trance that you’d be getting bed-rest while convincing her to let you out of med-deck, I’d say no."
Harper sagged a little more, only standing up by what seemed to be pure will. His eyes lost some of that glinting light, looking duller. "Your ideas of bonding with your new crew suck."
Dylan wouldn’t show that Harper’s barb had hit home. He lightly answered, "And you’re a pain in the ass in a loud shirt."
"It’s vintage Hawaiian, a part of my planet’s cultural heritage, you blasphemer. Well, a reproduction of a reproduction of a vintage, but that’s what you get in these decadent times. Look, I just realized that us in the same bed is a bad idea."
"Why? I’m not going to molest you."
"More’s the pity. If you were, I’d feel better about it. But I know that you think I’m a kid, and I’m told that my face drops ten years when I’m asleep, so I don’t want you to see that. I’m about 24."
Dylan had figured much lower. "You’re 24?" So much for Harper being a good kid.
"Oh, shut up." Harper ran his hand through his blond hair, making it stand up more. "Fine. I’ll go to bed with you."
"I’ve never had to drag anyone into my bed kicking and screaming before," Dylan said sourly.
"It’s a brave new galaxy out there, Dylan." Harper opened the door with his engineer’s skeleton key passcode. "You coming?"
"You’re funny."
"I try."
While Harper sat on the bed, Dylan took off his uniform jacket. When he turned around, Harper was asleep on the bed, looking as if the upper half of his body had just dropped down onto the mattress, his feet still on the floor. Asleep, he appeared to be about 12, which was only two years younger than his usual visible age. Not that Dylan really thought he was 14, but 24? It didn’t seem possible.
Dylan winced at how contorted he looked with the bulky tool belt still on. Dylan put his hand on its fastener and felt something explode under his jaw and into his head. Next thing he knew, he was lying on his back on the floor, his head ringing, with a weight on his chest and someone’s hands fisted in his shirt.
"Ow," Harper said from his perch on top of Dylan. "And sorry." He carefully let go of the shirt.
"Ow? You’re saying ow?"
"Headbutting somebody under the chin hurts. Sorry. Didn’t know it was you. You don’t go stealing a guy’s belt. I got instincts about that."
"I was trying to do you a favor. Your back would have killed you when you woke up if you fell asleep like that."
"Sorry I messed up your act of mercy, and that’s the last sorry you’re getting for this incident, especially since you started it by touching my belt." Harper stood up. "You still sure you wanna do this? Bet you didn’t think it would be this dangerous."
"Now I have to do this."
Harper grinned and gave him a hand to help him up. "Thank you for entertaining me." Harper took off his belt, boots, and bright red and blue shirt. The more sedate white undershirt gave Dylan’s eyes a welcome rest.
"What about the cargo pants?" Dylan asked.
"Huh?"
"Do you have anything in the pockets you shouldn’t be sleeping on?"
"Jeez, Daddy much? There’s nothing in these cargo pants but me. Oh, get that look off your face. You asked me to treat you like crew. I talk like this to crew."
"Rub it in."
"Fortunately for you, I’m not going to make the obvious response to that." Harper bounced up onto the bed. "Hey, this is a nice bed. Springy. But black satin sheets? Soooo tacky. I thought you had more taste than that."
Watching Harper bounce on all fours on the bed, Dylan said, "If I ever need more power, I could always hook you up to the engine. What happened to being tired?"
"Your Boston welcome gave me a shot of adrenaline that I have to work off now. Bleh, satin. Sheets shouldn’t be slippery. You ever slide right off?"
"Never."
"Liar." Harper finally put himself under the sheets. "This is so wrong. Sheets should be warm and soft like a big hug, not black and slick as a Nightsider’s heart."
Dylan sat down on the edge of the bed and took off his belt and boots. "I like them."
"Then all your taste is in your mouth. Hey, do I get a bedtime story?"
"No."
"Bad daddy. You’re not my real father." Harper snuggled in, seeming to settle down a little.
"I’m so glad of that."
"You’re not coming to bed? There’s room."
"I appreciate the invitation to use my own bed, but no."
"A puppy pile would be nice," Harper murmured.
"Are you asking me to sleep on top of you?" Dylan knew he’d made a mistake as soon as the words left his mouth.
"Rowr. But no. Just... I dunno. Forget it." Harper looked forlorn.
So forlorn that Dylan settled in under the covers with him. "Would you settle for next to you?"
Harper grinned. "Hey, yeah. Warm." He turned his back to Dylan. "This make it easier for you?"
"It’s not-- Yes." The sight of Harper’s back felt less threateningly intimate than seeing his face.
"Cool."
Harper’s request for someone sleeping close, possibly for warmth, made Dylan wonder about some things. "Harper, Beka mentioned that you lived in a refugee camp."
His whole body stiffened. "Not gonna talk about that."
"I need to know what things are like now. You all keep telling me that I need to know more, and you’re right."
"Not much to say, but I’ll try to be educational for you. You got your cruel Nietzschean overlords, marauding Magog, slavers, starvation, beatings, toxic levels of pollution, and grinding poverty. You run, you hide, you collaborate, or you fight. Usually, all four paths bring you to the same place in the end. Earth’s a hole you get buried in." Harper’s voice sounded dead.
Dylan had never seen Earth in his own era, but.... He shook his head, glad he couldn’t see Harper’s face. "You escaped."
"By taking a chance that only had about a 25% probability of working out. A suicidal chance, especially when you looked at the guy who made me the offer. But Beka got me away. Can you match that, Dylan?"
"I can’t."
"That’s all you get from me on the topic." Harper pulled the covers over his head until only a small tuft of blond hair could be seen.
Dylan cursed himself for an idiot. Maybe his pounding head had made him stupid. "I’m sorry."
"Fuck off," Harper answered, his voice muffled.
"I’m talking and listening."
"The next concept we’ll try to teach you is ‘timing.’"
"I have a knowledge of timing."
"There are some questions you don’t ask the inmates ‘cause they’re rude. The only reason I’m not leaving is that my knees feel kinda jelly-like right now. ‘Sides, I’m not used to my room here yet."
At least Harper was still talking to him. "I can make it nicer for you."
"Nah, there’s nothing you can do. It’s just too big, too bright, too open, too not mine right now. Dark and close mean safe. Well, not really, but I’m used to them."
"You want me to give you a smaller, dimmer space?" No wonder Harper liked the conduits.
"Nah. I’ll get used to it. Putting more stuff in there should help."
"Harper, would there have been a good time to ask about the camp?"
Harper pulled the sheets down a little so Dylan could see his face. "Not really. Unless you count ‘never’ as a time. You could make it up to me by petting my hair, though. I’ve seen you looking at it sometimes like you were wondering what it felt like."
"I have not." Really.
"Fine. Then you can’t make it up to me." Harper turned his back on Dylan again.
Since Harper had given him an invitation, Dylan reached out to stroke his hair. It had a mix of textures, rough at the blunt-cut ends and softer down the length to his scalp. He hadn’t put whatever stiffening product in that he used to spike it, so Dylan still didn’t have an idea of what it felt like usually. To his surprise, Dylan found it relaxing to lie in bed soaking up his engineer’s warmth and stroking the back of his head.
Harper sighed happily. "I may get you trained yet."
"I’ve heard that it’s relaxing to have a pet."
"You’re such a bitch. Good thing I’m into that." He yawned.
"Lights off," Dylan said.
As darkness fell, Harper burrowed a little deeper into the pillow and said, "Thanks."
Still stroking Harper’s hair, Dylan could tell when his engineer finally fell asleep. "Andromeda," he said softly, "please monitor his life signs and let me know if anything dips into a danger zone."
"Yes, sir."
The shared warmth under the covers made Dylan feel drowsy, so he fell asleep too.
------
Dylan woke up desperately aroused, with a hot body twined tightly around his. His chin rubbed against soft hair, the top of someone’s head. For a while, he didn’t know who this could be, but his questing hand found a raised, hard circle on the neck of his bed partner.
"Harper," Dylan gasped. "Let go."
Harper made a soft sound and clenched his hands tighter on Dylan’s shoulder and back. He had some grip.... It was a desperate clasp, not a sexual one, no matter what Dylan’s body wanted to make of it. Rubbing off against his unconscious engineer would be wrong no matter how much he ached. Maybe if he could calm Harper, he could get some space.
He gently stroked Harper’s back. He wondered if using Harper’s first name would help but realized that he had no idea what conditions Harper liked hearing it under. Beka seemed to use it to underscore commands or tease.... This wasn’t the military, which used family names, so Harper had chosen to be called "Harper" instead of "Seamus."
Eventually Harper started to loosen his stranglehold and breathe slower. Dylan untangled himself and walked to the bathroom to take care of himself. He tried to make his thoughts stay formless and concentrate only on the physical sensations of release, but impressions of Harper, the solid feel and electric, sharp metal scent of him, kept straying in. Harper smelled a lot like the Andromeda Ascendant. He’s not a kid after all, one darkly gleeful part of Dylan’s brain sang.... Dylan came.
This could complicate things.
Dylan shook his head. It could wait until morning, when he’d be thinking clearer. In the meantime he had to go back to bed, where his difficulty was nestled in his sheets, but he had discipline.
In Dylan’s absence, Harper had sprawled across the entire bed, taking up maximum space. Dylan was not sleeping on the floor. He also didn’t think he should shift Harper himself. Figuring it didn’t have a chance in hell of working, but he may as well try, Dylan said, "Harper, move over."
Harper murmured something in an accent so thick that Dylan couldn’t make out the words, but he rolled over to make space. Well. Dylan went back to bed.
-----
Harper woke up in somebody else’s bed. Had to be. These sheets sure as hell weren’t his. Oooh, bed partner. Must have gotten lucky. But they seemed to be dressed. Weirdness.
Then it all came back to him, Dylan and the tacky satin sheets. Wait until he told Beka about the sheets and ending up in Captain Terrific’s bed; she’d die.
Dylan smelled good. Musky too. He was not burrowing into one of his captains and sniffing him. If he didn’t leave, he’d make an ass of himself, and nobody wanted that to happen.
He started to roll off the bed, but Dylan asked, "Where are you going?"
"Away. Didn’t think you intended to keep me prisoner in your bed. I got work to do."
"Trance gave you orders."
"Yeah, and I listened to them so well yesterday." Harper really wished he could see Dylan’s face, but the darkness prevented him. Then again, the darkness hopefully prevented Dylan from seeing how hard he was. "I’m awake and bored. I don’t have anything to do." He came this close to saying "anyone to do," and he had no intentions of asking Dylan to give him someone, er, something to do.
"Bored?" Dylan’s voice sounded throatier. Or Harper’s hopeful imagination had taken total control of his fevered brain.
The air in the dark room felt heavy to Harper, weighted with tension. It couldn’t possibly be two-sided sexual tension. Dylan saying that if Harper wanted something to do, he could do his captain would be too much to ask.
In the dark, you could put any expression you wanted on a person’s face. He’d done that, but doing it with someone you crewed with full-time was beyond stupid.
"Yeah. I’m awake, and it’s dark, and I have nothing to hold my attention." Nothing aside from the thought of nuzzling his way around until he reached Dylan’s mouth, enjoying the journey the whole way, and that was not helping.
He couldn’t stay, because Dylan would figure it out, hearing what he wanted in his voice or smelling the lust on him. It would only increase and become more obvious if he stayed. He scented a bit of lust on Dylan himself, but that was a guy thing. Nothing personal.
Couldn’t Dylan say something, anything? The silence was too big, too heavy, too charged. Harper vibrated in its grip. It gave him too much time to imagine things. He could almost feel Dylan arguing with himself.
Harper was half-afraid that Dylan might want him after all, just not for the right reasons. Some spacer humans did business with the Dragans, and they came down into the ghettos sometimes looking to hire a dirty and desperate toy to play with, wanting a bit of rough nobody important would miss if things got too rough. They paid up just often enough that people kept taking the risk of going with them. Dylan wasn’t like that, but he had that "better than you" attitude going sometimes, and that took Harper to old places he didn’t want to revisit.
And here he was creating problems with an attraction that probably didn’t even exist. Stupid. The big silence was making him nuts.
Somebody had to settle this before Harper shook himself apart from uncertainty. In the absence of Dylan taking charge, it looked like he had to be the one to step away. Harper started to move to the edge of the bed again.
"Harper, you don’t have to go." Dylan’s fingers brushed Harper’s hand, making him shiver.
"I have to. I really have to." Harper got out of bed.
"Lights." Dylan had a thoughtful expression on his face as he lounged in bed, looking all-- Oh, give it up.
Harper did the more productive thing of finding and putting on his boots, then his belt. "Where’s my shirt?" When Dylan just smiled, Harper said, "I’ll get it back someday, mark my words, and when I do, I’m gonna wear it every day for a week just to rub it in."
"That’s an incentive to me to help you find it?"
"You get amnesty if it’s in my hands before I leave now."
Dylan shook his head. "I didn’t do anything with it, but maybe Andromeda’s drones...."
No way. "I am not taking fashion advice from an AI who flashes her cleavage all day long. Not that I don’t appreciate the view, but the look wouldn’t work on me."
"Why do you consider Tyr to be a part of the crew but not me?" Dylan suddenly asked.
Dylan loved the easy questions, didn’t he?
------
Harper fidgeted. "You’re not gonna like it." Fresh from bed, he looked endearingly mussed, more than usual. Did Dylan just think the word endearingly?
Dylan needed to get away from that line of thought. "I figured as much. Tell me anyway."
"Please keep in mind that all the opinions that are about to be expressed are solely the property of the Harper and may not reflect the opinions of the rest of the crew."
"Granted."
"It’s probably just you being from a different time and used to captaining a huge crew, but the way you hold yourself apart from us doesn’t do you favors. You only mix with us while on duty or if you’re trying to teach us something, like that game of basketball with Tyr. We tolerate Tyr’s ‘better than you’ ways because he’s a Nietzschean and they’re almost impossible to train."
"You think I think I’m better than the rest of you?" That definitely had to change.
"Dylan, sometimes when you look at us there’s a ‘this is today’s fallen humanity’ thing in your eyes. Speaking as one of the decadent barbarians, I have to tell you that it’s annoying. At least Tyr’s sneering isn’t personal."
"I didn’t mean you to think that."
"Plus, we trust Tyr to be Nietzschean. He’s gonna do things to save his ass. While he’s on board with us, most of the time our ass is his ass. When he leaves the ship without us, he ain’t crew anymore, get me? In these decadent times, we have situational trust. You, we have no idea what you’re up to until the moment hits. You might do the noble thing. Or the reckless thing. Or the stupid thing. Sometimes those things are all one thing. Or you might be sensible. You do that sometimes. We can predict Tyr, and we know what we have to do in response."
"You can’t predict me." Captains had to be able to confuse their enemies, but confusing their crews led to trouble. He’d known that, yet he’d chosen to see their reactions to his plans as their problem and shortcomings, not his.
"I like you, Dylan. That has to count for something."
While Beka had been nipping at his heels non-stop for the last few days, Harper had supported him and followed his orders, almost at the cost of his own life, even though Harper loved Beka with devotion. "Why?"
"Because the Harper’s opinion is important."
"No. Why do you like me?"
"Why does anybody like anyone? I just do."
"I have to earn being considered ‘crew’ but liking is that easy? That makes no sense."
"It’s makes perfect sense. Crew is more than just me. Liking you or not is something I do on my own." Harper smiled and tilted his head to the side. "I liked you since I first met you, even if you did trip me down to the floor and point a force lance at my head. Hey, you could have smacked me around much more than you did."
Dylan remembered how relatively gentle Harper had been in breaking the news of the Commonwealth’s dissolution to him, even though he’d been threatening Harper with bodily harm the whole time. Then again, Harper had looked more jazzed and fascinated than intimidated by him. Crazy invader, Dylan had thought at the time, and it had annoyed him. Harper had told the Maru crew that they should leave the Andromeda to Dylan, which was what Dylan had wanted.
Where would Dylan be today if Gerentex hadn’t been dissatisfied with that idea and forced them to join forces with him against the Nightsider? Left alone except for Andromeda, would he still be sane? Would she?
"I can’t speak for Tyr," Harper said, "but we all like you. Even Beka. That’s a good first step to becoming crew. Now I have stuff to go do."
"Harper."
At the door, Harper turned back to look at him. "Yeah, boss?"
"I like you too."
His smile lit up his whole face, but he said, "Of course you do. You can’t help yourself. The Harper is eminently likeable." Harper left looking far healthier than he had yesterday. And he left without the loud shirt.
Dylan figured that good first steps had been made on many fronts.