Work Text:
Most evenings start out with all of them spread out over the common area, poring over their own projects until they begin to peel off for their rooms. Here,as with so many other things, Davenport is set in his ways. He takes a cup of tea after dinner and sits with it at the low table and chair in one corner of the room, furniture that no one else really uses as it’s sized to him. He usually sits there for no more than three hours, with breaks to stand up and pace a little, before bidding everyone goodnight and retiring to his room. Usually.
Tonight he was...distracted, too caught up in a book he borrowed from a library here, about this world’s own (so far failed) attempts to make it to space. He’s aware of the others talking and working around him, and of how the noise in the room begins to falter as more and more people head off to bed. Distantly, in the back of his head, he assumed tonight he might be the last one up. When he finishes the book, his eyes feel tired and his back is stiff. It cracks a little as he does a celebratory stretch, and looking around, he realizes that he is not, in fact, the only person still up.
The other one, pen stuck behind her ear and humming as she draws, is Lucretia. She sits on the couch, one foot pressed against her other knee and bent over a sketchbook on her lap. A half-empty mug sits beside her, forgotten.
Since the meteor shower last year, he’s tried his best to rescind the intimacy they developed on that trip. He’d decided this as the last lights of the meteors were fading, his head pounding creep, asshole . He’d turned away from her in the tent, not corrected her again when she continued to call him “Captain.” He couldn’t stand to wrap his head around it. He didn’t want it to be right.
It’s impossible to not talk to Lucretia, or not think about Lucretia, so he’s developed a way of talking to her that keeps her at arm’s length. He does not think about her breath on his neck, or her voice, filled with tenderness, calling him Andrew. He thinks about asking her what she’s working on, what she’s noticed recently that he missed. He keeps to short subjects and ends conversations quickly. It’s a working system, he’s sure of it.
She’s his eyes and ears, he has to trust her. He just doesn’t trust the two of them together .
He clears his throat as he walks over to get a glass of water. She looks up, apparently more surprised to see him still there than he her. She must have been pretty wrapped up in her work herself.
“Oh.” She smiles briefly, her mouth forming a neutral line. “Captain. You’re still up?”
“Well, yes,” he sighs, giving a helpless chuckle. “So are you.”
“Yes, I just...forgot to go to bed, I guess. I got swept up in what started as a little drawing, and it got to be sort of a big drawing.” She holds the sketchpad a little closer to her.
“I see.” He busies himself with finding ice, counting cubes and making this the most involved glass of water he’s ever retrieved, trying to ignore his heart pounding in his ears. “Anything I missed today?”
“Taako’s going to tell you he thinks we’re almost out of salt, but that’s because he has a skewed definition of what ‘almost out’ means, so we should be good another two months. The sativa plant Merle’s been fussing over has a weird mite.” Normal things, he knew about the sativa but not the salt. She pauses for a breath, and then continues a little faster. “The captain thinks that he can delay ever having a conversation with me about the meteor shower by pretending everything is normal forever.”
She stops, waiting for him to reply, and in between is a moment of unbearable tension. He turns around and says the first thing that comes to mind. “That isn’t fair.”
“‘Isn’t fair’?” Her voice breaks a little on the last syllable. She sits up, tension visible in her neck. “Captain. Andrew. Come on. How long are we going to do this?”
“Maryam,” he says, trying to ignore that she just called him Andrew again.
“You kissed me, you told me to call you your first name. And then not even twelve hours later you can’t stand to look at me? Can’t stand to touch me? Can’t stand to even talk to me, lately.” She’s got it all in one, and even though he knew she was sort of invested in things as well, he hadn’t thought it would dig at her like that.
“I overstepped my bounds. It was wrong of me, and we shouldn’t venture into it again.” He’s got these excuses memorized like lessons.
“I think I’d be more ready to believe you if I didn’t keep catching you giving me longing glances .”
He sighs again, and doesn’t meet her gaze. She continues.
“Andrew, I like you. I really like you. I think part of that is that I’m pretty sure you like me too. I don’t understand why you’re so determined to ignore this.”
He looks at her, full-on, for the first time in a while. Apart from a growing weariness in her eyes, she looks as young and fresh-faced as when he hired her right out of undergrad. If things had gone normally, he thinks, she would have crow’s feet starting at her eyes and PhD or two under her belt. She’d be his colleague and equal, if not already his boss, and he’d have no such qualms about asking her to join him for a glass of brandy or. Well. It’s difficult for him to balance the woman she’s become in that time with the one he still sees.
“What do you want from me?”
“Acknowledgement. We went on that trip together, Andrew. It meant something. I thought it might’ve begun something.”
“Of course it meant something.”
“Then why stop there?”
“I’m afraid of losing, Lucretia.” Her breath flutters when he uses her first name, but she doesn’t interrupt. “Ten years of this, it doesn’t start to scare you? You don’t start to wonder how long this will go on?”
“Of course I have.”
“What if this doesn’t pan out? What if we’re still stuck with each other forever and grow to hate each other?”
“Well, what if it doesn’t? What if we didn’t? What if - hear me out here - we slept together and enjoyed it?”
That hits him hard, with more images he’s trying not dwell on. Half-formed fantasies of his mouth on her cunt, or his cock inside of her. Her soft breasts overflowing in his hands.
“What if you kissed me?” she asks.
“It wouldn’t solve anything,” he says, trying to ignore that part of his brain screaming yes yes yes kiss me.
“I think we could solve a lot of things by not being so afraid.”
Davenport lets out a laugh. “That’s horribly cheesy, Maryam. I’d expect better than such cliche romance lines from you.”
Lucretia looks startled, but laughs too. “It’s too late for that now. The highlights of your career are being written down by an aspiring trashy novelist.” She shifts to the side on the couch, to make room for him to sit down, which he does. They sit a moment in silence.
“I value your insight, you know,” he says. “You understand a lot. I wish you would take charge on more things, I think we might arrive at solutions more quickly. But this…”
“I know why you want to be careful,” she says, picking up where he trails off. “I know our survival depends on our ability to work as a unit. But I don’t think that ability rests on us always staying the same. We might always look the same, but we’re going to change underneath that. I mean, we can’t spend more than a year with anyone else, it follows that we’re going to start to - to fall in with each other.” He notices her stumble and skip over the phrase fall in love . “Why not see where it takes us?”
He nods slightly. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay, I’ll kiss you.”
She leans in towards him, and he reaches a hand out to her cheek. Where his fingers meet her skin it’s almost electric. Their lips meet in the middle, and it’s breathtaking.
Kissing Lucretia is like he’s remembered, like he’s tried not to think about. Soft human lips and a faint herbal scent on her breath. And it’s good, good, better than good. Intoxicating.
After a moment, Lucretia breaks the kiss, brushing her nose against his. “It doesn’t solve everything,” she admits, her voice soft and low.
“It doesn’t have to,” Davenport says, his tone matching hers. And he kisses her again.
They keep kissing, entwining closer and closer to each other until they’re lying next to each other, hands and arms wrapped around each other. Her tongue dances against his lips and pushes into his mouth, and he does the same, desperate for the sweet taste of her, the sweet sensation of being against her. He could lose himself in her soft hair and sweet-smelling skin. It’s a surprise every time they pause to look at each other and he sees the same wonder in her eyes that he knows is in his. She keeps one hand braced on his shoulder while the other begins to stroke down his back. Her fingers brush over his tail.
“Is that okay - for me to touch?” she says suddenly.
“Well, yeah, but it’s not an erogenous zone or anything. It’s just a tail.”
“You’ll forgive me, I don’t know the etiquette.” He shivers a little with goosebumps as she runs her hand along it experimentally, all the way down to the tuft of red hair at the end. It’s not an erogenous zone but it is sensitive, and somewhat different to have another person touching him there. Enveloped in her arms, he has a new perspective on how lovely she is, how...grand. There’s no other word for it, no matter how odd it sounds.
He looks at her face again and it’s such a rush to allow himself to take in how beautiful she is, and wonder how long he could stare at her. Her dark brown eyes meet his. She kisses him once on each cheek, and again on the lips.
“Lucretia,” he says, “If this is going to go any further, we should probably relocate.” She looks at him, smiling, but he continues. “If word gets out that we had sex on this couch we’ll never be able to get anybody else to stop being gross on here ever.”
“Oh, are we having sex now?” She laughs, batting her eyelids cartoonishly. “That’s a big leap from not wanting to speak to me twenty minutes ago.”
“We don’t have to, but it seemed a reasonable possibility, and I wanted to - to get that out there.”
Her smile drops a little bit. “I don’t want you to bite off more than you can chew and get scared off again. I want you... but only if you really want this too.”
“I want this, Lucretia. I have, since before the camping trip. Before I got too tripped up on my own bullshit to ask for it.”
She looks at him with a face so tender and so happy it makes him blush. “We can go back to my room.”
“Okay.”
They disentangle from each other, and she gathers up her books and pencils. He feels jittery and bouncy all over with anticipation, as they walk beside each other, not quite touching. She catches his eye a couple times, and hers are glittering with excitement.
She deposits the books on a heap on her desk, and joins him on her bed. He strokes her cheek and she does the same to him, and his skin seems to jump underneath her touch.
“Have you been with other humans before?” she asks, her brow furrowing a bit.
“I have,” he says.
“How is it easiest to do this, then?”
“Easiest if - maybe you can sit back against the pillows, here, and I can climb into your lap?”
“Okay.”
She sits back, beginning to unfasten the top buttons of her shirt as she does so.
“You don’t have to do all of them,” he says, moving over to her. He sits down on her leg, then scoots over to situate himself in her lap. “Here, I can do that.”
He takes her hand and then starts working on the buttons himself. He looks up at her and their lips meet again. Their kisses are quicker, less depth and more breadth.
She pulls her shirt off as soon as he finishes with the buttons, and then begins to undress him, practically ripping his shirt off of him.
“Sorry, I know I’ve seen you with your shirt off before but it’s...nice to be able to admire you,” she says.
“And likewise.”
“You’re so firm,” she says, hungrily running her hands over his bare chest and arms, over the red hair leading to his trousers. “So muscular.”
“I hide it well, I know.” He laughs. He does the same to her tracing his hands along the trail of white-blond hair underneath her navel.
“That’s not all you hide well,” she says, palming at his growing erection through his trousers. He starts.
“Shouldn’t we finish undressing, first?”
“What, are you worried about stains?” She says teasingly, then smiles a little guiltily. “I shouldn’t laugh, I’m worried about stains.”
“Then we take our pants off,” Davenport says, already unbuttoning his. They’re a humorous rustle of clothes for the next minute, but at the end of it they are both stripped down to their underwear.
He settles into kneeling between her legs, and his hand pushes down past her panties into the soft hair of her crotch, until his fingers run across her clit and her breath catches. He plays with her nub with his thumb while he strokes his index finger across the lips of her cunt. She moans against his mouth, and he bites at her lower lip.
Lucretia isn’t unoccupied, for her part. She reaches her hand past his waistband to grasp his cock again, and runs her fingers down his shaft from tip to base. He shudders a little, breathing heavily.
“You’d be a little, above average, wouldn’t you?” she asks against his mouth, between breaths. “I mean, you know. Among gnomes.”
“Only a little,” he says modestly. He slips a finger between her folds, and she moans.
“Fuck me,” she says. “Gods, Andrew, please.”
He hooks his legs over hers and sinks back to his knees, positioning himself at her entrance. He pulls back slightly before thrusting into her and she moans. She’s so warm and soft and perfect around him and he can’t remember why this took them so long. He gives a couple more quick thrusts as he lets himself fall against her torso, his head pillowed on her breasts. As he builds a rhythm, she bucks against him, one hand grasping his shoulder and holding him tight.
He wouldn’t have guessed it, but Lucretia is definitely...loud. She makes noises almost continuously, moans interspersed with little cries of “oh” and “yes.” It’s not what he expected
The disadvantage of their difference in size means that he can’t kiss her as he fucks her, he thinks as she buries a hand in his hair and bends her neck to kiss the very top of his head. Instead he busies himself with her breasts. He needs only one hand to brace himself against her back, so with the other he tweaks at a nipple, massaging it and feeling the tender flesh of her breast in his hand. He puts his mouth on her other breast, teasing her stiff, swollen nipple under his teeth. Her skin is salty with sweat, and he can hear her heart beating rapidly.
“Gods, I’m so close,” she pants. “Do you mind if I…?”
She leans back all the way and slips a hand down between their bodies to work at her clit. Her moans grow closer to whines, and she’s so hot around him, so beautiful. Her whines get louder and longer as he fucks her until she’s screaming in pleasure, hand working wildly at her clit, and he feels her clenching and releasing around him.
She falls back against the mattress, breathing hard but no longer screaming, and she wriggles off of his cock.
“Sorry,” she says once she can string words together again, “It’s just very sensitive...after… Maybe with a little more practice?”
“I’d like that,” he says, leaning in to kiss her. She picks herself up and kisses back.
Lucretia brings her still-trembling hand down from her clit to work at his cock, still slick and almost painfully hard. She bends forward and rests their foreheads together as she rubs her fingers over him, and it’s too much to bear too quickly. He tries to moan her name but barely gets a syllable out before he comes, splattering onto her hand and thigh.
They rest like that a moment, breathing heavily and gazing at each other. Lucretia falls back against the pillows again..
“That was pretty good,” she says.
“Just pretty good?”
“Every bit pretty good,” she repeats, casting prestidigitate to clean up. She reaches down to grab the covers kicked to the foot of the bed. “Come here.”
He scooches up to rest against the pillows with her, his eyes level with hers again. She pulls him in closely and kisses him, more softly than before.
“Stay with me?” she asks.
And wrapped in her arms, warm and content, Davenport is only too happy to say yes.