AN: Inspired by equivalencept's fic "Decoding" on AO3.
He remembered the last time he'd had to babysit a drunk person. It had been First Lieutenant Shawson in 2538, a baby faced man who had the misfortune of being the most senior officer alive in charge of an Army element of over a thousand people, stationed on a colony that had been half-glassed by the time Spartans had been sent down to evacuate people. He'd been of particular importance not because of his inspiring ability to lead in the face of galactic crisis, but because his mother was an Admiral and had been very, very clear about having her only son be saved personally by the Spartans in the evac order. He had vomited all down the front of Fred's armour and had to be carried the entire way to the transport.
This time was not quite as dire, or annoying. No one was shooting at him or his teammates, nor did he have Admiral Shawson's shrill voice coming in through FLEETCOM-5 asking after her son's well-being. He didn't even have to carry his current charge, but he was betting that would soon change. It always did.
Lopis's hand skidded across the brick wall to her right hard enough to take the skin off of her palm, but she didn't seem to notice. Fred was grateful for how narrow the street was, because he had zero faith in her ability to stand upright without the support of several storey-high buildings boxing her in.
"We clear the alley in ten metres," he told her, immediately pressing his foot down to prevent himself from running into her. "Why did you stop?"
"I didn't," she replied, bracing her hands on either side of the alley. Her feet stayed firmly planted on the ground, and her head bowed for a moment. He thought that she was going to vomit or even pass out, but then she huffed out a sigh and continued walking.
He didn't bother to correct her. She was moving forward again, and that was all that mattered.
Fred reached out a preemptive hand to grab the hood of her jacket when she made it out of the alley. As he'd predicted, she began to waver, the street now wide and looming and difficult to take in for someone who had ingested the amount of liquor that she had.
Her hood pulled taut in his fist and she shuffled her feet into a semi-stable position now that there was an anchor preventing her from tumbling forward. Her hand reached behind her back and swatted at his wrist. The angle was awkward and her fingers were ineffectual against his jacket sleeve. "Le'go," she muttered, voice forceful. "I can walk."
"No." He dug into his pocket with his free hand and grabbed the small water bottle inside. "Turn around."
"Once you free me," she muttered, pressing her chin over her shoulder to frown down at her hood. He let go of it and grabbed her bicep instead to turn her, initiating the movement for her. She had no choice but to comply, and blinked up at him, her brows knitted together in a squint despite how dark it was. "What?"
"Drink this." He offered the bottle to her. She stared down at it, and her frown deepened.
"What's inside?" Her hand felt its way up his and to the cap. He let go, hand still outstretched in case she dropped it. Lopis shook the bottle and listened to the slosh of its contents.
"Water," he stated for the third time.
"Oh." She uncapped it and took a long pull, then shoved it back his way. He needed two hands to refasten the cap, so he risked allowing her to stand under her own steam for a moment while he did so. "Good. Had too-much-to-drink." Her words came out sing-song, but he could see the annoyance in her eyes. First Lieutenant Shawson had drank to escape his duties; Lopis had done it as part of them. It didn't make her any less drunk, but it did mean she was more willing to follow the orders he gave her.
"You did well," he told her. "And you can sleep it off."
"How's—" A laugh interrupted her words, and she cleared her throat dramatically to start again. "How'sat for undercover work? Broth–brothel duty with a Spartan and a—a—"
He grabbed her arm again and stepped in front of her before she said anything else that someone might overhear. Lopis stumbled after him, clutching at his wrist and swearing at the rain beating down on them.
The entertainment district for this city was surprisingly dead, given what Osman had told him to expect. The streets weren't well lit, with most of the shops dim for the night. Only a few people walked along the sidewalks, and they were mostly singles who kept their heads down. The pistol tucked into his belt pressed into the base of his spine, the pressure comforting. Many people made the smart decision to not even bother looking at them, and he levelled a glare at the ones who did. Lopis was not cackling or yelling the way he remembered Shawson had carried on, but she was still fumbling and awkward, and her uneven movements drew attention from the sober citizens quietly walking the streets.
The silence put him on edge. He'd prepared himself for crowds, and there'd been plenty of people before the sun had set when they'd first entered the pub attached to the brothel. He checked his comm and found no security alerts or warnings to indicate that civilians were hiding from anything. Where had they all gone?
"Middle of the week," Lopis mumbled, and he realised he'd been voicing his concerns aloud. "School's out, so college kids aren't here to raise hell. Restric—rest—re-stric-tive nighttime zon-ing," she enunciated slowly and clearly. "—on businesses to keep drug sales down. No surprise's empty right now. Wait 'til weekend."
He catalogued what she'd said so he could ask her about it later. He remembered reading the words in the training dossiers, but it had only made sense to him in a distant, clinical way. He hadn't thought to put those variables together to assess their environment. Lopis's joking remark about putting a Spartan on a recon mission inside a brothel was an uncomfortably perceptive one, even if she'd slurred her delivery. He sped up their pace, ignoring her protests to slow down. Lopis was the expert in civilian settings, and her impaired senses also heavily restricted his own ability to properly react and assess potential threats. It was salt on the damn mirror all over again.
Endless walls of low-lying prefab units lined the streets and made every block look identical to the last. Massive skyscrapers towered behind them, so high it looked like they curved towards the horizon. It made him anxious not to be able to see the sky. His eyes flicked to his watch and found no FOF tags besides their own, but it still wasn't enough to take the edge off.
"Hey," Lopis said behind him. She had both hands on his arm now, pulling at it with more determined force. He realised he'd been moving almost at a jogger's pace and she probably couldn't move her feet fast enough to stay upright. "Slow down."
He stopped and she almost ran into him. He took a deep breath and checked his heart rate, then turned to look at her. She squinted up at him, and he made her drink more water. Happy to be stationary for the moment, she complied without complaint.
"Move slow," she whispered. Her words were slurred, but he could see the concentration on her face as she tried to push through the haze and focus on their job. Another thing the ridiculous lieutenant had never bothered to attempt. "Don't make a scene. Huge dude hauling a drunk woman around isn't a good look."
He scanned the street. It was empty, but he nodded anyway. He almost wished people were shooting at them this time, if only to give him an excuse to throw her over his shoulder and run. It was taking a significant amount of restraint not to do that anyway.
"We're okay," she said, tapping his arm to get his attention. "Target's not following, and no one gives a shit about us. So lead the way, big guy."
"Almost home free," he replied in what he hoped was a reassuring voice, and then didn't stop moving until they reached their prefab. He might've not been able to recognise it in the sea of identical prefabs without his watch directing him to their unit, and the anonymity of it was comforting.
Fred unlocked their door and shoved inside. It was completely dark besides the dim lights of the monitors on the west wall, but it was enough for him to navigate Lopis to the couch. He flicked on a lamp for her sake and then cleared the building. It was only three rooms and two closets, so the Inspector was still frowning on the sofa when he came back to the main area. He rechecked the locks on the doors and windows, and finding them secure, he let himself relax.
"Make a report," he told her, passing her a data pad on the coffee table. He didn't trust her motor skills enough to let her reach for it on her own. "Doesn't matter if its garbled. You can review it tomorrow."
He sat down on the other side of the coffee table and pulled the laptop on it towards him. He'd write his report out, given that he was the only one out of the two them with enough faculties to type full sentences. Fred brought up a blank page and then spied Lopis from over the top of the laptop screen. She was poking a finger at the datapad and squinting at the harsh blue light it gave off. He reached out for it and she pulled it up by her head. "I can do it," she sneered.
"Make a verbal report."
"I will type."
"You don't have the coordination for that."
"Don't patr—pator—pa—don't be rude." Her mouth hung open for a moment like she was going to say more, then her eyes flicked down to the pad in her hand and yawned hard enough to make her jaw creak.
"You can sleep soon," he told her, looking back to his own screen. He heard her grumble under her breath, and it made him smile despite himself. His prodding had worked, making Lopis focus all of her energy into typing out the events of tonight in order to prove him wrong. He wondered if she knew how easy it was to make her do things. Their professional relationship became much more productive and easy to navigate once he'd realised he just had to play the opposite game with her.
As he typed out his own review of the night's events, he made a conscious effort to unbind the knots in his shoulders and unclench his jaw. Watching Lopis whisper and flirt with their target had been a long, arduous process that had left him sitting at the back of the pub for several hours, unable to move or initiate contact unless the woman had begun to throw punches at the Inspector. He'd sat stationary for long periods of time many times in his career, but it had always been in full Mjolnir with teammates at his back. He'd been effectively naked in the strange bar with only a gun in his belt and a cursory knowledge of how civilians operated when danger arose—which was to either panic and flee or panic and fight. Three months of training at the Mill had not been nearly enough, despite Osman's assurances to the contrary.
But he was here now, and they weren't dead yet, so he took that as progress.
Fred was almost finished writing down his thoughts when he noticed that Lopis had gone quiet. He looked up from his screen and saw her passed out on the sofa. She was leaning against the cushions with her chin resting on her collarbone, her breath coming out in soft whistles. The text on her datapad was backwards from this angle, but he could see that she'd managed to write down a good chunk of coherent thought. He shut down the laptop and stood up, moving around the coffee table to carefully retrieve the datapad from her hands. He flicked it off and set it down on the table, then frowned at Lopis. He couldn't leave her like that, even if a more petty part of him wanted her to wake up with a stiff neck for making him walk her drunk through the streets. It hadn't been her fault that she'd had to keep accepting the woman's offers to buy her more cocktails.
He snaked an arm under her knees and grabbed her shoulders with his other hand, hauling her up off of the couch. Her head lolled for a moment before she snapped awake, blinking heavily up at the ceiling. Then she groaned and closed her eyes.
"Where we going?" she asked.
"The bedroom," he replied, long-stepping over the coffee table.
Lopis snorted. "How scandalous," she mumbled, and he ignored the heat that burned at his ears.
She threw her arms around his neck as he awkwardly fumbled for the door latch of their quarters. Lopis just barely cleared forty-five kilos, but she was drunk and shuffling around and apparently doing her level best to make things as difficult as possible, her centre of mass constantly shifting with each movement. It was not unlike wrestling with a Huragok, and the thought made him grin to himself. He doubted she'd appreciate being likened to a giant alien gas bag, even if the comparison was surprisingly intuitive.
Lopis noticed his grin and seemed to mistake it for encouragement. One of her brows rose and her lips curved up into a knowing smile.
"You can sleep this off," he said to drown out whatever was about to come out of her mouth, his voice too loud. She winced at the volume, but it prevented her from saying anything else stupid, for which he was grateful. "And we can review your report in the morning."
He walked over to her bed, a small cot that was opposite to his. He was about to put her down—carefully—but paused and looked at her. "Are you going to throw up?"
"Ha! No. Not drunk enough for that."
He didn't want to know what a more drunk version of the Inspector could possibly look like. He'd jokingly told Kelly that her personality was an inverse function of her height, and adding a variable like alcohol only made it curve upwards exponentially. She probably wasn't in any state to understand the joke, though, so he kept it to himself.
"Good," he said instead, and then maneuvered her to sit down on the mattress. She grumbled again, her head moving back and forth against the wall. He made her sit up long enough to empty the water bottle still in his pocket, and then decided that was about all he could do for her until she slept it off. She was still wearing her jacket though, which was wet with rain, so he forced her to stay upright while he removed it.
"Arms out," he instructed.
"My own personal Brokkr assembly," she said, making awful imitations of mechanical noises as she held out her arms. He kept his face carefully composed while he pulled her arms out of her sleeves, not wanting to encourage her with a laugh. It took slightly less time to remove it than Mjolnir did, given that she was incapable of staying still and weaved around without the brace of her arms on the bed. He was able to get it off of her eventually though, and hung it up on a hook at the foot of her bunk. Then he took off her shoes and set them by her locker.
"My pants," Lopis said, pulling at the fabric on her thighs in distaste. "Wet. Gross."
"Then take them off."
"Pull," she ordered, sticking a leg out at him. He caught it so that she didn't kick him in the groin, then pulled at the cuff of her jeans. Removing clothes while sitting down was difficult enough while sober, and it took a considerable amount of collaboration to remove her pants. Her skin was was cool where it had been soaked with rain, but he patently ignored how warm the backs of her knees and calves were as he helped her roll down her jeans. Lopis didn't seem to notice either, which was a small blessing.
Or maybe she did. "Can't 'member last time I had someone undress me," she said when he'd hung her pants over the metal bar at the foot of her bed. There was a cheeky, wicked smile on her face, and Fred looked just past her shoulder to avoid it. Still, his face flushed at her words, and he took a deep breath.
"I'll be in the main room if you need anything," he told her. She only had a long-sleeved shirt and underwear on now, covered by the blankets she'd tossed over herself. This was different than seeing officers tumble nude out of cryo or marines walk to the showers after being stripped of all their gear, but he didn't know why, and he did not have the luxury of figuring that out right now.
Lopis's arm shot out to catch him before he could turn away. She managed to snag his pocket, her fingers slipping into his coat to anchor him to her. "Thank you," she said, her words slow and careful. He saw something serious in her face that had surfaced above the alcohol in her system. "I wouldn't have been able to do that if you weren't there."
"You would've found a way—" he began, but she shook her head emphatically to cut him off.
"No. Not on my own. I can't do that—lose control. You made it safe." Her grin was wobbly and sloppy, but he could see the gratitude in her eyes. He allowed himself to return the smile.
"Get some sleep, Inspector." He gently removed her hand from his coat pocket and set it down at her side. She squeezed his fingers, a pulse of warmth that made his heart ache, and he was confident enough in the knowledge that she likely wouldn't remember it to squeeze back.
"G'night, Fred," she mumbled. "You're great."
He took up his previous spot on the floor to do a read-through of his report. He'd left the door to their quarters open to keep an eye on Lopis in case she did suddenly vomit or roll off of the bed. She was too small to force out anything louder than a faint whistle of breath, but the sound carried over easily to the main room. It mingled with her parting words that stubbornly wouldn't leave his mind. He kept the hand she'd held inside his coat pocket, clenched tightly into a fist to preserve the echo of warmth from her fingers.
No, this experience was different in every tangible way from escorting Lieutenant Shawson to an evac Pelican, and he came to the tentative conclusion that that was for the best.