A/N: ok, back again. First thank you so much to my reviewers! I had no idea how much motivation a few words could give.
Second, egads!! I have just (12/16/2004) read (or possibly reread) Brit2's story And the Winner Is! And either we are on the same wavelength or I have unintentionally borrowed her 'Harper gets Rommie drunk' plot point. Sorry! If it bothers, let me know and I'll alter it.
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Tyr was not pleased. Not pleased at all. As if his night wasn't going badly enough, he now had to pilot the Maru back to the Andromeda while dealing with three intoxicated crew members. He had been greeted at the entry hatch by the sober but always disgusting magog and a sober but noxiously giggling Trance. Those two would have been irritating enough, but they followed by an extremely drunk Harper singing love songs off key, an intoxicated Dylan who kept calling him buddy, and a glaring Beka who was muttering something about not being able to bring men back to her own ship anymore. Tyr had never seen Beka intoxicated before, and he found her glare and aggressive behavior somehow disturbing. And while his colleagues always excelled at inane conversation they were outdoing themselves tonight.
"Dylan, I've got a question for you. If the Andromeda Ascendant was one of the High Guard's premier ships why are there absolutely no seatbelts anywhere on board? Even the Maru has seatbelts. Hmm?" Beka poked the captain in the shoulder as if she had just scored a point in some argument only she was aware of.
Tyr spoke to the group, "I trust you understand that your presence in the cockpit does not mean that I will be participating in the rest of your evening. I hope the purple one and the monk take care of the rest of you, if it were up to me I would have dumped you all into the vacuum of space already." Unfortunately for Tyr no one was listening to him at this point. And Dylan was not going to be diverted.
"First Beka, Andromeda was not one of the premier ships, she was the premier ship. She was the best. And she still is! Do you remember the time we beat those Pyrian torch ships? And how we outran those Tellian courier ships? And those Ogami ships we blew to bits?!? That was great!" Dylan seemed to have lost the point somewhere. Didn't matter much though, as Beka was distracted by a new thought of her own.
One the other side of the pilot's chair stood Trance and Harper. Harper was holding Trance's hand, and she was letting him, partially because she knew he needed her help to stand up, partially because she knew he wasn't hitting on her, and partially because she enjoyed the feeling of holding her friend's hand. Harper hadn't stopped talking since entering the Maru.
"…and that's how Beka and I tricked that security team, just a Harper-patented little hack into the communications system, flip the permissions settings like a burger on the grill, access the upper level archives, splice together some old data and viola! they get orders to release us and then , oooo look at that orbiting communications distribution center, if I could get access to one of those I could pull the same trick on a planetary scale, we would never have to deal with anti-Commonwealth propaganda again. We could make it so that an entire planet would believe they had already joined the Commonwealth before we even got there. Oh, hey, even better, I could make them think I was a god! Of course I am a god anyway, a god of Love that is. Wait for me Rommie, I'm coming home!"
Trance didn't want to hurt his feelings, but she couldn't help but laugh in mingled amusement and amazement. She understood far more about the universe than the others would ever guess, but even she couldn't understand how Harper's mind made the connections it did. She gripped his hand more tightly for a moment. "That sounds just amazing Harper. I don't understand most of it, but I bet it's all brilliant."
Harper looked a little surprised for a moment, then suddenly swung his arms open wide, and burst out "I love you guys sooooo much!" He nearly pulled Trance's arm of its socket, and if not for her grip on him he would have tumbled sideways onto Tyr. Which would have been a very bad thing. But Trance was there to save him again, as always.
Tyr nearly flinched as Harper's hand came within inches of his eye. Why are these fools all standing around me when they can barely stand? he thought. He was about to shout at them all to get back to the mess area where they belonged when he realized that Beka was not arguing with Dylan anymore. As a matter of fact she was now staring at him again. But she wasn't glaring anymore. It was more of an inspection or evaluation. No, there was really no other way to say it, Beka Valentine was checking him out. And not in her usual circumspect way either; there was no restraint here, no regret for what couldn't be. Tyr couldn't understand what he was feeling. He should be repulsed by her lack of self control, a quality that normally defined her almost to the point of being a fault, but he found himself even more attracted to her than normal. He tried to focus all his thoughts on piloting the Maru, and was a little relieved when they finally entered Andromeda's docking bay.
Harper may have been having trouble standing, but he somehow managed to run off in search of the object of his obsessions. Trance chased after him to make sure he didn't hurt himself in his eagerness to find Rommie. Rev Bem, who had been attempting to meditate during the return trip, followed at a more dignified pace. Dylan turned to the remainder of his crew, "I think we should all go find Rommie. Don't you think?" Getting no response from either of them he continued, "Well, ok then, I guess I'll see you two later. But not much later, right? Right. Ok, going to find the others now."
Tyr released the seatbelt, stood, was about to follow Dylan when Beka placed her hand on his chest and began to look him up and down again. "Tyr, you're a man. A Nietzschean, but a man still. Right?……And you are on my ship. Yup, right here on my ship. So those pants are awful tight there Tyr, exactly how long does it take to get out of them? Do you need special help or anything?"
Tyr didn't know what to say at first. Obviously the attraction had been there for some time, but Beka could never be a wife and he had always assumed she would not accept being a second class woman to a Nietzschean. True, he had imagined scenarios where he and Beka ended up in bed together, but they all involved him as the aggressor, and usually Dylan's death. But he had never considered the possible ramifications and implications of this situation. Much as he might like to take advantage of Beka's invitation he couldn't act in this situation without understanding all the possible outcomes. There was also the not so small matter of how much the value of the prize would be diminished if he won it through alcohol. "Get a grip woman, nothing about our situation has changed in the last 24 hours except your blood alcohol level. Now let's go find the others before the android damages our only engineer." With that Tyr strode quickly out towards the exit hatch.
Beka was back to glaring again. She eventually followed him out muttering under her breath the entire way, "If Rev had just let bring that guy back with me I wouldn't be having this problem. But noooo, it's 'for your own good Beka'. My own good my ass. I'm surrounded by arrogant men, I swear the men on this freaking ship have no idea…"
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Argg, for the life of me I cannot make Tyr funny. He always comes out serious, even in the middle of a nonsense story. Oh, and I'm going to try to put more Rev into the next chapter.