Out in the Black Ch. 07

This is a book-length work, so not every chapter will involve sex. If you're just looking for a quick wank, this probably isn't your story.

Thanks for reading!

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Groggily, I registered that there was entirely too much activity for whatever god-awful hour it was. I cracked one eye and blearily observed Rusty sliding his feet into his magboots. "Time izzit?" I croaked. He turned and gave me a smile that showed signs of waking a certain part of me up.

"Oh-six-hundred," he answered, sounding entirely too chipper for an hour that I was positive did not exist in civilized society.

"Way too much energy," I grumbled, burying my face in the pillow. He chuckled and the gel in the mattress adjusted when he came to sit on the edge of the bunk. A warm, callused hand slid across the skin of my shoulder and down my back. I had just started thinking nice things about him when the bastard swatted my ass through the sheet. "Asshole," I mumbled without heat, noticing that the pillow smelled like him. That was nice.

Rusty laughed again. "You don't have to get up yet, but if we're going to make our departure window in a couple hours, I have pre-flight to do." I groaned and could feel him smiling as he kissed my shoulder.

"Coffee," I called after him as he headed toward the door.

"Yes, sir. I'll start a fresh pot." The door hissed open and shut and I dozed for a while, listening to the tromp of boots in the corridor as my crew got up and started their day. It was oddly soothing, the way the different gaits blended together. Half asleep, my brain created melodies to accompany the percussive beats. Realizing the footsteps of my crew had literally become music to my ears, I snorted a laugh and rolled onto my back. Eventually, I forced myself out of bed, reluctantly deciding I needed to put in an appearance as well if I didn't want anyone to push our departure time. It wasn't just Rusty who was ready to get away from this monstrosity.

When the hall outside the engineer's quarters had quieted, I rose and gathered my crumpled finery. Wearing the pants and carrying the rest in a ball under my arm, I listened at the door for a minute before letting myself out of the room and sprinting barefoot to my own. With less than an hour before our window, I didn't have time for a shower, so I threw on fresh underclothes and a jumpsuit and shoved my feet into my magboots on the way to the ladder leading to the office above.

I was already halfway up before I remembered the coffee I had failed to get. Fuck. Nothing for it but to soldier on without. As soon as I stepped off the ladder, my head was turning, searching out the source of the incredible smell filling my office. There, on the little tray table that extended from my console, was an insulated mug with steam escaping through the hole in the lid. That man was officially my hero. Giving myself a moment to enjoy the first sip of ambrosia, my hand hovered over the contact link for my XO. It took her less than a minute to pop her head through my door after I finally paged her.

"I was wondering if we'd see you this morning," Li said with a grin. She took a seat, hands cradling her own steaming mug.

"I'm as ready to get out of here as anyone else. What's our status?"

"We're filled to the brim on the essentials. Anything that could be ordered has been delivered and diagnostics have all been run at least twice. The Marzi's good as new - better, actually, since your boy toy has been making some after-market upgrades." Her face twisted as she admitted the last part.

"Leelee, you can't blame him for my choices," I said with a sigh. "I knew what I was getting into. And he's actually a kind and thoughtful man." I lifted my coffee to illustrate my point.

"Right," she responded skeptically, "so you start doubting he's the person you know he is and get your heart broken. I fail to see how that's a mark in his favor."

"You would rather he treated me poorly?" This came out a little snippier than I'd intended, but after the easy affection between Rusty and me that morning, her attitude was grating.

"I would rather he be honest with you!" I blinked, startled. Alix rarely raised her voice, so this outburst was uncharacteristic, to say the least. "You know as well as I do that Carter Rust does not get involved. He's pleasant enough, sure, in a bland, neutral way that lets him avoid feeling like a shit when he inevitably takes off and never looks back to take stock of the damage. I know you, Mac: you try to see the best in people. That's an admirable trait, but it also means that you're more open to getting hurt and I - I just don't want to be left staring at his back while I pick up the pieces and know I could have done more to prevent it." Her voice was nearly a whisper by the time she finished. I came around and knelt at her feet, taking her hands in mine.

"I'm sorry, Leelee. I didn't realize how much this was bothering you. I'll try to be more careful, okay?" The words felt hollow even as they exited my mouth.

"It's too late." It shook me to see the tears in her eyes. She pulled her hands away and dashed at them impatiently. "I told you, Mac, I know you. You're head over heels with this guy, whether you want to admit it or not."

Not. The answer was definitely not. I stood and brushed my hands against the legs of my jumpsuit to give myself time to get my face under control. "Well, if you're right, then what I said is still true." Returning to my seat, I retrieved my coffee and clutched the cup like a talisman. "I walked into whatever this is with Rusty with my eyes open. I'm under no illusions that there will be any kind of 'happily ever after' or whatever other fairy tale bullshit applies." I cocked an eyebrow. "Maybe this is just what it looks like when I actually enjoy the sex I'm having."

"Ew." She wrinkled her nose. "Did not need that mental picture so soon after breakfast."

"Are you sure? Because he does this thing with his tongue - " My XO's hands came up to cover her ears and she started singing loudly. I laughed and she made an obscene gesture.

"Fine. Do what you want. Just expect about a cycle of 'I told you so' when it turns out I was right."

"Heard and understood," I said with a smile. "I'd never expect anything less from you."

"Fuck off, asshole," she shot back, though her tone was more affectionate than not. Her eyes unfocused as she sipped her coffee, humming in appreciation before snapping her attention back to me. "So we're go for departure, then?"

"Hell yes. Let's get this bird in the air." The expression didn't really make any sense; we were in vacuum and would continue to be so for the duration of our travels, but it sounded nicer than "let's get the fuck out of here."

"Sir, yes sir," my XO drawled, tapping two fingers against her eyebrow in a mock salute. I rolled my eyes and she was chuckling as she left the office. It seemed like we were good - everything back to normal - but I knew this thing with Rusty had shifted something and the cracks that had surfaced couldn't be filled with a superficial patch job. Alix and I needed to have a real talk, sooner rather than later.

"Call it out," Li's voice came over the comms a quarter hour later. The reports came flooding in one after the other in the same order they always did: atmo green, fuel levels green, electrical system green, and so on. The thrill I usually got when I heard Rusty report "engines green" was noticeably stronger now, but otherwise it was typical departure protocol.

"Green lights across the board, Captain," Li said. "We're go on your mark." It was a complete formality since I was going to immediately relinquish control to the pilot, but I'd discovered that the vast majority of being in command involved letting people complain at you and delegating tasks, so I went with it.

"Take us out, Bailey."

"Aye, sir," the pilot responded immediately. This was followed by a noticeable lag before we moved away from the station, during which I listened to Bailey and docking control do their little call and response dance. Finally, we were on our way, the pleasure palace rapidly shrinking in the aft view I'd pulled up on my screen. "Goodbye and good riddance," I muttered before flipping over to start dealing with my correspondence backlog.

There was a rather sweet note from the celebrity herself saying that she hoped I was feeling better and she looked forward to working with me again. This was bracketed by dozens of angry messages from her team demanding to know what I thought I was doing by ducking out of dinner and arguing that I had not fulfilled my contract. They couldn't come right out and say they wanted to cut my pay because I hadn't slept with their client - transparently discussing the truth of the arrangement would be gauche - but they were sidling right up to the line and daring me to make an issue of it, knowing that publicizing the unspoken aspect of my agreements with the celeb set would explode my career while barely scratching the one that paid their bills.

The joke was on them.

I didn't bother to respond to any of it, diligently filing all of the messages away in the job's folder as had become my habit since going out on my own. When I'd been under contract with an agency, there was an assistant whose job included maintaining my records and dealing with my correspondence; I only saw messages that had been approved by my agent, my public relations team, and the agency's legal office. After we nearly didn't get paid for our first solo gig, Li jumped all over my ass and told me in no uncertain terms that this shit was my responsibility now and the livelihoods of the entire crew depended on me growing the fuck up. I took the lesson to heart.

Remembering that lecture - and how the solid weight of the obligations I'd taken on settled firmly on my shoulders - soured my stomach. The coffee I'd been so thankful for earlier now felt like it was eating holes in my gut. Morbid curiosity nearly made me ping the comm network again, but I held back. Some combination of cowardice and selfishness made me want to have a few more hours where everything was normal, maybe spend one last night in Rusty's bed before my actions made the situation even more complicated. Heaving a sigh, I turned my attention to the ship's communication filters and began the process of locking everything down.

~*~

"What did you do?" The words were an accusation, but the tone was shock. And maybe a little fear. Kells stared at me, wide-eyed and pale, as she repeated the question before continuing her message. "The last thing I got was your 'sorry, I'm a dick,' message sent at an ungodly hour. Then I check my news feeds and see this. What the hell, Rusty?" I blinked at the vid in confusion, not understanding how me apologizing for being a jerk the last time we spoke turned into whatever this was. Admittedly, being short on sleep from my nights brooding at the station and then making up for lost time with the captain the last two nights had left my brain in less than optimal condition, but she really wasn't making much sense and I was regretting waiting to check my messages. Maybe if I hadn't spent the day chasing down a discrepancy in the fuel mix first, I'd have been able to follow her.

My view switched from her face to the front page of some gossip site. Honestly, it wasn't the kind of thing I would have expected her to be into. Then I saw what she had been talking about and I panicked. Felt like my heart was about to burst by the time I hauled ass all the way from engineering up to the command deck, but there wasn't nothing in my mind but getting to the captain before he saw this and started thinking the inevitable. Considering it was almost dinner time, I probably didn't need to bother. But I wasn't exactly rational at the moment.

"Sorry - Cap," I gasped after bursting into the office. "Oh, shit." I had to put my hands on my knees and spend a few seconds just catching my breath before I could actually talk.

"Everything okay?" He sounded so calm, sitting there at his console. The last thing I wanted to do was tell him what I'd seen.

"Not really," I said. I didn't fully have my wind back, but I wasn't wheezing anymore. "I - shit - um, how to say this?" I scratched my cheek, fingernails rasping on stubble. Even though I hadn't done nothing, guilt sat heavy in my gut. "You know my friend, Kells, right?" He sat back and raised an eyebrow. "Well, she sent me a message. And - fuck, I'd probably better just show you." Without asking permission, I tossed the message up on his display, skipping past the beginning to get to the important part.

I studied his face as he took in the image frozen on his screen. The site was busy as fuck, with headlines about all kinds of shit crowded together, but the story still drew your eye. Right there in the middle of everything was the captain, head tilted back, one hand lifting his shirt while the other grabbed his crotch. It was an image I knew well since it had been burned into my brain as I watched it happen in real time. Giant letters above it screamed "Prince of Pleasure Palaces Pursues Own Self-Pleasure!" Cap's face was blank and still, only his eyes moving. One hand lifted and it seemed to me that it was floating, just hanging there in the air, leaving me plenty of time to stop what happened next.

A voice gleefully babbled about how shocking it was that "noted celebutainment personality, Matthison Carolinas, prefers the company of his own hand to the favors bestowed by the most beautiful people in the galaxy" as the video itself played on a loop. It wasn't much, really, and it didn't show anything - especially considering what happened just minutes later - but it was enough. The way he moved, it was plenty obvious what was going on.

When the audio restarted, I slapped at the screen to close the message. Cap still stared at his now-empty display. "I'm sorry, Cap. Matt. I don't know how this happened." My voice was raspy and I was shocked to find myself on the edge of tears. Or maybe I was going to vomit. I was scared as shit: worried he might blame me, freaked about how he was feeling, and terrified of what this might mean for all of us. I knew I didn't leak the footage, but obviously someone did. That meant at least one someone had seen it and that person was willing to sell the captain out. Even if he believed me about the leak, would he blame me for the whole deal? The vid wouldn't have been there to share if I hadn't set the challenge in the first place.

"Say something. Please." My voice actually broke on the last word and I realized I was a hell of a lot closer to losing it than I thought.

"Can we - go downstairs?" He still wasn't looking at me and his voice was all kinds of robotic, but at least he was talking.

"Yeah, sure. Of course. Whatever you want." I sort of herded him to the ladder, then thought again about his current state and slid down first so I could grab him if he lost his grip. Turned out he was able to manage just fine. Didn't realize until he was on the floor that he'd even brought the damn coffee cup. He put it on the table in his little sitting area and went to rummage in a cabinet under his bunk. Despite the situation, I couldn't completely repress my curiosity. I hadn't really been in the captain's quarters before, other than the one time I sprinted through. The day that fucking vid was created. I asked once why he always came to my room and he told me it was because there he was just Matt. Here some part of him was always the captain.

All the rooms on the Marzi were bigger than on most ships and Cap's was bigger still. His bed looked to be about half again as wide as mine and then there was the sitting area. He also had a full console setup down here where most of us just had wall screens. Not that I was complaining. Like I said, most ships I'd been on would have three or four of us crammed into the space I had to myself here. Cap stood, having found what he was looking for, and I jerked my attention back to him. He brought a couple of glasses and a bottle of some brown liquid to the table.

"Sit, Rusty," he ordered, pouring out a drink for each of us. I knew I should stay sober for whatever followed, but I very much did not want to, so I downed the drink - bourbon, as it happened - and he refilled the glass without comment. He raised an eyebrow when I took the fresh drink, so I managed to sip this one. It was pretty good bourbon, actually. Though I shouldn't have been surprised, considering the company the man usually kept. Which brought me back to why we were down there in the first place and made me concerned for how the high-society types were going to react to the video.

"I don't blame you." He looked directly at me when he said this and there was nothing but sincerity in his voice. Still, though...

"I'd understand if you did. You have every right - "

"No, I don't." I blinked at his firm resolve. "You didn't force me to put on my little show in the cargo hold. You didn't make me keep a copy on my system. And you didn't release the recording." I breathed a sigh of relief and my shoulders relaxed with one of my big worries removed.

"You believe me then?" I had to be sure.

"I do." He nodded once. "And not because I trust you, though I do. Trust you, I mean." It was Cap's turn to gulp his drink. He refilled his glass and fiddled with the lid of the bottle, watching his fingers. "I did it." He spoke so quietly I was sure I heard him wrong. "I leaked the video." Nope. That's what I thought he'd said.

My jaw worked as all my questions got jammed up together in my throat. "Why?" managed to squeeze through first, though it sounded pretty strangled.

"Fuck, I don't know. It's hard to explain." I stared at him, my forgotten drink still clutched in fingers gone numb. "I guess I just wanted out."

"Out?" It seemed I was stuck with single words.

"Of the whole celebrity circuit thing. It was - I hated it."

"There's this phrase you might have heard of, goes 'I quit'?" I was surprised to realize I was angry. More than angry. I was righteously pissed off. He had made Kells doubt me and, worse, made me doubt myself. And the whole fucking time he knew he was to blame.

"That wouldn't work for me." I stared at him. More drinking. More filling. I'd barely touched my second drink and he was on his third, maybe, or fourth. I hadn't really been counting. "I just - I know myself, Rusty," he finally said. "I'd think it would be better to just continue through what I've already contracted for and stop there, but then I would be second-guessing myself, thinking maybe it really wasn't so bad. And something would come along that I'd feel I had to take and it would be 'just one more project' over and over until death do us part." He said all that in one breath and ended up gasping a bit.

"So you decided to destroy your reputation instead?" Yeah I didn't live his life, but that seemed extreme.

"That wasn't the plan. I mean, it was kind of the plan, but my hope is that serious news agencies are more concerned with quality reporting over personal pseudo-scandals. Sure, the celeb set won't want to work with me anymore, but maybe once the whole thing dies down..." He trailed off, looking down at the glass in his hands as if he had forgotten it was there.

"You know those rich people sometimes go for scandal, right? Like it gets them off being slightly connected to a bit of risk, gives them the thrill of danger or something." The captain's face paled and he shook his head.

"Fuck. I think I'd just space myself." He blinked, shook his head once more, and his jaw firmed. "No, that won't happen." His glass clinked against the table's surface for emphasis. "That's why I suggested the whole framing of me preferring to jack off rather than fuck them." Here I'd been worried that part would embarrass him. "I'm so sorry." Cap turned to look at me with that unfocused intensity that comes with a lot of liquor in a very short period. "Rusty, please believe me, I didn't mean to hurt you."