Cohost writing prompt: @spy-thief-assassin-who — Smuggler who was too scared to ask the one question they should have
The first time they met — Jessica an itinerant fixer, Ciel a light freight shipowner — was because Ciel answered one of Jessica's open calls for a job she was hawking. Ten standard cargo containers, A to B, no questions asked.
Ciel met her in the only bar on a grubby waystation, asked a few questions anyway — carefully chosen ones, about expected timeframe and payment handling and so on. And a couple carefully-chanced ones about Jessica, afterwards: did she always do business out of bars? No office?
"I have a very agile operation," Jessica said cheerily. "Mobile. I'm always heading where tomorrow's action is."
Wanna come with? Ciel didn't say, no matter how much she was looking at Jessica's lips; no matter how much she thought Jess was checking her out, when she thought Ciel wasn't looking. Cute, yes; also potential trouble. Also a potential working relationship, and Ciel needed that more than a tumble.
The world is unreasonably small, given the size of space. They knock into each other; sometimes working together, occasionally at cross purposes. They hammer out the kind of loose, friendly rapport that can weather the times they're not on the same side.
They get to know each other a little, in snatches of chat in dozens of shitty only-bars-on-the-station.
"I wouldn't know how to settle down," Jessica tells her, quiet and tired, one late night in a booth with a couple of empties sitting between them. "But it gets old sometimes, you know? Never having more than a travel bag. Not so much as a consistent shelf to put a toothbrush on."
There's a shelf for toothbrushes on my boat, Ciel could have said. Just till you don't put it there any more; no pressure, but even saying it feels like it'll make it not really no pressure, and they're having a moment, so. She doesn't.
Jessica, under a disco ball, giggling over a cocktail.
Wanna come with? but she doesn't say it.
Jessica, with a stack of paperwork in front of her in a sticky-surfaced diner, looking exhausted and rumpled and achingly kissable, mumbling that life would be so much easier with an office.
Got a cabin you could fit a desk in— but she doesn't say it.
"I'm fucked," Jessica says, leaning on a pedestrian barrier with a disposable cup of coffee, looking fucking shattered. "They tightened up a bunch of regs. I used to be able to — I fit into some loopholes. But I haven't had a permanent abode for X many years, I don't have any given planetary citizenship, I don't have a spouse, I don't even have a permanent business address that could grandfather me in — I'm going to be illegal by year end, and there's no...there's just no simple fix."
"Holy shit," Ciel says.
"I've got a pal over Shambleyard who's offered — you know, fake married, for the paperwork." Jessica grimaces in a way that suggests complicated things about respective expectations, exactly how fake the offer is. (Or maybe Ciel's just got really good at imagining things into Jessica's facial expressions.) "But I'd have to live there full-time for at least a year for it to stick and I don't know if I can..." and she gestures with the coffee, encompassing anything and everything she might not be able to fucking deal with about that. And she pauses, but not long enough for Ciel to say anything, before she blinks and purses her lips and smacks the cup down on the railing, turns half angry, half — something else.
"It's been years," she says bluntly. "And I know I've never — I've never, either, but what the fuck is stopping you, Ciel? Why don't you ever ask me? Anything. You look at me and look at me and I can see you — thinking — but you never.... I mean, what? What even is it you won't ask me for? A night? More? Less, not even a night, a quick bathroom fuck? A — a — I don't know."
Ciel swallows, wide-eyed and pinned under her gaze.
"Guess I never knew either," she says, in a cracked voice. "Sure didn't know you wanted — well. Anything?"
Jessica looks at her and looks at her for a long time, expression morphing through a lot of subtle feelings, then pinches the bridge of her nose and very distinctly mouths: Fuck.