Cohost writing prompt: @make-up-a-starship-pilot — Starship pilot who really needs to pee
Content notices for: violence, nonconsensual piss.
The Scumfleet runs on a brutal hierarchy of might makes rank. You're the best pilot, not by a long way, but the best. Numis Chelata is second best.
In violence, of course, and therefore rank, she is first. It eats at your stomach; fear of her, naturally, and resentment, and the trembling shrinking weakness that takes you over whenever you have the slightest opportunity to defy her. It's the violence. Of course it's the violence. It's your fear of that which weakens your limbs and seals your lips.
She is violent.
That's why you've bided your time. You've waited and waited, and now — when she least suspects — you curl your fingers around your contrabrand length of steel strut. You've finished a series of fleet warps, checked your position is clear of threats, and now there's time to stretch your legs—
"I'm going to the head," she says casually, and starts to slip off the duty pilot's sensor feed helmet. You take one step, two, lift your arm, and swing the strut as hard as you can toward where the sliding helmet will reveal the tender nape of her neck—
She can't have seen. She can't. That was the point of waiting for the lifting helmet to obscure her view. But she steps back swiftly, and whips her elbow around, and even the glancing hit spikes your jaw with a head-spinning jolt of pain. You involuntarily drop your impromptu weapon, and then she's on you, fists swinging, gut — face — gut. Kick to the side of your knee, and you drop like a wet rag.
She kicks you again when you're down.
"Bad fucking move," she drawls, and reaches down for you. You try to scrabble away, terrified she'll gouge an eye — make you useless for piloting, instantly exile you to a short, sweating life in the bilges, rushing over emergency hull breach repairs for your survival; but she grabs for your hair instead. Straightens and walks, wrenching you along in a wailing scramble.
She doesn't drag you far; throws you onto the wetroom grating floor of one of this deck's tiny combined head-shower-decompression shelters.
"You're too good a pilot to be this stupid," she says. "You really need to stay in your fucking place."
You start to dryly sob something as she slams down the door seal handle and steps out of her jumpsuit, but it doesn't resolve into anything like meaningful words. She puts a deliberate foot down on your hair to keep you from flinching away, arranges herself in a painstaking squat.
"Didn't even have the sense to wait until I had an empty bladder, so I'd be less annoyed," she says matter-of-factly, and looses it on you.
Afterwards, she smiles down at you, almost gently.
"Now," she says. "Out of three pilots, where do you think pilot pissrag ranks?"
Your chest heaves and your mouth spasms, and you don't quite manage to voice it, but she nods anyway over your failure to say third.
"Set your sights a bit lower," she advises. "Toughen up a bit, then try for Miaka. Claw back second." She trails two fingertips in the pungent wetness she's left on you, then uses them to catch one of the tears running from the corner of your eye, and pushes them between your unresisting lips.
Untold, your weak, snivelling mouth curls around them, a warm, dutiful home, and she smirks.
"Well," she says. "Maybe you wanted the hard way."
It's only your fear of her violence, you want to say, closing your eyes against the brightness of her contempt, and suck instead of mewling the denial.