Even though she had been well received by the stick-wearing badass called Beau and had managed to get herself some Arby’s on Beau’s dime, Beckett was still pretty much pissed off by the time she got dropped off at the door indicated by the mysterious keychain attached to the mysterious key that had appeared in her pocket.
Beckett hadn’t even used a key before, that she remembered. It wasn’t complicated but it sure as hell felt weird. She stepped inside slowly, as if waiting to be attacked at any moment. And she was, just not in the way she had been expecting. As she explored more of the weird, retro as hell (except probably not, considering what year it actually was) apartment that was supposed to be hers, Beckett found Ransom.
“What the HELL are you doing here?” She protested.
Honestly, Jack was minding his own while experimenting in the kitchen - idly reading some posts/comments on the network. And, of course, fighting with Mariner. He was just about to tell his primitive phone to send the reply when the ensign’s voice nearly startled him out of his skin. Ransom had to catch the egg he’d tossed into the air in the process; it was meant for the frying pan, not the floor.
“Goddammit Mariner!” he called out, his heart racing from the surprise.
In his defense he had been alone, save for the random nightly company, the entire time. It was both a blessing and a curse as he’d rearranged furniture more than once, and cleaned more than any male Starfleet officer should, really. His apartment was pristine, and functional, and while still plagued with far too much purple for his liking - he was comfortable with it.
“These are my quarters, what are you doing here?!” Jack demanded, spinning around on his heels to face her. She still had her sleeves rolled up, and it still bothered his OCD - but he forced his gaze to flicker up to her face.
Beckett followed the trajectory of that egg with mild interest, which was of course obfuscated by how pissed she was, and it didn’t help that Ransom caught the damn thing. She made a face of derision at his exclamation, and his apron, and his entire presence. Finally, when Ransom had the gall to claim this apartment as his own quarters, Beckett scoffed and crossed her arms.
“Then how come I had the key to get in here, genius?” Beckett motioned in the front door’s direction before focusing her narrow gaze back onto his face. “This thing showed up in my pocket, out of thin air, so don’t you dare say it’s your place ‘cause I was told it was, like, some kind of higher being selection type thing.”
Very eloquent, as usual. But if anyone was used to her “eloquence” it would be this pain in her ass.
Then how come I had the key was all that needed to be uttered before Jack’s eyes went wide with horror at the realization that they were now bunk mates. “No” he said quickly, never mind that the eggs he had started were well on their way to burning.
“No, no no.”
Obviously, whatever higher being chose the room arrangements, had a horrible sense of humor that he was tempted to file a complaint about. “It’s a mistake, it’s gotta be a mistake. Look at it again,” he told her, pointing at the key. He set the egg back down in the carton and crossed the kitchen to her, reaching for the key to look for himself.
“What do you mean, no?” Beckett started before Ransom went on rambling even more, ordering her about as if - as if! - they were still on the Cerritos. The nice smell of food was starting to turn into something a little dangerous, she couldn’t help but notice. “Hey you’re not my commanding officer in here, man, you can’t just bark at me to-”
He was making for her now and Beckett held up the key, trying to keep it from his grasp and, given their height difference, failing miserably. “It says 202. This is 202. Not that hard to figure out how to match a key to a door especially when the key opens that door, ass.”
While Ransom stared incredulously at the keychain, Beckett kept looking from him to the stove with her arms crossed. “Your food’s burning.” she announced nonchalantly, barely loudly enough to be heard.
“ ‘No’ as in we should not share quarters,” he reasoned - for, reasons, of course. Dammit, she was attractive when she was angry. Ransom quickly dismissed the thoughts for duty: “And we are still representatives of Starfleet and while you’re here, you are my responsibility-”
Ransom reached after the key as she flailed her arm about. For a Starfleet First Officer, he should really have better hand-eye coordination. “Let. Me. See. It.” he grumbled as remained just out of grasp.
A quick sniff of the air and he stopped, realizing his food was burning. “Noo,” he all but whined. “My frittata!” Jack practically leapt back to the stove, cranking the dial (what he thought was down) but in fact, turning it all the way up and, of course, the dial completely broke off. Leaving the flames billowing from underneath the pan. “This is your fault, Mariner! Your chaotic-ness, that you bring wherever you go!” Smooth. Real smooth.
“The hell I am!” Was Beckett’s extremely quick response to being Ransom’s responsibility anywhere that wasn’t their ship, let alone their universe. “No Starfleet here, no ranks, man. I’m a free agent and your power over me is nothing. Nothing!”
It was hilarious how hard it was for him to catch her keys, especially given how short she was compared to him. It wasn’t like she could really keep it out of his reach in any meaningful way. And yet, he still couldn’t pick it up. “Damn, did you develop some kind of myopia while here?”
When the whining of the word “frittata” left Ransom’s mouth, Beckett couldn’t help a very pig-like snort of mockery. She watched his every move with visible amusement, tucking the key back in her pocket, even letting out a little giggle as the stove dial broke off. But then he turned it onto her, as if he wasn’t the mess that broke a dial just by touching it, and Beckett was left with all but fuming nostrils.
“You’re the clumsy oaf who can’t even turn a dial right, how is this my fault? What’re you gonna blame next, your ample muscles? Damn your much too strong biceps? Gimme a break.” Finally Beckett moved forward into the kitchen and took the pan off the heat, not caring where it lay. “Shove it back on there and turn that thing off before you set this whole place on fire!”
There were few statements from Mariner that could honestly strike fear in Ransom. But I’m a free agent was certainly one. Despite the troubling fact that Starfleet didn’t actually exist in this reality/world except in a fictional sense, meant that she was technically right. Still, he felt a deep sense of responsibility and stepping out of that would be damn near impossible. Which was unfortunate because she was basically a wrecking ball… made of dynamite.
“I don’t want to get headbutted!” he blurted out - a totally realistic concern, given who he was standing in front of. Sure she was shorter, but her hand-to-hand combat was impressive. That and he imagined payback for the whole stabbing her thing and sending her to the brig would come at some point. Regardless of if, at the time, they saved the mission.
Ransom watched where she set the pan and then fiddled for a moment before returning the dial and turning the flame off. He turned to Mariner and grinned faintly. “Ample, huh?” he asked with a flirtatious hint in his voice. It was short-lived, however, as he reminded himself that this was the Captain’s daughter.
He cleared his throat and slid the apron off, laying it on the counter for now. “Starfleet may not be a thing here but I am still responsible for you out of respect for the Captain and not wanting to die a very slow, very painful, but arguably creative death should anything happen to you here. I won’t compromise on that, Beckett,” he told her honestly.
Beckett only snorted at Ransom's reasoning for how badly he was performing the task of grabbing her keys from her hand. For someone so brave and wannabe-heroic he sure was sounding pretty pathetic right about now. Maybe this place has changed him.
The flirtatious tone with which he turned her words against her regarding his biceps made Beckett narrow her eyes and then blink. It had been a minute since she had allowed herself to think of Ransom's biceps (and six pack and shoulders, also his back with that defined dip at the middle and that 'v' thing his hips did) consciously and at the forefront of her kind, but apparently that hadn't made any difference in what she would blurt out at any moment. Luckily she was the type to recover quickly.
"When you're not on the bridge or kissing my mom's ass you're working out, so yeah, you'd have to have some kind of disease not to have ample biceps by now."
She groaned at his insistence and rolled her eyes. "So what - you're going to follow me around waiting for me to screw up so you can swoop in and save the locals or me or both? Top notch way to spend the time."
She noticed - which is what he took away from her rebuttal, and smirked smugly for a moment. “Hey! I am completely disease free! I may know my way around but I’m not an idiot about it,” he barked back. “The time I brought that rage virus back onto the ship was an accident and a non-sexual encounter.”
The roll of her eyes snapped him out of it though, enough to grab the pan and spatula and scrape off whatever burnt egg bits he could into the garbage. Honestly, Ransom had adjusted semi-easily to Night Vale. Everything was primitive, which meant mostly everything was manual and that meant staying busy. And he didn’t much mind it.
“I’m not going to follow you around,” he insisted with a roll of his own eyes. Hell, there was no reason to since they were sharing quarters. “Personally I love a moment to play hero but I don’t necessarily want you to put yourself in a position where that has to happen,” he admitted.
“And technically the Prime Directive doesn’t exist here either so what would you have me do? There are beings here that… There are gods - and even they haven’t found a way to leave Night Vale.” Ransom set the pan back down on the stove to cool still and turned back to face her. “It seems we’re stuck here for a while so we might as well try to enjoy it. Would you rather be in the lower decks right now completing all those shitty tasks?”
It was a pretty odd pivot to declaring his health status based on a hypothesis that she had declared impossible given how he looked, so Beckett angled her head back and blinked yet again, scrunching up her nose at Ransom’s loud declaration about his disease-free status. And sexual encounters.
“The Commander doth protest too much, I think, maybe? I didn’t accuse you of anything, chill.” She paused, then added, “not like your sexual health status is any of my business or concern either.”
But it was good to know he was healthy and she could fantasize while not feeling any dirtier than she normally did about it. Because it was Ransom, her mom’s… primary ass-kisser and second-in-command, and everything she abhorred about Starfleet encapsulated in a person.
Beckett watched him scrape off the burnt remnants of whatever that slop had been and thought that she would miss replicators as long as she was here and there was no amount of “home cooking” that would change her mind. “Yeah, right. You just said I’m your responsibility or something equally annoying so I bet you’re at least going to keep tabs and there’s no real difference there.”
She crossed her arms, actually considering his question about what she wanted him to do since there was no way back home that even “gods” (grain of salt there, for sure) had found. Maybe she could find a way to trace Cochram’s steps, build a ship and get back to space. Of course that wouldn’t help with the time displacement thing, but one problem at a time. One dimension at a time, in this case.
“Uh, yeah?” She snickered in disbelief. Of course she would love to be in the lower decks doing idle work and a little smuggling on the side, she loved it. She lived for it. “Wouldn’t you rather be on the bridge getting whipped by my mom and completing a mission for a good cause that upholds the values of Starfleet and the Federation or whatever?”
It was true - it was a bit of an overshare, but it wasn’t the first time they’d breached the subject at least. His dating history was far from honorable, but not quite deplorable. Yet. Honestly, it was pretty on par for the typical single/arrogant Starfleet Officer. “Likewise,” he agreed quickly, clearing his throat and forcing himself to move on despite his curiosity.
“Oh, what am I gonna do?” he countered as he cleaned. “Hide out in the foliage and watch you? Pfft. Yeah right!” Ransom scoffed. He would undoubtedly sink pretty low, and had in the past, but stalking was definitely a no-go. “There’s not even any foliage. I’d have to hide behind a cactus or something,” he said, waving the spatula vaguely in the direction of outside somewhere. He paused and turned to her. “I’m kidding, Mariner!”
And he truly was. Mostly. Of course he’d keep tabs but not nearly as suffocating as following her around. He had high hopes of her upholding the same structure of coming and going as they did on the Cerritos. Then again, this was Beckett Mariner and nothing about her screamed ‘I regularly follow a schedule’ - and that kind of freelancing made him twitch a little.
Ransom leaned back against the counter and crossed his arms over his chest, giving a little roll of his eyes with her reply. “Like I would really, truly, honestly, say no to that?” he threw back at her, completely letting the comment about the Captain roll off his back like it was nothing. “You want a beer?” he asked after a pause, standing again to cross the few steps toward the fridge, narrowly brushing by her. The kitchen space was nice but it wasn’t the mess hall. “Real Earth beer, the kind Riker tried to make that one time,” he reassured her. Couldn’t shine a light on Romulan ale but it was better than nothing.
“You prolly know more about me than I do about you, Commander Vanilla.” Mariner murmured just (hopefully) low enough for Ransom not to hear her. She at least assumed he’d read health reports on most officers, especially the ones in command. In fairness, however, the vanilla comment might not be fair because although she thought to herself that he probably mostly did missionary he didn’t stick to just humans and that was at least a little less vanilla than a lot of other people. Then, she wondered why she even thought about these things.
Mariner turned to stare at him and blink slowly as he described what he absolutely wouldn’t do, which amounted to stalking, but had thought enough about it to realize it wouldn’t work in the current terrain. She then told him, deadpan, “no cacti shaped like an upside down triangle that I’ve seen so you couldn’t even do that.”
While Ransom leaned against the counter, Beckett found the nearest surface that could hold her weight and hopped up onto it, not caring whether it was strictly speaking ‘a seat’ or not. “Yeah, so, you know how I feel.” She fought the urge to wonder why he’d smelled nice when he brushed past her, maybe he’d tried some new products that they didn’t have back home, but that wasn’t even remotely a thing she ought to have noticed and so Beckett zeroed in on the beer thing. “Oooh the real deal? Haven’t had one of those in years, even Riker hasn’t been able to smug- uhhhhhhh procure it.”
She grinned, only slightly sheepishly. “Okay toss me one.”
It went completely over his head, thankfully, as Ransom struggled for a moment to actually force himself onto another subject. Her and Boimler spent an awful lot of time together - was it possible they… No. No - he wasn’t going to humor that thought. Boimler was far too good to him, and one of the best ensigns he’d ever seen. He didn’t have time for that sort of thing. Surely.
“Ha! Yeah, well, consider yourself lucky for these broad shoulders,” he retorted. If they had working communicators he might be able to keep track of her whereabouts that way but.. Night Vale seemed to have caused his to malfunction.
At the mention of smuggling he paused, his eyes growing wide for a second. The fact that she so willingly broke protocol - and somehow had turned it into some kind of sick game where she tried to break as many as humanly possible, made him anxious. But being able to chalk it up to Riker’s influence made it feel less like something he had to address as First Officer.
He admired the Admiral, after all.
“Nope. Gonna pretend I heard nothing,” he insisted, reaching back in and grabbing two beer bottles. Shutting the door once more, he popped the caps on both and handed one over to Mariner as the tension finally seemed to ease enough for them to enjoy a moment. No doubt it would change, without notice, but he could appreciate her always keeping him on his toes.
If Beckett had even the slightest inclination that Ransom would even entertain the possibility of her and Boimler being together like that she would either have laughed him out of the apartment or laughed herself to death. No, no, Boimler was BFF and quasi-little brother material, but definitely not anything else.
“Consider myself lucky for those everyday.” Beckett murmured, rolling her eyes.
It was cool of him to pretend he hadn’t heard anything about the smuggling, though. When she took the beer, Beckett made a point of leaning in to knock her bottle against Ransom’s before settling back into her makeshift seat. She could be further pissed about them being roommates later. For now… she could roll with this. For now.