“This— It wouldn’t be right,” Nie Mingjue says, looking up a little helplessly from where the new cargo master has cornered him in his bunk.

“Yes,” says Meng Yao, voice heavy with derision, “I’m familiar with your crude little motto. ‘Don’t screw with crew,’”—his mouth twists with distaste as he quotes the words Nie Mingjue has been repeating to himself ever since Meng Yao first came into the mess at breakfast, back when they were still docked at Betrus, dimpling prettily as he asked their systems manager, Wei Wuxian, if it was true that the captain of the Miyazawa splurged on real coffee, because he was dying for a cup—“It rhymes, so it’s clever—whoever came up with it must be so proud.”

He sinks down onto the bunk, coming to straddle Nie Mingjue’s hips in a motion so fluid that it makes Nie Mingjue’s throat dry from the poetry of the movement. “At oh-six-hundred hours, you’ll go back to plotting hyperjumps,” Meng Yao says, cradling Nie Mingjue’s jaw in careful hands; Nie Mingjue swallows hard. “And I’ll go back to calculating cargo masses and profit ratios. But for now, the second shift has everything under control”—Meng Yao tilts Nie Mingjue’s head up slightly, enough to hit him with the full force of his beseeching smile, and Nie Mingjue knows that he was lost from the moment he let Meng Yao into his cabin, but he’s definitely lost now—“We can have this, just for now.”

–

AU setting vaguely stolen from Nathan Lowell’s Trader Tales From the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper, mainly because I’ve never forgotten the “Don’t screw with crew” line and while I think it’s generally a good policy to keep relationships out of the workplace, I knew for a fact that Meng Yao would treat the guideline with complete scorn.

3-sentence fic prompts game

Jiang Yanli likes evenings like this best: when she lets herself into the apartment Nie Mingjue shares with his little brother to find that he and Wen Qing have almost finished the prep work for dinner, bowls of spices and ingredients apportioned to her recipe, only awaiting her presence to put it all together.

Mingjue is just finishing slicing the beef, but he bends his head to allow Jiang Yanli to kiss his cheek, dimpling as she tugs once on his braid; Wen Qing steps away from the stove where she’s just turned the fire on under the pan—they timed these things perfectly because Jiang Yanli has been texting them the whole bus ride home—and takes Jiang Yanli fully into her arms, kissing her and then asking, “How was class?”

“Better than yours, judging by the groupchat, Qing-er,” Jiang Yanli answers, stepping around her to get to the stove, and Wen Qing groans, “Don’t remind me!” and then hops up onto the counter in front of the microwave, a slight smile resting in the corners of her lips and eyes as she watches Mingjue finish up and Jiang Yanli get started.

3-sentence fic prompt game