Furious five literally has no sense of privacy or personal space. They all had grown up together, had papers instead of walls and had to sleep all together in many missions. It took some time for Po to get used to their life style as they walked in to his room without knocking it at the most greatest times...
Title: Begging Forgiveness
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1.3k
Characters: The Captain, Maximillian Desoto
Pairings: Vicar Max x Captain, Vicar Max x f!Captain, Hollis x Max
Summary: The captain has a different definition of begging forgiveness than Vicar Max. He’s surprised to find out just how into her definition he is.
The sulfur stench of Fallbrook lingers on the vicar’s vestments. It follows him through the Unreliable’s corridors. The smell is rotten and bitter, but not as bitter as the rebuke he suffered with while holding his fragile apology in his hands.
He straightens his collar, and brushes his hands down his front to smooth out any wrinkles, before buzzing the Captain’s door.
His behavior in Fallbrook was unbecoming and Maximillian Desoto knows this. He knows it every time it happens. Anger clouded his judgement. Again. He let it take control, let it come roaring out of him and let it crash on everyone around him. Again.
The disappointment on the captain’s face, along with her swift censure, was all it took to cow his boiling rage.
He has to do better but he needs forgiveness in order to do that.
The door to the captain’s quarters unlocks and slides open. He steps through the bulkhead and into a hazy layer of tobacco smoke floating a few feet off the ground.
The captain lounges in a chair at her desk. Salt and pepper curls listing to one side of her head, her thick frame relaxed in her chair. Her feet kicked up, a cigarette in one hand, and the book he’d offered her days ago pressed open in her lap.
Vicar Max clears his throat, folding his hands in front of him. She takes a drag of her cigarette and turns a page.
She doesn’t look up from her reading, “Hey Vic.”
“Captain. I’m here about earlier...” Max doesn’t want to suffer the embarrassment of his actions twice. A small part of him prays she’ll take pity on him and finish the story herself.
“Hm?” she looks up from her book. The captain’s face is long and lined around the corners. The corners of her eyes, her nose, her mouth. He’s seen kindness there before, but not enough to spare him the recitation of events, as it turns out. Perhaps he deserves this specific punishment. Perhaps this is part of his atonement.
“With Cheney near Fallbrook? I want to thank you for…” Max chokes on the words he needs to say so he skirts around them, “for pulling me back from the edge.”
“Well, you may be a sanctimonious prick who gets heated sometimes but you don’t seem like the murdering type,” she shrugs.
He looks down at his hands and picks at a speck of dirt under his trimmed nails.
“Well, yes.”
Silence hangs in the air. Still, her absolution withheld. He takes a breath, willing the knot wedged under his lungs to unwind.
“Again, Captain, I’m.. I’m begging your forgiveness.”
She nods slowly. She dog-ears the page she was on and it makes him cringe. She slaps the book down on her desk and lets her feet fall to the floor with a thump.
The captain sighs, “Yeah, you keep saying that.”
“It’s the-”
“Trouble is,” she interrupts and takes a long drag from her cigarette before stubbing the butt in the ashtray next to her. Smoke billows out from her nostrils, “Trouble is this don’t much look like begging.”
He bites back his rebuke. He catches it just as it crests the back of his tongue. It is bitter and it’s not the way forward.
The captain leans back in her chair, lacing her fingers behind her head. There’s a twinkle in her eye and a little tug at the corner of her mouth.
“If I’m not mistaken, and Law knows I can be, but begging’s usually done on one’s knees.”
The Unreliable’s HVAC system whistles through the open door behind him, cooling the beads of sweat on the back of his neck, before the chilly droplets roll down his spine.
This is ridiculous. Petulant, even.
He could turn heel and leave. The door is open. Open, but not unto the forgiveness he desires.
Max’s feet don’t move - his knees fold.
He drops to one knee and then the other, measured, restrained. There’s no shame in falling to one’s knees, he repeats to himself. How often had he done so in seminary school in reverence and study. His face feels warm, he prays that he looks stoic.
“Oh, don’t you get cross with me,” she mutters.
An unbidden sense of disappointment wells up inside of him as the captain breaks her gaze to rifle through a desk drawer, pulling out a new pack of cigarettes, tamping them down to the filter, and plucking out a single cigarette.
Her rough hands cup around her lighter and the end of her cigarette. Click, click, click, and a deep inhale. She pulls her lit cigarette into her fingers, and scratches at the grey scruff on the sides of her jaw.
The steel flooring is cold under his knees. And hard. He tries to shift his weight from one knee to the other but it’s no help. His feet tingle.
“Captain, if I may-” Max starts, trying to pick up the pieces of his ego he seems to have left under his aching knees.
She chuckles, smoke filters out from between her teeth, “You most definitely may not.”
He swallows his words. Hard.
The captain stands from her chair. It only takes a few casual steps for her to loom over him. He can feel the heat from her bulky body. He reminds himself to breathe.
The captain slowly circles around him, close enough for the air shimmer between them.
The vicar begins to sink back onto his heels to try to take the sting out of his knees, but a quick tap on the back of his shoulder prompts him to sit bolt upright.
She stands before him again, letting the electricity build in the stagnant air and taking another long drag from her cigarette, “You were saying?”
Smoke billows out from between her lips in a dense white cloud, she sucks it back into her mouth with a quick huff.
“Captain?” He asks in a hush, quieter than he anticipated.
“Forgiveness,” The captain cocks her wide hips to one side and folds her arms over her chest, looking down at him. She taps the ash off her smoke onto the floor behind her.
“Oh! Yes, um,” the vicar shakes his head from side to side, trying to rattle his thoughts into order.
“Take a breath.”
He does and his thoughts coalesce into a point of light, he looks up at her.
“Captain,” he folds his hands in front of himself, “I’m here to beg your forgiveness. Using the goodwill I had earned in our service together, to trick you into exacting revenge on Cheney was untoward of me. All of us here on the Unreliable are trusting each other with our lives and it was not right for me to deceive you.”
The vicar’s head drops as he waits for the absolution he’s craved since that day in Fallbrook. The new way she looks at him and the distance she keeps in the field eats away at him.
“Ah, ah” the captain’s hand grabs his chin and lifts his head back up to look at her. It’s warm. Smells of tobacco tar, Purpleberry Crunch, and cordite.
“Eyes up, Max.”
The smoldering coal he keeps lodged in his chest alights in flame at the sound of his own name.
She smiles down at him. His insides melt.
“We can’t have this happening again. I’m not gonna be wasting bunk space on deceivers and backbiters making me run around the colony for secret vendettas,” the captain’s grip tightens on his chin.
“I understand.”
“That sure as shit ain’t in my grand plan. All vendettas gotta be up front,” the captain drops her hand away, “just like the rest of us. I don’t want to be second-guessing anyone on my crew.”
“I understand.”
She takes a half step forward, invading more of the scant space between them, “My vicar, least of all.”
He wonders what the leather on her pants would feel like against his palms.
“Stand up,” the captain quietly orders.
She doesn’t back away to give him space. Max finds he’s thankful for it. If any more blood drains from his head, he half believes she’ll catch him before he falters. His knees pop and click as he pushes himself up to standing.
“Are we golden?” she murmurs. The captain washed her face recently, clean water cut streaks through the dirt on her neck.
He nods solemnly, “Yes, Captain.”
The captain’s smile beams and the vicar’s guts spin. She claps him hard on his shoulder, “Good!”
The captain leans in closer, her words brush along the vicar’s cheek, “You’re dismissed.”
Plausibly I could be up for an open marriage with Liam that’s not a biggie and I’d totally support the brothersex but the lad requires 7/24 attention and that’s the dealbreaker. but let’s be honest i’d rather die than marry any of them
Being on holiday vacation somewhere warm in the middle of winter activates seasonal depression justttt a littler bittttt that throws me off because wtf!!! I was in winter mode !!!!? Where I was just experiencing regular depression ??!?????
