Pairing: Nie Mingjue/Meng Yao. AU Setting: spaceship! Or IRL age-of-sail ships, if you are familiar with that lol (please don’t ask where this idea came from because i have no answer)
“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.”
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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
