Work Text:
"Do you know how the toxic spores on The Green Moon work?" Cee asked, paging through the medical text. She sat in a ball in the middle of the couch as if she was still in space, still in a pod with a low ceiling.
"Of course," Ezra said. His words grew more breathy, more clipped as he spoke: "A man breathes in too much dust, he dies coughing. A man gets the dust in his blood, he dies feverish."
"You can get it in your ears too, if it gets stuck in the little hairs and ear wax," Cee said, looking up from the book. "Do you remember when they pulled us on the freighter?"
He shook his head and retrieved a bottle of beer. Cee had thoughtfully installed a bottle opener on the counter before Ezra learned to use tools with only his left hand, and this minor act had made his life much easier.
"Well after they cut your suit off they pinched your nose shut and sprayed you down with some misty liquid that kills the spores."
"You stood by and watched while I was disrobed?" he asked, returning to the couch with a smug saunter.
She rolled her eyes at him so hard that her entire head moved, but her cheeks lit up red. "No! Just the outer suit! I stopped looking before they opened up the rest of your clothes."
"That is a cryin' shame," he said, and took a drink.
Cee shut the book with as much fanfare as possible, but she couldn't fool Ezra. Her thumb was still wedged between the pages, holding her place and nullifying any dramatic gravitas she wanted to convey. "You had a stab wound all over your stomach! Your arm had just come off that day! Why would I want to look at that?"
He grunted to let her know he heard her, then regretted that he sat with her to his right side. He couldn't hug her with his stump and would have to turn too far to hug with his left for it to feel natural for him. Now he considered that while he had been unconscious, being doused with chemicals in the medical bay on a mass-transit freighter, Cee must have been terrified. He put down his beer, stood up, walked around Cee, and sat on her other side while she watched. With all of the grace of a man past his prime who had spent far too many years working only the sleaziest of jobs, Ezra hung an arm across Cee's shoulders and pulled her into a hug.
She gave in and hugged him back with the hand not holding her place in the book, snuggling in close under his arm until he couldn't see her face.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I enjoyed the void and left you to wait for me to catch up to you, didn't I?"
"It's not your fault or anything," she said. Ezra had always appreciated that even at her most emotional moments, Cee had a steely rational streak. It was why he was alive. "I'm not... angry at you or anything. But back then, I was just scared, I wasn't thinking about you naked."
"All the same. I am sorry," He squeezed her one more time, then released her and reached past to retrieve his drink. "How did they get the spores off of you?"
As Ezra expected, she opened the book in her lap to the precise page she had abandoned. He pretended not to have noticed.
"Yeah," she said. "They gave me a face mask with a tank to breathe stuff that cleaned out my lungs, and then they made me shower in the liquid. They had clothes for me, I traded the mercs' ship for safe passage... you know the story."
He knew the rest, yes. He looked down at the book in her lap, and pointed at it with his index finger while still holding the beer. "Any more fresh insights?"
"No," she said. She smiled in such a way that her lips made a smug little V shape. "I was hoping if I looked it up, there'd be some explanation from that moon for why you act like you do."
He laughed until he coughed and had to cover his mouth with his elbow. "Ah, Birdie," he comforted her. "I regret to inform you that I was born like this."