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Saffron met Jesse over Heinrich's dead body.
He'd gone off with big ambitions of a life of daring crime, and Saffron had encouraged it. What other choice did they have, frankly. He knew security programming, and he said that meant he also knew security system hacking and a salvage crew scooped him up right away.
But he'd been a Bellerophon boy through and through, and Saffron knew he'd struggle to adjust to life on the run. In the end, he hadn't adjusted at all, and the crew of the Walden called her to the docks when they returned to Parth and Saffron saw the body bag laying on the floor of the empty cargo bay from a hundred yards away. She'd been expecting it. Two crew members were standing behind it; a man with huge ginger sideburns and a woman in low slung cargo pants and a gun casually hanging from a strap over one shoulder.
"Yolanda?" The man asked.
"Yeah."
"Uh…I'm so sorry to have to be the one to uhm…" he gestured at the body and she could tell he was trying his very best to pretend to have manners. “Job like this is real uncertain, you know? And since he didn’t really contribute to the job but we still had to feed him, uh…you’re really just getting the body.”
"He was your husband, right?" The woman interrupted.
"Oh, no," Saffron lied. "A cousin. Last family I had left."
"Oh, well. What a shame," the woman said, in a tone that quite clearly said she did not consider Heinrich's death to be a shame. "Why don't you let me…honor his memory with you?"
Saffron hadn't been with a woman since her time in the Companion House before Durran, but somehow she ended up fucking Jesse from the Walden crew in the bar bathroom after a few memorial drinks for Heinrich and then since she'd always had a hard time doing anything other than one night stands or marriage and she did want to see Jesse again, they ended up as wife and wife within the month.
Jesse's crewmates didn't bat an eye.
"Nothing's ever certain out in the black," the captain told them with a lopsided smirk. "Best to not hesitate on things like this."
And the set-up was pretty nice. Jesse made pretty good money, or at least enough to support the two of them while Saffron got her feet under her and started figuring out where pickpocketing was easy and how to use what Heinrich had taught her to get into jewelry boutiques at night.
Jesse never raised an eyebrow at Saffron's work or at the way she spoke about the poor idiots she fleeced on the street. She laughed along with her and applauded as Saffron paraded around their tiny apartment in nothing but a diamond necklace, and she just rolled over in bed when Saffron got home from a robbery.
But she also had a job that took her away from Parth for weeks on end. The first time Jesse went off with The Walden, Saffron just tried to take advantage of the alone time, and the second and third times went much the same, but by the time the seventh trip rolled around, it was starting to get harder. The job was projected to take the crew all the way to the Kalidasa System and they would be gone for at least two months.
Saffron lasted three weeks before she folded this time.
She considered a man; they were plentiful and she probably would have been able to find one by wearing a moderately good bra and sitting at a bar for five minutes, but that wasn't what she had a hankering for. She'd been missing being in charge ever since the novelty of a pirate wife had worn off and Jesse hadn't seemed interested in switching up anything in bed.
So Saffron went to one of the bars near the college and found herself a sweet thing who was away from home for the first time and wanted to know what it felt like to sleep with someone who wasn't her high school boyfriend.
Her name was Scarlet. Or maybe it was Charlotte. It wasn't important. Saffron called her sweetie and she was very eager to learn. Saffron took her to bars and clubs, taught her slight of hand (just for card tricks of course, sweetie, nothing illegal), and spent hours tying her to the bed she was supposed to be sharing with Jesse. It was easy to indulge when her wife coming home from work was something that happened a few times a year rather than every evening.
Saffron stopped even thinking about Jesse's return date. There was no way to schedule an exact day for return with the sort of jobs the Walden took and Saffron had never been great at planning ahead or thinking about what the future held. Even now, she was getting restless on Parth in a way that Charlotte-Scarlet and her eager mouth couldn't alleviate.
They were at clubs more often; Saffron felt like she needed something to be happening at every minute or she'd go crazy and clubs were nice and dark and loud so the pickpocketing was easy even when she was wasted. Sometimes she went alone, but tonight her little plaything had come with her.
"I think someone's here looking for you," the bartender shouted over the music, startling Saffron by addressing her directly. "Bouncer just let me know."
"Do you know what kind of someone?" Saffron asked.
"A gal with big curly hair. Armed, they said. Asking for the redhead who's a regular."
"Ah, yeah. Thanks. That's the wife."
Scarlet-Charlotte looked at her in horror, but Saffron just stood and finished her drink.
"You stay here, sweetie. And I think this might be the last time we see each other. You were a real doll."
She put her glass down on the little table and headed out to the foyer.
Jesse was standing there, sidearm holstered.
"They won't let me in with the gun."
"Well, yeah. It's a club," Saffron said with a laugh. Jesse laughed too.
"Come here, baby," she said lowly. "I've missed you. But our neighbors were happy to catch me up on what I missed."
And maybe Saffron should have remembered that Jesse was a hired gun on a pirate crew and there was a certain kind of person that ended up doing that sort of job, but it didn't cross her mind until Jesse's fists were clenching at her sides and the bouncer started nervously eyeing the police wave screen. She backed away.
"Your little bitch is lucky she didn't come out here with you, 'cause I would have shot her right between the eyes," Jesse snapped once she realized Saffron knew she knew. "You better have all your things out of the apartment and be gone by morning, because If I ever see you on Parth again, I'll kill you."
Saffron packed all her things and also all the cash she could find in the apartment and was on a budget travel line ship to a moon of Valentine by lunch the next day. Their marriage hadn't been logged in the Cortex, so there was really no need for a proper divorce. Fleeing the planet would be enough.
It was probably time for a name change.