Human

"No," Capitaine Elienne Desorlay said flatly. She opened the drawer of her desk and for an instant her hand hovered over her sidearm before she reached past it for the crumpled pack of cigarettes. "No fucking way."

"They'll dock you," Lieutenant Charles Etay reminded her mildly, "If you get another citation for smoking in the squadroom."

"My business," Elienne said, patting her pockets for a lighter. Shit. It's always in that one pocket ... She hoisted herself up to fit her fingers in the front pocket of pants that had been shrinking in the wash more and more lately. Got you, you putain de merde. "Not yours."

"Partners," Etay said. "What's yours is mine, remember? And I can't afford the fine. I'm going to be - "

"So you fucking said," Elienne snapped, flicked the lighter and saw their supervisor heading towards them. "Merde."

"Have an orange instead," Etay said, producing another of his increasingly-frequent fruit miracles from a jacket pocket.

"Gift from your fucking podder?" Elienne asked sourly.

Etay smiled at her, sunny and unperturbed. "From the podder I'm fucking, yes."

Elienne stuffed the unlit cigarette and lighter in her pocket. "And didn't anybody ever tell you not to wade without your waterproofs?"

"Mmm, well," Etay said, turning the orange slowly between his hands. "Everybody knows pod pilots can't be natural parents."

"So you just assumed..." Words failed her for a moment, and then returned in a string of obscenities that turned heads even in the squadroom.

Etay didn't try to interrupt, peeling the skin from the orange as Elienne gave him the full force of her opinion of his intelligence, parenthood, upbringing and general character. By the time she'd run down into fuming silence, he had a neat pile of peel on the edge of her desk and a heap of translucent crescents in the palm of one pale, long-fingered hand.  He offered one to her, the sweet, sharp scent stirring some dim image in Elienne's mind, a feeling like memory but one that connected to no place or time she'd ever known.  She took the fruit without conscious thought, a broken fingernail ripping the thin membrane and sending a trickle of juice running down her wrist.

"I assumed, oui," Etay said as Elienne stuffed the piece of orange in her mouth and licked the last trace of juice from her hand before it could disappear up her shirtsleeve. "I know. When you assume you make an 'ass' out of 'u' and - "

Elienne cut him off. "You made an ass out of you, farmboy, leave me the fuck out of it.  I wouldn't fuck a podder with my worst enemy's dick, let alone get her en cloque. And you think she was assuming she wouldn't end up avec un polichinel dans le tirrior?"

That got her another sunny smile. "Do you think it's a plan to sue me for child support?"

She snorted. "Be serious." Even with the worst will in the world it was hard to see how a capsuleer could be out for Charlie's money. He makes less than I do, for Fortune's sake, and I make two fifths of one tenth of fuck-all.

Charlie ate another crescent of orange. "I am serious," he said. "I'm serious about everything. You know that."

"Yeah, everything and nothing," Elienne said. "Charlie. This has gone far enough.  She's a podder."

"She is a podder, yes," he conceded. "And she's going to be the mother of my child."

"Mother?" Elienne closed her eyes, decided The Super can go fuck himself, and fumbled the now-crumpled cigarette out of her pocket. "Look, farmboy.  Whatever the fuck a podder turns into when it reproduces, it isn't a mother. A mother is a human thing, it's ... " She lit the cigarette and burned it a quarter down with one ferocious draw. "Take it from me. I've had three. Stretch-marks and hemorrhoids and tit-rot and all the rest of it. Waking up at one in the morning, and again at two thirty, and again at four, all of you hurting like poison from how tired you are, and still loving that little, screaming, stinking creature more than you ever knew there was love in you, even while you want to put a pillow over its face so you can get some sleep. Human, all of it, hard and ugly as it is. That's not something that belongs in a podder's world."  She ashed the cigarette into Etay's pile of orange peel and drew on it again. "You've been fooling yourself that this podder feels for you like you feel for her, and now tu l'as mise en cloque and you're talking about the  mother of your child but Charlie, she's a fucking starship, not a mother, and whatever comes out of her in nine month's time - "

"Six months," Etay corrected her mildly.

"Whenever the fuck, she won't be a mother and it won't be your child. If it's even a child."

His expression was grave, and for a moment Elienne thought she'd finally got through to him.  Then he quirked one eyebrow. "You think it'll be a shuttle?"

No such fucking luck.

She shook her head, and stubbed out  her cigarette on the sole of her shoe. "Charlie.  This isn't a joke. It isn't a crush, anymore, yours or hers."

He offered her another piece of orange, and when she made no move to take it, set it carefully on the edge of her desk, ends upright like Tomas had used to make the smiles in his drawings. "I know that."

Elienne shook her head. A podder gets a pretty plaything, stops taking his calls when she gets bored, never thinks about the wreck she makes of a man's heart. That's a heartbreak.

A podder gets a pretty plaything and takes a fancy to breed another. What does she do when she gets bored with her toys and her poor pretty boy's fantasy that he's got something to do with her life and her child?

More than a heart's going to get broken, here.

She picked up the piece of orange and bit into it, sweet and tart at the same time, and sighed. "What am I going to do with you, farmboy?"

Etay studied the heap of peel and cigarette ash for a moment, apparently giving her question serious thought, and then reached out and swept it all into the trash bin by the desk and gave her his sweetest, sunniest smile. "Tell me more about your hemorrhoids?" he suggested.

Elienne tried to glare at him, but as always, she couldn't keep it up. No wonder that Fortune forsaken podder picked him for a diversion.

Sweet, pretty, silly farmboy. Thinking about a little voice calling him 'Papa', about first steps and milk teeth and all the rest of the holvertisements. 

Poor stupid fool.