So why was it so adorable?
“It’s the way of females,” Sway said, whispering to him so that she wouldn’t hear. “They claim areas and they begin to nest in them. And if those places aren’t as they like, they take it as a personal affront. Your female is already comfortable here.”
Tanin wanted to argue about her being his female, but even he knew that it was a foolish argument to try to make. His resistance to her was token at best.
It would be better for her to find a good male, but he wasn’t one, and that’s exactly why he couldn’t discourage her. He simply didn’t want to.
He turned back to his and Sway’s work. As it happened, they didn’t need quiet. If anything, they were enjoying the sounds of her working behind them. Her grumbles at the mess, her little grunts of effort as she moved things, were practically music. No female would feel this comfortable in Rik-Vane, but Garnet did here, on the Humility, among them.
It was a pleasure to listen to, even if they were trying to focus on work.
Chapter 20
Garnet
Agroup of males, all gathered in one house, could not be trusted to keep it neat, tidy, and pretty regardless of their species it seemed. The bridge was filthy. Absolutely unacceptable. She didn’t know how Sway managed to work in this mess, but it bothered her like a thorn in her side.
The visibly dirty walls and floor in the halls were gross, but understandable. That was the kind of mess that was easy to ignore because it built up so slowly that, over time, you just became accustomed to it looking that way. To give them credit, they did keep the galley and privies decently clean. Their personal bedrooms were, of course, their own business and she didn’t care how they looked.
But the gym, the rec room, and Tanin’s upper bridge were all just generally dirty and messy. The kind of carelessness that she couldn’t accuse of being unacceptable, but which bothered her all the same.
However, all of that paled in comparison to the bridge.
Sway spent so much of his time here working, but he didn’t bother to clean up after himself at all. She knew he would sometimes sleep in that chair. If he got up and moved around, stretching or doing some small exercises, he did them prison style in this small room. He’d eat and set his dishes aside, and the only time someone came to get them was when they ran out in the galley. The trash, however, could just pile up without end.
She finally understood how the guys could stomach the food synthesizer all the time. They didn’t. Sway obviously had a stash of packaged food somewhere, because there were wrappers shove in every nook and cranny. They weren’t plastic. They were the same paper-like product that made up their shopping bags. She didn’t think they were paper, the texture wasn’t exactly right, but she did know, from seeing it around in other places, that it was recyclable like paper. Those things were everywhere. And feathers! There were feathers all over the place! Sway clearly molted in this room, or plucked himself naked, because there were enough feathers there to make a whole second Sway.
The floors and walls were dirty, the consoles were dirty, the chairs were dirty – everything in here needed to be cleaned! It was a disaster zone!
Luckily, she now had her loyal puppy.
Spot was the one cleaning machine she was able to get working again. And he was a little powerhouse of a tool. He scrubbed floors, he wiped windows and walls, his body could crush trash, and his head was flat to hold things like piles of dirty dishes. He could even work without disturbing that pile. He wasn’t loud, but he smelled really nice thanks to the cleaning fluids she’d put in his tanks. He had some dings on his chassis, but he was otherwise sparkly clean.
And he followed her around like a pet. He was programmed to do so. As well as follow simple commands – i.e. clean, crush, compact, etc. She had already been thinking about names for him even before she finished repairs, but when she saw his little personality after turning him back on, the name Spot popped into her head and just seemed to fit him so perfectly.
It was also kind of a play on words. Spot clean. Spot!
The two of them attacked Sway’s mess with a vengeance. The guys remained in their chairs, doing whatever fancy work that was required for navigation. She could read Standard thanks to that language imprint she’d been given, but their work was far beyond her capabilities. She could only stare at it and figure it must be hieroglyphics before getting back to cleaning.
There was just somuch. Tanin claimed that they cleaned up around here every now and then, but she didn’t think they actually cleaned. They probably picked things up, maybe threw other things away, but there was no way this place had ever been cleaned properly. She tackled the dirt and grime of it all with the hard determination to leave this place sparkling.
Time passed pretty quickly that way. Every time she thought about taking a break, she told herself just one more thing. Just one more surface. She was almost done.
Then, she found a pile of trash under one of the unused consoles, and it just kept going. It looked like someone had just kept pushing trash deeper and deeper, compacting it until it was a dense mass of junk and garbage and those damn feathers that just kept coming!
And then one of the consoles turned out to be covered in a layer of filth so thick, it couldn’t even be used anymore. This bridge was designed for four people, but Sway was the only one up here. So, he had just worked at that console until it stopped responding, then moved to a different one without thinking that maybe he could just clean that first one.
That was an affront to her senses, and she grumbled about it the entire time she was scrubbing like she was trying to get down to the bare metal.
How did a person live like this? She got that Sway grew up in the space slums, but surely, he was raised better than this. At this point, it wasn’t even just laziness. This was willful ignorance of what it took to keep a place livable. Even children knew better than to-
“Garnet.”
“What?!” She whipped around, cleaning rag branded like a blade, glaring at Tanin who had come up behind her and touched her shoulder.
He kept his hands up, proving he was unarmed, as he gave her a look.
“It’s time for you to take a break.”
