Fandom: The Magicians

Ship: Fen/Margo

Rating: Teen

Wordcount: 4,080

Genre and tags: Space pirates AU

Margo was the bearer of the Sorrows, the fastest shot in the Trad—second fastest if you asked the Quinn girl, not that anyone should—and above all else, a notorious cutthroat bitch. She didn't lose fights to packs of jumped-up backstation grunts, especially not grunts of this station's calibre. So while it was certainly nice of the girl to pop out of nowhere, all compact and stabby, to dispatch a handful who had ambushed Margo on the docks, it also had not been necessary.

"You sure?" said the girl, wide-eyed. She'd disappeared her knives and was retying her haphazard ponytail. "Because it looked like they had you cornered there!"

Margo gave her a cool look. It seemed to bounce right off her. "I had it under control."

"Oh, well, that's good, because I thought that beefy one was—"

"I'm a professional," Margo said. "Like I said, I don't lose to meatheads with stun guns in their safety shoes. Got it?"

"Yes, ma'am," she said, upbeat and affable. They had to be about the same age; if it weren't for the naivete oozing off of her, Margo might have suspected an insult. "Never met a professional space pirate before."

The girl was flushed pink, likely more from adrenaline than exertion: she really hadn't worked very hard to take those pricks down. The flush was a good look on her, but aside from that wholesome farm-girl glow there really wasn't anything notable about her appearance. She wore basic clothes, loose black layers of the kind you could get printed cheap just about anywhere on Fillory, with worn-looking combat boots and nary an accessory in sight. Wide brown eyes, pale skin, probably a decent enough body somewhere under those clothes. That was about it.

Looks tended to deceive, though. Margo considered the girl, let the silence between them stretch past the point of comfort, then offered her empty hand. "Name's Margo."

The girl's face brightened. If eyes could twinkle, hers would have. "Fen! That's me, I mean, I'm Fen. Hi Margo. I think I've heard of you. You usually work with a partner, right? The tall and handsome one?"

None too delicately, Margo extracted her hand from Fen's grasp. "Sometimes I do," she allowed. "I'll be sure to tell him you called him handsome, by the way; it'll feed his ego nicely."

"What are you doing all the way out here? If it's not rude to ask, I mean. We don't really get many high-profile, um..."

"Pirates?"

"High-profile pirates, yes. We don't get a lot of those out here. Isn't there more to—" Fen gestured with both hands, huge and indecipherable. "—you know, steal, in a system with a few more gates? Like, literally any system that has more than one?"

God help her, the flustered act was actually working for Margo. Well, she did love a good girl-next-door fantasy.

"Generally speaking, yes," Margo said. "But someone who's good at what she does can usually find someone to, ah, liberate a few overstocked supplies from, no matter where she is. But to answer your first question, I'm here because my partner and I were separated outside of Minerva Base and I haven't persuaded any pilots to take me back to him just yet."

As Margo spoke Fen's eyes had gone wide again; Margo didn't know what she'd said that was so exciting, and she honestly didn't care. Fen nodded vigorously and said, "I have friends! My friends and I have a ship. We could help. We have some, um, supplies to move, too. We could drop you off on the way? Or move our supplies to where you're going? Um, where are you going, actually?"

"And your friends..." Margo raised her eyebrows. "They'd be down with letting me hitchhike? A pirate notorious enough they've apparently even heard of her on this podunk little station?"

"Oh, sure. We all have so much in common! They'll be happy to have you."

"Uh-huh." Not Margo's problem, as long as it got her on a ship heading closer to Eliot. "I'm heading to B'allmar. When do we leave?"

The friends were not happy to have Margo, big surprise, but they let her board their rickety little boat and promised Fen they'd take her Eliotward. Margo set up camp in Fen's cabin and stretched out on one of the beds with her reader. Even once the banging sounds had trailed off and the engines had sputtered to life, it was a long while before Fen reappeared.

At long last door to the cabin slid open. Margo glanced up to find Fen frowning at her. "Oh. That's my—never mind," Fen said, and swung the duffel in her hands onto the opposite bed.

"Have a nice fight with your friends?" Margo asked, unable to resist poking, but Fen barely reacted. She only shrugged, notably subdued, and got to work unpacking her bag.

"They're just overprotective." A package of inexpensive candies emerged from the bag, followed by a framed photograph, several sets of plain black clothes, and a goddamn rubber succulent. "I grew up pretty sheltered, I guess, so now they think I'm too trusting."

"Have they seen how you handle a knife?" On cue, Fen removed the bag's final item, a heavy wooden case large enough to hold a sizable collection of knives. Margo eyed it with interest. "Anyone who betrays your trust is begging for a vivisection."

Fen settled cross-legged on the bed, fake plant in hand. She fondled its not-leaves and gave Margo a half-smile. "They know. We've just known each other for too long. It's like siblings, I think. Doesn't matter how old she gets, your little sister will always be your little sister."

"Can't relate," Margo said, because she, at least, had a poker face. She shifted to face Fen properly, reclining against the cabin wall. "You know you don't have to stick around, right? Who gives a shit how long you've know these chuckledicks? You're your own woman."

"I don't really think there are that many opportunities out there for the wayward daughter of a no-name knife maker," Fen said lightly, and Margo rolled her eyes.

"Fen. Sweetie. You're hot. Take it from an expert: you find the right angle to play, you can make your own opportunities. The 'sexy, virginal bov-maid who needs a strong man to protect her' thing is a classic and it'd be a perfect fit for you, but you can make yourself into whatever your impish little heart desires."

Fen looked at Margo for a long moment—contemplative, maybe. Her cheeks were a little pink. "Is that what you did?"

"Wow. That's a little personal," Margo said, just to see that blush deepen. "And yes. Home sucked so I left and spent a few years being a few different people. Then I met my partner and finalized my transformation into the lethal, high-glam megabitch you see before you today."

Generally this was the point where Margo got questions about Eliot, or about what it was like to live as a criminal. Instead Fen said, "Was it worth it?"

"Obviously." Margo smiled. She found that she couldn't really help it. "Also, I'm starving. You planning to feed your honoured guest any time soon?"

"So," said one of Fen's comrades at length. One of the dudes, name might have started with a B. "Tell us about yourself."

Margo stabbed at her MRE with the aluminum utensil she'd been so graciously provided. She popped a flavourless bite in her mouth, chewed thoroughly, and swallowed. "My name is Margo Hanson. I'm a pirate. I'm going to B'allmar. You know all of this. What else do you need?"

Fen's eyes darted between them, but Whats-His-Name persisted. "What business do you have in B'allmar?"

"Like I already said, I'm meeting my partner there. You can look me up if you want my dirty secrets, you know. I even gave you my real name."

"Is this your business partner, romantic partner, partner in crime…?"

"Some or all of the above." Margo scraped up the last of the potato-ish shit on her plate. "Whatever accusation you're gagging on, pussy up and spit it out. I want to go bogart the shower and get some sleep, in that order."

"No accusation. It just seems like a funny coincidence that you happened to run into Fen, and the two of you happened to get talking, and you happened to need a ride in the precise direction we were already heading."

The direction they were heading had seemed pretty malleable from what Fen had said on the docks, but Margo didn't point that out. She dropped the shitty utensil onto her empty plate and pushed it away.

"This isn't some high-budget dick flick, Brody. Women talk to each other sometimes, and your girl seemed worth talking to." In the corner of Margo's vision, Fen smiled a little. "It was a coincidence and it worked out nicely for me. Now, if you'll excuse me."

Margo slid off the bench and deposited her tray in the cleaner. On her way out of the mess, she paused to look over their ragtag little group one more time.

"It's weird that you all eat together at the same time, by the way," she told them. Fen's eyes crinkled at her; B-Name kept glaring. The rest of them either looked at each other or ignored her entirely. "Just an FYI. Nobody does that in this world."

An ambush while she showered was so obvious as to be gauche, but these people clearly had no vision: Margo was nearly clean, revelling in the first real, non-sonic shower she'd had in weeks, when the door to the small room that contained her shower stall opened and closed with a soft, distinctive hiss.

Her visitor approached her stall but didn't enter it, which meant it was, again, probably a dude. No guesses which one, she thought, and killed the shower.

It would be so much more fun to be fancy about this, get up behind him and scare him so hard his cock would shrivel, but the glint of light on the ceiling said he'd brought a knife, not a gun, and she really was tired enough to drop. So she pulled down the loose dress she'd draped over the top of the stall, slipped it over her head, and retrieved the palm-sized pulser from its right pocket.

"Voyeurism is fine and all," she said, releasing the stall door and aiming the gun at Whats-His-Name's shocked face, "but you really need to get consent first, Blythe. This is just creepy."

"My name is Bayler," he growled. He still held his knife, mostly useless at this distance.

"Don't care. Tell me what your deal is." She caught the glance he flicked at his knife and gestured sharply with her gun. "You could try it, but I guarantee I'll have two shots in you before it's even left your hand."

Another noise, one of those frustrated man-grunts, and he dropped his arm to his side. He said, "I've seen through you."

"That's… cute? I think? Seen through me to what?"

"Don't play ignorant."

Margo sighed. "Jesus. Your ego really is unbelievable. I've got to assume it's a compensation thing. I promise you, I have no fucking idea who you people are or what secret plot you think I'm enacting. Nor would I care, frankly, but this—" She waved at him with her gun, then trained it back on his face. "—is shaping up to be really annoying."

B-Name glared. "You expect me to believe you're not hiding anything?"

"Please. Any woman of my calibre is hiding something. I have plenty of skeletons in my closet, which you'd know if you bothered to look me up like any self-respecting smuggler would." He jerked, a full-body startle. Margo rolled her eyes. "But none of the shit I'm hiding has anything to do with you or your friends. Or whoever they are."

There was a long, tense pause. Finally the guy relented. "We're not smugglers. We're FU Fighters."

Margo's laugh echoed off the walls of the tiny room, loud and sudden. "Excuse me?"

"Fillorians United. FU Fighters. We're a cell of true Fillorians dedicated to overthrowing the tyrants and reclaiming authority over our station."

"What, that whole neo-feudal thing you people have going? Whoa," she said, placating, when he went tense again. "Down, boy. I'm all for pulling the rug out from under rich assholes on a power trip."

"You are?"

"Sort of how I got where I am. Again: look me up. The whole revolutionary spirit thing is a little beyond me, but if you want to pop some motherfuckers' delusions of grandeur, be my guest." She thumbed the safety back on and lowered her gun. "We good?"

He nodded once, solemn. These people were such losers. "Yes."

"Good. Now get the fuck out of here so I can put on my underwear."

Back in the cabin, Fen was… sharpening her knives, apparently. She looked up when Margo entered, still holding a knife up to the light.

"Hi! That was a long shower." Carefully, Fen put her knife back in its case.

"Yeah, sorry. I got a little held up by an unexpected visitor. We had a nice, long chat. Long enough that my hair started to dry before I brushed it, which honestly just makes it look insane, so I had to get it wet and dry it again. You never told me you were a terrorist."

The look of shock on Fen's face was everything Margo had hoped for. Her jaw even dropped, leaving her lips to form a little 'O' shape like a character in a cartoon. "We're not—that's ridiculous, um, where did—"

"I told you. I had a chat with one of your friends." She dropped her shower caddy on the floor with her own bags and paused to ruffle Fen's hair before she sat on her own bed, legs tucked up beneath her. Something about those unruly curls just begged for Margo's fingers. Catching Fen's alarmed expression, she added, "Relax. It's fine."

"Oh. Oh! Well, that's good."

A long silence fell between them. Margo flicked through her reader and pretended not to watch Fen squirming in her peripheral vision. She clearly had something to say; if she wanted a career in toppling governments she'd really need someone to teach her to rein in that body language.

Fen shifted her weight, fidgeted, and—at last—picked up her knife case and put it firmly on the floor. "Okay. I'm just going to say it."

Margo set down her reader and folded her hands in her lap. She arranged her features in a look that she hoped said politely attentive.

"So. You know about me. You know my big secret, which is—it's good. And not just because I'm a bad liar! Because the thing is, you're, uh, really pretty. And you keep smiling at me and you said, you know, sexy and virginal, and I don't actually know if you sleep with girls? Or if you're just, like, friendly in general, maybe. And I'm not actually a virgin, but if you're interested anyway… I'm in. So. Do you want to fuck?"

That had, truly, not been what Margo expected—she'd thought it might just be the usual inquisition about her glamorous life of piracy, more fool her—but even before she'd reinvented herself, Margo was never an idiot. She was across the small room and kneeling next to Fen almost before the last sentence left her mouth.

Fen's nose wrinkled up when she smiled. It was infuriating how charmed Margo was by it. She kissed Fen so she wouldn't be tempted to say so.

A while later, when Fen was beneath her and breathing heavily, Margo pulled back just far enough to look at Fen properly. Her eyes were bright, Margo noted, and that easy flush spread from her cheeks all the way down past the neckline of her tank top. It was her best look yet, but she'd need to lose the top soon.

"I'm not friendly," she said, and drank in Fen's breathless laugh. "And virginity is a stupid concept anyway."

Then she got to work.

It was normally about six days from Fillory to B'allmar's orbit, probably closer to seven in a death trap like this ship. Margo had packed a lot of books and serials onto her reader, anticipating a week of neuron-decaying boredom. She didn't end up reading many at all.

Instead, she and Fen settled into a routine:

Fen worked when she was scheduled to work. As far as Margo could tell, this mostly involved some maintenance and some monitoring, and then a lot of time talking to her friends about the logistics of some assassination or another. Plus the occasional one-on-one combat lesson.

Margo ate when they weren't likely to be around, at least not en masse, because they still didn't like to talk shop where she could hear it and most of them weren't inspiring conversationalists anyway. She slept when the ship's internal clock said it was time for sleep and generally kept to herself.

The rest of the time, the time they spent together, involved a lot of banging.

Fen was shockingly horny—not that Margo was complaining—and their sexual proclivities got along like a house on fire. Margo could eat her pussy for hours before Fen stopped tugging her hair in a sexy way and started tugging it in an I'm oversensitive, get off of me way, and Fen's face lit up like flashbang the first time Margo pulled out her trusty jute rope. And as it turned out, Fen was all about the pillow talk.

"I love my friends," she said on the third night, stroking slow fingers through Margo's hair. "But I've known most of them since I was a baby. Sometimes I wonder who I could be without them."

Margo made a muffled noise against Fen's bare stomach. She turned her face to the side. "Leave, then. Try something else."

"Fillorians United is too important to me."

"And? You can fight the good fight without sitting right in each other's laps."

Fen hadn't responded and they'd dropped it for the night. Day four began with Fen's morning off, though, and on that morning she finally asked Margo about Eliot.

"How do you know your partner's on B'allmar? If you got separated?"

Margo was seated upright with Fen's head in her lap. She caught Fen's eyes upside down. "You don't need to butter me up with orgasms before you ask about him," she said, but Fen only raised an eyebrow. "I know because that's our meeting point. He got away before I did. He'll be there."

"Huh. Why pick B'allmar for that?"

"Oh, you know. It's got a big station, decent accommodations, and neither of us could say the name of it with a straight face for at least a year. The usual reasons. Why do you ask?"

Fen shrugged. "Just curious. I think I'd like him if I met him."

A good afterglow could make Margo a little gooey sometimes, and she did, famously, love to talk about Eliot. That was probably why she didn't push. Instead she tangled a hand in Fen's hair, almost gentle, and said, "You probably would."

An uneventful week, then, all in all, after that rocky first day in space. On the last morning, an hour or two out from the station orbiting B'allmar, Margo re-entered the cabin with her com in one hand and a rat bar in the other to find Fen sitting on a bed, waiting. Hands folded in her lap. Looking for all the world like the villain in a spy story.

"Jesus," Margo said, and took another bite of the rat bar.

"Hi Margo." Margo made a face and sat on the other bed. "That's a nice outfit."

With some effort Margo swallowed the last bit of rat bar. Christ, those things were like leather. "The skirt? I'm getting off this tub today, I had to step my game back up."

"It's very… um, leggy. I like it."

Margo squinted at her, decided it was too early for whatever was happening there, and looked at her com again. Finally, she'd picked up a goddamn intra-system signal.

"What are you doing?" Fen asked. She moved to sit next to Margo.

"Letting Eliot know I'll be there soon," Margo said, distracted, as she swiped the message off to him.

"I lived bitch," Fen read over her shoulder. "Is that like a code?"

"No." She dropped the com on the bed and turned to face Fen properly. "Fen?"

"Yes?"

"Why are you acting like a serial killer?"

After a beat, Fen sighed. "You're leaving," she said. Margo didn't bother with a response to that. "And I wanted to tell you… I talked to my friends. About splitting off from them for a while, to get more intel."

A smile threatened to form on Margo's face. She crushed it mercilessly. "That's great."

"And I don't know if you and your partner are, um, strictly a two-person unit?"

"We have tended to be, yes. Historically speaking."

Fen narrowed her eyes. She definitely knew Margo was fucking with her at this point, but that was her own fault for flustering so delightfully. "Can I come with you or not?"

She did smile, this time, as she patted Fen's cheek. "How about you get off at the station with me and see what happens?"

"You're awful."

Fen looked equally as ready to jab Margo as jump her. Regrettably, Margo was still into it. "I know. And you know that it's fucking weird that you can find ten different ways to beg me to fist you but you couldn't spit that out."

"I didn't want to seem clingy!"

"Fen." Margo grasped Fen's chin between her thumb and forefinger. "You were watching me sleep when I woke up yesterday. I didn't run for the hills then, did I? Take the win."

She pressed a kiss to Fen's mouth before a retort could manifest. On her other side, Margo's com beeped: Eliot.

"Come on," she said to Fen. "Get your cute ass off the bed. Let's get ready."

The inspector cleared them, fucking finally, and Margo shoved past her down the gangway. She scanned the crowds for Eliot's statuesque frame. Not evident, not immediately, but there were a fucking lot of people at the docks—what was it, another festival? The gangway ended and Margo jumped the last foot or so to the concrete floor.

"Get a new line, bitch," said a voice behind her shoulder, and a moment later she was enveloped in Eliot.

Faceless travellers groaned and whined but eventually the foot traffic redirected itself around them. Eliot's shirt was soft against her face; Eliot's chin rested on her hair. When she was able, she pulled back to look at his gorgeous face.

"Did you get the suite I like?" she asked. "With the hot tub?"

"Of course." He gazed into her eyes in a way that would sicken her if he were anyone else. On him, it was a little like looking in a mirror. "What do you take me for?"

Margo glowed at him. She could feel it. "I missed you."

"I missed you." They gazed some more. After some length of time or other, Eliot broke eye contact to look at something over her shoulder. "And what is this?"

Margo glanced at Fen behind her. She hung back a little, looking unsure of her welcome. "That's Fen," she told Eliot. She stroked a hand along his upper arm. "She's an idealist."

"Interesting. What do we need with one of those?"

Behind her, Fen approached—Margo could see it when Eliot's eyes tracked her, even if she couldn't see or hear Fen herself—so she raised her voice a little when she said, "I'm working on corrupting her." Eliot smiled at that, squeezed her with the arm around her waist. "Can we keep her?"

"Oh, Bambi. You know I can't deny you anything when you look at me like that."

Margo stood on her toes to kiss his smile. Then she stepped back from his arms and held out a hand to Fen, even though Eliot would definitely have something to say about it later. "Reunion's over. You coming?"

Fen smiled: quick, brilliant, and utterly guileless. "He's even more handsome in person," she said, and took Margo's hand.