Work Text:
Michael always feels at least two steps behind Susan Ivanova--an unsettling feeling for a Chief of Security. When she starts coming over to watch old cartoons with him once a week, he thinks she hates them. She sits through Daffy's slapstick, Foghorn Leghorn's bluster, and Pepe LePew's lovesick antics glaring at the screen with fierce concentration, her knees pulled up to her chest and hugging a pillow. Only at the end of "What's Opera, Doc?," when she turns to him and says with a small smile, "They should have kept Bugs dead. That would have been funny," does he realize she is actually enjoying them.
When she comes in one night to find him on his third glass of whisky, she finds all of his alcohol and unceremoniously dumps it out in the sink, ignoring his curses. She gives him a frosty, wordless look as he berates her and demands she leave, and he realizes he's weeping. It takes him three weeks to realize why she did it, and another week to apologize to her. He doesn't drink again.
When she leans over at the end of a cartoon one night and kisses him, it takes him almost a full minute to respond, so sure is he that he's having another erotic dream. She doesn't seem to mind--possibly she is used to him being a little slow by now--and he makes up for lost time after that.
When he wakes up in the morning beside her, her dark hair a tangled cloud of glory on his pillows, and she opens her eyes and smiles gravely at him, he realizes that he'll be happy to spend the rest of his life trying to catch up to her.