Touching Base
Posted on 29 Aug 2020 @ 3:46pm by Commander Calliope Zahn & Lieutenant Commander Lance Quinn (*)
Edited on on 03 Sep 2020 @ 12:12am
Mission:
M1 - Emergence
Location: Crew Lounge
Timeline: MD03 - 0900HRS
1302 words - 2.6 OF Standard Post Measure
Lance had one ankle up crossed over his knee as he sipped on a coffee and perused the PADD he'd brought with him. A little light reading on the latest transwarp trials some fairly inconsequential scientist had been working at. The fact that they'd published anything was almost hilarious, Lance even finding himself smirking at the findings - or lack thereof.
He was mid-sip when his eyes caught the movement across the table. Someone else sitting down. He peeked momentarily, assessing the woman who now sat across from him. Then he slowly lowered the mug.
"You changed your hair," he noted, looking back down at the PADD before placing it on the table. "I liked it the old way."
Calliope quirked a smile as she sipped from her tumbler of iced tea. The lounge was half dark and there was no service to the tables, forcing everyone to collect their orders from the counter. Lance looked disaffected by the conditions, as if he were in the back gardens with the paper.
"Should I shave it? Start all over?" Calliope teased. She rolled each of her shoulders and stretched her neck to work out the tension from the shuttle ride.
"It still looks fine," he replied brusquely. "Don't change it on my account."
Calliope's eyes wandered the lounge, trying to imagine what it looked like fully restored. With the lights half out, the shadows were weird and it felt vacant, like it would shut down around them. She decided to focus on Lance instead.
"What are you reading?" She expected it would be damage reports or debriefings. She'd spent her whole ride reading summaries and hadn't scratched the surface.
"Yamamat's Treatise on the Implications of Applied Trans-Warp theory." He said it as though it were obvious, though he knew that it wasn't. "Sadly, their meandering investigative techniques also made their way into their writing. How was your flight?"
Yamamat. She stored that name away for later. She couldn't really read Lance's stuff, but she tried the abstracts and summaries to get an idea of what he was talking about anyway.
"Not too bad. The pilot was kind of a hoot. A Denobulan CPO, he had all kinds of stories and the most ridiculous expressions. Made it difficult to focus, but the ride seemed shorter. Your slipstream connections were smooth?"
"Smooth enough," he nodded, now even more relieved he had been in the company of a reasonably bright young Andorian Ensign instead of this chatty Denobulan she'd referenced. He contemplated talking about the weather, yet it seemed like the least relevant small-talk topic he could muster. So he moved on to the reason they were there. "So, here we are."
"Here we are, indeed." Calliope echoed, distracted momentarily by a small fluctuation in the lighting before refocusing on Lance.
"Not exactly the location I expected us to both end up being assigned to. And quite different from Earth Spacedock, I must admit. Your sense of adventure, perhaps?"
"I think I've shaken out most of my wanderlust. This is an adventure of a different stripe. I really... I didn't think you'd want to come. I'm thrilled you did. I've missed you. And now, I don't know. I think it will be nice not counting down the days until one or the other of us has to shuffle off again."
"Hmm. I suspected when the transfer orders came through that you decided forgiveness was easier than asking permission." He took a sip of his coffee.
Calliope grin-grimaced. "That does sound like me, but I'd never had tried that game on you, Lance. Corvus convinced me to take the job and talk to you but she already had the orders made up. I think she knew my impulses before I even answered the comm. Are you really sure you're okay with this? "
"I think it's rather quaint, actually. Doesn't exactly say 'place to settle down', but it's better than a few dozen light years of distance."
"Um, so listen. The clean up crews are really overwhelmed. There's still a family's worth of personal effects in our senior quarters, left behind from the evacuation. I'll work on crating them up when I get the chance. But until then, we can move into some of the junior quarters that were unoccupied. We'll just not unpack our bags right away."
"Seems a reasonable proposal," he nodded thoughtfully. The prospect of having to deal with the emotional baggage of someone else's literal baggage was entirely unappealing. "What's the phrase you would have called it? 'Slumming it' for a few days?"
Her eyes lit up as the phrase evoked a fun memory from shortly after she'd graduated Academy. They had been vacationing and the flight was diverted. They'd ended up making do, staying in oddball places and inventing off the map sightseeing out of the local offerings. Calliope had treasured the memories from that trip, not least of all because it was when Lance had proposed.
"That's the spirit." She drank down her tea and then slipped a hand over Lance's— their wedding rings aligned. "I'm sorry I have to head out already, but I have to turn in my orders and get acclimated to the command center. I'll send you the quartering location. Maybe we'll chance on each other sometime between all the assessment and repairs?"
"Undoubtedly our paths will cross in all of this flurry of chaos," he agreed, squeezing her hand momentarily. "And perhaps they'll find some use for me too - a propulsion theory specialist on a stationary object in space would seem rather wasted otherwise. Perhaps dinner when we find some time?"
It pained her a little, but she didn't think Lance meant to rub in that this was a step down for him. Or at least a step far away from where he'd been working all his life. Calliope knew he was just trying to make light of it, was all. "Oh don't you worry. We'll be keeping you in work. And we'll find the time for dinner, or make the time if we have to."
"I'll get to work on the temporal mechanics of that immediately," he replied.
His dry delivery earned a reflexive laugh from Calliope. Letting go of his hand, she stood. "I'll see you soon. And..." She tapped on his padd of Yamamat's Treatise. "You can tell me later how it ends." Probably horribly. Lance would poke the theory more full of holes than a colander. But that was the way science worked. A bunch of egos all decrying each other's ideas until anything survived the scrutiny— the nugget of empirical gold at long last emerging from the field of hypothesis-dross. Just because she didn't understand it, didn't mean she couldn't stand in awe of it.
"I could tell you now, but let's save it until later." Indeed, the findings in the research paper were certainly going to be more predictable than his wife's movements over the next few days. He thought of making a joke about it; about falling into an intergalactic void and disappearing for months, but on second thought that might be in bad taste, considering. Instead he offered his warmest of smiles, reserved for these small moments between them.
She returned her glass to the self serve replicator and appreciatively greeted the lone lounge manager on her way out, making a quick self introduction and getting his name as he wiped down used tables and collected left behind things.
Lance watched her leave, his gaze lingering probably longer than it should have. If there was anything that could distract him more than research papers - no matter how poorly written - it was Calliope. A faint feeling of satisfaction crossed his mind as he realised that these meetings might become more frequent over the coming weeks.
