Slumming It
Posted on 07 Oct 2020 @ 4:50pm by Commander Calliope Zahn & Lieutenant Commander Lance Quinn (*)
Mission:
M1 - Emergence
Location: Quinn & Zahn Temp Quarters
Timeline: MD 03 2000
2155 words - 4.3 OF Standard Post Measure
It was late, but Calliope was far from tired. If anything, she felt she was on a second wind. She'd been on tours and in meetings all day and then doing the research she needed to work out the personnel team assignments in Engineering. Now she finally had the time to work out the details. While waiting her turn for her order at the lounge she messaged Lance that she was grabbing them dinner, if he hadn't caught anything yet. She didn't want to call and interrupt anything he was in the middle of. That was how they'd always communicated, even light years away. She didn't just call him. First, always, there was a message exchange. To directly call by voice or video without prearrangement was for pressing matters only. Lance was very serious about that. To lose one's train of thought due to some idle business was one of his greatest peeves.
--getting some sandwiches and sides. see you at 'home' if you need the break.--
It was another stretch of emergency lit corridor in the officer's quarters, but since they were assigning people their quarters temporarily in the same blocks, it wasn't as lonely. She walked by several other officers, who acknowledged her in passing. Outside of her own door, as outside all of the temporarily assigned quarters in the Jr section, sat a small crate. It was a kind of care package from the Quartermaster of the Caelian— she could tell by the printing on the lid. She opened the latches and found freshly replicated supplies- lanterns and a small space heating/ cooling unit. Blankets, pillows, bottled water. She made a mental note to thank them for taking the effort to help with the interim arrangements, and rolled the crate inside with her.
"Computer, lights," She said out of habit, but then felt stupid. Smiling at herself, she felt for one of the lanterns and switched it on to have a look.
Junior officer quarters on a starbase were no where near as small as on many ships in the fleet. This was a single occupant, about the size of someone's first one bedroom flat. She walked around with the lantern, just to be sure there were no surprises in the dark. It smelled a little stale, though it was pristine, as it had been unoccupied and cleaned out before the events of the Void. But there was nothing at all in it. Just the built in bed frame and uncovered mattress in the bedroom, the built in vanity in the bathroom, and one low fixed-into-the-floor table. No other furnishings. She imagined the station quartermaster's people would have it furnished by selective requests and replicated to taste from the catalog of options, had there been a station Quartermaster here yet, and had the industrial replicators been online...
As it was, Calliope set the boxed sandwiches down on the table. She put the bed pillows out on the floor for seating and one of the lanterns center for light.... To be cute, she folded the paper napkins neatly and ordered the flatware from the kit onto them properly. Not that she intended to use them for her sandwich, just for the visual amusement. She rolled a few extra paper napkins into origami roses and set them willy-nilly onto the table.
Content that she'd done the best with what she had on hand, Calliope took off her jacket and sat down with her padd to work on the engineering personnel assignments.
No sooner had she started when the door opened. Lance entered to the semi-darkness and having almost knocked-over something by the entrance on his way through.
"Who decided to put that there?" he grumbled, noticing Calliope already waiting inside. Discarding his own jacket and tossing it somewhere into the darkness he peered around the living space. It was a bit dark and dingy for his tastes - certainly a lot different to what he was used to - but since he wasn't going to be spending much time there it wasn't such an enormous deal. "When you said earlier we were slumming it I thought you were joking."
Calliope put her padd down and sprang up to catch Lance in a hug, though she was a little more enthusiastic with her right arm than her left, letting the left arm to list away from any contact against the forearm, which, for an otherwise enthusiastic hug had something of the almost delicate effect of holding your pinky out at tea. She buried her face against his chest and sighed, a long sigh, a contented sigh. "I missed you." He smelled different. His uniform had picked up the odor of burnt out EPS units, fried nuero-gel, and soldering. She inhaled deeply again and laughed lightly. "You smell like work."
"That's a relief. There's any number of things I could smell like," he remarked, considering the unusual places his day had taken him. It was decidedly a different experience to be crawling around the innards of a broken-down starbase compared to the research labs on Earth.
"Have you eaten since breakfast?"
"I...can't remember," he admitted, looking over the boxes. "No tuna?" he asked, unable to hide his slight disappointment. His nose wrinkled a little as he picked up another box and gave it a light shake.
"No, they're roast beef. I can go back for tuna though, if you'd like."
Lance just gave out a very clear sigh but shook his head. Too much effort.
She sat down, cross-legged at the coffee table where she'd spread everything, re-settling herself with support from her good arm while trying not jog the left one. "I've been working on this, I think I found some solutions for restructuring the team leads. I know I promised to connect with you about it earlier, but everything was pretty packed with meetings and introductory tours this afternoon."
Although he was listening to her speak, he was noticing her posture. "What's wrong?" he asked, virtually ignoring any other side of the conversation.
"What's wrong!" Misunderstanding his meaning, she tilted her chin back and rolled her eyes. "My, if that hasn't been the question of the day. I feel like I've been practically everywhere accounting for what's wrong."
His head angled a little. "Well, yes, but-"
"Well—" Calliope continued, "You already well know, over ninty-percent of the base is offline. No one knows what rats nest of problems awaits in all of the offline decks. Do you know there was a riot in Security? Yeah, a whole gang of pirates had gotten taken in just before the Void Event, and they broke out with a whole bunch of other convicts and made their escape during the evacuation. Tore the place up! They've been at large all this time. Nuts, right? We've got shuttle bays blown out, which is wrecking havoc with receiving personnel and supplies in traditional means. We've had to arrange site to site beam ins for everything. Personnel... They're coming in which is wonderful, but the assignments are too rushed— you've already seen the results of that. It would be better if they would twiddle their thumbs safely and wait for proper team assignments, rather than having been cycled at random right into the work and causing setbacks. Well, I'm fixing that right now," Calliope tapped the padd. "We're probably getting a boatload of Marines in to assist, which we all know is an integration nightmare, but we're crossing our fingers hoping it works out for the best. I'm advocating for it anyway, so I can't complain. I have to advocate for it, because while we're puzzling ourselves back together within this hull, we really don't know what to expect from outside. We may need the muscle. I've been doing my best to refresh on the regional politics and conditions. So many factions, renegades, pirates, old enemies, potential new ones, politics blowing hot and cold—" She paused to take a bite of her sandwich, managing it one handed while she kept her left arm curled against her shoulder.
"Your arm doesn't look how it's supposed to look," he finally explained, pointing as he took a bite of the sandwich.
"Huh? Oh." Calliope realized she'd been holding it sort of loosely in the air in front of her chest, avoiding touching it to anything. How could he even tell? "I um. I got spooked in a dark corridor. Fell on it." She explained briefly.
"You should see a doctor about it," he said flatly. He wasn't a doctor himself. Medical things weren't his area, so there was little point in doing a home-assessment. "You can't very well fix all of those problems without seeing to your own first."
"I've been to see the CMO. She gave me some painkillers, did some work on the muscles I pulled and told me to ice it and be 'mindful'." Calliope bit into her sandwich and chewed a little aggressively. Around a mouthful of sandwich she griped to herself. "...Self Manage. How am I supposed to...."
Lance frowned a little bit at the notion that she was merely prescribed painkillers. As an engineer his natural mindset was 'fix the problem, not the symptoms', but that was his logical brain's way of thinking. Not one of those nicey-nicey medical-types. "You could start by taking it easy, as the doctor suggested," he noted. His tone was just about caring, although it did border on the mildly annoyed end of the spectrum. He shook his head a little, discarding his sandwich for a moment before he moved around behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders gently. Moving his fingers across her collarbone and traps, he started to work through the tension there.
"Oh, you don't have to—" but she abandoned her protest when something popped into place in her left shoulder, instead, leaning into the massage and foregoing the remainder of her own meal. How did he do that? He'd dropped everything, travelled out from Earth in rush that very morning, and worked back to back shifts repairing fusion cores and still set her to rights even yet? "I feel like...." Calliope started, trying to think of a metaphor Lance might appreciate. "Like there are more variables than there is formula in this entire scenario."
"Well that would be frankly impossible without breaking the very idea of the formula itself. Mathematically speaking there's no..."
Calliope reached her good hand over her shoulder to pat him on the wrist, drawing her lips in to contain a chuckle as she anticipated further explanation.
"You didn't mean literally." It took him a few moments to register.
"Not literally." Regarding him, she turned around, the both of them sitting on the floor in the dim light from the table behind them.
"Ah, I see. Well, a formula doesn't always balance. Certainly not in the way one would expect, at least. Some mathematicians take years, decades even, to balance them properly. Which, I suppose, is not what you want to hear right now."
"It will take time to find our feet? I think that's just the thing I need to hear, actually." She looked into his eyes and then away again. Calliope's averted gaze fell on the glint of light reflected from the last remaining hypospray cartridges on the vanity counter. Even with their prolonged separation and reuniting, would Lance have been this attentive after such a long day if she hadn't missed her dose during the shuttle ride that morning? She would have taken a late dose in the afternoon, but for how precious every remaining fraction of a cc actually had become since Dr. Mazur's pronouncement against the drug. She had to skip, take partial doses, and stretch it out until she could find anther way to secure a supply. Not forever. Just temporarily, until she could find an alternative to it. She knew people and she had channels; she could source just about anything, after all, when she put some creative effort into the problem. In the meantime, if her pheromones were on the rise, what could it hurt to appreciate some of the best of the effects?
"I am glad," he said softly, gazing at her immaculate skin, her beautiful eyes. It wasn't difficult to remember why he had fallen in love with the woman all those years ago. Perhaps absence made his heart grow fonder indeed. "If you're finished with the sandwiches, perhaps we should retire. You must be exhausted."
"Not particularly..."Calliope kissed him like she'd longed to when she'd first seen him in the lounge that morning when protocol had restrained her. When she broke away again, she shifted herself to stand and went to the tripping-hazard crate where she produced the bed sheets in her arms. "But I'm thinking you're right. Help me make the bed?"
"Lead the way, Commander Zahn," he said, bowing a little in mock deference.
