The Past is in the Aft Torpedo Sights
Posted on 11 Sep 2023 @ 3:09pm by Commander Calliope Zahn & Captain Corvus DeHavilland
Edited on on 06 Feb 2024 @ 10:17pm
Mission:
M4 - Falling Out
Location: Obsidian Command, Promenade, The Dynasty
Timeline: M4 D1 Late Evening
2666 words - 5.3 OF Standard Post Measure
She knew she ought to be in bed. She knew she’d had a good night, a surprising one to say the least, but she couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t sleep until she scratched the itch and she knew that the replicator just wasn’t going to cut it. Earlier in the afternoon, she’d overhead Ensign Watterson and Petty Officer Vladivosk discussing a new restaurant on the promenade. Something to do with a Klingon and noodles. Corvus had brushed it off as uninteresting but vaguely remembered approving the request for the establishment. Something about the proprietor being someone of note in culinary circles and so it couldn't hurt to have a bit of additional draw to the civilian promenade.
What had drawn her attention to the conversation was the discussion of desserts. Corvus had a pretty big sweet tooth that she loved to indulge but did a good job of keeping caged. She’d made it all day without thinking of it again, but after another glass of wine and feeling charged from her flower delivery (and the note that came with) she decided she deserved to indulge herself. After checking that the place was still open, she dressed quickly in civilian clothes and headed out the door, dead set on something sweet.
At this later hour, the promenade was mostly dead. Most shops kept a standard schedule in line with the station's duty rotations. Only a few were open all hours outside of the station's dedicated mess facilities. So when Corvus finally found the noodle joint in question, she wasn’t stunned to see the place mostly deserted. Looking around the place hopefully, she walked to the little stand to ask for a table, but just as she was opening her mouth she saw a familiar face. Well. A familiar back of the head sitting at the bar top. Alone.
She felt that elation of having a guilty pleasure fade as she saw Calli and gave serious thought to just calling this adventure done and heading back home. Maybe there was an ice cream stall on the way. But just as she started to turn, she felt her conscious kicking her right in the head. With a sigh, she turned back and waved to the bar. “Can I just sit at the bar?” The Klingon at the seating booth just nodded and handed her a menu, so she walked in, walking to the bar and pulling up the stool next to Calli.
It did seem odd for Calli to be here by herself but there wasn’t a whole lot about Calli that made sense of late so she wrote that off as she sat down. Maybe some quiet time alone at a bar, enjoying a bowl of whatever deliciousness this place was supposed to have would go some ways to mending the relationship between them. So she sat down and opened her menu.
Calliope had been lost to the little world of the noodle bowl she was given, sampling a strand at a time. Trying a few little pippok beans. The flowers were salty, sweet... Although her crying had subsided, she still reflexively was sniffling and shuddering with little breaths. When someone sat down directly beside her, she straightened her posture and rubbed her eyes clear, before she realized who it was.
“Oh. Hey, Corvus. I, um…” Calliope brushed her pile of tissues further aside. “How’s…” She wasn’t sure what to ask. While she had been showing the Korinn delegates the station on and off, Corvus had probably been in meetings end to end since they had arrived. “How’s... everything?”
Corvus turned to smile back, her good mood still charging her up, but as she looked at Calli the smile faded almost instantly. Anyone could see that the woman had been crying, and knowing her as well as she did, she knew that something was very wrong. “Calli,” she breathed in alarm, reaching over and putting a hand on her shoulder, “What’s happened? What's wrong?”
“I just… don’t know. I don’t think…” Calliope tried to assemble a whole thought to fit what she knew in her heart now. She fidgeted with the chopsticks, unable to look at Corvus directly. “Remember how… When Quincy…” Calliope paused at the coincidence in the name of Corvus’ ex and Lance’s surname…. “When Quincy, just— it just all seemed suddenly obvious. Like… None of us knew anything, it came so suddenly, out of the blue what he was doing, and yet… It had been like that, basically the entire time?”
Quincy Masterson was not a subject that Corvus liked to think of regularly. For years she had walled herself up behind a bastion of work and purpose and never let anyone in. Yet. Somehow, Quincy had breached that wall and she’d given herself wholly to the idea of true love knowing no bounds - even those that she had built herself. She was in, wholeheartedly. So when that world came crashing down in a storm of infidelity that spanned the entire ship they worked on, it had come as a complete and utter shock. One day, she was happy as she had ever been and the literal next day she was at the lowest point possible.
“Yeah,” Corvus replied solemnly, feeling a familiar hurt return. It was a mere shadow of what it had been back on the Challenger when they’d last shared an assignment together, but it was still there. She doubted that it would ever really be gone.
“He… he even propositioned me once. I took it as a joke. That’s how willfully blind everyone was. When it all came out, I kept wondering if I should have said something. But what was it going to sound like, you know?” Like she’d solicited the flirting, probably. It wouldn’t have been the first time she’d been blamed for that sort of attention. Bringing it up would have just put a block up between her and Corvus at the time.
“I probably would have thought you were crazy. That you were just jealous Quincy was there and Lance wasn’t,” Corvus replied. “I didn’t see it…” she trailed off. “No one did.”
“I know it hurt, but… I was really relieved for you when he was drummed off the ship. When it was over.”
Corvus stared back at her old shipmate, “What are you saying, Calli?” she asked quietly.
“Lance… He didn’t pull a Quincy or anything. I just. I think it’s over. I think… I think it’s been over for a really long time. I think I’ve been willfully ignorant, because I liked that better.”
“What… made you come to this realization all of the sudden?” Corvus asked gently. “Because of… what happened on the Pathfinder?” she said cryptically, not daring to speak of it in the open as it didn’t ‘really happen’. While she had no love lost for Commander Quinn, it was a professional dislike, not the kind that reveled in watching his personal life come crashing down around his ears. Especially when it was going to cause a friend, distant as they may have been at the moment, pain.
Calliope nodded, taking up the chopsticks and picking at the noodles again, lifting and twisting them. “I just. After that it was impossible to play anything down anymore. I couldn’t keep excusing him. Not just professionally or socially like I have been. I mean, making excuses for him to myself even. You know: ‘He’s just like that,’ ‘he doesn’t mean it the way it seems,’ ‘brilliant people, they have their own internal pain and melancholy, and they need more understanding.’ That sort of thing.”
“For a… heartbeat of a moment, I considered that what I was being told about Quincy was just everyone else not understanding how he was. It took the cold reality of it to wash that out of my mind,” Corvus replied, “But I just assumed you and Lance had your own way of things. I’ve never pretended to understand how it worked. I didn’t know him. I still don’t.”
“In the academy, my friends called him my ‘theoretical boyfriend’, playing on his research study. That’s how rare it was that he came around. It wasn’t just you. No one I knew, knew Lance.”
“I had my own nickname in the Academy,” Corvus smirked, “So I didn’t put much stock on the ones everyone else was giving. Certainly not Lance’s,” she tried to offer reassuringly.
“For a hot minute, on the trip back, I thought maybe I could start over with Lance, in a sense. But I can’t. Or even… even if I could, it only works if I live in denial of what he really thinks of me. Nothing is going to change with him. Lance hates change. When I was younger, I thought I could make up the whole difference. But that was a dumb mistake on my part. I can’t be us without him.”
“I’m sorry, Calli,” Corvus offered genuinely. “I’m sorry that the reality of it all has to happen now. When you already have so much else on your mind,” she said, squeezing her friends shoulder as reassuringly as she could.
There was plenty complicated with the Pathfinder’s mission, but Calliope didn’t quite track what Corvus meant by the issue of timing. For Calliope, it was just reports and tours. Maybe Corvus was referring to the drain plug on her career. Calliope didn't want to muddy fresh waters opening that can of worms. “I’m sorry, you… obviously didn’t come down here to hear me pity warble. You were going to order something?”
She shrugged slightly, glancing at the menu. “I don’t mind listening,” she replied quietly. “It’s… kind of nice to talk to you and not argue,” she added, turning to the menu. “But I, uh, wouldn't say no to something sweet. I came here because I heard about a dessert they make here that’s apparently best in the quadrant,” she explained further, trying to find it on the menu and spotting it on the back at the bottom, “There,” she pointed, showing Calli.
At the bottom of the page, there was a sole feature which Calliope read out loud. “Sweet Taste of Victory: Blood-currant and lime sorbet bites in a candy shell, rolled in toasted and crushed Romulan topa nuts—” Before she came to the end of the description, Calliope had to giggle. “and served in an edible wafer boat.”
“Well that sounds divine,” Corvus smiled, waving for the waiter. “Two?” she asked Calli.
Before she could answer the waiter hurried over. Considering the lack of customers at the moment he was hardly busy. “Ma’am?” he asked.
“Two of these please and a glass off…” she trailed off, quickly consulting the drinks menu. “That,” she pointed, not trying to pronounce it. The description said sweet white wine. “Make that two as well,” she added with a smile.
“Coming up,” he nodded, then turned to put the order in.
“Everyone needs a treat now and then,” Corvus said, hoping the small gesture would improve her friend's mood. From what she’d remembered of her crash with Quincy, it was the simple things like this. The reminder of her humanity; that there was life beyond the heartache. Those were the things that kept her going in the early days.
Calliope slurped a noodle and then, while she was chewing, said through the corner of her mouth, “I guess I am already dressed up.”
“The way Ensign Watterson and Petty Officer Vladivosk were describing it, it’s supposed to be quite the experience,” Corvus offered, repeating what she’d heard that had ultimately driven her here. She didn’t want to make light of what Calli was going through but she thought she might approve of the change of topic. Something not distressing. Something focused on enjoyment and who didn’t enjoy a bit of dessert? “What is it you’ve got there?” she asked, looking over her soup. It didn’t seem quite like anything she’d seen before.
“Chef KevaQ made me some Lily drop soup.” She said, as though the gesture was more precious than latinum. “It’s an Orion dish.”
“Do you… know the Chef?” Corvus asked with a quizzical expression.
“He practically raised me! Do I know the chef…” Calliope repeated with a roll of her eyes, which became a head roll, lolling into her shoulders into a gesture manifesting in a complete lean over the counter. “Qevpob KevaQ!” Calliope shouted his name and title across the kitchen, beating her hands into the service bar suddenly, and feigning impatience through a grin. She remembered an episode of Take and Eat when KevaQ had explained that ‘honorable Klingons do not mutter. They make their demands known. Indifference is not a virtue. Either you want something, or you do not’.
“Vjlvjtlh!” came a barked reply from somewhere in the back, telling her to go ahead and speak up.
She leaned on both of her palms, her already low neckline plummeting, and bared her upper teeth. “Maj hoD naD yay, Hij chIS batlh!” Her pronunciation might have been poor, but her delivery carried like a Klingon. Our captain commands ‘Victory’. Delivered with honor.
“Nuqjatlh?” An aged, white-haired head lifted over the back counter in the kitchen, scowling. “Maj hoD?”
“hIja!”
He threw up his hands and grumbled. “Dutlhobqang'a'?” He asked, wondering why no one had told him sooner that they were waiting on the station Captain.
Calliope threw up her hands in return. “DaH jIQuch!” she said, conveying that she was telling him now, after all.
There was new activity in the kitchen as people shuffled and abandoned stations to converge with the chef who called out for “chenmoH! chIch chenmoH.” A lighter was found.
They formed a procession around one waiter who balanced the desserts arranged on a metal serving tray, and began a rousing round of, “meH QeyllS, meH yay!” The dessert bowls looked luscious, and then just as they set it out, a whoosh of flame moved like a fireball over the tray holding them. It lasted just long enough for the effect to lick colorfully and then leave the shells crisped and the dessert inside still cool.
Chef KevaQ remained as the rest of the kitchen crew dispersed. He was round in the belly and a greasy apron barely reached around his middle, the stitches in the sash strained mightily.
“Captain DeHavilland!” he said with a pleased chuckle while from behind the bar he brought up a two glasses and a tall bottle with a long neck and a bulb-like base form, and, resisting the urge to loosen the stopper with his teeth, instead observed Federation politeness and uncorked it with one of the cleaner corners of his apron. The plump depth of the wine bottle resounded back as the seal opened. He poured the glasses. “Welcome to the Dynasty.”
“Thank you,” Corvus grinned, “That was one hell of a welcome,” she added with a chuckle, taking the offering glass. “Welcome to Obsidian Command, Chef. Please. Have one with us?” she waved, suggesting he find a third glass.
KevaQ dragged a stool noisily across the deck and sat his creaking bones down, complying and filling a third glass with a satisfied sigh. “It has been a busy day,” he admitted. “Like the advance on Voh'Ragnar Seven, when the chronometers all froze and it was a fortnight before they realized they were fighting inside of a timeloop…”
Corvus raised her glass, “My Klingon’s pretty rusty, but I believe the proverb is: Stop talking! Drink!” she declared firmly, in her best imitation Klingon.
KevaQ raised his glass and drank to that.
