Out With the Old
Posted on 07 Dec 2023 @ 11:27pm by Commander Calliope Zahn
Edited on on 06 Feb 2024 @ 10:08pm
Mission:
M4 - Falling Out
Location: OC, Zahn's Quarters
Timeline: M4 D6 Late Afternoon
4191 words - 8.4 OF Standard Post Measure
Calliope stood back to take stock. Her new quarters were nice. Even if they weren't quite the family sized senior staff quarters with the extra office space and the big layout of her old quarters with Lance. But it wasn't as if they ever had or ever would have had anything like a party or a gathering in all that space anyway. Here there was a living space, somewhat trapezoidal, with a small table and four chairs beside the replicator. She could make out a sitting room with the holoprojector hidden in a display case. It was hard to think of the space as very big right then, but she knew it was only because the room was cluttered with all of the moving crates stacked around the furnishings.
Her first thought was to leave everything packed. Likely after a few spins out on the Pathfinder's local patrol, she'd have to pack up for a new assignment anyway. She'd even have separate quarters on the Pathfinder and could leave this place practically as it was now. But as Calliope replicated a hot tea, she started to locate her essentials anyway— just her makeup kit and her overnight bag. Then it was her supplement case. Her healing light emitters. Wrist and ankle weights. Yoga mat. The massage rollers... As she sifted and pulled out what she immediately needed, she kept thinking of something else she wanted to lay hands on. Calliope read the rest of the crate labels that Rhian had made. Dining ware. Downstairs closet. Shoes. Clothing. Craft Supplies. Bedding and Linens. Wall art. Accessories. Bric-a-brac. Personal care. Games. Display case. Memorabilia.
Wanting her favorite work out clothes, the neon ones to pair with her darker contrasting pullover, Calliope broke the seal on the clothing bin. The neon orange, electric blue, and hot magenta of the sets she wanted were immediately identifiable and she snatched them out at a glance, draping them over a chair. On the one hand, neon drew attention, but by the same token the hot colors also made her green skin seem dull and 'normal' as a human-like complexion by comparison. Instead of innocently and reflexively registering, 'oh, she's green', she imagined people thinking, 'wow, those clothes are loud'. And for some reason that just seemed amusing to her. She pulled out the athletically striped jogging pants that went with them. That was all she had been intentionally looking for in that bin, and yet... she discovered she couldn't help but sift the rest of the container.
She hadn't intended to go through anything in the room beyond just picking out what she needed. But what the hell. It was open anyway. Balancing her mug of tea to the side in one hand, she stuck her other arm in up to the elbow and started lifting out other outfits.
Inside was everything she had pulled from her storage drawers and bedroom closet. While her uniforms were pre-replicated to spec, many of her off duty outfits were genuine items gathered from interstellar travels. The Bajoran silk blouse came out first. It had been hands down her favorite piece. But Lance had bought it for her. She'd always suspected he'd likely just given her measurement scans to a girl at the counter and told her to pick a color that went with an Orion complexion. It was a smart move. Lance had always studied her to figure out what she liked or gravitated towards and then followed up accordingly. With his powers of observation, a good memory, and the capacity to write off credits as tips to sales associates, Lance had always been a talented gift giver.
The silk of the Bajoran blouse was handspun, and had the imperfections in the cloth to prove it, tiny little joins and burls in the thread that made it one of a kind. It was mostly a dull shade of warm tan, but there was a faint shimmer in the thread that occurred with a trick of the light. It reminded her of the grain fields they had hiked over to watch the Bajoran sun set on Ghillibab Valley, on one of their earlier 'honeymoons'. She had had to insist on holding his hand to keep him from marching on like they were on some sort of a mission. She'd done most of the talking, but he warmed up as the fire in the sky was cooling. They kissed briefly while they sat on a split rail fence of which Lance hadn't been very fond of perching on. He'd insisted they turn back and not wait for the stars. It would be more difficult to find their way back in the dark. She'd acquiesced. He wasn't wrong, afterall. He was never wrong.
Setting her tea down, Calliope folded the silk blouse and set it to one side. The evening gown she had worn to the Grotto joined it without much thought. Then her favorite galaxy faded night club dress, too. Although she'd donned it for a few plainclothes away missions, she'd never actually worn it anywhere with Lance, but she'd imagined she would one day, and had been keeping it for the future possibility. That wasn't going to happen any more, and she knew that would always be an unfulfilled feeling that came along with the dress itself. She figured she could get a different one with similar effect, only a new one would be baggage free.
Next she laid hands on a silver and maroon woolen sweater she had bought while they were on a bicycle tour of the English countryside near his home. She started to put it on the pile she was letting go of, but then hugged it, breathing it in. She teased her fingers around the cuffs where she had worn the sweater in and smiled. She'd selected it since it looked vaguely like command red from that decade. At the time she'd been training in Operations, but still imagined one day climbing her way to a leadership role in the fleet and trading gold for red. And here she was, assignment uncertainty aside, wearing command red to work. She had made it. Because command was her dream.
Her hands going to her hips, she surveyed the room with new perspective. What was all of this she was putting off dealing with besides a bunch of executive shots to be called over things in her own domain? Under her own command? Calliope decided it was her sweater, and it didn't really evoke much to do with Lance. It went into a separate pile on one end of the sofa. To keep.
With the fear of facing tough decisions reduced to the idea that she could just make order out of this disaster of a situation, Calliope was free of emotionalism and honed in on the task at hand, almost in the same headspace as leading a team, or calling out the shots in a confrontation. She proceeded through the rest of the crate quickly, deciding what to save and what would be let go of. When she came to the floor of the box only a couple of minutes later, she started towards the replicator to be rid of an arm load of clothes but paused with a feeling of wastefulness. She turned back and forth in the room, seeking a solution for the problem.
When she was a kid, she recalled, she and her mother never replicated clothes. They couldn't afford the energy credits to wish new clothes out of the wall all of the time. Her favorite items she'd learned to mend, and if there was something they no longer wanted that still had some wear in it, they could donate or regift it. Most of the items she was getting rid of now were in nearly mint condition, or very vintage, or really pricey authentic pieces from special destination trips all over the Federation... There was some value to them, even if she had purposed that they no longer had value to her.
Calliope kicked a small crate of shoes over and emptied it, then repurposed the bin, marking it "Trade at Pog's". That was that little secondhand goods place she had passed near the Casino. They might take some of it. If not, she could still absolve her conscience and say she tried while she dematerialized all of it. Folding them mechanically like she was packing her Academy bag for inspection, she put the unwanted clothes into the newly marked bin, then sorted the shoes she'd dumped and put a few lesser loved pairs of sandals and heels on top of everything else. The box was overfull and couldn't close. With a sense of accomplishment she set it next to the door, divorced from her conscience and ready to release back into the universe, then turned with her shoulders back to face the rest.
"Who's next?" she laughed, twirling the marker.
It was such a charge that she went through a few more boxes of possessions, continuing a streak of choices to cut out of her life. To her relief, it wasn't sour in the pit of her stomach like she had imagined it would be to go through everything. Instead, it felt like the end to an emotional indigestion that she'd had for so long it had become her normal. That long ill feeling of denial dissipated every time she assembled another box that she really didn't want to take with her into the next stage of her life. Whatever stage this was.
As she sorted out what she didn't want to live with, she occasionally rescued for keeping a few favorite things that were beyond the necessities she had begun looking for. Such as her 'ugly' ceramic vase made by her mother, when they had traded the fruit of their labors in a community pottery class. Her fingers traced the initials HZ carved into the foot. It made sense to have been on top of the bin she found it in. It was the last thing she had packed as she had fought over it with Lance while he tried to put it back on the shelf while telling her to stay. Calliope put it on the center shelf over the holo display unit, as if planting a flag on the moon, staking a claim. She lived here now.
Then she started another bin of travel tchotchkes to trade at Pog's Emporium. There were a few nice things she sifted out and put beside the vase, a pewter cast of a church on Altair IX. A snowglobe of a fictional wooly creature which she had traded for on Andoria. She gave it a shake and set it down. It played a dream-like march from the music box inside, activated by the agitation, while the synthetic wool of the creature swirled in the water inside, as if a strange windy vortex had kicked up. As it played on, she added to the display many interesting rocks and seashells she had found from every world she'd set foot on. Well. Most of them. Some she'd visited on an active mission and it just hadn't happened. Like Korix. Maybe she could get some of the inconsequential items from the space station signed out of collections. But as it was, there were too many rocks, shells, buttons, beads, toggles, chips, notions, and bits to sit on the shelf, anyway. She located a clear glass hurricane vase from another box, unwrapping it and setting it up to fill with her pocket finds.
That left room on the shelf for a few programmable photo display frames. She set up one that was already preloaded with her academy years. As it cycled through, she realized that it would also display the first selfies she had coaxed Lance to take with her. Sure enough one came up. The forced smile on his younger face looked more uncomfortable than she had remembered. There were holos from the dance she had dragged him to as well; he was looking uncomfortably away from the camera, like he wanted to be somewhere else. Those just weren't his kind of scenes. He was a little more natural in the images they took in the lab, but he still stood apart from his lab partners. They weren't friends. Back then, no one had been his friend. Calliope felt herself feeling sorry for him again, just like she had at the time. Something about that kid was still in the man she knew him as now. But she had to remind herself he wasn't exactly the same person as when she had met him. He was capable of reaching out to others and had a lot of respect in his circles. It was up to him to make his own way. There was nothing she needed to feel guilty about. She intentionally imagined the guilt as a puppet string he had so often played her by, even if subconsciously, and pictured herself trimming it away.
She turned over the frame and entered a "do not display" protocol for any image with Lance's likeness in it. Then she watched for a while at all the people and places cycling through. She knew from memory which ones it was skipping, so she added randomization to the display to try to trick herself, but sighed. It was still going to become a gaping part of her past. She took a moment to get another hot cup of tea, again replicating it without any fuss about tea needing to be 'properly made', like Lance would have insisted. She took a sip from the cup and enjoyed it just the same. Maybe she'd add Lance back to the photo rotations later, when it wasn't so fresh. Although it hurt somewhat, she could already imagine there would be a time in the not so distant future when it was hardly a thought at all. When she could just see that part of her life occasionally spent with someone that she used to know, and the ache would heal over with time.
At least the other display frames weren't going to be as problematic. One was childhood images. Another was early in her career. Since Lance had only been with her on vacations by then, the peas and the carrots of those parts of her life never touched. It only made her more certain of the fact that she had always lived alone anyway, just with the dream addendum of maybe one day having a married life. It wasn't that difficult to untangle at all. It had hardly ever affected the rest of her life, except in her own heart. And her heart felt lighter and lighter as she lifted those heavy expectations of the non existent future off of the crushed organ and let it pump for itself for a change.
Since all the vacation images with Lance were on a personal file in the computer, she took those particular display frames and erased the memory on them, pitching the formatted frames into the box to go to Pogs, too.
"The less to haul around, the better," she told herself, knowing that everything physical she kept she'd just have to move again or send to storage in a few weeks.
As the late afternoon wore into the evening wore into the night and she lost track of time, her possessions parted like the red sea before Moses; the stuff that mattered she kept on one wall and the stuff that no longer was to be part of her life was lining up at the door to leave.
It became more than just excising the memory of Lance. She began to curate herself as well. There were hobbies she wasn't going back to any time soon, and things that just came out of storage that had skipped nearly all of her adult life since signing up at academy. She'd simply never had it out of storage while she was on assignment until getting quarters on this very station. She halved her keeping pile in half again before she started to run out of steam. Anything she thought could be traded she put in the "To Pog's" pile, but much of it had only ever had personal value and not much more, so she started to put most of the clutter through the replicator and watch it disappear at the press of a button, the same as dirty dishes, or yesterday's dirty socks. Very little of it fit her anymore.
Calliope stood in the middle of the rearranged bins and boxes, with the labels re-marked. Having put the essentials where they belonged in drawers and cabinets and shelves, and shuffled the bins to be rid of into a narrow maze of pillars and piles by the door, the living space itself was much more visible now. Appreciating the hard won ground she had gained, Calliope spread out on the sofa between piles of things she had purposed to keep, and putting her feet up on the coffee table, crossing her ankles with satisfaction.
She was on something like her fourth cup of tea, and wasn't drinking so much as coddling it while she watched the random playback of photos on the frames she had put into the display shelf.
"Freeze frame one," she said out loud as one of her mother's selfies with her as a child came up in the rotation. Her mom was wearing her enlisted uniform, gold trimmed from the operational personnel department which managed the enlistment centers. The sky was full of trails of puffy clouds warmly colored by late afternoon sun filtering through them and Calliope was pulling the sunglasses off of her mother's face with her chubby toddler hands.
"Next frame in order," she said, anticipating the image she had long committed to memory, the one of her toddler self wearing the comically too big lenses she had stolen. Robbed of her fashionable eyewear, Heather Zahn's smiling eyes were visible in the follow on image as she laughed at little Calli's 'too cool' imitation of her.
Calliope smiled back at the past but couldn't help considering, as she often did when reflecting on her mother in particular, just how much her being born had changed the trajectory of her mother's whole career. Of her entire life. She'd left her career in space for a recruitment office job on a distant colony, to make a life just for her. For better or for worse, it had been her intention. And while Calliope had moved on, her mother had remained. Now that she was going through her own latest major life change, Calliope thought she probably owed her mom a call and something of an update.
Checking her cuff for the local time on Novex, Calliope decided it was early enough in her mother's time zone that she was probably still awake. She shook her hair out and double checked her reflection in some dark glass as she decided now was as good a time as any for a video chat. It wasn't like she was going to get much sleep anyway, and she felt as clear headed as ever on the tailwind of her progress.
She dialed up 'Mom' from her contacts on file and cast the call to her new holo display in the entertainment center.
While the subspace calling wait icon pulsed, Calliope pondered how her mom might react to the news of her filing for divorce. Not having any recent context at all, it would come more suddenly to her mom than to anyone else. And everyone found it sudden enough as it was. Her mother had always gushed over Lance, the few times she had met him. She'd said he was a real catch, classy, smart, handsome. On the other hand, her mother was one of the rare people that had also insisted that it was Lance who was marrying up. But it was her own mother, after all. Lance's family and social circle had found Heather Zahn even more distasteful than her daughter. Colonists of her ilk were loud, abrupt, uncouth, indelicate, lowbrow, common, and just generally not English by a furlong. Meanwhile, her mother had raved about the Quinns, their beautiful home, their lovely country, their wonderful accents, their art and traditions; they repaid the compliments by quietly expressing their distaste behind the back of the mother-of-the-bride at each event leading up to and even during the wedding and reception. At the time, Calliope had tried to forget the comments as quickly as she had overheard them whispered, but found fifteen years later she remembered them just the same. Calliope exhaled and let go of it all over again. No. As far as she was concerned, the Quinns didn't deserve them.
After a couple of minutes being shunted through various subspace redirects, the call on the holo display shifted to Novex Colony's communications grid and Calliope waited for her mother to answer. It buzzed repeatedly, and Calliope started to think she would be put through to leave a message, before her call was finally connected.
At first she thought it was a glitch and put her hand over her wrist to end the call. Everything had gone black and there was a lot of noise. But she realized after a split second that the noise was something like a crowded bar or restaurant or maybe a cheap club, with badly out of balance music playing; the bass was buzzing so terribly that even Calliope's teeth hurt from lightyears away. She felt a little dizzy as the holo image spun, a swirl of lights and reflections and unresolved figures actively overlapping. The comm unit must have been waving around too much for the holo to clear the projection. But it was trying.
"Mom?" Calliope quested uncertainly, putting her feet back on the floor and leaning forward as she tried to make out anything in the image.
A tinny version of her mothers voice was filtered by the computer, which was making its best attempt at differentiating Heather Zahn from the bar band in the subspace signal noise. "How come you don't gimme three for one. You know I ain't never cheated you, I'll make it worth the while, I put a special one aside, you gonna love. I know just the one. Gonna put the polish on real nice." Calliope wasn't sure what conversation she had called in the middle of, but all of a sudden she could see her mom's face, from below, where she was probably holding her comm from under the edge of the bar, leaning into it and avoiding whoever she was conversing with in order to answer her. "Baby dis a bad time, Mama's at work. Dis important?"
"Oh, uh, no it's fine." Calliope couldn't exactly say it wasn't important, but it wasn't pressing exactly either. She squinted, unsure she liked whatever scene her mother was in.
A gruff voice demanded, "Who's that you have on the line, Zahnie?" The sound made Calliope even more wary. That voice... as she tried to place it he continued with a bold guffaw that rumbled into a hacking cough. She caught him saying, "...there's another one, born to be in green! Too late to trade for her?"
"Oh my god, Mom!" Calliope was up off the sofa like a shot, her hands in her hair with the sudden realization. " Don't even! Are you getting drinks with ol' Fifteen'Cent?"
"Hm? Can't hear you, gotta speak up. Connection here be glitchin' on me."
"Sarge Tenpenny! Nick Tenpenny! What the hell does he want?"
Her mom bubbled an easy chuckle. "Aw. Never you mind, Baby girl. We jus' shootin the breeze."
"He's trying to get names from you!" That exact Marine recruiter was stationed in the center across the Plaza across from the General Starfleet one. He'd always been trying to steal recruits out from under Heather Zahn. Regardless of Calliope's own working respect for the SFMC, seeing her mother with Tenpenny was like watching her consort with the enemy.
"Uh unh. He ain't getting nothing from me I don't want him havin'.'" Calliope watched helplessly with an ick reflex as the comm was lifted over the bar and her mother and Sergeant Tenpenny were sitting shoulder to shoulder, half drunk and all but nuzzling as they held their cheap longneck bottles at lazy angles. There was more nauseating flirty laughter. From both of them.
Calliope covered her face and raked her fingers down over her cheeks. "Don't trade names with him! Oh my god, don't trade anything with Sarge Tenpenny! Mom, Mom listen to me—"
"Sorry baby," She blew a kiss at the comm. "I'll be catchin' up with you later. Lovin' you, Sweetheart."
"Bye, Sweetheart!" Tenpenny echoed with a smirk under his mustache, waving the ends of his fingers at her.
Calliope all but wretched as the holo switched off, leaving her mother's ugly ceramic vase behind it visible again. She turned her head up towards the ceiling and spat out reflexively, "Goddamned Marines!"
