Buddies
Posted on Thu Mar 9th, 2023 @ 9:53am by Commodore Jacob Kane & Lieutenant Alexis Ryan
Mission:
In Dreams
Location: In Dreams
Timeline: In Dreams
2276 words - 4.6 OF Standard Post Measure
Movie night felt like it should have been a regular thing. The fact that it wasn't seemed to be a gaping void in the weekly schedule.
Sprawled across a wide sofa with a thick knitted blanket and an oversized bowl of popcorn nuzzled into a space in the middle, Kane and Alexis had plenty of room to stretch out on all sides. It was one of the reasons why nobody else ever got invited; they'd have to give up some of the space.
"So it's a buddy cop drama at its core," he explained, motioning to the screen. "One grizzled veteran with a chip on his shoulder, and a young up-and-coming genius kid that doesn't have the street smarts." He glanced over. "Kind of like us, in some ways."
"Oh, I don't know," a reply came from somewhere beneath its own portion of blanket. "You're not that naive." A hand snaked its way towards the popcorn and, before helping itself, tossed a single kernel at him. "And since when have you been a genius?" It was an intentional misconstruing of his meaning, a reversal of the reflected portrayals, perhaps as a protest to being aligned with a character without 'street smarts'. It was a hell of a thing to say to an ex-child terrorist.
"You know what they say - geniuses are never truly appreciated in their own time," he retorted, ignoring the thrown popcorn. "Just like the movie. It was supposedly a bit of a bomb." His eyes went distant for a moment when he said the word. Bomb.
The silence from the other end of the couch wasn't brittle, nor was it the result of any undue awkwardness. Neither was it a demonstration of ignorance, however, the implications of the reference all too obvious to the scientist who spent her life creating patterns and sequences, which was all behaviour was when you really boiled it right down. It more closely resembled a simple courtesy, the provision of a space for the connection to exist without any pressure or expectation around unpacking it further. Pressing him for details didn't work anyway, and forcing him to retreat further wasn't going to help either.
Reaching across, Alex handed him the remote. The proverbial olive branch. A sacrifice and a gesture. I'm here if you want to talk.
He zoned back into the room as the remote landed in his palm. His face returned to normal as he glanced over. "So, how do you feel about big government conspiracies, rogue cops breaking all the rules and taking the law into their own hands? Is that something Alexis Ryan can get behind?"
"Sounds implausible." This time, the hand didn't beat around the bush and simply pulled the popcorn within range for permanent foraging. "Unless you're genuinely lauding it up over a movie that has 15 minutes of action and 2 remaining hours of judicial butchery." She'd give him that much to bounce off.
"Do I strike you as the sort of person that would subject you to that?" he asked, after a beat adding, "Don't answer that." He leaned over and grabbed a few kernels for himself. "I'd take a political thriller, sure, but the endless back-and-forthing? Too slow. Much prefer it when the hero shoots himself out of a bad spot."
"Just as long as the hero doesn't shoot himself." Digging her heels into the cushion, Alexis pushed herself up a little, groaning a little from the protest of sore muscles in doing so, and emerged from her huddle to an upright position that gave her a better view.
"The heroes in these old movies would get shot a dozen times and still somehow manage to walk it off. Probably in front of a huge explosion," he responded philosophically. "Then again, I guess that's why they're heroes and why we're not."
"Speak for yourself." It was a correction that only passed scrutiny because of how unlikely it was to be a legitimate boast. There had been too many opportunities in Alex's life for her to see first-hand what happened to so-called heroes. It was no accident that the title was mostly bestowed posthumously.
"Oh, so you're the hero now?" he asked, amused by that statement. "Now I'm trying to imagine you rushing into a burning building to save some trapped children. Or taking down a ruthless gang in a skyscraper all by yourself..." He shrugged with a sly grin forming. "Now that you mention it, I think I could picture that."
She looked across at him then, the first direct eye contact she'd initiated and held since he'd returned to the couch bearing popcorn. As a veneer, her eyes held a glaze of amusement, but it didn't take a very in depth scrutiny to realise something far more thoughtful lurked beneath. Her eyebrows flicked upwards and she hunched a shoulder. "We save who we can, right?"
"We're not the heroes," he reiterated, the humour no longer there. "The ones we left behind are."
Several slow nods punctuated the redhead's agreement. "Yep." Alex's gaze wandered back towards the screen but her thoughts didn't tune immediately back in to the plot. Despite the fact that he was only a little over an arm-span away, there was a pervasive sense of an unbreachable chasm that left her feeling exposed and isolated on a ledge with no escape points.
And no way of reaching him if he needed her to.
"I'd come back for you though," Alex promised without capacity to guarantee, her eyes still fixed on the moving pictures she was barely noticing. "We've got enough heroes already."
"Come back for me?" he side-eyed her, the faintest smirk back on his face. "If it ever comes to it, I'm going down fighting. Might not end up being heroic, but damn it'll be glorious. And maybe they'll make a movie out of it one day."
"Then I'll come back for your pieces," came the glib response, wry with a certain degree of acceptance that the situation was far more likely than any other. Eyes glued to the screen, Alex continued the charade of following along, more invested in personal recollection than a director's interpretation of partnership. You didn't get far as a soldier without having others to watch your back, it was something you learnt early and it shaped the way you viewed your own contribution. There wasn't a lot of room for cowards, even less room for glory seekers, and being forced to leave someone behind was something that stayed with you a lifetime.
A thumbnail worried the label on the side of her bottle, picked up in an outstretched hand from the coffee table in front.
"You want your action figure to have hair or...?"
Staring straight ahead, unflinching, she didn't even grin.
Again, the side-eye flashed her way.
"I haven't had hair since I was twenty-two," he retorted. "You don't even know what colour it would be. Could have been the same as yours. Only with a lot more grey..."
"You have eyebrows," Alex pointed out dryly. "Unless you've taken to tinting them, I think we can safely say you've not endured a lifetime of only being able to tolerate direct sunlight an hour either side of dawn and dusk." It was a somewhat unfounded gripe, since she was hardly as pale as some with her particular colour palate. She certainly didn't tan much though, and refused discussions that lead to disclosure of freckles.
"Okay, smart ass. Watch the damn movie," he snarked. After a few moments, he added, "There's a planet in the Sigma Draconis system where they think red hair is the sign of some sort of demonic possession."
"There are folk stories my ancestors used to tell about bald men stealing children from their beds," came the immediate quip back, though Alex was dutifully watching the damn movie and didn't so much as glance sideways. "Or it might have been goats." Despite a general reasonableness to any suspicion, it wasn't obvious or not if she was just making it up.
"Goats stealing children from their beds definitely sounds like a folk story," Kane replied, aware of the alternative interpretation of how she had phrased it. As silence fell for a few moments as the film built some tension, he stole the smallest of glances at Alexis. "Did you ever want children?"
"God, did I really get old enough for past tense?" Time was ticking certainly but surely the sail was still visible on the horizon. Alex frowned at the television, once again not properly absorbing the plot because the stories unravelling in her head were far too distracting. "Having children comes with certain adjustments, I guess. And then there are the events and circumstances leading up to having them." Relationships were hard enough to make work when your potential workplace was an entire quadrant. "I wouldn't hate being a mother," she eventually conceded. "I just don't know if I'd be a good one."
"I hear that kind of thinking is pretty-much a prerequisite," he acknowledged. "For what it's worth, I think you'd be successful."
It was a compliment of sorts, which was rare enough for some consideration, though it was more the impetus behind the question in the first place that had Alex looking across to pick his expression to pieces. "What about you?," she eventually asked.
"Me? No. That's never even really been a question for me. Out of choice, mind." He shook his head, eyes on the screen. "Far too busy fixing the universe." That was a limited - and lame - reasoning. In truth he wasn't sure he even liked children below a certain age. Not from fear, just a simple desire to avoid child-like activities. He'd grown out of it at an early age.
"Forever the least favourite uncle," Alex teased, allowing a grin to break through her curiosity. It had been an odd question, seemingly without context, but nothing was ever accidental where Jacob was concerned. "You might surprise yourself," she eventually said. "I've heard it's different when they're your own."
"Be that as it may, Athena comes first." He finally drifted his eyes back towards her. "Thankfully, a starship is incredibly difficult to impregnate, and I don't want to even imagine anyone who might think about trying..."
"If anyone has the capacity to recruit someone who'd consider it, you seem to have a knack," Alex pointed out. Athena had its share of officers where the Science Chief hadn't quite figured out how they'd got past Jacob's screening. "If it's any consolation, I don't think I'll be requesting maternity leave in the near future, unless you count thousands upon thousands of tiny little baby code strings."
"With the amount of over-complex interpersonal relationships that seem to be plaguing my junior officers, I'll take it," he noted in return. "If you can write a program that'll stop the ship turning into the fleet's loveboat, it might help save my reputation as a hard-ass."
"So we're adding 'perform miracles' to my list of responsibilities now?" The Lieutenant's tone was dry but not unsympathetic. There was an eagerness amongst at least some of the crew that Alex couldn't relate to, finding herself far more in Kane's camp when it came to mixing the complexities of romance and relationships into her career. "I was more hoping that you'd set a strong example already." She threw a piece of popcorn as an attempt to aim for his mouth. "One where I don't need to be terrified that acknowledging good work is going to be misconstrued as personal interest. Why do people do that anyway?" Alex sounded genuinely baffled. "It's like they've never heard of the possibility of platonic admiration."
Plucking up the fallen popcorn, Kane dropped it into his mouth. "If you start telling me you think movie night is going to turn into us jumping in the sack together, you can find someone else to teach you about the classics of Earth cinema," he retorted. "But at least I know you admire me."
"I'm not in danger of telling you anything about sacks, but I'd place a hefty wager on it doing the rounds below decks as speculation." Alex had considered hurling a cushion at him but that would involve surrendering one and, having secured about three-quarters of all available cushions, she wasn't quite ready to give any up. "Boy would they be disappointed to know the truth. Especially the bit where you normally fall asleep before the end."
"If that gets out I'll have you shipped to Starbase 80 faster than you you can say 'sacked'," he chastised. "I'm content for my own time to remain my own. Mysterious, and the subject of many rumours."
"Too busy working to gossip about you, Captain. Your secrets are safe here." A loud increase in the volume of the music on screen caught Alex by surprise and, with the squinting wince of one trying to decide if something was obnoxious enough, she reached across the divide between them to clink her beer bottle against his. "And there's your cue." Glancing sideways, Alexis winked. "Sweet dreams, Jacob."
"Captain Kane?"
He woke with a sharp intake of breath and blinked. He'd been dozing in the small containment cell, he quickly realised. Back to reality. Kane rubbed his eyes, cursing himself for feeling so groggy and off-guard in that moment. He'd been dreaming about...what was it?
"Your counsel is here..."
He didn't have time to think about dreams. He rose to his feet, stretched, and waited to see what Starfleet had sent him.
