It Really WASN'T A Booty Call
Posted on Mon Dec 9th, 2024 @ 12:04am by Ensign Kateyo Fenn & Ensign Vivienne Conrad
Mission:
Character Development
Location: Conrad's Quarters, USS Athena
Timeline: The morning after: "This Is NOT A Booty Call"
2424 words - 4.8 OF Standard Post Measure
Teyo wrapped his arms around his body, doing his best to keep himself warm. A moment ago, the skies had been clear; not a single cloud covered the sun. The temperature had been a glorious 34C, and the various sea birds had been enjoying their afternoon flight right above his head. The purple sea, which had been calm and had been lapping around his bare feet, was now choppy and aggressive. Thick dark clouds threatened the sky, covering the sun and also the heat. An angry gust of sea air, which had before been a comforting breeze, was now ready to take him out with the tide.
The Trill thought about leaving, he wanted to, but he was somehow rooted to the spot. The beachgoers had all gone, surrendering their picnics and perfect day to the oncoming storm. As the ground rumbled with thunder, he knew the storm was here for him. The wind danced around him, getting faster and faster to a tempo he couldn’t hear. The air around him buzzed with electricity and excitement -- or was that fear? It’s just a storm he thought to himself, there’s nothing to be afraid of. He tried to move again, willing his legs to obey the commands of his brain, but the more he tried the further they rebelled. The water around them became darker and darker until he could no longer see beyond its surface. His heart began to race, matching the rhythm of the crashing waves. Thud! Thud! Thud! It’s just a storm, it’s just a storm, he reminded himself but that didn’t calm his beating heart or the foreboding environment.
As the sky grew darker and the storm raged on, Teyo was certain that he could make out a figure standing in the water. No not standing in the water, rather on the water, as though floating through it, ghostlike. He couldn’t make out the stranger’s features but he knew them somehow. He willed his eyes and his legs to work properly; one to see better the other to move him closer. They both refused. As the shadowed figure moved closer it somehow became more out of focus. The visual illusion hurt his brain as it refused to believe the visual information its eyes were gathering. Within a heartbeat, the figure was close enough to touch the Trill and it reached out to do so. “Kateyo Fenn!” The Shadow said in its nondescript voice.
Teyo flinched. He tried to step away but the dark waters held him in place stronger than ever before. As the hand made contact, he felt a cold chill run through his body. “What the f-”
Teyo woke with a start, his eyes snapping open and immediately flooded with lights brighter than he was used to. He closed them again as he tried to hold on to the dream that was slipping away like sand through the gaps between little hands. As the dream world faded reality poked at his consciousness, alerting him to surroundings he wasn't too familiar with. Or maybe he was. He had been here before, something about that brand of shampoo and the lumpiness of whatever he was lying on. Slowly he opened his eyes, giving his pupils a chance to constrict back to a size that wouldn't overwhelm him. As they did so he suddenly became aware that he wasn't alone in the room and suddenly things started to make sense.
"Viv?" He asked croakily. "What are you doing here?"
"Pretty sure I live here, last I checked."
In a cruel twist that proved fate was a fickle bitch, Vivienne had rolled out of bed reasonably sure she looked about as trashed as Fenn ought to. There had been no miraculous descent into blissful sleep as a result of the Trill's blundering arrival, the insomnia that had kept her up long enough to let him in had continued to flaunt its control for the scant few hours she'd confined herself to her bedroom. By the time the chronometer had ticked over to a time somewhat in the vicinity of her usual alarm, Vivienne had been left with the only silver lining being the fact that it was unlikely her guest had asphyxiated on his own nausea overnight because she was very sure she'd have been awake enough to hear it.
Opting to take her shower before fronting up to whatever Fenn's repercussions were going to be hadn't helped much. Clad only in her uniform pants and the black tank she wore beneath the jacket, her hair pinned up as a maelstrom of tousled curls, Vivienne stood where she had taken up residence for the past few minutes, hands glued to the sides of a steaming hot black coffee as she listened to the ramblings of a sleeping man. The set-up she'd arranged last night was undisturbed, and so rather than dwell on his disorientation, she hid her own headache behind a frown and nodded towards the glass of faintly-mauve liquid.
"Might want to try downing that before you try to make sense of anything."
Teyo propped himself up on one elbow and then regretted his decision when the world around him started to spin. He allowed himself to flop back on the sofa and stared at a single point on the ceiling until he no longer detected movement and his stomach stopped churning. Slowly he moved back into a sitting position, very, very slowly. The last thing he wanted was to spill the contents of his insides right in front of Conrad. No amount of cleaning and apologising would ever make her forgive him for such an act.
"What am I doing here?" He asked tentatively, doing his best to make no sudden movements with his head or his eyes. "And what is that?" He asked, semi-pointing to the glass but giving up halfway through.
"Several decades of morning-after remedies distilled in powdered form." A slurp of coffee allowed a moment for that to sink in before Vivienne clarified. "You've had it before," she reminded him. "And at this rate, you're going to flatten my supply."
Without moving too far, the bleary-eyed engineer leaned her hip against the small dining table and rubbed the heel of her hand against her eye in an attempt to clear her own tension. "And I think what you're doing here is narrowly avoiding alcohol poisoning." Squinting through her efforts, Vivienne considered Fenn's rather grey features and cocked an eyebrow. "What's the last thing you remember?"
"The last thing I remember?" Teyo repeated in a hollow voice. The last thing he remembered was standing in the middle of a stormy beach, unable to move as a shadowy figure approached him. But that was just a dream... or was it? He had been drinking in the holodeck at some point right? Maybe that had been a part of the dream too or maybe it had all happened? "We had a party," he said thinking hard about the previous night's events. "There were snacks and music, I think."
Had he been just a smidgen less pathetic-looking, Vivienne might have attempted a retort a little more on the spiky side than what she eventually conceded was the more sympathetic. Fenn, for once, wasn't responsible for her mood in any case and was about to owe her a large enough favour to make a degree of leniency worth it. With a single huff of laughter, she fixed him with a pointed look tinged with amusement. "You'd had just about all the festivities you could stomach by the time you fell in my door. Far as I can tell, you did most of your celebrating with a single-malt and the voices in your head."
"Urgh," Was all Teyo managed to say, as the memory of the whiskey made an unwelcomed appearance in his mind. Taking a few deep breaths he moved slowly towards the drink Viv had placed out for him and took a tight hold of it. Just like in his dream, he was unsure how well his body was going to obey his commands and spilling the purple water was not an option. Purple water, just like on Trill, just like in his dream. He shuddered slightly as his arms prickled with goosebumps. Slowly he gulped the drink. "Thanks," he said once the glass was half empty. "Apparently this is our new routine," he added trying to inject some humour into the room. "What voices?" He asked, her words only just dawning on him.
It took only a moment's hesitation to make sure the liquid remedy stayed down before Vivienne pushed away from the table to plant herself on the arm of the closest sofa chair. Shrewd eyes only partially obscured by fatigue studied Fenn's features for a moment and, seemingly satisfied that he'd probably survive even if he was in for a few more hours of wishing he hadn't, she settled in with a hunch of her shoulder. "You tell me. Apparently they have lofty aspirations, which could be leading to some disappointment at the moment." Viv paused before adding with her usual candour, "You look like shit."
"Thanks," Teyo replied sarcastically, though he was unable to keep the smile from his face. "You're not looking too hot either," he replied in kind. "I hope I didn't keep you up too late." He drank the rest of his drink in silent thought. He was feeling guilty over disrupting Viv's sleep but also he was trying to ponder his mumblings from the night before. The words held no weight to his conscious mind, maybe having a clearer head would help. "Did I say anything else?" He finally asked.
Much like Fenn, Conrad didn't seem to take offense and opted for the curl of a partial-smirk behind an amused scoff rather than rolling her eyes. "Not only did you not wake me up, you didn't keep me up. I'd say you managed about ten minutes worth of rambling about the voices in your head wanting you to win Man of the Year before you passed out on me." She held up a hand in mock reassurance. "It's okay though, because it wasn't a booty call." Already, the gleam in her eyes toyed with him, a little more muted by the glassy sheen of fatigue but reminiscent, at least, of one of Vivienne's better moods. "You made that quite clear."
Teyo buried his face in his hands and would have blushed had he been able to. He forgot he was holding the glass and it slipped out of his grip and fell onto the plump sofa. Luckily it was virtually empty but he quickly scooped it up before the remaining purple liquid drained out and stained the fabric. He ran a palm over the spot to double check it was dry and thankfully it was. "I only said that so that you would let me in," he eventually said, not risking meeting her eye. The truth was he didn't remember saying that but that was the only reason he could imagine those words would have tumbled out of his mouth.
The slight arch of a sceptical eyebrow did the bulk of the work in expressing Vivienne's difficulty in imaging any circumstance where a drunk Kateyo Fenn opted for manners over blatant suggestion. His clumsiness was likewise out-of-character, however, no matter the current level of reasonableness behind it, and if Conrad hadn't prided herself on being observant enough to know better, she might have sworn he was embarrassed. Either he expected her to be insulted by being shoved into the platonic no-score zone or he was equally as surprised to find out that it took a whole bottle of brandy, on top of a bottle of whiskey, to unearth his sense of decency.
"I don't think you could have found your own ass let alone bothered anyone else's," she eventually replied, in a tone that was far more lenient than the words themselves permitted. "I don't know much about these voices you claim to be missing but I will say, having seen you in action without a blood-alcohol reading that would have floored most humans, you seemed..." Vivienne squinted as she searched for the right word. "Lost."
Pushing herself off the chair, she added, "Which is incidentally what'll happen to your career if you turn up for next shift looking like that. Sit down," she held up a hand in anticipation of his panic. "I already switched myself to first change-over, you need to sleep."
"Thanks," Teyo replied as a wave of relief washed over him. He knew that a few hours of more sleep would do him the world of good and he appreciated that she would do that for him. She had described him as being lost and that was exactly how he felt. The Q experience had fogged his brain and he wasn't sure how to move past it. Drinking didn't help, in fact, it had caused his emotions to leak out of him like a ruptured coolant tank. He wanted to get his head back in the game, he needed to.
He eventually looked back up at Viv, his signature toothy grin masking his inner turmoil. "So which way is the bedroom?"
A well-aimed cushion scruffed from the nearby chair hit its target unapologetically between the eyes. Despite the physical assault, Vivienne smirked in an effort to contain her amusement and pointed a finger-gun as backup. "There's not enough whiskey in the quadrant to earn you that amount of sympathy. Couch or floor, your choice," she added, moving towards the bathroom to finish getting ready. "Keep your barf out of my bedsheets."
Teyo smiled as he rubbed his nose where the cushion had hit him. He contemplated if he should throw caution to the wind and just climb into her bed anyway but decided against it. She had been good to him, last night and this morning, and annoying her further wasn't the way to repay her. I'm gonna have to repay her he thought as he slowly swung his legs back onto the sofa and threw his head back. Thoughts of the previous night's events and garbled dreams floated in his mind but were quickly replaced with whiskey purchases and storage fee calculations. "I'm gonna need a moon," he thought before drifting off.
