YE/D02 - Crew Mess

[Paul]

==

[Pax Cassidy]

<<<< Sickbay <<<<

The Crew Mess was quiet, though that wouldn’t last long. During times of stress, most humanoids enter a fight-or-flight state, suppressing their appetite. With the mission over, appetites would come roaring back, stronger than ever. Try as they might to temper them, even Starfleet officers couldn’t ignore their biological drives.

It wasn’t a proper meal time, but Cassidy was used to eating at strange hours throughout the day. He couldn’t remember a time in his childhood when his entire family had eaten together. As a doctor, he tended to take his breaks when he could get them. Even still, he preferred eating in the Mess Hall, rather than simply using the replicator in Sickbay. Medicine could be a surprisingly isolating profession. He wanted to spend time with the crew and get to know them outside of the exam room.

He sat at the table along the exterior edge of the dining area, facing the door. Behind him, the chaotic racetrack that was the Wairara system danced like a snow globe mid-shake. He’d replicated a plate of chilaquiles, piled as high as his head with fried eggs, shredded chicken, and hot salsa. Ever since he’d learned about the dish during his time at the academy, it had quickly become a fixture of any morning following a long night — and this mission had been one hell of a long night. The burns on his wrists and neck were red and irritated, and his metal spine felt exactly as heavy as it was.

Just as he prepared to dig in, the door to the mess slid open and Cassidy immediately forgot the pain of his injuries. For the second time that day, he was looking into the dark blue eyes of Ensign Elliot. An odd thought fluttered in his chest: was Elliot looking for him? He tamped the thought down, suddenly embarrassed, though he wasn’t sure why.

“Elliot! Good to see you again,” he said, his voice sounding steadier than he felt. He flashed a warm smile, that he hoped looked natural, and waved his cybernetic arm toward the open seat. “I’m happy to share if you want to pull up a seat.”

== Tag Elliot/anyone hungry ==

[Ian Elliot]

The young officer wasn’t sure what he expected when he walked into the Mess Hall. The med tech had told him to go here. They said he should go and eat. They had also greeted him by way of telling him ‘he’ wasn’t here. Ian wasn’t sure how the tech knew who Ian was looking for as his ulterior motive. So, still holding his toolkit, Ian walked into the Mess.

Almost immediately (or had he been blinded by nerves?), the person in question was waving, calling him over to share a table. His feet moved automatically, and though Ian could feel the movement of his legs, he couldn’t control them. Why was he walking over there? Did he really call him over? At the moment, Ian couldn’t even remember the man’s name, and was close to not being able to speak his own. “Ha – hi.” He stammered out, feeling the chair hit his butt.

His mouth hurt. Why did his mouth hurt? Oh. He was smiling. He was smiling really widely. He couldn’t seem to stop.

“How are you making out?” Ian wasn’t one-hundred percent sure what he was saying was even an understandable language. “After everything? That happened, I mean.”


==Tags!==

[Pax Cassidy]

Elliot’s beaming smile was dangerous. In this setting, there were precious few distractions to hide its effect on Cassidy. He felt himself being drawn in, as if gravity had suddenly shifted toward the other side of the table. How easy it would be to close the distance between them! His fingers flexed instinctively — an imagined touch. He’d made a mistake in overestimating his own restraint. Cassidy was no stranger to infatuation, but this was something else altogether. To anyone watching, he would have seemed fully enthralled by the conversation.

“How are you making out?” Ian asked tentatively, perhaps thrown by the intensity of Cassidy’s attention. “After everything? That happened, I mean.”

That was enough to knock Cassidy back to reality. His smile softened, a hint of regret creasing his brow. He’d lost patients before, but never his own crew. The seats around them seemed to grow emptier. Was it going to be like this every time? He shook his head and composed himself, not wanting to burden the young engineer.

“It was a tough one, but I’m proud of my crew. They stepped up today, even though none of us knew what we were in for,” he replied. It was a classic deflection, one that he’d employed many times in the wake of a tragedy — enough that he found himself doing it instinctively. It had the advantage of being completely true, which masked the non-answer at its core.

He glanced down at the toolkit that Elliot had brought along with him, having not noticed it before. Of course! The engineer had been looking for him, just not for the reason he’d hoped.

“Did Nurse Manx send you to take a look at my gear?” He asked guiltily. He held his cybernetic arm toward himself, inspecting it. The metal frame had survived the heat of the shuttle fire intact, though a few of the wires under the surface of his wrist had fused. The sensation was like a persistent tingling on the tips of his fingers. “You can take a look if you want. It’s a little tricky for me to mess with it myself.”

Cassidy stretched the heavy cyberware across the length of the table in a surprisingly casual gesture. Ordinarily, he would have felt some apprehension about letting someone tinker with his machinery, but somehow this felt natural.

== Tag Elliot ==

[Ian Elliot]

To answer the question that fell out of Ian’s mouth, the doctor looked somber. It stupidly occurred to Ian that it hadn’t just been the ship that was damaged; people had been hurt as well. Then he looked down, down to the table where Pax’s hands were, and saw that the man had experienced it first hand.

It took a concentrated effort for Ian to not focus on the burns, and dive down a rabbit hole of thoughts about what exactly happens to the skin when it’s burned by any number of specifically-burning things. His parents had wanted him to be a doctor. He was pre-med for a good minute before he realized that Engineering was his true passion. Medicine had been his formitive years, after all.

“It was a tough one,” came the reply, “but I’m proud of my crew. They stepped up today, even though none of us knew what we were in for.”

Ian nodded automatically in a show of understanding. Engineering was thrown one curveball after another, to the point where fastballs didn’t even exist any more. And then suddenly, without any warning (who needed warning?) the whole thing was done. But he didn’t know how or what to reply to Pax, and so he had nothing to say. He just sat in the moment, thinking about curveballs, and thinking about how baseball wasn’t really his sport (moved too slow) and how he really liked ice hockey instead. Everyone was always moving; the puck was always moving; it was chaos until you locked into the scene. Like how today had been.

“Did Nurse Manx send you to take a look at my gear?”

“Huh? What? Who?” Ian had been thinking about hockey. And he had no idea who Nurse Manx was. A manx was a cat, right? A breed of feline? Not domesticated feline, but big, right? And orange? Was there a feline-like nurse working in Sickbay? Who had Ian just talked to that told him to come here?

And then Pax’s arm was up, and out on display, and he was looking at it. Pax was looking at it. And now Ian was looking at it. Looking at where it connected to Pax’s skin, and immediately (again) drawn in to where it connected underneath the layers of skin.

“You can take a look if you want. It’s a little tricky for me to mess with it myself.”

The breath came out of Ian in a whoosh, as a sound that was somewhere between a gasp and an admission of admiration. “I can look?” He asked, before he could stop himself, already reaching across the table to meet Pax’s outstretched limb. “I can touch?!” And suddenly his hands were on it, and his heart rate shot through the roof. Clumsily, both his hands were around the mechanical part of the arm for an instant before he drew back, touching the delicate piece of machinery with the tips of his long fingers.

It was beautiful. Ian didn’t know where to start first. It had obviously been damaged, but Ian didn’t know how Pax had been injured, or by what, and the fact that this was still holding up was astonishing by itself. Had it been regular combustion fire? Had it been the more-deadly plasma fire? Ian’s deft fingers went to softly touch where the skin met the apparatus, to…

His breath stopped. This is exactly what he had wanted since he first saw Pax Cassidy. To explore every inch of him, see where things connected, and how. And… suddenly his throat was tight. And his face was hot. Ian stilled, both mortified and not, and forced his eyes, slowly, so slowly, to rise to look up at Pax. He was only aware he was breathing again because his lower lip began to shake ever so slightly, and now he couldn’t break his eye contact with the doctor.

“Sorry” he breathed, unsure if the word had been audible beyond his quiet sigh.


==Woof!==

[Pax Cassidy]

Elliot examined the cyberware with a hunger that seemed to run deeper than mere intellectual curiosity. Enthusiasm burst from him like steam from a pressure valve. Before Cassidy had a chance to react, the engineer’s fingers were tracing the seams that ran along the smooth metal surface of his arm. The layer of embedded sensors sent a flurry of electrical impulses into his brain. If only he had a hyperspanner, he could turn down the sensitivity of the synthetic nerve endings. That might be enough for him partially recover his better judgment, but they’d still be breathing the same air — still floating in this dangerous place.

Elliot’s touch trailed up toward the shoulder joint at the edge of his sleeveless grey undershirt, where the device was attached. He was sitting close enough that Cassidy could watch the skin stretch over the soft ridges of his forehead as he admired the intricate details of the machine. Then, their eyes met. He could feel his ears, cheeks, and neck redden in response.

“Sorry,” Elliot breathed. His voice was so quiet that he might have been talking to himself.

Cassidy couldn’t speak. If he did, the moment would end. He’d already let this go too far. What if the captain walked in? He felt his rational mind wrestling for control; it kicked and bit and screamed like a thrashing targ, but even that desperate uproar was drowned out by thoughts of Elliot’s trembling lip.

He raised his organic arm and gently clasped the back of the engineer’s hand, holding it in place. He wasn’t pushing it away, only stopping it from going further.

“It's alright,” Cassidy trailed off, his voice an uncertain growl. He was reassuring himself as well as Elliot. He cleared his throat, mustering up as much strength as he could. “Maybe this isn’t the right place.”

== bark bark ==

[Ian Elliot]

The moment that stretched between them went on for forever. He knew it last more than mere seconds (he had unintentionally started counting in the back of his mind), but how long they sat there, looking at each other’s eyes, Ian couldn’t tell.

Then his hand was enveloped by Pax’s larger one, holding him in place. Suddenly Ian was holding oxygen hostage in his lungs, and his body stopped recycling the O2 and CO2. “It’s alright.” The man replied, his voice low and gruff. Ian felt …what did Ian feel? He was nervous; that was clear to him. He was fascinated; that was obvious to them  both. He was excited… yes, he was excited. But in what sense? In all senses. It gave him such a thrill, as an Engineer, to be able to lay hands on a technological marvel. It gave him a rush, as a former Medical student, to inspect how machine connected to man. And it got his blood pumping, as a male, to be so intimate with someone else in this way.

Pax cleared his throat. Ian blinked. Breathed through his nose. His body was startled, and the spell was broken. This was real.

“Maybe this isn’t the right place.”

“I…” Once again, Ian didn’t know what to say. “Where would you like to go?” He breathed, his question’s volume a mere whisper. His heart pounded fast, and he had to keep from trembling; he was now aware of the emotion his lower lip displayed, and he bit it softly on the inside. He wasn’t about to assume anything, but to him, things at the moment were pretty clear. But it was the others’ call. He was the subject of Ian’s fascination, and if he wanted to continue, he would have to lead.


==Deep breath! Tag==

[Pax Cassidy]

A strange calm washed over the doctor. There, with Ian’s hand clasped in his own, with their eyes fixed on each other, he had perfect certainty about what he should do next. His rational mind sputtered in defeat and bowed its head, fully subdued. He gave the engineer’s hand a gentle squeeze and allowed himself to enjoy the feeling.

Cassidy’s time was up. From the moment he’d heard Ian’s laugh, his days had been numbered, and now he was dead to rights. With this sudden clarity came the realization he’d been acting like a lovesick pup for days: always looking for an excuse to hang around engineering, always hoping something in Sickbay would break. He dimly registered that he should have been embarrassed, but instead he watched the feeling pass like a distant comet.

“We could go to my quarters,” he offered casually, as if it were the most obvious thing he could have said. Somehow, he knew that Ian was with him already. The rest of the conversation was a game that they were playing together. “The power distribution is pretty complex. It might help if you had a look at the schematics.”

== Tag ==