Field Day

Posted on Sun Jun 12th, 2016 @ 5:29am by Captain Charybdis MacGregor

0 words; about a 1 minute read

Mission: Taking Chances
Location: USS Bonne Chance, Deck Five, Captain O'Conner's Quarters
Timeline: 2265
Tags: 1stlove

Once duty had ended, Charybdis knew that there would still be meetings to follow up on, and there was no way that Patrick would be able to do anything without checking on Main Engineering personally. She was reasonably sure that he trusted Fiona to handle things and take care of his ship... but at the same time he was an engineer at heart, and it was hard letting go of his first passion.

Briefly she imagined herself sitting in the command chair, and considered just how much difficulty she would have not stepping over to review the datastream in the Science Station Viewer personally. That gave her a chuckle, and she resolved to say nothing about the situation. She had grown quite fond of the willful and determined Chief Engineer, and she could most definitely fight her own battles. There was no need for her to be involved- Patrick would need to learn where the boundary was between concerned Captain and frustrated Engineer on his own, and Lieutenant Fiona McCray would definitely help draw that line for him.

Duty had run long on the bridge today- there was a considerable amount to do, and significant preparations to make for what might yet come. Such was the lot of the senior staff, and she had no complaints with it at all. She liked that her fellow officers relied upon her, and that her work was needed and appreciated. This was a life she could not have found anywhere else, and even though it was new to her, she had settled into it cheerfully and was relishing it.

There was still the alarm in the back of her head, but she was chalking that up to paranoia. She had work to do, and she couldn't focus on what might be- she had to focus on the needs of the ship and the mission. If she or Patrick were in jeopardy, they would face it together. Until then simply acknowledging that it might exist would have to suffice.

She stopped by her quarters, which was somehow strange to her. The chair she had spent so many hours in which she had crudely customized sat off-kilter from where she had last abandoned it. Her small statuary collection still sat arranged just so, secured to the surfaces upon which they sat, and the prints on the wall still hung there, making her smile.

But somehow the rooms seemed to belong to a lifetime ago to her, even though it had been less than a week. They were still spacious... in truth, the Captain's quarters were bigger, but only by a little. Yet these quarters seemed so vast and empty to her now, so quiet and lonely. Her fingertips brushed over the surfaces as she moved through them and she realized she would have to field day them in order to pass inspection... whether or not she was living in them was irrelevant.

Pulling out the rags and cleaning supplies, she shrugged out of her uniform and got to work. As she dusted and scrubbed the surfaces as she had been trained since the Academy, she began choosing items and placing them on her desk. Her hairbrush. Her toothbrush. Her magnetic bobby pin holder. Her spare uniforms. Her workout clothing. Her perfume atomizer. Her small collection of civilian clothing. Her lingerie. She was in the process of debating giving her statue of Apollo as a gift to Patrick to remind him of her when she realized that while she was trying to remove what she needed to relocate...

What she was actually doing was packing up everything that she owned.

The realization hit her and she flopped down on the bed, her hand to her forehead. She was trying to move into his quarters without even realizing what she was doing. Somehow it just seemed like simple expediency... she needed her hairbush because her hair was too thick for his simple men's comb to handle effectively and she had begun wearing it up out of expediency, to keep it from looking like she had spent all night having wild, passionate sex since she could not effectively brush it out. She needed spare uniforms because she was recycling two of them in his quarters over and over. She needed her perfume atomizer because her scent drove him wild with passion.

But she realized what she was trying to do was to move into his quarters. She had not discussed the idea with him... she had simply refused to leave since he had allowed her in, and had spent every night since with him. Not that he had asked her to leave, but neither had she volunteered to be anywhere else.

She wanted to spend every night with him... forever, she realized. And while that that thought was somehow very exciting to her, it was also very intimidating.

A dream of his had played itself out in her own mind last night. She had not mentioned it to him... she disliked this new dreamscape of which she seemed to be a part, and the fact that she now appeared to be snooping in his memories made her if possible even more uncomfortable than revealing her own past to him. It had been a tale of his youth, as a younger man, dallying with two sisters. Somehow it did not bother her that he had known others... if anything it made her relieved that he too had his secrets and his past lovers, so he was that much less likely to judge her for her exploits.

But seeing the verdant and lush hills of his home in his memories, she longed to go there with him and see them together. She wanted to see the faraway land from where he'd come, and to meet his parents and his kin. She wanted him to be able to proudly show off the exotic alien beauty whose savage heart he had captured, and to bring him boasting rights in the pubs and taverns of his youth.

It was beginning to become evident to her that she had a great many desires for their relationship, and that was very, very bad. Because so long as she wanted nothing she could give as she liked... but having wants and needs made her even more vulnerable. Which was moronic, seeing as he literally held her fate in his hands... yet somehow that did not matter to her, because she trusted him.

Love, it seemed, was a very complex thing for which she had been remarkably ill prepared. A song from an Earth vid of which she was fond titled 'Accidentally in love' began replaying itself in her head, and she giggled. In the infinite diversity of infinite combinations of the universe, she somehow never could have anticipated this point of her life.

Flexing her midsection, she vaulted off the bed and returned to cleaning her quarters in her underwear. It didn't take long, and it gave her time to think about how she should approach this situation. She didn't want to pressure Patrick... but at the same time, she did have needs, and certain practicalities. And if she had learned anything from her recent experiences with relationships, communication was key.

Snatching up a few select items, she tossed them into her Academy shoulder bag, then skidded to a stop before the door. Uniform. Definitely did not need to forget the uniform. Whatever the scuttlebutt on the ship was about her at this point, the very last thing she needed to do was stroll out into the corridor in her underwear.

Appropriately attired once more, she strode to the Captain's quarters and hit the door chime, then again. Apparently the commanding officer was still at large, which suited her purposes fine. She could get in trouble for it, but she had heard him key in his sequence for the door before, so of course she remembered it. So with a look to the left and to the right, she punched in the code... it was the formula for the appropriate matter/antimatter mix in the magnetic bottle for the ship's power core.

Patrick was nothing if not sentimental.

She dove through the shower, brushed her hair, perfumed herself and the sheets, dimmed the lights, put some soft music on the speakers, lit a few candles then spread herself out on the bed in the lacy black negligee she had been saving for just such an occasion (or if she'd needed to seduce an admiral, which was looking highly unlikely at this juncture). She pulled out her PDD to study the Starfleet Xenocultural reports on the Orion system, with the Capellans in the queue after that.

It had been a long day, and her logic was that if she was going to ask for something, the least she could do was make sure that her man was appropriately relaxed first. Which probably would have worked much better had she not fallen dead asleep, the long hours and short nights having caught up with her at last as she gently snored in the Captain's bed.

But she would still be a sight for sore eyes when he came home.

 

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