And So It Starts

Posted on Sat Aug 29th, 2009 @ 11:02am by Lieutenant Commander Eliza McAdams & Lieutenant JG Ryan Warner

2,844 words; about a 14 minute read

Mission: Behind the Mask of Familiarity
Location: Personal Quarters, USS Archimedes
Timeline: Current - Kate en route to Brig with a slight detour!

Life was never simple.

Proponents of that opinion, of which there were many, often never followed the line of argument through to its logical conclusion, which was to say that the statement implied, when utilized as a complaint, that simple was somehow better. Complication induced stress and stress lowered a person's ability to cope but lack of activity and stimulus had rarely been linked to an increase in optimism. Simplicity only insured that mundane routine took over and that seemed about as likely to instigate emotional meltdown as complexity. The happy medium, that delicate balance that was so difficult to maintain, that's what life ultimately boiled down to. Its pursuit, procurance and then the mad dash to maintain it.

Kate had shot at least several hundred metres too far in the opposite direction.

The whirling mass of information in her head had yet to settle, conversations were still shifting in and out of each other in search of that pivotal connection that would allow the jigsaw to start resembling something other than the fractured mess it currently depicted. She had spent the entire trip back to her...their...quarters documenting those thoughts on a PaDD, a procedure that was best done verbally if only to save her sanity, though standing alone in turbolifts speculating out loud did tend to make other people question whether or not she'd been successful. As soon as the doors had opened on the right deck, the security officer had struck out with long strides that set a pace similar to her mind's current velocity. Suddenly operating on such a small ship had turned up a benefit; it had only taken her a few minutes to get home.

Unaware of her approach, sat within the confines of the lounge in their quarters sat Ryan Warner. The pilot, with a mild restlessness grasping at his mind, had finally submitted to his current situation and returned home to find entertainment elsewhere. Hardly a deck away sat the CONN, where he currently desired to be seated. Instead he was reclined as far back as possible upon the large couch facing the window, his feet resting upon the coffee table. He wasn't necessarily relaxed, more fighting the urge to burst onto the bridge of the vessel and demand the freedom to fly for as long as he should like. The day itself had been rather dull simply because he had been struggling to find something productive to eat up his first day aboard the Archimedes.

He heard the door slide open, the slight hiss as it parted. He hardly made the effort to look round, he knew it was Kathryn anyway, he turned his head slightly, his cheek resting against the back of the couch, and swivelled his eyes as best he could to see behind him. When she didn't speak he lifted a PADD and dangled it over the rear of his seat. "Hi, honey," he joked in that Australian pang, over-emphasising excitement, dragging the sarcasm through his tone. "You'll never guess what...we've received our first experimental assignment."

Even the sound of his voice was enough to stop Kate in her tracks, a faint frown of annoyance flitting across her face. Had she given thought to the fact that he might be home, that alone might have preoccupied her for the entirity of her journey back to their combined quarters, but dedication to her work was usually total and, as such, Kate had even gone as far as to momentarily forget that she no longer had a private space to call her own. She had other things to do, other things that required her concentration, but as usual Ryan had found a way to intrude and interrupt. Having managed to take all of about four steps into the room, the young brunette gave no thought to the speed with which her hands found her hips and she frowned at the PaDD with mounting indignation. "But we've not even been here a day!" As much as his position in all this closely resembled hers, Kate wasn't able to keep the accusation nor the frustration from her tone. Logically, it was hardly his fault that they hadn't even been given a day to settle in but logic tended to fail her more often than not when Ryan was concerned.

"Not my fault." He maintained his position but turned his head back to face the window, bringing the PADD back round. She was always complaining, it was what she did. When he spoke in briefings, she complained, when he offered her a drink she complained - when he sat in a room, trying to get on with whatever was occupying his attention, she found a way to complain. It burned through him when they served together on the Daedalus and it was excrutiating now that they were forced to share such close quarters. He gave a very deliberate, loud sigh for her to pick up on before reading. "Both subjects are required to share an element of personal prevalance with their counterpart. Both should identify a particular landmark, setting or place, that is held in some meaningful regard, and take the time to explain why to their counterpart. A summary report from each candidate is required by the end of the week."

"The end of the..." Repetition of the instructions trailed off to an impatient huff as Kathryn closed her eyes, dropped her head back and shook her head a couple of times in disbelief, unimpressed huffs of laughter serving as a communication tool as she gathered her thoughts and began picking through them in order to figure out what to express first. On one level, Kate was fair-minded enough not to truly believe Ryan was culpable at every turn. The methods her job forced her to work to did not allow for that level of generalisation nor bias and it would have been entirely unreasonable to actually maintain that the man was directly responsible for every inconvenience thrown her way. Certainly, had she wanted to twist it, she could have found a way to hold him accountable for all of this, but the task itself had been assigned by someone else. She knew that, Ryan just had a way...

Sighing silently, she dropped the hand that had reached up to knead the back of her neck and let it slap against her thigh quietly. He never understood. Ryan Warner's entire philosophy seemed to be to fly at things very quickly so that your only option was to make a decision in the heat of the moment, without preparation or consideration for consequences. Maybe that worked for him, though their current situation suggested not always, but he had never understood that security didn't have that luxury. Always a shortcut, always a corner to cut... Had he ever even stopped to think what would happen if security personnel started behaving like that? Now she had to share something personal with him. With him, a man who had never shown the slightest regard for her or anything she did. Insecurity flared for a moment, along with accompanying anger, but the latter died first. Having faltered for a response for a few minutes, Kate eventually managed a very quiet, "Fine, pick a time at the end of the week and let me know." The resignation in her tone was palpable, tinged with the uncertainty that had settled in the pit of her stomach seconds before she made her way into the bedroom. Talk about timing.

He shot up instantly, leaping from the couch and cracking his shin against the coffee table. He nearly fell to the floor with the pain but instead and grabbed his leg, huffing out a few breaths to void the feeling. After a moment of hopping he moved towards the bedroom door, limping in. "I spoke to the first officer this afternoon, she's going to speak to the quartermaster about arranging two bunks. It should be - "

"Ryan!"

For pity's sake, had the man no sense whatsoever? If he was trying to test her reflexes then he'd done a damn good job of it because Kate, halfway out of her uniform and practically down to her underwear, had never snatched a sheet from the bed so quickly. Then again, she'd never been given cause to in the past either. Exacerbation of the problem came with her instinctual turn, since the bed clothing was gathering mostly to her front and did little to hide the back she had now turned towards him, but shielding her burning face from him actually seemed more important at the moment. It might have seemed ironic that his conversation bled so neatly into a situation that highlighted the necessity for separate bedrooms but Kate, already worn out and fretful, found the connection a little too coincidental. He just couldn't leave her alone, could he?

Being who he was and caught out by his own thoughtless behaviour, he simply stared at her for several painfully long moments. His eyes wandered slightly but snapped up towards her gaze before he promptly turned round and faced the wall, folding his arms and hissing out a sigh of frustration. This was not going to work, this instance in itself had proven to him that cohesion was not possible. Sure, there were bonuses to having Kathryn almost naked in the room next door but he could not see success in these close quarters. The strange thing was that he was trying to shed some positive light on their predicament. "You know what, Kathryn, you could bloody well tell me when you're changing. That would be really bloody helpful."

"Or you could think for once before you barge into a room, especially a bedroom!" Having shuffled over to the wardrobe, Kate wrenched open the door to her side and used it as a shield, enabling her to ditch the sheet and rummage around for a clean uniform. "I'm well aware that you would prefer the rest of the universe to do your thinking for you so that you're not forced to take any responsibility for keeping yourself out of trouble but that's not how grown-up life works!." The coat-hanger clattered as she wrenched the pants free and she spoke through gritted teeth as she started to pull them on. "I'm not going to start hanging banners for you every time there is a situation that could be avoided if you just thought ahead a little. If you're going to follow me around uninvited, I don't see why it should be up to me to broadcast my intentions." With her pants on, the fuming security officer pulled on a fresh tanktop and shut the door with a slam, leaving her hand resting against it as she directed her glare at the back of Ryan's head, mortification still staining her cheeks a delicate shade of pink. "It's a bedroom, after all? What did you think I was going to do in the middle of my duty-shift?"

He wheeled around sharply, his eyes blazing intensely at her. There it was again, that superiority complex oozing from her in one huge rant. She would chastise him and belittle him, call him immature and remind him that he was so thoughtless. It was like a parent yelling at you and it was rather humiliating in some regard. Ryan didn't cope well with humiliation. She might be angry but if she wanted to bruise his ego and insult his intelligence then he would show her what angry truly was. With his arms still folded, he spoke without raising his voice. "This is our bedroom now, Kathryn. If you hadn't been poking your nose into my business then that wouldn't be the case but unfortunately you just can't help yourself. So shut up, suck it up and learn to deal with it because I cannot cope with any more of your tantrums. I made a mistake." He gave a sniff, pausing slightly. "And I'm sorry."

An apology was not what she'd expected and her expression was honest enough to show that. Unfortunately, at least for Kate, it was also honest enough to betray the underlying issue for a moment, that being a faint insecurity that, if better understood, might have made the rest of her behaviour more understandable, if not any more tolerable. Romance had never really gone well for her in the end, to the point of leaving her somewhat distrusting of it, and the woman was certainly uptight enough to be considered somewhat prudish in situations where she didn't feel comfortable or, perhaps more to the point, valued. There was something almost old-fashioned about Kate, a sexual innocence that often went ignored because she was too busy being obvious about her work. Giving Ryan something else to sneer about, something she already felt self-conscious about, was just...

She sat down on the bed and quietly started pulling her boots on, loose hair tumbling forward to at least hide her expression from view for the few seconds she needed to find some sort of composure. She was a private person, she couldn't help that. More to the point, she had always known this wasn't going to work out because history had proven that she was not someone that anyone wanted to live with. She didn't even talk to her Academy roommate anymore and those were usually lasting friendships. She wanted to explain, in a sense, but at the same time couldn't bring herself to hand over that much to Ryan, just as she couldn't bring herself to point out that her reaction had only been a response to his initial accusation. What was the point? Every word out of his mouth was another nail in the coffin of her self-confidence and Kate couldn't deal with that right now.

Standing, she reclaimed her uniform jacket and picked up the clothes she'd been wearing earlier to transfer her pips and place them in the laundry hamper. Then, collecting the sheet she'd yanked free earlier, she set about remaking the bed. "I probably won't be home again for another 8-10 hours," she said quietly without making eye contact. "At this point, I don't know how long the investigation is going to take so the task will probably have to wait until the end of the week."

"There's an investigation happening?" His mood suddenly shifted and he raised an eyebrow. Despite meeting with some of the senior staff and at least making a short trip to the shuttlebay, Ryan hadn't heard a single word about any kind of investigation. Already Kathryn was more clued in than he was.

"The previous Security Assistant was murdered." Tucking in the sheet on the other side of the bed, Kate's tone remained subdued, informative rather than superior. She was surprised but non-judgemental that Ryan hadn't heard yet since, for all she knew, he'd spent most of the day in their quarters. Why it hadn't come up during his conversation with the First Officer, she couldn't say, but Kate didn't have time to fret now about who was taking this seriously enough. Lane seemed to be, Security and Intel seemed to be; that was the main thing. "I've been shunted up to take his place," she continued, explaining her use of the term 'previous Security Assistant', and stared almost sadly at the bed as she smoothed over a few of the creased with her fingertips. "And, subsequently, figure out who did it."

"Lucky you," he muttered as she made her way out of the room. It had been intended as a sort of sympathy note but it would probably be interpreted as jealousy. In fact, to be fair there was some mild jealousy in there. Ryan had yet to pull on for the Alpha Shift and he was awaiting a stint at the helm. Either that or a call to red alert which would provide him with a nice start to his station.

Luck. If Kate even believed in it any more, she sure as hell didn't think it was on her side. Given that she was now overdue for her intended conversation with Lt. Carter, the young security officer chose not to reply, chose not to invite yet another pointless argument that would leave her in the wrong state of mind to talk to a young woman who might be depending on her to prove her innocence. On the flip side, there was a murdered man counting on her to solve the mystery surrounding his death because the trail turned cold and the absolute last thing she needed was a head full of Ryan Warner. The doors to their quarters opened as she strode through them and closed without conversation.

Some things just weren't worth it.

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More domestic harmony brought to you by:

Lt. JG Ryan Warner
Chief Flight Control Officer
USS Archimedes

and

Lt. JG Kathryn Martin
Assistant Chief Security Officer
USS Archimedes

 

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