Tea Time

T'Vara had been in the quarters for about an hour when Mei-Lin came back from wherever engineers went at the end of a shift. She came in without ceremony, set her toolkit down by the door, and glanced at T'Vara sitting at the small desk in the common area with her medical kit open in front of her before she went to get changed without saying anything about it.

T'Vara continued her inventory. She was methodical about it and did not hurry and by the time Mei-Lin came back out in civilian clothes with her hair down T'Vara was most of the way through the analgesics.

Mei-Lin dropped onto her bunk on the other side of the divider and T'Vara heard the sound of her exhaling like someone putting down something heavy.

"Long shift?" T'Vara asked without looking up.

"They're all long shifts," Mei-Lin said. "You just stop noticing after a while."

T'Vara made a note on her PADD. "The analgesic supply is low. I'm going to put in a request to Zedd in the morning."

"Be specific about what you need," Mei-Lin said. "Don't give him a general list. Give him the three things you actually need most and he'll get them. Give him a paragraph and he'll get around to it eventually."

T'Vara made a second note. "Understood."

A pause settled in that was not uncomfortable. Mei-Lin seemed to have a natural ease with silence that T'Vara appreciated more than she would have said on a first day.

"Romulan," Mei-Lin said after a while. Not a question exactly, more like something she was putting into words rather than leaving as an assumption.

"Yes," T'Vara said.

"From the Empire?"

"From a colony the Empire stopped paying attention to about twenty years before I was born." She turned a page on her PADD. "So not really, no."

Mei-Lin was quiet for a moment. "That's an interesting distinction."

"Most people don't make it," T'Vara said. "They see the ears and the forehead and they've already decided."

"How long does it take them to undecide?"

T'Vara glanced up at that, mildly surprised by the phrasing. "Depends on the person. Some of them never do." She went back to her inventory. "I stopped worrying about those ones a long time ago."

Mei-Lin made a sound that was not quite a laugh but was adjacent to one. "I get that."

T'Vara looked at her properly for the first time since she had come back from her shift. Mei-Lin was lying on her bunk staring at the ceiling with the comfortable stillness of someone who had learned to exist in small spaces without fighting them.

"You're from Mars," T'Vara said. It was in her file and she had read the file the same way she read everything, thoroughly and before she needed to.

Mei-Lin glanced over. "Utopia Planitia. You read up on me."

"I read up on everyone I'm going to be sharing a room with," T'Vara said. "It seemed practical."

Mei-Lin looked like she was deciding whether to find that funny or unsettling and landed somewhere in between. "Fair enough. I didn't read your file."

"I know," T'Vara said. "You would have mentioned something by now if you had."

That one got a real laugh, short and genuine. "Probably." She sat up a little and looked at the medical kit spread across the desk. "You do inventory on your first night everywhere?"

"When I'm new somewhere, yes." T'Vara closed the kit and started putting things back in order. "Knowing exactly what I have and what I'm short on means I don't lie awake thinking about it later."

Mei-Lin nodded slowly like that made a particular kind of sense to her. "I do the same thing with the engine diagnostics."

"Does it work?"

"Mostly." She swung her legs off the bunk and stood up and went to the cabinet above the replicator and opened it. "There's tea up here. Real tea, not replicated. I brought it down on the planet from an importer I found." She looked back at T'Vara. "You want some?"

T'Vara looked at the cabinet and then at the closed medical kit and decided she was done for the night. "Yes," she said. "Thank you."

Mei-Lin put the kettle on and they sat on opposite sides of the small common space with their mugs and the ship hummed around them and New Ferenginar turned slowly outside the viewport and neither of them felt the need to fill every available second with conversation which suited both of them considerably better than the alternative would have.

After a while Mei-Lin said, "The crew is good. Mostly. Zedd runs a tight ship without making it feel tight." She wrapped both hands around her mug. "It's a good place to be if you're trying to build something."

T'Vara looked at her over the rim of her own mug. "Is that what you're doing?"

Mei-Lin thought about it for a second. "Yeah," she said. "I think so."

T'Vara nodded and drank her tea and did not push further because she recognized the particular quality of that answer, someone telling the truth about something they had not entirely figured out yet, and she knew from experience that pushing further was not what that kind of honesty needed.

"The tea is good," she said instead.

Mei-Lin smiled at that, small and genuine. "I'm glad you enjoy it."

They pair found something to start a bond over, one that would hopefully become stronger over time.