Aligning the Stars

Mei-Lin almost went to her quarters.

She got as far as the turbolift and stood there for a moment with her PADD under her arm and the smile she had been wearing since she turned the corner still doing whatever it was doing to her face and decided that she was not going to be able to sleep anyway and that she needed to talk to someone and T'Vara was perceptive enough that the conversation would be over before it started because T'Vara would already know everything and would simply wait for her to catch up and that was not what she needed right now.

She needed Lindsy.

She found her in the astrometrics alcove on Deck 5, which was where Lindsy tended to be when the ship was quiet and she had something to think about. The star charts were up and rotating slowly above the projector and Lindsy was sitting cross legged on the small mat she kept in the corner with a mug in both hands and the particular quality of stillness that suggested she had been there for a while.

Lindsy looked up to see Mei-Lin in the doorway.

"I saw the light," Mei-Lin said, half lying.

"Come in," Lindsy replied, her tone being of someone that presumed Mei-Lin was here for more than just a casual chat based on her approach.

Mei-Lin came in and sat down on the low bench along the wall and set her PADD beside her and looked at the star charts for a moment because it was easier than starting.

"Long evening?" Lindsy said.

"Working dinner," Mei-Lin said. "Captain's mess. Material specs for the suits."

"Mmm," Lindsy said, in a tone that suggested she had already heard everything that was not being said.

Mei-Lin looked at her. "It started as material specs."

"I believe you."

"It did," Mei-Lin said. "We spent a good twenty minutes on the ceramic composite issue."

"And then?"

Mei-Lin looked back at the star charts. They were beautiful actually, the way Lindsy had them configured, the sector around New Ferenginar rendered in soft blues and golds with the trade corridors mapped in faint green. She had a good eye for this kind of thing, making something functional also feel like it meant something.

"And then it stopped being about the specs," she said.

Lindsy waited, which was one of the things Mei-Lin had come to appreciate about her. She did not fill silences with prompts or reassurances. She simply left room and trusted that whatever needed to come out would come out on its own timeline.

"I told him I wanted to spend time with him off duty," Mei-Lin said. "No work reason. Just to get to know each other." She paused. "He said yes."

"Okay," Lindsy said.

"And he said he liked me." She said it to the star charts. "He said it like it was something he had already decided and just hadn't gotten around to saying out loud yet."

Lindsy was quiet for a moment. "How did that land?"

"Harder than I was prepared for," Mei-Lin said, honestly. "Which is the part I'm still working through." She looked at her hands in her lap. "I don't do this. I don't usually let things get to the point where someone saying something simple like that can land the way it did. I'm careful about it."

"What changed?"

Mei-Lin thought about it. "He's just very himself," she said finally. "There's no performance to it. He says what he means and he does what he says and he pays attention in a way that doesn't feel like an assessment. It just feels like attention." She shook her head slightly. "It's disarming. I didn't budget for it."

Lindsy smiled at that, small and genuine. "No," she said. "He doesn't give you a lot of warning."

Something in the way she said it made Mei-Lin look at her more carefully. Lindsy was looking at the star charts with an expression that was harder to read than her usual calm and there was something in her posture that was slightly different from when Mei-Lin had walked in, something that had shifted without announcing itself.

"Lindsy," she said.

"Mm."

"Are you okay?"

"Of course," Lindsy said, in the tone of someone who was going to need a moment before that was entirely true.

Mei-Lin looked at her and Lindsy looked at the star charts and the alcove was quiet enough that the ship's hum felt present in a way it usually didn't.

"Oh," Mei-Lin said softly.

Lindsy did not say anything.

"I'm sorry," Mei-Lin said, and meant it. "I didn't think about the fact that you might have your own." She paused. "Feelings. About the situation."

Lindsy was quiet for long enough that Mei-Lin started to wonder if she had misread it entirely and then Lindsy said, very evenly, "I haven't said anything about feelings."

"No," Mei-Lin agreed. "You haven't."

Another pause. Lindsy took a sip of her tea and looked at the rotating star charts and Mei-Lin waited in the way Lindsy had waited for her, leaving room.

"He's easy to notice," Lindsy said finally, which was the most careful phrasing of the thing Mei-Lin had ever heard and also the most honest. "I noticed him early. I put it somewhere and I've been keeping it there." She looked at her mug. "That's all it is."

"That's not nothing," Mei-Lin said.

"No," Lindsy agreed quietly. "It's not nothing."

They sat with that for a moment, the two of them on opposite sides of something that neither of them had planned for and that had not asked their permission before arriving.

"I should have thought about this before I said anything," Mei-Lin said. "I'm sorry. Genuinely."

Lindsy looked at her then, properly, and her expression was composed in the way it usually was but there was something underneath it that was more present than usual. "Don't apologize," she said. "You didn't do anything wrong. You felt something and you did something about it and he responded." She looked back at the charts. "That's how it's supposed to work."

"It doesn't make it less complicated," Mei-Lin said.

"No," Lindsy said. "It doesn't." A pause. "But complicated isn't the same as wrong. And whatever I'm keeping where I'm keeping it is mine to manage. It has nothing to do with you."

Mei-Lin looked at her for a moment. "You're being very gracious about this."

"I'm being honest about it," Lindsy said, which was a different thing and they both knew it. "Gracious would be pretending there was nothing to be gracious about."

Mei-Lin nodded slowly. She had come to the alcove looking for something like a big sister and she had found one, just not in the way she had expected, because the big sister in question was also navigating something of her own and doing it with a steadiness that made Mei-Lin feel simultaneously grateful and a little humbled.

"For what it's worth," Mei-Lin said carefully, "he talks about the ship the way you navigate. Like it matters beyond the practical function of it. Like it's worth something."

Lindsy was quiet for a moment. "I know," she said. "I've noticed that too."

The star charts kept turning above the projector, slow and steady, the sector around New Ferenginar mapped in soft light. Outside the viewport the planet itself turned below them, marsh clouds catching the orbital lights in faint streaks of green and gold.

"Are we going to be okay?" Mei-Lin asked. She meant it simply and directly, the way she meant most things.

Lindsy looked at her and the smile that came back was the genuine unhurried one that Mei-Lin had come to recognize as the real version. "Yes," she said. "We're going to be okay."

"You're sure."

"I'm sure." She held out her mug in a small gesture toward the corner cabinet. "There's tea if you want some. Real tea, not replicated. T'Vara has been getting into it so there's less than there was but there's enough."

Mei-Lin got up and found the tea and poured herself a mug and came back and sat down and they sat together in the soft light of the astrometrics alcove with the star charts turning above them and the planet below and neither of them in any hurry to go anywhere.

After a while Lindsy said, quietly and without looking at her, "Tell me what he said. The thing that landed harder than you were prepared for."

Mei-Lin looked at her for a moment.

"You came here to talk," Lindsy said simply. "So talk."

Mei-Lin wrapped both hands around her mug and looked at the star charts and told her and Lindsy listened the way she listened to everything, completely and without interruption, and the ship hummed around them and New Ferenginar kept turning and it was the kind of conversation that made a ship feel less like a collection of systems and more like somewhere people actually lived.