Lindsy had not planned to stop at the bar.

She had finished unpacking and the meditation mat was down and the navigation library was arranged and the room was hers in all the ways a room became yours and there was nothing left to do that required doing tonight. She had been too awake to sit with the charts and too settled to go back to the alcove on deck four and she had been standing in the middle of her new quarters looking at the viewport when she decided that her first evening on deck two was a reasonable occasion for a drink.

The bar was three doors down. She had noticed it when she moved her cases in that afternoon, the long L shape of it visible through the open doorway, the lighting warmer than the rest of the corridor in the way of spaces that had been thought about rather than just installed. She had filed it and kept walking and now she came back to it in her off duty clothes and her bare feet and sat down at the bar and ordered something from the replicator that was close enough to a Rigellian blend to be acceptable.

She had been there approximately two minutes when she heard footsteps in the corridor and looked up and Mei-Lin came through the door.

Mei-Lin stopped when she saw Lindsy at the bar and her expression did the small shift it did when she was recalibrating a situation. "I did not know you were up here," she said.

"I live here now," Lindsy said, which was still a strange thing to say and which she suspected was going to be strange for a few more days before it settled into simply being true.

Mei-Lin looked at her for a moment and then came and sat on the stool beside her and ordered something dark from the replicator and set it on the bar in front of her and looked at it and then at Lindsy. "You moved fast," she said.

"I always move fast once I have the route," Lindsy said.

Mei-Lin held her gaze for a moment and then something that was not quite a smile moved through her expression and she looked back at her drink. "Tell me," she said. "All of it. I would rather hear it from you than piece it together."

Lindsy looked at the bar surface for a moment and then at Mei-Lin and decided that the honest version was the only version worth giving. "After you left the alcove last night I sat there for a while and thought about what you told me," she said. "And then I went to see Zedd."

The bar was quiet enough that the ship's hum was audible through the walls.

"I told him I had been keeping something in a place since day two and that the situation had changed," she said. "And he let me in." She paused. "I stayed."

Mei-Lin wrapped both hands around her glass and looked at it and was quiet for a moment that Lindsy did not fill because she had learned that Mei-Lin's silences were working silences and interrupting them did not help.

"How do you feel," Mei-Lin said finally.

"Certain," Lindsy said. "Which is not a feeling I have had about something like this in a long time." She looked at Mei-Lin directly. "I also want to know how you are. The honest version."

Mei-Lin looked at her. "It stings a little," she said, with the straightforward quality she brought to most things. "I am not going to pretend it does not. But I made my decision last night because it was right for me and I meant it and I still mean it." She paused. "I am glad it was you. That is not a managed thing. That is just true."

Lindsy held her gaze for a long moment. "Thank you for that."

"It is not a thank you kind of thing," Mei-Lin said. "It is just what it is." She took a drink. "There is something else though. I can tell."

"There is," Lindsy said. "Zedd offered me the command liaison role this morning. And the quarters next to Tiraa on deck two." She paused. "I moved this afternoon."

Mei-Lin stared at her. "Today."

"Yes."

"You went to see him last night and this morning you had a new role and new quarters."

"Yes."

Mei-Lin looked at the bar surface and then back at Lindsy and the not quite smile came back stronger this time. "You had quite a twenty four hours," she said.

"I did," Lindsy agreed.

"The command liaison role," Mei-Lin said, shifting into the practical register she used when she was genuinely curious about something rather than processing something personal. "What does that mean."