“This is a bad plan,” Willow complained, looking over the padds before her. “Seriously, we’re on distraction duty and this is the best we can come up with?”

Willow had been summoned by Lieutenant Lake to the Pnyx about an hour ago to fulfil their part of Doctor Pisani’s crazy surprise birthday party and so far hadn’t heard a thing she liked from the lieutenant. The lieutenant however seemed rather confident in his plan.

Likely because, as he had put it, he was an ideas man.

Which meant he was nominating Willow to be the one to put the plan into action.

“Do you want to keep the captain’s mind busy for the next few days?” Matt asked.

“Only because I want to see the party go off without a hitch,” she answered, head tilting to the side with no small amount of childish attitude.

“Excellent! So –“

“So we start by having me ask him about doing advanced command training classes?” She’d had this exact same argument with the science officer three times now and he seemed impervious to any and all counter-arguments.

“Yes,” he repeated. “Because it will work.”

“I didn’t do command track though,” Willow protested. “I did flight. Like all of the flight. Shuttles, starships…fighters.” She said that last word like it was something disgusting in her mouth she was spitting out.

“And I know you did some command courses. And the captain himself recently completed several extension courses, including those on tutoring and mentoring young officers.”

The eye-roll went unnoticed by Matt as he continued. Or unacknowledged at least. He continued. “As I’ve said before, you ask him about a bunch of command courses, he’ll say he’ll think about it and it’ll keep him occupied when not dealing with the normal day-to-day minutia that is captaining a starship.”

“Yeah, and when he comes back to me? What then?”

Matt smiled at her, trying for charm but missing and landing somewhere around an adult reassuring a child. At least from Willow’s perspective. “Then Lieutenant, you take the captain up on his offer and progress your career.” He sat back, proud of this proclamation. “We keep the captain busy and you make strides in climbing up the ranks.”

She had argued with Matt for only a few more minutes, failing in the face of someone who simply refused to hear her counter-argument about how she wasn’t that keen on the idea. But with no other ideas of her own to substitute in, Willow had no choice.

Short of flying the Republic into trouble somewhere and making everyone’s lives a fair bit more interesting.

Credit where credit was due though. When she’d brought up the subject with the captain in his ready room it had the intended goal of getting his attention. Work had been set aside, an offer to sit made and she lost the next hour discussing her career, goals and ambitions with Captain MacIntyre before he announced he’d have to get back to her.

But she could see that Matt’s plan had worked. The captain was thinking about things. And when he next appeared on the bridge his regular circuits to check in with each station were shorter or skipped, his attention spent reading over a padd.

“It’s working,” Matt whispered to her late in her shift, having approached her own nominally to consult on something. “Well done.”

“Shut.” She spoke through gritted teeth. “Up.”

“Lieutenant Lake,” Captain MacIntyre spoke up, getting both of their attention. Matt for his part turned, as if everything was perfectly normal while Willow suddenly became enamoured with her console. “Have you ever mentored a junior officer for leadership roles?”

“Couple of times, captain. Why?”

“Keen to do it again? With some departmental cross-training perhaps?”

Hearing someone grin was physically impossible. Save for some very specific moments. Moments like when someone knew how things were about to go. Or the victim of said turn of events was in the room.

“Certainly sir,” Matt answered. “Who did you have in mind?”

The only reason Willow didn’t slam her face into the helm as her name was said was, she told herself, it would raise too many questions and risk the surprise.

It didn’t stop her from dropping her face into the bar top in the Agora that evening when Matt Lake sat down beside her, grinning like a madman. “Working like a charm,” he announced. “Oh, the captain has plans for you Lieutenant.”

“I hate you,” she mumbled into the bar top.

“Oh, it’ll be fun!” Matt said. “You never know, you might find a new passion and consider sciences.”

“If I wanted to wear blues, I’d have done it already.” She rolled her face just enough to spy the barkeep and wave him down. “Cure for bad decisions please.”