They were actually doing this.

On approach Lt. Commander Jason Ibanez could hear the pounding bass beat of some Risian Synth-pop, something a few years old by now, that song that everyone knew even if this wasn’t your genre of music. It mingled with voices and laughter and every once in a while cheers which told him they were playing some kind of party game, maybe with teams or maybe everyone was just cheering for their favorite competitor.

And here he was in uniform. No Hawaiian shirt half open and buttoned wrong after too many drinks, no shorts, no mismatched socks. Just his dark blue science stripes and clean uniform, like he had just become the ship’s Dad.

No, check that, he was absolutely standing beside the ship’s Dad. Nope, he was the ship’s used-to-be-cool Uncle, the longhaired guy in shades who kinda sorta still talked the hip talk, but really was showing his age.

Still, he was cooler than Captain Dal. He hoped.

Another cheer went around as a tower of D’jeng’a blocks fell and one team jumped for joy while the other moped for a moment. Then another round of drinks was passed and the sting of loss faded into the camaraderie of picking a new game. And for a moment Jason enjoyed the anonymity of just standing there as a face in a crowd.

A very recognizable face in a small crowd. The moment passed with a bittersweet sadness as K’Lim called out “Captain! Commander!  I’m thrilled you could make it! You’re just in time for Trivia!”

Someone in the back whispered “Are we giving up the rule you gotta drink if you get an answer wrong?” in a voice that was immediately far too loud for subtlety.

“Depends.” Jason stepped forward with a cavalier smile on his face. “What are you drinking?”

While some of the other officers fidgeted a bit, K’Lim thrust her chin upwards and declared with some amount of pride, “Varnis had a bottle of Alterian rum and we made the best spiced punch, you should try some!”

Jason took a step back and gave a sidelong glance towards the man who got him into this. “I’ll try some if you have some.”

Ishreth Dal glanced back, and with the ethereal calm of a hazard team lead who had been challenged to many a drinking game, replied back with a mild “Of course.”

Famous last words.

Three hours later and Jason couldn’t quite remember exactly where the time went. Only that it went, and now full of spiced liquid courage, nominally pressed on by a game of truth or drink (or was that truth or dare, but the only dare was drink?) he fixed Ishreth Dal in the eyes and asked a question that had been nagging him since Casperia Prime.

“How did you get a half Bolian daughter?”

There was a light gasp from the junior officers, all of whom had avoided asking the captain any prying questions. Because he was the captain. You just didn’t ask that of a captain.

Captain Dal was not nearly as drunk as Jason was. That was both due to his Andorian metabolism processing the alcohol faster and his self-awareness controlling how much he drank. That didn’t mean he was sober.

“You see,” he started in that aggravatingly calm, soft faintly lisping tone, “When a Bolian woman has a baby…”

Titters of laughter rolled up behind him as Jason, who was drunk enough to have the brake pedal of impulse control disengaged, fixed his gaze on Dal and flashed both hands in front of him, emphasizing each word with an open-handed forceful shake. “You. Know. What. I. Mean.”

Another ‘oooh’ went around the junior officers.  No one else would have dreamt of pressing the captain like that. Maybe Jason Ibanez had some protection with his three pips, but they all knew that Ibanez was also the sort of personality to press other people’s buttons on the daily.

Ishreth Dal indulged in a light smile that curled at the edges of his mouth. Except it wasn’t one of joy or laughter, but of sly social maneuvering. Jason immediately regretted both his former hope to crack said smile from his captain and his current course of questioning. But the words were already spoken, there was no taking them back and Jason was no social coward. He was in this, hip deep, and he would see it forward.

“You know I was a search and rescue specialist, correct?”

Jason nodded a slow assent. The crowd behind him fell silent, intent on listening. “Hazard team leader. I remember.”

Captain Dal fixed him with a very even stare. The sort of stare that seemed to look right through you, or maybe one that shined a spotlight on you as if you were a bug under a lamp, pin hovering millimeters above your body.

“Have you even been trapped under the ice for 47 days?” the Andorian queried as if this was a completely normal question.

Jason managed to shake his head fractionally, feeling like he was shaking off paralysis. “I haven’t even been trapped under the ice for one day…” he sputtered.

“It is not for the faint of heart.” Stated matter of factly, without judgement. “It is dark, it is cold, it is claustrophobic. There is an intense shift between uncomfortable heat in the drilling area to uncomfortable cold in the surrounding areas. Each step must be drilled, checked, double-checked, and even when you make the best decisions possible and do the best work you can there will be cave ins, setbacks, you will have to drill and clear again. And again.  And again.”

Slowly the room had fallen quiet, hanging on the sparse, soft words of the story that painted a bleak picture of walls of ice – tombs of ice – and a tiny team drilling through it.

“SARS hazard crews work in small teams, same people every day, day in, day out. You get close. You work together, eat together, sleep together, keep one another sane, focused and always pressing forward. Because if you don’t supplies run out and you suffocate and all the people you are trying to help die.”

Jason found himself nodding, hearing the underlying emotion. It was stressful. It was lonely. It was a massive amount of responsibility heaped on the shoulders of a very small team.

“Anaia was my teammate, she was an engineer – she had a great sense of humor. She joined Starfleet against her families’ wishes, we had that in common.  She’d make jokes when the battery packs wore thin and the shadows were nibbling at the paranoid corners of your mind.” Dal paused and flitted one blue hand through the air, almost as if he was caressing a face that was not there. “She was young, I was young. She was stressed; I was stressed.  She was lonely, I was lonely. I think you can put the rest together.”

The audience nodded slowly, in time with the cadence of the story. Of course they could put it together. It wasn’t an unreasonable way for a romantic relationship to start.

And, of course Jason had to break the moment by asking, “Where is she now?”

“She was killed, on Bolarus, in the Vaadwaur attack.”

The amount of calm the words were spoken with only made them hit harder. Jason straightened, feeling himself sober up even if the alcohol was still in his system, his lips tugging downwards. He never wanted to hear the name Vaadwaur again. A thought, he realized, that protected his mind from an even deeper, dawning realization.

He knew what Dal carried inside. He knew what that felt like, to lose someone close when they were far away.

And he knew that calm façade was a carefully cultivated wall to retain control. That somewhere inside was still pain.

“I’m sorry.” Jason stammered, still trying to get a grip on his own thoughts.

“I am, too.” There was a mournful pause. “No one deserved what happened when the Vaadwaur attacked.” Dal returned with strength behind his words.

It was enough to make K’Lim lift her drink and call out a “hear, hear!” and the group responded in kind. So many of them had lost someone to the Vaadwaur.

Slowly, in that moment, Jason Ibanez didn’t feel alone. He felt like he was a Starfleet officer sharing an experience that they all knew. The pain of loss. The pain of carrying on despite that.

The bittersweet sting of celebrating victory and yet carrying loss.

Not to mention the fact that their Captain wasn’t a soft-spoken stone, but a sentient being with real emotions who made mistakes and carried onwards despite that – it hit Jason harder than he liked. He had been a right fine asshole to Dal when the man arrived on the Calistoga.

Time seemed to slow and the conversation in the background blurred as Jason replayed scenes in his head. Realized keenly for the first time that he had shouted on the bridge, during a red alert. He was sure he was justified at the time. Now he felt the sting of shame creep in.

“You all right?”

Jason’s head snapped to come face to face with Dal, and the breath he sucked into his lungs prevented him from saying something career ending. The pink tone that had crept into his cheeks turned into a deeper shade of red and he tried to get his alcohol scrambled thoughts to for some sort of coherence. “No. Yeah. I mean…”

Jason held a hand up and realized that the crowd had broken into groups, each relating their experiences of the Vaadwaur, whether it was on the Calistoga, or a different posting. And he was sitting alone, staring off into space. For how long? He didn’t know.  Long enough for it to stand out to someone.

With Dal settled beside him.

Awkward.

One antenna lifted.  Dal said nothing. He was listening.

Jason gave a glance at the room, the proximity of his Captain, the expression on his Captain’s face and made a mental calculation on the probability of how to weasel out of this conversation without looking like a coward or digging himself deeper into the ‘Jason is a rude asshole’ hole.

And the answer was aggressively and embarrassingly low.

He took in a long, slow breath. “The Vaadwaur attack was… awful. In ways I can’t put words to. You’re not the only person who lost someone…” he trailed off and some little hint of drunken enlightenment said ‘say it now before you chicken out.’ “That’s not an excuse. I treated you like dogshit and I’m sorry. I never thought we were going to live through the Mireya VII encounter and yet we did, with a minimum of casualties. We saved the station, we saved the away team, we save the ship… and my big mouth didn’t help. I was just an angry frighted idiot. You had every right to kick me off the Calistoga, and yet here I am on the Salvation and… “

And he just stopped, the words that had spilled out in a torrent sputtered out as if someone had shut a water valve off and the only thing coming out of the hose now was a confused expression and a soft breath.

Dal’s expression softened. “You’re not the first angry, frightened idiot I have worked with.” He offered gently.  “That you admit it puts your light years ahead of others.” The Captain paused and added, “And your an excellent science officer. It would have been a shame to lose you.”

Now there was no hiding the redness on Jason’s face. Maybe he could play that off as alcohol induced rosacea, a condition he never had in his entire life, but had learned about when a friend told him a similar lie once upon a time.

“Thank you, Sir.” The words were soft, shrouded, but earnest. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad we serve together.”

A pause, a heady comfortable silence settled between them.

“I am, too.” Dal finally returned. “I suppose at some point we should sit down and just… talk. Maybe with less alcohol?”

Jason smirked and tried to recover into comfortable comedy by asking the most unintentionally loaded question ever. “And what would we have to talk about?”

Dal reached out and tapped his thin blue pinky finger on the gold band that encircled Jason’s left ring finger. “I don’t know, perhaps what happened with… her?”

Immediately and unconsciously, Jason snatched his hands back and grabbed the ring with his opposite hand.  Not to remove it, just to touch it, is if he was guarding it. Inwardly he cursed himself for still wearing the stupid thing after all these years.

And yet he felt like it was part of him. No one else, not even Dwasina ever called him on it.

Then again Dwasina Roix was many wonderful things. But she wasn’t a formerly married man with all the baggage that came along with it. Maybe all the details were not the same between him and the Captain, but there was enough similarity to sense the patterns.

After a breath and a moment to organize his thoughts, which Jason would be very proud of himself for doing in the morning, he offered, “Captain, we would need a lot more alcohol to have that talk.”

“I have a bottle of Aldeberan Whiskey, 2364.”

Jason blinked.  That was a good vintage. A very good vintage. A very generous offer. “You, Sir, are a compelling negotiator.”

“I’m not charming so I have to be compelling.” His blue eyes sparkled.

“Then let’s talk about dates and times … when we’re sober.” Slowly Jason leaned back and let his muscles relax. “For now, I think I just want to stay here and… enjoy being a part of the crew for once.”

“I think that’s a fine plan.”

Tomorrow they would hit Starbase 86. The Salvation would be repaired, refueled and be on their way back to Taskforce 17. From there, they would be heading to the Shackleton Expanse.

But for now, just this one night they were just right here. A crew that achieved victory, survived against the odds and came together afterwards.

It was a fine plan, indeed.