The reception hall aboard Brahms Station had been dressed for the occasion, and someone with far too much time and access to the station’s holographic emitters had clearly enjoyed themselves. Soft columns of light rose between the viewports, shifting slowly through the colours of a Ventaxian sunset, though Samwell doubted anyone else in the room would recognise them as such. Beyond the transparent aluminium, the Avalon System’s shipyards glittered in the dark, half-finished hulls hanging in their berths like sleeping giants. Somewhere near the centre of the hall, beneath a banner bearing the Fourth Fleet’s emblem, Rear Admiral James Preston McCallister was being passed from one congratulatory handshake to the next.

Samwell had positioned himself at the edge of it all, close enough to the viewports to pretend to admire the shipyards, far enough from the crowd that nobody would expect conversation from him. It was a tactic he had refined over years of receptions exactly like this one. He nursed his champagne flute and watched the bubbles climb.

“Oh come on, Samwell, stop pouting like that, it’s a party!”

He rolled his eyes before he had even turned his head. It was the fiftieth time his sister had said some variation of those words since the celebration began, and he had counted.

“I’m not pouting,” he muttered into his glass.

“You are. Your bottom lip does the thing.” Cheryon appeared at his elbow in that way she had, materialising like a transporter accident with excellent hair. “It’s been doing the thing all evening. We’re senior officers in this flotilla; we need to appear at least as if we’re enjoying ourselves while we celebrate our leader’s promotion.”

The tone was almost identical to the one their mother used to deploy across the yard of the family farm back on Ventax II, usually moments before assigning someone to muck out the grazer pens. Samwell felt his sister’s eyes on him and refused to meet them. Ensign Cheryon Bollwyn, chief operations officer of the USS Orion, may have been younger than him and a full rank below him. Still, she had spent her entire life perfecting the art of annoying her older brother, and the Delta Quadrant had done nothing to blunt her skills.

“So,” she pressed, taking a sip from her own glass, “are you going to tell me anything about your life since you joined the Whirlwind, or am I going to get the usual response? Because I have to say, your communiques lately have all the personality of a duty roster.”

Samwell sighed. Out in the hall, a string arrangement of something old and stately drifted over the chatter. “There really isn’t much to say, Cheryon. There have been my duties, and then there have been more of my duties. The Orion has handled the same missions as the Whirlwind. You know exactly how busy we’ve all been these last few months, saving people while holding a barely operational ship together. What is there to talk about?”

Cheryon fixed him with a glare of profound disappointment. “For an older brother who used to feed me a constant stream of gossip all through school, you are getting terribly boring in your old age. You used to tell me everything. You told me every detail when you slept with your best friend to get back at your ex-girlfriend, Tammy, for sleeping with your Academy instructor. Those are the details I like to hear!” Her eyes brightened with sudden, terrible inspiration. “Have you slept with another Deltan and broken their celibacy oath? Is that why you’re moody? If so, is he as hot as Lucquas was? Because Lucquas was gorgeous, those abs were sculptural, I completely understood the whole ‘forget Tammy, let’s get drunk and do Lucquas’ decision. And those biceps! I bet he was a cuddler. Have you heard from him lately?”

Samwell felt the heat rise up his neck faster than a plasma fire. He leaned in and hissed at her. “Cheryon! Please! Keep your voice down, I do not need the entire flotilla learning about my sex life at the admiral’s promotion party!”

“Ah.” She smiled the smile of a sibling who has just confirmed a hypothesis. “So that means you’re not getting any at the moment.”

Before he could protest, she was already gesturing with her drink towards a cluster of gold-shouldered officers on the far side of the hall, moving into what he recognised, with mounting dread, as matchmaking mode.

“You see the tall one in the golden uniform? That’s Lieutenant Brad Anderson, our chief of security and tactical. I see him in the ship’s gym all the time. He works out a ridiculous amount. Great body, though I’m not convinced his abs are quite at Lucquas standard. Want me to introduce you?” She barely paused for breath. “No? The one next to him in red is Andron Jines, our pilot. Less intense on the workouts, but very cute in a floppy sort of way.” She rose onto her toes, scanning the crowd like a targeting sensor. “And if neither of those works, I could always set you up with Nali, our chief engineer.”

“Cheryon,” Samwell begged, “please stop trying to pair me off with your crewmates.”

“Fine, if you’re not into Nali, there’s always Commander Kulcis.” She nodded towards where the Orion’s chief science officer stood in conversation near the buffet. “He’s a bit older, but still very handsome. Distinguished, even. I could absolutely see you as somebody’s, oh, what was that word Brad used, the thing he insists he isn’t…”

She snapped her fingers. “Toyboy! That’s it.”

“A toyboy?” The question escaped before his self-preservation instincts could stop it. “What’s a toyboy?”

“Brad says he refuses to be a toyboy for any older person he dates, on account of being young and good-looking.” Cheryon delivered this intelligence with the gravity of a strategic briefing. “So yes, I could see you with Commander Kulcis. Or, ooh, you could always make yourself a third nacelle for your hunky captain and his dishy husband. Or form a little throuple with Commander Hunsen and Counsellor Horin! Oh my goodness, that would be beautiful. Imagine the children. I would finally be an aunt!”

“Stop. Right now.” Samwell held up a hand. “That is gross, Cheryon. I am not getting involved with any of my superior officers.”

“Well then, who?” she demanded, sounding genuinely distraught at the barren wasteland of her brother’s love life. Her gaze swung to another group standing behind them, and Samwell followed it against his better judgment. “I mean, your ops officer and your pilot are adorable together, but they seem far too wrapped up in each other to open things up beyond monogamy. Unless, of course, you had a torrid affair with one of them!” She laughed at her own outrageousness. “Lieutenant Fenton is pretty hot!”

The champagne turned to vinegar in Samwell’s mouth. Across the hall, Oliver stood with Kimas’s arm looped through his, laughing at something Dannik was saying, and Samwell made himself look at the viewport instead, at the shipyards, at anything.

“Let’s change the subject,” he managed, and finished his glass in one long swallow.

“Fine!” Cheryon threw her hands up in surrender, sloshing her drink dangerously close to a passing yeoman.

“You’re no fun anymore. Have you heard much from your old Columbia bunkmate lately? Matthew, wasn’t it?”

“Matthys,” Samwell corrected, faster than he intended to. “And no. Not since we got back to the Alpha Quadrant.”

“Shame.” His sister shook her head with theatrical sorrow. “He was another fine one you let slip through your fingers.”

“I did not let Matthys slip through my fingers.” The words came out firmer than the conversation warranted, and he heard it, and pressed on anyway. “We’re just friends. That’s all it ever was. He was never interested. He was part of a throuple back on the Columbia, for goodness’ sake.”

“I said it before, and I will say it again,” Cheryon declared, “that man was more adventurous than you will ever be. Anyway, tell me about this vacation of yours. You’re still going to that planet, Colludia Two?”

He nodded, grateful for ground that felt safer. “A big group from the Whirlwind’s science department booked it together. White beaches, hot springs, absolutely no anomalies. Two weeks of doing nothing at all.”

Cheryon froze with her glass halfway to her lips. “Hold on. Colludia Two.” Her voice dropped into something between awe and accusation. “Samwell. That’s where Warp Five Forward are playing.”

He blinked at her. “Who is playing?”

The look she gave him could have stripped hull plating. “Warp Five Forward. The band, Samwell. The biggest band in the entire Federation. Five of them, harmonies that should be classified as a controlled substance, and one of them is the admiral’s son. His actual son.” She jabbed her glass discreetly in the direction of the man of the hour, still trapped in his receiving line of handshakes. “The whole flotilla was stuck in the Delta Quadrant while the boss’s boy became the most famous face across the Federation, and none of us had the faintest idea. Nali had to explain them to me twice before I believed her. And they are playing the shore leave concert of the decade on Colludia Two, and my brother, who has a confirmed booking on that exact planet, is standing here asking me, ‘ Who is playing?’.”

Samwell glanced across the hall at the cluster of cadets near the buffet, who had been unusually giddy all evening, and several pieces of overheard chatter suddenly rearranged themselves into sense. Two and a half years beyond the Barzan Wormhole, and the galaxy had simply carried on without them. Apparently, it had done so in five-part harmony.

“I’m going there to relax,” he said, a touch defensively. “Not to scream at five men on a stage.”

“You wouldn’t know how to scream at five men on a stage.” Cheryon sighed the sigh of the deeply burdened. “Fine. But if you so much as breathe the same air as them, I want a full report. Holo-images. Names. Which one smells the nicest. I mean it, Samwell, this is the only useful thing you have ever been positioned to do for me.”

“You could just come to Colludia yourself, you know,” he pointed out. “Beaches, hot springs, apparently a concert.”

“No.” She was immovable. “Two weeks at home with Mum and Dad, and then Nali and I are meeting on Trill for several days of pure indulgence at the Hoobishan Baths. She worked far too hard to book those tickets. We are not losing our spot, so I can watch my brother mope on a sun lounger, even for Warp Five Forward.” She paused, visibly wavering for the first time in the entire conversation, then shook herself. “No. Trill. Final answer. But the full report stands.”

Recognising a lost cause when he saw one, Samwell leaned down and let his sister kiss his cheek. She smelled of champagne and the same soap she had used since she was fourteen, and for one unguarded second, he was grateful for her, nagging and all.

Then her eyes went wide at something over his shoulder. “Oh my goodness. Admiral McCallister has just gone over to Scott. Our Scott! Ensign Florrick, from our security department. Why is the admiral of the entire flotilla making a beeline for one of our ensigns at his own promotion party?” She was already handing her glass to a bewildered passing holographic steward. “I need to know what this is immediately.” And with a final squeeze of his arm, she was gone, cutting through the crowd with the determination of a woman pursuing gossip at maximum warp.

Samwell allowed himself one last look around the hall, and it was a mistake.

Across the sea of dress uniforms, Oliver was looking straight at him.

And just like that, the reception dissolved.

The memory arrived uninvited and all at once. Luminous paint smeared across warm skin. The bass of the club still humming through his bones as Oliver pulled him close on the dance floor, close enough that Samwell could feel the heat coming off him. That first kiss against the pillar, urgent and breathless, Oliver’s hands wrapped around the back of his neck. The stumble through the doors of his quarters, laughter caught between kisses, furniture in the way, and neither of them caring. The strength of Oliver’s arms. The warmth of his mouth. Falling into the dark together, tangled and unhurried and certain, and then waking hours later with the solid weight of him pressed along his side, one muscular arm draped across Samwell’s chest, his breathing slow and steady against Samwell’s back.

Samwell knew exactly how that body felt against his own. That was the problem. He remembered it far too clearly.
His throat tightened. He swallowed, managed a smile that he hoped read as friendly and uncomplicated, and received one in return that was neither of those things. It was warm. It was knowing. It was the smile Oliver gave him in turbolifts and empty science labs and the quiet minutes before a duty shift began, the one that promised later without ever promising more. For a heartbeat, the music and the chatter and the entire celebration seemed to fall away, and it was just the two of them and the secret they were still keeping, and Kimas’s arm looped through Oliver’s like a fact that never changed.

That was the truth of it, the thing Samwell had finally stopped pretending to himself. Somewhere between the stolen hours and the careful goodbyes, between one ‘this is the last time’ and the next, he had fallen for Oliver Fenton. Fallen properly, stupidly, the way he had sworn he never would again. And Oliver, for all the things he whispered when they were alone, still would not choose. He simply kept them both.

That was why Samwell needed Colludia Two. Not the beaches. Not the hot springs. He needed to be somewhere, anywhere, that Oliver was not.

He broke the gaze first, turned sharply on his heel, and made for the exit.

A crowd of loud, laughing cadets spilled out of the hall behind him, their excited chatter about beaches and concert tickets chasing him all the way down the corridor.