Aya looked so small, tucked beneath a thin blanket on the biobed in the Resolute’s sickbay. For such a small ship, RJ had been surprised by the relatively large size of sickbay. But then again, with a guy like Mason as captain, he shouldn’t have been surprised. The ship probably dropped into a warzone at least twice a week. 

“She’s going to be fine.” RJ turned to find not the CMO he’d spoken to earlier, but Mason himself standing behind him. “I spoke to Micheals. Your sister had internal injuries but surgery went well and she’s just sedated now so she can heal.”

RJ nodded, relief washing through him. He’d been looking at Aya’s bio readouts on the screen above her for the last hour, but he couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Why couldn’t he had been something useful, like a doctor, rather than a command officer? What good was standing there and knowing what attack pattern to order a ship into in a situation like this? It wasn’t like he could keep death at bay with attack pattern Alpha-seven-nine, was it? 

He shook the thought off and focused on Mason, standing in front of him. 

The Resolute’s captain had changed since they’d made it back up from the surface, the torn and bloody combat uniform gone, replaced by the uniform of a Starfleet commander. The only evidence of what had happened on the surface was a bruised scrape on the side of Mason’s face, a cut lip, and a red ring around his pale iris where the blood vessels had burst. 

“Didn’t you get treated yet?” he asked, nodding toward the damage on Mason’s face. From what he’d seen, that uniform had to be concealing a lot more, especially as Mason had been in the fall-out zone from when he’d dropped half a planet on the Jem’Hadar.

Mason watched him with an unreadable expression. “Not yet, no. Why?”

“No reason.” RJ shrugged. “It’s just I would have thought the Captain of the ship was top priority…” 

“I’ll live. Why are you so concerned?” Mason’s gaze laser focused on RJ, pinning him like a collector secured a specimen to a board. “I would have thought, given the conversation we’re about to have, you’d have wanted me in less than top physical condition.”

RJ’s blood chilled, and the rest of the room fell away, his sole focus on the man right in front of him. “So we’re going to have that kind of talk.”

It was a statement, not a question. How could it be anything else, especially with the look on Mason’s face?

Mason made a small sound, almost like a grunt. For a second though, it almost seemed regretful. “I think so, yeah. Given the situation.”

“Look man,” RJ said, taking another step forward. “I had no idea she was your wi—“

He didn’t get another sound out of his mouth before Mason’s brawny forearm was in his throat and the wall behind him slammed into his back. It happened so fast he didn’t have time to react, he didn’t even get off even one punch before Mason was on him. Pinning him with a ruthless efficiency that was breath-taking. 

At just over six foot, RJ wasn’t a small guy but he was nowhere close to Mason. And up close Mason was even bigger than he’d looked. And packed with muscle. Absolutely solid, carved from hull plating, steel like muscle. He tried to struggle but Mason pressed harder with his arm, cutting off his air. 

“Don’t say a fucking word,” Mason snarled, a deep growl that rumbled from the center of his chest, transmitted through RJ where they touched. “You don’t get to say her name. You don’t get to make excuses.”

Mason glared down at RJ, pale eyes dark with anger… no, not anger. That was fury. A fury so deep that it could have burned up entire solar systems like a wildfire ripping through a drought-blighted landscape. The kind of fury that sustains a man on a lifelong mission of vengeance. 

And it was all aimed at him.

Ice rolled down RJ’s spine. He was about to die. Here and now, in a bloody sickbay of all places. 

RJ wasn’t a complicated personality. He wasn’t a great hero, and while he occasionally did have moments of heroism… like dropping a raft from orbit on a horde of Jem’Hadar to save his sister… he mostly looked after himself first. 

So, faced with a furious combat veteran ready to rip his spine from his body, RJ did the only thing he could think of… 

He kissed Mason.