Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
The mood in the Pub was oddly mixed, based on Brenz's impression of it. Kincade him that the old Earth custom of a "wake" was supposed to be both a celebration and a solemn remembrance of the person who had fallen, in this case Peter Acton, so the melange of emotions that the Betazoid sensed was probably to be expected. However, on the other hand, considering how suddenly he had died, Brenz wondered if the light feelings now were just a precursor to the grief that tended to follow a memorial service. He gently nursed the drink that O'Malley, the unusually closed-off and unreadable bartender, had handed him, realizing now that it had been quite some time since he had a drink. Like his best friend at the academy, Brenz was quite the partier and arguably made Kincade even more so during their time there. However, while Brenz mellowed his wild ways in the years since, Kincade seemed to have a relapse every once and a while.
Upon the bar was a series of pictures of Acton taken during his years aboard the Yorktown, surrounded by bouquets of flowers. Set upon what was alleged to have been Acton's favorite chair was a board where members of the crew wrote notes and remembrances. Brenz only knew Acton during his time aboard the Yorktown a year ago around the time of the ship's first mission to Thraerra, so the impact of his death wasn't as strong as among those who had known him for even longer. Brenz turned from the bar towards the table that Kincade and Michelle were sharing in relative silence, the latter for some reason that was hard for Brenz to determine without probing further and the former because of a feeling that Brenz recognized in his old friend whenever he had to speak before a crowd. Reluctantly, the captain got to his feet and tapped on the side of his pint of Guinness with a fork as he walked to the memorial on the bar.
"Can I have your attention, please?" he asked in a loud voice. Though Kincade always had a sense of jitters when he had to give a speech before a large room, he had gotten better at hiding it from non-empaths, thanks to some coaching from Brenz on a couple occasions. Also helps with talking to women. "We're gathered here today to remember a friend and colleague, Peter Acton. Those of us who have served on this ship since her commissioning knew him quite well. He was our brother in arms during some of the worst times in the Yorktown's history. He was respected by those who worked with him and loved by those who knew him personally. I'll invite those who want to share their remembrances of Pete to speak, but I just wanted to say a few quick words about him.
"Those of you who knew Pete long enough would know that if you ever got into it with him, you'd know that he could be a real pain in the ass at times." That remark drew a laugh from the assembled guests/mourners. "But, being a man of my...moderate stature, some times I wondered just how much I could piss him off before he'd take a swing at me." Another laugh. "Hell, during our first mission I put him in hack...and for some reason he seemed to enjoy it there. If I had to pick one particular memory to relate to everyone right now, it'd have to be the time we took on Shaw at that asteroid base in a system whose name escapes me right now. It was a running firefight into the base's control center, but we got stopped by this door made out of cast rhodinium, some of the hardest stuff out there. I volunteered to use my phaser rifle to blast through it by overloading it. Before we set it off, Pete gave me his phaser 2, you know the old one he always used to have around, probably even slept with it. When he gave it to me, at first I didn't say anything about it expect a simple 'thank you.' It wasn't until much later that I realized what a symbol of trust that was, that in spite of some of the disagreements we've had up until then, he believed that one of his most prized possessions was safe in my hands. My one great regret was that I never told him how...that I should have told him that I felt honored to..."
Kincade's voice trailed off and he sat back down, apparently unable to go on. At the next table over, K'Doss got up and raised his glass of...something; Brenz didn't really want to know what strange Caitian concoction he was drinking. Though she had been sitting beside him, from the impression Brenz got, she might as well have been sitting on the opposite end of the ship. Guess it's a bad week for couples around here.
"My initial impressions of Peter Acton were probably like most of yours," K'Doss started to say. "He was arrogant, obstinate, and yes, a pain in the ass. He seemed not at all defensive concerning the loss of his hair, something that would send shivers down my spine. The one thing about Pete that I have missed and will continue to miss is his odd knack for telling obscure jokes at what seemingly would be an inappropriate time. Even though I never understood the human-centric references, I valued the levity he added even when I thought we were doomed. And many of us here remember the tongo games, which if I recall was quite useful during our 'trip' to that tongo tournament. I regret the fact that he left this ship when he did and I also regret that he also left this universe far too early."
So far, any feelings of levity that the wake was supposed to inspire was simply not materializing, as Brenz had figured it would. Sometimes the emotions tended to pour out at situations like this, no matter how much one tried to change the intent from one of mourning to one of celebration. After K'Doss sat down, there was an awkward silence, briefly punctuated by the occasional cough. Hernandez, who had been standing by the memorial on the bar, moved in front of it and raised her drink.
"The first time I met the chief was two days after I came on board," she started to say. Brenz noticed that she tried to close off her emotions more than unusual, as if she not only wanted nobody to see how she was feeling, but also didn't want the Betazoid to get a read on her. Though difficult, it wasn't impossible for humans to conceal their true feelings, but it did take practice. "He didn't have time to introduce himself to me and show me the ropes, so my introduction to this crew was when we had to beam down to raid an insurgent camp. He told me I should be careful; we were going down with a few senior officers with us and since I was the newest security officer, I had two bullseyes painted on my back. Sure enough, I got hit, twice even. Afterwards in sickbay, the chief told me I need to start learning how to duck..."
A polite chuckle returned some levity to the room once more. The successive stories that Brenz sat through each sounded a little more cheerful and humorous and though the mood in the Pub started to lift, but there was still that pall of tragedy that hung over the room. Peter Acton had been killed in the line of duty along with the entire crew of the Justice, an act that at the moment seemed random and senseless. And those are the deaths that are hardest to get over.
Once the final toast was held, Brenz made his way back over to the bar for a refill of his drink. Already at the bar was Dr. Carter, whom by the XO's count was on his third tequila since the wake began. After taking another drink from O'Malley, Brenz took a seat next to the CMO, who grunted the second the Betazoid's backside settled into the stool (which was odd, since Carter couldn't have seen it since he wasn't even looking in that direction), "As many of these I go to, they don't get any easier."
"Wakes or memorials in general?" he asked.
"Both," Carter replied. "Ever heard of that old human psychology line about the stages of acceptance?"
"Vaguely," Brenz said, holding back the temptation to comment that humans were under the mistaken impression that they invented the field of psychology.
"Wakes always struck me as being as stuck firmly in denial," the doctor said. "Trying to bury our grief under a bunch of weak jokes and booze. Never struck me as particularly healthy."
"Since when did you start sounding like a counselor?" asked the XO.
"Back in the day, us chief surgeons were the closest thing you emotionally unstable command-track folks had to counselors," Carter said before taking a sizeable gulp of his tequila. "It was any wonder more captains didn't go nuts like Matt Decker and Ron Tracy."
"History was never one of my strong suits," the Betazoid said.
"I've noticed, Son," quipped Carter.
"How's that miracle thing going?" Brenz asked, recalling one of the topics they discussed the last time they were both at the Pub.
"Still a miracle, as far as I can tell," the doctor replied bluntly. "And it'd be a miracle if I ever figure it out..."
During the each of the remembrance speeches and even afterwords, Danielle hadn't said a word, either to K'Doss or anyone else around her. She knew too acutely how such services went and the emotions that came out of them. During the Dominion War back when she flew small fighters, such remembrances became commonplace, as pilots were lost in almost every engagement with the enemy. Memorial services for one or two quickly became mass funerals held on the hangar deck; the first to die long remembered but the "nuggets" who came to replace them and ended up dead were quickly forgotten in the growing carnage. Of course, Richard Hawthorne's funeral was a tad bit different, both in its content and in its lingering effects on her. Hell, that wound still hasn't closed up quite yet.
She fixed a look to K'Doss, who sat across the table from her as he looked elsewhere. Since finding out that Richard Hawthorne was the father of her child, she had gone through just about as many explanations as possible, both in her head and to him, to see if she could make any sense of it. None of them were that satisfying to either K'Doss or Danielle's ears. She now doubted that she'd ever hear an explanation for it, so all that was left to her to do was to try to find some way for them to live with it.
"Jerry," she said in a low voice. It felt odd to be having this conversation here at Acton's memorial service, but Danielle had put this off for too long. K'Doss, however, didn't seem willing to respond. "Jerry?"
"Not now," he grunted in a low voice.
"Then when?" Danielle asked harshly. "We need to talk about this..."
He growled as he shot up from his chair and headed towards the exit. Danielle got up and quickly followed him back out into the corridor. With most of the crew either at their duty stations, their quarters, or in the Pub, the hallways were almost vacant, meaning that they had some privacy. "Dammit, Jerry, listen to me!"
"Listen to you what?" he snapped as he turned around to face her. "Listen to you try to come up with some excuse why he's Richard's father? You can't, can you, so there's nothing more to discuss!"
"You're right, I have no idea how this happened, but we're going to have to live with it," she said with a shrug of her shoulders.
"Yes, we always seem to have to live with it, don't we?" K'Doss said through his fangs. "I've spent the past year trying to live up to a dead man. Now I find out that somehow my wife had his child years after his death and I'm supposed to just live with it? How do I know some clone of him or version from a parallel universe isn't going to magically appear on the transporter pad? How in Sheznar am I supposed to deal with all of this?"
"I don't know!" she shouted. "How the hell was I supposed to know that any of this was supposed to happen? The guy who performed our wedding said 'in sickness and in health,' not 'and children conceived by dead people!' You want to blame me for all of this?"
"I'm not blaming you," he hissed. "I'm blaming...him."
"What?" asked Danielle.
"I know you probably still care about him, but I can't help but feel that he's been a major source of pain in your life," said K'Doss calmly. "I know that's a horrible thing to say, but a lot of the pain I've seen you go through, particularly now, is somehow his fault. And...I...I feel so guilty about it. I hate myself for hating him..."
"Hey," she said in a reassuring voice as she placed her hands on his broad shoulders. "It's okay for you to be upset. I was angry at Rick for a while after he died, but it's like I told you last year, he's gone. Right now, we just have to worry about you, me, and the baby. There's nothing we can do to change anything that's happened before."
"You know, I really hate it when you make so much sense that it stops me from being angry," he commented with a smirk. "Makes you look smarter than me."
"Well, they say women have more raw intelligence than men," Danielle half-lied.
"Human women over human men, maybe," K'Doss countered. "Come on; I doubt Pete would appreciate us bickering at his funeral."
"I liked what you said about Commander Acton," Michelle remarked from the couch a short time after she and Kincade had returned to his cabin. He wished he could agree with her, mad at himself for suddenly choking up when he did. A captain was supposed to maintain a sense of decorum and calm even under the most emotionally difficult circumstances. During his reflections on Acton, he suddenly just...froze; his conscious mind becoming so focused on his former security chief's death that he suddenly forgot what he meant to say. "Sounded pretty heartfelt, especially after how he left."
"Pete left because I pushed him to it," Kincade said bluntly as he took off his uniform jacket and draped it over his desk chair. Before he sat down to look over the messages that had been left for him since he left for the wake, he spotted the padd he had been working on that contained the re-design proposals for certain sections of the ship, including his new quarters. Deciding that now was just a good a time as any and wanting to change the subject, he picked it up to take over to her.
"What's that supposed to mean?" she asked before he could hand the padd to her. There were many things that Kincade hadn't told her about the Yorktown's exploits, obviously since some of them were classified and yet there were certain things he didn't feel like dredging up around her again. Particularly when I've got a potentially bad argument looming.
"It's just that...I said certain things that probably made him want to leave," he replied. The truth was that Acton had barged into his ready room armed with the full knowledge of everything that had happened at Zavras, clearly disgusted with the captain's choices in that matter. The more Kincade tried to justify it, the more angry Acton became. "Actually, there was something else I wanted to talk to you about."
"Oh?" she asked in a low voice. For some reason, Michelle had been especially withdrawn of late, as if she didn't want to talk with him as much as she did before. Kincade had written it off as her being annoyed by his breaking more and more dinner arrangements over the past few days, something he personally vowed to work on once the Yorktown returned to Earth.
"Well, Starfleet sent over a bunch of design proposals for our refit, one of them including a new captain's cabin," he answered as he offered the padd to her. "Seeing how you and I will be sharing it for the foreseeable future, I wanted to hear what you thought about it before I signed off on the plans."
"Jack, I..." Michelle said nervously without taking the device away from him. Uh oh. "Sure..."
"What's wrong?" asked Kincade cautiously.
"I've been offered a lead position on the new dig being sent to Tagus III," she half-blurted, as if she had been trying to hold back on saying this for some time. "And I...don't know whether or not I should accept."
"Don't look at me," the captain said with a sigh. "I wouldn't want to have to choose between you and this ship."
"But that's what they're asking me to do," Michelle said. "It's the opportunity of a lifetime..."
"What's so important about this planet, anyway?" he questioned.
"Do you know how hard it is to get permission from the Taguans to even beam down to the ruins?" she asked rhetorically, since he obviously did not. "So, that leaves me with a lot to consider, doesn't it"
"Unfortunately," the captain stated. "But, think of it this way. You stay here and you get to see stuff that no one in the Federation has ever seen..."
"You and I both know that I'm not Starfleet material," Michelle said. "I'm worried that if I stayed here with you, I'd get bored waiting for us to find a planet that had anything interesting buried on the surface. Tagus is one of those things that doesn't come up very often and I'd be a fool not to take it."
"And what about us?" Kincade asked. "Were you just going to walk out on everything that's happened to us over the past year?"
"Why does it have to be so absolute?" she questioned.
"Don't go," he urged, suddenly finding a new wind of determination.
"Why?" asked Michelle with a surprised look on her face.
"Because I need you here," Kincade said before he started to pace uncomfortably. "You're the one thing that's gone right for me this past year. If you left, after everything that's happened, I don't know what I'd do."
"What are you saying?" she questioned as she got up from the couch. "Are you asking me to marry you?"
"Well, I..." he hesitated. "If you want me to."
"I do," Michelle replied.
"You'll marry me or you want me to ask?" asked Kincade in confusion.
"You know, you're still cute when you're nervous," she said with a smirk. "That's a yes to both."
"But wait, does that mean I'm ugly when I'm confident?" he countered with a similar smile before leaning in to kiss her. He was completely emphatic when he told her that she was perhaps the only thing that was good about the last year of his life. Kincade was struck by the sensation that this moment might be the thing that would start to turn his life around.
Lord knows that I've seen a lot of life-changers in my day...
Chapter Eighteen
The mood in the Pub was oddly mixed, based on Brenz's impression of it. Kincade him that the old Earth custom of a "wake" was supposed to be both a celebration and a solemn remembrance of the person who had fallen, in this case Peter Acton, so the melange of emotions that the Betazoid sensed was probably to be expected. However, on the other hand, considering how suddenly he had died, Brenz wondered if the light feelings now were just a precursor to the grief that tended to follow a memorial service. He gently nursed the drink that O'Malley, the unusually closed-off and unreadable bartender, had handed him, realizing now that it had been quite some time since he had a drink. Like his best friend at the academy, Brenz was quite the partier and arguably made Kincade even more so during their time there. However, while Brenz mellowed his wild ways in the years since, Kincade seemed to have a relapse every once and a while.
Upon the bar was a series of pictures of Acton taken during his years aboard the Yorktown, surrounded by bouquets of flowers. Set upon what was alleged to have been Acton's favorite chair was a board where members of the crew wrote notes and remembrances. Brenz only knew Acton during his time aboard the Yorktown a year ago around the time of the ship's first mission to Thraerra, so the impact of his death wasn't as strong as among those who had known him for even longer. Brenz turned from the bar towards the table that Kincade and Michelle were sharing in relative silence, the latter for some reason that was hard for Brenz to determine without probing further and the former because of a feeling that Brenz recognized in his old friend whenever he had to speak before a crowd. Reluctantly, the captain got to his feet and tapped on the side of his pint of Guinness with a fork as he walked to the memorial on the bar.
"Can I have your attention, please?" he asked in a loud voice. Though Kincade always had a sense of jitters when he had to give a speech before a large room, he had gotten better at hiding it from non-empaths, thanks to some coaching from Brenz on a couple occasions. Also helps with talking to women. "We're gathered here today to remember a friend and colleague, Peter Acton. Those of us who have served on this ship since her commissioning knew him quite well. He was our brother in arms during some of the worst times in the Yorktown's history. He was respected by those who worked with him and loved by those who knew him personally. I'll invite those who want to share their remembrances of Pete to speak, but I just wanted to say a few quick words about him.
"Those of you who knew Pete long enough would know that if you ever got into it with him, you'd know that he could be a real pain in the ass at times." That remark drew a laugh from the assembled guests/mourners. "But, being a man of my...moderate stature, some times I wondered just how much I could piss him off before he'd take a swing at me." Another laugh. "Hell, during our first mission I put him in hack...and for some reason he seemed to enjoy it there. If I had to pick one particular memory to relate to everyone right now, it'd have to be the time we took on Shaw at that asteroid base in a system whose name escapes me right now. It was a running firefight into the base's control center, but we got stopped by this door made out of cast rhodinium, some of the hardest stuff out there. I volunteered to use my phaser rifle to blast through it by overloading it. Before we set it off, Pete gave me his phaser 2, you know the old one he always used to have around, probably even slept with it. When he gave it to me, at first I didn't say anything about it expect a simple 'thank you.' It wasn't until much later that I realized what a symbol of trust that was, that in spite of some of the disagreements we've had up until then, he believed that one of his most prized possessions was safe in my hands. My one great regret was that I never told him how...that I should have told him that I felt honored to..."
Kincade's voice trailed off and he sat back down, apparently unable to go on. At the next table over, K'Doss got up and raised his glass of...something; Brenz didn't really want to know what strange Caitian concoction he was drinking. Though she had been sitting beside him, from the impression Brenz got, she might as well have been sitting on the opposite end of the ship. Guess it's a bad week for couples around here.
"My initial impressions of Peter Acton were probably like most of yours," K'Doss started to say. "He was arrogant, obstinate, and yes, a pain in the ass. He seemed not at all defensive concerning the loss of his hair, something that would send shivers down my spine. The one thing about Pete that I have missed and will continue to miss is his odd knack for telling obscure jokes at what seemingly would be an inappropriate time. Even though I never understood the human-centric references, I valued the levity he added even when I thought we were doomed. And many of us here remember the tongo games, which if I recall was quite useful during our 'trip' to that tongo tournament. I regret the fact that he left this ship when he did and I also regret that he also left this universe far too early."
So far, any feelings of levity that the wake was supposed to inspire was simply not materializing, as Brenz had figured it would. Sometimes the emotions tended to pour out at situations like this, no matter how much one tried to change the intent from one of mourning to one of celebration. After K'Doss sat down, there was an awkward silence, briefly punctuated by the occasional cough. Hernandez, who had been standing by the memorial on the bar, moved in front of it and raised her drink.
"The first time I met the chief was two days after I came on board," she started to say. Brenz noticed that she tried to close off her emotions more than unusual, as if she not only wanted nobody to see how she was feeling, but also didn't want the Betazoid to get a read on her. Though difficult, it wasn't impossible for humans to conceal their true feelings, but it did take practice. "He didn't have time to introduce himself to me and show me the ropes, so my introduction to this crew was when we had to beam down to raid an insurgent camp. He told me I should be careful; we were going down with a few senior officers with us and since I was the newest security officer, I had two bullseyes painted on my back. Sure enough, I got hit, twice even. Afterwards in sickbay, the chief told me I need to start learning how to duck..."
A polite chuckle returned some levity to the room once more. The successive stories that Brenz sat through each sounded a little more cheerful and humorous and though the mood in the Pub started to lift, but there was still that pall of tragedy that hung over the room. Peter Acton had been killed in the line of duty along with the entire crew of the Justice, an act that at the moment seemed random and senseless. And those are the deaths that are hardest to get over.
Once the final toast was held, Brenz made his way back over to the bar for a refill of his drink. Already at the bar was Dr. Carter, whom by the XO's count was on his third tequila since the wake began. After taking another drink from O'Malley, Brenz took a seat next to the CMO, who grunted the second the Betazoid's backside settled into the stool (which was odd, since Carter couldn't have seen it since he wasn't even looking in that direction), "As many of these I go to, they don't get any easier."
"Wakes or memorials in general?" he asked.
"Both," Carter replied. "Ever heard of that old human psychology line about the stages of acceptance?"
"Vaguely," Brenz said, holding back the temptation to comment that humans were under the mistaken impression that they invented the field of psychology.
"Wakes always struck me as being as stuck firmly in denial," the doctor said. "Trying to bury our grief under a bunch of weak jokes and booze. Never struck me as particularly healthy."
"Since when did you start sounding like a counselor?" asked the XO.
"Back in the day, us chief surgeons were the closest thing you emotionally unstable command-track folks had to counselors," Carter said before taking a sizeable gulp of his tequila. "It was any wonder more captains didn't go nuts like Matt Decker and Ron Tracy."
"History was never one of my strong suits," the Betazoid said.
"I've noticed, Son," quipped Carter.
"How's that miracle thing going?" Brenz asked, recalling one of the topics they discussed the last time they were both at the Pub.
"Still a miracle, as far as I can tell," the doctor replied bluntly. "And it'd be a miracle if I ever figure it out..."
During the each of the remembrance speeches and even afterwords, Danielle hadn't said a word, either to K'Doss or anyone else around her. She knew too acutely how such services went and the emotions that came out of them. During the Dominion War back when she flew small fighters, such remembrances became commonplace, as pilots were lost in almost every engagement with the enemy. Memorial services for one or two quickly became mass funerals held on the hangar deck; the first to die long remembered but the "nuggets" who came to replace them and ended up dead were quickly forgotten in the growing carnage. Of course, Richard Hawthorne's funeral was a tad bit different, both in its content and in its lingering effects on her. Hell, that wound still hasn't closed up quite yet.
She fixed a look to K'Doss, who sat across the table from her as he looked elsewhere. Since finding out that Richard Hawthorne was the father of her child, she had gone through just about as many explanations as possible, both in her head and to him, to see if she could make any sense of it. None of them were that satisfying to either K'Doss or Danielle's ears. She now doubted that she'd ever hear an explanation for it, so all that was left to her to do was to try to find some way for them to live with it.
"Jerry," she said in a low voice. It felt odd to be having this conversation here at Acton's memorial service, but Danielle had put this off for too long. K'Doss, however, didn't seem willing to respond. "Jerry?"
"Not now," he grunted in a low voice.
"Then when?" Danielle asked harshly. "We need to talk about this..."
He growled as he shot up from his chair and headed towards the exit. Danielle got up and quickly followed him back out into the corridor. With most of the crew either at their duty stations, their quarters, or in the Pub, the hallways were almost vacant, meaning that they had some privacy. "Dammit, Jerry, listen to me!"
"Listen to you what?" he snapped as he turned around to face her. "Listen to you try to come up with some excuse why he's Richard's father? You can't, can you, so there's nothing more to discuss!"
"You're right, I have no idea how this happened, but we're going to have to live with it," she said with a shrug of her shoulders.
"Yes, we always seem to have to live with it, don't we?" K'Doss said through his fangs. "I've spent the past year trying to live up to a dead man. Now I find out that somehow my wife had his child years after his death and I'm supposed to just live with it? How do I know some clone of him or version from a parallel universe isn't going to magically appear on the transporter pad? How in Sheznar am I supposed to deal with all of this?"
"I don't know!" she shouted. "How the hell was I supposed to know that any of this was supposed to happen? The guy who performed our wedding said 'in sickness and in health,' not 'and children conceived by dead people!' You want to blame me for all of this?"
"I'm not blaming you," he hissed. "I'm blaming...him."
"What?" asked Danielle.
"I know you probably still care about him, but I can't help but feel that he's been a major source of pain in your life," said K'Doss calmly. "I know that's a horrible thing to say, but a lot of the pain I've seen you go through, particularly now, is somehow his fault. And...I...I feel so guilty about it. I hate myself for hating him..."
"Hey," she said in a reassuring voice as she placed her hands on his broad shoulders. "It's okay for you to be upset. I was angry at Rick for a while after he died, but it's like I told you last year, he's gone. Right now, we just have to worry about you, me, and the baby. There's nothing we can do to change anything that's happened before."
"You know, I really hate it when you make so much sense that it stops me from being angry," he commented with a smirk. "Makes you look smarter than me."
"Well, they say women have more raw intelligence than men," Danielle half-lied.
"Human women over human men, maybe," K'Doss countered. "Come on; I doubt Pete would appreciate us bickering at his funeral."
"I liked what you said about Commander Acton," Michelle remarked from the couch a short time after she and Kincade had returned to his cabin. He wished he could agree with her, mad at himself for suddenly choking up when he did. A captain was supposed to maintain a sense of decorum and calm even under the most emotionally difficult circumstances. During his reflections on Acton, he suddenly just...froze; his conscious mind becoming so focused on his former security chief's death that he suddenly forgot what he meant to say. "Sounded pretty heartfelt, especially after how he left."
"Pete left because I pushed him to it," Kincade said bluntly as he took off his uniform jacket and draped it over his desk chair. Before he sat down to look over the messages that had been left for him since he left for the wake, he spotted the padd he had been working on that contained the re-design proposals for certain sections of the ship, including his new quarters. Deciding that now was just a good a time as any and wanting to change the subject, he picked it up to take over to her.
"What's that supposed to mean?" she asked before he could hand the padd to her. There were many things that Kincade hadn't told her about the Yorktown's exploits, obviously since some of them were classified and yet there were certain things he didn't feel like dredging up around her again. Particularly when I've got a potentially bad argument looming.
"It's just that...I said certain things that probably made him want to leave," he replied. The truth was that Acton had barged into his ready room armed with the full knowledge of everything that had happened at Zavras, clearly disgusted with the captain's choices in that matter. The more Kincade tried to justify it, the more angry Acton became. "Actually, there was something else I wanted to talk to you about."
"Oh?" she asked in a low voice. For some reason, Michelle had been especially withdrawn of late, as if she didn't want to talk with him as much as she did before. Kincade had written it off as her being annoyed by his breaking more and more dinner arrangements over the past few days, something he personally vowed to work on once the Yorktown returned to Earth.
"Well, Starfleet sent over a bunch of design proposals for our refit, one of them including a new captain's cabin," he answered as he offered the padd to her. "Seeing how you and I will be sharing it for the foreseeable future, I wanted to hear what you thought about it before I signed off on the plans."
"Jack, I..." Michelle said nervously without taking the device away from him. Uh oh. "Sure..."
"What's wrong?" asked Kincade cautiously.
"I've been offered a lead position on the new dig being sent to Tagus III," she half-blurted, as if she had been trying to hold back on saying this for some time. "And I...don't know whether or not I should accept."
"Don't look at me," the captain said with a sigh. "I wouldn't want to have to choose between you and this ship."
"But that's what they're asking me to do," Michelle said. "It's the opportunity of a lifetime..."
"What's so important about this planet, anyway?" he questioned.
"Do you know how hard it is to get permission from the Taguans to even beam down to the ruins?" she asked rhetorically, since he obviously did not. "So, that leaves me with a lot to consider, doesn't it"
"Unfortunately," the captain stated. "But, think of it this way. You stay here and you get to see stuff that no one in the Federation has ever seen..."
"You and I both know that I'm not Starfleet material," Michelle said. "I'm worried that if I stayed here with you, I'd get bored waiting for us to find a planet that had anything interesting buried on the surface. Tagus is one of those things that doesn't come up very often and I'd be a fool not to take it."
"And what about us?" Kincade asked. "Were you just going to walk out on everything that's happened to us over the past year?"
"Why does it have to be so absolute?" she questioned.
"Don't go," he urged, suddenly finding a new wind of determination.
"Why?" asked Michelle with a surprised look on her face.
"Because I need you here," Kincade said before he started to pace uncomfortably. "You're the one thing that's gone right for me this past year. If you left, after everything that's happened, I don't know what I'd do."
"What are you saying?" she questioned as she got up from the couch. "Are you asking me to marry you?"
"Well, I..." he hesitated. "If you want me to."
"I do," Michelle replied.
"You'll marry me or you want me to ask?" asked Kincade in confusion.
"You know, you're still cute when you're nervous," she said with a smirk. "That's a yes to both."
"But wait, does that mean I'm ugly when I'm confident?" he countered with a similar smile before leaning in to kiss her. He was completely emphatic when he told her that she was perhaps the only thing that was good about the last year of his life. Kincade was struck by the sensation that this moment might be the thing that would start to turn his life around.
Lord knows that I've seen a lot of life-changers in my day...