It Doesn't Take a Scientist to Understand What's Going On, Baby

Posted on 04 Jun 2013 @ 11:14am by Commander Andreus Kohl

3,437 words; about a 17 minute read

Mission: Episode 03 - Frontier
Location: USS Galileo - Deck 4, Chief Science Officer's Office
Timeline: MD 06 - 1500 hours

[ON]

Lurking outside Maenad Panne's office, Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Kohl was leaned against a bulkhead, nursing an iced coffee. The side of his head and his left shoulder were pressed against the cool bulkhead, as he stood there waiting. He wasn't waiting for Panne, though. He hadn't rang the chime to her office, nor even announced his arrival. Rather, he was waiting for his biochemistry to react to the caffeine. Kohl wasn't a coffee drinker by habit, but he wasn't entirely certain he was awake after sequential away team missions and a flexible shift schedule. He had managed a fair amount of sleep that afternoon, but it still felt like he had been dragged awake from the middle of a sleep cycle.

Standing himself upright, Kohl took another sip of the iced coffee, and then he touched the door chime with his knuckles.

In the middle of reading Petrov's mineral analysis, which was both arduous and expectantly boring, Maenad was grateful for the distraction even before she knew who it was. It didn't matter, at this point. She lifted her head from the fist that supported it and sat upright. "Come in," she said wryly.

The doorway open and Kohl took a couple of steps into the office. He smiled at Maenad, but he remained near the entrance, just slightly beyond the door's sensor range. As Kohl's gaze drifted between LCARS panels set into the bulkheads, he said, "Lieutenant Panne," in greeting. "How're you feeling this afternoon?"

"Oh," she said more upliftedly than her 'come in,' "I'm fine." A smirk turned her blank expression content. "You saved my life, Andreus," she reminded him. "I think we're on a first-name basis."

Kohl smiled at that. The smile lit up his face, melting away the signs of fatigue. He stepped closer to Maenad's desk and he made himself comfortable in the chair. Kohl placed his coffee on the desk and folded his legs, lifting his right ankle onto his left knee. "How are the planetary surveys progressing, Maenad?" he asked.

Without missing a beat, Maenad pulled a coaster from her desk drawer and slipped it beneath Kohl's drink. "More smoothly than I thought," she told him. "So far, everything has been rather bland and typical." She breathed out her nostrils and sat back, crossing her legs beneath the desk. "I wish that I'd gone to the moon with the abandoned cities," she said with a shrug. "I am archaeologist, after all." She made no attempt to hide her dissatisfaction. "But, bigger and better people." Maenad gave him a false smile, one that didn't show her teeth but instead brought her lips together in an almost straight line. She lifted Petrov's analysis of rocks and carelessly tossed it to the edge of her desk, shaking her head while staring somewhere above Kohl's head. "Rocks are a job only for the chief science officer," she scathed.

"But," Maenad brought her hands to her temples and closed her eyes, then slowly dragged them down her cheeks until her palms met beneath her chin. She dropped her hands back to the desk and drummed her fingertips on the edge nearest her. "You came to speak to me, not to hear me whine," she grinned at herself. "And if it has to do with my health, you had better have something else on your mind."

"Complaining is healthy, I say. You let all the the toxins out," Kohl said wryly. He wrapped his hands around his brushed chrome mug and took a sip of his sweet coffee. He set the mug on the desk, folded his hands in his lap, and then reached out suddenly to move the mug over onto the coaster. "But I'm not here to see you as my patient. I am in need of the brilliant Maenad, Chief Science Officer of Galileo. What can you tell me about our Life Sciences section?"

Maenad's cheeks flushed enough to tell that they had, and she tilted her head with an embarrassed smile. Few people thought she was particularly brilliant. Even if he was exaggerating, she appreciated it. "I can tell you that it's pretty busy with the lunar samples. We are recalibrating part of the arboretum to grow the alien samples we have collected. I'm also hoping we can find a dead animal to bring back and study, but on the record I hope that we don't find anything dead." She half-rolled her eyes, "Apparently, life is precious." Her eyes became contemplative and she looked back at him. "Why do you ask?"

"I've started writing a proposal, you see," Kohl said, "I'd like to be a member of a Medical department that participates in the crew's mission for discovery. Our medical staff feels terribly small when the ship is crash-landing, but there's a lot of us when it comes time to tidy up and practice preventive medicine." --He shifted his posture, laying his feet flat on the floor-- "Ideally, I would want us to pursue purely medical research, but I'm not sure our staff is academic enough to support clinical trials. In light of the current mission, though, we may be better suited to supporting your life science research of the Rojar system."

"Oh?" Maenad scratched her temple. "That's an interesting idea," she agreed slowly, thinking. Her department had a lot of work to do, but they were getting along just fine. Adding more people into the fray might complicate things. But, how? She asked herself, realising it was an empty concern. "What sort of projects do you have in mind?" she asked curiously. "I mean, do you have any specific research you'd like to do?" She shrugged, adding, "You're welcome to use the labs as little or as much as you would like, Andreus."

Shaking his head, Kohl looked to Maenad with wide, helpless eyes. "I don't, I really don't have anything in mind," Kohl said, and it came out apologetically. "It's only a seed of an idea. My first instinct is to offer the medical staff to support the cataloging of new lifeforms, plant or animal. Give us all a chance to brush up on our research methodology before striking out on our own in independent research."

Maenad grinned at him, steepling her fingers under her chin. "You're welcome to," she said warmly to him. "And I would be glad to help, if I could. I'm a geneticist; I might come in useful for something."

"I'm-- Yes, thank you, I'm certainly going to need any help I can get..." Kohl said, but he was staring down into his coffee with a preoccupied gaze. "I, uh, I just spoke with one of the other nurses and she told me Doctor Ni Dhuinn has accepted a new position at Starfleet Medical?"

Maenad frowned, straightening her neck. "Odd timing," she said. They had only just left dock a week ago - why hadn't she been offered the position before she embarked on a new mission? The admiralty wasn't known for its brains. "When does she leave?"

"She's gone," Kohl said. His tone, and the glint behind his sapphire eyes, matched Maenad's incredulity at the command decision to take Pola away right now. Kohl folded his arms around his chest and there was something defeated in the way he spoke. "She's leading a relief effort, apparently? On a protectorate world? ....Or so the gossip goes. Whatever time she would have spent making pleasantries would be measured in lives, rather than hours," he said. "Venture is making the travel arrangements, I guess."

"Nobody talks to me, so I don't know anything that goes on outside of my department," she said jokingly, even though it was hardly a joke at all. "As they say, out with the old and in with the new." She smiled across the desk and nodded at him. "Am I looking at the new chief medical officer?"

"Who?" Kohl asked, elongating the vowel with utter confusion. He fixed Maenad with a questioning, narrow-eyed stare and he asked, "What?" Kohl shook his head, and then he blurted out, "Oh!", and then he descended into bleating laughter. "Oh no --heh-- no. No, Starfleet Recruitment is dire straights if you're looking at this ship's Chief Medical Officer."

Disappointed, Maenad's shoulders fell. "Oh," her bottom lip curled. "You're a sensible choice, though, aren't you?" she asked a moment later. "We don't have anybody else who's qualified."

"If we're talking about qualifications..." Kohl replied, and he began to count them off on his fingers. "Doctor Carlisle? Even Venture must have a couple doctors who are ready for a promotion. Anyone, really, who walked away from Starfleet Medical as a medical doctor, rather than with a Master's degree in Nursing Practice. I'm not going to be curing any space plagues."

That surprised her. She didn't realise that Kohl wasn't a doctor. "You're not an MD?" she asked, touching her lips, eyes wide.

Kohl's smile turned thin-lipped. There it was, Kohl thought, the double-edged question. He didn't mind it from a patient so much, but it was always harder coming from someone with whom he worked and he liked. "I am certified as a Nurse Practitioner," Kohl answered flatly.

Maenad's cheekbones reddened over an embarrassed smile. "I knew that," she said. "I'm sorry." Her eyes found an obscure spot on her table as she sunk her lips, trying to find an excuse for having forgotten. She reminded herself about her test results not making it to Ni Dhuinn, which she had blamed on him. But that, really, had nothing to do with him being a nurse and not a doctor. "Do you think you'll ever become a..." she hesitated, realising the sting of the truth, "... doctor?"

Pursing his lips, Kohl studied the change in Maenad's complexion. He watched her eyes on the down, as a response began to form in his mind. As if he were telling a story, he asked, "Do you think you could give up being a Chief Science Officer to spend at least four years in a classroom?" Kohl asked. "On the wrong side of the lecture podium?"

"Sometimes, I would prefer it," she admitted with a smirk. Maenad didn't particularly enjoy being a chief science officer, but she wondered whether that was her or just the atmosphere. Location, location, location. "I am a teacher by trade," she reminded him, "so I think that sitting on the other side of the podium would be rather discouraging, yes," she laughed. "But, you have the perfect bedside manner."

Memories of her first days aboard came back, when Kohl performed her physical. She remembered having that first flicker of a crush on him, and feeling pleased that she might have found a new friend so quickly. She had her suspicions, just from what Kiri had told her, that Kiri had developed one on him as well - something, unfortunately, that went much deeper than just the rush of flirting. Not that Kiri could flirt to save her life, but Maenad quite enjoyed his company for it. "You know," she said, suddenly leaning forward on her desk, elbows out and hands clasped in front of her chest. She bit her lip, hesitantly, and smiled as she quieted her voice. "When I first met you, I had a tiny crush on you," she nodded.

Kohl's face contorted. She brought a smile to his lips that was caught somewhere between cocky and shy. Kohl folded his hands in his lap, and he said, "I know..." Meeting Maenad's eyes, Kohl tilted his head, favouring his left shoulder. His lips curled when he said, "I would have followed you back to your quarters to crack open that Beaujolais nouveau right then if I hadn't been on duty."

Maenad frowned but her smile remained. "But," she paused, "I thought you..." she licked her lips after trailing off. She was trying to think of a way to put it without appearing ignorant. "You prefer the company of men, I thought; the man who let you down on Vega." She eyed him suspiciously, still playfully. "You wouldn't have led me on, would you have, Andreus?"

Stuck on one thing Maenad said, or the sentiment between the words of something Maenad said, Kohl raised his eyebrows. Equally playful in timbre, Kohl said, "I was talking about drinking a bottle of wine with you. That doesn't necessitate penetration." Kohl narrowed his gaze and scraped his teeth across his lower lip. He frowned at the thought of it, and Kohl honestly asked, "Did I lead you on?"

Maenad's cheeks flushed when he said penetration and she scratched at the right corner of her jaw. "Well," she said soberly, "no. But, you know, I was in a new place, and you were so kind to me. I thought that.... Well, I don't know what I thought," she laughed. "But if you knew that I had a crush on you, and had you come by to share a very special bottle of wine with me, I think I would have thought that you," she pressed her lips. "I would have thought that maybe you wanted to be a little more than friends, maybe." She shrugged. "I'm not very good at the game," she admitted. "I can never tell when people like me, or how much they do." Maenad had been hurt more times in her life than she could count, and she hadn't seriously been courted for many years.

"That's probably because," Kohl said, "there is no quantitative measurement. 'How much' is a meaningless measure." --Kohl shrugged, fumbling his way through his supposition-- "The person on the other side of the equation probably doesn't know how much either."

Maenad wasn't quite sure she followed. She meant to place more emphasis on the question she'd asked him, about why he might have watered her suspicions that he might have liked her, but decided not to ask it a second time. If he'd wanted to tell her, he would have. "Miss Cho thinks very highly of you," she changed the subject.

Kohl blinked at that, and then he nodded in a gesture of agreement. "She was telling me I would get my promotion well before I ever believed it would happen," Kohl said. He reached for his mug and lifted it to his lips.

"Mmm," Maenad pursed her lips. She liked Kohl, but he acted very cryptically sometimes. "Very highly, I think," she reiterated.

With a mouthful of iced coffee, Kohl could only respond by cocking an eyebrow at Maenad. He swallowed hard and he set down the mug with both hands. "You think so?" Kohl asked hesitantly. He cringed a little bit, fearful of the answer to come from Kiri's own boss. "I thought I, uhm, I thought I felt something different when she hugged me the other day."

"Well," Maenad raised her eyebrows, "I'm not saying anything like that," she said slowly, "but I think maybe you might want to tread carefully just in case she, well..." she faded as her eyes squinted across the desk at him. "How old are you?" she asked from behind a quizzical frown.

Furrows of concern knit their way across Kohl's brow in response to the look Maenad was fixing on him. "In Federation Standard years," Kohl said, but he had to pause to work out the calculations in his head, "I would be twenty-eight?" The questioning lilt behind his statement wasn't uncertainty about his age, so much as uncertainty about the point Maenad was trying to make about it.

"Hm," she acknowledged. Maenad subtly shook her head, wondering what could be on Kiri's mind. "I'm just saying," she told him. "She's fragile. I don't think she realises what she's doing."

Now Kohl rested his palms against the edge of Maenad's desk. He leaned towards her and he asked, "What is she doing?"

Maenad sighed. "I don't know. Maybe nothing. I think that she really likes you, and I'm saying that if she does you should probably communicate that it's impossible, somehow."

Perched on the edge of his chair, leaning against Maenad's desk, Kohl's eyes favoured the ceiling as he considered how to communicate that message. Kohl cleared his throat, he fixed Maenad with his most formal expression, and he said, "I think I could love you, if only you had a penis."

With seductive eyes and a playfully sultry bow of her head, Maenad had entirely missed his meaning. She ran her teeth over bottom lip, grinning. "I could make you love me," she told him. "If you let me."

A wicked grin split Kohl's serious expression. His timbre went archly melodramatic, when he told her, "You're going to have to tie me down first, babe."

Maenad shook her head. If only, she thought. "I'm not sure what I mean with Kiri," she admitted. "Just keep an eye out for it," was all she could really say about it.

"I've got to admit, I don't totally know what to keep an eye out for," Kohl said. Sitting back in his chair, Kohl looked at Maenad with an amused frown and he shrugged. "Human courtship is foreign to me. Human friendship is foreign to me. Back on Argelius II, platonic friends can be far more intimate than some Human married couples I've known."

"Oh really?" Maenad watched him, raising her eyebrows. She knew nothing about Kohl's homeworld, and she continuously forgot that he wasn't human. She silently laughed, fidgeting with her long fingers. "Well, if it's any consolation," she admitted, "I don't know much about human courtship, either." She thought about Liyar, then, and smirked a little, not really knowing why. Zaren popped into her mind too and, not wanting to think much about her scatterbrained mind, she pushed the two of them back into the shadows. "But, I think that humans could learn a thing or two about intimacy. We're loving creatures; I don't know why so many people make such a big deal about it." She narrowed her eyes, though still remained pleasant, as she tried to pinpoint the last time she had slept with a man. It was years ago. And if she hadn't succumbed to Lirha's pheromones, she thought to herself with inward humiliation, she would not have slept with anyone since then. All these new and exciting men in her life made her realise that she was pining for it; academics had their charms, but they were far and few apart, and every time she thought she might like somebody, she didn't know what to do with herself. She had a guest right now, though, and her thoughts were distracting her. Maenad smiled at Kohl, bringing her full attention back to him. She plucked her bottom lip between her thumb and forefinger. Her ankles crossed beneath her chair, and the heel of her foot rose out of her right shoe.

Raising his mug, Kohl downed the last of his iced coffee. He smiled across at her in silence and when she focused on him, he said, "Thank you, Maenad, for sharing your thoughts about Kiri. I'll keep them in mind. She certainly doesn't need anymore heartache in her life." --He shook his head-- "Let me know if any of your projects are lacking for personnel. I'll prepare a summary of the scientific fields of experience and study for each of the medical staff."

"I will," she nodded, her smile fading. "You're going?" she thought the sudden change in conversation to his departure was sudden.

He tilted his head to glance at the chronometer on one of the LCARS displays in her office. Kohl nodded and he confirmed, "Yeah." He frowned. "Appointment." Planting his feet on the floor, Kohl pushed back his chair and he moved to stand. "We should have dinner, you and I," he said, "Once the away missions slow down enough to allow the luxury of a food and wine."

Maenad smiled, and stood with him. "Yes," she agreed, "I think I would like that very much." She walked around the desk and gestured towards the door, where she followed to see him out. "I am always available for you, Andreus. Call any time."


[OFF]

Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Andreus Kohl
Assistant Chief Medical Officer
USS Galileo

Lieutenant (JG) Maenad Panne
Chief Science Officer
USS Galileo

RSS Feed