The Great Big Disconnect

Posted on 15 Jan 2015 @ 8:41pm by Commander Andreus Kohl & Commander Norvi Stace

2,487 words; about a 12 minute read

Mission: Episode 07 - Sojourn
Location: Starbase 84 - Deck 597, The Karskat Pub
Timeline: MD 30 - 1027 hours

[ON]

An Andorian server laid out the table in the booth with a figurative cornucopia of brunch. There was an eggy dish, pastry sandwiches, fried cured meats, and the obligatory fruit salad. And there was wine. The wine was white, and it was bubbly. As the only person actually sitting at the table, Andreus Kohl looked out at the platters of food and he was, only then, starting to question why he had ordered so much. He had woken up famished, but now the feeling was starting to pass. Looking at the food from behind narrowed eyes, Kohl only poured himself a glass to start with.

From seemingly out of nowhere, Stace honed in on the spread with hungry eyes as she plopped herself, completely uninvitedly, down at the table beside him. "Someone's hungry," she said as she slid one of the spare plates in front of her and reached over to grasp at the spoon. Piling a mound of egg onto her plate she suddenly stopped dead. "Oh, are you expecting someone?" she asked whilst sitting down and picking up a spare fork to get started. "Cos I can just eat and go. I don't mind."

Although Kohl's eyes betrayed some surprise and discomfort when Stace first bounded into his solitary brunch, Kohl's voice was warm but firm, when he insisted, "Please stay. This is-- this was for me. Or for three of me? I don't know." --He shook his head, and his gaze wandered down to the food on the table-- "I suppose I'm not expecting anyone. Not now."

"Not now?" Stace parroted as she spooned full a mound of eggs into her mouth. Grabbing the napkins and placing one over her lap she then stuffed the other in the front of her collar and quickly wiped her mouth with it before allowing it to cascade down the front of her uniform. "That sounds ominous."

Kohl busied himself with scooping up food, and piling it on his plate in discrete quadrants. He tried to sound matter-of-fact and brave, when he said, "Victarion left." --But the slightest edge of panic set in when he said-- "Left Galileo. Left me. And he didn't even say goodbye. He said it in a letter. A letter!"

Stace stopped as she searched her extensive memory for any indication that she knew what Andreus was talking about. Victarion? she mused silently before shifting her face into a dismissive fashion to move the story along. It was odd, she thought, that this was the second conversation in as many days where she realised that the people she worked so closely to were in fact practical strangers to her out of uniform. "Who writes letters these days anyway?" she managed in a nonplussed tone that would hopefully unearth some clues. "I wouldn't worry about it, Andreus. He sounds like a total targ."

Kohl's immediate response was to frown, but the expression was enhanced for comic effect. Kohl had become familiar enough with Stace to know she meant no malice in her words, but Kohl still started to say, "Don't--" in Victarion's defence. It was what came naturally. "He's not a-- He's not," Kohl said, and he shook his head for emphasis. "I've known him since he was sixteen. Victarion is kind and considerate. Really, I suppose we were only courting. It wasn't anything serious... He's a good man, but there was something wrong about us when we were together."

"Listen," Stace said, placing down her fork and looking to him intently. Kohl was not the only one who referred to his colleague as more than just acquaintances, and after five lifetimes of forging relationships, Stace was a pretty good judge of character. "Sometimes the loneliest times in life can be when we're hauled up in wrong relationships. If you can see you were both wrong, then it sounds like his departure was for the best. But that doesn't excuse the cowardice of the letter."

"That knowledge doesn't seem to make it much easier," Kohl remarked. He stabbed some bacon onto the prongs of his fork, folding it in on itself into a bite-sized shape. "You don't know how good it felt to be near him. How cold it is for that feeling to be absent," Kohl said. He raised his fork and took a bite out of the bacon.

"You're right," Stace said, turning back to her own breakfast with an unamused look now washing across her, "in five distinctly separate and uneventful lifetimes, I have never once experienced the racking pang of a disconnected love." She fell silent and allowed her expression to convey her meaning.

Raising his glass, Kohl drank back a glug of wine. Once he freed up his hands, he set about piling some eggs on his plate. As he did, Kohl asked, "Was it always the truest of true love for every Stace?"

"Not at all," Stace replied setting down her cutlery and bridging her hands across her plate like a church roof. She paused for a moment and then relaxed into a half-smile. "My first host was practically a sociopath; an artistic recluse. I don't think she ever truly liked anyone, let alone loved. My second did, though. But his early death left his partner unmarried and I've always regretted that. Life was so much bigger then. So much more unexplored and exciting. My third was happily married to her partner despite a few indiscretions throughout the years, and my fourth was married to his ship. He'd never met a finer woman than the Gilmore." She smirked at her own story and then scrunched her nose up at him. "But me, the one sitting before you, I am destined to be a scientist. And a Fleet Scientist at that. And that can only mean one thing. I will take my career to the grave with me. And not a man." She softened and looked into his eyes.

"You can control every aspect of your life, Andreus. The one thing you can't is other people. Live your life in the confines of what you can master, and the rest will click into place at one time or another. And if it doesn't, then there's always the Ferengi Escorting Agency. I'm sure you can find something that fits the bill there." She smiled her jest and raised her eyebrow.

"Oh, no," Kohl said in a taunting manner, and he went on, "No, nonono, no." He shook his finger at her, but he laughed in amusement all the while. "It's not going to come to that. (Or, not this decade at least.) We are, the pair of us, too pretty for it to come to that." The blithe remark had hardly come out of his lips, when Kohl pursed his lips tight. Dark thoughts returned. Kohl poked at his eggs with the edge of a fork, as if that might distract him, but his sense of ease with Stace meant he could never filter his thoughts for long.

"I've been struggling..." Kohl said, and no matter how much he wanted to communicate this thought with Stace, the individual words became caught, as if they were stuck in his teeth. "Struggling to connect with people. ...With Victarion, but with anyone. That-- that was never a problem for me before. Certainly not when I was on leave."

It didn't take a telepath to sense that Kohl was drowning in his own unhappiness; and so Stace extended her hand out and placed it over Kohl's warmly. "I'm not a counsellor, Andreus - thankfully - but I've experienced my fair share of life. What's changed for you to busy your head back in that tough shell of yours?"

Kohl smiled fondly at the sensation of Stace's hand on his own. Physical contact was an integral piece of Argelian communication, but it had been trained out of Kohl in his days as a diplomatic officer. He had had to learn how to communicate with others in the manner they were most comfortable. The touch was comforting. "Our Doctor Devin has lead me to believe it relates back to my injury, my paralysis," was Kohl's reply. His timbre was soft, and somewhat couched in his old nursing way of speaking. "I, uh, I feel much recovered from the explicit trauma. The fear and violence of it; the changes to my body. But there have been further traumas, hidden beneath."

Stace's eyes flared at Kohl's words. When he was her Assistant Chief Science Officer, she had access to his entire Starfleet Medical file, including its psychological evaluation. But, beyond the initial introduction, Stace had probed deeper into it. Working with him so closely as she had, Kohl seemed to function on an exemplary level. Authority where needed, compassion when it wasn't and a well rounded leader. But beyond this, Stace realised that she barely knew the man sitting across from her. She inhaled and then clasped her hands more tightly around his. "What kind of traumas, Andreus?"

Offering a shrug, Kohl could only think to answer with, "I don't know." His eyebrows raised up his forehead, as he said, "That's what I need to discover through more appointments with Doctor Devin." His voice quavered at the uncertainty of it, but then he laughed, because there was a certain humour to it. "All I know is my disconnected feeling is a symptom, and it's been growing since the Borg attack."

Kohl shook his head and then he laid his eyes on Stace. "How do you do it?" Kohl asked suddenly. "How do you engage with our work enough that the work intrinsically is enough for you?"

"Who said it was enough?" she answered coolly with a raise of her fiery brow. She released his hand and then took in a deep sigh, looking out across the faces of the breakfast room before settling back to her friend. "It's different for me," she began, pushing her plate aside fully. "I have so much more experience than you will ever be able to in one lifetime. I've been in love several times over and the heartache of a loss never gets any easier. But as soon as you resign yourself to the fact that each 'discontinuation' of a relationship is a process - the same process, no less - then you just have to paint by numbers to reach the finished picture." In her mind, she was making perfect sense, but with a twitch of her eye she then realised that this might not be the case for the Argelian. She decided to change tact.

"I have control over my career. What happens on this ship and with my path is solely down to me. I call the shots. In a relationship, you're introducing an unstable and unknown factor into the mix. Something that you have no control over. And that, for me right now, is not appealing. Sure I'd like to love again. But it's not the be all and end all of life. They're pockets of joining that make you feel that this is what life is all about." She patted her stomach with a wry smile and winked. "And I'm already Joined. Everything I need to satiate that appetite is out there. And it doesn't necessarily come in the form of another humanoid."

As he chewed and swallowed his breakfast, Kohl nodded at her words to show understanding, if not agreeing for his part. "Have you put any more thought," Kohl asked, "into starting any research projects of your own aboard Galileo?"

"I don't have the time," she replied bluntly, now moving the plate back in front of her and tucking in again. "With things like the new deflector installation and the running of the department, I kind of don't want to split my time until we're underway with this next mission. Research and experiments are your remit, Andreus," she added with a smile. "I do have some avenues I want to explore but they're adventurous and labour-intensive, so I have to bide my time. What about you?"

Kohl reached out with his fork to start plucking a variety of foodstuffs from the platters and dropping them on his own plate. As he assembled his breakfast tappas-style, Kohl replied, "In trying to develop leadership in one of our junior officers, I've ended up leading research into a treatment for Vulcan neurological damage, caused by hyperthyoidism and trellium poisoning. She was off to a beautiful start. She hand-picked her team, and motivated them well. I pulled some strings to get my hands on fresh clinical data. And then our junior officer jumped ship and abandoned her research in my lap."

As he spoke, Kohl's manner was brightening -- although, at the back of his mind, it concerned him that he was becoming one of those people, who had an easier time talking about his work, rather than his after-hours life. All the same, he kept talking about his work: "I've also been reading up on theories about how language impacts evolution and biology. Lieutenant Nicholas and I are working up a research proposal."

"Well," she interjected, bringing it back to Kohl personally, "that'll at least keep you occupied for the next couple of weeks or so." She paused and she scrunched up her nose at him. "But just make sure that you don't bury yourself - and your life - in your work. Too many officers, and independent scientists, do that. And one day you look up from your science lab readout to find yourself old, grey and that life has passed you by. I'm always here for you. You know that."

"Ohh, I am far too fickle, as you will sadly learn," Kohl replied through a smile that was both abashed and amused. After taking another bite of bacon, Kohl said, "My moods change with the season. I get bored with my work, no matter which uniform I'm wearing. I'll be continuing with counselling, which should remind me to keep one eye outside the lab." --He ate some more, and then he put down his fork and regarded Stace-- "I'm glad you sat here with me. Thank you for joining me."

Stace flashed her eyes at Andreus and winced with her face affectionately. "Anytime, Kohl. You always know where to find me." She covered his hand again with hers and then gave it a tight squeeze, patting the back of his hand her palm as she then stood up. "My door's always open for you, Andreus. Anytime. Anywhere. When you know how to tackle this block you have, come and find me. I'll help you figure out your next step."


[OFF]

Lieutenant Commander Andreus Kohl
Chief Research Officer
USS Galileo

AND

Lieutenant Commander Norvi Stace
Chief Science Officer & Second Officer
USS Galileo

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