Fearful Hope

Posted on Sat Oct 31st, 2020 @ 1:44am by Lieutenant Samantha Leyton & Ensign Elegy Nascimento

Mission: Mission 3 - 100
Location: Deck E - Mess Hall
Timeline: Day 60, Month 3, Year 23:30
1745 words - 3.5 OF Standard Post Measure

As a denizen of Atlantis' night shift, Ensign Elegy Nascimento had been woken from a deep slumber when he'd been summoned to the bridge that morning. The discovery of a potential, theoretical wormhole had been enough to get his adrenaline flowing, but it was all for naught. That hadn't been his shift. Sovar and Yoshi had stepped in and Elegy had returned to his bunk. Sleep hadn't come easily, and even then, his rest had been fitful. With his mind racing, Elegy took to wandering through service tubes. When he made his way into the mess hall on E deck, Elegy could smell pasta. In an instant, a midnight snack felt like just the thing for him.

Dressed in grey sweat bottoms and a black t-shirt with gold lettering on the front that spelled Battlestar Galactica. Samantha looked up from her spaghetti at the newcomer to the messhall, which at this time of the night was fairly empty. She recognized Ensign Nascimento and gave a friendly wave.

After a loop around the mess hall to gather up his own bowl of spaghetti, Elegy circled back to the table where Samantha was seated. By comparison, Elegy was clad in his indigo flightsuit --his dark hair slicked into a side-part-- so he wouldn't need to swing by his quarters before his shift in the science lab. "Good evening, Lieutenant," Elegy said by way of introduction, as he helped himself to the empty chair opposite Samantha. "How was your shift?" he asked. Almost as soon as he said the words, he leaned forward and he looked her dead in the eyes. Conspiratorially, Elegy asked, "...It would be rude to ask about the wormhole before I ask about you, right?"

Samantha let out a small laugh. "Not at all. It seems everyone on the ship is excited about the wormhole. I know I shouldn't give my hopes up because the wormhole could lead to anywhere in the galaxy but I can't help myself. What do you think about it?"

Looking Samantha in the eyes, Elegy held out both his hands over his pasta bowl to demonstrate the prickling sensations on his skin. "I need the wormhole. I need to know everything about the wormhole. I can feel it in my skin," Elegy said in reply. "I want to know what it looks like, what it sounds like, what its turbulence feels like." --Dropped his hands to his sides, Elegy shrugged at his helpless devotion to his passions-- "Nobody on Earth has every seen one of these. Nobody.

"In my heart of hearts," Elegy continued, his voice went diffident with the admission, and his gaze dropped, "I want to believe the wormhole could have something to do with how we ended up stranded out here. But, truly, I'm afraid to think it could get me back home to my husband. I'll be too heartbroken if the wormhole is pointing into another quadrant of the galaxy."

Samantha nodded in agreement. "I know the feeling. The way our luck has been lately, I would almost call this ship cursed. Hopefully that will change. Where on Earth are you from?"

Suddenly, Elegy was grinning back at Samantha at the turn their conversation had taken. There was a glint in his sapphire eyes that betrayed how often he’d answered this question thusly. “I’m from nowhere on Earth,” Elegy said unblinkingly. “I was born in Heliopolis, on Vega Colony. I was raised in an artists' commune."

"Ah," Samantha replied. "I've never been to Vega Colony. How is it?" She had always hoped to visit most if not all of Earth's Colonies.

"The capital, you see, Vega City has grown into the crown jewel of the colony. The last time I made it back there, I could almost swear I was on Earth," Elegy said. The effusive way he spoke, he had clearly lost himself to memory. One couldn't say that Elegy was fully even aboard Atlantis anymore. "Then the commune where I grew up," Elegy said, "it was little more than prefab settlement cabins and a couple of disassembled starships scattered in the woods around a lake. Every home has been so heavily painted, or clad in unconventional building materials, you would never know they had all been constructed to be identical."

"Sounds nice," she commented with a grin. It was obvious that Nascimento enjoyed and missed his home. "My home was on Earth--eastern Virginia by the beach. I loved going to the old naval museums nearby at Norfolk. I especially loved visiting the old aircraft carriers, trying to imagine what it was like to serve on those ships."

“Naval museums? ...Huh," Elegy said. As he said those words, a mix of expressions played across his face. He vacillated between surprised, and impressed, and an eventual realization that that upbringing was inevitable. Leaning in, slightly, to the table between them, Elegy asked, "Yes-sir, no-sir from a young age, huh? Does that mean you joined Starfleet for the duty or for the adventure?"

Samantha chuckled at the comment. "I joined to carry on the family tradition so to speak. I come from a mostly military family. My father is a retired Starfleet Captain but it was my grandfather who had the biggest impact on me and helped me develop a love of flight. So why did you join Starfleet?"

“I had devoted myself to music," Elegy said in answer to Samantha's question. He indicated to her with the flat of his palm, reflecting on what she had shared. "Following in my mother's artistic footsteps, I only wanted to be surrounded by music. It was only after I graduated university, I had a bit of a meltdown. I suspect I'm a better student than I am a composer. I applied to Starfleet for the structure. ...I think I assumed they would need trumpet players in space?"

Samantha shrugged. "Very neat! Well, we could always use musicians aboard the ship for entertainment. What is your favorite song to play?"

Stabbing his fork into the pasta, Elegy twirled a couple strands around the tines of his fork. Still staring down into his bowl, Elegy said, "Well, that's the bother. The quartermaster shipped my guitar to Columbia by mistake, and my piano was too large to move out of Jupiter Station." --Looking up, there was restrained hope behind Elegy's sapphire eyes-- "Lieutenant Davis has offered to search me a loaner among the crew, and Ensign McManus thinks he might be able to build something. All that leaves me with now is to drum on my thighs."

Samantha leaned back, as she finished chewing her bite of food. "I hope McManus comes through in building one for you. If this wormhole works, you may yet be able to get your guitar back."

Shaking his head quickly, Elegy bit his lower lip and he held eye-contact with Samantha. "I don't know," Elegy warily said, "if I'm ready to think about that. Ready to believe in the wormhole like that. It'll hurt too much if it's pointing to farther away in the galaxy or it isn't even traversable, you know?"

Leaning back in her chair, Samantha nodded at the response. "Yes, but I have keep faith that it will work out. Even if it only takes off a decade of travel, I'll be happy." She didn't want to think about the possibility of failure.

After he swallowed a bite of pasta, Elegy admitted, "I can only take this isolation day by day. The opportunity to explore the wormhole, for its own sake, would be a respite from the Vrav." --He shook his head at the state of affairs: Atlantis running away from Ud Clan while simultaneously trying to make amends for the mistakes they'd made-- "Will the wormhole be anything like what scientists have theorized? Will it resemble something else entirely? Maybe it had something to do with how we got out here in the first place?"

"Perhaps...what else could hurl a starship halfway across the galaxy? If not a wormhole then the power to do such a thing would be unheard of. No such phenomenon exists that can do such a thing that I'm aware of other than a wormhole," Samantha replied, crossing her arms in thought.

While Samantha spoke, Elegy drummed his fingers on the edge of the table between them. He was squinting at the overhead, concentrating on vague memories that Samantha had triggered. "When we were preparing for the diplomatic mission with the Xindi..." Elegy started to say, but he trailed off in the time it took the final puzzle pieces to align in his mind. "I read reports about subspace vortexes the Xindi were able to produce," Elegy said, both intrigued and frustrated; "Allowing them to cheat from one area of space to another via subspace corridors." --He shrugged-- "I can't say I know anything about how they work, let alone if an NX-class starship could fly through anything but atmosphere or vacuum. ...Maybe the Xindi had second thoughts about our return?"

Samantha held no love for the Xindi after their attack on Earth as she thought over what Elegy said. "Possible...I wouldn't put anything past the Xindi. Yet at the same time, I would rather be dealing with the Xindi. At least we know more about them than we do the Vrav."

Nodding slowly, Elegy swallowed another bite of pasta. "The Vrav seem so lost and desperate. They seem to believe they're facing extinction. They have nothing," Elegy said, and he shook his head sadly. Wincing, he added, They have nothing else to lose. It makes them more dangerous."

"Indeed it does," Samantha agreed. An enemy with nothing to lose was the most dangerous kind. "I better try to get back to sleep. We have a big day tomorrow."

Elegy's gaze darted to the chronometer on the wall. He chimed in with a disappointed, "And I'm due to my post in the science lab." Unceremoniously, he went about shoving the rest of his pasta in his mouth, not wanting to waste a bite. Atlantis was paying a terrible price for their protein food stock. Elegy planned to relish every moment of nourishment that another day brought, regardless of what side of the quadrant he occupied.

"Have a good night, ensign," Samantha smiled, getting up and moving to dump her tray into the recycler.