Held in Reserve: Folded Inward [2/2]

Posted on Mon May 4th, 2026 @ 1:42pm by Lieutenant Darik Moreau

1,872 words; about a 9 minute read

Mission: Ghost Starship
Location: Tycho City, Luna
Timeline: [Character Backpost] 2375

2375, Tycho City, Luna

When his father arrived after school to pick him up, Darik was waiting in the usual place by the side entrance with his bag at his feet and his hands tucked inside his sleeves against the cold it seemed only he felt. He stood as soon as he saw him, bending automatically to lift the bag before being told, but his father’s eyes had already gone to the scarf. Not to the fact of it. To the way it had been arranged, made narrower than he usually wore it by folding it again and again. His father saw everything that way, not by force but by long habit, and Darik knew from the slight narrowing of his eyes that he had noticed the fold at once. “What happened?” Tomas asked, taking in Darik’s face, then the scarf again, and his voice was quiet enough that it made Darik’s stomach tighten.

Darik adjusted the strap of his bag on his shoulder and kept his eyes on the middle button of Tomas’s Museum jacket. “It caught,” he said, trying to make the words sound ordinary.

Tomas looked at him for a beat too long. “On what?” he asked, and there was no impatience in it, which was somehow worse...just quiet patience and care.

Darik said nothing. People were moving around them in little ordered streams, parents and children and staff all making their way home under the bright school lights. He could feel the publicness of it pressing at him, but truth was no one said anything to them...no goodbye, no acknowledgement. Like they were not even there. Tomas’s jaw shifted once. “Darik,” he said, not sharply, but with that low warning note that meant truth was expected. And the pronunciation of his name wasn’t the softer Federation Standard, but the firmer lilt of Cardassian.

“It is not ruined,” Darik replied quickly, because that seemed the most useful thing to say. “It can be repaired.” He kept one hand at the scarf as he spoke, fingers smoothing the fold over the damaged seam, and wished fiercely that they were already home.

His father went very still. “Who touched it?” he asked at last, and the question was so direct that Darik looked down at once.

“It does not matter,” he murmured, watching the ground rather than Tomas’s face, because if he looked up he would have to see the hurt arriving there.

Tomas let out a slow breath through his nose and lifted one hand to take the school bag gently from Darik’s shoulder. “It matters to me,” he said, and there was something raw under the words now, something that made Darik feel both guilty and stubborn at once.

He swallowed. “Some boys were being stupid,” he admitted, voice low. “I did not do anything.” That part he added because he knew it mattered. Because he had learnt that innocence was sometimes not assumed.

Tomas nodded once and said, much too evenly, “We are going home,” and Darik knew from the careful flatness of the words that whatever his father really felt had gone somewhere deep and sharp.

They spoke very little on the journey back. Tomas carried the bag. Darik kept his hands hidden in his sleeves, trying to warm them but also…just needing something to distract him. The tram was crowded enough that they stood, shoulder to shoulder without touching, and Darik watched their reflection in the window as the dome-light slid over the glass. He looked narrow beside his father still, all dark hair and composed, clearly Cardassian face and careful posture, the scarf too neatly arranged to be innocent. Tomas stared straight ahead, his mouth set in that controlled line Darik had begun to recognise as the shape of fear being made respectable.

At home Tomas did not take off his jacket. That alone told Darik enough, that his father did not do the ritual of removing the jacket and shoes, of running his hands through his hair, of making a cup of tea for them both. “Let me see it,” he said as soon as the door had closed behind them, and Darik obeyed without argument, unwinding the scarf from his neck and placing it in his father’s hands.

His father held it very carefully. Too carefully, like it was a precious, fragile thing he had dug up from the soil, a remnant of an ancient civilisation. His thumb found the damaged seam and stopped there, and for one brief moment his whole face changed. The control slipped and hurt showed through, plain and unguarded, and Darik saw with sudden awful clarity that his father was not only angry. He was grieving something too. “She gave you this,” Tomas said, his voice rougher now, eyes fixed on the damage.

Darik nodded once. “I know,” he said, folding his hands together in front of himself because he did not know what else to do with them.

Tomas closed his eyes briefly, then opened them again and looked at Darik with forced steadiness. “What happened?” he asked, and this time the question sounded less like interrogation than pain.

So Darik told him. Not every word, not the cruellest ones, but enough. The courtyard and the boys with the questions and the grabbing and the seam. He also said, because he wanted that part understood, “I did not fight. I did not even touch them,” and heard how careful he sounded as he said it, how much it resembled pleading without quite becoming it.

Tomas’s mouth tightened so hard the edges whitened. He set the scarf down on the table with a measured gentleness that only made the violence underneath it more obvious. Darik waited. For a heartbeat he thought his father might cross the room and put a hand on his shoulder or pull him close or say something that would make the air less sharp. He was not afraid that the violence would be turned to him because he knew his father.

Instead his father turned away, paced once to the counter and back, and then stopped with both hands braced against the tabletop. “You cannot wear it to school again,” he said at last, and the words came out controlled but not stable, as if they had been held back and reshaped before being released, as a new rule or instruction.

Darik stared at him. The flat seemed to go very quiet. “Because of them,” he said after a moment, his voice smaller than he wanted it to be, one hand moving instinctively to the bare place at his neck where the scarf had been.

“Because of this war,” Tomas replied, turning back to him at once, one hand lifting and then dropping again. “Because people are frightened and stupid and looking for somewhere easy to put it and you’re convenient.” He looked tired suddenly, older. More human than Cardassian rooms had ever allowed him to appear, but older and smaller.

“But it is mine,” Darik said, and the words sat rigid in him, the unfairness settling in his chest. “She gave it to me...it is just a scarf, nothing...strange...” He didn’t shout, didn’t stamp his foot. Instead he raised his chin a little and looked at him with a sense of defiance, of hurt, lips pressed together to stop them trembling.

“I know,” Tomas answered, and his voice cracked just once on the words before he forced it level again. He pressed his fingers briefly to the bridge of his nose, then looked back at Darik with an expression that Darik didn’t understand. Like his father was seeing not just him, but ghosts of what could be. “Darik, listen to me. You should have known better than to wear something from Cardassia. You’re already marked enough with your features.”

The words were not shouted and they were not meant cruelly. They were not even false in the way Tomas intended them. That did not stop them hurting. Darik felt his spine straighten at once, every part of him going quiet and contained. He looked down before his face could betray anything uncontrolled, focusing on the grain of the tabletop instead. “I was cold,” he said, in Cardassian, after a moment as he frowned, and the plainness of it seemed to strike Tomas harder than any argument would have done.

His father made a small sound then, quiet and stricken, and when Darik looked up Tomas had gone pale. He stepped forward at last, one hand half-lifting as if he meant to touch Darik’s shoulder, then stopping in the air between them. “I did not mean…” Tomas began, and failed to finish. After a second he looked away and said instead, “I will fix the scarf,” which was perhaps the only promise he trusted himself to make.

Darik nodded because it was easier than saying anything else.

Tomas stood there another moment, looking helpless in a way Darik had grown to dislike because there was nothing useful to be done with helplessness. Then he picked up the scarf and carried it through to the kitchen, where the sewing kit was kept in the highest drawer. Darik remained where he was for a long time, one hand still resting lightly at his throat.

Later, when his father brought it back, the fabric had been repaired so neatly that from a distance the damage barely showed. Up close, though, the thread was the wrong shade. Slightly too pale. Darik saw that at once. “Here,” Tomas said quietly in Cardassian from the doorway, holding it out.

Darik took it and turned it over in his hands, thumbs finding the repaired place with unerring accuracy. “Thank you,” he replied, meaning it for more than just the repair, even if he didn’t say it. The scarf was warm from his father’s hands.

Tomas lingered as if there were more he meant to say. Maybe an apology, maybe a warning, maybe a justification. In the end he just watched Darik as if he was the last tether to a past he no longer could safely hold onto, then gave a nod and stepped away.

That night, after the flat had gone still and the lights were low and his face washed of any trace of tears he might have spilled alone, Darik sat cross-legged on his bed with the scarf around his shoulders and spoke to his mother in a whisper. He told her about the cold first, because that was easier. Then, after a pause long enough to feel deliberate, he told her that he had been careful.

He did not mention the boys. He did not mention his father’s words. He did not say that the scarf would stay in his room from now on, folded safely away except on the very coldest nights when no one else would see it. But when he touched the repaired seam with his thumb, he thought of all the things that still belonged to him and would have to be hidden if he wanted to keep them.

[OFF]

Lt. Darik Moreau
Chief Intelligence Officer
USS Missouri

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