Held in Reserve: Open Sky [2/2]

Posted on Mon May 11th, 2026 @ 1:53am by Lieutenant Darik Moreau

1,657 words; about a 8 minute read

Mission: Ghost Starship
Location: Valencia, Earth
Timeline: [Character Backpost] 2380

2380, Valencia, Earth

On the line, Darik drew. The first shot landed cleanly, not centre but close enough for Darik to know he was on the right track. The gravity was different, there was natural breeze here. He would need to take that into consideration, somehow. He took the second more slowly, feeling the heat at his back, the pressure of the grip, the clean familiar path from draw to release. By the third, the range had ceased to be a place full of people and become what it always became when he shot well. Sequence, still body, target, breath.

The Bajoran boy existed somewhere to his left. The Earth coaches existed behind him. The spectators existed beyond the shade line. None of them were standing where Darik was standing and that seemed increasingly important.

When they were called to retrieve arrows after the first round, Tomas rose to his feet before he had consciously decided to. Darik came back down the line with three good placements and the look of somebody trying very hard not to look pleased in case that somehow jinxed it.

“You’re doing well,” Tomas said, trying for measured and hearing the pride anyway.

Darik’s mouth twitched. “I know,” he said, and there was a dry little spark in it that was all Nareth and all his own at once.

Tomas laughed, helplessly, and reached out to touch the back of Darik’s shoulder just once before he could overthink whether his son would welcome it. Darik did not pull away. If anything, he leaned into it for half a second before turning back to the line. And Tomas looked at his back and for a moment just saw Nareth, her dark hair tied back and shoulders proud as she showed off skill with a grace that Tomas had never had. But now he saw it. Their son had that.

Shreya, checking the scoresheet, said without looking up, “If you start celebrating before the final round, I shall be embarrassed for all three of us.”

Darik’s expression settled at once. “I wasn’t,” he said quietly.

“Good,” she said, and then went, as she always did, straight to what mattered. “Because your release was fractionally better on the second shot than the first. Keep that.”

The final round went better than the first.

Not perfect by any means. The wind shifted once and he overcorrected, the arrow going slightly wide. He adjusted again and what Shreya had taught him came back. Do not let one mistake contaminate the rest of it. Darik understood that instinctively. By the time the round ended he had placed well enough that he knew, before the tally was announced, that he had done more than merely avoid humiliation.

When the results were posted, he placed third in his division. There were smiles and handshakes and a certificate printed on thick cream stock with the Federation Schools Athletic Association crest stamped neatly at the top. The Mars boy’s mother clapped too loudly for everyone. Somebody’s younger sibling wandered onto the gravel and was retrieved with exasperation. The Bajoran boy did not come near him again.

Tomas stood beside Darik while the last of the certificates were handed out, his face schooled into something calmer than he felt. “Third on Earth,” he said eventually, looking at the paper in Darik’s hand as if it might disappear if he blinked. Paper was special. Real. Not just something sent to an account or displayed on a PADD, but real paper, with writing. “That’s not bad,” he said with a nod.

Darik glanced at him. “No,” he agreed and looked at it before he took a deeper breath. “It’s very good, actually.”

Shreya, adjusting the strap on the equipment case with one hand, tilted her head. “A ringing testimonial from the athlete himself.”

Tomas ignored her. He was still looking at Darik, really looking, and there was something in his expression now that Darik recognised from long ago and not often enough. Wonder, perhaps. Or the abrupt rearrangement required when somebody you love stops being merely your child and starts being, in front of you, entirely themselves.

They stayed a little while after the others began leaving, because Shreya wanted the equipment packed properly and Tomas wanted, in some quiet way, not to hurry the day out of existence. The warmth had mellowed by then, the edges of the afternoon softening towards evening. Darik sat on the low rail beside the range with his certificate folded carefully into the front pocket of his bag and his bow case by his feet.

For a while none of them said much. Then Tomas, watching a line of birds wheel over the palm tops beyond the far wall, asked, “Have you been thinking about what comes next?”

Darik looked at him. “After school,” he said quietly, before he shifted a little awkwardly.

“Yes,” Tomas said with a small smile, watching his son and taking a moment to see him less guarded than usual.

Darik had been thinking about it for months, if he was honest. Perhaps even longer. Not in one clean line, but in accumulating pieces stacking up, in school prospectuses and Academy requirements. In physical standards. In the way some futures closed while others opened. In what was respected and what was doubted. In what sort of person the Federation allowed to stand visibly in service and what sort of person it merely tolerated. He rested one forearm across his knee and looked out at the range rather than directly at his father. “I want to join Starfleet,” he said, going still. The words did not feel dramatic when spoken aloud, not in the way he had expected when he had practised them in his head. No, it just sounded true.

Tomas went very still. Shreya, busy with the case, did not look up at all. After a moment Tomas said quietly, “You’ve decided that.” It was not a question, but a statement.

“Yes,” Darik said and gave a firm nod, mouth tightening a little. He had made the decision.

His father looked at the field, at the targets now being taken down in the distance, at the patches of sun still lying warm across the pale ground. “That won’t be simple for you,” he said, swallowing.

“No,” Darik said, because it was true. It would not be simple for him.

“Darik.” Tomas’s voice had grown careful in the way it did when fear wanted language and was trying to dress itself as reason. “You know people will still look. You know it won’t stop because you wear a uniform.”

Darik turned his head then and looked at him properly. He was fifteen, taller now than Tomas had been expecting, and in the open Earth light his face carried both parents more clearly than ever, human mouth and eyes, Cardassian structure, everything he could not change and had long since stopped pretending he might. “I can’t change my ridges or my neck cords,” he said, and his voice came out level. “So people are going to stare anyway.” He glanced once towards the range, where he had stood that day under a clear sky and shot well enough that nobody could honestly say he did not belong there. “I’d rather they do it somewhere I can serve and make a difference.”

Tomas said nothing for a moment and the words just sat there, plain and impossible to avoid. Then, slowly, Tomas nodded. His face had gone complicated in that way Darik knew too well, pride and fear and love all trying to exist at once without shattering the others. “You really mean it,” he said, and when he looked at Darik he did not just see his son. He saw Nareth and her drive to serve, her pride in wearing the uniform. It had been a different uniform.

But the set of the shoulders and the pride before him was the same.

“Yes,” Darik said it as if he had just stated that the sun was warm.

Shreya snapped the case shut and straightened. “Good,” she said simply, as if they had just concluded a discussion about travel times rather than the shape of a life. “Ambition with a spine is rarer than talent and he has both going for him. Starfleet will do well with him.”

Tomas looked at her, then back at his son, and something in him seemed to give way, not collapse but yield. He reached out and adjusted the front of Darik’s shirt where it had caught slightly beneath the strap of the bag, an old habit of care he had never quite outgrown. “Well,” he said, his voice rougher than before, “I suppose if you’re going to terrify me properly, you may as well do it with purpose.”

Darik let out a small breath that might have been a laugh.

It surprised Tomas enough that he smiled in return, and this time there was no strain in it at all.

They began walking back towards the shuttle not long after, Shreya a pace ahead with the equipment case in one hand and the easy endurance of somebody long accustomed to carrying more than looked reasonable. The evening air remained warm around them. Other families passed by in little clusters, voices bright with results and plans and ordinary things. Somewhere out beyond the range complex, Darik could smell the sea again.

He walked between his father and his coach with the certificate folded in his bag and the heat still resting pleasantly in his bones. When he looked up, the sky above Valencia seemed endless.

For the first time in a long while, the future did not feel like something closing around him. It felt more like he was taking aim at it.

[OFF]

Lt. Darik Moreau
Chief Intelligence Officer
USS Missouri

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