Held in Reserve: Fourth-Day Afternoons [1/2]

Posted on Mon May 25th, 2026 @ 10:29pm by Lieutenant Darik Moreau

1,809 words; about a 9 minute read

Mission: Ghost Starship
Location: Tycho City, Luna
Timeline: [Character Backpost] 2382

2382, Tycho City, Luna

The brightness had started to hurt his eyes.

The School Study Hall was too bright and didn’t contain any physical books, so you couldn’t call it a library by any stretch of the imagination, which was a shame, because Darik Moreau did enjoy books. Physical ones you could pick up and page through, place a bookmark in and know that it would still be there when you came back to it. Books had a fragility he appreciated. A reminder that nothing lasted forever, no matter how official people tried to make things look. No, this place had been designed for seriousness rather than comfort, all pale walls, soft indirect lighting and long tables fitted with study terminals that glowed in orderly rows beneath the ceiling panels. There were alcoves for private revision, enclosed booths for oral drills and access walls full of indexed Federation educational archives already loaded onto PADDs for people too lazy to fetch them properly. It was all arranged with the sort of institutional confidence that suggested the room expected young people to become impressive simply by sitting in it long enough. It smelled faintly of warm circuitry, recycled air and the bitter trace of somebody’s over-steeped raktajino, which made you wonder how the faculty ever let a bunch of teenagers near a replicator unsupervised to replicate something that would make them buzz.

Around him students were doing what students in places like this always did, pretending not to compare themselves while comparing themselves constantly, talking in lowered voices about mock assessments and aptitude modules and future pathways as if saying the words often enough might make them less frightening. Darik had stopped listening to most of that some time ago. He came to the Study Hall because it was useful. The terminals held official Starfleet Academy preparatory material, indexed historical modules, service records, Federation charters and enough structured information to make the future feel, if not simple, then at least organised. And because if he arrived at the right time in the afternoon after lessons, he could take the same terminal near the back wall, half-shadowed by a structural column, with a clear line of sight to the door and enough distance from the louder clusters of students that nobody approached him unless they meant to...and it was closer to the heating, so it was a few degrees warmer than in the middle of the room.

At seventeen he had changed enough that some people still seemed slightly surprised when he stood up. He was tall now, almost six foot, dark-haired and long-limbed, the softness of adolescence thinning steadily from his face and leaving something sharper in the line of his jaw and cheekbones than he had carried only a year or two earlier. It made his Cardassian features stand out a little more, now that his cheeks were thinner. He had not fully grown into all of it yet though, and there were still moments where he folded himself into chairs a touch too carefully, or moved with the contained economy of somebody still accounting for the extra reach of his own arms. He was better at sitting still now than when he had been younger, and had learned how to wear it as a coat. He also had, entirely by accident, picked up one of Tomas’s habits. Before settling properly, he would straighten the edge of a PADD, smooth a sleeve cuff, align whatever was in front of him as if order in small things might encourage the larger ones to behave. He did it now without thinking, the terminal adjusted a fraction, the cuff of his sleeve tugged down and smoothed once beneath his fingers before he rested one hand against the side of his jaw and let the other move over the interface to flag sections for recall.

Today’s subject, the Federation and Starfleet history module for Academy exams, sat in front of him. It was a bit dry in places, though it did at least contain some personal logs and combat reports, which made it more interesting than the official summaries. He preferred those, the places where the facts were attached to people and you could pull meaning out from the shape of what they had seen. Even so, he reached for the black tea with cardamom and a hint of honey, the closest he had ever come to something like Cardassian red leaf tea, and drank from it as if it might improve the material through force of association.

He was halfway through a section on post-ratification development, eyes moving over a timeline while his mind quietly arranged dates into patterns, when somebody stopped at the far edge of the table. Darik did not look up. He had become very good over the years at distinguishing between the sort of pause that required him and the sort that would disappear if ignored. This one lingered, not impatiently, not awkwardly exactly, just there in a way that suggested the person attached to it expected to be acknowledged eventually. So Darik lifted his eyes with a slight look of disapproval which was just how his face…settled.

The boy standing there was older, not by much, perhaps a year, but enough for it to count in school terms. You could usually tell the senior years at a glance. They carried themselves differently, closer to adulthood somehow, all standing at the starting line with the look of people who had no time for anyone below them except, occasionally, to laugh. This one…seemed a little different, but not by much. He was…good looking, which was deeply inconvenient, but not in the polished, symmetrical way some boys were, the sort that looked as though they had been assembled to reassure adults. No, this was something more particular. Auburn hair that refused complete neatness and curled slightly near his ears despite what looked like an effort to flatten it down, freckles across the bridge of his nose and high on his cheeks, a nose that seemed as though it might once have been broken and healed just a fraction off, which somehow made the rest of his face more interesting rather than less, and also raised the question of why he hadn’t just had it fixed properly with a regenerator.

His clothes were tidy enough, though the collar sat open at the throat as if he had fastened it properly earlier and then changed his mind, and in the Study Hall light his eyes looked somewhere between green and hazel. Darik knew at once he should not spend time trying to decide which. He realised, a moment too late, that he had already spent too long looking. His eyes dropped back to the terminal and his fingers, betraying him slightly, went to straighten the edge of the PADD he had already aligned once.

“You’re doing the history prep as well,” the boy said, shifting the PADD in one hand and glancing at Darik’s screen before looking back at him. His voice was low enough for the room, but not especially smooth about it, and there was something faintly sheepish in the way one shoulder lifted, as if he already knew he was interrupting and hoped being useful-looking might help. “You look like you actually know what you’re doing,” he added after the smallest pause, mouth twitching at one corner. “Do you mind doing a quick spot quiz, or are you busy hating this in private.”

That was such a strange sentence that Darik looked back up before he meant to, the corner of his own mouth threatening something that did not quite become a smile. It should not have mattered that the boy had spoken to him normally. It should not have mattered that his eyes had gone to Darik’s face and stayed there without the usual little recalibration some people did when they noticed the ridges or the cords at his neck. Darik was seventeen. He was old enough to know that other people’s ease was their own business. It mattered anyway. More than it should have. Enough that he was suddenly aware of his palms against the table surface, warm and slightly damp, and of the sound of his own pulse moving higher, closer, somewhere near his ears.

“Which section,” he asked, because that was safer than answering the rest of it.

The older boy seemed to take that as agreement and slid into the seat opposite him, setting the PADD down, looking over at Darik with mild hope. “Charter amendments and early exploratory milestones,” he said, tapping the header once and then looking up again. “I sort of think I…know it but the dates keep swapping round in my head and the self-test keeps telling me I should be embarrassed.” His mouth shifted again then, this time into something closer to a proper smile. “Cian Wells, by the way. Senior year. I forgot that part.”

Of course he had. Because apparently Darik had just been sitting there having a small internal collapse without even getting the boy’s name first. “Darik Moreau,” he said, hoping it sounded like an ordinary response and not something rehearsed.

Cian nodded once, as if filing it away properly. “Right,” he said, glancing at the module again. “Good. So. Save me from Federation history.”

“That is because you are trying to remember the dates separately from the events,” Darik said before he had fully decided whether he wanted to answer at all. “It is easier if you remember the sequence first.”

There was the smallest pause. Then Cian’s eyebrows lifted and something warmer moved through his expression, not surprise exactly but interest. “Right,” he said, drawing the word out just enough to make it clear he had heard the correction properly. “That already sounds more useful than what I was doing…I was thinking if I just knew the dates I could…sort of fix it….” There was a grimace and then he let out a breath. “Like the dates would magically make it set in my head…”

His fingers shifted against the edge of the PADD, and Darik found himself watching the movement before looking down at his own screen again with a concentration that had become abruptly less reliable. His thumb pressed once along the smooth edge of the desk as if that small contact might ground him. It did not.

He should have said something…reassuring. Or tell him that knowledge didn’t work like that…but instead he swallowed and it felt like there was a lump there. He nodded instead, looking over at Cian for a brief moment. “Ask,” Darik said after a moment. “We’ll figure it.”

[TBC in part 2]

Lt. Darik Moreau
Chief Intelligence Officer
USS Missouri

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