Held in Reserve: Come Home [1/2]

Posted on Sat Jun 13th, 2026 @ 12:05pm by Lieutenant Darik Moreau

2,031 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: Ghost Starship
Location: Tycho City, Luna
Timeline: [Character Backpost] 2383

2383, Tycho City, Luna

The message had been sitting unopened on the terminal for nearly four minutes.

Darik knew that because he had checked the time twice, then a third time as if the numbers might somehow rearrange themselves into something less precise if he looked often enough. The admissions office terminal had a habit of making everything feel more official than it needed to, all clean Federation fonts, pale blue interface lines and the Starfleet Academy crest set in the upper corner like it had already made its mind up about the sort of person allowed to touch it. Around him other students were trying, with varying degrees of success, to behave normally. Some had opened their notifications the moment they arrived and were now pretending very hard not to react to whatever they had read. One girl near the windows had gone white and still in that very particular way that suggested either brilliant news or awful news, and Darik had no desire to find out which. He had enough to do dealing with his own pulse, which seemed to have climbed up somewhere near his ears and was now making itself known in the most unhelpful way possible.

His own message still waited.

The subject line sat there in patient Federation Standard, Starfleet Academy Admissions Decision, which was so direct it felt inescapable. Darik looked at it, then looked away, then tugged once at the cuff of his jumper sleeve and straightened the edge of the terminal a fraction, because apparently if his hands were not given something useful to do they were going to become damp and noticeable and ridiculous. He had spent years wanting this. Years. Mock exams, aptitude modules, application drafts, interviews, psychological testing, fitness work, keeping his record clean, making himself look as much as possible like somebody Starfleet could look at and say yes to without hesitation. And now that the answer was sitting in front of him he found, absurdly, that opening it felt like the sort of act that might split the world into before and after.

Eventually he exhaled through his nose, pressed the control and opened it.

The letter itself was exactly what it ought to have been. Formal and efficient, congratulatory without becoming embarrassing about it. It informed Mr Darik Moreau that he had been offered admission to Starfleet Academy for the incoming academic cycle, that further materials regarding enrolment, transport arrangements and induction scheduling would follow separately, and that the Academy looked forward to welcoming him into the next stage of service and education. For a second he simply stared at the words. Offered admission. It did not hit him like a warp pulse. It sat there on the screen, plain, official and impossible to misread, and something inside him went very still around it. He read the central sentence again, slower this time, and then once more because his eyes kept wanting to return to the same line as if repetition might make it settle properly into his bones.

He had done it. Against the thoughts he thought late at night despite what Cian had said…he had done it.

His throat tightened once, hard enough that swallowing became noticeable. Around him, the office continued with all the untidy noise of other people’s futures arriving at the same time. A chair scraped sharply back. Somebody laughed once in disbelief and then immediately tried to turn it into a cough. The girl by the window had both hands over her face now. None of it seemed entirely real. Darik saved the notification to his file, shut the screen before anyone nearby decided to look at his expression and stand too close to it, and got up. He did not hurry out of the office, but he also did not linger. The corridor outside was cooler and quieter, enough to make him suppress a shiver, and when he reached the outer windows he stopped there for a moment and looked out through the dome at the pale, neat curve of lunar afternoon. Trams were moving. People were crossing the concourse below with shopping containers and school bags and work PADDs. Nobody looking up at him through the glass would know that his life had just shifted its weight.

He took out his PADD and stared at his father’s contact line for a second before sending the shortest message he could manage.

I got in.

He looked at it once it had gone, briefly considered adding something else, then decided against it. Tomas would understand the rest. He then sent one to Shreya, a little longer, but only because he knew she’d…send him back a list of things he needed to remember. The reply from his father came before Darik had reached the tram platform.

Come home.

That was so thoroughly Tomas that Darik almost smiled.

The tram ride back felt longer than usual, though that might have been because every stop seemed to give his brain another chance to realise what had just happened. He stood rather than sat, one hand around the overhead rail, looking at his own reflection in the carriage glass in that detached sort of way people sometimes did when life had changed too suddenly and they needed evidence they were still physically present for it. He was seventeen, just a couple of weeks off eighteen. Dark hair needing a trim, its straightness making it fall into his eyes in a way he didn’t know had been annoying until now. His face sharper than it had been a year ago and the Cardassian ridges and neck cords were visible in the reflected light no matter how he stood. He looked like himself. He also looked, suddenly, like somebody who was leaving.

When he reached the flat the door opened before he had keyed the panel.

His father stood there in his favourite cardigan with one hand still on the control, and for a second neither of them said anything. Then Tomas looked at him properly, really looked, saw whatever was in Darik’s face, and the expression that crossed his own was so immediate that it almost hurt to witness. Relief first, then pride, then something very close to fear, all of it bright and unhidden in a way Tomas rarely allowed himself to be unless taken by surprise. “You got in,” he said, and it was not a question, his voice rougher than it usually was this early in a sentence.

Darik only nodded, because yes, apparently that was still the truth, and that was all Tomas needed.

He stepped forward and pulled him into a hug so quickly Darik did not have time to brace for it, and it was real in that way some of Tomas’s hugs had not always been, not an arm around the shoulders in passing or a brief touch while moving, but both arms and all of him in it, the smell of soap and starch and home, one hand flattening against the back of Darik’s head as if he were younger than he was. For a second Darik went still in surprise, seventeen and also fifteen and ten and five and every other age at once, and then one of his own arms came up around Tomas because not doing so would have been impossible. He noticed he was taller than his father now, broader on the shoulders…and his father suddenly seemed small and fragile.

Tomas held him tighter for a moment, the sort of lingering that said too much, and when he finally let go his hands stayed on Darik’s shoulders as though he needed to confirm he was solid. “I knew you would,” he said, which was obviously not the whole truth because Tomas had spent the better part of a year preparing himself for every possible kind of disappointment just in case the universe noticed he had something to lose and decided to make a point of it, but Darik understood what he meant anyway.

The flat looked the same as it always did. Warm and neat, a little…spartan, almost strict. That hint of Cardassian influence that hadn’t come from Darik but from his father making sure that even hidden, his heritage was kept alive. The kettle was already on, naturally. Two mugs sat ready on the counter and the table had been cleared of everything except a folded dish towel, Tomas’s work slate and the small silver tea tin Darik had kept for years. The normality of the room made the acceptance feel even stranger. Tomas took hold of Darik’s bag before he could object and set it down by the wall, then reached back and straightened the front of Darik’s jacket where the strap had pulled it crooked, fingers lingering for half a second too long on fabric that did not need straightening. “Sit down,” he said, turning towards the kitchen with briskness so deliberate it was almost funny. “I’ve made tea. Or I was making tea. I had intended to be making tea. I may have been standing in the kitchen for five minutes looking at the kettle like it had become symbolically important.”

Darik sat with a small smile, tugging at his sleeves for a moment to cover his hands, watching the room with that…knowledge that he was going to leave it. This had been home for years and in a matter of months it would be his father’s home, his childhood home…but not his home.

Tomas did make tea then, though with an intensity that suggested boiling water had somehow acquired moral weight. Darik watched him move around the kitchen and saw, with that newer older sharpness he had grown into over the last couple of years, how much effort his father was putting into keeping himself together in ways that looked ordinary. The mug set down carefully. The spoon aligned with the saucer. The tea measured correctly. The tiny practical orderliness of a man who could not control the world beyond his front door and had therefore spent years making the inside of the flat as reliable as possible. The little pot with honey was opened, a spoon taken out and stirred into Darik’s tea in the same rhythm that he had always known his father to do.

When his father handed him the mug, his fingers brushed Darik’s for a second before pulling back. Then he sat opposite him, wrapped both hands around his own tea and looked at him over the steam as if the shape of his son had altered while he’d been at school. “So,” he said eventually, and there was a small laugh in it now, not because any of this was funny but because he seemed to need the sound of one. “You got in.”

“Yes,” Darik nodded and smiled, eye-ridges raising a little before he took his tea and sipped it.

“I’m aware you said that already. I’m repeating it for my own benefit.” Tomas looked down at his tea, then back at Darik. “Darik Moreau…Cadet at Starfleet Academy.”

Darik looked at the steam coming off the tea and said, “Yes,” again, then frowned slightly into the mug. “I suppose it is better than falling out of an airlock…” he glanced at his father and smiled.

Tomas gave a soft, surprised huff through his nose, part laugh and part relief. “Fractionally,” he said playfully, and then his face changed again, the humour settling without vanishing. He looked down at the tea, then back at Darik, and there was no attempt now to soften what was in his expression. “I am proud of you,” he said, the words plain and unhidden. “More than I quite know what to do with, if I’m honest. You worked for this so hard, so quietly, and…” He stopped, swallowing once, eyes flicking away towards the little kitchen window as if the dome panels outside might help him find the rest. “You’ve done it.”

TBC:

Lt. Darik Moreau
Chief Intelligence Officer
USS Missouri

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