Held in Reserve: Come Home [2/2]

Posted on Sat Jun 13th, 2026 @ 12:06pm by Lieutenant Darik Moreau

1,879 words; about a 9 minute read

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

2383, Tycho City, Luna

Darik looked down at the mug in his hands because meeting that sort of open pride directly was somehow harder than the letter had been. The steam blurred the surface for a second. “I know,” he said after a moment, then frowned faintly into the tea. “That sounds arrogant.”

“It sounds,” Tomas replied, looking back at him with that exhausting accuracy of his, “like someone believing in their abilities.” The corner of his mouth shifted then, not much, but enough that Darik knew he was trying to make it easier.

Darik let out a breath through his nose and looked back down at the mug. Yes, he supposed he did. The silence that followed was not uncomfortable exactly, it just held too much in it. Pride…relief, because he hadn’t had a backup plan. Then the other things…like the fact he’d be leaving. The fact that Darik had spent years making himself into somebody who could do this, and that now he had, there would be no pretending it was still a distant shape. He moved one hand slightly against the ceramic, feeling the heat there, and then looked up again. “I know you’re worried,” he said, because there was no point pretending he didn’t.

Tomas smiled at that, though only just, and folded his hands loosely around the mug as if to stop them doing something restless. “I’ve been worried since approximately the second day I knew you,” he said, and when Darik’s expression shifted into something sceptical he added, “No, that isn’t specific enough to be useful. It isn’t meant to be.” He sat back a fraction, the chair making the smallest sound beneath him. “Of course I’m worried. I’m proud enough to make myself unbearable, and worried enough to make myself worse. Both things are true.”

Darik watched him over the rim of his mug, his father’s face a little older in that moment than it had been when he opened the door, and for once the fear in it did not feel like something aimed at him so much as something Tomas had been carrying on his own for years. He looked away first, eyes going to the table, to the folded crochet dish towel that Darik had traded for years ago and given to his father as a present, and the little silver tea tin that had been there as long as Darik cared to remember, and all the small familiar things that made the flat feel familiar. “Yes,” he said quietly, because there was nothing else to do with that kind of honesty except accept it.

Tomas picked up his mug again, but did not drink. He only turned it once between his hands, eyes dropping to the tea rather than to Darik, and when he spoke next the shift in his voice was small enough that Darik noticed it instantly. “She would have understood this more easily than I do,” he said, not using Nareth’s name and somehow making the sentence heavier because of it.

Darik went very still. The silence around Nareth had lived in the flat for so long that even this felt like a door opening a fraction, the air around it changed though the room itself had not moved. His fingers tightened very slightly against the mug. “Yes,” he said after a long moment, because anything longer would have broken the shape of it. “But…you’re here…”

Tomas gave a short breath through his nose that might once have become laughter in a kinder conversation. “I hear her in you sometimes,” he said, still looking at the tea rather than at Darik. “When you talk about service. About duty. About what matters.” His mouth tightened, then eased again. “And before you say anything, no, that isn’t criticism.”

Darik had not been about to say anything, but the fact that Tomas felt the need to clarify it made something in him go sharp and tender all at once. He looked at his father properly then, at the familiar face and the way Tomas still could not quite say Nareth without bracing. “She’d have wanted Starfleet, if she had been here. For herself…for me,” he said, and the sentence came out with more certainty than he had intended.

Tomas nodded once. “Yes,” he said, and the word sat there plain enough to be trusted. He let it rest for a moment, then glanced up at Darik again. “She would have been proud of you.” There was no hedging around it, no practical architecture to make the sentiment safer. Just the words, laid openly on the table between them. “Very irritatingly so, probably,” he added after a second, the corner of his mouth moving in something that was not quite a smile. “You know what she was like when she’d decided to be right.”

That pulled a small, startled laugh out of Darik before he could stop it. He heard it and almost looked away out of instinct, but Tomas had already caught it, and something in his father’s expression softened so quickly it was almost painful to watch. Darik looked down again, throat tightening around the next sentence before he had decided whether he wanted to say it. “I don’t remember enough,” he admitted after a moment, daylight and tea and acceptance letter all making it feel stranger somehow to say aloud. “Not properly. I remember pieces. Her hands. The way she stood. The way she...” He stopped and swallowed, throat tightening unexpectedly. “Sometimes I don’t know whether I remember her or just the shape she left.”

Tomas went very still at that. Then he reached across the table, not far, just enough to lay his hand over Darik’s where it rested near the mug. “Both count,” he said quietly, his thumb shifting once against Darik’s hand. “For what it’s worth, memory is mostly shape in the end. Yours just started earlier than most.” He held there for a second longer, and when he spoke again the words came without hesitation. “She loved you. That part I can tell you with complete confidence.”

Darik looked down at their hands. Tomas’s fingers were a little rougher than his own, older, familiar, steady despite everything. Outside the dome, trams continued moving along their tracks. Somewhere in the building the plumbing shifted softly in the walls. On the counter the kettle clicked as it settled from its boil. The ordinary sounds of the flat moved around the extraordinary fact that he had been accepted to Starfleet Academy and was about to leave the only home he properly remembered.

Tomas withdrew his hand after a while and scrubbed once at his face, as if that much sincerity in one sitting required physical recovery. “Well,” he said, reaching for his PADD in a movement that was far too brisk to be natural, “obviously this now means transport lists, medical forms, Academy issue requirements, and your grandfather will absolutely pretend he expected this all along and might even say something nice. A grandchild going to Starfleet Academy is…quite an achievement. Let’s see if he can put his xenophobia on hold long enough…”

That dragged another tiny smile out of Darik. He shifted a little in the chair, the acceptance still sitting in him strangely, huge and real and not at all tidy. “He’ll say he was never in doubt.”

“He’ll say,” Tomas corrected, with a faint return of dry humour, “that he had some doubts, but only about whether the Academy was up to standard.”

That made Darik huff a laugh into his tea. He looked up just in time to see Tomas watching him with that complicated mix of pride and grief and affection that had become easier to recognise now that he was older. “And he’ll say that it was my human upbringing that did it,” he said knowingly, the smile fading a little.

His father nodded, almost rolling his eyes. “He’ll claim influence. Funny. He wanted me to go to the Academy so badly but I had no interest…” he trailed off, clearly…thinking about his life. How he got here. “Darik…” his eyes snapped to his son and he pointed at him, like he was setting a new rule. “You are not to take every item of clothing you own with you. Even if I have to watch you pack like a salvage operation.”

Darik lifted one shoulder. “I was going to be selective,” he said, though they both knew that was at best an aspiration. And then he smiled, almost shyly.

Tomas gave him a long look. “You say that now….”

“I know what I need,” Darik said and gave a small smile, before he nodded. “Not everything. Still…need things here, for when I come home for break.”

“You are bringing the tea tin, aren’t you,” his father’s voice was quiet, warm, and then he let out a breath. “And the honey.”

Darik didn’t even need to think about it in any significant way. “Yes.”

Tomas nodded once, as if this confirmed a theory. “Thought so.”

Later, after the tea had gone half-cold and Tomas had started a list on his PADD that pretended to be about logistics and was, in reality, partly about coping, Darik stood by the small living room window and looked out at the ordered curve of Tycho City. The acceptance letter sat open on his own screen beside him, official and unchanged. Somewhere behind him Tomas moved around the kitchen with soft clinks of crockery and the familiar rhythm of someone making home hold together through action.

He was leaving. That still felt enormous. But it no longer felt solitary.

When Tomas came to stand beside him a moment later, close enough that their shoulders almost touched, neither of them said anything for a while. They looked out together at the station lights and the careful illusion of afternoon beyond the dome, and Darik let the silence sit as it was.

After a time Tomas spoke without looking at him, his voice quieter now, worn a little thin by the day and all it had held. “I am proud of you, Darik,” he said, and the words landed differently the second time, less like announcement and more like something settled.

Darik kept his eyes on the dome beyond the glass and nodded once. “I know,” he said, because now he did.

Tomas let that sit for a second, then added, with the honesty he seemed to have decided not to hide from anymore, “And I’m still worried.”

That made the corner of Darik’s mouth shift. “I know,” he said again, and when he glanced sideways he caught Tomas giving the smallest huff of laughter.

“Good,” Tomas said after a moment, looking out at Luna again. “Then we are both behaving consistently. I was getting worried for a moment we had somehow changed…”

That dragged a quiet laugh out of Darik, more breath than sound, but real enough that Tomas heard it and smiled to himself.

[OFF]

Lt. Darik Moreau
Chief Intelligence Officer
USS Missouri

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