Posted by Commander Shara Calloway (Chief Intelligence Officer) in Tennessee, Earth - Home Sweet Home

Posted by Civilian Micah Pikelsimer (Federation Security Agent) in Tennessee, Earth - Home Sweet Home

Posted by Commander Shara Calloway (Chief Intelligence Officer) in Tennessee, Earth - Home Sweet Home
Posted by… suppressed (6) by the Post Ghost! 👻

(snip)

For a moment Shara just took him in, before taking a deep breath. “Nadine was asking about Faye, wanting to know about her. I told her the story of how she got drunk at seventeen on seventy percent alcohol but treated it like a big experiment complete with detailed documentation of the effects. But also that Faye is a passionate person with a temper that can get the better of her sometimes.”

“Understatement of the year, right there.” Micah said with a chuckle.

Gazing back at Nadine, Shara sipped on her coffee before she continued. “The thing is that Faye is fiercely loyal to her causes and the people she cares about. But what we’re going through and what we have been going through since I showed up again in her life is that we’re both having to adjust our expectations of who we think the other person is. And it can be confusing and messy at times. Right now her heart and her brain haven’t reached the same conclusion. She’s angry at me, at the Universe too, but she won’t stay that way. She’s changed in many ways, but I know still know her heart,” she said quietly, before her words fully registered with her and she dipped her head. It was so hard to talk about her relationship with one daughter to the other one she’s never had one with. How did this even work.

“It’s okay, Shara. I wanted to know because it helps me know you and the kind of family you all are,” Nadine said. “And yes, some moments might hurt a little, but I wouldn’t have come out here if I didn’t think I could handle it.”

~Shara & Nadine

“Ya know… I think this was perfect timing.” Micah said. “History aside… y’all don’t know each other. You and Nadine, Nadine and Faye, Shara and Faye… you all are strangers in a way. But that’s a good thing. Means you are all on the same footing. Its not like Nadine has a lifetime of bonding to try and work into. All y’all are even more or less.”

Micah

Shara clutched her coffee cup as she considered this and nodded. Inhaling slowly, she expelled the breath quickly. “Love,” she said, turning back to Micah. “Can you grab my trunk for me? I think it’s time we took a walk down memory lane.”

“My favorite part of you to grab. OH! You meant the trunk. Yeah, no problem wife-of-mine.” He set down his coffee and walked out the door.

“cheeky bastard,” Shara said with a fond smile.

“What’s in the trunk?” Nadine asked.

She smiled softly, but there was a tiny grin pulling at Shara’s mouth. “Not tons, but because of the nature of my work, I never really had a place to keep things, so I mostly never bothered. So that trunk contains anything I felt strongly about enough to stash in storage before I went on my next assignment. It’s essentially pieces of my life that I wanted to remember. The only thing not in there and actually is upstairs in my travel bag is a framed photo of Edward, Faye and I from Tracken.”

“Really? Can I see it?” Nadine asked.

Micah entered the room carrying the large trunk. He moved to the side of where Shara had been sitting and set it gently on the floor.

Shara nodded. “Sure. I’ll go grab it,” she said, setting her coffee mug down and giving Micah a wink before heading up the stairs.

~Shara & Nadine

Micah winked back and followed her with his eyes as she walked up the spiral stairs to the bedroom, grinning like a teenage boy looking at his first adult magazine. He then remembered Nadine and tore his eyes away and looked at her and shrugged. “What can I say? She’s hot.” and he winked and went to refill the coffees.

Micah

Nadine laughed and shook her head. “Well, I suppose I’m getting a set of parents who aren’t bitter and hate each other, right?” she said with a grin to Micah.

“Oh no… I’m bitter as hell, trust me.” and he grinned.

“Uh huh,” Nadine said, not doubting it and yet she also understood that Micah as not a hard ass unless he needed to be.

“Yuh-huh.” he replied and stuck out his tongue at her. “Super-mature , too.”

Shara returned, moving quickly down the stairs nearly silently, a frame held against her. When she sat back down, she handed it to Nadine. “So that was taken in front of our house on Tracken. Faye’s ten there.”

Gazing intently and even peering more closely, she took in the people there. She looked back up at Shara and then back down at the photo. “Now I get Micah’s reaction. And Faye’s got the same chin. And the same brow line. I think. It’s hard to tell. Do you have any when she’s older?”

“Yeah,” Shara said, leaning forward and began to unlock the trunk, which seemed to a multi-level security system that required a mechanical lock code to get right, plus a thumbprint and something else Nadine couldn’t guess at. Watching her daughter shake her head, Shara seemed amused. “Problem?”

“Oh no, it’s just that for a minute here and there I forget who you two are and then you remind me. It’s kind of amusing,” Nadine said leaning back.

Opening the lid on the trunk, the piecemeal life of Shara Calloway became abundantly clear. Everything was tucked in neatly, with care. Visible on the top was a scarf in a rich blue tone, like a watercolour painting. Several small black boxes. A green box the perfect size for a ring. A couple picture frames.

Shara lifted it and handed it to Micah first, before gesturing for him to pass it to Nadine after. It was Faye’s Starfleet Academy graduation, but not the standard profile photo everyone had taken. No, this was taken by someone else at the reception, with Faye off to the side, holding a glass in hand and talking to someone out of frame, her eyes filled with pride and determination. Whatever someone was saying to her had captured her attention fully, her gaze intense. “That was the first image I was given when I learned Faye was actually alive. When I learned she had finally chosen a path for herself and went after it with everything she had. For all her faults, for all her struggles, that is Faye right there, Nadine. That’s your sister.”

Nadine gazed at the photo silently, but taking her time studying the details of the woman who was also her kin.

~Shara & Nadine

Micah looked over Nadine’s shoulder and said “She’s a force of nature, your sister. And I’m willing to bet hard currency that you’ll be talking with her before you leave here. So make sure you are ready for that, okay?”

Micah

Nadine gazed at Micah. “Well, you people don’t seem to take your sweet time with much, so I won’t be surprised.”

“She says to the woman who took decades to decide she could be married again. But I’m a rather stubborn woman at the end of the day,” Shara remarked.

“Decided? Oh that’s rich, love of my life. At some point you’re gonna have to tell her the real story.” and he cackled loudly.

“Hush you,” Shara said with raised brows. “She’s convinced we’re not crazy and I’m not going out of my way to dispel that idea.”

Nadine snorted. “You and me both. Outside of school, I can find it hard to just let things be. Just ask my ex. Used to drive him crazy.”

“Well, you come by it honestly, that’s for sure. It sure wasn’t your father. Curtis was the most mellow person I’ve ever known and I’ve met a a lot of people in my life,” Shara said as she reached into the trunk and pulled out the green box, she turned it around in her fingers and suddenly tossed it to Micah. Inside was a simple band in a polished silver colour that had a single round stone embedded in the metal so the stone was flush with the rest of the curve.

~Shara & Nadine

Micah looked at the ring and then at Shara. “Ok… gorgeous for sure. Whats the story?”

Micah

Shara stared hard at Micah. He knew. Of course he did. It just hadn’t clicked yet because Shara was a seemingly unsentimental woman who wasn’t attached to things. But it wasn’t the ring she had been deeply attached to- it was the giver of that ring. “My wedding ring,” she said quietly. “Wore it long past the time when we found out about Tracken. A part of me held out hope that they had survived a lot longer than most of the others. And even after it truly registered with me, I couldn’t take it off. Took me a whole year after my episode to take it off. The hard part was that I was a crewman who shared quarters with another person and there wasn’t a lot of privacy. And I just unceremoniously replicated a ring box between a split shift one night and chucked it into a bag in my wardrobe and that was it. After we got back to the Alpha Quadrant, I stored it in this trunk and there it has remained. It’s all I have from Tracken other than that photo. And memories.”

Micah looked at her and said softly “All you used to have.”

“What do you mean by episode?” Nadine asked gently, sensing that maybe this was all too delicate a place to go, but not having context.

Shara shifted her attention to her daughter. “Acute Stress Response. While the rest of the Maquis were grieving in their own ways, I couldn’t accept it. Faye and Edward were alive until someone proved it to me and damn anyone who tried to say otherwise. So I went along for months like that until one day it just hit and it hit hard. I have no memory of it all but apparently I just sagged against a wall in the mess hall and became completely unresponsive.”

“Like a coma?” Nadine asked.

Shara shook her head. “No, I was conscious when they didn’t sedate me so I could sleep, but I just… wasn’t there. And apparently the Maquis folks as well as some of the Starfleet crew I worked with down in engineering came and sat with me in shifts, wanting someone to be there with me when I came to, as it were. And when I did, the grief hit hard and fast and it took awhile to get me moving forward again.”

“You were an engineer?”

Shara laced her fingers, inverted her hands and cracked her knuckles, giving Nadine a cheeky smirk. “Daughter, I am well known to be an excellent programmer. I might not have your sister’s unparalleled ability to hack a computer and design a breathtakingly elegant system, but I know my way around a computer program,” she said with a wink.

“Yeah… you’re kind of scary,” Nadine said with a grin.

~Shara & Nadine

“You have no idea, kiddo. And be glad of that.” Micah said with a smile… but something in his tone conveyed an undercurrent of caution.

“So what other mementos you have hiding in there? If you pull out a feather boa and start talking about your time undercover in a Syndicate strip club, I’m gonna have to tell Nadine to go sleep in Vanessa.” and he wiggled his eyebrows at Shara.

Micah