Posted by Commander Shara Calloway (Executive Officer) in Deck 6 - Captain’s Dining Room

Posted by Captain Sara Kiernan (Commanding Officer) in Deck 6 - Captain’s Dining Room

Posted by Commander Shara Calloway (Executive Officer) in Deck 6 - Captain’s Dining Room
Posted by… suppressed (14) by the Post Ghost! 👻

(snip)

“Maybe you did,” Shara said gently. “But so what? We all make mistakes, make choices that in the long run turn out to be crappy. It’s part of life and growing, Sara. Maybe, instead of worrying about what you missed back then, focus on what you’ve learned, what you’ve gained. Because at the end of the day, we are all a product of our experiences. If you hadn’t had that experience with Nessa, would you be here the captain of the Asimov now? Maybe, but also maybe not.”

~Shara Calloway, XO

“When she got arrested, I became very career-oriented.” She shrugged. “I probably wouldn’t have made it this far if I hadn’t disregarded my life off-duty. But now I’ve been in command for a few years, having an actual life doesn’t sound bad. Just not sure where to start.”

-CO

Shara smiled and let out a soft chuckle. “I swear I said the exact same words not all that long ago. I can’t say what is the right path from you, but from my experience, start small. You tried to let someone in and it didn’t work out. That’s hard, but it’s also okay. It takes time for people like us to find out footing when we’re embarking on an adjusted path. Start small. Maybe get to know more of the crew. You’ll figure it out.” Shara grinned. “And in the meantime, I’m happy to have more meals and conversations like this. Anytime, Sara. I mean that.” And she did. Shara wasn’t the best at being a friend, but she was trying and learning.

~Shara Calloway, XO

“Thank you, Shara.” Sara smiled to her XO. “I appreciate your help.” She resumed her seat. She knew she had turned to the right person. Shara was the best possible person to help her figure this out. Then she sat with Shara and started eating her meal again.

-CO

Shara ate a couple bites more, allowing the silence to be comfortable. “You know, for all my years, I still feel like I’m stumbling along. Sure, I had the career part down, but everything else?” She blew out a breath that was half a snort. “And when Faye and I had our reunion, I had all my flaws laid bare. As did she. I feel like I’ve gone through something of a multiple stage reckoning. And I think our last mission wasn’t even the worst one, if that’s even possible. It was just the reminder that I’m not who I was before and I can’t just shrug stuff off the way I used to. Because I didn’t really shrug it off, I just buried it deep and so much of it has been yanked to eh surface in recent years. Mostly against my will. The rest? I think I’ve had to surrender and let it happen. I think it’s still happening too, it’s just… smaller.”

~Shara Calloway, XO

Sara stared down into her dinner. “Yeah. I took it all in intellectually, but… why examine anything or try to heal the wounds of the past?” Her eyes flitted back up to the XO. “Well, I guess you know where that goes.”

-CO

Shara snorted. “Oh, I do. I suppose I had the issue forced, in part, because of my Intelligence training. The mental training is rigorous and you absolutely have to go through therapy in some form in order to be aware of your triggers so that you can effectively turn them off. Especially for the covert mission training, you can’t risk having accessible buttons to push.”

“But on the other hand I got real good at keeping everything tucked away, including the things I had never shared before.” Shara folded her arms on the table, breathing deeply into her torso. “That mission where I had to get Faye out tore open everything, and I’ve never been able to put everything back. That’s a good thing in many ways, but I sometimes miss being able to truly compartmentalize.”

~Shara Calloway, XO

“Doesn’t it always come back for you though? When you compartmentalize?” Sara couldn’t help but chuckle at herself, pretending as though she knew anything about these things. “Doesn’t it come spilling out one way or another no matter what?”

-CO

Shara shrugged. “It does now. But after I returned to the Alpha Quadrant and was recruited by Intelligence I was trained in such a way that you couldn’t hit a soft soft. There were no buttons to push, because the job forced me to be impervious to the attempts. So maybe we could say that at some point it would have all come out, but not without such a traumatic trigger that we couldn’t predict. Faye was that trigger. Even though I knew she was alive, she didn’t know I was and we hadn’t seen each other since she was a teenager. It was easier to just pretend. I’m not saying it was a good thing, it just… was.”

~Shara Calloway, XO

“Do you wish you could go back?” Sara prodded further. She was somewhat relieved to have the discussion not aimed at herself for a moment. She made further digs at her meal, clearly stressed off eating either by the conversation or the topic that conversation centred on.

-CO

“Go back to being compartmentalized?” Shara drew in a deep breath. “No. I have so much that I am ridiculously happy about and grateful for. I might have not been easily hurt before, but I couldn’t say I was happy. Yes, it was easier to just go do my job over and over, but I wasn’t a whole person, Sara. I left things behind that I’ve missed. And while the process isn’t smooth or comfortable, learning who I am has been very important. I’m an active mom again, and a wife. I wasn’t looking for or expecting those things, but I don’t want to loose those pieces of myself again.” She starting chuckling. “Now, I do wish I could contain my emotions a tiny bit better than I have since our mission, but it’s getting there.”

~Shara Calloway, XO

The sound of Sara’s laugh joined Shara’s. “If only all that could be accomplished without going to counseling. I guess… I guess I just want to have a life. But I don’t want to lose this.” She gestured to the ship around them. “Not just because it’s an entire career but I actually like what I do, where I do it. And that balance is something you actually made work.”

-CO

She leaned back in her seat. “I can’t say it was any one thing, but I do know that the only reason I am on the Asimov in the first place is because I wanted that balance in the first place. I wanted to come out from the shadows and actually existin the lives of others again. You have to choose that though, Sara. It doesn’t just happen,” she said, gazing rather intently at her friend.

~Shara Calloway, XO

“I can’t just wait for it to happen, huh?” Sara joked. “I guess the hardest part of it is actually starting. Putting in some effort to be more than just a Starfleet uniform and a serial number.”

-CO

Shara pushed her plate to the side adn folded her arms on the table. “What do you like beyond the work stuff? Even tiny interests from before you joined count.”

~Shara Calloway, XO

Sara leaned back and stared at the ceiling for a minute before returning her gaze to Shara. “I want a family. I want… some damn peace and quiet sometimes. I used to play instruments, guitar and piano, I’d like to get back to it… I… I defined myself by the goal of getting here. I wanted to be a Captain of my own ship. So now I’ve gotten here and I’m still figuring out myself. I can’t be defined by my job forever.”

-CO

Shara grinned and leaned forward. “You know I play the guitar and the piano, right?” she said, a glimmer in her eyes. “Hobbies are good. They ground us in the moment and take us out of the grind. Not that I am even a good example of this balance. But having that guitar here with me, I have played a few minutes most nights before bed, just to calm myself and focus on something that gives me joy.”

~Shara Calloway, XO

Sara smiled back. “I never fashioned you the artsy type. Maybe I’ll try and get myself a nice guitar. We can jam sometime.” She chuckled through her nose, lost momentarily in memory. “My dad- he couldn’t sing worth a damn. But he had this old, maybe older than him, guitar. He played lullabies to put me and my brother to sleep. When I was older he thought me to play. Can’t stray too far from your roots, right?” As much as it was a reference to her father and the instrument they shared a love for, it also meant the legacy of officers in her family.

-CO

Shara forced herself to draw in a more full breath and nodded ever so slightly. “Depends, but I guess in this case I agree. I learned to play the piano from my classically trained mother. She was a government administrator by day, and played piano for an orchestra by night. There was never a time in my childhood that theer wasn’t music. It changed after she died though. I was fourteen. That was two years before I got pregnant and ran away,” she said with a snort. I never let go of music per se, but it was hard to keep in my life until recently.”

“It’s nice you have it back. I imagine the little bit of stability that is Micah helps make it a little easier to maintain now.”

“Tell me about your dad,” she said with a smile.

~Shara Calloway, XO

Sara sighed. “When my parents met, he was a senior officer, Chief Engineer on a massive ship. Probably a candidate to be an XO soon. She was there on some assignment from the Federation Council representative she was working for. It was never really clear… but she was traveling on the same ship my dad served on. I guess both our moms were in government. My parents got married and they knew they wanted to have a family. He requested a transfer to Earth. So we’d grow up safe. He got a position at the academy teaching an entry level engineering course. My mom moved up the ranks and became a senior advisor. But it was such a demanding schedule, she was away as often as not and dad was always around. My brother and I were always closer to him. And since we both followed in his family’s footsteps and joined up, it’s kinda stuck that way.”

-CO