Runa stared at the bottle in her hand. What the H&^^? There was a handwritten note in her sister’s elegant script with “Mike” on the outside. Runa swore, a lot, in old norse, and then a few she’d picked up during her years teaching, and then slammed a fist on the desk. How could two people, so good at listening to and helping others, NOT listen to each other.

It started three months ago. Revna had called her, not so unusual until she asked how Mike was. Revna talked to Mike every week, she’d know better than Runa. Then she thought that maybe Mike had said something to make Revna worry. Nope, not at all. They’d fought and now they weren’t talking. And now everytime she went to the bar or really anywhere she was being stopped by Mike wanting to know how Revna was. She felt like she was back in highschool. But now she was playing Revna’s part instead of the other way around.

Revna missed him. It was an ache that didn’t stop. Revna had confided in her sister, she didn’t understand, Revna had talked to Mike, she’d told him about wanting to leave Star Fleet. She was never supposed to be an officer. That had been Shauwn’s dream. Those first years after he’d died, she joined, without a plan for herself. She hadn’t known how to be Revna without Shauwn and had joined because that had been his dream. She asked Mike if he wanted her to come back, but Revna had been offered this great opportunity to work for the Federation Diplomatic Corp as an ambassador to the Delta quadrant. She wanted him to say ‘Come back and be with me.’ and he wanted her to finally find her own road, but neither said that to the other, and so now their stubbornness had created hurt feelings and they were both miserable.

Runa was ending that Right. Now.

She walked into Mike’s bar, it was quiet only a few people and marched up to the bar and set the velvet covered bottle down hard. “MIKE! You better get out here or we’re gonna Brawl!”

Runa, on the War Path