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Lieutenant Yasha Tarr of the USS Hestia entered her quarters, her styled brown hair flattening against the closed door as she leaned her head back and closed her blue eyes. The diplomatic dinner had been good, as far as occasions requiring dress whites go, but after what happened earlier... She shook herself. Shower, pyjamas, journal, sleep.
Pushing off the door with the precision and speed of someone in excellent control of their impressive musculature. She removed her dress whites and put them in the fresher, placing the butterfly knife from her boot in the bedside table as she did so. The captain wouldn't be happy if she found out that she'd gone armed to a diplomatic dinner but being somewhat prepared for things to go poorly was only logical.
She stepped into the sonic shower, washing the stiff styling gel out of the long hair on top of her head, and giving the shaved sides and back a cursory wipe down in case some had got on them too. She felt her hair relax into its usually state somewhere between curly and wavy. She finished her night-time ablutions and stepped into her plain but soft pyjamas.
Rather than heading to bed she went only to her bedside table, lifting the false bottom of the drawer, she passed over a couple of other items she wanted to keep a little safer from prying eyes, and removed a small notebook with a pen in a loop on the side. Writing in pen on paper was fairly obsolete these days, but since a previous therapist had recommended it, she found journaling the old-fashioned way more meditative than audio logs.
Besides personal logs on the computer could be accessed and whilst she didn't mind committing some aspects of her personal life to a medium that could become more public, her most intimate thoughts she preferred being between her and the pages of her diary. She withdrew to the chair and side table and steeled herself to start writing.
It had been a trying few days; dealing with the diplomatic tensions of a species on the brink of civil war, however justified, would have been stressful enough. As it was a member of the Q continuum had turned up and used them as subjects for his “science experiment”. Half the bridge crew had swapped jobs, the other half had remained as they “control group”.
Thankfully she hadn’t been swapped, she didn’t fancy her chances functioning in another department. Poor Dr Turak had been shunted into engineering and had apparently received quite a lecture on the ship’s function before being permitted to spend their duty shifts crawling through Jefferies tubes checking the health of the bio-neural gel packs.
Not all the swaps had been dire; First Officer Susan Kahele and Counsellor Lorak had handled their exchange of positions well. Clearly there were transferable skills on both sides of that equation. A Klingon counsellor clearly had a commanding presence and good grasp of people, and Commander Kahele was so careful to be approachable despite standing 6’4” with some frankly impressive and imposing musculature.
It hadn’t been a mere changing of uniforms and duty rosters, their records had been changed, no one outside the bridge crew had been able to remember anything ever having been different. It had even affected people's personal effects: the First Officer's office was now decorated with Klingon weaponry, and the Kahele's quarters now played host to an extensive civilian wardrobe. One which included several handknit jumpers that were very familiar, even though they shouldn’t exist yet; they’d all been pulled from Yasha’s future projects queue.
There were certain implications to that she had tried very hard not to think about. She and Susan had mutually, and without discussion, decided not to pursue a relationship, even though she’d been attracted to her since she’d walked into the room and smiled that supernova smile at her. Even though during the time they’d known each other she’d fallen head over heels.
The fraternisation regs technically only prohibited relationships between people in a direct chain of command in as much as this may be harmful to discipline and/or the functioning of the organization. In actual practice most officers, especially those who wanted to be respected by their crew, refrained from such relationships regardless.
She’d sworn off relationships with her superiors after her messy break up with Jose in the first year of the academy. Some part of her thought that it might be worth it with Susan, and not just because she was almost certainly not a narcissistic scumbag who would try to wreck her life by leaving and then try to crawl back when she proved to be a successful officer.
She’d knitted her the first, and so far only, jumper over a couple of weeks of denial. She’d wanted to do something chunky and simple for her first jumper project and that was the style that Susan preferred; it had seemed only sensible to make it for her. Of course, it had ended up oversized even on Susan’s largesse because she’d failed to swatch properly.
In retrospect Yasha’s attempts at not pine after Susan had perhaps been less than successful. Her attempts at not being jealous certainly had not been. She could admit that she was less than proud of how she had acted after Susan had a one-night stand with a former Tal Shiar agent and ended up with a broken wrist.
She would have liked to pretend that her anger at that had been purely professional, as much as Commander Kahele does not want it, it is her job to protect every member of the crew, but she had not felt nearly so strongly about Lt Cela doing the same, without the broken wrist. She could not help her bitter envy of those who got even a brief taste of what she longed for.
Flaunting a shore leave hook up in front of Susan, and most of the rest of the senior crew, practically sitting in her lap whist doing her best to radiate “just fucked”. That was the sort of juvenile behaviour that you’d expect people to grow out of in their academy years, and definitely not something you could write off as professional concern.
When Kahele had called her to her quarters she had not known what to expect. She had not known what to hope for. She had done what she’d always done, girded her loins and gone to face her fate head held high; and what a fate to face. Susan could wear a dress whites in a way that very few could, the cut of the jacket emphasising the contrast of her wide shoulders and ample bust with her trim waist and the long legs accentuated by the neatly pleated trousers. It had taken her a few moments longer than she would have liked to haul her mind out of the gutter.
She’d admit that she was apprehensive coming into unknown territory, but she could barely conceal her surprise when Susan, Kahele, had pulled open the drawer of incriminating jumpers and asked if she had any thoughts about what might have been different in this other universe where they were not in the same chain of command.
Oh, so we are talking about this. Alright then.
She desperately flailed for something to focus on and grabbed the cabled jumper that had caught her interest yesterday, although not entirely for the stitching. "I'm glad that in at least some universe I worked out how to get those cables to work with your shoulders." The triangular motif was some clever work, clearly the other her devoted more time to knitting.
Her brain supplied her with a vision of them curled up together in front of a classic film, her knitting whilst Susan had her arm around her, her dark hair loose around her shoulders. She threw it into the oubliette with all the other forbidden thoughts.
"Perhaps in another universe you got a better look at them." This vision barrelled into her mind at warp 9. Her and Susan writhing naked together, her nails raking across Susan beautiful broad shoulders. She hastily returned the jumpers to the drawer and forced her mind back to the present.
Susan, Commander Kahele, came dangerously close and pulled a boxy garter stitch jumper in red, black, and yellow out of the drawer. “I know it will be gone soon, but I wouldn’t mind seeing this one again.”
Susan mused aloud, “I think that given Q’s previous activities I’ll unfortunately remember the next five minutes, otherwise I might do something with them.” Her mind filling with all the things they could do in five minutes Yasha had reached the breaking point of her self-control, she’d excused herself and marched out with military precision.
In her diary she wrote the truth “In a hundred thousand universes I kissed her. In a hundred thousand universes I was not strong enough to say no, or perhaps I was strong enough to say yes.”
She closed the diary and returned it to its hiding place, then went to the replicator and ordered some yarn; it wouldn’t hurt to cast-on before bed.