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Years later, when they’re the kind of friends people look at and ask now how did you two meet?, Raffi and Rios will lie about the origins of their bond. Well you see, Rios will start, and then Raffi will jump in and say I was on the run from the Tal Shiar, which is a lie only in the sense that she was on the run from Starfleet Intelligence and accidentally managed to get the Tal Shiar involved too. But it’s lie enough to get them started, and soon they’ll be swapping sentences like a bottle of Andorian ale passed between them, laughing as they unfold the ridiculous and high-stakes circumstances of this particular tale.
But that’s not the story of how they meet. That’s the story of how Rios saves Raffi’s life. For the first time, anyway.
The story of how they meet takes place two days before in a little secondhand bookstore stapled onto the edge of a grimy dive bar on a backwater planet where Rios is taking a couple days of shore leave, and Raffi is—well, not on the run yet but will be soon enough.
Raffi, being a spy, notices a lot of things about her surroundings, even when she’s higher than a kite on a very long string (Raffi, being a spy, is careful, almost obsessive, about the drugs she takes) (even in her worst moments, she likes to feel the ground beneath her feet) (not that her carefulness matters to anyone but herself). Within thirty seconds of walking into the shop, she has the exits scoped and the patrons placed, which, to the casual observer, would seem impossible thanks to the towering shelves jammed with every manner of book, not to mention the aisles strewn with teetering stacks of dusty paperbacks and cat-like creatures that dart from nook to nook.
But Raffi is used to doing impossible things. It is, after all, the beginning of her long slide into disgrace, and she’s got no one but her anger and herself to rely on.
Except the anger isn’t that strong today.
Today she’s feeling sentimental. So instead of stopping at the bar like she normally does at the end (or the beginning) (or the middle) of a job, she keeps walking until the clink of glasses and choke of snakeleaf give way to the sweet perfume of old, crumbling, yellow-edged books.
Raffi loves the smell of books. She blames it on JL, who made her read way too many pretentious white male memoirs from ancient Earth back on the Verity, but also on her grandmother, who liked to collect hardcopy collections of poems. Poems are meant to be held, she often said, tucking a thin book in Raffi’s six- or ten- or twelve-year-old hands and settling back in her rocker with a collection of her own. Her grandmother always favored the short ones. Palm-sized, she called them. Something that folds easily into the mind.
Raffi never really got the poetry thing, but now that Jae’s taken Gabe and pretty much vanished from her life, she spends a lot of time thinking about what she could have done to change things. Maybe she should have read more poetry to Gabe. Or read to him in general. Or spent more time with him, any time, at all.
She’s thumbing through a well-worn copy of a book her grandmother read so often it fell to pieces thinking about how odd it is to find a slice of her childhood this far away from home when she notices him. Tall, a little bit gangly, hair scruffier than it should be given that he’s Starfleet (Raffi has learned that all Starfleet officers have a tell). She notices him not because he’s got that “in uniform even though I’m out of uniform” look but because he’s sticking his nose (quite literally) inside a leatherbound copy of The Many and the One by Spock.
She’s ogling and she knows it, but she can’t help but stare. Their eyes lock and he blushes to the roots of his hair. “I like the smell. Of books. But not all of them—”
“Have scents? Yeah. That’s because the paper’s replicated.” Another thing her grandmother had been very particular about was going to the trouble of tracking down non-replicated books. She made a game of it, and when Raffi left Earth after graduating from the Academy, she made her promise to bring a book, a real book, back from the first planet she set foot on.
I’m not the adventurer, baby, she said when Raffi asked her why she couldn’t just hop on a shuttle and tour a galaxy’s worth of bookstores herself. That’s you.
The man lowers his book, revealing an immaculate beard. “You read?”
“Not me,” Raffi says, one half of her mind (the half that isn’t watching the couple that’s just walked in the door) idly wondering why someone would devote so much time to beard upkeep and forget the rest of his hair. “But my grandmother did. If you want something that smells good, look for novels out of Andor. They put purple ragweed and sweetgrass in with the wood pulp. Gives it some pizzazz.”
“Pizzazz, huh?” The man chuckles and slides Spock’s book back on the shelf. “Thanks for the tip. I’m Rios, by the way. Cristóbal Rios. Commander, USS Ibn-Majid. And you?”
“Raffi. Just Raffi,” she says when he lifts an expectant brow. “Starfleet and I aren’t on the best of terms right now.” She expects him to bail (they always do), but instead he pulls another book off the shelf and holds it up for inspection.
“Ever read this one?”
Raffi cocks her hip and folds her arms. “I just told you I don’t read.”
“Ah, but you’re in a bookshop, which means some part of you must want to.” He flips through the book, coughs a little at the puff of dust, and puts it down. “It would probably help if I looked for books in languages I can read.”
“Or you could run a translation program like the rest of the galaxy.”
“The point is to get away from technology for a while.”
“Says the XO of a starship.”
“Point taken.”
Raffi looks down at the book still in her hands. “Here,” she says, holding it out (not because of the drugs or because she’s sentimental, but because the thought of taking it back to the house that gets emptier every time she returns is just too much to bear). “Buy this one. It’s good. Real good.” She rolls her eyes. “My grandmother said so. I don’t really remember.”
He takes the book and flips through it. Grimaces a little. “Poetry’s not my style.”
“Lemme guess, you’re more the philosophy type.”
“Guilty as charged.”
“Well you and your book-sniffing habit are in luck then. Philosophers never sell their work to publishers that replicate their books.”
Two days later when Raffi finds herself flat on her back in a different, much louder, much more dangerous bar, it’s Rios who punches the lights out of the Tal Shiar’s hired assassin and hauls her off her back and into a corner where he calls for an emergency beam-out. It’s Rios who covers for her by making up some bullshit regulation when relieving the ensign on transporter duty and erasing the transporter logs, and Rios who lets her hide out in his quarters till they reach the next planet on the Ibn-Majid’s tour, by which point Raffi starts to let herself think they’ve become something akin to friends.
Years later, when it becomes clear that they aren’t just friends but family and people start to ask them questions like now how did you two meet?, Raffi and Rios will not talk before deciding to leave the encounter in the bookshop out of the narrative. They’ll just do it, the same way Rios saved her from the assassin. Raffi won’t think to ask him about it until Coppelius, after they’ve told the story for probably the dozenth time.
“Why d’you think we tell it like that?” she wonders, head and shoulders hanging off the edge of his bed. Rios looks over his shoulder with that twinkle in his eye. “What, us? Pass up a chance at exaggeration?”
“Touché,” Raffi says drily. But then she sobers and flips over on her stomach. “But really, why do we do that? Are we just afraid?”
“Afraid of what?”
“I don’t know. Being boring?”
“Nah,” he says, flopping down on the bed beside her and pillowing his chin on his arms. “We’re just keeping it to ourselves.” He’s put a record on, one of those twentieth-century Earth disco albums they both love. Raffi leans her cheek against the warm skin of his arm.
“I’ve missed you,” she murmurs. “I’m glad you stuck around.”
A soft puff of air against her curls as he breathes a laugh out of his nose. He kisses her temple. “Me too, Raff. Me too.”