Work Text:
He’s going to get pneumonia or rheumatism, or both. His back is killing him—he should have switched to lying on his other side ages ago—there’s an awful knot forming rapidly in his neck, and whenever the lawn sprinkler comes about full circle, a few stray droplets fall on a patch of exposed skin of his back, between his low-hanging jeans and the edge of a T-shirt that got caught under his body when he first flopped down to the grass. Said patch of skin is currently very wet and extremely cold, hence the fear of catching several ugly diseases after a mere hour of what was supposed to be a quiet time reading in the park.
He still thinks it would be worth it. All because of one girl.
He risks a glance in her direction and bites the inside of his cheek to stop from grinning like a naughty schoolboy. She’s rather lovely, he thinks: wearing Academy-issue pants and undershirt despite it being the weekend, her jacket (is that a blue science lining he sees in the distance?) tucked comfortably behind her back as she leans against a trunk of a large tree (lucky her, his stiff back grumbles). There’s a multitude of PADDs and books scattered on the grass around her (she must have come here after a study session in the library), and she’s got her knees pulled up, resting a sketch pad against them as she works furiously, glancing at him every few seconds: to re-establish angles and measurements, he believes. He’s never been sketched before, especially not by a tiny, red-haired cadet with an assortment of freckles on her cheeks and shoulders (he wonders whether they end somewhere beyond the hem of her simple, grey top, or continue all the way down to… He shifts a bit on the grass, cursing silently under his breath as the movement further aggravates his aching back). He raises his eyes again—just in time to see her grunt in frustration, and throw her pencil and paper to the side, pouting. (In a very adorable manner.)
Thankful for the excuse, he heaves himself up from the ground, stifling a moan as his muscles strain in relief. “What’s the matter?” he asks, sitting cross-legged and working on that nasty kink in his neck. A hot shower will be in order tonight, no doubt about it.
The girl huffs impatiently, red hair flying as she shakes her head with vengeance. “I’m truly terrible at this,” she confesses, making a vague gesture towards the abandoned sketchbook. “And to think I got top grades on my technical drawings of quantum entanglement phenomena!”
He quirks an eyebrow at her and smiles, hoping the dimples might do the trick and get her to smile back. “I was sort of hoping I’d turn out to be slightly more interesting than an advanced physics problem…”
She does smile at that—a very lovely smile, he’s happy to notice—but it turns back into an unhappy frown mere seconds later. “I guess that’s the whole problem, right there.”
“Meaning?” he shuffles a little closer to her on the grass, hoping both that she doesn’t notice it and that she does.
“I know quantum mechanics. I know how to approach it if I have to. You… you looked so calm, lying there with a book and not a care in the world.”
“Trust me,” he sighs, averting his eyes, “there’s plenty of cares—“
“But you didn’t look as if there were, at least not in that moment. And I wanted to—keep that with me, for days like today, when everything’s wrong and itchy.”
He decides that he likes her way of expressing herself, imaginative yet straightforward: he finds out more about her current mood and general disposition from those few shorts words than from the life stories some girls used to tell him. “Why not just ask to take a holoshot of me?”
She shakes her head, looking positively appalled by the very idea. “It would have broken your… reverie. And I didn’t want that. But I wanted to maybe talk to you eventually when you finished reading, so I tried that instead.” She shots a nasty look in the general direction of her abandoned sketchbook. “And failed miserably.”
“Can I see it anyway, since we’re already talking?” he asks, suddenly feeling terribly shy. “Please?”
She blushes furiously and gathers up her utensils, holding them close to her chest. (Is it normal to become jealous of a piece of paper?) “If you really want to… but I’m warning you—it’s rather bad.”
He nods, more than a little intrigued. “I insist.”
Their hands brush as she finally relents and passes him the pad, and they both look away, as if the sensation of skin brushing skin for the first time is too much to handle for either of them. He swallows around a lump that’s somehow formed in his throat, and looks down at the drawing to distract himself from all the emotions.
He blinks.
He starts to wonder whether it should be turned right or left to properly discern the subject. Ninety degrees to the left? One-hundred-eighty to the right? This lumpy thing at one of the ends could very well be his head or his knee. And that appendix here…? He quickly glances down to assure himself no zippers have come undone in the past hour or so, exposing certain private parts of his anatomy. Unless that’s supposed to be his nose?
He hears her breathe in sharply through her nose, and looks up to find her looking away, chin raised proudly—a protection from an onslaught of tears, he thinks. Damn. “It needs practice,” he says slowly, hurrying to add as the chin rises even higher, “but there’s definitely some promise for the future.”
She turns back to him, her eyes sharp. “You’re mocking me.”
“I’m not! It’s just… you haven’t done a lot of drawing in your life, have you? Not like quantum entanglements?”
She shakes her head, pulling at the grass next to her left knee. “My sister’s the artistic type. I’m, well—a Starfleet brat of a nerd.”
He reaches down to intercept her hand before it does any more harm to the turf, and slips his fingers in between hers. She startles a bit, and tries to pull away—but once she looks up at him and encounters a calm, steady gaze without a hint of mocking, she stops resisting. “I like nerds,” he shrugs and grins. “They’re the most interesting people to talk to, usually. What’s your particular area of nerdiness, if I may ask?”
For the next hour, they stay like this: hands entwined on the grass, their knees bumping gently as they move around a bit, talking—well, he’s mostly listening to her talk, but he’s not complaining. She knows as much about deep space as he does about Earth’s indigenous cultures, so before long they find themselves enraptured by a heated discussion in xenoethinicism, exchanging opinions on Starfleet’s politics, heated and strong and absolutely naïve ones that only the young and passionate can have. He doesn’t even notice when his fingers reach for the pencil abandoned in the tall grass: he doesn’t usually draw much with his left hand, so the sketch is quite rudimentary: her profile, the way he imagines it, having seen her mostly en face, a wide, happy smile on her face as she looks up to the sky. He transforms the hopeless mess she’s made with his silhouette into a nebula, and adds a few twinkling stars for a good measure: all that without looking away from her face for more than three seconds at a time.
She finally notices the drawing as she pauses for breath, and turns it into a gasp. “You… you’re a real artist,” she breathes in awe, her eyes impossibly blue as she looks at him with something akin to disappointment. “And you made me show you that rubbish…”
“Hey!” he protests, tapping the picture with the end of her pencil. “Without said ‘rubbish’, I couldn’t have done any of this. It’s as much my creation as it is yours, alright?”
She makes a face, indicating she accepts his reasoning, even if she cannot quite believe in it. “I still think it was more of a salvage operation than an addition.”
“Then, if you want to get better at it, you must practice some more,” he says, reaching up to tap the end of the pencil against her nose: which she immediately scrunches up in the most delightful way. “I’d be happy to give you a few lessons if you like.”
“What if I’m just no good at it?”
“I’ll just keep on drawing you myself.”
It might be his—overactive—imagination, but it feels like she’s moved in closer to him. “What if I’m not pretty enough to be drawn?”
His eyes sweep up and down her form, and he’s delighted to see that, when she blushes, her freckles turn an interesting shade of gold. “You’re fishing for compliments, Miss…”
“Kathryn,” she says, pushing the sketching pad away and reaching for his other hand. “Now you must tell me your name.”
“Why?” he asks, tongue darting out to wet his lips as he breathes her in: coffee, sunlight and camellia shampoo. She smiles, and there’s quite a different quality to it than when she did before—one that makes him blush. Spirits help him.
“Mother told me never to kiss strangers,” she explains, deadpan serious, “and I very much feel like kissing you right now.”
Naturally, he tells her, right away—but the sound of it gets swallowed between their mouths.
Not that he minds it at all.
/end