A Scratch, and Nothing More
Posted on Tue Jun 30th, 2026 @ 11:13am by Commander Marisa Sandoval & Major Hastios Eilfaren
Edited on on Fri Jul 3rd, 2026 @ 12:44pm
1,917 words; about a 10 minute read
Mission:
In The Nick Of Time
Location: Astrometrics, USS Herodotus
Timeline: MD006 - 1730 hrs
Astrometrics was quiet enough to lie in.
Not silent. Ships were never silent. The Herodotus breathed around him in low mechanical tones, power moving behind the bulkheads, data streams whispering through the consoles, the distant thrum of a vessel that had survived another complication the reports would never quite capture properly.
Hastios stood alone beneath the projected starfield.
The chamber had rendered the local stellar map in full scale, or as close to full scale as Starfleet arrogance and good engineering could manage. Stars burned in suspended layers around him, cold and distant and impossibly calm. Somewhere beneath that glittering mathematics was the planet they had just left. Somewhere below those clouds, a wedding had nearly become a massacre, a prince had named him victor of a blood hunt, and a dead assassin had been carried away as proof of a law Hastios had never meant to step inside.
Aranis.
The name still sat strangely in his mouth.
He had given false names before. Many. Some for operations. Some for survival. Some because history had a habit of taking too much interest in people who stood in the wrong place at the wrong time. But this one had been cheered. Repeated. Planted in the soil of another world like a seed he would never be allowed to return and pull free.
He did not like that.
His hand drifted, almost without permission, to his side.
There was nothing there now. Not really. Addison had done clean work. The damage from the weapons fire had been repaired, the internal bleeding stopped, the torn tissue knitted back together with the neat efficiency of modern medicine. By any reasonable standard, he was healed.
His body disagreed in small, private ways.
A phantom line of heat tugged beneath his ribs when he breathed too deeply. Memory, not injury. Nerve echo. The body keeping its own record after the evidence had been removed.
Hastios lowered his hand.
“Scratch,” he murmured, barely loud enough for the room to hear.
The word was absurd enough that one corner of his mouth almost moved.
Almost.
He looked up again at the stars, letting their false distance settle over him. It was easier to stand here than in Sickbay. Easier than quarters. Easier than any place where concern might have walls and a chair and no obvious route of retreat.
Here, he could pretend he had come to review the system. To consider the temporal implications. To ensure their departure had left no visible wake in the record of a world that had not been meant to know them.
All of that was true.
None of it was the whole truth.
Hastios drew a slow breath, felt the ghost of the wound answer, and held himself still until it passed.
The doors behind him opened.
Marisa walked quietly into the lab and paused as the door closed behind her. For a moment she looked around, noting the stars above. The ones she'd studied before. The ones she couldn't forget.
Then her eyes went to Hastios, noting the expression on his face, the look in his eyes, his body posture. Gauging his recovery. Then she smiled and walked over to him. Put a hand on his arm.
She didn't say anything. Didn't need to. Not with him. She was here because she didn't want to be anywhere else. She let her presence and the silence speak for her.
Hastios felt her come in before the doors had fully closed.
He did not turn at first. Not because he wished to keep her away, but because the stars had him for a moment, and there were not many things left in the universe that could do that.
When her hand settled on his arm, some of the tension went out of him. Only a little. Enough that she would feel it.
Above them, the projected sky was no longer the system they had just left. It was El Auria, not as Starfleet remembered it from broken records and memorial files, but as he remembered it. His own data. His own routes. His own impossible little archive of a place the Borg had taken from the living.
Home, before it became history.
“That one,” he said quietly, lifting his eyes toward a bright cluster near the centre of the projection, “was always brighter from the northern continent.”
His voice was not cold. Not here.
“We used to think we were very difficult to end.”
A faint, sad warmth touched the corner of his mouth.
“Advanced. Wise. Old enough to know better.” He breathed in slowly, and the phantom ache in his side answered like a distant echo. “Then the universe reminded us that age is not armour.”
He let that sit beneath the stars for a moment.
“I come here sometimes,” he said. “When I need to remember that even long lives are still only lives.”
His gaze lowered briefly to her hand on his arm.
Her hand slid down to the crook of his arm. Not asking. Just there. A presence. As she was. "The stars remind me that we mortals are here for a moment." She smiled at him before returning her gaze to the projection above. "Some a longer moment than others. A blink of a cosmic eye. Still, I like to believe what we do with our moment matters. That people matter."
She was quiet as she studied the sky of his home world. It was enough for now that he was here and whole.
Then she spoke. Softly to not disrupt the moment. "What else do you think of when you look at the stars?"
“People do matter,” Hastios said.
He kept his eyes on the stars for a moment longer, though his attention had shifted to the warmth of her hand at his arm.
“I have lost enough of them to know that.”
There was no bitterness in it. Not exactly. Just the quiet weight of a long life filled with names most of the galaxy had forgotten. Friends. Crewmates. Commanding officers. Lovers. Worlds that had changed their flags, their borders, their languages, then vanished entirely.
After a while, memory became its own kind of country.
“When I was young, I looked at stars and saw distance,” he said. “Routes. Possibility. Somewhere else to go.”
A faint smile touched his mouth.
“Later, I saw warnings. Places I had survived. Places others had not.”
He finally looked away from the projection and down to her.
“Now?”
The word was softer than the others, almost a confession.
He let the silence stretch, not empty but full, as though it might carry what he could not quite bring himself to say aloud.
“Now I think perhaps I understand why staying matters.”
His gaze lingered on her face, warmer now, unguarded in a way he rarely allowed himself to be. Not defenceless. Never that. But drawn, as though something in him had quietly chosen her without asking permission.
Then, softer still, with a hint of wonder he did not try to hide, he added, “That is new.”
She watched his face. His eyes. She understood. Not on the level he did. She didn't have the time or experiences. But she understood. "Yes."
She looked at the stars for a moment, then turned her attention back to him. "I went to college to learn. I joined Starfleet to explore. To find ancient civilizations. To help people. I had a home base, but never a home."
He would understand. Perhaps more than she did. "This ship was supposed to be another stopping point. Another learning opportunity. And now...it is more."
She paused, the moment taking on a shape of its own. Then she met his eyes. Allowed herself to be open. Vulnerable. "I found home."
For a moment, Hastios did not answer.
He looked at her instead, properly this time. Not past her. Not through the reflection of old stars. At her.
There were things in his life he had learned to leave unnamed because naming them made them easier to lose. Worlds. Ships. People. Hopes dressed up as sensible decisions.
This, he thought, had already been named without him.
“My people had a saying,” he said quietly. “Not one of the famous ones. Just something old people said to young travellers who were too eager to leave.”
A faint warmth touched his mouth.
“They would tell us that home was not the place we returned to. It was the place that returned us to ourselves.”
His gaze softened, though he made no attempt to hide it this time.
“I did not understand that when I was young. I thought home was geography. A sky. A language. The sound of a particular street before sunrise.”
He glanced once toward the stars of El Auria, beautiful and impossible above them.
“I lost all of that.”
Then his eyes came back to hers.
“And still, somehow, I find myself here with you, understanding it better than I ever did there.”
The admission sat between them, quiet but alive.
Hastios lowered his gaze briefly to her hand at his arm, then covered it with his own. Not tightly. Just enough to answer.
“If you have found home,” he said, softer now, “then I am honoured to be part of the place that led you to it.”
A small pause.
“And if I am honest…”
His thumb moved once against her hand.
“I think I may have found something very similar.”
Marisa looked up at him for a long moment. It felt peaceful here. Right. A place where the past and future gave promise of something more.
For a lifetime she'd collected memories. Books lost and found. Pieces of the past. They grounded her to history. To knowledge. To her sense of being.
They weren't gone, exactly, but locked away. Safe. But now, they were protected by others. And by letting go, she discovered something she thought she'd never find.
A soft smile touched the corners of her mouth and danced in her eyes. "Good."
Hastios watched the smile reach her eyes.
Good.
Such a small word, and somehow it found its way under armour older than most living civilisations. He had heard vows spoken beneath shattered moons. Heard last words. Heard entire worlds beg not to be forgotten.
This was quieter than all of them.
It reached him more cleanly.
His hand lifted slowly, giving her every chance to turn away, and came to rest beneath her chin. Not to claim. Only to guide. His thumb brushed lightly there, careful in a way his hands had not often been asked to be.
For a moment, he simply looked at her.
Then he bent his head and kissed her.
It was not hurried. Not hungry. It held none of the violence of the day they had just survived. It was warm, steady, and almost impossibly gentle beneath the old stars of a world he had lost.
When he drew back, he did not go far.
His hand remained beneath her chin, his voice low enough that it belonged only to the space between them.
“Then perhaps,” he said softly, “we both have.”
A Joint Post By
Major Hastios Eilfaren
Chief Security & Tactical Officer
Second Officer
USS Herodotus DTI-30656
Commander Marisa Sandoval
Executive Officer
USS Herodotus DTI-30656
RSS Feed