Tether and Thread

Posted on Sun Nov 30th, 2025 @ 11:04am by Lieutenant JG Elen Rell & Sergeant Jace Morven

3,963 words; about a 20 minute read

Mission: Prologue
Location: USS Guinevere | Deck 14
Timeline: Early 2389

The space wasn’t officially listed anywhere, no matter how much you stared at a schematic. You had to explore to find it and in the busy lives of most Starfleet personnel…you didn’t. Besides, it was just a curve in the corridor near the auxiliary systems junction on Deck 14, marked once as a storage alcove before someone forgot to seal it properly. There was a bench now, curved into the wall beneath a long viewport that gave a clear view out past the port nacelle. If you sat quietly, you could hear the hum of systems wrapped in hull insulation. No one spoke here. No one ran drills here. That was why Jace came here since he had discovered it. For when the holodeck was booked, the gym busy, the barracks noisy and the Green Kiss filled with people. A place where he could go where nothing was demanded.

He was already seated when he heard her approach. Not rushed, not stealthy. Just the soft rhythm of boots with a slight unevenness, the swish of something soft brushing against a bulkhead. Then her voice, unmistakable. “There you are,” Elen said, easing into the space with that disarming confidence she carried into every room. “I knew you’d be somewhere with quiet corners and low lighting. It’s very you.”

She didn’t wait for an invitation. Just lowered herself onto the bench beside him and pulled something from the woven satchel that doubled as a project bag. A tangle of dark grey yarn unfurled, halfway to becoming something with a shape. Maybe. Possibly. He had seen her start many projects to then abandon. He remembered a sad-looking gormagander crochet animal that only had a head so far.

Jace didn’t move. His scarred hands were loose between his knees, fingers slightly curled. No combadge on his chest, he had shoved it into his pocket…to be reachable in a crisis yet turned away from it all. His undershirt sleeves were rolled to the elbow, showing silver lines on scars, matching the ones on his hands. Some were wider, having once been deeper when they were a wound. He didn’t speak, but neither did he tense when she approached.

Elen filled the quiet without disturbing it. Her voice wasn’t loud, but it moved in rhythms that spoke of a planet where different cultures had mixed, as had different species. Flowy. Yet just Standard, nothing special except a few loan words from other languages. “I was thinking about resonance earlier. You know, how certain warp field harmonics affect Betazoid perception apparently, not entirely sure why I was thinking about it…anyway, so I was doing that, and then…and then I saw a moth.”

He turned his head just enough to look at her. Not sharply. Just a shift, enough to show he was listening.

“A really pretty moth,” she said, holding the yarn between her fingers as she cast on, half an eye on the stitch count. She was using multiple needles, sharp ends on both sides. Once she was happy with the count she picked up another needle and started to do a rib stitch. Knit. Purl. He had learned those expressions just from listening to her. “It had this sort of shimmering underwing and I think it must’ve drifted in from hydroponics. Or maybe it was a holodeck echo, even if those are apparently a myth. I’m not so sure, I think there’s more about light particles than we understand... Either way, it was a full tangent. Lost the plot entirely.”

His eyes narrowed. Not in warning, just the smallest movement of disbelief.

She caught it immediately and grinned. “Look, some people notice threat vectors. I notice shiny things. It’s all data.” Still no answer. But he didn’t look away either. That was something. She knew she had found him in a mood. She was never sure what that really meant for him, what sort of moods he allowed himself. Quieter than usual? More locked down, or worse, crackled in away that made things bleed through? But she could almost sense the vibe and it made her be louder as she knitted. So she shifted slightly, turning so one leg curled beneath her. The yarn stretched across her fingers. “You ever think about that?” she asked, softer now. “The way we process things. You and me. How...not standard issue we are.”

His shoulders made the barest motion, something between a shrug and a breath.

She didn’t let it drop. “Not in a bad way. I mean, yes, chaos, various degrees of casual trauma, attention drift, the usual. But also…capacity. You see the world with this constant filter, all risk and angles and movement. And me...I get overwhelmed by texture and impulse and meaning and colour. But it’s still pattern, just a different kind.”

He looked at her then. Properly.

Elen’s smile softened. “You’re like me,” she said. “Just wired for a different frequency. Yours is all grit and muscle memory and contingency plans. Mine’s glitter and runaway thoughts and three ideas at once. But neither of us are built for standard Starfleet moulds.”

Jace didn’t speak. Not for several seconds. His expression didn’t shift much, but there was a flicker of something. Not quite amusement. Not quite caution.

She gave a small shrug, gentle at the shoulder. “It’s alright. You don’t have to say anything. I just...I think about these things. People like us. We don’t always fit, but we do see. And before you say something, I don’t think we’re better than others, or worse. We don’t have any superpowers, but neither does what we see or how we see it make us worse than your average Starfleet redshirt. It’s just…just that…sometimes, we dance to our own tune. Well. I dance. You sort of march or murderwalk…”

His eyes dropped to her hands somehow holding control over five double pointed knitting needles, then the yarn and the shape of the glove, wrist to palm. Then they went back to the viewport. Finally, he said, flat and low, “Gloves seem more useful.” It was a quiet comment, not dismissing what she said, just not finding a place for it to settle in him. He knew her better than to suspect it was an insult. He wasn’t sure it was a compliment either though. Where before he might have gotten up and walked away, he decided to…redirect instead. Like deflecting a punch rather than hitting back.

Elen gave a small, delighted sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Depends who you make them for.” She winked before she moved to . She made a thoughtful noise, then knitted backwards half a row and started again, lips pursed in consideration as she adjusted her tension. “I promised Rook a glove,” she said, half to him, half to the yarn. “Keep the oranges from biting back.”

Jace turned his head slightly. Gave her a look. She didn’t elaborate. He huffed. A short sound, pushed through his nose. Not quite a laugh, but in the right light, maybe.

“You’ve met Rook,” Elen said cheerfully. Knowingly. Because she listened to rumours and Sergeant Stare being in the Green Kiss during quiet hours? Yeah of course Elen heard about it. And kept it inside…made a point not going there looking for him. “You know how he peels things with that sharp knife of his like they personally offended him.”

Jace didn’t answer, but his shoulders had eased a fraction.

Elen kept going, adjusting the tension of the stitch. “Just the one glove. He asked, I said yes. Fair deal.”

He watched her for a few seconds. Not the yarn this time, but her hands. The way she worked through the rows without needing to measure, how she shaped care into form. Then he spoke, quiet and level. “I don’t know any other way of looking.”

Elen didn’t stop her knitting, but her hands slowed for a moment, as her mind refocused.

“I can’t unsee a pattern once I’ve marked it,” he said, voice quiet, hands still…his entire body still. “Doesn’t matter what it is. The way someone moves. The angle of a bulkhead that doesn’t line up. The hitch in a breath before action. It sticks. Always has.”

She turned her head, just enough to show she was listening. “It makes sense,” she said, her voice a little hushed. Matching his tone, but not…making herself less. More like she was breathing in tandem with him. “Given where you came from.”

He didn’t nod. Just kept his eyes on the stars. “I used to think everything about me was a reaction,” he said after a moment, and he tilted his head a little. “Turkana. Then the Dominion War. The years in between. That it all got carved into me. That if you stripped it away, there’d be nothing left but damage.” His voice stayed flat. Not defensive. Just him trying to make sense of what he had been told through the years, in counselling, in random words or comments…putting them down like landmarks on a map. “But I think I’d be like this anyway. Even if I grew up somewhere clean. With a bed that didn’t have a number, with people who didn’t hold their breath before speaking.”

Elen placed the half-shaped glove in her lap. Twisted the yarn once around her finger for a moment before shifting. She turned her body to face him, fully, her eyes on him. For a moment, she felt it…that underlying emotion in the contained marble. Just for a second. And then it disappeared, dulled, muted.

Drowned.

“I think I’d still track exits. Still see risk. Still scan a face before I trust it.” His voice was steady. But quiet. “I was always going to see this way.”

Elen let the silence hold a beat longer than before, and then said, “And still, you learned to share a bench,” she gave a small smile, not a grin, didn’t reach out for him either. She knew from the set in his shoulders that touch would make him bolt. That right now, what she was seeing was the trooper and the boy, the man with no real emotional language to explain what he felt…who still felt so much.

Jace didn’t reply at first. But the faintest edge of something softened the line of his mouth. “You made it harder to avoid,” he pointed out, flatly, and looked at her.

She finally grinned, tapping her own chest twice. “I’m very talented like that. They almost wanted to give me a medal once for that. Then of course I woke up…”

He exhaled through his nose again. This one not quite a huff. Not quite not.

She picked up the knitting. The yarn moved again. A few rows passed in silence, the thread catching softly against her fingers. The ambient light outside the viewport had dimmed slightly as the ship rolled through its course, stars shifting in slow drift. She let herself focus on the counting, on the sensation of the needles and the wool. The way it occasionally caught on her fingers, skin dry from work and callouses. A reset for her. She couldn’t hear him breathe. She knew he was next to her the way she knew that her neighbour’s cat had been watching her from a sunny spot as a child. The knowledge of being watched, even if you saw no sign of it.

She let herself drift. When she spoke, it was thoughtful, half distracted. “I wouldn’t know who I was,” she said, “if I didn’t have the mind I’ve got.” Ther was no movement beside her. She kept her eyes on her work. “So the hypo with the ADHD meds…when I use them, when I need them…they bring clarity, structure. I can thread systems, crosslink junctions, make a field team feel like a real department. And there’s part of me that thinks, maybe that version of me could wear command red one day. Run a section. Stand still without losing half her ideas on the way.” She paused, checking her word, sighed, knitted back two to pick up a fallen stitch. Wasn’t going to let any escape into chaos and holes. “But most of the time, that version doesn’t feel like me. She’s focused. Balanced. Controlled. But she’s not…this. The one who still gets excited about two-tone cabling or a funny-looking fruit or the fact that starlight can hit yarn just right. She’s a grown up…but lost some of her energy.”

Jace’s eyes remained forward. But she felt the way his attention tightened.

“I don’t think I want to be someone else,” Elen said, gently. “Even if that version might be easier for the chain of command to understand. Even if that version might be easier to like.”

Silence stretched between them. She let out a breath, deciding that the conversation as over. But then…

Jace said, “They’d burn that out of you.” She looked up. His voice was low. Unforced. “If you had to make life and death calls more than once a week. If you had to sign off on losses. Choose which team gets evac first. You’d still be you, but it would cost you. The gentleness. The way you…look at people without demanding anything…the way you see the shape of someone and accept them as they are.”

Elen tilted her head slightly. “You don’t think I could handle it?” she asked, curiosity overriding everything, even the slight sense of disappointment in her gut.

“I think you could,” he said. And then he looked away, a tightening between his eyebrows as a breath escaped his lips. “That’s the problem.”

She blinked. Not defensive. Just…surprised. She didn’t expect it…that he could see her as anything except a loud, somewhat chaotic engineer. Her fingers stilled on the yarn. Not from hurt…but from the weight of being seen so clearly.

“You’d do it. You’d hold the line. And you’d carry every part of it. Quietly. Until it changed how you talk. How you move. How you feel.” Jace’s hands were loose on his knees again. His voice didn’t rise. It never did when he spoke like this. But he looked back at her, his eyes firm. “They’d take the soft edges and harden them. Not to hurt you. Just because that’s how it works.”

Elen didn’t speak. But she gave the smallest nod. Just once. To show him she understood.

Jace looked back at the viewport. “You’re not less for choosing not to climb the ladder.”

Her smile, when it came, was a bit crooked. “You’re the first person to say that like it’s obvious. Like it’s okay not to want that.”

“I’ve seen what it costs.” His voice wasn’t soft, just factual. His eyes remained on the view. As if he could find something in it.

“And you think I’m worth protecting from that?” she asked, her voice quiet. Careful, because this was…new ground. Dangerous, maybe, invoking the protector…asking for more.

Jace didn’t answer her question. He didn’t flinch or retreat. He just stayed quiet, eyes on the stars, the line of his shoulders steady as a faultline that hadn't moved in years.

She exhaled, and didn’t push. She could tell she had reached a wall, a moment where he had given all he could without losing himself. She sighed, soft through her nose, then lifted her hand to scratch at her cheek with the back of her knuckle, a thoughtful little motion. “I like these talks,” she said after a moment.

He glanced at her, barely a shift.

“I know I talk more. I always talk more.” She gave a self-conscious smile, then shrugged one shoulder. “But there’s something about the quiet with you. The fact that you don’t fill it just to make noise. Or expect me to be any different. You’re just…steady.” Her fingers shifted on the yarn again. She continued knitting, fingers moving easily on the needles, then stopped mid-row. “But if you ever need to let go of that,” she added, “that control… I’d still be here. Still your friend. Whether you're silent or storming or stitched back up after falling apart.”

For a long moment, he didn’t speak. Then his voice came, quiet, shaped like something old. “I don’t know how.”

She didn’t respond, just waited. Another thing she had learned from him, about him…Silence for him was more important than hugs. She didn’t understand it…but she could respect it. So she adopted it now and then.

“I’ve spent years…years holding myself in check. Every movement, every reaction, every choice, calibrated. Because if I let go of that…if I stop thinking, even for a second…” He paused, his jaw tight, the muscle there flicking beneath the skin. “…then I stop being a man. And I go back to instinct.”

Elen set the yarn aside completely. Folded it into the soft pouch in her lap, slowly, with care. “Do you think you’re dangerous to others?” she asked, not afraid. Just honest.

“I know I am.” The words didn’t come with shame. Just certainty. As plain and fixed as shipmetal. “I’ve been trained, wired…built to respond before thinking. There’s a switch in me that doesn’t care about policy or protocol. It cares about survival. About elimination. About the fastest way to stop something from breaking me or mine.” His voice didn’t rise. But it had an edge, quiet and honed. “Control is what keeps that switch buried. It’s not a performance. It’s the tether.”

Elen looked at him for a long moment. Really looked. Then she reached across, not to touch him, but to rest her hand palm-up on the bench between them. A bridge, but one that didn’t push…but also showing she was unarmed. She just had herself, what she was. “You think you’re a wire under tension,” she said softly. “But I’ve seen how carefully you move around the people. You never cut unless you have to. You walk the line, even when it costs you. Even when no one else sees it. You stay in a room, still as marble, even when you want to bolt because some part of you cares about what is around you. About who is around you.”

He didn’t take her hand. But his eyes dropped to it. Stayed there, watching the calloused palm, the short nails…the little healing cut along her thumb.

“You say you’re all instinct,” she said, voice low, “but the truth is, your instinct is to protect. To steady. To survive, yes…but also to carry.” Her voice didn’t tremble, but it became a little breathless as she kept her voice quiet and slow. “That’s not animal. That’s someone who chose to stay a person. Every day. Even when it was easier not to.”

Jace exhaled, slow and controlled. She could feel the shift in the air beside her and smiled, gentle but bright. “And if one day that control slips…if that instinct takes over? I’ll still be here. I’ve got strong hands. I can carry back, too,” she said, her voice firming up a little bit and her eyes seemed more green in the light.

He looked at her. Met her eyes without flinching. Then gave a small nod. Just once. Measured. True. “I know you’re strong,” he said, voice low.

Elen didn’t smile this time. Just dipped her head in quiet acknowledgement, curls falling slightly over her cheek.

There was a pause, then his voice came again. Different now. Not guarded. Just distant in the way memory could be. “You remind me of someone,” he said. “From the war.”

Her eyes softened, half with surprise, half with awe. She didn’t press, knowing that if she did the words would stop. He was rarely this talkative. Maybe it was…the lack of something to do with his hands. They had barely moved since she had arrived. She longed to put a crochet hook in it, to teach him to create.

“Martinez. Corporal Martinez. Martian, like you. They had a way of…seeing people. Not judging, not fixing. Just making space. Kept pace with me when no one else did. Understood the shape of what I was, without needing it translated. Translated the expectations for me when…all I could see was my next target.” His hands stayed still between his knees. “I hadn’t felt that in years. Not until you walked into the holodeck.”

Elen blinked once, surprised. Almost about the argue…she remembered when she had first walked into the holodeck programme of Jace Morven and honestly, she was pretty sure she played twenty questions and got only two answers from him, one of them with bribery of time.

“You didn’t tell me to end my session,” Jace said. “Didn’t kick me out. You just stayed. Then later…you gave me the gloves because you thought I needed something to keep from floating off the map.” The smallest shift in his voice. Not emotion, exactly. But weight. “You saw something. Didn’t make a scene about it. Just…offered something that fit.”

Elen’s voice was soft. “I didn’t know what else to do. You looked like you needed something. And I make things when I don’t have words, or the words don’t fit with what I feel.”

Jace glanced down at her bag. At the yarn tucked loosely in the folds. “I’d wear another pair,” he said.

She gave a small breath of laughter, almost disbelieving. “Well. That’s good.”

He looked at her again. Steady. Not judging, not even reading. Just eyes on her, taking in how she looked, how she gestured with her hands. How she came to life at the idea of doing something tactile.

“Now I know the shape of your hands,” she added. “Could fit them better. Maybe line the palms. Keep the pressure right.” Her fingers moved over the soft edge of the pouch, already forming plans. Once she had finished the glove for Rook, of course.

After a moment she looked at him again, a thought pulling at her. “Did Martinez survive? The war I mean?” It didn’t feel insensitive to ask. It was a fact point. Jace liked those, she knew that.

Jace let out a breath and gave a nod, slow and measured, eyes going back to the stars. “They did. Not sure about now, but they survived the war.”

Elen nodded, a small smile coming to her. Good. That not everything he had seen, everyone he had known, had been reduced to ashes and bone. “That’s good.”

They sat like that a moment longer. Not reaching. Just staying. The two most unlikely companion on the makeshift bench, sharing space because they could without shattering the other.

---

Lt. jg Elen Rell
Engineer
USS Guinevere

&

Sergeant Jace Morven
Platoon Sergeant, Alpha Squad
Federation Ground Forces Detachment
USS Guinevere

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