Overlapping Rhythms

Posted on Mon Jul 7th, 2025 @ 11:27am by Lieutenant JG Elen Rell & Sergeant Jace Morven

1,719 words; about a 9 minute read

Mission: Prologue
Location: USS Guinevere
Timeline: 2388

Elen Rell didn’t need to look up to know someone had entered.

The door hadn’t made a sound because guess what? New seals, perfectly aligned. She’d overseen the work herself last week, triple-checked the tolerances. But something in the air changed. The ship didn’t feel wrong, just...recalibrated. Like the internal sensors had clocked a shift in inertia but hadn’t decided whether to flag it.

The EPS feed still hummed at the correct pitch. The diagnostics scrolled along in orderly columns on the nearby interface, precisely on schedule. But she felt it. Like an additional circuit had just come online. Not louder. Not brighter. Just… heavier. A stillness that muffled the space, as if the room had instinctively held its breath.

She kept stitching.

The crocheting kept her grounded, kept her from pacing, from disassembling the conduit seals again, or worse, starting another round of unnecessary recalibrations. She’d already rewritten most of the phase variance subroutine today just to keep her thoughts from spiralling sideways. Her fingers moved with soft, practiced certainty, looping the turquoise yarn through the rhythm her brain knew better than most of the warp equations on file. Familiar stitches. A quiet kind of anchor.

She didn’t look up until she’d finished the last of the repeat. A good stopping point. One she could find again later without staring at the pattern and wondering, what in the void was I thinking with that row? Then she felt him. Fully. Present and waiting.

Jace Morven.

Still as silence itself, standing in the doorway like he’d materialised there rather than walked. He didn’t speak. Didn’t shift. Just let his eyes move across the room with that clinical, quiet awareness she’d come to recognise. As if he were cataloguing potential cover points, structural weaknesses, tactical chokeholds…or maybe just checking to see if it was safe to stay. One hand rested against his thigh, fingers not twitching but...present. Ready. As if the muscles in his shoulders had learned not to relax unless someone told them to.

The corridor lighting cast long shadows across the deck plating, and his boots hadn’t made a sound.

He looked like part of the ship. Like bulkhead and intent.

And he’d come to her.

She gave a small nod. A ‘you’re not unwelcome’ sort of nod. Then turned back to the console beside her, letting the silence settle between them.

It didn’t bother her. Not this kind of silence.

She’d noticed it in the gym. The holodeck. That first time, mist and moss clinging to the air between them like an unspoken truce. Jace Morven didn’t fill space. He occupied it. Completely. Quietly. And she’d learned early that she’d be doing ninety percent of the talking if she wanted talking at all. But this wasn’t that kind of silence. Not a void waiting to be bridged. More like an open circuit, low power draw, no threat. Sometimes she suspected he left the silence on purpose. Not as a test, just a space he’d lived in so long he didn’t know what else to do with.

And her brain’s simple default was hating vacuums. It wanted to talk, to shift, to solve. To sprint. Words tended to spill out of her like atmosphere out of a hull breach. Fast, unfiltered, and frequently uncontrolled.

He had never left. His stillness wasn’t just in his face, but his body. None of the awkward shifting around she did. No, Jace didn’t shift. Just...he had stayed. Like leaving hadn’t even crossed his mind.

That surprised her more than any words would have. No clipped exit. No subtle bracing like he was preparing for some unknown emotional impact. No look of annoyance that made something sink inside of her, the knowledge of being too much. No apology. Just...quiet. Answering questions if he wanted to. If not, he was just silent. But never rude, never aggressive.

He finally moved. Not with noise. Not with weight. Just...chose a spot and folded into it. Sat cross-legged against the far wall, arms draped loosely over his knees, eyes turned inward. Not watching her. Not waiting.

Just there.

And it hit her in that moment. Not with drama. Not with fanfare. Just a soft internal oh. He’d come here. Not to Engineering because of a fault or a task. Not like that. She liked this space because not many came here, a little flung-out console that happened to hit the systems just right. And there was a door rather than being out there with the warpcore. He hadn’t come here to say something wasn’t working right, or needing some more power for whatever he might be doing with the Squad he had. No, he had come here, to this room. To her. To this space. He’d walked into the place where she lived, where her brain calmed down enough to breathe.

And he’d stayed.

She felt the familiar twitch start to rise in her legs...too long sitting, too many diagnostics already complete, too much silence hanging like fog. The crocheting helped. Loops and pulls and yarn tension. The motion was simple. Physical. It gave her something to hold, when her thoughts tried to scatter like unsecured tools in a grav shift.

Her foot tapped.

She shifted again. One leg folded under her now, spine curved too much to be proper. Medical and Cressida would fuss if they saw her posture. She’d promise to stretch later and forget.

But she didn’t speak.

Didn’t fill it.

Just let him be. Let herself be. And kept stitching.

Eventually, she spoke. Couldn’t help it. “You know,” she said, keeping her tone light. “I think this is the first time someone has voluntarily shown up while I’m running diagnostics. Usually people run a mile away unless they accidentally get tangled up in my yarn or trip over my tools.”

No immediate response. She counted two heartbeats. Maybe three. Then, quietly, a little flat but solid. “You don’t talk nonsense.”

She grinned, twisting a stitch just right. It slipped perfectly into place, satisfying in a way only tiny, deliberate things could be. Now that was practically glowing praise coming from him. Especially since she absolutely did talk nonsense. She made a hobby of it. A shield. A rhythm. A way to keep her own brain from running off the rails.

But maybe not as much with him.

His vibe was all silence and restraint and…she felt herself unconsciously questing outward, the Betazoid part of her brushing delicately across whatever strange, honed quiet lived inside him. That marble feeling again. Not empty. Not cold. Just...held. Like emotion taught never to spill. A mind constructed for lockdown, not through training but by necessity. It wasn’t defensive. It just was. How he was wired.

She blinked once. Let it go. Came back to the yarn in her hands.

“Coming from you,” she said, looping another stitch with a smirk in her voice, “I might frame that. Hang it right over the warp core. Then call the Captain down to inspect it. Take a holopic, send it to HQ: ‘Elen Rell does not talk nonsense, signed Sergeant Jace Morven.’ Stamp it. Frame it. Stick it in the next personnel newsletter.”

Still no reply. But she caught it, just barely.

A shift in his breath. Just enough.

And that was plenty.

She looked at the kit in front of her, ran a finger along the line of tools, then picked out the microbuffer. Without turning, she offered it over, still holding her crocheting in the other hand. The hook dangled precariously, loop on the verge of slipping free.

He got up soundlessly and took the buffer without a word. No hesitation. No awkward pause. Like they’d done this a dozen times already. Like it was natural. Her job was to talk, to fill the space just enough to stop it collapsing inward, and his was to hold it steady.

She set her crocheting aside, let it fall to the floor by accident. The hook pinged off the deck plating, a bright note in the stillness. She didn’t pick it up. It would be fine.

Instead, she reached for a tool, thumb settling over the activation plate as she slid down beside the open panel.

And for a while, they just worked. Not quite in sync, but not out of it either. Separate rhythms brushing against one another, overlapping enough to count. Her focus was absolute and he didn’t disturb it. He was there and working, with a confidence that her mind registered.

Eventually, her eyes flicked to him, quickly and sure, back to the job in front of her. “So this is a thing now?” she murmured. “Quiet corners of the ship. Shared tools. Carefully curated amounts of interaction? Sneak-engineering?”

Another pause. Then. “You’re not loud.”

“Yeah,” she replied, softer. She could be. But she knew when not to be. She could be a river of words without being loud if she needed to be. If someone needed her to be. “Some silences feel like waiting for something to explode. This one feels more like...breathing room. You know? That catch of breath you need if you’ve been running.”

He didn’t argue. Didn’t look at her. Didn’t leave.

And for Elen, who always noticed the absences….the missing weight in conversations, the way people edged around her brightness like it might be too much, for her his staying said enough.

He’d come to her.

And in the quiet hum of the ship she knew like her own pulse, with the softness of wool still clinging to her fingertips and something in his shoulders starting to settle...

She let herself believe this wasn’t just a fluke.

That maybe, just maybe...this mattered to him too.

---

Lt. jg Elen Rell
Acting Chief Engineer
USS 2388

&

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

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