Chapter Text
The Deep Space Nine gossip mill is hard at work as ever. No sooner has Chester slid into place at a table at Quark’s then the Ferengi bartender is there at her elbow. “Celebrating the happy event, Captain? Where’s the lucky man?”
Starship captains don’t flee at the prospect of public embarrassment, but Chester comes very close to bolting. Quark looks at her expression and raises his cocktail tray defensively. “Forget I said anything. I’ll just bring you something strong, shall I?”
“Just a coffee,” she says. She’s not sleeping anyway.
“A coffee,” he repeats. She just looks at him. “Very well, Captain. A coffee.” He tucks the tray under his arm and walks away, shaking his head.
Why the hell did she think it was a good idea to come here? She glances around; she is getting the oh-so-casual over the shoulder looks of today’s hot gossip. She doesn’t even bother to be surprised. If Quark knows, everyone knows.
The coffee arrives. She manages a thank you, then pretends it’s a lot more interesting than it actually is.
The chair across from her scrapes out, and someone thumps heavily into it. “So, what did you do?”
Chester looks up and blows out a long breath of relief at the sight of the tiny blond Trill across from her. “Rilas? What are you doing here—I thought the Negotiator was on that aid mission to Gamma Neevi II?”
“We blew three plasma conduits and the port warpcore when we got jumped by pirates halfway there,” says Captain Rilas Jeln, stretching. “Sotek had to come fish us out and tractor us home. Whole ship smells like burnt carpet.”
“And the pirates?”
Rilas lifts and drops a shoulder, her delicate features grim. “Abruptly retired.”
Yeah, from breathing, thinks Chester, looking her friend over. Rilas doesn’t share Chester’s compunction about being a soldier. She spent the war in Starfleet Intelligence. Most of her activity has yet to be declassified—whatever the hell she was up to, though, Chester knows it was bad. The Rilas she knew before the war and the one sitting in front of her are two entirely different people. Rilas still acts the part of the bubbly troublemaker she was in the Academy and when they were all junior officers together, but there’s a hardness behind her eyes now, a greater willingness to go immediately for the throat.
None of them have much sympathy for pirates after the last few months. And in a crippled ship, alone and far from help, no one’s going to argue with Rilas’s call to defend her people by any means necessary.
But Chester isn’t sure she likes it. It feels in her mind a little too like the flat viciousness she sank into during the war, when there was an ugly job to be done. It’s still with her, the rapid cruel calculations of survival. Pushing back against it, with the fear of endangering your crew—it’s a terrifying and delicate learning curve.
“Glad you’re here,” she says. “Who’s got the aid mission?”
“The Defiant,” says Jeln. “We’ll be here for the next two weeks. At least. My engineer says she’ll be able to salvage the core, she thinks. Hey Quark, what’s the strongest thing you can legally sell me?”
There’s a little wrangling. Quark believes in profit, but also in liability. That settled, and Rilas also settled with something gently frothing and fuchsia, she says, “Enough about me. What did you do? The Romulans are like a kicked Earth anthill, and all I got out of anyone was it was about you.”
Chester groans.
“She proposed to her Romulan liaison officer,” says Quark in passing, because he’s an enormous asshole who likes being the center of attention.
“You what ?”
“It was an accident!” says Chester. “I wouldn’t—I have better taste, Rilas!”
Rilas tilts her head. “That’s worse,” she says. “You understand that is worse, right, Diane?”
“Oh do I,” says Chester. “Look, what I saw was some other Romulan about to stab him—not that I don’t sympathize —and I stepped in to help and apparently, when you interrupt a ceremonial breakup you’re basically announcing your passionate love for one of the participants, so here we are. It’s a diplomatic crisis, and precipitating it feels amazing, let me tell you.”
Rilas lets out a long breath and sits back in her seat. “Wow. Of the three of us, I wouldn’t have guessed you’d be the one to do the accidental engagement thing. That’s more my line.”
It is, of course, then that Sotek glides up, a tall man even by Vulcan standards, and lightly built, even by Vulcan standards; he and Chester are of a height, but he looks almost flyaway next to her. An academic before his husband noted his boredom and chivvied him into joining Starfleet, he still retains a professorial air. That profoundly nonthreatening demeanor, coupled with naturally owlish expression, has served him extremely well in many negotiations.
Now he says, “I think it unwise that we have this discussion in a public venue. Perhaps one of our ships would be appropriate.”
Rilas gives him a concerned look. “Not it. My ship smells like horrible burning.”
“My quarters, then,” decides Sotek.
From the look of things, the Armistice is in the best shape of the three ships. There’s no scent of burnt plastic, and while Chester doesn’t ask Sotek about the voles, she sees no sign of them when they beam aboard. Sotek’s quarters are in a far better state than either of theirs, though that might just be Vulcan minimalism working in his favor. Whatever he’s done, his quarters feel lived-in.
“I haven’t put up any of my pictures yet,” says Rilas. “They’re in a pile on my desk. Old habits, you know?”
They know. Rilas didn’t even have a desk of her own for most of the war.
Sotek settles them in the seating area with its generous window and bank of plants, offers water—weaponizing Vulcan custom to ensure they don’t continue to consume stimulants or depressants at this time of night, Chester notes wryly as she accepts—and then sits down opposite her with an air of careful concern. Chester feels like a student in the process of failing an important course.
“The rumors I have heard are disturbing enough,” he says. “On their basis alone I would suggest that you avoid being alone on the station for the foreseeable future, and encourage Admiral Ross to deploy the Interpreter as soon as possible. But before I make any further suggestions, I would like to hear the events in question from you, rather than the… unreliable informal information network of the station.”
So he’s already been listening to the gossip, and found it bad enough to bring them back over here.
“She proposed to Subcommander Tanek on accident,” says Rilas, with no mercy in her voice.
“Is this so?” asks Sotek gently, his attention on Chester. It is the exact expression that’s the reason she started calling him gēge, older brother , at the Academy—at first by accident, and then on purpose. He was appalled at first, and then, as he looked into traditions of human elective kinship, took the role almost a little too seriously.
But right now, she’s not ashamed to admit that this is absolutely what she needs. So she tells him the whole ridiculous story.
As she speaks, Sotek goes graver and graver. When she gets to the part about tackling Tanek, he says, “That would have put your body between his and his attacker, correct?”
“Yes,” she says. “It seemed like the safer option under the circumstances.”
He slowly reaches up to pinch the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes. “Please continue.”
Oh. She’s fucked.
When she finishes speaking, he says, “The issue is not so much that you merely indicated your interest in courting him. It is that you have done so in a formal and archaic way that is not only unusually…ardent, but is also what a social equal or superior would utilize. Unfortunately, as the Romulans see it, you are neither.”
“Yes, Toreth gave me the speech. The hell do you mean by ‘unusually ardent’?!” Rilas lets out a strangled honk of laughter; Chester glares at her for being unhelpful in the extreme.
“You placed yourself between him and danger, which is not something another Romulan would have done lightly. You also took his weapon to defend yourself and him. That implies a…” He pauses, evidently searching for a delicate enough word. After a moment, he turns his gaze to her face, looking for some cue there, the concern on his own unusually strong. “A certain intimacy,” he decides.
“Oh,” says Rilas, a little faintly, and sinks down with her head on the table, trying to muffle her giggles.
Chester blinks at Sotek. “What kind of intimacy?”
“The usual kind.”
There is a stifled noise from Rilas.
“I feel the need to reiterate there was a woman with a sharp knife standing over us,” says Chester. “Very strongly. And, before either of you ask those concerned questions I can hear lining up in your nasty suspicious minds—he’s also the most annoying person I’ve ever met, and I barely tolerate him, let alone want to marry him!”
“The logic of your reaction, unfortunately, has little bearing in your present situation,” says Sotek. He’s being sympathetic. She can tell by his choice of words, and the way he’s not quite looking at her. “The fact remains that you have inadvertently made an unusually explicit and passionate proposal of marriage to the Tal Shiar agent assigned to your ship, and he has not rejected you. I believe that there is very little indeed that will discourage his female relatives from most earnestly trying to kill you.’
“Hold on. What do you mean, he did not reject me?”
“If he did not immediately fling you off him, or shoot you, or display his displeasure in dramatic and fatal fashion, he has not rejected your advances.”
“I think that was surprise.”
“He is an experienced agent of the Tal Shiar. I very much doubt he was immobilized by shock.”
Chester groans and buries her face in her hands. “I hate him.”
“The circumstances are indeed unfortunate.”
“Toreth says I can’t even dump him without making it worse.”
“That is unfortunately true.”
“So what the hell can I do?”
“Get off the station and hide,” says Rilas. “How do you even do this, Diane. How do these things keep happening to you.”
“Allow our diplomats to do their work,” says Sotek. “It is their profession. In the meantime, Rilas is correct. Your presence will only be inflammatory at this point.”
Chester groans and drops her head into her hands again. “I feel so stupid. This is the worst diplomatic incident I’ve caused in my life. Also I proposed to literally the worst person I know. He is an unbelievable fucking shithead.”
“Colorful human idiom will not aid the situation. However, please understand that had you done what you did under any other circumstances, your actions would have been laudable. It is only the specific circumstance of interrupting the separation of a couple that constitutes this kind of proposal.”
“So I got really, really unlucky,” says Chester.
“You could have gotten unluckier,” says Rilas. “Remember how his sister is my liaison officer? She wanted me to let you know she understands it was an accident, and she’ll give you a running start once their mother tells her to kill you.”
“Given Romulan and human physiology, that is unlikely to alter the outcome of a confrontation.”
“Thanks a lot, gēge.” Chester takes a sip of the water for something to do with her hands. “If it were Tanek, I wouldn’t be worried. He decided to fence with me last week—didn’t go well for him.”
“It is very likely he was trying to assess the threat you posed,” says Sotek, “and gain a better understanding of you in the process. His job, as an agent, is to understand you and be able to predict your actions and reactions. Should the truce end—which I am sure the Romulans see as an certainty, rather than a possibility—his task will then be to neutralize you and your crew as efficiently as he can. Do not take a victory in sparring too much to heart; he can afford embarrassment to further an eventual victory. And do not,” he catches and holds her gaze, “take any offer of a deepening personal relationship, platonic or otherwise, as anything but a tactical decision to further his assignment. He would be wise to play on the mutual embarrassment of this incident as an excuse to move further into your confidence. Indeed, I would have expected him to have attempted something similar earlier.”
“You mean you’re worried he’s going to seduce me?” says Chester, hears her voice squeak on the edge of laughter. “Have you met this guy, Sotek? Please, have one conversation with him, you’ll understand.”
“Nevertheless, kindly remain cognizant of the risk.”
“Going to agree with Sotek here. Your species has a whole genre of entertainment about young women dedicated to their careers throwing everything away because they fall in love with annoying men,” says Rilas. “What’s with that, anyway? Why is it never the other way around?”
“Twentieth century sexism, mostly,” mutters Chester. “Fine. I won’t enact the plot of a romcom with my Tal Shiar assigned idiot, even if we did just get engaged, even if he does somehow remove his head from his ass and get over his entire personality.”
“That is all I ask,” says Sotek, and because she knows him very well she can see the humor lurking at the corners of his eyes. “In the meantime, you are hardly the first and will not be the last Starfleet officer to find herself in this position. There is no immediate action you can take, but the Diplomatic Corps are very good at their jobs.”
Sotek will never simply say something like it will be all right —Vulcans don’t do platitudes. But this is basically the same thing. She gives him an unsteady smile. “Thanks. I’m looking forward to this being a humorous anecdote.”
“It is very likely to become one,” he says, “and no more. Much like the vole infestation I am told both of our ships are currently suffering.”
He’s got the voles too! That cheers her up no end. Rilas turns an incredulous look at both of them. “Voles? You both have voles? How do you have voles? ”
“Deep Space Nine,” they tell her, almost in chorus.
“I’m going to have to tell my chief engineer that,” says Rilas, smug. “Our engine problems might just be getting off lightly after all.”