Commander Emilia Parr moved through the Farragut like a force of nature, her voice bright and quick, laughter following her into every space. On the bridge she teased the helmsman, threatening to banish him to the cargo bay for shuttle “three-point turns,” drawing smiles from even the most stone-faced officers.

In engineering she leaned too close to the consoles, cracking jokes about diagnostics that ran slower than Klingon opera, watching the tension bleed out of the room as the crew chuckled.

In the conference room she danced the line between humour and command, cutting arguments apart with quips sharp enough to sting but soft enough to make people laugh as they conceded.

She was the ship’s pulse, its spark, its stage performer. She gave the Farragut light. And yet, every time her eyes flicked toward Ayres, she felt the performance stumble inside her chest. He stood there, steady and solid, carrying the kind of weight she could never joke away. His mouth would twitch with the beginnings of a smile, his gaze soften for just a fraction too long, and it was always enough to set a restless ache beneath her skin.

Too close, too restrained. Every brush of shoulders in the ready room, every glance shared across a briefing table, was like heat smouldering without release. She laughed louder to hide it. She teased more fiercely. She made herself theatrical, human, the officer who could make everyone else feel better. Because when the laughter faded, the absence pressed in.

Her quarters were silent, stripped bare of warmth. She would flop onto the bunk at the end of the shift and throw a hand to the ceiling as if delivering a soliloquy, mocking herself, mocking the empty room. “The tragedy of Emilia Parr, master of wit, hero of humour, longing for the one thing she could not simply joke into being.”

She wanted the simple thing, the easy thing: to lean against Ayres without pretending it was accidental, to let her laughter turn into something softer in the space between them. But simplicity had eluded them. Duty wrapped itself around every word left unsaid, every lingering silence. And so the lack remained, sharper than loneliness, heavier than exhaustion – the lack of intimacy just out of reach, the hunger that no joke could satisfy.

Captain’s Quarters

The door hissed closed behind her. Ayres had called her in under the guise of ‘finishing the duty rosters,’ but the PADDs lay stacked neatly on the desk, untouched. He stood by the viewport, the starfield spilling silver light across his uniform.

Parr folded her arms, cocking her head. “You know, Captain, when you invite me to your quarters without so much as a glass of wine, people might start to think you’re using me for my organisational skills.

He turned, slow, a faint smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “The crew aren’t that stupid.”

She laughed, a low, genuine laugh that softened the air between them. She crossed to the desk, trailing her fingers across the PADDs as though she might actually pick one up. She did not. She stayed standing, too close to him now, deliberately close, as if proximity might answer all the questions she had been avoiding.

The silence pressed in. It was not awkward, never awkward, but heavy with everything unspoken. She tipped her chin up, eyes glinting with that familiar mischief. “You know, Mike, I could make a joke right now. About us. About standing here like we’ve forgotten what rosters look like.”

“Then why don’t you?” he asked quietly.

Her smile faltered, just for a second. She wanted to, wanted to lean into him, to test how solid his chest felt against her hand, to break the fragile membrane of restraint that had kept them orbiting one another since Boreth, a few intimacies every now and then, but nothing solid.

But she did not. She shifted instead, brushing past him toward the viewport, close enough that her sleeve whispered against his arm. The starfield gleamed beyond the glass. She stared at it as though the stars held the punchline to her unspoken joke. “Because,” she murmured, “if I say it out loud, it might not be funny anymore.”

His hand twitched at his side. He did not touch her. And that – that absence, that almost – was the sharpest ache of all.