A Little Too Fitting
Posted on 28 Jan 2025 @ 11:31pm by Captain Brynhild Kleim
580 words; about a 3 minute read
Mission: Miranda
"Be honest. It's a little too on-the-nose, don't you think?" Brynhild asked with a laugh that few others got to hear from her. It was a sound far less restrained than she usually gave into, though she was never entirely unrestrained...
On the other end of the long-distance comms call was Jason, her brother-in-law with her brother Carl. Carl was at work, and their son--Miller--was in bed by this hour. The two of them were on the call with their individual glasses of whiskey (synthesized, of course) that they shared a taste for. It had been said more than once that Brynna got along better with Jason than Carl, though there was no animosity between the blood siblings. They were just very different people.
On a PADD on the desk in front of her were her orders to become the Commanding Officer of the USS Odin, another ship in the convoy that had recently lost their own.
"I think it's fitting," Jason replied, gesturing as he spoke and threatening the remaining liquor in his glass as he did so.
"Too fitting is my point. A woman whose call sign was Valhalla is now going to command the Odin. I'm half-tempted to just tell them they have it backwards." She smirked, not really serious...probably...about that as she drained the last of her glass. She liked things that fit and made sense together, tracing logical lines between points whenever possible, but there was such a thing as too much of that. It almost felt "cutesy" in its too-much-ness, but she wasn't going to actually argue that point with Starfleet Command.
Jason just gave her A Look, since he only heard her words and didn't see the train of her thoughts. "Are you ever going to lighten up?"
She put her glass on the desk and slid it away, leaning back in her chair and meeting his gaze via their two screens. "Chances are low," she drawled. "This attitude has done just fine for me over the past forty-ish years, so I see no reason to change operating procedure now."
"Fine, fine," he chuckled. "When do you transfer over?"
"Tomorrow," she said. "It would seem that there is some medical urgency to transfer their captain off the ship." She wasn't going to get into more detail than that, of course. Who would Jason tell? No one. But she had very clearly defined lines when it came to what was appropriate. As she had been told many (many) times, she played all of her cards very close to the vest even when she didn't strictly need to. It was yet one more thing that she saw no need to change any time soon. "As such, they're moving me over ASAP."
He nodded, taking that in. "All in a day's work for a Starfleet officer."
Brynhild chuckled. "Quite."
Once she'd left home for the academy, she had quickly gotten used to not letting the grass grow around her feet for too long since one could be moved on very suddenly, just like now. Fighter pilots were restless by nature anyway, and while she might now have been a command officer, she would always be a pilot at heart. Someone never grew out of or away from that.
Getting up, she walked away to pour herself another glass. As she sat down, she raised it in a toast with her brother-in-law. "To the next step."