Quick Fix, Part 3
Posted on Thu Feb 6th, 2025 @ 8:40pm by Crewman Mateo Gardel & Petty Officer 3rd Class Helliun Inant
Edited on on Sat Feb 15th, 2025 @ 11:01pm
4,086 words; about a 20 minute read
Mission:
To Boldly Go
Location: Medical Science Lab 1, Deck 7, USS Fenrir
Timeline: Day 11
[ON - Continued]
"The light should look...a bit milky," Hel said with a small smile, at the way he had said it. "And the handle should have a few burn marks. If you give me the wrong one, I'll just pinch you with it. It's how you'll know, and therefore learn," she added, playfully, clearly teasing with the tone of her voice. An empty threat, banter even. She couldn't resist teasing a little bit, so far she had been very civilised for a crewman. Usually she tried to at least scare someone a little, but the face Mateo had when she entered...she hadn't had the heart.
And now that they were talking, it felt different. He was intelligent, she could tell that, but scientists always were. No, he was also...she wasn't sure what it was. There was something there. He views the world through different eyes. He is a witness more than a participant for some of it. Yet as you stand on the Glass Sands, you long to go down to the caverns below. Unreachable, yet you long for it.
In her head, the words he said, the outrage in it...it did warm her. She had never taken offence of it. He did. Perhaps that was enough. "You'll get a chance to see my immune defence and cells close up. I have another medical scheduled soon, with extensive samples. With all the people we have been exposed to, they want to make sure I won't be carrying something...interesting with me on the mission." She laughed as she said it, simply because it was the way that the medical officer at Utopia Planitia had said it. He had used the term 'interesting'.
Mateo snorted, shaking his head as he finally spotted the tool Hel had described.
"Milky light. Burn marks."
Yeah, this had to be it.
He held it up between two fingers, inspecting it like he wasn’t quite convinced, then scoffed as her voice drifted out from inside the console.
His lips quirked, even though she couldn’t see it.
“Oh, okay,” he said, tilting his head slightly. “So that’s how we’re playing this? Threats? Physical violence?” A pause. Then, with a sharp, fleeting smirk—“Fine. But just so we’re clear? I pinch back.”
There was no way she could see the challenge in his expression, but the teasing edge in his voice? Undeniable.
He handed her the tool and shifted, stretching out one leg before it could cramp.
As the sounds of adjustments and clicking components filtered out from the console, his mind drifted.
He had spent his life studying things that made sense. Things that could be analyzed, categorized, understood. Hel’s species—biologically fascinating, immunologically distinct—was the kind of thing that got written about in research journals.
People like her got scanned, examined, written about.
People like him?
You only studied them when something had gone wrong.
The thought settled uncomfortably in his chest.
His eyes flicked toward the open panel. He could hear her working but couldn’t see her face. That made it easier to say things.
“If they were running extensive tests on me,” he muttered, shifting his weight, “I’d assume I was dying.”
His hand twitched absently toward his throat, a mild, half-conscious gesture of dramatics.
“Give it two days before I start writing a will.”
The joke landed effortlessly, but there was something real buried underneath it.
If someone was suddenly interested in his biology, it wouldn’t be for research purposes. It would mean something was wrong.
His mind ticked forward a few beats, pulling apart thoughts before he shoved them back down.
Instead, he focused on the familiar sound of a laugh from inside the console.
The word ‘interesting’ echoed in his head.
Mateo rolled his eyes.
“‘Interesting,’” he repeated under his breath, making a face she wouldn’t see. “Right. That’s medical speak for ‘we have no idea what’s going on, but we’re pretending we do.’”
He knew that tone. He had heard it before.
A pause.
Then—because sarcasm was always easier than sincerity—he exhaled sharply, shaking his head.
“Honestly, though? Kinda jealous. Must be nice, being so biologically fascinating that they roll out the full science fair for you.”
He could hear movement from inside the console as she worked, the subtle sounds of components clicking into place.
His smirk returned—sharp, but thoughtful.
“Me? I just get the standard ‘Breathe in, breathe out, don’t die on duty, next.’”
A beat.
Then—because he was very much not about to examine that train of thought further—he held up the tool in his hand.
“So? Did I pass, or am I about to get pinched?”
"Not this time...and I am almost disappointed, a pinching war sounds like good fun to me," Hel said lightly with a throaty laugh, finishing up by tidying up after herself. She scooted out, sitting up and meeting Mateo's eyes. "I am a curio for many, Mateo. The thing that they don't understand..." she smiled as she stretched her arms over her head, groaning softly as she straightened her back. "...is that to me they're just as fascinating."
She gave him a wide, wicked smile before closing the panel and standing, leaning over to turn on the work station. "Just like you are to me. You look fragile, yet I know from experience how resilient humans are...how they can push aside pain and suppress it as firmly as a Vulcan, how they can be as empathic as any Betazoid. And you all come in different shapes and sizes, in different shades and backgrounds and still, even then, you call yourselves the same thing. Humans are fascinating for their creativity, their hope, their rage and their love..."
She smiled as the work station came to life and stepped back, looking at him. "And you can survive more than you ever thought possible. Although a Will isn't the worst idea in the world, considering the nature of our work. We live in a metal ship surrounded by empty vacuum. Instant death is a hull breach away." She was grinning now, to herself, at the absurdity of what they had chosen to do with their lives.
Mateo huffed a quiet laugh, rolling his ankle to shake off the last traces of numbness as he stretched out his leg. “Yeah, well, not this time. You’re gonna have to find another excuse if you wanna start a pinching war.” The words were easy, flippant, but something in Hel’s tone lingered, turning over at the back of his mind like a stone in the tide.
When she sat up, stretching with a groan before meeting his gaze, something subtle but distinct shifted in the air between them. She wasn’t just stating facts—she was offering something. An acknowledgment, a perspective, an assessment that had nothing to do with science and everything to do with observation.
She had been studied. Prodded, tested, examined—reduced to a biological curiosity. And yet, she wasn’t bitter about it. There was something almost amused in the way she spoke about it, like she had long since accepted that people would try to categorize her, to fit her into neat little boxes. But what struck him wasn’t her awareness of it. It was the way she flipped it. Turned the lens back outward.
Because he was a curiosity, too.
That realization settled in his chest, unfamiliar and uncomfortable, like a puzzle piece that didn’t quite fit. People had been trying to fit him into boxes his entire life. Trying to make him conform to some expectation, some mold—round peg, square hole, over and over again until he learned to stop trying to fit at all.
Hel’s experience wasn’t the same as his. He wouldn’t pretend it was. But he understood the frustration of being measured by people who didn’t see him for what he was, only what they thought he should be. And whether you called it science or discipline or bureaucracy, the end result was the same: a label that didn’t fit, a role that didn’t suit, a weight of expectation that crushed everything else beneath it.
His fingers drummed against his knee before he exhaled, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “Alright, I’ll give you ‘creativity’ and ‘rage.’ But ‘hope’ and ‘love’?” He let out a quiet scoff, shaking his head. “You sure you’re looking at the same species? Because we are not that deep.” The humor was there, light and effortless, but beneath it, something lingered—the quiet acknowledgment that he, personally, doesn’t see what she sees.
And maybe that bothers him more than he wants to admit.
She said humans could survive more than they thought possible. And that? That hit closer than he wanted to examine. Because he had. And sometimes, he still wasn’t sure if he should have. But that wasn’t something he knew how to say—not like this, not right now.
So instead, he pushed off the floor the moment she did, rolling out his shoulders as if shaking off the weight of something unspoken.
Then she kept talking, and—Jesus. One hull breach away from instant death. His brows shot up as he fixed her with a flat, unimpressed look. “Okay. Wow. You do have a little Klingon in you.” He scoffed, shaking his head. “That was unreasonably morbid.”
He wasn’t arguing, though. She wasn’t wrong.
His gaze flicked to the workstation—fully powered, no flickering, no signs of his earlier catastrophe. The crisis had passed. But the conversation still sat with him. Stayed with him.
“Haven’t really thought about it before,” he admitted. “Not seriously.” He tipped his head slightly, eyes sharpening as he considered her. “You got one?”
A beat. Then, before she could answer, his lips curved, sharp and fleeting. “Because if you don’t, I feel like we should draft something up for you. Just to be safe.” His head tilted, voice dropping into something mock-serious. “Like, I dunno. ‘In the event of my death, my entire toolkit goes to Mateo, who will absolutely not know how to use half of it but will pretend he does just to mess with Engineering.’”
The smirk deepened as he rocked back on his heels, rolling his shoulders with a quiet sigh. “If we are one hull breach away from instant death, we might as well make sure our stuff goes to the right people.”
She laughed and faced him properly, watching him for a long moment. With understanding of a bond that had somehow managed to form over the last half an hour. Not just as two enlisted dealing with their jobs, but two different species that both seemed to have gone a little bit different than the general consensus of the species.
"Now who is the morbid one..." she teased as she looked at him, her eyes narrowing at him, the smile stretching her lips and showing her teeth. "You know, I would leave you my toolkit. I think that more scientists should dig into the guts of consoles and work stations...to understand that side too..." she winked and looked over at the work station.
"You want to know something...perhaps a little bit strange or funny? When I first came to Earth, some other people in my group of...enlisted...took me to this old building. The Victoria Theatre. They were showing this ancient thing...a two dimensional movie. It was...strange, to see, and hear. I had never seen anything like it. The story was based of one of Earth's ancient authors. The evil Prince living in luxury while his people are dying from the Red Plague..." her eyes widened almost playfully, adding to the drama of it as she looked at him again. "I don't remember much of it. Except...the female has a line in it. I think they were arguing beliefs, or religion...and she said 'but there's love and life and hope...'" she paused and considered it for a moment. "It made me understand that humans too are complex. He argued against it. And yet her...conviction...made me prefer her over him. It was good to see something that reminded me of our similarities. I was so fixated on how different we looked I didn't see any deeper."
Mateo absorbed her words, letting the imagery settle in his mind—the grand, decaying opulence of an old Earth prince indulging in luxury while the world outside withered in suffering. He hadn’t seen the film, but he knew the story, knew Poe, knew how his work clung to that delicate edge between morbid fascination and unflinching truth. It made sense that Hel had latched onto that line. There’s love, and life, and hope. A defiant stance against something cold, something indifferent.
His expression shifted—not quite a smile, not quite solemnity, but something suspended between the two. “That’s the thing about humans,” he murmured. “We contradict ourselves constantly. We argue against hope, against love, against all the things that should make life worth living—but then we turn around and fight for them like hell.”
His gaze flicked briefly toward the now-functioning workstation, the rhythmic pulse of the interface reflecting in his dark eyes before he looked back at her. “Maybe that’s why you preferred her. Not because she was right—” A pause. A slight tilt of his head, considering. “—but because she believed she was.”
Belief could be a force of nature, something powerful enough to pull people forward when nothing else could. And he understood, in his own way, the feeling of fixating on the surface of things—on what was visible, quantifiable—before realizing, belatedly, that there was depth beneath it. That people, in all their chaotic, contradictory mess, were more than what they appeared to be.
He exhaled, something thoughtful flickering beneath his usual dryness. “I get why that stuck with you,” he admitted. “Sometimes, we need a reminder that just because something doesn’t look familiar, doesn’t mean it isn’t.”
A beat.
Then, with a quiet huff, he tipped his head toward her toolkit. “And, for the record, if I inherit that thing, you better leave me instructions. Otherwise, next time I try to fix something, the Fenrir might spontaneously decompress.” His voice carried humor, but his eyes—steady, searching—held something else. Something quieter.
Understanding.
That was the thing about humans. About them.
Even when they didn’t fully realize it, they were always searching for connection.
She watched him, her expression softening a little. On her though, it did not look gentle. It was more that she was searching his eyes and features, marking them in her mind. "I suspect I will have to spend some time teaching you then," she said with a chuckle. "Or start labelling everything to go with a...guide. No one wants to decompress in that way."
She knelt to gather her tools, taking a moment to consider something. Her hands stilled and she knelt there, as if she was a statue, for a long moment. "We enlisted have to stick together, Mateo," her voice was firm, an unspoken promise. "I liked talking to you, and listening to you. We should do this again. Not the way some say that 'we should do it again' and never do it. We will meet up, perhaps have a meal, or the holodeck, before the system tests. Do you agree?" she met his eyes, a small smile on her lips. "I have some questions about human males I have not had the chance to ask and you seem like you would give me honesty."
Mateo blinked.
For a second—just a second—he thought he might’ve misheard her.
Not the part about labeling the tools or the decompression joke (which, objectively, was a solid point). Not even the part about enlisted sticking together, though there was a surprising weight to that sentiment. No, it was the rest of it. The part where she said she had liked talking to him. The part where she suggested they actually—deliberately—spend time together.
Not as a necessity. Not because of work. Just… because.
That was unexpected.
And it shouldn’t have been. It was a simple offer. A reasonable one. But Mateo wasn’t used to this part—the part where people actively wanted to keep him around. His experiences told him that he was usually tolerated more than sought out, and even when people did spend time with him, it was often because they had to or because he happened to be there, not because they had chosen him.
Hel was choosing.
She was looking at him, waiting for an answer, and that realization made something tighten in his chest—equal parts bewilderment and quiet, unfamiliar warmth.
His mouth opened slightly, then closed again. He almost fell back on autopilot—a snarky remark, something dismissive or sarcastic to brush past the unexpected sincerity—but something stopped him.
He wasn’t sure if it was the firmness in her voice, the way she had meant it when she said they should do this again, or the way she had so effortlessly folded him into the we of it all. We enlisted have to stick together. Not an I or a you, but a we.
He wasn’t used to that, either.
So, instead of defaulting to deflection, he let himself sit with it. Let himself feel it.
“…Dinner,” he said eventually, his voice a touch slower than usual, like he was still catching up to the conversation. His lips pressed together, then curved—small, self-aware, almost wry. “Yeah. Okay. That… sounds good.”
It did sound good. Weird, maybe, but good.
And then—because he could not leave well enough alone—his brow quirked slightly, amusement creeping into his expression.
“But just to be clear, I make zero guarantees about the holodeck.” His mouth twitched, as if suppressing a smirk. “If I end up getting sucked into some wildly uncomfortable Axan cultural experience, I reserve the right to judge relentlessly.”
The teasing was gentle, almost a reflex at this point. It made the moment easier—less heavy, less something he might overthink later.
But the agreement? The yes?
That part wasn’t a joke.
She laughed, standing and removing the scarf from her head, shaking her head to let her hair fall down. "Ha! You would not dare to judge, not once you stood upon the red sands and realised just how much singing my people do," she said, her eyes shining. She put the scarf away and untied the sleeves of her jumpsuit.
She looked at him before she pulled the jumpsuit up again, sticking her arms into the sleeves and zipping it up again. "Dinner then, tomorrow. And I promise I will not try and make you uncomfortable by trying to eat the cutlery..." the way she said it meant she had threaten to do it before with someone, as was the wink that made the promise of her words null and void. The lightness in her tone was there, a playful exchange, yet she meant it. "Perhaps after our shift, Mateo? That will prevent us from working past it...which I know is frowned upon while we are under the watchful eye of the Admiralty."
Mateo blinked, momentarily caught off guard by the easy certainty of Hel’s invitation. People said things like we should do this again all the time, but they rarely meant it—at least, not with him. So when she followed up with actual plans, an actual time, something solid instead of just vague pleasantries, it took him a second to process that she was serious.
His lips parted slightly, and then closed again. His fingers flexed against his uniform trousers, a brief tell of internal recalibration. He had spent so much of his life assuming friendships weren’t for him, that even in moments like this—where there was no ambiguity, no hidden dismissal—his instinct was still to hesitate.
But he didn’t want to hesitate.
Hel had been direct. Decisive. She had extended something freely, without any expectation beyond him simply saying yes.
And so he did.
“Okay.”
It was simple, but the way he said it carried weight—a quiet kind of agreement, something hopeful but still edged with self-consciousness. He nodded, an appreciative yet uncertain tilt of his chin, as if cementing the decision in place.
Then, finally, as the last traces of their conversation settled between them, he exhaled, shaking his head slightly. His lips twitched, something dryly amused surfacing as he ran a hand through his hair.
“And, for the record?” His voice was lighter now, teasing but sincere as he met her gaze. “You absolutely shouldn’t label anything for me. Trial by fire builds character. Or, you know—engineering casualties.”
It was humor, but also something else—an acknowledgment of the odd bond they’d formed in the last half hour. One that, somehow, didn’t feel quite so unfamiliar anymore.
"Or I could do it in...codes," she said with a warm laugh, nodding as she patted the work station. She had repaired it, and she suspected in the time she had spent here new things had been added to the list. Still, such was the life of the enlisted, no matter what department. "Just so you have to spend some big brain power on solving the mystery."
She put her toolkit over her shoulder again, the weight familiar. "And I think...I will pick you up from here tomorrow. You seem like one of those people who forget time..." she winked, teasing...and also not. She could almost see it in her mind's eye. "See you tomorrow, Mateo," she added before she headed to the door.
Mateo exhaled through his nose, watching as Hel slung the weight of her toolkit over her shoulder, easy and familiar. He had expected her to say goodbye, maybe toss in one last quip, but when she added, "I think... I will pick you up from here tomorrow. You seem like one of those people who forget time," something in his chest went tight.
She wasn’t just humoring him. Wasn’t leaving it up to chance. She was making sure he showed up.
He blinked once, absorbing the casual certainty of it. The way she said it like it was a given—like she knew he’d get lost in his work, like she knew he might forget or hesitate or talk himself out of it. And instead of leaving that door open, she just... closed it for him. No room for overthinking. No room for second-guessing.
For a brief, flickering second, the warmth in his chest almost startled him.
He swallowed, dragged a hand over his mouth, then gave a small, almost self-conscious nod. “Okay.”
It wasn’t much, but it was something.
And as Hel turned and made her way toward the door, he hesitated, fingers curling slightly at his sides. There was more he could say—something sharp, something clever, something to break the moment before it settled too deeply.
But for once, he let it linger.
Not yet.
Maybe not at all.
Instead, he just stood there, watching as the doors hissed shut behind her.
Then, exhaling softly, he glanced at the now-functional workstation, lips pressing together in something that wasn’t quite a smile.
Tomorrow, then.
[OFF]
Crewman Mateo Gardel
Medical Science Specialist
USS Fenrir
&
Petty Officer Helliun 'Hel' Inant
Engineering Officer
USS Fenrir
[PNPC - Hanlon]
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