Lab Rats & Leathernecks, Part 2
Posted on Tue Feb 11th, 2025 @ 7:32pm by Crewman Mateo Gardel & Petty Officer 1st Class Leon Inaros
Edited on on Sat Feb 15th, 2025 @ 11:02pm
4,015 words; about a 20 minute read
Mission:
To Boldly Go
Location: Medical Science Lab 1, Deck 7, USS Fenrir
Timeline: Day 12
[ON - Continued]
Leon's lips curled into a small smile as he looked at him. "I mean, I do enjoy sparkling clean biobeds," he said lightly, his fingers tapping against his leg for a moment. The movement was controlled, but also unaware. It was like a soothing gesture, or a reminder. He swallowed, the sound audible in the lab.
"I was a Marine medic," he finally said, meeting his eyes. "I am new to nursing. New to...the regular Fleet. New to wearing the blue," he added, his hands going to rest on his hips as he sighed. "So I'm adjusting to dealing with people after they've been...transferred to sickbay. And test samples, and labs, and...all of it."
Mateo considered him for a moment, catching the way Leon’s fingers tapped against his leg—controlled, but absent. The kind of movement that spoke of muscle memory, routine, or maybe something left behind. And then there was the way he swallowed before he said it, like the words Marine medic still carried weight.
Something flickered behind Mateo’s dark eyes.
“Well, that explains why you didn’t introduce yourself as ‘Nurse First Class Extraordinaire, Orderly of the Year,’” he said dryly, arms still folded.
His gaze drifted over the uniform. New to nursing. New to the regular Fleet. New to blue. The phrasing was careful. Deliberate. A Marine in a Starfleet uniform. That was interesting.
“Took a wrong turn on the way to a battlefield and landed here instead?” His head tilted slightly, tone sardonic but not cruel. “Or did someone actually convince you that test tubes and lab coats were the future?”
He gave Leon a once-over again, considering him now in a slightly different light—less ‘some guy delivering a crate’ and more ‘someone figuring out how to exist in this space.’
His fingers drummed lazily against his bicep.
“Guess that makes two of us,” he muttered, barely above a breath.
And then, louder, as if to bury the moment before it got too real—
“So, do they still let you shoot things in blue, or is it all clipboards and good bedside manners now?”
Leon smiled at that, looking at him surprise at what he was saying. The curiosity and...well, he was funny. You'd have to be a hard-nosed bastard not to at least smile at it. "Handed my phaser rifle in and picked up a medical grade hand-held scrubber...for those pesky biobeds," he said, even as he considered it.
"I don't know what my bedside manners are like," he finally admitted, almost thoughtful. "In the field, they were...okay. During the war, they were fine. It's..." he paused and looked at him. "I'm not sure how good I am going to be with flu symptoms. Not exactly like I can slap on something to stop the snot...well, I could, but it's not...great medicine. Might suffocate them."
Mateo’s fingers stilled against his bicep, his expression shifting—not softening, exactly, but tempering, like something in him recognized the need for precision in this moment.
“When you say ‘the war,’” he said carefully, his tone measured in a way that rarely was, “you mean the Dominion War, right?”
A reasonable assumption, but Mateo was a scientist, and assumptions were meant to be tested, not trusted. He didn’t ask to challenge Leon, but because it mattered—because context mattered, and because words carried weight.
When Leon answered, Mateo gave a slow nod, his gaze flicking downward for a second, as if cataloging that information before deciding how to handle it.
“I was six when it started,” he admitted, voice quieter now—not out of discomfort, but out of respect. “Eight when it ended. I don’t—” His brow furrowed slightly, and he let out a breath, as if turning the thought over in his mind. “I don’t really remember much. Not firsthand, anyway. It was something happening somewhere else, to someone else.”
His arms stayed folded, but it was less of a defensive stance now and more of a self-contained one, as if carefully holding the weight of the conversation in his own hands.
“I learned about it later,” he went on, his voice even but deliberate. “The numbers. The casualty rates. The battles, the occupations, the strategies.” A faint exhale through his nose. “The kind of thing you study in history classes and ethics seminars—and in my case, virology and epidemiology. The war left scars, but not just the kind people talk about.”
His gaze flicked back to Leon’s. A Marine medic. Someone who hadn’t studied it in a classroom, but had lived it.
“I guess what I’m saying is…” Mateo shifted his weight slightly, tapping his fingers once against his arm before stilling again. “I know just enough to know I don’t know what it was really like. And I’m not gonna pretend I do.”
The statement hung in the air, letting Leon decide what to do with it.
Then, because moments like this never sat comfortably for long, Mateo let out a slow exhale and tilted his head, just enough to inject the smallest trace of lightness into the moment.
“But hey, if flu season gets overwhelming, I hear there’s a black market for industrial-grade decontamination fields. Maybe you could just march people through one and call it preventive care.”
Leon let out a breath, nodding, the smile fading a little. He looked around and moved to a chair, sitting down. He rubbed his thigh for a moment, a familiar sharp pain he knew was in his head rather than anything physical. "I was already a medic when the Dominion War broke out," he said, confirming that it was the war he had talked about. He met his eyes, not looking away. The way Mateo had spoke, there...well. There were questions.
He supposed he had some answers.
"I was in the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Starfleet Marine Corps Infantry at the time. I was..." he smiled, shaking his head as he thought about it. "I was 22. And we'd...go where the ground fight was. Shuttles, ships, whatever could get us there. And we'd...beam down, or land...and dig in. Fight. It was..." he looked down, frowning as he folded his hands. "Sometimes, we couldn't beam anyone out. Had to wait for shuttles to get the wounded, those that prayed would pray that they didn't get shot down. Or if they did, that it blew the shuttle up in a second. I...learned a lot. And it's all useless now. The medicine I learned, it isn't...fitting in a civilised world. It's archaic," he met his eyes, holding them.
"I am glad you were too young. I wish I had been. I wish...we hadn't been so eager to see action. We thought we were invincible. We weren't. We won, but not because...we were better. We weren't, not as I remember it." He took a breath and looked away, a small smile coming to him. "Wow. Okay. Overshare. Sorry about that. It's...been a few days, you know? I never knew that new ships were so stressful."
Mateo said nothing at first.
He just watched as Leon rubbed at his thigh, the motion too practiced to be casual. Not a real injury—not anymore—but something deeper. Something that lingered. Something that hadn’t quite let go of him, even all these years later.
And then it clicked. A habit. A memory. A phantom pain.
Mateo didn’t know for sure, but the weight of the gesture, the way it coincided with Leon’s words, planted the thought in his mind.
Leon had been 22 when the war started. 24 when it ended.
Mateo was 23 now.
The thought struck him hard—unexpected, unshakable. Leon had been his age when he was being dropped into battlefields, digging in, watching the sky, hoping the shuttles made it before it was too late. At 24, Leon had been fighting to keep people alive in chaos.
And at 23, Mateo still wasn’t sure how to keep himself together.
Leon had been making life-and-death decisions. Mateo? He was one bad day away from losing everything.
Not a reassignment. Not a lateral transfer. The Fenrir was it. No more chances after this. One mistake too many, and he’d be out of Starfleet entirely.
Leon had gone to war. Mateo had been fighting a war of a different kind—one that was mostly with himself.
The contrast was staggering.
And suddenly, Leon didn’t feel so far away.
Mateo exhaled, his fingers stilling against his bicep, and when he finally spoke, his voice was quieter. Measured. Careful. Real.
“You were my age,” he said simply, not a question, but a realization. “When the war ended. When all of that was happening. You were 24.”
His brow furrowed slightly, and he shook his head, exhaling sharply through his nose. “I can’t—I don’t think I’ve ever really thought about it like that.”
How different their lives had been. How far away 24 must have felt for Leon compared to where Mateo was standing now.
“I don’t know what that was like,” he admitted, his voice even but laced with something raw beneath the surface. “But I do know that I don’t feel anything close to invincible now. And I sure as hell wouldn’t have back then.”
He let the words settle, but in the back of his mind, a thought pulled at him.
Bravery.
Was bravery doing what Leon had done? Walking into a battlefield, carrying people out, saving lives even when there was a phaser rifle in one hand and blood on the ground?
Or was bravery waking up every day knowing you had nowhere left to go, and choosing to show up anyway?
Mateo had never thought of himself as brave.
But maybe bravery wasn’t just about war. Maybe it wasn’t just about surviving battlefields—maybe it was about surviving yourself.
His gaze flickered—just briefly—back to Leon’s thigh. The motion. The habit. He filed the thought away, tucked it into a corner of his mind where he could turn it over later, examine it, question it.
For now, he let the silence sit.
“You say it like battlefield medicine doesn’t count anymore.” His voice softened, but there was still something firm in the way he said it. “Like none of it applies here.”
His fingers drummed against his bicep in an absent, thoughtful rhythm.
“But I don’t know. I’d argue you know more about keeping people alive when the odds are against them than most of the doctors in Sickbay ever will.”
A pause.
“And odds are… they’ll need that at some point.”
He let that sink in before shifting slightly, arms unfolding just enough to gesture loosely at Leon.
“And for what it’s worth, I don’t think you overshared.” His brow lifted slightly. “That felt more like… processing. Which, y’know, is supposed to be healthy. Not that I’d personally know.”
A dry smirk flickered across his lips before he leaned back slightly, easing some of the tension.
“As for new ships being stressful?” He let out a small, dry laugh. “Tell me about it. I’ve been here a week, and I already have a deep, personal grudge against logistics.”
"Oh, they're universally hated," Leon said, looking at him for a moment before he chuckled. He rolled his shoulders, watching the young man. He was young. And now he was really looking at him, at the tattoos, the piercings, the hair. The eyes though, they were older.
An old soul or a tired life.
"They're the ones that give you gear for winter planets when you're going to the desert. If they'd let us replicate it ourselves we'd have been fine, but no...that was something that had to be done properly...by logistics," he smiled to Mateo, laughing softly. It was like the samples getting lost. It was like everything else. People made mistakes. And it was okay. His leg ached a little, a reminder of a life that was now lost to him. Like the leg itself. Just lost. Didn't mean he couldn't make something new. He was trying.
They were all trying.
"How did you end up here?" he asked, curious. Curious about the crewman, this young man who didn't feel invincible.
Mateo huffed a small breath, shaking his head. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”
The logistics failures, the wrong supplies, the near-disastrous decisions made by people nowhere near the ones who had to live with them.
He could picture it—a group of Marines getting dropped onto a barren hellscape, bundled up for subzero temperatures because someone back at HQ read the wrong planetary data. It would have been hilarious if it wasn’t potentially fatal.
“Winter gear in the desert.” He exhaled through his nose. “That’s a special kind of incompetence.”
His gaze flickered toward Leon again, and that’s when he felt it.
Being looked at. Not just glanced over, not dismissed, not judged. Seen.
The piercings, the tattoos, the hair—Mateo was used to those drawing attention. But Leon’s gaze didn’t stop at surface level. It went deeper, and when their eyes met, for just a second, something unspoken passed between them.
Mateo’s stomach did a weird little flip, and to his absolute horror, he felt warmth creep up the back of his neck.
Blushing. Goddammit.
He immediately looked away, back toward the workstation, pretending he hadn’t noticed—or more importantly, that it didn’t matter.
And then came the question.
“How did you end up here?”
Mateo didn’t answer right away.
There were a lot of ways he could spin that. The official version. The sanitized version. The version that didn’t sound like failure.
But Leon had been honest.
He hadn’t dressed up the war, hadn’t polished his words to make it more palatable. He had given Mateo the truth.
And something about that made Mateo feel like offering anything less would be wrong.
Mateo tilted his head slightly, considering him, before exhaling a soft, dry chuckle.
“Well, if you ask my former COs, I think the consensus would be ‘persistence, bad judgment, and a remarkable ability to piss off the wrong people.’”
A beat.
Then, something quieter. Something real.
“But if you mean why I’m still here?” His fingers tapped absently against his arm.
A pause.
“Because I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
The words left him before he could rethink them, and this time, he felt the heat creep up his neck again. His face didn’t flush fully, but he felt it in his ears, in the way his posture stiffened slightly—an instinctive, knee-jerk reaction to embarrassment.
Because here he was, saying this to someone like Leon.
Someone who had fought in a war, made impossible choices, stood in the line of fire, and carried people out of it. Someone with honor, discipline, purpose.
And then there was him.
No war stories. No medals. Just a list of bad decisions.
His gaze flicked back up, smirk reappearing, masking over whatever had just cracked open beneath it.
“But hey,” he added, voice lighter now, deflecting, redirecting. “What about you? What’s a Marine medic doing scrubbing biobeds on a science vessel? Lost a bet? Or was it a court order?”
The sarcasm was still there, but this time, there was something else beneath it—real curiosity.
Why wasn’t he still a Marine?
Mateo’s gaze flickered toward Leon again, and that’s when he felt it. Being looked at. Not just glanced over, not dismissed, not judged. Seen. A slow, deliberate assessment—not of the piercings, the tattoos, or the hair, but of something beneath all of that. Something closer to him than he was used to letting people get. His stomach did a weird little flip, and to his absolute horror, he felt warmth creep up the back of his neck.
There had to be a reason. And Mateo wanted to know what it was.
Leon watched him for a long moment, frowning slightly. At the way he had said it. No where else to go. He let out a breath as that sentiment echoed in him as well. It was real. It came from the heart.
Yeah, I know the feeling, kid, he thought as he sighed.
"Training accident," he finally said, with a small smile that almost summed up the Murphy's Law aspect of life. "There was...an explosion. It detonated too early and too close to me. It took my leg, left it in a state that it couldn't be reattached so I got a biomechanical one. It..." he made a face and then rolled his eyes at his own reaction. "I never never good with tech so damned thing just hasn't synched properly with me. I can walk and move, just not...to the standard a Marine needs to be."
It was in his head. He knew it. And he tried to change it but he hadn't been able.
"So you see, you're not the only one with no where else to go. I was born out here. My career was everything so I never did real relationships," he gave him a small shrug, as if to say that he had nowhere else to go. No one waiting for him somewhere. "Guess we got that in common."
Mateo didn’t say anything right away.
He just let it sit.
The words. The meaning behind them. The way Leon said “nowhere else to go” back to him.
It was different hearing it from someone else. Someone who wasn’t scrambling to hold onto their last chance—who had already lost something they couldn’t get back.
He hadn’t been wrong about the leg. Not that he was about to say, ‘Yeah, I figured.’
Instead, his gaze flickered downward for a half-second before returning to Leon. “A training accident,” he echoed, voice quieter. “Hell of a way to get reassigned.”
His fingers drummed lightly against his arm before he tilted his head slightly.
“You really that bad with tech, or is that just a jarhead thing?”
The smirk flickered at the corner of his mouth—the closest thing to affection that Mateo allowed himself to show in moments like these.
Because the truth was, he understood it.
He understood the frustration of your own body not doing what you needed it to.
He understood having to adapt to something you didn’t ask for.
And he understood how quickly your entire career could come crashing down in one, single moment.
Mateo exhaled through his nose, glancing briefly at one of his workstations. “You ever let the med-techs poke at it, or is this one of those ‘it’s fine, I swear’ situations while it’s actively trying to ruin your day?”
His arms stayed folded, but his tone was… different. Not quite sarcastic. Not quite concerned.
Just aware.
And then Leon answered.
No dramatics. No lingering on the past. Just… fact.
Mateo’s fingers stilled.
Guess we got that in common.
His chest tightened slightly. Not enough to show, but enough to be felt.
He wasn’t the only one.
It wasn’t a revelation, but it was the first time someone had actually said it back to him.
Mateo didn’t know what to do with that.
So he defaulted to what he always did.
“Well,” he said dryly, “this is getting weirdly introspective for a sample delivery.”
He flicked a glance toward the crate, then back to Leon, arching a brow.
“I mean, I’d ask if you wanted a drink first before we start trauma-dumping, but the lab’s fresh out of synthehol.”
The joke was there—sarcastic, flippant, an easy way out.
But for once, Mateo didn’t completely take it.
Because he meant it.
They weren’t just talking. They were understanding.
And that wasn’t nothing.
"Oh, I thought that this was just regular Fleet thing, that everyone just airs their feelings and pasts," Leon said and smiled to him, a small and yet genuine thing. The drink sounded good. Yeah. Not a great sign to his first week here. "In fact, aren't you all like trained counsellors?" he teased and stretched his legs out for a moment before he stood. "Leg's diagnostic always runs fine, so it's in my head."
Not like he thought I was sane anyway, he thought with a small chuckle to himself.
"Next time we meet, there better be a glass of something that'll burn my throat." It was a vague comment. Perhaps they'd see each other in the bar. It would certainly be far more likely for Leon to approach Mateo and talk to him now.
Hell, maybe we both can find ways of belonging here.
"And you'll be seeing a lot of me. I suspect I'll be running stuff here all the time," he added, meeting his eyes for a moment. "Least experienced nurse gets to do the grunt work."
Mateo exhaled sharply through his nose—not quite a laugh, but close.
“Oh, yeah. We’re all practically therapists,” he said dryly, eyebrows lifting. “It’s in the handbook. Page one: Advanced Sarcasm and Emotional Unpacking.”
He gave a slow, thoughtful nod, lips twitching. “It’s why I joined, really. Passion for the field.”
Then, after a beat—because he couldn’t resist—he added, “And honestly, with the amount of therapy I’ve had over the years, I could probably qualify as a case study myself.”
The smirk that followed was quick, self-deprecating, before he held up a hand, shaking his head.
“Not that you’d want me counseling you. I’d be terrible. Disastrously bad.”
His tone was flat, but there was just enough humor in it to make it clear he wasn’t looking for pity. Just stating a fact.
He glanced at Leon’s leg briefly but didn’t press. If the diagnostics ran fine, they ran fine. Mateo knew better than anyone that not all malfunctions were mechanical.
Instead, he focused on the next comment.
"Next time we meet, there better be a glass of something that’ll burn my throat."
Mateo hummed, tilting his head slightly. “You’re assuming there’s gonna be a next time,” he said, but it wasn’t a dismissal.
Just a quiet acknowledgment that, yeah—there probably would be.
His arms unfolded slightly as he stepped back toward his workstation, fingertips lightly tapping against the edge of the console.
“And if you’re running stuff here all the time, I’d start placing bets on how long it takes logistics to screw up the next shipment.” His lips quirked. “Might as well make a game out of it.”
A beat.
“Try not to drop anything on your way out, Marine,” he added, deadpan, but with just enough of a smirk to make it clear he was teasing.
"We'll see. Don't break a nail, blueshirt," Leon said, just as deadpan, giving him a small nod. He'd take that bet, one day. If this happened more, at least. He would have some faith in the people on the ship, it was the general Starfleet Logistics Supply Chain he was more concerned about. Not that he thought he'd do a better job with all the ships in Starfleet.
He let himself out, pushing the cart before him. At least he knew he wouldn't have any real issue with the lab...which was good. He wasn't here to make enemies. He just...
I want to find a place to belong.
[OFF]
Crewman Mateo Gardel
Medical Science Specialist
USS Fenrir
&
Petty Officer 1st Class Leon Inaros
Nurse
USS Fenrir
[PNPC - Hanlon]
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