Bruised and Stubborn and Alive Part 1

Posted on Sun Jul 19th, 2026 @ 4:57pm by Lieutenant JG Elen Rell & Sergeant Jace Morven

2,106 words; about a 11 minute read

Mission: Pilot - "The Gate"
Location: USS Guinevere
Timeline: A few days after the battle

The corridor still smelled faintly wrong, even days later. Most of the smoke had been scrubbed from the air and the worst of the scorch marks had been sealed or covered over with temporary plating waiting for someone from Engineering or Operations to do some welding, but there were places where the ship remembered more honestly than the crew did, seams warped slightly out of line, panels that hummed in a way they had not before, exposed sections where Engineering had not quite managed to put the Guinevere’s skin back over all her injuries. Jace moved through it with his shoulders looser than they should have been and his body heavier than he liked, not injured, not enough to count, but tired in the places that did not show on a medical scan, under the ribs, behind the eyes, in the set of his jaw where he had been clenching too long without noticing. The lights were steadier now, but still low, and there was a tiredness in the ship that he had learned to recognise the way he recognised fatigue in a body. A slight delay in the environmental hum. A sharper note in the power relay behind the wall. A breathing pattern that was still alive, but not yet recovered. It had a haunted quality to it, but meson weapons did that. They hurt more than you could see.

He found Elen halfway inside an open maintenance recess on Deck 8, one shoulder and most of one arm swallowed by the wall while the rest of her sat folded on the deck with a toolkit spread around her knees. She wore her uniform with the sleeves pushed up, fingerless gloves pulled high over her forearms instead, soft knitted things that had probably been meant to dampen sensation and protect her skin from rough edges, although one cuff was singed now and the yarn had frayed near the thumb. A loose curl had escaped from the crochet scarf she had tied over her hair and stuck damply to her cheek, either from heat, effort or the fact that she had clearly forgotten she was a person with a body rather than a specialised repair attachment designed to argue with damaged circuitry. One boot was braced against the bulkhead for leverage, her other foot tucked beneath her, and she was muttering under her breath as she twisted something inside the access space with careful, irritated patience. “No, no, I know you think you are very important, but we are not making that noise today,” she said to whatever component she was holding, then exhaled through her teeth when a tiny burst of sparks spat from somewhere near her wrist. “I know you’re hurting, but don’t worry...Auntie Elen will patch you right up.”

Jace stopped beside her without speaking. For a few seconds he only looked at the open panel, eyes moving over the exposed lines, the improvised bypasses, the little strips of diagnostic tape stuck to three different places with Elen’s tight handwriting marking them in shorthand that probably made sense to her and perhaps to three other people in Engineering, but to him was a blurry mess that moved if he looked too long. He let his eyes slide away from the writing and onto what mattered: the guts of the ship. The shape of it. The pressure. The heat. He had grown up with broken things, with machines that had to be coaxed, forced or cannibalised into working because failure meant darkness, hunger or a perimeter that would not hold. This was cleaner, newer, better made than anything he had known then, but damaged systems still had tells. He crouched, moving a loose cable loop to the side with one hand and holding it there, feeling the heat from it against his skin. It was hotter than it should be, not enough to burn, not yet, but enough to tell him something was broken further along the line. His other hand reached for the hyperspanner closest to her knee and turned it around in his palm, checking the setting before holding it out at the angle her hand would need when she pulled back.

Elen paused, just enough for the silence to become acknowledgement. She did not look out from the recess, but her fingers flexed once where he could see them, tapping twice against the inner casing before she caught the motion and pressed her palm flat instead. “Thank you.” She shifted her shoulder deeper into the access space, her knee bouncing once against the deck before she pinned it still with the edge of her boot. The emergency clarity had gone now, leaving her to find her own rhythm again in the aftermath, all the little restless pieces of herself trying to scatter unless she gave them heat, pressure, tools and something specific to fix. “If it starts screaming, step back. If I start screaming, also step back, but maybe with more urgency and concern.”

“I’ve seen you in pain. You start screaming, I am calling Doctor Vale,” Jace said quietly, settling into a crouch beside her. He watched the movement of her shoulder, the careful pressure of her arm inside the wall, the way she shifted her grip by feel rather than sight. There was a bruise near her wrist, mostly yellow now, but still dark at the centre, and a thin scratch across the back of her hand that had scabbed neatly under a layer of dermal sealant. She had been repaired just enough to keep repairing other things. That seemed to be the way of it.

“Oh don’t, she’ll never let me live it down. She’ll ask where my safety buddy is, whether I logged the repair, why I’m elbow-deep in the wall instead of resting or letting someone else help when I have not had enough sleep or rest, and then she’ll dob me in to my chief.” Elen drew her arm back enough to take the hyperspanner from him, her fingers brushing his, warm and quick, dark residue smudged over the knuckles. “The ship has been doing the quiet tragic kind for three days, so I feel someone should balance the energy.”

Jace looked at the open recess rather than her face. He reached past the toolkit and took the hand lamp, adjusting its angle so the beam fell into the space without shining directly into her eyes. Elen gave a small hum of approval and leaned back into the panel, the light catching on the curve of her cheek and the fine dark curls that had worked loose near her temple. He stayed where he was, holding the lamp steady, still as a brace point. He had not meant to find her. Not exactly. He had walked the ship because he had needed to, because after the battle the Guinevere had become a map of where everyone had nearly died and his head kept returning to places his feet had not yet checked. He had walked and he had found her. And here he was. “Heard what you did,” he said after a while, his voice low enough that it sat beneath the hum of the damaged relay.

Elen’s shoulder stopped moving. Not much, not long, but enough to show that she had heard him. She let out a huff of breath that could have been a chuckle if it had more air behind it. “That is dangerously vague,” she said lightly, although the humour was not as quick as usual. “I do many things. Some of them are even in my job description.”

“In Engineering,” Jace said, his voice quiet. Saying it made something shift in him, not enough to show on his face but enough that his mind marked where it sat, the way Drake had taught him to do when a feeling arrived before a name. He noted it, held it for half a second, then put it aside because it was not useful yet.

“Ah,” she said, and the single syllable came out with all the careful brightness of someone stepping around broken glass in bare feet. She adjusted something inside the recess, the tool clicking twice before she eased it free and held it back out to him without looking. “Yes. That.”

He took the hyperspanner and passed her the microsealant applicator before she asked for it, falling into the routine they had settled into over the last year. “Colonel said you were a lemming.”

Elen went very still again, then slowly drew back from the panel enough to look at him. There was a dark smudge along one cheekbone and the worklight caught the green-gold in her hazel eyes, making them look very tired, very bright, and very much alive. “Did he,” she said, and her eyebrows lifted with the sort of injured dignity that did not survive the smudge of soot on her nose. “Well. I have been called worse by a lot of people, and half of them were nowhere near as broodingly handsome as he is.”

He stilled a little at hearing the words broodingly handsome said about his Commanding Officer. But he suspected she was trying to distract him from what he wanted to say. “He said you ran in front of them. As a distraction.” It wasn’t an accusation, more like an observation, but his breathing had gone quiet and his body still.

“I ran across Engineering,” she corrected, as if that made it better. She reached into the panel again, shoulder rolling awkwardly as she found the next join by touch, her voice muffled slightly by the recess. “There is a technical distinction.”

Jace glanced from her to the panel and back again, as if the repair might offer him a better answer than she had. His grip tightened around the lamp before he eased it loose again, keeping the beam steady because at least that was useful. “No,” he said quietly. “Running across the room so they shoot at you instead of the ship is still running in front of them.”

“Yes, there is.” Elen pulled back enough to give him a look, one eyebrow lifting despite the soot on her cheek and the exhaustion sitting under her eyes. “One implies no plan. The other implies a very short plan executed at speed.” She saw his jaw tightened, not enough to become expression to most people, but enough that she saw it. Elen’s humour softened around the edges, and she looked back into the panel because looking at him directly made the whole thing less abstract, less about the ship and more about the fact that he had come to find her with the information sitting in him. She set the applicator against the exposed relay housing and pressed carefully, a thin line of sealant spreading along the join. “Well, the meson weapons were doing internal damage before anything looked bad enough from the outside. Panels were sulking, relays were live, coolant was leaking, and...you know...we sort of need those things not to explode. Engineering is full of systems that do not respond well to being pulled apart from the inside out. The warp core was shielded, yes, but shields were not exactly having their finest hour, and the coolant network was already leaking in two places, and there were people everywhere trying to hold the ship together with both hands and half a prayer.” Her thumb smoothed the sealant down twice, then a third time, although it had already taken. “So I made noise.”

Jace watched her hand move over the repair, the dirt on her fingers, the yellowing bruise near her wrist...the way she moved, like there was...energy under her skin. “You made yourself a target,” he said, voice flat with it, but his eyes were on her and the blue darker than usual.

Elen glanced at him, only for a second, then looked back to the relay as she reached for the next microseal strip. “Yeah, I did,” she admitted softly, a small smile curling her lips for a moment before it faded as she refocused her mind to the task.

He watched her catch the edge of the backing with her teeth and pull it free, watched her press the strip down across the damaged EPS relay housing with her thumb and keep working. “You’ll get yourself killed.”


To be continued in part 2

Sergeant Jace Morven
Platoon Sergeant, Alpha Squad
Federation Ground Forces Detachment
USS Guinevere

&

Lt. jg Elen Rell
Engineer
USS Guinevere

RSS Feed