In Principio: The Shape of Devotion Part 2

Posted on Tue Jul 7th, 2026 @ 4:27pm by Master Chief Petty Officer Julian Trent

2,887 words; about a 14 minute read

Mission: Prologue
Location: USS Murmansk
Timeline: 2372

Continued from part 1

The room became very quiet. Somewhere inside the wall, the environmental system clicked as it changed cycle. The scent of food remained between them, warm and domestic and suddenly absurd. Julian could hear the faint vibration of the engines beneath the deck and the sound of his own breath coming slightly too quickly.

Nico held his eyes, his hands now motionless at his sides. “I do not want to share you,” he said, each word deliberate despite the tremor beneath them.

Julian’s first instinct was to smile. The expression began automatically, something easy and suggestive which might turn the sentence into flirtation, but Nico saw it forming and shook his head.

“No. Listen to me.” Nico’s voice rose, not wildly but with the force of something held back too long. He stepped closer, one hand lifting as though to stop Julian physically escaping into the joke. “I am not asking to own you. I am not asking you to stop speaking to people, or flirting, or being yourself. I am asking whether this means the same thing to you that it means to me.”

Julian’s smile disappeared, his face settling into something far more exposed, blue eyes on him and lips parted.

Nico drew in a breath, his hands opening helplessly at his sides. “I love you.”

There it was. There was no music. No candlelight. No careful preparation. Nico said it flushed and angry beside a table where the food was going cold, his voice roughened by the fact that he had not wanted the words to come out like this. Nico’s eyes shone, though nothing fell. “And I do not know whether you stopped sleeping with other people because you chose me or because nobody interesting enough has asked.”

The sentence found the exact place Julian had been protecting without knowing it existed. He opened his mouth, but the answer which came first was defensive. “That’s unfair,” he said, his shoulders drawing back.

“Is it?” Nico asked, stepping closer rather than retreating from the argument now that it had finally begun.

“I told you who I was,” Julian said, spreading one hand as though the old warning ought to settle everything.

“And I believed you.” Nico’s voice steadied, but the heat remained in it. “But you are not the same man you were two years ago. Neither am I. We have built something, Julian, and you keep behaving as though naming it would destroy it.”

“That isn’t what I’m doing,” Julian said, his hands curling at his sides as his pulse began to beat harder in his throat.

“Then tell me what you are doing.” Nico held his eyes, no softness offered to make the question easier.

Julian wanted to move, to pace, to take control of the space in the way he always did, but Nico was standing in front of him with too much honesty and nowhere for the conversation to escape. He looked around the quarters instead. His tea sat on the table beside Nico’s food. His shirt was visible through the half-open bedroom door where he had left it across the chair that morning. The book he had not finished rested beside the sofa. On the counter, Nico had placed the small jar of mustard Julian liked and Nico hated because he had remembered Julian would be there for dinner.

There were rituals everywhere.

Julian had spent years studying religion because he wanted to understand why people surrendered themselves to things they could not prove. He had read scripture, attended services, learnt prayers in languages no longer spoken outside ceremony. He knew when to stand and kneel, how to cross himself and how confession was meant to move guilt from the private dark into something witnessed and forgiven. He understood sacrament as an outward sign of an inward reality.

He had never trusted the inward reality, but he knew the architecture. The repeated acts. The objects made meaningful by use. The choice performed until it became devotion. He looked at Nico and realised he had been doing it for months. Perhaps longer. He knew Nico’s shifts without checking. He kept track of the days Nico spoke to his family because those calls sometimes left him happy and sometimes left him quiet. He knew when to tease him out of a mood and when to sit beside him without speaking. He knew which prayer Nico whispered under his breath when a patient died and which saint his mother invoked whenever he travelled.

Julian had opportunities. More than one. He had flirted, enjoyed the attention, carried it to the point where leaving with someone would have been simple. Then he had come here. Every single time. Not because nobody interesting had asked. Because Nico was waiting. The realisation did not arrive gently. It opened beneath him like a missing section of deck. Nico might leave. Not tonight, perhaps. Not immediately. But if Julian could not answer, if he kept turning everything into a joke and asking Nico to live on scraps of implication, eventually the patience would end. Nico would pack away the tea, move Julian’s shirts out of the drawer and revoke his access to the quarters.

Julian imagined stepping into the corridor and knowing he could not come back, and the thought was intolerable.

“You haven’t been sharing me,” he said at last, his voice quieter than he intended. His hands had loosened at his sides, but he still could not make himself move closer.

Nico’s expression changed, pain tightening briefly through it. “That tells me what you have not done,” he replied, his mouth trembling once before he pressed it flat.

“I know,” Julian said, looking down for half a second before forcing his eyes back up.

“Do you?” Nico asked, his voice breaking around the edge of the question. He drew in a breath which failed to steady him. “Because I am standing here telling you that I love you, and you are giving me a report on your recent sexual activity.”

Under any other circumstances Julian might have laughed. Instead he closed his eyes for a moment and pressed his tongue against the back of his teeth, searching for something honest enough to survive being spoken. “I didn’t decide,” he said at last, opening his eyes again.

Nico’s face closed slightly, his shoulders drawing back as though he had braced for the answer.

“No, listen.” Julian lifted one hand, not touching him yet, and took half a step closer. “I mean I didn’t sit down and make a rule. I didn’t tell myself I was going to stop. I just…did.”

“That is not an answer,” Nico said, though some of the anger had begun to give way to hurt. His arms folded loosely across his chest, not defensive so much as containing himself.

“It is the only one I have.” Julian looked at him, frustration entering his voice because the truth felt too large and badly shaped. “I stopped wanting to. I could have. I didn’t. Every time someone asked, every time it might have happened, I thought about coming back here.”

Nico said nothing, but his eyes moved over Julian’s face as though testing whether he believed him.

Julian gestured towards the room, suddenly angry at his own inability to make Nico understand what had only just become clear to him. “My clothes are here. You keep my tea. I know which side of the bed you’re going to sleep on before you get into it. I know when you’re lying about being tired because you don’t want to talk about a patient, and you know when I’m going to leave before I do.”

“That is routine,” Nico said, one hand unfolding to gesture towards the room around them.

“Yes,” Julian replied, the word coming harder than intended as a sudden smile touched his face. “Exactly.”

Nico stared, the anger in his expression shifting towards confusion. It darkened his eyes, made them wider. Made him look younger.

Julian’s breath caught as the shape of the thought finally became clear. “You believe in those, don’t you? Outward signs.”

Something flickered in Nico’s expression, his eyes moving briefly towards the medallion before returning to Julian.

Julian followed the movement. “You once told me that ritual matters because it gives shape to something people cannot always say.” Nico’s lips parted, but Julian continued before courage failed. “You are my ritual, Nico. I have been coming back to you every night. I have been choosing you every day and apparently I was too bloody stupid to understand what that meant.”

The anger in Nico’s face softened, but he did not move closer. “And what does it mean?” he asked, his voice low and careful, one hand resting against the back of the chair beside him.

There was no escape left. Julian looked at him and knew. He knew it with the same dreadful clarity he had known the Borg might appear in a corridor at Wolf 359, the same certainty with which he had understood that some injuries could not be survived. Only this fear was quieter and far more dangerous because Nico was standing close enough to touch and Julian had placed every weapon he usually used against vulnerability beyond reach. “It means I expect you to be here tomorrow,” Julian said, his hands opening at his sides as though he could no longer hold the truth closed.

Nico swallowed, his eyes fixed on Julian’s face, and one hand tightened around the chair back.

“It means I want you to be.” Julian’s voice had dropped, roughened by the effort of keeping it steady. “It means when something happens, good or bad, you are the person I think about telling. It means I haven’t wanted anyone else because they are not you. It…means that I think…I belong here. With you.”

Nico’s eyes closed for half a second, and the tension in his mouth loosened.

Julian stepped closer, close enough now to see the dampness along Nico’s lower lashes. “I don’t know how to say this properly.”

“You know several languages…and religion. And philosophy. And the Kama Sutra,” Nico said, the faintest trace of humour returning through the emotion as he opened his eyes again.

“None of them are helping right now…” Julian said, looking at him as he let out a breath. “Although the last one would make this weirder in a better way, maybe.”

Despite everything, Nico gave a short, broken laugh. It softened the room and the atmosphere. Not enough to make the argument disappear, but enough to let them both breathe.

Julian reached for him then, slowly enough that Nico could refuse. His fingers closed around Nico’s wrist, feeling the pulse there, fast and alive. “You asked whether this was only happening to you,” he said, his thumb moving once against the warm skin.

Nico looked down at the hand between them before meeting Julian’s eyes again, his expression open now in a way that frightened Julian more than the anger had.

“It isn’t,” Julian said quietly, and the words were not enough. He knew that as soon as they left him. Nico deserved the whole truth, not the safe perimeter around it. Julian drew in a breath, feeling Nico’s pulse jump beneath his fingers. “I love you.”

Nico went utterly still, his eyes widening slightly with surprise, his hand going to cover his hand, gripping it.

Julian, the idiot, had imagined saying those words in other contexts. As a joke. As seduction. As something whispered after sex because the body made everything feel more dramatic than it was. He had never imagined saying them like this, fully dressed in quarters which smelled of cooling food, frightened enough that his hand had begun to tremble around Nico’s wrist. “I think I have for some time,” Julian added, because apparently humiliation could always deepen. “I’ve just been treating it like…something dangerous. When it’s not. When you’re not.”

Nico laughed again, and this time the sound broke into something wet. He looked down, pressed the heel of one hand briefly against his eyes and shook his head. “That is the least romantic declaration I have ever heard.”

“I can try again,” Julian offered, uncertain whether the suggestion was kindness or self-preservation. His grip loosened around Nico’s wrist, though he did not let go.

“No.” Nico caught Julian’s shirt in both hands and pulled him closer, not gently. “No, you can’t. It’ll ruin the effect.”

The kiss had anger in it. Relief too, and fear, and the months Nico had spent pretending he did not care. Julian felt all of it in the pressure of Nico’s mouth, in the way his hands tightened against the fabric and then moved to Julian’s face as though he needed to confirm he was really there.

Julian kissed him back with equal force, one arm wrapping around Nico’s waist while the other caught at his shoulder. The table pressed against the back of his thigh, and somewhere beside them a fork shifted against the bowl with a soft scrape.

When they separated, Nico remained close enough that their foreheads touched. “I am still angry with you,” he said, his breath warm against Julian’s mouth and one hand still resting against the side of his face.

“I assumed,” Julian murmured, keeping his arm around Nico’s waist and feeling the tension still held through his body.

“You do not get to make me drag every feeling out of you like this.” Nico’s fingers tightened slightly against Julian’s cheek, the warning in his voice softened only by how close they remained.

“That feels like a broader negotiation,” Julian said before good judgement could stop him, his mouth moving despite the danger in Nico’s expression.

Nico pulled back far enough to look at him, and Julian saw the warning arrive in the tightening of his eyes.

“Sorry,” he said quickly, one hand lifting slightly in surrender. He meant it.

Nico studied him for a moment, then let out a long breath and allowed his hand to drop from Julian’s face. “I do not need you to become someone else,” he said, smoothing the front of Julian’s shirt where he had gripped it. “I need you to tell me when something changes.”

Julian nodded, the agreement feeling enormous, not because the request was unreasonable but because it required him to notice his own life while he was still living it.

“And I do not want to share you,” Nico said again, quieter now but no less certain, his eyes holding Julian’s as one hand remained against his chest.

“You haven’t been,” Julian replied, then saw the impatience begin to return to Nico’s face. He closed his eyes briefly and corrected himself before Nico could speak. “I know. That isn’t the point.”

“No,” Nico said, folding his arms but remaining close enough that their knees almost touched. “It is not.”

Julian forced himself not to hide inside the distinction. “I don’t want you to,” he said, drawing in a breath before the next part. “I want this to be…us. Exclusively.”

Nico’s shoulders lowered slightly, tension leaving them in stages. “That sounded painful,” he observed, one corner of his mouth finally moving.

“It was,” Julian admitted, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck before he sighed. “Just because the words in that order are new to me.”

“I am glad,” Nico said, and Julian smiled despite the cruelty of it.

This time, Nico allowed the smile. The food had gone cold. Nico noticed a moment later and glanced towards the table with an expression of deep irritation, as though the argument had personally offended the meal. Julian followed his eyes and reached for the bowls. “I’ll reheat it,” he offered, already gathering them before Nico could stop him.

“You’ll ruin it,” Nico said, moving beside him and watching the bowls with immediate suspicion.

“I am capable of operating a reheating function on you...oven thing. It’s your kitchen setup that is stupid,” Julian replied, drawing the dishes protectively out of reach when Nico tried to take one.

“You once set soup to boil for twenty-eight minutes, evaporating all the liquid...that pan was doomed,” Nico reminded him, following Julian towards the counter with one hand hovering near the bowl.

“That was experimental…it was an expression of my emotions and state of mind,” Julian said with an innocent smile.

“That was smoke, Jules…you almost got the hazard team here,” Nico said with a laugh, shaking his head. “Idiot.”

Julian looked at him and, for a moment, simply watched. There would be more to talk about, and saying he loved Nico meant he had to face certain realities. His own emotions, the possibility that he could lose him…but also the good things. He had a person now. He was someone’s person, and that person wanted to stay with him. And that mattered.

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