Bruised and Stubborn and Alive Part 3

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

2,092 words; about a 10 minute read

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

“You should not have to be interesting to people shooting at you, Elen,” Jace said quietly. He looked down at his hands as he said it, at the split knuckles healing, the fading bruises. Evidence of what had happened in the battle...and afterwards.

“No,” Elen said softly, closing her eyes as she took a deeper breath before she turned to look at him. She saw the line of his jaw, the blue eyes that were focused on his hands. Crouched like that, he was as still as a statue. She wondered what he was feeling. She made no attempts to reach out with her Betazoid empathic abilities to find out. “I should not. You should not have to kill something outside a classroom either, Jace.”

He looked at her then, and for a second there was no blunt answer ready in him. His face stayed controlled, but she saw the shift in his eyes, the way something moved behind them and was shut away before it could become too visible. He crouched beside her with his sleeves pushed up, still close enough to help, still holding himself like someone waiting for the next sound to mean danger, and Elen’s expression softened despite herself. She had worried about him too, though she had known, in the deep instinctive place where people put the things they could not bear to check during a crisis, that Jace was difficult to kill. That was not the same as safe. It was not even close.

Jace’s eyes moved over her face, then to her hands, which like his showed the marks of both battle and work, then back to the open panel as if the machinery might be easier to speak to. “You worried me,” he said at last, the words low and uneven at the edges, dragged out only because there was no cleaner substitute.

Elen’s hand stilled on the edge of the toolkit. Her fingers curled lightly around the handle, then loosened again when she realised she had done it. “You worried me too.”

“I’m trained for it.” Jace said it too quickly, and something colder came with it, not aimed at her exactly, but brought up like armour because the alternative was standing there without any. He looked away from her and to the open panel, flexing his fingers once as if checking they still worked. “It’s part of me.”

“And I am apparently very annoying to murder.” Elen tried it lightly, feeling a need to push through and say something fun. She got no reaction from him and decided to let it drop. She wiped her thumb against the cloth by her knee, leaving another dark smear across the fabric, then looked at him properly. “Jace, I know you are a survivor. I know enough of what happened in Sickbay, and on the way there, and what you did outside that classroom. I know enough to know what you can do, and what you did. But knowing someone is a survivor does not stop you from caring whether they have to survive something.”

His eyes narrowed slightly, not in threat but in thought, as if the phrasing needed more than one pass for him to understand it. He looked at the panel, then at her hands, then back at her face. “You are too.”

“A survivor?” Elen asked, and the word came out smaller than she meant it to, almost caught between humour and the place beneath it.

Jace gave a small nod, the movement almost reluctant. His eyes stayed on her for another second, then dropped to the smear of sealant on her thumb, the singed edge of her glove, the tools laid out around her knees. “Yeah,” he said, voice low and quiet.

Elen blinked. For once there was no immediate joke ready, no loose thread of brightness she could tug across the moment to make it easier. The word felt different coming from him. Not kind, not cruel, not comforting in any simple way. It sounded like something he had measured, recognised and hated a little for both of them. Maybe even a curse, if she let herself think about it too long. She looked down, picking at the sealant on her thumb even though it had already dried, because her hands needed something to do and the rest of her had gone still. “Well.” Her voice came back lighter because it had to, because otherwise it might come back too honest. “That is probably the nicest thing anyone has said to me while I was elbow-deep in damaged circuitry.”

“Not nice.” Jace shifted the lamp slightly when the beam slipped from the repair, putting the light back where she needed it before he looked at her again. “True.”

Elen’s mouth twitched, but it did not quite become a smile. “You do realise those can overlap occasionally,” she pointed out with a breathless chuckle.

He considered that for a second, then looked back to the open panel. “Not here,” he said as he shifted a little, easing a tension in his back.

“Well…damned if we do, damned if we don’t then.” Elen said it lightly, but her fingers stayed still on the edge of the recess for a second too long. She closed the panel, finishing the repair and marking it as done on her PADD. “Like this work...” she murmured, even as she packed up her tools in a way that only made sense to her. “All dramatic, but ultimately cooperative. A lesson for all of us...until it breaks again.”

Jace watched the closed panel for a moment, then looked at her. The repair had settled, and the hum was steadier now. “What is a lemming?”

Elen lifted her head very slowly from the bulkhead. One curl had worked loose beside her cheek and the soot on her nose creased when she frowned at him. “I beg your pardon?”

“A lemming.” He shifted the lamp down and set it beside the toolkit, no longer needed now that the panel had stopped complaining. “Like what the Colonel called you. What is it?”

Elen’s mouth opened, then closed again. She sat there with one hand still braced against the deck, genuinely thinking, which made the whole thing worse because she clearly expected an answer to magically appear and it did not. “I...have no clue either.”

Jace stared at her, flatly, for a long moment before he tilted his head to the side. “Huh.”

“I gathered from context that it was not complimentary.” Elen said it with a small, crooked smile rather than any real offence, shifting to sit back properly with one hand braced against the deck and the other rubbing at the sore point where her shoulder had been pressed into the recess for too long. “Though with Jesse, that can still mean several things. Concern or exasperation or maybe even deep spiritual exhaustion. He has already called me a lunatic once, so I assume we are building a theme here.”

Jace looked at her for a moment, his mind working on it, taking what she said and finding places it could settle. “He cares,” he observed, quietly. Because he knew Moriarty cared. Not just about people in general, but individuals. Because he was a good man, able to make care sound like an order, or an insult, or whatever people needed to hear. The thought made a muscle in his cheek tense, briefly, before relaxing.

“Yes,” Elen said, reaching for a cloth and wiping at the grease on her thumb, only to add another smear to the fabric instead of removing much from her skin. She sighed and put that in the kit too. “Which is why I imagine it was said with mild affection, horror, and deep disappointment.”

His brow drew in slightly, not confused so much as sorting the possible categories into order. “Animal?”

“Probably.” Elen tucked the loose curl back under her crochet scarf, then stopped with her fingers still near her temple as she thought about it. “It sounds animal. Small, I think. Possibly furry, like a tribble. Possibly prone to poor tactical choices and causing commanding officers to age prematurely. I think. Just a theory. An Elen-Theory.”

Jace almost rolled his eyes, or as close as he got to it. It made little sense to him. “You are not furry...or anything like a tribble,” he said and stood, oddly smoothly for a man who had been crouching for so long.

“Thank you for noticing.” She gave him a very solemn nod, before a grin spread across her lips. “The tactical choices are still under review.”

He gave the smallest huff of breath, not quite a laugh but close enough that Elen’s eyes brightened with victory. “If I am a lemming,” she said lightly, leaning back on her hands, “I would like it noted officially that I am a very well-intentioned one.”

Jace offered her a hand without making anything of it. Elen looked at it for a moment, partly because her knee had stiffened and partly because she knew he had noticed, then took it. He pulled her up carefully, strong enough that she barely had to push from the floor, controlled enough that she did not feel hauled, and for a second after she was standing his fingers stayed around hers. His eyes moved over her face, her shoulder, the bruise near her wrist, then he let go and looked back at the sealed panel. “Do not make it a habit,” he said.

“Running into weapon fire?” Elen asked, flexing her fingers once after his grip was gone, her eyes still on him rather than the repair.

“Yes,” Jace said, his voice flat, although his shoulders had not quite settled and his hand stayed close to the heavier case at her feet as if he had already decided she was not carrying it.

“I will try very hard to avoid needing to,” Elen said, and when he did not look convinced, the humour softened into something more honest. She looked down at the sealed panel, giving it a small nod almost as if to reinforce that she had repaired it. “I mean that. I am not looking for ways to die, Jace. I just...knew I had to protect the ship. It's my job...just...sometimes the two things stand horribly close together.”

He watched her closely, quiet for long enough that the repaired panel hummed between them. It was not agreement in his face, not exactly, but he had heard her, and that mattered more than whether he liked it. His jaw shifted once before he looked away. “Next time, call for help.”

“I wasn't alone...so I had help,” she said, the corner of her mouth tugging despite the exhaustion under her eyes. “I shouted at the boarders to make them stop damaging the ship. Very loudly. I feel that counts. Even if they might not understand Standard.”

“It does not,” Jace said, already reaching for the case before she could pick it up.

“It counts a little, I think,” Elen tried, but she let him take it, which probably said more about how tired she was than anything else.

Jace settled the surprisingly heavy case into his hand, tested the weight of it once, then glanced back at her with the same flat certainty he would have used to reject a bad firing angle. “No,” he said.

“Fine,” she said, sighing as she stretched her body. “Next time, I will make sure that I both call for help and tell off alien boarders in a more emotionally satisfying and procedurally appropriate manner.”

Jace adjusted his grip on the case and stepped back to give her room, his eyes dropping briefly to the way she shifted her weight off the stiff knee. “Good,” he said, and waited until she started walking before he moved with her.

Elen walked a little slower than usual, one hand brushing the wall for balance when they passed another patched seam. Jace noticed, but did not mention it. He only shifted half a step closer to the busier side of the corridor, putting himself between her and the passing crew while the Guinevere hummed around them, bruised and stubborn and alive. Behind them, the repaired panel held steady, one more small piece of the ship persuaded back into life.

----

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

&

Lt. jg Elen Rell
Engineer
USS Guinevere

RSS Feed