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[notabricklayer]

The lights of their apartment come up in the way he is used to lights coming on the way he is used to lights coming on - smoothing increasing from dark to light with barely a hitch inbetween. The apartment is the same as before - a naturally quirky Victorian that's slightly stark thanks to the driven surgeon who had made this his home once upon a time.

He always meant to take time off, decorate the place a little more elaborately, set it up to be more of a home than a place to collapse after long shifts. Maybe now's time.

But right now he can do something about these damned boots. Some day he is going to both fund and write a paper outlining the evils of these boots, and he'll stuff it down the throats of every lazy ass on the Starfleet Surgeon General's board.

Comments

[notabricklayer.livejournal.com]

"Much." He agrees - but it's the way she looks so pleased with herself that he approves of, as much as (or even more than) the healthy fire.

Though, we won't lie, the boy did jump impressively when the flames erupted. Usually fire erupting, in his life as it is now, means something more along the lines of 'someone is shooting at us'. Even way back, in Georgia, fire had to be coaxed out of hiding.

This seems a much more efficient (and decidedly less frustrating) method. He approves.
"I think you'll be the one explaining how that happened to the cleaning crew."

[olyabird.livejournal.com]

Olga rises, wiping her hands on her trousers. The butterknife, mostly unscathed, is returned to the kitchen, and then she joins him.

"Shove over," she murmurs. Which is funny, really, as she still wants to curl up right next to him, her head on his chest, her head tucked under his chin.

[notabricklayer.livejournal.com]

He complies, shifting more towards the end of the couch rather than more of the middle than one man should be able to cover comfortably. She's right, he has to admit it - a big fire is just better. Must be why, when he lived here and it actually was in San Francisco, after the series of failed attempts to get it to work properly, he never lit a fire in the fire place again.

[olyabird.livejournal.com]

She settles down along his side, and lets out a long sigh.

A moment later, she shifts back, to look into his face.

"Cleaning crew?"

[notabricklayer.livejournal.com]

"They're called Loompas, so far as I've gathered. Never seen one, but they're supposedly around here somewhere." He shrugs, not terribly bothered by it, and it's rather hard to work up a good head of steam when he has her cuddled up against him.

[olyabird.livejournal.com]

Her hand rests on his chest and she's half propped on one hand, half leaning against him.

"Loompas."

Her brow furrows.

"Like in the movie?"

[notabricklayer.livejournal.com]

"... There's a movie?" He replies, bewildered. "About a cleaning crew?" Honestly, it doesn't sound like a very interesting movie, but then not all stories can be good ones.

[olyabird.livejournal.com]

"No. Nono. It's -- about a man who makes chocolate. And he has this," she shakes her head, trying to recall, "factory. And the Oompa Loompas, these little dwarf creatures, they do his bidding in everything. Including the cleaning."

She remembers watching it one time over at Tiger Cub's place. From the wild colours, she'd thought they'd laced her drink with some kind of psychedelic, but no, that was really the way the film was intended.

[notabricklayer.livejournal.com]

"..." He eyes her. "A chocolate factory and dwarf creatures who clean... and do other things." He's just trying to decide if someone was on drugs while making the movie, or on drugs deciding to name themselves after something from a movie like that.

"Really."

[olyabird.livejournal.com]

"Yes, it's very famous in the west, apparently."

She shares his scepticism. But then, her world is filled with enough strangeness that what people consider entertainment usually doesn't even register.

"Do you have films? In space?"

[notabricklayer.livejournal.com]

"Sure do. There's even a movie night for the crew, every other week or so, barring emergencies. Keeps morale up, theoretically." Some movies work better than others - 'Die Hard' had most of the crew in hysterics (and led to some interesting off-duty injuries in the low-grav exercise chamber), but 'Life is Beautiful' earned a week full of psych calls.

[olyabird.livejournal.com]

She hums a little, under her breath.

If he listens carefully, he can hear the gears grinding in her head.

"Lyonya..."

[notabricklayer.livejournal.com]

One hopes he doesn't listen carefully - actual gears grinding would freak him out, just a little. Possibly more than the trick she pulled downstairs. His universe isn't big on robots, yet.

He does get the impression she's thinking about something, though.

"Yes, Olya?" He asks, lazily tracing patterns on the exposed skin under his hand.

[olyabird.livejournal.com]

She licks her lips, trying to think of just how to phrase the question.

"They always show the cosmonauts, floating around in space. In the capsule, I mean." She's seen footage of the ISS. "Do people fuck like that? In your star ship?"

Olga has never been one to mince words.

[notabricklayer.livejournal.com]

His first reaction, which he successfully keeps to himself, is to laugh. That question, though less crudely phrased, shows up a lot when the young public are invited to ask questions of the Enterprise crew.

The second is to imagine that particular situation with Olga and himself.

It is... a very good image. Sometimes that good imagination is a blessing.

"I'm sure folk do, they just generally don't inform me of the specifics unless they get into trouble of some sort. Forming that sort of personal relationship on board ship tends to get tricky."

[olyabird.livejournal.com]

She chews on that answer for a moment. And then her brow knits again.

"How many people aboard your ship, anyway?"

[notabricklayer.livejournal.com]

"Four hundred and thirty souls, including yours truly. She's one of the larger classes of starships in the fleet. And the finest, if the chief engineer is correct." McCoy drawls, and while he's sure there's some pencil-pushers in Star Fleet Command who would gladly court-martial him right now for even mentioning that much, he hardly thinks Olga is going to try and take over the ship.

Or that she'd need such simple information to do so.

[olyabird.livejournal.com]

Her eyebrows rise, even as she frowns.

"That is -- more people than were in the village where I was born. That is a small city's worth."

[notabricklayer.livejournal.com]

"Well. Four hundred and twenty-five, until the middle of the next month, when we rendezvous with the Lexington." He amends, using actual count rather than crew complement. "We do better than most."

[olyabird.livejournal.com]

She blinks, grey eyes knowing the reason for the recalculation.

"Is this your usual levels of attrition or are you at war?"

He would cringe to know the rates at which the Light and Dark gnaw at each other.

[notabricklayer.livejournal.com]

"Most ships of the line lose ten percent of their crew complement within the first three months." His tone is flat, a recitation of details he hates with every fiber of his being. "Ships that patrol the Romulan and Klingon Neutral Zones are more likely to be destroyed entirely. Ships on exploration missions, understandably, tend to be the most lethal."

Olga gets one guess as to what the Enterprise is up to.

[olyabird.livejournal.com]

If she couldn't taste his disgust with the words, if she couldn't read the pull of his emotions beneath this words, his ability to reel off those statistics with such a cool demeanour would send a chill down her spine.

But no. He is not Gesar.

He is something entirely different.

She lays her head back on his chest, her fingertips idly stroking the fabric. "So your ship -- is not at war. But others are."

[notabricklayer.livejournal.com]

"The Federation is not at war, officially." His voice is dry, unimpressed. "But there are quite a number of species that either don't know, or don't care."

[olyabird.livejournal.com]

That gets a dry chuckle.

"Just as we are 'officially' under Truce. And have been for five hundred years. Still, the Opposition moves."

[notabricklayer.livejournal.com]

"Suppose it does, darlin'." He is not some super-enlightened being of the future. He grew up on a human-centric planet, and the rest of the universe is a wild adventure. But he also is decidedly against unnecessary violence - regardless of species involved.

And he definitely doesn't understand why there needs to be an Opposition. Surely they've gotten beyond that by now.

Except, apparently, they haven't. Which is a very depressing thought.