Midnight Snack
Thanks so much for sharing Joshua with me, Andy. I'm always discovering something new.--Maer
Wednesday, January 21, 2522
On board the Equinox
2015 hrs, ship’s time
Joshua closed the cover on the green notebook with a resounding slap that echoed through the hydroponics area. Finally finished. He had found all the names that he was going to get out of the book and locked them away inside his memory. He had some theories about what the names meant, but they were only that: theories. But there were a lot of planets and a lot of names and the ship was bound to make their way to one before too long. All he had to do was convince Nika it was worth a stop. And considering her interest in the history of the ship, he didn't think it would be a hard sell.
Sitting there, with the pleasant smell of the vegetables and herbs surrounding him, Joshua came to the conclusion that the rank smell in the room was him. Wasn't surprising, he thought. He couldn't remember when his last shower was. In fact, he really wasn't quite sure what day it was, only that they hadn't arrived on Osiris yet. He had been skipping lunches, eating dinners after hours. Couldn't be more than 4 days. Maybe 5. More than that and Nika might come to check on why her XO was skipping crew gatherings.
Well, he could go catch a shower and check in on Rina afterwards.
---
Smarting from my dressing down, I grabbed the first change I could get my hands on and hit the crew shower. As showers went, it covered all the bases: shower head, temp controls, with enough pressure to make it worth the effort and enough hot water to make it a pleasure. I locked the door behind me and was grateful EQ had a compartment big enough to include a separate dry space to strip down and change in. No more hanging your things in a waterproof bag off the showerhead. No more fumbled towels hitting the soaked shower floors. It was a luxury I'd gone without for years, long enough that having it again was a blessing and a treasure, not to mention being able to leave the water running. With a bigger ship came a larger water supply. Wetting down and turning the water off and shivering through my scrubbing up was no longer a necessity.
It was one of the little things that made shipside life worth it.
Even so, I didn't linger. Perhaps when we got to Osiris, I could find a proper bathhouse and indulge in an orgy of a soak. For now, I just needed to get clean again. I'd just returned to my quarters and stashed my dirty clothes in the spare drawer we were using as a hamper when Joshua walked in.
"There's plenty of hot water left," I said over my shoulder as I toed the drawer shut with my bare foot. I scrubbed my hair with my towel, saying past it, "I didn't stand under it for hours and hours, though I wanted to."
---
"Oh thank goodness," he sighed in relief. "I will attempt not to use too much hot water, but I...well, I smell pretty bad." Joshua scrunched his face up in distaste. "I hadn't noticed until now."
He pulled a clean shirt and pants from the good drawer. Hopefully they wouldn't need to decontaminate or burn the ones he was wearing now. Clothes tucked under his arm, he headed out to the shower. "Be right back." He paused and restated, "Be back in a while. I may need a bit."
The shower itself was a godsend. He stayed in probably too long, but he justified it by telling himself he was just using his water allocation from previous days when he hadn't used the shower. Plus, he had a lot of plant muck under his fingernails. When he was all done and dried off, he felt almost squeaky around the edges, like the dirt and sweat weren't the only things he had washed off.
---
I was waiting for him and wrapped my arms around him when he stepped back in. He smelled faintly of soap and I nuzzled his chest.
"You smell good," I murmured. I worked the top button of his shirt loose. "Let's see how far down it goes..."
---
He kissed her on her cheek as he said, "I just got clean, love. Are you going to dirty me up so soon?" Joshua smiled at her as he took her hands and wrapped them around his waist, where she couldn't unbutton another button yet. He felt like he had gone from all-encompassing isolation to complete togetherness in a blink of an eye. And much as an out of practice athlete needed to stretch, he wanted the chance to adapt to being his normal self again.
"Kiera said you were working on your own obsession. I don't see it in here. How did it work out?" He knew he was manipulating her a little by turning her attention to the filebox, but it was for a good cause.
---
His rebuff threw me and it took me a few seconds to recover. I tightened my arms around him and sank my face into his shirt, wondering just what the hell had happened. Under my hands, his posture told me everything I needed to know. I turned away and regarded our bed with regret. Aware he waited for an answer, I gave him one.
"It's up. It's done. It's pretty much what it looks like. A bunch of papers incurred in the normal course of business. I've got it organized by date and location and there doesn't seem to be a pattern underneath the surface. No unexplained stops or time differences between points A and B. Nothing like my first trip on the MakeMake, anyway. So it looks like my scenario is just another paranoid delusional rant." I tossed a wry look over my shoulder. "Nothing new, right?"
---
"Hey now," Joshua said quickly. "Don't be so harsh on yourself. That willingness to be unafraid to look for the answers wherever is one of the things I love about you." He held her tight to him. "Besides, the Ion has a mystery about it for sure. No delusions there. I'll help search for patterns."
---
I leaned back in his arms and sighed. Dammit, he confused the hell out of me: physically unresponsive one second, offering comfort the next. Something was wrong. Or maybe it’s not him. Maybe it’s you, whispered the cynic inside. Did I want to push things to see if it was right? His compliment mocked me as I dithered. Yeah. It's definitely you.
Shut up.
"I'd like that," I finally said and turned around to look at him again. "Just ... not right now. I'm quite frankly tired of looking at it. You know what I'd really like to do?"
---
"Tinker with the engine? Go make a snack in the kitchen?" His voice was lighthearted, teasing. "Enlighten me, love..."
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"Kitchen. Snack. You and me. Like before. I miss that." I wrapped my arms around him, noting the one option missing from the list but unwilling to suggest it. It felt off, he felt off and of everything that could possibly go wrong, this was one thing I didn’t want to associate with our cabin. I wanted it to be a haven, a place for him come home to rather than avoid. Pressuring him about our love life would put an end to that right quick. Even so, I couldn’t resist adding, "I miss you."
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"Well then," Joshua replied, "let's go to the kitchen. We can bake up something sweet for your on-call." A little half smile crossed his face. "A midnight snack, if you will."
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"That would be lovely," I said warmly, smiling up at him. "No time like the present, right?"
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"Absolutely." He grabbed her hand and wrapped it in his. Rina was right, he thought, as they walked in hand-in-hand towards the galley. He gave her hand a firm squeeze. It had been too long.
As they headed towards the galley, they were interrupted by Beggar, who, of all things, had repaired Joshua's robot and wanted to show it off. Joshua was happy, but not for the reasons that everyone seemed to think he'd be happy. The bullet hole made it unreturnable, but Beggar had done fine work with it. Almost as good as new. And definitely able to be sold if they could find the right buyer. No way they'd get full price...but maybe enough to buy him time to earn the rest of the money to pay the robot off and not get thrown into debtor's prison.
Joshua properly oohed and aahed over the robot, but it took a while before he and Rina could disengage and make their way to the galley. It was 2300 hours when they entered the galley, thankfully empty of people. It still wasn't comfortable for him, but more so than much of the ship. It wasn't his old kitchen, but it was still a kitchen and the assorted trappings of cooking always gave him comfort.
---
"It's amazing what he's done with it," I said as I leaned against the dishwasher, staying out of the way as Joshua started pulling ingredients. "I'm ashamed to admit it but he did most of the work. I broke it, I should have been the one to fix it. But ...," I added, sighing. "Beglan had the time and I got distracted by the Ion records and this is how it turned out. I'm sorry."
---
Joshua shook his head. "Don't apologize, silly. Doesn't matter who fixes it as long as we can sell it when the time comes." He looked over the kitchen, unconsciously rubbing the beard on the side of his face as he thought. Sugar cookies. Simple and quick, since Rina had shift in under an hour.
"Could you get some butter out from the fridge, please?"
---
"Sure." I opened the fridge and anticipating, asked, "Milk, too?"
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"A little bit, please." He slid the steel jar with the sugar in it over and measured out some for the mix and some for sprinkling. He looked over at Rina. In the quiet moments like this, sometimes it still amazed him that she had ended up with him. Generally a happy thought, but also a little disconcerting, like his subconscious kept expecting to wake up one morning and find she had left to go find Mike.
---
I pulled the milk along with the butter and toed the fridge door shut. I handed off the milk and set the butter to softening in the microwave. When it chimed the end of the cycle, I set it where he could reach it and grabbed one of the medium mixing bowls to cream it in. I straightened from the cabinet and caught his look.
"What?" I asked.
---
Joshua shook his head. "Nothing. Just sorry that I've let my inability to adapt get between you and me." He started measuring out flour, wanting to get everything prepped before starting.
"Can you forgive me?"
---
With that, the old Joshua, the man I'd fallen in love with, was back in the room with me. Slowly, as if not to startle a skittish animal, I rounded the counter and carefully pulled his hands away from his task and kissed them.
"Always," I said and dared look up.
---
Joshua took one of his hands and palmed her cheek. "I can't promise I'll be perfect. Rough few months and all. But I'm going to try to be better."
His eyes drifted towards the flour, sitting unmeasured on the counter. "Cookies won't bake themselves though, and I hate the idea of leaving you starving on the bridge," he said, quietly smiling.
--
"You get started on the creaming," I said and kissed his palm before stepping back. "I'll measure and set out the dry ingredients."
I pulled the butter and the mixing bowl over and moved in on the flour.
---
They went about the business of cookie baking and Joshua found himself relaxing back in the rhythm of the kitchen. This was where he was most comfortable. And, Joshua thought, he had pushed himself out of it. For good reasons - Kiera had needed to be establish herself as the new steward. But just because she cooked for the passengers didn't mean he was locked out. In fact, no reason why he couldn't cook again for the crew on a semi-regular basis. The thought made him happy and he was smiling as they got ready to roll the dough into balls and dip them in the sugar mixture.
He washed his hands in cold water in order to try and keep the dough from getting too tacky. "I'll roll, you dip?" he asked as he looked over at Rina. She, as always, had already anticipated what he needed and gotten the cookie sheets out.
---
"We got time for dancin'? I thought we were making cookies." I winked and got a bowl of ice water to put between us.
---
He started rolling the dough into 2 inch diameter balls. Big cookies were the way to go, all crispy on the edges, soft and chewy on the inside. Any other way really just fell short. As he finished a ball, he passed it to Rina for dipping in the sugar and placing on the sheet. "So...," he said as he circled some dough between his palms, "I did find a pattern in that green notebook."
--
"Oh?" I smiled down at the dough as I dipped it and placed it on the sheet for flattening. I had hoped getting Joshua cooking in the galley would unwind him enough to open up to me. Looks like you were right. I dipped another cookie in the sugar and put it next to its mate. I gave Joshua a nudge of my hip as I asked, "What did you find?"
---
"In between all the randomly unimportant notes, I kept seeing the same pattern, over and over. A planet, a name, a city, another name, another city. Thirty nine times. Has to mean something, right?" Joshua had some theories, of course, but he wasn't sold on any of them for sure.
---
"Hm." I got several rows of cookies lined up on the tray as I pondered that one. "Are they different names and places or the same every time? Could they be a substitution code for something else? Like a five digit number? That would be enough for a one time pad cipher, though that extra level of encryption wouldn't make sense. OTPs can't be bruteforced. You have to know the key." I got another row lined up like soldiers on the sheet. "I don't know. Hexadecimal maybe?"
---
"Different names every time, with an occasional planetary repeat. I hadn't checked the Cortex to see if the city names were actual city names." Joshua hadn't recognized many of the city names and some of the planets were unfamiliar to him as well. But a code didn't feel right to him.
He shook his head and handed another dough ball. "To me it feels more like record keeping. We know Jing Jing Bei was some sort of detective agency. Maybe they were finding lost relatives and putting them together?"
---
I immediately had a less innocent reason for the name-planet groupings, that of tracking people down through their contacts for bounties or execution, but Joshua didn't need to hear that.
"Were there any discernable patterns in the names themselves? In the pairings along gender or planet or legal status? Were the planets the same distance apart? How about occurrance? Were these people working their way left to right across the Verse or from the inside out?"
Why don't you just say it? You want to see the list of names for yourself and see if there's any correlation to the documents you've got tacked to the machine shop wall.
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"Well, it was only first names, so not like I can figure out legal status. The Planet-Name-City-Name-City groupings weren't all in one place. Each instance was scattered in a different place in the notebook and it is hard to tell whether they were proceeding in some sort of order. So I couldn't tell you if they were going inside out or what."
But gender? That he could tell her and it was something he hadn't really considered yet. And when he ran through the names in his head, damn if she wasn't on to something. "Hey," he exclaimed, rolling the dough in his hand to flatness in his excitement, "all the names that came first in each instance - they are all female names."
---
"Children." I looked up. "Mother-child pairs. Missing or exploited children. Slavers. Sex trade. Missing through war or kidnapping. Divorce disputes. Custody battles. Or," I added. "Maybe marriage or geneology records. There are many reasons for tracing family trees. Inheritance. Paternity. Maternity. But the fact that all the first names in the pairs are female suggest mother-child descent as the focus. What sort of searches would require those parameters?"
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He rolled the last cookie ball and then went to wash his hands again. As the water ran over his fingers, he said, "I don't know, but my guess is that it is something good. You know what the agency's name translates to in English?"
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"No." Like many in the Verse I knew enough Chinese to swear in, but wasn't literate in the language by any means. Or even terribly fluent. "Do you?"
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"Roughly, you can translate it to mean 'Guardians of Peace'. So I think they had good intentions." But course, good intentions could run across a huge spectrum. And that didn't include good intentions gone bad, but Joshua firmly believed they were doing something good.This ship had a history of being owned by dogooders, as he had told Nika.
Joshua pulled a glass from the nearby cabinet and started using it to flatten the cookies on the sheet. "Maybe we'll get a chance to investigate sometime."
---
"If the endeavor was a good one, worthy of doing, why was it hidden away in the crawlspace? Why didn't the Capain of Ion take it with him or her? Surely they could continue the work using a different ship, right? Why walk away from it?" I got another glass and together Joshua and I got those cookies flattened and in the oven. I started rinsing off the dirty utensils at the sink. "If you were reuniting lost loved ones, wouldn't you continue to do it? And apart from leaving the record behind, why were the names hidden like a code?"
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Joshua sighed. And this is why he didn't tell people when he discovered things. The whole crew was generally more cynical than he was and they always found ways to poke holes in his theories. "They weren't in a code, Rina. Just in badly organized and written Chinese. As for the rest, I don't know. I'm going to choose to believe that they ran out of money or got killed in the line of duty." Felt odd to think of those endings as a positive takeaway, but better than believing that the former crew were a bunch of bounty hunters.
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"Izvinitieh." The happy light had gone out of his eyes and I realized I'd gone too far. "I'm sorry. I'm a morbid ass. Please don't take me seriously."
---
He shook his head. "It's okay," he said as he wiped down the counter and set the timer for the cookies. Thankfully, they wouldn't take long, since Rina only had about 20 minutes before she needed to be on the bridge. "Realism is what lives out here in the Black. Idealists get thrown into flaming deathtraps, that sort of thing."
---
That again.
"Joshua, stop." I pulled the plug on the sink and wiped my hands dry. "You can't believe that."
---
"I don't know if I do or not, Rina." He shrugged. "Everyone talks like it is true. Acts like it is true. Everyone on board this ship is a pragmatic soul, wouldn't you agree? And pragmatic is just another way of saying realism."
He reached out and rubbed her arm softly in reassurance. "I said I needed to adapt. And all signs point to adapting in that direction."
---
'Joshua," I said softly to lessen any sting my words might inflict. "Since when has my grip on reality in the absence of hard facts been anything approaching realistic? I tend toward the grim and gory because that's been my experience but mine is not the norm. It's so far off the bell curve you could justifiably call it insane. I'm not the yardstick you should use to measure yourself. Seriously. I'm not." I took his hand and folded it in mine and stepped closer. "The Universe already has enough copies of me running around. What it needs is more of you. Don't lose sight of that."
---
Rina wanted to try and paint herself as an outlier, but as she said right after that, Joshua was the outlier in this 'Verse. And sometimes swimming against the steam was tiring. But he just nodded tightly and said, "Bear with me, ok? Dark places lead to dark thoughts and I'm having trouble shaking free of them these days." He lifted her hands, still wrapped around his and brought them to his lips for a kiss.
---
I understood how darkness could suck a person down and the desire to pull him out of it swamped me. His kiss still tingling on my fingers, I smoothed his hair back with both hands and held his head, searching his face for the man I knew and loved.
"I will," I promised. "I'm here. I'll always be here. Come back to me."
---
Joshua pulled her close to him for a hug. "I haven't gone anywhere. You'll have to work hard to get rid of me, I promise."
---
I wanted to argue that he'd already gone but kept my mouth shut and let him hold me. He's a big boy. Give the man some room, let him work it out. He'll come home when he's ready. So said common sense. God, how I hated it.
---
Joshua stood there with her, just letting himself relax in her presence until the quiet of the galley was interrupted by the beep indicating they needed to check the cookies. He smiled at Rina and reached for an oven mitt to grab the cookies. "Give these 5 minutes to cool," he said as he pulled the tray out, resting it on the stovetop. "Then you'll have some tasty warm cookies for your bridge shift."
---
The aroma of warm vanilla and sugar poured out of the oven when he opened it, homey and soothing. Six minutes later, the cookies were off the pans and plated. My fingers stung as I picked one up, still piping hot, off the stack. I broke it in two and gave him half.
"Here," I said and gave him a smile. "What's mine is yours."
Would he catch what I'd meant? Or would he just see the cookie?
---
"And what is mine is yours." Joshua took a bite of the cookie and then leaned forward to take a taste of her.
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Go to Joshua's Crew Page or to Rina's Crew Page
Go back to: Timeline Season Five, Jan 2522 to Aug 2522
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