Man Up
WHO: Joshua, Yu-Shin Harrington
WHEN: June 25, 2521 - Just after dinner on the Decatur
Joshua found himself on a mission of mercy. At least that was how he framed it in his own mind. Nika had given him a command to find her 12 hours off ship, away from the crew. And she needed it, he could tell. She was radiating tension, enough to make her nearly vibrate if she stood still. The situation with Mike certainly contributed. But he was pretty sure that entering back into Decatur's orbit and learning that Brian Connelly was out on a combat team was an even larger cause. So he wanted to find something planetside; something that would take her away from the Decatur. And the best person for that, he understood, was Lt. Commander Yu-Shin Harrington. Harry to her friends, the set of which included Nika (but not necessarily Joshua).
Harry (he thought her as Harry, but he made a mental note to make sure to call her by rank) would probably not only be more familiar with the planetside options but would also know what would suit Nika best. Every story he had heard suggested she had intuition and emotional reading capability equivalent to a Companion without all that pesky training. If anyone would know where to send Nika to ease her down off the cliff, it would be Harry.
Besides, Joshua admitted to himself as he hurried to catch the commander in the hall outside the dining room, it was a good excuse to spend a little time to getting to meet this enigma. He really wanted to get to know the woman who had caused Christian to fall in love with her. "Commander Harrington?" he called quietly. "Do you have a few moments?"
--
The tiny Asian woman paused near the door of the galley. Dark eyes studied him thoughtfully, and Harry seemed to be weighing something. "What do you need, Mr. Drake?" Her tone was not unfriendly, nor overly cool. Merely neutral and calm.
--
"If this is a bad time, I apologize. I was looking for some help for Nika and thought you might be of assistance." Joshua stood quietly in the hall, hands clasped behind his back. He hated having to disturb her in her on duty. Joshua's sense of boundaries and privacy was particularly strong, perhaps because so much of his had been taken away. Or perhaps because he knew, firsthand, how easy it was to destroy someone's privacy. But it was either now or never for the question he had.
--
Her eyes narrowed on him. Harry's youthful appearance was belied by the gentle lines framing her eyes and beginning to appear near her mouth. Up close he could discern that she was far older than he might have first suspected. Perhaps closer to the Gift's passenger than he might have ever realized, though she seemed to have the grace and musculature of a younger woman. "It is not a bad time," she conceded mildly. "What kind of help is it that you seek for Nika?"
--
"Nika's going to crack unless she gets some time away. I was hoping to find her a place groundside where she could be isolated from personal concerns for 12 hours or so. I don't know the area like you do. I also suspect that I don't know Nika like you do." He tilted his head toward her as he said it, a sign of respect. He paused for a moment and then admitted, "I also find you oddly fascinating, Commander. Everyone speaks of you with such respect and awe. My mission of mercy also gives me a chance to meet the person behind the stories. A little bit selfish, perhaps, but nobody's perfect."
--
Dinner had told the woman all she needed to know about their former pilot's mindset. Harry pursed her lips and said mildly, "Take her down to the southeast corner of town. The military personnel stay closer to the starport... and the kind of steam she needs to blow off is better done down there." And she could put a word in a few people's ears to keep an eye on the young captain to make sure that any trouble she might cause would be ... contained. As she studied him, though, her dark eyes gave away nothing. "Empty flattery is unbecoming a man of your talents, Mr. Drake." Harry's tone remained as calm as ever. "The desire to interact with someone comes from the need to learn something you feel they can teach you." The implicit direction to state what it was he wished to know was clear.
--
"It wasn't *empty* flattery." Joshua was a little offended, although he couldn't quite put a finger on why. "They say the most dangerous lack of knowledge is the group of things you don't know that you don't know. With you, I have that intuitive feeling that I could learn from you...but I don't know you well enough to know what it is you could teach me." He stood in the hallway, nervously shifting his weight from foot to foot, feeling he was failing an exam he hadn't been aware he was taking. "Six months ago, I was unstable enough in knowing who I was that I could've used your help figuring out to stabilize. Of course, now I'm more sure of myself and I have surely placed myself in the worst possible situation." Lord, he was rambling. He needed to get it together. "I'll stop taking up your time. Southeast corner of town. Thank you very much."
--
There was a long moment where he got nothing from the woman. Neither expression nor verbal confirmation. And then Harry pushed the door to galley open. "Follow me." Whether it was because something he said caught her attention or merely because she decided he wasn't completely lacking was not clear. But the order was. She took him through the massive galley toward a pantry, skirting around several cooks on the way with barely a nod.
--
Joshua, as always, was good at following commands. He stopped at the door to the walk-in pantry that she entered, standing off to the side with his hands and arms now positioned awkwardly down and in front of him. He hadn't felt this off balance in a while. She unnerved him, which shouldn't surprise him, since Christian unnerved him in the same way.
--
Harry shifted several things on a shelf and retrieved a box before turning to look back at him. "You spend too much of your time inside your own head. Less thinking and more doing would not go amiss," she informed him calmly. "If you have spent the entire six months stabilizing, you've wasted the last five and a half."
She let that sink in and then added, "Whatever it is you seek, the only way to find it is to get //out// of your own head, Mr. Drake."
--
She hit Joshua with the statement as he was glancing back over his shoulder and he turned to look back at her with a huff of a laugh, involuntary but honest. "I'm sorry," he said as he leaned a shoulder on the door jamb. "I'm not laughing at your advice, I promise. Just the irony that I've spent the majority of my adult life outside my head and inside other people's. I spend 6 months figuring out my own head, and I'm told to get out of it." He shook his head softly. "So your advice is to do less thinking and perform more action? What if all of my potential actions lead to heartbreak? What then?" "And call me Joshua, if you would. Mr. Drake sounds foreign to my ears."
--
"Welcome to living, Joshua," Harry retorted tartly. "Any action you take could hurt someone. Even the best-intentioned ones. Sometimes those are the ones that hurt the worst. You have lived in other people's heads most of your life and you're spending too much time contemplating your navel lint now. Get off your derriere, child, and *be* the person you wish to be. Unapologetically. You'll make mistakes. We all do. And you apologize and go on. Learn from them."
--
"Damn. Could you maybe sugarcoat that a little less? You know, give it to me straight." Sweet merciful heaven, there seemed to be no shortage of people in the Verse willing to kick him in the ass. "I'm working as best I can to be the person I want to be, to work towards redemption for the person I was. I guess I'm just at the point where I have to pay the piper for a decision I made. I think I know what the right decision is. I guess I just want it to be a different decision." Joshua sighed. "I knew life wouldn't be easy when I chose to break and run. And I know others have it tougher." His thoughts immediately went to Rina and he paused quietly. "You didn't have to take the time. You don't know me from Joe Schmoe. Thanks for doing so." The funny part was she had just verbally kicked his ass from here to kingdom come and he still didn't feel like he had any real grasp on her. Like trying to grab hold of a wave before it knocked you over.
--
"I see no need to sugarcoat it for you, Joshua Drake. Xiao Mei has chosen you to be her backup. Which tells me more about you than even you may guess." Harry's brown eyes were steady on him, her very neutrality giving away that her opinion of him was definitely not as high as Nika's -- that she had trouble seeing //why// the former pilot would hand this man the level of trust given him, and so quickly. That was out of character for Nika. "But you will be no good to her if you waver in the wind. In point of fact, you will get her killed -- an occurance that will bring about a side of me that it is unlikely you wish to meet." She was not elderly. Not yet. But the woman was clearly set in her ways and had little tolerance for bullshit.
"Man up," she instructed him mildly. "You would not be *in* her confidence if she didn't have confidence in you -- therefore you should have confidence in yourself. Until you do, you will continue to waver. And the man who, for all intents and purposes, is the second in command of a vessel has no room for such uncertainty. You cannot do the job that needs doing -- for the ship or for her captain."
--
Second in command? She had never really stated that upfront or aloud (or at all, for that matter, Joshua thought), but then again, that wasn't Nika's way. It made a certain amount of sense when he thought about it; viewed events through that lens and ran orders through that filter. "I actually have a surprising amount of confidence in myself considering what's been done to me. But you don't have to worry about me letting down Nika." He shoved off the wall and stood upright, looking Harry directly in the eyes. "If she is Xiao Mei to you, then she is Jie Jie to me and I would never disappoint her." He said the phrase for big sister with a perfect Chinese accent. "I'm more confident in my job on the Gift than I am about anything else in my life right now. Despite that in the job I feel like I'm constantly swimming upstream with what I believe. I've stood firm. I've been confident." If not entirely successful in winning the crew over to his viewpoint on guns. "It's everywhere else that's the problem. But that's not your burden. I'll have to live with what Blue Sun did to me and with me for the rest of my life. I continue to adapt. And the other issue..." He drew out the pause for a while before sighing. "Well, that will be resolved one way or the other before long, it seems."
--
Something sparked in the back of the tiny woman's eyes. Something that looked... almost like a hint of reluctant approval. "You will do," she pronounced. "As to your other issue..." She clucked her tongue in the tsking sound common to mothers the Verse over. "Your first love -- your first real one -- is very special." Whether she referred to Rina and Mike or Joshua himself was entirely unclear. "Be certain your captain is armed when you leave her in town, Joshua," she instructed calmly. And then she handed the small box in her hand to him. "And when you retrieve her back to the vessel, I recommend tea."
--
He took the box of tea, stepping sideways to allow her to pass him and leave the pantry space. "Both of those things I can do." As they reached the hall once more, he turned around and gave Harry a long stare. "I have no idea what I was expecting you to be, but this was certainly not it." He nodded happily as he turned back around to rejoin his crew. "I like being surprised."
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