Heron May mingle

[grandstanding]

Who: Heron crew and visitors
Broadcast: nope
Action: the Heron
When: all May!

[Birds of a feather mingle together.]

Comments

A

[grandstanding]

[Erik's trips to the bridge have become habitual over the last few days; always in the afternoon, always for an hour or so, always to do the same thing. Winter is a new fixture, today, but Erik just offers him a nod of greeting as he moves to his usual chair. People come and go from this area all day long.

He sets a ragged square of steel on the console for a moment, regarding its size and texture. With a short huff, he scoops it up again and begins to work, folding the edges over with his fingers as though it were no less stubborn than clay.]

A

[reconstitution]

[ Winter looks up from his book when Erik enters, offering him a nod in return. He goes back to his reading for a while, only to look back to see what the other is working on. It's remarkable, really, the way the steel seems so malleable in his hands.

Winter's forgotten about his book at this point, simply watching what Erik is doing. ]

What are you making?

[grandstanding]

[He doesn't look up yet, focusing on the metal. The edges are smoothing out under his fingers, the square shape becoming rounded.]

I'm not sure yet... A medallion, maybe. [A familiar shape for him, one he's made many times before.]

[reconstitution]

Do you make these often?

[ Maybe if he spent more time around his crew, he'd have figured that out, instead of being a glorified hall monitor with a title.. ]

[grandstanding]

I used to. In the place before this one.

[reconstitution]

How long were you there? I've heard of a few others that were trapped before this.

[grandstanding]

[He turns the piece of metal in his fingers, letting it suspend in midair now as he continues to work on it.]

It was six months in that one, thereabouts. Two months in a different one about eleven years before that. [It gets hard to keep track of, sometimes, his memories having come and gone so often. The time stretching outwards, from his lack of history to compare with. The only benefit of the Fleet is that he didn't wake up with no memory of who he was for a third time.] It felt much longer.

[reconstitution]

I'm sorry.

[ What else can even be said about it? What kind of impact has that had on Erik as a person? ]

I take it neither were very.. good? [ Kidnapping aside. ]

[grandstanding]

[Erik's hands sculpt higher in the air, and he glances to the scars that loop his wrists. Hardly the worst of it. Far from the best of it, too.]

The Fleet is less taxing. Both physically and mentally. [It has its particular problems, he won't pretend otherwise. So far one of the worst things about it is the lack of purpose. Once the more immediate offenses are discounted, that is.]

[reconstitution]

I understand.

[ He gets it. This place is stagnant. There's no purpose, no mission, no real sense of order.. it grates on his nerves more than need like to admit. Winter's not even sure if that's the programming talking out his own opinion. The two seem to blur together, sometimes. ]

[grandstanding]

However, it was nice to be able to take a walk outdoors whenever I wanted. [Another sticking point for him. If only they were docked at a planet that didn't require a mask just to exist outside.]

[reconstitution]

It's difficult being confined to the ships. Starts to feel like the walls are closing in.

[ The chilled halls and the small quarters don't help that, either. ]

[grandstanding]

[Erik's hands pause for a moment, his eyes unseeing, before continuing to mold the piece. They are confined. And he knows better than most how close the walls are, can feel them without seeing them. But that helps (he thinks - he hopes), that he can sense them and they're not mute concrete.]

We've been docked here for a while. Is that normal?

[reconstitution]

The pattern has been four to five week rotations once we reach a planet. Drifting between is less.

[ Winter thumbs at the pages of the book absently. ]

[grandstanding]

So there's still a margin of error, but we're close to this being an abnormally long stay.