[JP] Lt Alex Storm and LtJg Roy Bancroft - Silence is Sanctity - Part III
Karen Morris
(( Hall of Liquid Transactions – Capital District, Ferenginar ))
The silence between them had shifted since the landing – not heavier, but certainly more dense. Charged. As though each step they took was a shared decision to trust the other not to speak – literally and metaphorically.
At last, the stairs opened up onto a wide, open platform – no doors, no guards, no one at all to speak of. Just a single arched entryway flanked by two massive columns, a wide corridor stretching out beyond.
The second Alex's foot touched the step, she dug the map out of her pocket again without any words, and without looking back.
The main floor had injected a frenetic pace to the silence. Hastily scrawled signatures scratched documents in liquid latinum. Shuffled footfalls scraped across the stone floor. Stools were dragged from place to place. Canes stumped throughout the room as older patrons stood in defense of their livelihood. But here on the eighteenth floor, the marble walls and floor seemed to absorb any accidental or inadvertent noise - a sneeze, a scuff of a foot, a rustle of an outfit.
Orienting the map to her current location and direction, Alex ascertained behind which door their presence was requested and required.
Roy followed several steps behind Alex, giving her space but remaining present. A Ferengi clerk – probably an intern, judging by the oversized ledger tablet strapped to his belt and the sheer panic in his posture – came sprinting out of one of the many doors lining the corridor, arms full of contract vials.
Too many vials. And he was moving too fast.
One slipped from his arms.
Glass shattered, and a splash of golden liquid splattered across the stone tile, just a few inches from Alex’s boots.
Alex couldn’t arrest her step in time, and a muffled crunch dissipated in the immediate area. From her imposing height, her eyes studied the Ferengi. An eyebrow quirked up, and she riffled through the pocket of her slicker, grabbing a square of cloth. She thought about using it to clean up the mess, but since it was liquid latinum, she didn’t think she’d be allowed to walk away with it. She crouched down next to the Ferengi and handed him the handkerchief.
Despite his immediate instincts, Roy stayed rooted where he was.
It wasn’t hesitation – it was calculation. The Ferengi clerk had already claimed the mess with the proprietary fervor of someone guarding a wounded asset. Roy read the posture immediately: territorial, panicked, and one wrong movement away from escalating into something contractually binding.
He kept his hands loose at his sides, attention fixed instead on the space around Alex. There was a steadiness to her that suggested this might not be the first time she’d knelt amid broken glass and shattered hopes.
Liquid glimmered across the polished floor, catching the corridor light in fractures of gold. Roy noted the way it pooled around the shards – how close it lay to Alex’s boots.
Too close for his liking.
His gaze shifted – not to the clerk, but to her hands.
Nubby Ferengi fingers began picking up pieces of glass coated in liquid latinum and placed them in the cloth Alex had handed him. She tried to help, but the clerk pushed Alex’s fingers away. In doing so, he pushed her pointer finger into another piece of glass. Alex stood and squinted at it, trying to see it, but its minuscule size, the brightness of this hallway, and the fact that blood was now dripping from her finger made it impossible.
Rubbing the blood off with her thumb, Alex strode toward the fourth door on the left, until – a second drop struck the marble floor.
Then a third.
Roy didn’t reach for Alex. He didn’t race to block her path. Instead, he stepped just far enough into her periphery to matter and lowered his gaze, two fingers extending meaningfully to the floor between them.
Red against gold-veined stone. Impossible to miss. Impossible to ignore.
Alex caught the movement at the edges of her gaze and paused, turning toward it. Roy stood there, tranquil, patient, pointing to the drops of blood lingering on the floor.
He lifted his left hand next, palm open and empty. There wasn’t any demand it in, just a pause offered where momentum had been carrying her forward. His other hand rose slightly, mirroring the same restrained gesture he’d used earlier on the landing. Wait, but without insistence.
Her forefinger ran over her thumb again. Alex could barely feel the tiny piece of glass embedded there, but meeting Roy’s eyes again, she saw his hand outstretched - an offer. In the few steps it took to bridge the gap between the two of them, she breathed slowly and focused her thoughts only on the shard of glass and the drops of blood.
When her hand finally touched his palm, he closed his hand around them just enough to stabilize. It was a physician’s hold. A careful one.
He turned her hand gently toward the corridor light, angling it for illumination. Blood tracked along her finger and down across his skin, warm and real. Roy adjusted automatically, thumb lifting her finger slightly to elevate it, the rest of his hand steady beneath.
The duality registered only distantly. This was clinical, precise. Yet also… familiar.
A sliver of glass revealed itself near the crease of her knuckle, catching the light when he’d shifted her hand just enough. It was superficial, embedded shallow.
Roy tilted his head, assessing, then released her hand only long enough to glance back toward the Ferengi clerk.
The cloth – Alex’s cloth – was still there, bunched around glittering shards of the broken vial. Not at all ideal, but it would have to do.
Roy extended two fingers toward it, then turned his hand palm-up in a gesture that brooked no negotiation. The Ferengi froze, eyes narrowing. Then, with visible reluctance, he tipped the glass shards carefully into his free hand, wincing, and held the cloth out. Roy accepted it without comment.
Alex’s eyes never left Roy’s the entire time. They were tender yet demanding, wary yet confident, friendly yet more so?
He gave the cloth a brief, practiced sweep – one smooth pass of his palm to ensure no glass clung to the fabric – then folded it once and once again, clean and efficient.
He returned to Alex’s hand, the cloth creating a barrier around his fingers. With a single controlled motion, he pulled the shard free. The glass came away cleanly.
He pressed the cloth firmly against the cut, blood darkening the fabric almost immediately, blooming out like the expanding petals of a rose. Roy watched the response, waiting for capillaries to behave.
They did.
Only then did he adjust his grip, wrapping the cloth around her finger and across her palm in a temporary compression band – secure, intentional, and deliberately easy to remove. The wound would need irrigation and sterilization once they returned to the Artemis.
Finished, he gently released her hand, stepping back and returning her space as smoothly as he’d entered it.
Her uninjured hand rose toward Roy. But instead of reaching out for him, she let its motion continue upward, where she adjusted the slicker still resting over her shoulder. Looking past him, she walked toward the door she had seen on the PADD.
The fourth door – the one that led to the Arbitration Chamber, their ultimate destination – waited steps away from them, polished and glittering.
Alex reached it first, but she paused and turned to look at Roy. Her lips open as if pleading to be able to speak, even to chance forming the words, “Roy … I,” though no sound proceeded from her mouth. She blinked twice, put a smile on her face, and shook her head as in a wordless apology for these strange thoughts and sensations that left her flummoxed.
With a small puff of air which might have been interpreted as a sigh, she stepped up to the door which parted soundlessly, revealing the Arbitration Chamber beyond. With her back to Roy, her forefinger swept across her face.
But the room was… empty.
No disputants. No witnesses. No looming Ferengi adjudicators perched like vultures over glowing contract-fluid.
Just a single clerk.
He sat at a desk far too large for him, posture slouched in a way that suggested either boredom, triumph, or possibly both. When he noticed them, he didn’t rise. He didn’t bow. He simply lifted one hand and made a casual, dismissive shooing motion, as though waving away an inconvenient breeze.
Then he turned a PADD around and slid it across the desk:
MATTER RESOLVED PRIOR TO ARBITRATION.
FEDERATION PRESENCE NO LONGER REQUIRED.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME.
PLEASE EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP.
Of course.
Roy felt the faintest pull at the corner of his mouth – not quite a smile, not quite a sigh. Ferengi ‘efficiency’, distilled to its purest form: summon neutral parties, escalate ceremony, monetize silence… and conclude everything with backroom negotiations.
They had been pawns in a staged show. He glanced toward Alex, the hint of a smile still on his face at the absurdity of the situation.
Alex shrugged her shoulders while holding her hands palms up.
The clerk had already returned his attention to his work, satisfied that profit – somewhere, somehow – had been preserved.
Roy inclined his head once in acknowledgement. Not to the clerk, exactly – more to the moment itself.
Alex nodded her understanding, and pausing for Roy to walk with her, made her way back to the wide hallway. The Ferengi apprentice, liquid latinum, and glass were all gone. In their stead, three crimson drops on the floor were the only evidence that the two of them were ever actually there.
~*~
End Scene for Alex and Roy
~*~
Lieutenant Alex Storm
Tactical Officer
USS Artemis-A
O240103SK2
And
Lieutenant JG Roy Bancroft
Medical Officer
USS Artemis-A
A240205RB1