Coy Sessions - The Preamble

Posted on Fri Jan 2nd, 2026 @ 8:05pm by Commander Rosa Coy & Remal Kajun

947 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: Character Development
Location: USS Sunfire

The counseling room felt lived-in, which already made it unusual. Rosa paused just inside the threshold, taking in the small rebellions against standard Starfleet décor: a wooden bowl carved by hand, a strip of woven fabric pinned along the wall, the faint smell of mountain tea steeping quietly in a corner. Remal Kajun sat with an ease that suggested he belonged here, not because he owned the space, but because he cultivated it.

The doors parted, “Rosa,” he greeted, warm without intruding. “You made it.”

The door slid shut behind her with a soft hiss. She hesitated long enough to betray she was weighing her options: fight-or-flight distilled into a single heartbeat. Then she crossed the room with the gait of someone perpetually ready to pivot, dropped into the chair opposite him, and sank back with the kind of exhale that carried too much history.

“Let’s just talk,” Remal said, hands resting lightly in his lap. “Nothing formal unless you want it to be.”

“Talking’s fine,” she muttered, eyes flicking toward the ceiling as though hunting for a crack she could slip through. “It’s the being heard part that gets tricky.”

He let that sit. He didn’t need to nudge her forward; silence, with the right company, sometimes performs the work on its own.

She shifted in the seat, fingers curling around its armrests, knuckles whitening for a moment before easing. “It’s been... a complicated few days. More complicated than usual.” A faint, humorless smirk pulled at her mouth. “And my ‘usual’ is already a mess.”

Remal nodded, slow and steady. He wasn’t writing anything down, he never did, but Rosa could swear he caught every breath she took. “Tell me what that means for you.”

“It means I made a deal with my symbiont.”

Something flickered across his face, interest, not alarm. “Coy.”

“Yeah.” Her gaze lowered to her hands, thumbs brushing each other in restless passes. “When you don’t know Trill stuff, that sounds stranger than it is.”

“It sounds like a part of you needed something.”

Rosa gave a soft, incredulous laugh. “Part of me? Try five lifetimes’ worth.” Her eyes lifted to meet his. There was exhaustion there, but also a kind of simmering intensity, an engine perpetually running hot beneath the skin. “Coy’s been… quiet lately. Not absent. He doesn’t do absent. But reserved. Holding himself back after a fight we had.”

Damn right I don't do absent. Coy added simply.

Remal adjusted his posture with the smallest shift, an invitation to continue, not a prod.

“I pushed him out,” she said. “Or tried to. Started with a physical fight, just to show I was still in control. But then I took a man to bed just to spite him. Bad idea. Effective, but bad.” Her shoulders rose, then lowered slowly. “After that, he backed off. Too much. Like he was waiting for me to make the next move.”

Her tone softened, introspective. “I didn’t like the silence. I thought I would. But it felt wrong. So we… talked. As much as talking works between us.”

Remal didn’t interrupt. Rosa could feel him listening, really listening.

“We worked out something like a truce. Temporary. Ground rules.” She ticked the points off in a subtle brushing motion of her fingers. “No names. No control. Always leave them wanting more. Coy gets the… experiences he craves. I get the choices. And we stop crawling into each other’s heads uninvited.”

A breath of a moment passed. “That’s where I’m at,” she said. “Every couple of days, someone new in my bed. All on my terms.” Her jaw tightened. “I’m not proud of it. I’m not ashamed either. It’s management. Sometimes survival looks like indulgence. Sometimes it looks like a mirror you don’t want to look into.”

Remal leaned in slightly, not crowding her, just anchoring the moment. “You’ve been carrying this without support. That takes a toll.”

Her eyes narrowed, not in anger, but recognition. “Yeah. It does.”

“And the compromise with Coy, it sounds like it’s helped. At least for now.”

“It’s helped us not tear each other apart from the inside.” She huffed. “Which is something.”

“It is.” His agreement was gentle, sincere. And that gentleness unnerved her more than judgment ever could. He studied her with quiet curiosity, not the clinical kind. The kind that seeks to understand without trying to own. “Rosa,” he said softly, “you’ve lived with him for years. But you speak like someone still standing at the edge of the beginning.”

Her breath caught, a subtle shift Remal didn’t miss. He didn’t push. He didn’t ask the question directly or drop a ritual’s name like a hammer. Instead, he let a more human, more grounded thought drift between them. “Sometimes the hardest part isn’t the joining,” he murmured. “It’s letting yourself look back without fear.”

Her throat tightened. She tried to swallow the reaction before it registered, but Remal already saw it.

For a moment, Rosa wasn’t the pilot, the rebel, the woman with a symbiont who burned like a live wire inside her. She was someone who had been carrying an origin story like a wound that never closed. “Start there,” he said. “Wherever ‘back’ is for you.”

She inhaled, sharp, bracing, resigned. “The beginning,” she whispered, eyes drifting toward a memory she never wanted to give voice to. “Fine.”

The room seemed to shrink. The tea’s steam curled upward like a prayer. Somewhere deep inside her, Coy stirred, listening.

Then Rosa began.

TBC

 

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