Coy Sessions - Becoming a Pilot

Posted on Fri Feb 6th, 2026 @ 5:55pm by Commander Rosa Coy & Remal Kajun

2,233 words; about a 11 minute read

Mission: Character Development
Location: USS Sunfire

The universe was narrowing again, this time to a trigger and a heartbeat. Whatever came after would be written in that thin space between collapse and the quick The memory didn’t arrive as a fall or a slip this time. It unfurled. It rose. It stretched its wings as though it had been waiting behind her ribs for permission to breathe again.

The counseling room softened at the edges as Rosa let her eyes drop half-closed. Remal watched the minute change in posture, the way her shoulders loosened, the way her breath left her in a longer, lower exhale. She had come into this session steadier than the last. Coy had been quiet, well, quieter, for days. He still had the occasional undisciplined thought that flickered through her mind like the tail end of a sparkler, indecent and unrequested, but she could swat them aside now with the ease of someone batting away gnats. The rhythm between them had returned to something livable. Not harmonious, but workable. Like two dancers who still stepped on each other’s feet but no longer apologized for it.

Rosa tilted her head, as if listening intently to something just beyond the wall, something the rest of us couldn't quite hear. Her eyes grew distant and unfocused, staring past us into some unseen space. "It started with the wind," she murmured.

The shift came then, sudden and undeniable. Remal felt it, the way a room feels the pressure change before a summer storm rolls in from the plains. The air grew thick and heavy, charged with something unspoken. Rosa sank, not down into the cushions beneath her, but inward, into a memory bright enough to cast shadows.

Trill’s northern highlands. A sky the color of scraped metal hung low overhead, heavy and brooding, threatening rain that never quite came. The air was crisp and sharp, smelling distinctly like cold rock and early morning.

Rosa had been sixteen, all elbows and certainty, already arguing with gravity the way some teenagers argue with their parents. She remembered the bite in the wind, the way it cut clean through her sleeves, the exhilaration that rose from that cold and braided itself with something wordless and electric.

“My father brought me to the cliffs,” Rosa said, her voice shifting with the memory, smoothing into a younger cadence. “He told me every pilot has a birthplace. The moment they truly become one with flight.”

Papaiya Prilen walked a few paces ahead of her, boots crunching along the frost-hard trail. He carried a small flight pack slung over one shoulder, humming some off-key tune as though nothing monumental was about to happen. That had always been his way, he treated the extraordinary like an ordinary Tuesday and the ordinary like something worth fireworks.

Rosa remembered trailing him, trying to hide her excitement behind a practiced veneer of teenage nonchalance. She’d failed. Her feet kept walking too fast, as though the thrill was dragging her forward by the throat.

“The cliffs at Lethan Ridge weren’t meant for kids,” Rosa said softly. “But my father never thought rules were built for people with wings.” They’d reached the ridge’s lip, a sheer drop hundreds of meters down, the valley below etched in blues and greens, a river cutting through it like a silver signature.

Papaiya had stopped, squinted into the wind, and nodded. “Good updraft today.” Then he turned and placed the small flight harness in her hands.

Rosa remembered the weight of it. Not heavy, just unreal. “I thought he was joking,” she said, a smile flickering at her mouth. “Sixteen, sure, but I’d never been off the ground except in shuttle pods. This was different. This was… him encouraging me to jump.”

She could still see the look Papaiya had given her, half-pride, half-dare. A look that said I see the wild in you, kid. Let’s see what it can do. He adjusted the harness across her chest, tight enough that the straps pressed into bone. The glider wings were folded, sleek, curved like crescent moons along her sides. The neural interface hung dormant against her wrist, a soft band that hummed faintly when she touched it.

Her hands trembled. She’d denied it then and denied it for years, but she admitted it now. “I was terrified,” she whispered. “The good kind. The kind that tells you something in your life is about to change.”

Papaiya stepped back once the fit was secure. He tapped the control at her wrist; the wings unfurled with a sigh, stretching outward in perfect symmetry, pale metal catching the sun like a promise.

“You listen to her,” he had told her. “The air has moods. Don’t fight them. Feel where it wants to go.”

Rosa remembered licking her lips, her mouth suddenly desert-dry. “What if I fall?”

Papaiya shrugged. “Then you fall. But you’ll learn faster on the way down.”

Before she could argue, he rested one warm hand on the side of her face, a gesture more grounding than any safety protocol. "You’ve always belonged in motion,” he said. “This is just your first real direction.”

The wind rose then, cold and curious. Rosa stepped to the edge, looked down at a valley painted in impossible colors, and felt her pulse synchronize with the gusts.

“And then,” she said, voice deepening, “I jumped.”

The sensation wasn’t falling. Falling was chaotic, panicked, helpless. This was a surrender into something larger that welcomed her weight. The wind caught the glider wings, snapped them taut, and Rosa felt the lift, real lift, slam beneath her ribs like a new heartbeat.

Air rushed past her ears, roaring and intimidating, filling every space around her with its thunderous presence. The wind whipped through her hair and pressed against her skin like a living thing. "The second I left the cliff,” she whispered, “the world stopped being a surface. It became something else entirely.”

She banked left, clumsy but instinctual, the neural interface reading her micro-movements, amplifying her intention into graceful arcs. The valley swung beneath her like a cradle of green fire. The river glittered. The ridge behind her shrank into a distant spine of stone.

“I didn’t think,” she told Remal. “For once in my life, I didn’t think. I just existed exactly where I was.”

She’d screamed once, not in fear but in the primal joy of being exactly who she knew she was supposed to be. Papaiya’s cheer echoed faintly from the cliff above, swallowed by wind.

Every gust was a conversation. Every current was a hand pushing, pulling, testing her. She leaned into it all, and something ancient in her bloodline lit up. Trill physiology was never built for flight. Their evolution had rooted them firmly to the earth. But Rosa…

“I felt like the world had been lying to me,” she said. “As though every step I’d ever taken on the ground was rehearsal for the moment I finally touched the air.”

Coy, listening from inside her now, pulsed with a quiet warmth. Not possessive. Not intrusive. Almost reverent. Rosa didn’t resist it.

Minutes became moments unmeasured. She dove low, skimming so close to the treetops that leaves brushed the tips of her boots. She climbed sharply, letting the air harden under her wings. She banked, tilted, spiraled until dizziness flirted with delight.

“There was a moment,” she continued, her voice thickening in memory, “when I stopped feeling the harness. Stopped feeling the device. It was just… me. And the sky.”

She had leveled out into a long, steady glide. The valley opened beneath her in a vast bloom of color, every shade of green possible. The river glowed. The wind held her like something it had been waiting centuries to claim.

“That was the moment I fell in love,” she said. “Not with flying. With being unbound.”

Eventually she had circled back, legs wobbling when she finally touched down on the ridge. Papaiya had been waiting with that big, uneven grin, pride radiating from him like sunlight. He pulled her into a tight embrace, laughing as though the universe had given him the punchline to the world’s best joke. “What do you think?” he’d asked.

Rosa had been breathless. Exhausted. Overwhelmed. She remembered the exact words she’d managed to speak:“This… this is who I am.”

Papaiya squeezed her harder. “Then the universe just caught up.”

Rosa came back to herself slowly, the counseling room regaining shape and warmth. Her eyes glistened, but not from pain. Something softer lived there, something fierce and bright.

“That was the day I understood my life wasn’t going to make sense unless it involved the sky,” she murmured. “Everything that came after, Starfleet, the ships, the training, the crashes, the victories, every bit of it started on that cliff.”

Remal folded his hands loosely in his lap, his fingers intertwining with a practiced ease that suggested he'd sat this way countless times before. “It sounds like freedom found you first," he said, his voice quiet but certain. “Long before you knew its name. Long before you had the words to call it what it was." He paused, letting the weight of that truth settle between them like dust motes drifting through afternoon light.

Rosa’s voice slipped into a tired but satisfied whisper. “And it’s the only thing I’ve never tried to outrun.” The room settled around them, full of wind that wasn’t there, and a sky that had imprinted itself on her bones.

Remal waited a beat, letting the memory finish landing before he spoke again. “We’ll stop here,” he said gently. “Come back when you’re ready to take the next ascent.”

Rosa nodded once, eyes steady, as though she could still feel the lift beneath her ribs. The cliff waited somewhere inside her, patient as stone, and the sky, it would always be just one step away. All it took was the stubbornness to defy it.

Rosa lingered a moment more, as though the memory’s wind still pressed lightly against her skin. The counseling room felt grounded, almost still in comparison, but she carried the echo of altitude inside her, the rhythm of lift and fall, the way the sky rearranged her pulse.

She straightened in her chair. The quiet between her and Coy was balanced, neither strained nor crowded. A rare, truce-like weaving of their breaths. “Next ascent,” she repeated softly, tasting the words. They fit.

Remal offered a final nod, neither dismissing her nor holding her there. “You know where to find me.”

She did. And she would. The past was a long corridor with too many closed doors, but she had opened one today, and the hinge had not shattered. That counted for something.

Rosa rose, brushed invisible dust from her uniform, and let her steps find their own momentum. The automatic doors parted. The hum of the corridor wrapped around her, crew voices, consoles chirping, the steady thrum of a ship in motion. A vessel always had a heartbeat of its own, and today it seemed to pulse in time with her own.

Coy murmured an appreciative hum as she walked, though not about anything indecent for once. You’re lighter, he observed, the thought washing through her like warm air slipping across a wing.

“Don’t get poetic on me,” she muttered under her breath.

You liked it.

She didn’t argue. It would only encourage him.

The turbolift ride was short, but her body hummed with a familiar anticipation, something that had started on that cliff and never once dimmed. Flying didn’t soothe her. It ignited her. It aligned everything in her that the ground ever tangled.

The doors slid open to the hangar bay. Light spilled across polished deck plating. Engineers moved around her with practiced efficiency, voices echoing between the bulkheads. The scent of coolant and warmed duranium filled the air, a perfume she had never admitted she loved more than anything floral.

Her shuttle waited in berth six, sleek lines angled like a creature ready to leap. Rosa felt her chest expand, as though seeing an old friend from both this life and the last.

“Commander Coy,” one of the deckhands called. “Patrol window opens in ten.”

She nodded, already stepping toward the shuttle. Her boots rang sharply on the deck, each impact a countdown.

Coy stirred again, soft as a wingbeat. This is what we’re made for, he said. Not a claim, not a pull, just a truth whispered into her bones.

Rosa touched the hull with her palm. Cool metal warmed beneath her skin.

“Let’s go remind the sky,” she whispered.

A ramp descended. Systems flickered awake. Engines purred like something eager to be released. As she climbed into the cockpit, the memory of her father’s laugh shimmered through her, not painful, not heavy. Just alive.

She strapped in. Ran the checklist. Felt the hum of the controls sync with her pulse.

The bay doors opened to the stars. And the girl who had stepped off a cliff to discover who she was, she never stopped falling upward.

Rosa lifted the shuttle off the deck, turned her nose toward open space, and let the sky take her again.

TBC

 

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