Coy Sessions - The Quiet Between Storms

Posted on Mon Feb 9th, 2026 @ 3:20pm by Commander Rosa Coy & Remal Kajun

2,010 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: Character Development
Location: USS Sunfire

Rosa arrived early for her fourth appointment with Remal, early enough that the corridor lights still carried the soft, waking glow of artificial dawn. She moved with a peculiar tension, not the tight coil of panic or dread, but the quick silver indecision of someone arguing with herself at every step.

Coy was unusually still. Not silent, he never offered her silence, but muted, sitting deeper in her nervous system like a predator politely waiting behind a tree. You don’t have to tell him 'everything'.

That’s not comfort, that’s baiting. she shot back internally.

And yet you walked here early.

She ignored him, or pretended to.

The counseling room was already warm with lamp light. Remal had lit a small incense braid today, something resinous, almost cedar-like. Rosa caught the scent and rolled her eyes softly. “You trying to summon the Prophets in here or just set a mood?”

Remal looked up from adjusting a small cushion on the low table. “If they show up, I’ll ask them to wait outside.”

It made her laugh, barely, but genuinely. A laugh edged by nerves. She took her usual chair but didn’t settle back. Her body held itself forward, ready to spring.

“You seem… prepared for something,” Remal observed gently.

“I was ready to talk about the joining,” she said, surprising even herself with the blunt opening. Then she grimaced and waved a hand in a small cutting motion. “Actually, I thought I was ready. I’m not. Not today.”

“That’s allowed,” he said.

Rosa’s shoulders loosened a fraction. “Something else has been circling. Maybe it’s easier to approach the gravity well from a wider orbit.”

Remal nodded once. No pressure, no encouragement, just permission.

“So,” she said, exhaling through her nose, “why don’t we talk about what came before everything went sideways.” Her gaze slipped toward a memory she hadn’t visited in years. Not avoided, just unused. “I guess I should start with the Academy.”

“The thing about Starfleet Academy,” Rosa said, “is that everyone arrives thinking they’re special, and everyone leaves realizing everyone else is special, too.” She tilted her head as though listening to an old campus breeze. “I didn’t stand out at first. I wasn’t the best in my class. Not the fastest. Not the strongest. I was… sharp. Quick. Clever in ways that irritated half my instructors and intrigued the other half.”

Her smile warmed with a crooked charm. “I liked that more than I should have.”

Coy hummed in agreement, the faintest ripple through her chest.

Rosa ignored it.

“My first year was surprisingly normal. I made friends, three close ones, actually. Jari, a Vulcan with a dry sense of humor so subtle you had to squint to see it. Mira, a human from the Mars colonies who laughed like she was auditioning for an opera. And Tovan…” She paused, rolling the name in her mind like a marble.

Remal watched without intruding.

“Tovan was Trill. Unjoined. Smart. Serious. Too serious, really. He’d read every textbook twice before classes even started, and he thought that made him immune to chaos.”

A long breath colored the air between them. “He liked me early on. Everyone knew. Even I knew. I pretended I didn’t because… I don’t know. I wasn’t ready to be someone’s object of affection, I guess.” She rubbed her thumb along the armrest of her chair, absently circling a groove.

“Tovan would walk me to the flight-yard every morning. ‘Coincidentally.’ He took notes for me if I overslept, which was often, and he once punched a second-year cadet in the mouth for calling me a ‘cocky-atmospheric kid from the equator.’ Not my best moment, watching that. It was sweet, dumb, unnecessary, flattering.”

Remal’s expression softened. “You cared for him.”

“Yeah.” She said it without hesitation. “But caring isn’t the same thing as choosing.” A tiny crack of grief flitted across her face and was gone almost before it formed.

“There was this one night.” She stared across the room as if a memory hovered on the opposite wall. “Midterms. We were exhausted. Mira had lost her voice from overstudying, don’t ask how that happens, and Jari was pretending he didn’t need sleep. Tovan and I went out to the Academy cliffs, the overlook above the bay. Wind was cold enough to numb your thoughts.”

Her breath wavered. “He told me he wanted to apply for initiating, joining. That he thought a symbiont could make him ‘more.’ And then he said he wanted me with him through all of it.”

Her jaw tightened just enough to show how much that knot still lived inside her.

“I told him no.” The word dropped like a stone into the counseling room. “Not because I didn’t want him. Because I didn’t want to be consumed. Tethered, ya know?”

A moment passed, “He was hurt. Maybe angry. He handled it badly. Said I was afraid of being something bigger. That I’d rather run from intimacy than face myself.”

“And were you?” Remal asked carefully.

“Probably.” A bitter smile. “But he weaponized it. We stopped talking for weeks. When we finally did, it felt... different. Too fragile. Too polite. And eventually he drifted, and I let him drift.”

Her fingers tapped once against her knee. “It was the first time I realized relationships don’t just break, they fade, like stars losing fuel.”

Coy stretched inside her, a slow feline flex.

You were never meant for predictability.

Her eyebrow twitched. “Shut up.”

Remal’s lips curved minutely. “Coy chiming in?”

“He always chimes in,” she muttered. “Especially when the topic is romance.” She shook off the memory like water.

“Anyway. I threw myself into flight training. If adolescence taught me rebellion, the Academy taught me rhythm. Precision. How to master a craft instead of just wanting it.”

Her posture changed subtly, straighter, more assured. The pilot resurfacing. “I wasn’t the top of my class, but I was the one they watched. I learned techniques faster than I learned people. Simulations felt more honest than conversations. Engines made more sense than emotions.”

Remal nodded. “You started becoming yourself.”

“It felt like that.” Her eyes flickered. “In a way it was the first time I didn’t feel... too much.”

“Too much for who?”

She smirked. “Take your pick. My mother. My instructors. Tovan. Myself.” The smirk softened. “But the flight yards didn’t care. They took every bit of me and gave it back in lift and thrust.”

“You were finding home.”

“Yeah,” she murmured. “Without knowing that’s what it was.” Then her expression dimmed with a flicker of old regret.

“Toward the end of my Academy years, something shifted. Everyone was talking about the Dominion War. The casualty projections were climbing every week. Training stopped feeling like preparation and started feeling like... triage. Like we were all being fitted for loss.”

She rubbed a palm along her thigh. “I graduated early. Barely. Not because I was eager to fight, no, but because Starfleet needed pilots. And because I needed distance from the part of my life that still smelled like a boy I once loved and the cliffs where we unraveled.”

Coy offered a low, approving hum. Running toward the sky is still running.

She closed her eyes. “Not now.”

“When they first sent me to Jupiter Station, I thought it was punishment.” Her laugh came quick and sharp. “I wanted a ship, action, the chance to prove myself. Instead I got a floating classroom and a syllabus.”

Remal’s brow rose slightly. “You didn’t stay bitter.”

“No. Not for long.” Rosa leaned back then, finally easing into the chair. “Because something happened there that I didn’t expect. I became good at teaching.”

Her hands opened slowly, as though demonstrating a delicate maneuver. “I learned patience. Humor. The art of reading a terrified cadet’s eyes and knowing exactly what kind of lie would calm them. I learned how to talk someone through a stall-out without letting my own heart rate spike.”

A warmth rose beneath her voice. “I... loved them. My students. Every wide-eyed idiot with dreams bigger than their cranial capacity. They reminded me of myself, and they reminded me of who I could be if I softened the right edges.”

She lifted her gaze to Remal. “That year on Jupiter Station is the closest I ever came to peace.”

“What took it away?”

Rosa inhaled slowly. Air caught in her chest before she forced it out again. “The war. It crept in through the comm channels, the casualty reports, the shifts in deployment. Pilots were dying. Good ones. Young ones. Former students. Friends.”

Her throat tightened. “I remember the day they posted the Velsin Run losses. Three of the names were cadets I trained. Kids who shouldn’t have been out there without more hours. Kids who wanted to be heroes.”

Her teeth grazed the inside of her cheek, a flash of old self-blame. “I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t sit in a well-lit instruction bay while other pilots died doing what I taught them to do.”

Remal’s voice was angled soft. “You felt responsible.”

“I felt enraged.” Her voice vibrated with something raw. “At the war. At Starfleet. At myself. At the universe. I felt like I was handing out wings to people who didn’t understand that flight can kill you faster than gravity.”

Silence pulsed. “And so I requested transfer to a starship. Any ship. I didn’t care which. I wanted to be where the danger was. Where the loss was happening. Where I could at least carry my own weight in the destruction.”

Her eyes drifted to the floor, then back up. “Where Jupiter Station made me gentle. The war made me hard again.”

Coy stirred, a slow curl of warmth in her belly. And I made you something else entirely.

Rosa’s lips pressed flat. “You made me survive,” she murmured under her breath.

The counseling room settled into a tender quiet. Rosa leaned back, letting her head touch the rest of the chair for the first time all session.

“That’s the thing about the Academy and Jupiter Station,” she said. “They were the last parts of my life that felt... ordinary. Before everything I did carried a different weight.”

Remal let his voice meet hers like a soft landing. “Before the sky began expecting something from you.”

“Yeah,” she whispered. “Before that.” She rubbed her palms together, as if scrubbing off lingering dust from old hallways and simulation consoles.

“I wasn’t ready to talk about the joining today. But I think,” she said slowly, “I needed to remember who I was before it.”

Remal offered a single nod, the kind that opened a door rather than closing one. “Whenever you’re ready,” he said softly, “we’ll step into that shadow together.”

Rosa exhaled, long and steady. Coy tightened in her spine, not in resistance but in recognition.

“You don’t get to come to that session,” she told the symbiont inside her.

Coy chuckled, warm and wicked. Just try and stop me.

Rosa rose to her feet, stretching her arms upward once, shaking out tension, not quite dismissing the past, not quite embracing the future. “I’ve got flight patrol,” she said. “And after talking about all that, I think I actually want to fly.”

Remal smiled. “Then fly.”

She didn’t respond, just turned toward the door, posture taller, step lighter. The hangar bay awaited her, sleek hulls, humming engines, that sharp metallic scent of promise. The sky wasn’t calling her this time. She was calling to it.

And for the briefest moment, she felt like the cadet she once was, wind at her back, future at her fingertips, and the quiet between storms stretching wide in front of her.

TBC

 

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