Post 426: Can Anybody Find Me. . .

Stardate: 70901.1830
Title: Can Anybody Find Me. . .
Author: Lair Kellyn
Scene: Seven
Time: Before and after "That Trill"
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It took a LOT to get Salvek of Vulcan to dance.

Kellyn needed fewer than the fingers on one hand to count the times that they had danced since she'd known him. He'd shocked her on their first date more than eleven years ago by suggesting they do so, proving that he could do it if he was so inclined.

Apparently, there was still enough of the residual emotions from Pon farr coursing through him that he was so inclined to acquiesce to her
unspoken request- in front of the whole crew. Something she thought she'd never, ever see. So she jumped at the chance.

She'd been having a blast already. Catching up with folks, congratulating the guests of honor, of course. She'd even been asked to sing a number for the crowd, and it felt good to blow the dust out of the old pipes, so to speak. She had no idea what song she was going to sing, but then a request came in the form of a hand scrawled note from the crowd- and she'd laughed. She figured that Dabin Reece had put someone up to this as his way of saying goodbye to her, since he hadn't been able to spend any time with her while he'd been aboard ship at all.

He used to sing this particular song all the time, loudly and off key, as they strolled the halls of the space station where he claimed the 'acoustics were just crazy perfect'. He'd always done this so that she'd beg him to stop and then deign to sing the song for him herself.

Her rousing rendition of that same song, "Somebody to Love" drew whistles and cheers from the crowd tonight, and a curtain call.

Truth be told, Dabin Reece and Lair Kellyn were about the most unlikely pair of friends you could ever expect to find. He of the silly, playful nature, she of the brooding, intense, no-nonsense work ethic. But they'd worked together for years on the deep space station where there was little to do between shifts but form a circle of friends you could count on- and she hadn't counted on the fact that her child would become so attached to the man. Arie and Dabin had, starting from the time she was about two years of age, what Kellyn referred to as a 'wonderful peer relationship'.

He'd taught her so much about science, and music and Arie snapped the attention up like a baby duckling eating breadcrumbs. Like the baby duckling that Reece had the audacity to bring to their quarters one day, knowing full well that the child (and her mother) wouldn't be able to resist it. "Uck" the Duck had lived with them for years, until it finally passed away before they'd left the station to return home to the Indy. Upon its death, the child (already far into her Klingon obsession) announced that "Uck the duck was now among the honored dead at Sto Vo Kor."

As Kellyn and Salvek finished dancing, and Salvek pointed out that Reece was still aboard ship, Kellyn thought it especially odd because she'd come across Jaine Hood the day before, on her way to the transporter room. She'd said goodbye to Kellyn and wished her well in the future- and she didn't say anything about the fact that she was leaving alone.

"I can't believe it," Kellyn said, and then she watched quietly as Salvek approached the table and then he and Reece went through another performance of the comedic pas de deux that they had always danced around each other.

====*See post "That Trill"*====

Kellyn began absentmindedly rotating a fork over and over in her fingers as she watched Reece and Grace dancing now. There was an aspect to this budding romance which bothered her, and she couldn't sit still. She kept lurching forward in her seat on the edge of the booth, prompting Maak the Klingon to ask if there was something wrong with her chair.

"No, no," Kellyn said, as she stood up and prepared to walk Salvek to the door, knowing he had to return to duty. "Just worried about an old friend."

"Kellyn," Salvek observed as they walked out into the hall toward the turbolift, "You have that look in your eyes,"

"What look is that, my dear?"

"The look that says your wrinkled nose is about to be poked in somewhere that perhaps it best not go."

"S-al-vek," she turned his name into a three syllable word from it's proper two when she knew he was right and didn't want to admit it. "Dabin is one of my oldest, dearest friends. You know what it'll mean if he and Grace,"

"Yes. But he is a grown man."

"I know, but did you see the way he was looking at her? Ten years we've known him, and I never saw him look at anyone that way. Not even Jaine. Not ever."

"Perhaps," Salvek said thoughtfully, "that is the reason that he has chosen this path."

She nodded, considering.

"You know, there were those who warned me about you," Salvek added, seeming puzzled by this years after the fact. "Those who said that I should choose a Vulcan mate, one more suited to me."

"Maybe you should've listened. . ."

Salvek gently placed a hand on her cheek as they stood in the deserted hallway.

"They were all wrong. Do not be too hard on Reece,"

"Oh, I hadn't planned to be," she turned and cast a smile at him over her shoulder. "But he is going to catch hell for not at least telling me himself."

Lair Kellyn made her way back through the dining room and watched as Grace and Reece continued to dance. She couldn't help but smile at the sight. She'd seen Dabin many ways in the years they'd known each other, but never this way. He was, to put it bluntly, smitten.

Her mind filled with random images as she remembered a lot of things they'd done together. All the times that Dabin had taken Arie off her hands aboard the station so that she and Salvek could run 'just one more transwarp experiment' on their prototype engines. How the child had taken to calling him "raffe", short for giraffe because of his definitive spots. How he'd been so amused by it that he brought her a stuffed toy of a giraffe, which had been her best and constant companion since the age of two.

When Kellyn had become so ill years ago from that puzzling Bajoran neurological disease, not only had he thrown himself into helping Jaine Hood research possible treatments, but he'd found the one which was eventually successful in curing her, involving a glial cell transplant from another old family friend, Jariel Camen.

Before she'd been cured, and while she'd been barely able to move and only able to walk with the use of the motor-assist bands strapped to her legs, he'd been the one to convince her that if she'd just use a crutch that it'd be a lot easier on her, and everyone else because she'd be less likely to fall.

She would never forget the day he'd taken her for a walk and they talked for hours in that deserted cargo bay, how he'd convinced her that even if she couldn't be cured that life was worth living, as best she could live it. . .

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Lt. Commander Lair Kellyn
Engineering Chick and nosy old friend of one Dabin Reece
USS Independence NCC-90791

NRPG: Just some plot exposition for you there. . .Reece and Lair go wayyyy back :~) ~LK