Welcome Home, Sasha (G/t)

One.

"So, can you tell me anything about why the hell they were getting emulsified by Commander Martin back there?"

"Yes."

"Uh, will you?"

"In due course, sure. But everything you need to know, for now, you already do."

"Well, fuck."

If you oversleep, then don't expect to get work or pay during the day. That was one of the general, unspoken rules aboard the space station Novis, and Lieutenant Sasha Keeling had prayed that the team with whom he was meant to scout would be as apathetic as usual and not catch him arriving late to training. Or, they would at least allow him to pull some sort of overtime to make up for the time lost: not much, considering all he had done for them already just trying to fit in.

Washing up and putting on his suit in record time, Sasha had zipped out of his quarters and through the space station's corridors, hoping to catch up with his presumed partners before they made any bold decisions without him. But they had.

Where he had expected to find them in Hangar C, conversing by and packing gear into the eldest's parked spaceship, he instead found an empty parking space that had run cold. Any other day, Sasha would've just figured that its owner was out for a test run with his partners being elsewhere in Novis doing other things. But, the lack of message left for him, them not answering his calls for verification, and the teasing expressions and chuckles from those in the hanger that caught sight of him set in stone that they not only left him in the space dust but used him, never going to bring him along in the first place.

Sasha hadn't had much time to wallow in his embarrassment, though he definitely lived up to his given nickname of Sasha the Sheepish. As he turned around to head back to his quarters to nap and drink his shame away, he was stopped by a familiar but a nowadays not-so-frequent face.

He, a superior on various levels except for height, had known all too well that Sasha had no business being in the hangar. He wasn't enlisted for any mission at the time, yet there he was, ragged looking with his auburn locks going in all directions and his deep-set chestnut eyes no better but everywhere else suited up like it should've been.

Sasha easily saw the judgment on his senior's face, watching his facial muscles squirm and lift the textured, ebony hairs above and on it. But rather than being scolded on the spot as he and all the now silenced onlookers expected, the higher-up just guided him away from all their eyes to his haven with no questions asked, where he could take him in all for himself.

It wasn't the first time Tshepo Azikiwe, a Novis admiral, had brought him into his laboratory, finally greeting the shy subordinate with a "Glad You're Back" upon arrival, but Sasha never thought that particular meeting then – one predicted to be another one-hour lecture on how he shouldn't be so susceptible to first-time kindness – would eventually lead to him taking the role not of just a passenger but of his Mission Specialist and potential copilot in Tshepo's own ship, the Demeter, light years away from Novis and headed to... to...

"Can you at least tell me where we're going?" the now lackadaisical lieutenant probed in the present from down the hall, voice floating through the cracked open, milky glass doorway dividing the helm from the rest of the dark and dim ship.

As far as he could tell, there was a blur on all the windows, and all the mapping systems in the Demeter except those in the cockpit were shut down. Sasha had no way of detecting where they were in the caverns of space, and there was no way he was going to be able to get Tshepo's lenses off him that did.

To combat the boredom and Tshepo's silence on the matters ensued, Sasha wondered to himself, lain with one foot on the bed of his cold cabin, twiddling and examining a miniature of a NASA Space Shuttle from years – decades, a century – past he's had since childhood between his fingers. He gazed at it intently, still enamored by its attention to detail and maintained quality for something so small and ancient. He could even imagine almost undetectable, tiny navigators inside the orbiter, fiddling with the controls at the helm.