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Title: Come Fly With Me: Five Moments On A Journey
Fandom: Star Trek XI
Rating: Hard R
Pairing: Gaila / Captain Christopher Pike
Summary: On her way to Earth, Gaila meets and exchanges invitations with Captain Pike.
Content Advisory: Character backstory, explicitly sexual friendship, fanon.
All Thanks To:

jain for running

ladies1st, for which I wrote this;

igrockspock my recipient for being awesomely inspiring of my very best efforts; and

lomedet, always.
Disclaimer: None of these characters or their settings belong to me.

Three.

Truth be told, Christopher Pike doesn't have many good associations with weightlessness, his stomach wobbling minutely as he palms the lockpad, steps into the vestibule, and strips off his uniform. On a ship or space station zero-g usually indicates system-wide failures, one step closer to catastrophe and imminent death; he's felt the same lurch during battles and disasters that he feels now upon crossing the threshold into the grav-null chamber. Planetside, floating is generally associated with swimming, which he likes somewhat, or vertigo, which he doesn't at all. However, he thinks as he kicks off the floor, looking up as 'up' vanishes, like any death-defying sensation weightlessness has its pleasures.

Not least when he soars towards a naked girl with green skin and bright eyes, floating red curls framing her sweet smile. "Hello, Captain," Gaila lilts, tipping towards his vertical with spaceborn ease. Her scent hits him then, musky and sweet; he knows she is faithfully taking her pheromone suppressants, but that just makes intoxication a choice.

Pike closes his eyes, hands extended overhead, friction-braking against the ceiling to keep himself in place. "Call me Chris," he tells her once more, his conscience squirming in the pit of his belly. Gaila's a young refugee and a former slave; even though he let her set the venue for this meeting he still has lingering doubts about whether he can trust her own estimate of her response to authority.

Once again Gaila laughs at him, and he looks up to see her starfishing nearer, sleek arms and rounded thighs spread wide, her pubic curls one damp shade darker than those around her head. Her smile is cheerful rather than worshipful as she settles her limbs around him, her skin warm and velvety under his fingers, the edible green of burgeoning summer. "Chris," she murmurs, her lips a centimeter from his. "But you are the Captain."

"When I'm in uniform." Which isn't true, Pike learned long ago to project command no matter what or how little he's wearing. In this moment he tries to throttle it back, not to overwhelm the young woman with him; his fingertips skim the dimples of her lower back, and she arches under the touch, soft curves of breast and belly warm against his skin, but he drifts his hands up her back, not down, as if they have unlimited time for this.

Gaila tilts her head, looking into his eyes as she sets a hand on the wall and pushes off, and as they drift slowly towards the room's center Pike returns her gaze and thinks that perhaps she isn't so easy to awe. "No, you still wear your authority," she tells him, pushing her fingertips into the gray hair at his temple. "I don't think you can take it off, but I like it on you."

"Do you, now." Pike smiles a little as he slides his hand up over her shoulder, where he can feel the thickened skin left by scar removal, though no marks are visible. He pushes his hand up her neck and she presses into the touch, smiling, sighing, hooking her knees behind his thighs. "Do you like people who are in command?"

"I like people who are themselves." Gaila waves her hand sharply, and they stop, suspended in midair; she matches it to her other hand, all her fingers pushing over his scalp, and only reflexive stubbornness keeps him from tipping his head back into her hold. "I like you, Captain," she murmurs over his lips, rubbing her thumbs over the outer corners of his eyes where smile and pain creases have collected. As their mouths slide together she smoothly hitches her hips higher so he feels how wetly hot and ready she is, shimmies gently so all he wants to do is shut his eyes and thrust into her. Thin air beneath his feet and at his back, Pike has nothing to brace against, nothing to hold onto but Gaila, warm in his arms.

One.

"Captain Pike?"

He looks up at the sound of his name in a sweet female voice, and smiles evenly as if his heart didn't just skip a beat. Gaila, no last name, one of eighty-three immigrants being transported by the Yorktown to Earth for naturalization and citizenship proceedings. Prettiest of the lot, says a voice in the back of his head as she smiles back, bright and shining, tilting her head of red curls on her long sleek neck.

Her long green neck, and Pike knows he has a thing for Orions, that the little voice of interest is a missive from points south. He crosses his legs as he lays his padd aside. "Good afternoon, Ms. Gaila, please have a seat. What can I do for you?"

"Have dinner with me," she says directly, smoothing her skirt around her rounded thighs as she sits. Stroking them, quite possibly to slip that sensory image into his head.

"That's a very pleasant offer." Pike narrows his eyes a little, assessing the crimson-haired girl sitting across his desk from him, and feels a bit more uneasy at his lack of reflexive unease. A hundred scenarios of subornation, abduction and espionage begin with a seductive agent of hidden loyalties infiltrating an officer's guard, and as he looks into Gaila's seemingly innocent blue eyes he shouldn't have to force himself to distrust her.

As Pike inhales to decline, he catches a wisp of her richly floral scent; he juggles thoughts of the gentlest phrasing, turning up the ventilation, having the molecular filters in the air vents checked by the Science Lab. Then she straightens her spine a little, her jaw firming though she keeps smiling; something makes him pause, hopefully her intent to speak rather than the biochemical siege she might be mounting, and with a wary eye on his own reactions he nods to prompt her. "I know what you're thinking, Captain," Gaila tells him, her one-handed gesture emphatic and... conservative. She sits almost primly and faces him directly, no tilts or curves to her posture now. "I'm an ordinary psi-null, but I can see you're wondering if someone's using me as bait. May I tell you something about myself?"

Pike waves an encouraging hand, slipping the other beneath his desk to tweak the ventilation flow 25% higher. "Please do."

"I ran away," she says, without preamble, without equivocation, "from an entertainment center. I planned to since they bought me, but I finally left when my friend Anishe sent me a message. One word, 'Go.'" Gaila's eyes unfocus for a moment, shining wetly; Pike is about to conclude, 'what a lovely performance' when she blinks twice and focuses directly on his again. "She'd been bought from the center about... a third of a year before? We were learning Standard together, so we kept corresponding. She wrote me about the tasks her masters set her, the people she seduced so they could be packaged up and turned over to their enemies." Gaila's smile widens with mischief, reminiscent of one of his Engineering ensigns hacking a program or designing some new gadget. "Orion script made the Standard look like gibberish, and then we'd encode it. It was fun..." But the smile fades from her eyes. "And it was stupid. I'm lucky Anishe managed to warn me. I didn't wait for her owners to have Front Office question me, especially since I was already a known troublemaker." Gaila's cheek dimples, but her eyes glint, clear as glacial ice. "So, I know the kind of lure you think I might be, and the kind of people who use those methods. If I wanted to work for them... I don't want to. I came to the Federation instead."

Pike nods again, digesting this for a moment. Gaila's story hangs together well, neither too smooth nor too gappy for verity. It could be entirely true. It could be a marvelous piece of fiction. Even with the increased airflow, her scent still makes his mouth water. She sits expectantly, mouth quiet and eyebrows high, smoothing her skirt out over her knees, waiting with obviously effortful patience that impresses him even as it reminds him that she's not very old.

Of course, neither is he to a Vulcan. He should keep his upright stance, his distance, but he leans in and rests his chin on his knuckles, watching her feathery eyebrows slant down and her plush lips curve up, feeling dark heat curl in his gut. "So that's not your reason," he says, letting the palpably obvious 'if you're telling the truth' hover unsaid, "but you still haven't told me what is."

Gaila blinks, seemingly startled and guileless. "Captain, do you know you're handsome?"

Pike has to smile at that, looking down at his desk, away from her smooth young face. "I've been told so on occasion. As doubtless have many of my crewmen, more often and much more recently."

Gaila makes a vibrantly dismissive noise, flourishing her hand in a wider swing. "None of them is you, Captain. None of them have your experienced eyes." He glances up, and her posture is still vertical, but her head tilts just slightly. "I knew I wanted to talk with you as soon as you welcomed us aboard."

'Talk, all right', Pike thinks wryly, somewhat closer to relief than regret, and makes what he knows he's telling himself is a conscious decision to take the risk. "My eyes, huh?" Pike watches Gaila's eager nod, the little bounce she doesn't quite suppress, and imagines Number One's take on her, pictures One's smile that would be a loud laugh from anyone else. When the Yorktown reaches Earth, the immigrants will disembark and One will return; these two women are unlikely to meet, and he can't quite decide if that's a pity or a salvation. He could give Gaila his contact information dirtside and send her away now, but when they arrive he'll have plenty of ship's business to attend to and she'll have a new life to build, one that doesn't need the looming specter of a sugar daddy.

Also, she breathes so irresistibly. "All right, Gaila." As she does now, sighing and relaxing, her head tipping so her curls flow over her shoulder, her loosened posture accentuating every curve so his mouth goes dry and his pulse kicks up. "Let's have that dinner," Pike manages to say without stammering, keeping his eyes on her face despite the delicate shift of her collarbones, the rounded rise and fall below. "How does 1730 tomorrow sound?"

"Your quarters, Captain?" She leans forward as she asks, tilting her face up; like a flower towards the sun, he thinks, and about leaning over his desk to kiss her, and mentally smacks his inner drooling ensign upside the head.

"That would not be the best idea." Pike tells her and reminds himself. "Meet me on Deck 12, Conference Room 23-C."

"23-C, Deck 12," Gaila repeats, standing smoothly with just a hint of a shimmy. "I'll see you tomorrow, Captain Pike."

Two.

Pike has been drunk a time or three in his life, but he's rarely been this intoxicated, all without even a drop of alcohol. A tricorder sweep confirmed that Gaila's not lying about those pheromone suppressants, but certain parts of him seem not to have gotten that memo, or to have completely disregarded it when she stepped around the table and settled on his lap. She leaned over him, warm and plush against to his chest, her scent wafting from the curls brushing his face, and kissing her was like sipping temptation, swirling through his brain and lighting his blood on fire. Before they started doing something undignified in this hapless conference chair he shifted her back a necessary inch and asked her how she'd spent her time since her escape. She started describing her self-directed course of studies, sketching diagrams on his palm with a warm forefinger and explaining how to render computer languages in different scripts, and he's found himself as helplessly intrigued by the mind unfolding behind her eyes as the face they shine from.

So of course it absolutely had to happen, as he sits here with his hands wrapped around her soft hips, looking up past the sweet curves of breasts and cheeks into her wide blue eyes, that he needs to scold her. "I appreciate the offer, but you can't hack into other people's personal files."

"But it's quite simple, really," Gaila explains mildly, still smiling, her fingers wonderfully mobile on his temple, tracing the lines framing his mouth. "Most people don't bother to modify the standard protections, and Federation message protocols are usually designed in basic --"

"That is not the point." She sounds so appealingly proud of herself, reminding him of a system or three he's broken into in his time, and Pike's tempted to listen to her explain until he can't stand not to kiss her clever lips, but for her own good he can't let it show. He catches her wrists, tugging her distracting hands away from his face, watching her lush mouth go round with surprise. "How would you feel if someone went through yours?"

"I'd be annoyed that my encryption was so easily broken," Gaila answers, tossing her head to swing her curls out of her face, vibrating with confusion on his lap.

She's lived in the Federation for less than two standard years, Pike reminds himself, closing his eyes for one long steadying moment, pressing her soft green hands palm-to-palm between his. "Gaila, it's a violation of privacy," he tells her, and she stares at him uncomprehendingly. "Which is why it's illegal." That makes her eyes widen, red eyebrows arching high. "If someone lodges a complaint against you I would be obliged to remand you to the brig," he adds, and hopes, all the way from places far south of his heart, that she won't try to charm an exception out of him.

She doesn't. She stills completely but for breathing, lashes veiling her eyes for a few seconds, then looks up again. "I wouldn't want you to have to do that," she says soberly. "I suppose this also goes for the Starfleet Intranet?"

That hits Pike with a stab of real worry, lopsidedly equal between his ship and this girl. His hands tighten reflexively on hers, not letting up when she trembles. "What did you break into?"

"I didn't! The security would still be much too difficult. I just--" Despite himself, Pike's lip twitches sideways, and Gaila pauses to watch it. "I was just wondering," she says, curiosity in her voice. "I won't even try, I promise."

"Good." Pike loosens his grip enough to fold his fingers around hers, holding her gaze to make his next words absolutely clear. "Not least because that would be espionage." She sucks in an annoyed breath, and he continues coolly, "The Federation doesn't grant asylum to spies."

She relaxes as she exhales, with a slow nod of understanding. "That... makes sense. I told you, Captain, I'm not anyone's spy. I own myself now, and there are secrets I don't even want to know."

Pike tilts his head a little as her earnest words echo in his ears, as he restrains himself against the pull of her pretty face. An agent isn't likely to lay out her capabilities so clearly, if, of course, she's telling the truth. "I believe you," he hears emerge from his mouth, feeling the same surprise he sees in her blue eyes, an inexplicable certainty in his gut. Experience and conscience prod him to add, "As long as you keep yourself above suspicion. So, no hacking."

Her cheek draws up, puckering with a dimple. "Yes, Captain," she says, eyes bright, "I'll leave everyone's files alone," and the chuckle he's been holding back breaks free.

Pike leans his forehead on her soft shoulder, releasing her hands to slide around his back, curving his around her waist. "Lecture's over, you can call me Chris," he murmurs over the velvety bare skin above her elbow, and brushes a kiss along her forearm, warmed by her reciprocal giggle.

"Then may I ask something?" Gaila wriggles closer, her back supple beneath his arm as her posture eases. "Chris?" She trills the 'r', rolling his name on her tongue, and he stubbornly tries not to think of how else she could roll that pink tongue, or where. "Come fly with me?" Pike looks up, blinking as Gaila's smile flares. "There's a zero-G chamber in the Fitness and Recreation complex, and I've been living planetside for most of the last two years. I'd love it if you joined me."

She waits for his answer almost breathlessly; he nods and her wide-eyed delight makes his cheeks prickle when he hasn't blushed in years. "I'd be honored." Pike tugs his communicator out from beneath the satiny curve of her calf and flips it open as she strokes up the back of his neck. "Pike to Yeoman Cusack," he says as crisply as he can manage with Gaila's fingers pushing warmly through his hair, the smooth inside of her wrist sliding over his temple.

"Cusack to Pike. Two minutes late, Sir. I was about to pull out the battering rams."

"You wouldn't dare." Gaila runs her sharp damp tonguetip along the rim of Pike's ear, and he'll admit he jumps, but his voice does not hitch. "Reserve the Zero-G chamber for me tomorrow, 1400 through 1600?"

"Done, Sir. Having fun?" Pike can hear Cusack's ginger eyebrows waggling through the comm, and Gaila maps the shape of his ear with warm lips and flexing tongue.

"I'll keep you posted," he says, and snaps it shut. Gaila breathes a giggle over the hinge of his jaw, another into his mouth when he turns his head, her tender lips parting invitingly, her tongue a heated flicker over his.

She hums between kisses, low and sweet, and murmurs, "May I take your shirts off?"

Pike's fingers are curling under his hem before he remembers where they are. "This isn't exactly a private location."

"You locked the door." Gaila touches her nose to his, her sparkling eyes filling his vision, her hand tracing over his obliques as if he's already stripped. "And we have things to say that call for the fluency of bare skin."

Pike manages to just look at her for a moment as she shines enticingly at him, eyes and smile bright, cheeks flushing red through green like a ripening apple. One moment, as his pulse beats a hectic tattoo and he feels the warm heft of her through their increasingly irrelevant clothes, until he says, "Computer, confirm door lock, authorization Captain Christopher Pike." He hauls off both shirts as the computer chirps its reply, clears the table with one sweep of his arm as Gaila laughs triumphantly, and ignores the burn in his forearms as he lifts her onto it. Her hair fans out around her head, her eyes glimmering with more than the ceiling lights as she giggles delightedly and slides her hands up to his shoulders; her skirt slips away from her sleek thighs, pooling around her hips as she hitches her knees around his waist and he leans over her for another heady kiss.

Five.

"Lieutenant Gaila," Pike says, looking up into the sunshine. Silhouetted against the bright sky behind her, barely leaning on a cane wrapped in sparkly red-and-gold diffraction tape, the woman before him salutes crisply, her grin gleaming, the light sparking ruby highlights in her garnet hair.

"Admiral Pike," Gaila says, lowering her hand to her cocked hip, and it feels good to return her broad uncomplicated smile, to see her alive and in a neat Operations uniform, even if her long green legs are crisscrossed with sallow patches of new skin. "Today's the day."

"That it is." The thought's a sharper joy, a blade of starlight through his chest, but it doesn't turn his eyes away from the sky. His medical suite's tiny veranda unfortunately lacks seating, but Gaila stands at upright ease beside him, one hand on the back of his chair, the other braced on her cane as she looks up with him.

"I should've brought a telescope," she says at length, as if the sky above them isn't as daylight-blue as her eyes. "But I probably couldn't see them as well as I can think of them, floating in spacedock, maneuvering free." Pike can imagine it too, the ship that was his so briefly now leaving without him; instead he regards Gaila, her glowing face as she looks beyond Earth's atmosphere to the departing Enterprise, her straight-backed posture, every inch a Starfleet officer with the scars to prove it.

Gaila catches him looking, and smiles sweetly as she returns his gaze. "How much longer are you here, Sir?"

"Five more months is my current prognosis, but I hope to better it. It's good to see you up and ready for duty, Mr. Gaila."

She rolls her shoulders in a fluid shrug. "I'm not actually out of here yet either. I told them I needed to look presentable today, to visit the Admiral." Her grin widens with mischief, and he pictures Jim Kirk sharing that look with her, and smiles back. "They gave me six months when I woke up here, but I think I can get that down to four."

"I have every faith that you will." As they chat, a countdown ticks in Pike's mind: crew muster, pre-departure checklists, all the minutiae of readying a starship for flight. "Do you have anything lined up?"

"I'm joining the Enterprise, the next time she's in this sector." Gaila looks up again, the endless sky reflecting in her eyes. "Jim -- Captain Kirk," she corrects herself with wry warm pride, and Pike knows the fit of that feeling, "promised me before he left."

As he nods, Pike rations out one private, possessive thought, not long enough to enumerate a list, about all the beauties that were his that are Kirk's now. For Gaila, he simply smiles. "Congratulations, then. He'll be fortunate to have you."

"Yeah, he will be, everyone's hurting for engineers." Gaila visibly keeps her smile bright. "But I'll be glad to have him, too. He reminds me a little of you." Pike pushes down the dark half of his reaction to that, tilting his head inquiringly, and she continues, "When we met, you were very protective of your ship and everyone on it, even my fellow immigrants and their undefended personal messages." He gives her an attenuated version of a stern look, and she responds with a grin that once would've been a giggle. "You were even protective of me, I remember." The admiration in her voice is a distillation of everything he wanted from captaincy. "I think Jim's going to be a captain like that, too." What he had, what Kirk has now. What Jim has earned, and is earning.

The Enterprise should be going to warp very soon. Pike swallows hard beneath his smile. "It's all part of a captain's duties," he replies, "and I concur with your assessment of Captain Kirk, Lieutenant."

She blinks at him, narrowing her eyes slightly, then slides her hand from his chair to his shoulder, leaning just enough to let him feel her gravity-bound solidity. "Sir," Gaila says crisply, "I think you should know that the only reason I haven't climbed into your lap is that it would violate Starfleet regulations on personal conduct."

Gaila grins as Pike's breath catches and he tips his head back laughing, and he reaches up to mesh their fingers and squeeze her warm hand.

Four.

The Yorktown's projected to reach the Oort Buoys in 13.25 hours, and Terra herself 4.25 hours after that. Pike shuts down his console and leaves his ship to his Second Officer for the rest of Gamma shift, glancing across his quarters to his bed.

Gaila lies facing away from him, a crumpled sheet loosely draped over her curves, his spare padd cradled in her hands and her tousled red hair spilled across his pillow. He watches her reading, warm and naked and focused, and he knows every reason for restraint still applies, why he didn't have their first dinner here, why he hasn't brought her to his quarters before, every lascivious quirk of Cusack's eyebrows, but she makes his standard-issue bed far more than standardly inviting.

She doesn't hear his first three steps, whipping her head up warily on the fourth. He holds his hands up, palms out, and her startle fades quickly into a smile he already knows he's going to miss. "What did you pick?" he asks as he sits, letting himself lean over her.

She props herself up on her elbow. "Post-Introductory Combinatorics." As he peels off his tee of plausible deniability, she wriggles the sheet down like an unveiling, stretching so sleekly that he reaches out to run a hand down her side. "I don't think I'll finish it tonight, though." She shivers under his touch, her eyelids sinking.

"I'll send you the text," he promises absently, hand curving to the plush rise of her hip. She's wonderfully upholstered but he's felt her muscle beneath, tensing under his hands, breathlessly tight around him. Gaila looks up through her lashes and tips sinuously onto her back so his fingers slide across the tender round of her belly, her breasts shifting hypnotically with her breathing, and he's stayed up all night before for lesser reasons than this delectable girl. He thinks of kissing her again, makes himself breathe instead, wants to laugh at himself for how long it takes him to remember what he planned to ask. "Where are you heading after the Welcome Center?" Not that he should invite himself into her Earthside plans, but he figures it's not too much interference to care about what they are.

Gaila leans the padd against Pike's thigh and drapes her hand on his knee, gaze tilting upwards as she thinks. "One of the major settlements, to work on getting my citizenship and some organized education. I have a list of warm cities to try. Hopefully I can settle near one of the oceans, that'll be new."

"What about a desert?" he asks before he can restrain the thought of her in the North American southwest where he grew up. Gaila would be like a walking wildflower out there, her lush colors set off by sere surroundings.

She wrinkles her nose honestly. "Too, too dry," she answers, and he chuckles. "Anyway, I'm not staying on Earth forever. I want a career back in space."

Something in the tilt of her head is so young Pike's heart twists, something in the shine of her eyes is so determined he reaches up to cup her cheek. "Going back to find your friend?" he asks gently.

Gaila blinks at him, and then her eyebrows pull down, her eyes glittering. She doesn't shift from under his touch, though, just stills, so after one stunned moment he pulls his hand away. "Anishe? She's dead, if she's lucky." Gaila rolls onto her belly, towards Pike, her hip pressing to his side as she sets the padd out of the way, but the open invitation of her previous posture closes off as she plants her elbows, props her chin on one hand and continues enlightening him. "I remember the couple who bought her, when they came to the center to shop. I was glad they didn't buy me."

"I see," Pike says, as apologetically as he can, breathing through the whiplash.

Gaila looks at him sharply, contradicting him with her eyes. "Did you think I wanted to go back and try to end slavery, all by myself?" Pike shakes his head, hoping it's the only lie he'll have to tell her. "That would be nice, the way... those stories for children they publish on the Federation public 'net are nice. They end happily, they break scientific laws for pretty effects. Like those. Just as possible."

Her shoulders are tight beneath her tousled hair, and she hasn't looked less like young in all their brief, intense acquaintance. Pike nods, truthfully now, and carefully sets his hand between her shoulderblades. Gaila sighs, her shoulders loosening as he strokes evenly between them, down her spine to her waist and up again, and her voice softens. "It's just that, it would take so much more than just me to free the slaves. Even the Federation sees the Syndicate as a necessary evil." Pike wants to argue that point because it's accurate, and closes his teeth on his tongue instead. "Sometimes we had Starfleet officers at the entertainment center. They were generally easy customers, except for all the pity. Very good tippers."

The bottom of his stomach drops out, leaving a hollow space. "I assume you were debriefed about this?"

"At the Starbase where I claimed asylum," she says evenly. "I couldn't give them names of people or ships, but they thanked me anyway. I like the way the Federation does things." That last is chipper again, but Pike keeps petting her as he wrestles his thoughts, resenting and needing his resurgent doubt as he reevaluates his mental image of Gaila, as he wonders again about hers of him.

So he asks, "Is that why you decided to go through the citizenship process?" instead of 'is that why you picked me?'

Before she answers Gaila shifts under his hand, curling comfortably around him, her arm on his thigh, her other elbow by his instep. "The Syndicate won't bother trying to recapture a Federation citizen. Too much trouble for the potential profit by that point."

Her clear-eyed, sweet-voiced cynicism stings him. "The Federation would never surrender a resident sentient back to slavery, whether or not you're formally a citizen."

"Oh, I know, but an actual citizen they'd fight to recover. That's how I'm betting, anyway." She shrugs with flimsy nonchalance, takes a breath, catches his gaze and says deliberately, "I know you'd fight for me regardless, Captain Chris Pike." His throat closes on words, but Gaila seems to have them all. "You're not like the officers I met at the center, you should know. You're the kind of person I hoped I might meet when I decided to come here."

"What kind is that?" comes out gravelly, but less choked than he feels, as he skims his hand up her sleek throat.

"The kind who is what he says he is." Smiling, she presses her cheek into his palm. "The kind I came here to be."

Pike contemplates Gaila, curled warmly with him, smiling honestly, and there are reasons they shouldn't continue this Earthside but he can't recall a single one. Right now he could kiss her goodnight and send her to his shower, or shift over her and press her into the mattress again. Instead he looks at the curve of her smile against his thumb, the high forehead under her tumbling red curls, and says, "I think you're succeeding. You certainly have a good plan laid out."

She drops her gaze bashfully as she smiles wider, so reminiscent of an ensign or a student under his praise that a throb of belated guilt twists his own smile. "It's finally my life, I might as well figure out a trajectory for it. They didn't realize..." She looks up again, blue eyes steady. "The Front Office didn't realize that all those assorted guests brought in little bits of the galaxy. I want more of it, as much as I can have."

"Then you should have it all." Pike finally understands what he should've seen all along, intuition lurching in his gut like weightlessness as he slides his thumb along her pulse one last time. Cupping her velvety shoulder, he takes her other hand and gently tugs her to sit up, and her brows crinkle together as he inhales deeply and lets go of her. "Gaila," Captain Pike asks, firming up his spine, looking her in the eye, "have you considered applying to Starfleet?"