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Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Day 01 [2100hrs] When All is Stretched Thin
Last post by Ellen Fitz -The ambassador said merchant the way a man says a word he's rehearsed too many times to believe anymore, and the Reman honor guard traded a glance that said they didn't believe it either. No one on this planet would believe it. Starfleet's idea of subtlety was a coat cut a season out of Federation fashion and a briefcase full of trade concessions nobody asked for, and the fact that it was working at all said less about the disguise than about how tired everyone here had grown of pretending politics were anything but a knife with a bow tied round the handle.
Hirek stood two paces behind the Andorian diplomat's left shoulder for the better part of four hours, translating where translation wasn't strictly needed, correcting nothing, offering nothing, letting the woman walk herself in slow circles around a council that had learned distrust from experts. The Reman and Romuluan delegates watched all of it with the stillness of those who'd spent centuries being told to wait in the dark.
Tal'Aura was dead. What had lived inside her — what had used her hands to sign the treaties and her voice to swear the oaths while the war ground on beneath — wasn't so easily buried. Hirek had spent thirty years learning to read the seams in his own people's faces, the places where the mask didn't quite meet the skin, and he'd learned recently that some of those seams ran deeper than any training had prepared him for. The Infested wore whoever was useful and discarded whoever wasn't, no announcement, no warning.
Until they are found. All of them. Rooted out and burned down to the marrow.
And here he was, standing at a merchant's elbow while career diplomats congratulated themselves on the historic first steps of a government that didn't yet know what it would become.
He excused himself with the correct degree of deference — a murmured word to the aide, a nod to the diplomat that promised nothing and delivered less — and didn't look back to see if anyone questioned it. No one would. He'd filed the leave request with Stark: family, the islands, a debt of presence long overdue. Approved without comment. No one on the Theurgy begrudged a man wanting to know if his mother still drew breath. Because truth was never offered in Romulan communication.
The transport office sat three streets down from the consulate, between a shuttered apothecary and a noodle stall that had somehow outlasted two governments and a war. Hirek let his stride lengthen once he was clear of watching eyes. The air still smelled the way it always had — stone dust and cold rain, and underneath it something green trying to survive the concrete. He gave his name to the clerk, arranged for a private craft rather than the public lines and stood turning a credit chit over in his fingers while she worked.
Stay and finish it. Or go and start again.
It had been circling since the Triangle, since he'd watched his own service to Starfleet Intelligence curdle into something closer to belonging and hadn't decided whether to trust that or distrust himself for feeling it. The Tal Shi'ar were bleeding — not dead, they were never simply dead, but staggered and exposed in a way he hadn't seen in his lifetime. A man could spend that exposure wisely. Could go home and put his hands to the actual shape of Romulan freedom instead of playing translator for a Federation that thought a bow tie made a spy invisible.
Or he could go back to the Theurgy, to the slow grinding work of hunting parasites through the dark, and trust that saving the galaxy would save Romulus too, eventually, in its own time, on someone else's schedule.
He hadn't settled which coward's math he preferred.
The clerk slid the authorization across the counter, and he was reaching for it when he saw her.
Talia stood near the far wall in her flight suit. He hadn't clocked her as part of the escort roster until this moment, hadn't thought of her at all in the mental press of ambassadors and Infested and a planet trying to remember how to be whole — and that omission struck him as strange. They hadn't spoken since the Triangle. Since his quarters, and the silence that came after, whatever they'd called it that wasn't quite goodbye.
Every instinct said to cross the space and needle her the way he always had — Shadow, still alive, I see — fold this back into a shape they both knew how to hold. It would cost him nothing.
It would also cheapen what they'd survived, and he found he didn't have that in him today. He took the authorization, folded it once, and crossed the space — not toward her, just past.
"I'm going to the islands," he said, without breaking stride. "There's a seat on the transport, if you want it." He didn't wait for her answer. He kept walking and left the rest to her.