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Day 4 [1400] - Broken Wing

[Lt. Reggie Suder, Callsign “Gemini” | Fighter Assault Bay  - SCO’s Office| Deck 16 | Vector 02 | USS Theurgy ] Attn: @Nero‍ 

With power came responsibility.  Reggie had learned that the hard way on more than one occasion.  It was all prestige and importance to be given a command, even one over an element or a wing, but that carried a responsibility to one’s subordinates.  In as much as they were under her command she was also responsible for them, for their actions, their inactions, their decisions, their fuck ups. 

And while it gave Lieutenant Reggie Suder absolutely zero pleasure to do so, it was her responsibility to take action and ensure that her wing was under control, a danger only to the enemy, properly reigned in and aligned with the chain of command.  Her wingman had not demonstrated these qualities earlier in the day.

She’d restricted Hale to his quarters and while she’d intended to address this with him after a shower and a change of uniform, her unfortunately timed trip to decontamination and sickbay forced a necessary delay in her timeline. 

Medical had done a fantastic job patching her up and there would be no scarring, but the skin in the affected areas of the acid burn was still pinker and a bit more puffy than she would like, though she had been assured that the irritation wouldn’t last more than a day or two tops before releasing her back to duty.

A duty she now had to perform.

Razor was a good man.  As SCO it was his right and responsibility to know everything that went on in his squadron, both the good and the bad.  IT was also his right to hold the office and handle the discipline himself.  But when Reggie had requested the use of his office to speak confidentially with one of her pilots and declined to elaborate on the details, Razor had granted the favor with no questions asked.  That, at the very least, would permit her the option of keeping this conversation off Hale’s record which, depending on his attitude towards her, she was more than willing to do. 

But if he continued to cop the attitude with her that he showed in the cockpit, she might just have to drop the hammer on him.  It was truly up to Hale.

She took the SCO’s seat behind the desk feeling less like a wing commander about to dicipline her wingman, and more like an instructor about to dress down a cadet.

“Lieutenant Suder to Lieutenant JG Hale,” she said as she tapped her communicator, her tone formal; official.  “Report to the SCO’s office immediately.”

Re: Day 4 [1400] - Broken Wing

Reply #1 –
[ Lt. JG Logan Hale, callsign "Wraith"| Fighter Assault Bay  - SCO’s Office| Deck 16 | Vector 02 | USS Theurgy] Attn: @P.C. Haring
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That Logan was upset was an understatement. He was burning with anger. Alith had locked him out of his own fighter and taken control of the small craft. She broke off the attack on the Klingons and flew them both back to the Theurgy. He screamed his head off. Logan thought it was a mistake to let the Klingons live. They were attacking them as they trained. Any attempt to meet them with kindness was merely evidence of one’s own weakness. A weakness they could no longer afford. A weakness Logan no longer wanted to afford. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He had lost too much to the Klingons.

So, it came as little surprise that he was confined to his quarters for the time being. Logan paced his quarters a dozen times. Again and again, he alternated between slow pacing, quick turns, and sitting in the corner with his face buried in his hands. He felt his chest quiver and the sorrow for his friends wouldn't go away. He felt the frustration inside him. There was nothing he could do about it. His friends were dead. He was the last one aboard the ship who really knew about the Valravn, and they didn't begrudge him command of the Flight Element.

By now, Logan didn't know how many times he had walked through his small quarters. He just wondered how durable the floor was. A deep rut must have been driven into the floor already, but the carpet still shone in that steel gray he had found when he moved in. A move-in that was also only a few weeks ago. Logan couldn't help but think that it was he who had abandoned his friends when they did the right thing and defected to the Theurgy. He had been too afraid of what might happen. After all, he had only just found his way back to Starfleet.

And now he was faced with a pile of shards. A pile of broken pieces that once must have been his life. He drew the consequences from the death of a comrade and left the fleet. He managed as a Cargo Runner, only to be betrayed by supposed friends and take revenge on them. He went back to the fleet, only to become the traitor himself and abandon his friends. Then everything changed again, and he was allowed to join them again, only to lose them again. But this time for good at the hands of the Klingons. His little sister in mind... Alissa... Logan saw her fighter being slammed against that rock, every time he closed his eyes. He saw her crushed skull over and over again as her body was recovered by the Oneida. They were images he would never get rid of. Images that mingled with all those of his other dead friends.

Logan caught himself staring into his teary eyes in the mirror. His fingers ached. He had cramped up. Logan sniffled. It was so damn unfair. He washed his face and realized he was still wearing his pilot suit. He went to change, but as he undid the first buckles, he heard Suder's voice over the internal radio. She was ordering him into the SCO's office. "Great." he whispered, annoyed. "Now I have to deal with her, too." So, he left the suit on and went on his way.

A little later, the door to the squadron commander's office closed behind him with a hush. He stood in front of the desk. The woman sitting behind it looked more like the principal of a school, and Logan wondered what the spectacle was all about. If she was trying to intimidate him, it wasn't a good idea. Logan was out for confrontation. He dropped his arms to his hips. "So? Here I am. Let's get this over with."

Re: Day 4 [1400] - Broken Wing

Reply #2 –
[Lt. Reggie Suder, Callsign “Gemini” | Fighter Assault Bay  - SCO’s Office| Deck 16 | Vector 02 | USS Theurgy ] Attn: @Nero‍ 

Reggie sensed him coming, a dark cloud on the horizon of an otherwise beautiful day approaching, drawing closer and threatening to storm.  She sensed his anger, his frustration, his desperiation, but she could not sort out the sources from which these feelings came.  Obviously the altercation with the Klingon’s had triggered something, and she would have been stupid not to understand that he felt some resentment of being assigned as her wingman, being forced to break in a wing commander who did not know the ship she flew half as well as he did. 

But there was more there, she realized.  Something beyond the obvious, beyond the immediate.  Among the storm of emotions she sensed from Logan, it was elusive, like a woodland creature hiding from detection, only to pop it’s head out every so often to see if the coast was clear.  It took more than a few tries before she could identify it.

Grief.

Almost immediately the image she had drawn of Logan vanished in her mind only to be replaced by a blank page, ready for a new image a new interpretation, one that she could not yet identify much less illustrate and as he walked into the SCO’s office, his hands set defiantly on his hips, accentuating the bite in his demand to ‘get this over with’, Reggie knew she had adopted the wrong approach by utilizing the authoritarian approach to this.  She’d spent way too much time trying to break flight cadets.. 

She stood and motioned to the guest chairs in the room.  “Come in please, Logan.  Sit down?”

Reggie kept her tone soft, kind, inviting.  She did not know what Logan would do with the invitation, but for her part, she pulled the second guest chair and sat herself down, so that if he chose to reciprocate, the two could talk face to face without the authoritative look of a desk between them.

Once Logan made whatever decision he would make, Reggie started the conversation. “Obviously,” she started, again keeping her tone calm, and welcoming, “we have some things to discuss.  I’m not going to yell and berate you about the incident with the Klingon ship, but I am going to ask you what was going through your mind?  I get the impression something drove you to that action, something beyond the awkwardness of my being positioned over you in the squadron.”

Re: Day 4 [1400] - Broken Wing

Reply #3 –
[ Lt. JG Logan Hale, callsign "Wraith"| Fighter Assault Bay  - SCO’s Office| Deck 16 | Vector 02 | USS Theurgy] Attn: @P.C. Haring
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For now, Logan refused to sit down. Slight confusion had spread through him. He tried to grasp why the woman in front of him suddenly changed tactics and, instead of the authoritarian style she was already using to confine Logan to his quarters, was now taking the compassionate approach.  She said she didn't want to lecture him. Instead, she said she wanted to know what was going on in his head at that point in time. However, he didn't trust her. There was obviously something going on here and all of this was just serving to confuse him.

"You want to know what was going on?" hissed Logan between clenched teeth. His jaw ached. He ground his teeth. "I will not have Klingons attacking my comrades unchallenged." The pilot angrily pushed himself off the back of the vacant chair. "That's what was going on, Reggie, or is it lieutenant again now?"

"What the hell was that about? A pilot who freezes when a woman talks to him, a hotshot who can only barely control his craft, you and your Rio on the Valravn, both inexperienced and a fully armed Klingon cruiser." He pointed at Reggie and made a gesture that included her RIO. "Sorry, but the odds were clearly in the cruiser's favor, and I acted to save my people. For me to have to justify it now is ridiculous. We were on a training flight. The group was scattered around the compound. Easy pickings, then."

Finally, the pilot did sit down. He rested his arms on the chair and gripped the edges. Logan sighed heavily. "So, what now? Are you going to let me keep flying and doing my job, or are you going to clip my wings?" It didn't matter what happened or had happened. In the end, the answer would come down to a simple yes or no.

Re: Day 4 [1400] - Broken Wing

Reply #4 –
[Lt. Reggie Suder, Callsign “Gemini” | Fighter Assault Bay  - SCO’s Office| Deck 16 | Vector 02 | USS Theurgy ] Attn: @Nero‍ 

Things were never as easy as black and white.  Not any more.  Not in a long… very long time.  It didn’t take a telepath to see how Logan was baiting her.  His snide comment about Reggie vs Lieutenant, his commentary about the lack of skill of his fellow pilots, his jab at her and Athen.  He was spoiling for a fight.  Yes, he wanted to be heard, who wouldn’t, but right now his anger was clouding any sense of tact he might have had and still clamped down like a hard shell covering the sense of grief, which seemed as though it might be a root cause of all of this.

You know, she thought to herself, if piloting doesn’t work out, maybe I should become a counselor.

She shuddered at the thought.

“Well,” she said, her voice still calm and casual as it had been before.  She would not provoke the direct fight he seemed to want so bad.  “Honestly, I haven’t decided.”
She reached over to the desk and grabbed the PADD that she’d been working with.  Keying a sequence into the unit, the room’s holo emitters hummed to life as a wireframe model of the Klingon cruiser appeared followed quickly by a similiar representation of wolves 13 through 16 as they were flying when they first encountered the ship.


“I wanted to see if I had missed anything duiring that encounter, so while I was in sickbay getting the burns to my face treated, I had Thea re-construct the engagement.  This is a composit of all the sensor data taken by our four ships.”

She pressed the advance key on the PADD, and the majority of the Klingon wireframe turned red.

“Red sections indicate destroyed or offline systems.  Based on data we had at the time, the cruisers warp and impulse engines were offline, only two disruptor arrays were online and even those were operating at a fraction of their full potential and their hull integrity is an absolute mess.”

She paused a moment.  “Normally I’d agree with you that one cruiser against four fighters is not the best of odds, but given it’s weakened state, we engaged.”
Reggie let the animation play out, narrating as she went.  “At this point, Chaos and Dixiebee engage and each take out one of the last two remaining disruptor arrays.”
She refrained from any snide commentary about how Logan had described his fellow pilots.  As she finished her narration the entire wireframe of the klingon crusier turned red, indicating it had been fully disabled.

“Now,” she said, “based on what I saw out there and what the analysis here shows, those two precision strikes fully disabled the Klingon vessel.”
She turned back to Logan. 

“As I said, this data was composited from the sensor logs of all four of us, and our squadron network was operational, so we all had access to this data in real time during the engagement.  So, what I would like to know is what, if anything, you saw that I may have missed.”

It was important that she not accuse him directly, that she not attack him, but that she approach him from a more collaborative angle.  If he opened up a little, let his defenses down and showed that he was willing to work with her, then they might be able to get to the root of the matter together as well.

Re: Day 4 [1400] - Broken Wing

Reply #5 –
[ Lt. JG Logan Hale, callsign "Wraith"| Fighter Assault Bay  - SCO’s Office| Deck 16 | Vector 02 | USS Theurgy] Attn: @P.C. Haring
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"It's that simple. Right?" replied Logan bitterly. He looked at the wireframe model of the Klingon cruiser. It rotated slowly on its axis on the table in front of him. Critical systems were marked with a glowing red and according to the analysis, the ship had been only partially combat ready when it encountered the squadron of fighters and threatened them. In hindsight, Logan saw that, too.

"But to me, the situation presented itself as having a Klingon cruiser there and four fighters here with minimal armament and inexperienced pilots at the stick on the other side." Logan wrinkled his nose. "From my point of view, we were at a disadvantage. Despite the heavy damage to the cruiser has already sustained. You can fire a torpedo salvo by hand, you know?" He swallowed hard. "And that was something to be avoided. I wasn't going to let that happen again."

Logan thought back to the battle with the Klingon cruiser just before the Oneida arrived. He remembered it all too well. They damaged the cruiser, rendering it nearly unable to maneuver. Alessia and he shot up the ship's communications arrays and destroyed one of the two warp nacelles. The pilot had been convinced that they would drag themselves home battered. But he was quickly proven wrong. The Klingons followed them and engaged them in combat. At that point, they had to protect Captain Ives' shuttle and Chancellor Martok. He and Alessia had been the only escorts because only the Valravn were able to keep up with the shuttle at high warp speeds.

The cruiser engaged them and opened fire. They had all taken cover in an asteroid field, like the Praxis debris field now, and used the boulders for cover as best they could. The two Federation pilots didn't do too badly and put the Klingons under good pressure. They bought the shuttle the necessary time. But then the cruiser fired a full spread salvo of torpedoes. They slammed into the surrounding rocks and Logan had trouble dodging the fire, torpedoes and bursting rock.

"And then I saw them. Alith announced the arrival of the USS Oneida. But my eyes were fixed only on the drifting wreckage. The cockpit had been smashed in by flying rock. And I can still see my sister waving at me. I could see her eyes through the visor of her helmet, but there was no visor anymore. I could actually see her eyes, glazed over, looking off into the distance. Dead."

Logan hadn't realized how he'd gotten into talking. At some point, he must have started telling his story. "She actually waved at me, Reggie. Like Captain Ahab in that stupid novelle of Moby Dick. I'll never forget that picture." He wiped tears from his eyes.

After a long pause in which there was only silence and his light sobbing, he continued. "Well. I didn't want this to happen again. Not if I could help it. I wanted to protect you all, and I didn't want to make the same mistake I made with the other cruiser. I wanted to solve the problem once and for all and for good."

He leaned back in his chair. His gaze wandered to the ceiling. It was the first time Logan had opened to anyone. Yet somehow it felt good to get the whole thing off his chest.

Re: Day 4 [1400] - Broken Wing

Reply #6 –
[Lt. Reggie Suder, Callsign “Gemini” | Fighter Assault Bay  - SCO’s Office| Deck 16 | Vector 02 | USS Theurgy ] Attn: @Nero‍ 

Reggie let a silent sigh escape her as her own comprehension settled in.  He’d lost someone close to him prior to her joining the squad, to the Klingons.  It was the only thing that made sense given his rationale and his repeated use of the word ‘again’

“I’m so sorry, Logan,” she said softly.  He didn’t seem to hear her as he continued to speak of her…his sister.  There was not much in the world that Reggie would claim she fully understood when it came to the feelings of another person.  However the loss of a sibling…that she understood better than most.

He had started talking in the middle of his thought process so there was much to the lead in she didn’t know.  Those unfamiliar with this kind of thing might try to step in and ask him to go back to start from the top. But she had seen this in more than a few pilots during the war, herself included.

So, she let him continue and when he came to the inevitable conclusion, she allowed a silent moment to hang between them.

“Logan, I am sorry for your loss.  I truly am.”

Her voice left no hint of judgement or patronization.  Just the true empathy for the loss.

“I had no idea,” she continued.

He should have told her from the start that he was dealing with this loss.  He should have been forthright and volunteered that.  Any omisison like that not only put him at risk to say nothing about her and the rest of the flight.  Even so, she understood and if she were being fully honest with herself, she wasn’t sure if she’d be forthcoming if the situation was reversed. 

No.  The time for recrimination and all that was not now.  Compassion was needed now.

“Tell me about your sister?”

Re: Day 4 [1400] - Broken Wing

Reply #7 –
[ Lt. JG Logan Hale, callsign "Wraith"| Fighter Assault Bay  - SCO’s Office| Deck 16 | Vector 02 | USS Theurgy] Attn: @P.C. Haring
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Logan laughed dryly when Reggie asked him to tell her about his sister. "Alessia Garcia wasn't my sister in the biological sense. More like one in spirit," he began. It wasn't hard for him to tell from her. He recalled how he had met her back when he rejoined Starfleet after his excursion into smuggling and started as a test pilot for the brand new Valravn warp fighters. "She gave me the cold shoulder from the beginning. I was a competitor to her, not a friend. Every time I tried to approach her; she blew me off hard. She didn't want anything to do with me at first."

Logan sat down a little more comfortably and began undoing and unbuckling the buckles and clasps of his EVA suit. By now he felt the weight of the armor of lightweight materials pressing down on his shoulders. With a quiet grunt, he first freed himself from his neck piece, to which the helmet could be connected to the chest plate.

"We kept stealing each other's records. Liliana Walton, our boss, had to really keep us apart so we didn't clash. And what fights we had. Never physical though. We were at each other's throats over every little thing, and I do mean 'little things'. 'You're standing three centimeters too far to the left' 'Your aftershave stinks like hell' and I wasn't even wearing aftershave then, because I was just trimming my beard. We really fought a lot. Then, one night, I found her crying on the sofa of our casino. I asked her what was wrong, without even a hint of spite or sarcasm. I honestly wanted to know what was wrong with her, because I didn't know her that way. I handed her a beer and sank down next to her on the sofa. It took what felt like an eternity before she told me she'd gotten news of her father's death."

Logan unfastened the armored sleeves from the breastplate and pulled his arms out one by one. He placed them on the table next to the collar and began opening the breastplate.

"I didn't say anything. I didn't know what to say and there was nothing I could say. I just sat there and stared into the void. Until, what felt like another eternity later, I put a hand on her shoulder to show she wasn't alone.

The time until the funeral was somehow strange. Alessia hadn't told anyone else, except Liliana, and asked that it would stay between the three of us. We agreed, and to this day I haven't told anyone else." Logan smiled bitterly. "Finally, she asked me to accompany her to the funeral. I asked no questions and agreed immediately. Ever attended a Spanish funeral? It's an experience, I can tell you that, Reggie.

Anyway, the relationship between Alessia and me had changed fundamentally. In the weeks that followed, the others in our unit thought we had something going on. It was funny, but a friendship definitively developed between Alessia and me. A real friendship and over time I began to think of her more as my little sister. Any shenanigans we got up to, we got up to together. Our petty squabbles were a thing of the past and when we did argue, it was about sports, and which was the better team."

He lifted the breastplate and squeezed out to the side. He let the armor slide slowly and gently to the side of his chair on the floor. Then Logan tried to get some air by grabbing his shirt and shaking it, which actually provided a brief cooling.

"Ever since her father's funeral, we were practically inseparable. We did a lot of things together and the rest we told each other. You could find us in the crew mess or in the gym in the evenings. Our flying performance increased tremendously as we encouraged rather than hindered each other, and I remember what she said to me when I brought her back home that day. 'Always follow your heart. No matter where your path takes you, even if you are not sure. Your heart will never lead you astray.'"

Logan's face now drew a bittersweet but satisfied smile. He was sitting comfortably in his chair by now. He grabbed a PADD and logged in, producing a picture of them both just made recently.

"She was a great pilot, was quite passably proficient in a few martial arts, and had a fantastic sense of humor. However, her taste in books could be better."

All this time he avoided eye contact with the Betazoid, until now. Now he looked directly at her.
"I miss her dearly, Reggie. And I really hate waking up in the morning knowing she isn’t there anymore. It hurts.”

Re: Day 4 [1400] - Broken Wing

Reply #8 –
[Lt. Reggie Suder, Callsign “Gemini” | Fighter Assault Bay  - SCO’s Office| Deck 16 | Vector 02 | USS Theurgy ] Attn: @Nero‍

Reggie sat quietly as she took in Logan’s recounting of his relationship with Garcia.  Reggie, obviously had not known the woman, but from the way he described her, the Betazoid certainly wished she would have.  There was something special about the kind of relationship between two people that remained plutonic but was, in some ways, more intimate than any physical relationship could hope to be.  She looked at the image Logan had to show her and she understood what she had meant to him.

She felt his loss as he spoke of her, in some cases literally as her Betazoid senses picked up on his thoughts and feelings. For once, she wasn’t reaching out with her mind, but rather she received and picked up what he was pushing out and in both the literal and figurative sense, she knew exactly how he felt.

Reggie dared not say those words to him, though, as they could be rather off putting and she often never said those words even in a figurative meaning.  But between the telepathic reception, and her own losses oh so many losses during the War, she was almost certain she knew exactly what he was going through.

“…And then we encounter another badly damaged Klingon cruiser,” Reggie said when Logan had finished.  She did not offer a direct response to him and his sense of loss.  Any such response would be insufficient and insignificant. “And you find yourself reliving her death all over again.”

She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she had been holding.

“I can certainly understand and empathize with what must have been going through your mind in that moment.”

She spared him the pedantic bullshit of a counselor; psychiatric buzz phrases like ‘it’s never easy’ or ‘it’s not your fault that you lived’ or the ever popular, ‘you need to put that behind you and move on’.

Reggie knew she was being too hard on the counseling staff in her past.  They did the best they could, and she had to admit that in some key ways, they had helped her.  But they were counselors and no matter how much training and expertise they had, they could not even begin to understand unless they had been a part of a squadron.  It made Reggie wonder why the Corps hadn’t considered cross training some of their pilots in counseling.  But she digressed.

It still left the issue of what to do about the incident.  Reggie understood, forgave, and was more than willing to overlook the incident.  She doubted the Klingons would know the difference, but she and Logan had not been the only to Wolves out there, and damage had been done to their ships.  Damage that would need to be accounted for in the report.

“I have to file a report on what happened out there,” she said, her tone soft and comforting. She didn’t want to sound confrontational with him, but at the same time, he had to know that the paperwork needed to be sorted.  “With the damage to our ships, and Dixiebee and Chaos as witnesses, I can't pretend nothing happened without more questions coming up.”

She paused, only long enough to take a breath.  She had no desire to drag this out and make him sweat it.

“That said, I’m going to put in my report that the error was mine, and due to an array malfunction.  Due to interference from the debris field, you thought you heard me order deadly force against the Klingon ship.  You attempted to clarify the instruction, but did so on a private channel in order to avoid the appearance of insubordination.  I was not monitoring this channel, so without clarification to the contrary, you carried out my orders as you understood them and it wasn’t until you received the stand down order from me that we realized the problem.”

She would fall on the sword for his problem.  She could take it.  As a pilot still learning the ins and outs of the Valravn platform, she could easily argue that she wasn’t as familiar with the comm system and thought she was monitoring the private channel between her and her wingman. Dixiebee and Chaos wouldn’t know the difference, though Athen and Hunter would need to buy in for this to work.

“I’ll talk to Athen about it.  He'll be on board.  He likes you.  At the same time, I suggest you talk to Hunter and it'll go no farther than the four of us.  There are two conditions however.”

She let that hang between them.  Things could not always come free, unfortunately, and even though the official record would put the blame on her, they both knew he had lost his objectivity and permitted his emotional entanglement to override his better judgment.  For that, there had to be some penance, even if it stayed just between the two of them.

Re: Day 4 [1400] - Broken Wing

Reply #9 –
[ Lt. JG Logan Hale, callsign "Wraith"| Fighter Assault Bay  - SCO’s Office| Deck 16 | Vector 02 | USS Theurgy] Attn: @P.C. Haring
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Logan was glad that Reggie didn't say much. Somehow it was like back then, only now he was in Alessia's place and Reggie was in his. Now he could empathize with how she must have felt back then. The emptiness that was inside and a sudden feeling of connection with someone you would have loved to throw through an airlock just a few seconds before. Reggie was there when he broke, and she thankfully didn't bother to comfort him with condolences.

However, she did make it clear to him that as his supervisor, she had to file a report. The pilot had to give her credit for trying to cover for Logan and for being willing to take the risk to do so. That was not a given and was a testament to her character. She quickly came up with a halfway coherent story but made it clear that the success of that story depended on the other members of her team going along with it. Logan's mind began to work. He let the various possibilities run through his head. A lot depended on no one blabbing, and also on others not looking too closely. That was a lot of unpredictable factors and if it did go wrong, she would have to take the brunt for his misbehavior.

"No." he then said firmly. "I mean, thanks for wanting to do this for me, even though I haven't exactly made things easy for you lately, but no, thank you. I'll have to deal with that myself." Logan smiled a pained smile. His eyes were red, and his voice trembled a little. "The Klingons won't make a fuss about it. On the contrary, we fought them and won fairly and square. The fact that I didn't listen to you in the process is entirely my own fault. It wouldn't be the first time I've been court-martialed. Either way. I will stand up for my mistake, Reggie. Please write your report truthfully. Don't leave anything out. I won't hold it against you.”

Logan grabbed his things off the floor and stood up. "Nonetheless, that was a great gesture on your part. I won't forget it. Thank you." Logan didn't wait for her to dismiss him but ended the conversation at that point. He had come to know Reggie as someone who only wanted his best, someone who wanted to take care of her team. Even if she couldn't replace Alessia - because no one ever could - she at least seemed to have the right shoes to fill in the shoes of Liliana ,Meerkat’ Walton, and Logan respected that. He had developed newfound respect for the woman and would probably act less like an asshole in the future.

Re: Day 4 [1400] - Broken Wing

Reply #10 –
[Lt. Reggie Suder, Callsign “Gemini” | Fighter Assault Bay  - SCO’s Office| Deck 16 | Vector 02 | USS Theurgy ] Attn: @Nero‍ 

Reggie sat back in the seat as Logan excused himself.  She might have been upset over the breach of protocol, but given how emotionally difficult this conversation had been for him, she did not begrudge his desire for a quick and unrestrained exit from the meeting.  Besides, Reggie hadn’t really been one for useless protocol herself and waiting for a formal dismissal in a conversation like this seemed about as useless as could be.

Still there was the matter of the mission report.  She’d offered to work with him to minimize the impact of the incident, and when he’d declined the offer, chosen to take responsibility up to and including a potential court martial, her own respect for him skyrocketed. 

The Wolves needed him.  She needed him.  Now more than ever and despite his willingness to take his licks, she was not going to throw him to the well… the wolves.  Given that the Klingons were not likely to make a case of it, she suspected that the risk to Logan would drop to zero once she squared it with the SCO.  It was a simple matter really, she’d tell him about the incident, minimize it’s impact, chalk it up to a miscommunication, accept responsibility and cite her getting used to the equipment and the leadership role she had been given.  She would promise to put in more simulator time and to review the various command protocols, things she was planning to do anyway.  But it would ultimately end there.

Still she was concerned for Logan.  Not for his ability or his regret over the incident, but rather over his head.  Had he stayed long enough, she would have encouraged him to talk to someone, anyone on board.  Formally, informally, a member of the squadron, a counselor, it didn’t matter.  Just someone.  She made a mental note to mention it to him at an appropriate time later on.

Her wing was a bit broken.  All of them in their own way but they were her wing and despite their hang-ups she was proud of the way they had acquitted themselves during the flight.  Something, she decided, to build on.

-FIN-
 
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