33. Songbird #2
Tavi settled beside her, putting his arm around her the best the geometry would allow. The mechanics of a three-foot-ten Tessarae hugging a seated human were faintly ridiculous. But, it was one of the best hugs she'd had in a long time. Right up there with Maren's from just twenty minutes ago.
"You do nothing, Charlie," Tavi replied. He paused. "You leave your feelings right where they are. You'll figure out what to do with them at the right time, I'm sure of it."
"Oh yeah?" Charlie asked incredulously.
"Yeah, sure!" Tavi stressed. "I mean, who really knows, though, right?"
He laughed, soft, and she felt it more than she heard it, his shoulder against her side. Charlie gave him a small, shy smile, before it fell. She saw Tavi catch the flicker. Then, she let her eyes close as she spoke again.
"I think I'm in trouble," she said, barely above a whisper. It felt big to say what she'd been holding in all this time.
Tavi took a deep breath against her before he slowly nodded.
"Yeah," he said. "But it sounds like good trouble."
"Good trouble?" Charlie repeated, laughing a little at the sheer absurdity of it. Of all of it, frankly. Especially of falling for a starship captain on the far side of everything she'd ever known. "What could possibly be good trouble?"
Tavi smiled.
"I have no fucking idea. But it could be fun to find out."
They laughed, both of them, and it loosened something in her chest she'd been clenching for weeks.
Tavi tightened his arm around her and kissed the top of her head as she leaned into him, brief and warm, the gesture of someone who couldn't reach her forehead when they stood next to one another but had never once let that stop him. This was how Tavi held his people.
"You'll be okay, kid."
"You're younger than me."
"I only look younger than you, Spark Plug. In reality, everyone's younger than me. Tessarae live a very long time, and I've been old since I was twelve in Tessarae years."
“And how many Earth years is twelve Tessarae years?”
“Well, one Tessarae year is equal to thirteen and a half Earth years.”
Charlie’s eyes went wide. “Holy shit, you are older than me!”
Tavi laughed. "Yeah, but you're also sitting on the floor in Engineering listening to Robbie Dupree on repeat at 2300. I'm allowed to call you kid."
Charlie leaned her head against his. And they stayed there for a while, two engineers on the floor of the department they ran together now alongside their other good friend.
And now, she had let loose what she was holding in for so long in the quiet with the unspoken promise that Tavi would never let go.
The library was Orion's but walking into it always made the knots in Charlie's shoulders quietly let go. It's just what the library did.
Charlie, Tavi, and Maren had come to tell Orion about the co-chief appointment, since Orion and his library were where good news went on this ship. Nobody would tell you to, you would just end up there when something mattered.
Tavi got about four words in before he started narrating the whole scene with his hands. It was a sight to watch Maren, who had already told Tavi twice that his account was "embellished," let him tell it that way anyway.
Orion listened with all his attention, and when Tavi finished, he was quiet for a moment.
"The three of you, together," he said. "Yes, that's right. That is how it should be for a long, long time." He looked at Charlie with warmth and patience when he said it. "The captain agreed to this readily, I assume."
"She did," Charlie said. "No argument."
"No," Orion said, turning back to the shelf he'd been tending. "She wouldn't have." He paused. "It has been a good season for her. It would be just fine for that to continue into next week."
"Next week?" Tavi asked.
Orion hummed.
"What's next week?" Charlie pushed.
Orion looked at the three of them. "Why, it's her birthday, of course."
Charlie stopped breathing. Reyna's birthday was next week?
"On the eighteenth. It'll be her seventy-fifth, too," Orion said lightly.
"Her... seventy-fifth," Charlie repeated.
It didn't come as a complete shock to Charlie.
She knew the math, and had since her first week on the Emberkind, the whole Kaelari two-hundred-year lifespan, the woman who looked thirty-something and wasn't. So it wasn't the number that made Charlie pause.
Seventy-five was early adulthood for a Kaelari.
It was that not a single person on board the ship had said a word about their Captain's milestone birthday next week.
"Does the crew do anything for it?" Charlie asked.
"No, but that is not entirely due to the crew," Orion explained, his hand stilling on the shelf.
"The Captain herself does not permit a fuss.
There is always a mission, or a repair, or a crew member who needs her more than a calendar does.
" He breathed a deep sigh. "I do not believe she has let a single birthday of hers on this ship be about her. "
That landed somewhere deep under Charlie's ribs and stuck like glue. A woman who ran toward every fire on this ship, who put herself between her crew and every dangerous event the universe threw at the Emberkind, apparently could not be talked into letting one single day be hers.
Charlie knew the type. She'd been raised by two of the best ones.
"Nope," Charlie said. "That does not pass the sniff test. Not this year, dammit."
"The sniff test?" Tavi asked, completely distracted by Charlie's words instead of the whole point.
"It's an Earth idiom," Charlie tried to explain quickly. "Essentially, it's a way humans tell if their food is bad or not. A sniff test. If it smells bad, toss it. If it smells fine, it's still good to eat."
"Well then, what the hell does it have to do with birthdays?"
"Nothing," Charlie sighed. "I'm just saying... you know what? It's not important. What is important is that we need to do something."
Charlie felt the plan arrive fully formed and ready to build.
Tavi was already grinning. "Oh, I know that look. We are so doing something."
"Let's hide it in an Earth Night," Charlie said, talking fast as everything filled in.
"The biggest one we've ever thrown. Food and music and the whole crew, the works.
A real, bona fide birthday party. It can be like the kinds we'd throw back on Earth, with streamers and too much cake and somebody probably crying in the punch by the end. "
"It'll be Borran," Tavi said.
"What are streamers?" Maren asked with the biggest grin on her face.
"The party is happening," Charlie said, making it final. "For her."
A hush fell over them.
"But Charlie," Maren said as her shimmer went bright. "She does not permit fuss." Yet despite Maren's words, Charlie saw the smile fighting against Maren's face.
"Yeah, but see? That's the beauty of a surprise, Maren. She doesn't get a vote." Charlie winked at Maren, who laughed softly, before turning to Orion. "She can't know, though. About any of it, Orion."
"I understand, and I agree," Orion replied.
Charlie thought about the facts she had before whipping around to Tavi. "Does she know we know it's her birthday?"
"I doubt it, she doesn't tell anyone," Tavi answered. "No one in Engineering knows."
"I don't believe it has come up," Orion said.
"Good. We're going to keep it that way."
Charlie began cataloguing the whole event, handing out jobs in her head before she'd even finished a thought.
She looked up at the surrounding group, meeting each set of eyes. "Not a single word, friends. Not one tiny flicker of a mention, not one step out of place. Got it?
Everyone nodded. Then Charlie watched something move across Orion's face. "I have kept larger secrets on this ship," he said, "for far less worthy reasons."
Charlie smiled as Orion set down his datapad. Then she noticed Tavi beaming at her.
"Okay, Spark Plug, almighty Earth party goddess. Where do we begin?"
As it turned out, the ship had just been waiting for permission to get involved in a celebration for its captain.
She'd walked into Borran's kitchen with a whole speech ready, ready to go on about how it was Reyna's seventy-fifth birthday and how nobody ever did anything but that this year they were going to.
She'd gotten about six words in. "So, it's the captain's birthday. I was thinking—"
Then Borran set down his knife, looked at her with those small, warm eyes, and said, "Finally." As if he'd been standing in that kitchen for years with a feast already ready.
"You'll want Earth food, yes?" he asked, already pulling things off shelves.
"I mean, if you can. I could write down some of the—" Charlie stopped. "You know, I don't actually know how to explain a casserole to a Brontari—"
"You explain it. I make it better." Borran said simply. "Write it all down, Spark Plug. Everything food you miss. I will do the rest."
And that was it, the whole negotiation. Charlie left the kitchen with the distinct sense that she'd just handed Borran something he'd wanted most in the world.
By that evening, there were smells coming out of the food hall that Charlie couldn't identify yet desperately wanted to. But it could wait until next week.
What's funny is that it went like that everywhere Charlie went.
Maren took lighting as a personal engineering challenge, disappearing into the library's environmental systems with a look Charlie recognized as Maren's most devoted form of determination.
Two days later, Maren pulled her in to show her how the overheads dimmed to something warm and low and gold instead of the ship's clean white.
"String lights," Charlie said it as a half joke, describing the way people back home hung little illuminated bulbs across a backyard.
But Maren had listened so intently and then built it, producing filaments threaded along the shelves so the entire library glowed like somebody's string-lit porch on a summer night.
Charlie let Maren see just how astounded she was by the work, her eyes shining in the amber glow.