Title: Reverie
Author: Jazz
Rating: G
Disclaimer: Characters belong to Paramount.
Summary: A crewmember contemplates something dark.

Alone in the dark, he waits.

He thinks this is not real life, for there is no console below his hands, no orders barked at him. Hoshi is not at his shoulder; there are no stars to guide him home.

But there is space. He cannot escape it, and yet-

If I had been born to walk barefoot on grass, instead of pressurised decking, he thinks, I might have run away.

Might have been happy.

Instead, like a leaf falling from its branch in autumn, he does not resist the pull of gravity, and lies breathless and becalmed, his moment of dark contemplation vanishing as if it was nothing more than a whisper on the breeze, or the blue light in his peripheral vision as he prods the ship into warp.

In his imaginings, he lives in a world of long plains and white skies. His only contact with space comes with his dreams, so he sleeps with the lights on.

Travis wakes. He is disappointed.

END