Love, Cultures & Traditions.

Posted on Thu Jan 22nd, 2026 @ 2:04am by Lieutenant Cassian Massy

600 words; about a 3 minute read

Mission: The Hand That Rocks The Babe
Location: Operations Headquarters
Timeline: Transit to Velis III

Lieutenant Cassian Massy stood at the Operations console on the bridge of the U.S.S. Dreadnought, amber diagnostic streams scrolling endlessly beneath his fingertips. The ship hummed around him, power conduits cycling, sensor pallets recalibrating, backup systems testing their redundancies one layer at a time.

“Status,” He spoke as he tried to make sure everyone was active, engaged and paying attention.

“Green across the board,” One of the Team Leaders replied automatically. “Running tertiary diagnostics on environmental controls and medical isolation systems now to eliminate surprises once we drop out of warp.”

He initiated another cascade of commands. Shield harmonics aligned. Internal transport buffers verified. Auxiliary power relays cycled, reassuring, familiar. This was his domain. Systems were honest. They behaved logically. Every cause produced an effect that could be traced, quantified, corrected.

People, however, were another matter entirely.

His gaze drifted, only briefly, toward the middle drawer in his desk, in it was a book about culture and tradition but not his own..Hers. The thought tightened something in his chest he hadn’t yet learned how to name properly.

Their relationship, if that was even the correct term yet, was still new, still fragile in ways no diagnostic could quantify. Anastasia’s culture carried layers of meaning in gesture, tone, and timing that Cassian was only beginning to grasp. A pause could be respect… or disapproval. A direct statement might be valued in one context and quietly offensive in another. He found himself replaying conversations long after they ended, parsing intent the way he parsed sensor data, searching for anomalies he might have missed.

Her culture placed meaning in restraint, in silence, in gestures that lingered just a heartbeat longer than necessary. A pause before speaking could carry respect, or disappointment. A glance held too long could be invitation, warning, or apology depending on context he was still learning to recognize.

Cassian exhaled slowly.

He’d grown up believing honesty meant clarity—say what you feel, mean what you say. With Anastasia, meaning lived between those spaces instead. In what went unsaid. In intent rather as well as action. His thought was cut short as another diagnostic chirped softly. The ship made sense. The ship responded.

Anastasia challenged him in ways no system ever had. Cassian had spent his career learning the language of starships, learning how to listen when something was just slightly off, how to anticipate failure before alarms ever sounded. With Anastasia, he was realizing that the same attentiveness was required, but without the comfort of clear readouts or error codes. Her traditions mattered. Her ways mattered. And he was keenly aware that good intentions alone were not always enough.

He wanted to do this right, not rush her, not offend her traditions through ignorance, not reduce something meaningful to awkward guesswork. He found himself researching cultural protocols late into the night, reading old Federation briefs and personal accounts that never quite captured the nuance of lived experience.

Still, when she smiled at him, rare, reserved, genuine, it felt like a successful diagnostic across his entire nervous system.

Cassian straightened as another status update cleared.

Velis III awaited them. A world in crisis. Lives hanging in the balance. Soon, efficiency and precision would matter more than introspection.

But for just a moment longer, the Chief Operations Officer allowed himself a private hope, that when the mission was over, when the systems were quiet again, he might finally learn how to read the spaces between her words… and find his place there.

And, for the first time, for someone who mattered beyond the scope of duty.

RSS Feed