I asked, she answered, now what...

Posted on Mon Oct 26th, 2026 @ 12:59pm by Captain Wolfe Sean

2,323 words; about a 12 minute read

Mission: Looking in all the wrong places.
Location: Quarters.

USS Dreadnought — Quarters

The silence was, perhaps, the worst part.

Aboard the USS Dreadnought, there was always some distant reminder that the ship was alive around him. The muted thrum of the engines, the occasional announcement over the comm system, the faint vibration of personnel moving through the corridors beyond his door. Ordinarily, those familiar sounds were a comfort to Wolfe. They meant the ship was operational, his crew was at their posts, and there was always something that needed his attention.

Now, they served only to remind him that he was out of the fight.

He sat on the edge of his bed, his posture slightly hunched as he stared down at his hands. His quarters had been kept in order, his belongings undisturbed, and everything was precisely where he expected it to be. There was something almost offensive about that normality. Somewhere between the decision to investigate the bunker and the moment of his rescue, things had gone terribly wrong. Yet here he was, back aboard his ship, surrounded by the familiar comforts of his own quarters, as though the entire ordeal could be dismissed as an unpleasant interruption.

It couldn't.

He drew a slow breath, wincing faintly as the movement reminded him that his body had not yet forgiven him for what had happened. Whatever the medical staff had said about rest and recovery, he had little patience for either. His instincts kept returning to the bunker, retracing the decisions that had brought him there, searching for the moment when the investigation had ceased to be manageable and become something far more dangerous.

Where had they missed something? What had they misunderstood? And, perhaps most troubling of all, what had their failure cost them?

He pressed his palms together, lowering his head for a moment.

The rescue should have been a relief. In many respects, it was. He was alive, he was back aboard the Dreadnought, and he had been given another opportunity to put things right. He was grateful to those who had brought him home, even if he hadn't yet found the words to express the full extent of that gratitude.

But gratitude did little to quiet the nagging voice at the back of his mind.

He was a marine captain, an officer. He was supposed to be the one making the decisions, assessing the risks, and ensuring that his people came home safely. Instead, the investigation had ended in disaster, and he had required rescuing himself. He knew, intellectually, that no officer could account for every variable and that accepting help was not a failure of command. Knowing something and believing it were, however, two very different things.

His gaze drifted towards the desk, where a terminal waited patiently for his attention.

There would be reports to read. Debriefings to conduct. Questions to answer, both from his superiors and from himself. There would be a full accounting of what had happened in that bunker, and he intended to see it through. Not out of a need to assign blame, but because whatever had gone wrong could not be allowed to happen again.

Still, for the moment, he left the terminal untouched. The medical staff had made their instructions abundantly clear. He suspected they would be less than impressed if they discovered him attempting to resume his duties before he was fit to do so.

A faint, empty smile touched his features at that thought.

He could already imagine the lecture.

He shifted back against the pillows, though he remained far from comfortable. His eyes settled on the closed door to his quarters. Part of him wanted to summon someone, to have a report brought to him or to find out precisely what had transpired aboard the ship while he had been incapacitated. Another part wanted nothing more than a few uninterrupted minutes to gather his thoughts and make some sense of the experience.

For now, he allowed himself the silence.

The bunker would still be there in his memory when he closed his eyes. The questions would remain unanswered until he was ready to face them.

Now he had to decide what he intended to do with that second chance.

For all the things Wolfe had faced in his career, for all the dangers he had encountered and the decisions he had been forced to make, there had been few moments that left him quite as vulnerable as asking Penny to marry him.

It was a peculiar thing, really. He could walk into a potentially hostile situation with a plan, a sidearm, and the confidence that he would find a way through whatever awaited him. He could issue orders under fire, take responsibility when things went wrong, and shoulder the consequences of decisions that might affect the lives of everyone under his command. Those were things he understood. They were things he had trained for.

But asking Penny to spend the rest of her life with him?

That had required a different kind of courage altogether.

Wolfe sat quietly, his eyes resting on the small collection of personal belongings scattered across his desk. His recovery from the bunker incident had left him with far too much time to think, and his mind, unhelpfully, had decided that the question of marriage deserved considerably more attention than anything the medical staff had prescribed for him.

He had asked her.

The thought still brought a warmth to his chest, followed almost immediately by a tightening in his stomach.

He wanted to marry Penny. There was no uncertainty about that. If anything, the ordeal he had recently endured had only sharpened his understanding of what she meant to him. There had been moments in the aftermath of the bunker investigation when he had been forced to confront just how easily a life could be taken away. One minute, a man could be making plans for the future; the next, that future could become nothing more than a collection of unfinished promises.

And there had been Penny.

Even when he hadn't known precisely how things would end, even when his circumstances had left him with little control over what happened next, the thought of seeing her again had remained stubbornly present in his mind. He had wanted to return to her. To hear her voice, to see her smile, to have the opportunity to tell her all the things that were so much easier to leave unsaid when there was always another mission waiting.

He had wanted a future with her.

Now that he had asked her to share that future, he found himself confronting the uncomfortable reality of what he was actually offering.

He exhaled slowly, leaning back in his chair and rubbing a hand over his face.

He was a Marine. A captain, certainly, and an officer who had spent years learning to assess risks and make decisions under pressure, but beneath the rank and the uniform, he remained a man whose profession frequently placed him in situations where the consequences of failure were measured in lives. His duty could take him into hostile territory, into places where the odds were uncertain and the enemy was unforgiving. He could be ordered to go somewhere dangerous with little warning and less opportunity to explain himself to the people waiting for him at home.

And Penny would be the one left waiting.

That was the part he struggled with most.

He could accept the danger when it was directed at him. He had made his peace with the possibility that his career might one day demand more of him than he could give. It was an understanding he had reached long ago, an unspoken agreement with himself that serving meant accepting the risks that came with the uniform.

But Penny had never signed that agreement.

She had not volunteered to spend nights wondering whether the next communication from the Dreadnought would be his voice telling her he was all right, or someone else's voice explaining why he would not be coming home. She had not chosen to lie awake worrying about deployments, hostile engagements, or the countless things that could go wrong when a Marine was sent into the field.

And yet, by marrying him, she would be accepting those uncertainties as part of their shared life.

Was that fair to her?

The question had been circling his thoughts for hours, perhaps longer. He knew that Penny was capable of making her own decisions. He would never presume to make that choice for her, nor would he insult her by suggesting that she did not understand the implications of loving someone in his position.

Still, understanding the danger and living with it were two very different things.

He remembered the bunker, the confusion of the investigation, the moment when events had slipped beyond his control. He remembered the fact that he had needed rescuing, that his survival had depended in part on the actions of others. It was a humbling realisation for a man accustomed to being responsible for those around him.

What would Penny have thought if she had known just how close things had come to ending differently?

Would she have looked at him the same way?

Of course, he knew the answer was not so simple. She loved him, and love was not something that disappeared merely because the universe became dangerous. But he could not ignore the possibility that his profession might one day ask more of her than either of them was prepared to give.

He wanted to protect her. It was an instinct that ran deep, perhaps deeper than he sometimes cared to admit. Yet there was a bitter irony in the fact that the very career that had shaped him into the man she loved was also the thing that could hurt her most.

He could promise to love her. He could promise to stand beside her whenever circumstances allowed, to listen when the burdens of his work became too much, and to make every effort to return to her whenever duty sent him away.

What he could not promise was that he would always come home.

That truth sat heavily with him.

Wolfe lowered his gaze to his hands, studying them for a moment. Hands that had held weapons, issued orders, helped his fellow Marines, and carried the weight of responsibility through situations that would have broken lesser men. Hands that, when he had asked Penny to marry him, had perhaps betrayed just how much the answer mattered to him.

He had not asked her because he was frightened of being alone. Nor had he asked her because the bunker incident had made him desperate to cling to something familiar. The thought of spending his life with Penny had been growing in him long before his recent ordeal.

The danger had simply reminded him that there might never be a perfect time.

There would always be another mission. Another deployment. Another reason to tell himself that he should wait until things settled down, until the ship was out of danger, until his responsibilities were lighter, until he could offer her a life with fewer uncertainties.

But Marines did not always get to choose when the fighting stopped. Captains did not get to schedule the universe around their personal lives. If he waited until he could guarantee her safety, he might spend the rest of his life waiting.

And he did not want to do that.

He wanted the ordinary things, too. The quiet moments that had nothing to do with rank or duty. Waking beside her when there was nowhere he needed to be. Sharing a meal without a comm signal threatening to interrupt it. Hearing about her day and telling her about his, even when the most exciting thing that had happened was a tedious report or an argument with a superior officer.

He wanted to build something with her that existed beyond the boundaries of his uniform.

Most of all, he wanted her to know that she would never be an afterthought. Not behind his rank, not behind his responsibilities, and not behind the demands of the Corps. There would be times when duty would have to come first, because that was the burden he had accepted when he put on the uniform. But that did not mean he wanted Penny to spend her life feeling as though she came second.

He would have to work at that. He knew it.

A marriage could not survive on good intentions alone, particularly not one shared with a man whose profession involved the very real possibility of not returning from a mission. It would require honesty, patience, compromise, and a willingness to face the difficult conversations rather than hide behind the convenient excuse that he was protecting her by keeping his fears to himself.

Perhaps that was what troubled him most. He was accustomed to carrying the weight of his decisions alone, to presenting a steady face to his Marines even when the situation was anything but steady. Letting someone see the uncertainty beneath that composure was harder than he cared to admit.

But if he was asking Penny to share his life, he could hardly expect her to share only the parts of it that were easy.

He rose carefully from his chair, still mindful of the injuries that had earned him his enforced recovery, and crossed to the viewport. Beyond the viewport, the stars stretched into the distance, cold and beautiful and utterly indifferent to the lives unfolding beneath them.

Somewhere out there were worlds that needed protecting, people who depended on Starfleet and the Marines, and missions that would demand his attention long after his body had recovered. The future would bring dangers he could anticipate and others he could not.

He would face them. He always had.

But now, for the first time in a long while, he found himself thinking about what he was fighting to return to.

Penny.

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