Sturdy New Crib

Posted on Thu Jun 4th, 2026 @ 8:02pm by Ensign Noah Balsam & Lieutenant JG Tamblem Dravor & Lieutenant JG Sheldon Parsons & Ensign Khrys Ral

Mission: Port of Call
Location: 6-18 New Junior Officer Quarters
Timeline: Mission Day 23 at 1600

[Day 23]
[1600 Hours]
[Deck 6, Quarters 6-18]

Noah dropped his bag with a bereft spirit, a wince-like glance going around the room. It was nearly empty, save for several crates that contained the four young men's effects. They did not, as yet, even have furniture, which had been promised to be replicated and delivered within a couple of hours. "Well. Shit." Noah said it. Only ten minutes ago, they'd entered their old quarters on 4-11 and had missed the replacement names on the door. And it too was empty. Which had caused a bit of a panic.

Noah winced a glance up at the ceiling to find that this room had no skylight style windows like they'd had before. Maybe their individual rooms would have a window... but... Noah's guess was no. This was an interior cabin. And it felt like a downgrade. About five minutes ago, they had been in the Quartermaster's office trying to find out where they'd been transferred. Well. Here it was. Deep in the bowels of the stardrive.

"Shit..." Noah uttered again.

Khrys dropped his bag beside the door with little ceremony, the soft thud of it against the deck punctuating the quiet of their new cabin. He had barely taken two steps inside before Noah’s expletive, muttered but unmistakable, caught his attention.

He turned immediately. “What’s wrong?” Khrys asked, his dark eyes settling on Noah with easy concern. The question came naturally to him. Betazoids had a way of reading the emotional temperature of a room almost instinctively, and whatever Noah had just encountered had clearly shifted it.

The Human had spikes of nuanced anxiety, disappointment, a feeling of being uprooted.

Khrys crossed his arms across his chest, his posture relaxed but attentive as he waited for an explanation, the faintest crease forming between his brows. This was already this third cabin since coming aboard, so this routine was exhausting.

"Just... shit..." Noah repeated with a shake of his head. "I liked our old quarters. It had... character. Character, and" he pointed up, "Windows." of which this one had none.

Dravor shouldered through the door a beat behind the others, duffel bag slung over one arm, and stopped just inside the threshold to give the place a slow once-over. Bare deck plating, bare walls, bare everything. His gaze tracked up to the ceiling. No viewport. He clicked his tongue. "Huh."

He dropped his bag onto the deck and walked the perimeter with his hands in his pockets, taking stock. He gave one of the walls a knock with his knuckle. Solid. He actually nodded a little at that. "Okay, yeah." He turned back to Noah and Khrys with a grin spreading across his face. "No windows. We don't need windows." He gestured broadly at the empty room. "You know what you can't see from a window? The inside of this place, which is going to look great once we actually have, like, furniture in it."

He slung himself down onto the deck where a couch would eventually be, perfectly at ease, like he'd already claimed the spot. "Relax, Balsam." He spread his arms wide. "We got ourselves a sturdy new bassinet." A beat. "Or whatever you people call it."

Khrys’ nose crinkled as a soft giggle slipped out, the tension of the moment easing at Dravor’s attempt. “I think the word is ‘crib,’” he said with an easy shrug, his tone warm rather than corrective. “But… close enough.”

Dravor managed to pull a wincing grimace of a smile as he called their new place a bassinet, and Khrys corrected him.

He drew in a breath, glancing around the room with a more thoughtful eye now, the bare walls, the faint hum of ship systems filling the quiet. “Yeah,” he added, nodding to himself as much as to his roommates, a small spark of enthusiasm returning to his voice. “We can definitely make this place feel more like home.”

"Def-definitely need the furniture back... I wonder if we can get some... you know..." He nudged Sheldon, "Special dispensation from the Assistant Chief Engineer with um replicator credits. To make it a little more special. Since we're giving up our windows." His foot tapped the floor, "Plus this floor is really hard..." His nose wrinkled, "I'm from a bathyscaphe, but even this is a little... submarine-y feeling."

Dravor looked over at Noah, then back to Sheldon with a grin that said he was absolutely not going to let this opportunity pass.

"I mean, he's not wrong." He stretched his arms behind his head, still completely at ease on the bare deck. "We're down here in the dark running on recycled air and hull plating. Least the ship can do is spring for a decent couch." His dark eyes settled on Sheldon with easy confidence. "I'm sure the Assistant Chief Engineer could pull a few strings. For morale."

Up to this point, Sheldon had been quiet. In the weeks since Subrek, this was not an uncommon occurence for the young engineer. While engaging with Counselor Qo in a new but less than conventional therapy modality had helped him to reduce the intensity of his panic surges, they still came. And right now, looking at the reality of their new living situation, the panic was rather expectedly rising again. A hurried hand went to the ridged lapel of the sweater, white-knuckling one side of the vee as Sheldon's breath quickened. To those who lived with him, at least, this gesture had become a tell tale sign of his mental state.

Sheldon had been struggling to regain stability after F'Rar's death and the kidnapping of his friends. Those events had tapped back into that old Adelphi wound: the five engineers that he not just couldn't save, but had actively caused the death of. While he, himself, didn't fully understand how it all connected back to that particular trauma, Sheldon had accepted that it did and was working to deal with it. But how the fuck was he supposed to do that when the only real stability he knew--his quarters with Noah, Dravor, and Khrys--had just been taken away without notice or recourse. A terribly cold anger welled in the pit of Sheldon's stomach.

"You'd be surprised," his voice was filled with hoar frost, "how little leeway that gets you around here." Like when authorizing a site-to-site transport on your own authority during a panic attack--something that had tripped internal security and earned Sheldon some scrutiny. He'd been cleared of any consequences given the medical situation but Sheldon got the feeling that now was not the time to use his access codes for personal gain.

"Fuck this," he said spitefully, throwing his bag on the floor. He walked deeper into the room and, folding his arms, let himself slightly fall backwards to lean against the far wall.

Noah's ached. His brows knitted. He knew Sheldon's pain and it hurt him that... Sheldon just didn't need him right now. What he was going through, he was getting help. But what Noah suspected it was, and perhaps the full reality, weren't totally aligned. He felt the well of uselessness, a sort of stirring anxiety, in his gut. He eyed the replicator and he considered making something he knew Sheldon would like. Food was, in a way, Noah's love language. As was music. But the replicator wasn't likely reprogrammed with their personal recipes yet. And Noah had no idea where the Dots had put his precious guitar. That caused its own anxiety.

"Hey." Noah approached Sheldon. "We'll make it work... oh-okay?" he tried to catch Sheldon's eyes.

Khrys lowered himself to the floor with a dramatic lack of care, sprawling out as though he intended to claim the space entirely. A moment later, he shifted, the hard surface clearly betraying him, and let out a quiet, dissatisfied huff. “We should definitely request carpet,” he declared, adjusting again before giving up and rolling onto his side. “And thick, plush carpet,” he added, emphasizing the last word as if it were a personal plea to the universe.

He shifted into an exaggerated, almost theatrical pose, equal parts languid and provocative. resting his head against his hand as he looked up at the others. “They should change the name of this ship to the USS Don’t Get Comfortable or You’ll Get Moved Unceremoniously,” he went on, a grin tugging at his lips, his tone light but laced with just enough truth to land the joke.

Dravor let Khrys's joke hang in the air for a beat, the corner of his mouth pulling up despite himself. Then his eyes cut to Sheldon against the far wall and something quieter moved across his face.

He pushed himself up off the deck and crossed the room, settling against the wall beside Sheldon. Close enough that their shoulders touched. He didn't say anything right away, just tipped his head to rest briefly against Sheldon's. "We're going to be okay," he said, low enough that it was mostly just for him. "All of us. Yeah?"

Noah agreed with a nod, his hand still on Sheldon's shoulder, still crouched to be with him. "Yeah. Yeah we'll manage..."

Khrys turned to face his roommates, shifting just enough to gather them all into his line of sight. “We’re all in this together,” he said, the words simple but grounded, carrying more weight than he might have intended.

There was still that quiet, persistent edge of doubt beneath it all, he could feel it, the lingering sense that he had arrived late to something already established, already solid. An outsider trying to find his place. And yet… they had never treated him that way. Not once. They had been there for him, steadfast, unflinching, through the worst of his breakup, offering support without expectation, without hesitation. Brothers, in every way that mattered.

He let out a small breath, something in his posture easing as he settled more comfortably into their shared space, the words feeling a little more real now that he’d said them aloud.

The anger didn't go anywhere. That was the thing about it — it didn't dissolve or soften or decide to be reasonable. It just got...outnumbered. Dravor's shoulder against his. The brief, warm weight of his head. His low comment in that always-so-damned-reassuring tone. Noah's hand on his shoulder. Noah, crouched down to be level with him, which was a significant logistical undertaking for someone with legs that long. Khrys from the floor, serious under the joke. New to their knot of friendship and more, but welcome all the same.

The hand gripping his lapel loosened without him deciding to loosen it. Slowly, the way a fist opens when someone's been holding something too tightly for too long, his fingers uncurled, the red in them giving way to pale again. He let his arms drop to his sides instead. Sheldon looked at Noah first. Then across at Khrys. Then — briefly, because briefly was all he could manage — at Tamblem beside him, close enough that Sheldon could feel the warmth of him through his sleeve.

"Yeah," he said finally. His voice had lost the hoarfrost, mostly. What was left was just tired. "Yeah, okay." Sheldon didn't move away from the wall. Instead, he stayed puddled there, too exhausted physically and emotionally to stand back up. "We're going to need a really good couch, though," he added after a moment. "Like, crushed velvet or something." It was an olive branch towards acceptance but that didn't mean he was happy about it. The company, though? That he was thankful for. At least they were in this together.

"So what now?" Sheldon asked, looking back and forth between the faces of The Bestie Quad Squad.

Something in Dravor's chest unknotted at the sound of Sheldon's voice losing that frost. He lifted his head, and the grin that spread across his face was slow and deeply satisfied, like a man who had been waiting for exactly this moment.

"Now?" He pushed off the wall and turned to face the room with the energy of someone who had just been handed a mandate. "Now we get the couch." He held up a finger. "Not just any couch. The couch. Crushed velour, obviously, because you have taste." Another finger. "Massaging recliners. Heated, if we can swing it." A third. "Thick carpet, for Khrys. And something for these walls, since apparently windows aren't happening."

He swept a hand across the bare room like he was already redecorating it in his mind.

"You are Sheldon Fucking Parsons." He said it the way someone might say the sky is blue. "Starfleet's foremost subject matter expert on the practical application of flamethrowers. We deserve furniture that reflects that."

He looked back at Sheldon, eyes bright. "So. Industrial Replicator. You're driving."

Khrys pushed himself to his feet, the motion quick, almost instinctive, like something in Dravor’s words had stirred him awake. The lingering lethargy fell away as he straightened, his posture sharpening with renewed attention, eyes settling on Dravor, and then Sheldon, with a quiet, newly sparked focus.

"If you-you guys can give me a second..." Noah said. He rose up and smiled at his friends, ruffled Sheldon's perfect hair and then had to spend a few moments finding his engineering kit. From it he produced what was probably not a simple isolinear-gelpack interface. Or else why would he have made an effort to find it? He waggled it in the air with a slightly impish smile. "Ready to go." His smile, infectiously wide with hint of teeth, had an edge of almost smug... except this was Noah. "Velour usually requires extra..."

Dravor watched Noah produce the device, made the kind of careful, deliberate choice of expression that a Security officer makes when he absolutely does not want to be a witness to anything, and then schooled his face into the most professional blank he had in his arsenal.

"Speaking as the Security guy in the room," he said, slow and easy, "I want to go on the record right now. That, right there?" A lazy nod toward whatever was in Noah's hand. "Perfectly standard piece of engineering kit. In the perfectly capable hands of a Starfleet engineer. Doing whatever perfectly standard thing he says it's doing."
A grin spread across his face, slow and pleased.

"I have no follow-up questions. None. And if anybody ever asks me later, that is exactly what it looked like and exactly what it was. Crystal. Open and shut." Tamblem spread his hands like a man who had said his piece, then pivoted very deliberately toward the bare wall and made a show of admiring it. "Beautiful bulkhead. Really fine workmanship. I could look at this thing for hours." He did not turn around.

Noah smiled in to a cheek at that, and wondered what they would come up to make this new space theirs.

The "Sheldon Fucking Parsons" comment and the hair tousle had registered but only barely. Sheathed in both anger and weariness, Sheldon's amygdala wasn't exactly processing at full power. The strong emotions created a kind of internal shield lattice that caused reality to kind of...bounce off. Or if not bounce away exactly, at least slide alongside down his body and slake off before full processing could happen. But as the conversation progressed and the plan for yet another heist — this one enabled by industrial replication — began to form, some other part of Sheldon's brain started to take over.

It was, Sheldon would reflect later, a very specific feeling. Like a gear that had been spinning uselessly suddenly catching. Like the whole mechanism of his brain was suddenly clicking into a new and purposeful rhythm. He was still angry — that hadn't gone anywhere. The anger was right where he'd left it, banked low and hot in his chest like a warp core threatening to breach. But something else had come online alongside it. Something that Counselor Qo had been helping him identify and map over the past couple of weeks of their sessions together — a part of him that didn't particularly care about feelings one way or another, that looked at a problem the way a targeting system looked at a trajectory, and just...began.

Sheldon had started, tentatively and with no small amount of Qo's patient scaffolding, to understand this part of himself. "The Engineer," Sheldon had named it. The part of himself that banished emotion and tractor beamed onto a problem, rotating it angle by angle to understand every side of it before forming a plan. It was the part of his brain that, when engaged, left him three hours deep in a repair schematic with no memory of ever sitting down to map it out.

There it is, some quieter part of Sheldon observed, with something that wasn't quite amusement and wasn't quite relief. Right on schedule. But there was a thankfulness to that recognition as well. The Engineer meant he didn't have to live in his emotions right now. He could simply immerse himself in the problem and ideate on how to solve it. His friends needed him to come up with something that would help them all feel a little more at home in this terrible new space. The Engineer, apparently, had decided he was up to the task even if Sheldon proper had his doubts.

He pushed off the wall suddenly. Sheldon's voice, when it came, had changed register entirely — not the hoarfrost of earlier, not the tired surrender of yeah, okay. This was flatter. More precise. "Let's go then."

He didn't wait to see if they followed. He already had the shuttle bay's industrial replication suite running in his head — Tork had converted it during the repair crisis and Sheldon knew every inch of that setup — already clocking the variables. He looked sidelong at Noah as they moved into the corridor — all legs, hypermobile, and known to sit in furniture like a question mark that had folded over on itself. He thought about Khrys and the carpet comment, too, which had not been a throwaway, and the particular quality of stillness that came off the Betazoid when he was comfortable versus when he wasn't. He thought about Tamblem and how the man claimed space with both arms spread wide, taking up exactly as much room as the geometry of the situation would permit. And he thought about himself and the red cardigan Qo had helped him realize was a safety anchor: texture worried in hand to physically process the anxious energy of the moment.

Sheldon Parsons was still angry about his quarters. He would probably be angry about them for some time. But The Engineer had a problem now. And The Engineer, whatever else could be said about it, did not leave problems unsolved. So when they arrived at the shuttle bay's industrial replication suite on Deck 7, Sheldon had immediately stepped up to the control console and begun entering commands with a flurry of nimble fingerings. Tap-tap-taptaptap-tap-tap, his hands danced across the smooth surface of the LCARS interface as he designed the couch already fleshed out in his mind. And after the rendering completed on screen, Sheldon grabbed the diagram with his fingertips and flung it into the air, where the industrial replicator system re-rendered it as a three-dimensional hologram floating mid-air.

The hologram that bloomed above the console was, objectively, a masterpiece. It was also the color of a flamingo that had eaten another flamingo. The crushed velour caught even the holographic light the way the real thing would — a deep, directional pile that shifted from cotton-candy pink to something approaching magenta depending on the angle, plush enough that it looked like it might absorb a person entirely if they sat down too quickly. The overall form was a generous L-shaped sectional, its proportions slightly larger than standard Starfleet issue in every dimension, which was the first indication that this had been engineered rather than simply ordered.

The long end of the L was deep — considerably deeper than any couch had a right to be — the seat cushions wide and yielding enough that a person of unconventional sitting habits might arrange themselves into any number of geometrically improbable configurations and find the furniture simply...accommodating them. A gentle graduated rise at one end suggested that if someone wanted to tuck their feet up and fold sideways into themselves, the couch would not only permit it but support the small of the back in the process. The corner section was oversized. Not subtly oversized — aggressively, intentionally oversized, with a broad flat armrest running the full width of it, padded to exactly the density that suggested it had been designed for a specific forearm to drape across it with maximum territorial ease. The remaining chaise end was lined along the back with cushions of a slightly different construction — the same velour, but the fill visibly denser, the surface pile longer and softer, almost fur-like, the kind of thing that would register immediately to fingertips as this is where you sit when you need to feel the world less.

Tucked into the inside corner, nearly invisible unless you were looking, was a small integrated side table at exactly the right height for a mug. Next to it, a narrow channel in the upholstery that was either a very specific lumbar support ridge or a place to wedge a cardigan. Possibly both.

"Wow..." Noah blinked dark eyes. "That's...." It was beyond description. Consummately Sheldon. "Pink." Was the only came to mind. Noah gave Sheldon's shoulder a pat. Noah has somewhat surreptitiously slipped his interphase in to the replicator simulator to give them access to some of the more luxury aspects and custom choices that standard Federation Starfleet might disallow.

Sheldon stood back from the hologram with his arms folded and studied it for a moment, head tilted slightly. "Crushed pink velour," he said, in the same tone one might use to read aloud a maintenance report. "Eight-way hand-tied spring suspension. Forty-three centimeter seat depth. Variable density fill." A brief head-cocked pause led to Sheldon then turning towards his friends. "It's kind of hideous but...maybe?" he asked them.

Noah looked at Tamblem and Khrys for their reactions. "Drink holders?" Noah asked.

Dravor turned back from his bulkhead-admiring just in time to catch the hologram in full bloom, and whatever clever thing he was about to say evaporated on the way out.
It was pink. It was so pink. Pink in a way that suggested the color itself had been engineered, focus-grouped, and then escalated. The velour caught the holographic light like it was personally insulted by the concept of subtlety.

It was the ugliest, most beautiful thing the Trill had ever seen. The grin that spread across the Trill's face was slow and absolutely delighted. "Nah, it's perfect," he responded to Noah. "Shelly." His voice came out warm enough that he didn't bother to dial it back. "Shelly, that is hideous." A beat, and the grin got wider. "It's perfect. I love it. Look at it. Look what you did."

Dravor took a step closer to the hologram, gesturing at the velour, at the impossible pink, at the whole improbable masterpiece of it. "This is the gaudiest piece of furniture in the entire fleet, and it has your fingerprints all over it." Dark eyes flicked back to Sheldon, bright with something he wasn't bothering to hide. "Build it. Build it exactly like that. Don't change a thing."

Khrys studied the hologram in stunned silence, his eyes tracing over detail after detail with growing disbelief. The craftsmanship was extraordinary, every line, every texture, every subtle detail rendered with an attention so precise it felt almost impossible.

His mouth fell open slightly, awe overtaking whatever words he might have prepared.

“It is…” he began, the breath catching faintly in his throat before he finally found the rest of the sentence. “It’s us.” The soft cadence of his coastal Betazoid accent slipped through unguarded, more pronounced in his astonishment, lending the words an earnestness he couldn’t conceal even if he’d tried.


"Yeah. Its... I mean its us and its a conversation piece." Noah affirmed. "Now lets go make it."


A Post By:

Lieutenant JG Sheldon Parsons
Assistant Chief Engineer

Ensign Tamblem Dravor
Security Officer

Ensign Khrys Ral
Science Officer

Ensign Noah Balsam
Systems Specialist