Somehow His Eyes

Posted on Fri Apr 24th, 2026 @ 9:49pm by Captain Björn Kodak & Andrew Munro & Debbie Gless

Mission: Port of Call
Location: Turbolift
Timeline: Mission Day 6 at 1423

[Turbolift]
[USS Sojourner]
[MD 6 - 1423 Hours]

We need to talk.

Four words. It sounded like Andrew had laughed when he'd said them over the comm — Björn had caught that, the slight catch of it in his voice, something almost giddy underneath — but that hadn't stopped the words from landing the way they always landed in the days after Subrek: like the first tremor beneath your feet before you know whether it's going to be a full-on earthquake or a very slight, momentary tectonic shift.

We need to talk.

Björn had been in the middle of reviewing the updated repair schedule from Parsons and his team when the call came through. He'd set the PADD down before Andrew had even finished the sentence. He was already moving before the channel closed, slipping out of his ready room and heading out into the corridor.

In the turbolift now, watching the decks flash by, he tried to do what he always did when he didn't know what was coming. He made a list. Organized the possibilities. Gave the anxiety somewhere to live other than the center of his chest. And from that list, he began to formulate all the potential tactics he could try to help Andrew. Given what he’d been through on Subrek’s ship, his paramour’s disquietude was entirely understandable.

But over the comm, Andrew had seemed — what? Not distressed, exactly. The laugh had been real. But "we need to talk" from the man you shared your bed with was a specific kind of sentence, one that didn't leave a lot of room for optimism regardless of the tone it was delivered in.

Maybe something had happened on the ship. Maybe he'd had a difficult session with Qo — Björn was quietly, deeply grateful for Qo, for the work happening in that office that Björn himself had no access to and no ability to speed up or fix but knew was happening all the same.

He'd heard and felt Andrew wake in the dark more nights than he could count now, watched him surface from whatever the Kordra-Lisrit had left behind in him, and had learned the specific helplessness of being the person beside someone who was fighting something you couldn't fight for them. Qo could help. Björn could only be there. He had made a kind of peace with that…mostly.

But maybe this particular instance was something else entirely? Maybe Andrew just wanted to talk. People said "we need to talk" and meant nothing catastrophic all the time. Perfectly normal. Perfectly—

The turbolift stopped, the doors whooshing open with their easy sigh. Björn walked out, footfalls directed in the normal groove towards home. His quarters were thirty seconds away and he spent them running through what he might say, what Andrew might need, whether he'd have the right words or whether he'd stand there wanting to help and finding himself empty-handed the way he so often did when it mattered most.

The doors to the quarters slid open. He walked in, expecting to see Andrew upset and pacing or laid out on the couch in a haphazard pile of PADDs and dirty dishes that meant he hadn’t moved all day. But exactly none of it was what he walked into. Björn’s eyes went wide as he took in the sight before him.

Debbie Gless was standing in the middle of their quarters making faces at something swaddled and gently held in her arms. She looked over at him with a kind of mirth he’d not truly seen in her eyes in years: the kind of happiness that bubbled up all the way from the core and shone through the eyes.

Björn stopped in his tracks. His brain, which had spent the entire turbolift ride organizing itself around the wrong problem, presented him with nothing useful here.

What was she holding? It was small. It had — were those fronds? His fight-or-flight instincts stirred briefly, some ancient part of his threat-assessment architecture waking up, but Debbie did not look threatened. Debbie looked like a woman who had just been handed the entire universe and found it to be exactly what she'd ordered and then some.

"You're here!" Andrew said from somewhere to his left.

Björn turned. Andrew was standing by the desk holding a tricorder, eyes bright in a way that was different from the wild spark in them in when Andrew woke in terror at 0300 every night. Different in a way Björn didn't have a word for yet as his brain worked to process what he was seeing and hearing.

"Right. So. Long story and we need to talk to Xex very soon but—" Andrew pulled a breath, "—that plant Debbie brought you from Hukatuse? It ate your DNA. And mine. Then it—" he made a gesture with the tricorder that seemed to be attempting to convey the entire concept of symbiogenesis, "—tossed it all together and birthed itself as our kid. We uh…we’re kind of dads now, Björn.”

Björn opened his mouth just in time for Debbie to put the baby in his arms. “Here you go, honey,” she gently squeezed his shoulder before coochie-cooing the baby’s right cheek. “This is your other dad, sweety.”

It was — the word arrived slowly, like something surfacing from deep water — small. Impossibly small. Its skin was pale and translucent and threaded through with fine green veining that pulsed, slowly, steadily, like something that had learned to do what a heartbeat does and found its own way of doing it. Where hair should have been there were fronds, tiny and trembling slightly in the recycled air. And as Björn stood there, the thing — the baby — turned its head toward him with the same slow, deliberate, inevitable orientation that the plant had always turned toward him.

And then it opened its eyes. They were golden. Sharp. His.

"Surprise," Andrew said quietly.

Björn looked at Andrew. He looked at the baby. He looked at Debbie, who had taken up a position slightly to the left with her arms crossed and was wearing the expression of a woman who had already fully processed this development and moved directly into logistics. Logistics she, for the moment, reframed from diving into to give the Chameloid at least five seconds to react to and catch up with what was happening.

"I—" Björn rasped.

"I know," Andrew said.

"It—" he licked his suddenly dry lips, about to expound.

"I know."

"We—"

"I know, Björn. I know,” Andrew’s face lit with love and grace. He’d come forward in the traded sentence stints to place a hand on his partner’s shoulder: an amazing reversal of the same gesture Björn himself had been using to try to help settle Andrew’s night terrors.

The baby made a sound then. Small and insistent and absolutely certain of its own importance. One tiny hand had found the front of Björn's uniform and was working at it with the focused determination of someone who had only just discovered fingers and intended to make full use of them.

"I'm going to be the most," Debbie announced, to no one in particular and all of them simultaneously, “disgusting grandma that has ever grandma'd in the history of grandmas. I want that on the record. Both of you look at me and acknowledge that I said that." As usual, her hawkishness was punctuated by the blow-pop of a rather large (and decidedly purple) piece of gum.

Björn looked at her. Nodded. Slowly, like he didn’t quite know what he was agreeing to but knew better than to challenge it.

"Good," she said.

He looked back down at the baby, which had found the combadge on his uniform and was now regarding it with the solemn concentration of a scientist examining a specimen. It looked up at him. The golden eyes — his eyes, somehow his eyes — found his face and stayed there with an expression that seemed to be asking a very reasonable question about who exactly this large person was and whether he was going to be useful.

Björn had commanded a starship through a nebula full of Kazon. He had shapeshifted his way through more crises than he could count. He had faced things in the Delta Quadrant that had no name in any language the Federation had yet catalogued. But the esteemed Captain Kodak had absolutely no idea what to do next.

"We're going to need a crib,” Björn said finally, licking his dry lips wet again to curb the crack he felt forming in the lower one.

Andrew laughed. It was the first real laugh Björn had heard from him in longer than he wanted to think about, and it landed somewhere in his chest and stayed there.

"Aye," Andrew said, still laughing. "We are at that. Come on,” he nodded towards the replicator. “Let’s get you some kaffee and settle in. We need to talk,” he said once again, the words filled with the promise of so many years of life and laughter with this tiny new little being infusing his tone.

“I’ll take her,” Debbie offered as Björn and Andrew passed by her. It was less of an offer, given the look on her face. It was more like, “Give me that baby now and no one gets hurt.”

“Take…her?” Björn’s golden eyes flashed and then settled into mirth of his own. “We have a baby girl?”

“Surprise,” Andrew said again, this time full of warmth and bemusement. With Björn’s hands now free—and Grandma Gless cooing along with the baby over by the couch—the man sweetly kissed the Chameloid on the head. “You’re a dad now, too.”

=/\= A post by... =/\=

Captain Björn Kodak
Commanding Officer

Doctor Andrew Munro
Civilian Biologist

Grandma Debbie Gless
Diner Matron