That’ll do, Shelly

Posted on Mon Jun 29th, 2026 @ 6:41am by Lieutenant JG Sheldon Parsons

1,829 words; about a 9 minute read

Mission: Aperture Science
Timeline: Mission Day 1 at 00:00

[Cabin 4-11]

[Deck 4]

[MD 12: 1832 Hours]

The closet contained: four Starfleet uniforms, two bathrobes, one red cardigan, three pairs of regulation boots, one pair of unicorn slippers signed in three different hands, and one flamethrower.

Sheldon stared at the closet. The closet stared back. This was not a productive dynamic, but it had been going on for the better part of twenty minutes and neither party seemed inclined to blink first.

He had asked for advice, of course. That had been the plan: consult people he trusted, gather data, approach the problem like a sensible adult with a reasonable relationship to getting dressed. What he had gotten was a committee. The committee had been, in retrospect, an enormous amount. The good kind, though.

He'd asked Irynya first.

In the mirror, over his shoulder behind him, she appeared. Not the Irynya he'd tracked down outside the gym, though. Not the one with the coffee in her hand and her hair pulled back and the specific post-workout energy of someone who had already accomplished more before 0900 than most people managed in a full duty shift. No. This was something else entirely. This was the version of Irynya in his brain that was a Risian goddess descended from whatever higher dimension produced women who moved like she did. 

The light around her pulsed deep and red and warm, saturating the mirror like something out of a fever dream, and her hair floated around her in slow motion, each dark strand catching the red glow and releasing it again in lazy, hypnotic waves. Her outfit, such as it was, swirled around her in the same unhurried rhythm, gauzy and barely-there and somehow managing to be simultaneously ethereal and aggressively intentional. 

She was not standing so much as existing at a frequency slightly above the one the rest of the universe operated on. When she spoke, her voice arrived in layers. It resonated. It had depth and warmth and a quality of reverberation that bounced it back richer and fuller than it had come out.

"You wore your uniform," she said, dark eyes traveling the full unhurried length of him with the authority of someone conducting an assessment that was also, somehow, a verdict, "to a beach party on Risa."

A pause. Vast. Damning. The red light pulsed once.

"We have a lot of work to do."

Then she was gone.

And there was Iry. Actual Iry. Coffee in hand, hair pulled back, already pivoting toward a duty shift she was going to be late for if she didn't move. She'd given him exactly as long as she could spare and not one second more.

"Button-down, top button undone, roll the sleeves," she'd said. "Dark jeans. Show some leg shape, Shelly." And then she'd pushed off the wall and walked away, because she had somewhere to be and he had everything he needed.

He'd gone to Khrys next.

The mirror shimmered.

Khrysaros appeared bathed in light that was softer and warmer than the lighting in Cabin 4-11 had any business producing. He seemed, somehow, to be approximately four inches off the deck. In each hand, held aloft with the solemn authority of someone who had carried them down from a very significant mountain, was a stone tablet. The one on the left read, in letters that suggested they had been there since the beginning of time: To thine own self be true. The one on the right, in the same eternal chiseling: You are enough.

His expression held the open, earnest quality of someone who had been waiting since the dawn of sentient life to be asked exactly this question and found it, upon arrival, exactly as meaningful as he'd always known it would be.

He said nothing. He didn't need to. He had brought tablets.

Then the actual Khrys, at an actual table, hands wrapped around an actual mug, looking at him with that quality of attention that made you feel like whatever you'd said was the most important thing he'd heard all day. "Wear what makes you feel most like yourself," he'd said. "In the most sure and honest way." Simple. Cellular. Impossible to dismiss.

Sheldon's eyes went to the cardigan. His hand followed without asking permission — fingers finding the familiar weight of it, the worn softness at the cuffs, the specific give of fabric that had been clutched and worried and clung to in more Jefferies tubes and difficult moments than he could count. He knew exactly what it would feel like to put it on.

He set it back on its hanger.

Not because Khrys was wrong. Khrys was, in the way of genuinely good people, completely right. But just you could stretch, just this once, to include a slightly braver you.

He'd asked Noah last. He'd been stalling and he knew he'd been stalling.

The mirror exploded.

Noah arrived like a system coming fully online — suddenly, completely, at a velocity that left no room for adjustment. Holograms erupted from his PADD in cascading arcs, filling the air with rotating silhouettes and fabric drape simulations and color-block diagrams that Noah was already annotating before they'd finished rendering. His mouth moved faster than thought, questions overlapping with answers he was supplying himself before the questions had fully landed.

"Okay, favorite color, how do you feel about structure, do you want him to notice your shoulders or your— actually I already have data on that, Betazoid fashion is too much, Trill is all monk robes or power suits so that's out, what about Argelian, Argelian is interesting, Argelian does a lot with a silhouette, it's tasteful but it's also—" holograms were already being discarded, flicked into non-existence with the focused efficiency of someone running a diagnostic at crisis speed, "okay Argelian, specifically the cut that— wait, I have seventeen variations, let me just—"

Then silence. Just Noah. Sitting cross-legged on his bunk, PADD balanced on one knee, head tilted at the angle he used when he thought he was being practical and also slightly genius about something.

"What about Argelian?" he'd said. "You know, show off your butt, but not in, like, a crazy Betazoid way.”

He'd said it like it was a complete sentence. Like it was, in fact, a solution.

"...Thanks, Noah."

"You got it!"

He had not asked Tamblem.

This had been a deliberate choice, made on the grounds that asking Tamblem what to wear to dinner with Tamblem was a level of recursive romantic chaos Sheldon's poor nervous system just wasn't equipped to process. He had not asked. He had been very firm about not asking.

His brain had consulted Tamblem anyway.

In the mirror, Dravor materialized in an outfit that could generously be described as a tactical decision. Dark, fitted, aggressively confident, cut in ways that suggested its primary purpose was to make someone else's evening significantly more complicated. And his hair! Sheldon's imagination, apparently, had given Dravor glitter in his hair, fine and gold and catching the light with every slight movement of his head, as though he'd walked through a cloud of it and emerged entirely unbothered, which was honestly the most accurate thing Sheldon's subconscious had ever produced. He looked like someone who had never once in his life stood in front of a closet for twenty minutes. He looked like someone for whom the concept of overthinking an outfit was a charming anthropological curiosity belonging to another species.

"Leather," dream-Dravor said, without preamble. His eyes did something lusty that Sheldon's higher brain functions were not currently equipped to catalog. "Definitely leather."

Sheldon dismissed him.

From across the narrow hallway, through the closed door of the bedroom Tamblem shared with Khrys, came a sound. Just movement. Just the specific, ordinary sound of someone else also getting ready, the soft percussion of a life being lived four feet away. Sheldon stood very still for a moment and listened to it.

The coast was apparently clear. Exiting into the main living area, he crossed to the replicator and entered in his clothing decisions. The pile of garments sparkled into existence — ans then was promptly snatched out of the replicator and carried back into the room. Once again in front of the mirror, Sheldon began to dress.

The shirt first — dark slate blue, soft in a way that wasn’t the cardigan’s softness but was something. A fine basket stitch to the weave, subtle enough that you wouldn’t notice it across a room but present enough that his fingertips found it immediately when it materialized in his hands, tracing the small repeating pattern across the chest without being asked to. His hands did this on their own. He let them.

The trousers next. Dark, tapered, and — he caught himself in the mirror mid-turn, just a glimpse, just a second — doing exactly what Noah had said Argelian tailoring would do. He moved on. Promptly. With great professionalism.

Returning to the shirt, Sheldon undid the top button. Rolled the sleeves to the forearms, one and then the other, the fabric settling just below the elbow the way Iry had described it, the way she’d made sound like the easiest thing in the world.

Then he looked in the mirror and really looked.

The slate blue sat well against his coloring. But it was the light pink pocket square peeking up from the lip that tied everything together best. The square was the most unrehearsed thing about the whole outfit. The part that was just him.

That’ll do, Shelly, he thought to himself. 

As he reached to close the closet doors, his eyes landed once again on his unicorn slippers — replacements, the previous pair having met an ignoble end courtesy of a goo monster — and visually traced the names penned in three different hands, written before everything got complicated. He'd been meaning to ask Khrys to sign them too. He just hadn't worked up to asking yet. Sheldon would though…when the time was right.

He finally closed the closet and opened his bedroom door slowly. The hallway was four feet of quiet, and across it Tamblem's door was still closed. Sheldon held his breath, moved past it in three steps, and came out into the living area. Sheldon crossed it quickly, quietly, looking like someone who was trying. Not performing. Not armored. Just…trying.

He went out the door.

The walk to Debbie's took six minutes. His right hand drifted once to the bottom hem of his new shirt, fingertips finding something soft without being directed, resting there a moment before falling back to his side.

As Debbie’s came into view, Sheldon stopped for just a moment. A real date, he thought. And with the biggest smile he’d smiled in the history of Sheldon smiles, he went in.

=/\= A post by… =/\=

Lt JG Sheldon Parsons

Acting Chief Engineer

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