Breakfast Patrol
Posted on Mon Apr 13th, 2026 @ 7:30am by Maren Malbrooke
Edited on on Tue Apr 14th, 2026 @ 4:42pm
2,090 words; about a 10 minute read
Mission:
The Mysteries of Maren
Location: Guest Quarters - Deck 2 - USS Herodotus
Timeline: MD003 0741 hrs
Morning aboard the Herodotus arrived quietly, though Maren only really knew it by the change in the room itself. The ambient lighting had shifted to a softer, cooler setting, and somewhere beyond the walls the ship had settled into that low, steady rhythm of a new day already underway.
At some point in the night she had fallen asleep properly, not the hard emotional shutdown from before but something thinner and more uneven, broken up by stretches of half-dreaming and those strange moments where she surfaced just enough to know she was still there before dropping again. When she woke for real, the room was still, the air cool, the PADD dark beside her on the bed where she had left it.
Her body felt wrung out. Not injured, not anymore, but emptied in that strange way grief could manage when it had worked through you hard enough. Her eyes felt sore. Her head was thick. Her stomach, annoyingly enough, had decided that after everything else it was now its turn to be difficult.
That more than anything got her moving.
Maren pushed herself upright slowly and sat there for a moment, staring blearily at nothing while she tried to gather herself into something resembling a person again. The ship beyond the room was a distant murmur at the edges of her awareness, there if she let herself pay attention to it, but this morning she kept the emotional noise blurred and shallow on purpose. She had no interest in finding out how much of herself was still leaking into the walls.
Eventually she swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood, pausing only long enough to make sure the room wasn’t going to tilt on her before she started moving. The replicator caught her eye for a second, but the thought of standing here eating breakfast alone in borrowed quarters made her feel tired all over again.
She made her way toward the bathroom instead, one hand dragging absently through her hair as she went.
The mirror stopped her cold.
For a second she just stared at herself. Her hair looked like she had slept in a plasma conduit. Her eyes were swollen and tired, her face puffy in that unmistakable way that came after crying too hard and then pretending to sleep it off. She looked wrecked. Not elegantly tragic. Just properly, honestly awful.
Maren narrowed her eyes at her own reflection.
“Yeah, brilliant,” she muttered. “You look amazing.”
Maren stood there for another second, still squinting at her reflection like maybe it would improve out of spite.
It didn’t.
With a quiet sigh she turned on the sink, splashed cold water over her face, and immediately regretted how awake that made her feel. A towel followed, then a second pass with her fingers through her hair that did almost nothing except make it look slightly more deliberate. She leaned closer to the mirror, inspected the damage, and decided that “less haunted” was probably the best she was getting without a full shower and a complete personality transplant.
That would have to do.
By the time she stepped back into the main room, the idea of staying in it any longer had lost what little appeal it might have had. She wanted food, and more than that she wanted people nearby in that distant, background sort of way that made a place feel lived in without demanding anything from her. Somewhere she could sit, eat, and let the noise of other lives happening around her take the edge off her own thoughts for a while.
Her eyes went briefly to the replicator and then away again.
“No,” she muttered to herself, already heading for the door. “Not doing breakfast alone in here.”
When she reached the exit, she straightened a little, dragged her hand once more through the worst of her hair, and keyed the door open with all the resolve of someone who had decided that if she was going to be trapped on a starship in the wrong universe, she was at least going to go find something decent to eat.
The doors slid open and Maren stopped dead.
Two security officers stood outside her quarters, planted there like they’d been grown out of the deck plating specifically to ruin her morning. The look they gave her wasn’t openly hostile, but it was definitely the sort of look that asked where exactly she thought she was going.
Maren stared at them for a beat, then let out a short breath through her nose.
“Wow,” she said, lifting her brows. “This is a bit much, isn’t it?”
Her gaze flicked from one to the other, unimpressed.
“I’m seventeen,” she added, in that dry, faintly offended tone teenage girls had perfected since the beginning of time. “What exactly do you think I’m going to do? Hijack the ship before breakfast?”
One of the officers shifted just enough to answer. “Major Eilfaren posted us here for your safety.”
Maren’s eyes narrowed slightly. She had no idea who Major Eilfaren was by name, but with the way they said it, she could make a pretty solid guess. Big, green-eyed, built like he could punch through a bulkhead if he got bored.
“Right,” she said flatly. “The giant one.”
Her hand settled on her hip as she looked between them, unimpressed. “And let me guess, this was his idea of subtle?”
The sarcasm sharpened as she glanced down the corridor, then back at them.
“Or was this the captain’s?” she asked. “Because that would make sense. Post two guards outside the traumatised teenager’s door, then go sit in his office drinking ancient wine and feeling profound about it.”
She let that hang for a beat, fully aware it might annoy them.
“Honestly, if this is ‘for my safety’, your ship really needs to work on its people skills.”
One of the officers held his ground, though something in his expression suggested he was reconsidering how simple this assignment had sounded on paper.
“We’re under orders to accompany you if you leave your quarters,” he said evenly. “If you need something, we can assist.”
Maren gave him a look that suggested this was not the reassuring offer he seemed to think it was.
“Whatever,” she said, waving one hand dismissively. “Then assist.”
She pointed down the corridor, then back at herself, then mimed shovelling food into her mouth with all the grace of someone making a point as hard as possible.
“Where’s your chow hall? Mess deck? Galley? Somewhere on this floating tin can where people go to get breakfast?”
The officer blinked at her, clearly caught somewhere between “chow hall” and “galley.”
Maren stared at him.
“Oh my God, seriously?” she said, looking to the second guard as if maybe this one had been issued with more brain cells. “The place with tables? Food? People eating? Me, walking in, sitting down, not dying dramatically from starvation?”
She acted the whole thing out again, more exaggerated this time, ending with both hands spread wide in disbelief.
“Breakfast,” she said, slower now, as if speaking to a particularly disappointing child. “I want breakfast.”
The second officer gave his partner a brief look before answering. “We can take you there.”
“Great,” Maren said, as if this had all been much more difficult than it needed to be. Her eyes slid back to the first officer, lingering there just long enough to make the point properly.
“You, though…” She tipped her head slightly, giving him a once-over that was all teenage judgement and no mercy. “Maybe security’s not really your thing.”
She started walking, expecting them to fall in around her.
“I don’t know,” she added lightly over her shoulder, “something with fewer moving parts. Or words.”
The first officer stepped across just enough to cut in front of her, not aggressively, but with enough firmness to make it clear he was done being talked around.
“I understood you perfectly well,” he said, more assertively this time, his voice flattening into something professional and unamused. “And if I’m responsible for your safety, I’m not making assumptions because you feel like being difficult.”
Maren stopped short, more from surprise than obedience, her brows lifting as he held her gaze.
He didn’t move.
“We will take you where you need to go,” he continued, still steady. “But you will stop treating this like a game.”
Maren blinked at him once, then her whole expression softened into something so suddenly sweet it was immediately suspicious.
“Aww,” she said, tipping her head and looking up at him through her lashes with exaggerated innocence. “There he is.”
She even folded her hands loosely behind her back for half a second, rocking back a little on her heels like she was trying very hard to be impressed.
“That’s much better,” she went on, her voice all mockingly cute now, honeyed in a way that made it obvious she was doing it to get under his skin. “See, I knew you had a real sentence in you somewhere.”
Her eyes flicked over him once, quick and shameless, before settling back on his face with the faintest smile.
“You should’ve started with the serious voice,” she added lightly. “Very commanding. Super intimidating. Gold star.”
Then she leaned just slightly to one side, peering past him down the corridor as if he were now the only thing delaying breakfast.
“So are we done with the dramatic hallway stand-off,” she asked, still in that too-sweet tone, “or do you want to keep proving how dangerous I am before I get pancakes?”
The second officer, who had been wisely saying very little up to that point, spoke up anyway.
“Pancakes aren’t exactly a healthy breakfast,” he said, almost by reflex, like the thought had slipped out before he realised he was addressing her.
Maren turned her head slowly toward him.
For a second she just stared.
Then she looked between the two of them like the ship had assigned her the least helpful security detail in Starfleet history.
“Oh, amazing,” she said, throwing one hand up. “So one of you thinks I’m a tactical threat and the other one’s suddenly my nutritionist.”
She let out a sharp, disbelieving huff and dragged both hands down over her face before dropping them again, very much at the end of her patience.
“I just want food,” she said, the words coming out with all the exhausted, minor-drama energy of a girl who had had a truly catastrophic forty-eight hours and was now somehow arguing about breakfast. “That’s it. Not a lecture. Not a tactical assessment. Not whatever this is.”
Her hands spread wide in a small, irritated flourish.
“I want to go sit somewhere, eat something with too much syrup on it, and be in a bad mood in peace. Why is that suddenly this hard?”
The first officer gave a quiet, long-suffering huff and finally stepped aside, turning to lead the way down the corridor with the kind of rigid professionalism that suggested he was now committed to pretending none of the last few minutes had happened.
Maren watched him go, then looked sideways at the second officer before her attention slid back to the first. Even through all that stiffness she’d caught it earlier, just for a second when she’d said pancakes — a flicker of something warm and unguarded, the sort of immediate, ridiculous positivity people only ever seemed to have about food they genuinely loved.
“See?” she said lightly, falling into step behind them at last. “You could’ve just led with that.”
The first officer didn’t look back, which only made it better.
Maren shoved her hands into the pockets of her jacket as they started down the corridor, some of the weight from the night before finally lifting just enough for her to feel more like herself again. “And don’t think I missed that,” she added, just loud enough to carry. “You absolutely like pancakes.”
There was a beat before she threw in the last part, smug and entirely too pleased with herself.
“So maybe let’s not act like I’m the unreasonable one here.”
She caught the faintest tightening in his shoulders and smiled to herself as they turned the corner, following the promise of breakfast deeper into the ship.
A Post By:
Maren Malbrooke
Civilian, USS Pioneer
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