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Zunite Oswald
| | Posted on Tuesday, March 09, 2004 - 12:36 am: | |
[Posted on behalf of Sonya]
Life it seems was a circle. That probably wasn’t the only explanation for why Zunite was now unpacking her belongings on the Coronado. It had only been a little over 6 months since she had left Coronado; running, she now realized, from the deaths of friends that echoed the ship. Zunite carefully put a photo on a shelf and let her mind slip back.
She had packed her bags and left the Coronado for the university, not letting the Captain talk her out of it. It was for the best, she had caused that ensigns death by her own incompetence, and all the tact and officer training programs in the world could not convince her that put in that situation again he would not have died. She was not made of the same material as her father, she couldn’t accept killing innocents just because there were some in the universe out to kill her and her friends. At the university she would teach and be happy and the new friends she made there would be safe from being killed by the savages of the universe.
Two weeks of teaching was enough to convince her that, whatever she may have thought, she couldn’t be happy simply living the easy life. She tried filling every moment with her students, hoping that somehow they would be able to convince her that this career was as rewarding as her old one. It wasn’t. It couldn’t be. Something was still missing. In an attempt to fill that void she began working in the department’s labs – working on other people’s projects, correcting them, nearly blowing herself up a few times – she met Aaron there.
Aaron swept her off her feet. He made her feel alive. They spent every spare moment together. Zunite began her own research, gaining funding and her own lab from the university. The university was eager to reap the rewards of Zunite’s brilliant engineering mind. She took up warp field research, finding the limited understanding of something that was so commonly used to be fascinating.
A few months pasted blissfully, and then the unforeseeable happened. Aaron, always seeking new adventures, died in an accident. Zunite buried herself in her research, unable to believe that death could be so cruel. Two months later, still grieving for her lost, but finally calm enough to cope, Zunite reemerged from her research. She published a paper on warp field theory and began the rigorous process of convincing both the university and the Starfleet authorities in the area that her theories were sound enough to test on real starships. By pulling strings and calling in a few favors, she had found herself once again assigned to the Coronado.
She ran a finger across Aaron’s face in the picture and then turned and saw her reflection in a mirror. She no longer was a commander. She was no longer even a member of Starfleet. She was a civilian, a scientist, and an engineer. Not a member of the crew, but in a sense that most of all gave her the courage to come back to face what she knew was an even more brutal world then the one she had just left.
Zunite was finally home again
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