They are two days away from the system when Isabella notices something - troubling.
She takes longer than usual to compose herself that morning, and emerges from the living quarters with carefully measured steps, and avoids eye contact.
"Do you," she asks Lalita quietly, "have the ability to fly this class of ship?"
An indelicate full-body shudder ensues. "I have - somewhere, written down, a - I spend a great deal of time away from other Vulcans, I hoped to avoid this but knew I could not be sure, I have - a speech of sorts prepared." She reaches for her temple, winds up with one hand clenched in her hair as she teeters towards the computer and goes looking for the file.
Her speech of sorts opens with common knowledge about pon farr, of which none is new to anyone who can identify the phenomenon merely by virtue of "an unexpected need to meditate for seven days". And then: "If I am reading this speech then I have not found myself among the lucky half-Vulcans who evade the problem entirely, and have instead fallen prey to the unpredictable timing that affects those of us who do experience this phenomenon. I was not betrothed in childhood, and even if I had been, my intended would almost certainly have died when Vulcan was destroyed. I am prepared to address the issue with meditation and medication, but this would be at some risk to my life; exact figures regarding how much risk are unreliable due to the rarity of half-Vulcan half-humans. If, given the kindness of another person, I opt for the traditional satisfaction of the hormonal imbalance, there is no guarantee I will have the wherewithal to comprehend, let alone abide by, a change of mind during the process, which should be understood before beginning. Regarding practical matters - I will not regard assistance during this time as any sort of ongoing commitment - I am fitted with a contraceptive implant -" She trails off; there's a bit of formal thank-you-for-your-time language at the end but she's apparently opted to skip it in favor of scrunching her eyes shut and trembling violently. If she has any of the Vulcan emotional suppression, it's not helping her much now.
The sensation of not being going to die is, when it appears, like a punch to the gut in the best possible way. This might be a stupid way to design a species, but it is not without some advantages.
Neither does Isabella. Insofar as "plan" is even the word. Her father's species evolved in a desert; she can do without much intake of anything over the course of a week, whether "anything" is a stand-in for "sleep" or "water" or "food". Over this amount of time those needs just aren't going to be competitive with the main one.
When the last of her little problem is out of her system, she is abruptly no longer impelled to stay awake. She drops her head onto his chest and falls instantly asleep.
She talks in her sleep, in a mix of her native languages.
But he's slept a lot more recently than she has, and now that they're not having near-continuous sex, he thinks maybe it's time to check on their navigation. He gets out of bed, attends to his badly neglected personal grooming, and then heads for the captain's chair to use the ship's computer.
They are parked in interstellar space. There is a course entered to Betazed, ready to resume whenever the order is entered; it will take them another two days to get there at reasonable warp. The proximity alarm is operative and will beep at them if any debris or hails or distress signals make their way to the Prometheus.
She pokes around in her files, looking for what to read next; she finished the novel she was reading while he was sleeping the other day. She can't work on her essay or her diary with a passenger supervising, but it's not that urgent -
She peers at the access date on her essay.
She peers at Lalita.
"I'm—what is it, 2269? I'm two hundred and seventy-four years old," he says. "I was born in 1995. You seem pretty well-informed; I'm sure you can fill in a lot of the blanks yourself. That's why I soak up languages like a sponge - I know a lot more than thirty. That's why I can break medium-tight encryptions while daydreaming. I had to learn to crack a few things so I could muddle my data trails; I can pass for anything from early twenties to mid-fifties, but that still means I have to cycle identities every thirty years."
"Oh - anything about family is either a flat-out lie or actually meant successive imaginary generations of me. I won the Harlequin in a game of poker the year she was commissioned, for example; I'm older than warp drive, let alone that ship. But the book's real, and it really has been with me since childhood. I can show you if you want."
He laughs. "Aren't they just? This book was my favourite thing in the world as a child."
"Just about everything. I learn faster, think faster, move faster, react faster, heal faster, I haven't aged since I was thirty, my memory's almost perfect even coming up on three hundred years - I never looked it up and the records are long gone, but I'm half convinced genetic engineering is the reason I'm so pretty."
"Running," says the computer.
And then it offers her the number 21,476,912,443 ± 2,008,154,014.
"It doesn't count future generations. Those are people who are alive today, who will - according to my best guess, you can see there's a huge margin of error - who will now have access to Federation standard of living and live longer for it. Lives I've saved. It does count the Mirivanl, though, even though Starfleet has not yet picked up a warp signature from them."
"I look at it when I become concerned about the prospect of spending a much smaller number of days on some prison moon. I would willingly be inconvenienced for a day under those conditions to save a single life, and will live for dramatically fewer than twenty-one billion days. And I have not even been caught yet, by anyone apart from you. The math checks out."
"You want to come with me? On - it really is seventy-five percent surveying. Even the planting of warp plans is mostly a matter of learning to write numbers in the local languages and running a computer analysis of citation patterns to find someone inclined to pass mysterious research off as their own."
"It... is a minimum, not a maximum, but - until a week ago I had not - indulged - at all - and do not yet know what rate I will prefer for the intervening years. And I am not sure what you are insinuating. I specified that I would not take assistance as an indication of a more ongoing commitment, but that relates to the fact that the situation was urgent and I did not have a traditional mate available with whom to conduct a ritual marriage-sealing. The matter will not be urgent again for seven years."
"While it would not have been culturally uncharacteristic for me to have been betrothed at age seven, I do not wish to become so now to a man I met less than two weeks ago. I believe I would find physically affectionate friendship emotionally confusing. I would be willing to be your girlfriend."
"Large transfers of wealth draw attention; we have known each other for less than two weeks; the fact that we're going to be traveling together doesn't diminish the fact that then you wouldn't have it anymore. I suppose I'm a slightly longer-term caretaker than any of your myriad identities, since I age as I am expected to, but it will still add an extra step if you want to buy anything."
"I can block casual reading, but you probably can't, unless you were engineered by someone particularly prophetic about what humanity would encounter in later years. If I couldn't block it I wouldn't want to go anywhere near a Betazoid. We have enough supplies to go to Hallia instead, if you were only agreeing to Betazed to avoid inconveniencing me."
"Yes, I know. And you can't block Betazoids anyway. Just -" She shrugs. "Not everything is casual surface reading. If you want to be my boyfriend you should probably know that it would make me uncomfortable if you were engaging in less casual telepathy with other people."