“Too much?” Dasranika asked of the reclined figure across the short lounge of their quarters as she presented herself clad in a white dress uniform. The thin golden beading at its hem caught the low lamp light, accentuating the pristine surface in the dim room.

Dane lowered the worn book in his hands, allowing his dark eyes to peek over the worn page edges. 

“You’re visiting a mine,” he remarked.

“And?”

“Well, that’s a lot of white for a mine,” Dane smirked, as one eyebrow wiggled its way further from the top of his book. 

“You think it’s too much?” Dasranika grimaced as she patted down the uniform’s front panel, tugging at the hem in discomfort.

“I think you’re at risk of being commissioned as the new light source for the whole complex if you’re not careful.”

Dasranika threw him a sharp look, her normally maternal features scrunching into a playful scowl. She knew she would regret asking his opinion; the man could make a smock look chic, whereas she had always disliked the figure in the mirror. 

“It’s good to have job prospects,” she teased as she unclipped the jacket and slid it onto its waiting hanger. “And what will you do when I follow my new path?”

Dane lowered the book to his lap, slipping an ornate wooden bookmark between the pages as he placed it back on the table surface alongside a pile of similarly well-thumbed tomes. 

“Well, it will be a struggle,” he offered with a performative sigh as his semi-permanent smile slid into a playful sorrow. “But I shall tell all my colleagues that I’m proud to be married to our first sentient lamp.”

“So we’d still be married?” Dasranika slumped down on the sofa next to him and lifted a china cup to her lips.

“Till death do us part, the vows never said anything about transfiguration.” Dane lifted a carafe, it’s translucent surface twisting in the low light as he offered it up.

With a nod, Dasranika presented her now-empty china cup and accepted a long pour of opaque red liquid from the slender spout. 

“I think I’d make a good lamp,” she laughed as she cupped the delicate receptacle between her hands, it’s elegant flower motif curving around the edges and disappearing into her palms.

“The best lamp,” Dane confirmed with a smile as he set the carafe back down on the table with a light clinking of glass against metal. “Positively incandescent.”  

Dasranika allowed a small laugh to escape her lips as she took a long sip from the cup. 

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We need to get the Concord to agree to the trade deal first before anyone thinks about career moves.” She reached up and unclipped her tightly wound crown of hair, allowing the thick plait that rounded the edge to fall away into a lustrous mane of dark hair. 

“You think there’s a chance they won’t?” Dane leaned back into the sofa, offering a wide arm which Dasranika took eagerly, sliding into his shoulder with a short shuffle of satisfaction. 

“You’ve read the reports?”

“I have,” he confirmed as he pointed to the PADD that sat on the coffee table with his outstretched arm, which he then retracted and began to slowly run his fingers through her recently unleashed hair.

“Thoughts?”

“Are you asking as a Captain of her Diplomat?”

“The uniform is over there,” she motioned to the white beacon of overt formality with a foot to where it now hung on the edge of the set of shelves. A perfect icon of Federation properness and in Dasranika’s mind, officiousness. She’d far rather take to the mine in a dirt covered jumpsuit, feel the rock in her hands, hear the words that the miners share over impacts of the hammer and axe. But the Concord was ruled by beings who wished to keep their hands clean and thus formality was the costume of necessity. 

“Then as your husband, I think they are…” Dane pused, selecting the best word from his extensive lexicon. 

The Concord were one of the multitude of independent nations peppering the newly accessible Shackleton Expanse, filled with adventurous spirit in what was, to the Federation, a new frontier. Previously locked behind The Shroud, they were now an important potential ally, if only because they held claim to the greatest Dilithium deposits in a hundred lightyears. They certainly weren’t attractive because of their stratified and purist policies that extolled genetic perfection and biological supremacy by virtue of a constructed and edited genetic code. 

“…problematic,” he finally finished. 

Dasranika turned her head upwards to face him with a frown.

“That is a very vague assessment,” she chided. “I was hoping for something a bit more insightful.”

“They are an authoritarian nation built around the aggressive speciest segregation of three sentient races, where an oppressive and totalitarian ruling class maintains hegemony through the idea of artificial genetic superiority and purity,” Dane offered. 

“That’s certainly…”

“Insightful?”

“Was not the word that came to mind.” Dasranika shuffled closer into his body. 

A long, comfortable silence eeked its way throughout the room. They had always valued each other’s opinions, but it was a fine line to walk for them both between professional advice and her responsibilities as a Captain of Starfleet. 

“Do you think it’s a mistake, parlaying with them?” She asked into his chest. 

Dane considered the question for a long moment, meticulously assessing each imagined future possibility against his vast knowledge base of historical occurrences. 

“I think it’s dangerous to align ourselves with a government that at its core seems opposed to the values the Federation champions.” He eventually answered with a sigh. 

“We’ve done it before. The Klingons, for example, are hardly known for their freedom-loving social policies,” Dasranika argued, idly running her hand across his chest, probing with a finger beneath its light cotton covering to touch his comforting skin. 

“But even the Klingon Empire doesn’t predicate itself on the idea that one party is inherently superior to another by virtue of their genetic base pairs.” Dane smiled as he felt her hands slip beneath the cotton. “At least not like it used to.” 

“We need their resources to make exploration of Shackleton truly viable,” she hummed. “They could supply dilithium to the whole fleet for the next century without blinking.”

“Then we are back to what we value more, our needs or our principles,” Dane replied in a hushed tone. 

Dasranika let out a contented noise, somewhere between a happy purr and satisfied sigh as his fingers continued to track through her hair.

“Always have to find the philosophical question, don’t you?” She murmured as the last pieces of the uniformed Captain gave way to the happy wife. 

“Is that not why you married me?”

“No!” She turned her face up from his chest towards his face. 

Handsome by any account and charming by all the others, Dane was ever the diplomat, the philosopher, the considerate and steady voice of reasoned opposition to whatever she was thinking. 

She reached up and placed a kiss on his lips. 

“You have a nice face,” she whispered as she pressed a small control in the sofa’s backrest and dimmed the last of the low light from the room. 

Diplomatic considerations could wait for the morning; for now, they would remain hung on the shelf alongside the uniform, a troubling responsibility temporarily out of sight and mind.