Bring Her Again

Gideon Ashe had been coming through the station long enough that Sena could place his ship's arrival pattern without checking the manifest, a loose, unpredictable rhythm that worked out to roughly four or five stops a year, always on the same long-haul freight route, always around the same hour of the evening when the dinner rush had thinned but hadn't quite ended. She knew his usual booth, the one near the middle window that wasn't too close to the door and wasn't too far from the kitchen either.

She knew his order came in two parts — the stew if it was on the board that night, the burger if it wasn't — and she knew he liked his coffee poured strong enough to stand a spoon in, a detail Stirling had adopted as a point of professional pride some years back and had never once gotten wrong since.

So when Gideon came through the door that evening, Sena had his rhythm half anticipated before she'd even looked up properly, and it took her a beat longer than it should have to notice that he wasn't alone.

The girl beside him was younger, gangly in the specific way of someone who'd grown several inches faster than the rest of her had caught up to, somewhere in the middle stretch of her teenage years, carrying herself with the careful, watchful posture of someone taking in a place she'd never been and wasn't sure yet how to read.

"Sena," Gideon said, with his usual easy warmth, though there was something slightly more careful in it tonight, a performance layered thin over the top of his normal manner. "This is my daughter. Talia. Talia, this is Sena. Runs the place, more or less."

"More or less," Sena agreed, and offered Talia a smile that got a small, uncertain one back. "Good to meet you. First time out this way?"

"First time anywhere out here," Talia said. "Dad talks about this place sometimes. I didn't really picture it, though."

"What'd you picture?"

Talia considered this honestly. "I don't know. Bigger, maybe. Fancier."

"We get that a lot," Sena said, easy about it, and gestured them toward the booth by the middle window, the one that was, without either of them apparently noticing, exactly where Gideon always sat.

He noticed it once they were seated, a small flicker of something crossing his face, half pleased and half self-conscious, the recognition of a habit being witnessed by someone new to it. Sena caught the flicker and set the water glasses down without comment, giving them a moment before she asked what they wanted rather than sliding straight into his usual order the way she normally would have.

"Stew's on the board tonight, if that interests either of you. Otherwise the usual menu."

"Dad always gets the stew," Talia said, glancing at the specials board like she was testing the accuracy of her own memory against reality.

"Not always," Gideon said. "Sometimes the burger."

"You basically always get the stew when it's on."

"I get the burger sometimes."

"When was the last time you got the burger?"

Gideon opened his mouth, paused, and then admitted, with the particular sheepishness of a man caught out by his own child, "I don't actually remember. It's been a while."

"So, basically always the stew," Talia said, not unkindly, and Sena, watching this exchange, filed away the detail that Talia knew her father's ordering habits well enough to call them out, which told her something useful about how much attention the girl actually paid to the parts of his life she did get to see.

"I'll do the stew," Gideon said, to Sena. "Talia, you want to look at the menu, or—"

"I can look at the menu myself," Talia said, a little quickly, and picked it up before he could suggest anything further, the small, reflexive assertion of someone used to being spoken for and not entirely comfortable with it, even when it was well-meant.

Gideon caught the edge in it and, to his credit, didn't push, leaning back instead and letting her read in peace, though Sena noticed the careful, slightly too-attentive way he watched her do it, like a man trying hard to get something right without being entirely sure what right looked like anymore.

Sena gave them a minute rather than hovering, drifting off to check on a nearby table before coming back with her pad in hand. When she did, she asked Talia directly, without routing it through her father the way she might have out of habit with a younger kid.

"What are you thinking?"

"I don't know yet. Is the fish good, or is that a trap question at a place like this?"

"It's good. Chef's particular about it, which around here usually means it's better than it needs to be."

"I'll do the fish, then."

"Good call," Sena said, and left it at that, and Gideon, watching this small exchange, seemed to notice something in it too — the plain fact that Sena had asked his daughter what she wanted rather than assuming she'd fall in line with whatever he ordered, a small thing that nonetheless seemed to register with him as worth noticing.

Stirling arrived a few minutes later with Gideon's coffee, unasked, set down with the ceremony he brought to every delivery. "Strong enough to stand a spoon in, as always."

"You remembered."

"I remember all my regulars' preferences. It would be poor hospitality not to." Stirling glanced at Talia with polite interest. "And for the young lady? I have a number of options that do not involve caffeine, should that be of interest."

"I'm fine with water for now," Talia said, and then, once Stirling had gone, looked at her father with an expression somewhere between amusement and genuine surprise. "He just knew how you take your coffee."

"He's got a good memory for that kind of thing."

"For everybody, or just you?"

"I don't know, honestly. I've never asked him about anybody else's coffee," Gideon said, and Talia laughed, a small, real sound that eased something in his shoulders, the first genuine crack in the careful performance he'd been running since they'd sat down.

Dani came by not long after to take Talia's order, and recognized Gideon immediately with the easy, unbothered familiarity of someone greeting a regular fixture rather than a stranger. "Gideon. You're due, aren't you? Feels like it's been a while."

"Little over four months."

"Four months, and you never once mentioned you had a daughter this whole time. Rude, honestly." Dani said this with open teasing rather than any real accusation, and turned her attention to Talia with immediate, easy warmth. "First visit?"

"First visit."

"Well, welcome. Fair warning, your dad's basically furniture around here. We've got a running bet on whether he'll ever actually order something off-menu, which he never does, so if you want to be the reason he finally breaks the streak, that'd be a great use of your evening."

"I heard that," Gideon said.

"You were meant to," Dani said, unrepentant, and Talia, watching this exchange, seemed to relax by another visible degree, the sense settling in that whatever this place was, it wasn't the kind of formal, unfamiliar restaurant she'd apparently braced herself for.

She ordered something off the regular menu, not the stew, a choice Gideon noted with a small, careful glance that Sena caught from across the room — the look of a man recalibrating some outdated picture of what his daughter liked to eat, filing away a detail he hadn't had before.

Once Dani had gone, the booth settled into a quieter stretch, the two of them with drinks in front of them and nothing yet to actually eat, and Sena, passing with a rag in hand to wipe down a nearby table, caught enough of the conversation that followed to understand exactly what kind of evening this was going to be.

"So," Gideon said, "how's school going?"

"Fine."

"Just fine?"

"It's school, Dad. It's fine. It's not really a story kind of thing."

"Sure. Right." He nodded, took a sip of his coffee, tried again. "You still doing the — the thing with the study group? The one you mentioned last time we talked?"

"That ended in the spring. I told you that."

"Right. Sorry. I lose track sometimes, with the route and everything."

"It's fine," Talia said, though something in her tone suggested it wasn't entirely fine, just familiar enough not to be worth making an issue of. She looked out the window at the docking ring, the quiet scatter of berth lights, and didn't offer anything further, and Gideon, visibly searching for the next thing to ask, came up a little short.

It went on like that for a few minutes, question and short answer, the two of them clearly caring about each other and clearly out of practice at the particular rhythm of talking without a schedule or a checklist behind it, and Sena, watching from the counter while she refilled a set of salt shakers that didn't especially need refilling, recognized the shape of it immediately.

She'd seen it before, in other regulars who came through with people they loved and hadn't quite kept pace with — not a broken thing, just a rusty one, the kind of gap that opened up naturally when someone spent half the year somewhere else and came home to a person who'd kept growing in his absence.

She didn't intervene right away. There wasn't anything to intervene in yet, nothing broken enough to fix, just an ordinary awkwardness that most people worked their way through given enough time and enough plain proximity. But when Ivo came by with a basket of bread for the table, she caught his eye and gave him a small nod that meant, without either of them needing to say it, take your time with this one.

Ivo set the bread down and, recognizing Gideon from past visits with the easy familiarity of someone who'd clocked a few small recurring details over the years, said, "You still owe me that story about the depot cat, by the way. You promised last time and then your ship left before you got to the ending."

"The depot cat," Gideon said, brightening slightly at the memory. "Right. The depot cat."

"What's the depot cat?" Talia asked, genuinely curious now, the first question all evening she'd asked without being prompted.

"There's a supply depot two stops back on my route that's got this cat living in it, been there for years, technically not allowed, technically everybody feeds it anyway. Last time I came through, it had apparently declared war on the new shipment scanner."

"Declared war how?"

"Sat directly on top of it. For three days. Wouldn't move. Depot manager tried everything short of physically relocating it, and everybody was too scared of getting scratched to actually try that."

"So what happened?"

"Depot manager's kid came by after school one day, picked the cat up like it was nothing, moved it six feet, and it never went back. Cat's apparently fine with the scanner now, so long as nobody makes a fuss about it."

Talia laughed, actually laughed, and Gideon, hearing it, looked pleased in a way that went beyond the story itself, the small, genuine relief of a conversation finally finding its footing. "You never told me that part. You just said there was a cat."

"I was saving the good part for in person."

"That's a pretty low bar for a good part."

"It's a solid story. Ivo agrees with me."

"Ivo's just being polite," Talia said, glancing at Ivo, who grinned and didn't dispute it, and went back toward the kitchen with the small, satisfied sense of a job well done, though he hadn't done much beyond ask about a cat.

Chef sent the food out not long after, the stew for Gideon prepared exactly the way he liked it, a detail Chef mentioned to nobody in particular but confirmed with Sol at the pass, the quiet, practical care he brought to every regular's order without needing to make a point of it.

"Extra bread on the side, the way he takes it," Chef said, sliding the plate onto the tray. "Skip the pepper garnish. He never touches it."

"You remember that?"

"I remember what people actually eat versus what they leave on the plate. It's not complicated," Chef said, in the tone of a man who considered this simply part of doing the job properly rather than any special feat of memory, and went back to the grill without further comment.

Sol, plating Talia's fish alongside it, glanced out through the pass at the booth by the window without comment, though when Nari came through a moment later to collect the tray, Sol said, mild and unhurried, "That's Gideon's kid, out there."

"The regular? Didn't know he had one."

"Neither did I, till tonight. Guess that's the job, sometimes. You know a person's coffee order for a decade and you still don't know the whole shape of their life." Sol wiped her hands on her apron and turned back to the flattop, unbothered, the observation offered and dropped without further weight put on it, though Nari carried the tray out thinking about it a little longer than the comment probably warranted.

Talia's plate came out alongside her father's, and she looked at both, then at the room around them, something shifting visibly in her expression.

"Does everybody here know you?"

"Some of them," Gideon said. "I've been coming through a long time."

"The bartender knew your coffee. The waitress remembered you didn't mention me. The busser knew a story about a cat you told him." She said this slowly, working through the accumulation of it. "I didn't know you had a whole — I don't know. A whole life out here that people know about."

"It's not really a whole life. It's a stop on a route. I eat here maybe five times a year."

"Five times a year for how many years?"

"Since before you were in school, probably."

Talia was quiet for a moment, picking at the edge of her fish with her fork rather than eating it. "What's it actually like, though? The stops. I always just pictured it as, I don't know, gray hallways and cargo bays. You never really said much about the parts in between."

"It's mostly gray hallways and cargo bays," Gideon admitted. "But there's a few places like this scattered along the route. Not many. Enough that I've got a rhythm to it, I guess."

"Like what? Other restaurants?"

"One or two. There's a laundromat two stops from here that's run by a guy named Petrus who insists on telling me about his grandkids every single time, whether I ask or not. I could probably draw you a family tree at this point."

"That's not really the same as a restaurant."

"No. But it's the same idea. Little fixed points. Things that don't change even when everything around them does." He took a bite of the stew, considering. "There's a mechanic near the far end of the route who keeps trying to get me to trade my ship in for something newer. Every single time. I keep telling him no. I think he's just doing it as a bit, at this point."

"Does he actually think you'll say yes someday?"

"I genuinely don't know. Might be the whole appeal of it, for him. Something to needle me about that never resolves."

Talia smiled slightly at that, turning her fork over. "Okay, that's a little bit funny. You have a whole cast of people out there. It's weird you never talk about them."

"I don't know. It always felt like it'd sound like complaining, or like I was trying to make the route sound more interesting than it is. Most of it really is just gray hallways."

"I don't think it'd sound like complaining. I think I'd just like knowing." She said it plainly, without much weight behind it, but Gideon heard it anyway, and something in his face shifted, like a door left slightly open that he hadn't noticed before.

"I could tell you more of it. If you wanted. Next time we talk, or — I don't know, I could write it down, even. The Petrus thing alone could probably fill an hour."

"I'd rather hear it than read it."

"Fair," Gideon said, and filed that away too, the same careful, recalibrating look he'd had earlier when she ordered the fish instead of the stew.

Sena, coming by to check on the table, saw the plates mostly untouched still and the two of them leaned in slightly over the table, and rather than asking the usual question about how everything tasted, she simply topped off the water glasses without comment and drifted on, leaving the conversation its air. It wasn't a large thing. But it meant the moment didn't get cut by the ordinary rhythm of service, and neither of them seemed to notice the choice being made on their behalf.

"Can I ask you something else?" Talia said, once Sena had gone. "Not about the route. About — I don't know. Just, in general. Do you actually like doing this? The freight thing. Or is it just what pays?"

Gideon considered this longer than he had the other questions. "Both, honestly. Some days it's just the job. Some days I like the quiet of it more than I probably should admit. You get a lot of time to think, out there, whether you want it or not."

"Do you think about me? Out there?"

"More than you'd probably guess," he said, plain and immediate, no hesitation in it at all, and Talia, caught slightly off guard by the directness of the answer, looked down at her plate and didn't say anything for a moment, though something in her posture eased.

"What do you actually do all day, though?" Gideon asked, after a moment, trying the question at a new angle. "Not the school-is-fine version. Like, what's an actual Tuesday look like for you these days?"

"Honestly? Kind of boring. Classes, homework, sometimes I go to Reya's after if her mom's cooking something good. I've been staying up too late on stuff I'm not supposed to be staying up late on."

"Like what?"

Talia hesitated, just slightly. "Just — a thing I've been working on. It's not a big deal."

"Doesn't have to be a big deal for me to want to hear about it."

She didn't answer that yet, turning her water glass slightly on the table, and Gideon, sensing he'd nearly gotten somewhere without quite getting there, let it sit rather than pushing further, the two of them easing into a slightly longer quiet that didn't feel uncomfortable so much as full, like something building toward being said rather than something being withheld.

It was closer to the end of the meal when Ivo came back to clear the bread basket, and Talia, mostly finished eating by then, glanced at her father with an expression that had shed most of its earlier caution.

"Does everybody here know you'll be back? Like, do they just know you'll show up again eventually?"

"I think so. I never really give anybody a firm date. It's more that they know the shape of it, I guess. Four months, five months, somewhere in there."

"That's a weird way to live. Knowing you're coming back but not when."

"You get used to it," Gideon said, and then, after a beat, added, "I don't know if I'd recommend it, though. I don't know if it's a great way to raise a kid, if I'm honest. I think about that more than I probably let on."

"I didn't say it was bad," Talia said, quieter now. "I just said it was weird."

"Okay," Gideon said, and let that stand, and Sena, passing again with a fresh pot of coffee for a nearby table, caught the shift in the two of them — steadier now, less careful, something in the booth that hadn't quite been there twenty minutes earlier — and didn't linger, but noted it the way she noted most things worth noting, without needing to comment on it at all.

"You said next time I should hear more of the Petrus stories," Talia said, after a moment. "So there's going to be a next time you actually tell me things, and not just when I catch you off guard by asking."

"There's going to be a next time," Gideon said. "I mean it."

Talia nodded slowly, seeming to actually believe it this time rather than simply accepting it as something fathers said, and reached for her water again, something in the whole shape of her more settled than it had been since they'd walked in the door.

Dani, meanwhile, had been watching Talia across the room with the particular interest of someone assessing whether an evening had room in it for a little more fun, and found her opening once Talia had mostly finished eating and Gideon had gone to find the washroom.

"You any good at cards?"

Talia blinked, caught off guard. "I don't really play."

"Nobody here really plays either, that's sort of the point. We've got this beat-up game behind the counter, terrible rules, mostly an excuse to razz each other. Want to learn while your dad's gone? I promise it's not complicated, and I promise I will absolutely humiliate you the first few hands regardless of how simple it is."

"That's a strange sales pitch."

"It's an honest one. Come on. Five minutes. Worst case, you hate it and go back to staring out the window."

Talia, after a moment's consideration, shrugged and slid out of the booth, and Dani walked her through the basics at the counter with the same enthusiastic, slightly chaotic explanation she gave everyone, narrating half the rules a beat too late and losing the first hand so spectacularly that Talia actually laughed out loud, the sound carrying enough that Gideon, returning from the washroom, paused at the sight of his daughter grinning at the counter with a stranger's card game spread out in front of her.

He didn't interrupt. He watched for a moment, something soft and slightly surprised crossing his face, and then took his seat back at the booth and let it run its course, and when Talia rejoined him a few minutes later, still faintly laughing about something Dani had said, he found himself smiling in a way that had nothing careful or performed about it at all.

"You made a friend."

"She's ridiculous. In a good way." Talia slid back into the booth, more relaxed now than she'd been since they'd arrived. "This place is kind of great, actually. I didn't expect that."

"Yeah," Gideon said, looking around at the worn counter, the mismatched chairs, the low hum of a working kitchen behind the pass. "It kind of is. I don't know if I ever really told you why I like coming through here so much."

"You never really told me anything about it. Just that you stopped here sometimes."

"Fair." He turned his coffee cup slowly on the table, considering. "It's not much, on paper. Small station, small restaurant, same faces most times through. But it's steady, you know? Route like mine, you're never anywhere long enough to really know a place. Except here. I know Stirling's going to remember my coffee. I know Chef's going to make the stew right without me asking. I know Sena's going to have a booth ready even if I show up at a weird hour. It's not home, exactly. But it's the closest thing to it, out on the route."

Talia was quiet for a moment, processing this. "I didn't know that's what it was for you. I always just figured you were somewhere lonely most of the time. Ship, depots, whatever. I never really pictured you having a place like this."

"I've got a few, honestly. Not many. This is probably the best one." He looked at her, something more direct in it now than the careful, searching questions from earlier. "What about you? You've got — I don't know, whatever the version of this is for you. Friends, places, things you actually care about. I feel like I ask about school because it's the easy thing to ask, and then I don't actually find out anything real."

Talia considered this, turning her own glass slowly. "I've been doing this drawing thing. Like, actually seriously, not just doodling in class. There's a program at school, mostly digital work, but I've been doing some on paper too. I didn't really tell you because it felt like a whole explanation every time, and we never have that much time on the calls."

"What kind of drawing?"

"Mostly people, honestly. Faces. I like trying to get someone's actual expression right, not just a generic face. It's harder than it sounds."

"I didn't know that. At all."

"I know. That's kind of the point I'm making," Talia said, though gently, without any real edge to it. "It's not your fault. You're gone a lot. I just — I don't always know how to fit the big stuff into the short calls, so it ends up being logistics. When you're back, when you're leaving again. Not the actual stuff."

"We should fix that," Gideon said. "Not just — not just saying it. Actually fix it. I don't know exactly how yet, but I want to hear about the drawing thing properly, not in the two minutes before a call cuts out."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Show me something sometime. Not tonight, I don't have anything with me, but next time. Bring something."

"Okay," Talia said, and there was something lighter in her whole posture now, the careful, watchful tension from earlier in the evening mostly gone, replaced with something closer to the easy give-and-take Sena had seen in a hundred other tables over the years, people who genuinely liked each other finally finding a rhythm that worked.

They talked for a while longer, the conversation looser now, ranging from the depot cat's ongoing rivalry with the shipment scanner to a stretch of Talia's school year Gideon hadn't heard about in any real detail, to a mutual, slightly ridiculous debate about whether the elevator with the double-press button was a design flaw or an intentional prank by whoever built the station.

"I still think somebody did that on purpose," Talia said. "Nobody accidentally builds an elevator that ignores the first button press."

"I've thought about it for years and I genuinely don't know. Might be a wiring fault. Might be some engineer's idea of a joke that outlived everybody who'd get it."

"That's a very unsatisfying answer."

"Welcome to most of what I actually know about my own route," Gideon said. "Half of it's a mystery I've just gotten used to living inside."

Gideon asked better questions as the evening went on, less like a man working through a checklist and more like someone actually curious about the answers, and Talia, in turn, offered more without needing to be pulled, the two of them settling into something that looked, from across the room, considerably more like the easy affection Sena knew was underneath the whole evening from the start.

Dani swung by once more near the end of the meal, mostly to check whether Talia wanted a second look at the dessert menu, and left with a small, satisfied grin at the sight of the two of them leaning across the table, Talia sketching something quick on a napkin while Gideon watched with open interest, the way he might once have watched her do something considerably simpler, years ago, before the routes got longer and the calls got shorter.

"That's actually really good," he said, looking at the rough sketch — Talia had drawn Dani, quick and a little exaggerated, mid-laugh at something she'd apparently said a minute earlier.

"It's just a doodle."

"It's a really good doodle. You got her expression exactly right. That's exactly the face she makes."

"You've known her for like an hour."

"Long enough to recognize it," Gideon said, and Talia, pleased despite herself, folded the napkin and tucked it into her jacket pocket rather than leaving it on the table, a small, quiet decision that suggested she meant to keep it.

It was closer to the end of the evening when Gideon finally checked the time and sighed the particular sigh of a man whose ship kept its own schedule regardless of how a good evening was going. "We should get back before the Bellhaven's ready to shove off without us."

"Already?"

"Route doesn't wait, unfortunately. Not even for good conversation." He was already reaching for his jacket, though without much urgency behind it, the reluctance of someone who genuinely didn't want the evening to end plainly visible.

They settled the bill at the counter, Talia lingering a moment to say goodbye to Dani, who told her, with total sincerity, that she was welcome back anytime and that next visit they'd actually finish a full hand of cards without Dani losing halfway through out of pure chaos, a promise Talia accepted with a grin.

Sena came around from behind the register as they gathered their things, and said, mostly to Gideon, in the same plain, unhurried tone she used for most things, "Bring her again."

Gideon looked at her for a moment, and something passed between them, the easy understanding of two people who'd known each other long enough that the small sentence didn't need any further explanation attached to it.

"I will," he said.

"Good," Sena said, and that was the whole exchange, no more elaborate than that, though Talia, catching the tail end of it, looked between the two of them with the faint, curious expression of someone sensing there was more meaning in four words than she'd fully worked out yet.

"What was that about?" she asked, once they were through the door and heading back toward the berth corridor.

"Nothing complicated," Gideon said. "She just meant it was a good visit."

"That's it?"

"That's it," Gideon said, though he was smiling in a way that suggested it had landed somewhere deeper than the plain words let on, and the two of them walked on together toward the Bellhaven, Talia's sketch still folded carefully in her jacket pocket, the evening behind them settling, the way most good evenings at the Cosmic Bar and Grill eventually did, into something neither of them would forget, even once the route pulled them apart again.

Back at the restaurant, Sena wiped down the booth by the middle window, the one Gideon always sat in, and thought, without making any particular occasion of the thought, that it had been a good one, the kind of evening that didn't announce itself as anything special while it was happening and mattered anyway, and went back to the rest of her closing work without further comment, the restaurant settling into its ordinary quiet around her.