Useless, Chaz thought to himself, he was useless.  After nearly two months of hopping around through n-dimensional space and twiddling his thumbs, Chaz was seriously starting to doubt his sanity and his judgment in signing on for this particular internship position.
Sure, he’d wanted to get away from the glorified tomb that was the colony he grew up on, but he wanted a real sky with real color in it and real oxygen to breathe, not another endless existence in a steel and titanium coffin.  All the flyer had said that a research vessel was looking to take on a doctoral student in the hard sciences as an intern and the interviewers for the position hadn’t given him many details between grilling sessions either.
And so here he was, trapped on a military research ship of all things with a dozen Confederacy naval people and another handful of young physicists of varying titles and fields on its way to watch a star blow itself up.  He thought that might be exciting, save for the small fact they’d be sitting a few light-hours out-system due to the facts of the black hole the star orbited and that sitting next to a star going nova wasn’t exactly safe.
He flicked through the biology journals that the ship kept in its database, wondering which one he was going to read for the dozenth time and why the people behind this particular expedition had brought a biologist along.  Where were his actual skies and atmosphere, warmth from a sun, the feel of a real ocean?  Chaz sighed, trying to keep his frustration bottled up as he stabbed at the console buttons.
The door chime rang through the tiny box of his cabin, and Chaz wondered who that was, off-duty as he was and not on particularly friendly terms with anybody else on board.  He swiped some too-long brown hair out of his eyes and rose from his seat with the nagging feeling he’d forgotten something.  He was still trying to recall whatever it was as he keyed his door open to reveal the short and slim figure of the ship’s second pilot and emergency medtech.  Well, relatively so since Chaz only stood about a half head taller than her and he was fairly close to the six foot mark.
“Uh, Crewman Mors, something wrong?”
She quirked an eyebrow in response and held up a small pair of scissors.
“A few things Mr. Brightwell.  The first being that you apparently forgot about me cutting that hair of yours, and the second you always hiding away from everyone else on board.”
Chaz blinked, trying to ignore the almost threatening way she held the scissors and the accompanying cool smile, and he fought down the sudden urge to shut the door and hide.
“I’m, er, sorry about forgetting Crewman Mors-“
“Ali, please, or Alisia if you must,” she interrupted with that same cool smile and Chaz got the distinct sense of his brain tangling itself into knots at her continued assaults.  She grabbed him by the arm and yanked him out into the passageway as the door to his room hissed shut behind him.  He wasn’t sure whether to take the scissors held out in plain view as a threat or a promise.
“Now, I realize that to a young master of biology like yourself, a ship full of military personnel and crackpot physicists probably isn’t the most entertaining or welcoming bunch.  We do try however, unlike certain members of this expedition.”
Chaz found it hard to ignore the point on her last remark, emphasized as it was by Ali stabbing the air with her scissors.  With a delicate motion he tried to extricate his arm from hers, although she just waved the damn scissors back and forth and held on tighter.  The familiar metal and composite construction of the ship’s deck and walls pressed in on Chaz as they walked along, his intense dislike of confined spaces coupling with his intense dislike of being pulled around like a spoiled child.
“Would you let go?  I can walk on my own.”
She turned her head to face him as she continued to charge on, her amber eyes drained of their usual warmth, not that Chaz had looked into them much.  She wasn’t too much older than him, at least judging by looks, and her short brown hair and slim figure lent her a sort of tomboy-ish prettiness that he was decidedly not thinking about.
“Can you walk to the mess, or are you going to try and run back to your cabin of solitude?”
Chaz tried to think of a coherent answer to that, but her constantly waving that pair of scissors around and their being almost at the mess anyway were preventing his addled mind from coming up with anything better than a confused grunt.  He also had the feeling she knew he’d been looking at her.
So he grunted, not quite sure himself out of confusion, fear, or out of bemused acceptance of his fate.  Ali sighed, shook her head and kept tugging him along the final stretch to the bulkhead leading into the mess hall.
The walk didn’t take long, and when they arrived at the oddly closed bulkhead she tapped the door controls and shoved Chaz in with a menacing snick of the scissors.  Chaz didn’t want to admit that he was scared to look back, and just kept walking.