Helga felt her stomach turn to stone as he took her hand. Already this was terrifyingly familiar.
June 1907. A park bench in the National Mall. She remembers how his knee bounced nervously, how he chewed his lip. Christopher was so… nervous. His hands took hers… brown eyes unable to meet her own gaze. “Helga… I’ve got something to ask you…”
“I’m listening,” she managed, voice soft and hoarse. Surely he could hear how all confidence had drained from her. “Go… go on…”
Hearing that shift in the Helga’s voice did little to ease his own nerves, and for a moment Korso felt as though he’d somehow jumped into someone else’s body; a stranger, speaking to another stranger. Glimpses of a fragility in his First Lieutenant had been caught in fleeting off-moments before, and gradually this side of the woman was melding in his mind with the harder half that she most often put forth day-to-day... but this vulnerable nature she had was still one that he didn’t quite know how to predict. Whether she would most naturally turn to instincts of flight or something else, he wouldn’t know for certain.
Raising his eyes finally to meet hers, though, he was reminded that despite these fears that were stirring doubt in him, he knew that he was looking at a woman whom he’d come to place a great reliance on. He trusted her with more than he had ever allowed anyone else to have, and while he may not have yet spoken the words (unless he’d let it slip that one time he’d been on the verge of slumber and was thinking it), he knew he loved her.
Madly, he was in love with her.
Nodding a bit at her encouragement, he took in a breath of air and cleared his throat a second time, “First, I want to say that... Ever since you came onto the Valkyrie, my whole life’s changed. Ever since we first met in that bar, really...” A small smile curved his mouth as memories of that night were drawn into his thoughts as he continued, “I don’t know if either of us knew what was gonna happen, but... I knew I couldn’t let you slip through my hands after that first night, and when you asked to join the crew... I’m not sure if you know how much it meant to me, that you were the one who made the first move towards that decision.”
He felt like he was starting to babble a bit, and his eyes began to travel absently along the thick braid of blonde hair that was slung over Helga’s shoulder, searching for the proper path that would lead him towards his final point. The question. “What I’m trying to get at, is... You’ve given me a whole new outlook on life, Helga. For a long time, I think I was just going from one job to the next, and there was nothing in between. There wasn’t really... meaning to anything I did with myself.” Stormy grey eyes returned to richer blue ones, “When I wake up in the morning and see you there... suddenly, it’s like... my life isn’t just about the work anymore... I wake up, and my first thought is, ‘I can’t wait to see her open her eyes and hear her say something’.”
The pale skin he’d attained through years of life as a spacer became tinted with warm hues that brought out the blue in his eyes as he smiled shyly and glanced downward briefly. Shifting on his knee, shoulders rising a bit with a visible tension, he finally reached where he’d been going with this build-up, “So, what I want to ask you about, is... Well, the holidays are coming up, and I might’ve mentioned you when I was using the FTL comlink to call Earth, and...”
Chewing on his lip, his smile took on an innocent appearance that seemed to be preemptively begging for forgiveness, “... My mom wants to meet you.”
