Om mani padme hum (Luke/Open)

[khanele]

After a long hard day, Julia normally had recourse to two options for relaxation: cooking and yoga. On the ship, however, culinary pursuits just didn’t hold the same allure. Somehow, pulling levers and pressing buttons didn’t provide quite the poetry she was accustomed to. So yoga would have to do. As soon as her final ‘t’s were crossed and ‘i’s dotted, she made a beeline for the gym. As she’d noted over the past few days, at this time of night the room was empty.

Good. She had difficulty enough with meditation when alone without adding the challenge of another person’s presence. Besides, after a day like today, the last thing she wanted to see was yet another face. She carefully removed her shoes and socks, laying them to one side as she arranged her body in a sitting position on the training mat. The plastic beneath her bare feet was cold with disuse, but it soon warmed to the touch, allowing her to settle in to the indentation her body made in the impressionable synthetic material.

Her mind sank too, into blissful emptiness, where there was nothing beyond the subdued beating of a heart, the silence between dust motes, the gentle rhythm of breath. In and out, in and out. Almost without thinking, she began to murmur a Vedic chant. With every repetition of the stanzas in Sanskrit, she slowly, ever so slowly, released her hold on the day’s stresses, and the steady procession of messy thoughts and emotions receded further and further until they seemed to be a mere speck on the horizon, easily ignored.

[Luke Martin]

Luke was beginning to find it strange spending time alone. Usually, he was working with other people on the flight deck, or Ally was around him, sitting with him, just gazing at the stars, or eating together, or whatever. However, this evening, he was completely alone, and at a complete loss as to what to do with himself. Damn Anna for keeping Ally occupied.

After circling his room a couple of times, he eventually got changed into some shorts, a loose t-shirt, and trainers before picking up his bag and heading to the gym. Usually, the gym was empty around this time, so he could do whatever he wanted; weights, cross-training, run a boxing simulation, whatever. But tonight, it wasn’t empty. Oh boy.

Julia, the ship’s shrink was doing yoga, and she looked pretty into it. She also looked pretty out of it. Maybe she wouldn’t notice him if he started doing his own thing. Dumping his bag on the floor in the corner, he set his communications device to pick up the local radio signal, so he had music, then headed over to the cross trainer, placing his bottle within reach before climbing on. Ten or fifteen minutes of this, then he’d be psyched up to do something a bit more vigorous.