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Four months later...
John walked into the bar. Much emptier than he had ever remembered it being, no doubt due to the recent skirmishes with Rheinland, he nonetheless chose a bar stool near the edge of the bar, granting him some view out the starboard window of the station.
It'd been a while since beady-eyed, fresh-faced Lieutenant Graham graced the Bar & Grill, since he'd first met Captain Hartman, the woman who had scared him into having more than a few brain cells. A while since he'd seen an Admiral, one of the role models of the Fleet, break down in front of him over his lost crewmates.
And somehow, he'd made it here. "Commander John Graham, executive officer of the Liberty Logistics Corps", they now called him. He was honestly surprised someone up in the massive unorganized mess of a command structure they called the Admiralty had seen fit to put him in any kind of authority position, but perhaps he just underestimated himself.
He had actually ran the Logistics Corps for a while, as there hadn't been a Captain to be C.O. of the Corps. But just a few days ago, he received a message from Hartman. He'd thought she'd retired, or gone into the reserves at least, but no...she was back, and now his direct superior. Hopefully, he'd make less of a mess then he did the first time he met her.
He shot a look at the bartender, who had walked over to him. "Pint o' liberty ale." The bartender nodded, walking over to the back counter, as Graham took a look out the window. As he gazed over the lumbering civilian transports and shuttles flying past, he thought of everything he'd experienced in the last few months. The friends he'd made - comrades, even - in the Corps and in the Fleet, and the bitter battles he'd fought, the lives that had been lost, and the future that seemed so uncertain.
He took a moment to adjust his service uniform a bit, dusting off the commander epaulets on either of his shoulders. He'd been relatively untouched, in terms of war horrors. Nobody close to him had died, he hadn't been captured or severely wounded, and was in charge of, while an important part of the Navy, a relatively safe one, where the deadliest and most dangerous threat wasn't an alien from the Omicrons or a foreign invader, but a two-bit pirate with an antimatter cannon and a thirst for credits.
The bartender returned with his pint of ale, and Graham took a swig from it. In all reality, he thought to himself, I was one of the lucky ones. Still, being assigned to the Coral Sea and working as X.O. for the Mount Shasta with Admiral Davies, he had surely seen his fair bit of combat. And just like the green Lieutenant he had once been, he was not a fan of it - quite the opposite, in fact. It's one of the main reasons why he signed up for the Corps in the first place.
Still, he somehow managed to get his own battle scars. He apparently hadn't listened to Hartman as much as he thought he had - piloting the Coral Sea, the Defiant-class put under his command, directly into a flight of Hacker bombers preying on a Bretonian convoy. He tried to drive the bombers off, but to no avail - and they turned on him. They weren't a match for him themselves, but the freelancer Gunboat that showed up to help certainly was, and before long, he was in critical condition in a medical bay on Los Angeles.
Thankfully, nobody under his command was more than injured, but it was still a lesson he took to heart. And he needed a few drinks to wash the memory out of his mind. With that, he took another gulp.
