=/\= The Engineer's Hands =/\= by Tavi Tavi had some good hiding places on board the Avalon. Two of them she'd chosen as favourites. The first was the library, where there were three different ducts she could kip into at a moment's notice. The other was riskier, but afforded the most excellent view of the chief engineer's office and workstations. He was a strange one, that engineer. Like Tavi, he seemed to prefer to be alone. He worked lots of extra hours, too. When everyone else went off-shift and the night crew came in, he stayed on and worked alone, often going off to fix things in remote corners of the ship. The little stowaway followed whenever she could, whenever she could avoid getting caught. She liked to watch him fix things. Sometimes his hands would just pass lightly over a piece of equipment and it would start working. Sometimes his fingers flew, moving and adjusting and straightening. Or bending and twisting, making tiny parts do things no one else could. Tavi would sigh quietly and look at her own small hands, wishing they could do those magical things. Sometimes the engineer went into the holodeck, where she hadn't figured out a way to follow without being detected. Then she wished she could see what he was doing, imagining a program filled with marvelous tools and gadgets, a place to try out the wonderful innovations she saw him do when he worked. Back in the library, late at night when the librarians weren't there, Tavi persuaded the far corner terminal to yield an engineering text, and slowly started reading her way through it... =/\=