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There's a recurring dream that came to her like a sudden fall, a push off an aircraft in flight into orbital skydive. In her younger years, she would find herself on Cerberus again. The blackened leaves of what was supposed to be the wheat harvest in 2259 crumbled between her fingers and drifted into the breeze — half memory, half imagination.
Later, after the night terrors subsided, the dream would cast her into the humid warmth of the Nehru colony. She would look up, squinting her eyes against the clarity of the bright sunlight filtering through vivid green leaves and near-translucent, poisonous flowers.
Whatever the beginning, the dream soon followed a rigid script: her mother's voice calling for her to come in, there's a subspace message for you, honey. When she had shaken the dirt off her shoes, her mother would be standing before the northern window in their tiny home in Athens, looking out at nothing. Her mother's back was always rigid, hackles up and ready for a fight. Later, when she dreamed of Nehru instead of Cerberus, Farhad would be there too, looking at her mildly and smiling the placating smile she'd only ever seen around her mother.
There would be an unopened message blinking at her from the comm screen, but she already knew its contents: a card with a purple, animated pony, because to her father she would always be a little girl of six, the last year they would live under the same roof. The message in the card read:
To our best girl and favorite Valentine: Hope you're going easy on all the boys whose hearts you're always breaking. Miss you every day. Be well. Love, Dad and Uncle Jim.
Joanna opened her eyes and breathed out, slow and even. She was thirty-six years old — a goddamn grown woman — and this needn't faze her anymore, like it did when she was fourteen and hating Dad for not being around. She counted her fingers (one, two, three) until she could open her mouth without screaming the starship down and poor Ensign Gaarav, who'd been trying to rouse her without success through the comm.
"McCoy here. This better be good, Ensign."
Even without an image to go with the audio, she could see Gaarav's embarrassed gesticulations — which were especially eloquent, even for a Tellarite.
"You'd want to see this, Commander," he said, rolling his Rs dramatically. "We've come across the first recorded, naturally-occurring stable wormhole."
"Five minutes," she said, already kicking her boots out from under her bunk.
***
Captain Barnett was already on the bridge when Joanna arrived, looking as if she'd been awake for hours and sparring with Klingons. On any other person, that description would mean bruises and at least three different fractures, but on Octavia Barnett it only meant that she was bright-eyed and punchy and ready for more. The Enterprise's captain was exactly the kind of Starfleet lifer who thrived in situations involving words such as "anomaly" and "crisis".
"Situation report?" Joanna asked, sliding into the first officer's chair. "I assume it's good news, seeing as nobody's shooting at us. Or trying to consume the ship in its maw."
"We're attempting to scan the wormhole now, sir," Ensign Kalum said from Ops. "It shows no signs of collapsing, but there's too much energy interference for precise readings."
Barnett looked pleased. The spiral glow of the wormhole dominated the bridge's viewscreen, limning the elegant lines of her face. "Continue the scan, Ensign. Gaarav, inform Lieutenant Zakariya to stand by with a survey team and an unmanned probe."
At the chorus of aye Captain, Barnett turned and raised an eyebrow at Joanna. "Well, Commander?"
Joanna raised her hands. "Aw, come on, Captain. Not raining on the Science division's parade here."
"I have it on good authority that you can still bring Zakariya to tears whenever anyone brings up that time you pulled him off the discovery of his life on—"
"I saved him from a venomous animal."
A sudden pulse of light from the viewscreen jerked Joanna out of the squabble, in tandem with the rest of the bridge. Ensign Kalum cut through the tense silence with a Bajoran curse, almost punching at her console. Her voice pitched high as she squawked out, "There's an object coming through!"
Kalum's going to burn every audio recording of this moment, was Joanna's first thought. Her second, as the shape on the screen coalesced into something recognisable and utterly, entirely impossible: Mama's going to rise from her grave to kill him again.
"Captain, it's the Enterprise," Kalum said — unnecessarily, because any damn fool with eyes to see could make out the NCC-1701 emblazoned on the hull. "The original Enterprise."
"They're hailing us, Captain," Lieutenant Thavih called out, the azure of his skin paling into pastel. His antennas wriggled uneasily.
"On screen," Barnett snapped.
"—Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise," said the man in the captain's chair, the face of a thousand history holovids. He was dotted with soot, and something sparked just off-screen. "We request immediate assistance. I repeat: we need immediate assistance."
"I am Captain Octavia Barnett of the USS Enterprise-A." Uncle Jim's — Kirk's — eyes widened. "I believe, Captain, that your ship just survived the impossible. Again."
Kirk rose to his feet. Joanna could see the gears in his head working like a finely-tuned machine, considering and discarding theories in seconds. His eyes were wary.
"How do we know you're not a trap?" he demanded.
Barnett's lips thinned, for the barest second. "This is hardly your first experience with time travel. Has Commander Spock met his counterpart yet?"
Kirk barked out a sharp, unwilling laugh. "So the brass declassified the files. Okay, not saying I entirely believe you, but — what year is it?"
"2285. Our Sickbay will receive your wounded, Captain — stand by."
***
Joanna had prepared herself, told herself she was ready. The crew was quickly briefed en masse, and the personnel and history records locked against access by anyone other than Enterprise-A officers. Lieutenant Dalcour beamed her dad — Doctor McCoy — directly to Sickbay with the injured, not-so-incidentally making sure he was too busy saving his crew to formally meet the senior officers.
Uncle Jim hadn't recognised her, when he came on board with Spock and Uhura. "This is Commander Esfahani, my second in command," was how Barnett introduced her, and Kirk shook her hand without comment.
But Joanna had responsibilities, and she would be damned if avoiding her goddamned father was going to keep her from discharging her duties. The blue of the Enterprise's Science uniforms haunted the corners of her eyes, spooked her into fleeing around corners and into the understanding arms of her finest bourbon. She'd had better days.
"Any change to the status of the wormhole?" she asked Ensign Kalum, 27 hours after her Dad came on board her ship.
Kalum shook her head, making the earring on her right ear swing. "No, sir. The wormhole is in no imminent danger of collapsing."
"So… theoretically, the Enterprise can return from where she came."
Kalum hesitated. "History says—"
"Noted," Joanna sighed.
It was soon time to convene both crews and find a way out of the mess, which was an awfully familiar situation for Starfleet ships named Enterprise, as Thavih murmured sotto voce. Joanna watched the faces from her past and her Academy classes file into the briefing room, Sulu graciously overlooking Gaarav's worshipful stare as the Ensign vibrated gently in his seat.
She didn't want Dad to recognise her, but it still stung a little when he paused upon hearing her accent and she braced herself for discovery, only for him to move on with a disgruntled headshake. Joanna surreptitiously studied his face — Lord above, it was strange to think that she was, technically, older than her father now — and tried to match feature to memory. There weren't many photographs or recordings of him in her possession, even before the divorce, and the last one was two years out of date when the Enterprise disappeared.
"So that's it? We're stuck here?" Kirk was saying, kicking back from the conference table. Next to him, her Dad was sitting just a shade too close for propriety, the only visible sign of their relationship. Over their shoulders, through the room's viewports, the Enterprise's hull sparkled with repair crews.
"In our records, the Enterprise was lost, presumably destroyed, along with all hands in 2262 — two years into its three-year mission." Zakariya paused. "However, knowing what we know now of Ambassador Spock… there's no reason to assume that history can't be changed."
"I'm not terribly fond of charging into situations based on assumptions," Joanna said. The words hurt. "We're also assuming the wormhole remains stable. What if it destroys Enterprise when we send her through? What if that's why she never came home?"
If it works, she thought, I might have Dad back. Or I might lose him to something else anyway.
The meeting devolved into quantum physics and shouting, the latter firmly squashed by Barnett's thousand-yard stare. Joanna was out the door a breath after Barnett dismissed the meeting with her decision — to wit: repair the Enterprise and shove her back into the wormhole, then hope for the best. It wasn't quite polite to leave without at least making an attempt at conversation with Spock, first officer to first officer, but to hell with that. Spock wouldn't appreciate the small talk and she's just had to deal with her formerly-dead father, which probably put her in the running for the ship's informal betting pool on Worst Mission.
Joanna was going to give Sickbay a wide berth, until Doctor Almadal caught her coming out of the turbolift and, like the evil space pirate progeny she was, cheerfully hijacked Joanna's escape.
"You're a goddamn psychic, Maria," she grumbled, consenting to being steered into the doctor's room. "How did you even—"
"Jo, the day I can't predict your behaviour is the day I suffer from a memory wipe. You always go to the observation deck when you're upset."
"The 'why' 's not a surprise."
"Well, no," Maria allowed. Her speech pattern was changing, Joanna noted, meshing with the Captain's — had been ever since they set up home together. "But you don't have to talk about it if you don't want to."
"Aren't you going to offer me a drink?"
"On balance, no."
"Maria, I'm not going to bust up the rec room on a sip of Romulan ale. For god's sakes."
The doctor tsked. "You ex-Security types are all the same."
Joanna shot her a sour look. "That, Doctor, was unfair and unnecessarily derogatory."
"Yeah, yeah, acknowledged." Maria steepled her fingers. "All the same, you don't exactly have the best history with intoxicants."
"I blame it on genetics," Joanna sniped back.
"Was that the same reason you joined Starfleet?"
"Lord, no, Dad hated — hates space. When I started using Dad's surname again, every damn person I met assumed I enlisted because of Dad." Joanna leaned back in the chair, making herself comfortable. "Maybe I did, but not in the way they're thinking — and they're thinking of the wrong father."
***
There was a vid message waiting for her when she returned to her quarters — Farhad, fresh from an expedition to Nammu II and revelling in his natural habitat. That is: covered in mud and the ichor of something that was probably deadly or infested with alien grubs. Joanna played the message to the end, and played it again. Her stepfather cheerfully rambled on about various plants, wandering in and out of frame, and signed off with the usual, "I hope they feed you well on that starship of yours, my dear. Love you, see you soon."
"I can't be dealing with this," Joanna announced to her quarters, and left.
The observation deck was cool and quiet, almost deserted at this time of the night. Lieutenant Fernandez nodded respectfully at Joanna as she rolled up her prayer mat and left, the mat tucked under one arm. Fernandez moved like a cat, for all her bulk and muscle, and the swoosh of the door was the only announcement that Joanna was finally alone.
Not for long, though. Joanna had only made herself comfortable in her usual spot when she heard the door opening again, and the sound of heavy footsteps on the deck. She turned around, fully expecting to be yelling at a crewman she was going to have to apologise to later.
"Evening, Commander," said her Dad, stiffly. "I wasn't expecting anyone to be up here at this ungodly hour."
"Insomnia. It's an affliction," she said, doing her best not to sound feeble. Dad was carrying a PADD — of her time's design, not his, and she made a mental note to personally murder whoever it was on her ship who supplied him with it.
Joanna raised her eyebrows and stared at the PADD pointedly. "Doing some research?"
"What? No. No!" Dad shifted from foot to foot, chin jutted out belligerently, before settling on an expression that was somewhere between shifty and sheepish. "I thought— I've been thinking about what you said, 'bout our chances. I was going to ask Captain Barnett if I could leave a message for my daughter, if we don't make it through the wormhole in one piece."
Her vision swam. "Oh. She won't object, I guarantee. It's reasonable."
In silent agreement, they settled on opposite ends of the observation deck. Joanna stared at the field of stars beyond the viewports, trying not to eavesdrop as her Dad began and erased message after message.
Her Dad was terrible at this, Joanna thought. Finally, after one too many Computer, erase and unable to help herself, she called out, "Need any help, Doctor?"
"No!" Dad roared back, then muttered, "Unless you can transplant Jim's silver tongue into my head."
Joanna's hands knotted into fists, pressing onto her thighs. "She won't mind it, you know. Your daughter — I'm betting every credit I have that she'll just be glad to hear from her old man."
Her Dad looked both mortified and reluctantly grateful. His eyes — hazel, exactly like her own — assessed her in a single, intense sweep. "Your daddy was a wanderer, Commander?"
"Something like that. And he wasn't gifted in correspondence either." She forced her hands and posture to relax, opening out her body language like a friendly stranger. "But hell, he kept at it. There's a nothing a child doesn't appreciate more than knowing she's always in her father's mind."
"I appreciate the thought." Dad set the PADD down, pensive. "Joanna, my daughter, she was thirteen when that wormhole swallowed us up. She'll be an adult now. That's a whole lifetime I've missed, even if I wasn't already absent before."
He glanced at her. "I can't pretend I won't be glad to be back in my own time, Commander, but it occurs to me — we could be changing the fundamentals of each and every life on this ship. It could be that my Joanna having a few more years with her old man means you not having more time with yours. And for that, I am truly sorry."
"I'm a Starfleet officer," she said, gently, around the lump in her throat. "I swore to do what's right, not what's convenient. You don't have to be sorry, Doctor."
***
That night, she went through the cards and letters Dad sent her, all of them. Maybe he thought she'd been too young to tell which ones were written by Uncle Jim, but she'd known Dad's every tenor and inflection since before she could string together a complete sentence. Dad tried too hard to love her the best he could; it tied his tongue up in knots, and his words jerked across the screen like an unwilling horse. But he loved her.
There wasn't a time in her life when she hadn't understood this. The knowledge was built into her bones, seared into her synapses. Joanna may have lost her father when she was thirteen and her mother only years later, but like all children who were loved well and securely, she'd never questioned her possession of that love or felt compelled to go looking for substitutes. Even with Mama gone, there'd been Farhad and his absent-minded but unstinting affection, a constant across the planets his work brought them to.
She didn't know Uncle Jim well enough to love him, but he made Dad happy. That was good enough, Joanna thought. Good enough for anyone in this universe. And it wasn't as if Dad was the only one who moved on — Mama did too, and Joanna, eventually.
If the Enterprise wasn't lost in 2262, Joanna's mother would still have married Farhad, but he probably wouldn't have been able to cart her across the universe without her father throwing a fit. Farhad wouldn't have adopted her — she would've gone to Dad when Mama died.
Joanna would've been able to spend more time with Dad, maybe even see him alive today and had the chance to tease him for being an old man. And she might've not enlisted in Starfleet, without Farhad gently prising open a flowerbud to show her how wondrous the universe was, how the bright heart of the flower was born in a star's distant death at the beginning of everything.
She'd enlisted in Starfleet as Joanna Esfahani, over Farhad's gentle protests, because she was young and still a little unsure, and refused to be burdened with expectations heaped on Leonard McCoy's daughter. Joanna made her peace with her father legacy since, had done so for years, and she was too old now to be ripping herself new wounds over the past.
No regrets, she told herself. Whatever happens.
***
Lieutenant Dalcour heaved sighs of dissatisfaction with the repairs to the original Enterprise, but soon pronounced her as spaceworthy as he could manage it, without a complete overhaul. The repairs' completion came none too soon, 39 hours of Dalcour bearing up under the unspoken questions the other set of crew was too polite to voice. For the entirety of the period, Commander Spock watched Julien Dalcour's Vulcanoid features and his vehement, passionate arguments with Chief Engineer Scott with something akin to appalled fascination. It drove Dalcour quietly enraged.
"My biological father is Romulan," Dalcour finally said, clipped and icy, dropping his usual pleasant courtesy.
Spock started. "My apologies, Lieutenant. I meant no disrespect to to your parentage."
"Feel free to disrespect that man all you want, Commander. He's not family," Dalcour said, and that was that.
Joanna had tasked herself to escort Scott and Spock to the transporter platform with Dalcour, silent except to wish them luck. Together, she and Dalcour departed for the bridge for one last farewell, to the ship that had shaped her life almost as much as her father's. The Enterprise gleamed brightly in the light of the stars, turning with stately grace towards the mouth of the wormhole.
"Hail them, Ensign," Barnett said.
Kirk's face blinked into view, flanked by Spock and — Joanna's heart leaped — McCoy.
"Godspeed, Captain."
"And to you, Captain," Kirk said, inclining his head. "If we succeed, I hope we'll still see you captaining the Enterprise one day."
"Based on Ambassador Spock's own journey through time, Captain, I can say with near-certainty that this timeline will remain as it is," Spock interrupted. "It will simply be another alternate reality among many realities."
Barnett's mouth twitched. "Thank you," she said, with only the barest hint of irony.
Kirk grinned. "Any other last words, Enterprise-A?"
"Don't forget to write." Joanna was proud that her voice refused to shake. "Say hello to the kids when you're home."
Next to Uncle Jim, Dad frowned, opened his mouth — but they were out of time, all of them, as the Enterprise sailed into the throat of the wormhole, and into an unknown past.
Goodbye, Joanna thought, and waited for her universe to change.