Work Text:
2401
“Shields are at ten percent,” T’Lyn calls. She took over at tactical several minutes ago after their chief of security was knocked out.
“I need options!” Mariner shouts. She clings to the armrests of the captain’s chair as the ship shakes again. “Do we even know what the hell this thing is yet?”
Tendi swings around from the science station. “It’s some kind of temporal anomaly, but nothing like anything on the books. It’s trying really hard to tear us apart, and we’re only stuck in the distortions around it.”
The debris from alien ships that must have fallen victim to the anomaly isn’t helping either. When they entered this area of space, the debris was all that was visible. They came to investigate, and that was when the anomaly made itself known. Like something intruding into its space activated it.
“Why the hell hasn’t retreating worked?”
“Best I can tell, it’s bending time around us when we try. We try to back away, and it’s suddenly like we never moved anywhere. The good news is, if it won’t stop doing that, I do think we can move forward into the anomaly itself.”
She gets to her feet, restless. “How would that be good?”
“These readings look like it goes somewhere. Maybe a way out.”
“Ruthie!” Mariner calls. “You still got your ears on down there? What can you give me?”
“I give it about a five percent chance we could MAYBE get out of here IF we find the right angle, but I can almost guarantee you we could make it into that anomaly. But we don’t have enough power left for both.”
As if on cue, the ship shakes again.
“Shields are down,” T’Lyn provides.
They’ve already lost several good people since this damned thing started throwing them around. If there’s any chance of getting everyone else out of here…
Mariner’s first officer must see the twinkle in her eye, because he steps into her line of sight before she can even open her mouth.
“Beck, no,” Boimler whispers.
“I am not giving up on getting this crew home—”
“It’s not giving up. It’s giving them a better chance.”
“Is it?”
“Yes. It is. Do you hear what they’re saying? If we don’t take a chance with that anomaly, we are all going to die.”
Mariner takes a breath. “You’re right. Helm—!”
She doesn’t get a chance to give the order before the turbulence outside the ship throws a large chunk of debris into the bridge—or that’s what Mariner reasons must have happened a split second after the brief decompression stops, leaving her on the floor clinging to her chair.
The breach, now covered by a forcefield, is to one side of the now-glitching viewscreen. Both officers at the front stations are gone, sucked out…
And Tendi is gone, too.
“Beam them back in!” Mariner orders. If they’re fast enough, maybe there will be a chance to revive them once they’re through the anomaly. Once they’re safe.
Rutherford’s voice comes through from engineering, and the cracking in it isn’t the comms. “We can’t…all transporters are down.”
T’Lyn comes around her to take the empty helm. “Orders, Captain?”
She swallows. “Get us into that anomaly…”
When she looks back to catch Boimler’s eyes, his are damp, but something in them is as determined as she feels. She holds his gaze for a moment to give her strength. He’s always been good at that.
The ship continues to shudder as they approach the anomaly, and she turns back to the viewscreen to watch the strange patterns of distortion as they draw closer.
“Beck—!”
She barely registers her name and the sound of screeching metal before a warm body slams into her, taking them both to the floor and rolling out of the way of a falling metal beam from the ceiling. Everything goes fuzzy for a moment as they stop.
When Mariner can focus again, she’s already sitting up. T’Lyn has pulled her up, and someone else is at the helm. The ride is still rough, but less so now that they’re close to the center of the anomaly.
“Beckett. Are you all right?”
“I…yeah, I—Brad!”
When she twists to find him on the deck beside her T’Lyn’s hands catch her arms, almost as if she’s trying to keep her from looking.
“Brad…?” He isn’t moving. Blood is spreading on the deck from under his head. “Brad!”
Not him too. Please. She knows she won’t find a pulse, but she checks for one anyway.
“I’m sorry,” T’Lyn says quietly. She knows their history. She was there for most of it.
“He saved my life…”
He saved all of them, stepping in to make sure she made the right choice. If this works, he and Tendi saved all of them.
***
Mariner wakes up alone, in a bed on a starship. The last thing she remembers is T’Lyn holding her on the deck, and a flash of light as the ship entered the anomaly.
She knows this isn’t her ship anymore because the ceiling looks all wrong, and the standard-issue Starfleet mattress feels off with no one beside her, but she can just see the stars going by outside the windows from the corner of her eye.
She’s too afraid, at first, to sit up and look around. To find out if she recognizes these quarters. She clutches the blanket to her chest, waiting for her heart rate to slow.
Please let this be one of the ships we were all on together.
When she feels brave enough to move, her eyes fall on the uniform draped over a chair by the bed. Two pips on the collar—one gold, one black. She doesn’t know exactly what year it is, but relief washes over her. She would recognize this messy little room anywhere.
“The Cerritos,” she whispers.
Her friends should all be here. Her mother is here. She’s alive, and practically everyone she cares about in the universe except her dad back on Earth should be on this ship right now.
Wait a minute, wait a minute, what the hell! The part of her mind that’s twenty years younger is still in there, panicking. It occurs to her—them?—that she could have been exposed to something on an away mission, or some alien could be screwing with her mind, or…
Maybe it’s a hangover from a horrible dream. Maybe fake memories have been implanted somehow. Maybe…
Mariner throws the covers off, glances down to take in the shorts and t-shirt she’s wearing to confirm she’s decent enough, and bolts from her quarters. It takes a moment of running before she realizes she doesn’t remember exactly what Rutherford and Boimler’s room number was in the early 80s. She’s got…maybe one digit.
Come on, baby me, stop panicking and be useful.
None of this is helping the “maybe it wasn’t real” hypothesis.
Finally, the fuzzy memory sharpens. She’s not far from where she needs to be. When she makes it there, skidding to stop in front of the door, it opens before she even rings the bell.
“Ruthie! Can I borrow your tricorder?”
Rutherford sighs, and that’s when she realizes it’s already in his hand. “No need,” he says, handing it over anyway. “I already scanned myself. Chronitons everywhere, and my implant is going haywire dealing with twenty years of memories it definitely knows it didn’t have yesterday. It...it was all real. We’re in late 2381 now.”
Almost exactly twenty years earlier. She stares at the readings for far too long, trying to process. “This isn’t what we thought was gonna happen, is it?”
“No, I…I thought we’d end up somewhere as we were, not in our own younger bodies…or I thought maybe the whole ship would come through somewhere—somewhen safer…this is not what I was expecting at all.”
She pushes past him, looking for the bunks she remembers off to the right. “Where’s Brad?” she asks anxiously.
He’s there, in the bottom bunk, still asleep, but the rise and fall of his chest relaxes her the way nothing else could right now. If he’s here, so is T’Lyn. So is Tendi. They’re safe, in their own quarters. She takes another step toward him, but Rutherford catches her arm.
“What are you doing?” he whispers. “You can’t wake him up right now! We need to talk.”
“And he should be part of—”
“Cap—Mariner…I’m…I’m sorry, but that’s not our Brad. I mean, ours from twenty years ago, yeah, but…”
She blinks. “What are you talking about?”
Rutherford swallows. “The comms were still open…he died before we went through, didn’t he?”
“So? It’s fucking time travel!”
“But i-it’s pretty clear it only transported our consciousnesses. His was already gone. So was anyone else’s who’d already died. I already scanned him; no chronitons.”
She’s already shaking her head before he even finishes. “No. Nope. Nu-uh. Fucking tricorder is wrong.” She yanks her arm free and drops to her knees beside Boimler’s bunk anyway, shaking him before Rutherford can stop her. “Brad? Brad, come on, wake up, we made it…”
“You’re gonna freak him out!” Rutherford whisper-shouts.
She ignores him. “Brad!”
Boimler wakes up with a startled gasp. “Oh my god! Mariner? What…?”
She yanks him in close, holding him tight the way she hasn’t in a while because maybe it would have been weird after the divorce, and it’s probably weird now, but it doesn’t matter. She lets her fingers card through his hair at the back the way she used to because she needs to feel it. She needs to know there’s no blood there. She needs to feel his heartbeat against her chest and hear him breathe.
But when he called her Mariner, she already knew. It’s been so long since he called her that. The version of her best friend she spent the better part of the last twenty years with is gone.
Boimler has frozen. “Mariner…?”
Part of her fights back, desperate. “Please tell me you just had a really insane dream?”
“I…what? Not that I know of. Are you okay? What’s going on?”
No. She isn’t. She sits back, and maybe she’s squeezing his shoulders a little too tight, but she can’t make herself stop. “Just think, really hard. Come on. Please?”
“Please…what?” He looks over her shoulder. “Rutherford, what the hell is going on?”
But he’s Brad, and he’s clearly still worried. He still cares, because that’s what he does. He’s holding onto her arms, one of his hands rubbing up and down as if to try to soothe her even though he doesn’t know what’s wrong.
How many times had he done that in two decades? In the mess hall here on the Cerritos, on shore leave, nights in bed after hard days, moments in her ready room in recent years, even well after their marriage was over.
He was always there for her, no matter where their friendship or their relationship stood.
Most of it is gone now, except in her memory.
“She’s fine,” Rutherford is saying. “She just had a really weird nightmare. Right, Mariner?”
“Yeah,” she says faintly. She can see on Boimler’s face that he doesn’t buy that, and she bolts before he can say anything else.
She has to get out of here. Out of this room. She wants to go farther, but she barely makes it a few feet down the corridor before her knees give out. She hears the door open again behind her, and the tail end of Rutherford telling his roommate to stay put, that he’ll check on her, go back to sleep.
Mariner sits back against the bulkhead, and Rutherford joins her on the floor. It’s the middle of the night for their shift; there shouldn’t be anyone in this section awake for a while, so why not sit right here?
“Tendi,” Mariner croaks, barely more than a whisper. “She’s gone too.”
Rutherford looks as miserable as she feels, and she feels pretty shitty. The guilt isn’t helping either. If the pattern holds, her wife is here, but his is not.
“N-not gone,” he says, almost like he’s trying to convince himself, too. “They’re just…I mean, they’re here. We can make sure it doesn’t happen. They’ll live this time. Everyone will live.”
Fourteen casualties. There were fourteen casualties before they entered the anomaly, including Boimler and Tendi. And they would all get another chance now. The whole crew has another chance now.
It has to be worth it.
***
“Okay, is this everybody?” Mariner calls.
It’s morning, between shifts when they could get everyone together through word of mouth, and a small crowd of about twenty has gathered in the cargo bay Mariner and her friends usually use for their own shenanigans.
“Why aren’t Commander Boimler and Lieutenant Commander Tendi here?” Barnes asks. “Aren’t we missing a couple of other people too? Of the people who were on the Cerritos around this time, anyway…”
“Jet!” someone else offers. “Where’s Jet?”
“What about Lia and T’Lyn?”
Mariner opens her mouth, but nothing comes out.
Rutherford takes over for her. “T’Lyn is keeping watch for us, but the others aren’t coming because the Boimler, Tendi, Jet, and Lia here are the ones from this time.”
Mariner swallows. “As some of you have probably figured out already, anyone we’d already lost before we entered the anomaly didn’t make it back here with us. They don’t remember.”
A quiet wave of disappointed whispers washes through the small crowd.
“But if the captain hadn’t done what she did, we wouldn’t be here at all,” Rutherford says. “Another fifteen seconds or so, and the ship would have been destroyed.”
Silence falls over the cargo bay for a long moment.
“What do we do now, Captain?” someone asks.
“For one…stop calling me that. I’m not your captain anymore. We’re…whatever we were in 2381. We’re whatever we are now, and we’ve got to get used to that. I don’t want anybody causing any trouble over some kind of misguided loyalty to me.”
Jennifer raises an eyebrow. “It wouldn’t be misguided.”
Mariner lets out a breath, not sure whether to laugh or be touched. They never dated again, after the whole Starbase 80 thing, but eventually, they’d managed to be friends. And she was a damn good officer. Mariner had requested her for her crew herself.
She has to raise a hand to ask for quiet again over the round of enthusiastic agreement Jennifer spurred, and then she has to clear her throat before she can continue. The younger part of herself—the part of her who, in this time, isn’t even sure she ever wants to be the captain of a ship at all—is dumbfounded.
“Well…I appreciate that. Anyway, what we do need to do is make contact with everyone else who isn’t on the Cerritos right now. They’re all out there. Some of them are on other ships, some of them are at the academy…some of them are confused kids right now.
“We’ll start with everyone who’s at least of age…split up the shipmates you remember who would be, and reach out to whoever you can track down. We need to at least confirm whether anyone who isn’t here on the Cerritos even remembers. We don’t know if that’s a factor. The more data, the better. Meet back here in forty-eight hours to report what you’ve got. Once we have that, I’ll report to Captain Freeman. I’d like to have a clearer picture before I do that, but from there, we’ll let Starfleet decide how to handle this.”
***
T’Lyn has already cleared out of the corridor to report for her duty shift when Mariner makes it out of the cargo bay, after being held up answering questions she doesn’t really have answers for. It takes the rest of the day to track her down again. She catches her in a corridor near her quarters after what felt like an unending shift pretending everything is normal.
“T’Lyn! Babe…what gives? What’s with the silent treatment? You’ve been avoiding me since we woke up here.”
The Vulcan seems almost reluctant to stop and face her. “I am not…avoiding you. I am merely aware of the inevitable.”
“Inevitable what?”
“Temporal laws state that it is most likely our memories of the previous timeline will fade, and we will revert to behaving as our younger selves once did.”
“Wait, what? We’re going to lose our memories too? Why didn’t you say something sooner? Without Tendi, you are the ranking, surviving science officer!”
“As you said yourself this morning, however—and through the comm patch-in Lieutenant Commander Rutherford provided for me, I could hear the entire briefing—you are no longer my captain. Regardless, that is not why I said nothing. Rather, it did not seem prudent to panic the crew. By the time we gather again in thirty-six hours, it will likely be evident to most of them.”
Mariner feels cold. “We’ll start to forget that quickly?”
“It is highly likely that, at the very least, the sharpness of our memories will begin to fade almost immediately.”
And the thing is, she’s right. Standing here, just trying to remember their bonding ceremony…it isn’t as clear as it would have been yesterday. Nothing is. She didn’t notice before because it was all still so new. They were all trying to make sense of what happened to them.
“Dammit,” Mariner whispers. “Is…is when we’re meeting again soon enough? Will we remember enough by then for me to be able to report everything to the captain after that?”
“Everyone’s memories should still be sufficient enough at that point, yes.”
“Okay…okay.” She leans into the bulkhead, trying to get her head around all of that. “So where does that leave us?” she asks eventually.
T’Lyn does not lean—she’s as Vulcan as ever, after all—but she does draw in closer. “The fact remains that we were not, at this time, bonded—nor were we yet in any form of relationship. Not for many years. It may happen again, but I would prefer to allow it to occur naturally and not due to any perceived obligation to a series of events that no longer exists. I would suggest that we allow time for our memories to settle into their final state and…‘take it from there,’ as you would say.”
Mariner sighs. “If you’re right, then yeah…it makes sense. I hate it, but it makes sense. Dammit, why do I have to love that stupid logic of yours?”
“Because you are an intelligent woman.”
She laughs. Everything hurts, but T’Lyn is still making her laugh.
That’s how she knows, whatever happens, that they’ll be okay.
“One for the road?” Mariner asks.
T’Lyn doesn’t answer aloud, but her head tilts, and there’s that hint of a smile just before the requested kiss. “Good night, Beckett.”
***
“That part of space will be off-limits for the foreseeable future, and the reason why will remain classified to the highest levels. No one will have to make the decision you made this time around,” Captain Freeman assures her, as soon as she knows.
It’s only been a few days, but to Mariner it feels like forever. They’ve all been scanned and evaluated and tested six ways from Sunday. Their chroniton levels, brain scans, and matching stories—including the same from crew members who are on other ships now and a handful of cadets at the academy—finally convinced Starfleet that none of them are crazy.
It feels strange being in her mother’s ready room again. For part of her, it’s been a long time. It was stranger the first time, when she came here a few days ago to break the news, but the feeling hasn’t quite gone away.
“What about…the big stuff? Do they want to know? Would they even do anything?” The Mars attack, Romulus, a handful of other things…it wasn’t something she’d thought about when she was focused on her crew, but there’s so much else they could prevent.
“No…it seems they’ve received word that they can’t accept any other information.”
“Received word?” Mariner scoffs. “That’s not cryptic at all. It was those time cops from, like, three or four hundred years from now, wasn’t it?”
“You’re not supposed to know about them.”
“Everybody knows about them.”
Freeman just shakes her head. “Apparently, the timeline depends on certain events that you could warn us about, but…in any case, preserving the lives of your crew is all that can be allowed. It’s the most change the timeline can accommodate.”
“That’s bullshit! Do you know how many people—?”
“I can’t know. I hate it too, even without the details, but…you can’t fix everything, Beckett. Saving the universe is not your job. Your job was to take care of your crew, and you did that.”
Mariner clears her throat. “Well…what’d they say about Boimler and Tendi? We should at least be able to say something to them; besides being my best friends, they’re—they were my senior officers.”
She thought it would be easier once her mother knew—once Starfleet knew and took over the situation.
It isn’t easier. Even as the details of her memories fade and she begins to feel like herself again—her younger self—the part of her that still feels responsible for her crew fights against having their well-being taken out of her hands. She’s been assured they’ll all receive any support and counseling they need to integrate back into this time, but…
Particularly when it comes to Brad and D’Vana, how are she, Rutherford, and T’Lyn supposed to re-integrate if they can’t tell their closest friends why they’ve been practically locked in labs and briefing rooms for days? Granted, she’s sure the rest of her crew is going to run into that themselves, with their own friends, and there’s already an official cover story.
But it sucks. The whole situation sucks.
Freeman sighs. “Officially, the word from Command is that this whole thing is to be strictly need-to-know due to the Temporal Prime Directive…and no one else needs to know. But I can also tell you that if it were me, and they were my senior officers…I’d feel like they deserved to know.”
She would have understood that even without her own command experience, but it certainly doesn’t hurt.
Tell them if you think you should; just make sure I don’t find out about it.
“Thanks, Mom.”
Freeman comes around her desk to sit on the edge of it in front of her. “There’s so much I feel like I want to ask you, but I know I shouldn’t—and you shouldn’t tell me if I did. I’m…I’m so proud of you, Beckett.”
She makes a face. “And you weren’t before?”
“That’s not what I meant. You’ve made so much progress the last couple of years—of course I was already. I just mean—”
Mariner crosses her arms. “I know what you mean, Mom. Apparently, I’m gonna do exactly what you wanted me to do; maybe I should be congratulating you.”
“That’s not fair. What is wrong with you? In a way, we’re almost the same age now; I’d expect you to be a little more mature.”
“And I was! When I was just that age. Before we came back here. But I’m not just that person anymore. I’m also the me you knew a week ago. You try having two versions of yourself in your head. I’m trying to live two lives lives at once! I have memories of things that may never happen now, I—Mom, there are now two people on this ship I was married to in another life, one of which is aware of it, and no, I’m not telling you who.”
Her mother holds up her hands in surrender. “All right, I’m sorry. Point taken.” She pauses. “Two? Really? Is it easier with the one who knows, or the one who doesn’t?”
“It sucks with both for different reasons; do not recommend.”
***
Mariner makes a beeline straight from her mother’s ready room to Boimler and Rutherford’s quarters, where Rutherford has Boimler and Tendi waiting.
When she gets there, not a single one of them is sitting down. It looks like they’ve all been pacing the whole time.
“What’d she say?” Rutherford asks, as soon as the door closes behind her.
Mariner is already across the room, throwing her arms around both of their friends. Boimler and Tendi don’t seem to know what to make of that, but hug back. They’ve both seemed confused but supportive all week.
“We’re telling them, but we’re keeping it on the down-low. Mom’s whole thing is basically what she doesn’t know, she can’t tell Starfleet.”
“Telling us what?” Tendi questions, pulling back to look at her. “This whole week has been crazy! I’ve been worried sick about you guys. Where have you been?”
“It’s another time travel thing, isn’t it?” Boimler asks.
Mariner’s eyebrows go up, but she’s not really surprised. It was really only a few months ago they got stuck in the 23rd century together for a few days, after all.
“Yeah…but it’s way crazier than the Pike thing.”
“What could be crazier than Spock smiling?”
Mariner exchanges a glance with Rutherford. “Uhh…a few things.”
***
At least they didn’t end up so far back she was still an ensign without her own quarters. With her own quarters Mariner has her own bathroom, tiny as it may be. There’s enough room to shut the door, turn off the lights and sit against the wall on the cool tile.
In the dark—the pitch blackness she can’t get out in her room with the windows—she can pretend it’s any other bathroom. She can pretend, for a moment, that nothing has changed. That she’s home, and T’Lyn is outside that door in their quarters. Brad and D’vana are alive and they’re coming other with Rutherford for game night tomorrow.
The younger half of her mind doesn’t quite know how to feel about all of that, but at least right now she’s going along with it.
As much as it hurts, it’s nice to be someone else for a while. Someone who’s sure of herself—or was until she lost her ship a few days ago. Someone who, at least at some point in her life, knew what she wanted, rather than someone who purposefully picked a fight on Ferenginar two weeks ago just to feel something.
She tries to ignore the chime at her door, but it’s insistent. She buries her head in her knees and asks the computer to open the main door to her quarters just so she can yell through the bathroom door for whoever it is to go away.
“Mariner, I’m not leaving so don’t yell at me!”
Boimler. Of course it is.
“Mariner? Where are you? We haven’t seen you like two days! Are you okay? Mariner?
She groans when the bathroom door opens, squinting into the light from the main room. “Ow,” she says pointedly.
“Sorry,” Boimler says quickly. He quickly lowers the lights in the main room and turns on dim lights in the bathroom, equalizing everything. “Are you okay?” he asks again. “I got worried when Rutherford told me you actually accepted the captain’s offer for a few days off.”
She groans again. “No! I’m not okay! A week and a half ago, I was captain of a starship with a wife I wanted to start a family with and an ex-husband who was still my best friend, and now I’m a…horribly single, barely junior grade lieutenant hiding in the dark in my bathroom.”
Boimler leaves the bathroom door open and slides down to the floor beside her in the cramped space. “Man, an ex-husband too, huh? Interesting twenty years you had.”
“You’d have liked him; the purple hair got a little more conspicuous by the time he was over forty, but, you know, I still liked it.”
Boimler laughs once before that seems to sink in. “Wait, what?”
“Yeah, we were married for a few minutes in the…late 80s? Early 90s? Things are already getting fuzzier, but I know it definitely was interesting. Oh! Your transporter clone’s not dead, by the way; they faked it. He joined Section 31. Just don’t tell anybody I told you that.”
“He what? We were what? Okay, now you’re just fucking with me.”
“Not anymore!” she jokes, punching his arm. For a moment she’s expecting the usual retort…until she remembers, all over again, that he’s not her Brad. This one, predictably, is beet red at the moment. “Sorry, he uh…we had a joke. He would have laughed.”
“You’re serious,” he squeaks, rubbing his arm.
“As a heart attack. One of which you literally had last year. In the middle of a senior officer briefing that you were giving! Thank god for twenty-fifth-century medicine, those are kind of barely a cold anymore as long as they’re treated immediately, but seriously, we’ve got to figure out how to keep you from stressing out so hard this time around.”
She’s gripping his hand now. She doesn’t know when she grabbed it, but at least he isn’t pulling away. “Like in general. I mean it. Don’t be so hard on yourself. I know you’ve been getting better, but like…get better at it faster, Boims.”
“You’re really, really serious. About all of it.”
“You thought we were making it up?”
“No! I mean—I don’t know what I mean.”
“I’m serious about all of it, Boims. I can already kind of feel it all slipping away, and maybe that’s not so much of a bad thing so we don’t go crazy having to do it all again, but…I was there. It was fun, it was beautiful…sometimes it was messy, but we made it. We were living the dream.”
He squeezes her hand. “If you’ve been struggling with this so much, why didn’t you say something? Hell, why…? If you were with T’Lyn before you all ended up back here…why isn’t she here? Shouldn’t you be helping each other through this?”
Maybe she shouldn’t have mentioned that part, but Tendi asked why T’Lyn wasn’t there when they were explaining and…anyway.
Mariner sighs and lets her head drop onto his shoulder. “Maybe, but she’s being so logical about it all. She thinks we should wait and see how much we’re going to remember in the long term before we act on…anything, you know. I mean, she’s not wrong, but…”
“You could tell her that’s not what you want,” he suggests gently.
She groans. “Or not. Because I’m becoming the emotionally repressed idiot I was twenty years ago more and more every day, and that is absolutely not something I would have done. Would do now. Could do now…shit, I don’t know. It’s so much easier to talk to you.” She sits up suddenly, having a thought. “Oh.”
“Oh?”
“I just realized…maybe that’s why things went the way they did.”
Boimler blinks. “With…?”
“Us. We were good for each other at the beginning—I mean we were always good for each other as friends, even after, and…okay, we probably could have made it work, but we were young and—well, not that young, but definitely stupid, but you know what I mean—and T’Lyn and I never would have worked in the end before I grew up some more…hmm. Well, that’s a mindfuck.”
Boimler’s eyebrows are hiding in his hairline by now. There’s no way he followed all of that, and he clearly doesn’t want to try. “You’re telling me.”
“Sorry, I know it’s a lot.”
“It’s okay, I’ll live.” He winces when she squeezes his hand too hard at that, and she doesn’t want to know what her face looked like for a second there. “Fuck. Sorry.”
She shifts closer until they’re resting shoulder to shoulder. “It’s fine, just…don’t go anywhere?”
“Yeah…of course not.”
A comfortable silence settles over them, and she takes it as a reminder that he’s still Brad, even without the years behind him. He’s still a good friend, and he’s still here. It doesn’t matter what does or doesn’t happen later. He’ll be there.
“Boims!” she says, popping up on her knees. “Do you want to see our ship?”
“Do I what?”
“Our ship! Mom let me make a holodeck program as long as I promised to only keep one copy on a chip I could destroy if I had to or whatever—you know, Temporal Prime Directive stuff. Had to do it before I forgot. I had Rutherford in there yesterday helping me with some details.”
“Are you kidding? Of course I want to see the ship.”
***
“She’s beautiful.”
Boimler’s eyes are wide and bright as he takes in the bridge. A view of the exterior of the ship is up on the viewscreen. Neither representation is perfect, but they’re close enough. Enough to be proud of.
Enough to make her chest ache.
Mariner stands in front of the captain’s chair. “Smaller science vessel, brand new when we got her but nothing fancy, but, you know, she was ours. Definitely some experimental equipment down in the labs though that I didn’t care about at the time, but you and the nerds sure did.”
“Ooo! What kind of experimental stuff?”
“I should probably…not tell you that, sorry.”
“Aww…”
Even in his mild disappointment at that, his hands are still up balled up at his chest in his excitement. It’s so much like the first time she has to blink a few times to remind herself this is different. It’s not him.
“Mariner?” His arms drop when he turns back to her. “What’s wrong?”
It takes her a moment to realize there are tears on her cheeks. “I…sorry…”
Has she cried? Maybe she should remember, but the last week is such a blur of activity she honestly doesn’t know. It’s not really her thing, but she should, shouldn’t she? If there weren’t another version of her friends here she wouldn’t even be questioning that she should.
“What?” Boimler comes to her, reaching for her arms and looking worried. “Don’t apologize…what’s up?”
All that does is break her down faster. Maybe it’s the echoes of those words and ones like them, that voice, that tone she knows so well…twenty years of it all blurring together.
“I know you’re right here…I shouldn’t need to miss you…but I miss you,” she sobs. “I miss D. The…the D’Vana who ate ice cream and ran Cardassian prison breaks with me all night after we broke up the first uh…oof, few times and-and after T’Lyn and I had our first fight—you were there for that one and—look, there was a lot of ice cream and holodeck ass kicking in twenty years, okay?”
“M—Beckett, you’re allowed to be upset about that.”
“I know we’ll get all that time again, and maybe it won’t hurt so much in a few more weeks, when…when it’s faded more, but—you—h-he was there and then he just wasn’t! She just wasn’t! They should be here! E-even if it’s just for a little while before we all…go back to how we were now, or whatever. It doesn’t matter! It’s not fair!”
“Y-you’re right; it’s not. I’m so sorry…”
He pulls her into his chest, probably because he doesn’t know what else to do with her, but it’s fine. She doesn’t know what he could do either. Maybe this is what she needs.
“I’m scared,” she admits.
“To forget?”
She nods and sinks to the floor. He follows her down.
“You can tell me about him. Or…any of it. If you want to,” he says.
“I’ve probably told you too much already. Maybe I shouldn’t have. Timeline and all that…”
Boimler shrugs. “Okay…you don’t have to. I was just saying, you know, you could.”
He sits back, waiting for her, and there’s the silence again. The good silence. There have never been a lot of people she could be silent with. The background engine noise in here is different than the Cerritos—as close as she could get it to her ship. It’s better when she closes her eyes.
Mariner relaxes, crossing her ankles as she leans against the front of her chair. “Maybe…maybe a little.”
She doesn’t know where to start. Boimler seems to gather that when he glances at her.
“Were we fun?” he asks.
She laughs. “Oh, we were so much fun.”
Maybe this time, things will be different, but if they are, she knows that will never be one of the things to change.
***
It’s Boimler Mariner is expecting again the next day when her door chime rings, but this time she isn’t hiding in the bathroom.
And it isn’t Boimler, either.
“Hey…T’Lyn.”
The Vulcan is standing the way she always does, with flawless posture, but somehow she manages to seem sheepish at the same time. “May I come in?”
Mariner steps back to let her. “Yeah, sure.”
T’Lyn allows the door to close behind her before she speaks. “It has come to my attention that perhaps I allowed my own younger mind—with its much more lacking understanding of human needs—to influence my judgment more than I realized.”
Mariner opens her mouth, not quite sure how to respond to that, but before she can say anything, a notification pops up on her tablet, resting on the desk near the door. Something makes her grab it, and T’Lyn doesn’t protest.
It’s a message from Boimler. Don’t be mad. I’m still here whenever you need me, but I think you need her too.
She huffs out a quiet laugh. “Dammit, Boims…”
T’Lyn raises an eyebrow, and Mariner hands over the tablet to let her read the message.
“‘Came to your attention,’ huh?”
The Vulcan just inclines her head slightly; her version of a shrug. Or maybe an admission, based on the context.
Mariner takes the tablet back and sets it aside. “You were scared, weren’t you?”
T’Lyn raises an eyebrow. “I would not have used those words.”
“Of course you wouldn’t. But I get it. It’s okay. The idea of being bonded to a human is probably a lot for who you were now. Who you are now. I uh…the idea of being married at all is a lot for this me, and now I remember doing it twice.”
“Perhaps that…is not an inaccurate assessment.”
Mariner shifts closer, holding out a hand. They were never much for the Vulcan traditions—two fingers, and all that. After a moment, T’Lyn takes it, and she can feel an echo of the bond their future selves shared.
“What remains of the bond will fade,” T’Lyn reminds her.
“I know,” Mariner says quietly, tracing over her knuckles with a finger. “This doesn’t mean we have to end up there again…or if we do, it doesn’t have to be any sooner. We can do whatever we want, whenever we want, okay? A good friend told me I shouldn’t be afraid to ask for what I need, and I just know that…right now…I need you. Even…even if it’s just to make it easier to let go.”
“I am sorry that I was not here.”
“You’re here now; that’s what matters.”