Obsessed with this page of "Academy Slang" from the Star Trek RPG Officer's Manual and it's just...various slurs? And some in-universe jokes? But mainly slurs.
Ridgehead? Kirk?? Tribble???
Will be telling people to "warp off" in the future though, 10/10 for that one.
Apparently, Paramount wasn't happy with this and another TNG-era publication and pulled the license. Hmm.
Which Star Trek Show Has The Most Range Between Highest Highs And Lowest Lows?
The Original Series
The Next Generation
Deep Space Nine
Voyager
Enterprise
Remaining time: 5 days 23 hours
So! When it’s good, it’s really really good, and when it’s bad, it’s awful.
It can be the contrast that’s the greatest when the show is really at its prime in comparison to the show still trying to figure out what it’s supposed to be in the early seasons, or maybe the s7 episode where writers are trying anything and the episode isn’t working for you. Or maybe it’s just a random episode that you really don’t like!
Which Star Trek show do you think exemplifies this most?
Summary: A space station orbiting an empty planet orbiting a dying star, home to a scientist working alone in rooms large enough for three. A year of silent observation punctuated at the last by an explosion, an injured Federation commander, and a callous in the shape of an emerald ring.
I was breathing. I sucked air into my lungs, coughing as I inhaled burning smoke. It hurt but I was breathing. That was good. It meant I wasn’t dead. I sat up, wiping my eyes, checking the ring on my pinkie, starting up on my feet before falling back down to my knees.
“Shit!” My ankle. “Son of a—” I took another breath. “I’m okay, I’m okay. Ankle.” I was sore all over but nothing else hurt as bad as my ankle, thank God. “Alright.”
I rubbed something from my eyes and looked around. I was in my lab. What had happened to it? The lights were flickering, some of them had fallen from the ceiling, and the console I’d been working at was putting off black smoke. The entire room was wrecked, with twisted metal and sparking wires everywhere. I’d been doing something, working on something before the explosion. Explosion? The ringing in my head made it hard to think. I was in my lab, on the floor in front of my primary station. What had I been doing?
“Come on, Kitty. Think!”
The star. Of course. The star and all my data on it that I’d gathered on it over the last year. The Federation ship, they’d come to get me, pick me up a month ahead of the supernova because the Federation was oh so conservative with everything they did. I’d been uploading my data to the Federation ship when whatever had happened happened. I must have hit my head and twisted my ankle on the way down. But what could have happened to the station?
That could wait. I pulled my pant leg up to my calf. My ankle was already a faint purple and was starting to swell. I gingerly prodded where the swelling started and immediately regretted it. What was it I had learned back in basic first aid, on sprains versus breaks? I couldn’t remember. There wasn’t a bone sticking out, though. That was good. It was starting to throb now, a little pulse of pain with each heartbeat, but nothing sharp. I could deal with that. I just needed to get in touch with that ship and get out of here.
“Computer?” Nothing. “Computer, respond.” What now?
The Commander. The one from the Enterprise, Riker or something, wasn’t it? I sat bolt upright and scanned the room again, but I was definitely alone. It wasn’t a big space, the entire station wasn’t big, just a lab, sensor array, galley. Just enough for me with an extra two sets of quarters for a research team that had never materialized. He had to be around here somewhere. He had been gathering my handwritten notebooks for transport. The galley, then.
I climbed to my knees, a jolt of pain coming from my ankle, and managed to crawl to the wall.
“One, two, three.” I pulled myself up, then gingerly tried putting weight on my right foot. “Shit! Okay, okay, no, you’re fine. You’re okay. Just a little pain, that’s all. You’ve been in pain before. And it’s probably not even broken.”
I took a hopping step, clinging to the wall, slowly making my way out of the lab and down the hall to the galley. My head was getting clearer and the ringing in my ears was starting to fade. The station was quiet. That was probably good, wasn’t it? Nothing was exploding. Whatever had happened, maybe it was over.
The galley was through the next door over and I pushed the button to open it, sucking in a breath as soon as the light hit me.
The star. It was burning. I hopped another step inside the galley kitchen, not able to look away from the windows that framed the red and gold star. It was on fire, tendrils of plasma reaching out far into the void of space, visible even with my naked eye. The entire star was roiling and glowing brighter than I’d ever seen it, and I had been looking at it every day for a year.
“Hey, Doctor.”
The Commander’s voice was faint but I followed it into the room. It was dark and the lights were flickering like the ones in the lab. Combined with the light from the star, it was frightening. I limped through the small kitchen and into the sitting area. Under the yellow glow of the sun, I saw movement on the floor in front of the couch.
“Commander!” I rounded an armchair and crouched down beside the man, almost falling forward onto my knees when I put too much weight on my ankle. He was leaning back against the couch, legs stretched out in front of him. A box of my notebooks was strewn across the carpeting around him. “Are you okay?”
“Doing great.” Riker winced as he pulled himself up straighter and rested his arms on the couch cushions behind him. “I think I’ve got a broken rib or two.”
“A what? Commander!” I sank down closer to him, trying to see any sign of injury besides the grimace on his face. He looked okay from the outside. No bones sticking out. All the blood on the inside. But his face was a scary shade of pale, almost white, and he was sweating. “Does it hurt? Can you breathe?”
“Yes and yes.” He let out a slow breath and looked around the galley. “What happened? Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine. My ankle’s twisted, it’s not bad.” I settled down into a more comfortable position. “The sun, it’s…I think the nova is starting.” The light coming through the window was brighter than I’d ever seen, turning everything yellow. I still couldn’t believe it.
“How is that possible? You said it had another month!”
“It does! It should!” I took a steadying breath. Riker didn’t look good. “I don’t know what happened. I was uploading the data to your ship and then I was waking up on the floor. It… maybe a solar flare knocked out the station systems. Or a shock wave from the fusion reactions, they’re accelerating. What about your ship? Did you call them? My computer system’s down.”
“They aren’t answering. Whatever hit us could have knocked out their communications. We need to get to the shuttle bay.” Riker made a move as if to push himself up from the floor and instantly fell back down, letting out a groan.
“You need to not move!” I was up on my knees again, hovering, fighting the urge to touch him, to find out where it hurt and what I needed to make better, like I was eight again and running my hands over my little sister’s near invisible scrapes with pretend magic that fixed everything or, more often, patching up real scrapes with a dermal regenerator our mom kept at my height because I was the one Ellie always ran to.
“There’s no shuttle anyway,” I told him, winning over the urge to pull a grown man into my arms and tell him everything would be okay. “I don’t have one. I have a transporter though, back in the lab, it’s strong enough to get us down to the planet.”
“Right. I need you to—” Whatever Riker needed me to do was lost in the screech of tearing metal. I ducked under the cover of my arms, trying to protect myself from anything that came crashing down on us, as if my arms would stop the weight of a space station. Finally, it stopped, the crashing giving way to a groaning that didn’t make me feel any safer. I sat up and realized that Riker had put his arm around me to protect me as the station seemed to tear itself apart.
And with good reason. The room was destroyed. The area where we sat had, somehow, escaped the worst of it but the kitchen was flattened by what looked like the entire ceiling caving in. The door wasn’t even visible anymore. It was the only way in or out of the galley.
“I think we’re trapped.” It took longer than I would have liked to get to my feet.
“Be careful!” Riker called after me as I limped toward the kitchen. “That could all come down with the next wave.”
I stopped at the edge of the counters. The replicator had been knocked over in front of the door with the ceiling collapsed on top of it. Doors of every cabinet had opened, spilling dehydrated meals and a mishmash of ingredients all over the floor, fresh vegetables mixing with flour and sugar.
“Maybe I can move some of this.” I stepped over a patch of strewn bulgar wheat and pushed a piece of metal ceiling tile out of the way. I yanked my hand back. “Shit! It’s hot.”
“Damnit, Doctor. Would you stop for a minute?!” I turned to find Riker pulling himself up to sit properly on the couch, one arm wrapped around his midriff. “You’re gonna get yourself hurt.”
He was right. I was a researcher, not an engineer or a mechanic. I could keep the station running, sure, in between visits from the mechanics that the Daystrom Institute sent, but I still didn’t know how to get us out of this room.
Which meant we had to wait to be rescued.
“Okay, that’s fine,” I whispered. I spun the ring around my pinkie. Once, twice, three times, feeling the stone twist around in the familiar circle. “We can wait it out. We have air. We have…” The last storage cabinet in the galley was untouched and I pulled out a few bottles of water. “We have water. That’s good. And he’s probably not gonna die.”
“I’m not going to die!”
I almost dropped the bottles, meeting his gaze across the yellow room with wide eyes.
“No, I know. I’m sorry, I.. I talk to myself sometimes. It… never mind.”
I shuffled back across the room, away from the acrid smell of burning metal and closer to the orange glow of the sun. Was it getting brighter? I sank down on the couch beside Riker.
“Here.” I unscrewed the top from the metal container and handed it to him. He swallowed some down but the pain from the effort was plainly written on his face. I took the bottle back from him as he sunk back and laid his head on the cushions.
“What’s our status?” He spoke with his eyes closed.
“Er… Well, we’re trapped in this room, unless we can move a replicator and half the ceiling, which we can’t. We can’t activate the transporter from in here, not without the computer working or taking voice commands, so I think we just…have to wait for your ship.”
“There’s no other way out?”
“No. The station, with the bulkheads, the way it’s designed, each room can be sealed off. There’s only one way in or out. But we have water and the air in here will last a while, plus there’s gotta still be some airflow to the rest of the station cause I doubt the vents closed.”
“How long until the sun goes supernova?”
“I don’t know. No, don’t…don’t look at me like that, I don’t know! Commander, this shouldn’t be happening, it doesn’t make sense. I launched a probe a week ago and it was consistent with every single other probe that I’ve sent out in the last year. We should have a month!” I buried my face in my hands, then yelped as the movement accidentally put too much weight on my knee that transferred down to my ankle. “Ugh.”
“Alright. Hey, come on, sit up.” The couch dipped beside me. “Doctor Campbell.”
“It’s Kitty,” I mumbled into my hands.
“What?”
I sat back up and turned to the man sitting next to me. “My name’s Kitty, no one calls me Doctor Campbell.” Well, no one called me much of anything here but back home, I was Kitty.
“Kitty. I’m Will. Here.” He pulled the bottle of water from where I’d dropped it between us, twisted off the cap, and handed it to me.
I drained it and then took a couple deep breaths. “Thank you.” I tossed it on the floor into the pile of my spilled notebooks. “I’m sorry you’re stuck here. I thought it was ridiculous your ship coming out this early, but I guess I was wrong. Okay. Alright. So, we’re stuck in here, you’re hurt. Your crew’s gonna come get us whether you can get in touch with them or not, yeah? I mean, if they can. So maybe we can just wait.”
“I was never good at waiting…” The Commander scanned the room, taking everything in. There wasn’t much. The kitchen was small and nondescript when it wasn’t trashed. The table was built to seat 4 and tucked into an out of the corner. The sitting area held the couch we were on, a coffee table, two chairs, and a bookshelf where I kept my notebooks. Nothing that I could see could help us. “Why isn’t there a computer terminal in here?”
“I don’t need one. Well, there wasn’t one installed because the station was behind schedule, but I never asked them to come back and add one because I like handwriting my notes in here, I use the station in the lab.”
“Maybe if we can get behind a panel… There might be an access point even if they didn’t finish it. Where was it going to be installed?”
“Next to the bookcase, but it’s all sealed up, they never put in a panel. You’d have to get through the actual wall and I don’t know if they put anything back there, anyway.”
“Better than sitting around.” Riker leaned forward, staring at the wall across from us with a clenched jaw. He nodded once and then, with a grunt, pushed himself up off the couch, barely getting to his feet before he started to sway sideways.
I caught him as best I could, grabbing him around the waist while trying to balance on one foot, trying and failing to hold both of us up without putting weight on my jacked up ankle until we finally collapsed on the couch in a very heavy pile that knocked the breath out of me.
“God damn… Get off of me, you stupid lunk…” I squeezed out from where Riker had landed half on top of me and rolled to the side, flopping sideways on the couch as I gasped for air. My ankle was on fire, throbbing with every heartbeat. “Owww.”
We lay there panting for a second: me, with my head halfway on the arm cushion and my feet hanging off the couch, and Riker with his back flat on the couch and body stretched out onto the floor.
“What was that?” I panted. I sat up and glared down at Riker where he was lying against my thigh. Shit. It was hard to be angry at a man when he was squeezing his eyes shut and clenching his jaw just from the effort of lifting his legs back onto the couch.
“I might have more broken than I thought.”
“Of course you do, now! I told you, the wall’s sealed up, you’re not gonna be able to open it! And now you look even worse and what am I supposed to do about that?” I took a breath, taking a break from yelling directly down at Riker to glare at the wall across from us where the nonexistent panel wasn’t. I pushed aside the annoyance as best as I could and tried to think. “Broken ribs. Broken ribs, okay, that’s lying down, I think, so that’s good, you’re already doing that. Then there’s ice if we had some but we don’t, but not moving is the big thing and it’s too late for that one. Assuming no internal bleeding.” I looked back down. “Do you feel like you have internal bleeding?”
Riker was blinking up at me. I wasn’t sure if it was because he was trying to figure me out or to figure out if he was bleeding internally.
Then he let out a laugh, deep and loud, shaking his entire body.
“Shit, that hurt.” He let out another chuckle and then a cough, clutching his ribcage. “God, Kitty, what are you talking about?”
“Trying to remember my first aid training, since you decided to try to jump around the room with a shattered ribcage!” It had been a while since I’d been around anyone and I knew it showed. I had taken this assignment when it came up because I needed space and time away from everyone. A year of solitude was definitely enough of both. I had never been the best with people even when I talked to them every day. Now, I probably sounded crazy.
But this officer, and his ship, had come all the way out here to pick me up, along with all my research, and now he was here on my couch with broken ribs. And it was because I somehow hadn’t done my job right. Yet here I was yelling at him for an ill-conceived but still reasonable attempt at saving our lives.
“Anyway. Here.” I tugged my jacket off and draped it over him. He was paler than before and he was shivering.
“I’m fine.”
“I know you are. I was hot.”
“Sure.” He tapped his badge again. “Riker to Enterprise.” Nothing. He shivered again, adjusted my jacket, let his head settle in a little further into the couch cushion. “You might be right. About not moving.”
“Mmhmm.” I pushed the hair back from Riker’s forehead. He was cold and clammy under my palm. “You’re freezing!”
“Going into shock isn’t gonna kill me.”
“Oh. Shock. That’s…that’s not surprising.”
“I’m okay. How’s your ankle?”
“Hurts.” I lifted my leg and wiggled my ankle experimentally. It was a mistake, especially after putting so much of my and Riker’s weight on it.
“I’m sorry. That was stupid of me.”
“Yeah. It was.” I dug the heels of my palms into my eyes, trying to think. Everything was happening so fast. I’d gone from uploading my data and packing up less than an hour ago to this, sitting on a couch with an injured Starfleet officer nearly in my lap. “If I could get to the lab… Oh, I’m an idiot.”
“What’s in the lab?”
“A med kit. I didn’t think. I wanted to make sure you were okay, I forgot about grabbing it.”
Riker didn’t answer. His eyes were closed again.
“Fuck. Commander. Er, Will.”
His eyes flashed open. “I’m not dying.”
“Well, stop acting like you are, then.”
“How do I even…” He trailed off. I listened to his breathing, the only sound audible in the silence of the station. Even the groaning and grinding of metal had stopped after the last pressure wave. Will inhaled, froze for a second, arm wrapped around his ribs, then exhaled just as shakily. I tucked in the jacket around his shoulders, checking his temperature again. He wasn’t exactly freezing, but he was cold and sweaty. I pushed his hair up, using the jacket sleeve to wipe the sweat away before tucking it back in beside him. It all felt so natural, taking care of him, trying to take away the hurt whether it was a scraped knee or stubbed toe or a broken rib. But a dermal regenerator and a kiss wasn’t going to send him on his way, not from this.
Will settled in a little, tilted his head up against my leg. “I thought I was supposed to be rescuing you, not the other way around.”
“I don’t think either of us are doing any rescuing here.”
“How much air does the station have?”
“Oh. We’re fine.” I knew that much. I knew the station specs. “The station has enough breathing air just in the main section for…well, it’s three people for a week. So we’re fine. Even if the dampers in here are closed, that’s… I dunno, this room is maybe” I counted ceiling panels, tapping my ring against my knee with each one, ‘ninety cubic meters? So that’s, for two of us at, say, ten cubic meters a day if we’re really stressed, which we are, then that’s over four days just in here. But that’s not counting the build up of carbon monoxide, and I don’t know what level that gets dangerous at.”
“Did you just do all that math in your head?”
“Yeah.” I estimated the room dimensions again and multiplied them together in my head. “Yeah, probably a little under a hundred meters cubed. And ten thousand liters s a day of air is really generous for how much we need, we’re probably a lot under that.” I looked down at where Will was bathed in the golden light from the dying sun. “The sun’ll probably go nova before we run out of air.” I couldn’t do the calculation for that as easily. The parameters I’d used before were wrong.
I heard Will take a breath, hold it for a few seconds, and release it. Did he fall asleep? “Kitty, has anyone ever told you could work on your delivery?”
“My… Oh. Yeah, actually. Sorry.”
“What are you doing out here?”
“I’m…studying the star.”
“No, I mean,” Will paused as he tilted his head back to look up at me, The starlight glinted off his eyelashes, casting delicate shadows. “What are you doing out here alone? This station was built for three scientists.”
“They never got assigned.”
“You never requested them.”
“How…how do you know that?” I looked away. I couldn’t hold his gaze.
“I read the mission summary, on the way here. You requested to come out as lead scientist and then you never put in for your team.”
“Mmm.” I ran my palm over my knees, focusing on the soft texture of my pants, the even weave of the cotton. “You’re right, I didn’t. I don’t… I don’t mind the quiet. And I can do the job myself, it’s just taking readings. I mean, it’s a lot of readings, but I wrote programs so the computer does them at the right times, so I can do it all myself.”
“Sounds lonely.”
“Maybe I like lonely.”
Will didn’t answer. I traced the pattern of the golden glow across the jagged metal that covered the floor and broken table of the dining area. My eyes followed the light across the floor into the kitchen and over the piles of spilled grains and vegetables. The shadows drew out at long angles on the floor. The star’s light was turning more orange by the minute. How long did we have? Would we even have time to notice when it finally went nova? All we could do was wait.
“Where are you from?”
“Me?” Of course me, who else would he be talking to? “Earth. Arizona.”
“Hot.”
“Yeah. You?”
“Alaska.”
“Cold.”
“Mhmm. Didn’t stay there long. Enrolled at the Academy when I was eighteen.”
“Too cold?”
“Too lonely.”
I glared down at him. He was smiling, eyes closed, skin glowing from starlight.
“I doubt you’ve ever been lonely.”
“Now that is cold.”
“Sorry.” I twisted the ring around my pinkie finger, watching it gleam green in the light, feeling the smooth stone setting rub against the calloused pad of my thumb, a callous in the shape of the stone. “What was wrong with Alaska?”
“What was wrong with having company on this thing?”
I snorted. “Ass.”
“Fair’s fair.”
“I asked first.”
“Actually, you didn’t.” Will shifted closer, letting his knees hang over the edge of the couch just a little less. He sighed, hopefully more comfortable. I’d nearly forgotten he was hurt. Thoughtless. “But okay. I left to get away from my dad. Well, he left first, wasn’t much reason to stick around after I finished school.”
“Oh.”
“Luckily, San Francisco is a long way from Alaska.”
“You didn’t miss…anyone?”
“Nobody to miss.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I can’t imagine… we’ll, I can’t imagine that.”
“Big family?”
“Sort of. Well, no, not big, but we’re close.” I tilted my head back against the couch to look at the golden ceiling. “You don’t have anyone back home?” It was easier to ask questions like that when I wasn’t looking at the man. Easier to be personal when we could be dead any second. Easier still to push the conversation back to him instead of letting it get any closer to me.
“I talk to my dad sometimes. Just recently. We didn’t for a long time, after he left. He kind of fell apart after my mom died.”
“Oh. That’s why he left?”
“Yeah. Who’s in Arizona?”
Back to me again, but somehow I couldn’t help but talk. “My parents. They grew up there, moved out to Phoenix when they got married and had us. That’s where we grew up, but once we were out of the house, they moved out into the middle of the Sonoran.” I could almost pretend that the light against my closed eyes was the sun burning into the hot dirt of the desert.
“Scientists, like you?”
I snorted, pushing away the hair that had fallen into my face “Artists. Kooky, that’s the word people use. They do these weird sculptures out in the desert. They’ve got a replicator and a climate unit in one of those tiny modules they give to colonists, just so they don’t burn up in the summer, and they make this metal art in the middle of nowhere.”
“Huh.”
I huffed air, wondering how close I was getting to that rate of ten cubic meters per day. “You can say it, everyone does. It’s stupid.”
“No, it’s not. That’s kind of the point of the Federation, isn’t it? People doing what they want? Heck of a way to grow up, though.”
“No, that’s the thing, they were pretty normal when we were growing up. Well, I mean, they’re weirdos, but they didn’t drag us all over with them, they waited until we were moved out to really go off the rails with their art. I don’t even know if it’s good.”
“Eh, it’s art, does it matter?. I play the trombone. I’m not sure if I’m good.”
“You play the trombone?”
“Yeah.”
A brighter flash of light out the window, bright enough to see through my eyelids. I opened them in time to see another stream of plasma coming off the sun, streaking into the black. Starlight shining through the tall windows of the station.
“I play piano.” I had used to, at least. Didn’t have one here on the station. I was probably rusty.
“You any good?”
“Yes.”
He laughed, laughed with his entire body in a way that suggested he couldn’t laugh in any other way. Didn’t know how to. But then he pulled his arms tight around himself, the laugh cutting off as he squeezed tight, like he was trying to hold himself together.
“I’ll play for you when we get on your ship,” I promised him. My hand had landed on his shoulder, squeezing like I was trying to hold him together, too.
“I’d like that. Maybe I’ll buy you dinner.”
I didn’t think I’d ever laughed the same way Will did. At least, not in a long time. But I huffed air out of my lungs a little harder than I normally did and I could feel my lips part in a toothy grin as I stared up at the ceiling.
“Maybe you will.”
“You gonna see your parents when you get home?”
Oh. I hadn’t thought about that. Well, I had, it was all I thought about, really, or at least I was always thinking about not thinking about it. But I had a month left, should have had a month left, and so I had planned to continue to think about not thinking about it. Now it was here, closing in on me, so close that I couldn’t avoid it anymore.
“Kitty? You still up there?”
I squeezed his shoulder, instinct again, telling him it would be okay because that’s who I was, that's what I did. “Yeah, I’ll go see them. We’ve written letters. They miss me.” I tapped my pinkie against his shoulder, ring a little too tight on my finger, flipping the stone around so it was pressing into his shoulder like I could bury it inside of him along with all the memories that I shouldn’t tell.
“Letters?”
“Yeah! I’m better at writing, if I can put some thought into it. Not so good at those videos people send.”
“That’s cute. Old-fashioned.”
“It’s cause of my parents. They never liked too much technology. They like things slow.”
“Slow? Think I need to ask your dad before I buy you dinner? Wanna make sure I do it right.”
“No, he’d hate you whether you did or not. I mean,” I backtracked, forgetting that honestly wasn’t always the best option. Forgetting that this whole dinner situation was hypothetical, even if we did survive. Forgetting that the light coming in wasn’t from a sunset on Earth, certainly not one colored just like a pretty evening on that pier in Vancouver with the sun sinking over the curve of the Earth and casting long shadows from gulls screaming overhead. “He’s not big on Starfleet. Not command track, anyway, he’s kind of…well, the first big word he taught me to write was ‘antiestablishmentism.’ Which actually is a word, by the way. He didn’t like when I joined the Institute, but he’d have liked it less if I joined Starfleet. Which is funny, cause Ellie’s four years younger than me and he was actually soo proud when…”
I fished the water out from where it had sunk into the edge of the couch beside me and took a gulp. I talked too much.
“You thirsty?” I asked once I’d swallowed around the lump in my throat.
“Shouldn’t sit up.”
“Oh. Here.” I poured a splash of water into the cap and fitted his hand around it, taking it back once he’d tipped it into his mouth. I twisted the cap back onto the bottle, a kaleidoscope of light bouncing off the metal surface and reflecting onto the walls around us. “There you go. You’re gonna be okay, Will, I bet your ship’s got a great doctor on it. They’ll probably be able to fix your ribs in like five minutes. It won’t even be sore.”
“What about the internal bleeding?”
“I shouldn’t have said that.” That was my problem – I never said the right thing, always said too little or too much. “I haven’t talked to anyone else in a while, I kind of got used to talking to myself. Didn’t really have to censor anything I said.”
“Sounds kind of lonely.”
“Damnit, Will, I’m not lonely. I just needed to be alone.”
“Cause of that ring?”
The metal bottle fell from my hand, landing softly on the carpeting, casting those damn reflections around the broken walls of my station.
“What?”
Will was looking up at me again, head warm against my leg, the red of his uniform turned a golden orange in the yellow light. I looked away, at the bottle, the star, the stupid remains of meals I’d never cook spilled across the kitchen floor, coming back to him and the expression on his face that was something like concern and something like curiosity but too much of both.
“You’re right, none of my business.” Will smiled.
My hand was still on his shoulder, holding a little tighter than I should, emerald still turned inwards. I ran my thumb over the black fabric of his uniform, feeling the fibers catch on my callous, dragging them this way and that, focusing on that smallest of sensations.
“Kitty? I’m sorry, I shouldn’t’ve…” He snaked his hand out from under the jacket that lay low on his chest and covered mine, stopping the progress of my thumb. I stared at it, stared at my bright pink nail pinned under his thumb, the way his hand molded to mine as warmth seeped into my skin. “I’m sure he didn’t deserve you.”
“She.” The word fell out, hanging in the air. And more followed, stumbling over each other, chasing one after another to escape after being caged inside for so long. “Not he. It’s hers, Ellie’s, her engagement ring. She was always smaller than me so it only fits on my pinkie, that’s why I can’t wear it right. We always said she had bird bones. Well, I did, my mom got mad when I said that, said it’d give her a complex and she’d take off like a Roadrunner.” I sucked in a breath, filling my lungs with half a liter of air. “She liked it, said she wanted to learn to fly.”
“Ellie is..?”
“Ellie’s my sister. Little sister, so of course she always got into the stupidest situations, I think she really thought she could fly some days. She always had at least one knee bandaged. My mom let me have the dermal regen cause Ellie would only let me fix her up, but she loved these stupid little bandaids, like how they used to make them? She got them when she went up to Bozeman on a field trip, like some retro thing, except they had little pictures of starship’s on them and she always made me use those. Sometimes I got to sneak a pass of the regen over her before I stuck them on, though.”
I took a breath, couldn’t stop talking, couldn’t stop looking at the pattern that Will was tracing on the back of my hand.
“She was in Starfleet, you know? She graduated a few years ago, she was a test pilot for ships out by Utopia Planetia, which my parents kind of loved and kind of hated because she’d be home for dinner more than I could be but she was taking orders from The Man. But she was really good at it, Will, like, I’ve seen her fly and she’s just fantastic, I didn’t even know ships could do the kind of things she does in them. So, she was on vacation, or shoreleave, I guess? And she and Tony were in Vancouver, I was home after my last assignment out studying a pulsar, and I had a few months home so Tony asked me to come up with them. And he just… he begged me, really, which was so weird because we’ve never been close but I went and we were out on this pier just walking around and he pulls this holocamera out of God knows where and hands it to me and I spent five minutes messing with those knobs because that’s what I do, then I turn around and he’s getting down on one knee.
“And it was beautiful. It was sunset, over the Pacific? You know what that looks like. And the sun, it was a lot like this, so orange and red, with long shadows just like these, and I don’t know if I’d ever taken a picture before in my life, that was always my mom’s thing, but they turned out so well, and she just was glowing, literally glowing like they say people do but you don’t really get it until you see it.”
Will was fiddling with the ring, turning it back the right way round, letting the band drag across my skin as he pressed it with his thumb.
“He was taking her to work, back on Mars. Well, riding with her, he couldn’t fly, but he wanted to drop her off after shore leave. It was such a short flight. You’ve done that, right? It’s so short. But there was a problem with the shuttle, some kind of alignment of something, I don’t know, they couldn’t ever really explain it. You’d think they’d know, right? It’s fucking Starfleet, don’t you have redunancies on everything? But it didn’t work, whatever it was, and they brought back enough of them to let us claim whatever survived the explosion. Which was really just the ring.”
I was breathing. It didn’t hurt but there was some kind of stutter in my chest and there was a lump in my throat that I didn’t think had anything to do with oxygen depletion. But I was breathing and that was good, because it meant I was alive.
I watched Will’s thumb trace the band of the ring before squeezing my hand.
“I’m sorry about your sister, Kitty.”
I bit down on my bottom lip, just enough for it to hurt. “Don’t.”
“What?”
“Don’t feel sorry for me.”
His hand froze, let go, pulled away until he was just touching a fingertip, a bridge between us just a nail bed in width.
“When did the accident happen?”
“A year ago.”
“Hmm.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Will.” I shook my head. “Don’t do that.”
“No, really, Kitty, it was nothing. You said you needed to be alone. I get it. And you had a year alone.”
I had. I’d had a year to think, or to stew, I wasn’t sure. To drown in data and formulas, maybe. To write letters. To rub a callous into the pad of my thumb.
“I wanted to be alone.” It was the only thing I could think to say, parroting my own words that he had parroted back at me. A reflection of a shadow of me, round and round again like echoes in a canyon until I faded away to nothing.
“Sorry to drop in like this.”
I snorted, coughed, rubbed my eyes. “God, it’s got to be getting late. Where are those shadows coming from?”
Will shuffled up and without looking at him, I followed his gaze, covering my eyes to look out into the sunlight. Between us and the star, hovering in space, was a starship, silver curves casting shadows from the partially eclipsed sun.
“Enterprise to Riker, come in.”
I shook Will’s shoulder, as if he’d missed it somehow. “Will! That’s them!” I shook him again, more carefully, as the badge chirped to life again.
“Riker, this is Enterprise, please come in.”
He pulled my jacket off of him as he reached for his com badge.
“This is Riker. Captain, we sure are glad to hear from you.”
“Likewise. Standby for transport, Commander.”
“Acknowledged. Two to beam directly to Sickbay.” Will tilted his face up to look at me, smiling again, ignoring the broken ribs and the emotional vomit of a woman who hadn’t had a real conversation in nearly a year. “Told you I was here to rescue you.”
I was going through my old fic folder and I found this thing I wrote like 4 years ago.
I think I had a vision for a whole thing, I have no idea what the vision was, but I kind of want to go on with it because I feel like the world really needs a TNG Vampire AU
