Work Text:
“You know all those old probes, right, the ones they make Earth kids learn about in grade school,” you start, feet on the dashboard of a holographic car, replicated beer in your hand. B’Elanna sits beside you, wrapped in a blanket with a drink of her own. “You know… Voyager, Cassini, I’m talkin’ those really early ones they launched when the furthest any human had gone was Earth’s moon?”
“Yeah?” she answers. Your eyes are up on the stars, a beautiful rendering of the sky from somewhere on Earth, but her gaze falls on your face, the wonder she must see there.
“On… on some of them, you know, like the Voyager probes, they made these- these golden records, just real deadweight you know, and they were using money still so it cost them something enormous, probably, to add these, just… detailing life on Earth and where we are and what it was like to be human back then. I mean… They left out war and poverty and all of that bad shit, and I think maybe they should have kept it in, give… whoever, a better picture of who we were, you know, but, that was back before first contact, and before anybody on Earth even knew if there was anyone else in the galaxy we could talk to. It was this- you know, this enormous leap of faith, just on the off chance someone came across this hunk of metal flying silently through interstellar space.” You pause, for a second, take a sip of your drink. “And here we are.”
“Here you are, four hundred years later, sitting in a fake car with your half-alien girlfriend, halfway across the galaxy, and all you want to tell me about is some ancient hunk of junk that doesn’t even exist anymore,” she jokes, voice gentle. You smile, drop your gaze from the sky to her. She’s smiling, shoulders relaxed, and you like the way she looks in the artificial starlight. “Sometimes I remember why I love you.”
“Only sometimes? B, I’m hurt,” you tease, lean into her side. She tosses her blanket around your shoulders, tugs it in as tight as she can once you’ve shifted to accommodate, and you let your legs hang over the side of the car. The position is awkward, and you’d bet you’re going to feel it later, but this is where you want to be, for now. You rest your head on her shoulder, cradle your drink in your hands.
“I don’t think,” you start, talking quietly to her, “the people who made those records and launched those probes ever thought we’d be here. I’m not talking about drifting through the delta quadrant trying to get home, I’m talking about- about here, on the ship, exploring. You know, at least not so soon.”
She doesn’t really reply, just hums in response, rests her head on yours, so you continue. “I mean, I don’t think anyone did. It took Vulcans a lot longer to get off the ground than us, and they’re a lot smarter than us too, I think they’re just… a lot less reckless,” you laugh, sip your drink again. “A Vulcan isn’t going to build a warp ship out of a nuclear warhead for no other reason than just to prove that they can, a Vulcan isn’t going to send people to space when they still don’t know how to make arti-grav, or grow food, or all of this other stuff humans had no idea how to do when they were sending people to the moon, or those early Mars missions, or back when we had orbiting space stations. People were losing vision, and muscle mass and bone density, and all this real damaging stuff, but we were still sending people because we could, because we wanted to, and I guess everyone thought that whatever we’d gain from going into space without all the equipment and creature comforts we’ve got on Voyager, or even on those early NX starships, was worth what we were going to lose. And human history is full of that sort of thing. You know, sending people on months long sea voyages to discover some new island only to have half the crew die of scurvy or something. It’s like we’re all possessed by this- this innate sense of wanderlust, I guess.”
Gently, she threads her fingers through your hair, apparently happy just to listen to you talk. You trace the band of the milky way with your eyes. “I know you know this,” you continue, “but on Earth, we still call the galaxy by local names, like- like Milky Way, or Silver River, which I can’t actually pronounce in Chinese, I’m not gonna try, or Straw Way or Winter Street, I don’t think I’ve actually ever heard anyone call it by the fed standard term. Even out here, it’s either just ‘the galaxy’ or one of those. It’s like we’ve got this weird attachment to it since we’ve named it.”
“The Klingon Standard word is qIb,” she tells you, contributing something for the first time in a while. You’d guess it was hard to get a word in edgewise, with how much you have to say. “Back before they knew what it was and that it wasn’t the only one, they called it qIb, and then once they found other ones, they just started calling them all qIb, there isn’t a real way to differentiate between them in Klingon besides location. It’s the same with stars, and it was the same with planets before they started meeting their neighbours. Stars are all Hov, planets were all yuQ unless they were Qo’nos.”
“They all have the same name?” you ask, “it’s not just a classification thing?”
“Yeah, they’re all called the same thing. It’s a wildly different culture, right? They don’t see a need to give everything that’s relatively the same a different word, whereas you, humans have to name everything something different. A targ is a targ whether it’s suited to mountains or suited to plains, a galaxy is a galaxy whether it’s ours or someone else’s. I think it’s simpler.”
“It is, I guess,” you admit, yawn a little, shut your eyes, “still, I like all the different names we have for things. Makes life more interesting.”
“If you say so.” Her fingers in your hair are soothing, calming, and you actually start to drift to sleep. She doesn’t try to stop you, doesn’t wake you right away because she knows how much you sleep, knows it isn’t much, knows a couple minutes of rest in a fake car on the holodeck will do you good, probably leave you tired enough to sleep when you get back to your quarters. You almost forget that this place isn’t really real, that you’re on a ship in the middle of nowhere, that the air you’re breathing is as recycled as anything else on the ship. It’s soothing, comfortable, quiet.
She only wakes you when she needs to, when she’s startled from her own attempt at sleep by the computer attempting to inform you that your holodeck time is almost up. You save the program, resign to shuffle back to your quarters with B’Elanna’s blanket clutched tight around your shoulders, her arm securely around your waist. You crawl into bed still holding the blanket, curl up tight and bury your face before she even lays down. She tucks herself close to you, and you’re half asleep before she says anything.
“Goodnight, Tom,” she whispers, to which you slur something that sounds vaguely similar to ‘goodnight, I love you’.
(You fight about something stupid in the morning, loud and angry and entirely pointless, because you get up too early, and you’re too tired, and she can’t find her uniform and why do you even need uniforms anyway, why can’t she just replicated a new one, why is this your fault, but that isn’t what you think about while you’re on duty. You think about the stars in the holodeck and the smile on her face, the peace you felt and how much you love her.)