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“Keyla!” Her call rebounds off the walls of the corridor, various crew members of the Discovery looking up from their groups and small huddles of having the night off just in time to dodge out of her way. A flash of red hair rounds the corner ahead of her, and Joann follows with just brisk enough a pace to not be qualified as actually running, so as not to alarm anyone further with three of the alpha shift’s bridge crew sprinting through the halls. “Keyla, wait!”
“The drones can't get Stamets’s blood off the med bay floor… No, wait. No one can clean Stamets’s blood...Okay, I've got it. I’ve got it. No one can get Stamets’s blood... Oh, shoot. No, wait. Wait, wait, wait. Stamets’s blood is so…red.”
The turbolift doors close at the end of the hall, the bright, electric blue of Keyla’s augmented eye the last thing Joann sees between the cracks. She arrives at the doors less than ten seconds later, but of course when the doors slide open again with a slight whoosh there’s no one inside. Tilly skids to a stop next to her, curls flying every which way.
“Did she—” Tilly asks, and Joann nods, the same concern she feels bubbling deep inside written all over their friend’s face. “Computer, locate Keyla Detmer.”
“Lieutenant Keyla Detmer is currently located in crew quarters, cabin one-zero-seven,” the cool, mechanical voice responds back.
Joann and Tilly step into the lift together, Joann inputting their destination and then curling her fingers into her palms. Beside her, Tilly is practically vibrating with tension and is the first out the lift doors when they open again, stopping in front of the room and halfway through calling “Key—” at the door before she steps back, remembering that it’s Joann’s room as well.
“Keyla?” Joann calls softly through the door anyway. She passes her hand over the scanner and the door opens for her, revealing Keyla tucked into one corner of the room. Her legs are curled up into a ball on the bedspread—the one Joann’s assigned, technically, but the one they never use in favor of the one underneath the window where they can sleep under the light of warp—and her uniform partially unzipped down the front, as if she’d been trying to tug it off but given up halfway through. One side of her head is crushed sharply against the wall, her hand pressing into the augment on the other side hard enough to make her palm go white.
“I’m fine,” Keyla says, the bite to her tone sounding nothing like herself. The Keyla that Joann knows—the Keyla they all know—is quick with a snappy remark, radiantly triumphant when she manages to win against Tilly in kadis-kot, and cocky as all hell coming off the flight simulator after another record-breaking run, but this Keyla is the same one from the captain’s dinner table. No longer borderline unhinged, maybe, but taut and deadened and every syllable scathing. “I’m fine.”
Joann steps cautiously further into the room, expecting her to retract her limbs further into herself but pleased when she does not. She pauses, glancing back at Tilly, who tears her worried eyes away from Keyla to catch her look, mouth forming a small ‘o’ of realization. “I’ll just. Uh. I’ll just—go—go make sure Captain Saru’s okay,” Tilly says, already backing away. “I mean, we left him with Georgiou and she’s scary, so I—yeah. Hope you feel better, Keyla!” The door shuts itself again on the sound of Tilly’s rapidly receding footsteps.
“It’s just me,” Joann says calmly, the thudding of her heartbeat slowing slightly now that her eyes are on her, safe in their shared quarters. Keyla’s are fixed on a point straight ahead, the intensity of her stare carved into the sharp line of her brow. Joann comes forward again, pausing at the edge of the bed and, when Keyla doesn’t move, easing herself onto it without bothering to slip off her regulation shoes. She hesitates, balancing on her knees on the mattress. “Keyla…”
“I’m fine,” Keyla repeats dully. She blinks, and a singular tear slides out of her right eye and rolls down her cheek.
“All right, you’re fine,” Joann replies readily. Her hands rise, then hover in midair. “Can I touch you?”
“Yeah.” The permission is no more than a whisper, but it is all Joann needs to hear before she is sliding next to Keyla, gentle fingers skimming up and down Keyla’s forearm and tracing the taut tendons of her delicate wrist until the force with which she’s pressing the augment into her skull lessens. Joann coaxes the hand away gently, the palm smudged with the faintest trace of blood from where she’d forced the metal to dig into her skin, but she’s not truly bleeding. Joann nudges her from the wall with her leg, then eases herself behind her, putting herself between Keyla and the hard sheet of duranium alloy and letting out a breath she didn’t know she was holding when Keyla leans against her, stiff back to Joann’s chest. Her body fits snugly around Keyla’s, Joann’s arms coming forward to rest gently around her middle.
For a long while, there is only the sound of their breathing filling the quiet room, deep and slow next to harsh and pained. Joann doesn’t break the silence, feeling the minute tremors wracking Keyla’s entire body, her muscles knotted and tight. She studies the bright pinpricks of stars out the window, the tiny hairs—blonde, not red—at the base of her neck. She breathes in the scent of the moisturizing agent Keyla uses, cinnamon mixed with myosotis sylvatica native to her home in Germany, and is content to wait.
Finally, Keyla takes in a shuddering breath. “I’m…” she tries, and the word is barely a croak. “I’m…” Joann can’t see her face from this angle, but she doesn’t need to to hear the crack in her tone, the hitch in her voice. “I’m—I’m not fine, Joann.” The words draw up an ache deep inside her, a rush of love and care for the woman in her arms and a fervent wish that she could just make it all okay—
But Joann says nothing, just tightens her hold around her middle a little as if she could put all the cracking pieces of her girlfriend together again by simply the strength of her warmth.
“When I was on the Shenzhou…” Keyla says, the words barely more than a whisper. “At the Battle of the Binary Stars…” The spasms rock her body in its entirety now, little uncontrollable jolts that shake Joann as well. Another tear drips down onto her right sleeve. “I was on the bridge…I was flying…we took a hit.” She draws in a breath that seems to rattle in her chest. “There were sparks…I remember getting knocked out of my chair…flying through the air…” She swallows. “When I woke up, they told me I’d hit my head on one of the consoles, hard enough to cave in part of my skull…that I was lucky to be alive. And those few weeks in the med bay, getting transferred to a facility back on Earth…” Her voice dips, shudders. “Losing my eye…those were the worst weeks of my life. I felt so…helpless. Out of control.”
Joann nods, holding her close enough for her to feel the movement even if she’s facing the wrong direction to see it. She’d known the bare bones of the injury, of course, and only so many things couldn’t be fixed by Starfleet doctors immediately and would need the type of lifelong cranial and ocular implant Keyla had, but she didn’t…talk about it. Losing Captain Georgiou, yes, briefly, especially when she’d supposedly come back from the dead at the end of the Klingon War, but never her injury.
Never the moments Keyla felt weakest, because Keyla hated feeling weak.
“I don’t know what’s happening, Jo,” she murmurs. “We crashed on the Colony, and I…” Joann sees the events on the bridge happen again in her mind, Keyla’s body spinning through the air, impacting the deck plating like a ragdoll. Reaching for her, fingers outstretched, the distance between their stations suddenly a yawning abyss…
“We landed on the Colony,” Joann says. “Because of you.”
“Crash-landed,” Keyla says, turning slightly so that Joann can see her face. The corner of her mouth twitches upward. “Split you the difference.” She turns away again. “I can’t stop seeing it, just replaying over and over, and every time I step onto the bridge and sit at those controls I just—I just think it’s all up to me. I used to love that, you know? But now, it’s on me if we crash, or if something hits us, or if that—that—” She falls silent once again, shoulders shaking.
“When I first left home for the Academy,” Joann says softly, choosing her words with care. “I was scared to fly.” The shaking slows slightly, a sure sign that Keyla is listening. “Coming from the collective, I’d never…never been higher than a tree before, and when I had to take a shuttle onto the campus for the first time…I think I was gripping my seat hard enough to leave handprints.” She squeezes her slightly around the middle. “And now look, I’m ops officer on a Federation starship and dating a hotshot pilot.”
The tremble of Keyla’s body against her is almost a laugh, instead.
“Being afraid…isn’t the end. Struggling…isn’t the end. Just means you’re human, Keyla.” She shifts, drawing back slightly so that she can turn Keyla’s face toward her with a featherlight touch along the curve of her jaw. “I believe in you, hotshot. No matter what time we’re in.”
Keyla sniffles, then twists to lean back against her again, this time much less stiffly. Her head tucks just under Joann’s chin, her fingers nestling in the collar of her uniform. “I think I should, um…talk to someone who’s not you. Besides you, I mean. Dr.—Dr. Culber.”
“Okay,” Joann says warmly, happily.
“Okay,” Keyla whispers.
They remain like that for another minute before Keyla pulls away, wiping at one side of her face with one hand. “I hate—” is all she has to say, scrubbing at her eye with the sleeve of her uniform, for Joann to know what she means.
Her fingers trail along her jawline again, followed by a tender press of Joann’s lips to hers. “I’m so proud of you.”
“For what?” Keyla asks, her hand rising to touch her augment, silver metal embedded in her skin. “Being broken?”
Eyes soft, Joann pulls her hand away. She knows Keyla doesn’t like being touched there, doesn’t even like hands raked through her hair because it reminds her of what she lost, so she kisses her fingertips instead. “For admitting it. For getting help. If you face something, you can beat it, Keyla. And especially you. Always you.”
Keyla’s gaze meets hers, one eye a dark blue like the rippling shafts of light in deep ocean and one like the blue-green foam at the edges of the waves, but their associations with diving for abalone in her childhood are not the only reason those eyes feel like home—the only home Joann has out here, nine hundred and thirty years removed from everything she’s ever known, but home all the same. After a long moment, Keyla gives a little dip of her head before untangling herself enough to stand on the side of the bed, pulling Joann up with her. She glances toward the door, then looks down again, her hands making an aborted twitch toward the zipper of her uniform and wring together in front of her in front of her instead, fingers twisting over her knuckles over and over again.
Joann gives her a soft smile, and then takes hold of the zipper herself. One hand rests gently against Keyla’s stomach to keep the fabric taut, the other drawing it slowly up her body and nestling the slider underneath the flap of navy when she reaches her collar in proper regulation standard. Keyla steps close, forehead falling to rest on her shoulder, and Joann takes that as a cue to wrap her arms around her again.
“I’ll talk to Culber,” Keyla whispers, just audible despite being muffled by Joann’s uniform. “But can you just…can we just stay like this a while longer?”
“Of course,” Joann says. “As long as you need, I’m here.”