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When Keyla Detmer was five years old she fell into a door and got a scratch on her face. Her mother rushed her to the nearest hospital and told her, “You’re very beautiful, Keyla, so we have to make sure this doesn’t scar.” Keyla was too young to understand quite what that meant but the words sunk into her bones like liquid iron, too hot and heavy and hardening until she couldn’t move.
Keyla wasn’t allowed to play on the monkey bars with the other kids, only swinging on the swings, up and up, higher, faster, hoping she could launch herself off and beyond the sky and into the stars.
When she was seven a Starfleet officer came to the school and told her she could fly someday, so long as she practiced. From that day on whenever her mother wasn’t watching she trained. Keyla could run a five-minute mile and hold her own in a fight by the time she was ten.
Her mother had no idea.
Keyla hid her posters of the stars in the sky that she hoped to one day travel to under pictures of the stars who were on television.
“You could be just like them one day,” her mother would say, hope gleaming in her eyes. “I wanted to be an actress you know.”
Keyla did know all too well what her mother had dreamed of.
When she was eleven years old Keyla Detmer failed the pilot’s test. She cried to her best friend because she couldn’t cry to her family.
When she was 12 Keyla Detmer earned her license, she proudly kept it hidden in her linen closet.
When Keyla was 17 she left home without a note and joined Starfleet. Her mother would not have approved but Detmer was her own person.
She left her mother's dreams behind and reached for the stars.
She became a helmsman on the Shenzhou, serving under Captain Georgiou and she charted their paths through those stars she had longed for.
And then everything fell apart.
Detmer was 28 when a war started and her captain died.
Detmer was 28 when the ship she was temping on got hit by a Klingon battle vessel and she flew up and up, out of her seat and across the room, smashing her face on a corner.
She woke up five days later in the medbay, with a promotion and half her face wrapped in bandages. The doctors told her she could take them off soon but she was afraid to.
She did not call her mother, she did not need to be reminded that beneath the bandages anything could have happened. She did not need to be told she “should never have joined Starfleet”. She did not need to be told her looks were “wasted”.
Instead, she called her best friend and talked to her for hours about trivial things like how pretty women were, or what food Detmer would have when she got out of there.
Two days after that the bandages came off and Detmer didn’t look in a mirror before she was out again for surgery.
Three more days and six surgeries later, Detmer had a piece of metal where her eyebrow used to be and an ocular implant instead of an eye.
Detmer avoided looking in mirrors as much as she could and when she passed a bit of wall that was too reflective she did not recognize the person looking back at her, someone who was in her mind more metal than human.
Lieutenant Detmer became helmsman of the USS Discovery and she didn’t try to flirt with the beautiful woman she was across from, because beautiful women don’t date people who don’t recognize their reflections and who go to push their hair back and then drop their hand like it’s been burned because they felt the smooth coolness of something that was most definitely not skin. Tazzy tried to help and Detmer pretended it worked because the other option was to show just how broken she was and probably always would be.
Lieutenant Detmer didn’t talk with her mother anymore, not really. She tried once after the accident.
“What a shame,” her mother had said. “You could have been great.”
Detmer never wanted to be known for pretending to be something else. She had wanted to fly.
Detmer had flown, she still had nightmares about the crunch of her face and the pain shooting through her skull.
When Lieutenant Detmer was 28 and a half, Airiam joined the crew.
Airiam wasn’t bitter about the fact she actually was more metal than skin. She never complained or cried that her mind worked differently now.
Detmer asked her about it, one long night, a few drinks in and aching from the weight of all she had lost. “How do you stand it?” She’d asked. “You lost so much more than me, you lost everything, and you seem so fine.”
Airiam had smiled at her then, a sad smile, a proud smile. “I got up each day so my husband’s loss wouldn’t be in vain until I could start getting up every day so I could breathe the air and smile at someone and make them feel a little better about getting up that day. Some days are better than others but my best is different every day and as long as I am doing my best I have done enough.”
When Keyla was 29 she asked the beautiful woman who worked across from her and who she laughed with at lunch if she would go on a date.
When Detmer was 29 she did not call her mother to say goodbye. She called her best friend who had helped her through everything instead.
She kissed her girlfriend and then flew most everyone she cared about through a wormhole.
Keyla Detmer was 29 when her girlfriend held her hand and she said goodbye to Airiam.
Lieutenant Keyla Detmer woke up in the morning and forced herself to splash some water on her face and eat some breakfast, some days she needed support, and some days she supported the people around her. She did her job and smiled at people and pushed her hair back without dropping her hand. Some days were good and some days were bad but every day she took a deep breath and did her best. And that was enough.
She did not need her girlfriend to tell her she looked beautiful because that had never been what she had sought, she had just wanted to be good enough for her mother, good enough for herself.
Now she knew that good enough was just another term for accepting yourself and that sometimes that feels impossible and that, that is when she relied on other people’s love that she knew was there unconditionally.
The metal in her bones and on her face was a part of her and it always would be, but metal can strengthen and rebuild and Keyla Detmer was growing and changing and staying the same.
Keyla Detmer woke up and did her best and that was enough.