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Normally these things start at the beginning but here we will start with what was almost an ending and then we will ricochet back like a rubber band stretched almost to the breaking point.
Joann Owosekun took the oxygen provider and held her breath and left her girlfriend and crew behind. She didn’t think that they would survive. She didn’t expect that she would.
When Joann was young she didn’t care for the stars. She loved the feeling of soft warm dirt on her feet or of the cool water around her and she never felt it was necessary to dream of anything more.
Then, she grew older.
Joann remembers the moment she began to dream of infinity. She was twelve and had climbed a tree on a bet, it wasn’t the first tree she had climbed but it was maybe the fifth. The tree was so tall it seemed to scrape the sky and she climbed higher and higher to the cheers of the children below. When she reached the highest branch that would hold her, she looked down.
At that moment it seemed to Joann that the world could be pulled out from under her and she could fall forever in an endless spiral to a ground that no longer existed. She wasn’t afraid though, and that made all the difference. Infinity can only hurt you if you fear it, or if you get caught drifting alone in it forever.
Joann knew her grip was strong and felt somewhere deep inside that if she let go the wind would catch her and the branches would slow her fall.
She climbed down after much begging from the others, but her feet on the ground no longer felt quite the same.
Joann would always carry a bit of dirt in her, a bit of water in her soul, heavy and grounding and present. But in her eyes, she could see the endless expanse of what could be. And that, that made all the difference.
No one understood when she left the collective, no one understood why she wanted to be surrounded by noise and bustle and beeping. Joann didn’t know how to explain that the noise and bustle were just part of it and what she really wanted was the feeling of infinity and the knowledge she was steady and strong throughout it.
Joann loved the dizzying feeling that came from everything being big and the assurance that came from being above it all.
Joann joined Starfleet because she could see possibilities twinkling like the stars and because someone told her she’d do well there.
Her feet were always steady as she soared higher and higher until she thought she might break from the duality of it all.
Joann Owosekun passed all her classes, graduated with honors, and joined the crew of the US Discovery.
Her family wasn’t there to see it.
She’d sent them a letter, written on stationery she’d made a long time ago, the pulp she’d pressed. It was a peace offering.
She was joining Starfleet to spread peace, after all.
She wanted them to be proud of her, wanted the people who’d raised her to see who she’d become because it was someone she was proud of. She graduated barefoot, feeling the dirt under her toes and the knowledge that this homage was the closest she would get to them again.
Owo became known for having a clear head in the face of adversity, for knowing how to stay calm when it seemed all anyone should be doing was panic. She guided the crew through infinity and maybe it could have been said she felt more at home swimming in the vast ocean of stars than she ever had in the waters of childhood.
Or maybe it was the same.
Owo knew the way she could feel the currents in the water around her and she grew to know how to sense the currents in the air too.
She found a new home among the stars, not superior to that of her childhood but not worse. Just different. She was different now, but she could never begrudge her past self those long afternoons spent swimming or digging in the earth. She knew she could never go back, knew her joy was in the sky now, but she did still wish for peace with her family.
Then a war broke out and Joann’s dreams of peace fell apart.
A beautiful woman sat across from her at the helm one day, who flinched every time she reached for her face and Owo wanted to grab her tight and hold her tightly, to protect the woman whose laugh reminded her of tulips for a reason she could not explain. Perhaps it had something to do with coming back again and again, through even the harshest winters.
One day Keyla Detmer asked her out on a date, and she accepted.
She didn’t regret it- she could never regret loving someone with all the force of infinity.
Keyla flew the ship through a wormhole, and Joann lost any chance she might have held on to that her family would forgive her. Owo held tight to the family she had left so that she would not be alone as she drifted in the universe.
Owo had thought they would die. That everyone she had left would die, she had believed it with a slow sad ache in her chest and she had believed she would not get to kiss her girlfriend one last time. She thought her last thoughts would be the mourning of her new family, a family that understood the way she saw the stars as a home and felt the same way.
Joann woke up from nightmares where she was gasping for breath, dying, and knowing that everyone she loved had suffered the same fate. She woke up and she listened to her girlfriend’s breaths, desperate for the steady rhythm of it all.
She’d sit up in their bed and look out the window at the stars and try to count them all, trying to count infinity until she could feel air in her lungs and know she was safe.
Joann asked the stars to give her infinity and she asked the ground to never forget to hold her feet tightly. Owo stretched up and was weighed down and then she found her equilibrium somewhere in between, lying in a room of plants in the middle of a starship, thousands of light-years and thousands of years away from her first home. The tree she had climbed as a child had been both infinite and grounded because it knew where it was, so Owo grew tall and remembered where she came from, but never went back, could never have gone back even if she tried.
Could never have gone back, even if they didn’t fly through that wormhole.
Owo pulled tight like a rubber band until she understood that she was not elastic, she was bark and wood and earth and sky, all growing together, growing towards infinity.