Chapter Text
Personal log, Stardate 6745.3
It’s hard to pack up what seems like far too few belongings for five years of my life, but the Enterprise refit seems to require that they strip everything out of her, right down to the bulkheads on every deck, so there’s not much point in trying to leave things behind. Being honest with myself, at this moment I’m not sure when, or if, I’ll be coming back. I have a lot of decisions to make while I use up some of my accumulated leave.
He’d deliberately not gone home to San Francisco.
Not that Sulu didn’t want to see his family, although, in moments of honesty, he could admit that he mostly didn’t. After nearly 10 years in Starfleet, some of his reasons for joining were just as valid as ever. Instead, considering how little of his leave he’d use during that time, he’d decided to take six months off, partly to think about everything he’d been through in those 10 years, and partly to think about what might come next.
And, particularly on Enterprise, but also as a junior officer on the Arjuna, he realized that any planet he’d visited during his career, he’d barely seen more than a flash of. In another moment of honesty, he reminded himself that he hadn’t seen all that much more of Earth outside of San Francisco. So, with six months leave, and all the credits he’d never gotten to spend across his career so far, Sulu made a list of the twenty most interesting places to go on Earth, making sure he’d at least stand on every continent, and resolved to spend a week exploring each.
He quickly found he couldn’t limit himself to twenty.
It took nearly a week of determined relaxation in the unmarried officers’ barracks on Starbase One to narrow the immediate list down to only forty-seven places. But the more he read, the more places he found he wanted to go. Eventually, he figured out that to spend a week in every place he wanted to go would take the rest of his life. In the end, unable to procrastinate anymore, he took the list of forty-seven and had the computer randomize the list before booking his first destination. Without allowing himself time for second thoughts, Sulu threw together the appropriate wardrobe and beamed down to explore the Great Pyramids for Week One.
Sometime in Week Six, swimming with porpoises in the outer fringes of the Amazon delta, it occurred to Sulu that he was running away. He supposed that shouldn’t have surprised him much, but it did. It took until early in Week Eight, walking steadily up the centuries-old path to the summit of Mount Fuji, for him to realize what he was running away from. His future.
Quietly sitting in a tea house at the top of the mountain, he met Miranda, and stopped running.