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Infinite lifetimes have not made falling through the wormhole any easier, not by a mile. The Captain almost thinks it's getting harder the longer they do it. The tumble through the blue void seems more nauseating every time, and it leaves their head spinning long after their boots have hit solid ground.
They press a hand to their chest, over their pounding heart. Their ragged breathing echoes around the cramped confines of their cryopod.
It's quiet. Too quiet. The computer doesn’t greet them and there’s no sounds of commotion from the bridge; no sound of human life at all.
The Captain slowly opens their eyes, already suspecting what they might find and dreading it all the same. Dull blue light filters through the frosted glass and the dead screen on the wall in front of them shows nothing but the Captain’s reflection.
They push the cryopod door open and step out onto the empty bridge. The silence is deafening, and the absence of everything that should be happening right about now presses in around them, so close they fear they might suffocate.
No no no not this again please not this I can’t do this again
The Captain’s feet mechanically carry them across the bridge to Mark’s cryopod where they throw the door open, hardly registering their own actions. Empty. There is no sign of their head engineer, just like before.
They drift back to the center of the room, sinking to the floor with their back against the now useless main console. This was one universe they’d hoped never to see again. Years of drifting through space on a dead ship with nothing but their own thoughts calling them a failure for company. Always teetering on the brink of insanity, one step away from losing their mind completely.
Was this punishment? Was this personal hell their sentence for not being able to fix things?
I’m trying, I swear I’m trying to fix it, please I don’t want to be here again. They plead to whatever higher power that had seen fit to put them here.
But then again, maybe the Captain deserved this. After all, hadn’t their choices cost countless lives, lives of people who trusted them? How had Lady put it, “The multiverse is littered with the corpses of your failures,” hadn’t it been? Maybe this was the one place where the multiverse was safe from them, where they couldn’t do any more damage.
They close their eyes in defeat. As they do, a sound echoes from deeper in the ship. A clang, followed by a faint yell of frustration, too far away to make out the words.
The Captain’s head snaps up. That wasn’t right, no one else was here. No one else had ever been here.
At least, not last time.
Slowly, the Captain climbs to their feet. They make their way to the door of the bridge and peer into the corridor beyond. Nothing. But they heard something. They venture further into the Invincible, staying as quiet as they can.
As they creep through the hallways, evidence of someone else occupying the ship starts to appear. Scattered tools accompany panels pulled free from the walls, exposing the guts of the vessel. Whoever was here had been trying to fix the Invincible.
Good luck with that, the Captain thinks. They may not have been an engineer, but they knew their way around a ship, and they’d had a long time to figure things out. There wasn't a damn thing anyone could do for the Invincible now.
They can hear more sounds now. Shuffling and muttering, getting clearer the closer they get to the reactor. The Captain pauses to pick up a metal pipe, feeling the need to arm themself. Just in case.
The door to reactor sits slightly ajar, the gap barely big enough to squeeze through. Auxiliary power is only going to life support, the Captain remembers, all the doors have to be hauled open manually. They can still hear someone moving inside the room. They raise the pipe in their hand like a baseball bat and take a deep breath.
1… 2… 3!
The Captain grabs the edge of the door and throws it open. The figure crouched in front of the control console jerks in surprise, dropping the wires they’d been working on and whirling to face the Captain.
It’s Mark.
The pipe slips from the Captain’s fingers and falls to the floor with a clatter. Mark. The one person they’d been searching for for god knows how many lifetimes now and never been able to find; at least, not the right version of him. But it’s him. It’s really him this time.
Mark stares at the Captain, eyes wide and chest heaving. Neither of them move, neither of them speak, both of them not quite believing their eyes. The Captain notices Mark’s hair and beard, both starting to become overgrown. With a sinking feeling they realize this isn’t their hell they’ve stumbled into, it’s his.
They take a tentative step forward. “Mark…?”
Whatever trance the shock of seeing another person left on Mark suddenly snaps, and the head engineer backs up quickly, putting distance between himself and the Captain until his back hits the wall.
“Stop– stop it, don’t come any closer!” Mark’s voice is hoarse from disuse and while he doesn’t quite yell, there’s a panicked aggression in his voice that makes the Captain pause. It reminds them of a cornered animal.
“Ok, ok,” the Captain raises their hands in surrender. “I won’t, I promise.”
Mark doesn’t look like he believes them, but they stay still, hands raised, until they see him relax slightly. He takes his own step forward, and the Captain fights the urge to run to him and wrap their arms around him, because maybe if they hold on to him he can't disappear; maybe the wormhole won’t be able to whisk them away if Mark is their anchor.
“Is it really you?” Mark asks quietly, “Or did I finally start hallucinating?”
“It’s me,” the Captain says, slowly lowering their hands. “Or at least, some version of me. It’s… hard to tell sometimes.”
“But you’re here,” Mark presses, “You’re actually here?”
The Captain nods. “You’re not hallucinating unless we’re hallucinating the same thing.”
Mark laughs. There’s no humor in the sound. "Wouldn't be the most impossible thing that's happened to us."
Even in the dim light the Captain can see the dark circles under Mark’s eyes and the exhaustion and defeat in his posture. “How long have you been here like this?” They ask, barely above a whisper. They fear the answer.
“I don’t know,” Mark’s voice breaks and the Captain’s heart breaks with it. “At the beginning I was too panicked, I didn’t keep track. Now it doesn’t seem like there’s any point in trying. I don’t know if I’ve been here six weeks or six months. Fuck, it could be six years and I wouldn’t be able to tell.”
“I’m sorry,” the Captain whispers, feeling tears gather in the corners of their eyes. They wouldn’t wish this on anyone, but especially not Mark. Never Mark. "I've been trying so hard to find you but I can’t control where I go or how long I stay there. I never wanted to leave you alone and I never wanted you to experience one of these universes and I’m so sorry, Mark.”
“You were looking for me?”
The Captain blinks in surprise. “Yes. I’ve always looked for you, every time we got separated. Why does that surprise you?”
Mark shrugs, an odd look on his face. “Figured you had more important things to worry about than me.”
“You are important.”
He doesn’t meet their eyes. “How long did it take you to find me?”
“I…” the Captain trails off. They haven’t thought about time in a linear way in god knows how long, but their heart is telling them it’s been so long since they’ve seen Mark, their Mark. “I don’t think time really works for me in a way that I understand anymore. But… I know it’s been at least a few lifetimes.”
“Oh,” Mark says quietly.
There’s a stretch of silence where the Captain feels a few tears start to make their way down their face. They wipe them away with a gloved hand and sniffle a bit. It feels pathetic, but honestly they can’t bring themself to care anymore.
“Captain?” There’s no pity in Mark’s gaze when they look up, only concern, to their relief. “Do you… want a hug?”
They nod again. “Yeah. Do you?”
“Yeah,” Mark admits shakily.
The Captain is already moving before the confirmation has fully left Mark’s mouth and they practically throw themself into his arms, holding him as tightly as they can, their fingers tangling in the soft curls at the nape of his neck. Mark’s arms wrap around their torso just as tightly and the Captain feels him bury his head in their shoulder. Together, they collapse to the floor like puppets with their strings suddenly cut.
One of them is trembling, and the Captain can’t tell if it’s them or Mark. Maybe it’s both of them, but does it even matter? Does anything outside of this moment, this embrace, matter? The Captain can’t fathom how anything could. Their whole world has collapsed to a single point: the man they cling to like he is the most precious thing in the universe, because to them he is.
“Captain?”
“Hmm?”
Mark pulls away from them slightly, enough to look them in the eyes but not to fully break the embrace. The tears streaked down his face mirror the Captain’s own. “You said you didn’t want me to experience a universe like this, does that mean you’ve been somewhere like this before?”
The Captain nods almost imperceptibly. “Yes. It was just me, no one else ever showed up.”
“And… how long were you there?”
They swallow back the tears that threaten to spill again. “Until I couldn’t bear it anymore.”
Mark doesn’t say anything, but they can see his jaw working. Despair starts to flood his gaze as his brown eyes search the Captain’s face.
They can’t think of anything to say, and truthfully there might not be anything they could say in this situation. So they don’t. Instead, they brush stray locks of hair from Mark’s forehead and wipe the tears from his cheeks. Small, tender gestures they hope convey everything they can’t put into words.
Mark leans into their touch, and for a moment he looks like he wants to say something. But he doesn’t; just slumps against them again instead.
It's all the Captain can do not to sob as they hide their face in his shoulder. They can hardly bear to see Mark like this. Watching whatever fragile hope he still clung to shatter might have been the cruelest thing they'd had to witness yet, and the universe had seen fit to show them a lot. It's hard to remember meeting him for the first time, some unknowable amount of time ago. He'd been so eager, so full of life and enthusiasm. Such a far cry from now, worn down by everything the universe had put him through.
Haven’t we given enough? They think bitterly. How much longer does this have to go on? How much more can we take?
They’re so tired of running and getting nowhere. They’re tired of failing. Even if things don’t end, is it so much to ask for one lifetime where they have time to breathe, or any time at all for that matter?
They’d take this lifetime, here on this dead ship. It would be better than the first time, with Mark here. Not optimal by any means, but could any life with him be so bad?
Even as the thought settles in, the Captain feels the crystal on their palm start to grow warm. They should have known better than to hope.
“Captain,” Mark’s voice is ragged as the room fills with a familiar blue light, “Please tell me that doesn’t mean what I think it means.”
Numbly, the Captain drops their arms from around Mark, eyes fixed on the hand clenched around the warp crystal. They can’t look at him. “I’m sorry,” they whisper again. How many more times will they have to apologize for leaving him?
“No, no, Captain please–” Mark grips their arms, panic rising in his voice. “Please don’t leave me, I can’t– I can’t be alone again, I can’t do it–”
“Hey, hey, listen to me,” the Captain catches Mark’s face in their hands, desperate to make him understand one thing before their time runs out. “I will make things right, ok? No matter how long it takes, I will fix everything, I promise. Do you understand?”
“Captain, I–”
“Please tell me you understand!”
Mark nods.
“Thank you,” the Captain breathes.
As a sudden wind kicks up, heralding the arrival of the wormhole, they lean forward and brush a soft, chaste kiss against his lips.
It is both almost nothing and everything all at once. Mark’s face is full of emotions that break their heart when they pull back, and even now they can’t bring themself to say the one thing they so desperately want to say. So, one last time, “I’m sorry,” (I love you), leaves their lips.
And then the Captain is falling again.
They don’t get up when they land on the other side, Mark’s pleas still ringing in their ears. They don’t even check their surroundings. Instead, the Captain curls into themself and cries, really cries. Big, heaving sobs, letting themself break down like they haven’t allowed since all this started. The unfathomable indifference of the universe will never fail to rear its head in the cruelest ways.
They’re tired.
They’re so tired.