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Chapter Text

1: The Complication is this: Nurse Chapel today is not Nurse Chapel yesterday

Sickbay, not long after the away mission to Psi 2000

She’d seemed so bewildered. But earnest, desperately earnest. “You couldn’t hurt me,” Nurse Chapel had said. “I’m in love with you. I know how you feel.”

Of course that was untrue, for she clearly believed he felt nothing for her, thought nothing of her. But at this very moment, Spock’s feelings, usually tucked neatly away, burst open into a horror-filled maw inside him. Seeing her like this, clinging, desperate, full of that inexplicable, empty version of love—what other feeling could it engender besides horror?

He’d been in love with her once. They’d been in love once. He’d seen it in the wry, conspiratorial grins she gave him. The way she bumped his shoulder when they walked side by side, the warmth in the way she’d teased him. The way he could feel she wanted him. He knew she remembered that. But they could not have that relationship anymore, not after what he’d done.

Did she remember that day? When his brother had come back, trying to win him over to his dangerous, chaotic side?

“You can’t deny your emotions, brother. Repress all you want, but you cannot deny them. So choose.”

The swirling time vortex had pulled at Spock, as if it had hooks in the skin under his fingernails and the insides of his eyelids. It longed to devour him. But he was not the nearest to it. Instead, there was his betrothed, T’Pring, bound and tied to the railings, and across from her, but below the balcony, just as near to the gulping, pulsing vortex that Sybok had made of the warp core, was his friend, Christine.

Choose .

As always, T’Pring, even bound and mussed, her hair falling down across her cheek, was firm and certain. Her chin was straight, jaw rock hard, as she glared daggers at Sybok, knowing him for a mentally confused patient, for someone whose words meant nothing, because he was illogical, and it was her duty to save him from that.

For her, logic was everything, duty, responsibility. If the vortex took her, if she died here, she would die with her logic intact.

But Christine—Christine was looking at him. Not imploring, she was not a girl desperate to be saved—he had always admired her boyish effervescence. And even now, forced into the role of the damsel, she stared at him with pure confidence in her set jaw and lined brow. She knew he would solve this, that he would show his great wit and skill and save everyone, defeat Sybok, win the day once more.

She didn’t know that he had no idea how to stop this. She didn’t know that after the loss of Pike, he had lost confidence in himself. He had been struggling to find meaning and purpose. His duty to logic had not been enough to support him in a cruel and illogical universe. Would emotion offer him anything more?

But seen by her eyes, he’d felt a small burgeoning of hope. What she offered could perhaps be enough. Perhaps there was no logic or justice or true fellowship in the world, but there could be love.

She trusted him.

He had to be worthy of her trust.

A fallen spar, a reflected phaser bolt, and Sybok was screaming in rage at being taken out at the ankle. Spock raced toward the time vortex, even as it grew and swelled. Christine was at the bottom of the broken ladder, he ripped off her bonds with his ferocious Vulcan strength, and was about to clasp her to him, to race away with her to safety—because he’d chosen her; more, he’d chosen love over logic, hope over duty. He wanted to be a hero to her, even if he could only be a tragic one—but her eyes had lit up, the warmth in them, the delight, because he’d saved her, just like she knew he would. “Give me a boost,” she said. “I can get to her. I have my vibrascapel for the bonds.”

He didn’t know what she meant, but she swung up him like he was a ladder, and he caught her foot, and launched her up onto the higher balcony where T’Pring was bound.

“Don’t be a fool,” he heard T’Pring say. “Can’t you hear it? It’s going to arc soon.”

“Don’t talk. I’ve got you,” Christine said, and she was cutting with the vibrascalpel, and the time vortex was warping, and then the bonds attaching T'Pring to the railing were undone. Behind them the time vortex blorped and its strange blue bands reached out.

“Go!” T’Pring cursed at her. With still bound hands she shoved Christine back toward the edge of the railing, where she would fall, but fall to safety. “He chose to save you, not me. Go!”

But Christine caught her hands. “ No . He just needed my help.”

Then the warp caught them and with a rippling, pixellated smear, they were both gone.

Spock stared into the empty space, the warp core a melted heap, the time vortex gone. He had thought he had chosen Christine, because he wanted to hope that there was something good, something worth loving in the world. But his eyes fell on Sybok and he realized that he had made the same mistake as his pathetic brother. He had chosen emotion over logic, foolish, blind emotion. Not even love, but simply pride. He wanted to be regarded by eyes that thought he was a hero. Then Christine had stolen the hero’s turn from him, rightly, because for her it wasn’t a performance put on like a mating dance, it was simply what any officer of the Enterprise did, what was right to do, the duty and logic of the moment.

He’d lost them both.

He thought she must not remember that day, this Christine with her worried expression and soulless touch. She should not touch his hands like that—he was Vulcan—but even skin to skin her mind was a vague cloud, tangled with anxiety and diffidence. She loved him like a magnet loved its opposite pole. She needed him. But he no longer felt that she liked him. But then, he no longer offered her anything to like.

That day had changed everything.

She’d looked so proud of him for his clever moves, disabling Sybok. She’d been so full of love for him, but the kind of quiet, undemanding love she was so good at. She had never asked for him to betray his fiancée. She would never. He had done that on his own. He would have mourned T’Pring, but not missed her, let Christine comfort him, and then moved on to her. He had been so selfish that he could have forgiven himself for that, for choosing to abandon his fiancée because he preferred the other woman in danger. He had let his emotions sway him into cruelty and unkindness. He should have found a way to save them both, or sacrificed his desires for duty.

He should have found a way to save everyone.

“I see things, how honest you are," Christine begged, swarming him with touch, like some monstrous python. "I know how you feel. You hide it, but you do have feelings. How we must hurt you, torture you.”

Oh, she did. She tortured him every day. Because he had gotten them back, but they had been broken along the way. What they had fished out of that time vortex was not what they’d hoped to catch. Something was missing in each woman. There was a sense of lost time; the memories that should have been recent and immediate felt long ago. They had strange confusions. And their emotional responses were incorrect.

He’d realized the severity of the situation when T’Pring had frowned at him with a cutting expressiveness that reminded him of their youth—before she had grown so composed and withdrawn. “Spock?” she asked, like she didn’t quite recognize him. “Why am I— Where am I? On the Enterprise? Shouldn’t I be—” and then she frowned again like she couldn’t quite remember. Her eyes flashed, she stared up at him, a simmering rage coming to a full roiling boil. Her relentlessly, frustratingly calm face contorting with rage was like an image from a nightmare. “What did you do ?”

McCoy had had to sedate her.

But Christine’s alteration had been even more uncanny. He had been so desperate to get her back, to finally save her. Yes, choosing emotion had been wrong, but he had bent the laws of physics to find them again, to fix his error. He had thus spared himself the consequences of his mistake . . . only, he hadn’t. He imagined reuniting with his Christine, her thanking him for saving her from an eternity of suffering. He would admit his error in thinking that saving just her would be heroic enough and ask for forgiveness. She would confess that she had long been waiting for him to choose her over T’Pring—his duty. He would let his hands settle around her waist, draw her near—

But that hadn’t occurred.

He turned to her, and she’d looked at him with those pretty blue eyes, a puzzled, distant expression in them, as if she remembered feeling something for him, but the immediacy of her overwhelming feelings were gone. Something else in them was missing too. He didn’t know what it was, except at that moment she seemed to notice it also, and the flash of fear across her face shook him to the core. She looked around at the Enterprise like it was unfamiliar, like she was remembering it, but from a long distance away. And then she looked back at him. An ache filled in her expression, like she’d found those feelings she’d had for him again, like she was clinging to them to fill that empty space, and she looked at him like he was a hero and could make everything better.

The emptiness inside her made his skin crawl. He recoiled from her—from what he had made her.

He hadn’t saved anyone.

“I love you,” she said, clasping his hands, as if feeling her mind, the desperate ragged force of that love that was holding her shell of a self together, would be anything more than horrific to him. “I don’t know why, but I love you.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, because he was so sorry. He had made so many mistakes. But you could only move forward, he knew now, you could not fix the past. And so he drew his hands away, and let her go.

You couldn’t love someone you’d hurt like this. Christine had become a Frankenstein’s monster, a husk, a guilty shadow. She was the damage he’d done to her, his own failure. The cocky, confident scientist was gone. She was frightened by the gaps in her own mind, the mistakes she made while performing treatments. The one thing she’d had perfect faith in—her own mind—had without warning betrayed her.

Only it hadn’t. He had damaged it.

It seemed her other friends had also turned away from her. Her grief and bouts of fear and uncertainty confused them, made them feel they did not know her. And as for him, well, he could no longer treat her as a friend, because he could not bear to be near her when she was abject, clinging, and empty. So he treated her with a cold, alien formality. The girl who had challenged him and smiled at him and treated him like a true companion, she was dead.

So he wept, when she once again dared to tell him she loved him. Because he had loved her once, and it had destroyed her.

#

Chapter Text

2: Further developments result from Vulcan mating practices also gone horribly wrong.

Leonard McCoy had thought he’d seen the last of T’Pring when he’d sedated her from behind and got her the hell off his ship. But there she was, larger than life, on the goddamn viewscreen, staring down Spock like some kind of assassin robot.

Spock’s mysterious disease had been no fun at all—and McCoy usually loved a mysterious disease—because he was being a little bitch about talking to his doctor about it, but the symptoms were clearly messing him up. There’d been something weird with him emotionally too. He was usually impeccably polite around Nurse Chapel—not friendly, not that the green blooded goblin was ever friendly—but icily, perfectly polite. She did her best to mirror his behavior, except for how she followed his path longingly when he strode briskly away at the first opportunity.

McCoy hated that longing. Sometimes he went back into his files and he played the few frames of the shaky vid recording from what the Captain dubbed the Time Vortex Adventure—just another goddamn day at the office really. He’d only known Nurse Chapel for a couple of weeks then—long enough to know she preferred Doctor (she had a goddamn MDPhD, fucking wunderkinds), that she’d tell him to go fuck himself when he tried to pull rank on her, and long enough to get the vibe that she was down to do the dirty with greenblood himself, only they were being professional because he was engaged. She was kind of like his eldest girl, who only crushed on imaginary boyfriends, because then they wouldn’t ever be disappointed in her. But a few weeks was enough to know someone like Nurse Chapel, because she demanded attention.

On the vid she was still a lot. She had that dumb grin and that furrow in her brow when trying to solve a complex problem, and she had her arm around that scary witch’s shoulders like it was no big deal. That girl wasn’t longing for anyone.

They hadn’t gotten that girl back.

So maybe he was a little nasty to her about her stupid crush on greenblood. Maybe he thought she’d snap out of it if he just mocked her often enough. But of course his mockery didn’t make a difference. Even getting a bowl of plomeek soup thrown at her head didn’t make a difference.

He brought her a towel in sickbay where she sat on a biobed and dried her hair, her expression unreadable.

“Gonna give it up now?”

Christine had laughed a little, self-mockery. “He can treat me how he likes.”

McCoy shook his head. “Have you even heard the words self-respect?”

Christine gave him a long dismissive stare that was definitely calling him out for being a shit to her. But then her vision shifted and she stared at the door, like she was aching for that fucking green-blooded goblin to come in and give her a cuff around the ear.

“Do you know what it’s like? To feel like you’ve got this hole in the middle of your body, and you see someone and you know that they can fill it up. You know that only they can fill it up. But they won’t.”

“Sure,” McCoy said. “I feel that way whenever I see my goddamn ex-wife. She also threw soup at me, and yet she got the restraining order. Sometimes you’ve just got to move on with the hole.”

She stared at him, astonished, like she didn’t believe that he’d actually said something sympathetic. But it wasn’t. It was get the fuck over him, just in slightly nicer words. “Thank you,” she said.

“Don’t thank me . I don’t think fucking greenblood is the guy to fill your hole anyway. Not even sure if he’s got the right parts for that.” McCoy wiggled his eyebrows, but goddammit, Spock had been skipping out on his mandatory physicals since he’d gotten on this ship. He should know.

“Dr. McCoy,” Christine said, clearly scolding. But then there was almost a hint of the impish girl he’d barely had a chance to meet. “You know what a metaphor is.”

“Do I?”

“It’s the comparison that’s not a euphemism.”

Before he could say something to get himself hit with the towel, Jim came barreling in, all torn up about whatever was wrong with Mr. Spock. Really, for a captain, he looked up to that greenblood like he was his wise uncle or something. McCoy knew the truth though. Just because you were an alien didn’t mean you couldn’t be a brat. And throwing soup at a girl who was just trying to make you feel better was worse than bratty.

“She’s not mine,” Spock had said, weirdly feverish and disassociated. “She shouldn’t serve me. She belongs to someone else.”

Oh well. McCoy loaded up his best set of hyposprays and set off with Jim to deal with this alien mating drive situation. He wasn’t going to complain about Christine belonging to someone else than that greenblood, even if it was nonsense. She deserved better than that putz.

#

Her room always seemed dark these days. Christine wasn’t sure why. She stared up at the lighting fixtures and wondered why they didn’t gleam like she thought they used to, and why the dark spaces weren’t dappled and full of . . . something good. She thought they used to be full of something good.

Stepping out of her room these days felt fraught in a way it didn’t used to. She had her job, and she still knew how to do it. Except when she slipped up. It was so strange—when she got distracted, she’d end up formulating things for Vulcan biology or calling bandages leaves . She forgot who her fellow crewmen were, and people’s names were harder to find. Everything had changed. Her past felt like so long ago, and yet when she looked at the calendars, it wasn’t.

The captain had assured her that she wasn’t going mad, but that she’d had a run in with a ‘time vortex.’ Gave you the weird sense of missing time, Jim had said, and thumped her on the shoulder like she just needed to buck up.

But it wasn’t just time that was missing.

Mr. Spock seemed like a completely different person. She remembered—she thought she remembered—his face, eyes wild, sweat on his brow, reaching for her. She’d thought he cared about her. But maybe that was just a dream. Maybe she had just fantasized about him.

And yet, that ache inside her, that knowledge of love lost, it was overwhelming and unsustainable. She knew she’d had it. She knew he’d loved her once. How could he take it from her? How could he leave her like this?

The questions didn’t make sense. They made her feel like a girl, like a dumb kid. But she couldn’t make the feelings go away. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It hurt too much.

She’d thought about leaving Enterprise, going back to a lab, getting lost in a new phase of her research, where she wouldn’t have to worry about her swiss-cheese memory of the past, doing something with her life that wasn’t this endless buzzing from one end of the quadrant to the other and getting into insane situations. But every time she tried to make a move to leave, the thought of leaving Mr. Spock hurt too much. She was empty and wrecked and so, so exhausted. At least here she could see him, and hope that maybe this time he’d turn around and look at her like he used to.

But away from Enterprise, all she’d have was the hole.

It was embarrassing when even Dr. McCoy thought you were pathetic. But what did he know about it anyway? He hadn’t known her when she’d been friends with Spock. He hadn’t known her when she’d had friends: Erica and Una and Pike and La’an. Nyota was still here, but it didn’t feel the same to be around her. It was like she kept waiting for Christine to do something different, to act like someone else, and Christine didn’t know how to be that someone else she expected. Erica was the same, at first talking over tightbeam like they’d just chatted a minute ago, and Christine had tried, she’d tried so hard to talk back, to sound normal, but it hadn’t worked. Babygirl, are you okay? Babygirl— And she tried so hard to say she was fine, but Erica was looking so scared, and she couldn’t fake it. It was like there was this heavy cement block between her and the emotions that had used to come so easily. The energy, the thrill of a new obsession, the joy at seeing the people she loved . . . they were just gone . Psychotropics didn’t touch it. Even simple alcohol did nothing for her these days.

Part of her was missing, and it didn’t look like it was coming back.

She got up. Might as well go to work. At least when she got back in the lab and started thinking her mind raced just like it used to. It just took a little more effort to get the details of her previous projects, and her old ambition was gone. If the work was good, that was enough, right? It didn’t matter if anyone knew her name. Sometimes she caught herself thinking about weird runic sigils instead of gene sequences. She’d looked them up, but they weren’t like any language attested. Even Nyota looked blank when she’d shown them to her.

Christine was halfway down the hall to her lab when her vision went strange. It warped, pale outlines of everything separating out, like hollow ghosts. She staggered, reaching out for the wall. Then the pain hit. She clasped her head and fell to her knees. The pain increased tenfold, her breath hitched, and she gasped out a sobbing desperate scream. She was dying. She had to be dying. This was an aneurism or a lightning bolt or something . It hurt so much.

Chekov was passing. He yelled some Russian swear word and raced over, calling out to a few other crewmen. But Christine couldn’t see anymore. Her vision had blurred out, and all she felt was a strange echoing throb, like there was a second her right there, and they were trying to line up, but they couldn’t. They couldn’t line up.

She curled up into a ball and puked all down her front.

#

“How’s my patient?” Dr. McCoy asked as he saw Christine’s eyes come open, staring vaguely at the wall.

“What?” she said.

“Come on, girl. Name, rank and serial number.”

Her eyes narrowed and fixed on him, and that was a relief. “Fuck off,” she said.

He blinked. That was more explicitly rude than she’d been in a while. Not bad.

She rubbed her head. “What happened ? I thought I was dying.”

“Yeah, well, I’m calling it an unexplained neural cascade. Basically, all the neural networks in your head lit up at once. No idea why. That’s why it’s ‘unexplained.’ But any after effects? I’m not joking about the name rank and serial number, though maybe the date would be more important.”

Christine went suddenly tense. “Did I lose more time?” She shook herself. “Christine Chapel, MDPhD. Rank of Lieutenant Nurse. 665837. And-- It’s eight days out since we were orbiting Betazed, right?”

“Right,” Dr. McCoy said. “You didn’t lose anything more than twenty minutes of unconsciousness.” But he was having a hard time not watching her closely, her face a little sweaty, her shoulders twitching, like she wanted to run. “Any good dreams?”

“Jungle,” Christine said.

McCoy froze. “Really?”

“Yes.” She lifted her head, looking at him, a little puzzled. “Is that meaningful?”

“No,” he said. But she was still looking at him. “What?”

“You didn’t snort and make fun of the concept of dream reading,” Christine said calmly.

Goddammit. She could read him as well as he could read her. “Yeah, well, not everyone has a big chunk of missing time in their past.”

She stared at him. “What?”

He stared back. “You-- you just asked if you’d lost more time?” He was thinking fast and hard. Had anyone actually sat her down and explained what had happened? Ugh, Spock had classified it because of the whole evil brother involvement, so they probably hadn't. Just because everyone else had experienced it as five days—oh, good. That was a reasonable explanation. “Weren’t you talking about those five days you lost during the time vortex nonsense?”

Christine blinked. “Oh. Yeah. I guess I must have been.” She frowned. “I guess when you said ‘big chunk’ I thought it must have been something longer.’

“Five days is no picnic.”

She eyed him, biting on her lower lip. “And no jungle in those five days?”

He stared her straight on. “Hell if I know. I didn’t go into the time vortex. That was you.” And T’Pring.

#

“You think Nurse Chapel's seizure had something to do with T’Pring?” Spock asked, his distaste for even saying the name shaping his lips. But that was an emotion and he put it away.

McCoy, having no resistance to emotions, was pacing around the captain’s ready room, scowling largely. “I didn’t say that at all,” he said. “First, it was like a seizure, but it wasn’t a seizure. It was something else weird. And I didn’t say it had something to do with your bitch of an ex-fiancée. I said I wanted to know if anything like that was happening to her too. Christine said she saw jungle, and I don’t know what that planet was like, but maybe it was jungle. Or maybe it wasn’t. But there was no trigger for what happened. So I want to know if it had to do with the time vortex bullshit.”

Spock considered this dispassionately. He was not emotional, neither horrified nor guilt-stricken like he had been while infected with that bacterium that made them all act like they had over-imbibed intoxicating substances (when Christine had told him she loved him again and he had cried ). After the time vortex incident, he had accepted that his emotions were uncontrolled, and so he had gone to Gol and done the basic pre-kohlinar training. It had allowed him to let go of his guilt about what had happened to Christine and T’Pring, even as he accepted his responsibility.

Yet, recently, when enduring the pon farr, he had once more had to come face-to-face with his animal self. He had been so full of rage at Christine’s presence, as if even without logic and with only lust in his heart, he knew that her devotion to him was deeply mistaken, he knew that she was not his to touch. Seeing T’Pring on the screen had lit up their old bond, atrophied and worn down by distance and time. But even with her, he had not felt that certainty of desire, of the fact that he might claim her. He had intended to go through with it, but her refusal, when it came, had not come as a true surprise.

Her vindictiveness, and her choice to pit his captain against him, to preserve herself from any man’s claim, had come as a surprise. And though he had been full of pon farr induced rage at her afterwards, believing he had killed his captain, in retrospect, he was pleased. Her logic was unmarred. She was still cool and decisive, herself , in a way that Christine was not herself. At least removing them from the vortex hadn’t destroyed both of them.

“I doubt T’Pring would welcome my presence,” Spock said. “But I agree that we must at least ascertain whether or not she is suffering from similar symptoms. The time vortex was a mystery, and our way of removing them may have had unpredicted damaging effects.”

Jim was frowning. “We’ve got a mission though. We can’t just turn around and zip back to Vulcan.”

“I believe a message should suffice,” Spock said. “If suitably formal and logical, T’Pring will respond.”

“Sure she will,” McCoy said. “The way she looked at you could rival my ex-wife’s stares. That slow blink was Vulcan for ‘go die in a fire.’”

“The Vulcan for ‘go die in a fire,’” Spock carefully explained, “is ‘go die in a fire.’”

Jim was smiling. “My man. I’m afraid I’m with McCoy on this one. That slow blink was definitely Vulcan for ‘go die in a fire.’ You can send your message, but I’ll let Bob know that we'll need to divert to Vulcan after this thing is done.”

#

It was Stonn who received the message. And though deep down, he also wished Spock would die in a fire, he was too logical not to respond.

No, he wrote . T’Pring has not been having unexplained neural cascades. She has, however, had an explained one, during an attempt at telepathic bonding. She has recently visited a psionic professional and discovered that there are major areas of damage which prevent her from forming new telepathic bonds. She has been using meditation practice to heal the damage and investigate its source.

He eyed the message. Was that saying too much? T’Pring would be displeased with him for sharing so much of her business. But Dr. McCoy was a medical professional, and though he held no affection for the man, Stonn was very aware of the consequences of the time vortex incident, and he did not want to deny information that might be useful.

For him, the incident had been concerning indeed. Sybok had been under his particular care, and his escape had been a smear on Stonn’s reputation. Discovering that T’Pring had been taken captive, had been sucked into a time vortex and then recovered, had been discombobulating. He had to meditate for quite a while once he knew she was safe. He had realized while meditating that his feelings for T’Pring were somewhat stronger than friendly collegiality. They involved great respect for her intellect and determination, as well as admiration for her poise, her fashion, and her form. It was, of course, inappropriate, as she was engaged, as was he. But that was just how emotions were. They paid no heed to appropriateness.

But on her return, she was different. It was not immediately obvious, as her poise and determination were unchanged, but there was a rawness to her, a slow burning fury underneath everything that left her jagged and unpredictable. When he accidentally brushed against her skin, he felt it, and it was so hot and powerful that it had burned his mind.

He had asked her then what had happened, and she had balled her hands into fists and said, “I don’t know. I don’t know . All I know is that he took something from me. Maybe just my memories of those five days, but it feels like more. It feels like he took everything from me, and I will never, ever forgive him for this.”

The rage at Spock was unhealthy and not sustainable, so he encouraged her to work through her feelings. Eventually, he could touch her hand without being burned by the heat of her rage, but it was only shielded, not reduced. She was grateful to him for his encouragement—and also for his secrecy. If anyone else knew about her inability to control her fury, she would be deemed unworthy to continue her work. But he could see that she was as effective as she had always been, and he made certain she had the support to keep her emotions in check.

They often sat together and meditated, and one evening, she offered her fingers to him, and he accepted. He could feel the burning inside her through their kiss, and he offered every coolness in himself to soothe it. She felt it; she breathed it in.

For a moment, her perfect Vulcan poise seemed broken, and there was something raw and animal in her, in the way her body moved, in the fierce confidence the casual cruelty and the possessive warmth of her. He recoiled from it. Then it was gone, like it had never been there, and he found her looking at him, a slight puzzlement on her face.

He had not seen her , he decided. He had seen a strange shadow in her mind and it had frightened him. How silly. But he could smile at his own foolishness, because he knew that she would walk beside him.

He quietly released his own fiancée from their bond. She was acquiescent, as she had her own full and interesting life and though they had been childhood friends, they had grown apart in the interim. She would not long for him.

T’Pring had been writing messages to the Hgrtcha to reorganize her own engagement—she had been doing this since long before she and Stonn had come to their understanding. She wanted nothing to do with Spock. But before their clan bureaucracy came to any terms, Spock entered the pon farr.

Although Stonn was no warrior and was not thrilled by the prospect of battling Spock to the death, he was certain his logic would allow him to prevail. T’Pring had not wanted to ask him, but the thought of Spock touching her made her quaver with rage and fear and hate. Her emotions were so overwhelming that Stonn never even thought of doing anything but offering himself. It had come as a shock when T’Pring had chosen the Starfleet Captain instead. Her reasoning had been cold logic, knowing that the emotional bond between the Captain and Spock was great enough that either one of them prevailing would make her repellant to the survivor. But it was one more moment where he wondered if this was the same woman who had entered the time vortex. He could not imagine the T’Pring he had known before ever doing something so cold. She had been unhappy and confused about her fiancée’s disinterest, but this one was nothing but broken glass and rage.

It had taken him a while to accept what she had done, but he had not rejected her for it. He knew that something dark must have happened to make her this way, and he would be there to assist as she dug deep inside herself to find it.

They had only recently decided to bond, to make certain he would have no ill effects if he entered the pon farr. He had questioned for a while whether he would be able to handle her emotions. It was not only anger, but a variety of negative emotions that were so strong in her. The usual methods of attending to them and letting them go were ineffective. But he had grown comfortable touching her skin, and decided that he would be able to handle it, even though she had not reached the level of emotional stability that he would have preferred. But when they went to the than-tha to be bonded, the perfunctory pressure on her mind had sent T’Pring into a screaming spasm. She’d buckled, clutching her head. The than-tha had hurriedly pulled back.

“The place in your mind that hosts the betrothal bonds is damaged. I am not an expert, but it seems as if you have had one forcibly broken. Perhaps your previous engagement ended in an unexpected death?”

But it had not.

T’Pring had holed up in her room for a few days, and then she had come to bid him farewell. She was going to Gol. She needed to know what was wrong with her mind.

“I need to know what he did to me.”

Stonn wished that he could offer comfort that did not require vengeance. But maybe knowing would bring her peace. He wanted her, so much, to find peace.

#

Chapter Text

Christine had been in her room for the last three days. After the first neural cascade she’d been fine for a while, and then suddenly miniature cascades began happening, repeatedly. They were almost on a schedule, except they weren’t, and they hurt so much . McCoy finally said, “fucked if I know what’s going on, so you can stay in sickbay or you can go to your quarters. I release you to your own cognizance.”

She’d crawled into bed and just tried to sleep between the blasts of pain and strange visions that came with them. But she couldn’t sleep much. Mostly she just lay there, clutching the blankets and wondering if this was the end. Would she end up losing all cognitive function? Would she simply suffer severe pain for the rest of her life, making her unable to focus, unable to do anything she wanted to do?

The fear was overwhelming, but it was the same fear she’d had since the time vortex incident. Her medical sources had no answers. She had downloaded the scans McCoy had done on her, and there were no strange shadows or lurking viruses in her brain tissue. There were no clues to what was wrong with her.

She had been on Enterprise long enough to know that anything could be a clue. When the spasms hit, sometimes they brought images with them, more jungle, strange runes, rain, lots and lots of rain, and a sensation more than an image, a feeling like oh, you . That had been the hardest to come out of. The pain had been excruciating, and yet she’d wanted to hang onto it, because of that feeling. You. She kept a record of the images, but they made no sense. They didn’t even seem to connect to each other. She needed answers. She was desperate for them, but she had nothing.

McCoy was not in the same situation, but he wouldn’t tell her what he knew. She was caught in overwhelming anxiety—so bad that her cortisol levels were in the danger range and she had to give herself a sedative. Still no one would tell her what was going on. She’d heard McCoy, Mr. Spock and the Captain talking when they thought she wasn’t paying attention. “Do you think she’s recovering them?” “They shouldn’t be there to recover! I thought that’s what we theorized!” “It was logical, as the physical form would not have altered. But the mind has long been known to follow its own rules.” “Oh thanks, greenblood.”

Christine was close to screaming, just tell me, just tell me. But why hadn’t they? If knowing was worse than what she was already experiencing, did she even want to know? The anxiety choked off her words.

“Nurse Chapel, I need you in sickbay if you’re up for it,” McCoy said through the comm. Christine blinked muzzily. Was there a medical emergency?

“I’ll be there in ten?”

“That’s fine, girl.”

Christine got up and dressed for the first time in days. Her eyes hurt and her head hurt, but no one had called her for anything in a week. She would go. When she stepped out, she heard the crewmen talking. Unannounced shuttle docked, and they just let them in. They’re in sickbay now. What were they thinking! They’re Vulcans, so no big deal, right? Don’t you remember Sybok! It’s fine, it’s Mr. Spock’s ex—

Faint memories came back to her. Spock’s ex. T’Pring. A fist in a man’s face, an expression both emotionless and collapsing all at once. She hadn’t seen her cool, hard visage during the pon farr incident, but Uhura had, and she’d said that she’d looked different. “Hard to tell with Vulcans, you know. She’s still gorgeous, but I didn’t recognize her at first, she looked so icy. She was all micro-expressions before, but this time there was nothing, like any sort of complex feelings were dead.”

What was she doing here?

When Christine stepped into sickbay, she spotted the strangers immediately. A tall Vulcan man was standing calmly in his robes near a biobed, and T’Pring was sitting on it, arms crossed, looking entirely displeased with the situation. Then she glanced over, as if she’d heard Christine come in, though Christine was pretty sure she hadn’t made any noise, and their eyes locked.

The feeling shook her. You . It was that same sense of familiarity, of knowledge. But there was nothing behind it, it was as empty as the feeling had been without anyone to be connected to. It felt . . . so wrong. Christine froze where she was, staring, stammered, “I’m sorry,” and then she turned on her heel and walked right out.

She needed to find a ‘fresher, because she was going to puke her guts out.

#

They knew something. That was unforgivable. When T’Pring had heard about the message from Stonn, she’d immediately chartered a shuttle. They would hunt down the Enterprise wherever it was. Because they knew something. How dare they; how dare they.

All she had wanted was to be allowed to move on with her life. She had reined her fury, forged a new connection with a man who deserved it—who was logical, who respected her opinion, who would not betray her for an emotional affair with a pretty human girl—she had managed to lose no ground in her work, progressing through the checkpoints and promotions as expected. But then she’d simply tried to bond with Stonn, and everything had fallen apart.

T’Pring had no patience for weakness in herself, and being told that she was damaged beyond surety of repair was a revolting surprise. Her life was hard enough, and now she might never be able to bond to anyone again? She had repressed memories? She had experienced a traumatic mental injury, not a brain injury, strangely, but an injury to the mind itself. Then Stonn had said, ah, perhaps that explains the rage, and she had felt betrayed all over again. He was supposed to be the one who did not see her as damaged, but even he had noticed that she was raw and having trouble with her emotions, even if she meditated for hours a day. So she had gone to Gol.

The masters at Gol had taken one look at the mess in her head and recoiled from her. External interference would only make things worse, they said. You must undo the damage yourself, step by step. It will be tiresome, and painful, and there is no guarantee you will not make things worse. But if you wish to bond again, or even regain balance in your emotions, there is no other way.

That was what she’d been doing, carefully peeling away the protective coating her mind had made around the wounds to try and see what was underneath. All she had found were faint images, sense memories, impressions. But they were clearly memories. If there was a context to them, if McCoy could explain, she would do whatever it took to gain that context.

Dr. Chapel was also suffering.

When she’d first walked into sickbay, she looked dreadful, gaunt and ill, her hair too long, twisted up into a knot on the back of her head. But the wrongness of how she looked sank its hand into T’Pring’s gut and twisted. It lit her always readied fuse of anger. She didn’t know why. The wrongness, the rage, the urge to scold her and send her to her knees to be taken care of, the urge to turn and leave her, kicking earth and leaves over her as she fled, they came from nowhere. But they were as fierce feelings as any she’d had.

“Tell me,” T’Pring said—demanded—of Dr. McCoy. “What have you kept from us? What have you failed to tell us about our jaunt into the time vortex—those five days we have missed.”

The door opened again and Christine was back, wiping her mouth and looking a little green. She kept her eyes averted from T’Pring.

Dr. McCoy glanced at her and then at Christine and sighed, putting his hand in his thinning hair. “They didn’t give me permission to tell you this, but fuck it. I’m kind of thinking it’s important that you know. You weren’t missing in the time vortex for five days. You were missing for five years .”

#

“ Where are we?” asked T’Pring, her wrists still bound together. She glanced around. They’d landed hard in a glade. Plants were not the greatest cushion.

Christine pushed herself up, bewildered and not totally thrilled by the tone in T’Pring’s voice. Couldn’t she be even slightly appreciative that she wasn’t here alone? She’d attempted a daring rescue, and T’Pring had seemed totally unimpressed by the risk she’d taken. She took a glance around at the unmarked jungle. “Fucked if I know.”

T’Pring gave her a dire look of direness.

“ Well, we’re somewhere, at least,” Christine said, throwing her hands up. “We could have just been paste across the timestream.”

“ I do not need to imagine a worse case scenario to adjust my feelings about this one.” T’Pring’s tone was flat. “I am aware that being alive at all is a stroke of luck. Unfortunately, it may not be a long lasting one if we do not come to terms with our environment quickly.”

“ Well, I still don’t know where we are. You know as much as I do—trackless jungle, animal sounds, the potential for imminent death.”

“ I do not see the point of being sarcastic about it.”

“ At a time like this, can you not criticize my tone?”

“ Perhaps, instead, you could modulate your tendency to drama.”

Christine was very unlikely to modulate her tendency to drama after that comment. “Right,” she said, pushing herself up to her feet. “How about we do something useful instead of bickering?”

“ We must locate shelter, water, defenses against wild animals, and a source of food imminently.”

“Yeah , I was kind of thinking that already, okay?” She had really, really had enough of this girl.

“ Dr. Chapel.”

“What ?” Christine snapped, turning around to find T’Pring staring up towards the canopy of one of the trees.

“ Do you, by any chance, still have that vibrascalpel?”

“ Yeah? Why?”

T’Pring raised her hands. “I would appreciate you freeing me, so we can then flee quickly before that creature up there pounces.”

Christine followed her gaze upward and saw it—something rather like both a lion and a monkey, and watching them in a position far too much like a hunting cat for comfort.

“ Fuuuuuck.”

#

“Five years ?”

Spock had arrived in sickbay via the rear door too late to stop Dr. McCoy from informing them of that fact. In truth, he wasn’t certain there was a good reason to keep it from them, except sometimes knowledge spared was trauma spared. T’Pring sat on the biobed, her brow furrowed; Christine stood near her, but with a good distance between them. Her eyes were wide with surprise.

“But that doesn’t make sense. We were only gone for five days.”

McCoy huffed an annoyed breath out. “Figure it out. You’re the goddang wunderkind, girl, not me. I’m just an old sawbones. Time vortexes do things with time, right? You were gone for five days and five years. It’s why your memories were so off to begin with. You remembered the Enterprise just fine—like you would remember your alma mater if you showed up there for your fifth year reunion.”

“ Oh ,” Christine said, like it made sense of a lot of things. “Coming back wiped our memories?”

“That was the theory,” Spock said, approaching.

T’Pring whipped around, her eyes flashing. “ You . I don’t want to see you .”

He stood there, unmoved by her emotion. He focused on Christine instead. “You would be brought back into the exact physical forms that had entered the time vortex. I was able to use the transporter to remap your biological matter at that time. But that would necessarily mean your minds would also return to their previous form.”

“But . . . they didn’t,” said Christine. “The gap shouldn’t have been there if that was the case.”

T’Pring curled her lip, staring Spock down. “You idiot ,” she snapped. “Did you miss the six month module in our eighth year on the difference between the mind and the brain? Transporting a mind with five years more information and experience into a brain not wired for it would damage both. But it would not simply erase memories. It would write them into the very tissue, overlaid on what was there previously, rather than integrating and rearranging.”

“That means they might be difficult to access,” said Christine, leaping off of this information with ease. “The neural pathways would go around them. But they’d still be there. Would something like a neural cascade trigger them?”

“A psychic manipulation would,” T’Pring said. “If that manipulation touched an affected area.”

Their eyes met for a moment of shared insight, and then they both quickly turned away, Christine grabbing for the wall as if she was dizzy and nauseated, and T’Pring’s jaw clenching fiercely tight.

Spock frowned deeply. “I was endeavoring to save you. I felt the risk was worth it. And I do not think a simple mind-brain disjunct could have caused such trauma. Perhaps it was something on the planet.”

“Your scans said the planet was uninhabited,” McCoy said flatly. “Edenic, you said.”

Spock did not respond. That was not a logical refutation of his proposal.

“Five years,” Christine said, staring at her own hands. “What happened to us during those five years?”

#

Christine was wet, very wet, and cold and miserable. She had fallen in a river, and it had been raining for the past few days, so there was no way to build a fire.

She was also very reluctant to take off her clothes, even though T’Pring told her that was illogical and she would dry faster that way. So she just sat there, shivering.

It had been days of trudging through mud, trying to find some sort of sign of civilization, or anything that wasn’t just unmarked jungle. They’d slept in holes in trees—crammed up with insects crawling down her neck and up her sleeves. At least Christine’s medical tricorder still had some juice, so they’d managed to identify a few fruits and nuts that wouldn’t kill them instantly. One just gave a long slow stomach ache, and another made T’Pring dizzy and hear voices and start getting into arguments with dead philosophers, which was both funny and terrifying.

Because this sucked, being here sucked, cut off, no civilization, no shelter, but at least she wasn’t alone.

“ Hmmm,” said T’Pring. She seemed to have found a chimney up in the rock. She took the long stout stick she’d acquired at some point (she’d beaned a monkey-lion across the nose with it once, with the ease of a trained martial artist, and Christine had nearly fallen over her own feet) and poked up. Something moved, because immediately, Christine heard the sound of rain coming into the cave. She groaned, noting the trickle of water inching across the stone.

“ What have you done now?”

“ I think that with perhaps some sort of funnel contraption, this could both release smoke and protect against the rain.”

Christine hesitated. “Smoke?”

“ Well, we can’t build a fire if we will inhale toxic fumes all night, and it is too wet to build one out there. But this would be a reasonable space for a fireplace.”

Christine glanced around. The cave wasn’t terribly large, but there were various rock formations and alcoves in the wall, and possibly small entrances to other nearby caves. The ceiling seemed solid enough. She swallowed. “You want to stay here?”

The words felt like giving up. They needed to find people, and then they could communicate with the Enterprise, and get picked up, and go home .

“ It would be logical to choose a home-base that we could work out of.”

“ Stop saying that!” Christine snapped. “A lot of things would be logical, but that doesn’t mean I want to do them, or that I’m okay with doing them! Logical doesn’t mean right .”

T’Pring’s lips curled away from her teeth. She stared her down. “Is that why he liked you? Because you gave him license to listen to the weakest part of himself? You claim to be intelligent, but you are the stupidest person I have ever had the ill-luck to meet.”

It was the past tense that did it. It had only been a few days—right? But no, over a week, maybe three. Christine had lost count, being cold and miserable and poorly slept. He ‘liked’ you. She swallowed hard. If Enterprise could find them, they would have been found by now. If there was any chance of going home, they would know by now. She balled her hands into fists and blinked back tears. She crumpled, dropping to a crouch and wrapping her arms around herself. “Fuck,” she said.

“ You swear too much.”

“ I will give you the logic,” Christine said, every inch of her bitter and tired and overwhelmed. “But do not take my swearwords away. They are scientifically proven to reduce pain.”

“ They are?” T’Pring sounded surprised, but also a little curious.

“ Yeah,” Christine said, lifting her head a little. “They’re not like other words. They release some kind of endorphin, I think.”

“ Hm.” T’Pring had managed to plug up the hole she’d made and the trickle had stopped. She perched on the edge of a rock formation, her hands folded politely in her lap. She was staring into the middle distance, her lips a little tight. Then, very precisely, she furrowed her brow, glared at a stone, and said, “Fuck.”

For the first time since they’d ended up on this everyone-forsaken planet, pursued by monkey-lions and nibbled by ants, hungry and cold and miserable, Christine actually wanted to laugh. She wanted to cry too, but it was such a relief to know she could still want to laugh.

#

“God dammit, what’d you do to her!” McCoy cursed at T'Pring. Christine had been looking a wreck, and clearly, seeing Spock’s ex bitch had only made things worse, with how she was running to the can to puke. But she hadn’t had a neural response, not until now, when she was crumpled on the floor and holding her head and keening. The readings were all off the chart, and unlike with the previous ones, it didn’t look like they were going down.

T’Pring had gone an unusual orange-yellow color, and her hands were contorted into ugly shapes, but her eyes were open. She was clearly fighting whatever it was. But she sure didn’t have the wherewithal to answer him. It was her boytoy who moved first, moving to kneel in front of her and offer his hands. “Give me some of your pain,” he said.

But T’Pring shook her head. “Take some of hers. She doesn’t know how to handle it. It will kill her if she doesn’t learn how to handle it.”

The fellow, Stonn, clearly whipped, turned without hesitation, and, ignoring McCoy entirely, took Christine’s hands in his. A raw expression of pain warped his features for a brief moment, and then it was gone, as if he could put his pain away just like his anger and sorrow and whatever else those Vulcans could ignore. But as he did, the readings on McCoy’s tricorder changed. The neural cascade was starting to slow.

“Well, hell,” he said.

“Your crude medical interventions will be of little use, Dr. McCoy,” the goddamn witch said. “This is problem of mental damage, and only Vulcan methods have a chance of amending it.”

“You’re going to take my patient to Vulcan?”

“She is your colleague, not your patient,” the witch said. “And there is no need for that. I can teach her what she needs to know onboard ship.”

“I’m not sure I like how she reacts to you.”

T’Pring shrugged. “You can do little about it.”

God, he really hated her. McCoy scowled, but she wasn’t wrong. And for all that he made fun of Christine, dismissed her or criticized her, he did like her. She was smart as a whip when not moping over Mr. Greenblood. She hadn’t told him to fuck off as often as he’d expected, even though he’d been insufferable. Sometimes she even gave into little bouts of sarcasm that he liked a lot. Trusting her to someone who’d been happy to leave Mr. Spock and the Captain to die was against all his instincts.

Except one. The doctor one.

“What do you need? Quiet room? My office is at your disposal.”

#

Chapter Text

The doctor’s office smelled vaguely of booze and feet, and T’Pring’s nose curled. Dr. Chapel sat cross-legged across from her. Her eyes were shut and there was a line between her brows that revealed the lingering pain in her head. It was difficult to be near her, unexpectedly difficult, as if a strange beast inside T’Pring’s mind sought hard to recognize her, to think of her, but it could claw no pathway to her conscious awareness. They had been each other’s only companion for five years. She ought to have more memories of Dr. Chapel than of anyone. But all she had was a scant few memories from what felt like the distant past, of a sly grin in the medical bay and a slack, idiot face as Spock put his arms around her. Revolting. Kissing in public was so unnecessary, it was animal, all lips and tongue and bodies. There was nothing else.

The woman in front of her seemed different to the one she remembered. She was oddly quiet and sedate—more . . . feminine ? If she had not been addressed by name, T’Pring suspected she would not have recognized her as the same woman. How odd it was to think she had spent five years with her, when all T’Pring saw on seeing her was a stranger.

“You may keep your eyes shut,” T’Pring said. “Take slow breaths—slower than you think is normal. But do not force it, if you need to breathe, then breathe. It is easy to hyperventilate.”

“My brain's already doing bad enough, I don't need to cut off its oxygen too,” Christine murmured, her voice low and oddly intimate.

T’Pring hesitated, then plowed ahead. “This is a complex meditation, so you must find a steady place to begin. Center yourself around a belief you hold strongly.”

Dr. Chapel grimaced a little as if there had been another stab of pain. “I don’t know if I have one of those. What do you use?”

That was . . . not a question T’Pring wanted to answer. Her belief was “Spock has done something unimaginably terrible to me.” She believed it with every ounce of her being, and most of her emotions too. It was very strong, even if not particularly rational. Fortunately, more and more evidence was emerging to validate her belief. “Don’t you have some sort of tenet of faith? I stick to . . . infinite diversity in infinite combinations.”

“I think I used to believe in something, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been that young.”

T’Pring paused. “Aren’t you named after your god?”

Christine’s eyes opened and she stared at her, brows raised. “I-- I guess? I’m not religious. I’m . . . a scientist.”

“My apologies. I was just curious. What do you believe strongly about your science?”

“Oh-- okay, I think I have something.”

T’Pring sighed in relief. She would like this to be over soon, but there was a long and complex meditation that she needed to convey first. And they very much could not risk a mind meld. “Hold that at the center of yourself. Then use that strength to shore up the spaces around you. Let yourself be confident in your present moment, in your knowledge and perception, in your experiences. Then, when you are feeling stable, reach out and touch the blank time, but very, very lightly.”

She could almost see Christine’s mental movements in her furrowed brow and the ways her eyes moved even behind closed lids. It meant that when it all went wrong she saw it instantly—the sudden pallor, the color going out of her lips, the pained flex, the panicked flicker behind her eyelids.

T’Pring reached out without thinking and caught her hands.

#

Christine crouched in a heap in a collapsed house. It was falling in again, more and more roof tiles and floorboards were coming down on her head, beating her, nails catching her skin. She had made herself as small as possible and bit hard on her lower lip to try not to cry.

“Oh.” The voice was in her head and she looked up in panic. “This is your mind?”

It was a sehlat, tall and golden, with large, intelligent eyes and bloodstains on its whiskers. Christine’s eyes went wide, and yet a wild, bloodthirsty beast this close was mesmerizing more than terrifying. She slowly uncurled, looking up.

“What was your belief?” the sehlat asked.

“Um,” Christine wasn’t sure what was going on, really. “It was that the universe is comprehensible.”

“Definitely an article of faith,” the sehlat said, sounding amused. “Did you doubt it?”

Christine shook her head. She got up and realized that she barely came up to the sehlat’s chest. She was eight years old. “I suddenly realized that it didn’t matter if it was comprehensible, because I wasn’t smart enough to comprehend it.”

“Why did you think that?”

“I don’t know.” She looked away, kicking her feet in the rubble. “Everyone used to tell me I’m stupid because I have a hard time guessing what people mean when they say things. And these days I just forget things, I get distracted and I start doing the wrong thing. I always thought that if people just were straight with me, I could understand anything. But now it’s all-- it’s all too much.”

“I want you to let that go.”

“What?”

“It doesn’t matter if you’re smart or not, that is simply pride. The universe exists outside of you. You are a part of it, but only a minuscule part. Your intelligence is also minuscule, so small that when compared to any other being, the differences are invisible. Does that make sense?”

Small Christine nodded firmly.

“Hold onto your humility. Then we will to rebuild this house.”

“You’re going to help me?”

“Of course.”

Christine hesitated for a moment. “Can I ride you?”

The sehlat looked as startled as a llama. “What?”

“Just a pat?”

“What-- what do I look like to you?”

“You’re a huge sehlat! With soft-looking fur, and you’re so big.”

“Oh.”

There was a moment of silence. Then:

“Yes, you may ride me.”

Christine leapt into the air, punching it in delight.

As she climbed on, the building slowly started rebuilding itself. There was a floor now, a glossy blonde hardwood. The sehlat wandered the edges and Christine smoothed her hands up the walls, fixing the various rooms. “This is the science one!” she said. “And this is . . . my self identity.” That one was ratty and a little broken down, but once the bones were good, they moved on. “I think this is . . . family.” It was a labyrinth, with beautiful, comfortable places, and also sudden, unexpected pits. The next room was sunlit and warm. It felt strangely deep though, and there were areas in it with panels of knives affixed to the walls. Near them were vents that piped in ice-cold air that made your skin tingle. Small Christine bit her lip. “I think this is the room for sex.”

“ Is it ?” said the sehlat, looking around. “It’s unusually pleasant for that.”

Small Christine shrugged. “I think I like sex. You get people to look at you like they like you, and there are interesting puzzles.”

“That is certainly an attitude.”

“It’s a little musty in here though. Think it’s been closed for a while.”

There was another odd scent too, coming down a long dark hallway, something cool and dank, like an old well. “What’s that?” the sehlat asked.

Small Christine looked panicked and her hands buried tightly into the sehlat’s fur. “I don’t want to go down there.”

“I’m afraid we may have to.”

Small Christine shook her head hard. “It’s not safe. The floor-- the floor is bad.”

“It would be,” the sehlat said. “That is where the damage is, the part that makes this house unstable. If we can mend it, we can mend you.”

“But you can’t mend it,” Small Christine said sadly. She slipped off the sehlat's back and stood at her shoulder. “Yours is the same. We’re both just balanced on the edges. If we move too much we’ll fall in. And there’s a monster at the bottom. You don’t want to wake it up. If you wake it up . . . it’s gonna hurt. It’s going to take everything down.”

“That seems unlikely. The damage is not a monster. It is simply remembered trauma and katric scarring. Even if it takes the shape of a monster--” But Small Christine wasn’t paying attention. She was leaning in, running her fingertips along the rims of T’Pring’s ears and tracing a fingertip across her cheekbones, along her whiskers, and over the bridge of her nose. The expression on her face was childishly quizzical.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Why are you so far away? Come back.”

Then, from behind, T’Pring heard the creaking of floorboards, the shifting of support walls. She felt the presence before she saw it. Christine wasn’t wrong. There was a monster in that well, and it had finally noticed her. In her peripheral vision, she saw vines, living and green growing in and out of the walls. They were the bursting tendrils, coming for her, linked to a heavy, petrified mass for the stem. The mass might be dead, but the tendrils were pulsing and alive and wanting . They wanted her. They wanted to catch her and grab her, and they would destroy Christine’s whole mind to do it. The petrified tree called up a similar monster in her own mind. She felt it respond, and like lifting a log in a wood and seeing all the insects scuttle away, its motion dislodged a hundred thousand things, each alive and with pincers, and it hurt, it hurt.

Small Christine started to scream, and T’Pring tried to scoop her up, but her hands were paws. Her body was huge and ungainly. She was the sehlat that Christine had seen. She bowled over the little girl and fell.

Christine was panicking. T’Pring felt herself panicking in response. She started to gasp, to hyperventilate, and then something hit her neck with a hiss and she knew nothing more.

#

It had taken a long time to get to the top of the nearest hill. Only at its peak did the thick jungle canopy finally part, opening onto a blue-pale sunset sky. They stood there, side by side, as the star of this star system—their new sun—sank below the horizon. As it did, a dull, terrified knot tied itself up in Christine’s stomach. There were no stars. Aside from the one in this solar system, there was only the endless blackness of space.

Stars were friendly, hopeful things. They meant galaxies, with potential planets, people to meet, worlds to explore. But where they ought to be was utter blackness. There was only one solar system here. One goldilocks planet. They weren’t even in the same universe that Enterprise was in.

They weren’t in the same universe as home.

Suddenly the bitter thoughts, the times she’d looked at T’Pring and wished she wasn’t there, that anyone else was there instead, they felt ugly and terrifying. She wasn’t alone. Because T’Pring was here, she wasn’t alone, and god, she was grateful for that.

#

“ I’m going to fix it.”

“ It’s late, leave it.”

“ You’ll whine all night, I’ll fix it.”

The jungle in the dim half-light of a rainy evening. Then a sound, unfamiliar. T'Pring turned, watchful and ready, just as the kahs-wan had trained her to be. But it was already plunging toward her moving fast. Tusks . She tried to dodge, but too late. A tusk caught her side. She felt the catch, then the rip.

So that was what it was like, the feeling of flesh tearing, its fibrous strands parting, each one blossoming with dark green blood.

There-- a narrow gap between stones. If she just— She fell into it, wriggling just far enough back that the beast couldn’t get at her. She clutched her bleeding side, trying to apply pressure. But her arm felt numb. Her whole body shivered in the cold, so cold, her mind not working. She’d die here. She hadn’t wanted to, not yet. Even though there was no chance of getting back. Even though they were trapped in a futile world with futile lives. There was still so much more she wanted. Why had she only realized it now? Her life wasn’t over , she still wanted .

Please help , Christine.

#

The rooms towered impossibly high, the arches so far up that there was only shadow to be seen of the ceiling. Shelves and shelves of codices. The language unfamiliar, possibly unreadable, with an unusual telepathic key, but what an intriguing puzzle it would be.

Was there glory in this? Possibility and an endless task that nevertheless felt worth it? There were devices too, perhaps even the device that had sealed them into this pocket universe and could unseal them. Would there be dangers? Monsters, maybe? But there would be discovery .

A world of ideas, possibility at their fingertips. More than a home—a future.

#

Sitting in the sun over the bathing pool. Christine in ragged shorts and a breast band, standing up with two long poles, demonstrating . . . something, some sort of principle of rustic engineering she’d just learned. T’Pring, watching her, brow furrowed, critiquing as Christine explained, still combing knots out of her long hair.

“ No . . . I think that actually might work.”

Christine made a celebration dance and then dropped to her knees in front of T’Pring. “Tell me I’m a genius. I only have you for validation anymore.”

T’Pring laughed—actually, out-loud laughed, dimples flashing and everything. Then a brief, affectionate press of fingertips. “Yes, you are a genius, clearly.”

Christine’s eyes were bright and the praise made her flushed and delighted. “You know it.”

#

“ We are fine, Spock. We do not wish to risk your plan. The cost would be too high. We will see you or we will not, but do take care. Give my father my regards.”

“ You don’t have to worry about us. We’re fine here. We’ll figure it out and then be back soon. Miss you guys. Tell Erica I love her, okay?”

“But I-- I only just realized that I--”

“ Spock.” Christine’s voice was gentle and a little pitying. “It’s been a long time. This isn’t about you. This is about us.”

#

“What is wrong with them?” McCoy snapped. He’d been pacing around, trying to get a peek into the office, certain they shouldn’t have left them alone in there together. “I don’t get this mind/brain thing. The mind’s in the brain. Where else could it be?”

“The katra is not limited to the brain,” said that fellow Stonn, very calmly. “It can exist outside of it. It is one of the reasons Vulcans were very concerned by transporter technology at first. If we are unformed and then reformed, is it only our bodies that are carried, or are our katras carried too? But eventually we discovered that the katra is indeed transmitted too.”

“We theorized ,” Spock said, dismissively. “The katra is not a physical object. The data that was used was simply that the katra of someone transported can still be moved into another’s mind. It was not that the katra itself was transmitted, but that it reemerged in its host.”

“That is not true,” said Stonn. “If it was, why did you not simply remake Dr. Chapel and T’Pring from their transporter buffer records? Instead, you reached into the time vortex to capture something—but not their physical forms. You could only access their katras that way, and by drawing their katras back into the transporter and aligning them with their bodies, you brought them back.”

Captain Kirk made an expressive face. “Does that mean their bodies are still down there, on that planet? Like, rotting?”

“No, Captain,” Spock said. “They were rewound in the extraction process into a molecular pattern that matched the one in the transporter buffer.”

“But you cannot rewind a katra,” Stonn said. “It is not a physical emanation, so it does not need to be unformed and reformed. It is merely carried with the records of the molecules and then deposited into the body once it is recreated.”

This was all a bit much for McCoy. Sounded like ‘souls.’ But souls didn’t usually mess with your head. Of course Vulcans would make souls into something logic-y.

“Huh,” said Captain Kirk. “So, that’s what went wrong with them then. It’s like all those stories of kids going to other worlds and growing up and then being squashed back down and going back to being kids. You’re back, and even if you forget that other world, you can’t forget the growing up part. Because you did that. They grew up, and then got dropped back when no one had expected them to be grown up.”

“That is . . . a logical comparison,” said Spock, sounding like he wasn’t sure if it in fact was.

“Nah,” said McCoy. He’d read all those books too. “I mean, I don’t think you’re wrong, Captain. But that doesn’t account for it. It doesn’t account for the neural cascades, but more, it doesn’t really account for Christine. I don’t know about the other one, we weren’t acquainted , but growing up is one thing, even the kind of growing up you might have to do on an uninhabited planet—maybe some trauma, lots of stress, whatever. But you don’t come back cracked. And she’s cracked. Not mad, just, you know, like a pot that got dropped and now it can’t hold water no more. You see what I mean?”

“I do not,” Mr. Spock said.

Captain Kirk made a face. “Sorry, Bones. I’m not quite following. Sure, she’s a little more sedate than she was, but isn’t that a growing up thing?”

“How old do you think she was before she went? I know I call her wunderkind, but I’m pretty sure she turned forty last year.”

Captain Kirk, also a wunderkind, looked mildly horrified.

“I agree with, Mr. . . . Bones?” said Stonn.

McCoy grinned. “McCoy,” he said. “But you can call me Bones.”

“Oh. A nick-name.” Stonn frowned just slightly. “Thank you. What I mean is that I have noticed similar things with T’Pring. Although on the whole she is herself, there is a part of her that is, as you put it, ‘cracked.’ Not whole. For her, the symptoms are difficulty controlling her anger, and some irrational thinking, particularly involving her . . . former fiancé.”

McCoy gave Spock a long look. “I’d say a good deal of Christine’s ‘symptoms’ are around you too, Mr. Spock.”

“I do not understand.”

“You think it’s sane that a girl like that pines after you? You are not god’s gift to women, Mr, ‘a woman should only serve her own man.’ And she calls me sexist.”

“You cannot use logic to explain love, Dr. McCoy,” Spock said.

McCoy felt like his head was going to pop off. “Are you lecturing me about love , goddamn alien robot man?”

“Your xenophobia is tiresome,” Spock said.

“Oh, it’s not xenophobia,” McCoy said. “This handsome fellow here isn’t full of shit like you.” He slapped Stonn on the back, which was clearly not the thing, but Stonn did not move, only forced a deeply uncomfortable smile. “I don’t envy you the witch you’re trying to marry, but if the time vortex incident had something to do with her plan to make Mr. Spock and the captain duel to the death, I’m starting to feel a little sympathetic to her.”

“But why,” said the captain. “Why would they both imprint on Mr. Spock?”

Spock’s face was emotionless and yet, very not. “I believe they both had feelings for me before the incident. Perhaps it was simply a way to reconnect with their past selves.”

“I am sure,” Stonn said with an impressive dryness in his tone. “That reconnecting with her concern that her fiancé was having an emotional affair with Dr. Chapel was exactly the trauma reaction most likely in that situation.”

“If you are so skeptical,” Spock responded. “Then what do you imagine it is? I have already suggested that perhaps an emanation of the planet itself was responsible, but no one appeared interested in that idea. I agree that time spent on an uninhabited planet would be insufficient to cause this difference—but it was not a never inhabited planet, but a once inhabited planet. And we are very aware of what those can contain. Can you not imagine some sort of mental influence left by the alien ancients being the cause of this?”

But even as Stonn’s mouth moved to form a possibility, a wild shout came from the office, and a crash.

“What the hell?” McCoy grabbed his hypospray and stalked toward his office, ready to sedate as many young ladies as necessary.

#

The memories had come in a rush, all tangled and disjointed. They’d been accompanied by pain, searing down every single nerve, like her bones had turned to pain. Christine had vague memories of McCoy rushing in and knocking them both out. Waking up in her own bunk was accompanied by the faintly unpleasant knowledge that McCoy had likely put her there.

The pain lingered in her body, having made all her muscles sore, her joints ache. Christine lay quietly, her head pounding, and breathed.

Five years.

She counted slowly back in her head. Five years ago in this timeline Pike had still been healthy, leading the Enterprise with his casual panache. Erica hadn’t been promoted to the captain of her own ship yet. Christine had just been given an offer to join the Andorian Research Institute, and had turned it down without even thinking, because her life had been so good . Friends, adventure, a girl or boy in every port. She’d even been managing to get publications out while traveling. Spock had been seconded to the Farragut for a few months, so the tension between them—those moments where they’d connected , accompanied by the obvious sexual attraction—hadn’t been giving her the highs and lows of ‘ we could, but we can’t’ all the time.

It felt like a different world, like she’d been a different person, like a different actor had been playing that role. But when she looked in the mirror, her face was the same. Just . . . sad. God, she looked so sad these days.

She hadn’t been sad in the memories. She’d been scared, awed, angry, desperate, and joyful too, somehow, even marooned on an uninhabited planet for five years with someone she hardly knew, she’d felt joy. Since she’d been back . . . she hadn’t felt anything even remotely similar.

But the memories were just memories. She couldn’t feel those feelings anymore. For a moment, right when the cascade of pain had been overwhelming, the memories had fought back, and she’d been tossed up again to those heights of wild fear and desperate need, pure pleasure and delight. The echoes of those feelings hurt more than the pain. The pain was physical, her brain receptors over-activating. But the emotions hurt in her sense of self. If she couldn’t feel those pure, unvarnished feelings, was she really alive anymore? They hadn’t brought her back, not fully. And if they couldn’t bring all of her back, why had they brought her back at all?

There was only one person to ask about this. Slowly, being gentle with her aching bones and joints—it felt like growing pains had back when she was nine, only in a more fragile body—she rose and bathed and dressed. If there was one thing that had been rescued from the vortex, it was determination. She would not hesitate in this.

“Mr. Spock?”

Spock was seated at his desk in the astrometrics lab. He did not respond as she addressed him, but she saw his body tense. He turned slowly. “Nurse Chapel,” he said, in the lower and more grim voice that he used now, ever since he had returned from his pre-kohlinar training. It was as if the training had taught him to cut off his emotions before they touched his voice. It made a painful sorrow well in her stomach. She had always hated his relationship to his own emotions, but she had been unable to do anything about it. Perhaps she had even made it worse.

T’Pring had never had that barrier . The thought came bursting up from the distant past, the memory of that terrible moment where Spock had kissed her on the bridge, and she’d had to face the fact that he wasn’t just a hot friend to her, that she had feelings , and she hated having feelings. She’d remembered that moment with the painful clarity of trauma. The memory of the kiss was blurred, only warmth, strong hands, tongue, and oh fuck— but the memory of T’Pring’s face on the viewscreen was seared into her brain like the maillard reaction. Who had ever said that Vulcans were emotionless? The mask of betrayal and pain had been obvious, and when she’d spoken the edges of her words were rough, like she was barely holding it together, like she wanted to cry.

It was a strange thing to remember so vividly, when much newer memories of T’Pring had now infested her head. But the new ones did not feel particularly connected to Christine’s sense of herself. While the other one . . . Oh, it was the shame. She could not connect to the moments of fear and awe and joy, but shame was still one of her primary emotions.

That realization made her feel even worse.

“How are you feeling, Nurse Chapel?”

“Oh, terrible.”

“You should rest.”

Christine shook her head. “Rest is a panacea for many things, but not for curiosity.”

Spock’s face stayed emotionless, but he turned fully to face her. “You have questions then.”

Christine nodded. She had . . . a thousand questions. But he’d only ever answer one or two. She stared at his lack of expression. Sometimes she still saw shadows of feeling on his face—but around her there was nothing but cold resistance. Disgust? She took a long breath.

“Why did you bring us back?”

“Is that not obvious? My intention was to save you. There were unforeseen side effects. I apologize for them, but I do not apologize for the attempt.”

“I don’t-- I don’t remember much. The memories don’t make sense, not fully. But I remember telling you that we didn’t want to leave. Did we change our minds? Was there an attack?”

Spock stared at her. “I disregarded your opinion.”

Christine froze. “What?”

“It was clearly flawed and lacked perspective on the situation.”

“You’re-- you’re serious?”

“The request was impossible to take seriously. I was well aware that the you who was taken would want me to do everything to rescue you. T’Pring, however, must have realized that my intent was to end our engagement and pursue a relationship with you, so clearly she had convinced you to not return to prevent that future.”

“That-- that makes no sense , Mr Spock,” Christine said. “We’d been there for five years . I’m pretty sure that we’d talked things out by then. And we—” She remembered that moment above the pool of water, the way T’Pring had welcomed her into her emotions, her laughter, the touch of her fingers. “We were friends. I know we became friends.”

“I do not think that very likely. You had no connection save me, nothing in common. You endured each other’s company, or, plausibly, trauma-bonded. Your personalities are vastly incompatible.”

She stared at him. He’d just disregarded that too, when there was no way he could know better than her about whether or not they’d become friends. “Could anything we’d said have stopped you from bringing us back?”

Spock shook his head. “I was determined. And-- I admit that I did not consider the five years real. I saw it as simply the impression of five years. We trained for this sort of incident in Starfleet. There is protocol. I assumed that returning you to the correct timeline without the memories of those years would reset your characters.”

Christine felt herself smiling tightly, and also felt something shattering out of her. It was that sense of assurance that Spock loved her, that deep down, he must, because if he didn’t, if he hadn’t loved her once and taken it away, she wouldn’t feel this empty. But she felt so, impossibly empty now. It wasn’t his love he’d stolen from her, she knew now. It was her life. It was five years of her life, and then all those months afterwards, not knowing, scared and confused, when he knew why her memory was bad, why she no longer felt connected to her past, why her emotions were dead and cold.

“We weren’t real to you,” she said softly. “Were we ever real to you?”

Spock slowly seemed to bristle, to draw his shoulders back and puff his chest out, as if he was filling with an emotion that blew him up like a balloon. “I am insulted by that assumption. You were ultimately real. You kept challenging my emotional control. My desire for you forced me to act in a way counter to logic. I had decided that I would abandon logic and duty to save you, and only you, so that we could be together. But you, foolishly, went after my fiancée, and were snatched from my arms. I made every effort to get you back so that we could have that future that you kept encouraging me to imagine with your smiles , and your displays of your body . But now you blame me for acting to regain you when you were the one who invited my fervent adoration?”

Christine felt only cold. She felt as emotionless as a Vulcan post-kohlinar. “I didn’t ask for that. I didn’t want ‘fervent adoration’ either. I just liked you. But there is no way I would ever want to be chosen like that. Costing someone else their life? You could have talked to me at any time about what you needed to do to be in a relationship with me, but I guess it wouldn’t have made a difference, since if I’d disagreed with you or asked you to do something you didn’t want to do you would have just disregarded my opinion.”

“My emotions led me astray. I should have known better than to—”

“Oh, get over it already! There isn’t a dichotomy between logic and emotion. There never was . There’s only chemical responses in your brain and what you do with them.”

He stared at her, emotionless. “I brought you back because I loved you.”

It hit like a two-by-four. He’d had those feelings. He’d had the ones she’d been wanting, waiting for. But he didn’t anymore, because she wasn’t the girl he’d wanted. She’d come back wrong, and he wasn’t in love with the one who’d come back, just the one who’d gone. It was like she was dead. And yet-- she didn’t have to be.

“If you’d really loved me, you would have listened to me when I said to leave us. If you love someone, you listen when they ask you to let them go.”

#

Chapter Text

Stonn had not expected any of the sorts of strange occurrences common to Starfleet to impinge upon his life, but he was aware enough of the adventures of the Enterprise to accept that these were the kind of incidents that happened to this ship. It made him somewhat wary about being on it. But obviously his concern was mainly for T’Pring. Being here was causing her great suffering. Now it seemed that she had not simply been in the vortex for a short time, but that she had transited through it and been the resident of an uninhabited planet for five years. She had had to find a way to survive and to find purpose while losing all hope of rescue. That knowledge was unsettling, and yet in some ways reassuring. There was a possibility that they could find answers for what had happened to her, for why she had altered so much. It was not an unknowable mystery, simply a secret.

But it was, in fact, the complicating factor of Dr. Chapel that was the area of his concern at the moment. Their experiences had been similar, so T’Pring’s meditations from Gol should have been able to aid them both, and not send them into further catastrophic meltdowns.

He had been discussing katric theory with Dr. McCoy. They both agreed that the gap in memories should not have done quite as much damage as it had. Spock continued to assert that an alien influence from the planet had done the damage, and yet that theory didn’t quite seem to match the patterns that had appeared. Stonn had his own theory, but he was not entirely certain if he should say it aloud quite yet.

He was not sure if he was comfortable with the implications.

T’Pring was in the common room of the guest quarters they had been assigned, seated on her meditation mat, eyes closed. They opened when he entered and met his with that expression of exhausted calm that had been her only existence outside of rage for far too long.

“Are you well?” he asked.

“The incident’s effects are minor,” she responded. “Some pain remains, but I have been purging it slowly.”

“And psychological effects?”

“Well, I am no longer picturing my mental avatar as a sehlat,” she said, very dryly.

Stonn’s brows shot up.

“It is only logical for me to tell you the sequence of events as I experienced it,” she said. “I would rather not, but that is because it feels shameful.”

Stonn lowered himself to the ground and sat across from her. He admired this woman very much, and her determination, even in such pain, to go ahead with this disclosure, was merely another proof that she was worthy of this admiration. But he was wary that she marked it as shameful. He sometimes felt that they existed on opposite sides of a cavern, and though he reached out for her, she squirreled herself away inside shocking forcefields of her negative emotions. “Please tell me, and I will give every effort toward ameliorating your suffering.”

T’Pring gave a simple nod. “I believe I failed in my teaching of the meditation practice, as nearly immediately I noted the collapse of Dr. Chapel’s mental structure. Caught in the urgency, I reached for her and via our physical contact, I was conveyed into her mind as if we had melded, though no official meld had taken place.”

“Mm,” said Stonn, adding this fact to his mental model of the situation.

T’Pring’s lips flexed as if that lack of comment annoyed her, but she did not say so.

“It was clear she had lost control, because her own avatar was an eight-year-old child. The child-form of Dr. Chapel perceived me as a large sehlat.”

Stonn did not laugh at this, though she seemed to be waiting for him to do so.

“I aided her with restructuring much of her mind-house, and then we approached the place that was damaged. She feared it—quite sensibly. We did not approach, but I believe my presence caught its attention. It responded with destructive force. It is not simply damage. Or if it is, it has a self-protective mechanism that is very concerning.”

“What metaphor did it use? An earthquake?”

T’Pring shook her head. “It was a vine, a vast living vine. It seemed to have been burned once, but it burst forth with fresh tendrils and thrashed around blindly, as if trying to attack me.”

Stonn felt a chill down his back, but he did not give in to that sensation. He had a task at hand. “What occurred next?”

“I lost sense of myself, and instead slipped into scattered and unfortunate memories of the period we spent in the time vortex.”

“How many?”

T’Pring frowned. “There were scattered sensations, images, and words, but I believe five central memories. Some were mine, others belonged to Christine.”

“Christine,” Stonn repeated, and saw the flinch on T’Pring’s face. She had not used Dr Chapel’s personal name before, and clearly had not realized that she was doing it now. “What was the substance of the memories?”

T’Pring shrugged, and then grimaced. Stonn had often heard her say that shrugging was unhelpful and therefore illogical. “Some to do with our awareness of the world—that we were isolated. A pocket universe, perhaps? No stars. But though it was uninhabited, there were relics of ancient races on the planet. We discovered a library. Then a traumatizing memory of where I was near death. I suppose Dr. Chapel must have discovered me and performed healing. And then--” She fell silent.

She seemed to be unaware of her silence. Stonn waited. Then it seemed illogical to wait any more. “Did any of the memories address your relationship with Dr. Chapel?”

T’Pring’s head shot up. “What do you mean?” the words came out with a whip-like snap.

Stonn did not respond to her anger—he knew it was automatic for her. “Do you recollect the nature of your relationship?”

T’Pring’s lips pressed together tightly. “What does that matter? Those people are dead. And they were alone for years. If they found solace in—”

“T’Pring,” Stonn cut her off. “Do you recollect the nature of your relationship?”

T’Pring took a long breath and was clearly wrestling down her anger. “No,” she said. “But one memory involved a brief ozh’esta. I assume we were intimate, but I cannot say whether it was a familial, romantic, or merely sensual bond.”

Stonn nodded simply. “I make no assumptions, but do you believe that this bond had a telepathic component?”

T’Pring’s shoulders came back, her chin up. “You mean an emergent koon-ut-telan? You mean your hypothesis is that we were married ?”

“Yes.”

“That is impossible. That is—”

“I am not basing this deduction upon any behavioral indicators. I simply suggest that as the than-tha said, the mental damage you both have suffered could, in fact, be the consequences of a forcibly broken bond. As we know, though bonds involve the katra, they are biological and have physical manifestations. They are a true unification of body and mind. If you had bonded, the rewinding of your cellular structures would have erased the physical attachment points for the bond, and it would have no choice but to snap. The resulting damage from its recoil would have similar patterns to the ones we see in others with forcibly broken bonds.”

“Similar patterns?” T’Pring said. There was a slight quaver in her voice that Stonn politely ignored.

“You told me of some of them—of your father after your mother’s untimely death, how he had to spend many years doing extra meditation before he was well again. His emotions had become more difficult to manage—sometimes deadened, other times on a short fuse. He attempted to be himself, but even as a child you were aware that it was mostly pretense.”

“You are saying my rage is the rage of a widow,” T’Pring said flatly. “And yet my former bondmate still lives. So should we simply reform the bond and become well again? It would be easy, to bond to a human I have barely met. I know nothing of her, except that I once despised her and was jealous of her, and, furthermore, the woman here, she is nothing like the girl in my memories. So I know her even less. I feel nothing but pity when I look at her. I know she is nothing that I want. I want you . You are generous and logical and loyal, and I know that I am not well, and yet I can almost feel well when I am near you.”

The words pierced his heart and he wanted to offer his fingers, to meet in an embrace. It was not easy to help her manage her wild emotions, but to know how much she valued it was deeply gratifying. “Thank you for saying those things,” Stonn said. “I am honored and moved.”

T’Pring’s shoulders sank and she shut her eyes, closing her hands into fists as if to fight another wild, rising emotion.

Stonn spoke before she could misinterpret his intent. “I do not think it would be easy to reform a burned and broken bond. Nor am I confident it would mend anything. The damage would still be there. It would simply make you unable to avoid the pain from her side as well. I believe you must follow the instructions of the wise teachers of Gol and pursue a painstaking process of readjustment and acceptance. But understanding the source of the damage may aid in mending it.”

T’Pring sat silently for a long time. Then she let her face fall into her hand. “Is it hypocritical for me to be disappointed by this? I have no interest in bonding with her, but if it would fix everything instantly, I would do it without hesitation.”

“No,” Stonn said, but he wondered where her claimed revulsion and disinterest had gone. He knew that the extent of her pain meant that it was logical to desire its cease, and that it was self-centered to desire her to suffer if it meant she would stay with him, but it was still unpleasant to imagine her turning joyfully away from him. “It is not hypocritical.”

#

McCoy was not thrilled that the Vulcans had decided that the meditation practice must be a daily thing, and T’Pring and Christine had taken over his office for the duration. But at least they were doing it where he could keep an eye on things.

Today, Christine had shown up with an unusually taut and thoughtful expression on her face. McCoy had also heard that Mr. Spock had requested leave and was in his quarters instead of being on duty during alpha shift today, which was interesting. He would have enjoyed being a fly on the wall in whatever knock-down-drag-out fight they’d had, but only if it had ended with Christine punching the greenblood in the face. He hesitated after thinking the pejorative. Maybe he’d stop saying it aloud at least. Stonn was a good fellow. His logic meant he tended toward full disclosure and he trusted members of the medical profession, while Spock’s was the ‘none of your business’ kind.

“Where’s Mr. Spock?” the captain said, bopping around like a nervous child at a grown-up party.

“Mediating, I’d guess,” McCoy said. “Two ex-girlfriends wanting vengeance at once might make you want to do a lot of meditating.”

Kirk’s brows shot up. “Well, that’s one way of looking at the situation.”

McCoy shrugged. He didn’t think he was wrong.

T’Pring arrived a minute or two later, icily correct in dark Vulcan clothes and some pretty flashy eye-shadow. Armor? McCoy considered. Armor. He hoped there wouldn’t be a fight.

He sidled over to the door and peeped in, but the two women were simply sitting across from each other, on opposite sides of his desk, and speaking quietly.

#

“Do you miss her?”

The question came out of the blue, and T’Pring didn’t know what to say or think. “What do you mean?”

Christine tipped her head to the side and licked her lips, her gaze distant, like she was contemplating a memory. “Yourself, I mean,” she said. “Do you miss the self that lived that life? I liked seeing me from your perspective. She had so much enthusiasm and positivity, even in that situation. I admire that.”

T’Pring considered her, and also thought back to the scant memories they’d recovered. She had not considered her alternate-timeline self to be a different person, someone to miss. But she had also not contemplated her character overmuch. “There are aspects of her person that I do consider admirable,” she said. The only jealousy was for the peace and patient curiosity she seemed to have found inside herself. She had sense-memories of closing her eyes and letting the sun shine on her face, of puzzling over runes for hours and hours and finding connections that made her heart start like it had been newly electrified. The sense of self-knowledge, that she knew what she desired and why, that was also foreign to her. It made no sense either. How could the self who had been trapped alone on an uninhabited planet have found more purpose in her life than T’Pring herself had? T’Pring did her duty and followed the prescribed course. She knew what she did not want (Spock), and what she hoped would lead her to something worthwhile (Stonn). But she could not picture a life for herself beyond three years into the future, when her term at Ankeshtan K’til would be over.

“Do you think we were a couple?” The words were casual and light, and yet they made T’Pring fuse like lightning-shocked metal to her chair.

“What?”

Christine’s eyes curled up in silent laughter. It was more demure than T’Pring would have expected of her, and yet, it also had an unexpected cast of familiarity. “I suppose I’m not really your type.”

T’Pring stared at her for a long moment. She was just casually suggesting this? She had no access to Stonn’s well-meaning theories, or even an understanding of what the ozh’esta might have meant. And yet she had still come to this possibility? “Well, no,” she said. “But I didn’t think I was . . . your type either.”

“Oh well,” Christine shrugged. “Five years is a long time to be alone .” The flex of her eyebrows made it clear she was implying a sexual relationship. T’Pring was unsure if she felt better that she had not intended to suggest that they had an emotional connection as the bond would signify. “And I wouldn’t say you were my type, but I am bisexual.”

T’Pring flinched slightly at the word.

“I take it you’re not.”

That was . . . not quite as easily answered as it might have been. And she had no facts about the sexual experiences of the version of herself that had existed inside the time vortex. “I am . . . a good daughter,” she said. “Growing up in a household where casual touch telepathy is welcomed by all, there was no way to keep a secret. I was not allowed the scope to investigate what being . . . less good, might be like. And once I was on my own, well. The opportunity did not arise. So I never thought much about it.”

Christine was watching her with unnervingly perceptive eyes. “It sounds like you thought quite a lot about it, actually.”

“Never seriously. I was engaged. I knew where my interests should lie.” She tried not to wince at that thought. She had done so many things with Spock to try and please his human ‘urges.’ She had enjoyed some of them. Perhaps it would have been the same with Dr. Chapel. Humans had needs. It would not have been out of the question to have engaged in a sexual relationship with her. ‘If you were the last person on the planet--’ well, you made adjustments. No doubt she would have enjoyed some of it.

“I’m sorry. I was making assumptions. I don’t know anything about your relationship to your sexuality.”

T’Pring glanced up in surprise. This kind of caution was all new-Christine.

“I just-- I feel so disconnected from those memories. I can see you’re a beautiful woman, but in the memory, it wasn’t just that. I touched your fingers and there was this lurch. It was almost like you were haloed in sunshine, too bright to look at directly, and yet too intense to look away from. Perhaps I thought if I joked about it, it wouldn’t seem like something . . . lost.”

The words shaped an echo of the memory in her mind—one that was emotionally inflected in a way that T’Pring was not culturally set up to see. She had recognized the symbol of the ozh’esta—but Christine’s memories were colored in with a bright attentiveness to her feelings. Even the same moment, they would remember differently.

“Stonn believes that we were telepathically bonded,” T’Pring said. “The removal from the vortex would have forcibly broken the bond, and the backlash is responsible for the emotional damage.”

Christine’s eyes went wide. “What? Telepathic bonding? But why would we do that?”

T’Pring blinked. She hadn’t even thought about the prospect that they might have formed the bond intentionally. Perhaps not romantically at all. She did not have that kind of skill, but might she have developed it? Or perhaps an accident with a mind meld? “I-- cannot say,” she said.

“You didn’t mean--” Christine hesitated. “There is a Vulcan marriage bond, isn’t there?” Then she seemed to hear herself, and laughed weakly. “Of course not for us .” She flapped a hand. “Sorry, I’m being distracting. We’re here to meditate, right?” Christine flashed a shamed little grin, and T’Pring found it impossible to not stare at it, trying to categorize it in a complex system of forgotten memories. Impossible. She shook her head to try to clear it out. It wasn’t important for them to talk about this.

“Yes,” she said. “Let us begin in the same way, but be gentle, very gentle with yourself. You are damaged, and we are using tweezers, not dermal magnets, to remove the shrapnel.”

“Excellent metaphor,” Christine said, with an oddly conspiratorial smile, and only then did T’Pring remember that she was a medical professional, and it had indeed been a suitable metaphor for her.

The session was long, and it did not seem to do very much, and yet the practice seemed to work better with Christine alongside her, as if the rooted bond was more alive near its former attachment, and therefore more generous when T’Pring went to shift it. It was only at the end that she touched something that released another flood of memory.

Christine had mud on her face and her hands were bleeding, but she was grinning like an idiot. She’d gotten the bamboo pipes to work, and they had a shower now. She gloried in her success.

T’Pring was doing math to track the monsoon season and was pretty sure they were going to be doused in rain in the next week or so. Thus Christine's joy was a little ironic, though pleasing to see. “Yes, yes, you’re still a genius,” she said, and Christine laughed and tugged her up, into the shower space, and turned on the stream, dousing her in cold water.

T’Pring recoiled, but Christine didn't let her leave. She wrapped her arms around her to protect her from the water (not turning it off, of course) and bent her head to meet her gaze. Her grin was still there, stupid and proud, finding joy in this small plumbing success—something that before they would have both taken entirely for granted. She'd changed since they arrived—the bitterness, jealousy and selfishness washing away like life was a river, being replaced by someone generous and sensitive, if still impulsive and dramatic. T’Pring tangled their hands together. Christine’s knuckles were scarred from all the mistakes she’d made trying to carve a simple comb. A gift.

T’Pring pushed up onto her toes and they kissed in the falling water.

“ Make it hot and I’ll do that with you more often.”

Christine, stunned by the kiss, just nodded, “Yeah. Hot. I’ll make it hot.”

It took a month, and the rains did indeed come, but she made it hot.

When T’Pring surfaced from the memory, she knew, without a doubt, that the telepathic connection was a naturally occurring romantic bond. Left alone for so long, they had come to know each other in a way you could never know another person in this busy, changing world. They had come to know themselves in that way too. And they had altered themselves in ways that let them fit against each other like dressed stone.

But of course they had. What other choices had there been? They had needed each other to survive, and so they became each other’s tool.

#

Chapter Text

Though she had been doing it for weeks now, walking slowly into the dangerous places in her own mind was still not easy. Her mind resisted, sending out reactions of fear and tears and pain. Christine didn’t really understand T’Pring’s suggestions for removing the chemical intensity from the traumatized places in her mind—“draining the well.” But if she stayed quiet, sat in the middle of this rock cave (their cave, she knows it’s their cave), she could reach out and touch each crystalline surface, and see the memories written bright upon them. She knew now, what they had been, and she knew how hard it had been to get there.

T’Pring huddles in her half of the cave, hissing unhappily as she tries to sort out her hair with her fingers. Christine, sitting crosslegged on an outcropping on her side, grins cruelly and waves her vibrascalpel. “Whenever you want to give up, I’ve got this right here.”

Hers is close clipped now, odd-length locks sticking up in a cowlick and flopping down around her ears. Might as well accept the lack of personal hygiene and not end up with a rat’s nest. T’Pring hasn’t given in yet.

“ I didn’t think Vulcans were vain,” she says. “With all those shitty bowl cuts.”

T’Pring glares at her like she wants to murder her, then twists the whole mass of knotted hair up, ties it into her old sash, and leaves. Christine chuckles a little to herself. It’s small entertainment, but she enjoys bullying her ‘roommate.’

She sees her again sitting by the river with her head in her hands, her shoulders drooping.

Christine feels like shit. Neither of them are handling this well, but at least T’Pring isn’t venting her feelings by making fun of the only other person on the planet. What does Christine know about the significance of the braids and complex hairstyles that T’Pring preferred? She’s never asked. They’re at minimum a connection to home, and god knows they have all too few of those.

Carefully, so as not to be seen, Christine backs up and takes another path. She finds her way to the recently fallen tree on the peak of a low hill. It’s starting to dry out, and Christine considers it. How hard could it be?

A week later, she’s decided the answer to that question is ‘really hard.’

Christine still remembers how to start fires from her high school wilderness survival courses, and has located a kind of rock close enough to flint as to make that pretty easy. She’s also managed a bit of flintknapping, and has a knife and a peeler. She doesn’t want to use the battery on the vibrascalpel too much, in case they need sterile surgical instruments.

Now she’s the owner of a hand-axe (i.e. a piece of flint that she can split things with if she gets angry enough), 18 rough stones of varying textures, and four chisels of different sizes (also pieces of flint). She’s been working on this every day for hours, and her fingers are sore and raw from it. The six failed attempts have all gone in the fire. But finally, one is working out.

It’s still crude and not like she wanted it, but the tines are long and unbroken, and they have a nice bevel to them. They’ve been smoothed until Christine’s hands are bloody. She’s greased it, let it rest, then greased it again. Fine. Fine.

At the camp, T’Pring is drying some sort of horrible root thing that is, nonetheless, edible and doesn’t make anyone ill.

“ I think we need to start taking some meteorological measurements,” she says. “Understanding the likely weather patterns could be essential, and a rain gauge would be easy to set up. The readings from your--”

Christine walks up to her and shoves the comb into her hand. T’Pring freezes, the unexpected touch of skin to skin startling, and, Christine realizes too late, incredibly rude. “Sorry,” she mutters. “Yeah, sounds good. Um, I’m going to go.”

She flees.

When she eventually returns, four hours later, with a bag full of berries and arms and face full of scratches, T’Pring is frowning over a weird concoction cooking in a hollow rock near the fire and poking it with a stick. Her hair is out of the sash, combed clean and pulled back into a simple but tidy three-strand braid. She looks like herself again.

Christine comes over and examines the substance. “Is that glue?”

“ It was supposed to be soap.” She doesn’t have the tinge of frustration in her voice that she’s had for the last . . . forever. She glances up at Christine through her eyelashes, and stares at her, unreadable as always. But there’s no antagonism in her expression, so Christine crouches down and sticks her finger into the concoction. She winces at the burn, then tries to wipe it on a few stray leaves, only to have them stick firmly to her finger.

“ Well, you seem to have invented glue. Congrats.”

“ Thank you,” T’Pring says dryly. She has the comb carefully tucked into her sash. “Truly we are survival geniuses.”

Christine can’t help the smile that spreads across her face at that, and rubs the leaves into tatters against her side. “We’re not so bad.”

The memories felt fragile, like blown glass, and Christine turned them over and over in her mind, careful not to push too hard, not to drop them, for fear they would shatter, and dissipate into what everything else was: the unpleasant gray plastic of her life. These memories still had color, emotion. She felt like the woman in them wasn’t her distant, stupid self, locked five years in the past, but someone who could be near and close by, alive and smiling and inventing something crazy and making her Vulcan wife laugh, being in love and clever and foolish all at once. Christine wanted to meet her, wanted to know her. “How did you make her love you?” she wanted to ask. “When did you know that this wasn’t another futile crush? When did you stop being scared of your feelings? Did having those feelings make you want to stay alive?”

But it wasn’t her . It couldn’t be. That Christine was alive, and this one hadn’t felt more than gray and exhausted since she’d taken her place.

The meteorological set up is still in its testing phase. Christine perches on a rock, taking notes on a slate as T’Pring reads off the measurements.

Christine sniffs the air. “I still think there’s going to be a storm tomorrow.”

“ You keep claiming you can smell oncoming weather, but you have never been right.” T’Pring eyes her humidity monitor suspiciously. “There is no sign there will be any rain tomorrow.”

“ The body is a better sensor than your sad bit of peat there.”

“ Then wager.”

Christine sits up straight. “You want to bet?”

“ Yes.”

“ What-- what are we going to bet?”

“ The last of the currant store.”

“ You’ve been doling that out like I’m a diabetic kid at halloween. You’re on.”

That night it pours.

“ Yessssssss.” Christine grabs a whole handful of currants, pressing them against her mouth and teeth, bursting them, until her lips and tongue are stained dark purple with them. T’Pring is watching her, with lowered lids and a taut expression. She takes another handful. She crawls over to her and kneels, straddling her legs. “Your turn.”

“ They’re yours--” T’Pring starts, but her words are met by a handful of berries being pushed against her mouth.

“ Right. So what I say about them goes.” Christine leans in close to her ear. “I want decadence. No parsimony. Enjoy yourself for once.”

There is a moment where no one moves, then abruptly, T’Pring tips her head back, takes them into her mouth, and bites down, so the currents release their rich, sweet juice. She swallows, her mouth comes open and she is panting just a little. “Wasteful.”

“ Taste them,” Christine says, scooping more up, and gnashing a handful into bloody pulp and juice in her mouth. “Taste them until you never forget their flavor. Then, even when they’re gone—”

T’Pring grabs her wrist and pulls it in, taking a mouthful from her hand.

When she looks up, juice is smeared on her cheek, trickling down her chin, and Christine can’t breathe.

“ Is this what you want from me?” T’Pring asks, steely and dignified, even with berry juice all over her face.

“ Y- yeah,” Christine barely manages.

Forget remembering the flavor of currants. She knows now that she will never, ever forget just how much she wants to lick that juice off of T’Pring’s face. There is so little to desire in this world, that the small things have become large—currants, a full stomach, grease and salt—but this isn’t a small thing. It’s huge. She wants it so much, and it’s right here. She can feel the texture of T’Pring’s skin under her tongue, its heat and the sticky sharpness of currants against its own flavor. But she can’t have it. There is no fucking way T’Pring will ever go for being touched like that. Even thinking about it is insane. This six month dry-spell is literally driving her mad.

#

“How’s it going?” Captain Kirk sat in his ready room, leaning eagerly over the table as Christine came in. “Sit, sit. No need for standing at attention when you’re on medical.”

Christine tried not to smile too wryly. On medical . That was one way to put it. She sat across from Jim, and then handed him the PADD. “I’m here to hand in my resignation.”

Jim’s shoulders went tense as he read the PADD quickly, and then he looked at her, with that penetrating gaze that she sometimes suspected penetrated absolutely nothing. “For personal reasons, not medical? The pension’s better with medical. Kicks in right away too.”

Christine nodded. She was well aware of that. “I have options outside of Starfleet. I don’t need that level of support.”

“So,” Jim said, cautiously. “If it’s not medical reasons, why are you leaving us?”

Christine stared out the ‘window’ in his ready room and considered her response. There were many answers; some were angry—you should have told me what had happened to me—some were pathetic—I’m not myself here. He didn’t need to know the innermost workings of her mind. “Just thinking it’s time for a change,” she said. “Now that I know why I have the gaps in my memory and my emotions, I can work towards solving that in my own time. And fresh inputs will help me focus on something else besides what I’ve lost.”

“Sensible, sensible,” Jim said. Then he paused. “ Emotional gaps?” he asked, sounding puzzled.

Christine nodded. “It’s sort of like a flattening. I have a hard time enjoying things like I used to. I’d like to get that range of emotion back.”

“Of course,” said Jim. “That sounds terrible. How did that happen? It was definitely not part of the specs Mr. Spock gave me when I approved bringing you two back.”

“Well,” Christine said, suddenly wanting to snap, and enjoying that first flush of anger. “He wasn’t aware that T’Pring and I had formed a telepathic marriage bond, and rewriting us into our old bodies would forcibly break it, doing severe mental and emotional damage.”

Jim just stared. “Oh,” he said, then he stared some more and his brows rose. Christine regretted her urge to overshare; she knew exactly what he was thinking, and she wished, very much, that he was not thinking about that. Particularly because although she had recovered quite a few memories, none were particularly intimate, and so they were on the same page with regards to their ability to picture it. “Well, five years.” He gave a smug smile and an approving shrug.

Christine sighed. Obviously, shagging the local alien was his general practice. He would have gone for it in five minutes. It was only surprising to him because she wasn’t male.

He was watching her with a slightly lewd expression on his face. “You aren’t . . . getting back together, are you?”

Christine tried not to groan. “No,” she said. “We aren’t really the same people we were. Five years is a long time. We both had to change in ways that made us more—“ What was the right word? Understanding? Open-minded? Desperate? Eh. She gave up. “—compatible. ”

Jim considered this too and she considered him. Would he change after being marooned on a planet for five years? Unlikely. He was too elemental, too much himself. 

“Well, I suppose now that you’re in a world with men, there are better options. Not sure about whether that fellow Stonn is a better option, but for a girl, I guess.”

Christine was suddenly swept with the urge to storm down the hallway and ask T’Pring to marry her again, because that would be better than to have her bisexuality considered contingent on the availability of a male . How had she stayed on this starship so long?

“So no issues with my resignation request?”

Jim shook his head. “We’ll be rolling by Vulcan to drop off our other two friends in about two months. I will request a replacement nurse to meet us there, and you can take off then. Soon enough?”

Christine nodded. That was what she’d intended to ask for. She would be able to meditate with T’Pring until they left. “Thank you. Permission to leave?”

Jim looked distressed, like he wanted to chat more, but Christine did not. “Um, permission granted.”

Christine turned and left the ready room, a sensation of relief rolling over her along with the door’s closing.

#

“I’m leaving Enterprise.”

Erica—cut off in the middle of an awkward ‘long time no see’ because Christine hadn’t called, but Erica hadn’t checked in on her either for two months now—made an absurd looking face. “You-- what?”

“Getting out,” Christine said with some semblance of a smile. “Time to figure out what’s next. I actually already got a response from Archer Polytechnic—they’re looking for genetics faculty, and they have decent lab funding.”

“That-- that’s great,” Erica said. She looked less awkward, less like she wanted to run. “What changed?”

“Oh,” Christine said and bit her lower lip. “I found out that those five days I spent in the time vortex were actually five years, and Spock decided to remove us from the vortex without our consent. We hadn’t actually wanted to lose the last five years of our lives. And I’ve remembered bits of it, and it turns out that T’Pring and I got together there, which might have been part of what pissed Spock off about it, anyways-- I’m still dealing with the emotional trauma of a broken telepathic marriage bond, but I feel better than I have since Sybok did his stupid thing.”

Erica’s eyes were nearly bugging out. “What ? You-- you-- there was way too much in that to process at all. Please start at the beginning, and, please explicate one key point . . . You’re not in love with Spock anymore?”

She sounded so wary. Had it been that bad? Christine shook her head. “I’m done with that.”

Erica sighed out a deep and desperate sigh. “Thank fuck.”

“I’m still not . . . okay,” Christine said, cautiously.

“When were you ever okay , babygirl?” Erica said gently. “You’re just-- you sound more like you than you have for a long time." Her shoulders sagged and she rubbed the back of her neck, the shame written all over her. "I’m sorry I stopped calling, but it felt like I didn’t know you anymore, and you didn’t have anything to say to me, and I couldn’t do anything to help. But I would have been there if there had been." Her hands balled into fists and she set her jaw. "I would have.” She shook her head. "I will."

If she'd been herself, Christine would have been like, 'dude, it's been like a few weeks,' but she'd been so alone and terrified that she couldn't make herself shrug it off. Her lack of casual dismissiveness said enough, and Erica understood. Christine wished she could feel good about that. But her emotions were still so muted. She clung to the trace emotions, and to the hope that she’d found again. Something about resigning had given her forward momentum, and that felt familiar. Maybe that had always been a key element of herself, always plunging forward, and she’d been stuck. “I know,” she said. “I couldn’t call you, because your face when you looked at me-- I knew I wasn’t myself, and it was terrifying. Because if I wasn’t me, who was I?”

“That sounds so shitty. I’m sorry I left you to handle it alone.”

Christine shook her head. “You did try. I just didn’t have a way out, because I didn’t know I was trapped.”

Erica gave her her flashy little smile, a, you can't make it okay, but thanks anyway, smile and watched her for a long moment. Then her brow furrowed. “Wait, did you also say you married T’Pring ?”

#

Chapter Text

“Say that again, what did you remember?”

T’Pring sat perched up on McCoy’s desk, a cup of something hot cupped in her hands, her eye make-up only one color this time, but still dramatic and brilliantly hued. Christine had a faint memory of them sitting across from a cold firepit and T’Pring carefully drawing flared shapes onto Christine’s eyelids with a stub of charcoal. It was mostly a memory of touch, the roughness of the charcoal, the brush of T’Pring’s calloused fingers. She suspected it had ended in kisses and some other intimacies (she could remember how small T’Pring felt under her, and yet how immovably strong she was, her body as firm and alive as a sapling), but the details of such intimacies were still a little vague.

“Nothing important.” But T’Pring’s small smile lit her face like a flame. “Just you making me recite all four-hundred stanzas of the Wrecking to you, multiple times.”

Christine was impressed. “You memorized a poem with four-hundred stanzas?”

T’Pring looked vaguely shifty. “I remembered up to about two hundred, by the third hundred I was starting to make them up. And then, you seemed pained by the traditional ending, so I kept going.”

Christine laughed aloud, and realized, oddly, that that was something she hadn’t done much of since the vortex. “You were always a good storyteller.”

“It has never been one of my named skills before.”

“Well, neither was mechanical engineering for me. Yet I made McCoy panic the other day because one of the specialty hyposprays got jammed and I unscrewed the casing to fix the trigger hydraulics, and he nearly fainted, and then went on a tirade about how you don’t fix sensitive medical equipment. You replicate new versions. Good luck being stranded on a planet for five years with no replicator, I told him, and he shut up.”

“What was your last one?”

Christine hmmmed and gave her a suggestive look. T’Pring drew back a little, eyeing her suspiciously. They avoided talking about anything particularly explicit between them, skirting recollections of finger kisses or more. But that didn’t mean she remembered nothing. She knew, already, how T’Pring kissed, with a restrained precision that slowly built in intensity, until the lightest brush of tongue shook her to the core. They didn’t talk about that. She let the ruse drop and shook her head. “There was this room—like a cathedral built by the ancients there. I remember star-maps on the walls—and some writing. You’d been working on understanding it. It was talking about how the stars were going out, one by one, and how once there had been so many of them, but the universe was shrinking. They only had so much time left. There was a machine drawn on the wall in that room, we were still trying to work out what it did. It seemed like a loom, only half in the world and half out of it, like a tool that someone might try to use to weave time.”

“Are you sure that wasn’t a nightmare?” T’Pring asked suspiciously.

Christine shook her head. “I think we were getting close—to understanding why the time vortex was there, and how it had been made. Who knows, maybe we could have even unwoven it if we’d had a little more time.”

T’Pring’s eyes lingered on her face, then she turned away and nodded. “We worked well together. I enjoy all those memories, of working with you.”

Christine let out a small breath of a laugh. “Once I got over being a bitch to you, and lashing out because I was so scared, and so mad at you for being able to not let your emotions make you helpless.”

“I found your relentless optimism so irritating.”

“It was all a lie.”

“I know that now, but then I thought you were stupid .”

“Forgive me for not wanting to imagine my death every five minutes.”

“I do.”

They both laughed then, T’Pring with only a discreet smile, and yet it was more generous an expression from her than usual. It was an intimacy. She had regained the memory of when that sort of intimacy had begun—Christine being like, “You’re different now. Did I teach you to feel your feelings or something?” T’Pring had just glared. “There is no reason to use formal manners when we are living in each other’s sashes. I don’t respect you enough for that.” Later, when they weren’t using any opportunity to be rude, she’d explained about private manners, for family. They were as close to family as it was possible to get on this world, and they weren’t even the same species—but at least they’d come from the same universe.

Christine stared vaguely at the wall—no portholes this deep in the ship, but McCoy had a picture of the Milky Way stuck up there, along with a poster of some weird Andorian band. Still, she could see deep into the universe inside her own head. “It’s frustrating, being so close to understanding that place, and losing all that knowledge. Do you think it will come back?”

T’Pring shook her head. “It seems unlikely. Katras are mostly sense-memory. They don’t usually bring languages or complex knowledge sets. Though they are supposed to impart wisdom. I’m not sure if there’s actually been much research on that, particularly in regards to what ‘wisdom’ means.” She flexed her brows in a deeply sarcastic way, and Christine couldn’t help her small grin. This T’Pring was grouchy, easily angered, and an iconoclast. The one in her memories had been introverted and infinitely patient and incredibly stubborn. She liked both of them.

“I’ll let you know if it does.”

“Mm. Are you thinking of a return excursion?”

Christine went still. “What?”

T’Pring stared at her. “A joke,” she said. “I wouldn’t like to risk another of Spock’s fishing expeditions for us. And without that, if we went back, there’s no guarantee we’d ever be able to leave.”

“Of course,” Christine stammered. “Just, I hadn’t thought of it.”

“They’re not there.”

“I know that.”

They were silent for a long moment, and Christine wished she hadn’t been so obvious about being surprised. There was no solution to any of this waiting for them somewhere. It was simply slow recovery and painstaking work. She was used to that. But there was still that deep ache inside her, that she only forgot for brief moments—laughing with Erica, talking to T’Pring, consulting her new chair about classes and lab organization. Would it ever close up? Would she ever feel like a whole person again, or would she always be the remnants of the someone who’d been stolen out of her, leaving only a husk?

That was the dark side of remembering all these things. She remembered herself, only it wasn’t her . Those parts of her were gone, and she wasn’t sure there was any chance of getting them back. Knowing the bond was part of it only made the ache worse, because T’Pring was there, she was right there, and yet . . . she was also missing.

“Can you--” Christine’s breath was rough and she knew there was an inappropriate amount of emotion flowing around. Then she held out two fingers. “I know it ended badly last time, but . . .”

T’Pring stared at the offered ozh’esta with a look that most resembled horror. “Christine--”

“I know. I know you have Stonn. I just-- I want myself back so badly, and I can’t not wonder if she’s somewhere inside you. If I could feel the same way about you that she did, I feel like I’d know her, I’d be so much closer to getting her back.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“I . . . am aware of that.”

T’Pring considered her face for a long moment, and then nodded. She reached out and met Christine’s hand with her own. Their fingers slid against each other, palms meeting, thumbs leaning, little fingers tangling, and with the touch came a sensation of openness, like the gust of wind down a corridor when the front door came open. Internally, it knocked Christine off balance, swept her off her feet, the sudden meeting of minds a more intimate mingling than lips and tongue and saliva. The sensation was not physical, and yet her mind could only process it as if it was. T’Pring was raw and rough and hot, like jagged cliffs in Vulcan’s sun, like sandpaper, and burning coals, and she hurt to touch. She hurt—and the unfamiliarity hurt too. It hadn’t been like this—T’Pring’s mind had been cool and steady, cool like a swimming pool—cold from the air, but once inside, it was exactly what you wanted, wrapping you up and drawing you in, and full of living flashes and darting motion, like fish exploring your legs. Christine knew she wasn’t the same either. And that knowledge—coming directly from the connection—made her want to cry. What was she now? Moonstone and dust, cold and abandoned, atmosphereless. She could sense the herself from before somewhere deep inside her, that fierceness and chaotic joy, and it seemed to be reaching out, desperately toward the touch. But it was encased in glass. It was an echo, not really there. She couldn't bear it anymore, and jerked her hand back.

T’Pring was staring at her. Every line in her face showed the tension she was holding back. “It’s not there, is it?” she said, softly.

Somehow, Christine knew exactly what she meant, and was ashamed by the fact that she hadn’t said it. She hadn’t been looking for herself inside T’Pring. She’d been looking for that love, that same one she’d decided Spock had taken away from her, that feeling that she’d wanted so badly to have back. But worst, it wasn’t from T’Pring that she wanted it. It was that feeling inside herself, her own ability to feel that way again. It wasn’t there.

Her whole body felt like it was on the verge of collapse. She could feel those echoes so strongly, but they were untouchable. She couldn’t feel those feelings, they belonged to someone else. She hated that. She hated that it wasn’t there.

“You wanted to know if you still loved me,” T’Pring said softly. There was a vulnerability on her face that Christine wasn’t used to. “What did you find?”

Christine stared at her and hurt—for T’Pring and for herself. And also for those other two, who were no longer here. “There used to be someone inside me who loves you,” she said. “But she’s gone somewhere else. I know where the ache comes from and the strands that still reach out for you. It doesn’t feel like they belong to me, though. I don’t think I can love anyone, because I’m not anyone. I’m a wrung-out sponge of a person.”

T’Pring stared at her for a moment longer, and then looked away, her lips taut. “We aren’t them. I’m not her either. I don’t think I can ever be again. But why should we expect that? We don’t have those experiences, those capacities. Why should we have those emotions?”

“Do you have them for Stonn?” It wasn’t meant to be cruel. The question was real and important. It was fine if they couldn’t have them for each other, but if they couldn’t have them for anyone ?

“I . . . They’re not the same. But should they be? Perhaps I cannot stand on a mountainside and feel the sun and breathe in only peace anymore, but his presence is calming. He makes me feel as close to myself as anything can right now.”

Christine nodded. She wished her eyes weren’t stinging with tears, because it would look like jealousy when it wasn’t. It really wasn’t. It wasn’t perfect, but it couldn’t be, because they were still broken. But it was as close as they could get. “Good,” she said. “That’s good. You deserve that.”

“I am planning to bond with him.”

Christine nodded again, not wanting to look at that implacable face. "Yes, of course. He's a perfectly good man. It’s not like you need to ask me to step aside. We’re not those people anymore. We’re not bonded, and we were never engaged.”

T’Pring gave a brief uncomfortable nod. “What will you do?”

“You don't have to worry about me,” Christine said, a laugh haunting those words. “I'm more myself every day. You get on with your life. I promise I'll do the same."

T’Pring’s expression did not suggest that that was sufficient.

“I’ve already made plans to leave Enterprise,” Christine said. “I’m not trying to fill the hole with Spock anymore. Gonna teach at Archer Polytechnic on Earth. It’ll be something new, something fun.”

“Good,” T’Pring said. Her eyes flicked up and into the distance, as if into memory. “You always got bored too easily.”

“I’m never bored,” Christine said.

“No, because you make trouble instead of accepting it.”

They laughed again, T’Pring silently, and there was that strange doubling sensation again. They’d done this so many times in the past, but those times belonged to someone else.

“I think I fell in love with your joy,” T’Pring said.

Christine swallowed the lump in her throat. “I think I fell in love with your patience.”

“I don’t have that anymore.”

“Joy’s also pretty tough for me.”

T’Pring nodded. “I think it is sensible for us to not attempt to fix each other. We are both quite low on resources.”

Christine nodded. It hurt more, too, being around it. It felt better, but it also hurt more, and walking away from T’Pring over and over again made her unbearably aware of the hole.

“Be safe, Christine,” and T’Pring leaned in and pressed her lips against Christine’s, unerringly and chastely. The touch was like a burning brand, it ripped open a hole inside of her that welled with pain and loss, and it left Christine breathless and in agony. T’Pring walked away.

#

It felt like anger, but T’Pring knew it was grief. It still came out as anger though, every feeling did, even those moments where she was almost happy, her mood would rise, and then like a reactive metal exposed to oxygen it would catch fire and coat itself in a film of rage. She knew how to smother it when necessary, and she'd had to smother it when tasting those broken shards of Christine’s mind. Where is it ? Her gut had said. What she sought in there, what those flimsy memories, that wounded part of her katra knew should be there was gone, and the remnants were broken, disgusting, pathetic . It was not Christine’s fault that it was gone, but she was what was left, so she was easy to blame. And seeing it, seeing the gap, it was like walking into a hospital room that yesterday had held a friend, and today was sterile and untouched. Where are you ?

It was just Christine. She was there, her hand pressed so familiarly, the u-shape of her face, the shadow in the blue eyes, the slant of her mouth, all the same, and then T’Pring pressed against her mind, and it was a thin veneer, set to crumble at the lightest touch.

What was worse, the veneer was still someone , just not her Christine. And she too was pressing in, searching, walking through the corridors of scorching metal, unmoved, untouched, because the person she sought was not there either.

How cruel it was to know from someone who wanted to love you that there was nothing there to love. She had become someone new in that world, someone focused and driven and patient, who had valued herself, not simply judged her value by how well she fit the role she had been given to play. Now she could do neither. She was only ragged scraps.

The ruins were ancient—so ancient they had been beneath the jungle this whole time. They’d climbed up on a fallen spire—Christine wondered aloud if the people here had been giants, because the spire was the size of a steppe—and lay on the rough hewn stone, warmed by the sun.

“ There are more things to investigate,” T’Pring said, going through their rough notebook, but she’d taken off her pack and leaned against a block of stone, her shoulders relaxed.

“ Later,” Christine said. “Come lie down and tell me a story.”

“ I don’t-- what?”

Christine patted the warm rock beside her. “Story.”

“ I don’t tell stories.”

“ Yes you do. You told me all of those stories about Surak, and those weird human books you read, and the plot of that Klingon opera that was suspiciously like Hamlet.”

“ Those aren’t . . . stories.”

T’Pring moved down onto the rock beside Christine and stretched out, feeling her spine unfurl. They were a polite distance away, but close enough for Christine to push the bag of provisions over toward her.

“ Yeah they are,” Christine said, her narrow slits of blue eyes dark. “Face it, you’re a born storyteller. Tell me . . . the history of Vulcan.”

“ You have no interest in that.”

“ Sure I do.”

“ No. You will fall asleep and then I will be annoyed with you, and I am already annoyed with you enough.”

Christine laughed. “Then tell me . . . what you wanted, out of your life. What would have made it feel worth it?”

“ That’s an illogical question. There are no external benchmarks for value, only how well you feel that you have followed the precepts of Surak—”

“ You always say my questions are illogical when you don’t want to answer them.” Christine rolled onto her side and narrowed her eyes. “It doesn’t mean you don’t have an answer.”

“ Perhaps I don’t want to think about the question.”

“ I used to bother Spock about not letting his emotions out enough, but it wasn’t really that I think emotions are these great amazing things. I have them, I know that most of them are shit. But he tried to pretend he didn’t feel bad things, and that’s just lying. If you pretend you don’t have the bad parts of your personality, then you just make excuses for acting according to them.”

T’Pring stared her down. “I don’t believe you are truly as thoughtful as you keep coming across as.”

Christine’s brows shot up, and then she laughed. “Okay, fine. I’ve just had a lot of time to think lately. My usual work hard-play hard system got derailed by this whole being trapped on an uninhabited planet nonsense. And maybe things my therapist said are sounding relevant again.”

“ What is yours?”

“ Mm?”

“ That thing you wanted that would have made your life worthwhile?” It was all in the past tense, of course. It had been a year, a monsoon season and a chilly, hungry time, when even the thought of killing and eating meat had not been as repellent as it should have been. But the spring had come again, and there was warmth approaching. Though they were finding out more about the ancients of this planet, they were truly ancient, and it seemed unlikely that they would ever even be able to use their technology to put out a distress call between universes.

Christine sighed, her lips quirking wryly. “Turnabout is fair play, eh?”

“ Yes. Always.”

“ Well then.” She took a deep breath. “I wanted everyone to know my name.”

“ What do you mean?”

“ Not like, everyone, everyone. I didn’t want to be notorious. I just wanted the whole field of genetic modification to be like, oh, well, we need to use Chapel’s method here. Or, in Chapel 2256 we have the theory that will ground all future work on the subject. Maybe someone could name an endowed chair after me. I wanted the work I did, that I was proud of, to change the world, a little bit.”

“ Both grandiose and yet not.”

“ I’m very grandiose,” Christine said, amusement in her tone. “Just, you know, in my specific subfield.”

“ And yet you spent years on the Enterprise instead of working toward this goal.”

“ Yeah,” Christine said, taking a long, uncomfortable breath. “That’s what I’ve been realizing. I think I was scared of going for it. I wanted it so badly that I’d rather get in my own way than try to do it and fail. I said later, and now-- now there isn’t a later. Everyone in this world already knows my name.”

“ Your reputation is complete.”

“ Don’t tease me about this, I’m being vulnerable here.”

“ I can see you find it shameful, but I admire it, I think,” T’Pring said. “I have always simply wanted . . . to not disappoint anyone. Everything asked of me, I worked to do it to the best of my abilities. I have never followed my own desires or inclinations to discover what they are. I did what I was told. So I have not thought about what would make my life worthwhile. I had no grandiose, personal, reluctant dreams. I just did what I was supposed to do with the goal of impressing everyone around me with my competence.”

“ Oh,” Christine said. She was staring at her in a way that seemed a little bewildered.

“ I think I also have had more time to think while here than before. It’s no longer enough. Perhaps because here there is no one asking me to do anything, no one to be impressed by my effective execution of my obligations. There is only you. So what do I want, when there is no one to impress and nothing to prove?”

“ What do you want?”

T’Pring lay back beside her and stretched out on the stone, arms up to arch like a cat, and then she relaxed. “I’ll let you know when I decide.”

Christine rolled over to lie on her front, folding her hands under her head, lying with her gaze still on T’Pring.

They watched each other, cautious and thoughtful for a little while longer, and T’Pring let her hand drift out to rest on Christine’s back, her fingers just close enough to her collar to brush against her skin. But she refrained from doing so.

“ I’ll tell you too,” Christine murmured. “For here. I’ll tell you what I want for here.”

There was something unsaid there, in what Christine said, but perhaps not what she meant. T’Pring wondered if her own response was one where it was important that it was for here, or if it would have been something important to know about herself wherever she was. Should she be looking for something less important? For something she’d never imagine elsewhere? What do I want for here? You ?

#

“I apologize. I did not realize you were here.” Stonn had walked into the common room of the quarters and called for lights to find T’Pring seated on the meditation mat. She’d been sitting in full darkness.

She came out of her trance and blinked up at him, eyes adjusting to the new light source. “I believe I was sitting too quietly and the sensors forgot I was here.”

She would have had to have been quite still, and with a lowered pulse as well. She did not look well. For a time, when they had come here, she had seemed energized with excitement and discovery, not the directionless anger of before, one that offered momentum. Now she looked tired and gray, and he was glad they would only be on the Enterprise for a few more days.

“Just sitting, or meditating?”

T’Pring hissed out a breath. “Meditation didn’t used to feel like clearing storm-felled trees in a forest. I was just sitting. I didn’t have the energy for that.”

Stonn sat beside her, reaching out to offer his hand. She closed their fingers together and he felt her rough edges lean in for comfort. She needed it more than usual. The edges of her mind felt more raw. The press of her need was rough and painful, he did not like to think of what might have caused it. “Did something happen during your session with Dr. Chapel? You had settled into a comfortable practice, I thought.”

“The practice was fine,” T’Pring said. “We spoke afterwards. She desired-- She is still hoping for some sort of full recovery, that there is a way to regain what was. I had to show her that it was impossible.” She paused, then spoke. “So I kissed her, twice.”

Stonn felt his own emotions rise painfully, but he kept calm, acknowledged them and let them dissipate. “It is not . . . unexpected. She is your wife.”

“She is not ,” T’Pring snapped harshly, and the flare of pain in her mind sparked and burned and Stonn retreated his hand before he was damaged by it.

“I am sorry, your former wife. I understand that your emotions must be complicated.”

“She is not that either. Call her my ex-bondmate if you must, but not that.”

Stonn was not entirely certain why she desired to split hairs. Even if the memories were not there the facts were undeniable. He could not say he liked them himself, but he would not illogically deny them. Then he recalled that her mother had died when she was young, and though her father had remarried as Vulcan men must, he had always differentiated between the two women by using adun’a, wife, for T’Pring’s mother, and ko-telsu for his new partner. Giving Dr. Chapel the status of adun’a was, perhaps, a shade too far. Or was it too correct—as it was a relationship that had been lost, similar to her parents’ lost relationship?

He would not ask. That was an uncomfortably intimate conversation, and his curiosity was no excuse to cause her to battle so many intense emotional triggers.

“Did the action resolve anything?”

T’Pring shrugged. Stonn found the recently-adopted human gesture deeply unappealing. “Why have you not asked me about what motivated me to bond with Dr Chapel?

The antagonistic question made him pause. “I do not presume to understand most of your motivations. I was not there. Why should I need to understand?”

“You do not think that understanding this question is essential to understanding me?”

“No,” Stonn said.

“I do,” T’Pring said, and then looked fierce but inverted, as if she had found new anger at herself.

Stonn thought for a while, but she seemed disinclined to follow up the topic, and so he offered an impression. Perhaps he made an effort to make it more positive than he truly felt, but this was not the time to center his own complex feelings about the situation. “I do not know Dr. Chapel well, but she seems pleasant of nature and intelligent. I cannot disrespect the merit your choice.”

“What choice? She was the only person on the entire planet.”

“I do not think it would have been difficult for you to go without bonding for five years. So I believe it must indeed have been a choice.”

T’Pring visibly flinched. Stonn suspected she had already come to that conclusion, and it was his coming to it that had distressed her. In many ways it distressed him also. “Maybe I am afraid to be alone.”

“Are you?” Stonn asked gently, but a sadness rose in him at those words. He knew her feelings for him. He knew she calmed in his presence and enjoyed his company. But perhaps he was appealing simply because he was there, because being alone with her out of control emotions would be unbearable.

“I don’t know.” She sat for a long quiet while. “I am—but I am because I feel disconnected from everything, from my clan, from my colleagues, from my friends. I don’t know them anymore, and worse, I don’t know myself anymore to share with them. What do I have to offer? My uncontrolled anger, my embarrassing adventures, the fact that I will have lived a portion of my life twice over and still have no idea for what purpose I am living?”

Stonn watched her, observed the strange steadiness in her face as she stared deep into the hole inside her, the taut exhaustion on the corners of her lips. Something in her seemed to be drifting away, in spite of all he had borne to keep her close. “I have always felt that following the precepts of Surak for the good of Vulcan is purpose enough.”

T’Pring’s gaze lifted. Her lips stretched into a faint, flat expression, that might have been called a smile by someone who did not care about the connotation of the word, and she nodded. “Of course,” she said. “Of course.”

When she dreamed, she dreamed of runes, of an entry point into a world long departed. She recollected nothing of their meanings, and yet they absorbed her, shifting and changing in front of her eyes, as she puzzled out words and pictures, as she learned the patterns in which they fell, until by a series of marks, she could read them aloud in the pidgin she’d built with Christine—quick Vulcan and Federation Standard shifting back and forth with swears borrowed from whatever odd home-tongue Christine had brought with her. Sometimes she dreamed that there were hidden people behind those runes, calling out for her to save them, and other times she knew that the voices were simply the embodiment of her desire to know, to find the story there, to tell it.

She did not remember the parts of the story she had learned, but only that it was a good one. One way or another, it was one she wanted to tell.

#

Chapter Text

They were already in orbit around Vulcan, and everyone was tidying up and getting ready to go. There’d been hugs all around among the ladies—well, Chapel and Uhura and Rand—and some things said that McCoy wasn’t sure he liked to hear, like, you’re well out of this , and fuck them for doing that to you . He wasn’t thrilled by Spock’s decision-making skills (and the captain yes-manning him as always) but had they really expected them to leave a crew member and a visiting civilian trapped in a time vortex? The whole time differential just made it more urgent. If Enterprise had fucked off for a year, both of them would have been dead of old age by the time they checked in again.

And yet . . .

The key players here had taken over his office again for a final mediation session. They’d been a little odd around each other for the last week, not that they ever weren’t odd around each other. There was always something going on with them. Chapel hadn’t been in full-disclosure mode, but she’d mentioned a few things when he’d asked. “Well, you know. We have a lot of memories of each other, and sometimes we get one that's a little . . . personal.”

She meant they’d fucked, obviously. McCoy wasn’t a girlie mag man, but he couldn’t help the girlie mags inside his head. He also felt that Chapel deserved a high-five for getting a Vulcan out of her robes, but was pretty sure that would not be welcome.

That wasn’t the whole of it though. You weren’t that weird around each other just because you hooked up a couple of times with someone you didn’t much like.

It was getting near the end of their usual time, and he girded his loins and then gave a quick knock and came in. It didn’t look like they’d been meditating at all really, though they’d set up on mats on the floor. There was a PADD between them and they were sketching something on it, like the vague outlines of some alien technology. Chapel was going on about something, gesturing, with T’Pring sitting upright and attending with a furrowed brow, but when he came in, they stopped.

“Y’all wrapping up in here?” he asked. “It’ll be nice to have my office back.”

“You couldn’t give us an extra fifteen minutes, today ?” Christine asked, her voice low and a little bemused.

McCoy shrugged. “The shuttle’s docking in an hour, figured you had things to get ready. And there was something I wanted to show you two, before you fucked off for good.”

That got their attention, and then he had to rummage around on the medical computer to find the file he’d saved. Mr. Spock had a hard-on for keeping things tidy, and once reports were written and submitted, all recordings were purged, and this recording had just been a few seconds of fuzzy video before they’d decided to switch to audio only for the quality.

He finally pulled it up. It sputtered for a moment, and then resolved into some odd colors and lighting—from the settings of the alien device they’d managed to contact—and there they were.

Dr Chapel’s eye was bandaged, the socket packed with some kind of moss, her hair short and a peeling sunburn on her face. She was wearing a jacket that seemed to have been roughly cut and stitched out of some kind of alien tarpaulin, with an odd iridescent gleam to it. Her arm was up, around the shoulders of her companion, who—the thing that had made McCoy shocked more than anything else—had allowed it. T’Pring was still reserved and dignified, but it wasn’t a cringing or recoiling dignity, just self-possession. There was something bright and easy in her eyes, especially when they flicked over to Dr Chapel. One of her hands was bandaged, but her hair was tidy and braided into a dutch coil, and her clothes seemed to be made of some kind of stripped and woven leaf.

“No, no, I think we’re fine,” the other Dr Chapel was saying. “Yes, there was an explosion yesterday--” T’Pring gave her a clearly disapproving look, and the recent wounds were explained. “But that just means we’re getting closer to get the time loom going again. We've linked into the telepathic key, and I’m pretty sure we can unweave the seals around the planet, and bring it into alignment with our universe, just, you know, as long as I don’t overload the capacitors again.”

“Please don’t,” the other T’Pring said flatly, and then the video cut out.

Chapel was staring at the screen with a look like she’d been cut into two and was only still standing because gravity hadn’t caught up with her yet. T’Pring had gone as still as stone.

“You-- you had that all this time?”

McCoy shrugged. “Thought it was kind of neat, so kept a copy for after our XO wiped the records.”

Chapel took the controls and replayed it, freezing it in one of the clearest frames.

There was silence as they stared at it for longer, and McCoy was suddenly not sure he should have shown it to them. They’d been sorting shit out. Was this going to make things worse?

“You never wore your hat,” T’Pring said suddenly, and seeming to reference nothing. “I made you a hat, but you always forgot it.”

“Your hand’s bandaged,” Chapel said. “But your braid-- I didn’t think you’d ever let me touch your hair.”

“The cut of your jacket—it’s a form of to-pal. It suits you.”

“You let me touch you on camera.”

“Look at those machines—the patterns of lights—and is that an oil-based interface?”

“I know that’s one of the rooms in the Library. Which one?”

“It was your favorite—I think it was their storeroom for all broken tech. I always found you in there underneath some kind of machine with those strange tools.”

“Yeah, yeah, you never came looking for me. I had to always drag you out of the books because you forgot to eat.”

“The Vulcan metabolism—”

Christine reached out and pressed their hands together abruptly, catching two fingers in hers and T’Pring cut off. She looked at their joined hands, eyes wide, and opened her mouth to speak. But just then, the comm crackled, cutting her off.

“Shuttle’s requesting permission to dock.”

They looked at each other, fingers still locked tight. Wasn’t that some weird Vulcan kind of . . . kissing ?

“I’ll go tell them you need a few minutes,” McCoy said, and slipped out.

#

“I had it for a moment,” Christine said, releasing her grip on T’Pring’s hand. Like a slippery fish, she’d hooked that feeling, the intense way that other version of herself had felt about her T’Pring. It had felt like biting into an orange when you were dying of thirst, or cool water on a sprain. But it had been sucked away too quickly, dragged down into the searing ache of emptiness, as if inside her mind she was still attached to the vortex. And with it, it took the hope of ever being able to get those feelings back. It was only pain now, as if something had to fill that space, and it was a searing, cosmic ache of losing part of yourself.

T’Pring drew her hand back, curling it into her stomach as if there was a wound there. She nodded. “I did too.”

Christine dropped into McCoy’s office chair and let her head fall into her hands. “I hate this, I hate this, I hate this. Why didn’t they fucking leave us alone ?”

T’Pring stepped toward her and placed her hands on her back, rubbing down the fabric of the nurse’s jumpsuit. Christine lifted her head just enough to push her face into her stomach, cheek against the silky cloth of Vulcan, and they stayed like that, not touching skin, not bearing to feel that raw, empty space again, but still touching, until the grief became distant enough to have the intimacy feel awkward, and they drew back once more.

“We should ready ourselves,” T’Pring said quietly. “The shuttle will take you to the spaceport, and us to Ankeshtan K’til, and those memories--”

She stopped, as if what she’d intended to say, she no longer believed.

Christine gave her a long, dead-eyed look. “Nothing but echoes.”

They stayed silent for a long time after that. Then, finally, T’Pring took a deep breath and seemed to gain control of herself. Or, if not control, then understanding.

“I would like to stay friendly with you,” she said.

Christine’s eyes went wide.

“You are a worthy person. You, as you. ” She pressed her lips tight and looked away. “ I know we are not what we once were, but I still value your company.”

Christine’s shoulders, which had been taut like a drawn bow, relaxed, just a little, but enough. “I’d like that too.”

#

She finds her in a cleft in the rock. She finds her by the smell, the coppery blood, so much blood. She has to get her out to even see the wound, and there is just that one little gasp, the pain speaking its own word. Her blood is thick and sticky when it hits oxygen, and at least that means it doesn’t run free like a human’s and bleed you out in moments, but it is still bad, so bad, so bad. She doesn’t have anything here, no antibiotics, no sterile bandages. But she can carry her to the cave at least, clean the wounds with what she has, bandage them tight and hope, beg any lingering gods in this scrap of a universe to not let her be left alone here. She can’t bear to be left alone.

The fever comes. The wound is infected, and all she can do is bathe it, give her damp moss compresses and cover her with leaves when she shivers. Christine wraps her arms around her knees, head buried in them. She rocks, desperately, pleading silently with T’Pring because she doesn’t believe in anything else. I can’t lose you, I can’t lose you, I can’t lose you. Fuck, I love you so much.

She thinks quietly over the easiest ways to die if she’s left here alone.

The fever breaks. The oozy tar-like puss that gathered at the wound is gone. Instead the skin is knitting back together, scarring cleanly. When T’Pring’s eyes blink open, in them is the clarity and calm that had become so familiar in these few brief seasons. Christine lies down next to her and slowly reaches for her hand. At some point during the fever, touching her skin hadn’t done anything anymore, the sense of her mind, the rush of falling into it, stopped happening. But she hadn’t been scared that it had been a symptom of T’Pring beginning to die, because although the rush wasn’t there, her presence was. Even when asleep, Christine could tell when she’d gotten worse, when the fever was high, or the chills were shaking her body, or the wound was aching like someone had stuck their foot in it. She’d thought she was high, hallucinating from lack of sleep, but she was always right, so she stopped thinking about it.

But now in her eyes she can see the mirror of the feeling inside her head, the sense of cool interest, of fond wonder, the way T’Pring sees her. It’s like standing in a dressing room with mirrors reflecting mirrors, reflecting reflections of themselves. I can see you seeing me, and I know I’m filthy and exhausted and tear-streaked and broken, but in your eyes I look like someone worth holding onto.

T’Pring squeezes her hand and then moves in, laying her head on her shoulder and breathing out a soft, comforted sigh, and Christine stares up at the roof of the cave and wonders when she ended up here, feeling like she's been thrust out into space, flying like some kind of angel, but she's in the old universe's space, among all the stars and nebulae and comets, all near her, all visible, all awesome and awful and here.

Her fingers come to rest on T’Pring’s neck, where she can feel her pulse, and she lets her eyes shut. They’re okay. They’re okay, and they’re together, and even knowing that they’d lost an entire universe, she can’t imagine anything closer to a happy ending.

#

Chapter Text

2 Years Later

The campus coffeeshop wasn’t anything special, but it had tables outside, and after years cooped up on a starship, Christine liked being outside. She left the windows open in her classrooms, and even in the lab, she made sure there was natural light and a really good HVAC.

One of her grad students, Zhilu, who she’d poached from a colleague who was rumored to be a shit to his female students, had run into her there. They were talking about the project, and Zhilu’s first first-authored paper, when Christine got a beep on her PADD and glanced down to see the message. Reached campus. Unnecessarily large. There in 10. The brusque annoyance made her smile even as the thought of seeing T’Pring again strummed all of the chords of stress inside her.

“Good news?” Zhilu asked, with that hopeful tentativeness that all her grad students used around her. It was like when she seemed happy, they all tiptoed around to try and make it stay.

Christine wasn’t sure why they cared so much. It wasn’t like she got angry when she was depressed, just introverted. She shook her head. “I’m just meeting someone here. She’s on her way.”

“Oh,” Zhilu’s glance was one Christine had learned to recognize in her students (and Erica) who gossiped unnecessarily about her personal life. “A date ?”

Christine, horribly, found herself going red. Zhilu was not one of the students she’d expected the interrogation-direct from. She was super serious and as far as Christine’s own control of the gossip circuits knew, had never gone on a date in her life.

“ No ,” Christine protested, probably uselessly, after the Very Visible Blush. “Just a friend visiting from off planet.”

“Not Captain Ortegas,” Zhilu mused, as if her whole life had been reported to her graduate students at some point. Goddammit. Didn’t she work them hard enough so they had more to do than gossip about their professors? She sighed. If she was coy about it, it would only make things worse.

“Just a friend. You want to stick around and meet her?”

“Oh no!” Zhilu flapped her hands like Christine had asked her to watch her strip. “So much work to do, got to go!” and she fled.

T’Pring strode into the coffeeshop garden about two minutes later, and found Christine still laughing to herself. “What is amusing you?”

Then, of course, she couldn’t laugh anymore. It was still like that, every time she saw her face, like a long dead tree rooted deep inside her suddenly filled with sap and strained up through her, choking her.

They didn’t meet often; T’Pring was the embodiment of her strange, lingering grief, but she was also a friend. Sometimes it was a relief to spend a little time with the only other person who understood. In spite of the lurch of pain that had ended her laughter, Christine still wanted to smile at the sight of her.

“Students. If you notice someone spying on us, it’s one of my students. I think they all want me to date someone, like really badly.”

“Ah, they want you to be distracted so you are more slack in your organization of their lives,” T’Pring conjectured.

“That sounds about right. Can I get you something to drink?”

They got coffee (theris leaf tea for Christine and a three shot americano for T’Pring—Christine hadn’t asked about it, but caffeine did fuck all for Vulcans, and she had no idea how without that she’d managed to develop a taste for espresso ) and sat out in the Earth sunshine, slowly catching up since the last time they’d talked.

“You’ve cut your hair again.”

Christine played with the clipped ends. “Yeah, I realized I kind of missed it like this, no upkeep at all.”

T’Pring stirred her coffee. “Short suits you.”

It was nearing the end of Christine’s fourth semester at Archer and her genetics lab was shaping up to be very productive. She’d been meditating regularly, and though she wasn’t getting many new memories, her emotions weren’t so difficult to access. Or, maybe, the meditation just let her be more sensitive to what traces were left, and she had learned to grab onto the positive ones and play them up, building feedback loops inside her mind, so she could feel them for just a little longer.

“What are you up to on Earth? Some new pre-big-bang cult you’re investigating?”

“I only ended up involved in a cult one time .”

T’Pring had left Ankeshtan K’til, going to Xir’tan for a few months to study with various meditation masters and scholars of Surak to look for a purpose in this world. She had reportedly had a very logical discussion with Stonn, that it was impossible to know if she would ever be able to bond again, and though their relationship was meaningful to her, he needed to find a new betrothed. He had agreed. Since then she’d been tracing any research on what might have been here before the universe. Mostly there were theories, though there were a few references to contact with alien races who claimed to have been around even before the universe itself.

“Figure out the meaning of life yet?”

T’Pring shook her head. “Monks are so boring, whether Vulcan or Bajoran. I am not actually all that interested in the intricacies of ethical behavior. I want to understand the origins of the universe .”

“Did my grandiosity rub off on you?”

T’Pring gave her a wry look. “I blame you for most of the troubles I have in my life.”

“Except the ones directly attributable to Spock.”

They nodded and clinked mugs.

It was a struggle to pretend they were just ordinary friends. Being near T’Pring could be physically painful, triggering aches and pains and neuralgia, all made worse by touch, and it also brought that strange double-seeing where every once in a while Christine would catch sight of her face and it wouldn’t be her face, it would be the other one’s. Expectations would rise up in her, for some expression she’d expect to see turned on her, warmth, or heat, or earnest excitement, and it wouldn’t be there. When T’Pring’s eyes turned on her, they would be still and contemplative and thoughtful, and they wouldn’t be the ones she wanted to see at all.

They avoided talking about the past. That wasn’t the point of their friendship. It was only a sore spot, a difficult place, something gone that couldn’t return. It was better to stay focused on the present and future, the search for a new purpose, because that was what they had to do, they had to find something, anything that would make them forget they’d been broken.

Maybe seeing each other was a mistake, because it was a reminder, and usually afterwards Christine had at least a month of not wanting to get out of bed. But there was no real possibility of forgetting, so a reminder was not inherently a bad thing.

When they said goodbye there was just a bare brush of T’Pring’s fingertip down the side of Christine’s hand. It felt like a blunt knife cutting to the bone. Christine made sure to smile as T’Pring turned and walked away, keeping it fixed in place, even as the soul inside her—not hers—rose up in bewildered desperation. Where are you going? Why are you leaving me again? Don’t you know you’re supposed to stay?

Then she turned and nearly jumped out of her skin. Zhilu was standing there, backpack full of books, hands full of coffee, with her eyes wide.

“Are you stalking me?”

“I just got back from the library for more coffee!” Zhilu protested. “I didn’t think you’d still be here. It’s been three hours .”

Christine winced. Three hours wasn’t unusual for her and T’Pring. They talked slowly and with a lot of pauses, but extensively, about everything. Her students would definitely get the wrong idea.

“I didn’t mean to spy. But I saw you still there when I arrived, and then when I got out with my coffee, you were saying goodbye.”

She’d seen them say goodbye. She’d seen enough to know T’Pring was a Vulcan, and they hadn’t said goodbye in a way that was neutral for a Vulcan. Fuck. What conjectures had she made?

“Yeah?” Christine said, not able to keep the exhausted suspicion out of her voice.

Zhilu made a pained face. “She’s pretty.”

“Mhmm,” Christine said, a little stiffly. Pretty was not the word. T’Pring had never looked less than goddess-level perfect, even when injured and covered in mud.

Zhilu looked mortified, and Christine felt bad. She sighed. “You could have said hello. I would have introduced you. And you can tell the grad student rumor mill that she is not my girlfriend.”

“What is she, then?” Zhilu asked, and then looked horrified, as if she hadn’t meant to. “I know it’s none of my business. But the way you were when you were talking—and then the saying goodbye. You just, it was like--”

“What did we look like?” Christine asked, suddenly curious. She’d never really thought about how they came off to outsiders before. There was so much between them, but it wasn't them, not really, so she’d kind of figured they were mostly stealth about it.

Zhilu made a grimace that was clearly humiliated. “I-- look, I don’t know. You looked like . . . this couple from my favorite holo program who got together for five minutes before life pulled them apart, and they’re still in love, but they lost too much by being in love, and they can’t risk feeling that way again.”

Christine didn’t speak for a long time. Really? Did they look like they were still in love? “Oh,” she said, finally.

“I’m so sorry. I should never have said that. I don’t know anything. I was just making things up because of the hand touch. Oh god. It was probably perfectly polite, and I just know nothing about Vulcan manners. Is she your sister-in-law or something? I’m--”

Christine held up a hand to stop the flood of apologies. “No, no. And . . . well. You aren’t that far off. We were—” This was too difficult to explain. There really weren’t any words for it. She sighed. “Just call her my ex-wife.”

Zhilu froze. Christine was pretty sure she’d confirmed a lot of the questions her grad students had been debating. They’d been desperate to know if she was queer, what sort of people she dated, and if she had a tragic romantic past (she blamed Erica for getting them on to that one). Welp, there was the yes for 1 & 3, and hot Vulcan women for #2.

“I-- I’m so sorry. I really didn’t know anything, or want to assume anything. I just thought it, and I should never, have ever said it.”

“It’s fine,” Christine said. “I asked. And pushed.” She shook her head. “But just say hi next time. I’ll introduce you. She’s . . . pretty great. You’ll like her.”

Zhilu paused. “Your . . . ex- wife?”

Christine pressed a finger to her lips. “No more questions. I need to stay a little mysterious, don’t I?”

She let her go with a smile, but walking home she felt empty and sick. You still love each other, you just can’t risk feeling that way again. Was that true? Did that have anything to do with it? She didn’t love her. That was the problem. She knew what it was like to love her, to need her like air. Now she just liked her. They managed to get along. Shared experiences did that, and though the experiences were a little unusual, they were definitely shared. It wouldn’t have been hard to have her around more. Except of course, that it was hard, it was always hard to see her, because even the good things, they weren’t enough.

Maybe if she’d never remembered anything from that other planet, she would have thought this was enough, that the faint sense of pleasure and casual attraction she felt around T’Pring was the height of romance. Or was at least a good romance, and not one of her desperate ill-fated crushes.

But she couldn’t even appreciate feeling good with that weight of loss breaking her down all the time.

In her apartment she fell into the twin-size bed and pressed her hands to her face. Was she ever going to be okay? She’d been working so hard, staying busy, staying focused, but she didn’t care about this world anymore. The science was interesting because it was a puzzle, but the fame? Who cared about that? She looked after her students because they needed to be looked after. But even Erica had called her out on her lack of ambition.

“You’re more fun than you used to be, but I don’t know if you’re better. Where are you going, Christine? It seems like you’re just . . . existing.”

“Isn’t that normal?” Christine had asked. “That’s what you do as an adult, isn’t it? There’s . . . nowhere else to go.”

Erica scrunched up her face. “Yeah, people in the 21 st century just existed when the only thing you could accomplish with your life was a number in your bank account, and you’d realized the planet was dying and your bosses were so interested in their own bank account numbers that they didn’t see you as a person anymore. Then acceptance of existing as a win on its own was part of being an adult. But we don’t have to live like that anymore. We don’t . So why are you?”

She’d pretended to laugh, like she’d never really thought about it, but the answer had been obvious to her. She wasn’t sure why Erica hadn’t guessed it.

Because I can’t have any of the things I want.

“What do you want, babygirl?”

I want to go home.

#

The knock came on her hotel room door at 3 in the morning. If T’Pring hadn’t been on a completely different time zone, she would have slept right through it, but she didn’t. She commed out. “Who is it?”

“Me.”

There was no surprise there. She’d known. Who else would knock on her door at 3am on Earth?

She opened the door.

Outside, Christine stood with her hair tousled, jeans and a t-shirt with a striped pajama top over it. “Hi,” she said.

“Nashaut,” T’Pring said. The word spilled out, even though it shouldn’t have. Or, perhaps, it should. Some part of her still acknowledged Christine as her adun’a, even if it meant nothing now.

Christine shut her eyes for one desperate moment. Then she was stepping in, one arm looping around her waist, pulling her body close, the other cupping her thigh and slipping over the silky fabric of her plain sleeping shift. She was taking hold of her chin and moving it just enough to lean down and claim her mouth. The touch burned. It burned like a grater running over an oozing wound. And yet, it also felt like the ache of a stretching muscle, like the sort of pain that made you feel alive. When, for a moment, their lips parted, T’Pring had to gasp for breath.

“I’m sorry,” Christine stammered. “I know it hurts. I know it hurts. But I want it anyway. I feel terrible around you, but it’s more than I feel at any other time. I just-- I’d rather feel terrible than nothing at all.”

T’Pring rested her fingertips on the sides of Christine’s head, her thumbs at the bend in her jaw. She could feel the raw despair, how it dragged at her, pulled her down into the dead space where nothing mattered, there was nothing to hold onto. T’Pring was a drawbridge that for a moment was down, and if Christine just lunged far enough she thought that maybe she could cling to it and not fall.

It wouldn’t work. T’Pring was too flimsy, too precariously balanced above her own deep, painful well. There was nothing in this world that would make up for what they’d lost. They’d lost the ability to let it. So she nodded. It would hurt, but life hurt, good things hurt, and it would feel like something besides white hot rage. She slowly drew Christine’s pajama top off her shoulders, and then reached back to unfasten her shift and let it slide down her body. “I want it too.”

#

She knew this skin, knew each finger as she kissed fingertip after fingertip. She grinned as T’Pring traced a line down her nose and across both lips and then leaned in to bite gently at the skin of her throat. They’d fallen together a hundred thousand times, in reality or in her mind, on rotting leaves, against a tree, against a bookshelf, sweaty in the late summer heat, coming together with cool water lapping around their thighs. Angry or tired or lonely, your body under my hands is something immediate and quiet to attend to. Sometimes I'm not even doing anything, just cupping skin and pressing my nose to your hair and feeling you breathe, knowing you’re close.

Was it any different in a bed, kneeling over her, leaning in and feeling that lurch of anguish with each kiss, each brush of skin? Maybe they’d just become desensitized by the end of it, or maybe they would fall so deeply into the pain it would end up being a safe place.

It hurts being with you, but hurting is better than the dead feeling of being alone.

“Are you all right?” T’Pring touched the side of her head.

She’d felt the vibration from the sound Christine made against the inside of her thigh. Christine lifted her head, panting and pained, but still licking arousal off her lips. “It feels like getting struck by fucking lightning, I won’t say it doesn’t. But I’m not going to stop.”

T’Pring traced her sticky mouth with her fingertips. “My anger burned him too much for him to touch me. He said that wasn’t important, but I know it was one reason he wanted to leave.”

Christine’s mouth flexed, and through the pain, T’Pring sensed furious indignation. She’d trusted Stonn to do his best for T’Pring, but he’d failed. “I’d rather die here than stop before I make you come again.”

They had always been competitive and so it was easy to work hard at dragging pleasure from each other’s bodies. I want to make you feel good, so good. I want it to show you that there is enough left of the way you feel about me to make this worth it. I want to be worth it to you.

The aching in every bone, every muscle, every nerve grew more and more the longer they touched. But the pain was mixed with a strange feeling, a sensation of living roots filling and growing, and then, with their bodies tangled together, every inch of skin painfully sensitized, T’Pring’s fingers crooked inside her, Christine’s head thrown back, the linking happened.

The blunt burnt off stubs of the bond opened, raw and wounded, and pressed together, like ground, bloody flesh, like someone trying to reattach a severed finger by force. It grew shoots, tendrils, that shot out, wrapping around the angry stubs, forcing them together.

The pain was endless.

They pulled apart as quickly as possible, but it didn’t stop. The bond had reformed in some damaged, awful way. Christine was curled in a ball, holding her head and whimpering. T’Pring clenched the bedside table so hard the veneered wood crumbled under her fingers. She put a hand to her head, doubled over her knees, retched, tried desperately to remember the mantra for pain.

Then she found the comm to the main desk.

“I need a than-tha. It’s an emergency.”

#

Chapter Text

“Have you seen your friend lately?” Zhilu was smiling as best she could, but the worry was clear on her face.

Christine just stared at her. “Who?” She couldn’t find enough inside her to do anything about the worry, not even to smile. What was the point?

“Um, your-- your friend. The Vulcan— your . . . ex-wife?”

Christine couldn’t really feel her face. She couldn’t feel anything except those new, clean, horrible scars that the than-tha had left behind, when they’d rebonded and it had been worse than being broken. “No,” she said.

“Oh.” Zhilu looked so worried, and it sucked to make all her grad students so distressed about her. But she just-- she couldn’t do any more. She couldn’t pretend to reassure them. She didn’t have the energy. “Sorry.”

Christine’s mouth worked, and then she shut her eyes. “Just-- can you just get back to it?”

“Yeah, of course.”

#

The than-tha had wanted explanations. With Christine a huddled heap wrapped in a sheet on the bed, and her own body raw with the pain that had sluiced through her like falling water, T’Pring hadn’t had any patience for curiosity. She’d responded with cold and ugly invective, and the dignified and respectable Vulcan psychic medic had looked incredibly insulted and stormed off, but T’Pring didn’t care. She needed painkillers and to be alone with her rage and grief.

There was no way back. There really was no way back.

It was why, a few months later, she was surprised but not surprised to get a tightbeam call from Christine. The monastery only had one transmitter, and so she’d been summoned from the pre-kohlinar training to sit in the tiny dark closet with the screen flickering in front of her.

Christine looked dreadful, all dark circles under her eyes and unwashed hair. She hadn’t looked that terrible after a debilitating stomach ailment on the planet. T’Pring knew she herself was not at her best. Kohlinar was nothing she wanted, but there were no more options available to her. At least she had the hope of permanent numbness without recourse to suicide. Christine did not have that option.

“Hey,” Christine said, her voice rough.

T’Pring inclined her head, not quite trusting her voice.

“Doing okay?”

“No. But that is to be expected.”

For a moment it looked like Christine might smile, even a tiny bit, but she didn’t. Instead she stared vaguely over T’Pring’s left shoulder. Then she seemed to come back to herself, and she looked at T’Pring. There was something broken and desperate in her eyes. “I want-- I want to go home,” she said.

There were many possible interpretations of that sentence, but there was only one that would be offered to T’Pring. Still she could not be sure.

“What do you mean?”

Christine’s face went tight and then slack and then she breathed. “I know it’s-- I know it could be just like dying. It’s leaving everything, not knowing if we’ll ever come back. I know it’s not a magic cure. I know even if we go, we’ll still be these versions of us. Maybe it will make everything worse. But it’s the only thing I want. I don’t want anything I used to want. I don’t feel anything I used to feel. And we were so close, weren’t we? We were going to figure out what had happened to that planet, learn to use the time loom and free it from its vortex. We didn’t get a chance to finish. And maybe that’s all it is, unfinished business. But it’s the last thing I remember wanting, and I want to want it again. I want to go home.”

T’Pring took a long breath. The idea shook her. “You want to run away.”

Christine’s lips curled in an involuntary smile. “I’m going to run away. Run away with me.”

Go home . T’Pring had never thought of it in those terms. It wasn’t home. Home was the clan house, always. But she’d been back to her clan house, and it had felt like a place full of strangers. Everyone could sense her damage, her inability to control her rage, and they veered around her, made uncomfortable by her presence. She’d sought something to do, something to focus on, to give her next hundred years purpose, but nothing had felt worth it. And now everything was too hard. Simply living, feeling, existing was too hard.

Would it be easier again if she could confront that unfinished business? She’d have to start from scratch with the runes, but she’d done it before. She could do it again. And if they never made it back? Well, this time she would have a chance to say goodbye.

“All right.”

Christine looked exhausted and opened her mouth, and then, as if the words had taken this long to register, astonishment crossed her face and she closed her mouth again, recalibrating what she was going to say. “All right?” she repeated.

T’Pring let her eyes fall shut. “I want to go home too.”

#

Stonn’s new apartment suited him very much. He had married soon after they’d dissolved their arrangement, and his clan had found him a very good new match. His wife was young and appealing. Her previous fiancée had died in an unfortunate accident. T’Pring suspected that they were quite relieved that Stonn had seen logic and decided to end his relationship with her, and thus rewarded him with the best the adult marriage market had to offer.

They had been cool and logical all through the decision to end things. Cool because ever since they had left Enterprise, when she had reached for him, he had been one step too far away. She suspected one aspect of his retreat was the pure madness of anything associated with the Enterprise. He had become friendly with Dr. McCoy during his time there, and the doctor had spoken of their many adventures, all of which would make Stonn’s tidy, logical soul recoil. The other part, of course, was that he had cared for her, and he had continued to care for her when he believed her the victim of a terrible plot by Sybok. Once he was aware that the damage she’d suffered had been a result of her losing the five years she’d spent of her life on an alien planet with a woman who had—in his simple and direct understanding—become her wife, the term ‘victim’ became obscured by ‘widow’, and his role as ‘protector’ and ‘helpmeet’ had become ‘pale replacement.’

He was wrong, of course, infuriatingly wrong. But it was a comprehensible mistake.

His wife welcomed her into their house and brought tea, and T’Pring could feel her eyes on her, anxious and uncertain. T’Pring had a faint wash of grim pleasure at her discomfort. Even damaged, she could still be considered admirable enough to be a threat.

“What brings you to my home?” Stonn inquired, when he was seated across from her and his wife had, clearly reluctantly, made herself scarce.

“I am here to offer a farewell.”

“We have previously undergone the rituals of parting.”

T’Pring nodded. “I am glad to see that the decision has worked well for you.”

Stonn’s shoulders shifted in a very slight way that said those words had brought him discomfort. T’Pring waited. “I had no aim of abandoning you.”

The very easy fury lit itself on fire. But you did. She didn’t need to say so. He knew what he had done. And of course the reasoning for them to separate had been perfectly logical, but the impetus—he couldn’t deny it. She’d felt the tension and jealousy and confusion he’d had, then quickly handled, around Dr. Chapel. And worse, she'd noticed how when he'd looked at her, he'd begun to see her from a greater and greater distance, the expression of emotion at the touch of her hand more restrained and cautious. “I am aware.”

Stonn hesitated. She made him uncomfortable. That was one thing she was very good at. “I still cannot quite understand why you are here.”

“I am returning to the planet inside the time vortex.”

Stonn visibly recoiled. It made the affection she’d once had for him return. He had felt that news strongly. What had passed between them had been real; its echoes lingered. “Why-- why would you choose that?”

“Because it is one of the two remaining options that have a reasonable chance of bringing me peace.”

“It is illogical,” Stonn said—too quickly, not giving what she had said full consideration. “It was a dangerous accident that sent you there in the first place. It is dangerous to even attempt to make passage there again. And then once there—the planet is also dangerous. And there is no way of returning that will not damage your memories and your katra further.”

“There is one. The ancient technology remaining on the planet could be used to bring the planet into phase with the rest of our universe.”

Stonn scoffed. “You could never manage to comprehend that enough to get it to work.”

T’Pring shrugged. “Christine will be with me. I have no doubt that with our concerted efforts we will be able to solve it given sufficient time.”

Stonn’s face went still. “This is the human’s plan, is it?”

“She suggested it.”

“No wonder it is foolish. But you will go along with it, because it is her. Leave the human to make her own mistakes. Your troubles are not that you cannot exist in this world, but just that you are dissatisfied with its options. It is arrogant and grasping to believe that you deserve more than any of us get. It is not suitable to a follower of Tu-Surak.”

“You criticize this about me?” T’Pring felt the anger rise, but this one was the kind that was the closest she got to delight anymore. This was an argument she could win. “You believe I am arrogant, that I want too much, when I can have nothing ? The scars Spock left in my mind make me unfit for marriage, they have left me with a level of emotional regulation that makes me unfit for the forms of employment I am trained for. Because of both of these facts, I am now an unfit daughter to carry forward the reputation of my clan. What else is left? Only the kohlinar, and I already know what it feels like to lose a portion of my emotions. I know that I do not want to lose the rest of them. But I have been pursuing that because no other choice was available. Why should I not take the one thing that I actually want?”

“What is that?” Stonn asked coldly. “Dr Chapel?”

Had he actually said that? Had he lied to himself sufficiently to believe their relationship was more than co-sufferers and hesitant friends? He could not imagine how painful that conjecture was. Christine was the one thing she could never have. They had proven that, by the unbearable pain of their rebonding. They would have to be incredibly careful to not invite a repeat event when alone on a planet without any psionic specialists to save them from their idiocy. But living with the ghosts of their past lives would be better than this—where everyone made assumptions and dismissed the unbearable weight of those missing parts of themselves. T’Pring took a long, tired breath. “She requires my assistance.”

“Do you think that going there will allow you to recover your memories fully, reform your bond, heal the damage until you are just those people who should never have left that planet?”

“It will not.” She did not even have to conjecture.

“Then what is the purpose of going?”

T’Pring considered this. “It is to fulfill the fate I was meant for.”

Stonn’s brow furrowed. “ Fate? What role does fate have in any of this? It was random chance you ended up on that planet together. You bonded, but what other choice did you have? We know telepathic bonds are an adaptive strategy for community protection. There is nothing essential drawing you together. Yes, you went through the same experience, but your obsession with her is irrational. You could have simply taught her the basics of meditation and left, but instead you worked with her every day for months, as if you wanted the opportunity to reform your bond again.”

Jealousy. T’Pring smiled very tightly. He had stewed in it long enough for it to replace his logic. Pathetic. Especially when he was the one who had pointed out that regardless how necessary her bond with Christine had seemed, it was not a forced choice. One option could always be refused. But simply because she had not refused, that did not make their bond romantic or desirable. It had not made her feelings for Christine any more important than her feelings for Stonn, and worst of all, his drawing away had disregarded her choices. (Not that you could help it when your feelings changed, but she still wished he would have told her what concerned him, confessed the moment when he had doubted them enough to begin to close the door on his feelings for her.) “I disagree.”

“What?”

“I don’t believe in random chance. I don’t believe in forced choices. There was something essential drawing us together. We ended up on that planet together because there was no other way we could have acted.”

“That is nonsense. Fate is only spoken of by credulous primitives.”

“It is simply logic. The reason I did not end up on the planet alone was because Christine acted according to her principles. She was brave and foolish enough to make the attempt to save me, and so we ended up there together. I was taken captive by Sybok because I was stubborn and kept attempting to claim Spock even though we clearly had nothing in common anymore. Christine was desperately lonely, so she fixated on Spock who would be a reliable love interest who did not demand anything of her. Thus she also became Sybok’s target. We ended up there together because we chose over and over again to pursue our needs and act according to our characters. Falling in love and bonding could only be the result of the same choices.”

“You were alone on the planet. In that context—”

“The context was determined by our choices. As I explained.”

Stonn took a long breath and regained his emotional control. “So you do hope to get it back. You will throw away every chance of mending yourself and your life for her.”

T’Pring shook her head. “We cannot get it back. That has been . . . confirmed. All I hope to get is a little relief from the pressures of being who I used to be in this world when I no longer am that person. And to fulfill the duty I have given myself.”

“What duty is that?”

“The ancients on the planet left a telepathic key to their language. It was only a small clue, but they believed it was sufficient to then deduce the rest of their language on logical principles. Although they knew that their universe was dying, and had no hope of their ruins being discovered by anyone, they nonetheless left the key, so that in case, in case of impossible things , their story would not be lost. Perhaps I will be unsuccessful, but this task of understanding their texts and their memory is the one I chose when I was there before, and I have yet to complete it. I have decided it. I will be their impossible thing.”

Stonn looked entirely blank. “Oh,” he said. He had no response to this.

“I am telling you this so that if we do not return, you will be able to explain to my clan where I have gone. I do not wish to advertise our departure, as I am certain that Starfleet would be displeased by our opening an experimental time vortex with the intent of adjusting the fabric of the universe to include a new solar system. And Spock still believes he rescued us. I doubt he would like to hear that we are trying to unrescue ourselves.”

“I-- you trust me with this?”

T’Pring stared at him, feeling her mouth work as she fought the real source of anger inside her. “I have trusted you with everything. You know more than I told anyone else. I let you feel more than anyone else. So I am trusting you with this too.”

If he did not realize how vulnerable she had let herself be around him, and how much she despised being vulnerable, he would never understand what their relationship had meant to her. So she was giving him this last chance.

He stared at his hands for a long time. Then he spoke. “Dr McCoy showed me the video he had of you.”

Something settled in T’Pring’s throat, right at the core of her chest. “Did he?”

“I could not imagine you ever being so affectionate and familiar with me.”

T’Pring swallowed but the lump in her chest only grew. “And that . . . made you doubt my feelings?”

“You said that you could never feel the same about me that you had about her.”

“I said that I did not have that range of emotion anymore. I could not feel it about anything . Not even my family or the places I have always loved.”

“You spent so much time with her. You spoke of the memories like they were little gifts. You shared physical affection with her, kissed her, actively attempting to get your mutual feelings back. When I saw the way you interacted, I knew that what you wanted was not something I could give you.”

T’Pring took a slow, deep breath, but everything in her had already combusted and the fire was roaring merrily. “Dr. Chapel is a human. Humans do not understand the purity of a bonded pair standing side by side and addressing the world with a union of minds and of certainty. They do not act for their clans, and they do not hesitate to demand physical touch even from people who dislike it. I know humans hold themselves up as the only species in the known universe that understand romantic affection, but that doesn’t mean you must believe that their way is the only way. Do you think I would not have had to adjust? Do you think she had not been forced to learn to respect my boundaries? If, in that video, we had come to a level of comfort and familiarity with each other, it was because we had five years to do nothing else. But would I have been happy with someone whose logic matched my own, who I could understand without endless arguments, who knew instinctively what made me comfortable and what was unpleasant? For so long, that was all I wanted. That was why I relied on you more than anyone else.” She closed her eyes and put away her anger. “So I am asking this of you, because I relied on you, and for a time, at least, you were there.”

Stonn bent his head, tension in his body showing that he had heard her. Then he nodded. “I will accept your charge. If you do not return, I will inform your clan of your decision.”

“Thank you.”

T’Pring wondered as she left, bidding goodbye to his wife, if she was disappointed in him. She did not think he even truly wished her to return. This was a relief for him, to have her troubles out of his life.

She knew if they had bonded, it would not have lasted. At some point, she suspected, that even if she had never fallen into the vortex, she would have realized that her life, spent doing what she was told, was not enough, and she would go and seek something more.

Stonn did not need anything more. It was an unpleasant comparison, but perhaps this was something she had in common with Spock, this knowledge that being obedient to others’ wishes could only do so much. In the end you had to obey the mandates of your own soul.

#

“You’re serious,” Erica said, hands gripped tight around her beer.

Christine sat across from her in the one non-student bar in collegetown, and twiddled with the straw in her grenadine seltzer. “Yeah. I wanted to tell you in person.”

“It’s a suicide mission,” Erica said, her face going taut and angry in a way that didn’t suit it.

“It’s really not,” Christine said, trying not to look at her face when it was like that. That wasn’t what she wanted to remember.

“But you-- there’s only one way to come back, and it’s impossible. ”

Christine shrugged. “Might be impossible, might not. But that doesn’t mean it’s a suicide mission. It’s-- it’s the opposite of that.”

The sounds of the too expensive bar echoed between them. Erica stared down into her beer. “Don’t say that.”

“I said it because I meant it,” Christine said softly.

Erica dropped her head into her hand.

“I’ve done everything I can, Erica. I’ve gotten off Enterprise, and out of Spock’s orbit. I’m doing something that’s fine, and what I wanted, and I still feel aimless and wounded. I’m not alive. I’m living, but I’m not alive.”

“Isn’t living good enough?” Erica asked.

Christine met her gaze. “You were the one who told me not to settle for good enough.”

Erica threw her head back and puffed out air through her lips. “Yeah, but I didn’t mean go back to the planet that was trying to kill you! Everything you told me about that place was miserable . You were either too hot or too cold. You wore the same clothing for six months , until it basically disintegrated, and then you like, wore leaves .”

“It wasn’t leaves . We’d gotten fibers from the stems of these spiny bushes and managed to rig a hand loom so the leaf strips would form the weft—”

“Yes, my aunt does that with bay leaves. You don’t wear it as clothes . And like, there were fucking wild animals. You were like, oh yes, we had to hide from the monkey-lion—”

“We actually think they’re on the verge of a kind of sapience that we might be able to communicate—”

“And then you were like, some kind of evil invisible unicorn gored T’Pring and she nearly died. And the insects, you’ve told me so many stories about insects. I cannot even imagine .”

“I know,” Christine said. “I know . And I still want to go back. Yes, I was miserable there, but I’m miserable here. And when I was happy there, I was happier than I’ve ever been in my life.”

Erica glared at her. “Because you got laid regularly and never had to use an alarm clock.”

Christine forced a tiny grin to show her appreciation. If Erica could joke about it, she was coming around. “You really know me.”

Erica punched her arm. “Shut up.”

“I mean it though. I was happy. I was so happy that I noticed it enough to write it all over my memories. I’d stand in front of an alien machine, or in the sun on a hillside, or put my face in T’Pring’s neck and breathe in, and I’d just feel it. It’s a long shot, but maybe if I go back, I’ll remember what it’s like to feel that way again.”

Erica’s shoulders drooped. “What about us? We used to just get drunk and hang out and laugh together. Wasn’t that a good time?”

Christine nodded. “It was a great time. But I can’t do that with you anymore. I can’t drink.”

Erica stared at her grenadine and seltzer. “Yeah, I noticed you weren’t drinking. I didn’t ask, because I didn’t want to make it weird. But I don’t understand where it came from. Why?”

Christine breathed. It took focused effort to confess this. “Because, ever since I– after the goddamn than-tha cut the zombie bond out of of my head, all that weight I've been holding up got a thousand times heavier. I don’t laugh when I’m drunk anymore. I stop being able to move. And sometimes I think I might just become part of the chair, just never move again. Sometimes I remember that there are hyposprays in the case under my bed that will make me become inanimate, just like that chair, and I’ll just . . . stop. And knowing I can’t ever find a way to be happy like I used to, it’s hard to come up with a reason not to just pull one out and finish it. So I stay sober, where I can remember that I have a class tomorrow, or a student counting on me for an eval, or you, waiting for me to text you back. That’s why I don’t drink.”

Erica’s face was still, but it looked like it was the veneer over a shattered mirror. She swallowed hard. “You think this will help? You really think this will help?”

Christine shrugged. “I feel better when I imagine doing it than I have for years . ”

Erica’s jaw set. “Fine. Then let’s get you back there. I’ll take you. No reason I can’t pop over to some coordinates on one of our little hops. The Gallant is at your service.”

That was way more than she’d expected. “ Erica . I couldn’t ask you—”

“No. Babe. I love you. If this is your one chance to get back to feeling okay, then I’m behind you, a thousand percent. That means I’m taking you, and hanging around for like a day or two, just to see if you get that loom working, or whatever it is.”

Christine closed her hands into fists, trying to resist her desire, then couldn’t resist and couldn’t figure out why she was even trying. She slid off her stool, darted around the table, and crushed Erica in a hug. She could feel the judders in Erica’s body as she held back tears.

It was goodbye. They could talk about getting the loom working all they wanted, but who knew what would happen if they did. It could disintegrate the whole planet, shoot them billions of years into the past or future. It was a project, not a doorway.

Hope wasn’t the point. Action was. They had to do something , and this was the last thing Christine could think of to do.

The planet was waiting.

#

Chapter Text

T’Pring had no one to embrace before they brought the time vortex to life. The Gallant had towed a small junked ship to the coordinates Sybok had used and then they’d borked the warp drive. She watched Christine cling fiercely to Captain Ortegas and wondered if this was a human ritual, or if there was just no one T’Pring needed to bid goodbye to in that way. Perhaps she had accepted their fate more fully. But when Christine turned away, her face shuttered, T’Pring knew that this was a last resort choice for her. They were the same in that way. They could acknowledge that they were loved, but could not return it in the way it needed to be returned.

Christine slung up her pack—they would not be unprepared this time—and gave her a wry glance, that T’Pring knew once would have involved a shoulder jostle. “Ready?”

“Yes,” T’Pring said. Her own pack was on, the straps adjusted. She carried another case as well, and she was mentally prepared also. Christine was always trying to perform four emotions at once—a human error—but beneath their hollow shells: cockiness, bravery, hope, excitement; she could tell that she was also ready. Past ready.

“Let’s do it.”

Christine nodded to Erica who grimaced, but then hit the switch, backing away to a safe distance. Before them, the time vortex whirred to life, pulsing and sending strange echoes through their bodies. Christine carefully hooked an arm through hers, making sure that they had no skin contact, and they stepped through.

#

The shattering rewrite of existence sent them crashing to earth, all their supplies scattering. Above them rose trees so tall and dark and endless that the possibility of sky seemed imaginary. The forest smelled deep and emphatic like pine-pitch with juniper aerosols. The air was cool but still damp. The sounds of life, moving beasts and strange insects filled the forest. There was a sense of familiarity without memory.

Christine lay on the leaf-mold, body limp and nerveless, staring up at the thick canopies. She could feel nothing except a bone-deep relaxation. Everything was still empty, still muted and quiet inside her, but some of the pain seemed to be gone. Why? But the reason was easy to identify. It was all of the pain from trying . 

She’d been trying so hard to be better, to be functional, to be who people expected her to be. But here there was no one who expected her to be anything but what she was. It was a relief to be free of expectations. She let her eyes fall shut and lay there, listening to the sounds, breathing the scented air.

“Are you going to lie there all day?”

It had been a while, maybe even a full hour. But T’Pring’s voice, cool and measured, slid into her ears without disturbing the sense of calm.

“Maybe.”

Christine opened her eyes. T’Pring was sitting up on the roots of a massive tree, legs crossed, poised and calm in a position familiar from all those mornings of meditation. Seeing her here had that same strange doubling effect that she often had with T’Pring, but this time, with this quiet background of trees and scents and sounds, the doubling was so strong it almost seemed to devour the T'Pring she knew. How could this be anything but the girl from her fragmented memories, cool and patient, playful and kind? But the deeply skeptical quirk of her eyebrow pulled Christine back into reality.

“That is probably an unwise plan.”

Christine casually propped herself up on her elbows. “I don’t see you getting yourself going all that quickly.”

“I found a place to rest that did not involve inviting insects into my clothing. Also, there are problems to be solved. If you are attentive, I think you will notice that we are not in the same environment as previously. Two hypotheses come to mind. Either the time dilation effect continued at pace and we are a thousand years in the future, or we have translated ourselves to a different location on the planet’s surface."

There was a new tone in her voice, a low key intensity. It struck a similar string inside Christine and made it resonate. A challenge, already, a problem to solve. It wasn't those raw feelings, joy and peace and excitement, but without the relentless grief and hopelessness, even mild interest felt like a bright and colorful bird, just peeking its head out from behind that familiar gray cloud.

Christine looked around. She’d felt it already, but this was definitely not quite the same climate they’d been in before. This was . . . a higher latitude rainforest, perhaps? She sat up fully, and brushed leaf remains off the back of her jacket. “All right,” she said, pressing her hands onto her knees and leaning a little forward. “How do we figure out which?”

#

It was a long hike, with too many back-and-forths, bivouacking and taking turns keeping watch while sleeping. This part of the planet was unfamiliar, but it seemed to only have smaller predators, not the monkey-lions they’d known before. They’d been able to figure out that their previous camp was somewhere to the northeast. But that didn’t tell them about bodies of water or mountain ranges or other barriers between them and it. At least the alien tech functioned like a beacon that the tricorders could pick up on, so they would make it there, if they were stubborn enough.

The relief that had made this world already better than the last one faded quickly with physical exhaustion and frustration. Christine fought through the tiredness, the discomfort, and the frustration of having to stay away from T'Pring, being careful not to brush skin on skin, attempting to stay focused on their goal.

But w hen Christine grew quiet and turned inward, T'Pring, her friend this time, noticed and would drop back to walk at her side. Sometimes she would ask what was wrong and talk her out of it. Sometimes she'd distract her with other curious thoughts or discussions, and sometimes she would just stay near, and her presence itself helped push away the cloud. 

Once, while being distracting, T’Pring related her new theory of fate—interesting enough that it drew Christine right back into the world. "It makes sense," she said. "Why else would we have landed so close to the time loom?"

T'Pring scowled at her. "You do not understand my theory at all. Finding the time loom is good evidence, but ending up near it had nothing to do with it."

“We would have found something,” T’Pring added. “Because you’re the sort of person who looks for things. You are irritatingly curious.”

At that, Christine felt an odd flutter inside her. Yes , she remembered how to feel curious. It had been so difficult for so long, but here, without the weight of loss, loss, loss, she felt it like a tiny green sprout coming up through dark soil. Yes. She was curious. That wasn't just an emotion, it was part of her character. 

“Here’s my challenge to your theory,” she responded. “You say that we ended up where we are because of our characteristics—because we acted like ourselves. So why are we here now? Why did we decide to come back? Is it because of some essential self that wasn’t lost with our damage, or is it because of who we became via the loss itself?”

T’Pring considered this, clearly irritated, which made Christine sure it had been a good question.

“No,” she said finally. “It cannot be the essential self. I don’t believe in personality as an atemporal entity. If I recall correctly, I think that just before you joined the Enterprise, the crew of the Enterprise had had a long shore leave, correct?”

Christine nodded. “They had been in space dock for a while. I think it was a couple of months—long enough for our XO to get sent on another mission.”

T’Pring nodded. “Spock returned to Vulcan, grieving for his lost sister. He was soft and vulnerable and unsure. He seemed to enjoy spending time with me, particularly if I made efforts to keep him distracted. It was the first time we had connected as adults. I found him very attractive, and he did not seem to mind if I teased him or was playful with him. I was also on leave, and we became close. If, at that time, Sybok had escaped, he could not have lured me with the same lies he used, because I was confident in Spock’s affection and in myself. My personality was different. I would not have ended up in the time vortex. It was only due to the later events—Spock abandoning me the night we became officially engaged, the way he became more comfortable on the Enterprise than with me, the way he began responding to my teasing with shame, and, of course, you, that made me insecure enough to listen to that very irritating man.”

“You’re saying your personality changed that much that quickly?”

“Have you never experienced similar?”

Christine hesitated, thinking of how relentlessly positive she’d been those first few weeks on the ship, and then how there had been that moment—Spock kissing her on the bridge—when she’d realized exactly what her feelings were and exactly how awful feeling that way was. She’d done her best to pretend to be the same, to react like she would have before that moment, but she wasn’t all that successful. Erica had kept giving her these looks when she’d had to be bullied into having fun. She’d thought it was just a mood, or an emotion, but it had lasted in one form or another for years—until she’d been on this planet, alone with only T’Pring for possibly ever and had been too mad about it to be passive anymore. “No, I have.”

T’Pring nodded, and then they encountered another dead end, and argued about what to do about it for ten minutes.

The conversation came back to Christine when they had found a place to camp for the night. What did it mean in T'Pring's theory that they had ended up here again? She didn't believe there was a secret version of themselves, still static and stable inside of them that drew them back again and again. They were new people, and those new people had been drawn here too. How strange it was to think of who she was now as someone.

She had been grieving so long over the loss of herself. But which self was she grieving? Sometimes in this environment she could taste the bitter words that had come so easily to her tongue in those first few months of their exile, when she’d been so angry and distressed about being trapped here, being lost, cut off from home, abandoned by Enterprise, that she could only lash out at the person beside her. Did she miss that girl? No, not at all.

But she remembered being that girl. Not all of the time here, but she'd been that girl before she came. Those memories were unaffected. And yet, though she knew that girl was her, it didn't feel like her.

It was her other self she admired more; the later one, who had stopped resisting, had appreciated what she had, had learned to find joy in every possible moment. That person didn't feel like her either, but if no version of herself did, did it matter? In some sense, that person simply was a past version of her, like any other. She's you back when you were here the first time—back when you figured out that the one thing that made your life here worth it was caring about the person you were with.

She didn't have the feelings that person did anymore, but she couldn’t control that. Why not focus on the ethical stance that that change embodied? Here, in this experimental environment of a lone world with a lone companion, would it be so hard to take on that pose for herself? Even if T’Pring was different, Christine’s choices—to consider her, to pay attention, to offer kindness instead of blind emotion—those could be the same. Maybe wanting to feel the way her past self had felt had been the wrong tack to take from the beginning. Why not instead do what your past self would do?

#

It was different to not be around Vulcans. Wherever she had been, T'Pring realized, she had always, in one way or another, been around Vulcans, even if only in her mind. But there were no Vulcans here. There was only the world and Christine, and neither would judge her for her rage. Stubborn, bitter, irritable—thus she'd been cursed, but though she used those words as a mantra to berate herself with each step, perhaps— perhaps they were beginning to lose their sting. 

On the day she realized this, she and Christine had chosen a route that led through a canyon path. It was logical. It had clearly been traversed by animals recently, and the weather would hold for the next few days. It was also the more direct route. Christine had warned her that if they ran into trouble, there wouldn't be an alternative, but that too had only annoyed T'Pring. What was the better option, then? Why bother pointing out an obvious risk? It was a risk, but a small one. She was willing to take it.

Unfortunately, logic couldn’t foresee the huge tree that had fallen into the path, blocking the way with the weight of its trunk and the bars of its fractalling branches. The logical option had been wrong. Embarrassment and frustration and exhaustion at just imagining backtracking all that way overwhelmed her. There was too much rage to hold down. She she didn't. In her fury, she dug into the fallen tree with her bare hands, grasped branches, and started breaking them off. She clawed the rotting, insect eaten trunk apart. 

And then, well, the route was passable again. T'Pring's fury faded, sweeping out like a flood no longer dammed. Embarrassment overwhelmed her. What must she have looked like? How humiliating to let anger overwhelm her like that, to push her into foolishness, into actions that could have harmed her—

She glanced back. Christine was staring at her, wide-eyed and cheeks flushed, and . . . pupils dilated, hands drawn forcibly back. She met T'Pring's gaze, offered a deeply awkward smile, and licked her lips, and . . . oh.

Christine twisted her hands behind her back and put on an awkward grin. "Well, you fixed that problem."

"Obviously it was the most logical solution."

Christine barely repressed a snort, and T'Pring deeply wished she could chop her in the gut in vengeance. But it was not an angry feeling this time. It was simply an urge toward physical familiarity. The anger was still a wild thing inside her, always on the verge of being let loose, but it was no longer all encompassing. It no longer transformed every strong emotion into some cool or hot shade of rage. She could feel other things too.

They were both changing as they traveled. Christine, though often petulant and scowling when physically exhausted, moved differently than she had at the beginning. Her slow, restrained movements became athletic and springy, confident again. They were not quite so boyishly exuberant as before—but they seemed a similar type, just, perhaps more mature. She built muscle quickly—just from walking and carrying her heavy pack, it seemed, and even her body shape became more familiar.

T'Pring, already stronger because of Vulcan's higher gravity, thought that she was changing in perhaps more subtle ways. But these ways were strongly linked to the ways Christine responded to her anger. The flushed face and dilated pupils was only one way. At other times, when T'Pring would be fed up with her black moods or insistence on some 'easy' alternative that would only bring them trouble later, and she would snap viciously and harshly about how Christine had brought them there in the first place. Did you trick me here, lure me into danger only to abandon me? I will only curse you for being responsible for my death if you do nothing to avert it. Christine, pricked only by the most painful words, would rise up, lash out in return, You chose to come with me. I can't promise you anything! Maybe all I wanted was this to be my grave without anyone knowing. Lighting that fire of responsiveness, of indignation, would spark alight her energy again, and when the argument had run its course, Christine would breathe, and offer a wry smile, and they would continue on.

"Sorry," she'd mutter.

T'Pring would shrug. "Of course you are afraid, hopeless, bewildered. We have chosen a Quixotic quest, but that is no reason to not put in the effort."

But sometimes T'Pring slipped into cruelty too easily. It was fine if it was well-deserved, and there were plenty of targets where it was. But it wasn’t easy to control the target, and Christine was always there. In one of their arguments, T'Pring had cut at the vulnerable spot of Christine's fears of having lost too much of her mind— when you fall into these moods, you are less than human. You are only emotion, and no logic. No smarter than a beast, and worse, because you cannot even prioritize survival over suffering. She had seen Christine's face go white, the shame overwhelm her. But she had gotten up, put on her pack, and begun to walk.

“I am sorry," T'Pring said when they were ten kilometers away. "I was terrible to you earlier. I need to amend that. There is no excuse to lash out in anger—” 

"No," Christine said, her voice hollow, but her gaze fierce. "No, I need that. When I'm in the black, you can't reason me out of it, you can't jolly me out of it. But when I see your rage, it's like a flame pulling me in. It's like a light, that I can follow out of the darkness."

It was strange, that not feeling like she should be embarrassed of her anger lessened its burn. At other times too, Christine laughed in the face of her anger, or responded to it with mutual indignance, confirming that her feelings were not irrational. It was so terribly un-Vulcan, to treat anger not as an embarrassing lapse in public manners but as evidence of a situation that needed to be mended.

Often, after T’Pring gave vent to her rage, she would find her anger fading quickly. The usual strategy for handling an emotion was to let yourself feel it and accept its truth and unimportance, but there were certain sources of anger that were not unimportant and only grew when looked at. I did not deserve to be sacrificed. I did not deserve to have my life stolen away . Saying the words, having Christine hear them, acknowledge them—the loneliness and impotence could no longer win. Instead of irrepressible fury or sickened grief, she could share the bitter irony of the situation, and Christine would understand.

#

As they crossed into familiar territory, new memories began resurfacing, triggered by the sights and smells. They were not particularly momentous ones, just small things, but they shared them, trading perspectives on events, as if both of their scraps could together make a whole.

The more they spoke about those times, reminded of them by the reflected doubling of their current experiences, the weight of lost memories lightened. With each other, those two other selves were real, they were like mutual friends. They could easily acknowledge that those past selves existed, had lived and suffered and altered. Those lost years were not a secret or an error or a death. And as they spoke, as the events repeated—disastrous bivouac attempts, tumbles into mudpuddles, or alert wariness around strange beasts—the her became you , and then, slowly, the you became me .

Could it be that those forgotten years, now remembered well enough to be worked into stories, could become just something that had happened to the people they were? Not lost selves, simply past selves.

Here was the story: Christine had been young and brittle and vicious, and the T’Pring who had first been translocated to this planet had been brokenhearted. It was a relief to remember how things had changed. The first time she and Christine had laughed together, the first time they’d known they understood each other without arguments or endless explaining, they had been so important. And if they were not those women either, it seemed possible to think that by remembering them, they might simply be becoming new people, new versions of themselves, who would be different, must be different, with all their grief and their rage, and yet would, once again, be people worth being.

(Was it, T'Pring wondered sometimes, that they could never have been whole again while pretending to be their past selves? Could they simply only be at peace in their new broken selves while alone together?) 

Of course, they would not bond again. Back then, they’d needed each other. They could not have survived alone. The bond had been a desperate connection, a way to cling to the only piece of community they had. Both Humans and Vulcans were community animals. The trauma of being torn away from their lives, from having to face the possibility that there would be no rescue, that there was only this world, only one other companion, that had fed into their bond. The options were ‘trust you’ or ‘die.’ W hen they had bonded, Christine curled desperately around her chilled, impaled body, trying whatever she could to keep her warm, it had been out of fear and pain. Their mutual sexual attraction had made the bond of trust into something all consuming—a relationship so intimate that ending it had torn them both apart. Its roots were deep set in existential need.

Their love had been a consolation for their frightened past selves—it had been valuable to them, necessary. But they did not want to go back to being those people. They needed to move forward, become new selves, independent of the broken bond that could not heal. Surely this clean, untrammeled friendship was better. If they could, in some way, simply heal themselves , and stay pleasant companions, that would be enough. It was reasonable to remind herself that their love had been a gift, that it had saved those versions of them both more than once, and thus was something to honor, but it was not something to grieve.

#

And yet . . .

At one campsite, Christine crouched over the firepit for nearly an hour, attempting to light damp wood with a nearly empty ignition tool. T'Pring left her to it, organizing the tent and bedrolls and obtaining a meal of the grand treefungus, and lemony wheatgrass. When she returned, Christine was still crouched there, her cheeks stained with tears wiped away by dirty fingers, her shoulders shaking, and no fire at all in the pit. She looked up, hunted and desperate and self-flagellating in a way that made T'Pring's feet still in her approach. 

"It's out, and I don't have flint, and I've fucked up again, and I–”

" Christine ," T'Pring said. She did not let any pity enter her tone, or sympathy either, because it would only be taken as more pain. "Please stop aggrandizing your failures. You’ve failed so many times, thinking of any of your failures as important is like trying to pick one tribble as king.”

Christine's eyes went wide, shocked. Her nerveless fingers dropped the empty ignition tool. And then, suddenly, she laughed, a raw chortle of a laugh, one that T'Pring had not heard from her since— since.

She shook her head, and stuffed the empty ignition tool back into her pack, and extended her arm, like she was looking for a hand up. T'Pring reached for her before realizing that neither of them wore gloves, and they were not allowed to touch. Christine realized at the same time, and drew her hand back quickly, pushing off the ground instead to unfurl and stagger to unsteady feet. A familiar flare of anger lit T'Pring up inside. It was not fair ; it would have been so simple to hand her up, to be a shoulder while she caught her balance. But they were required to stay apart.

Christine gave her a sidelong glance. There should have been nothing in it, as Christine looked at her all the time, as this was a nothing of an occurrence. But something in her face had shifted, just a little.

T’Pring licked her lips, suddenly, automatically. She understood. They were not the same people that they had been. And it was important to remember that the katric damage was not equivalent to the loss of love. It was damage , a physical wound, the psychic whiplash of a broken tel-ashau. The self was always changing, and like a flame guttering in the wind, you could not fully determine which way it would turn next. Their selves would grow around the damage, and make them into two individuals that were new. But sometimes, perhaps, it turned the same way twice. She was not the same as the girl whose bond had been broken, whose five years of life had been erased. But perhaps there were some things that that girl had wanted that she still wanted, very much.

They weren’t the same people, and they did not need to love each other in the same way, but it would be nice to be able to touch again.

#

Chapter Text

They had disagreed about the way to make a bathing pool. Christine planned to widen the river, and dig down to create a deeper pond. T'Pring was aware of the principles of building a dam, though they were rare on Vulcan. Both stripped down to underthings; on a hot, humid day, the cold water was lively and refreshing. As T’Pring moved stones into a line, she called out casual insults to Christine’s intelligence, family background, and species. Christine’s responses were making her want to laugh, but she still did not trust her enough to laugh out loud.

T’Pring picked up a stone to add to her mounting heap and froze.

“Dr. Chapel.” They had been on a first name basis for months now, but at that moment, she forgot.

“What is it?”

T’Pring held out the stone across her miniature dam. Christine splashed over and looked. Then she tucked her lower lip between her teeth and worried it. “Not uninhabited?”

“At one time at least.”

The stone had old grooves worn into it. The pattern was faint, faded by time, but it was distinctly geometric. It was a glyph.

T’Pring gripped the stone tight, looking around at the mess they were making, at their own half dressed, improper actions, and felt a plunge in her gut. They’d given up, when it had been their duty to make every effort to return home. She had a life, responsibilities, and she had simply allowed their burden to slide off her shoulders. Her eyes fell on Christine’s face, and she too seemed caught up in memories of Enterprise, of lost friends and abandoned responsibilities.

But then she appeared to shake them off. She rubbed her thumb over the lines of the glyph. “Cool,” she said.

“Cool?” The word burst out. T’Pring couldn’t quite believe what she’d heard.

Christine's mouth scrunched into her petulant-child expression. “We’ll look into it,” she said.

“You don’t-- you don’t think this is the key to getting home?”

“Might be." Christine shrugged. "But you can't rush it, even if it looks right, it's still dangerous. It's more important not to fall headlong into a trap than to try and get back quickly. Gotta stay cautious. And first thing's first. You really need a bath."

“Oh,” T’Pring said, ignoring the last jibe, as she was not the one who had said 'no point in having the same standards of hygiene camping as on a starship.' Her experience with Enterprise-type shenanigans was very limited, but Christine’s was not. “Protocol, I understand.”

Christine grinned, quick and daring. “I never thought I’d be telling a Vulcan to follow protocol.”

“You foolishly underestimate your own competence.”

Christine’s mouth fell open. “You-- how can you manage to make me feel insulted by a complement?” She took a step toward her then slipped on a rock and plunged right down into the now actually rather high water on her side of the dam.

She came up spluttering and flailing, regained her feet and looked around in horror. Her little hole had disappeared entirely, as the dam had filled up the area and the water level had risen to past waist height. “Dammit!” she said. “Your plan worked better too. I think my brothers lied to me.”

“Surely the principles of a dam make sense to you,” T’Pring said.

Christine cast her an odd look and then a quick flash of a smile. “Come over here.” She held up her hand as if to give T’Pring assistance in climbing over the dam. T’Pring wasn’t entirely sure why. “Come on, you made it, you should enjoy it.”

Still uncertain of the intent, T’Pring climbed up onto one of the larger fixed stones and hesitantly reached out, not sure if she wanted to touch Christine’s hand. Their fingers brushed, and the fierce intention to mischief was so alarming that T'Pring just reacted. She leapt off the stone, and crashed bodily into Christine, who yelped as they hit, her arms coming up to catch her, and they both fell into the water with a dramatic crash.

They both rose up, water pouring down, over hair and skin and clothes.

“What was that?” Christine demanded.

T’Pring glared at her. “You were going to submerge me.”

Christine’s eyes went wide. “I was going to dunk you. Brief submerging! For play!”

“Why?”

“Because you looked upset!”

“So you thought you would pretend to drown me to ameliorate this?”

Christine flapped her hands. “It-- It's a game.”

T’Pring glared her down, and Christine glared back.

“You are no fun,” Christine said.

“Your sense of fun is madness,” T’Pring responded.

“At least I have a sense of fun!”

“I would prefer you not to if I’m likely to be injured by it!”

Suddenly Christine's expression shifted, becoming unreadable. The tautness in her shoulders disappeared. “Okay,” she said.

“What?”

“I’m not going to get you hurt.” The shift in Christine’s presentation was bewildering and T’Pring couldn’t quite follow what she was trying to say. “I promise. I won’t do anything that has a chance of getting you hurt, even if it seems fun.”

“I—” T’Pring stared at her. “That is reasonable. You’re being reasonable.”

Christine stared her down, and then offered a wry, self-mocking shrug. “I’m going to guess that you didn't grow up playing in water on Vulcan.”

T’Pring gave a wary shake of the head.

“Then it’s mean for me to do anything that might scare you.”

“I’m not-- scared.”

“Didn’t say you were. Just that it would be mean for me to try.” Christine reached out her hand offering her fingers unexpectedly. She meant it in a move of sincerity, T’Pring realized. Did she know what else it was? “I like you,” she said. “I can do better. So I’ll try.”

T’Pring slid their fingertips together in a tentative embrace. This time there was no mischief, just a hint of surprise and a quiet, fierce determination to conform to her words. T’Pring had not kissed someone new in a long time. She was not like some of her school friends, always forming intense attachments, desiring only to be in communion with another’s emotional mind. So it had been a long time since she’d held a moment like this, with that curiosity and hope of soon knowing someone well. And she did have that hope, she knew now. She hoped very much to know Christine well.

#

When they found the river and the remains of their dam, they knew they were almost home. For Christine, reaching the cave was an uncanny homecoming. It was a place that had become almost real in her memories—so real, it was like walking back into a childhood home and seeing it as so much smaller than she remembered. The signs that they had lived there, their storage containers, plumbing lines, and chipped out alcoves sent a queer terror through her. It was real, their memories were real. The planet had not had the same effect. She'd been to too many strange new worlds to list this one as particularly distinctive. But seeing things built by her own hands … The memories were not just memories of dreams. Here they were, in this place they had built a life . Now, only half-remembered, the ruin that life had been left in felt like it was breaking her heart.

 The cave was a mess—it had not been a thousand years, but it was clear they hadn't simply left yesterday either. Christine wrapped her arms around herself and scowled up at the wreckage of the carefully rigged plumbing and the animal spoil in what had been their storage spaces. It required work—everything did. One task after another—but that was good. She could put away these feelings. Hard work gave her no time to ruminate or puzzle or long.

It was only in the evenings, sitting around the fire, telling stories, when the doubling grew too strong. So many times she'd stretched out lazily by this fire, T'Pring on the other side, maintaining some industry, and told stories or jokes or debated temporal physics with her. Being here again, for brief moments, it felt like they'd never left. And then the anguish would overwhelm her, because they had been forced to leave, and everything was different now. 

But the past was also present it a less painful way. Lying here, telling a joke, T'Pring responding in her sly, cool way, she would remember that feeling she'd had, that simmering pool of love always inside her, always ready to bubble over, to turn laughter into kisses and inject so much energy into her body that she needed to pull T'Pring close and cling to her with every ounce of strength she had. 

But then she would blink, and she would remember that those feelings were only a memory. Though she loved the woman in front of her—she could say that now, because the steadiness of their friendship, how she relied on it every day could only be a form of love—she had to hold back, had to contain herself, because she knew what happened when she dove greedily into that remembered feeling, when she clung to it and tried to make it her own. She could feel it happening again, even when only looking at her, could feel the ache begin to form inside her, the damaged part of her katra begin to ooze and quake, and if she let it wake up and overwhelm her again, there was no one here who could save her from herself.

It was a relief to see less of each other when they rediscovered the alien cathedrals beneath the jungle. T’Pring delved into the library while Christine sorted through the giant storerooms of oddments and devices. In the evenings they both had so much to say, to share, that they had no time to linger in emotional memories. Eventually, the doubled echoes faded into ordinary memory. This was their cave now, not their past selves', and their lives could fill it up instead. 

From the storerooms, Christine collected items that perhaps T’Pring might like. Calculation devices and recorders, anything small she could mend and fix to make T’Pring’s study easier.

“You are too considerate,” T’Pring said. “It is becoming slightly annoying.” But she said it with a smile in her tone that meant it actually wasn’t.

Christine then told her about how she'd realized that one of the parts of her past self that she missed was her choice to be considerate instead of cruel. It was something she admired and had decided to take as part of herself.

But T’Pring stared at her in a way that made Christine herself suddenly check back over everything she’d said, making sure it wasn’t absurd. “What?” she asked, when she could find nothing.

“You never lost that,” T’Pring said. “When I met with you again on the Enterprise, that was one of the first things I noticed—that you were very unlike the Christine in my memories, the one casually attempting to poach my fiancé, because you were considerate and observant and did not put your emotions on anyone else.”

Christine stared at her. “What?”

“You were sad, but you were never unkind.”

“Oh.” She sat back. It was a jarring thought, to realize that perhaps the changes in her personality that had happened during those five years had stayed, even as the memories and emotions had been lost. It would explain a lot about how she'd felt different, been confused by the way friends and colleagues had treated her, and confused them too. Maybe that was something the katra brought with it. There were too many mysteries about that, and even Vulcans knew hardly anything about how it worked.

If you get back, you’ll research that. All sorts of katra related damage. That’s the next project .

She was almost startled by the thought. A positive thought about after . She hadn’t had one of those before. It tasted . . . smoky and sweet.

“Too bad I have no similar connection,” T’Pring said casually. “Anger was not a feature of my past self.”

Christine lifted her head. “Oh, I think you do have a similarity,” she said, not even thinking about it. “You’re demanding.”

T’Pring stared at her. “What?”

“Sorry if that doesn’t sound like a good thing. But I think it is,” Christine said. The thoughts were becoming clearer as she spoke, and the ideas were making her want to smile. “Before, when Spock complained about his relationship with you, he kept talking about how pressured he felt. But you weren’t pressuring him at all. You were clear about your displeasure, and you set boundaries, but you didn’t demand things of him. You kept trying to meet him where he was. You kept hoping too hard and then giving in. You didn’t even make him promise to not kiss girls he was working with as a ruse anymore.”

“I didn’t want to ask him to make a promise I knew he couldn’t keep.”

“Exactly,” Christine said. “You didn’t demand anything of him. And that’s how we started out too. You didn’t ask, because you had no faith I’d give a fuck about you. And then I-- I tried to dunk you. You remember?”

T’Pring had gone still. “I do,” she said slowly, with a measured and disapproving tone, which Christine knew she totally deserved.

“You’d never spent time in water, hung out with your brothers in a pool, or anything on Vulcan, and I scared you by doing that. And I got it. I realized how dumb I’d been to do that to you, even though I had only been goofing around, and I promised I’d never do anything to risk you or make you feel like I was endangering you again.”

“You kept that promise.”

Christine nodded. “You noticed.”

T’Pring nodded also. “You are implying that that moment changed how I behaved around you.”

“Maybe not that moment, but after it. I hope so at least—that you got more comfortable being clear about what you needed from me, and when I made a promise, you expected me to follow through.”

T’Pring considered this and then slowly nodded. “I had every confidence in you, by the end. You made mistakes, but I could have high expectations for you, because you met them regularly.”

Christine felt herself smile at the praise and ducked her head a little to hide it. This whole conversation felt . . . unusual in that it felt so normal. Thinking of those memories in this way didn't bring her pain or longing. They were simply part of a logic, putting together the narrative of their past that had led them to being who they were today. “I think you kept that. You have high expectations of everyone now, and I don’t think that’s a problem. I don’t think it's related to the anger either. It’s like how me being sad isn’t being related to being more considerate. It’s good to be able to ask for what you want. It’s good to not expect people to let you down all the time. I think you kept the more demanding part of your personality, and I think you’re the better for it.”

T’Pring contemplated her with a slightly smug expression on her face. “And here you are, being perceptive and considerate again.”

Christine grinned as hard as she could, and knew that if they had still been their past selves, that sentence would have gotten her naked in twelve seconds. They weren't those selves anymore, but these realizations made it clear that those selves were part of them. Being here, together, had made the memories of those missing five years solidify into something real, into memory beads on a string, that they could pull in to the narrative of their self-identity, that they could use to understand the new people they'd become.

For the first time since Spock had pulled her out of the time vortex, Christine felt whole again. Not healed, or perfectly normal, but like someone who could cast a shadow, not just the lingering shadow of a person who'd disappeared .

#

They had been working with the alien technology and research for at least twenty days before the slight concern T’Pring had began to bloom into something concrete. Christine had brought a small machine back to the camp and was carefully taking it apart and eying each piece for wear or breakage.

“You have been playing with these small technologies for a while now,” T’Pring said. “Have you touched the time loom at all?”

Christine glanced up, eyes wide, and then shook her head. “I-- no. I don’t feel ready. When I look at it . . .” she paused, thinking, and T’Pring could see her applying her experiences of strange occurrences on the Enterprise to her analysis. She'd explained how those adventures taught her to consider situations from many more angles than simple human logic .  “… when I look at it, I feel an odd sense of fear and distrust. It’s like it’s telling me I’m not ready.”

T’Pring nodded slowly, her lips pressed together as she thought. “The aliens clearly had telepathic abilities,” she said. “I have similar reactions to certain tomes, as if I am being warned to keep away.”

“I don’t-- I don’t remember that from before,” Christine said. “I didn’t feel afraid of any of the machines.”

“No, nor I the books. It is odd.”

Not unexpectedly, Christine took this information as a suggestion to ignore the fear and started pushing against it. Humans. But her attempts to address the question of the time loom directly quickly turned into bewilderment and frustration.

“I remember things! I remember what used to work, but when I try the exact same thing, it doesn’t work this time. It feels-- it feels like those memories are a lie.” She looked over, her blue eyes flashing and unsettled. “What if they’re all a lie?”

“Ah,” said T’Pring, “Five years of our lives implanted by an alien consciousness?”

“Things like that happen. I’ve read—“

“Why would aliens do that?”

Christine frowned. “To maintain records of their civilization? To open up a weakness? To lure food?”

“What do these ones want?”

“For us to bring their planet into the new universe.” She said it like it was obvious, like they knew this, deep in their gut. This, T’Pring also found suspicious, but she had a theory about it.

“Yes. They do. So why would they give us unhelpful memories? No, logically, were those five years implanted or not—and I think the most parsimonious theory is that they were not—they would not have offered us mistaken memories about the technology. Thus there are two theories of what is happening. One is that there is a counter force trying to work against us. Does that seem possible?”

Christine considered this. “There are no signs of anyone trying to interfere.”

T’Pring nodded. “So the second option is that something about the situation has changed. We are doing our best to replicate it, but we have also brought more supplies, we are not identical to our previous selves, we are working with their memories, and of course katric memories are notorious for not providing useful information. It’s a mystery, but not one worth panicking about. Just solve it.”

Christine leaned forward, letting her chin rest on her fist, her short-clipped hair sticking out in all directions. She looked handsome like that, especially in those thin, Starfleet-issue undershirts, with her body more solid and defined from all the physical activity. It was a puzzle that T’Pring turned over in her mind over and over again: how had her distaste for human features and habits—too much expression, righteousness and quick-sparking tempers, general untidiness and impatience with routine—become affection? The logic was unreasonable. In the memories, her feelings for Christine were tied up with those harsh, sharp emotions of loneliness, exile, of need. She had ached for assistance, and finally, once, twice, then reliably, Christine had offered it. How did something as basic and unlovely as need become affection, attraction, and more.

Though maybe need was always paired with desire. When they had slept together on Earth, desire had been epiphenomenal. They had needed each other. They had both needed , and the other was there, attempting to fill that gaping emotional wound. It would not have been enough, even without the vile consequences of their rebonding. But it had been something when their lives had felt too empty to bear.

Neither of those cases were how she would prefer to form a bond. A bond should be reasonable and measured, not formed in a flash of desperation or the fear of death. It was supposed to be about life, about making plans for the future and finding your most reasoned ally. Spock had never been that, but he’d been young, and she’d hoped he would grow into someone more reliable. He had indeed grown and changed, but not in any way that made T’Pring desire his partnership.

Christine too had grown and changed in many ways. She was still over-expressive—but perhaps it was also that T’Pring had learned to read every flex of her face. The dramatic expressions were cartoonish lines, while the slight flexes of her lip and the way hollowness could grow around her eyes were a swift, dense cursive. But she was no longer righteous—her temper sparked quickly, but not so quickly as T’Pring’s did these days. She was only untidy when it did not matter, but with her tools and research she was meticulous, and she was not the kind of human who avoided routine. At first it had seemed that T'Pring had sacrificed so many of her standards because what she needed was more important than what she preferred, but now it seemed just as logical to think that her preferences were shaped by seeing the value of what lay underneath. When Christine acted with reason and empathy, she became beautiful. She had become someone perfectly adequate as a partner, and she had also become someone who could never be T’Pring’s bondmate.

The than-tha who had separated them the last time had said as much. I don't know if it is because she is human, or because of the katric damage you both have, but neither of you should go about touching anyone else's mind, especially each other's. The root of your bond is too big and angry to burn out. It is too damaged and interwoven with other parts of your mind. But as long as there is still life in it, it will seek to reconnect, if not with her, with anyone. You will never find balance with it. And if you reconnect with her, the ends of your bonds will chew each other up, suck on each other, and destroy both of your minds. Perhaps you would survive it, but the human would not. Unless you wish to destroy her, do not touch her mind again.

The memory made something cold close in her stomach. She considered the intuition that had come to her. Warily, she made a plan to test it—if she could find a safe way. But she did not say her thought aloud. She knew what things would write ruined heartbreak across Christine’s face, and this was clearly one of them. Her own emotions were painful enough; until she was sure, she would not toy with Christine’s.

#

“I’m here to assist you.”

Christine blinked, rolling out from under the loom. “Um. Sure.”

T’Pring stared down at her. Christine was sweaty and had some of the glistening oil interface on her nose. It had been harder and harder to look at her, as, once more, they became each other's closest and dearest companion. At first she had looked like she was growing back into that person physically as well, an older version perhaps—though not literally older, as she was still two years younger than the last memory T’Pring had of this place. That was a puzzle—older in what could be counted by suffering, perhaps? But she'd grown into a new heavier shape than her previous one—her muscles solid, not the ropey ones built from the near starvation lifestyle they’d had before—and steady, in a way that made T’Pring want only to lean on her.

She crouched down to see the undercarriage of the loom. “Explain to me what you’re doing?”

Christine blinked, then nodded, and started going into the details of how the machine worked, certain and confident in her explanations, and T’Pring reached out while she was distracted, and cautiously rested her hand on Christine’s bare shoulder. She did not reach out for her mind, but let them brush, like two membrane universes, side by side in thirdspace. For a moment Christine continued on, and then her voice faltered. She glanced over at T'Pring, but the look on her face was strange, brow furrowed with analytic thought, not surprise or longing. She glanced back at the loom.

“This isn’t even the right one ,” she said. “This is the prototype. The right one is--”

Then the violent sting of their bond coming alert made T’Pring jerk her hand back, scuttling away from the machine and standing up.

Christine slowly rose, staring at her. “What-- what happened? What did you figure out?”

T’Pring shrugged, bitterly and miserably. “We cannot do it alone. It requires a telepathic connection to understand these things. But we are the wrong two now, as we cannot telepathically connect for long without it being debilitating.”

They were the wrong two.

Perhaps the discovery hurt T'Pring more than it would hurt Christine, she could hope that. But she was reasonably sure nothing could hurt her more than this, so even a lesser violence was still a critical hit. This was the last place she'd felt she had a purpose, that she could be worth something to someone, even if those people, the ancient civilization of this planet, were all dead. But it had been pointless to come here, and without a chance of making the loom reweave time, they had no way out. T'Pring had accepted the possibility when she'd left, but she'd accepted the possibility in the belief that she could fool herself into pleasant industry in the interim. Without that, what was there but living here, with Christine near, desirable and untouchable, in the same pointless despair she'd spent the last two years in. Worse, she would have no strength to draw her friend out of the black moods and despair she was prone to. What would be left of them? Something, logically, there had to be something , but T'Pring could not, for the life of her, imagine what it could be.

Christine stared at her, immobile, for a long time, then, when there was no way to doubt that she had understood just what this meant, just what their fate was sure to be, she set down her mysterious tool, turned around, and walked out.

T’Pring went back to the library and stared at the obscure sigils that once had seemed so full of meaning and possibility, and now were only bricks in a wall she could not climb.

When she returned to their camp, she was not sure what she expected of Christine—curled up in her bedspace, realizing her despair as lethargy? Some worse consequence? Would she be there at all or have fled into the wilderness? Would she feign cheerfulness, or let anger and frustration turn her bitter once more?

T’Pring stepped into the shadowy cave, and was hit by a warm body. Christine was there, her arms around her, cupping her cheek, leaning in and pressing their mouths together with a jarring bump, and a heated desperation. No . This was the worst option. They could not destroy themselves by falling into each other. Then they would not even have the strength to find a clean way to die. But for a moment she did not care and kissed Christine back, just as desperately.

Then the kiss, rough and intense, broke for breath, and Christine stumbled back, moving well clear of her, her eyes wild and grinning in a mad sort of way. “Sorry,” she said. “I was only going to hold you. But I didn’t-- right as I touched you I knew that if I was holding you to me and feeling that, I’d never let you go again. And then, well, so much for all the math I’ve been doing. At least if I kissed you I'd have to stop to breathe.”

“What?” T’Pring said, confused and still shaken and overwhelmed from the kiss.

“Did it move? Did you feel the bond move?”

T’Pring shook her head. Then frowned. “Maybe? But not enough to hurt.”

Christine nodded. “All right, so here are my two theories. One is that it will get better. If we touch, but don’t overload things, we will be able to maintain telepathic contact for longer and longer periods, as we repair the loom.”

“That is . . . a hypothesis.”

“The alternative is that it will get worse. We will have a shorter and shorter time before the bond tries to reform, and we will be in more and more danger of debilitating pain as we try and repair the loom. If that’s the case, well, we need to be mostly relying on our intellect and skill, and only use the telepathy when we are really stuck.”

That was . . . deeply optimistic. The sound of Christine being optimistic was jarring, and also wonderful . T’Pring wasn’t sure at all how to handle this feeling without moving to her, grasping her by the shirt and pressing their bodies together. But she did not. Even without skin to skin contact, her nearness, her feelings , felt as if any further closeness could stir and wake the bond. The emotion was a full body ache. She took a ragged breath, pushing through the feeling, feeling it and letting it go. “You are a gift,” she said softly.

Christine paused in her thought-to-word stream and gave her a curious, moved look. “What?”

“In spite of all the trouble we have been through, you reliably, relentlessly make my life better.”

Christine’s cheeks darkened, she looked soft and her hands squeezed at her sides, holding herself back from reaching out. “Samesies.” Then she shook herself. “And then there’s the third hypothesis,” she said.

“And what is that?”

Christine fixed T’Pring with her fiercest, most determined glare. “It’s that we are healing . I believe that we are healing. And when it’s enough-- when it’s enough it won’t hurt. We will be able to reconnect, and it won’t hurt.”

“ Keyh sahla,” T’Pring said softly, May it come.

#

Chapter Text

Experimentation was Christine’s bag. If they needed telepathy to find the way to solve the alien machinery, she would figure out how to get some. They were not the wrong two. They were the only two. You worked with what you had. That was what she’d learned their last time stuck on this planet. If you didn’t have your snazzy Starfleet supplies, you made do. You built solutions to your problems. You loved the person you were with … and then you knew you'd never have loved anyone else the same way.

If they succeeded in getting this time loom to work, then, according to T’Pring’s theory of fate, it was because they were meant to, because some important part of their character guided them to make the right decisions. They had been so close before. And though they were different, they had become new people, they were not so different that they could not fulfill the same fate. Spock had not ripped them out of themselves, he had merely shaken them into new arrangements. They could get there again.

And she did believe in her third hypothesis. She knew fuck all about katric connections, but she did know that the body wanted to heal and so did the mind, and it gets better if you don’t pick it, and sometimes you need the PT to realign your body after healing too. Healing was not a simple metaphor. Healing took work and mindfulness and hope.

But she had that again. She’d found it right here, where she’d left it.

She'd added a section in her journal that was ‘things she wanted to tell Erica.’ She was saving them up, so that when she did see her again, she’d remember. It was a when, not an if. Of course, Erica would hate the things she had to say, because about half of them were the things she couldn’t say to T’Pring, because they were about T’Pring. Like how the firelight licked across her face making her look like a sorceress from those classic fantasy novels Christine had been obsessed with at 13. Or how she’d caught her laughing at a pun—an actual pun, which T’Pring always said she hated. Or how sometimes she just thought about how they’d be good together. She'd spent so much time angsting about how if it wasn't just like it used to be, it wasn't enough. But she kind of thought that it would be now. Did Erica think so too? T’Pring was someone safe to be around, the person who it was easiest to be with. If we ever get back, sort out this bond problem, it would just be nice to live with her, I think. I like to imagine being able to touch her again, bump up close and hold her hands and maybe kiss her hello. I’d like to sleep in the same bed with her. I’ve never wanted that with someone. But she’s small and a little cold and I think I’d like that. I want to hold her all the time, wrap her up, keep her warm.

Erica, of course, was going to hate all of these things. “Goddammit, Christine,” she’d say. “Your unrequited bullshit is going to kill me .”

Me first .

Christine set up a timer, and hung out with her fingers on the back of T’Pring’s hand as she carefully read over one of the texts she was struggling to translate. Her notetaking immediately got faster. She had the mental discipline to not do what Christine did, which was just bask in that sense of another person's mind, right there. T'Pring's gray-blue focus, the patterns of light that were inspiration, understanding, intuition, they were too beautiful to look away from. But she tried to force her attention onto something else, anything else, because the ache in her, the need to connect with her, to be body to body, mind to mind, made the bond quake like a waking giant.

With that full discipline they lasted about two and a half minutes.

It was a place to start.

T’Pring muttered that they were playing with fire. But that was just science . If it wasn’t fire that you were playing with, what was the point?

#

The experimentation was logical, but it was also starting to drive T’Pring mad. She could stay focused and make progress while Christine was touching her, but it took a force of will that was truly momentous. Touching her hand was the most effective to create the telepathic pathway, but it was also dreadful, because it was like-- like someone was asking you to do mental arithmetic with their tongue in your mouth. She’d tried alternatives, but touches to her neck or upper arm were even more distracting and the telepathic connection was not as good. Afterwards, as the bond writhed, needing to reconnect with its other half, she’d press her face into her hands and mentally recite stanzas from the Wrecking to keep herself together.

But the memory of Christine’s hand on hers lingered.

It was deeply ironic, that it was at this point in her life that she was discovering that sexual desire was a major part of her existence. It was illogical. She had never needed it before. With Spock, she’d exploited her sexuality to create a sense of connection between them when the mental and social connections weren’t there. With Christine, before, they had used sexual intimacy to distract each other from their fear of death–and from boredom, and to maintain social connections, and, well, there had to be other reasons, as the memories were too prevalent for a low frequency. Still, it was unnecessary to go back to that desperate coupling, attentive solely to keep themselves grounded in this world and this life, but there was a definite frustration to being so close to someone she was undoubtedly attracted to, and knowing they could not risk touch save for in pursuit of their goals.

Perhaps the frustration made her a little more cutting. Watching an oil-filthy Christine strip to her waist and scrub, or work hard at levering a stuck door open in the alien complex, or suddenly come out of a lingering daydream full of enthusiasm and ideas, T'Pring's need to step close and touch could only express itself in sarcasm and critique. But she’d thought she’d been doing a decent job hiding her burgeoning concupiscence until the time Christine had shown up out of a rainstorm, bedraggled and drenched, and she’d said, “That shirt is so see-through you might as well parade around naked—” And Christine had just turned her head, looked at her , and then she’d smiled . It was a filthy little half-smile, and any hope that the sarcasm was a disguise for her frustrated attraction was gone.

But there was nothing to do about it. Christine had been right, with that blustering, painful, experimental kiss. Even if they had fifteen minutes, enough to touch, to meet, to come, it wouldn’t be enough. It would be too hard to let go again.

Then came the evening they’d returned to camp and discovered that a family of squirrel-type creatures had made a mess of their shower rig. After shooing out the critters and patching the hole they’d gotten in through, Christine took a look at the untethered stem-pipes, then frowned deeply with her hands on her hips. “Yeah, I think-- I think I can fix this.”

T’Pring had intended to spend the evening studying a set of her vocabulary notes. But Christine stripped down to an undershirt and took out her set of Starfleet-issue compact engineer’s tools. She nearly immediately opened the wrong pipe and ended up drenched and startled, and T’Pring set down her notes and poked the fire lightly, watching the muscles on Christine’s back flex as she manipulated a tool above her head.

Then she bit her lip and slowly slid her fingers between her legs.

Christine paused, as if she could sense that something in the space had changed, and glanced over. “What are you doing?”

“Don’t look at me,” T’Pring snapped. “Stay focused on the problem at hand. You will flood the cave or break something anyways, and if you aren’t paying attention it will be worse.”

Christine took one more look, a little wide-eyed, and then obeyed.

T’Pring slowly, needily, got herself off while Christine fixed the shower. After the second drenching, she stripped down to her underwear and tossed her clothes near to the fire to dry. She very carefully did not glance over at T’Pring again while doing so. She was a vision and a memory all at once. And when she made those small grunting sounds as she forced the cover that connected one pipe to the other back on, T’Pring’s tendrils curled tight around her hand and she came, with only a very quiet gasp.

Finally, Christine looked around again, flushed and intense, hands shaking. T’Pring curled up, wrapping her arms around her knees, holding herself as tightly as she could, because Christine could not hold her instead.

#

The experimental results were promising. With focus and care, they could last longer and longer while touching. Whether it was from improved focus or lessened activity from the bond was unknown. Those options had variables Christine could not figure out how to control for, and in the end, it didn’t really matter, as long as they were still in the safe-zone while they worked. These efforts led them to a slim text about the time loom where the indigenous aliens explained that they intended to build it on the nearby spire. At least T’Pring was reasonably sure that meant ‘nearby.’ Only, they had a memory of going up to the top of the nearest spire-plateau on their previous visit and had seen nothing resembling a time loom.

“Might we only be able to see it when bonded?” Christine asked. “We weren’t . . . touching yet, last time.”

It was a reasonable hypothesis, so they set out to climb the spire.

The memories of the last time they had climbed up to the high plateau made the going easy at first. “I think it was the first time that I realized that I liked you,” T’Pring said, moving ahead easily, Vulcan strength carrying her quickly uphill.

“We’d been here for months .”

“And I didn’t like you.” T’Pring cast back an amused look. “You didn’t like me either.”

Christine grimaced and hauled herself up a steep slope by the roots of a tree. “I honestly wasn’t thinking much about whether I liked you or not at first. I was mainly focused on being hateful because I was so scared.”

“Your behavior did not appeal.”

“It didn’t appeal to me much either.” She caught up. “But I’d been getting over it, hadn’t I? I wasn’t still being awful by the time we were going up this trail, was I?”

T’Pring glanced over, and shook her head. “You had already made me the comb, and admitted your complete incompetence in dam building. We were . . . ready to discuss unfinished business.”

They walked for a while in silence, Christine thinking of those moments, lying up on that flat plateau on the top of this mountain, quietly realizing that the things she had longed for, that had driven her, no longer mattered. Because they no longer mattered, she was free to find value elsewhere. Perhaps value could come from inside instead of outside. Maybe acting in ways she was proud of would make her able to feel even better about what she accomplished.

Lying there, T’Pring comfortable enough to let her hand rest on Christine’s back, was an accomplishment in itself.

“If we get back, is there any unfinished business you still want to work on?” Christine asked. The question sounded casual, but it didn’t really feel that way. There were so many things that had turned into can’t after Spock had dragged them out of this place. Can’t feel, can’t care, can’t live . But maybe it was a foolish question. The unfinished business was here . There-- there were only new opportunities that they might, this time , be able to pursue.

She noticed T’Pring watching her, something gentle and generous in her face that wasn’t usually there. There were some things they still couldn’t bet on. But they could hope. Maybe, maybe , T’Pring was hoping for some of the same things too.

“You first,” T’Pring said, casually.

Christine gave her a dirty look. “You always make me go first.”

“You wouldn’t ask the question if you hadn’t already thought about the answer. Give me a moment to think.”

Christine did not believe that she needed a moment to think. This was all about getting Christine to do the personal disclosure first. She grumbled wordlessly for a moment and then gave in. She shrugged. “If I go back, I’m going to be happy . That’s my big plan. Be happy around the people I love, since I couldn’t do that before.”

“You are often frustratingly incisive,” T’Pring said. “It is hard to follow that, but I’m still glad I asked you to go first, as being one-upped by that would be just as bad.”

“It’s not a competition.”

T’Pring raised an eyebrow at that, and Christine gave in. Maybe it was.

“Well,” T’Pring continued. “To counter yours. My intent is to be very unhappy , by developing ambition, and pursuing it, in spite of the disapproval of the people I love.”

“Ooh, I like that. That’s a good one.”

As they climbed higher and higher, the day passed on, in spite of them having started before dawn. The steeper slopes were more difficult to navigate and though they were able to climb even difficult, sliding patches, it all took time.

“Probably should start looking for a good place to bivouac,” Christine said, eyeing the sinking star. T’Pring agreed.

As night grew nearer, the sounds of the crepuscular animals grew louder and sounded nearby, and Christine felt more and more wary—a natural amygdalic reaction. What creatures roamed the higher up places?

“Christine!” The shout came right as she was at her most tense. She glanced up. T’Pring ahead, was standing, feet planted, in between her and a beast. This wasn’t a monkey-lion or any of the other familiar ones. This was a creature with massive shoulders, short legs, and a vicious looking tusk. And it charged.

The flashback to those memories—the blood, the fever, the despair—no, not again, not again . It couldn’t happen again. But T’Pring wasn’t moving, she was ready like she was guarding, like she thought it would be noble to put her body between the beast and Christine . Christine raced up the slope and threw herself at T’Pring, hurling their bodies to the side as the tusked-creature plunged down the path, just missing them.

But off the path, there was nothing to catch them. Christine balled herself around T’Pring as best she could and they bounced down the slope, grasping at slippery slate and scrawny plants and outcroppings to try and stop the tumble. Then the ground cut out from under them, and they fell. It was a short, sharp fall, but the landing had a snap. Christine’s already bruised body bloomed with new pain, and she clung to T’Pring, holding her, skin to skin, and gasped. T’Pring winded and bewildered, was holding her back. She felt that panicked touch on her mind. Christine, are you well? Christine! Then came an unexpected ease of the pain. Please don’t let go, Christine pleaded, silently. And with that, she slipped out of consciousness.

When she awoke, there was only starlight, her head on T’Pring’s chest, hands cupping her face. Her leg throbbed, but she could feel the pain sapping out through the fingers that touched her cheeks. Unexpectedly, she felt nothing from the bond.

“You’re awake,” T’Pring said softly. She looked ragged and exhausted, from the fall and taking Christine’s pain away, she presumed.

“You’re touching me,” Christine replied, just as soft.

“I’ve been touching you for hours.”

“It doesn’t hurt.”

“No, it doesn’t.” Then T’Pring placed her fingers on Christine’s face in the appropriate meld position and slid in in a way Christine realized she’d been doing ever since she’d slipped into unconsciousness. She took the form she always took in Christine’s mind, that big, powerful golden sehlat, and Christine walked alongside her, through the labyrinthine house, and out into a yard overlooking a vast, wild field. There was the remains of their bond, now only a fallen tree, covered with masses of ivy, using it as fertile soil in which to grow, and binding it down. “You were right, about the healing. I believe the experiment caused it to use up emotional energy in distress without giving it more to feed on. The roots of our bond have finally died.”

Christine stared for a moment longer before her knees gave out and she dropped onto the ivy covered ground. She’d killed it. She’d killed it . And along with the pain from her leg, she was overwhelmed by grief.

#

Chapter Text

It was a good thing, that their bond had died, T’Pring told herself. Emergent bonds were inherently dangerous, and theirs had been one built on trauma and need. But the waves of grief washing from Christine as she hoisted Christine onto her back at dawn and began the slow and precarious trek homeward—where they had proper medical supplies and could treat what she was reasonably sure was a lower quadrant leg fracture—struck her with equal force.

That bond had been the marker of a simple truth, an I loved you once , a proof of the reality of this place, those lost five years, themselves. What were they to each other without it?

T’Pring kept taking Christine’s pain until Christine had plied the bone-knitter and healed the damaged flesh around it, and taken their strongest analgesic. Then, finally, she let it go. She swayed where she stood, and Christine, perched on a ledge, caught her and gathered her into her lap.

“I’m not the only one who’s going to be out cold in a few minutes,” she murmured, and then she shuffled them carefully—keeping weight off her leg—into the heap of blankets and onto the narrow sleeping pad that served as her bed. T’Pring usually slept across the way, but they could touch now, for better or for worse, so she did not fight anymore and simply lay against Christine’s warmth and gave in to the exhaustion.

#

“I guess you could say we’re free now,” Christine murmured into her shoulder. “Not long lost anymore, just us.”

She was shaggy and still dozy from the aftereffects of the analgesics, but kept trying to get up and do things, and T’Pring had threatened to tie her ankles together once or twice. You needed to stay off a freshly knitted break for at least three days. But the only thing that could make her properly not move was to lie on top of her and distract her.

“And what will you do with your freedom?”

Christine gave her a suspicious look. “Lie here until my leg is healed enough to walk back up that mountain.”

“Good answer.”

“I knew you’d like that one.”

The desire that had tangled between them also seemed faded and mismatched—though was that because desire and pain were not friendly bedfellows, or due to the sudden loss of tension, knowing that if they wanted it, they could indeed couple as much as they liked, making the desire less prominent? Or was it simply, as T’Pring thought hers was, a lack of interest in meaningless touches when what they’d lost, what she missed, was meaning.

“If you promise to not move outside of a two meter radius while I’m gone, I will fetch you currants,” T’Pring said.

She hadn’t expected the hesitation. Christine frowned at her. “But I can’t feel you. I won’t be able to know if you’re all right.”

“You couldn’t feel me before.”

Christine pouted at this. “But I could stay nearby .”

“I will be very careful,” T’Pring said. “Do not let this incident become another trauma. We are well.” She paused. “Except for your leg. Please rest it.”

Christine nodded obediently and let her leave.

In some ways it was a relief to be on her own, in the dappled leaf-cover. Christine had been reaching for her every chance she got, and hoping each time, as if she was attempting to tease the bond back into life. With each touch T'Pring would tense, waiting for that stirring pain, and then when she felt nothing, was washed in furious grief. They should have been rejoicing at this, at the healing that had taken place. They could go about their lives without that struggle of needing to be together and being unable to be together all at once. They could mentally link up to fix the time loom without fear of debilitating pain. They could attain their goals, return home, and become strangers once more.

Was that possibility where the grief was coming from? It was not likely . They had not been bonded for a long time, by anything except shared trauma, and they had become friends. They were even closer now. Although what alteration would come from this new change was unpredictable, it could not take away the time they had spent together. Mental bonds did not replace emotional bonds. And yet, the fear of their relationship disappearing was not irrational. T'Pring suspected that the death of the bond root meant that the remaining damage would, with a little more work, heal. She could return, to work, family, bonding. Christine also could find a purpose outside of this place. They could both put aside the weight of their experiences here, the memories of pain they came with, and move on. When there was a choice, when there was freedom, why not take it? Why be bound to someone you had only ended up with by accident? When you have finally un chosen, why would you risk choosing that same pain once more?

She returned with a collection of currants to find Christine where she had left her, reading her own journal. She sat up when she saw T’Pring and the cloth bag of currants. “Ah! So many! You got so many!”

“That is because I do not eat half while picking.”

Christine gave her a suspicious look. “I don’t believe you, you have red marks on your mouth.”

Abruptly, something about her eyes changed. Her cheeks had reddened, her pupils dilating. “Do you-- do you remember our bet?”

T’Pring cautiously set the currants down between them. “About your ability to smell the weather?”

Christine nodded.

“You turned out to be uncannily good at smelling the weather.”

Christine tucked in her legs and glanced away, but she was smiling with an odd sort of look on her face. “I fed you handfuls of currants, you had juice dripping from your lips.”

“It was . . . deeply unpleasant. Like one of your topsy-turvy madness ceremonies.”

Christine glanced up, her eyes still oddly dilated. “I wanted to lick it off your face. I wanted to eat you up.”

T’Pring froze, then her face was suddenly hot. Of course. Dilated pupils, elevated heart rate, warmth . . . arousal. “ Already ? We hadn’t even been here two full seasons. You still despised me.”

“Do you think I wait to like someone before I have sexual thoughts about them?” Christine was grinning at her. “Is it the opposite for you? Were we already deeply in love before you started having horny fantasies? I know you do. You got yourself off watching me fix the shower, that's dirtier than I’ve ever been about you.”

T’Pring’s face was flaming hot, and probably two shades darker with green. “I did not-- I-- I didn’t realize I desired you carnally until you embraced me under that spray of cold water. But I had thought . . . other things. There were small intimacies. I wanted your physical attention. When you made me the comb, that was the first time I thought of letting you dress my hair. I thought of it . . . many times. The way it would feel—the touch of the tines, your fingers parting hanks, brushing against my skin. I wanted to wash yours. Not just because it needed it.”

Christine’s eyes were no longer dilated. There was a divot in her brow, and a curve to her mouth like pain. She swallowed, a lump moving down her throat. Then, slowly, she reached out and took T’Pring’s hand. Her mind, behind the touch, was sweet and pained and so familiar.

"I've been thinking, and reading, and, um, thinking some more." She bumped the journal with her free hand. "And I'm a fucking sadsack in this journal. But I…” She bit her lower lip, and then smiled her helpless, startled-oryx smile. "I wanted so much. I wanted so many things I couldn't have. And now— they're possible. I'm still scared, because the distance between possible and real is not a short one. But I'm okay. I'm so much more okay than I was before we came here, and I can handle whatever happens. I can handle all sorts of things now."

T'Pring nodded, wishing it was not illogical to be disappointed. Was it not the best outcome, that Christine could now handle setbacks, follow her own wishes, become the person she wished to be? "I am glad to hear that. You are— You deserve—” But for some reason she could not find the words to wish her well. She stumbled over them, she stumbled over rush of selfish rage that she did not want Christine to be well on her own. She could not say that. She had to be supportive. She had to —

But before she could find those words, Christine broke in in a rush, cutting her off with breathy, cracking words. “You know you’re stuck with me, right?” she said. “Even though we’re not bonded anymore, even though all of this was some fateful accident, I’m never going to be able to just let you go. And if you’d want it, maybe we could bond again, the normal way, on purpose this time. When we leave here, even if you don’t want me, I’m gonna be . . . at your side or on your tail—at your back. You know that, right? I’m going to stick with you. Always.”

Something untwisted inside of T’Pring, something she hadn’t even known was there, locked tight, keeping her bound and tangled up in herself. As long as she could say it was a forced choice, an accident driven by the body's need, a connection made from whatever they had because they had no hope for something better, she could stay away, keep herself from admitting too much, from acknowledging the truth of how she felt. But there were no excuses left, only this sunny broken girl and the sense of peace that came when she said yes . Yes, this is what I would choose, every time, with every self, in every world.

“Good,” T'Pring said, quietly but firmly, the rage settling like a comforted sehlat curling up by the fireside. “At my side is where I would like you, always. I have protested for a long time, but it was simply a formal protest against a truth that I could not deny. Be at my side. It is the appropriate position for my wife.”

#

When next they reached the first plateau of the spire, it was dawn, but they had fended off night animals with fiery torches as they traveled straight through.

There they could just glimpse the crest of the higher plateau above. With fingers tucked together, above the crest, a new image formed, an aurora of colored light and dusky shadows rising up and up, through the atmosphere and out, braiding and weaving together to make patterns in space. That was the warp and weft of time, the cocoon that held this small remnant of the previous universe in stasis, a time capsule, waiting to be opened and make this small solar system and all its mysteries once more become part of the inhabited cosmos.

When they released their hands, the visions remained, and the sense of each other did too, a mirrored wonder, shock, hope, and knowledge. It was a knowledge of each other, but also of the planet, a place with its own strange katra that had tangled its tendrils with their own. The grief of the ancients for their universe met the hope of a new one being born, and to that deathless katra came the final, long-hoped-for knowledge, that they would not be forgotten, that all they had done and thought and said and loved would not be ground to worthless dust.

As the wonders of the old universe revealed themselves around them and inside them, they could only turn to each other, tangle their fingers together and hold on. Then, when movement came again, when action, they stumbled back until someone’s back hit a tree and their bodies pressed together, hands still latched. A touch on the face, the throat, the lip, and then a kiss, one, another, then too many to distinguish, flowing together like moments of a river. The firework sense of connection, the reduplication of each others’ feelings, the knowing of the other’s body; it was like a plunging into a bottomless pool, like thinking you were drowning, and then suddenly, miraculously, being able to breathe.

#

Chapter Text

The Enterprise came out of warp only about a thousand meters from the Gallant and Erica took a long slow breath, readying herself for anything.

“Hailing,” said Mitchell.

“On screen.”

Jim was lounging as usual in the chair ( Pike’s chair), ankle over his knee, and gave a brief faux professional nod. “Captain Ortegas.”

“Captain Kirk.”

Spock stood at his shoulder, hands folded behind his back, brow furrowed deeply in a way that Erica, at least, could recognize as his best attempt at being threatening. (They’d practiced it, back when they’d all been friends, back before the thing between him and Christine had gotten weird, back before he’d rather get his girlfriends back broken than listen to them .) She spotted Uhura in the comms corner. Her expression was not thrilled at all. Erica got that. Man, she wished she could negotiate with Uhura about this, someone smart and empathetic and not dopey, macho Kirk, who could barely make a decision without Spock’s input. And in this case, Spock’s input was not the good stuff.

“So, we got an alert that you were in this area, only no one’s supposed to be here, and there’s no record of you having orders to be here.”

Erica raised her eyebrows and glanced around. “Looks like a bit of empty space to me. Thought it would be a good place for maneuvers.”

Steam metaphorically appeared out of Spock’s ears. But he still left the talking up to Kirk.

“Well, it’s not. It’s restricted space.”

“Oh yeah? Why?”

Kirk looked uncomfortable. “Well, um—”

“She knows why,” Spock said, roughly. “What are you actually doing here, Captain Ortegas?”

“I told you,” Erica said. “Maneuvers.”

She checked the chrono carefully. Christine had told her to just drop them and fuck off, but Erica had taken a good look at who put through the request to make this segment of space off limits, and who might be coming to check on any unscheduled activity here. Long range scanners were set to notify Mr. Spock himself.

“And are maneuvers why there were reports of omega radiation coming from this area?”

“Couldn’t say,” Erica said flatly.

“What did you let them do?” Spock snapped. “You know neither of them are mentally well.”

Erica wanted to snap back yeah, they’ve both been deep in that depression shit since you dragged them out of a time vortex against their wills . But she needed to play for time. It had been almost thirty hours. The Enterprise must have been pretty far away, it having taken that long to get here at what, warp 5? Any higher than that and Starfleet would have Things to Say about using dangerously high warp speeds outside of actually charging toward the frontlines of a war. But they definitely hadn’t dilly-dallied.

No doubt Christine had made certain that they’d be far away when she scheduled this. But they’d hardly had any time at all. Erica was going to make certain Spock didn’t rip them back out again. Not like last time. She wouldn’t let him do what he’d done to them again. If that meant firing at the Starfleet flagship, so be it. She’d been court-martialed before. She could handle it.

“I’m sorry. I was here for maneuvers. Not sure who you’re talking about.”

“Both Dr. Chapel and T’Pring are missing.”

Erica’s brows shot up. “Yeah, it’s Christine’s summer break. She said she was going to go hiking somewhere. Haven’t heard from T’Pring . . . ever. But isn’t she like, hanging around weird monasteries these days? How can you tell they’re missing? Do you have them chipped or something?”

Spock’s mouth hardened. “Your sass is as frustrating as ever, Captain Ortegas. I cannot believe that you would conscience what I know you have done. You claim Dr. Chapel is your friend, and yet you help her return to a place she was trapped and suffered greatly. Did you not think that there was some alien message mind controlling her into obeying?”

Erica stared back at him. “Did you think there was? I kind of think that’s the sort of thing your people from Gol would have noticed.”

Spock looked frustrated and stymied by that. Erica prodded further. “Didn’t T’Pring go to Gol? I thought that would have been a kind of normal step to do.”

“Yes, she went to Gol,” Spock snapped back. “That does not mean there was no alien influence. You have very likely sent them to their deaths , Lieutenant Ortegas.”

“ Captain Ortegas , ” Erica snapped back. “I outrank you, Mr Spock. Perhaps you should consider speaking with a smidgen more respect to a superior officer.”

Spock’s mouth contorted with pure disgust. He’d never respected her abilities. Just because she didn’t act like he thought a captain was supposed to act didn’t mean she couldn’t do what a captain needed to do. And she was doing it now.

“I will offer respect where I logically deem it is due.”

“Yeah,” Erica said. “That’s how we got into this situation in the first place. What the hell is wrong with you? Why can’t you let Christine make any choices for herself?”

“I have never prevented her from choosing anything.”

“You didn’t let her choose to stay on the planet in the first place. You brought them back. In spite of the fact that you had a good idea it would damage them.”

“I-- we -- rescued them. Would you leave your crew behind on an uninhabited planet? That is in violation of Starfleet protocol 57782. You do not simply abandon people. I will not abandon my crew!”

Erica stared at him. She’d heard the play by play of the Sybok attack. She’d heard how Spock had stopped after getting Christine, how it was Christine who hadn’t stopped, who hadn’t been willing to abandon the visiting civilian on their ship. Who had done the abandoning? “Still feeling guilty about picking Christine and leaving your fiancée out to dry?”

“Guilt is illogical.”

“Depends on what you do with it.”

“This is not about that. You are in violation of regulation—”

“I know what I did,” Erica said. “I know what I did to Christine too, by fucking off and not being there for her when I should have been. So I’m here for her now. I’m not letting you bring them back, okay? They made their choice. Maybe that’s against regulations, or maybe it rubs it in that you didn’t ‘rescue’ anyone. But they aren’t hurting anyone, and they made their choice. So leave them the fuck alone.”

Spock’s mouth bent. He looked, suddenly, more like the kid he’d been on Pike’s Enterprise, the up and coming wunderkind, all full of hopes and dreams and desperately trying not to show it. “I can’t,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because if they die there, I won’t ever be able to assist them. My actions were in error. I know that. I have been trying to find a way to mend their pain. I am still trying. I cannot let them—”

Then Erica remembered what she’d heard last about Pike, and how Spock had found a place where even with his broken body in that damn tub, he could live a full, imagined life, just in his head. Erica sighed. She’d seen Pike regularly after the accident. Sure, his life hadn’t been great, but he’d been getting faster with the morse code. He’d been spending time in the stables, horses eating sugar cubes out of his motionless hand. He could still live in the real world, enjoy things in the real world. He didn’t need to be dumped into a fantasy menagerie built by a bunch of aliens because he couldn’t face facts. He was Pike, he could face anything.

“You can’t fix everyone, Spock. You aren’t a legendary hero. You aren’t destined to alter the course of the universe. You just do what you can, and let other people handle things when you can’t. Okay? Let them handle things. Let people make their own choices about what to do with their lives . Even if those lives aren’t the ones you think they ought to have.”

Spock’s face went hard. “How long has it been?”

Erica checked the chrono. “Thirty-one hours,” she said.

“That’s over a year. If they were going to come back—”

“You don’t know how long it will take!”

“Time is running faster for them. They could already be dead. Do you even have a communications rig set up?”

“I’m not micromanaging this. I’m just here to make sure you don’t fuck things up.”

“Saving their lives is not ‘fucking things up.’”

“It was last time , Spock . You hurt them so badly that they had to go back, because they couldn’t live here. They couldn’t live here ." Her voice cracked as she said it, and though it was embarrassing, it also wasn't. She'd had to have that talk with Christine, had to hear the awful thoughts she'd been having, knowing that Christine was only telling her the least of it. Did he know what it was like, to see those black clouds go through your best friend's mind, pulling her down, pushing her little boat farther away from shore? It had left her breathless and terrified, because she couldn't stop them, she couldn't turn around and shake Christine and make her be all right. So she'd done the only thing she could.  "It was this or giving up, Spock. At least there's a chance now. At least they aren’t somewhere they have no chance of coming back from. Why can’t you trust them to save themselves ?”

“How do I know they’re even trying?” Spock snapped. “Captain Pike chose not to save himself. He could have chosen not to go in there. He could have--”

“I don’t know why he made that decision, Spock,” Erica said. “I don’t know . But he made it. This time it’s their turn. It’s not your decision.”

“Why don’t we just give them a little more time,” Jim suggested. Spock gave him a furious look, and then forcibly composed himself. “They survived five years there before. Let’s give’em two. Forty-eight hours.”

“They’re trying to work a miracle,” Erica said, cautiously. “You’re not going to even give them another five?”

Jim tipped his chin and nodded. “Dr Chapel was part of my crew. My crew works miracles in very short time spans. 48 hours.”

“All right,” Erica said, not thinking it was all right at all. “Forty-eight hours. And then we’ll talk about what to do next. Okay? We need to talk. No just grabbing for them with the transporter.”

She ended the comms call and turned to Mitchell. “Make sure all plasma cannons are ready. If they’re not back in 48, we’re going to fight the Enterprise.”

The fact that Mitchell didn’t even blink at the order made Erica breathe again. Okay. Idiot she might be, but her crew would back her all the way.

#

44, nothing.

45, nothing.

46, nothing.

47.

Erica worked her hands, leaning over her console, breathing hard. Being captain was great, until you had to do shit like this. At least her dinky ass puddle jumper ( I love you, Gallant) ’s crew of twelve were loyal to the teeth. How to get out of this without killing everyone was the key question. Sometimes loyalty went too far. But there was no way in hell she was letting anyone rip Christine out of there before she was ready. Two years? Fucking two years ? Maybe they wanted to take their time and like, tame a monkey-lion as a pet or something first.

48.

“Time’s up, Captain,” Jim said, casually. “So how are we going to handle this rescue mission?”

“I have all my previous records,” Spock said.

Then a new voice spoke up. “We’ll try to contact them first, right?” Uhura said. “They should have access to the same comms rig they had before.”

“Yeah,” Erica said, relieved by Uhura’s assist. “We’ve got to contact them first.”

“And if they protest again?”

“They asked for more time last time, Spock! We’ll give them more time.”

“Let me just--” Uhura was desperately hammering things into the comm console. “We’ll contact them--”

“The Captain didn’t give you orders,” Spock snapped.

“Stop sucking lemons, Spock,” Uhura snapped back. “We aren’t at war. This is just sense.”

“Yeah, it’s really fine,” said Jim.

“They’re not answering,” Uhura said. “Let’s give it ten minutes?”

“They’re probably already dead,” Spock snapped. “You’ve waited too long already.”

Uhura rolled her eyes. “Ten minutes without you jumping to conclusions, okay? If they’re already dead then bringing them back now or ten minutes from now won’t change anything. Calm down .”

“I am perfectly calm.”

“Oh, really?”

Uhura's tone was entirely the ‘I’m going to rile up the Vulcan’ tone Erica knew so well from her time on the Enterprise. It was all playing for time. God, she could kiss Uhura—not that she didn’t want to do that on a regular basis anyways. Nyota was way too hot.

“Hey, Captain, there are some odd omega waves hitting the sensors,” Mitchell said.

“What?” Erica sat up. “Where are they coming from? Lieutenant Uhura, we’re getting omega waves. Are you noting them?”

“Yes, Captain,” Uhura said.

“ I’m Captain,” Jim protested. “Wait. What omega waves?”

Mitchell had turned the viewscreens toward the waves, and Erica saw what would happen next clear as day with her pilot’s intuition. “Brace for impact!” she yelled, and hit override on all the stabilizers. The shockwave caught them and hurled them like a surfboard on the swell, but without the stabilizers they were carried easily away from the impact point. The Enterprise had not reacted so fast and they were hit broadside with it. But they were also a lot larger and more shielded. They skidded badly out of the way and there were explosions from their nacelles.

“Mitchell!” Erica yelled. “Hail Enterprise, make sure they’re okay!”

The frequency turned into the Enterprise bridge, shaken, but not badly. Their shields were down and they had a damaged nacelle, but engineering was on the comm, already sending teams to fix them.

“What was that!” Spock snapped. “Did you fire--”

“No, man,” Erica said. “You might want to look behind you.”

“Huh?” Jim turned in his seat as if she’d meant inside the Enterprise. But Uhura moved the viewscreens to show their rear. Spock stared at the screen. His eyes were wide and his mouth slack as he saw the star where no star had been before, and the small series of planets orbiting around it.

“You want to try that comm again, Nyota?” Erica asked.

“Already dialing,” Uhura said. “I’ll patch us both in when they pick up.”

It wasn’t an if anymore.

It was a few minutes later when the comm crackled to life. “Thought you might be calling soon.” Christine’s voice . Erica’s eyes teared up a little, but she was Captain, so she wiped them quickly and pretended they hadn’t.

The screen lit up with a strange set of colors. The image was a little shaky, but it was clear enough to see what was important. Christine was there, with her wide, troublemaker grin, shoulder to shoulder with T’Pring, something like axel grease smeared over her nose. T’Pring had an unusual-looking pair of goggles pushed up on her forehead.

“Looks like you worked a couple miracles,” Erica said. But it wasn’t the whole bringing a planet out of a time pocket thing that she cared about. It was that unrepentant asshole look on Christine’s face, the one she’d thought was gone for good. It wasn’t. It had just been left on the planet with a chunk of their lives, and it looked like she’d found it again.

“We managed,” said T’Pring. “Though the last attempt had a much higher chance of destroying the universe than of success.”

“And yet it worked.”

“We should have checked the chordal arrangement more thoroughly.”

“I have intuition. The planet gave us intuition!”

“You have what they call the ‘devil’s own luck.’”

“I thought you said it was fate.”

“You will never understand my theory of fate.”

“I understand your theory of fate. It’s just ‘things happen because people are people.’ This happened because we are us . Deal with it. It’s fate.”

“You are oversimplifying—“

Christine leaned over and ended the argument by kissing her right on the mouth. There was a brief struggle, T’Pring pulling away and fixing her with an infuriated glare, and then she caught Christine by the front of her shirt and pulled her in to kiss her back.

On the secondary screen, she saw Spock blanch. From behind him Uhura caught her eyes and made a tiny punch into the air. Erica grinned and matched it. Who cared if it was appropriate for a captain?

“Oh shit,” Christine said, suddenly. “Did you get the video working?”

“Yuppp,” Erica said. “Mazel tov.”

#

Starfleet was not particularly thrilled by an additional new solar system suddenly appearing in Federation space, but since Kirk had been nearby at the time, they grouchily accepted the situation as Further Enterprise-Related Shenanigans.

After some finagling, Christine and T’Pring were appointed as the M-class planet's administrators. They planned to set up a research base there, where scholars could come in, stay in the old alien ruins, and learn as much as they could about the previous universe from the planet’s records.

Nearly everyone promised to visit, Crew, family, students, even Stonn and his wife. Erica was the first, of course, and Nyota got leave so that she could co-author a monograph on the alien language with T'Pring. Christine was now deeply obsessed with becoming the foremost human expert on katric anything. 

When Spock came, he brought flowers. Something in him had bent a little, and though he was as awkward as always, when he looked at Christine and T'Pring, his expression was one of relief, like the weight of responsibility for the whole goddamn universe wasn't quite so heavy on his shoulders anymore. He said congratulations. He said, well, not I'm sorry , but, "I realize now that my choice to remove you from the vortex originally was an emotional decision made out of distress and fear. I was unable to bear feeling helpless, and so I helped in spite of your wishes. Although I could rationalize this desire, it was a violation of your autonomy, and I apologize for that."

T'Pring looked like she was about to rip his head off for showing up at all, in spite of the pat apology. But Christine stopped her. "Don't do it again," she said. 

Spock nodded, and for a moment, he looked at her like he used to, with that curiosity and affection, as if understanding her might be a door to understanding himself. Christine met his gaze unflinchingly, facing that look, that interest, that she'd spent far too long being abject for. And she smiled, because the past version of her who'd wanted it so badly was gone, and she didn't miss her in the slightest. She returned her attention to the one Vulcan whose attention she wanted.

"If you say one thing to Christine about 'wanting being better than having'—” said that Vulcan. "Stonn was very distressed by that, even though you were just being emotional ."

"I will not," replied Spock. "In this case, I will trust, that Christine knows what she is getting into."

"Are you trying to be humorous—"

Christine laughed and caught T'Pring around the waist, pulling her back before she actually went for Spock's throat. "I do know what I'm getting into," she said. And then she tangled her fingers into T'Pring's, pressing her cheek against her wife's cheek, and smiled slow and predatorial. "And having is better. Having is the best thing in two universes."

When Gallant was in for a refurb, Erica scheduled a longer trip to the new planet. She brewed a type of moonshine from local currants that made everyone—even the Vulcan, though she claimed otherwise—very drunk and very sick the next day.

It was late one evening, sitting around the fire at the old camp, laughing with Nyota and Christine, even T'Pring letting out a quick, fierce smile and a bout of edged sarcasm, that Erica knew, for sure, that this was the happy ending. 

Everyone had had a little too much moonshine–Nyota heading off to curl up in one of the alcoves hours ago, and Christine having slowly slipped from resting her head on T'Pring's shoulder to having it pillowed on her lap. Only Erica–inured to even the worst liquors–and T'Pring, who claimed the moonshine didn't do anything to a Vulcan metabolism, despite the fact that Erica had seen how drunk she’d gotten last time, remained awake. She'd set down her drink and let her fingers card gently through Christine's hair, though she was looking only into the fire.

It was still jarring and a little bewildering to see them like that. Spock's picture perfect fiancée, so upright that the stick-up-your-ass jokes wrote themselves. Christine, hot mess, then just a mess, now just herself, trusting someone with every shaky piece. But they worked, somehow. And, well, Erica understood a lot more now. For one, T'Pring wasn't prim, and maybe hadn't ever been. She was just a well-combed lioness. For two, Christine talked a good game about being weird, independent, going her own way, but she only thrived when she was loved and supported.

"Shoulda known," Erica said, swirling her glass and watching the sediment woosh around like a purple snowglobe, talking mainly to herself. "When Spock strolled up to us in your body, she looked like she was going to pass out. At the time I thought she was scared of lirpas, but it was the bisexual panic again."

T'Pring inclined her head the tiniest fraction and let out a breath that might have been a laugh. Christine claimed that T'Pring laughed a lot, but Erica was not convinced she was telling the truth–or maybe not convinced that she was seeing the same truth as the rest of them.

"It would have been a surprise to me," T'Pring murmured. "Though I would be very entertained to find out how I would have reacted had she made a pass back then."

"With lirpas?"

T'Pring raised one eyebrow. "You are familiar with lirpas?"

Erica thought this was probably not the time to elaborate. She just nodded. But watching them, watching what she'd always wanted–someone to look after Christine who actually had the skills to do it right–all of the feelings bubbled up, sulfurous and hot, like a fucking geyser. 

"You two better not do anything like this to me again, okay? I had to say goodbye to my best friend like she was going to die, and then I nearly had to fire on Nyota! Never again. You just stay happy and married and ordinary. I'm the Starfleet captain, I get to have the crazy adventures."

T'Pring regarded her with a look that should have been entirely unreadable, except, of course Erica could read it. It wasn't very subtle. "Thank you," she said, "for everything you did to help us."

Erica sighed and flopped back against the heap of cushions in their grim little cave. That wasn't a promise. There were some people–she should know, she was one of them–you just couldn't stop them. When they got their motor running, the gear locked and they were away. And it was good they were like that. Christine had lost that spark when she was in the slough of despond, and it had been bad. It had been so bad. She needed to run, and she needed someone who could keep up and head firmly in the same direction.

Christine gave a small sleepy murmur in her girl's lap and reached her hand out to tangle her fingers into T'Pring's. It hurt to see, Christine so vulnerable and needy. But it hurt in a good way, because T'Pring interlaced their hands and traced a fingertip across the lines of her face with a look that made her sure that the whole Vulcan-emotionless thing was a dramatic overstatement. Erica'd like more, of course, she'd like some kind of shovel talk and a super earnest vow, but maybe walking into a time vortex intentionally , arm in arm, was better than anything she could think to ask for. 

When T'Pring looked back at her, there was a quiet expression on her face that said she would never apologize for what they'd done. And if she had to, she'd leave again without even saying goodbye. She'd take Christine by the scruff of the neck and go so far away that no one could find them. And that, Erica realized, was the right answer. It was the one she wanted to hear. Because when the world asked too much of you, tore you apart and ate you up, what you needed, more than anyone else, was a getaway driver on your side.

FIN