Chapter Text
Deanna sighs softly as sleep laps at her consciousness. It has taken them so absurdly long to get here, in the most literal and figurative of senses.
Their move from Nepenthe to Earth had not been easy. They both felt it, what they were leaving behind: the home they had created for their son with the knowledge that he would soon leave them, the place where Thad last breathed the air and the air last left him.
This year has been a tidal wave of emotion that has left her exhausted, though she can’t regret any of it. Will leaving to help Jean-Luc had hurt, but she knows that the experience—the revelation that Jean-Luc had a son who would have been Thad’s age, the terrible choice that Vadic had forced on him, the moment when she’d nearly lost and then found him through the tether that bound their very beings together—had jolted them both so thoroughly that they’d finally broken through the fog of grief and stitched together the raw, gaping wound that Thad’s death left in their souls. They will always bear the scar, but the bleeding has stopped.
And finally, finally, they’ve settled into their new home and new jobs and the wet chill of the Pacific Northwest. Their wild girl is thriving in the Academy, studying linguistics and determined to follow in the footsteps of the legendary Uhura, and the winding, honest talks over Jumja tea and raktajino with Beverly that she’s missed out on for twenty years no longer exist only in her desperate imagination. After so much pain and silence and loss, she and Will are in a place where they can plan a vacation, not as an escape or a desperate attempt to fix something that neither of them can articulate, but as an opportunity to simply be.
It only follows that their transport shuttle is diverted before it ever arrives, and while Deanna has never had particularly strong feelings about asteroids, she thinks she could throttle one with her bare hands right now. They have to settle for an Academy vessel and a transfer to a cargo ship, bound for an outpost a few billion miles from Kaphar Prime and then it’s only a hop, skip, and a transporter beam to a Bajoran diplomatic convoy. It’s variously cramped, loud, uncomfortable, and ice cold, and a year ago they’d both have broken a few hours into this farce but instead, they laugh. Will wraps himself around her to keep her warm and Deanna pushes her knuckles into the knotted muscles at the base of his spine and when they finally arrive at the beachfront cottage in the predawn hours, the bioluminescent seaweed strewn across the sand and the light from the moons casting a purple-blue glow around them both, they collapse in the massive bed in a tangle of limbs and stale clothes.
“Hang on.” She reaches behind her, unclasping her bra, and works it through the sleeve of her tunic. “Move up a bit.”
Will complies, and she wriggles back against him a bit until she’s fitted into the bend of his waist, one of his arms resting under her neck, the other draped low over her waist. She grabs for a pillow and tucks it just above his bicep, angling it so that both their heads can rest on it. With one foot she manages to catch the edge of a velvety, folded throw that he intuitively grabs for and tucks around her body.
She feels his mind settling heavily over her like a weighted blanket, its familiar presence insulating her from the ragged sensations of hunger and thirst and muscle aches. He is the only presence that can—that has ever been able to—soothe her in that way, even when the chasm of grief hung between them.
“Worth the wait?” He mumbles into the top of her head, his breath warm and damp on her scalp.
She lets one hand drift over the arm that’s crossing her like a safety harness and runs her fingertips over the back of his hand, over the wiry hairs and age spots that fleck his skin, tracing the almost invisible scars inflicted by alien blades and sheared-off edges of hulls and molten-hot wires and tearing thorns and shattered keepsakes and the talon-like nails of a little girl gripping her father’s hand.
She pours the word into his mind like cascading water, feeling it wash over him as he drifts to sleep.
Always.
She wakes slowly, each sensation dawning like a layer being unwrapped from around her consciousness, until she reaches the feeling of him.
Her pants have been stripped off and she’s tucked between soft sheets, her hair untangled from where it was tied back and splayed across a pillow. The smell of coffee mixes with sea air and something salty and sharp that’s foreign and familiar at once.
It’s rare that she sleeps so deeply that she’s surprised by his absence beside her. Even when she sleeps later than he does, her subconscious is often keen to his waking mind, to the point that she’s occasionally urged into a dream state mirroring the tenor of his activity. More than once, when he’d been at the helm, she’d woken in a cold sweat.
Now, she lets her mind unfurl slowly into the world around her, until it bumps up against the solid presence of Will Riker. Her eyes still closed, she smiles and hears his bare feet on the wood floor, coming closer until the edge of the bed dips beside her. “Good morning.”
“It is,” he murmurs. “Though the chronometer might argue that particular point.”
“Oh?” She squints, letting her eyes adjust to the hazy light spilling in the windows.
“I think it’s around dinner time back home…next week,” he chuckles. “Confused the hell out of me when I woke up, so it’ll be spending the week in my bag. We’re on vacation. Who the hell cares what time it is?”
She reaches for him, pulling him by the hand back down onto the bed next her. His entire presence feels so much lighter these days—and so does she. Truthfully, she’s not sure either of them realized how much of the darkness that had been consuming him had seeped into her own psyche. The bond that they share has never had any sort of fixed rules, shifting and evolving over time, for better and worse.
They’ve shared pain, joy, fear, ecstasy—all of it, and she’s not always in control of how much runs along the current that’s between them. Will, for his part, hadn’t truly understood how much of what he felt echoed across their bond until Deanna had been in labor with Thad—the exhaustion, the pain, the onslaught of emotion, all of it had sapped her of any ability to shield him, and he’d crumpled into a heap beside her as the white-hot agony of a contraction spilled across their link.
She’d accepted pain relief the next time, mostly for his sake, and the merciless laughter that the story elicited from Beverly when she’d finally shared it had been a moment of pure joy for them all. Will had feigned embarrassment, all the while radiating an overwhelming sense of gratitude.
Deanna rolls to face him and runs her fingers through his hair, letting her bent arm rest on his shoulder as her hand caresses the back of his head. “Well then,” she murmurs. “It seems there’s nothing to say we should be out of bed at this hour, whatever hour that is.”
He reaches over to tug the blankets back over them, shifting them both closer in process. “You make a compelling argument. Though I’m open to further convincing.”
Later, she tells him. For now, just be here with me.
Over the years, his voice in her mind has gone from a tinny, low whisper to one that’s clear enough for her to feel the way he emphasizes certain words, the weight of fatigue and stress and emotion behind each syllable. Now, she hears warm contentment bathed in unrestrained love as the words sink into her mind and deep into her soul.
Wouldn’t want to be anywhere else, Imzadi.