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Nyota can feel the stares like they’re coming from four sets of eyes instead of two, and while staring seems to be the norm ever since Beckett and Boimler burst through that portal, she’d really rather not lose her cool in front of someone who thinks she’s so... well, cool. She drops her padd on the bar and lets the clatter cover a sigh.
“You can’t crack it?” Erica looks disappointed, which is not what Nyota needs.
“Oh, I can crack it. But all it says is this is a time portal.”
Mariner blinks. “I’m sorry, what?”
“That’s what it says, word for word. This is a time portal.” Nyota slumps across the bar and buries her head in her arms. “This was such a waste of time. I need sleep.”
“Girl, I’ve been telling you that since I got here.”
“She doesn’t sleep.”
“Yes I do.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I slept last night.”
“For how many hours?”
Nyota lifts her head. “Five?”
Erica leans across the bar toward Mariner and bets her it was less than three. Which, rude. It’s not Nyota’s fault that work-life balance is a joke in this career. Maybe that’s why Bibi left Starfleet. Come to think of it, she was always extolling the virtues of rest. Certainly more than her parents did.
“Okay,” Mariner says, slamming her glass down so hard its contents slosh onto the bar. “I think we should have a slumber party. Like now.” She waggles her eyebrows and grins.
Nyota glances at Erica, who lifts her hands in a helpless gesture. She turns back to Mariner. “It’s three o’clock in the afternoon.”
“Helloooo.” Mariner twirls her hand toward a bank of windows. “We’re in space. We’re not bound by a planet’s timetable. There’s no sun to dictate day and night. We’re literally adhering to a set of made-up the rules.”
“Yeah,” Erica says slowly, and Nyota’s relieved to hear the incredulous pitch to her voice because finally, she doesn’t have to be the only spoilsport in the room, “but we kind of have to stick to them since, you know, we’re on the clock.”
“Careful,” Nyota says as she massages the crick in her neck, “or she’ll quote Starfleet labor codes at you.”
“Really? Like verbatim? That’s kind of hot.”
Nyota freezes, eyes wide as she turns. Tell me you did not just say that. Erica drops her gaze to the table and coughs. “You know, in a completely respectful, platonic, not-gonna-fuck-up-the-timeline-at-all kind of way.” She wiggles in her seat a little. Clears her throat.
There’s a moment of silence that lasts long enough to make Nyota wonder if they’ve finally managed to shatter Mariner’s illusions by virtue of being weird as fuck, but then she jerks her chin toward Erica and grins, “All right, okay. Let’s go.”
“Go where?” Nyota asks.
“And do what?”
Mariner plants her hands on her hips and looks between them. “Have neither of you had a slumber party before?” Erica tilts her head to consider the question and Mariner says that doesn’t bode well. Nyota’s still hung up on the fact that it’s 1500 and can’t picture what slumber party even means in this context. Mariner’s shoulders sag. “Come onnnn you two, I was just beginning to adopt Boimler’s belief that everyone from the past is cool.”
Nyota massages the bridge of her nose.
“I guess playing hooky could be considered the adult equivalent of staying up all night,” Erica ventures. Nyota can’t tell if she’s warming to the idea because Beckett’s enthusiasm is that infectious or because Erica’s just more adventurous than she is. She folds her arms on the bar and leans forward. “How do you feel about horror movies?”
“Love ’em. Adore ’em. Play ’em all the time in the h—” Beckett puts a hand to her mouth and coughs against her fist. “In my head. I play them all the time in my head. While I’m working. Because, you know, I think they’re so cool.”
Erica rubs her hands together. “Hell yeah. Okay, I’m in.”
“You’re serious? You’re going to ditch work? Just like that?”
“No,” Erica says, hopping off the stool and clapping a hand on Nyota’s shoulder. “I’m going to go to Una and ask if I can ditch work.”
“That’s not—”
“Semantics.”
“I am so getting busted back down to cadet for this,” Nyota groans as Beckett comes around the bar to drag her off her chair.
It’s the kind of scene the Una of six months ago would have shut down immediately: Mariner and Ortegas spilling off the turbolift with Uhura between them looking like she wouldn’t mind if a black hole opened on the bridge and obliterated her. If Beckett didn’t have such a firm grip on her, she might have walked over to Spock’s science station and gone looking for one herself. Una looks from Mariner’s grin to Uhura’s fidgets to the sparkle in Ortegas’s eyes. Hijinks. Unmistakably. She decides to play along.
“Ensigns. Lieutenant. I don’t remember assigning any of you to the bridge.” Briefly, Uhura fills her in on the inscription on the portal. Una blinks. “You came all the way up to the bridge to tell me that? Couldn’t you have just used the comms?”
Uhura opens her mouth, hesitates, then shrugs. Ortegas and Mariner appear to hold an entire conversation with their eyebrows while Una and La’An look on and Uhura becomes more and more embarrassed. Finally—more to put an end to Uhura’s misery than to feed her curiosity over whatever the hell is happening here—Una narrows her eyes and asks what’s going on.
It’s like a comedy show: Mariner props an elbow on Uhura’s shoulder and crosses her ankles in a jaunty lean as Ortegas tucks her hands behind her back and rocks onto the balls of her feet. “Nothing that will get us in trouble. We just came up here to ask if we could have the rest of the day off. For watching movies.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Worf’s honor,” Mariner pipes up, then winces. Behind them, seated at tactical, La’An frowns and opens her mouth, then seems to think better of it and closes it again. Mariner recovers and jerks her chin toward Erica. “Ortegas is a horror geek. She offered to show me her collection.”
Una looks from Mariner to Ortegas to Uhura and back again, but it doesn’t sound like a euphemism. And really, if it is, does she even want to know?
“I’m thinking A Nightmare on Elm Street,” Ortegas offers.
“Solid choice,” Beckett nods.
“And Ensign Uhura, you’ll be...?”
“Participating,” chorus the usual suspects. La’An rubs her forehead. Uhura just tugs at her collar and nods.
“Participating. I see.” Una looks slowly between them, pretending to consider, then catches Erica’s eye and winks. “All right. Leave granted. And Mariner?” She waits for their errant time traveler to stop dragging Uhura toward the ’lift and turn around with an innocent blink. “I don’t want to see you back on this bridge unless I’ve called you.”
La’An waits until the ’lift doors have closed before turning to Una with a frown. “Are you sure that was wise?”
“What, giving them the afternoon off? Are you kidding? Uhura hasn’t taken leave since she beamed onboard. I was beginning to think I’d have to get Dr. M’Benga involved.”
“You might still have to. She looked ill.” Una chuckles. La’An suppresses a sigh. All this time travel has her wanting to crawl into a storage closet until everyone’s sorted back into their proper lines. “Anyway, what I meant was, is it wise to let them spend so much unsupervised time with Mariner?”
“You don’t like her?”
“It’s not that I don’t like her. It’s that she’s—erratic.”
A snort. “That’s one way of putting it.”
“And we’re trying to protect the timeline. Not wreck it.”
“Watching movies for one afternoon isn’t going to break the space-time continuum.”
“How do you know they’re going to watch movies?”
“Because they told me. You heard them yourself.”
“And you believe them?”
“Well, yeah. It’s not every day that someone has the guts to walk up to me and ask if they can miss the rest of their shift because they want to watch A Nightmare on Elm Street.”
She folds her arms. “The remake or the original?”
“Which remake? There are four.”
La’An raises an eyebrow. “Precisely. And I’m sure there will be another four by the time Mariner—” She pauses.
“Having trouble with the tenses?”
“They’re awful.”
“Best not to think about it too hard.”
La’An sits down at Nyota’s empty station. Even in the middle of a minor diplomatic crisis, operations on the bridge have reached a kind of lull. La’An hates lulls. They lure people into a false sense of security, and then the trouble starts. “My point,” she continues, “regardless of tenses, is that every minute we spend with our visitors risks contaminating the timeline.”
“I can’t exactly lock them in their rooms, La’An.”
“Why not?”
“They haven’t got any.”
“There’s always the brig.” A pause, during which Una actually swivels the captain’s seat around to glare at her. “Fine. All right. But if we get an angry visit from Temporal Investigations, I’m blaming it on you.”
“You know, if you’re serious about this temporal purity thing, you could always join them.” Una blinks at her prettily, as if she’s got her pinned. “I’d go, but then it wouldn’t be a day off. It’d just be watching a movie with your boss. Which is weird.” She frowns, then shakes herself. “Anyway, one of us at least should have fun.”
La’An considers it. Briefly. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
Una spins back toward the viewscreen. “I’m just sayin’ it wouldn’t hurt to live a little.”
La’An humphs. “Who are you, and what did you do with Number One?”
Una just smiles and shrugs.
“Okay,” Beckett says, standing in front of Ortegas’s movie cabinet, “not that your collection of physical media isn’t incredibly impressive and probably belongs in a museum instead of on a starship that participates in more galactic incidents in a week than your average freighter sees per year, but please tell me we didn’t just sweet-talk Number One into giving you the afternoon off to watch a bunch of... whatever these are.”
Ortegas and Uhura exchange a look. “I mean, we can always go with a different medium if DVDs aren’t your thing.” Ortegas thinks for a minute, then lights up. “Have you ever seen Creature from the Black Lagoon? I’ve got that on VHS.”
Uhura makes a face. “What’s VHS?”
“It’s this tech they used in the nineteen hundreds. Took me forever to track down the replicator patterns for the parts to build the VCR. It’s funny that you said that thing about a museum, because I actually got the pattern for the erase head last week from that museum on—”
Beckett groans. “Noooo, the movie was supposed to be a cover.” Ortegas looks at her blankly. “You know, for hijinks.” Silence. “You don’t seriously expect me to come all this way and not play Enterprise Bingo.”
“Oh no,” says Uhura.
“No no,” Ortegas agrees.
Beckett crosses her arms. “And here I was thinking you were the cool one. You’re just as boring as Chief What’s-Her-Name. With the braids.”
“Look,” Ortegas says, clasping her hands in front of her chest and taking a step away from the movie cabinet. “As much as it pains me not to deny a personality comparison to La’An, I’m with Uhura on this one. Enterprise Bingo is not the game you want to be playing when you’re trying not to mess up the timeline.”
“C’mon, it can’t be that bad.”
Uhura folds her arms and looks at her sternly, which—hm. That’s a lot. “There are phasers involved.”
Briefly, Beckett weighs the pros and cons of getting shot by Nyota Uhura. She hates getting stunned, but if Uhura were the one doing the stunning... Over Uhura’s shoulder, Ortegas makes eye contact and slowly shakes her head. “Okay, so I agree, phasers are definitely a bad idea. But we can just skip that square. No need to go for blackout, right?”
“Sorry,” Ortegas says. “Not happening.”
Beckett sits on the couch. To her right, Uhura’s still looking at her with that incredibly iconic glare, and Beckett remembers why she didn’t want travel back in time in the first place. This is so much worse than pissing off her mom. She sighs. “Fine. All right. But can I at least see all the squares?”
Ortegas rocks back on her heels as if giving the request some thought, but then Uhura grabs her arm. “Hold on. If you’re from the future and you know about Enterprise Bingo, can’t you just look up the squares when you get home?”
Busted. She clears her throat. “Okay so the original game maybe didn’t survive. In totality.”
“Mariner,” Ortegas gasps in a remarkable imitation of Boimler-flavored shock. “I can’t believe you were trying to trick us into altering the timeline.”
“Oh come on. You can’t seriously believe knowing bingo squares is gonna fuck up the fabric of space-time.” She looks between them, these icons, these legends, these women she’s idolized her whole life, but neither appears to harbor a favorable opinion of the word budge. “Fine,” she sighs, falling back against the cushions. “We can watch your weird ancient movie. But only if we make it a slumber party like I wanted in the beginning.” She bats her eyelashes. “Please?”
Ortegas rolls her eyes and starts pulling pillows off the bed, tossing them into the middle of the floor with a handful of blankets to make a nest in front of the clunky device she called a teevee. Now that she’s looking at it, Mariner’s pretty sure Rutherford tried to build one of these last week. She can only hope Ortegas’s parts are better quality; Rutherford’s went up in flames.
Uhura walks over to the cabinets and pokes her head into a few. “You’re running low on snacks again. Might have to make a run to the matter synthesizers.”
“Ooo, do you guys still use those little—”
“NO,” they shout. “No more questions. No breaking the timeline!”
Beckett pouts, but successfully bats away both pillows Ortegas lobs at her head. “Keep throwing those and you’ll start an all-out pillow war,” she warns.
Her companions share a sidelong glance. “I don’t see any problem with that.”
“Two against one,” Ortegas agrees. “We’d trounce you.”
“Oh hell no.” Beckett snatches a pillow. “I’ll have you know I’m reigning champion in my division of the Starfleet Pillowfighting League.”
“That cannot be a real thing.” Uhura pauses. “Can it?”
Ortegas grabs a pillow and jumps up and down to loosen her muscles. “Only one way to find out.”
When it comes to movies, horror isn’t Nyota’s first or even tenth choice of genre. In fact, she’s not really much of a movie girl at all. If she had her way, they’d be singing. But Chapel—her usual karaoke buddy—has been pretty busy dating Spock, and the last time Nyota tried to get Erica to sing it almost ended in blood. (Turns out Erica’s neighbors are on different shifts and don’t appreciate being woken up by showtunes at their version of 3am.) She’s been too busy to set anything up since she got her own quarters, and at this point she’s kind of accepted that horror movies are going to be a fixture in her life.
When Nyota slips back into Erica’s quarters bearing a tray of freshly synthesized snacks (and a few bowls of fresh fruit she stopped to pick up from the airponics bay), she expects to walk into an all-out pillow war. They called a truce to allow for a food run, but Erica is nothing if not competitive. She expected them to have gone at least three more rounds by the time she got back.
Instead, they’re sitting on the floor in front of what appears to be the entire contents of Erica’s movie cabinet—DVDs, holos, VHS, microtapes, and a handful of formats Nyota doesn’t recognize but assumes are older than her great-great-grandmother. Cross-legged, sitting side-by-side, their heads bent together, they sort through the collection, voices rising and falling according to their strength of opinion. From what she can hear, it appears that Beckett has a vampire kink. Erica insists that zombies are much, much cooler.
“You’re just saying that cuz there’s a hot butch in that one.”
“Shut up, it’s a classic.”
“No way,” Beckett insists, “but this one, on the other hand...”
Nyota smiles and shakes her head and sets the snacks on a nearby table and as she does, Erica catches her eye. She can’t quite describe what passes between them—Erica on the floor, Nyota at the table, Beckett between them sorting through the movies, unaware of the sudden softness that’s moved into their eyes—but whatever it is, it lodges deep in her throat. What was it her grandmother liked to say about Starfleet? You’ll meet the most unlikely people of your life. Encounter the strangest anomalies. Experience things you couldn’t dream.
Whole friendships, she once said, built in a day.
Nyota looks at Beckett, then back at Erica, and when she does there’s something like sadness splashed across her face.
Whenever Erica invites her to Terror Tuesday, Nyota at least tries to pay attention to the action onscreen. To her credit, Erica has been really good about picking movies she thinks she’ll enjoy. She even gave Nyota a list of tropes and had her cross out the ones she didn’t like, but today she’s lost the plot almost from the start. She’s pretty sure it involves vampires and rock bands and a lot of other things Beckett declares confusingly sexy in a tone that indicates delight, but Nyota doesn’t care. All she cares about is the dark room and the fluffy blankets and Beckett and Erica pressed against her sides.
“Do you care if I fall asleep on you?” she mumbles once she realizes it’s bound to happen.
“I care very much,” Beckett answers. “So much that I might beg you to.”
Nyota considers for a moment how very, very weird it is to fall asleep on a girl from the future who idolizes some future version of herself, then decides she’s much more interested in taking a nap than in the ethics of temporal dislocation. “You have very nice boobs,” she sighs, wriggling down into the blankets and tossing an arm over Beckett’s side.
Beckett pats her back. “I’ll be sure to tell my girlfriend you said that.”
“Kidding!” she adds when both Erica and Nyota bolt upright. “Kidding. I would never break the Temporal Prime Directive like that.” A pause. “But if it had to be broken...”
Nyota flops back down and Erica socks Beckett in the arm before asking a little too casually what the TPD has to say about making out. Beckett asks if they’re speaking hypothetically or in the concrete, and Erica says that depends on what the answer is. It’s the kind of scene Nyota wishes could go on forever—soft and warm and familiar and light. As she falls asleep to the sound of Beckett and Erica flirting above her, she wishes, just for a moment, that it could last beyond one night.