Chapter Text
Year 2 – USS Enterprise, en route to Sigma Trianguli VI
There were words along her ribcage she had never learned to read.
They had been there as long as she could remember—pale script, inkless yet legible, etched into the shallow inward curve beneath her left breast. Vulcan, the medscanner had confirmed once, though the universal translator refused to parse it. Not directly. Not even McCoy’s clever tinkering with the language subroutines had managed to coax it into Standard.
Jane Kirk had never let her try too hard. The one time she pressed, with hypospray in hand and some theory about “symbolic latency in genetically triggered linguistic patterns,” she had barked that it was private, and Lenora, to her credit, had stopped asking.
Not that she could’ve explained it if she tried.
Jane Tiberius Kirk had stopped believing in soulmates long before she ever left the surface of Tarsus IV. There were children who died clutching each other’s hands, mouths open on gasping declarations, desperate for something permanent in the ruins. Others who died in her arms with someone’s name on their lips, hands clasped around promises that dissolved into ash.
If fate had bound them in pairs, it had done so with the careless precision of a sniper. Jane remembered too many final breaths to think anything beautiful came of binding.
Still. The words remained. Unreadable. Unspeakable. Hers.
Sometimes, after a mission left her scraped raw, she would trace the line of them in the dark. After she had dismissed her officers, after McCoy had bullied her into taking the sleep she never wanted, she would lie there and let her fingers follow the curve of the last symbol. It reminded her of the Vulcan character for ash . She did not know why that mattered, only that it did.
“Captain.”
The voice cut through her reverie like a silk blade—soft, but undeniable.
Jane blinked, the muscles of her back stiffening as she sat forward in the command chair. The helm and navigation stations ahead glowed in steady arcs of light, Sulu and Chekov’s hands poised over their consoles. To starboard stood the science alcove. There, hands folded behind her back, was Commander T’Lir—her stance as precise as the instruments she oversaw.
The sight of her—poised, still, impossible to misread—sent a sharp awareness through Jane’s chest. She hated how easy it had become to recognize her from a single word.
“Commander,” she returned, casual, lips crooked into a half-smile. “Status?”
“The ion storm has cleared. We are on course for Sigma Trianguli VI. No anomalies at present.”
No anomalies. Jane wished she could say the same.
Instead, she sat straighter, one hand resting on the arm of her chair, the other draped loosely against her knee. From anyone else, the report would have been routine—an anomaly passed, a course resumed. From T’Lir, the words carried the weight of a verdict.
She forced the tension from her shoulders with practiced ease, as if the words had not struck deeper than they should.
“Very good,” Jane said, brisk enough to carry. Sulu acknowledged her from the helm, Chekov flicked a confirmation light across his panel. All was in order.
All but her.
The silence on the bridge pressed in, heavy with the hum of systems. She let her gaze fall to the viewscreen, where the starfield bloomed wide and brilliant against the dark.
Jane’s eyes tracked the scatter of stars as though they might reveal something to her if she only stared long enough. What she saw instead—reflected faintly against the curvature of the glass—was the shape of her first officer’s poised silence.
Waiting, not with impatience, but with that measured stillness that always felt like… expectation. It was not concern. Not exactly. More as though she anticipated Jane would speak something she hadn’t yet found the words for.
Jane never did.
She gripped the edge of the chair until her knuckles ached, then released it with deliberate care. The weight in her chest remained.
“Mr. Sulu, steady course,” she ordered, voice smooth again.
“Aye, Captain.”
That was all. Another storm weathered. Another quiet deferred.
Yet when she leaned back, the remembered touch of words along her ribcage burned like a brand. Pale, indecipherable, inescapable. She breathed against it. Steadying herself with the rhythm of engines and stars.
And did not, for the thousandth time, ask.
Later – Captain’s Quarters
There was blood beneath her fingernails.
It wasn’t real. Not now. Not anymore. But Jane woke with the taste of dust in her mouth and the old ache in her knees, and it took her longer than she liked to remember she was on a ship, not a colony floor.
She pulled herself out of bed and stood at the mirror, pushing the regulation tunic off her shoulders. The mark was still there. Pale. Slender. Elegant, if she were feeling cruel—because beauty made it harder to dismiss.
She traced it.
T’Lir would know what it meant, she thought, not for the first time. And then, T’Lir could say it.
She pulled her shirt back down.
No. She didn’t want to know what her last words would be—not yet.
Some things were easier left unread.