Work Text:
Ready Room
Erica walked into the briefing room, her posture stiff, her stride carrying an almost fake confidence she didn’t feel. “What’s up? You wanted to chat?” she said, voice slightly higher than usual, trying to mask the knot of dread tightening in her stomach.
Una didn’t flinch at the greeting. “Have a seat, Lieutenant,” she said briskly, motioning to the chair across from her desk.
“Oh, this feels, uh, official,” Erica muttered, the nervous humor faltering halfway through.
Una’s gaze didn’t waver. “At precisely 0240 hours, you pushed the engines to one-sixth impulse power, when I gave you strict orders to keep us at one-eighth.”
Erica flailed, searching for an explanation. “I was trying to dodge tiny asteroids. We were all on edge. My finger might have slipped a little.”
Una’s eyes narrowed. “A reasonable error by the standards I hold most helm officers to. But you’re not most helm officers. You don’t make mistakes like that. Unless they’re intentional. You forced my hand.” Erica’s gaze fell, unable to meet Una’s gaze. “You flew fast enough for us to be spotted by the Klingons so I’d have no choice but to switch over to your plan. Look me in the eye and tell me I’m wrong.”
Erica’s stomach sank. She met Una’s gaze, feeling the weight of it press down. “You were going to leave Pike and M’Benga stranded for six hours. We all know the Klingons don’t take prisoners.”
“Disagree with me all you want,” Una said, voice clipped. “It’s not your call to make.”
Erica’s hands curled into fists at her sides. “Do you know what could happen in six hours?” Her voice carried desperation she couldn’t hide and she realized what she revealed with that statement. She was no longer talking about Pike and M’Benga.
Una’s shoulders slumped slightly, a flicker of sadness crossing her expression. “I’m sorry about what happened to you, Erica. But I can’t have it affect your judgment.”
Erica swallowed, trying to find her footing. “It was a mistake. I can get a handle on it.”
“You better,” Una said sternly. “Pike and M’Benga were about to escape in a shuttle, so your maneuver endangered everyone on the ship unnecessarily.”
Erica’s expression dropped further. She shook her head, voice barely audible. “I never meant to do that.”
“I know,” Una replied softly, with a care that caught Erica off guard. She paused, then continued, firm again, “But there are consequences for insubordination. I’m pulling you from the duty roster. Two weeks. In that time, you’ll have to report to the warrant officer for Chain-of-Command training.”
Erica’s head sank. The weight of her error pressed down in full force. “Am I dismissed, sir?”
Una nodded slowly, and Erica turned toward the door. She almost didn’t hear Una call her back.
“Erica?”
She froze, then spun halfway to attention. “Yes, sir?”
“This can’t ever happen again. You do realize that, right?”
Erica managed a small, tight-lipped smile, one that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “I do. And I’m sorry.”
Her smile fell before she even reached the door, and she stepped through onto the bridge, shaking her arms out in frustration at herself, at the situation, and at the knowledge that she’d earned every word of that reprimand.
Erica's Quarters
The doors slid shut behind her with a soft hiss, and for once the silence didn’t feel like relief.
Erica didn’t bother turning on the lights. The ambient glow from the corridor faded as the door sealed, leaving only the dim wash of the bulkhead lights. She crossed the small space automatically and leaned against the wall of the bulkhead.
Two weeks off the duty roster. Chain-of-Command remediation. She’d been yelled at before, reprimanded, scolded. Pilots pushed boundaries, that was half the job. But this? This wasn't a “got carried away in a dogfight” kind of screwup. Una had looked at her like she'd crossed a line she couldn’t uncross.
And she had.
Erica exhaled sharply, scrubbing both hands over her face. The words kept looping in her head:
“You don’t make mistakes like that. Unless they’re intentional.”
She could still hear the quiet betrayal in Una’s voice. Not anger, but disappointment. That landed harder than any dressing-down could.
You were going to leave Pike and M’Benga stranded for six hours.
She squeezed her eyes shut at the memory of her own voice. She’d gone acting casual, that fake confidence—What’s up? You wanted to chat?—as if she didn’t already know what was coming. But the second Una called her on it, the façade cracked. She’d all but admitted it.
Because it was true.
She slide down slowly until she was sitting against the wall. The silence pressed in around her, heavy and close.
She hadn’t stopped thinking about being taken by the Gorn, not really. It would fade away when working until she didn’t expect it and then she would lay down to sleep the memories crept back in. The smell of the ship, the pain. She remembered thinking, this is how it ends, as she felt the blackness of unconsciousness pulling at her while piloting the shop.
She was moments away from not making it…if enterprise had just been moments later in beaming them aboard.
So when the Klingons showed up, when it looked like Pike and M’Benga could wind up in the same kind of situation, being taken...she couldn’t allow it. Force the circumstances. Make the rescue happen.
Except Pike and M’Benga hadn’t needed rescuing.
And she’d put everyone on the ship in danger for nothing.
She felt a sharp stab through her torso, the memory of the injury healed any yet somehow just always there out of reach. She had always thought she was tough enough, competent enough, unshakable.
But sitting here, it felt like a lie. She’d let fear steer the ship more than her training had.
She let Una down.
She let the crew down.
She let herself down.
Her throat tightened, but she swallowed it back. No tears. Not for this. She didn't deserve to cry about the consequences she knew damn well she earned.
Una’s voice echoed again, softer this time. “I'm sorry about what happened to you, Erica. But I can't have it affect your judgment.”
Too late.
She dropped her head back against the bulkhead and closed her eyes, breathing through the hollow ache in her chest.
Two weeks.
She could fix this. She had to. She would take the punishment seriously, go into it with the same focus of piloting. But right now? Right now the only thing she could do was sit in the quiet and face the fact that for the first time in a long time, she wasn't proud of what she'd done.
And she wasn't sure how to forgive herself for it.
Later
She’d made it through the day without being cornered. Reported for Chain-Of-Command training and then ready to just slip back into her quarters.
No bridge. No socialization after work. No lingering in corridors long enough for someone to call her name. It wasn’t hard if you timed it right and kept your head down. Avoidance masqueraded well as efficiency.
But the silence that had felt necessary in the morning started eating at her by evening.
Her mind kept replaying pieces of the ready room.
“What’s up? You wanted to chat? Fake ease. She could still hear it.
And Una’s voice, steady, clipped, all command. “At precisely 0240 hours, you pushed the engines to one-sixth impulse…” The words still lodged like grit under her skin.
Erica had flailed for humor, for excuses. “We were all on edge. My finger might have slipped a little.” God. She could hear herself. Could see the moment Una didn’t buy a single syllable. She had lied and Una knew it. Maybe that is what stuck with her the most.
Then the part she couldn’t stop circling back to Una’s voice low, firm, the one line she hadn’t had an answer for: “You don’t make mistakes like that. Unless they’re intentional.”
She thought about going to bed without speaking to anyone. She could. No one would stop her. No one expected her anywhere. That freedom should’ve felt like breathing room. Instead it sat wrong in her chest, like a bruise pressed from the inside.
“There are consequences for insubordination.”
“Two weeks off the duty roster.”
“This can’t ever happen again.”
Even when Una’s voice had softened — “I know you didn’t mean to” — it hadn’t made the shame go down any easier.
Her mind looped back to the ready room, the moment she’d turned to leave and tried to smile like she wasn’t cracking. “I’m sorry.” She hadn’t even said it right. Too fast. Too thin.
There was nothing more she could say to Una right now to make it right. It would take time and action, showing she was taking the punishment and reprimand seriously. But there was someone else she needed to apologize to.
When Erica initially suggested her plan…she looked back and knew she was already compromised…she should have asked to be relieved of duty then. And then when Nyoto just spoke the truth about what she saw with the Klingon ship…Nyota’s quiet, startled face when Erica snapped at her as she left.
By the time she was standing outside Nyota’s door, she didn't remember consciously deciding to go. Her finger hovered over the chime for too long. She almost turned away.
She pressed it anyway.
The doors slid open and Nyota appeared, off-duty, surprise flickering across her face before it softened.
Erica didn’t step inside. Didn’t lean on the doorframe or try to pretend she’d dropped by for something casual. She just stood there, hands at her sides, pulse too loud in her ears.
“I shouldn’t have…” The words stuck, came out rougher than she meant. She paused, swallowed, and tried again. “Back in the ready room, when I…snapped at you. You didn’t do anything wrong. I know that.”
Nyota’s expression was gentle in a way that only made the knot in Erica’s chest twist tighter. “Erica…”
“I’m not…” She cut herself off, forced the words into order. “I’m not asking you to say it’s fine. I just didn’t want to pretend it didn’t happen. You didn’t deserve that. And I hate that I did it.”
Uhura studied her for a long, quiet moment. No judgment. No pity. Just seeing her. That was somehow worse.
“I forgave you before you even left the room,” Uhura said softly.
Erica nodded once, but it didn’t land. Forgiveness didn’t erase the fact that she’d crossed a line with a friend, with the whole ship she should have never crossed.
“I don’t know if I’m good at coming back from things,” she admitted, the words barely above a breath. “Even when other people let me.”
Uhura’s voice lowered. “You don’t have to figure it out tonight.”
Erica gave the smallest nod, an acknowledgment, not agreement, then stepped back before the conversation could turn into something kind or comforting. She wasn’t ready for that.
“Goodnight,” she managed.
She didn’t wait for Nyota’s reply before the door closed and the corridor swallowed her again.
The quiet of her quarters felt different when she returned. Not lighter. But cracked, just enough to let air in.
She sat on the edge of the bed, boots still on, staring at the motorcycle she was working on, a mission to rebuild something as she was also trying to rebuild herself. The apology to Nyota still sat in her chest like something fragile and unfinished. Maybe forgiveness from someone else didn’t mean much if she couldn’t give herself any.
But at least she’d said it. And for tonight, that would have to be enough.
She lay back on her bed, staring at the ceiling, the hum of the ship, her ship, surrounding her. Her mind drifted, not to the part where Una had handed down the punishment, but to the moments around it. To the parts she hadn’t let herself hear.
Una hadn’t looked at her like she was someone to be gotten rid of. The reprimand had been firm, unyielding, even but it hadn’t been severance. Una hadn’t said, You’re a danger. She’d said, This can’t happen again. It hadn’t been exile: it had been course correction.
She’d spoken like someone who believed Erica could steer back. That this had been a break in judgment, not in character. At the time, all Erica had heard was what she’d done wrong. Now, replaying the words in the dim quiet of her quarters, she could hear the part she’d missed: Una expected better from her because she still believed she could be better.
The ache in her chest didn’t disappear. But it shifted. Not gone, just no longer the whole of it.
She unlaced one boot slowly, then the other, letting them thud softly to the floor. The quiet held, but it didn’t press as hard as before.
She’d screwed up. She was facing it. For tonight, that could be enough.
And tomorrow, maybe it could be something more. She went over to her pad and requested a meeting with the ship’s councilor as well.
1 Week Later
Erica’s boots clicked softly on the deck plates as she made her way down the quiet corridor, still wearing her uniform, still feeling the weight of the response. The ship hummed around her, lights low, crew alert, but routine. She had spent the past seven days not on the duty roster, she attended Chain-of-Command training, she visited the councilor twice, and she just kept her head down.
She thought about her discussions with the councilor, her admission, I know the crew did so much to get us back. I think I felt like we needed to do more this time. That I needed to make something else happen. I was so in my head without realizing it I couldn’t see the big picture. She did plenty of challenging even hazardous maneuvers as a pilot, but always because she was told to do or she had to make the judgement to save the ship immediately. This had been different, she had caused the danger to happen.
Now a summons to the captain’s ready room made her pulse quicken.
She paused before the door, feeling the weight of the bridge crew aware of her, hand hovering over the controls. Why now?
The door opened. She hadn’t even seen him since the reprimand. But she found her confidence and walked in, eyes meeting the captain’s. He was leaning casually against the edge of his desk. “Sir?”
“I wanted to see you before you returned to the bridge,” he said, gesturing to the chair across from him. Erica moved to sit, heart thrumming, hands tight in her lap. “It’s been a week since Una pulled you from the roster. I’ve been reviewing the report from the Warrant Officer.” He gave a small, approving nod. “And I certainly put a lot of weight into Una’s recommendation. It's not been two weeks, but she says that you’re ready to return to duty. She trusts you, Erica. I trust her judgment. And right now, the ship needs the best pilot at the helm.”
Relief washed through her, but nerves tightened in her chest. “I understand, sir. Thank you.”
Pike’s expression was steady, thoughtful. “It is also your choice. It’s about knowing you’re ready. You’ve shown you can handle what comes, and Una trusts you—so do I. You’ve earned your place back at the helm if you are ready.”
Erica swallowed, exhaling slowly. “I won’t let her or the crew down again.”
“I know you won’t,” Pike said. “Now, we are observing a collapsing neutron star at close distance Go back, take your station.”
Sliding into her seat next to Jenna, hands settling on the familiar controls, Erica felt a steadiness she hadn’t in days. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she could almost hear Una’s quiet confidence, the voice she’d carried through the reprimand, the reminder that she could do better, that she could be trusted again. The ship hummed under her fingers like a language she finally remembered how to speak.
I know what I’m doing. I know what I’m capable of. I can do this. I am not lost. I have a whole crew with me.
Confidence wasn’t loud or flashy, it was quiet, steady, rooted in the work she’d done to get back here. Erica let herself lean into it, feeling the shift from doubt to certainty, from fear to focus. She was ready, capable, and not only believing in herself again. But believing in the crew again.