Chapter Text
The guest quarters on the Enterprise were a study in sterile comfort. Everything was precisely where it should be, the lighting was optimal, the temperature perfect. To Will Riker, it felt like a gilded cage. And inside it paced the ghost of his own choices.
Tom Riker, still wearing the faded Starfleet issue fatigues from his rescue, stopped his pacing and fixed Will with a look of pure, undiluted venom. “Come to get a look at the spare part?” he sneered, his voice a harsh echo of Will’s own. “See if the duplication process degraded the merchandise?”
Will’s first instinct was a hot surge of hostility. This man was a monument to his own worst impulses. The arrogance without the accomplishment, the defiance without the discipline. He was a funhouse mirror reflecting every stubborn, prideful flaw Will had spent years tempering. He saw in Tom’s eyes the man he might have become without the structure of Starfleet, without Jean-Luc’s love, without Deanna’s steady presence.
“I came to see how you were settling in,” Will said, his voice tight, his first officer persona firmly in place.
“Settling in?” Tom laughed, a sharp, bitter sound. “I’m ‘settling in’ to the fact that my life, my career, everything was stolen from me. You got it all. And I got eight years of hell on a rock.”
“That wasn’t my doing,” Will countered, his temper flaring.
“Wasn’t it?” Tom shot back, stepping closer. “You never once thought to double-check? To scan for the second transporter pattern? You just flew off to your glorious future and left me there to rot.”
The accusation, so unfair and yet so horribly plausible, hit its mark. Will had no rebuttal. He turned and left, the door hissing shut behind him.
That night, the anger curdled into a cold, unsettled feeling in his gut. Deanna sensed it the moment he entered her quarters. She didn’t probe, just poured him a glass of Aldebaran whiskey and waited.
“He’s infuriating,” Will finally growled, sinking into the couch. “He’s everything I’ve worked my entire life not to be. He’s a raw nerve of resentment.”
Deanna placed a cool hand on his arm. “Perhaps he has a right to be resentful, Will. Think of what he has lost. Not just time, but his entire sense of self. His reality has been shattered.”
Later, in the captain’s ready room, Jean-Luc Picard offered a different angle, steepling his fingers. “He is a Starfleet officer, Will. Or he was. He endured an ordeal few of us can comprehend, and he did it completely alone. His defiance may be all he has left. It is the armor that kept him alive.”
Will stared at the star-streaks of warp travel. Their words chipped away at his anger, and the memories began to surface. Entirely his, but Tom’s as well.
Valdez. The biting cold that seeped through the thin jacket. The gnawing emptiness in his stomach. The oppressive silence of the house, waiting for the sound of his father’s return, never knowing if it would bring a grunt of dismissal or a fresh wave of criticism. The punishments: being told he didn’t deserve to eat, didn’t deserve a roof over his head, the shove out the front door, the sound of the door’s lock sliding home, the knee-deep snow, the gnawing hunger, the shivering hours until dawn.
They had both survived that. They had built their resilience on the exact same foundation of cruelty and neglect. Will had used it to build a life filled with duty, camaraderie, and love. He had people to come back to.
What had Tom built on that foundation? Eight years of utter isolation on a dead planet. No Deanna. No Picard. No Enterprise. No one. Just the howling wind and the ghosts of their shared childhood.
The next morning, Will went back. He pressed the door chime and entered before Tom could tell him to leave. Tom was standing by the viewport, his back to the door, his shoulders rigid with tension.
Will didn’t speak. He just stood there, letting the hum of the ship fill the space. He looked at the set of those shoulders and saw the boy from Alaska.
“You know,” Will began, his voice low, “for a while, after I joined Starfleet, whenever an away mission had me hungry or cold or alone, I’d come back to my quarters and shake for a while.”
Tom didn’t turn, but Will saw the muscles in his neck tighten. Tom remembered.
“It wasn’t the cold of a planet,” Will continued, his gaze fixed on Tom’s back. “It was the cold of that porch in Valdez. It wasn’t the hunger from a destroyed ration pack. It was the hunger from three days with the cupboards locked. It was like every mission that went sideways just plugged me back into that house.”
He took a step closer. “For the last eight years, I had a place to come back to. I had a warm ship. A hot meal. Friends. You….”
He swallowed, the full, horrifying understanding of it finally dawning on him. Eight years. It wasn’t just a number. It was a sentence.
“Eight years,” Will whispered, the words stark and heavy in the quiet room. “Eight years alone and cold and hungry.”
It was the repetition of his own deepest, most private terror, spoken aloud with the weight of absolute truth, that finally broke the dam.
Tom’s rigid posture collapsed. A raw, ragged sob tore from his throat. He folded over, bracing his hands on the viewport, his entire body wracked with tremors that had nothing to do with the ship’s climate control. It was the convulsive shaking of a man finally, finally allowing himself to feel the cost.
He wasn’t the arrogant duplicate. He wasn’t the defiant officer. He was just a boy, thrown out into the snow, who had never been let back in.
Will didn’t move to comfort him. He didn’t say a word. He simply stood in the silence, broken only by the raw, shuddering breaths of the man at the viewport. He watched the stars streak by, a constant, steady flow of motion and purpose, a stark contrast to the static agony in the room. He didn't move, didn't speak. He simply bore witness.
Slowly, the violent tremors subsided into quiet, hiccupping breaths. Tom’s knuckles, white where they pressed against the cool transparent aluminum, slowly relaxed. He didn't turn around, but his voice, when it came, was stripped of all its former armor, raw and exposed.
“The first year,” he began, the words barely a whisper, “I thought that the Potemkin would figure out a way to break through the interference, rescue me. I kept my uniform clean. I practiced my drills. I logged reports.” A hollow, broken laugh escaped him. “I maintained protocol for a crew of one on a world that was nothing but rock and howling wind.”
Will’s heart clenched. He could see it. He could feel it. The desperate, disciplined hope crumbling day by day into dust.
“The hunger was familiar,” Tom continued, his voice gaining a little strength, a horrific monotone. “It was an old acquaintance. I knew how to ignore it, how to stretch a protein pack for a week. But the cold, the planet’s night was so long. And the silence…” He finally turned. His eyes were red-rimmed, but dry now, filled with a weary, bottomless grief. “The silence was worse than the wind. It was the silence of that house, Will.”
He took a step away from the viewport, his movements those of an old man. “After a while, I stopped being Thomas Riker, Starfleet Officer. I was just a thing that survived. The thing that found water, that dug for grubs, that huddled in the outpost while the storms raged. I forgot the sound of my own voice. I forgot what it was like to touch another person.”
He looked down at his own hands as if seeing them for the first time. “I held onto the uniform. It was the only thing that wasn’t rock. It was the only proof that any of it had been real. That I hadn’t just always been there, alone.”
Will finally found his voice, thick with an empathy that now felt all-encompassing. “I’m sorry, Tom,” he said, the words utterly inadequate. “I am so sorry we left you there.”
Tom nodded, a short, sharp gesture. He knew there was nothing to forgive, that Will hadn't known. The apology wasn’t for absolution; it was an acknowledgment. A shared burden.
“What happens now?” Tom asked, the question hanging in the air between them. It wasn’t a challenge. It was the lost, bewildered question of a man who had run out of survival strategies.
“Now,” Will said, his own voice firming with a new resolve, “you take a hot shower. You get some real food. You sleep in a bed with clean sheets.” He managed a small, weary smile. “And then, tomorrow, we start figuring the rest out. Together.”
He took a tentative step forward, then another, until he was standing before his brother. He hesitated for a moment before reaching out and placing a hand on Tom’s shoulder. The muscle beneath the thin fabric was tense, coiled. But he didn’t pull away.
It was a touch. After eight years of nothing, it was a connection.
Tom’s eyes squeezed shut for a moment, as if the simple human contact was almost too much to bear. When he opened them, the bitterness had been scoured away, leaving only a vast, exhausted vulnerability.
“Together,” Tom repeated, the word foreign on his tongue, yet holding a faint, fragile glimmer of something that had been lost for a very long time. It wasn’t a solution. It wasn’t a happy ending. But it was a start.