Chapter Text
The cabin lights had come up to their morning setting, a slow warm climb that the Curiosity's circadian system insisted was more humane than a sudden wake. Somewhere past the bulkhead the deck plating carried the faint, even tremor of a ship running slow on impulse. One note, steady, and it hadn't changed since gamma shift, when they'd dropped out of warp and started the crawl in.
Ezri was awake before the lights finished. She lay on her side watching the ceiling find its color, one hand resting under her ribs, and she was smiling at nothing in particular.
EZRI: I'm excited about today.
Beside her, Julian made the sound of a man surfacing. A long breath, and no movement after it. He didn't open his eyes yet. But the corner of his mouth lifted.
JULIAN: Mm. Yes.
A pause while the rest of him caught up. Then, all at once, the eyes opened and the morning was over.
JULIAN: Yes… today. We're in it, we've been in it since gamma shift, Torren walked us through the outer margin at 0400 and the readings have been drifting ever since, which is… Ezri, the window's only eighteen hours wide, and that's the outer estimate, the regular survey ship that stumbled through it couldn't even confirm the duration, they just confirmed the effect, which is half the problem…
He'd rolled onto his back. One hand came up off the blanket, fingers spreading slightly, as though the idea needed somewhere to sit.
JULIAN: …because coherence isn't stability, that's the part everyone keeps wanting it to be. The adjacent realities aren't merging, they're not even touching, they've just fallen briefly into phase… like two tuning forks that happen to ring at the same frequency for a few seconds before the air takes it back. Which means the data isn't going to sit still long enough to be comfortable about, and that's the interesting part, isn't it, because every instrument we built was built to measure things that hold still…
Ezri had turned her head on the pillow to watch him. His hand drew the idea in the air above them; his eyes were on the ceiling, following it. She watched the hand. She didn't reach for it.
JULIAN: …and Cat thinks the divergence will be strongest at decision nodes, high-consequence ones, which, if she's right, has implications, because it means the phenomenon isn't just showing us adjacent physics, it's…
He stopped, caught the new thought, his hand closing around it.
JULIAN: It's showing us adjacent choices. Sorry. That got ahead of me.
EZRI: It usually does.
She was still smiling. It reached her eyes.
JULIAN: Is that a complaint?
EZRI: No.
She pushed up onto one elbow. The blanket slid, and the cabin's morning light caught the small things on the shelf above the work alcove. Bartholomew's smug ceramic cousin had not made it onto the ship; the mug lived on DS9. But other things had. The dartboard scoreline she kept threatening to frame. A shell from the Ilvian coast that had no business surviving a transporter cycle and had anyway. And the photograph in its slim frame, propped at the angle it had occupied since the quarters were new.
Julian, on Bajor. Ezri beside him, both of them slightly windblown, both of them caught in the half-second before a laugh rather than during one. The Ilvian coast behind them. The day they'd married.
Ezri's eyes went to it and stayed. The smile stayed too, but it stopped moving. Held in place.
She didn't say anything. Julian had moved on to the sensor lensing.
JULIAN: …because the suite discriminates by persistence, it learns what stays and rejects what doesn't, which is exactly backwards for this, we'd be teaching it to throw away the only signal we want…
He was looking at the ceiling, building it. His hand had started moving again.
Ezri kept her eyes on the photograph. He talked on, easy and bright, his face turned up toward the bulkhead. Her hand came down off her ribs and flattened against the blanket, and stayed there.
EZRI: Eighteen hours.
JULIAN: Eighteen, optimistically. We'll lose two to setup, probably another four to the first calibration pass, which Cat will hate, which means realistically twelve hours of actual…
He turned his head toward her at last. His eyes moved over her face (an even, unhurried pass) and went back to the ceiling.
JULIAN: You're excited too. You said. About today.
EZRI: I did say that.
Her fingers pressed flat against the fabric, then eased.
EZRI: Go on. The lensing.
He went on. His hand found its rhythm again above them, and his voice climbed back to where it had been.
Ezri lay back down and let the warm climb of the lights finish its work on the ceiling. She listened to him. She did not look at the photograph again.