Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Lt. Mariner’s Log, Stardate 62642.7. Following our engagement with the Strange Energies around the new colony on Proxima Centauri IV, the Cerritos has returned to Earth for repairs three months ahead of schedule. Brad got a commendation for his quick thinking in teaching the Energy Being to play the violin; yeah, turns out that music is a really good way to process thousands of years of pent-up murderous rage, who knew?

Anyway, you’d think that would cheer the guy up, but unfortunately this little U-turn back to the Sol system has put him, well really both of us, in a bind. While the rest of the crew is going to be taking an extra shore leave, lucky them, Brad got a message yesterday from his parents. Apparently, so long as we’re going to be back on Earth, they want to meet his new fiancée…

“Y’know, I kind of can’t believe I’ve never met your parents before.”

The message had arrived when the five of them were hanging out, as they often did on Friday nights when the bar got too crowded, in Tendi and Rutherford’s quarters. Mariner was laying flat on the couch and playing with her friends’ new pet (recently domesticated courtesy of Tendi’s genetic research, and whom Mariner had been insisting for the last hour needed a more creative name than just “The Moopsy”); Boimler, who was sitting on the ground at her feet with his back to the sofa, was still peering anxiously down at the message. “I mean, we’ve been back to Earth loads of times since we started dating,” she added, lifting the ball of fluff over her head and playing with its feet.

“Hah, well, I mean it’s just a total coincidence,” Boimler deflected weakly. “It’s definitely not because I was keeping you away from them or anything…”

“He is lying, correct?” T’Lyn said surreptitiously to Tendi, from where they’d been comparing data reports at the table.

“Oh, yeah, definitely.”

“Brad, c’mon, it’s gonna be fine,” Mariner insisted; The Moopsy yawned with its cavernous mouth and then wiggled its tiny feet, clearly asking to be put down, so she plopped it into Boimler’s lap as she sat up. “Look, I know you and your family don’t always get along, but you don’t need to worry this time! Trust me, I’m great at the whole Meet The Parents thing.”

“Beckett, no offense,” he said, gingerly picking up The Moopsy and setting it aside, “but your relationship with your own parents is rocky.”

“Psh, c’mon man, nobody has a great relationship with their own parents.”

“That’s true!” Tendi chimed in, as T’Lyn said “Agreed” and Rutherford called from the kitchen: “I haven’t seen mine in years!”

“See?” his fiancée said airily, waving a hand as Boimler gave the three of them a concerned look. “But when it comes to my partner’s parents, I am a sorceress, okay, they always love me! I wear my uniform, offer to tune up their replicator, talk about how beautiful their homeworld is—it’s easy!”

“Okay but my parents hate Starfleet, the uniform isn’t going to help here.”

“I mean it could be worse,” Rutherford pointed out, stirring a pot on the stove from which were rising the delicious smells of garlic and soy sauce, and an Orion spice the others couldn’t yet pronounce. “Tendi’s family tried to kill me, at least you won’t have to worry about that.”

“Thanks, Rutherford, that’s really helpful.”

The engineer shook his head fondly as he dipped a spoon into the pot and took a taste, and then called over his shoulder, “Dinner’s ready.” The rest of the group migrated to the table, Boimler reluctantly putting down his Padd at Mariner’s scoff that he “stop torturing himself” and sitting down beside her. “Here we go,” Rutherford said, setting out five bowls of savory-smelling soup. “Piping hot batchoy; four with egg, one without–” Boimler gave a grateful nod, “–and extra soy sauce for Mariner.” He watched anxiously as they all picked up their spoons and added, “I tried using some Orion d’laoi this time, tell me what you think?”

Tendi took a sip of the broth first and then broke into an immediate grin. “Wow! This is amazing, Sam, it pairs really well with that human spice. What’s it called again, Gonjer?”

“Ginger,” Mariner corrected, tasting her. “I’m with her, Ruthie; it’s a weird combo but I think it works.”

“It appears that Human and Orion palettes combine in an odd but not unpleasant fashion,” T’Lyn agreed.

“Filipino sure does at least,” Rutherford said with a grin as he sat down and tucked into his own bowl.

“Ooh, speaking of R&R plans,” Tendi remembered, “T’Lyn, are you doing anything for shore leave? Sam and I were going to visit Los Angeles, but I feel bad leaving you here alone…”

“Feeling ‘bad’ is not necessary. I will be attending a conference at the Terran University of Science in Oslo; do not restrict your recreational activities on my account.”

“Man I love L.A.,” Mariner said with a shake of her head. “You’ve got Hollywood, Santa Monica, the weird long train rides from where the auto industry fucked up their infrastructure? Place is wild.”

“Yeah, bring us back a souvenir,” Boimler said gloomily as Rutherford patted his back.

“It’ll be okay buddy. Besides, they’re your parents! I’m sure they just want you to be happy—and if you love Mariner,” the engineer shrugged, “they’ll have to love her too. Right?”

Meeting the Parents

Planet Earth was glowing its usual cheerful blue outside the window of the middle-tier officer’s hallway as Boimler and Tendi waited for the others outside Mariner’s quarters, the former checking and re-checking his mini-Padd for new messages. Most of the crew, including T’Lyn, had already beamed down for leave, and Boimler was clearly getting anxious to do the same. “What is she doing in there?”

“Yeah, usually you’re the one who takes forever getting ready,” Tendi observed, which did not help her friend’s mood. “Sam said he’d be a little late coming up from engineering; you guys can go ahead if she gets out early.”

“Thanks Tendi.” He huffed and checked the app again. “If we’re late I’m never going to hear the end of–”

He was cut off by the door sliding open. “We’re not going to be late, Brad, don’t worry,” Mariner said with an eye roll, walking out, and then brightened. “So, what do you think?” She’d put her hair up in a bun instead of its usual ponytail, unrolled her sleeves and polished her boots and pips. In short, every inch of her was perfectly to-code. “The uniform still gonna be a problem? I mean we’re not gonna be able to hide the fact that I’m in Starfleet, so I figured hey, steer into the skid, y’know?”

“Should be, uh, should be fine,” he said, looking her up and down, and then added: “Man, it is never not eerie seeing you like that.” His eyes were wide and somewhat disturbed, but his cheeks had also turned a faint pink. Behind her, Tendi let out a giggle.

“I think you scaroused him, Mariner.”

Boimler properly flushed at that and grumbled something noncommittal as his girlfriend smirked, breaking the illusion. “Yeah, I kinda got the impression that your parents are as tightly-wound as you are. Thought cleaning up a little was probably the right move.”

“Well you guessed right,” he said with a sigh, straightening his own uniform shirt. “In my family, I’m the easygoing one.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah. You packed civilian clothes for the rest of the weekend though, right?”

“Got’em right here,” she said, patting the gray duffel. He nodded and then looked over as Rutherford arrived out of the turbolift, already in jeans and an asymmetrical shirt with his own bag slung over his shoulder.

“Oh hey, you’re all here. You guys ready to go?”

“Yeah man, we were waiting on you.”

They made their way down to the transporter bay, where they gave a nod to the crewwoman manning the desk. “Good luck,” Tendi said kindly as Mariner and Boimler stepped onto the pad, and then the two of them vanished in a shimmering haze.

When they reappeared a moment later, it was into the warm, temperate air of central California. It was a sunny day in Modesto, and despite it being nearly autumn Mariner could already tell that she’d start sweating in a few short minutes in the mediterranean heat.

The small city itself was humming lazily around them; as someone whose primary exposure to Earth city life had been the hectic mish-mash of eras that chracterized San Francisco architecture, Mariner found it eerie to be somewhere so visibly locked into the aesthetics of twenty-first century America. Most of the buildings she could see were only one or two stories high, and despite the rattle of a commuter trundling out behind them from a renovated antique depot and several sleek modern trolleys speeding along their lines, many of the nearby businesses still had old-fashioned parking lots. Most of the streets she could see were wide, as if they had once accommodated many more cars than the few farmers’ pickups that rolled past, pulling trailers of livestock stacked with crates of produce.

The street they were on, at any rate, had been turned into a path for walkers and cyclers; overhead stood an antique arch reading “Water – Wealth – Contentment – Health.” It looked—not that Mariner knew much about city planning—like it was supposed to go over a road that continued into the downtown, but instead the paved path split in two like a bubble in a zipper to circumnavigate around a massive, perfectly circular hollow in the ground, as if someone had scooped a portion the size of several city blocks right out of the earth.

Inside the hollow was a city park; steps and ramps leading down from all sides let out into wide grassy lawns and shady trees, between which kids flew kites in the summer breeze and families enjoyed Sunday morning picnics. In the center of the hollow was a bubbling fountain around which wire tables had been set, with couples sharing coffee and old folks playing kal-toh. But Mariner’s eyes were drawn to the statue atop the fountain itself. Even at a distance, she could see the immortalized bronze figures of what looked like average twenty-first century civilians pulling each other out of blocks of rubble, one of them holding the city flag. “Okay, so I’m going to make three guesses about what happened here and the first two don’t count,” she mused.

“Yeah, one of the warheads went awry during the bombing of San Francisco and landed here,” Boimler said, starting down the nearest set of steps into the repurposed crater. “Tons of collateral damage, the city basically had to rebuild itself out of the rubble.” As they reached the halfway point on their spoke of sidewalk stretching from the fountain to the edge of the park, he started to crane his head, looking around at the civilians—several of whom had noticed the Starfleet uniforms with intrigue. His face lit up as his eyes landed on a middle-aged blonde woman standing on another line of sidewalk not far away. 

“Mom!”

After all the stress she’d heard about his parents causing him over the last few years, Mariner was genuinely surprised to see Boimler drop his bag on the concrete and run forward across the grass, pulling the woman into a hug as she turned. She let out a surprised laugh and hugged him back, patting his shoulder as he let her go with a grin.

“Bradward, honey,” she said, beaming up at him. It turned out, Mariner observed as she approached, that Mrs. Boimler was a delicately-featured woman with wavy blonde hair and the exact same smile as her son. She patted Brad’s shoulders again in a fluttery sort of way—clearly, like her son, perpetually a little anxious no matter how happy she might otherwise be feeling. “Have you gotten taller? You used to be the same height as me!”

“Time travel,” he chuckled. “It always adds a couple inches, guess it didn’t completely wear off.”

“Time travel?”

“It’s fine, mom, we're trained to handle that kind of thing. I can’t tell you a lot about it, but we were completely safe the whole time, I promise.”

“‘We?’” she repeated, and then remembered, looking around him and let out a soft gasp of remembrance as Mariner waved.

“Hi, Mrs. Boimler.”

“Oh– dear, of course, hello,” she said with a genuine, if still nervous, smile as she stepped around Boimler to shake her hand. “Lieutenant Mariner, right?”

“Oh please, call me Beckett,” Mariner said, with a laugh that practically tittered. Boimler’s mouth fell open at the sound. 

“Beckett, welcome. It’s so nice to finally meet you, Bradward’s told me so much about you. Have you ever been to Modesto before?”

“Ooh, unfortunately not, but your son here has promised to give me the grand tour tomorrow,” Mariner said, linking her arm through his and even leaning on him slightly. “Didn’t you, Brad?”

He registered he was being spoken to and snapped out of his amazement just in time to stammer out a reply: “Uh, y-yeah, yep, that’s the plan.” He gave Mariner a confused look as they ascended the steps towards the rim of the crater, but she just winked at him and continued:

"Wow it is literally so beautiful here; I'm sorry it took so long to visit."

"Oh, that's fine, dear, we understand..."

"No but really, I should have made more of an effort. And obviously I was missing out," she said, looking around at the suburbanized streets like they held all the fascination and intrigue of ShiKahr or First City. "This place seems really cool."

“Well it's not quite as exciting as the big city, but it's quiet and safe, and it's really only half an hour to San Francisco by train. Bradward tells me that's where you're from?” Mrs. Boimler added politely as they ascended the steps towards the rim of the crater.

“Well, technically I’m from all over, since I grew up on starships,” Mariner gave a wave of her hand, “but yeah, my dad works in the city these days so San Francisco is kind of my homebase. Guess I got lucky my future in-laws live so close by, right?”

“Oh, um– yes, of course,” Mrs. Boimler said, a look of concern briefly flickering over her face, but it was quickly replaced by her sunny smile again. “Bradward, you should have told me your girlfriend was such a nice young woman!”

“Yeah, Bradward , what did you tell her about me,” Mariner teased, elbowing him slightly. He rolled his eyes, already seeming more relaxed.

“Just that you’re a great officer who always pushes me to be better,” he answered dryly.

“Oh so complete lies, gotcha,” she said with a wink towards his mother, which actually made Mrs. Boimler laugh a little, covering her mouth with her hand.

“Why don’t you kids wait here, I left the car plugged in a block over.”

They waved her off; the moment she was around the nearest corner, Boimler rounded on Mariner. “Okay, what the hell was that!”

“Oh please, like you don’t code switch around the senior staff,” she snorted. He gave her a look. “Look, I know things are tense between you and your parents so I’m just buttering them up a little, greasing the plasma injectors!”

“Beckett, I don’t want you to have to literally be a different person around my parents; that’s not fair to you–”

“Brad,” she cut him off firmly, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I’m going to see your family, like, twice a year. You’re the one who has to deal with them all the time, I don’t want to make any trouble for you.”

He opened his mouth to respond, but an unfamiliar rumbling hum sounded from around the corner and both turned, Mariner perking up with interest. The Boimler family “car” turned out to be a pale blue pickup, with stickers in the window declaring government clearance to park on city streets. “Whoa, retro,” she declared, as Mrs. Boimler rolled down the window to wave them over. “Can I drive it?”

“Oh– I suppose,” Mrs. Boimler said, surprised, at the exact moment that Boimler interjected with a sharp and slightly panicked: “Absolutely not.”

“Wh– c’mon, man, why not!”

“You don’t have a license! And besides, the last time you drove us anywhere you ran us off the road into a pond!” Mrs. Boimler let out a little gasp, to which her son quickly added: “It was a shallow pond, Mom, nothing to worry about. But the point stands,” he added quickly to Mariner as he opened the door, who huffed.

“Fine, fine. But you’ve got to admit, those were specific circumstances, I don’t just drive off the road for no reason!”

“Why do you even care about driving a car, you fly a whole starship like every other week…”

They continued their bickering as they piled into the pickup next to Mrs. Boimler and drove off. Soon enough they were flying off down the road out of the city and into the green hills beyond. Mariner rolled down the window and poked her head out, watching the rows of orchard trees and vineyard bushes flash past while her wind streamed in her hair. “Ahh, real sunshine,” she relished, leaning back against the seat and letting her arm rest out the window. “We’ve got the holodeck, but it’s not really the same.”

“I’m guessing you don’t get much fresh air on those starships,” Mrs. Boimler called over the rush of the wind. “How long have you been in Starfleet, Beckett?”

“Ten years; I graduated early from the Academy when the war started and spent two years serving at Deep Space Nine. After that I moved around from ship to ship, got a wide variety of experiences from across the Fleet, then a few years ago I transferred to the Cerritos.”

“That’s your mother’s ship, isn’t it?”

“Mmhm. I wanted to be closer to family,” Mariner said airily. “And that’s where I met Brad.” She took his hand as she flashed his mother an ingratiating smile, while he silently marveled at this selective version of her service history. “But to tell the truth I feel like I’ve been in Starfleet my whole life; like I said, I grew up on my parents’ ships, so to me it’s normal.”

"Do you like your job, then?"

"I love it," she said honestly, and privately marveled at that fact; five years ago, she wouldn't have been able to say that without a sarcastic bite at the end. As Mrs. Boimler turned the pickup off the main road and onto a small gravel driveway, she glanced at Boimler and grinned. "But to tell you the truth? I don't think I would love it half as much if I didn't have the best coworker in the galaxy." She saw in the rear-view mirror as Mrs. Boimler smiled at the compliment towards her son, and Brad, noticing it too, gave her a grateful smile; per usual, Mariner thought, he’d been worrying way too much.

At the end of the gravel lane sat a beautiful old farmhouse, twenty-third century if the quirky geometric architecture was anything to go by. Behind it lay the wide vista of rolling vineyard hills. Mariner hadn’t so much “visited” the Boimler family farm last time as asked Sol station to beam her directly into the middle of the fields at his address, and then wandered through the vine rows shouting his name until a girl dressed like a suspiciously sexy pioneer had pointed her in the right direction, so this was the first time she’d seen the house where he’d grown up. “Wow,” she admitted honestly as she hopped out of the pickup and peered at the lush greenery around her, just beginning to turn to autumn oranges and golds. “You get a lot of great views from a starship, but I’ve got to admit, this is pretty spectacular.”

“It might not be Risa, but it’s home,” Mrs. Boimler said fondly, shutting the pickup door behind her.

“Well I would just love to get a tour tomorrow before we go into town,” Mariner said, turning to Boimler; his back was to his mother, so she didn’t see the fond little eye-roll he gave her and the mouthed “thank you.”

"Well that could be nice; Bradward, what do you think? Maybe you and the girls could show her around?"

“Yeah, of course,” he said out loud. “I can’t wait to show you all the, uh, drying trays and refractometers, and–”

“Bradward,” a curt voice said behind them, and Boimler suddenly went stiff. “You’re home.”

The trio turned, and Mariner felt her eyes go wide. Standing in front of her was what could only be described as an older and somewhat taller and stockier version of Boimler himself. The man had the same nose and jaw, the same squarish head and the same whiskey-blue eyes; the only differences were the graying brown hair swept back from his forehead, and the unyielding set of his mouth.

“Oh,” Brad said weakly beside her. “Hey, Dad.”

“Wow, I had no idea humanity had such a thriving physical media scene!”

“Yeah, records are a little niche,” Rutherford said, checking the vinyl in its cardboard case and carefully tucking the brown paper bag over it as they stepped out from Protazoa Music into the blazing sunshine. “But there’s still a good crowd of collectors, plus they’re easy to store on starships, so it’s a pretty popular hobby among officers. Word has it Riker’s got a first pressing of The Kimtones’s breakout album.”

“Huh. Are they any good?”

“Nah, not really…”

They debated the merits of music as they walked down the boulevard, with Rutherford explaining his preference for classic rock over jazz and Tendi making a strong case for acid punk and Orion shanty-rock. “Aw man, I haven’t been back to L.A. in forever,” Rutherford said, shaking his head and basking in the sunshine of his hometown.

“So this is where they film Terran holonovels, huh?” Tendi said with intrigue, spinning around so her sundress flared out as she walked over another pink star.

“Yeah, but that’s just Hollywood. The rest of the city’s more chilled out.” For some reason he hesitated, before continuing: “Actually, with Mariner and Boimler going off to visit Modesto, it got me thinking—I-I kind of wanna show you where I grew up. Is that okay?”

“Okay?” she repeated, and he looked nervous until she grabbed his hand. “Sam, that sounds amazing!” He broke into a relieved smile. “Let’s go!”

“Oh, uh– right now?”

“Why not! R&R is only two days, after all.”

“Right. Yeah, you’re right.” He took a deep breath and then smiled, and if it was a bit anxious then at least Tendi didn’t seem to notice. “Let’s go.”

It turned out that Rutherford’s old neighborhood wasn’t far, a short ten-minute trip by the high-speed metrolines that crisscrossed the sprawling city like a silver web. But when they stepped out of the train back into the waves of late-summer heat, Tend immediately noticed that they were in a much quieter part of town. The street was lined with two-story apartment buildings, small businesses and vacant lots which had been turned into centuries-old city gardens. Most of the buildings that she could see had murals in bright colors painted across the street-facing walls, and beneath the tall waving palms the summer trees and flowering desert plants were blooming on all sides. “It’s beautiful,” she murmured. “This is where you grew up?”

“Come on,” Rutherford urged, taking her hand. “I know where to get the best food in town.”

He led her down the street past long stretches of city garden and mural-painted apartments until they reached a small commercial area, where there turned out to be a refurbished twenty-first century strip mall, complete with an outsized parking lot and a large sign listing the establishments available. Over one of the stores a sign in black-and-white letters read CREDIT HITS, outside of which several grills were already smoking with red coals, adding their own heat to the baking air. “You’ll love this place, it’s an institution. Three hundred years old,” Rutherford promised as they reached it, holding the door open for her.

“That is one loyal customer base,” Tendi teased as she ducked inside.

“Heh, you better believe it. That’s why I wanted to get here early, this place gets packed as soon as everyone’s off work.” And then he froze, eyes fixing on something over her head. “Hoh boy.”

“What?” Tendi frowned curiously, turning and finally getting a good view of the shop. Gleaming steel buffet tables were lined with platters of skewered pieces of raw or deep-fried food, glowing mouth-watering shades of gold, tan and crispy brown under the heat lamps. There were metal tubs of fragrant sauces and platters of something wrapped in leaves. Tendi hadn’t seen such a spread of human food since the time the Cerritos had transported a group of Terran diplomats to Bajor.

None of that was what Rutherford was staring at, however. Across the shop, holding a broom in his hands, was an older, broadly built man in an apron, watching the couple. To Tendi’s curiosity, the man barely seemed to pay her a glance, instead eyeing Rutherford down with an unamused—but not entirely hostile—expression. Tendi heard her husband swallow hard, but to his credit, Rutherford stood his ground as the man with the broom approached the pair. “Hi, Mr. Mabini,” he said awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck. “How are you?”

“Samanthan Rutherford,” the shopkeeper said warily, setting the broom aside. “As I live and breathe. It’s been a long time.”

“Um, yes, sir. I-I know it has…” He seemed to remember he wasn’t alone and gestured to Tendi. “Um, this is my wife, D’Vana. I wanted to show her around the neighborhood, so I…thought I’d stop in and…”

The shopkeeper glanced again at Tendi, taking in the green skin and visibly alien features, and then back at Rutherford, who winced. Something in the older man’s face softened. “Pleasure to meet you, D’Vana; please, pick out anything you like. Samanthan, magsalita tayo dito.”

He nodded to a walkway leading back to the kitchen behind the buffets, and Tendi didn’t miss the shift out of FSE as they stepped to the side and began to converse quietly. Clearly there was some history here, but the shopkeeper was letting Rutherford save face and not upbraiding him in front of his wife. She pretended to be examining the food while listening to the tumble of half-whispered syllables she didn’t understand:

“Mr. Mabini, gusto kong humingi ng tawad. Ang ginawa ko noon, iyong tindahan– patawad na po–”

“Ito ay pinatawad, Samanthan. Water under the bridge. ” Rutherford exhaled in relief at this, before the man added: “Ngunit ang taong dapat mo talagang humingi ng tawad ay ang iyong ina.”

“Alam ko, he said with a wince. “Bisitahin namin siya bukas. Hindi ko pa… hindi ko pa siya kayang harapin.”

“Perfect timing. The summer festival is tomorrow; lahat ay nandoon.”

“Ah man,” Rutherford exhaled. “No time like the present, I guess…”

“They’ll be happy to see you. I mean it,” Mr. Mabini said firmly. Rutherford grimaced, clearly not believing him, but nodded. “Well,” the older man said in a slightly louder voice, “let’s not keep your bride waiting; have you found anything you’d like, Miss D’Vana?”

Tendi jumped, flushing as she realized she’d been caught eavesdropping. “Oh! Um– this?” she offered, picking up one of the skewers with what looked like blocks of condensed blood on it. At least, she hoped that’s what it was. Human foods could be strange sometimes. (For one, she would never understand their obsession with ketchup. Who wanted to eat fruit as a paste? )

“Straight for the Betamax,” the shopkeeper said, impressed. “She’s a good one, Samanthan; don’t scare her off.”

“I know, sir.” He and Tendi shared a glance, and she could read the waves of relief in his eyes; clearly whatever tension had been between the two men was now resolved. “I know.”

They brought the food outside to cook themselves on the hot grills and sat down to eat. “So,” Tendi said as she dipped the skewer in vinegar, affecting nonchalance, “what language was that? I haven’t heard it before.”

“Tagalog. It’s what they speak in the Philipines,” he explained. “I was born here in LA, but my mom’s whole family is from Manila. I haven’t spoken it a lot since I was a kid…”

He trailed off, apparently lost in thought. Tendi was about to ask why when the sound of approaching voices distracted her, and both looked over; a trio of middle-aged office workers were approaching, but when the saw Rutherford they slowed, eyes narrowing. Rutherford tensed up again like a spooked cat, but before the trio could get closer, Mr. Mabini (who had been grilling a skewer of his own) abruptly approached the group and began to converse with them in quiet but firm tones.

Two of them, both women, began to look molified, but as they followed Mabini into the store, the third, a man, gave Rutherford a glowering look. Sam attempted to return this an apologetic half-wave, but the man just glared deeper and then swiftly looked away, vanishing inside the store.

“Aw man,” Rutherford sighed to himself, returning to his meal with a now glum air. Tendi glanced between him and the workers in the store, considered the evidence with a quiet “Hm” and tilt of her head, and began to form a hypothesis.

Dinner at the Boimler family residence was…awkward, to say the least. Whereas Mariner’s weekly dinner in her mother’s quarters often turned into bickering (and even the occasional fight), apparently any tension in Brad’s family left the diners eating in near-total silence. She tried valiantly to break it. “Well this is great,” she said with a forced smile. “You guys must be happy to have Brad home, right?”

“Of course,” Mrs. Boimler said immediately, and with a smile in her son’s direction, but fell quiet when Mr. Boimler just grunted. Boimler winced. Mariner’s smile slipped away as she looked down at her plate and puffed out her cheeks. It didn’t help that the meal was basically tasteless; Mariner had always assumed that the jokes about white people having bland food were just an unfortunate stereotype, but the meatloaf she was politely choking down truly tasted like cardboard. Whatever cultural delicacies the Scottish-German ancestral Boimlers had carried with them from the old world when settling in the central valley, they apparently hadn’t been handed down in the subsequent generations (or at least had never gotten programmed into the family replicator).

“So, Bradward,” Mrs. Boimler piped up, at least trying to do her part to carry the conversation. “Beckett said you two met at work?”

“Oh, um, yeah,” he replied, looking relieved. “I mean technically we met years ago when we both had a layover at Sol Station, but we didn’t remember it afterwards for a long time, so…”

“Yeah, it’s actually a really funny story,” Mariner chimed in, forcing a laugh and keeping eye contact with Mrs. Boimler, who had the exact same expression of gratitude as her son. “It was right after the war started, and I was on my way to DS9 and Brad was on his way to Risa, so–”

“You fought in the war,” Mr. Boimler interrupted, drawing her attention.

It was a statement, not a question, but Mariner answered it anyway. “Oh, uh, yes sir. U.S.S. Quito and then Deep Space Nine, served with distinction; got a Medal of Commendation plus the Silver Palm for a combat injury–”

“So, then you’re a soldier.”

At the word, every single one of her hackles went up. “Dad,” Brad broke in sharply, his hand darting to grab hers under the table.

“I’m just asking her a question,” his father returned. “Don’t you want me to get to know your fiancée better?”

“Beckett doesn’t like talking about the war,” Brad insisted, as firmly as he was able to despite his obvious nervousness. “Can’t we discuss something else?”

“Well, how were your mother and I supposed to know that? It’s not like you’ve ever brought her around before, or told us anything about her.”

“My time in combat was, uh, a-a lot shorter than the rest of my career,” Mariner said, thankfully getting her wits back before Brad, whose face was going a dangerous red, could reply. “Besides I wouldn’t really call myself a soldier ,” she added with a forced laugh. “I’m an explorer, that’s– y’know, that’s what Starfleet is all about, so…”

“I see,” his father replied, turning his cool blue gaze back to her. “And what, exactly, do explorers do?”

Mariner blinked at him, completely wrong-footed by the emotional whiplash and also just outright confused by the question. Everyone knew what Starfleet did, at least in passing. “We—go on missions? To explore things?”

“And these missions,” he said, “are they dangerous?”

Her eyes slipped sideways to Mrs. Boimler, looking for backup, but there was no further aid incoming from that quarter; the woman’s face had gone suddenly anxious. “They…can be,” Mariner admitted, sensing a trap even if she couldn’t see where, “but–”

“But they’re usually not, and we’re just low-level officers, Mom, we mostly stay on the ship,” Brad interjected quickly. “It’s honestly fine, you don’t need to worry.”

His hand gave hers an urgent squeeze, which Mariner interpreted to mean don’t talk about the bad stuff, something she was always more than willing to do anyway. The abrupt interrogation on her combat service had rattled her, which she could only assume was the goal. Her eyes darted across the table to meet Mr. Boimler’s, whose face was still as unyielding as a granite cliff, and she felt her eyes narrow, just slightly, as she worked out just what was going on here.

On some fundamental level, she and Bradward were very similar people—wide-eyed adventurers, eager to seek out new life and new civilizations, to see and experience everything that the many worlds of the galaxy had to offer. They were cut from the same cloth. But Brad needed external validation in a way she didn’t, and it didn’t take a session or two with Migleemo to see why. Life had given them different hangups; her damage had happened in space stations and starships, and in one case while reading a KIA report while sobbing in her Academy dorm room.

His damage had happened right here, at this dinner table, and she’d be damned if she let him face it alone.

She squeezed Brad’s hand back and turned back to his mother. “Yeah, we’re not really important enough for the dangerous missions,” she lied, blatantly and without remorse, and then turned a bright smile on his father. “But that doesn’t mean we don’t do important work; actually, our senior officers were so impressed with us that Boimler and I just got promoted to full lieutenants last year!” Try to undermine that, asshole.

His mother’s face lit up. “Bradward, honey, you didn’t tell us you got promoted!”

“Oh, um, well it…didn’t seem important,” Brad said anxiously, gaze flickering anxiously to his father, but Mariner had won a victory and she wasn’t going to let it go that easily. She interjected with a laugh and a wave of her hand:

“Oh you know Brad, he’s always too modest. I bet he didn’t even tell you about the commendation he got the other day.”

“A commendation? Honey, did you hear that?” Mrs. Boimler said, turning back to her husband with a spark of pride and even hope in her voice. “Bradward got a commendation.”

“He was amazing,” Mariner gushed before Mr. Boimler could reply, deliberately not looking at him as she charmed Mrs. Boimler with the story. “We were en route to the new colony on Poxima Centauri IV when this ancient alien consciousness the settlers had apparently woken up stopped us; it literally manifested in human form right on the bridge! Classic Strange Energies situation."

"Oh my. I can't even imagine..."

"Yeah, turned out that a totally different race of ancient aliens had colonized the planet ten thousand years ago and locked the entity away with some sort of mystic totem before nuking themselves out of existence. It was pissed, we thought the whole mission was gonna be a bust.” She decided not to mention the part about the pitched space battle and the entity nearly destroying the crippled ship before Boimler's timely intervention. “ But, in the finest tradition of Starfleet, Brad got through to it by appealing to art and beauty and its sense of wonder, y’know all that jazz. He really came through for us,” Mariner said, turning to him with a grin, and he returned it with an almost-genuine smile.

“Really? Oh Bradward, dear, that’s wonderful,” said his mother.

“Thanks, Mom. It was touch and go there for a few minutes, but yeah, I think I handled it pretty well–”

“So what did you do.”

They turned back to the head of the table. His father was watching him with the same flat expression, and Brad’s voice stammered off. Mr. Boimler raised an eyebrow, arms still crossed as he leaned back in his chair. “Go on. I want to hear the end of this riveting story.”

“I, uh–” Brad was beginning to flounder again under the drilling blue gaze. “I-I taught it to play the violin. Yeah, turns out it was really into…music…”

“I don’t remember you being very good at violin,” his father replied. Brad’s face fell even further.

“I– I made second chair, Dad,” he said, voice gaining an edge.

His father didn’t answer, just continued to glare back at him. Boimler’s scarlet flush started to spread again, and Mariner recognized as his eyes got that familiar feverish, twitchy look that meant he was about to say something he’d definitely regret.

“Well!” she said loudly as she smacked her hands down on the table, startling the other three. “That was a delicious meal, Mrs. Boimler. Did you have anything in particular planned for desert?”

“Oh, um– n-no, I don’t think so dear.”

“Well then if you don’t mind, I have brought the replicator code for my dad’s famous secret-recipe sweet potato pie,” she said with a charming smile as she stood up. “Please, allow me; Brad-why-don’t-you-help-me-in-the-kitchen-come-on.”

She grabbed him by the arm and hauled him into the other room. As soon as the door was closed she let go, and Brad let out a frustrated sigh. “I am so sorry about him,” he whispered angrily, throwing a vicious glance at the door. Now freed from the prison of the dining room, he seemed more at liberty to express his true thoughts.

“Hey man, don’t apologize to me; you’re the one he’s tearing to shreds,” she snorted as she pulled out the isolinear chip and plugged it into the replicator. “And come on, Brad, you need to talk yourself up more! You earned the hell out of that commendation, I mean I’ve never taught an incorporeal being to play an instrument–”

“Right, yeah, about that. Beckett, I get what you’re trying to do, but please stop bragging about stuff I’ve done at work, okay?”

“But you should be proud, your dad’s just being a–”

“I know! But trust me, nothing you say is going to help!” He saw her expression and sighed. “Sorry. Just– he doesn’t like Starfleet, so the best thing we can do is just not talk about it.”

“Fine, man, but he brought up the war stuff.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

They paused as the replicator whirred, and then materialized a piping-hot pie on the tray. “Besides,” Mariner pointed out as she picked it up, “Starfleet is like our whole life. What else are we supposed to talk about?”

“It’s all about proper cultivation.”

The family was seated around the table again, ostensibly to eat the pie, but Mrs. Boimler was too busy serving coffee, and Mr. Boimler had pulled out a Padd to show Mariner the monitor screen of a new irrigation system the vineyard had just implemented. (Bradward, for his part, was remaining mostly silent and cuting the pie into squares with the side of his fork instead of eating it, which Mariner could only assume was a strained effort to keep a handle on his fraying temper—or possibly dissociate himself away from the conversation entirely. Lucky him.)

She was drawn back from her observations by the continued lecture on agricultural diligence. “Some farmers think that getting a good yield is up to the sun and the rain, taking whatever nature gives you, but that’s just making excuses.” Mr. Boimler tapped the Padd insistently, as if Mariner had contradicted him. “Nature’s got no chance against modern technology, you understand me? No chance.”

“Totally agree,” she nodded. “Technology is so important.”

“In the old days it was all drape-cloths and sprinkler systems, but now I can analyze a field down to the individual grapes on the vine. I can roll out the sunshades for one row and send more irrigation drones for another. If you’re vigilant and keep a close eye on your crop, every year can be a good year.”

The one-sided conversation paused briefly as Mrs. Boimler came around, setting two mugs of coffee next to their plates, before Mr. Boimler continued: “But that’s just the beginning; this new irrigation system is an investment. The government’s been working on a modified drought-resistant strain that’s expected to produce double the yield as the best varietal currently available; to preserve biodiversity only a few farmers will get the contract, and I intend to be one of them.”

“For sure,” Mariner agreed, and then the confusion of what he’d said caught up to her. “Uh– sorry for being ignorant, but what’s the payoff for that? I mean it’s not like you get larger recreation stipends for growing more grapes than someone else, right? So is there another type of reward or…?”

“You mean other than sticking it to the Gallos?” Boimler muttered under his breath, though apparently not quietly enough, because his father shot him a look.

“It’s about preparing for the future. Crop science is always improving; someday the ideal vintage will be developed, and if the Boimler farm wants a chance at cultivating it then we need to lay the foundation now.” He fixed his gaze hard on his son as he added: “Success relies on making a plan and sticking to it, down to the final detail.” 

The metaphorical temperature in the room was noticeably dropping again. “Oh, uh, wow, where have I heard that before, huh Brad?” Mariner tried to joke, hoping that the implied flattery would ease tensions between father and son. Unfortunately Boimler missed the cue and cut his fork through the pie harder than necessary.

“Not everyone has the same plan as you, Dad.”

“Really.” His father set down the tablet. “So then what exactly is your plan, Bradward. How are you going to fulfill these big Starfleet dreams of yours?”

“I’ve told you a thousand times.” His voice was growing testy, and he punctuated the sentence with a loud clink of the fork. “I’m going to work my way up the ranks until I get my own ship.”

“That’s not a plan , that’s a goal. How are you going to ‘work your way up the ranks?’ What concrete steps are you going to take? You’ve never actually explained that to your mother and me.”

“I’ve tried, Dad, but you don’t understand Starfleet well enough to get what I’m saying." He added in a mutter: "Mostly because you’ve never bothered to look into what I do."

"Bradward, honey, your father's just trying to look out for you," Mrs. Boimler attempted, but her son ignored her:

"Look, I’ve got a plan and it’s a good one, why can’t you just trust me?"

“I would trust you more if you didn’t so often do things without thinking them through.” Mariner nearly choked; Bradward Boimler, not thinking things through? “Look at the farm, you think this place would keep running for a single day if I didn’t keep my hand on the wheel? Do you have any idea how much foresight it takes to make sure I get the newest technology and the best strains? I know a thing or two about planning ahead, Bradward, and you could stand to take a leaf out of my book!”

“Right, because you’ve never made an error in judgment. I mean genetically modified grapes, genetically modified kid, what’s the difference,” Boimler said sarcastically.

The instant he'd said it, Mariner knew that he'd made a mistake. Mrs. Boimler sucked in a breath; Mr. Boimler froze. The room went dead silent as both of their eyes swiveled to her.

“Wh– no, hey, look, it’s okay,” she insisted, sensing a countdown on an invisible timer. “Brad told me two months ago and I’m fine with it, I’m not going to report–”

“You told her?” Mr. Boimler cut her off sharply, looking back at his son. Brad had gone tense as he realized how badly he’d misstepped.

“I– yes, Dad, I told her. But Beckett’s not–”

“Oh dear god,” Mrs. Boimler said faintly, sinking into her seat.

“Guys, really, it’s fine–” Mariner tried, but she was overruled by a stronger interjection:

“Are you out of your mind?” Mr. Boimler’s voice was not just sharp now, but also rising in volume. “You say you have a ‘plan,’ was this part of it? Telling everyone about our personal details?!”

“I didn’t tell ‘everyone,’ I told her!” Boimler snapped back. “She’s my fiancée, Dad, she had a right to know!”

“It’s family business!”

Brad threw his hands up in the air: “We’re getting married! She’s going to be family in six months!”

“You’re not married yet!” his father thundered back. “Of all the shortsighted, irresponsible–”

“How is this irresponsible?! What, was I supposed to wait until we’d tied the knot to break it to her?!”

“Her father is an admiral, Bradward!”

“Uh, if it helps, my folks already know–” Mariner added, only seeing split second too late the warning look Boimler gave her. His father’s face turned purple.

“You told her parents?!”

“Of course not; I’m not stupid–!”

“So she told them!”

“Beckett didn’t tell them anything, she didn’t have to! They figured it out! I mean come on, Dad, I’ve got purple fucking hair! What do you expect me to do?!”

“I expect you to do the responsible thing and come home! For god’s sakes, Bradward, how long are you going to waste your life on this daydream?! You think if an admiral knows the truth about you that you’re ever going to get anywhere in that job?! When, when are you going to grow up and realize you don’t belong out there, you belong here!!!”

There was a ringing silence. Boimler fumed at his father; the man fumed right back. Mariner and Mrs. Boimler looked back and forth betwee the two of them, the first gape-mouthed, the second mouselike with worry.

“I think I’d better get started on my chores,” Boimler said at last tersely, pushing the chair back hard and standing up. His father’s jaw, if possible, went even tighter.

“Bradward, don’t you dare–”

His son ignored this and stormed off, heading towards the front door. Mariner winced as she heard a it slam shut a moment later.

Mrs. Boimler glanced at her husband, biting her lip. “Dear–”

“He wants to go pout, fine. The irrigation system needs checking anyway.” Mr. Boimler stood up, in the same foul mood as his son, and left by the back door. It rattled shut behind him, leaving the two women alone in the dining room. Mrs. Boimler exhaled, though out of disappointment or relief Mariner couldn't tell, and picked up the uneaten slices of pie. Still gobsmacked at the rapidness of the conversation's explosive devolution, Mariner stood and followed her into the kitchen, leaning against the door as the older woman began loading plates into the sonic dishwasher.

“Well,” she said, when it was clear Mrs. Boimler wasn't going to start the conversation. “That was…a shitshow.” The other woman sighed.

“I’m sorry you had to see that. Bradward and his father don’t really get along…”

Mariner opened her mouth to say “gee I wonder why; maybe because his dad’s a jerk?” and then realized there was no point. If Brad’s mom was going to stand up for him, she would have done it years ago. Apparently interpreting her silence as pensiveness, Mrs. Boimler gave her a weak smile and nodded to something over Mariner’s head. “That’s him when he was little.”

Mariner turned and found herself looking at several framed photographs hanging on the wall. Two of them were typical family pictures, the three Boimlers awkwardly gathered together against a black backdrop with forced smiles. But the third was of a twelve-year-old Boimler holding up a silver medal with one hand and a violin with the other, beaming at the photographer. It was weird seeing him with brown hair, Mariner noticed. She’d gotten so used to the purple that seeing him in any other color, even as a kid, was jarring. Even his eyebrows were brown. Despite the dour mood she felt her mouth quirk upwards at the sight of the medal’s blue ribbon crinkled tightly in his fist. “So he was always a massive overachiever, huh?”

“That was the state tournament. I went up to Sacramento to watch him compete,” Mrs. Boimler said fondly. “Do you play any instruments, Beckett?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah, guitar. Used to enter competitions myself with the other kids on my ship when I was little.” She snorted as she turned back around with a shrug. “I always won.”

“Congratulations.”

“Nah; it was natural talent, so it doesn’t really feel fair to take pride in it. Brad’s the impressive one; the guy works so hard at everything . I don’t know how he does it.” She returned to the counter and started loading plates as well, continuing pensively: “Before I came to the Cerritos I was, uh, kind of in a bad place, mentally speaking. Brad helped me climb out of that hole and start trying again. He helped me believe in Starfleet again. I didn’t think there was anyone who could do that.” Her voice softened as she added: “He’s an amazing guy.”

There was a beat of silence, and then, suddenly realizing how personal she’d just gotten Mariner looked up at Mrs. Boimler. The other woman’s eyes had gone misty, and she was looking back at her with an anxious, lip-pursed worry that Mariner knew, after years of having seen it on her son, was the result of some internal bout of indecisiveness. “Oh, uh, sorry. Way too personal–”

“No, no, it’s– thank you. It’s wonderful, to hear all that. Really.”

They paused again at the sound of the door opening quietly, and Mrs. Boimler exhaled with relief. “That must be Bradward.” She picked up a few glasses and added, “I think I can take it from here, dear; why don’t you go see if he’s alright?”

“Yeah, probably should; the guy’s gotta be tying himself into knots by now,” Mariner mused. “Thanks Mrs. B, let me know if you need anything.”

“Oh, I’ll be fine, dear. But thank you.” She gave Mariner an unconvincing smile that was definitely meant to be a brush-off, but, deciding not to push it, the younger woman just gave her typical two-finger saulte and left, already deep in thought.

A cool, dry night wind was blowing over the sunbaked buildings of L.A. and rustling the palm leaves when Tendi came out of the bathroom, drying her short hair (oh how she’d missed real water showers) and dressed in a white hotel bathrobe to find that the balcony door was cracked open. Rutherford was standing outside; he looked over as she stepped out and slid the door shut behind her. “Hey.”

“Hey,” she answered, leaning against the railing next to him. For a long, quiet moment they watched the metro trains zip overhead, and the occasional car meandering its way along the quiet street below. “So,” Tendi finally began, in a teasing tone, “you seem to have quite the reputation around here.” She’d only intended to make him smile, but instead Rutherford winced badly.

“Ugh, yeah, I know.” He slumped forward a little on the rail, much to her surprise. “I’d kinda forgotten how many people I need to apologize to around here…”

Guilt was an unusual expression on Samanthan Rutherford, she mused; usually, he was so upright and honest that he had nothing to feel guilty about. She herself knew the routine well. With rare exceptions, only people who had a past to make up for could be that unfailingly moral. “You-u wanna talk about it?” she offered, drawing out the you. Rutherford hesitated, so she added: “I won’t judge you, promise.” She nudged him. “Pirate’s honor.”

Rutherford smiled a little despite himself. “You’re an ex-pirate.”

“Sure buddy. Keep telling yourself that,” Tendi said with a wink, leaning out on the balcony to smile at him. The wind ruffled her green hair, framed in a halo of streetlights, and his grin grew a little wider before he exhaled and rubbed the back of his neck.

“Okay, fine. The truth is, I was sort of a teenage menace,” he admitted. “When I was young it was just pranks and stuff, but once I got older I started running with a bad crowd. I really embarrassed my mom and—anyway, that’s part of the reason I joined Starfleet, actually.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I mean I was a smart kid, but also kind of a jerk? I burned a lot of bridges around here.” He looked out at the street, the waving palm branches and quiet apartment buildings. “The last time I visited home, I was still at the Academy. That…that was the last time I saw my mom.” Tendi fell quiet, watching him; Rutherford almost never spoke about his family. “I guess she got bad vibes when I talked to her about Buenamigo and she warned me to stay away from him. We got in this huge fight and I stormed out and…”

“And then you forgot about it because of the implant,” she realized. He nodded miserably. “Oh, Sam…”

“I haven’t been home since then. I didn’t even remember to come home, because remembering this place would remind me of my mom and that would just remind me of our fight and Project Texas, and the implant would like, redirect my thoughts every time.” He watched guiltily out at the cityscape below them. “I-It’s not like I forgot about all this or had amnesia or anything, it’s just that I…couldn’t think about it. For over ten years, I couldn’t think about where I grew up or my family or…any of this.” Rutherford sighed again. “I’m sorry. Maybe we shouldn’t have come here.”

“That’s not true,” she admonished, drawing his attention as she took his hand. “Sam, this place is a part of you. Buenamigo might have taken that away for a while, but he doesn’t get to keep it.”

He considered this for a moment, and when he nodded his face was more set. “Yeah. You’re right. Thanks, D, I needed to hear that. May as well face this sooner rather than later, right?”

“You’ve got this,” she agreed. “And even if it gets hard, I’ll be right there with you.” Sam turned to face her, taking her other hand as well.

“Tomorrow, I’m gonna go visit my mom,” he promised. “Will you come with me?”

“Of course! I’d love to meet her.”

Rutherford smiled with relief. “You’re the best wife ever, you know that?”

“I may have heard that somewhere before,” she teased. He kissed her, but what was supposed to be a short peck for gratitude melted into something softer, more tender.

“You know,” Tendi said, tilting her head with a smile as they drew apart, “we’ve got this nice hotel room, all to ourselves. If you want to take your mind off things, I might have some ideas.”

“Huh, like what? Did you bring the model ship?” She raised her eyebrows, and he got it with a blush. “Oh! Right, yeah, that’s way better.”

There was no noise coming from Brad’s room when Mariner reached the top of the stairs, so she tried the knob only to find that it was locked. She knocked on the door. “Brad?” There was no response, so she knocked again, and then frowned and rapped hard on the door. “Dude, open up!”

“Wh– oh, Beckett, sorry, hang on.” The door opened a moment later; Mariner’s eyebrows rose and, despite the depressing atmosphere, she was unable to repress an amused half-smile as she evaluated the man on the other side of the door: uniform shirt unbuttoned over his khaki undershirt, purple hair sticking up every which way, a set of headphones around his neck. Boimler frowned at her response. “What?”

“Nothing. Just that you look like a teenager.”

He rolled his eyes. “Are you gonna come in or not?”

“What, with your parents home?” she said with a fake gasp as she stepped through the door after him. “Do we have to leave the door open? Are we gonna tell them we’re studying and totally not making out on your be– ohh. Wow.”  She stopped dead in the center of the room, staring gape-mouthed at the decor around her.

It wasn’t just the posters of famous captains and first officers tacked up on the wall; she’d seen his recruitment poster of Number One, so she’d always assumed there were others. And it wasn’t just the model starships and figurines of the entire crew of the Enterprise-D lined up on the walls, or the Starfleet flag hanging over the bed, or the combadge (a combage! Mariner couldn’t imagine how he’d gotten his hands on one, seeing as they were always destroyed after decom for security reasons, nor why someone would want a basic piece of work equipment) in a little glass box on the desk.

It was all of it, together, arrayed around her like the fleet’s most cluttered recruitment booth. “Dude,” she managed at last, “I think a starship threw up in your room.”

“Yeah,” he winced, closing the door behind her. “I kinda forgot how bad it was.”

“Didn’t you always say you ran away to join up, back in ‘73? How did your parents not see it coming? I mean, no offense man, but this isn’t subtle.”

“Well, my dad’s not used to not getting his way,” he huffed, grabbing his Padd off the desk and sitting down on the bed again; among the few non-Starfleet related things in the room, Mariner spotted a set of high school textbooks—printed on real paper, which was weird to see, having grown up on a Starship where Padds were used for everything to save precious space—stacked neatly on the desk, and several trophies, ribbons and medals on a shelf above it. Most were silver, though there was a handful of gold and bronze. “And he always saw it as a pipe dream, so I think he thought I’d give up on it eventually. Plus whenever we fought about it I always said I wante to go to the Academy, so I don’t think he expected me to just run off and enlist…”

He trailed off, with that telltale pinch in his brow as he began swiping through work updates on the screen; clearly he was still upset about the fight from dinner. Mariner sat down next to him.“So,” she said conversationally. “Your dad is a dickhead.”

To her relief he let out a startled snort, but then he deflated again. “Uh, yeah,” he sighed. “Kinda.”

“No joke, if anyone else had been that much of an asshole to you I’d be in the brig again right now. I mean you saved the ship, where the hell does he get off bringing up stuff from when you were in high school?”

“He’s right, though, it wasn’t special,” Brad mumbled, still staring down at the Padd screen without really seeing it. ”Anyone could have done it–”

“Dude, literally no one else on our ship could have done that; you’re the only one onboard who plays violin.”

“You play the guitar…”

“Oh my god, I can’t believe you’re letting him get into your head like this!” she groaned. Brad looked up at her, his lips pressed tightly together. “Boims, seriously, I know how this sounds coming from me—but you’ve got to stop letting what happened in the past dictate how you see yourself now.”

“I know,” he sighed, looking around the room. “I know . But it’s just hard when I’m here. It’s like the– the weird, insecure, overachieving kid I was when I lived here just comes back. I hate it, I really do, but it’s like it’s easier just to go along with it and bottle everything up until I explode and say something stupid, because that’s how I used to handle it back then.”

“I know, man,” she exhaled. “Regression is a hell of a drug.”

“No kidding.”

“But for what it’s worth,” she said, and he looked back to meet her eyes, “I think you’re amazing. Screw your dad, who cares what he thinks?”

He snorted again, but his expression was a little less self-loathing as he replied, “Oh sure” and waved the work Padd at her meaningfully: “Because you don’t think I’m weird-insecure-and-overachieving.”

“Mm, no, you’re definitely still all those things,” she said, simultaneously plucking the tablet out of his unresisting fingers and leaning closer with a quirk in her mouth. “But you’re also kind of a dorky badass space adventurer. Which, luckily for you, is my type.”

He pinked with a half-hearted smile. “Yeah?”

“Yeah…” She closed the distance between them, their noses brushing together as she pressed her lips against his. Brad responded easily, apparently grateful for the distraction—but as she began to deepen the kiss and press her hands gently against his shoulders, he stopped and pushed her back.

“Sorry. I’m just not really feeling it right now…”

“Don’t apologize man, it’s fine,” she said firmly, pulling away. “And honestly I get it, that was rough down there.”

“Yeah,” he sighed, standing up. “Thanks, Beckett, but I think I just need to get some sleep.”

“Right, good plan,” she realized as she followed suit and rolled her shoulders; she hadn’t even noticed how tired she was. “Where’s the bathroom?”

“Down the hall, two doors to the left.”

As Boimler unpacked his pajamas, Mariner slipped out of the room and down the hall. “Bathroom, bathroom,” she muttered to herself, looking around—and then stopped as something caught her ear. There were voices coming from the main bedroom; Mr. Boimler must have come back inside while she’d been talking to Brad.

Glancing back at the bedroom door (she had a feeling her fiancé wouldn’t appreciate her spying on his parents, even if it was for his own good), she crept over and pressed her ear against the wall. The couple on the other side seemed to be having a whispered argument:

“–a little harsh? He really likes this girl…”

“He likes what he thinks she is. There’s a difference.”

“But she seems nice, Beauford, and he’s so happy with her—maybe we should rethink this–?”

“Ethel, no. You remember our research, that girl’s an agent of chaos. And her family has been in Starfleet so long they’re practically not even Terran anymore; if he marries her he’s just going to keep frittering his life away out there—besides, do you really want him spending the rest of his days on those deathtrap ships?”

“I– no,” his mother’s voice sighed. “No, you’re right…”

“Of course I am. We stick to the plan,” he said firmly. Mariner’s eyebrows narrowed; so, there was a plan? And they’d definitely gone snooping on her and her family before she’d even gotten here.

There was the creak of beadsprings on the other side of the door, and she hastily slunk across the hall into the bathroom, locking it silently behind her. Then she leaned against the wall, rubbing her chin.

Okay, so this is going to be a little harder than I told Brad. But it’s fine! I’ll figure it out… But how, exactly?   Mrs. Boimler had been an easy sell, but her opinion apparently counted for about as much as a box of raisins with her husband—probably less, actually. And in all of her extensive dating career, Mariner had never encountered a parent so thoroughly unwilling to be impressed as Mr. Boimler. “Seeming nice” and making their son happy apparently wasn’t enough to overcome his strongest objection to her: Mariner was Starfleet, and Starfleet was the thing, in their minds, that was taking Brad away from Modesto. That wasn’t exactly a problem she could solve. She sighed, slumping—and then she looked up again.

“No,” she said firmly to herself in the mirror, straightening up and smacking her fist into her other palm. “You are not giving up that easily. Step up your game, Beckett; Mission: Charm Offensive has just entered Phase Two.”

Chapter Text

Mariner’s next day started way too early, with the horrific sound of a 5:00 AM alarm trilling from Boimler’s Padd as it lit up the room with what felt like the light of a thousand supernovas. 

“Ughhh hhhh Boims turn it off.”

She heard a groan as he rolled over and patted futilely around, and then cracked an eye open again as bed springs squeaked; as she watched he stumbled off the side of the bed over to the desk and swiped the Padd to silence the alarm, and then staggered to the closet. “Where are you going?” she asked, squinting in the sudden dimness as she saw him grab a jacket.

“Pickery shed,” he answered groggily, shrugging it on.

“What? –Wait is this why you always get up at five?”

“It’s a farm, Beckett, so long as I’m home I’ve got chores to do.”

“But you’re on R&R.”

“Tell that to the raisins.”

Mariner watched as he pulled on his work boots and then headed for the door. “Hold up,” she called reluctantly with a yawn, pulling herself upright and ignoring the siren call of the mattress. Brad looked at her in surprise as she grabbed her leather jacket off his desk chair. “I’ll come with you.”

When Mariner had first heard Mandolina invite her now-fiancé to “the privacy of the pickery shed” four years ago, she’d imagined somewhere quaint and rustic, with baskets of ripe grapes and farm tools hung up on the wall, and presumably a folksy hay bale for—well, a roll in the hay.

Which was why when they stepped inside the large sheetmetal barn and Boimler flipped on the bright floodlights ( thunk-thunk-thunk they went as they turned on in succession down the row) she was surprised—and, alright, a bit impressed—to find herself in a room not much smaller than the Cerritos engineering bay, and only slightly less stuffed with technical instruments. Rows of drying racks a story tall and running the length of the building stretched out in a grid in front of her; each was stacked with hundreds of what looked like metal trays lined with paper on rotisseries, set to spin in groups of six around caged light bulbs. In the trays were clusters of grapes in various stages of dehydration.

As Mariner watched, Boimler went to the nearest rack and powered up a Padd attached to the side, analyzed some sort of report on the screen, and clicked a few settings. The bulbs in the rack glowed to life, casting heat and light like an artificial sunrise over the grapes as the trays began to slowly spin.

“Looks like I need to check trays 34A, 92B, and 121D. Hand me a refractometer,” he called over his shoulder, pulling himself up onto a rolling ladder.

“A what?”

“Those things that look like tricorders, they’re charging over there on the table; we use them to measure the amount of sugar in the product. I’ll tell you the brix number and you can put it in the chart, should make this go a lot faster.” She spotted the tools he was talking about and passed one up to him on the ladder—and just like that, they fell back into their old work routine like a well-oiled machine. “16°,” he called down.

Mariner located what looked like the right box in the chart and started typing. “So this is how you make raisins, huh? I always thought they were sun-dried,” she mused, looking around.

“Yeah, when I was a kid we did it the traditional way, on trays right out in the field. We still do when there’s a surplus. But Dad had the shed installed when I was fifteen; there are refractometers in the racks, but we randomly check a few trays every day to make sure the readings are accurate. Can you push the ladder to section nine?”

She did so, watching as he scanned the next tray of grapes. “So what’s the difference?”

“Better control, mostly. We can regulate the temperature, the amount of artificial sunlight, get exactly the right flavor profile—basically we get all the benefits of vine-dried raisins, but in a third of the time. Peak quality at peak efficiency. 16° again, by the way; section twelve.” She recorded the reading and then rolled the ladder again; it really was a lot like their work on the ship—repetetive, boring, and with only the company as a perk. “We were one of the first vineyard in the state to do it, too,” Boimler called down. “Pickery sheds are standard practice now, but Dad’s always wanted to be on the cutting edge.”

“Of raisin technology,” she said dubiously.

“Joke all you want, but there’s just as much science in farming as on a starship, Mariner. My family’s managed this vineyard for fifteen generations, we’ve been here for every major agricultural advancement for the last four hundred years.” He took the next reading and added: “18° brix. I mean that’s why my dad’s so intense on me leaving Starfleet and coming home, right? It’s the family business.”

This was such a perfect opening that she wondered if she should tell him about what she’d overheard. “Listen, Brad,” she began, steeling her will. “About last night–”

“God, I know,” he groaned, climbing down the ladder. “I’m sorry, I should have stuck up for you more.”

“It’s fine, Boims, I don’t need their approval. But you obviously do.”

“What? No,” he scoffed. “I don’t care what he thinks.”

She decided not to point out the error. “Come on, man, everyone cares what their parents think. Even I care what my parents think.” She followed him to the next row, watching as he pulled the Padd off the end and reviewed the chart. “If they never accept me, are you going to be okay with that?”

There was an uneasy pause, and she forced herself not to press him. At last she heard him sigh. “Beckett, if my parents never approve of you, then you’ll be in good company, okay? Will it bother me, sure. But I care more about you than about their opinions.” He turned back around and handed her the Padd, grabbing hold of the ladder. “Besides, they’ve never really ‘approved’ of me either.”

“Yeah, I noticed that,” she said, crossing her arms and watching dubiously as he climbed up again. “I saw all those trophies in your room, Brad, I mean come on. Orchestra state championship? Vice president of the debate club?” He rolled his eyes, but couldn’t hide the faint pink flush of pride. “You must’ve been the perfect kid, and I say that as a former Grade-A Bright-Future Overachiever myself. Your parents don’t know how good they had it; trust me, they would not have survived a Beckett Freeman childhood.”

“You just said you were an overachiever too,” he pointed out dryly.

“Yeah, and a troublemaker. I figured out four ways to get into our ship’s holodecks without a pass,” she reminisced. “One of them the head engineer still doesn’t know about.”

Boimler shook his head in fond exasperation at her antics, scanning another tray. “Yeah, well, if you saw all the trophies then you also saw that most of them were silver. My parents expect the best; Dad used to say that they took the risks to give me the natural advantage, and now it’s my turn to put in the effort.”

Oh. Even though he was several feet above her, Mariner still schooled her face into a neutral expression; this was the first mention either of them had made about his little revelation since the night before she’d proposed to him, two months ago. Starships were covered in microphones to make the computer work, meaning there was always a risk in talking about it too openly. “So they really tried to control, like, everything about you, huh?” she said curiously.

“You kidding? I didn’t end up this much of a dork by accident, Mariner. —17° brix, section six.”

“Oh please, like you wouldn’t have been a violin-playing, type-A, annoyingly attractive hardass without their influence.”

He shrugged, holding tight to the ladder as it moved. “Who knows. Musical talent is partly genetic.”

“I guess, but…” She trailed off as the ladder rolled to a halt, watching the spinning trays in front her and trying to find the right way to put it. Your parents did crimes on you and you literally never talk about it didn’t feel like the best of openings. “Does it, y’know, bother you?” she at last settled on awkwardly.

Brad looked down at her, surprised, and then quickly returned to the task at hand: “I mean– yeah, Beckett, of course it does.” She snuck a glance up at him; his brow was pinched, though whether in concentration or discomfort she wasn’t sure. “I know they were just trying to help me, but it’s still eugenics. Even aside from the fact that it could ruin my life if anyone found out, it’s just an inherently bad thing to do.”

“I just don’t get why they would take the chance,” she wondered aloud. “It’s super illegal, why even risk getting caught?” Sure, if she wanted to do something not entirely on this side of the law (always for a good reason, of course), she usually knew a guy. But the Boimlers didn’t seem like the type to have natural connections to black market geneticists.

“I’m not totally sure. I know my parents were having trouble having kids,” he admitted. “And when they went to get tested, it turned out there was some sort of genetic problem on my dad’s side. Between us, I actually think my mom was relieved, because I’m sure she’d been blaming herself.”

He climbed down to scan a tray near the middle, continuing: “Legally doctors are allowed to do therapeutic gene editing for serious enough problems—fatal defects and major disabilities, that kind of stuff. But Dad saw it as an opportunity. He found a doctor that would do more than just fix lethal anomalies and, y’know, tried to put his thumb on the scale to get the outcomes he wanted. Male, blue eyed, smart, strong immune system…” 

“But it didn’t work, right? You said that’s where your weird allergies come from—and the purple hair, obviously.”

“Yeah well, that’s the problem with augmentation right?” he shrugged, descending the rest of the ladder. “Or one of them, anyway. Humans have got what, twenty thousand genes?”

“I dunno, man, I don’t really pay attention when D’Vana goes off on that stuff.”

“Point is, you can’t account for everything; genetics is weird, something’s always going to get overlooked or combine in ways you didn’t expect—and that’s before they’re even old enough to have their own personality.” He took the chart from her and entered the readings himself, as if to avoid meeting her eyes as he continued briskly: “You can’t really ‘engineer’ a kid, they’re always going to turn out at least a little different from what you planned.”

Different from what they planned. Her mind flashed back to all the silver trophies and his insistence that his parents expected the best, and Mariner had to repress a stab of anger. Blowing up at his family wouldn’t help right now—and neither would contributing any further to the tension between Brad and his parents. No, she would have to keep what she’d heard last night to herself.

As she followed Boimler back towards the door he continued: “I don’t have any proof, but I’ve always kind of thought that maybe Dad got spooked by the whole ‘infertility’ thing. If everything doesn’t go exactly right he freaks out.” He saw the look she was giving him and rolled his eyes: “Okay, yeah, and he passed that onto me. Panicking over little details is how I was raised; I was supposed to take over this place, remember?”

“Sounds to me like he still thinks you will someday.”

“Yep, I know,” he sighed. “Thing is, if I don’t, the state’ll give the vineyard to someone else when Dad retires. I’m fine with that, but to him it feels like he set me up to carry on this family legacy just to watch me throw it all away on some cheap thrill-seeking.”

“Which, by the way, insane take,” she scoffed. “I mean it’s not like you ran off to join the circus, you’re in Starfleet!” She pushed the door open as she added: “Look, if you ever tell anyone I said this I’ll deny it—but for real, Brad, you’re basically an officer in a space navy. Any normal parent would be embarrassingly proud of that.”

“Navy and exploration service,” he pointed out. “I get your point, Mariner, but you’ve said it yourself a million times, Starfleet’s only a military organization when it has to be. Otherwise we’re out there talking to energy ghosts and getting pregnant by sticking our hands in bowls of marbles; not exactly what my Dad thinks of as a respectable career. And even if it was, it’s not the vineyard.”

They stepped outside and paused briefly for him to lock the shed behind him. “I tried,” Boimler admitted. “I mean really, I did. But no matter how much I wanted to care about the farm, raisins, being a good son, all that stuff—every morning I’d come out here and I’d see… that.”

She followed his gaze skywards, to the array of the morning stars and the glittering arm of the galaxy arching above them. From the familiar constellations of Earth, it was easy to pick out the stars she knew best; there in Orion’s belt was the sun around which Tendi’s homeworld orbited, and in the Andromeda constellation the star whose system included the Andorian moon. The brightest star of Eriadnus was easily identifiable as the Vulcan sun, and she could even see, dimly twinkling and too faint to be part of the major constellations, the distant suns of Bajor, Ferenginar and Cardassia.

And there were more, too, this far from the city lights: thousands upon thousands of pinpricks in the roof the world, all four quadrants of the galaxy stretched out laterally before her—and beyond that the distant galaxies that themselves masqueraded as stars, billions of worlds that might never be explored, but whose suns nonetheless sent their photons out like emissaries across the void of space to land on her own strange homeworld. It was nothing compared to the view from pitch-blackness of the ship, of course, but the shimmering infinity of the cosmos stretching out to all horizons would still take her breath away anywhere.

“And that was it, you know, I couldn’t fight it.” Boimler’s voice drew her attention back to earth, and she looked over to see him shaking his head, still peering at the starry expanse. “I knew I was supposed to be up there; I’d imagine all those worlds and think to myself that somewhere, on at least one of them, there had to be a place where things were different. Where– where I was different.”

Mariner watched him, and the stars reflected in his eyes. After a moment Brad shrugged and cleared his throat. “’Course that’s not how it works. Doesn’t matter where you go, you bring your baggage with you, right?”

“I mean, it kind of worked,” she pointed out. “You’re definitely not the same person you were when I met you back in ‘81, neither am I.” She nudged him with her elbow and he looked over at her, surprised. “You grew, y’know? We both did.”

The corner of his mouth turned upward, and he reached out and took her hand as they both peered skywards again. “Yeah. I guess we did.”

It was early dawn by the time they’d gotten back to the house and changed into their day clothes. Mrs. Boimler herself was wide awake, filling a large carafe of steaming coffee out of what looked like a drip coffee maker in the kitchen. Mariner was confused (there was a replicator right next to the woman, after all), but she didn’t have time to question it before Brad called, “Morning, Mom.”

“Bradward, honey, good morning. –And Beckett too; hello, dear.” She gave the younger woman a tired smile. “I’m just getting the breakfast line set up for the girls; they’ll be here in a few minutes.”

“The girls?”

“She means Leanne and Mandolina and those guys,” Boimler answered, picking up two carafes from the kitchen table.

“I know you two had plans to see the city, but I’m afraid we really need Brad’s help on the farm today,” Mrs. Boimler added. “But of course you’re welcome to stay for some food before heading into town if you want, Beckett.”

“Oh, uh– well if Boims is gonna stay then I can stick around too,” said Mariner, only briefly surprised by this strange turn of events before she worked it out. This must be part of their plan. “Actually,” she continued with more resolve, “I’d love to help.”

“Oh.” There was a flicker of panicked, weasely shiftyness in the older woman’s face with which Mariner was far too familiar to miss. Got you. “W-we couldn’t ask you to do that, Beckett; vineyard work is a lot of labor. I’m sure you’d rather spend your vacation doing something more enjoyable…”

“It’s really no problem, Mrs. B; Brad here can tell you that I am totally okay with hard work,” Mariner said, though not without shooting a warning look at Boimler before he could choke on her blatant lie. She turned back with a bright smile: “There is nothing I would like to do more on this R&R than learn how the Boimler Family Farm works with a little hands-on experience.”

“Oh, um—w-well, if you’re sure, we can always use an extra set of hands,” Brad’s mother relented, flustered but unable to fight back against such a reasonable offer. Mariner felt a little bad for putting the woman in an uncomfortable position, but if Mrs. Boimler was going to be a pushover then Mariner was going to push.

The lieutenants left the house carrying two pitchers of coffee apiece. As Mrs. Boimler walked on ahead, a fifth pitcher in one hand and a Padd in the other, the pair fell slightly behind out of her earshot. “A little hands-on experience?” Boimler said under his breath, dubious. “What are you planning?”

“Wh– nothing! I was telling the truth!”

“Beckett, I don’t even care about how this place runs. And I grew up here.”

“That’s my point, Brad.” She paused and he turned to look at her, suspicion in every line of his flat expression. “Look, I’ve already got your mom on my side,” she said firmly, and it wasn’t even really a lie. “Now I’m going to make your dad like me if it kills me.”

“Beckett, you don’t have to do that.”

Yes, I do. “I know I don’t,” she lied airily, starting to walk again. “But if you’re worried, you can always pay me back later.” The lilt of mischief in her voice carried the implied threat of future rules-bending adventures, and Brad grumbled but let it go.

The place they were heading turned out to be a pavilion attached to the back of the shed, with what looked like sliding walls that Mariner assumed could be pulled down when the weather turned colder. There were rows of sturdy-looking picnic tables and a buffet setup near the front, along with several large replicators. As Mrs. Boimler set her Padd down on the table and began turning them on, Mariner was reminded of the confusion she’d had in the kitchen and voiced as much to her fiancé. “I just don’t get it; why make coffee by hand when you’ve got replicators out here? Actually, come to think of it, why have farms and vineyards at all?”

“Seriously?” Boimler raised his eyebrows. “Not everyone has access to Starfleet-grade replicators, Beckett.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He eyed her, amused, and then shook his head and turned to the replicator. “Coffee, black,” he announced; the machine whirred, and a mug of steaming coffee appeared. He handed it to her with a nod. “Try it.”

She studied him suspiciously but lifted the mug to her lips and took a sip. The smell hit her a only a single useless instant before the taste did, and she nearly spat it out. It was the flattest, blandest cup of coffee she’d ever had. “What the–”

“Starfleet’s replicators are top-of-the-line,” Boimler explained with a little laugh, as she looked down at the mug in offended shock. “We get the best equipment because we’re stuck out in space for months at a time; same with our holodecks. Good replicators are hard to build and code, and even if you have one they need constant maintenance or the taste goes off; that’s why we spent like half our time as ensigns just fixing them. Hard to run a starship without decent coffee.”

“This isn’t coffee, this is a crime against nature,” she swore, peering down into the mug. Suddenly the inedible meatloaf from the night before made a lot more sense. “No wonder everyone swears you can taste the difference with replicated food, I just thought they were being picky!”

“I guess growing up on starships your whole life you wouldn’t have known—but yeah, I mean you won’t starve on replicated food, but you can see why most people prefer the real stuff.”

“Our coffee comes from the farms up near Santa Barbara,” Mrs. Boimler said proudly, walking back over and handing her a second mug. “One nice thing about living in California, the produce is some of the freshest on the planet.”

After the betrayal of the replicated coffee, Mariner was suspicious, but Boimler gave her a go-ahead-try-it –nod and she warily took a sip. It was damn near the best cup of coffee she’d ever had. “Okay,” she said with mock-seriousness as she lowered the cup, “so now I get why Admiral Janeway took the desk job in San Francisco.”

Mrs. Boimler let out a genuine laugh as Boimler snorted, picking up the Padd she’d set down on the table. “Mom,” he noticed, “Are these the assignments for today?”

“Yes, why?”

He tapped on the Padd a few more times, and then said thoughtfully, “It would be more efficient if you assigned each person to a different varietal, instead of having them sort between the buckets.” He handed it back to her, adding: “Also, the southwest part of the vineyard near the shed is downhill; with the new irrigation system you should tell anyone working down there to keep an eye out for fungal infections in the vines, make sure they’re not getting overwatered.”

“That makes sense to me; I’ll ask your father about it.”

By this time a dawn glow was filling the small pavilion; as Mrs. Boimler went off to finish the morning preparations, the two lieutenants walked to the edge of the concrete floor, coffee cups in hand. New golden daylight was spilling across the rolling fields, clearing the morning mists and prompting birdsong to fill the air; hill after hill gently rose and fell all the way to the horizon, until they were so distant they seemed to melt into the sky.

“Okay,” Mariner admitted, “I know we see a lot of great views from the ship, but this is kinda awesome.”

“This was my favorite time of day when I lived here,” he agreed. “When everything’s still quiet, right before the workday starts… That’s actually why I get up so early on the ship; sometimes you just want a little bit of peace before anything crazy happens, y’know?” He took a drink from his mug and then looked over at her and stopped. “Whoa.”

“What?”

“Nothing, just– you, uh, you look beautiful.” Though she couldn’t see herself, Mariner could imagine that the gilded sunlight was probably doing her a lot more favors than the fluorescents on the ship, and smirked as she subtly shifted into a more flattering pose.

She was rewarded by the blush creeping up his face as he quickly took another sip of coffee and looked back out at the fields—though truth be told he wasn’t the only one. “Well, uh– hey, right back at ya,” she murmured, watching the dawn light wash over his face. Damn, he was pretty. Mariner couldn’t believe how long she’d insisted to herself that she wasn’t into this—well, actually, she could. Her self-loathing and terror of losing anyone else she cared about had insulated her heart (and sex drive) away from their friendship for a long time; Bradward Boimler had been firmly marked down as Not An Option for years before her fear had thawed out enough to let herself risk something serious with her best friend. Of course, once she had, it’d become embarrassingly obvious even to her that she’d been in love with him for a long time. Her eyes flicked down to the gold band on his fourth finger; Mariner was still scared shitless of getting married, but for him, it was a risk she was willing to take—commitment issues be damned.

Although, she had to admit, his current outfit wasn’t really painting her choice in the best light; even their uniforms looked a lot better on him than whatever this getup was. “Okay, now that we’re together I’m not letting you off the hook anymore,” she chuckled as she eyed him up and down, drawing his surprised attention away from the view. “Explain.”

“What?”

“This.” She gestured to his general appearance; after their pajama-clad visit to the shed he’d changed into the same unflattering overalls and asymmetric linen shirt she’d seen him in the first time she’d visited Modesto. “You have to know this look isn’t working for you.”

“Gee, thanks Mariner,” he said with an eye-roll, defaulting to her surname as he did whenever he was annoyed.

“Oh c’mon, nobody’s dressed like that since the sixties! Besides we do physical labor on the ship all the time, why didn’t you just wear one of your work T-shirts?”

“This is what vineyard workers wear,” Boimler argued. “Picard wore this.”

“Yeah, and Picard is an eighty year old man.”

“If it’s good enough for the captain of the Enterprise then it’s good enough for me; besides, I have my reasons.”

Mariner was about to ask him what they were when the sudden call of, “Bradward!” and “He’s back!” drew her attention. 

“Like that,” he sighed under his breath, as they turned to face the onslaught. “Mandolina, Genevieve, hey…”

The wave of flirting crashed down in a barrage that nearly drowned itself out as the vineyard workers crowded around the man. “We heard last night you were back in town!” one gushed, just as another sidled up next to him with a: “Do you like my bonnet? It’s new.” (“Wh– hey!” Mariner snapped as she was shoved aside and back through the ranks, but went unheard.) “You were away for so long this time,” pouted the redhead with the ponytail, whom Mariner vaguely remembered as Lianne-who-needed-help-getting-naked. “Can’t you stick around a little while? We could catch a holomovie after work–”

“Me too!”

“And me! We’ll share you, we don’t mind!”

“Ladies!” Boimler interrupted nervously, hand darting out to catch Mariner’s arm and drag her back closer to him. “I believe you’ve all met my fiancée, Beckett Mariner? She’s a war vet and runs Cardassian prison breaks for a workout.”

Mariner caught his tone, sized up the crowd and decided that she could easily take any of them in a fight, or all of them together. “Hey,” she greeted cheerfully, but straightened her leather jacket for good measure. The vineyard workers looked alternately crestfallen, affronted or outright betrayed.

“Fiancée?” one of them repeated, dumbfounded.

“We thought she was just a friend,” said another, glaring at Mariner.

“Ahah, well, a lot of things can change in four years, Lianne,” Boimler insisted, edging his way out of the circle of girls and pulling Mariner along with him like a talisman against bad fortune.

“Di-id you just use me to scare off a bunch of stalkers?” she drawled once they were out of earshot.

“Am I a bad fiancé if I say yes?” he winced, stopping by the replicator. “Straw hat, size large.”

“S’fine, man, but why? I mean sure, you don’t run Cardassian prison breaks for a workout, thanks for that by the way—but you’re trained in self-defense, you could take them if they get too handsy with you.”

“‘Self-defense?’ I can’t just use anbo-jyutsu on a bunch of civilians, Mariner,” he argued, taking a straw hat out of the replicator as it materialized. “Besides, they’ve never ‘gotten handsy’ with me, they’re just—eager.”

“Wh– come on, dude, one of them was licking her lips, I swear!” He shook his head and she grumbled. “Fine, how about this: if any of them start getting pushy, I’ll take care of it.”

“I’d prefer nobody ‘takes care’ of anyone today, thanks.” Before she could respond he turned and gave her a quick peck on the lips. “But it’s cute that you’re jealous,” he said smugly as he pulled back.

Mariner was left gaping at him as he put the hat on and walked away. “Wh– I’m not jealous!” she called after, ignoring the heat filling her own face. “What would I have to be jealous about! –Besides, I’m hotter than all of them anyway,” she muttered to herself, turning back—only to find the gaggle of grape girls glaring at her from across the way. She hadn’t seen that much disdain and disappointed horniness since the time her mother had been tasked with showing the PSA-holo on avoiding alien STIs to a bunch of Edo cadets. O–kay, Mariner thought, and tried not to grin. Maybe today wouldn’t be as boring as she’d feared.

As the sun rose over the city of Los Angeles Tendi and Rutherford huddled together under the awning of a quiet shop, peering down at his Padd and its list of names. “Is this all of them?” Tendi asked.

“As many as I could remember.” He looked over at her. “D, are you sure about coming with? I can handle this on my own if you want.”

“Absolutely,” Tendi said, resolute. “You dealt with all my crazy Syndicate stuff back on Orion, remember? Your weird uncomfy backstory is my weird uncomfy backstory.”

He gave her a relieved smile. “You’re the best wife ever, you know that?”

“I might have heard that before,” she teased, making him laugh, and then tugged his hand and started them off down the street. “Now come on, enough stalling! Operation: Mending Bridges is a go!”

And with her declaration they were off, crisscrossing the streets of the L.A. neighborhood like—well, like two Starfleet lieutenants on a mission. In five hours they made as many stops: there was a former teacher, with whom Sam had apparently had a bad relationship, and to whom he confessed to having been the source of an unkind senior prank; an old lady to whom he apologized for his “disrespect” (Tendi wasn’t entirely clear of what that entailed, but he explained it involved a human prank which featured eggs and toilet paper); and several shopkeepers of small handmade goods or foodstuffs, from whom he begged forgiveness for many small shoplifted items over a decade past.

“I don’t quite understand,” Tendi mused as they walked away, the last shopkeeper’s clemency having lifted her husband’s guilty burden enough that she could see the resultant lightness in his step. “Earth is a post-scarcity society, right? Why bother stealing things you could just replicate for free?”

“It was more about the challenge, y’know?” he admitted sheepishly. “I never stole anything that wasn’t handmade, it was like– I dunno, like a trophy, I guess? Sorry, I know that’s stupid…”

“No, actually I get that,” she said with a wincing chuckle. “It’s nice to feel clever and capable and, y’know, in control of something—especially when other parts of your life feel so out of your control.” When Rutherford didn’t answer she glanced up at him. “Sam?”

“Sorry. I just…never thought about it that way,” he admitted thoughtfully. “That…makes a lot of sense.” Tendi tilted her head, curious, but before she could ask Rutherford nodded ahead of them and added: “The next one isn’t that far from here, come on.”

He led her down the street and past several stucco condos and houses before turning onto a busier road, lined with shops and the frequent city gardens he’d informed her earlier in the day were the legacy of “parking lots,” from when the city had been primarily travelled by the human personal automobiles called “cars.” As they crossed the road to another building on the other side, Tendi was introduced to another relic of the automotive era: a repair garage, with several shiny automobiles sitting out front which she was sure were prestige pieces of a bygone era. A few older folks, presumably the owners, were sitting on a nearby shaded bench gossipping, but when they saw Rutherford they stopped with intrigue.

“So, the rumors are true,” an older woman with sleeve tattoos said dryly as he approached. “Prodigal son’s finally come home?”

“‘Course they’re true,” an old man wheezed. “Mabini’s never told a lie in his life. Probalby doesn’t even know how.”

“Hey, Mr. Hernandez, Mrs. Rivera,” Rutherford said with a wince. “Is, uh, is Alexandra in…?”

“Why,” a third old man said with a snicker. “Cruising for trouble?”

“That pun wasn’t funny in ‘55, Bador,” Mrs. Rivera rolled her eyes.

“She’s in,” Mr. Hernandez answered. “If you’re feeling brave.” He glanced at Tendi and added, “Very brave.”

Tendi flushed; working on the Cerritos, it was easy to forget how few humans had ever met an Orion—and the stereotypes that preceded her. But Rutherford frowned, taking her hand. “Great, because me and my wife have business with her. C’mon, D’Vana.” She was all too eager to follow him away from the curious glances, and heard the gossip start up again behind her, this time in a language she didn’t understand (not for the first time, she regretted leaving her combadge on the ship to practice her FSE).

As they turned the corner towards the garage she saw that the neighborhood mural on the side of the wall featured more of the old-fashioned automobiles. Entering the back lot, she began to hear muttering and quiet cursing in a woman’s voice. Its source became clear as they reached the garage Tendi saw a pair of legs sticking out from under a car, currently propped up on a lift. Sam abruptly tensed, but gave her hand a quick squeeze and let go. “Uh– Alexandra?”

The muttering stopped. There was a beat of silence, and then abruptly the legs scooted themselves out from under the car to reveal the rest of the woman—a beautiful human woman, Tendi couldn’t help but notice, despite the smudges of grease staining her face and pale blue workman’s jumpsuit. Curly black hair tumbled around a tanned face shiny with sweat, and dark almond eyes stared at Rutherford in shock for a moment before snapping into narrowed animosity.

Rutherford immediately stepped back as the woman rose to her feet like a gathering thunderstorm, holding up his hands in surrender. “I came to apologize!” he said quickly as she opened her mouth, which gave her enough pause that he was able to get another few sentences out. “For the Chariot. A-And a lot of other things! I know I messed up, Alexandra, I’m sorry–”

“Messed up’ doesn’t begin to cover it,” she cut him off. “For the Chariot, or ‘a lot of other things.’”

“Alexandra–”

“You got any idea how much that car cost, Sam? That thing was antique.” She emphasized with a jabbed finger at Rutherford, making him wince. “I saved up recreation stipends for two years for that car, you think an apology gets you off the hook?”

“I mean it, I swear!” Rutherford insisted, reaching into his pocket and pulling out an isolinear credit-chip. The woman glanced down at it, the other eyebrow rising. “Two thousand, nine hundred and forty-two credits. I-I know it’s a couple hundred short, but…”

Tendi tried not to let her eyes bulge as they darted down towards the chip. Three thousand credits? That was fifteen months’ worth of recreation stipends; looking back, all those protestations of “I like the replicated beer better!” and “Nah, who needs a hotel on shore leave? I’ll just sleep on the ship!” suddenly made more sense. He’s been saving up for this for over a year?

“Please,” Rutherford begged, and Alexandra gave him another wary glance. “I swear, I just wanna make things right.”

Alexandra eyed him and then the chip, looked sorely tempted—but after a long moment she scoffed and brushed her dark hair back over her shoulder. “I don’t need your credits, Sam. I replaced the Chariot years ago.” She hesitated, and then relented: “But since you owe me, I’ve got some projects in the shop right now. You can put that fancy Starfleet engineering to good use.”

Rutherford smiled in relief. “Deal.”

“Good.” Her voice turned ironic as she added: “I admit, when I heard you were back in town I wasn’t expecting you to come around trying to pay me back. We’ve obviously got a lot to catch up on.” For the first time, Alexandra turned to her attention to Tendi. “Speaking of which: you must be his wife.”

“Hi, yes! My name’s D’Vana, it’s nice to meet you!”

“D’Vana,” she repeated. Tendi gave her a nervous smile, and it seemed like the human woman was studying her hard, before Alexandra said blithely, “Congratulations.”

“Oh– um, thanks?”

She nodded and turned to Rutherford.  “I’ll be inside catching up on some paperwork. Try not to wreck anything out here, okay, Sam?” she said dryly, but Rutherford just gave an enthusiastic salute.

“You got it!”

Alexandra eyed him a moment longer and then turned and walked inside. Tendi blew out a breath of relief, her cheeks puffing, and then turned to watch as Rutherford shed his civilian top so he was just in his undershirt, sat down on the scooter and wheeled himself under the car. “Oh wow, this thing is really messed up,” he called out cheerfully, clearly already in a better mood. “Can you hand me that wrench?”

“The what?”

“It’s an old kind of hyperspanner, looks like a little metal bar with a hook on the end.”

Tendi did so, watching his arm vanish back under the antique automobile. “So,” she said, plopping down into a cross-legged position beside the vehicle. “Who was that, and why did you owe her three thousand credits?”

“Alexandra. We dated back in high school,” Rutherford explained, voice slightly tinny as it echoed against the undercarriage. “I worked for her dad, he actually wrote one of my recommendation letters to Starfleet. But mostly we hung out at the races.”

“The races?” A moment later it hit her and she giggled. “Oh.”

“Yeah, street racing was ki-ind of my gateway into the whole shuttlepod scene,” he reminisced. “Anyway, one day I got into an argument with this guy and made a stupid bet. And when I say stupid I mean to the tune of a thousand credits that there was no way I was going to win, not with the car he had. So I begged Alexandra to let me race with her car, the Chariot. Which I then crashed.” Tendi could hear the grimace in his voice even from underneath the car. “She dumped me and her dad almost took me to court over it, but my mom talked them out of it so that it wouldn’t affect my Starfleet application. At least I technically won the race before I crashed, so I was able to partly pay her back with the prize…”

“Wait, so that means the car was worth four thousand credits?”

“Forty-five hundred. I was gonna pay her what I owed her next fall, but now was as good a time as any, so…” He trailed off with a rattle of metal-on-metal, concentrating on whatever he was fixing. “Man, I haven’t worked on an old car like this in way too long; this is gonna take me hours! Guess every cloud has a silver lining, huh?”

They passed about half an hour happily that way, with Rutherford explaining the nuances of Terran carbon-fueled autos and Tendi handing him the old-fashioned tools needed to repair them, before the door from the garage into the shop opened again with a: “D’Vana.” Tendi looked over; Alexandra was standing in the doorway. “Come in here, I need a second set of hands on something.”

“Oh– sure, I’d love to help!” She got to her feet, though not without crouching first to peer at Rutherford under the car. “I’ll be back in a little while, ‘kay?”

“Have fun!” he called, blissfully lost in the world of antique mechanics.

Tendi followed Alexandra into the shop, but much to her surprise they didn’t go towards the little office with the large glass window facing into the waiting room, where she assumed the mechanic kept her records. Instead Alexandra led her up a back staircase into what turned out to be an apartment above the shop. As she shut the door behind her, Tendi looking around with scientific intrigue; despite living with humans, she didn’t get to see much of their material culture or architecture outside of what was allowed on a starship.

She found herself in the kitchen of a refurbished twentieth-century apartment, old brick and mortar and ancient hardwood floors, but with those standard modern amenities that humans were so famous for—a replicator in the wall, a matter-recycler at the end of the counter. Vine-like plants tumbled out of their vases on shelves and sills, and sunshine and the sounds from the street poured in from the open windows. There was art, too—replicated prints and hand-painted street art, and personal knicknacks (a small clay statue here, a crocheted Terran animal there) arranged on the shelves next to real paper books. To a practiced Orion eye, it was clear not a single piece of the art was a forgery. It was also clear, she noticed with a smile, that not a single one of them were by anyone famous. She loved human culture for that—that it valued art for its own sake, not the money you could get by selling a piece on the black market.

Behind her she heard Alexandra shut the refrigerator door and reluctantly turned back around. “What did you need help with?”

“This,” Alexandra said, setting two beers on the counter, much to Tendi’s surprise. “That’s Sam’s punishment, not yours. Besides, I want to talk to you.”

She stiffled a giggle. “Fine. Just so long as we bring him one after.” Alexandra eyed her as they sat down at the counter across from each other.

“So,” she began, twisting the cap off and watching the carbonation fizz, “you’re the Orion woman everyone’s saying my dumbass ex-boyfriend married.”

“Oh,” Tendi said, suddenly nervous. “Um, listen, Alexandra–”

“Look, trying to pay me back is a good sign,” the human woman said bluntly, putting the bottle down. “And Sam might’ve gotten up to some trouble, but he was never a bad guy. But he fucked off to Starfleet over ten years ago and nobody’s heard from him since, and now he comes back with a computer chip in his head, an Orion wife and a completely different personality? Obviously something went down and he’s not spilling.” She looked Tendi dead in the eyes: “So if you’re here and you don’t want to be here, you can tell me. I’ll kick his ass, and then I’ll call his cousins and they can come kick his ass some more. This is the Federation, you don’t have to do anything here that you don’t want to do.”

“Oh!” Tendi gasped aloud as she finally figured it out. “Oh, my god, no! I swear, Alexandra, you’ve got the wrong idea!” The human raised her eyebrows, and Tendi quickly clarified: “Sam and I met at work , I’m a Starfleet science officer! We serve on the Cerritos together.”

“Science officer,” Alexandra said, settling back with a nod. “Okay. That’s a lot better.” Tendi nodded, releived. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to make assumptions, but you hear stories.”

“No, I-I get it,” Tendi said with a wince. “I actually, um, know quite a bit about the Syndicate; I never had any contact with that sort of thing, but I get why you felt you had to check.”

Alexandra nodded, now looking intrigued. “Thanks. Hope this is okay to say, but I didn’t realize there were any Orions in Starfleet.”

“There’s not a lot of us, but we’re there. I worked with Sam for ages before we even realized we liked each other. He’s a really sweet guy, trust me; he’d never take advantage of anyone like that.”

“I believe you.” Alexandra looked through the nearest open window down into the lot; even as they listened, they sounds of something metallic being dropped and rolling away drifted up through air, along with a faint oppsy-doodles ! “But he’s definitely changed,” she said dryly. “What happened to him? I mean he seems like a nice enough guy, but he was pretty different as a teeanger. It’s just kind of eerie, seeing him like this.”

“It’s a long story,” Tendi admitted. “And not really mine to tell. But let’s just say that he got stuck in a pretty bad situation, and it…um, changed his mind, on a lot of things.” At the other woman’s thoughtful silence she added gently, “I-I know that maybe this isn’t what you want to hear, but Sam’s a good husband, a-and a great friend! He really turned his life around in Starfleet—and from what he told me down there, he wouldn’t have been able to do that without you. So…thanks.”

“‘Turned his life around,’ huh.” Alexandra smiled to herself, as if remembering something that was now a little less bittersweet. “Honestly, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m glad to hear it.” She looked back at the Orion and shrugged, lifting her bottle. “Besides, everyone needs a second chance sometimes, right?”

And Tendi, who knew it better than most, couldn’t keep a rueful tinge out of her grin. “Right.”

If there was one thing that Beckett Mariner knew about Bradward Boimler, it was that the guy valued hard work and attention to detail. And after meeting his parents, there was no question of where he’d gotten his strong (Mariner would argue pathological ) work ethic. If she was going to get his dad to approve of her, she knew, it would have to start with rolling up her sleeves and applying a little of that famous Starfleet elbow-grease.

So, she worked. Minute by minute, hour by hour she cut stems, transferred bunches to the drying shed and taste-tested so many grapes that she began to think she’d never get the taste out of her mouth. Eventually as the sun rose it even got hot enough that she had to shed her beloved leather jacket and replicate one of the straw hats the other harvesters were using, thinking longingly of ice-cold buffer-time margaritas all the while.

Some things, at least, were the same everywhere, since it seemed that the vineyard girls passed the time in the fields by gossipping. They obviously didn’t like her very much, but Mariner had plenty of experience in turning coworkers who hated her into sources of entertainment. Plus, she was new and therefore interesting; in response to their questions about Starfleet (she assumed to learn more about Brad’s job) she told several of her funnier stories about life on the final frontier, and after one particularly snotty comment from Mandolina she also started making up fake ones. Most of these featured a uncharacteristically Kirk-esque version of Boimler, fighting off man-eating centipedes or arena gladiators—shirtless, for good measure.

“–And I don’t know if you’ve ever met a Gorn before, but their scales are pretty rough, so his knuckles were all bloodied up when he turned around. And that was the day I fell in love with him; I mean what woman could resist that raw Boimler machismo?” she said, fighting to keep a straight face as she cut a bunch of grapes off the nearest vine; the idea of Brad sucker-punching a Gorn was almost too much. The dork would probably try to open trade negotiations with them instead, she thought fondly.

“I wish I had a fiancé who’d fight a Gorn for me,” sighed Mary-Rose beside her, a pretty woman with short dark hair who’d taken the heartbreak of losing the Raisin Bachelor relatively well. Mariner lightly punched her shoulder.

“C’mon, you can’t give up hope! I’m sure there’s lots of great guys here in Modesto.”

Mary-Rose looked a little cheered by this, but a poisonous voice spoke up behind them with: “So if you’re engaged, then why don’t you have a ring?” and Mariner turned.

A trio of raisin girls were standing behind her, the one in the red bonnet (Genevieve, she remembered) at the forefront. “Ooh, yeah, funny story,” Mariner agreed, voice dripping with honey. “I proposed to him.”

The girls stared at her for a long moment, gape-mouthed. Then Genevieve shrieked “That was an option?!”, kicked over a half-full basket of grapes and stormed off.

“Woof, rough day,” Mariner said, watching her walk away. When she looked back at the other workers, however, the mood had notably dimmed as they seemed to close ranks, falling into cool silences. Despite the situation, Mariner couldn’t help but respect their solidarity; they’d obviously all been competing with each other for years, but in the face of a common enemy they’d banded together. That good old Federation spirit, she thought dryly to herself as she replaced the grapes in the basket and headed off down the row towards the shed—and then grinned as she had a better idea. She’d been working her ass off all day, after all; it was time for a little break.

Elsewhere in the vineyard, a purple-haired young man adjusted his hat under the blazing sun and knelt down to pluck a grape off a shaded bunch. He eyed it, test-squeezed it, eyed it a moment more and went to pop it in his mouth—only to be beaten by a vineyard fly, who had apparently decided that today was a good day to die by flying directly down his throat.

Boimler hacked and wheezed and tried not to lose his breakfast. “Oh come on,” he rasped, spitting out fly wings and misery; somehow, out of all the strange space-pollens and oozes in the universe, vineyard flies were still the worst thing he’d ever unwillingly gotten in his mouth. “Stupid flies, stupid raisins , stupid planet Earth–”

“Hey man, be cool, my boyfriend’s from Earth.” 

He looked up as a shadow fell over him, and was temporarily blinded by the ring of the sun before his eyes adjusted and he saw that it was Mariner who had caused the mini-eclipse, cross-armed and smiling at him from her halo of noon daylight. “Mariner,” he said, relieved for a distraction from the drudgery.

“Hey Boims. You up for a little buffer time?

Brad grinned up at her, and then took the hand she proffered and let her pull him to his feet. She handed him a bottle of water and he took a long drink, grateful to wash away the taste of fly guts. “So,” Mariner said conversationally, leaning against the nearest monitoring pole and fanning herself with the straw hat, “all the girls here hate me.”

“Yeah, sorry,” he exhaled.

“Are you kidding? I’m having the time of my life! I just keep making up stories about you saving me from space-monsters and whisking me off to foreign planets for romantic trysts.”

“Really? You’re not telling them any of our real stories?”

“Hell no, man, those belong to us. Besides.” In one deft movement that was more like a judo throw than anything else, she’d taken hold of his shirt-collar and somehow switched their positions, so that he was the one slightly off-balance against the post and she’d planted a hand on it just over his shoulder. “They can have the weird fantasy version of you. I like the real one better.”

Boimler blushed; he was still so easy to fluster, even after knowing her for half a decade. “I– Beckett,” sounding like he was trying very hard to be the responsible one and not think about the prospect of a makeout session in the shade of the vineyard rows, “I-I don’t think this is an appropriate use of buffer time–?”

“Hasn’t stopped us before,” she said, and smirked at the sight of the flush deepening all the way to the roots of his hair. 

“I– uh–”

He was just fumbling for an answer, gaze darting between her eyes and her lips, when they both heard the sudden sound of approaching footsteps and looked over. “Dad!” Boimler yelped, scrambling out of the compromising position only to predictably trip back into the vines with a startled shriek and a rustle of foliage.

“Bradward,” Mr. Boimler said, eyeing his son as the latter clambered up, picking twigs and leaves out of his hair. “Your mom said you were working today, but here I find you fooling around with your girlfriend.” He said the last part with particular disapproval, and his son flushed an even deeper red.

“Dad, we weren’t–”

“Um, it was my fault, Mr. Boimler,” Mariner piped up, clearing her throat; she had instinctively snapped to attention with her arms behind her back, causing Boimler to shoot her a surprised look, but she continued, “I distracted him; just, uh, can’t keep my hands off this guy.”

Mr. Boimler eyed her with disapproval, and then turned back to his son; Mariner winced. Damn it. A whole morning’s worth of work, gone to waste. “Your mother told me your suggestions,” his father continued, and then much to their surprise continued: “They’re good insights, especially about having the pickers keep an eye on the downhill fields.”

Boimler blinked. “Oh. Um, yeah, of course. …Thanks, Dad,” he added, voice softening.

She could have been imagining it, but Mariner thought he stood a little taller at the praise, and a hint of a familiar expression flickered across his face. It took her a moment to pinpoint it, but when she did her stomach clenched up: the look Brad was giving his father was a more tentative version of the same hopeful, eager-to-please expression he wore around the senior staff. Of course, she realized as it dawned on her. She’d felt like something was missing from her understanding of the situation last night, but she hadn’t been able to put her finger on it. After all, if his father had just been overly harsh and critical, Brad would have probably turned out a lot more like her—a rebel with authority issues, ready to tell the whole world to fuck off.

Instead, he was a people-pleaser, always desperate for that extra ounce of approval that would never quite be enough to substitute for his own lack of self-confidence. And now she knew why: it was that occasional little compliment, the grudging praise that made you think it was possible to earn approval, if you just tried a little harder, were a little better next time. Drip-feeding parental affection. The man probably didn’t even realize she was doing it, she realized through her cold fury, but it didn’t matter; she still wanted to hit him.

“Your mother said you wanted to go into town,” Mr. Boimler continued, ignorant to her rage and his son’s wary hope. “I loaded the pickup with the the co-op’s weekly order; drop them off on your way.”

“Wait—really? You’re okay with us leaving? But it’s the middle of the workday.”

“You have to report back to your ship tomorrow, don’t you? Your captain will notice if you haven’t taken a break and your work slows down because of it.” Boimler looked genuinely surprised by this generosity, so Mariner interjected:

“While we’re there, why don’t we pick up dinner?” His father glanced at her as if just remembering she was there. “As a thank-you, for all your hospitality.” She smiled through her grievance and turned up the wattage on the charm for good measure. You can do this, Beckett, come on. What’s the point of all that charisma if you can’t use it when it really matters?

Mr. Boimler studied her, but apparently couldn’t find anything wrong with this request because he merely grunted. “Fine.” To his son he added, “Be back by six.”

“Right… thanks, Dad…”

Mr. Boimler nodded, and then spotted someone coming around the corner of a row beyond them and headed past. “Lianne, there you are. I want a word about–”

The pair didn’t wait around for him to change his mind, instead hurrying off as his father started talking to the worker about varietals. “I can’t believe it,” Boimler said, face lighting up as they hurried towards the house. “He never lets people take time off during the harvest, I-I guess I really impressed him with that advice.”

“Yeah,” Mariner said, glancing back over her shoulder suspiciously as they reached the pickup, but the vine rows were now hiding the older man from view. Well, if this was part of the plan then at least Brad was out of their hands for a couple hours. “Looks like.”

“You make sure the boxes are strapped down and I’ll get the keys.” Still half-lost in thought, Mariner didn’t get a chance to answer before he darted up the steps to the farmhouse and she was left to look over the crates stacked and corded to the bed of the pickup. Boimler emerged a few moments later, keys in hand and (much to her approval) dressed in his usual civilian clothing instead of the overalls. “We’ll have to unload all these as the co-op,” he explained as they opened the doors, “but if we hurry we can still make the 1:30 showing.”

“The ‘showing?’ Where are we going? –Brad, please tell me we’re not actually taking a tour of the city.”

“Nope. We are going to the best place in town.” He punched the button on the key, and the car rumbled to life. “I’m taking you on a date.”

By the time they had pulled into the lot of a sandstone-tan building with a large dome and constellations on the side, Mariner realized she might have gotten her hopes up a little too high.  “A planetarium,” she said with a nod, trying to be supportive. “Cool, yeah. I mean we work in space and flew past the solar system on our way in here, but no, man, this is really cool, thanks for bringing me here.”

Boimler rolled his eyes good-naturedly. “Have a little faith in me, would you? Come on, we’re missing the previews.”

“The what?”

Instead of answering he just hopped out of the car with a grin, and she huffed, feigning annoyance at the secrecy, and followed him to the front doors.

Inside the museum was quiet and mostly empty, with only a handful of families walking around with young children. She’d been technically incorrect in her guess; this wasn’t just a planetarium but a natural science museum as well, featuring hologram of the local fauna and explanations on the region’s geography. But Boimler walked straight past the displays of prowling coyotes and beavers building their dam into the more space-focused part of the museum, passing by a model of the galaxy and a display detailing a brief history of Starfleet (including an original copy of his beloved Una Chin-Riley poster). Mariner assumed they were going to the planetarium’s show, but instead he took a right into a smaller permanent exhibit that looked newer than the rest.

To her surprise, the room she found herself in was clearly no longer devoted to science; if anything, it seemed more like the inside of a collector’s ship (albeit without the offensive trash-bag smell). There were cardboard cutouts of what Mariner had to assume were holonovel characters, given the campy costumes, and a life-size replica of what looked like an artist’s imagination of an Andorian Yeti. Behind several panels of glass lay what looked like relics of a holonovel production process, among them a vintage, half-burned leather vest that she would have killed to get her hands on were it in better condition; a little plaque beneath the glass read Authentic Costume – Rescued by first curator during the bombing of Los Angeles.

“I’m gonna get us some popcorn,” Boimler called over his shoulder. “The replicator’s in the concessions room, I’ll be right back.”

“Right,” Mariner said, still looking around her in curiosity. On a space of wall free of glass cases was a panel describing the exhibit’s purpose. As Brad headed off down a little side-hallway out of the exhibit, she walked up to it, tilting her head in curiosity.

Terran Science Fiction: A Century of Imaginative Preparation.  

In the second half of the twentieth century, humanity escaped the bonds of earth and took to the stars for the first time. This great achievement was, in part, fueled by antagonism between the warring nations of Earth in that era—but it also spurred a creative and scientific fervor of much-needed optimism. More than ever before, Earthlings began to imagine what it would be like to meet our extraterrestrial neighbors, creating for ourselves new stories about alien worlds and distant galaxies—one of the most popular of which was directed by a native of our very own Modesto…

“Beckett.” She looked over; Boimler was standing in the hallway, holding two striped cartons of popcorn and grinning ear-to-ear. “Come on, it’s about to start.”

She followed him into a room that turned out to be a dimly-lit auditorium, lined with rows of plush velvet chairs. These were facing, not a stage, but a large computer screen, on which were playing flashing video clips accompanied by a voiceover in old-timey pre-FSE English. The setup seemed vaguely familiar, but it took her a moment to realize what she was looking at. “Hey, I know what this is!” she declared. “It’s one of those early holomovie things Tom Paris likes!”

“It’s called a film,” Boimler answered, amused. “But yeah, that’s the general idea.”

“Well whatever you do, don’t tell the raisin girls; they’ll be super jealous.”

“Probably, but they’d also hate this. Actually, you’re the only person I’ve ever taken here,” he said with a shrug.

“Really? Why; seems like a pretty good place to make out with a high school girlfriend,” Mariner said, peering around the shadowy auditorium.

“Because,” he said, as he handed her a carton of popcorn, “you’re the only person I know who’ll appreciate it.” Mariner, caught off-guard by how touched she was at this, didn’t have a chance to respond before the lights began to dim even further. “It’s starting, come on.”

They sat down in two of the empty seats, right in the middle of the theater. The video-clip show stopped as the lamps darkened, and then went out complete. Silence filled the room; in the absence of any other light source, all Mariner could see was the faint off-black glow from the screen and the rows of darker chair-backs in front of her. Then, a string of bright blue words appeared on the screen: A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away…

A sudden trumpet fanfare blasted into the room, and she clapped her hands over her ears on instinct with a shout. She looked over in shock only to see Boimler grinning like a little kid, sitting forward in his seat; he glanced at her, eyes shining, and nodded towards the front. Mariner rolled her eyes fondly and looked forward again to find that text had started to crawl across the screen, detailing an unfortunately familiar setting: a period of civil war, an evil space empire, a band of freedom fighters with little more than gumption and heart to arm them.

The “film” opened on a firefight between two starships and a brief comedic interlude with some exocomps, before focusing on a band of crewmen trying to hold their ship as the fascists boarded it. Mariner briefly tensed up at the surprisingly realistic sounds of mass phaser-fire, and Boimler looked down at the sight of her fingers gripping the armrests. “Shit, I forgot,” he whispered. “Mariner, if we need to go–”

“I’ll be fine Brad; this isn’t like a holomovie, it’s two-dimensional.” When he still looked concerned she reassured him: “Look, if it really starts getting to me I’ll leave, okay?” To prove her point she let go of the armrest.

“Okay, but just let me know…”

Despite his worries, she was quickly proven right; the shootout was soon over and the story moved on to the heroics of the main characters, who despite the passage of centuries and shifting social norms were still intensely compelling. Of course the special effects were laughably bad by twenty-fourth century standards (many of the “aliens,” for one thing, were obviously puppets or humans covered in face paint and rubber prosthetics), and the characters were all speaking in a dialect of English now several centuries old. But the story was timeless: a deceptively average kid called from his life on a farm to join a spacefaring alliance, become a hero and save the galaxy. She could see why a young Boimler had been so inspired—and to be fair, by the end of it, she was rooting just as hard for the resistance fighters as he was.

“Tell me they made a sequel,” Mariner urged afterwards, as they made their way down the steps into the grassy hollow towards the fountain. It was a golden California evening, one of the last warm days of the early autumn, and they were delaying their promise to pick up dinner and return to the oppressive environment of the Boimler farmhouse by loitering around the city park. “The story can’t just end there, I need to know if they win the war.”

“It’s part of a trilogy,” he reassured her. “Actually there’s a bunch more movies, but I’m a bit of a purist, I only really watch the original three. There’s some debate in the fan community about whether the rest of the films are good or bad, but it’s all in fun, everyone’s pretty chill.”

“Good, because we are watching the rest the moment we get back to the ship. Also, the princess seems to have way more chemistry with the smuggler; I hope she and the Strange Energies kid don’t get together. They kind of give me sibling energy, honestly.”

Boimler choked, much to her confusion. “Uh– don’t worry, they don’t get together,” he rasped. Mariner gave him a bemused look and shook her head. “Y’know I saw that for the first time on a school field trip when I was nine years old,” he reminisced as they reached the bottom of the steps. “I went home that day and immediately started looking up everything I could about joining Starfleet; it was like a whole possible future I’d never even thought about had opened up in front of me.” He tilted his head thoughtfully and admitted: “Also, looking back, I probably had a crush on the princess.”

“Of course you did man, she kicks ass!” she snickered, lightly punching his shoulder. “You’ve totally got a type.”

“Oh please, you’ve got same one!”

“Uh, excuse you, I’ve got lots of types. You should know, you’re one of them.”

They sat down on a bench facing the fountain, listening to the sounds of bubbling water and children flying a kite on the opposite slope. As their joking faded off into thoughtful silence, Mariner began to sense what was coming. She’d hoped that the movie would be enough to distract him, but distractions could only last so long. May as well steer into the skid. “So…nine years old, huh? That’s when you got interested in Starfleet?”

“Yeah. That’s…that’s kind of when everything started to go wrong,” he sighed. Mariner didn’t believe that for a second; a few years ago, the pair of them had accidentally gotten de-aged by an overdose of chronoton particles in a cave system on Bajor VII, and even without knowing anything about Starfleet he’d been terrified of being lectured by his father for getting “lost” and had had a distaste for the vineyard. What she could believe was that he’d participated in the time-honored tactic of rewriting his own memories into a more palatable backstory—something about which she certainly had no stones to throw. “Listen,” Boimler continued, rubbing the back of his neck, “I think this whole trip might have given you kind of the wrong impression, about my parents.”

Aaand there it is. Mariner had to fight to keep a neutral face; she had guessed this would happen, but she’d hoped he’d prove her wrong. Damn it, Bradward. One little compliment and suddenly all was forgiven; she pushed aside the uncomfortable realization that this bad habit was probably what had allowed them to keep being friends through those rocky early days when she’d been, alright, a bit of a bully. These were his parents , it was different. “Uh– sure, okay,” she said guardedly, and then, unable to resist: “But I’ve gotta say, man, this trip is explaining a lot about you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean,” he frowned.

“Nothing! Just, y’know, I finally get why you’re such a hardass about following protocol. If I thought I was going to get grilled for every tiny mistake, I’d be pedantic about that stuff too.” He pursed his lips and looked away, and sensing her advantage she pressed: “And I love your mom, but honestly, Brad, I’ve met Kewjian trance worms with more of a spine; being a people-pleaser is one thing, but she just goes along with whatever he says.”

“You’re seeing them at their worst right now,” Boimler insisted. “They’re just freaking out because we’re getting married and that means there’s no chance I’m ever coming back home for good.” She gave him a flat expression. “Look, I know my mom’s scared of everything, and my dad can be–”

“A jerk?” Mariner interrupted.

“Kind of controlling. And sure, maybe a bit of a jerk,” he conceded. “But it’s only because he really thinks I’m throwing my future away out there; he’s just trying to do what he believes is best for me.”

“Yeah, except this isn’t the twenty-first century, Brad; who cares if you leave the family farm to go off and chase your dreams?”

For once he didn’t retort right away, instead looking ahead towards the fountain. The bronze figures were being gilded by the glow of the sunset, making them look even more heroic than usual. “You see that guy in the statue there, the one with his hand highest on the flag?” Mariner did; it would be hard to miss the telltale Boimler square head and long nose, even on a man born nearly four centuries ago. “That’s my ancestor, Beauford Boimler the First. He led the rebuilding of the town; my dad’s named after him.”

“Oof,” she realized. “Talk about pressure.”

“Exactly. Most people tend to stay where they were raised, right? I mean look at you, you were raised on starships and now you do what your parents do.”

“Psh, that’s totally different! Starfleet’s all about going into the unknown, being in a new place every week.”

“Yeah, and that’s what’s familiar to you,” he insisted, straightening up. “Starfleet is your family business; the vineyard is mine, or it was supposed to be anyway. I’m the first person in my family for centuries to leave Modesto and do something other than make raisins. When you’ve got everything you need for a happy life, why run off looking for danger?” He shook his head, peering up at the statue. “Dad thinks I’m crazy; who knows, maybe he’s right.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Marriner said, stretching her hands over her head in the warm evening sunshine. “But admit it, no matter how many times you get shot at by enemy ships or high on alien pollen or covered in goo–”

“Ugh, so much goo,” Boimler shuddered.

“–There’s always a little part of you that says, Who am I kidding, I love this.” She looked over at him with a wry smile, and he couldn’t help but half-smile back.

“Yeah. I do.” He looked back at the fountain, watching the sleepy afternoon descend over the little park with a shrug. “Dad’s whole life is this place, running the vineyard is who he is. I’m just hoping someday he can accept that what for him is his whole world, for me is just a world.”

“Hnh. Fair enough, Boims, but if I were you I maybe wouldn’t put it exactly like that.”

“Yeah?” He glanced over at her, his smile growing. “How would you put it?”

“Mm. Well,” she faux-reasoned, deciding a little flirting was in order to lighten the mood, “you could tell him that you met a gorgeous, badass, totally out-of-your-league astronaut who seduced you into the spacefaring life and won’t let you go.”

“Oh please, I seduced you,” he said smugly.

“Wh– you did not!”

“Uh, pretty sure I did.”

“Psh, says who?”

“Come on, you teased me relentlessly, you couldn’t stop touching me, you pestered me like every chance you got for years! Admit it, Beckett Mariner,” he said with a smirk, and now they were almost nose-to-nose, “you were crazy about me from the start.”

“Circumstantial evidence,” she declared. “Completley inadmissible in any court from here to Qo’noS.”

He opened his mouth to respond, but she got the last word by cutting him off with a kiss. Brad didn’t seem to mind, lacing his fingers in her hair and kissing her back. It was warm, and soft, and perfect and–

–Ruined, as his mini-Padd trilled and they broke apart with sighs. “It’s them,” Boimler said, checking the screen. “I’d better take this, hang on.”

“Great, so now I have another reason to be pissed off at them,” Mariner mumbled under her breath as her fiancé walked away. She watched him swipe and reply to the call, voice drowned out by the fountain, and then try to object to something. He was cut short, and then pinched the bridge of his nose, and gave up with a nod. A moment later he’d ended the call and walked back to her.

“Change of plans. They’re coming into town for dinner.” 

The sky over Los Angeles was tinging pink and purple as the trio leaned against the now-repaired car, which Tendi had learned was Alexandra herself’s, laughing and drinking from cans of Heisler as the pair of old friends reminisced. “Sam always got the best grades of anyone in our class,” Alexandra said to Tendi with a snort. “All the teachers loved him, and all the kids hated him. Except me, of course, but that’s just because he was pretty.”

“Aw, your classmates hated you just because you were a good student? That’s not very fair,” Tendi said sympathetically. Rutherford blushed.

“I-I think it’s more because I made it pretty clear that I didn’t care about my grades, I just didn’t really have to try…”

“Yeah and because you picked a fight with every guy in our class who even slightly annoyed you,” Alexandra scoffed. “You’d hit on their girlfriends right in front of them just to piss them off, and then challenge them to a race when they got mad!”

“Did it work?” Tendi wondered.

“Not after the captain of the Pareses Squares team gave him a black eye.”

“Can we please talk about something other than how much of a teenage idiot I was?” Rutherford groaned, as Tendi giggled and patted his shoulder.

“Fine, fine,” Alexandra relented. “He was a dumbass around the guys, but Sam was actually a pretty good boyfriend, the Chariot aside.” She gave Rutherford a wry smile. “I think I still have that stuffed unicorn dog you won at the festival for me somewhere.”

“Ooh, an Alfa 177 canine?” Tendi realized. “I’ve always wanted one of those!”

“I dunno, D, I don’t think it would play very well with the Moopsy,” Rutherford mused. “Besides, I don’t think it would have enough room in our quarters; remember how excited The Dog was to get transferred to The Farm where she could run around and stuff?”

“But an A177 would be way smaller than The Dog! Oh, and we could take it outside on the holodeck!”

They were just debating the merits of trying to take care of a puppy on a starship (and pausing to explain the history of The Dog to an intrigued Alexandra) when a voice abruptly called from the end of the lot: “So it’s true!”

The trio turned, and Rutherford’s face fell. It remained a tableau of guilty shock and fear as a human woman in her mid-fifties stalked up to him, glaring with a venom that Tendi normally associated with one of Lt. Shaxs’s outbursts against the Cardassians. “Uh oh,” Alexandra muttered under her breath.

“I heard that he was here,” the woman began as she reached them, heaving with fury. “I just couldn’t believe it unless I saw it with my own eyes.” Rutherford winced.

“Auntie–”

“Don’t you Auntie me!” He flinched. “Everyone’s talking about you, saying you showed up at Mabini’s yesterday with a metal plate for a face and a new wife! I thought it couldn’t be true, that not even you would be that shameless, but here you are!”

“I– Aunt Estela–”

“Over ten years you’re gone, no explanation, no apology, no one’s even heard from you! And now you think to show your face around here again, after what you did to my sister?!”

“Aling Estela , that’s enough,” Alexandra said sharply.

“No it’s damn well not enough!” To Tendi’s surprise, angry tears were now brimming in the woman’s eyes. “You broke her heart, Samanthan! Umiyak siya hanggang sa mamatay dahil sa inyo!” Whatever she’d said, it made Rutherford stop dead. “My sister! How dare you…”

Alexandra stepped forward, bracing the now-crying woman’s shoulder. “Okay, Estela. You’ve said your piece, alright? Now I think it’s time you went home.”

The woman glared viciously through her tears at Rutherford, who somehow seemed to be shrinking into himself. “Fine. Fine! I’ll leave. But some other people should do the same!”

“Estela–”

“I’m going!” She broke out of Alexandra’s hold and stormed off towards the street, but not before throwing back over her shoulder: “You shouldn’t have taken the deal, Alexandra! That boy doesn’t deserve his fancy degree, not after what he did!”

Rutherford’s eyes widened, but he didn’t respond. Alexandra likewise bit back a frustrated noise, and Tendi, following their lead, watched as the woman gave her nephew a last vicious look and then stormed off down the street.

They watched her go. When she was several blocks away, Rutherford repeated in confusion, “‘Taken the deal…’” Alexandra’s face shifted sideways, but it was too late; Rutherford’s human eye widened and he whirled on his feet. “Wait, Alexandra—did Mom pay you back for the Chariot?” She sighed, which was confirmation enough. “W-Why didn’t you say anything…”

“Mercedez asked us not to,” she admitted. “Samanthan–”

“That’s why your dad didn’t press charges.” He rubbed his forehead. “I’m so stupid, it was a four thousand credit car! Of course she must have paid you back…”

“Look—it’s in the past, okay? And Estela didn’t mean what she said,” Alexandra insisted. “She’s just–”

“She didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.” He lowered his hand, looking anguished. “I’m sorry, Alexandra. I swear, I wouldn’t have even bothered you today if I’d known Mom had already…”

“Sam, seriously, it’s water under the bridge,” Alexandra insisted, but it was clear from Rutherford’s miserable expression that he didn’t believe her.

“I-I think we’d better get going,” he mumbled. “C’mon, D’Vana.”

Tendi bit her lip but nodded. “Thanks for everything,” she said with a small wave to Alexandra. “It was really nice to meet you.”

“Yeah… you too…”

The mechanic watched them go until they were around the corner. Once they were out of eyesight, Tendi set a hand on his arm. “Sam? What about the other people on your list…?”

He stopped, and she did the same, watching with concern as he stared down at the sidewalk. “...I think we should just go back to the hotel,” he said at last, but his voice was quiet and broke halfway through.

She nodded, uneasy. “What did she say to you?”

“What?”

“Your aunt. Sh-she said something in that language you speak—I didn’t understand it.”

“Oh. Uh–” Rutherford started to walk again, passing her by. “I-I don’t remember.”

She watched him take several steps, and then followed after him. “Right,” she said weakly, trying not to notice the way his hand flinched away from hers when she reached out to take it—trying to pretend that she didn’t know, of course, that his implant had perfect recall, capable of replaying the entire confrontation back on loop after shame-filled loop.

To say that Boimler was anxious when they pulled up in front of the farm-to-table restaurant his parents had selected was an understatement; after he put the pickup in park he sat there for a few moments with a thousand-mile stare at the dashboard, as if seriously contemplating just driving away. After the disaster of the previous night, Mariner couldn’t blame him. “Hey, c’mon,” she said, taking his hand; Brad looked over, pursing his lips. “It’s gonna be fine, trust me.”

“You’re sure,” he said dubiously.

“Obviously.” She waved a breezy hand, putting on a show of the same confidence that had convinced him to follow her, however protestingly, into near-certain disaster many times before. “Look, we’re in public this time, they’re not gonna start a scene. Besides, your dad was impressed with you earlier, remember? You went all command-track middle-management on him, he’s gotta respect that.” Boimler looked a little less anxious at this and she added: “Look, we’ll smooth everything over from last night and end this trip on a high note, and then tomorrow we’ll beam out of here! Nothing to it.”

He searched her face as if hoping to borrow some of her courage, and then inhaled through his nose and nodded. “Yeah. Okay. End on a high note.”

“See, now you’re getting it.”

The inside of the restaurant was the kind of place that Mariner usually only got to visit on the holodeck—white tablecloths, candles, a terrible Kimtones jazz album playing softly over hidden speakers and a notable lack of drunks of various species being shuffled out by bouncers or angry bartenders. The Boimlers were sitting at a round four-person table near the doors, in a suit and flowery dress respectively, and Mariner immediately felt a little underdressed in her white T-shirt and leather jacket. “Hey guys; wow, the food here looks great,” she observed as she sat down, taking the lead on making conversation.

“California produce,” Mrs. Boimler said with a weak smile, but then fell quiet as her husband cleared his throat.

“Did the crates get dropped off at the co-op?” Mr. Boimler asked his son.

“We did it first thing after we left,” Brad said nervously. His father nodded curtly. “Um, so, how did you get a table? This place usually has a long waitlist…”

“The owner owes me a favor.” He opened the menu, adding: “There are benefits of living in a close-knit community.”

“The Cerritos actually only has five hundred people on it,” Mariner offered. “We might be in a new place every week, but it’s actually a lot like living in a small town.” She looked at Boimler and added, “Everyone pitches out in emergencies, and we all know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. We take care of each other.”

Brad gave her a grateful nod, catching the implied promise. “Exactly.”

They paused as the waiter arrived to take their order. When he had left again, Mrs. Boimler hesitantly piped up: “Bradward, dear—your father and I have something we wanted to discuss with you. Both of you, really.” Mariner and Boimler shared a wary look. “We were very impressed with your suggestions this morning. Even with just switching the baskets, the harvest is already going so much faster.”

“Oh. Um–thanks, Mom. But really, i-it wasn’t that big a deal–”

“No,” Mr. Boimler spoke up. “Your mother’s right, Bradward; you made a good call today.” He glanced to his wife briefly and then continued. “Ethel has…pointed out to me, that sometimes I might not be giving you your due. If I haven’t recognized that before now, then– then I apologize.”

Boimler was staring at his father with an expression of such shock that Mariner assumed this might be the first apology he’d ever received from the man. “I– um, i-it’s okay, Dad,” he said and then cleared his throat, eyes darting down to the tablecloth as he blinked hard. Mrs. Boimler was smiling mistily at her husband.

“If I’m hard on you, it’s only because I’m trying to help you succeed,” Mr. Boimler continued firmly. “But today you proved to me that you’ve got a good head for management.”

“Dad, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Boimler insisted. “I’m a lieutenant; directing teams of people, learning how to manage large projects, that’s my whole job! Look,” he said hesitantly, “I know that me going into Starfleet maybe isn’t what you wanted me to do with my life. But it’s not a rejection of you, or of any of this.” He gestured around the room, and for the first time Mariner noticed the photographs on the walls—some of them centuries old, of farmers standing next to replanted vineyards or building new shops out of the blocks of rubble.

“Starfleet is all about cooperation, how people from different worlds and different civilizations learn to work together,” he continued. “Where I come from, how you raised me, they’re part of what I bring to that table. And I love what I do, and I’ve found someone who makes me happy.” He looked over at Mariner, his face softening as she gave him a rueful half-smile and a nod, and he took her hand as he turned back to his parents: “Isn’t that what you wanted for me in the first place?”

His father looked at his mother, and the younger couple held their breaths. “...Of course we want you to be happy, Bradward,” Mrs. Boimler said hesitantly. “And…it seems like Beckett does that.” She turned to them, biting her lip. “We just wondered if perhaps someday—after you’ve done everything you wanted to do in Starfleet—the two of you might consider moving back here, to take over the farm together.”

It was an offer of compromise. A truce, Mariner and Boimler both recognized, glancing at each other. Of course they both knew that the answer was no—but, Mariner reasoned, whatever Mr. Boimler was planning was decades in the future, plenty of time to renegotiate. She wrestled down her discomfort at the thought at the thought of outright lying; what was one little fib, if it meant keeping the peace? “Uh– yeah, y’know,” she fudged, “we can think about th–”

“No,” Boimler cut her off, causing her head to whip around to look at him in surprise.

“Wh– dude, what are you doing?” she whispered out of the side of her mouth, glancing back at his parents with a pasted-on smile.

“Ending on a high note.” He took a deep breath. “Mom, Dad—I think we need to talk.” His parents were watching him, his mother anxious, his father’s brow beginning to knit again as Brad summoned his courage: “I’m sorry, but it’s time you knew. I’m never going to move back to Modesto or take over the vineyard; Starfleet is where I belong, with Beckett. I hope you can accept that.”

His firm tone was belied, at least to her, by the fact that as he finished this declaration he was tightly gripping Mariner’s hand; she knew from experience that he was about ten seconds from passing out from the anxiety alone. His father was watching him now, face inscrutable. Mrs. Boimler’s own face crumpled, but as she sighed and glanced up at her husband she gave a nod.

To their amazement, and relief, his father gave her a single, short nod back.

And with that, it was over; Mariner and Boimler both let out silent exhales, and as their food arrived she shot him a proud look. Boimler gave a hopeful grin back. Progress. Not peace, not yet, but progress. It was a good start.

When the waiter had left, Mrs. Boimler stood up. “I’m going to go wash up for dinner; Beckett, dear, would you join me?”

“Oh, uh– sure, alright,” she said, pleasantly surprise at the invitation. Boimler shot her a last grateful look as they left, and as she followed his mother back through the restaurant she realized just how much tension she’d been holding in her shoulders and jaw. When she got back to the ship she was going to need a long massage on the holodeck. And a drink. And honestly, a real vacation.

“Beckett? Beckett, dear.”

She realized as the old-fashioned bathroom door swung shut behind her that Mrs. Boimler had been saying her name. “Huh? Oh, sorry, Mrs. B, just lost in thought…”

But she faded off at the startlingly familiar look on the other woman’s face; it was the same miserable expression that Brad wore on the rare occasion that one of the senior staff criticized his work. “Beckett, I– I want to apologize,” she said, twisting her fingers anxiously. “I know we’ve been less than…hospitable.”

“Wh– uh, no, psh, it’s fine,” Mariner lied on instinct; it was time to let bygones be bygones, after all. “You guys are busy, you weren’t expecting us–” But Mrs. Boimler shook her head.

“No, we haven’t treated you well. Please, believe me when I say it wasn’t personal. And you’re– you’re nothing like I imagined you’d be.” She seemed to be searching her face—why, Mariner didn’t know. “You’re a sweet girl, and I can see how much you care for my son. And I know there are things he’s not telling me, about how dangerous it is out there. I know you must be part of the reason he’s still…”

Mrs. Boimler trailed off and turned away as her gaze flickered distant. Mariner watched as she ran the old-fashioned sink tap, unnerved at the sudden shift in atmosphere. What the hell is going on? “Uh– Mrs. Boimler, look-“

“I almost lost him, you know.” Mariner fell silent. “He was always smaller than the other boys, and his allergies—and when he was born, he– he was very sick. He almost…” Mrs. Boimler’s voice shook and died as she reached to turn off the water. And then, so softly Mariner almost didn’t hear it: “I should never have let Beauford talk me into it.”

Oh. No wonder she was so terrified of Boimler getting killed out there in the distant reaches of the galaxy; Mariner wondered how long the guilt had been eating her alive. “Look—Mrs. Boimler, you don’t have to worry about him, I promise,” she said, making a mental note as she set a hand on the woman’s shoulder never to mention his many brushes with death. “Brad’s a great officer, he knows what he’s doing. And I would never let anything hurt him.”

“I know. I know you would try,” Mrs. Boimler said quietly. And then she looked up at herself the mirror—and for the first time since she’d met her, Mariner heard a thin line of strength color the woman’s voice: “But if anything ever happened to him, I’d never forgive myself.”

She turned on her heels and walked out of the bathroom, leaving the bewildered officer behind her with her hand still raised. Confused and not a little worried, Mariner washed up, pondering the strange exchange, and then fixed her hair and straightened her jacket before heading back out into the restaurant. She scanned the floor for several seconds, trying and failing to locate their table, before she realized what the problem was.

The table nearest the door was empty, the chairs pushed back, the plates of food still steaming with heat and entirely untouched. The Boimlers were gone.

Five minutes earlier, as the bathroom door swung shut, across the restaurant Brad was left alone with his father. Without Mariner at his side he suddenly felt his confidence draining away. “Uh– so, Dad, w-we’ve been talking about me a lot—probably too much,” he muttered under his breath, and then resumed in a forcibly upbeat tone: “Um, how’ve things been here?”

“Fine.” Seemingly unaffected by the awkwardness in the air, his father took out his mini-Padd and tapped on something with a frown and a brief mutter to himself. Boimler looked around the restaurant, rubbing the back of his neck. Clearly something more still needed to be said to placate his father, though he wasn’t sure what.

“Dad, look–”

He was abruptly cut off by an alarm from the mini-Padd like the klaxon of a red-alert, yelping and nearly tipping back in his chair; his father swore loudly and stood as heads turned to crane at the sound. “Damn!”

“What the– Dad, what’s–?”

“It’s the new irrigation system, the drones have gone rogue!” He shoved his chair in as Brad’s eyes snapped wide. “They’re venting all their water onto row C12!”

“C12– wait, that’s in the southwest quadrant,” Brad realized. “Dad, if the water rolls downhill it could flood the drying shed, all the equipment–”

“Could get water-damaged, I know! And right in the middle of the harvest—if those computers fry we could lose a quarter of the yield before we get them replaced!”

They were both hurrying for the doors before the conversation was even finished; Brad tapped where his badge should have been with a, “Boimler to Mariner!” and then, feeling only fabric, remembered he’d left it at home with his uniform. “Dad–”

“I’m messaging your mother, just get the car started! Damn it all to hell!”

Mrs. Boimler came flying out of the restaurant doors only a few seconds later as father and son both got into the pickup, Mr. Boimler still frantically tapping at the mini-Padd. “Where’s Mariner?!” Brad demanded as his mother hopped in the back seat.

“I just told her, she said she’d beam back up to her ship for help!”

“The Cerritos! That’s perfect, I’ll message my friend Rutherford—he’s an engineer, he’ll be able to figure out what happened to the drones–!”

“Leave that to your girlfriend and focus on driving,” his father ordered. “I’ll keep trying to fix it from the app, just get us home!”

“Right!” Brad put the pickup in drive, his mind already leaping ahead to the disaster and possible solutions. If Mariner recruited enough people from the skeleton crew they could put down sandbags while the engineers shut off the drones—but no, the replicators were too far away from the shed—could they beam some down from the ship? Was that even legal? He’d need to fill out the emergency civilian aid paperwork later and–

As the pickup left the town behind and roared off down the highway, Mr. Boimler glanced up from his mini-Padd to his son’s laser-focused expression, and then at the mirror. His wife met his eyes from the back seat, and gave a tiny, guilt-stricken nod. He gave a subtle nod back. It was time.

Chapter Text

Rutherford was sitting at the hotel desk when Tendi returned from a short excursion, carrying two containers of takeout for dinner. To her surprise he was not in the despondent mood she’d left him in, but rather happily typing away at something on his work Padd with an almost frenetic energy. “Sam?” Sh set down the food on the table as a pinch began to form in her brow. “What are you doing?”

“It’s a code! I based it off the one Buenamigo had in my implant,” he replied eagerly, still tapping out numbers and letters. “I modified it so that it’ll let me keep my memories from after the Texas- class was destroyed, but I won’t remember this weekend at all!”

“‘Won’t remember?’ You’re trying to erase your own memories?”

“Yeah, it’s perfect! I’ve already apologized to the people here I was a major jerk to, so this way I’ll have a blank slate! Literally!” He beamed down at the Padd in relief, tapping away on the screen.

“But… I’ll remember.”

“Yeah, but all you have to do is not mention it,” he laughed. “Besides, even if you do I’ll just forget right away afterwards! Easy-peasy, right?”

Tendi watched him for a long moment, biting her lip. To try to modify his own memories like this, she knew he must be truly desperate. Maybe it would be kinder, to just let him forget…

“And finished!” he declared, sitting back. “Just gotta hook up the Padd to my implant; can I borrow your multi-key? The cable-port door’s been sticking lately and I don’t like sending mods wirelessly ever since the whole Badgey-ascending thing. Rather not have that guy in my head, right?” He chuckled at his own joke.

“Oh. Um…” She reached down to her belt and unhooked the tool, before hesitating. She’d worn it for the last three years, but she could still easily remember the days when even seeing one would have filled her with shame. She looked up. Across from her, Rutherford was happily scrolling through the code on his Padd, checking for any errors. Tendi took a deep breath.

“No.”

He looked over, surprised. “D’Vana…?”

“I said no. I’m not going to help you lie to yourself like that.” He blinked, and she sighed, sitting down on the stool next to him. “Sam, I know how hard it is to face up to your past. There are things I did when I was a teenager that I’m not proud of too!”

“That’s different; you were raised in the Syndicate,” he protested. “My life was great, I-I had no excuse.” His voice took on a pleading edge: “I messed things up a lot, D, and now it’s too late to fix it. Wouldn’t it be better to just forget and move on?”

“You mean with your mom,” she said quietly. He looked away. “Sam, I can’t pretend to know what your relationship is like. But take it from me:–” She touched his face, and he turned back to her, mouth pressed with anxiety. “–You can try to forget who you once were, but you’ll always carry that person inside you. The sooner you stop hiding from them, the sooner they can become part of who you are now.”

Rutherford watched her for a moment, shoulders hunched and searching her eyes as if for a way out, and then let out a heavy exhale and picked up his Padd. As Tendi watched he pulled up the save menu and deleted the code entirely.

“...I have to go see her, don’t I?” he said in a small voice. His wife took his hand.

“I’ll be right there with you, Sam. No matter what.”

The front door to the farmhouse slammed open as Boimler sprinted inside and up the stairs, his mother’s call to wait dying on her lips. “Just gotta change, be back in a second!” he shouted back, vanishing around the corner of the hallway. At the bottom of the steps the couple shared a look, his mother uneasily crossing her arms as if against a chill.

“Beauford,” she said in a whisper, “are you sure this is a good–”

“We had a deal, Ethel.” His voice brooked no compromise, and she bit her lip. “We tried things your way. Now we’re doing it my way.”

Whatever timid response she might have made was interrupted as her son came flying back down the stairs and towards the kitchen, having changed out of his nice clothes and into what looked like his uniform trousers and a khaki T-shirt. “–Repliate sandbags from the breakfast line,” he was already rambling, mind clearly running a million miles an hour as he headed for the back door. “Mom, you message the rest of the workers; if the water’s running downhill we’ll need their help putting sandbags around the shed. Dad and I will try to shut the system off manually–” At their unexpected silence he turned back to see his parents watching him, his mother with a wretched expression, his father stony-faced.

“Guys, come on, red alert!” Brad insisted, hurrying back. “We’ve got an emergency here, why are you just standing around!”

“There is no emergency,” his father answered. “We just needed to get you to leave the restaurant with us.”

“What?” Boimler felt like he’d just been given mental whiplash; three minutes ago they had been speeding down the highway in pursuit of certain disaster; now his parents were idling in the kitchen like nothing had happened. “But you said the irrigation system–!”

“The new system is top of the line. Sit down, Bradward. We have something you need to see.”

Unwilling to change gears so quickly, he looked between the two of them, wondering if this was some sort of bad joke. “But– you said–?” To his growing trepidation, neither moved from their positions in the kitchen doorway. Slowly, still jittery with adrenaline and the fog of catastrophe, he took a seat at the kitchen table. “Mom? Dad? W-What’s going on? If there’s no emergency then why did we leave Beckett behind–”

“Your girlfriend isn’t who you think she is, Bradward,” his father interrupted flatly, reaching into a kitchen drawer.

“Fiancée,” Boimler muttered, unheard, watching in bewilderment as the other man pulled out an actual, physical manilla folder and tossed down on the table in front of him. He nodded to it.

“Go on. Read it.”

“Beauford–” his mother mumbled, but she was cut off as well:

“He needs to see the truth, Ethel. It’s the only way he’s going to learn.”

“Learn what,” Boimler said warily, reaching out to take the folder. The moment he opened it, his eyes went wide.

He recognized the format immediately. It was weird to see it printed on physical paper, but the blue border and rounded orange-and-yellow tabs highlighting the headings were unmistakably Starfleet; the word CLASSIFIED was printed across the top in blocky purple letters next to the delta seal. In the right-hand corner was an old service profile shot of the woman he’d just left behind at the restaurant. “W-Where did you get this…?”

“That’s not important.” Bradward looked up, face pale. “What’s important is that if you want to marry this girl, you know who she really is.”

“Dad, th-these are classified records, I shouldn’t even be holding these–!” He made to shut the folder, but his father put his hand down hard, pinning the open cover to the table.

“Do you know what that girl got up to during the war?” Beauford demanded. “Did you know that she has ties to Klingon terrorists?”

“I– look, no, I don’t know her entire service history, but–”

“What about her demotions? Drunkenness on the job, disrespecting senior officers? She once had a psychotic break and broke another crewman’s jaw! Did she tell you about that?”

“She has PTSD, Dad, she’s working on it–!”

“You love Starfleet so much, but she wouldn’t even be in Starfleet if her parents hadn’t shielded her from the consequences of her actions! Admit it!” Boimler tried to answer, but found he had no response; that, unfortunately, was a fair point. His father breathed out hard through his nose and nodded. “And speaking of being shielded from consequences.”

He flipped ahead in the papers to a tabbed page close to the back. “If you realy love this girl so much, then I’m sure you already know that she was tried for the murder of another officer. Right, Bradward?”

Although several times in his life (especially early in their acquaintanceship) Boimler had irritably fantasized about what Mariner’s mugshot would look like, he’d never quite pictured it like this. In his mind’s eye she’d always been glaring or smirking at the camera, possibly drunk, definitely defiant. But this version of Mariner was dead-eyed and thin-faced, seeming not entirely present. As if some part of her was very, very far away.

“The case was dropped, but she pleaded insanity, not innocent,” his father said flatly. “Bradward, do you even know this girl?”

“I–” He was still staring down at the official records, fighting to think through the haze of rising panic. “–I-I’m sure she had a good reason–”

His father scoffed. Still light-headed, Boimler turned to the silent observer in the room. “Mom? D-Did you know about this?”

“I tried, Bradward,” his mother mumbled. “I thought that, i-if you could convince her to stay, maybe she could get better here with you and–”

He stood up abruptly, pushing the chair back with a loud scrape and closing the folder tightly against himself. “I need to go.”

“Bradward–” his mother began anxiously, but his father just nodded.

“Let him go, Ethel.” The older man met his eyes, calm and collected. “Give him some time to think.”

Time to think. Boimler’s head spun as he left the room as quickly as he could without running, the folder clenched in his hand. A niggling thought fought its way up through the bubbling dread: when, where had they gotten it? An afternoon wasn't enough time to do—whatever they'd done to get it, so they must have had all this information before he and Mariner had even arrived...meaning they'd known all this stuff about her for days, possibly weeks. His hands shook as he took the stairs two at a time. Time to think. Had Mariner really–?

Yes, his brain responded before the question was even finished. Yes, she had. Mariner didn’t talk much about what she’d seen during the war, but what little she’d shared with him had cured him of the last vestiges of patriotic glory-seeking that had once compelled Brad himself to enlist—and he’d seen enough of her life after to know how much self-sabotaging she’d done before ending up on the Cerritos . Everything his parents had said was true—and Starfleet records didn’t lie. Oh god. He felt nauseous; Starfleet records…

The door to his bedroom sounded unnaturally loud as it slammed shut behind him, his feet carrying him quickly to where he’d left his uniform shirt crumped on the bed that morning. Combadge, combadge. Where the hell was his combadge? He flipped over his shirt several times and then shook it out. Nothing.

Boimler looked around the room, struggling to keep a lid on the rising panic; his eyes landed on the old-fashioned badge in its protective case on his desk, and he darted forward and scrambled to open the box, nearly dropping it in the process of pinning it on his shirt. It buzzed to life as he tapped it, thanking whatever deity might be listening that it still worked. "This is Lt. Bradward Boimler, connecting to the U.S.S. Cerritos, ship’s code 75567. Come in, Cerritos!”

There was a pause, and then an answer crackled back. “Mr. Boimler?” It was Ransom. “What’s going on; this isn’t your assigned combadge. In fact it’s showing up as decommissioned.”

“Uh–” Damn it, he’d forgotten he wasn’t supposed to have this. “I’ll explain later, Commander; can you just put me through to Mariner?”

“I thought she was with you. Everything okay down there, Lieutenant?”

“Fine!” he yelped, and cringed. “Fine. Everything’s fine, Commander. I just really need to talk to Beckett. Please, Sir.”

He held his breath and counted to five, hoping against hope that his years of good behavior would buy him enough of Ransom’s trust for the senior officer to look the other way, just this once. Then–

“Sure thing, Lieutenant. Enjoy your R&R.” He silently exhaled as the combadge crackled, and then Mariner’s tinny voice piped out of the speaker:

“That had better be you, Bradward, or your ass is grass.”

“It’s me. Beckett–”

“Where the hell did you go; I came back from the bathroom and you were all gone! I’ve been comming you for twenty minutes!”

“It’s a long story.” He swallowed, fear wriggling in his stomach like a bad bowl of gagh. “Listen, how fast can you get to the farm? We need to talk.”

By the time Mariner appeared out of the swirling beads of light behind the pickery shed and began striding towards Brad across the grass, it was clear her fiancé was already several stages past his normal low-level anxiety and in a full-blown, sweaty-hands, cringingly-overtalking panic spiral. “I'm sorry,” he said as soon as she was within earshot, “Beckett, I swear, I had no idea they were going to–”

“Just let me see it.” He handed it over, face a mask of dread. Mariner flipped through the file. Full, unredacted page after page of her various gray-ops missions (what Starfleet had on record, anyway), demotions, not-entirely-lateral transfers and writeups for misconduct flashed under her fingers. Even the court martial for the murder of Lt. Jansen was in there.

“Exactly how much of this is classified from civilians?” Brad asked weakly, looking over her shoulder.

“All of it.”

“Oh my god…”

“Look, we can deal with this,” Mariner advised, shutting the folder. “This is real paper; clearly whoever they were working with knows better than to leave any evidence. Your parents probably just hired an investigator who knows someone at HQ that’ll sell low-grade fleet secrets under the table.” Brad let out another moan. “I’ll tell my dad and he can look into it quietly, without getting your family in trouble. There are no security officers coming to arrest your parents, okay?”

“That’s great, but it’s not the point Mariner!” With the immediate legal threat gone, his terror was quickly melting into anger. “What if they’d gotten caught, w-what if their ‘investigator’ had been undercover Starfleet! This could have wrecked my whole career just for being associated with them, they could have gone to prison!” He threw his hands up into the air as he paced, ranting: “I can’t believe they did something like this again!"

"Really?" she said dubiously, leafing through the testament to her most damning moments. "Because I've only known them two days, and I definitely can."

He stopped his pacing to turn to her, face an incandescentlly furious red. “I can’t believe they would treat you like this. After everything you’ve done for them this weekend–”

“Brad, they’ve been planning to break us up since before I got here,” she sighed, shutting the folder.

“What? But they’d never even met you–”

“I overheard them talking about a ‘plan’ last night, this must have been it. I know I should’ve told you earlier, I just…”

Boimler stared at her for a long moment, and then looked up at the sky, seemingly out of words for his anger. “Unbelievable,” he managed. “They’re unbelievable.”

“Let’s just get rid of the evidence and then bail, we can go back up to the ship.”

“Right. Okay.” He nodded too many times, but her reassurances seemed to finally be getting through to him because he let out a curt exhale and straightened his shirt, though his face was still creased with worry. “There’s a matter recycler in the shed, come on…”

She followed him towards the shed doors, the tense silence almost crackling between them. Mariner wanted to believe it was because he was still worried about his parents—but, well. She had to know. “Boims,” she said abruptly, “just—look, be real with me, how much of what’s in there did you see?”

“...A lot of it.” He hesitated, and she knew what was coming. “Look, it’s your business, but–”

"The trial." He winced.

"It, um, it said you entered a plea of insanity, so–"

He offered it like an absolution, but Mariner didn't take it. “Lt. Jansen was my superior officer, he was in a lot of pain and ordered me to do it,” she said shortly, not breaking her stride towards the shed. “The courts usually drop the charges in those cases, especially in wartime.”

“Oh…”

“I’m not proud of it, Brad.” He had rarely heard her voice sound so brittle.

“No, that’s not– Beckett, I am so sorry. They had no right to pry into your life like that.”

She wavered, and then decided that this wasn’t the time to dissolve into a puddle of post-traumatic stress. “It’s fine,” she said, even though it really wasn’t. “Let’s just hurry and get rid of this stuff. Your parents can thank me later.”

The sky was fading from orange into scarlet as they reached the drying shed, casting a long shadow back into the fields. “You know, before they pulled this, I was almost beginning to think they’d changed,” Boimler said as they approached the doors. “I really thought that they’d finally accepted that I’m an adult, they can’t keep trying to control my life!"

“And I thought my parents were overbearing,” Mariner agreed darkly.

"But no, th-they don’t approve of my fiancée, they don’t approve of my job, they don’t approve of anything about me! Sometimes I think that the only thing that would make them happy is me shriveling up here into a raisiny husk of a man they can box up and ship to Fresno!”

Somehow his familiar ranting was soothing. It’s okay, she tried to reassure herself as they headed into the barn. He saw your file and it’s okay. He’s not running away.  But she wanted to. The folder felt like it was burning in her hand, and “running away” sounded like the most tempting offer she’d had in days. Away from the farmhouse, away from Modesto, away from Brad even—preferably to some seedy bar, alone, where she could drink until the memories threatening to crawl their way out of her subconscious slithered back into the shadows where they belonged. Nobody was supposed to see that pain without her permission; even Boimler she had only just started letting peek into that darkness, on the rare occasion she could face it herself. The idea that his parents had been digging around in her past like that, making judgments about her, evaluating her…

“–done, okay, I’m done with their bullshit,” Boimler vowed beside her as he yanked the door open. “I swear, Mariner, I will make them apologize to you no matter what it ta–” 

“Bradward, let me comfort you!”

Both of them spun on their feet at the sudden cry, and then screamed as something large and fleshy and humanoid launched itself out them out of the darkness of the shed, Boimler tripping back into the drying trays as Mariner swung her fist.

CRACK!

The humanoid spun a full three hundred and sixty degrees around in a mad pirouette, staggered sideways and fell over into the opposite rack with a clatter. “What the fuck–” Mariner began, but Boimler cut her off with a gasp as he sat up, covered in sticky raisin remains and clapping a hand over his mouth:

“Oh my god, Lianne!”

The ambulance team who had the fortune of being called to the Boimler family farmhouse that night was treated to tableau that would be discussed at the Modesto Medical Center for years to come. With the backdrop of Mr. and Mrs. Boimler standing immoble on the front porch behind them, Lianne MacMurry (dressed only in a bathrobe and holding an ice pack to her badly-swelling jaw) was ushered into the back by the medic as the driver interviewed the Boimler boy and his girlfriend, both  in Starfleet badges and the latter of whom seemed rather…uh, upset.

“Yeah, I would like to report an attempted assault!” Mariner snarled, as Boimler struggled to hold her back.

“Mariner, hang on, I don’t think that’s what hap–”

“She jumped out at you naked in a dark shed, Brad, what else can you call it?!”

“I-I think just a seriously misguided seduction attempt,” Boimler said awkwardly, glancing over at Lianne, who was glowering at Mariner as the EMT helped her into the ambulance. “Look I don’t want to press charges, just—just get her to the hospital, please?”

The Boimlers and Mariner watched the ambulance drive off down the gravel way and then turn right onto the main road. When it had vanished over a sunset-gilded hill, Brad set his jaw, clenched his fists and turned back around, leaving his fiancée to stand beside the mailbox as he stalked towards the farmhouse.

“Okay, what the hell, guys?” he demanded as he reached his parents. “Was this part of your ‘plan,’ throw a naked woman my way and hope I pull a Hysperia?!”

“We just told her you would probably be out doing chores at that time and you might need someone to talk to, we didn’t think she would be—like that,” Mrs. Boimler said with a wince. Boimler threw his hands into the air.

“It’s Lianne! She wouldn’t know subtlety if it hit her at full impulse!”

“Wait– you said our ‘plan,’” his father began sharply, “what–”

“Beckett overheard you two talking last night! She knew you were trying to get rid of her and kept it to herself to let you save face! You keep saying you’re just trying to do what’s best for me, how is breaking up my engagement what’s best for me?!”

“Because you shouldn’t be marrying this girl in the first place!” his father snapped back. “For god’s sake, Bradward, she just sent a woman to the hospital; now do you see what we’ve been telling you?!"

"She was protecting me! Which she wouldn't have had to do if not for you!"

"She's a menace! Good god, Bradward, no wonder you haven’t progressed very far in that job if this is the company you keep!” Brad opened his mouth to retort, but Beauford cut him off: “You told us you went into Starfleet to ‘see the galaxy,’ to make something of yourself; well it’s been ten years, and where has it gotten you!”

“I’m a Starfleet lieutenant,” Boimler said heatedly.

“That’s right,” his father retorted. “A lieutenant, stuck in a middling, dead-end career on the worst ship in the fleet!” Boimler faltered. “Oh yes, I know about your ship’s reputation; you’ve always complained that I never look into what you do, well I did just that, Bradward, and you know what I found? Sloppiness. Unprofessionalism. A ship in such disarray that it got its own special on the nightly news, with this girl somehow always at the center of it and dragging you in with her!” He gestured angrily at his son: “Is that how you pictured your future, as a failure among failures? Is that what you gave up your own home for, what your mother and I sacrificed for? You have a perfectly good future waiting for you right here, Bradward, if you would just face the fact that you’re not made for this!”

“Okay, that is it!”

Both of them turned, startled, to see Mariner herself storming up the driveway towards them. “Beckett–” Boimler insisted, trying to step in front of her, but she was having none of it:

“No, y’know what, I don’t care if they hate me, Brad, I’ve had enough of this! Like snoop through my files, feed me truly terrible meatloaf, whatever, but you’ve saved my ass too many times for me to just sit around listening to any more of this bullshit! First off,” she snarled at his father, “the Cerritos is a great ship, and Brad is great at his job! He can negotiate with a Ferengi and he speaks like five different languages!”

“I mean– I’m not exactly fluent–” Brad stammered, but she cut him off:

“Shut up, Bradward, yes you are! You were the only one who could understand Tendi when the comms went down last year, let alone Lt. Kayshon! Plus,” she continued, wheeling back on his parents, “he’s tough, okay, and he might be a dork but that’s just because he cares, he cares so much even when other people don’t , and he’s the bravest fucking person I know! Do you know how many times he’s died?! Because it’s up to four now! Guy’s got a fucking punch card with the Cosmic Koala!”

“With the what?” his mother said faintly, but Mariner barrelled over her:

“Sometimes I swear the whole universe is out to kick his ass, but does he let that stop him? Hell no! He gets back out there every time, because he’s Starfleet! He bleeds blue and silver, and if you think they’re going to let him go, or I’m going to let him go, just to come back here and grow stupid raisins then you’ve got another think coming!” She jabbed a finger viciously at his father. “You were a jerk who doubted him his entire life but he proved you wrong, and now you want him back?! Hell no! Go fuck yourself!”

“Excuse m–”

“And as for you, lady, get your shit together! This is the twenty-fourth century, learn to stick up to a man and protect your kid! I stand up to Brad all the time! It’s not that fucking hard!”

“Enough,” Mr. Boimler cut across the tirade before his wife, who had gone teary-eyed, could respond. Mariner rounded back on him.

“Ohoh you wish that was enough, I am just getting started –”

“I am not going to stand here and be lectured about the merits of Starfleet by someone who’s spent the last decade backsliding her way towards a dishonorable discharge,” he cut her off. “You might act the part of a respectable officer, young lady, but you’re not fooling anyone here.”

“Yeah, I already know you’ve seen my service record, big fucking whoop–”

“Those records told me everything I needed to know about the kind of person you are. You had potential, Miss Mariner, but you’ve spent ten years squandering what could have been an impressive career.”

He stepped towards her, and for the first time Mariner found herself under the full power of that piercing glare. She was wrong, she realized as she stepped instinctively back; his eyes weren’t the color of Romulan whiskey, like Brad’s. They were pure Andorian ice. “If you don’t want to talk about the demotions, why don’t we look at your list of demerits from bar fights and your obvious drinking problem. Or the court martials that only conveniently went away after intervention from your parents.”

She realized she’d lost her voice and scrambled to find it again with a scoff: “I– yeah, okay, so I’ve made some mistakes, so wh–”

“You couldn’t hold down a position for longer than two years until you ended up on your mother’s ship. You’ve been in an obvious downward spiral for almost a decade, and the only reason you’re still in Starfleet and not a prison colony in New Zealand is because your parents keep indulging your erratic behavior.” He was still advancing, and Mariner struggled to respond as her feet stumbled under her in instinctive retreat. Why wasn’t she talking back, she was great at talking back! “It wasn’t until my son came along and apparently took you on as a charity project that you began to get promotions again; well, young lady, the free ride stops here. I know my son, and Bradward needs someone who will push him to be better. All you’ll do is hold him back.”

She had retorts. Of course she did. But every defense that rose to her mouth withered under that piercing gaze; Mariner’s whole field of vision had narrowed to those two pitiless blue eyes, so much like his son’s, so full of disdain. “Even if I were to let him stay in Starfleet, I would never approve of him tying his future to such an unstable, shiftless, futureless individual as you. And you want to tell me what Bradward has accomplished up there, wasting his life away? You want to tell me about his potential? I know exactly how much potential my son has, I’m the one who made him that way. You are the one who’s not good enough for my son.”

She took a last step back and staggered as her foot hit soil instead of concrete. When she looked back up there was no triumphal smugness in his face—just granite contempt. How, she wondered mutely, how had he known? How had this total stranger sized her up and reached down inside her and dredged up the one thing she was the most afraid of, the thing she pretended so hard not to care about? Wasted potential. A fuckup, a loser. The folder she was clutching tight to her chest proved it, Mariner thought bleakly. He was right. And she knew it. She was damaged goods.

And then Boimler stepped in front of her.

There was a moment of silence. A cold wind swept over the fields, ruffling the vines and their hair, and then settled.

“…You know, Dad, you might not’ve used those exact words—but you’ve told me I wasn’t good enough pretty much my whole life.” Brad’s face was hard. “And no matter how much I tried not to listen to you, deep down some part of me’s always believed it. But the funny thing is, the moment you said it to her—I suddenly realized how bullshit that is.”

His mother let out a soft gasp. His father’s eyes tightened, calculating. “Beckett is kind, and brave, and the most loyal person I’ve ever met!” Brad continued, voice picking up pitch and steam. “She's survived stuff you couldn't even imagine—a-and you, you’re an asshole who played God with his own kid’s life because– because–” His eyes widened, just slightly, and he peered at his father like he was seeing him clearly for the first time. “Because it was never about me, was it. It wasn’t about helping me or giving me a leg up in life.” His glare narrowed. “It was always about you. Your inseucrities, your– your own fear that you won’t measure up!”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” His father’s face was as harsh and unmoved as stone. “All I ever did, I did for the future of this family. For our legacy.”

“Our legacy? What are you talking about; Dad, we’re raisin farmers! On a post-scarcity planet!” He let out a laugh that was slightly hysterical and one hundred percent furious: “Y-Y’know if there’s anyone here who needs to step on a starship once in a while, it’s you! Maybe if you got out there and saw a strange new world or two you’d realize that there’s more to the universe than the Central Valley!”

“You think I didn’t have regrets, other things I daydreamed about doing?!” his father snapped back. “Of course I did! But I grew up, Bradward, I made something of myself! I improved this farm, I buckled down and planned ahead for the next generation!”

“The next gener– hang on, that’s what all this was about?!” Mariner heard it in his voice when it finally clicked. “Th-the genetic engineering, the way you always pushed me to compete—I always thought you and mom had some sort of weird dark secret you were keeping from me! You seriously did all that for the farm?!”

“I did it for this family! Was I supposed to leave our future up to chance?! I had a responsibility to this community, to our history! You’ve never understood that because you’ve never taken responsibility, no matter how hard I tried to teach you!”

“Oh my god, you’re actually insane. Dad, you broke Federation law, y-you bribed someone for fleet secrets! You committed felonies, twice, for– for– for fucking raisins!”

The shrieked, inherently ridiculous words rolled across the fields, leaving the four staring at each other in stunned silence, Boimler panting with rage. Then, pulling himself together with several hard breaths, he seemed to summon his nerve and looked his father dead in the eyes with that twitchy, too-self-controlled viciousness that Mariner knew too well. Oh no. “Uh, Boims–”

Brad cut her off, or possibly hadn’t heard her. “You know what, Dad? I’m glad the augmentation failed.” His father didn’t respond, but his whole face suddenly went tighter, eyes widening; his mother seemed to sway where she stood. “Because that other version of me, the one who’s everything you ever wanted him to be? He never would have measured up to your impossible expectations either. But unlike me, he might have gone his whole life thinking it was his fault somehow, instead of finally realizing the truth: that you’ve never really loved anything you couldn’t control.”

He looked over his shoulder at Mariner, who was still fighting to not look as shaken as she felt. “I’m just sorry it took you hurting someone you could never control for me to see that,” he finished, stepping back towards her. “C’mon, Beckett, let’s get out of here.”

“Right behind you,” she agreed under her breath, reaching for her combadge. She couldn’t bail on this whole shitshow fast enough, the luggage they’d left in his bedroom be damned.

“Bradward,” Mr. Boimler said sharply, causing them both to turn back around.

Unlike his blistering anger just a moment ago, the farmer was now watching his son with an inscrutable expression, and Mariner felt her stomach drop. There was something wrong with that face, and especially on someone who looked so much like her best friend; it was too collected, too calm. Like a man who knew he had a winning hand and was about to go all-in.

“If you choose Starfleet and that girl over your own family,” he said, in a voice so steady it was cold, “don’t bother coming back.”

Boimler’s eyes widened again, just a fraction. Mrs. Boimler sucked in a breath and looked up at her husband in shock. “Beauford–”

“He wants to make his own decisions, Ethel. Fine. Let him decide.” Father and son’s gazes were locked, Brad’s face almost, but not quite, an expression of disbelief at the ultimatum. “Them.” He nodded back to the farmhouse, just once. “Or us.”

“Dad,” Boimler said, stunned. “I– c’mon, you don’t mean th…” He trailed off in the face of that unchanging granite stare. “...Mom?” Mariner watched as the woman’s eyes filled with tears and she opened her mouth as if to say something, before looking at her husband and then giving up, her gaze dropping to the ground.

“I think it’s time you tell your friend goodbye,” Mr. Boimler said, with curt, quiet finality. Brad looked back over his shoulder, and Mariner realized she was still clutching the folder to her chest like a paper shield. For one horrible moment she thought she had lost—before Boimler’s eyes met hers, and his expression grew firmer. He reached up and tapped his badge.

“ Cerritos?”

Hope flamed in her chest, and Brad looked back at his father. The face shifted as something dawned on it; right in front of them, for the first time, the granite cracked. Was that her imagination, Mariner thought, or was that a thin line of disbelief and— fear, peaking through?

“Two to beam up,” Boimler finished flatly, as his voice turned every bit as icy and unyielding as his father’s. The last thing Mariner saw before the blue light of the transporter washed the world away was a vision of the farmhouse with the growing umber-tinted darkness behind it, Mrs. Boimler beginning to cry quietly—and the face of the man who looked so much like her best friend falling in disbelief, anger and the beginnings of panic, as his meticulously-planned future vanished in front of him.

Tendi began to hear the sounds of the festival several streets away as night fell cool and dry over the baked L.A. neighborhood, an indistinct hum of human chatter and music. With every step Rutherford seemed to be dragging his feet a little more beside her, and he barely seemed to notice when she squeezed his hand in moral support. Eventually the hubub was loud enough that she could tell the crowd had to be just down the next street; they rounded the last corner and then Rutherford abruptly came to a halt, as if suddenly unable to take another step into the scene playing out in front of them.

All told it was a warm, welcoming picture: a small carnival had filled the street, people milling around under the glow of string-lights and streamers of multicolored flags. The source of the carnival seemed to be a peaked-roof building with a belltower and a mosaic of what looked like a bird over the door; from the architecture she vaguely recognized it as a human temple, probably several hundred years old. Children ran back and forth with happy shrieks and faces painted in luridly colored approximations of Terran animals, and rumbling food trucks wafted up simmering clouds of steam, filling the air with the savory aromas of human delicacies Sam had taught her the names of: hot dogs (“not made from real dogs, the name’s just misleading!”), squid balls, okoy, turon.

Tendi felt her mouth start to water at the sight of a stand selling sorbet cones in shades of orange, yellow and ube-purple, and then giggled as she spotted a human boy aiming a replica Starfleet phaser at a target in a shooting booth. The weak beam of light flashed out and struck the red-and-white bullseye, and the boy began to whoop delightedly, punching his fist in the air. It reminded her of the improptu parties at her parents' house during her childhood whenever her mother's fleet had returned with a good haul.

“I guess some things are the same everywhere,” she chuckled, turning to Sam as the vendor handed the boy a prize, and then tilted her head. Her husband’s face had turned from anxious to almost petrified as he watched the festivities. “Sam–?”

“Hey, Samanthan!”

They both turned at the call to see a grinning man about their age approaching them; Tendi didn’t know much about human religions, but given that he was the only one in long black robes she could guess that this was the temple priest. “Heard you were back bro, it’s been too long!” the man greeted, stepping forward to hug Rutherford and clap him on the back.

To Tendi’s relief, Rutherford broke into a startled laugh as he hugged him back. “Luis, what’s up man?”

“Well it’s Father Luis now, for one thing,” the man said with a grin, stepping back to gesture proudly to the robes. “But that’s old news, what about you! Mr. Mabini said you’d gotten married; you must be DVana,” he added to Tendi.

“I am, hi! Nice to meet you!”

“Luis is my cousin,” Rutherford explained, “we grew up together.”

“Causing all kind of trouble, good times,” Luis said, pretending to wipe away a tear. Tendi noticed as Rutherford winced and reached up to rub the back of his neck, but Luis continued: “How’re you liking Earth?”

“It’s great! I actually went to the Academy here, but I was pre-med at the time so I didn’t really get out of San Francisco much.”

“Ah, Northern California, my condolences,” Luis said with faux-seriousness, which made Rutherford half-chuckle despite himself, and then looked over as someone holding a clipboard called “Father!” and waved with a anxious look. “Well hey, enjoy the festivities; party’s going ‘til nine, bingo to your right, beer tent to your left. Oh– and Sam,” he said, reaching into a hidden pocket in the folds of the robe, “Mabini said you wanted to visit your mom.” He pulled out what looked like an old-fashioned key card and handed it to Rutherford. “Just lock up when you’re done.”

“Right,” Rutherford said weakly; Luis made to head off towards the clipboard-bearer, but then Rutherford suddenly spoke up: “Luis, wait.” His cousin turned back, surprised, and Sam wavered for a moment before he said, in the smallest, most nervous voice Tendi had ever heard: “...What if it’s too late?”

Luis’s face softened. “She forgave you a long time ago, Sam. I promise.” Rutherford swallowed and gave a short nod, and his cousin gave him an encouraging smile before nodding at Tendi. “Nice to meet you, D’Vana.”

“Nice to meet you too.” They watched as Luis hurried off to fix whatever minor disaster had arisen, and then Rutherford reluctantly turned towards the temple. With what looked like the resignation of a man condemned, he headed for the steps; not knowing entirely what to expect but determined to help him see it through, Tendi followed.

The inside of the temple was shadowy and quiet; there were more mosaics in here, and statues and religious icons along the walls. She looked around curiously at the few dimly-burning candles and rows of benches as she followed Rutherford into a hallway off to the side, leading to the restrooms and a turbolift that appeared at least a century out of date, complete with a key scan. As they waited her eyes drifted to the sign next to the lift doors, and she felt her stomach turn over. “Crypt?” she read aloud, looking up at Rutherford, but he just hunched his shoulders, eyes finding the ground.

The lift arrived, and carried them on a silent ride down under the temple. When the doors opened, Tendi found herself looking into a room made of tan marble stones, reflecting the lights of dozens of little candles burning in iron racks along the walls. As they stepped inside and the lift doors closed behind them, she saw that the marble walls were carved with names and dates: Norita Ichon, 2078-2161. Bayani Lacang, 2066-2150. Diwata and Miguel Fernandez, 2021-2069 / 2022-2071. She bit her lip as her vision blurred. Oh no. Oh, Sam…

There was a doorway on the opposite end of the room, and she followed him through it into the next chamber, almost identical to the first. They passed through two more rooms and took a right before eventually coming to a stop somewhere deep in the crypt. In front of them was an identical wall niche to all the rest, dimly reflecting their hazy figures over the carved inscription:

Mercedez Kalinaw Rutherford

2332-2374

Tendi looked up at Rutherford, a lump sticking in her throat. He stared back at the stone, tears brimming in his human eye.

“Hey, Mom.”

The words still seemed too loud in the silence, but then, Tendi thought, probably anything would, here among the marble stones and the flickering candlelight. “I, uh, I-I know it’s been a long time,” Rutherford continued, swallowing hard. “I’m…I’m sorry about that. Really.” He fell short here for a moment, and then took a shaky breath. “But, um, there’s someone I want you to meet!” He stepped sideways and gestured to Tendi. “This is my wife, D’Vana.”

Tendi gave him a tiny half-smile, and then turned back to the grave with a small wave. “Hello, ma’am. It’s nice to meet you.”

“We got married last year, but we’ve known each other for five years now,” he went on. “She’s my best friend, and she’s a Starfleet officer too. She’s so smart, Mom, and really nice, you’d like her.” He swallowed again, voice pinching: “And, um, m-my life’s been pretty good lately, y’know? I-I’m an engineer now, like a real one, and a lieutenant. I work on a ship called the Cerritos, that’s where we met, and–” His voice broke.

“Sam…”

“A-and I’m doing better, a lot better, I-I’ve changed a lot and–!” His shoulders began to shake as his voice gave up completely, and he ducked his head; Tendi pulled him in, and he turned towards her, burying his face in the crook of her neck.

They stood there for a long time while he cried, until at last even Tendi’s face was wet too. When at last it seemed like the tears had run out, she stepped back, careful to keep her hands on his arms. Rutherford had turned his face away; he didn’t seem able to meet her eyes, let alone look back at the grave. “Come on,” she said gently, guiding him towards a marble bench placed in the center of the room. They sat down, Rutherford leaning forward on his knees, shoulders tensely hunched as if he wished he could make himself smaller. “Do you want to talk about it?” she prodded softly. “It’s okay if you don’t.”

“No, I– I need to.” He took a deep breath. “Just…give me a moment, okay?”

She nodded and sat back, waiting patiently as he pulled himself together enough to start talking. When he did, his eyes, both human and mechanical, were still unable to leave their fixed point on the floor.

“My dad was a real jerk,” he began, and she realized that, in retrospect, she’d never heard him mention the man. “Left before I was even born. A-and Mom did a great job, an amazing job, but—I-I was always so angry, and I didn’t know why. Looking back I think it was because I was always wondering, y’know?” He at last managed to look up at the grave. “Like why weren’t we, I, good enough for him to… for him to stay.”

He sniffed. Tendi squeezed his hand but didn’t speak.

“Maybe that’s why Buenamigo was able to get his hooks in me so easily, I-I don’t know… anyway, I’ve just felt so guilty because like, she loved me so much, and then I… then I left her too.” His voice grew tight. “Just like he did. The last thing I ever said to her was that I never wanted to see her again. And maybe that’s who I am, y’know, maybe that’s in me too–”

“Sam, no–”

“D, I’m so scared I’m gonna do that to you someday,” he confessed, gripping her hand even though he couldn’t dare look at her. “I don’t want to, but I just see so much of him in me even though I’ve never met the guy, and it really freaks me out! I don’t want to be like him.”

“Sam, look at me,” she ordered. He at last forced himself to glance guiltily over at her, human eye wet with tears, and Tendi reached out and took his other hand. “Your dad was a massive, collosal, galactic-level jerk,” she said firmly, meeting his eyes with unwavering sincerity. “But the fact that you’re even worried about this proves that you’re not him.”

“But my mom, the stuff I said to her– I-I wasn’t even at her funeral–!”

“You made a mistake, and you’ve apologized,” Tendi insisted. “And you heard what your cousin said, she forgave you a long time ago!” She nodded towards the marble plaque, and both looked back. Their reflections looked back at them, wavery in the tan stone. “Don’t you think it’s time to forgive yourself too?”

Sam hesitated a moment, staring at his puffy, blurry face. Then his focus shifted, and the carved lettering of her name on the niche came into view. Mercedez Kalinaw Rutherford. His shoulders slumped as he nodded, exhaling. “Yeah…yeah, you’re right. She wouldn’t have wanted me beating myself up like this forever.”

“Of course not. She loved you,” his wife said softly, and Rutherford nodded again. It was okay. She still loved him. They both did, and…and that meant, he could let it go. The feeling of the guilt slipping off his shoulders was like taking off a grease-soaked uniform at the end of a long, bad day.

“I just…wish she’d gotten to know the man I am now,” he admitted. “Instead of just the man I was when she died. I wish she could’ve seen how much I’ve changed, y’know?”

“Humans believe in an afterlife, don’t you?” Tendi suggested, watching the candlelight dancing on the marble. Rutherford half-shrugged.

“Some of us do. I mean, I hope. Mom did, anyway.”

“Then…maybe she does know, Sam.

He looked down at her with a bittersweet half-smile and scrubbed his human eye. “She would’ve loved you, you know.”

“I know.” She rested her head on his shoulder, squeezing his hand again. “I would have loved her, too.”

The transporter room of the Cerritos phased into existence, and suddenly Mariner realized she was tired—very tired. The past two days felt way longer, somehow, as if she’d been away from the familiar white-and-gray aesthetics for years. She looked over in surprise as beside her Boimler stepped wordlessly off the pad, and then followed him out of the hall, giving the crewman at the booth an awkward nod as they passed.

The hallway beyond the room was thankfully empty, the silent hum of the ship the only sound. Brad certainly didn’t break it, walking instead to the nearest window. “Boims?” she said uncertainly, but received no response. Now that he was out of the confrontation, the fight seemed to have leeched out of him; Mariner watched as he pressed a hand against the glass, looking down. When his shoulders slumped, she knew.

“Brad, come on, you– you can’t take what he said seriously, he’s just…” She trailed off as she approached, not sure what to say. Just his father? Just the person who’d quite literally made him who he was?

“Y’know, I-I always kind of knew that I was just another one of his plans.” The blue light reflecting off the planet illuminated Boimler’s face as he stared down at the California coast, far below. “I just—I don’t know. I guess I just always hoped I was wrong.”

“Brad, let’s– let’s just go back to your quarters, okay,” she said weakly, setting a hand on his arm so that he looked over at her, his expression dull and tired. “We can get you cleaned up, come on…”

“Yeah. Okay.”

He let her lead him, unresisting, back down the hall. Mariner’s mind was racing; she– she could fix this, right? She just had to find the right thing to say, the right words to get it through to him that nothing that had happened in the last two days had to matter, not to her and not to him. They were almost at the turbolift doors when she stopped him, setting her hands on his shoulders. “Look, and what happened down there—it was all bullshit, okay?”  she said forcefully, searching his eyes. “And your parents are assholes, and they suck and– and I love you. Who gives a damn what they think, right?” 

But he just looked back at her with an expression so tired that it sent a pinch of fear straight into her stomach. “Right,” he said, like he was only agreeing because it was too much effort to fight her. “Yeah. No, I know you do.” He cleared his throat, eyes flickering away.

It wasn’t working, Mariner realized desperately, and then, of course it’s not. After all, she had never been in his position. Sure, her mother had once shipped her off to Starbase 80 with an “I’m not sure I can call you my daughter,” but that snap had come from a place of pain after an apparent betrayal by the child she loved; Mariner knew that, for as much as those words had hurt her (and for as much as she was definitely still holding a grudge), her mom hadn’t actually meant them.

But this… this was different. She knew it was different, and for possibly the first time that weekend, Mariner realized what that fundamental difference between their respective issues was: just as Brad had never seen the nice safe universe pull back its mask and reveal how fragile everything he loved was underneath, she had never lived in a universe where her parents, for all their faults, didn’t automatically love her. 

The lift doors opened beside them, and to their surprise (and Boimler’s sudden stiffening) it wasn’t empty. Mariner repressed a groan; speak of the devil. “Oh– Beckett, Mr. Boimler, you’re back early,” the captain said in surprise, Mariner’s father standing beside her, and then noticed their disheveled appearance. “Good god, Mr. Boimler, what happened to you?”

Brad’s mouth moved silently for one too many seconds, and Mariner jumped in: “Oh uh, just a farming– accident– thing,” she scrambled quickly. “We were just going to get Brad cleaned off, but you guys go ahead, we’ll catch the next one–”

“Don’t be silly, there’s plenty of room! Besides, the shower in the captain’s suite has a water setting,” her father offered. “Why don’t you two come up with us to your mother’s quarters, wash up there?”

“Oh, uh– we don’t want to interrupt your night–”

“You’re not interrupting anything, Beckett, now stop being stubborn, the man has raisins stuck in his hair!” Boimler winced. “And from what T’Ana tells me dried fruit juice is hell to get out of hair in a sonic shower; you strand your CMO on a megaflora planet one time,” her mother muttered under her breath. 

They had no excuse against this, so the two were unfortunately compelled to step inside the lift. As the doors closed Brad remained uncharacteristically silent, staring at the floor in bone-aching tension, and Mariner could see her parents starting to share concerned glances. She quickly picked up the conversation again, hoping to distract them: “Since when do you have a real shower, Mom?”

“Perks of being a captain, Beckett; I keep telling you, ranking up has its benefits.”

“You could’ve told your own daughter, you know.”

“And give you special treatment after all the railing you do against Starfleet nepotism? Please…”

Thankfully the lift let out almost directly at the captain’s quarters, and they were able to duck inside and make a beeline for the bedroom as her parents loitered in the living room, the door sliding safely shut behind them. “Urgh,” she groaned, “Brad, I’m sorry about this– let’s just clean up and go–”

“It’s fine,” he mumbled, still not meeting her gaze. “Um, I’m gonna– yeah, I’m gonna go shower off, try to get this stuff out of my hair…”

“Right. No, yeah, you do that.” 

They stood in silence for a beat, before he turned and disappeared into the bathroom. Mariner watched him go, and then stood alone in the bedroom, looking around. Her whole body ached somehow, her finger especially, and she realized that she was still holding the folder. It hadn’t left her grip since Boimler had handed it to her what felt like hours ago, but suddenly she wanted nothing more than to be free of it.

Mariner stalked over to the matter recombinator and shoved it into the chute. As she watched the atomization process swirl and disintegrate the paper, she tried to tell herself that she felt a rush of grim vindication. In reality, all she felt was mixed relief and shame. The thoughts continued to churn uneasily as she materialized a uniform in her mothers' replicator; somehow putting on the reds made her feel a little better, but she couldn't shake the knowledge that though the record was gone, the past wasn’t. All of her mistakes, every one of her fuckups. The times she’d been too slow or too weak to save someone else—or too tired, to save herself. Years of exhaustion and bitterness and nihilism, solidifying into familiar armor around a wound so deep she had a hard time getting at it now even when she wanted to.

She’d been scared there for a moment, she realized as she pinned on her pips, looking at her troubled face in the mirror. Scared they might really succeed, in turning him against her. Scared that he’d seen something in that folder that revealed her for the fuckup she really was, and now he’d finally leave. Scared that they were right—that deep down, she knew she’d never be good enough. And if they were able to get to me in just two days… 

She could have guessed it, Mariner thought guiltily, should have guessed it years ago—the hunger for praise from senior officers, the desperate need to prove himself, the workaholism as if work itself was the only way he could verify he deserved to be here. The image of a nine-year-old kid staring up at the stars wishing to be anywhere else stuck like a lump in her throat. He’d said it himself, she realized: when you’ve got everything you need for a happy life, why run off looking for danger?

Boimler’s running away to Starfleet hadn’t been the cause of his father’s resentment of him. It had been the result.

The bathroom door next to her opened as she refastened her badge, and she looked over. Brad came out, back in uniform but with his hair still damp and sticking up every which way. He looked around the room as if searching for something, and as his face went white she quickly volunteered:

“I got rid of it.” He turned to look at her, but seemed no more relieved. “It’s gone, Boims; like I said, no one’s coming for you or your parents.”

“Beckett,” he said again, taking a step towards her, one hand reaching out as if to touch her but hesitating. “I'm sorry, I-I was so focused on myself I didn't even– listen, you have every right to be mad and–”

“Dude, it’s fine," she said, and tried to tell herself it wasn't a lie. "I mean like yeah, I was a little shaken up back on the farm but–”

“No—no, it’s not fine, I know it’s not fine—look, I’ll make it up to you, I swear I’ll find a way to make this right.”

“Brad, seriously–”

“I just need a little time, like a couple of days—I-I’ll get my parents to apologize to you and then it’ll be fine, this’ll all be fine! I’ll figure something out, Beckett, I swear, just please don’t–”

He was cut off as the door to the room unexpectedly opened and both looked over, Boimler with a stifled yelp and a sudden flush of red over his panicked pallor.

Mariner’s parents looked back at them, surprised; the captain, who was closest to the door, had two coffee cups in her hands. “Uh– sorry, I must’ve gotten too close to the sensor.” When Mariner looked past her, she saw that the low delta-shaped coffee table had been set with four plates of pie and vanilla ice cream. “We were just gonna have a nightcap before turning in," her mother said, in far too airy a tone to be genuine. "Thought you two might want to join us.”

“Oh, um– I-I can leave if you wanted to talk to Beckett– I didn’t mean to impose–” Boimler stammered as they stepped into the room, looking like he wanted nothing more than to run (or, well, speed-walk) for the door, but Mariner’s father waved them over to the table.

“You’re not imposing on anything; it’s dessert, not a war room.” He set his own pair of mugs down as the younger officers approached and added: “Now, don’t feel pressured to stay, but the coffee’s hot and the sweet potato pie’s pretty good, if I say so myself.”

Brad gave what was probably supposed to be a polite smile but came off to Mariner as a grimace as he sat down. Okay, I guess we’re doing this. As much as she knew her father had genuinely meant his insistence that they weren’t obligated, she also knew Boimler was probably physically incapable of turning down a direct invitation from an admiral. An awkward cup of coffee with her confused parents, while her fiancé repressed a panic attack that was certain to leak out in any number of weird social mistakes; it was kind of perfect, Mariner thought darkly. A shitty end to a shitty day.

“So,” her mother began as she sat down opposite them, trying to break the silence, “how was your visit to Modesto?”

“Oh, um–” Mariner glanced at Boimler, “y’know, it was–”

“Fine,” he interrupted. “It was fine. Um, Sirs.” He cleared his throat as if hoping to hide how his voice had pitched up nervously and cut his pie with the side of his fork, his eyebrows pinching together. The Freemans glanced at each other.

“Well uh– we’re glad to hear it,” the captain offered. Boimler nodded, looking so stiff that Mariner realized he was trying to sit at attention. It had taken her years to get him to loosen up around the senior staff, including her parents, and now two bad days had reset the board to square one. Desperation to impress and please had been transfused back into every rigid line of his posture. As if hurrying to give himself an excuse not to talk, Boimler speared the piece of pie and then stuck it in his mouth—and then he paused. 

The turbolift ride back to the surface was as quiet as their descent, but now in a more reflective tenor. As they headed to the front doors of the temple Tendi took Rutherford’s hand. “You doing okay now?”

“Better. Way better,” he agreed fervently, pausing at the door to take both her hands in his. “D– thanks, for real. I-I couldn’t have done this without you.”

Tendi smiled back at him, tilting her head ruefully. “Mm, I think you could’ve.” She stood on tip-toes to kiss his cheek. “But I’ll always be here to help, Sam, I promise.”

He grinned sadly at her, and then pushed the doors open. As they stepped out into the balmy night air, however, they were met with an unexpected burst of voices:

“Samanthan!”

“There he is, I told you he was back!”

“Sammy Rutherford, well I’ll be damned!”

Rutherford’s eyes went wide as he looked around at the gathering crowd in amazement. “Whoa. What the–”

In every direction the couple looked, there were smiling faces, ushering them out into the street and asking Tendi her name, how they’d met; beside her the stunned Rutherford was being inundated with questions about how he’d been, what he’d been up to, clapping him on the back and congratulating the not-so-newlyweds with many happy years—rank upon rank of neighbors and family members and old friends, welcoming him home.

It was only as Brad’s face changed from misery to genuine surprise that Mariner remembered he’d never actually gotten the chance to taste it, back at the farmhouse. “Wow,” he said, looking up. “This is really good, Sir.”

The admiral looked delighted. “It was my grandfather’s, but I’ve been tinkering with it for years. Remind me sometime and I’ll teach you and Beckett how to code it.”

“Really? But– Mariner told me the recipe was a family secret.”

“Well, what’s the point of a secret family recipe if you don’t pass it on to the next generation?” her father chuckled, and then stopped, blinking.

To the bewilderment of the Freemans, the admiral’s offhanded comment was met, not by the typical measure of thanks, but by their daughter’s expression of fierce pride, and their future son-in-law staring at them with wide eyes suddenly brimming with tears. “I-I’d, um– I’d be honored,” he managed hoarsely. “Uh, th-thank you, Sir.”

As he reached for his coffee cup and tried to disguise wiping his eyes with covering another cough, Beckett gave them a rare grateful nod. Wondering if he’d missed something, the admiral glanced at his wife, who just shrugged. “Uh– no problem, son,” he replied, and then softened as Mr. Boimelr coughed badly again, and this time it sounded like a smothered choke. “No…problem at all.”

Fin