Between the Mountain and the River End Notes
I made a separate post for the end notes because there are things I wanted to acknowledge that are spoilery for the fic.
First: A lot of the plot was inspired by the ST: Next Generation episode "Yesterday's Enterprise." Basically, the Enterprise encounters a temporal anomaly where the present shifts to an alternate universe; Guinan is the only one who realizes that something is wrong with the new universe, and when the anomaly is resolved and everything returns to how it was, Guinan is the only one who remembers the new universe. Guinan later explains in "Generations" that she got her universe sense from being in the Nexus, so I extrapolated that Kirk might have a similar reaction, since I gave him a similar universe sense in Start Infinity Again.
Second: A bit of Spock's dialogue in the final Council scene comes from "Spock's World," the novel by Diane Duane.
Third: Enormous thanks go to my twin sister, who knows a lot more about physics than I do and put up with me asking her to help me make my climax scientifically plausible. She also told me about spaghettification, and I still love that that's the actual scientific word for what happens to you if you fall into a black hole.
Thank you everyone for reading! I hope you enjoyed it.