Fic: Chekov/Sulu, Demora, I told you your dreams would come true
Title: I told you your dreams would come true
Author: alldoubtaboutit
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Demora Sulu, Pavel Chekov/Hikaru Sulu, ensemble.
Warning: allusion to character death at the end
Type: oneshot
Word count: 5,843 words
Summary: Once upon a time her daddy told her, mouth pressed to the crown of her head, that all children are dreamed into existence by their parents.
Notes: Technically this is more like Demora genfic, but Chekov and Sulu are a a major part of the fic? It's actually about Chekov and Sulu seen through the eyes of their daughter. I've been meaning to write something like this for a while now, a fic about growing up and parenthood. Hope it fits into the theme of this comm well enough.
About Demora's origin, it is based on this fic I wrote a while back but this fic stands independently on its own.
And a helpful key: Sulu is 'daddy', Chekov is 'papa'. :D
Once upon a time her daddy told her, mouth pressed to the crown of her head, that all children are dreamed into existence by their parents.
And her papa once told her the story of how she came to be. She was their little thumbelina picked from a fairy planet: her daddy and papa were on shore leave, and they stumbled across a field of tulips gently undulating in the wind. Daddy thought they looked so pretty he started to pluck them from the ground to plant in the ship's arboretum, only for a golden fairy queen to appear and stop him. The fairy queen took him away and locked him up, but eventually papa, with his easy charm and natural smarts, solved a few mathematical problems which pleased the queen, and she let daddy go. The queen liked papa so much she even let them keep a tulip. Daddy and papa put it in their room and took care of it every day, and one day the petals unfurled and in the middle they found their little Demushka fast asleep.
Of course she knew that to be untrue, in school she learned that human females carry the babies for about nine months before giving birth to it. There were other species where the male carried the baby, and there were species where there was no such thing as male and female but all technological progress aside, a human fetus still needed to gestate in a uterus.
So even though she had two fathers, she knew that out there, she had a mother too.
***
Once upon a time she would spend days studying papa's face when he taught her mathematics and she would wonder why she looked nothing like him. He would teach her about the unit circle and trigonometry, and he would trace a cross, without a ruler, but he drew the straightest lines in the world, and he would draw a circle around the middle. He would mark out right triangles, ninety forty-five forty-five and ninety sixty thirty. She would look at him while he drew, and she would wonder why she didn't have his perfect ninety sixty thirty triangle nose or his steely blue eyes or curly light brown hair or the pale, milky white skin. She wondered if the scientist who presumably stitched her together somehow gave her papa on the inside and daddy on the outside, and if you cut her up, her heart and lungs and stomach would look exactly the same as papa's.
There were days where she wondered if there was any part of papa in her at all, days when she would stare in a mirror and pinch her squashed nose to make it sharper, days when she would open her eyes wide and tilt her head all angles to catch the light, hoping for the day when she would see they weren't black after all, and that there would be a hint of blue in them and they would be clear like pools of liquid. She read in a book that the ideal ratio of the width of the mouth to the width of the nostrils mirrored the golden ratio but her mouth and nostrils were the same width, and she would feel like there was something wrong with her face with its bloated cheeks apple red and tiny eyes black and beady like a crook's.
"I want to look like you, papa." She told him once, when she was much younger. She wanted to look like papa because she felt so much more like papa than she felt like daddy, though she loved them both the same.
"There is not a person in the world who would say you are not my daughter," he chuckled. "I used to take you out for walks in Union Square and people would tell me all the time, oh Pavel, is that your little girl? She looks exactly like you!"
What a liar.
***
Once upon a time the Excelsior needed a captain. The admirals had whittled down the list of suitable candidates to two: Hikaru Sulu and Pavel Chekov.
Picture the ready room of the newly refitted USS Excelsior: brightly lit, dove gray carpet, padded lime green chairs and a black lacquered interactive table in the center, communication screen raised. Admiral Nourazar saying, "Let it be known that we consider you both equally qualified, and have no preference for the other. Considering your relationship, Starfleet has decided it would be best to hand the final decision to you two." Picture Hikaru Sulu and Pavel Chekov, seated along the breadth of the table, exchanging a look.
A list of possible outcomes:
1. Both wanted the captaincy very, very much. They would immediately start to bicker, and the fight would be resolved only when the childish behavior led Starfleet to intervene, the captaincy going to the next-best candidate and the two of them back where they were. But the damage was done and from that point on all trust in their relationship would be lost.
2. Both wanted the captaincy very, very much, and both were keenly aware of this fact. Out of love one would sacrifice one's dreams for the other, and the other would do the same. This would escalate into a reverse argument where one rooted for the other. Eventually there would be someone on the losing end of this argument and he would grudgingly accept the captaincy. But inwardly, resentment and envy would bubble and taint their relationship.
3. Only one wanted the captaincy. This was the perfect solution. Fortunately, outcome three prevailed, although outcome two put up a pretty good fight.
Hikaru Sulu and Pavel Chekov had exchanged a look. They both appeared to want to say something, but had to consider their words very carefully.
Pavel broke the silence. "You can have it, Hikaru," he said. "You'll do a great job I know it."
Hikaru remained silent for a long while. He reached out and took Pavel's hand in his. "Oh honey I love you," he sighed, "but I wish you'd tell the truth sometimes."
Pavel looked away for a while. He turned his palm upward and crossed his fingers between Hikaru's. "I want it," he said, turning back to look at Hikaru, eyes sparkling with determination. And he was glad, he honestly thought he was going to have to engage in a battle of persistent deference until Hikaru gave up on insisting he should be captain and accepted the job and he would stew silently for a few days and then the sourness would disappear, because these hard feelings, they didn't last long did they?
Hikaru had Demora and Pavel and it was enough, Pavel had finished high school before puberty hit and enrolled in Starfleet where he still holds two marathon records (youngest winner and fastest time), was assigned to the Enterprise before he graduated and then graduated at the top of his class as the only person to have been awarded perfect marks for advanced theoretical physics, he was part of the team that assisted the resettlement of Vulcans and engineered the peace treaty between the Klingons and the Federation, he fell in love with his pilot and successfully lobbied Starfleet to adopt family-friendly policies and had the most perfect little girl anyone could hope for and now he would be getting his own ship and he knew, quite certainly, that he would never have enough.
***
Her days growing up on the Excelsior were marked by a rigid timetable she dutifully followed. Up to this point she had spent her life equally in space and on earth, two years on the Enterprise and two in a loft overlooking Lombard Street in Russian Hill, San Francisco.
The Excelsior, newly refit, was at that point the fastest Federation starship and her papa was captain. It was also the first starship to have schooling facilities for the children of her crew.
She had classes with the other kids from 0800 to 1400, and after school her parents had signed her up for extra lessons.
On Mondays she had ballet, on Tuesdays art class, Wednesdays swimming and Thursdays violin, Fridays were her favorite as she could run free around the starship after school. On weekend mornings she had language classes, Japanese and Russian respectively.
After extra lessons she did her homework in the evenings. Papa would help her with maths and history, daddy would help her with science and literacy. English literacy, that is, because her daddy couldn't speak Japanese at all. Whenever she needed help with Japanese, which was very often, she had to make subspace calls to Auntie Uhura.
"It's not fair, daddy," she complained. "I don't see why I have to study Japanese when you can't speak it yourself."
"Just because I can't speak it doesn't mean it's not important, my dear. When you get to my age, you feel a sense of regret when you realize you can't speak your mother tongue."
Demora frowned. She dropped her stylus on the table and crossed her arms. "Well," she huffed, "sounds like you're the one who should be going to classes, not me."
Daddy sighed. "I do want to learn it, but it's just-it's so hard to find the time."
"I don't like Japanese," she pouted. "It's too hard."
"I know," daddy said. "My parents used to make me go for all these classes too, and I absolutely hated it. To tell you a secret, I skipped about half of those lessons to play basketball with my friends. I guess I feel like I have to pass the baton no matter what."
"Pass the baton?"
"Means passing something on to someone. You remember the relay races at Family Day last year? In this case the baton represents knowledge of the Japanese language so our culture won't die out."
"But you can't even read Japanese!"
"Sure I can, let me see." Daddy grabbed her datapad from her and tried to read out the hiragana characters.
"Your pronunciation is awful," she giggled.
Daddy passed the datapad back to her. "Okay, how about from this point on, you be my Japanese teacher? Demora sensei." He grinned.
***
Learning history with papa was weird, because she could never tell when papa was telling another one of his stories again and when he was telling the truth.
He told her about the world wars, and he told her that daddy's great-great-great-great-great grandparents were peace heroes, and that back then, people used to call them war heroes, which papa thought was a funny term because daddy's great-great-great-great-great grandparents were decidedly anti-war, working for peace, smuggling food and medicine across borders.
He told her some really awful things sometimes, like how there was a time when women were made to have children they didn't want and the children that they did want they were not allowed to have.
It's all changed now, these days the only children around are children had by parents who wanted them.
***
"Daddy, why am I a girl?"
Daddy raised his eyebrows. "Do you not feel like a girl?"
Demora thought for a little while. She had never really thought about how much she felt like a girl. She just wanted to know why, with two male parents, they didn't choose to have a baby boy. She wanted to know how the scientist patched together her DNA, how he or she stitched together XX from a couple of XY's. In all her research the only cases where two male parents could have a baby girl was with the help of DNA from a female donor. And then they needed a woman to carry their baby too.
Daddy didn't seem like he wanted to answer the question. "We thought a girl would balance out our household," he said.
"Will I get any siblings?" she asked, the second in a series of planned questions.
"Do you want one? I'm afraid we're not planning on any at the moment."
"I don't think I want one," she replied. "I just want to know if he or she will look like papa."
There was a pause. "Why do you ask?" daddy said softly.
She shrugged. "I don't look like papa."
"Demora..." he began.
"Who is my mother?" she couldn't stop herself from asking.
***
Eventually she gave up on hoping that when puberty hit she would start to look a bit more like papa, that where other girls grew breasts and armpit hair her hair would turn from black to brown and color would seep into her irises and she wouldn't look so plain boring.
Puberty wasn't kind to her at all, it gave her acne and wobbly thighs and it gave her boobs when she didn't want them and then her boobs stopped growing when she finally realized that she did want boobs after all.
After ten years on the Excelsior her parents finally decided that they were ready to settle down into a less peripatetic life, and they moved back to Russian Hill, something with a garden this time, both taking up jobs at the Academy.
In their pursuit to mold the "well-rounded" child with all her extracurricular activities her parents had scarcely equipped her to navigate the social jungle of junior high. It didn't help that up till then she knew only about four other people her age, David Marcus and the three other kids on the Excelsior.
School was, to borrow an outmoded term, hell. She would come home right after school every day, not knowing how to talk to other people. She would hide in her room and close the curtains and lie down on her bed to listen to music at a loud volume, music stolen from daddy's jazz playlist.
In high school she decided to ditch violin for the trumpet, and got invited to join the school band. The acne pustules stopped the violent eruptions and receded, and it was a simple matter of getting some anti-scarring treatment from the doctor. She started to get friends, and even boyfriends and she was staying out late and later and best of all, it made papa hopping mad.
In junior high he was always going on about how she needed to go out more and make friends, join clubs and societies to boost her chances of getting into the Academy (because everyone knows being a child of Starfleet officers does not make it any easier to get in) but now he was going on about how staying out too much would hurt her academically and consequently her chances of getting into the Academy. There was just no way of making him happy so she decided to never do what he wanted her to.
Daddy on his part let her do whatever she wanted as long as she kept her grades up, but eventually she was grounded, due to what she suspected was heavy lobbying on papa's part.
She was furious! She tried to go online but papa had already blocked her connection. She sat on her bed and fumed for a while then she picked up her trumpet and blew a few noisy tunes. Then it suddenly struck her that she had some codes written during computer science class that she could try to use to get online. So she turned on her radio to a contemporary pop station and played it at top volume to annoy papa, even though she hated pop music too.
At dinner papa called her out on her sneaky hacking so she decided she would ignore him for the rest of the day. But he wouldn't shut up about how important it was for her to have the right character and resume for getting into the Academy, at which point she resolved to take this to the next level.
Two weeks into her grounding sentence she had a term test for calculus. She made no attempt to answer the questions, filled in a couple of half-answers for fun and then spent the rest of the time doodling on the margins. When the paper came back marked, she scored a grand total of one out of a hundred, two half-marks awarded for the half-answers.
After dinner, while daddy pottered off to the kitchen to do the dishes, she pulled out with a proud flourish the test paper for papa to sign off on.
Papa went into total shock. He simply froze up, barely clutching the test paper as it sagged downward.
Demora stared at him resolutely, waiting for him to explode. Despite staying out late nights and sometimes coming home for only an hour's sleep before having to drag herself out of bed for school she had so far been able to maintain a perfect GPA. And she had always scored full marks for mathematics. Okay, so there was that one time she got a 98% due to a careless error and papa was so apoplectic with rage he turned positively purple like a blueberry about to explode and well, she'd like to see what species of vaccinium he would turn into now. Cranberry? Bilberry?
Still, he said nothing. He couldn't even look at her. Was he ashamed of her? Was he so overwhelmed by how sullied, how besmirched the family reputation was? Good for him. It wasn't even like they were related by blood anyway so it shouldn't count.
All around them was a deadly silence, broken by stray clinks from the kitchen where daddy was wiping the plates before putting them back in the cupboard and the occasional jovial "whoops" as a plate slipped from him, blissfully unaware of the unfolding battle of resolution. Papa slowly began to unfreeze and he reached out for his stylus. He swiped his fingers across the test paper, flipping through the pages. He thumbed his way back to the front page, and signed off on it like it was a normal test paper, and passed it back to her, all without saying a word, without any hint of expression on his face.
She shrugged and stuffed her paper back in her bag and loped into her room, where she locked the door and started up her computer reflexively. Thirty minutes later, she found that she could go online again and immediately updated her status: i hope he's learned his lesson.
It wasn't the full out victory she had hoped for, she felt robbed of something somehow. Still she shrugged it off as she got a reply from her friend Amita: "is this about sean? yeah i've always thought he was a bit of a d-bag." And almost immediately Sean had replied: "HOW ABOUT NO." It got a little chuckle out of her.
Later that night when she crept out of her room to brush her teeth she heard some loud sniffling down the corridor from her parents' room and instantly felt a stab of annoyance at her papa because back when they were on the Excelsior and she left the door to her room open because she was scared of monsters in the night he always told her off for sniffling like a pig and here he was sniffling away noisily and wait, oh-oh no, he was crying. She-she's made her papa cry now, hasn't she? Oh no.
***
Back when they were on the Excelsior and her papa helped her with math homework and the homework was done they would continue on late into the night talking about math, him teaching, her learning. Once, he taught her about imaginary numbers and she loved the special, languid way he drew graphs and symbols and numbers like he wasn't afraid of them or trying to control them, it was like they were on such good terms he knew that the graphs and symbols and numbers would always come out exactly as he wanted them to.
He wrote this:
And he asked her if she knew the solution.
"Minus one?" she said.
Yes, he said, and then he wrote a few more numbers.
"Cube these for me," he said.
She did so, with a little help.
"Wow," she said to her papa, "it has three solutions?"
He gave a little shrug and a smile. "At least."
And she liked that there were three, for they were three and she liked the number three. When someone said to her "family unit" she thought of an equilateral triangle, equal on all sides and angles.
***
The next morning she got up early and left for school before her parents woke up. Usually daddy drove her to school on his way to work but she didn't think she was ready to face either one of them.
School was fun, as usual, and being around her friends almost made her forget how badly she screwed up at home but as she was walking to Pier 39 with her friends after school a shimmery dark blue car loomed over the horizon and hovered to a stop by the kerb.
"Hey uh, Dem," Marlene said, "isn't that your dad's car?"
What? "Gosh, yeah, I kind of forgot we have some family thing going on today. Guess you'll have to do without me. Sorry guys," she said sheepishly, waving them on.
She waited till her friends disappeared farther down the road, then turned to face the car. The door wooshed open and she clambered in.
"I heard about your test paper," daddy said through gritted teeth, the way he gets when he's angry but tries not to be.
"You know, it's alright if you fail, really. It's just," he fiddled with a few random dials on the dashboard, Dizzy Gillespie playing for two seconds before he switched the music off again, "it really hurts when you don't try? Your papa told me most of the paper was blank, but there were doodles on the side. Were you-were you feeling unwell? Was there any reason why you couldn't attempt the paper?"
Demora bit her lip. She felt so thoroughly indefensible. "I was just trying to make a point," she mumbled with a shrug. "Papa he, you know, he's always so hung up about getting into Starfleet Academy it's like. I mean, my grades have always been good. And i just wanted to show him that it was useless to ground me."
"Point taken," daddy paused for a while. "It's just that he misses spending time with you. I miss spending time with you too. You lock yourself in your room all the time and the only times we ever see you are mealtimes and even then we don't really talk.
"We thought we could make being grounded a bit more fun for you. Sure, you do have a lesson to learn and we hope that you'll be more open with your whereabouts because it really worries us sometimes, that you just disappear without a word and it's kind of silly but it scares us to think that you might not return one day. I guess maybe it's our fault too because we should have made that clear to you, that part of the deal of getting grounded was so we could spend more time with you. We've just never been good at the whole talking about emotions thing-you know us-we talk science and maths and literature and history but we're really not used to talking about ourselves. And-I guess we have to learn to let you go, one bit at a time, too, because much as we love to we can't keep you around forever. Your papa said to me last night that it hadn't really struck him how much you've grown into your own and he thinks it's marvelous really. It's-" daddy shrugs a little. "You know."
Demora couldn't hold it in any more. "Why does he care so much anyway?" she blurted.
"Who?"
"Papa. I mean, it's not like we're actually related."
"Do you need to be related to someone to care about them?"
"No, but, we're talking about parents here." Demora shot a quizzical look.
That was when she noticed her daddy's face started contorting strangely. His hands were gripping the edge of the dashboard so hard that his knuckles were white. He looked like he was about to explode. Or cry.
Her heart hammered in fear. It was completely unheard of for her dad to get this mad. It was papa who had a short fuse and a combustible sort of anger, but her daddy, he was perhaps the most easygoing person and never ever got mad, he got a little frowny and showed a disapproving look from time to time but that was it. Oh shit, she thought. What kind of trouble was she in now?
"Sorry?" she offered timidly. "What did I do wrong?"
Daddy pressed the back of his palm to his mouth as he tried to calm down. He put his hand down. He closed his eyes and grit his teeth and tried to take a few deep breaths.
"By your definition," he said solemnly, "I'm not your father either."
"What?" She was completely thrown off her guard.
"It's. A long story. But we found you. On a planet. Your mother was dying. She said. We have to. Take care of you. We. Never found out. Who your real father was."
***
It was strange. For a long while after she floated through her days not really knowing what to do. For a long time she had been trying to imagine her mother, what happened to her, who she was and what kind of life she led etc. Her favorite version had been the one where Auntie Uhura was secretly the one who conceived her. An exceptionally skilled team of scientists, Uncle Spock (especially since he was the product of genetic blending himself), and Uncle McCoy, as he was a doctor and doctors tended to be involved in such stuff, worked in a lab day and night pushing strands of her parents' DNA together until they fit and would result in a healthy, normal human being, and they put the genetic code in a spare ovum and Auntie Uhura, who was such a good friend of her parents, volunteered to carry her for nine months as her cells divided and multiplied until one day, whilst Auntie Uhura was working on the bridge, she came out a little too early and it just so happened that Uncle McCoy was on the away team so he had to bark directions into a communicator while Uncle Kirk tried not to panic and conduct the delivery. And someone would ask for a bucket of hot water and towels and Uncle Scott would beam them up (and himself) from Engineering, and her fathers were there gripping on to each other in nervousness as they watched her birth on the bridge of the Enterprise.
So that was all false. Fancy that. Her mother was, well, her daddy didn't really say much about her but she was dead. She wondered what life would be like if her mom was alive. Why didn't she have other relatives who could take care of her? A granny, a brother perhaps. Why did her mom pass her to two random strangers? Who was her real father?
She imagined growing up with her mother, and the granny and the brother, because it seemed a bit too lonely if it was just her and her mom. They would live in a niceish planet, maybe an earth colony. Her mom would teach her all about being a woman instead of getting weird scientific books about menstruation and uncomfortable talks about sex and the inexplicable fear that she would find her mooncup stuck in her vagina one day and she needed someone who wouldn't react in sheer horror to that bit of news.
Maybe they led a rural sort of life, on a farming planet. She barely went to school at all but she would walk the fields each day with her mom, who would tell her stories about the sky and she would look up at the stars and wonder if there was anything out there in the glittering dark. Would she be happy?
Daddy said they found her on a planet. Found. To be found meant that she was lost, abandoned. And papa once told her that all children are born to people who wanted them. Was she a wanted child? If by some chance her daddy and papa were not called away to the planet that day and her mother died all the same, was there anyone out there who wanted her?
***
"I used to think you were the biggest liar in the world. You said things that were blatantly untrue and stories too far-fetched and fanciful. I say 'used to' because, well, I don't anymore. And I don't think I've phrased this eloquently but you know us, you know it's like a family thing that we make sense of the square root of minus one better than we can ever make sense of our emotions."
***
Uncle Scotty tells her that Starfleet engineering is working on a new sort of console that combines the duties of the navigator and the helmsman so that they can be performed by one person. She laughs. Maybe she would have appreciated it more if this new sort of console was there when she flew her first starship.
Uncle Kirk, sorry, Admiral Kirk, is the one who pins the new rank onto her, as she relieves the previous captain.
"You're a captain now," her papa says to her, and she can fill in what follows: just like me.
And her daddy is standing there with tears in his eyes. He hasn't been in space in decades. Since he landed on earth those years back he planted, quite literally, his feet into the ground and now chairs the botanical garden society.
She talks to Auntie Uhura and tells her about the time her navigator made the observation that the high-ranking women of Starfleet tended to be hard-hearted castrating bitches, always seeming like they have to prove that they're better than the men.
"That is an incredibly sexist remark," Uncle Spock says. "How is such a person allowed in Starfleet?"
And she tells them that it was the navigator's idea of flirting, but he was really, really not her type.
"As if that needed saying!" Auntie Uhura scoffs. "But what's your type anyway?"
She has absolutely no idea. She's been around, tried lots of stuff, things that Uncle Kirk, quite disturbingly, high-fives her about. In all likelihood she'll play around some more, but maybe, if there was a person out there she could be completely honest with, the sort of person who wouldn't react with sheer horror when she said something like "uhh, I've been fishing up there and for some reason can't feel my mooncup. Help?", yeah, she might settle down with that person.
"It feels like only yesterday, the day you were born. I was there with your parents. Trust me when I say I believe this ship is in good hands," Uncle Kirk says. "You're a captain after my own heart."
It's time to part ways now, and she waves goodbye to the set of people who brought her up on this ship, back when children were prohibited on starships and they were idiotic enough to break the rules and brave enough to rewrite them.
She boards the shuttle with the set of new people who will run this ship, the USS Enterprise-B, people she has worked with, people with whom she trusts with her life and this beautiful ship.
When she gets to the bridge there is someone standing there. It's a tall, lanky girl with short cropped mousy brown hair and unmistakable blue eyes.
"Hi, I'm Joanna McCoy. Jo for short. Sorry to bother you but I've just been down in med bay and I note that the supplies are, how do I say it, significantly lacking."
"Oh yeah I've talked to Starfleet about it. We have to make do with the bare minimum. We'll pick up the rest from Starbase 2, which is twelve hours away. We'll just have to cross our fingers and hope no one dies along the way."
"What? Alright if anyone catches Rigelian Kassaba fever I'm going to hold you responsible."
"Sure, go ahead." She waves to her first officer, a Bajoran.
"A lot can happen in twelve hours," Jo continues. "Arethian flu can infect the whole crew in two hours, an undiagnosed case of Sharat Syndrome may lead to a collapse of the lymphatic system when we enter warp speed and it is well documented that instances of depression and insomnia are extremely common in the first couple of days out in space. Also, someone's mooncup could get stuck or something."
Demora laughs. "Well, if there's anything you can't handle your dad is on Starbase 2. I'll be sure to get us there in time."
Jo nods and shrugs, and gives her a heavy slap on the back as she heads for the turbolift.
"Lieutenant Vasquez, lay in a course for Starbase 2, warp 7.5."
"Course laid in, sir."
"Take us out."
***
Once upon a time she asked her daddy, "what comes after death?"
"Hopefully? Nothing."
"Why nothing?"
"I don't know. It seems kind of tiring to me, to go on living infinitely. I much prefer when things end somewhere. But I guess if there really is an afterlife and it is whatever we want it to be, I'd be a pretty boring person and say I want a garden. No clouds or glittering towers of diamond and gold, just give me some good old plants and a trusty pair of shears and I should be content for the rest of eternity. And then again, only if, after some time, I'll be joined by your papa and after what I hope is a very long time you'll join us. And we'll build a nest of leaves amidst the stars and invite people to drop by anytime-oh, well, it's kind of a 'been there, done that' don't you think?"
***
She is in a conference in Babel when the news comes to her. She is given time off to head back to earth and she has to hitchhike on a number of starships to get back home.
When she reaches home, finally, papa is sitting in his favorite chair overlooking their little garden patch. He looks a little lost, deep in thought, and as if he's been crying, but mostly lost in thought, and the tip of his nose is a bright, raw pink.
As she leans down to hug him she catches sight of her reflection off the glass of a photo frame on the adjacent table, and as she buries her head in papa's shoulder, sniffling noisily like a pig, she thinks of their identical strawberry red tipped noses and it dawns on her that they have always looked alike.
Author: alldoubtaboutit
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Demora Sulu, Pavel Chekov/Hikaru Sulu, ensemble.
Warning: allusion to character death at the end
Type: oneshot
Word count: 5,843 words
Summary: Once upon a time her daddy told her, mouth pressed to the crown of her head, that all children are dreamed into existence by their parents.
Notes: Technically this is more like Demora genfic, but Chekov and Sulu are a a major part of the fic? It's actually about Chekov and Sulu seen through the eyes of their daughter. I've been meaning to write something like this for a while now, a fic about growing up and parenthood. Hope it fits into the theme of this comm well enough.
About Demora's origin, it is based on this fic I wrote a while back but this fic stands independently on its own.
And a helpful key: Sulu is 'daddy', Chekov is 'papa'. :D
Once upon a time her daddy told her, mouth pressed to the crown of her head, that all children are dreamed into existence by their parents.
And her papa once told her the story of how she came to be. She was their little thumbelina picked from a fairy planet: her daddy and papa were on shore leave, and they stumbled across a field of tulips gently undulating in the wind. Daddy thought they looked so pretty he started to pluck them from the ground to plant in the ship's arboretum, only for a golden fairy queen to appear and stop him. The fairy queen took him away and locked him up, but eventually papa, with his easy charm and natural smarts, solved a few mathematical problems which pleased the queen, and she let daddy go. The queen liked papa so much she even let them keep a tulip. Daddy and papa put it in their room and took care of it every day, and one day the petals unfurled and in the middle they found their little Demushka fast asleep.
Of course she knew that to be untrue, in school she learned that human females carry the babies for about nine months before giving birth to it. There were other species where the male carried the baby, and there were species where there was no such thing as male and female but all technological progress aside, a human fetus still needed to gestate in a uterus.
So even though she had two fathers, she knew that out there, she had a mother too.
***
Once upon a time she would spend days studying papa's face when he taught her mathematics and she would wonder why she looked nothing like him. He would teach her about the unit circle and trigonometry, and he would trace a cross, without a ruler, but he drew the straightest lines in the world, and he would draw a circle around the middle. He would mark out right triangles, ninety forty-five forty-five and ninety sixty thirty. She would look at him while he drew, and she would wonder why she didn't have his perfect ninety sixty thirty triangle nose or his steely blue eyes or curly light brown hair or the pale, milky white skin. She wondered if the scientist who presumably stitched her together somehow gave her papa on the inside and daddy on the outside, and if you cut her up, her heart and lungs and stomach would look exactly the same as papa's.
There were days where she wondered if there was any part of papa in her at all, days when she would stare in a mirror and pinch her squashed nose to make it sharper, days when she would open her eyes wide and tilt her head all angles to catch the light, hoping for the day when she would see they weren't black after all, and that there would be a hint of blue in them and they would be clear like pools of liquid. She read in a book that the ideal ratio of the width of the mouth to the width of the nostrils mirrored the golden ratio but her mouth and nostrils were the same width, and she would feel like there was something wrong with her face with its bloated cheeks apple red and tiny eyes black and beady like a crook's.
"I want to look like you, papa." She told him once, when she was much younger. She wanted to look like papa because she felt so much more like papa than she felt like daddy, though she loved them both the same.
"There is not a person in the world who would say you are not my daughter," he chuckled. "I used to take you out for walks in Union Square and people would tell me all the time, oh Pavel, is that your little girl? She looks exactly like you!"
What a liar.
***
Once upon a time the Excelsior needed a captain. The admirals had whittled down the list of suitable candidates to two: Hikaru Sulu and Pavel Chekov.
Picture the ready room of the newly refitted USS Excelsior: brightly lit, dove gray carpet, padded lime green chairs and a black lacquered interactive table in the center, communication screen raised. Admiral Nourazar saying, "Let it be known that we consider you both equally qualified, and have no preference for the other. Considering your relationship, Starfleet has decided it would be best to hand the final decision to you two." Picture Hikaru Sulu and Pavel Chekov, seated along the breadth of the table, exchanging a look.
A list of possible outcomes:
1. Both wanted the captaincy very, very much. They would immediately start to bicker, and the fight would be resolved only when the childish behavior led Starfleet to intervene, the captaincy going to the next-best candidate and the two of them back where they were. But the damage was done and from that point on all trust in their relationship would be lost.
2. Both wanted the captaincy very, very much, and both were keenly aware of this fact. Out of love one would sacrifice one's dreams for the other, and the other would do the same. This would escalate into a reverse argument where one rooted for the other. Eventually there would be someone on the losing end of this argument and he would grudgingly accept the captaincy. But inwardly, resentment and envy would bubble and taint their relationship.
3. Only one wanted the captaincy. This was the perfect solution. Fortunately, outcome three prevailed, although outcome two put up a pretty good fight.
Hikaru Sulu and Pavel Chekov had exchanged a look. They both appeared to want to say something, but had to consider their words very carefully.
Pavel broke the silence. "You can have it, Hikaru," he said. "You'll do a great job I know it."
Hikaru remained silent for a long while. He reached out and took Pavel's hand in his. "Oh honey I love you," he sighed, "but I wish you'd tell the truth sometimes."
Pavel looked away for a while. He turned his palm upward and crossed his fingers between Hikaru's. "I want it," he said, turning back to look at Hikaru, eyes sparkling with determination. And he was glad, he honestly thought he was going to have to engage in a battle of persistent deference until Hikaru gave up on insisting he should be captain and accepted the job and he would stew silently for a few days and then the sourness would disappear, because these hard feelings, they didn't last long did they?
Hikaru had Demora and Pavel and it was enough, Pavel had finished high school before puberty hit and enrolled in Starfleet where he still holds two marathon records (youngest winner and fastest time), was assigned to the Enterprise before he graduated and then graduated at the top of his class as the only person to have been awarded perfect marks for advanced theoretical physics, he was part of the team that assisted the resettlement of Vulcans and engineered the peace treaty between the Klingons and the Federation, he fell in love with his pilot and successfully lobbied Starfleet to adopt family-friendly policies and had the most perfect little girl anyone could hope for and now he would be getting his own ship and he knew, quite certainly, that he would never have enough.
***
Her days growing up on the Excelsior were marked by a rigid timetable she dutifully followed. Up to this point she had spent her life equally in space and on earth, two years on the Enterprise and two in a loft overlooking Lombard Street in Russian Hill, San Francisco.
The Excelsior, newly refit, was at that point the fastest Federation starship and her papa was captain. It was also the first starship to have schooling facilities for the children of her crew.
She had classes with the other kids from 0800 to 1400, and after school her parents had signed her up for extra lessons.
On Mondays she had ballet, on Tuesdays art class, Wednesdays swimming and Thursdays violin, Fridays were her favorite as she could run free around the starship after school. On weekend mornings she had language classes, Japanese and Russian respectively.
After extra lessons she did her homework in the evenings. Papa would help her with maths and history, daddy would help her with science and literacy. English literacy, that is, because her daddy couldn't speak Japanese at all. Whenever she needed help with Japanese, which was very often, she had to make subspace calls to Auntie Uhura.
"It's not fair, daddy," she complained. "I don't see why I have to study Japanese when you can't speak it yourself."
"Just because I can't speak it doesn't mean it's not important, my dear. When you get to my age, you feel a sense of regret when you realize you can't speak your mother tongue."
Demora frowned. She dropped her stylus on the table and crossed her arms. "Well," she huffed, "sounds like you're the one who should be going to classes, not me."
Daddy sighed. "I do want to learn it, but it's just-it's so hard to find the time."
"I don't like Japanese," she pouted. "It's too hard."
"I know," daddy said. "My parents used to make me go for all these classes too, and I absolutely hated it. To tell you a secret, I skipped about half of those lessons to play basketball with my friends. I guess I feel like I have to pass the baton no matter what."
"Pass the baton?"
"Means passing something on to someone. You remember the relay races at Family Day last year? In this case the baton represents knowledge of the Japanese language so our culture won't die out."
"But you can't even read Japanese!"
"Sure I can, let me see." Daddy grabbed her datapad from her and tried to read out the hiragana characters.
"Your pronunciation is awful," she giggled.
Daddy passed the datapad back to her. "Okay, how about from this point on, you be my Japanese teacher? Demora sensei." He grinned.
***
Learning history with papa was weird, because she could never tell when papa was telling another one of his stories again and when he was telling the truth.
He told her about the world wars, and he told her that daddy's great-great-great-great-great grandparents were peace heroes, and that back then, people used to call them war heroes, which papa thought was a funny term because daddy's great-great-great-great-great grandparents were decidedly anti-war, working for peace, smuggling food and medicine across borders.
He told her some really awful things sometimes, like how there was a time when women were made to have children they didn't want and the children that they did want they were not allowed to have.
It's all changed now, these days the only children around are children had by parents who wanted them.
***
"Daddy, why am I a girl?"
Daddy raised his eyebrows. "Do you not feel like a girl?"
Demora thought for a little while. She had never really thought about how much she felt like a girl. She just wanted to know why, with two male parents, they didn't choose to have a baby boy. She wanted to know how the scientist patched together her DNA, how he or she stitched together XX from a couple of XY's. In all her research the only cases where two male parents could have a baby girl was with the help of DNA from a female donor. And then they needed a woman to carry their baby too.
Daddy didn't seem like he wanted to answer the question. "We thought a girl would balance out our household," he said.
"Will I get any siblings?" she asked, the second in a series of planned questions.
"Do you want one? I'm afraid we're not planning on any at the moment."
"I don't think I want one," she replied. "I just want to know if he or she will look like papa."
There was a pause. "Why do you ask?" daddy said softly.
She shrugged. "I don't look like papa."
"Demora..." he began.
"Who is my mother?" she couldn't stop herself from asking.
***
Eventually she gave up on hoping that when puberty hit she would start to look a bit more like papa, that where other girls grew breasts and armpit hair her hair would turn from black to brown and color would seep into her irises and she wouldn't look so plain boring.
Puberty wasn't kind to her at all, it gave her acne and wobbly thighs and it gave her boobs when she didn't want them and then her boobs stopped growing when she finally realized that she did want boobs after all.
After ten years on the Excelsior her parents finally decided that they were ready to settle down into a less peripatetic life, and they moved back to Russian Hill, something with a garden this time, both taking up jobs at the Academy.
In their pursuit to mold the "well-rounded" child with all her extracurricular activities her parents had scarcely equipped her to navigate the social jungle of junior high. It didn't help that up till then she knew only about four other people her age, David Marcus and the three other kids on the Excelsior.
School was, to borrow an outmoded term, hell. She would come home right after school every day, not knowing how to talk to other people. She would hide in her room and close the curtains and lie down on her bed to listen to music at a loud volume, music stolen from daddy's jazz playlist.
In high school she decided to ditch violin for the trumpet, and got invited to join the school band. The acne pustules stopped the violent eruptions and receded, and it was a simple matter of getting some anti-scarring treatment from the doctor. She started to get friends, and even boyfriends and she was staying out late and later and best of all, it made papa hopping mad.
In junior high he was always going on about how she needed to go out more and make friends, join clubs and societies to boost her chances of getting into the Academy (because everyone knows being a child of Starfleet officers does not make it any easier to get in) but now he was going on about how staying out too much would hurt her academically and consequently her chances of getting into the Academy. There was just no way of making him happy so she decided to never do what he wanted her to.
Daddy on his part let her do whatever she wanted as long as she kept her grades up, but eventually she was grounded, due to what she suspected was heavy lobbying on papa's part.
She was furious! She tried to go online but papa had already blocked her connection. She sat on her bed and fumed for a while then she picked up her trumpet and blew a few noisy tunes. Then it suddenly struck her that she had some codes written during computer science class that she could try to use to get online. So she turned on her radio to a contemporary pop station and played it at top volume to annoy papa, even though she hated pop music too.
At dinner papa called her out on her sneaky hacking so she decided she would ignore him for the rest of the day. But he wouldn't shut up about how important it was for her to have the right character and resume for getting into the Academy, at which point she resolved to take this to the next level.
Two weeks into her grounding sentence she had a term test for calculus. She made no attempt to answer the questions, filled in a couple of half-answers for fun and then spent the rest of the time doodling on the margins. When the paper came back marked, she scored a grand total of one out of a hundred, two half-marks awarded for the half-answers.
After dinner, while daddy pottered off to the kitchen to do the dishes, she pulled out with a proud flourish the test paper for papa to sign off on.
Papa went into total shock. He simply froze up, barely clutching the test paper as it sagged downward.
Demora stared at him resolutely, waiting for him to explode. Despite staying out late nights and sometimes coming home for only an hour's sleep before having to drag herself out of bed for school she had so far been able to maintain a perfect GPA. And she had always scored full marks for mathematics. Okay, so there was that one time she got a 98% due to a careless error and papa was so apoplectic with rage he turned positively purple like a blueberry about to explode and well, she'd like to see what species of vaccinium he would turn into now. Cranberry? Bilberry?
Still, he said nothing. He couldn't even look at her. Was he ashamed of her? Was he so overwhelmed by how sullied, how besmirched the family reputation was? Good for him. It wasn't even like they were related by blood anyway so it shouldn't count.
All around them was a deadly silence, broken by stray clinks from the kitchen where daddy was wiping the plates before putting them back in the cupboard and the occasional jovial "whoops" as a plate slipped from him, blissfully unaware of the unfolding battle of resolution. Papa slowly began to unfreeze and he reached out for his stylus. He swiped his fingers across the test paper, flipping through the pages. He thumbed his way back to the front page, and signed off on it like it was a normal test paper, and passed it back to her, all without saying a word, without any hint of expression on his face.
She shrugged and stuffed her paper back in her bag and loped into her room, where she locked the door and started up her computer reflexively. Thirty minutes later, she found that she could go online again and immediately updated her status: i hope he's learned his lesson.
It wasn't the full out victory she had hoped for, she felt robbed of something somehow. Still she shrugged it off as she got a reply from her friend Amita: "is this about sean? yeah i've always thought he was a bit of a d-bag." And almost immediately Sean had replied: "HOW ABOUT NO." It got a little chuckle out of her.
Later that night when she crept out of her room to brush her teeth she heard some loud sniffling down the corridor from her parents' room and instantly felt a stab of annoyance at her papa because back when they were on the Excelsior and she left the door to her room open because she was scared of monsters in the night he always told her off for sniffling like a pig and here he was sniffling away noisily and wait, oh-oh no, he was crying. She-she's made her papa cry now, hasn't she? Oh no.
***
Back when they were on the Excelsior and her papa helped her with math homework and the homework was done they would continue on late into the night talking about math, him teaching, her learning. Once, he taught her about imaginary numbers and she loved the special, languid way he drew graphs and symbols and numbers like he wasn't afraid of them or trying to control them, it was like they were on such good terms he knew that the graphs and symbols and numbers would always come out exactly as he wanted them to.
He wrote this:
And he asked her if she knew the solution.
"Minus one?" she said.
Yes, he said, and then he wrote a few more numbers.
"Cube these for me," he said.
She did so, with a little help.
"Wow," she said to her papa, "it has three solutions?"
He gave a little shrug and a smile. "At least."
And she liked that there were three, for they were three and she liked the number three. When someone said to her "family unit" she thought of an equilateral triangle, equal on all sides and angles.
***
The next morning she got up early and left for school before her parents woke up. Usually daddy drove her to school on his way to work but she didn't think she was ready to face either one of them.
School was fun, as usual, and being around her friends almost made her forget how badly she screwed up at home but as she was walking to Pier 39 with her friends after school a shimmery dark blue car loomed over the horizon and hovered to a stop by the kerb.
"Hey uh, Dem," Marlene said, "isn't that your dad's car?"
What? "Gosh, yeah, I kind of forgot we have some family thing going on today. Guess you'll have to do without me. Sorry guys," she said sheepishly, waving them on.
She waited till her friends disappeared farther down the road, then turned to face the car. The door wooshed open and she clambered in.
"I heard about your test paper," daddy said through gritted teeth, the way he gets when he's angry but tries not to be.
"You know, it's alright if you fail, really. It's just," he fiddled with a few random dials on the dashboard, Dizzy Gillespie playing for two seconds before he switched the music off again, "it really hurts when you don't try? Your papa told me most of the paper was blank, but there were doodles on the side. Were you-were you feeling unwell? Was there any reason why you couldn't attempt the paper?"
Demora bit her lip. She felt so thoroughly indefensible. "I was just trying to make a point," she mumbled with a shrug. "Papa he, you know, he's always so hung up about getting into Starfleet Academy it's like. I mean, my grades have always been good. And i just wanted to show him that it was useless to ground me."
"Point taken," daddy paused for a while. "It's just that he misses spending time with you. I miss spending time with you too. You lock yourself in your room all the time and the only times we ever see you are mealtimes and even then we don't really talk.
"We thought we could make being grounded a bit more fun for you. Sure, you do have a lesson to learn and we hope that you'll be more open with your whereabouts because it really worries us sometimes, that you just disappear without a word and it's kind of silly but it scares us to think that you might not return one day. I guess maybe it's our fault too because we should have made that clear to you, that part of the deal of getting grounded was so we could spend more time with you. We've just never been good at the whole talking about emotions thing-you know us-we talk science and maths and literature and history but we're really not used to talking about ourselves. And-I guess we have to learn to let you go, one bit at a time, too, because much as we love to we can't keep you around forever. Your papa said to me last night that it hadn't really struck him how much you've grown into your own and he thinks it's marvelous really. It's-" daddy shrugs a little. "You know."
Demora couldn't hold it in any more. "Why does he care so much anyway?" she blurted.
"Who?"
"Papa. I mean, it's not like we're actually related."
"Do you need to be related to someone to care about them?"
"No, but, we're talking about parents here." Demora shot a quizzical look.
That was when she noticed her daddy's face started contorting strangely. His hands were gripping the edge of the dashboard so hard that his knuckles were white. He looked like he was about to explode. Or cry.
Her heart hammered in fear. It was completely unheard of for her dad to get this mad. It was papa who had a short fuse and a combustible sort of anger, but her daddy, he was perhaps the most easygoing person and never ever got mad, he got a little frowny and showed a disapproving look from time to time but that was it. Oh shit, she thought. What kind of trouble was she in now?
"Sorry?" she offered timidly. "What did I do wrong?"
Daddy pressed the back of his palm to his mouth as he tried to calm down. He put his hand down. He closed his eyes and grit his teeth and tried to take a few deep breaths.
"By your definition," he said solemnly, "I'm not your father either."
"What?" She was completely thrown off her guard.
"It's. A long story. But we found you. On a planet. Your mother was dying. She said. We have to. Take care of you. We. Never found out. Who your real father was."
***
It was strange. For a long while after she floated through her days not really knowing what to do. For a long time she had been trying to imagine her mother, what happened to her, who she was and what kind of life she led etc. Her favorite version had been the one where Auntie Uhura was secretly the one who conceived her. An exceptionally skilled team of scientists, Uncle Spock (especially since he was the product of genetic blending himself), and Uncle McCoy, as he was a doctor and doctors tended to be involved in such stuff, worked in a lab day and night pushing strands of her parents' DNA together until they fit and would result in a healthy, normal human being, and they put the genetic code in a spare ovum and Auntie Uhura, who was such a good friend of her parents, volunteered to carry her for nine months as her cells divided and multiplied until one day, whilst Auntie Uhura was working on the bridge, she came out a little too early and it just so happened that Uncle McCoy was on the away team so he had to bark directions into a communicator while Uncle Kirk tried not to panic and conduct the delivery. And someone would ask for a bucket of hot water and towels and Uncle Scott would beam them up (and himself) from Engineering, and her fathers were there gripping on to each other in nervousness as they watched her birth on the bridge of the Enterprise.
So that was all false. Fancy that. Her mother was, well, her daddy didn't really say much about her but she was dead. She wondered what life would be like if her mom was alive. Why didn't she have other relatives who could take care of her? A granny, a brother perhaps. Why did her mom pass her to two random strangers? Who was her real father?
She imagined growing up with her mother, and the granny and the brother, because it seemed a bit too lonely if it was just her and her mom. They would live in a niceish planet, maybe an earth colony. Her mom would teach her all about being a woman instead of getting weird scientific books about menstruation and uncomfortable talks about sex and the inexplicable fear that she would find her mooncup stuck in her vagina one day and she needed someone who wouldn't react in sheer horror to that bit of news.
Maybe they led a rural sort of life, on a farming planet. She barely went to school at all but she would walk the fields each day with her mom, who would tell her stories about the sky and she would look up at the stars and wonder if there was anything out there in the glittering dark. Would she be happy?
Daddy said they found her on a planet. Found. To be found meant that she was lost, abandoned. And papa once told her that all children are born to people who wanted them. Was she a wanted child? If by some chance her daddy and papa were not called away to the planet that day and her mother died all the same, was there anyone out there who wanted her?
***
"I used to think you were the biggest liar in the world. You said things that were blatantly untrue and stories too far-fetched and fanciful. I say 'used to' because, well, I don't anymore. And I don't think I've phrased this eloquently but you know us, you know it's like a family thing that we make sense of the square root of minus one better than we can ever make sense of our emotions."
***
Uncle Scotty tells her that Starfleet engineering is working on a new sort of console that combines the duties of the navigator and the helmsman so that they can be performed by one person. She laughs. Maybe she would have appreciated it more if this new sort of console was there when she flew her first starship.
Uncle Kirk, sorry, Admiral Kirk, is the one who pins the new rank onto her, as she relieves the previous captain.
"You're a captain now," her papa says to her, and she can fill in what follows: just like me.
And her daddy is standing there with tears in his eyes. He hasn't been in space in decades. Since he landed on earth those years back he planted, quite literally, his feet into the ground and now chairs the botanical garden society.
She talks to Auntie Uhura and tells her about the time her navigator made the observation that the high-ranking women of Starfleet tended to be hard-hearted castrating bitches, always seeming like they have to prove that they're better than the men.
"That is an incredibly sexist remark," Uncle Spock says. "How is such a person allowed in Starfleet?"
And she tells them that it was the navigator's idea of flirting, but he was really, really not her type.
"As if that needed saying!" Auntie Uhura scoffs. "But what's your type anyway?"
She has absolutely no idea. She's been around, tried lots of stuff, things that Uncle Kirk, quite disturbingly, high-fives her about. In all likelihood she'll play around some more, but maybe, if there was a person out there she could be completely honest with, the sort of person who wouldn't react with sheer horror when she said something like "uhh, I've been fishing up there and for some reason can't feel my mooncup. Help?", yeah, she might settle down with that person.
"It feels like only yesterday, the day you were born. I was there with your parents. Trust me when I say I believe this ship is in good hands," Uncle Kirk says. "You're a captain after my own heart."
It's time to part ways now, and she waves goodbye to the set of people who brought her up on this ship, back when children were prohibited on starships and they were idiotic enough to break the rules and brave enough to rewrite them.
She boards the shuttle with the set of new people who will run this ship, the USS Enterprise-B, people she has worked with, people with whom she trusts with her life and this beautiful ship.
When she gets to the bridge there is someone standing there. It's a tall, lanky girl with short cropped mousy brown hair and unmistakable blue eyes.
"Hi, I'm Joanna McCoy. Jo for short. Sorry to bother you but I've just been down in med bay and I note that the supplies are, how do I say it, significantly lacking."
"Oh yeah I've talked to Starfleet about it. We have to make do with the bare minimum. We'll pick up the rest from Starbase 2, which is twelve hours away. We'll just have to cross our fingers and hope no one dies along the way."
"What? Alright if anyone catches Rigelian Kassaba fever I'm going to hold you responsible."
"Sure, go ahead." She waves to her first officer, a Bajoran.
"A lot can happen in twelve hours," Jo continues. "Arethian flu can infect the whole crew in two hours, an undiagnosed case of Sharat Syndrome may lead to a collapse of the lymphatic system when we enter warp speed and it is well documented that instances of depression and insomnia are extremely common in the first couple of days out in space. Also, someone's mooncup could get stuck or something."
Demora laughs. "Well, if there's anything you can't handle your dad is on Starbase 2. I'll be sure to get us there in time."
Jo nods and shrugs, and gives her a heavy slap on the back as she heads for the turbolift.
"Lieutenant Vasquez, lay in a course for Starbase 2, warp 7.5."
"Course laid in, sir."
"Take us out."
***
Once upon a time she asked her daddy, "what comes after death?"
"Hopefully? Nothing."
"Why nothing?"
"I don't know. It seems kind of tiring to me, to go on living infinitely. I much prefer when things end somewhere. But I guess if there really is an afterlife and it is whatever we want it to be, I'd be a pretty boring person and say I want a garden. No clouds or glittering towers of diamond and gold, just give me some good old plants and a trusty pair of shears and I should be content for the rest of eternity. And then again, only if, after some time, I'll be joined by your papa and after what I hope is a very long time you'll join us. And we'll build a nest of leaves amidst the stars and invite people to drop by anytime-oh, well, it's kind of a 'been there, done that' don't you think?"
***
She is in a conference in Babel when the news comes to her. She is given time off to head back to earth and she has to hitchhike on a number of starships to get back home.
When she reaches home, finally, papa is sitting in his favorite chair overlooking their little garden patch. He looks a little lost, deep in thought, and as if he's been crying, but mostly lost in thought, and the tip of his nose is a bright, raw pink.
As she leans down to hug him she catches sight of her reflection off the glass of a photo frame on the adjacent table, and as she buries her head in papa's shoulder, sniffling noisily like a pig, she thinks of their identical strawberry red tipped noses and it dawns on her that they have always looked alike.