man all i keep thinking is 'last ship star trek au' 'last ship star trek au'. it needed to happen okay. set sometime in season one. but in SPACE!
for my h/c bingo square 'homesickness'.
Most nights, the hum of the USS Nathan James's engine thrusters is a gorgeous sounds. A gorgeous sound for a gorgeous ship. Most nights, there is nowhere Alisha Granderson would rather be than here. Most nights.
Tonight isn't most nights. Tonight, the hum in the air in the background all around her feels to Alisha like a tangible anxiety, a swarm of bees hovering always just out of sight and setting her nerves on edge. She stands on the port side of the ship and stares out into the black of space, feeling panic well up inside her. Alisha can remember setting foot aboard the Nathan James for the first time, how solid the walls felt, how anchored the floor. She'd walked to a window and watched them take off from the ground.
In this moment, it feels like tempting fate. It feels so incredibly dangerous, rocketing through the emptiness of outer space in a technologically advanced tin can. After all, a tin can with warp capabilities is still a tin can, and tin cans crumple.
Alisha closes her eyes and dips her forehead to the window. It feels chilled, and she finds she can't stop herself from imagining what it would be like to die in space. That scenario is one she's been avoiding thinking about, but it creeps in at night, or what passes as night when there is no sun, whenever she is forced to stop doing and be alone with her fear and the sky. When she was a little girl, Alisha Granderson dreamed about space. She stood by the shores of Lake Erie, stared up at the stars, and dreamed about going there. Her breath catches abruptly and Alisha chokes on air. One hand comes to rest graspingly at the pane of the window.
Right then, Alisha suddenly wants off this ship. The walls feel claustrophobically close, with no escape available. She longs for air like one buried deep underground.
Right now, Alisha can find no difference in being buried below the Earth or flying far into the outer reaches of distant space. At least underground there is hope of reaching the surface. Out here, breaking free of the confines of the ship would bring only sucking emptiness and a near-immediate death.
With the small part of her brain still thinking rationally, Alisha wonders what her mother would say about this, her mother the Admiral, her mother who was the kind of woman starships get named after. She wonders if her mother had ever felt the way she does now, like everything familiar has disappeared and all that's left is emptiness, like she could disappear, blink out of existence, and no one would ever know she was gone.
By the time the concerned voice breaks through the hum of unseen angry bees around Alisha's head, she finds herself sitting on the floor under the window, her back to the wall and one hand braced beside her thigh.
"-ent Granderson?" Andrea Garnett is saying, crouching down as she speaks, voice canting louder and worry seeping through her words. "Alisha, can you hear me?"
"Andrea," Alisha says, the decorum of rank and position fallen to the wayside in the jumble of her frazzled mind and the general laxness of being off-shift. "Is everything okay?"
"Is it?" Andrea's question is gentle and mildly amused. She puts a hand on Alisha's shoulder, and it's a welcome weight, grounding Alisha where she sits on the ship's floor and reminder that, despite how dangerously fragile life itself feels out here, she is solid and present and so is the Nathan James around her.
The words 'I'm fine' get stuck in Alisha's throat on the way out. She tries to say them, she really does, but the maintenance of her image as one of strength and dependability to the ship's third in command seems less and less crucial off the bridge, the longer their sojourn on the Nathan James continues past its intended conclusion. Not to say that the gravity and import of her position aboard this ship, and Andrea's, has become diminished, but that the longer they go on this mission for a cure, alone and in dangerou out in the emptiness of space, it is becoming more and more apparent how important it is to remember to be a person, not just an officer of Starfleet. How important it is, in these most terrifying of times, to allow one another the space to be vulnerable. Weak, even.
Moments of being permitted to be weak, they can save your life out here.
"I'm tired," Alisha tells her in a small, faint voice. "They're all I dreamed about when I was a little girl. The stars. I'd stand by the lake and look at the sky at night and think 'one day'... And now I just…"
"You want to go home."
Andrea's words and the feeling of one of her hands settling over the top of Alisha's own draws sharp pricks of heat to the backs of Alisha's eyes. She takes a deep breath and exhales slowly. Nodding, she presses the back of her free hand against her eyes, trying to shove the shame overflowing her back down. For all that vulnerability is a lifesaving act of bravery aboard a ship like this one, there's something about being so overwhelmed by homesickness that you literally start crying in front of the woman third in line for the Captaincy that feels a not-negligible amount of childishly inappropriate.
"Space fatigue," Andrea says, rubbing Alisha's knuckles gently with her thumb. "They call it space fatigue. It can happen to anyone, it's a form of depression that sometimes hits people who spend a lot of time off-planet." With a shiver down her spine, Andrea looks up at the window to the empty darkness outside. "Now more than ever, I would imagine. We weren't designed for this, none of us were. No species is made for space travel, and then with the epidemic…" Her hand tightens around Alisha's and she dips her head to make eye contact with the younger woman. "There's no shame in it, Alisha. Even the Captain had it not too long ago. I had it shortly after we first took flight."
"How do I make it stop?" Alisha asks quietly. She sounds as small as she feels right now, so small and insignificant she may well be swallowed up and vanish altogether.
"I don't know." It's not the answer Alisha is looking for, but it's the most truthful one Andrea can give. She knows Alisha, has gotten to know her better of late, and she knows how much the Conn Officer values honesty. "When it happened to me, the only thing I found to fight space fatigue is reminding myself that there is life off this ship. I talked about my daughter. You have a girlfriend, right? Back home?"
When asking the question, Andrea makes no mention of the uncertainty about whether 'home' even still exists, if there will be anything waiting for them when they get there.
Constantly surrounded by a thousand reminders that those uncertainties are there, constantly hanging over their necks like the threatening blade of an invisible guillotine, Alisha appreciates it. She sighs and twists her hand around, palm up, and holds onto the hand covering hers. So, grasping onto anything to lift the insurmountable weight of all the vast expanses of space around her, Alisha talks.
She talks about her girlfriend and the dog park they walked past together, about Detroit and the sunset on Lake Erie. And as she talks, Alisha feels the encroaching press of the darkness outside recede slightly, pulling back from her to allow her room to breathe.
Below her, within the body of the Nathan James, the engines rumble on. It's a comforting sound.