Future's Past, Chapter 12


Will and Tasha's apartment, Kansas City, Missouri, Earth, May 25, 2008

Will woke early the next morning, and immediately checked on Tasha. She was out cold, curled up on her bed with her back to the wall, as usual, and still wearing all her clothes. She wasn't as ashen as she'd been the night before, when she'd made it back to the apartment through sheer willpower.

Will took a quick shower, then double-checked his work schedule on the pocket calendar that he carried with him nearly everywhere. Handwritten, antiquated, even in the 21st century at the dawn of cellphone-based calendars . . . but it told him all he needed to know. He was not scheduled to work that night, thankfully. He would have called in if he'd been scheduled. He wasn't about to leave Tasha alone, today.

She slept until the middle of the morning, and then staggered into the bathroom for a shower. She emerged 15 minutes later, wearing her usual t-shirt and workout Capri pants that she tended to lounge in, and curled up on the opposite side of the couch beneath the throw blanket.

She had run a comb through her wet hair, and was letting it air-dry, which was typical. She'd let her hair grow longer than it had been on the dry, climate-controlled Enterprise, mostly because it was easier to manage in the American Midwest when it was longer. When humidity spiked in the spring and summer months, Tasha could just tuck it behind her ears and forget about it.

"Good morning," she said, her voice a bit stronger, but still raspy.

"Good morning," he replied. "Feeling better?"

"A little," she said. "Thanks for taking care of me."

"I'm glad you're feeling better," he replied, smiling a bit. "You look like you feel better. Want some more ginger tea?"

"Please," he replied. "That's the first thing I've kept down in three days."

I wonder what she's got, Will thought, as she curled up on the couch. After another minute, she grabbed the front section of the newspaper. It was two days old, but she seemed fixated on it even as water began simmering on the stove.

"I never knew this guy's real name," she remarked, seemingly out of the blue.

"Hmm?" he said, straining the ginger root slice from the cup of tea just before he handed it to Tasha and sat beside her to glance at the article, a news brief about a double shooting in Midtown.

"There was a drive-by shooting outside the Rec several days ago," she said, taking the cup of tea from him. "Thanks. I went out to help, and one of the victims was a regular. I just knew his nickname. But here it lists him as Timothy Patton."

"You were there when that happened?" Will said.

She nodded, and took a sip of tea. "He was hit right here," she continued, holding her hand to the upper half of her breastbone. "He was all but dead, coughed blood into my face. Rescuers tried to resuscitate him, but they stopped because it was obviously not going to help him.

"Anyway, one of the medics said the man was HIV-positive, so, the manager at the Rec took me to Swope Park clinic, and they gave me medications that are supposed to thwart both viruses, and that's why I've been so sick," she said. "But she told me that with a blood splash to my eyes, there's a three percent chance of contracting the infection."

"We've both been vaccinated against HIV," Will said.

"We are, but I couldn't tell her that," Tasha said. "I didn't think the vaccine had been developed, by this year."

"But if you were vaccinated in the 24th century, you're probably fine."

"She told me that the virus has been difficult to develop a vaccine for because it mutates so fast," Tasha said. "Do you remember much from human physiology?"

"I didn't do well in that class."

"A vaccine is developed from whatever strain of a pathogen is available. If this virus mutates, the vaccine we received would have been derived from the mutation that was present at that time, and probably not from the mutation that's present now. Does that make any sense?"

"Yeah, it does, and it means—,"

"—that I could still contract the mutation that I was exposed to," she said. "And so could you."

He stared at her. "What do you mean by that?"

"You know what I mean by that."

The coldest and most awful dread washed across him, a realization that statistically, although she was in more danger than he was, they both were potentially in trouble, but for far different reasons.

"So this nurse told me to keep taking this stuff for one month, but she had to be kidding," she continued. "I need fluids and food to live. And I need to make a living. I don't need to be puking all the time."

"I've got water left if you want a second cup," Will said.

"Maybe later," she said, noticing the entire apartment was picked up, orderly. "The place looks great."

"Thanks," he said. "I hope you stay, because it's your place, too. And it needs to be messed up, again. Things are too neat and orderly when you're not here."

She shot him a playful look, then glanced away, again, setting the empty cup on the table in front of the couch.

"Where's the block that was hanging from the doorknob?" she asked, noticing for the first time that the "got wood" cedar block was no longer dangling from the inside of the front door to the apartment.

"I threw it away," Will said.

She didn't respond.

"It was time to pitch it," he continued. "It was causing more trouble than it prevented."

She nodded and stood up, moving toward the sink and looking out the kitchen window. Sunlight bounced off the adjacent building and filtered across the counter, warming her fingers that now rested atop it as she peered outside.

"How come the sun didn't used to shine in here?" she asked.

"Someone finally cut down that dead, pine tree next door, about a week ago," he replied, standing beside her and nodding out the window, toward the open space where the dead tree had been. "It fell down partially when the storm came through, so they just took the rest of it down."

"Oh," she said. "Well, it needed to be cut down before it fell down, I guess."

"I hope you stay, because I miss you," he said, even as she continued to stare toward the window ledge.

"I miss tripping over your shoes, and I miss your Cheerios-with-hot-sauce breakfasts, and turning off the light after you've fallen asleep with a book over your face," he said. "And I miss just talking and all those little things I'd taken for granted until you weren't here, because I was busy with someone else whose name I don't even remember . . ."

"Stephanie," she said, looking down into the sink at the garbage disposal.

"Oh yeah, Stephanie Sloppy Seconds," he said. His response actually got a smile out of her.

"She still around?"

"No," he replied. "She drank too much coffee and had bad breath."

She sighed, shaking her head involuntarily. "That figures," she said.

They stood silently for nearly 30 seconds, each one desperately wanting to start the conversation they both knew they needed to have. But they also were afraid of saying the wrong thing, and worsening the closing rift.

"You'll be all right, Tash," he said, finally breaking the silence.

It was the use of his nickname for her that brought the initial lump to her throat, and that first lump was always the toughest to get rid of. Exhausted and sick, the stringent control she normally forced over herself quickly began eroding.

"What's the statute of limitations on apologies for saying things I had no right to say?" he asked.

"I don't impose a statute," she replied, then mentioned what she'd said three weeks ago, when she was so angry at him. "And I don't hate you," she added, then crossed her arms in front of her, embracing herself against the flood of emotion that was choking her up. She bowed her head, hoping he wouldn't see how upset she was. "I'm sorry I said that. I didn't mean it."

He slipped one arm around her shoulders—she resisted for half a second, because she was Tasha. But he pulled her close to him anyway, whispering, "I'm the one who should be sorry," into her still-damp hair.

She nodded, hiding her face against his shoulder, struggling to keep her composure. Her arms haltingly slipped around him to return his embrace, and her face silently crumpled against emotions shooting through her.

This has really messed her up, he thought, tightening his arms around her, reaching up with one hand to cradle the back of her head. He felt her physically shaking, even as she attempted the breath-holding trick to keep her emotions in check.

"It's OK," he whispered. It was a bullshit platitude, and he knew it. Neither of them cared, at that point.

But it had its intended effect. Her breath caught in her throat as a single, audible sob against his shoulder, and a cascade of them ripped through her seconds later as she exhaled. Then she completely came apart, dissolving into long-suppressed, but mostly silent crying against him as sunlight streamed through the kitchen window.

About damn time, Will thought. We needed this. Too much has happened, too much has been said. I don't ever want things to get this bad, again, and I don't want to lose you, he thought, and his own eyes welled up at that prospect.

Humbled by the emotional impact of what was happening, he wished he could do more for her beyond lending an accepting embrace and unconditional support. He knew that stress and exhaustion catalyzed her breakdown, but also sensed what a tremendous level of trust she still had in him, even after everything that had been said three weeks ago.

"I missed you, too," Tasha finally said against his shoulder, after another minute had passed, her voice still choked up but stronger. "I really did."

Her arms relaxed from around his shoulders and dropped to an easier embrace at his lower back. Will reached up, cradling her tear-streaked face in his hands and gently kissing her forehead before embracing her again so he could hold her longer, sensing she wouldn't mind, and she didn't. She rested one side of her face against his shoulder as his arms folded around her again, not intending to let her go anytime soon.

I think I missed you more, Tash, he thought. And that part felt good, it felt right.


May 26, 1445 hours

Will was sewing a button back onto his work uniform. It had been loose for the past two shifts, and he'd been afraid it would pop off at an inopportune time and wind up on someone's dinner plate. So he purchased a small sewing kit, and set himself up at the kitchen table to sew the button back on.

"What are you doing?" Tasha asked. She was curled up on the nearby couch, reading one of the books that Will had picked up from the used bookstore. She wasn't interested in personal finance, but it was something to read, and she supposed it was good for her. If anything, it would put her back to sleep. Will had wanted her to sleep, and although she'd dozed intermittently throughout the day, she wasn't wired to sleep that much. For months, she'd teased him about having "an engineer's taste in reading" because he'd managed to choose the most bland, technical items to read. Now she was glad for them, because they bored her into slumber.

"I'm sewing a button back on," he said. "It was loose, and it would have fallen off eventually, so I'm doing preventative maintenance."

"Where'd you learn how to do that?"

"My Aunt Anne taught me," he replied. "My mom's sister. My father would have had it repaired by someone else, but my Anne insisted that I learn how to do quick repairs, learn how to cook, learn how to do for myself. I learned how to make ginger tea from her. I think she knew that I'd be on my own sooner than I should have been."

"Sometime when I'm not throwing up, would you teach me how to do that?" she asked.

"Sure," he said. "I'd teach you now if you felt like it. It's a good skill to know, and different than those sutures you've had. What's the latest suture tally for you, three times?"

"Three times," she replied. "Well, four if you count the number of wounds that needed to be sewn up."

He shook his head, but couldn't help smiling. "My aunt actually makes clothing for herself," he said. "She's multitalented and is a very good tailor. I can get by. I can do simple repairs and fix buttons . . . and you, you get sewn."

"Battle scars," she replied, but couldn't help smiling at the analogy. "Your aunt sounds like an interesting person."

"Anne?" Will said. "Oh, she's the absolute best. You'd like her. She never got along with my dad, though. I think those two probably hated each other the moment they met. It wasn't even an oil and water kind of thing. More like oil and dynamite."

He stopped.

"Listen to me. I'm talking about the future in past-tense."


She slept more that afternoon. Now she was awake, feeling better. She'd even been able to keep some crackers down. But now it was 1800 hours, and time to take the AZT, again.

"Will," she said, staring at the pills in her hand. "I don't even want to take these."

"That's up to you."

"If I do what I'm supposed to do and swallow these pills, my head will be in the bottom of our toilet for the next six hours."

"If I knew I'd been exposed to the actual virus, I'd take the pills," he replied.

"All right," she replied, holding out her hand toward him, the pills sitting on her upright palm. "Here you go."

"No way. I don't know that I've been exposed," he said, shaking his head even as a wry grin crept across her face. "I just said there's a possibility that I may have been exposed."

"There's a possibility that I was, too," she said. "But they're still not sure."

"You're being wishy-washy," he replied.

"I don't want to take these," she said, more resolute by then.

"Then don't."

She decided against taking them, but didn't flush them down the toilet, either.


They lay awake in their respective beds that night, listening to a thundershower rumbling outside and cars splashing past on the street outside their window. As the storm had rolled in earlier, she told him about being caught in the hail two weeks ago, and he admitted that he'd left a window open during the same storm.

"Our apartment smelled like Prince William Sound," Will laughed. "And that tells me that something aquatic lived on the carpet in that corner. Maybe they had a fish tank."

They actually found themselves laughing within minutes, talking about anything other than viruses, being sick or dying. They'd decided they would worry about that tomorrow, when the clinic opened and they would maybe get some answers.

"Will," Tasha asked, out of the blue. "Tell me about Alaska."

He smiled, as comforted by the query as he was by memories of his favorite place in the universe. He looked away, toward the far wall, imagining the mountains and cool sea breezes.

"It's beautiful, it's still as untamed as it was when people first began inhabiting the area," Will said. "It's unstable, always changing, always its own place. Everything about Alaska is big. The Chugach mountains, the Copper River's delta that changes literally every day . . . and everything's bigger than you. Most people take their homes for granted, and I was one of them. Up until a few years ago, I had associated Alaska with my father, but he wasn't even from there."

"Where's he from?"

"Pennsylvania," he replied.

"Oh," she said.

"In the fall, the hills around our house turn crimson from all the bearberry bushes," Will continued, describing what Valdez looked like. "That show only lasts for a few days, and then it's swallowed by snowfall. Even the spruce trees are covered with snow so deep it's over my head by December. That never stopped me or my friends from going up there, and usually one of us got stuck someplace. Only had to be rescued once, and we were lucky. We could have frozen to death.

"I played lots of hockey, and lots of hooky from school," he continued. "Why sit inside when you live someplace like that?"

Tasha smiled in the darkness, imagining that she'd have done the same thing.

"I'd probably be outside, too," she said.

"You'd be cold," he said. "It's cold. It's a humid kind of cold that cuts through people. I grew up with it, so I'm used to it. But you start shivering when the temperature hits 60 Fahrenheit, and there are plenty of days in the summer when that's the high temperature around Valdez, and we were all running around in without shirts and barefoot because we thought a heat wave had come."

"Several generations of my mother's family made their living working on fishing boats. They lived and fished off the Aleutian Islands for a couple hundred years after they arrived from Russia," he continued. "They'd fish the Pacific, and they'd fish the Bering Sea. And a few of them died when their boats went down. Even with a survival suit on, you don't last in water that cold. And if you don't have on a survival suit, you die in minutes. Your blood cools, heart fibrillates from the chilled blood moving through it, and you just pass out and sink, and that's it. I used to have nightmares from hearing about people being trapped in ships going down, or tossed overboard and never located in time—of course, they only had minutes, so if you went overboard, you pretty much were dead.

"I think everyone whose family is from that area has at least one relative who never made it back home. It's part of the heritage. There are cemeteries near Dutch Harbor, and Unalaska, and Adak, or what's left of Adak after the big quake hit.

"My great-grandfather lived through that one when he was a kid. A 9.2 struck right off the coast, just to the south, and half the island just sank into the Bering Sea. He had a sister, and they never did find her. She was presumed dead. Anyway, the quake hit, the town sank 50 feet, and the tsunami finished the job with the part of town that didn't quite sink. My great-grandfather survived because he'd been playing hooky from school and had been hiking, so he was on high ground. And his dad survived because he'd been at sea, on a fishing boat, in the Pacific. My grandmother used to tell me that the ground is always shaking as a reminder that nothing is permanent. We're only borrowing the ground on which we stand."

"The beaches where I grew up are made up of large rocks," he said. "There's no sand to speak of . . . well, at the Copper delta there's sand, but the beaches near Valdez and Cordova are polished rocks. I used to spend hours making forts and fiords. And I'd find mollusks, and leave them on the beach for the sea otters to find. It didn't take long for the seals to pick up on this, and pretty soon they were coming up to the house. My dad was so angry. It's illegal to feed wildlife. And the seals had ripped into the shed, or overturned one of the benches to get at the bait we kept there for fishing.

"In the springtime—well, when the sun returns, for that matter, you start hearing this low cry from the Sound, from Prince William Sound. And it's the trumpeting from humpback whales. They are the descendants of the whales that James T. Kirk brought forward in time to save Earth some 80 years ago."

"You can hear them, even if they're under water?" Tasha asked.

"You can. And you can see them. They'll be out there breaching, slapping the water with their fins. They stay there until the fall, and then they migrate to the Hawaiian Islands. But all summer, they stay there and feed on herring. And you can see Orcas. They're everywhere. Sometimes they'll travel alongside the ferries. Even though it's illegal to feed them, I think they still hope someone might drop something into the water."

"From a boat, you mean," she said.

"Usually a boat," Will replied. "It's a short enough ride. Not a bad ride, either. About 20 minutes unless the tide's active or the water is choppy. You get over being seasick very fast if you're riding on a boat every day. Although, I do remember you mentioning a certain trip you took to Alcatraz Island . . ."

"Oh, that one was memorable," she muttered.

When Tasha was graduated Starfleet Academy, she and several communications majors decided to make the necessary pilgrimage to Alcatraz near San Francisco. The abandoned jail held a great deal of historical lore and was a popular destination for tourists and Academy grads. The solidly constructed prison was crumbling by then, structurally unsound from age and having weathered its share of earthquakes.

Tasha had never been on an open boat in her life before taking the ferry to Alcatraz, and she caught quite a bit of crap from her friends for being so seasick. She'd spent both the initial and return trips with her head hung over the back railing, vomiting trails through San Francisco Bay.

She'd told Will about that incident sometime back, months ago during a similar conversation, and he'd laughed, as she'd expected he would.

"I don't imagine you'd do well with one of those ferry trips," Will said of the Prince William Sound ferries. "You'd need a nausea patch."

"Or maybe some ginger tea," Tasha said, grinning. The rain continued lashing the windows, running down the panes and casting street-lit, rivulet shadows across the walls in their bedroom. "It sounds beautiful, though, all those mountains."

"It is," Will replied, suddenly tired, intoxicated from memories of the incredible surroundings he'd grown up around, and had assumed existed everywhere else until he traveled elsewhere. "It's gorgeous, almost magical. It's home."