Another story

Shut up

Don't expect much from me

Go and read you leeches


I'd always known who my father was. That was the first thing I wanted to say.

Yes, I'd never known him, but I had known who he was from the beginning. My mother never hesitated to tell me everything she could about my dad, and whenever I asked, she gave. Stories, pictures, recordings of his voice, whatever, she wanted me to know him as well as I could without actually knowing him. I knew he was in Starfleet, I knew that he liked tea, and I knew that he was valedictorian. I also knew that he had no idea I existed.

He wouldn't take too well to being a father, that's the reason Mom always gave whenever I asked why. She said that he had never been comfortable with children, and the addition of a baby he hadn't planned on wasn't a surprise he would have welcomed. I didn't know what that had meant when I was 10. I knew what it meant now.

He didn't want kids. He hadn't then and, while it's possible that he might have changed in the years away from my mother, chances were that he wasn't looking for them anytime soon. I had... accepted that. More or less. I may have had a problem with it when I was 15 which led to a rather intense and frankly embarrassing rebellious phase, but I was an adult now, and I had moved on. A complete and total adult with no issues or problems connected to it whatsoever. Nope. None. I was an adult.

A professional adult.

A professional adult with absolutely no lingering parental issues, I thought as I laid on my new bed, a lead feeling in my stomach as various unpacked bags and boxes scattered throughout the room. This hadn't ever, even slightly, been my intention.

God, how did it get this way?

Everyone I knew wanted to work on the Enterprise, all of them would have killed for this opportunity, but that didn't change the fact that I had never even wanted to go near it. Not even mentioning any personal objections I might have had, I was severely underqualified. Most of the officers on board the flagship had displayed excellence and proficiency in one way or another, they had been top of their class, had multiple merit awards, things like that. I wasn't any one of those. I was a good officer, yes, but it wasn't like I stood out. I was just an administration overseer that had been just slightly above average her entire career and had barely made bridge crew the month before. By all rights, I shouldn't be on the Enterprise. I shouldn't have been chosen for this position.

Yet I had been. So here I was. Fuck.

Sighing, I reached up and rubbed at my brow, god I felt like crying. I had never intended to transfer in the first place, I had only intended to apply to an open position on the flagship, have the act of applying noted on my file, and then stay on the Qalisa. But since I was the one that applied, I wasn't able to back out without a good reason. Which I didn't have. Not a professional one, at the very least.

But I didn't want to be here.

Warmth began seeping down the side of my face and pressed my hands against my face, hoping that the tears would go away. I might not have had a professional reason to not want to serve on the Enterprise, but a list of my personal reasons? That could probably blanket the hull. God, Mom was going to flip when she found out.

I paused, I really wasn't looking forward to telling Mom about my new assignment. She was adamant against my joining Starfleet, raged against my shipping out on the Qalisa, and had always been firmly, staunchly against my desire to travel the stars. I knew she loved me, of course, nobody loved me more, but this was one thing that she would never budge on. She hated starships and she hated the thought of me on a starship, but the flagship of the Federation? She might well swallow her hatred of them just so she could ship out and drag me home herself.

She'd always been overprotective, sometimes to the point of stifling, but it was only when it came to this specific situation that would I let it go. Over the years, her anger at my life choices had faded into a sad sort of resignation, and I'd been able to work out why she hated the stars. I could even understand it, to a point.

My father had been, unequivocally, the love of her life.

As she always told me, my mother couldn't remember a time when she didn't know my father. Their families were old friends and they were raised alongside each other. Every first they could have, they'd had with each other, and Mom had been convinced that they would build a life together. She'd waited for him when he went to Starfleet Academy, she'd waited when he shipped out. She waited through every other relationship and fling he'd had. She'd metaphorically remained by his side for decades, waiting for him to come back to her, through the pain and his false promises, she waited. But the fact was that he wouldn't come home and she wouldn't go with him.

She always said that she would gladly suffer a thousand heartbreaks for him, but once the day with a thousand and one came, she knew she had to leave. The day he left for the last time was the day that she'd left him as well, and the last she saw of him was when he left for the stars, leaving her with only a shattered heart and an accidental pregnancy.

Once I'd found that out, it made sense to me why she'd never wanted me to meet my father. She'd lost him, and she was afraid of losing me, too. By the time that had sunk in, I hadn't wanted to meet him anyway, so I kept current on his career, and though it filled me with an odd sense of pride, I tried to stay as far away from it as possible, but then I was transferred here. Right into the heart of Meet-Your-Long-Lost-Dad Central.

Letting out a long sigh, I only began to cry harder.

I really didn't want to meet Captain Jean-Luc Picard.