The sting of tears hit her eyes as she heard his voice. There was a tone to his voice that she had rarely heard before. It was normally reserved for statements of regret, of loss, of opportunities passed over.
She did love him. She had for years. And she had pushed him away after Kes Prytt because she feared that a failed romance would wreck their friendship that was both tenuous and absolutely steadfast.
And now this message, coming right on the heels of her experience in that other universe. And the look on his face. Er, the other's face. It was all colliding together, now.
"Computer: record response. Begin: 'Jean-Luc, I miss you too. Let's talk.' End recording. Transmit immediately."
Unfortunately, making up one's mind to explore possibilities didn't mean that life went smoothly in response. Setting up a real time conversation took more time than it should have, due to their ship's itineraries and locations. Between the misplaced delegations and crew members and the general uproar and confusion across the quadrant it took two weeks of planning.
As the days passed and her ship was being put back together (she kept going down to the extremely full shuttle bays just to watch her enthralled engineers) she refused to allow herself to think about what he might say.
The morning of their message day, she laid in bed, wondering if indeed her experiences with the…other one, if they really were simply just an aberration, that her Jean-Luc (Ah, Beverly, it's problematic to call him "yours") had messaged her to be polite (because she knew they had been polite to each other for nearly thirty years), and that their upcoming conversation wouldn't actually mean anything. It would be just two good friends, catching up, sharing stories of shared displacement, and they would laugh softly, then say goodbye, and politely sign off.
Because they were friends.
Their conversation was stilted, awkward. She was fidgety and wanted to ask if he had also encountered another universe, tell him about her own brief, unsettling experience, but they just sat across from each other on the viewers and stared uncomfortably. They chatted about nothing in particular - their ships, the crew, the potential for a new warp core in her vessel, a reconfiguration of the arboretum on his.
After just a few minutes, she found herself crumbling on the inside. Yes, he was simply contacting her to be polite, because they were friends, and she should really just go ahead and sign off and enfold that other experience back into her heart, pretend that she hadn't been ideating about possibilities in her universe, because nothing had really changed for him, and really, had it changed for her? No, because here they were chatting like friends do-
Abruptly, he slumped down in his chair, looking defeated, and rubbed his head. "Beverly, this is uncomfortable," he murmured.
Her jaw dropped. Polite, careful Jean-Luc had disappeared, leaving this…well, this somewhat weary man on the screen in front of her.
"We need to spend some time together," he bluntly stated, and her eyes widened in surprise. She swallowed, suddenly nervous in a new way, not quite sure how to respond. He raised his hands, then, opening himself to her, beckoning some sort of response. "I, that is...we are better when we are together. Face to face, I mean."
She felt her cheeks warm at the many meanings of his words, and started to giggle (goodness, Beverly, you're giggling) as he in turn became flustered. It felt as if the ice had finally broken.
And then they were interrupted by a red alert siren on her ship.
Two days later, she was still simmering about the faulty warp core monitor. The crew knew it, too. But she didn't care to explain that she was pissed at the monitor more because it interrupted her conversation with Jean-Luc than because her ship could have imploded.
She was sitting at her terminal in her ready room, reviewing reports. A notification appeared. It was a message from Jean-Luc. Simple, text only, with a set of coordinates embedded in the message.
She pulled up the coordinates and on screen appeared the database entry for a restful vacation planet. It looked lovely. Warm temperatures near the equator, temperate forests up north, snow-covered mountains dappled across the continents, and quiet places to just...be.
It looked restful. Beautiful. Romantic.
Jean-Luc had invited her to a romantic planet for shore leave.
She swallowed as an unsettling blossom of hope began to form in her core.