Ione knew her husband was eager to meet his new sibling. Elieth would certainly deny experiencing such an emotion if asked; without their bond, she might even believe him. Yet, now she had boundless access to his well-ordered mind, and there could be no denying it.

She felt a trace of amusement from him then, then heard in her own mind:

"My wife, you are a bad influence."

"Tosh," she thought back, struggling to keep the smile from her face as he fiddled once more with her simple floral arrangement on the tea table. Of all the many plants that called their sitting room home, this was the assortment he kept coming back to.

"I would not have pursued you if I wanted a good influence. A good Vulcan influence," he self-corrected.

"You're fretting," she chided, "Is it your mother?"

"No. She accepts us now," his stern, dark eyes met her over the petals of the orchid. His newest hybrid, the one he'd be sending back with T'Pel, "my father softens her much the same way you do me."

"Ah. Ah. You softened yourself," Ione said this aloud, her stifled laughter in her tone.

He was a joy to tease, even if she had to catalogue the minor twitches in his facial muscles to decipher the Vulcan equivalent of a sly smile.

She had been hesitant to marry him when he'd finally asked. Their time together before she'd left for Deneva had convinced her that the Vulcan people were too stubborn and intractable to be good partners to non-Vulcans, and that Elieth would always do what must be done to be a good Vulcan son. How could she be expected to live amongst a people who worked tirelessly to logic away every emotion and whose thoughts were so difficult to parse? To live on an arid world, when she'd grown up on a temperate Betazed orchard? How could she bind herself to a man who might never love her back, or, at least never admit to loving her back? Whose parents would surely never accept an inter-species bond with a Betazed of all things?

But then he'd followed her to this cool, forested world and had forbidden his mother from interfering. He'd told her, albeit generously translated from the stoic words of a Vulcan to Betazed, that he'd loved her from the moment he'd met her and would sacrifice much to prove it to her.

And hadn't he done so? Hadn't he risked the silent condemnation of his parents to engage her in Betazed courting rituals? And hadn't his father, despite his mother's early silence, written her from the Delta Quadrant after they had married, welcoming her into the family? And hadn't T'Pel grown to accept her for the peace she brought Elieth, something he'd admitted had been absent in his youth, with her Betazed thoughts and ways?

If not for the latter, Ione might have laughed uproariously in disbelief when Elieth told her his parents had adopted a Cardassian orphan. No, her resulting confusion had been tied up in the logistic of such a thing rather than dismissive. How had her father-in-law found such a child? Why had the girl agreed to be raised by a people once firmly considered her enemy? What sort of forms had needed to be filled out? To which government did they submit them?

Then the girl had written Elieth at the behest of her new parents, and Ione's curious confused had given way to delight.

Esket had never had siblings before, much like Ione, nor a living mother, and so she explained to them that she would take to her inheritance of such a large new family with enthusiasm . Her pictures showed she wore her hair in the Bajoran styles she seen aboard Deep Space Nine, and her letters wondered if Deneva was humid like Cardassia. She told them in video calls how T'Pel was teaching her Vulcan, which she likened to an art, and how the Captain of the Venture was her favorite aunt, of which she now had six. She asked Elieth what it was like to grow up on Vulcan and Ione what it was to spend her childhood surrounded by fruiting trees.

Such an earnest girl, open and kind. Ione could easily forget what Esket's people had done to the Federation, for surely it could never be the fault of the child, the sins of her elders.

Her new sister would be arriving imminently, which meant mercilessly teasing Elieth for his nerves. How a man his age could worry that he would not be liked by a child who already signed her letters with love was beyond her.

"They are almost here," she beamed, already she could hear the thoughts of Esket as she moved up the long walk. Everyday, petty nerves and deeper anxiety were stubbornly ignored for the sake of excitement. She hummed songs in her head to drown out the former.

T'Pel's mind was a brick wall with no cracks; Ione could not read it, but she knew it was there.

Elieth, with great grace and composure, did the Vulcan equivalent of rushing around the home to make sure everything was in place. His mother's rooms were to be hot and arid; Esket's were to be lukewarm and humid, with gifts neatly wrapped and placed on her desk and perfectly fitted, locally made clothing in her wardrobe.

Ione helped him by preparing a mint tea for T'Pel and the Bajoran root phosphate drink that Tuvok noted Esket enjoyed.

As each finished their respective tasks, the front door chimed.

Carrying the tray of drinks to the tea table, Ione watched as Elieth palmed open the door. She was at his side before it finished opening.

"Mother. Sister," Elieth greeted.

"Son," T'Pel stood tall before them, regal as she no doubt always would be. After addressing Elieth, her dark eyes turned to her, "Daughter."

Ione smiled, now knowing such a gesture would not put her mother-in-law on the wrong foot, "T'Pel, Esket, welcome!"

Esket, too, was smiling. Nothing in her mind or previous letters made Ione believe that the girl's parents were trying to curb her of her emotional nature, and the carefree way Esket held herself in her adoptive mother's presence supported that belief. Such a parenting decision, Ione, suspected, took a remarkable amount of restraint from those who had already raised many Vulcan children.

"You do not need permission, child" T'Pel said to the girl.

Esket gave a little hop of excitement and threw her arms around Elieth.

"Your new sister hugs, my son."

Elieth accepted the tight embrace gracefully, bowing to wrap his own arms around the short girl, "Then I shall hug my sister."

T'Pel nodded, her expression blank.

Ione knew better, though.

It was not indifference the woman felt but approval.

Esket released Elieth and threw herself at Ione next, who rocked her back and forth and laughed. Years ago, if told she'd embrace a Cardassian child with no hesitation, she would have scoffed at the absurd suggestion. Now, Ione knew that this girl would be the finest ally in every effort to torment Elieth with teasing and jests.

Ione held her out at arm's length and put on a great show of looking her over, "You have T'Pel's eyes."

Esket giggled and exuded gratitude, the feeling wrapped delicately around the fraught worries of a child afraid of their own shadow and who didn't know if they truly belonged, "You know that's not possible!"

"Perhaps, but you can't convince me otherwise. Now, come in! I've made you a fizzy drink and those ginger biscuits your father says you like!"

She led the girl into the living room as Elieth grabbed the luggage. T'Pel followed behind, speaking in low tones to her son.

…

The Doctor chose not to dwell on his own feelings as he completed the scans necessary to determine if the Admiral had suffered any hidden brain damage when her head met the turbolift wall. Surely there was a joke in there somewhere, about which had won: the wall or her head.

He did not crack jokes with the Admiral.

She'd arrived just as the third waves of injuries had surged in, just moments after the Captain comm'ed him to let him know to expect her (the 'find the Admiral if she doesn't arrive in the next ten minutes' was strongly implied by her tone), and waited with an uncharacteristic amount of patience as his team worked down the list of those with more acute traumas. By the time he'd stabilized his third spinal injury and knitted together his fifth orbital bone, she'd grown lethargic in the the corner.

That's when he'd requested Dr. Gibans to come up from Two to help.

That had freed the Doctor up to handle his old Captain, something his staff clearly thought he'd want to do. He could forgive them that assumption, since he rarely spoke with them about his time aboard Voyager. After all, Kelemane had been his natural crutch in conversation; they'd only had their assumptions to work from.

Voyskunsky, for her part, made no fuss when he pulled her into a treatment alcove. In many ways, she shared her absurd propensity of suffering bizarre injuries with Captain Janeway. In that way, at least, she had at least trained him well in healing a commanding officer.

Which typically meant privacy and minimal conversation and a vague, friendly air.

Except today, she appeared willing enough to talk to him as he scanned and checked her vision.

"It must be nice, to finally have a trained medical staff to help you."

He hummed a thoughtful affirmative while doing his best to clean away the fresh and dried blood from the tangle of hair around her ear and temple. Over the seven years serving her, the Doctor had learned that it was best to let her carry the conversation to the point, without interfering with effusive worry or friendliness.

"They're all exceptionally qualified people," she tried her hand at diplomacy, "I'm just surprised Dr. Giban's didn't take the offer of CMO on the Aurora\."

Well, if she didn't know that Clarence actively detested the very idea of management, it wouldn't do at all to out him for that to an admiral of all people. No, Gibans wanted to perform complex field medicine with a team of people he in no way had to lead. The Doctor respected him for knowing his limitations, and saw nothing wrong with leaning into a very narrow definition of his role.

"I'm glad he didn't, we'd be at a disadvantage without his skills," he, too, tried his hand at diplomacy.

"I'd wondered who Captain Janeway would pick for her CMO. Tuvok as her XO was no surprise to me, we were meant to transfer him to the Bellerophon once we captured the Maquis."

"I believe I recall Tuvok mentioning that…"

"I was surprised she picked you. Don't look at me like that, I'm not saying what you managed to do for Voyager is something to scoff at, even I know it isn't. I'm just saying that she has her detractors and her followers, and this ship is full of those she's confident fall in line with the latter."

She pushed his hand away from the injury with a wince, "You? An unknown CMO from a backwater ship is an odd risk to take for someone so careful. You might want to think about it, and then ask yourself what about you might be appealing to a Captain known for taking unnecessary risks."

The Doctor grabbed the dermal regenerator, doing his best not to react to her insinuation, and began the process of repairing the surface level bleeding. He'd already administered the coagulant that would slow the internal bleeding in her temporal lobe until one of the ICU biobeds Was freed up from being used to repair ruptured livers and more complex cranial and spinal injuries.

She definitely needed more thorough treatment as soon as possible, but he could do a lot here to reduce the pressure in her skull until then.

Why did she even care about why he was offered the posting? They hadn't seen one another or spoken since Voyager's return, and Voyskunsky hadn't given a single indication she was following his post-Voyager life.

That silence was mostly his choice, since he had his small group of friends and supporters happy to see him. Lewis and Haley had made up the bedrock of his Alpha Quadrant family, even when he'd been in the Delta Quadrant, and that had quickly expanded to include Reg, Qrlthlmtrly, and the small army of engineers aboard the McKinley Station — many of whom he still kept in contact with. Sometimes, he even received word from Seven or Chakotay or Harry: congratulations for his successful case and placement aboard the Venture, updates on their own successes. Yet, there's been there'd been no suggestion that the Admiral was following the progress of his case or career; he certainly hadn't kept track of hers.

That simply wasn't their relationship.

Perhaps it would have been different if he had proof she thought of him as anything more than a tool? Or if he'd given her any suggestion that he might forgive her for any of those pivotal decisions she had made on their voyage when it came to him.

He didn't, and he hadn't.

"I should have had this conversation with you a year ago," she admitted, "so you could have considered it before accepting."

"The good news," he said, pointedly ignoring everything she'd just said in hopes it stave off whatever else she wanted to say, "is that you'll recover."

"The bad?" She played along, apparently content to let him change the subject now that she'd had her say.

"No bad news. I've bought you the time you need. Once a bed opens up, we can repair the bleed in your brain. It was a good thing you came when you did, too much longer and I'd have to reconstruct a number of your neural pathways. It's like making changes to a program, only more evasive."

The admiral shrugged, ignoring his final sentence, "I took orders from your Captain."

"She would be the one to reverse the chain of command," he tried to keep his tone noncommittal, like he wasn't particularly proud that Captain Janeway had managed to do what not even he, Commander Tuvok or Chakotay had been able to do aboard Voyager, but he knew he'd failed when Voyskunsky raised a perfectly manicured brow at his delivery.

"Don't look too pleased, she's just using me to obfuscate her dislocated shoulder."

"Of course, she is," he scoffed, turning away to input his orders to Dr. Gioxi, "You won't mind if I put you in the capable hands of my Deputy."

It wasn't a question.

"Not at all."

"Fantastic."

He made his handoff with Gioxi, who was eying him in that way of hers that suggested whatever she'd been hearing in Voyskunsky's thoughts made her bitterly regret she couldn't also read his. The Doctor chose to ignore it, knowing that she'd never tell him what she'd heard, unless it was a security risk. His Deputy had proven herself to be fully guided by her respect for the privacy of others, even if she did wish she could poke around in his empty head.

…

Lieutenant Shaw's report came through the internal command channels quickly, at roughly the same time as Bartel's, her Science Officer. Kathryn focused on the engineering update first, as it unfortunately would have something to say about their immediate prospects. It contained pages of Morlin's fuel equations and annotations, as well as Shaw's analysis of repair times based on the math. If they shut down all non-essential systems, they would reserve enough power to remain adrift for two weeks or to travel at impulse speeds for three days. The closest Fleet ship was half a week away, so the latter was out of the question. The repairs were all hypothetical until they understood what cause the loss of anti-matter.

The recommendation was to stay put and wait for help.

Which would be fine, but Kathryn's perusal of the science reporting was as telling as it was damning. They'd hit a portion of the sector with unmapped subspace pockets. Traveling through them at warp had likely caused the depletion of fuel, and there was nothing to suggest impulse speeds would be any different.

It also meant that anyone who responded to their distress signal could suffer the same event.

She immediately keyed in to Tuvok to adjust the distress call to highlight the threat. While she enjoyed a good tete-a-tete with other ships' crews, it would do to strand them along side the Venture.

She keyed in orders to Morlin, Shaw, Ilako, and Bartel to assemble a team to assess all information and hold a briefing with solutions in three hours. Taitt was added as a near afterthought, in case any of those required navigation input.

As she was finishing that and pulling up the latest report on casualties, her ready door chimed.

"Enter," she called.

Her CMO entered, his already shaking head picking up its pace when he immediately clocked the way she was favoring her left arm.

"Not a single member of your bridge crew has sought medical care, and they all need it. Am I going to have to lecture you on the power of a good example?"

Kathryn opened her mouth to say something to that, but clicked it shut when she saw the thunderous edge to his expression. She wasn't one to take this sort of approach from her crew, but maybe — given what she'd gleaned in the last couple of days — sending the Admiral to him hadn't been her finest decision.

"She told on me," came out of her instead, half natural response to the situation and her train is thought, half attempt to diffuse whatever mood the Doctor was in.

He huffed and set down his medical kit as she stood to join him at the couch. His shoulders sagged in the way she was learning meant capitulation. The Doctor's poor mood, however, wasn't going anywhere.

"Of course she did, call it a tit-for-tat if you want," he opened the handheld scanner and got to work, managing to scoff only once at what he saw, "Can you even move it?"

"My right arm?"

"What, have you done something to the left as well?"

She gave him a warning glance, "I haven't tried because it hurts."

The scanner made a small clack as he snapped it shut, "That's because there isn't a single ligament in your shoulder that hasn't torn. How are you even coherent?"

All right, so the exasperation in his tone hadn't vanished. They were now at the point where she needed to say something, as his Captain, even if she didn't want to as his friend, "Tone down that frustration, Doctor," spoken like an order.

The expressive lines of his face went through a spectrum of something, before he sighed, visibly calmed, then nodded, "Yes, Captain."

"Thank you."

"It's just my toned-down, professional opinion, that you seek treatment sooner."

"Doctor—"

"Lift your arm."

Kathryn blinked, "Excuse me?"

But his face was serious, "Lift your arm, Captain."

She could try to do as he said, or she could get angry. Typically, that was the binary. A Captain warring for control over an errant CMO. Yet, he wasn't errant, not really, and they weren't at war. Kathryn didn't know what was going on with her CMO and (at that moment tentative) friend, but she could try give him some grace regardless. It felt right to, even if she wanted to order him right out of her ready room.

She's talk to him about his behavior later, when he'd cooled down a bit.

"Aeson, you know I can't."

He blinked in shock, whether at the use of his first name or her admission was beyond her.

She continued, "We can discuss proper captain role-modeling at a later date, that's a promise, but we're so deep in the current crisis at the moment that I can't afford to take the time to go to Sickbay let alone force my bridge crew to do what I can't even do."

"I'm sorry," and he was, she could see the contrition, even if it was buried beneath three layers of scowl.

"No, you're right, but right now I need you to heal this mess of a shoulder, so I can get back to work."

The Doctor nodded and instructed her to remove her uniform jacket. It was easier said than done, given the state of her arm, and he eventually had to help her. Despite the tension of their conversation, he was gentle with her, drawing her arm from her sleeve without aggravating her injury. Her mood lightened slightly, at the image this must make: the two of them coordinating the thankless task of getting her down to her turtleneck. At least Tuvok hadn't taken the opportunity to walk in on it. While he would have immediately understood what was going on, he would have had an almighty of a raised eyebrow.

Kathryn chanced a glance at the offending shoulder and blanched. Was her collar bone supposed to be like that?

"Easy," the Doctor said, guiding her down to the coach where she sat with a plop.

"I can't heal all of this here," he confessed as he opened his medical kit, "I can remake the connections, but we'll need stabilizers in order to repair all the damage. I should have Ilako beam you there now, but we need the biobed space for more serious cases."

Whatever he applied via hypospray took the worst of the edge off her pain, but the dull throb remained. So too did the clarity of her thought, which made her suspect he was capitulating and fixing her up just enough to send her back to work.

"We lost Michael Grant."

Kathryn felt his eyes on the side of her face, before he went back to the kit and pulled out whatever medical regenerator he needed.

He braced his hand on her collar to manually manipulate it into place and began working — the dull agony doubled, and Kathryn ground her teeth.

"At last count, there were eighteen in the morgue."

Her resulting hiss was as much from pain as it was from shock. The number had more than doubled from the original report. If his tone not-so-subtly suggested Grant wasn't the only one she should be thinking about, well, she'd just have to let that go too.

For now.

In the next moments, he started to do something to her shoulder that made truly unsettling popping sounds. Yet, the pain began to gradually lessen until it was a simple ache. As if she'd played too much Velocity the day before, not battered herself against the Bridge floor this morning.

Medical tricorder in hand, he made her work through a simple range of motion and nodded along with what he saw. Eventually, he handed her jacket back and packed away his equipment, studiously avoiding eye contact all the while.

"Don't lift anything greater than five pounds and limit any unnecessary motions above your head," the instructions were rote, a recital as he clicked his kit shut and stood, "This is a patch at best. Come to sickbay as soon as you have the time."

"All right," she stood and started the tentative process of getting her arm into her sleeve, "I'd like a report from Medical on the status of our injured."

"Yes, Captain. Will that be all?"

She nodded, sending a wry, "Thanks for the house call," at his back as he left.

…

"W-we're going to die."

"With that attitude we are, Reg."

"S-sorry, sir. W-we might die."

"Better."

As he listened to the volley of words between Lieutenants Shaw and Barclay, Mroll Taitt thought the human engineers had taken leave of their senses. All three of them. They, with their mad ideas and impossible solutions, argued — but not really — with Ilako, who was creating simulations of various flight paths based on the sensor readings and Morlin's equations on the fluctuations of the subspace pockets. Even the one with the nervous stutter was enjoying himself, calling out all the ways everything could go wrong and they could die.

He liked them and their clever, implausible, and fatalistic ideas.

Mostly because they did all the talking for him, which freed him up to review their work in peace and think through his own inferences from the data.

This is what he knew: if he took the Venture too close to a subspace pocket, it would expand to meet them, and draw zealously from the antimatter they managed to retain in the initial collision. That was the primary condition he had to contend with. It was up to the engineers to worry about the inertial dampeners and the power fluctuations from close calls.

Easy enough, except the ship was large compared to the parts of space they'd mapped with their sensors free of the pockets. They would be threading a very unforgiving needle no matter which way they went.

He'd be threading the needle.

There were ten potential paths according to Bartel and Ilako. Mroll knew already that four of them were impossible and that three more were just on the wrong side of a bad choice.

Which left three: one that would take at least three days of careful maneuvering but was leisurely compared to the others. Another that was a day and a half of hands-on flying with some tight maneuvering but held the promise of being forgiving on minor mistakes. The last was a ten hour, precise slog of a fly along a carefully plotted course and would see them to safety fastest.

The first would bring them painfully close to the limits of their remaining power, the second would drain them of most and leave them on reserves until they could rendezvous with the Saturn. The final option would get them out the quickest, but had so little room for error it would be overly confident any pilot to declare they could do it without any trepidation.

"We should go with three," Bartel murmured, comparing the remaining trajectories once Mroll had silently whittled them down.

"One wrong twitch of the finger and that's it, lights out."

Shaw was a careful man, Mroll could appreciate that quality in a someone charged with keeping the lights on, but that was why he was an engineer, not a pilot. Then again, Bartel was missing a key reason why three wasn't their best option.

The Kzin tapped at his own chin with a blunted claw. Standing at least head above the others, he towered over each without needing to try. He'd learned young, as one of the few of his kind in the Fleet, to soften the clearly predatory features of his species. So, even if it was not comfortable, his prominent fangs remained tucked into folds of his cheeks when he was not speaking and his claws were shortened to the quick. His face was free of the long hair that humans insisted on calling fur as were his hands, a regional style customary of his clan. Only the long, soft cranial hair remained, but as it was prone to matting he wore it in braided, protective style.

And he slouched, to appear shorter. This did not really work.

All this to say, when he did choose to speak, people couldn't help but pay attention.

"Two," Mroll said, one webbed ear twitching as he watched the ongoing simulation, "I would like you argue for option two during the briefing."

He handed the pad he'd been taking notes on to Morlin, "Please review my calculations."

The young engineer smiled at him gamely.

…

The debriefing room was silent as the other senior officers thought over the options outlined by Shaw and Ilako. They'd come down heavily in favor of the second, which had gotten the Taitt seal of approval: a nod. Usually, that's all it took to get the Captain to sign off on a flight plan, but today was was not a typical day.

Today, there was another opinion to grapple with.

"Three," Admiral Voyskunsky stated, as if the conclusion was forgone.

Tuvok only briefly met the Doctor's eyes as she said it. Both men were painfully familiar with her style of tackling crises — which was to punch through them with excessive force. It was a trait that had seen them through the Delta Quadrant, but there had been losses as a result of it.

The Doctor watched the Captain's reaction — or lack thereof — and wondered if she'd give in so easily to what the Admiral wanted. He knew that his words would change nothing, they rarely had before, but hers might if she cared to use them.

"Lieutenant Taitt," Captain Janeway finally responded after some thought, "I'd like your opinion."

The large man tilted his head slowly, thoughtfully, and carefully gathered his words before speaking, "We have only the illusion of choice, Captain. The first route is the safest to navigate, but it will leave us derelict before help arrives. We only have a seven percent chance of making it a quarter way through the third. Those are not winning odds."

"It has the best probability of us clearing this space without relying on aid," the Admiral argued.

The Kzin hummed, "With option two, the Saturn will be in position to help us before we burn through our reserve power. We should not ignore timely help that is freely given, Ma'am."

"We also shouldn't put the Saturn at risk of having to tow us out. Two is the safest option for them as well," Shaw's no-nonsense tone, while sometimes made the man unapproachable, was much appreciated when it was used in support of the preferable outcome.

"I'm inclined to agree with Mister Taitt, Admiral," the Captain declared, her delivery such that she took a firm stance while respecting the other woman's rank, "How long until we can get underway?"

Voyskunsky had yet to wrestle command from Janeway under the guise of her own mission's timeline; the Doctor wondered how much longer that restraint would last. Given the steel set of her jaws and stare, they were all working on borrowed time.

By the looks of it, the same thought was going through a non-trivial number of the senior staff's mind as the Admiral weighed her options.

If this were the Delta Quadrant, he knew she'd throw caution to the wind and insist on three. In all fairness to her — and he could still afford giving her some of that even if he didn't particularly want to — she'd had to take the long odds almost every time . There had been no Federation ship waiting in the wings to help them.

But this wasn't the Delta Quadrant, the Venture wasn't her ship, and this wasn't her crew.

Perhaps aware of what he as thinking, the woman in question met his eye and remained blessedly silent.

"We can wrap up repairs by the end of Gamma," Shaw declared.

"Very well. Get some rest, Mister Taitt. It sounds like you're going to need it. Dismissed."

…

The sunset was beautiful — the purples and red playing off the natural oranges of the land around them. A stern Cardassian man —papa, a young girl's voice supplied — stood with his back to her. Hands clasped together tightly behind him, he surveyed the horizon as the wind swayed his neatly coifed hair this way and that.

He did not seem to mind.

"We should go to the market, while I'm home."

He did not look at her as he spoke, even though she wanted him to. She always wanted him to, but he never did. And if he did, she didn't want him to.

—we can't go to the market, the same girl's voice explained, something like tenuous understanding coming to her with those words. the market was gone. papa was —

"We can grab sampa fruit."

Her favorite, but it wasn't in season yet. The local grocers refused to sell produce out of season, there was a war on after all and it was a waste of resources.

"Why is the sky on fire, Papa?"

"That's the sunset."

—no. it's fire.—

Flames replaced golden light, as if just waiting for her to realize what they were. As she stared at them, a flash of light punched a hole in the atmosphere large enough that she could see the inky blackness of space where it had once been. Somehow, she knew if she looked closely enough, long enough, one of those false stars orbiting her planet would break off from the others to enter through that void in the sky.

She looked away.

He began to turn as the land at the far side of the valley curled upwards in a violent spray of orange and grey. Debris rose in a column toward the sky, a collection of ash and sediment and pulverized granite. A slow-moving pillar yet to be captured by gravity. There would be disastrous consequences once it was — this is what it looks like when an energy weapon rips apart the school district, the little girl said. I was supposed to be at school when all my friends died. why wasn't I? —

"Eskey."

A disembodied woman's voice — aunt katie's, panic receded into calm, she wasn't here when the world ended. this meant it already had. — filled the silence where rushing air and calamity should be.

"Don't look."

—I've forgotten his face. they took it from him. if I look, I don't know what I will see. —

The pillar fell, a ship swung over the horizon, and the man finished his turn.

She did not look.

Ione woke.

"That was not mine," she said aloud softly, after a time had passed, knowing that Elieth would have woken with her.

"I did not see it, but I felt it," he acknowledged, voice low and even, and turned on the bedside light as she sat.

Usually, it was her nightmares that wormed their way through the bond and drew him out of bed. Ione had not been on Betazed when it was occupied, but the psychic trauma was shared among her people. She could not know another Betazed who had and not know, intimately, their personal horrors. It was why it was so easy to love Elieth — he cushioned from her all of the many emotions he claimed not to feel but did.

He could reach back on the worst nights and soothe away the sharpest edges of her dreamscapes.

Nothing of the sort could be done for Esket.

Ione voiced the thing she had felt since the girl's arrival in their home, "She doesn't how how not to be afraid."

Elieth stood and moved to pour her water from the basin near their bed, "My mother says she has gone years without the psychological care required for a child who's experienced what she has. Even now, she does not trust it."

She knew little of Cardassian culture, but from what she did, this information did not particularly surprise Ione. Esket seemed to shy away from all things Cardassian, from her clothing to her hair to her food. Whatever Cardassian therapy looked like, it must be something she shied away from as well.

Yet, she dreamt of home the way all children did, even if she could never return there.

"She's waking. We should show her where the sweets are. Nothing soothes a nightmare quite like early morning dessert."

"My mother would disapprove."

Ione smiled, taking the glass he offered her, somehow doubting that.