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“There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom.”
(Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard)
In the aftermath of the fight she fears has forever ended things with Seven, B’Elanna Torres goes to the Musilla Mountains and simply disappears. Tom is away when she decides to leave and so is Harry, though she messages both to let them know she’s taking time off work and will be reachable only on emergency comms. Naomi she leaves in charge of the apartment, reasoning it’s a five-minute walk from the university and she informally lives here anyway, now that her parents have relocated offworld. As B’Elanna walks her through a set of last-minute instructions—how to work the security system, when to water the plants, what to feed the cat-like creature that likes to beg for scraps outside their door—Naomi looks as if she wants to ask a question. A question, no doubt, about their fight, about why Seven has stopped returning all their calls. B’Elanna avoids eye contact and talks too long about which rooms get the best light, as if Naomi doesn’t know.
Down the street from their apartment, adjacent to but not associated with Naomi’s school, is a library. She stops at it on her way to the transport station and feels her shoulders loosen as soon as she steps inside its cool and vaulted stone-carved walls. She’s never been one for libraries before, especially not ones with highly specialized collections, but if the librarian she approaches senses her discomfort or is surprised to see a half-Klingon inside a religious archive on Bajor, they don’t reveal it. They just roll up their sleeves and in half an hour provide enough material to keep her reading for the rest of the year.
At the end as she’s thanking them and clutching a datarod in one hand while twisting the strap of her satchel in the other, she pauses and turns back toward the stacks. “Is there anything…in print?” she asks after a long hesitation. “That I can take with me? Something I can hold?” The librarian smiles the kind of smile that makes B’Elanna think they’ve been waiting their entire life to be asked that question and leads her to a room perfumed with a scent so sweet B’Elanna wishes she could bottle it and take it with her into space. Who would have thought that light and heat and water and wood could smell so good when combined and left to age?
The librarian asks if she’s looking for more of the same topic, and when B’Elanna answers yes, points her toward the far corner of the room. Hundreds of spines, some crisp and some creased, a quadrant’s worth of questions standing sentinel on the shelves. She leaves two hours later bearing an armful of hardcopies and carries them three blocks to the transport station under the warmth of a late-spring sun.
The cabin, once she gets there, is less cabin than room—a skeletal, light-flooded structure stuck atop six spindly legs halfway up a sloping mountain, a remnant of a remnant of a time in Bajor’s past when the government hired people to spend the dry season watching for wildfires in the hills. It isn’t the dry season and they don’t need sentient eyes to spot the smoke anymore, but she spends long hours watching anyway, mesmerized by the hills’ tumultuous hues, every shade of red and orange and green and gold fireworked across the rugged terrain. In the distance, at the bottom of a valley tucked at the extreme edge of the range of her vision, the Holana River winks in the sun.
The books she piles in a corner opposite the floor-to-ceiling windows and forgets about for the first nine days. On the tenth when she wakes as if from a stupor, she discovers she can’t recall a single day. It’s as if her brain forgot to record the hours, unhinged her skull and let the details roll like marbles into the cracks and corners of the room.
Two weeks pass and then three and then four, and somewhere in the middle of those she begins to read. She starts with the datarod and then moves to the books, and there’s something about the books that makes her stay. (Their scent, perhaps, or their heft in her hands, the rasping turn of each read page.) She’s still in the books when Harry texts her. Not an emergency, he assures. Just in the area and wanted to check in. She tells him she’s fine and prefers to be alone, but please, if he’s taking shore leave, stop in on Naomi, make sure she’s doing okay. A few hours later he sends a picture of them smiling on their doorstep, feline friend’s furred face held up between their cheeks.
She knows they’re worried. She can hear it between the lines of the messages they send at the start of every week. She knows she needs to talk about what happened, but she doesn’t know what to say. Instead, she responds with reassuring monosyllables and spends days in front of the windows, watching the light move across the valleys and the trees.
In the middle of the seventh week, long after she’s read and reread the books, B’Elanna Torres begins to pray. It isn’t something she chooses to do. It just sort of happens. One minute she’s standing by the window thinking about a line she read and the next she’s on her knees fumbling her way through the Plea for the Dead. “Kahless,” she says as she hasn’t said since childhood, “I implore you to remember those warriors who have fallen in your name. Lift them out of the cavern of despair, and—”
She falters then, palms pressed to the window, unwilling or unable to go on.
Here is the heart of it, the thing she cannot say: Seven is gone, and B’Elanna is unmoored.
you can get caught holding one end of a love, she reads, when your father drops, and your mother; when a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone, your brother’s body spoiled, and cold, your infant dead, and you dying: you reel out love’s long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting.
The ninth week, her comm chimes once, twice, three times in a row. She lunges out of bed, tripping over the blankets in her haste, and gropes for the device. A message from Tom, eleven words, three lines, each one sucking a little more oxygen out of the room. Icheb is dead. Ranger mission. We don’t know where Seven is. And then a few minutes later, Are you okay? We’re coming home.
I’m fine— she types.
Then, Don’t wor
Then, What hap
Where
Was Seven
I can’t leave, she finally types and doesn’t delete. But Naomi. Please make sure she’s okay.
Then, because it’s been eleven years and they still haven’t forgotten what happened after she heard about the Maquis, she says, I won’t be alone. I’m calling Ro.
She’s close by. A transport away. Turns out Tom contacted her weeks ago, asked her to stick around until he or Harry could arrange enough leave to come home. Ro expects her to be angry—they all expect her to be angry—but the weeks of silence with the books and the mountains and the light and the trees have scoured her of any emotion beyond this deep and welling grief. When Ro arrives, B’Elanna goes to her willingly, folds herself into her arms with relief.
“Seven’s gone,” she says. And then, “Icheb’s dead.” And then, “I don’t know what’s happening to me.” And then she stops being able to speak.
Ro doesn’t push. She knows how to handle this. She’s lost more people than B’Elanna can imagine, and the fact that she’s here in this light-riddled room, thumbing the tears from B’Elanna’s cheeks instead of refusing to share the burden of yet another person’s grief is more than B’Elanna could ever ask for. She closes her eyes and pulls Ro’s mouth to her own. Tries her best not to think.
“Aren’t you going to ask about the books?”
“Not my business,” Ro replies, cinching her robe and padding on bare feet across the dawning room. She replicates two mugs of coffee and brings them back to bed, offers one to B’Elanna and nestles the second between her crisscrossed legs. “But if you want to talk about them, I’m all ears.”
B’Elanna cradles the mug to her chest and lets the steam dance along her jaw and neck. “Do you ever pray?”
Ro startles. Barely, but enough.
“You don’t have to—”
“No.”
“Right. Okay. I didn’t think so, but some things change.” Silence descends, awkward, brittle, while B’Elanna sips her coffee and rolls it around her tongue. “Would you think less of me?” she asks at last. “If I said I’ve started praying?”
Ro’s eyes snap to hers once more, but this time her expression softens. “Never,” she replies, leaning forward, fingers warm on B’Elanna’s knee.
“The thing is I don’t really believe it.”
Ro looks up from her stretch down on the floor. “Believe what?”
“Any of it. Kahless, the prayers, the rituals, the rites. It just seems like so much baggage to me.”
“But?”
“But I can’t—” her breath hitches and she grips the book she’s holding so hard her nails mark half-moons in the page. “I keep saying them. The words. I keep reaching for them over and over in my mind.”
Ro spreads her feet wide and bends at the waist, rests the crown of her head on the boards. After a long moment, she plants her palms and rises up, settles into a cross-legged seat on the floor.
“I guess the thing I’m worried about is that I’m being hypocritical. Saying these things when I have no belief. When I have no intention of belief.” Their eyes meet, and B’Elanna smiles sadly, giving a one-shouldered shrug. “Forty years old and still worried I’m not enough.” She scoffs. “Some things never change.”
Ro bends her knee and twists to the right, spine perpendicular to the ground. “I don’t pray,” she says flatly. “But I know people who pray. And sometimes I stick around when they do. It took me a long time to admit it, but… I find it comforting. Not the meaning, but the words. The sounds. Their shapes. They’re woven into me, for better or worse.” She stops and comes back to center, gaze slanting to the floor. Then she lifts her chin and pins B’Elanna with a sharp-eyed look. “But I don’t believe in the Prophets. At all. Never will. Does that make me a bad Bajoran? Maybe. But does it make me less of one? Not at all.”
Days later, in bed, when the largest pieces of B’Elanna’s grief have broken off and drifted into a warming sea, Laren grips her hips and holds her as she arches into rose-gold light. “This is what I believe in,” Laren reveals when they’re spent and drowsing in the tangled sheets. “Connection. The body. Its wants, its needs.” She splays her hand across B’Elanna’s belly, and B’Elanna burrows into Laren’s shoulder and stays.
She thinks of Voyager, of the strange, inexplicable encounter with her mother on the Barge of the Dead. She had been so certain of one thing and then so certain of another that she barely remembers the time in between. “I guess,” she ventures, “I don’t know what I believe. And I suppose this is the longest I’ve ever not been sure.” Laren doesn’t respond and B’Elanna thinks that’s the end of the conversation, but then a long time later just before she slides asleep, Ro’s arms tighten around her.
“Come with me tomorrow. To meet a friend. She’s helped me these past ten years. I think you’d like her.”
B’Elanna doesn’t know how to identify the emotions threading through Ro’s voice, just that this is the first time she’s been allowed to hear them. She nudges her nose up into the warmth of Laren’s neck, breathes the heady scent of her, the sweetness of the nearby books. “Okay,” she whispers, kissing first her jaw and then her cheek. “Tomorrow. We’ll meet.”
Kira Nerys is not at all who B’Elanna expected her to be, which is to say she’s heard a hundred stories about this woman and did not anticipate meeting a hero of both the Resistance and the Dominion War—not to mention a dozen other crises in between—at all, much less while wrist-deep in loamy earth.
They’ve traveled only a handful of miles south of B’Elanna’s place, though she’d never guess it due to the terrain. The path they follow after beaming into the valley winds through a forest and spills into a clearing with a cottage and a garden and a view of the river that plucks the breath out of her throat.
Nerys is on her knees in the garden unearthing basket after basket of what looks like muddy roots. She doesn’t look up when they enter the clearing, but B’Elanna can tell from the set of her shoulders that she heard them coming a long way off. She waits until they reach the garden, then stops digging and greets them with a smile that transforms her entire face.
“B’Elanna. Welcome. I am so pleased to meet you.” She stands and steps over the half-dug row of vegetables, not bothering to brush the dirt from her hands, just smiling and reaching and grasping and holding and gods, B’Elanna is finding it so strangely hard to breathe.
Ten minutes later she’s wrist-deep in her own row of dirt, digging up what she learns is kava root—(Nerys has already harvested the fruit) (it sounds like later they’ll be making springwine)—and the odd thing is she doesn’t even mind. There’s something soothingly mind-numbing about the work, the light and the shade and the breeze and the birds, the flex of her arms and the sweat beading her shoulders, the murmur of voices as they work.
(“Since when did you get into gardening?”
“Ezri talked me into it. What? Don’t give me that look.”
“What look?”
“You know what look. Quit digging so hard, you’re gonna break the roots.”
“We’re going to break them when we cook them anyway.”
“Yes but—” (a sigh). “You have dirt on your nose.”
“I have dirt on my hands. It was bound to happen sometime.”
“You’ve been out here for five minutes!”
(laughter)
(jostling)
(a noise of surprise)
“There,” Ro says, and B’Elanna hears her smirk, “now we match.”
“You bastard,” Kira says, and the words are warm and stretch like taffy across her grin.)
Later, inside the house, standing at the sink and wringing kava fruit through coarse-woven cloths until the juice runs out in pastel streams, Nerys turns to B’Elanna and asks about the books.
Actually, what she says is, Laren mentioned you like to read.
They begin then to talk about Bajor, how wonderful it is to see it has healed enough to house not just libraries again but books, hardcopy books from around the quadrant, and a digital collection a thousand times that size.
B’Elanna had not planned to reveal herself to this woman, much less spill all the angst of the past three months, but as she watches Nerys wring a cloth full of kava into a narrow-necked jug without spilling a drop, she opens her mouth and words roll out.
Words about Seven. About the fight. About Voyager. About the two of them and how they were the only ones to come into this quadrant feeling like it wasn’t home. About what it’s like to fucking lose that person after eight years of having her around—twelve, if she counts the years on Voyager—and what grief does to the mind and what the mind does to the body and what the body does when it decides to stop moving through the world. She talks about the prayers and the way they’ve been bubbling inside her, about their strange comfort despite a life of disbelief, about how she misses her mother (something she’s never ever spoken out loud) and how she doesn’t miss her father, and how that is also new. She talks and she talks and she talks about the books—about the library and its soaring arches, the Bajorans who didn’t question her presence there at all; about the scrolls and the myths and the doubts and the questions; about the rabbi from Earth’s twentieth century who wrote about loneliness and longing so well that whenever she reads his novels she feels gripped at the throat.
The words stop as abruptly as they started, and B’Elanna snaps her mouth shut and casts her gaze into the sink. She grips the edge of the counter hard as heat bleeds through her cheeks. Nerys stays silent for a long, steady moment, then rinses her hands and touches B’Elanna’s arm.
“Balcony,” she says, voice firm and gentle, and then, “We’ll drink raktajino. Or tea, if you prefer.”
Ro looks over from across the room and smiles—a sad, deep-eyed smile that hooks her ribs and pulls. I don’t get it, the smile says, but Nerys does, and she gets me and I get you, and I think, if given the chance, you’ll get each other too. B’Elanna closes the distance between them and pulls Laren into her arms. “Thank you,” she whispers, standing on tip-toe with tears in her eyes. And then she blinks and turns and takes a deep breath and follows Nerys outside.