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Language:
English
Series:
Part 9 of Discord Weekly Challenges
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Published:
2024-07-04
Words:
384
Chapters:
1/1
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15

grounding forces

Summary:

Until she joined the Rangers, it had been years since Naomi lived in space. And Seven had warned her about the tedium. That's not what gets to her. What gets her is how quiet it is.

Notes:

Set significantly post-Voyager, but pre-Picard. This kind of belongs to both fandoms, but also to neither

Chapter 1

Chapter Text

Until she joined the Rangers, it had been years since Naomi lived in space.

Most of her life, her mother likes to remind her, has been spent on Earth, and sometimes Ktaris. Either way, firmly planetside.

And Seven had warned her - in those early days, when Naomi was still new, still in training, not allowed to fly on her own yet - about the tedium. The long stretches of time where nothing happens at all, where there’s nothing to do but ferry supplies to various backwater colonies, and wait.

That those are the good times.

And she can handle that. Naomi has always been good at passing time. She’s taken up knitting; brushed up on her engineering; programmed her ship’s replicator to create something that bears more than a passing resemblance to what she remembers Neelix’s leola root stew tasting like. That last one, she probably should have left to nostalgia. It’s absolutely disgusting.

What gets her is how quiet it is.

How she can drop a hyperspanner and the loud clatter of metal-on-metal will only startle her. How she can go days without hearing a single word, and weeks without hearing one spoken by someone who isn’t her.

Voyager was sometimes dull, but it was never quiet.

And she was never this alone.

Seven had encouraged her, when she first signed on, to maintain her relationships back home. People she could call whenever she was in range. People who would be happy to hear from her. She had thought she was being clever when she asked Seven who that person was for her. That she might catch her in a moment of hypocrisy. But Seven had just frowned, and said, “you.”

She gets it now, sort of. How important it is to have some grounding force outside of this life. Even just one person, even just for the occasional call when time and subspace allow for it.

They would, right now.

And she feels strangely trepidatious about it, even as she settles down in front of the screen. Even as she selects the name from the admittedly short menu of personal contacts.

There’s static, a slightly garbled ringing. She’s only just in range. But the face that pops up on the screen, though blurred at the edges, is still comfortingly familiar.

“Mom? It’s me.”

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