Chapter Text
“It’s a very tempting commission, but you know you don’t have to take it.”
Diane Chester has her head and shoulders inside the industrial oven–the crummy, temperamental one–in the family bakery. It is a bad time to be startled, doubly so because she is in no way a short woman, and even the slightest twitch brings the back of her skull into sharp contact with the top of the oven. She bashes a shoulder trying to put a hand to her head.
But at least it gives her an excuse to hide her expression from her grandmother. At least until she figures out how exactly she feels about said grandmother–one of the Federation’s greatest (retired) warp scientists–figuring out about the message from Starfleet Command Chester hasn’t mentioned to any of the family.
She puts down the old fashioned screwdriver that the antique oven demands, and glares at the blackened heating element she’s been trying to unearth for the last twenty minutes. She should have counted on this. Dr. Chirou Zhai isn’t just foremost in her field–she’s an incurable snoop.
Chester also should have known better than to come back in from the roof deck, but she’s spent so much time feeling useless over the last eight months that she had to do something. Besides, watching the shuttle traffic coming into Starfleet Command hardly put her in the right frame of mind to make this decision.
She wiggles around to frown at her grandmother, who’s twirling a microwelder around her fingers, obviously just waiting for Chester to give up on the repair and let her take over. Her iron-gray hair is pulled back in the tight regulation bun just like it is in the pictures of her when she was the chief engineer of the Excelsior , but now she’s tiny and birdlike, and the usual mischief in her dark eyes is replaced with worry. “I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to be reading my correspondence, grandmama.”
A snort. “Who said anything about your correspondence? Nimura told me. She heard it from–”
Chester prods the dead heating element with a tentative finger, and reflects that the fastest communications known to science aren’t subspace transmissions, but the gossip network of retired Starfleet engineers. A network her grandmother keeps well primed with a steady stream of homemade bao and shameless flattery. In this case, it’s paid off–apparently the source here was the commanding admiral’s mother .
How grandmama knows Admiral Ross’s mother is a mystery, and Chester, for once, isn’t overly inclined to investigate. She starts picking at the socket of the element. Yep, completely fused. Again. Updating the oven’s been one of grandmama’s little projects, but ovens are not warp engines. This one might be dead for good now–and if they get a new one, grandma will want to ‘stress test’ it.
All else aside, being on the other side of the quadrant for that sounds pretty good.
“Whatever you do, we’ll be proud of you,” her grandmother is saying. “It’s not that I’m not proud to have my granddaughter following in my footsteps–even if you didn’t go into Engineering like anyone with sense –but well.” She pauses, and behind her, Chester can all but feel the cheerful little bakery cloud up, like it has every time the war’s mentioned. “Significantly less of my granddaughter came home from her last mission, and I’d prefer that to not happen again.”
In the privacy of the oven, Chester makes a face. Okay, it’s in line with her own humor about her injuries, and she appreciates grandmama matching her tone, but that doesn’t mean she wants all her decisions to come down to said injuries. “The artificial eye works fine, grandmama. I don’t even have to worry about getting eyelashes in it anymore. And they grew back everything else important–” which was a lot of things that she’d really prefer not to think about, the whole experience seems a lot more horrible now than it did then, with a knife actually in her guts, “so really, it’s just the eye. Regenerated livers are supposed to be 3% more efficient, did you know?”
“For all the wild binges you don’t do,” her grandmother says wryly, and there’s a brief silence after that. Grandmama did not just mean the physical injuries. They both know it. Chester doesn’t need to look behind her to know the worry is back.
“It’s soon,” says her grandmother, and there’s a quiet tap as she sets the tool she’s fiddling with on the counter. “It’s very soon. There will be other ships, with different missions. Ships that aren’t so new the controls still squeak, missions not in the Gamma Quadrant. We’re proud of you. That’s not going to change.”
Now Chester really hesitates. Grandmama has always been encouraging. Almost too encouraging. This, right now? Sounds like Mom. Mom who grew up on a starship, and decided to hell with the whole space exploration thing, she was going to stay on Earth and open a bakery, where the gravity stayed on and subspace anomalies hardly ever ate anyone. Grandmama offering her an out feels like a betrayal.
It’s the depth to which that hurts her feelings that makes her realize she’s already made up her mind. She’s taking the commission. The ship. She wants it like she’s not wanted anything since–well, since Cardassia. She’s not been letting herself want things since then. She’s not dared. She feels like she walked away with far too much.
Because she nearly died there. She should have died, all of them should have died. Fishing a hundred thirty survivors out of the wreckage of the USS Bedivere is supposed to be the crowning glory of Chester’s career. A hundred thirty, out of seven hundred.
It’s horrible enough for Chester, but worse is how it’s scared her family. They’ve been trying not to bring their own feelings up too much over these months of medical leave, but it slips out anyway, in how her mom’s been snatching heavy things out of her hands, how her dad reaches to steady her when she doesn’t need it, how sometimes there’s a lapse in conversation at the dinner table and she looks up to find all of them looking at her like she’ll slip away if they don’t keep an eye on her. She even found her mom looking in on her like a child one night–that only happened once, because she’d bolted awake asking for a status report. During the war, someone opening your door in the middle of the night meant something very, very wrong.
And now, with the commission in hand–it’s all going to come up again, only much, much worse. Because they know exactly how bad it can be, and she’s still heading back into it.
She sighs. No way she’s finishing this conversation in the oven. No way she’s fixing the oven herself, either. She carefully backs out, wincing as she straightens up and stretches. Six one, all her dad’s fault if you ask mom or grandma.
“The heating element is completely fused,” she says, and takes the opportunity to re-tie her ponytail, getting strands of long black hair out of her face.
Her grandmother gives her a totally unimpressed look. “So you’re taking it.”
“Who said anything about…” Chester looks at her grandmother’s face, and gives up. “Did the admiral’s mother tell you that, too?”
“No. You’re not upset.” Her grandmother is not particularly given to emoting strongly, but the uncertain and mixed pride and fear are there all the same. Chester abruptly remembers arriving home, a compression bandage still tight around her abdomen, supporting the new tissues, and her new eye occasionally resetting, still integrating with her nervous system, and her grandmother with the exact same expression hugging her carefully and saying, “A lot of officers have lost ships like you–not a lot walk away with as many people alive as you did,” which had been outright laughable at the time. The majority of the Bedivere’s crew had died within the first forty minutes after Chester took command; the two-hundred odd who’d survived the crash on Cardassia had been steadily winnowed down by Jem’Hadar attacks before the Klingon front line had reached them, six hours later.
A lot of Chester’s time with Starfleet Recovery Services has been spent reviewing that crash and the forces involved. She can, intellectually at least, accept that none of them had had any business at all walking away from the wreck.
But it’s a lot of death. A lot of death, on top of many others. When she takes this commission, Chester will become one of the youngest captains in Starfleet history. And because of what the war had done to Starfleet, she’ll have plenty of company.
“So you’re taking it,” her grandmother says. “Why? And remember, we’re going to have to get this past your mother.” She offers a smile, suddenly all mischief, and Chester can’t help grinning back, relieved. The expression brings the similarities of their faces to the forefront; round, coming to a sharp point of a chin, wide dark eyes with an expression of pleased surprise in them, even at rest.
“Because…” Chester looks down, leaned against the oven and then shifts to the counter when the entire thing lurches, and hesitates, because she hasn’t said it out loud yet and abruptly, it seems stupid. She’s not sure she has the words–strange for someone whose entire training has been words. “I told you when I came home that I turned out to be a very good soldier during the war. I realized I was very good at killing.” She stares down at her feet, seeing not her bright sandals on the scuffed restaurant floor, but boots on Starfleet-issue carpet. “I don’t like that, and I especially don’t like being called a hero for it. When I said I wasn’t going back–that was why. I don’t want to be that person for the rest of my life, and between the Borg and the Romulans and whatever the hell is going to happen with the Gamma Quadrant, I’m worried Starfleet’s going to ask me to do just that.”
“And you’re still going back because…?” her grandmother prods. They’ve had that conversation once before, brief and miserable, when everything was so fresh Chester couldn’t help but talk about it. They haven’t since.
“Because there’s something better than running from that possibility. It’s making sure it doesn’t happen. They’re sending us to the Gamma Quadrant, to mend fences, help people–and stop the next war. Stop the territories the Dominion’s ceding from erupting into territorial conflicts. The Armistice Class was built to be warships; they’re getting refitted for aid and exploration.” She lifts and drops a shoulder. “Just like me.”
Her grandmother is watching her, thoughtful. The worry has gone out of her eyes.
“I have to do this,” Chester says, and in the little back kitchen of the old bakery, with the peeling old Year of the Monkey calendar on the wall and the cooling unit that makes loud creaking noises coughing to life, here in the midst of a hot spell in the Northern California autumn, where she’s wearing a ratty old short-sleeved shirt, its garish colors long faded and soot up to her shoulders, it feels more real than if she was saying it in the captain’s uniform they’re promising her, in some shiny briefing room. “I wanted to be a Starfleet officer, not a soldier–and I wanted to be a captain and get out there and help people. We fought a war, and if I can’t go back out there and start in the right direction myself, I can’t expect it from anyone else. I want to come back from what I became during the war, and I don’t think I’m the only one, so I’d better go start doing it.”
It’s a lot to say, even to family, and she finds herself tensing as she waits for her grandmother to respond.
“Good,” her grandmother says. “You sound like yourself again.”
Sounding like herself and feeling like herself are two different things, but Chester supposes it’s a start. She’ll have plenty of time to work on the rest of it on her way to Deep Space Nine.
Deep Space Nine. The Interpreter is already on its way. Her new command.
“Now, what did you say the ship was again? Armistice Class?” Her grandmother wipes her hands off and heads out of the kitchen and upstairs to the family apartment. Chester looks at the still-broken oven, at her grandmother’s retreating back. “What are you doing?”
“Calling that old rascal Montgomery Scott and seeing what kind of ship he’s proposing to saddle my favorite granddaughter with!”