Chapter Text
Hawthorne wants nothing to do with whatever’s going on between the Captain and her murderous shit of a counterpart—that poor bastard she’s got as wall decoration makes it pretty clear what she’s like—but he can’t say he’s thrilled about his, either. Working with the fascists in the mirror universe, great. He’d like to think he’d be better than that, but apparently not.
At least his alternate seemed… unenthusiastic. And he was pretty sure he had a better chance working with his unenthusiastic alternate than whatever was going on with his Captain’s alternate.
His counterpart leads him into the turbolift. “Engineering,” he says, and then stands there and frowns at Hawthorne as the lift hums.
Hawthorne is perfectly willing to let him marinate in his own juices. He leans against the wall and glares back.
“Hold,” says his counterpart. Then he looks hard at Hawthorne. “You don’t like your captain very much,” he says.
“Doesn’t matter whether or not I like her. We have some pretty strong policies against helping fascists in our universe,” says Hawthorne, glaring.
Whatever he was expecting, it’s not for his alternate to deflate, looking down. “Yeah,” he says. “So did we.”
That… sounded more like him. That … was a start. “What happened?”
His counterpart lifts and drops a shoulder. “The emperor returned.”
“Yes, and?”
“And Admiral Chester,” there’s an inflection of disgust, ever so slight, in his alternate’s voice, “decided she wanted to be on the winning side.”
“So you don’t like your Admiral,” says Hawthorne. “From over here, it still looks like you’re working with her just fine.”
“Do I look like I have a choice?”
Hawthorne doesn’t dignify that with an answer.
“Look, I don’t know what your captain there did to you, but if she’s anything like the Admiral…” He trails off, like he doesn’t know what to say, then, more quietly, “I wouldn’t cry over her, either.”
There’s a cold dread in the back of Hawthorne’s mind now, but he asks anyway. “So what did your ‘Admiral’ do to you?”
“She killed everyone I ever cared about.” It’s a flat statement, despair, and the confirmation of everything Hawthorne’s feared from his own Captain Chester.
Two years ago, he woke up from a catastrophic explosion that never should have happened with his team dead and unknown technology in his skull. They told him it was Dominion. But his best friend, Marbog—a Choblik and one of the Federation’s foremost cybernetics experts—knew better.
Marbog knew it was Federation tech, not Dominion. And Hawthorne knew for damn sure that the new faces around the station, the ones pushing to accelerate the timeline right before everything went to hell, were also Starfleet.
Those cybernetics? The original version was supposed to be for mind control. Someone killed his team and tried to turn him into their own personal puppet. It wasn’t the Dominion. It was someone using Federation tech and Starfleet officers, and Hawthorne only had one conclusion he could draw from that. That there’s something rotten in the core of an institution he used to believe in.
And that if they interfered in his project, they most certainly will interfere with the new, state-of-the-art warship headed to the Gamma Quadrant to stabilize it. And what better agent to have aboard than the captain?
The captain’s young for her position. Oh, sure, they’ve cooked up a fantastical story about the crash of the Bedivere . It might even have happened. Maybe it was what recruited her to work for them. The thing is, she’s too young for her position. She’s got too many weird gaps in her records. And if Hawthorne were Secret Police, and if he were picking out people to lead his totally-not-a-conquest venture into the Gamma Quadrant, he’d absolutely make sure the Captain was someone he could trust.
That she pretends to be such a perfect Starfleet officer, all morals and conscience and saying exactly the right things at exactly the right times, is adding insult to injury.
That she could turn around and kill everyone Hawthorne cares about, doing exactly what he’s afraid she might do to Interpreter and its crew…
…well it’s what keeps him awake at night.
Very literally.
He takes a deep breath. “Your version. You trusted her?”
His counterpart gives him a bitter look. “Yeah. Like the idiot I am.”
Hawthorne swallows hard. “Mine… I think she’s up to something. I don’t trust her.”
His counterpart nods, a sharp pained gesture. “Good for you. Keep it that way. Or get trapped into this.” He gestures. “She killed her entire crew except for me and her grandmother. She kept me because she thought I was useful.” His mouth twists, bitterly. “Every last one of them, because she saw the chance to get the Emperor’s favor, and she went for it. Then she went after everyone else. Smiley never had a chance—he never saw it coming from one of his own people. She’d always believed in our freedom, too. Or she said she did. Turned out what she believed in was getting to be one of the people doing the oppressing, and the instant she thought she could have it, she did anything and everything to get it. Whatever else you can say about her, she’s decisive.”
Hawthorne thinks of his own Chester, even in the last few minutes when she was being hauled away by Tanek’s alternate. “Yeah, you can say that again.”
They look at each other across the turbolift, and Hawthorne realizes just how much his nightmare the man across from him is. He’s not got any trace of the cybernetics that the fascists tried to control Piper himself with, but he’s being controlled all the same. Hawthorne really doesn’t want to think he would have made the same decisions in his alternate’s place… but at the end of the day, that’s what having an alternate means , isn’t it? That if things had been a little different, it could be him standing there. The chief engineer and lackey to a murderous fascist.
He thinks about the Captain, and wishes that he was a little less certain that she is a murderous fascist.
“So,” he says, all too aware his alternate is supposed to be here, turning him against Starfleet, the decent parts of it, “how do we not help the murderous fascists out?”
His alternate stares at him, and then tries something like a smile. It’s pretty horrible, but Hawthorne forces himself to return it. “I have a few ideas.”
J’etris looks down the table of assembled senior officers and keeps her disappointment hidden. They’re in the first few months of their first cruise, she reminds herself. It’s only to be expected that people are still settling in. Coherence in a starship crew takes time to develop. Trust, even longer. These are all people accustomed to other ships, other crews, and it will take time.
But the briefing room feels like a bunch of strangers, not a team. Everyone still has their guard up. Exhausted from the war, hammered on by a malfunctioning ship, now stranded until the cores come back online… The circumstances are bad, and the sudden pall cast by the Captain’s absence makes J’etris realize just how much Diane’s been holding them all together by sheer force of personality.
No wonder she was so damn stupid on the station. J’etris resolves to do more, so Diane’s not the only one working on crew coherence, and there’s no time like the presence.
“Captain Chester and Lt. Commander Hawthorne were abducted by what we have gathered was a force in the mirror universe,” she says. “Details of previous encounters are in your briefing materials. Lieutenant Fult and I,” she nods at the Tellarite woman, “have come to the conclusion that this is very likely the opening movement of an attack on the Interpreter . Our engine trouble is very likely related.
“To that end: Engineering, while the restoration of our warp drives is a delicate process, we will need to expedite it. The alternative is getting caught without power when our friends on the other side move to the next stage of their plans. Additionally,” she folds her arms, “ someone out there has decided that they can take our officers at will. I intend to discourage them.”
She looks up and down the length of the table, and is pleased to see a similar determination on the faces of her fellow officers.
“We have little historical data on the mirror universe, only secondhand accounts from what little previous officers have been able to glean in their time there,” she says. “Our temporary guest’s debriefing indicated the balance of power has shifted once again, back to a ‘Terran Empire’ similar to the one encountered by the original Enterprise. The logs from the officers involved in that crossover indicate an authoritarian regime that functioned on cruelty and intimidation.”
“Such a regime would find our ship very interesting,” Fult puts in. “Which is very likely why this initial attack targeted the two officers most of use in a plot to capture it.”
Both officers’ access codes have already been changed, and Diane’s command codes placed in abeyance. Those orders were no easier to give now than they were during the war, and it’s the smoldering anger of that which spurs J’etris to add, “However they are used to doing things in their galaxy, I intend to give them a rude welcome.” She looks down the table, catching people’s eyes as she does; Dr. Tyrell looks back at her steadily, Counselor Rala meets her gaze briefly before his attention goes back to his padd. Commander Salera is the picture of Vulcan control, but there is a slight tenseness to her shoulders and the set of her jaw that speaks to concern. Fult is visibly enraged. “This is a new ship,” she says, “and a new crew. We’re still finding our feet with one another—which way our colleagues will jump, how they’ll fight when we’re in a tight place. And out here, we’re facing situations that would challenge an experienced crew, one that had worked together for years, one with a ship they knew as well as they knew one another. But right now, our lack of familiarity with one another doesn’t matter. These people have come onto our ship, into our home, however new it is, and taken our people.
“Captain Chester is fond of quoting the words of another Starfleet captain in circumstances like this. That Starfleet is a promise. That you will not be left behind.” She stops, lets the words sink in. “We will be making good on that promise today, gentlebeings. We’re going after our people. And be damned to anyone who stands in our way.”
“Good speech, sir,” says Fult as the rest of them trickle out. “I just wish it could get the engines back online. And get us a sample of their technology so we can actually track them down.”
J’etris huffs a quiet laugh. “That’s on the to-do list.”
Fult stands. “You’ve known the Captain longer than I have,” she says. “Is there a possibility she’ll extract herself?”
J’etris thinks about this for a moment. “Lieutenant, if we don’t get a call from the mirror universe in the next few hours begging us to come take her back, I will be very surprised.”
The other Tanek deposits her on the ready room couch. He’s careful about it, too, as if he thinks she’s something immensely fragile and valuable.
Given that her alternate’s not been interested in anything but her discomfort, Chester finds this unsettling. She looks around the room, noting differences, and trying to ignore the way this Tanek has taken up guard over her, watching her intently like a dog waiting for a promised treat.
That’s not a thought that goes anywhere comforting or good.
The ready room is certainly not like her own. Hers is comfortable, but still sparing. She’s got some pictures—the restaurant again—and a good luck knot, and that old one of her and Captain Steenburg, after her promotion, and one of the little bao decorations from the restaurant pinned up near her desk. It’s the one with the crossed eyes, and there are three others still in the window of their bakery back home, now much faded. Her dad drew the originals on a corner of his lecture notes when she was twelve, and it made her giggle so much he had them printed for the window, and she’s taken a copy of that one with her from the Academy to the Bedivere . The one on Interpreter is new; the old one burned in the crash.
This is…
…it’s like someone’s been reading about her Chinese heritage, but hasn’t really understood it. It’s a clutter of artifacts, the cheap next to the genuine, with no real grouping or apparent recognition of which is which. It’s trying too hard, without knowing what it’s trying to do.
Chester’s own family is a blend of cultures, but it’s a far more comfortable one than she’s seeing here.
But in this universe, the Terrans were conquered. This mess in front of her, this aspirational packrat horde—it’s probably all her alternate’s got of her heritage. For a moment, Chester might almost feel bad for her, but the shattered corpse (hopefully corpse) on the wall out there tends to put a dampener on it.
The door opens. Her alternate comes in, the spare elegance of her white coat in garish contrast to her surroundings. “Tanek,” she says, and Tanek straightens, his attention abruptly fixed on her, “be a darling and go over there and wrap up the loose end we talked about?”
“He’d better not harm any of my crew,” Chester says. “If so, I won’t have a reason to cooperate.”
It’s a risk, and her skin prickles as they both look at her. Tanek appears genuinely startled. Her alternate, faintly disappointed.
After a long moment, where Chester wonders if she’s torn it, her alternate waves a dismissive hand. “Humor her, dear one. Don’t harm a hair on his head.”
Tanek glances at Chester again, then at her alternate. Then he gives her a bow several degrees more respectful than anything Chester’s ever had from her Tanek, and slips silently from the room.
“Charming fellow,” Chester says.
“Isn’t he though,” says her alternate, clearly pleased. “The Romulans sent him to spy on me. I decided to keep him. He’s good at his job.”
The types of jobs Tanek is good at, as a Tal Shiar agent, are not pleasant ones. Chester keeps silent, in favor of examining her alternate.
Up close, the resemblance is even more uncanny. Chester wishes there was something more alien to the face in front of her. Something that she could point to and say, no, that’s not me . But there isn’t. Not even that dissected corpse on the wall of the bridge. She knows the vicious desire to maim, to hurt, and she knows that if she were to give into it, she’d want to make sure it was a really effective demonstration that people wouldn’t forget in a hurry. She’d want to keep the reminder around.
And she’d want to do it with her own hands in front of everyone, with minimal assistance, to make everyone realize they’re in danger of the same thing, and that should she need to deal with them personally, she’s not going to need any bodyguards for it.
So she is absolutely certain that her alternate did that herself. And she wishes she could say this makes them completely different.
But it does not, and pretending it does not is leading herself into a trap. A certainty that she has the moral high ground, that she is inherently better than her alternate. And that, ironically, is the best possible way to ensure that she’ll turn out just as bad.
Her counterpart stalks up to her, considering. “Start talking, Captain. I look forward to what you have to say.”
Chester shrugs a little. “Can I have the cuffs off, first? It’s not the easiest way to have a conversation.”
Her alternate smiles a little, and reaches out to take her chin in her hand. Chester lets her head be tilted this way and that.
She needs her counterpart to trust her. To see just enough of herself to be interested, and just enough difference to underestimate her. It’s a fine line to walk. If she decides Chester is too much like her, she’ll kill her out of hand. Too high a threat. If she decides Chester is totally different—
—Well, if she’s lucky, she’ll end up as the newest wall decor.
Her counterpart is interested in her pain. And if the way the Admiral is examining her right now is platonic, Chester will eat her figurative hat.
That gives her leverage.
It probably won’t be very pleasant leverage, but if it means getting herself and Hawthorne out of here and warning her crew, she’s using it. The question is whether her counterpart will be stupid enough to give her that leverage. She wouldn’t.
“Normally,” her counterpart purrs, “I’d make you prove you could be trusted. But I don’t think I need to do that. Captain.” The title is whiskers off an insult. She circles around behind Chester, one of her hands closing around Chester’s wrist, and does something to the lock on the cuffs. They chirp open.
Chester spends a moment deciding whether to attack. Call it quits right here and now, take her alternate hostage, and demand an end to this mess. Or simply fight her, and see if she can’t get her alternate distracted that way. She has a feeling that might just count as flirtatious here.
She decides not to push it. She also decides she’s given the Admiral enough flirtatious advances; if her counterpart wants things to go that way, she’s going to have to work for it. Too much eagerness on her part, and her alternate will suspect a trap. So she simply rubs her wrists when the cuffs are released and sits down on the very comfortable ready room couch as if she’s perfectly at ease. “So,” she says. “I take it you want my ship. I’m not giving it to you.”
“I don’t see you having much of a choice in the matter.” Her alternate leans against her desk and smiles. Chester really doesn’t like that smile.
“You’d be surprised,” she says. “However, I think there’s more than enough room for us to come to an agreement. The Intendant, assuming she wasn’t lying—“
“—As she so often is—”
“—indicated that you’re still cleaning up from the Alliance, and that you could use some help with that.” She watches her alternate closely. Can she negotiate her way out of this? Or will her alternate assume weakness and nothing else?
“And you’re offering it, is that it? I was under the impression that your people had non-interference regulations.”
“We do,” says Chester, “but I have a certain amount of wiggle room where my ship and crew and their safety are concerned. Furthermore, I think it’s much more in our interests to have you and yours in control over here, not the Alliance. Previous reports of their activities were quite illuminating. Command will look the other way.”
“Mercenary of you,” her counterpart remarks.
“Besides,” says Chester, “when else will I get to work with someone who can keep up with me?”
Her alternate lets out a breath of a laugh. “You really think you’re charming, don’t you,” she says. “And clever. Able to get yourself out of anything just by talking. We have some information on Starfleet captains, you know. Always the diplomatic option. Always the soft option. Remarkable that your civilization has even survived, when it destroyed ours.”
Chester meets her eyes, steady. Gotcha. “We have found it effective in our own universe.”
Her alternate smiles, mocking. “Yes. Your universe. Your kind, soft universe, where Terrans are somehow the top of the heap.”
“You seem to have been making some progress toward changing that here.”
“Progress, yes. But not enough to trust readily. Tell me, Captain , what would you have me do?”
“I can offer help,” she says. “Within certain limits, of course. But it’ll go much better for you and your people, not having to figure out our technology from what wiped computers and the smoldering hulk of my ship will tell you—because if you take my ship, my crew and I will make damn sure you’re going to have as hard a time as possible getting anything useful from it.” She lifts and drops a shoulder. “I’m fairly certain you don’t intend any of us to survive this little exercise.”
“You make a compelling argument, Captain,” says her alternate.
“So talk to me. Tell me about your plan. Let me see if we can cooperate.”
Her counterpart favors her with an arch look. “And exactly how much would you have me tell you about my plan, Captain?”
“More than none of it.” Chester leans back in her chair and crosses her legs, a facade of ease just as artificial as her counterpart’s unimpressed expression. She has tried the carrot, now for the stick. “I take it you did something in order to force the Interpreter out of warp. And I take it there was a reason other than me that you sent your errand girl aboard. What I don’t understand is how exactly you were intending to secure my ship without my cooperation.” She rests an elbow on the couch arm and props her chin on her hand, raising her eyebrows. “I don’t count on people’s cooperation. I rather doubt you do, either.”
Her alternate snorts, turning away.
“Trust me or don’t,” says Chester. “But understand this; any of my crew will blow the Interpreter to hell before handing it over to you. You get nothing without my help. Cooperate, or we die…and you get to tell your superiors about your failure.”
Her alternate snarls and rounds on her, and Chester has half a moment to brace herself, before there’s a dagger at her eye, a cold line resting along her cheek, and her alternate leaning in close. “I’m perfectly capable of giving you reasons to cooperate, Captain.”
Chester spends a moment feeling very, very glad that her alternate’s gone for her artificial eye, the one that still doesn’t quite feel like hers . She keeps it open, even with the knife right there, because the biopolymer doing duty as a cornea doesn’t have pain sensors. Her reward is the deep unease that flits across her alternate’s face. She squashes the impulse to say, Sorry, someone else already beat you to that one. She doesn’t need her alternate going for her remaining good eye. Instead, she just smiles.
“You don’t want to know,” she says gently, “just how much trouble I can make for you if you decide to go with threats. We can keep this civil, Admiral, or you can find out whether I’m as soft and sheltered as you so obviously believe I am. Personally, I can’t say it’s a gamble I’d care to make.”
The Admiral glances at the knife, at her total lack of reaction, and then slowly lowers the blade. There’s an assessing look in her gaze again.
“You’re not giving me a lot of reason not to kill you,” she says, jumping the way Chester expected her to, escalating first and escalating faster. It works with Klingons, and Chester has no doubt that’s how she learned it. It’s her deepest gut instinct, too. But she’s good at not listening to it. It’s too easy to get in over your head, fast.
Chester also knows it’s not a bluff. Chester herself doesn’t believe in bluffing; never say anything you’re not completely willing to follow through on. She suspects her alternate is even worse. Besides, there’s the practical aspect. If her alternate does decide there’s not a lot of reason to kill her, she’ll follow through in a heartbeat. But, as they’re having this conversation in this first place. Chester suspects she’s not quite at that point yet.
She’s getting there, though. Time to pull her back a little. “You’ll have a great deal of trouble getting what you want without my assistance.”
“I don’t need you.” Damn, wrong steer; her alternate is bristling now. “I don’t need you any more than I’ve needed anyone . And I think you’re lying to me right now. I got your file, Captain, long before we disabled your engines.”
Oh shit , Chester thinks, bracing for another attack, but her alternate props a hip against the desk across from her with a friendly deliberation that raises the hairs on the back of her neck. “And that…that’s not the woman you’re pretending to be right now. How many times did someone lodge a complaint about you doing the right thing against orders, or against best practices? Very few actual reprimands, though. That was interesting. You’re good at talking your way out of the problems your conscience makes for you. But that strong moral center, that stubborn streak of stupidity—that’s completely out of character with your current actions. Offering to cooperate with me? Please.” The smile again, cold and slow, and even in the depths of the war it has never occurred to Chester to be afraid of herself. She knows about her own vicious streak, and her pride and her ambition. But now comes a cold creeping feeling that perhaps she’s underestimated their depth. “You see, you’re not the only one here good with people, Captain.”
This scares her and she lets it out onto her face, because she also knows her alternate isn’t going to believe her if she’s not scared. She takes a breath to steady herself, her mind racing through options. A sudden lunge for the knife; her hands are untied now. But that’s relying on the coin toss of which of them wins the ensuing wrestling match, a high risk of leaving Hawthorne to fend for himself in Engineering. Chester doesn’t know him well enough to know if she can count on him for that. No. She can’t abandon him.
She can double down on her cover as a selfish self-centered glory hound. But if her alternate calls her on that, she’s probably dead.
So what did her alternate see in her service jacket? What would a woman like her see?
A fool. Someone so sentimental, it will hamstring her at every turn. Someone who’s been lucky enough to follow her conscience this whole time. Conscience, in this world, is a luxury. A pampered, condescending twit.
Who’s just had it all kicked out of her.
Time to grovel.
She slowly raises her gaze to meet the Admiral’s. “If you read my file, you know about the Bedivere ,” she says softly. “It went down over Cardassia. My crew died. ”
The woman across the table just watches her.
“I will do anything ,” she says, “to stop the same thing from happening to this ship and this crew. Anything at all. So what if that means I’m bluffing with an empty hand?”
It’s true. It’s just her anything and her counterpart’s anything are definitely totally different things.
Her counterpart leans forward. “Then start acting like it, ” she hisses. “Stow that arrogance of yours and stop trying to play games with me . Do what I tell you, and you and your crew might come out of this alive, especially if you don’t piss me off any further. ”
Chester looks around, like she’s desperate for a way out. Then her shoulders slump, and she looks down. “What do you want me to do?” she asks, this time resigned. Resigned enough? She’s not sure.
Her alternate leans back and smiles. “Your engineer is helping mine determine how to stage a remote takeover of your ship’s systems from here. With your cooperation, that might not even be necessary—but I think we’ll be able to trust each other just a little more if I have some… contingency plans in place.”
That will put her in an ugly bind. If her alternate does by some miracle let her return to her ship, she’ll have to keep cooperating, or her alternate will take over the ship’s systems—intruder control among them—and do as she pleases anyway. She’ll be able to warn her crew, and hopefully they’ll engineer a workaround… but she’s not sure how feasible that will be even if her alternate doesn’t install some kind of monitoring software at the same time.
It’s clearly designed to give her no choice at all. But she’s had it with no win scenarios.
She forces herself to look up, clearly unhappy, to nod, as if she knows she has no choice.
“Go down to engineering and encourage your Mr. Hawthorne to do his best. I know he’s not too concerned about your neck being on the line,” and her alternate smiles, slow and satisfied, “but from what I’ve seen, you certainly are.”
Oh, you asshole , thinks Chester. She reconsiders her position. Clearly, her alternate wants her to prove her trustworthiness. Equally clearly, the reasoned approach is going to earn her nothing but disrespect. If she goes down to Engineering now, it’ll be with an armed escort, watching her every move. She won’t be able to do shit that way, and that means more delay before contacting J’etris and warning the Interpreter about whatever the hell’s going on here. That’s unacceptable.
As is the smug look her alternate is giving her now.
Chester takes a deep breath and stands. She acknowledges that this is a very stupid idea, an awful plan, and is probably going to get her killed. But it seems like the only language her alternate self is willing to understand is that of violence, and if that is the case, Chester is certainly happy to provide.
So she pauses as she passes by her alternate, looking into her face. She’s an inch or so shorter, and a glance down shows her counterpart’s boots have a heel to them. The detail annoys her disproportionately. She is, she realizes, really tired of feeling smaller and shabbier right now.
So she suckerpunches the First Admiral of the Terran Empire in the stomach.
It feels really good.
If she wins this scuffle, she’ll have a hostage and maybe a way off this ship. If she loses—well, maybe she can twist that into a seduction. She suspects her counterpart will be into the whole conquest thing. At the worst, she’ll go down putting a finger in someone’s eye, and that’s a lot better than passively trotting off into the hands of the guards outside, unable to do much about the plans Hawthorne is being roped into right now.
But she doubts it’ll come to that. If her counterpart is as intelligent as she thinks she is, she’ll see this attack as the calculation it is, not desperation. This willingness to pick a fight—it should show her counterpart she’s not the cowed, careful officer she was expecting. She’s someone who she’ll have to deal with on equal footing.
Her counterpart has folded over, whooping for breath, and Chester grabs her by the back of the jacket and hurls her into the couch. “That’s quite enough of that ,” she says. “If your disrespect is all I get for diplomacy, fine. I’ll try something else.”
Her counterpart rolls back to her feet and jabs a punch at Chester’s midsection. Chester blocks, blocks the next blow, moves in to kick her alternate’s feet out from under her, only to get headbutted in the nose for her pains. She reels back against the desk, grabs one of the heavier stupid knicknacks, and smashes it over her counterpart’s head.
Her counterpart roars with rage and drives a shoulder into her, sending her over the desk in a crash of ornaments. She rolls and scrambles to her feet, rounding the desk in time to meet her alternate’s kick coming the other way. She pivots to take it on the meat of her thigh, grunting with the impact, and punches her alternate in the nose for her pains. She keeps moving forward, driving her alternate back toward the couch and the windows.
And finds herself abruptly flat on her back as her counterpart drops her with a foot hooked around the back of her ankle and then follows her, pinning her.
Insultingly, she’s not even breathing hard. Chester struggles, finding her wrists have been pinned level with her shoulders, and her alternate’s full weight has come down across her thighs. She has no leverage, but when her counterpart leans close, Chester rears up and headbutts her in the nose. Her counterpart grunts, jerking upward—a glancing blow and a bloody nose rather than the break Chester was going for. She glares up at the other woman, who looks down at her and then grins, wide and feral and then dives in at Chester’s face, claiming her mouth in a rough, biting kiss.
God I hope I don’t secretly have this much of a narcissistic streak, thinks Chester, with a flare of vindication. Her alternate is offering her a path to her confidence, and soon as Chester has her confidence, she can actually start doing things instead of trying not to end up as wall art.
Her counterpart is going to hate those things, but she doesn’t need to know that right now.
Chester pushes up into the kiss and bites back, a lot harder than polite. The Admiral grunts with surprise, but doesn’t release her grip. Dammit.
It’s her counterpart who breaks the kiss, bloodied and gasping and grinning with delight. “So there is something of me in there,” she says. “A little spirit.”
Chester, too, is breathing hard. She bares her teeth, tasting blood—hers or her alternate’s, she’s not sure. “Just because I live in a reality where I can’t kill whoever I want to doesn’t mean I’m nice , sweetheart.”
Her counterpart laughs and settles herself a little more firmly across Chester’s legs. The weight pinning her arms doesn’t lighten an iota. Not what she was hoping for. “Clearly, we have things to discuss.”
“Like you getting off of me?”
“I’d be an idiot to trust you that far,” her alternate purrs, and leans in again. This kiss isn’t biting, but confidently dominating. Chester isn’t having it; she pushes back, nipping in warning at her counterpart’s mouth and pressing up into it.
“Defiance,” says her counterpart, breaking away. “Be careful with that, Captain . I’ve only so much patience.”
Chester snorts. “I’m you ,” she says. “You think I’m just going to lie here and take it? You haven’t let anyone treat you like a toy. Why would I?”
Her counterpart looks her over, then pulls her arms over her head to pin them in place one handed, freeing up her other hand to caress Chester’s throat. “A very good question,” she says.
Chester, well aware of the threat in the gesture, smirks and presses into it. Not a time to act like the intimidation worked; let her counterpart think her previous fear was an act, see something as ferocious as herself under the gilding of a proper Starfleet captain. “Whatever you say, I don’t see a good reason.”
“Maybe because I could kill you right now?”
“Would that work on you?” asks Chester, keeping her tone to genuine curiosity.
Her counterpart smiles a little. “No. No, it would not.”
“Enough with the games, then,” says Chester. “I’m not here to be your lackey. Admiral, think about it. In all the universe—if I’m not your equal,” she smirks, tilts her head to expose more of her throat, like she’s not worried about what her counterpart will do with it, even every nerve screams in protest at the vulnerability, “who is?”
She can’t see her counterpart well at this angle, but she stays there, hoping she hasn’t made a monumental mistake. But after a very long moment, fingers trail up her throat and seize her chin, tilting her face back to meet an evaluating gaze. “That is a very good question,” her alternate says softly. “A very good question indeed.”
“Maybe we could answer it,” purrs Chester, and the moment her alternate’s grip on her hands slackens she worms out of the grasp and rolls them. The Admiral hits the floor with a startled grunt. “I’m not one of your little pets, Admiral. I’m not here to suck up to you. I’m not here because I’m scared of you, for damned sure. I’m here because you brought me here—and because you made me curious.”
Her counterpart snarls and yanks her down again. There’s a brief struggle, but Chester stays where she is. Her counterpart pauses, now finally ruffled. “Curious how, Captain?” she asks. “How you could actually get power?”
“I can’t say I don’t have a taste for it,” pants Chester. “I can’t say, seeing you on that throne, I didn’t wonder what the hell I was doing with myself. I spend my days in the most powerful warship we’ve ever built running errands for Command. Distributing supplies, chasing off pirates, breaking up fights at weddings. Power? They don’t like captains who think about power.”
“Their loss,” purrs her alternate. She leans in close, looking up at Chester with no little interest. “So. You think I can give you power?”
She’s getting to something here. “Are you kidding? You’re the First Admiral of an entire empire . Of course you can. I’m smarter than most of your people and you know it. I know how my ship works. And I know how to control my crew. That’s a lot more going for me than most of your captains. And,” she moves deliberately against her alternate, an invitation, “I’m you , you know how I think. If I start getting too ambitious, you’ll see it coming a mile away.”
“I think I see it now,” says her alternate, with the same wry sound in her voice as Chester’s heard in her own many times. She tugs at a wrist; Chester loosens her grip with a brief silent hope it’s not going to get her killed. But her counterpart doesn’t go for her throat, instead tangling her fingers in Chester’s hair and urging her in close. “Clever. Too clever. I’ve always been too clever… and you’re no exception, are you?”
Chester leans in, well aware of the vulnerable position it puts her in, as she lifts her weight from pinning her alternate’s hips. “Maybe you could do something about that,” she says, and her alternate moves in with her eyes glittering, her fingers wrapping into Chester’s hair like she can’t bear the idea of letting go. Her mouth presses over Chester’s again. Chester uses her free hand to cup her alternate’s face, daring a tender gesture. Her alternate leans into it.
Then the world tilts crazily as her alternate bucks, rolling both of them. Chester is braced for it, wriggles her way out of the hold and props herself up on her arms as they come to a lurching halt with her alternate all but in her lap. “Think we can come to an agreement?” she asks.
“Yes,” breathes her alternate, and leans in, her eyes low lidded and fixed on Chester’s. “Show me you can be useful,” she says. “Show me we can work together. I could always use someone else competent.”
That, Chester doesn’t doubt. Her alternate is warm and solid, powerful muscle and a promise of violence, and it is, as embarrassing as it is to admit it, very hot. She’ll examine that later, but right now, it’s getting her what she needs. She caresses her alternate, cupping her cheek in her hand and sliding a hand into her rigidly coiled hair. “Just don’t forget,” she says, steel in her voice, and feels her counterpart shudder, “I am your equal , your ally, and the second you forget that, the second you decide that I’m like one of your idiots out there, is the second I stick a knife in your back. Got it?”
A hand twists in her hair and pulls her in close. “I’ll hold you to it,” says her alternate. “Captain.”
“You’ve already got my word on it, Admiral,” says Chester, and brings their mouths together once more.