‘I thought you should know,’ said Thawn, trying to smother rising anxiety as she stood in the open door to Beckett’s quarters, ‘that my aunt’s left.’

He’d opened with a guarded, apprehensive expression that fell as she spoke, and stepped back to usher her in. ‘You alright?’

She twisted her fingers together as she entered. ‘Yes? No? I got what I wanted.’ But their argument still hung over her, and she didn’t know how much she could say to him. How much he wanted her to say. So as the doors shut behind her, she said, ‘You’re off the hook, by the way.’

‘Off the…’

‘I’ve made it clear to Anatras that she doesn’t get to swap one political arrangement for another. That I won’t try to secure links between our families or anything like that.’

‘Okay.’ He sounded a bit dumbfounded, but she’d passed him to stand in the middle of the one-room quarters, staring past the bed at the window, and the looming interior of Gateway beyond. ‘What’d she say?’

‘I think…’ Thawn’s voice caught. ‘I think I’m going to pay for this some day. I’m not sure when. I’m not sure how. But there’ll be consequences. But I’m free, anyway. I live my life. She doesn’t get to dictate it. Not any more.’

‘That’s… that must have been really hard.’

She knew if she looked at him, this would get tougher. Reading him was like breathing, sometimes, and he’d made it clear he didn’t want her to, found that unsettling when it wasn’t reciprocal. ‘Yes,’ she sighed, gesturing at nothing. ‘Yes, it was hard, Nate, pushing her back, pushing away every pressure I’ve let rule me for… for years…’

She’d thought she had more control, or perhaps her mask wasn’t as good as she thought, or she’d simply underestimated him, because a mere second later he was by her side, hands on her shoulders.

‘Hey – hey, I’m sorry you had to do all of this alone. I shouldn’t have reacted the way I did; I put myself first, and that was a crappy time to do it…’

‘Okay.’ She twisted in his grip, not pulling away but finally turning to face him. He looked worn and tired, she realised, and now she wondered how much it had been weighing on him. ‘I should be clear, I guess: it was a good thing for me to do this cleanly. I don’t think I’d have done that if you hadn’t pulled away. I’d have tried to compromise, when what I really, really needed to do was recognise how much my family’s hurt me – and draw a line.’

‘That’s good,’ he said, expression creased. ‘That you could do that. Because – yeah. You deserve better than playing by their rules, because you know you can never do it right. Never be enough. The game’s rigged. But still…’ She had been about to speak, not sure if she was actually going to argue with him on instinct, defend her family on instinct, but he pushed forward. ‘Still, you shouldn’t have had to do that alone.’

She bit her lip. ‘It wasn’t easy.’

‘And I’m sorry. I should trust you better. Because you do get it about my father. And this was absolutely the time for me to suck it up and have your back.’ His gaze was earnest, guilty, and she felt her chest ease at the warmth of his hands still at her shoulders.

‘Thank you,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you about it first. I should have seen it coming. It’s just so hard to think with my family, with my aunt. I could have planned, but planning would have made it all very… real.’

‘And you were ambushed by her arriving. I do get it. And I’m glad you figured it out, but…’ He tilted his head, and apprehension rose again. ‘What if I wasn’t off the hook?’

‘What?’

‘Because there will be something that comes next. Some day, the other shoe’s gonna drop with your aunt.’

‘I’m not going to ask you to make an effort with your father you don’t want to make just so my aunt…’

‘I mean that when that comes… how about I actually have your back?’

There were a thousand things to say. She was still hurt but guilty, victorious yet shattered. Words were inadequate, but she still couldn’t reach out with her thoughts. So she made herself clear the last way she could, by falling against him, burying her face against his shoulder and letting him wrap his arms around her. It was like falling into a blanket, like falling asleep after days of exhaustion, like staggering into the warm indoors after being left out in the cold.

And still he was speaking, his voice soft, earnest. ‘We never said what comes next. We just ran away together and then lurched from one crisis to the next. And somehow we can… go hell-bent-for-leather for each other, somehow I can try to break myself rescuing you from the Borg or… or let some eldritch inter-dimensional abomination out of its prison when it’s that or lose you…’ His words started to tumble over each other, and he pulled back, bringing his hands to her cheeks, tilting her face up to his. ‘And I still had to play coy about if going for dinner meant anything?’

She gave a hapless whisper of a scoff. ‘I avoided it, too. I threw away my entire life to chase after you, run off with you…’

‘And I’m still not saying anything, am I?’ Beckett mused, lips curling with amused frustration, and she could see him wrestling, because she knew words weren’t easy. ‘I’m trying to say – I want you, I want to be with you. I want the dinners together, the dumb holidays, the shore leave trips, the fights about taking up too much space on the bookshelf – cos I will take up way too much. I want it all. Cute dates. Lazy mornings. And all the sillier moments in between.’ But even as she gazed at him with delighted fascination, he gave a rueful shake of the head. ‘Still feels super… mundane, when I put it like that. Like just scratching the surface. Am I making sense, though?’

It wasn’t just that words were hard. They gave definitions, but they set boundaries; boundaries on thoughts and feelings that felt limitless.

She rested her hand against his chest. ‘You are,’ she murmured. ‘And…’ It took a moment to force her breathing to slow. ‘We argued about me reading you. But we still could… connect, couldn’t we.’

His gaze flickered. ‘I still found you in the dark.’

‘I realised something, talking with Adamant, fighting with my aunt. It’s not just that I cut myself off from non-telepaths because I don’t know how to communicate. I cut myself from everyone a long time ago. Spent so long not believing I could want things for myself, thinking my feelings were wrong or an inconvenience. So I didn’t let myself show them. Didn’t let anyone else see them. Locked up doors inside myself I… didn’t even begin to understand.’

‘Wow,’ breathed Beckett after a beat. ‘Your family really did way more of a number on you than I thought.’

But he wore a gentle smile, and she had to give a nervous giggle. It died quickly enough, and she found her hand curling in his uniform jacket. ‘I’m saying, I… our connection doesn’t have to be one way. It doesn’t have to be me reading you and you not reading me. But it takes…’

She didn’t have the words for it, and yet his gaze sobered with an understanding she couldn’t grasp.

‘Oh,’ he whispered. ‘Oh, it takes completely jumping off the cliff, huh.’

It took surrender. She could press her forehead against his, stand close enough for their breathing to mingle, and that still wasn’t it. It was the crumbling of fortifications in her mind she’d forgotten she’d ever built, reaching out with tottering telepathic senses in a way she hadn’t for decades, in a way she’d been told brought only disappointment and shame.

She’d found his thoughts across hundreds of millions of kilometres, trapped on a Devore warship with a thousand Brenari echoes swirling around him. The bond between them had been somehow enough for him to find her, trapped on a dying Borg diamond. And still, through all of that distance, tension, life-and-death stakes, that was not as hard as it was to crack herself open and reach out for him.

Hard and yet as easy as breathing, at the same time.

There he was, laid out for her like the sheafs of a manuscript, every thought and feeling. The fear and guilt at the core of him that she knew was reflected in herself, the trepidation at that whispering sense of each other as they intertwined without secrets, without deflection. And wonder, growing wonder, as she knew he could see all the same in her, too.

Eyes closed, pressed against him, Thawn felt her lips curl, and despite being closer to him than words, she still spoke, if only in a whisper, as if anything louder might break the moment. ‘Hello, Imzadi…’

They’d stood at this precipice for what felt like aeons, pulling away from or pushing each other, themselves, in turn. Even now, all they’d done, with all of their decisiveness and hard choices and admissions, was lean over the edge like it was a dare. For all their bravery, until this moment, they hadn’t, as he’d said, jumped off the cliff. But now there was no fear. No uncertainty. Just peerless skies ahead, and deep, inviting waters below.

And together they fell.