Taes’s personal log:

I’m not her patient. I never was.

I’m her shadow or her reflection. Or her better half? That’s how the Archivist sees me. She thinks she needs me to take her museum to the next level. A bigger stage! A whole new method of thinking or being. She wants me to take command with her, not as a promotion, but as a release.

It was only ever me — only ever herself — that she could trust.

Kellin is paying penance for the crimes of Trojet.

Flavia pointed out something else to me before I noticed. I haven’t seen a single Starfleet officer in a contemporary uniform. These wrecks are crewed by those under the Archivist’s command, in tattered historical uniforms. For all her big ideas, she has no patients, no visitors. The graveyard museum is all for show.

It’s all for nothing.

Worse, this memorial fleet isn’t a duty to The Archivist and her crews. It’s a choice they keep making every day.

Starfleet never gave her the resources to properly develop her curriculum. She can preserve the museum, and manage little else, while the rest of the fleet is defending the Federation on multiple fronts.

I asked the Archivist to excuse Kellin, and she agreed. Alone with her, only her, I admitted that I was as hollowed out as she was. I stepped away from my starship command last year. It demanded too much of me, and there was too little of me left. Any one of the captains in the squadron would have more to offer — even more integrity than I.

I joined a research institute, I told her. I lost myself in the administration, the collection of data. I became an archivist myself. Staring at my console, nothing but cold data stared back at me. I saw nothing in the data, nothing between the data. There was nothing I wanted to do, nothing I had to prove.

I had no more inspiration than the Archivist herself.

She didn’t respond. She hugged herself with her bony hands and dismissed me for the day.

There was a light gone out in her eyes. I recognised it. I remembered seeing it in myself.

I saw it in my own reflection in my ready room viewport, watching the explosions over the Vaadwaur homeworld.

If I can’t revitalise her museum, if I can’t elevate it to a beneficial symposium for Starfleet captains…

If I were her, I would want me to destroy it all.