Chapter Text
Tommy’s in the middle of trying to convince Wilbur to eat breakfast when the door chime chirps. He opens his mouth on instinct, almost yells for whoever it is to come in, but Wilbur flashes him a half-panicked look, and he remembers that things aren’t exactly normal anymore.
With one last significant glance from Wilbur to the replicator—which leaves Wilbur wrinkling his nose in distaste—Tommy shuffles over to the doors. He’s surprised to find DS12’s commanding officer, Commander Halo, standing on the other side. Instinctively, Tommy snaps to attention.
“Sir,” he says, conscious of the way he hasn’t brushed his teeth and still wears his rumpled pajamas from the night before. Behind him, he can hear Wilbur shift in his seat.
“At ease,” the commander says. “There’s no need for formality while you’re here, cadet. You’re on leave.”
Tommy’s shoulders drop, but only by a little. He can’t imagine there’s any good reason the commanding officer of the space station they’re on is standing at his door at 0700 hours.
“Can I help you, sir? We were just about to discuss our departure plans.” Or rather, Tommy was just about to try, though he’s not sure how much luck he’d have had with Wilbur in fine form.
Commander Halo grimaces. “That’s…what I’m here to talk to you about. May I come in?”
And really, what choice does Tommy have but to say yes?
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They’re to be quarantined on DS12 until further notice, and it’s bullshit.
Correction—Wilbur is the one under quarantine. Tommy, Commander Halo explains, is free to leave at his leisure, to which Tommy thinks: as fucking if? He almost scoffs in the commander’s face at it, really. Like he’s going anywhere without his brother.
Ponk said the best thing he can do is be there for Wilbur, and damn if he’s not in this for the long haul. Did they think he’d just waltz back off to—to wherever, less than a week after getting his dead brother back?
Thanks, but no fucking thanks, Tommy thinks.
The commander wouldn’t even give him a straight answer about why, just that Starfleet ordered it, and it had taken every ounce of respect and protocol Tommy learned at the Academy not to swear at him six ways to Sunday on his way out of their quarters. Once Commander Halo is gone, once they’re alone again, Tommy flops down in the chair across from Wilbur.
“Guess we’re here for a while, huh?” he says, fuming.
“Guess so,” Wilbur answers, staring down at his hands. He’s picking at his nails, and, Tommy notices, he still hasn’t eaten.
Wordlessly, Tommy replicates a plate of toast for himself and a raktajino for Wilbur. Tommy hates coffee, especially Klingon coffee—it tastes like kissing a Klingon’s dirty sock with tongue, in his refined opinion—but Wilbur swears by the stuff.
Or he used to, anyway, because when Tommy extends the steaming hot cup to him, Wilbur pushes it away with the tips of three fingers and shakes his head.
“Wil, you’ve got to get something in your system,” Tommy says, hating how wheedling he sounds, even to himself. “C’mon.”
He extends the mug again, and this time Wilbur takes it reluctantly, though he still doesn’t drink. He just stares down into the depths of the mug.
“I can’t, um,” he says, and then stops. Tommy counts three heartbeats before Wilbur tries again. “I can’t exactly taste anything at the moment.”
Tommy blinks. Wilbur continues.
“When I—when you’re first assimilated, the Borg inject you with high amounts of lithium to help stabilize the body as it—as it adjusts. To the nanoprobes.” His words are halting, but his tone is detached. He sounds a hundred light-years away. “One of the last clear memories I have is just, the taste, you know? The smell of it. Overwhelming everything else. It’s still there.”
“Is that…normal?”
Wilbur’s eyes flick up, though it takes a moment for his gaze to focus fully on Tommy. He shrugs one shoulder.
“The doctor said it was psychosomatic. It’s supposed to fade with time.”
Good, Tommy thinks. That’s good.
“Well,” he says briskly, “you can’t bloody well not eat anything until the taste goes away. Drink your fucking coffee, Wilbur, or I’ll make you.”
Wilbur arches a brow at him, and it still gives Tommy pause to see the band of metal rise right along with it, but he does as Tommy says. He drinks the coffee. It’s a start.
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They’re quarantined for three weeks, though it feels more like three months. Time crawls when you’re under house arrest on a space station and your newly undead brother is hardly talking to you, Tommy learns.
And he gets it, he really does—if things are hard for him, they’ve got to be worse for Wilbur, who’s still barely sleeping and picking at his food. Most nights, Tommy rolls over to find Wilbur sitting at the viewport, staring out into deep space without so much as pretending to sleep in his bed. Some nights, Tommy joins him. The number of those nights is starting to grow, but still Wilbur doesn’t open up. Whatever he’s feeling, he keeps it shut up inside his thoughts, sealed tighter than an airlock against the vacuum of space.
Tommy doesn’t know how to feel about that, but he keeps swinging down from his bunk anyway, padding across the floor and settling opposite Wilbur in the viewport, knee nudging his brother’s just enough to let him know Tommy’s there. Wilbur never says anything, but he doesn’t pull away, either, and that’s something. It has to be.
They pass the time by watching a lot of terrible shows on the ‘net. It’s just close enough to movie nights back on Earth with Niki that some part of Tommy aches to be home.
Days pass. Wilbur takes to reading, spending whole days folded into a chair with a padd in hand. He replicates himself a pair of reading glasses, which Tommy knows he doesn’t need—especially not with the new prosthetic eye—but wears almost constantly nonetheless. They do a halfway decent job of masking the implants on his face at first glance, which is probably why he’s wearing them, and also why Tommy decides not to mention it.
Nearly every day, Starfleet officials are calling Wilbur on the comm about something or another, asking for medical updates and refusing to budge an inch about their impromptu confinement on DS12. They insist it’s regulation, but Tommy and Wilbur both know that’s not true. Tommy’s not an expert on every rule in the book, but he knows the longer the detainment goes on with no answers, the more it’s pushing intergalactic law.
Wilbur knows it too, and he takes it a lot worse than Tommy does. By the end of the first week, he snaps. Tommy’s in the main room during the call, trying to give Wilbur some privacy, but it’s impossible to miss Wilbur’s rising voice through the open doors.
“—know this is ridiculous!” he hears his brother snap, and ducks his head down over the padd he’s trying to read.
There’s a muffled response, which Tommy can’t quite make out. Wilbur scoffs.
“That’s not what this is about, and we both know it, sir. I’m a Federation citizen just like everyone else. My status as an—an ex-Borg doesn’t negate that.”
His voice falters at that, just a little. Just enough to notice.
Another response, slow and measured. Tommy hears tone and disrespect and Captain.
“Oh, fuck my tone,” Wilbur says, voice rising. “Fuck me while we’re at it! Fuck anyone who doesn’t fit into Starfleet’s regulations, am I right?” He’s half-yelling now. “You think I’m unsafe, Admiral? You think I’m going to do something erratic? Well here,” Wilbur snarls, and Tommy hears the dull slap of an open palm colliding with metal, “here’s me being erratic, sir. I resign. I fucking quit. Fuck you, and fuck Starfleet.”
There’s a quiet chirp as the comm cuts off, and for a moment, the only noise in their quarters is Wilbur’s ragged breathing. A minute later, he emerges from the bedroom, composure fraying. His eyes are bright and wet behind his glasses.
“Wil,” Tommy begins.
“Don’t,” says Wilbur, sounding wrecked. “Just—fucking don’t, Tommy. Not now.”
So Tommy doesn’t.
That night, he drafts his own resignation from Starfleet, after Wilbur has finally fallen asleep on the bunk beneath him.
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(He comms Sam at 0400 before Sam goes on duty, creeping away into the living area so as not to disturb Wilbur, who seems to have finally fallen asleep.
“Are you sure about this, Tommy?” Sam asks, brow furrowing. In truth, Tommy hasn’t felt sure of anything since he got the news about the Laika’s discovery. He felt lost without Wilbur, and now he feels unhappy on DS12. He feels unhappy every time he stares out the viewport at the star-spangled void of space. Tommy thinks if he could take a knife and cut himself open, core himself like an apple, he would find an empty place at his center—a space that hasn’t felt full since the last time he was on Earth, hearing the tree frogs at night and lying on the living room floor, listening to Wilbur pick away at his guitar.
Tommy’s had his adventure, his taste of the final frontier. Now he just wants to go home.
“I think so,” Tommy admits quietly. What he doesn’t know in this moment is that Wilbur, not asleep after all, stands just within the bedroom doorway, frozen in place as he listens in on a conversation he wasn’t meant to hear. “I just—fuckin’ miss home, I guess.”
Sam looks doubtful. “I can’t stop you, but…there’s always a place for you here, Tommy. If you want. The Pandora would be lucky to have you.”
He does not say I’d be lucky to have you, but he thinks it.
Tommy says, “I’ll think about it.”
And he does. He really does. But he still sends in the resignation. If there’s any place in the universe where Tommy wants to be, it’s by his brother’s side.)
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Time goes on. Tommy is beginning to think it will never end, that they’ll just be stuck on Deep Space 12 for the rest of their lives, and that’s when Wilbur performs a miracle, or something very nearly like one.
On the third week of their quarantine, Tommy wakes to the sound of Wilbur’s voice in the next room, and someone’s drawling responses over the comm. Rolling out of bed, he pokes his head into the living area to see his brother deep in conversation with someone on the comm that Tommy can’t quite see over Wilbur’s shoulder.
“I mean, it’s a fucking violation of intergalactic law,” the person says. “Starfleet can’t just hold you there forever, man. You know that. I know that. They know it too. Somebody could get in serious trouble for this, Wilbur.”
“I just want to get off this station,” Wilbur says tiredly, dragging a hand down his face. The metal on his arm, not quite hidden under his sleeve, catches the light as he does. “I’ll be honest, Big Q, I don’t really care how it happens. I just want to leave.”
Realizing who’s on the comm, Tommy enters fully into the room and leans over Wilbur’s shoulder to wave at the screen. Wilbur jumps at his appearance, but the man onscreen grins brightly when he sees Tommy.
“Tommy!” he exclaims.
“Hi, Quackity,” says Tommy. Though he was always more Wilbur’s friend growing up, Quackity is still a friendly face, nonetheless. He used to be their neighbor back on Earth, and Wilbur’s best friend through high school. When Wilbur went to Starfleet Academy, Quackity went to law school. He always said to call him if they got into intergalactic trouble, or just trouble of the regular kind. Tommy thinks he was probably joking, but it seems Wilbur is calling in that favor. “How’s it going?”
“Better for me than it is for you, seems like,” Quackity says, grin fading into something a little more serious. “How’s Deep Space Twelve?”
Tommy says, quite seriously, “Fucking boring.”
Quackity shakes his head with a slight smile.
“Well,” he says, “hopefully I can pull some strings to get you two out of there.”
“That’d be nice,” Tommy says, trying not to let his relief at the thought of being off this station show. “Thanks, Big Q.”
“Anytime,” says Quackity. “Anytime.”
Thirty-six hours later, their quarantine is lifted, and they’re granted permission to leave Deep Space 12 at last. They’re going home.