Chapter Text
The main property of the delta function is in the fact that it reaches infinity at a single point and is zero at any other point. Its most important property is that its integral is always one.
Although true delta functions are not found in nature, they are approximated by short duration, high amplitude phenomena such as a hammer impact on a structure, or a lightning strike.
—
“Sir?”
Number One's tone is inflected like a question, but she's not asking. The stars outside are telling the story for her.
“I see it.”
It’s a pinpoint that isn't a pinpoint, a ripple that is more than just a ripple. The black dot would be invisible if it weren't bending space and time around itself; but it's larger and denser and heavier than anything else in the universe, and so it warps the constellations of the Alpha Quadrant like a funhouse mirror.
The Romulans have noticed it too; the pace of their fire slows, not quite to a stop, and their ships hover like sharks turning in an Earth-bound ocean. The battle ebbs, caught in the wake of the black hole.
“Don’t waste ammunition,” Pike tells Lieutenant Mann, “but as long as they're still firing, we are still defending ourselves.”
He takes the few steps required to stand at Number One's shoulder. He can see—can feel, in the inches between them—how she's tensed up, fingers braced over her console. Someone who didn't know her might mistake it for fear.
“I’m detecting high-energy gamma rays and gravitational waves that suggest a quantum singularity, Captain. Tachyon radiation too, it’s scrambling the sensors and the weapons array. And the gravitational distortion is huge.” They both watch as the data on her console scrolls by at speed, too much too fast. “But it's not—”
Enterprise shakes with another shot off the shields, but it's far away, a glancing blow that speaks to the Romulans’ drifting attentions. Pike grips the edge of Number One's console, glances behind him; sees Spock looking across from his station, already on the same page as they are.
“The distortion is not inwards,” he completes. “Gravity appears to be pushing outwards. Like—”
The rest of his sentence hangs in the air. Like an opening door.
“Sir—” Number One’s voice is low, and Pike catches the tilt to her head which means she's looking at him from the corner of her eye.
The unspoken. Discovery. Burnham. Treason if it leaves their mouths, and yet. If the data doesn't lie (and it rarely does), that treason will be pulling itself back into their present in the next few seconds.
Pike’s skin prickles. Fear. Excitement.
It has been almost three years. A thousand days.
“Amin?”
The lieutenant at the helm turns to him. He reminds himself that she was there too, at Discovery’s end; that she will know what this is, or guess, at the very least.
“I’ve already compensated for the distortion, Captain. The approach might be bumpy but I can keep us from becoming gravity’s lunch.”
“Good. Do it.”
He’s about to let a boyish grin split his face, fueled by adrenaline; but there’s a burst of—of light, so bright that he imagines for a moment this is death, coming to call him home—away from that future, please—but as quickly as it’s there it fades, leaves beeping consoles and blinking officers in its wake. The stretching view of the stars remains empty.
Pike tenses his jaw and gathers his resolve. “Updates?”
“Sir—” and Amin is still squinting against the faded light, frowning down at her console. “The distortion appears to be—”
“Rapidly reducing.” Number One glances to the viewscreen. Closing. “But I’m getting new readings for high tetryonic radiation—”
“I have a life sign.” Spock pushes the readout from his workstation onto the main viewscreen with one practised wrist-flick. “In gravitational freefall at the point of the singularity. It is originating from the same location as the tetryonic radiation, suggesting a small vessel or exo-suit—”
“Yes, I follow. Mann, I need you to work out how to lower our shields for transport with those Romulans still firing.”
Pike stands at his chair, leans over the arm and thumbs through a call to the transporter room. “I want a lock on that life sign, now. And medical,” —switching out to call Boyce— “I need a team to receive them, we don’t know if this is going to be a casualty—”
“Captain—” Pitcairn’s voice crackles through the comms. “We have damage down here, I can lock on to the life sign but the computer won’t let me bring it back to the transporter pad whilst it’s—”
“Do you have an alternative?”
“I can engage site-to-site transport but the primary relays in the pattern buffer were hit—”
Mann’s console beeps. “Sir, the Romulans have disengaged their weapons. I’m in a position to lower shields for the duration of a transport—”
“Can you do it?” he asks Pitcairn. “Site-to-site?”
“I won’t know if I can hold the matter stream in the buffer and re-target the ABC until I redirect—”
“Yes or no, Commander?”
“Yes, sir, yes, I can do it—”
“Then—”
“Alright, sir, but with the energy distortions the best I can get is the middle of the bridge—”
“Do what you have to, that’s an—”
“Yes, Captain, locking onto the life sign now—”
A split second which feels like an indeterminate number of years, and then that never-gets-old glow materialises in the middle of the Enterprise’s bridge, rebuilding something atom-by-atom—
A thunk as the Red Angel—still feotally half-curled, limbs outstretched like a diver reaching for the surface—leaves zero-g and crashes to the floor. The bridge crew flinch at the sound, but don’t leave their stations. Something about her is off, Pike realises immediately; it doesn’t look right—
The Red Angel rolls onto her knees, and Pike spots the crack in the visor, hears the in-drawn breaths of someone who, until a moment ago, was drowning. The ragged pace of her lungs makes the Alert lights flash from her helmet like morse code, obscuring her face.
She stabs at the visor release with the heel of her hand, and it draws back; lets her unmistakable hair fall down around her face.
He can hear it now, in the tenor of her breathing; can see it, in the shape of her, in the way that she holds herself, so different to Burnham.
“Ensign,” Pike says, voice far away to his own ears.
He steps forward. Tilly tilts her head, pushes her hair from her face, and in that moment time stretches and pings back like elastic. If he’d passed her in the corridor Pike might not have noticed, because she looks almost, almost the same—but there are soft lines in the corners of Tilly’s eyes, her mouth; an unfamiliar sharpness that speaks to the passage of time.
She breathes, and her gaze never leaves his.
“Fifteen,” Tilly says. She’s perched on the edge of the couch in his ready room, arms loosely balanced on her knees and head down, eyes closed, breathing heavily. “A nice round number.”
“Fifteen years does check out.” Boyce runs the scanner up and down Tilly’s arm and across the width of her collarbones. “Cellular degeneration certainly suggests somewhere between ten and twenty years since the last medical record on file.”
“Ageing sounds way less meaningful when you say it like that,” she murmurs.
Boyce moves the scanner up over her throat, raises an eyebrow. “Clearly your exposure to space did no lasting damage to your esophagus.”
She sways on the edge of the couch, and Pike instinctively grabs her arm. Boyce steadies Tilly’s shoulder. Her eyes flutter and then open.
“Sorry. Time sickness.”
“Time sickness?”
She focuses on Pike, like she’s following his words back out of the rabbit hole. In the ambient light her eyes are a deep, searching blue.
“It’s a cool way of saying I jumped through a wormhole and now my body’s mad about it.”
She reaches up to grab his arm, to circle his wrist with her fingers. Like an anchor in a storm.
He lets her hold on; tries for calm. “You know, I had an Ensign once who said everything sounds cooler if you put ‘time’ in front of it.”
Tilly smiles, like he wanted her to. “I hope you listened to her.”
Her eyes close again. Her fingers tighten on his skin.
“Just breathe,” he says, trying to keep his own steady. Anchor in a storm.
The swish of the doors, and a familiar presence at his back. Pike leans away but doesn’t let go.
“Ensign,” Spock says. “You look unwell.”
She laughs, short and sharp. “God, I missed you. We all missed you so much.”
We.
She opens her eyes. Her pupils are still a little wide.
“It can wait,” Pike cuts in before she opens her mouth. “Until you’re feeling better.”
She shakes her head. “No. I want to tell you this now.”
It’s…new, this forcefulness (at least for him; was she like this with the others?). In the corner of his eye Pike sees Spock with his PADD poised, ready to notate.
Both of them, set for a debrief.
He grimaces.
“Alright. But keep it short. And Dr Boyce stays until you go to sickbay.”
Boyce knows, the same as half the crew. They’ve already committed treason just by looking at her. Talking is simply another stage in a lost cause.
Tilly exhales through pursed lips, like she’s fighting nausea, but her gaze is steady. Her focus on him is fierce and intent.
“Leland was dead when we left. Which is ironic, to go that far and find out Georgiou collapsed him into a magnetized puddle before the wormhole closed? Or maybe it was after, or at the same time, or never, time doesn’t really matter when you’re on the edge of something like that, but he was dead, and we were alone, and we—it’s so—”
She flattens her mouth, swallows. “It’s so cold. And you have no idea, until you’re there, of what it’s like at the end of the universe. You can do the math, but it’s—it’s like nothing you’d imagine, ever, just millions and billions of kilometers of cold, dead rocks for company.”
Her fingers tense and flex around his wrist. In the pause, Spock’s stylus scratches lightly at the surface of his PADD. Pike’s knees are starting to ache where he’s knelt on the floor, but he’s not going to move, not going to make her let go.
“But we—we still had the crystal. Control was neutralised, and the data stopped resisting transfer to a memory core once it realised we weren’t trying to blow it up anymore, and Michael—Michael decided that she would send us home.”
Michael. After three years of silence, her name stings.
“That is…” Spock pauses, and a whole childhood rushes in to fill the space. “In-keeping with her behaviour and personal traits.”
“Yes. She saved us.”
“But the crystal,” Pike says. “It should have burned out.”
“Sometimes, and it pains me to say this, I cannot tell you know much but, sometimes, when you’re dealing with—” and she waves her fingers in the air, “—all this, our normal understanding of math can be a little…off.”
“Off.”
She starts to reply; but her eyes flutter again, matching another gentle sway to her shoulders.
“Okay, we’re done,” Pike says, but she shakes her head.
“No, no, I’m fine, I want to—I want to explain.”
She works through that controlled breathing again—he can see Boyce surreptitiously running the scanner in their peripheral vision—and then refocuses.
“The crystal was broken, don’t get me wrong, the lattices had decayed and it cracked into, like, six pieces, but—it didn’t burn all the way out, not like we’d expected, because math, off. So we knew there was a chance we could still get home.”
“Yet,” Spock points out. “I see you here. When you left—” and Pike can hear the home hidden inside it, “—you were not the Red Angel.”
“I told Michael it should be her, but she had—unfinished business, and she wanted to stay. I told her to come with us, I tried, but it was never going to—”
“Her mother.”
Tilly swallows. “Yes. Yeah. We left them with a piece of the crystal and we— we hoped.” She looks down at her hand where it’s still looped around Pike’s wrist. “Still hope.”
Silence.
“Where are the others?” Pike asks gently.
Keep listening, he tells himself. Even if you don’t want to hear.
“We—we could find a way to jump, we knew that, as long as we had the crystal, but it was in pieces. Five, once we gave one to Michael and Dr Burnham, so it would be like—like a—”
“Like a stone skipping across a lake.”
“Yes, exactly. Five smaller jumps, to get us from here to there. And I knew the suit, I’d had so many years by then to watch Dr Burnham’s logs, and I’d already helped Stamets run the spore drive, it made sense for me to wear—” She twists the fingers of her free hand. “We made adjustments, fixed the graviton beam, worked out our path. And we had three successful jumps. But then the fourth—on the fourth jump, something went—wrong, I don’t know how, but the wormhole closed before they could follow me through, and I—”
She breathes out, very slowly. “I tried so hard to jump forward, out of a future I didn’t recognise into one that I did, but the suit, it never—it just never let me. Backwards, only ever backwards. So I decided—I decided to find help.”
She looks up, fixes Pike with those bright blue eyes he hasn’t forgotten. “I decided to come back to you.”
Time sickness, it turns out, is fatigue and nausea and musculoskeletal pain. Pike goes with her to sickbay—insists—until Boyce shoos him out with a stern look that says you're not helping. Tilly grabs Pike’s hand, nods her thanks (or reassurance, maybe), and he feels the future decade of work she's worn into her skin.
A specialist. That’s what he’ll agree with the Admirals, he thinks. Starfleet Transfer Regulation SFR-03-8532-3892. Besides; there’s precedent for misplaced officers on board. Discovery’s own past is replete with them: in Tyler under his own tenure; in Lorca’s justification for chasing down a prison shuttle in the middle of a war.
He sits alone in his quarters, in civilian clothes, drumming fingertips against the arm of his chair. His heart is racing the way he hadn’t let it earlier, each beat a name: Burnham; Saru; Nhan; Stamets; Detmer; Owosekun; Bryce; Rhys—
The list goes on (and on).
Beta shift are chirpy with their afternoon, and some of them smile and nod at their Captain even though they know it’s 2am for him and everyone else on Alpha shift. He walks in circles around his ship, thinking. For six months, that’s all he’s been able to do—nothing said aloud, no shared memories over drinks or consoles—just the hope that Discovery is okay. Now he only has reality.
The mess hall is quiet in its 2am-and-mid-afternoon lull. The light is a gradient, harsh to soft, to account for light-sensitive optical cells in different species. Tilly is at the far end, in the dimmest corner. The stars are thin, elongated lines in the large windows, throwing out softly modulating light. She looks like she’s sitting under the moon on Elyisum, a ghost of his childhood.
“Ensign.”
He has to say it twice before she looks up from her glass of water.
“Oh. Hi. Hello.”
Pike gestures to the other chair. “This seat taken?”
She shakes her head. He sits.
“I see you still can’t follow orders for bed rest.”
A quirk of a smile. She ducks her head.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“I guess that can be forgiven.”
She rubs the side of the glass with her thumb, leaves a fingerprint in the condensation.
“It sounds different. Space, I mean. In different times. Like, a millennia from now, it just sounds…empty.”
Rationally Pike knows the ship’s ambient temperature is a perfectly comfortable 65 to 80˚F, but his skin prickles cold. Primal fear is an icy hand on the back of his neck.
“Obviously it’s psychological,” Tilly continues. “There’s no sound in space, but—I can still tell. When I’m somewhere with the living instead of the dead.”
She frowns, little creases between her eyebrows that don’t quite go away when she looks up.
“Sorry.” She smiles wearily. “I’m being macabre. You’d think I’d have learned to hold better conversations by now.”
“It’s alright, Ensign.”
Her smile softens, a little more real. “Commander.”
“Commander?”
“Saru, he—he kept up our training, our development. I think he wanted his crew to have something normal in the middle of all—that.”
Pike knows that wish; to keep morale high in the middle of unimaginable fear.
“I don’t even know if it means anything,” she says. “Starfleet couldn’t sign off my promotions, or my Bridge Officers Test, but—it’s how I lived for all those years, so. It feels real to me.”
He recalls his own career in one vivid burst of milestones.
“That’s all it is. Experience. We climb the same ladder, just in…different ways.”
She sips her water. “I appreciate the advice, sir.”
In the lull he hears the engines whine, the soft chatter of crew in the corridor outside. He’ll have to work out how to brief them; those who don’t know, those who do.
“I’ll speak to the quartermaster,” he says. “To make sure you get the right uniform.”
“You're giving me a uniform?”
He shrugs. “You're Starfleet. One of us, until I'm told otherwise. So. Blue jacket, two stripes on the cuffs. And no arguments.”
She contemplates her glass. Through it Pike can see the distorted dark red of the off-duty clothes they've given her. It makes the water look like arterial blood.
“Thank you.” Another silence. “The uniform feels like home.”
Starfleet makes nomads of them all, but it’s the ship they always come back to. They both know what they won’t say; that Tilly’s home is Discovery, lost in time and secrets. Pike has the sudden urge to touch every nearby surface, as though he can keep Enterprise safe just by knowing that she’s there.
“Welcome back,” he says instead. “I missed you.”
He means Discovery generally; but he catches the flicker of Tilly’s eyes to his hands and arms and chest, then up to hold his gaze.
He’s not used to such direct looks from her—can’t process the way his pulse jumbles with it—and he leans back in the chair and crosses his arms, glances away.
“I have to speak to Admiral Archer, but—I’ll fight for you to stay here, if that’s what you want.”
She bites her lip; nods.
“Well then. Looks like you’re stuck with us.” With me.
She smiles, wide and bathed in starlight, and Pike remembers how much he likes making her do that.