A Road Less Traveled

Neria looked at herself in the mirror, and wanted to scream.  Wanted to smash the glass with her fists and break it right into her skin, shred herself to ribbons of bloody tissue.  Wanted to feel herself drown in searing pain, wanted to feel nothing.  She hated it.  Hated her situation... hated herself.  She had failed.  Thrown it all away.  Starfleet was her first and last chance to get away from it all: the world that made her.  Khalindar, with its bleak, polluted lands and seas and sky, full of a rank brown stench haunting her nostrils... and equally putrid male-dominated society, using women like tools, possessions for their pleasure.  When they weren't busy clubbing each other over their stupid, sap-filled heads, or throwing their weight around with other cultures, trying to intimidate and provoke them into war, they treated women as slaves, playthings and receptacles for their sperm, to carry the next generation of warriors to birth.  Or just to lay there, legs in the air, and take it up the vagina whenever their sexual moods struck, and it was often.

There was nowhere else for her to go... was there?

But there was one way out.  She eyed her own eyes in the mirror, dark and angry and scared.  Tried to see herself there, in fifteen years... and couldn't.  All she could imagine was a broken mirror... jagged cracks through her face.  An unbreakable mirror, but that wouldn't stop her from seeking an alternate tool.

"I'm not going back to Khalindar," she told her reflection.  "I'm not going back.  I'm not, I'm not..."

Neria laughed as Tueri told her a joke, about what happened when the tribble crossed the road.  The party was in full swing, the replimat alive with good moods and good food.  Everyone was chatting, mingling.  Her father and Mehera were rapt in conversation; Eve was off visiting with others; the Sirenn scientist exchanged ideas with the Ki'tiki conn officer.  She kept expecting something to go wrong, but that was just her nature – one more learned habit from a future that would hopefully never come.  It had turned out better than she had hoped.

She found she wasn't very hungry, and kept picking at her food, drifting between dialog with Tueri and thoughts of herself... her younger self... her younger counterpart.  Wondering where she was: She was supposed to be here.  She hoped she hadn't gotten away with taking off again.  Neria's hand flexed involuntarily to tap her communicator and ask what was the holdup... but one, that was something her father would do (micromanaging); she felt uncomfortable with that degree of supervision – it seemed paranoid to her, and she was paranoid enough.  The Usurpers did that to a person.  Neria was making a concerted effort to break from old habits.  Two, she felt glad the younger Neria wasn't here – and wouldn't mind if she never showed up.  Nothing unnerved one quite like seeing yourself, duplicated, even if fifteen years younger.  What would become of her?  Time, this time, held no answers for Neria April.

Speaking of time... She looked at her chronometer.  This party wouldn't last forever – couple hours, at most.  Time to get this show on the road, she thought.

Neria stood from her chair and tapped her communicator, speaking loudly at the same time: "This is Comman— This is... the captain.  Can I have your attention please."  At the audible blare of a hundred com-badges chirping at once, combined with her voice, the subdued roar of multiple conversations died down.  Everyone turned in their seats towards their table.  "I'd like to propose a toast.  First, to my father: If not for him, I wouldn't be here."  Laughs rippled through the crowd.  She grinned, dark eyes twinkling, beholding him, and lifted her glass to him.  Stephen April smiled back with that same twinkle, and raised his glass to her, with a nod.  In that moment, their mutual resemblance showed crystal clear.  It took a moment of love, and joy, to bring it out.  "I think it's safe to say that he has been, without a doubt, one of the best damned captains ever to sit in a captain's chair.  There'll never be another like him.  To my father."  She swept her glass in a half-circle, at those assembled.  "And of course, to one of the best crews in all of Starfleet.  I know every ship's crew likes to say they have the best captains, and every ship's captain thinks she has the best crew... but in our case, we all know we really are the best, don't we?"

"Hear, hear!" someone said, and more laughs went around.

"But seriously—"  Neria paused, thinking: Look at me.  Giving a speech.  She was her father's daughter, after all.  "At the Academy, one of my instructors made me read a book, by a Terran writer named Robert Frost.  There was this passage in there, titled "The Road Not Taken".  He made me memorize it.  Let me see, how did that go..."  She bit her lip, frowning at the air, then nodded, and began to recite:

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could, to where it bent in the undergrowth;

"Then took the other, as just as fair, and having perhaps the better claim, because it was grassy and wanted wear; though as for that the passing there had worn them really about the same,

"And both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black.  I kept the first for another day, yet knowing how way leads to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.

"I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere, ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by... and that has made all the difference."

She paused, indicating the recital's completion, then fixed them with her uniquely dark eyes.  "Most of you know me.  Some of you don't.  I've been down another road... seen where it leads.  This is a new road for me... and for you.  Here's to the difference – to taking that road together."  She held up her glass.  "To roads less traveled."

A strange feeling of unease festered in her gut.  With a heady sip, she quickly retook her chair, flushed.  She had been telling herself she wasn't ready for this captain bit... but that definitely sounded like a captain to her.

That was what scared her.