Carried With Me
Posted on Tue Mar 24th, 2026 @ 8:52am by Maren Malbrooke
Edited on on Tue Mar 24th, 2026 @ 3:05pm
2,458 words; about a 12 minute read
Mission:
The Mysteries of Maren
Location: VIP Quarters - Deck 2 - USS Herodotus
Timeline: MD002 1132 hrs
The door slid shut behind Marisa with a soft hiss, and the silence that followed felt almost unnatural.
Maren stayed where she was for a moment, standing in the middle of the living space with the PADD still in one hand and her mother’s old leather coat hanging from her shoulders like a second skin. Her eyes moved slowly over everything, taking it in properly now that no one was talking at her. The quarters were clean in a way that still felt faintly unreal, all smooth lines and quiet lighting and starship order. No patched bulkheads. No concealed compartments. No signs that anyone had ever had to make this room survive something it wasn’t built for.
It looked safe.
That was the problem.
Safe had become one of those words that sounded better in theory than in practice. Safe meant unwatched, unhurried, undefended. It meant not needing to think about where the exits were the second you entered a room, and even now her brain had done it anyway. Door. Bathroom. Sleeping alcove. The angle of the viewport. The replicator Marisa had shown her with its calm little voice and absurd list of choices. All of it sat there waiting for her to trust it.
Maren let out a slow breath and set the PADD down on the nearest surface, though she kept a hand on it for a second longer before letting go. Her other hand moved absently over the sleeve of the coat, thumb brushing the worn leather near the cuff. It still smelled faintly like smoke and old fabric and something she had spent years telling herself she remembered clearly. She pulled it tighter around herself on instinct, even though the quarters were warm.
Then she turned slowly in place, taking the room in again with the wary look of someone who had spent too long learning that comfort could be a trap. The bed looked too soft. The lighting too gentle. Even the air felt wrong without the constant edge of fear threaded through it.
For the first time since the jump, there was nothing immediate demanding her attention.
No alarms.
No patrols.
No one shouting for power reroutes or evasive vectors.
Just the room.
Just her.
And that, somehow, was almost harder.
For a little while Maren just stood there, letting the quiet settle around her instead of fighting it.
The room still felt strange, but not in the sharp, hostile way everything else had since she came through the jump. It was strange the way a place felt when it had been made for comfort on purpose. The kind of comfort she didn’t really know what to do with. Her shoulders loosened a fraction as she turned slowly, taking in the bed again, the low lighting, the clean lines of the room, the fact that nobody was about to burst through the door and tell her to move.
She let out a breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding and reached up to rub at her temple. The emotional noise on the ship was still there if she paid attention to it, a low distant current of lives moving around her, but it had softened now that she was alone. She tried to do what little she knew how to do and let it drift further back, not shutting it out completely, just blurring the edges enough that it stopped scraping against her nerves. It wasn’t elegant. It wasn’t proper Betazoid control. It was more like turning down the volume on a room she couldn’t leave.
That helped.
Maren shrugged out of the old leather coat at last, carefully this time, and draped it over the back of a chair where she could still see it. Without it she looked younger somehow, less like someone braced for a fight and more like what she actually was: a seventeen-year-old girl standing alone in borrowed quarters in a universe that wasn’t hers. Her gaze drifted back to the bed and this time, instead of eyeing it like a threat, she gave the faintest, almost embarrassed huff of a laugh.
“Okay,” she murmured to no one, the word soft in the empty room. “That does look really comfortable.”
The corner of her mouth twitched as she walked over to it and pressed a hand down against the blanket, testing the mattress underneath like she expected it to prove her wrong. It didn’t. If anything, it made her expression shift into something a little lighter, a little more openly her age.
For the first time since waking in the shuttle, Maren let herself have a small, private thought that wasn’t about survival or escape.
Maybe, just for tonight, she could stop.
Maren stood there for another moment, letting the quiet settle properly around her before she turned back toward the surface where she had left the PADD. The room still felt unfamiliar, but it no longer felt sharp at the edges. It was just strange now, and she could live with strange for a little while.
She picked the PADD up again and moved to sit on the edge of the bed, one leg folding beneath her without really thinking about it. For a few seconds she just looked at the screen, her thumb hovering over the available files while she tried to decide whether she was ready to open any of them. The answer was probably no. She did it anyway.
Tarelle Von.
The entry opened beneath her fingers, and after a brief hesitation she selected the log covering her posting to Utopia Planitia. The screen shifted, text giving way to recorded video, and when her mother’s face appeared Maren froze.
She hit pause immediately.
For a long second she didn’t move at all. The room seemed to fall away around her as she stared at the image on the screen, her breath turning shallow without her meaning it to. The woman looking back at her was older than the scraps of memory she carried, more defined, more real. Not just a voice her father used when he spoke carefully. Not just a half-remembered touch or the shape of a face blurred by years and grief. She was there. Close enough to see the way the light caught her features, close enough to hear her if Maren only pressed play.
Her thumb brushed lightly over the edge of the screen as if that could somehow bridge the distance.
“You look the same,” she whispered, and the words came out smaller than she intended.
Her eyes burned almost at once. Not because this was her mother, not exactly. She knew that. She knew it in the same part of herself that knew what ship she was on and what year it was and that the Dominion had lost here. But knowing it and feeling it were two completely different things, and right now all her mind seemed to understand was that Tarelle Von was looking back at her for the first time in years.
Maren swallowed hard and pressed play.
The voice hit her worse than the face had.
It was warm and steady and so painfully ordinary that it cracked something open in her before she had a chance to stop it. She sat there with the PADD held too tightly in both hands, listening like if she missed even a second of it she might lose her all over again. There was no shield for this, no sarcasm, no sharp remark to hide behind. Just the quiet ache of hearing someone she had spent half her life wanting suddenly sound as though she were only in the next room.
By the time the first log had barely gotten going, tears were slipping silently down Maren’s face and she wasn’t even wiping them away.
The log began simply.
Tarelle Von sat in a tidy office space with Utopia Planitia visible in the background through a narrow viewport, the light from Mars washing everything in a soft copper hue. She wore the uniform neatly, as though she had never done anything else, and when she smiled at the start of the recording it was small and unforced, the kind of smile that came from speaking to people she expected to understand her.
“Personal log,” she said, her voice warm and clear. “Lieutenant Junior Grade Tarelle Von. First week at Utopia Planitia and I still haven’t decided if the view is calming or if it’s trying too hard.”
The little line made Maren’s mouth tremble.
It was such an ordinary thing to say. So alive. So easy. Not grand or tragic or important enough to survive as one of the stories her father might have held onto. Just her mother being herself, and somehow that hurt more than anything.
Tarelle glanced down at something off screen, then back up again with that same soft, private amusement.
“I heard from Mother this morning. She says Father is pretending not to be proud that I’m here, which means he’s probably already told half of Betazed that I’ve made Starfleet regret letting me in.” She paused, smiling a little more to herself now. “She also reminded me, as she always does, that peace of mind is not the same thing as silence. I think she knows I’ve been trying too hard not to feel everything at once.”
Maren’s breath caught.
It wasn’t the exact phrasing she remembered, not word for word, but it was close enough to strike somewhere deep and sore. Her mother in her universe had said something like that too, hadn’t she? Or had her father said it because Tarelle used to? She couldn’t even tell anymore. The memory was all fragments and borrowed echoes, but hearing the shape of it now made the years between them feel unbearably thin.
The log continued.
“I haven’t decided what kind of counselor I’m meant to be yet,” Tarelle said, leaning back slightly in her chair. “I only know I want to be the sort of person someone can breathe easier around. Mother says that’s enough to start with.”
Maren closed her eyes for a second, but the voice only got closer when she did. It filled the room in a way nothing else had since she’d arrived, warm and steady and almost painfully gentle. There was no sharpness to it, no fear buried under the words, no careful weighing of what could and couldn’t be said. Tarelle sounded safe. She sounded loved. She sounded like a version of herself that had been allowed to become whole.
When Maren opened her eyes again, another tear slipped free and tracked silently down her cheek.
Tarelle laughed softly at something in the next part of the recording, shaking her head before continuing. “If I don’t answer Mother’s next message soon, she’s going to assume I’ve either been kidnapped by engineers or adopted by the first patient who cries in my office.” Her expression softened after that, something quieter settling in. “I miss them more than I expected. I knew I would, but knowing it and feeling it are two different things.”
That one hit like a blade.
Maren looked down at the PADD in her hands, her grip tightening as if the device itself were the only thing holding the moment together. It was too much and not enough all at once. She had wanted this for so long without ever letting herself say it out loud, wanted her mother’s face, her voice, any proof that she had once been real and close and reachable. And now she had it, but only like this. Preserved. Untouchable. A life adjacent to the one that had been taken from her before she’d ever really had it.
By the time the log moved on to ordinary details about quarters assignments and first impressions of the Fleet Yards, Maren had stopped trying to hide the tears. She sat curled slightly over the PADD on the edge of the bed, listening like if she missed a word she might lose her all over again.
The log ran on for a few more moments, all of it painfully normal. A remark about quarters that were still half full of unpacked boxes. A passing complaint about engineers who treated counseling appointments like optional maintenance. Another soft, amused mention of her parents, of messages from home, of the strange comfort of hearing familiar voices across impossible distance.
Then Tarelle smiled again, smaller this time, more private.
“If Mother asks, yes, I’m eating properly. If Father asks, no, Starfleet has not immediately collapsed because they trusted me with patients.” Her expression softened after that, and when she spoke again her voice had gentled into something so full of affection it almost didn’t sound meant for a log at all. “And if any of you worry about me, don’t. I’m all right. I am loved, I know where home is, and I carry you with me.”
That was the line that did it.
Maren’s breath caught so sharply it hurt. For one suspended second she just stared at the screen as if she might somehow hold the moment still, as if looking away would make the voice disappear. Then the grief hit her whole.
It tore through her too fast to contain.
The wave of it rolled outward from the quarters in a sudden empathic burst, a deep, aching pulse of loss and longing and love with nowhere to go, spilling through the decks around her like a pressure front. Not anger. Not fear. Just grief so raw and young and old at the same time that anyone sensitive enough on the ship would feel it catch in their chest.
Maren barely noticed.
She pulled her knees up onto the bed with none of her usual care, set the PADD aside only far enough that it wouldn’t fall, and grabbed the nearest pillow with both arms like it was the only solid thing in the room. Then she curled around it, leather coat half twisted beneath her, and cried in the way people do when they’ve spent years not allowing themselves to.
Not neatly.
Not quietly.
Not with any dignity at all.
By the time exhaustion finally dragged her under, her face was buried against the pillow, one hand still stretched toward the paused PADD on the bed beside her, as though even in sleep she couldn’t bear to let her mother go again.
A Post By:
Maren Malbrooke
Civilian, USS Pioneer
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