What She Held In
Posted on Fri Mar 27th, 2026 @ 2:37pm by Maren Malbrooke
Edited on on Fri Mar 27th, 2026 @ 5:54pm
3,012 words; about a 15 minute read
Mission:
The Mysteries of Maren
Location: VIP Quarters - Deck 2 - USS Herodotus
Timeline: MD002, 2124 hrs, Prime Timeline
By the time evening settled over the Herodotus, the ship had gone quieter in the way starships sometimes did without ever truly sleeping.
Maren had spent most of the day in and out of herself. Reading. Pausing. Wandering the edges of thought without ever straying too far from the quarters. The PADD had hardly left her hands for long, and when it had, it never stayed far from reach. She’d worked her way through pieces of her mother’s life in this universe slowly, sometimes only a paragraph or two at a time before having to stop and stare at nothing for a while.
Now the room was dim, lit mostly by the low ambient glow built into the quarters and the shifting starlight spilling in from the viewport. The tea from earlier had long gone cold. Her mother’s coat was still with her, dragged close and half wrapped around her shoulders where she sat curled into one corner of the bed with the PADD balanced against her knees.
She had already seen enough to know this version of Tarelle Von had been real in all the ways that mattered. Smart. Warm. Funny in that dry, quiet way that caught Maren off guard every time it surfaced in the logs. She had built a life here. She had people. She had work she cared about. She had parents who loved her and messages she meant to answer and a future that, right up until it didn’t, had looked like it was still waiting for her.
That was the worst part.
Maren stared down at the file in front of her, thumb resting near the final entry in the list. The date sat there on the screen like something heavier than it had any right to be. 2385. Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards. Final log.
For a while she just looked at it.
She knew, in the blunt practical part of her mind, what came after. The uprising. The dead. The posthumous medal. She knew this wasn’t going to end well because it had already ended. The log was just the last piece left behind.
Still, her thumb hovered there.
The room felt smaller now. Quieter. Even the distant emotional texture of the ship seemed far away, dulled at the edges by fatigue and by the way she had spent most of the day trying not to feel more than she could survive.
Her fingers tightened slightly around the PADD.
“This is a terrible idea,” she murmured to herself, though there was no real conviction in it.
She took a breath, pulled the coat a little tighter around herself, and pressed play.
For a second there was nothing but static and the faint scrape of the recording device being moved.
Then the image lurched into focus.
The log had not been set up with care. It had been dropped somewhere that gave it a view of Tarelle from slightly below and off to one side, as if she had wedged it into place with shaking hands and hoped it would keep running. The lighting was wrong immediately. Not the soft, even light of quarters or an office, but the brutal pulse of emergency systems cycling through smoke. Somewhere beyond the frame an alarm was sounding in ragged intervals, sometimes swallowed by distance, sometimes close enough to make the audio distort. There were other sounds too. Metal giving way. A burst of shouting cut off too quickly. Something heavy striking the deck hard enough to shiver through the bulkheads.
Tarelle was crouched rather than seated, one shoulder pressed to the wall beside her as if she had chosen the spot for cover more than comfort. There was blood on her sleeve. Not a dramatic amount, not enough to turn the scene theatrical, just enough to say she had already run out of time to stay untouched. Her hair had come loose badly, strands stuck to damp skin at her temples, and the careful poise Maren had seen in the earlier logs was still there only in fragments now, clinging to her like the last dry part of a person caught in a storm.
She didn’t speak at once.
Instead she listened.
Her head turned slightly toward something outside the room, and the look on her face was somehow worse for being controlled. She was not panicking. She was doing what people did when panic had already burned through them and left something colder behind. Her breathing was too fast, though she was trying to hide it. One hand was braced flat against the deck beside her, the fingertips smeared dark where she had clearly pressed down into someone else’s blood or her own and not had the time to care which.
When she finally looked toward the recorder, the expression she found was not calm. It was effort.
“I don’t have long,” she said, and even through the interference her voice was unmistakably hers. Softer than the alarms. Softer than the destruction. Warmth dragged through terror and made to hold shape by sheer will. “If this is recording, if it gets out, then that means somebody still has a chance to hear me, so…”
She stopped and swallowed hard, the words catching somewhere between breath and grief. A sound outside the frame made her flinch before she could stop herself. Maren felt that in her own body, a small involuntary tightening through her shoulders, like she was bracing with her.
Tarelle looked away again, listening. When she spoke next it was lower, rougher, and full of the kind of exhaustion that only came after seeing too much too quickly.
“The synths turned on us. Everyone thought it was a systems failure at first. Then the defence grid started firing. They’re hitting the yards. They’re hitting Mars.” Her voice faltered for the first time there, and the terror under the control showed cleanly. “There are people still moving in the lower sections. I was with three of them. One made it to a lift. Two didn’t.”
She shut her eyes for a second, not dramatically, just because grief needed somewhere to go and there was nowhere for it except inward.
“I stayed because there were injured everywhere and because that is what I was supposed to do,” she said quietly. “I stayed because someone had to keep telling them where to go, who could still walk, who needed carrying, who was already gone. I stayed because leaving felt like choosing myself over people who were more afraid than I was.”
A bitter, disbelieving half-laugh escaped her then, small and wrecked and human.
“I don’t even know if that was brave. It might just have been stupid.”
On the bed, Maren didn’t realise she’d stopped breathing properly until her chest began to hurt. The quarters around her had gone thin and unreal again. All that seemed left of the room was the PADD in her hands, her mother’s coat gathered tight around her shoulders, and the sound of Tarelle Von trying to keep her soul together in a dying room while the world outside burned.
Tarelle shifted then, and pain crossed her face too quickly to hide. She pressed a hand briefly to her side, drew one unsteady breath, and looked back into the recorder with red-rimmed eyes that were trying very hard not to become the eyes of someone saying goodbye.
“If anyone I love hears this,” she said, voice trembling once before she steadied it, “then I need you to know I was not alone at the end. I was frightened, yes, but I was not alone. There were people here. There were hands to hold. There were names spoken. It mattered.”
That was where Maren felt the first tear fall.
Not because the words were large. Because they weren’t.
Because this version of her mother, who was not hers and still somehow was close enough to break her open, was trying to make death gentler for the people who would survive it.
Tarelle’s breathing shook once before she steadied it, but when she looked back into the recorder there was no real composure left now, only the effort of holding herself together long enough to be understood.
“Mother. Father.” Her voice softened instantly on the words, and that softness hurt more than the fear ever could. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I know how cruel this is, leaving you with a recording instead of my voice answering back, but I couldn’t bear the thought of you hearing my name from a stranger first.”
She swallowed hard, and for a second she couldn’t go on. Something thundered somewhere beyond the room, close enough to rattle the recorder where it sat.
“I wanted to come home,” she said quietly, and the truth of it landed like a blow. “I keep thinking that. Not about duty or Starfleet or any of the things I thought would matter at the end. Just home. I wanted one more message from you. One more meal. One more stupid argument where Father pretends he isn’t emotional and Mother catches him being exactly that.”
A broken little laugh escaped her and collapsed almost immediately into grief.
“You loved me so well,” she whispered. “That’s what I can’t stop thinking about. I was loved so well.”
Maren’s breath caught hard enough to hurt.
On the screen, Tarelle pressed a trembling hand to her mouth, then lowered it again because there was no point hiding tears from a goodbye.
“I thought I had more time,” she said. “That’s the worst part. I really thought there would be time for all the ordinary things. For the life that comes after you’ve become yourself.”
Her eyes dropped for a moment, and when she looked back up again there was something even more raw in them, a grief that had gone beyond fear now and into mourning for a life not yet lived.
“I wanted so many things,” she said, voice unsteady and open now. “I wanted to be better than I am. Kinder. Braver. I wanted to grow old enough to stop feeling like I was still only beginning. I wanted…” She stopped, breath breaking around the words. “I wanted a daughter.”
Maren went still.
Tarelle’s face crumpled, just for a second, and she let it. There was no strength left for vanity.
“I wanted a little girl who rolled her eyes at me and stole my clothes and thought I was embarrassing until she was old enough to know better,” she said, crying now and not trying not to. “I wanted someone stubborn and bright and impossible. I wanted to hold her and know she was here. I wanted to tell her who her grandparents were and what home felt like and all the things my mother taught me when I was too young to understand why they mattered.”
By then Maren was crying before she even realised she was.
Tarelle drew in another shaking breath. “I wanted to love longer,” she said, and this time it was not poetic, not polished, just true. “That’s all. I wanted longer. I wanted the rest of it.”
Something screamed through metal outside the room. She flinched hard, eyes darting toward the sound, and when she looked back her fear was finally visible in full.
“I am afraid,” she said. “I need you to know that, too. I am so afraid.”
The honesty of it was unbearable.
“I don’t want this to be the end of me. I don’t want these to be the last words I ever say. I don’t want smoke and alarms and this room to be the last thing I have.”
Her breathing had become ragged now, and still she kept going, because love would not let her stop.
“But if this is all I get, then listen to me.” Her voice broke completely on the next line. “I loved my life. I loved being your daughter. I loved being here. I loved the silly, forgettable, ordinary parts of being alive more than I knew how to say while I was in them.”
Tears slid freely down her face now.
“And if there is someone, someday, who would have been mine…” She stopped there, like even now she couldn’t quite bear the shape of it, but the thought was already alive in the room between the words. “Tell her I was thinking of her, even before she existed. Tell her I would have loved her. Tell her there was a place for her in me.”
Maren folded in on herself at that.
On the screen, Tarelle looked straight into the recorder one last time, smoke drifting behind her, the world ending around the edges of the frame while she poured the last of herself into the only thing she had left.
“I love you,” she whispered. “I love you so much. And I am sorry I don’t get to stay.”
Something catastrophic hit nearby. The image shook violently.
Tarelle turned her head toward it, and whatever she saw made peace and terror cross her face in the same instant.
Then the log cut to black.
The screen stayed black.
For a few seconds Maren just stared at it, her whole body gone still in that rigid, unnatural way people did when some part of them hadn’t quite caught up yet. The recorder had cut so suddenly that her mind seemed to keep waiting for it to come back, for the image to flicker, for her mother to draw another breath and finish the thought.
It didn’t.
The silence that followed felt brutal.
Grief hit her low and hard, not as tears at first but as something sick and hollow dropping straight through her stomach. Her breath caught halfway in and stayed there, thin and useless, while the ache in her chest turned sharp enough to make her hunch forward. For one horrible moment it felt like there was too much of everything inside her at once. Tarelle’s voice. The smoke. The fear in her face. The line about a daughter. That last unfinished shape of love aimed at someone who had never existed in that universe and somehow still found her anyway.
Maren folded over before she really meant to, one hand bracing against the mattress while the other dragged the old leather coat hard against her chest. She held it like it might keep the rest of her from coming apart, forehead pressed down into the worn sleeve, breathing in broken little pulls that never seemed to go deep enough. Her eyes burned. Her throat ached. The grief was so physical it made her feel unsteady in her own skin, like sorrow had weight and teeth and had decided to settle inside her ribs.
She did not let it out this time.
No wave. No pulse through the ship. No helpless spill of feeling into strangers who had not asked for it.
She held it in with everything she had.
That almost hurt more.
The force of it stayed trapped inside her chest and belly and skull, turning her thoughts into static and her heartbeat into something she could feel in the base of her throat. Tears kept coming anyway, hot and humiliating and impossible to stop, soaking soundlessly into the leather and the pillow beneath it. She bit down hard on the inside of her cheek once, then again, trying to stay quiet, trying to contain at least that much of it.
It took a long time for the worst of it to pass.
By the time she could breathe without feeling like it might break her, she had curled almost fully around the coat, knees pulled up, the PADD dark and face-down beside her like something sacred she couldn’t look at for another second. The room had gone soft at the edges. The ship beyond the walls felt distant again, mercifully so. There was only the bed, the dark, the damp heat of tears on her face, and the crushing, exhausted certainty that something inside her had been opened too far to close neatly again.
Her mother had died in that universe.
Not vanished. Not taken. Not turned into a story people spoke around with careful hope threaded through it. Dead. Afraid. Loving. Real.
And somehow that hurt almost as much as not knowing.
Maren shut her eyes and pressed her face deeper into the coat, fingers tightening in the leather until they ached. Her father had spent years building Tarelle into something untouchable, something luminous enough to survive absence. But the woman in that log had not been a ghost or a legend. She had been tired, frightened, bleeding, still trying to comfort other people while the world ended around her.
She had been human enough to want her mother.
Human enough to want a daughter.
That was the part Maren couldn’t get past.
She lay there with it until the tears slowed and the room stopped spinning, until all that was left was the dull, deep ache of having finally grieved something she had never been allowed to lose properly. When she opened her eyes again, they went first to the coat in her hands and then, slowly, to the dark screen of the PADD.
She wasn’t ready to play another log.
She wasn’t ready for much of anything.
But somewhere underneath the wreck of her, beneath the nausea and the heartbreak and the raw, humiliating tenderness of it all, one thing had started to settle into place with quiet, stubborn clarity.
If she ever went back, she was not going back the way she had come.
And with that thought still fragile and wordless inside her, Maren curled tighter around the coat, let the silence hold what was left of her for the night, and stayed there.
A Post By:
Maren Malbrooke
Civilian, USS Pioneer
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