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nonelvisTitle: Once More, This Time to the Left
Fandom: Star Trek: Discovery
Characters/Pairing(s): Katrina Cornwell, Carl the Guardian of Forever, Michael Burnham
Rating: All ages
Word count: 500
Spoilers: None
Summary: You made your choice, Kat thought, and her body burst into starlight. Five connected drabbles about what happens to Kat after the torpedo explodes.
Author's notes: Covers prompts for “You made your choice,” “Seated together at a bar,” and “Where is Katrina Cornwell right now?” Many thanks tolizbee, who both beta’d this story and inspired it with a question I wondered about when I beta’d her Katoberfest2024 story even though it turns out I already knew the answer because I'd beta'd previous stories of hers. All I can say in my defense is that it's been a long goddamned year.
::xposted to AO3 and Ad Astra
You made your choice, Kat thought, and her body burst into starlight.
Dying stung much more than expected. Her skin hummed in synchrony with the torpedo wave, and a single tone, a high A-sharp, sang in her head.
She couldn’t feel her body, but there was a structure nonetheless: the sense of limbs and fingers and toes connected at a great distance, yo-yoing away and back again; a cool breeze sifting through her hair.
Is this the choice I made?
The note stopped, and there was silence for a long, long time, until there wasn’t anymore.
* * *
Alive, Kat had never traveled through a wormhole. Dead, she didn’t know if she had either, though the whirling in what wasn’t not her brain suggested disorientation, possibly temporal displacement – but if she didn’t have a brain, how could the words “temporal displacement” float through her disembodied skull?
People with near-death experiences sometimes spoke of a shimmering tunnel of light and color and its inexorable pull. She couldn’t see it so much as sense it, a prickling at her endpoints, her edges vibrating in bass and cymbal. She’d have screamed if she could. But the wormhole swallowed it.
* * *
“You don’t seem like yourself,” said the pug-nosed man at the bar. His jowly face suggested a little too much gravity, except that the bar was literally floating in space.
At least the afterlife had Oban, or what smelled like it: smoke, cream, malt. It tasted real enough.
“I don’t usually show up for these things,” he continued, “but you’re something unusual.”
“Death isn’t unusual,” Kat replied.
“It is when you’re not dead.” A puff on his cigar, which ... never mind how it worked in space, that was the least of Kat’s questions. “I’m here to give you another choice.”
* * *
“Time travel’s a funny thing. Lots of unintended side effects. So you tell me: you want to let yourself rest, or take your chances? The universe tilts either way, neither good nor bad.”
“You’re asking me whether I’d rather die or jump into the unknown?”
“Same thing, isn’t it?”
Kat sipped at her Oban. “No. Not at all,” she said. “I’ll take the unknown, thanks.”
He nodded. “Good talk.”
A vertiginous slip into a stream of water circling a drain; a blinding, pulsing neon glow and white noise crackling through ears she didn’t have –
– then lungs, and breath –
* * *
Michael Burnham, a captain’s pips on an unfamiliar collar, leant over Kat. “Admiral? Are you okay?”
“Michael? How ...”
“Tilly can explain later. Something about antichronoton particles released before the Red Angel’s wormhole opened intermingling with torpedo explosion waves? There were a lot of words, even for Tilly. The important thing is that you’re alive.”
“Where am I?”
“You’re on board Discovery. And I have to tell you ... it’s 3191.”
Kat chuckled hoarsely. “He said the universe would tilt. I didn’t realize it’d be that much.”
“Who –”
“Never mind, Captain. It’s just good to be home. Whenever it is.”
Fandom: Star Trek: Discovery
Characters/Pairing(s): Katrina Cornwell, Carl the Guardian of Forever, Michael Burnham
Rating: All ages
Word count: 500
Spoilers: None
Summary: You made your choice, Kat thought, and her body burst into starlight. Five connected drabbles about what happens to Kat after the torpedo explodes.
Author's notes: Covers prompts for “You made your choice,” “Seated together at a bar,” and “Where is Katrina Cornwell right now?” Many thanks to
lizbee, who both beta’d this story and inspired it with a question I wondered about when I beta’d her Katoberfest2024 story even though it turns out I already knew the answer because I'd beta'd previous stories of hers. All I can say in my defense is that it's been a long goddamned year.::xposted to AO3 and Ad Astra
You made your choice, Kat thought, and her body burst into starlight.
Dying stung much more than expected. Her skin hummed in synchrony with the torpedo wave, and a single tone, a high A-sharp, sang in her head.
She couldn’t feel her body, but there was a structure nonetheless: the sense of limbs and fingers and toes connected at a great distance, yo-yoing away and back again; a cool breeze sifting through her hair.
Is this the choice I made?
The note stopped, and there was silence for a long, long time, until there wasn’t anymore.
Alive, Kat had never traveled through a wormhole. Dead, she didn’t know if she had either, though the whirling in what wasn’t not her brain suggested disorientation, possibly temporal displacement – but if she didn’t have a brain, how could the words “temporal displacement” float through her disembodied skull?
People with near-death experiences sometimes spoke of a shimmering tunnel of light and color and its inexorable pull. She couldn’t see it so much as sense it, a prickling at her endpoints, her edges vibrating in bass and cymbal. She’d have screamed if she could. But the wormhole swallowed it.
“You don’t seem like yourself,” said the pug-nosed man at the bar. His jowly face suggested a little too much gravity, except that the bar was literally floating in space.
At least the afterlife had Oban, or what smelled like it: smoke, cream, malt. It tasted real enough.
“I don’t usually show up for these things,” he continued, “but you’re something unusual.”
“Death isn’t unusual,” Kat replied.
“It is when you’re not dead.” A puff on his cigar, which ... never mind how it worked in space, that was the least of Kat’s questions. “I’m here to give you another choice.”
“Time travel’s a funny thing. Lots of unintended side effects. So you tell me: you want to let yourself rest, or take your chances? The universe tilts either way, neither good nor bad.”
“You’re asking me whether I’d rather die or jump into the unknown?”
“Same thing, isn’t it?”
Kat sipped at her Oban. “No. Not at all,” she said. “I’ll take the unknown, thanks.”
He nodded. “Good talk.”
A vertiginous slip into a stream of water circling a drain; a blinding, pulsing neon glow and white noise crackling through ears she didn’t have –
– then lungs, and breath –
Michael Burnham, a captain’s pips on an unfamiliar collar, leant over Kat. “Admiral? Are you okay?”
“Michael? How ...”
“Tilly can explain later. Something about antichronoton particles released before the Red Angel’s wormhole opened intermingling with torpedo explosion waves? There were a lot of words, even for Tilly. The important thing is that you’re alive.”
“Where am I?”
“You’re on board Discovery. And I have to tell you ... it’s 3191.”
Kat chuckled hoarsely. “He said the universe would tilt. I didn’t realize it’d be that much.”
“Who –”
“Never mind, Captain. It’s just good to be home. Whenever it is.”