Today I came home to find my father unpacking a large container that had recently been sent from Earth. Containing his personal affects, Father was taking great care to unpack and place the various objects around our quarters, and when I happened upon him he seemed taken aback by my sudden presence.

"Don't mind me, just make yourself at home," I told him with a smile as I moved to my bedroom. Our living arrangement had become quite comfortable these past few weeks, and though he and I didn't see eye to eye on a host of issues, there wasn't the same strained tension that I had felt during the initial days of the move. And I could tell that he was actually warming to the idea as well.

Since Uncle Alexander's visit three weeks ago, Father seemed much more relaxed around me, and though I was hesitant I didn't see much point in remaining standoffish toward him. Last week I had taken him to Lairis Prime for the graduation of several new students from the Starfleet Medical Training Facility there, and afterward we ended up spending the majority of the day enjoying the local culture and fanfare associated with the graduation. Apparently the Lairissians value medical knowledge and expertise more than anything else, and to be accepted into something as prestigious as Starfleet Medical Community was a high honor indeed. And as an officiator of ceremony, I enjoyed a bit of elevated status there as well. Treated as honored guests everywhere we went, my father and I really got to enjoy the culture of Lairis Prime, the people there temperate and friendly, much like their climate.




 Now back aboard the station, my father seemed intent on maintaining that attitude.

It had been an incredibly long day, a long week really, and I had been looking forward to an easy night, some time to read and just take my mind off of my current research ventures into a cure for Kathryn. It seemed that Starfleet was piling work onto the station, especially me, and in light of the recent activities of myself and the senior staff involving that Ringleader madman, I really felt we had no choice but to grin and bear it. Changing out of my uniform and into more casual attire, I returned to the living room and fixed myself a drink.

"What's in the box?" I asked my father. He hesitated for a moment, staring down at something still inside the sleek metal container, before finally reaching inside and gently pulling out a large model ship. It was a perfect wooden replica of an old sailing vessel, something that would have been found on Earth during 16th to the middle 18th centuries. It had three main masts, their sails opened and posed as though proudly catching wind. It was the sleek design of a frigate complete with crow's nest and rigging and even a partially visible below deck area where the cannons were ominously protruding from its respective bows. I stared at it for a moment, slowly putting my drink down and moving closer to it to examine it further. There were no markings to denote a name, and yet somehow I felt I knew it.

"The Astral Queen," I whispered more to myself than my father. His eyebrow arched at the name, and with a smile and a nod he confirmed that I was right. He held it out to me and gingerly I accepted the ship. The moment I touched it, momentary visions flashed in my mind of me at a much younger age, how happy I had been to receive this as a gift on my tenth birthday. I remembered hours of simply staring at it and imagining vast adventures upon it, me as the Captain and ordering my men about as I marched from bow to stern. I could even remember one bright winter morning on which I, tired of land locked life, had boldly declared to my mother that I was forever departing home and striking out for the sea. Despite hearing all about Starfleet and space from my father, my love of the ocean had been deeply instilled and nurtured thanks to my mother who saw fit to take me to the shore whenever we had a spare moment. She loved the Cliff side, and I longed to dive into the water.

"I am surprised you kept this. I had forgotten it when I..." I found myself suddenly unable to speak as the memory of that particular day when I had left home came back to me. I had only been fourteen years old, the death of my mother still fresh in my mind, and I had angrily stormed out of our home in New Berlin determined to never return. Now I here I sat with him going over old personal artifacts.

"I kept everything after you left. I knew that one day, I'd have the opportunity to give these back to you. Your mother would have wanted you to have them, despite what our relationship is or may have been." I couldn't look at him then, the way he was suddenly going on about my mother and her wishes for the both of us. I felt a brief pang of guilt quickly shrouded by anger as I considered his words. My mother had always been a mediator between me and my father, our relationship having never been too solid and her always having to broker peace between us. I could still remember the many times that she told me how much he and I were alike, and that it was likely the reason we fought so much. "Stubborn Thrace Pride," she used to say. I noticed then that my father was watching me, as if he could read my mind and knew the thoughts that I was having.

I placed the ship on the coffee table next to my glass and stood. Feeling slightly manipulated I crossed the room and stared out the large window that dominated the wall. I listened to the sounds of my father still shuffling about the various items from the box. I heard him close the box finally and then move away from the couch.

"Yes, you left so suddenly, there wasn't really time for you to take any of your stuff were there? You just....declared you'd had enough and took off." James said quietly as he moved next to me.

"Not like you gave me much choice did you? I mean, it was a simple thing really..." I replied with a slight ring of anger in my voice.

"What is so simple about someone dying Son? It's not like it was an old friend of colleague or something like that. It was my wife." Father stated plaintively.

"My mother," I countered quickly. My old anger was returning, slipping about me like an old sweater. I crossed my arms as I continued to glare out the window.

"Besides, it wasn't the death that I was bothered by, not really. It was the not knowing. I tried to talk to you, wanted to, and yet you simply wouldn't answer any of my questions. I knew you were involved--" I started but I suddenly caught the surprised look on my father's face in his reflection in the glass, and I stopped and turned to face him.

"You thought I was involved in her death? How? In what way? What could I have possibly done?" James's questions stammered out at me, and I was taken aback by how flustered he seemed. It was so unlike my father to be uncertain about anything, especially something regarding my mother, particularly about her death.

"Oh come on Dad, I know you were there. I mean, I woke up at home to find you gone, returning a short time later and telling me that she was dead. You wouldn't answer any of my questions, and people just hushed it all up or told me to ask you rather than tell me themselves. I just knew that somehow you had manipulated the situation. I was sure that somehow, you and that bloody institution she worked for had done it, covered it all up and made up something about an accident." My words poured from me, and again I was stricken by how similar it all sounded in my mind, how they were nearly the exact same thoughts I had had when I had woken up in my bed twenty-seven years ago.

But this time my anger was not met with quiet acceptance from my father, but his own anger. "What do you think; that we concocted some grand conspiracy just to keep you from knowing what happened? Did you ever think that maybe, her death had affected a lot of people in such a way that they were uncomfortable talking about it? I know that is how it was for a lot of her friends, and I was no exception. Do you have any idea what it is like, to come home and find your wife and son missing, and receiving a frantic summons from one of her coworkers demanding I report there at once? You have no idea...." Dad turned and walked away from me then, shaking his head and continuing to mutter under his breath that I had no idea. I turned and watched his father pour his own drink and then down it in one.

"Hang on," I said as I turned back to the room. I had just latched onto one thing Father had just said, something I knew as false. "What'd you mean 'Wife and son missing? I wasn't missing; I was in bed at home. I must've....fallen asleep after school or something, but I was home." The look on my father's face as he stared back at me told me that we clearly disagreed on this point.

"What do you remember, about that day precisely?" James asked questioningly. He was peering at me carefully, as though seeing me differently for the first time. But I wasn't paying him any attention. Though Dad had just asked, I attempted to relive those days in my head, attempting to call up the images of that day I had tried so hard to keep it at bay, to cope with it and move on from it. I remembered coming home; looking for mother and discovering she wasn't there...no, that wasn't right. She was never there when I got home. She was always at the institute, and I had gone to meet her...

Wait. That wasn't right either. I hadn't gone there had I? I had several memories of the institute where my mother taught, the people that used to smile at me and the teachers that were overjoyed to see the "Young Thrace Lad" as I was often called as I gamboled down the corridors in search of my mother. How many times had I often found her either in her lab or in the school garden, tending to some new plant or new compound she had created for her botany class experiments?

But that had not been the case that day...had it? Surely not. I knew I had been home. I had woken up to find my father home, despondent, and finally coaxing the news from him that my mother would never be coming home....

And it was this thought that I latched onto now. I looked back at Father, anger alight in my eyes and playing across my face as I stared at him. "I remember being home, alone, and suddenly finding you there with that terrible news! I remember asking you, begging you to tell me what happened, and yet you said nothing! I went to the institute, found that giant gaping hole in the back end of it, and no one there to tell me anything but how sorry they were. No one gave me a straight answer, but instead referred me back to you. After I few days of trying I gave up, convinced you would never tell me anything and that I would have to find out from another source. But then the more I looked the more I kept hearing about this 'accident,' some student experiment gone wrong, and that was it. But if it was so simple, why couldn't you tell me? Why did you just sit there, or just wave me off and say, "Maybe later," or "some other time?" I wasn't looking for anything other than the truth about what happened to my mother, and you of all people kept snowing me. Why?" I was more pleading with Dad now, anger seeping away as another feeling welled up inside me. Watching my father now as he sank into his chair at my words, realizing that he had never moved passed her death, which neither of us had, made me feel...Shame. I had carried this around for so long, deciding long ago that I would rather be mad at my father than continue to feel hurt and helpless at the loss of my mother. The anger had driven out everything else, and had eventually driven me from home.

"I never realized how much you didn't know, how much you had forgotten. I always imagined, hoped, that as you aged and came to grips with her death, you would remember." Dad said from his seat. He poured another drink but this time he held it without taking a sip.

"What's to remember?" I yelled suddenly. "I don't have any information to remember!"

"You know a lot more than you think Son. Sit down. I suppose it is time we both shed our delusions about our memories then, about our hopes. It seems that I will have to force you to remember." At these words Dad took a drink from his glass finally, and then set the unfinished contents down on the coffee table. I finally crossed the room and took a seat in the cushy armchair next to the sofa, and waited for Father to speak.

He did not look at me. Instead he stared down at the few things he had placed on the table earlier, a small pocketknife, the old picture of my mother that had once been in his office. His eyes flickered over each of these, and finally settling on the old ship, he began his story:

"I had been at work all day at Starfleet's Intelligence office in downtown New Berlin. It was ridiculously hot that day, hotter than any on record. I had been rushing, wanting to finish my rounds early so that I could meet you before you headed home from school. Your mother didn't like it when one of us wasn't there to meet you after school you see, and while neither of us worked too far away, almost always we were caught up doing something for work. You didn't seem to mind though, and I suspected that you liked getting home before us and carousing about with Meredith. You two were thick as thieves then." James smiled wide at me, but very little of the mirth reached his eyes. I just waited for him to continue.

"Sometimes you came to my office to wait, sometimes you went to hers, but more often than not you went straight home. So, when I went to the school to pick you up, I assumed that you were home. So that was where I went. I thought that I would swing by and pick you up, and then we would snag your mother. Maybe, we would have us a night on the town, I don't know. But either way I knew that she would be rather upset if I turned up at her office without you. I got home only to find it empty. The front door was still locked, the computer told me no one had entered since we all had left that morning, and that you had certainly not called ahead. I was just about to call your mother to see if you were with her, when the computer notified me of an urgent communiqu� from the institute for me. Thinking it was your mother, I readied myself for a tenuous albeit loving lecture about our rebellious son and his penchant for being unpredictable." Again Dad smiled at me, but I sat on the edge of his seat, eager for more.

"Imagine my surprise when Professor Tabrez's face was peering at me from the monitor. I remember thinking how horrible he looked, his normally speckled brown appearance now replaced by this pinkish blotched one. Even for a Caldaran, he looked ill. I didn't even get the chance to ask a question. He told me that there had been an accident, and that I was urgently needed. He said that there had been an explosion and half the building had collapsed, and you and Cynthia were among the missing. He didn't even need to finish the statement, for I was already out the door and on my way." Now Dad reached for his glass and finished it, and not taking a chance on looking at me, he plowed on with the story.

"When I arrived, both you and your mother had already been found, but she was in rough shape. Apparently she had been aiding in the rescue of the other students, and when she had been alerted to the fact that you had not been found, she had rushed in to find you. And find you she did. She had just handed you, unconscious but otherwise unharmed, over to another professor there when a support beam had caved in and dropped another portion of the ceiling on her. It took some time, but they were later able to free her. Unfortunately she had sustained incredibly severe injuries, and died before she could be taken to the hospital." Dad stopped talking finally, indicating that he was finished. He leaned back on the sofa and closed his eyes.

"Hang on," I said. I felt stricken with this new information, my mind pouring over each newly revealed detail as I concentrated on the story. "Why didn't they use transporters? She could have been in a hospital in seconds. They could have gotten her out with no problem."

"I told you it was hot Ben. You should know...Oh wait, you might not remember that either. Heat on New Berlin is extremely rare, it being a lunar colony and all, and bloody difficult for the atmospheric condensers to process. More often than not it happens because of a solar flare or ion storm passing through the atmosphere. In that case it was an ion storm, and when that happens it's near impossible for the atmospheric condensers to function, and the ionizing radiation wreaks havoc with the transporters. Starfleet had declared that all transporters be shut down in all lunar colonies during such storms, and ours had been completely shut down for hours before the storm. There simply wasn't time to activate one, and even if there had they probably wouldn't have used it due to the possibility of molecular damage." Dad once again finished and I was left to wonder. It was true, I did know that. While Federation technology had advanced considerably in the past thirty years, once still tried not to use the transporter during an ion storm if it could be avoided..

"So, my mother died saving my life. And I somehow escaped without a scratch." I suddenly felt quite tired and I sank back into my chair.

"I don't know about that 'without a scratch bit,' but essentially yes. The emergency medics cleared you, and I was allowed to take you home. You slept for three days. In fact, I was worried that the doctors had missed something and I called another doctor to take a look at you. But again they cleared you, and said that you would more likely than not wake up on your own. And sure enough you did, but you were confused and angry, and nothing I did calmed you." Dad continued to sit with his eyes closed, but I felt suddenly clear, awake.

Not once during his entire story did my father falter. He spoke clearly and openly, never once holding something back. And Father never lied to me. He may avoid or dodge a direct question, but once he spoke it had always been the truth. It was something that many relatives said I inherited from him. Now it was my turn to look at my father as though seeing him for the first time. My thoughts slowly turned inward as I realized that all this time I had been angry with him nearly to the point of hating him, but I was the one who had been impatient, had demanded answers from him and had behaved in such a belligerent and irascible manner.

I thought about all our past dealings since her death, the way I had been cold to him and shut him out of my life. I thought about how Meredith had pleaded with me to talk to him, and even how Rebecca had done the same. Through my mind's eye I saw my bitterness and resentment taking root in him, turning him callous as he dealt with me during the few interactions we had over the years. So much time wasted, all because I had been unable to remember, and unwilling to forgive him.

It was entirely my fault. Every bit of it. I had run away, and he had labored under the opinion that I would soon see reason. He had held out hope that one day I would remember, but I buried the memories, the pain of her death, under a dark mound of anger, shame, and later guilt at the rapid deterioration of my relationship with my one surviving parent. I had conjured up many reasons for no longer talking to him, spouting to anyone who would listen that our differences were too vast for either of us to cross, and yet here sat a man who had held onto a hope that one day, I really would wake up.

My father stood suddenly and began to leave the room. Obviously the conversation had worn him down, taking more out of him than either of us initially realized. Staring after him, again it struck me how much time had wasted between us, both so stubborn to really talk about this. He had counted on my memory returning, I had counted on him finally telling me. It seemed that in a way, we both got what we wanted. I wanted to call out to him, to stop him and say something, but for the moment, all I could do was watch as he walked away. The silent hiss of the door to his bedroom opening and closing truly signaled the end of our conversation, and for the first time in a long time I really wanted to talk to my father all over again.