Counsellor Greg Carraway’s office on Sirius was comfortable even by the standards of the mighty, hotel-in-space Odyssey class. No gleaming steel, no modern Starfleet minimalism, just soft lamplight, warm tones, and the faint scent of tea leaves. The carpet was soft enough to muffle voices and footsteps. Shelves lined the wall, with a mixture of well-thumbed paperbacks, magazines, and more weighty, hard-backed tomes sat upon them – an indulgence of space, Kharth thought. A small side table hosted a pot of something herbal that steamed between two mugs, next to a comfortable couch.

Carraway himself sat in an armchair opposite, not in uniform but a soft brown cable-knit jumper, sleeves pushed to his elbows. He looked less like a Starfleet officer than a man you’d meet in a café for a book-signing, but the steady blue eyes above the thick, grey-and-brown beard reminded Kharth of what she knew. He was soft, and kind, and sweet – and these were all strengths.

He was also not a fool.

He’d poured the tea as she talked, her hands clasped before her, trying to keep her body language and voice neutral and still feeling him peel apart her layers with nothing more than kind eyes and gentle, sympathetic smiles. Only once she was done did he talk, voice as ever ringing with nothing more than frustrating, earnest sincerity.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said at first, and she almost walked out the door there and then – but he pushed on. ‘Regulations mean I can’t serve you anything stronger than tea, even after all that.’

Despite herself, she cracked a half-smile. ‘If that was all it took, I’d report to the Round Table, Counsellor. Valance says I report to you.’

‘Well, yeah.’ He gave a calm shrug. ‘After all that, are you going to tell me that you’re totally fine?’

‘Who’s totally fine?’

‘Ah.’ Carraway sipped his tea. ‘Are we talking about you or playing semantics? I don’t mind too badly, it’s all your time, your active duty status on the line. I just like to know.’

Now she narrowed her eyes. ‘I’m not fine. I don’t see the point of talking about it.’

‘I think you know better than that, Saeihr. I think you just don’t want to talk about it. Which is allowed, it just won’t help me sign you off as fit for work with Captain Valance.’

‘Now you’re playing games,’ she pointed out. ‘You think I should open up for therapy and my wellbeing or whatever, but you’re pretending like this is all procedural box-ticking.’

He watched her, gaze level and open. ‘Does it matter what I think? Because if so, if you do care about my opinion: yeah, I want to work with you so you can get through each day, so you’re not ripped apart by this, so you can make sense of this. If you don’t care… then talk to me so you can go back to work.’

She bit her lip. Looked away. Reached for the tea. Had a sip. Found it annoyingly pleasant, a Romulan white leaf he’d almost certainly hung onto since they’d served together. ‘What am I supposed to say?’ she managed at length. ‘Everyone thinks he’s dead. Maybe he is.’

‘Uncertainty puts you in limbo,’ Carraway said softly. ‘You can’t begin to figure out what you’re feeling, because your feelings aren’t set yet. Are you grieving? Hoping? Fighting? Surviving?’ The questions were rhetorical, and he wrapped his hands around the mug, leaning back in the overstuffed armchair. ‘This session isn’t about answering that. It’s about us figuring out how you keep going without those answers.’

‘I keep going by looking for those answers,’ she said simply. ‘We need to find the people who built that facility, who helped that thing that took him over. This isn’t about advanced technology or a knowable being. This is about people. This is an investigation. Here, I know what I’m doing.’

Again, he watched her. ‘I could ask more questions. About if you want revenge, about how far you’ll go for answers, if you’ll hold the line and follow orders – you know the drill.’ Carraway waved a dismissive hand at the concept of a roaring rampage of vengeance. ‘You’ll insist you’re fine, we won’t know ‘til we get there. Reassuring me and Valance that you’ll do your job by the book is part of how you don’t get benched, of course.’

‘If I insist it’ll be fine,’ Kharth grumbled, ‘you’ll just look at me like I’m repressing. There’s nothing I can say you’ll accept other than saying I’m not ready to go back on duty, which isn’t true.’

‘Fair enough,’ he agreed. ‘So let’s think about how this disaster scenario is worse if you buckle down, focus on work, and refuse to process what did happen.’

‘You always say process, but I don’t know what processing feelings looks like. I’m never going to be happy about this.’

Carraway sipped his tea. ‘Let’s go back to the containment room.’

Discipline meant she didn’t betray the tightening in her chest. ‘What about it? Torkath tampered with things he didn’t understand. Jack and Brok’tan got trapped.’

‘And you didn’t.’

She swallowed through a lump. ‘I was pushed out the door.’

‘By Torkath, right?’

‘I’m not going to be grateful to him for saving me while he was saving his own skin from the consequences of his own actions -’

‘Things went wrong,’ Carraway cut in, voice gentle. ‘And the first you really knew about it was when you were outside and the door was shut.’

Kharth set her jaw. ‘You’re going to have something to say about “control” or “helplessness,” aren’t you.’

‘Am I?’

‘That’s basically what therapy’s about, isn’t it? Acknowledging we’re helpless in the face of the cruelty of the universe but forcing ourselves to go on anyway?’

Silence dragged out as Carraway leaned forward to reach for the teapot. The sound of pouring as he refilled their cups felt deep, portentous, even though it was only tea.

‘That’s not,’ he said carefully, ‘what I talk about with most officers. But most officers don’t have your history.’

‘I don’t need to be a refugee of Romulus to be sad that my boyfriend got possessed,’ Kharth spat. ‘This doesn’t have to be about my history.’

‘Everything’s about our history, though. Pushing and pulling. But no,’ Carraway allowed, settling back into his chair, ‘I’m not here to talk about your childhood. I’m here to talk about how you could do nothing but stand by as someone you care about got hurt, maybe killed. And then how something wearing his face hurt you.’

Sometimes, Kharth remembered, Greg Carraway wasn’t soft or gentle. Sometimes he was blunt, and he still spoke simple, unwelcome truths like they were a kindness. But by the time he got there, he’d wormed his way in deep enough that it didn’t make her angry, defiant.

It just hurt.

She did not touch her tea when she looked away again. ‘He said something,’ she managed at last, eyes raking over the bookshelves. There was a collection of trashy murder novels, a series she’d read at the Academy and wondered how soft Federation citizens coped with something so genteel in its violence as their escapist fiction. ‘It, I mean. The Vezda. In Sickbay.’

Now, Carraway used his most dangerous tool: silence, and the knowledge that the other party would rush to fill it, sooner or later.

But she had to wrestle the memory of fighting with Airex in the gym first, of what he’d told her to say, and accepting that he was right. The silence had stretched out, long and taut, before she finally spoke again.

‘It called me by my true name,’ Kharth said, still not looking at him. ‘Which I’ve never told Jack. It must have read my mind. That was the moment I knew something was wrong, but it wasn’t – a mistake. It kept calling me that. And I don’t know why.’

She’d thought she heard his breath catch, and that made her look over; the thought that she’d finally found something to make him, the man who carried all their secrets and pains, falter. The creasing at the corners of his eyes spoke of deep wells of sympathy, and she knew she should have found it more annoying and unwelcome.

But when he spoke, he didn’t give voice to comfort. ‘One thing I know I don’t have to explain to you, Saeihr, just – remind you in this moment,’ rumbled Greg Carraway, ‘is that even for sapient beings we can understand, let alone unknowable powerful aliens… sometimes cruelty is its own point.’

Against all sense, she gave a short, hollow bark of laughter. ‘And you wonder why my therapy’s different.’

‘No,’ Carraway said softly, reaching for a PADD on his side-table. ‘I don’t. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make progress. And I think today was good.’ He pulled a stylus from behind his ear and began scribbling. ‘I’m going to tell Karana that you’re cleared for active duty.’

She stopped. ‘What? Just like that?’

‘Well…’ He tilted his head this way and that. ‘On the proviso we keep having conversations.’

‘We don’t have a subspace comms network out here. What’re we going to do, write therapy letters?’

‘Easier than that.’ Carraway gave his usual kindly smile, and now she was back to finding him annoying. ‘Because I’m being reassigned to Endeavour. We’re going to talk once a week minimum, and basically whenever else I fancy it. Refuse, and you ride the bench.’

‘Great,’ said Kharth before she could stop herself. ‘It’s been decided I’m so messed up, you’ve come to therapeutically babysit me.’

‘Don’t be so hard on yourself, Saeihr.’ His smile widened, now with a touch of wryness. ‘Remember, I was Endeavour’s counsellor for a long time. I know I’m going to have to therapeutically babysit probably everyone.’