“But your first impulse is to go for the easy answer. The least painful one. The one that doesn’t require you to think about who you used to be any more than you have to. You’re too afraid to face it!”

“What would be the point?” she cried, rising to her feet. “I can’t reconstruct who I was. Even if I recover some fragments of it now, I can never find a protocol to put them together the same way. And I’ve grown so much since then. Learned so much, formed new friendships.”

“Work friendships! All you have anymore is Starfleet. No family, no romance… you’re a fragment of who you once were! These officers who put you back together again, they just taught you the parts that were useful to them!”

Her voice rose with her anger. “You have no idea, Shastri. They did everything to encourage me to become my full self again. My life isn’t incomplete just because you aren’t in it.”

“And your family? You hid from them too, let them think they were dead to you, until your work forced you to treat them as a resource!” He gestured sharply at her. “This is what I’m saying. You cling to duty and responsibility and Starfleet discipline because they’re what was around you when they put Humpty Dumpty together again. They’re your safe space. And for a dozen years, you’ve hid in it and wouldn’t let anyone in from your old life. Maybe you were afraid your new self wouldn’t measure up!”

Uhura gaped at him. “That’s rich! Maybe you’re forgetting that I did reach out to you after Nomad. I was still lost, fragile, looking for answers, and you were so cruel. You called me a liar, met me with such fury that I couldn’t understand. How the hell was I supposed to reach out to you after that? How could you expect me to trust you?”

He opened his mouth to riposte, but she wouldn’t let him. “You don’t have the right to act like the wronged party, Shastri. You got mad because you thought your new girlfriend had dumped you. Oh, the horror.

“I had just lost everything! I woke up surrounded by strangers—none more so than the face in my own mirror! All I had were feelings of familiarity I couldn’t understand, bursts of emotion I couldn’t contextualize. I couldn’t trust my own reactions. I felt I could instinctively trust the people around me, but how could I be sure that was genuine? It was a relief when they proved it through their actions.”