I Know What You Did Last Century

Posted on Sun May 17th, 2026 @ 10:42pm by Commodore Jacob Kane & Lieutenant Alexis Ryan

Mission: Aeon's End
Location: USS Athena - Captain's Quarters
Timeline: MD-4
2121 words - 4.2 OF Standard Post Measure

Commodore Kane hadn't really understood the need for the additional meeting; the ships were in convoy, the situation nominal, at least for now. Their next steps were being plotted out. That his elder self had called a private meeting, in his quarters, was a little unusual. He suspected the other him knew that.

When Admiral Kane entered, there felt like a weirdly long moment where the elder man stared around the room. His face bore the expression of someone coming back to an old house after years away; memories being triggered all at once. He looked a little moved, in spite of his weary and war-worn demeanor.

"Kesatian?" Kane asked the Admiral, who waved a hand.

"I had to give up a few years ago," he muttered.

"Fine." Kane poured himself a half measure and eyed the other man, who seemed to be gazing at books. "So, what's this about?"

"Just a moment." The Admiral paused, and glanced to the door as it chimed. "Come in."

It had been the last summons Alexis had expected, though in hindsight that seemed naive given Zora's earlier pep talk. Still, Kane's request had provoked a measure of intrigue because the man wasn't the type to focus on crew moral in the midst of a crisis, and so the expectation was more that there was some sticking point in her recent reports that needed clarification.

It was a theory blown immediately out of the water as she stepped into the room and was confronted by her first living proof of the consequences of her failure. It wasn't polite to stare; she was doing it anyway.

"Sir." Her gaze swung back towards her-Kane, and there wasn't space amongst all other priorities to correct herself for that possessive presumption.

"I'm as confused as you are," the Commodore noted. Admiral Kane's eyes flicked between the two of them.

"You haven't figured it out yet, have you? I don't remember exactly when we did..." The Admiral sat, looking up at the two people standing in front of him. "The dreams. You've both been having them, haven't you?"

Years ago, some time during her second year at the Academy, Alexis had taken the opportunity to sign up for a freeflying course on a whim. It hadn't been a hobby she'd returned to very often but the sensation of plummetting, of leaving something solid and dropping into nothingness, was profound enough to have lingered. It shouldn't have been possible here, of course.

For a split second, the ground beneath her feet seemed to evaporate.

And in the silence that coalesced, the Admiral had his answer. She was too dumbfounded to deny it, too taken aback to clarify, and increasingly too overwhelmed to process the implication. There was mortification enough in the notion that Kane knew she'd been lost in a narrative that implicated him heavily; the suggestion that he'd also been experiencing something similar hadn't crossed her mind.

"Dreams?" The younger Kane spoke up first. "I guess. I don't see the connection." He glanced at Alexis. "They're just dreams."

With a snap of her head, Alexis turned her disbelieving stare on her version of the man currently bombarding her with information she couldn't process. She had arrived at a very similar sentiment when scolding herself about becoming overly preoccupied with the details of each dream, which had been far more vivid than any she'd experienced in years and seemed to leave her with a sense of deja vu that couldn't be accounted for. With that in mind, she'd never spoken of them, never jotted any of them down for prosperity, had just chided herself for becoming overly attached to a narrative that was, at best, wildly inappropriate and put it all down to stress.

So why was Kane acting like he'd known the whole time?

Confusion, tinged with the burgeoning hint of mistrust, swung her gaze back and forth like a pendulum.

"What's going on here?"

Admiral Kane had the look of a man who was waiting for the other penny to drop.

"The attack on Starfleet Command. The Academy ball. Marines on the front line..." He listed off, looking between the two of them. "You're both having the same dreams. Sharing them."

"What?" his younger doppelganger snorted in disbelief. "That's impossible. How can two people be sharing that many-"

"Oh trust me, it's true. Isn't it, Lieutenant?"

Alexis had spent so long forcing herself not to recall any of it, especially in Kane's presence, that being confronted with even a brief snapshot from another's perspective was instantly jarring. Her first reaction was a slight wince, bombardment from too many recollections all vying for prominence. Very little of what she could remember was comforting, even though there had been a thread of emotional connection running through the sequence of dreams that had grown so poignant that it had been easier to just avoid Kane entirely than to reflect on the confusing muddle of misplaced feelings his presence evoked. It had all been rooted in an ongoing sense of struggle and loss, culminating in a very vivid and tenaciously persistent vision of him clinging to life on a hospital biobed. They weren't nice dreams, or at least they'd become increasingly less-so over time.

It made no sense. She'd never been able to figure out why her mind kept taking her back there, or how it was that each new addition seemed to build on a narrative that showed an alarming amount of consistency compared to what Alex normally expected of her dreams. If what this older Kane was alluding to was right, then there was a whole new layer of confusion to work into the mix. Would he lie about something like this? What would the point be? Even if some future version of herself had let slip some vital details, this was a bold claim to make when it could so easily be shot down in flames.

Slowly, she switched her gaze to regard her Kane.

"There have been a few oddly-specific dreams lately." Her hesitation was for good reason; these were details she'd never intended to share, confessions she'd never intended to make, and yet the only way to corroborate was to implicate herself further.

"You thought you were dreaming about each other in isolation," the Admiral nodded. His expression wasn't quite a smug one, but rather a little wistful. Perhaps even sorrowful. "We did at first, too. Took us a long time to work it all out..." He trailed off, not quite able to revisit certain memories in his head. Older Kane touched his slightly greyed beard; a familiar action that the younger one would recognise.

"And?" the Commodore asked. "When you did?"

"It..." Admiral Kane stared at Ryan. Guilt was written all over his features. It ruined two lives he wanted to say. But he took the other route. "It's not a natural phenomenon. We...you are connected. Through some sort of transdimensional...something. The science wasn't something I really understood. You did. We...agreed to discuss it with Starfleet medical. But...ah..."

It was just like him, Alexis grasped hold of the fleeting thought, to dismiss something so preposterous as a 'trans-dimensional something'. Decoding the scientific jargon wasn't Kane's forte, a reluctance that had seen him bestow a considerable amount of trust over the course of her tenure. It made their current predicament all the more difficult to endure; in the absence of his own understanding, he relied on the experts he gathered around him to provide accurate, effective advice. The kind of advice that didn't see the entire ship flung into a shattered version of tomorrow, subjected to its own 'trans-dimensional something'. Apparently she had a knack for inciting them now.

Guilt curdled in the pit of her stomach and Alexis blanched, her mind bouncing between each flare of realisation that saw her revisit moments from each dream that she would have sworn to take to her grave rather than ever risk Kane finding out. The prospect of him not only already knowing, but having experienced them simultaneously...

She was having trouble looking at him; either of him.

"How did you stop it?"

This, more than any other question, seemed suddenly the most pertinent.

"Distance, mostly." Admiral Kane's eyes went distant. "They stopped after we..." He took a moment to re-assert. It was another uncharacteristic thing; the younger man would never have shown that vulnerability. "Starfleet determined that it was too much of a security risk and Lieutenant Ryan was transferred. The distance appeared to reduce the connection to the point where the dreams stopped happening."

The younger Kane watched his own aged face. He hated that he could see the mask already descending, trying to disguise discomfort. Pain, even. Had those events truly scarred him just as much as the collapse of civilization? Or perhaps the latter had merely left those wounds to fester.

"So you're telling us this - breaking the temporal prime directive, I might add - because..."

"Because I didn't agree with how they handled it. And..." Admiral Kane's eyes twitched. "Because she died. A few months after."

He's lying.

It wasn't, despite any understandable preference for it, a knee-jerk reaction to being told she was sitting on a ticking timebomb. As numb as the Admiral's words had left her, Alexis was more distracted by the silence between his words and her own capacity to read it as if she'd been interpreting it most of her life. Perhaps, under different circumstances, she might have been able to pass it off as a professional eye for minute discrepencies but given the fresh context doing its best to rip her life literally apart...

Irritation flared, well on its way to becoming full-blown anger.

"This isn't exactly a convenient time to be asking for my resignation."

"Which would be denied..." Commodore Kane retorted, a little too sharply. But then he was also dragging the weight of this revelation too. "I don't know if I want to hear any more about this. If or when we get back, we'll make our own judgement on it, that's all." He caught Alexis' eye, trying to urge caution rather than reaction. "We'll...talk about it. On our own terms."

He knows.

Even as the dull headache that had been taunting her for days threatened to intensify, Alexis struggled to stave off the succession of pin-drops that set off a cascade of realisation. The jungle offensive, the Breen attack, nearly dying at his own wedding... Snippets of conversation, once mere figments of her exhausted mind's attempt to process the day, were discomforting enough now that they were forced into a public domain that left no room for denial. Knowing that Kane was also aware of the unspoken moments, quite a number of which strayed across several lines, drove home each implication as one damning hammer-blow after the next.

She stared, her gaze locked in place by the same avalanche of falling pennies tucked behind the younger Kane's eyes and had to swallow before her throat would relax enough to let her speak.

"Permission to leave, sir."

It wasn't fair that he knew enough to call bullshit on her pretence.

"None of this is going to matter if we can't figure out a way to get back and that's not going to happen with us standing here swapping bedtime stories."

Commodore Kane gave her the nod, despite the reticence of his counterpart. As Alexis left, the older man sighed.

"I didn't want this to go that way," he admitted.

"There's more to it than what you said, isn't there?" Younger Kane asked.

"I just...missed her," the Admiral remarked quietly, a decade of memories troubling him. "We made a bad call and it ruined two lives. Well," he scoffed gruffly. "One life. And one career." He didn't elaborate too clearly but it was obvious from the bitterness in his tone that Alexis had suffered far more than he had, in the end. "She died a Maquis traitor in their eyes. And here I am, running what's left of the fleet..."

"Men in general are quick to believe that which they wish to be true." the younger one said, drawing upon one of his typical quotes normally attributed to Caesar. It drew another scoff from the older man.

"And yet I would rather be first in a village than second at Rome..." he muttered, glancing at the closed door and the woman that had left. "Not so much Caesar this time. A little more Augustulus as the Germanic hordes descended."

The younger Kane reached out and grasped the older man's shoulder. "We can still save Rome. And those two lives."