Thanks to a note from an astute reviewer, I'm posting a short-follow up on two of our characters who I, unfortunately, left a bit unresolved!

U.S.S. Enterprise

Stardate 6092

2200 hours

The crew of the Enterprise was enjoying a rare, quiet bit of interstellar meandering through the Alpha Quadrant. No planetary distress calls to answer; no border skirmishes to referee; no imminent novae to evacuate, diplomatic conflicts to mediate, or out-of-the-blue medical crises to manage. Just sailing along through the cosmos, just boldly going for a bit, her crew taking a moment to breathe and relax and play and reflect.

Except for Leonard McCoy, of course. While looking forward to eventually settling into an evening of a nice medium rare steak, courtesy of a recent re-provisioning, and a few episodes from his new favorite collection of restored early twenty-first century holos that Joanna had sent him for his birthday last week, McCoy was currently fretting about overdue quarterly crew physicals, and building up a multi-faceted argument in his head for the captain as to why those requirements should be semi-annual, or even annual, despite Starfleet regs—well except for high-risk personnel such as engineering, maybe—but anyway, he spent half his time chasing down people who were late or no-shows for exams, and by the time he caught up with them it was time to start all over again, and it was an egregious waste of his time, dammit, since Jim had latitude to allow flexibility out here in the middle of nowhere, and as if he and his highly-skilled staff didn't have better things to do—

His internal rant was interrupted by the beep of the comm unit on his desk. He stopped pacing and slapped the switch, irritated at the intrusion into his silent monologue.

"Yes, what is it?" he said tersely.

"Doctor McCoy, incoming transmission for you."

It was the third shift comms officer on the bridge, and he peered into the monitor at her unreadable face.

Up there, at the station that didn't quite feel as if belonged to her yet, the ship's CMO appeared on the miniature viewscreen that was set flush into the panel where Ensign Trel was currently managing all of the inter- and intra-ship communications, which constituted a surprisingly heavy volume even this late in the standard human diurnal cycle. The doctor seemed to be in Sickbay as he answered her hail.

His sigh before he responded was loud enough to cause her to flinch. "Yes, Ensign. Who is it?"

"It's Starbase Three, sir." Ensign Tren flicked at one of the buttons on her panel and looked at him wide-eyed and wary through the visual link. In her brief time aboard, she had been amply but unofficially warned of the various officers' temperaments and expectations aboard this ship—her first assignment—and sought most vigorously to contain the trembling she felt in her fingers and antennae at having to disturb the CMO at this late hour. He had seemed solicitous enough at her onboarding, but she had heard stories of his infamous temper and his fondness for the mysterious variation of human humor known as sarcasm.

"Yes, but who is it, Ensign?" he repeated, unmistakable impatience creeping into his voice.

In his office, he regretted his sharp tone as her face flushed dark blue. She was new, this one. The previous third shift comms officer, Walker, had been rather precipitously but not unexpectedly transferred to Food Services at their recent stay on Starbase Twenty-One, and they had picked up this new ensign there as backup for Lieutenant M'ress. He swallowed his irritation and worked up a smile that he hoped, following his recent xenoduction training on Andorians, would fall somewhere appropriately between friendly and professional.

Her antennae twitched and she returned a cautious, brief smile. "Moment, sir," she murmured, studying her instrument panel. "Seems to be a public civilian code, sir," she said, her voice faint and sibilant, and he jammed frantically at the amplitude controls to increase the volume. "He says his name is Brodie, sir." Her voice echoed against the bulkheads now and he pressed the controls again to compensate before responding.

"I think they have the wrong number, Ensign—" he started, then broke off as the undeniable ping of a salient association pricked at his memory. He cast back for the tidbit of recall that tugged there, and some distant neural overseer deep in his hippocampus plucked it out of one of the innumerable crowded pathways headed into long-term storage and placed it newly in his awareness, front and center. Brodie...Brodie. Right. Images he had seen of the man, after being brought back and released, had haunted his idle thoughts for a while, and now flashed before his vision again with renewed clarity. He winced.

"All right," he continued briskly, and nodded at the ensign, "thank you, go ahead and put him through." He stood behind his desk and gripped the seat back between his hands, leaning in for a closer view of the monitor.

"Aye, sir." Tren's bewildered face, listening piece pressed to the side of her head, shimmered away. She would spend the next few hours parsing their brief exchange, trying without success to tease out what had gone awry before the commander had suddenly proceeded with such a threatening expression and abrupt termination of their communication.

But there, in McCoy's private office, Brodie's face and shoulders slowly came into resolution on the monitor. He appeared to be seated at a comm cubby in an open-air shopping and food vending space that the doctor vaguely recognized from his brief time on the station. The sheerest violet-tinted shimmer behind him indicated that a privacy screen had been enacted around the area, an add-on expense in the space that was just large enough for an average-sized Federation humanoid to stand in comfortably. A pay-relay interface was situated off to one side and a wall of revolving adverts and nonstop chyrons filled the other. McCoy spied a Tellarite adult and child strolling past in the background, carrying out an animated conversation that was punctuated by much gesturing but thankfully muted by the screen, then he turned his attention to the caller.

The man was looking at him expectantly. "You're McCoy?"

He looked much better than the doctor expected. His beard, which had appeared reddish in the previous images, was now shot with gray, but he thought the biomed lab on Three had done an admirable job of growing replacement teeth that were indistinguishable from his natural counterparts. Aftermarket parts, as the techs often called them, out of earshot of patients, of course. He had put on some weight, and looked clear-eyed and well-rested, and altogether lacking the horrific thousand-yard stare that had earlier made McCoy groan inside and curse Noel, not for the first nor last time.

McCoy dragged his chair out and sat down with a sigh, crossing his arms on the desk in front of him. "Yes, that's me. What can I do for you?"

"I'm Brodie—"

"I know who you are," he interrupted, not unkindly. "Solorio spoke of you. With a great deal of fondness," he added. Brodie's mouth quirked up and he nodded.

"You're her CO, then? That's what she said, anyway. I've put in for a bit here at Three and thought I might be able to catch you on a quick subspace. Glad you were around. They told me I couldn't talk to her?"

McCoy knew for a fact that a real-time subspace transmission halfway across the quadrant, even a "quick" one, was not a trivial matter, and would cost anyone a pretty penny, as grandma used to say. He supposed the life of a pirate—no, smuggler, Tara had insisted—must reap some impressive tangible benefits. Before he could open his mouth to reply, Brodie leaned forward and his intense visage filled the screen.

"I thought you found her. So where is she?"

He hesitated only slightly more than a heartbeat. "She's in seclusion. On Vulcan."

The man's eyes widened and he sat up, his shoulders bulking up around his ears. "Vulcan! What's she doin' there?" he exclaimed. "Is it some sort o' punishment?"

McCoy suppressed a smile. "No. She's, ah…" He debated just how much he should or could tell this relative stranger, recalled how horrified Solorio had been upon learning of his treatment at Helen's hands, and relented. "She's undergoing some training. We expect her back aboard in a couple of months."

Brodie sat back and his brow smoothed. "Ach, well, I suppose I might reach out to her in a bit, then. Just to say hello."

"I think she'd appreciate that." He then wondered fleetingly if Solorio would come back from Vulcan, and her experience there, with a different idea of friendship or human connection, and it filled him with a deep stab of sorrow, or regret; he wasn't sure which of those to acknowledge first.

But on the viewscreen, a growing look of alarm was spreading across Brodie's face. "But if Tara is on Vulcan, then where is her Druocaan f'larioenn?"

McCoy blinked at him and wondered briefly if the man was having a stroke. "Her what, now?"

Brodie's eyes narrowed and took on a glower. "I gave her a f'larioenn cloak, McCoy. Before I left her there on that gods forsaken place. To keep her warm and keep her company, you know. And that wee creature couldn't survive on Vulcan, in such a hot and dry environment. So I doubt Tara took her along."

Another memory bloomed without forewarning in McCoy's mind, clear and present as if they were there again on that cursed planet: in the cave, when she was in the midst of the worst of it, and he was just trying to keep her present and grounded so they could get out of there, and he'd noticed the thing curling around her shoulders, and the way her eyes had settled when she'd touched it.

"Oh, that. Yeah. What did she call it? Emmalin. Yes, I remember now." He frowned, trying to recall where he had last seen it. "She had it with her, going into that other space, when we landed there—" he realized that wouldn't mean much to Brodie, and changed course. "I don't remember what happened to it, to be honest." He shrugged, irritated with himself that he hadn't noticed its absence earlier.

Brodie waited a beat, brow furrowed in incredulity, before he responded. "You just left her there? You left her behind?" he asked tersely. McCoy's eyebrow went up. Brodie's use of the pronoun confused him for a minute.

"Well, ah, I'm not sure what happened, Mister Brodie. We were a little...well, distracted with trying to stay alive and contain a nuclear meltdown while wrangling with yet another disgruntled lesser godlike being"—he thought back to Kukulkan, the events still fresh, and rolled his eyes—"this one with a nasty case of malignant narcissism; but yes, I suppose you could say we likely left it behind." He began to wonder where this conversation was going, and whether he would ever get to his evening of steak and bourbon and any random holovid indexed in his new collection of vintage House, M.D.

A look of abject horror spread across Brodie's features, and McCoy became aware of a growing sense of foreboding lurking at the edge of his consciousness.

"You...left her behind." Brodie repeated, a statement rather than question now, his tone at once aghast and accusatory.

McCoy flipped frantically back through his snapshot memories of their time on Resliv III, trying to recall the last time he'd seen the...the well, what should he call it? thing? around Solorio's shoulders. He thought it was just before they had stepped across that boundary, when they'd left reality behind in favor of the heady allure of a pristine new world that wasn't really there after all.

"Well, ah...it wasn't intentional, I assure you, Mister Brodie," he said cautiously. But Brodie's agitation became apparent in his rapid breath and the sheen of perspiration that appeared on his forehead, and McCoy began to wonder with alarm about his relative stability, after all.

"But she...she'll die of loneliness, Doctor."

She? Oh no, the still, small voice in the back of his head whispered as the smuggler's meaning finally began to sink in. "Do you mean—" he cleared his throat. "Are you implying that the thing is, ah, sentient?" Quasi-sentient. Sentient-responsive, was what Solorio had said, her words floating back in his memory now.

"Thing?" Brodie said in obvious disgust. "Why is any lifeform we don't understand always called a thing? What does sentient or alive even mean these days, Doctor?"

He had some firm beliefs about that topic, but it was, McCoy had to concede, sometimes a point of contention. It occurred to him that if Brodie had stayed the course in the Academy, instead of getting tossed out for a juvenile joy ride across the Bay as his records indicated, the man would have made a more-than-capable Starfleet officer.

"Well, I suppose it, ah, she, might still be there, somewhere, on the planet. It's hasn't been that long. She may have survived—"

But Brodie was having nothing of McCoy's attempts at placation.

"She needs affection," Brodie thundered, "and she needs companionship, McCoy!"

The doctor fought the urge to lean away from the monitor. He took a calming breath before responding.

"Mister Brodie," he said gently, "If possible, if your medical and legal situations permit, I would recommend that you depart for Resliv III, and initiate a search for the, for," he fumbled momentarily, "for Ms. Solorio's companion animal. Being. Creature. If you could locate her and return her to the lieutenant, I'm sure there would be a great deal of gratitude from both parties."

Brodie's gaze shifted sideways and took on a thoughtful aspect.

"Maybe a short trip out there, if you have the means—" McCoy ventured, but Brodie cut him off.

"Starfleet has expunged my criminal records, and has restored my shuttlecraft with the newest engine and shielding technology. I most certainly have the means. In addition," he gave McCoy a conspiratorial look, "they have agreed to allow me to continue working along my established, shall we say, shipping routes, without interference, and indefinitely, if I agree in return to drop any charges of unwarranted detention and severe treatment. So I may leave at any time to investigate potential areas of interest. Including Resliv III."

McCoy considered what he knew of the man's history alongside Starfleet's offer, and decided with a heavy heart that in this case, discretion was the better part of valor. He gave Brodie a half-salute and smile. "That's wonderful. I am sorry, by the way. For what Helen, er, Doctor Noel did to you, and I wish you the best of luck, Mister Brodie."

Brodie nodded in response, then seemed to hesitate before responding. He looked at McCoy with a pensive expression, and sighed, then said, "She...well, she just reminded me a bit of my niece, I think. I guess I felt a little guilty about leaving her to fend for herself there. Maybe this will make some amends, you know?"

McCoy nodded. "Yeah, that can happen sometimes. I understand, Brodie, I really do. Fair winds and following seas, sir."

U.S.S. Enterprise

Stardate 6158

0200 hours

Her dreams are more peaceful these days, and for the most part follow the paths of the wonderfully mundane dream-trips on which most humanoids embark in their sleep: processing and consolidating waketime experiences, synthesizing patterns and memories into longer-term storage, perhaps the occasional transport back to a particularly vivid or frightening childhood episode; all normal and most unremembered upon waking. The enormous towering specter who had stalked her, infusing her nights with rage and terror, does not return.

Once in a while, though, her sleeping brain finds reason to betray her. She finds her dreamself back on that bone-numbingly cold and gray planet, alone and hopeless; or wandering the noisy and crowded streets of Novlia Prime, alone and tiny and injured; or on Vulcan, in the early days, alone and overwhelmed with the revisiting of her grief and the intensity of new connections; and she awakens with a start and a gasp and a roiling mess of emotion.

When this happens, the little creature she calls Emmalin—which the creature tolerates because it is quite fond of who it calls The One Who Thinks Out Loud—is always sleeping there next to her on her bunk. It curls up more closely to her and thinks to her she is not alone and never shall be alone again. And as great ship they dream upon sails into the stars, they both find a quiet and safe sleep.