Uhura called from the kitchen, "Captain, Sulu says you have fifteen minutes to get on-board the shuttle, or he's making us ride up with Chekov and the repair supplies."

"Alright, alright." Jim came out of his room, tablet in hand, and turned off the screen lest he be tempted to read another message. "You know, Chekov's not that bad of a pilot, and the other shuttle's seats are brand new."

Uhura was leaning against the kitchen counter, her own travel case tucked at her side. Jim wondered how she'd pulled the joyous duty of wrangling him onto the shuttle in time. "He's flying the shuttle with the worst stick in the shipyard, loaded down with extra weight, and the majority of his experience is still from a simulator. That's going to be a rough ride."

"Gotta learn somehow." Jim checked his case, tossing in the necessities; they'd be staying on the station until the warp core was up and running. The installation was progressing nicely, if not as fast as Scotty wanted.

"He's been better, the last few days," Uhura said, not bothering to sound casual. He stopped pretending like packing was the most fascinating thing he could be doing, and found her giving him a meaningful look.

"I talked to him," he said. "Scotty asked me to."

"It helped."

"Good." He resumed shoving things around in his case to have something to do, then gave up and shut it, snapping the locks into place. He ran a hand over the scratched surface. "I've still got a lot of apologizing to do, though."

"Have you ever considered the possibility that there's someone you need to forgive too?"

She couldn't possibly mean Khan or Marcus. He glanced up. "Who?"

Her expression suggested she was thinking something like, 'world's most oblivious smart person'. "Yourself."

He suppressed a shiver. "For what."

She raised her eyebrows, and he sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "Spock said kind of the same thing," he admitted.

"The Commander's a smart guy."

"Yeah." Jim picked up his tablet so his hands couldn't fidget. "And a good friend."

"And a great boyfriend."

Jim gave a short, soft laugh. "Sorry if he's been-you know. Extra busy." Dealing with me. He didn't say it, but he thought she heard it loud and clear.

"You can make it up to me by focusing on getting better so he's not as busy." She chased that with a smile, and he laughed again.

"Okay. Yeah."

"Come on," she said, and breezed out the door. "We have ten minutes, then it's the supply shuttle, and I love Chekov like a brother but he's not the pilot Sulu is."

Jim watched the shipyards fall away beneath the shuttle, growing smaller and smaller until they were swallowed up by the sprawling Midwest countryside, green peaking between gray and black storms that bloomed eye-searing white with lightning. That in turn became North America as they ascended further, and finally, the curve of the Earth-white scattered over blue and green and brown-filled the window. They slid into the orbit which would bring them to Starbase 1, and something seemed to come loose from him and fall away.

McCoy sat next to him, working on his tablet with a scowl that promised some eventful meetings about the status of the medbay upgrades. Uhura and Spock murmured quietly one row back, discussing crew rotations and rosters and who they needed to cajole to get certain labs and specialists assigned to the ship. Everything felt normal, almost okay, and better yet, he felt aware enough to really own the feeling. He wasn't foolish enough to think he was leaving his problems behind, but now he harbored a fleeting hope that maybe he knew enough to get through what he had to. The rest, he would need to find a way to let go.

Someone at the back of shuttle said, "There she is," in a low voice, and he looked out his window; everyone else, even McCoy, did the same.

All of the exterior panels that had needed replacing were done. With the core still offline there was no light from the nacelles nor the deflector dish, leaving her outlined by a handful of viewports, yet even so dark and still the Enterprise was as beautiful as the first time he'd seen her in the shipyard, under construction and a shadow of what waited for them now.

He thought back to the afternoon in the field (it felt like years ago despite having been all of four days), and wondered how he could have forgotten where home actually was. Maybe that had been the cumulative effect of everything he'd been through, though, blinding him to the things that could help him and making him feel like the driving force behind his own personal disaster rather than one of the many survivors of someone else's.

Murmurs of relief and awe and everything in between rippled through the crew, and he felt reassured by the fact that he wasn't the only one who needed to see her in one piece to make it real in his mind. The shuttles turned towards the hangar deck, and Sulu put his conversation with Darwin over the audio system.

"Enterprise, this is Galileo and Ramachandran, on approach and requesting permission to land, shuttlepads four and six."

"Galileo and Ramachandran, this is Enterprise. Permission granted for landing pads four and six." Jim was sure he heard Darwin's voice tremble, though it might have been the shuttle's speakers. "Welcome aboard, everyone. It's good to see you again."

Someone shouted, "Yeah!" and that led to a general round of cheers and applause. McCoy gave him a sideways look that was full of grudgingly fond resignation, and he responded with a tried, happy, smile.

He shut his eyes and listened to the sound of his crew's elation, and let some of it be his own.