Healing? Maybe

Posted on Fri Feb 13th, 2026 @ 2:07pm by Consul Josephine Carlyle-Cragen

Mission: Season 6: Episode 6: Conglomerate
Location: USS Elysium, Various
Timeline: Current
1402 words - 2.8 OF Standard Post Measure

Josephine sat exactly where she was told to sit.

The chair was comfortable, angled slightly toward the window that looked out on nothing but stars. She appreciated that. It gave her somewhere to rest her eyes that wasn’t the counselor’s face. People looked too closely when they thought they were helping.

She folded her hands in her lap. They were steady. They always were.

The new counselor did not rush her. That, too, was appreciated.

“When you’re ready,” they said gently.

Josephine exhaled, slow and measured, as though bracing herself against a current only she could feel.

“I grew up on a starship,” she began. “People expect that to mean danger. It wasn’t. It was structured. Safe. My parents were dependable. My brothers were… certain. I learned early that if I stayed quiet, the ship ran more smoothly around me.”

The counselor nodded but did not interrupt.

“Quiet became a habit,” Josephine continued. “Not invisible. Just… contained.”

She paused, her gaze drifting toward the stars beyond the window. “Invisible came later.”

The silence that followed was not empty. It was heavy, like gravity pulling her backward through time.

“England,” she said at last. “Seventeenth century. I still don’t know how to say that without it sounding absurd.”

She described it clinically at first — the crash, the castle, the knowledge that rescue would not come. But when she spoke of Westin, her voice shifted.

“He wanted to explore. To experience it. I wanted to disappear into it. I believed history noticed everything, even the smallest interference.”

So she stayed inside. Read. Catalogued. Preserved. Watched the night sky through a telescope she pretended was for curiosity rather than longing. She did not say the word lonely, but it hovered in the air between them.

“I didn’t want to matter,” she said quietly. “I wanted to leave no mark at all.”

The counselor asked softly if that had worked.

Josephine’s lips curved into something almost like a smile. “No.”

She spoke of her return to the present as if it were a correction rather than a rescue. Of the court-martial, the demotion, the unspoken expectation that she be grateful it was not worse.

“If you accept punishment without protest,” she said, “people stop looking for additional reasons to hurt you.”

The counselor’s expression darkened when Josephine reached Kyle Cragen. Her voice did not.

“He knew me from a time I should never have survived. I think that made me… valuable to him. Collectible.” She swallowed. “He took my name. My choices. My future.”

When she spoke of Sephine, it was as though she were describing an old injury — something no longer present, but still aching in cold weather.

“She survived,” Josephine said. “She complied. She endured. And that frightens me more than the man who created her.”
Arrianna’s name fell into the room like a dropped glass.

“There was no way to go back,” Josephine said. “She wanted the woman I had been before. As if trauma were a detour instead of a road.”

The counselor did not push when Josephine went quiet. Eventually, she spoke again.

“When Arrianna died, I didn’t scream. I didn’t fall apart. I became very still.” A pause. “Still is something I’m good at.”
Her hand drifted unconsciously to her abdomen, where it had rested so many months before.

“But Liberty needed me,” she said, and for the first time, her voice softened. “So I stayed present. That felt… necessary. Non-negotiable.”

The counselor asked what Josephine needed now.

That question took longer.

“Permission,” she said finally. “To stop apologizing for existing where I am. To stop waiting for consequences. To believe that choosing quiet isn’t the same as choosing failure.”

The stars outside the window shimmered as the ship adjusted its heading. Josephine watched them, as she always had.
“I don’t expect absolution,” she added. “I just want to look at the sky again without wondering which century I’m being judged from.”

The counselor let the silence settle — not as an ending, but as a beginning.

Josephine did not look away from the stars.

But for the first time in a very long while, she wasn’t watching for rescue.

===

Josephine closed the door to the cabin softly behind her.

The space was small by starship standards, but she had chosen it deliberately. Fewer corners meant fewer places for memories to hide. The lamp by the desk cast a warm, steady glow — nothing harsh, nothing theatrical.
She stood in front of the mirror longer than she intended.

Her reflection looked… ordinary. Tired, perhaps. Older in the eyes. But solid. Real. That unsettled her more than distortion ever had.

“You’re still here,” she said quietly.

The woman in the mirror did not argue.

Josephine reached up and brushed her fingers along her jaw, as if checking for seams. For fractures. For signs that someone else might still be living behind her eyes.

Sephine had never looked back at her.

That, she realized now, had been mercy.

“I survived,” Josephine said, testing the words. “Not because I was strong. Not because I was clever. Just because I endured.”

Endurance had always been her gift. Her curse.

She thought of Arrianna then — not the version shaped by grief or desperation, but the woman she had loved before everything fractured. The laughter. The certainty. The way Arrianna had reached for her as if Josephine were an anchor instead of a shoreline already eroding.

“I couldn’t be who you needed,” Josephine whispered. “And I don’t know if you could have been who I was becoming.”
The admission settled into her bones. Heavy. Honest.

She placed both palms on the edge of the sink and leaned forward, meeting her own gaze.

“I’m not disappearing,” she said. Firmer now. “Not for history. Not for guilt. Not for ghosts.”

For a moment, she almost expected resistance.

There was none.

Josie straightened, turned off the lamp, and left the mirror behind — not because she feared it, but because she no longer needed it to confirm she existed.

---
Next Counseling Session – The next day

The counselor noticed the difference immediately.

Josephine still sat neatly, still spoke carefully — but she no longer folded inward. There was weight in her presence now. Not heaviness. Gravity.

“You said last time you wanted to talk about Arrianna,” the counselor said.

Josephine nodded.

“I avoided it because I didn’t want to turn her into a cautionary tale,” she said. “She deserves better than that.”

The counselor waited.

“I loved her,” Josephine continued. “Not quietly. Not cautiously. I loved her in a way that surprised me.”
She paused, breath catching just slightly. “But our relationship began in chaos. Captivity. Fear. We clung to each other because there was nothing else to hold onto.” Her voice softened. “When the danger passed, she wanted certainty. I wanted space to understand who I was becoming.”

The counselor asked if Josephine had told her that.

“Yes,” Josephine said. “Many times. Gently. Poorly. Too late.” She swallowed. “She was drowning,” Josephine said. “And I was trying to learn how to breathe again.”

The counselor asked the question Josephine had been bracing for.

“Do you feel responsible?”

Josephine closed her eyes. “I feel… adjacent,” she said after a long moment. “Close enough to touch the edge of it. Too far to stop it.” Her hands tightened briefly in her lap. “I didn’t cause her pain. But I didn’t fix it either. And part of me will always wish I had chosen differently — even knowing it might have destroyed me.”

The counselor let that sit.

“What do you think Arrianna would say to you now?” they asked.

Josephine’s breath hitched — just once.

“She would tell me to live,” she said quietly. “And then she would be angry that I listened.” A sad, honest smile touched her lips. “She wanted to be my future,” Josephine said. “But she couldn’t survive being my past.”

The counselor asked what Josephine wanted to carry forward.

“My child,” she said immediately. “My work. My books. The sky.” She looked up. “And Arrianna — not as a wound. As a chapter.”

The counselor nodded. “That sounds like healing,” they said.

Josephine did not correct them.

She had learned that healing didn’t always announce itself.

Sometimes it simply stopped hurting in the same places.
---