The crate sat where it always had—tucked into the corner behind his desk, half-shadowed beneath the recessed shelf where the ambient light never quite reached. He hadn’t opened it in years. It was the sort of container that became part of the furniture, its presence registered only in passing, like a scar you stopped noticing after the first few years.

It was late. The Saracen was steady, systems humming in their usual chorus, no anomalies, no crises. The kind of night that left too much room for the past.

He opened the crate without ceremony.

The contents were few: an old Academy datapadd whose charge had long since faded; a stylus with the initials “L.H.” scratched in with the tip of a knife; a Starfleet-issued repair kit, cracked at the hinge. And beneath it all, folded with a cadet’s uncertain attempt at precision, the jacket.

Gold and black. The gold dulled to something closer to dust than brass. Still regulation cut, still his size—though it felt too small now in every way that mattered.

The warehouse.
The Orion transport.
The impossible launch.
The storm.
Lieutenant Commander Harel—just Cadet Harel, then—bloodied, breathless, twenty years younger and desperately trying to remember everything he’d ever learned about transporter theory, all while the ceiling threatened to collapse around him.

He unfolded the jacket slowly.

The left sleeve was still torn just beneath the shoulder—an angled split in the fabric that had never been patched. He didn’t need to touch it to feel the memory underneath: the sting of plasma shrapnel scoring across his arm when the first engine coughed to life, a burst of pain that nearly knocked him out before the console even lit up.

He remembered gripping the edge of the transporter control panel with that same arm, blood running past his knuckles as he wiped the interface clear with the sleeve. The Orion systems were primitive, half-corroded, and speaking in a dialect no one had used in two centuries. He remembered rerouting power, dumping memory from the buffer, and trying not to think about everything that could go wrong.

Three cadets in a dying shuttle.
One transport successful.
Then another.
Then static.

Cadet Williams never reformed.

The buffer held him for less than a second—long enough for a flicker of outline, the silhouette of a life that could have made it. Then the screen turned white. And then black.

Harel had kept working. Had to. They were still airborne—barely. The transport vessel barely held together long enough for the Apollo to get a lock on them. No time to explain. No time to mourn. That came later. Too late.

The commendation came. So did the memorial service.

And someone—he didn’t remember who—folded the jacket and sent it back with his things.

He’d never worn it again.

Now, in the dim quiet of his quarters, Harel held it in both hands and studied the tear. His arm still bore the scar—a pale line just below the muscle. Not the worst wound he’d taken in uniform. But the one that stayed.

Not because of the pain.
Because of what it cost.

He sat down, jacket across his lap, and stared at it for a long time. He didn’t cry. He hadn’t cried in years. But something in his chest ached like old metal under pressure—something long-sealed shifting in its casing.

He could still see Williams’ eyes, even now. Not in pain. Not in fear. Just surprised—as if, right at the end, even he hadn’t believed it.

No report ever accounted for that look.

Eventually, Harel folded the jacket again. More carefully than before. Reverently, even. He set it back inside the crate, but this time he didn’t close the lid.

Some things didn’t belong in storage.

Some things were meant to be remembered.

-Lt. Cmdr. Harel
Chief of Operations
USS Saracen