Reconciliation
By Deanie
October 2002

Spoiler Warning: Up to "The Knight, Death, and the Devil”
Rating: PG
Feedback: It's better than chocolate! Deanie@lisacaps.com
Author’s note: This is in response to the Andromeda_Romance fic contest, to write a Harper/Trance fic explaining the scene in TKD&D where Harper and Trance bring Beka Sparky Cola to celebrate the 50th member world joining the Commonwealth, and Trance hiccups.
Thanks to my wonderful friend and beta-reader, Valerie, for the rush job.
Disclaimer: The Andromeda crew doesn’t belong to me. I’m just playing with them, and will return them when I’m done…

***

Harper was on his hands and knees, nose nearly to the ground as he peered into a low-lying cabinet in one of the Andromeda's storage areas. ‘I know that champagne is in here somewhere, he grumbled silently.’ He'd hid the last bottle from the Castelian delegates during their recent treaty talks on the ship. Now I know why they say some people 'drink like a fish.'

It was in there somewhere. He pushed aside the Andorian china, shuddered as he reached past the Perseid brandy. Now there's a scary thought -- drunk Chin-heads. "Aha!" he exclaimed, pulling out the ship's last bottle of champagne. "I almost thought we'd be celebrating with Sparky Cola."

"Looking for something?"

Trance's voice startled Harper, causing him to hit his head on the upper edge of the cabinet. "Do you have to sneak up on people like that?"

"Sorry," she said, recoiling a bit at his harsh words. There had been a time when they had been best friends, when she was young and carefree. She’d even seen him as possibly being more than a friend someday, if that were possible for one of her kind. She shook her head. That was then, this is now. She had been forced to put behind the dreams of her childhood and grow up. To the rest of the crew it had seemed like overnight. For Trance, it had been ages -- long, lonely years filled with pain and sorrow. "I was just going to look for the champagne, for the celebration."

Harper sighed, immediately feeling guilty. He hadn't meant to snap at her. He just didn't know what to do around her. Didn’t know how to act around the person who had replaced his best friend. She was Trance, but at the same time not-Trance. “Sorry,” he apologized curtly.

“Great minds think alike,” she commented, pointing to the bottle of champagne in his hands.

“I guess they do.”

Trance’s heart wept as Harper headed for the door, giving her a wide berth, as if he was afraid to touch her. One shore leave they’d walked hand in hand along a deserted beach on a tiny planet in the middle of nowhere. Now he was afraid to get close enough to touch her. She sighed. She knew he was trying. He’d made overtures to her, trying to rebuild their friendship, but everything was so tentative. Every time she thought he was close to accepting her, something else would happen. She didn’t blame him. Couldn’t blame him… she was the one who had changed.

In the doorway, Harper turned, looking back. Trance stood, utterly still, her arms wrapping around herself in an instinctive gesture of self-comfort. She looked so lost and alone. Hell, she was alone, a refugee from a horrific future trapped out of her time. Harper sighed. She was doing the best she could… they all were.

“Trance?” he began, needing to say something but unsure of what to say.

“It’s okay, Harper.” She didn’t turn around to face him, unsure about her ability to control her emotions when confronted with the truth about his fear and distrust of her. “I understand.” She did understand. She just wished it wasn’t so hard for them to reconnect.

Harper turned to go, breathing a sigh of relief. She’d let him off the hook. He could leave in peace. In a sense she had given him permission to not worry about her feelings. But as the door opened in front of him, he knew he couldn’t leave things between them as they were.

‘No,’ he thought. ‘I’m not leaving, not like this. I have to find out what happened.’ He had to say the words that had been building inside of him for so long. He stomped across the room, coming to stand in front of Trance. “How could you do it? How could you just…change?”

She stared. Did he understand nothing? “I didn’t want to change. I loved my life here. For the first time, I was free. It was my life, my choices. You were my friends… I didn’t know that people could be so nice and real. Beka, Rev, Dylan… I was part of a family, more a part of that than my own family had been. I didn’t want to leave all that behind and go into a future that I knew would be hard and miserable. I wanted to stay here and just be Trance.”

Surprised by the vehemence in her voice, Harper merely listened.

“If I had stayed, things would have gone horribly wrong. For all I know, coming here made no difference – they still might. But I had to try.”

There it was, a cryptic reference to the “bad future” from which she came. “What happened, Trance? What was so horrible that you were willing to travel through time, giving up your life here with us? What could have been so bad?”

Trance looked up at the ceiling. She didn’t even know what to say or where to start. Afraid the mere action of telling them could upset the path they were on to the point where she wouldn’t be able to stop the things that would occur, she’d told herself that she wasn’t going to tell anyone… but this was Harper. How could she make him understand?

“Trance?”

“It was almost worse than I could imagine. We were attacked by these mysterious aliens, Beka and I were lucky to survive.”

Harper listened to her carefully chosen words. She and Beka had been lucky to survive? “And the rest of us?”

“You died, Harper. You decided not to activate the tesseract device, and you died.”

“The larvae?” he asked with trepidation, feeling the no-longer-existent Magog larvae move in his stomach.

“No. They didn’t get a chance to.” She left the rest unsaid, but he knew. Someone…Tyr? had killed him before they had a chance to hatch.

But wait. She had said only she and Beka survived. “What happened to the rest of them?”

“These things attacked the ship. We couldn’t fight them. Dylan, Tyr, even Rommie…all dead.”

‘Rommie?’ Harper thought. She was a high guard AI. He’d pictured her outliving all of them by thousands of years. If whatever happened had been horrible enough to kill her, the others didn’t have a chance.

“After that, we were all alone. And the world was different. Scary. Beka…changed.” Trance grimaced, thinking of the changes that had befallen her friend. Emotionally and physically, Beka had never been the same after their friends had died. “Things just kept getting worse, like this horrible spiral that we couldn’t get out of. But I knew. The time would come. I only had one chance to make things better.”

Harper didn’t know what to say. He’d been so mad at her, for changing, for leaving him behind. But now he could see that what she’d gone through was so much worse than what he’d imagined.

Trance felt her breath catch in her throat. She closed her eyes, not daring to hope that this could be a change for the two of them. She’d lost most of her hope so long ago.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” How could he fix this rift with her? Then the answer came to him. Maybe he just had to say what he felt. “I don’t want things to be this way. I miss you, Trance, I miss my best friend.”

When she opened her eyes, they were wet with tears. “I miss you too. I’ve missed you for so long.” With a sniffle, she stepped forward, clutching Harper in a fierce embrace.

Harper’s arms came up around Trance. It felt so good to hold her again. She was different, but at the core, still his Trance.

They both took a step back, looking at each other intently. With his free hand, Harper reached up to brush away a tear that rolled down Trance’s cheek.

“Tears?”

“You may not believe me,” she said. “But they’re happy tears. You have no idea how wonderful it is just to be able to look at you. I never thought I’d see you again…”

She looked directly into Harper’s eyes before continuing. “I missed you. I kept thinking about you. Every time I closed my eyes I saw you – dancing on the beach at Ammons drift, guzzling a case of Sparky cola in record time, watching me play Yesheedono on Albuquerque Drift.” She blinked, fighting back the tears. “I never got a chance to tell you how much I care about you.”
The tears were falling now. “I love you, Harper, and I never got a chance to tell you.”

He pulled her into his arms, cradling her into his warmth. Slowly, their lips came together in a tentative kiss; it rapidly grew in intensity until it threatened to consume them both. Harper dropped the bottle, too far gone to hear the crash of the shattered glass. Trance’s arms came up around him, stroking his back through the fabric of his shirt.

“Harper? Trance?” Startled at the sound of Beka’s voice over the intercom, Harper and Trance sprung apart. “Where are you guys? Good news. He signed! We officially have fifty member worlds signing the Commonwealth Charter. We should celebrate.”

Guiltily, Harper looked down at the broken glass. “Maybe we’ll celebrate with Sparky Cola.”

Trance laughed as he popped open a Sparky and handed it to her.

“Before we go up to command, I’d like to propose a toast.” He opened his own can, holding it up in the age-old gesture. “To old friendships, and new beginnings.”

Trance nodded as their cans clinked together. They each took a big sip of the caffeinated liquid.
She smiled. “Sparky Cola always makes me…” Before she finished her sentence, Trance let out a burp.

“I know,” he teased, grabbing the rest of the Sparky to take with them in command.