By Lt. Commander Keiran O'Sullivan
80307.10
After Tying Loose Ends into a Noose
-=Location, Unknown=-
80307.10
After Tying Loose Ends into a Noose
-=Location, Unknown=-
"Keiran, open your eyes."
"Maggie?" O'Sullivan felt a hand grasp his arm, and stirred. "Turn on the lights, willya eh? I can't see a bloody thing."
"Your eyes are still closed. Open them!"
"Margaret Mary O'Sullivan, what are you blathering about, woman? Turn on the damned lights!" Keiran tried again to see what was around him, without success.
"Open your eyes, Keiran, You're still asleep." She insisted.
*Must be another nightmare,* He forced his eyes open at last and found he was in a dimly lit room.
"The date." He pleaded frantically as he rolled over in bed, unable to remember where, or worse, when he was. "Maggie, what is the date?"
Out of the corner of his eye he saw his wife. Her head of unruly dark hair shimmered in ringlets against her shoulders as she moved toward the door. She was wrapped in a plaid woolen shawl, and had a suitcase in one hand. Her back was turned and she didn't answer.
"Today's stardate!" He demanded once more. "What is it?"
"Does it really matter?" She whispered dejectedly, pausing as she reached for the doorknob and speaking without turning back to face him. "No matter how much time goes by, nothing ever changes for you now, does it? Whatever the date, wherever you go, you're still there."
*There.* He thought. *At the front slaughtering Jem'Hadar, before they could slaughter us.*
Keiran sighed, and banged his head back against the hand carved, wooden headboard his grandfather had given his grandmother as a wedding gift. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.
As his lungs expanded, he winced. He felt a burning pain in his chest. He looked down, and suddenly instead of lying in the bedroom of his home in County Cork as he had been just a moment ago, he was laying on his back, on the battlefield, a gaping hole blasted through his uniform tunic.
Through his chest.
He began to pant shallowly, horrified at the sight and nauseous from the pain. He heard the sound of phaser fire, of explosions all around him. On the ground beside him lay bodies pooled in the blood of the dead, his ears rang with the shattering screams of the dying.
"Maggie?" He gasped as he tried again to speak. "Wake me up. Please, wake me up!"
A female form appeared beside him, and knelt down. Her hair obscured her face, and only when she turned did he see that it was not the woman he'd been married to.
"For you it will always be 2374, won't it Keiran?" The woman's eyes shone, threatening tears as she looked away from him and off toward the sky.
Her lovely face darkened with sorrow as she gazed down at him again, gently caressing his cheek. Even so, it was a beautiful, welcome sight, especially if it were to be his last.
His head lolled back and he closed his eyes. She started to shake him by the shoulders.
"Keiran, wake up!"
In his disorientation he didn't understand how she could be with him now, but he didn't care, either. She was here, nothing else mattered. He spoke her name aloud at last.
"Liis."
O'Sullivan reached up and tried to touch her, catching Captain Zanh off guard as she stood beside his bed in Sickbay.
She instinctively moved a step backward as his weakened arm lurched forward, allowing only the tips of his rough-hewn fingers to brush against her face.
Liis was dumbfounded by his use of her given name. He had never, and would never, take the liberty of calling her by it under any ordinary circumstances. In his heavily medicated state, his reality appeared to be very different from the one in which he and Zanh truly existed.
Still unaware of this he tried to sit up, which was a big mistake. He immediately put stress on his wound, causing a fresh wave of pain to drag him under. His eyelids fluttered rapidly, eyes rolling up and back as he passed out cold.
Zanh scowled. "Can't you give him anything more?"
"Anything more, Captain, and he won't ever feel pain again. He'll be dead." Dr. Terasha replied clinically, taking note of his vital signs and then moving away. "If you'll excuse me, I need to gather the instruments required for his next series of treatments."
Zanh Liis nodded mutely as she continued staring at her Chief of Security. Her hand reached up unconsciously and touched her cheek at the point where his fingers had grazed her.
Whatever had happened to him in the past, she thought, it was doing its damnedest to hold onto him.
She knew he'd been a jumper too, with the Timeline Control Division of Temporal Investigations just as she had. Moreover, it had come up in conversation that also like her, his memory re-sequencing sessions had been, to put it mildly, less than completely successful.
He'd been quite disappointed by this, he confided. The main reason he had agreed to go into service of Temporal was that they promised him if he did, he wouldn't have the nightmares anymore.
His memories of the Dominion War were to have been washed away, leaving his mind a clean slate with which he could begin again.
Things just hadn't worked out that way.
"The best laid plans," Zanh whispered sadly, closing her eyes. She thought about a brief conversation they'd had before leaving to board the Gauntlet, and couldn't help but feel responsible for his current condition.
"I'm so sorry, Keiran. I should have listened to you. I hope you can forgive me."
The man was a mystery but by this point, she knew one thing for certain about him.
Whatever it was that he saw when he looked at her, it was something entirely different than anyone else she had ever known.
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Lt. Commander Keiran O'Sullivan
Chief of Security
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
Lt. Commander Keiran O'Sullivan
Chief of Security
USS Serendipity NCC-2012