555: Just As He Left Them

by Keiran O'Sullivan
81005.0015
Following Easier Said

-=USS Serendipity=-


When Keiran asked the Operations officer currently on duty, Elliot Talbot, for a place to shower and a change of clothes, he'd been told that he was welcome to use his old quarters, if he liked.

When he expressed surprise that they had not been given to someone else by now, he was told plainly that no one had been allowed to use them since he'd departed the Serendipity.

When he inquired casually as to why, the answer left him speechless.

"By order of the Captain," Talbot explained. "If you have any trouble getting in, let me know and I'll reset the code for the doors." Talbot had the feeling even as he spoke, however, that such measures would not be necessary.

-=/\=-

*By order of the Captain.* O'Sullivan ran the words over in his mind again and again as he walked through the halls. He reached his destination and found that indeed, his code for the doors had never been changed.

He crossed the threshold, called for the lights at twenty percent, and shivered. Perhaps it was cold in here, or perhaps it was just that the place felt haunted.

"Computer, increase temperature to twenty-two degrees Celsius."

He slowly walked toward the replicator to conjure up some new clothing, but stopped dead in his tracks in the center of the room.

A memory replayed itself inside his head, every second recalled in perfect detail.

It was the memory of the one time that the two of them had stood face to face here, alone.

-=Flashback: During their previous Sylph encounter=-


He accurately read her features and understood that he couldn't conceal himself from her any longer. She knew.

He didn't know how or why she had found out but she knew, and he was beaten. Beaten so brutally he had no strength left to pretend he was still putting up a fight.

"Please," he entreated her. "Don't ask me."

"Don't ask you what, Keiran?"

Just the sound of her saying his name that way, with such concern and hesitation, injured him.

"The question ye were wantin' to ask me, so."

He turned away from her again and stepped forward, leaning an arm against the wall and his head down upon it. "Please, Zanh Liis, I don't have it left in me to lie to ya."

"The truth is something I don't want you to ever have to live with," Keiran continued, answering her next anticipated question before she could ask it of him, either . "If it's in my power to save you, Liis, I will always save you."

She took a tentative step forward. "Is that what this is really about?" Her voice was hoarse and low as she wrestled the aridity of her throat for every syllable. "Saving me?"

Keiran lifted his head slowly and with unfathomable pain in his eyes, he sighed. "Always has been, Zanh Liis." He held his arms open and up in the air, a hopeless gesture to accompany his explanation. "Always will be."

He felt an almost intolerable physical pull toward her. She was wearing a dark evening dress, running her hands up and down bare, pale arms as she stood just two steps away- still as an alabaster sculpture and twice as beautiful.

Tears fell silently down her face as she reduced the distance between them by one step.

"I'm beggin' you," Keiran warned her, desperate. "Don't come any closer. Please." If she did, he didn't trust himself to stand his ground a second longer.

-=End Flashback=-


Keiran closed his eyes, a deep and familiar ache resonating through his chest. It had taken every ounce of his strength that night not to close the gap between them in two quick strides, take her into his arms and kiss her, then and there.

That memory was now replaced by images of another time; the one that the Sylph had most recently shown to him.

The one in which he had returned here to take command of her ship, broken and empty after her funeral.

The night that Jariel had come knocking on his door to deliver a book filled with letters she'd written but never expected either man to ever see.

Keiran had taken the book and gone to the holodeck, as she'd asked, before reading it. Discovering upon his arrival how meticulously she had recreated home, and her beloved Perseids meteor shower.

Sitting there beneath the artificial sky and reading that book was the very last thing he remembered doing before he came back to consciousness in the transporter room here aboard the Serendipity.

Words from her letters and the emotions they conveyed filled his mind and heart, blocking everything else around him out completely.

She had written about so many things.

Among them, how she always fought so hard to keep her deepest emotions restrained, locked inside of her.

"A way to keep safe, a way to keep some small part of myself unavailable. Incapable of being hurt. But I was wrong," she had written. "Keeping part of me closed off from you didn't keep me from being hurt, it only hurt you during our marriage because you imagined I was doing it for entirely different reasons."

She had also tried to explain to him how it felt when she realized why it was that she never danced.

"It always felt wrong...I had this feeling that I just wasn't meant to do it," she explained, "It was only recently I realized the reason for that was that I was never meant to dance with anyone but you."

Her unique and unmistakable voice echoed in his ears as he read, causing the words to leap off of the page and cut right through to the very heart of him.

He couldn't help but question if the emotions she expressed in those letters would have any truth to them at all here, in this alternate branch of time-space.

There was no denying what had happened anymore. His years of experience told him that it had to be an Alternate Continuity Paradox. He just couldn't fathom how it had been created.

Still however it had begun, the results were unmistakable. From what he'd seen and heard so far, it seemed that at least Blane, Dane and Zanh had experienced a reality where he was the one who died, not Liis. Try as he might, he had not been allowed to speak to the Perseids crew yet; they were being debriefed by a TEMA response squad and were, for the moment, under lock and key.

He had to wonder if Carrick had experienced any effects of the paradox, but had not wanted to ask during their reunion when there were so many other things that needed to be said.

He deduced from the evidence available to him so far that he himself had been the only one to 'live' the timeline where Zanh Liis had perished during the rescue attempt.

He couldn't pray hard enough to thank God that he was not stranded in that timeline, forced to continue along the dark path that event had set him on.

He finally replicated a new uniform, standard except for its black collar and affixed his pips upon it. He activated the sonic shower, climbed in and leaned against the wall, closing his eyes. No sooner had the tense muscles in his shoulders begun to relax a little when he heard his name being fairly shouted over his combadge.

Sighing, he leaned out and grabbed it.

"O'Sullivan." He sighed, surprised at this point he could even remember his own name.

[Admiral Lassiter is once again demanding to see you, Sir.] Zander Blakeslee informed him regretfully. [Immediately.]

"Aye, Zander, I understand. On my way."

He regarded himself in the mirror and regretted not having shaved before he got into the shower; now it would have to wait.

He knew Gem Lassiter well enough to understand that if she thought he'd taken an extra two minutes for the sake of his vanity and kept her waiting, she would never let him forget it.

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Captain Keiran O'Sullivan
Temporal Investigations