by -=/\=- Zanh Liis
90329.01
Soundtrack, Hamburg Song by Keane
Hours after A Weather Eye
-=/\=-
-=Quarters of the Captain, USS Serendipity=-
90329.01
Soundtrack, Hamburg Song by Keane
Hours after A Weather Eye
-=/\=-
-=Quarters of the Captain, USS Serendipity=-
Sighing deeply in her sleep, Liis rolled over and clutched the blanket tightly between her fingers as she dreamed.
-=Spring of 2380, Alternate Timeline=-
As she sank to the grass, she leaned back against the tree- their tree. She closed her eyes, thinking of all the things she needed to say, to do. Things she would say and do, if she just had the chance.
Afternoon turned to evening, and as twilight bled into darkness she realized that she might as well...
It was just as she was convincing herself it was time to go that she heard the sound, saw the lights, and where there had been nothing but emptiness before, suddenly, he was there.
He was hurt.
His face bruised, his arm was bandaged and in a sling, but he was here. He was alive and he was in one piece, she could ask for no more.
She cried out his name as she jumped to her feet and threw her arms around him. Keiran groaned involuntarily, the pain in his ribs and chest searing through him as she pulled him into her embrace.
Somehow, that pain was a small price to pay for the sensation of being held by her this way.
It took a moment for him to realize that she was sobbing against his shoulder.
"Shhh, hey, now, 'tis all right. Don't cry. You didn't think that a few Romulan operatives could really be the end of me, did ya now?"
"I thought," she gasped between breaths, "that you were never," She turned her eyes up toward him, and he marveled over the fact that even when she wept, she was beautiful.
"Remember, what you told me? Here. The night of the Perseids."
He nodded.
"Y-you s-said that if I e-ever thought I c-could, that you w-would," she stammered, stuttering for the first time in years. Her eyes fluttered shut as he brushed the tears from her face. She cast her gaze downward, gathering her courage.
"Liis," he whispered, tilting her face back up toward his, "What are you,"
"I love you," she announced, clearly and without hesitation. "I love you, Keiran and you can't," she began to shake, weeping again. "You can't ever scare me that way again, do you hear me? Or I swear, I'll,"
He laughed softly, even as he tried to hide how much pain he was really in every time she hugged him closer.
"I'll do my best on that, yeah? Promise," he began, not having fully absorbed what she'd said before she tried to think up some punishment suitable to threaten him with.
Finally, her words began to sink in. He pulled free from her and took a step back.
He didn't want to misunderstand what was happening here- he had to be certain.
"Zanh Liis. What did you just say to me?"
"I said I love you, Keiran."
"But."
She shook her head, taking his bruised face gently into both of her hands. "There is no 'but'. Not this time." She brought her lips so near his, Keiran thought he might perish from the ache of wanting her if she didn't kiss him soon.
"I love you," she repeated, and then she was kissing him and for one perfect moment, nothing else that had ever happened in her life, or his, seemed to matter anymore.
After she finally released him so he could catch his breath, Keiran kept his eyes closed.
"I'm dreamin'. Honest to God, I must be." For a moment he actually wondered if he were dead, because he couldn't believe that any sort of reward in Heaven could be any better than the feeling of finally hearing her say that she loved him.
"No," Liis assured him gently, stroking her hand against his cheek. "You're not dreaming, I promise you. But you are hurt, Keiran, and we shouldn't stay here. It's getting cold. You're shaking."
"Not shakin' 'cause I'm cold, Liis," Keiran rumbled softly, pressing his lips to her ear as she ran her hand up and down his uninjured arm. "I've never felt so-"
He stopped, staring into her eyes with an intensity that entranced her. "Tell me again, what ya told me before." He still wasn't entirely certain he could believe her words, and needed to hear them, once more.
"I love you."
Again he closed his eyes, releasing his breath slowly. He was feeling dizzy now, overcome he was sure with emotion as well as exhaustion. His weight swayed slightly from foot to foot.
"Whoa," Liis put her arms around his waist to steady him. "Come on O'Sullivan. Let's get you home."
"This will be home for us both, soon enough." Keiran whispered, kissing the top of her head as she led him from beneath the tree. "I promise you."
They beamed for now back to his small apartment in the city, not far from TI's main offices.
Offices into which they both knew that they would soon be going, but not simply to return to work. Rather, to make an announcement that was not going to go over well at all with their superiors, let alone their 'handler', Jonas Vox. Be that as it may, Keiran honestly didn't care. The Universe would have to take care of itself from here on out, because his only concern was taking care of Zanh Liis.
She helped him up the stairs and into the apartment, got him out of his boots and headed toward the bedroom.
She smiled wistfully, remembering the time that he'd put her to bed here and spent the night on the tiny couch as she slept off the Jack Daniels she'd consumed trying to forget; and how he'd told her the next day that there was no such thing as perfection when it came to the management of time and history.
All they could do was the best they could do, and that was that.
She hadn't accepted it then, but now she did. Now, she was not only accepting of the future that this timeline had set out for her but looking forward to it. To marrying him, as she was certain knowing him that he would eventually ask her; and getting the hell away from Vox and his ilk as quickly as they possibly could.
"Are you hungry? I'll get you something."
"Tryin' ta...finish me off are ya?" Keiran joked, wincing in pain as he ambled along. Liis' cooking was a thing of legend; it was infamously bad.
"I meant take out, wise guy." She ordinarily would've nudged him in the ribs with her elbow to tease him, but injured as he was, she dared hardly touch him.
In the condition he was in there would be no more talk of the future or what it meant for them tonight; there was plenty of time for that later. Now that he'd come back to her in one piece, Liis felt that they had all the time in the world, for everything.
She pulled the covers back and eased him down onto his bed. Slowly he leaned himself into the pillows she'd propped up to support him, and he tilted his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. "In the other room, please," he whispered, "The med kit?"
She hurried to retrieve it, and he selected a hypo from it and administered the dose of something to take the edge off of the pain once again. There was no escaping it completely.
She wrung her hands. It was painful to see him suffer; she would much rather have suffered the wounds herself if she could have spared him having to.
"Is there anything else I can do for you now?"
"Yeah," Keiran said dreamily, as his eyes fluttered shut from the effects of the medication. "Stay."
Having never had any intention of leaving, Liis had already removed her boots and jacket.
"If that's what you want..."
"Is. Just. What I've wanted." He murmured softly. "For so long."
She carefully sat down beside him. His head drooped to the side and she guided it over onto her shoulder as she brushed his hair back.
"Sleep now," she whispered. "I'll be watching over you, Just as you've watched over me, even when I didn't know you were doing it."
-=Flash=-
"He's not coming back this time, I've already told you, Zanh Liis." Tucker Brody sighed with frustration and ran his hand back through his floppy mane of artfully disarranged, sand colored hair. He pushed his fingers down at the bridge of his nose as if fighting off a throbbing headache.
"He is, you'll see," Liis insisted, her voice a hoarse and her words desperate, but still she was defiant. "He promised me that no matter what he'd always come back to me."
"Keiran O'Sullivan is DEAD Zanh Liis," Brody insisted, uncharacteristically raising his voice. "He is never coming back."
"Maybe here, maybe now," Liis insisted. "But that can't be the end."
She gathered her knees to her chest. She rested her head upon them and wrapped her arms around, beginning to rock back and forth on the thin padding that constituted the mattress of her narrow metal bunk.
"It's not the end of him. It can't be the end of him."
-=/\=-
Liis awoke with a start and sat up, entirely certain that she'd find herself still in the six by six foot cell that had made up her hospital room in the other time.
She shivered, wondering how it was possible that such sweet memories could still be poisoned by others so bitter.
Keiran immediately reacted to the sound of her gasping for air. He hadn't fallen asleep, instead he'd been watching over her as she dreamed, staring at the stars out the viewport and thinking back over all that had happened in recent days.
"Hey, there," he whispered affectionately, reaching out to her. "Is all right, darlin'."
She focused at last on his face, searching his eyes and finding them warm, clear and blue as the calmest of seas.
She took in the surroundings of their newly redesigned quarters and her shoulders relaxed. It took her much longer, however, to still the pounding of her heart.
She closed her eyes, the weight of his hand upon her arm anchoring her here, in the now she preferred so much to any other time she'd ever lived. "What time is it?"
"Is..." Keiran craned his neck to see the chronometer on the bedside table. "Oh three hundred or so."
Liis groaned and allowed him to gather her into his arms. She rested her head against his chest. "Sorry I woke you."
"Didn't."
"Oh?" She looked up at him, concerned. "I'd have thought you'd be worn out after the day we had. Something keeping you up?"
"Just this." He kissed the top of her head. "All of this."
"It's still hard to believe. Isn't it?" The starlight caught the gems in the band on her finger and Liis watched as they threw streaks of color onto the wall.
"Maybe so," Keiran answered, "But I've never wanted to believe in an'a'thin' so badly in my life."
He knew she was worried, that thoughts of Tucker Brody and who knew what else were keeping her from feeling pure joy in the place at which they'd finally arrived. "I promise you, Liis," he vowed, "I'm not going to let an'a'one take this away from us. Ever again."
She tilted her head up and kissed him, and as one kiss became another, and another, she remembered a question suddenly that she'd had earlier when she first saw the bed where it was now located; high up in the bedroom that was more a balcony than anything else overlooking what lay beneath. "Keiran,"
"Mmm?" his mind on anything but talking, he wondered what she could possibly want to ask him now.
"This bed, it...weighs a ton. If the ship loses artificial gravity..."
He rumbled with soft laughter. "Exactly why I told Mister Blane to bolt the blessed frame to the floor."
-=Hours later=-
Liis awoke again just before her alarm was due to sound at oh six hundred, and hurried to shut it off.
Keiran was finally, for once, sleeping soundly and peacefully and so she took it upon herself as the CO who also had the ability to claim the right as his wife to verify that his schedule had nothing pressing upon it for the morning.
Then, she cleared it.
She tiptoed softly around the room as she dressed, taking it all in. She was still unable to believe the pains he'd taken to make the space feel like a real home and not just sterile, standard quarters they were to endure until they got to go home next.
As she descended the stairs she found another gift waiting; a real coffee maker was now set into an alcove in the wall beside the replicator. She laughed quietly at the sight but decided to forego testing it out for the sake of letting him sleep in, knowing the aroma would wake him.
Instead she popped her hand into the glass jar of coffee beans that sat on a shelf waiting to be ground and used and tossed a handful of them into her mouth instead; eating them just as they were to tide her over until she could get to the Afterthought for a cup of the real thing.
She pulled on her boots and with one last look around left their quarters for now, but only after placing a handwritten note on the small kitchen table that read:
"For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be..."
...I hope that you slept well.
SHTV, L
As she made her way through the gradually waking corridors of the Serendipity, Zanh Liis O'Sullivan thought back to the sight of Keiran as he slept, and doubted that Tennyson himself could ever in his life have seen such wonders, as she had.
She made herself a promise in the moment that no one, least of all Tucker Brody, would ever be allowed to bring Keiran any harm, as long as she was living.
She pressed the button to call the turbolift and was shaken from her daze by the sight of a familiar face when the lift doors parted.
"Good morning, Captain. Can I buy you a cup of coffee?"
She grinned back at TC Blane and took up position beside him.
"Hell, yes."
------------------
-=/\=- Zanh Liis
Commanding Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
-=/\=- Zanh Liis
Commanding Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012