By TC Blane and Zanh Liis
100204.14
Immediately Following From Very Bad to Impossibly Worse
-=Quarters of Zanh Liis O'Sullivan, USS Alchemy=-
100204.14
Immediately Following From Very Bad to Impossibly Worse
-=Quarters of Zanh Liis O'Sullivan, USS Alchemy=-
“We need to talk about Rada.”
TC eyed both his Captain and her husband carefully to monitor their reaction to his opening of this particular barrel of fish.
The subject of Rada Denger had been a source of contention between the Captain and TC in the past, and he was fairly confident that it would be again.
Judging from his Captain’s sad expression he was not sure where the conversation was going to land this time; still he felt his concerns needed to be spoken.
“He’s lost.” TC said plainly, “and now he is a liability.”
Liis shifted, only slightly. "Is that so."
Keiran shifted much less slightly, thinking this is not going to end well.
“More harm then good has come from the…procedure.” TC fought to hold back the string of profanity that his gut urged him to say. He had no love for Temporal Investigations before this and even less love for the process they referred to as "resequencing".
Liis turned toward her husband, and, with the gentlest tone of which she was capable she spoke his name.
She needed to say nothing more.
He nodded and stepped forward. He crossed the room, shoved his feet into his boots and exited without a word.
Now Liis turned her attention back towards TC. "Rada is lost? That's your final, considered opinion?" She moved toward a metallic chair that was up against a small table in the corner and sank into it. "We're just supposed to cut our losses and give up on him?"
“The last time we had this discussion you said to let him have his day of reckoning.” TC grabbed a chair and spun it around, sitting down into it to face Liis on the same level in an attempt to seem not confrontational. “I know you remember the conversation," he said with a slight smile.
She shifted again but did not mirror his lighter expression; her features fixed to reflect her worry as if they were set in stone. "How could I forget."
TC looked down at the carpet. “Well you were right and I was wrong. He saved us all plus quite possibly prevented genocide. What he had to do to accomplish that was horrific on any level.” He shrugged his shoulders and looked up. “I would have made the same choice if I was him.”
"It's only because of those decisions on his part that you and I are sitting here to be having this discussion at all." Zanh droned.
"I know that! I..." he sighed and rubbed his icy blue eyes. He felt a profound sadness for Rada and it pained him to see the man going though the anguish. “We let him have his day of reckoning. His moment in history.”
He paused before turning those piercing eyes toward Zanh once more. “Then we let them take it away from him.”
"It was the only way to save his life!" Zanh protested now, launching out of her chair and stomping across the room. "His mind was burning itself to death. It was going to take him with it. If he hadn't killed himself outright then his body would've shut down from the stress." Liis leaned against the wall, staring back at Blane with a sadness he'd rarely seen her allow to come through. "Do you think I wanted any of this for him? Do you think that I would've allowed them to resequence him if there had been any other option?"
“Maybe the natural option would have been best.” TC added quietly. “You don’t know what would have happened. He was not given the chance to fight it and win, to become more then what he was, to grow.”
"Yes, wouldn't it be nice if we all got to have the best option available to us all the time. But you know, I don't remember seeing that in the Starfleet handbook for new recruits. Do you, Thomas?" Zanh snapped, as this was all really beginning to get to her. Of course, she wished Rada had had the better option. Of course, she wished that things could've gone differently. Of course, as his Commanding Officer she felt a horrible sense of guilt and anguish, seeing what had become of him since and all he'd lost. "We had to do the best we could at the time and-"
“He knows something is wrong. It maybe like ghostly mirage in his mind but he knows it is there. He feels it.” TC stood up and started to pace. “He feels the pain of what happened but he has no clue why he feels that way.”
He turned back to her. “He’s lost Wren, he’s lost his past. He has no emotional support structure.” TC thumbed his chest. “Except for us. The people who keep lying to him and I can tell from the look in his eyes that he knows that we are.”
Zanh opened her mouth to speak but there was simply nothing to say. She closed it again and exhaled heavily.
He shook his head and sat back down. “A man's demons are as important to him as his angels. Without them right and wrong become disjointed, blurred. Morality can be questioned.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “This needs to be righted, Captain, and quickly before we lose him. He needs to be allowed to face his day of reckoning. He needs to be allowed to hate the demon within himself…” His eyes implored her. “…and Wren needs to be allowed to be the angel for him. Nether TI or any of us on this ship and can do that for him, only her.”
Liis wanted nothing more for Rada and Wren than the happy ending that would reunite their family. She thought about Tam now; another innocent victim in all of this as well. The boy had lost the only father he'd ever known the moment Rada was resequenced, and there was nothing at all fair in any of it.
She knew that was part of what was getting to Blane now; the overwhelming unfairness, the injustice, of it all.
She knew because it was getting to her too.
Images in her mind overlapped to the point they nearly overwhelmed her; snapshots of better and worse moments from her own seemingly separate lives and histories; moments when she'd lost, and then found, love and family once again.
"We can't always fix what we want to fix, Thomas," she whispered. "I wish that we could."
“If we do not find a way to fix this we, all of us that know about what happened, will be directly responsible for destroying him.” TC’s face hardened as a wave of determination washed over it. “I can not, will not, live with that.”
Liis' initial reaction was to remind him that powers higher than either of them had sealed Rada's fate; that even if she had wanted to there would have been nothing she could do to stop the resequencing short of kidnapping Dengar at the time and she still truly believed in her heart that the only way to save him from the immediate effects of his emotional collapse was to remove the memories.
She knew, she had always known, how flawed resequencing was and she had held out the smallest of faint, dim hopes, even as he looked at Wren with no recognition of who she really was to him, that in time, their bond would win out and they would begin anew even if not pick up where they left off.
She couldn't find words to articulate all of this to Blane now though. It hadn't been that long at all since she had faced the darkest possible outcomes for her own life, shown to her one at a time and with twisted clarity in the alternate timelines they had seen. The wedding rings on her fingers still felt too newly placed there for her to be counting her blessings just yet, especially in the face of Dengar's suffering.
She thought of a phrase she'd heard Keiran reference before; something his mother used to say. 'There but for the grace of God go I'.
She approached Blane slowly now. She took the chair opposite him and spun it around, straddling it as she sat down before him. "I'm thinking now of a day when you and I had a very important conversation, aboard this very ship, and not too far away actually from where we're sitting now. Do you remember it, Thomas?" Liis gestured with her eyes above them, to the deck where the training holosuite was located.
It was the location where, after her encounter with the Sylph, she had confided to Blane before anyone else on her crew that she had retained her memories. Salvek had insisted that the crew not try to make her remember, or indeed even speak of what had happened with her and O'Sullivan unless and until she gave indication that she herself remembered it first. This despite objections from Tryst and Jariel at the time, who insisted that Liis had a right to know. That she must know.
"When it was me, when my mind was at stake, what did you think about the loss of memories then?" Liis sighed, considering. "I don't remember that you ever really told me. I know that you did your duty and followed orders. I also remember that the moment I told you that I remembered, you said you had something for me and gave me Keiran's letter."
TC nodded, remembering the moment very clearly. “Yes. You were despondent, but not on the verge like I believe Dengar to be,” he responded, not backing down from the point he was trying to make.
"You have no idea," Liis whispered through gritted teeth, trying to bite back the rising panic that the memories brought, "just how close I was to breaking." She thought of how much she wanted to give up on everything when she'd lost Keiran, and shivered. "No idea."
She glanced up at him, eyes full of honest emotion as she fought the tremor in her voice to continue. "Thomas, I want you to know that few people can understand better than I just what Hell resequencing inflicts upon those who undergo it." Liis again felt the need to move and rose upon shaking knees. She twisted her earring chain as she walked back and forth before him in this space that seemed to grow smaller by the second.
"I also know from experience what carrying memories that are destructive to you can do. I barely made it back from remembering all that there was to know. Some days I fear that there is still more there beneath somewhere, just lurking below the surface and that one trigger, one instant later," she thought now of Tucker Brody and her alternate timeline stay at Starfleet Medical. It was just a memory now; at least that was what she kept telling herself whenever she'd wake up from the nightmares to find Keiran was there, beside her. Still it was one that haunted her and would never truly leave her. "What's worse I think of what could happen to him."
She twisted her wedding ring, and Blane knew that the 'him' in question was Keiran. She continued on without pausing to draw a breath, needing to force the words out before she lost what was left of her will to do it.
"You can't push these things. It's really been no time at all since Rada has been through all of this. We have to give him a little time to sort himself out. As far as Wren goes," she turned back to him with reddening eyes that did not fully give way to tears but revealed her sorrow nonetheless, as clearly as they exposed her exhaustion.
"Believe me, few people could possibly feel worse for Wren Elton at this moment in time than I do. But she saw him in Sickbay too. She saw him before, and after the procedure and I truly believe that she loves him enough that she'd rather know he was alive and functioning in some kind of life rather than curled into a ball or worse, having to be restrained, locked up in a room somewhere in a corner on suicide watch because he couldn't live with what he'd done."
TC looked her right in the eye. “And what makes you think that he is not on the verge of suicide now? Perhaps not directly and maliciously but there are plenty of ways to take you own life, especially if you put not value on it.”
"Then we have to give him the time he needs to find that value to put on it again. I...could encourage him, strongly, to take some shore leave." Liis offered. "Get him off of the ship, give him some time with his thoughts."
“Really?” TC voice took a very rare sarcastic tone to it. “And what thoughts would they be, reflections on the good and bad moments of his life? Spend time with family to be thankful for the good times?”
"You'd prefer he remembered Wren being assaulted and nearly murdered by those monsters? That he whiled away the hours recalling how he destroyed an entire species to save the quadrant and then collapsed from the grief of having killed them all even though it was justified? That he remembers shaking, screaming, breaking while imprisoned in our Sickbay and terrified of everyone who entered the room? Terrified of his own mind to the point where he simply shut down?"
She clenched her hands into tight fists, digging her nails into her palms to try to create enough pain in the skin that it might keep her grounded here, in this moment where she was. Her eyes narrowed. "Yes, that would be so much better, wouldn't it?"
“The man has gaps the size of black holes in his thoughts and memories. What exactly do you want him to reflect on?” he asked.
Liis laughed sadly. How could she begin to try to explain that which is inherently inexplicable? "Don't you see? It's only in his own way and time that he'll be able to rebuild his life- and hell, he might even remember what it was that made him who he was to begin with. Not enough time has passed, Thomas. If I've learned nothing else from my years with Temporal Investigations it's that these things take time."
“Captain, I believe he could be a danger to himself. I’ve seen this before with combat stress. People try to forget or bury the horrific events of their life or what they have done, or lie to themselves that it never happened. Those people have a tendency to take risks or turn to substance abuse to deal with the underlying buried anguish that they have forced themselves to forget.”
Zanh released her clenched fingers and intentionally tried to soften her tone; though she knew that if she didn't fight to retain at least some of her artificially constructed, distant demeanor, she'd come unglued entirely at the thought of what Blane must have seen in his time.
She'd seen his 'artwork'. She knew every name, every date had meaning; a time and place and event associated with it that had resulted in the loss of life. Any man who was deep enough to keep account of not only the friends but the foes who had fallen in battle before him wouldn't be saying anything akin to what he was now unless he felt it truly had to be said.
"I know you've seen a lot happen to those around you, Thomas. To me, to Keiran. Hell, you lived the paradox too, but unless you've ever been resequenced you can't really know-"
He pounded himself on the chest. “This is something I know about!” He turned away to do a rare thing, regain control of his emotions.
Liis didn't approach him now; she didn't move or speak. Instead she just gave him as much time as he needed to catch his breath. He looked as she'd never seen him, and she had to wonder now just what Special Ops had put him through that this was something that got to him in such an excruciating, unrelenting way.
“TI practically wiped the slate clean and gave us a blank slate, but are we sure the Dengar we got back is truly going to be better then the Dengar he might have become?” He shook his head as he turned back towards her, control once again restored. “I see a man that I do not know, someone who is relying on people to help him who are incapable of doing so. We are leaving him to deal with things on his own, on a life raft in the middle of an ocean of lost memories.”
"We're not leaving him!" Liis tenuous hold on her temper now slipped. Her volume increased. "We're doing all we can to help him- there's nothing within my power that I wouldn't do to help Rada or any of my officers!"
She caught herself, and with great effort she lowered her voice back down; trying and failing to conceal the emotions that betrayed just how much those under her command meant to her. "You know that. If I could take the pain for him, if I could ever take the pain for any one of you that comes from this life, you know I'd do it without a second thought."
“The only way out of this is for him to face what he did. To deal with it.” He hung his head. “Because either he will not be able to handle it and self destruct or we leave him on the course he is on and watch him self destruct anyway. The only difference is that he will know why.”
"You're so sure of that?" Liis' voice was haunted now, as if somehow she at least believed that she knew better. "So sure he'd know why he was dying as all that's left of him was lost?" She let the question hang in the air for a long moment before concluding with her own opinion on the matter. "Because I'm not."
TC paused considering the question. “No,” he answered honestly. “Everyone is different. But I know that deep down inside of him there is that light we all have in us. I know he would find his way. It would not be easy. But if he had all of the pieces of his puzzle to play with, I truly believe he would get the whole picture and find his way.”
Zanh was silent for a long moment, considering his words as she battled her own conflicting thoughts.
She laced her fingers and brought them to her chin, her lips tight and her eyes closed as she tried one last time to table her own feelings for a moment about the justice or injustice of what had happened, what had followed, and tried simply to focus on what she should do now.
Finally, she came to a decision.
"I'm going to send him to Earth."
Blane said nothing. She waited a moment before going on. "I'm willing to bet that if word gets out that he's gone on vacation," she stressed the word to indicate she expected it to be in no way a pleasure trip, "that there's someone aboard ship who might make it her business to try to track him down there. Wren and Rada they...they have a lot of memories on Earth. Maybe, if he just has a little time and is out of the environment..."
TC shook his head slowly; a clear and direct sign that he was not convinced that simply allowing Rada to go on vacation would fix the problem.
"Well, what else would you have me do then, Thomas?"
“Allow the man to grieve, with all of the information he needs to do it effectively. To know why he feels so bad.”
"You know it's not within my power to give him back everything he's lost, even if I wanted to!" she exclaimed, her words urgent and hoarse with deep frustration. "Even if I could be absolutely sure that giving him everything back would be better than ever having taken it."
She sighed deeply and with great despair. It was clear from his set jaw and his unchanging eyes that this was not enough to satisfy him.
"I'm sorry if it's not all you hoped for. For now, giving him time is the very best I can do. What's more," she held her arms open hopelessly, "it's all I can do."
TC stared his Captain for a moment and Liis saw a wave of sadness and regret cross over his normally cold blue eyes.
He simply nodded, stood up straight, and pulled his tunic tight to remove the wrinkles. His eyes never leaving hers, he changed posture and stood formally before her at attention.
Liis stomach clenched at the sight. She dreaded what was going to come next.
“As Second Officer of the USS Serendipity it is my duty to recommend that Lieutenant Commander Rada Dengar be removed from duty until he can be examined by the ship's CMO and Counselor and be found fit for duty."
"Thomas," her eyes entreated him even more than her low, unstable timbre. "Please. Think carefully before you say what you're about to-"
"His recent actions and experiences while serving as well as recent events have led this officer to question his fitness for duty." Blane interrupted, wanting to get this out and over with.
The overriding expression in Zanh's eyes surpassed sadness; it exceeded anguish, it was impossible to define as she whispered, "When was it, exactly, that you lost faith in my judgment?"
Blane continued, undeterred. "I believe that he is a danger to himself and therefore to others,” his voice was low and unchanging. He would not back down. “I will submit the official report detailing my reasons for this recommendation including dates and times.”
He trusted the captain and would follow her to the ends of the universe, but this time he believed with all that he was that she was wrong. He had hoped that he would have found away to handle the situation behind closed doors. He was now convinced that was not going to happen. He just played the last card available to him.
He had to do what he thought was best for Rada and the crew around him.
Just the glints of unshed tears shone in the corners of Zanh's eyes as she steeled herself, and nodded to him slowly, only once. "Commander Blane, your position will be noted in my logs." She stared through him. "Make your report." She clenched her hands again to try to hide the fact they were vibrating. "I will transmit it to Starfleet myself, right in front of you, as soon as it's done. You. Are." The words broke up as she tried to dismiss him and she turned away. "Get out."
Blane stormed from the room and the moment he'd gone, Liis' head fell into her hands.
Keiran had been standing by, pacing the halls and waiting anxiously for their discussion to end: consumed by the sinking feeling he'd better not go far.
Seeing the look on Blane's face as the man departed, he knew sadly that he'd been right.
He dashed back into the room, his eyes searching out his wife.
Seeing her now, the way that she kept her head down and would not raise her eyes to meet him, Keiran's heart seemed to beat out of time. "Liis."
She didn't move, still in silence though he could see her trembling, even from where he stood.
He moved toward her slowly, lowering himself to one knee before the chair she sat in and wordlessly gathering her into his arms.
She heaved a sudden, shuddering sob as his arms enclosed her. She dropped her head down, resting it against his strong shoulder.
Before her tears could actually fall, however, they evaporated in the withering heat of her rage; at the Domox, at life, at the things she could not change.
Just as quickly as her emotions had surged to the fore, she forced them away once again.
Falling apart now was a luxury that she could not allow herself. She was Captain of this ship, people were depending upon her to do her job, and right now her job was to keep herself together long enough to see to it that Rada left the ship for awhile: quickly and quietly. Without any more dark marks being made to his record- marks such as being found unfit for duty for any reason. Marks that he surely had not earned, did not deserve and that would not be looked upon kindly later by those at Command when it came time to promote him again.
She had to act.
She unwillingly wrenched herself free and purposely avoided looking him in the eyes as she slapped viciously at her badge. "Zanh to Dengar."
[Dengar here, Captain.]
"I need to speak with you immediately." Liis did not want this conversation to draw the attention of any who might be on the bridge and so added, "please report to my quarters at your earliest convenience. Zanh out."
"Liis," Keiran had so many questions but he feared pressing her for answers to them now.
"Later, okay?" she whispered. "Later. Right now, I need to be alone."
He nodded and left her again, and the moment he'd gone Liis felt inescapable, silent tears burn their way down the flesh of her face.
Alone, she allowed herself this solitary moment to grieve for Rada Dengar, for TC Blane, and for all those whose minds had been deemed such a danger- a threat so great- that the powers who 'knew better' felt they must attempt to transform their darkest demons into tormented angels of light.
----
Commander TC Blane
Second Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
and
-=/\=- Zanh Liis O'Sullivan
Commanding Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
Commander TC Blane
Second Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
and
-=/\=- Zanh Liis O'Sullivan
Commanding Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012