Stardate 101001.17
Soundtrack: Hallelujah (as performed by Rufus Wainwright)
Three days after Forever Lost
How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished! Samuel 1:27
-=USS Serendipity=-
The captain of the ship called Sera turned heavy, downcast eyes up at last, tilting her head in the direction of the unseen space beyond the obvious wall beside her.
Her hair swung forward with the motion and kept on moving; falling as a dark, drawn curtain against the colorless skin that clothed her high, hollow cheekbones. Her earring jingled loudly, far too merrily for her present state of mind.
She reached up, silencing it abruptly before finally raising an open-palmed hand to point directly instead toward that haunted room: the room that had dominated her attention the past seventy-two hours and continued to do so even now because of the single, troubled mastermind it contained.
Its walls were nearly soundproof; that had been part of the redesign of Sickbay. A noiseless place, created so that if one patient was particularly distressed or restless that those in the surrounding bays could slumber on, undisturbed.
It was never intended, Liis thought, to serve as the local adjunct of Starfleet Medical’s teeming madhouse.
Yet, that was all it seemed ever to have done. She herself had spent time in that room, as had Rada Dengar and now, the current occupant.
With no way to tell if he’d actually finally ceased the wailing he’d resumed the moment he was brought on board, Liis turned to Dalton McKay now for answers.
“Has he stopped?”
“Captain, I am much more concerned about your current medical status than in catchin’ up on how anybody else is doin’.” McKay hemmed. “Remember, Mama always said ‘if you want to succeed at business you’d best start by mindin’ your own’.”
“My mother never said that.”
“You don’t remember your mother.”
“Beside the point. I’m certain she never said anything like that.” Liis uttered a groan as McKay applied gentle, direct pressure to the orbital and maxillary bones of her face. They were still sore, though the dermal regenerator had outwardly healed the blows that had blackened her eyes and broken her jaw.
She knew better than most that inward healing, the kind that no outsider can see or observe, was the kind that takes much longer. For that kind of healing, physically and emotionally, she was going to need a lot more time.
“Ow.”
McKay stopped his probing. “Ow?”
Liis nodded. “Yeah. Ow.”
“’Ow’ as in, ‘that smarts’ or ‘ow’ as in ‘I feel like an angry centipede in cleats is doin’ the Texas Two-Step on my face?”
“What the hell does that even…” Liis threw her hands into the air.
McKay sighed. She was clearly too distracted to play their usual, rousing round of guess the meaning of the metaphor today. “How bad does it hurt on a scale of one to ten?”
“Today or compared to when I got back?”
“Right now.”
“I can live with it.” Liis answered enigmatically, as she hopped down from the biobed. She grabbed her jacket from a hook on the wall and threw it on. “Will you answer my question now?”
McKay sighed. Perfect recall of their conversation meant he wouldn't be afforded the luxury of feigning ignorance. "He didn't stop until he completely lost his voice. Then he finally collapsed from exhaustion."
Liis recoiled. “You didn’t sedate him?”
“We attempted to sedate him. Tried every drug in the book, Captain, and a couple off-label. He just wouldn’t stop. His resistance was almost…superhuman.” McKay shrugged uneasy shoulders. “We could have set a phaser on stun I s’pose but that seemed…” He didn’t finish his thought, because the look on her face said he didn’t have to.
“He didn’t…hurt himself, did he?” Zanh’s stomach threatened to reverse on the dry toast and coffee that Keiran had begged her to choke down. “Did you have to use restraints?”
McKay shook his head and lifted his tricorder, scanning her again. He frowned as it beeped to confirm the results he had dreaded. “See? Your blood pressure is goin’ off like a Roman candle and your heart rate is off the map. You’re not well yet, Captain-“
“Dalton,“
“You haven’t slept and you’re droppin’ weight faster than a turtle in an Iron Man contest…”
“What the bloody hell?” Zanh finally ripped the tricorder and its scanner away from him and summarily threw them across the room. “Dalton, listen to me. I am in no imminent peril of death by deprivation or starvation. The man in the next room is my responsibility, at least until we get back to Earth. I need to be apprised of his condition.”
“You broke it, you bought it,” McKay grumbled, observing his scattered equipment with irritation. Zanh’s narrowing eyes told him he’d better get back to the issue at hand. “He’s my responsibility, Captain,” he tried, but he stopped. He knew this was personal for Zanh, and being she was the Captain and the decision to keep Brody out of lockup where the rest of the crew felt he belonged was hers, she did have the right to know if the man in their care and keep had finally stopped screaming.
“No, we didn’t restrain him. No, he didn’t do any permanent damage to himself- well, maybe his vocal chords, I don’t know but if he did we can fix that later.”
“Did he ever say anything else?”
McKay was now the one casting his eyes to the floor. “No. Just the one word. Only…” he paused, retrieving his tricorder and quickly reassembling all the auxiliary parts to form the whole, just to busy his hands.
He could cure almost any disease of the body with the accumulated knowledge of hundreds that rode around in his program. There was just only so much-- so frustratingly little-- anyone could do for the mysterious and debilitating ailments of the mind. Finally, he closed the tricorder and finished his thought. “Only her name.”
Zanh’s immediate response was deeply felt, but barely perceptible.
“You’re cleared to return to duty, Captain,” McKay finally announced. “Whenever you feel ready.”
“That’s convenient, because I feel ready right now,” Liis replied, moving toward the door. “First order of business, I want to see him. Open the door.”
“Captain, I don’t think-“
“Open the goddamn door, doctor. That’s an-“
“Captain?” A female voice, familiar but drained of all recognizable emotion, begged Liis’ attention
She turned and saw a tired, pale Landry Steele standing over her shoulder.
“Steele, I already told you…“ McKay moved before Zanh could react, raising his hand into the air in protest of Landry’s advancing steps.
“It’s all right, Dalton. I’ll talk to her.” Liis’ eyes locked on Landry’s; taking stock of her soul as only Zanh was able; reading into her though Steele tried mightily to keep her conflicted feelings concealed. “Can we use the room?”
“Of course.” Dalton nodded, first to the Captain in acknowledgement then to Steele as he passed by.
Landry stepped inside. As the door hissed shut behind her, she wasted no time in speaking. “Please, Captain. I heard that he’s been calling for me. Can’t I see him?”
“Don’t you have more pressing issues on your mind, Agent Steele? Like whether or not I’m about to bring your career to a swift and definitive end?”
“I’ve done that already with my behavior, Sir.” Landry droned, not really caring one way or another what happened to her Starfleet future right now. In this moment she had only one concern, and he was locked up in a room that for the last three days had remained maddeningly inaccessible to her. “I understand that, and I know that I have no right to ask you for anything..."
“Damn right you don’t. Your actions, or rather your initial failure to act and disclose what you knew could have brought about the destruction of not only this ship but the timeline itself as we know it.”
“Yes, Sir.” Steele answered, offering nothing on her own behalf. It’s impossible, she thought, to defend the indefensible.
“Do you regret those actions?”
Landry shifted now. She honestly didn’t know yet what she felt so she answered as clearly as she could. “I regret disappointing my crew mates, Sir. Specifically Cristiane and Commander Blane. I also regret that my actions could have caused loss of life among this crew.”
“You should. In fact, that’s just the really short introduction to what should be a very long list of regrets here. You really blew it, Landry, and, honestly?” Zanh ran a hand back through her hair and huffed a frustrated sigh. “I am not sure exactly what to do with you yet.”
“Decide my fate at your leisure, Captain. I deserve neither compassion nor consideration after what I’ve done. But the man in that room, over there,” she paused to draw a breath, and her voice became unsteady. “He was a good man, once. A man who tried to do what was right and help people. You and I among them.”
“I suppose you’re going to tell me next that he just got lost somewhere between the desire to help the masses and his quest for absolute power.” Zanh muttered, more to herself than Steele but the look that flashed in Steele’s eyes told her that the remark had been heard all too clearly.
“With all due respect, Sir, he is human. As such, he must wrestle with his inborn weaknesses, his darker side against his better self.”
“As do we all, Agent Steele.”
Landry shuffled her feet slightly. “What was that verse of the Bible Tuck always used to quote? The one his mother read all the time?” She thought for a moment. “Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upwards.”
“Tucker Brody as Job? I don’t think so.” Liis said, staring beyond Steele and out into the distance. She was wrestling with her own better self in this moment all right- the person she was locked in an epic battle with the one she wanted to be.
The former said that she’d already shown Brody more than enough mercy after all the levels of Hell he’d put her through.
The latter insisted that no kindness shown to one so broken could ever be enough to be deemed truly righteous.
“My husband is quite the Bible scholar, you’ll recall,” Zanh said, countering Steele’s unspoken assertion that she didn’t know what she was talking about. “I find myself thinking of the words of David instead.”
Without speaking, Steele's eyes asked which Zanh had in mind.
“How are the mighty fallen,” Zanh recited.
Landry bowed her head. Her shaggy, auburn locks tumbled downward, obscuring her tortured face.
“So. You want to see him,” Zanh continued, beginning to pace and violently twisting the chain of her earring. “To what end, Landry?”
Steele shrugged her shoulders, her head moving in a motion somewhere between a nod and a shake. Her hesitance to answer instantly infuriated her captain.
“Do you hope to talk sense into him? To try to bring him back to some state in which he is capable of reason or subject to redemption? Because I’m afraid that all medical evidence indicates that at this point, and for likely a very, very long time, Doctor Brody will be incapable of anything close. He may never be.” Zanh watched the pain fog and then evaporate in Steele’s eyes, and she had to admire the woman’s firm stance in the face of such scrutiny.
“Still…” Zanh sighed, hating every moment of this for more reasons than she could count, “Contrary to popular opinion and my own best efforts to deny it I do have a soul. So I’m giving you one more chance to answer my questions honestly.” She stepped forward, leaving no space between her and the woman she was addressing. She lowered her voice to the point that even at this range, Steele had to strain to decipher the words.
“I warn you, Landry, if my bullshit detector so much as emits a single ‘ping’ when I hear your responses then your next step will be to immediately pack your things and prepare to disembark the moment we reach Earth. Leaving your career, your combadge and your Temporal Compass behind you. Do you understand me?”
Steele nodded, her expression as fixed as stone despite the fact that acidic tears burned behind her eyes.
“Then I’ll ask you again,” Zanh whispered, “why do you want to see Tucker Brody and what possible reason could there be for me to allow it?”
Landry shuddered and offered one sentence in answer to both questions.
“Because I love him, Captain.”
The honesty in the words combined with a direct, unflinching stare convinced Zanh that Steele was telling the truth, and Liis was forced to ask herself in this moment how many times she would have answered with those exact words to so many, varied questions.
“You know he’s not…” Zanh paused.
“I know.”
“I mean, he thinks he’s- that you are-“
“I’ve heard the rumors, Captain.” Landry replied softly. “I know what I’m walking into. I…” Finally, she was forced to look away. “If I can offer him any kind of comfort at all, in the time left before they take him from this place and lock him away from all the world then I want to do it. For the sake of everything we’ve been.” She could hide the tears in her eyes no longer. “For the sake of the good man he once was.”
Now it was Zanh who averted her eyes. She damned herself in this moment for being able to understand not only the reasons Brody was driven to madness but also Steele’s for grasping so tightly to the shreds of her own fraying sanity.
“All right.” Zanh spun toward the door, activating it with leaden footsteps. She paused but did not look back. “As long as it doesn’t further agitate him, you can stay with him until we reach Earth. Then,” her voice broke, and she cleared her throat to try to steady it. “You’ll have to let them take him, Landry. Can you do that?”
“I don’t really have a choice, do I?”
Zanh didn’t answer. She simply began moving again, giving the word to the guard outside Brody’s door to let Steele in, pay strict attention to the monitors, and to pull her out at the very first sign of trouble.
She strode out of Sickbay headed port but suddenly turned on her heel starboard, deciding that she needed a few hours more on her own to contemplate all that had happened before she was ready to retake her rightful place on the bridge.
Commanding Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012