Parts One and Two
By Lt. Commander Lair Kellyn
80207.0
Following Duet
--=Holodeck Two=--
By Lt. Commander Lair Kellyn
80207.0
Following Duet
--=Holodeck Two=--
Arie shivered suddenly, and the father in O'Sullivan reacted instantly. He put a huge hand on her small shoulder.
"You cold darlin'? Computer, adjust temperature by,"
"No, I'm not cold." Arie swung her feet in time with his as they sat side by side. She could always tell right after meeting someone if she was going to like them, and Arie liked this man; with his big blue eyes, silvery beard and his long, tall legs.
"Afraid, then, la?"
She nodded.
"No need to be of me. You know what my job is on this ship, right?"
The child nodded again, and her hat bobbed up and down above her long dark bangs and the ridges on her nose. "Chief of Security."
"Right that. That means it's my job to keep everybody safe. So if you're in some kind of trouble, maybe I'm the person who can help you out of it, you think?"
Arie considered this.
"I was friends with an honored Klingon warrior, on our old ship. She was Chief of Security there."
"Ah, so you know well then that we can help, sometimes when other people can't."
"She helped me a lot." Arie thought back to the Pool of Dark Waters, and how N'Dura had helped her ask Kahless to bring her mother home safely when she was missing. It had worked.
"I miss her." Arie concluded sadly. "I miss the way things were on the old ship. But I had a choice before I came here. I made it and now I have to get used to it."
"Choice?" Keiran asked, his low voice rumbling softly.
"Yes. To go away to school, or come here. I chose here."
"Are you beginnin' to regret it?"
She considered his question far more thoughtfully than Keiran would have expected for a child of her age. "Not regret, exactly. I miss my school. My friends. This isn't home."
"Lair Arie, do you know what a home is?"
"A place where you're born, or that you get used to. A building, or ship, or station that you can always go back to, where you always fit."
Keiran whistled. "You sure you're only eight, Miss Lair? I'm beginnin' to doubt the authenticity of your birthdate."
"Yes. I'm sure." She answered quickly, with honest sincerity.
"That's what a house is, Arie. But a home is something else entirely." She raised an eyebrow and Keiran laughed.
"You get that expression from your father." Keiran knew enough of Salvek already to know that look of incredulity well. "A home is people, and love, and belonging. Anywhere can be home, Lair Arie, so long as you are with the people that you love, and you let it be."
She sighed, and frowned.
"That expression you get from your mother." He knew enough of Lair Kellyn to recognize the frustrated pout the child had surely picked up in one of the most amazing examples of nurture versus nature he'd ever seen.
* But then again. *
Keiran began to think about his time with Temporal, and about a split-second, transient look that had crossed Zanh Liis' face when the subject of Salvek's family had come up at the party the other night. . .and he began to wonder.
Was Lair Arie really adopted, or was something much more going on here after all?
"You have many people here who were on the last ship, don'cha now? Answer me that, young Cosette."
"Yes, Sir."
"And you're with both your parents. Most Starfleet children don't get that chance, you know."
"I know."
"So is it really all so bad then? Bad enough to. . ." he waited for her now to confess her sins to him, and she looked up at him repentantly.
"Bad enough to sneak out on your new Vulcan caregiver and probably scare your mother half to death." She was clearly ashamed of what she'd done.
"Well. You'd better get moving, back home Miss. Maybe she hasn't come home yet and she'll never know. Then we can forget about this, because we both know you're not gonna go accessing your mother's programs again without her permission are ya?"
"No, Commander O'Sullivan."
"Good. Off with you then." She stood up before he did, and she held her hand out to him very formally.
"I would like to thank you, Commander, for. . . " she paused and once again sounded so much like Salvek that O'Sullivan's doubts about the authenticity of her adoption records were strengthened a hundred-fold. ". . .setting me straight."
"Anytime, Miss Lair. Remember, everyone on this ship cares for you and wants you to be happy."
"You too?"
"Aye. Me too."
She called for the arch, and pulled the hat off her head. She skipped across the stage, and she skidded to a stop suddenly.
"Do you have any children, Commander?" She called back to him, her earnest eyes attempting to pull the truth from him with the sheer intensity of her stare.
"Yes." Keiran blurted, having fully intended on telling her something else, if not an outright lie. For some reason, unlike even the forms of torture he'd been subjected to during the war in the enemy's attempt to do the same- she had been successful in the extraction. "A son."
"I would like to see him someday. Is he on the ship?"
"No, Arie." Keiran said. His throat seemed to be tightening. Closing. His breathing, restricted. "He's very far away."
"I hope that I meet him one day. If he's like you, I would like him."
Keiran nodded as she vanished through the arch.
He whispered, his words echoing up toward the mezzanine of the empty house as something more than a wish, but less than a prayer.
"I'd like to see him, too."
He'd stopped actually praying for that reunion so many years ago.
No one seemed to be listening.
As Arie skipped out through the arch, she collided into a woman wearing a gold and black uniform.
It took her a moment in her haste to determine that the woman was, in fact, her mother.
"Oko-mekh," Arie began, wringing her hands.
Kellyn's own hands were on her hips, and she looked at the child with the kind of stern, searing disapproval that only a mother can manage.
"I'm really sorry. I know I shouldn't have snuck out. I won't do it again."
"We'll discuss this at home. Get showered and changed before your father gets back. I'll be right behind you. Did you turn the program off?"
"No. Someone's still in there."
"Oh?" Kellyn was caught off guard. "Who?"
"Commander O' Sullivan."
Kellyn nodded. "You go on. I'll be just a few minutes behind you."
Kellyn moved in through the arch and it vanished behind her. The walls and rows of seats of the programmed theater filled in, and she lowered herself into the plush, velvet upholstery of a seat near the back. She was curious to see what was going to happen next.
She saw O'Sullivan standing on the stage, scanning the deck as part of his sweep of the ship. She prepared to rise once more, as he seemed about to terminate the program and she didn't want to land on the deck if he did and her chair vanished from beneath her.
"Computer, end pro-" He stopped. He sighed. He closed his tricorder. "Belay that."
He looked around him. "Remove all characters except the orchestra. Have orchestra begin playback of Act Two, The Barricades. Bring Him Home."
Kellyn felt her breath catch in her throat. She had never heard a living man sing this song- only the holographic representation of Colm Wilkinson playing Valjean as he had in the original, opening company back in the year 1985. Four hundred and three years ago.
Somehow, the words and music had never seemed more relevant than during the past fifteen years of Federation history.
O'Sullivan slowly lowered his towering form to the stage, and knelt. He drew a deep breath.
His lips parted and his voice, crystal clear and angelic, filled the theater.
Kellyn was frozen in her seat.
She had thought, after hearing him sing the first two lines, that she should leave. It was obvious that she was intruding upon a private moment, and she felt she had no right to be here, even if it was her program that he was running. But she was awestruck, and before she knew it the song had ended.
Tears blurred her vision as she rose, and on-stage O'Sullivan rose too. He straightened his tunic, and then told the computer to end the program. As the grid around him became obvious, so did Kellyn.
They stared at each other from their relative positions, which in reality were only a few meters apart once the forced perspective subroutines were removed.
He saw the tears in her eyes, and was unsure what to say, so he waited for her to speak first.
For her part, Kellyn felt she owed him something more than a feeble excuse or clumsily stammered greeting. She closed her eyes a moment, then gazed on him anew.
She sang, extending her hand toward him gently.
O'Sullivan's shoulders sank once more. He was unmasked.
"I'm ready, Fantine." He whispered. He spoke the weary, accepting words of a dying man with far too much conviction for Kellyn's comfort.
The two shared another long stare, the kind only offered and understood by those who had known, and survived, great suffering.
Kellyn reached out toward him, attempting to put a hand on his shoulder. He opened up his tricorder and started to scan, moving away from her before she could touch him.
She still had one of Reece's modified tricorders attached to her belt from the earlier scanning of Engineering on both ships, and so opened hers up as well.
"Give you a hand?"
He nodded as if to say she could suit herself.
She fell into step behind him and finally wiped at the tears that had stained her pale skin with the cuff of her sleeve. "Quite a voice you've got."
"I could say the same to you." He cocked his head to the side. "Hadn't quite figured you for a Fantine though."
She smiled. "Well, you were right. I usually sing Eponine."
"Your young Cosette is quite promising, as well. Remarkable voice for a child so young."
"Thank you. That child is in quite a bit of trouble at the moment."
"Don't be too hard on her, eh?" Keiran requested. "She's a good kid."
Kellyn thought his comment odd, and then wondered if he'd gotten out of her what had made her run away. She thought better of asking, though, and anyway another question dominated her thoughts as she considered the passion with which he'd sang the song before.
"What's his name, Keiran?"
"Whose name?" O'Sullivan's jaw set firmly, as he refused to give in to the emotion that threatened to sweep him under like a tidal wave. This woman, and her daughter, both. What manner of witchcraft were they using on him, to see through him so clearly where so many others had tried and failed?
"Your son's." Kellyn persisted gently.
Suddenly, the familiar sound of feedback resonating was heard nearby as the beta waves set off another hidden listening device. Keiran shook his head.
He grabbed the GU-24 from its hiding place behind a panel in the wall, and crushed it in his powerful hand. "I'm hopin' that was the last of these little buggers."
Satisfied that they had finished sweeping the room, O'Sullivan headed toward the arch.
As they reached the exit, Kellyn began to resign herself to the fact that her question would remain unanswered. Then once again, the man surprised her.
"Carrick." He said softly, at last. "'s name's Carrick."
"How long since you've seen him, Keiran?"
"Twelve very long years. He was so small." He sighed. "He's sixteen. A man now."
He looked down at his boots. "I've lost count of the number of letters I've sent to him. But I don't think he's ever seen a one of them."
"If he has, then he knows the kind of man his father really is, and he'll find his way back to you." Kellyn offered. "If he hasn't, then surely he will wonder, and he will seek you out on his own, in time."
"Think so?"
"Whatever our parents are, or are not as the case may be," Kellyn thought about her own as she spoke. "They're where we've come from. We have to make peace with that at some point, before we can accept who we truly are."
"Whatever you do, Lair Kellyn," his tone changed as he offered her some unsolicited advice now.
"Don't let anyone, or anything, not your work, not duty, anything," he almost seemed to glare through her, years of pent-up regret powering his words. "Or anyone, not even Starfleet, come between you and that beautiful little girl. We make so many sacrifices, great and small, in the service of others. But some are just too much to ask. So don't let them keep you from her, Lair Kellyn. She's your flesh and blood. There is nothing more than that."
Kellyn felt her blood pressure begin to climb, and she began to try to shake off the shock to formulate the standard excuses for why Arie seemed so much like her, when she was in fact adopted. As she opened her mouth, Keiran leaned closer and whispered.
"She's your flesh and blood," he repeated. "And I, for one, promise you I will do all I can to help you and Salvek protect her."
All color drained from her face as O'Sullivan left her in the hall outside the holodeck.
Kellyn reached up to tap her badge, then remembered as her fingers found only her chest just beneath her left collarbone that she'd taken it off.
She had to talk to Salvek.
This was a secret that it seemed there was just no keeping any longer.
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Lt. Commander Lair
Chief Engineer
USS Serendipity/Alchemy
Lt. Commander Lair
Chief Engineer
USS Serendipity/Alchemy