526: Miles to Go

by -=/\=- Zanh Liis
80923.0300
Days After His Father's Son

-=/\=-


-=Earth=-

She stood outside of the beautiful, imposing building, looking up.

The sky was remarkably clear today, and that fact irritated her to no end.

She was not alone in feeling that way.

Another pair of eyes pierced the joyful, cloudless blue. They cursed it internally, and the scowling expression displayed upon the countenance of the man was accompanied by such unrelenting bitterness that it chilled Liis through.

"Are you ready to go in?"

"Never be ready."

"Then I suppose there's no point in waiting any longer."

He looked at her and opened his mouth to speak, but stopped. He considered his original choice of words, and shook his head.

She didn't have to be here, as far as he was concerned.

Why had she bothered to come?

He realized that she must have her reasons at the end of it all, and let the moment go by in silence.

It wasn't that Zanh Liis was in a hurry to go in herself. On the contrary, she would prefer to stay outside here forever, even in the cursed sunlight than to go into the building before them.

Going in would constitute an admission that all of this was real.

If she went in she would see the people, and the ceremony would begin, and there would be no stopping the inevitable.

At the end of it all, nothing could stop the inevitable now.

She interrupted her line of thought, finding it unbearable to continue. If she gave into her own emotions now, she couldn't be there for him the way that she needed to be and that was as unacceptable to her as not being here at all.

She reached out and offered her hand. The man paused, looking at her outstretched fingers.

"Need a strong arm to hold you up, do you then?"

She knew his pride was at stake, and nodded.

"Alright then, yeah. We'd best go in now."

He led her toward the large doors, and at the very last minute, she felt the lump in her throat moving steadily upward.

*I don't know if I can do this,*

His pleading blue eyes begged her not to desert him now, and she understood from the look on his face just how terrified he was, too, and how much he did need her there to hold his hand as he walked through those doors, leaving the normal behind and stepping into the surreal.

She nodded again, following him inside.

Everything was both at once foreign and familiar to her here. In her fogged state of mind she could not have recalled the proper names for each of the sacred objects displayed in the sanctuary but she could remember enough of lives gone by to know that each had its own ritual significance, and purpose.

Determined to her very core not to do or say the wrong thing, she planned to fade into the background as much as possible. She tried to release his hand and failed. Silently, her eyes urged him forward, begging him simultaneously to allow her to hide...

...but sadly, it seemed, this was not to be.

"What a wake yesterday, yeah?" A voice in the foyer spoke softly. "Befitting the man that he was."

"So young, though, no? Seems like there should have been more years to speak about."

"Only God knows when 'tis someone's time to go home, Eilish. Mind that."

"You're right, Tadgh, I know..." The woman, dressed all in black, turned around and gasped aloud as she saw Liis and her companion enter.

"Oh, my...is that, can't be." Tears spilled from her eyes as she rushed forward toward the man holding Liis' arm so tightly he was now cutting off her circulation.

"It is, has to be," Another female voice joined the two previously speaking, and she rushed up to the man, taking his face gently into her hands. "Carrick?"

"Aye, is me, Sister." Carrick looked shyly at his Aunt, a Sister of the Church, as she sized him up from head to toe.

"Goodness, you are the image of your..." the words caught in her throat for a moment as she realized what she was saying, "...your father."

"He is that." Tadgh O'Sullivan looked at his nephew and shook his head. "I bet you don't even remember me, do ye boy? Been a long time."

"Aye, Uncle, I do," Carrick was suddenly starting to feel sick at the thought of just how many O'Sullivans he'd see today, and how unfamiliar they'd be to him.

*Mother, I wish I knew why you did what you've done.* He thought sadly, as he glanced at Zanh Liis, silently pleading her help.

Liis snapped out of her own state of shock long enough to intervene.

"Sister Mary Clare, I'm Zanh Liis. We spoke via subspace."

"Oh, Captain Zanh," The tiny Nun wiped at the corners of her eyes and stepped away from Carrick. "Yes, thank you so much for all your help, and for bein' here. Might I speak to you privately a moment?"

"Of course."

Carrick clutched her arm instinctively, but Liis' eyes conveyed to him that it was all right to let go. She wouldn't go far.

"I'm terribly sorry that you missed the wake," Mary Clare whispered as she took Liis aside. "You...had every right to be there with the rest of the family, you know."

Liis looked away, not wanting to lie to the woman's face but unable to speak the truth.

The truth was that she simply could not have lived through it; being in the same room with him, that way, for so long...

"I'm sorry I was unable to attend, but I had arrangements to make in order to be present here this evening." She contented herself with the fact that this was not entirely untruthful. "How did Carrick manage?"

"Boy's in shock, to be sure, we all are. But he has so little of his father to remember, 'tis going to be hard on him to fathom what he's lost just yet."

Liis looked up at the elaborate stained glass windows surrounding them, and uttered one short, pointed sentence as she ran her hands up and down her arms.

"For us all."

"Aye." Mary Clare now shifted uneasily from side to side as she looked up, and up, at the very tall woman beside her. "I must ask, just one thing of you, Captain Zanh. Are you certain, about the interment site,"

"Completely certain." Liis answered.

She had allowed Keiran's family to make all of the funeral arrangements completely in line with first his faith and then their own preference; but this was one thing upon which she would not budge.

"Very well then." Her station in life had taught her to read people with great clarity, and Mary Clare understood immediately that the woman's mind was fixed. "I just wanted to ask you once, in person. I mean no disrespect to ya, Captain, or to the place that you hold in my brother's heart as his trusted partner in work."

"Held."

It was in moments like this that Mary Clare felt the sorriest for those who did not have faith. She reached out, taking Zanh's icy fingers into her own.

"Hold, Zanh Liis. Love doesn't end with this life. It is perfected, along with all things, in Heaven." She blinked quickly as tears streamed once again down her lovely, freckled face. "He's watchin' over you still, yeah? You just can't see him now. Mind that."

Liis felt a burning pain in her chest where she believed that her heart had once existed.

-=Flashback: Four Days Earlier=-

"I don't understand what you're saying," Zanh insisted, "so you'd better tell me again."

"You fixed the error in progress, Zanh Liis. The mission was a complete success."

TEMA agents Tred and Fen stood in her Ready Room addressing her; Fen was the one speaking now.

"Fixed it?"

Liis picked up one of the two enormous pieces of rose quartz that served as bookends on the shelf opposite her desk.

She hefted it into the air once, twice, and the third time she caught it, she spun and smashed it into the elaborate stained glass artwork behind her desk, causing a staggaring, shattering sound.

"FIXED IT?"

She ignored the bits of glass that had imbedded themselves into her arms right through her uniform as the pane had exploded on impact. She picked up the sickeningly familiar envelope that sat on her desk top.

"Keiran is gone," she struggled for every word. "You tell me how it's fixed."

"If you hadn't corrected the errors in progress and stopped the Cascade, not only would Carrick have died, but the entire crew of the Perseids would have been lost. Somehow, what you did had an effect on everything else and in the end, Captain O'Sullivan died, yes. But instead of a meaningless death he died a hero, Zanh Liis. He saved seventeen members of his crew."

"That's not good enough," She cried, sinking down into the chair. "It's just not enough."

-=End Flashback=-

-=/\=-Zanh Liis
Commanding Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012