by Keiran O'Sullivan and Commander Salvek
90110.17
Soundtrack: If I Could Be Where You Are by Enya
Following Damnation
-=USS Serendipity=-
90110.17
Soundtrack: If I Could Be Where You Are by Enya
Following Damnation
-=USS Serendipity=-
As he carried the broken and bleeding body of his wife in his arms, Keiran O’Sullivan spoke only one word.
He spoke that word transporter operator Andrew Parrish; the man who had only barely been able to get them back from the Romulan ship alive; and so had done so without time to specify a location to beam them to outside of the transporter room.
“Sickbay.” Keiran instructed. Parrish nodded.
An instant later, the entire team once again faded from view, rematerializing at the requested location.
“Help her,” Keiran demanded of the first medic he saw. Salvek, who had been steadying a weak and wavering Lindsay, set the man down on the nearest bed upon seeing another face across the room, one belonging to someone he could not wait another moment to see.
Salvek ran to her and said not a word as his arms enclosed her.
Kellyn’s uniform became stained with grime and dried blood from his tattered shirt and body, but she did not care. The very fact he could hold her, and her him, was all either of them cared about at the moment.
“Never again my love," Salvek promised. "Never again."
McKay saw Salvek first as he entered Sickbay, and grabbed a dermal regenerator. He cleared his throat to announce his presence, and to suggest to Kellyn she release his iron grip on Salvek so he could treat the man.
Salvek shook his head at McKay and took the regenerator with his hand. “The Captain.”
McKay looked around the room, finally locating Zanh Liis, limp in O'Sullivan's arms. Then the doctor was gone, hurrying to her side.
Kellyn led Salvek to an empty bed so he could sit. She retrieved a gown and a wet cloth for him, as Salvek removed his shredded shirt and ran the regenerator across his chest to heal the wound.
“I wanted to be there, Salvek, so much.”
“I understand.”
She did not know, truly, how much he understood.
Now that Arie was safe, he was haunted by his decision to leave Kellyn on Lethus- a decision she supported with all her heart. No matter what the justification, Salvek was unsure how he would ever feel completely convinced that he had made the right decision.
“If it had been anyone else, other than our daughter.” Salvek whispered.
Kellyn hands flew to his face, and her lips to his. Any self-doubt would have to wait for another day, for now all that mattered was they had survived, and they were together.
The warmth of her embrace fired life back into his heart, that had been so cold and somber since the moment their family had been torn apart. He wished nothing more than to simply take her to their quarters and show her how much sorrow had filled his heart at the thought of losing her, and how much passion filled it now that he knew she was safe.
*Soon enough.*
“Arie?”
“I asked her to wait outside until we knew if, if,” Kellyn could not complete the thought.
“If I would return alive.”
Salvek slipped into the gown Kellyn had provided him. With the immediate concern of the wound to his chest dealt with, at least temporarily, he was in acceptable enough shape for Arie to see him.
Kellyn tapped her badge, “Arie, someone wants very much to see you. You can come in.”
Before she even finished, the doors to Sickbay were open, and Lair Arie was a streak across the room to her father.
“We’re home Oso-mekh, we’re home.” She said. Arie hopped up on the bed, with one arm around her father, and the second beckoning to Lair Kellyn. “Group hug.” She requested.
“Thank you for not forgetting me,” She said with a sincerity that immediately brought her mother to tears.
“We are a family. That means one is left behind, or forgotten.” Salvek replied, his free hand reaching around Arie, and caressing Kellyn’s impossibly soft cheek as he spoke.
Dalton McKay had rushed over and taken Zanh Liis from Keiran without a word of greeting; launching instead into a litany of orders for his nurses and junior medical staff.
Keiran stood mute, watching as if in slow motion the events unfolding before him. Events over which he had maddeningly little control.
He hated feeling so helpless.
He folded his now unacceptably empty arms and brought them up around his opposite shoulders, as she would do, were she the one standing here in his place.
*Would to God that you were standin' here, in my place.*
The last time he had been here with her, in this room, he had struggled with the last of the strength he had to put himself between her and the entity that was attacking her.
No!" Keiran screamed again. "You don't understand, you have to let me do this. I know that I can help her!" A second later he had somehow gained possession of Salvek's phaser, and held it on the newly assembled group at the foot of Liis' bed.
Jariel and Vol were now standing there as well, staring blankly as the man refused to give up his hold on the Captain.
Quickly, Keiran hit the controls in the handle of the phaser with his thumb. "This is set to kill, I warn ya. Any man who tries to touch her, dies here."
Salvek raised his hands up slowly and backed away. He tapped his badge as O'Sullivan turned his attention back to the unconscious Zanh. "Security, emergency in Sickbay,"
"Liis," Keiran's voice faltered. The emotion with which he spoke merely her name was devastating to all who heard it.
"Her brain is dying, Keiran, she can't hear you. She dies along with it if you don't get the hell out of my way." Doctor Breaux insisted.
"Liis, listen to me, I know ya can hear me," Keiran murmured in her ear softly, going ahead with what he knew he had to do. "You have to stop fighting our memories. Don't try to hold on to them, don't try to understand them, and for God's sake, stop fightin' to keep them."
-=End Flashback=-
She had never given up the fight, though, and together, they had survived.
This time, there was no such being for him to fight that way. No living assailant he could try to protect her from. The damage to her body had already been done, and all he could do was pray that they’d gotten her back here in time.
He watched as Thomas and William were taken in hand by the swift and capable Sickbay staff as well. Immediately masks were placed over their faces; injections given to try to help their lungs function properly once again.
Keiran leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes, disappearing from the here and now deep into his mind, as memories of the life he’d seen living the paradox grasped hold of him, and quickly pulled him under.
-=Alternate Timeline, The day before the events in Stardust=-
He took up the axe and wound his hands tightly around it.
As his fingers fairly strangled the thin wooden handle, he wished to God that it were the throat of the person who had jammed that hypo into her, injecting the poison that had drained her life force away within seconds of entering her bloodstream.
It made him absolutely sick to think of that bitter substance coursing through her body.
The body that he had loved so passionately, and cherished so reverently.
From her graceful neck where the hypo had been applied, the lethal serum had traveled, on through her veins and finally pumping through her heart, which it then stopped; cold and still as stone.
The very heart that he had hoped so desperately to win back, in time.
*In time...*
He wanted revenge, but there was none to be taken. He wanted to make something, someone, suffer the way that his heart and soul were suffering, and would suffer, for the rest of his life.
He knew the depths of this pain, he had felt it before.
He knew the length of the sentence it brought with it, and was resigned already that for the rest of his days, he was a man who appeared as one walking around amongst the living but who was both already dead, and damned.
"Keiran, please, don't do this."
"Stay back,” he warned, and the woman to whom he spoke jolted. She had seen him hurt before, but never like this.
"But Keiran, your heart. Doctor says that you'd best not-"
He clutched the axe even tighter in his hands. "My heart is broken, Mary Clare. There’s nothin' more can be done to damage it now."
She bit her lip to try to hold herself together. "Might feel that way, yeah? But you can't,"
"GO!" Keiran shouted at his youngest sister, turning on her with genuine fury for the first time in their lives. She jumped, so startled by his voice and his expression that she backed away slowly, shaking her head. Softly, she began to pray.
She said nothing more directly to him as she left him where he was to go fetch help, if she could, to try to calm him down or, at the very least, to keep him from giving himself another heart attack. "Our Father," she began again, her voice breaking as she turned away and took off at a run, "Who art in Heaven..."
Keiran returned his attention to the task he'd set his mind and heart upon the moment that they had told him the news.
The news that his son Carrick was alive, but that the cost to bring him home had been greater than Keiran could ever have feared.
The woman he loved had died, saving his son.
How the hell was he supposed to live with that?
He cried out in anguish..
It was a fierce, heartbroken sound; something more than a wail, just less than a scream.
He swung his arms and shoulder back, and then forward with all the force of his strength. The axe chipped the wood of the tree trunk. Splinters showered everywhere as he drew the axe back again, prepared to repeat the process until the goddamned tree was felled.
With every swing and resounding crack of the violated bark he felt his rage decrease, and his sorrow increase in amounts that were both dizzying, and terrifying. He didn't know how he would survive if sadness usurped his ability to stay angry. He needed that anger, to burn and sting and gouge him, every day and night to remind him that he was, in fact, still alive.
If it didn't, if the quiet solitude of grief swallowed it up and reduced it to nothing, he didn't know how he would face the rest of this moment, let alone the hour, the day, the weeks, months, and years meant to follow.
"I did ever'a'thin' you asked of me!"
The axe connected with the tree again.
"Every damned time! I went back, and back, and I kept goin' until I got it right. You SWORE I got it RIGHT!"
He felt his chest constricting, and realized that he was forgetting, every time he assaulted the tree, to draw breath afterward.
"I was the one s'posed to die. Not her," he shuddered, "Not my Liis. Not again." He stopped moving, and bowed his head. "Never again."
He felt a searing pain in his chest and left arm, and suddenly gave a thought to the warnings of his physician and friend, Azalea Adams, about his heart condition.
His heart had been damaged during the initial Sylph encounter back on the Serendipity; and during the second he'd had with them while commanding the Perseids, they had nearly finished him off.
He was out of breath and so forced to rest a few moments before his task could be completed.
He analyzed the tree carefully now, and remembered the day when she'd asked him, as they lay beneath it listening to the sound of its flattened leaves whispering even in the breeze-less afternoon, what kind of tree it actually was.
-=A memory...=-
"'Tis called, in Irish, crann creathach, a chisle," he had told her. "Universal Standard translation would call it a Tremblin' Poplar, or Aspen tree. Then there's the Latin, if ya like..."
She laughed softly. Even though she’d been living here ever since they'd retired and gotten married over the summer, she never tired of the local twist on the pronunciation of words.
Words like her name, the way that he spoke it.
Words like…well, ‘like’. Somehow, it ended up with an ‘o’ in it and when he said it, came out ‘loik’. Every word spoken here had not only a definition, but a definitive personality. The written words had extra consonants and vowels that seemed to make no sense, because they were often omitted when the word was pronounced, anyway. She found it to be more complicated than just about any language she'd ever seen anywhere, on any world, in any time.
"Nah, I don't need the Latin, I'm good." Liis thought of the Latin name he'd chosen for their Jump ship, Sine Qua Non, and thought that was enough Latin to last her a lifetime.
"I thought Aspens grew in groups? Well, that's what I was taught, anyway." She shrugged, not needing to mention the name of the young Botany enthusiast who had told her that, a lifetime ago when she was still in school.
-=/\=-
Commander Keiran O’Sullivan
Security Liaison for The Alchemy Project
USS Serendipity, NCC 2012
and
Commander Salvek
Executive Officer
USS Serendipity NCC 2012
Commander Keiran O’Sullivan
Security Liaison for The Alchemy Project
USS Serendipity, NCC 2012
and
Commander Salvek
Executive Officer
USS Serendipity NCC 2012