by Zanh Liis and William Lindsay
80107.0200
Eighteen-hundred hours: the same day as The Inquiry and Clocks
Soundtrack: The Oldest Story in the World by The Plimsouls
-=/\=-
-=Headquarters of Temporal Investigations: Location: Classified=-
80107.0200
Eighteen-hundred hours: the same day as The Inquiry and Clocks
Soundtrack: The Oldest Story in the World by The Plimsouls
-=/\=-
-=Headquarters of Temporal Investigations: Location: Classified=-
They'd been separated, by this point, for hours.
Kept in strict and agonizing isolation from each other as they individually endured a relentless firestorm of questions they hated answering before, wished they didn't have to answer now, and hoped to never have to try to answer again.
It all seemed just a bit too much to take, as their eyes finally met across the Grand Lobby.
Keiran looked as tired and worn as Liis felt, and one glance between them said everything that words could not. His eyes left her then, traveling up toward the high, domed ceiling, as Liis' peered down to the gleaming, ebon floor beneath her boots.
As badly as they needed to, they couldn't speak just now. Rather, she couldn't speak and they both knew it.
She felt the air was suddenly too thick to breathe, and instinctually turned and retreated into the emergency stairwell, beginning to climb.
She kept climbing.
Finally, with a short and audibly frustrated sigh, she used her good hand to push her way through the last door obstructing the path between her and outside air.
The moment she stepped onto the roof, she closed her eyes and inhaled sharply.
She felt an involuntary urge to cough as the sting of the wind reached her lungs. It howled and whipped at her, burning her face. When she took in her surroundings anew, her eyes watered as tiny wisps of snow, more like chips of ice that felt like splinters of glass were forcefully blown into them.
It was bloody freezing up here.
Winter was her least favorite of all of Earth's seasons, as of Bajor's.
She had fought all of her life, it seemed, just for the sensation of feeling warm enough.
It always seemed to just barely elude her; no matter how many layers of clothing she wore. No matter how many blankets she piled on top of her bed. She had at times in her life achieved a feeling of not being cold, but never quite the feeling of truly being warm enough to sleep, and dream, without struggling not to shiver.
She could count on the fingers of one hand the times she could remember feeling warm enough. Only recently had those times happened, and in only one location.
The house in Ireland seemed more than a world away now as she wrapped her good right arm up and over the sling covering her injured left and felt her jaw rattle, her teeth already beginning to chatter together.
Will Lindsay had followed her here, and called her name softly as he stepped from the doorway out into the early evening air. Snow immediately settled down onto his hair and shoulders. He shook his head to try to keep the moisture from taking hold and chilling him through.
Without turning, she spoke to him in a tone he'd never heard her use with him before.
"You son of a bitch."
Will blinked, drawing a step back, and then laughed incredulously. It didn't even take him a split second to judge from the sound of her voice that she was in no way being playful in her use of the term. She was serious, and seriously upset about something.
It wasn't the worst he'd been called in his life, to be sure. Still the words were, here and now, rather unexpected. "Nice way to start a friendly chat, that."
"Nothing friendly about this chat." She turned at last to face him, clearly seething. "I don't know what to make of you, Lindsay? Angel and savior? The spawn of evil itself? Who and what the hell are you really?" She threw her useable hand up into the air in frustration and took several steps away from him.
Will drew a breath to speak, but stopped before following through.
Where with any other woman he would have instantly resorted to pouring on the charm in an attempt to smooth over apparently ruffled feelings, in the case of this woman he had no doubt that if he tried, he'd find himself quickly thrown over the side of the roof.
Besides, in truth he was in no mood to be charming tonight. He was worried, he was uneasy, and he hated few things in life more than those two feelings.
"What the hell's'a matter with ya?" He demanded, running a hand back through his hair and allowing an uncharacteristic sigh to seep gradually from his lungs "I just saved yer XO from a very ugly and lengthy ordeal. If that thing had gone to court-martial, which it easily could'a done, just in case you choose to delude yourself-"
"Brody." Liis growled, her teeth rattling painfully despite her best attempts to keep them clenched tightly together. "I walked into that interrogation room and Tucker Brody was sitting there waiting for me." She marched back up to him and poked a finger against his chest emphatically. "Your doing."
"No!" Will exclaimed, shocked and truly disgusted at the thought. "I would never. Liis."
"What kind of games are you playing here? Are you testing me? Trying to see if I'll break? Has Lassiter managed to convince you that I should be driven out of my command by way of madness? Or is this about Keiran? Why did you do it?" She continued her breathless, rapid-fire barrage of questions at ever increasing volume, until Will finally had to raise his voice to be heard.
"Listen to me!" He shouted. It was something she'd never yet heard him do, and so it captured her attention. "Do you really believe I'm capable of doing such a thing to you?" He took hold of her by the good arm, firmly, and met her searing glare directly. "Don't you know me at all by now? I thought,"
"I thought I was beginning to know you. To see what it was in you that Keiran trusted so." She shook her head. "Then, you sabotaged my compass and lied to me about it, William. You lied to my face. So you tell me now why I should be so quick to believe that you didn't sic Brody on me? He came after me like a shark smelling blood in the water."
"I thought we were clear on the matter of the compasses." Will hated nothing more in life than thinking a matter was settled and then finding out later it was not.
"We were," Liis replied, "Until the moment I saw that man sitting in that room ready to deconstruct what little sense of sanity I've managed to piece together since all of this began."
She shivered mightily, her voice wavering despite her attempts to steady it.
"Tell me this, William. If you had nothing to do with it, then how did he end up here? I have told no one, except Keiran, and you, that Tucker Brody was the doctor assigned to my case in the alternate continuation of the timeline. There is no way that his showing up here, today, can be an accident."
"I don't know, but I'll find out, I promise you." Will vowed resolutely. "Had to be Lassiter's doing. If she called on him to treat you in that alternate, perhaps he's a favorite of hers to work with in matters like paradox situations. I don't know. But I give ya my word, Liis, I didn't set you up. I swear it."
She wanted to believe him. She thought that perhaps she did, deep down, she was only too rattled in the moment by the experience of her discussion with Brody and everything else she'd seen today that she couldn't allow herself to feel safe here, in this place, not with anyone.
"Yer going to catch yer death, woman." Will chided, almost as certain if they stayed out here much longer, he'd also catch his. "Back inside."
"No."
"If yer husband saw ya out here, no coat and still gettin' better from your injuries-"
"He knows exactly where I am." She said absently, twisting her earring chain and taking a step further toward the edge of the roof, looking out over the skyline.
The building which housed Temporal Investigations was nondescript by design, so as to hide in plain sight.
The rest of the scenery was not.
Elaborate skyscrapers in the main downtown hub sparkled in the distance, awash in city lights.
The days were shortest this time of year and the sun had already deserted the sky, retreating beyond the horizon line and leaving behind gradient hues of blue, lightest to darkest, before turning into crystal clear, cold black, sequined with stars.
"I always came up here," she whispered.
"When ya were wantin' to hide?"
"When I wanted to run."
“I see,” said Will, hugging his arms tightly around his chest against the cold as he sensed her anger lessening and finally dared approach her. “And what would you be runnin’ from now?”
“What else?” Liis replied, thinking it best not to turn to him so as to hide the thoughts which might shine through her face. “The usual.”
“The usual?” Will mused. “Now, my Bajoran’s a little rusty but as the memory goes that best translates as; you don’t wanna talk about it.”
“Your Bajoran is better than you think.” Liis grumbled. She was fighting a battle within herself. Could she still trust him as she had when they'd left Earth? Could she continue to do so, despite the episode with the compasses and despite the convenient arrival of Tucker Brody?
She forced herself to respond with a weak smile. There was too much to sort through in her mind before she could even hope to find the words, not that many people could pry those words from her anyway.
To her side she saw that Will was offering her his jacket but she used her free hand to wave it down, Will wasn’t too bothered by the cold yet, but there was no use in letting it get to both of them.
After fixing his jacket again on his back, Will looked out over the city. He softly commented, his words carrying more meaning than it may seem. “Tis a beautiful place, is it not?”
“Out there?” Liis indicated the city below with a tilt of her head “It is.”
Will could tell what she was really saying. “But in here, it’s not?”
“No, it’s not.” Liis said adamantly, her mind seeming to be on other things “We’ve both seen how ugly this place can be. I just got reacquainted with a whole world of ugly disguised as a friendly looking, slightly built blond guy.”
“Ashton Ledbetter?” Will hazarded a joke now, rubbing his hands together in a futile attempt to warm them up. The look in her eyes warned him against trying such frivolity again. He quickly changed tack. “I’ll bet it makes ya wonder why I’m intendin’ on stayin’ here.”
Liis turned toward him again, and from the expression on her face it was clear that she had been wondering about just that, even if not only that.
Will saw there was a lot going on behind her eyes. “I know this place is not you, Will,” she argued, quietly adding her concern. “I mean if you just took this post for the sake of those of us on the Sera…or for the love of the gods, Gem Lassiter,”
Will stopped her with a raised hand. “Nah, I want to this for myself as much as I do anyone else.” He insisted with a shake of his head. He wanted to tell her about Lassiter’s secret mission, to explain to her that he was hunting for corruption, but given where they were standing he had no way to know that no one was listening in. This was a low security area of one of the highest security buildings around, if one of their higher ups wasn’t listening in then someone on the other side almost certainly was. He’d have to wait to tell her. “I can’t go into too much detail. Suffice it to say, I intend to make some changes around here.”
“What you did at Salvek’s inquiry certainly spoke to that,” Liis observed, as a cold wind blew across the roof.
Somehow it seemed to finally cool the rest of her anger and the accompanying suspicion that had been rising in her, and she began to regain, she felt, control of her emotions.
"I didn't mean to seem ungrateful for what you did for him. Taking them on head first like that right out of the gate...speaks to the kind of man you are, William."
“That it does.” Will said with a shrouding smile but then he shrugged dismissively. “I had a chance to mess with Gem and to help cut through some bureaucracy. I couldn’t resist.”
Liis shook her head. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you do realize how much of a very bad idea it is to piss off an Admiral like that?”
Will smiled, almost proudly “Naturally. It's almost as dangerous as pissing off Zanh Lii-"
Before the words had left his lips, the building trembled violently beneath their feet.
Will had been staring down at the ground for an instant, intent on looking back up to dramatically flash his trademark grin at her. Now he found that calculated action was the only reason his eyes and face were spared from direct impact, as the windows of the adjacent building shattered, They began raining shards of glass down upon him, clattering like hail.
As he shook his head in an attempt to clear it, he also found that he was no longer standing. Instead he was lying, face down, on the surface of the roof.
He tried to raise his head to locate Liis, but had to duck with his hands protecting his skull several times as chunks of metal, stone, and other debris that had flown up into the air succumbed to the dictates of gravity and dropped downward to settle on and around him on the roof.
He called her name, but received no answer.
*She was standing so close to the edge,* Will thought frantically. *The whole time, I thought she was standing too close to the edge,*
"Zanh Liis!" He called again, crawling toward the precipice even as the building continued to reverberate with what he could only imagine were the aftershocks of some sort of explosive detonating deep within it.
He finally scrambled on hands and knees toward the edge and at last he saw her, or rather, just the top of her head as she dangled lifelessly like a rag doll over the side.
The sling on her arm had been snagged by something jutting out of the side of what had once been the building's smooth surface; and that was the only thing keeping her from falling to a certain death on the sidewalk eight stories below.
"LIIS!"
She groaned and only spoke one word; a name not belonging to him as Will tried valiantly to grasp at her. Keiran's name.
She was just beyond his reach, and he feared, even as he heard a secondary explosion and felt the building sway again a moment later, that she would not remain there long.
Worse, he could see that the synthetic fabric of her sling, while surprisingly strong, was starting to give under the strain of her weight.
He had only seconds to act.
He tried to hit his combadge but being that his new one was already tied into the Temporal Investigations comm grid which just been blown to hell, it did them no good.
"Liis, you've got to hit your badge," Will implored her, even as he weathered the eerie, continual swaying of the building beneath them- so foreign as one considers a building to be solid; something that should be permanently affixed to its foundation.
"Bloody hell. Looks like we're doin' this the hard way. Again." He quickly pulled the belt from his waist and secured it around the low railing at the edge of the roof, then wrapped it around his wrist and secured it in a tightening loop so that he could not fall should the building resume its sickening shudder.
Doing so, he was able to lower himself just enough to reach her combadge with the tip of the toe of his boot. He heard it chirp and shouted down toward it.
"Serendipity, this is William Lindsay. Medical emergency. Lock on to Zanh's badge and beam her directly to Sickbay!"
[What about you sir? We're not reading your signal-] Andrew Parrish asked in confusion.
"Just the Captain. There's been an incident on the surface," Will warned, his tone grim. "Hurry. Energize!"
Will watched as Liis dematerialized.
He had no way to know from his vantage point if she was badly injured by the blasts, but he knew one thing; there had to be people inside who had been.
As soon as she was gone, he pulled himself up and back onto the roof, and began to try to find a way to descend down into the chaos below him.
------------------------
-=/\=- Zanh Liis
Commanding Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
and
Captain William Lindsay
Interim Director
Temporal Investigations
-=/\=- Zanh Liis
Commanding Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
and
Captain William Lindsay
Interim Director
Temporal Investigations