by Wren Elton
90819.12
Concurrent With and After That Which is Lost
-=Sickbay; USS Serendipity=-
90819.12
Concurrent With and After That Which is Lost
-=Sickbay; USS Serendipity=-
The overwhelming sense of dread in Wren Elton's heart was quickly and forcefully subdued by the violent, vehement strength of the denial that besieged it.
That denial fought valiantly against all threats to its sovereignty and momentarily triumphed as she watched Rada's eyes flicker and catch alight. They did so with knowing recognition as his mind sparked with memories revived by the sight of Lair Kellyn.
Yet rapidly Wren was stung with the end of this sickeningly finite victory, for in seemingly the same instant of time that it had gained supremacy over all other emotions, it also crumbled to dust in her hands and slipped through her fingers to become nothing as it hit the ground.
He knew her, that much she could tell from the mildly pleasant expression he wore like a mask as he glanced beyond the Bajoran and over toward her and Tam. Yet with the quiet man, sensing his emotions had become an art of observation like listening for a faint song which told her just how he felt about her and everything else at any one moment. The music hadn’t been silenced, but the lyrics were now without meaning.
The horror struck her of what made this so much worse than she’d first thought as she realised that it wasn’t even a burden she could shoulder alone. Tam was only part Betazoid but could sense as well immediately that something was seriously wrong with the scene unfolding here; not just in Rada but in her. She wished that she were better at shielding him from the force of her own emotions and her complicated and sensitive mind, but there was only so much that even a mother could do to protect her child from the truth of who she really is.
With that knowledge of true self comes an awareness early on in children, of the things that frighten their mothers most. He knew her fears better than almost anyone, better than anyone now. He’d always tried to protect her from them, because for so long, he'd been the only man in her life. They'd always had each other, even when there was no one else they could trust.
Then suddenly, they’d had Rada too, and it had been a relief and a joy for Tam because for the first time in his life someone was looking out for him and his mother. Several someones, in fact, aboard the ship that he had finally come to feel was a real home. But no one more than the someone who made his mother happy as no one else he'd ever seen.
Now, after a long and confusing journey trying to get back home and the fear he'd felt at knowing that his mother was not just slipping away but being violently ripped away from he and Rada both, Tam could hear nothing more than the frantic thumping of his heart and the screech of fear as it tore through his thoughts. It was his mother’s fear echoing within him and he was fully aware of just what she was so terrified of.
*I am Vulcan.* He replayed the words again and again in his mind; the phrase that Arie had told him that she clung to when she was really afraid and her Bajoran side seemed too much to cope with. *There is no fear. There is no pain.*
It seemed almost useless as he watched his family on the brink of what seemed certain and sudden destruction, there was in reality he knew more pain than a boy his age could begin to try to handle.
“Kellyn, please take Tam out of here and allow me a moment alone with Rada.” Wren asked in a pained tone, and without a word, the concerned Bajoran nodded once.
As only a mother can, Kellyn authoritatively grasped Tam's hand in a manner causing him to simply follow her silent command without protest or question. He allowed himself to be led from the room, even as his large round eyes continued to stare at his mother until the last possible moment.
With Tam gone now it actually seemed all to get worse as she could suddenly allow herself to think just of the personal consequences. She couldn’t turn away from his smile, noting that while the corners of his lips turned upward, the joy that she would expect to see in his eyes as well was missing. This lack of harmony between his features changed the meaning of the smile entirely. It was an expression which was as handsome it was endlessly kind, but that clearly revealed that he still was weakened by his ordeal. He was too damn weak to be holding anything back and any residual hopes for them had been dashed in an instant.
She hesitated now to reach out to him, though touching him was the instinctive thing to do. She felt that maybe, if he just felt the warmth of her skin against his that some disconnected pathway between his mind, heart, and memory would be re-established. Perhaps then the devastatingly polite gaze he'd settled upon her would melt into the look of passionate desire and affection that she was so used to seeing in him when they were alone together; when they were truly together.
It wasn’t the just the comparatively crude warmth of a touch that she missed, it was the exhilarating heat of the fire in his eyes that would say so much just for her that was suddenly so clearly gone.
She realised she'd been so far away, for so long it seemed, yet still at points even as sick as she'd been there were blissful seconds when she could feel their minds reaching out and finding at least a fragment of what they had come to be.
She could stand wondering no longer and grasped hold of his hand. Hers was shaken with tremors that he became acutely aware of the moment their fingers made contact, and he looked truly bewildered by both her aspect and her actions.
Words of sorrow that she could no longer contain spilled from her lips, tumbling out one over another. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
“Of course, I do.” He protested. So worried was he about what he might have lost to the span of time he couldn't remember, Rada reacted defensively to the assertion that it had taken from him a single thing more than it actually had. He objected more strongly than he'd meant to, and suddenly she withdrew her hand as if she'd touched something either too hot or cold for her skin to bear without experiencing pain,
He tried to lighten his tone as he clarified just what he knew of her, hoping he'd not offended her too badly. “I’m not much with names but I remember you work in the café. We’ve met a couple of times.”
In that instant a dagger of ice seemed to have been thrust into her very soul and with each passing second of his silent confusion, his kind yet loveless glare, it seemed to be getting twisted slowly around and was brutally tearing her apart in the process.
"We've met?" she asked in disbelief as she felt his entire being slip even further away from hers.
She couldn't even consider it, utterly unwilling to accept that it was possible. It could not be true that she could survive all she'd been through just to see the only life she wanted, the one she'd fought so hard to get back to, lying lifelessly now as if murdered in cold blood at her feet.
"Yes." Rada said with ever increasing nervousness, his eyes becoming wearily wider as he shifted slightly beneath the covers.
It hurt so much to watch but much, much more to feel what she knew was just illusion. He could tell she was Betazoid, a telepath, and just as he had on the very first day they’d met he now cloaked his emotions with a barrage of tiny lies. She knew a thousand little signs which told her he was frightened, but his fear was shielded from her, his pain tucked neatly away. She was supposed to make him feel safe. She was the one supposed to take away his pain.
Yet here they were, telling nothing but the usual polite deceptions, once more strangers as they should never have been again. Obscured from one another by barriers that only the deepest of shared knowledge could tear away. He knew her no more and for every change that she’d watched in him while they were together she wasn’t sure she really knew him either. Who they were together was one, but who they were apart was a mystery she had no desire to think about.
She realised she was staring at him but she couldn’t look away as she contemplated the reality she felt she was now trapped in. The silence dragged itself viciously onward before being transformed into something so much worse as he tried kindly to show her he remembered.
"You make lovely Cappuccinos. You never forget that I like two sugars instead of one." He informed her in a tone like he was listing everything he knew of her in this world.
He was trying so hard to be helpful with that unsubstantial grin painfully forced upon his face. He was everything of who she’d fallen in love with and nothing of the differences in the man he became. It was just too much for Wren to stand.
In an instant she seemed to fall back from the moment and into a mind full of happier times. Her thoughts flashed with memories of a thousand things that she knew about him, which she could only beg the gods were still there, that no one else did, or ever could.
She saw so many rare and special facets that made Rada Dengar a man unlike any other she'd ever known. His unassuming brilliance of mind. His gentle, soft-spoken nature and keen wit shared almost solely with her were only the first of a list too long to itemise that came instantly to her thoughts.
She stumbled back slowly toward the exit, not wanting to risk sending him back into any state of agitation by upsetting him. He'd come too far to risk that now. No matter how much she wished that he remembered her in the ways she remembered him, she loved him too much to risk his sanity for the sake of her heartache. She knew then she had to get out of there, it was a moral absolute she simply couldn’t trust herself to uphold much longer.
As halting, unsteady steps drew her away from him one at a time, her mind turned spitefully against her. It twisted the heart in her chest with intense, and intensely focused visions of other things that only she knew of and with him.
The position he most often settled into when deeply asleep and dreaming. The sound of his breathing between sentences as he whispered soft, warm words of affection into her ear. The way that he looked at her just before he leant in to kiss her. The appearance of the world as it seemed to change as she felt his hand moving slowly along her body while he held her close.
She almost shivered in fear with these thoughts, knowing that her memories of him were not about to stop there. She tried to free herself from them as she quickly realised just how much they could hurt her now. If she let them take over her need to suppress them, a need only slightly greater than the need to remember them in every fine, intricate detail she would be as lost to the world as Rada now seemed to be.
"You should...get some rest." Wren blurted out her excuse to leave as she forced a strained and uncertain smile onto her face to match his, praying that deep down he still knew how false it was.
"I am quite tired." He admitted, as he slowly sank again into a position lying down and not sitting, still being careful not to be too comfortable that he couldn’t jump out of bed away from the near stranger if need be. For all his clear tension, involuntarily he still sighed as waves of soreness coursed through his aching muscles.
Wren felt her heart disintegrating as she couldn't help but compare the sound of that sigh with others she'd heard him exhale, shuddering slowly in pleasure rather than pain. Those memories were the strongest of all, the ones of times when he could never hold back.
"It was very good of you to visit." Rada said, politeness again covering his confusion, as he raised his hand to his mouth and tried to conceal a yawn while his eyelids felt too heavy to hold open any longer. "I'm sorry that I wasn't better company."
"Sleep well." Wren choked out softly, as she turned away before he caught sight of the tears pooling in her eyes. She could try to hide from him but her senses, her betraying unyielding Betazoid senses, could never let her look completely away.
As she disappeared beyond the curtain, she knew Rada barely had time to consider her strange reaction before she felt sleep overtake him again. He calmed so quickly now, his heart no longer beating for her.
Part of her fell out of consciousness along with him and she was able to keep herself at least from breaking down right then and there. In that moment she felt so very lonely and her hand continued slightly to shake. She realised there was no one left in the universe who truly understood her and it was suddenly a much emptier place. She’d lost him before and she’d survived, but this was the first time that she couldn’t just tell herself that he was out there somewhere with his soul still partly merged with hers.
As she looked out into the world away from him it felt like she was staring into the vast emptiness of space even though she was trapped here in her solitude with a wall in every direction. Her eyes found Lair Kellyn across from her, dutifully watching over her son. She’d been wise enough, a mother herself, to know that she couldn’t simply move the child away now.
He was very nearly stoic and unmoving as she felt him tapping into every Vulcan capacity he had. Wren had tried to deny him that part, but he’d used lessons from various sources, even some from Rada, and he had enough to maintain a little control. For the first time she realised she was actually glad for his Vulcan half. It was a half he would never have had if he’d been Rada’s son in biology rather than just in spirit, a spirit she feared was now getting crushed.
A lump formed in Wren’s throat as she knew it wouldn’t be long before he started asking her to help him comprehend. How the hell was she going to explain to a child something she couldn’t even understand herself? She knew the bare minimum about his procedure, just enough so she could be prepared for the potential consequences, but never enough to make sense of something like this.
Though both women knew her eyes and the change in her posture to be that of someone being utterly crushed beneath the weight of intolerable sadness told Kellyn all that she needed to know and more than she wanted to, the Bajoran still had to ask a single question.
"What happened?" Kellyn asked softly as if she felt it’d be easier for Wren to hear the words spoken like that.
"He said," Wren began numbly, leaning closer to Kellyn to whisper in her ear as Tam stared back into sickbay through the waiting room window barely noticing she was there, "that I make lovely coffee."
It was confirmation of something she’d already known yet for just an instant as she heard Wren’s words Kellyn felt a flicker of the true extent of the Betazoid’s pain in her own heart. In that moment Kellyn knew nothing could be said and feared nothing could be done as she watched Wren fall back behind Tam, her one non-shaking hand supportively resting on his shoulder, as she joined him in his longing glaring towards the stranger behind the curtain.
They couldn’t stay here too long. Wren knew for certain it wouldn’t be good for either of them if they did. Yet she allowed herself just a few moments more as she wondered, as she suffered, every fibre of her being asking the same question.
Her eyes hollowly locked on a distance that wasn’t there, her smile abandoned when she’d no longer want it to be found, the painfully melancholy woman could have easily been without thought at all at this time. Yet on the inside it was chaos as a few of the same words repeated constantly, shouting for answers they couldn’t find. Just what was she supposed to do now?
Wren Elton
Manager, Afterthought Café
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
Manager, Afterthought Café
USS Serendipity NCC-2012