by Michael Blakeney and Gem Lassiter
90916.22
Concurrent with Purgatory
-=Executive Officer’s Quarters: USS Zenith=-
90916.22
Concurrent with Purgatory
-=Executive Officer’s Quarters: USS Zenith=-
Admiral Lassiter paced the quarters of her son in even, orderly, and measured steps.
She didn’t gather up his things now, and had immediately noticed that Gira hadn’t either.
That would be done for them; a task completed by people for whom it was much easier to do.
People to whom Nicholas Lassiter was only another name on another roster; not someone that they had so dearly loved.
His belongings would then be wrapped, safely nestled into cushioned packing material and placed into neat and tidy containers. They would be transported as she had specified, by shuttle and not teleporter, to a storage unit until she was ready to face them.
She wondered if she’d ever be ready to face them.
She heard a disturbing, unexpected yet strangely familiar noise suddenly and spun around.
Someone was here, in this room, or she should say, in the next one.
Specifically someone was in the bathroom, and it sounded as if they were ill.
Violently ill.
She waited for the trespasser to emerge, arms folded with irritation, not fear. The wrath in her grew exponentially by the second as she wondered who would dare intrude here; taking the liberty of entering without permission this place she considered something so sacred.
It was, after all, the last place he had lived.
The young woman who emerged from the bathroom was crying, and inelegantly wiping at her eyes, nose and then finally the corner of her mouth with the cuff of her sleeve.
She moved toward the replicator and asked for a glass of water. Apparently she still thought she was here alone, not having heard the door as Gem had entered.
“Are you lost, Ensign? These quarters do not belong to you.”
The girl shrieked, startled, and spilled the glass of water, sloshing it across the front of her tunic and the toes of her boots. Without looking, she reached back and behind her, banging the glass against the wall several times before finding the proper slot in the replicator to put it back into.
“Admiral,” she stammered, gulping deeply to try to keep from gagging as she attempted to speak over a deep and threatening recurrence of nausea. “Please, let me explain…”
“Explain what? That you were one of his conquests and you’ve come here hoping for a souvenir? I know my son well enough, Ensign. You don’t have to tell me your name to tell me what you are.”
Natalie Grey found it interesting that Lassiter said “know’ and not ‘knew’, still thinking of Nick in the present tense. She only wished that she were still able to do the same thing.
“If you’d just let me explain to you who I am,” she tried again, but Gem didn’t want to hear it.
“I don’t care who you are.” She answered coldly. “I don’t recognize you though, you must be one of Lindsay’s new hires to the Project. I didn’t know Nicholas had any…experience…with any women from the Serendipity’s crew.”
“I’m not from the Serendipity’s crew.” Grey blurted, regretting the correction the second she’d spoken it.
It took a moment, but Lassiter’s eyes suddenly seemed to glow with loathing.
“You.” Gem couldn’t disguise her bitter, hateful rage that this girl, Natalie Grey, had lived while Nicholas had died.
She’d read Grey’s report, about how he’d been a hero, saving her life.
Lassiter translated it in her own way though, and the shadows and torment in her mind twisted Grey’s words; interpreting them to mean that this woman had committed the mortal sin for any Starfleet officer.
She’d taken the easy way out and left one of her own to die in her place.
“Get the hell out of here. And you’d better not be planning to try to take anything of his with you!” Gem spat. “He gave you his time and attention, that is what you can…” she stopped before saying ‘remember him by’ and changed the words mid-thought to “…take with you.”
The usually bright and kind eyes of Ensign Natalie Grey narrowed and filled with sorrow too deep to allow any of the anger she also felt to bleed through.
She couldn’t understand how this could possibly be the same woman that Nick had spoken of as the mother he adored, and was so adored by.
I’m taking so much more of him with me than you will ever know, Natalie thought, as she turned on her heel and swiftly walked to the door.
“Don’t worry. Sir.” She stressed Lassiter’s title for emphasis. “All that Nick left here is yours.” She shook her head, pausing in the doorway before turning away. “And that’s all you have left.”
After the girl had gone, Gem felt anger beyond any she’d ever known swelling in her, taking from her what little was left of her control.
The emotion rushed up with furious power and pulled her down, slamming her into something that felt as low and hard as the ocean floor when a riptide’s claws sink into you; dragging you up and then throwing you down until you can go no farther. The violence of such a deadly sea was capable of turning the softest, shifting grains of sand into seemingly solid matter; making them feel like the thickest, most unyielding wall made of bricks and mortar upon impact.
Her emotions pushed her far beyond the point she could contain them.
She bent down and with a surge of sudden strength, she screamed as she flipped over the coffee table.
She upended every chair, threw every decoration and pillow and article of clothing her hands encountered, until the room looked nothing like it had when she had entered it.
She felt a zapping sensation in her chest as the internal defibrillator recently installed there charged and expended a burst of electricity, attempting to modulate the irregular, thumping beats of her broken heart.
The sensation made her stop, just for an instant.
Just long enough for her eyes to drift down to the floor.
She caught sight of something, a few feet away, and gasped.
She stepped toward it and then dropped to her knees though the motion was incredibly painful. Her head spinning, she held the item in fast her hands.
It was a small, black, leather-bound book.
The silver lettering on the cover was bowed, as was the cover itself, unnaturally bent from its original shape by the weight of the chair under which Nicholas had apparently placed it to steady an uneven leg instead of bothering to have the chair itself fixed.
Looking at the side of it, though, she could immediately tell that he’d never once bothered to crack the binding to read it.
“Nicholas, this was a gift.” She whispered to the empty room. “From your mother.” She stressed the last word disapprovingly, as if he should have especially treasured it as such.
Nicholas had never realized that she’d given him this particular book for a reason.
It was not just meant to be light reading from an era of literature long gone out of style, hundreds of years since.
It was supposed to tell him something about the vital, vibrant, and unique personality of the man who had been his biological father, only she never got up the courage to tell him so.
Thinking of that man once again, Gem clasped the book in her trembling hands and closed her eyes. Her mind returned her to another time and place, to events that had been explained to her shortly after they’d taken place by the man who had experienced them.
-=Flashback, 2357, Current Timeline: Aboard a small ship in orbit of Earth=-
Michael held the transponder in his hand, examining it, rolling it around between his fingers. For a few seconds he stared at it, watching for something, but he didn’t know what.
"Damn!" He growled, angrily flinging the infuriating thing across the room.
It would have been irritating to have damaged it beyond repair but there was something so much more frustrating in watching it gently impacting upon the towering pile of pillows on the bed and then rolling down onto the mattress, unharmed by the trip.
He ran his hands through his hair with a furious pull, not even caring for the moment that it was not immediately falling back into place. He turned quickly about, trying to remember what he was supposed to be doing.
"Damn it, woman, what have you done?"
With frustration he abruptly stopped walking and flopped himself down for a moment into a large chair in the corner. His head was pounding, his thoughts were racing, and this was not how things were supposed to be going at all.
This assignment was supposed to be just like all the others: get in, catch the bad guys, get out and then have a little fun as a reward to himself for a job well done. Those were all the things he was best at.
But the job wasn't done, and the reward he'd hoped for was not turning out to be the diversion that he'd wanted at all.
This one couldn't be like all the others. No, this woman had to make her presence known in a way that precluded at this late date any chance of a meaningless encounter for fun alone. So many had tried and failed and eventually given up when the blatant knowledge of who he was overrode any initial expectations they’d had for something more. Who the hell was she and who the hell was he if it wouldn’t work this time?
He hated this.
He was now doing something that he did very rarely, because he loathed to do it so much that it made him feel like he was going to jump out of his own skin. Every moment of fun dampened down to one of soggy distraction at best.
He worried.
About her.
If only she'd been willing to go along, to cooperate. If only she hadn't been so close to figuring him out, he could've kept her here. Kept her within arms reach and the firing range of his phaser to be sure that those who'd murdered the imposter posing as Braylan didn't succeed in killing Gem too.
Until now this type of situation had always been so simple, so easy. Women knew he was trouble, even the most trusting of them had the sense to realize he was dangerous. They loved it about him and they knew they risked a broken heart and anything else when they chose to be part of his life.
They knew of the risk and they chose to take it on. If anything happened to them he could walk away comfortable in the knowledge of that one simple fact. Yet, now he cursed himself that it was different.
He actually cared about her making it out of this alive, and that made him absolutely livid with himself. Disgusted was probably the more appropriate word.
He was not happy; he was not having a good time. All of this unpleasantness needed to end, as quickly as he could end it.
"I've got to get the hell outta of this timeline." He muttered, jumping back up out of his seat and returning to the comm panel.
He pulled from his pocket the communications and storage device that Gem had uploaded the phony Braylan's computer data onto during their confrontation with the alien assailant. He paced about a moment, thinking, internally debating, and then abruptly released the door, moving out of the bedroom and into the main cabin.
He interfaced the device with the ship's main computer and involuntary winced as he did so. If he ever did see her again, which he highly doubted he would, she was surely going to kill him if the alien forces at work here didn't. He could only begin to imagine how angry she'd be when she figured out that he'd taken this.
Michael dropped down into the chair as the computer began to decipher the data within. Countless rows of useless, meaningless information overtook and scrolled through his screen. In an instant he felt furiously bored and he sat pouting like a child forced to be inside doing their homework on a beautiful sunny day, not that it felt like it was sunny anywhere at the moment.
"I need a drink." he murmured, wishing he could allow himself the luxury.
It wasn’t like his being sober was of any real benefit at this point. There were many people who were experts in analyzing data back home, some of whom at another time would have tagged along. They were the type who saw something of an appeal in a process like this. They where people who preferred to break everything down into facts and to consider them in that sterile form. People like Gem, but none of them quite the same.
Right now that type of person would be tinkering and fiddling with the output in that way they’d insist was nothing but following a process but which he’d be damned if he could be taught. For him, it was simply a matter that he’d take as long as he had to wait for the computer to complete its task of translating however the hell the imposter had stored the data into a format that he could use.
The numbers on the screen began to finally line up in their respective rows and then came the beeps. Every row that was completed the machine felt the need to announce that it was locked in. They could have chosen a thousand different and more appealing sounds, but then this was never intended for people like him.
After what felt like an eternity a single extended beep signaled that it was done and a list of contained files began to fill down his screen.
In typical fashion most of them he quickly recognized were just spreadsheets and data sets, none of them of any interest to him, but to his surprise and his gratitude there was a single video file among them.
Michael had to read the title twice. He refused to get his hopes up too high, with his luck recently there every chance this file wouldn’t live up to its name.
“Computer, open My Confession.”
---------------
Lt. Commander Michael Blakeney
Temporal Investigations
and
//// Gemini Lassiter
Director, The Alchemy Project
(and former TI Agent)
Lt. Commander Michael Blakeney
Temporal Investigations
and
//// Gemini Lassiter
Director, The Alchemy Project
(and former TI Agent)