by February Grace
91004.00
Hours after Welcome Home
-=The Grace/Reece Family Quarters, USS Serendipity=-
91004.00
Hours after Welcome Home
-=The Grace/Reece Family Quarters, USS Serendipity=-
Dabin didn't want to take his eyes off his newborn daughter, and so he wasn't really looking as he reached over the arm of the rocking chair toward the bookshelf to retrieve a storybook to read to her.
As he pulled the first one his hand encountered from the collection and surveyed it, he shuddered. "Arrgh. I hate this book. Creeps me right out."
"What?" February looked at the illustration on the cover of a girl with blonde hair in a blue dress with a pinafore, chasing a stressed out white rabbit with a pocket watch in his paws. "Clean cup, move down? The Mad Hatter? Don't step on the mome raths? It's a classic."
"It's sick and twisted, and not in a fun way." Dabin concluded.
"But it is a classic." Bru said, shrugging as she gestured with Sophie's pacifier to punctuate her statement. "I think being sick and twisted is a prerequisite for most children's books."
"Well I hate Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and I don't want to read it to our daughter." Dabin pouted.. "I don't know how that got in here. I ordered 'selected' children's stories in book form because of the illustrations but I specifically told them I didn't want this one."
"Well, here. Try this instead." Bru picked up a book and held it out to him. Sophie, feeling the motion of the air as her mother moved by, began sniffing it like a curious puppy. "The characters aren't scary at all. Well, except for the fact they may remind you a little too much of our command crew."
"Winnie-the-Pooh?" Dabin pondered the implication a moment. "Oh yeah. I can see that." Sophie began to fuss. "Yeah, I don't like that other book either, Sophie. This one is much, much better. Let's have a look." Dabin opened the book, but Sophie continued to cry.
"I think she's ready to sleep, do you want me to try putting her down in the crib?" Bru fought to stifle a yawn but was unable. "I don't know who needs the sleep more, her or me."
"You go on ahead. I'm..." Dabin held the baby over his shoulder, and placed a gentle kiss on top of her soft, downy hair. "I'm kinda enjoying this."
February smiled. "As you wish. But if you get too tired..."
"We'll be fine." Dabin assured her. "I've done this a couple times myself too, ya know."
"Yeah, yeah. You're an old pro." February left the room to go to the replicator for a glass of water, and when she returned, she discovered that both Dabin, and the baby had already fallen fast asleep.
She gently took Sophie from him and set her down in the crib beside the comfortable rocking chair where Dabin was, but she left him alone. He'd gone so long without sleeping, she didn't want to risk waking him and him not being able to fall asleep again.
She brushed his hair back from his forehead and gently kissed his spotted brow. "Goodnight, Father Goose." She whispered, and then she retreated into the bedroom to try to get a few hours of much needed sleep as well before she had to report for her first duty shift in the morning.
In the nursery, Dabin's mind descended into dreaming, and soon he would be wishing that he'd never fallen asleep at all.
-=/\=-
"Confess your sins to me! I and I alone can save you from your sad, sinner's ways!" The voice echoed in the mind of Dabin Reece. Somehow, as he surveyed the man speaking the words, the sound and the picture did not match.
Perhaps that was because the man repeating the words was not the one who had spoken them originally, so many years before Dabin had even been born.
The man speaking the words now was short, stocky, had dark hair and a remarkably square jaw line. The man who had originally spoken them was tall, blond, and with delicately sculpted features that charmed both men and women alike. He had moved with a natural elegance, and exuded a charisma that made him seem truly incapable of wrong.
The man embodying him moved like a bull in a china shop but was truly incapable of wrong.
Anyone would think that given the discrepancies in their physical descriptions that one would obviously be the good man and the other the man you never turned your back on.
Appearances so often deceived.
As had this man, this past host, and Dabin knew it.
He knew it, and Reece knew it, and in this moment Dabin couldn't decide which one of them hated the man more for it.
"You must repent! Then and only then can you find you way to Wonderland. It's a magical, timeless place where all of your dreams will become reality. But only if you humbly submit that you must acknowledge the error in your ways and follow the path of the brightest of all possible lights!" The man's eyes suddenly narrowed and took on shadows that spoke more of his true nature than anything else could. "Me."
"I don't want to talk to him." Dabin said, turning toward the Trill Guardian here present and presiding over his Zhian'tara ritual. "He freaks me out. Can't we send him back wherever he came from?" He made a nervous, shooing motion with both hands.
"He is a part of you now, Dabin Reece." said Tregill, the Guardian. "He has been a part of Reece for a very long time. A dangerous part that you cannot simply deny exists, or it will mean ruin for you and for your symbiont."
"But. But. But." Dabin protested, kicking the toe of his boot against the floor, "Can't I just, like, skip over him now and come back to him later?"
"You won't want to come back to him later." Tregill replied evenly, knowing more about Dabin than the young Trill realized. "You don't have to interact with him long. Just long enough to really get a sense of who he is, then we can move on."
"I already have a sense of who he is." Dabin grumbled. "He's nothing better than a snake-oil salesman. Can't we go on to Aramos now? He sounds like much more fun."
"Now now," said the man embodying former Reece host Ladron. "I know from former Zhian'taras that Aramos was the greatest Reece sinner of all. If you think that he's interesting then you surely must need to repent as well...what was it you said your name was?" Dabin looked into the face of his friend Lukas Fenstermacher, who had agreed to take on the role of Dabin's least favorite past host as a special favor.
Dabin had introduced his friend to the woman who was soon to become his wife; and Lukas figured that any guy who could not only fix him up with the prettiest girl on campus at Starfleet Academy but also help convince her to agree to take on the surname Fenstermacher was worth a special trip to Trill in order to participate in his once-in-a-lifetime Rite of Closure.
"I have something to say..." Lukas said, asserting his personality beyond that of the man whom he was representing; a daunting task as it seemed that the last thing Ladron Reece ever wanted to do was shut up.
"Nobody's listening to you." Dabin snapped, not realizing that it was his friend who was attempting to speak. The Guardian, however did.
"Are you all right, Ensign Fens...Fenster..." He struggled with the name, and both Lukas and Dabin chimed in unison with the correct pronunciation.
"Fenstermacher!"
"Yes, of course." Tregill replied, inclining his head humbly in apology. "Dabin, your friend wishes to speak to you."
"Oh, sorry Luke. I didn't realize."
"Look, Dabin, I know that you don't want to do this." Lukas said, and his heavy German accent seemed suddenly to suit him again as he chose his own words; the accent definitely did not suit Ladron. "But the sooner we finish with the talking and the learning and the things of this nature, we can both go out and I can buy you a beer."
"I'd rather have chocolate cake."
"Fine. I will get you the cake with the frosting and the sprinkles and the whipped cream and that. But you have to, what is that phrase you always say." Lukas flashed bright eyes at Dabin. "Suck it up."
"Sucking." Dabin replied, saluting his friend with a snap of his hand and a sigh. "All right, Ladron. Let's get this over with."
Suddenly, Dabin's dream switched from purely that of his Zhian'tara to a much more confusing scene.
A scene in which his friends were not embodying his past hosts any longer, but in which he was actually in a small, dimly lit room with the people who had actually hosted Reece.
Every single one of them.
"You are not paying attention to me!" A minuscule, yet surprisingly intimidating woman with the sharply bobbed hair, a tiny nose and gigantic black spectacles rolled up the pile of papers she'd been carrying and summarily smacked Dabin over the head with them.
"You are a Trill Initiate! This is not the first day of training! My gods pull yourself together!"
Dabin winced with every blow and finally backed up with his hands in the air. He blinked, confused. Usually Leacynth was such a fun host to remember, but this was definitely not fun.
"I'm telling you, this guy is bad news. Women like him far too much and that's a bad sign. I ought to know." Aramos Reece remarked, stroking his perfectly manicured fingernails across his shirt to buff them before stroking his also perfectly groomed goatee with his fingertips.
"Look out for this one, Dabin," a young, female voice warned. Tulila's hands were shaking as she leaned forward and whispered in Dabin's ear.
Her eyes shifted toward Ladron, who was over in the corner in quiet conversation with the rest of Reece's past hosts. "If you think Deveral Grace had issues...you haven't seen anything yet. You haven't seen anything like Ladron Reece."
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Lt. February Grace
(Rattling Reece's Cage)
Senior Flight Controller
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
Lt. February Grace
(Rattling Reece's Cage)
Senior Flight Controller
USS Serendipity NCC-2012