By Rada Dengar and Zanh Liis
100210.20
After Music to My Ears
-=/\=-
How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering. ~Charles Baudelaire
-=/\=-
100210.20
After Music to My Ears
-=/\=-
How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering. ~Charles Baudelaire
-=/\=-
The weight of Rada’s chin pressed heavily on the palm of his hand, where he rested it as he started out of the viewscreen of the shuttlecraft Destiny into the unyieldingly darkened emptiness of space. He looked the very physical incarnation of melancholy, utterly frozen as this was an image constant throughout time.
For many long centuries men had sat just like this as they contemplated their problems and their failures while the cold from the glass in a nearby window radiated out onto their face. It was not the type of sadness where a man had tears in his eyes. It was however a tired sort of misery where the entire body felt just that little bit too much to carry alone or for anyone else to want to help.
Throughout history this state had been routinely entered by a man alone in transit as he watched himself passing by the outside world, dragging ever further from a place he’d once found happiness and ever closer to a place he for some reason foresaw only sadness would be found. However men rarely reflected over history at this time except that was those parts of history they claimed as their own.
Right now Rada Dengar was most concerned with the history that had brought him here, not that at this time he would think to learn from the mistakes he’d made when he’d still had the chance. The thoughts were simply there, like those of other shuttle journey’s spent not alone as he was here.
He thought back over when he’d first been assigned to the Independence. It wasn’t at all long ago but somehow he was still so much younger than. He was yet to kill and murder was an experience that caused some to freeze or to regress but aged heavily those men who truly understood it. He’d been traveling from Trill for his first look at the ship, to first meet so many people he’d come to call his friends and all of whom he’d likely never see again.
The name of the shuttle had now slipped from his mind. Gan…Gany… he tried but no, it was gone. He did however remember the journey and how it was so different from here. Control of the shuttle was almost completely lost and in the shower of sparks and flame he’d been forced to act fast to save them all; he had a purpose to fulfill. Even when his life was safe though it felt like such a different existence as he nervously tried to know how to speak to all the others but especially to the young nurse there. He’d felt so many emotions then.
He’d even had to take one of the toffees from his pocket to calm his nerves. It was a curious habit he’d always had, the origins of which he could not completely recall. Maybe they took him back to a simpler time when a kind old person had comforted him as an innocent child with their sweet taste. Maybe it was that in the company of screaming men no one expected him to speak with a toffee in his mouth and so the taste gave him the freedom to relax for just a moment. Maybe it didn’t really matter now; he had no good reason to do it.
It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy the taste and so the occasionally eat the toffees even when there was no danger to be found. However right now even though they sat in his pocket staying uneaten and growing old he didn’t feel like that or any other form of enjoyment. It just wouldn’t feel right for a man like him to take such a simple and innocent pleasure. Nothing felt right in the way he knew he should since he’d lost his memories and he could at least take some meaningless comfort in that fact. Life had felt right at many times before and so this must have been the first time; he’d only been responsible for a single massacre in his life.
Eventually his mind moved on from shuttles; he’d not taken many shuttle trips in his lifetime anyway. So many people even still stepped onto transporter pads fearing for their lives but Rada trusted them more than any other slower form of travel. With a transporter you avoided all obstacles and practically nothing it seemed could go wrong. Never once had they hurt him but he knew that in the past transporters had saved his life many times. They’d done it more times than he could currently even remember.
Now his mind moved on to that most immediate of events that had brought him here. He’d had that final conversation with the woman who was even still technically his Captain and thanks to it now his life in Starfleet was over.
He knew though there was nothing different he could have said or done.
-=Flashback: USS Alchemy=-
[Zanh to Dengar.] Liis uneasy voice had rang through his combadge.
“Dengar here, Captain.” He’d answered her with all the calm that he could fake, completely unsurprised but still unprepared for what she would say to him.
[I need to speak with you immediately. Please report to my quarters at your earliest convenience.] She instructed him with something strange in her tone before finishing without allowing him even the briefest moment to argue. [Zanh out.]
Fully Rada now expected to be relieved from duty within the next several minutes. He was, he was sure she knew, a danger to this ship any day let alone one where he still held his rank and position. Accepting though that he’d simply have to decide whether it was worth it to fight back when the time came Rada released a deep foreboding sigh before he set off in the direction of the Captain’s quarters.
It wasn’t long at all before he reached them as the Alchemy was indeed a small ship and soon he was standing outside her door, asking himself if he was really ready face the inevitable consequences if he were to press the chime. He could only delay them so long anyway though and knowing that he just felt himself growing weaker he soon found his hand had reached up and asked that he be allowed to take the first steps on the journey to his own potential Hell.
-=/\=-
On the opposite side of the door, Zanh Liis reached up and brushed the backs of her hands against her face.
The first slow, stinging tears had been followed by ones much more painful and harder to stop; tears of anguish, tears of frustration which she found were always the quickest kind that ever came to her.
They were followed by the ones that she hated most of all though; the ones that were the most persistent, and haunting, and that seemed to burn her face long after she'd wiped them away.
They seemed to sear tiny holes into her soul as they fell; weakening, she was certain, the very fabric of all that held her together into a single, tangible form.
Sometimes she wondered if they had the power to truly melt her; or at least corrode what was left of her away.
It was times like this that it was difficult to remember that she wasn't facing such moments entirely on her own anymore; in fact her first instinct was always, still, to withdraw even though a pair of strong arms stood ever at the ready now, attached to the shoulders of a man who had proclaimed himself before his God and the world at large that he would always be willing to help her carry any burden she should struggle with.
It was that realization, that she could just easily in this instant slap her hand against her badge again and ask for Keiran and he'd stand here beside her that was making her feel such sadness now. Not sadness for herself, though she often still struggled to believe her good fortune in life. She struggled now with sadness for another instead. For the man who had just rang her door chime in answer to the summons she had issued.
He could not turn to the pair of arms meant to comfort him above all others now. He had lost her, and she him and in that so much more had been lost for all who knew them. It was more than just a man losing the woman he adored and a woman losing the man who adored her. The crew had lost their friend; a child had lost a father, a woman had lost her foundation and the man had lost the star which served as guide to his internal compass.
Now the needle spun in hopeless circles; his mind winding faster and faster along with it but never able to find a proper heading.
Going in such maddening circles was making him dizzy and sick; it was destroying him just as surely as the very insanity they'd attempted to save him from should have. He may have been burning but now he was crumbling; turned first to stone that was quickly dissolving to dust; a statue turned ancient ruin long before its time.
She didn't know how to help him, and that was what was really getting to her. She had known that there was absolutely no choice but to send him for resequencing at the time; and as much as she hated all that had followed she still could not regret the decision. He had to have the chance at least to clean the slate- it bought them time, and time, Liis had known all along, could be the only thing that really proved any sort of remedy to a tragedy such as had been suffered by a man who had done what no other could have and in that action, saved so many more millions of lives than he'd taken.
Still she knew that Rada was a man of science; of mathematics and formulas and complicated systems. He was also a man far more tender hearted than his exterior would often allow the world to see; and so there was simply no way that, even though the data was overwhelming and the evidence conclusive, that he could justify the cost numerically. He couldn't see that one man had saved millions of lives and perhaps entire species and worlds from unrepentant, vengeful executioners. All he could see was that one life had taken millions and nothing that one man, him, could do could bring those lives back.
Liis tried now to bid him enter, but her voice cracked with the attempt. She cleared her throat and tried again and finding a hoarse rasp was all she could manage now after her exchange with TC Blane, she figured she had better save her strength for the conversation which had to come.
For the first time in years, she really wished that she could have a shot of Jack.
She stepped forward to activate the door and Dengar looked up at her in surprise, having clearly expected or at least hoped to have another moment to gather the thoughts he could before this conversation took place.
Now that he saw her, he looked very much like he just wanted to get it all over with.
She wouldn't torture him any longer.
She motioned him in and pointed toward the chair across the room but Rada simply shook his head. She nodded that it was all right, he could remain standing if he wished, thinking she wouldn't be able to sit at a time like this either if she were him; in fact she couldn't sit at a time like this even though she was her.
She stood just a few feet away from him now, arms folded, back up against the wall. She finally raised her eyes and looked him fully in the face. "Rada,"
"Captain, I don't wish to make this any more difficult on you than it has to be, I-" he raised his hand gently. He was certain he knew what she was about to say. He was also certain from the sadness darkening her features that he didn't want her to feel badly about what she had to say. He was about to tell her that it was all right, that he knew what was coming and that he'd pack his things the moment he got back to the Serendipity and leave quietly and without argument. It was only as he inhaled and then tried to force the air back out from between his lips as amplification of sound that he realized that her eyes were red. "Captain, have you been...crying?" he stumbled over the last word, disbelieving the sight.
Liis looked away, hugging her arms more tightly around her aching stomach.
"You have." This was a matter of great concern for him, because for all the things he wasn't sure he remembered correctly, one of the things he was positive that he did was that Zanh Liis rarely cried, over anything. "What's happened? Are you all right?" he stepped closer, his face a study of pure worry. "Is there anything I can do to help?"
Liis could not believe what she was hearing. With all that the man had been through, with all that he'd lost, and all that he had still to lose he was still more concerned about someone else's suffering, or even their potential suffering, than he was his own.
This was a man who deserved so much more than he'd gotten.
This was a man who deserved to know the truth.
She gave no thought now to what this could do to her future, let alone her command. She gave no thought to what it might do to her emotionally if things went badly because of the decision she was about to make. The one she had, in fact, made before he rang the chime on the door.
"What's happened?" she spoke at last, the words slow and difficult to hear. She mouthed them a second time, wishing in this moment that she had a little of the faith that Keiran did or some like it. That she had some greater, larger power to turn to in this moment just to make things feel a little less overwhelming. But there was no help here; there was no one else who could do what must be done; she was the only one and she owed him nothing less.
She looked into his eyes more intently. "Are you sure you don't want to sit down?" she was worried that if the conversation continued that the knowledge of what had happened may take his legs out from beneath him- and in this moment she couldn't trust the strength of her own to help hold him up if he fell.
"No thank you, Captain."
"Rada, please. I'm asking." She did not order him, she genuinely was just making a request. "If I sit, will you sit too?"
He finally relented, nodding again slowly and turning several shades paler than he'd been a moment earlier.
He recognized the look in her eyes. He'd seen it before, one other time only.
When was it? Where had they been?
He tried to remember as he slowly backed up and lowered himself into the chair she'd indicated. As he settled into it and she pulled another chair closer across from him so she could face him still, images began to collide in his mind.
The room hadn't been much larger than this one, but it was not here. Not on Alchemy.
There had been furniture in it: a chair, a desk.
A desk.
It was her Ready Room.
No, it was an office.
It was his office.
He was speaking.
He was speaking to his Captain.
Their voices overlapped in his mind, impossible to isolate one from another as their volume began to increase with words that he tried desperately to make sense of.
Can a few more hours really make a difference?
In here, in this small room maybe not-
That I should sit while I watch the readings drop down to zero?”
Rada, I can’t-
You need a reason not to take me in and treat me for exhaustion? Well it’s simple; because I’m not exhausted, not yet. Exhaustion is when there is nothing left.
"Rada?" Liis felt a surge of panic as she watched his eyes glaze over; his mind clearly somewhere very far removed from this room. "Stay with me. We need to talk about this." He tried to bring himself back to this place now, to this cold and shallow world he had come to call his existence. A landscape in grayscale without light, or depth, or warmth of any kind to be found.
"I'm here, Captain," he assured her softly. His eyes held a pain so deep it could never be equated to any known unit of measurement. "It's all right. I know what you have to say."
"You do?" He was talking, Liis thought, she wanted to keep him talking before she took her final decisive action.
"Yes. You're going to relieve me of duty now. You're going to ask me to understand, that you have no choice because I cannot be relied upon under pressure now." He thought a moment and she allowed him the silence to finish completing his thought. "I may have been once, I don't remember. There's so much that I don't..." he paused, "remember."
"But there is," Liis steady gaze locked upon him now, "there are things that you do remember."
"I know that it, that this thing that no one is willing to tell me I've done- and I know I've done something- must be really, truly horrible," he whispered.
"What you did was truly necessary, Rada," Liis reached out and put a hand on his arm. "It was difficult. It was horrible because loss of life is always a horrible thing. But you've committed no crime, you've- I-" she stopped now; her words slamming to a halt in a stunning moment of self doubt. If she did this, there truly was no going back for him.
"Captain," Rada's voice was far more pleading than his words. "I must know. Please. If you won't tell me the truth then how can I ever trust anyone else will?" He averted his eyes a moment now, remembering the looks he'd been receiving from his shipmates- remembering the sadness in Lair Kellyn's eyes back on Sibalt as she clearly struggled to hold back from saying something that she really seemed to wish she could say.
"You're my Commanding Officer. Suspend me from duty, end my career if you must. In fact, if I really do pose that great a threat to my friends, those who have become like a family to me aboard the Sera then I won't even make you do that. I'll resign," he promised. "But I can't go on this way, I can't go forward to find any other kind of life if I don't understand why my last one ended."
She asked herself again as he returned his eyes to her if this was the right thing to do.
"If I tell you the truth..." Liis whispered back, her eyes darting back and forth in search of answers in his that could not be found there. He was still lost, and she had to ask herself as she remembered Blane's cutting words if the state of subsistence that the man in front of her called his current existence could be called anything similar to real life.
She thought about her own past now, she thought about the life she'd been forced to contemplate facing without Keiran; and she realized now that there really was only one way out for him, and that was through.
"You took an action that saved millions of lives, including every single life aboard the Serendipity, the Alchemy, and the handful who'd been sent to crew the Zenith," she spoke as tonelessly as possible, trying to hold back her violently surging emotions. "You did what no one else could, Rada, and in so doing you also saved the life of every telepath in the entire Alpha Quadrant."
A look of at first shock and then of realisation crossed Rada's tortured eyes, and Liis' filled with tears as she struggled to keep him here, where he was. She didn't know if she could help him to realize that he'd done so much more good than harm, if only he could see it.
For a long time Rada simply stared forward, unmoving but far from unfeeling as he tried desperately to force away the realisation of just what he must have done.
Then finally he spoke again, his soft voice utterly devoid of any emotion but with the cold fight in the way he slightly shook that said he was being slowly torn apart from the inside out.
“How many did I kill?”
Liis almost felt his pain burning into her as she looked forward into his eyes, though he dared not turn them from the floor. He was forced to keep them focused there out of the most overpowering of fears that if he looked up now, if he actually saw anything around him, it’d serve as a reminder that the entire galaxy still existed at a time when it took his all just to continue to exist within the flames that were consuming his inner world.
Liis tried desperately to sound unfeeling and objective, like she was speaking of pure facts even knowing that death could never be reduced to something so cold as long as a single good man still lived in this universe.
“I can’t give you an exact number,” she replied truthfully, her voice cracking slightly. “They were on the other side of a portal we couldn’t scan through. We…”
Without even finishing Liis knew she didn’t need to say any more. It was like a knife through his very soul that Rada had now heard in her words the confirmation that he had killed. Whereas before it had taken all he had to keep his hold against the riptide that attempted to drag him out into the violent sea of his own internal madness, now it was taking more than he had to give and his breathing was growing ever louder.
“It was enough,” he concluded, his voice much louder now as he was almost shouting. “It was enough that millions of lives were not sufficient to be saved that would keep for me even the lightest grip upon my reality.”
His breathing started growing heavier again. The mental defenses against the memories had folded. His mind was suddenly flashing-- not with images but with words like from a description to be found in a book about all the worlds’ greatest evils. As he spoke it was with rage at what he’d done but with the fresh recognition as he said each word as if he’d been reading then straight from that book as he spoke them.
“It took so much power,” he announced in disbelief, rapidly breathing in and out. “More power for destruction that even those millions who were saved should have ever held together. Power I’d had for but an instant when I chose to use it to murder.”
Liis began to feel panic rising up within her as she became so completely uncertain this had been the right choice or even a choice she'd had the right to make.
“No, you didn’t!” She insisted, feeling the tears biting back at her eyes with the knowledge that as he remembered, the only version of reality he could perceive was the one that once again damned him. “You have to listen to me, Rada. You tried to give them a choice. You tried to save them. They didn’t give you the chance and that wasn’t your fault.”
Clearly, Rada wasn’t even hearing her.
“They…” he started, with an assault of memories laying siege to his mind. The rapid pounding of his heart was almost enough to propel his body from this seat. “They were called the Domox. I…I lost contact. I couldn’t stop it once I’d started it. I…”
He couldn’t go on speaking but that didn’t mean that on the inside he was anywhere near done. It was suddenly all becoming clear to him.
He could see himself there, standing on the bridge; the world at first distorted and frozen but as all the dozens of secrets his mind had held became unleashed it was suddenly vibrantly clear and time was going very rapidly forward.
“If they ask why then tell them I’m the only one who knows how to prevent the very imminent destruction of everything they hold dear.” He barked with conviction though he struggled still to breathe as he felt the feeling leaving his limbs.
On the outside, it was then Liis saw it; he had started to curl into himself beginning with his arms. He was living through it again and she’d seen exactly where that took him.
She had to stop this somehow; it couldn’t be allowed to happen a second time.
“No, no, no!” Rada was suddenly screaming as Liis leapt up from her chair and started violently shaking him by the shoulders as if to wake him from the nightmare that was his reality.
*This cannot be happening...* she thought.
He was living the realisation of what he’d done all over again and his body was trying to fold in on itself in the chair.
“I…I killed them all. I…” Rada began to shake quicker than she could shake him exactly as he had then, but Liis didn’t give him a chance to finish.
“Rada, stop!” she shouted, as she reached around and in desperation clamped her hand down over his face, holding his mouth and nose shut to stop any air from getting in.
He felt himself there on the bridge and he couldn’t breathe. He was gagging for air but it wouldn’t come and now he was growing so weak that the world around him was beginning to grow weak along with him.
His eyes began to close as everything turned to darkness.
When he opened them again he was still shaking but he was back in the same place as Liis and still without air.
His face was starting to turn red and Liis finally released him, leaving him gasping desperately to get enough air into his lungs.
His body wasn’t moving but his eyes turned to her, staring fearfully into her although maybe it was through her while many seconds passed with nothing but the sound of his labored breathing. It took a moment of processing the sound for Liis to remember that she herself also could, and needed, to inhale.
Then finally the shaking seemed to slightly still as tears filled his eyes and he spoke once more.
“I…I don’t remember,” he confessed; both grateful and terrified that the walls were up again that held back the memories. “Thirty seconds ago I knew everything I’d done, but now it’s gone. Captain, what…I…” He stopped, utterly unable to find words to continue.
As his eyes finally came back into focus he looked to see fresh tears in Liis’ eyes to match his own.
“You cannot learn what happened like this,” Liis adamantly and fearfully decided, as she considered the impossibility of this situation and finally stepped back from him. “But we can’t keep it from you forever.”
“I need help.” Rada quietly pleaded with the galaxy, feeling so lost as he was regaining some sense of composure as his mind washed away the final conscious remnants of anything he’d not known before he came here except for events of the meeting itself.
“I know.” Liis acknowledged, the sadness in her voice reflecting that she was still highly shaken. “But no one here can give it to you.”
She began to consider all of the people who would try to ‘help’ him and how many of them would willingly destroy the man he’d been in the process. No one could help him as he needed, except perhaps for one woman and Liis couldn’t even tell him about her unless that was what tipped him past the point he’d almost just crossed again.
When she spoke to him at last it was with a renewed, quietly powerful tone of authority in her voice; issuing an order without clearly stating it as such, knowing he'd do whatever she instructed at this point. She could only hope that she was doing the right thing. “As soon as we get back to the Sera you are going to take a shuttlecraft and make the journey to Earth alone.”
Rada finally fell back, exhausted, into his chair.
He knew she was right to make this decision, he had to be isolated right now because he couldn’t face what he no longer remembered the details of but so powerfully remembered happening to him. Should someone say the words that started him recalling it all again...
However he just didn’t know what difference it was going to make in the end.
“But what happens after I get there?” he asked quietly, taking his head in his hands, knowing already it was a question to which he could never expect her to have an answer. “I can never come back to the ship.”
Hearing the sadness in his tone Liis suddenly realised just how much Starfleet, or perhaps just this particular ship, meant to him in spite of everything that he’d lost. It was no surprise really; after all knowing you could go home was never more important than when you felt you were lost away from it.
“Maybe one day you can,” Liis whispered, entirely without faith in what she was saying. She automatically found herself looking away but she forced herself to face him again, hating so much to give him such an impossible target and struggling even to say the words she knew she must. “If we can find a way to get you the help that you need, you'll always be welcome back here.”
"Will we find a way?"
"I promise you," she assured him, "I am still your Captain, and I will do everything in my power to keep looking for a way. The moment I find it..." Her voice faltered again, and she stopped. She could say nothing more.
As Rada looked up at her again; so fearful in his silence it was utterly clear that he was certain that was never going to happen.
-=End Flashback=-
So now he was here heading towards Earth, not having spoken to another being since the Captain had seen him off on the shuttle: personally and on her own. She’d made quite sure that no one else knew of any of this, at least not yet-- not until it was too late for them to stop her.
Now no one would know that he was gone until they noticed he was missing.
Then if they were smart enough to put it together, they’d know that none of them were ever going to see him again.
Lt. Commander Rada Dengar
Chief Engineering Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
and
-=/\=- Zanh Liis O'Sullivan
Commanding Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
Chief Engineering Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
and
-=/\=- Zanh Liis O'Sullivan
Commanding Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012