1104: To Remember, to Forget

by Rada Dengar
100725.2230
After Back at the Beginning

-=San Francisco, Earth=-

For the first time in a long time Rada found himself forgetting about everything that was so wrong in his life. He didn’t at all understand it and yet somehow talking to Wren like this was making him feel simply good. There was something about her which he’d missed at the start of their conversation. She’d seemed so tense, they both had, but as she’d relaxed he’d found that he was too.

When she’d first made a joke, something small and sweet, he had been startled by the sound of his own laughter, though she seemed to be even more surprised. Something had changed in her with that sound, as if she hadn’t believed she could make him laugh with everything that had happened, and then once she had it became all she wanted to do.

He still struggled to believe it was even possible for his laugh to still exist, no matter how many times he heard it. He was sure that it was long dead; crushed beneath the weight of memories blocked from his mind. Yet as he looked at every fine detail of how she moved, finding himself occasionally even staring, that weight seemed a little lighter as the mind so adept at worrying for tomorrow could care for nothing but the now.

“So there I was; an ensign, heading up to my first day on the flagship. I’ll admit I was rather nervous as ensigns tend to be. When our runabout suddenly stops dead in space…”

He was amazed she was still listening to him as she took another sip, almost a gulp, or her wine. He wasn’t aware of just how much he was smiling at her, but she certainly was.

He was sure they must have been quite an amusing sight to behold. Their steaks had each come in polystyrene containers with plastic forks, which they ate them with and from as they had no plates or cutlery. It seemed oddly appropriate as they drank wine that was far too sweet from glasses meant for coffee, in a dusty old tavern that was long since shut down, here beneath the plastic flowers and by the light of candles lit by a spanner.

“Pretty quickly things start to go wrong, and I mean wrong. Suddenly the console beside me explodes in a shower of sparks and the poor pilot is sent falling to the deck…”

The situation itself should be utterly ridiculous enough alone to make them laugh. Days earlier each had been on a Federation starship, so clean and advanced, with replicators for their food and order all around. Even now this little world was like the eye in the storm of the bustling city outside their walls, full of restaurants with elaborate décor, and which a man couldn’t even enter without a suit and tie nor a lady without a sufficiently elegant dress. Yet they found themselves here instead laughing without a care in the plainest of clothes with plastic forks and room temperature wine.

“Luckily there was a nurse there to intervene because I was so distracted by our imminent deaths I probably would have just let him hit head first…”

Their meal was long since eaten, though it had taken them quite some time. From slow beginnings of small talk they’d discovered far better topics and found their conversation erupting to life until they had practically forgotten about the food. It made him smile to see her talking about events in her life, yet it made him feel something else entirely as his nervousness had slowly left him and he found he was talking back. He found she was actually interested in hearing him talk about some esoteric engineering ideas he’d had. Though she’d clearly had little idea what he was talking about she still watched him with rapt fascination and he found himself telling her thoughts he didn’t think anyone would ever care to hear.

Now he was talking far quicker and more cheerfully than he’d known.

“I look into the sensors and I discover some power fluctuations. If I had to give them a name it would have been ‘runabout destroying’. Now I really don’t know what I’m supposed to do…”

Now the food was gone as was over half the bottle of wine. Neither had had enough to be called drunk; just enough that every laugh became that little bit louder and if either of them had suggested karaoke there was a serious danger the other would agree.

Though he was scared that he would offend her, and he felt he must surely seem far too forward, Rada found he couldn’t quite take his eyes off of her as she listened so intently to his story. He couldn’t quite explain it but he found his heart beating faster in a way that was far more intoxicating than the wine.

“Luckily, I think to myself, there are other engineers here and so I turn to them hoping to do whatever they are,” he paused for dramatic effect. “The only problem is…they don’t have a clue either…”

He couldn’t believe she was laughing; she had such a wonderful laugh.

“So here I am, about to be blown up, and I find I’m actually worried what my new captain is going to think if I let one of her runabouts be damaged before I even get onto the ship.”

He stopped just a second to breathe and take in another drink of his wine.

“Oh, come on you weren’t really thinking that,” she said, as if not believing him, when she knew full well that was exactly how his mind would have worked.

“I swear to God. Well, I’m an atheist, so I swear to whoever atheists swear to. I swear to Athe….!”

She laughed again

“So, what did you do?” she asked, truly absorbed in the tale.

He paused for a moment just thinking that she was so beautiful, before continuing on.

“What could I do? I bypassed the computer, running the controls straight to propulsion. Looking back I’m amazed I didn’t just blow us up myself. Yet somehow it works and we’re sent flying away, all ready for me to realise I’ll have to explain to my new chief engineer why I had to rip her runabout apart.”

She laughed once more and he stopped and happily sighed, each in bliss, before silence fell as their eyes met across the table. Then their eyes didn’t part, and nor did they speak, as he unconsciously placed his glass down on the tablecloth.

Hope suddenly filled her features as he stood up from the table, moving slowly and wordlessly towards her. She closed her eyes as she felt his hand brushing her cheek, his breath on her face, as his lips moved in towards hers.

He came closer, so much closer. Wren found herself expectantly and anxiously waiting for contact that didn’t come, before his hand left her skin and his breath seemed to grow softer. She opened her eyes, confused about what was happening, to find him shaking with a look of terror on his face.

Her smile rapidly evaporated as she felt now memories stirring in him far more intense than had happened before.

She could see them playing in his mind as he stood in sickbay looking over her weakened body, as he ran through vague halls of the Serendipity with a single unstoppable thought, then as he was stood on the bridge and aimlessly watching more deaths than he could imagine. For one horrible moment he knew all what he had done, the vicious scream of a wounded animal falling from his lips, before his eyes flew wider.

Rada then stood, barely conscious of his actions, staring straight into her soul. She was frozen and so was he, simply watching one another, until two words tumbled from his mouth.

“They’re gone.”

Wren could see he was about to panic as every sense of the man told her he didn’t remember anymore but he knew something was very wrong.

“Rada it’s okay.” Wren tried to calm him, quickly moving towards him.

“No, you don’t understand,” he replied drastically, his breathing getting a little heavier. “Kissing you like that, without even thinking. That’s not me…I have no idea why I did that.”

It was him, Wren thought, but she couldn’t possibly explain the changes that happened to him with their love.

“I do understand,” she insisted, her hand reaching to just touch his arm in a way to say she understood so much more than he could believe possible. She could tell he wasn’t listening, just keeping staring in front of him in a world that seemed to be mere illusion. “You don’t understand what’s going on and you’re frightened by it.”

Rada quickly shook his head.

“It’s not that. It’s not fear,” he immediately protested, but she knew that that had always been what he’d say when he was most afraid.

“Yes, it is, Rada. I’m Betazoid,” she replied, finally grasping hold of his wrists to draw his attention away from the world of pain in his mind.

“Betazoid senses can be confused,” he answered desperately, his eyes now finally finding hers again and practically challenging her over the suggestion that he was as afraid as he felt. He was retreating to logic in the way he did when he couldn’t control his emotions. “They have to be backed by reason.”

“Then what does your reason say you’re afraid of?” she asked him, though she couldn’t possibly expect him to find any sense right now.

Rada inhaled slowly and shakily, his voice growing quieter as his eyes fell from hers. The world was such a blur.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, it does, Rada,” she said a voice of the tearful firm. “Don’t you understand? You matter to me.”

As confusing as he found the world right now while it seemed to bend and twist, like he was looking a failing holographic projection, he did not challenge her assertion that he mattered even though no one could possibly know him enough for that.

“I’m…I’m afraid of what I might do.”

“You’re afraid you’ll do more than kiss me?” Wren asked, humour her natural response thought she quickly thought better of making a joke as it didn’t even seem to register on his ears.

Rada inhaled quickly, the air around him seeming as thin and false as everything else.

“Wren, I’ve done something awful,” Rada answer with such cutting honesty that she knew he wasn’t talking about anything that had happened this dinner.

“Rada, it’s okay.”

“I’m going to do it again. I may even do something worse.”

“No, you don’t have to do anything. You don’t…”

He cut her off, his hands rising in front of his face.

“Look at me! I broke into this building without knowing why. I set a romantic table without intending it. I told you things I…I have no control over what I’ll do.”

“You’re still a good man. You’re still you,” Wren insisted, his panic suddenly passing on to her.

Rada was shaking his head as he spoke.

“I’m capable of guilt afterwards but in moment after moment I have no sense or right or wrong.”

“I don’t believe that,” Wren protested but he clearly didn’t hear it.

“What if this is how it happened and how it will happen again?”

“This isn’t how it happened,” Wren insisted, tears biting at her eyes as she saw what she’d done to him, but again he wasn’t hearing her.

“One can not expect the world to bear this risk.”

Wren’s eyes were suddenly far wider.

“What are you saying Rada?!”

“You have to choose to be good. You choose who you are,” he answered, though it was only half an answer. “My logic, my discipline, my entire identity is fading away. All that deserved to live is to be no more…”

Wren couldn’t stand it anymore as she took hold of him, pulling him so tight into her arms, though this time he did not sink back into the world of returning memories. So she held this man of beautiful reason, bizarre and abstract but beautiful none the less, as he felt himself losing his mind.

“I remembered,” he wheezed so desperately into her ear. “I chose to forget.”

Lt. Commander Rada Dengar
Chief Engineering Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012