by Denise Moreno and Tucker Brody
Stardate: 100922.15
Immediately After To Do Better
Stardate: 100922.15
Immediately After To Do Better
Denise moved eagerly. She was so close. It looked like she was finally going to make it. Only then instantly she stopped in her tracks; her stomach fearfully sinking, as an all too familiar pained and angry voice shouted out viciously from behind her.
-=/\=-
“HOLD IT RIGHT THERE!”
Everyone but Denise, including the two Serendipity officers, turned to see who it was. For her it was entirely clear from the voice alone that it was Tucker Brody. Denise simply froze in place, almost able to feel the phaser that Brody had aimed square at the centre of her back.
“The Captain is no longer to be trusted. I am now in command of this vessel.”
“This is mutiny,” Denise said, turning slowly and confirming every suspicion that Brody did indeed have a phaser at the ready. What was truly shocking however was the state he appeared to be in; not just physically but psychologically as well. The man’s normally military posture had been replaced by a bent, burdened stance and he teetered in an obvious struggle to keep his feet beneath him.
“You don’t look well, Brody...”
Brody ignored her comments entirely, speaking loudly to all around him.
“Captain Moreno came here to destroy the Temporal Drive. She’s lost her nerve and wants to strand us all here, in this time.” All eyes turned to Denise, some accusing and others disbelieving. She was far past caring what any of them thought of her, still she recognised the doubt in the eyes of a few and dearly hoped she could use it.
“I am still in command of this ship,” she reminded them all in her most determined, disciplined voice, which was tremulous in spite of her wishes. “I order you to escort Commander Brody to the brig.”
Some of the crew looked afraid, some looked uncomfortable, but not a single person moved.
A smirk crept over Brody’s face and Denise knew right away that her bluff had failed. There was no way she could force anyone here to obey her any longer.
“I’m not going anywhere, Captain." Brody gestured with a tilt of his head, his voice dropping to a tone of cold finality as he added, "Now step away from the Temporal Drive or I will kill you.”
As her eyes caught his, she had no doubt that he would fire. Yet what unnerved her most was the unmistakable instability she found gleaming in those normally focused eyes. Tucker really didn’t look well. For a second, she found herself thinking of how her hand; her shaking hand, was so close to her own phaser. She calculated the risks. Brody was the only one who had his weapon fixed on her, and she doubted his reflexes were operating at full capacity right now. She took in a deep breath, her eyes never leaving his.
There was a chance that she could fire first. She just had to do it without hesitation. Realising that was the factor which would determine who lived and who died, her hand began to move away from the weapon. If she could kill without hesitation then she was too far gone already. "All right,” she said softly, putting her hands up and stepping towards Brody.
The action should have calmed or at least comforted Tucker, perhaps eliciting a smug grin, yet his countenance merely grew more anxious. His hand vibrated from side to side as if to indicate she must hurry. The smirk he’d worn before had completely faded, replaced by the grimace of a silent mouth poised to bark orders, as if he wanted to demand she do something more but he didn’t know what.
This was not the Tucker Brody she knew.
Fully aware now what he had become and in spite of herself, for just a moment a trace of pity crossed Denise’s features. The expression of disgust and fury that immediately leapt to his face in response made Denise’s heart skip in a beat in shock; shock, that was, that he didn’t immediately kill her where she stood.
“Perhaps I am not the one who’s lost their nerve,” she wondered intentionally aloud, searching his eyes for any hint that she was right. Evidently, Tucker would not take this calmly.
“I HAVE NOT LOST MY NERVE,” Tucker spat, and though every sense in her wanted to back away in fear her feet were too past caring to move. What she saw as she looked deep within him said that he was right about this, but wrong about so very much.
“Look at you,” she droned, forcing her lips to form the words even as the world spun around her and her hands and feet tingled, going numb from fear. “Something’s changed in you, Tucker. Everyone here can see that.”
“I AM,” he started, but stopped; insisting his tone be calmed. “I am merely more…more determined, more focused…than ever.”
Denise saw her chance and she took it. She focused her eyes on his with all her strength and what little remained of her composure, attempting to unsettle him in that way she’d seen him do with many others before.
Instantly she realised her error as a small, mocking laughter began to fall from Tucker’s lips. Somehow, her failure had returned to him some sense of stability.
“Oh, that’s very good, Captain,” he said with mild amusement in stark contrast to the unsteadiness still in his stance. “What did ya think was going ta happen? Was I supposed to fall apart and then suddenly everyone would rush to your side?”
Denise wanted to argue, to fight him on his terms, but then something happened under the weight of his glare that she could no more resist than she could've prevented the scorching of her face if she’d been looking into the sun itself. Railing against all efforts to fight, her eyes fell away from his, just for an instant, but for a thousand times too long for anyone to have missed it. Murmurs began in the gathered crowd around them.
“Everyone here knows that I will deliver them through time. They know I am willing and able to do whatever it takes,” Tucker insisted, and even as many of the murmurs were near inaudible whispers, in her heart Denise could feel that not one of their agents disagreed.
“You’re right. They do,” she said, close but not quite yet defeated. “But they don’t know what they’re getting themselves into and I think you know that.”
Again Denise turned to speak to the crowd. She slowly drew in and released a breath, wondering if she had any chance of making them listen, or even if Tucker would give her the chance to continue.
“You think you know him. You don’t trust him but you’re sure, you’re so confident, that his goals are the same as yours.” Her tone grew more anxious, even desperate as she spoke. “Well, you thought you knew my goals too, but you were wrong. It’s true I did want to take us back. I wanted to take us back more than anything, but I was never intending to change the illustrious Department of Temporal Investigations to suit our, or even my, purposes.”
Curiosity passed over a few expressions, but not a single person seemed at all swayed.
“Temporal Investigations has taken everything from me,” she said, all the frustration of decade after decade finally catching up with her as her breathing grew less even. “So I was going to destroy it; to go back to just the right point that I could stop it from ever coming into creation. It’d have been like tearing away the first vital bricks, to cause this hideous monument to our arrogance to come crashing down to the ground. Time would have been restored to what it should have been. My life would have been restored to what it should have been.”
Her eyes moved from person to person, finding nothing but blank stares as though she was speaking some foreign language to suggest that her own actions meant Tucker’s motivations could be unknown to them. She realised she was wasting her breath.
Tucker exhaled a short, bitter laugh. "Your life. Your life?" His voice rose again both in volume and in pitch. "That's right, because everything that has ever happened, for all time and in all time is about YOU, isn't it Denise?” Anger was overcoming his words as he began to speak each and every syllable with increasing speed. “Never mind the lives that time has stolen from the rest of us too, every man, to the last.” His eyes became wild; he was practically shouting now.
He drew in a deep pained breath, the sound by the ears of others was morphed into a vicious threat, clearly conveyed by burning eyes which spoke volumes about what he intended to do with the rest of his life. The unstable determination that radiated from him in this moment felt like an unstoppable river; the water running angrily and uncontrollably along once solid ground and tearing it away to nothingness. “Well it's time to put things right, and that's exactly what we're about to-."
Abruptly mid-sentence for just a second the river froze, as at the back of the room a low, rasping voice rose that no one had ever, in a million timelines, expected to hear.
"It's over, Tucker."
Brody startled and spun. In an instant his weapon was trained on the woman the voice belonged to: his eyes widening because this very sight should be impossible.
The voice emanated from a woman battered, and bloodied by his own hand: a woman whose weight was being almost entirely supported by the strong arms of her husband.
"Captain Zanh!" Jamie Halliday exclaimed, unable to contain himself a moment longer. Ashton Ledbetter reached up and put his hand over Halliday's mouth, only releasing him once Keiran O'Sullivan gave a look that told Ashton he'd better let go or there'd be Hell to pay if they all got out of this alive.
"You..." Brody's eyes burned through Zanh. "This is all because of YOU!" He began to shake and sweat profusely. Another, entirely different sort of look was exchanged across the room between Keiran O'Sullivan and Ashton Ledbetter now: all other eyes were remained fixed upon Zanh Liis and Tucker Brody as they stared each other down.
Denise Moreno was, for the moment, too shocked to act.
The computer counted down seventy-five seconds until initiation of the Temporal Drive.
"We've all lost in the past." Liis said evenly, her tone as calm as it was commanding. "How much of the future we lose is being decided this instant, in this place. Do you really want-"
"I want what belongs to me!" Tucker cried, his arm shaking as he struggled to keep hold of the phaser. "I want my accomplishments. I want the life that you, that the other timeline, took from me. I want my wife. I want our children- I-" he trembled even harder as the computer indicated that there was now merely seconds until the drive would activate. Soon he'd be well on his way back to all those things that History had so cruelly denied him.
Looking upon him, the sadness that ran from Denise Moreno's eyes all the way to her heart was now abysmal and complete. This was the moment where she could see so clearly just how little really separated her from the likes of Tucker Brody, and all traces of fear or doubt were suddenly gone.
As Zanh held Brody's gaze, Denise took a halting, half-step forward.
[Sixty seconds until the Temporal Drive is engaged.]
"I want what you took from me." Brody repeated, the stubborn demand for things that deep down he knew no one could ever return to him now, but for which the rage and bitterness that practically was consuming him refused to ever acknowledge were forever lost.
Unbeknownst to Brody, O'Sullivan's eyes shifted toward Moreno, and he gave her a nearly imperceptible nod of approval as he saw what she was planning to do.
"How did I take your life from you, Tucker?” Liis demanded, so tired but so much more so of this persecution for crimes she had no memory of committing. “What happened-"
"What happened?” Tucker snapped, almost as if the anger he felt and the tragedy of his life should be enough to tell anyone, let alone this demoness who’d dominated his nightmares, why they were here. “What happened is that TI has been punishing me in this lifetime for mistakes I made in another. How can you hold a man accountable for errors in judgment he hasn't even made yet? Decisions that have been erased by time itself?"
The way he spoke now, his eyes growing absent from the room and seeming to look back across all the worst moments of a lifetime all at once, made Liis realise how much larger many of the targets for his hatred were than her. At least in his mind, Temporal Investigations itself, this organisation that he’d spent so much of his life immersed in, was causing him this inner torment no man deserved.
"I don't-" Liis continued, her eyes showing him a sudden, shocked compassion. Though she knew he deserved no such consideration, she wondered now how much of this monster before her came from the man himself and how much from the evil she’d seen herself within the higher ranks of Temporal Investigations: the same dark hearted men and women as lacking in courage as they were in conscience.
Those of Jonas Vox’ sort.
The same ones who had taken so much from her, and from Keiran.
"I released you from the hospital." Tucker's voice dropped, barely audible now as he appeared to be far more back there than he was present here. "I let you go, and you were still sick. So sick that it cost so many lives. Your ship. Your crew."
Liis felt her stomach knot and fought the urge to recoil in horror at this disclosure, even as Keiran's hand squeezing tightly against her shoulder reminded her that he may be lying- she knew, somehow that he was not. In a life that hadn’t been and now wouldn’t be, a ship full of people she cared about and would have gladly laid her own life down for would have died, because of her. Nothing had happened here, but the knowledge made her feel somehow colder as it broke away another piece of her soul. In this instant she understood a little more of what Tucker had been living with now for so many years.
"The line was corrected. Erased. But it didn't matter. No matter what I did, they were going to carry that mistake forward. They were going to penalize, to hold me back. To keep me from the life I was destined to live and the woman meant to stand at my side."
"Landry Steele." Keiran whispered into Liis' ear, and she stood just a little taller though her face offered no confirmation she'd heard him. Her eyes however did say that she doubted if all of this was really just about what he’d been denied in this timeline, if it was just the redirection of anger at himself for what he’d done in another.
"You can't be certain that making this jump will correct everything." Liis warned, as Moreno continued to move incrementally forward. "All you'll be doing is ensuring that everyone on this ship, and on mine, including Landry is deprived of the futures they are meant to have."
Brody winced, an involuntary physical reaction to the mention of Steele’s name.
"What about my future!" Brody shouted, his words so strained that it was like every further second he lived in this timeline was a new cause of insurmountable pain. "What about the past that was ripped away from me?"
Liis offered him no audible answer; she didn’t need to, as a look was exchanged between the Serendipity officers. Deep down all those with experience with non-linear time knew that for all their technology and their resequencing abilities, the one thing that could never really be truly changed was your own past. Success may be fleeting, but every mistake would be with you forever.
Denise was fully aware of this fact as she considered what might be the biggest mistake of her life, looking up to the Temporal Drive with her hand brushing down once again over her side, a shudder passing through her lips.
“I’m sorry.” Liis spoke honestly and sadly as her eyes burned through him.
A look of confusion and disbelief passed over Tucker’s face to have heard those words. He was completely unprepared and unaware of just how much she meant by it though, as out the corner of her eyes Liis watched Denise withdraw her phaser from her side and aim it to the drive above her. Only at the last instant did Tucker realise, his eyes widening in horror as he turned a rapid about face, too late to do anything but watch as Denise’s weapon fired.
“No!” he screamed, as the beam struck at the very heart of the drive. In an instant the energy spread like a wave of fire, burning away at the vital components, exactly as Denise knew it would.
Only then it didn’t stop, as with a flash of light and a violent sizzle, the energy was redirected. Ashton and Jamie had reconnected the drive so as to cause it to burn out the engines should they try to use it, and those same connections now caused the phaser energy to travel a path of flaming sparks all around them. True flame would have spread no less efficiently in the driest of forests, as the energy moved like the hand of death casting the once functional systems into being little more useful than ashes.
“No. No. No…” Tucker insisted to himself, taking his head into his hands, and tears building in his eyes.
A soul-shattering wail rose above the sound of the fire suppression system alarms. Jamie hurried to override both the system and the alarms as there was no real danger of conflagration. Everyone stood perfectly still, unable to move, speak, or look away as Tucker Brody collapsed to his knees.
His screaming continued, unabated, and the sound of it chilled Zanh Liis through. Her own knees faltered, and Keiran grasped her more tightly around the waist, keeping her from falling down.
Then, the sound stopped, and in the split second it took for the man to make the motion of raising the phaser in his trembling hand and turning it on himself, Zanh Liis broke free of the grasp of her husband and dove, snatching it away and groaning as she landed painfully on the deck beside him.
She tossed the weapon to Keiran, who grabbed it out of the air in one swift, smooth motion even as he tried to comprehend what she had just done.
Brody looked up at her, his expression indescribable as the tears filled and overflowed from his eyes.
“No, Tucker.” Liis whispered, remembering darker times when a better version of the very man before her had prevented her from taking the same dark, violent action against herself. “No.”
The sound of boots pounding as they carried someone into the room sounded behind the group, though still, no one turned or moved.
“Keiran, as Interim Director of Temporal Investigations I order you to arrest Dr. Brody, and the rest of the Poseidon’s misguided crew. Ledbetter, assist Captain O’Sullivan in…” William Lindsay ordered, only now stopping to look down and see that Zanh Liis had reached up, and placed her hand on Brody’s cheek. Brody shook as a man freezing to death in the unforgiving waters of a frozen ocean; and yet even after all he had put her through, all the times he had haunted the worst of her nightmares, she was determined to show him compassion.
“No, Will.” Liis insisted. “He needs to be in a hospital, not in prison.”
“We’ll let the medical staff decide that, right?” Keiran stepped forward, once again placing a hand on Liis’ shoulder.
“Send him to the Sera,” Liis insisted. “Turn him over to McKay. I trust him to make the determination.”
Keiran and Will exchanged a glance, and out of respect for her experience with the man and aboard this ship, Will deferred to her request.
“Very well. The rest of you, into the brig. Beginning with you.” He took the phaser out of Moreno’s still shaking hand, and clamped his other hand down on to her arm. Finally, she returned from her own thoughts to the present.
She looked up, taking a moment to lock eyes with each member of her former crew. “You heard Captain Lindsay,” she said softly. “I expect you all to give him your full cooperation.”
Liis watched as Ashton Ledbetter and Jamie Halliday stepped forward, each taking hold of one of Brody’s arms and lifting him up before hauling the man from the room.
While everyone else filed out, Keiran assisted Liis to her feet. He moved carefully as he proceeded, taking such good care to ensure he didn’t do so too quickly, he looked at her with an expression of deep complexity and concern. There was a one word question burning in his mind that he simply had to ask.
“Why?”
Liis shrugged her aching shoulders, and unable to give any logical, definitive reason, she gave the only reply that she could. Though it would have been confusing to anyone else, to a man who understood her mind, her nature and her convictions as well as Keiran did, it was the answer that made the most sense that any could.
”Because.”
Denise Moreno
Former Commanding Officer
USS Poseidon
and
Tucker Brody, MD, PhD
Former Temporal Investigations Agent
NRPG: And there you have it, ladies and gents (wait, I’m the only chick here, but still) this is what happens when a man travels 14,000 miles (literally) to kick his Captain’s keister back into gear and finish the mission.
And so politely, too.
Thanks, Danger. ~ZL