by Fleur Le Marc
81028.17
…continuing from part one…
-=Takesian Plains, Bajor=-
-=/\=-
A long night followed. Camen was still burning up, restless in his sleep. At times he spoke aloud, making very little sense as he was held fast in intense dreams that he could not seem to separate from reality.
Fleur stayed by his side, placing cold cloths against his head and forcing water down him, sometimes drops at a time. The doctors had said there was nothing she could do but wait this out, and the wait seemed longer than almost any other she’d ever endured.
The only one that had ever seemed longer, she thought, was the wait for the medics to come to the bakery the day he had collapsed on the station, all those years ago…
-=Flashback, DS23=-
He enclosed his head in his hands.
Fleur managed to keep it from slamming into the deck as he slumped out of his chair, and a commotion rose in the room over the Vedek's loss of consciousness.
People started to come out of the kitchen upon hearing the disruption in the dining room, and Fleur shouted to them to get medical help, right away.
"It will be all right," she whispered to Jariel as she cradled his head. She wrapped her arms tightly around him and began gently rocking him to and fro. "
You will be all right."
-=End Flashback=-
Morning arrived again at last, and three full days after it began, Camen’s fever finally broke.
Fleur helped him to the shower and waited just outside as he washed, listening closely to be sure that he was all right.
When he reappeared he was dressed in clean clothes. Now that the flush of the fever had abated, his unshaven face looked deathly pale.
She propped him up in a chair while she attended to some necessary housekeeping.
He was still contagious to other Bajorans, they had warned her, for at least three days after the fever subsided. So she made note of the time in her journal before she turned her attention to putting fresh blankets on his bed.
As instructed, she took the ones that he had been sleeping on outside, started a small, contained fire and burned them- along with his clothing.
Once she was finished, Camen ambled across the room and sat down on his freshly made up cot.
He gratefully accepted the fresh water she offered and looked up, into her weary eyes. “I had very vivid dreams the past few nights.”
“I can imagine.” She began to fix him some tea, knowing that food would be too heavy on his stomach until a little more time had passed. “You were talking, how do you say, silver streak.”
His eyes flashed terror at the thought.
“Do not worry, I hardly understood a word you were saying. I only know you were serious about whatever it was.”
“Last night I dreamed that you were telling me about your childhood,” Camen said, accepting the weak cup of tea and forcing himself to drink it.
“That was no dream. You asked, I told.”
“Oh.” He frowned. He had hoped that story had only been fiction.
“Do you remember any of it?”
“You four when Henri framed you for stealing food. You were nine,” he said slowly, “When you found out that the Le Marcs were not your parents.”
“You remember all of it, then.” She drank slowly from her own cup of tea.
“Did they ever tell you the truth, of what happened to your parents?”
“Not by choice.” Fleur’s eyes again grew distant.
Camen set his cup aside and fought the urge to take her into his arms and hold her. She looked so lost, and he wanted so much to find her.
“I stayed with them, after they sent the others away to school, I was the last one left helping Maman run the bakery,” she began again, her voice a ghostly echo.
“When I was seventeen, Papa died. They said it was his heart, but I know better. It was the drinking that finished him off. His life was one of lower morals than you could imagine, Monsieur le Vedek,” she slipped, in her distraction, and called him the pet title she had since the day she’d met him. “He had, how do you put it, a
wandering eye. Unfortunately, the rest of him followed.”
Camen was incensed. “I see.”
“I think that is why Maman was so bitter,” Fleur tried to justify the behavior of the woman who raised her, though Camen had a hard time accepting any explanation as valid for the way she singled Fleur out as the family scapegoat or the way she neglected her.
“He never made a penny. When she gave him money for the little amount of work he did at the bakery, he gambled it away or spent it on wine. Or other women. He simply could not be trusted.
“I don’t know why he ever had a kind word to say to me, but I listened to him and he was right. I could make a living at what I learned, and I saved every penny I managed to get as wages from the age of sixteen so that I could go to proper cooking school.
“I had a talent for cakes and pastry and I began to enter competitions. The proceeds from those competition wins went toward further schooling.”
“You could have gone out on your own long before you did,” Camen surmised. “Yet you stayed?”
“I felt I owed her something for keeping a roof over my head all those years,” she explained, “Especially after Odil died. Then it was just she and I. The others never came to visit, let alone help her.”
“Wonder why.” Camen shrugged, thinking that her behavior even toward her own children did not befit the title of ‘mother’ in any sense.
“I was just about to turn twenty-one,” Fleur explained, when one day, just before dinner, there was a knock at the kitchen door. It was a man, a solicitor. How do you call it?”
“Some kind of legal representative?”
“Oui, exactly. He asked to speak to me, and I saw my Maman’s face go white. She sent us up to the apartment, and he sat me down at the table in the kitchen and told me that I was a very rich young woman now.”
“What?”
“He handed me an enormous bundle of papers, and I didn’t understand what any of it meant.” Fleur explained. “I saw words that said things such as ‘
held in trust’ and “
rightful share of estate’ and I was lost.”
Camen gaped at her, also lost.
“Then, he proceeded to tell me a story,” she whispered, wringing her hands. “The story of my mother’s life.”
-=Thirty-one years ago, Paris, France:
Residence of Ambassador Dominique Saint-Just=-
Finally alone with her, the man could restrain himself no longer.
He picked her up, took her into his arms and kissed her passionately.
“This is wrong,” The young au pair whispered between kisses, even as she clung to him tightly.
The man who was, even now trying to draw the shoulder of her blouse away from her skin as he kissed her was young, dashing, powerful…and married.
“Charlotte,” he breathed into her ear, “how can it be wrong to love someone?”
“You have a family,” she objected, finally regaining enough of her senses to push him away. She spun out of his reach and grabbed for the door handle. “You are a leader of the people. You cannot,”
“Cannot have what I want?” He pursued her, and seventeen-year-old Charlotte Leveque felt her resolve weakening.
“My marriage was
arranged, Charlotte. I do not love her. And if you are patient, just a little while longer,”
“It is you who should be patient then,” she insisted. “God himself will punish us if,”
Her objections were lost on him, and once again he kissed her.
“You are the one thing in this world that makes everything matter,” he pleaded, “Do not abandon me now."
She closed her eyes, released the door handle, and fell into his arms.
-=/\=-
“Au…pair?” Jariel asked, unfamiliar with the term.
“Kind of like…um, a nanny. For the children.”
“He was married,
and had children?”
Fleur nodded, reddening with shame. “She should have run away from him.”
“She was young.”
“She knew better. She must have known better. Knowing my grandmother, I believe she had to have been raised to know right from wrong. She was weak, and she paid the price for that weakness.” Fleur’s lips tightened as did her fingers, into fists. “She had me.”
-=Flashback, thirty-one years ago=-
“You
can’t be pregnant.”
Dominique Saint-Just stomped around his library, watching as the pale and trembling au pair stood across the room, leaning against a bookcase for support.
“I am telling you, I have been to the doctor, and I am certainly pregnant.”
He picked up a glass vase of flowers and threw it across the room. Upon impact it shattered right beside Charlotte, leaving her even more shaken and in tears.
“It’s not mine, then!”
“It is!” She insisted, rushing up to him despite her fear. “I promise you, I have never,” she whispered, embarrassed to admit now that she had made the ill advised decision to choose as her first lover a man who was already someone else’s husband.
“You have to get rid of it.”
“No!” She shouted, her hands closing over her belly protectively though there was no way to tell yet what was within it. “You can’t expect me to-“
“Oh, I can. And I do. Do you understand what will happen if anyone finds OUT about this? Right before the election?
Charlotte wept. “You said that our love was all that mattered. Dominique, let us leave this place. Ask Sabine for a divorce. We can have the children live with us, most of the time, and we can,”
“No.” Saint-Just said, simply and with finality.
“No…”
“No.” The man’s eyes were cold and angry. “This problem is going to go away, or else
you will.”
The sound of a key turning in the locked door made both of them jump; and an instant later, standing before them was a furious Sabine Saint-Just.
“You little whore,” she spat at Charlotte, flying at her and grabbing her by the front of her dress. “You dare to come into
my home, seduce
my husband and now you expect him to raise your bastard child with our
OWN?” She drew her hand back and slapped the girl across the face.
Charlotte fell to her knees. “Madame, I am so sorry, you do not understand,”
“No,” Sabine continued. “It is
you who does not understand. Get out of my house, and do not dare to ever show your face here again. If you do, I will kill you myself.”
-=End Flashback=-
“Oh, Fleur,” Jariel’s eyes reflected his horror at hearing this. “Did she go to the authorities? Sue for some sort of support for the child?”
“No,” Fleur whispered, “She took Saint-Just’s words very much to heart. She knew that the family was very powerful. She tried to return home only to be turned out by her parents for breaking God’s law. She was left with nothing, and no one, to help her.”
“What happened then?” Jariel prodded, wondering even as he asked how it was possible that Fleur could be the flesh and blood of such a heartless man.
“She could have gone to public Federation agencies for help, but she was too ashamed. So she went to a convent. Stayed with the sisters there. She prayed and begged God for forgiveness for her sins. Then, right after I was born, she just…disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“She wrote a note, left me behind and was never seen or heard from again.”
Camen’s hand flew to his mouth. He leaned back against the wall as he sat on the cot, closing his eyes.
“The parish priest managed to find my grandparents based upon pieces information that my mother had given him, and he contacted them. Told them that I was not to be punished for the sins that brought me into this life, and that I was their responsibility. But they were old, and bitter.
“So they did what they did best. They used guilt to motivate their second daughter, who was already married and had children of her own, to take me and raise me.”
“Brigitte and Odil?”
“Brigitte and Odil.”
There was only one missing piece of the story now and Camen knew he could not rest until he’d heard it. He returned his gentle gaze to her.
“Why did the solicitor come to see you?”
“To tell me that my biological father had died, and that in his will, he had left me an equal share of his fortune as to his other children.”
Fleur’s face was indescribable as she shook her head.
“You should have seen the look on his wife’s face when I showed up at her hearing to contest the will. All it took was a simple DNA scan to verify my parentage. The magistrate upheld the trust and I inherited what I considered to be blood money. My mother’s blood.”
She let her words linger for a long time before she spoke again.
“I took only what I absolutely had to have to begin an entirely new life. I gave a sum to Brigitte to repay her for raising me, far more than she spent and enough so that she could retire.” Fleur explained. “Then I left the rest untouched in an account and started again,” she looked up at him, her eyes brimming with tears. “On a space station in the Klingon outback called
Deep Space 23.”
Camen realized now just why Fleur was such an angry young woman when he had first met her there.
“All these years, I had no idea what to do with the money. I just tried to forget it, but then I realized that it could do so much good for other people, if I only spent it wisely.”
He reached out, taking her hand and tugging on her sleeve until she finally sat down beside him.
“After we spoke, on the
Alchemy,” Fleur whispered, avoiding his eyes now, “I realized that I needed one more fresh start in my life, and that now was the time to take that money and be rid of it, once and for all, and to do so in a way that only benefited others. Those who had no one to help them. So I came here, and I spent it all.”
“Everything? You didn’t keep any for yourself, for your future?”
“I could never again build a future for myself with money that my mother bought with her soul.”
She saw the look in his eyes as he reached out, unconsciously, to touch her face.
“Non, non. Please, Monsieur, do not look at me that way. This is
exactly why I never told you of my family. I did not ever want to see you look at me
that way.”
She rose and crossed the room, headed for the door. Halfway there she remembered that he could not be left alone as sick as he was.
She’d been warned to watch for signs of certain complications that the fever could bring on and as badly as she wanted to escape, she could not risk his health by allowing herself that luxury now.
“I’m sorry,” he averted his eyes, understanding that the very last thing she wanted was his sympathy.
“Besides, when it is compared against your childhood mine looks like a trip to the amusement park, eh?”
“Don’t say that,” Jariel summoned the strength to rise and approached her, taking her hand again. “One person’s suffering does not negate another’s. Your experiences are your own, and nothing changes that. I am sorry,” he tried to lead her back to sit down again, “For all you've gone through.”
“I am not that girl any longer.” Fleur insisted, standing her ground. “Nor am I the confused young woman who made her way so far from home to run away at last.
“No, I have met people that have influenced my life in the past several years, and the changes in me are not only for the better, they are permanent. People like Salvek of Vulcan. Lair Kellyn of Bajor. February Grace and yes, even Dabin Reece of Trill. But more than any other, one man has taught me that it is better to serve and keep going than to allow the darkness of the past to pull us backward. We must keep moving to remain ahead of it, and work is the best way to do that.”
“Did that man ever tell you that sometimes work is just an excuse we use to escape dealing with our emotions? That eventually we have got to slow down, to stop, and feel them? Otherwise we are as much a prisoner of them as ever?”
“No.” Fleur looked away. “You have never told me that.”
“I’m telling you now.”
She could stand his intense stare no longer. “I must go and fetch more drinking water. I will be back soon. Will you be all right?”
He nodded.
“I will hurry.” She broke free and ran out the door, stopping only once she was out of his view from the window.
-=/\=-
When she returned she not only had the water but also a basket of fresh fruit and vegetables looped over her arm.
“Delle left these on the front step,” she indicated the small cooktop across the still unfinished kitchen and the single pot that sat atop it. “I will make soup for you.”
“You don’t have to, I can eat some more instant cereal,”
“
Pffffft. I do not think so. In fact, I know not.” Fleur set about washing and peeling the vegetables, and Camen sat in a chair opposite her, knowing if he asked to help, as sick as he still was she’d only refuse him.
“May I ask you a question please?”
“But of course.”
He hesitated. Perhaps he shouldn’t. “What…ever happened to Charlotte?”
Fleur stopped peeling the root vegetable in her hand and drew a breath.
“I have heard two variations on the story of her life. One from the solicitor and one from Brigitte. Which one is true, I do not know. Perhaps neither.” She shrugged,
“Anyway, does not matter. She gave me life, for that I am grateful, because she did not have to. She could have taken the easier course and I would not be here right now, and it would have been her own choice to do so. I never would have known the difference.”
Camen recoiled at the thought of a universe without her in it.
“What were the stories?”
“Is it so important to you to know, Monsieur?”
“Yes. It is.”
She sighed.
“Well, by one account, she managed to find work with another family. She went to school and she married well. She moved far away from Earth and is out there, somewhere; but all ends were dead when they tried to find her. That is the story the solicitor told me.”
“And the other?”
“That she ended up living on the streets after she left the convent and died before she was twenty.”
Camen frowned. He truly hoped that the second story was the incorrect version.
“But as I told you, it matters not to me. She left me with the sisters at the convent without even giving me a name. Mother Superior chose it, according to documents at the church.” Fleur scoffed at the very idea behind her name.
“Fleur Aurore. Or, as they wrote on the record,
flower of the dawn. Complete nonsense.”
Camen looked up at her with tears in his eyes.
“I think it suits you perfectly.”
Fleur turned back to the cooktop where the water was just starting to boil, and kept on scrubbing the vegetables for his soup as Camen stared at her, mesmerized by her every move.
-----
Fleur Le Marc
On Bajor