Chapter Text
As she hangs around Synthville limits, waiting for Rios to join her, Arcana hands her a flower - a simple daisy-like synthetic - before she smiles and says goodbye.
Raffi idly picks a petal off and lets it go with the wind. One for Gabe. Fourteen years, and she’s been right all along. She’s lost her baby, and gained the truth. But it’s taken a whole slice out of her life and it twists like a knife in the heart. He loves me not.
She picks off a second one and remembers Gabe’s father. The good sex, the solid uncomplicated love, the family home, the Sunday morning breakfasts, the fierce hugs at the end when they held on to each other until they had to let go. She shakes her head to dispel the images and lets the wind take the soft little thing. He loves me not.
The third one’s for JL. She wishes she’d known he was going to die right from the start; it would have held back the worst of her anger. Maybe. Her face crumples a little. Here, at the end of all things, the revelation that she is right, has been right all along, bears down on her and hurts her, in some strange way she can’t grasp, even more than being wrong would have done. She’s stayed strong, and together, and come up with all the solutions, because that was what JL expected of her, his forever XO.
But now the dark underbelly of it is catching up with her, as the monstrosity of the revelation turns in her mind. It’s the breathtaking injustice of it - all the innocence caught between the hammer and the anvil. Little Thaddeus Troi-Riker. Gabe. Elnor. And now JL is dying. She’ll be losing him, and very soon. She lets the petal go. I love him.
The fourth one...this one is for herself, somehow. She’s going to die. She knows she is. Perhaps horribly. The knowledge thrills through her from crown to tiptoe, like skateboarding on the edge of a cliff. Two hundred and eighteen ships, and it only takes five minutes to sterilise a planet. Nothing she can do about it. But it doesn’t mean the bitterness of it is any less; it fills her like a dark corrosive tar all the way from throat to stomach. Ah, Raffaella. The fourth one floats away.
The last one, now. She feels the tears running down her face. Rios, darling Rios. Her baby brother, her bosom friend, her babysitter always, even when all he could do was stop her clawing at her skin in the throes of some drug or other. Fourteen years with nary a word from JL, and she couldn’t have survived any of it without that great stroke of luck: finding him, just after they’d both been cashiered, through the losers’ network of Starfleet rejects. The irony of it was that he’d always listened patiently to her drug-addled ravings about the Romulans, except now it wasn’t a horgl trip anymore, it was real, and she’d dropped him neck-deep it. She wished she’d had more sense. She wished she’d sussed Jurati out. She wished Cris hadn’t - hadn’t looked at her. He’d looked at Jurati, and then he’d seen her.
Oh, he’d said very little, and that through clenched teeth, when she’d pressed him, but she’d never, in all their escapades together, ever seen him so affected by any woman. And where he loved, he loved well, long, loyally.
She was sorry for Jurati, sorry enough to give her what little maternal loving she had left from the aborted attempt with Gabe, still sitting in her stomach like a stone. More than a temporary good person, Jurati, one might even say passionate, brilliant, dedicated; crushed all the same between hammer and anvil like they all had been.
But she didn’t trust her, especially now, with her broken mind, with the terrible tearing battles she’d fought against her own psyche, with the hold Oh might still have over her, with two hundred and eighteen snakeheads bearing down on them.
“Hey”, says Rios, turning up like he’s always done for her, looking somehow like he knows a happy secret. “Agnes is staying behind to do some synth work. You ready?”
She crushes the petal, and, unseen by him, flings it away.
They start walking.