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Up until now, Liva had only touched, and nuzzled, and kissed it. But could she—? She returned to his good eye. Yes, she saw permission.
“What happened to it?” she asked.
They’d taken half his sight, but it was the length of the road ahead that blinded him – the unknowable length of the one-and-infinite road which led to oblivion or perhaps, if he died on his feet, to Sto’vo’kor.
Two years a prisoner – their finite number no succor, being unknown to him. All he could see with his dimming vision was the road before him, a nonstop non-progression of days without difference, fights without purpose, victories without honor, wounds without meaning.
The road. The isolation, the futility. The gravity, the length. That’s what he survived. It blinded him, yet he endured it and escaped with half his sight retained, the scar a testament to his perseverance. He was proud of the damage. He wore it as a badge of honor – and of reminder: this was who the Jem’Hadar were, what they did.
Liva lay with her cheek on his heart, hoping he wouldn’t feel the tears rolling into his fur. They weren’t for pity, but didn’t come with labels to say otherwise. They’d be easy to misread, because he didn’t know them as she did. They weren’t for weeping, really – not the kind to actually spill over, after springing to her eyes.
Other than now, these surfaced only when she watched dancers. Skilled ones, whose bodies could express the unwordable and penetrate her with it. The breach occurred through a sense she couldn’t identify, something other than her known five. The directness of it, the power, the mystery – that’s what made her eyes water.
But now they watered as Martok penetrated her with his own unwordable expression – and they spilled over because the breach was a release, in words, of the heretofore unworded – and they flowed because the release was his, and now hers, making the confluence too enormous to contain.
“Despair is no respecter of species,” he remarked, “nor of time, nor place. It cleaves to Vulcan and Klingon alike, on homeworld or asteroid, in ages past or the present hour. Listen to this image, Liva, of how it binds a man.” The ‘image’ came from the PADD she’d brought him – the special one, which held his Vulcan desert poem in his native tongue. He’d been quietly exploring more of its poetry when she awakened this morning, reading beside her in the bed.
“I see the road before me,” he translated from the Klingon text, “yet it blinds me with its length. My steps are trapped in gravity— in its eyes, rather—
“No, in its gaze. Gravity traps my steps in its gaze, until I cannot bear to look. I close my eyes, and my feet— my feet—”
Liva waited. Martok lay inhaling with force, his chest rising steeply beneath her cheek. She rode it back down as he expelled the breath with matching weight.
It was in his prison cell, he explained, that the road stretched to its most blinding length. From the door, it was four short steps to his designated bed. But those steps were “trapped, in the gaze of gravity” – spellbound, by a stupefying syllogism: If he walked them, then night must come. If he slept, it meant he wasn’t dead.
“In that bed, Liva, was not where I meant my eye to close.”
It only benefited the enemy that their captive Klingon fought so strenuously in combat, defending his life with the fiercest determination to win his honorable death.
He never did win it. Kept losing. Returning to his cell. Facing the bed. Battered, but alive. Alive again, and again, and yet again. The enemy that much better trained, that much more battle-savvy. To overcome his opponent in the ring was to oppose his own people in war.
No, he didn’t want to sleep. Didn’t want the night. He faced the bed and gravity trapped his steps. Unable to bear the view, even so did he stop and stand and stare at it, loathe to walk the blinding distance to sit or lie in it. “My eyes are closing, and my feet—
“I want to say they ‘pull down’, they ‘sink’— but, it has more permanence, it’s— as if through the rock, they work themselves into it and down, they—”
“Like roots?”
“Yes! My feet are r- r-rooting, I root them down. My steps are trapped and I’m blinded. I’m rooting down my feet, at the door. If I don’t walk this road, then the night cannot come and although I may not die, neither will I sleep, nor live another day.”
With these words he barreled into a shaky silence, drawing long rough pulls of air through his nose, in, and out again, unevenly.
“Oh, Martok,” Liva whispered. His heart thumped disquietly amid his rising-falling breaths, and he squeezed a palmful of her hair, gripping it close to her scalp. She imagined his toes likewise clutching the floor of his cell, inside his boots (if he’d worn those).
“You didn’t want to exist,” she said, and waited as before, riding his heavy form in the thickened lull. At length he took a steadying breath and cleared his throat, then translated the remaining words with softer grit in his voice.
“The journey will not end, if I hide. The night hides the light— the light only— from my senses. Perhaps by pushing forward without fear, I shall see the way that I am to walk.”
Liva watched her fingers play quietly in the smoke-brushed fur on his pectoral. “Did you? See another way?” It went without saying that her bear had pushed forward without fear, or despite it rather, as was requisite for courage.
His muscle rose and fell again before he replied. “Not I, at first, but my cellmate. A Cardassian, with dauntless will and a clever scheme. And the ‘way’, the way was— not another path but a light, Liva, which the night was unable to hide from my senses.”
He swallowed. “It untrapped my steps. An imprisoned warrior does not root his feet while there is hope of escape.”
As Martok finished speaking, his hand relaxed in Liva’s hair, his tortured squeezes melting into gentle strokes. All the steel of his grip was tenderness now, his caresses open and warm. This hand – so soft, so giving – this very same hand possessed the hardness to sustain years of daily combat brutal enough to destroy its owner’s eye. This hand, this—
Liva’s throat made a noise and she moved to mask it by kissing his chest the same as she’d kissed his face— everywhere, without letting up— no, without looking up. She’d lost command of those unlabeled tears and was nakedly crying over a strong proud warrior.
Dammit! Don’t let him see you. And get a grip.
She felt for the blanket’s edge and pulled it over her head, fixing her mind on the cocooning heat, and on his fur, gauging its curly density with her lips, and on the solid muscle beneath it, which boasted the fiber to withstand two years of—
Her throat hitched again: hiding was useless. “I’m sorry!” she told him, pressing her forehead against his heart. Even those two measly words were thick with the damned wetness.
“You’re sorry…” echoed her general. “What makes you say that, my Liva? Come, tell me.” He lifted the top of the blanket, making the room’s air feel cool where her skin wasn’t dry.
Liva let him see her face. “I’m afraid to answer.”
He chuckled softly. “Ah, as before. You want me to respect you in the morning.”
“No! I mean—” She looked away from his eye. “It’s you. I’m the one who should respect you.”
“Liva,” he replied, cupping her cheek in that hand, drying it with a firm thumb, “do you believe it shameful to weep?”
She shut her eyes. Yes, exactly… I admire you too much to cry…
“I do not. I myself wept in that prison camp.” He made a throaty noise like a laugh. “There were days when I wept like an old woman, thinking I would never again set foot on a Klingon vessel. It does not shame me to say it.”
She reopened her eyes and Martok smiled, still stroking her cheek. “But I might have done far worse than weep, had I known of my little Liva and her silken qevpob, thinking I should never be granted the fortune to touch my yearning hand to it.”
“My silken what?” asked his Liva, nuzzling that hand and smirking despite her tears.
“Your cheek.” He ran his thumb across her up-quirked lips.
“Mmm…” She kissed it while nestling more firmly into his embrace, where his hand wasn’t the only thing yearning now. “You make it sound so dirty in Klingon…”
