Work Text:
"'Cause I see sparks fly
Whenever you smile"
- Taylor Swift, "Sparks Fly"
/
SAM was playing her theremin in one of the campus’ soundproof practice rooms when a movement made her look up. Ocam Sadal was smiling and waving at her through the glass panel in the door. She waved back.
He pressed the door button. She unlocked it.
“May I come in, Queen Sam?” he asked, sweeping into a courtly bow.
“Of course, silly!” She giggled, swept up a handful of programmable matter from the table, and formed an extra chair for him to sit on as the door slid shut. “Here.”
“Thanks.” He dropped into it with a sigh, stretched out his legs, and leaned back with half-closed eyes. “Mm, it’s so quiet in here. Feels so good.”
SAM glanced at her instrument. “I can stop playing if you’d rather … ”
“Oh, no. I meant, like … telepathically quiet.” He rubbed his temples as if his head ached. “Caleb and Darem have been sulking at each other for hours without saying a word.”
“Oh, okay. I gotcha.”
She lifted her hands and kept playing, until tiny musical notes flew around the room like a swarm of bees. Ocam pulled out a screen and worked on it silently. It would have been exactly her idea of a perfect afternoon if he didn’t look so tired … and if the bone-rattling voices of her Makers didn’t keep replaying in her memory over and over.
If you disobey us, you will have failed.
She’d still been giddy from her revelation about Benjamin Sisko at the time and cut the transmission with a carefree “Later!”, but the more time she had to think about it, the more she dreaded what they might say or do to her in response.
“Hey, Ocam?” she said, after one too many wrong notes.
“Hmm?”
“How did you and your sister get your father to take down the Wall?”
“Well … she did most of the arguing, to be honest,” he said, with a self-deprecating shrug. “Tarima’s never been the kind of person to take no for an answer.”
“Wasn’t she scared, though? To talk back to him, I mean?”
“Scared? He’s our father. I mean, he can be stubborn, but he’d never … SAM, did something or someone scare you?”
His sleepy dark eyes were suddenly so wide open, and focused on her face with such heartfelt concern, that she didn’t know where to look. She felt as if she’d given him full access to her control center without even trying.
“I - I thought you couldn’t read photonic minds.”
“I can still read your face. Now, what’s wrong?”
She told him, in just the sort of incoherent rush the Makers would never have approved of, about the ultimatum they had set for her, how she’d failed to meet it, and how they were threatening to recall her back to Kasq. He listened with a stillness that had something very controlled about it, hands clasped, jaw tight. Several times, she saw him lean forward and open his mouth, only to shut it again.
“Now do you see why I’m scared?” she wound up. “I can’t blame them for being disappointed in me - I mean, what kind of diplomat only makes a fight worse? - but I like it here. I like you, and … I don’t want to go home.”
Ocam reached out for her, his white hand with its beating pulse covering her photonic brown one. She wasn’t sure what it meant that she sometimes saw fireworks when he touched her, but this time it was a candle: small, bright and warm.
“Starfleet won’t let them take you,” he said. “Not against your will. And if there’s anyone who should be disappointed, it’s you in them, not the other way around.”
“You really think so?” She faltered. “But - the War Collegers … They were acting like jerks, of course, but it wasn’t their fault I was mad at the Makers.”
SAM could still remember, even through the haze of Caleb’s intoxication program dialed up to twelve shots, how helpless she had felt, not knowing what impossible demand the Makers would blast into her audioprocessors next. She had been used to it at home, but that was before she’d known what privacy felt like. Benjamin Sisko’s story, she felt, was hers: the story of a person pulled away from everyone they loved by forces beyond their control.
“Hey,” said Ocam. “You messed up, so what? Everyone does. If I told you all the stupid stuff I did in bars, believe me, we’d be here for hours. You can tell your Makers that mistakes are part of learning - and if they don’t get it. that’s on them.”
He reminded her of Professor Dax, whose offbeat wisdom had set her cognitive subroutines spinning in a similar way. It was disorienting to be told, after a lifetime of trying to be perfect, that failure didn’t have to mean the end of everything.
“I know one thing I’ve learned, anyway,” she said. “Twelve shots is definitely too many. It’s going to take a lot of experimentation to figure out my limits.”
It was highly gratifying to hear Ocam laugh, even if she hadn’t exactly meant for that to be funny.
“Well, if you ever need someone to see you home safe,” he said, “Call me any time.”
He bowed over her hand and let it go, every bit the Betazoid nobleman - then ruined the image by bumping into the theremin on the table. The metal on his commbadge would put it all out of tune. It would take ages to fix.
SAM, who was seeing fireworks fit for a First Contact Day parade, couldn’t care less.