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She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah
- Leonard Cohen, “Hallelujah,” 1984
Maybe there's a God above
but all I ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
- Leonard Cohen, “Hallelujah,” 1994
Marie doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand that he doesn’t want to talk about it, that he can’t talk about it.
He tells her it’s classified, which isn’t exactly the evasion he uses it as, but she pushes back, stating that she’s got higher security clearance than he does—as if that entitles her to the story of events. As if that entitles her to—
No.
He doesn’t want to talk about it.
Will she push harder? Demand more? Not knowing, all he feels is anxiety—and a shred of lust when she leans in to kiss him. He grasps at it, uses it to push down the anxiety and finds himself telling her that they should get together again when she’s back on-planet; he will probably still be here. And she says that she would like that.
“But I really hope you’re not.”
She doesn’t understand.
***
But of course she doesn’t understand, Kat would have pointed out. Marie can’t possibly understand that which he does not tell her.
Kat was logical like that.
But this isn’t about logic. This is about fate. Something that should be unknowable yet is something that he knows. This is about the future, preserving it, protecting it. Ensuring those they’d lost to it were not lost in vain.
He knows things he shouldn’t know, things he’d rather not know, things others can never know. He’s seen his future, and that is a thing no man should be forced to see, a burden no man should be forced to carry.
Of course Marie doesn’t understand.
***
The incessant chirping of his communicator drives him from the house. He doesn’t need to see who’s calling to know they’ll want to talk about it—about what happened, about why he’s here rather than on his bridge—and he can’t.
He can’t talk about it, so instead he saddles his horse for a long ride, galloping across the snow-covered valley as if he can outrun his fate, running, running, running until he is as breathless as his horse, and he has to spend long minutes walking the animal out to properly cool him down, and guilt over his behavior has him trading carrots for the perception of forgiveness.
Kat had loved feeding the horses carrots.
“I think you’re the only doctor I know who still makes house calls,” he told her when she came to Montana after that fateful mission to Rigel VII, after Talos…
“Just for you,” she said with a smile as Tango gobbled up the carrot in her palm. Chris might have raised Tango from a colt, but he swore that horse loved her more. The traitor.
Kat wasn’t a doctor, not anymore, promoted to rear admiral some five years back, but she’d said that he needed help, and while he wasn’t too proud to admit that she was right, he had refused to see another counselor. So, there they were, grooming horses while he told her about Rigel VII, mucking out stalls while he talked about Vina and the Talosians, and stuffing hay nets while she helped him tease reality from illusion.
***
Marie doesn’t like horses. He thinks she’s somewhat scared of them.
The first time she came to Montana he asked if she would like to go for a ride, and she said that she didn’t know how. He offered to teach her, promising that Mary Lou was very patient with beginners, but Marie declined. She declined again the second time, and she never joins him in the barn for chores so the time he spends there is solitary—except for the horses.
At some point he realizes that he doesn’t mind. Horses don’t ask questions he can’t answer. Horses don’t need to know to understand. Horses simply allow him to not talk about it. It is a silence, an understanding, he appreciates.
If he and Marie were anything more than casual, then her aversion to the things he loves would be a problem. But they’re not, so it’s not.
***
As soon as she leaves, he’s in the saddle, running from the chirping and the specter of fate and a hundred things he cannot talk about. Running, running, running.
He should have remembered that you can’t outrun an admiral with a point to prove.
***
It’s classified.
And he is so damn tired of those words. Tired of hearing them, tired of thinking them, tired of speaking them. The taste of them is like broken glass in his mouth, too many sharp edges wrapped up in two little words, so many that the truth becomes a lie he repeats over and over, until he is choking on his own blood.
It’s ironic, he thinks, that everyone wants to know. But if they knew, they wouldn’t want to know.
The present is a veil between anticipation and horror. Part the veil and madness may follow.
Indeed.
***
April wants a soldier, a plastic toy of a man, molded without the fractured mind or the crippling self-doubt or the soul-crushing guilt, and he wants it bad enough that Chris manages to get out of his own redundant systems checks, cashiered back onto duty without a psych evaluation, as if none of it ever happened. And really, according to the official logs, it didn’t.
But it did happen. He watched it happen. And now he’s stuck in the present, buffeted by a past and a future he can’t talk about, and everywhere, everywhere, someone wants to know.
He really should have had those systems checks.
***
When Kat came to Montana after the war—another post-mission evaluation house call, and why she hadn’t yet kicked him to another counselor he never knew—Chris had every intention of demanding an explanation for her orders to sideline the Enterprise the moment she knocked on his door.
But his relief at seeing her there, standing on his porch, alive and whole, was so great that all thoughts of reproach immediately disappeared and, wordlessly, he enveloped her in a tight hug.
She’d nearly died. How could orders compare?
Not expecting his reaction, it took her a moment to reciprocate, but then her duffle bag thumped onto the porch at their feet, and she was clinging to him, shaking in his arms, great sobs muffled in his shirt, and he realized that as hard as it was to sit out the war, it was a hundred—a thousand—times harder for her to survive it.
Whatever her reasons for keeping him out of it, he forgave her then and there.
So when they’d walked out to the barn, and Kat had fed the horses all the carrots she could carry, he didn’t ask her to explain her orders but talked only of the mission.
Later, he asked if she wanted to talk about it, about what she went through.
Kat just shook her head. “I can’t, Chris. It’s not classified, but I can’t.”
He understands her a little better now.
***
As the shuttle arcs its way through the vacuum towards Enterprise, he reminds himself that this is for Una.
And maybe April is right. Maybe he’s fine. Maybe he doesn’t actually need those systems checks. Maybe he’s not really broken and all he needs to do is get back on the proverbial horse.
So he does.
But the Enterprise feels more like a graveyard than a starship, and the stretch of deck plating between the turbo lift and his chair feels like the plank, and the chair feels just as broken as he does when he settles into it, and everywhere he looks, fate makes itself known.
He takes a breath. He can survive this. For Una.
***
“There’s surviving, and then there’s living,” he tells La’an. Not his words. And he knows Kat would say them again if she were here to say them, with the same crooked grin she wore the day after graduation, the day his deferral request had been answered.
“I’m sorry,” she said, sitting beside him on his stripped-bare mattress in his stripped-bare dorm room. “I know how much you wanted that post.” Of his friends, Kat was the only one who understood what it was like to watch your friends celebrate commissions you couldn’t have. But she would be starting her residency at Starfleet Medical this summer, an accomplishment in its own right.
“Mom needs me more,” Chris said. He didn’t think his mother would survive losing both him and his father in the same year. He couldn’t ship out to deep space now, not until things were more settled at home.
He pulled in a shaky breath and turned to look at her. “I’ll survive. Besides,” he added, forcing a smile, “McKinley isn’t a bad posting.”
Nothing this year had gone the way he’d thought it would. Losing his father, nearly doubling his course load to graduate on time after the bereavement leave, and now deferring his commission to take a posting closer to home. At least at McKinley he’d get to pilot the latest shuttle designs before any of his cohorts.
“Surviving isn’t living, Chris.”
He looked away, at the crates that would be transported to his mother’s house instead of to the Antares, at the PADD that contained the letter from Captain Warner and the words “unable to promise the posting next year” atop the stack.
They were quiet for a moment before Kat lightly slapped his leg and stood. “Come on. Up you get.” Chris questioned her with a look. “We’re going to get these crates to the transporter, and then we’re going to go to your place and wallow in some very expensive scotch, and tomorrow, flyboy, you’re going to start living.” She grinned and offered her hand.
He took it, and for the first time in a long time, he smiled.
***
Start living.
He tries. Kat gave her life so that he could, and he won’t waste that. So he tries.
He gathers up the broken pieces of himself, he tries to forget about the future haunting his steps and the past nipping at his heels, and after they get Una back, for a while, things are better.
Better isn’t perfect, but it’s something. There are days that don’t actively try to break him further, days when he manages to feel comfortable in the chair, and there are even days when he allows himself to believe that, eventually, he will be fine again.
He talks to Una. He hosts dinner for the crew. He goes fishing with Joseph. He calls Marie.
He lives.
***
A fortuitous assignment at the Neutral Zone turns long-distance comms into actual dates. Dinner, breakfast when they spend the night together. Things are going well until Marie mentions rumors about Romulans developing new weapons.
He wants to challenge her assertion, the casual prejudice he hears in her voice, but she changes the subject, and he remembers that this is a date, not the debate floor, and that Marie fought in the war, and even though he didn’t, he knows enough of the details to understand how Klingon military tactics would leave any veteran blaming the most obvious fall guy when faced with similar atrocities, so he lets her.
But she brings up the past, the past he has tried so hard to leave behind, the past he covered up, fresh paint on a scorched bulkhead—a different era of captain; a different era of himself—and she asks about things he doesn’t want to talk about, things he can’t talk about. Anxiety twists in his stomach, stealing his appetite, and when she leaves, he isn’t sure if their limited time together is a blessing or a curse.
“I’m always curious who the Chris of tomorrow will be…Surprise me.”
She still doesn’t understand.
***
She would understand if you’d just tell her, and he can practically hear the exasperation that would be in Kat’s voice as she said it.
But he’s not ready. He’s not ready to tell Marie that the Chris of tomorrow is a scarred and broken man. He’s not ready to tell her that in less than ten years he will be a cripple, the furthest thing from the Chris he is today.
He’s not ready to watch her run away.
***
Sometimes he wonders if he made a mistake on Boreth, if there hadn’t been another way to get the crystal other than trading his future for it.
He already knows the answer, but sometimes, late at night when he replays events over and over again in his mind, he imagines that he makes a different choice, one in which he never goes down to Boreth, and he allows himself to imagine a different future, one in which he remains whole and unbroken.
And sometimes—
***
He was halfway to her temporary office before he remembered that she already left, was probably halfway to Earth by now. He continued down the corridor anyway, punched in his override code with shaking fingers, and stumbled into the vacant cabin.
The sound of the closing doors was the impetus his legs needed to finally give out, and he ended up on his hands and knees, gasping out an order to the computer.
Moments later, Kat’s concerned voice came from the wall console. “Chris? What’s wrong?”
“I…” His heart was pounding too fast in his chest, his skin was hot and cold all at once, and something was pressing against his chest, making it hard to breathe. He grasped at his jacket, clutching a fistful of fabric, tugging, but still that invisible pressure tightened around his lungs pressing, pressing, pressing, and his words came on a rush of breath. “Ican’ttalkaboutit.”
“Okay.” Training hid her confusion, masking it in patience and professionalism. “What do you need?”
“I can’t— I can’t— I can’t—” He couldn’t breathe. It was too much. How was he supposed to live with this knowledge? How was he supposed to bear this fate alone? How was he supposed to survive this?
“…my voice…not real…You’re on Discovery…safe...”
Gradually, her voice brought him back from the future, and the pressure on his chest eased.
“…take a deep breath for me? Good. And let it out. Again.”
When he was firmly back in the present, he released his hold on his uniform and looked up at her face on the screen. For a moment, she let the mask of professionalism slip, worry crossing her face. At the sight, he forcibly swallowed his fear.
“Chris…”
“I’m… I’m okay,” he said, the words trembling.
“You’re not,” Kat replied, and they both knew it for the truth. “What do you need?”
But before he could answer, Saru’s voice was sounding over the comm. Tyler and L’Rell were back.
“I have to go,” Chris told her.
“Chris.”
“I know. I… I know.”
On the screen, Kat nodded.
***
—Sometimes he wonders what he would have said if they’d been allowed to finish that conversation.
And what it might have changed.
***
Marie doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand that he would rather lose his commission than see his best friend imprisoned for the crime of being herself.
Eyewitness to his vehemence, and still she tells him that his job is to uphold the law that would send Una to jail—as if he hadn’t attacked her security officer in front of half a dozen witnesses. As if he regretted doing so.
Anger seethes in his chest, its teeth sharper than the knife in his hand, and this time he does challenge her assertion, with harsh words that question the morality of her sacred law.
Marie stares at him intransigently, clinging to her conviction the way a fanatic clings to doctrine, and he stares back, equally unwavering, wondering if Marie is angry because Una might go to prison, or because Neera’s involvement has turned her open-and-shut case into one she could actually lose.
Her answer, when it comes, is that she didn’t ask for this case—as if that absolves her of any guilt in the matter.
“She should have taken the deal.”
She doesn’t understand.
***
Maybe it’s personal for her, too.
Marie swore an oath to uphold the law, and maybe she took his involvement in the case and his insistence that the law is wrong as a personal attack. Maybe she really doesn’t want to prosecute Una’s case, and maybe a career of trying cases she doesn’t believe in has honed her ability to compartmentalize her own morals.
And she’s right, taking the stand would put too many people at risk. As much as he wants to fight this fight, he recognizes that in this instance he is indeed outgunned. He appreciates the warning, and her willingness to help Una as much as she is able.
It’s enough to make him forget the fact that she never did condemn the law.
***
“I’m adopted,” Kat told him once, back when they were still young enough to have the word “lieutenant” affixed to their respective ranks and naïve enough to fear its permanence.
Chris looked over at her words, spoken out of the blue. They had the observation lounge to themselves, the entirety of the starbase still at the gala fêting representatives of the Federation’s two newest member worlds. It was the event of the decade, but as mid-level officers, they were both old enough as to be unimpressed by the novelty of obligatory work-sponsored parties and too unimportant to be missed when they snuck away from the noise and the crowd.
Lying next to him, Kat turned from the stars overhead. “Did I ever tell you that?”
Chris shook his head, wondering why she was telling him now. “No.”
Kat hummed the affirmative and looked back at the stars, fingering the beaded fabric of her gown. “I can’t even remember my birth mother, and I never knew my biological father. My parents and I aren’t biologically related, but they’ve always been my parents. The Federation is like that.”
He frowned at her profile, not understanding. “Taking in peoples who need homes?”
Kat snorted in amusement. “Sometimes,” she said softly, and it was a moment before she continued. “When my parents told me that I was adopted, I cried for days, wondering what was wrong with me that my real parents didn’t want me. Finally, they got me to calm down enough to tell me that it wasn’t that my birth parents didn’t want me, but that they did. They chose me. And despite the temper tantrum I’d just thrown, and all the arguments and the screaming matches and the times I refused to clean my room, they still chose me.
“That’s what the Federation is to me. That’s what we’re celebrating today—planets, people, choosing each other, adopting each other into a larger collective despite their flaws and shortcomings. Protecting each other, looking out for each other. Mutual interest based on shared values, not DNA.” She looked at him, blushing slightly at the dumbfounded look on his face. “I know it’s not the most elegant analogy.”
“No,” he said quickly, reaching for her hand. “It’s perfect.” Because that’s what the Federation and Starfleet was to him, too: family.
***
He’s making lasagna the first time he feels guilt. Guilt because Marie surprises him with a thoughtful and meaningful gift, and he’s been hiding a fate he’s still not ready to tell her about. Guilt because when their kiss is interrupted by another untimely comm, she retreats to the bedroom to take the call and all he feels is relief for the chance to think. Guilt because she’s clearly invested in this relationship, and he can’t help but wonder if his continued reluctance to tell her about the future means he’s not ready for a relationship at all.
He should tell her, before things get any more serious, so she can understand what she is signing up for with him. He owes her that. But the thought of doing so sets his heart to racing in his chest, sets the bulkheads to closing in around him, until he is panting for breath and his grip on the medallion has forged its imprint on his palm.
***
He talks himself in circles trying to decide what to do as he layers noodles and sauce and cheese.
She’s clearly ready to take their relationship to the next level—if the medallion in his palm is any indication. But he’s not. That would require trusting her with his fate, unlocking the door and letting her inside the emotional walls he’s built around his future. And if he opens that door, if she learns what’s to come, there’s a chance that she’ll disappear, there’s a chance that the fear he’s locked inside will escape, and the bulkheads start to close in on him, pressing, pressing, pressing, until it becomes a struggle to breathe, until his quarters become a coffin, and he has to get out, has to get out, has to get out.
So when her comm offers the perfect excuse, he takes it, ending their relationship before she ever has the opportunity to hurt him.
***
Sometimes he imagines how that conversation would go, how Marie would react when he tells her what will happen to him.
Will she accept the man he is going to become, or will she end their relationship and leave him to his fate?
He thinks of Una, still so insistent that there is a way out of what the future has in store for him. Would Marie insist the same? Would she stay, hoping to change his future? Would she believe him when he told her that it wasn’t possible? And when fate inevitably came for him, would she desert him when she saw what it turned him into? Or would she stay, resenting the man he had become?
***
In some ways—most ways—the forgetting was easier. No past to haunt him, no future to taunt him. A simple existence without the burden of command weighing him down. The kind of life he once dreamed of.
But Rigel VII shows you who you really are, and he is not meant for a simple existence. He is meant for things far more painful and cruel.
It’s a harsh lesson in himself, one he refused to learn the first time he was here and one he can’t ignore now.
A galaxy full of lives to choose from and he chooses duty. Every. Single. Time.
***
There might be things Marie doesn’t understand, things he can’t tell her, but one thing they’ve always mutually understood is duty.
A relationship will be difficult, yes—he hadn’t been lying about that—but their mutual dedication, that’s a strength, a bond. There aren’t many people who understand a captain’s commitment to his crew.
“So where are you gonna to find another gal who gets you like I do?”
Nowhere.
She brought him home, and he can’t throw away a chance at happiness out of fear.
And he knows that he doesn’t deserve her or her forgiveness, but he asks for it anyway.
“Let’s see how the next thirty minutes go and take it from there.”
***
As a cadet, he didn’t go home for spring break. He indulged his mother for winter break because the end of the semester meant that he had no homework and thus no excuse to remain on campus when home was only a transport away. But mid-semester he could exaggerate the amount of studying he had to do and stay on campus. It was lonely with the majority of the student body and all of his friends gone for the week, but he just couldn’t, couldn’t go home to another fight with his father.
Then, the morning of the first day of the break sophomore year, a mess tray plopped down across from his, silverware rattling, coffee sloshing.
Chris looked up and frowned. “I thought you went home?”
Kat pulled out a chair and sat. “I’m a grad student with a full course load and papers to grade. I don’t have time to go home,” she said and took a sip of her coffee.
He knew she was exaggerating, but he appreciated the sentiment, and his answering smile wasn’t completely forced.
The company made the week pass more quickly, days spent studying and exploring the city, nights spent staying up far too late watching old science fiction films in his dorm room. It very quickly became a contest of sorts to see who could pick the most absurd film, and they laughed their way through poor special effects and ludicrous plot lines, consuming what was surely unhealthy amounts of popcorn and analyzing humanity’s vision of the future, conversations and friendly debates cut off only when one or both of them fell asleep and picked up the next morning over breakfast. And while they talked and laughed and debated, Chris could forget about his father and the arguments waiting for him come summer.
***
Crivo?
He balks. The entire planet is the very definition of tourist trap: cheap souvenirs, bad food, overpriced excursions, and gaudy hotels. The last thing he wants on vacation is to spend half his time fending off hawkers and the other half being sneered at by the locals, and he can’t help the way his face wrinkles in distaste at the thought.
But Marie wants to see the museum, and waxes poetical about day trips and lakes that are no doubt crowded with noisy tourists and where he’s willing to bet fishing is banned entirely.
His resistance is so strong that for a moment, he thinks the whole idea of a vacation together is a mistake, because he would rather stay on Enterprise than spend a week in a busy tourist destination. But Marie seems to have the whole thing planned already, and when she asks if he’s keeping something from her, it’s not just resistance he feels, but fear. Because yes, there is something he’s not telling her, something that he can’t tell her, something he doesn’t want to tell her, and how can they plan a vacation together when he’s keeping his future a secret?
So he calls off the whole trip before she can ask again.
***
She calls him, demanding the explanation he should have given her in the first place, and his request to have this conversation at a better time—in a better location—is met with accusations in song, and then he’s singing too, venting his frustration about their lack of shared interests until he catches himself. They can’t have this conversation on the bridge.
But the words don’t stop, and what would have taken hours of therapy to vocalize is spilling from his lips in the course of a stanza: that he would rather run than be honest.
And thankfully La’an cuts the comm before he can get any further, because he doesn’t need therapy to understand why he would rather end things with Marie than have a tough conversation with her.
***
The boeuf bourguignon is a metaphor, one he’s not fully conscious of until he is halfway through preparing the dish, slow-cooked labor and care an edible manifestation of penance and commitment. Though, perhaps it’s a futile one because Marie says even that won’t make her forget that he lied to her, and rather than question if that is indeed what he did, he wonders if she is speaking about the food or the metaphor behind it.
He finally tells her what he wants, that Crivo sounds like a personalized nightmare, and she tells him that he needs to be more honest with her or they won’t work.
“You’ve got to trust me more than that. You’ve got to trust us.”
He nods and tells her that he knows, not that he does, because he also knows that it was never about the vacation.
***
“So this is where you snuck off to.”
Kat’s voice was startling over the sounds of laughter coming from the nearby campfire, causing Chris to nearly jump out of his skin.
Sure enough, there she was, a speckled blue mug that he knew contained several shots of whiskey in her hands. He was surprised that she’d been the one to come after him; she’d been looking very cozy with Gabriel before he’d gotten up.
The camping trip had been his idea, a night out in the middle of the desert with friends. No papers to write, no finals to study for, just good friends and more booze than they could conceivably consume. But he’d snuck away at least five minutes ago, needing space from the drunken revelry, needing space to think, and he glowered at the one who would dare intrude on his solitude.
“What if I had been taking a piss?”
Kat scoffed and hooked a thumb over her shoulder. “Head’s on the other side of the rock.”
Caught, Chris grunted in response and relaxed back against the rock formation.
Gravel crunched beneath her boots as she moved closer. “Would you like to be alone?”
“No, but…” He looked to the right. Even with the stars bright overhead it was hard to make out her features in the shadow of the tall rocks, especially with the scarf and heavy jacket swallowing half her face. Further beyond, Philippa laughed and said something he couldn’t make out. No doubt still giving Leland shit for nearly tipping the ATV.
“Ah.” Kat leaned back against the rock next to him.
They were quiet for long moments, staring out at the vast wilderness and endless sky.
“Today’s my dad’s birthday,” Chris said eventually, then scuffed his boot against the ground and amended, “Would have been.”
“Oh.”
“I thought I wanted to get rip-roaring drunk with my friends and forget the whole day even existed, but…”
“But,” she echoed knowingly.
“Yeah.”
Kat didn’t respond further. Just tipped her cup over and let the whiskey spill out onto the ground.
***
Parnassus Beta reeks of blood and gore. He can taste it on the back of his tongue, sharp and metallic.
“Monsters,” La’an said once, but he isn’t so sure. Klingons, Romulans, Gorn…
Sometimes a monster is just someone you don’t understand yet.
And maybe it is naïvely optimistic to think that there might be more to the Gorn than carnage, but he needs something to hope for right now, because the very air is heavy with blood and he fears that they are too late.
***
His relief at seeing Marie alive and whole is so great that his legs nearly give out. Somehow, he manages to stay vertical, and then she’s in his arms, and he’s holding her tight, and everything is going to be okay.
But then she pushes him away, calling him an idiot and saying that he should not have come.
He’s confused. He came for her, and she’s…angry?
And then it’s clear: she’s not angry that someone answered her distress call and came to rescue her; she’s angry that he came.
“You were safe. And now you’re here.”
He actually understands that better than she knows, and not just because the words echo across time and space.
***
“There’s more to it,” he said as soon as the ready room doors closed behind them, “isn’t there?” They had mere minutes before Discovery arrived at Section 31 headquarters, but he had been waiting a year for this explanation; he would have it now. And he would have the whole of it, not simple platitudes meant to stroke his ego. “About the war? The Pergamum?”
“Of course there is.” She wasn’t looking at him, instead staring out the viewport she had walked straight towards after preceding him into the ready room. “I know sitting out the war was hell for you, but Chris…” She trailed off, and watching her reflection in the viewport, he thought she was about to cry. “We lost half the fleet in that war, and they weren’t. Going. To. Stop.”
She spun to face him, expression hard. “I had to make a lot of terrible choices during the war, but…” She trailed off, her features softening as she stared at him, and then raised her arms and let them fall in a gesture of defeat. “You were safe. Keeping you that way? That choice was easy.”
He…didn’t know what to say to that.
But they never got the chance to find out what he would have said because Detmer commed with the two-minute warning he’d asked for, and Kat was composing her expression, and he knew that their moment of honesty was over.
***
Their orders are to remain on their side of the demarcation line. But he won’t let orders or an arbitrary line drawn in the sand prevent him from helping the ones he cares about. Not this time. He did that once before and it nearly destroyed him. He won’t let it happen again.
This time, there is not a force in the galaxy that can stop him from going to her. Not the Brass, not the Gorn, and, God help him, not the threat of war.
***
But the longer they remain on Parnassus Beta, the more dire their situation begins to look, until Marie’s despair seems warranted.
Tactically, they have no good options, and he can’t see a way out of this, not without comms, or a transporter, or a hell of a lot more firepower.
But maybe…
Ferrying people off the planet in waves is the worst of a lot of bad ideas; it would take a miracle to make it off the planet once, let alone twice, three, four, however many trips it would take to get everyone back to Enterprise.
But hiding in plain sight would certainly make it easier.
It’s not a great plan, it’s not even a good plan, but it’s a start.
***
But the Gorn find them anyway. It has them cornered, their only route of escape cut off, and he knows that the youngling can kill them faster than any one of them can draw a weapon.
The thing screams, in triumph he thinks. Marie holds her ground. His heart is in his throat.
The Gorn coils for the attack…only to turn and run from the kill.
It doesn’t make any sense.
And Marie…
She knows why; he’s sure of it.
***
She’s cagey when he asks, trying to turn his attention back to the mission at hand, but he won’t be swayed. She knows something.
It’s hypocritical of him, but he asks anyway, asks her to trust him with the truth.
Eventually, she does. Pulls up her sleeve and shows him the truth, and it’s far worse than he could have ever imagined.
***
“There’s an emergency lever for the blast door. I can bring it down manually, from the inside, and seal off the rest of the ship.”
“No,” he said simply, knowing what she meant to do.
“We are out of time,” she argued. “That last light will change, this torpedo will blow, and everyone on the bridge, maybe everyone on this ship, will die.”
“And if you do this, you die.”
***
No. He won’t let her do this. This is his mission. He won’t let her sacrifice herself for it, for them, not when there’s still a chance he can save her. He’s stood witness to too much death, too much sacrifice, already. He can’t bear to watch it happen again.
He won’t survive watching it happen again.
***
“This isn’t where your story ends,” she said gently, “and I think you know that.”
Of course she would have put it all together—Boreth, the crystal, his comm. She’d always had an uncanny sense of perception. It was probably why she was here, on the Enterprise, in the middle of this battle for their future: for him.
But if his fate was sealed, then he couldn’t die here.
“If I'm meant for a different future,” he reasoned, “this thing can't possibly go off with me in here.”
“Maybe not. But how many people will pay the price if you're wrong?”
Once more, his fate—his life—became a choice. Save her life, risk death and the deaths of those future cadets, or walk away and live with the guilt?
Once more, as always, he chose duty.
“Go.”
He went, cursing his fate.
***
It’s the same choice he would make were their positions reversed—the same choice he already made. To give himself for others, to sacrifice for the greater good.
So maybe it’s hypocritical to not let her make it now, but this time he does not choose duty. Not yet. There’s still time.
In the end, however, neither one of them get a choice.
***
Marie’s fate is out of his hands. An entire starship at his command but in this, he is powerless.
Her life now rests in Christine’s hands. In Spock’s. In Una’s DNA. In her own ability to pull through the surgery.
He’s distracted, the last thing he can afford in a battle against the Gorn, but his worry is a physical thing, snaking inside his gut, and once more he pulls up her bioreadings.
***
Technically, under extreme conditions, the human body is capable of going more than 453 hours without sleep. The human mind, however, is another story.
He’s pushing 48. Or is it 56? Temporal disorientation occurs at stage 3 of sleep deprivation, so chances are that he’s somewhere in between.
Reduced alertness? Check. Reduced attention span? Check. Apprehension and anxiety? Check. Memory deficits? Check. And if it weren’t for the constant stress of the last two—three? —days keeping him awake, he’s sure he would have already experienced the micro sleeps, too.
The list is dredged up from his subconscious, a memory of that time Kat lectured him about the consequences of sleep deprivation the morning after he’d pulled an all-nighter cramming for finals—the perks of befriending a psychology major. Starfleet taught it too, drilled the list and various methods of compensation into all its command officers.
Next will come the paranoia, the depression, the suppressed immune response, and the hallucinations. Though, maybe he’s already experiencing those because the Gorn ship just…disappears.
***
Okay, not a hallucination, just an optical illusion. Bending light. It’s the perfect hiding place, and quite possibly the Gorn home world.
The thought sends a chill through his bones.
But no sooner had he thought it than ships are rushing past them. One, two, ten, twenty, an entire armada headed straight towards Federation space, and he knows they can only have one goal in mind: invasion.
***
Enterprise doesn’t stand a chance against an entire armada. He knows that before he even asks if they’re within firing range, and he adds another item to his list of side effects: poor decision making.
But what other choice does he have? They need to stop this invasion. But he can’t think, can’t concentrate on anything for more than a few seconds. His mind and body cry out for sleep, totally at odds with the stress-induced insomnia that has allowed him to remain awake for…how many hours now?
Another list of side effects comes to mind, those for long-term, sustained stress. Headaches? Check. Muscle tension? Check. Increase heart rate? Check. Heightened anxiety? Check. Upset stomach? Check. Nausea? Not quiet yet. Poor focus and cloudy thinking? Check and check.
Sleep. He needs sleep.
Sleep. Sleep…
Sleep!
***
High-risk behavior is another of those side effects of prolonged stress, but if the Gorn are truly affected by stellar flares, then this has a chance of working. A one in one thousand percent chance, Scott says, talking through the requirements to turn Enterprise into an artificial star. Certainly better odds than firing on the armada.
He tells Scott that it’ll work and does his best to radiate confidence in his own plan. It has to work, because the Federation is lost if it doesn’t.
It has to work, because Fate is not done with him yet.
***
“What are you doing here?” were the first words out of her mouth when the door slid open, startled, confused, just a little demanding, and every bit as bedraggled as she was. Her ponytail was askew, escaped strands of hair sticking up every which way around her face, her clothes rumpled as though she’d slept in them at least once, her eyes red and swollen, and ringed with dark shadows that spoke of tears and sleepless nights. Even the week she’d spent holed up in the library preparing to defend her dissertation, Chris had never seen Kat look so frazzled.
Before he could answer her, she continued. “Don’t you have that flight today?”
“I told them I couldn’t make it.”
“What? Chris, no! You said yourself that if you don’t make that flight it’ll be six months before they can test those engine modifications in similar conditions.”
Chris shrugged. “So I’ll test them in six months.”
“You think they’ll let you after backing out at the last minute?” She scoffed, but it didn’t sound quite right. “They probably already gave the assignment to someone else. What were you thinking? How could you risk your career like that? Why would you—?”
Inwardly, Chris sighed and then cut her off. “Hey, Kat? Shut up and let me in.”
For a moment she didn’t move, simply blinked shock-widened eyes at him. But then he was stumbling back into the hallway, thrown off balance by the force of her launching herself out the door and colliding with his chest, her hold on him fierce and desperate. She was crying before he even finished wrapping his arms around her shaking form, her tears hot on his neck.
“Thank you for coming,” she managed between sobs.
“Of course,” he murmured, though, he didn’t think she heard him. Wispy strands of hair tickled his face. He smoothed them down only for them to pop right back up.
“I thought he loved me.”
“I know,” Chris said softly. “I know.”
***
Seeing Marie in sickbay, he has never felt so helpless.
He can’t lose her. He’s already lost so much. Losing her, too, would be more than he could bear.
He needs to do something, anything. He needs to fight, to save her, but there’s nothing he can do. And so, he stops fighting, he let’s go and tries it his father’s way.
He sits, and he prays.
***
Marie’s alive. She’s not out of the woods yet, but she’s alive, and he is so damn relieved that he can’t stop the tears that start falling at the sound of her voice and so damn weary that he doesn’t even bother trying.
She asks how. How is she alive? How did Spock and Christine manage to save her?
He admits that Una helped.
“You shouldn’t have done that.”
Irritation lances through the exhaustion because he just can’t, can’t bear to think about the alternative, to argue about what-ifs and maybes and futures that might not come to pass, to weigh her life against a regulation he doesn’t believe in.
But even though she lets it go, lets him finally wrap his arms around her, he’s still not sure she understands.
***
“I’m sorry,” Kat said.
Chris looked up from the hay net he was stuffing and frowned. He’d been talking for so long that he’d forgotten what he’d even said. What was she apologizing for?
“I’m sorry I put you through that. I don’t regret my orders—I’d give them again. But I am sorry they cost you so much.”
“I…”
Hell. He’d compared the Pergamum to Hell. His own personal hell, knowing that his friends were dying and there was nothing he could do about it.
And she’d kept him there.
Once again, he wanted to demand why, but in that moment, why didn’t matter.
One day he would ask—one day when she was ready to talk about it. But not now.
“You’re here,” he said, voice thick. “You survived. That’s all that matters.”
***
The reality of just how close he comes to losing Marie opens his eyes to what he has been putting her through, half-truths and evasions about his future like jagged pieces of glass beneath her feet, bloody footprints leading back to two words and a truth that cuts like a lie in his mouth, and he sees now that every fracture in their relationship is of his own making.
Marie trusted him with the truth on Parnassus Beta; it’s time he did the same.
So later, after she is discharged from sickbay and settled comfortably in quarters, he sits beside her and he tells her.
At first the words stick in his throat, stoppered by a vise of fear. What if she runs away? What if she hates him for keeping it a secret for so long? What if—?
But then they are tumbling from his lips, a torrent of honesty and hope.
***
He doesn’t tell her everything. He doesn’t tell her about the Discovery or why he was on Boreth, just that he touched a crystal and traded his future for something bigger, something more important than himself.
He tells her that in less than ten years there will be an accident, one he can’t prevent, one that will leave him paralyzed and all but mute.
He tells her that he understands if she wants to break up; she didn’t sign up to be a caretaker.
He tells her that he’s scared, that there are days when thoughts of the future feel like being buried alive and he has to talk himself down from a panic attack.
And he tells her that he’s trying to live while he still can, that he doesn’t want to let fate keep him from living his life now, and that she helps him see what that life could be.
***
When he’s finished, they sit in silence for a moment. He wrings his hands together and waits for her reply.
He expects her to break up with him. He expects her to yell and accuse him of lying to her. He expects her to call him crazy and insist that the future isn’t written in stone.
He expects everything except what she does.
She takes his hand. She stays.
***
“Congratulations, Captain.” Delicate crystal pinged as glasses touched. The ceremony was over, the reception concluded, and tomorrow, Chris would officially take command of the USS Enterprise. But for now, it was just them and the view of the city skyline from Kat’s penthouse apartment. Being an admiral certainly had its perks.
“I can give you orders now,” she said with a teasing grin, causing Chris to chuff into his drink.
“You were always able to give me orders.”
Kat gestured vaguely at the extra stripe on his sleeve. “This feels more official.” She grinned and took a sip before setting her glass down on the coffee table. “I got you something.”
“You already gave me something.” An antique compass, so that even in deep space, “you’ll always know your heading.”
“This isn’t a gift,” she said, twisting around to get something off the side table behind her.
Chris set down his glass and took the proffered box. It was a flat wooden box with a single clasp on the front. He flicked it open and raised the lid. Inside lay a leather-bound journal, the kind ancient sea captains would record their logs in, along with a well of ink and a metal-wrought quill.
“You’re the only person I know who still takes notes on paper,” Kat said while he stared open-mouthed at the not-gift. Then she chuckled. “I fear you’ll make your officers print out physical daily reports.”
“It’s more tactile,” Chris muttered in defense of his affinity for ink and paper and ran a hand over the embossed leather of the logbook.
He looked up. “This is wonderful. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. And, I expect a full report.”
Chris grinned. “Orders, Admiral?”
***
Gorn DNA proves stronger than Illyrian blood, and M’Benga tells him that Marie’s only hope for survival lies in a rumor about a flower they may or may not find at an abandoned research facility in the middle of the Restricted Zone, and he realizes that he’s not here for a prognosis, but to authorize a mission that will violate a dozen hard-won treaties.
They have it planned well, a two-man away team, but he knows that Starfleet will never sanction it. Not for rumors and maybes. Not for one life. So it’ll have to be off-the-books, covert, and he heads it up because should anything go wrong, he wants all the blame to come back to him, which, apparently, Marie already told them he would say.
“I won’t allow people to take risks like this for me.”
People? Or him?
Either way, she still doesn’t understand.
***
He confesses his truth to Marie, and she lies to him about the chimera flower, and he can’t, can’t understand why she didn’t trust him.
“Because of you! Because I don’t have the space to worry about how my dying hurts your feelings.”
Her words are a blow, a blade, the cut of them delayed momentarily by his confusion, but then they slide deeper and more painfully than the knife that was buried in his leg, and for a moment, he can’t breathe. He can’t— He can’t— He can’t—
He needs to move. He needs space, distance, and he finds it on the opposite side of the kitchen. There, he can try to see the situation from her point of view. There, he can concede that she had to make a choice.
But why wasn’t he a part of it? Why tell everyone but him?
She tells him that they both know that he would have insisted that they find another way—as if he’s never been faced with a no-win scenario. As if he’s never been forced to make a difficult choice with his back against the wall.
As if he never told her about it.
***
She insists that she didn’t lie to him, a truth stretched further than a tightrope.
At first it feels like payback, like bitter revenge for his long overdue explanation, and if it is, perhaps he deserves it. He’s stretched his own truths just as far.
It just feels like she never did forget.
***
He knows what it’s like to be terrified of the consequences of a difficult decision. He knows what it’s like to be scared of the future, and he knows what it’s like to keep it a secret out of fear.
She didn’t tell him, but he knows now. That’s what matters. He knows now, and whatever happens, he’ll help her through it.
He’s scared, too.
***
“I’m picking up a distress signal,” said Lieutenant Bryce from the comms station. “Wait. This can’t be right. It’s for a Captain Edward Parker…from a Doctor Moreau? And it’s encrypted.”
Chris frowned. Who encrypted a distress signal? Whoever Doctor Moreau was, he must not need help that badly if—
Doctor Moreau. The name sounded vaguely familiar for some reason.
“Any idea where it’s coming from?” he asked.
“No, sir. Just that it’s being broadcast on a repeating frequency.”
“Could it be a trap?” posited Saru.
“Section 31 trying to determine our position?” added Burnham.
Malware didn’t seem like Section 31’s style, but Chris supposed he couldn’t put it past them. Not after playing them the fool at Talos.
He rose and went over to the communications console. “Can you figure out what it says?”
“No, sir,” Bryce said. “It would take days without a decryption key.”
Chris stared at the names on the screen, straining his mind to recall where he’d heard them before. And then it clicked. “The Island of Lost Souls,” he breathed.
“Sir?”
He smiled, still staring at the screen. The film had given him nightmares when they’d watched it, and when he’d admitted as much, Kat had teased him mercilessly for a week, conveniently ignoring the fact that she’d hidden her face in his shoulder for half the film.
“The Island of Lost Souls,” he repeated. An expectant silence followed his words, everyone waiting for him to explain. He straightened and looked around the bridge but was met only with blank stares and raised eyebrows. “Charles Laughton, Richard Arlen? Paramount Pictures, 1932?”
Nothing.
“Doesn’t anybody watch tv?”
Apparently not. But if his hunch was correct, and he was willing to bet that it was, that’s what she’d been banking on.
He instructed Bryce to use the film’s title as the decryption key and mentally crossed his fingers.
Moments later, Kat’s worried face appeared on the screen. “Chris. I need your help.”
***
Marie said that she knew all the risks involved with merging her DNA with the Gorn’s and didn’t care. She wanted the treatment anyway. Chose it.
But she didn’t know all the risks, did she? She didn’t know that she would attack Gamble. She didn’t know that something could take over her mind and body, and that she would look at him through the eyes of something she couldn’t control.
Does she care now? She’s concerned, worried, but he wonders if she cares.
He knows what it’s like to want life, to be willing to trade almost anything to have it.
He wonders what Marie is willing to trade.
***
“Why don’t you tell me what happened?” Kat prompted.
“It’s all in the report,” Chris said curtly. He wished she’d hurry up and get to the part where she asked him about his feelings so they could get this over with. The sooner he returned to duty, the sooner he could forget about the mission and everything that had gone wrong.
“I read the report,” Kat responded, ever patient. “I want to hear it from you.”
Silent, Chris ground his teeth.
“Chris, why request me as your counselor if you’re not going to talk to me?”
“You know I don’t like people rooting around in my head,” he replied, answering only the first part of her question. “You, however, have already been there.” It wasn’t the truth, but it was a truth, and Kat accepted it, smiling slightly.
“I know you value your privacy. But you are aware that this evaluation is mandatory if you want to return to duty?”
Chris forced his answer through clenched teeth. “Well aware.”
“You’re not in trouble. These sessions are required any time lethal force is used in the field, even when it’s justified.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said irritably.
Her seemingly endless patience finally snapped, her eyes flashing with resentment when she retorted, “Then stop treating me like I’m the bad guy. You demanded to speak to me.”
“There’s nothing to talk about, all right? I’m fine. I don’t care.”
“You don’t care?” she echoed, confusion furrowing her brow.
“No,” he said. “It was him or Ensign Ruelle. Simple as that. There’s no need to sit here and talk about it.”
“So you thought, what? That I’d sign off on your evaluation and help you sweep everything under the rug, and you could return to duty and pretend it never happened?”
Chris swallowed, realizing now how badly he’d miscalculated.
“If that was your plan, you should have stuck with Doctor Strauss. I know you, Chris.”
She did, and this was a terrible idea.
“I thought you’d understand,” he said. “But clearly you don’t, so you know what? Maybe I will see Doctor Strauss.”
“Sit down, Lieutenant!” The order cracked out, stilling him as he made to stand. “I rearranged a week’s worth of appointments to be here, so god damn it, we will have this discussion.”
Slowly, begrudgingly, Chris returned to his seat.
With a regretful sigh, Kat broke eye contact, taking a moment to calm herself. Then she looked up. “They wont stop.”
Too angry to speak, Chris said nothing. Damn Command for forcing him here. Damn her for reading him so accurately. And damn the pity in her eyes.
“The nightmares,” she went on, and the sympathy in her tone grated in his ears, caused his fists to clench. “They won’t stop. Not until you deal with this.”
“What do you want me to say?” he shouted, launching to his feet. “That it was horrible? Awful? Traumatic? It was! It was the worst thing I’ve ever had to do! I hate that I had to do it!”
Suddenly weary from his outburst, he slowly sank back into his seat. His hands were shaking. He clasped them together between his knees.
“I can’t stop thinking about him,” he said, staring at his hands and seeing only the death they had delivered. “Was he a husband? A father? Is there someone who loved him, someone who is grieving his loss?” He chuckled bitterly and looked up, meeting Kat’s patient gaze. “Who the hell feels guilty for saving their crew mate’s life, huh?”
Wordless, Kat set her PADD to the side and came to sit next to him. She laid a gentle hand over his and said softly, “A human.”
***
They still can’t agree on a vacation.
Marie really doesn’t like camping, and he briefly mourns the fact that he will never get to share that part of himself with her. But at least they can still enjoy the Northern Territory trails together, he thinks, until Marie brushes his suggestion aside with the fact that Vice Admiral Pasalk will be on planet.
He doesn’t get it. He thought she hated Pasalk. Why would she care about his whereabouts?
And why is she defending him?
“He’s good at his job. And so am I.”
***
She wants to get back to work. And he can understand that. She’s been cooped up on the Enterprise for months now, watching from the sidelines while he and his crew do the job that was taken from her by circumstance.
He can set aside his dislike for the admiral for one night; he can give up hiking the Northern Territory and make dinner for the guy who tried to imprison him.
His hand doesn’t hurt that badly.
***
The first thing he feels when he’s human again is fear. It is a fear so absolute that he almost wishes for the protection of logic once again.
The second thing he feels is guilt, and shame instantly colors his face. If Marie left him for what he’d done, he would deserve it.
***
Her anger is a palpable thing, thick and cloying emotion he can feel even before her knifepoint glare pins him like a specimen for her scrutiny. He opens his mouth to apologize, but she looks away, turning her attention to scrubbing the enamel off his dishes, and he thinks better of speaking.
Silent, he finishes clearing the counter, quietly washes sorbet dishes, every forceful clatter of dinnerware coming from the island causing him to flinch, shoulders rising defensively.
And when Marie receives a transmission from Pasalk, he can’t help but feel that the future of their relationship hinges on the outcome of that call.
***
“You really don’t like arguing, do you?”
The question took him by surprise, and when he looked up to find Kat standing before him, all Chris found himself capable of was a very dumb, “Huh?”
Kat rolled her eyes in exasperation and sat beside him. “You really wanted to go to the cabin, but Leland wanted to pretend he has an ounce of swagger.” She waved a hand to indicate Chris’ roommate, who was currently attempting to chat up two girls so far out of his league they might as well have been on another planet.
“But if you couldn’t be there,” Kat continued, “you would rather have gone to any one of those dive bars you were eyeing so longingly on the way here. And,” she added pointedly, nodding at the drink he’d been choking down since Leland pressed the glass into his hand, “you hate vodka.”
Chris looked down at the drink he was still holding, wondering if he really was that transparent. He hated everything about the trendy, dress-code-enforced night club—the music, the crowd, and even though he had escaped to the patio area, the Miami heat had him sweating through his button-down. “Leland wanted to come here.”
“Chris, it’s your birthday. Why didn’t you just tell him what you wanted to do?”
That was just it, though. He had told Leland what he wanted to do this weekend: a night with his friends at his family’s cabin in Montana. Drinking, cooking outside, a game of no-holds-barred Truth or Dare. Maybe some scientific experiments of a questionable nature. But Leland didn’t listen and instead planned the party he thought Chris should want, not the one he did.
“You analyzing me?” Chris snapped irritably. They hadn’t been friends long enough for her to be doing something as intimate as poking around inside his head.
Kat gave him a look that was equal parts exasperation and sympathy, and Chris immediately regretted his tone. Abashed, he looked away.
“I don’t need to be a shrink to see that you avoid arguments,” she said gently.
“I do not.”
Kat scoffed and gestured around the club.
Defeated, Chris shrugged and looked back out at the crowd. “It’s just easier.”
Kat sighed audibly—a feat given the volume of the music. “Do you want a beer?”
“God yes.”
***
Evil.
Perhaps it’s his upbringing in the church that allows his mind to accept the fact that Evil can exist in the universe as more than just a concept, that it can have form and sentience, that it can be more than just another monster he doesn’t fully understand. That a being with the knowledge and strength to hold it back could also exist. An endless battle between Good and Evil waged across inter-dimensional space since time immemorial.
And Marie says that she’s that being.
“You all saved me, but you also changed me.”
No. He can’t—
Not again.
***
She tells him that it’s her destiny.
“You, of all people, can understand that.”
Yes. Destiny—fate—is indeed something he understands all too well.
He learned long ago that you can’t fight Fate. No matter how you try to change it, Fate, Destiny, always finds a way.
As much as he longs to search for another solution, as much as he resists the idea that she must sacrifice her life for this, they are out of time, and he cannot deny the evidence before him. If this truly is her destiny, there is no other way.
She accepted his fate, he can’t not accept hers.
But she won’t face it alone.
***
They go to Vadia IX to imprison the Vezda. Marie takes her place as the Beholder, a sentinel to stand guard over their prison for eternity, and he leaves with the memories of a lifetime he didn’t live. A gift Marie said, and she didn’t understand why he doesn’t see it as such.
A part of him hates her for it, for giving him memories of a life that wasn’t his. For making him watch her die. But even now he cannot blame her, because of course she didn’t understand.
He never told her about Talos.
He never told her about Kat.
***
She was gone in a flash of blue. Blue like the sciences uniform she wore the day they met. Blue like the ocean behind her the day they hiked San Pedro Mountain. Blue like the sky overhead the day he taught her to ride.
“Come on,” Chris said, grabbing her hand and leading her out to the barn at an exuberant jog. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”
“Who’s this?” Kat asked as they approached the small barn.
“This is Tango,” he said, reaching up to rub beneath the horse’s forelock.
“He’s beautiful.” Kat offered her hand for Tango to sniff, and the horse abandoned him to snuffle at her jacket pockets, his playful demand for sugar causing Kat to laugh.
“Do you want to ride him?”
“I don’t know how.”
“I can teach you, if you want.”
Kat looked over and nodded eagerly, and Chris took an immense pleasure in showing her how to groom and tack up his horse. She looked a little nervous once she’d mounted— “I swear he’s taller from this angle.” —but he had her trotting around the ring before the day was over.
She was breathless when she pulled Tango to a stop, her eyes bright with exhilaration.
Chris gave Tango a well-deserved pat on the neck and looked up at Kat. “Well?”
She grinned. Behind her, the Mojave sky stretched an endless canvas of blue. “It feels like flying.”
***
Things are clearer when he’s back on Enterprise, the illusion peeled back like a curtain to expose the rotting reality beneath, broken memories reframed by what happened on Vadia IX, and it’s all so obvious now that he wonders how he could have not seen it before.
But the compass in his palm still can’t find north, its arrow spinning ceaselessly.
Memories, both lived and not, grasp and seize at him like wicked branches, his mind a forest of anger and confusion he cannot escape.
Maybe there is no escape. Not for him. Maybe in escaping the cage of illusion he has imprisoned himself in reality.
Or maybe the old thing is just as broken as he is.
He snaps the lid shut, grips the case until its edges bite into his skin.
Was any of it real?
***
Una asks if he wants to talk about it.
Even if he did, would she understand? The Talosians had forced her to see things, but they hadn’t made her live them. Would she understand the difference? Would she understand how illusion can become reality? How easily it slips its fingers inside your mind? How it twists and tangles and leaves you wanting nothing but the fantasy? How it makes you believe?
Moreover, could he force her to relive that day in an attempt to explain it—the day she nearly killed them both to save their lives?
No.
Instead, he stares into the whiskey she hands him and tells her he’s not ready.
***
He doesn’t remember leaving the apron out, but it’s there, draped over the back of the stool. Every muscle in his body freezes at the sight of it, fear turning his stomach to lead—is this all still an illusion?
But there are no letters pressed onto the fabric when he goes to look, simply worn denim, soft after so much use. He breathes a sigh of relief, his trepidatious heart slowing. But his relief is quickly overcome by the ghost of the dream, the love he no longer has, and he can’t help but wonder if he ever truly had it at all.
***
Nothing feels right anymore, not his bed, not the chair, not the uniform. He doesn’t feel right anymore. Maybe he never felt right again to begin with.
A part of him longs for the succor of the illusion, for the life that was never really his, if only for a moment, so he can forget the pain of reality. A narcotic, Vina once said of the power of illusion. A trap. One she eventually fell for herself.
He understands her better now.
On the shelf, the compass spins, spins, spins.
***
He remembers all of it, the life they lived together, every time he doubted the reality she crafted, every time he tried to escape, and every time she pulled him back.
“Come back to me.”
And he did.
Every. Single. Time.
***
I've seen your flag on the marble arch
love is not a victory march
it's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah
- Leonard Cohen, “Hallelujah,” 1994
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the lord of song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah
- Leonard Cohen, “Hallelujah,” 1984