Chapter Text
They came in all shapes and sizes.
On an away mission once, Riker killed a massive feline predator called a cartiga with his bare hands. But he wouldn’t call that cat a monster. The aliens who hunted it, who drugged and taunted it, didn’t qualify as monsters either, because they were just children, really, tossed into a dangerous arena unprepared. Set up by their own parents to die.
With his eyes closed and the baroque music swelling all around him, Riker became a different person. A different time. His eyes were glued shut by dried blood from a head injury; his pants were wet and sticky, his flesh consumed by that numb itch that stole over him from time to time, unpredictable. He couldn’t drag his brain out of the past, couldn’t force himself to focus on the music or the musicians, all those strangers in this room with him. Couldn’t listen to their gaits, try to assess. They could grab him by hair, force his head back and his lips open, and he couldn’t fight them back.
Beside him, Picard breathed deep and slow, so calm that if Riker just opened his eyes he knew he would calm down, too. Absorb Picard’s serenity like it was his own. But his eyes stayed shut. When he tried to mimic Picard’s breathing, his lungs flinched; he could only gasp.
And the air turned sour and metallic, like breathing in a mouthful of gas.
And the monsters in his mind overtook him.
Crack.
His skull slammed against the dojo mat, unprotected by a helmet. Whenever he hit his head, and he hit his head often, there was always a wave of nausea and a thick feeling in his brain, like someone had settled a cotton sheet over the coils and left it there to gum up the works. Gravity spun around him in a circle, until finally he realized where he was: stomach-up on the dojo floor, staring at the ceiling. Will shook his head to clear it — which never actually worked for him, but he always tried it anyway — and flexed his abs to sit up.
He meant to jump to his feet, weapon at the ready. He meant to slide right into an offensive position and put his father on the back foot. He would keep his elbow tucked and his shoulders loose, and he would slide his feet into a feint, and everything would turn out fine.
But his body didn’t obey him.
His abs flexed. The muscles in his neck strained. But his body didn’t move at all.
“Up,” Kyle Riker commanded, pointing his anbo-jytsu truncheon at the floor. The end of it sparked and hummed, threatening to burn if it touched bare skin. Will had plenty of little burn marks littering his skin from that thing, could almost taste the sulphur in his mouth every time he heard it crackle.
“Get up,” said Kyle with a touch of impatience. “I haven’t got all day.”
“I…” Will’s voice came out slurred. “I can’t.”
The look his father gave him was a special one, reserved for baseball game injuries and less-than-stellar grades. It was a look of deep contempt. Next he would say “I didn’t raise a quitter—” and Will was sick of hearing it, so he raised his head as much as he could while his body lay useless on the dojo floor.
“I can’t move my legs,” he said, a foreign calmness washing over him.
Kyle’s eyebrows furrowed. Not concerned, just quizzical. Will tried again — tried hard — to kick his feet or jump off the dojo mat, but nothing moved. Even his hands felt strange and heavy, his wrists numb. He could bend his elbows, but his fingers hung useless and limp. With a groan of pain, Will let his head fall back.
“I didn’t toss you that hard,” said Kyle, sounding ludicrously like one of Will’s classmates when they got in trouble on the playground.
It was a C5 spinal cord injury. Will knew from his prep classes for the Academy. They’d had him in paramedic training for a year now. He stared up at the ceiling with bleary eyes, his skin suddenly slick with sweat.
“Hospital,” he said, too groggy to make it a full sentence.
With a sigh, Kyle set his truncheon down. He stood over Will, studying the way his body lay, and nudged one of Will’s legs with his foot. Finally, disgusted, he shook his head.
“Hospital,” said Will again. If they left this injury for too long, it would never heal right. He needed to hit the hospital in Fairbanks within six hours, or he’d be standing crooked for the rest of his life. “Dad…”
Kyle covered his face with his hands. He raked his fingers through his hair, exasperated. Overwhelmed. His eyes flickered from one corner of the dojo to the next, as if he half-expected to see a fully-stocked medcenter tucked away behind the tile walls.
“Dad,” said Will pleadingly.
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Kyle, voice clipped. He turned to leave and a spark of alarm lanced through Will’s chest. “This was a solo accident, alright?” said Kyle, pointing back at Will without turning around. “You were practicing on your own and you fell. Understood?”
“Dad!”
“I’m going to find an aircar,” Kyle said, and he was out the door without a backward look. Shallow, panicked breaths filled the silence. Will knew they were his own, but he couldn’t believe it. Not really.
A dream, he decided. Had to be a bad dream. Because he was smart, he was athletic, he didn’t get into stupid accidents like this. He was Will Riker. He’d been taking high school math since he was in first grade. He was the only kid in all of Valdez to get his own Academy prep program, the youngest-ever pilot to take a solo flight at the flight school.
He was going to be a Starfleet officer someday. The Stargazer. That would be his ship. This unresponsive lump of flesh on the dojo floor? That wasn’t him.
It wasn’t him.
There was no heat in the dojo. When the lights turned off automatically, Will was alone, his breath a frigid cloud of fog forming over his lips.
Junior Mance. His clever fingers racing over the piano keys. Will closed his eyes and imagined it so vividly he could hear the music in his ears, faint and tinny. Kyle would come back for him; he just had to distract himself, make the minutes tick by faster. Music would help him.
Creole Love Call. Blue Monk. Swingmatism and That Mellow Feeling and Harlem Lullaby. Will’s breathing was still too fast, too shallow, but overlaid atop his quiet breaths there was the electrifying clarity of Mance’s piano. Gene Ammons on the saxophone. Cannonball Adderley on alto sax and Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet and the high natural contralto of Jimmy Scott keening over the brass.
It all came crashing down around him when naturally, like any budding musician, he tried to tap his toes.
His body wouldn’t obey him. The music warbled and warped. Thirst settled into his throat like a wad of barbed wire and there was nothing he could do to dislodge it. It was only an hour, maybe less, before he smelled urine and realized he couldn’t control himself, couldn’t even feel that his pants were wet. His chest ached and his breathing stuttered, and by the time night fell, Will gave up. He didn’t try to hold back the tears. He sobbed helplessly, like a child — nearly twelve years old, taller than his father, and crying like a baby. And he couldn’t even control his hands well enough to wipe the tears away.
He listened hard, desperate for another hint of it, but the music was gone.
In the early morning, before the sun was up, the dojo door creaked open and Will’s father stepped inside. There was no soundtrack playing in Will’s head. The cold floor of the dojo had leached all rhythm away; the snow banks outside dampened every sound. Just the tap of his dad’s shoes on the dojo floor, slow and cautious, like he half-expected Will to be dead.
“You okay, kiddo?” he asked, voice low.
Rescue. The hum of an aircar engine outside. The sight of an emergency regenerator in his dad’s hand. Dimly, like the chime of a distant bell, the music started up again — a little muffled, a little too connected to the pounding of Will’s heart, but there.
Kyle wrinkled his nose at the smell as he approached, but he didn’t say anything — and Will was so overwhelmingly grateful for that, so desperately glad to be rescued, that he forgot all his anger at being left here. The regenerator buzzed over his skin in a blue light, not healing him, but preventing further injury. He wrapped his arms around his father’s neck and leaned into his touch, and with uncharacteristic gentleness, Kyle laid him out on a cleaner patch of the floor. He stripped Will’s soiled clothes away and manipulated the unfeeling legs, bending them at the knee. His hands passed almost clinically over Will’s genitals with a warm rag. Quiet, ragged sobs filled the room — barely audible — as Kyle wiped away the rank stench of fecal matter without judgment or disgust.
Only a father would do that, Will thought. Humiliation and gratitude washed over him, so strong that all he could do was close his eyes and try to keep breathing. He could see Kyle’s hands lingering between his legs, but he couldn’t feel it, couldn’t sense the fingers sliding inside him, stretching him open. And he was grateful for that too.
Kyle checked Will’s face for any reaction. One hand was curled over Will’s penis. With the other, he’d inserted his index and middle fingers into Will’s body, pliant and relaxed. Whatever expression he saw on Will’s face, it seemed to disappoint Kyle. He stopped touching him entirely; for a moment he just stood there, pale and closed-off, staring at the dark stain on the dojo mat where Will had lain all night waiting for rescue.
Silently, Kyle moved away and washed his hands. He bundled Will up in a blanket, every inch of bare skin hidden. He cradled his son in his arms — clean now, no longer crying, but red-faced and exhausted and in pain. Kyle’s lips brushed against Will’s scalp. Then he kissed Will’s cheek … then his lips, gentle and chaste.
“You’re alright,” Kyle murmured. “There’s an aircar waiting. You’ll be alright.”
So Will rested his head against his father’s chest, tears drying on his cheek and making his skin prickle. The music built to a crescendo, so triumphant now that it was deafening, intoxicating, impossible to look at it directly. And for the rest of his life, if he could help it, he would never think about the six hours he spent lying in his own waste on the dojo floor, or the illegal move that cracked his spine in the first place.
Never again.
When the holodeck program ended, Picard sat up, a little dazed, and waited for Riker to come back. His eyes were closed, his face pale and tight. His muscles were tense, not relaxed.
But minutes dragged by into a full hour, and a cold sweat broke out on Riker’s forehead, and finally, with a quiet gasp, he let the tension fade. His eyes, when he finally opened them, were glassy but aware. He looked as though he’d run a marathon, and he didn’t glance at Picard or ask him when the music stopped. He just threw his legs over the side of the bed and curled over them like he might vomit.
“Fuck,” he breathed. “Jean-Luc—”
Picard was there, one hand on Riker’s shoulder, the other wrapping tight around his fingers.
“Jean-Luc—” he tried again.
The program was over. The music was done.
They stayed.