Chapter Text
Part Three
“Help me!”
The familiar words and the haunted face flitted across her consciousness. But this time, for once, Natasha felt oddly calm.
I should have tried this earlier, she thought.
She hadn’t been able to get any sleep overnight, and in frustration, she had decided that maybe she should try to come here. And, in a way, it was working.
She leaned back and let the cool breeze blow gently on her face, closing her eyes and trying to maintain this level of calm for as long as possible. She sat alone on the hilltop, overlooking a vast sprawling city. The skyline was a bemusing and beguiling hodgepodge of buildings, from towering modern skyscrapers to quaint stone buildings dripping with history.Below her, figures walked this way and that through the park, talking, laughing and generally enjoying life.
This time, she really was home. At least, a fictional version of home.
Yet, although being here brought her some fleeting calm against her dreams, she still felt numb.
“Nice view.”
She turned to see Jirel leaning on the holodeck arch, the door back to the corridors of Starbase 216 closing shut behind him.
“How did you find me?” she asked, with only the slightest bit of warmth.
“Come on,” the Trill smiled, before clearing his throat and calling out into the air, “Computer, locate Natasha Kinsen.”
“Natasha Kinsen is in holodeck nine,” the emotionless reply came.
“See?” Jirel gestured, “You Starfleet lot want more alone time, you really need to do something about that.”
She couldn’t help but smile, as he walked over and flopped down next to her. They shared a moment of silence as they contemplated the skyline in front of them. “London,” she said eventually, “Or at least, London circa 2355.”
“I’ve never been,” Jirel admitted, “Always thought it’d be bigger.”
“This was where I grew up,” she continued wistfully, “While my father was lecturing archaeology at the Royal Academy. I used to think this place was the centre of the universe.”
“I’ve heard that about Londoners,” Jirel replied with a grin, “Hey, is it true that you still use those old 23rd century transporter pads to get everywhere?”
“Nah,” she shook her head, “There’s a couple of them over near Trafalgar Square, but they’re really just there for the tourists.”
Jirel nodded and looked back out, suddenly finding himself forgetting what he had actually come back to the starbase to do. Finding it hard to leave.
“I guess,” she continued, without prompting, “This park is where it happened.”
“Ugh. No happy story ever started with that sentence.”
“I was ten years old. Me and a few friends were playing right around here. We were a nightmare bunch of kids, always getting into scrapes, climbing trees, jumping off walls. All of that. One time, someone even got hold of her dad’s stun pistol. That was a painful afternoon.”
Jirel smiled, now listening to her intently. His reason for coming to the starbase seeming less important with every passing moment. Whatever it had been.
“But one day,” she said, gesturing to a tree below them, “We were climbing that tree down there, and this little boy fell. Probably dropped about ten feet. Pretty big fall for a child. He wasn’t hurt badly, but you’d never have known that from the noise he was making.”
She paused, smiling to herself as she remembered the scene. “Anyway, the others just ran off. They all panicked, I guess. But, I dunno, I just felt an urge to help him. He’d cut his knee, twisted his ankle, banged his head, and I...patched him up. Best I could do, anyway.”
“At ten years old?” Jirel asked, genuinely impressed. She nodded.
“Used some fabric from my dress to bandage his knee, used some ice from the drink I’d had to soothe his head, even made him a crutch out of an old tree branch so we could hobble home. And that’s when it happened, I guess. When I decided I wanted to be a doctor. Something about helping that kid, stopping the pain, fixing what was broken, it...felt good.”
She idly pulled a handful of grass out of the ground and threw it up into the artificial breeze, watching it cascade back to the ground. “I miss that feeling,” she said in a quiet voice.
Another silence descended. Jirel looked over and saw the sadness in her expression. “I offered you a job on the Bounty, remember?” he said with a hopeful smile, “Plenty of broken things to fix with us.”
“I’m a doctor, not a psychiatrist,” she replied, mustering a smile.
She was slightly surprised to see that the usually jovial Trill didn’t seem overly amused this time. A question popped into her head, but she decided to ignore it, turning back to the wider view and electing to go with a different question instead. One that had been playing around on her mind ever since they had arrived at the starbase.
“How do you know Admiral Jenner?”
Now it was Jirel’s turn to look out at the view. He contemplated a typical joke answer, but he felt that she deserved better than that. Though maybe not the full truth. “You remember back on that planet you led us to, when we were picking our way through all of the Soraxx’s little tricks and traps? That part where the tricorder broke, we were about to die, and I just went for it.”
“I remember,” she replied with a snort, “They don’t teach that at Starfleet Academy.”
“I know.”
He looked back and smiled enigmatically. It took her a moment to process what he was saying. When she didn’t she couldn’t help but snort even louder at how preposterous it sounded. “You? You went to Starfleet Academy?”
“Class of ‘59,” he said, with a misplaced look of pride that almost immediately collapsed, “I mean, I don’t think I can technically say that, what with me flunking out and everything, but…”
She stared at him, shaking her head slightly in disbelief.
“Hey, I told you I was adopted by a Starfleet officer, right? And what else do kids of Starfleet officers do but follow in their footsteps.”
“So, the admiral—?”
“Was one of the lecturers while I was there. Before he got his extra pips, of course. And, even though I...didn’t make it. We somehow kept crossing each other’s paths. And…”
He drifted off, losing track of how he planned to end this particular story.
“And now he’s sending you on recovery missions?” Natasha asked with a shake of her head, “I’m sorry, but there’s absolutely no way that’s true.”
She couldn’t exactly picture the scruffy Trill lounging in front of her in a cadet uniform, diligently attending astrophysics lectures and first contact seminars. Even for a single semester.
“Pretty much,” Jirel shrugged, smiling back breezily, “Gotta keep hold of a few secrets though, right?”
The ensign’s face flashed into her mind for the first time since they had started talking. She suppressed the instinctive flinch. “Right,” she nodded simply.
Jirel relaxed and leaned back on the grass, having now entirely forgotten his reasons for coming to the starbase in the first place.
“Guess that does explain why he asked about you,” she said eventually, causing him to sit back up and take note.
“Who?”
“Admiral Jenner. He asked me about you. Yesterday.”
“Huh,” Jirel managed, “He did, did he?”
As he considered this, he suddenly remembered the real reason he was here.
“Crap. I’ve gotta go.”
“Wh—?” she asked, as he stood up, “Why?”
“No biggie,” he shrugged as he left her alone on the grass, “It’s just...Denella’s been arrested.”
He walked back through the holodeck arch and left her to wallow in her past.
* * * * *
Sunek whistled a jaunty tune as he strolled down the Bounty’s cargo ramp.
He wasn’t entirely sure where the rest of his crewmates were. He hadn’t seen any of them since yesterday, and even then had been trying to avoid them lest he ended up getting involved in any of the repair work. But equally, he didn’t really care where they were. Not after the message he had just received.
As he reached the bottom of the ramp, he was approached by a frustrated man wearing a Starfleet engineering uniform. Lieutenant Ravi Kapadia hadn’t had the dubious pleasure of meeting Sunek yet, but at this point he just needed to speak to anyone.
“Excuse me?” he managed, trying to match pace with the cheery Vulcan as he sauntered across the landing pad, and trying not to ask too many questions as to why this Vulcan was cheery or sauntering in the first place.
“Sorry, can’t stop,” Sunek replied, patting Kapadia on the shoulder, “Got a hot date.”
Kapadia’s brow furrowed in further confusion. “It’s just, I need to run through some of these repair plans that your engineer - Denella? - provided for me, and I can’t seem to find her anywhere?”
Sunek stopped on a dime, forcing Kapadia to come to a quick stop himself.
“Wait,” the Vulcan said thoughtfully, “Does it still count as a hot date, singular, if there’s two of them?”
Kapadia opened his mouth to reply, but couldn’t actually think of anything to say to that. After a further moment of contemplation about his metaphysical conundrum, Sunek shrugged. “Well, whatever. Keep up the good work, Lieutenant!”
Sunek patted Kapadia’s shoulder again and shot him a beaming smile, then resumed his jaunty march across the landing pad, leaving the Starfleet officer staring at his wake.
A short while later, Sunek was on the outskirts of the Kraterite township, still whistling to himself. His destination was the same bar as the night before, the one that the text-only message from Ensign Taris and Ensign D’Amato had said to meet them at, from 1700 hours.
While Sunek would never admit as much to anyone, there was a significant disadvantage to his life embracing his emotional side. It was something that went beyond the simple fact that plenty of the emotions were more painful than he had appreciated before his time with the V’tosh ka’tur. It was more of a butterfly effect-style pattern of mistakes that his emotions would often generate.
For example, had Sunek not experienced the strong emotion of humiliation when he had woken up hungover in the shared living area of two attractive Starfleet ensigns, he wouldn’t have been in quite such a foul mood ever since.
And, had his mood been better, he might have cast a more critical eye over the text message that he had received. The one he was now acting on. He might have questioned why two Starfleet officers would be communicating with him via text, rather than a proper comms link. He may also have questioned why these particular officers were getting in touch at all, given how anyone could have objectively seen how little they were interested in him.
But Sunek was humiliated, and in a foul mood. So when he saw the message, a message that seemed to validate him in just the way he wanted to be validated, his ego did a backflip and his libido lit up like a dabo wheel.
And so, instead of dispassionately analysing the situation, Sunek’s uncontrolled emotions had told him to march himself straight to his hot date (or two hot dates, depending on how you were counting) with D’Amato and Taris.
He walked on towards his destination whistling an old Vulcan folk tune. He was still whistling as he passed a secluded alleyway near to the bar he was heading for.
He stopped whistling when he felt the hypospray dig into his neck.
Instead, in his last moments of consciousness, he looked back at the events of the last few hours, and with the benefit of hindsight finally realised how much of a fool he had been.
Then he slumped to the floor, and stopped thinking about anything.