And there won’t be snow on Romulus this Christmastime

Posted on 29 Dec 2018 @ 10:32pm by Lieutenant Lake ir-Llantrisant
Edited on 30 Dec 2018 @ 7:56am

902 words; about a 5 minute read

[ON]

Lake ir-Llantrisant’s Personal Log, Stardate 68917.3

All through the conference room, not one member of the senior staff was stirring, not even the Nekomi...

After Captain Saalm dismissed us from the day’s staff briefing, Scarlet passed me at the doorway. She asked me if I had heard from Andreus. (At least, I think that’s what she said? Someone was talking loudly behind us. I may have misheard Scarlet.) I recall she served with Andreus, back on the old Galileo. Back before I’d ever known Andreus, before we’d ever courted. The way he talked about it, Andreus Kohl had grown up aboard Galileo.

I lied to Scarlet. I told her I hadn’t heard from him. I told her I hadn’t heard a single syllable from him since the day he ended our relationship. It was a lie. Or perhaps it was a truth of technicalities. In fact, Andreus had not spoken a single word to me, not since that fateful day on the Starfleet Academy campus. I had brought him a cake and he told me he didn’t want to eat it, didn’t want to eat anything with me ever again.

Still, that didn’t mean I hadn’t heard from Andreus. The other day, I received a communique from him. There were no words in the message: no video recording, no thoughtful prose, no sound of his voice. Rather, he sent me a box full of memories. Without comment, he sent me holographic images we had taken during the handful of times we had been together. He had probably been purging or procrastinating when he sent them to me. I had a tendency to snap candid holo-images of Andreus. There were images of Andreus reading menu boards, Andreus fixing his hair, Andreus waiting for turbolifts.

The images of us together were fewer. There was one outside that Algolian restaurant aboard Starbase 74. There was one with his arms draped around me in an art gallery. There was the one when I was wearing the red suit. And then it was the last photo, the final photo that struck me. In it, Andreus had a look in his eyes. It was a look that turned his sapphire eyes such a dark shade of blue, they looked to absorb all light that entered them. They looked to absorb all the light in the galaxy.

The holo-snap of me in the red suit had been taken at a party. I had mingled for a time, but the mood of the room eluded me. I didn’t know any of Andreus’ friends, nor their children, and I wasn’t familiar with the occasion for the celebration. Kriss-mass, I think it was called? The gathering had been filled with loud music and noxious foods to scare away a myth about an old bearded man who would sneak into the houses of unwitting Humans and inject them with contraceptive drugs to prevent spontaneous virgin pregnancies. Andreus could sense my discomfort and so he put me to work. When he told me what to do, I refused, and then he reminded me that he was a Commander in Starfleet, and he made it an order.

I stepped away from the party to use the replicator in the kitchen, and I returned to the party room as a changed man. My Betazoid couture had been balled into a cabinet and I disguised myself in a padded costume of red and white. My features were hidden with a white wig and beard, and I was dressed all in red, from my hat to my coat to my trousers, except for the white fur trimmings and slick black boots. When I had first moved through the party as myself, the small children had looked through me with indifference. Now, it was different.

Now, when I entered the room as the mythical Santa Claus, I invoked immediate love and fear from every child in the room. It hardly took a heartbeat, and every child’s face either lit up with exquisite joy, or crumpled into tearful terror. Some of them turned away, couldn’t stand to look at me. Others came running towards me with outstretched arms, to thank me or to beg me for things. I must admit, it warmed me to evoke such strong reactions. It made me feel powerful. And it felt... it felt familiar somehow.

Last night, I stared at that holographic photo of Andreus Kohl. The photo was a memory of an instant when Andreus Kohl had been looking at me with dark sapphire eyes. In the image, I could see that Andreus had the same look on his face. I remembered it well. Andreus looked at me with a hideous combination of love and fear. He always had done. Always. I don’t think I fully recognized it for what it was until I’d seen all those small faces staring up at me, through the claustrophobic blinders of the Santa wig and beard. Love and fear.

I had known in that moment it was going to end. The end had come even sooner than I could have imagined. That look, that wasn’t a look you wanted to wake up to on Christmas morning.

End log.

[OFF]

Ho, ho, ho

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