Memory
Posted on 28 Feb 2015 @ 10:15pm by Petty Officer 3rd Class Ellsworth Hudson
1,027 words; about a 5 minute read
Ellsworth returned to his seat after intermission to find that it had been occupied by a woman with a man sitting next to her. He scowled and dug into the front pocket of his dress jacket to fish out his own ticket. Why was it people could never seem to take the time to just read the seat number? It was as plain as day to anyone literate and yet still people ended up sitting where they didn't belong. He'd paid a fortune for that seat and by the time he reached it he'd worked himself into a huff over the trespass.
"Excuse me, that's my seat you're sitting in," he said pointedly, stretching his diminutive form as tall as he could to seem more imposing.
The woman stopped in the middle of a laugh and turned from her companion to look up at Ellsworth. She was wearing a stunning, flowing dress whose solid mint green color was interrupted only by a broad scarlet stain beginning just between her thighs and blossoming down and outward in a strange pattern like the delta of a crimson river. It was very clear that beneath the dress half her body had been recently exposed to a plasma fire from a malfunctioning energy unit, like the kind used to power larger housing compounds on Betazed before the war. Her flesh had melted away in various pockets, leaving the material of her dress sunken into strange depressions along her skin; a few places on her exposed arms even showed melted and charred bone. Ordinarily it would have been something Ellsworth found absolutely repulsive, but for some reason it seemed completely normal to him in that moment. Even her missing eye didn't bother him, where the eye socket had been broken and crushed into her skull by the butt of a Jem'Hadar rifle.
"Oh, Alax, we were beginning to think you wouldn't come back."
"That's not my name. You must have me mistaken for someone else," Ellsworth said, frowning down at the woman, though it seemed like it really might have been his name. Or, perhaps, it used to be his name. The memory surrounding it was hazy at best.
"Still stubborn, I see. Denin, do you remember the time-," she asked, turning to the man next to her.
The question had cut off so abruptly that Ellsworth presumed it had been finished telepathically. The man cut his eyes to give Ellsworth a knowing look, then turned back to the woman and nodded with what looked like a smile. But it was hard to tell exactly what the move was meant to be because the lower portion of his jaw had been completely blown off by a disruptor bolt, a wound that matched several more spread across his torso. It seemed like he might have been prevented from thought at all by the gaping wound in the back of his head where a portion of his skull had been smashed in postmortem by a fallen support beam. But whatever it was she'd asked of him, he seemed to have retained enough mental capacity to remember, and it appeared to be a fond memory from the look on what was left of his face.
"What are you talking about?" Ellsworth demanded, growing increasingly annoyed with the pair. "That's very rude, you know."
"Come with me outside," the woman said abruptly and before he could blink he found himself no longer at the seats but standing near the exit to the theater. "I have something to tell you, but it's hard to stay here."
The woman's hand was outstretched to him but Ellsworth refused to take it; instead, he brusquely moved past her to pass through the doors on to the street outside. And then for some reason he was on the beach in Ambanivato on Risa when he'd expected to be on the snowy, bustling sidewalk in Medara on Betazed. The transition jarred him, and he turned to the woman for clarification. Somehow she'd changed from her theater wear into a light dress with many folds of silken cloth. She was walking away from him and he had to sprint to try to catch up.
"Hey, wait!"
He could tell she was speaking but the wind kept catching her words and carrying them away or they'd be lost in the crash of the surf. And no matter how hard he ran, he could never seem to catch up to her. The sand was thick and porous, and it was slowing him down. It shifted beneath his feet as he ran, forcing his muscles to make constant adjustments. Within moments his legs were completely exhausted and screaming in pain but he ran on, trying to catch her. Despite how quickly she was gaining distance on him she looked like she was just walking at a leisurely pace, moving her arms and hands in animated speech. Occasionally he'd catch the hint of a laugh or half a word, just enough to make him all the more frustrated that he couldn't reach her. But she was so far beyond him now that it seemed impossible to catch up.
Eventually he couldn't even see her anymore; she'd disappeared around a break in the trees into a cove and somehow he knew she was gone, passed away from this world again into something beyond. His knees grew weak and buckled, sending him down into the sand where he cried openly and sobbed into his hands.
"Mom, please...."
Ellsworth's heart was racing when he woke up, he was completely drenched in sweat, and his chest was heaving like he'd just run a marathon. The darkness in his room was suffocating, and his hand shot out to the side, smacked into the bulkhead, and fumbled for the control panel. The small lights over his bed finally came on, like the twin suns of Risa, and helped to pull him back into this world. After taking a few minutes to get his breathing under control, Ellsworth rolled on his side to face the bulkhead, curled into the fetal position, and whispered in a shaky voice:
"Computer... Begin personal log."
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