A Spiral of Lies

Posted on 30 May 2013 @ 10:23pm by Commander Andreus Kohl & Lieutenant Dawn Meridian

1,880 words; about a 9 minute read

Mission: Episode 03 - Frontier
Location: USS Galileo - Deck 3, Counselor's Office
Timeline: MD 05 - 1228 hours

[ON]

Settling himself on the sofa, Andreus Kohl folded his legs in a loose approximation of a lotus position. He leaned over the arm of the sofa, and reached for his matcha latte, made from a variety of leaves only found growing in Vega Colony. He lifted the mug to his lips and sat back into the sofa. Before he drank a single sip, Kohl asked, "How're you this afternoon, Dawn?"

For once, Dawn had settled into the cushy leather chair opposite the sofa instead of the swivel chair that sat motionless behind her desk. It was odd not to be able to spin around at a moment's notice. Then again, she could always sink into the chair to hide, if she had to... not that she would. She wasn't sure Andreus was the kind of person she had to hide from, although she didn't know him particularly well. He'd sort of appeared one day. Reappeared, she'd been told. Maybe he was a magician. Magic would be helpful around sickbay.

Dawn's drink of choice - far from matcha latte - was coffee, absolutely black. She sipped at it like medicine, her sharp features twisting a little with every taste. She could never decide whether she hated coffee or loved it, but she figured, if she was going to drink something to wake herself up, it might as well taste the role.

"Bored/excited," she said, as if the two didn't contradict each other. "Away mission," she added, as if that explained everything completely. She took a big sip of coffee, winced, and then smiled at Andreus, her grey eyes surveying him with part academic, part personal interest. She left the "And you?" implied but not spoken.

When Dawn spoke of away missions, a knowing smile teased the edges of Kohl's lips and he nodded an emphatic nod. He winced when Dawn winced, but it wasn't because of bitterness. The slightly glaze over his eyes probably made it quite evident he was stung by memory. When he spoke, his conflicting emotions resembled excitement and tragedy, and he said, "Away missions. Right?" Then he shook his head, as if it was kind of funny, and he took his first sip of the hot drink.

Dawn nodded thoughtfully and her lips curved into a half-frown. "I like them, usually," she said, her tone distant. "Seeing things people haven't ever seen before, learning about alien species and cultures." But there was always a risk in that. If you delved too deeply into the mysteries of space, you ended up leaving things behind. Family. Friends. For every door that opens, another closes. "But at the same time, we're responsible for their lives. We can't really be swept away by wonder. It's a strange anchor." She wasn't being very Counsellor Meridian, but that was beyond her now.

Kohl nodded at that with some enthusiasm. Something in that spoke to him, resonated with something inside of him. "That," he said cautiously, "Could be why I'm feeling this way. In my flight to Rojar I, I couldn't feel any of the wonder. I couldn't feel any of the horror, even. I have patients to care for. I had" --he pursed his lips for a few heartbeats, reluctant to make the comparison-- "I had puzzles to solve..." Except the puzzle pieces were all the broken parts of Darius, Rhodes and Panne, and the picture on the box were their baseline medical records.

Dawn furrowed her brow. She'd heard about what had happened on the orbital survey, vaguely. "Puzzles," she agreed after a few moments. A very different kind of puzzles from the ones she was used to. She tried to understand people's minds, tried to help them adapt to things that were giving them trouble. Dealing with injuries was a lot more than that. It took more from you, at least.

"It might be," she said tentatively. "Sometimes it's better to become something of a machine for a little while. Better for the patients, at least. To be able to help them without shaking, without crying." She rolled her fingers into a fist and then let it relax. She gave Andreus a small smile. "I don't know if it's better for us, though."

"And now, I can't stop," said Kohl, his posture tense. "I can't stop thinking about it. The flight and the crash. But it-- it's not only that flight I'm thinking about."

She nodded slightly. She didn't know that she had the stomach to be a doctor - at least not all of the time. It was really scary, having people's lives in your hands, and it wasn't something she could take too much of at a time. She was impressed that Andreus took it as well as he did. "Not only that flight?"

"What do you mean?" Kohl replied, feigning ignorance artlessly. He narrowed his eyes in a questioning expression, and shook his head. He knew what she was asking, he recognize them as his own words, but all of the courage it had taken to speak them aloud had escaped him.

Dawn blinked at him, eyebrows raised. He knew exactly what she meant. The sudden avoidance surprised her. "You said you were thinking about more than just the shuttle flight," she said. Maybe it had just slipped out. She couldn't fault him for having things he didn't want to share.

Staring into the middle distance between them, Kohl rubbed his lips with the pads of his fingertips. He lowered his hand, and he opened his mouth, and then he closed his mouth again. Kohl licked his lower lip, and he said, "My father was killed in a shuttle crash. The day I transferred aboard Galileo my dad died... I didn't tell anyone. Well, almost no one."

Dawn blinked again. She opened her mouth for a moment as if to say something, and then promptly shut it again. She hadn't been expecting that. At all, really, although she wondered if she could have picked something up in his tone. She lowered her head, a moment of condolence. "That's... quite a burden to carry alone," she said. Death was one of the few things that made her hesitate. It was something she'd faced before, in a way, but everyone had their own ways of dealing with it. There were plenty of reasons not to share something like that.

"It's... worse than that too," Kohl said, and now the words were coming out easier with the figurative flood gates dropped. He wasn't experiencing a full-on catharis, but there was a certain thrill at sharing his conspiracy with someone. He wouldn't be alone now. Mostly, he sounded a little scared of himself. "I lied to Doctor Carlisle about it. I explicitly lied about my dad not dying in the crash, because I was afraid she would deem me unfit for duty. (I don't know why I thought that.) But now I don't know how to talk about my dad after I've been lying all this time."

Dawn blinked for a third time and took a rather long sip of coffee. This time, she managed not to wince. That... made a lot of sense. A lot of people dealt with grief by working through it, and if Carlisle might have threatened that, lying wasn't so strange. Still... Dawn wouldn't have wanted to be the one lied to. Lies... stung, at least once you knew about them. "A spiral of lies," she said into mug. There wasn't any judgement in her tone. "I can't really blame you."

She set the mug down gently and sank back into her chair. "You're worried about what happens when they find out?" That, and he was disturbed he'd even thought to lie in the first place, maybe. Lies were scary, twisted things, and a tool she didn't ever really use... but they weren't always bad.

"I feel like I'm worried about either possibility," Kohl said, sounding conflicted. There was a snarl of a wince on his lips and his searing gaze was flitting around. Kohl raised his hands like a scale, raising one side and then the other. "Telling people I lied or not telling them," Kohl said, "Telling people my father died or not telling them."

"Yeah," she said quietly. She'd seen what lies did to people. They twisted around them and everyone else until they were so tight the only way to loosen them was to tell more. She'd decided long ago that she wouldn't lie, but she understood why Andreus had, at least a little. If something threatened to stop her from counselling... would she just accept that?

"Telling people will be harder," she said, looking at her hands. "Much harder, really." She looked back up, her lips drawn thin. "But the other option is staying in this... limbo. Torn between keeping up the lie or giving it up. And the longer it goes, the harder it gets to stop." She let out a breath. "I think people will understand, Andreus. I don't think there's any way they couldn't."

Kohl nodded at each of Dawn's statements, hearing them appeared to relax away the tension in his shoulders. He thought there was a certain ring of truth to her words. His breathing was coming slower, more deeply. Kohl took a long sip of his matcha and then he said, "I ho-- I think you might be right about that." But there was still hesitancy in his timbre.

"Well, at the very least, it's true for me. So I'm at least right about that." Dawn smiled, in her own knowing kind of way. It was her making-a-point smile, but without any of the maliciousness that usually came with a smile like that. "Even if everyone else would hate you - and I don't think they would - you have to ask yourself if you're willing to keep lying to them forever. It's easy to keep the lie going from moment-to-moment, but in the long run, it'll drain you." It was kind of dark to think about. Avoiding the truth to spare everyone the pain, but letting it build up... or telling the truth, and releasing all that pain at once. It wasn't an easy choice to make, to break that cycle.

After vocalising a thoughtful, "hmm," Kohl looked down in his half-empty mug of matcha. He took a long pull from it again and then he stared at Dawn. His thoughts were at an impasse. They would need time to masticate and digest Dawn's perspective into his own. "Thank you, Dawn," Kohl said. "Really, though."

She could tell that Andreus was considering her words, at least. That was a start, at least. Healthy change wasn't instant. If he'd just decided to go along with whatever she said, he'd either be lying or overeager. Slowly, she nodded, and downed the rest of her coffee with her eyes closed. "It was no problem," she said. "If I helped at all, that's all I can ask."

[OFF]

Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Andreus Kohl
Assistant Chief Medical Officer
USS Galileo

Lieutenant (JG) Dawn Meridian
Counsellor
USS Galileo

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