Enlightenment III

Posted on 30 Apr 2013 @ 5:13pm by Crewman Neo & Naskisem

2,036 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: Episode 03 - Frontier
Location: USS Galileo: CIV Naskisem's Quarters
Timeline: MD7 1000 Hours

ON:

She looked away from him, at the opposite wall for a moment before looking back. "Promise me you will not tell him what I have told you."

"You think he doesn't already know?"

She frowned. "What do you mean?"

"You believe he doesn't know what you think of him," Neo clarified. "You meditated with one another."

"You misunderstood," she said gently. "I will suffer consequences if he learns that I have discussed him with you."

"You won't suffer anything," Neo said. "This isn't a zekteiah'rizez," he lapsed into MAG, the only sign that he was at all affected. "That is why I am here. To make sure this goes off. It will." He leaned back and shifted his head back against the cushion, looking at the ceiling. "Yeah, I won't tell him anyway. Wouldn't help the trust thing." First Maenad, now Naskisem. Liyar certainly had a track record. Neo closed his eyes.

Naskisem relaxed now, grateful that Neo was there for her. She watched him for a few seconds as he sunk back into the couch, but she remained sitting on the edge of the seat. She wondered about their past, what relations were like in Neo's family. He was genuine. He too wanted to help his brother, wanted to help him accept her for who she was. Liyar had no better option, and it was a good one at that. Naskisem looked down at her hands and studied them while Neo sat with his eyes closed. It was good to have him here with her, she thought. Humans were so foreign to her. The atmosphere, the temperature, the sights and sounds. Even the feeling was too much. A part of her wished that she had never left Vulcan, that she had done things differently with her life. Eventually, she looked up at him. "Are you tired?" she practically whispered.

"You got the good quarters," Neo said. "Nice couch. I've got a bunkbed and a roommate. She smells."

Smells were a problem that Naskisem had noticed also. She did not like them. She imagined having to share a room with an alien and was repulsed. "You are welcome to stay with me," she looked around the room. So much wasted space. "Humans overvalue hierarchy and diminish personal suffering based on social status. While others are given cramped and shared quarters barely hospitable for an animal, some are given quarters such as these. You may spend as much time here as you like." She stopped looking about the large room and turned back to him. "It would ease my conscience."

"Consider your conscience eased," Neo replied. He certainly wasn't going to argue. "What is it you were doing when I got here?" he asked, recalling the odd steps she was doing just before the music she was playing had stopped.

"Terran ballet." Naskisem looked at the wide-open floorspace that she'd been using. "I do not think that I am exceptionally good at it. But, I had to find something to do with my time. I was hoping that Liyar would have introduced me to the engineer today, Lilou Peers."

"Not an effervescent host," Neo said wryly.

Like a statue, Naskisem remained perched on the edge of the sofa. Her hands were on her thighs and she stared across the room at nothing in particular. She was more concerned with her thoughts than what was on the walls. She agreed that Liyar was a very ungracious host, but she said nothing about it. The events of the past twenty minutes replayed in her mind; all that Neo had said, the feelings they inspired, the memories she wondered he had. And, because he was bonded, she also found him more interesting. What was it like to be bonded? Did he like his mate? Did she like him? Could she ask about it, and if she did would be angry? Liyar was angry enough with her, she didn't want to ruin what she had with Neo. There was still that part of her mind that said, despite all that had been said and all that she knew, she was defective in some way. She had been told by everyone that Liyar could not refuse her. That even by her sheer presence, he would have wanted to befriend her. But he hadn't. At all. She wanted to know why. She had to have it proven to her somehow.

"Neo," she said softly, breaking a silence that had lasted several minutes. "Could you tell me what it is like to be bonded? Would I make a good bondmate?"

Neo leaned forward once again, placing the flats of his feet on the floor and resting his elbows against his knees. "You know yourself. Your mind, your personality. Things which are good and bad. You know you the most out of anyone in the universe. Being bonded is like having someone else with all that knowledge. In a way they're you. They're part of you, they breathe through you. It's like they use your lungs." He bit his tongue between his lips in concentration. That came out stupidly. He shook his head. "They're part of you. You're part of them. You're that close, there's no room for petty jarelpekh." It was the reason why quite frankly he'd been shocked that anyone wanted to bond with Liyar at all. "Yeah, you would make a good bondmate. It's just you. There's no stuff, there's nothing to do. It's you."

She listened to him carefully, word by word. She had heard all of these things before. She had been unclear, perhaps deliberately. "For Liyar," she said. "Do you think - you are his brother - that I should not have come?" Her words were sincere, and peculiarly sad.. "I came on the advice of my family. I thought I would be well-received. If I return home having failed, I will shame my relatives. No one will want me then."

"Do you want to bond with him?" Neo asked simply.

She hesitated. "I want to help him to find himself that he will want to bond with me."

"That doesn't really answer the question I asked."

"Clarify," she said with a puzzled expression.

"Do you, Naskisem, want to bond with him, Liyar?"

"I want to bond with Liyar, yes," she carefully explained, "but not in his present form. He is incapable of bonding, the way he is now." She closed her eyes for a second.

"Okay. Well, I've known him his entire life. He's always been riye- mentally ill," he corrected hastily. "You should be thinking about what you want in an equal relationship. Don't be his mother, yeah? Take care of yourself."

Naskisem chewed on her tongue behind her lips. Her eyes moved but her head did not. "I do," she said. "I do, but I also want to help him." She didn't know who she was trying to convince anymore. She wanted to bond with the Liyar she thought she was told about. She wanted to keep herself in good favour with her friends and family; Liyar's problems were not 'common knowledge' because of Vulcan's strict privacy laws. If she returned empty-handed, she would be the outcast. She would be the one with the problems, even if it wasn't her fault, and she could never tell anyone otherwise. Other males would see her as the reject of a statused Vulcan from a privileged family and would want nothing to do with her.

"You're here. Why did you come?" Neo asked, mostly out of curiosity.

"To help him and bond with him," she said to her chest. "My parents are acquaintances with yours. I was not bonded from birth, but my parents wanted me to bond with someone of reputation. I have spent most of my life on Vulcan. I have little experience with offworlders. I have done work for the Vulcan Science Academy and analyses for the V'Shar. I am currently on sabbatical from the VSA, but my outside experience is very limited. My family has always placed me in high regard with respect to stability and logic. I was told that my foundation was strong enough to assist Liyar. I was not told the full extent of his mental health, only that he needed a strong partner, like T'Yron, to provide him with stability." She shuffled her feet. "I do not want to bear the shame of being rejected."

Reputation, Neo repeated in his mind, cracked and dry. Liyar had that in spades. "Bonding with him will help him, but if you bond with him; then you're in his head. You will forever be tied together. Wanting to help him is good reason but it's not good enough. I want you to bond with him," Neo said flat out. "I want him to go back to Vulcan, and do whatever it is he does. Bond with you. Start again. Have a family. I don't," he said, tilting his head, "want his bondmate to be trapped. I don't want him to die in seven years when you Challenge," Neo said in a rare moment of blunt honesty.

Naskisem straightened her posture. "You offend me," she said blankly. "I will not Challenge."

"I am willing to do whatever is necessary to accomplish this. I need to be certain I'm not wrong," Neo said. "You don't seem to know anything about this man. I'm honestly shocked that you do want to bond with him. He's delusional, borderline abusive, and probably belongs in a meditation cell. I don't want you to bond with him and then regret it."

"Then I apologise." Naskisem was beginning to feel exasperated. "I only know what I have been told and have seen. If he is as severe as you believe, then I am offended by my parents and my by myself for my own misjudgement. I do not enjoy being made a fool of."

"I meant what I said. Meditate on it, yeah?" he said, arching his eyebrows in request. "I don't know how severe he is. I'm going to find out, and make sure that no one gets hurt. From what you've told me, he's volatile and uses intimidation to get what he wants. That is severe." Neo hadn't spoken to Liyar directly in years, not including their most recent conference over vidcomm. Neo liked to think he knew his brother enough to say that Liyar's honor would prevent him from acting so foolishly, but the evidence was piling up. He had known T'Yron. Somehow she had escaped all of the negativity of the Niram clan, all of the conjecture, all of the speculation. Nearly everybody was fond of her. Neo also wanted to think that he could have trusted T'Yron's judgment, but his suspicious nature made it difficult. "If he's functional, if you fully intend to join your mind with his, then I'll do everything I can do. The only thing standing in his way right now is riyeht." Neo rested his chin on his fingertips. "Come to know him. That is the only way you're going to be able to tell if you will be a good bondmate for him. If you get to know him and find that you're compatible, that you can handle him."

"I will try," she replied, though she doubted that he wanted to speak to her. She could do nothing until he saw her again, which she thought would be a long time.

Neo stood and rose to his full height, clasping his hands behind him. "I'll get started. I guess it's time for a reunion."

Naskisem inclined her head. She remained seated for a long while after he was gone, mulling over her life, her emotions, and the trouble that her family had gotten her into. She was outraged, but showed it only as much as any good Vulcan could. Eventually, she returned herself to trying to learn the Terran ballet she had been slaughtering earlier.

OFF:

Crewman Neo
Support Craft Pilot, FCON
USS Galileo

Naskisem
Alien Archaeologist/Anthropologist, CIV
USS Galileo

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