Where in the world is...?

Posted on 08 Feb 2015 @ 8:10pm by Petty Officer 3rd Class Ellsworth Hudson & Ensign K'os Beaumont

2,672 words; about a 13 minute read

Mission: Episode 07 - Sojourn
Location: USS Galileo - Deck 4, Quarters 04-1007 EN
Timeline: MD45: 1500hrs

[ ON ]

Anna Beaumont was at her wits end. Her husband Cole wouldn't verbalize it but he'd been beside himself about his son, K'os. She didn't know how to console him when he was like this. Usually she would call K'os; he always knew what to say or what to do to make her husband feel better. But now...now that K'os was incommunicado, she just didn't know what to do.

Well. There was one thing. She just didn't know how comfortable she'd be making that call. She looked at Arthur playing with toys on the floor while she bit her lip in thought.

Screw it. She needed info on K'os and there was only one person that might know. She moved to a console on the desk and sat down. She looked up the directory and found the Galileo. It took her a few minutes to find the name she was looking for, and with a deep breath she sent a video request.

Ellsworth was busy at his desk, swamped in all the paperwork that seemed to attend a ship's departure from starbase. There was also extra paperwork, it seemed, thanks to the new deflector dish that he knew nothing about but still needed to order replacement and maintenance parts for. When the console beeped it was a distraction, an annoyance, and without hesitation he reached over to activate the commlink without bothering to check the name just to shut it up. It was always some functionary from Ops these days, calling to annoy him about something.

When he finished up the last paragraph on his PADD and turned to the viewscreen it took his brain a moment to register the woman's face. But once it did it was difficult to manage the flow of information, scenes from his own memory and whatever lingered in his mind from the bond he'd shared with the Vulcan hybrid: he saw her face hovering above the bed in a picture frame and felt K'os's insistent touch at his hip; her laughter over some joke K'os had told and the self-satisfied look he got on his face, the one that made his dimples appear; a star-filled sky in an alpine glade where K'os had spoken of her in the deep of the night.

"Uh, Anna," Ellsworth stuttered, working very hard to make his vocal cords work. Seeing her made him realize in one thunderous, overwhelming rush the astonishing depth of his own hubris, to think that he could easily compartmentalize and stow away K'os and everything about him. He'd done some incredibly stupid things, thought some really dumb stuff, but believing he could ever just sweep away a man he'd called his imzadi...

Anna blinked at the young face in front of her. She wasn't much older than K'os - something that made their relationship a little strained at times so she wasn't sure why she was so surprised. What was I expecting? She thought to her self.

"I'm uh, ya, I'm Anna. I wasn't sure if you'd know who I am. I'm K'os' Step--I mean, I'm married to K'os' father, Cole." She still wasn't comfortable calling herself his mother, step or not. "You're Ellsworth Hudson, right?" Her hair was tucked back into a ponytail, and had that dishevelled look of a mother of a small child.

"I know who you are," Ellsworth said, almost interrupting her in his rush to speak. "And yeah, I'm Ellsworth."

It came out sounding flat with just the slightest edge to it, and he regretted it. He was angry at K'os, not Anna, but it was hard to contain so it leaked into his voice. So, too, did worrisome thoughts leak into his mind. Why was she calling? Had something happened to him? The barest thought of it made his eyes wet and his lower lip tremble against his will, fueled by all his ongoing inner turmoil. The only thing that kept him from bursting into tears on the spot was pride and the thought that K'os might be okay, which was in and of itself difficult to bear. In some ways, K'os being hurt or even dead was preferable because it meant he hadn't truly been abandoned.

Anna caught the change in the man's tone and her heart sank. She was hoping K'os was there with him or that he knew where he might be but he looked hurt more than Cole. She looked down at her hands before looking back at the screen.

"I'm sorry for bothering you, Ellsworth. K'os spoke of you often when he was aboard the Galileo. I just thought maybe..." She sighed. What did she think this was going to get her. "I thought maybe you'd heard from him? Or that he was there? He won't return our calls and we're worried. Cole found out two days ago that he was re-assigned back to the Galileo? This is a little embarrassing but we didn't even know he was on leave..."

"What?" Ellsworth asked, stunned. "Re-assigned back to the Galileo?"

He could hardly hear himself think over the sound of his heart beating in his ears. He was by turns thrilled at the prospect of seeing K'os again and furious at himself for feeling that way. Things were different now, or at least they were supposed to be. He'd tried to lose himself in Grayson, confronted Pennington, fumbled his own recovery with Wintrow and... Met Oren. The thought of the El Aurian made him feel like crying all over again; seeing his big green eyes and patient smile in his mind felt like a punch to the gut.

"I'm... A little behind on processing paperwork, I guess I haven't seen the personnel transfer. I haven't even seen him in two months. Before we docked, I didn't really speak to him, and then when we docked at starbase... He just left, and I..." With an unflattering sob, a tear finally spilled over his eyelid. "Fuck." Ellsworth slapped one hand open-palmed against the console and used the other to angrily wipe at his cheek. Sometimes he really hated being a Betazoid.

Anna's hand went to her mouth at the sudden outburst. Her heart melted at the sight and she found her eyes were getting wet now as a result. While her and K'os had never been close, their one close conversation happened when he called home after having met Ellsworth. If anyone knew what had happened to him, she thought for sure it would be the one person K'os had ever said he truly loved. Her voice caught in her throat at the realization that Cole's secret fears may be justified.

"Ellsworth. I'm so sorry. I thought because he talked so fondly..." She took a deep breath and decided it best to tell him. As deeply private as K'os' Vulcan family was she thought it best to tell Ellsworth everything she knew. "I know it doesn't seem like it right now, but K'os would never have just left without a reason. Tell me, have you ever heard about something called, Pon Farr? It's not very well known."

"No," Ellsworth said, looking away from the viewscreen. As often as he ended up crying, he still felt foolish doing it in front of a person he didn't know. Her 'he wouldn't have left without a reason' sounded hollow to him because he had left without a reason, but as he sniffled and continued to wipe at his eyes he figured it did no harm in at least listening to whatever her theory might be. It certainly had to be better than his own, chalking it up as just one more abandonment in a lifetime of such events.

She tried to give a sympathetic smile, but he was turned away. She was not very good at this, and she hoped she wouldn't make things worse. "Well, I don't really understand it myself. I certainly didn't know about it until Cole mentioned something to me a month or so ago. How I understand it, Vulcans experience this, Pon Farr thing every six or eight years, I can't remember which. Wow, it's harder to explain than I thought. Um they experience this intense drive to mate -- like seriously intense from what I understand; can drive them to madness. Cole said Ko's' Uncle mentioned once that Vulcans can die if they don't treat their Pon Farr. Apparently it's only relieved by mating, participating in some ritual, or meditation which I hear is the hardest way."

Anna took a deep breath. She was talking fast, and feared Ellsworth wouldn't even absorb the info. He looks so mad. She thought to herself. "K'os isn't a...typical Vulcan though. Cole tells me he has experienced it a few times before, separated by three or four years. Which can happen in children of mixed species I'm told. The one he had at 17 apparently almost killed him. Mating doesn't work, he's tried it before. They've even tried that ritual, with no results. Only a combination of guided Vulcan meditation and medication helps him. He was overdue for it during his shoreleave. Cole assumed he would get treatment before he left with the Galileo...the thing that has Cole and I worried most, Ellsworth, is K'os hasn't been to Vulcan. His family there contacted us a couple months ago to ask about him, but we haven't heard from him or know where he would even have gotten treatment for it. When we found out that he was returning to the Galileo...well...we're really worried."

Ellsworth listened patiently then looked down and to the side, moving his eyes slowly and methodically as if the movement somehow helped his mind think. He felt like he remembered...something. He'd always run into hard walls in K'os's mind; as overwhelming as the experience always was, there continued to be a sensation that some things were held back. But none of that - none of this - helped.

"So... He's gonna be crazy?" Ellsworth looked puzzled. No one had ever accused him of being an intellectual giant, and those deficiencies certainly weren't helping at the moment. If the treatment was guided meditation and medication, could he get that somewhere else? "Or, do you think he went somewhere else? Why wouldn't he..."

The last trailed off in a whisper. He tried to retrace his steps, think of anything he might have done to ever make K'os feel ashamed and like he needed to hide. It wasn't long before self-doubt crept in, and his mind raced ahead of itself. What if he'd done it to him? What if they shouldn't have slept together, or linked? What if that somehow triggered it? When his eyes finally flicked back to the screen they were wide with concern and borderline panic. It felt like it must have somehow been his fault, to drive someone off like that.

"I don't know." Anna said, feeling pathetic and helpless. The look he was giving her was the same one Cole had when he first heard K'os hadn't been to Vulcan. "Cole says he's relieved that he's returning to duty and that it means he's ok." Even she didn't believe her own words, and she could see that she wasn't helping either.

It took only a moment for raw emotion to crystallize into spite. Ellsworth's dark eyes narrowed and his lip curled a little bit, making him look like the feral street child he'd once been. His mind was working in overdrive, assigning all manner of thoughts and emotions to the half-Vulcan in his absence. He probably thought he'd just get to cut his losses and be reassigned somewhere in the vast fleet, never thinking for a moment personnel management would shuffle him right back to the place he'd escaped. It would've been nice and neat that way, everyone would have moved on, so on and so forth. "Yeah, I guess we should all be glad he's okay, right?"

"If he is." She said quietly, feeling like maybe she really was making it worse. "I still worry. I know my husband. He bottles his feelings up and makes it seem like everything's okay so he doesn't make the people around him feel bad. I don't think K'os is ok, how can he?" Arthur started making noises from the floor and she turned and scooped him into her lap. "I'm sorry for dropping this on you Ellsworth. Like I said, I thought you knew all this. If, you talk to him or see him, can you tell---can you just see if he's...well?"

Whereas before Ellsworth had felt like all the blood was drained from his body, now it felt like it was rushing back as fire through his veins. His chest began rising and falling irregularly and color was rushing up his neck to his cheeks as that fire spread. Whether K'os was fine or not almost seemed secondary to finding him and...what? Screaming at him? Pounding his fists against the solid Vulcanoid musculature of K'os's chest? Holding him to a bed, looking him in the eyes, and taking all his anger out in an intimate moment that was ultimately just some stupid, primal show of dominance? Or, perhaps more likely, just crying? None of it seemed fitting. It all seemed useless. He'd get nothing out of it, and he knew it. If K'os could just leave like that, whatever made him think he'd get any real answers or satisfaction out of him?

He realized he was gripping the arms of the chair and halfway out of his seat, having risen in anger. Seeing Anna still on the other end, he sank back down into the chair. And with that he seemed to deflate considerably, almost shrinking before her eyes into someone that was no longer fire and brimstone but frail and unwillingly exposed.

"I'll find him and make sure he's okay," Ellsworth finally mumbled, looking down into his lap. "And I'll ask him to call you, too. So you know he's okay."

"Thank you Ellsworth. Again, I'm sorry for the trouble." She gave him what she hoped looked like a sympathetic smile before ending the transmission.

Ellsworth pushed away from the monitor until he was pressed against the back of the chair, as if physically distancing himself from the bad transmission could somehow do the same for him emotionally. He stared at the default symbol of the United Federation of Planets, looking at it but not really looking at it. His eyes traced the laurels and darted from star to star, but his mind was focused only on K'os. For a moment it seemed like he was approaching the event horizon of an epiphany that promised an emotionally numb clarity, but it vanished the second he reached for it. It was just a mirage.

After all, who was he kidding? He was Ellsworth Hudson, and the path he walked was one littered with trials and tribulations. Just when it appeared there was a victory, a moment where he could sit peacefully on a couch wrapped in Oren's arms, there was a fresh crisis, the reintroduction of someone who'd felt so much like the missing half of a broken man. Slowly, the emblem of the Federation began to grow wavy and cloudy, like a distant and distorted image. Ellsworth didn't even bother holding it back this time; the tears flowed freely, punctuated by sobs that started small but eventually racked his body. As he placed his head down on the desk, forming a very unattractive puddle of tears and snot, that grew with every uncontrollable sob, he was thankful at least for the absence of his new roommate, the priest, so that he could be alone in his misery.

It was really all about the little things in life, wasn't it?

END


PO3 Ellsworth Hudson
Quartermaster
USS Galileo
[ PNPC - Mott ]

&

Anna Beaumont
Civilian | K'os' step-mother
Eart
[NPC - K'os]

RSS Feed