This Old House

Posted on 28 Jul 2016 @ 5:04pm by Petty Officer 3rd Class Ellsworth Hudson & Lieutenant Oren Idris Ph.D.

2,101 words; about a 11 minute read

Mission: Episode 11 - Divinum Mundi
Location: Bajor
Timeline: MD -23

[ON]

Ellsworth looked singularly unimpressed by the structure. It had what he'd come to recognize as many of the hallmarks of Bajoran architecture - round forms, flowing lines, and warm tones that altogether seemed drab and stale to a Betazoid. If he was a real estate agent, he might have described the building as "quaint." Or, fifty years ago, at least. Now it looked every bit like it had been given over to nature for several decades. It was a lifeless husk upon which other things could grow and thrive.

"A ruin? Did you drag me here for work, Oren Idris?"

"No..." Oren said, sounding exasperated. Though their arguing and giving each other the cold shoulder had died down slightly, purely for Cyrin and Marika's sake, things were still tense and Oren felt it wearing him down. Walking ahead of Ellsworth, Oren took out an old keycard for the door only to find the power to the entire place was shut down. He sighed, rubbing his eyes before ripping off the nearby panel to open the doors manually. After several minutes of trying to turn one of the valves, he finally turned to Ellsworth. "Are you just going to stand there, or are you going to help me?"

"If we ever want to get inside, I guess I should help you," Ellsworth said.

The young Betazoid was feeling almost petty enough to shoulder his way into the entryway and try to take things over. Instead, he wedged himself next to Oren, and almost instantly became angry with himself over the emotional response of being in close contact with him. He wanted to be mad. He did not want to feel that stupid flutter in his heart when they touched. But his emotions, per usual, were betraying him, never doing what he wanted them to do but rather doing whatever they wanted to do.

"You have to hit the pneumatic release."

"The what..." Oren asked dumbly, eventually stepping aside to let Ellsworth do what needed to be done. If he'd learned anything during this camping trip, it was that there were certain things Ellsworth was much better at doing and all he was good for at those time, was getting in the way.

Once the doors were finally open, Oren hesitated before entering.

Ellsworth, on the other hand, was no stranger to breaking and entering; he'd run away from foster homes so often on Betazed that breaking into a place to sleep had become commonplace. He brazenly stepped past Oren and into the building.

"What a wreck," he complained. "And it smells like something died in here. Do you want me to try to turn the power on? Maybe there's a solar backup or something."

"No...I don't think we'll be here long enough to need it," Oren said, finally following Ellsworth inside and entering the familiar room. He looked around, noting how much smaller everything appeared now in comparison to how he remembered it from almost fifty years ago.

"Oh, okay, great. I'm so glad we could cap the trip with a few minutes in an abandoned house. Thanks, Oren, I didn't love Bajor enough already. This tiny peasant shack has so totally opened my eyes to the planet's glorious wonders, why didn't I see it before?" Ellsworth complained, turning around in a circle with his arms extended in exasperation.

"Oh my Gods, can you just shut up for five minutes?" Oren suddenly said, his voice echoing slightly in the empty room. "I'm sorry! Alright? I'm sorry I changed our plans and didn't tell you. I'm sorry I invited Marika and Cyrin along to our romantic trip." Oren listed all he had done wrong quickly, though he didn't raise his voice. He just sounded frustrated and tired. "I'm sorry I acted like an asshole, but I was scared. We spent all of shoreleave together and it was amazing and perfect, and I was afraid, if we went on this trip alone together that it would feel like too much for both of us and having Cyrin and Marika here would take the pressure off."

Ellsworth stared, disassembling everything Oren had said so he could take it piece-by-piece to properly assess his feelings about all of it. With the apology out of the way and Oren's reasoning laid out, he felt a little guilty about the way he'd been behaving. Part of him still wanted to fight, just to vent that pent up emotion until it was exhausted, but for the most part he just felt ashamed.

Before Ellsworth could say anything, Oren added another sentence, with more hurt in his tone now. "And this peasant shack is where I was born...jerk."

"Oh." Now, he really felt ashamed. Ashamed and moved to do something, anything. It was a short distance to cross the room and surprisingly easy, given the emotional distance between them during the trip, to reach out a hand to lay on Oren's arm. He wasn't sure what to say, so he repeated himself, "Oh."

"Yeah...Oh," Oren agreed, but didn't move away from Ellsworth and instead looked around the small room. "I haven't been here in years..."

He moved away from Ellsworth too soon and walked from the main room into a hallway, one part of it leading down into the cellar and the other leading around the corner, towards two other rooms, his parents' bedroom and Oren's old room. After a glance down the cellar stairs, Oren decided to move forward towards his room instead. He hesitated only a moment before entering. It looked the way one would expect it to after fifty year - dusty and run down but mostly in tact, with two small beds against opposite walls, a small wardrobe and a toy box, both thrown open and empty.

"I can't believe I was ever that small," Oren said to Ellsworth, who was in the doorway with him.

Ellsworth walked into the room, letting his hand brush along Oren's hip as he passed him in a small gesture of affection. He avoided the beds - they had to be constituted largely of dust and allergens at this point - and went to peer into both the wardrobe and the toybox. Something about them being completely empty made the whole arrangement seem sadder. He completed his circuit quickly and shuffled back into place next to Oren.

Everything looked so... He wasn't even sure what the word was supposed to be. Simple? Humble? Agrarian? Particularly compared to his childhood on Betazed, a place where everything gleamed and glittered.

"How long were you here?"

"I was sixteen when I left," Oren replied, not taking his eyes off the room. He still couldn't get over how small everything looked. To think this little house was his whole world for his entire childhood seemed unbelievable.

"That was almost fifty years ago. This is the first time I've been back." With that, Oren finally took his eyes off the beds and looked at Ellsworth, trying to gauge his reaction.

Fifty years ago. It made his mind spin a little bit trying to grasp the truth of it. By and large, Ellsworth ignored the differences in their age. He didn't want to acknowledge it. Acknowledging the difference, the oddity, meant acknowledging his own relative mortality. At such a young age it was hard enough to think about the next ten years; harder still to think about the next ten years with a partner that would age imperceptibly.

Instead of immediately saying anything, Ellsworth's fingers reached out until they found Oren and then walked themselves into place so that they were holding hands.

"It's humble," he finally said. "Do you... Remember it? Were you all here?" He turned his head slightly to the look at the window, suggesting the question was about more than just Oren's immediate family and extended to include his people.

Oren gave Ellsworth an odd look that lasted for only a second, but then smiled. Squeezing his hand affectionately, he shook his head. "No, just my parents and me and my brother." He hesitated in his speech when he mentioned his brother but made sure not to take his eyes away from Ellsworth's face. Somehow, watching him take all of this in made it more real, more okay to talk about.

Ellsworth's eyebrows drew together just slightly as a mark of confusion. He squeezed Oren's hand with his thumb and allowed his head to pivot to the side, deepening the show of his confusion and curiosity. "Your... Brother?"

Oren nodded silently, eyes lingering for a moment on the room before leading Ellsworth out. "I had a little brother," he said, walking ahead of the Betazoid. "Dejen...he was five years younger than me."

"I didn't even," Ellsworth began, but it fizzled out before he could finish his statement. It embarrassed him to say it out loud, to admit that he didn't even know Oren had a brother. That he'd grown up in a small house in the middle of nowhere on Bajor. That he didn't have his own room. It suddenly embarrassed him to admit that out of Oren's seventy-five years, Ellsworth knew very few of them.

"It's alright," Oren said, sensing the tension in him. "I don't talk about Dejen...ever, I guess," he admitted, turning to look at Ells again. They stood there in the hallways for a moment before Oren smiled a bit and led Ellsworth to the basement door. "Come on, I want to show you something." It took a few good tugs, but eventually the door gave way and they could walk down the creaky staircase into a large room. It was clearly a dance studio, with wooden floorboards and mirrors along three of the four walls. Some were broken but otherwise the room looked untouched, with dust and other particles covering the floor and the mirrors.

"This is where my father worked. I spent a lot of time with him down here."

Ellsworth gave the room a good sweep. He'd seen one too many shows involving basements; nothing positive ever seemed to happen in a basement. But this seemed safe enough. He recognized it for what it was immediately and brightened a little bit for the familiarity.

"He was a performer?"

Oren smiled in response to the question. "He was a dancer. He performed and taught dance classes. Well, until the Occupation. Then it was just the two of us down here. I loved coming down here with him. We'd talk, play music, dance..." Oren let out a long sigh, looking wistful as he walked slowly around the room.

Ellsworth ruined the moment with an uncontrolled derisive snort and laugh that he quickly tried to cover up with a hand over his mouth. "Like, sixty years ago? I bet people were still doing the Andorian Aperture." He demonstrated the 'ancient' dance move, sliding across the floor toward Oren with his arms flailing like an opening and closing aperture. Upon arrival, he grinned and rested his wrists on top of the other man's shoulders. "Sorry, you know how I get on a dance floor."

He continued grinning, but, behind it, his eyes were searching Oren's for signs of grief or loss. Being here had to be stirring up difficult memories. Not to mention the situation had been perilously close to forcing him into thinking about his own deceased parents. When in doubt, he deflected with a joke.

Oren seemed to understand and, despite the sadness in his eyes, he was grateful for the break in tension between them and decided to play along.

"We didn't do the Andorian Aperture...it was all about the Bajoran Pavane back then." Oren followed it up with an equally embarrassing dance move, spinning around Ellsworth once before trying to steady himself once he came to a halt.

Ellsworth caught him with an outstretched arm that allowed him to easily draw their bodies closer together. After the disaster that was their camping trip and the heady rush of slowly making up, he had a lot of pent-up emotion that was bubbling to the surface. It required a conscious effort to slow the beating of his heart, and he had to push from his mind amorous thoughts of pulling Oren to the dusty floor, letting them become the stuff of fantasy later.

Instead, he contented himself with pressing a cheek against Oren's neck. "I wish I could have met them."

[OFF]

--

LT Oren Idris
Chief Research Officer
USS Galileo

PO3 Ellsworth Hudson
Operations Officer
USS Galileo

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