Unbearable Vulnerabilities [18+] (Part 3 of 5)

Posted on 30 Apr 2019 @ 9:58pm by Lieutenant Lake ir-Llantrisant & Lieutenant JG Matthew Plumeri

2,785 words; about a 14 minute read

Mission: Episode 17 - Crystal of Life
Location: USS Galileo-A - Deck 3, Counseling Office
Timeline: Various

Previously on “Unbearable Vulnerabilities” [18+] (Part 2 of 5) …

Slowly, Lake closed the physical distance between himself and Matthew. The emotional distance would take more time, more effort, than a handful of steps. Keeping a couple of metres away from the sobbing man, Lake took a similar posture as Matthew. He pressed his shoulder into the bulkhead and he crouched to the floor, lowering his face into Matt's eye-line. Lake rested the side of his head against the bulkhead, and he asked, "Let you go? Where would you go?"

Matt felt thoroughly embarrassed. The long journey to the Latari system was taking its toll on him. Under normal circumstances, he easily made friends. But what he wanted was something more. And that was not so easy this time around. The tears were hot and genuine. He remained hiding his face in the crook of his arm a moment longer. He tried to dry his eyes a little as the intense emotional wave passed. He couldn’t bring himself to look at ir-Llantrisant. Ashamed that his temper and his emotions got the better of him. He knew that Lake was a few meters away and sitting on the floor. Matt saw his COMM badge and reached for it. His right hand bloodied, he picked up the communications device and saw that it was damaged. He let it drop to the floor, wiped the blood from his hand and onto the dark part of his uniform. He would have to speak in Standard now. His accent was thick, and it made him feel self-conscious.

“I don’t have anyplace to go. I’ve never been good at being alone. Not for long periods of time. Not like this.” He closed he eyes, revealing his face as he leaned his head against the bulkhead. His cheeks were wet. He dried them with a quick wipe on his sleeve. The feeling of being against the walls and in the corner felt reassuring now. There was nowhere else to go, and he was tired of running. He sighed. And in that sigh was sorrow and pain and exhaustion. His breathing was labored; he still was weighted down – this was just a lull in the storm.

And now the continuation…


[ON]

On his knees, Lake edged closer to Matthew. He shuffled closer and he lay the medkit on the carpeted deck between them. Lake pried the case open and withdrew a small, circular sterifield projector. Looking down at the equipment, Lake said, "We're on a tough little ship, heading towards the middle of nowhere mighty fast. I'd say it's been hard on all of us." --He held the circular device over Matt's injured hand and he pulsed it a couple of times to clean away the blood-- "I can't say the senior staff has come together as a cohesive unit. I haven't sorted how to connect with any of them..."

Lake looked up, his lips pursed, and he looked right at Matthew. "What is it about this crew that's making you feel alone?"

At first, the sterifield projector stung, just a little, as it cleaned the wound. The skin was cut on the meaty part of Matt’s hand and thumb. Probably from the way he hit the vase and sent it sailing. His temper was something he had to work on. As Lake cleaned the wound, he felt the warmth from the cleaning. It allowed him to focus on something else. Matt heard Lake say that he was having trouble connecting with the senior staff. And that’s the way he felt too. The Counselor was supposed to be a a member of the senior staff. If he was having difficulties, then maybe it was true that a lot of the crew were having difficulties. Difficulties with the distance and the time and their vulnerability out here with no one else to back them up. Just three ships and that’s it. It was an insight he needed.

Lake had challenged him, questioned his ability and his capability to be a member of the crew. Perhaps even a member of Starfleet…or had he? Could Matt have mis-interpreted the question? It was time to stop being afraid and time to start acting like a Starfleet officer. “I feel…different from them. I try and connect but it feels…artificiale” he said ending with a Fontalan word. He hoped he was expressing himself OK. “I feel…ah…like a stranger. Here. A stranger to myself. I feel apart, separate and I don’t know how I got here. I miss my home. My real…home. I want to hear my language and I want to see familiar places." It was the best he could do for the moment.

"I felt the same way when my family defected to the Federation," Lake remarked. He told the story like a parable, like it had happened to someone else. It already felt like so long ago, like it had genuinely happened to a completely different person than the one he was now. He packed away the sterilizer in the medikit, trading it for a dermal regenerator. Lake said, "My parents decorated our home in a Romulan style, they planted whatever Romulan crops could survive in the new environs of our colony, they wouldn't permit us speaking Federation Standard at home. Within the boundaries of our farm's acreage, my parents created the only Little Romulus on the entire planet."

Lake swallowed hard. He shuffled closer to Matthew; he could practically feel the disturbance in the air from the other man's breathing. Lake cupped his hand under Matt's right hand and he waved the egg-shaped device over the wound. At Lake's touch of the toggle, healing radiation projected from the dermal regenerator. "Not one of us could imagine Romulus would fall, that it could be in any way possible. Familiar is a dirty word to me now. All that's familiar to me is scraps and ash," Lake proclaimed.

He listened and understood a different side to Lake now. It was hard to reconfigure his thoughts and his feelings. The loss of one's entire world was...unimaginable. This was the first time he thought of "the Counselor" with any kind of understanding - limited though it may be. He didn't know what to say. And any platitudes from him now after he had exploded in anger at him not more than twenty-minutes prior would seem cheap and disingenuous.

Lake was close now and he was running the dermal regenerator over the wound which was being nicely healed up. Matthew's eyes slowly traced from Lake's hands, up his arms and to his shoulders where he stopped. Matt asked, hesitantly, "Do you ever feel...trapped? Like...you can't breathe? No matter what you do, you're drowning? Sometimes...at night...I can't breathe. I wake up...like...in a panic. It takes me a while to get back to sleep. Sometimes...I feel like I never want to go back to sleep." He dared to look up into that face.

With Matt's questioning eyes turned upon him, Lake's entire body went still. His hand stopped swaying the dermal regenerator and his jaw tightened. The clenching of Lake's jaw was visible through his taught skin. Without looking up, Lake answered that question with a question: "Have you heard of a star called Pleione?"

He nodded, slowly, "Class B star with emission lines instead of absorption lines. A classic decretion star with rotating gas..." he cut himself off. "Yeah, I know it." There was more going on inside Lake than met the eye.

"I thought I was going to die there," Lake said abruptly. His voice was small, probably smaller than Matthew had ever heard it before. Lake made every effort to tell the story with some semblance of a matter-of-fact mien. He wasn't entirely successful. His voice cracked around the edges. "I thought I was going to die on the ball of mud that was orbiting that star. It was my last assignment before Galileo," Lake explained. Tentatively, he made eye-contact with Matt, but he could never hold it long. "Schofield was assigned to investigate the pre-warp culture on that world. I was disguised to look like a native, along with the rest of my away team. We became separated. I was accused of being a foreigner by the local authorities. They dragged me into a basement beneath a pyramid.

"I had no identification papers," Lake continued, like a pallbearer approaching a grave. "I had no rights. I wasn't a citizen. I was hardly even a sentient being to them. I assumed that pyramid would be my tomb. ...Hobus come for it's wayward child..."

Matt knew that Romulans had an active mythology and cosmology. Matt noticed, for the first time, that Lake was on his level. Physically he was on the floor with him. The shock of this caused him to look away a moment, he had to avert his eyes but, he brought them back. There was more here. "What did you do?"

Lake didn't answer that at first. There was the answer he had given the Schofield's Captain, and there was the answer he had given to his personal log. Lake finished repairing the surface-level abrasions on Matthew's hand and then he tucked the dermal regenerator away. Lake took a deep breath, making a decision, and then he locked eyes with Matthew.

"I gave up," Lake admitted. He said it like it was the only obvious answer. Perhaps it wasn't what any other Starfleet officer would have said, wasn't what any other Starfleet officer would have done, but the answer came out of Lake like it was the only sane answer possible. He flailed his hands helplessly and then he braced his palms against the deck. "I told the local investigators ev-er-y-thing. I told them about Starfleet, about the Prime Directive. I told them what Commander Blake eats for breakfast." --He shrugged again, this time a little defiantly-- "They thought I was ill, so I flailed around the room and I beat my chest against the wall. I let them think I was ill, but there wasn't much acting involved. I was in severe distress; it felt as if my mind was imploding...

Matt sat there, tired, exhausted and just listened. It was difficult to keep eye contact; Matt felt that everything he knew about Lake was coming undone. It was clear to him that Lake was trying to help and that he was baring a part of his soul that he didn't share often.

"Anyway," Lake said, trying to think less about how he had felt, and think more about what had happened. "I couldn't risk digging my combadge from out of the folds of my costume, but I managed to crack the casing. The emergency beacon allowed another away team to rescue me. I got away in the end."

Lake's honesty and forthrightness was astonishing. It demonstrated to Matt that no other Counselor would put themselves out like this. It was risky; there was probably a chapter in a book about how you're not supposed to do this as a Counselor. The same chapter next to Captain's not 'fraternizing' with their crew. But for Plumeri, it was the break he needed. He needed to know that if he was going to be open and honest then Lake was willing to meet him on that ground. Common ground was what Matthew needed and it seemed Lake had figured that out. All of this flashed in his mind in a second. All he could say was, "I've felt that way. Not at all like what you experienced. But I know what it feels like to be an 'other'."

"When you wrote your report later; did you omit some parts? Those parts where you told your captors everything?" he kept his eyes averted for as long as he could. Then looked at Lake.

Frowning at Matthew, Lake eyes silently said what must you think of me?. He shook his head twice, and he explained, "Nothing so dramatic. The Exploratory Division needed to know the cultural contamination risks of our away mission. I told them what happened." --He hesitated-- "It's about storytelling. Telling the facts in a fashion that they want to hear them."

He looked into his face and searched there. Matthew determined that Lake was telling the truth and that is what he was looking for. A way to tell if Lake was telling the truth. He pressed him further, "Is that what you do here? With me? Tell me what I want to hear?" Matt knew that the situation was delicate. But he still felt raw. As soon as he said it he wished he hadn't. It came out all wrong and he looked away. Frustrated with himself. Was there anyone he could trust?

The answer came easily, perhaps too easily. Shaking his head, Lake said, "No," and he elongated the vowel as he struggled to explain what he needed to explain next. Lake paused and he sighed and he shifted his body weight, fulling sitting on the floor now. Entirely casually, Lake said, "I don't care enough about what you think about me to tell you what you want to hear. Regardless of what it sounds like I'm examining your cognition through diagnostic questions. I'm challenging your perceptions to empower you to avoid self-defeat. What I say to you in this room is my career. My duty to Starfleet."

Matt gestured in irritation with his hands and grunted. He had suspected that "the Counselor" was just marking off a checkbox. He felt inwardly vindicated. Organic or silicon Starfleet treated everything as "property". He inwardly laughed at "cognition" and considered it just another byword. He knew it that Lake thought of him as just another checkbox. "Yeah, ok. OK, yeak I thought so. I knew it. That's what I really don't....I really don't like about your...about what you do." He was getting irritated and frustrated again. His Standard language skills were OK. But he wasn't going to win any Rhetoric awards anytime soon. "I'm just another 'talking monkey' to you. And not just you. To....no. Forget it. OK. Just forget it." He looked at his hand and said, "Thanks for fixing my hand. I'm sorry about the vase. I'll get you a new one or...whatever you want. So - look. Now that I know I'm just another one of your projects to fix. What do I have to do to stop coming here? I kinda want this to be over you know? I don't know what I want, or how I fucked things up so badly. All the time like. And I guess you aren't able to help me either. Counselor." He pulled his hand away. He wanted to crawl in a hole and just disappear.

"Why does it have to be one or the other with you?" Lake asked indignantly. He held out his hands like a scale, palms up, weighing out science and belief. Clearly, this wasn't the first time Lake had had this argument with a patient. Clearly. "Either I approach my duty with a scientific method or I can care about my crewmates' well being. Science or belief," Lake spat out. "Are you telling me when you were investigating the ruins of Cheron, you lovingly caressed every piece to learn from it through touch alone? Or were you robotically following a checklist with no curiosity for what those artifacts meant to people, nor what the Federation could learn from them. Because apparently you can only do one or the other."

"No, no...I can do both those things. Don't call me a robot. I mean, it's not black or white. It's not like that. I'm not like that OK?" Uh oh, he was getting mad again. His mind raced and he hated the idea that other people thought he wasn't smart or that he couldn't do something as well as they could. He let out a sigh. If he had been a steam engine it would have been hot steam coming out with that sigh.

Then he suddenly stopped. Held his breath. Looked at Lake, "Wait a second. Cheron? 'Lovingly caressed'? Are you reading my log entries?"


[OFF]

To Be Continued

Lieutenant Lake ir-Llantrisant
Chief Counselor
USS Galileo-A

&

LTJG. Matthew Plumeri
Science Officer - Astrometrics/Historian
USS Galileo-A
NCC-80010

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