The BLTS Archive -Captain and Counselor
Howling at the Moon
by Lori (zakhad.ficsite@gmail.com)

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Archive: ASC

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Notes: Short bit in the Captain and Counselor series. Slightly out
of order, as I also have other stories in the timeline *before* she's
nine months along, but my muse is calling the shots.

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Sister moon will be my guide
In your blue blue shadows I would hide
All good people asleep tonight
I'm all by myself in your silver light
I would gaze at your face the whole night through
I'd go out of my mind, but for you

Lying in a mother's arms
The primal root of a woman's charms
I'm a stranger to the sun
My eyes are too weak
How cold is a heart
When it's warmth that he seeks?

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun
My hunger for her explains everything I've done
To howl at the moon the whole night through
And they really don't care if I do
I'd go out of my mind, but for you

~~ Sting

---

One of the problems of having an empath sharing your quarters -- off
duty musings become difficult, especially if they're likely to change
the emotions. I don't brood often, only when there's a particularly
knotty problem at hand, but sometimes I wake in the middle of the
night and stare out at the stars, and think things through while she
sleeps. That way if she does notice, I can pass it off as a bad dream.

That's the heart of the problem -- she expects me to talk about it.
Maybe not right away. She'll give me all the space I need, let me go
silent for days if I have to. But it starts to worry her, and seeing
that little frown between her brows causes me pain. I hate hurting
her. Eventually it would come to that. She worries when I keep
secrets, usually because she knows how I get -- she calls me Captain
Masochist.

So I wake at night. And often, I find that my brooding is eased by her
presence. Just her presence -- I've become that wrapped up in her.
Moonstruck. Déesse d'lune -- my goddess of the moon, fair of face,
eyes like the night. . . . How cliche. But her name -- derived from
Diana, goddess of the hunt and the moon -- and her Betazoid eyes
invite the comparisons.

Her serenity reminds me of the moon, too. I've been there, several
times during training at the Academy. Going EVA on the moon is one of
the sophomore year activities. The silence as we hiked across one of
the mares -- the Sea of Tranquility, if I recall correctly -- all
fifteen of us had orders to maintain radio silence, and when we got to
the dome and took off our helmets, not a one of us laughing and
boisterous cadets cracked a smile. Something about the walk through
such an otherworldly place, the pale ground and the utter silence, the
gravity difference that added spring to our step, had driven it home
to us that we were going into space. All the dreams of exploration and
adventure could never match the actual experience of somewhere not
Earth.

We apply familiar labels to the unfamiliar to make it understandable.
How many kinds of wine are there? Yet wine is a Terran beverage -- the
label is applied to a growing variety of alien beverages made by
similar processes, even though the end product is sometimes nothing at
all like the wine my own papa distilled. Not even alcoholic, in many
cases. Sometimes I think the universal translator does us a
disservice. How can we experience and truly comprehend when we
continually see through our own narrow perspective and use our own
restrictive labeling?

She has been at my side for the majority of her career. Long before
any intimate liaison, we spent many pleasant hours together on duty,
and many unpleasant ones. She helped me prepare for diplomatic
endeavors -- she is good with languages, and excels at facilitating
understanding. Mine of the new culture, and their understanding of us.
She also facilitated my understanding of myself.

She taught me that expression of emotions we don't wish to acknowledge
is sometimes the only way to rid ourselves of them. I've never felt
comfortable with crying, or with discussing my feelings in general,
and it made for an interesting session with the counselor when she had
occasion to initiate one.

That first session was an eye-opener. Even though I knew she was
capable, there's still something about an officer who's that much
younger that makes one assume a kind of seniority that comes with more
experience. She wasn't intimidated by me. Others were. Over the years
I've realized that part of it is her empathy -- it levels the playing
field even when she doesn't take advantage consciously. It's so much a
part of her that even when she doesn't extend herself, some part of
her registers what she senses, much in the same way humans recognize
body language.

She is, by turns, the most alien yet the most familiar person I've
ever known. She surprises me almost daily, sometimes in small ways.
Sometimes she renders me speechless.

I have loved, many times. But I have never seen anything like her -- I
find it difficult to believe I spent so much time not looking at her.
How I schooled myself to see the uniform and rarely the person inside
it. I wasn't prepared for the whole of her.

Command will go on and on about the way she and I work together so
well, about the self control and the professionalism I have. They give
most of the credit to me. I know better -- if she wanted to she could
melt me with a look and take over the ship. I'd probably offer to give
her a foot rub afterward, because walking all over me hurt her feet.

Well, perhaps that's an exaggeration. I'd probably entertain the
notion for a few moments only because I'd be curious to see what she
would actually do with the ship, then order security to haul her off
to the brig. Then we'd find a way to exorcize the alien entity
possessing her and things would be normal again.

I live on my cross, one hand nailed to duty, the other nailed to her,
and I hang in the balance. She holds me up. I was falling down,
unbalanced, so many times -- at some point living this life becomes
more difficult, the years of ethical puzzles and interpretations of
regulations and enigmatic mind-bending experiences begins to take
their toll. Having counselors aboard starships was Command's solution
for it. Still an imperfect one -- a counselor must have a willing
patient -- but it helped me through more pain than I fathomed I could
take.

And now she holds me up in a very different way. She slipped into my
life quietly, and turned me inside out. Rather than hours of talking,
the cure for my heart's ache is to come home and hold her. She heals
me with a touch. They say you never realize what you have until it's
gone. Sometimes you don't realize what you need until it's there. Once
you realize it, your life is never the same.

I see her in poems I read, in plays, in the paintings I look at that
depict women of all ages and station -- I see her in everything. At
times I wonder if I should label it obsession. I used to come off duty
and bring my work home with me. I still do when it's difficult, but in
the less stressful situations, the mapping and charting and
observational missions, I come back to my quarters and enter a world
where I tolerate things I once would have considered ridiculous. She
could do anything to me. I'd probably smile while she painted my
toenails -- which would not happen, even she has her limits. But I
never would have guessed I taste good with chocolate. Nor would I have
guessed that there could be so much satisfaction in simply touching
someone.

deLio, with whom I occasionally play handball, finally explained
something to me, though he wasn't intending to -- he asked me about
human attitudes toward women and whether they have changed over time.
He listened to my discourse with an interest I'll admit got me a
little carried away, to a point that I caught myself at last and felt
silly, but he thanked me for my thoroughness and asked if I thought
humans would ever lose the unconscious habit of subordinating women.

I firmly believe that we humans have come a long way from the old
patriarchal structures most of our cultures have had traditionally. I
thought at first that working with Deanna and I as he did, seeing her
day in and day out as my officer, had fostered this -- but it turns
out that he'd been observing the crew at large. He'd decided that
serial monogamy was normal for humans and that somehow males were the
dominant ones. He'd seen men behaving as if nothing at all had
happened after the severing of a relationship, and the women upset --
inferring that the decision-making was the male prerogative, and the
female had no control. Then Deanna and I had shown him an entirely new
set of behaviors. Granted, he only had what he saw of us in public,
but he'd accumulated an amazing amount of data from it. He chose me to
explain things to him because my behavior was so significantly
different from the other males he'd observed that he thought I would
not be offended when asked to explain that behavior.

His question was why the data banks described the marriage of two
people, male and female, as the accepted norm for our species, yet the
majority of the humans he knew aboard the ship were not conforming to
those parameters. It surprised him that we would alter our behavior to
compensate for the demands of Starfleet, and that Starfleet would
condone it. It further surprised him to learn that Deanna and I had so
much difficulty with Command and that the positive attitude of our own
crew was an exception. Why would Starfleet not accommodate the needs
of humans, when so many of their enlistees were human?

The longer we talked, standing there in the handball court, the deeper
we got. The reasons so many married couples opt for safer duty
planetside or even a starbase. The influence on the war on this. The
last *Enterprise,* which was full of families. The changes in the
fleet overall. The intricacies of human relationships. And of course,
why captains and other bridge officers do not indulge in intimate
relationships. He seemed most interested in that aspect, hammering
away with questions that from another human I would have found
intrusive and irritating, but years of diplomatic endeavors have
inured me to fielding such questions from other races.

Then he asked me why I had done so, if it were so impossible and
regulations existed to curtail such entanglements. At which point I
began asking him how the L'norim handle relationships, and when at
length he explained, I began to understand his attitude toward Deanna,
the reverence and the respect -- his behavior on Galisi became
comprehensible at last.

When the L'norim marry -- which is not their term and the mechanics
are considerably more complicated than a human marriage -- they do so
for every reason but love. They seek the mate most suited to their
lifestyle. This much is in the data banks. A holdover from their
formative stages of evolution complicated immensely by the trappings
of civilization, just as human practices are. L'norim were not
hunter-gatherers like humans were. They were hunters, all predator,
and they did so in family groups. The smallest possible family group
was a foursome. There were no hierarchies; the common goals were
pursued with unity and it mattered little which of them remained with
the children to protect them and which did the actual hunting. The
children would watch and learn with two parents while the others
carried out the hunt.

As they evolved and developed technology, the formation of the family
unit was redefined, but functionality remained the priority. The
L'norim equivalent of a romance is confusing by human standards. They
admire self-sacrifice and devotion to principle, and their concepts of
gender politics are so mind-bendingly different than the monogamous
pairings humans consider normal that as deLio explained as simply as
he could I found myself consistently trying to redefine things in my
terms. They are devoted to their family and they take turns working
and raising children. deLio's own tour of duty in Starfleet was
considered an aberration by his parents, a phase he was going through,
because he hadn't yet married and was at an age where it began to be a
concern -- it could take years to make the proper connections and find
the right people to forge what was to be a lifelong contract.

deLio had been observing his fellow officers with curiosity and
analyzing interactions since he came aboard. He'd served on a deep
space station for a few years, and prior to that on an outpost. His
record was exemplary. I'd chosen him from a small field of available
and eligible security officers. It's hard to come by good officers
these days, and he'd been offered another posting on an
Excelsior-class already, but he'd chosen the *Enterprise.* I have no
idea why and I probably never will -- he said he'd not heard of me
before, other than a mention or two at the Academy, and given his
taciturn demeanor and his avoidance of small talk, I could see how
that would be so. But he told me that day in the handball court that
he had decided to remain aboard longer, despite his parents' urging to
return home.

He explained that he'd not realized the nature of the relationship
between myself and Deanna until Geordi mentioned it in passing to
someone else in his hearing. At that point, rather than ask anyone
questions, he had begun to pay close attention to our interactions.
Although he may not understand human relationships, he knew the
physical manifestations of it; in a way he was better at reading our
body language than we are, because he's not human. He has to do it
consciously. He saw something that startled him -- he saw behavior
patterns that reminded him of home. Because he'd assumed we would have
the same behavior patterns as the rest of the crew, he hadn't paid
attention and hadn't recognized it. He had observed us from then on,
until the incident at Galisi -- at which point he responded not as an
officer, but as a L'norim, honoring what he perceived to be something
akin to what he considered normal. He sat with her while she lay
wounded rather than lead the security team in to capture the Maquis.
Protecting the fallen mate of a commanding officer was a higher
priority than duty. L'norim ships were staffed by family groups,
spouses often served side by side, and to him, my relationship with
Deanna seemed familiar and altered his perceptions.

He had thought this was an adventure far from what he knew, that
Starfleet would take him on a fascinating tour of the unknown and the
unexpected. And he had found that the most surprising and most
appealing thing about it had been a familiarity. He found a
relationship between two commanding officers that reminded him of
home. Finding it had rekindled his interest in his Starfleet career --
he became more curious than before about humanity in general, and how
such a different culture could manage to produce something familiar.
And, I suspect, his homesickness had been eased by it.

I have felt a kinship with aliens from divergent cultures before, but
I'd never imagined I would find one with deLio. What I knew about the
L'norim told me that we had nothing in common beyond a devotion to
duty and Starfleet. But I find, to my complete bemusement, that the
two of us have both found the same thing in the same relationship --
home. The very thing we both thought we had left behind. He finds it
in the professional side of my relationship with Deanna; I find it in
all aspects of it. My home has been Starfleet longer than it has been
France.

Perhaps we carry within us what it takes to recreate the familiar.
Perhaps we see the familiar where it does not exist, because we all
tend to label the unknown in terms of the familiar. Whatever the case,
it's ironic that we race to the stars in search of the fantastic
unknown, but we are never truly satisfied until we find the familiar.

But there is also a danger in the familiar. I almost lost myself, when
I found my senior staff unraveling around me. Worf was the first blow,
Will the second -- though I sometimes wondered why he *didn't* leave,
he couldn't mean to retire as a first officer, after all -- and then
Beverly. I had become too complacent. Settled. With them gone, the
sense of family had vanished. I chided myself for doing exactly what
I'd told myself I wouldn't do -- allowed myself to assume these people
would be at my side no matter what. At the depths of my melancholy, on
the verge of retirement, I found myself again in the eyes of a woman
with whom I had stood shoulder to shoulder for years, but never really
looked at directly.

As a child I saw the stars and imagined my life. As a young man I
lived it -- I found my way, as Maman said I should. I lived among the
stars and they became familiar. The routines of starship life have
become mundane. Not all missions are adventures. They don't tell you
that -- all you hear about are the fantastic missions, the battles,
the confrontations. I sometimes wonder if Nechayev isn't getting even
with me for turning down the directorship of the Academy by cycling
cadets through the *Enterprise* more often and at higher volume than
on other ships. Training exercises -- I feel for my staff, they have
to deal with them.

But I endure it as part of the package -- the stars still have their
appeal. We are still exploring and still finding adventure. I still
stand sometimes and look out at them, thinking of all the places I've
been, all the people I've met and the phenomena we've cataloged. I
imagine what is to come. What happens is never what I imagine --
that's why I'm still here. The stars promise the unimaginable.

And I come full circle, to the woman who shares my bed, who I watch as
I ponder my life and my future. I hadn't imagined her. Not like this,
and not on a starship, and never as my first officer -- she was my
counselor. She was the woman men worshiped with their eyes as she went
by in one of her off-duty outfits. She was the soft-spoken beauty who
nearly married and gave up her career out of subservience to
tradition. She evolved when I wasn't looking.

I find the stars in her eyes.

They call me. I must answer, just as I had to answer the call as a
child, pointing my destiny ever outward, into the unknown.

I am afraid, as I watch her roll over in slumber and I see her profile
-- nine months pregnant with my son. I am not afraid of the danger of
living in space, nor of fatherhood. It doesn't bother me that the rest
of Starfleet thinks I'm crazy.

I am afraid that I will let this pass, that this uniqueness we two
have created will be forgotten. It can't be duplicated. I stand in awe
of it, not quite believing I've been this fortunate, to have so much
in a single lifetime.

And it occurred to me, just tonight, that it will not pass unmarked.
It can do so only if I do not tell you about it.

There are too many things to say, so I will say the most important
things. She is about to awaken, as she always does when I begin to
feel too much -- your mother is that sensitive to me.

Yves, I love you. And if for any reason I am not there to tell her,
please tell your mother that I love her, too.

If you ever hear the call of the stars, wherever they are, answer
them. I can guarantee you that it will be the adventure of a lifetime.
And if you ever find yourself moonstruck --

"Jean-Luc, who are you talking to?"

"Oh. . . Yves, of course. Sorry we woke you."

"I don't believe you. The third time in a week -- have you been
sleeping at all?"

"Until you wake me up by not snoring."

"I told you that I could sleep in the -- "

"No, cygne, I wouldn't be able to sleep at all. Would you like a foot
rub?"

"Why do you keep offering to do that? I'm beginning to think you have
a fetish. Go to sleep, already. You can talk to Yves later. Maybe when
he's able to remember what you're saying?"

"Mmm. . . I think he'll remember."

"What are -- you're recording this! Jean-Luc! Turn that off!"

"If I can't record my thoughts, I suppose I'll have to settle for a
quieter medium. Don't suppose you might have. . . a pen? OW!
Deanna --"

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The End