The BLTS Archive - Crimson Joy by Orlando (ajfgdm@globalnet.co.uk) --- Set after the episode The Child. Warning: some readers may find method of consolation to not be to their tastes. Disclaimer: Paramount owns Star Trek. I own a few things too, but nothing as good! I chose to put these words in this order, and both the scenario and suspicions are mine. --- She was empty. He held her. He made her less empty. She ached. He held her. She ached less. She sheltered in arms to which she had not felt the need to retreat in years and felt the strum of their owner's grief. She recognised it. It had not changed in character. She tasted what had once been brilliant bereavement and saw how it had been made blunt by its years of endurance. She understood it. Even so, it hurt her to have confirmed what she had already suspected: that his grief, his grieving, was for her only in some infinitesimal part. She pressed her empathy deeper into him. He knew what she was doing because she felt his muscles flinch away from her. He tried to defend himself. She heard his gasped breath scratch in his throat. His belly clenched. Then he remembered who was doing this to him. He murmured her name. He repeated it, as if to assure himself, or her, that he accepted the penetration. She found what she was looking for. She found it deep within him. She listened to the shiver of his breathing. She felt his hand clench and unclench around the satin counterpane on which they lay, and she knew he bled for her. He would go down on his knees and beg if it would have her released from her own hurting. She felt her own hand clench. She was angry. However deep she scoured, she could find no mourning in him for her child, and she wanted at least *some* of his sorrow to be for her child. She wanted at least a crumb of his anguish to be for her dead baby! She wanted him to at least acknowledge the child's passing as a loss: tumultuous and far beyond the reach of solace. But it wasn't. He couldn't. He lay so closely beside her, that when the back of her tongue caught his scent, it shocked her in its familiarity. In the morning, she would taste him on her pillow as she had not done in years. In the morning, she would find him lingering on her towels. She would be aware of him, if she could not bring herself to launder them, clinging to her sheets. Even the bathroom steam would be heavy and humid with him. He was unbearable: the bulk of him on her bed; the weight of him in her mind; the dormant masculinity of him where her knuckles almost-accidentally grazed his thigh. His hand was tight against her shoulder; his cool breath displaced her hair; his hip supported her back; his boot puckered the peach of her bed covers. Which of these things of almost-intimacy was allowing her to read him with such excruciating clarity? He moved, shifted on her bed. Did he realise just how far deep in him she was? Was he uncomfortable with her autopsy of his grief? When he murmured an apology, she realised that time had passed. Hours? He was sorry - hadn't wanted to wake her. Go back to sleep. The bed tipped as he left it. She traced his heavy footsteps to her bathroom. She heard his boots on her tiles. As she listened to him relieve himself, she thought how he had wrongly assumed that the stillness with which she had been lying in the lee of his body was sleep. She thought how pitiful for him; how sad for all Humans, how much of a handicap it must be to lack an empathic sense. She thought how *terrifying* it must be to be so utterly blinded by darkness that you could lie in someone's arms and yet not sense their waking mind. She thought how like amputation it must be to lie in another's arms and be utterly unaware of them as they watched you polish your tarnished grief. He came back to the bed. She withdrew her empathy. She tugged it out of him in rebuke for his needing her pity when she needed his. He moaned quietly. She wondered if he knew why. She listened to the quiet. She listened to the uneven exhalation of his breath. She lay under the seamless darkness with no other frame of reference to the outside world but him. She realised then, perhaps as she always had, how she was always aware of him. Nothing was as flagrant as he. Nothing demanded of her attention like he. No one intruded so blatantly on her empathic sense as Will Riker. No one penetrated as deeply into her consciousness as he. She recognised his constant familiarity then: his unconscious flittering, his deliberate flirting with the edges of her empathy; the way he would invite himself in; the way he would be calculated in his staying away. He was always there. Like the sky. Always there - even in winter; even at night; even in storms such as this. Tonight he was heavy where his consciousness abutted into hers. He was like water-logged clothes. Tonight he struggled to give her comfort while he, himself, was only treading water. She kissed him for his effort, grateful at least for how he was trying - and almost not failing - to attend to her needs before his own. His lips curved. He smiled. He brushed her hair. He guided her fingertips to his arousal. She squeezed. He pulsed. His fingertips anointed themselves in her tears. His tongue was in her mouth, bitter and barbed. Her baby's death had hurt him. It had re-lit his own grief. He was five years old again. He would always be that five year old lost in the school yard. He would always be that infant deprived of its momma's milk. This was *the* one thing in his life. And how he nursed it. It kept him from her; kept him from captaining a starship; had him trawling for women from Starfleet banquets to brothels. He defined himself, not by the uniform on his back, the rank on his collar, or by his achievements and gains, but by this one loss. He carried this absence. It was so palpable it was a perpetual presence. She listened to his breathing, felt the ebb and flow of his emotions. She remembered when she had told him - oh, years ago - in her mother's lofty summer house glistening and polished and closed up against the winter, that she could not conceive. She had told him that even he, as much as he tried, could not make her belly fat with his child. She was a hybrid. She proved the rule. She was sterile. She had told him how it made her sad to know she would never be a mother. She had traced the youthful line of his naked, arrogant, jaw with her finger and his lips with her tongue, and said there were so *many* other things to fill her life! She had never forgotten telling him that lie. She had never forgotten what she'd felt from him on hearing it. His relief -as he sprawled flat on his back in front of the roaring hearth, his head nested in her lap, winter wind tanning his smooth cheeks, an antique brandy snifter teetering on his chest - had come gushing out of him. His jubilation had bounded around the room. His satisfaction had been acidic; his spite sulfuric. She hadn't understood it then, hadn't wanted to. She understood it now. She felt him shift again. She felt his lips in her hair. She felt his sudden need to hold her tighter and the heavy weight of compassion in his chest. She felt his need to express it. She felt his ambivalence. She felt his need to punish her. She knew he never would. Not physically. Not physically. But, even he knew enough about Betazoid empathy to use his mind as a weapon, if he chose. She had changed. In his eyes, she had become something other, alien, distant. She had kicked him in the teeth, reached in and twisted his guts, spat in his face; aired his dirty laundry in public; told the world his sordid secrets. She had broken their pact. She had become a mother. She had become a mother and she had promised him that she *never* would. She had promised him that she would never give the care he had craved all his life to someone else. She could not be his mother and therefore she should never, ever, ever become the mother to another. He had chosen her because he could not make a mother out of her. He had chosen her because he was in no danger of making a child, giving a child something that he had never had. She felt sudden warmth, slight relief. She felt how her brief maternity betrayed her. She knew that he had felt it too because he moved his hand, spread his fingers across the warmth of her damp breast. She could smell herself. She could smell her own pungency, the faint note of something that might have been sugar, or fine, distant spice. She felt his rapt attention. She felt his erection wither. She lifted her fingertips. She dabbed herself. She lifted her finger to his lips. They parted. He drew her in. He released her, moved over her. His hands slid under her shoulders. His touch found the clasp of her body-suit. He unsealed the closure along her spine. She lifted her shoulders. He eased the sodden fabric away from her. Her breasts strained, were taut, felt massive. The back of his hand scraped against her. She expressed against him. She heard his tongue flick to the back of his hand. She heard his sigh. His desire turned to need. His need became a demand. She wanted this for him. She wanted this for herself. Her breath turned to amber in her throat. She closed her eyes. Inside her eyelids it seemed lighter than in the complete and seamless dark of her bedroom. Cooler. It seemed cooler. She opened her eyes, felt his whiskers rasp against her, felt his weight settle into her. His kiss was tentative. Did she want this? Yes! His tongue was cool, cautious. He was lost, utterly lost. He had needed this all his life. This. He had needed *this*. She remembered the medicine they had given in sickbay. Something to dry her up. Something to drain this medal of maternity and shrivel her motherhood. It was still in the bathroom. She hadn't used it. Had she known all along that she would be here, with him, giving him this? Perhaps. His lips pursed around her nipple. She throbbed inside him. He plucked. He sucked gently. He set a rhythm and the contractions of her womb echoed it. She felt a sharp twinge in her hip. Thirst filled her mouth. He moaned. She held him. Her fingers brushed his groin. He was quiet, quiescent. Content. She nursed him, feeling him draw at her; feeling his need be quenched even as her mouth turned arid. Her barren body had made this for the baby it should not have borne. Her baby had grown too fast; had become a child; had gone away in a heartbeat. This man lying against her needed this. Both he and she needed to experience this. She caught the image he had always had of her in his mind. She felt his tears. They fell against her like hot ash. He cried. His belly heaved. A chasm of grief yawned in her own. She cried for the child she had lost and never had. She suckled him until she was dry, until his need had abated. She caught the word as it darted like a mythical beast through the darkness of her bedroom. She touched it in him. She held him tighter. "Momma. Momma." --- The End