The BLTS Archive - Ether by Orlando (ajfgdm@globalnet.co.uk) --- Note: Past events/flashbacks begin and end with // Disclaimer: Paramount owns _Star Trek_. Archive: asc. Feedback: if you feel so inclined! :0) Enjoy! --- Desperation had driven him to her door. "I never could keep a hold on anything." He emptied the glass, his arm moving to knock back the contents, as if now it had started, it could not stop. Behind the bar, the 'tender obliged it with more bourbon; the real McCoy. He'd brought it with him: his own, portable solace. Anaesthetic. Amputation. He remembered shore-leaves. He remembered hangovers. He remembered stupid souvenirs bought with inebriation. He remembered them as years ago. The past, as they say, is a different country. At least the terrain there had been familiar and the confident strides of youth which crossed it, sure-footed. "Friends. Family. Women." He toasted her with the desultory salute of his half-empty glass. It always seemed more half-empty than half-full. "You." Loneliness could quite easily drive him into her arms, and he knew it. Even as he summoned the willpower to resist it, a craving for her arms, her bed, her body and her attention came awake in his belly. She was ether. She could dull the edges of his sharp life, turn corners into curves. It had been so long, and he was so lonely, and he had never been designed to be this man he had become. Had never been meant to play this part history had hastily scribbled for him in its margins. "I don't think that's really true." She gestured around herself, included herself in the expanse. "All this has been yours for a very long time." "Yes," he agreed. "A long time." He wore it on his face: this time of which she spoke. He looked at the contents of his glass, as if it was distilled there. "Is it really mine? Do I want it?" "Apparently not tonight." "In the morning?" Did his fear sound loud in her ears too? "It's yours. You can't give it away. You can't abandon it. You won't forsake it. Part of you wants it. A greater part than resents it." Her fingertips traced his frown lines. They were deeper than any laughter that had left its mark on him. She left memories in her fingers' wake. Memories of women, of comforts he had surrendered long ago in favour of victory. Acceptable losses to secure the ultimate victory. A Pyrrhic victory. But what was one man's death against all that had been saved? How relevant was his own unfurnished life when measured against all that had been preserved? She made him shed tears. He did not know he still had them to shed. He still had them. They lived in the heart of him; in his belly; an artesian well of emotion in an emotionless man. If only he could reach it, plunder it; use some of it to quench his thirst. If only. 'If only....' slept on his pillow. His companion. His mistress. No, he had another, more demanding, mistress. And she drove him hard. She had him shackled. She was jealous, relentless, unforgiving. She checked his collar, smelled his breath, and rifled his pockets. She took his gifts; demanded his fidelity, ensured his celibacy. She was the first thing he saw when he came awake into another daybreak he did not want to share with her. She would not let him leave her side. She kept him where he was while he watched another man do the thing he wanted to do; be the man he had been born to be; live his life. His mistress accepted everything he had to give, and had taken away everything he ever had. She greeted his arrival home. Home? What was home to a man who had nothing to put in it, who lived in empty, unoccupied rooms? What was home to a man who captained another man's starship? His companion's touch trailed down his arm. They left blooms of warmth in his muscles. She took hold of his hands, her fingers weaving themselves around his. "You would like to dance." She tugged him gently from the bar stool. He looked down at the hand in his own, wanting to know what it looked like, felt like. He pushed his lips against her palm. Tasted her. His lips came away tinged with the subtle scent of Chanel. She was flesh, blood. Here for him. Tonight at least. He came to his feet. She noticed he took another swig of the bourbon before abandoning the glass, as if he wasn't quite convinced it would be there, when he returned. He nodded, as if he were fifteen and his first time in long pants. "No more bourbon tomorrow," he heard himself murmur as if she was his priest and this the confessional and tonight all the unintentional and necessary sins of a life would be granted and absolved. "Your bottle is still half-full. Enjoy yourself." "Am I enjoying myself?" he asked, and somehow his voice seemed raw as if he'd swallowed too many tears, or too much bourbon. Or both. He had not been drunk in years. At least not on hard liquor. Her hand tugged his with more insistence. "Dance with me." He nodded, stiffly, as if afraid his neck would break. "I'd like that." She wove a passage for them through empty tables and upturned chairs. He followed her to the dance floor. He would follow her anywhere tonight; anywhere she chose, so long as he did not have to make a decision for himself. Not one. Not one between now and morning. The quartet waited. Three a.m. dust dulled burnished brass. Ivory was still. The dance-floor was vacant for them. He could smell polish. Across the street, neon ached against the navy blue night sky. She gestured to the waiting musicians. "Something slow?" Her palm covered his heart like another Star Cross. "Something to make you bleed?" The band played what she asked for, what he wanted. They stitched sorrow from the very air. They plucked at the sinews of him. It hurt. At least it hurt. "Please hold me." Even though it was almost words she still took him into her arms. He could feel her against him. She fitted into him. His missing piece -- one of them. Woman. Warmth. Everything she had was his; for tonight at least. He closed his eyes and said the words. "Touch me. Please touch me." She raised her hand and curled her fingers against his cheek, and he remembered how he had forgotten. He had forgotten this. "Like this?" He covered her hand with his own; pressed its palm against him. She started a thaw. They moved slowly, his body and hers, pressed together in intimacy. Part of him remembered what this was supposed to feel like: an instinct, as if his body had memories his mind had bricked behind cellar walls. Her breast rose and fell against him. Her heart beat against him. He pressed himself into her. He did not stir. He breathed deeply, pretended she loved him, imagined she would always be this for him; deceived himself she could be much more. Soft jazz murmured in his ear. It twisted around him like amber, like a good aroma from the whisky jar. "My friend died today." His words were just a murmur in her perfumed hair. If he gave them any more volume, he would hear them himself; if he heard them, he would have to believe them. He had to believe it. Tomorrow he would believe it. Tonight, just believing in this would take all his self-deception, and he was not a man to be easily deceived. If he had been, perhaps he would not be so dead. Or know it so completely. "He was a good man." "I know." Across the bar, his dress uniform was still slung over the cracked back of a chair. Underneath he was all black. Still in mourning. Always in mourning. Death had taken its toll on him; death and loss, and all the petty cruelties life liked to throw in men's eyes, but would not blind them because it always has more for them to see. Much more. His boots, not designed for dancing, too recently stood at a grave-side, creaked. "I miss him. He's been gone - a few hours. And I miss him. I miss them all. Even the living." Her mouth covered his. He knew he would taste of liquor. Black. Dead. "Especially the living?" His mouth moved only to make words. "Especially the living." The band trailed to the end of its set, but knowing he had not yet finished, flowed into something else so he hardly noticed the hardly-noticed rhythm. He knew he had a woman in his arms, and it had been so long since one had been there - just holding him. Him. The man. They saw just the uniform now; the rank; the authority. Didn't any of them see what was underneath? There was nothing underneath to see. He looked in mirrors and nothing looked back at him. Nothing at all. He was grateful: he did not want to see what was really there. "I can't keep a hold on anything." "You know that isn't true, Will." "I'd like to believe that. Outside those doors I have to believe that. I've waited years for today. Years. To see him again. To talk to him. Then he's there. And Geordi is gone. We pay for everything. Everything has its price. This is a bitch of a universe we live in. A bitch. The bitch of them all." She dried his face. It had been wet before. Memories of tears came back to him, shed years previously on behalf of, because of, the man who had made him this.... --- //"How do you feel?" "Almost Human." On the bridge, they watched the Borg ship terminate itself, the atrocity it was, and Jean-Luc Picard, still too much Borg, stumbled into his first officer's waiting arms. His first officer held him. He held the man who had been his captain while he went to his death as Locutus of Borg....// --- It was the death that still filled his arms. He still carried it. It was heavy; a dead weight. It would not let women come to him. It kept his friends away from him. It had laid down distance, paved it with an unassailable camber. He had watched them retreat. He was the captain now. He had been the captain too long. He had learned Jean-Luc Picard's lessons too well. "When I saw him again today, I wanted to tell him that I tried my best. I wanted to tell him that I hadn't intended to take his ship away from him. I wanted to tell him I still had too much to learn from him. I wanted to tell him so *damn much*." "I know. I *know*." "I don't want to be The Captain. I want to be Will Riker. I want my friends back. I want my life back. I want my Imzadi back...." --- //The ready room doors opened. Troi stepped inside. "Captain?" she asked. "*Captain*?" he queried her choice of address. He knew that there was an uncertain, twitchy smile constricting his face. He wanted her to hold him; to make love to him; to take away the hurt. He wanted to tell her he wasn't ready for this. He wasn't ready to be Jean-Luc Picard's successor. But, she would know that. She would know all of it. He knew she could not let him say the words. She could not let herself hear them. Not as Deanna Troi. She would listen to him, but he must seek her professional counsel as the captain. She was his counselor now. "I think I need to be alone -- Counselor." He needed to know how much he needed to bend to fit into Jean-Luc Picard's empty chair on which he rested his hand. "I'll be waiting, sir. I'll be here, when you need me." 'Sir' -- the woman who had called him Imzadi, who had screamed his name in passion, now called him 'sir'. He had watched her go. She had never come back. She had never been Deanna for him again. He watched how easily she had found her way into another man's waiting arms. "Make her happy, Worf." "It is my intention, Captain, to make her happy." 'Captain'. The man who had made him sweat, thrice-weekly on the holodeck, who had staggered home with him half-blind from back street bars now called him 'captain'.// --- "Kiss me." He kissed her. It had been - years - since he had kissed a woman. His lips slowly remembered how they were supposed to part, what pressure they should apply. He remembered how it was supposed to feel. His tongue remembered how she was supposed to taste. He kissed her harder, with more feeling, as if she was real; as if she was his. He would have crawled into her - if he had known how. "Make love to me, Will." "I really want to make love to you, Minuet." --- Humid night clung to him like damp voile. The floors of Minuet's home were wooden, polished, swept clean. Her bed was antique, dressed in fine white linen. Outside, cicadas made the blackness quiver. Inside, a pearly-faced clock ticked on the cherry-wood dresser as if it wanted to remind him the demands of time were not his to disobey. He knew that. He knew that. Pearls shimmered at her throat. She wore silk; ash black as if she knew. Underneath she was out of history; a challenge he wasn't up to accepting. Her fingers guided his to her seams and fastenings. His eyes, that had not seen in so long, watched silk and lace finds its way into his hands. He remembered when he had known how to undress a woman. He lifted scraps of intimate warmth to his cheek. He inhaled her. Minuet. She lay against him in the hot night, her hand on his thigh. Her fragrance filled the room. The night smelled of her. The air pushed down on him. The sheets barely covered him. "It's been a while for me," he murmured into the darkness. A breeze breathed its breath on him from the crooked casement above the bed, and across the room, an arterial-red petal shuddered from its vase onto the old bureau. "Years." "Be slow, my love. Be slow." His fingers traced her graceful contours; touched her hip, her waist, her breast. His hand closed around her shoulder. "Is this all there is for me?" His voice was hoarse like a tortured man's. "A woman who doesn't even exist?" "I exist. I am here. I am your ship, Captain Riker." "Will. My name is *Will*." "Will." "You're not my ship, Minuet. You are fantasy." "Is that all you have left, Will? Fantasies?" "If I'm lucky." He hadn't been lucky in years. Poker was a forgotten art. He had deserted the baize. These days he anted up with lives; bluffed with phasers, and turned his poker face on Romulans whose own faces had been chiselled to play the game. "Then I am every fantasy you will ever need." He eased himself over her. Remembering; remembering what it was like to live at sea level, how fresh the air, how rich. He lived in garrets now. There were no ladders high enough to reach up to him, or he down to them. He had earned himself medals. Admirals, who had forgotten, talked about Riker and the _Enterprise_ in the way they used to talk about Picard and the _Enterprise_. Almost. The day he stopped hearing the difference was the day he resigned his commission; the day he would begin to live again. His arm ached from carrying this torch. His had to be higher than all the rest. His had to light a fathomless night. Blacker than cancer. Borg-black. One day he would lay it at his feet and watch it go out - the day he could make himself believe Jean-Luc Picard was not coming home.... --- //Ten Forward. He watched them: his crew knitted tightly in grief. He stood alone; a dropped stitch; a man whose time had prematurely come; who hadn't been ready to surrender away teams, and women, and poker. A man who had inherited strategy, brinkmanship, and diplomacy; whose shoulders were weighted down with politics. Who paced the bridge, and worked out alone in the gym because Jean-Luc Picard had never shed sweat in public; who had deserted Ten Forward, except for wakes. "Captain?" "Yes, Lieutenant Crusher?" "What you said about Commander La Forge. It was - He would have appreciated it, Captain." No doubt he would have appreciated it more if Will Riker had said it. He would have said something Human, talked about the man. Not the uniform. The lieutenant would not catch his eye. "We were working on this." He extended his hand. "Geordi and I thought you'd - Anyway - " He took the isolinear chip from the young man's fingers, and said, "Dismissed," because he knew that was what both of them needed him to say. He felt the discreet surveillance of his first officer's wife. Sometimes she still looked at him as if she were seeing Will Riker. Tomorrow she would be at his ready room door. Geordi and Wes had given him back Minuet. She lived in the iso: chip. Had it been so obvious to his youngest and his oldest friend that he needed her so badly....?/// --- "I remember when I called Lieutenant Crusher 'Wes'. I remember being taller than him." She covered his lips with her own to make the words stop. Her body came against his to make his mind stop. She reminded him he was a man. In his isolation, he had forgotten. He remembered screaming for Bajorans on Celtris III. She saw it on him. He had survived torture tailored for another man's body. "Make love to me, Will Riker. Tonight, you are Will Riker, and I am a woman for you." It was easy. It was difficult. She was everything he needed her to be. She waited. She encouraged. She gave what he needed. She took what he was able to give. She kissed him because he needed that more than anything his body struggled, and failed, to do. Later he started up at her ceiling. He counted the revolutions of her antique fan. He felt its chill on his skin. He balanced a glass of bourbon on his chest. He lifted it to his lips. She took it from his fingers. Ice shivered in the empty glass. "Sleep, Will." "I love you." "You can't love me. You can only need me." "I need you." He knew morning was only four hours away. His other mistress, the _Enterprise_, was waiting. He could keep this from his collar. He could keep this from his breath. He could be this ship's captain until Jean-Luc Picard returned home. --- The End