The BLTS Archive - Never fifteenth in the Riding The Tick series by R.Schultz (cousindream@aol.com) --- Spoilers: Set during "Yesterday's Enterprise". Disclaimer: The Trekiverse belongs to Paramount and ViaBorgCom. Resistance is futile. Earth will be assimilated. I'm playing with Trek, no money is made, and I'll be put your poor repressed critturs back good as new. What is it about you rich guys and other people's sexuality, anyways? This story is mine, via common-law copyright. Written February 2001. Apx. 1450 words long. Warning: Love and sex between (fictional) adult consenting women is favorably mentioned, though not graphically. If womyn to womyn love fails to fire your photon torpedoes, why don't you go elsewhere? Posted to round II of the Fem_Fuh-q_Fest, later to the ASCEM. May be archived, but please notify me. --- The Klingons are on their way, and the entire ship knew it. We'd stayed too long in the same place, and they'd had time to gather superior force. I knew this was bad, knew it in my bones, and feared what was coming. I had never been able to accustom myself to too much bloody butcher's work in the years since joining Starfleet. No, that was wrong. I adored medicine today as much as I had a quarter of a century ago. However, I'd never been able to accustom myself to the unending supply of crew needing emergency care. I'd never been able to accustom myself to the numbers lost and permanently maimed. I'd never been able to able to adjust to fighting what is increasingly obvious is a losing war. How the hell did it get to being a shooting war instead of a political one? I forget, it's been so long ago. It's been so... I'm suffering from battle fatigue, I know that. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, only there's no Post yet. You called it the thousand meter stare, and I think I have it, now. Once I thought your sufferings as a mercenary soldier were beyond belief. A nightmare I should never have to share. Stupid me. Now you are leaving, have left me, for good. Forever. I'm part of the council that recommended we send yesterday's ENTERPRISE back, though only after much argument, and Guinan's personal plea. I seem to be always sending you away. The hardest part is knowing you love a man, this Lt. Castile, this stranger you barely know. A man. It is so ironic. I know, I know, it's hardly fitting for me to talk of men. How many times did I say I'm sorry, Tasha, my lovely yellow rose? Do you remember the days when each morning I would enter SickBay and find a yellow rose on my crowded desk? And you would go to Ops station and find a red rose on the railing in front of your station? The little bud vase was so poetic, glued to the curve high above Captain's station. It's gone. So is our love. So now are you. You sit somewhere in that mangled bridge, over there, on that other ENTERPRISE. That other one. Ready to leap backward in time to whatever destiny you will embrace. No. Correction. We all know what destiny you are going to embrace. It was not planned, sweet Tasha Yar, it happened, what evil fate drove you from me. How many times have I said I am sorry? Counselor Yoolis worked me through my worst aberrations, you know that, he talked to you himself about my distress. His entreaties had no more effect than mine. They meant nothing. You had rejected me. It was so ironic the Counselor dying in a accidental shuttle crash while this bitter war is going on. Do you know how bitter it made me, to see you flitting from flower to flower while I suffered the torments of hell? To know of your romances, your girlfriends, the ones you took to bed? I knew about your many past lovers. You had yourself told me of the many times in the far past when you had casually coupled with one person while you claimed bondings with another. But now, then, here, you could not allow some of your own medicine to sully your life. You are a hypocrite. I love you. You kissed Lt. Castile where I could see the two of you. I knew the two of you were making promises to each other. Experiencing tragic love. Dammit it, Tasha! My love, our love, was tragic too! You were the first woman I ever loved. We kissed so many times in public, throwing our lesbian love into all their faces. Wes was so supportive of us, he cared that I had found someone new after all the years of widowhood. He goes into battle with me and I despair of either of us surviving this coming disaster. And today you kissed a man. It is so ironic. Oh, Tasha, you cannot know, you cannot understand, how much I still love. I am sorry, so very sorry that my inhibitions and fears did not allow me to propose marriage. I am sorry beyond telling that... Did you hear? Space Station 74 was abandoned and Tarsis 4 has fallen with moderate loss of life. Which probably means the Klingon-Romulan alliance has obliterated it. What skilled liars Starfleet have become. The days when we had high ideals and the luxury of honesty are so far distant in the past they feel like a time of legend. I wonder if Doctor Terence Epstein is still amongst the living? It may be petty of me, but I hope he isn't. If only. If only....so many things. I am so sorry, Tasha, not a day has passed without pain racing through my guts. Well, a fond wish and five thousand NuCreds will buy you a cup of coffee in San Francisco. Or maybe it's ten thousand by now. I saw you on the way to the transporter today. You and your Lt. Castile. I saw you kiss him. Yet you could not stand the thought of me kissing a man. Tell me, Tasha, how great a bitch are you? Did he kiss you there, between your legs, where you once loved to see my head? Did he trace with his tongue the faint lines which indicated your warrior scars? Has he made you come time after time? You're a hypocrite, Tasha. I love you. Personally I think he's not that great a prize. Away from Starfleet he'd be just another shallow man spending all his time at work and leaving his family to raise itself. He's not all that handsome, either. His nose is too big and he stumbles and he doesn't have much in the way of sensitivity, though he's brave enough. Why him? I shall never understand. You took my best friend from me, you made Deanna Troi your next love, until her transfer. From her to Ensign Hansen, and I thought her unbalanced with those grossly over-sized breasts. Still, I am sorry she was lost with the GRENADA. She was brave. Then back you went to Samantha Wildman, a plain plump lump if ever there was one. HER you gave another chance. Why not me? You're a hypocrite, Natasha Yar. And after her that pushy selfish Delaney girl, Megan, with all her little twisty mind games. And now a man. How ironic. You could have forgiven me, Tasha. It would have been so easy. Doctor Terence Epstein could have been relegated to the status of a bad dream in our, my, history. We should be together now. I feel like it would be worth dying for, just to know you were with me. Going out together like a bunch of silly damned hero's from some idiotic HoloDrama. Tasha, you could have asked me to go with you on Yesterday's ENTERPRISE. I would have went. Even if I had had to share you with a man. I miss you. Tasha. I always will. I love you. Feel my kiss, please, before you die, there in that Ghost Ship. Feel it through time and space and pain. Know it, Tasha. I shall always love you. Good-bye Tasha. I will never forget you. As ever, your most pitiful love; Captain of Medicine(Acting),Doctor Beverly Howard Crusher. --- I looked down at the PADD in my hand. I could not remember picking one up. Whatever for? The reader told me it was blank, new, unused. Why was it in my hand? Had I been writing something in it? Or about to? I couldn't remember, and decided my mind must have been thinking of some stray avenue of thought. Forgotten, now. I felt a painful emptiness at that second. As if I had just met the ghost in the hall. Or someone had walked on my grave. Deanna Troi stuck her head around a corner, smiling at me. I wondered why Deanna and I had never become an item after Tasha's death? Some things were predestined not to be, I suppose. Maybe it was time for me to start inviting a friend or two to my bed. Toys always lack something, no matter how gifted the artisans of Risa. Who better than your best friend? Then again, maybe not. "Don't forget," Deanna reminded. "Poker night, 1850 hours tonight." She looked sideways at me, feeling my dejection. Knowing the cause. I had been thinking of Tasha. And the Lovers of Natasha Yar Memorial Poker Game. "It's been two years, Beverly." "I know, I know. I feel her loss today, for some reason. 1850 hours you said? I'll be there. Never will I miss it. "Never." --- End -- the Riding The Tick series