Work Text:
This is the moment of just letting go
She said, if you had life eternal
Ghost - Life Eternal
“It’s not going well.”
You sighed and sank back against the couch in Deanna’s office. Your confession was met with the empathetic furrowing of her brows, the concern and kindness apparent in her eyes. She said nothing, simply let the space between you yawn wide and allow your words and worries to pour out.
“They’re fighting again,” you said, and shrugged your shoulders, uncertain of what to say, how to quantify those new pains that were really old pains reemerging.
The brothers couldn’t agree on how to take care of you, and it created a clash of wills with no resolve.
Data wanted to wrap you in softness, to comfort and reassure you and give you everything you could ever want, to shield you from every sharp edge and cold wind. But Lore? Lore wanted you to want that sharp edge, to crave it, because he needed you to fight like you had never fought before without a moment’s rest, to take that spark of life still inside you and raise it into a forest fire. Data gave you the compassion and kindness you refused yourself, and Lore gave you the drive and determination to keep going.
The truth was, you needed both of those things like you needed your next breath. But it was tearing them apart.
Data accused Lore of pushing you too hard and worsening your condition, while Lore accused Data of crippling you with kindness. They fought for your time like animals fighting for the last scrap of meat, and nothing you said dispelled the increasing tension.
Worse still was the fear that if this illness led to your death- when it led to your death- the bond between them would be strained to the point of fracture, and they would no longer have each other when they needed that most.
Though the animosity had never turned violent in your presence, you had heard the whispers that their feud had crescendoed into a physical altercation several days earlier in engineering. Part of you wondered if they fought each other because they were helpless to fight the real villain— your illness. Unable to solve the mystery of the infection, they picked the battles they thought they could win, which were the battles with one another.
And it felt there was nothing you could do to stop any of it.
“But how are you doing?” Deanna reiterated her earlier question, emphasizing the part you had ignored.
You had been avoiding that very question. Both Data and Beverly insisted you see Deanna regularly to help you deal with the emotions and resultant smothering of them that came with the territory of chronic illness and the unavoidable reality of mortality, but you didn’t want to talk about it. In fact, you would rather gnaw your own arm off and club yourself unconscious with the bloody stump than talk about it. If you talked about it, if you put it all into words, then everything you didn’t want to be true would be given form and certainty.
You finally looked up and met dark eyes that glittered under the lights. “I’m tired.” The words felt heavy with the weight of your fatigue. “Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to think through an impenetrable wall of stone and I’m completely stuck in place. My brain is slow, my thoughts are cloudy, and I…"
One word after the other, one sentence after the other, one paragraph after the other. Ideas clicking into place. That's how conversations form. That’s how research is done, how reports are written. Genus. Phylum. Order. You knew what those classifications meant. At least, you thought you did. But the words began to feel distant and insubstantial. The connections in your brain fell apart under a haze. Thought processes were weighed down and scrambled. The words become ideas of words, an abstract instead of a tool. Sometimes, you felt like a child who’s heard adults say those words, but don't yet understand them. Distantly, you know what they mean, know that they’re the tools with which you have ordered your life, but you can no longer easily connect them to larger ideas. Some days are good, but every difficult day is harder than the last, and it feels not like a decline, but a connection turning on and off.
One of these days, you thought, it might not turn back on.
"I’m just really tired, Deanna.”
Deanna moved from her chair to sit next to you, her hand resting gently on your knee. “It’s expected that you would be tired. All of these feelings, all of the pain… they’re to be expected given what’s happening to your body. But even though it’s expected, you still haven’t accepted it yet, have you?”
You shook your head slowly. “I don’t think I ever will.”
As long as you had been on the Enterprise, Deanna had been more than just the ship’s counselor. She was your friend. And you were relieved to see not pity in her gaze, but understanding.
“Tell me,” she said, “If you knew there was nothing you could do to change your circumstances, what would you do? How would you live your life?”
“Angry. Bitter. That’s how I’d live it.” That was your instinctive answer, the one that bubbled up without having to think about it. Deanna didn’t push, just watched you patiently. “I would spend time with my family. That’s what I would do. That feels like the only thing that matters.”
Deanna nodded. “And are you doing that?”
“Not enough,” you admitted. “I can’t let go of the idea that if I just push harder and search for answers that this will all work out. If I just hit the right combination of… hell, I don’t even know. Something. Something that will put everything back together the way it goes.”
“You can’t put things back.” The confidence of her statement was wrapped in gentleness.
You let a long moment pass in silence. “I know.”
Why did you feel a horrible finality in accepting that?
Deanna took your hand between hers. “There are a lot of people working on the answer to this. People who care about you. You don’t have to take all of this on yourself. Let people help you so you can live your life.” She squeezed your hand and gave you a warm smile that held no humor. “Go be with your family.”
Lunch today?
You sent the message through the private channel you shared with your husbands and sat the PADD on the worktable in your lab. For a moment, you stood there with Deanna’s words fresh in your mind.
Illness or no, there was still work to be done.
Taking a deep breath, you allowed yourself to regroup after the transition from the soothing lights of Deanna’s office to the competing bright and red and ultraviolet lights of your botany lab that allowed for the care of plants with disparate needs from across the galaxy.
“Our girl’s growing fast.”
Frankie’s bright voice pulled you from your stasis as she came in from the arboretum and nodded excitedly at the larger workstation behind you.
Her close-cropped silver hair caught the light when she bent down to unload the soil containers she carried. She straightened and put her hand on her hip, looking thoughtfully into the near distance. “Boy? Girl? Huh. I guess it doesn’t matter.”
Interest piqued, your tragedies were briefly forgotten as you joined her at the worktable that had become a makeshift research lab the last few months.
A terrarium three meters long and half as tall took up most of the surface. Inside the habitat, you had painstakingly recreated the conditions of the caves below the rocky surface of the moon of Taurani II, where you had discovered a new phylum of subterranean fungi. Inside, a small field of dark, jagged rocks were spotted with a patchwork of shimmering crystals, tufts of vibrant green moss, and lacy webs of bioluminescent yellow and blue lichen, and a fine mist of iridescent spores catching the light, all of it carefully collected to recreate the conditions the fungi thrived in.
All of the time and resources spent for a single fungi.
Though that wasn’t true anymore.
Sitting at the heart of that small world was the fungi you had collected, swaying back and forth on the delicate mycelial web contained in its pale and pink-spotted body. But it no longer lived alone.
A week prior, you watched rapt as the fungi split into two separate entities in a process you were calling biofission, its own strange version of mitosis. Not an identical split, a smaller, more delicate twin broke away from the main body. The pink hues of the new fungi had deepened into something much brighter, saturating its flesh with a vibrancy similar to earth fauna warning off predators.
Frankie named the miniature fungi Athena, and the larger, Zeus, after the myth of the goddess springing fully-formed from the brow of her father. The original parthenogenesis.
Neither you nor Frankie, nor any of the junior exobotanists, had any solid theories as to why Zeus had undergone biofission. The leading theory was that Zeus either felt its environment was optimal for reproduction, or it was nearing the end of its life and this process was a natural step in its lifecycle.
And Frankie was right. Athena had grown noticeably overnight.
Frankie settled into her work at the main station, her soft humming filling the open space as it always did. While she busied herself checking the atmospheric controls of the larger terrarium, you corralled Athena into a smaller, open terrarium that you took back to your station for study.
You watched the young fungi for several moments and noticed that the mycelial network it used to walk around on was thicker and more dense than Zeus’s. Uncertain if the network possessed the same properties as its progenitor, you removed your glove and held your hand in front of it, hoping it would respond as positively to your touch as Zeus.
Instead of crawling onto your hand as you expected, Athena recoiled, its mycelial web bursting from its body to spray you with a fine, grey mist you had never seen in Zeus.
The pain was immediate and blinding.
Your lungs burned as the mist filled your airway, and you doubled over, coughing violently and struggling for air. The acrid film of spores clung to the delicate lining of your throat, choking and asphyxiating you.
'Warning. Contaminant detected. Contamination protocols initiated.'
As the warning klaxons wailed, the transparent walls of the decontamination unit descended for several meters around your workstation, sealing you off from the rest of the lab.
Frankie pounded on the wall and yelled for help through her combadge, but there was nothing she could do. Safety protocols wouldn’t allow a contaminant to infect the rest of the ship. Violent currents of air rushed around you while the ship worked to purify the tainted atmosphere.
You fell to your knees, choking and gasping for precious oxygen as the acid fire raced through your bloodstream. Seconds turned to minutes turned to incalculable eternities.
Beyond the barrier, a crowd began to gather—junior exobotanists, security personnel, and Alyssa among them. But medical couldn’t help you.
The rest of the ship would be safe, but it was too late for you.
Vision dimming, a powerful banging pulled your attention.
Lore was on the other side of the barrier, using every bit of his android strength to punch through the wall. Small cracks began to spiderweb out from the impact site, but not soon enough. Moments later, Data was behind him, attempting to use his clearance to override protocol, first in his voice and then in the captain’s. It wouldn’t work.
As you looked at your husbands, the chaos stilled to a pinpoint in time where everything suddenly made terrible sense. You were filled with a profound grief as you remembered what you had said to Deanna earlier.
Your husbands were what mattered. Lal. You wished you had just a little more time. Just one more moment to hold their hands and tell them you would give it all up for them.
The spores blazed through your already failing body. Time was up.
“I love you.”
The words rode your last breath.
01101000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111
01110111 01101111 01110010 01101100 01100100
Systems: online ; scanning...
Awareness?
Chaos. Cacophony.
Informat-noise-ion...TOO much sound light color too bright--23°C bright light SOUND—
organic: sweat, breath-
impulse engines air intake overloaded system: scanning.
Voices (familiar): scanning connections-
...now, we’re even
...she's-at once-breathing now!—new sensory inputs**: air-pressure-23°C-light-noise-light—touch-on-arm-sensors-too-much TOO MUCH--cognitive relays: overwhelmed overloaded* system overload systems nominal?
Explosions-and-academy-and-wedding-and-laughter-and-pain-and hands--
…a life for a life, tin man
LOVEMAKING-SCIENCE-CACOPHONY-23°C...warp...nine-breath Diagnostic...colors...light-too-much...pain...pain...
I am...what? Am Varroc am--I am Lieutenant I am Lieutenant Self—where am I—where am—...
...where is fucking medical-FamiliarANGER—polymers—diagnostic-23°C—Systems Online—Childhood:Bloodied Nose—Hand-Pressure-Sensors—Warm-Overwhelmed-Overwhelmed-Over/—
23°C--Love--I love--LOVE—breathing now-daughter-
…that life better, or worse?
MAKEITSTOP--23°C-SystemsNominal-overloaded—and explosions: Stella, Ensign—
I screamSOUNDCACOPHONYchaosBRIGHTLIGHTTOUCHno senses mixed color{{pain}}sight Breath too much too much too much STOP
PLEASE LOVE I love -you too much TOOMUCH
…I’ll be back, plant girl.
Eternal-forever-stopitstopmakeitstopLOVEyoueternitysystem overload-23°C I scream LOVE YOU too much noise sight sound makeitstop-TOO MUCH-Breath-touch-overloaded-overloaded MAKEITSTOPITST-too many thoughts-lovers-warp-STOP CAN’T STOP—MAKEITALLSTOPSTOPSTOPGODSHELPMESTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOP—
“What in the hell is going on?”
Riker’s baritone boomed above the maelstrom of your pitched, nonsensical babbling and the fearful murmurs of those gathered.
Lore placed the palm of his hand on your chest and looked across your frozen, screaming form at his brother, needing confirmation of what he felt there.
Data pushed up your uniform sleeve and ran his finger over the seam that connected your hand to your forearm. “Q has made her an android.”