DANCING STAR, by Seed

A Star Trek Enterprise Fanfiction

SPOILERS: Zero Hour

SUMMARY: Archer faces his Season 3 demons…

DISCLAIMER: Not mine!

RATING: K+

NOTE: This story rewrites the last scene of Season 3 finale, "Zero Hour" and then takes a completely different route from everything in "Storm Front"…

My endless thanks to bluedana, for helping me through this, encouraging me, bearing with my bouts of madness and finally for proofreading the final version of my fiction… Blue, you are my shiny little star!

A/N: This story has originally been posted at the Logical Choice forum and I had decided not to post it anywhere else until I had written an epilogue, which, unfortunately, is still missing. But, as (un)luck would have it, the story got lost because of a server crash and I decided to post it here for anyone still interested. I am sorry to say it seems at the moment extremely unlikely that I will ever get around to writing the epilogue, so be advised...


Chapter 1

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"I tell you: one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star." (Thus Spake Zarathustra)

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When he first came to, Jonathan Archer was only aware of the pain in his head. He lay still, trying to open his eyes, blinking, and painfully creasing his brow. His whole vision field was composed of a semi-dark vagueness, above him some kind of whitish substance … cloth, maybe?

A moaning made him try to turn his head to his right, but the motion left him dazed, and some moments passed before he was able to make out the image of a man lying on a cot, heavily bandaged, blood and dirt haphazardly marring the not-so-white gauze. He slowly realized that the man's left arm was missing at the elbow.

"Where…?" The thought flickered and lasted but a fleeting second. He felt so empty that no mental process had the strength to make way into his mind, and let himself fall back in the void of thoughtlessness.

He dreamt an azure sky and sunshine. He was lying on his back on an ancient Terran ship's deck and looking at white sails swelling in the wind above him, while the pull made the rigging softly screech.

---

A golden-red light was knocking at his eyelids, while raucous wheezing syllables floated around to his ears. He tried to open his eyes again, but the light was painful to bear.

There were voices all around, some merely speaking, others, by the tone, giving orders, some again tinged with urgency, but above all many voices moaning, pleading and wailing. He couldn't understand any of them.

"The translator…" he thought, finally succeeding in opening his eyes.

Four men were standing around his bed, staring at him: a doctor in a white coat smeared with blood, a lamp in his hand, and three men in military uniforms which looked as if taken from an old war movie. Two of them were human, but he completely forgot them as soon as the third one stepped into the light.

From the slick white face of a devil from ancient earth legends, his features frozen into a perpetual sneer, the fixed gaze of disquieting red eyes hypnotized him. He felt a cold damp overcoming him, sheer revulsion, like he had never felt before.

"What…" he tried to utter, but his voice failed him.

His head was hurting viciously. The men were speaking again, in the foreign language. The alien creature gave an order, then they all left.

He fell into darkness again.

---

He sat on the floor with his back to the wall, his hands tied on his lap, his chin on his chest, lulled by the van's motion. In the morning he'd been hoisted to the train by a couple of rough soldiers and he'd been alone ever since.

He was almost too weary to wonder, to think, to guess. Nothing did make sense. He was convincing himself he was probably living in his own delirious mind, a prisoner of himself.

Even so though, why he'd chosen this particular setting for this nightmare, he was at a loss to understand.

He was cold and damp, and could hear the soft beating of the rain on the roof. He could also see some of the greyness outside through the narrow horizontal slits on the van's wall. They were travelling through a ghost country, now and then the wreck of a tree in the mud, then fields, more mud, woods, mist. And always rain. Like it was trying to wash the world away.

He tried to move his neck, to melt the painfully dull sensation which had taken residence there. Tried to move his legs, his arms. But the feeling he was looking at something happening to someone else made him disconnected from his own body.

"Where am I?" he asked himself. No answer came. "Who am I?" This was easier. "Jonathan Archer, Captain of the Enterprise." The answer came unbidden, automatically.

But was he, really? If so, then, where was this ship, Enterprise, the thing in the world that made him who he was? The thing that defined him. So much so, that he was to himself, before anything else, Enterprise's captain.

"You can be a captain to your crew, a captain of your ship, but without these things you are only yourself. No captain. Simply Jonathan Archer."

The thought upset him. "Where's my ship?" Anger and anguish, suddenly coming alight, gave him energy. Struggling with his bound hands, he started searching himself, feeling for the patch on his left shoulder. And there it was, Enterprise's emblem. A sudden rush of relief coursing through him, his head upturned, his eyes closed, his breath slowly exhaling, he silently thanked the stars for the small token of his identity still left to him.

"I am Jonathan Archer, Captain of the Enterprise" he said softly to himself, his hand stroking the roughness of the badge over and over. He repeated the words many times.

---

Three days and two nights he spent in the van, often burning through angry bursts of fever, for the most part shivering under a stinky scratchy blanket, now and then trying to eat something they had thrown in at some stop during the way, a stale piece of bread, or a half-rotten apple.

But he was not alone. A long procession of ghosts was visiting him.

"You said you would come because I needed you!" his words coming out slurred by fever, rage and disappointment "And I did need you. Oh God! I needed you so much! But you were not there. I had to do it all on my own! You know… you know… those things! Sim, the ship, the dead… always alone! Alone!" He screamed the last word, shivering even more violently.

"Friends!" A smirk of rage and an almost-sob erupted from his lips. "Is this your friendship? The only times you were ready were when you had to question and betray me. The insectoid ship … it was easy then, wasn't it? Just jump to the occasion, just show everyone what a fool I am! That was fun, wasn't it?"

A long pause, stressed by his own ragged breath.

"And when I had to steal that warp coil, oh! What a field day, eh? Suddenly your conscience had awakened… You couldn't keep quiet, you couldn't allow such an act, eh? The truth is, you had to make clear to yourself that it was entirely my fault, that it was my decision, and only mine, that you didn't have anything to do with it. And you know what? You were right! You never had anything to do with it. Never. Not once. It was always me. Only me. It's all on me!" His speech ended on a sob, and he kept crying until he was too tired to go on.

He had many guests. Crewman Fuller. Hoshi. Malcolm Reed. Phlox. Sim.

He was never sure whether it was Trip or Sim, at the beginning, and that made it even more awful.

"Trip! Please! You… you must forgive me. You are the only one. You do understand, don't you? It was for them, at home, and for the dead, so many of them. And my crew. It was for you Trip! It was for Elizabeth. You told me you were sorry, you told me I'd done the right thing! Please!" At this point he realized it was Sim in front of him, sneering, saying: "So what? Are you going to take me to sickbay at gunpoint?"

And later. "You wanted to know how many of them were children?… the answer is: almost a million and a half. Maybe I should be happy Dolim slew you… Maybe I would be happy if he had slain me too…" His words resonated in the empty car.

At the end of it all, the Captain of the Illyrian ship from which he'd taken the warp coil would appear. He never said anything. He just stood there in the dark staring at him.

---

When the train lurched and stopped on the track, Jonathan Archer did not think too much of it.

They had stopped many times during the way, sometimes for what seemed like hours to him, even though he had no way of knowing. Some times he heard people shuffling around the vans, now and then a harsh word resonating in the mist. Other times he didn't hear a thing. If he peeped outside to try and understand where they were, he usually saw nothing but mist, or darkness, depending on the hour. Once he'd seen what looked like the outskirts of a town, gritty roads and deserted edifices grimly looking at him. No-one was ever around.

He was beginning to feel like a ghost himself.

This time though, some minutes after the train had stopped, the door was shoved open, and the, by now, almost familiar soldier spat something at him. Archer tried to push himself up, but was stopped by a sudden spinning of the world around him. The short tempered soldier didn't bother to wait, and brusquely pulled him up by his arm and threw him out of the van. Archer fell gracelessly on his right shoulder and groaned in pain, but the guards (there always were two of them) pulled him to his feet and, grabbing him under his arms, started half-pushing and half-carrying him along the track.

It was dark, he was dizzy, and apart from some fleeting impressions of darkened alleys, whooshing black trees and chilly fog, he didn't remember much else.

But, in the end, it seemed he had only bargained one cell for another, as he found himself steadily gazing at a mouldy grey wall in a barren room.