Disclaimer: The characters and the ship etc belong to Paramount, and I'm playing for a little while to procrastinate about my actual work, and hopefully kick-start myself. I hope I'm at least playing responsibly! The concept for this fic was inspired by, borrowed from, and pitifully expanded beyond C.S Lewis' excellent short story The Shoddy Lands'. No infringement intended, I'm just a fan hoping to explore something he started, and I'm taking no credit for it but the Enterprise spin I've put on it. Of course I can't take any credit for them, either. If ever you have the opportunity to read this pretty rare piece of fiction of Lewis', I highly recommend it. As usual, he makes marvellously complex issues seem as easy as breathing, and every bit as natural. But I have to say the twist is mine. end plug
Rating: G
Codes: S and a man of your choice.
E-mail: sorted@witzend.fsbusiness.co.uk
Author's Note: I don't usually work in first person, but I wanted to stay as close as possible to the original story, and it made a lovely change for me. No spoilers as such but you may notice stuff from Vanishing Point' thrown into the mix here and there in disguise. This is the most experimental thing I've ever written, so I don't really know where it's going to go!
WINDOWS
How often have all of us been together like this? I think I can count the times on one hand and have fingers to spare. There's always work to be done, away teams exploring, shifts rotating—but for once, we're all here. It's odd to look around this bridge and take in these faces I've served with for eighteen months now, some longer than that in one way or another. Funny how you get so used to people that you barely notice them anymore. I still feel like I've got a lot to learn, some days. Like they'll never be completely known to me the way I'd like. But I take these moments as they come, and enjoy them for what they are—a crew that all want the same things in life, at the end of the day. To explore, to fit in, to be what they can be, and to be that well.
She's here, same as the rest of us, and she's doing her job, not looking at me, and making quite the self-conscious show about it. Maybe she can't look at me after what happened. I'd rather not talk about it, but I can't help myself; something happened on the last away mission, something that shook things up between us, and they haven't settled back into place since then. Maybe they won't and maybe they can't, and maybe we have to accept that. But I'd like to try, if she'll let me. It wasn't my fault.
We had some time to spare before the away-team was due back on Enterprise, and it seemed a shame to waste the opportunity—new culture, new planet, new things to discover. She's oddly eager for some things, innocently exciteable, ready to learn and absorb things I wouldn't stand a chance of understanding. In fact, she amazes me. Doesn't matter how flighty she might get in tough situations, in these matters of mixing and blending in she's about the best we've got.
We visited a tavern on the south side of the river, nothing fancy, simply a place to get a drink and talk about the mission—you know, small-talk that wouldn't stand up under inspection—before we were due back. It was a bad mistake, but I couldn't have known that then. I couldn't have imagined in my wildest dreams what that drink would do to us. To me. Or maybe to her. I don't know.
You know how, sometimes, you can't help but look into somebody's eyes when you're speaking to them? Maybe you don't mean to do it, but it can happen, with the most unlikely of people. You talk and you stare and your words seem to stare back at you, filling in the gaps you wished you'd said but couldn't, and suddenly . . . something happens. You connect, you see a kindred spirit, or your worst enemy, or a part of yourself. They're the windows to the soul, the eyes. Yesterday, in that tavern, I broke in.
I suppose when I make such an abrupt statement as that, you would expect that there was a flash of light, or dizziness, or the tavern spinning around me, a disturbance in perception. I wish I could say that was true, because it might make this whole thing seem more real. It might make me believe I'm not crazy. But the moment of . . . change . . . came in an instant. One moment I was sitting across from her, our hands on the table, leaning in too close and whispering every word we said too soft; the next, I was somewhere else entirely. That's all I can say to describe it, and don't expect more from me—because this place wasn't really a place at all. There was something that might be called a deck under my feet because I was standing on something solid, and grey stuff where the walls should be, and light of a kind if it can be called light when it has no obvious source . . . but it was about as much of a place as any dream you might have, blurry and unfinished, and the more I tried to focus on anything the further away it became. It was like the thickest fog you ever saw, except it shifted and changed, and there were colours . . . I can't tell you what colours, because you wouldn't believe me.
The moment I arrived in this place' I realised I was alone. She was gone, left behind in that tavern or taken somewhere else—when I'm finished perhaps you'll be able to decide for yourself—and I was alone in this unreal vision of our ship. The stuff that wasn't a deck was solid enough to walk on, so I walked, hoping to find a way out I suppose, although at the time I don't think I was too clear on what I was hoping to do. It's instinct, and who am I to argue with instinct? And I was worried about her, but that's something I've not admitted to anybody but you. As long as we're clear on that. It'll be our secret.
The ship, as far as I can call it a ship, was the same the whole way through, giddy and indistinct, but as I walked I noticed pockets of clarity, an object suddenly brought into sharp focus, and the colours were stronger around these objects than anywhere else in the haze. The first of these things was a face, attached to a bluish blob that might have been a uniform, a face I recognised as a friend of Hoshi's from Hydroponics. But the blob she was walking with was just that, and nothing more—just a blob. He had no face but a smoky pinkish array without colour, without definition. I didn't know him, at least not from that badly-drawn sketch, and probably not in the physical world either. The woman whose face I recognised was surrounded by a cool, clear blue, a calming and overall friendly colour, and that seemed to fit—Ensign Simmons is a very friendly person.
I hadn't gone far before I came to an open door, and although I couldn't get my bearings enough to know whereabouts on the ship I was, I went in. The doorway looked true, solid, the first things since Ensign Simmon's face that looked real enough to touch, and with so much of this wispy, dream-like unreality around me, that was enough.
I was in her quarters, this mysterious woman I'm talking to you so candidly about, and I can't tell you how the thought confused me, excited me, made me feel a little boy peeping at an adult magazine. Ridiculous, really. We've all stopped by each other's quarters at some time or another, after all. But I felt like I was intruding, and it was hard to shake that feeling no matter how much I reasoned with myself. There were some things that were beyond the realms of our normal experience, and this was one of those . . . because as I stood in her sound, tangible doorway, not daring to reach out and touch it in case I should find out I was wrong, she walked through me.
I know what you're thinking, and believe me, I'd be thinking it too if I were you; but I'm telling the truth. She came in from outside, and she would have been no more aware I was there than if I'd been a ghost. I have to admit it occurred to me that I might be. Maybe that drink was lethal to humans; maybe I was dead and this was my life flashing before my eyes in the final breath. And I also have to admit, I was disappointed that this might be all I'd see. I'd like to think I've lived a better life, a fuller life, than that.
The moment when she passed right through me is something words would only cheapen, and so I won't try to describe it. I'm left with a lingering impression of comfort, even now as I think about it, a sensation of warm, spiced milk in my veins where my blood used to be. If an enemy had done the same I might have wanted to scrub every inch of my skin clean of it, and rid myself of an invasion of spirit, if you like . . . but this wasn't an enemy. It was her. I hadn't allowed myself to consider what I thought, or felt, when I looked at her before that day, because there hadn't been time; but at that moment I realised I had only dreamed of being half so close to her as I was that day.
She didn't see me, didn't give any indication that she had shared the experience with me . . . until suddenly she turned around, and there was such utter bewilderment in her eyes, clear, dark, living eyes in a dead world, that I instantly hated myself for what I'd done. It hardly mattered that I hadn't asked for any of this; I had scared her. She must have felt that brief violation of herself, of her space, and felt as unsettled by it as I did. But the look passed, like a wisp of smoke being blown away into the haze, and then, slowly, she smiled. Maybe she felt that spiced milk in her veins, that melting honey-glow, too. I don't know.
Before I fully realised what I was seeing she was removing her uniform, kicking off the rigid boots that hide more delicate feet than you would suppose were behind that restrictive leather, and there she was in her regulation underwear, wearing it as if she were modelling lingerie in the Paris fashion week, and there was I, standing and staring with every muscle in my body utterly paralysed. She peeled away the clinging underwear as if it was hateful to her, and a sickly yellow glow began to coalesce at its edges. I tried to turn away, honestly I did. There are some things about the experience that are still beyond explanation, and I think this has to count as one of them. My body—if it was even a body here—wasn't my own. I have a theory about this, same as I have a theory for everything else that happened, but it wouldn't do to tell you just yet. Perhaps you'll guess, like I did. But somebody wanted me to see.
She stood in front of her mirror, pivoting on those pretty feet a little this way, a little that way, studying herself, and the yellow grew and spread until it screamed its bitter acid-hue all over her reflection like a mustard gas. If the colours mean what I think they mean, I can only feel desperately ashamed that I might have contributed to its appearance in some way before this. Because I think this colour, like the blue surrounding Ensign Simmons, had a meaning, some significance. Again, I can't tell you what, just yet. But the colour was the most anguished and rejecting I've ever seen.
She climbed into her shower, and I felt the clamp that had welded my feet to this non-deck and locked my body into a powered-down robot release me. I took it as a dismissal. So I left.
I can't tell you how much willpower that took.
I went on down the corridor, turning when the turns came, barely looking where I was going at this point. I'm fairly sure I never intended to head for the bridge, but that's where my feet took me. Maybe they were still being controlled, even now, and I had no say in it. You're probably sick of me saying I don't know why any of this happened the way it did. I'm afraid it's the best I can do. I'm no good at this. I'm no good at writing down my thoughts, even to myself. I find it a miracle I'm even trying.
The bridge was clear enough, in part, that I could see right away where I was. Her usual station was every bit as solid, as touchable, as honest, as her face and her body had been, and as clear as Ensign Simmons' face. It was the first things I saw, because it leapt out at me from the grey nothing-ness that made up so much of the rest. I saw T'Pol at the science station, and she was an angry green, that aura hovering around her like the proverbial raincloud. I can only say that I know the colour of envy. It's green.
And then I saw myself, shrouded in a warm rose madder like blood and wine. Do you have any idea how scary that is, to see yourself, looking back at you, your eyes passing right through the space where you stand as if you're not even there? The experience stands as the most terrifying of my life, but I wouldn't change it for the world in the palm of my hand. Because I was real, you see. In comparison to me, even her station, even her quarters, her face, looked like cheap imitations. It embarrasses me because when I remember the face, the body, that was mine and yet not, I can't help but think I'm not so perfect-looking as all that. This was an idealised version of me, every little feature I've tried very hard to ignore over the years smoothed away, the tone of my eyes brighter, cleaner, as if I'd been airbrushed for a magazine cover. It all comes down to this theory that I have, and one that I'm holding to like a lifebelt—because if it's true, and if what happened to us is really what I think it is, then I can't begin to unravel what that means for us.
And now you want to know what my theory is, and at last, I think I'm ready to tell you. I was pulled from that place at the same moment I saw myself on the bridge; whatever I was expected to see or do there, clearly I'd done it. I was back where I had been in that tavern, looking into her eyes, trying to breathe and forgetting to. I don't have to ask to know what the look there meant; she knew what had happened. I can only cling to the idea that her smile was warm, that the hand that curled into mine wasn't my imagination. I don't know what I'd do if that was taken away from me.
You see, be it through that drink, or the air in that tavern, or maybe just the complete and unbroken eye-contact we'd made and held for so long that day, I think I saw inside her mind. The colours mean something, but so do the contrasts of solid and diminished, real and unreal. The real things, the things you could see and touch and even smell, were the things most important to her. Her friends, her quarters, her job . . . me. The rest was unfinished because it doesn't occupy so much of her mind as those things do. The colours only stained those things with her opinion of them; the blue, a sort of calm and comfort around her friends; the yellow, bitter and ugly, her own sense of self-consciousness, or feeling slighted or invisible or unattractive in some way; the green, so much a cause of that horrible yellow, her envy for T'Pol's mind, presence, and the attention she gets from all of us. I'm as guilty of that as the next man, so maybe I was right to hate myself as I looked at that mirror. I don't want to think about the red around myself, a red so bright it seemed to throb with its own heartbeat, because it seems either delusional or arrogant of me. But I can't forget how perfect I looked, quite different to what I see in my mirror every morning. I saw me as she sees me, and that changes everything.
Why am I writing this, you ask? With so many people to see, here, on the bridge when I should be working? I wouldn't have the courage to do this if I waited until I was alone, and that's the honest truth, just like everything else I've said. So I'll plan it, I'll write the words in my head and when my shift's done I'll put it all down in physcal form. And I'll deliver it to you—but maybe I'll have a drink first. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea to me.
But why tell you what happened, and such intimate things as these are? The reason is, it was you, Hoshi, that I saw. You must remember that day. You must remember the way we were talking, leaning so close, forgetting everybody else. And you must remember that brush with something you didn't understand, that whisper in the back of your mind. The warm-milk feeling running through you, just like water through gravel. I know, that's very poetic of me. But I'm feeling inspired today. I thought I'd make the most of it while it lasts.
I know that after this you might not want to talk to me. I'd understand. If I didn't understand that, at least, then I would be saying this to your face instead of writing this letter like the coward I am. I wanted to apologise for what happened, and it's selfish of me but I had to get it off my chest, too. I couldn't see you every day, knowing what I know, and stay silent.
It's up to you what you want to do, Hoshi. Talk to me or shut me out, but please don't ignore me. I know I've ignored you in the past and I'm sorry for that. If you would just let me know if what I saw was real, that I'm not going crazy, it'll be enough. I'll be in my quarters until the morning if you want me. I won't sleep, but I'll be there.
Waiting.
********
I tried very hard to keep this mystery man's voice' neutral, so that I wasn't leaning one way or another, but I don't know how well I've done. Anyway, thanks for reading.