Credit for the fantastic image for this story to Kerr Avonsen. Thank you for permission to use it!
Cally had never had a nightmare in her life. She'd lived through plenty of them since dedicating her life to Blake's Cause, but had never had an actual, wake-up-in-the-dark-clutching-your-blankets-and-screaming nightmare. None of her people had ever had any, either; no one sane, anyway. It simply wasn't typical of the Auronae psyche to manifest anxieties in such a manner.
But then, Cally was hardly a typical member of the Auronae; she'd spent far more time in the company of aliens than her own people, since reaching adulthood. And the nightmare slices of reality through which she'd lived since beginning her own, personal part of the war against the Federation were far beyond any horrors the planet Auron had ever encountered.
Until Servalan had destroyed that world and its people with their infant telepathy and untroubled sleep.
And until someone had tried to steal Cally's identity for herself.
Now, Cally discovered after being brutally torn from sleep three nights in a row by a series of horrifying images behind her eyes, one of the Auronae could have nightmares.
oOo
I want to live. The words were all she could remember, even in the first few seconds after waking from the nightmare. The words, and an all-encompassing sense of loneliness, the kind of loneliness that comes from feeling like the only person in the world, or the galaxy-maybe even the universe. The kind, Cally thought with a shudder, that was her greatest fear. May you die alone and without companions. An ancient Auronae curse, one she'd flung at others in the not-so-distant past. One she was now suffering from herself.
With an exclamation of annoyance and disgust at the morbid turn her thoughts had taken, Cally swept the covers from her body and rose to her feet in one fluid motion. Why in the names of all the ancient members of the half-forgotten Auronae pantheon was she having such thoughts? She wasn't dying; on the contrary, she'd never felt more alive!
Or more alone.
The voice whispering these thoughts to her was her own, Cally realized; it could only be her own, since no one else's voice could whisper into her mind. Not now. Not ever, perhaps. A dull ache of tightly-wrapped misery forced itself from its hiding place in her heart, clenching her throat and stomach with emotions she had thought completely controlled, completely eliminated.
Well, she'd been wrong before. Why not now?
Cally settled herself to the floor in the lotus position. Meditation was the only thing that had allowed her to return to sleep, these past few nights, but she had the distinct feeling that it wouldn't work this time. Not when she'd allowed her subconscious to formulate thoughts like the ones she'd just had.
The first night she'd simply awakened, heart pounding in fright, wondering what had disturbed her sleep, realizing with a feeling of startlement that it was her own mind playing cruel havoc with her emotions, stirring them into a noxious brew of fear and anxiety. But considering what had almost happened to her so very recently, she hadn't stopped to ask the all-important "why?", had simply meditated, brought herself back to calm serenity, and fallen swiftly asleep once again. It seemed to work; for the rest of that night, she slept peacefully.
The next night was a repetition of the first, only with the question of "When will this stop happening?" briefly fluttering the surface of her mind before floating away as she breathed her way to tranquility and sleep once again.
But this night, the third night, was the night Cally acknowledged that anesthetizing her mind to stillness was not necessarily the answer, that the peace it brought was only temporary. The problem, whatever it was, remained. And with the unexpected bitterness of the realization that no mind but her own could whisper thoughts to her, she had the problem pinned down as well, for her to examine at her own, unwilling, leisure.
She was alone, and the vulnerability of being alone frightened her.
Alone in her mind, trapped there, with no one to comfort her, no one to share with her. Alone forever. Her lips twisted with the same bitterness, not so unexpected now that she was examining it this closely. She stood up again, flicking on the light to take quick inventory of her image in the small mirror on the wall over her dresser.
The eyes were tired and wary, the mouth set in a stubborn line, the hair snarled from twisting around on a hard pillow. There was a pallor to the skin, born of exhaustion and too much time spent in space. But it was, undeniably, her own face. No one else's; the face of a stranger did not stare back at her.
But it might have.
"My thoughts are my own," Cally murmured to her image. "They belong to no one but me. The mind behind this face is the same mind that has always been behind this face. I control my thoughts, no one else does." She frowned grimly. "No one else," she repeated softly, her eyes growing abstracted. No one else, indeed. Her lips twisted in a wry smile at the irony of the arguments she was using in an attempt to console herself.
"That is how you got into trouble in the first place, is it not?" she asked her image, tapping the mirror idly with one abstracted fingernail. "No one else in your mind." She'd never have believed herself to be so vulnerable to invasion in such a fashion.
That word again. Vulnerable. She shuddered and turned away from the mirror, suddenly unable to look at herself any longer. But her thoughts continued to plague her as she sat back on the edge of the bed. That was the route the Invader had taken-following the path of Cally's loneliness deep into her mind, offering her innermost self the comfort of companionship. And then abusing the courtesy of guest to host by rudely putting her out, like an old pair of boots too worn to mend.
But Kerr Avon had stopped it.
Cold terror, which had been steadily growing, she realized dimly, since she'd first awakened this night, retreated at that particular memory. The picture of Avon acting as White Knight to her Damsel in Distress brought first amusement, then amazement at his being the one to play that particular role.
And she hadn't even thanked him. Not with anything as tangible-or mundane-as words. But he knew himself to be thanked anyway. It was in his eyes; Cally could see it in the half-smile he'd shared with her when the ordeal was over. The first ordeal, at any rate. It was a pity that there was nothing he could do about this newest ordeal; that thought brought an untainted smile. "I'm not a puppeteer," she could almost hear him snarling in the voice he reserved for when others came uncomfortably close. "Take your alien psychoses elsewhere."
The smile faded as Cally's mind brought forth a long-suppressed bit of knowledge, offered to her consciousness like a rare delicacy on a silver platter. She shook her head violently, as if trying to dislodge the thought. But it was now thoroughly wedged in the forefront of her mind, impossible to dismiss.
Avon could help, if he were willing. And if she were willing. Cally's subconscious had chosen, at that instant, to remind her conscious self that there most certainly were ways for non-telepaths send as well as receive thoughts from someone with telepathy. But the price might be higher than either of them would be willing to pay.
Kerr Avon was a man who valued his privacy above all else in his life except, perhaps, his honor. And, Cally realized with a start, she herself valued her own privacy more than she had ever realized. It was eminently logical; how else could she have survived for so long, far away from the warm mental web in which she'd lived on Auron, isolated among mind-deaf humans? The need to be alone in her own mind had to be there, to keep her from having gone mad from the isolation long before this. So she was not so different from her human companions-especially Avon-as she might have originally believed. Another small irony to be stored away and taken out those times when she felt herself slipping into a sense of detached superiority. We are not so different.
That realization served to crystalize the tentative decision she'd reached, at least subconsciously. A sense of detachment settled over her that had nothing to do with a mistaken sense of superiority; she hardly felt or even noticed when her body, seemingly of its own volition, settled to the floor, once again attaining the lotus position. I have been vulnerable for far too long, she thought calmly; it was as if her entire psyche had been bathed in ice. And it has been entirely my own fault. It is time to remedy that. A serene smile spread across her face, reaching even to her unfocused eyes. Now, I must do what I must do.
Her decision had been made, and peace-not the sterile, anesthetic quality that she'd numbed herself to sleep with the previous two nights, but true inner peace-flooded Cally's being as that phrase repeated itself endlessly in her mind. I must do what I must do.
oOo
Kerr Avon came abruptly awake. He'd been sleeping well, for the first time in weeks, and was extremely annoyed to find himself awake once again. And extremely annoyed at who or what had awakened him in the first place. He flipped over onto his back, gritting his teeth and trying to keep control of his temper. His mood was always blackest when his sleep was interrupted, and he'd recently started making a concerted effort to calm himself when things like this happened. It would be interesting to see if his efforts would eventually be successful; for now, all he was doing was giving himself a headache as he tried to calmly and rationally consider what exactly had brought him out of sleep.
It hadn't been a ship-wide alarm; that would still be ringing with the shrill hysteria common to such warning devices. No one had called him on the intership...or had they? No, the intercom light was red, not flashing the impatient twitches of green that meant someone was waiting for him to respond to a communication. If someone had contacted him, they had apparently changed what passed for their mind. He ground his teeth in irritation. Everyone on board this ship knew what a light sleeper he was, knew that even the small, courteous "beep" of the intership would awaken him. If it had been important, whoever had called him-most likely Vila, since according to the wall chrono it was time for his watch-would have waited for him to respond, not signed back off again. Therefore, Avon reasoned, it was not important, and whoever had called him had simply chickened out at the last second. Which, once again, brought him back to Vila.
Goaded by these thoughts into thoroughly-irritated action, Avon sat up and flicked the intership on. "Flight Deck," he said clearly, then: "Vila!"
He heard a slight yelp and the sound of something falling to the floor and gurgling away its contents. Avon smiled, somewhat maliciously, as Vila's frightened voice entered his room. "Avon? 'sthat you? You nearly gave me a heart attack, calling me in the middle of the night-"
"Precisely what I wished to discuss with you," Avon interrupted smoothly.
A pause, then an indignant: "What the bloody hell are you talking about?"
"Did you call me on the intership?" Avon asked, ignoring the question, just as he was ignoring the uneasy feeling that Vila hadn't, after all, been the culprit. He'd gone too far into this to back out-or down-now.
Another pause, longer this time. Avon could almost see the thief's eyebrows climbing towards his practically non-existent hairline. "No, Avon," came Vila's voice, cautiously soothing. "You called me, remember? Made me spill my...drink, you did," he added in a tone of indignant outrage.
The pause between "my" and "drink" was very slight, but it was enough to allow Avon to relax fractionally and even let a smile briefly cross his lips. "Yes, I did, didn't I," he said musingly. "So you didn't try to call me a minute ago?"
"Avon," this time Vila's voice sounded slightly concerned, "are you having nightmares or something? Because if you are, maybe you should see Cally about getting a sedative-"
"No, I'm fine," came the curt response. Cally's name had triggered something in his memory, and Avon struggled to figure out what it was as he dismissed Vila. "I was mistaken, that's all. Forgive me."
oOo
The intership went dead after the abrupt-and completely unexpected-apology. Vila gaped at the speaker with wide eyes, then shrugged and bent to retrieve his now half-empty bottle from the floor. He regarded the puddle on the flight deck mournfully, watching with interest as Zen cleaned it up by somehow sucking it into the flooring. Very efficient, Vila noted approvingly.
When that was taken care of, he returned his attention to the rest of the bottle's contents. Holding it up before his face and peering critically at the remainder of the liquid, the thief shrugged once again and quickly downed half of it. With a satisfied sigh, he sank back down into the arc of the U-shaped couch, put the games program back on, and took up where he'd left off.
oOo
Back in his cabin, Avon sat slowly on the edge of his bunk, a bed as narrow and purely functional as Cally's. He'd been pacing ever since signing off from his conversation with Vila, a good ten minutes gone by. Why had Cally's name set off warning bells in his head? And why couldn't he put his figurative hands it?
He took a deep breath. Pacing and wracking his brains for an explanation hadn't helped; perhaps a bit of cool, controlled reasoning would. He concentrated on the Auronae meditation techniques Cally had begun to teach him, a seeming lifetime ago. Clear the mind. Breathe deeply. Relax. Concentrate on the breathing, on the focal point he had, under her instruction, created. Do not think of the "nothing" called for in traditional Terran-style meditation; simply allow the thoughts that surfaced to pass along the forefront of the conscious mind and flow with the currents. Examine nothing; do not be distracted.
I must do what I must do. A smile curved Avon's mouth, slight, triumphant. That thought, plucked from the back of his waking mind where it repeated endlessly like music behind dialogue in a play, was not his own. It was Cally's voice.
The smile disappeared quickly as Avon brought himself out of the trance. Now that he was aware of it, he was able to "hear" that murmuring voice as it whispered continually behind his own thoughts. And it worried him.
He rose to his feet once again, this time throwing a robe around himself. Cally's voice in his mind was a not-unfamiliar phenomenon; Cally's voice repeating a single phrase over and over again, disturbing his sleep, was. It didn't "feel" like her normal telepathy, which was like hearing her speaking voice ringing strongly and clearly in his mind. The logical correlation, he decided as he strode toward the door, was that she was somehow telepathing in her sleep. Whether he was the only one who had heard her or not, and whether it meant trouble or was merely Cally being uncharacteristically careless, was something he was determined to find out.
Her possession by that alien Other had disturbed him far more than he would have believed possible. Not just disturbed his sense of self-preservation, which he cited so often and held as a shield before him; not just disturbed his desire to keep this crew functioning and whole, for whatever obscure reason. It went deeper than that, deeper, perhaps, than he was willing to look. Because to admit that the idea of losing Cally terrified him to the core of his being would mean admitting that she meant more to him than he had realized-and such feelings were dangerous. Dangerous to him, personally, no matter how much his mind longed to generalize such dangers to the crew and the ship.
Avon cursed under his breath as he reached Cally's door. Caring too much had probably gotten Roj Blake killed, someone else Avon was determined not to allow too close, and he definitely-and desperately-wanted to avoid that degree of caring. It was far too frightening.
Angry at himself for harboring such thoughts, Avon banged a little more loudly on the door than he had intended. "Cally?" he called, lowering his voice half-way through her name, suddenly remembering that it was the middle of the night-or near enough, anyway-and that Cally's wasn't the only room in this corridor. Dayna slept further down the hall, and Avon didn't fancy waking her up without good reason. Unless, of course, Cally had intruded into the other woman's thoughts as well, and Hal Mellanby's little girl was already awake and waiting, gun in hand...
By the time he reached the end of that uneasy line of reasoning, Cally had had more than enough time to awaken at his knock-she slept as lightly as Avon did-and come to the door, demanding to know what he wanted. Since she didn't appear, he had to assume that there was, indeed, something wrong, and that her voice in the back of his mind had been a message of some sort.
Gritting his teeth and wishing he'd thought to bring along a weapon-just in case-Avon opened the door; Cally never kept it locked. Poor guerilla tactics, Avon had always thought, but typical Auronae.
Not that walking unarmed into a potentially dangerous situation was any better tactics, but Avon had already alerted any intruders as to his presence. He burst into the room, giving-he hoped-potential attackers no time to act, then skidded to a halt before his momentum brought him tumbling over the silent figure seated on the floor in the middle of the small cabin.
Avon studied her, half-exasperated, half-amused at the incongruous picture Cally presented. She was in a trance; not the hesitant, clumsy half-trance that he had achieved, but in a full trance she had once described as "the root of self-examination". Avon had scoffed at the need for such a thing, and tonight's events certainly hadn't improved his opinion. She looked like a small child pretending not to notice another person, but somehow, at the same time, like a model posing for a painting of Serenity.
He pulled his eyes away from her for a moment, flicking them around the room with practiced ease, just in case. But, as he had begun to suspect, there was no one there, no visible danger. Just Cally, seated in what looked to him like an extremely uncomfortable lotus position-funny how the Auronae and Earth humans both called it that-with a Mona Lisa smile hovering around her lips and inward-looking eyes shining large and luminous in the dimness of the cabin. And her mental "voice", louder now, still repeating the meaningless phrase over and over again.
Enough was enough, Avon decided. He stepped forward, allowing the door to close behind him, knelt down and reached to touch Cally's shoulder gently.
"Cally." The sound of her name penetrated the well of stillness that her mind had become, sending ripples and eddies to the center that she labeled "self". It seemed to come from a long distance, and she had trouble placing it at first, separating it from the currents in which her own thoughts freely floated.
"Cally." It came again, more urgently this time, and she felt her brow wrinkling. The serenity she had achieved was now flawed; it would serve no further purpose to remain in this detached state. Using the voice as an anchor, she pulled herself to consciousness, blinking a little as her eyes adjusted to the light of the outer world once again.
"Avon," she said as his face came into focus, surprised to find him here, now. His face was only inches from her own, his mouth turned down in a concerned frown that melted quickly into a relieved half-smile, which was in turn supplanted by his normal, coolly-neutral expression.
He rose to his feet at Cally's response, relief lending speed to his movements. She rose as well, gracefully, and turned to sit on the edge of her bed. "What are you doing here?" she asked, voice still calm, and waited quietly for him to answer.
It took him a minute to do so, a minute during which he came as close to shifting awkwardly from foot to foot as he ever had. "You woke me," he finally replied, the simple truth harder to speak than he would have thought possible.
"I?" Cally asked, truly startled by his response. "How?"
"What is it that you must do?" Avon countered her question with one of his own. "And why must you do it at so inconvenient an hour as the middle of the night? And," he finished, a trifle tartly, "why must you do so at the expense of my sleep?" It was his turn to wait as she digested these questions and their meaning.
"Oh my," she said softly, and that was all either of them said for a long pair of minutes. They remained frozen in position, eyes locked, Cally's normally-erect posture sabotaged by the realization that her thoughts had gone beyond her own mind and entered Avon's, unbidden by either of them; and Avon, leaning with one casual hip against the desk that stood next to the door, waiting for-and expecting-an answer.
Cally dropped her eyes from his, slid them away in a manner most unlike her. She looks like Vila, Avon realized with a mental start, like Vila when he's been caught out. Guilty. "I assume," he added, with less than his usual acidity, "that there isa reason?" His raised voice made it a question in the end, and Cally nodded jerkily in response.
"I must apologize, Avon," she said softly, reluctantly returning her gaze to meet his with something less than her usual frankness. The timidity in her eyes also reminded Avon uncomfortably of Vila, and he found himself resenting whatever had caused Cally to behave so uncharacteristically more than he resented the fact that this uncharacteristic behavior had ruined his sleep for the night.
"I would prefer an explanation," was all he replied, in dry, clipped tones.
Her head snapped up at that, and an irritated look passed fleetingly over her face. Good. Maybe she'd stop skirting around the subject now and tell him what was going on. "I shall first apologize and then explain," Cally responded to his remark with her usual spirited forthrightness. "I apologize for disturbing your sleep; it was entirely unintentional. A sort of mental 'leak'; I was concentrating on the wrong kind of control."
"Apology noted and logged. And now the explanation?" Avon settled his hip more firmly against the desk.
Cally lowered her eyes to her hands, a small frown once again touching her lips. "I have been experiencing nightmares." She waited to see what effect that statement would have on him, to see just how much he actually knew about the Auronae.
"The children of Auron are not subject to nightmares," Avon replied flatly, suspiciously. Just as she'd always thought; he knew more about her people than he'd ever let on. "Are you certain that they were nightmares, and not...something else?"
The implication was quite obvious, and her head snapped up again as she stared in outraged silence at Avon. He returned the stare coolly, knowing full well that she would see the validity of the question once her initial anger had passed.
Which, of course, it did, and quickly, too. Cally flushed with anger, Avon found himself thinking, was an impressive sight. And he found himself startled at that thought, even though he recognized it as completely his own and not the product of invasion, either by Cally or by mysterious outside forces.
Cally took a deep breath, unaware of those thoughts flitting ghost-like through Avon's mind as she took time to deliberately confront the doubts his simple statement had evoked. "Yes, they were nightmares," she said, finally. "I know the feel of my own thoughts. And yes, the average Auronae is not usually subject to nightmares. But," she added, "I am hardly the average Auronae." A shadow crossed her face, briefly. "There is no such thing as the average Auronae any longer, with only a few of us to represent an entire race. I am alone, Avon, forever separated from my people, even more than when I voluntarily chose exile over their short-sighted insularity. Would you not consider recent events in my life sufficient to cause nightmares?"
"I had to ask," Avon replied quietly. "Your presence on board this ship has been..." He paused, and Cally jumped in angrily.
"Has been what? A danger? A disruptive influence? A magnet for telepathic invasion?" Her eyes glittered dangerously, and Avon found himself reassessing his earlier appraisal of her as impressive in her anger; outraged, she was truly magnificent.
"I was about to say, has been singularly unpleasant for you," he replied smoothly. Cally looked chagrined, slightly shamed at jumping to conclusions, and Avon smiled inwardly. Keeping people off-balance was a mechanism he employed, like his cutting sarcasm, to insulate himself from the pain of disappointed hopes. The inward smile turned to an outward frown as he realized that, perhaps, he had no need of such defense mechanisms around Cally, vulnerable to psychic phenomena or not. And the frown lingered as he wondered how long he'd had such thoughts percolating in his subconscious. Which they must have been, to appear full-grown in his mind now.
"Avon, I shall not be drawn into a senseless argument with you," Cally interrupted his uncomfortable self-examination, her voice returning to its smooth serenity by some magic he could never hope to duplicate. "The point of this conversation is that I have been having nightmares, ever since that...Other...tried to replace me."
"And?"
A simple interrogative, but one Cally was finding more extremely difficult to answer. Avon waited patiently while she dropped her eyes and fidgeted with the thin blanket covering her bed. "And," she finally replied, "I've been meditating, and through meditation I believe I have found a solution to those nightmares, in a memory I'd kept buried. Until now."
"A solution and a memory? Of what?" Avon asked, his voice intrigued.
"A memory," Cally answered, eyes still lowered, and her voice as well, "of the fact that there is a way for a non-Auron to communicate with one of my people telepathically. Not just receive thoughts, but send them as well." She caught her lower lip between her teeth, gnawed on it nervously for a moment, then continued. "It is not a process that is undertaken lightly, and is very rare that it succeeds. It was discovered accidentally, when I was much younger." A smile at a memory. "Sellie-my sister Zelda-did it," she explained, a touch of pride entering her voice at her sister's accomplishment. "Her best friend was not a clone, not a telepath. Her best friend after me," she added. "Miris was a year older than us, and Sellie adored him. He was her first 'boyfriend', I suppose you would say, although that is not really the correct word."
The remainder of the proud smile faded and her brow creased with the unpleasantness of the next memory. "We were exploring an abandoned part of the city, where renovation and modernization had never taken place. There was nothing around us but deserted buildings, empty streets, tumble-down, overgrown areas that might once have been parks." Her gaze, unhappy now, turned inward.
"It was my idea to go," she admitted painfully, fully caught up in the memory. Avon wondered if she even remembered his presence there; as if she caught that thought, Cally turned her eyes toward his and smiled wistfully. "Sellie was far more cautious than I, or Miris, but somehow we always managed to convince her to do things she would not have done had she been alone, or with others. So she went along with it when Miris challenged us to a race, and we were all three enjoying ourselves...until Miris fell through a rotted set of timbers."
They'd been inside one of the buildings, in a vast expanse of emptiness only dimly lit by the sunlight that peeked through the rents in the frayed and faded curtains that still, somehow, hung above the gigantic glass windows to the room. At the further end were mirrors, and those mirrors had been the three children's goal. Miris had been ahead, winning as usual, his legs longer than those of the twins. Cally was closest behind him, her face grimly determined. Sellie trailed the two of them by a good amount; it was when Miris turned his head to laugh triumphantly back at the sisters that the ancient timbers had given way beneath his feet and he had plunged into the darkness of the basement below.
"We were terrified," Cally continued. "I was closest, but suddenly Sellie was passing me. I could hear her screaming his name, in my mind and in my ears, both. But when we got to the edge of the hole, there was nothing. Only silence."
"And then?" Avon asked gently.
"And then she stopped screaming altogether," Cally replied. Her voice was wondering, slightly awed. "She had the most intense look of concentration on her face. She was calling for him, I could tell, even though she had shut me out." Thathad been a cold moment in Cally's life. "She was trying to reach him, even straining for a response. I tried to tell her he couldn't hear her, and even if he could, he wouldn't be able to speak to her telepathically. I tried to convince her to go to the basement with me, to search for an entrance. She just shook her head at me, telepathed with icy calmness for me to leave her alone, and then ignored me again." She shivered at the memory.
Avon found himself fascinated by this glimpse into Cally's past, a past she had shared with no one else on the ship, as far as he knew. "What did you do then?" he asked, some of that fascination appearing in his voice.
Cally shrugged. "I went into the next building, looking for the entrance. Cellars on Auron were never accessible by the building they were beneath; you had to go to an adjoining building to obtain access. By the time I found the entrance and rushed downstairs-I'll never know why I didn't kill myself, since there were no lights-Miris was awake and complaining about the fact that he was sure he had concussion and a broken leg. Which he did," Cally added. "Have a concussion, that is. The ankle was merely sprained. The fascinating part is that he never spoke a word. He was telepathing to Sellie, and she was relaying his comments to me. It was...amazing, wondrous. And extremely difficult to duplicate."
She smiled a tiny smile that faded immediately. "Difficult, but not impossible. The only thing necessary for success is complete trust in the other person. Sellie and Miris trusted each other implicitly. They were willing-and able-to share things, intimate details, to create the initial bond. That intimacy faded, our scientists discovered, but the bond remained. From that day on, Miris could not only 'hear' Sellie, he could also 'speak' to her. But never to anyone else. Sellie described it to me once, or tried to. She said it was like having him constantly in the back of her thoughts, but in a different way than it was with us, or with the other natural telepaths. It took a conscious effort on her part to initiate conversation, one that was not as instantaneous as our own. When I telepath to you, Avon, you hear my voice, don't you?" Cally asked abruptly.
"Yes," Avon replied cautiously. "Is it different with other telepaths?"
Cally nodded. "Very. We communicate entire concepts, entire ideas and thoughts, without having to resort to the symbols of the spoken word. With time, Miris and Sellie accomplished that same sort of communication, only he had to be taught it, and Sellie and I knew how to do it instinctively." She stopped, uncertain once again as to how she should proceed. Avon still looked interested, intrigued, even, and Cally knew that his intelligent mind would follow this revelation to its logical conclusion. And she hoped he would not simply stalk out of the room in a fury, especially after what she was about to say to him. If he did, it would kill her last hope of achieving complete sanity once again, and condemn her to continue with the half-life she'd been living since her arrival on Saurian Major.
She took a deep breath, then spoke once again, forcing herself to look him straight in the eye the entire time. "Avon, I am going to present this to you the best way I know how: as a sort of business proposition."
Alarm was growing in his eyes, alarm and suspicion, and Cally hurried to finish her proposal before he could begin objecting. "Avon, the invasion I was just subjected to was, granted, a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence; it is extremely unlikely that we would ever encounter such a situation again. However, it has brought home to me certain unpleasant truths which I would much rather have not faced." She grimaced uncomfortably. "The fact is, I am vulnerable. Not just because of my telepathy, but because of my aloneness within my telepathy. I can send, but I cannot receive. And it is affecting me, has been affecting me for some time now, although it took this event for me to realize that."
"I had not noticed such effects," Avon replied. Dryly, but at least it was a reply; at least he hadn't simply walked out once he saw where this conversation was leading. And he did see it, Cally knew; he was not stupid. But he was listening.
"The nightmares are one symptom," Cally countered simply. "The fact that part of me actually welcomed...her...is another. I am alone, Avon, and I do not think I can bear the solitude for much longer. In this state, I am as much a danger to this ship as I am to myself. The only alternative I face," she added, her voice steady, "is to leave." She tried to read his expression, but the mask was fully in place. "Do you know what I am asking?"
Did he know what she was asking? Avon wondered incredulously how he could not know what she was asking. After all, he wasn't Vila, and even Vila-even Tarrant-could see where this was leading. "You want to try and create the type of bond Sellie and Miris had," he replied after a moment, his voice flat, emotionless. "To protect yourself and to protect us. Am I correct?"
Cally nodded, her cheeks flushing at the coolness of his tone. "Yes.".
"And you think of it as strictly a business proposition?" Avon murmured, moving to stand very closely in front of her.
Cally rose to her own feet, determined not to be at a disadvantage as she nodded her head. But there was uncertainty in that nod; what was Avon driving at? "Is that not the logical way to present my argument? After all," she added, her own voice becoming dry, "I could hardly offer you an emotional appeal."
"Why not?" Avon asked, his eyes locking with hers, a half-smile playing about his lips. It broadened at the incredulous widening of her eyes. "Why did you select me, Cally?" Avon continued relentlessly, his eyes boring into hers. "Why not Vila, or Tarrant, or Dayna? Why me? Tell me; I want to hear it from your own lips."
He'd moved closer during this speech, so close that Cally could not retreat, not with the bed right behind her, pressing against her knees. If she moved now, she would only sit-abruptly and embarrassingly-on its edge. Or fall over Avon, trying to push past him. So she stayed where she was, frozen, motionless, trying to formulate an answer. "I did not think you would respond to an emotional appeal," she finally offered. "And I do not feel...close enough to Dayna, or Tarrant. Or even Vila. Not close enough to make this kind of request. And if I had, only Vila, I think, would be willing to attempt it. After all," she finished, "there is no guarantee that it will work, is there?"
"So, having eliminated all other possibilities, you chose me," Avon said, only a slight edge of sarcasm to his words. Cally nodded wordlessly as he leaned forward slightly, just enough to bring their faces closer together, almost close enough to touch. Kissing close. "Is there, perhaps, another reason?"
Cally continued to stare at him a moment longer, wondering if she were misinterpreting his words and actions, then leaned forward and touched her lips hesitantly to his. He responded instantly, grasping her arms and pulling her closer, returning the kiss in full measure. After a startled moment, Cally pulled her arms free, only to entwine them desperately around his neck. This was, indeed, why she had chosen him; why, perhaps, her subconscious had chosen to call him from his bed. Had she waited until ship's morning, until she'd had time to truly think her actions through and perhaps change her mind, this might never have happened.
He still hadn't answered that request, Cally thought dreamily as they dropped, clumsy with passion, to sit entwined on the edge of her narrow bed, but perhaps he didn't need to. If physical closeness was all he was able to offer right now, then she would accept it. She would still be vulnerable, but not as much as she had been. Then she stopped thinking all together, and abandoned herself to the feel of Avon's hands and Avon's lips on her body.
oOo
"Cally," Avon murmured into her hair much later, "teach me how to do this thing you require of me."
She turned in his arms, delight and disbelief warring in her face. "Are you certain?"
Avon nodded, eased over on his side so he could see her more clearly. "I felt you in my mind, whispering your feelings," he said gently. "And I felt...slightly cheated...that I could not do the same." He reached up and traced her jaw with one finger, then dropped his hand to her waist. "If this doesn't show our trust for one another, then I can't think of a single thing that will."
Cally smiled. "Eminently logical," she replied as she snuggled her head into his shoulder. "But it will require absolute concentration. No distractions," she warned, removing his hand from where it had wandered and firmly replacing it on the neutral territory of her waist. "Understood?"
Avon nodded. "Understood." Meanwhile, he stood apart from himself, wondering if he was making the right choice, how he had been able to make the choice in the first place. He shrugged mentally at the questions, unable to answer them. Sometime during this most remarkable week, he'd reached a decision as to his feelings about Cally, and now he was consciously aware of them. Simple, when it came right down to it. If nothing else, they needed each other.
And that, perhaps, was the purest relationship of all.
He was ready, and Cally was ready. And when the bond formed, quickly, smoothly, with none of the false starts or complications they'd both feared, they knew they never needed to be alone again.