A/N: I've finally got time to work on this story and have been editing it. That has included splitting Chapter 8 in two because it was too long, so I apologize that this isn't new material. I'll start posting new chapters once I've finished. I'm excited about finally finishing :D

Fake Plastic Trees

Ten Forward was bustling. Celebration was in the air. The ship was now in orbit around Ark11.

The party had burst in a carnival. (Riker allowed the tumblers to spread festive anarchy in the ship's corridors but he drew the line at fire jugglers.)

A live concert had spontaneously cranked up. In just a few days, instruments stuffed at the bottom of lockers had been rediscovered and hidden talents brought to the fore.

The hard months which had preceded this day hadn't been forgotten, but it was like the crew now had permission to express optimism. Their experiences weren't being swept aside - if anything, they had surfaced in many of the songs people had discovered.

The crew had embraced an array of music (which was not exclusively Terran) and in doing so had found a way to deal with the buried feelings of guilt he and Troi had discussed days ago. The crew had been given a positive outlet to embrace those feelings.

But war songs had equal footing with other types of songs. Apparently there wasn't a love song that had never been written.

Riker marveled at the millennial ability to regurgitate itself and its themes over and over again.

But today, everywhere he went on the ship, the music was unified by jaunty tempos and uplifting melodies.

The millennial anthropologist Lark, as usual, was in the thick of it.

She had been called upon to join several musicians in Ten Forward. "One last song" kept turning into "just one more", until Sudamen had turned up, and like an unwelcome ion storm, attempted to put an end to the game.

"We'll be beaming planet-side in half and hour, Lark," he yelled from the door. When he saw Riker, he nodded.

He looked like an impatient parent, Riker thought. Not that anyone else was caring.

"Just one more ... we promise," Lieutenant Chafin from stellar-cartography pleaded. The six foot six Terran looked odd, begging his case.

Sudamen snorted, catching Riker's eye again as he made a face. There was an element of theatricality to the whole act.

Data's theory and evidence had ended their interest in Sudamen, and Riker had given up trying to engineer an informal interview with the man. However, the first officer still considered the Caldosan peculiar, and nothing he did today did anything to dispel that assessment.

"Oh, all right." Sudamen threw his hands in the air. "What about that awful Radiohand song you are always playing ... Fake Spastic Breeze?"

Again, the Coldasan glanced at Riker.

Riker did a double-take.

"You know perfectly well the band's name was Radiohead and the song is called Fake Plastic Trees, Sud ... and anyway." Lark looked less than enthusiastic. "As much as I love it, are you sure that's a good song to go out on?"

Sudamen stared at Riker as he spoke. "The way you sing it, Lark ... it's perfect."

She shrugged. After a quick conference with her band, she addressed to the room.

"My boss has just requested a song from a group called Radiohead. When their second studio album was released in 1997 Rolling Stone Magazine called it the first album of the new millennium – so maybe it's appropriate to play one of their songs. This one comes from a little earlier in the 90s though. It's sort of sad and soaring at the same time – bittersweet, maybe. A bit like playing one last song for you guys.

"A green plastic watering can
for a fake Chinese rubber plant
and fake plastic earth ..."

Lark was right. The song was bittersweet. It didn't fit the mood – but its sadness was hypnotic.

A waiter leaned on the counter, chin resting on hand; a young ensign in front of Riker swayed; a seasoned science officer stared into her cocktail glass.

But the first officer was studying the great bear of a man still standing at the door.

"She lives with a cracked polystyrene man, who just crumbles and burns ..."

Riker had to rub his eyes and shake his head before he could truly believe what he was seeing. Even then, he struggled to make sense of it.

The big man's hand was cupped over his mouth, but Sudamen seemed ... forlorn. Creases marked his forehead where his brows had pulled up.

As the melody swelled, his head drooped ... and the door behind him slid open.

"She looks like the real thing
she tastes like the real thing -
my fake plastic love."

As if time had slowed a thousandfold, Riker watched as Troi entered the room. Intensity rolled off her in waves - he could feel her; the thought confused him momentarily.

But before he had time to consider it, he was ensnared in her intent. She was a hunter. She rounded Sudamen – still lost in his haunting - her eyes locked on another point in the room. She sought the singer's face. Her head was shaking.

Suddenly she stopped. Behind her, Sudamen's head rose. Troi's eyes widened and her mouth twisted in horror. Riker blanched, fearful an image from one of his dreams had come to life. Troi did not move.

Lark was in her own world, oblivious to the scrutiny. Her final lines, devastating:

"It wears me out.
It wears me out.
And if I could be who you wanted;
if I could be who you wanted,
all the time, all the time ..."

And, just like that, the song ended.

Rapturous applause broke out. The crew whooped and stomped its approval.

Riker watched Troi snap to. He saw the confusion break on her face. The song had scarcely died before Lark threw a significant look at her impromptu band. She grabbed the mic again.

"I refuse to end on that note." She pounded the base of the mic into her hand. "Management can go screw itself."

So this is what they mean when they say a crowd goes wild, Riker thought, bemused.

The band, privy to her plans, had maniacal grins plastered over their faces. Lieutenant Chafin branded his own special look of devilry as his fingers started swiping deep, fat notes from his bass guitar.

"I don't want to be crippled and cracked.
Shoulders, legs, knees and back.
Ground to dust and ash.
Crawling on all fours.
When you've got to feel it in your bones ..."

The soft, introspective singer was gone – replaced with a frenetic, rasping, swooping performer set to raise the stage with her voice. The band was loving every second of it.

Troi looked lost and sick and blissful; he didn't know how he knew, but he realized she needed rescuing.

Around her people were dancing – and not the stately, elegant dances she was comfortable with. The euphoric frenzy burning up the room might have been enough to overwhelm her ...

But as lost as she seemed, she had also found something. Something unexpected. She twisted back, her eyes automatically finding Riker's.

He watched her expel a breath, her shoulders rising and falling. There was a look on her face he couldn't identify – some deep emotion bubbling under the surface.

Behind her, Sudamen's face stared straight ahead again, but he turned and this time, Riker knew he hadn't been mistaken. Six times the man caught his eye – deliberately.

The song ended abruptly, reducing the audience to a madhouse.

With a curt nod to the Enterprise's first officer, the Caldosan steeled his face. He nodded at Lark and pointed to the door with a jerk of his hand. She got the message. She pushed through the crowd to the waiting man. And, just like that, she disappeared out the door.

She had understood him perfectly.

If only I could too, Riker thought.

He was about to step to Troi, determined to understand the drama that had just played out before him, when he saw her hand flick to her comm badge. He saw her lips move but missed what she said.

She threw him one last look of ... was it exasperation? and headed to the door.

Riker lay in his bed, resting fitfully for three hours before he decided to stop playing the charade.

He got up hours before his shift. He went to the gym; he showered. He read, he reviewed as much information as they had on the dead impostor, on the Fleur-de-lys, and on the Bounty, trying to render some sense which tied in to what Data had told them earlier that day.

After three nights of blissful, precious sleep, his unwelcome night time visitor had returned.

He sat motionless for a half hour, staring at the tongue barb he had found in Sem's pocket: the one gift in his rotten dream. For he had woke up knowing, the barb and its earring mate had a truth to communicate. The dream was the last thing he wanted to remember, but now it was reaching out to him, daring him to look within himself for answers.

Steeling himself, he leaned back and closed his eyes – trying to recall exactly what he had seen.

No matter how it started, no matter where he was – be it in the humidity of the Jalaran Jungle or the cold of an Alaskan glacial valley – she would always come. She would always drape her arms around his neck, run her fingertips across his chest, let her hands travel over his body, and set him quivering while he tried to control his desire to possess her.

In the early hours of this morning, he had failed.

As he had pressed her hard against a marble column and, as her legs encircled his hips, drawing him into herself, and they moved up and down, she had gasped exultantly – her cry echoing in the cavernous room.

It wasn't any place he had ever been to or seen, but his dream sense told him it was an old place. Its hush and awe not broken by, but amplifying – in its high-vaulted ceiling – the ecstasy in this woman's gasps.

Spent, they slid down the column, clinging to each other. As he stared up, knowing a peace he had no right to, she lay light kisses over him, and he realized the room was not empty – among the many columns, artifacts were arranged on stands and under glass covers; a white headband, a scrap of paper, a piece of vine, shards of vase – all on display.

He had murmured to her, calling and asking her to look; her head had lifted, wonder in her eyes as she took in the gallery. Then she had turned to face him.

She was just as confused as he was. And when his eyes met hers, finally, pandemonium was unleashed.

Under his hands, her skin began to boil and hiss; flesh roiling and steaming. He scrambled back suddenly, sickened. She opened her mouth and let forth a howl, drawing away from him in terror. Orange flames erupted from her palms – her hands held out in supplication. Transfixed he watched as the flames traveled and licked her arms, unrelenting in their hunger. He could do nothing – the weight of his own disbelief rendering him motionless. Before him she ignited, cracked and blackened as the fire consumed her wholly. But her eyes – like holes – never left his; the horror on her face a mirror of his own.

And he could feel nothing of it.

He watched helplessly as she disintegrated, slowing blackening the white marble floor with ash. An unexpected noise startled him. He watched in disbelief as huge doors opened and Data, leading a class of school children, skipped through the room – ignoring him – and stopping at each artifact. The children's faces forming big Os as Data spoke – his lips moving in random patterns – not mimicking the singsong chant that was the only thing Riker could hear, repeated over and over and over again.

"William was a bad man,
William was a thief,
William came to my house and stole a piece of me,
William was a bad man,
William was a thief,
William came to my house and stole a piece of me,
William was a ..."

He put his hands to his ears but could not rid his head of their voices.

And when he closed his eyes, burning Troi branded herself on his eyelids. His gaze fixed on black ash. Until a shaft of light from an overhead window fell all-too-obviously on something tiny and silver in the dust.

Dream Riker felt himself moving forward on hands and knees, preparing to pluck the antique tongue barb from the floor. An unexpected shadow fell over him.

A large shape bent and claimed the prize for himself.

"Tsk, tsk," said the Caldosan, blowing the ashes from his hand and watching them flurry and float. In the light, they glittered like a showman's trick to draw the eye.

"Tsk, tsk, Mr Riker," he said, holding the barb up to his face, rolling it between his thumb and finger.

He took a sweeping look at the room before his face snapped in front of Riker's. Dream Riker imagined stale, hot breath on his cheek. For a parsec they looked at each other.

Dream Riker jolted, recognizing something in the man's sad eyes; they had reached an understanding. Then, with melancholy in his voice, the big man started to whisper.

Riker strained to hear.

The voice strengthened. "A mausoleum ... a mausoleum ... a mausoleum ..."

Around the hall, Sudamen's voice echoed louder and louder, until Riker bolted upright, Sudamen's final message ringing his ears: "A mausoleum ... this museum is a mausoleum ... this museum is a mausoleum."

Fake Plastic Trees, by Radiohead
Bones, by Radiohead

There was no place in this chapter for a nice dream. Poor Riker.