Note: I was watching TNG and got the wildest urge to revisit an obscure one episode character. I want this fic to fit into Picard in a way that doesn't get Jossed later, so I'm deliberately ambiguous about time.
People who read my Deep Space Nine Freedom series will see my little wink-wink-nudge-nudge references to it. If you haven't, don't worry, reading it isn't necessary to grasp what's going on.
- Trigger warning: Mentions of abuse, murder, childbirth and illness. -
.o
Occhiolism
.o
"We live and we die,
like fireworks.
Our legacies hide
in the embers.
May our stories catch fire,
and burn bright enough
to catch God's eye..."
-Sleeping At Last, "In The Embers"
.o
Shuttlecrafts weren't the most comfortable means of travel, but that didn't stop Jean-Luc Picard from gazing out into the void. Age wore his skin into folds and added aches he never had before, but his dark brown eyes were sharp as ever.
He brought the shuttle to a halt and shut down its engines. The only sound inside the cockpit was the hum of life support systems and Picard's own thoughts. He couldn't remember the last time he heard true silence. When had such a simple concept escaped him?
Picard smirked at the gloom outside. Canyons of age chiseled themselves across his cheekbones, each crag carefully measuring his wry smile.
"'Do not go gentle into that good night.'" He spread his thin fingers and continued the Dylan Thomas quote, "'Old age should burn and rave at close of day-'"
"'Rage, rage against the dying of the light.'"
The voice came from nowhere like sinister thunder across mountain peaks. Picard didn't know whether he heard it with his ears or his mind.
"I didn't know you were familiar with ancient poetry," he said to the void.
And the void replied, "Your species' art is excellent at capturing the futility of its limited existence. It must be frustrating."
"Frustrating?"
"To be so aware of what isn't achievable to you. To gaze into all your foolish schisms and know that harmony is beyond your reach."
"Perhaps, but one of humanity's traits is finding a means to make something achievable." Picard steepled his fingers and pressed them against his mouth. His lips were warmer than his hands. "We still seem very small to you, though, don't we?"
An unnerving chuckle rattled the darkness. "My awareness is the Hopf fibration to your circle, Jean-Luc."
"And yet, you were curious enough to look at me under your microscope. Why?"
"Because knowledge expands awareness the way the universe expands around us. But that is not the reason you sought me specifically, now, is it?"
A witty gleam flickered in Picard's dark eyes. "I came to pick your mind about what you know. I remember you asking me about death, but death is not the greatest mystery to existence. There is a mystery even greater. Can a vast mind like yours figure out what it is?"
Dim flashes of color broke the inky blackness. A chimerical visage rotated into view and came closer until its distorted blue and peach features filled the cockpit window. Two inky black eyes focused squarely on Picard's and a pink mouth set itself in a soft line.
"Have you come here to create conflict with me?"
The broad face frowned. Facial expressions. That was new.
"Conflict? With you?" Picard cocked his head and smiled. "Not at all, Nagilum."
Nagilum turned their face to the side and fixed their immense left eye on Picard. "I have already learned all I cared to know about your species."
"True, but..."
Picard relaxed, letting his hands settle in his lap. The pale blue veins under his skin were time carving him like rivers carved canyons.
"There is one thing that is as much a mystery to people like me as death is to you. Search my mind. We write poetry about it. We tell stories about it. We dedicate songs to it. We base religions around it. We chase it, we find it, we lose it and we pine for it. We are the happiest when we experience it and we are devastated to lose it. It has many forms, many words and many ways of being expressed. Some of us believe it is even more eternal than life or death."
Nagilum faced fully forward. Their frown lifted, replaced by something Picard interpreted as a smirk.
"Your mind calls it 'love.'"
"Yes. It is something I can't explain to you, it can only be experienced."
"Hm. So you say. I will seek it for myself, then, and share my hypothesis afterward."
With that, Nagilum winked both eyes shut and vanished like a morning star into dawn.
Picard replicated himself a cup of decaffeinated Earl Grey tea. He smiled to himself, inhaled and brought the steaming cup to his lips.
.o
Nagilum remembered the young universe's heat radiation cooling enough to allow matter to form. Everything was awash with light, dark, energy, waves, particles, plasma and emptiness. Space and time wove together, yet remained perceptibly separate and malleable from anti-space and anti-time. They peered often into their currents and watched them carry lower life forms along like molecules in solar wind.
Lower, smaller life forms had no idea how deaf, blind and ignorant they were to the grandness they existed in. They did not feel the separation between space and time, nor could they grasp the vastness of existence. Their petty squabbles were so... so... insignificant.
How could they recognize their inconsequentiality when they were so ephemeral? They struggled against their transience with a dogged futility that was impossible not to admire.
A few were self-aware that they were not knowledgeable about everything. Picard was one of them. Nagilum grew fascinated by him, by how he toyed with an unknown capable of blotting him out like nothing.
Maybe lower lifeforms longed to learn all they could and leave clues for the future before their pitiful lives ended. Evidence suggested future generations picked up where the previous left off. Picard himself said some people believed their consciousness carried on after the thing they called death, yet their fear of its unknown frontier spurred them to create, explore and learn while they existed in a limited form they still understood.
Despite all they did, they were lost when it came to this thing called love.
Nagilum deemed it worth exploring.
They slipped through the lacuna between space-time, anti-space and anti-time and shrank into its inexorable flow.
.o
Time slammed Nagilum back into space above a blue and brown planet orbiting a diamond white star. They plunged through the atmosphere, burned their way across sunny azure skies and crash landed in the middle of a deserted grass field. A ringing noise filled their head and a strange sensation closed over their body.
Pain.
"Ohh," Nagilum groaned. Their voice lost its echo, but not its depth. They barely recognized it as belonging to them.
A smoking crater surrounded where they fell. Tiny flames licked the grassy field. They dragged their aching physical shell over the too hot crater rim and peered into a nearby pond.
Their eyes were still as black as the void, and their brown skin had an ultramarine undertone that faded to pink at the inner edges of their mouth. Lips, mouth, whatever, anatomy was complicated. Ridges ran over the center of their head, starting from the bridge of their nose and ending at the nape of their neck. Fine, curly black hair clung close to their scalp, its coarse darkness bisected by their central scalp ridges.
Nagilum frowned and struggled to their feet. They were naked. This body's genitalia dangled. What did that mean, again?
"You look Odoan, but rest assured that your physicality is temporary," said a gravelly voice from behind.
Nagilum whipped around. The other figure wore hooded brown robes that concealed all but their peach hands from view. Where did that creature come from?
"I came here to learn ab-"
"-love. Yes, I know."
"Who are you?" Nagilum narrowed their eyes. "Why did you bring me here?"
"If you're going to learn about love, you might as well know what you're getting into." The alien gestured to themselves. "I am known here as the Storyteller, and the story I have to tell will guide you on your journey."
Nagilum realized they weren't going to be in this form long, so they sat on the grass with their legs tucked under them and gazed upward at the Storyteller. Not even the bright sunlight penetrated their mysterious companion's hood.
"Storyteller, enlighten me."
And the Storyteller wove a love story billions of years in the making. Names were named, places were described and they provided a map for what was to come.
.o
Nagilum's first mortal body died shortly after the Storyteller finished the tale. What a strange experience, to feel all bodily processes cease and to slip out of their skin as they embarked on their experiment with an open mind.
They spun through redamancy, sexual pleasure, spiritual awakenings, stillness, heartbreak, childbirth, abandonment, betrayal, life and death.
They were a deka tree sapling lovingly planted behind a sylvan house on Bajor. The changeling gardener, his name was Kejal, sang to them with a beautiful voice and guided their growth until their canopy spanned the width of the house. Kejal had a Bajoran father named Mora Pol whom he loved very dearly, though they weren't the same species. Then Kejal went away for many years and returned with a changeling named Odo, though he called him his mother. Odo departed and brought back a Bajoran woman named Kira Nerys. A short time later, there was a wedding between Odo and Kira. Not long after came a funeral for Mora Pol. Then everyone departed. Only memory remained until a tornado turned everything into rubble and scattered seeds over the hills. Everything happened exactly as the Storyteller said.
They were a young man from an early era of Earth. An epidemic swept many away. He watched his beloved sweetheart waste away and die from the virus called AIDS, and he scattered his lover's ashes at sea under the cover of night. The two years following were painfully distressing. Then he developed the illness and perished alone in a hospital.
They were a colorful bird for a little Yridian girl whose father beat her terribly. One morning, she rushed in with a bleeding mouth and opened the cage, freeing them. Her father knocked her down as the the bird flapped away into the morning sun.
They were a Romulan nurse who tenderly cared for Ambassador Spock in his old age. They fed him his final meal of plomeek soup, listened to the stories he had to tell and sat by his bedside while he gasped his last breaths. His death sent shockwaves through the galaxy.
They were a Beta-zoid woman who fell in love with a Cardassian woman. They loved in secret until they were discovered by a Talaxian who offered to perform a marriage ceremony.
They were an obsequious Ferengi woman who dressed as a man and swindled a bunch of Yridians to help her friends escape debt.
They were an El-Aurian who shared his bed with a human woman and a Bajoran man because he couldn't stand being alone after his experiences inside the Nexus.
They were a Klingon man who refused to kill his developmentally disabled son. Instead, he raised him to be a warrior and watched proudly as he marched off to fight against the Dominion. His son single-handedly killed an army of Jem'Hadar to keep valuable information out of Dominion hands. When he came back, wounded and scarred, he earned a place in the Order of Kahless.
They were a Jem'Hadar who served and died in the name of their gods.
They were an Ocampa woman who gave birth to a beautiful daughter after a difficult labor. She named her baby Kes.
They were a Borg drone who walked to their demise to protect the Collective.
They were a Vulcan girl who graduated at the top of her class and went on to be a religious scholar. She loved knowledge more than her suitors, and sought to acquire as much information as she could until Bendii syndrome stole it away.
They were a Bajoran Vedek who sacrificed his life to keep the Obsidian Order from discovering a Resistance cell hidden under his floor.
They were a pregnant whale brought forward in time to quiet a curious probe hovering over Earth. She gave birth to a girl, and they swam the seas together with music in their hearts.
At last, they were Lal, an artificial life form created by Data, the android they examined a lifetime ago. Lal lived the shortest life, but she felt everything as strongly as the Storyteller.
"I feel..."
"What do you feel, Lal?"
"I love you, Father."
"I wish I could feel it with you."
"I will feel it for both of us. Thank you for my life." She began to slip away. Everything was dark, but she gazed unafraid into its familiarity. "Flir-ting...laugh-ter. Pain-ting...fa-mi-ly. Fe-male... hu-man..."
Nagilum had seen enough. There were many forms of love, and just as many ways to die. The heavy latibule hung on their psyche like a delicate ornament. They entered the lacuna they came through and swirled back into the universe they knew.
.o
Picard exhaled as the first sip of tea warmed his throat. When he looked up again, a familiar chimerical face reappeared in the cockpit window.
"So, how was it?"
"Very illuminating," Nagilum replied simply. "I noticed a common theme throughout my experiences. Love leads to creation. Mortals such as yourself see your ability to create as a gift from a higher power, so you create in return. You seek to preserve life, yet you also rush to end it for your opposition when you believe it necessary."
The truth of Nagilum's words washed over Picard like the sip of warm tea he just swallowed. He set his teacup down on the console and looked upward at the immense face hovering in space.
"Life is the greatest gift given to us by the universe, and what makes it matter is what we do with it while we have it. There is no such thing as a disposable life. Killing should always be the last resort." A memory of Enseign Haskell dying on the Enterprise bridge floor flashed through his mind. "It's a pity there are some who don't see it that way, but am I correct in assuming you see it a little differently now?"
"You are correct in that assumption." Nagilum squinted, their immense eyes blinking slowly in the dark, "However, I am puzzled by this strange distress- you call it grief. I did not expect it to linger."
A half-smile quirked Picard's lips. "Grief is a key component of love. It hurts because it mattered. With time, the pain softens and the memories you find painful now become a source of comfort."
"So it seems."
"Grief aside, did you enjoy yourself?"
"Of course. Learning is enjoyable."
"You could say that curiosity, in itself, is a form of love. A love of learning."
"Point taken." Nagilum's face came closer, their inky dark eyes focusing in like gamma rays. "You carry immense grief, Jean-Luc. Who have you loved? Who has loved you?"
"You can read my mind to find that answer."
That smug smirk again. "Yes, but it won't be as interesting. Tell me in your words."
"Oh, so you're curious again, eh?"
"Yes."
"Do you have time?"
Nagilum chuckled, "What is time to an immortal?"
Picard hooked his finger into the handle of his teacup. He raised it in a toast and grinned, his brown eyes twinkling.
"I'll start at the beginning."
.o
"...Like fireworks,
we pull apart the dark,
compete against the stars
with all of our hearts.
Till our temporary brilliance turns to ash,
we pull apart the darkness while we can."
-Sleeping At Last, "In The Embers"