A/N: Sorry it took me so long to update. I keep having to work a lot, and the muse decided to quit on me for a while. (I suspect this is because it has been quite hot up here, which my poor Michigan muse has not gotten accustomed to yet this summer.)
JUST A DREAM
"Hoshi Sato. You stand accused of preventing the rightful acquisition of life and property from your elders and betters."
"I accuse you of stealing that life from its true owners!" Hoshi shot back. "And stealing my own life from me."
Thetik glared; his anger rolled from him like waves crashing upon the shore. "Are you dead, then? We have done nothing wrong. Nothing any less wrong than those who did the same to us, brat! This is how it always has been. This is how it always will be. We come, we watch for a few millennia, and we wait our turn to live once more."
"Why do you do this?" she cried. "Why not stop it? You know the anguish, why inflict it on others?"
"Because we cannot use your minds, and you would threaten the cycle," said Thetik, coming right up to her, butting into her consciousness and indeed her very thoughts. "You would warn your crew and they would come nowhere near the planet and we would lose our chance. We tested you with the nightmares, to see if you would be a threat, and indeed you were. You are." He turned away, facing now the assembled mass of Betweeners all seething with hatred for Hoshi and what she had stopped them from doing.
"You are a threat, Hoshi Sato, and thus we shall make you less of one." He did not face her as the universe around her began to swirl and flood in upon itself. "Enjoy eternity."
And then they were gone, all those grim, glaring faces and waves of anger, and she stood alone in endless black space, enclosed by nothing and nothing forever. "Malcolm, you had better appreciate this," she whispered, but the sound fell back, quashed by the endless emptiness. If she had not been able to look down and see her own body, or what passed for her own body Between, she would have believed her eyes had suddenly been stricken blind. Malcolm had been right to fear this place; without another mind to share the terror, she barely remembered that the universe existed.
But she could beat this, she knew that Archer and Trip and T'Pol and Travis and Phlox and Liz Cutler and everyone else that mattered to her were out there somewhere, and she knew that she was their friend.
She also knew that someone she cared about was in here as well, somewhere in the endless black. She cast about her, feeling with the mental senses of a Betweener rather than the physical senses of a human, and could not find him. Only echoes remained, a faint trace here and there. To her surprise she felt a glimpse of herself, and followed the thread back.
"Colors," she heard herself say. "Like we were flying through a painting. And the cave. Do you remember going into the cave I drew?" There they were, herself and Malcolm, but try as she might she could not reach them. Perhaps all times existed as one in the void. Or there was no time and her mind merely imposed the order it understood on the inexplicable situation. She could not reach them, but she could feel them, and she could feel another Malcolm somewhere else.
So she left them behind as they attempted to make sense of the gravity that did not really exist, and followed the other trail of Malcolm. Again she could not reach out to him, but she heard him. "Hoshi, Hoshi, please hear me..."
I do, she said, but of course he did not know that she was even there.
"I never felt at home anywhere until Enterprise," he said, sobbing. "I never belonged. I walked around the world just like the Betweeners do, no contact with anything. And now that I know something different I can't go back! Don't make me go back to it! Please, someone, someone, anyone, hear me! I do exist! I do!"
She could not listen to it. His pleas rang in her ears, private things that he would never have said out loud to anyone, harsh and cold with despair, and she fled, no longer caring where she went or if she ever found him.
So of course she found herself sitting next to the right Malcolm as he stared blankly into space.
"Malcolm!" she cried, waving her hands before his face. He did not even blink.
Carefully, gently, she took his cheeks in her hands and knelt on the emptiness in front of him, and dove into him, the true Malcolm, feeling his very soul wash over her as she had earlier felt the true essence of Pyrrih.
In his mind she saw a father, never once speaking a word of love, and a mother who tried but failed to make up the difference. A sister who cared about him but who never could really know her brother because he did not let her in.
She saw friends pass by, never knowing the true Malcolm, lovers who despaired because they could not get to the real person. In all of this flood of images she saw Malcolm in none of them. Because, she supposed, in his view he had not really been there. He had watched like he did not truly belong to the universe.
"Don't you dare think that," Hoshi said. "Regardless of whether or not you feel you were there, you were, and you left an imprint on everything. Who cares if they don't know your favorite food. You didn't just watch all your life, no matter what they say."
Damn you, Thetik, she thought to herself, because he had found one thing that truly meant hell for every single individual. She felt her own walls beginning to crack, and she knew that he had implanted the same suggestion in her own mind, that she did not really exist, and in a few moments she doubted she could escape at all.
"Malcolm," she said, stepping backwards, trying to look him in the eyes, "Malcom, please, please wake up." If she could just let him know that she was there...!
She couldn't remember what he really looked like. He had blue eyes, she remembered, or did he?
What color were her own eyes?
Somewhere deep within her mind she knew that Thetik's meme had begun to work on her, to make her doubt her own existence and condemn her to nothingness, but she could not make herself realize this. "Malcolm, please please please, wake up, I need you, please help me," she whispered, reaching out one last time to touch him.
Her fingers groped but felt nothing, her mind slid over glass walls; no more Malcolm, no more Hoshi, no more...
She screamed to the universe that she existed, and the universe did not answer.
But someone else heard her cry, and awakened in the split second before she ceased to be herself any longer. A light touch on her mind, and she fell no further, and came back to being, came back to herself.
"Hoshi..." said Malcolm.
She began to laugh, and then could not stop the flood of sobs as he held her close, trembling himself but no longer lost.
*****************
"We are inside the cave," said Phlox tersely into the communicator. He threw a glance over his shoulder at the two pale bodies lying supine on the gurneys. Mayweather hovered around them, checking the life support monitors as Phlox had shown him. "We have positioned them on Ensign Sato's exact coordinates, just as she instructed, but there are no signs of any brainwave patterns."
"Do you feel any... um, effects... like we did earlier?" came Archer's voice over the comm.
"Neither of us are experiencing anything," replied Phlox. "Captain, I ordered you to stay in sickbay. You have been through a rather traumatic ordeal."
"I am in sickbay. T'Pol set up a communications relay for Trip and me so I could monitor the situation, doctor. Don't worry, we're both resting."
"Very well," said Phlox, though he rather doubted the last statement, and clicked the comm unit shut.
"Yeah, right, those two resting?" said Mayweather under his breath. Phlox suppressed a smile and turned back to the ensign.
"I wouldn't speak like that, Mr. Mayweather," said Phlox. "You've been a difficult patient yourself at times. I've noticed that among the humans aboard Enterprise there is a peculiar trait of disdaining the advice of your medical officer."
Travis grinned. "We all like to stay busy," he said.
"Hmm. I'll keep that in mind. There are quite a few menial tasks that most patients in Sickbay could perform, like cleaning out the bat's cage and feeding the Regulan bloodworms, that would not overly tax them and keep them busy."
"Just don't expect me as a patient for a while, doc."
Phlox smiled again, and they fell silent. The doctor drowsed in the cool, dark cave, idly monitoring his patients. He didn't really expect anything to happen, to tell the truth, but he felt that he had to try for the sake of Lieutenant Reed and Ensign Sato, not to mention their friends and families.
Truth to tell, he did not like this false hope. He would rather simply accept the hard fact: there was nothing he could do to save the Lieutenant and the Ensign, and it was merely prolonging the inevitable.
"Doctor," said Travis suddenly. "Do you see that?"
The ensign stared intently at a patch of darkness just at the foot of Sato's gurney. "What are you looking at, Ensign?" asked Phlox.
"There's... it's like a person, I think. Like a ghost," he said, and cocked his head to the side. "But I can't really quite see it. Just sort of like a mist with a face."
"I suppose that is one of Malcolm's Betweeners, then," said Phlox dubiously. Without letting Travis see, he scanned the human's body and found things normal.
"I guess that means they're coming," said Travis. "Hey! I think it just nodded!"
"Tell me if it does anything else," said Phlox, turning back to his scans and marveling at how very gullible the human mind seemed to be.
****************
The Void folded back in upon itself, preventing them egress and refusing all attempts to escape it. Hoshi could feel Pyrrih, calling them and urging them on, somewhere deep and distant, very far away from wherever they were now.
She clenched Malcolm's hand in her own and tried, again, to latch onto Pyrrih's mind and pull them out. Beside her, with her, Malcolm groped about, seeking the way out. He was too weak to do very much, though, after all his mind had been through.
It was up to her, Hoshi knew, and with one last heave she broke them free of the Void and hurled them through a blur of color and motion to Pyrrih's side, deep within the cave called Falling Rocks.
Malcolm clung to her, gasping; he had been so strong, so comforting in the Void that she hardly believed it was the same person for a moment. But she felt in her own mind that she had taxed it nearly to the breaking point.
"It is about time," said Pyrrih, voice and mental signature strained with the
effort of holding back Thetik and his followers. "Go! Now!"
She wrenched Malcolm along behind her, seeing her own body there, open and
waiting for her to reclaim it. "Hurry up!" she cried to Pyrrih, and at the last
moment he turned and dove with them, back into their own proper bodies and
home.
Only a moment passed as she felt her own limbs respond to her command, felt her lungs inflate under her own will, then exhaustion overtook her and she slipped back into darkness with Doctor Phlox's incredulous voice ringing in her very own ears.
"I don't believe it! They are alive!"
****************
Is that the end? Almost, but not quite, you lucky people you.
