She is still in his arms, but again she is hot and sweating, writhing though still asleep, trapped somewhere he maybe was supposed to pull her from but could not. The lighting in her quarters has risen to mimic the early hours of daylight, and he props himself up on his left arm, reaches around his other to stroke against her cheek with the back of his large index finger.
"Deanna, you're dreaming again, come back to me,"
She moans lightly, like the weak attempt of a cry, and his voice is hoarse with sleep, like gravel on glass.
"Come on now Dea, it's time to wake up now,"
She whines, the sound accompanying her stretching limbs as she blinks open her eyes, bleary and confused.
"Will?"
Her voice is no more than a whisper, and he continues to soothe the clammy skin at her cheek, his fingers cool and soft. She rolls slowly over in his arms, and he tries to remember where he was a week ago, and why he wasn't right here, why it's taken him this crazy thing to finally be there for her. Deanna's opening, blinking eyes are so wide, and they are wholly dilated as they always were in the morning, that time they were never apart.
"That's me,"
He grins at her, craning to look into her face, and she smiles lazily back, like she almost cannot remember why she was woken, she simply smiles for the joy of having him near.
"You were having a bad dream, there was water?"
Alarm lights her up and she scrambles to face him completely, turning to her other side and pushing herself back from him by small hands she has pressed to his chest.
"I didn't mean to do that, I… I was not sure I could,"
She seems to regard her own actions with awe, but also with shock that she didn't stop herself, that she dragged him down with her.
"Hey, hey Dea, don't be like that, it's okay I'm not mad,"
Again, the pad of his thumb reaches over to swipe at the apple of her cheek, and she is flushed with the shame - he soothes her in as much as he can, tries not to fill himself with too much apathy.
"I do not know why it was so scary, the imagery was -"
"Deanna, you were drowning, please just don't start counseling yourself, and let me?"
Her eyes shut over again, then open slowly as she breathes in all the air around her, pupils contracting back into their usual orbs of obsidian.
Will's hand stops it's movements and instead snakes into her hair, fingers working through a curl that falls away from a mess of sleeping knots at her crown, before he leans into her to kiss lightly against her forehead.
He smells strongly of pine needles and smoke, inexplicably so, and his morning stubble scratches against her face where he is near. And in some confused moment the smell is not comforting, and too strong for her sense, and it is all she has to roll over away from him, a hand covering her mouth.
She scrambles out of his arms in one single second, and rushes away to the open doors of the bathroom, the fabric of her nightgown falling down back below her knees. It takes him too long to react to her, and he can hear her retching before his own feet have hit the floor, and his urgency has him tripping over his pajama pants towards her.
She is slumped over the toilet bowl, and his arms reach around her from behind, where he joins her on the floor, cradling her shaking body, small and bucking with a violent force. The smell is strong and sour, and largely of bile as her stomach was so achingly empty; he tries hard not to turn his nose up, his own stomach hard like steel.
He picks her up without word, when she is empty and finished with her spluttering, cradling her into him as he had done all that time ago, when that insanity had swept the Enterprise. She is clammy, and her eyes struggle to focus on his face, the ceiling up and beyond his head gliding above her; her arms scramble to cling around his neck as though it is routine.
She expects that he is taking her back to bed, and so she buries her head in his cotton chest and tries not to breathe in any other smell than the warmth of his own body, tries to ignore the feelings that are not her own.
Will walks with her gently, and cannot take his hands away from around her for even a second, hopes there is strength enough in her arms to hang onto him, around his neck and grasping at each other. He walks her all the way to Sickbay without hearing a single protest, finally giving in to that desire in him to take her to Beverly, anytime she so much as coughs.
It's still early, he thinks maybe that it must be almost 0700 hours when he walks through the doors, but he knows that Beverly likes to start and leave her work early, a morning lark rather than a night owl. Deanna can sense it, he's sure, because she groans and digs her nails in ever so slightly to the back of his neck, leaving small indentations of half moons, but not drawing blood.
"Deanna, you're almost an hour ear-"
Beverly is walking out of her office holding a whole pile of data padds full of research from Betazed, from Starfleet Medical, from her own work years ago, thinking that the noise she hears in main sickbay is the entrance of the counselor, likely slipping in before the rest of the crew wakes.
"-ly"
Her voice drops off when she looks up, meets directly with Will Rikers bloodshot eyes, on a level that Deanna's eyes are not, and the woman is resting bridal style in his arms, the both of them in pajamas that together make them seem as though they belong as a pair.
A passing orderly has the data padds thrust into his hands as Crusher rushes towards them, her brain turning in 50 different directions as she motions Will to carry Deanna into the private room adjacent to her office, all the lights still down and the room cool and calm.
He places her down gently, and her arms pull away into her centre, unclasping from around his neck and receding around her own body, curling in on herself atop the biobed. The contact activates all the monitors around her, and she groans as they spring into life with terrible volume, the heart rate in particular screeching as the birds had done, angry at her body for not conforming to its baseline. Beverly comes at her wordlessly with a tricorder, more noise and more flashing lights, and the larger panels of LEDs around the room warm into a daylight glow, now that there are people there, Will with his back against the wall, dazed and keeping himself from being an intrusion.
Beverly moves like a force of nature, a great whipped up motion of air, or fire by the flow of her own russet hair. Either way, she is fast, and she works without calling any other members of her staff, needing no more people in the room with a young and ailing empath.
Deanna is grateful, she really is, only a door has never been much of an obstacle between minds, and her entrance was far from subtle; there are concerns of course, but she is too focused on trying to hold her breath against the nausea to really live in them. And the smell of sterilisation is strong, stronger than Will's pinewood, or the must of his sleeping skin, or the shampoo she uses in her own hair, but there is nothing left to throw up.
"She's dehydrated, Will, could you bring me some water?"
Deanna can hear her talk, and realises that her eyes are squeezed tight shut to stop the room spinning, so she opens one just a crack, reaches her hand out to the Doctor's tilting body.
"Beverly, the room...is spinning."
She is out of breath somehow as she speaks, and Beverly is caught up by a hand that is wound around her wrist, small but grasping fingers that are holding on so tightly to her; she has to wonder where that strength is coming from.
Deanna takes her hand away and back into her centre as the Doctor has to move to the other side of the room where a hypospray kit lies, and her actions are fast and inscrutable, combining and reducing, reappearing again with some concoction that is cool against her neck.
It reminds her of two nights ago, the same feeling of going limp and numb, only not so strong, and suddenly she finds it not so necessary to hold her breath, to have her arms around her stomach with such desperation; the nausea is not gone, but it is bearable.
Will's return is not calm, but he brings with him a large glass of water, and a straw, and he is not walking on a tipped ceiling, his feet are placed mercifully upright. Beverly nods at him, and he moves in to crouch by her head, where she is curled on her side on the biobed, bringing the glass up and offering her the straw against her lips. He holds it steady as she sucks at the cool water, his other hand pushing the hair away from her forehead, slowly and with loving care.
The palm of his hand is warm, but her forehead is hot, and so he continues to smooth over the skin whilst she drinks, looking into where her eyes are nearly shut.
When she stops, he takes the straw from her cracked lips and then leaves the glass on the floor beneath the bed, not moving from her side.
"How do you feel?"
He murmurs so softly that, across the room, Beverly cannot hear, and he is still stroking her forehead gently, her eyes open and large - waking saucers.
"Better,"
"Mmmmhmm?"
He nods with her, still crouched, his hair under the morning lights just now noticeably mussed, and sticking up at so many odd angles.
The call he made to her in the middle of the night is just now beginning to make sense to Beverly.
"It's morning sickness,"
Will quiets his comforting murmurs to Deanna, and the movement of his hand stops as he throws an incredulous glare over his shoulder, his eyes piercing the doctor's own.
"Morning sickness? Isn't that supposed to be...well, not like this?"
Beverly sighs, tricorder in hand and beeping harshly again, her shape coming closer to him to stand almost at his back, looking over both him and Deanna.
"Usually it's a relatively safe and normal part of pregnancy, in humans, and for Betazoids it's a little more intense, but this is of a scale such as the condition Hyperemesis Gravidarum, likely due to the acceleration of the pregnancy."
"How long-"
After all this time, Deanna's breaking voice is gravelled and yet still soft and quiet.
She tries again.
"How long will it last?"
"I really couldn't say,"
More typing at a tricorder, and a pause that is not long, but still hangs with impatience in the air.
"I'd guess at a week, maybe a little longer, for Betazoids the sickness lasts for only the first Quart so it might be sooner, I'm honestly not sure."
Deanna nods and then fixes her eyes back to Will, who has been watching her all along, tries to get lost in whatever it is she finds there, even if it is not the love they once shared, or the friendship they could gain over time, even if it is something old and worn out and confused.
"I can give you your supplements while you're here, and I'd like if you could stay in for the morning at least, just so I can keep an eye on you,"
The woman does not respond, and Beverly takes the opportunity of her agreeable silence to push further.
"And - I'm not comfortable with you living alone at the moment, how would you feel if I assigned a member of my staff to stay in your quarters for a few weeks?"
"I'll do it."
Finally, Will's eyes tear away from Deanna's own, and his response is so sudden, eager and charged with some energy she doesn't recognise. Her eyebrows raise in apprehension.
"Commander Riker?"
He turns his face towards her, but a hand still remains on Deanna's forehead above where her eyes have slowly begun to drift closed, and so he lowers his voice gently.
"I told her I'd be with her through this, that I'd keep her safe and make her happy. Why would you push a nurse she doesn't know or trust into her life, when I can easily do it myself, I brought her in didn't I?"
The Doctor does not alter her expression, or her tone of voice, and if in this moment she is anything other than confused, she is suspicious.
"Will, you are first officer of this ship, how do you possibly expect to spend all day on the bridge, then all night with Deanna without running yourself into the ground."
Deanna's breathing is slowly evening out into a sleeping rhythm of peace, and her heart rate has dropped ever so slightly to compensate. Riker's voice all of a sudden takes on the quality of a painful memory.
"I owe her Doc, I've walked away from her so many times when she deserved better, and I swear this time I'm going nowhere,"
He turns back to stroke again at Deanna's face, the skin cooling and soft now, his eyes full of a fondness he never knew was his.
"I have so much to make up for, I never should have walked away,"
He hears Beverly slowly approach his back, and one of her own slender hands clasps over his shoulder, strong and confident, but there is something more to her that is hurting on his behalf.
"I don't know what happened between you two or why, and I don't know what this is, but if you're sure you can do this, I think I might just let you try."
"Thank you,"
He lets his head drop heavily to look down at where his knees are bent to crouch, the floor swimming like a wavy flag, and the memory of her joy when he'd proposed two years ago, the reflection of a letter he'd sent on their wedding day stares back at him.
"Thank you,"
The mornings are rough, too early to do much more than wake, empty her stomach, and then sleep away the nausea in his arms, often looping two or three times before 0700 when Beverly drops by with her box of magic and medicine.
The afternoons are invariably better, and she can almost convince herself that there really is no problem, now that the supplements have been mixed to a potency that keeps her own mind clear and her body able to hold her upright. She reaches a point where Bridge duty is not so daunting, and she continues to refuse to be excused from it, enjoying the feeling of sitting beside the Captains soft confidence, and the care he demonstrates without even saying a word.
The work makes her feel useful, and well, and not at all as though she was used by an entity of no description to incubate a child she still does not know the nature of. Riker's eyes are always on her, it seems, and she can feel in him the desire to make up for his mistakes in their relationship, and she's tried to tell him that it's not necessary, but she can feel even in herself that she is not truthful. There had been a point where she had blamed their failure on youth, but as everybody seems to enjoy reminding her, she is still young, and he is not anymore.
Maybe he had been a hothead, or maybe she should have listened to her mother when she said he was too old for her, but at the time 6 years seemed like nothing. And he was so shiny and bright, full up on big big starship dreams, and she had thought that if her father could have seen him they would have been as kindred spirits. In the end, it was those big big starship dreams that got in the way of his love for a 21 year old student on Betazed, a girl even, who had seemed so refined already, so polished that her University degree came with two Starfleet pips and no need for the command fast track. But he was burning with desire and she could feel it, always as though he were one offer away from leaving her side. Eventually, he did, and a series of terrible events led them together again, a year after they should have met to be wed, both of them older, neither very much wiser.
Then another year, and she had learned not to call him Bill, learned how to enjoy his company without expecting more, learned to foster a fledgling relationship that almost certainly would have lead to the closest of friendships.
And then this, and everything she has learned seems to escape her, because she can feel his eyes on her, feel how he burns with this new challenge, now that he has the command he wants, the challenge now of finding some way to have it all, to make up to her what he had so carelessly thrown away.
She lifts her head up, somebody is coming closer to her.
"When do the water lilies bloom?"
She finds herself asking, fingers just skimming the surface of the water; the someone is watching her motions with suspicion.
A woman appears from around the hedgerow of thistles and holly, watching over the pond that Deanna finds herself crouched down beside.
"Not for a few more weeks, Counselor,"
It is the voice of Keiko, the young botanist woman, who responds, her feet light on the cobblestones as she approaches.
"Is there something I can help you with?"
She asks, and suddenly, the water that rushes gently in the falls before them, is far too loud to think over. Deanna stands up slowly, up and off her haunches so that her robe and nightgown crease back down to her ankles. There is a pang of shock in the woman as Deanna's body comes into profile.
"No - thank you,"
She smooths, ignoring how Keiko's eyes bulge a little at the sight of her changing body - it is possible that she has not heard what happened.
But then, in another second, another shock of terror that is not hers, it is clear that she knows all too well.
In a ship this large, she maybe had false hope that this would not spread to the civilian level.
"Counselor Troi?"
Keiko shocks her from her thoughts, and it seems she has been too silent for too long. Her fingers slip around the closed bud of a rose that springs up to her waist.
"I'm sorry, I like to come down here to think sometimes, I suppose it is calming,"
Deanna explains, letting the bud slip away and turning out to face along the path, her bare feet cold against the cobbles.
It has not yet occurred to her that she looks lost, and horribly out of place.
"I can leave if… if you'd rather I - ?"
Miss Ishikawa tries to say, but her sentence is poorly constructed, and Deanna is too distracted at having finally remembered her last name, and the exact contents of the one single time they have spoken before; that was in the safe zone of her office, however.
"No, I do not mind the company,"
Deanna tells her, thinking about the woman's neurosis concerning space travel, and her relationship issues with the transporter chief O'brien; she is a woman who fills herself with the cycling trivialities that make being a Counselor just bearable.
She starts walking slowly down the path that turns along past further rows of short peach trees, and finds that Keiko follows her at a cautious distance, busying her attention by picking and pruning at the few withering leaves she comes upon.
"These peaches seem to be developing wonderfully in this atmosphere,"
From up ahead, Deanna's compliment reaches the botanist, and though she cannot see Keiko's face, she can feel the appreciation that is returned to her.
Her slim fingers knot themselves around the stalk of a fruit.
"I'm glad you noticed, it's taken some serious work to get the balance just right in here,"
Keiko appears more quickly at her side, now that she has stopped walking.
"You can take one if you want, they're just about ripe,"
The woman plucks one free for herself, accenting her point, or maybe just trying to make Deanna feel more comfortable in eating one herself; the suggestion, however, drives an unexpected stab of hunger through her, and so she pulls free a peach of her own.
"Thank you,"
Deanna says gratefully, already biting into the fuzz and finding her mouth almost watering around the succulence of fresh fruit. It reminds her of the summer fields back home.
They continue walking together, somewhat awkwardly, until the path ends in a sloping grassy bank, and the river that runs down into it from the pond she had found herself at earlier.
Keiko falters as the counselor moves to sit, straight legged on the grass, her nightgown falling into a pool around her waist and up to her knees. Deanna looks up at her where the woman lingers on the path still, her eyes a silent welcome.
Soon, they two are strangers on a slope of rolling green, eating fresh fruit and avoiding the gaze of the other, feeling only slightly uncomfortable.
"Is there a project that requires your attention?"
Troi asks, the curiosity finally filling the silence of chewing mouths and the babbling of running water.
"Um, no - not really, why do you ask?"
"It is just, you are working late,"
Keiko responds more tellingly not with words, but with raised eyebrows and a pointed expression.
"I was thinking the same of you,"
She gestures down at the woman's pajamas, the peach forgotten in her other hand, and that same accusation remains on her face.
"Is something wrong?"
She adds, dropping the fruit altogether on the grass, and leaning back slightly with her arms outstretched behind her, giving off the feeling that it has been a while herself since she last enjoyed her work this way.
"I was thinking the same of you,"
Deanna echos, sitting further upright and fixing her new companion with a kind of wry smile, one that does not scream evasion, but is a symptom of it nonetheless. Their eyes meet for a few moments, above the mouthful of peach juice, and another that is full only of questions.
"Touche,"
It seems suddenly that they are both smiling, and whatever trepidation she had expected of Keiko, this is most certainly not it. She is a refreshing person of joviality in a series of days that have been lived beneath a deep and mournful cloud.
"Well okay then,"
The woman starts, pushing back up to lean forward, wiping her hands off on the cotton tops of her thighs, her clothes simple and disarmingly civilian, covered in the charm of hardwork - dirt and leaves.
"I'm avoiding a date night with Miles, because he told me my work wasn't as important as his - whatever that means,"
Keiko explains, rolling her eyes in exacerbation at her own plight, her mind sticking with the memory of the man's words more than with her own handling of the situation. It is a fledgling romance, they both know this, it is baby love, and in their youth, they are doing nothing wrong at all.
"I'm sure he'll apologise once he sees sense, and if not, well, then I'll just have to make him,"
A cunning smile comes upon her, and she has an upstanding soul, Deanna notes, smiling along with her.
"I…I, uh, hear you and Commander Riker might...be in a similar sort of, um, situation,"
Deanna frowns deeply almost immediately - are they gossiping?
"I have no idea to what you are referring, Miss Ishikawa,"
She responds diplomatically, but the humour has returned well to her, and suddenly her cheeks are rosy with the pleasure of it. A perfectly arched eyebrow accompanies the look, and Keiko sees her for the first time now, as if she is complete.
"Of course,"
They fill the ensuing silence then with giggling, young and fresh and tinkling along with the running water and the rustling of leaves about them, as though they are anywhere else than midnight on a starship.
It is even almost the silent and creeping am.
"Since you have told me, then, you may as well know I am here because -"
Deanna falters, and they break eye contact as she looks down at her own hands atop her thighs, confusing even herself with this motive she does not know.
"Well, because I cannot sleep,"
She thinks of Will's well-meaning presence on her sofa, snoring and rolling off onto the floor every half hour, falling with a thud and a curse that he hopes he has not woken her - she is awake anyway, not because of his noise, but because she has spent so long sleeping alone that she doesn't know how to be anyway else.
She doesn't tell him this.
"I've been working only light duty lately, and I am certain it will drive me to insanity,"
Keiko almost laughs aloud, but tempers herself and tries to keep up the mood.
"I guess you'd be the most qualified to know!"
And then they laugh again, Deanna changing positions against the bank to cross her legs like a child, and extending her arms behind her as Keiko had before; she tries hard to breathe in slowly, to steady herself.
"It is my professional opinion, yes,"
The humour peters out in an exhausted way, as though they are both so awake that they must be tired, and grins turn languidly into lazy parted lips.
Deanna's nightgown lays flat over her body as she leans back, and she feels how eyes find themselves pulled like magnets to her centre - it does not take long for her elephant to trample its way through the room.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
Keiko asks brazenly, insightful enough, but perhaps a little tactless; then maybe she just practices in directness.
"Talk?"
Deanna asks, creasing up her eyebrows, wondering when she lost her own insight, and let control of the conversation slip away from her.
"It's just, you, you look a little lost, Deanna,"
A beat.
"I know it's a cliche, but when your job is to listen to people's problems, I just wonder, sometimes, who do you talk to?"
Keiko lays a hand on the grass next to her, in the space between them, just close enough that maybe emotions, electricity could arc between, that maybe they might share something in it.
"I do not -"
Deanna falters.
"I have people near me, if I need to,"
The civilians face falls away from her lazy smile, falls away from whatever spark of joy they might have shared.
"But are they your friends?"
Keiko asks emphatically, drawing her hand back into her centre and using it to sweep the hair that has fallen in her eyes, wanting badly not to allow a moment where either one of them can hide from the other. All of a sudden, it has become much more important to her that she do something tonight, that she help somebody that is not green and vegetative. She has seen an opportunity to make a difference.
"We could be friends,"
She offers, and Deanna looks at her shrewdly, wondering if there is an ulterior motive, and who knew she could be such a jaded girl.
Keiko turns inwards, and finds herself asking - who hurt her?
The Counselor nods slowly, but says nothing at all, having made a judgement in her mind, that maybe she could use the people in her life now more than ever.
"My grandmother,"
Keiko begins, when it is clear Deanna has nothing to say, a sigh trapped in her throat.
"She… she used to tell me that people - that we are each only as old as our omens,"
Her voice has taken on a much softer quality, and the memory is fond and filled up in shades of purple and green.
"I keep hearing people talk about how young you are, and it reminds me of what she said,"
Deanna's eyes lift up from where they have been staring into her lap, and she wonders what else is being said about her that she cannot hear in the walls themselves.
"Because you feel much older than that to me,"
Keiko reaches now finally to graze the Counselors skin, a woman who is at once a child, and a sage of a hundred years.
It is amazing, the knowledge that people have so deeply inside themselves, from the places they have been and the people who have shaped them, and yet this knowledge is just hidden until such a time when it may be even remotely useful - Deanna can think only now of her omens.
And she is a deceptive woman, a terribly unique blend of age and youth, her face so ageless and her body maybe that of a childs, and a child grows of it - her mind is much older.
"Omens?"
She asks, finally breaking the contemplation. A single fish leaps in the water below.
"They're, uh, the things that mean something, anything that might happen, or will - they warn,"
Keiko takes her hand away and gestures it infront of her when she speaks, trying to describe something she has only ever spoken of natively, in an ancient language she can barely recall.
"Having a child… like this - that's a really big omen,"
"Of what?"
Deanna responds very quickly, eager almost at the feeling that she's speaking with a healer, with the ghost of a woman she has never before met, through a culture she does not understand.
"I think you'd know that better than me,"
She is told humbly, Keiko not exactly fishing for more news on what has happened, not gossiping, but certainly filling herself up with the curiosity that lives in the very ground they sit on.
Deanna bites her lip at the thought of it, of the uncertainty of it all, but there is a feeling that grips her shoulders and shakes her into gratitude.
"Thank you,"
She emphasises, and Keiko's eyes crease up in shock.
"What for?"
Her whole body shifts to face in to Deanna, to be in awe of how tempered she is, how fortified and fragile.
"For not trying to tell me I will be fine,"
She frowns.
"People have been insulting my intelligence by telling me this will all be okay, but I know they are lying,"
Deanna adds, brimming over with a sudden sense of venom, but remaining soft and level all the same, a fine breeze that drifts apart from a hurricane.
"Tell me I will die, or that this will be too painful, that I'm going to hurt, but please, do not endeavor to lie to me, do not tell me this will be okay,"
They meet eyes again for another time, a vision of reality each in the others - compassion, mortality, empathy.
"I… I hadn't realised it was like that,"
Keiko says, flawed maybe for a moment, because the gossip has never considered how this will end.
"Do you… have you made a decision, about whether -?"
Maybe they do not know each other well enough to ask, but she has done it anyway.
Deanna breathes as though the air has just become much cleaner - it is a strange opposite of reaction.
"I'm keeping it,"
She says simply, a smile of grace coming upon her face.
"But I would not call it a choice,"
"Hmm?"
The Counselor takes a moment to think of herself, and all the things she cannot control, the things she has tried to control nonetheless.
"I believe this may be another of your omens,"
She says sadly, a simplicism to her in the discussion of a concept she maybe still does not understand. A peculiar expression of wonder takes over Keiko's face, and she pulls her hand away from atop Deanna's own, rooting it in the grass so that she can ground herself a little, moving to sit more comfortably where it has become hard and cold.
"How so?"
She finds herself asking, not entirely sure she likes how the mood has changed too quickly for her to keep up with.
"The child,"
Deanna sighs, herself filled with indecision - but what harm can it do to speak with a stranger?
What could she lose of friendship with a woman she knows only in any hour that comes after midnight, in a smell that is clean grass and peach juice, who sounds like running water and distant chirping birds.
"It cannot be terminated,"
She is brazen in her speak of such a thing, the customs of her planet much different, the era such that it ought not matter - one woman to another.
"Dr Crusher's tried everything?"
Keiko wonders aloud, and she is not as taken aback as maybe would be expected, she is even terribly accepting of the reality of what has happened, even if she won't say it either.
"No, not Beverly,"
Finally, a flash of some emotion that is real, and not measured: shock.
There are tiny cracks of light appearing beneath her.
"Then...who?"
The gardner asks, the human even, a woman who will not understand what this is, just as Deanna had not understood the customs of Japan.
"Me,"
She tells her bluntly, an empath to all emotions but those that dwell within her, and she is teetering dangerously close to the edge of a wire, a fine line that has been drawn between the sanity she has always held onto dearly, and the mania that will arise once this kills her.
"It is Betazoid biology, that babies do not survive where they are not wanted, it is inherent, functional, painless,"
An artificial breeze catches itself in the treetops behind them, all the leaves groan, protesting the late hour.
Something sobering and real, grips at all the living things.
"You - you mean… you don't want it?"
Keiko asks, knowing the answer but fearing the silence more than any knowledge she might have, full of a terror that this could have been her too.
Deanna just shakes her head in response, unashamed to admit that she is too young, that there are too many things left for her to do in her life to have a child now. She is unashamed to say that she does not want a child, or more specifically, that she does not want this one.
"Have you spoken to anyone about it?"
"No, it is my burden and nobody else's,"
The botanist frowns, because she does not understand what is being said.
"How do you think the crew would feel about me knowing that I bear a child I despise?"
A surge of surprise rises like an electrical current in Keiko, a feeling that she has lost faith, that she is disheartened, that something she thought was true all this time has been wrong.
"They would feel as you do now,"
Deanna states sorrowfully, swallowing down around the regret that she felt she could say anything at all, because this would have been much easier to keep to herself.
"It is much simpler that people believe I care too deeply to let it go, rather than that I do not care at all,"
She starts to stand up, tired now because she has emptied herself of emotion, and filled up on somebody else's disappointment of her actions; she takes a moment to wonder if her mother would feel the same. Her body is a little stiffer than it was when she sat, and the fabric falls softly like water back down around her ankles as she straightens out.
Fire and blood rushes to her head - she sways - a hand reaches out for Keiko's shoulder.
And on the ground, she is shaken from her own reaction by Deanna's shaking hand on her cold skin, and suddenly, she has forgotten everything she thought, and sympathy joins urgency in a hollow at the centre of her heart.
"Counselor?"
Keiko calls, standing quickly herself, taking the hand that lies on her body in a hand of her own, clasped around the bony fingers there, tightly as though she herself is an anchor. Deanna's other hand is held over her eyes, blocking out the spinning world for just a few seconds.
"I'm fine, thank you,"
She says eventually, a deep sigh of new fatigue and the hope that she will now be more able to sleep; her body tries to dislodge itself from her companion's.
The counselor is walking away with remorse and maybe even a shame she does not want to feel, before Keiko can even call her back, or realise that her skin is cold now where the contact has left her.
"Deanna!"
She calls after the woman, desperate to take back how she had reacted, thinking maybe she had been so close to something better than this.
"I… I'm sorry,"
Deanna turns around to face her, a terrible smile made anew of her lips.
"I understand now,"
She wants more than three words to explain how she takes it all back, but Deanna is a woman built with too much grace to say anything more at all. Keiko can do nothing more than stand and watch as the woman wanders away, with bare feet and a sweeping gown like the ghost of some ethereal beauty nobody has yet had the chance to see but her.
She swallows around a lump in her throat when the ghost is gone, and even her words don't seem to have done enough to take it back, because they had been empty.
She understands nothing at all.
