Author's Note:
So 10 chapters in, I feel like now is where I justify myself.
Anybody who's taken the time to message me or review this story, you guys are doing the most for my ego right now - but, of course, I really rely on anymore you have to say about this story, good or bad, so please do leave me a review if you haven't already and tell me what you think.
I do a lot of writing in between classes, but this is the first time I've had something I really thought I could publish, given that I have a lot of this actually written in pre-edit already, but nothing is fixed yet, so anywhere you'd like to see this story go is completely flexible at this point if you want to leave me your suggestions.
Finally, I hope it doesn't come through too badly, but I'm not a woman and I've never been remotely near a pregnant one, so my internet history is a really questionable place right now. Any serious inaccuracies I guess we can chalk down to that, but again, if anybody has any suggestions for different angles I can take, especially in the monologue of the female characters, that would be honestly the most helpful for me.
A quick disclaimer: it goes without saying, they aren't mine, I'd probably have done a lot different if they were, but unfortunately Paramount has the pleasure, so let's all move on with our lives.
PS: I'm sorry for what's about to happen, it's just where the characters took me, blame them.
It is not done, to beam into the Fifth House - it is not polite.
Will, therefore, finds himself ringing the door chime, feeling like an imposter from the second he materialised on the planet surface.
Beverly answers, and he knows something is wrong.
She holds a finger up immediately to press against her lips, to silence his opening mouth, then she steps aside and points directly down the corridor, shutting the door behind him as he moves in without her. He ends up in the kitchen when she catches up to him, and again she puts a finger to her lips, and points to the wooden door that is half shut over the back-room, motioning for him to go in ahead of her, but following closely behind him.
The fire is burning lowly, crackling in the silence, the log creaking and moaning the effort of continuing to blaze in the way it does. In it's glow rests Deanna, her body not the most immediate thing to notice of the room, but she is still there, a feature upon the sofa, laying end to end with a pillow tucked between her knees, and one beneath her head.
She is breathing so lightly that she might not be breathing at all, and her lungs are lost under the fabric of her sweatshirt, her cheeks ever so slightly flushed with heat, pink and bringing some kind of life to her.
He wants to move closer to her, to touch her and feel that she is living, but Beverly has a hand on his arm, pulling him back out into the kitchen, a whisper at the root of her tongue.
"Don't wake her yet,"
Will can barely hear her, and the carved panels of the kitchen walls simply absorb the sound, enforcing the silence that has since permeated throughout the whole house.
"Is she is okay?"
He asks, entirely unsure as to why because he's fairly certain by now that she isn't, that she won't be for a long while; he shakes his head as though he regrets even saying anything at all.
"She just needs to sleep - I can't do anything more for her,"
Beverly utters, her eyes meeting his own, and he can see regret within her too, that she can't do more, that she maybe cannot do anything at all.
She slips past him and out into the back-room, moving quickly but so silently she is as much a whisper as her voice, and she returns with a bag slung over her shoulder, and a combadge between her fingers.
Before she turns away from him to leave, her hand moves forward to show him the item, shaking it just a little to demonstrate something to him, and he nods his affirmation, glancing his fingers past the badge over his own uniformed chest.
She reaches to squeeze his arm, to offer him some reassurance before she leaves.
And then she does, shutting the door behind herself and walking back down a path that is lit by solar panels hidden beneath the grass, and the creatures of bioluminescence that continue to play, and burn between the trees.
Then back within the house, Will starts to look around himself, lost.
He doesn't want to wake her up, he wants more than anything to let her sleep; but there are so many things he wants and cannot have, so he thinks he maybe has to let this one go.
And he does, or he at least tries his hardest to, kneeling in front of her face beside the sofa; he puts a large hand against her stomach, taking liberties he might not be afforded when she is awake.
At his touch, something moves beneath the surface, and a lungful of air gets trapped in his throat. Another hand joins by the side of his first, splayed and held out rigidly from his body, a distance that he maintains in his fear, his awe.
There is that same movement again, responding to his touch he thinks, but isn't sure until he his nudged in the palm of his left hand, so lightly that it could be nothing at all - but he knows it is not.
And she hadn't told him this was happening.
"I'm sorry,"
He jolts the sudden sound, moves to look up and along her body until he sees that her eyes have opened, and they are regarding him with a kind of sorrow he hasn't seen from her before, nothing but resignation to an end they neither can see.
Will isn't sure what's woken her: the feeling of his hands over her, the child within her, or the sadness of his mind so loud in her own, but she is awake nonetheless, and apologising for something he hasn't even said aloud yet.
She blinks.
"How long?"
He asks, not wanting to be hurt that she kept it from him, reminding himself of the colour of his own eyes, displaced, in amongst the scenery of Betazed.
"A few days,"
Deanna murmurs, reaching over to rest a hand on his head, her fingers like breaths of wind through his hair, gently soothing him in a way that maybe he ought to be doing for her.
"Why?"
Their conversation is a series of words that make little sense when spoken aloud, but there has always been something between them, deliberate and predictable, an understanding, that often what is left unsaid is the most important.
"I did not want to,"
Deanna responds, and he stops breathing for a second, confounded by the sound of her voice, confounded by the sound of her honesty.
"Why?"
Will asks again, trying to find her eyes behind where they continue to hide, her lashes fluttering as they struggle to stay open for too long.
"I can never be sure,"
She begins, speaking as though she is seeing something more each time she closes her eyes, and she's trying so hard to hold onto the image of it, to help him understand.
"If you are the ocean or the sky,"
Deanna's fingers slow in his hair, and even though her eyes are closed he can tell that she sees him more deeply than before.
And she is a terrifying woman, because she draws out of him the things he cannot even tell himself.
"I don't understand?"
Will despairs.
She takes a deep, steadying breath, takes her hand back from him and holds it against her heart, tries to persuade her body to slow down for just a moment.
"I have spent these past days wondering if you are what gives me air, or if you are what drowns me."
"Deanna,"
He whispers to her, terribly sad, some feeling evoked deep within him that he has no name for, has only ever experienced in her presence.
Her eyes snap open again, fire and fury and nothing of either at all.
"No - I know that my love is not for everyone, but I will not lie to myself that it is for you,"
She is speaking now in the way that women who drown oceans do, the way that young boys dream of but never can handle the reality - he takes his hands away from her like he has been burned.
Will thuds back on his heels, hits the floor heavily with very little air left in him; he sits now like that same young boy, his legs bent out in front of him, hands holding on to his knees.
"How could you say that to me Deanna, after all of this?"
He asks, all the emotion he had walked into this conversation with now blown up against the walls, like he's been shot in the head with a bullet - her thoughts, in the shape of a weapon.
Deanna seems too to be equally as hurt by it though, every time she hurts him she is only hurting herself, everything dripping in the sweet ache of a gunshot.
She speaks in silence, an 8 word plea for him to stay gone:
"I will not survive you a second time,"
The ceiling seems to split in two, the floor into a chasm that could eat him up, and if at any point he could ever have claimed to know how he hurt her, then he has always been wrong until now, feeling that just being near to him is causing her so much agony that she is near to death.
"Deanna,"
Will has no words, he can only say her name, over and over in the vain hope it will do something more than it has been doing so far, will do something to pull her closer to him by the rope he has wrapped around her neck.
"No,"
She pleads.
"I can't,"
A beat.
"I will not let this happen to me again, you can either be close, or very far away, but having you in between is exhausting,"
She takes a deep, throaty breath.
"You are exhausting me,"
Tears have come to her eyes, but they do not appear completely sad, they are somehow red in the glow from the fire, refracting all the light around her so that she may as well just be crying flames, some form of anger that is not explosive has come upon her face.
"Then let me be close, I'm here for you, we are Imzadi,"
Will finds himself begging now, as the fire behind him cracks open into a huff of embers, loud and imposing and a perfect reflection of how she herself cracks, drags her body further upwards on the couch, her hair flipping back over behind her head.
"But you cannot tell me you love me? You keep saying the same words without meaning them at all, but you can never say love?"
She hisses, her tongue forked, a snake - a woman scorned.
Will stands up as she moves, and the stillness in the room is shattered so cleanly by all the motions, casting shadows on them both.
But still he says nothing at all.
"I think you should leave,"
Deanna begins to say slowly, pushing her legs out and swinging around to sit fully upright, to not have to look so far up to him, to not be so small beneath his thumb for much longer.
"I can't, you need me here to look after you, I have orders,"
He pleads with her, his hands gesturing desperately out in front of him as she goes so far as to stand, her body not shaking, but not quite steady either. It is clear that she cannot hear him, whether she is refusing to or she just can't let herself for fear of giving in, all the emotion seems to suddenly have drained from her, shed like a second skin left behind in the depths of the sofa cushions she had slept on.
"Orders can be disregarded, Commander, and this is my home. When I tell you to leave, I am not asking."
Deanna's words have become pointed, sharpened, almost as if from nowhere, but she keeps her arms down by her sides, and if she were not speaking with such inflection of terror, then anybody could be fooled into thinking she is just a shell, a woman who is completely empty.
"Where is this coming from, I thought we'd talked through this, I thought we were together again?"
He begs now, appealing to the look in her eyes, but as he looks to her there he must struggle to hold the air up in his chest, and not sink into one of the cracks in the floor. Because the literary scholars of Earth have been telling them all for centuries that it's in the eyes, that eyes talk, but if he could go back then he'd introduce them to her - because her eyes say nothing at all.
"You need to leave Will, whatever you thought then you thought wrong - you thought only of yourself,"
She orders, orders him as though she is his captain - his god.
But he isn't moving fast enough for her, he isn't moving at all, and all of a sudden she is lit up by the fire spitting harshly again, and there is some sound in his mind, splitting it in two.
LEAVE
He grabs a hold of his head with both hands, whinces the pain her voice has caused him, but still he does not move.
GET OUT
She has closed her eyes, and he has squeezed his together so that he can concentrate on forcing out the feeling of her screaming over and over in his mind - but he is weak, and he can't even quiet her a little.
Then, as he still hasn't moved even one foot towards the door, he feels the tingle of a transporter beam grip onto him, a different feeling than usual, and when he opens his eyes he sees how the world is a different shade than he would expect, green and red and not swimming in the same way as a starfleet transporter does. He has no idea where he is going, or what had been done to trigger the foreign beam, but he is leaving, and her voice is disappearing from him, being dragged away by the increasing distance of space.
The colours shrink away and he blinks once.
