Captain Picard is drinking his own mug of tea - earl grey, hot - and he's wondering just what to do about her, not for the first time, what would be best for her.
It's late, but he's chosen to take a later shift than usual, and the monitor in front of him is open on her file. He remembers speaking with an older commander, sage and assured, describing to him exactly the woman that would walk onto his bridge, take up space on his ship, and she had sounded 100 years older than she is.
The woman had been her C.O. for the entirety of her service in Starfleet, the time she had spent posted to a research vessel after being transferred from Betazed once she had completed her Phd.; Commander Alaric, a Vulcan woman and a scientist at her heart, it was surprising to hear her speak with fondness, with awe even.
Picard breathes in through the steam from his mug, a catharsis between the veil it creates and the screen on the desk. She really looks no different than she does now, only that she wears her hair down instead of in that severe bun, and there is something a little more angular in her features that only age could have done to her.
Beside her picture is her complete service record, all the way back to her original application to the academy, complete with promotionary awards and even a medal for exemplary service. He doesn't think he wants to know the story behind that one, it took the destruction of the Stargazer for him to earn a medal of that standing, and she is so young, so unassuming that maybe to find out would ruin him.
In the 'reason for application' section of her record, there are surprisingly few words, so not consistent with her usual disposition that it makes him smile a little even now, recognising the intensely personal woman he has come to know.
Why not apply? And might I ask, why half the Admirals in the Fleet applied, and if their answer would mean so much now as it did then, or even if it would be the same?
He takes another sip of his drink and swallows it down harshly, scrolling down through the page until he reaches the letter of recommendation written by one of her professors from a school on Betazed, a man with a prestigious name he recognises well - Sal Tambaum. The man is notorious, an excellent teacher but a terrible judge of character, a Betazoid aristocrat and a snob to boot. His words are not surprising, but they are so full of prejudice, that it is hardly a recommendation at all.
Miss Troi is an exceptional student, she works hard to compensate for the deficits caused by her disability, and one may easily be fooled into believing she is as skilled as any full-blooded Betazoid. She benefits greatly from her breeding as a daughter of the Fifth House, and as such she demonstrates a unique taste for diplomacy likely inherited from her mother, as well as a keen understanding of many of the Federation Languages. She is dutiful in her studies and allocates little time to social activities due to her isolation in the classroom, and though this is unfortunate to see it is not unexpected. Miss Troi can be a precocious young woman at times, but the variety and inclusivity of the Starfleet organization will be a good fit for her, and as the only recorded individual of her particular genetic arrangement in the Federation, she will make an excellent addition to the diversity of Starfleet's collection.
The taste of the man's distaste is terribly sour in his mouth, wondering how life must have been for her growing up so different, so isolated. Tambaum had called it a disability, but among the crew of the Enterprise she is the most able of them all, exceptional even, a most-valuable asset. He cannot even begin to imagine how one could think of her as less.
The monitor scrolls further down into her Academy class records, and she had been a medical student foremostly, though it is clear that was not what she enjoyed. Her grades are consistent across all the classes she attended, including her defensive training as well as basic engineering and piloting skills. She was about as good a student as the Academy ever sees, and in amongst her high grades there is one which stands out.
The girl had been a marksman in her weapons training, certifiably a mean shot, and they had trained with live as well as energy weapons just in case of coming upon a hostile planet and needing the knowledge of defense.
Her instructor had placed her as the sniper of the class, and as such she demonstrated a keen ability to service and properly maintain a sniper rifle, as well as camouflage techniques and evasive tactics including the construction of a fox hole.
Unsurprisingly, she did not continue the class past her first year, at the point where she could cease the activity she did, walked away with her certificates, a legacy for excellence and did not look back. It does not shock him that she didn't want to be known for a feat of violence, and the next year she was signed up for more advanced biochemistry and species specific medicine classes, anything to reclaim her own sense of benevolence and compassion - the fierce pacifist that she seems to all to be.
He scrolls again until he reaches her graduation statistics, fifth in her class and the only graduate to be awarded immediate post on Betazed to complete the last year of her Phd while working at the Institute for Psychological Research there. She had been working on a thesis paper during her time on Earth, an exceptional student indeed.
Then he comes upon her promotion to lieutenant, after earning the degree, and her refusal of its honorific on account of the perception that comes with being a Dr, and so she simply has a few letters that follow her name, and the ability to call upon a more professional title when she is under scrutiny for her age.
She was transferred to the science vessel Minerva, along with the Commander Alaric who chose her for the assignment due to her effectiveness on staff on Betazed. Her position aboard was largely one of research facilitation and crew support, as well as her own personal research into deep space assignments and their psychological effects. Once she came to be assigned to the Enterprise, her data was passed onto a professor at the Royal College of Betazed to continue on her work - it was very enlightened material indeed.
Her assignment itself was not without its controversy, her own Commanding officer had desired the position, but something made her step aside for Deanna, made her write a recommendation so fierce that the fact it comes from a Vulcan is nothing short of astounding.
She had even been promoted to Lieutenant Commander after an incident aboard the Minerva, but the file is classified, and he's never once thought to look inside, citing that time as where she earned her service medal, and really, truly not wanting to think of her that way.
He knows the rest from there, the formal event where they first met, however briefly, the way she called Riker Bill that first day on the bridge, her discomfort at Farpoint, her agony, really.
Since then she has made herself somehow into someone invaluable to him, and after this year he cannot even begin to fathom how he would function as well as he does in her absence. He hadn't even wanted a Counselor onboard, but somehow this tiny little woman had found a way to make it so that she was needed, to seed herself so deeply in the crew that to think of anything, however slight, happening to her, sets the entire crew on tenterhooks.
Beside the monitor on his desk is a book she had given him, after Tasha's death those months ago, when he had been away from the bridge for a fifth day, and even Beverly did not have words enough for him. She had said no words at all, and one evening there was a package on the desk in his quarters, wrapped in brown paper but not bound with any kind of twine, or sealed with a mark to identify the sender.
The whole place is dark, regardless of any lights that may be trying to illuminate his life - for the moment everything is blanketed in black. His hands lift the package and it seems heavier that it looks, sliding out of its loose wrapping to reveal the smoothly bound cover of a book. It is moderate in size, perhaps not too long of a read, but there is not title to indicate its depth or again, still, who has sent it for him.
The brown paper falls to the floor as he sweeps it out from the underside of the book, lifting and carrying it with him to sit on the low sofa at the centre of all this darkness. Here he has spent many a night meditating on themes of grief and death that have begun to surround him, where he has pondered some of life's greatest questions if only for the point of doing it, as if not doing so would make him less of a Captain, less of a man.
Fingers graze the surface, smooth and bound in a very old kind of horsehair buckram, brown and coarse to the touch, and it feels as though he is holding something much greater than simply a book.
He coaxes open the cover with care, and a deep blue repeating pattern on card covers the inside two pages, both just as unmarked as the rest of the thing; slowly, an impatience arises within him.
Turning the next page over, he finds finally a slightly yellowed plain sheet of paper, and through the darkness there is light enough to read what has been inscribed there, in handwriting so tall and elegant that he finally knows who has sent him this gift.
'To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die' ~ Thomas Campbell
She has written out the words so that they encompass only one corner of the page, and the rest is inscrutably plain, as if there are supposed to be further things written there if only he could see them.
A smile graces his face at the feel of her care imprinted in the paper, the way she has made the words her own but never claimed them, the way her pen never once leaves the page until she is done, everything linked together, dependant on what comes before it.
Across from this page is the title, finally, in letters bolder and printed in black by a press, rather than in the deep purple of her pen.
A Confession
And
The Death of Ivan
Ilyich
That same smile remains on his face, and though he has never read these works before, he feels he knows them well, somewhere inside himself where he dare not venture.
And in such the way that she is, the tiny little woman has found exactly what is within him without ever speaking to him once, sent it to him god knows how, and left a note that is not even her own, reminding him to think on - that he is doing everything exactly how he should.
He comes upon the name of the author at the bottom of the page, 'Works by Leo Tolstoy', and he still cannot swipe that solemn smile from his face, so instead he begins to read, turning to the next page, and then the next, until finally the darkness that he sees lets up enough to let in those lights that have been around him all along.
The book is in his hands somehow, and his mind is reeling over the sensation of its memory, wondering if there is anything that comes close to this kind of gesture that he can provide for her - if maybe he has provided it already. It's terribly ironic, he has decided, that the one person he might turn to for advice in this kind of situation, is the very woman who he needs help with, needs guidance on how to guide. After all, she is one of his sheep, only she is much more lost and she has strayed far from the flock, leaving them all wondering the same things, and how on earth she can be helped.
