All night she cannot sleep, for the restlessness of a Klingon. It has not been this bad since she first joined the crew, and had been unable to adjust to the close sleeping quarters. She had been fortunate how accommodating Captain Picard was to her, though maybe that was just in the wake of her performance at Farpoint; there is embarrassment still to the memory.
Even Worf had not been this bad.
Ko'lek checks on his son for the third time before 02:00 hours, and she finds herself groaning audibly into the silence at how this pulls her attention again, how his level of fear and care wrap neatly into paternity, unsupervised and yet always present.
He fusses over the bedding, the buttons on Ridoll's pajamas and how high up his neck they travel - the temperature of the room.
It is as though he is trying to perfect some specific conditions, but the boy has not woken once, and his concern is unfounded in any sound reason. And maybe if she were there, she could tell him this.
Deanna tries to roll over, swapping her left leg for her right to tuck the pillow up between them anew, the whole process a chore of moving a body that will not be moved.
She sighs, remembers how their dinner had ended, how the man had told her about his wife and his home, his mission, the religion he follows, how he had slowly worked his way through the rest of his dinner, and frowned as she did not. Explaining to him that the baby left her little room left in her stomach for food was unnecessary, and even though he had heard it before, somehow he did not believe it of her, his perception bordering on the irritating.
Then, Ridoll's small head had begun to loll a little on his shoulders, and the boy asked for a story, said he was too tired to sit with them anymore. Deanna had shown them where to replicate bed-clothes, helped them pick out the right size and to find their favourite fairy tale from the data-banks, an uncontested Andorian folk story about the child had of a sun and a moon. She had been read it too as a child, only once or twice, but the moral lingers, one that warns people to be accepting of individuality, because those who do not fit in may one day possess something that the others need.
Deanna had felt like the child, as Ridoll probably does too: different from all the others, yet capable of adapting to both the day and the night, and shining just as brightly in both. At the time, it had helped.
The boy had wanted her to read it to him, but that was where Kol had gently put his foot down, seeing how she too was yawning and pale, and so she said goodnight with grace, and he saw her to the door with words that she can scarcely remember.
Now, she is here, and she has been for a while, unable to decide between a soothing bath that she may not be able to maneuver herself out of, or a shower that she will have to stand upright in, and so she had chosen neither and simply climbed into her bed, swaddling herself in the sheets.
Those sheets are almost on the floor after hours of tossing and turning, and just one of broken sleep that had immediately followed her finding a comfortable position. Quickly, she has learned that wasting comfort on waking thoughts will earn her nothing, and now she sees this to be evident in how she moves to reposition along the pillow again, lifting her stomach to scratch the skin and extend her torso out to try to give her diaphragm more room to expand.
She takes a deep breath, but it not enough.
Kol returns to his own bed, she feels the comfort in him as he settles himself down, tries not to steal it and make it her own, if only to see if that will work. She tries expanding her mind, reasoning that maybe she can drown him out if she fills her senses with enough people who are peaceful and sleeping, maybe she can turn them into a sea that will carry her away too.
First, she finds Picard, whose quarters are the closest in proximity to her own, given how he is not situated in normal crew quarters either, but in a forward portal in the decks above her, with a view so brilliant of the stars that seeing just the once is enough to have it cemented in her memory.
He is sleeping, thankfully, but all of a sudden, she exhales harshly that breath she had been holding in, and remembers a time when he painfully had not been.
Madness has her grabbing her head in anguish.
Her quarters are unyielding to her attempts at shutting them off from him and his restlessness; she stands abruptly from the bed.
She is alone, she can see in the space, but he is so loud in her mind that he could be in the next room. A groan escapes her.
Pushing the hair back from her temples with wriggling fingers, she exerts a kind of pressure that turns her into a melting pot of animalistic and ostensibly human emotion. Her mother had warned her, after all, and she had refused to listen.
The floor is suddenly cold beneath her bare feet, out in the main room of her quarters, and her cream coloured shift has her looking younger than she thinks. The loose tie of her robe trails the floor as the doors shut behind her.
Midnight has swallowed all the crewmen from the corridors, though with the pain in her head she doubts very much she would care if anybody sees her like this, stuck in the pulsing glow of the wall panels. The carpeted deck is much softer between her toes, and in the 6 months that she has been aboard, it shocks her that she has only just noticed this now.
It is much colder in the turbolift.
A fist comes balled up to rub at her eyes, where they are puffy and bruised and tired, all pale and free of the light makeup she had been wearing in the day.
On her way along the corridor she passes a young man in a robe of deep crimson hanging over his bare chest. He nods respectfully to her in silence, hands cradling tightly to the small newborn in his arms against the bare skin, and the ends of his beard are tickling at the babies head as it mewls softly.
She smiles for him, and then he is gone behind her.
When she comes upon the golden door plaque, she finds that she does not hesitate.
Shock fills the man within, then his own sense of trepidation, and she rings again.
This time, his answer is fast, and his build up of agitation deflates from him immediately.
"Counselor Troi?"
And she pushes inside without a word, strangely impolite of her, mistakable for anybody else for how different she looks now with her hair all the way down her back in wild curls, as opposed to up in that severe and elegant bun.
He turns his back to the closing door.
"What's going on, is something wrong?"
Picard's voice denotes urgency, and for all this thought she has expended in getting here, she is suddenly at a loss for words.
"Counselor, are you crying?"
A hand draws up to swipe beneath her eyes, and he walks closer to squint at where she stands like an island in the middle of his living area, assessing how she has come to him in a certain state of disarray.
She had not even realised her face was wet, now it seems she can't stop the tears at all.
"I cannot sleep, Sir,"
She winces the continued restlessness inside him.
"You are keeping me awake,"
In a moment that seems she has had the air knocked out of her at this admittance, she sinks down onto the edge of his sofa, meeting his eyes with watery, endless orbs of obsidian and dark space.
They are different now than in the daytime, where the lights in his quarters are low and deep in shades of grey, gold and red. The lights in her space still are not right.
"What?"
His bluntness is an immediate regret, and he quickly ties his robe around his exposed chest before perching himself on the arm of the sofa across from her, squinting still through the dim distance between the two.
"I don't understand?"
He rephrases, and it is an easier thing to hear.
Deanna tugs at her dressing gown, taps fingers against her knee, then takes both hands to run again through her hair, unable to voice this feeling that there are ants crawling her skin, the feeling that she knows is within him too.
"You are in pain, agitated, wide awake and exhausted at the same time,"
She tells him, swallowing down on the feeling.
"Something is driving you to madness and I cannot sleep,"
The emphasis is heartbreaking, and in his confusion, he has forgotten until now what it was that broils up in his body, hot and holding him in a suspenseful grip.
Picard says nothing at all, suspicious of how little he knows her, and how she is here, in his quarters nonetheless, telling him how he feels in a way that maybe could be soothing if he were in any kind of mood.
"Really Counselor, I think this is highly inappropriate and you sh-"
"You made a decision?"
Deanna cuts him off before he can say very much more, and there is pain enough in her head to tell her that if she leaves now, she will never sleep until he does.
"You made a decision, and you haven't decided if it is the right one yet?"
She is stabbing in the dark with terrifying accuracy. The Captain sighs.
"Years ago?"
Words push him, but her body language is so strangely submissive at this hour, knowing his volatility could spill over into her at any moment, and unsure if she will be able to control it.
"Yes,"
He responds simply, finally.
"But I don't understand what that has to do with you-"
Exasperated, desperate, she cuts him off again.
"Please,"
She begs, like a child, and she is hurting just as he is.
"Please Captain, I cannot sleep,"
Suddenly, the sound of her voice is very harrowing, and she is trembling, sniffling even, the tears that continue to fall in her anguish.
"Please,"
And that is all it takes.
Picard holds his hands out in his lap, splays the fingers thoughtfully, tries not to clamp them too tightly against all that he is feeling, and the thoughts that are unchecked within him.
"I made a decision, you're right Counselor,"
He begins, unsure.
"And it was years ago, but I still don't know if I did the right thing,"
A second sigh of frustration leaves him, and there is a low growl at its root, the stubble on his chin scratching against the palm of one of his hands now, moving and fidgeting the intimacy.
"There is more,"
Deanna tells him, certain that this cannot be enough to set him so on fire with anger, with confusion and frustration.
"What don't you want to tell me?"
He meets her eyes again, lets the sight of her weeping through hurting eyes and sitting barefoot on his sofa, the thought of her drifting through the ship in her nightgown, be enough to push him onward, if for her sake rather than his own.
"Wesley's father,"
A beat.
"Jack,"
The name is tasteless on his tongue.
"Today was the anniversary of his death,"
Deanna nods with him, the words new but the feelings that accompany them just the same.
"And I made the decision that killed him, Counselor,"
Picard shakes his head, dropping it down between his shoulder in shame, saying aloud what fires him now instead draining of him the ants on his skin, and leaving him as just a shell of all the regrets he holds on to.
"You cannot reconcile that with yourself?"
She questions, and knows telling him it was not his fault will be useless, may even just be a lie, however controversial that thought is.
"After so many years?"
Deanna then prompts, impatient and just so tired.
"I can't no, it's this way every year,"
"Because you could have saved him,"
Like a flipped switch, she becomes the embodiment of his own anger, lets it work through her like a conduit, and her eyes - she lets them light in the feeling that keeps them awake.
"Because it ought to have been you,"
"No, I -"
He stutters, shocked, never a therapist has confronted him in such a way, with the audacity and the youth and the informality of her.
"I don't think th-"
"Yes you do,"
Deanna counters, the sleep in her voice laced with a venom that is not her own, and tastes foul at the root of her tongue.
"You are angry at yourself as much as at him - you think he should have disregarded the order,"
"No, I would never expect that, he - he was a good officer - he knew the right thing, I… He -"
"So then why are you angry?"
Her voice is rising.
"Because you were too weak to make the other decision?"
She regards him with surprising calm in her demeanour, her voice betraying it all.
"Were you too weak, Captain, or just a coward?"
"No! Absolutely not, that is not how it happened!"
He responds, standing now abruptly to loom over her, but she is unchangeable now, his outrage further fuelling this spiel she works on.
"Well there must be some other reason why you despise yourself, then? Perhaps you ought to have sent somebody else, done it yourself?"
Picard throws his hands down at his sides, all the fabric of his dressing gown kicking up in a flurry.
"He was the most qualified, it couldn't have been anybody else!"
"So you wanted him to die? You sent him on purpose, out of spite, because you wanted his family as your own?"
Their words come thick and fast, a previously sleepy and tension filled place has cracked clean in two.
"I couldn't have known he would die, it was a simple mission, there was no way - no way to know what would happen,"
Picard growls.
"I would never take him away from his family!"
Deanna stands now too, but her legs are unstable from all this energy, all the fatigue, the focus she has to maintain on the barriers in her mind - to keep control.
"Then what is this frustration, what is this blame if you did everything right? If there was no danger, no way to know, nobody else you could send, no malice to the decision nor cowardice in its calling, then why are you angry?"
Her chin gestures up at him in confrontation, and she comes very close to him, her words falling in volume slightly, but her inflection is impeccable in its iteration of his own feelings, that it might as well be he is arguing with himself at last.
"You're not angry at him, or yourself, or the atoms that made up the explosion that killed him - then what?"
A vision of a young boy blurs past her eyes, in her mind, then a grown man, it seems, waving to his mother from the bridge of a ship. It's meaning is clear.
"You are angry at what he has left behind?"
He shakes his head no, like a young boy, freckled and in pants that are too short.
"You are angry that they were able to live without him, to move on, and you feel you cannot?"
Something strikes in him, and he is not defensive anymore, she is not shouting - the air, without them noticing, has lost its electricity.
"There were so many things he never got to do with Wesley, and I have wasted my own life dwelling on his memory when they were able to find a way to live despite his absence,"
He takes a settling breath.
"But I, I have nothing to show, I have left no legacy behind like he has - I'm angry because my whole life up to now means less than his ever did,"
Deanna sighs the feeling of diffusing emotion, as it leaves her and does not return to him, and that same fatigue retakes a hold on her for the moment, her eyelids droop a little as she walks closer towards him.
Their faces are only inches apart.
"Captain,"
She breathes.
"Your life is much more than the things you have yet to do,"
He looks down to where her hand has wrapped tightly around the fist of his own, slowly unfurling it out with her nimble fingers.
"Measure it by the acts of those who you care for and nurture, measure your life not by the debts you owe, or the people you have lost, but by the people you have saved,"
She brings his opened palm out now to clasp it in both her hands in between them, small and cold and not quite closing around all his knuckles.
"In the time we have known each other, I have seen more good deeds done, and more injustices put right than I have ever seen or known of any other person in my lifetime,"
The hand drops abruptly, her eyes waver again, and he watches as she sways a little of her feet, awed of her features now that they are so close to his own.
"Let that be your legacy,"
She rolls over again, her own legacy in turmoil inside her, kicking and writhing such that she cannot steal comfort from anybody nearby her. But now that she has opened out her mind further, and taken down a little of the wall so that she may peek over it, ecstasy smacks her open-palmed in the face.
It is a woman whose mind she knows only when it is beneath Will's. And she cannot be angry at her for that weakness.
She is the same woman as he's had a few times over, and as such the feeling of her with somebody else is not surprising, familiar even, for those nights like this when curiosity got the better of her, or she had been simply too tired to hold up those barriers in her mind.
Anybody else might mistake this for weakness, on her part, but then they would be underestimating how difficult and truly arduous a task it is to constantly maintain such strong borders on her mind, whilst making sure she doesn't completely isolate herself.
Balancing between complete singularity, and madness, is a science almost, and an underrated art that she will not profess to have perfected.
She adjusts the pillow beneath her head, switching it to the cold side where her cheeks begin to burn the heat of embarrassment at what the woman feels. Then, maybe, she is just jealous.
A groan of frustration escapes her, legs tingling where they are tucked up together on her side.
Through a series of movements, she extends them, short and prickling the cold air in peach fuzz, then drags them back in one by one, sluggishly as though she is walking along a horizon in slow motion. It does not provide her relief for long, and in lying down for this amount of time without sleep, her hips have started to throb slightly, and there is not any way for her to win this battle.
Ko'lek rises again, and he has thirst in his mind for whatever they had drank over dinner, equally as restless as she. And in so much as she can never understand these things, it is impossible to know whether he is the cause of her own, or the effect.
She groans again.
The man checks on his son, who still probably hasn't even turned in his bed, and she traces his movements as if they are her own, the feelings he has as he quenches the thirst, revels in is silence and his peace anew, then fills up with worry for the crew he has left behind.
He is thinking of his wife, and now she shrinks away from the love there, so dissimilar to how Will had felt, and she is just grateful he is not aboard right now; his mind would have her driven to insanity by this unending night.
Kol returns to his bed, falls asleep very quickly as one who is accustomed to taking it where he can, and she wonders if there is more to him than a father, a husband and a saviour. She'd rather not take the time to ask.
He had spoken so reverently of the fifth house, and of her line, that it had been stifling to sit near him for that time, and listen as he made out that she herself was the Goddess Deanna, that she was the embodiment of all that she stood for. The parallels in their lives are many, she cannot deny, but her childhood had been filled with so many who thought is terribly audacious of her mother to name her so - a mutt, as she had been called - a disabled child named for a Goddess.
To the aristocratic circles their family ran in, she was an abomination in pink silk - probably still is.
Her mother had pointed to her intellect, her aptitude for language and art, calling it a sign, saying she was more truly Betazoid than any of them, that they had lost themselves in snobbery, and she was their to humble them.
Right now, she feels no kind of humble at all.
All her body is in turmoil, upside down and back-to-front, the whole think taken over and out of her control. She finds a tear unexpectedly in her eye and moistening the pillow beneath her, blaming it on the hormones, because she misses her mother so desperately now that she could cave and call her. But then, she would know.
Deanna brings one leg in to her stomach as closely as it will go, flicks her foot rhythmically back and forth.
How could she possibly explain something like this to her mother, to excite her for a grandchild, then disappoint her for its nature, and her continued lack of a husband? She will be blamed for this, for being too young to have a child, even if she is old enough to be married. And Will, he will be blamed too, as if this is all just a tall tale written to distract her from the idea that he is the father, and she has allowed him back into her life so intimately after how he had left.
Lwaxana always told her he was terrible news, that he would be her ruin if she wasn't careful, so wary as she was of the Imzadi bond - another sign, she said - but it was the advice Mr Homm gave her, in a voice he never uses, on a day that her mother spent in bed with a flu, and he had a break from her demands for just a few moments in time.
She had never heard him speak before, and likely won't again, but the man cares for her deeply, and she had felt it keenly as he told her: you must want to spend the rest of your life with yourself, before another.
She kicks her leg out again.
He had spoken with a look in his eyes that was nothing of judgement at all, and at the time, just for the sound of his voice and her own excited youth, she hugged him tightly, though his body towers over her own, she had hugged him nonetheless.
Maybe he'd been right, and maybe this makes sense more to her now that she is carrying another life, now that she is terrified over what that means. What if she doesn't love herself?
What if she doesn't want to be with the person she is now, forever? And if that is true, then how can she possibly want to spend her life with a child, and love it and nurture it, if she cannot do the same for herself?
A flurry of kicks pick up against her bladder.
The answer is that she doesn't: doesn't want to spend her life with herself or with a child, and she had known as much a month ago, when she'd sat in a moment of solitude and concentrated on the second consciousness she suddenly possessed. It would not be quashed, did not resist but also did not bend to her will, and since, she has not once dared to look inside the child's mind again, fear of what she might find there clouding her reason.
At this point, her mother would tell her that she ought to be sending love to her child, and receiving it back. She ought to know its gender, it's responses to certain foods, sounds and lights, the other people in her life who it loves to have near.
Deanna desires to know none of these things, isn't even sure if the particular child she finds herself encumbered with is capable of expressing such things, or if it wants to, knowing that she had wanted rid of it.
She groans again, has to go to the bathroom.
She still wants rid of it.
