... aaand another for all your patience


He has missed this ship.

He has missed her as if she were his mother and him just 5 years old again.

Even the lights seem different somehow.

He supposes - though it makes him feel silly to admit - that this must be what home feels like.

There's a little skip in his step in off-beat skids against the carpet, and if he had the time he would turn it into a symphony if only to make music from his movements.

Three young women pass by him giggling; he crosses his feet fast over one another to smile, jogging backwards as he watches them go.

Short of snapping his fingers and winking every other second, he is as close to the line between cool and creepy as he ever is.

He turns back to look ahead of himself, musses his hair up a little with carefree fingers, and cranes to check both left and right before he chooses which way to turn.

A familiar waterfull of hair catches his eye.

The music changes as he skips left and jogs to catch up with them.

"Deanna!"

He calls ahead, and for a single second the ship is a field of yellow grass, there are 3 staggered moons just barely visible in the sky, and he can smell the musk of her perfume chasing after him on the wind.

It is a cliched dream that once was reality.

"Hey Deanna!"

He tries again, coming closer alongside her.

The longer he has spent away from her, the people he has had in his bed that weren't her, the more time he's had to forget whatever it was that happened between them, the more brazen he has become in approaching her.

It does not occur to him right away that maybe this absence has not treated her the same way.

She turns to look over and up at him through those spider-eyelashes of hers, and he can barely contain the childish grin spreading across his face.

"I've missed you,"

He blurts artlessly, not meaning for it to come out as harried as it had; he slows down to her creeping pace.

"On the Tiberius, I mean."

She blinks back, knows exactly what he means.

The chill of their eye-contact sprints along his spine.

Before she has any kind of moment to respond, he is already taking in the sight of her whole body, forgetting to look where he is walking, planning on what next to ask from his long list of questions.

A night sky of neon stars across her cheeks distracts his attention.

"Have you been painting?"

Will presses, amused.

There is barely any awkwardness tangible between them.

"I have, yes,"

Deanna responds softly, smiling low and humbling him, her voice like the bursting dam he hadn't realised was ready to break.

"You look well,"

She tells him, changing tact diplomatically.

He can tell, because not everything is a mystery to him, that she is weighing him up in her mind, trying to decide whether or not he is worth forgiving.

Even if he does not deserve it, the selfish part of him knows she always forgives him in the end.

"I feel good, yeah, feel great,"

He responds enthusiastically, shaking his arms out at his sides to emphasise the point.

"And you?"

Serious concern grabs him suddenly, as if he'd forgotten entirely the month that has been going by.

"Is everything going alright with…"

He wafts faintly at her stomach, having avoided looking directly at it for this long.

She has grown, he can't ignore that fact, become more thin looking in the face and darker beneath the eyes, more severe in the draping of her clothes.

"Just fine, thank you,"

Deanna tells him, and he finds himself not caring all that much if it's a lie.

"I trust you've heard about our guest?"

She goes on to ask, reaching her arm out to brush along the wall as they follow the bend in the corridor.

"Schreiber?"

Will scoffs, bobbing his head just back a little in his distaste, letting his eyebrows express how he is surprised at her uncharacteristic turn towards gossip.

"I've heard about him alright, more than that I've met the man -"

They make sudden and direct eye contact, and he beams sarcastically to her, mimicking the Doctor's same leering grin.

"He sure is charming,"

He adds, and loses his smile watching her grip onto the wall with more force.

Before he can make some halfway decent offer to help her out, he feels her turn her eyes up to regard him sweetly, if a little embarrassed.

"Sorry Will, could I just take your arm?"

Deanna asks him very politely, maybe stiffly even, and he doesn't hesitate to go one further and take her arm from her, tucking it up securely beneath the crook of his elbow.

The first touch of her skin, much less than water would have been after 40 desert nights, gives him something that he tries hard not to confuse with what he has felt before.

She turns her eyes back away, lets go of the wall, and he plummets headfirst into the tail end of a years-old memory.

"Could I take your arm?"

He blinks sweetly across to her, and she nods, parting starkly blue painted lips to smile widely for him.

"You're going to have to let me go soon enough, love,"

She chimes back.

He doesn't remember how many years are between them.

"Remind me again where we're going?"

He asks, then makes a thinking noise, points his finger out ahead in the air and clarifies:

"Not a dance?"

"Not the kind you're imagining,"

She replies fast, turning her smile into closed wry lips.

He feels the very tips of her fingers jolt and grip him tighter for just a second as they stumble naively together over a knot of tree roots.

Above them there are lights that - not at all like fireflies - illuminate the canopy in slow swirling shoals.

"But there will be dancing?"

He tries to clarify, righting them both back onto the evenly mossed path.

He wears dress shoes, thinks it may be a mistake.

"Not the kind you're imagining, no."

"Deanna Troi, ever the enigmatic,"

He adds dryly, inhaling deeply the smell of the undergrowth all along the path around their ankles, and the caramel scent of her hair in humid clouds about her.

She has such a newness about her like an aura, as though she has been freshly stamped out and sent on her way - she has such innocence that even her hair cannot be tamed.

They walk fewer than 10 more steps together, when suddenly a force he can't comprehend grabs him by the neck and thrusts his head back.

Without control, he is guided the rest of the way.

The music is completely chaotic, calamitous even, utterly unbearable to have to listen to for too long.

They aren't even 5 feet inside the globed marquee and already it has been too long.

"It's the vibration!"

She yells to him in her small voice, skipping her nimble toes jovially against the cushioning moss underfoot.

Her eyes are gleaming and he does his best to hide a grimace.

"Your shoes, your shoes!"

She goes on, swinging her arms in exaggerated motions down to his feet, jabbing her fingers at the shined wingtips where they sink into the topmost layer of green.

A couple sweep past her in complete euphoria, their arms wound like jesting snakes around each other, and he takes a stumble out of step to let them through, finding himself beguiled by the freedom of it all.

He wonders how many people share his thoughts now.

"Take them off, nobody can hear you!"

Deanna yells at him, her feet stilling as if something in him has earthed her, and she is without charge for a few moments.

The swinging couple burst into flames in the corner - he knows what he sees is not what has passed.

"You are safe with me, love."

He gives in, his knees give out, and he crouches to unlace his shoes slowly and with clumsy, gripping fingers.

It does not take too long.

Deanna's cherubim youth has somehow morphed into restless, reckless childishness, that grins and litters the air with sweat, good humour and electricity.

It shocks him that he can't ever remember being this young.

"So this is what the kid's are into these days?"

He hears himself joke, as though he's another man at the end of a long tunnel.

She laughs and exposes her light heart to him.

Her bare arms pull him into her, away from where he leaves a ghost standing in his shoes, and tight to her body more than just 5 feet from the closed canopy entrance.

In the very centre of the room there is a languidly spinning metal plate, a few lights blinking on its edge to ward the dancers away.

The closer they get, the louder the sound grows, rising like a great plume to the highest peak at the centre, and sinking like pocketed rocks down into the ground below.

A banshee band strums away on a host of instruments he's never once seen before, and they slap at the sides of their perches, the spinning floor, their own bodies to make sound grow out of them.

Deanna winds her arms all around his as far as they will go, ceasing at his elbows and gripping onto him with the bitten wicks of her nails.

Starfleet protocol has had her nerves rearranging the way she is ordinarily so lovely.

There is a creeping feeling in the balls of his feet that grows from the ground as he is pulled into a slow rhythm, and he finds his eyes casting down to try and mimic her steps too.

His mind begins to buzz, his whole body soon, and they become faster as if no time has passed at all.

Flaming, she unlocks from him and sets him free, sets herself off spinning in circles on the moss, bare toes barely connecting as she flies.

He thinks he understands, he isn't quite sure.

"What is this?!"

He roars above the furore, squinting trying to slow her down with his mind, going half out of it thinking he might be losing control.

"Tradition!"

Deanna shouts back, then smiles showing all her teeth gleaming the reflection of every light he cannot see but that must be there.

Bizarre does not begin to describe the feeling he has seeping like wet cement into his bones, rather than weighting him it renders him motionless, suspended at least 5 feet above his own head.

He hears her say 'vibrations' again, but her lips don't move at all, and a surge of something completely indescribable takes over his senses at last.

His mind is still present, and he is in the room, but that grinning, gasping and grasping euphoria is glowing in the bottom of his throat.

This is some kind of science he has never seen before, but he's smoked his way to it's hazy cousin, drank towards the confused uncle of it - and he thinks he likes this much better.

Clarity.

He has clarity - and mania enough not to know what to do with it.

"You have to keep moving!"

Her face swings into view, and she takes his arms again, no idea where she will take him next.

They begin their spinning together, and he stomps his childish feet in time with the thunderous ruckus of a skin-drum, feeling as if he is a reed of grass in high wind - too moved to be still.

He dances, and the music is god-awful, his feet both left, and her's not even visible for their flurry and graceful blunder, at least 50 other people carouselling around and around and around leaving streaks of lightning behind them.

"Just so long as I can keep my shoes on,"

Will grins again, swinging quite gracefully from the memory, his feet nearly still, shuffling along the deck as if he had never been young at all.

He feels Deanna's eyes turn up to him just the same as before, but does not look at her, knowing she perhaps can't understand the way the nostalgia makes him grimace.

Would that he were back there now, he would have rewritten their lives together so unrecognisably that the people they are today should be sickened at the notion of the difference.

That is to say, he should never have left her.

Or even, and Deanna breathes sharply just as he thinks it, he ought never have introduced himself to her at all.

Will looks down at her at last - she is a disease without any cure.

"I quite think I am done dancing for now, don't you?"

She replies sweetly, cutting a hole in the wall he locks himself behind.

They are a series of badly formed metaphors, poorly constructed together yet at extreme risk of falling apart in the absence of the other.

They round yet another corner, and he scrunches his eyes shut because he cannot stop thinking.

"How did you find commanding a ship of your own?"

She asks before he can disappear, offering him the chance to talk about something that means nothing at all to either of them.

He's half a mind to scream aloud.

Instead he smirks bashfully, looks ahead once again.

"Well, it wasn't ever really my command, it's not like they were my own crew or anything,"

He clarifies, conversation easy again; she leaves a silence long enough for him to wish to elaborate.

"That chair was mighty comfortable though I've gotta say!"

And he laughs suddenly at himself, jostling her arm against his rising ribs, such is their difference.

Deanna doesn't much think about it, and so finds herself laughing gently as well, as if the emotion infects her through the skin.

As their laughter peters out, Will wonders glumly when he became the lighter of the two.

"We can make this work can't we?"

He asks her, suddenly sober, preaching water yet himself drinking wine.

Deanna smiles, but he does not turn his head to see it, rather feels the way her turning lips tug upwards at the edges of her heart. He can hear it in the ocean of all her words.

"Of course,"

She sighs out easily, almost defeatedly, but he feels her fingers squeeze his bicep tightly and knows she believes herself when she speaks.

"We always do -"

She looks up at him with immeasurable eyes, and for a single second he has no idea what she's seen that's made them so dark; he does not immediately respond.

"- don't we?"

"Course, yeah,"

Will rushes to assure her, squeezing back unable to continue looking right into her eyes for all the unanswered questions he sees there.

He loves her - he doesn't want to think about it.

He opens his mouth;

"And I'm sorry,"

"Hm?"

Sighing, he drops his arm, drops her hand, unthinking and now adrift. A crewman whose name he doesn't know passes by in brusque steps with raised eyebrows, eyes tracking in their direction.

"I couldn't change for you,"

Will explains in a lower whisper.

"I never asked you to change imzadi,"

Deanna tells him, creeping back into his side and looping her arm under his again so to steady herself.

"And I do forgive you - I'm sorry too,"

"You're sorry?"

They round a blind corner, and he looks down at her in surprise.

"I have not been - myself, lately,"

Deanna admits slowly, taking a deep breath as they pass the open holodeck doors; the sound of playing children rolling atop the waves lapping within.

"I love you - I don't need you to change."

She looks down at herself hopelessly.

"It's me who has been changed."

The children all stir up in laughter.

"I am having trouble deciding between the things I want and the things I need - I cannot see the distinction anymore,"

She breathes, and Will frowns, letting her continue with honesty he can barely recognise.

"I love you, but I cannot, and in my confusion I hurt you and I can never take that back,"

She finishes emphatically.

Diplomacy reeks of her.

"I love you too,"

Will responds softly, lost for anything better to say to her - last time he tried to help her under the weight of what consumes her, it nearly consumed him too.

And he does truly mean it when he tells her he loves her, could just spend the rest of his life saying it over and over, platonic or not.

He appreciates that even after everything, they can still admit with honesty how they have a transcendent love for one another, something which is not always gentle, yet completely out of their control.

There is just far too much between them that time can't take away.

"The things you said Deanna, you don't have to tell me you didn't mean them,"

He starts, forgetting where he meant to end up.

They round another corner and face a fork in the corridor, predictably the both of them aiming for different directions.

It's as if they are scripted this way - to always mirror their own divisions.

"I did,"

Deanna admits to him softly, slipping her arm from his, knowing just as much as he does about division.

"I did and I don't - I don't need you and yet I do,"

She ghosts further away, letting him drift towards his path, neither of them slowing their steps.

"I doubt I'll ever figure it out."

He hears her lament as she goes, and he's no idea where she's going.

Then, when she has disappeared, he hears a voice he doesn't recognise for all its measure and mechanism, greeting her kindly in manufactured shock. He smiles the thought that he doesn't need to worry about looking after her maybe as much as he had before.

Will frowns, turning quickly on his heels down the second fork, suddenly remembering where he's supposed to be.