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After the hubbub of the Xhand story breaking, the previous day's session had been difficult for Deanna as well as Jean-Luc. He'd been quick to anger, and completely unable to block the intensity of his emotions from her. She'd felt every barbed comment he'd thrown her way. She'd known it wasn't personal but she wasn't used to such venom from him. In the end, she'd put an early end to it. Told him they weren't progressing. She'd left him alone, told Beverly to steer well clear of anything approaching discussion of the day.
He opened the door to her, his face ashen. "Deanna, I would like to apologise for my behaviour yesterday. I was rude to you."
"You absolutely do not need to apologise to me."
"Well, nonetheless, I am sorry."
"Jean-Luc, listen. You have my permission to say whatever you want, whenever you want. I promise, I won't be offended, it takes a lot. I live with Will, remember?!"
He smiled, it didn't reach his eyes, but it was the right reaction at least. She tried a different tack, "Has Beverly gone already?"
He was busying himself, replicating some drinks for them, "Yes." He called from the kitchen.
"And Louis?"
He wandered back through with two steaming mugs, passing her one, "Actually, he's still here. I think…"
"Oh?" He wasn't going to talk to her today, she could already tell, "Is school out?"
He was shivering a little, his hands wrapped around the mug, she'd already noticed the thick sweater he was wearing despite the fairly pleasant weather for the time of year. A bad day then. "Is he going to school?"
"Oh… I uh… perhaps I should ask him." He said. He rose and went in the direction of the staircase. She could hear him shout up to his son, his voice wobbly, lacking in the power he had once had. Now it sounded husky, weak.
Soon enough, he returned to the back room where they routinely stayed for their sessions. "He'll be down soon."
"It will be good to see him, it's been a few weeks."
He didn't answer her. Instead, he sat down, taking the mug in his hands once again. She was happy to wait him out, at the very least, he needed the company. From upstairs, she could hear the sounds of a large teenager crashing about in a rush eventually resulting in giant footsteps bounding down the stairs.
"Papa, pourquoi tu m'as pas réveillée?" he shouted in French.
He looked at her guiltily, shrugging, "He's upset that I didn't wake him."
"Papa!"
"Quoi Louis?" he shouted back, more than a little anger creeping in.
Louis appeared in the doorway, "Ah Tata, salut." He said, a happy, easy smile on his face. He leaned down to kiss her.
"Louis, hi… how are you?"
"Late!" he shouted back from the kitchen. She could hear him ordering a croissant and a glass of chocolate milk. She couldn't speak French but she had grown to recognise the odd word here and there over the years since Beverly and Jean-Luc had settled here.
"Can I help?" she called back.
"I could really use a ride… Papa?"
In that instant, she felt a cold fear wash over her before she realised from where it had originated. She turned to Jean-Luc who was frozen with the mug half-way to his mouth. His eyes were wide in terror for just a second before he realised she had noticed.
"Why don't I give you a ride Louis? I can take the ground car, Jean-Luc? Would that be okay?"
He looked at her, nodding. Grateful.
"Papa?" shouted Louis, this time from nearer the front of the house. "Papa?" he repeated, losing the patience he was working hard to maintain.
"I'll be right back." She said quietly to Jean-Luc, patting him on the knee. "Coming Louis. One second."
Jean-Luc remained frozen in position. She worried what would happen when she left, but part of her was also curious. She left him, he remained static. "I'll be right back."
He nodded at her, dumbly, eyes wide.
On the way to the lycée, Deanna took the opportunity to question Louis, mindful not to increase his stress given how late he was. "So, how are things going, Louis?"
He was digging around in his bag, sure he had forgotten something, "Oh uh… I think at least…"
"It's okay, I know it's difficult," she said as she drove through unfamiliar streets.
"When he first came back… I mean, it was, it is so great to have him back. I would dream of him… when he was missing, when we thought he was dead."
"It must be very confusing."
"I suppose so… I just…" he paused, she waited him out. She was struck by how similar he was to his father when it came to matters of the heart. Both of them trying diligently to articulate feelings they would rather remained secret. "It would be better if he weren't so… hurt."
'Hurt' was a good word. She knew Louis's French was far stronger than his English. Jean-Luc had said years ago, both boys were far more eloquent in French. He and Beverly weren't worried, it was natural; they were living in France, spoke mostly French aside from with their mother. Louis had a beautiful accent when he spoke English, though Ted was starting to lose his now he was away off-planet. Just enough of a hint of their French heritage. The English would come later, as it had for Jean-Luc when he had left for the Academy. Of course, the accent hadn't hindered anything when it came to women… Beverly had told her ll about Louis's nocturnal escapade...
"It must be difficult for you to be so patient with him. I know he appreciates how strange this must be for you."
"It's okay Tata, I can see he's struggling. I know he'll get better, that we need to be patient… I know he's been treated terribly, by the Xhand. He's really trying though. This is it, just here on the left, merde…"
She pulled the ground car over coming to a halt outside a suspiciously empty lycée. "Merde." He repeated. This word at least she knew. She had heard Jean-Luc using it through the years…
"Good luck Louis, I hope you don't get into trouble." She said as he kissed her goodbye.
"I've been getting an easy ride… lately," he finished, shrugging. He climbed out of the car, pulling on his backpack. "Salut Tata!" he shouted as he jogged toward his school.
She'd learned a lot from his distracted chatter. She'd taken advantage really, knew he would be thinking about his lateness rather than the diplomacy of what he was telling her. Thanks to the solipsism of the teenager, Louis seemed to have a pretty good buffer between him and his father's trauma, thankfully. She could tell that he really didn't know how much it was costing his father to even get through the day. She was grateful for that, she'd worried at first that Jean-Luc would need to go into some sort of half-way house before he could re-join his life. They did seem to be managing though she wasn't sure if the years of grief were better or worse than what they were dealing with now.
Beverly was seeing another therapist, Deanna herself was too close to be of much use. Besides, treating her and Jean-Luc at the same time would have been unethical. He needed serious intervention, intense daily therapy, Beverly needed someone to hold her together, someone to vent to. Deanna couldn't be that for her and treat him at the same time. Still, she was glad that Louis had no idea how badly off his father was, it was better that way, better that he was protected from the worst the universe could offer. What had happened to Jean-Luc shouldn't have happened at all…
When she arrived back at the house, she let herself in using the override Beverly had set for her. She found him exactly where she had left him, sitting in the same armchair in the garden room at the rear of the house.
He was looking out at the garden, lost in thought, tight lines of tension on his face. He turned to her suddenly aware that she had reappeared. She felt a bolt of fear, recognising it as his immediately. Sometimes, it was hard to tell when she knew the person she was reading so well.
"It's okay, it's just me," she said gently.
He nodded, pulling himself together, "I'm sorry…"
"You don't need to be… Louis was fine, definitely late."
"Okay…"
She took a seat opposite him, "I know how afraid you feel right now."
He looked at her, surprised. "I'm not scared."
She quirked an eyebrow at him, her face telling him that she didn't believe him for a second. "Empath, remember?" she said, pointing to herself.
He dropped his head then, a hand going to his brow, his classic stress-tell. "I'm terrified…"
"I know."
"I keep thinking… they would… after days of nothing, they would just appear. Sometimes they would take me out of the cell… there was a room, they would... And sometimes, they would just start right there in the cell." He stopped, started to rub his arm subconsciously. There were clearly parts of the story he wasn't able to yet say aloud. "Then I was moved somewhere else… there was a different species, some kind of subservient people. I was left alone, for long enough… And suddenly they just appeared again. And it started all over."
"What did they do? In the room." She hated to do this, but she had to make him say it.
His voice had dropped to a whisper, "They beat me. Over and over again… they didn't have anything sophisticated, just brute violence. I couldn't protect myself. They're so much bigger…" He stood again, turning to the window, "They just punched, kicked, sometimes with batons. It didn't matter what I did, it was… mechanical, thorough. I was in so much p-pain…all the t-time."
He started weeping then, he sat down on the arm of the chair he had just vacated, his head in his hands. She could feel the grief pouring from him.
"I couldn't make them stop… All the time… agonising pain. They would leave me alone just long enough to heal the worst of it… then they would start over." He paused, and she waited for him to go on, knowing that words just didn't matter sometimes.
"I don't know if they did it to anyone else… by that time, I didn't really care about the rest of the crew. I just wanted it to stop. I couldn't believe it was happening at first… it was humiliating… I couldn't get over how this could happen to me." He rubbed at his thighs, tried to regulate his breathing. "I feel so ashamed…" he said ever so quietly, his voice breaking on the last word.
He sobbed, she went to him, hugged him fiercely, her own tears stinging her eyes. "Oh Jean-Luc… I'm so sorry this happened to you."
She held him as he wept. His body convulsing with the power of his emotion. She'd known he had been in a terrible state when he was found. She'd read the reports of the other reclaimed crew, knew about the brutal conditions. It sounded to her as though he had been singled out in some way… What he was disclosing was so much more than anything the others had divulged about the missing Admiral. They'd all been very clear about being beaten from time to time, but none of them had endured anything near the scale of punishment as he had, nor for so long. He'd been found much later…
"There was no explanation… no end goal. It was just violence for its own sake. They didn't ever say… And now… I just keep thinking that they're going to find me, here. I can't let my guard down."
"You know they can't."
"Do I?"
"If the Xhand turned up in orbit, what do you think would happen?"
"I uh…" He stopped, giving the question serious thought. "They probably wouldn't get past the Mars perimeter defence… I know, I know the way I feel, it's not rational."
"Very few fears are."
"In my cell… they must have had some kind of transporter technology. They could use it… find me here…"
"Jean-Luc, what happened to you was terrible. But believe you me, if the Xhand ever showed up in the Terran system, there is no single way we'd let them find you. Will would have the entire fleet on them so fast…" she said, knocking his knee with her own.
"Hah…" he smiled.
"But I understand you are feeling fearful. I think we could probably help a little. Maybe we could update your home security? It's probably been a few years?"
He sat up then, intrigued. "I wouldn't know… Perhaps Beverly… when I was away..?"
"Maybe that's something we could look into."
