Alright, this is it! Final chapter! Meant to post this sooner, but life had other plans. Anyone else get hit with winter all at once? This is by far the worst blizzard we've had in the eight years we've been up north. Several feet of snow since Sunday, and it's STILL SNOWING! The highways are shut down, the schools are shut down, it's like snowmageddon out there. Anyway, I'm very excited to finally reveal some long awaited answers. And I have a few more notes for you at the end :-)
Two weeks later
Carmen sat on the floor of her private quarters, an unmarked box open before her. Carefully, almost reverently, she added a piece of paper to the scattered pile inside. Some of the pencil marks had run due to the rain it was held under last, but still she could make out Shadow Ridge and the winged silhouette of the Grolese.
Door chimes interrupted the soothing chords of jazz that drifted overhead. "Come on in!" she called, and her heart did a little flip-flop to sense his presence fill her doorway.
"Hey," Sheppard greeted, shuffling inside. "How are you holding up?"
"I'm...fine. All things considered." A brief and somewhat sad smile flitted across her face. "I just thought it would be easier, you know? To finally send a child home. Two of them, if you count Toleel. He'll spend his days on Elba IV, but he'll be with his father at least."
"Goodbyes are never easy. Even when they're good goodbyes," he said with that straight-forward and simplistic wisdom that she always appreciated. He squatted down beside the box and gave it a curious wrinkle of his brow. "Hey, what's this?"
"Oh, just receipts, brochures...mostly stuff from our trip to Alaska last year."
"You mean right after the trial?"
Nodding, she closed the box in a sheepish hurry. It felt a little silly, to keep all these worthless odds and ends. But ever since her trial, ever since that day she was granted a home on the Enterprise, she found herself unable to get rid of even the smallest reminders of happiness.
"Oh!" Carmen sprang to her feet suddenly. "I have something for you!" She rummaged through a mountain of stuff on the sofa while Sheppard looked on, intrigued. "They're somewhere around here...oh no! What happened?"
Carmen cradled a wilted bouquet of flowers in her arms as though it were a fallen soldier on the battlefield. The petals, once a glorious shade of lavender, now appeared sad and gray. Two leaves near the base of the stalk had begun to speckle with decay.
"Are those from Vakrona?" Sheppard asked.
"Yeah. They used to look like orchids. And I remembered...well, during our last away mission...you said that your mother used to put orchids all over the house. So I wanted to...I just thought that...here." She dumped them into his hands.
His gaze wandered over the rotten blossoms tenderly. "No one's ever given me flowers before."
"No?" Carmen wrung her hands together. "Well, flowers were actually my second choice."
"What do you mean?"
Her grimace turned into a tenuous smile. "According to Klingon custom, one is supposed to bring their parmaqqay the liver of their enemy upon returning home from battle. But...I opted for flowers."
"I appreciate it," he laughed. "And here, maybe some water will help them perk up." He went into the kitchen and filled a glass from the sink. As he placed the shriveled flowers inside, it felt like putting a bandaid on an axe wound. "What was that word, by the way? Par...parma…"
"Parmaqqay," she repeated. He waited for her to explain, but she hopped up on the counter instead, letting her legs swing over the edge. "So what are your plans for today? Does your shift start soon?"
"Not for several hours," he answered."The truth is...I came by to see if you were hungry."
"Hungry?"
"Yeah. You know...ghung."
Her eyebrows shot up in surprise. "Have you been learning Klingon behind my back?"
"And that's not all," he said with a wink.
Carmen watched, perplexed, as he began to pull things from her kitchen cabinets. A skillet. A spatula. Some mixing bowls. Then he ordered a whole list of ingredients from her replicator. "What is all that for?" she asked.
"Pancakes," he replied, a smile in his voice. "Your favorite. It was your grandma's idea, actually. She said you appreciate food that's been cooked the old-fashion way. Plus, it would be nice if we didn't have to eat in Ten Forward all the time."
"I don't know…" Carmen glanced around her quarters, which looked like the aftermath of some natural disaster. "Ten Forward is a little tidier than my place."
"It's okay." The smile in his voice now reached his lips. "I don't mind your mess."
"No, you never have. " Carmen smiled back, a strong and sincere smile that he always seemed to draw from her.
Though her pancake skills were rusty, she tried to remember some of her father's best tricks and tips. It wasn't long before they had a lumpy bowl of batter to show for all their hard work. While the first pancake sizzled in butter, her quarters filled with the smell of home. There was something familiar about it all-the dried batter on the counter, her uniform slung over the back of the couch, her trombone leaning against the wall-familiar, yet also wonderfully new.
The pancakes turned out flat and terribly burnt on one side. But Carmen insisted they were the best she ever tasted. She sat on the counter, a plate in her lap and a vase of dead flowers nearby. They talked and they laughed and they ate until their hearts were as full as their bellies. Carmen told him about Jora's village and the seven Perler boys. About the fight at the bar and the night she spent in the jungle. About being captured by the Tal Shiar and marched to Shadow Ridge. About the fight for their lives and what it was like to see her father in sickbay all over again.
"You're going to miss that place, aren't you?" Sheppard asked as she came to the end. They had been gravitating towards each other slowly, and now he found himself standing in front of the counter, just inside of her knees.
"Yeah. I think I'll always miss it, but it's good to be back. Good to be here, with my parmaqqay."
His head tilted to the side. "There's that word again. Are you going to tell me what it means?"
Reaching up, she curled an errant strand of chestnut colored hair around her finger. "It means...imzadi. Beloved."
Before her words could finish sinking in, she lifted off the counter and pressed her lips against his. It was a small kiss, a brief kiss. But several moments passed before he could open his eyes again.
"I...I thought you…"
"I know what I said, back on Zinor," she hastily interjected. "That...that it would only hurt, to get attached. This is all just borrowed time for me, and so I was trying to protect myself. But...I don't want to hide behind my walls anymore. I want...well, I want you."
The breath halted in his throat. "So...I can kiss you back?"
She cupped his face in her hands, gently guiding his mouth towards hers. "You'd better."
He obliged, laughing through the kiss. It made her laugh in return, and for a moment they had to break away, eyes shining at one another. As they kissed again, she pulled herself to the edge of the counter and up against the young man. This time, the kiss was neither small nor brief.
"Crusher to Ensign Riker." The doctor's disembodied voice interrupted them all too soon. Carmen snatched the small device lying near her sink.
"What is it?" she demanded, a breathless edge of impatience in her voice.
"What do you mean 'what is it?' The recital started five minutes ago!"
"Baka!" Carmen pulled herself away from the young man. "I'll uh, I'll be right there!"
"What is she talking about?" Sheppard asked, his head still spinning from the rush of alluring sensations.
"You know how Dr. Crusher puts on these recitals every month? Where people go up and read poems and stuff?" Carmen leapt down from the counter, wiping at the flour and dried syrup stains on her clothes.
"Yeah?"
"I sort of asked if I could read something at the next one. But I completely forgot that it was tonight!"
Sheppard sighed wistfully, looking around at the glorious mess they had created. "Well, mind if I come with you?"
Her eyes sparkled at the idea. "I'd like that. My mom and dad will be there, too. And my grandma, but she'll be reading a poem she wrote for Picard."
"Your dad will be there?" He gulped, trying to banish the thoughts that had just run rampant through his mind.
"Yeah, come on!"
She took his hand and led the way. Together, they hurried through the maze of brightly-lit corridors. They were the same corridors as the ones from her childhood, but something felt different about them now. A good kind of different.
After a few more kisses in the privacy of the turbolift, they raced across Deck 10 to the performance theater. They were still holding hands when they stepped inside, pausing a moment to let their eyes adjust.
"Over here!" Crusher whispered, frantically waving at them from stageside. Carmen turned to Sheppard and kissed him on the cheek. "Try your best to stay awake, I'm not until the second half. I'll see you afterwards?"
He nodded, a boyish grin on his face as he watched her trot down the aisle to join the doctor. After they disappeared behind the curtains, Sheppard looked around for a place to sit. His stomach turned to ice when he saw Commander Riker staring at him through the crowd. Something about his unwavering gaze reminded the junior officer of a hawk locked onto its prey. He was about to slink off when Troi waved him down.
"Allan! Come sit with us!"
"Yes, Allan," Riker said, though it sounded more like a threat than an invitation. "Come over here."
Carmen's knees trembled as she took center stage. She had marched into battle before, but this...this was a whole new level of fear. The expectant silence practically smothered her Betazoid senses, and she felt sure that everyone could hear each nervous thump of her heart.
"I uh…I wanted to read something..." Carmen's voice didn't sound right, probably due to the fact that her tongue had turned to sandpaper. "Something I found in a book. It reminded me of someone. Of a lot of people, actually." She scanned the audience, trying to gauge their reaction. Most everyone had fallen asleep already. Some were even snoring aloud. Only a handful had survived Data's anthology dedicated to his cat, a 12-page series of poems and essays. Worf had taken the stage next, and managed to recapture some of the audience with his rendition of the ballad, When Your Enemy's Innards Are A-Glistening.
Amidst the sea of faces, Carmen found her mother's encouraging smile. There was her father, too, sitting rigid with his arms folded across his chest. Between them hunkered Sheppard, pale and frightened and vigorously avoiding eye contact with the commander.
"It's uh...it's called the Bridge Builder," she continued. "By Will Allen Dromgoole." Clearing her throat, she lifted a slip of paper to her face. Then, with a struggling cadence that would have made Dromgoole roll over in his grave, she read each line of the poem aloud.
An old man going a lone highway,
Came, at the evening cold and gray,
To a chasm vast and deep and wide.
Through which was flowing a sullen tide
The old man crossed in the twilight dim,
The sullen stream had no fear for him;
But he turned when safe on the other side
And built a bridge to span the tide.
"Old man," said a fellow pilgrim near,
"You are wasting your strength with building here;
Your journey will end with the ending day,
You never again will pass this way;
You've crossed the chasm, deep and wide,
Why build this bridge at evening tide?"
The builder lifted his old gray head;
"Good friend, in the path I have come," he said,
"There followed after me to-day
A youth whose feet must pass this way.
This chasm that has been as naught to me
To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be;
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
Good friend, I am building this bridge for him!"
A video flickered to life on the screen. The dim form of a Romulan appeared. He hunched over a metal table, his hands shackled in chains. "That's when I first met her, you see. When I was stationed on that miserable little planet." He spoke to someone sitting in the shadows to his left. With a nod of their head, they urged him to continue. "I was only a subcommander then. My men found a scout somewhere in the tunnels. She was a mere child, not much older than my son. It was my responsibility to dispose of her. She seemed so ready for it, so...accepting of her fate. None of my training had prepared me for that."
"But you didn't kill her?" the stranger asked.
"No. I...I let her go. Her face haunted my dreams for years thereafter. Time and again I would see her kneeling in front of my gun. But then she'd look up and it would no longer be the girl-it would be my son, Toleel. I was so afraid that he would come to a similar fate. That the war would leave him as empty and alone as that wretched child."
A mirthless smile curled the Romulan's lips. "But it was not the war that took my son. It was Carmen Riker, the child soldier. The life that I spared. When I saw her on my viewscreen, standing on the bridge of the Enterprise,she was no longer a child. But I knew her face, I knew her name. There was blood on her hands. Indeed, it was on my own hands as well. Every Romulan life that she took since that day in the tunnels stained my conscience. And the most important life of all-perhaps the only life I truly cared about-was gone because of her."
A deranged laughter seized hold of him as his eyes glinted with the madness of grief. "Now when I dream of that day, I dream of her blood streaming across the rocky ground. Of her throat cut into ragged ribbons. Ha! I look at that shine in her eyes, the shine of death. It makes me feel…" He inhaled deeply. "...at peace. Then I wake up, and she is still alive. But my son is still dead. My son is still dead!"
The video cut to black, his final words stinging the silence. Eventually another dim form came into view. This one was human. Male. Sandy blonde hair. He wore a red Starfleet uniform and looked right into the camera as he spoke.
"That was one of our first interviews with Admiral Alidar," he explained. "But this is not the Admiral Alidar that you know. Not the one that you brought to trial last year, Captain Picard. That one committed suicide on Elba IV six months ago, though Leyton had the incident covered up. No, this Admiral Alidar is from Carmen Riker's universe. She wasn't the only one to cross over, you see."
He looked away for a moment, listening carefully. Then, deciding it was safe, he continued. "My ship was sent to investigate a strange energy signature near the planet where you found Miss Riker. We were shocked to discover a Romulan Warbird in its death throes. We pulled Admiral Alidar from the helm, along with a handful of survivors from his crew. There were strange creatures onboard, some sort of human and machine hybrid. The Borg, he called them."
An involuntary shudder ran down the officer's spine. "The Warbird's shields had been weakened by its battle with the Enterprise. They were boarded by a roaming party of Borg once Miss Riker's ship had already been destroyed. But something happened when they crossed over into our universe. The drones...they went into a dormant state. We tried to study them, but found their biology far too advanced. Leyton ordered us to press Alidar for answers, and he revealed that his people had developed a weapon against the Borg-a weapon that would bring about the war's end. Yet he had no incentive to help us build such a thing."
A hint of guilt crept into his eyes. His voice dropped lower, almost to a whisper. "When you brought Miss Riker to the council, Leyton finally found the leverage that we needed against Alidar. He told him of how she had come through the same wormhole. How she had found her family again, rebuilt her career. All while he was languishing in prison, without a ship, without a son. He is demanding her life in return for the weapon. A weapon that...in all honesty...we may need soon. You see, two weeks ago, the Borg drones from Alidar's ship...they woke up. If Leyton builds this weapon, he will possess the only viable means of saving the Federation. It will be all he needs to declare martial law. You must find another way. You must help us, Captain Picard. You must help us all."
The video ended, leaving the screen an ominous black. Leyton paced the floor up and down, sighing repeatedly. "Good thing Talbot intercepted this message before it reached the Enterprise," he said, turning his attention to a man who hung, beaten and bloodied, between two strong-armed officers. Sweat dampened his sandy blonde hair while his red uniform hung in threads from the night of torture he had just endured. Leyton looked him over with disgust. "Why would you do this, Wharton? Why would you turn on me? I offered you command of your very own ship if we could get that weapon built!"
"These are people-real people," he said through swollen lips. "You can't just use them like pawns in a chess game."
"Yes I can," Leyton replied, slipping a phaser into his hands. "And then I will rewrite the rules."
"I saw her, you know. On Zinor." Wharton struggled to lift himself a little. "She damn near killed herself trying to save a fellow crewmember. She's not the monster Alidar described. We can't just hand her over-"
A bolt of energy shot straight into his chest. His eyes and mouth flew open, frozen in pain. His entire body glowed for but a few seconds before he seemed to evaporate into thin air.
Leyton switched the phaser in his hand back to stun. Calmly then, he walked towards the monitor and pressed a few buttons. Two words flashed across the screen as he disappeared down the long and dark corridor, humming to himself all the while.
MESSAGE DELETED
I would love to hear what you think! This is the end of this episode, but there will be one more for this series (with a little one-shot inbetween just for fun, a scene on Betazed during Carmen's visit with Lwaxana). I'm still tying up some loose ends for the final installment, but I have a rough draft of the first chapter written, so I'll try and post it for you sometime soon. I hope you'll keep following! A HUGE thanks to everyone who has made it this far, and to those who have left such wonderful and witty reviews. You guys keep me going :-)