Part IV
Jean-Luc Picard began to worry when Beverly didn't toss back an immediate retort. When Beverly turned around with her jaw set and her lips pressed tightly together, Jean-Luc Picard really began to worry. In fact, he was beginning to fear for his life. Best of all, he had no idea where the comment had come from or why he had said it. After all, they'd just managed a cease-fire between them. He wondered what would happen if Starfleet found out how easily he broke cease-fires. They would never assign him or the Enterprise to a diplomatic mission ever again.
Not that it would be a bad thing.
In fact, it would be quite pleasant to not be assigned a diplomatic mission ever again.
He wondered if he should tell them himself.
In his head, he began to compose the letter. "Dear Starfleet, I regret to inform you that one Captain Jean-Luc Picard has erred in the duties of a diplomat. On said Stardate (he'd have to fill that in later, he'd lost track of the date), Captain Picard willingly and knowingly broke a cease-fire, resulting in renewed hostilities between the two opposing factions. This transgression—
"Jean-Luc."
He blinked, surprised that he'd drifted off in thought, and doubly surprised that Beverly had spoken to him. Oh no, she was speaking to him already. That couldn't be good. Was this the moment of his death?
"Jean-Luc? Are you even listening to me?"
He blinked again and brought himself to make eye contact. No hint of murderous intent lay behind her blue irises, and he figured he was a fairly good judge of that. But he wasn't quite sure. One could never be quite sure around women. "What were you saying?" he asked. Though, the real question he wanted to ask was, "Are you going to kill me?"
Beverly motioned toward somewhere on the left side of the sheer cliff. "I found a ladder."
Frowning, he glanced over and saw that there was, indeed, a ladder. "Just now?"
With a roll of her eyes, Beverly turned away from the captain to study the ladder. "Yes. Apparently one of Lady Q's information dumps. The whole 'having to climb up a sheer rock face' must have been a little joke of hers."
"Well, you should've seen the look on your face," he said, and then inhaled sharply. Do I have a death wish?
The doctor whirled on one foot and faced him, the corners of her eyes narrowing ever-so-slightly. "I imagine," she said slowly, "that it looks a lot like the look you have on your face right now."
He couldn't deny it. "To be honest, I'm beginning to wonder if you're going to kill me."
"And to be honest, I'm beginning to wonder if you want me to."
A resigned sigh escaped his mouth. "Are you?"
Beverly brushed errant wisps of hair out of her face. "Am I what?"
"Going to kill me."
She rewarded him with a genuine smile. "No."
He smiled back. "That's a relief."
Beverly started walking over toward the ladder. "Only because it would be too much work to hide your body. Oh, and there's that whole 'Beverly, you have to be the hero and save the universe' thing, too." The last bit was in a sing-song tone. "I don't think the hero is allowed to kill their sidekick." She glanced back at him. "Even if he's asking for it." Facing forward, she continued talking, but more to herself than to Picard. "Boys just never grow out of that phase of pulling the ponytails of the girls they have a crush on. You're just as bad in adulthood, except you use words and do other annoying things instead. Honestly, how humans manage to not kill their significant others and even then manage to reproduce is beyond me. I don't think the realm of science can even touch it." By this time, she'd reached the ladder, and cautiously tugged on the side with her right hand. "Is this ladder even safe?"
At the posed question, a piece of paper appeared in Beverly's free hand. "Must be a love letter from Lady Q." She read it out loud. "The ladder is safe. And I have no idea how you humans do it, either."
"We haven't done anything," Picard muttered.
"You'd better be talking about saving the universe, Jean-Luc Picard," Beverly replied as she tucked the paper away in a pocket.
"Of course I was."
The raised eyebrow Beverly gave him clearly indicated that she didn't believe him. She motioned with her hand again. "You first."
Maybe she was going to kill him. "Oh, no. I couldn't do that. Ladies first."
"You aren't getting anymore free views of my rear end." She smiled again, that enigmatic smile that edged somewhere between amusement and the intent to kill. "Besides, it's age before beauty, we all know that."
He opened his mouth to reply and found he had none. So he closed his mouth, sucked it up, and climbed up the rope ladder. First. Halfway up, he glanced downward to check on his friend.
Beverly was following him, only a few rungs below where he climbed. For someone who was as afraid of heights as Beverly, Picard mused, she was doing remarkably well. She had to be concentrating on something else to keep herself from looking down. Perhaps she was plotting his murder, which would keep her mind occupied. But could she really plot his murder while staring at a rock face? He took another quick glance to check. And he discovered that Beverly wasn't staring at the rock face. And she wasn't looking down, either.
She was staring at his behind, instead.
Staring so intently, in fact, that she failed to notice that he had noticed.
Before she did notice, Picard brought his attention back to the ladder in front of him. For the rest of the climb, he relished his new ammunition. But by the time he got to the top, his relief of thinking Beverly had stopped plotting his demise vanished. Even while checking out his ass, she still could be strategizing how to kill him and hide his body. Damn. The edginess returned, and he couldn't even bring himself to enjoy that he'd caught Beverly out. Damn, damn, damn.
He wanted to stomp his foot and shout that it wasn't fair.
Beverly was right. He was acting like a two-year-old.
The sounds of breathing, a few swears, and then Beverly's hands appeared on the top rung, followed by her head. Picard decided to make himself as scarce as possible and strode over to the entrance. Like the cave before it, this cave's entrance had intricate Mayan face carvings. But unlike the other cave, there were also glyphs etched underneath the faces. He ducked under the overhang to get closer to the glyphs. His fingertips traced the lines of them but the movement brought him no comprehension of the glyphs themselves. When he removed his hands, flecks of mica glittered on the pads of his fingers. Brow furrowed, he kept studying the glyphs, refusing to give up.
"Scowling at them isn't going to help you understand them," Beverly's soft voice said from behind him.
He jumped at the sound, cracking the top of his head against the rough rock above him. How had he forgotten Beverly was there? Wasn't he supposed to be fearing for his life? Had he no survival instinct?
As for the last question, he was very much starting to think that he didn't have one, or at least his mouth didn't. He hadn't had this difficult of a time keeping his replies to himself since he was a youth. And the last time he'd let his mouth run off like his had been in the past day, he'd lost his heart due to the target of his words trying to kill him. Beverly already held his metaphorical heart in her hands. He'd much prefer physically dying to her opting to crush his love into dust, scattering the ashes of his deepest emotions into the proverbial winds.
And damn, his head hurt. He couldn't remember doing so, but his hand now held the top of his head. He wasn't sure of the dampness he felt there was blood or just more sweat. One glance at Beverly told him that it was blood. The mischievous scamp had gone from her eyes, replaced by her determined physician concern. "Look into my eyes," she said.
She was checking to make sure he didn't have a concussion, though at the same time, his brain repeated the words in the seductive tone he'd always imagined.
Just how hard had he hit his head? How could he think of that at a time like this?
He did as he was told, gazing steadily into his friend's captivating blue eyes. If she had any plans on killing him, she was hiding them well.
"Now let me see your scalp," she said.
He took a step back, not removing his hand from his head.
Beverly frowned and stepped forward, taking his wrists in her hands. When she went to move his hands herself, he resisted.
The doctor fixed him with a glare the captain had previously only seen when he was misbehaving in Sickbay. "Honestly, Jean-Luc, stop acting like a child and let me see. You men try to act all manly, and then when you get hurt in front of a girl, suddenly you're the biggest babies around."
That did it. He allowed his friend to move his hands. He then proceeded to glower at the vista around them as the physician assessed his head injury.
"It's just a scrape. If I had a dermal plaser, it wouldn't take me long to—" A plaser appeared in the doctor's free hand. "Thank you," Beverly said to the air, and then proceeded to make use of the plaser. Once the scrape had been healed, the plaser disappeared. The doctor took a step back and appraised her work. "Lady Q can be quite helpful. You're fine, Jean-Luc. No permanent harm done."
He grunted. "Says you." Then, wanting to be somewhere other than under his friend's annoyed gaze, he started toward the cave entrance.
"I wouldn't go in there if I were you," Beverly said as Picard fetched a flashlight from his pack. "Those glyphs say 'do not enter.'"
Though he knew perfectly well that Lady Q kept providing Beverly with extra information whenever she pleased, he chose to be belligerent anyway. "And how do you know?"
"I just do."
"Whatever." He stepped into the cavern. Once inside, his flashlight revealed nothing terribly exciting. A few steps into the first chamber, he scuffed his feet over the dirt on the floor, revealing what looked to be a tile mosaic underneath. He knelt down and cleared away more of the dirt and confirmed his supposition. Wanting to see the entire work of art, Picard methodically circled the chamber while wiping away the dirt under his feet. What emerged were tiles formed into the face of what Picard gathered to be some sort of Mayan god. The god vaguely resembled a macaw. "Fascinating," he said to himself. Primarily fascinating because he knew next to nothing about the Mayan religion—while Beverly knew practically everything through her connection with Lady Q.
He found another arched opening inset along the back wall of the antechamber. After briefly shining his light inside, where it was immediately engulfed by darkness, he strode into the next room. Then he heard something.
The captain halted and titled his head to listen. Yes, there was the noise again. After listening intently for a minute, he decided it was tiny pebbles hitting the ground. Perhaps there was a crack in the mosaic he hadn't seen and the disrupted dirt he'd scraped away was now falling into another chamber below. With a shrug, Picard stepped deeper into the main chamber. He knew a Codex had to be in here somewhere and he was determined to find it and prove Beverly wrong. Why he had to prove her wrong, he'd no idea, but dammit, he had to. His flashlight illuminated more mica, these specks reflecting the light more strongly than the sun had outside. In the middle of the chamber, he finally caught sight of the Codex in a recessed portion of the stone wall. He moved toward it, scraping at the dirt as he went, hoping to find another mosaic. Once he reached the recessed area, he did another quick survey of the walls of the chamber around him. Once again, he lit up more mica. The flecks seemed even larger, and most of them were symmetric pairs, like tiny little eyes.
The hand reaching for the Codex stopped in mid-air.
Tiny little eyes.
He spun around, highly alarmed, and the light traveling in a circle revealed that every single bit of 'mica' was in a symmetric pair.
Like tiny little eyes.
He looked up, flashlight following the movement of his head.
Something dropped onto his face.
It had tiny little legs.
Fuzzy ones.
He let out a sound a Starfleet captain and a man his age should never make. Ever. From his throat came a cry that was a cross between a strangled human, a frightened rabbit, and a very small child. And then his throat stopped working. As did his lungs. Perhaps even his heart.
If he'd dropped dead, he would've been very grateful.
Instead, he remained steadfastly alive. He wiped the fuzzy thing from his face and bolted. One glance behind him revealed the tiny pairs of symmetric eyes all following him. Only now, his flashlight revealed tiny fuzzy bodies with eight fuzzy legs attached to those eyes. He dashed over the mosaic—entirely forgetting its existence—through the opening, and then outside, barely remembering to stop before he catapulted over the ledge.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" Beverly asked, looking up from a map.
When had she gotten another map?
He couldn't manage to form a coherent thought, much less a sentence. And they were right behind him and there were thousands and their lives were at stake. "There's... behind... eyes... fuzzy... on my face..." Picard grabbed Beverly's shoulders. "Run!"
She blinked and glanced around. "Where?"
And then the spiders—tarantulas, the captain's brain told him, though he didn't comprehend it until much later—streamed from the opening he'd just run through. The herd of them (they couldn't be called anything less) flowed over the outcropping and down the sides of the cliff. They left the two humans unmolested, without even a single one of their fuzzy legs touching them.
"Oh, they're babies!" the doctor said. "Baby tarantulas! I never thought a spider could be that adorable."
His eyes so wide that they could almost fall out of their sockets, the captain turned to Beverly. He took Beverly's cheeks between his hands so that he could look her fully in the face. "Are you mad?"
Beverly cupped Picard's face with her own hands, brought him forward, and kissed him fully. Not even a second had passed before he responded, all thoughts of spiders and tarantulas and the one that'd fallen on his face fled from his mind. How long had he wanted her to kiss him like this?
She slowly, gently broke the kiss and rested her forehead on his. "Jean-Luc," she whispered.
The captain gazed into his friend's eyes again and waited for her to speak. He thought she would explain herself; even tell him that she returned his love.
At least until he saw the scamp tugging a smile at the corner's of Beverly's lips. "I do believe that you just screamed like a little girl."