A/N: As a reminder, this weird version of Star Trek is based on my life, so there's no telling what will happen because life is unpredictable.
Ode to A Starship by Lina Shay
Chapter Twenty Two: Lonely Among Us
"Make sure to feed Jalapino and Squishy," Sisma told me with a hug. "And pet Jalapino too. Ok?"
I nodded.
"Thank you so much," Sisma told me.
B'Liz punched me in the arm. "Don't do anything stupid."
"I'll try," I shrugged. "Have a great shoreleave."
B'Liz and Sisma got into Peter the Shuttlecraft and flew out of the shuttlebay. I let out a sigh of discontent. An entire week on the Wasatch by myself. I guess it wasn't totally by myself. I still had Jala hanging around. Darren was going to be there for a while. Speaking of Darren...
"Hey, Lina," he greeted as I walked down the corridor. "You staying here for shoreleave again?"
I nodded.
"You could see if someone is headed toward Bajor and get a ride," he suggested.
"No, I would rather not," I muttered. "Besides, my father is no longer on Bajor. They sent him to see a specialist on Earth."
"Great!" Darren exclaimed. "I can take you to Earth with me. You could see your father again."
Why was Darren so obsessed with me going home? He was like this the last time we have shoreleave. Why couldn't he just get it? I didn't want to go home. I didn't want to face it. I would rather just go on with my life instead bringing myself face to face with the tragedy my family went through. Why couldn't he just leave me alone?
"Darren, I have something to do right now," I told him. "I'll see you before you leave."
I headed straight toward my quarters. I sat on my bed and looked around at how empty it was. Abelista went back to Ktaris for shoreleave, so I had the quarters to myself. It just made everything more lonely. I wished that I knew what to do with myself.
I told the computer to play some music, and I looked over an old Bajoran novel about the princess of the Rakantha province before the world government was insistuted. She was apparently in love with a Vedek and had to go on a quest to save her sister from an awful plague. I decided that the novel was interesting, but could have been much more interesting. I thought that it would have been good if instead of being on a quest to save her sister, she could be on a quest to defeat the Pah-Wraiths. And instead of being a princess, she could be a scullerly maid in the house of the Kai.
I grabbed a datapad before I lost my flow of ideas. I made sure to write down every alteration I would have made to the book. I decided that the main character wasn't just an scullerly maid, but was called by the prophets to be the only one who could defeat the Pah-Wraiths. I decided to keep the idea that she falls in love with a Vedek. That was actually the only thing I kept of the origional story.
For once in a long time, I was enthrawled my something. I was interested in something. I found something I liked to do. I spent a great deal of time writing this novel. Around the sixtieth kilobyte and the third day, my flow of inspiration ebbed. My life was back to being meaningless. In some desperate hope that my inspiration would return, I spent a great deal of time staring at an empty datapad.
Jala still had to keep things secure, despite the fact that there was nearly no one left on the ship. She finished with her security sweep of the ship about twenty-one hundred hours every night. Because it was my only contact with her, I stayed up so we could talk and play on the holodek. My sleeping habits were way off. Not only did I not get to bed before two hundred hours, but I slept almost ten hours since I had nothing really to get up for. And it seemed that even when I went to bed, I tossed and turned for hours.
Somewhere amongst the common, I noticed that my religious practices had been being neglected. I tried to spend more time praying in front of my mandala and reading the words of the Kai, but I wasn't concentrating well. I also had some catch-up work for Andrannon that wasn't getting done. I had planned for this break to be a great relief, not only to be away from work for a while, but also a catch-up period so I would no longer be behind in my work. Everything I had planned on during shoreleave seemed to go undone. I found myself at the end of liberty and I wasn't any better off.
I got a message from my mother one day. It was nice to see her face again. Everyone said that I looked just like her. I never minded.
"Hello, my little groatcake," she said. "Not much is happening here. Mostly we are just waiting. Tomorrow your father gets his MRI and CT. Then on Tuesday, they decide if he is going in for surgery and when. So, we are still keeping busy. Prophets willing, we will only be here on earth for a month. I hope to go shopping for clothes at one point. Some of the earth fabrics are quite confortable.
"That's so exciting about Risa. I hope something good comes from it. You might try asking Grandma Shay about that. She once lived on Risa. I'd better get back to Dad. We have physical therapy in one and a half hours, and we haven't had breakfast yet. May the prophets guide you, Lina."
When the screen when black, I sat back in my chair, wishing I had taken Darren offer and gone to see my mother. I missed her so dearly.