JMJ

Chapter Thirty-Three

The Brunt of the Storm

Some time earlier…

Putting fear and joy together was not exactly a novel concept. "Thrill" most called it. The Ferengi preferred the term "motivation", but to Brunt it was control. To understand these two emotions was the ultimate lucrative power. It was far more profitable than Rule of Acquisition Number 55 "Take joy from profit and profit from joy." Simply knowing a person's fears and joys was enough to own them, and Brunt knew his people. Despite what Ferengi tried to claim, they were ever trusting creatures. They longed for reliance on others with such passion that it almost rivaled their passion for latinum, and how often had Brunt used this against them. Of course, it only worked if the one implementing the control had both of his own fear and joy under his reins.

Or was good at pretending this to be so…

No one was infallible. Brunt had made mistakes even in his own philosophy of life, but when it did work, it was perfection like a brew of the finest wine, the vintage of which Brunt relished with the gentle sips of the most refined connoisseur when watching his plans play out.

But the fear and joy he felt now was something more powerful, more exploding with color and energy, more nearly unbearable, that it was something quite out of his expectations. It strengthened him with a joy of all the power he felt running through his body, but it was also a fear that rushed through him. It gave him more power still to know that this powerful terror pulsing through his brain was something that no one else could sense. It was a power he knew was partly false. He was intoxicated with Keeoopii serum overpowering his emotions and senses to lull the host into the warmth of delight that could not be warranted, and yet the fear of this knowledge of what was happening strengthened that joy rather than lessened it.

It was as fascinating as it was dull, but no one said that gaining power was without its own sacrifices. How the Keeoopii did with all power and grace through Brunt's weak and miserable physical body make him do all that he might have done anyway. Was it irony? Yet it was so sweet.

Drowning in the contrast of fear and joy he clung to it all the harder even when blackness enshrouded him when the parasite forgot to let him know what was happening, but his anger was fleeting as the serum continued gushing through him. It was like the veins of his blood being constantly soothed by a dreamy sauna. His brain was almost a separated entity from his body. One might even call it a soul, but this entity bathed and soaked in this power, in this unspeakably unholy but glorious bath, and it was also enlightening.

There was a tiny part of him, a prick that was always screaming, always warning. The more he basked, however, the more he understood that that screaming prick had always been there for as long as he could remember. He was sure it was in the back of everyone's minds. That pretty little thing that was always insecure. It was only satisfied when someone else was screaming too.

He trembled deep within himself when he heard the screams on the transmition screen. He was back in the capital, but he felt as though he was still in the Lagoran Highlands as much as he felt that he was in Ferenginar City. Where did it matter where he was physically, anyway? The mind was a transient thing.

Females crying, children terrorized, men pretending to be brave by acting angry, but it was all the same. Their joy had been stripped from them, the joy of complacency. The person he and his merged Keeoopii was speaking to was little important to them. Poolsha'Bai. Such a nasty little witch, but she was with her Keeoopii compatriot quite the clever beast, and she too had been given what she always dreamed, power over man.

But he like Poola'Bai despite their technical talk about plans and merges knew that it was the torture that made them feel alive. It was the fear. It was the power. And it was double the relish with the Keeoopii, double the resonations of their own personal fears and double the joy that it gave them. He was almost queasy with the feeling as though he could no longer stand on his legs. He seemed to feed on their negative emotions like sustenance as a plant draws up water into its roots.

That is the sustenance of the Keeoopii, the Keeoopii thought— he and the Keeoopii together.

Yes…

Now it was only to make the rest of the Ferengi Alliance feel the joy of knowing that their enemy was one easy to defeat so that they would forget their fears of the invading Keeoopii. Brunt had made certain that the one blamed was the moody whiny Gloobram (harmless in himself, but so easy to manipulate). It was Brunt who made sure that it looked like Hidden Profiters had done the destruction that was hurting now so many people in Lagoran City.

The Hidden Profiters were to be blamed on the destruction of Poolsha'Bai's home, her work with the environment, her push for WRM. Destruction of property was something the people of Ferenginar abhorred and feared. That someone would dare was incongruous. It was the most barbaric of things. And although some New Coursers were known to wreck and steal from Old Aquisitioners behind their backs, this ploy of the Keeoopii would end the Hidden Profiters. It would end the reign of the Keldar's too by making it look like Quark was in on it by helping fund Gloobram and making Rom look completely incompetent, and as for Ishka… she would be blamed on allowing the Keeoopii to get through in the first place.

Once the Hidden Profiters and the Keldars were out of the way, it would be smooth sailing towards the Keeoopii and Ferengi merge towards the beginning of the Ferengi Alliance's power that would reach to the ends of the universe. There was not one corner of the known systems that did not have the teeth of a Ferengi sinking into it or at least their pawing fingers with latinum and holy greed. Now it would be tenfold and soon limitless in the confines of power at the head controlling and maintaining that every Ferengi worked towards the same goal united, male and female, young and old, popular and unpopular, gentle and strong…

Brunt held his PADD to Ooaseel upon the Nagal throne. How he got there, he did not recall, but his irritation about it was so fleeting.

He grinned so wide his mouth hurt, but the pain was part of his joy. His eyes were so wide they stung. His heart pounded so hard it shook him with violent reverberations. But it was dull pain as much as it was deep. It had always been there.

Always.

He waded in this ghastly pool like a sick ulbolay that had wondered into a warm mucky vat where it would remain until it realized that it could not move out of it even if it wanted to after gorging itself on the rotting remains of what a farmer had no use for. It would die from the poisons left for the greeb-rats. His mind swam like one finally sinking beneath the murky water but finding that one could still breathe and could open one's eyes as one felt the warmth of the oozing thick liquid gorge him inside and out. He was no animal, he was in control.

"The Congress of Economic Advisers will meet immediately to decide how to handle this situation," said Ooseel so poised, so elegantly, like a genius of power, wisdom, grace and beauty.

"Just thumb scan here for the nagal seal, O, Acting Nagus." His voice felt foreign, stronger than himself; it was a mere instrument for use rather than part of his body like any flute or horn. "And we will begin the investigation into the First Clerk's involvement and prove that the Keldar's are feuding against themselves to the destruction of the Ferengi Alliance."

"This is dangerous," Ooaseel admitted as though she was concerned, and she smiled gently at Brunt, despite the hateful coldness in her harsh commanding eyes.

Brunt only sneered back a full Ferengi sneer.

He hated her. She pleased his senses but he feared her also. Hatred was, after all, another link between fear and joy. There was a reason why people said that love and hatred were closer to each other than apathy. The emotion of it all bristled through him like a brush of needles just as he was sure it did to Ooaseel to look upon the Alliance's most notorious ex-liquidator.

Brunt used to stand for everything Ooaseel abhorred, and Ooaseel used to stand against everything Brunt upheld, but how the Keeoopii had brought them together and had merged their hatred into one hatred. How Ferenginar would bring all in the Alliance together in the same way.

"To accuse the First Clerk of treachery is to place an investigation upon the whole family," Ooaseel added.

"Ah! As I just said, my lady!" declared Brunt prostrating himself as before a queen. "And might I add that after this investigation starts with the help of the best investigator, Bogal, mind you, I request that we also look into the arrest of a certain Ilgaina. She is not what she seems, and although she is good at being illusive, I think a simple matter of file-hunting will find squeeze her out of hiding. She's faked her identity, I'd sure of it."

"One investigation at a time," retorted Ooaseel.

Brunt was not sure how much time elapsed between her retort and his resentment which was blinded again into blackness by the Keeoopii, but the next thing he was fully conscious of was the screen behind them.

It had been showing Tower commercials at random but suddenly the volume became louder, and the jingles were replaced by humming machinery. Both he and Ooaseel turned to the screen with confusion that shook the parasites just a little from their hold. It was like a shiver beneath the seal of a blanket in the night. A cold draft swept through, but it was quickly stifled.

It was only Meegs.

Admittedly, neither the Keeoopii in his head nor Brunt himself knew much about Meegs' purpose in the plans of the Keeoopii collective, except that he was breeding the true goddess of the Ferengi with technology left over from the failed Aavara.

Brunt frowned as he studied the screen, but the Keeoopii's veil soon had the serum lulling him again.

He did not care the purpose of it after a time. After all, if Quark was going to suffer, it was a treat he need not question. If something truly was amiss, the Keeoopii aboard the Paradigm's Haven would stop Meegs. The remains of the Aavara's involvement well-armed them with secret technologies. He had heard Meegs was somewhat mad, but not so mad that he could pull loose of his leash of which he was unaware.

The emotions built up again like boiling water in Brunt's veins to see Quark humiliated as he tried so hard to be brave and noble. How pathetic he made himself allowing such self-conceit to get the better of him. Of course he would not allow Sharlezeed, Bennar, or Nog, take his place. How much a man lauded himself in suffering to keep his dignity! Brunt knew all about dignity. The most fleeting of all facades, it was not worth keeping up for greater things. Pain was no obstacle to such martyrs, however— and how unsurprising that Quark was such a fool now that he lowered himself into thinking it was love that compelled him rather than pride.

Love was only the greed one had to keep joy beside him.

There was no love. Love was a lie. There was only power. Love was propaganda for sentimentality and to make people feel that lust for the company of people was more important than greed for money or power. It was to put the weak into their place for the powerful to step on them more easily. The hilarity of the moment swelled so much in Brunt that he felt his heart would burst from the pain of it, but he loved it either way. Oh, how pathetically Quark tried not to cry out! How he tried to pray to the Dayitela!

How ironically pathetic!

The once feisty little worm who believed in every last tittle of the Rules of Acquisition written down through the hand of the most fleeting whim of some Grand Nagus or other now traded it all for an ancient belief more sentimental than anything the Federation put forth to control their own people.

The joy, the fear, and the hatred Brunt felt was sheer ease, a high concentration of syrupy-sweet balm upon all the pain inside Brunt. It was intoxicating. No matter how it pained him he could not let go of it even if he was able. He would not ever. It only made him stronger. It only made him better.

Every kick on Quark's body might as well have been Brunt's kick not Meegs'.

He had once felt the power of it swelling through him when the little bar proprietor squealed at every wound inflicted upon him like some Earth-piglet through Brunt's order long ago on that Bajoran space station. The memory of it swelled Brunt's pride, but this was so much more than that had been. This was power incarnate, this moment. He fed upon it like a leach, sucking the blood from its victim. Every humiliating gesture Meegs made was more than any shock that Brunt had inflicted upon Quark outside of the Keeoopii revolution.

It was…

Not through Brunt's own power, but he found himself willing to ride upon the power that was not his own if it gained him what he wanted, even if it meant the loss of his own…

Quark was not giving in. It was becoming unnatural. He just kept chanting like a madman, like a Hupyrian moon-dreamer after smoking too much of their hypnotic drugs. No, it was worse than that somehow. He was not sure how, but it was worse. Brunt wondered if Quark had gone completely insane, but he knew that was not it. No madman no matter how insane could keep going like this. No drug could induce this. Quark had no pyrocyte for strength. He had not a drop left. His weak little spineless heart should be bursting through the seams, rupturing his entire cardiovascular system like a blocked pressure pump, but he remained as he was. No complaint. Not a squeak, not a gasp, not a typical Quark whimper, not even a pant. His voice became stronger rather than weaker, calmer rather than crazier, more sympathetic and loving than desperate, and Meegs became more and more like a rabid beast worse than any vengeful Nausicaan. He was the one growing more insane with each chant Quark made. He even began missing his target.

His assistant doctor was shaking out of his Keeoopii merge by the shock of this. That was evident enough.

Was something happening beyond all their control? Something that was from that hallowed River that Brunt himself hardly believed in anymore? And yet for someone who had not feared the afterlife in all his life either from belief that he had it made or lack of belief that it mattered at all, he suddenly felt a guilt that made him feel as though a great wave from that same River would wash him straight to the Vault.

Chill like an Andorian breeze filled Brunt as he stared with wide eyes at the scene that neither he nor the Keeoopii comprehended. It was like a stone into a cold pool rippling through him. Ripping from within him. Shattering him like falling through a glass panel. His own chest was starting to burn almost whispering of a heart attack himself.

It's fake. It's the only explanation. What was happening on screen was created by Quark and his friends. They probably had already defeated Meegs. That had to be it. That had to be it!

But despite all this, he felt like he would faint, but was it he who was fainting or the Keeoopii? He suddenly felt naked.

He choked. The psychical response that pulsed through his body had him release such a violent heave that he dropped his PADD stumbling forward. It felt so distant like action that was not his but an action of someone of little importance in the background of a busy hall. All was within him… or was it beyond?

The Keeoopii?

No.

Pattering.

Rain?

Fire rain.

The sound of it grew. It was pelting far too hard to be fire rain, but it could be nothing else, and it pelted harder, as though his already sensitive sense of hearing was turned up ten times. It was deafening. So deafening that he held his ears for pain with a silent scream of agony, but holding them did nothing. The scream could not escape his lungs. The sound of rain all went straight through to his brain and pounded in his head.

It was drumming. Drumming, drumming. Not war drums, not execution drums, but the drumming for the procession of life. The life that came through along the River. The rushing of a waterfall poured upon his mind down through him to his heart and washed through every vein to drown him, and like the fire rain it was, it burned.

The burning was so intense that he lost completely the sense of where he was, and what had happened to him before or after or even if there was a Keeoopii. He had the vaguest sense that something other than himself was screaming. After all, he had no power to scream himself amidst such sudden agony. The Keeoopii was fleeing the emotions of Brunt no longer under its control, but beyond any control.

He was alone.

Was it strange that he did not like it?

The blanket was gone.

He was cold and prone.

At least if the Keeoopii had been there, they would have guilt together. For that was truly what caused the most pain. His crimes did not need words. He felt them fuller than anyone reciting them to him. He knew what his crimes were. All his life? Had he ever been innocent?

Well, no one was born conniving. He recalled one moment long ago when the rain had stopped. Such a blessed moment it seemed now being drowned in a monsoon of fire rain inside and out as though the clouds of the storm were within his body; lightning struck from vein to vein and synapses to synapses.

The rain had stopped in that lucid memory. The sight of courting Ferengi fireflies bloomed to life from their hiding spots in the blackness.

Why was there blackness in such a city?

Oh, yes, because the fog was so thick, and the light nearest him was doused on purpose.

#

"Can you see them? Can you?"

"Where? Where?" his own voice so little and young.

Kneeling beside him, the warmth of another body. She was naked but the toddling child hardly knew anything different. He was just as unclad as most babies and little children were in those days. The feminine laughter was musical and bell-like. It annoyed him that she laughed at his frustration, but he loved it. Yes. Loved it, either way.

She pointed her fingers out in front of him, and sure enough there were the little blinking lights like magic floating in the fog in some surreal sort of dance. Immediately, he ran to them full of wonder and delight.

"Be careful, they may pinch if you try to grab them."

But he did not listen. He was good at catching things, or so he thought. He prided himself in the snails, worms, and toads he had come upon in the past. He grabbed at the light to bring one to her. She seemed to love them so much, and he could see why. Just think of all those little glowing baubles put along a string to hang from ear to ear when she sung a lullaby over his head. It would be more brilliant than any suit jacket of his father. But as he snatched he was pinched, and crying began instantly.

That strange but love-filled creature that had warned him did not mock him now, but instantly came running, her bare feet pattering like wings along the lush garden-like courtyard. She snatched him before he was too covered in mud in perekooli beds. She snatched him with greater ease than he could ever manage with a frog or even a worm, and she held him close kissing his head.

He reached up after a few moments and kissed her back despite himself.

The fireflies continued to dance around them in their strange courting dance like some alien ball. He relented to watching in her arms, and with humility accepted that it was a power beyond his, just like the power of the one who held him.

#

It was so shortly after that that his father had allowed her to be put into indentured servitude. She had done something apparently illegal, but Brunt had never known what it was for sure. He never bother to find out when he was clever enough to figure out such things. At the time his father did nothing to save her. In fact he seemed rather glad that he no longer had to bother over her. Their contract was at an end, and despite the childish tears of his son, the father convinced him that it was for the best. It was just.

Brunt had believed him. It still hurt, but he believed him with all his being, just like anything that had to do with power, but he believed him not in the way that he truly felt that it was just in any sense but that his father was in control and he had no longer wanted her. It had always fascinated him, and that fascination meant more than anything else, so that it was fairly early in his life that he tricked his own family members himself out of their latinum and gleefully went off to make something of himself more in control than his father thought he had been.

He quickly learned how easy it was to trick Ferengi with latinum to get power. How willingly they traded latinum for power! It was so mesmerizing. So beautiful. So glorious.

Was it still those fireflies?

How many people did he squish between his fingers like gree-worms, and how he bathed in their tears! The weaker the creature the easier it was and the more satisfying his power felt. What a beast was his fattened soul, fat from gorging on anyone who got in his way. Unlike other Ferengi who felt nothing personal in the game of latinum, everything Brunt did was deeply personal. Everything was about power. He was a leach. No worse. Far worse. He was a zombie in Ferengi flesh— a zombie of his own making that devoured the living. The more alive they were, the more full of wonder, the more innocent, the more gentle, the more he loved it. It was the only thing he loved.

Now, though more than leach, he was the fattest, bulgiest, grossest looking parasite, veins popping out pulsing with vile energy from every creature he had sucked up, and the pain of every one of those people he had conquered with ease fell upon him now. The ghost of their suffering was inescapable. After all, their suffering was all still inside his soul. The suffering, the pain, the rage, the confusion…

It used to bring him joy that soothed his own fears. He wept through tears of rage; it was too much to handle now. He would do anything to make it stop. Anything. But then that was why he was unforgivable, because, of course, he was too horrid to go back on all he had done now. He was a monster. He was the undead. He was a demon. There was no hope for him, and neither did he deserve pity from anyone— much less the one to whom the River belonged. Much less the one to whom the River flowed in a place beyond the Divine Treasury.

He would explode. He wanted to as he saw the soft faint glow at the end of the River from that bend he sat gorged as he was stopping so many others from passing through. He was a soul beyond recognition, an ugly, gruesome bloating thing— a cancerous tumor. A bug that anyone would squish from fright and disgust.

He had no power. It was all an illusion and a lie he had told himself from the beginning. A lure from the Krokatwa to fatten his heart for a scrumptious meal that only a Krokatwa would like.

It may have been innocent once, but just like that little flying light he tried to grasp, he was pinched every time. He had just learned to ignore it, but he never had any true power over those little glowing baubles. Never. Just as he had laughed through his tears at his mother's pain alongside his sardonic father, how much further he had laughed at his step-siblings. Each one he tricked into their place. He sneered at each one so close that he could see his reflection in their hollow eyes lost in misery at losing to him.

The bauble at the end of the River seemed to beckon him, if only he would accept it like he had the scoop of his mother's arms when he had still been innocent.

He squeezed his eyes shut and rotting sludge seemed to squirt out of them numb with pain like insalubrious mud slapped upon a bleeding wound. He clenched his teeth so that the sharpest ends pierced his gums and bled through his mouth and down his face. He clutched at his bulbous, gorged heart pressing through his boneless, spineless body. He was ready to rip it out rather than face that gentle bauble of light of that beaconing gentle love to him to accept help from his impossible illness no matter how much it was his own fault that he had contracted it.

No! He was too gross. He would have squished this beast he was without a second thought. He would rip his own heart out and toss it readily into the Vault himself, he hated it so much. How he would rid the universe of such a nauseating thing.

But there was a softness as he recalled once more his mother's arms. A softness like a gentle healing breeze. He thought of ignoring that too. He might have. He wanted to with hateful spite, but he stopped.

At last he opened his eyes.

He let his hand fall from his chest, and he let his eyes rest upon that glow.

For the first time in his life since that day in that forgotten courtyard, he fell upon his knees. Not to falsely grovel so that he might laugh at the one to whom he groveled later when that one begged for mercy at his feet. He was the one broken. He always had been, and no matter how much it stung like an energy charge, he relented.

He relented to a hand that was there to catch the person trapped beneath that horrendous growth all around him where his bones still had marrow, his lungs still needed oxygen, and where his soul still was made for love.

"Please…" he choked, and he found that it was his own voice swollen and weak though it was. "I'm sorry."

He was awake in the chamber. This meeting chamber in the Tower of Commerce. All was solid. His physical body was whole and normal; though he was in pain still. Not nearly as much as he had been before, but as he looked weakly from where he was half-kneeling, half-sprawled upon that cool tiled-floor he saw Ooaseel.

Her teeth were in his hand. What he had done or said to cause this, he could not fathom. He was bleeding, but her teeth were not tightly round him anymore. As he pushed her gently from him, he saw that she was dead. How or why, did not seem too clear, unless she had killed herself just as he had been about to do and thrown her heart into the Vault.

Had she bitten him because his parasite had happened to leave Brunt first, and she could not stand the thought of that? It was certainly nothing he had done. The parasite was clear across the room now, and writhing in agony. It seemed unaware of Brunt, but even as Brunt looked at its struggles, he felt it was no threat to him, at least. He felt no glee at its pain, but there was also nothing that could be done for it without sacrificing a Ferengi. Its death agony was imminent.

He was drawn anyway from wondering about it by the screens in front of him, and he forgot all about the Keeoopii.

The screen upon which Quark had been so miraculously bold was now showing commercials again. Their jingles might have been asinine, but he almost loved them now. He would have bowed to them, in fact, for their frivolousness in comparison to his vile insatiable desires.

He hardly noticed his hand anymore either as he pressed his wrists together and bowed his face to the floor— not to the screen, but to the River he knew was there and to the light he knew was waiting. He was at its gates now. The Dayitela was there. Even now he felt that the warmth of that hand that had shaped him was upon him, and he knew he did not deserve it. He would do all he could to make up for it; though he was weaker than that toddling creature he had been when trying to catch a firefly.

His heart nearly burst again, but from the feeling he had banished from his soul long, long ago: sorrow. Like in a cleansing rainstorm, the droplets of his sorrow fell. Sorrow mixed with love with no bitterness strong enough anymore to seal it away fell. His heart was so unused to it, but it was a different kind of swell. It was the natural swell of a muscle not being used for so long. It was a soreness that needed it, and one he accepted unflinchingly as he lay forward prostrate on the floor.

At least he was a living creature. Weak and frail, he may be been like an infant fresh from the womb, but he was, in fact, alive. He may not have known what to do exactly or where to begin far less, but he did know one thing, that he would at least begin by a previously unknown appreciation for his undisturbed breathing and the free air that filled his lungs.