Without love, what are we worth? Eighty-nine cents. Eighty-nine cents worth of chemicals walking around lonely. —Hawkeye Pierce
Maybe we should be afraid, she says, and even as the words leave her mouth she does not know what they mean, and because their connection has been severed, neither will he.
But he is probably going to hear it as an ending.
She has wondered periodically whether they are always speaking the same language beneath the universal translator, and now that she's been in his head, she knows. That his devotion to Starfleet runs so deep he dreams in Federation Standard. That, no, they don't need the translator to understand each other.
But then again, she's not so sure.
Now that the decision to talk about it or not has been taken out of their hands, it occurs to her that their not being together is more cowardice than it is any other thing, even inertia. Frankly, inertia would have worked in love's favor. She can't speak for him, wouldn't dream of it (she thinks, rolling her eyes), but she has been alone for almost all of the time between Jack's death and now, and it has very little to do with her limited choices aboard a starship and everything, actually, to do with one choice in particular.
And what it would mean to make that one choice.
Maybe we should be afraid, she says, but maybe what she means is, I'll ruin this. That they have come to an understanding that suits them both as much as it doesn't, that maintains a sort of equilibrium only ever periodically, temporarily upset by some outside force—Q, for instance, impromptu archeological digs. And he is a master of language when the stakes are low, just the fate of one civilization or another, and she wraps herself in the dialect of medicine like so much armor, which he is too decent or else too paralyzed to breach, but together they make small talk over the wrong sort of breakfast and dare not venture further, not even in the name of coffee and croissants.
Maybe we should be afraid—and she is. Afraid of losing him not to another woman but on her own merits. As languages go, medicine is safe, prescriptive, and if sometimes it is also painful at least it is not she who makes it so. It necessarily tamps down her own… linguistic impulses. As her friend, Jean-Luc absorbs her teasing barbs, laughs even. As a lover? A—husband?
Well, it would change everything, wouldn't it?
She knows that without her prompting he will not broach the subject again. And yet to return, after everything, to the way things were before is somehow equally unimaginable, and now that it's been spoken aloud this thing between them looms so large that she doesn't know how to see past it, how to see anything else at all. She's told herself that she prefers her careful distance, that it's better, safer—repeated this like a vow until it became instinct. She worries now that she won't be able to hide from him again. Worries, too, that opening this door will reveal too many others she's long since barricaded, will open herself to pain. To causing pain.
But he does laugh, doesn't he? When he is privy to her every thought, all these locked-away pieces of herself that she has learned from hard experience are not welcome, not by anybody, he does laugh. And he does keep her secrets.
He admitted that he'd loved her. And he can't know—not unless she tells him—that she's just done the same, by admitting that she is afraid.
But maybe, together, they could unlearn their fear. If she can just find the words to explain, in a language that they both understand.