AN: Here we are, the next piece! (I'm not sure it's exactly what some of you were hoping for, but it's the next piece for our couple, nonetheless.)
I hope you enjoy! If you do, please do let me know!
111
It was an invitation to talk, or an invitation to listen. Jean-Luc couldn't quite recall what Deanna's favorite way to phrase it had been, but it all amounted to the same thing. If he wanted to talk about his feelings—whatever they might be, and whatever they might be about at the moment—then she was ready and available to lend him a listening ear.
While Jean-Luc didn't mind being a listening ear for someone else—especially in situations where there was absolutely nobody else who might be better suited to the task and, therefore, could relieve him of that role—being the one to require a listening ear was quite possibly his least favorite activity. In fact, he made it a point to talk about his personal feelings as little as possible.
Beverly, of course, knew that as well as anyone—better than anyone, perhaps.
She stared at Jean-Luc intently, her fingers stilled at their work for the moment. Jean-Luc's own work had been temporarily abandoned, too, but he picked it up and pretended to focus on it, giving himself an excuse not to make eye contact.
"I am a man, Beverly," he said.
"And I'm a woman," Beverly said. Her voice rose, at the end, with an unmistakable hint of amusement. "And now that we've had a lesson in biology, Jean-Luc…"
"I mean to say that, it isn't so simple for me," Jean-Luc said. "Feelings and the like."
"It isn't so complicated, either," Beverly said. "We might have been talking about history, Jean-Luc, but we don't live there."
Jean-Luc laughed quietly, grateful for the relief from the tension that he could feel building in his body.
"To be quite honest, Beverly, we don't know where we're living currently, or when," Jean-Luc said. "We haven't seen another living being that appears to be in possession of any sort of advanced thinking skills. We don't know the societal beliefs surrounding genders and acceptable feelings."
"We may be the entire society here, Jean-Luc," Beverly countered quickly and just a touch sharply. Jean-Luc felt the barb of her words and understood what she was saying without her actually having to say it—she was tiring of him, at the moment. She would tease with him a little, perhaps, to keep tension at a tolerable level, but she wasn't interested in prolonging it too much without any other advancement in their discussion.
Jean-Luc cleared his throat.
"You may be correct," he said.
"And if we constitute the whole of society, then we make the rules for that society, Jean-Luc," Beverly said. "And—if that's the case? I declare right now that every member of this society, man or woman, has the right to openly feel whatever it is that they feel, and they have a right to share those feelings and discuss them with every other member of our society."
Jean-Luc laughed at her words. He used the net in his hands to help work out some of his anxiety. He wondered if she could see, in the dim light, that his fingers trembled slightly against his will.
"The way I was raised…" Jean-Luc said. He paused a moment. "My father…my brother…"
He stopped. Beverly interrupted him, or at least he could say that she did. The truth of the matter was that he hadn't worked out what he might say next. He wasn't sure how he wanted to explain his family to her, beyond what he'd told her in the past. She waited, and she gave him time to continue, but when it was clear that he wasn't sure what came next, she spoke up, effectively interrupting anything he might have said.
"I'm sorry, Jean-Luc," she said, softly and sincerely. "I'm sorry for…everything. Anything. I'm sorry that you feel that you can't discuss your feelings, but…I'm not your father."
"That much is very true. You're quite unlike anyone else I've ever known in my life," Jean-Luc said. "And that's the honest truth." He hesitated. "You are…very important to me, Beverly."
He dared to glance at her—just a glance. Her brow was furrowed. She was leaning slightly toward him. She almost looked pained. He was causing her that pain, and he felt sorry for it. It weighed heavily in the pit of his stomach.
She made eye contact with him.
"You are very important to me, too, Jean-Luc," Beverly said. "If you weren't…"
She stopped short.
"If I weren't?" He pressed.
She shook her head.
"I wouldn't even be here," Beverly said. "Among other things…"
For what felt like an eternity to Jean-Luc, they sat there. It was, in reality, probably only the span of a few moments that passed, but it seemed to drag on forever. Jean-Luc didn't know what to say. He didn't know how to make himself say even a fraction of everything that he would say, if he only knew where to begin.
Beverly broke the tension of the moment by somewhat abruptly abandoning her work altogether and pushing herself up from her spot with determination.
"Where are you going?" Jean-Luc asked, reaching a hand out and catching hers.
As soon as he caught her hand in his, he realized that he hadn't planned the action. He hadn't planned what came next, or what he might say. All he'd done was realized that she was leaving and, perhaps, that he had driven her away. All he'd known, in that instant, was that he didn't want her to leave. He was desperate for her to stay.
She looked angry, and then her features softened. She squeezed his hand, the action almost imperceptible.
"Please," Jean-Luc said, "stay. And—if you must leave, don't do so in anger."
"There are chores to be done," Beverly said. "There's water that needs to be brought up and barrels that need to be filled, if we intend to bathe. Something has to be prepared for our dinner…"
"I will prepare something from what we have," Jean-Luc said. "Just—please, Beverly. Don't be angry with me. I am…trying."
She laughed and closed her eyes. She shook her head.
"Trying to do what, exactly, Jean-Luc?" Beverly asked. "You won't even talk to me. I'm willing to listen, and I'll sit here for as long as you want. We'll open ration packets, and we'll eat those for the night. If you want to talk to me, Jean-Luc, then I want to listen. But just to sit here and listen to you make excuses? Watch you do everything in your power to avoid me? I would rather have a hot bath and a satisfying meal."
Jean-Luc could have described her tone and her words as harsh, but he knew that he deserved them.
"That's fair and understandable," he said.
"I wasn't asking for your validation," she countered.
"I'm afraid that—we're at risk of having a misunderstanding of sorts," Jean-Luc said.
"It's impossible to have a misunderstanding where there's no communication," Beverly said. "You would have to talk to me, Jean-Luc, for me to misunderstand anything. Right now, what I understand is that…you don't want to talk to me about your feelings. I'm trying to respect that. Now—there are chores to be done."
She moved as though she would pull away. Somewhat instinctively, Jean-Luc tightened his hold on her hand, keeping hold of her hard enough that she couldn't tug her hand free. She stopped and looked at him—glared at him, really. He could feel her frustration and anger.
"You are hurting me," she said. It didn't sound like a whine or complaint. Honestly, it sounded like a threat.
Jean-Luc eased up on the pressure he was putting on her hand.
"My apologies," he said. "Believe me, Beverly—the last thing that I want to do is to hurt you, and I mean that in every possible meaning of the word. But—I do not want you to go. Please…sit."
She hesitated a moment, clearly considering whether or not she intended to honor his request.
"Please?" He pressed again.
She sat. She did so with the same air of frustration and anger as before, though. It was palpable and thick in the air around them. Jean-Luc felt like he could have taken up one of the blades from the nearby box and sliced through it, cutting a window through which they might see each other and communicate without the cloud of feelings hanging between them and obscuring anything.
Of course, if he did his part to help clear away some of the feelings, perhaps the fog wouldn't be quite so thick.
He drew in a breath, accepted his responsibility for at least some of the air of aggression and tension in the room, and focused his eyes on the floor, only allowing himself to occasionally glance in Beverly's direction. The tension in her features and the flash of anger in her eyes didn't exactly make him feel warm and comfortable, after all.
"You deserve some honesty," Jean-Luc said. "And open communication."
She laughed. He didn't believe the laughter at all. There was a sharp edge to it.
"There's always something new to experience," she said.
Jean-Luc glanced at her.
"I deserve that," he said. She softened slightly. Then, she started, as though she might say something else or even rise again. He held his hand out to her to still her.
"I feel…"
He stopped. He saw her start. He almost laughed at her reaction to the words. He exhaled, breathing out some of his anxiety, thankful for the simple moment between them that could make him nearly laugh when he was feeling practically tied up in knots.
"I feel as though I have done you wrong," Jean-Luc said. "I feel as though…I have done you a great injustice. I've injured you in many ways, and I don't know how to reconcile that."
"There's nothing to reconcile, Jean-Luc. Perhaps that's your feeling, but it doesn't mean that it's mine," Beverly said.
He nodded his head, more to acknowledge that he heard her than he agreed with her.
"I feel very much like a man, Beverly," Jean-Luc said. "The men we talked about earlier. Destroying, tearing down…I feel like I cost you your son."
"Wesley?" Beverly asked.
Jean-Luc refrained from asking her if she had another son of which he was unaware, understanding what she meant and not wanting to annoy her.
"If it weren't for your decision to follow me, you might be at home with him now. No doubt, the crew all has a mandatory period of rest and relaxation—time to recover from their experience. You might be on Caldos, now, in front of a fire not unlike this one, but in a much more comfortable environment. You might be spending time with Wesley and your Nana. Instead, you have followed me to…well…here."
"Wesley is alive," Beverly said. "His pod deployed safely and on-time. I am certain that he is safe, and that he will be well taken care of, Jean-Luc. For what it's worth, we're alive, too. You and I. And this place…it isn't Caldos, and it isn't La Barre, but it isn't exactly hell, either."
"No," Jean-Luc agreed, smiling at her choice of description. "It isn't that…"
"It's very much what we choose to make it," Beverly said.
"And, thanks to you, it is tolerable and promises to only improve with time," Jean-Luc said. "I also took your husband from you, Beverly. I made you a widow. I did that."
"Jack died in the line of duty," Beverly said.
"He was doing his job," Jean-Luc agreed. "But who gave him his orders? As his captain, Beverly, I put him in that position. I put him in that place."
"That's your job," Beverly said. "We all know—we all understand—a captain's role."
"There was a moment, you know, when I might have saved him," Jean-Luc said.
"You made a call," Beverly said. "You had…" She broke off, and Jean-Luc could tell that there was more emotion there than she might have expected after all these years.
After all these years, they both still mourned Jack to some degree. It was impossible to truly forget someone who had touched your life in such a significant way. Love didn't simply disappear because the loved one was gone. The passage of time might dull the feelings, it might even change the shape of them, but everything was still there.
"You had to make a call," Beverly said. "You told me what happened, once. After you brought Jack's body back."
"You know, then, that I might have saved him. If I had made a different call…"
"And if I had done things differently, I might have never lost a patient," Beverly said. "We are human, Jean-Luc. You are human."
"You are too quick to forgive me for making you a widow, Beverly, and for separating you from your son."
"An anomaly and my own decisions separated me from Wesley," Beverly said. "And Starfleet made me a widow."
"Jack was my best friend," Jean-Luc said.
"I know," Beverly said. "I remember."
Jean-Luc shook his head.
"Jack was my best friend, and…yet…"
"Yet?" Beverly pressed, when he stopped.
Jean-Luc considered how honest he wanted to be—how honest he could be, really.
Beverly was looking at him with expectation. The anger from earlier was gone. She'd relaxed. This was what she wanted, but Jean-Luc wasn't sure that he could handle it—that he was prepared to handle it.
"I can't be sure, Beverly, of the motivations behind my decision-making," Jean-Luc said. He rose to his feet. He felt restless. Confessing truths was difficult. Talking about feelings was one of the most uncomfortable experiences that he could think of. He preferred to avoid it and, at the moment, he was wishing that he hadn't begun it.
"You did what you had to do," Beverly said. "You're a good captain, Jean-Luc. You made the best decision that you could in the moment."
"Did I?" Jean-Luc asked, facing the flames flickering in the fireplace. He fed them another piece of wood, and he watched as the fire worked at consuming the new fuel.
"Of course, you did," Beverly said. "You thought you had time, but you were only able to save one…"
"And my choice of which to save?" Jean-Luc asked.
"The closest…" Beverly said. Her voice caught. "You knew that, if you were wrong, Jack would forgive you. You knew that…I would forgive you."
"Yes," Jean-Luc mused. "And I would like to say that I am as innocent as I professed to be, but one fact remains…I destroyed your home, Beverly. Your family. Jack's family. And I can say that it was entirely by accident—that I didn't expect that explosion, and I was helpless to stop it, at any rate. But what I also know, is that thoughts had at least crossed my mind before that which, if acted upon, would have destroyed Jack's home. Your home."
Jean-Luc turned around to face Beverly—to face some reaction to the secret that had been eating at him, in some form or fashion, for years. He didn't know what he expected, but Beverly simply looked stunned and still. She was processing it. Of course, she was. Se hadn't lived with it as long as he had.
"I'm afraid—I need some air," Jean-Luc said. "And, I dare say that you may need a moment, and some space. I will…bring some water for the barrels."
"Jean-Luc…" Beverly said, as he walked past her and toward the door of their new home. He tensed and paused, almost terrified to look back. He kept his back to her for the moment.
"Yes?" He said, pressing her to continue—to say what she had to say.
"Why didn't you ever say anything before?" She asked.
"Many societies can agree it's wrong to covet the wife of another," Jean-Luc said. "How much worse is it when the man isn't a stranger, or even a neighbor, but your best friend? What kind of man would I be? And, if I did act in accordance to those feelings, even without conscious intention, what kind of a monster would that make me? It is very hard, sometimes, to shoulder our own truths, Beverly…all of them."
He waited a second longer. Beverly didn't say anything, so he stepped out into the fresh air. It was cold—of course it was. The sun wasn't down yet—not entirely—but it soon would be. The temperature had already started its dramatic nocturnal drop. Jean-Luc gathered up one set of the buckets—two of them that could be removed for filling and re-affixed to a long stick, in order to make it easier to carry them across their shoulders. The bucket poles were just another of Beverly's small ways of improving their lives here.
He placed the buckets across his shoulders, and he started toward the pond to gather water, aware that Beverly would be left behind to come to terms with just what kind of man with whom she'd stranded herself for the foreseeable future.
He had shared some of his feelings—a tip of an iceberg, so to speak—and Jean-Luc had to admit that he didn't understand why people encouraged the act so much. He, for one, certainly didn't feel better. He felt a little more unburdened than before, perhaps, but certainly not better.