life's blood

[warpfairy]

They're not near Cardassian Union space.

But then, they're not near Federation space either. This ship has as much right to be in this system as they do.

It makes Isabella nervous, anyway, and she's just about to suggest leaving and coming back another time, when the Prometheus is hailed.

They're armed. She can't warp inside a solar system.

She answers the hail.

"Hello, Federation vessel," says one of the three visible Cardassians in bad but intelligible English. "What're you doing out here alone?"

Isabella swallows. "This is the deep space survey vessel Prometheus," she begins.

The computer lets her know that they're charging weapons.

"We have no hostile intention," she says.

Comments

[warpfairy]

The autopilot is working fine. She could be reading, but at the moment that interests her less than the possibility that her boyfriend will explain the problem.

"Did you hear my question?" she asks after a silence.

[dream_me_up]

"Which...? The one about you suppressing your emotions? Yeah," he says. "...It's complicated."

[warpfairy]

Pet, pet. "I am willing to listen."

[dream_me_up]

"It hurts to see you like this right now because I feel like you're doing it because you have something nasty waiting for you when you stop, and even though you're not feeling the nasty, I'm still imagining it," he says. "It'd still hurt if you were feeling it, just - differently."

[warpfairy]

"You are correct about what will happen when I stop, unfortunately."

[dream_me_up]

He nods.

He sighs.

"There's more," he says.

[warpfairy]

"Please, go on."

[dream_me_up]

"...When you have feelings, you have feelings about me," he says. "I love you. It's hard to be around you when you don't have feelings about me. But - I don't know, I can't honestly say that watching you suffer would feel like an improvement."

[warpfairy]

"Both my current emotionless state and my subsequent distress will pass."

[dream_me_up]

"Believe me, I know," he sighs. "And so will me crying everywhere."

[warpfairy]

Isabella hesitates.

And then she says, "When I cease my suppression, I expect, among other things, to be angry at you."

[dream_me_up]

He doesn't really have a response to that.

[warpfairy]

"It will likely be transitory, but as you are already under stress perhaps I could postpone this event longer than planned."

[dream_me_up]

"Putting it off won't help me any."

[warpfairy]

"Are you certain?"

[dream_me_up]

"Yeah."

[warpfairy]

She nods once.

"I had planned to stop today. I have disliked the results of more prolonged suppression in the past."

She takes a deep breath.

When she lets it out again, she's herself. She isn't crying, screaming, ranting - but there's light in her eyes again, and her body language isn't so intensely measured.

[dream_me_up]

Lalita relaxes noticeably.

[warpfairy]

"I had no idea what was going on," she says in a low, snappish voice. "I was on the other side of the wall from you, but I didn't know that. You'd worked out a deal with them, but I didn't know that. You could get us out at any time, but I didn't know that. If I had known any of it I could have screamed the first time he touched me. If you'd - if you'd summarized the situation in Vulcan through the wall, perhaps in song to make it sound like you were entertaining yourself - or knocked on the wall in Morse code - or whispered to me the least bit of translation of anything that was said while I was still present - I could have been spared days of torture."

[dream_me_up]

"I didn't know that," he says, with a hint of his earlier sobbing coming back to haunt him. "I've been down this road before, but never with somebody else. I know how to handle it when it's just me. I didn't know how to handle it with you there. I got it wrong. I fucked it up. I'm sorry."

[warpfairy]

"I thought they were hurting you, too. I didn't know. I still don't know; maybe you just had time to heal."

[dream_me_up]

He shakes his head.

"No, he just fucked me," he says tiredly. "That was the deal. I play along, and nothing bad happens to you."

[warpfairy]

Isabella turns away and bites her lip. "And they didn't know you understood their language, so you thought you'd know if they were deceiving you."

[dream_me_up]

"Yeah."

[warpfairy]

"And meanwhile I understood nothing that was happening to me at all, not where you were, not whether he would kill me by accident or deliberately, not what they said, not that I could have shouted at any moment and you would have appeared and we would have been on our way - I dropped into suppression more because I cannot tolerate confusion than because I cannot tolerate pain or fear, but of course it's not a matter of picking and choosing, they are all either on or off, I could not leave the emotions that would have prompted informative shouting intact while I dealt with not knowing and having no way to find out."