Joint Duty Log | Com Levine, Capt Landon Neyes, Cmdr Grant, LtCmdr Neyes, Noah (NPC) | "Immersed In Echoes" - pt VI

Posted on Sat Nov 1st, 2014 @ 1:52am by Commander Logan Grant, PhD. & Commander Amelia Waterhouse & Commander Tristan Neyes PhD. & Commodore Andrea Levine PhD

2,678 words; about a 13 minute read

Mission: All Hallows’

Landon turned and brushed Logan off, moving to the bed on his own. "Commander. I would threaten you for some manly reason, but I just don't give enough of a shit. Get him out of here," he said, motioning to Tristan.

Tristan shook his head, "Landon, I-"

"RIGHT... now." It was an order, and a threat.

Fighting back his gutting heartbreak, and the shock of being man-handled by his own brother, Tristan slowly made his way out into the other room. He nodded to Logan as he left.

Andrea looked at him go, fighting internally with herself, trying to decide if she should stay in the room or walk over to Tristan. Two considerations seemed to outweigh all others, though; her worry of leaving Logan alone with the confused, raging Landon, and her curiosity. Her scientific curiosity. Her eyes returned to look at Landon, carefully, quietly, considering the man.

"Aside from my disappointment to learn I was left for dead, literally," Neyes asked, "how could there be two of us?"

"There are... a few possibilities," Andrea chimed in quietly, still looking at Landon, pushing herself backwards and away from the man to stand a tiny bit closer to the door. "A transporter malfunction, advanced forms of cloning," she offered quietly, trying to find the right balance between her scientific analysis and some amount of careful gentleness to avoid enraging the man again. "There could also be ways to override a genetic signature," she continued, her gaze briefly going to Logan's, "only making it seem like the original."

She took a careful breath and swallowed. "We can't really know for sure until we have more data. We'll need your help, Landon. Do you remember anything? Anything about what happened to you before --"
(you died)
"-- the Romulan ship?"

Neyes shrugged, for what could he say? He'd gone over the night before, and the morning of the attack in his head a thousand times. This was of course after the million or so times he'd driven his head into the floor punishing himself for getting himself captured, and his crew murdered. "I was an idiot. I stormed off into the woods with a bunch of marines and my regret. I receded; I let the symbiont take the wheel for a couple rounds, I guess... I didn't want to face the fact that Rochelle could have been killed." He fell silent for a moment, the squirming feeling of misplaced rage skittering under his skin and roiled in his gut.

"When I came to, I was chained to a chair in a tiny room naked as the day I was born. It was a fun five months. Assuming this isn't another twisted trick to skewer me on my own fallibility, I am glad to be here. Even if you are all total strangers on my- ...on this ship."

Once he was certain the man had gone, Landon pushed himself back up onto his bed, hissing in temporary struggle as pain stabbed at his torso. He settled back in and looked to the other three. Bringing up Rochelle was a motivator, certainly, but he was more concerned immediately with the ship and crew. They'd been attacked by a Romulan warbird, and now a man claiming to be his dead brother was also claiming host to the very creature that made Landon who he was. It wasn't possible, and if it was he wanted answers.

---

As Andrea Levine spoke to the man who may or may not be Landon, Noah had slipped out of the room to follow the smaller Trill. If Landon was found to be the real deal, questions would need to be answered about the slug inside the counselor, but for now regardless of who had the real — original, whatever — Neyes symbiont, there was still a man who'd just been accused by his brother to be a fraud and told to go away. If Pond had done that to him… Noah didn't want to think about how much it would hurt.

"I'm sure he'll come around, once we all have more info," Noah offered quietly as he approached Tristan. He really hoped it was true, but he also realized that sometimes stating the cold hard truth wouldn't help, so saying the reassuring thing, hoping it was found to be true was best. "Is there anything I can do while we wait for the commodore and witchdoctor to figure it out enough you can go back in?"

"I can't go back in. Not until we know more." The counselor said. He had feared it would go this way, but had foolishly hoped for the best. Landon was damaged at this point. Whatever had happened to him was shaping his reality right now, and it had taken the other Landon enough time to come to terms with Tristan being alive. Now it was happening again, and he didn't know what to do. So many thoughts swirled in his head, and he took a seat on a chair in the main room.

"I um... Can you get me a drink?" Neyes said.

"Like a drink drink, or just water or something?" Noah clarified, followed by a sympathetic smile. He wished there was something else he could do, but he didn't know science, and his understanding of people was informal and artistic at best. It helped when calming and comforting people... but his abilities hardly measured up to a professional. So the best he could do is play gopher.

Neyes buried his face in his hands, exhaustion dripping from his disheveled form, "Rum, Mr. Waterhouse."

"Call me Noah," he insisted, fishing his trusty flask out of his back pocket. He handed it directly over to Tristan, and sat down on the coffee table facing him.

---


"Yeah yeah, save the bravado, Mr. Neyes. We're on the same side." Logan sighed, shadowing the Trill as he painfully climbed back into bed. He didn't blame the man for posturing, in the same situation he likely would have done the same. But as the Trill began to answer the burning question of the hour, he looked to Andrea with earnest knowledge burning behind the emerald irises of his eyes. He didn't protest when Tristan had been shut out, if anything he knew that progress was sitting right on the cusp of being made. He'd deal with the bonding of brothers later. What he hadn't told Tristan was that he hadn't expected this to be a warm gushy, schmaltzy reunion filled with tears and hugs - he'd expected to go exactly as it had. Like Landon, Tristan was supposed to be a dead figment of the past and nothing more than a painful memory.

The story, however, was what brought him back from his mind's little birdwalk. "So you ran off after her..." He mused out loud. That was where the familiarity of the story ended and the memories split and diverged. The man in front of them was captured. The man that had rescued Rochelle had died. "You never found her?" He implored softly, bravely taking a seat on the edge of the bed and folding his hands in his lap. It was not unlike talking to a child with all the care that was being taken with Landon. It was a pointless question, one that made him shake his own head as if to erase it. "You never found her." He reworded it as a statement, "But someone, the spitting image of you, did. You deserve the truth and while some," he cast his eyes towards Andrea, "may think we need to keep it from you a bit longer, I disagree. You need to know. You, or rather a duplicate of you, found her and you two ran from a cave system full of cannibalistic mine workers that had kidnapped her trying to exploit her political strong hold. Figured she was important, figured they could trade her for a cure for whatever sickness they had only she didn't cooperate and things were about to go completely tits up when you entered stage left. Somewhere along the way both of you were badly injured, managed to get cornered and chose to jump off a cliff instead of being caught and eaten. Lucky for you both the Cardassian brought the ship into the atmosphere and beamed you both aboard, granted you were both Dee Oh Eh between exposure, trauma, hypothermia and exsanguination."

His eyes never left Landon's as he spoke, waiting to see a spark of something. A memory, an emotion, something. His own glittered with something else, a small barb. "Rochelle tells it with a little more detail, reserves that for people like Andrea and I, but detail." He began, wetting his lower lip, "Something about coming clean to one another, a declaration of love between the two of you that made the decision to jump and not be eaten just a bit easier. She'd wanted you to leave her and you wouldn't. You'd demanded she go and she wouldn't. So you chose to die together, be one another's final memories." She'd shaken when she'd told him, shaken and shivered as if she still felt the cold and the fear that likely came along with such an ordeal. Logan would never forget the look in the firebird's eyes when she'd finally looked up at him. He'd added his own flourish, choosing not to recite what had been said verbatim, but the story still stuck and the details were still true.

"The nurses in sickbay are still talking about how the two of you were beamed in wrapped in one another's arms and how she sat at your side for two weeks before the Symbiosis Commission claimed you." He was softer then, more sympathetic... Maybe even empathetic. He and Andrea had been faced with their own set of harrowing life or death ordeals and had come through them ironclad. They'd been lucky. "Tristan was sent to the Vindicator a few weeks later complete with a dear John letter from you to Rochelle. It took a bit, but she trusts him and has been looking after him like the recording requested." Sometimes being the counselor and friend had its perks, he knew a lot and had heard even more from whispers along the hallways. The trick was being able to pick out the truth from the lies, and that came as a specialty to Logan. He knew that what came next would set apart the truth from the lies and would be what would either make or break the decision to move forward as a whole.

Landon blinked. His heart sank as he realized the torture would never be over, and this wasn't the calm respite he'd finally arrived at. Rochelle had been saved yes, but she'd shared an intimate... life-altering experience with someone that wasn't him; she'd been taken by the lie, by Tr'Bak. On the opposite side of that token was the crushing knowledge she had to endure it alone, while sitting helpless to change the fate of the person she loved. Even if this other Landon was a perfect clone, capable and knowing every aspect of himself, it still wasn't him. She'd declared her love, life, and future to a lie. Maybe it would have been exactly the same, but he would never know. He wasn't there.

It had stolen his life, and then his death.

He wouldn't have known the tears were flowing from his stone-cold face, if he hadn't felt the wet streams rolling down onto his neck. Feeling betrayed and unsafe wouldn't do this justice. Landon could feel the edges of the bed like they were the last walls of defense against a hidden threat. He could feel his mind pulling back, recoiling from the knowledge he would never be safe from the stranglehold of his captors and their reach. Tr'Bak had inserted himself into the deepest aspects of Neyes' life now, and etched his signature into what would become his legacy.

"He told her he loved her?" Landon whispered, the hurt carving its way into him.

"He did." The softness of Logan's voice spoke volumes to the effect watching the man in front of him cry had on him. He wanted to do something, anything to try and lessen the pain and suffering that had been brought about by the entire fiasco. For the moment, he looked to Andrea and mouthed the words 'tissue' and 'please', and once again gave Landon his full attention, reaching to pat one of the Trill's hands. The pain that painted itself across the Trill's face in long, wide brush strokes only served to cement Logan's affirmations even further. He loved the woman so many regarded as a phoenix, enough to live for her through such a harrowing ordeal. "That's why we're being so careful with her, she loves you and always has from what she's told Andrea and I." May the prophets help the Romulans when she finds out the truth, he thought to himself. "We're going to make this right. I can promise you that."

Neyes looked at Logan, his features reclaiming whatever dignity he still had, "I would like to speak to Archer. He's still on board, yeah?"

"He is." Logan sighed with a nod. The Trill was closed off and understandably so, "Commander Waterhouse is probably speaking with him at this moment. I'll make sure he's sent your way as quickly as possible."

With a wipe against his blackened, encrusted arms, Landon soldiered himself back into the reality he'd known before his capture. Though he felt colder, and even his heartbreak for Rochelle seemed to hold itself at a distance. Now all he could feel was a smoldering rage, ebbing at the edges of his control, and brought on by the man pretending to be his brother. He knew it was certainly possible there was a circumstance which allowed Tristan's death to be a ruse, but he wasn't about to believe it on a whim. Speaking to Archer would hopefully clear up some of those gaps in his knowledge, not to mention his memory.

Landon slowly turned to sit off the side of the bed, the sheet still covering most of his naked form. "I don't suppose this, ...second me, left anything behind. No time for a duty log, I guess."

Running his tongue against his lower lip, Logan looked to Andrea and nodded. "There is... The Dear John he recorded on Trill. Rochelle spoke of it briefly, Amelia has heard it."

With a solemn shake of his head, he tried to accept the circumstances he'd been thrown into. This wasn't some nightmare, or a dream he would find had only been in his mind. There wouldn't be any waking up in his quarters to find the Vindicator in orbit of Notura, and Rochelle waiting on the bridge for him to issue the day's orders. Now he was there, a former captain and prisoner. Rochelle thinking he was dead, and his crew thought the same.

Neyes lightly patted the edges of his bed, idly cutting time to spare him a moment to think, "I'll have a look at that, please. And I'd like to get some clothes, if you don't mind."

"Absolutely, we'll get it to you." Logan nodded and found his feet, reaching to grab the leather bug out bag that Noah had retrieved from the Horizon. "We had to go on hope that there was stuff in here for you, replicators aren't an option until Commander Waterhouse levels with Archer." He said with an almost sheepish smile and sat the bag on the bed beside Landon. "For what it's worth, welcome back sir."

=/\= END LOG =/\=

Captain Landon Neyes
Former Commanding Officer
USS Vindicator

Lt Commander Amelia Waterhouse
Executive Officer
USS Vindicator

Lt Commander Tristan Neyes
Chief Counselor
USS Vindicator

Commander Logan Grant
Counselor
USS Vindicator

Commodore Andrea Levine-Grant
Former Professor of Physics
Starfleet Academy

Noah Waterhouse
Pastafarian Minister
Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

 

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