JL | Com Ivanova, Capt Neyes, Cmdr Neyes - "After the Stars Fell"

Posted on Mon Jan 25th, 2016 @ 8:37pm by Admiral Rochelle Ivanova & Commander Tristan Neyes PhD. & Captain Landon Neyes

2,584 words; about a 13 minute read

Mission: Resurgere

Beep.

The sound seemed so out of place, foreign and alien to everything Rochelle's ears had expected to hear. She expected the cacophony of an explosion, maybe even the chuckle of a Romulan, but not the electronic sound that greeted her barely conscious ears. The one closest to the source of the noise gave an involuntary twitch as it honed in on the general location it had come from; up and to the left of her head.

With the continuing rise of consciousness came too the rise of memories and reminders that the once valiant Vindicator now lay in ruin as nothing more than debris scattered about, and burning, in some remote portion of space. There would be memorials for the dead, burials to attend, life to try and resume - but Rochelle felt empty with the hollow words reverberating consistently in her skull. Archer's voice beat a steady tattoo, hammering against her tender temples with every pulse of blood through her ravaged head and body.

"She's gone, Rochelle... There's nothing left. Pendragon is taking us to Theta, Almar is in command right now."

"Where's Landon? Tristan? Zed? Vokar? He'd never let anyone commandeer the Pendragon..."

"Safe... Kind of... Vokar is dead. Everyone else is alive and well, so... Safe."

The how and the why mattered little, but the rescue had happened amid complete and utter chaos. The telling of the tale only further served to isolate the woman who had spent what, by all rights, should have been her final moments arguing the merits of her crew listening to her orders regardless of their personal affections for and towards her when the sound of an explosion heralded a darkness that had consumed her. Vindicator herself had chosen to spare the plucky young woman that was her mistress, beseeching upon whatever Gods were watching that the future be seen through and not extinguished for sake of pride of regulation.

Beep.

The computer monitoring some function of her body or another chirped yet again, reminding her that she was curled up in a bed on a ship that wasn't hers. She was alive. They were alive... He was alive. Tiredly, and feeling as if she were stuck in heavy muck and mire, weighed down by an unseen force, she brought her hand to the swelling rise of her belly. Such a fool she'd been... Such a fool.

"Get off me." A gruff voice threatened while the doors to her private medical suite hissed open.

A few shapes appeared in the door. "Sir, no she needs to rest." A medical officer said, blocking Landon from entering the room. "You can see her tomorrow."

Neyes effortlessly moved the young man out of the way by pressing his proximal forearm against the man's shoulder and sweeping him aside. "You're dismissed, Ensign." His eyes softened immediately at seeing Ivanova laid out on the biobed at the center of the room. Her hair was cleaned and kept, a far cry from the hours prior. The fading remnants of her injuries quickly vanishing after her attentive treatment post-rescue. The Trill captain moved over to her bedside and took her hand in his, and the defeated medical staffer hastily left the room.

"Hey, you." He said, rubbing his thumb across her hand gently.

"Hey..." Rochelle whispered back, her voice hoarse and filled with what could only be described as grit. To say her throat hurt would have been a gross understatement of the feeling of raw constriction that still gripped tightly at her larynx. Smoke and particulates had done their job, ripping at her throat and lungs long after she'd succumbed to her injuries and the final blow of her skull against the deck plates that had rendered her unconscious and the falling debris that had split her scalp to the skull. "You look good." She added, exploring his face through still swollen eyelids that left her peering through not much more than slits. It was frustrating, irritating, left her feeling vulnerable - but with Landon there she felt content to express it as nothing more than a passing heavy sigh as she flipped her hand over to hold his thumb in her palm.

He settled a hand on her blanketed midsection, "We're all ok."

Neyes struggled to find something to offer her. It just was the way of things, it seemed, that he would live through so much and yet fail to provide even the simplest of condolences for the blow she suffered. This struggle was masked by a reassuring smile as he cleared an errant hair away from her face. "You... you look so good," he chuckled. Immediately he kicked himself. He felt like a stupid child, lost in a sea of complex circumstances that didn't make sense. How was he to take this burden from her? She had lost so much in the last few hours.

This was their life together. They both knew it, and they both accepted it. To engage in being an officer of Starfleet was to accept that your life was at the whim of the most dangerous place in the galaxy. It was part of why they found each other so compelling, and certainly why Landon found her absolutely intoxicating. He hadn't realized how much he feared losing her, though, until today. Each moment leading up to Archer carrying her out to a barely functional shuttle was a moment of absolute panic. His hands had been shaking so heavily it was like they belonged to someone else. His vision was like a magnifying glass, warped at the edges and disjointed while he worked the controls and Archer set her down inside the shuttle's small med bay.

Absolute and all-consuming fear. Like nothing else he knew.

He felt a swell building in his throat, "Rochelle. I'm sorry."

Her head shook as she released the hold she had on his thumb and reached to cup his cheek in one tiny palm. "Stop." She mustered the order as sternly as she could, her thumb gingerly stroking the contours of the skin beneath it. "You have nothing to apologize for. It happens whether we want it to or not, it's inevitable." Of course she spoke of the death and destruction, of the chaos that had ripped a ship as big and strong as the Vindicator-E apart and left her as nothing more than sullied wreckage. A junk heap. Rubble. Nothingness. Her teeth caught her lower lip as she worked to try and make sense of the chain reaction that had transpired to cause such catastrophic failure. Her catastrophic failure as the commanding officer of just such a junk heap. "If anyone's to be sorry, it's me." She nodded, cementing her own words as they bubbled from her lips.

While Landon had committed the first 'bad' by tangling with Tr'Bak on the dance floor, it had been Rochelle who had been unable to calm the situation. Instead she'd been cocky, arrogant, and postured them straight into battle. She hadn't been afraid of the Romulan; only hateful and bent on avenging that which had been stolen by him in the first place - nearly a year's worth of her time spent mourning the death of an impostor when she should have been hunting down the hidden captive. Guilt played heavy across her heart and tired psyche, rendering her lost in a feeling of idle incompetence. In every way she'd failed them, and then allowed her own foolish sense of loyalty to the cause to bring her close to trading her own life for theirs in some misguided last ditch effort to save the day she'd lost.

The sting was bitter, but at least they were alive and relatively well.

"I failed you," her thumb stilled against the roughness of his stubble, "I failed all of you."

Neyes leaned in and slowly kissed her, pressing his forehead to hers. "No." He moved back a little, but kept his face close so she could see him without needing to turn and look. "All those people. Rochelle, a thousand people, are alive because you did exactly what you had to as Captain of the ship. You failed no one, not because a megalomaniac who demands the galaxy respond to his every poke and prod has the resources to force terror on anyone he wants to."

"We're alive. In the end that's what matters." Landon added.

It was so much more than a simple dusting and glossing to cover the fact that Tr'Bak, in every way, was a galactic terrorist flying high the banner of the RSE to cover the heinous acts he committed in their honor. It was bigger than that, bigger than the tangled web that they indeed did weave.

The familiar and comforting feel and taste of his mouth against hers, however, spoke volumes for their need to remain firmly centered in reality and not bird walking off into distance what-ifs. Rochelle returned the kiss and allowed her eyes to remain closed, relishing in the nearness of him and his touch; things she'd nearly thrown away for the sake of an oath and the honor associated with it. It would take time to heal the wounds she'd wrought across herself, a battle she'd have to wage within her own essence to find closure for. It had been why loving Landon had been so taboo in the first place, why Starfleet frowned so heavily on a Captain romancing a member of their crew; when the time came to call they'd be forced to either send them away or send them to their death... Both options had been faced that horrendous day, and when push came to shove it had been him who had refused to accept either one. "The worst part," she rasped, finally trying to voice part one, section a, of the conflict warring within, "is that I honestly wonder if he could have been talked down if Enterprise hadn't done stupid." Trying to put her thoughts into coherent and correct sentences wasn't an easily achieved goal given her current state of affairs, but she tried. "He didn't fire."

Neyes stopped himself from taking her words to heart. She was a CO who had lost her ship, sent her crew to the wind, and nearly surrendered her own life to her command.

"None of that. Any of that, is your doing. Don't assume responsibility for another Captain, or for the actions of a psychopath." His face soured at the humanization of Tr'Bak. There was no part of Neyes that would ever find that man capable of any kind of compassion. In Landon's eyes, Tr'Bak was a walking dead man with a rapidly approaching expiration date.

She nodded against him in perfect understanding. She wasn't responsible for what Karim had or hadn't done, and as such couldn't be held accountable - but the doubt still lingered that the fight could have been avoided, dusted over, and sent packing as nothing more than a verbal skirmish over a "minor" incident. Blame couldn't fall over anyone, aside from perhaps the Stenellis Empress who had left out the key details of the Romulan's presence. "I can't help it." Rochelle admitted, "People died today, and I couldn't stop it." It was a dark confession, she realized, but she also knew that he would undoubtedly understand. How could he not?

He kissed her cheek, voice almost breaking, "People die. I'm not ashamed I'm glad you weren't one of them."

Before she could respond, the life they had created finally chose to make it known that he was, in fact, alive. It was as if he didn't feel that the constant beeps of the computer monitoring his life force could be trusted, that those who had conjured him into reality needed something more, something tangible to go by. Rochelle shifted slightly, her bruised diaphragm causing her to flinch when a foot, or fist, met it with an astonishing degree of precision. "The worst part?" She uttered, gently sliding Landon's palm to rest just above her naval, "I almost lost both of you..." Life, she decided, wasn't fair. It wasn't right... And now her heart simply ached for the fact she'd almost traded the wildly flickering life within her for what? A ship? In retrospect it simply didn't make any sense, and it hurt.

"You'll never lose me." He whispered to her, Landon leaned back a little and smiled. There was a lot to discuss, and as much as he wanted her to rest for herself and the baby there wasn't any convincing anyone else of that. "There's talk of what's coming next. I haven't been able to get anything tangible out of Archer. The Vindicator is beyond salvage."

A groan was her first line of defense, and it came along with a nod. It wouldn't be enough of an answer, however. Even with her vision still clouded by the swelling of her eye lids and whatever variety of drugs had been pumped into her veins, she could see, and feel, him waiting for some form of absolution. Her jaw tensed as she swallowed the budding knot in her throat, and she again worked to find her voice; "You'll be questioned. I'll be questioned. Almar will be questioned... Everyone that was at that party will be questioned and then Starfleet will decide what's to be done," she began, and paused only to run her tongue over the cupid's bow of her upper lip in thought, "and you know I'll defend you from whatever Tr'Bak has tried to charge you with."

Neyes' expression lingered on her, careful not to irritate her injuries as he leaned in to be closer to her. As if she hadn't said anything at all, he impressed the false reality that she was injured in a sporting match of paresis squares. There was no Tr'Bak, and no Vindicator. He wasn't a Captain, and she wasn't his Commodore. As pleasant a fiction as any he had ever tried to believe. For a fraction of a second he let himself believe it too, and the nightmare faded somewhere in the shadows as his mind spun through the imagined reality in a flash.

Then with a disappointing blink of a eye, it was gone. Blessed as they were to have their lives, they were muddled and unclear at this point. No ship. No clear direction but to clean up the disaster left behind them.

Neyes stood up and wiped a small wetness from his left eye as the door to the room swished open. "We have news," Tristan said to them. Holding out a PADD for Landon to give to Rochelle. Neyes slowly walked over to take it, and quickly skimmed it as he moved to hand it to his fiance.

"You'll want to read this," Landon said quietly, hoping it wouldn't upset her too much.

Taking the PADD from his hand, Rochelle moved as to afford herself a more comfortable and better perch to skim the message on the device. Her lips pursed and her head shook, but at least the news was news. It meant a start from the rubble... Or an end to their journey. "Admiral Red has set a hearing for when we arrive at Cold Station Theta."

---

Commodore Rochelle Ivanova
Commanding Officer
USS VINDICATOR, NCC 78213-E

Commander Tristan Neyes
Chief Counselor
USS VINDICATOR, NCC 78213-E

Captain Landon Neyes
Liaison
USS VINDICATOR, NCC 78213-E

 

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