Stardate 12009.03
(or wheneverabouts we had that two day lapse before break-in funtimes time has no meaning anymore)
w/ CJ as Henry Sumner
It was a small ship with too many people nearly falling apart around them, with a couple of telepaths, and yet Raqiin was still determined to have some form of private conversation one way or another. She liked Henry, really, she did. Or at least the Henry she used to know. And they could do some proper catching up, if he wanted, but...
She couldn't shake Suder's fear/anger/disgust away. Couldn't shake her words. Yes, of course there was bad blood between them; that much was obvious from their every interaction, and Raqiin had been intent not to pry, but she wasn't so sure anymore.
She wasn't sure about a lot of things anymore.
"Hey." Nice and casual, quiet, with a lean against the bulkhead.
Henry had been sitting on his bunk, his head in his hands. He looked up with a small start, his eyes blinking rapidly as if he'd just been snoozing.
"Oh, hey," he answered, managing a tired smile.
Her return smile was small, not reaching her eyes. "Is this a bad time? Don't answer that." All the time on this mission was a pretty bad time, all told. "You look about ready to call it quits."
"I'm not sleeping very well," he admitted with a small shrug. Henry rubbed his eyes, and then his face, before slowly sliding further back on his bunk so he could lean against the wall.
"What's on your mind, Raq?"
She chewed on her lip a moment before slipping from where she leaned to come sit on the edge of the bunk. "Taemin." To use the name, the name being used here, among others, in this universe, whatever. "Not to beat a dead," she scrunched her nose, "goat? I know we talked about...your fair assessment, but..."
Henry narrowed his eyes in a mixture of confusion and suspicion as he turned to face Raqiin. He seemed to mull the matter, shifting his jaw in thought before simply nodding.
"I'll keep you two as away from each other as I can, so long as the both of you try to stay as away from each other as you can. There's no getting around that you're both here, and neither of you are getting off this ship until the job's done." There. Fair enough. That said: "Do I need to know what happened?"
A small frown found him.
"Have I given some impression that I'm not able to handle her presence?" he asked. "Do you think I'm unable to focus on the incredibly personal task at hand?"
"I think she and I talked, and that she implied things that concern me." She shook her head. "Henry, I would never want to think poorly of you, and I'm not about to choose sides or anything like that. I just want to make sure...that my crew is as safe as reasonably possible."
Henry's expression turned very dark indeed - not in the dangerous sense so much as the indignant rage variety. His jaw tightened as he slowly rose from the bunk, his hands on his hips as he moved to shut the door.
"What, precisely, did she imply?" he asked.
Raqiin wondered for a long moment if she really wanted to say exactly what. It wasn't much, admittedly, and she wasn't going to press the issue. But he wouldn't know what was and what wasn't said. She wasn't here to, what, to tattle or anything. She just wanted to make sure.
"She implied enough to make me come ask after you, isn't that enough?"
Henry hit the control, the door sliding shut rather slowly as he turned around to face Raqiin.
"No, but it's fine," he murmured. "Hard to tell you which exact event she implied about if I don't know any more, but I can probably guess."
He took a deep, steadying breath as his eyes drifted closed and he leaned back against the door.
"That's really not encouraging." That there might be, have been, multiple events. "There may have been something about grabby hands. There may have been something about trapped in a cell. Tell me to drop it if I'm walking into a minefield blindfolded here, but I feel like I have a right to make sure there aren't going to be more problems than there already are."
Henry grimaced, a wave of both anger and hurt radiating from his tired form.
"Fuck's sake," he muttered. "No, I did not molest Taemin. I... I did mistreat her."
Tears, both of anger and shame, rimmed his eyes.
"Years ago, when Kesh was my XO, she started acting strange," he recalled. "She wasn't herself, and at some point we became convinced it wasn't actually Kesh. We were half-right. It was Kesh, but from a different universe. She'd replaced the real Kesh, who was being help prisoner elsewhere. I was Chief Tactical at the time, so it fell to me to interrogate the impostor."
Henry swallowed and cleared his throat, his eyes closing again.
"My relationship with Kesh to that point had been turbulent, but there was a bond. I was a bad officer, and I let my personal feelings get in the way of the interrogation. I was in her cell, mad, demanding to know what Taemin knew about Kesh's location. I... I think maybe I had pressed her into the side of the cell or something, which is when she started rubbing herself against me, trying to entice me or throw me off balance or something.
"I... let her think that for a moment, and then I grabbed her by the neck and started to choke her. I gave her one more chance to tell me what I needed to know, and she did."
Henry sniffed as he wiped his eyes.
"That was wrong. I know that was wrong, and there's no excusing it, and I freely admit that I... hurt Taemin. Just not in that way."
Just because Raqiin was used to feeling emotions, even strong ones, from people she cared about, on a daily basis--it never made it easier. She felt it just as strongly ever time it reached her, and she was an empathetic sort.
He didn't have to tell her the story. He didn't have to go into the detail that he did. In some ways, she appreciated it. That he could tell her. Even if it was to clear the air. Even if it was to make sure she knew that while Taemin was hurt, it wasn't in ways that might make her afraid of Henry. Henry who had always been a little volatile. Seemed like a Sumner trait in some ways; Sara just redirected the volatility into other areas.
Like impulsively leaving everyone behind for a distant loved one.
Raqiin shut her eyes, hunger her head, breathed out slow. Bit back a comment of 'I didn't come here to interrogate you, you know', given how bad taste it would seem in the circumstances. Let him feel, and let herself feel him feeling it.
"Okay." Simple, quiet. Taemin's question ("So you're okay...with...what he did to me?") now had a proper answer. "Alright. Thank you, Henry. And I'm...sorry for dragging it up."
Henry shook his head lightly as her arms crossed defensively over his chest.
"Circumstances aside, I don't know how to feel about Taemin," he said. "Like, I'm sure I owe her some apology, but it's hard to trust her."
"On that, I agree. But as far as I'm concerned, there's no choice but to trust her. She's already said she plans on shipping back off, putting in transfer orders once this is done, but I don't...know if that's a good idea, either."
Raqiin shrugged, looking up at Henry. "She is, at the very least, someone who cares about her patients. So there's that."
Henry ran his hands through his hair before pressing off the door, moving to sit on a crate.
"Something she has in common with her counterpart, I guess," he observed. "She's here, and there's not much to be done about it. But I won't hurt her or anything like that. I'm... I'm not a threat. That part of my life is over."
"I trust you on that. But I guess that raises the question...of what part of your life this is." A topic change, if he wants it. Though the topic might not be any more emotionally stable.
"The reckoning, I guess?" he answered after a moment's thought. "Life's been good to me on Orion. I'm happy there, y'know? I've got a good job, I've got a partner I can just be myself with. I don't try to put the galaxy on my shoulders. I was wholly content to forget about the rest of reality."
Henry sighed as he turned his gaze Raq's way.
"This is the one, singular thing that would've pulled me away, and it's entirely absurd that this other big mistake of mine just happens to be along for the ride."
"We're almost through." They have to be. They have to be close to getting Sara and bringing her back home, because they can't just be on this mission indefinitely. "And then you can go back to being happy. Because I want that for you. It's all I ever wanted for you after you left. To be away from all of the stupid Starfleet nonsense that drove you away to begin with and find your calling."
And it hurt a lot back then, but the years have changed them. Henry's popped up now and again to lend a secretive hand, and she appreciated it now as much as she did then. But so long as he's happy...?
"Maybe it's our brand of awful luck and jinxes that put you in this situation. Hey, we gave her every opportunity not to come."
Henry's gaze softened as Raqiin spoke. He didn't reply right away, clearly having some internal discussion as his eyes scanned side to side.
"Starfleet didn't drive me away," he said. "I drove me away. I wasn't good at my job, and I was trying to use it to escape from my difficulties with being an adult. I hurt Taemin because I couldn't think beyond that moment in time. I pulled a phase on my old CO because I couldn't fathom trusting someone else with my life. I was never going to be happy in Starfleet because I was never the kind of person who should be in Starfleet.
"And it's my fault that we're all here. There was no reason not to say no to Sara. This was a dumb, impulsive plan, and I should've had the emotional courage to tell her this was stupid, but I didn't. I got her a shuttle, I enabled her impulse, and now, at best, she's suffering greatly for it."
Her eyes lowered. "There were extenuating circumstances."
To all of it, really.
"You know," she continued, with a small laugh, "sometimes I actually miss him? Captain Griffiths. But I never could figure out where I stood with him. You never have that problem with Sara. You always know exactly where you stand with her. Without question or hesitation. But this is..."
The amusement faded off, and she drew in on herself. "I don't know, with this. This hurts. But I don't know that you could've stopped her. Probably would've gotten some kind of shuttle one way or another. For once, I don't know where we stand with her. Because she couldn't trust any of the rest of us enough to say anything."
Henry furrowed his brow in mild confusion as he processed that statement.
"Why do you think her doing this says anything about how she feels about you?" he asked.
"The part where she didn't say a word? Maybe--maybe it was just the fact that she knew we'd try to stop her, or to help her do this but in a...less dangerous way. Thalev's okay with all of this. Relatively okay. Gave his blessing. And I know this can't have been an easy decision for her, but to just up and leave all of us like that?"
Raqiin threw up her arms, upset. "What am I supposed to think? What did she think was going to happen that wasn't exactly this?"
"I'm pretty sure her hope was to be back before leave was up," offered Henry. "Look, I don't think this was an issue of trust. She wouldn't even tell me where she was going; I had to have that isotope planted on the shuttle without her knowledge. It was important to her that nobody knew where she'd be, and... I think that's just one of those stupid things people like to do for love.
"For example, I helped break my partner out of a secret Starfleet Medical facility after helping to technically bring her back from the dead. Shit gets complicated."
She stared at him, letting her arms drop. Of course...of course people did wild and stupid things for love. What a strange phenomenon. The unbidden thought rose: would she do something like that for Oleg?
Well, she was doing all of this for Sara, who she loved like a sister-in-arms. Would that be so different?
"Do you think it's worth it?"
"That, I don't know," he admitted, leaning again against a bulkhead. "Depending how we find her... maybe this ends up being a brutal lesson."
His voice broke slightly at the end, his eyes closing as his jaw clenched.
"If she's anything like me, she didn't have much choice but to learn it this way."
She mulled over that but gave no comment. Maybe it was a lesson that needed learned, but it also seemed so needlessly cruel from so many angles. "Either way. Whatever the case, we're bringing her home. Whether she likes it or not."
Henry glowered.
"I get Taemin implying that Sara's off on some fling because being cynical and manipulative is all she has," he observed. "I don't get you implying that Sara wouldn't want to be with her family and her crew. What, because she tried to keep something quiet? Because she didn't broadcast her private business to the crew, her devotion is questionable, now?"
"That is not what I said, and you know it." She scrubbed her face with a hand and let out a small curse. "She thinks with her heart and follows it. It's wonderful and frustrating all at once. It makes the brass keep her on a tight leash, but it keeps us flying straight. I don't agree with what she did. But I'm going to fight to my last breath for her."
Even if it wasn't a mission. She would have found a way.
"So don't start questioning my devotion."
Henry averted his gaze and held up a hand in placation. Annoyance remained in his presence as a huff transitioned into a calming breath.
"Sorry," he murmured. "Guess I misunderstood what you meant. I'm very tired."
"...Yeah. And high tensions sure don't help. Sorry, I...should've been more clear." Raqiin stretched out her legs and stood, moving over to him and placing a hand on his arm.
"Your sister is one of the most singularly frustrating human beings I've ever met. I'm guessing it runs in the family." With a smile, enough to crinkle the corners of her eyes. "When it's all done, I'll do what I always do: advise her. Also known as telling her when I think she's wrong. I'll let her know exactly what I think about all of this, we'll have an argument probably in the ready room, a verbal knock down drag out, and then we'll forgive each other for being so stubborn and move forward with whatever happens next. Not because she's my captain, but because for all we disagree, I respect her. She's got a sturdy spine and a heart that doesn't quit and more guts than a Klingon banquet."
Henry's eyes remained on the floor as his arms folded across his chest.
"Do me a favor?" he asked, his voice soft.
"Name it."
"When we get her back, odds are she's gonna know exactly how stupid this was," he offered. "So maybe go easy on her a bit this time."
"...What can I say, I'm a softie at heart," she replied with a wistful sigh and a pat on the arm. "Odds are pretty good I'll forget to be mad at her anyway."
Henry managed a meager, mirthless smile in response.